Wired News: Rolling Camera Eyeballs Danger

If you want, you can buy these for me. I'll figure out what to do with them later. Thanks.

Petrosexuals

Tom Toles is as good as pleated pants are bad.

the funniest expression i've heard in awhile...

comes in a restaurant review. Frank Bruni takes on Florent, the
bistro i've never been and need to visit, and in the midst of it all
drops this line to describe accessories i'm sure he does not own:

bulky black eyewear, the training wheels of hipness.

nice. and i suppose my clear frames would be the water wings of
jackassery. yeah, that's about right.

Mapping Manhattan

Pretty neat project from the NYT. Literary map of New York City...If only I knew how to read.

these are the people in my neighborhood

cast of characters:

George: Gruff, loud, older Italian gentleman, fighting weight estimated at 260 lbs., proprietor of George's Pot Pourri.

Random neighborhood woman: Many look surprisingly similar. lotsa gold, lotsa hair, lotsa lung capacity.

Scene: Outside aformentioned store.
Voice volume: Please interpret every lowercase letter as an uppercase, and read every exclamation point as a foghorn.
Topic: The weather, naturally.

alternate topics include, the state of the neighborhood [going to hell w/ these real estate values, for chrissakes!! a million five! a million five for that building she paid $25,000 for! blessed mother!]

Random neighborhood woman: What's with this weather?! This is crazy! Why's it so cold?

George: Look at you out, look how you're dressed!

Random neighborhood woman: Lookit, I got 3 jackets on, what are you talking about?! Why should I be cold?!

George: You're cold because you've got no blood!!!

oh, that's why.

...they're the people that I meet each day.

"Whatever it is that pulls the pin..."

Over lunch, thumbing through the notebook I carry to make some people think I'm more thoughtful, intelligent, or french than I actually am, I came across a quote by Diane Arbus that I jotted down in her retrospective show at the Met a few weeks ago. It was in her application for a Guggenheim grant, one of those life-changing kinds of opportunities that sometimes arise from that peculiar combination of talent, luck, connection to others, and a hell of a lot of Guggenheim money.

In her statement, she described the rationale behind her plans to photograph "American Rites, Manners, and Customs":

These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary."

Some of these things, these people and places and scenes she saved, have a permanence in my head that I couldn't shake if I wanted to. There are dozens of photographs and paintings and buildings and books like that in my life that are hard-wired into who I am, and I find that they come out most when you're inviting someone else into that space, trying to explain why these things are stuck with you.

The beauty of it all though, the added beauty of looking at something you'd swear you know back to front, is that you realize you don't, and something else is added in that instant you notice something new, or someone points it out for you.

My favorite picture of hers is alittle kid in the park clutching a toy hand grenade, a look of
exasperation on his face that's both comic and terrifying.

I've seen it countless times, but only once before as an actual print. A professor had been given a working portfolio by Arbus over the course of their friendship, and he had a print of that image. To see another print years later made this kid wholly new to me, and the excitement of showing someone something like that for the first time becomes doubly so.

Looking at it for not long enough, out from that little square on the wall jumped what I'd never seen before --a little wooden ice cream spoon at his feet, the crest pattern on his outfit, the strange joy of the girl in the top corner trying to break away? or happily skipping? --taking their place of permanence with the other details I picture without even seeing the picture anymore -- the dirty, knobby knees, the strap of his overalls slipping down his shoulder, the nanny lurking in the background -- ominous, protective, suffocating, omnipresent.

This happened throughout the show, happens whenever you look a bit closer at anything. Things deepen, take on a kind of texture there next time, our lives the better for it.

add to your list of things you don't want to eat.

Yuck.

This bit from an article in the Washington Post goes a long way to capture what may've been going on inside the Sistine Chapel before Ratzinger was pope'd. Seeing the pictures and hearing the whispers made the whole process unexpectedly fascinating to me.

These moments after things were decided seem both nonsensical and totally, obviously right.

"From the very first vote on Monday evening, Ratzinger was at the front of the pack of contenders. And almost before the electors knew it, the grave atmosphere of the conclave was over, and they were singing Latin songs, eating chicken cordon bleu and toasting the new pope with spumante.

'It's wonderful to be in a group of 115 people, and you're all equals. You're all talking: Eminence this, Eminence that, first name this, first name that. And then suddenly, one of you is different,' said Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington. 'He's no longer one of you. He's the Holy Father, the successor to Peter and the Vicar of the Christ.'"

Pabst, you thought?

i've read/heard this from numerous sources today

maybe he was just speaking in tounges or something, but...

"The time has come that the American people know exactly what their Representatives are doing here in Washington. Are they feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people, the American people, have a right to know...I say the best disinfectant is full disclosure, not isolation." - U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, 11/16/95

I'm not quite sure why I hate this little man so much these days. Wait, now I remember.

Thanks, Keith!

who knew? they are much less ferocious looking in real life. not to mention the combinations. it's like Mendel with fur!! Maybe science isn't soooo beyond me, after all. I demand to be funded immediately.

thank god it's not a liger

So I've been having a lot of dreams lately in which mountain lions figure prominently. Last night, for instance, one was in a room with a door I couldn't lock. Troubled by the prospect of being eaten on a nightly basis, I sought guidance in through the wisdom of www.dreammoods.com (that is to say, I googled "dream" and "mountain lion")

partial clarity ensued:

Mountain Lion

To see a mountain lion in your dream, represents lurking danger, aggression and raw emotions. You need to keep your attitude and emotions in check. Alternatively, mountain lions symbolize pride and grace.

I don't know quite what to make of that, and I prefer the explanation that I instead have The Mountain Goats on the brain, but the something tells me the site's description of a monkey dream is dead-on:

Monkey

To see a monkey in your dream, symbolizes deceit people are working to advance their own interest. Monkeys also symbolize a playful and mischievous side of your own personality or an immature attitude.

To see a monkey hanging or swinging from a tree, denotes that you be troubled by young ones.

To dream that you are feeding a monkey, denotes that you betrayed by someone whom you thought cared about your interests.

This, however, is just bullshit:

Morocco

To see morocco in your dream, signifies that you will receive assistance from people whom you least expect it from.

No, it means you're thinking of Charo María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza, even though she's from Spain. Filthy.

if rupert murdoch and tony soprano had a prime minister

Poor Silvio -- Do you think they'll hang in him upside down? Perhaps this a is little ray of hope for my 3 friends too many who got fucked over by the very corrupt Alitalia:

ROME, April 20 - Closing down Italy's 59th government since World War II, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned today, but he immediately announced that he would form a new government.

Mr. Berlusconi, ceding to the demands for renewal of his center-right allies after dismal electoral results earlier this month, said the new government would commence an "updated program."

less corruption, more pope intimidation, right? and doesn't that photo look just a bit like brando? or brando for that matter?

I'm moving

Here. In other news, I'd like to borrow roughly 2 million dollars from each of the people reading this. thank you.

interpretations, please

i've never read anything about dreams, what they can mean, suggest, or distract us from, but mine have often seemed a bit off. for instance, the junior senator from new york. why is a pantsuit wearing hilary clinton having a discussion with me on the telephone, then in person? my guess is that i'm reading too many op-ed pages, when instead i should be doing the word jumble or whatever the hell it is that keeps so many people looking nice and sedated on the train in the morning. and, no, john. she wasn't hot. you're still wrong on that point.

redaction

puddles, i meant puddles. orange ones at least. hell, who am i kidding? i don't even hate puddles these days, as we have seen.

you know what really bugs me?

Puppies. And people who rant.

on vulnerability; or blood, wine, sidewalks and the necessary limits of language

If you had told me that I'd be on a street corner in green point kneeling over a man who looked like he just got the life beat out of him, I'd call bullshit.

But there I was a 9 o'clock this Saturday, on my way to mini-beef wellingtons, wine, and cheese at a friend's amazing new apartment, steps from her front door, when I came up this man, badly bleeding from his face, unable to tell me in broken English or unbroken Polish how he had come to be this way.

I had no idea how long he'd been there, and in the time it took for the police to arrive, I stayed with him, trying to learn if he'd been jumped or was hurt more seriously than he looked. The funny thing about language is how it renders us totally unable to communicate sometimes. And anyway, what could I say even if we did understand one another? So in lieu of words it was eye contact, a hand on the shoulder, fumbling with him as he tried to unlock his cell phone. One
neighbor called out from across the street, and I couldn't help but wonder for how long she'd watched before I came. Another person in a van pulled over and asked if he could help. I thought of Kitty Genovese.

The strangeness of this situation is of course compounded by the fact that I got myself jumped a few weeks back, though I clearly fared better than this guy. I'd like to think I'd have stopped anyway, and I probably would have, if only because I know other people wouldn't. There's something about someone bleeding on a dirty sidewalk that has to stop you. Or should, at least. I've carried the word 'vulnerable' in my head since then, and it's the first one I wrote down, sarting this.

When the four officers arrived, three men and a woman, they asked what happened, what I'd learned from him, etc. I said it looked like he'd been mugged, they suggested that maybe he'd had a bit too much to drink and fallen over.

"Would knowing that have made you come faster or slower, do you think?" I asked, with a bit more sarcasm than is wisely directed at a group of people with guns. They didn't really have an answer, and said they would take care of him. "Good."

These days, it seems mandatory here for me to associate things happening with the poems you people seem to like reading [get your own damn book], and thinking of what happened with this man, I was reminded of something by Philip Larkin:

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

jerk

Tom DeLay.

way to go NYT

The New York Times' Hotspot Directory - Wireless Hotspots - Worldwide Hotspot Directory very helpful. maybe. we'll see if it works when i try it.

Seamus Heaney tells me why I must go to Ireland

Below’s his poem, Postscript, describing a part of the country I believe my family comes from. I hear it’s beautiful, and know it must be so. God forbid I turn 30 without having been, anyone on this earth is allowed to hit me with a shovel. Or, more appropriately, a shillelagh. I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes obsessed with these things, and there will be more on them soon.

The thing about moments is that they present themselves for only as long as it takes to do so, before they turn into a different moment. Time may seem to drag sometimes, but it’s not the moments that do. They can’t, any more than we can prepare ourselves for them. What they can do, though, is accumulate. The effect they have is necessarily instantaneous, though we may not always realize it at the time. And what they add up to, it seems to me, is our impression of a person, or a place, or thing (that would be a noun, i guess). Jorie Graham has written that there are “moments in our lives, which, threaded, give us heaven.” And I understand better than ever what she means. Threaded, yes, but the power of one fully realized can do what Heaney describes below. And that’s pretty fucking incredible.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

fire, brimstone, and bullshit alert!!

Frist Set to Use Religious Stage on Judicial Issue

Recovering from near death cold/flu just in time for this....

WASHINGTON, April 14 - As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."

those damned people without faith. ruining everything for everyone.

this is why i live here

I often find myself going to work with this silly look on my face these days, which I could blame on daylight savings time, but is in truth the fault of a girl, and something tells me it rubs off on people. It's always difficult to get in in the morning, the ever crowded f-train full of people used to cramming up against one another and those who I know have done this commute for longer than I've lived here, but still betray no hint of common sense when it comes to rush hour.

Trying to balance coffee and magazine and holding onto rails so as not to fall into people, I must've been quite a site this morning. With my stop approaching, attempts to get a half read article on that absolute bastard of a supreme court justice antonin scalia [he oddly went to my father's high school] crammed back into my bag were comically unsuccessful.

Which is when the woman sitting directly in front of me, watching this epic struggle of man double-teamed by bag and new yorker issue, looks up and says something I have to ask her to repeat. "Can I hold that for you?" she offers. Why, yes, you can. Coffee is guarded by complete stranger, fat judge goes in my bag, and i thank the woman who at that instant was my favorite person in the world.

Then, always trying to link the things that happen to me to the words that matter, I remember Seamus Heaney's translation of the Greek Tragedy Philoctetes, called The Cure at Troy. And I smile at this woman and thank her, and my eyes wide behind lenses she can't see through thank her nonetheless. And I half want to tell her what I've had memorized for awhile now:

There's a whole economy of kindness
Possible in the world; befriend a friend
And the chance of it's increased and multiplied.

Point being, go do something nice for someone today.

this is how the world works now

you buy a record on a whim, and not at all because of someone's urging.

you get a song from the arcade fire's funeral release stuck in your head, even though you can't make out the lyrics.

frustrated, you google search for the lyrics, even though they are printed in the liner notes.

the lyrics you find are as follows:

Neighborhood #2 (Laika)

Alexander, our older brother,
set out for a great adventure.
He tore our images out of his pictures,
he scratched our names out of all his letters.

Our mother shoulda just named you Laika!

Come on Alex, you can do it.
Come on Alex, there's nothin' to it.
If you want somethin' don't ask for nothin,
if you want nothin' don't ask for somethin'!

Our mother shoulda just named you Laika!
It's for your own good,
it's for the neighborhood!

Our older brother bit by a Vampire!
For a year we caught his tears in a cup.
And now we're gonna make him drink it.
Come on Alex don't die or dry up!

Our mother shoulda just named you Laika!
It's for your own good,
it's for the neighborhood!

When daddy comes home you always start a fight,
so the neighbors can dance in the police disco lights.
The police disco lights.
Now the neighbors can dance!
Look at 'em dance.

you are reminded of the fact that good music is not always so good when written out.

[e.g. "Our older brother bit by a Vampire!" does not give "not unbecoming men that strove with gods" a run for it's money. Tennyson: 1 , Arcade Fire: 0]

you ask yourself what a laika is, and feel dumb that you don't already know.

you google "laika" and discover it to be the first dog shot into space.

you find yourself somewhat in awe of that little creature and her distinction in history, and decide to read more about the story. you recall that in history class, the dog's demise was not mentioned in such great detail.

and you read this :

"The more time passes, the more I'm sorry....
We shouldn't have done it....
We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog."

and find yourself unexpectedly touched by what must've been a wrenching realization for many of the scientists working on the project. and looking at the little capsule the dog spent her time in, it just looks like the saddest, scariest thing in the world.

--

from tower records to a space dog to a bit of remorse. just add google. my brain often works this way w/o google. it's just nice to know someone's making billions of dollars off the way i've always thought.

there's so much interconnection in this world that it can make your head hurt.

because this is ethical

fucking incredible.

The wife and daughter of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have been paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by Mr. DeLay's political action and campaign committees, according to a detailed review of disclosure statements filed with the Federal Election Commission and separate fund-raising records in Mr. DeLay's home state, Texas.

on the virtures of clean underwear

As any skunk, deer, or raccoon along Interstate 80 can tell you, there's nothing remotely funny about being hit by a bus -- not even the Peter Pan kind. To almost be hit, however, is something entirely different, and can actually make for a memorable afternoon.

Especially if you're standing outside the Met, there's a giant puddle involved, and -- in exchange for your life -- you get drenched instead in what I'll call 'water-plus' [plus what? plus dirt, and grime, and oil, dead skin cells of upper east siders, etc.] that makes the kind used to cook those hotdogs sold at the steps to the museum look like holy water.

It also helps if your art companion for the day is similarly sprayed, and if instead of the water ruining your Sunday, she helps to make it. As she tends to these days.

I know this body is impatient.

The poet Robert Creeley died on Wednesday.

He's been one of my favorites for as long as I can remember, and there are lines that I'll remember until it's my time to go. I did a quick search to find something of his to put up [strange that i did so just a few days ago already], and was happy to find a poem I'd never read before.

I'm sorry he's gone, but I'm glad I found this. I expect this one'll
be with me for awhile.

"Goodbye"

Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky's
"Born very young into a world
already very old..."
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it's ending,
I realize it won't
be long.

But couldn't it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother'd say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.