Let it go and so to fade away

24 03 2014

I’ve been circling around and around this post by TNC; still not thinking in straight lines.

Scattered bits: the bad faith of American triumphalism, of progressivism (as Whig history); the shock of my students when I speak plainly about white supremacy; how it is harder for me to speak plainly of male supremacy (/patriarchy?); how white supremacy doesn’t just hurt black people; how male supremacy doesn’t just hurt female people.

And then the posts on waning Christendom in the US, on the erosion of religious structures, what it all means. More circling.

But this: to look to God is to look away, that religious belief seems to me a form of alienation, a scrim between oneself and the world.

Of course, to the believer, it is I who am alienated.

How any of this relates to kenosis, I don’t know.

And through a side door: we carry our troubles with us. If I have a morality, it is that we should carry our troubles with us. We have to learn how to carry them, so they trouble us less, and when memory is enough.

This is one way to find out who we are.

The troubles are ours; they can’t be given up to God without giving up ourselves.

But then, that might be the point. To some.

I’ll try to think better, to gather these flyaway threads.


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Categories : Musing

The lady don’t mind

24 03 2014

Trickster doesn’t care that I have work to do.

She doesn’t care that I’m eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

008

She doesn’t care that I just want to sit where I want, how I want, or how comfortable I am.

Trickster wants in my lap.

004

Now.


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , ,
Categories : Musing, Photos & art

Listen to the music: The beat goes on

19 03 2014

I bought a lot of albums, and then a lot of cds, from the Electric Fetus on Fourth Avenue, in Minneapolis.

It was right across the bridge over 34W separating Phillips from Whittier, although it didn’t really seem like Whittier until you crossed Nicollet. I lived in and around Stevens Square for a few years, and the feel in that neighborhood was different from—gritter than—Whittier.

Anyway, 4th Ave near Franklin Avenue was kind of shitty, what with cars screaming by on the interstate below. Above Franklin there was a huge brown wall to try to block out the noise, but it wasn’t clear that the wall was much of an improvement.

The Fetus was on the other side of Franklin, on the southwest corner. It was, initially, right on that corner, crammed into this tiny space next to an Ace Hardware. When the hardware store moved (into a space in a mini-mall on Nicollet & 18th), the Fetus stretched itself into that new space. It was a bit discombobulating, at first, but they made good use of all that room, expanding both the head-shop portion at the front of the store and the music in the rest. The classical section was the most spare, but the jazz and blues kicked ass, and the international selections were a revelation.

In addition to African and Brazilian music, I got into Nordic and Scandinavian tunes when I lived there (it didn’t hurt that NorthSide Records mainlined that stuff into the city): Hedningarna. Hoven Droven. Väsen. Garmana—have you listened to “Gamen”? Jesus. Go listen to it!—and my beloved, and still missing, Finnish Ambient Techno Chant.

I bought both new and used cds, and a lot of them. The Fetus had a policy that if you bought 3 or more cds, you’d get 10 percent off; three or four times a year everything in the store would be 20 percent off. It wasn’t my only record store, but they did get a lot of my money.

The folks who worked there were the Minneapolis version of the stereotypical sullen music snob, which is to say, not that sullen, and not that snobbish. And every once in a while they’d throw a free promo cd into your bag, sometimes because it was there, and sometimes because there was something you bought that made them think you’d like this new music, too.

They tossed in an Esthero ep, which worked: I bought the full-length cd. A Beth Orton ep led me to multiple cds, and if you asked what they were playing on the store’s sound system, they’d toss you the jewel case and let you inspect if for yourself.

They didn’t do the hard sell; the music was enough.

I found that same attitude in the guy who ran the used cd shop on lower St Denis in Montréal. I bought a lot at a shop on Mont Royal, but had almost no interaction with that shop’s staff; at this store—and I cannot remember it’s, or his, name—the owner loved to talk early punk and new wave. I was the right age (if a bit young) to have caught that music when it first hit, but, boxed in by AOR stations out of Milwaukee, I wasn’t exposed to most of it until I left Sheboygan Falls.

(I’ve told you the story about my first extended exposure to Patti Smith, right? Where the fuck was she when I was in high school?!)

He’s almost certainly closed up shop by now; he was thinking even back in 2003 that he wouldn’t last long, so I’d guess the collapse of the cd market has since wiped him out.

I can get any cd (or cd’s worth of music) I want  online, now, so as a music consumer I don’t really need the music store any longer.

But as a music lover, I miss the curators.

~~~

188. esthero, breath from another
189. Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This
190. Eurythmics, Be Yourself Tonight
191. Eurythmics, Revenge
192. Eurythmics, Savage
193. Everything But The Girl, Walking Wounded
194. The Falcon and the Snowman
195. Marianne Faithfull, Kissin’ Time
196. feelies, Time for a Witness
197. Feist, The Reminder
198. Christine Fellows, the last one standing
199. Aretha Franklin, Spirit in the Dark
200. Aretha Franklin, The First Twelve Sides
201. frente! marvin the album
202. Peter Gabriel, So
203. Peter Gabriel, Us
204. Peter Gabriel, Shaking the Tree
205. electronica gainsbourg
206. Gang of Four, A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
207. garbage, G
208. Garmana, Vengeance
209. Garmana, Hildegard von Bingen
210. Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On
211. Gear Daddies, Billy’s Live Bait
212. Gentle Waves, The Green Fields of Foreverland
213. Lisa Gerrard, Duality
214. Stan Getz and Joao, Gilberto, Getz Gilberto
215. Giant Sand, Chore of Enchantment
216. Giant Sand, cover magazine
217. Giant Sand, Swerve
218. Giant Sand, Is All Over the Map
219. Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man, out of season
220. Astrud Gilberto, eponymous
221. Bebel Gilberto, tanto tempo
222. Estair Godinez Band, Live from the Dakota


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , ,
Categories : Music, Musing

Listen to the music: 99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer

18 03 2014

Clearly, this woman is more energetic than I am. Or more obsessive.

When I decided to listen to all of my cds in alphabetical order, I never considered reviewing each and every one.

Okay, maybe I did, but only for a second. It wasn’t meant as a writing assignment for myself, but as a listening assignment. Why did I have these cds, this music? What was I missing? What held me? What no longer did?

Jayzeus christy, why did I buy this?

After I thought the thought, I had another: Hey I should blog about this. Sometimes I run a little dry in the blog department, so blogging about these chunks of listening space would keep the posts flowing. (Bad image, but you know what I mean.) And writing about it publicly would help to keep me listening, even if I got bored with the whole thing. It turned a lark into a project, a way to track my commitment to the music itself.

It’s worked pretty well. Sometimes I listen because I want to listen; sometimes I listen because I haven’t listened in a while; sometimes I listen because there’s something in this set of cds that I want to talk about.

The mixed motives keep me moving.

Anyway, while I very briefly considered mini-reviews of each cd, I turned against the thought almost immediately: blegh. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to offer my response to each cd—as Megan Seling notes, this woman is setting herself up for a book deal (and sure, I did I get a nice bump in readership when a Listen to the Music post was Freshly Pressed: imagine if I were really committed!)—but I wanted to follow where the music took me, not mark every step along the way. If somewhere amidst 10 or 20 cds I came across an overlook or a canyon or a hidden river, I wanted to stretch out in these spots, to linger, to find out if there was still anything there, anything more.

I may be listening my way along the trail, but I’m after something more.


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Music, Musing

This is your captain speaking

17 03 2014

So here’s my take on Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia: Read folks who, unlike me, actually know something about Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia.

What should the US do about C/U/R? Criminy. I’ll go with what has evolved into my default position on all matters in which the US is urged (often, but not always, by mouth-foamers) to do something: Ask four questions.

  1. What, practically*, can be done?
  2. If there is anything, practically, to be done, what among those options will make the situation better?
  3. What is “better”?
  4. What happens if the chosen action fails?

(*As in, what actually could be accomplished and what are the odds of success.)

There are other considerations, of course, including prior commitments and reputation management and allied relations, but it seems that amidst those other considerations, these four questions have gotta be answered.

I don’t know what those answers are in this situation, tho’ I do know I’m skeptical of aggressive action. As for those who think Putin is pwning our president, well, I’m skeptical that aggression is a sign of strength.

And  if Putin does end up getting his way and keeping Crimea? I guess he wins, whatever that means. A bad outcome, but probably not the worst.

Now, on to something about which I can know with 100 percent absolute super confidence: What happened to that Malaysian jet?

The Rapture, of course!

Duh.


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Categories : Musing, Politics

Gimme some water

16 03 2014

I think I’ve established that I have no plans to live forever.

Still, I’d like to hang out for awhile longer and, while so hanging, to be in relatively decent health.

I’d been using these old pedialyte-type plastic bottles as water bottles for both me and my cats—separate bottles, people! And what, you don’t refrigerate your critters’ water?—but have been thinking for awhile that maybe I should make the switch to glass. Or at least newer plastic bottles.

Then I listened to this Leonard Lopate segment on WNYC on plastics and, well, while I’m not chuckin’ my Tupperware—and yes, I have actual Tupperware from an actual Tupperware party—I thought that yeah, maybe cutting down my use of plastic would be. . . prudent.

So out went the pedialyte bottles!

And the new water bottle?

011

Knew I kept that around for a reason.

As for the cats? Well, they get an old marinara sauce jar—at least until I finish my bottle of Talisker.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Musing

Another one bites the dust

15 03 2014

I am an extremely lazy television viewer.

Not in the sense of not moving from the t.v. my external monitor, but in that I’d rather watch old shows over and over again than deal with the uncertainty of new shows. I watch to unwind, not get wound up.

There’s nothing wrong with such inertial sensibilities, at least as regards t.v. (and, it must be said, movies), but it does tend toward staleness. Thus, the only way to expand the comfortable old choices is to watch some new stuff.

Eureka worked out; Fringe did not. I’ve liked most of Waking the Dead, at least what’s available on Netflix, but it does seem like it headed toward MI-5 kill-everyone melodramatic cynicism. (Wallender is all right, tho’ a bit predictably dreary; don’t know that I’ll be revisiting that one, tho’ I may watch new episodes.)  And I’ve got some ‘new’ shows in my queue— Battlestar Galatica, Orange is the New Black, Top of the Lake, and a coupla’ other Brit-drams—which I’ll get to. Eventually.

Oh, and Leverage? Big enthusiastic fist-bumps for Leverage! Yes, formulaic and cartoonish, plot-wise, but since the show doesn’t take itself too seriously and the characters are witty and human and weird, well, big enthusiastic fist-bumps for Leverage!

So, anyway, another new show I was watching was Agents of SHIELD. I thought Thor was dumb, haven’t been interested in Iron Man/Captain America/The Hulk, zipped through an awful lot of the Avengers, and I have never been nor am I now a Marvel or DC Comic geek. (I only know about that distinction because of what I’ve read on TNC’s blog.) Still, sci-fi, strange tech: I could be up for it.

And so I watched. Some episodes I liked, some I didn’t, but I wasn’t so bothered as to stop watching. It was kind of mediocre, but I wasn’t so invested in the Marvel world that any plot problems really bothered me. It was slow in bringing everything together, but what the hell.

Well now I’m at to-hell-with-it. No, it wasn’t the poisonously oblique plot lines or the rushed intensity of the characters relationships to one another.

It was the beatings. The torture.

I’m not generally bothered by onscreen violence, and there isn’t overly-much in AoS—the expected battles of good-vs-bad guys—nor its it terribly graphic. That’s fine.

What’s not fine is the good guys beating the shit out of people they have in custody and having that be okay.

A few episodes ago Good-Guy Ward got the information he needed from a perp by threatening to have him sucked out of the plane.

This was not a problem for any of the other Good Guys.

In a more recent episode, another suspect was beaten (the Good Gal beating him was only stopped because she was needed elsewhere), then threatened with having his tongue pulled out and sundry other torments by yet more Good Guys.

Again, not a problem for the Good Guys. Which pretty much makes them not-Good Guys.

(I keep hitting the wrong key and typing “Good Goys”. Which, I guess, most of them are. Goys, I mean. Definitely not Good.)

This wouldn’t be a problem for me if this were all somehow to demonstrate the shadiness of the Good Guys and the moral peril involved in trying to be Good while sometimes doing not-Good. But that’s not how it’s set up: we’re supposed to cheer how bad-ass our Good Guys are.

Fuck that.

The Clairvoyant is bad because she (and, c’mon, she’s gotta be a she) engages in the crudest form of ends-justifying-the-means consequentialism. SHIELD has put the earth in danger and thus can’t be relied upon; someone else is gonna do what’s gotta be done to protect the joint.

Which makes her different how, exactly, from the Good Guys? Why shouldn’t I take her side?

Screw ’em all; I’m done.

So now I have space for another show. Maybe Friday Night Lights? Or how about Breaking Bad? At least we know (almost) everyone on that show is bad, right?


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories : Musing, Review

She sits by the hour maintaining her hair

11 03 2014

This should have been an omen.

You gonna get your head shaved? The Astor Place Hair man asked, in response to my request for a cut.

Ha ha, no. I don’t have the head-shape for it, I said, running my hand over my short-but-needed-a-trim hair.

I waited a bit, looking over the photos of famous people taped to the walls and doors, until the chair just behind and to the side of the reception desk opened up.

Just a trim, I said, but I like short bangs.

Ha ha, okay, said the cut-man. I make you see your face again. I grin-maced, took off my glasses, and settled in, waiting for him to wet down my head and ask what specifically I wanted done.

Never happened. Instead, he got out the electric razor and attacked my head.

Okay, not my head, but the hair on my head. I watched it drift down in alarmingly large patches.

You had lot of hair, said the cut-man.

I did not have a lot of hair.

No point in stopping him now. Bzzt bzzt bzzt. Thick squares of hair falling everywhere.

Now shorn, he decides it’s time for the water bottle. Now I use scissors.

Oh, now you use the scissors. When there’s nothing left to cut. Snip snip snip. Then back with the razor, bzzt bzzt bzzt. Then snip snip snip.

By this time I was telling myself It’s only hair, it’ll grow. And Hey, you always have to tell them to be aggressive, so. . . .  

Not a problem this time.

Now I see your face! the cut-man said, delighted.

There was no reason for such delight: I don’t have that great a face.

After my last cut, I said Holy moley, my hair has never been this short. Compared to this cut, that one left me looking like Rapunzel.

I’d say it’s butch, if I were at all butch-looking, which I am not. It’s just. . . very very, very very, very short. Very. Short.

Good news? It’ll be quite awhile before I need another cut. In the meantime: It’s only hair. It’ll grow.


Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Musing

Bound by the beauty

10 03 2014

It is shit like this that makes me, a fan of science, want to smash every fucking machine I see and go live in a cave.

What, exactly, smashes me so?

Not that mathematicians find some equations beautiful and others ugly.

Not the attempt by neurologists to look at brains looking at beautiful and ugly equations.

Not fMRI machines.

No. All of that is fine.

What is not fine is the presumption that functional magnetic resonance imaging studies—and neurologists—will be able to settle the age-old question of What Is Beauty.

I’m not exaggerating. These researchers, after having read a book on beauty, conclude the experience combines pleasure, reward, and hedonic states. “Whether one can ever experience beauty without at the same time experiencing a sense of pleasure and/or reward is doubtful.”

I don’t do the philosophy of aesthetics, so I’m hardly in a position to take on this particular definition of beauty, but when I say of Golijov’s Ainadamar that It makes me cry and I hate crying but it’s so beautiful how can I not listen to it . . . I don’t think I’m misunderstanding beauty.

These guys need to watch Moonstruck, is what I’m saying.


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Musing

I turn to my computer like a friend

24 02 2014

This isn’t creepy at all:

Language, [Ray Kurzweil] believes, is the key to everything. “And my project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means. When you write an article you’re not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organising and processing the world’s information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would like to actually have the computers read. We want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage an intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions.”

Excellent.

Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, he says. It will have read every email you’ve ever written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.

Nope, not the least bit creepy.

Or it would be if it weren’t horseshit.

Yeah, yeah— “Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity.”—but brute force isn’t always for the win. And a bit of code which allows a computer to understand the documents it scans doesn’t mean that computer will have attained human understanding.

It’s not that I doubt computers can learn in some sense of the word, that it can incorporate algorithms and heuristics which will allow it to attain some kind of understanding of what it learns; I don’t doubt that computer understanding is possible.

It’s just not clear that computer understanding is comparable to human understanding, not least because it’s unclear what human understanding is, and across time and space, becomes.

Human understanding may also incorporate algorithms and heuristics, but I don’t know that it can be reduced to that. It is fragile and unstable and prone to break down, and even when we think we understand, well, maybe we don’t.

And can I mention disagreement in understanding?

Ray Kurzweil is, as the Observer writer Carole Cadwalladr, notes, a “techno-optimist”, someone who believes tech can make turn us all into bionic women and six million dollar men (Better. Stronger. Faster.).

As someone who wears glasses, uses the elevator to trundle my overstuffed laundry bag down a couple of floors, and likes to sit back and watch Leverage on my computer, I ain’t anti-tech, far from it.

But I am a skeptic. Especially of the idea that tech will allow us to escape the human condition.

Maybe someday we will no longer be human, we will be immortal or transformed or perhaps we will truly have figured out some way to transcend the immanent. Perhaps someday we will escape being—we will no longer be.

Actually, we already can achieve that: it’s called dying. But I don’t think that’s what Kurzweil has in mind.

~~~

h/t HuffPo

 


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Musing

« Previous Entries Next Entries »