first bloggy

Kyle and I made a blogging pact a few weeks ago but I haven't delivered. Then I told Zoe about it today and she made two posts in the time that we were speaking about it, so I feel that I have no excuses.

D and I are in Paris for one more week. We were in Venice before this and Spain before that. We were supposed to stay here through the 18th, but now I think we will go to London for the weekend.

Paris has been good. Maybe that makes it sound like I'm blah on it; it has been good in a liveable and pleasant and beautiful way that reminds me of being in LA without the isolation or something. We have run into a few art friends and made a few new ones. In NYC, I forget I do actually enjoy meeting new people. But also, I think we have been lucky to meet particularly good people on this trip.

I don't think either of us has done quite as much work as we'd have liked to but I think that that is okay. I feel a little bit adrift mentally, like I don't really have any exact work to focus on except for screenwriting and editing; for the first time in a long time I don't have any overdue projects or unfulfilled artistic or writing obligations hanging over my head. I'm mostly just chewing on concepts for stuff that I think I'm supposed to be making for the next year. That feels good but also somehow frightening.

Have gone to see more art here than I have since moving to New York–or than I did in LA, to be honest–I think. At least in terms of openings. I'm not sure if the results of this are a net positive or not. But it feels fun in a way and I feel like art is worthwhile again for me, if only as a form of entertainment–as in all art appears as a parody of itself these days (which is not to say it is bad!). That being said, I appreciate what appears to me to be an earnest kind of investment in participating in art amongst Paris kids. No one is pretending that someone forced them to be there (at the opening, let's say).

I was going to say that I feel tired of irony, but I think that is the opposite of the thought I meant to have; which was maybe more like I'm tired of ironic distance when it comes to participating in art–like talking about a show as though your mom dragged you to it; maybe this is called like like, faux nihilism. Like "art does nothing it sucks I'm only here because I accidentally got a liberal arts degree and have no skills other than synthesizing information." But on the other hand, I'm more tired of people who enter the arena of "discourse" having made a series of massive assumptions about what art does, is, or wants to do/be. Most often, "art is political" "art is radical" and so on. That's tangential to the irony thing, I guess. I don't know.

Anyway, I think we'll go to London for the weekend and stop feeling the low-level stress of not speaking enough French, and stay in a nice hotel with a spa or something.

Also we saw the new Jim Jarmusch movie, which was maybe not good but definitely fun. Though seems like at Cannes everyone was like ooh la la? I thought it was a bit try-hard. Though, there was this whole thing where the characters were aware of being in a movie in an interesting way. It played into my ongoing layers-of-reality // virtuality obsession. Maybe it modeled something like a kind of cinema that prevents the viewer's identification into it? Simply by reminding the viewer that she sits outside of it through the characters like 'naming' of their situation.

That's all for now.