pabloandresbaeza. @pabloandresbaeza-blog - Tumblr Blog

Posts

hey all. this is dead, indefinitely. I am working to build a hybrid blog/portfolio site (probably wix) aiming for a spring launch. in general I want to publish content less frequently and of a higher caliber, which Tumblr especially is a bad medium for. I've had a literal addiction to social media for a few years now, and you can still very much find my writing mostly on Facebook. short essays and hot takes on the regular. same username. feel free to add me, though I strongly encourage messaging first. but I want to work slowly towards dealing with my anxious/compulsive tendencies, and that means curating my writing a little more, trying slowly but surely to feel like I'm in control of my internet use as opposed to controlled by it. tonight after a long talk with a beloved friend I once again deleted the Facebook app off my phone. I'd like to keep dreaming and being raw and loud and open in my vulnerability - I'm also trying to find real, less performative, higher-stakes ways to do so, and also spend substantially more of my life doing the other things I love - walking, hiking, reading, eating good food, meditating, exploring new social worlds and spaces. these are scary dangerous times, and part of feeling like I have something to say as a writer and empath, I'm learning, means learning how to make the space I need to make for me to feel truly happy and held in the boldness of my idealism. thanks for reading, xx

Internet poem, vulnerability

I cried three times in the last week I made it a public statement I wrote a poem in order to brand my sadness to ask for an end to violence in a world that needs words more than it needs patience, silence, or bodily life

moon in leo

even bent-backed and pressured, I, diamond-like ember freer. the whole point is the growl. didn't I say I'd had enough? my breath molten. honey, these are the end times; abrasive in spades, scarce relief. heat as in sidewalks as in bullets as in bodies as in aching as in heads. trapdoor migraines, starvation & quarantined apartments. all I see on my block which is America. when it don't burn it rains. my breath molten. read the screed on my news feed, insomniac glare cycle. touch the screen, touch the mattress. check the time. wake up late in sweat again. the job for the house for the shrink for the company for the job for the house for the shrink for the company for the job touch the screen / touch the bed. abolish outside. abolish waiting. you write your internet abolition screed. I see you, you parlor-trick rhetoricians, American revolutionaries. I read your revolution (read the screed, read the feed), I eat your words for breakfast. your words are all synonyms for violence. all of them. touch the bed touch the screen check the time wake up late touch the screen touch the heart touch the heart touch indoors stay indoors to try and contain the latest fire

mercury in cancer, mars moves direct

so this has been pretty dead for months. I’m newly entering creative writers block (except for on Facebook, where my coping mechanism for my anxiety has been largely to write short essays about my politics to something like a mass audience), I was on vacation for the last five weeks, I’m looking for a job, I’m broke, I’m deadlocked about where to live and completely anxious about it, meanwhile the world is in literal chaos.

I’m toying with deleting this or archiving it or something and eventually creating a new platform only for my writing and maybe photography. I’ll give it a few months, I suppose. my anxiety has been off the charts the last two days and I’m finding it extraordinarily hard to listen to my emotions. I’m feeling like one big lesson from the last 48 hours and the transition from vacation to involuntary structurelessness is that social media has been such a crutch over the years for my anxiety and maybe I should move to start slowly divesting from it - all of it. in the utopia I have long ago formulated in my mind we are free to be vulnerable and real with each other as human beings without the transactional more-is-more mentality I have always felt dominates online dating. maybe I’ve still been relying on other forms of social media, or at least on the anonymity of the Internet, to assuage very real fears of loneliness, not around lack of people or love, but about feeling personally and structurally incapable in this individualized world of being able to live the devotional, village-like existence I have always dreamt about having with friends, with neighbors, or whatever.

anyway, this is all to say that while I am uncertain about how much content I will actually post on here anymore, I’m beginning to lose faith in the Internet as a space where I can really get the kind of social joy I really crave, and that my compulsions toward self-disclosure, elegant as they may be, are right up there with my relentless binging of information as, well, compulsions, and compulsions born of a general and increasing ambiental dissatisfaction with life on the terms of the society I currently live in, or at least with the way it seems to be easiest, or even expected, to exist in the United States and to a lesser extent the world at large these days.

I’ve always been relentlessly stubborn and have had a kind of internalized survivor mentality about my mental health, so as per usual it’s my natural instinct to fight ceaselessly towards a kind of composure - nevertheless, I’m lost, I’m exhausted, and I don’t know if I would say I’m truly depressed - maybe too passionate or open to the many ephemeral happinesses of my days - but I’m feeling increasingly raw, and whatever this static alienation-dissatisfaction is, it’s collecting and becoming harder and harder to ignore.

June 2016

1 future days / can 2 roygbiv / boards of canada 3 beautiful life / gui boratto 4 crazy over you / bullion 5 treat me like fire / lion babe 6 you saw it all / herbert 7 top ranking / blonde redhead 8 three women / stereolab 9 mer du japon / air 10 vengo / ana tijoux 11 colonial mentality / fela kuti 12 emergency (EMF remix) / will see feat. avierre the don 13 plata o plomo / maria y jose 14 same drugs / chance the rapper 15 stop / j dilla 16 marrow / ANOHNI 17 por el suelo / manu chao 18 poblador del mundo / portavoz feat. raza humana 19 eu sou favela / seu jorge 20 hymn of the big wheel / massive attack 21 dinosaur on the ark / the very best 22 country road / all that jazz 23 i remember learning how to drive / animal collective & vashti bunyan 24 wigwam / bob dylan 25 paper bag / fiona apple 26 goettingen, du / the finches 27 fourth of july / sufjan stevens 28 forget about / sibylle baier 29 ballade 3 / tosca tango orchestra 30 good house / deakin

may 2016

1 miss understanding / kamasi washington 2 getting there / flying lotus feat. niki randa 3 heaven / jamila woods 4 workinonit / j dilla 5 can't stop this / the roots 6 freedom / beyonce feat. kendrick lamar 7 lift me up / vince staples 8 when doves cry / prince 9 the way i move / jody breeze 10 ghost / DJ rashad 11 vampire dub / DJ richard 12 DP / dan bodan 13 you're unknown to me / herbert 14 the line / dvsn 15 daydreaming / radiohead 16 golden chords / deakin 17 i feel like the mother of the world / smog 18 13 de mayo / caetano veloso 19 starman / david bowie 20 waitin' for a superman / iron & wine 21 living room / grouper 22 gunpowder / vashti bunyan 23 it's you / animal collective & vashti bunyan 24 time, as a symptom / joanna newsom 25 future feminism / antony & the johnsons

monologue (transcribed) from a late-night conversation with jacquelyn and omer, brooklyn, new york

when i lived in oakland i knew a woman, a playwright, from west oakland. a really important black artist figure in the bay. i remember she would say it was so hard to think western because she couldn’t compartmentalize things. i think that’s how i’ve been, always, about relationships. it’s been really messy, chaotic, this boundlessness. but i think, for me, anyway, i started with this kind of universal love and had to learn to bound it. was taught to bound it. i learned heteromonogamy, in actually i think this much more feminine cliche way than masculine cliche. but i learned to want in this way, to feel needed in this way. and i’ve unlearned a lot of that. and it’s not just the straight thing, it’s also been hard, hard for me, i really have always dis-identified with hookup culture, especially with gay male homonormativity. honestly what it is is i’ve never been able to consume people. i’m really stubborn about resisting judgements. it’s hard for me to use heuristics to figure out whether i’m gonna like someone, even though yeah, i still do it, we all do it.

but all these love projects, because that’s what they become, love projects, feel like an extension of these boundings. it’s like i’ve needed to learn to be human and need to consume people. when really i am so actively resistant to consuming people. and so in love with patience. and valuing devotion itself so much.

my love is so boundless. the thing is, i think my love is the kind of love most useful for apocalypses. and it’s weird to say but i really believe humankind is headed towards apocalypse. so i think the older we get, the more useful i feel in my love, the more understood, the more confident. it’s a kind of universal love.

i worry a lot about becoming this totally monastic, sexless person. but actually i think it’s this kind of volcanic thing, this hunger. i can think about my life and my decisions right now and cast any amount of judgement on them but to be honest i’m hella ecofeminist and what i want is nothing less than ecofeminism. in community. and i don’t want it to be a reactionary ecofeminism. i want it to come from the slow mundanity of learning people. of meeting people. of being with people. in everyday life. but i’m hoping to grow that utopia with others, collectively. i just want us to live in a world where we value and care for and listen to each other, where we value the earth we live on, too. that’s my boundlessness. i dream.

#personal

bed

keep me held, hope, hold me in your frame as you hold to your bed, hold the frame, holy, this frame, a bed made, i made the bed, somewhere the bed made from pakistani cotton, hands (perhaps polish, maybe chinese)

held what was to become a mattress, made way to a truck bed, please hold the thousands of miles it took to find you a surface you could make, lay hands on, rest on, hold on, as many hands as made your bed, hold them in your frame, and hold me in your arms

April 2016

1 monstro / downtown boys 2 40 days / slowdive 3 button up / sheer mag 4 hey mami / sylvan esso 5 landcruisin' / A.K. paul 6 really don't mind / luomo 7 deepdown / nightmares on wax 8 you and i / washed out feat. caroline polachek 9 esencia de vida / makiza 10 silhouette / julia holter 11 it hurts until it doesn't / mothers 12 on the lips / frankie cosmos 13 the boy with the arab strap / belle & sebastian 14 golden days / whitney 15 everlasting sigh / moses sumney 16 dance for you / dirty projectors 17 prospect hummer / animal collective & vashti bunyan 18 work / charlotte day wilson 19 beautiful people / mark pritchard feat. thom yorke 20 changes / charles bradley 21 willie / cat power 22 sensing owls / jose gonzalez 23 dear someone / gillian welch 24 say valley maker / smog 25 take care / yo la tengo

that moment you’re maybe a half-week from finishing your thesis*

and months of needing to design a project and meet enough people to interview, crippling self-doubt, pretending to know what your research design is to tell strangers what you’re doing, having too much head space being taken up by a project that has refused to move along tidily, delays, delays, delays, not knowing how my interviews cohere, not knowing how to present your interviews, feeling like you’re not knowing really what you’re doing at all, struggling in a program that’s only one calendar year that you’ve entered after leaving the other side of the country and the place you’ve built a four or five year relationship with...

and it’s past midnight and you’re finishing the last translation of the incredible life story of your documentarian friend who grew up on the border and is a documentarian focusing on the border and undocumented people and you’re listening to joe hisaishi and really seeing how in less than two weeks the world is going to know about this person’s journey and the work they do and why they do it and three other stories like it and you’re like, ohhhhhhhhhhh, that’s why i wanted to move to new york to become an oral historian and documentarian.

anyway, that’s my life update. that and an inner emotional world that has honestly been way too full (if frequently exciting) for months on end. i’m gonna be excited to let my mind (and arguably my heart too) breathe a little (a lot) more, but i’m feeling like this crazy thing is finally paying off, and if you want to know what it is, if you’re in new york city, you should come to my exhibit on the 28th, and if you can’t make it, i’ll put it up on here once i’ve debuted it. exciting!

*excepting summer projects like more polished second draft transcripts, a community forum, whole-website translation and creating searchable transcripts, but those things are a) mostly less glamorous (except the community forum which i am really excited about) and b) ridiculously achievable in a two and a half month time span

bushwick, brooklyn, NY

evening of aries new moon. DUMBO, brooklyn, NY.

"dead end." richmond hill, queens, NY.

to the barechested blue-shorted american man on the J today

you linen skin you tongue-twist the hot mouth bow-trickle the calf-suckle with diamonds on your breast bravado-lipped and already looking the wrong direction - I hope you survive.

on listening to prospect hummer in quiet solitude, at my bedside

april swells unexpectedly a spirit riding like the concave of laughter rising from my stomach to my chest, I lie awake in wondrous contemplation as if stumbling upon everyone's soft inconsequences, softer blushing secrets. o how embodied, this reminding of joyous, a feeling in my eyes, in my arms, in my hands of wanting only to paint with my breath

april on stuyvesant

oh goodness how-sweetness flowers blooming on gray blocks greenest pasture: mud and weeds on street tree and all the while the sky envelops the lone cathedral with sheets of hairlike rain

tumbleweedsareinvasive

“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more—more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.” Dave Eggers

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

pabloandresbaeza.