If this blog had a manifesto, to be cautious and reckless

To begin.

This blog will be part personal, part place to post pictures and relate experiences of music, dance and culture that I’ve lived in this city and elsewhere, part critical theory jam session, part Italian and part Brooklyn and Virginian.

I know I’m about 3 years late to the blog game. I‘ve thought about making a blog for a while, but the medium seemed to be inherently limited: too public to think through parts of my experience that are inherently private, but too private to have any public effect, the blog oscillated through my thought as a way to script evasion and then to make encounters. To offer, and then rescind, the things interior to my being.

I felt, and still feel, the need to cipher the personal and occlude the parts of my life that don’t transfer well to a remote world in which people speak to each other through distances. At times I know that I am going to encrypt in words certain realms of my experience so that voyeurs don’t derive too much pleasure from looking inside me.

But at a certain point, which is now and in the future, I say that I am out of spin. Spin in the sense that I can encrypt and cipher only so much of the language that identifies the I that writes. By this point, you’re probably thinking, “Who is this Derrida wanna-be freak?” Yeah, that’s me, but I’m also Hulk Hogan’s younger brother, a Scandinavian design aesthete with a passion for cheese and fine sausages from small villages in the Pyrenees, a guy from redneck Virginia, the bastard child of Virginia Woolf and Giorgio De Chirico (displaced in time, yes;), the one who loves my mother’s bulgoki, and the one that writes because there is only so much time.

I distrust writing, and writing in a public sphere, to journal publicly, because writing cites/sites you before you’ve even completed a sentence. It fixes you in your orbit. But I am out of spin, and in writing finite words, I hope to access certain infinite spaces that dislocate me, and you, from our normal orbits through the city, even if for a moment. To write is always a movement away from oneself; a way to lose one’s certitude.

So I say that this blog is a form of hope, a written one, in which hope is drawn obliquely through half-formed syllables, through lines that will be erased as paragraphs ramble on, and refound as new ones open up. A hope that is bound up in the act of making things intelligible, a hope that is at once cautious and reckless. A hope that thinks on the border that writing visits and one that crosses the border in ecstatic moments.