Para los que puedan

Sabado primero de agosto agosto.agosto

TODO CONTENTO !

Corto Morales + Schmürz + Gordöloco trio

ceci quinteros cello seba rey bajo mauro mourelos trompeta

hernan hayet bajoestereo alejo duek guitarra hernan hayet bajo estereo

ceci quinteros cello rodrigo gomez bateria y voz

todos juntos

todos contra todos

todos a la vez

en ronda

¡TODO CONTENTO!

-abrimos la puerta a las 21hs

-22:00hs se proyecta el documental CUENTOS DE FAMILIA

-23:00hs TODO CONTENTO!(Corto Morales + Schmürz + Gordöloco trio)

-ENTRADA 10 PESITOS

-BARRA AMIGABLE

AV.GARAY 2380 SAN CRISTOBAL

tocar timbre

El interpretador

A cool magazine that my host sister here in Argentina, Malena Rey, helps edit.

To choose the defeated

"Needless to say, we fought tooth and nail, but we had corrupt bosses, cowardly leaders, an apparatus of propaganda that was worse than that of a leper colony. We fought for parties that, had they emerged victorious, would have immediately sent us to a forced-labor camp. We fought and poured all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for over fifty years, and some of us knew that: How were we not going to know that if we had read Trotsky or were Trotskyites? But nevertheless we did it, because we were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return. And now nothing is left of those young people, those who died in Bolivia, died in Argentina or in Peru, and those who survived went to Chile or Mexico to die, and the ones they didn’t kill there they killed later in Nicaragua, in Colombia, in El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of these forgotten youths."

- Roberto Bolano's acceptance speech for the Romulo Gallegos Prize

Our Irish Childhood

This afternoon, I decided to raid my house's hidden tape collection in search of Phil's Tape, the legendary compilation prepared by Phil, my brothers' and my smotheringly Irish babysitter (who, years later, would give me an alarm clock and a box of condoms as graduation presents). And lo, there was the case, with Phil's old handwriting! Each song detailed in impossible-to-read script. But no tape.

This is where YouTube and being unemployed come in. I've managed to recreate Phil's Tape as a YouTube playlist (minus two songs which I could not find). Side 2 of the original tape begins after "Thought I'd Died and Gone to Heaven" by Bryan Adams. Simply click "Play All" and live a Gumbiner childhood.

And below, a Scottish folk song, which is somehow appropriate.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite passed away today at the age of 92.

Following Cronkite's visit to Vietnam - and his subsequent determination that the war there was un-winnable - President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

Chomsky vs. Foucault

Two heavyweights facing off.

At its core a conflict between pragmatism and idealism? Are we thinking about society or is society thinking us? I think I side with Chomsky here: our concept of human nature is socially/intellectually conditioned and constrained by various power structures etc., but we do need a direction - even if it is based on our limited conception of human nature and/or justice. The only reasonable way to reconcile this issue is to - as Chomsky suggests - keep the specter of our fallibility in mind as we proceed.

Part 1:



Part 2:

DFW

An old but wonderful interview with David Foster Wallace: Salon. (via Stephanie [awhile ago]).

"It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel."

Also: a very well-done biographical piece by the New Yorker.

"In the new novel, a character comments, “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

Some thoughts after the mezcal ran out

“And I asked the boys, I said, boys, what do you make of this poem? I said, boys, I’ve been looking at it for more than forty years and I’ve never understood a goddamn thing…I remember that while I was drinking the coffee the boys sat down across from me again and talked about the other pieces in Caborca. Well, then, I said, what’s the mystery? Then the boys looked at me and said: there is no mystery Amadeo.” (398-9)

Today I finished Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives – a 650 page chronicle of two Latin American poets, their search for the Mexican poet Cesarea Tinajero and their infant literary movement, “Visceral Realism.” Bolaño’s protagonists are thinly veiled stand-ins for himself (Roberto Bolaño = Roberto Belano) and his real-life literary companion (Mario Santiago = Ulises Lima). The novel, additionally, appears to be a partial biography: Santiago and Bolaño both traveled to Europe (like Belano and Lima), and “visceral realism” seems to be an obvious parody of their real-life movement, “Infrarealismo.”

The novel is sprawling and fractured and Bolaño has a tremendous talent for creating authentic voice in his characters – probably because he knew many of them. He strays from his literary predecessors of “the Boom” era (Marquez, Fuentes, Llosa etc.): eschewing magical realism for a less mythologized realism and presenting his poet protagonists as the antithesis of the socially-inclined-left-wing-radical-Latin-American-writer stereotype. So where does that leave Bolaño? His realism is far from a 19th Century William Dean Howells novel (it makes no attempt to recreate the thing-in-itself), but more maximalist than a Carverian short story. It feels unedited like Kerouacian stream of consciousness and then, at times, concise, poetic and crafted (Bolaño always thought of himself as a poet not a prose-writer). His narrators are many (over fifty in the novel) and their narration trends towards the prolix end of the spectrum. To complicate things further, his realism has a meta-fictional aspect: he is, after all, writing in a new-realist style about the attempt of two poets (who he makes very little effort to cover up as being modeled after himself and his friend) to form a new-realist literary movement. Artifice, may you be layeth'd bare.

In a sense, I think Bolaño’s drive can be summed up (a little bit ironically) by a quote from García Marquez’s recent autobiography, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” At its heart, Bolaño’s work is a beautiful mediation on how we process the past. It is filled with the lust, insecurity, ambition and excitement of youth. It makes us feel adventurous and hopeless, epic and self-conscious. It can do all of this because it is not overbearingly ideological. Kurt Vonnegut said, “There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.” Now it’s probably a little more complicated than that, but Vonnegut gets at the essential point: its useless trying to codify Bolaño’s realism, because to a certain extent, it is beside the point. The beauty of Bolaño’s work is not in its style or purported innovation in relation to his predecessors (which everyone seems to be harping on about), but in the way it tells us stories about the world that feel true and real, and make us think about living. It is how he frames notions of experience and past in ways that connect with us, but refrain from imposing “meaning” on us (the novel is not, in other words, modernist in the T.S. Eliot/New Criticism sense: using the poetic object to hem in/make manageable the chaos of the real world). For Bolaño, chaos is what’s it all about, and that’s what makes reading him so much fun.

Party with the Navy

For those of you in the San Francisco area, check out the almost murderously good line-up of the Treasure Island Music Festival.

Holy crap. Tickets sales began today at Noon.

Peroni, 'sigue con estilo'

The other day at work (I am working for a (very) minor advertising firm in Bogota called 'La Estacion') we discussed the novel way in which we were going to market Peroni (the Italian beer) to the Colombian market. As the brief noted, Peroni had already attempted a 'lanzamiento imenso' which, among other things, involved a champagne party where everyone recieved free Ipods. However, this extravagance appeared to have failed. Colombians - according to recent polls - still viewed Peroni as no different from their stock beer, Club Colombia. Here is, more or less, the attack plan my Junot Diaz-look-alike-boss (Matteo) gave:

Matteo: What is Italian?

(no response)

Matteo: Tell me. What is Italian?

(no response)

Matteo: I will tell you what it is, the Italian is the most suave, the most handsome, the most perfectly confident person we know. Think about the 'Italian Job'. The original. 1962, or something like that. Roger Moore(pronounced Ro-her -- who is, fyi, not even in that movie), you know Roger Moore?

(heads nodding)

Matteo: So objective: make Colombians drink Peroni. Why would Colombians want to drink Peroni over Club Colombia? Key insight: Because they want to be handsome suave Italians. How do we make them feel like handsome suave Italians? We hold a raffle.

(General murmurring)

Matteo: My plan is to give out raffle tickets to every Bogotanan who purchases a Peroni.

Creative team guy #1: In what form will we hand out the tickets?

Matteo: Their code will be on the napkin they recieve with their beer.

(exclamations of 'que bueno' or 'chevere' from creative team guys)

Matteo: When they finish their beer they can drop off the raffle ticket in a huge and shiny plastic Peroni bottle we will place at the front of every bar and/or restauarant in the city.

(switches to next slide: woman in bikini clutching a big green Peroni bottle)

Why is this even better than you could imagine? You are asking me, Matteo, señor, why is this perfect? Because the raffle prizes will be for Italian things.

Creative team guy #2: Like what?

Matteo: Vespas and leather shoes

(switches to next slide: a man with no shirt straddling a Vespa)

Me: Sorry, what?

Matteo: Vespas and leather shoes. They will drink their Italian beer, they will win their Italian prizes, they will say, hey this Peroni stuff, this fits my suave, cool and handsome lifestyle.

(general applause)

Matteo: Daniel, write that up and give it to me by 5 o'clock.

Me: Yes.

Matteo: I'm going on break. Anyone want a cigarette?

Planet Earth meets Koyaanisqatsi meet the Internets

It's not every day that numerous multinational corporations fund a stunning HD nature documentary and then make it available for free on YouTube. But what really makes "Home" special is the fabulous aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand.



The full movie can be viewed here.

Song

Afternoon cooking in the fall sun--
who is more naked
                                      than the man
yelling, "Hey, I'm home!"
                          to an empty house?
thinking because the bay is clear,
the hills in yellow heat,
& scrub oak red in gullies
          that great crowds of family
should tumble from the rooms
                        to throw their bodies on the Papa-body,
                                      I-am-loved.

Cat sleeps in the windowgleam,
                      dust motes.
        On the oak table
    filets of sole
stewing in the juice of tangerines,
    slices of green pepper
              on a bone-white dish.


-Robert Hass

That old man with the burning eyes

¨Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.¨

- Eugene Debs, the 5 time Socialist Party candidate for President (once, in 1912, winning over 6% of the popular vote) and founding member of Industrial Workers of the World, at his hearing for violating the Espionage act of 1917. He was sentenced to ten years in prison and disenfranchised for life.

Question Technology

A few days ago, a tuned-in reader (his name rhymes with Bessie Trumbiner) alerted us to this important development in the all too inevitable march toward the Singularity.



The fascinating development in this particular technology (other than the fact that it makes so much sense as the next step) is that it physically mediates the external environment of the user. Instead of a consulting tool, the computer becomes a lens to augment (or, more frighteningly, judge) the world. The scene in which the inventor uses the device to project the Amazon.com (see, private company) rating on a potential book purchase just highlighted the various ways the technological "lens" could be hijacked to give highly biased or advertisement-based information.

I found myself especially horrified by the attitude of the presenter, who is wholly consumed by the desire to give humans "relevant information" to help them make "the right decision" in every situation. At the end, she jokes casually about brain implants.

Which begs the question: Has our frenzied accumulation of information become more burdensome than useful?

Marxist though he was

"Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.¨

¨...What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand?"

- After Theory (2003)

---- (for David) ----

Employed as we are, in an old book

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

SF, Bike City

San Francisco just approved a measure to add more than 3o miles (or 14 million dollars) of bike lanes (solid lines, not dotted ones). Check it out at Forum here (sans Michael Krasny) and the Mercury News here.