Category: Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

Caveat: “그놈은 멋있었다”

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

"그놈은 멋있었다" is the title of a 2004 movie that I recently downloaded and watched.  Roughly, the name geunomeun meoshiteotda translates as "He was cool" or "That guy was cool."  It was a teen comedy-romance.

But I enjoyed it, as I spend most of my working days immersed in the world of Korean teenagerdom, and thus, although the movie is hyperbolic and romantic fantasy, it is also, at another level, a somewhat realistic portrayal of contemporary Korean teen culture. So, despite its genre limitations, I recommend it.  It's available on youtube in about 14 segments, with subtitles, if you can't find it in your video store or are unable to find a good subtitled download of it (I found mine on silentregrets.com [update: silentregrets no longer exists – presumeably shut down by the copyright police])

I learned a wonderful and useful phrase from the movie:  정말?  jeongmal = "really?"

The lead actress in this movie, 정다빈 (Jeong Da-Bin – a screen name), committed suicide in 2007, suffering from depression.  A quote associated with her is: "I'm complicated and I feel like I'm going to die…I have lost my identity."

Caveat: Trolleyology

Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

A brand new word, with two widely variant meanings.

On the one hand, Word Spy (a website for "new" words) describes trolleyology as the practice of a sort of amateur anthropology in which people judge other people based on the contents of their shopping trolleys (shopping carts), especially to provide a means of evaluating potential love interests.

On the other hand, I have seen a reference in The Economist magazine (Feb 23rd, 2008), as well as googled sites such as ZhurnalyWiki or the mckimmy ethics blog where trolleyology is defined as the study of a collection of hypothetical ethics problems au courant in philosophy writing, in which people have to make decisions about switching the routes of runaway trolleys (streetcars) based on variant numbers of lives being at risk.  I have run across this practice in my readings in philosophy before, but had never seen it called trolleyology.

It's a good word:  so young, yet already deliciously ambiguous!  I can already visualize a comedic skit involving people making ethics decisions involving runnaway shopping carts and potential love interests at risk, where the contents of the carts informs the decisions made.  Lends a whole new potential meaning to the idea of a "streetcar named desire."

And for some reason I have this vivid image of a trolebus (Spanish for trolley car) in a poem by the neosurrealist poet Miguel Labordeta, but I can't recall the name of the poem or find it using google.  But it was a poem definitely linked to mortality and love.  So in the spirit of this, I'll quote another poem by Labordeta, "La voz del poeta": 

  Acariciándolo todo, destruyéndolo todo,
  hundiendo su cabeza de espada en el pasmo del Ser
  sabiendo de antemano que nada es la respuesta.
  En lo alto del Faro.
  La voz del poeta.
  Incansable holocausto.

Caveat: Dust and Silence

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Life is a Dream / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / My Poetry & Fiction / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.  The silence."  This is the ending of a paragraph near the end of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I just finished.  In some ways, a very typical bit of postapocalyptic fare.  In other ways, more spare and unprogrammed, maybe.  A gloomy, depressing book, though.

Oddly congruent with the current fall of yellow Mongolian dust – a seasonal visitation not uncommon in Korea, but rendered more worrisome now that it comes laden with the unquantifiable atmospheric  toxicities of Northeast China's vast industrial effluence.  All the cars were covered with a fine spattering of rain-patterned pale dirt, as the yellow dust had come accompanied by rain.  All the piles of snow have melted.  The cold, damp air tasted like sand.  It was easy to imagine McCarthy's world, as I read while riding the subway into Seoul to buy my Sunday installment of English-language magazines.

The last time I was so profoundly affected by a post-apocalyptic story was perhaps James White's Second Ending novella, which sometimes still haunts my dreams even though it's been thirty years since I read it (and I had to spend 30 minutes with google to figure out the title of it).  But overall I have always felt James White to be a vastly underrated sci-fi author. 

And speaking of underrated, I found myself thinking of Alasdair Gray's Axletree for some reason, recently too – the tale of  those men who build a babel-like tower to heaven, only to damage the surface of the sky and bring the deluge down upon Earth when it shatters. 

Then there's John Lucian Jones' story of the Protagonist – a robot-sentience from a machine civilization called in to solve the mystery of an extinct primitive civilization that seems to have stopped in its tracks just as these robot-people from a distant star were about to make contact.  We gradually learn that the extinct civilization in question is none other than Earth, as the Protagonist obsesses Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius-style over the ruins and artifacts. The stunning truth is that the robots themselves have inadvertently destroyed everything on the planet due to sheer ignorance of the possibility of carbon-based life.

Caveat: Proof that James Joyce was Drunk

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

What do Hans Blix, Noam Chomsky, Jesse Jackson and Will Ferrell have in common?

They are all recipients of something called the James Joyce Award.  Can you even imagine that these characters have anything else at all that ties them together?

The day was springy.  I worked fewer hours today – a slightly shorter schedule.  I wrote a page-long document about some of my concerns about the "debate program" curriculum that I'm struggling with.  I came home and ate a pre-made sandwich I'd bought at the Orange store downstairs, and drank some grapefruit drink and watched Jay Leno.

And then Craig Ferguson came on:  the Late Late Show (these things are delayed telecast on the military channel that I manage to receive, here).  I've decided I can definitely get on board with a late night television host who can mention both Kierkegaard and Karl Marx during his monologue, which also included dog farts.

Caveat: Happy Lunar New Year

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Quotable

Today is lunar new year.  So I had the day off.  But I didn't do anything productive with myself, whatsoever.  I watched some television, did some reading, surfed wikipedia.

Here's an interesting quote:  "rational arguments don't work on religious people; otherwise there wouldn't be any religious people." – tv character named House, on the eponymous tv program.  I'd never seen this program before.  I find the premise and the main character vaguely annoying.  But I'll concede it's pretty well written.  And I liked that line a great deal.

Caveat: Delusions of Skepticism

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I spent time surfing around online yesterday, and have also been reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.  Dawkins is a vaguely militant atheist, but upon reading his book and thinking about what he has to say, I would say his skepticism trumps his atheism, and I think it's important, as he does, to make a clear distinction.

If I understand Dawkins' argument clearly, scientifically well-founded skepticism disallows a 100% atheism, but inevitably leads to a 99.99% atheism.  But a skeptic will always say:  "show me the evidence, and I will change my mind."  A 100% atheist will affirm that no evidence will ever be found:  that's what I like to call "faith-based atheism." 

My wanderings online led me to wikipedia (inevitably) where I found an article on mereological nihilism.  As I have understood it, it's a sort of extreme anti-platonism – a denial of the objective reality of all composite objects (which is to say, only philosophically "simple" objects are actually "real" – e.g. quarks and photons and such indivisibles). 

Is this a true anti-platonism?  Unless I very much misunderstand, it seems an almost perfect inversion of the parable of the cave…  In the cave, the "real" reality lies in the transcendent perfect prototypes (i.e. pre-existent images of the compositional objects), and the illusion is in the grainy shadow-projections on the wall.  But all these prototypes (categories, or sets, e.g. sets of  "simples arranged tablewise" standing for "table") are just illusion under mereological nihilism.  I think I may be a mereological nihilist, on top of being a godless atheist and metaskeptic (i.e. I'm skeptical of skepticism).  In any event, it sounds cool.

Caveat: Experimental Philosophy

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

What would experimental philosophy be?  I mean, beyond the practice of science in general, to the extent that science is, still, what used to be called natural philosophy?  I mean, could you practice experimental ontology, for example?  How would that work?  Could I work this into my ongoing career as an itinerant epistemologist?
I ran across the idea in a novel I finished reading over the weekend.  Kiln People, by David Brin.  Sci-fi, entertaining, humorous, essentially founded on a single improbable conceit: what if technology that allowed people to make innumerable temporary but fully functional copies of themselves were widely available and cheap?  Well, anyway, one idea Brin skims across in the novel is that of religion and/or philosophy as experimental sciences.  I was intrigued.
I also started reading another novel over the weekend – Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.  Rather in a different vein than hacky sci-fi, but also entertaining, in its way.  I used to be in that category of people who would roll his eyes and groan at the thought of tackling a James novel, but something in the Turn of the Screw, which I read for a semiotics class in 94, converted me.  With Melville, he’s the cream of 19th century American Literature.  Hard to explain.  I’ll see if I can add more as I work further into the novel.
So you might gather, I spent the weekend reading.  I was feeling profoundly antisocial and unmotivated, and my computer was ill with a linux mess I created for myself which left me without my standard resort of dinking around online.  The computer’s healthy again, and work focal.
I stopped and bought some 삼각김밥 (samgaggimbab, which I roughly translate as “three-cornered-rice-wrap-thingy”), which are rice and some kind of savory additions molded into a triangular shape and wrapped in a sheet of seaweed stuff, a la Japanese California rolls and such-like.   They’ve grown on me recently, very convenient  Korean fast food, I guess.  Here’s a picture I found of the stuff online by googling the term:
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Caveat: Original of Laura

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / My Photos / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the great writers of the recently ended century, left an unfinished manuscript when he died, which is called “The Original of Laura.” He had explicitly requested that it be destroyed, and now, years later, his son (Dmitri Nabokov) can’t decide whether to go through with it or not.
Nabokov, of course, is famous for the novel Lolita. Personally, I like both Pale Fire and Ada much better – especially Ada, with its alternate-universe North America which seems partly inhabited by vaguely frenchified tsarist Russians. I would be fascinated to read a “lost” work of the author’s, but something about respecting a person’s last wishes comes into play too. Dmitri is stuck with a terrible dilemma.
Meanwhile… here is building I saw a while back, a few blocks from here on the other side of the Jeongbalsan (Jeongbal hill).
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Caveat: It’s raining helmets… and the Mexican snowplow squadron

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Life is a Dream / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / My Photos / My Poetry & Fiction

I looked up at my television a while ago, which I had on on some Korean channel.  I saw a man on a motorcycle, he looked like a zombie.  He had a passenger riding behind him.  Suddenly it began to rain a large number motorcycle helmets from the sky.  The driver of the motorcycle was struck by one of the falling helmets.  The television had my attention.
It was apparently the scene from a movie – the show was some movie review show, where they show clips of movies and talk about them, but, since it was in Korean, I didn’t really have much ability to capture what this movie was.  But the scenes were pure magic realism, and I was captivated.  There was a scene where a woman was reading a white book that fell on her from the sky.  And a scene where an immense number of empty plastic bottles and containers (ie. trash) was growing into a giant pile in the center of some huge city.  It grew to such large size it towered over the skyline of the city, like a mountain.  People went and climbed and had picnics on it, enjoying the view.  And could throw their empty containers over their shoulders – so convenient!
So.  I had to know what this movie was.   Hmm… how to search?  Google.  I typed in “falling helmets” and “movie”.  I found a blog about movies – some woman in Minneapolis, of all places.  And lo, there it was:  Citizen Dog (Mah nakorn) – a Thai movie from 2004.
That, and yesterday’s snow, has me thinking about a story I started once – my own little foray into magic realism.  Like everything I’ve tried to write, it never got finished.  The story is set in my familiar haunts in Mexico City.  It starts on a morning I actually experienced, when I emerged one chilly morning from the Casa to see it snowing.  Of course it quickly changed to rain – it doesn’t really snow in Mexico City – except on the higher elevations surrounding:  Desierto de los leones, or Tres Marias.
But then my little story diverges:  in the story, it never stops snowing.  Partly, I was influenced by headlines of a freak snowstorm in northern Mexico – Durango / Chihuahua / Cd Juarez, which had recently received several feet.  I had been obsessing on the concept of hardworking squadrons of Mexican snowplows.  I thought ‘the Mexican snowplow squadron’ might be a great name for a rock band.
Back to the story.  For forty days and nights it snows.  Of course, this means utter social chaos and human tragedy writ large across the hyperinflationary, delamadridista Mexico City of the 1980s.  And meanwhile, snowbound in some small non-profit casa de huespedes, the main characters find friendship, love and meaning.  Really, I was trying to write this.  Once.  Several times.
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Caveat: Chocolate Rain Obsession

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Today was a very long day at work.  I really liked my students today, though.  Especially the incurably silly Gavin, Cathy, and friends in the new ER2(T) class, with their “happy singing zombie students” act.
Not to mention the “8th grade princess mafia,” aka the new TP1(T), which by some quirk of exam-scores and fate has become a girls-only class.  They’re smart-alecky and unshakably in love with their cellphones, and only motivated under very generous definitions of the term… yet, they manage to be unmotivated almost exclusively in English, and thus I can’t bring myself to complain.  I was feeling sad for the super-smart Lainy and Julia, the only 7th graders in the group having recently been promoted into it, given the other girls’ very cliquey behavior, but they’re so smart they hold their own and put the others to shame with stunning performances.
So.  I stopped in the H-mart on the way home at dusk, and bought some food for my barren cupboards, including not just cabbage and tomatoes but a decadent bag of doritos and some chocolate milk.  Then I proceeded to spend the evening surfing wikipedia and other bits of the internet.  And became obsessed with a little internet meme that peaked over the summer, known as “Chocolate Rain.”
I’ll let you pursue it, if you’re interested – the tale of Tay Zonday, a University of Minnesota PhD candidate who, using a quirky youtube video, bootstrapped himself from obscurity into talk show appearances, big-bucks product jingles and endorsements, and major-talent collaborations.
And yet he continues to be a grad student, and the original ditty is actually an intriguing piece in its monotonous way:  a little allegorical study of racism, with references to, among other things, the riots in the Paris suburbs.  And, to quote:  “Chocolate Rain / Made me cross the street the other day / Chocolate Rain / Made you turn your head the other way.”  And continues, “Chocolate Rain / The bell curve blames the baby’s DNA / Chocolate Rain / But test scores are how much the parents make.”  People who complain that the song is pointless, haven’t read the lyrics.  And those who accuse him of selling out are missing the point completely, I think – publicity is a two-way street, and a thinking artist with a social-change agenda may in fact have a weird sort of  obligation to leverage offers of publicity and money from commercial interests in order to further that agenda however he or she can.
A Brazilian vlogger observes (and maybe I’m just quoting him to showcase my own multilingual erudition, but I liked the way he phrases it):

É impressionante como a internet consegue transforma em celebridades os mais inusitados dos seres e as suas mais toscas exibições de talento. Veja o exemplo de Tay Zonday, um garoto que gravou uma canção chamada “Chocolate Rain” fazendo uso de uma voz grave, quase que robótica.

I’ve certainly got the tune and words stuck in my head, now.  And so I listen to dozens of remixes and parodies of “Chocolate Rain,” while eating doritos and drinking chocolate milk, while I sit in my little apartment in happy Ilsan, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.
To quote Mr Zonday: “This internet thing is wild!”

[Update: youtube embedded video added retroactively, 2011-08-03, a part of background noise.]
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Caveat: Saved by hip-hop?

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I was watching part of an episode of a program called American Dad on the AFKN channel on my television.  Something involving a criminal with a german accent, whose brain has been transplanted into first a fish, then into the body of a seventies-era-looking black man.  Meanwhile a hippie dude who says he is a "tree in a man's body" is running some kind of eco-terrorist thing.

And there's a werewolf subplot.  And the pet space alien, Roger (a regular, apparently, described at wikipedia as "sarcastic, alcoholic, surly, lonely, aloof, and flamboyantly effeminate"), loses a pair of sea monkeys he dearly loves, after feeding them some champaign.  Near the end, Stan says, "for the second time of my life, I was saved by hip-hop."  Bizarre cultural references abound.  Was this a good use of my time?  I don't know, but I laughed very hard, several times.

I sure get tired of those military public service announcements, though.  It's like watching them collectively, as an institution, try to convince themselves that they have a clue.

I am drinking something called citron tea, which is made from something that is inexplicably almost identical to orange marmalade jam – you scoop out a spoonful of it into a cup, add hot water, and drink:  presweetened vaguely tea-ey hot citrus drink.  I bought a huge jar of it for 3000원 (about 3 bucks) last time I was at the supermarket.  I like it.

Caveat: “how many times can this train wreck wreck?”

Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

The above is a quote from a blog on the New York Times website, talking about Britney Spears.  I was doing some random web surfing… honestly, I don't really care that much about Britney.  But I was immediately impressed with the twisted and unusual phrasing of the question, which uses 'wreck' as both a noun and verb, in sequence.  I love things like that.

So.  I'm so glad people use language creatively, even when discussing Britney's latest crisis.  It gives me hope.  In a weird way.

Caveat: End of Tomorrow

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Not My Poetry / Quotable / The Wonders of Work

Today was kind of the last official day for School of Tomorrow (language hagwon); as of next week, we become part of LinguaForum officially. We had a long staff meeting that wasn’t entirely pleasant, as we confronted the changes that we face – more classes to teach, completely changed curricula, etc.

Meanwhile, it was hard to get motivated to teach out of the “old” books for one last day – so I had the kids reading a simple little poem by Wallace Stevens, called “The Snow Man.”

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

 
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Caveat: qubits

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Science & SciFi

I'm reading a book I bought by someone named Seth Lloyd, a physicist, about quantum computing.  I'm trying to figure it out, but I can't, for the life of me.  It's profoundly counter-intuitive.  I'll let you know if I make sense of it.

I'm not very happy about xmas.  I generally don't care much about it… but I'm feeling rather isolated, I confess.  Well, I'm not here to moan about it.  But it's been a kind of gloomy day.

Caveat: The longest war

Background Noise / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I overheard on the radio part of a book review of Susan Faludi's new book, Terror Dream.  Without having read the book, I'm probably as skeptical as the reviewer with respect to Faludi's apparent core thesis:  that Bush/Cheney's war-on-terror is resulting in significant rollbacks of feminist gains of previous decades.

Nevertheless, one sub-thesis that the reviewer mentioned, that I found compelling and powerful, was the idea that, far from being a strange and unwonted new type of war, the new "war-on-terror" is, in fact, America's oldest and most formative experience of war:  after all, wasn't the idea of a besieged city-on-a-hill at the heart of the White Man / Native American conflict, from the time of the first British settlements in North America?  A community of "innocents" victimized by fanatical, unknowable others who, "unprovoked," would come into the community and attack civilians.  As a nation, after a long period of aberrant integrative practice, we've finally reconnected with our long lost old demons, now conveniently externalized into the broader world.

In this sense, we've been fighting the war-on-terror since the mid 1600's.  By comparison, all other wars are irrelevant internecine squabbles.  Regardless of the validity of the parallel, the drawing of it is quite thought-provoking.  Are these Islamic fundamentalists, our fellow humans, the new Injuns?  Wow.

Listening to:  Magnetic Fields' "Strange Powers;" "The Trouble I've Been Looking For."

[Youtube embed later as part of Background Noise.]

Caveat: Psychogeographie et l’art de la dérive

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I was listening to Warren Olney's (sp?) "Which Way L.A." radio program last night, and he had as a guest a man named Will Self who is a practitioner of Guy Debord's psychogeography – a 50's situationist pseudo-artistic movement that endeavored to move around cities in unexpected ways, thus  "reading" urban landscapes  in some way via the subconscious.  Or something like that.  But I realized that I may actually be a long-term  psychogeographer, given my love of wandering about urban spaces without plan, map or program. 

Will Self had just spent the day before walking in a straight line from LAX to Watts – about 11 miles, and something very much like what I would do – indeed, more than once while living in LA I would take long undirected and notably untouristic walks, once walking from Long Beach to San Pedro, for example.  And just recently I've taken some rather random jaunts around Seoul, as well as last Saturday's long hike from Imjingang to Munsan-eup.

It's a rather high-falutin'-sounding term, though.  I like better Debord's concept of 'dérive' – "drift."  This suits me just fine.  I think I'll pursue it.

Caveat: “Set adrift on memory bliss”

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

The hip-hop duo P.M. Dawn (the Cordes brothers of Jersey City) had a 1991 hit single "Set adrift on memory bliss," which prompted me to buy one of only 3 albums I acquired while stationed here in Korea with the US Army's 296th Support Battalion at Camp Edwards, up towards Munsan (about 15 km north of here!).   I bought the album, entitled Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience, in cassette form, at the Camp Casey PX Store (Camp Casey was the 2nd Infrantry Division's HQ at that time, and about 30 min. drive inland from Munsan, straight east).

Naturally, since I owned so few albums, it was on heavy rotation, with the consequence that I have very strong memory-associations of my year here when I hear songs from this album.  I recently was set to thinking about it, and so I broke down and bought the album, in MP3 form.  It's actually quite different from a lot of rap – an opinion I'd formed early on – as the group make lots of complex references to everything from religion and philosophy to broad aspects of popular culture from the 80's.

I was thinking of this partly as I was fishing in my brain for examples of rap music from the genre's formative period (i.e. late 80's / early 90's) that weren't entirely focused on violence and "gangsta" culture.   I have been wanting to see if I could combine sharing some aspects of popular culture and rap music (which interests one demographic of my students) with sharing a more literary approach to poetry and literature (which interests an entirely different cross-section). 

I have always held that rap music is our modern American culture's closest equivalent to the ancient forms of epic poetry, whether Homer's works or medieval creations such as El Poema del Mio Cid or Le Chanson de Roland.  And I believe the equivalence is perhaps even stronger than the obvious superficial resemblances of topic – both ancient forms and modern ones overlaid rhythmic music with repetitive and formulaic poetry.  Both treat extensively subjects such as war (or gang violence – same thing, right?) and questions of male honor and reputation.

I've often fantasized about trying to craft a "ghetto" reading of the original El Cid (in its archaic 11th century Spanish) to a modern drum-machine and sampled soundtrack.  I think it would prove quite interesting.

Meanwhile, I'm listening to KCRW (streaming).

Interesting (almost poetic!) English du jour:  "We will be the invisible motivation of link South Korea into one." — from Korean National Railway's website, English version.

[Update: youtube video added retroactively, 2011-08-03, part of the background noise.]

Caveat: Listless Chilliness

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Well, the high today was about 10 c.  That's about 50 f – which makes it the coldest day so far, this fall.  And a chill wind blowing, so that the weather news here for the first time decided to mention the concept of windchill.  I was walking around my neighborhood, not feeling motivated to go into Seoul today, and felt cold for the first time since coming to Korea.

It was a listless day and I ended up coming back and reading the afternoon away, losing track of time.  I'm reading Henry George's Progress and Poverty.  Pretty dry, and radically out-of-date, from a politico-economic analysis point of view.  But… I still think some of the argument may have merit.  Not sure.  Will have to get back to everyone on that question.

In other news: I'm thinking that Mr. William B. Ide may be a candidate for holding the record as the person who dropped furthest in a single demotion.  In June of 1846, he was the elected President of the de facto sovereign California Republic.  In July of the same year, he became a private in Captain Fremont's California Battalion.

Caveat: More Nonsense, or Immanent Cybersoul?

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

In other news: I found a blog that is stunningly bizarre. Go take a look at it. I dare you. [Update:  the link is dead.  The strange blog has disappeared. Which supports the spam theory, below.]
OK then.  I’d like to hope that it is some kind of strange inside joke.  Or the product of a random text generator of some kind, like that Kant engine I found some time back (see my blog entry from 2006.05.02). Or, at the least, I hope it is the output of some weird automated translation engine, from some profoundly syntactically un-English language.
Actually, I think it must be the output of some kind of automated, text-spewing tool: a database-driven textual abstraction engine of some kind?  a spider-phisher (meaning a tool for attracting the attention of automated internet indexers, such as Google)?
But part of me enjoys imagining that there is a real, human author of the blog, who is actually sharing the poorly edited contents of his/her actual brain.  I mean… what a remarkably strange brain that must be, to be inside of!
Actually, another thought occurs to me:  this is an emergent symptom of a new, global, incipient cybersubconscious.  Immanent (imminent?) oversoul of humankind.  I’m sure some of you will be quite skeptical… but let’s think about it.
The internet today is an almost unmeasurably large text.  Borges’s infinite library, maybe.  But it is not just a passive text, sitting there for all of us internet-connected readers to read.  It is also inhabited by a seething, swarming plethora of text-reading and text-generating machines (e.g. google-spiders and spambots, respectively).  A vast ecosystem of predators and prey, living and dying, battling and fortifying, all in a text-based universe.  The word made virtual flesh, but not incarnate.  There be dragons.
So it is an unmeasurably large text in constant dialogue with itself – if not particularly self-aware dialogue, if not particularly meaningful dialogue, it is nevertheless a huge babbling demon.  A giant idiotic infinitely schizophrenic mind.  Grendel ruminates incoherently in his deep.  The internet becomes humanity collectively dreaming.
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Caveat: Lady Sovereign

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Teaching & Methodology

So I finally set up a wifi network at the school, yesterday.  I took my laptop to my classes, with varying results.
The school has an odd schedule on Wednesdays – I don’t teach till slightly later, and it’s the one day that I migrate into other classrooms besides #5 – which is sort of my homeroom.  So I started with my 경기외고 cohort at 6.10, but I think this is too early relative to their normal Monday-Friday time, or something, so the class often fills up gradually over the 45 minute period:  Richard and Jun Yeong always wander in around 6.20, and Fred (Mr Sleepy!) inevitably comes in, headphones blaring, with 15 minutes left in class.
So.  Yesterday, there were only 5 girls at the start of class:  Amy and Sunny (both named Da Hye, both very smart, but they have diametrically opposite personalities), along with Clara, Jenny and Jane (“Queen Jane of the wide grin and blank stare”).  Oh, and Wayne (Ho Gyeong) was there – Wayne’s always there, trying to be invisible, but really quite smart, and the only student who’s doing two cohorts at once:  he’s in the 경기외고 cohort for both MWF and TThSa.
Since I had my laptop, and with the reduced classroom population… although I hadn’t really planned on it, I decided it would be a good time to do something “different,” and so I played a few songs from my massive collection on my laptop (currently approximately 3300 songs – 100’s of ripped CD’s, plus what I’ve downloaded).  I waited until something “clicked” and, perhaps not surprisingly, they seemed to like Lady Sovereign, a contemporary British rap artist whose recent album Public Warning I bought last spring.
pictureSo while they listened to her song “9-to-5” I ran to the office and printed out the lyrics (the internet is so cool – you can find the lyrics to any song in the known universe in a matter of seconds and have 15 copies spewing out of your printer).
So we had a fun time, running through the song again with the lyrics in front of us.  Uh-oh, there’s a few bad words there – well, aren’t there always, with rap songs?  But hey, that’s English too, right?
And on schedule, Richard (“Ricardo”) and Jun Yeong showed up, and Cristine and Becky came in (although Becky immediately fell asleep face-down on her wrist; and after some class discussion, we decided unanimously to let her continue her nap, having just heard a song by Lady Sovereign about the hazards of not getting enough sleep!).  Fred (Mr. Sleepy!) never showed up at all, though I found him sleeping on one of the benches in the lobby of the school a little later.
These 경기외고 cohorts are my most most difficult, in some ways.  They have the highest proportion of what I might term, diplomatically, as “differently-motivated” students.  I’m not sure if listening to Lady Sovereign was any help or not, but it was a nice change of pace.
Another day in the life of “Jeredeu-Ticheo,” (this is Konglish: “Jared-Teacher” i.e. Jared-seonsaeng cf. parallel in Japanese: Jared-sensei) – I guess I’m still the “mediocre new guy” at Tomorrow Language School!

[Update: I added the youtube link 2011-08-03 as part of the background noise effort.]

Caveat: Emotionally Attached to your Roomba

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

I was listening to the radio (a Canadian radio show called "As It Happens"), and heard about people who become emotionally attached to their Roombas.  A Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner – you put it into a room, and it navigates around using a low-level artificial intelligence, and vacuums the floors.  These Roombaphiles name them, attribute to them a gender, give them little bits of clothing (some kind of cover), and have even taken them on road trips.  A woman interviewed had named her 3 Roombas Nigel, Basil and Clyde.  The question arises:  is it possible to love a Roomba too much?

Maybe I need a Roomba?  To be my friend?

Caveat: A Walled Garden

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

Not what you think:  I'm going to talk about closed technical standards and the fun I had with them, last night.

Last Monday, after my trip into Seoul on Sunday, my mp3-player broke.  Not sure what happened to it – it still turns on, fine, but it refuses to interact with me except to display its boot screen.  I tried connecting it to my laptop with the USB cable, and it refuses to recognize the connection.  Anyway… I'm kind of annoyed, as I've only had about 6 months of use out of it.  And I was thinking, crap, so I've got to buy a new mp3-player.

I realized that, among other things, my new cell phone claims to be able to play mp3's.  It's tied into a music-distribution website run by KTF (Korea Telecom something-or-other, who is my service provider).  The service is called Dosirak (도시락).  So, in my naivety, I thought to myself, well, mp3 is mp3 is mp3, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.

I spent about 4 hours yesterday messing with my phone.

First, I realized that if I was going to be putting music on my phone, I would need some supplemental memory.  So I went to the shop where I'd gotten the phone, and shelled out 20,000 won for a 1GB memory chip – hey, 20 bucks, no big deal, right?

Only after I got home did I realize that I had no USB cable to go with the phone – I had been thinking it was in the box I got the phone in, but no… there's a little notice in the manual (in Korean, but I got the gist, anyway, it was in bright red hangul) saying something to the effect of "USB cable sold separately."  I was about to hoof it back to the telecom shop, but then I thought, wait, this phone speaks bluetooth – and so does my laptop, right?  (Bluetooth is a wireless data-transfer protocol for very short distances, i.e. less than 100 meters).

So I spent about 30 minutes trying to get my phone to read my laptop.  Under Ubuntu linux, forget it!  There's an acknowledged bug with the current Ubuntu distro, with respect to reading bluetooth clients where the client requires passkey-enabled pairing – which my phone apparently required.  So, after about 30 minutes of dinking around and online research, I rebooted the laptop to the despised and innately nefarious Windows Vista Business to see if I could bluetooth to my phone from there.  Still it took another 30 minutes of messing around – there was a not-to-be-found-anywhere Wireless Device icon missing from my systray, and when I finally found it and ran the gadget, the phone was more than a little bit stubborn about reading the PC.  I had to lower the security levels on the PC to zero, shut down the firewall, all that.  Not sure what I was doing, just monkeying with switches till I could get it to work.

So.  But finally, I was moving an mp3 file to my phone!  I opened up the Dosirak player on the phone, and it couldn't see the file!  Hmm….  turned out, after another 15 mintues of poking around, the file had been moved over to the phone without any .mp3 extension on it.  And for some reason, the file-rename utility on the phone won't let you insert non-hangul and/or non-alphanumeric characters – crucially, the desperately needed "dot" in front of the .mp3 extension couldn't get typed in on the phone.  So, with a heavy sigh, I went back to the PC and renamed the file to something very short, thinking maybe the filename had been too long, and retransfered it to the phone.

That worked.  Now I had a .mp3 file on the phone.  Once again I opened the Dosirak player, but the Dosirak player still couldn't see the file.  I looked around some more, and noticed the 3 sample songs on the phone (all lovely K-pop pseudo R&B compositions) had .fmp extensions on them.  Uh oh…

What the heck was .fmp?  Extensive research on the web turned up exactly zero on .fmp as a music format.  Something related to Filemaker Pro, but, for sure, that wasn't what these were.  My heart was beginning to sink.   In a fit of desperation, I tried changing the extension on the file from .mp3 to .fmp in hopes of tricking the Dosirak player into seeing the file.  This actually worked – but the Dosirak player immediately complained that the file was corrupted.  Clearly, .fmp wasn't just a secret renaming of standard mp3 format, but something different and/or proprietary.

I did some more web research, and finally found – in a PDF published in Europe, on international music encoding standards – a footnote that said that KTF (i.e. the parent company to Dosirak) had rolled out a proprietary encoding standard that included DRM (digital rights management) for its music-selling service.  Heh… this must be the .fmp, right?

And there you have it.  And I've been thinking about this in the broader context, on and off:  this business of creating "walled gardens" using proprietary standards, and how annoying they are.  One of the reasons why I refuse to jump on the Apple bandwagon – as everything they do is pure "walled garden" from a technical standpoint.  Basically, I can play all the mp3's I want on my phone, as long as and only if I buy them from KTF.  And thems the rules.

And some of you, reading this, will be saying:  "I understand exactly zero of what he just talked about."  And others will just shake your heads quietly in grim commiseration.  Whatever.

I guess I'm going to go shopping for a new mp3 player today.

Caveat: Radiohead

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

pictureI’ve had a fondness for the musical group Radiohead for many years now.  A kind of dark, complex, introspective, idiosyncratic pop.  I hadn’t been thinking too much about them, lately, though as always they’re on my regular play list among the mp3’s.  However, recently I read about them in, of all places, a business website.
Recently they’ve produced a new album.  However, rather than release it through a standard record company distribution deal, they’ve simply posted the mp3 tracks to their website and allow people to download it, for a price that the individual user is allowed to set – any price at all.
Of course, this alternately alarms or exhilarates all kinds of economic commentators.  It’s so… chaotic, democratic, “new economy.”  They ask, is this the future of IP (intellectual property) distro?  Just a fluke?
I would be one of those people who would be fascinated and excited to think this is some vision of the future of intellectual property – but I’m actually inclined to believe this is, more likely, a fluke – at least for the short and medium terms.  Radiohead (and Thom Yorke, their leader) have always been very savvy with respect to both technology/internet stuff as well as the issue of marketing/merchandising/publicity.  This is very much in that vein.
Nevertheless, I confess I did exactly what so many are apparently doing.  I went to their website, gave them some money, and downloaded the album.  I could hardly resist, just to say I’d been a part of it.  And, I’ve learned, I paid quite a bit more than most did – but then, I was always a sucker for “pay what you think it’s worth” pitches – same as I always tip too much at restaurants, right?  I paid exactly what I thought I’d pay if I’d gone down and bought a new Radiohead at the big store – say, around 13-15 bucks.  Yorke and friends are, in fact, getting an average of about 8 bucks per album download, and everyone’s remarking that, even so, they’re getting more cash in the bank than if they’d gone through a standard CD distro deal, since there’re no middlemen whatsoever. 
Ah well.  Hey, it’s a pretty good album – as Radiohead goes.
Still, I still think my favorite is probably Hail to the Thief – I bought that CD at a Target store in suburban Sydney, Australia, when I’d realized I’d just set out to drive 2000 km to far north Queensland and had absolutely nothing to listen to except Australian radio – which makes US radio sound pretty damn good.  Consequently, I had this CD on constant repeat for the whole drive north up the coast, and I associate its songs with vivid blurs of endless streams of Ozzian countryside, broken up by repetitive snippets of eerily tiny Target stores, cheap motels, Hungry-Jack restaurants (=Burger King, in Oz) along those two lane roads, and the sleepy moments late at night, driving, when I would start to forget which side of the road I was supposed to be on. 
In particular, one of my favorite songs of all time:  “There There (The Boney King of Nowhere).”
What I’m listening to right now.

 

Caveat: Saul was on the road to Damascus…

Banalities & Journaling / Less Banal Than Usual / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

picture… and something happened. He was struck by an awesome vision.  But he dismissed it as a ridiculous if terrible dream. It was nothing, he thought to himself.  Nothing real.

Gilles Deleuze, commenting on Spinoza, wrote, “ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation.” This has been a guiding aphorism for me for many years now.  But…

Does this mean there is something like unethical joy, too?  What’s the difference? Where do ethics come from – for an atheist, for someone committedly anti-transcedent?

For the secularist, “human nature” – the behaviorial consequences and maladaptations that are the unintended consequences of evolutionary psychology – these are original sin. And standing in for the apocalypse, we have environmental degradation and catastrophic social collapse, and war. But are these limiting “secular” ontologies and eschatologies any less destructive of human aspirations than the classical varieties? Wouldn’t we do better eliminating all types of original sin?  Denying all flavors of apocalypse?

Or do we materialists need to build ourselves a christ-machine?  Without souls, what’s to be saved?

But without original sin… with the human being decentered and meta-copernicanized… what is virtue? Is there any behavior better than any other? I feel this is so, but can’t see why.

I’m spinning. You know.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Literacy, Post-Literacy, Textacy

Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

So one of my students turned in a quiz last night on which she'd used not just a handwritten emoticon (ie. one of those little smileys done with punctuation 🙂 for example) but also the acronym "LOL."   I was struck by how unlikely it was she'd learned these things in school, and yet she'd managed to acquire them via this universal internet culture that permeates everything these days.

There was a time when I was younger when the phenomenal growth of television was causing people to predict a demise of literacy, and the term post-literacy was tossed about.  I'm beginning to wonder if the news of the death of literacy was a bit premature – the internet, and telephone text-messaging, and such, seem to be giving good ol' literacy a bit of a boost, but with some odd twists, too.

The odd literacy of the online world is qualitatively different from the literacy of books and even newpapers.  It more closely resembles the strange permutations of advertising language  than what we traditionally think of as literature.  Of course, writers like James Joyce or Vicente Huidobro anticipated so many of its features, but I still feel inclined to think it needs a new name – something that conveys it is new and distinct from old school literacy.  Not to mention I love to make up words.

So I shall call it textacy (in parallel with liter-acy I guess).

Caveat: nonsense

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I spent part of the day, yesterday, reading blogs. I really don't do that, very often. I had discovered (or, more likely, re-discovered) a review of the "Sokal affair" in which a physics professor at NYU had "hoaxed" the pomo (postmodernist) publication "Social Text" by sending in an article full of jargony BS and the editors let it through.   It was quite a scandal, as it allegedly proved just how vacuous pomo discourse really is – it was an "emperor has no clothes" moment. 

I also discovered an interesting little website that randomly generates a pomo article each time you refresh the page.   A lovely tool, but my first thought was – I bet some of the things that get said are really profound.  It's kind of like an instantiation of Borges' infinite library, for a particular type of discourse.  Another tool that has similar functionality is the Kant generator.  Again, my reaction, more than – wow, random BS! – is, instead – I wonder if this can generate real meaning?  Finally, there is a random generator of CSCI research papers made by some people at MIT.  Infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters, all that. 

Regardless, a review of the Sokal affair caused me to question the pomo allegiances I tend to take for granted in myself.   My affairs with Jameson, Deleuze, et al.   Are they really that impenetrable?  Or, contrariwise, am I really so deleuzional as to believe I "get" what they're trying to say?   

Currently I'm struggling through a kind of phase where I question just about everything – about what I believe, about what I want to do, about what I like  to do.  Ad infinitum.  So why no question what philosophical / lit. crit. authors I take seriously, too?

I have no answers, here.  Nor even any profound, clearly-expressed doubts.  But  I think back to Jean-Jacques LeCercle's Philosophy of Nonsense:  just because it's nonsense, doesn't mean it doesn't mean anything.  There's value and, ironically, meaning to be found in nonsense.  It's a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.  So if the pomos are writing nonsense, maybe they've got a reason for it.   

 

Caveat: jobs & lit crit

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

So the interview probably didn't go as well, in retrospect, as I might have hoped.  I was unfocused – having the epiphany in the middle that I didn't really WANT the job didn't help, I'm sure.   Meant I was going through the motions, and that can't be good for quality-of-presentation. 

Meanwhile, my current job goes on, despite a deficit of motivation on my part. More limbo, then. More nothing.

Was reading Harper's recently, an article about language and poetry, about Eluard and the way that poetry is about that which cannot be mapped.  Interesting idea – striking because it may have resonances with respect to my thesis on Cervantes' Persiles and the Quijote and the way that they function as "maps" of the Spanish Golden Age social space (and of each other). 

Obviously, Quijote or Persiles are, specifically, NOT poetry, but rather novels.  Prose.  The beginning of the "opposite" (this hyperbole is not meant literally, just literarily) of poetry.  But then… the idea works only if an effort to extend the metaphor to a "poetic" text (e.g. El Cid) failed.  I'm not sure it would.  Then again, there's the unstated fact that the Harper's article was most definitely talking about MODERN poetry.  Perhaps that's different?

Caveat: Television & Hell

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Dateline:  Amsterdam
I woke up wide awake at 4am. Still struggling with time-change related biochemistry, probably. I had that somewhat obnoxious “hook” from the currently popular Jennifer Lopez song looping through my head – a tenor-saxophony sort of sound, da-da-DA-da, da-da-DA-da ad infinitum. I guess there could be worse.  But one could hope for better, too.
The selection of television channels at this hotel (Hotel Vijaya) is eurotrocious.
There’s the darts channel.   All darts, all the time.  Like watching golf, but more boring.
There’re channels with infomercials 24/7 in both english and german, each with dutch subtitles. An attractive blendery thingy, for example, that I really, really wanted to buy immediately – it seemed to offer a simple solution to most of my core issues.  Fortunately, I can’t dial euro-900 numbers from my room.
There’s CNN, which is fine is small doses, but gets old fast unless I interleave it with a sufficient amount of anything else.   And CNBC, which is occasionally great, except when it segues into infomercials.
Raiuno, an italian-language channel, with a seemingly never-ending parade of 2nd tier celebrity interviews and news about the pope’s health.
A french/swiss channel, with it’s inevitable feel of cultural pomposity – but I probably have spent more time looking at that channel than most of the others, partly because the picture is clearer, but also, I rationalize, to provide me some practice with the admittedly “rusty” language-skills. A nice artist was being profiled yesterday morning – Ming, I think was his name, Chinese-French. Amazing, giant, sloppy black / white / grey busts of old men, children, whoever. Sufficiently impressive to make me want to look him up sometime – hence this note.
The spanish channel, TVE, with its never-ending stream of light news and bad acting and second-rate issues analysis (I learned that spain will be the first country to be voting a referendum on the european constitution, however – probably the only guaranteed “yes” out of the 10 countries where it’s being put to vote). And, regrettably, I’ve got that darn mexican-based prejudice against the ceceo (the pronunciation of “soft c” and “z” as english unvoiced “th” – common to madrileño and more northern castilian dialects – hence “socios” -> /sothios/) – this sort unconscious sociolinguistic red flag that pops up in my head when I hear it, screaming “snob,” is hard to overcome – hopefully once I’m in spain and have spent some time there, I’ll get over that. But on a positive side, I did catch some comedy that made me laugh out loud, the other night. Little sight gags and such, including a bit with a man trying to explain to his boss that he’d found a certain unmentionable body-part in an office trash can, that was quite humorous.
There are a ziljoen (=zillion? … I just made that up, parallel to nederlans “miljoen”) dutch channels of course. I have limited patience for them, not because I don’t understand them (everybody knows I can sit and watch television in languages I don’t understand for hours) but because they all have such a limited repertoire of commercials that they get repetitive fast.
I caught some profoundly derivative but fascinating dutch rap music videos, however. All that gang-sign, inner-city american posturing, body language, movement, eminemesque but translated into dutch. The group was called THC (hmm go figure) and appeared to be several young men of morrocan descent (common immigrant group, here). One piece on social prejudice, blatent buy-in to victim-based culture, but full of legitimate complaints all the same – the dutch white middle-class turning away, ignoring, fearing, etc. Another, happier bit, with dancing girls in morrocanish costume, looked like it was filmed in morroco as well. And apropos morroco, Bob and I went to an exhibit on morrocan history yesterday at the Nieuwe Kerk, the books with their arabic calligraphy were incredible, some of the roman- and punic-era artifacts fascinating, the decorative materials (intricately ornate doors, blankets, etc.) were less interesting to me, however.
So that’s a partial review of my hotel’s television selections.
I have an entrepreneurial vision to make a t-shirt memorializing my visit to Amsterdam, and – specifically – my stay on the periphery of the famous red light district (which I found singularly tawdry and uninspiring):  the shirt will say “museum of chastity / Amsterdam” – with an appropriately unsexy logo(?).   If, as I discussed with Jay some months back, Las Vegas is Hell under Disney administration, then Amsterdam is Hell under the left wing of the democratic party, or perhaps a tribe moderate anarcho-syndicalist college drop outs with a weakness for public spending?
Not that I have anything against Hell – I’m much in the need of familiarizing myself with its geography, customs and mores, given my inevitable long-term prospects, as a “faith-based atheist.”   Besides… most (but not all) of the people I’ve met who are going to Heaven get on my nerves.  Perhaps righteousness is only fun for the people on the “right” side of it.

Caveat: World of Choral Conducting

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

Dateline: Amsterdam

My friend Bob is here in nederland, of course, for an audition to be part of a workshop with a famous choir director named Eric Ericsson (sp?), incl. Nederlans Kamerkoor (sp? I think).  So Friday night, I met up with him in Utrecht about 5 pm, at the Pieterkerk.  Only minutes before, I had passed a small shop selling t-shirts and comic books (and snottily named Piet Snot – not hard to figure out), and had seen a shirt that said "Wie is de Bob".  This seemed so ridiculously relevant that I bought a size XL immediately, and was in the process of putting it on when I saw Bob at the end of the street attempting to decipher a historical marker. I gave it to him as a gift.

After dinner at an "african" restaurant in a weird warehouse-bunker thingy under the streets of touristic Utrecht, Bob and I went to the kamerkoor concert at the Pieterkerk. The music was thematically tied by being Iberian in langauge (if not composer) with some old bits and new bits in the first half, and a rather interminable, repetitive new composition for the second half, based on a civil war poem by Miguel Hernandez.  First, a Golden Age sacred piece in Latin, then some more popular spiritual pieces in castilian – these latter by Guerrero and reminding me of some verse I'd just read in Persiles.  The piece I liked best was a short contemporary composition by Joost Kleppe set to some verse by… I think it was a Brazilian poet. The performers themselves were amazingly good, and the acoustics in the 11th c. church were incredible.

We met some of the other conductors who will be auditioning for this workshop, including a coterie of Florida State University alums. I was odd-man-out when it came to the "shop talk" of these choral conductors, but I made my way as I often do by providing some comic relief and occasional snippits of hopefully insightful historical commentary. After the concert, it turned out Joost Kleppe was actually in attendance, and as the conductors introduced themselves and then I presented myself as "not the conductor", this Joost even commented something to the effect that I was a "spare" – a la Monty Python. All good light fun.

In total there were 5 of us on the train back to Amsterdam on friday night – Bob and myself, then three others (and forgive me if I'd rather leave them anonymous than get their names wrong). The one guy's audition was Saturday morning, so when we all had lunch at the Beurs van Berlage cafe yesterday morning, he was already done – but Bob and the others audition today (Sunday). We met the last of the FSU coterie, Jose, too, yesterday morning. Oh… turns out their auditions are all in the Beurs van Berlage building – just a few doors away from the Beursplein and the cafe entrance, actually. So that's what Bob's doing right now (more or less).

We all went out to dinner at an Indonesian restaurant last night, all very clubby with so many choralists (is that what they're called?) I just stuck to my sidekick role. I've been around Bob enough, over the years, to be able to at least follow some of the shop talk, if not really "understand" it. I can fake it successfully – as I do with so many things.

 

Caveat: Where there’s smoke…

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

Dateline:  Amsterdam

Many people, knowing my personal history, may be inclined to imagine that my visit to Amsterdam was motivated by some, er… burning desire.  Far from it – I think that phase of my life is definitively over – over for some 18 years and counting, actually.   Nevertheless, the little "coffeeshop" with it's heady aroma is ubiquitous in central Amsterdam, and the "psst, psst" from street vendors of various substances and services leaves me vaguely but not irremediably uncomfortable.

I'm back at Beursplein.  I already have my tickets to Utrecht and will leave shortly.   Apropos my visit to various restaurants and cafes (i.e. with respect to more conventional smoke):  the Dutch show their progressive side, since, unlike most of Europe, they actually have posted "no smoking sections" in many public places.  Nevertheless, they remain unrepentantly European – hence, they don't actually obey these "no smoking" directives.   Kind of like Americans and speed limits, I suppose.

There's a little bouquet of flowers in a square little vase on this table that looks rather more like a salad than a flower arrangement.  But it's nice I guess.

Caveat: Beursplein

Banalities & Journaling / Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Hiking & Travel / Language & Linguistics / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / The Wonders of Work

Dateline:  Amsterdam

I'm sitting in a cafe on Beursplein, in the Beurs van Berlage (whatever that is) in downtown Amsterdam.  I just had a very tasty soup.  I came here looking for WiFi, didn't find t-mobile but figured out KPN (dutch phone company) and for a coupla euros, I'm hooked up once again.   This is nicer than the lobby of the Ramada, where I went yesterday.

I set out this morning to go to the Rijksmuseum, but it was raining hard, and so I bought a transport pass and took a trolley (sort of indirectly).  I got to the museum and decided I wasn't in the mood (plus there was a sign announcing that a portion of it was closed), so I got back on a trolley at random and visited some grim Dutch suburb (something southwest of here, I think). 

I don't make a very good tourist, I guess – I'm just as happy riding public transport at random as I am visiting museums or landmarks.

I meet with Eurobob tomorrow in Utrecht.  Meanwhile, mostly I'm killing time.  I wrote up a a rather pessimistic review of reporting capabilities at Paradise Corp for Ravi and Tom, RE the bid for business from that large retail chain.   In retrospect, I'm wondering if it's what they wanted… but if they want me to write up the solution (as opposed to a condemnation of current abilities) that's much more in depth, isn't it? 

As in, you'll have to build such and such aggregate, using such and such process, and tie in data from here, there, and everywhere.  Seems like a request to design reportomatic 2.0.  I'm all for that, but it ain't gonna be cheap, is it?

Meanwhile, I'm reading Persiles.  So you've got this guy, Periandro (later revealed to be Persiles), dressed in drag (and looking very gorgeous, apparently), looking for his sister, Auristella (i.e. Sigismunda – and one is inclined to impute something incestuous, there).  But she is dressed as a man, and is about to be sacrificed because the barbarians want the blood from his (her) heart to test a prophecy of a future king.  But one of the barbarians gets the hots for Periandro (who he thinks is a woman) while Auristella reveals she is a woman (to avoid being murdered) and the barbarians break out into an orgy of violence and soon the whole island is in flames.  Really.

And that's just the first few chapters.

So far, Nederland reminds me of a kind of old-world New Jersey, but they talk funnier.  I don't mean that as an insult, either.  I think Dutch is a very cool language…  kind of what I expect English would sound like if I didn't understand it.  It's got similar phonetic inventory, and very similar cadences to English.  Kind of like how they talk in Jersey, right?

Caveat: A week later [Maná – Muelle de San Blas]

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

Dateline:  Los Angeles

A week goes by, not much happens.  I leave for Amsterdam next Monday, AM.  That's when stuff happens.  I'll meet Bob there on the 11th.

Meanwhile, I had dinner with Wendy this evening, good conversations regarding our respective retirements (hers marginally more authentic qua retirement than mine, I suppose), etc.  Ate at her favorite place, La Dijonais there on Washington in Culver City. 

I will confess that I sometimes listen to sappy Mexican top 40 radio, when driving.  I got all sentimental, driving up the 110 home, thru downtown and the tunnels and the Arroyo and all that, very memory evoking – the 110 is the only stretch of LA freeway that I still vividly recall from my childhood visits to LA – so it's like my oldest "local" road-memory.   And road-memories are special, right? 

And for some reason, a snippet of Maná's "Muelle de San Blas" got me all teary, thinking about my long, interesting, complicated, and lately pretty darn OK life. 

So whatever.   More later. 

[I retroactively added this embedded video on 2011-06-24 as part of my Background Noise project]

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