Jimmy Chen

Seems like you should ‘read more’

i read canonical literature with my family when i was twenty-five

when i was twenty-five
i read canonical literature with my family
my dad read lolita
my mom read the bell jar
my brother read portnoy’s complaint
i read infinite jest

that night we read nabokov
the next night we read plath
the next night we read roth
the next night we read wallace

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Web Hype / 31 Comments
May 15th, 2011 / 5:56 pm

Excerpt Hover, Htmlgiant (2011)

It’s funny how much shadows are glorified under hovering windows, the subtle gradation from dark to light, as if we were the sun casting these shadows from God’s eye view. Rembrandt and Caravaggio spent a lot of time with chiaroscuro, moving across their subject’s face from dark to light. An imaginary sphere will always be rendered in pencil with its shadow, for the surface upon which light falls is the same tone as the the paper, an argument that light is white despite the jaundiced yellow of the sun. I always found the future really sad in Back to the Future II, like I would be fine if I fell out of a tree and into a girl’s room, just stayed in the 80s, when Huey Lewis was still news, and nothing except the air guitar move where you jump floated.

Random / 7 Comments
May 13th, 2011 / 5:49 pm

Boyfriend pillow

Be careful in the cache of artistic enterprise, you just might trip over something, which is not what artist Robert Gober, his surrogate-phallic foot pictured left, was thinking, or maybe it was, or maybe thinking is our way of running away from the void, which, in better days, was known as truth, before the post-fuckturalists got to it; or maybe we’re near the end of something, the one unknowable something that we know currently, the one where a search query for boyfriend pillow yields a pillow with a bisected fisting hole, because falling asleep alone or beside someone has never been so complicated, with our television-seared synapses and tiny odes to nature in loops of waterfalls and forest rain inside white noise sleep machines plugged into a wall with an alien black cord to teach us the forgotten narrative of who we were. SkyMall is mankind’s way of saying we’d rather look at shit conceived by schizophrenics than learn, via a group of racially diverse cartoons calmly dying, how to stay alive a little longer before the plane crashes. And of course you can’t say “plane crashes” in today’s cultural environment without invoking that historical moment comprised of  a hundred frozen moments from different angles whose aggregate faux 360º view is stricken in the minds of all, the number of the perished paltry compared to what god did on his better days.

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Random / 15 Comments
May 12th, 2011 / 11:16 pm

Jizz street

When I see, and it is often, a used condom on the street, I bend down hoping there’s a money shot inside. I don’t think I’m a perv, or gross; it’s just how brains work. You go to college, you want a job. You do crunches, you want sick abs. You see a rubber, you wanna see spunk. A money shot, by definition of it being seen, is a precluded you. When I see any circular thing on the street, like from the other side, I’m drawn towards it, crossing the road without looking both or either way, hoping it’s a condom. I understand not everyone does this, I am sorry. A similar thing happens when I see panties on the street, though that is sadder, because a girl out there is not doing so well. A properly employed condom, this is turning into an essay, represents two responsible people who wanted to feel each other somewhat, and the narrative, this is turning into fiction, is that the ejaculator for some reason feels compelled to walk into the street and snap off the condom, the orange light from the lamp above turning the money into sunny delight. And he lets it flop to the pavement for guys like me to see the next day and think this could be a post. The brightest thing in our universe is conceptual, a circle filled with sun color that goes in the upper right corner of a child’s drawing, its crooked rays as javelins to the face. I want my days to be a gigantic moving child’s drawing, each shape inaccurately drawn by tiny hands and without judgement. I put a circle in the middle of today, now I fill it in with sunset pink and bisect it by a horizontal line that stands for the edge of this world. I want a cocktail mistake to be the sun, the sun to be a condom, and the condom to be jizzed. I want us all to jizz without ever jizzing, which may be Buddhist or something, or just happy.

Random / 10 Comments
May 10th, 2011 / 6:33 pm

Random / 7 Comments
May 6th, 2011 / 12:46 pm

Cat muses

Catistentialism is nothing more than their attempt to ruin a coherent couch, as mine is now littered with hair, hair balls, passive aggressive affection, and evil looks. Man plunges into the couch next to cat, and into despair. To have a cat fight catistentially, which is talking at one’s mirror regarding a neglected litter box, is not to use the word in its original sense. To show that God doesn’t exist may be to show that each unique defecus combed and mined from a litter box does, each piece’s existence preceding its essence. Now that we believe God doesn’t exist, we are assured that our despair can only be mitigated by feeling hairs which have yet to be collected into a hair ball by a brash milk lapping tongue, asexual at best, whose host’s eyes see straighter than the author’s.

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Random / 12 Comments
April 30th, 2011 / 8:34 pm

Stupid ass pants

Irony is a smart people excuse for looking stupid. Talking Heads made nice songs, and so did MC Hammer, but you’ll only see one in some art chick’s iTunes library, the bichromatic spectrum of roots and highlights in her hair, the slow erosion of nail polish marking an idea she had three weeks ago one night reading Derriduh for class. Orwell said something about there needing to be opposing classes for a society to function, but my googlefingers are tired, and only Joyce can make up words like that. You may ask yourself, where is that large automobile? First, it’s called a Bentley, and ’twas inside MC Hammer’s garage before he spent all his money on fabric. (In the disclosure, is foreclosure, hence its closure.) Rap stars enjoy walking around showing off their mansions, huge ass freezers full of nothing but popsicles, the former which record companies lease per month, until the sales drop. Snoop Dog encouraged me to drop it like it was hot, but I simply dropped it like it was a hernia. The university is a cultural war zone without fatalities; the only collateral damage is a bruised ego and a secret asshole, whose soldiers come out firing blanks in cafes and open mics, the worst ones holding clipboards on sidewalks, in need of a shower. High brows listen to music inside their heads, low brows rub it with their ass. Problem is we all monobrow, fucking monkeys who just recently upgraded from sign language. Each side needs the other, so when you walk down the street, you can wear your team’s t-shirt, identify your party at a bar, go up to them and say stop making sense. Remain in light, speak in tongues, dance like there’s an angry handjob inside your pants. Point to the atoms between you and your enemy and say you can’t touch this.

Random / 8 Comments
April 29th, 2011 / 3:18 pm

Gopher gaze

This is what I know about sex, there is a hole, there is a stick, and it all works out in the end, and occasionally “in the end,” if you know what I mean. And duh, sometimes two sticks and/or two holes can get along just fine, I went to college. The idea of penetration can only exist because we feel outside of things, but what if we are put inside, a gopher hole maybe, or in a gallery peaking into a room made to make us feel inside a hole. What if aesthetics is humanity’s commercial, something to seem better than it is. Duchamp’s cunt is shaved because Courbet’s used up all the hair. We all know about the male gaze, but the gopher gaze didn’t get a thesis written about it, until now, well not exactly.

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Film / 10 Comments
April 27th, 2011 / 7:31 pm

Walden in Dwell

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Author Spotlight / 4 Comments
April 22nd, 2011 / 1:32 pm

Irresponsible Book Reviews

[The following book reviews are of books which have not been read, their commentary based solely off of the cover art, cultural projection (i.e. other book reviews, hearsay, author shtick, just “that feeling”), and the book’s title.]

Mao II

With the success of Mao (now known as “Mao I”), DeLillo just had to milk Mao II, which like most sequels (e.g. Karate Kid II, The Hangover II) is basically the exact same story taking place in Asia — which brings us to DeLillo’s story of a schizophrenic 20 lbs. overweight Chinese communist who thinks he’s a Warholian version of himself. The narrator wanders around all day self-obsessed by lyrical thoughts with vague allegorical tendencies; that and he likes wearing girl’s underwear. If this sounds like Murakami, you’re in the wrong country. Asian people may all look the same, but the street signs differ. DeLillo’s captivating portrait of the fragmented individual is coaxed by his succulent, yet restrained prose. There is a difference between non-American and un-American, and while our conservative folk may accuse him of the latter for his unflinching accounts of post-America, his expanded look into the universal human, in their commonality, makes complete humans of us all. Awesome Dim Sum scene in Chapter 5, just saying.

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Web Hype / 21 Comments
April 20th, 2011 / 12:11 pm