Sep 28 2007
Thought of the Day: "Construction"
After two days of driving in Los Angeles
" The shortest distance between two points is always under construction."
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
After two days of driving in Los Angeles
" The shortest distance between two points is always under construction."
Hey sorry everyone. The Jewish holiday kinda swallowed me up and now I'm off to L.A. for a speaking gig. Will blog if I get a moment but no guarantees. Otherwise, back on Monday.
Going under for Yom Kippur. Easy fast everyone!
6EMEIA, a Sao Paulo-based art collective does these fabulous paintings using sewers as their canvas. There's a whole collage of them on Flickr. (via Laughing Squid).
As of this morning, The New York Times is no longer charging readers to read online its columnists, nor archives from 1987 to the present. They explain it thusly...
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will
also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without
charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public
domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to
1986, and some will be free.
When I was 10, I had no idea I was "a whole new generation." But I think that idea's pretty cool.
Perhaps you heard the fabulous segment on On the Media this week about the music used to harass and interrogate combat detainees at places like Guantanamo Bay. If not, please do. It's a real eye (ear?) opener.
The part that hit me hardest on this assessment of "sonic suffering" was the musical choices military officers made as they seemed as boneheaded as the logic behind torture as appropriate foreign policy. Neil Diamond's "America", Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and Eminem's "White America" are all on the sonic harassment playlist ostensibly because repeating the word America to a Muslim detainee the height of offensive. Never mind that "America" is a paean to immigration, "Born in the USA" an excoriation of oversees war and "White America" a bludgeon aimed at racism. Rage Against the Machine, a band composed of outspoken liberal activists wrote the state department letters to ask them to stop using their music as a weapon against prisoners of war.
All this tells me is that the US Military is either a) tone deaf or b) never thought these choices would be subjected to public scrutiny. A) is sad but laughable. B) scares me to death.
Seen on a bumper sticker this afternoon...
2008: The End of an Error
Amen to that.
Ninotchka (1939): "Rigidity is among the best fodder for comedy."
Seen: As part I of Smokler's Sunday Cinema's month-ling salute to the great women of Hollywood.
Observations from this past week...
"Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.”
-- Martin Luther (via The Painting Activist)
While participating in a beautiful Taslich ritual (where, on Rosh Hashanah you throw bread into a moving body of water to release what you'd like left behind from the previous year), one of our leaders passed out this quote from Annie Dillard.
"On a shore, eight thousand waves break a day...At any one time, the from breaking waves covers between 3 and 4 percent of the earth's surface. The acreage of this foam -- using the figure 4 percent -- is equal to that of the entire continent of North America. By another coincidence, the U.S. population bears nearly the same relation to the world population: 4.6 percent. The U.S. population in other world, although it is the third-largest population among nations, is about as small a portion of the earth's people as breaking waves's white foam is the planet's surface. And the whole North American continent occupies no more space than waves' foam."
I love that. Also part of the ritual. We wrote phrases in the sand signifying things we also wanted to let go of for the coming of 5768. One of the others I spotted was this.
"May our actions be thoughtful and our sins forgiven."
Indeed.
Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator (2002): "Skateboarding has and will survived its brightest star being convicted of murder."
Notes: Few things compel me like a "dangerous allure of southern California" movie. I think Alpha Dog may be next.
Title: "Member of the Wedding"
Author: Carson McCullers
Synopsis: 13 year old Frankie Adams hates her life in a small southern town and plots to use her older brother's impending wedding as her escape.
Backstory: I loved McCullers's first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and wanted to bring something short and classic to visit my parents in the Berkshire mountains. at 153 pages, this fit the bill.
Verdict: Rich, painful and sad. McCullers is a master of character, mood and setting. Once in a while, her plots seem melodramatic, drawn out for kicks rather than from the center. But her prose is such a joy to bite down on, I forgive her.
Didn't like this one as much as "Heart" but almost. Sad that she died so young, with only a half dozen novels under her belt. But a relief in that one day I will finish them all.
Color Me Kubrick (2005): "A great performance in the midst of a lightweight movie feels like a $1000 bottle of wine at a backyard picnic."
September 11, 2001, one of the clearest days in my memory. I know exactly where I was. Laura and I still remember to chat every September 11. We call one another, catch up on world and national affairs and usually end talking about sandwiches from Le Petit Deli and the movie The Best Years of our Lives.
It's our special thing and seems to make the day both a memory and but manageable one as well.
Six years. Still hurts some.
After reading the cover story of this month's Mother Jones, on a school for mentally disabled kids that uses electric shock and imprisonment as "treatment" techniques, I want to rinse out my eyes with borax. Has our society reached a moment of reckoning where parents are so desperate that they will accept this kind of abuse for their kids? Where we have so few nets for the most vulnerable citizens that we effectively leave them in the care of predators? And have we in fact grown so cynical that there are entire industries dedicated to barbarism as a form of rehabilitation?
I want to crawl under a rock but I fear we're already there.
"Homo sapiens are a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree."
The Thin Blue Line (1988): "Our justice system's tragic human frailties can have tragic, human consequences"
Seen: At this week's edition of Smokler's Sunday Cinema, my weekly household movie screening.
If I had to say I had a professional mission, I'd argue it was to make plain how well technology, the arts and progressive politics work well together. So I my heart practically burst when I found this poem by Richard Brautigan.
I like to think (and the sooner the better)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think (right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Isn't that lovely? (via WorldChanging).
The last month has brought two of the best magazine profiles I've ever read to my attention.
First up, The Atlantic did an analysis of Karl Rove called "The Rove Presidency" (sadly only the first few graphs available to non-subscribers. I got it from the library after hearing about it on Left, Right and Center) which gets exactly why Karl Rove seemed invincible 3 years ago and now may be the personification of the Bush administrations failures and eventual middling place in history.
The New York Times Magazine last week devoted their cover (again behind a pay wall. My apologies) to record producer Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Records, mastermind behind the Aerosmith/Run D.M.C "Walk This Way" recording and the newly appointed president of Columbia Records. Journalist Lynn Hirschberg reports, with little hesitation that Rubin has been charged with bringing the label into the 21st century, realigning a business model fundamentally broken or has he puts it bluntly "saving the music industry from itself."
A great profile expands what you already know and takes you somewhere unfamiliar. Until reading "The Rove Presidency", I pretty much knew Karl Rove was cunning yet short-sighted, a brilliant campaigner who couldn't apply the same strengths to governing. But I figured he was mostly in the game for the thrill of winning and had simply chosen the Republicans as his team rather than guardians of his values. Rubin I knew was a musician with a golden set of ears and a penchant for looking past prevailing cultural boundaries but as a beneficiary of the system, I didn't see him as eager to upset it but rather in the mold of a producer-gone-suit like Jimmy Iovine.
Turns out, Rove is quite a student of history and saw his run with GW as similar to the 1896 election of William McKinley which ushered in 30 years of Republican rule. He wasn't put trying to win but trying to win for the ages, both with party and policy. In fact, the article submits that Rove's insistence on participating in policy decisions (Social Security his passion) may have spelled doom for Bush since getting laws passed and winning elections are two very different birds.
Rubin isn't taking the Columbia post as a way of keeping afloat a sinking ship but a personal challenge of see if the deserves to be sailing at all. He's aware that the major record label system is creaky and outmoded and that change will take time. "We may just have to be content to be the best dinosaur" he said plainly. Dousing the inferno of file sharing isn't mentioned once.
What a pleasure it was reading both these pieces! If you can find them, do.
In the reading queue this week. Done quite a bit of catching up on the pot.
Friends over at the The Elegant Variation have reminded me that the latest issue of Bookforum has hit the streets. And the web. Bookforum puts the entire contents of each issue on their website. Since I only have the time and budget to subscribe to one Lengthy Dissection of Contemporary Issues Through Books (the spot belongs to the New York Review of Books), this is a godsend.
This issue offers up such delectable noshing as
*A David Ulin (my editor at the LA Times) assessment of On the Road.
*An essay on the death (or is it?) of the public intellectual.
*Reviews of new books by Naomi Klein, Edmund White,Zakes Mda and Junoz Diaz.
*A Gerald Early piece on the letters of Jackie Robinson.
I'm already across the living room, at the printer, thinking about an afternoon in the bathtub reading.
I have no idea why MTV, according to this NY Times article is revamping the VMA's to 'return to its former days of glory' (to me that was 1981-87. Does this mean a surprise appearance by Alan Hunter?) but I'm going to guess a near pathological unwillingness to invest in music-related programming is part of it.
Just sayin'
So I'd been reading about the Sundance Film Festival for about 80 years and it only took me about 78 to realize where the name "Sundance" came from. In a parallel example of latent dumbnity, I was at the grocery store yesterday wasting time with the latest issue of Interview Magazine (website has everything but the interviews, the idiocy of which will become obvious in a moment) when I remembered this publication made their bones on pieces where two famous people chatted with each other. In, like, an interview. In a magazine called Interview.
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
The NY Times reports that Luciano Pavarotti has died. Pancreatic cancer. He was 71.
I don't know jack about opera but man, that dude could sing.
Wow! I've been gone a little while and I missed writing here a bunch. Here's what I've been up to.
*BookTour.com, the company I co-founded earlier this summer, was featured in a NY Times story this past Sunday. Huge for us and a personal milestone for me.
*I published this essay about Bill Graham, the legendary rock promoter in connection with the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.
*I celebrated a late birthday with 25 of my closest friends.
*I'm a Berkeley Rep. Theatre subscriber for this season, thanks to a birthday surprise from my parents.
Regarding this blog, I'm gonna spend some time evaluating what needs to go on this blog and what doesn't. In the recent past, the intimidation of feeling like I had to post x much, y often has kept me from posting at all. I don't want that to happen again. But I also need to be clear on what this space is for. I used to write all the time here because I wasn't making my living it at. Now that I am, I can't justify writing essay-length pieces here I could be writing for publication. Or perhaps I can, to push an idea out of the nest and see if it can fly.
Increasingly, I view my blog as a map of my mind, a snapshot of where I'm at on a given day and an outlet for expression to small to ignore but too big to devote worktime too. Right now, that makes the most sense to me.
So I'll be messing with a bunch of different kinds of postings. If you keep reading, I promise to keep it worth reading.
"In America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it ... and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen."
--Jack Kerouac (via The Writer's Almanac)
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