Duy Huynh

iCopyright notice: I do not own any of these pictures! Except the last one, which is a picture of my penis. If these pictures do get removed, here's a link to the artist's official website.

I found this artist in a gallery in Asheville.

(Bristles.)

That just sounded so adult and professional.



















Pretty fantastic, huh? I would honestly buy one if I actually had money. Which is, you know, any important component involved in purchasing things like paintings.

Song for today? "Honey Bunny," by Girls.

It is so ME. Ha ha, not really. But I like the Deathly Hallows necklace. I got a Deathly Hallows key chain on Amazon. I showed it to a bunch of people at school and only a handful recognized it. Despicable.

How did it ever happened that my two of my three best friends are Republicans, and none of my three best friends likes Harry Potter?

This is indeed a disturbing Universe.

-Christopher

The Fog, a Poem

That feeling you get—a phantom’s electric hand on your neck
When your eyes fall on a hooded visitor in the doorway
Who has no face—just a smirking stretch of smooth skin
The cold darkness that moves in the tubes of your
Stomach like a moth’s wing—a quivering flap
It lingers in the air tonight, masked with such fog
That might adorn the sky in your most feverish nightmares
Orange lamplight sinking to the ground in defeated gasps
Invisible rain drips from unseen pipes, demonic percussion
Like one would hear mingling with whispered screams
On the dense black nights that plague the agitated jungles of Africa
The fog, this legendary—this mythical beast I speak of, the faceless visitor
That stands at an angle in your doorway and howls
With silent laughter that ignites in your brain
Fog, hanging in the air like the ones who watch us
In the graveyards, gray forms that stand among the trees
The stars, the moon, the elephant clouds—all murdered by
This unwelcome guest, silently annihilated with one swipe of a
Slick knife through their glowing celestial throats
I walk along the empty street, its dead eyes glazed
And voices murmur in sinister dialects
Shadows flit before me—then flap like bats into the sky
Muddled vampires standing crooked against the white
Those faceless visitors—laughing, whispering, watching
Tonight I walk along the darkest depths of the ocean
Muted submarine sounds thundering in the blackness
Impossible monsters of the sea gliding over my head
My footsteps like mercury, footsteps like those that imprinted the
Ghostly horizon of the moon and slid off the side
Drifting serenely down to Tartarus, dark eternity
This fog, cursed cloud of musical insanity
Wicked silver spirit escaped from Pandora’s pretty box
Supernatural maze that rides the wind
It shrinks the world to this deathly orange street
Guarded by the outlines of houses in which asthmatic
Spirits reside, strings of skin reaching over their empty eye sockets
Past these billowing walls of devilish fog, I fear,
Lies only vacant space—cold dark dark dark eternity
Waiting to pounce on me, the shivering hairless rat I am
Waiting to pounce on me like a hellish lion of the Underworld, ripping me apart
And letting my intestines dance gaily against its fleshless jaw
My brain crushed in an instant between its saber tooth fangs
This fog, fallen angel that haunts the earth
Trailing lost wanderers through the swaying woods
Moaning bewitched pagan hymns that float on the groaning breeze
That rattles through the cackling trees
That peers through your blinking bedroom window
Fog, prophet of Hades, guard of the night
Gray, shapeless Minotaur
Faceless visitor--in your doorway

The Psychic Duck, A Guest Post by Alex (AKA "Slicks")

If you’ve got no place to go,
And you’re down on your luck.
Please, do come in,
And speak to this duck.

He’s able to tell the future,
It’s 100 percent true (I swear).
So, please, do sit down,
And ask for your fortune, if you dare.

He accepts no form of currency,
(but tips help pay for his food),
So, please, do not worry,
As you’ve got nothing to lose.

I understand you must be confused,
As you cannot understand his diction.
So, please, do listen close,
As I translate his wondrous prediction.

He says you’ll be the king of the world,
And as rich as any man can be,
So, uh…, please, do not forget,
Who originally told you your destiny.

My name is Charlotte Tan,
And this is The Great Anatidae.
So, please, do be charitable
To those who helped you out today.

I hope we’ve boosted your esteem,
And made your hard life easier,
So, please, do have a nice day
Mr… what was it? Caesar?

Howl

The first dozen lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between...


Allen Ginsberg has changed the way I understand poetry.

I'll have to pay him back.

-Christopher

A Poem by Emily Dickinson

I died for Beauty -- but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room --

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied --
"And I -- for Truth -- Themself are One --
We Brethren, are", He said --

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night --
We talked between the Rooms --
Until the Moss had reached our lips --
And covered up -- our names --

Guest Post: Kat

Apocalypse 2.0: Aliens Do (Not) Exist

Hi. I'm Kat, and I'm here to prove the existence of aliens, discuss the Republican primaries, and make oblique references to my favorite TV shows. Also, I promise you that all but one of those items are very closely related to each other.

Before I proceed to blow your mind into little meat-drops with the explosive power of PHILOSOPHY, there's just one quick little concept we need to discuss: the Fermi paradox. Essentially, Fermi was this great scientist, mathematician, and astronomer who concluded that, in an infinite universe with infinite possibilities, there is a mathematical absolute certainty that aliens should exist somewhere in the world.

The only problem with that idea is that, technically, those same calculations also confirm that we should have some proof of or contact with these sufficiently advanced aliens. Ergo, the paradox; infinitely simultaneously provides proof for both the existence and non-existence of extraterrestrial creatures, sort of like how Firefly proved that FOX was capable of making excellent shows by existing, and then proved they were all idiots by being canceled after 12 episodes.

So, which is right? It's gotta be one or the other.

Or does it?

There's another, better answer: both. Let's assume that there is, or was, intelligent life in the universe, somewhere, because the simple fact of having impossibly large numbers makes anything almost certain. For example, however unlikely and weird it would be if it was occurring in your immediate vicinity, somewhere in the world there is a man in a Star Wars costume doing the funky chicken. Because math says so.

At any rate, these aliens have not contacted us because, in all probability, they no longer exist. Since I, unfortunately, have no reliable historical contacts in the Moon Kingdom, I'm going to use a little perspective change; to them, we're the aliens, so everything that applies to once culture should logically apply to the other.

Earth has existed for billions of years, and only in the past twenty-five or so have we gained the technology to send our voice out into open space, and our robots to just our closest planets. Traveling fast enough to get to a whose new planet will certainly be decades, if not centuries, in the future, but I have no doubt it will happen. After all, 100 years ago, people thought the very idea of journeying through space at all was laughable. But what else has happened in the past century?

Two World Wars. A deadly plague that would have wiped out almost all of humanity if it had come any earlier. (The Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918, statistically the most deadly disease humanity has ever faced, would have been unstoppable without medical knowledge.) Nuclear Crisis. By God, it's AMAZING we survived the 1900s. All of that, long before we have a chance of traveling to infinity and beyond.

Civilization has a natural tendency to self-destruct, once it reaches a certain stage. Why? To quote Rei Ayanami, “Man fears the darkness, so he scrapes away at the edges of it with fire.” We've been make little, gradual progress with technology since we evolved into our earliest form, but what happens when the fires we're spreading fill the whole room, and no progress can be made? The answer is easy- we burn. Self-destruct. End of program, everyone gets hugged and turns into Tang, or primordial ooze, or whatever.

On that cheery note, let's talk American republican politics. Yay, old white men insulting each others' ideas in a polite way! On TELEVISION!

The field in the voting primaries has been particularly insane, with one candidate lurching forward and taking the lead, to suddenly fall back and never be heard from again. They have a common goal, to become president, and they are all tearing each other apart and destructing campaigns so well and so systematically that they're likely going to make it impossible for any among them to win. Politics makes an excellent microcosm of humanity, mainly because it shows both who we trust to represent us and what humans are capable of given power. The presidency, for those candidates, is the dream at the end of the line, the thing that would have been impossible a few years ago but that they all desperately seek. Is this starting to sound familiar?

I'm saying is, the presidency is an alien species. President Obama is actually a human shaped shell run robotically from the inside by a bunch of tiny Daleks. One of those sentences is true, in a metaphorical way.

Before they can reach office- before we can contact aliens- Herman Cain will be a pervert and drop the race- we will start a nuke war, and die out. Rick Perry will fumble with his words and leave the race- we will develop advanced robots that will turn on us and exterminate all carbon-based life. In pursuit of a goal, individuals have as much of a self-destructive tendency as society as a whole.

Society, human, alien, or whatever else, will implode on itself the more advanced it becomes. Wars could not kill our species until we gained the technology, just recently, that enabled us to do so. Flus and plagues cannot wipe life from the world unless they spread across the ocean on our boats and our planes. We are approaching the climax stage, and we will reach it long before we can travel to meet our celestial neighbors.

That, my friends, is the answer to the Fermi paradox, which turns out to be more like The Hedgehog's Dilemma. The more we interact with others and advance, the more we prick ourselves and get hurt. Politics, evolution, and scientific progress both save us and doom us at the same time. After all, would we even desire to meet our brothers in space if we did not have they scientific knowledge to know they could exist?

___________________________________

That was a guest post from Kat, a friend of mine who is President of Australia and also an alien herself. Thanks very much to Kat for this fantastic post.

Happy Martin Luther King Day to everyone, tomorrow. Do some charity, huh? Or make a special effort or resolution to connect with not just people of other races or religions, but people who you just normally wouldn't hang out with. Because that's what it's all about, isn't it? Everyone coming together despite their differences. A world united by the acknowledgement that everyone is an individual. Peace. Unity. Love.

Or something.



-Christopher

Good News! And a Texas Poem

The good news is that I finally got my laptop back. The fantastic tech guy who was working on it recovered almost all of the files, and he updated everything that needed updating, which is fantastic. And that combined with the fact that I probably needed this experience to wean me off my laptop makes me think this was all a blessing in disguise.

I'm still happy to get my laptop back, though. How shall we celebrate! Ooh, I have an idea! How about a nice poem!

An Ode to Deserts and Hills and Texas

Walking over the dusty red hills of Texas
Where coarse grass grows like hair on the fisherman’s cheek
The echoing silence surrounds me like an ocean
That could carry me up to the sky
Roads slice through the sandy land carved by
A scalpel, the surgeon’s paintbrush,
And the earth’s muddy intestines peek through its grassy skin
Its pulsating brains are exposed
Rusty rainbows of copper and crimson, carmine and coffee
With slithering scars of sparkling yellow

I gaze over the mountains and valleys, mesas and plateaus
That tower over the land like skyscrapers
From ancient cities
And I think it must be some great ocean
Frozen in time
The hills are sandy fossils, abandoned exoskeletons
Of enormous waves that once crashed and sprayed
Red droplets of water into the hot air
And suddenly I feel as though I am on a foreign planet
Standing here among this unmoving ocean
This prehistoric play set
On which giants must have once run on their
Calloused bare feet
Unleashing their roars that carried over the land

The yellow sun wraps its searing claws
Around my moist white neck
I squint at the sky and dream my dreams
Among the hills of Texas



-Christopher

Wanna Know How Stressed Out I Am Right Now?

I am THIS stressed out.

*Explosion*

A Poem, Tracy Turnblad, and Allen Ginsberg

Stuck in Traffic

Glistening clouds of chemical smoke
Roll over their hard metal skin
And stumble off to the sky
Where they will eat a hole into heaven
Their rumbling asthsma mingling together
The drone of mechanic bees
And through their transluscent kaleidoscope eyes
You can see their squirming organs
Pulsating issues of pale white
Twitching and jerking then suddenly still
These hard metal creatures glide over
Gray veins on the earth with liquid movement
Automated salmon swimming upstream
A rainbow colony of busy insects
Crawling about with a serene choreography
Programmed by some unseen director
Who perhaps hides away in the clouds



I don't remember if I've told you. But I've joined the school musical: Hairspray. I don't really have a part because this is my first time in a music at this school, so I'm just sort of in the chorus, although they're thinking about casting me as IQ on the Corny Collins Council for those of you familiar with the musical.

But I came home from rehearsal today tired and angry and whiny and hungry. I was in a terrible mood. I've had a stressful first week back to school. My computer crashed, to top it all off. (I'm blogging from my mom's computer now.) So I was certainly grumpy. But then I cheered up because I discovered that my Dad has met Allen Ginsberg, (author of Howl), and has both a signed copy of the poem from him and a post card he wrote. Dad wrote to Ginsberg and sent him one of his own poems, and Ginsberg wrote back and critiqued the poem. I nearly wet myself when I was told this. He showed me the post card and the book and it was so amazing my brain exploded.

So now I'm in a good mood. Which is good.

Sorry about the lack of posting. It's been since, you know, my computer crashed. But what can you do, huh?

I saw It's a Wonderful Life for the first time ever last week. Fantastic movie. More on that later.

Adieu,
-Christopher