-- the paper boat --

The dogs, they've been let out

2006-02-12T22:47:00.000-05:00

January 28th was the start of a new year -- now the year of the Puppy. According to reliable astrological sources, this means if you were born in this year, or any multiple of 12 since passed or to come, that:

“You would make an excellent businessman, activist, teacher, or secret agent.”

Let’s hope maybe all four?

The first canine ever was cloned just a few months ago in Korea, named “Snuppy” (left). It seems few cells from the left ear of the big dog is the key ingredient for making the small dog, who by all appearances, seems to be pretty content with such genetic verisimilitude. Given the timing though, I can’t but worry a little if such reproductive interventions might promote unexpected astrological phenomena, like the spontaneous eruption of more leap years? or perhaps just more & persistent déjà vu.

On New-Year's Sunday C. and me headed down to Chinatown on the southside to have Dim-Sum with-sum people. At the table, S. received a fancy gift on request from her friend, who just returned from China -- nothing less than a white Chinese opera beard (and I just learned myself what you likely already know, that the white beards cost twice as much as the black ones, having been made from Yak hair.)

There was somehow a moment dramatic vacuum, like something more should be happening. I wanted S. to stand up and conjure 1000 Ming warriors to battle for filial glory, or I wished a for a big bronze gong to clang and have my face painted up all opera-stylely. There were noble Confucian principles waiting to be observed, and I wanted to observe them to without reservation.
.... ..... ..... ......

Outside at the parade the dragons danced all fancy. The high school marching bands made the most of new “50 cent” song played with tubas. The onlookers (supposedly as many as 25,000 of us), were all really into it. Interestingly, over half of them were non-Asian, and of that half, most of them were waving Taiwanese national flags with enthusiasm and substantial vigor. Given what a loaded symbol the national flag of Taiwanese independece is for Chinese and Chinese Americans, it felt a little strange not exactly knowing what it might mean to them. But then why should I assume they didin't know?

At the end of the parade a bunch of VIP’s gave small speeches on an even smaller portable stage rig. The MC asked the questions several times to the crowd “What I want to know is ”Who let the dogs Out?!” before finally the "Baha Men" song of the very same name came belching “Woof...Woof...Woof-Woof!” from the loudspeakers. Year of the dog, indeed. I heard someone shout "Heel boy, heel!"; or maybe I wish I had.

.... ....

The year of the dog is starting out strong. Random luck had its way with me the following week, as I happened upon having lunch with the Director General of the Taiwanese Consulate in Chicago, one of the very men I had seen speeching on stage at the New Years parade the weekend before. Personal friend of your auntie lands you at the 57th floor of a downtown skyscraper drinking tea with a perfectly nice diplomat, someone who: 1) is a little perplexed 'how young you look' and 2) how decidedly un-Asian you appear. Young man, what is your deal?

But he and I had enough of a way of things to actually talk about those very facts, as well as his early diplomatic postings in countries like Swaziland and the Dominican Republic. It was clear the job was generally tiring and thankless and involved great personal sacrifice beyond full mention. I felt a bit sheepish taking up his time, although I suppose the excuse to go eat red-bean ice cream with your friend’s nephew seemed worth it enough to him? Perhaps life on the 57th floor gets boring, even if you can see 15 miles in every direction.

And upon inquiry I got somewhere with the whole flag thing that had stood out at the parade. The Director said, yes of course the plastic flags (which his organization helps provide along, historically, with the funding for the event itself) are a contentious issue among the Chinese community. To him, it was a matter of time until the Mainland would get its act together enough to get people plenty of red flags to wave around too. "One country, two systems," even in nice old Chicago.

I wonder about Snuppy, and how old she is in dog years right now, and whether her dog years are going any faster, or any slower, given she is a clone of an older counterpart. Can you teach an old dog new tricks? or a new dog old ones?
One China or two?
Teacher or Secret Agent?
In the year of puppies, all such confusions must be risked. If you let the dogs out though, I beg of you, please pick up after them.

freely admitted

2005-12-13T13:00:00.000-05:00

I love free admission. That is to say, I love to admit things freely, when the open and more extroverted version of me lets that happen. But really what I mean is that I like getting into places (fancy parties, concerts, dinners, museums) at no cost whatsoever. That is the one benefit of working in a academico-museum context -- a card that lets you pass right on in, that tells the person at the entrance counter that you are going to spend your money on postcards and tea, not on no-damn ticket.

The Art Institute was a nice destination on a cold Saturday, for I., C. and me. There were African pots and fancy french paperweights on the list of things to see... I have to say, 5 months here in Chicago, I still miss Durham a lot. So the fact that I., another former Durhamite, moved here when I happened to, means that when we go to the museum together in the winter it feels vaguely kindred, and good for that.

And art looms. Perhaps it even stalks a little. In blue behind I. and in red behind C. it seems somewhat nefarious, but then how couldn't such simple paintings be? If art reflects life, then I suspect as a person Ellsworth Kelly is probably one of those types constantly looking over others shoulders when they are reading the newspaper.

.....

In the COntemporary gallery a boy knelt in front of a piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a pile of wrapped candy weighing exactly as much as his lover's own body, who had dies of AIDS. Viewers are encouraged to take a piece away with them, so the metaphorical body loses weight as the real one surely must have. But they say museum staff replenish it regularly.

What if our bodies were in fact made wholly of flavored sugar and bright shiny paper? Sometimes it feels like that might actually the case. Maybe save those in your pocket, for later.

water for a boat, water for a belly

2005-08-01T15:45:00.000-04:00

Is this thing still on? Is anyone still here?

At this point I assume I lost any of the few Paper Boat readers out there with the absence of any post, even a fortune-cookie fortune, in the last 2 months. The boat has been in dry dock, at least metaphorically.

I have been pre-occupied with water lately, given it summer and so hot. I have found Chicago tap water is the best I have ever tasted. the best. but even so, a bit of orange-blossom essence in my fridge water pitcher makes my guests really happy.

I swam in the clear and cool waters of nothern Lake Michigan this last weekend - right where it starts to mingle with Huron. This paper boat floated in the waves, I kept my eyes open swimming under, and there were all these patterns in the sand, tiny mussels sprinkled along the bottom. I took a gulp of the water I was swimming in and swallowed, it all felt good.

Today Craig sent me a water editorial from the New York Times that made me sad, and feel utterly spoiled for my lovely Chicago tap, and the northern parts of the Greeater Lakes. Honestly, I don't get the whole Poland Spring and Dasani thing anyway and at all. My dimes and dollars go to other things, like with bubbles or tapioca. This essay made me thirsty, but more than anything simply upset...

August 1, 2005
Bad to the Last Drop
By TOM STANDAGE

London

IT'S summertime, and odds are that at some point during your day you'll reach for a nice cold bottle of water. But before you do, you might want to consider the results of an experiment I conducted with some friends one summer evening last year. On the table were 10 bottles of water, several rows of glasses and some paper for recording our impressions. We were to evaluate samples from each bottle for appearance, odor, flavor, mouth, feel and aftertaste - and our aim was to identify the interloper among the famous names. One of our bottles had been filled from the tap. Would we spot it?

We worked our way through the samples, writing scores for each one. None of us could detect any odor, even when swilling water around in large wine glasses, but other differences between the waters were instantly apparent. Between sips, we cleansed our palates with wine. (It seemed only fair, since water serves the same function at a wine tasting.)

The variation between waters was wide, yet the water from the tap did not stand out: only one of us correctly identified it. This simple experiment seemed to confirm that most people cannot tell the difference between tap water and bottled water. Yet they buy it anyway - and in enormous quantities.

In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity. Furthermore, consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than that of soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade. This year, Americans will spend around $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.

Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today's high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?

It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.

Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.

Admittedly, both kinds of water suffer from occasional contamination problems, but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. New York City tap water, for example, was tested 430,600 times during 2004 alone.

What of the idea that drinking bottled water allows you to avoid the chemicals that are sometimes added to tap water? Alas, some bottled waters contain the same chemicals anyway - and they are, in any case, unavoidable.

Researchers at the University of Texas found that showers and dishwashers liberate trace amounts of chemicals from municipal water supplies into the air. Squirting hot water through a nozzle, to produce a fine spray, increases the surface area of water in contact with the air, liberating dissolved substances in a process known as "stripping." So if you want to avoid those chemicals for some reason, drinking bottled water is not enough. You will also have to wear a gas mask in the shower, and when unloading the dishwasher.

Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.

Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option. For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.

More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world's population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.

Widespread illness also makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. One of the main reasons girls do not go to school in many parts of the developing world is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells.

Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.

I have no objections to people drinking bottled water in the developing world; it is often the only safe supply. But it would surely be better if they had access to safe tap water instead. The logical response, for those of us in the developed world, is to stop spending money on bottled water and to give the money to water charities.

If you don't believe me about the taste, then set up a tasting, and see if you really can tell the difference. A water tasting is fun, and you may be surprised by the results. There is no danger of a hangover. But you may well conclude, as I have, that bottled water has an unacceptably bitter taste.

Tom Standage, author of "A History of the World in Six Glasses," is the technology editor of The Economist.

PB notes: Technology

2005-06-06T09:28:00.000-04:00

ad nauseum, yes, we know, Japan is a technophilic kind of place. I just learned you can watch TV on your cell phone here, for example. I also recently saw an advertisement for pre-Fab homes made by Toyota that are earthquake proof.

Yes, the same technology that makes your mom’s Camry such a smooth ride has found its way into making houses (or rather “steel frame unit systems”) that even Outkast’s ‘shaking like a salt shaker,’ or ‘like a Polaroid picture’ <<-much less shaking it like a moderate-level earthquake->> would not do much damage to.
That is undeniably cool.

(the almost magic steel-frame unit system joint in question)

Toyota is perhaps the reason why the greater Nagoya area (Okazaki included) has thrived. It is a bit of a company town. Before they were in the car (or home), business, Toyota led the way in power loom technology. Spinning wheels, to steering wheels, to houses on wheels, to…? Oh the future, it rolls out in front of us like a red carpet, but doesn’t it**

Being a bit of a Luddite at heart, the idea that robots or certain other devices could replace hands or other human craft (at least for jobs besides digging coal or defusing bombs) is something at which I cringe a bit. Mitsubishi (cars, banks, homes, salt) has just come out with the ultra-uber-super-crazy-duper Fine Point Pen. It can even write R-I-C-E on a grain of rice.

(in case you forgot what this white speck was, you can now just as easily label it)

Maybe somewhat disheartening, that. I mean, I love a good pen, but that is what you could call putting a long tradition of people (those who will write your name of a grain of rice with a cat's eyelash for 5 dollars) out of a livelihood. But then, there is really no reason to be so pessimistic. “RICE”?! is that all you can bring, Mr.-I’m-a-big global-monster-conglomerate? Dude, check yourself before you wreck yourself, because supposedly a guy in Turkey can write over 200 letters on one grain! hah!

But innovation comes from all sides. It’s a matter of finding new solutions to old problems. Do you know, for example, that if your electric hotplate is on the fritz, you can quite satisfactorily cook the local favorite - kishimen noodles - in a small Tiger automatic rice cooker? I found this out just last night. Every problem has at least two solutions, and certainly in the case of noodles, as many as you got boiling in the pot.

** What is Toyota’s vision of the future? Well, that is supposed to be one of the points of the World Expo I think I'll likely pass on going to. Thomas went last Friday and waited 3 hours to get into the Toyota Pavilion only to be able to stay 20 minutes.

Sure, techonology could have saved him time: he could have reserved a pavilion pass on the Internet and not of had to wait in line. But much as it is with money, to save time you need to have some in the first place – Internet reservations necessitated booking one month in advance. that’s thinking ahead.

("Wakamaru" - Mitsubishi Corp's Expo robot (every pavilion needs at least one!))

At the Toyota Pavilion were many things (I hear), including an: Interactive Fun Zone

What fun does the future hold? Oh man, apparently one that would have made Julian Huxley and Asimov freak-out in equal measure. Couldn’t the Division Head for Corporate Communications at least have gotten some Lit. or English majors to write some decent copy, instead of taking the job on himself? egad.

“The Dream, Joy and Inspiration of Mobility in the 21st Century”

The main show will feature uplifting performances involving the i-unit, robots and human performers. A fantastic spectacle will unfold on the stage by means of a giant 360-degree screen and stage props. Through the appearance onstage of elements of life, nature and future society, visitors will be introduced to the wonder of moving about freely and living, and also to a new kind of relationship between people and cars.

6.3 billion (+2)

2005-06-02T06:23:00.000-04:00

Happy to say that there is a new bike in my life. well, actually kind of an old bike, but new to me. for the very fair price of 2000 yen I secured myself longish term rental from the nice lady at Nonoyama bike shop. it is a Bridgestone brand, tricked out with basket, and model name: “Colmo Roadman.” Getting on the springy seat, you can feel the power of the eight-speed gears that make the name so right on for this remarkable example of Road Vehicle. it’s got a mustard yellow bell on the right handlebar which is great, ‘cause the brakes don’t work as well as, well, they could.

Unfortunately, the internet doesn’t have much information on it, aside from one brief exchange between “weedman” and “luker” on bikeforum.com:

luker
never see one like it - looks like a pretty decent randonneur. Are the wheels 650b?Supercolmo? Man, the Japanese came up with some startling attempts at Euro-sounding trade names. I have an Araya with a "Compy" saddle...

...
Jung-Shih, a Taiwanese student also here for some Japanese study, rented a bike from the same shop. Eager, we decided to check out Okazaki Castle and the park of its environs on our new rides. it was a beautiful Saturday for such a thing.

Utmost in civility, livability, and right-on-ness: community gardens spread like squash tendrils across the banks of the river on one side,

while some decent playgrounds, 30 years on now, hold firm on the other.

There is nothing "spectacular "about this town, which may in fact be its greatest asset. 30 minutes off the World Expo is happening, making the neighboring city a Big Deal. big deal indeed. look instead to the Small Deal that packs a punch.

(pretty industrial, though on a small scale. Japanese classes are in a building that itself is a reclaimed metal smelting warehouse).

……..

Being somewhere else all together means doing something else all together, even like watching the occasional TV. Last night on NHK there was a show on the world birth rate. Apparently geared towards to the 10-13 year old crowd, it discussed what national birth rates were, how they were calculated, and how Japan at 1.29 children per woman is on the low end of global things in the population growth game. and it was a game, actually and in part, that the two kids helping MC the show guessed on:

(can you even imagine such a program even being conceived in the states? you completely can’t. This is not the kind of stuff that helps kids go koo koo of Coco-Puffs; it is a advertiser’s nightmare)

huh.
it appears to be a 'timely' show, given the the recent government reports. Of course, the relationship between the government's promotion fo births, the pensioner population, and womens' reproductive rights in Japan is not a nice story at all (while the Pill is finally legal, it's not likely playing much of a role in the particular case of 1.29).

Overshooting by about 0.7, maybe the kids' guesses where thrown off by other demographic considerations news-worthy of late?

Yes, the current world population is estimated to be 6.3 billion people. but what about the big rumour about the two Japanese soldiers holed up on a mountainside in the Phillipines, the ones that the Japanese government is now frantically working to officially contact and confirm? the last census missed them, I bet. Two soldiers that, it should be added, have supposedly been holding out since the conclusion of world war II 60 years ago.

The two in question seem less keen on media coverage spotlight. but then if you could avoid the war, are those who sent you to it (80% of there particular army division perished), wouldn’t you continue to wait it out? Real myth turned urban myth (?) turned absurd, it is all still pretty unclear...

the last Japanese soldier they found like this (i.e. in the Phillipine jungle) in 1974, one Lt. Onoda, didn’t know the war had ended. Onoda refused to surrender till his former commanding officer was flown to him in the jungle to tell him the war was over, like for real. I guess being that kind stickler for confirmation must have made him quite the intelligence officer in his day.

<><>>>>

Of course, When I heard the 1.29 figure for Japan’s birth rate, I also couldn’t believe it. Just looking around the South City Park here in Okazaki this past Sunday, one gets the impression that the Kids are winning. they were in droves, wall to wall and tree to stream, it was completely out of hand. Fun was being had by the short-set like it was disappearing with the sunset (and indeed, the kiddie train that weaves through the greener parts of the park was scheduled to steam-down just around then.)

Cute Animals, or rather representations of there of, are everywhere. So it shouldn’t come to any real surprise that the WC next to the panda-shaped train has a like-minded mural:

However I want to ask: just what the hell is going on here?

I could stare at this mural for a couple days and I think be not a hair closer to cracking the egg on the riddle of this one. Suggestions? The car is upset, this much is clear. because the mouse just flew out the back window with steering wheel in hand, perhaps? the bear is also freaked out, maybe by the mouse, and because the car is completely NOT paying attention to the fact that they are about to hit a pig. the pig who is oblivious (and I suspect constitutionally non-plussed) and waving to me. making me realize -but my god, what is my part in this scenario?

I shout out to the pig before remembering that Never will always be soon enough in a case like this. these wacky animals, they don’t need to know any better. Frozen in this nut-o pose, the accident will never completely happen. but then I guess it is also always happening? to envy or despair the life of imaginary creatures, it’s hard to know. and where is the WC? it's all almost enough to make you forget when nature is calling.

Nature is calling. but where is it? apparently hanging out with Daily Living:

this store says simply “nature and daily living” in Japanese on the left; and on the right the name of the store in English: Hell-Bent. peeking in you find all sorts of crazy and beautiful wood furniture that is unaffordable, but uniquely designed and crafted. If not a chair though, at least I can buy the sentiment. life and nature are hell bent if nothing else, damn straight they are. and one can only try to be as hell bent about it as possible.

…
Even after the extensive bike excursion of the day before with Jung-shih and “Roadman”, and this day added, the kind of geographic sense of things that gives me the wherewithal to keep my right straight from my left (or was is it left from right...? ) still eluded. Following that adage which popped into my head 2 seconds before - “When in doubt, look higher about” - I decided to end the day by taking a spin on the local(creaky, old) Ferris wheel to get another perspective on things.

Building upon building to the horizons. and 6.3 billion and counting.

I think I can even make out the two alleged holdouts, some thousands of miles south on that Phillipine mountainside, in their late 80’s, and content enough. But really, after 60 years, you (or even the thought of you), should remain a secret safe. What does the world want with the two of you anyway? I suspect nothing that hasn’t already kept them away all this time for half a century and more. my intuition: stay on the panda-train. or the Phillipine jungle (or don’t). Either way, it's all pretty Hell-Bent, baby.
_Hell_ _Bent_

-----

ps.
Jo-san: wish you were here, like two years past.
No worries, though, I'm eating plenty of 'ten-don' in yer honor.

fragments from Okazaki

2005-05-26T07:28:00.000-04:00

Land
ho

This whole airplane-riding business has gotten so out of hand lately, that if I in fact got on a wrong flight (distinct possibility), I won’t admit to that at this point. Suffice to say though, the Paper Boat will be broadcasting from the other end of the Pacific for the next little while. Captain of the ship has seen fit to take a brief shore leave somewhere where there are fewer things to hassle with. and really, no better place than an obscure industrial town like Okazaki, Japan.

(when its 3am for you East Coast types, the sky here is such)

If you are a biologist who has taken Genetics 101 along the way, the word “Okazaki” can’t help but conjure the image of short, incomplete double-strands }{{{ of DNA floating in a cell, known as “Okazaki fragments.” The exam on DNA replication would have given 3 points each to correctly answering that those incomplete bits are (rather diminishingly) referred to be on the “lagging” strand of DNA, rather than the ”leading” strand.

Whether they were discovered here, or by a dude named Okazaki (much more likely), I find myself hoping on Holism over the fragmentary. still ambivalent about what it should mean to be 'leading' rather than 'lagging' exactly, let's assume the lead.

...
It has been a couple years since I was on this end of things, continentally speaking. but so far it is feeling much the same. and this includes the Good List.

For there are a lot of great things about a place like Japan, and in terms of small details, these include that fact that:

1 - the stationary supplies are of surgical quality
2 - the smaller cars are and the larger insects share a lot in common
3 - rice balls in *crisp* seaweed for purchase in any random 7-11
4 - you can find people still wearing driving gloves

(and yet/accordingly):

5 - you can walk and bike all kinds of everywhere, feeling unbeholden to cars.

(they don’t bully. however they do drive on the other side of the road, which is good for keeping one attentive about crossing the street)

The list is longer, sure. and of course a list of things not-so-very-cool also exists. For the moment though, let’s look to the nice; it tempers the jet lag.

some May places

2005-05-24T08:07:00.000-04:00

Lately, it seems like it is all about travel. By the end of this calendar year I reckon I may well have airplaned around more than any time before, putting the "mo" in mobility.

-Dateline – Boston----

And airplanes, yes. But then that means, inevitably and also, airplane magazines. The American Way magazine (and it is so the American way) has ads that completely dumbfound, and make me wish the word “outsource” never found its way anywhere near common usage

Globalized by habit of purchase, sure, I outsource customer service to India. I outsource my sneaker manufacture to Indonesia, apparently for ‘good’ reasons and the worst reasons both. But I’m supposed to “outsource my personal life” too? At this point I fear for the woman in the picture, and for anything left in this world that might be considered personal.

It is freaking cold here in Massachusetts in early May. I walk past an unoccupied Citizens Bank ATM upon de-planing with a receipt sticking out of it, just asking to be taken. Is this personal information? Clearly yes and clearly no. In a culture where ones' salary is the simultaneous source of both pride and careful secrecy, it is a record of both anonymous and highly specific transaction counted down to the cent.

Withdrawl: $201.50. Balance: $184,618.34. I realize I live an entitled life, but clearly others are living an E n t i t l e d L i f e.

Maybe I’m feeling a little grumpy for no good reasons. Emotionally roly-poly times make it so that an afternoon in the Boston Public Library is a free form of therapy.

You can sit there and read, zone out, and take in the exhibit on printing and typography on the first floor (nice). It tells you things you already know, but that is OK; it’s often best to be reminded:

Perusing the stacks and all sorts of patterns jump out. go to the foreign book section, for example, and note how the German language books are stacked compared to the French ones.

hmm...

…

Members of the hometown crew are doing fine. the baby is learning new words, and more importantly all the animal noises. it is like old McDonald’s Farm at C. and A.’s house that way.

>

Take the red line to Cambridge to find that B.w. knows where breakfast is at. The Brookline Café serves up the eggs Florentine needed to Fortify you for a walk around Fresh Pond. For the body, thems good eats.

-In Kackalak----

And D. comes down to visit for the weekend! such visits in spring compliment the wisteria on its purpleness and floppiness; the sun in its tenacity well past 8 pm. late day light like that means K. and S. may possess the native intuition of knowing when to go swimming at the quarry. it is a salve and antidote, a nice word from a stranger. perhaps it's important to remember we lived immersed in water for the first nine months, after all.

(quarry's edge)

...
It isn't $184,618.34, but our Lakewood household still had money left over in the collective pot from the yard sale in the spring. So the four of us spent it. Every last quarter. in quarters. How much does 30 dollars in small change and another 30 in small bills look like? it looks like a waiters nightmare at the sushi restaurant. but you like him, he likes you all, and you leave a big tip for that kind of service (although unfortunately in unrolled coins).

-There is here, Chicago.o.o.----

It is a fine place. let’s call it home, shall we. A new apartment is found surrounded by the glories of cheap and excellent vietnamese food. of public transport coded in your favorite color. now that is what luck is good for, exactly that sort of thing.

I picked up a Hungarian cookbook (they eat noodles for dessert!) and a New Orleans one as well (they eat everything with 2x the amount of cream) at R.’s yard sale. I laid claim to copy of Darwin and of Voltaire, but for now they will stay well stored in the R. bunglow basement (I swear, I am coming back for them!)

South Side apartments of friends have a quality of light and space that makes you want to eat grapes and stare happily out the window all morning at nothing but the occasional European Starling.

As for wildlife, S. and I saw three rabbits in Millennium Park, and I spied a fox in Graceland Cemetery from by window seat on the EL. That all seems very auspicious. Like Aesop is cooking up a fine little fable of the time spent. Hopefully I am the Tortoise and not the Hare; the Ant and not the Grasshopper; certainly neither the Scorpion or the Frog. fingers crossed.

...

And it is airplane time yet again. I just found my passport after some rummaging.
better pack a snack.

synchronicity plays more than nice

2005-04-28T00:16:00.000-04:00

First: it must be acknowledged that the flowers are out of control. The lilacs on C.’s block that we tour –and flower bunches we huff- at night (because the bushes are in the neighbors yard); they have peaked. the azelas in the front yard. They are feeling it. the bees.the hover. the notion. the flower. they are photogenic in kitchen light at sunset. you’d be at risk of falling in love with whomever happens to be in the same room, and for only that alone.

before I was lying when I said it was spring. now I’m for sure on it. like for authenticated real.

kurt knows the water like a pig knows pork

… .... ..... ...... ......... .........

and Flashback:
After my post about interesting jobs and the job search quite some time ago, Maggie wrote to me, in complete agreement about the conundrum of the hum-drum of the particular worry that goes into believing you might get an academic job, much less one that actually suits you. She knew well the game of it, it was like commenting on a basketball playoff we’d both been watching on TV the night before. yeah man, the job search sucks eggs.

that was the beginning of months of obsessing over cover letters, teaching statements, and whatever of the rest. and then some trips. some interviews. a lot of questions, a lot of smiling from the joy of curiosity. a lot of smiling other times because it is the Right Thing to Do. we all want to be friendly. sometimes moreso if they are considering hiring you (though sometimes, and conspicuously, not)

and for all that I can tell you this: I am moving to the Third Coast.
the Windy City. the kielbasa capital of the US of A.

... ...
Last Thursday at 3:15 pm exactly, Maggie was to come by the house. and then to a Gamalen concert in Chapel Hill. Why gamelan? because it is like listening to the voice of god in the your cupped hand. because it’s thin bronze and wooden tones make any reasonable person want to be unreasonable. all reasons are shot to hell. your ears are filled with the narcotic singing of Indonesian xylophones.

at exactly 3:15 I was half-way through a long week of thinking I might know something, while in fact knowing nothing. People were supposed to get back to me with Information. About if they thought I taught about apoptosis well, or made ants seem charming, and all of those sort of things.

at 3:15 my phone rings. the ring that tells me I have a message. and it is B. and she says: “we want to offer you a job!” and I flip my little lid. it is even one of those zip-lock kinds, but it doesn’t matter. this is good. and then Maggie steps to the porch, and wondering what kind of strange oracle-life she’s acting out, delivering on the air of her arrival very good news.

that I got the very work I wanted. that I had waited 7 months to hear about. and no one could understand more that meant than she, I’m thinking.

I’m also thinking about synchronicity, and this kind of it. about how it tastes at moments like an olive in your mouth- kind of slippery and pungent, and making you want to bite down. I will get to teach artists about biology. and how does that rock?

it completely rocks. it’s like a big, shiny pile of rubble, all fossils and jade.

and we went to gamelan. and had a beer on Franklin St. A margarita too. all those spacey sounds ping-ponged through our heads. mint on the tongue. blue-green on the eyes. a warm egg in your chest.
the good moments are better than best.

p o l l e n g a m e s

2005-04-13T10:37:00.000-04:00

everything is now covered in a fine yellow skin.
the rain washed a lot away, but that only means the pollen is piling in the corners of drain paths, creating strange paisleys at the corner of your eye.

I saw one of the one-in-a-billion pollen grains that will contribute its DNA to the next generation of lovely and tall southern pine. it was on the go, flowing through the air, things to do.

And one thing you could do is assiduously collect pollen every spring for years on end. and then use it as a kind of bright and vibrating paint, like a certain German named Wolfgang.

Most of my friends do what may make the most sense, and simply sneeze.
it is just that kind of season.

now as then

2005-04-11T00:15:00.000-04:00

sea kayaking. a visit with C. to Nim & Phillip on the coast. ping-pong is a religious duty. longboards that let you carve skate-wheel lines to the liquor store at night. and the Atlantic coast, it just wakes you up from oversleeping.

this is all two weeks ago now. and is it not a matter of Great Wonder that jet fuel is the magic carpet of our century \\ to carry you from Carolina sea-salt to the middle of the desert by the day next? it is no exaggerating to say the air is full of grapefruit in Arizona.

There, the flowers are almost neon,

and the neon, well its almost something else altogether.

Talking, smiling, seeing if the desert is a place you could work and live. and also by chance the chance to see friends after two years time. B. lives here. and yes, ants are everywhere, but if you are committed to your trade, you do experiments in your extra bedroom like B. And how incredible is that.

dear Ehab happened to just be down from Canada and in the desert the very same days as me. those things happen by happenstance, but about as often as never.

…
A few days after that, and jet fuel can make a visit to Chicago for the third and fourth times in a month a matter of reality . By now I can walk through O’Hare with eyes closed and ears plugged and still find my way to the CTA station, Blue line. The light is still playing funny inside the tight crowds of building, and the lake water turns kinds of blue that you’ve considered in dreams you’ve forgotten. but only dreams, and only what you can’t find it in yourself to remember.

<<<>>>

B.w. sent me some Franz Wright poems the other day, the last part of one which quietly read (and in a very small font):

but how
How does one go about dying?
Who on earth is going to teach me
The world is filled with people
who have never died.

And who is going to teach me how to die? What a hard, and perfect, poem kind of question. I think it only underscores the fact that everything we do is always //and in every instance\\ for the First Time. Any thought that it is otherwise is a gross but convenient untruth.

Because I can’t see but that we are just really just these fancy analogy machines, fitting one idea of one time to the new-another ... and all at the risk of obscuring the fact that This has actually never ever happened before, even though it seems really déjà-vu-ishly the reminiscent. In our “been there, done that” kind of culture, it is an easy mistake, but no less worse for its easiness. And so I am suspicious over whether learning from mistakes, learning from your peers, or learning from history are all in fact notions that do any useful work but to mislead.

..
We thought we were somewhere before, but we weren’t. I thought I was in Chicago four times in the last month. but if I could manage to be a more honest person, or more attentive, I could tell you really it was in fact a different place every time. what’s done not re-done, a city of versions rather than addresses.

I read a line in a book the next day, and it felt as if I were eating a meal from the same plate of thoughts, the page saying:

everything we hold true is a trick we play on ourselves, a redemption on past experience for the purpose of trusting the present

and I will admit, I have the hardest of times trusting the present to its ways. as a Good Scientist I’d simply and efficiently call this whole thing the issue of "induction," of reasoning from past and repeated instances of experience, to generalizations that cover our beliefs of all cases – future included. But even Hume had a problem with this promise of Knowledge from Experience, rather than Speculation. and he wasn’t even a poet either/even/still. so really, I can’t see how the Trick We Play on Ourselves isn't anything but evident.

and I wonder if the redemption on past experience enough to save us from an uncertain future. Is it like my mother says, that I constitutionally really hate surprises? Then I’d have to hate everything about this moment, and its uncertainties. and maybe, sometimes, I completely do. but it is the worst sort of thing to admit to. pity if induction was really a matter of taking things for granted; the New! simply taken for the old, for the déjà viewed.

<<<>>>

I can’t take for granted Ehab happened to be in Tempe when I was. If I believed in sin, it would be one to do such a thing. if I believed in ESP, I would have known beforehand and otherwise; if I believed in telekinesis, I would have simply floated into and out of that moment.

But I believe in none of that. I trust instead in things like cousin S. driving through the night 11 hours to visit for this weekend on a whim. for Phillip and Nim to be in town again. and so to playing Life-Size chess at the botanic garden on Saturday,

To shimmying and jumping through spinning hula-hoops in the evening,

and then: Taking the First Quarry Swim of the season this next day Sunday afternoon.

(this moment was mistaken for the one before)

A question:
Was there any way to guess a pair of Canadian geese were nesting there at the quarry’s edge?

No, there just wasn’t.

and she had a nest of her own feathers, sitting on five eggs, each its own color. each the size of a mango.

and I assure you -
none of this has ever happened before.

it is a short life --all firsts and lasts -- packed like gunpowder in a firecracker

!*!

so keep the matches handy.

......

Round II

2005-03-15T22:23:00.001-05:00

A couple of interesting things happened today, like the set of lovely bamboo kitchen utensils I received from Cathy and Andrew in the mail (thanks!). or the huge dump truck overturned like some kid’s Tonka truck in the middle of the street I was driving down.

But there was also Chicago. again. a second trip that came, went, and was now on my mind.

Finishing up last Saturday, it was a job trip too -- and in part at the same institution as before -- and yet totally different

But first: the Approach.

Why? --because the experience of flight that is utterly mindblowing everytime. If it isn’t, you probably aren’t paying the attention you could. maybe the free pretzels are distracting you.

From the window of row 11 all the fields were visible in Indiana. crops various, this one farmer seemed to be growing modular homes in one hundred-acre patch.

I hope this one is a disciple of Washington Carver’s gospel of crop rotation, and once all those houses get harvested and shipped off, that they grow something nicer next year. Like okra or something. maybe soybeans.

Geography takes on map-like qualities at 30,000 feet. This is a “great lake” and yet it looks something not unlike the far end of a bathtub I'm sitting in, the very southern tip of Lake Michigan and it's bend a managable curve on the landscape of things.

Making the way to O’Hare, Chicago offered itself up as a Lego city. and I could even make out exactly where I was supposed to be in one hours time, down to the building.

Cities mean that there are many things to be negotiated. Like the nineteen bucks the ride was supposed to cost, and the very awkward fact that your taxi driver, Gabriel, wants your phone number so you guys can hang out later on.

...

and the job interview, that is a matter of negotiation too. of holding the cards to your chest, but not too tight. of close observation. this time you could feel like you have your game on, only to walk into what feels like a cartoon episode. The people talk almost with cartoon voices, they chase themselves around, and they say cartoon-like things.

Someone may try to even convince you of the idea that you are trying to duplicitously mislead them and question your ethical bearings (!) Or: take you to dinner, and talk about the exact number kidney stones they have passed in the last two years (and what subset of those actually hurt).

Not like it was all like that, but enough of it was. Enough that it makes you think that Rocky and Bullwinkle really weren’t all that unreasonable; that it made completely sense for Rocky to be a flying squirrel. wearing a flying cap.

I notice in the notebook I was making notes in that I had tried to start a dream journal in 2002 on some of the earlier pages. Uncanny as it is, there was an entry for the very day, exactly 3 years before. It read,

“March 11- elevator dreams: fast elevator, no walls, just a floor. Dr. Wong is lecturing me.”

And I find myself in an elevator here, considering the many buttons as possible options unbridled.

One reads “lobby,” another “14.” I look for the one that says “June” or “New Orleans” but have no luck. After all, this isn’t a dream, Andy. push a button and lets go.

…

Let’s go, for example, to Prairie Avenue Bookstore, an oasis. A cathedral of design and archtitecture books. I spent some time here, taking in the pages upon pages of glossy and mesmerizing images. like of the glass house on the hillside in New Zealand. You want to crawl into one of the photos, and mostly just fall asleep in the idea of a glass house. the idea of green hillsides.

But you opt for where you are. Listen to Dylan's "Corrina, Corrina" on repeat on your walkman (thanks, A.) and you see things clearer walking about the city. you notice where the the fabric of the city is pulling up a bit from the seam, like I mentioned in an earlier post. The reader might have understandably considered such a comment as so much hyperbolic metaphor. but oh no. This time my camera is on hand, and I can have photodocumentary proof of this very real phenomenon (lower right).

And you notice ice skater’s like this little girl in Millenium Park. Who on god's green earth strapped regulation hockey skates, each about half her total body weight, too her poor, small feet??

“Get me off! I am off! I’m done!” she said to her Adult Supervision.
Damn straight.

...

S. was generous of spirit enough not only to come up to the Loop from HP again, but also listen to me tell my Tall Tales of cartoon antics from the recent days: "Did I tell you Bullwinkle is actually quite a lot taller in real life than you'd guess, and that he has a unique view of the tenure system?" People nod and listen to you in your delirium, and that is a grateful moment.

and its nice to have the company of people who dress well enough that others notice. the waitress and S. compared bracelets, glass versus bamboo. The Margaritas she served were OK there, but where was the salt? I guess it was being rationed for distribution on the icy streets…

...

And Chicago light. It is a peculiar winter light. made that much moreso because of all the tipping-tall windows and narrowed streets. sun coming down on a broad Midwest plain simply has nowhere else to go.

The reflections refracted, and refractions reacted. The Carbide and Carbon Building was emanating an especially bright and black intensity. It looked like a huge stick of graphite, a giant pencil lead. I rubbed my hands along it, and they slid and slipped. my palms covered in dark, slick powder.

This is a ghost city gleaming and I am a ghost person, all the ageless buildings and their light shining through me like my eyes weren’t brown or body not solid. that is what you call Architecture.

...

And tarmack time. that two hours you wait, sitting in the row 11, for your plane to be de-iced. you look over notes of what you learned during your visit. some of the people you met and things you saw during the interview were positively wonderful and inspiring. but you also wonder if some of Them are keeping similar notes to yours, together with the fingerprints they lifted from that water glass you were drinking from.

I myself make "Pro/Con" lists in such cases because they are helpful in making at least something in life seem black and white. because the are hopelessly reductive and ridiculous, and yet infinitely comforting to the mind. but word choice itself communicates more than simple place in a "good/bad" column can. meanings inherent to certain word choice can burn away and obviate the sentence wrapped around it, and so say whatever it is going to say for itself, quite regardless of anything else. Those are the things to try to pay most attention to...

bridges: apex, apogee, vernal, vertices

2005-03-07T21:20:00.001-05:00

I am great believer in Spring. as a notion, sure. but as a visceral fact, better still. I am even a more earnest believer in believing it might be Spring. Sunday might have been the start, the honest-to-goodness one. or maybe. Two things in particular press themselves as sure symptoms in my mind: (1) daffodils blooming in the yard, and (2) the urge to casually bicycle around indefinitely without destination.

With this working assumption, me and the Sears bicycle took off around the ‘hoods. Down Lakewood towards James St., some questions prepared for this trip included: Do other houses have flowers going on? Who’s hanging around outside? Is that dumpy little street Cecil Rd. a dead end or what?

…
Today’s route brought me passed the Apex Street Bridge, a small but high concrete and steel structure that is now only a pedestrian crossing, cement pylons put in the middle. But I don’t know how many ever really cross it, over the old train tracks-cum-bike trial.

If you look up the phrase “other side of the tracks” in the Encyclopedia Britannica, there is a photograph of the Apex Bridge. nothing more epitomizing of the idea exists, no sharper a gradient, I am pretty certain. But of course, there is a historical society organized around the bridge. and I found this out just now, the internet told me so. These folks seem to have a pretty certain take on the two sides that are connected by the ASB, though :

“One community, soon to be designated a historic neighborhood that surrounds a park; the other of which suffers from boarded up houses, rampant crime, and blight.”

I’m curious to see what happens to this idea of the “community of the bridge” this historical society has in its vision. Will preserving the bridge really do something for engendering that possibility of a community there? I’m doubtful, but I want it to be true; at least truer than it has been for like minded projects around Durham.

...
A new crossing also caught my attention this trip. my bike homed onto it, and I saw something shining past the trees in the park mentioned just above, Forest Hills Park. You see, they re-graded the stream that flows there, and put new bridges to span it.

This one, the shining one, was quite a fancy number. Unpainted and unvarnished, from a good 20 feet away you could actually smell the wood. Pine. so strong a smell, I wondered if maybe the thing was still breathing and moving sap.

It is a very nice bridge, and I can tell you the following about it:

--it is fragrant.
---it has 6 sets of posts that anchor the handrails.
----it takes me exactly 18 paces to cross it, end to end.

Since it is a bridge, the next logical question would be: Is their a troll living underneath it?

I can tell you this: No. However there was occupancy, use, and some presence apparent. the tracks along the mud tell us the raccoons have been around, poking at the night water, shuffling their feet in the cool soil.

…
From around the bridge, things sure looked like Spring. It is almost a postcard, with it green grass, gentle curve of the water, the light.

I crossed the shiny bridge, repeating the sound of the word “bridge” in my head with my steps, inducing my memory to think of Die Brücke (the Bridge), a german artist movement that made me realize that block-printing is the bomb. Apparently they named it so with intimation that the movement was to be “their bridge of common interests and their link to the future.”

A link to the future! what a sense of optimism. Could such a thing be accomplished in just a simple 18 paces? The Red Queen told Alice you need to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. Surely, no truer now than ever - a casual 18 paces might still land me firmly in the past – or at best the present. The present is a “community of the bridge,” and now is a matter of successfully making it from then, with a stream of a single moment to cross on the way.

What are the chances then, that when - every 10 seconds or so- one blinks their eyes, that upon opening Here will still be here? The chances are very, very high, no doubt. but I maintain it is a probability nevertheless. Certainty left you about 2 minutes back as dusty historian fodder.

You cross and think about all the bridges you build through the day, or through some course of years. And there are a number I wish all concerned had taken more seriously, as much so as the Apex Street Bridge seems to be. then the others I now regret not having just torched with more of a conflagratory abandon, to see the big fast flames. otherwise, some of the bridges just seem creaky.

I guess the sturdiest and most flexible are those suspension bridges. but even then, as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge taught all of us inexcusably awake for the film in physics class: better to “cut once, measure twice.”

I’d prefer to cut twice and measure once, personally. I rather have two goes minimum at most things. Because my eyes were closed the first time. because I forgot to try harder. because I simply want more.
As for bridges, just remember there may be a giant fish, or pirate treasure underneath. so whatever else you do, always take the opportunity to look down.

a windy place - Chicago

2005-03-03T20:57:00.000-05:00

It is Sunday. you wake up, disappear into the sky, and then come down.
I just happened to come down in Chicago this time.

O’Hare was difficult. but it is worth it, if only for the fact its concourses make you feel like you are traveling through some wrinkle in the fabric of space.

It had been two years since in this city, when I was visiting both Seb and Ehab. but they’ve moved on since. From that time I remember how cold it was. I remember the yellow seahorses at the Aquarium, and also that Seb sang in the choir on Sunday, but I couldn’t see him because they were standing up by the big organ.

That time I took the bus everywhere. This time E. picked me up from the airport, as she was in the city for the weekend. It is Chicago, so I assume this is a function the luck of the quarter Irish in me. Also just the generosity of friends you don’t see often.

I had bubble tea the night before this day. But that tea couldn’t compare to the purple concoction my Sunday companion was now was drinking, which exactly matched her sweater in every nuance of color & hue. that simply doesn’t happen by accident, no, it simply can’t. “It is like drinking a flower!” E. said. and I could tell. it was very fragrant. like a bee, I could smell it from across the table.

…
As E. drove me around the city and various old haunts of hers, it became clear that to get to the bottom of a place, it is often good to view from the top.

Why pay 9 bucks to go to the observation deck of the Hancock Building when on the floor below you can buy a martini for the same price and sit for free? This logic seemed impeccably sound to me, and better still on the 95th floor with vermouth massaging my veins.

wonderful.

peering down, things looked simply manifold.

Cities are expansive, the experiences folded in each inch of space like tangled thread. Sometimes you can see where the stitch lifts from the fabric a bit, as in the case of this flyer posted in a mailbox in Boystown.

The flyer said a lot, but read in part:

Lost, looking for an old friend named Desiree.

I don’t know her last name. I was last with her 1982-1984 at bus stop of Clark and Belmont. It was 3:00 or 4:00.…. She looked at me as I got my arm stuck in the C.T.A. bus door, as I hung on for life! And late for work. Now thinking about it now, I would have stayed right there, talked, and got info and stayed connected. that was a big mistake….

brian@yahoo.com

When you are lost, it seems to me looking for a friend is very natural. That the friend is named Desiree makes me suspicious of whose short-story narrative I happen to be stuck in at this Mailbox Moment. But either way, we see how the time between 1982 and 1984 is in the same ballpark as three or four o’clock; Experience makes a mess of time and simply mashes it up like raspberries in jam --- She looked at me, my arm stuck in the door, I hung on for life (and late for work). Now thinking about it Now, I would have stayed there, talked…

And I wanted to stay there in that Place. and talk. I wanted to reconsider all my recent small mistakes as possibly big ones. and vice versa. And how can I get my arm out of this damn door? the driver sees me through the glass, but doesn’t stop. hang on for Dear Life. brian@nowbut-I-wishItwerethen.org

I all can think is that I hope she gets in touch.

…
The next day found me in a suit and tie, talking to people about the possibility of work, and exchanging pleasantries concerning what constitutes “spring weather” in a place like this. It snowed all day, like “TV snow.” You know, the kind the falls slowly and finely enough, but in thick flakes. that makes you think maybe you are in fact in some one else’s head, and they are dreaming of snow, and you are in their dream. it was that kind. by evening though, the air was cooler it would stay on the ground enough to slide around in.

And I did exactly this with S. What is good about having even one friend is that they have friends, which means you can meet perfectly charming strangers like S. in an unfamiliar place and enjoy the slippery character of snowfall with them. as well as the simple pleasure of trespassing in the Hilton on Michigan Ave. You see, it has these massive ballrooms, and they aren’t good about locking all the doors of them (yes!) We felt grand, and stupefied. maybe this was in fact also the architecture of someone’s sleeping dream? nothing else could explain that behind one ballroom was only another twice the size of the first, with as many lightbulbs in number as a mathematician might posit in sport.

All On. Everything Empty. a place for lying on a Versace-esque carpet, and wondering how S.’s thrift store umbrella might do a lot for self-conscious décor that seems still a little insecure about its proper degree of pretension.

It is so perfect to have a perfect evening, when everyone and thing around is unknown and new, but you feel more comfortable than you typically do in your own rented house. am I right here, or am I right?
You know I am right.

…
And at the end of formal Chicago responsibilities, Tuesday afternoon meant that the Free Weekday at the Art Institute was dessert. I saw so much that to try to say much would be to say nothing. But it makes a strong impression to walk into a room of famous paintings only to overwhelmed by the smell of fresh paint. Was I experiencing them somehow quite differently and more immediately for once? Was Magritte touching up a part he wasn’t satisfied with right there on the spot? Looking to the floor explained the smell piling off the walls.

Ah, Exhibit preparation. I wonder though if Picasso also used Thybony paint, even just once? then I thought, maybe it is just a contemporary installation piece, and I was so completely missing it. or getting it.

I ran into Gauguin again, and I think I have a thing for his painting I never realized before. They are beautiful.

This one was titled “Why Are You Angry?” to which I wonder, why was Gauguin so nosey? I mean that is a question of such intimacy, constancy, and everydayness that you could have titled the painting, ”What it’s like to be breathing.” Because why are you angry anyway. and so often? why am I? I don’t know, and neither do you, and isn’t that just a fine pickle.

Moving onto Chagall’s blue windows meant only being asked the same question, but more gently.

the heart of the mattering matter. Why are you so angry. As far as our human drama goes, I think it is the answer you could give to any Jeopardy question, and always be correct. I’m thinking free art on Tuesday means swallowing a spoon of medicine, and that’s just the way it is. Beautiful, color sculpted spoons of knowing, of some Adam’s apple that tastes so good that it leaves a lump in your throat. and, damn, what a lucky thing that is. lucky. most difficult. lucky.

…
Flying back to North Carolina found me in seat 14D. In this same seat arriving a few days earlier I had seen a first: a young girl using an airsickness bag on an airplane across the aisle. she was so discreet that it was only amazing chance I noticed. she couldn’t have been more graceful and quiet about it than if an invisible magnet was directing the incident. I was floored.

Now heading back a dark man with a thick brown hand-woven cap sat next to me. I thought he looked like pictures of people I had seen who come from Bhutan or there around, his features framing the space around is face without any sort of hesitation. He carried a bag that said "RDU" in blue marker followed by a series of numbers, and "OIMI" in big block letters.

Google tells me OIMI is an organization for resettling immigrants, and the large number of people waiting for him past the security gate seemed to confirm some new home was being made, that arrival was happening. I can’t even imagine what that transition must feel like. I’m Chicago to Durham, and oh-the-drama. This fellow next to me is essentially landing on Mars.

It is Tuesday. you wake up, disappear into the sky, and then come down. This time it happens to be here. and what a place that might be.

...

p.s.

I was told Chicago is welcoming and the kind of place that makes you feel like you belong there. The CTA buses were clearly doing their part.

blink (blink)

2005-02-25T00:08:00.000-05:00

Today was a day that my working on working was working. I went onto campus and saw a talk on fossil birds, then a discussion on the evolution of butterfly wing sizes. I submitted a job application, an abstract for a meeting, and sent in some requested comments on something someone had written on fungus-growing termites in Africa, as per my deadline.

I mean, what a day! I was like a biologist or something, doing what I was trained to do for once. It almost felt a little creepy.

Not only that, but I wasn’t late for anything. Nor obscenely early. By 6:50pm, I found myself in the campus union, crossing over to the Biology Dept. to see some Famous Biologist famously give some special talk at 7:00. Ten minutes to spare! As Thursdays go, this all seemed quite unprecedented.

So feeling free, feeling smug even, I picked up the campus paper to see what the world had to offer. (I have to grimly admit, the overturned Ford Explorer on the front page caught my attention). I opened to a random page a saw that in 10 minutes Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker writer, was going to give a talk just a few 100 yards away from where I was standing.

*Decision made*

I had been a good trooper all day, but as Science goes, Malcolm is far more my kind of empiricist, curious about things for the right reasons – because things are mind-blowing, and almost make sense, but not quite. Because they are interesting, but you don’t know exactly why. So ask, ask, just ask. then maybe ask again.

The room/atrium thing he was speaking in was already packed like a moving van, because our Mr. Gladwell, he is a hot ticket. There has been a lot of press recently on his hair, his new kooky 'fro. I walked to an obscure corner in the standing-room-only crowd, only to find him there (and me here) in a position arm's length! where I could touch the famous Malcolm Coiffure if I wanted to. It loomed in front of me, because as he was ensconced in the corner, sitting and crouched, signing some books before the talk.

...
He talked about his new book, “Blink,” which seems to be all about split-second, and first-impression, decisions. Having just made one to come to the talk, I naturally felt gratified. He shared an anecdote from his book about how once the Munich philharmonic used a canvas screen during auditions for a new trombonist, resulting in the first woman ever becoming a member of the symphony, much to the maestro’s dismay. Gladwell discussed the efficacy of physical screens or other things to obscure our snap-judgement biases based on skin color, looks, height, sex -- indeed, those things that might not really effect whole well you might play the trombone, or anything else, really.

It reminded me of the idea of the “veil of ignorance” that the philosopher John Rawls came up with in trying to develop an ethics of a just society. And here was the physical veil, coming up again and again in Gladwell’s talk.

He made the case that juries shouldn’t see the accused, and that this would no doubt change the racial bias in conviction. and no doubt he is right. with that and other things besides.

...
An older woman in a red dress asked a question at the end of the talk.

“One comment and one question, actually,” she said.

I suppose you know after all the symphonies started using canvas screens at auditions, and the number of women hired historically increased, they started to use screens raised three inched from the ground...?

...So they could see the auditioners shoes, you see.”

Ah. hm. touche.
What are the hopes for an equitable, Rawlsian society where we measure a person by the weight of their talent--rather than their girth, sex, race or anything else? I guess it depends how much you are allowed to peek…

At the least, it recommends avoiding heels at any upcoming symphony auditions, or some blindness of a generous sort.

2005-02-22T10:19:00.000-05:00

What is this?

and More

the hyperlink

2005-02-18T12:58:00.000-05:00

I am working on a job application right now, where after a preliminary round, I’m being asked to write a course syllabus up for a class to be called “The Human Event.” I've been informed that the goal of this class is to have students, “think critically and seriously about the nature of human existence.” An admirable goal for a 3 credit-hours.

And the human event is an event in the making-- made, unmade, making out. Anthropologists, I wonder if it would be fair to that for a good half or more the 20th century the human event has been analysed through the lens of small group living ,and its naturalness. Of then the group and its social links as a structural reality that mediates human culture and identity.

Given this, given jet planes, telephones and the internet, what is a natural social reality now? I mean right now? If the hunters-and-gatherers of yester-year seemed to exist generally in groups of 50-300 people, in-the-flesh, everyday, I-know-your-2nd-cousin kind of groups, then it seems a lot has changed at least for the American Modern; it is a social life and identity now aerosolized into a peculiar kind of mist. Full of new possibilities, of coincidence, of something very different. of some completely other kind of recognition. But maybe I speak only of my own take on it.

Maybe I speak to this web-log, this paper boat, a folded sheet of wood-pulp floating on an ether sea of electron waves. I started putting entries here mainly for the distraction of some friends whose numbers are of the single digit sort (hi Rob, Jeff, Jen). But strangers come across the boat too, occasionally adding a friendly comment or nudge, often simply as "anonymous."

(paper boats at P.S.1 in NYC)

I came across Audra’s web-log, “Budapest and the Rest," through her comments to this log, and I imagine she through to me by the fact we use the same blog service, in a comaraderie of technology. I check into her web-log to get a refreshing dose of the Magyar life of someone I don't even know. Of something far away and completely unrelated to me. Sometimes it almost feels like reading someone else's mail, or a letter simply addressed to "you all." And so maybe that is what my web-log is as well, I wonder -- a letter with vague address?
…

I was reading a recent post about some contemporary art in Budapest involving, of all contemporary things, tampons. In writing about the problem some men have in engaging over this facet of life, Audra mentioned a certain “Vinnie” as an enlightened male.

Vinnie?
Well, his name was conveniently hyperlinked, so:
(click, click)

And it is a Vinnie of apparent “tampon case” fame (!)

But wait, something is strange, and it is not the retro tampon case. No.
Who is that woman holding the case with such verve in the left hand corner?..... I know her!

(In fact, I know her)
Or rather, I know who she is.
…

Even though I’m sitting down in the coffeshop, I think I need to sit down again, because I am reading about tampons in Budapest on the internet only to click on a link that pops R.’s face on my screen. I swear it is R., if for no other reason, the left-coiled coif that is verging on “beehive” that is pretty unmistakable. And I was riding in R.’s car to the primate center the other day. to look at lemurs. for a women’s studies class that I am sitting in on. that my friend Jenny is teaching. and what-the-hell?

So I know the woman in the photo. or actually just kind of know her. we discuss feminist science theory >but I really don't know her at all >but she is now here on my laptop screen, which is…which is this other context of Knowing where I can know a fair bit about people that I don't know hardly at all.

Writing it out now, I'm sure it reads as pretty unremarkable. But at that hyperlinked and most unprepared moment, you must understand that this confluence of place, space, time, people, context, and hypertext some how hit my mind like some zen koan, all bright purple and impossible.

I mean, these paths that make no sense lead you back to you in ways unpredictable, the real distance of continents a virtual distance, transformed into a utterly unexpected and local association. It’s like saying goodbye to someone boarding a plane only to find them working the toll booth on the way out of the airport parking garage.

It is almost too much? maybe too little. it is this new possibility of casually knowing more and more about people and events that we, as a trend, know actually less and less about. And it isn't just the internet. The comments we overhear, the conversations we remember, the references, associations, they all leave us shadow-knowing so many people and things we don't, won't, or have no want, to know.

This feeling is true for me, so I imagine equally for you. You the anonymous reader, that is.

What is this. If anything, it seems to be the human event. at least the 1st world human condition, a rumoured society of global acquaintances that I think the my ancestors nestled in the Yangtze river plain or Carpathians knew nothing of, though for better, worse, either, or, I can't really figure. Needless to say though, I’m trying to work Audra’s blog into the syllabus now. and of course, Vinnie too, who R. tells me is doing very well with his business...

Roosters in the House

2005-02-14T10:56:00.000-05:00

As months go, February is actually packing serious heat. Not only does it carry Abe Lincoln's and Georgie Washington’s birthdays, but it also is blessed by the glowing presence of The most important holiday of the year—
Yes, that’s exactly right, Chinese New Year.

It is forgivable if you mistakenly thought that when Dick Clark dropped the Times Square apple that it was something other than a false start. Awfully trashed or awfully mirthful/less, when you were conniving that resolution you will not keep or scheming a midnight kiss, that may have been a matter of a Happy 2005. But burn a joss stick for your ancestors, roll out the Double Happiness, and let’s get on with it folks -- take pleasure in this Happy Year of 4702.

I can’t imagine what People’s Republic must have been like this last week as people packed trains to head back home. You are one of over 1.4 billion; what do you wish for?

"I hope my work will go smoothly and my parents will have good health," civil servant Liu Yijue told the French news agency AFP.

Cheers to comrade Yijue for keeping it both real and simple.
small and meaningful hopes carry a better weight in your hand.

***

It’s year of the Rooster. And what will that mean for you age-divisble-by12 people? Well, it seems the following is true of you:

"a hard worker; shrewd and definite in decision making often speaking their mind. Because of this, you tend to seem boastful to others. You are a dreamer, flashy dresser, and extravagant to an extreme."

And what would be the best livelihood for such a personality, beside say the life of Elton John or Madonna?

"Born under this sign you should be happy as a restaurant owner, publicist, soldier or world traveler."

huh.

***

My housemate C. has apparently been throwing these Chinese new year parties for a few years now. It seems she started the personal tradition in Germany, an obtuse detail that somehow only makes it that much more perfect. C. and her friend Rose decided to you be reasonable and invite around 200 people; almost half of that filled the house Saturday night. Luckily old houses have floors that can handle the dancing that comes with that.

I invited only a couple folk, a true minority amongst the hordes, but at least a couple dressed to kill, like Laxmi here.

Sure, the get-up was mainly for another party later on, but that doesn't matter as much as the fact that the rhinestones in her belt buckle spell out her name. A rooster and its strutting crown ain’t got nothing on that action. Take notes you chicken koop fools.

***

The traditional red envelopes were passed out as party favors. Usually with a nice sum of folded cash, these particualr ones included polite suggestions for revelry. For example, the card in the envelope I chanced on read: “Find someone you’d like to have sex with and take a shot.”
((hm.))

I assumed 'the shot' was referring to “Red Star” Chinese liquor from one of the wooden cups lingering around the crowd, but maybe I’m limiting my horizons with this interpretation? I actually passed on the Red Star this time. This seemed for the best anyway, for as C. reminded me, on first meeting as housemates we got a little blotto on the stuff, resulting in a decision of infinite wisdom to paint the bathroom ceiling *right then* and through the early morning. that particular Fire Water is best avoided.

***

And even roosters sleep. I mean, they need rest before crowing at some other ungodly and limnal hour.

So once everyone leaves a 4 a.m., the idea of brushing your teeth and going to bed is the best sort of idea. While debating the virtues of flossing before or flossing after brushing with someone crashing at the house that night, I went to spit-n-rinse, only to find the foreshadows of yet another holiday that this month harbors...

oh, right.
What should it mean to find a tiny red heart staring at you from the bottom of your bathroom sink when your just about to spit a mouthful of minty suds right onto it?

Don’t over think it, that little bright heart. Riding down the drain or holding tight to the white enamel, it is what it is. so take hold, give away, and please be kind on this February 14th.
Rooster says so.

Ecto-parasites, Almond Joy, and Henry Moore

2005-02-02T22:40:00.000-05:00

The academic job search is an awkward creature. Legs longer than they are short, fur a little tufty, and eyes kinda wandering. but compelling for all those reasons.

As someone who is currently on this search for the perfect kind of job, or really even for one that seems to offer a reasonable and right livelihood, I forage. Besides putting my ear to the wall, I also rummage through various internet sites. I track through the woods of hyperlinks for a fat winter rabbit. I liken the job lists to ciphered Kabbalistic code just waiting to be cracked, hollows opened, the secrets of happy employment encrypted suchly.

One source around which I’ve formed a nicotinish habit is the Chronicle of Higher Education. The ads sometimes have the aura of a Personals posting in being a mixture of overly specific and terribly vague, with a real sense of expectation hanging there uncomfortably. Even though it is the NY Times of the higher-ed world, it still finds its way towards an honesty subversive and critical enough to provide the kind of skinny you need to understand life in the hard, seemingly La-Tee-Da, world of “the Academy.”

I appreciate the first person columns written by people under the protection of pseudonyms telling of the vagaries of academic life, especially so the diary columns written by current job seekers that chronicle the Byzantine process of trying to get a decent teaching gig.

I actually submitted an entry early last fall to see if they’d pay me the $500 dollars per column to tell of my job search. That didn’t happen, but I recently re-read the piece I’d written, the following question posed:

Had I at times been complacent towards carefully examining my own professional goals and interests? Probably so. Had I been exceptionally complacent? Probably not. Given the course of graduate training, I think I fall in the range of “predictably naïve."

Can't say for sure if anything has changed since then. you know, Qualitatively. but I would trade my new found self-awareness for a position right about now (attn: Dr. Bartha at UBC, if you are reading this...)

In the meantime, I come across some pretty interesting job openings and imagine other possibilities my Dopplegangers may be pursuing. Here is an intriguing sample three that, given the necessary skills, I’d give a try.
why not? anything for the sake of Science, I say; anything anything say-I-said, Knowledge Be Sublime...

--------(1)-----------
Virginia Commonwealth University
JOINT FACULTY POSITION
Departments of Sculpture and Mechanical Engineering

The Sculpture Department and the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Commonwealth University are seeking a dynamic and energetic faculty member for a shared tenure-track faculty position. Applicants must possess either an MFA or equivalent in Sculpture (or a closely related discipline) or a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (or a closely related discipline). The candidate will teach in both programs and should be conversant in contemporary art and mechanical engineering and posses a significant record of achievement in their respective field. Particularly attractive is experience that demonstrates an ability to initiate interdisciplinary research and educational synergies among diverse areas.

--------(2)-----------
Georgia Southern University
Job Title: Curator of the United States National Tick Collection
Job Number: 507597
Date Posted: 11/15/2004

Curator of the United States National Tick Collection
The Institute of Arthropology and Parasitology, Georgia Southern University, invites applications and nominations for the position of Curator of the United States National Tick Collection (USNTC). It is the largest tick collection in the word, with over 123,500 tick collections housed in the Institute. This is a twelve month, senior research position.. Candidates must have knowledge of systematics, research experience with ticks, and computer skills.

--------(3)------------
Job Description:

Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars, Incorporated, a well respected market leader in the Snackfood, Petcare and Food industries with leading brands such as, M&M'S®, SNICKERS®, MILKY WAY®, SKITTLES®, PEDIGREE®, WHISKAS® and UNCLE BEN'S®, is currently seeking:

Applicants for a two-year post-doctoral position within R&D. Applicants must have a doctoral degree in analytical biochemistry, medicinal chemistry, or a related field, with research experience specifically in the area of phytonutrients and functional foods. Applicants for this position would be required to have a working knowledge of the basic principles of chromatography, including, but not limited to, HPLC and GC, combined with a working understanding of various analytical detectors including electrochemical, fluorescence, diode array, and mass spectrometry. In addition to a strong analytical background with hands-on experience in method development, the successful candidate must also love candybars and easycook rice. OK, I added that last line.

feel the Learning, people. Feel it.

Time spared in your Spare time

2005-01-30T13:18:00.000-05:00

icicles form on the whiskers of tires.

egg cartons make omelettes of vertigo.

a roadside orphan of a tree considers its situation,

while others conspire on the possible ways over the wall.

if you are a plastic toy, there is more than enough to smile about.
you are small. you are playing. you are blue, yellow, or green.

if you are a wire jellyfish, then shine silver with looking.
from the sill towards something morning. maybe flying.

and the moon. it will go through phases very different from simply halves or fulls, regardless of whether you care to notice or not.

...

the past, or the passing. going fast, or fasting. being last or lasting
...

On Sunday you get to thinking that if the earth rotated a little quicker on its axis (as before, hundreds of millions of years ago), then two things:

(1) the Time between sun rise and set would be shorter...
(2) but the year would also get piled full with many new days, gratis.

Hard going to know if that's a fair trade.
on matters of Quality Time with the time at hand on a Sunday,
there is nothing to say.
best let the daylight sort it out for itself.

The Liquor House and WMDs

2005-01-27T23:25:00.000-05:00

My local paper apparently just got bought out by some media giant, and I know this is supposed to be the death knell for good local coverage.

Despite this, there is a certain something that certain staff writers (yet unfired), sometimes bring to the the Herald-Sun. a naturalism to the journalism. And two things in particular: the eye for the story worth writing, and simplicity in letting the story “tell itself,” saying things with such clean lines (and one sentence paragraphs) that every detail absurd, beautiful, and cruel is so clear as to be invisible and imminent at the same time. um, or something like that.

...
And really, that there is a speakeasy club in Durham with the false name “Trimmaz” is absolutely amazing (below). What more is needed to recommend the virtues of non-fiction over fiction? That it was BYOB is so damn do-as-you-please.

But then the shotgun detail is sad and scary --the criminal charge brought forth scarier still in its surreality. No WMD’s in Iraq, but friend, just go down onto Garland St. and apparently you can find something worth calling one. It’s just that kind of world these days....:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
City Shuts Drinking Club Front Business

BY Eric Olson : The Herald-Sun
eolson@heraldsun.com
Jan 24, 2005 : 8:53 pm ET

DURHAM -- City officials have closed down a Garland Street barbershop that was operating as a front for a liquor house.

Police responded to the business in late December after receiving a complaint of noise, Durham police Sgt. D. Gunter said.

When they arrived, they saw a Trimmaz sign that advertised the 1911 Garland St. business as a barbershop, he said.

The business had nothing inside except for a single table and a box for collecting money, Gunter said.

"What they were doing was opening up a liquor house and an activity center," he said. "They weren't selling it, people were bringing their own in."

To avoid drawing attention to what really was going on, Gunter said, patrons of the business parked across the street in empty hotel parking lots and walked to the building.

"We watched it for a couple of days and found a flier that said, 'Parties all night, every night,'" he said.

Police at one point also arrested a juvenile boy with a sawed-off shotgun outside the business and charged him with possession of a weapon of mass destruction, Gunter said.

City officials got involved and cited the club for several violations the next day.

Within a week, the landlord evicted the tenants, and Pratt Simmons, the City-County Planning Department's planning supervisor who oversees zoning enforcement, had closed the door of the barbershop for good.

"With no foot dragging or tape to cut, I was amazed how fast they were shut down," Gunter said. "Everything just sort of fell into place perfectly."

Intersectional

2005-01-20T09:05:00.000-05:00

Intersections are crossings. and maybe crissings. There is some sense of something --a running out-of and into, a through and through, where one's meeting another one too. If there is any convention recognized, let it be the names of not only the places, but moreso the paths, that we choose to christen in our particular avenuvial ways.

How can it be that the starting of something starts here and the ending ends there in a way that can be named? And I’m even speaking in a practical sense here. Take for example this T intersection in my neighborhood.

There is plenty going on here, a dissertation’s worth really, for the civil engineer and the critical theorist alike.

Why Chapel Hill Rd. runs perpendicular into Chapel Hill St. can only be considered as a cruel, cruel joke played by the Dept. of Public Works on anyone trying to find there way anywhere. Of course, I could just not be picking up of the obvious and important differences between a Road and a Street that would make my - and many drivers’- conflation just a silly one. And this is just one detail, for after all. it’s important to note that we have the situation that - where Chapel Hill Rd. hits Chapel Hill St. - the latter turns magically into Duke University Ave.!

I think there is a term for this in subatomic physics, where the very act of colliding with certain other types of particles turns you into something completely different. muon to gluon or something. But who needs a cloud chamber to understand such phenomena when you have the streets of Durham's west-end to see how true this is? likewise, if you are slapped by a friend or jilted lover, such a singular collision might also bring the point home, transforming you most elementally from Significant Other to Ex in a pico-second. gold to lead.

There are risks to be run. and what's more, stop signs and traffic lights. In making it possible to find something, let’s first take this opportunity to get truly lost. May I recommend somewhere at the corner of Chapel Hill Rd./St.

MLK Day

2005-01-17T23:32:00.000-05:00

__________________________________

Angela Davis, teacher and activist, was speaking on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations at Duke University. Only a few years ago Duke didn’t recognize the holiday in any way. Now they have a former Black Panther speaking in honor of. It is a Go Figure kind of moment.

NPR reported that many are bothered that on this holiday King is primarily remembered as he was in 1963, rather the person he was in his last and later years when not only civil rights, but human rights more broadly, were occupying his activism and manifesting itself in his strong opposition to the Vietnam war.

Angela Davis picked up on this very sense, and like some Aesop’s fable drew out the current presidency as an example by which the connection between civil rights abuse, prisons, the death penalty, and global war finds itself embodied, and embodied in a way she can’t but imagine King would have responded to. Her thoughts, the recent news, and all other things considered bring forth disturbing patterns that don’t take a moral philosopher to find creepy.

But first: priorities. In a world where everything finds final worth in its price, by commodity or actuary, Davis noted:

This weekend's presidential inauguration will cost more than the 35 million dollars the Bush administration initially pledged to the tsunami disaster.

The final amount they pledged in tsumnami relief, upwards of 500 million dollars, is equivalent to the bill for 1.5 days of our war in Iraq.

If you are the president, this might not seem strange.
(In fact, a number of things may not seem strange to you in the least). Indeed, as Davis points out, why, for example, would anyone be bothered over the nomination of his long time friend and advisor, Alberto Gonzalez, to be the new Attorney General? It would beg the question in the first place of anything strange in the fact that while governor of Texas you oversaw 152 executions in your state, more than any ever in the history of the US. Your legal advisor at the time, Alberto Gonzalez, saw nothing wrong with this, nor that it included the execution of mentally retarded people.

It seems to me if the stories of people like Sister Prejean don’t convince one that such things are worth a second thought, the fact the US Supreme Court was considering the legality of such executions, and recently found them to be cruel, unusual, and unconstitutional, might make one wonder. Or one could take pause on the well known demonstrations of racial prejudice being characteristic of the US death penalty system. But these, it seems, are just maybes.

For Gonzalez as much as for Bush, if this doesn’t register concern, it is clearer why the Geneva conventions, which Gonzalez called “obsolete” and “quaint,” wouldn't. Could this attitude, a Congressional investigate panel recently asked, have contributed to the Abu Ghraib abuses? Charles Graner just yesterday was sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in the torture, and one could ask further questions after this. For he was a prison guard in Pennsylvania, and not only have US prison practices have been linked to torture practices of military detainees, but Graner himself was sued for going even further during his Penn. days -- for putting razor blades for prisoners’ food, for example.

How does this person get sent to be a prison guard in Iraq? Maybe that questions answers itself all too well. I’m not sure. But the fact this is a live question for us, and not for our president or soon-to-be Attorney General, is sobering a tap on the shoulder that more work is needed. I don’t know what work that is exactly for me, or us, or anyone necessarily. A thousand small-things-large, and daily, I imagine.
Oh, but only if voting were enough.

As for MLK and this day, what Angela Davis made clear in her talk is that these issues on penalty, prison and King’s broader human rights concerns are all one in the same question still urgently waiting to find answer. The fact I can hear this from her, a person formerly on the FBI Ten Most Wanted, speaks something to the nature of possibility that does exist.

Drive 95

2005-01-16T11:26:00.000-05:00

Even though the trips are short these days, as Travel it still seems long.
There were a couple recent years when, in the name of Science & Discovery, I spent a lot of time driving alone between Long Island and Florida collecting ants in sandy holes of pine barrens. The trips were wearing in a way no book on tape was never really able solve (especially since my right car speaker is shot). So it felt like a big step to take a solitary drive further than just a couple hours over these holidays, from Durham to Boston.

I go 95. That’s to say interstate 95, though more than a few tractor trailers may try to run straight over your little Subaru at about that many miles per hour. The toll taker at the Delaware Bridge tried to thieve 3 bucks from my change. And the stop-and-go snail trails of cars between DC and Baltimore are hardly ever going to stop. Still, I felt vaguely, most vaguely, reminiscent for a moment on this drive north. Like some bird that had read the migration directions dackwarbs, I was going on vacation. to vacate.

The things you see may not be better than the things you don’t, but how would we ever know? Looking can bide the time nicely, and seeing even moreso, if you’re lucky.

Firstly, a stop through Our Nations Capital. The Capitol looked bright ( but as we now know, clearly tinier that of Texas, pardner).

D. says I never take pictures when I visit the District. but I do! Ahem. a certain D. might recognize this certain house flower? It turns out that flowers aren’t as shy to the camera as some congressional staffers that I happen to know...

I visited my all time favorite, the Freer Gallery of Asian Art. Not only is it a wonderful place, but it is almost always e m p t y. Me and this old Indian woman were like tumbleweeds in a ghost town, blowing quietly room to room.

New to the Mall is the new National Museum of the American Indian (?- Is it just me who didn't get the memo about “Indian” being a suitable term again?)

It is a beautiful space. Something between a desert, the inside surface of a seed, and a moon (the photo here converted to 'pencil,' you know, for that real "acrhitectural" effect..)

...
As for space, the next stop, NYC, certainly takes up a lot of it while amazingly managing to hardly have any. Even still, there is enough that you can bowl. If you go 30th birthday bowling in East Village, the man of honor, C., might wear a pig mask while sizing up his shot. I wish I has something to say about this, but really, I'm drawing a blank.

They have TV floating widescreen above the pins at this place:

I can’t think of a more annoying concept. Perhaps pins that scream bloody murder when you knock them down? actually that might be funny... I don’t know. I’m sure someone working on this very problem.

And let's face it, TV has found is way to every other conceivable space. For example, say you want your whole body scanned by Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) just to see if you have any weird thing growing in you, or, say possibly a forgotten surgical tool?

First, it is a Busy Life, so don't bother with sitting down.
As Seb and J. point out at this Park Slope establishment, you can just walk-in off the street, and keep standing...

While all the electron dipoles in your body are orienting you into a big human compass for the sake of seeing your insides, why not pass the time watching the Sox/Mariners game on the Flat Screen while you are at it.

There is always room for entertainment. I think medical term is Cathode Anesthesia.

Donna Haraway speaks of the cyborg life we increasing lead. Humans interfaced with technologies so fundmentally and seamlessly, our social and organic selves intertwined, wires to vessels, wristwatch to adrenaline high, information-now-identity. Why does "normal American life" feel more and more like something out of a Sharper Image catalog taken from the USS Enterprise?

Computer Scientist Steve Mann has been working hard at it for decades:

I sometimes feel like this, between my laptop, digital camera, and cellphone. Once considered a remarkable Luddite among friends and family alike, I am shocked to what a little cyborg I've become. Example enough is this very inter-net inter-face web log, open access to the things that would otherwise stay cradled inside the memory-bed in my head.

And of course peripatetic picturing taking is one of Professor Mann's specialities. New technology has made his 24-7 wearable computer habit a little less burdensome, but please, shoot me if I ever strap one of these things long-term to my head....

...
As anesthetics go, art is my preferred opiate.
Please give me a massive chuck of stone any day over a flat-screen.
J. and I made it to the Isamu Noguchi museum.

It was black stone morphine, most perfect.

And they had nice skylights too. Peer too much and you start getting watery, but no worry in losing yourself, assuming at least you find your friend reflected in it, and upside down. Everything is a mirror.

But no, I mean it like for real, everything is a mirror. J. proved the point by sticking my camera down his coffee mug, and in his genius found an image that has been echoing in my head for weeks now...

...
And then, you know, Massachewsetts.
It snowed, like it was supposed to. Winter-whiteness became state law a few years back after extensive pressure by Robert Frost poetry lobby.

But the cyborg in me can't help tinker. Sure, this looks as if the trees of Kendall Square are snow-thrown from a storm,

but this is actually a negative of the orignal picture, the trees lit from below in the dark (to see, copy this image out and flip the negative button in PhotoEditor ). There is no limit to the true blackness of a snowflake after all.

...
Holidays mean presents, means hand-wrapped somethingness in a huge and funny game of mutual acknowledgement, and hopefully thankfulness.

Hands might also pass over dishes of food. Rob (left hand) cooked a south Indian feast for New Year's. The spices were intense and baroque, and had the odd effect of getting us all a little high somehow. Cath's hand (right) is busy blowtorching the creme brulee, the sugar providing a more predictable buzz.

And my father had the holiday lights up, wound around post outside the door. Slip on the ice when you are walking up, and it quickly turns into a firey waterfall. You might have a twisted ankle real bad, but you also just got to see God in the streak of color that turned your eyes to mush, so consider it a fair trade.

(And then one thousand other things happened)

...
..This post is already too long. Like the road. Like 95 if you have a headache. Blessed with the luck of the Irish (or quarter Irish), your Ma will accompany you on the 13 hour drive back down. I'm turning her into a cyborg too. She has heard of email, and has on a couple special ocassions managed to retrieve a message from her answering machine. But stick a digicam in her hand, and she can find the rainbow in the interstate sky, dead center if you look close

Having arrived, you know you are back in the South when you pass by one place, and one place in particular. Not the Piggly Wiggly, nor the Waffle House.

Nay I say to anything but Chadsworth’s Column Store. That’s right, the place for all your home-column needs. Just call 1-800-COLUMNS. I reckon they’ll have something Corinthian that’ll suit you for this New Year, like the feel of some honeysuckle on an old oak fence...

Life of a Human Piledriver

2004-12-14T22:56:00.001-05:00

“Information-based society.” oh, man, how many times have we heard about this canned notion already? But that is the word on the street. serious knowledge. the Real Deal. my fortune cookie even said so the after an evening of Szechuan Tofu. On a little scrap of ribbon paper it read: "Gazpacho is tomato based; a rue, flour based. You are Information based." The 14th Patriarch couldn't have said it better.

The Internet is certainly one key ingredient in this tepid and endless information soup. And papers of all kinds, another. I wonder too if even the T.M.I. or “Too-Much-Information” heard from housemates concerning their certain personal details may become an informational hair on the back of a particularly distracted camel overburdened with Knowing. But still, the world wideness of the web accounts for a bulk lot of it, the camel's share. Stuck in that web, you might flounder and perish. and its only Tuesday! you still have a whole week of whatever you are supposed to get through.

…

Long before the advent of the Internet and its virtual virtues, I was raised in a household that admired not only information, but the extensive storing of information -hardcopy- and of too much of it. If you file these things Dewey-decimal like, it’s called a library. If you stack the cut-out articles and coupons from magazines, newspapers and everything else in piles and unlabelled boxes that form corridors of passage through a room, that is a fire hazard. and moreso, it is PackRat-ism.

Like a baby mouse, I was reared in a capacious nest of shredded paper. and it is a tendency I have to fight still now that I roam the meadow by myself. It is piles (usually tidy) that my housemate, C., worries might fall over in the middle of the night in my room…

But my pile issues are so very different from some people in town, who have embraced two Great American Traditions and rolled them into one in a PB to the J sandwich manner. The venerable practices of:
Hoarding & Driving
-- and doing them simultaneously.

I refer to this lifestyle as “piledriving” so only logically these folks are Piledrivers. One piledriver I know of works at the Food Co-op. He drives Suburban that looks like it was once shiny copper, but is now rained-stained into a cupric green patina. It is stuffed almost exclusively with old newspapers. All accept the driver’s seat. if just barely.

I don’t know how he drives it, because if you look into the driver’s side window, there is literally no space to move your elbows. Maybe he only drives in straight lines. Maybe he just shifts his weight left or right while the rig is rolling forward. I’m not sure.

The other one I know lives two houses down from me. Not surprisingly, this fellow also drives an old Chevy Suburban (if you are going to haul, you HAUL, baby).

The photo is a night shot, and not so good, so I hope the sense conveys (unlike the other guy, I’m a little afraid of this piledriver, so I opt to have the cover of darkness). He carries a wider range of things in his snail shell, including a lot of old fast food wrappers, books, and assorted memorabilia (note St. Mickey, Patron Saint of Adorable Overconsumption, on the dash).

…

There are books probing the psychology of this kind of behavior. you might in fact find it in one of these Suburbans if you look hard. but even if there were, would you read it? One thing that is common among hoarding is that what one holds onto is largely if ever put to use. If you are really good at this kind of thing, maybe congratulations, they call you “ a collector.”

There is that thing about Letting Go. but I have a hard time of it.

The other day my computer crashed, and in that moment, all of my outbox from January of this year to now soundlessly vanished. it is nowhere to be found. I told D. about this misfortune, and she mused, that, well, “how could you ever say you ever really gave those messages and letters to the people you sent them off to if you still hold onto them?” Trust the seminarian to drop the straight truth on you like it was the time of day. After all, I don’t have the paper letters I sent anyone, so, yes, really why should I have the bytes?

I understand this, intellectually. but my mouse-mind is small. native to its ways. and reluctant to lose hold of the warm and secure bedding these habitual scraps have all become.

Sunday Paper

2004-12-12T23:51:00.000-05:00

This weekend had its fair share of interesting things, things that could make great extended blog-fodder. This included:

-The Drag Show at Ringside my Japanese friends wanted to go to, and were equal parts agog and pleased by,

-The great benefit concert put on for the Palestinian town of Tuwani,

-The birthday potluck that on arriving I came to discover was Incredible Hulk themed, but where everyone suddenly and unexpectedly pulled out instruments. This, only to find that three banjos, three guitars, three fiddles, a harmonica and bathtub bass later, that I was square dancing.

...
But, none of these appealed to my larger bloggish affections. For none of them made me feel quite as good as my discovery of a brand new art supply shop - in downtown Durham- that carries good paper.

Although this web-log is called the Paper Boat, the only thing I talk about less than boats is probably paper. One reason for this might be that I’ve been disappointed in universe of paper offering around here. There is a good shop in Raleigh, I hear, but that’s a trek. and the shops in Durham and Chapel Hill have all consistently disappointed. Mind you-me, I know absolutely nothing about paper as a technical art or craft. I just know what I like, and what I think inked blocks will print well on.

And so, I was glad to be the first customer of Main Street Art supply.
The Very First.
I wanted it for projects this weekend, and Christa and Sam went through their piles of inventory, opening all the shipment boxes hither-thither. Among all their wares were in fact many stacks of fine paper. My fingers browsed. Fingers feel lighter when they hold things like paper. They also make sounds that find no articulation or even existence otherwise except upon the moment the shifting of hands move along the wide, thin blankets of possibility that paper is.

Poets write on paper. But how often to they write about it?
The range of descriptors that sommeliers use for wine I would imagine could apply equally to the world of paper. Christa knew her stock, and together we oo-ed over the different kinds and their qualities of heft, hue, and transparency.

Of paper, more than plenty of it was worth buying for use in some experiments of ink and attention. I left with the following. None disappointed today when Ink kissed Surface…

Frankfurt Cream
Arches Rives (125g/sq.meter)
Somerset Book Softwhite
Johannot
Hosho

Blood may be thicker than water,
but Paper, it is thinner than all the spaces Inbetween.

Classical Breathing

2004-12-09T13:10:00.000-05:00

I usually don’t listen to much classical music. but yesterday morning was that kind of day. it was Warm in this second week of December. you could walk barefoot onto a porch and feel just mighty fine as you please.

some kind of string orchestra was playing away when something I never had noticed came sliding out of the radio into my mind’s ear. Maybe I heard something completely different, but I swear that this what I heard: the sound of the player breathing during the viola solo.

Every several seconds, the curved and crisp sound of a quick inhalation
(//h-h-h)
Quiet. It was not unlike to the sound of a persons fingers sliding along the metal strings of an acoutic guitar. but not that sound at all. It was was the sound of air. these short stacatto bursts of smooth and transparent breaths. with the volume cranked so high, it sounded like wind in the kitchen.

Viola players, am I wrong?
If I am, maybe don’t tell me.

Iris Chang & The Other

2004-12-07T11:03:00.000-05:00

MEMORY & IMAGINATION(a)

I was flipping through the last pages of The Economist the other day and saw a face I thought I recognized, or remembered from somewhere. And I did, from the back of a book cover. It was Iris Chang, and the article said she had died. on November 9th, at age 36.

It is now six years to the week when I finished reading her book “the Rape of Nanking.” The book is one of few to fully chronicle the killing and pillaging of the citizens of the city of Nanking, China, by the Japanese army in four months of 1937-38. It is asserted that 80,000-380,000 people were killed (give or take History’s astounding 'margins of error'). However, it is the nature of the brutality with which this was carried out that no one in China has ever forgiven Japan for; much of Japan refuses to acknowledge that in fact it ever happened.

How is it that such divergent truths exist. The history texts are literally written differently in these different countries. But I tend to think that what the books say isn’t simply a cause, as much as it is a symptom. Sociologist Evitar Zerubavel writes, “Far from being a strictly spontaneous act, remembering is governed by social norms of remembrance that tells us what we should remember, and what we should essentially forget.”

History seems to be fundamentally the embodiement Collective Memory.
Chang wanted her work to be a medicine for these symptoms of collective amnesia.
...

It was shock and dismay to read that this amazing author had died not only so young, but apparently by her own hand. The Economist reports that she had presently been working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and that in researching for it “the stories had been affecting her,” in a way that significantly contributed to her recent and severe depression. As speculative - and perhaps sensationalistic- as that sounds, I can’t see how it wouldn’t be true. How could anyone delve so deeply into atrocity and not have rattled the middle of the middle of their bones.

I remember writing a paper in college about massacres during the Chinese civil war in the 1920’s. I remember that during that time I couldn’t even read the newspaper at the kitchen table without starting to cry. It was ridiculous. Obviously that shallow spring puddle of a term paper doesn't compare to the ocean you would have to dive into, and swim in for years, in devoting your life to writing books on these subjects.

How is it that even in never experiencing these kinds of events, that these secondary experiences so filtered can still leave such thick and purple marks on us we aren't fully able to handle them? It has something to do with empathy, and empathy's connection to and dependence on imagination. Maybe it is that we are humans, maybe we have brains that are large enough to be too large. Our ability to imagine “the unimaginable” is beyond vast. This much is clear.

IMAGE & IMAGINATION(b)

Of course, one critical aspect to both memory and imagination in the last 150 years of world life finds its home in the reality of the photographic image. Not only is there facsimile of a true and actual moment in a photo, but there is a signifier like a pointing finger that tells us to imagine what is possible in reality. Such photos have mattered in the understanding and memory of the Rape of Nanking, as with other wars & genocides.

It is because of this certain heavy talent for Memory, Imagination, and photographic documentation, that some facts about our ways of being feel so cruelly absurd. I was lucky to see the film “The Fourth World War” the other day in Chapel Hill, on T.'s invitation. One scene illustrated the connection of the anti-IMF protest in Argentina with the general anti-government movements related to the years of the “Dirty War,” --that time in the 70’s when tens of thousands were “disappeared” in that (and many other) South American country.

The mothers of the disappeared still come to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. They march, They sit. They bang pots, and they hold up the photos of their children the government disappeared. Photos as the document of memory; as the symbol of possibility that is now lost possibility. but maybe never completely.

In the film, a mother at the microphone speaks to the crowd, stating in a cracking voice that she is "the Other," not unlike the hundreds of Other people the government deems as such, and so abuse. There is no Other to her, that is not also herself. In this way she refuses to let the Other exist, and the notion to find legitimacy. And how could the all those soldiers in the military so easily Other those young men and women, just their same age, that they kidnapped and killed over those years. Or the Japanese soldiers do what they did in Nanking.

Isn’t that also the Imagination? I am afraid of this thought. But as much as Imagination lets us empathize with people and events far or past, it seems that it also has a remarkable capacity that lets us imagine that the very people in front of us aren't people anything in the way we are people. How else could human life simultaneously mean so much and damn little to us, at every very same moment? It seems too easy.
...

Put another way...

Recently photos of Navy SEALS with Iraqis homes they had raided, were found on the web, at a site called www.smugmug.com. As CNN reports:

“One man lies on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat…What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo. Other pictures show debris and upturned furniture…The woman who posted them told the AP they were on the camera her husband brought back from Iraq…”

And what is it about the nature of our Imagination's ability to Other that allows the wife of the soldier to say, with absolutely no apparent trace of irony, that:

“She was upset that a reporter was able to view the album, which includes family snapshots.”

Isn't this also an instance of Imagination's power? The soldier and his wife are documenting. They creating the collective memory with plenty of Imagination(b) and hardly none of Imagination(a). Her family snapshots seamlessly together with those of an Iraqi family whose home has been raided and are sitting on the floor bound, on smugmug.com. And somehow she and we can - and regularly do - imagine there is nothing too strange about this, because somehow these families aren't even similar in whatever fundamental ways that would and could matter. Whatever Imagination does and is, it is a moral capacity.

How How is one to understand this? Is there anything here capable of understanding? Is this possibly anything similar to the nature of the questions Iris Chang faced in doing her work, multiplied by powers of ten? I don't know if the terrible power of imagination let her Other herself to the point that she could do what she did to herself. But the relevatory and positive capacities of her imagination are also now gone, as are all the future memories that she was to have. and I can't see how this isn't a tragic loss.

I know I am in equal parts reckless with memory, imagination, and the photographic image - and this post is maybe only evidence to that point. But this is avoidable. It has to be. to believe it is possible to treat Memory, Imagination, and the Image in a way that makes how we now create Others more and more unteneble. That that place does have a beginning.

“I’ve perfected all modalities of transaction”

2004-11-30T23:09:00.000-05:00

Oh, November. What I bumper crop of,
Ups!
Downs....
0.. Arounds..0

and not in the least amazing business opportunities.

Yes, you may not believe it, but since Oct 30th I have recieved 21 different email solicitations from 21 different personas to be part of an “absolutely risk free” financial transaction in which I help discretely transfer anywhere from 1.85 to 27.6 million dollars from what seems to be a very astute and trustworthy financial promissory in Muaritania/China/Ghana/South Africa/UAE.

There is a technical term for doing this with money - I know it, tip of my tongue -having to do with washing. rhymes with “pondering”…
but anyway, details.

...
What happened in November for me to get 21 of these things when they usual trickle at two a year? maybe the election? the Rapture? a massive failure of my email SPAM blocker? I’m asking questions here, people. Questions. But do not be deceived, because I've got some Andy Rooney going on -- the questions are rhetorical and a gesture of polite consideration at best. I have my own answers well-at-hand and already, before you or I were born, even.
...
Or do I? I don’t know, I really don’t know anymore. To be honest, these solicitations have really thrown me for a loop. I'm reconsidering Things. I'm thinking about my actions or lack thereof.

I mean, maybe it is true what Barrister John Ugo, of John Ugo & Associates of Lagos says about trying to reach the next of kin of the European fellow that died in the car crash in ’92 and left a pile of money, only to find no one. ((no one but little ole me))-- who apparently just happens to have the same last name as the deceased, wealthy European.

Thing is, Barrister Lagos “looks forward to hearing from me soonest” since he assures me I am the only person he has contacted about the matter. And? Two weeks have passed, a full fortnight, I’ve have yet to responded...

I have to admit, it’s been a hard month for me. I guess I’m depressed. and I’ve been travelling a lot. I mean, I have no other excuse for not jumping at this chance. Princess Cecilia Eisen, by chance of Lagos as well, also wrote to me. She opened her message, “Good Day and Compliments of the Season.” Of the season! it’s true, I have a weakness for season (but how did she know??)

Again, I feel lousy. For Princess impressed upon me that the 4.35 million dollars if not transferred immediately (out of Nigeria and into my account and of which I would be kindly renumerated 30% of that amount so stated) would then instead "be automatically remitted to the trust funds for arms & ammunition TO FURTHER ENHANCE THE COURSE OF WAR IN THE WORLD.”

Jeez-Louise. what am I doing. I feel like I’m chewing glass here. Sometimes I really wonder if I'm a lout. A lay-a-bout miserable with opportunity, with the ability to help a dying man in Pretoria, Mazulu Amed, give his wealth to an orphanage in Bulgaria, or stop the Course of War in the World, and all I can do is think about Myself.

Or get lost in myself...or them. I mean who are all these people with all this cash-money that doesn't exist. who am I given that? Has anyone actually even seen me in two weeks? Have I really been travelling? Why don't I recognize any of these clothes I'm wearing? More to the point, where is my 14.7 million dollars? Ms. Pilot Kathleen Melissa of the U.A.E. if you are reading this, please, could you email again about our transaction?

Thanksgiving-->Chana Masala

2004-11-29T10:50:00.000-05:00

The people at Trinity House and associates kindly had me for Thanksgiving. Given the vegans around, it made complete sense to have a South Indian Thanksgiving. D. and H.A. used many recipes from the Indian cookbook my Mom gave D. for Christmas seven years ago. L., however, is from Madras, so she managed on her own.
Oh -- but the food was good.
...
After dinner and before dessert, someone had the idea to have us read Ch. 13 of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man at the table. A scene where the protagonist eats hot yams on the snowfallen Harlem street. Unashamed of the food he eats, and who this makes him. Black in America. or otherwise. or whatever. The yam was hot, buttered. and he ate three.

There is so much giving its hard to realize what you get (and but its even all the time). I couldn't be fuller. even if I had four bovine stomachs or two Siamese minds. it is overflowing. it is a steaming orange yam in my winter hands.

Texas

2004-11-24T17:46:00.000-05:00

You say you’re not from Texas,
Man as if I couldn’t tell,
You think you pull your boots on right,
And wear your hat so well,

That’s right -- you’re not from Texas,
That’s right -- you’re not from Texas,
That’s right -- you’re not from Texas...
But Texas wants you anyway.

Even if that is not true, it is a nice thing for Lyle to say.
While I’m dubious whether Texas on the whole would want much to do with me, I think at least things with me and Austin are copacetic. It's a place I don’t feel out of place at all.

The rains rain warm in late November. and the trees, the L i v e Oaks; low, crowning giants they are. Their limbs are dense and make these earnest and dark marks everywhere you look along the landscape. It’s like Robert Motherwell was drunk on tequila and took a big brush to the place. It makes you blink your eyes. If you sit on a limb, and you might mistakenly think you are riding on the back of a great oxen.
No doubt, these Oaks know Life.

....
At this time when the notion of place seems to be so much of a preoccupation to me, it would almost seem beyond coincidence that a week after being in Massachusetts that I’d find myself in Austin, a place that I was all set to move to seven years back. That is, until the Lure of Learnedness led me instead to Durham at the last moment. funny, the ways that the coin flips.

But I actually had another purpose to be in Austin beyond nostalgic waxing. Really. In fact a visit to friends Bee and C. (and Thor the cat) would be all the reason enough. However I also threw in a stop to the annual philosophy and history of science meetings . You know, ‘cause why not? There could be something to it. or not. you never really know.

If you are lucky (and I always am. despite any or all evidence to the contrary) attendance to such kinds of conferences will provide some interesting juxtapositions. For example, what crafty events coordinator could have thought of a better pairing than to have the “Active Release” physical trainer’s conference take place side-by-side with the philosophy of science conference at the Raddison? People firmly inflated to the proportions of statues amongst the networking groups of cognoscenti dressed in appropriately intellectual tones of black. It was like a scene from the African savannah -- lions, zebras; hyenas, gazelle. Disparate creatures, and everything loitering together in one strange space.

In bearing witness to this, it came as a serious question to me whether there is anything really greater gained in reading “Philosophical Norms of Naturalism” than “The Art of the Lower Extremity.” The physical trainer with muscles overflowing the Ethan Allen chair in the lobby** was reading the latter, and looked downright sanguine compared to his academic counterpart sitting in the next seat. That fellow's eyes had a concertedly worried and sag-baggy look to them as he considered, with probably too much care, what Norm may ever be Natural in this natural of worlds.

For let's be clear, the trainer knows the fundamentals of the norms of nature already, like: drink plenty of water. let the leg hang loose after prolonged walking. stretch hamstrings before and following exertion. is there anything else we really need to know. you know, in the long view? Art is Practice, not Analysis, after all.

....
No visit to the Lone Star state would be quite complete without a vist to the state capitol building. It turned out that Trooper Sims, who greeted Bee and me upon entering the building, knew plenty about the place. and was eager to share.

Sure, from visual inspection alone a non-expert might be able to tell that the Texas State Capitol is taller that our National Capitol in DC (and would you have even doubted that?)

But would you have known that the painting of Sam Houston after the battle of San Jacinto hanging on the wall has him portrayed with the wrong leg broken? Or! that both Sam Houston and General Santa Ana (in the red vest) were big time morphine addicts in addition to being blood-crazed nationalists? Gratitude goes to Trooper Sims for this 411.

...
Finally and of course, STARS are the motif in these-here parts.
and I mean everywhere.

Whether you sit down..

or look up...

No, forget "Lone Stars," friends. Austin, and the capitol in particular, is a damned constellation if anything. you could go blind from the everpresent shine of this monumental branding campaign of a state that so badly wanted to be its own country, rather than just a one of 50. And yet, they have managed to buck the system at every turn anyway. I don't know, given history, might it not have been better to leave the the state alone to its Lone devices?

The city Austin at least, I consider a bright and shining.
....

** sidenote on lobbies:
Hotel lobbies are great places to learn things you may never need to know. People sit near you, they talk loud. Such voices can school you to the fact that the following things will prevent the Breathalyzer connected your ignition from letting you start your car.
Take note:

1- gargling with Listerine right before leaving the house
2- eating a sandwich with Boar’s Head brand white wine mustard
3- spraying perfume on yourself after fastening your seatbelt

Massachusetts

2004-11-14T09:54:00.000-05:00

This last Tuesday I found myself in the Boston Museum of Fine Art.
J. had snuck me in, and I was most grateful. After strolling through the Art Deco exhibit the exit door spilled me out into a room of Expressionism. A huge Gauguin loomed along one wall, a painting of rising, and falling. breathing, tilting. standing up, and lying down. It was titled:

D’ou venons nous
Que sommes nous
Où allons nous
:::
Where do we come from?
Who are we?
Where are we going?

It was a fair question.
I was in Massachusetts again. Where had I come from? Among other places, Durham.

Two days before election day I bought a plane ticket. just like that. I think I sensed that I would need to go to some place that was a home. A home to what I would otherwise call “home.” or Home the way my family, many friends, and the autumn ponds still call it some 13 years after I left.

Where was I going?
Rob welcomed me at the airport. “Welcome to a Blue state,” he said. And this was an oddly comforting thing to hear. You know, given circumstances.

.....
Anything I might try to say here would only be trite to the feeling of fullness I had. in sharing time with everyone in the manner I saw you all last week, and prefer: on foot. by subway. over steaming bowls and cups. in the morning. & way late at night. It was a meal of days visiting.
and now my stomach grumbles.

Among all other things, I was lucky enough to walk around the clear water of Walden Pond. It is the kind of place where your companion may be a poet, their own hair as autumnal as their words. And Thoreau would be thoroughly happy with this, I think.

The people fishing said they weren’t getting any bites. Perhaps the brown trout were following the admonition painted on the a rock in the pond...?

...Only in a "Blue state.”

…

Hey. Hi.
And Where Are We Going?
I have not the faintest of ideas. It begs the second question anyway of Who We Are. And I suppose that could be asked in more ways than there are leaves on the ground. In a world of Red and Blue states, some may wish to redraw the lines bordering Canada, as the joke is now going. But I honestly wonder who we would bother to call “we,” and where the me or the you are located among that. Politically, psychologically, spiritually, or most otherwise, there is a placeless of being that makes Gauguin in Tahiti such an agitation in a museum in Boston, mid-November.

...
In the simple sense, sometimes I wish I was where I was last week. That is to say, back in Massachusetts. feeling full that way. But maybe that is about a sense of place more than place itself. Maybe the where and the who are all confused for me at the moment.

Of course, all these questions and their possible answers are flying through us like neutrinos do: billions at every moment and otherwise completely unrecognized.

That is, unless you buy a new CD.

I bought an album by Cat Power in Cambridge. Today back in North Carolina I am listening to the very end of its 18 minute melody. and I hear Gauguin rise from Chan Marshall’s very throat, as she sings:

Where are you from?
And where are you going to?

Can songs answer paintings?

>>
Where you are going
is where you do come from,
And where I will be
is with you.

(…..)
And how do you like them apples. Massachusetts MacIntosh.
The skin is red and green, the flesh white, and it tastes as true as anything could taste to me. The youth in the painting is reaching for a fruit. Another is eating one. There is not much else to do. It’s late. it’s early. floating in paper boats. and we are all very hungry.

……………
……………
……………
……………

Postscript:

A note on what happens over five months time between visits:

Kids—that weren’t walking before are now.

Squashes—that we planted as fingernail sized seeds in June have done well enough that even holding one up is work plenty.

Cats—On the other hand - Naki over that same time is still white and black. I take comfort in those things which stay the same.

And this would include Molly on the farm. 23 years old, and still of this world as a cat. Also still black and white. Some things don’t seem possible but are, and holy for the fact. This rickety cat is evidence and she should be beatified.

Dad has jerry-rigged a light bulb contraption of (to me) Worrying Flammability to keep her feather-weight bones and body warm as she sleeps through late years. all day and all night. St. Molly of the bathroom hamper, bless us.

.....................................

2004-11-03T11:55:00.001-05:00

The Day Inbetween

2004-11-01T23:02:00.000-05:00

Today is the day after Halloween and before the election. As a biologist I saw put it at the beginning of her seminar today: “This Monday is like being between the devils and the deep blue sea. I guess the devils are past us. Let’s now just hope we don’t drown.”

So given the options, let’s talk about Halloween.
Halloween is the time to be either more yourself, less yourself, or both. Invited to a party themed around coming dressed as your adolescent former self, I was most happy to take out my skateboard, spiking hair, and doing all those other things that transformed me back into that 15 year-old. Into that better version of me.

It seems the whole night got carried away with the idea however, as I suffered something that happened regularly in my teen years – a failure of my green Subaru. True, it is a different Subaru than then, and a different green, but it is just as good at getting a flat tire right as you are planning to go somewhere.

...
Sunday was a little better. Although we got only a few trick-or-treaters at our door, some were simply as cute as little pumpkins.
Some in fact were little pumpkins.

This time I took a different approach to costume and character, I think with some success: And how hard was it hard for me to go as an obnoxious French philosopher named 'Jacques'?...

…unfortunately, not as hard as it should have been. Of course this raises its own existential issues I'll have to face up to, but at the least I was told my fake accent was tres bien. (Note the “weight of existence” hefted in the right hand, and the empty jar under the left arm. What’s inside? “Nothing. It is em-pty. zis is ze nat-ure of ‘uman life.")

And then there are the lives of some authentic American francophones of more immediate and central concern to many of us: Monsieur Kerry and entourage, I wish you the best of luck demain.
And the rest?
c’est la vie, comrades, c’est la vie.

State of Affairs; Affairs of State; State Fairs

2004-10-27T14:20:00.000-04:00

And only six days until everything unwinds a bit. or maybe a bit more. How can’t the election have us on pins and needles? and then more needles still. Some acupuncture of the body politic.

I know one thing certain, I am sick of polls. I polled myself today on this very question and found that 47.5% of myself was thoroughly sick of polling. But with the 3% margin of error, I suppose it’s a “statistical dead heat.” (What kind of term is this?)
...................................statistics. death. heat.................................
I’m definitely sick of this. If you aren’t however, I highly recommend a site, not for the information so much as for the presentation: electoral-vote.com gives a animated map of just how the polls have predicted what state is going which-whenever way over the last six months. It is like watching the flashing bulbs of a troubled Christmas tree. it is like the oracle of our collective knowledge of knowing nothing very much at all. About ourselves, sure. And most of all, about the electoral college.

...
But thankfully one can move from Affairs of State ----> to State Fairs. And the North Carolina State Fair more specifically. Cousin K., L., and I headed out on the historically busiest day—the Saturday before the gig is up. I was glad to find L. was as excited about seeing the fancy poultry as I was. Usually B. has been the one to share this enthusiasm with me. The fact that my cousin’s girlfriend also couldn’t wait to look at the guinea hens could only warm me to her.

and then the goats...

and then the hogs...

..and then the sense of peaceable kingdom if ever a kingdom might exist. If ever the sense to be peaceable might build a kingdom of its own (let’s break the ground right here, shall we...)

…
And there was so much to take in down the Midway. I saw the biggest pumpkin in the state (740.56 lbs.) and a selection of the award winning pickled beans.

As for the food, the “Bloomin’ Onion” was a little too raw this year, but the fries were right-on. They fell off the small gingham paper dish like fat petals off a finishing flower. it was perfect. Maybe their heavy calories contributed to the Professional Guesser guessing cousin K’s weight 15 pounds short? Either way, it got him an inflatable “Finding Nemo” doll. Missing 2 out of three at the pitching game on the Midway got me, however, nothing at all. But remember the Marine chin-up bar I mentioned from the Greeley fair in July many posts ago? (Passing time in a thinner air). Well the Marines were at the NC fair as well. Semper Fi - do or die, L. hung for 70 seconds and won that CD carrying case for Cousin K’s car.

Most importantly, the rides all shone bright. the Zipper zipped. It is a giant YKK on speed.

The roller coasters coasted as if on cresting waves of black air, even if the thin rails were there as pretense.

…
And finally, what of the "State of Affairs"?
I report Decidedly Autumn.
In my room, it is orange. In my room I was changing. but I’m always changing. but I mean colors changing. not of the season so much as of the day. I was changing, you see. my clothes. and at 6pm this means a corner of this room might catch fire with fall sunset. By chance one sock on; one off; and there is conflagration.

On my body the light was burning hotter than the heat. no statistics. no death. just heat. good old equinox heat. And this light cast shadows off from random wire figures. Piled in a chinese take-out box on the shelf. Faces and hands warmed themselves.

...
So what the hell can be worried for? Affairs of State. changes of state. whatever. Whatever end comes to our emerald votes and this state of affairs, fellow citizens, there is always Sublimation. As a matter of last resort, if this chunk of ice finally gets too cold, please don’t simply melt. rather V a p o r i z e.

Floating underwater from above

2004-10-18T11:29:00.000-04:00

Sometimes driving down the highway at the end of Saturday feels like snorkeling into a reef of sky. There is plenty of water, just vaporized. Forming corals of cloud.

...
There are large jellies that float and shine with preternatural halos. Bioluminescence...?

No. Simply luminosity.

. . .
You might come across strange reef structures, iterated and colorful. Corals are colonial creatures and build little modular cubicles of individuality<>communality. This particular coral looks a lot like the old Heart of Durham hotel, abandoned for years and now in being demolished...

With a wall torn away, the antics of the inside walls can be seen in full spectrum. It is like a ripe piece of fruit sliced in half. psychedelic pomerganate. seeds piling out. Look more closely and some anemones and morays can be seen among the old doorways (They can be a bit cryptic).

...
But time to surface. time to get a dose of breath.

Feeling Froogle

2004-10-17T09:53:00.000-04:00

Google is useful. It is the Magic Eight-Ball of this culture that can be called upon to answer any question posed. No matter how unanswerable it may in fact be.

The other day I noticed the "Froogle" link. Ha. Clever! (pun).
I clicked to see what online buying, goooooogling style, might be like.

Going to the page automatically generates a short sampling list of the 25 items "recently found with Froogle" that are for sale. In some ways I thought the selection wasn't dissimiliar to the sort of things for sale at our house yard sale a month back. (Some things I thought would go didn't --handmade craft wooden yo-yo $.50, while other things were bought, I know not why --used phone that has broken #2 and #4 buttons).

So Froogle. What was there to be had at my first moment of glimpsing into this flea market? The snapshot could reveal something interesting about this life we are living out. Or really maybe not.

THE LIST of 25:

The items appeared in the order below. as did the following thoughts(most = variously interchangeable; a number = quite sincere; too many = 'clever').

DeWalt Belt Sander
-- Ok. very useful.
USB CD Writer
-- Used computer electronics online...? No.
Swingline Stapler
-- Swingline does make the best stapler, but who is going to buy? Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems something akin to selling individual pencils online.
piano lamp
-- Very specific device. interesting...
Golf Bag
-- I understand our modern desires to both package and be mobile, but a bag for your Volkswagen? seems a bit excessive.
Leg Warmers
-- Hm. I wonder what color and pattern they are. I welcome a comeback.
Pregnancy Test
-- When you really need to know, is it best buy one from a stranger off the internet?
High Chair
-- I think someone got a little over enthusiastic after buying the aforementioned pregnancy test. Package deal.
Guitar Amp
-- Cool. I admire electric guitars, and Sonic Youth playing them.
Electric Razor
-- I once had one myself but sold it to a pawn shop upon moving abroad.
Mouth Guard
-- My hopes this isn't a "previously used" item.
Cigar Cutter
-- This is so mid 90's . I guess the seller realized this.
Eyelets
-- Are these just many tiny eyes? *this* could be very useful.
Eternity Cologne
-- Cologne that could last forever would be great. no need to buy a new bottle! definitely a thrifty and "froogle" find.
Arm Chair
-- I actually haven't found a good one in years. but the shipping?
vitamin E
-- Dietary supplement or skin revitalizer, it is unclear. could this be code for ecstatic "E"? Everything is considered a natural supplement these days.
Chalkboard
-- Does this signal the rising dominance of the "whiteboard?" or "dry-erase board"? No,no,no.
Pot Rack
-- Truly a flea market item.
Topiary
-- I really, really want to know what this is. perhaps a giraffe? a lion? teapot-shaped shrubs?
Little Black Dress
-- I n d e e d. succinct. mysterious. Poetry meets alluring advertising.
Autometer
-- Does this measure how automatic something is? If so, does it do it automatically?
Kiehl's Breadmaker
-- I know only one person who still uses their's. it makes great bread. I hope this isn't the one.
HP Deskjet
-- Everything is moving faster, why wouldn't desks.
Hulk Hands
-- Yes! As bizarre as they are, I love to see people with these things on. another excellent/virtual flea market item.

----

And something else on the online sell::
I noticed that CNN's website is using this "smart technology" that generates adds to go with articles based on the keywords it finds in them. As they write:

Content Match pairs its listings with related content on CNN.com article pages and section fronts. The listings are determined by the relevancy of keywords, which advertisers bid on, to the content of the specific CNN.com page."

Thus, an article about W. stumping in Wisconsin had accompanying ads for "Free Sheboygan County Foreclosure Search" and "Wisconsin Buyer 1st Realty - Excusive Buyer Broker" (Excusive? are they making excuses? if so, I'm not buying them. (thank god some other people's typos are worse than my chronic own)). The implication seems to be that "keywords" = "meanings," a notion that is no less lame-O for being so very popular and widely assumed. (Didn't Wittgenstein put a close to this matter? I think "Liberal Senator from Massachusetts" is a good example of a recent "keyword/codeword" travesty...)

After the 'W. in Wisconsin' article I clicked on another, this one on the Russian space capsule, Soyuz, and its tricky docking to the space station some days back: "Soyuz Docks with ISS After Fast Approach."

And the "Content Matched" ads embedded in this article?

Buy Cellular Docking Stations $129.99
The Dock-N-Talk allows you to dock your cell phone and use your normal corded or...www.cellamericas.com

USB 2.0 Docking Stations
Plug into your laptop/notebook to add USB 2.0, PS/2, Serial, Parallel, USB file...www.byterunner.com

Docking Station Items on eBay
Visit eBay Electronics for "docking station" items. Discover great deals on new...www.ebay.com

Hmm.

The ole Soyuz crew seem to do a better job matching this-to-a-that than advertisers can (and they aren't even floating weightless in space).

Keywords? ...amateurs.

Please mark clearly.

2004-10-14T19:49:00.000-04:00

Today was the first day of early voting in Durham County. People down at the board of elections seemed buzzed. Can my vote wait the almost three weeks before all its friends are counted? It is a restless thing.

Ready, Steady, Go!
Change is coming, people.
uh huh. that's right.

-------

ADDENDUM: the papers reproted today "Durham leads NC in early voting."
Like I said: uh, huh, that's right.

International Apples

2004-10-12T10:11:00.000-04:00

It's apple season. Where I grew up in Sterling, Massachusetts it's apple season. MacIntosh is the word on the lips of every pomme-eater and cider drinker. They are the Appaloosa of apples: mottled, dappled with green and red. Those apple farms are closing down by the year, but perhaps enough will also remain. I was gladdened when I heard my fellow Sterlingite, B.w., was returning this weekend to get the apple in the way you can't in the city. I trust that now many sit in bowl somewhere in Cambridge. quietly ripening.

You know the world you are living in is truly global when the following is true about tha apple juice you buy at a gas station on Columbus Day weekend in rural North Carolina:

Sip, sip, sip...four continents, ten countries.

...
In other tran-national fruit news, local rock band International Orange just won The Independent awards for best new band in the Triangle. Even if it is like comparing "apples to oranges," cheers to that.

At the Ocean, Tiny Action

2004-10-10T22:42:00.001-04:00

Sad and strange fact: I haven’t been to the coast for a whole calendar year. So when B. said that a carload + dog were heading down, I had to go. To see sea. To taste salt in my mouth and eyes. To pay propers to the place where various horizontal expanses meet like layers of a perfect cake; sky, water and sand. On actually arriving, it was only better still.

You can lay out on the beach of Fort Fisher in Wilmington and swim, then fall asleep, then carve the likenesses of cats, crabs and large, somewhat trans-gendered, mermaids out of the miniscule bits of glass we know as sand (as J. here can attest to):

...
The surfers were out. As were the kite flyers. One caught our eye from a distance most particularly. It was kind of clunky. And black. “Is that a … truck?” said C. Oh yes, it was. This little kid was running down the length of the beach, trying to fly nothing other than a kite conjured in the form of a black monster truck, with the monsterish name “Destroyer” written across its side.

“Wow, I’ve never quite seen a kite like that,” I said. The boy cautiously agreed, maybe not knowing any more than I did whether that was a good or bad thing. But really it was neither. It was just a thing. A strangely funny thing.

<<<<\/\/>>>>
Walking along the foam edge of the incoming waves of tide, you can see bubbles and shifting roly-poly things squirming in the sand.

I’ve always seen tiny clams getting tossed around in this part of the water called the “swash” but never really understood what was going on till B. and H. pointed out how the clams were actually pushing themselves *out* of the sand as waves came, catching them, and surfing them higher up onto the beach. An expert on the matter (and former teacher of B. and H.), a Dr. Olaf Ellers writes:

To migrate, several times each tidal cycle, it [a clam] jumps out of the sand (pushing its shell upward by thrusting two to five times downward with its foot) and rides flow from waves. This method of locomotion has been named "swash-riding" (Ellers, 1987, 1988).

Not only that, but all along the beaches' swash you can see small clams lift up en masse, in patches along the beach. How and why? Apparently they can hear the big waves coming, and set themselves up into pole position to catch the next ride.

Another plentiful inhabitant is the Mole Crab, Emerita talpoida. On shore walks you may likely walk over their mysterious multitudes unknowingly. Little streamlined tank-pods, these crabs dig backward into the sand when uncovered by the wave water in the swash. I’m suspecting they may also be surfers, perhaps when we are not looking. Maybe you can note with affection the tiny yellow eyes at the end of the short eye-stalks of its small and pointy head.

The first time I’d ever come across mole crabs was on a visit to Assateague Island in 1992, finding some here and some there. Today there were thousands and upon thousands more. You could dig your hands into the soft and loose sand when the waves come up, and emerge with these smooth ellipsoids in your palm, in every conceivable size. I suppose if you are of a more technophilic persuasion, a certain analogy might come to mind.

It was hard not to crouch, dig and laugh in curious awe as the somewhat anxious crabs try to dig down between your fingers. So this is exactly what we did, watching out for the mole crabs, or what we now joyfully referred to as “Tiny Action.” C. seemed to find the smallest baby one, barely the size of the sharpest pencil tip, and so translucent as to almost be invisible.

Could I learn to be as both hidden and brave as a surfing clam or moling crab? Life no doubt is in the swash. If only the cycle of tides or the sense of the ocean were somewhat more obvious to me...

Still, one has to admire the waves. Even if they are about to soak you (and your camera).

Fear and Rage

2004-10-06T11:10:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure what is easier for most people to read-- words or faces.

If our general ability to follow the programming directions from the VCR instruction booklet is any indication, I think faces. If you saw the the facial acrobatics of last week's presidential debates, again I think faces would be your likely answer.

One of the most memorable things about my five-year-old trips into the Boston Museum of Science was not just the room with the mega-hella big Van de Graaf generator that throws blue bolts of electricity that crash into the oversized metal bird cage the exhibit guide sits in. No, the lightning bolt machine was cool, but in the room NEXT to that had something equally intriguing: a psychology exhibit.

All along this one exhibition wall hung a series of white masks of human faces, each contorted into a different expression: happy, sad, worried, frightened, angry, soothed, and ecetera, ecetera so. It was about the deep-seated and universal ability we apparently have to interpret different facial gestures of fellow humans as conveying specific emotions, from infancy on. Of course there are cultural differences and subtleties too, and they can cause trouble (as this author reports from once critically misreading a grimace as a grin).

And what of our ability to read it in other creatures?

The other day walking down the street I saw a fairly standard "Beware of Dog/ Stay the Hell Out" sign on someone's yard fence with a picture of a mean, snarling dog on it:

But wait, I thought, am I reading this right?

The sign reminded me of a facial gesture chart I'd seen by the great animal behaviorist, Nikolaas Tinbergen, supposedly illustrating the emotions underlying the facial expressions of dogs...
: : : Back home looking at the figure it seemed to me that according to Tinbergen the dog on the "Warning" sign was showing more "Fear" than "Rage," or really a fair mixture of both (circled):

...
Is it that most of us are too unawares and ignorant to know the difference? Would a "Dog Whisperer" simply look at the "Warning" sign and think they need to enter the yard and talk with this clearly anxious and frightened puppy?

Perhaps the thing is really that one should be just as scared of an animal that is fearful as much as one that is raging; as rage is the fist of a body in fear >>

>> If the current global politics and its various manifestations tell us anything, it would seem this much is certainly and tragically so...

Yar! Ahoy! (n a t u r e . . . )

2004-10-05T18:13:00.000-04:00

It’s getting chilly in North Kackalack right now. yep, it is. Every next day is a day closer to the center of a distant Winter, and so every day I go outside there is some urgency. I feel like a pirate on the the ocean of the on-coming Fall season, jumping on the ship of any nice afternoon that I happen to come by and rummaging it, stealing dry gunpowder, grog, and just most importantly some sliver of what could be left of the sun's summer light.

Go now(!) and you can still find the juke-joint hopping in the forest. Walk around and all that jumping at your feet is as likely to be tiny frogs as it is the autumn crickets — both small, both likely to chirp-chirp-chirp in that loveable, OCD sort of way.

...

Crayfish, those small and crafty freshwater lobster-creatures, make these little sculptured volcano-homes by the streamsides. No joke. This thing may not be Mount St. Helens, but it’s as tall as my camera and goes deeper in the ground than I’d likely dare to reach (assuming my arm was like stick-thin).
Did you know Antonio Gaudi was a crayfish? It’s true.
...

frogs sing songs smaller than your fingernail.
...

wood berries catch fire.
poof! (just like that)
...

I wish I dressed as well as most beetles. It's always an 80's dance party with them; six-legs, six ways to get fun-ky.

Around the District

2004-10-01T13:28:00.000-04:00

DC is a strange place. If for no other reason than for the men with shotguns, the long black motorcades, presidential helicopters, and elusive blimps. These things are all right there, like a fire hydrant might be in any other city.

And as for blimps,

This one seemed to be floating around me, at times almost alighting on my shoulder. Whenever I felt a creeping sensation up the inner edge of my inner spine I’d turn my head and this white ghost would be quietly (so quietly) sneaking behind a gingko tree or some building, pretending to be a cloud. A friend who works of “the Hill” later told me it was a new “security blimp” that does surveillance in the city and also takes air samples to test for biological warfare agents that evildoers might be releasing from above. Crikey.

...
As for air, what about water?
C. and I went to the fish market. It is a series of rafts floating on the murky, littered surface of the Potomac. But the seafood is abundant. We decided to buy a Red Snapper and cook it whole. Everything about this animal shines a beautiful red, somehow even its smell.

C. wanted to make it “Rwandan style” which involves hot peppers and tomatoes – and having never been to Africa I decided to take his word on it. Spicy was the way to go. So make it so. Neither of us had ever possessed the presumptuousness or skill to try to cook a eight pound creature like that ourselves, but together the possibility was there and real. With 4 hours marinate and labor(as well as cous-cous and asparagus) it came out on the better side of good...

...
And many things in a District shine. How can they not? Light is everywhere, its trying to get your attention. Like the longest escalator in the DC metro system, Dupont Circle; it vibrates laconically photonically at evening or noon (upper). And of course clubs, they like to have their own particular brooding atmospheric, as seen with the red lights of “Black Cat” and the blue glow of the “9:30.”

Can red be to blue as night is to day?
What the hell could that possibly mean anyway?
(Suggestions welcome)

“Maps, they don’t love you like I love you”

2004-09-26T09:28:00.000-04:00

When I first heard the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs sing this line as I drove down the Jersey Turnpike out of NYC early this June I thought, ”damn straight.” Without the map, I would have ended up in Perth Amboy like the time before. No need to repay the visit, thanks. Even if Einstein showed that space is curved, I take a deep pleasure in surveying the two dimesions of space all layed out in mulit-colored and broken lines. I do believe there is such as thing as an intimacy to geography, and I've always had a excellent sense of physical direction; maybe that's the left-handedness throwing me a bone.

...
And maps have insinuated themselves in every corner of my consciousness this week, one almost every day. Thursday I saw a huge aviation map of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee taped across an acquaintance's dining room wall, lifting and falling by the propellered breeze of the fan on the table. All these altitudinal routes traced out among the radio towers and taller hills on the landscape. Headings of determination.

If I could fly, would I bother with a map? Probably not. The sensation almost always strikes me when my eyes are closed, so really no need.

...
This morning this fellow Jim and I were given Mapquest maps of a Durham neighborhood, with the names and addresses of potential swing voters for Kerry/Edwards. We both actually knew that particular neighborhood, and that really was the only saving grace given that few of any of these maps coincided with the addresses. Deterrence not, slowly we decoded misinformation and found our way to the 30 or so houses we were supposed to call on. Even then, nothing is guaranteed. L. Barlett doesn’t live at 6B Carson Circle anymore, K. Libby apparently is in the Philippines right now. And Old Post Road? Well, that doesn’t even exist… a development paved that one over, come to find.

Technology sometimes does get it right, in peculiar ways. Now you can find out about the distribution of campaign contributions on the internet – in some cases block by single block (FundRace). For example, in Boston we see that indeed the Democratic causes have the Donkey’s share of contributions (blue dots), bleeding heart liberals they are -- God bless them.

And what about that one conspicuous red circle at 55 Hayden Ave. in the Suburbs? Seems like the Watkins’ household has some change to spare this election year. Must have been that tax cut. Should I know this? Do they want me to know this? Is it worth knowing? Probably not $76,500 worth, but if me and Mrs. Watkins ever have lunch together I think I’ll let her pick up the check.

The city-by-city map of the FundRace site has a thing of local interest: A lonely blue patch in the center of North Carolina amidst the predominance of red: the city of (Old Bull) Durham.
...
And The Magnetic Fields are playing in the background and there is this lyric I can’t get out of my head these last couple of days--

And your eyes are the Mesa Verde,
- big and brown and far away,
and your eyes are Kansas City,
- in Kansas and in Missouri…

And if the eyes don’t tell?
Well a map always might.

2 out of 7

2004-09-20T09:16:00.000-04:00

Weekends are islands of time. And there is so much to do.
It's recommended that you:

(1) Stay away from the news.
.....
(2) Bash pinatas to shreds at a birthday party (thank you, K. and L., for the "eyeball").

(Lo and behold, knock a pinata open and it might be filled with all sorts of fascinating surprises, like chocolates in the shape of severed fingers and ears, day-glo condoms, and of course little snack boxes of "Dots" hmm...)

.....
(3) A potluck southern-fried vegetarian style is also a good idea. See just how kool-thang you might look in Sammy's cobalt sunglasses. (Naturally, Sammy looks best in them; upper right corner).

.....
(4) The weekend is also that special time for working on home improvements. Buying random tiles to fill in the gaps in your kitchen floor makes any Sunday that much better. Art lives in the everyday but-don't-you-know.

"Monument"

2004-09-18T13:34:00.000-04:00

We know that the "body count" of US military deaths now exceeds 1000. Of course we have only estimates of how many civilians -- those who wanted no part -- have died. some say 13,000 while other claims have been upwards of 40,000 people.

I heard a song today that is a kind of choral reading of the names of some of the thousands known to have died, "Monument" by the Heavenly States.

Listen here: Monument

No Lucy, no Linus

2004-09-16T17:04:00.000-04:00

Yes, clouds. I have been working on how to draw clouds lately. When I'm bored waiting at a cross-walk, they are the most beautiful, ubiqituous and changeable thing around to stare at. It's been particularly so here in Carolina this fall, you know, with the hurricanes.

And of course, we see THINGS in clouds. The proverbial rabbit, or dog. Why is it that it is in clouds, vegetables and planetary surfaces seem to be the places we spot things like profiles of Nixon?

Once my friend laughed and yawned at the same moment and the wrinkle in her chin was the spitting image of Meg Tilly. These things happen. Then again, there was a time some cirrus clouds an acquanitance told me looked exactly like the wiring diagram of a 1983 Sony Beta-max player. Hard to know what to make of that kind of observation.

The other day I looked up, and what did I see? Gander at the photo, I'll let you be the judge...

ps: the US postal service is releasing a new line of stamps, just announced: cloudscapes.

Yellow-shouldered, pin-striped, purpled-crested...

2004-09-12T16:47:00.000-04:00

This morning while eating sliced apples and peanut butter, Kyle placed gold-colored metal tray in front of me.

And what merits such a presentation? Four Saddleback Caterpillars, Sibine stimulea, that he found on his palm tree. When he woke up this morning he saw strange spheres, many and little, on the floor below the palm. Seeds?

No, no dear reader, caterpillar frass.*

*(what is "frass," you may say? Let's ask the Army Corps of Engineers; like average engineers cubed, they know they have an answer for everything: FRASS )

And the caterpillars?
Creatures.
Alien, spiny and bright green.

The USDA guide to “Caterpillars of the Eastern Forest” describes the Saddleback as, “another unique slug caterpillar. Charcoal black or brown, with unmistakable lime green abdominal saddle. Saddle with central patch ringed with white. Dorsum of first and eighth abdominal segments with fingerlike lobes bearing numerous stinging spines. Sting intense and of considerable duration. Food: broadly polyphagous on trees, shrubs, grasses such corn, and other garden plants.”

“Slug” caterpillars lack the overly soft, gasket-like legs of other caterpillars and instead have a set of elliptical suckers, giving them a very slug-like demeanor.

The USDA guide lists some other members of the slug caterpillar group – members of the moth family Limacodidae,—you may find hugging the surface of smooth leaves in your woods if you bother to stare at leaves macro-zoom close. They include such dandies as the:

Monkey slug
.......Red-cross button slug
Purple-crested slug
.........Spiny oak slug
Pin-striped slug
.............Small parasa
Crowned slug
.........Yellow-shoulder slug

that a slug might be so fancy.

Looking down

2004-09-09T10:42:00.000-04:00

It is remarkable what patterns show themselves if you bother to let eyes linger at your feet

the colored scraps that fall to the floor

or the marks of what you wear that will wear into you

Chance animals

2004-09-08T19:57:00.000-04:00

It’s uncertain what to make of particular synchronicities. Are most coincidences meaningful for the fact they are so unlikely, the substance of them signaling something more significant? Or is it that they are very likely and our expectations are just so askew we aren’t able to see just how natural such occurrences are?

Perhaps the most simple & classic example of the latter, less mystical alternative, is the experience of learning a new word or hearing of some quasi-celebrity for the first time and then hearing the word or seeing mention of that person at every turn (again and yet again) the days and weeks following. My guess is that this is a function our lack of attention to the patterns we aren’t already primed for seeing, but once we a cued-in can’t help but notice in everything (For some reason, I recall Don Knotts –of Incredible Mr. Limpett fame— being such an instance for me).

Anyway, now I’m wondering about the Camelopard.

I was looking up some word in the dictionary yesterday and then got to browsing only to come across the camelopard, the apparent love-child of a camel and a leopard (head of the former, spots of the latter). Pliny makes note of it in his records, and it sounds like the Romans were really thinking about giraffes. Hm.

Later that night I’m reading some random book I’d never opened before. I flip to page 74 and there in its chimeric glory is the picture of a camelopard, as recorded in a book by Gaspar Schott, 1776. (by the way, why wasn’t I named “Gaspar,” Mom?).

Is the fabled “camelopard” going to be another Don Knotts for me? I guess only time will tell. Although I haven’t come across any more camelopards today, there are some concerned whether contemporary hybrid shenanigans such as “ligers” and zeedonks” are really what the Almighty had in mind…

(see also: wholphins, ratacoons, satyrs and GFP bunny)

Asking nice like

2004-09-01T17:02:00.000-04:00

As my man Ali G says,

”Respeck: there’s so little of it in the world today, you look it up in the dictionary and it ain’t even there.”

Yo word - true dat. For years friends have made fun of some of my polite & understated tendencies that at times come off absurdly stilted. Perhaps it’s like a kind of social stutter, equal parts self-conscious and intractable? Even so, I'm not sure what's not good about erring on the side of polite, as long as your sincere? I'd reckon most of us get our share enough of getting treated lousy in the daily course of things as it is...

The other day the Neighborhood Watch bulletin appeared folded and stuffed in the screen door, shining with a xeroxed promise of News and Information. On reading the updates of recent goings-on, I came to find that my neighbors are masters of the craft and push the mathematical limit of respectful understatement (and maybe safe neighborly concern)-- see below. Respeck yo, it’s not just a word not in the dictionary.

An excerpt from the NW bulletin:

B. and K. had a pleasant and productive discussion with F. and D.
B. and K. assured them we did not want to infringe on their being in the back yard and having social gatherings with friends, however, yelling at other neighbors making neighbors feel uncomfortable in their homes was totally out of the bounds of being acceptable.

They also mentioned the problem with people exposing themselves while urinating and defecating in the yard. This also being totally beyond the bounds of decency - especially since two small children live just 2 houses away. F. assured B. and K. on both these issues letting them know that the homeless people who had been hanging out were no longer visiting as much and they would keep things under control. F. and D. also said they appreciated being approached in this way. We will make sure F.is invited to the next meeting.

Parasite Love

2004-08-27T16:47:00.000-04:00

Currently the housemates and I are top-to-end cleaning out a very big old house that has generations of old biology graduate student stuff layered into every possible corner of space; the egg shells and old feathers of birds that hopefully have flown to a place they like more.

This morning K. came across this piece of old yellowed notebook paper with the following sketch of a song (I think for gee-tar). The influence of a bioloigcal frame of mind isn't *too* subtle, is it? hm.

Was it ever performed? In the presence of the "parasitoid" in question perhaps? Ouch, what a crusher that'd be.

--Am----------G-----------------Em----
out of the light and into the darkness
--G---------------------D----------------Am--------
what I thought was a fire, turned out to be a flame,

( Am------G---------Am-----------Em)

------G--------------D------------------Am------
which blows out so easily when it starts to rain

like a parasitoid, you eat me from the inside,

dependency bred through intimacy

Food for too much thought

2004-08-26T17:31:00.000-04:00

There was one egg left in the refrigerator. I felt groggy, but despite this drew upon some (for me) remarkable inner resources,and decisively grabbed the egg. I cracked it in the fry pan and closed my eyes to the warm image of a fried egg on toast filling my mind with a sort of serene joy.

looking down into the pan (see below) I yelped.

hmm

Holy mother-of-nothing, my egg was purple magenta around its edge. I swear, these days things go wrong in the smallest and absurdist of ways frequently enough I’m wondering where the camera is, and this was just another example. I mean…wha? My housemates were very impressed/amused/incredulous until Kyle mentioned maybe that was the pan he cooked ginger and garlic curry in last night. It’s jar stuff, and kinda bright, but I still was suspicious. I mean, if it was the curry paste, what does magenta have to do with “ginger,” “garlic” or “curry” anyway?

I ate the egg. It was my best fried egg in months.

...

Later in the day I went to the hospital cafeteria on campus to meet my friend Y. for lunch. The lady in the back was cooking about four gallons of canned green peas on a griddle. hm. something new. New techniques for a new millennium, I'm guessing.

Sitting down finally with Y. we got to eating, him a salad too (new to the States, he seems to like the salad bar). Lifting something curiously on his fork he asks, “What is this?” A wet, purple-magenta disk hung in his tines....

a slice of pickled beet.

ok, so maybe not all magenta food is so bad after all.

Orange

2004-08-23T17:03:00.000-04:00

I lived in a beautiful house for the last two years and now that house is being sold by my landlords. Certain inevitabilities follow from such events, including the moving of hundreds of books, various tchotchkes, clumsy furniture, and innumerable scraps of paper with details that I can’t bring myself to discard: words to look up in the dictionary (“caesura”,”caducous”), things to do (“see if check is still cashable”) and observations of moments who’s original time, place and full contexture are now lost (“blue & coral cotton shirt; lisp”). Moving such things at once and en masse shakes the memory and other stable notions. It is that can of orange soda you were carrying in your backpack that bubble fizzes with some agitation when you finally snap the tab to take a sip.

The room I’ve moved into in the new house is painted orange in a couple bright and varied ways. So much so that even with my eyes closed I sense its solar color penetrating my eyelids and making the darkness bright.

And maybe this is auspicious.
I was stacking a set of photobooks I bought on Japan, each one in the series premised on a color and also a mood or sensibility that color is thought to manifest. Coming across the book on Orange I noticed its Title – “Orange: When you feel something has just begun.” Considering this undecided and liminal space of post-school/pre-Next Step I am presently in, orange might be the sense of things that I need. The words accompanying the picture on page five read, “It could be a bandana, socks, a coat; it could be a pin. Orange has come to change the gears of your mind.” Let us see.

And while I rankle a little at moving house and feel suddenly as if someone has switched the right and left lenses of my eyeglasses in a prank, thank god whole peoples & traditions thrive particularly from such itinerancy. If it weren’t for the Roma/Gypsies and their never ending migrations from India to Iberia, there would be no Flamenco, and so no Flamenco guitarists and dancers to be found just by chance in Sven’s dining room last Saturday night.

I have to be honest, I have had a crush on Flamenco for many years now. There at the party I could flirt with it openly as it filled the air all around me, wine in one hand, my heart in the other. A girl at the party even happened to be from Spain and impromptu sang a Jorge Luis Borges poem from a book she pulled from the shelf. Are we everywhere like this? dancers, guitarists and divas? As hopefully so, as certainly so.

"Free-Speech-Zone"

2004-08-09T11:27:00.000-04:00

What more need be said? Sure, I had heard about the free speech zone (or "FSZ") absurdity at the Democratic National Convention up in Boston and other places. But then I just saw the photos (exhibits A & B) of the space and it completely flipped my lid. A small area enclosed with razor wire under a bridge?! Is it me, or did the Boston Police and Secret Service simply go on the cheap and buy the old set from Mad Max's "Thunderdome"? (note unruly protesters with crazy hair waiting to enter the FSZ)

and of course, more nuttiness.

photo log #'s 534,568 – 534,571

2004-08-05T10:47:00.000-04:00

In support for the thesis that meaning is contextual rather intrinsic; sometimes words in another language completely hit the mark regardless and by the blessing of not knowing their actual native meaning (in this case "hair salon"). Fris-E-ur, indeed.

In Vienna they have a nice summer tradition called a “Hueringer” where, out of the ebullient impatience of the grape, they drink the wine not fully yet fermented and mixed with soda water. It’s better than half bad, though, and I don’t even like white wine that much to start. Catch some Hueringer-ers mid-evening and they may give you this kind of look. They may also give you the finger (lower left), and maybe that’s fair enough.

Don’t be afraid, airbrush your BMW, ‘cause you only live once, but the Goddess of the Ocean Storm lives 4eva!

Finally, what would Vienna be without the Boys Choir?

Working notions

2004-08-04T22:00:00.000-04:00

Visiting Dachau Concentration Camp outside of Munich is sobering and quiets you down quickly. When there recently I saw had the horribly cynical and false phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” – Work Will Make You Free – welded into the iron of the gate, as it was in the camp gates throughout Eastern Europe . And shouldn't it be to the contrary; if we are free, we can pursue livelihoods as makes sense to us. But then, the Nazis weren’t known for their exploration of the finer points of emancipation, or dignity.

...........

Today in my in-box I received my bi-annual note from the “Iwate Prefecture Ambassadors Association.” They are always hoping to hear about –or alternatively generate— news about what is probably the most sparsely populated prefecture in all of Japan. Of course, when you get attention, it isn’t always the preferred kind…. This time it looks like my former home was curious (and somewhat worried) to know whether any of us saw the article in the Wall Street Journal a couple months back about using the “Ganbaranai” slogan to promote their northern province.

To “Ganbaru” is to try hard and give it your utmost effort – a phrase as “Japanese” as you could get that embodies a sense of cultural identity not matched by our own slogans like “Be all you can be” etc. To “Ganbaranai,” however, is to precisely NOT “Ganbaru.” (!) Shocking for country like Japan, that like other first world cultures, often enforces hyperized notions of how working constantly and at haste will provide freedom (above all, freedom to go into debt buying shrink-wrapped Stuf. It seems that the mountain air gives the people of Iwate that little clarity to see somewhat differently.

Arnold (em)bodied

2004-07-23T12:08:00.000-04:00

So I am here in Austria, and came across a photo of Arnold Schwartzenegger around town. Once Austrian, now head of the fourth largest economy of the World, the state of California. I guess playing Conan the barbarian and Mr. Freeze might prepare you for that kind of thing.

Right just before I left for over-here a letter came in the mail. My friend Jen had sent me a news clipping. My old classmate, Jay Cutler, made the news again. In first grade Jay and I used to do skids together in the playground sand. Just recently, Jay won his 3rd Arnold Classic title.
How many degrees of separation does that give me to Arnold, or this photo I've come across here in his homeland? I should now say something about 'the world being small' at this point I suppose. But really, it's even worse than that...

lingua obscura

2004-07-23T11:48:00.000-04:00

observation logbook: observation #3452, Vienna.

I like made-up words.
And who doesn't?
Philosophers win the prize, though, hands down. Here's a sample of some buzzing past my ears ... A concept for every occasion:

truth as conformation
ratifying knowledge
holistic conventionalism
method of coincidences
discursive interactions
norms of critical contextual empiricism
synthetic a priori
N-dimensional manifolds
measured realism
naive empiricism
underdetermination
constituitive of the concept of the object
communicative rationality
inter-paradigmatic conceptual limbo
sensualist positivism

gelegenheidsdichterdrinkster

2004-07-13T12:04:00.000-04:00

Flemish: Belgians keen on speaking a peculiar kind of Dutch
Flanders: A place where they like to speak Flemish.

F. and C. live around the Turkish part of Ghent, so their are a lot of 'doner kebab' shops and smokey tea rooms exclusively the province of men . Canal to cobblestone, it overall seems to be a three-storey city overall, save an occasional medieval steeple.

Today the sun was actually out, which naturally means good Belgian waffle weather. mmm. Warm vanilla hinted sugar-bombs, these things. The shop warmed them up and you can just take them away in your hand.

Of course, you could also buy them at Food Lion.
(?!)
Yes, truth revealed, beloved Food Lion is a Belgian company. That lion in profile on the logo that looks like it's busting out with "The Robot" on the dance floor? Yeah, that's the Lion of Flanders, my friends.

And what word-concepts might they have in Flemish they might not have in English:

gelegenheidsdichter : occasional poet
gelegenheidsdrinkster : occasional drinker

ergo... gelegenheidsdichter-drinkster : occasional poet drinker ?

swim. swam. swum.

2004-07-06T21:34:00.000-04:00

93 Fahrenheit? Dunk your head, yo.

The Quarry is an oasis in a state where few lakes exist that aren’t simply dammed rivers. Bodies of water in North Cackalak are a little too brownish and murky. I need the satisfaction of seeing my feet floating below me in green or black glassy water; but maybe that’s the New England snob in me talking.

The sharp and unpredictable patches of cold and warm water throughout the Quarry are contenders for the top 20 damn-fine things the world of senses has to offer. It’s like taking shots of whiskey while you’re swimming, randomly and seriatim.

It’s true, seeing the loss of the rope swing was sad, as was the park rangers kicking us out mid afternoon. Today my feet still feel like they are floating a little.

petals; fungus

2004-07-03T17:26:00.000-04:00

Late last afternoon is rained so hard that almost every small flower got knocked the tree in front of my apartment. Now its shadow is this ring of red petals that makes it look as if the force of one strong sneeze shook the flowers off all the tree's slender branches. Everywhere else on the ground thick and floppy mushrooms are springing out of the ground, like tan and earthy cumulus clouds piling on top of each other, ready to storm something fierce. I suppose a shower of spores.

passing the days in a thinner air

2004-07-02T08:32:00.000-04:00

If you are in Colorado and happen by to the Rocky Mtn. Stampede in Greeley, you find all the things one might expect at a summer fair, like carousels, airbrush artists and irresistible petty gambles on the Midway (long live the ring toss). Recruiters from all four branches of the military may also show up (7 pull-ups gets you a Marines CD carry case; 10, a T-shirt).

The food stands run the range, but Grandma's made me the happiest.

I had fried pickles for the first time. I also saw a 3-week old baby camel (Dromedary, not Bactrian) at the petting zoo, which filled me and my companions with a small but very certain grief. What is it like as an African camel at 6000 ft., bottle fed and surrounded by agoutis, potbellied pigs and downy, speckled goats in a petting zoo sponsored by the Volvo dealer of greater Greeley?
...
The sun is brighter and the sky is large everywhere you'd care to look this state. The food is also large, like the cinnamon buns at Johnson's Corner truck stop that are as big as a child's head. Naturally you get a side of butter with that.

Course, the original reason to be in northern CO were biology meetings in Fort Collins: 1300 evolutionary biologists together for 4 days, each of us allotted 9 free drinks. Out of the 750 talks some will stand out, even to the most skeptical of imaginations --

June 28, 9:15am: "Consistent departures from neutral equilibrium in large, unstructured populations of whale lice"

Falling off the trees like ripe fruit

2004-06-22T14:46:00.000-04:00

I’ve come across two fallen bird’s nest, thankfully both empty, in the last couple of days. It must be the season to let the old domiciles go, fledglings having fledged and all.

On stopping to pick up the upside-down-tire-squashed one of the pair (right side), the Goateed Campus Traffic Officer happened to come by.

GCTO: “Taking that with you?”

Me: ”Um…yeah”

GCTO: “That’s art man, right there. We couldn’t make a thing like that. It takes a bird.”

The GCTO and I then rode our bicycles side-by-side for the next mile….

“You ride this road much?” he asks. “I love it, art’s everywhere. Look there. See those shadows over there under the trees? That’s art, right there! Man, it gives me goosebumps.” He shows me his forearm for verification as we pedal (he did in fact seem to have goosebumps).

He feeds the pigeons under the graffiti-ed railroad bridge we are passing under. He also assures me he only takes care of the “lovable” animals on campus (e.g. “Cisco” the quasi-feral cat at the Rec Center; “Chip” the squirrel who lives in the river oak behind the Administration Building). By the by, he also mentions that BB King said the Blues is beautiful music that can only been written by “Good people who got the Blues themselves.”

Who'd know a Bodhisattva Dr. Doolittle works at the campus traffic circle? Maybe the birds up in their nests.

A tough day for Sno-Kones

2004-06-21T11:57:00.000-04:00

Fluffy, icy Sno-Kones were having a rough time of it at the Bulls Ballpark this Father’s Day. Every few yards, another casualty, all green and red splattered and melting along the concrete.

We got lawn seats. Turns out cousin K. went to high school with the Bulls star batter, Matt Diaz, back in Florida. Two points for a small world.

(Bulls rallied in the bottom of the ninth and an extra inning, going from 4-0 to 4-5 to beat the Ottawa Lynx.)

Pulaski Bridge: magic portal from Queens to Brooklyn

2004-06-19T13:22:00.000-04:00

An elusive bridge I was supposed to cross, according to Mapquest, to get to Jeff's place in Greenpoint. I found other means.

Did you know ExxonMobil polluted the Newtown Creek that runs beneath this bridge and the surrounding land on a massive scale? Yeah, news to me as well. J. and I took a boat trip the other weekend on the creek, thanks to the Riverkeepers. Crude oil leaching from the ground thick and slick onto the water. It stank. I guess as most "corporate responsibilty" does?
Bloody crazy.

break the bottle, christen the ship!

2004-06-19T12:22:00.000-04:00

Last late night I was driving from Raleigh with friends and BLOGS came up.

Y. was intrigued and E. is a fan, but dubious as having her own. I have always been a bit ambivalent to the idea for myself. Zooming down the blackness of interstate 40 West the internal dia/monologue went something like this:

"In some sense, web logs might be thought of as virtual "zines" of sorts (! exciting! speaks to the high school Fugazi devotee in me). But really, it isn't even anything close to a zine since it lacks the essential homemade tangibility......hm."

"What's more, friend, 1) You're more visual than textual, and 2) your writing hasn't much improved since first grade. a poem:

fish is good
fish is nice,
fish is even good
on rice.

This was my first piece of creative writing ever. I think it may be the zenith at that- accessible, unpretentious, short and evocative (warm bowl of rice! mmm...)

But then I realized I could do it for free. Granted, this is one of the WORST reasons to do anything. But I am curious. So I christen this blog of very small observations:
"the paper boat"