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September 16th, 2008 | Seven Weeks Left
"This is not hyperbole: We cannot win without Pennsylvania." —Sen. Joe Biden, Denver, August 28, 2008 Who wants to come with me to campaign for Obama in Pennsylvania?
 September 14th, 2008 | Palin Please. For the love of God, read this.
September 12th, 2008 | More Flaubert "Talent is a long patience" —Flaubert
September 12th, 2008 | From the Window
September 11th, 2008 | Afternoon Dialectics "That Flaubert is sui generis is to say nothing; but that he is no longer Balzac, that he is not yet Zola, and this in a host of determinate ways, is to articulate the structures inherent in and constitutive of the novel of Flaubert" —Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form
September 11th, 2008 | Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time
September 7th, 2008 | Mos Def & Talib Kweli
From Mos Def and Talib Kweli's "Respiration": ...
September 4th, 2008 | Deliver us from Hell America turns its back on whitey
September 4th, 2008 | David Harvey's Lectures on Marx's Capital
If ever the internet needed justification for its existence... CUNY professor David Harvey's lectures on Marx's Capital.
September 2nd, 2008 | New Orleans A New York Times blogger watches New Orleans' "Disaster Industrial Complex" scramble to action
August 30th, 2008 | Baked Alaska New York Times columnist Gail Collins on McCain's "inspired" VP pick.
August 28th, 2008 | Edouard Lock A film version of La La La Human Steps choreographer Edouard Lock's Amelia, with music by David Lang.
August 27th, 2008 | Obama Shoots Hoops, Talks Olympics
Obama on the Olympics:
August 23rd, 2008 | The Skin of the Dream Finnish soprano Karita Mattila sings Kaija Saariaho's "Parfum e l'instant" at Esa-Pekka Solonen's 50th birthday gala
August 22nd, 2008 | Warbler Delight Writer Amy Leach on a peculiar bird that sinks, and flies "from summer to summer to summer"...
August 21st, 2008 | Modernity
Proust, caught in the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow":
August 21st, 2008 | Who Will You Vote For? China prepares for an important democratic election
August 21st, 2008 | Fish, But No Cigar An amusing short film by Lyn Elliot.
August 20th, 2008 | Leave the Girl Behind
Cheesy, I know. But I still like it: "Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud. Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. "We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?" "I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"
August 18th, 2008 | Jeffrey Lewis Video Jeffrey Lewis turns in circles
August 14th, 2008 | Dogen "Although we say that the mountains belong to the country,rnactually they belong to those who love them." —Zen Master Dogen (13th Century Japan)rnrn
August 7th, 2008 | Dionysian Magic "But how suddenly the desert of our exhausted culture, just described in such gloomy terms, is changed when it is touched by the Dionysian magic! A tempest seizes everything that has outlived itself, everything that is decayed, broken, and withered, and, whirring, shrouds it in a cloud of red dust to carry it into the air like a vulture. Confused, our eyes look after what has disappeared; for what they see has been raised as from a depression into golden light, so full and green, so amply alive, immeasurable and full of yearning." —Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
July 28th, 2008 | Follow the Bouncing Balls
Sony Bravia ad ...and the making of said Sony Bravia ad
July 19th, 2008 | Fainting Goats
July 18th, 2008 | Decasia by Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison "Even when this film, this body, deteriorates away, these dreams, these images, continue."
July 17th, 2008 | Cheney Aide Edits Climate Reports One more reason to trust that the government is looking out for your best interests.
July 2nd, 2008 | George Carlin An amazing interview with George Carlin, from WNYC's Brian Lehrer show:
July 1st, 2008 | Quivering in the Target
Georg Büchner scholar J.P. Stern on the writer's use of language: "Words, everywhere in Büchner's work, are such strange, isolated objects: now like gaudy beads of poison, now like knives quivering in the target, now like scalpels dissecting living limbs, now again like gory wounds." Büchner's Woyzeck is coming to BAM as part of the 2008 Next Wave Festival.rnrn
June 30th, 2008 | Foggy Mountain Breakdown This is clearly overdubbed, but it's still worth a watch, if only for the odd combination of Paul Schaffer, Steve Martin, Earl Scruggs, and others.
June 28th, 2008 | Joan Copjec "Prosthetic Gods, we do not simply bring our fantasies closer to reality, more within reach, we experience their remodelling by the market into mise en scène ofthe postponement of desire." —Joan Copjec, The Silent Partners
June 28th, 2008 | Josh Hamilton, Down and Back
From Sports Illustrated: The Super Natural: After drugs and alcohol nearly destroyed his career before it got started, a repentant Josh Hamilton has miraculously restored the skills that now make him a Triple Crown threat.
June 21st, 2008 | Beside Ourselves "The artist is the man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness of expression and no other ground than this incomprehensible station on this side of himself." —Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (55)
June 17th, 2008 | If the Squirrel Fur Fits
From the Nevada Opera's program notes for a production of Rossini's opera, La Cenerentola:
June 10th, 2008 | Regress "A dream concerns a region in which pure semblance reigns. Everything is outward show, each figure portrayed is another, resembles another and still another one again, while the latter is like yet another one still. We seek the original model; we would like to be sent back to the starting point, to an initial revelation, but there is none: a dream is the likeness which eternally reflects its like." —Maurice Blanchot, l'Espace litteraire
June 3rd, 2008 | Lunch Break at the Xerox Machine An animation by experimental filmmaker Marie Losier, made by photocopying her face over a period of three months.
May 21st, 2008 | Look, Ma! It Wipes Right Off!
Graffiti Research Lab will do their thing on BAM's Peter Jay Sharp Building on Saturday night, May 31.
May 17th, 2008 | Irony, Man, Nature At the moment that the...language-determined man laughs at himself falling, he is laughing at a mistaken, mystified assumption he was making about himself. In a false feeling of pride the self has substituted, in its relationship to nature, an intersubjective feeling (of superiority) for the knowledge of a difference. As a being that stands upright […], man comes to believe that he dominates nature, just as he can, at times, dominate others or watch others dominate him. This is, of course, a major mystification. The Fall, in the literal as well as the theological sense, reminds him of the purely instrumental, reified character of his relationship to nature. Nature can at all times treat him as if he were a thing and remind him of his factitiousness, whereas he is quite powerless to convert even the smallest particle of nature into something human. — Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight, 214.
May 6th, 2008 | Whatever You Say, Riccardo.
Conductor Riccardo Muti on his decision to leave La Scala and accept the music director position of the Chicago Symphony:
May 6th, 2008 | Another Wood Does Good
Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood strikes out 20 batters
May 1st, 2008 | Robert Johnson, Eric Clapton
Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" Eric Clapton discusses/plays Robert Johnson
April 28th, 2008 | SNL Triumph Christopher Walken as a gardener whose afraid of his plants.
April 21st, 2008 | Deconstructing Deconstruction Only in the New York Times could an article on French Theory elicit over 600 written responses. Stanley Fish stirs things up yet again.
April 18th, 2008 | Rows to Hoe
Colorado Rockies manager Clint Hurdle, on the pep talk given to his team during what ended up being a 22-inning game against the Padres:
April 16th, 2008 | Adorno A review of a new biography on T.W. Adorno in the NY Sun. Not the first place I'd expect such a book review to show up, but I'll take it.
April 14th, 2008 | Church, Blood "Ask yourself what you did after 9/11. You either wanted blood or you went to church." —caller on WNYC's "Brian Lehrer Show", responding to Barack Obama's recent statements about small-town insecurities
April 9th, 2008 | Dharma Seed Rodney Smith, one of the profoundly inspirational people I know...
April 8th, 2008 | McDonalds vs. Starbucks I dare anyone who thinks corporate deregulation is a good thing to look at this and tell me it isn't terrifying...
April 2nd, 2008 | The Cost of Victory "Over the past two decades, [baseball] teams with [...] relatively small payrolls have won their divisions less than 10 percent of the time." Read on.
April 2nd, 2008 | Tutu "I am not an optimist; I'm a prisoner of hope." —Bishop Desmond Tutu
April 2nd, 2008 | Release Nelson Mandela's release from prison, captured by BBC News.
March 31st, 2008 | Come On Everybody Conga solo by Giovanni Hildalgo.
March 26th, 2008 | Fantasy Baseball
...and did I mention I own a major league baseball team? Follow the drama of the Astoria Asymptotes as they struggle for supremacy in League "A Steady Diet of Fastballs".
March 21st, 2008 | S.E. Rogie
I've been listening obsessively to the music of Sierra Leone musician S.E. Rogie. The genre is "Palm Wine" music, apparently named after a West African drink extracted from the fermented sap of the oil palm. But even more interesting are its unlikely influences---like Calypso, which originated in Trinidad as a music of the slaves who'd been transplanted from Africa. It's amazing, then, that the music managed to make its way back to West Africa to influence the music there. Rogie also sings a few cowboy songs, which is just bizarre, coming from a West African...
March 18th, 2008 | The Unheard "The regression of the masses today is their inability to hear the unheard-of with their own ears, to touch the unapprehended with their own hands—the new form of delusion which deposes every conquered mythic form." —T.W.Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
March 15th, 2008 | Yankee For A Day Billy Crystal is the Yankees DH for a day.
March 11th, 2008 | Lacan "[Man] thinks as a consequence of the fact that a structure, that of language [...], carves up his body." Lacan in action...
March 11th, 2008 | Poor Sad Stub
Writer Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia:
March 7th, 2008 | The Moon Will Remain Bloody and Dark
Rabelais, on debt:
March 6th, 2008 | Incipit
The inscription, found inside of a used copy of Essential Papers On Object Relations I recently purchased: The thief left it behind—the moon at the window. A little bit of non-attachment in a book that deals with the importance of attachment! I'm certain this book will benefit more by being in your company than in mine. Perhaps some day we can sit down together and you can share the meaning of it all, with me. "...I know I'll often stop, and think about you..." Be well. Love, Bob
March 4th, 2008 | Animus Dei
From Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: 1603 FLORIO Montaigne II. xii. (1632) 304 Aristotle..cal'eth [the soul] Entelechy, or perfection moving of itselfe. 1652 J. SMITH Sel. Disc. x. 500 Wickedness is the form and entelech of all the wicked spirits. 1655-60 STANLEY Hist. Philos. (1701) 256/1 The Soul is the first Entelechy of a natural organical body, having life potentially. 1837 WHEWELL Hist. Induct. Sc. (1857) I. 43 The Entelechy, or Act, of a moveable body. 1842 SIR W. HAMILTON in Reid's Wks. I. 202/2 note, Aristotle defines the soul, the Form or Entelechy of an organized body. 1850 MAURICE Mor. & Met. Philos. (ed. 2) 194 Motion is the entelechy (the perfecting power or principle) of the potential as potential.
March 3rd, 2008 | Koolstadt
rnDutch architect Rem Koolhaas has big plans for Dubai. From the Times review: If he fails he at least will have raised questions that most architects would prefer to leave safely unexplored. If he succeeds he could bring us closer to a model of a city that is not only formally complex, but genuinely open to the impure.
February 28th, 2008 | Land of the Free 1 out of every 100 adults living in the U.S. is behind bars. 25,000 people were sent to prison last year alone, bringing the total prison population to 1.6 million. Unbelievable.
February 27th, 2008 | Speak Not "In reality, man possesses, in art, a language already then when he is yet unable to pronounce what is inside him; art, then, is the language of what is otherwise still unpronounceable." (190-1) —Franz Rosenzweig, from The Star of Redemption
February 26th, 2008 | Rectangular Pupil Why do goats have rectangular pupils?
February 22nd, 2008 | Moth & Bunny A old rabbit sees the light in this beatiful animated short with music by Tom Waits.
February 21st, 2008 | Conservatium Academium
From an article in The Chronicle, discussing the recent research of Matthew and April Woessner on why more conservatives don't go into academia:
February 21st, 2008 | Bad Internet "The Internet's vision of 'consumers' as 'producers' has turned inner life into an advanced type of commodity," critic Lee Siegel writes. Read on...
February 19th, 2008 | Poverty is Poison Paul Krugman: "To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain." Read on.rn
February 16th, 2008 | There Will Be Blood II The worst idea ever for a movie sequel, from The Guardian.
February 8th, 2008 | Luciano Pavarotti nails nine high C's in this excert from Donizetti's aria, Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!"
February 2nd, 2008 | The Gaze
Three patient cameras, three incredible scenes: From Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, (feat. Schubert's Piano Trio in E-Flat) Children's puppet show scene from Truffaut's The 400 Blows Anna Karina in Godard's A Woman Is A Woman (scroll to 5:25)
February 2nd, 2008 | Yes We Can A well-crafted musicafication of a moving speech by one Mr. Mr. Barack Obama from Illinois.
February 1st, 2008 | Edwards New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on the importance of John Edwards' campaign. Remarkably, Krugman doesn't mention the fact that Edwards was the only candidate to make corporate reform—and an absolutely uncompromising stance on corporate reform—a central part of his campaign, which to my mind, when bundled with his health care plan, was his most important contribution. But then, of course, what's most sinister about the "corporate stranglehold" Edwards so often talked about is its ability to remain out of sight, hidden behind its shiny products and "everyday low prices". But how can you talk about how to fund universal health care and not talk about how Exxon quarterly profits are 10 billion dollars and growing, or how the government outsources national security operations to for-profit mercenary armies whose soldiers make upwards of $1,200 per day—roughly 6-9 times more than what it pays its own soldiers? You can't. Hopefully Obama and Hillary re-open the debate.
January 31st, 2008 | Fox News
A recent salon.com article discusses the plummeting ratings of Fox News. Included in the article: America's Mayor & Sean Hannity chased by an angry mob.
January 31st, 2008 | One Million Strong One of Britain's leading polling groups is reporting that the war in Iraq has claimed upwards of a million lives. So much for Hammurabi.
January 30th, 2008 | The Dying Swan Prima Ballerina Nina Ananiashvili apparently has no joints in her body. See her live at BAM in late February/early March.
January 30th, 2008 | Is Starbucks Dying? The New York Times looks at why Starbucks' stock is down over 40%.rn
January 26th, 2008 | Bush's Favorite Painting
The web edition of the January 2008 Harper's Magazine features this excerpt from Jacob Weisberg's new book on President Bush, discussing the meaning of the president's favorite painting: Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”
January 24th, 2008 | Colbert Connections Says Steven Colbert: "The ankle is just the wrist of the foot."
January 23rd, 2008 | What's In A Name?
From a Salon.com review of a recent Stalin biography:
January 23rd, 2008 | Damn Yankees
Major League Baseball published its 2007 payroll stats this week, with the Mets coming in a good hundred million short of the Yankees. Here's the full rundown.
January 23rd, 2008 | Humane Capitalism Nobel Peace Price-winning economist Muhammad Yunus talks with WYNC's Leonard Lopate about how microlending and "social businesses" can help to make free-market capitalism more humane.
January 21st, 2008 | Keep Moving And You Won't Freeze To Death Franz Kafka: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
January 18th, 2008 | Sesame Street Shakespeare Patrick Stewart poses a crucial ontological question.
January 4th, 2008 | Who Doesn't Love A Good 6/8? Sly and the Family Stone's version of Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be)
January 3rd, 2008 | Consumption Factor? Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, had this editorial in The Times yesterday. Worth consuming.
December 15th, 2007 | More Must Haves More Must Haves. This time, incoming director of the New York City Opera, Gerard Mortier. What did we do to deserve him?
December 14th, 2007 | Must Have
Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, offers his "must have" on NPR
December 13th, 2007 | Rhythm of the Saints A Rolling Stone review of Paul Simon's album, The Rhythm of the Saints, one of the greatest albums in the history of history.
December 13th, 2007 | Danny Kaye
December 12th, 2007 | Everyone but Mozart
One of Samuel Beckett's friends recalls the author's love for music:
December 10th, 2007 | Beckett and Buster Here's an unlikely find: a short film by Samuel Beckett, starring an old Buster Keaton.
December 6th, 2007 | Consumer Politics
In the spirit of really not wanting to eat the yellow snow—of even digging up the white snow just to make sure it isn't yellow underneath, I did a search via the FEC's campaign contribution disclosure database for the financial contributions made by rival CEOs Warren Eisenberg (Bed, Bath, and Beyond) and W. Howard Lester (Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, West Elm, Hold Everything). Unfortunately, I can't link to the results because they aren't generated in a static URL. But I will say this: if you're suffering from holiday shopping anxiety and need some reason to limit your gift buying to a few select locations, this is a great way to make your cuts. First, go here to find out the name of your CEO of choice. Then, go here, type in the name of said CEO of choice and see where your dollars are ultimately going. And yes: Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, West Elm, and Hold Everything are all under the same corporate roof. rn
November 29th, 2007 | Special Delivery Here's a green gift idea for the holidays: rent Mother Nature.
November 27th, 2007 | Repetition Compulsion Zizek gives yet another plug for why Freud still matters.
November 27th, 2007 | Mind the Gap
More Adorno: "Connoisseurship of art is the combination of an adequate comprehension of the material and a narrow-minded incomprehension of the enigma; it is neutral to what is cloaked. (122)"
November 24th, 2007 | Who has been reading whom?
On art's impersonation of the BEYOND...
Adorno: "The cruelty of forming is the mimesis of myth, with which it struggles" (Aesthetic Theory, 50) Lacan: "The more the object is presented in the imitation, the more it opens up the dimension in which illusion is destroyed and aims at something else" (Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 141)
November 23rd, 2007 | Free Market Fantasies
Karl Marx, from Capital, Vol.1
November 22nd, 2007 | Boban Markovic
November 22nd, 2007 | Boban Markovic
Happy Thanksgiving. Today, I'm thankful for, among other things, Serbian brass band music. Like this. And like this.
November 20th, 2007 | Oh Reilly Bill O'Reilly to Jon Stewart: "You know what's really frightening? You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary, but it's true. You've got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night and they can vote."
November 19th, 2007 | Japan's Chaotic Century
I stumbled upon this bullet point summary of Japan's chaotic century while researching an upcoming BAM show (Ship in a View) and thought I'd share. Here's a taste: Empire: With or Without You: One can contrast the small Japan of today with the nascent Japanese empire at the start of the twentieth century and the much larger, even sprawling Japanese empire of the 1930s and 1940s. The loss of these territories in 1945 reframed Japan's position in the larger world system: Japan went overnight from being the metropole of a dynamic Asian empire to being a mere periphery in a U.S.-dominated global order. To get a sense of this statistically, the total land area of the Japanese empire in 1910 was about 260,000 square miles; at the empire's height during World War II, over 4 million square miles; and today, about 148,000 square miles. As these figures suggest, the impact of empire—not to mention its sudden loss—was profound economically, politically, culturally, and (perhaps above all) in Japan’s conception of itself and its national destiny.
November 12th, 2007 | Loopy Who Philadelphia-based guitarist Dirk Quinn does a one-man version of The Who's "Baba 'o' Riley"
November 11th, 2007 | Listen to the River
Passages from Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse: And later, speaking to Vasudeva, the ferryman: "'Did the river,' he once asked, 'also teach you this secret: that time does not exist?'
November 8th, 2007 | No Life Without Death
Hegel, from the preface to the Phemomenology:
November 8th, 2007 | Enjoy Every Sandwich
Paul Reps recounts a Buddha tale:
November 7th, 2007 | Lapham's Quarterly
Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham has a new project. Why someone hasn't thought of this before, I don't know.
November 7th, 2007 | Kant, music, freedom
Kant, from the Critique of Judgment:
November 5th, 2007 | Redemption Walter Benjamin, from The Origin of German Tragic Drama: "Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them. [...] The persistence which is expressed in the intention of mourning is born of its loyalty to the world of things."rn
November 1st, 2007 | Visions of Joanna
"I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilight I have a crush on a dove stuffed with sawdust and diamonds. Watch her.
October 27th, 2007 | Car Talk Philosophy The Car Talk gentlemen ask: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what he's talking about?
October 25th, 2007 | Der Abschied
Adorno, on Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth):
October 24th, 2007 | Helvetica Helvetica, the recent documentary on the ubiquitous, modernist typeface, is brilliant and I cannot recommend it enough. No actors could have spoken more convincingly, colorfully, or articulately about Helvetica than do the designers—most inventors of typefaces themselves—featured in the film. Ultimately, it ends up providing as concise and effective a lesson in the politics of art and design as I could ever imagine, breezing through the debates on modernism and postmodernism without any heavy-handedness whatsoever. Of course, it's all at the expense of a typeface originally intenteded to be a "crystal goblet"—perfectly transparent, like Enron's accounting records—which ultimately, I think, becomes a point in and of itself.
October 20th, 2007 | Vending Machine Couture My life is complete. I can die happy now.
October 19th, 2007 | Freedom from "Freedom" "Morality as taught by way of rules is extremely powerful and valuable in the development of practice. It must be remembered that it, like all the techniques in meditation, is merely a tool to enable one to eventually get to that place of unselfishness where morality and wisdom flow naturally. In the West, there's a myth that freedom means free expression--that to follow all desires wherever they take one is true freedom. In fact, as one serves the mind, one sees that following desires, attractions, repulsions is not at all freedom, but is a kind of bondage. A mind filled with desires and grasping inevitably entails great suffering. Freedom is not to be gained through the ability to perform certain external actions. True freedom is an inward state of being. Once it is attained, no situation in the world can bind one or limit one's freedom. It is in this context that we must understand moral precepts and moral rules." —Jack Kornfield
October 18th, 2007 | Shaun Green is Blue
Shawn Green on the Met's pre- post-season collapse: "You feel like you did when you cut school," Green said Monday from his home in Newport Beach, Calif. "You know you're not supposed to be home at this time." Here's the entire, endlessly depressing article.
October 18th, 2007 | 12-tone Tomm NY Times critic Anthony Tommasini offers avideo crash-course in 12-tone music
October 14th, 2007 | Darth Stewie Family Guy tackles the flaw in the Death Star.
October 11th, 2007 | Takeover BAM is throwing an all-night party. Check out Takeover.
October 10th, 2007 | The Gutter For those who care to know, here's an example of everything that is potentially rotten about academia.
October 8th, 2007 | BachTube A full-screen video of an old Glenn Gould playing Bach's "Goldberg Variations."
October 7th, 2007 | Faust
Alas, what am I, if I cannot
October 7th, 2007 | Yin, Yang Nietzsche: "But have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost? How much reality has had to be misunderstood and slandered, how many lies have had to be sanctified, how many consciences disturbed, how much God sacrificed every time? If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed:that is the law—let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled!"
October 1st, 2007 | True North
Gorgeous film clips from filmmaker/artist Isaac Julien's True North installation, coming to BAM as part of Julien's Cast No Shadow in November. Click on "True North", then the links.
September 30th, 2007 | Disaster Capitalism A New York Times review of Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine.
September 29th, 2007 | Freedom Watch?
The New York Times profiles a new republican advocacy group (and White House front), Freedom Watch, founded by billionaires with the hopes of providing a conservative equivalent to the liberal MoveOn.org. They ran an ad recently, countering MoveOn.org's now-infamous "General Betray Us" ad, which included a wounded soldier begging Congress not to cut off funding for the war. It apparently concluded with an image of the World Trade Center and the now-unconscionable assertion that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Here's some additional info, some not included in the article. One of the founders of Freedom Watch is the shopping center magnate and former U.S. Ambassador to Italy, Mel Sembler. Sembler is chair of the Sembler Corporation, a residential and shopping center developer responsible for many of the soulless, 500,000 square foot seas of concrete that are gradually destroying American cities. Sembler is also co-founder of Straight, Inc., an adolescent drug treatment program whose license was revoked by the Senate in 1993 due to widespread allegations of abuse, ranging from sleep deprivation, starvation, over exercise, beatings, denial of basic health needs, sexual assault, deprivation of liberty and speech and psychological torture occuring at the center. Another founder of Freedom Watch is Sheldon G. Adelson, apparently the 6th richest billionaire on earth and chairman of the ever-nobleLos Vegas Sands Corporation, a hotel, gaming, and resort development company headquartered in Las Vegas that, according to its website, owns "The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, the Sands Expo and Convention Center, and Venetian Macao Limited, a developer of multiple casino hotel resort properties in The People’s Republic of China’s Special Administrative Region of Macao." I'm sure both of these fine gentlemen have their hearts in the right places.
September 28th, 2007 | Apple Tree "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree." —Martin Luther King Jr.
September 26th, 2007 | Giveth and Taketh Away Talk about two sides of the same coin...
September 26th, 2007 | Eating Guppies
Writer George Saunders on writing: The hardest part about being a writer is that, having overturned your vehicle and broken a plateglass window and eaten a bunch of guppies, you can't afford to pay for any of it and have to put it all on credit cards.
September 25th, 2007 | Nothing and Everything
From Sharon Salzberg's Lovingkindness from Everyday Mind:
September 23rd, 2007 | Greenspan, Iraq "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." —Alan Greenspan
September 23rd, 2007 | Baseball Playoffs on TBS
A somewhat terribly written but interesting article on the baseball playoffs' move to cable television. There's something terribly sad about this. Number crunchers claim that the difference in cable to non-cable households is 20 million, which they toss off as being an almost negligible amount. In other words, they claim that moving the playoffs will hardly affect the ratings. But the move smacks of the same trend towards privatization that is slowly dismantling everything from public schools to national defense. I have a feeling that those 20 million people are largely the same 20 million disenfranchised by every other move the government has made towards relinquishing its responsibilities and outsourcing them to the highest bidder. Of course, largely thanks to smug grad students and NPR addicts, myself not excluded (although I do have cable), non-cable subscribers can't at all be conflated with those living below the poverty line. But I think the point still stands. But I suppose that if soldiers must pay for their own body armor, I guess it makes sense for people to pay for baseball.
September 19th, 2007 | Trump Hotel Donald Trump, speaking at his unfinished, 46-story hotel in SoHo: “The Trump SoHo is a very, very special building. It’s by far the tallest building in SoHo. It is going to have by far the best views.”
September 19th, 2007 | Omar Bin Divorced
British grandmother Jane Felix-Browne, 51, has reportedly divorced her fifth husband—Osama Bin Laden's son Omar, 27, because of death threats and such. British Grandmother Jane Felix-Browne: "It's gonna work this time, I can FEEL it!!"
September 18th, 2007 | Blackwater: New Orleans
...and yet another article from The Nation on Blackwater, U.S.A.—this time on their involvement in post-Katrina relief in New Orleans. An excerpt:
September 18th, 2007 | The Nation on Blackwater More on Blackwater, U.S.A., from The Nation.
September 18th, 2007 | To Serve, Protect, and Sell Keychains
Regarding the last post, Matt P. sends in a link to Blackwater's website. I thought it might interest compadres to know that the same private security firm currently deployed in Iraq to protect diplomats and Green Zones also has this custom Blackwater teddy bear for sale—none too soon for Chistmas shopping. Along with a whole host of other items, they also sell weaponry accessories, which might interest our real soldiers in Iraq if they find themselves without a Pentagon-provided holster or custom winter shooting gloves. We laugh, but this really isn't that far off, considering that our tax dollars already fund outsourced for-profit private security firms who, incidentally, make 90% of their money on no-bid contracts funneled to them largely because of an unabashedly partisan stance. (Blackwater donates almost exclusively to the Republican Party and is explicitly pro-life.) It isn't far off, then, to suggest that, with the growing trend in privitization, U.S. soldiers might one day find themselves in the blackwaterusa.com "Pro Shop", filling their shopping carts with all sorts of goodies. Everyone knows that they already shop for their own Kevlar.
September 17th, 2007 | Dark Day for Blackwater
Back in March, I mentioned Blackwater U.S.A., a private security firm based in North Carolina that touts itself as "the most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations company in the world". I was blown away then to learn that Blackwater had upwards of 100,000 contractors in Iraq, 30,000 of which are actually deployed in combat operations. Because they're a private firm and not associated in any way with the U.S. Military or government, they're able to conceal their operations from the state and thus from any accountability whatsoever. Some 780 of their "soldiers" are presumed to have been killed, but because of the firm's private nature, the deaths aren't included in official casualty stats. This video from The Nation elaborates. rnrnThe New York Times reports today that Blackwater's license in Iraq has now been revoked after its guards apparently killed eight Iraqis in a firefight. The Iraqi Government won't be able to press charges because of the rules exempting private contractors from such things. rnrnFor further reading on a related subject, read Naomi Klein's article "Disaster Capitalism: The New Economy of Catastrophe" in the October issue of Harper's. It's adapted from her new book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, outlining the way disasters, including the invasion of Iraq, Katrina, and others have been exploited by privatized contractors as opportunities to remake ruined cities and states in the corporate image.
September 6th, 2007 | Where I Will Be, There I Was
Lacan:
September 6th, 2007 | Mr. Preston Represents PBS just filmed part of a documentary on reading in my awesomest friend Matt Preston's classroom down in Denton, Texas. Check out this video to see Matt and his blind student Ethan in action. Molly Ringwald narrates.
September 6th, 2007 | What's Added Takes Away Eric Schlosser, of Fast Food Nation fame, opines on food additives.
September 5th, 2007 | The Great Dictator
To Sid Caesar's argument to Beethoven's Fifth, select moments from Bugs Bunny, and Danny Kaye's performance in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I add Charlie Chaplin as a barber, shaving a customer to Brahms Hungarian Dance No.5, as one of the greatest moments of film acting ever set to music. The film in general is worth seeing. It was a late one, filmed in the 40's, and features a talking Chaplin as both a Jewish barber and a Hitleresque dictator. Memorable moments include his spot-on—and frankly, terrifying— faux German ranting (in which the word Sauerkraut finds disproportionate usage) and a beautiful, chilling scene involving the Hitleresque Chaplin dancing alone in a room with a balloon that resembles the Earth. Incredible.
September 5th, 2007 | Scenes from The Great Dictator
YouTube, of course, has the clips I mentioned below. Watch these only if you promise to also rent the DVD...
Here's the stunning The Globe Scene Chaplin as the dictator. ...and the barber scene..
September 5th, 2007 | MLK and Buddhism A paper by Martin Luther King, Jr. on Mahayana Buddhism.
September 4th, 2007 | The Reaper of Tonic's Grim
Here's the architecture review of the big, blue, building that went up next to the now-defunct Tonic, which was once one of the only places in New York City where you could hear progressive jazz and experimental music. Tonic is closed now. They couldn't pay the rent.
August 31st, 2007 | Opera I'm endorsing the Opera Browser as a surprisingly smart, clean, and fast alternative to IE—and even Firefox. E-mail is integrated into the tabbed browing feature, which alone seperates it from its overburdoned brethren...
August 31st, 2007 | Cologne I don't understand why Bloomingdales sends me catalogues advertising cologne. The bottles are beautiful, without question, but unless I'm being mislead, what's inside of them unfailingly smells like paper.
August 20th, 2007 | Mozart
It's funny how we familiarize ourselves with things because we like them, but then stop liking them at some point when they've become too familiar. The edges of a finely cut carat become worn down. Sparkle gets reduced to shimmer, shimmer to shine, and before long, nothing is left but a record of time's toll taken on the blood that runs through things. Which is why its nice to discover, even on well-trodden ground, something that sparkles where least expected—like in the second movement of Mozart's 9th piano concerto, which I somehow hadn't heard until recently. When the piano comes in, listen to how it makes its first ascending statement but then, instead of doing something different the next time—rising to the next highest note, for example—it stays put, repeating itself, repeating that top note three times. It's an odd time to be redundant; the piano has just made its dramatic entrance and we expect nothing short of pathos—pathos in terms of being moved in one way or another, moved by a melody moving one way or another. But it just sits there. The orchestra reaches up to the note we expect the piano to play but then, as if too weary to sustain the effort, falls back down, like a mouse trying to escape from a sinkhole. It's tragic, really. A musical image of exhaustion. Here's Mitsuko Uchida playing at the Salzburg Festival.
August 11th, 2007 | Goat. Thanks to this site, a goat now lets me know when I have new e-mail. Welcome aboard, goat.
August 5th, 2007 | MORE Nietzsche
...and more Beyond Good and Evil:
August 2nd, 2007 | Put down your flute and go save the world
On morality, Schopenhauer writes:
August 1st, 2007 | We Free Spirits...
Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil:
July 27th, 2007 | Down Boy!
From A.O. Scott in the New York Times:
July 25th, 2007 | Recordings
Two amazing recordings:
Haydn, Cello Concerto No.1, H.7b/1 played by Pieter Wispelwey and the Florilegium Musicum Ensemble. Steely, sinuous period sound. Impeccable intonation. Eats Haydn and excretes him, like a monster gaining strength off its prey... George Antheil, Jazz Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony. Rowdy orchestra music from the 20's, splatting brassy jazz licks like a bottomed-out speaker that can't handle its own sound---a self-destructive enthusiam perfect for the self-described "bad boy of music"
July 21st, 2007 | Murdoch & The Wall Street Journal That the Dow Jones Corp. and the Bancroft family (the majority shareholders) would even consider selling to Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp. is something I will never understand, especially after reading this piece in the New Yorker. Not that I really needed any convincing. We do have at least one martyr, though. More to come on this...
July 16th, 2007 | Starbucks Booted Starbucks is closing their location in Beijing's Forbidden City.
July 15th, 2007 | Cheney is Insaney The Guardian reports that executive branch opinion on Iran is increasingly shifting towards military action. Thank you, Dick Cheney, for all you do to make the world a safer, more peaceful place.
July 14th, 2007 | Which Marlene?
"I am Marlene Dietrich -- Miss Dietrich is me." ---Director Joseph von Sternberg on his most famous star.
July 13th, 2007 | Senate Rowdiness
A Hindu chaplain is disrupted as he attempts to deliver an invocation in the U.S. Senate chamber. Look here.
July 9th, 2007 | Fair and Balanced Reporting The latest gem from Fox News' "fair and balanced" reporting: Universal Health Care Breeds Terrorists
July 4th, 2007 | Playlist For those in need of a non-commercial classical radio station that plays something other than Strauss waltzes and Swan Lake, WNYC in New York City now features an internet-only classical radio station with a very interesting playlist. New music mixed with obscure old. Check it out.
July 2nd, 2007 | "I" is not
From the Dali Lama... Likewise, the solid "I" which seems to exist somewhere within the body and mind is merely an imputation. The body and mind are no more represented by the sense of "I" than is the protruding rock represented by the word "human." This "I" cannot be located anywhere within any individual piece of the body and mind, nor is it found within the body and mind as a collection, nor is there a place outside of these that could be considered to be a substantial basis of the object referred to by the name "I."
June 23rd, 2007 | Quiet Clothing
From designer Elie Tahari's website:
June 21st, 2007 | Recognize This
John Dewey, from his incredible book Art As Experience:
June 16th, 2007 | Hilarity at Yankee Stadium
From an exchange between Mets announcers during Saturday's subway series after a Yankee reliever stalled his windup:
June 16th, 2007 | Catalog of Destruction
I spent thirty minutes on the phone this morning calling retailers to have my name removed from their catalog lists. Eddie Bauer, L.L.Bean, J.Crew, Pottery Barn, Land's End, West Elm, Levinger, and that's just the beginning. According to ForestEthics, the Boreal forests are being logged at a rate of two acres a minute, 24 hours a day, largely to paper the world with cataloges already available on the paper-less internet. Here's a blurb: The catalog industry is causing the destruction of forests such as North America’s Boreal Forest. Stretching from Alaska to Canada’s Atlantic coast, the Boreal is the size of 13 Californias and provides one of our planet’s first lines of defense against global warming. The Boreal also provides critical habitat for a wide range of species, including endangered caribou and half of North America’s songbirds.
June 16th, 2007 | Dali Lama
He speaks: Through accustoming your mind to this sense of universal altruism, you develop a feeling of responsibility for others: the wish to help them actively overcome their problems. Nor is this wish selective; it applies equally to all. - The Dalai Lama, Compassion for the rnIndividual
June 15th, 2007 | Simpsons Wit
Homer Simpson, after realizing that Bart and Lisa have stolen his RV:
June 11th, 2007 | The Gay Bomb
The Pentagon apparently pondered building a hormone bomb which would make opposing troops more interested in sex than fighting. Read more about the "Gay Bomb".
June 11th, 2007 | Constellation
Adorno, from Negative Dialectics: From the Buddhist Lankavatara Sutra: Further, Mahamati, the Bodhisattva-Mahasattva who is conversant with words and meaning observes that words are neither different nor not-different from meaning and that meaning stands in the same relation to words. If, Mahamati, meaning is different from words, it will not be made manifest by means of words; but meaning is entered into by words as things [are revealed] by a lamp. It is, Mahamati, like a man carrying a lamp to look after his property. [By means of this light] he can say: This is my property and so is kept in this place. Just so, Mahamati, by means of the lamp of words and speech originating from discrimination, the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas can enter into the exalted state of self-realisation which is free from speech-discrimination. Further, Mahamati, if a man becomes attached to the [literal] meaning or words and holds fast to their agreement in regard to the original state of Nirvana which is unborn and undying, the Triple vehicle, the one vehicle, the five [Dharmas], mentation, the [three] Svabhavas, etc., he will come to cherish views either affirmative or negative. As varieties of objects are seen in Maya and are discriminated [as real], statements are erroneously made, discriminations erroneously go on. (156) It is by the ignorant that discriminations thus go on; it is otherwise with the wise. So it is said: 34. Those who following words, discriminate and assert various notions, are bound for hell because of their assertions. 35. The ego-soul is not with the Skandhas [things we cling to, resulting in suffering], nor are the Skandhas in the ego-soul. They are not as they are discriminated, nor are they otherwise. 36. The reality of objects is seen being discriminated by the ignorant; if it were so as they are seen, all would be seeing the truth. 37. As all things are unreal, there is neither defilement nor purity; things are not as they are seen, nor are they otherwise.
June 10th, 2007 | Did Nina Simone Drink Coke? Sharlene Hector doing Nina's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free".
June 9th, 2007 | Get Up, Stand Up
June 8th, 2007 | Beethoven
Beethoven:
June 7th, 2007 | Smashed Up. You know, like life.
Playwright Charles L. Mee:
May 10th, 2007 | Springtime Seafood I'm cooking again. The latest: Halibut with Grapefruit Beurre Blanc, sauteed shitake mushrooms and Belgian endive. Absolutely sublime.
May 10th, 2007 | Brilliant Comedy Sid Caesar's Argument to Beethoven's 5th.
April 21st, 2007 | Pitch Science Go Mets. And in a related story, The Mechanics of a Breaking Ball, from Popular Mechanics.
April 16th, 2007 | Goodman "An unrecited poem is not so forlorn as an unsung song..." —Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art
April 10th, 2007 | A Diamond in the Rough On January 12, Joshua bell took out his 2 million dollar Stradavarius and played for 45 minutes in a Washington train station—unannounced. It was all part of an experiment by the Washington Post, recorded on hidden video cameras and detailed in this article from the paper's magazine.
April 8th, 2007 | Toumani Diabate; Green Power
Three of the best albums I've heard in a long while are all by the Malian kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate. The kora is a 21-stringed gourd instrument from West Africa that sounds a bit like a cross between a harp and a Japanese shamisen. In Diabate's hands, it sounds like whatever he wants. Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra: Boulevard de l'Independance In other news, I received my first bill from Con Edison since signing up for "Green Power". The verdict: $10 dollars cheaper than my monthly average without green power. Call me crazy but it might just be the compact fluorescents...
April 5th, 2007 | Trapped Beneath Words
Lacan:
April 3rd, 2007 | Francis Fukuyama Clears His Name
From Francis Fukuyama: But this is different from saying that there is a universal desire to live in a liberal society - that is, a political order characterised by a sphere of individual rights and the rule of law. The desire to live in a liberal democracy is, indeed, something acquired over time, often as a byproduct of successful modernisation. Moreover, the desire to live in a modern liberal democracy does not translate necessarily into an ability to actually do so. The Bush administration seems to have assumed in its approach to post-Saddam Iraq that both democracy and a market economy were default conditions to which societies would revert once oppressive tyranny was removed, rather than a series of complex, interdependent institutions that had to be painstakingly built over time.
April 3rd, 2007 | The Magic Butt-Flute
From Mozart's letters: | ||||||||
"The river gazed at him with a thousand eyes, with green with white, with crystalline, with sky blue eyes. How he loved the water, how it delighted him, how grateful he was to it! In his heart he heard the voice speaking, the newly awakened voice, and it said to him: 'Love this water! Stay with it! Learn from it!'