TRYSTAN TRAZON

THE BAMBI PRINCIPLE or "The Boy Who Cried Knife"

2012-01-26T08:46:00.000-08:00

The Bambi Principle

(or "THE BOY WHO CRIED KNIFE")

"I came here today to ask, to beg you, to vote to release those elephants from that zoo!"

—Bob Barker

I am sitting alone again in a girl's toilet stall off a junior high gymnasium somewhere near the end of the world. With a black sharpie and the beam of a pocket flashlight shaped in the mouth of a dragon, I am channeling Terry Robbins past The Days of Rage, equipped for subterranean vengeance. If they catch me this time -- as I was caught the last time -- I'll forgo the demerit slip by taking the Vice Principal into the band practice room to play her a lounge rendition of "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road." (Last week was "Goodbye, Marlon Brando"—because really, who can think of a better time to hone your aptitude for nostalgia than in the 8th grade?) As is the case with most lone militants in junior high that skip gym, I have yet to identify the principles driving this chestnut radicalism, nor have I identified, for that matter, an adversary to burn.

Except for maybe Sammy Kipps.

Sammy Kipps and his protégé in the purple jumpsuit, Chuck "Appletree" Machado, hauled me down the aisle to the back of a schoolbus last week to proceed with a ritual aptly called "The Faggot Wash." Greg Misner and Appletree's cousin, Lance, were last month's burnt offerings. It's not unlike a baptism, truth be told. Shoved against the emergency exit door, they broke my sunglasses, purloined a black Jansport from my shoulders, waited three skips of a heartbeat for an audience to raise to their knees and watch them lash out their terrier-sized cocks and simulate heavy rain. The driver took a pause before lunging into another gospel shrieking selection from KUBE 93 (Seattle's #1 Hit Radio Station), stopped the bus to ask which of the three of us started it. After the fingers twirl and I am outsung by accusations, she feigned an attempt at peacekeeping. Each of us resolved to keep the incident to ourselves, from the administration, our parents, our invisible friends and the ears of their secret stash of Care Bears. Back on the bus, I made plans to call up Sergio when I got home. Sergio and his fraternal twin brother Avni were a part of a notorious squad that met behind the Skate King on Friday nights. Both siblings wore coordinating walrus mustaches that \ let them pass for twenty-four. They claimed their father preserved ties with the Albanian mafia and that I danced like MC Hammer. When I called, their grandmother said though a long, indecipherable yawn that they had gone to live with a stepmother in Fresno.

The Faggot Wash will play three repeated showings from here till the end of the winter semester. The driver will be singing along to Aretha Franklin's "Respect' with the rest of the world her second-hand man. But I will be defenseless. This toilet stall will write my redemption song.

The PhysEd instructor, Ms. Uselbech, knows where I am this seventh period. She is adamant to see that I fail, even having explained to her, quite delicately, that telling someone like me to play volleyball is like asking a nun to give a poledance. I don't think she found that terribly funny, which leads me to believe that she's keeping one. We negotiated, I thought, on a passing grade if I showed up at attendance in a clean shirt. I have, thus far, been more than accommodating. I just hope one day she gets to visit this stall and see all the sketches I've drawn of her giving birth to Baby Hitlers.

The mistake might have been switching to public school. As often as I complained about the cushy, overcoddled Montessori school, they left me to my World Book Encyclopedias, encouraged me to play Rachmaninoff at their quarterly talent shows. They even let me skip the second grade...

I await the seventh period dismissal bell, pulling up my gym shorts in rehearsal for a future transgression:

"There's no going back there, Ma..." I begin in a stoic whisper in the front seat of her '86 Toyota minivan. "I already disposed it in a dumpster behind the cafeteria. Let's just leave it alone. It's not like I woke up expecting to find a knife in my locker this morning."

Fifteen minutes later, during the xylophone jingle in a radio spot for upholstery cleaner, she will make a gymnastic U-Turn back into the mob of the parking circle, park the van and ask me to find it on my own. My front teeth will chatter. I will clutch my seatbelt, recalling the origins of my defenselessness, there, at the back of that bus, mouth drenched in Appletree's baptism. Later, I will finalize my plea that she salvage me from this endless seven-hour dart massacre they've designated junior high. But before all this—yes—before my amazing attempt at self-retrieval, claiming the knife has left the dumpster after word of it had been circulated, she will know everything. She will momentarily, not recognize me. She will know, in my flushed, spent-out, calculated tears, that I am lying...

The failed 19^th century American lawyer turned epigramist Christian Nestell Bovee defines panic as "a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination."

If the crude miracle of being born can be described as a going over to such an enemy, then I arrived to the world sufficiently unarmed. The morning before, the weather reports in The Seattle Times would read that "whitecaps broke on the usually placid Lake Washington beach, rain beat on the tops of empty park shelters with temperatures in the early 50s." It is not important that any of us remember the day we born, but they say the development of memory of infants is closely connected with the same facilities behind recognition. The recollection of a face, the stench of a wet dog, or a knock on the door. On September the 8^th, 1984, at approximately 8:30 AM on the Southside campus of Virginia Mason Hospital, a door knocked, the florescent lights twitched, and I entered—which is to say that I panicked.

I have been telling people stories ever since.

The process of a closed adoption legally forbids couples from knowing very much as far as details on the part of the child's biological family, even as it might be relevant to unforeseen physical defects or extended medical history. I was brought home that day by my adoptive parents with the following information, no more, no less: it was clear my birthmother's origins were rooted in the Philippines and that she was 30 years old at the time of my delivery. Less clear was the migratory nature of her career in finance, although I suppose it meant lacking the resources or stability to raise a child. Even more nebulous were the details about my father; merely that he accounted for a fraction of my French bloodlines. However, even through the restraints of the inscrutable, a child learns to invent his own caricatural history. On yards of butcher paper, I'd diagram a complicated nexus of bloodlines resembling the infrastructure of the Empire State Building. Through this nexus, I'd trace myself back to the likes of Elvis Presley, Marie Antoinette, Kermit the Frog. The truth would reveal itself as something less of a floating high-rise, and to its own credit, a manifold far greater than what a child could have borrowed from his encyclopedias, his mother's Dolly Parton records, or The Prophetic Warriors of Make Believe on Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

But I would know none of that yet.

The name "Trystan", for those who might not know, is a variation (though not an unequivocal reference) to the medieval Celtic folk hero made popular in a certain Wagnerian song cycle. Fourteen years later would I learn in a music theory course that the infamous Tristan chord in Wagner's overture consisted of an augmented fourth, sixth and second, making it the most recognizable unresolved harmony in the canon of Western music. I have long contemplated getting a tattoo with the chord on my forearm, and under it, a caption reading: "Resolve me."

It has been said that my adoptive mother, Christie, even through her years as high school valedictorian to vice-president of a state insurance company, wanted nothing more than to bear children. Born Christie Anne Kreinop, my mother arrived from third-generation Germanic agricultural workers settled in the Midwest. Most of her relatives were born fair-haired, with concentrated seraphic features which evoke, in their parents, a feeling of redemption. Their photos as children would have them staring at us with innocuous aerial blue eyes, as if caught in the astonishment of being photographed. It was easy to see why they had four-to-six children; they'd have stopped if any came out looking like a hippopotamus. Most of them have remained, to this day, within a twenty-mile semidiameter of Seymour, Indiana (the hometown of the singer John Mellencamp, lest it fail to be reiterated). Most are practicing Lutherans, collecting from these teachings a kind of quiet strength in spirit, generous to the point of yielding. Most are, for one reason or another, bored to death, which meant I was arranged a baptism. The ceremony was small, procedural, and not particularly painful. Unlike circumcision.

This quiet strength of spirit is associated often with Greater Midwest hospitality. I think it's misunderstood as a shortcoming of charisma and social intelligence. It is neither of these things. In fact, what I think it could be is something of an estranged fragility conditioned out of their unresolved relationships with their own mortality. The preconditions of agricultural labor require that they take a role as catalysts between nature and predator savages of machinery. Stories have scattered thin over the years of men falling off of soybean tractors for reasons unknown (stung by hornets, their wives would later speculate), leaving their vehicles in a steady spiral that eventually crushes their spines to death. My grandfather, Robert Kreinop, died at the age of thirty-six for carrying his coworkers out of a cataclysmic fire started by a discarded cigarette. When such accidents seem to defy the logic or syllogisms of a compassionate Lord and Savior, the most powerful response is also the most faithful: to give these accidents over to the unfathomable phenomenon of tragedy and stay put. Viewing the accident as a series of amplified slips isn't helpful, nor is the thought: "One sliver of a moment, and the whole thing might have been resolved." Because it had resolved; just in the worst way they could have anticipated.

Christie was thirteen years old upon receiving news that her father was never coming home. Six years later, she would make the decision either to leave her first husband and a towering position at an insurance company, or resign herself to kitchen table in Southern Indiana for the rest of her life. "But why stay put? And for what?" she must have asked herself in the rear-view mirror of a thousand traffic jams. So she marched out of Southern Indiana with her older sister, Karen, and they dropped their haversacks in the corner of a studio apartment in San Diego.

Just a short radio signal away lived my father, Steve, studying for his San Diego State bar exam after a graveyard shift at a French bistro. Their paths wouldn't cross here, but some ten years later in San Francisco.

Born in Columbus, Ohio and raised in a Tudor house in Cincinnati, Steven Gary Toole is probably one of the only living Jews that hate Woody Allen. A descendent of mostly Russian lineage, he is faraway removed from the premise of a universe that is cold and empty, a premise as exclusive to his origins as a warm shot of vodka. His father, Conrad (or "Connie") was a traveling salesman for Levi's Jeans. In the days of red hunting and heightened anti-semitism, Connie devised an anecdote for his clients explaining the genesis of our surname. The anecdote, if I recall correctly, has something to do with his grandfather arriving on Ellis Island at inspection without his name on record. Under pressure to think on his feet, he reached into the pocket of his trousers for a claw hammer given to him on ship by a one-armed plummer who said he'd need it when they reached the states. This is apparently how he decided on the name Toole. The other less ambiguous, far more probable explanation is that Toole is one of many American conjugations branching from the names Tolstov or Tulinsky.

Steve was a middle child in a house dominated by chatty women. His mother, Belle, died of tongue cancer shortly into his first year of law school. I know close to nothing else about her, really, but have reason to suspect she was born at Kings County Hospital early three blocks from my former apartment in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Perhaps there is such a thing as an eternal return.

I imagine this as a slogan slam-posted to the doors outside the hotel ballroom in San Francisco where my parents first met. With my father two years out of law school, he held off on plans of starting his own private practice to join the training staff of a "human potential course" then known as Lifespring. My mother, Karen, and Karen's future husband, Pete, were also on the staff. I make a fair amount of mocking jokes about the program, since it almost transparently fits the category of New Age, or more accurately, "psychoanalysis without the analysis". I prefer public streaking in park fountains. But it turns out that the research commissions from Berkley, Stanford and USF found an overwhelming 90% of Lifespring's participants came from the training program using words like "transformative" or "transactivating."

A normal course might consist of up to 300 participants in a succession of weeklong evening lectures lasting from 6:30 till midnight. The goal was to show participants all the ways in which human beings hold themselves back from the living experience, largely through the manipulation of a fair number of "chuck the crowd a microphone" exercises. They would also spend entire week redefining words like responsibility, space and surrender. Commitment, for instance, would eventually get redefined as "doing whatever it takes." The word conclusion would be re-characterized subtly as "the mother of all false beliefs."

Neither my mother nor my father have gone especially out of their way to hide from me that they were smoking obscene amounts of hash back in those days. But personal reservations aside, I like to idealize them informally as consciousness missionaries, which is not exactly the same as calling them evolved hippies. Rather than pushing a series of principles seized from heavy-handed theology or gyrating philosophical thought, they promoted instead an unpretentious, solution-based method for people without the structural (or practical) orientation for solution in their daily lives. The program would be less effective on disparaging assholes like me who have been known to spend up to half-an-hour at the deli counter questioning what a whole wheat pastrami says about their order on the food chain. In fact, if I caused my parents any great distress (which, in itself, is an acknowledged fact), it had something to do with challenging their systematic recognition of the things that could be solved, and the long strain of unsolvables that seemed at times to spread itself like a sudden cancer.

My first four years were spent as an only child. A group of around seven-to-eight kids from around the neighborhood would climb over our backyard fence to recount their lives at home. It seemed all of their fathers had, at one time, flung a stained-glass coffee table out the window, and that their mothers were each running recruiting marathons for a divorce lawyer. To keep with the spirit of urgency, I forged my parents into the same scenarios, and announced to my friends that for reasons beyond my understanding, my parents, too, would soon be filing a divorce. At each of these backyard assemblies, through the Brady Bunch role-play sessions and the bludgeon of a deflated tetherball, the topic of worry and question was invariably: "Whose parents will get divorced first?" Little by little, the backyard assemblies would shrink, as would the impromptu gathering of their parents at the caudle sac a shot across the fence. At one of the last of these assemblies, Hannah, the slightly older Indonesian from next door confronted me privately: "Your parents aren't getting a divorce, and I can prove it." I asked for her proof and she pointed to the window of their bedroom. It was April. Midday. The dog was out. The blinds were down. This would gracefully cue my introduction to the more innocuous mechanisms of heterosexual intercourse.

People frequently ask about when, where or how I first learned that I was adopted. Thanks to the ham-fisted climaxes of outhouse Harlequins or evening soap operas, the answer they usually expect is a full description of a devastating rite-of-passage ending in fake carnage and firetrucks. The truth is, the disparities in physical resemblance to my parents alone would never have me not knowing. But if recognition is the overture to memory, then it must have occurred to me right there, as Hannah sat with her knees pressing the grass, using a daisy and one-half-of-a-donut hole to demonstrate grown-up penetration:

I was one half of The Donut Man; never to know from where I began.

The rumors of my parents' divorce grapevined back to them past the point of relevance, whereupon they sat me down and told me to channel my fabrications elsewhere, or rather, keep my goddamned mouth shut. With the neighborhood freshly evacuated, I crept to the leg of my Fisher Price easel, equipped with a roll of butcher paper spread miles wide to contain a raving and reckless four-year old imagination. Maps were drafted of undiscovered continents, their states, their capitals, their villages in decline; blueprints for Victorian fortresses with Malaysian rock gardens with asymmetrical floor planning; Donald Ducks genitals, and other acts of indiscretion in the rest of the Disney kingdom. Suddenly, I was no longer an only child, beckoning for an audience, propagating stories to keep the attention of a room. I wanted, mostly, to be left alone. That is, until I drew a small but technical sketch of what my older sister might look like, which was a sort of menopausal Pocahantas. Three months later, my parents brought home a younger sister, already eight-months old, from Taegu, South Korea. They would name her Melia; a name referencing the nymphs of the ash tree in Greek mythology that sprang from the blood of Uranus when Cronus castrated him.

Both my Mother and Father, I am sure, would claim these references to Western folklore and mythology were completely unplanned. (I am on the fence until the weight of me sends it breaking.) Still it suggested, from an early age, a kind of bulldozing of immemorial past-lives, preparing us as pawns to a more preponderant mythology. I speak, of course, about the mythology of the nouveau American middle class: a place where cultural heirlooms built unmarked graves; where the story of who we were and what we'd become seemed navigated by chance and strategem like the chattering of dice across a Monopoly board; where the insatiable appetite for upgrades supersede absence and start a line around the megaelectronics store.

We must have been told at least a thousand times that "Nothing is truly impossible." Maybe this is where the trouble started.

For a second grade family portrait, I inserted myself as a hippopotamus. With the rest of my family in full character, I defended the drawing to the class by describing myself (convincingly, I thought) as a semi-aquatic, vegetarian boar who enjoyed summer afternoons on large meads of grass. The fact was that in a mere five years, my younger sister had adapted to the family like the missing picture cardboard piece the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club somehow forgot; I was still in search of a larger chorus.

And so I started playing music.

-- FOR PARTS 2-4 OF OF "THE BAMBI PRINCIPLE", e-mail TrystanTrazon@gmail.com --

Anatomy of a Coda

2012-01-26T08:30:00.000-08:00

This is the preface I wrote a million years ago to a essay compendium called THE PLEASE CATALOGUE. I've been told it describes "Star Wars", but it basically applies to any story in the world worth telling.

This is a story of wishes and exonerations. A story of cosmic retribution. A story of arrivals and departures. Of disappearance. The belief in magic. Of small-tales, tall-tales. The search for paradise. Of half-lives and the flight of angels. Of past, present and future converging at a streetlight. Of infidelity to deadlines and time zones. Of freedom as an anesthetic. Of friends. The music of an accident. Of foiled rivals. Of lightening storms. Of rain on the rooftops. Of requiems. Of reckless premonition and its cataclysmic blunders. Of trains and boats and planes. Of big cities and small towns and put-upon accents. It's the story of the big balloon that missed Dorothy, and the man who gave up trying to save the world.

It's a simple story, really. You probably know it already.

And this is not what happened, but it's how I remember it...

Don't Paint the Tigers

2011-10-04T10:08:00.001-07:00

The six-month-old cub is so rare it is thought there are fewer than 20 others like it - all in captivity.

The female tiger, which has been named Fareeda, was born to two white Bengal tigers. Fareeda's brother Shahir and sister Sitarah both bear the typical black tiger stripes in common with 99 per cent of their species.

Fareeda, who was hand-reared by keepers at Cango Wildlife Ranch, near Cape Town, South Africa, is part of a unique breeding programme to keep the White Bengal species alive.

Keepers at the ranch were delighted when Fareeda and its siblings were born on Christmas Day last year, but even more surprised to see Fareeda's rare lack of markings.

Odette Claassen, 52, from Cango Wildlife Ranch, said the keepers had to wait six months before they could be sure Fareeda definitely did not have stripes.

She said: "Some cubs develop stripes in their first few months but after six months it's clear that Fareeda is truly one of the rarest of her kind.

"When she was born Fareeda had noticeably pale colour it did cause a stir of excitement amongst the staff.

"But we knew there was the possibility of the cub's very light black and ginger stripes darkening over time existed.

"Most white Bengal tigers are bred in the US from a single male captured in the 1950s, but Fareeda is the first to be born in Africa, which is very special.

"She has a lovely nature and loves playing with her brothers and sisters, although she has nipped me a few times when she wants a feed.

"White Bengal tigers are not albino, they have distinctive blue eyes, and they used to be found in Northern India before they died out.

"My hope is that one day Fareeda and her kind can be returned to their native habitat and that is why it is so important to educate people about tigers and keeping the breeding programmes going."

favorite song of the former decade

2011-10-04T01:04:00.000-07:00

LIVE VERSION

OFFICIAL VIDEO

Someone just dared me to do an interview like this:

2011-10-03T23:44:00.000-07:00

CITY WATER

2011-10-03T23:41:00.003-07:00

CITY WATER

by Trystan Trazon

What's left of this town but a dusty street

Where the sun don't shine anymore?

The paper mill's down,

We got nothin' to eat,

And the daytrippers all left the shore...

There's smoke pourin' out of the window,

There's a fist rising out of the floor,

There ain't no one but me

Far as these eyes can see

And I feel that I've seen this before,

Yeah, I feel I've all seen this before...

Early bird, your bread is rising,

Sniff the dime-a-dozen rose!

Spring has left!

Your song is slipping!

Too late to look down at the streets below...

The city you so well remember

Is tumbling like a cem'try stone,

The sky is black!

We're bound to breathe it!

But we won't drink the city water anymore --

No, we won't drink the city water anymore.

August, 2005

2011-10-03T22:34:00.000-07:00

Roger Ebert just posted this compelling photo of "a hooker sitting in a window"...

Photo by Rosalind Solomon

Remain, Retreat, Revamp & Revisit

2011-10-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

Streaming two different films simultaneously on my laptop, which seems only appropriate on such a cold and equinoxical Monday night. The first being Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia," which I've been intrigued with since the trailer came out this May. I'm finding it difficult to get past the prologue when images like THIS are played in underscore to the opening of Tristan and Isolde...

This film, if you culture vultures remember, is the one that got Von Trier in scalding water when he went on that deliciously offensive tangential tirade saying that "he sympathized with Hitler." Keeping that totally warm, fuzzy and humanizing sentiment at bay, I am surprised by how much I am enjoying this. I keep putting on pause as if to brace myself for doing a cannonball into a dunk tank of pirhannas... I have a feeling that is about to get pretty psychologically laborious.

I'm also watching a totally fascinating documentary portrait of the New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham New York, which makes me want walk down 7th avenue in orgami motifs and abandon all sense of boring, upscale fashion principles. Unfortunately, half of my pants are perforated with holes from the barbarous amount of walking that I do in this city. An accessory designer friend of mine, Ken Marcelle, told me yesterday at a BBQ that I had a utilitarian sense of fashion, which threw me off, since I don't want to be associated with that word, like, EVER. Nor do I want to give the impression that I'm somehow ABOVE the pursuit of personal aesthetics, even I tend to save my looks for when I am out performing gigs at night.

On that topic, I've become increasingly motivated to create my own performance pieces, free from the criteria of other collaborations I've been involved with as of late. There is a limit to what I'm willing to reveal about the work that I'm generating now, but this desire is new, exciting and induces within me a sense of danger and ecstasy that I haven't felt in awhile. The only way that it will ever come together is to take a less careful, cerebral approach to what I do... as Chuck Close says: "Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work."

That said, as I'm developing the themes and atomic complexion for what these new forms will take, a part of that will be making a record of what I consume - what repulses me - what I am trying to adapt into this new and empirical recognition of what it means to be human.

It's been YEARS I activated this blog. Since the summer of 2007, the world has changed. The internet has changed. My personal constitution has changed. I only have recently overcome the fear of googling myself, thinking that it will bring to light things that I'd rather not know in total neglect of the fact that other people have unadulterated access to it. Last August, when I finally worked up the courage to type my name into a search engine, I noticed that this blog was the first to come up since my personal website was taken down.

Now that TrystanTrazon.com is being renovated, I really hope to use this a companion to the site. The intention here is less to fastidiously control my sense of self-narrative and projection and more to SHARE what I deem interesting... what I am seeing, thinking, remembering, consuming... should you or any inquiring mind care to know. As Nora Ephron said in her interview with Terry Gross, if it takes longer to write than a half an hour, it's not a blog... it's something else.

And on that note of something else, I am clocking in.

Love & Other Reasons Firefighters Become Insomniacs,

T.TRAZON

After 4 long years, I have decided to resuscitate this blog....

2011-10-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

... and also, to skip the imperative post where I have to explain WHY.

BACK IN THE STATES (Be a slave to your inner voyeurism!!)

2008-03-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

Click photo above to access Flickr account link documenting TRYSTAN'S EPIC CRUSADE THROUGH THE TRANSPACIFIC...

I Hate Jordan Catalano

2008-01-22T11:40:00.000-08:00

There’s a tendency with most generations to wistfully idealize the decade in which they grew up and reference them with artifacts, then adapt them into our sense how things were, even if we missed out on them the first time. This is how I feel about My So Called Life, in spite of being in every way a child of the 90’s... though let’s face it: I was, at most 10 at the end of the grunge era, which left nowhere for my lumberjack angst, and probably explains why I force myself to listen to Crowded House when questioning my own integrity. I think that’s must be why we always find ourselves returning to coming-of-age-themes in the first place. They always provide us amplified expressions of the inner gaucheries and volatilities that we never REALLY got over, and never really will ever go away.

So now that I finished with the entire 5-disc series off of Netflix, I’ve been arguing with my friend Jeremy about something I think needs to be erased from the zeitgeist. I contend that JORDAN CATALANO DOES NOT DESERVE ICONIC BEEFCAKE DOMINANCE OVER THE MID-NINETIES. This is not because I don’t find Jared Leto attractive (although he looks eerily like my third ex, thereby evoking indifference), but because Jordan Catalano easily made for the most annoying, pacifist love interest in the history of television... the part of it I’ve seen, anyway. Everything from his watery, dumb gaze to his dithering makeout sessions under the stairwell with Angela. There is nothing James Dean about him, which come to think of it, might sort of be the point. May expand on this later, if I don’t completely manage to make myself fall asleep when I start...

In brief, life is busy. I’m the dramaturge for Does Anyone Know Sarah Paisner?, written by the one and only Jenny Lane, and also scored music to the trailer which can be seen here:

Outside of work, I’m currently developing a rather large project which is too fragile to be discussed. Training for the 2008 marathon. Saving up for a possible trip to Tokyo to be taken in March or Mid-April. Lining up gigs. Trying to find room in my life to start dating again without officially becoming “someone who dates”. Saw a woman get stabbed on the Q train last week. Oh, and that might be perfect note to end on...

It’s snowing in Park Slope.

Love & Other Animals Aboard the Arc...

T.TRAZON

Steps Toward Fulfilling New Years Resolution

2008-01-10T22:34:00.000-08:00

Mr. Toole,
I am sending you a search application packet in another email. It takes many people time to get to the “right place” to search and you do have to be open to any kind of result. It is not a problem to do searches with an out of state petitioner, all of our searches are conducted by email/phone/mail. The search fee is $350, which can be made in two payments, one at the start of the search and one when the case is ready to go to CI (about 3-4 months later). The average time for a search from start to finish is 4-6 months. The search fee includes all court and agency fees associated with obtaining your sealed adoption file, securing a court order to access these files and the services of a Confidential Intermediary who actually makes contact with your birth family to obtain a consent to contact before your identifying information can be exchanged. The hardest part for you is the waiting once you’ve returned payment and paperwork. It will seem like nothing is happening for about 10-12 weeks, then your CI calls when the case is assigned and things generally move much more quickly at that point.

I did take a peek at our birth registry and there is no entry for your birth date and place, which only means that no one has contacted our office searching for you previously. You should also register with the Soundex registry, which is the largest national registry at www.isrr.net. Look over the first email I sent you which includes the search info. packet and let me know if there are any thoughts, concerns or questions not covered. I will be out Friday and back in the office Monday 8:30 – 1:00.

WARMly,

Michelle Meeker

Taking a break from talking about politics...

2008-01-06T20:47:00.000-08:00

XIAOCHANG: I would say that her wanting attention would be a fairly good indicator of her needing help
XIAOCHANG: she's not independent enough for that
ME: yeah. she's doing what children do when they don't have the communication skills to tell their parents what's wrong.
ME: i think britney just wants a cookie.

Knock, Knock, Turn Your Chair.... 2008 is EVERYWHERE

2007-12-31T14:42:00.000-08:00

There are 7 hours left before the emergence of 2008, and the year begs for some single serving reflections before its departure…

In brief, I would grade 2007 with a cumulative B average, given that I forced myself to tear apart the upholstery from the last five years and, with some resistance, exertion and upheaval, make some relatively monumental changes that didn’t relate to my wardrobe. Namely, I moved back to the city I love; the city where I plan to spend the rest of my life, and didn’t run even when I was forced out of my soaring loft space in Bushwick and left homeless for nearly a month. I bashed the doors open from relatively complete isolation to invite enough exploits and strange, fascinating people for a six volume novel. I laughed a lot. I started running again. I cleared up my skin. I rediscovered Buddhist meditation without drinking through the disparities. I fell in love. I asked a lot of really dumb questions. I had my picture taken a lot by people I didn't know. I caught myself lying. I wore messenger hats and fingerless black gloves. I burned incense and listened to Eartha Kitt while drinking Ceylon and throwing darts at the ceiling. I got over Adam. I sat in cathedrals during my lunch break and wrote dirty haikus. I worked a lot. I stopped sleeping with strangers. I made my bed (almost) every morning. I smoked Salvia in a park at San Francisco. I went out dancing. I arrived overdressed.

I got back my fucking nerve.

And I am going to own the shit out of 2008.

Love & Other Igniting Endorphins,

T.Trazon

WINTER SOLSTICE PARTY

2007-12-14T10:01:00.000-08:00

2007-10-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you forget how expansive a resource the internet can be. I've been doing my own version of misguided face crunches for ten years. Apprently FIVE DAYS is all it takes for people to get rid of their turkey necks. Thank God I'm quite there yet.

New York life type trife da Roman Empire state

2007-10-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

This is another half-hearted attempt to do justice to The Long List of Things I Pretended to Start. Like renouncing corn syrup. Or buying rollerblades (without the retrosexual guilt). Or not yelling at other people’s pets. I figure if one or more of these gets accomplished, my real priorities will somehow align together like toy soldiers, and we’ll march off into the city to “Hang on Sloopy."

But I’m also, like, tired of running into five-to-seventy-six known faces at any given point of the day (as is often the case with living in this city) and fearing that imminent trainwreck which seems to follow the question: “So... what is it you’ve been up to?” Never is it an issue of being for lack of words, it's more the crisis of which word to start with. Lately I've been falling back on the phrase "tending Satan", but no one seems to laugh at that. So I expect that this might, if nothing else, help me keep in check with myself to see exactly how I am, what I'm up to... and maybe if I don’t feel like answering I’ll just refer them to on this blog:

So let’s start with right now. Where I am now. Which is the Starbucks off of West 4th and Washington Square. Picture, if you will, a loud, raging ferment of Chinese exchange students translating “Things Fall Apart” via text message. A merry-go-round scuffle of cliff-notes for Bourdieau, Schiller, the Situationists, and a girl crying as she digs under them for her amphetamine prescription. Then next to her, a physics undergrad with a Hasidic beard, publicly weighing the pros and cons of testing Tesla’s theory by jumping off the Verrazano Bridge. This is why, Ma and Pa, I cannot go back to school.

I came from the West Coast after a two week boycott of reality to discover that I really had returned to fall in New York. Walking to work past the pale trenchcoats sweeping down 47th, the nurses having dyed their hair dimestore burgundy, the people hugging themselves in the subway stations, I sighed the last breath of summer and awaited the reverberations. The long list of late fees. The unfinished business breeding fresh enemies. The job I took for experience and somehow became my perception of past/present/future. Yes, I realize that I’m speaking in lists, and not without insignificant vitriol, but I really can’t help it.

It all has a little to do with my job. I’ve been working as a production assistant for D.I. Love, a low-budget film directed by Boaz Yakin shooting out of Kaufman-Astoria with Jacqueline Bissett, Josh Lucas and Adam Brody. Without going into too much situational detail (which could provide search engine fodder for some fanclub for The O.C. - or whatever), the experience has been riotous, by which I mean it has been both turbulent and completely hilarious. Somehow, in the brief span of this job, I’ve become a bus driver, tax accountant, key grip, insurance salesman, sound technician, veterinarian, mother, father, cop and freelance whore. Am I demeaning the experience? Probably. That's not to say I didn't make some solid contacts. I also can't complain about the pay. And of course, I feel that I now know just about everything I possibly could about working in this industry. Namely that I will never work in it again. After Thursday, hugs will be exchanged, the last champagne bottles will be uncorked at the wrap party, the ribbons will come down and I will be temporarily unemployed.

So in the interim, I'm going to back to bartending and spending a month-or-two to finish a play. Miraculous Lives is neither close nor far away from completion, so I’m thinking of summoning up a former project or taking on something entirely new. My friend Craig is going to print up some business cards so I can start giving piano lessons/booking private gigs starting November. And if there's enough money leftover from my $800 rent and (sometimes) gratuitous lifestyle, I plan on taking up Bando Thaing (a Burmese form of kickboxing). So that, my friends, is the abridged version of what I'm up to and my Earth dominating plans for the near future. Anyone who knows me well enough understands that I always leave room for failure and, of course, a little bit of the extraordinary.

Tomorrow, Jessica and I have two new roommates moving in. One is a designer from Aeropostale and the other is a model for L’Oreal. I know what you're probably thinking. I've never lived with fashion people either, but though my assumptions trouble me, I'm leaving them by the doormat. As Boaz says, "We're switching reels, folks... it's about to get forbidden."

Love & Other Noises From the Hall,

Trystan Trazon

Lies (by Xiaochang Li)

2007-08-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

Photos From the Week's Past

2007-08-11T00:32:00.000-07:00

This must be the place...

2007-07-02T03:15:00.001-07:00

MANHATTAN FROM THE ROOFTOP DECK

MY SUBLIMELY IMPRESSIVE ROOFTOP

NEIGHBORING ROOFTOP

WILKOMMEN

WORKSPACE

ALTITUDES

UP THE LADDER...

… AND INTO THE MAGICIAN'S QUARTERS.

COMMONS AREA

COMMONS AREA PEERING INTO KITCHEN

CEREAL DYNASTY

HALLWAY (Does this remind you of a certain Dario Argentino movie?)

EXTERIOR – MORNING

JEFFERSON STREET

Low-Impact Consumption Month

2007-06-04T21:38:00.000-07:00

Hi Guys,

So in keeping with the spirit of "pretending to be better people" via our general consumption practices, I'm fwing to all of you a list of "low-impact consumption" guidelines as specified through an activist/meditation group in Soho I'm a part of called The Interdependence Project. ( http://www.theidproject.com) July is the official month we're going to start putting in place these instructions, though if you're intimidated by the idea of acclimating yourself into a different routine, it's been suggested that you observe them perhaps a week or so beforehand. The guidelines, at least as I see them, are relatively straightforward and noninvasive, though it'll be interesting to experiment and which prove harder to keep than the others. If you're interested in coming to the meetings, they're typically held on Mondays and Wednesdays at The Lila Center between the Bowery and Houston street. It's a spectacular, kind and rather brilliant group of people. And if you need evidence of this, then search for the podcasts under "The Interdependence Project". (I think I ramble on in one of them about Sesame Street and the Laws of Aggression... like everything that is said in these meetings, context is EVERYthing) It's also become a greater part my personal scheme to bring back Mondays as the new Sunday.

For the guidelines, scroll down after the heading "Consumption Update, Art Groups, etc."

Love & Other Inconviniences,

T.Trazon

-----
JUNE INTERDEPENDENCE PROJECT UPDATE

Hey Everyone,

Our meeting notes and basic guidelines for the Low-Impact Consumption Month of July have been posted on the discussion board at:
http://theidproject.com/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=415.

It also might be enlightening to take the ecofoot.org personal ecological footprint quiz. My own results shocked me when I found out that if everyone lived the way I do, we would need 2.4 Planet Earths to sustain us in the long run. I always thought I lived pretty environmentally - urban, small apartment, mass-transit, vegetarian - but clearly I still have a lot of work to do! If you would like to see how a few other folks did on the quiz and post your results, visit:
http://theidproject.com/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=420

Dorothy and Ben have been hard at work putting together a large body of information resources on how to lower our consumption impact that will be posted on theIDproject.com before July begins.

Again, we are really hoping for a broad participation in July, even if you only practice a few elements of the guidelines.

Weekly Gatherings:

We have two great groups going strong. Please join us Monday or Wednesday if you don't already. Monday's June 4 topic is "Free Speech, Kind Speech, Right Speech." Wednesday's June 6th topic is "Ignorance: Knowing What You Don't Know." Please let friends know if you think they might be interested. If you aren't in NYC, check out the podcast at
http://www.theidproject.com/podcast.htm

Details on weekly gatherings are at http://www.theidproject.com/classes.htm

ID Arts:

-Sunday, June 10 - Looking Glass Life Drawing and Meditation Group 1:30 - 5pm
-Sunday, June 17 - ID Arts Tour of Rubin Museum of Art 1pm
More info http://www.theidproject.com/arts/index.htm , including some drawings from the first Looking Glass group last month!!!

-Writers Group - we are starting a group for people who already have an ongoing writing practice and are also interested in meditation. Email cassie@theidproject.com if you are interested in participating.

-Theater Group - we are also starting a group for performers who share an interest in meditation. Email davidb@theidproject.com if you are interested in this group.

Sentient City: The Art of Urban Dharma: We are accepting submissions in all genres for issue #2 of Sentient City. The Deadline is July 15. We are also looking for design help with the magazine. Email kyle@theidproject.com with any questions or submissions.

Hope you are enjoying your start of summer. See you soon, at a weekly gathering or in cyberspace.

Peace,

Ethan, Dorothy, Nomi, Juan Carlos, Kyle, Leah, Cassie and the crew
The InterDependence Project
http://www.theIDproject.com

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Retreat in Vermont
A Meditation Retreat at Karme Choling
with Ethan Nichtern
Simplicity: Meditation For Real Life
July 27 - August 3, 2007
You don't have to attend the whole thing

With the flexible schedule of this retreat, you can come for one or two day or the whole week. This is absolutely the most beautiful time of year in Vermont, and a great meditation center very dear to my heart that you should check out. There will be extra optional study sessions for those who want to go deeper with their study/practice of the Buddhist teachings.

Follow this link for more details

----

Guidelines for July Low Impact Month

I pledge to lower my impact on the environment for one month.

Below I have listed the general guidelines that I came up with and also the Compacter rules. Any portion and combination of the "rules" can be followed. This can be as hardcore or low core as you want it to be. We also suggest that daily meditation practice, journaling the experience and frequent posts on the discussion board be a part of the month. Please start posting suggestions and resources so we can all help each other. There is a lot of information out there.

I pledge to lower my impact on the environment for one month.

This can be as hardcore or low core as you want it to be. We also suggest that daily meditation practice, journaling the experience and frequent posts on the discussion board be a part of the month.

Suggested Guidelines for July Month of Low Impact

1. Limiting Waste

-plastic bags

-coffee cups

-napkins

-energy, lights, air conditioning, cell phone charging, computers

2. Travel

-public transportation, ride share

-walking, biking

-planning ahead to make less trips in the car (if you have one)

3. Food

-buy local

-no bottles water

-try to eat less meat

4. Other

-limiting general purchasing and consumption of new products

-trying to use second hand stores, library, Craig's list, freecycle.com , downloading music and movies…

5. Personal

-find something personal that you would like to add to your month.

Compacter Guidelines

The aim of the Compacters is:

1. To go beyond recycling in trying to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the U.S. consumer culture, to resist global corporatism, and to support local businesses, farms, etc. – a step, we hope, inherits the revolutionary impulse of the Mayflower Compact

2. To reduce clutter and waste in our homes (as in trash Compact-er)

3. To simplify our lives (as in Calm-pact)

*First principle- don't buy new products of any kind (from stores, web sites, etc.)

*Second principle- borrow or buy used

*a few exceptions- using the "fair and reasonable person" standard –i.e., you'll know in your heart when you're rationalizing a violation:

-food, drink, and necessary medicine (no elective treatments like Viagra or Botox)

-necessary cleaning products, but not equipment (don't go out and buy the Dyson Animal, for example)

-socks and underwear (utilitarian- non-couture or ornamental)

-pajamas for the children

*Utilitarian services allowed (plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, veterinarians, dog/house-sitters, fire/paramedics, dry cleaners, house cleaners, etc.) Support local and encourage used parts (rebuilt transmission, salvaged headlight unit, etc.)

*Recreational services (massage, etc.) and local artisanal items – Good sources for gifts, but should not be over-indulged in for personal gratification

*Charitable contributions (Seva, Heifer, and the like) – an even better source for gifts

*Plants and cut flowers- whenever possible cultivate from free cuttings or seeds. Ok in extreme moderation (yo, incoming oxy) when purchased from local businesses (i.e. not the Target Garden Shop)- and again, within reason

*Art supplies – First line of attack: SCRAP. When absolutely necessary (for the professionals and talented amateurs in the group), from local businesses

*Magazines, newspapers, Netflix- renewals only, no new subscriptions. Even better to consume online

*Video rentals and downloadable music files (non-material) – freely shared and legal, please

-Nomi Dale

Anthem.

2007-05-31T17:26:00.000-07:00

You want to go out Friday
And you want to go forever.
You know that it sounds childish
That you've dreamt of alligators.
You hope that we are all with you
And you hope that you're recognized
You want to go forever
You see it in my eyes.
I'm lost in the confusion
And it doesn't seem to matter
You really can't believe it
And you hope it's getting better.

You want to trust the doctors
Their procedure is the best
But the last try was a failure
And the intern was a mess.
They did the same to Matthew
And he bled 'til Sunday night
They're saying don't be frightened
But you're weakened by the sight of it
You lock into a pattern
And you know that it's the last ditch
You're trying to see through it
And it doesn't make sense
But they're saying don't be frightened
And they're killing alligators
And they're hog-tied
And accepting of the struggle

You want to trust religion
And you know it's allegory
But the people who are followers
Have written their own story.
So you look up to the heavens
And you hope that it's a spaceship
And it's something from your childhood
Your thinking don't be frightened

You want to climb the ladder
You want to see forever
You want to go out Friday
And you want to go forever.
And you want to cross your DNA
To cross your DNA with something reptile.
And you're questioning the sciences
And questioning religion
You're looking like an idiot
And you no longer care.
And you want to bridge the schism,
The built in mechanism to protect you.
And you're looking for salvation
And you're looking for deliverance
You're looking like an idiot
And you no longer care.
You want to climb the ladder
You want to see forever.
You want to go out Friday
You want to go forever.

Photographic Investigation For Untitled Writing Project / The OTB on W. 49th St. / 5-03-07

2007-05-29T05:31:00.000-07:00

2007-05-29T04:07:00.000-07:00

My name is Trystan Trazon.
Formerly Trystan Phillip Toole of Greater Seattle, Washington. Currently living on the margin between Queens and Brooklyn. Ask what brought me to this city, and I’ll ramble off a list of excuses. I make music, I write plays, I shake martinis, take my paychecks, then dance myself into debt. I've spent most of my life shooting my mouth off and am now understanding the authority that comes with being an attentive listener. I'm the world's tardiest answerer of voicemails. I don't always write (or for that matter, speak) in complete sentences. I am preoccupied with pop culture revivals, past revolutionaries and public indecency. But mostly I’m preoccupied with this absurd reality of people, in spite of their collective resistance and capacity toward suffering, forever struggling to just get along.

Really, this blog is here mostly as a means to condition a kind of self-narrative. By that I mean (and I've said this many times before) the idea that "if you didn’t write it, it didn’t happen". Brick upon brick of my self-referential memory have left an entire fourth wall open to the crisis of forgetting. I am showing signs of a geriatric at the age of twenty-two. I need to build this wall, or rebuild it, as the case may be. Even if it means reversing the chronology. Otherwise, there really is no excuse for this blog. Maybe to defend the declining relevance of neosocialist theory. And oh, to post YouTube videos of Jennifer Hudson.

Yes, mostly just that.

So enjoy at your risk. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

Keep With The Bliss,

Trystan Trazon.

Dedicated to all The Nobodys & The Somebodys

2007-05-29T01:10:00.001-07:00

“At long last love has arrived,
And I Thank God I’m alive.
You’re just too good to be true,
Can’t take my eyes off of you.”
- Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons

We open on a jetliner, suspended mid-song.
Playing courtesy of Phil Spector before The Wall of Sound Shakedown. It's a veteran theme, an orphan angel in the zeitgeist, lowering his bow to the young in love and newly emanicpated. It should be a fanfare for change, but you hear it as an oath of good riddance should the plane shake-and-shudder to its fall somewhere between Southeast Pennsylvania and the modern dregs of suburban Jersey. Not that these are thoughts which you, yourself, can account for. You've been drinking bourbon and soda since you crossed the Mississippi River. The coffee must have rattled your nerves this time, but that bitch sitting behind you reading The National Review certainly isn't helping. (Why is it men, and always men in planes are reduced to the back of their furniture?) She's crushed both knees into your seat, killing your stereophonic bliss, leaning invasively into that disparity that splits your dream from imminent suspicion. You keep listening to the song until it barges in from the left like a sprawling citadel--that view of Lower East Manhattan which hints at the beginning of the end. And its here where the woman behind withdraws both her knees to release you into the mystery. And there she has left you, in that space between to swim and retrieve how your story is to begin.

This will be a story, you've decided, of wishes and exonerations. A story of cosmic retribution. A story of arrivals and departures. Of disappearance. The belief in magic. Of small-tales, tall-tales. The search for paradise. Of half-lives and the flight of angels. Of past, present and future converging at a streetlight. Of resistance, then the courage to give in. Of friends. The music of an accident. Of foiled rivals. Of lightening storms. Of rain on the rooftops. Of requiems. Of premonition. Of trains and boats and planes. Of big cities and small towns and put-upon accents. It’s the story of the big balloon, and the man who gave up trying to save the world.

It’s a simple story, really.

You probably know it already.

And this is not what happened, but it’s how I remember it.