Piano Bar

Almost all of the recording sessions for Piano Bar ('84) are on Youtube (thanks Jaime) - check em out.

Hello

Yami showed me this video last night while we sat on the kitchen floor. And I thought, how have I never seen this video? Have you seen this video?


Also, because it never gets old.

Hospice

I cannot stop listening to this album

Myspace

Welcoming remarks made at a literary reading

A great speech given by John Hodgman shortly after 9/11.

Re: An exercise in power?

"As far as I do think I understand it, the debate was initiated by the charge that I...and maybe others don't have "theories" and therefore fail to give any explanation of why things are proceeding as they do. We must turn to "theory" and "philosophy" and "theoretical constructs" and the like to remedy this deficiency in our efforts to understand and address what is happening in the world...My response so far has pretty much been to reiterate something I wrote 35 years ago, long before "postmodernism" had erupted in the literary intellectual culture: "if there is a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret," despite much "pseudo-scientific posturing."

To my knowledge, the statement was accurate 35 years ago, and remains so; furthermore, it extends to the study of human affairs generally, and applies in spades to what has been produced since that time. What has changed in the interim, to my knowledge, is a huge explosion of self- and mutual-admiration among those who propound what they call "theory" and "philosophy," but little that I can detect beyond "pseudo-scientific posturing." That little is, as I wrote, sometimes quite interesting, but lacks consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies...

It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers....Of course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them...

There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."

MORE

- Noam Chomsky

Maybe they agree on this one...

"I try to carry out the most precise and discriminative analyses I can in order to show in what ways things change, are transformed, are displaced. When I study the mechanisms of power, I try to study their specificity... I admit neither the notion of a master nor the universality of his law. On the contrary, I set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them..."

- Michel Foucault

Flavor Cartridges

A few days ago, when perusing a website, I noticed a side-bar advertisement for "The No. 1 Electronic Cigarette". I hadn't even known there were electronic cigarettes, so I clicked through to Blu's website. That's when I found out that Blu is a nicotine-infused flavor chemical slurry that you inhale. Like a cigarette without any of the negative effects (except the effects of nicotine, which are, in fact, the major health issues of smoking).

Re: Madres

I just finished reading a collection of stories by Abelardo Castillo, an author from San Pedro who is very popular in Buenos Aires. Here are my two favorites: "La madre de Ernesto" (Spanish/English) and "Patron" (Spanish/English coming). I like the idea of these two being read back to back.

"Chaos from start to finish"

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong."

- American Pastoral (1997)

Dream Song 224

Eighty

Lonely in his great age, Henry's old friend
leaned on his burning cane while his old friend
was hymned out of living.
The Abbey rang with sound. Pound white as snow
bowed to them with his thoughts—it's hard to know them though
for the old man sang no word.

Dry, ripe with pain, busy with loss, let's guess.
Gone. Gone them wine-meetings, gone green grasses
of the picnics of rising youth.
Gone all slowly. Stately, not as the tongue
worries the loose tooth, wits as strong as young,
only the albino body failing.

Where the smother clusters pinpoint insights clear.
The tennis is over. The last words are here?
What, in the world, will they be?
White is the hue of death & victory,
all the old generosities dismissed,
while the white years insist.

(1968)

826 DAY

Happy 8/26 day! Please go HERE to support 826 writing programs.

or go here

Las Afueras

Paula Peysere is a poet who writes for "El Interpredor" (Male's magazine). I found her book in my house.

ADDENDUM: I just spoke w/ Seba and apparently Paula Peysere is also an itinerant hair-cutter who cuts hair 1 Friday every month. This Friday she will be cutting hair here on calle Arganarez. I plan on attending.

This is her haircut blog. Scroll way down to see Male's haircut.

Porquesta toca manana

Llega temprano, por favor, y no podes hablar (fyi):

pOrqUestA ---- Baño Sonoro

¿ por qué es tan difícil escuchar ?

¿ por qué empiezan a hablar cuando hay algo que oir ?




¿ qué hay que oír ?


será una experiencia acústica única para cada par de oídos
vamos a necesitar bastante de su silencio
------------------
sábado 22 de agosto- 21 hs puntual puntual
departamento único de asuntos intuitivos e irregularidades básicas
entrada $10 (el vino lo invitamos nosotros)
capacidad limitada por favor confirmar asistencia hasta el viernes 21
esquina triangular sobre Guatemala entre Uriarte y Darragueyra . portón negro de garage. tocar timbre.

frente a la plazoleta

A Land Apart

It's probably not news to most of you in New York, but a new neighborhood has fastened itself to the Brooklyn community (though not to the landmass). This development is perhaps the final step in the gentrification of Brooklyn, as young, white people create communities that even THEY cannot join.

J/K, though, it looks really cool and I'm sure the people are great, &c, &c. Plus, this is probably what the future of Brooklyn looks like, what with sea levels rising and all.

Notice I didn't use the word "hipster".

Joel Salatin: A Good Farming Story

Though there are doubtless dozens of such interviews already in circulation, I particularly like this version of Joel Salatin's philosophy on farming and food. He has quite a talent for distilling the complex issues of small farms in the US into a digestible moral philosophy. Impressive.


Morsels:
"The food industry, I'm convinced, actually believes we don't need soil to live."

"The food industry views everything through the skewed paradigm of faith in human cleverness rather than dependence on nature's design."

"...a culture that views its life from such an arrogant, manipulative, disrespectful hubris, will view its own citizenry the same way--and other cultures."

"The Jeffersonian ideal of the agrarian intellectual is about as culturally American as it gets--and I suggest as revolutionary today as it was in his day, when breaking from royalty and all its worldviews was as different as breaking from globalization, and its worldviews is today."

Bolsa

Yesterday Anna and I went for some cafe con leches after our IUNA (art school) initiation. When we left the cafe I left my bag (w/ journal, book and used film) on the chair next to me. I didn't realize that I'd forgetten it until I was sitting eating a choripan in some parilla nearly 25 blocks away. I spent 4o nerve-racked minutes walking back to the cafe. When I finally got there, the barista had set my bag (my bag!) on the wooden counter in front of the espresso machine. I thanked him profusely and then, as I turned to leave, this guy, this salty, 70 year old guy, turned to me and said: "If you don't have a brain, at least you have legs."