En Espanol, Por Favor

Hot on the heels of Sinical's Hip-Hop list comes my addition to the Pam's Europop Picks: Miguel Bose's Velvetina. There are a few video clips but I can't seem to find any MP3 downloads. This could be for one of two reasons:

1. I can't locate the link.
2. The lable is Time Warner and the tracks are locked down.

Still, I love the heavy beats and sweet sound of this stuff. I find it, well, sexy is the word that comes to mind.

So what?

You know what's getting on my nerves lately? I'm gonna tell you. It's this: The flap about the "Bush Tapes." You know what I have to say about the Bush Tapes? Big fucking deal.

So W. might have smoked a little weed. Is this at ALL surprising from a Skull and Bones mediocre frat boy who was already known for doing blow and getting hammered and going for a drive?

So W. made some vaguely disparaging remarks about homosexuals. Once again, like this is a surprise from a guy who wanted to amend the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage?

There's just not enough here to grab on to. Is this because I'm already so outraged about the things that have come out of the "President's" mouth in the present that I don't give one good goddam about what he might have said in the past? I've heard excerpts from the Johnson tapes and the Nixon tapes, now there was some nasty stuff. But anything I've come across from the W. tapes just leaves me apathetic.

The media I'm seeing is really hyping this release of information like it's full of shocking surprises. But as far as I've seen, there's no there there. My inner paranoid freak makes me wonder if this administration isn't a player in this. "We gotta give them something so it looks like there's still a shred of independent reporting out there."

Naming conventions

So, I missed the autocomplete when I typed in "hardto" & came up with a search result. This one caught my eye, a Rick James tune with the same name, you know, of the blog here.

The name for this blog here, was Drew's idea. When I asked for the reason, he said that he liked the idea of being "hard to get" and it's multiple connotations. Jump in if I'm wrong here, Drew. Not sure what other connotations folks get, if you know what I mean.

Having Rick James in the mix kinda warms my heart. It reminds me of sweaty Forestville nights dancing The Freak to P-Funk, Rick James and the Commodores (think, Brick House). Those were some of the most confusing, murky years of my life, but dancing is the blessing I got from it all. Not being afraid or unable to dance to me is more lifesaving than knowing how to swim, for example.

Ah, Forestville. Drew's been there with me. We even stayed at my childhood home. It felt like I was walking him through one of my paintings... through veiled memories and tangible presence. It's just a government suburb, outside of DC, but no one's childhood is limited by geography these days... take a look at where I grew up, I circled the shool I attended through 6th grade:



I walked over a bridge to get to school, you can see the little path near the bottom left of the circle. Before I went, I think I was four, my brother & I were walking around & playing in the creek. I remember feeling impatient to go to school. There were a few mornings I spent, catching minnows and frogs, near the bridge - while kids ambled across in school clothes, with books in hand. I thought they were so fancy!

In elementary school, we were more likely to dance to Baby Come Back then anything as rowdy as RJ - Hard to get, hmmm?

Under My Thumb

The folks at 43 Folders had a clever idea-Google "rules of thumb" and see what comes up.

They found rules of thumb for flirting, evaluating a pet store, building a church (balconies? not hot) and selling remote controls.

We all have personal rules of thumb, of course. For instance:

-If Ice Cube is in it, I won't be renting it
-Brown clothes in my wardrobe are too much hassle
-Buy the canned tomatoes; the ones in the produce section will just break your heart.

These are fine but they aren't a system, they're just ad hoc ideas. But I know within me, there are rules, rules I follow, some I've developed and some I've borrowed and many of them make systems.

Between the time I started typing this post and now, I went back to the posting at 43 folders. There are many comments from readers including this helpful hint:

If a helicopter is bigger than your thumb held at arm's length, you can bring it down with ground fire.

For any of you who are too distracted by the concept of "the rule of thumb" because you are busy thinking about how the phrase "rule of thumb" refers to an old law requiring men to restrict themselves to beating women with a rod no greater in diameter to their own thumbs, this site claims that story is bogus. The site goes on to say that, per the O.E.D., "rule of thumb" has been used at least 300 years to refer to any method of measurement or technique of estimation derived from experience rather than science.

Y tu?

The truth about love

Happy Valentine's day everybody!

I have spent the day putting hearts on all my powerpoints & finding out what folks are doing for their celebrations. We hope to do some decorating. I'm getting stencils of hearts & spray paint. We're bringing cameras.

Some thoughts on love:

My father-in-law loaned us a book on Shackleton, early in our relationship - along with the admonishment that "marriage is hard"...

Here's from Rumi:
Bouyancy

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be a respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That's how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

Here's a Neruda thing:
The Table

"...The World
is a table
engulfed in honey and smoke,
smothered by apples and blood.
The table is already set,
and we know the truth
as soon as we are called:
whether we're called to war or to dinner
we will have to choose sides,
have to know
how we'll dress
to sit at the long table,
whether we'll wear the pants of hate
or the shirt of love, freshly laundered.
It's time to decide.
they're calling:
boys and girls,
let's eat!"

How's Your News?

Journalists spend a lot of time worrying about the decline of print journalism. What this really means, of course, is that print is evolving, not dying. In a world where the act of knitting can become hot, hot, hot, it seems premature to declare the death of journalism that you read yourself rather than having someone else read it to you.

One piece of the evolution is the end of objectivity. Chris Anderson describes objectivity as a product of scarcity. If a community has very few sources of information (a paper, a few television channels, a radio station or two) then those sources are obliged to be objective, if only from a business standpoint. In contrast to the U.S., English newspapers have always been national, not local. Papers distinguish themselves by taking sides.

Since news is now a commodity, Anderson suggests that aggregators differentiate themselves in the marketplace not just via opinion and partisanship but through sensibility and worldview. He breaks down the difference like this..."sensibility" would be The New Yorker, Maxim and MTV-if you are this kind of person, you'll like this kind of information. "Worldview" is more like a lens for viewing the world, often expressed as an "-ism"...enviromentalism, libertarianism, etc.

This seems intuitively correct. A mass media produces "Happy Days" while narrowcasting can produce "Straight Eye for the Queer Guy"; why should news be any different? Make a liberal FOX News, an enviromental Rush Limbaugh, etc.

This is a long-ass post but I have one other idea to pass along. Cass Sunstein thinks that all this fragmentation is a bad idea. "For democracy to work, people must be exposed to topics and ideas they would not have chosen in advance." says Sunstein.

The essay is, like everything he writes, sharp and well-reasoned. He ends it with this sentence:

The task for the future is to find ways to ensure that the Internet reduces, and does not increase, the risk of social fragmentation.

Fragmentation: hot or not?

The Cabinet National Library

I love this. I can't stop looking at it. I really can't.

Turner

You're gonna dig this.

Nazis. I hate those guys.

It's the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and here in central Europe, feelings are running very high. There's a thoughtful commentary in the Times on the recent scandalous walk-out by Saxon members of the National Party of Germany (NPD) during a moment of silence for the victims of the Holocaust.

There's no denying that Dresden was a bloodbath and that many innocent people lost their lives. I can't do the whole moral equivalency thing where you equate the bombing of Dresden with the millions of lost lives in Europe, Jewish and otherwise. They're all lost lives, ruined by Nazism.

What sticks in my throat and infuriates me nearly beyond words is the blantant racism and sheer stupid insensivity of the NPD. I'm pretty sure no one stopping the NPD - or anyone else for that matter - from commemorating the bombing of Dresden. Hell, we all learned about Dresden in history class and I don't remember being taught that it was an event that glorified the allies and downplayed the loss of human lives. It was a firebombing. There was death and destruction everywhere. Yet the SPD can't acknowledge that Auschwitz, too, was a tragedy beyond description.

Neo-Nazism is on the rise in former Eastern Germany. In Saxony, the SPD got just over 9 percent of the vote. You could conclude that one in ten people you'd meet when walking the streets of modern Dresden supports the SPDs racist platform. This is terrifying. Combine this with the rhetoric coming out of Iran these days about the Zionist agenda (thank you Dick Cheney) and you end up with the world looking pretty scarey for this latke eating member of the tribe.

W.W.Chuck Klosterman.D?

I felt both a little bit spanked and intrigued when I read this in Esquire, excerpted below. An interesting counter to some of my feelings of late about the election, swearing in, etc.

Do you want to be happy? I suspect that you do. Well, here's the first step to happiness: Don't get pissed off that people who aren't you happen to think Paris Hilton is interesting and deserves to be on TV every other day; the fame surrounding Paris Hilton is not a reflection on your life (unless you want it to be). Don't get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren't on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn record and play "Maps" all goddamn day (if that's what you want). Don't get pissed off because people didn't vote the way you voted. You knew that the country was polarized, and you knew that half of America is more upset by gay people getting married than it is about starting a war under false pretenses. You always knew that many Americans worry more about God than they worry about the economy, and you always knew those same Americans assume you're insane for feeling otherwise (just as you find them insane for supporting a theocracy). You knew this was a democracy when you agreed to participate, so you knew this was how things might work out. So don't get pissed off over the fact that the way you feel about culture isn't some kind of universal consensus. Because if you do, you will end up feeling betrayed. And it will be your own fault. You will feel bad, and you will deserve it.

Now, it's quite possible you disagree with me on this issue. And if you do, I know what your argument is: You're thinking, But I'm idealistic. This is what people who want to inflict their values on other people always think; they think that there is some kind of romantic, respectable aura that insulates the inflexible, and that their disappointment with culture proves that they're trapped by their own intellect and good taste. Somehow they think their sense of betrayal gives them integrity. It does not. If you really have integrity—if you truly live by your ideals, and those ideals dictate how you engage with the world at large—you will never feel betrayed by culture. You will simply enjoy culture more. You won't necessarily start watching syndicated episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond , but you will find it interesting that certain people do. You won't suddenly agree that Amelie was a more emotive movie than Friday Night Lights , but you won't feel alienated and offended if every film critic you read tells you that it is. You will care, but you won't care.

You're not wrong, but neither is the rest of the world. And you need to accept that those two things aren't really connected.

Insightful or just bullying?

Red State sounds, international beats

Yesterday I went looking for CDs at the public library. In most public libraries, the approach to the collection seems based on what is inexpensive, more so than what would be good for the collection. This means that you might or not be able to find, say, some Duke Ellington. But you can probably find The Nylons.

I checked out STRICTLY THE BEST 19 which is a reggae collection, similar to those NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL MUSIC collections I see in stores and on TV. There's some good stuff and some peculiar stuff...I'm particularly fond of "Big Man, Little Youth" by Red Rat and Goofy. The whole song is two guys going back and forth about how a woman really prefers him, one because he is a big muscle guy, the other because he's skinny and cute.

However, the strangest is "Bush Wacked" by Josey Wales. The songs on here are all copyright 1997 so it's safe to think that it isn't about W. The song is a country and western song. It's not a bad fake-country song either. Growing up in East Tennessee I remember learning that hillbilly recordings by The Carter Family were played on radio stations whose signals reached Jamaica, therefore 1920s country music had an influence on Jamaican music.

I don't know enough about music to vouch for that. "Bush Wacked", however, is not influenced by country, it is country. Or at least it is country as much as Jimmy Buffet truly is calypso or whatever.

Every once in a while David Byrne or Paul Simon or Sting or (fill in your own list here) record something influenced by a non-North American culture. These don't get fully absorbed into the culture, they are novelty songs even if some of them are especially thoughtful novelty songs.

Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that this could happen in reverse. "Bush Wacked" is every bit as good a country song as Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion" is a good reggae song.

As a white, American, guy I tend to forget that my culture isn't the main dish of the world. Sometimes my main dish is someone else's condiment.

A House Divided

Now is a really good time to write to the president and remind him why you didn't vote for him. No, I mean right NOW. I'm just sayin, is all.

What to do [the 2005 edition]

I recently loaded up a list of goals to a site that posts & lets you track your success, failure & the final value of accomplishment. The site is called 43 Things and is geek heavy (check out their zietgeist page if you think I'm fooling. Ex. #5, Learn Ruby [that's code folks, the latest code]). My goals are under the user name benne and are in no particular order.

The way I structure my goals has changed somewhat over the years. I didn't really start making goals until I was 22, late to the game I know, but prior to that I couldn't shake the idea that all I should focus on was the next thing. When I first started trying to figure out what engaged me, I had a template that I could fill in. It was like an excel sheet, with timelines on the top row & the intended group that the goals would affect, like this:


click for the whole picture.

Pretty heady stuff, plenty of options inside of those boxes. I enjoyed the fact that years after I made the goals from that first try, I had accomplished a lot of what I had set out to do (still working on that dynamic world peace for the next 100 years thing). Anyway, I'm hooked on the idea of charting a course for myself - but have largely abandoned the exercise of reminding myself that what I do has an effect on the world around me. That part I get.

Dune tunes

Hey kids. I have yet to meet a few of you though I say hello to all. Here's to meeting all of you someday. Well, as long as you're good folk. No more room for poopy people in this life, okay?

I was aurally introduced to a Albert Ayler a few days ago and have been pondering the effect this music has been having on me. I picture a vast open area out beyond ideas that is covered with sand dunes. I like to coat those dunes in my mind with a good dose of magic light and throw in a backdrop of a deep blue sky with just enough clouds for interest. This has been the the ironic land of peace where I have supplanted myself since hearing the music of Albert Ayler.

The music requires nearly all of my available energy to listen to. When I dedicate less of my attention I get upset with the music and imagine myself never listening to it again. Think of William Parker + Steve Reich, John Coltrane (during his period of modal exploration) + John Adams (who wrote Short Ride in a Fast Machine), or John Cage + Eminem.

Albert Ayler has enabled me to open myself to the vast open space of existence, as in the sand dune analogy, while grounding me in the fablulous world of all I am. Simply put, I am human. With that, I know that being a human also includes this vast open space called the imagination, where wonderful new things are born. Albert Ayler takes us into a world of imagination, yet demostrates the power focus can have on the experience.

Think about trying to meditate for the very first time with the breathing techniques common in Buddhism. At first, there is much going on in the mind and the practice is far from relaxing. Then you focus on one thing, breathing, in order to open up all other space in the mind. This is the approach Ayler seems to have in his music.

Interestingly enough, Ayler has an album titled "Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe." I'd recommend some of his other albums prior, but check out whatever you can.

See you on the dunes.

Math is hard

I made an idiot of myself on the internet yesterday. Okay, it's not like it's the first time someone has been an idiot on the internet and it certainly won't be the last, but I claimed something was basic math without actually paying attention to the, um, basic math. Homer said it best: Doh.

Math has always been really hard for me. I say that not in a whiney "Math is hard." voice, but in a "Damn, I just don't GET it." tone. I flunked geometry the first time and both algebra and chemistry found me totally flustered. It's like I'm the math equivelant of color blind. I opted out of the sciences early on, even though I'm fascinated with the natural world, because I couldn't do the math.

For this sorry state of affairs I blame two people. First on the list: my 7th grade geometry teacher. This pale woman with fuzzy blonde hair would stand in front of the classroom openly yawning during her geometry lectures. Under the yellowish glow of the flourescents, she failed to enlighten me one bit about the mysteries of Pythagoras or how to find a hypontenous. Meanwhile, I dozed open-eyed at my desk, wondering whether my teacher had turned transparent, so seemingly absent was she. And this was before the pot-smoking days.

The other person I blame is, naturally, my dad. My dad was a math teacher for much of his life before he became a technical professional, and lately, he's been teaching math again. I think, in retrospect, it must have driven him completely wild that I could not for the life of me get what "x" was. Nor did I care. Numbers, which were his bread and butter, totally bored me. When he tried to tutor me through algebra, it was cold war for the entire term.

I don't think I need therapy to get over my math trauma, after all, I'm a fairly highly functioning adult. (Okay, I get that there's such a thing as denial.) I do, sometimes wish I saw the pattern, though, that I cared what "x" is, that I could make my brain pay attention to the most simple of math problems. I wouldn't mind making myself out to be just slightly less of an idiot than every other idiot on the Web. If you're an idiot on the internet once, you're an idiot forever. It's simple math.

Welcome

Let the posting begin!