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Sunday, January 17th, 2010
A good weekend for music with friends -- John came over last night and we played for a couple of hours, then I went over to Bob & Janis' place this afternoon and played, I am hoping to practice with the Lost Souls tomorrow evening. Set lists below the fold.
 John and I played a pretty eclectic mix of music: A couple of takes of my "Bonaparte" medley, "Jockey full of Bourbon", "Behind that Locked Door", "Meet me in the Morning" (which I think has potential to be really great), "The Battleship Maine" (by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers),"Little Ditches" (by Michael Cross, about undertaking), "One of these Days", "A Man of Constant Sorrow" (ditto on the potential greatness), and "Walk Right In" among other songs. With Bob and Janis and Greg I played a pretty Grateful Dead-centric hour of music; starting with a drastically slowed-down version of "West Texas Cowboys" we played "Panama Red", "Breakdown Palace", "Rollin' in my Sweet Baby's Arms", "Loser" and more.
↻...done
posted afternoon of January 17th, 2010: Respond
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Ryan Iverson of Stupid is the new Awesome pictures Werner Herzog's take on Curious George -- it is pitch-perfect, hilarious.
posted afternoon of January 17th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, January 14th, 2010
In the wake of the horrendous destruction in Haïti, Manosuelta shares some lines from Frankétienne's Voix Marassas, ode to the poet's ravaged, ruined land:
Pays lapidé dilapidé ruiné au blanc des os.
Pays des saintes misères et des luxes agaçants.
Pays des paradoxes inouïs et des contrastes insupportables.
Pays matelotage féroce à l'oblique du dehors et du dedans.
Pays cancan curiosité à travers la fente obscure de nos fantasmes érotiques.
Pays béance qui saigne à l'envers du silence.
Pays complicité pornographique des corps décapités.
Pays musique flûtée des langues coupées.
Pays tunnel en cul-de-sac.
Pays voyage tortueux des culs-de-jatte.
Pays carcan de nos servitudes et de nos tares séculaires.
Pays bossu de nos mirages insulaires.
Pays des connivences barbares entre l'eau et le feu.
Pays des alliances et des dissonances.
Pays des miracles époustouflants.
Pays promiscuité des beautés infernales et des laideurs sublimes.
Pays des horreurs esthétiques et des divines blessures.
Pays enchaîné supplicié au carrousel de la malédiction.
Pays subtil nageant moelleusement dans le silence velouté des pièges fascinants.
Pays perdu suspendu entre dièse et bémol.
Pays noyé dans la graisse d'un cauchemar millénaire.
Pays miroir soûlé miroir brisé dans le bordel des dieux paillards.
Pays fêlure assiette porcelaine vaisselle faïence dans l'antique zizanie des zombis somnambules et des ombres débraillées.
Pays folie qui passe et repasse en dansant nuit et jour dans mes rêves déraillés.
Un très étrange pays tuatoire.
Un grave pays repu de malheurs obèses et d'ordures pathétiques.
 Twitter user InternetHaiti posted this afternoon that Frankétienne and his wife are confirmed alive, but their house has been destroyed.
If you are looking for ways to donate to the relief efforts in Haïti, here are three good links:
posted evening of January 14th, 2010: Respond
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 I happened on Matt Logue's E M P T Y L A project earlier this week -- impressive and beautiful! Impressive in a totally different way (and beautiful in a roughly similar way) are Masataka Nakano's Tokyo Nobody pictures -- rather than editing out the crowds and cars, Nakano waited for the moment when they were gone.
posted evening of January 14th, 2010: Respond
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At Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog, I find new pictures of Mars from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (Thanks for the link, cleek!) The pictures of Martian sand dunes make a beautiful desktop background, so think I:
(To a first order approximation, this is formations produced by the interaction between sand storms and frozen CO2.)
 (Clicking on the "Full image (grayscale, non-map projected)" to the right under "JPEG Products" will give you a very large image file which you can crop at your leisure...)
posted evening of January 14th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, January 10th, 2010
I went over to Woody's house last night and watched The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I've seen a couple of times and loved for its visual beauty; I think I may be getting past the gawking and starting to be able to appreciate the tragic beauty of Joan's story. In particular I was noticing something in common between watching this movie and reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ -- how my understanding of the story is shaped by knowing the lead character will suffer martyrdom. It probably goes without saying (though I don't know if I would have made the connection myself before yesterday) that Joan is a Christ-like figure -- in her story as in Jesus' there is a sense of fatality, that he will go to his death on the cross and she to hers on the pyre because God has set in motion the course of events and it is not subject to change.
Something that had held me off from reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was the subliminal fear that it would be mocking Jesus -- I am not a religious man and indeed have been known to appreciate lampoons of religion and of Christianity, but the idea of a life story of Jesus which mocked him was rubbing me the wrong way. I am glad to find my worries were totally misplaced.
posted evening of January 10th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, January 7th, 2010
 Adam Bertocci has written -- on a lark, in order to get some attention for his more serious projects -- a script for The Big Lebowski as Shakespeare might have written it. And what a job he has done! The Knave abideth. Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.
Update: As of January 9th (quick work!), Michele Schlossberg and Frank Cwiklik have announced that they will be producing Two Gentlemen of Lebowski at the East Village's Kraine Theater (upstairs from KGB Bar) in March, with Mr. Cwiklik directing.
posted evening of January 7th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, January third, 2010
I'm impressed again by Saramago's eye for the details of the story as he looks at Joseph and Mary's predicament -- they are in Bethlehem, 100 km from Joseph's shop and source of livelihood, they need to find a way to feed themselves for the 33 days Mary must remain in confinement following the circumcision of her son. My unresearched understanding of the Nativity sort of has the Magi showing up with their gifts immediately the night Jesus is born (and I am wondering whether the visit of the Magi will figure in Saramago's retelling*) -- I should go look at some source material and see how close this is to the accepted story. Joseph's taking work building the Temple has me thinking of Balthazar working on the Convent. Two passages from this section that I think illustrate the broad range of tone Saramago brings to this story. First a belly laugh:
On the eigth day Joseph took his firstborn to the synagogue to be circumcised. Using a knife made of flint, with admirable skill the priest cut the wailing child's foreskin, and the fate of that foreskin is in itself worthy of a novel, from the moment it was cut, a loop of pale skin with scarcely any bleeding, to its glorious sanctification during the papacy of Paschal I, who reigned in the ninth century of Christianity. Anyone wishing to see that foreskin today need only visit the parish church of Calcata near Viterbo in Italy, where it is preserved in a reliquary for the spiritual benefit of the faithful and the  amusement of curious atheists.
and only a few pages later, Joseph is walking back from the construction site where he has found employment; he passes by Rachel's Tomb, and we get deeply reverent, mournful introspection:
Without so much as a word or a glance, one body separates itself from another, as indifferent as the fruit that drops from a tree. Then an even sadder thought came to him, namely, that children die because their fathers beget them and their mothers bring them into this world, and he took pity on his own son, who was condemned to die although innocent. As he stood, filled with confusion and anguish, before the tomb of Jacob's beloved wife, carpenter Joseph's shoulders drooped and his head sank, and his entire body broke out in a cold sweat, and now there was no one passing on the road to whom he could turn for help. For the first time in his life he doubted whether the world had any meaning, and he said in a loud voice, like one who has lost all hope, This is where I will die.
* No, it does not.
posted afternoon of January third, 2010: Respond
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Saramago's telling of the trek Joseph and Mary must make from Nazareth down to Bethlehem in the ninth month of Mary's pregnancy, is utterly gripping and fascinating. I had never thought much about this aspect of the Christmas story; Google Maps gives the distance they had to travel as either 155 km (taking the westward route) or 166 km (taking the eastward route) -- perhaps 2000 years ago, on donkey and foot rather than in a car, it would have been shorter to go due south, not sure what the geography is like there. This is a long way to be forced to travel in service of paying taxes to an occupying power! The four canonical gospels do not spend much time on it, I wonder if there is another biblical source for this. I'm moderately surprised to find this book (so far, at any rate) not strongly hostile to religion; prayer in particular is being treated as a vital source of comfort to the impoverished Nazarenes. There is a lot of hostility towards the villagers' patriarchal misogyny apparent, and this misogyny is encoded in much of the prayer; but it isn't seeming to me like this translates directly to an anti-religion stance. A little bit of beauty from the third night of the trek, as the travellers take refuge in a caravansary in Ramah:
That night there was no conversation, no prayers or stories around the fire, as if the proximity of Jerusalem demanded respectful silence, each man searching his heart and asking, Who is this person who resembles me yet whom I fail to recognize. This is not what they actually said, for people do not start talking to themselves like that, nor was this even in their conscious thoughts, but there can be no doubt that as we sit staring into the flames of a camp fire, our silence can be expressed only with words like these, which say everything. From where he sat, Joseph could see Mary in profile against the light of the fire. Its reddish reflection softly lit one side of her face, tracing her features in chiaroscuro, and he began to realize, with surprise, that Mary was an attractive woman, if one could say this of a person with such a childlike expression. Of course her body was swollen now, yet he could see the agile, graceful figure she would soon regain once their child was born. Without warning, as if his flesh was rebelling after all these months of enforced chastity, a wave of desire surged through his blood and left him dizzy.
posted morning of January third, 2010: Respond
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Adam Shatz has published "Wanting to Be Something Else", a review of Museum of Innocence, in the new London Review of Books -- this is the best, most thoroughly developed writing about Pamuk I can remember reading since McGaha. Shatz traces themes of alienation and longing in Pamuk's writing from The White Castle through The Black Book, My Name is Red, and Snow up to the current book, examining what drives his books, where they succeed and where they fall short. This piece is required reading for anyone interested in understanding Pamuk's fiction.
posted morning of January third, 2010: Respond
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