Little Yooper in the Big Apple, Part I

While trying to get some work done on an already overdue paper this evening, I got stuck putzing around on the internet for a while, and happened to find out that one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Ames, was doing a little show that night not too many blocks away from where I sat at the NYU library. I made my way over to the bar which was hosting the show, and was disappointed to find that it was sold out. The guy at the door said that I could wait around by the entrance to the theater, however, and maybe he'd be able to squeeze me in once everyone who had paid in advance got their seats. I was number three on the waiting list, which made me hopeful that things might work out.

The waitlist was quickly getting very very long, and lots of people were being turned away, while I waited with the two people who I thought were in front of me on the list. The theater was a little room with not very much seating, and as it became more and more crowded, the guy at the door kept reiterating that there was a good chance that he wouldn't be able to get us in. Then several of Jonathan Ames' friends came in, and of course they were given priority over us, and they had to go find more chairs for the room, and I figured that I wasn't going to get in. Then three more people came, and were talking to the guy at the door, when FIONA APPLE popped her head out, not five feet away from me, and waved them in. At first, I was thinking: "Wow, that's awesome! I just saw Fiona Apple!" A few seconds later, however, I realized that because Fiona Apple got her three friends in, I probably wasn't going to get in! "Damn," I thought, "Fiona Apple screwed up my evening. Now I'm probably going to have to head back to the library and read about complex sociopolitical interdependency between states." I perservered, however, despite the guy saying once again that we probably wouldn't be able to let us in. Then I heard Jonathan Ames come to the microphone and begin the show. They were showing it on a TV in a nearby room, but it wasn't the same. I went back to the door. Then, after a long discussion with one of his superiors, the guy told the two people in front of me that they would be able to go in, as long as they stood in the very very back. I thought initially that this meant me as well, and as I readied my fifteen bucks in my hand, he mentioned that he wasn't sure that I was going to be able to go in, because there wasn't any room left. He went back in the theater to check out the situation, as I looked over to see that the names of the girls he had just let in had been crossed off the list, and that they were AFTER my name. I was first, and deserved to be let in, and he knew that, but I was not an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, and so was going to have to wait. First Fiona Apple, and now this horrible inequity!

He soon came out, though, motioned me over, took my money, and let me in, mentioning that I had to stand in the very very very back. This meant that I basically had to stand in front of the bathroom door, which was in a little recess, and peer over people's heads at the stage. Luckily, I was taller than the others who were standing, so my sightline was not obstructed. People kept having to go by me to get to the bathroom, and I had to repeatedly push myself back into the wall so that they would have space to open the door, which was annoying. I figured this was probably the worst place to be in the whole theater. At least I got in. Then, a guy nudged pass me to use the bathroom, a fairly short bald guy with hipster glasses. It was MOBY. My backpack was in his way, so I moved it for him, and he was very polite. This was an odd celebrity experience, because I really don't like Moby and find his brand of annoying whiny political activism very irritating. He's like Bono, but his "songs" are 300 times more annoying. It was still weird that Moby was a full zero point zero inches away from me - a former pop culture phenomenon! I realized that I couldn't think of any of his songs though - I kept think of Fatboy Slim, whose CD I got back when it was big, and who I imagine to be Moby's big rival.

The show was good, but not what I expected. Jonathan Ames didn't to any readings. He screened a sitcom pilot that he made a few years ago. It was really funny - all about worrying that people thought he had a small penis. Then he started interviewing members of the audience, which turned out to be entertaining. While this was going on, I noticed that Finoa Apple was standing directly behind me - she had sneaked to the back of the room, I heard her tell a friend, because she wanted to stand up. I was worried I was in her way, so I asked her if I was. She said I wasn't, and soon left. I was hoping that our mutual experience standing by the bathroom door would lead to some kind of conversation, but it didn't. She's really short.

The finale of the show was Jonathan Ames arm-wrestling members of the audience (he beat them all), and then a guy with a prosthetic vagina -the Mangina- wrestled a 22-year old girl. Not arm-wrestling this time, but real greco-roman style. She won. There had also been a hula-hooper who was very impressive, and some kind of performance artist that I don't think anybody actually liked. It was fun. The end.

CB vs. BMP: Ensuing correspondence

As is predictable of me, I've taken this whole situation far too personally and far too seriously. Joel's attitude is much better than mine. Nevertheless, interested parties can read my emails to Brooks Thomas from the past 24 hours here.

We exchanged correspondence in awkwardly formal language. I think the issue has come to resolution, though. Brooks seems distressed over our reaction, which implies that he regrets posting the review, though he didn't actually apologize.

Nasty Bear Mountain Review

Check out this review of BMP's first EP, which we recorded in my bedroom when I lived on Ann St. It made me laugh. Every other review is approximately 3x better than ours.

celestial biscuit review

Okemos related coincidence.

I spent a fun-filled Thanksgiving weekend in Mexico with a close friend of Dax's younger sister. Kristie Timber. She knows several of you.

Meanwhile, southern Texas is still warm, still dusty and full of yellow butterflies. My neighborhood includes lots of stray dogs, a drug-dealing ice cream truck, a gunsmith, a Dairy Queen, a hammock, friendly neighbors, cockfights, and mountains of grilled meat and corn tortillas.

I like it mostly.

Happy Thanksgiving

Hi Everyone,

I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.

Office Chatter

---

"Hey John. Seen Tad?"

"He left. I guess he left his door open."

"Yeah, Big T likes to live dangerously like that."

---

"What are you up to John? Controlling the world?"

"Sure."

"I know you. You're controlling the world. Nah, you're controlling the universe. You're the controller of the universe."

---

"What's crackin'?"

---

"Stayin' out of trouble John?"

Altman

Robert Altman passed away.

Waterboarding; Experiment

After seeing the recent publicity of people documenting themselves being waterboarded to see whether Cheney was right that it's not a form of torture..... we found out with Brian that it is. The average CIA agent can last 14 seconds in this type of torture, our own B. Wiers can last for 6. None of us would recommend anyone else trying this or doing it to anyone else.


]

30 Dicks

This is a pretty funny video.

The Chirps @ MySpace

A couple weeks ago I went to Mac's to catch Kid Congo Powers who wasn't really so great, but his opening act was.

In the bathroom I complemented the lead singer on covering "Honey Hush" and he said "Didn't we go to high school together?" It was Chaz Brackx, one of the crusty punks who hung out at the dark end of D-corridor.

You can hear Chaz sing here.

I like the first song that comes up but not so much the others. They were better live, except I didn't get to close because Chaz was whipping around his cane and tossing cigarettes over his shoulder at the crowd.

The Fiery Brook

The free, objective man doubtless finds things repugnant and distateful in Nature, but he regards them as natural, inevitable results, and under this conviction he subdues his feeling as a merely subjective and untrue one. On the contrary, the subjective man, who lives only in the feelings and imagination, regards these things with a quite peculiar aversion. He has the eye of that unhappy foundling, who even looking at the loveliest flower could pay attention only to the little "black beetle" which crawled over it, and who by this perversity of perception had his enjoyment in the sight of flowers always embittered.
L. Feuerbach

The Fall Car Ad

This is especially of note to Dax - a car ad with music by The Fall.

The election and my mom, a Platonist

I was happy about the elections, though one thing struck me when I was listening to NPR. There was this woman and she said something like: "So these people voted for Democrats, and now the Democrats have to pay up. What was the issue on people's minds? The Iraq war. And the democrats have not really devised anything to counter the administration. They have been complacent from the start." My cognitive dissonance finally dissolved, and I was like "Wow, a smart voice on the radio. Finally." She had this very smart voice so it sounded more impressive, but very direct, without some bullshit "objective" ambiguity. Anyway, I talked to my mom the next day and she was also ecstatic, but then I started complaining about how fucking long it takes for people to wise up, to see the most simplest of truths etc. I told her how smart I was and how I protested the war from the very beginning and all that. And she just said to me: "Dear Ljalja (that's my nickname), people have left their caves only yesterday." Then, I thought how my mom should be on the radio saying something like: "and so the American people have finally left their caves on Nov 7. in order to put their votes in a ballot box. Let's see how long will it take them to crawl back into them." I surmise not too long. But then again, I'm a pessimist.

Chicken a la Ishpeming

This is a wonderful demonstration of Yooper ingenuity. It's this creative spirit that will lead us to sovereign statehood, and make me the first governor of the state of Superior. Or maybe this guy.

Viral video infects Swim Club

This is really really funny:
http://www.vimeo.com/clip:114601#

So now what?

I thought it might be interesting to initiate some Superfriends post-election analysis. Good questions might be:

1. Is Democratic control of Congress going to change things in any substantive way?
2. Are the Democrats going to continue to be major wusses and avoid controversy at all costs?
3. Is there anything we can actually do about the war right now? Is pulling out feasible? Are we stuck there for as many years as it takes to gain some semblance of national security in Iraq?
4. Does Rumsfeld's long overdue departure signal any actual change in the Administration's policy, or is it just a superficial way of placating anti-war sentiment for a while?
5. I only voted with the majority of Michiganders on one of the five ballot proposals. Am I out of touch with Michigan?

I'm worried that the Democrats aren't going to be able to get their shit together, and are going to try to play it safe and avoid flak in the run-up to 2008. What they should do is pass a whole bunch of legislation like a minimum wage increase, environmental protection bills, and other popular initiatives that Bush will likely veto, making him look like an evil, uncompassionate idiot. The problem is that a lot of these new Democrats are pretty conservative, and may be reluctant to sign on to progressive legislation. Hopefully I'm wrong, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can whip their troops into shape and try to be as productive as possible. Also, there should be a lot of very dramatic public hearings about the conduct of the war. There are a lot of people who need to be brought in front of publicity-hungry Democrats so that they can be yelled at for hours in front of C-Span cameras. I would find this at least a bit cathartic.

As for Rumsfeld's resignation, I'm finding it hard to be too happy about it. Seriously, this should have happened at least 2 1/2 years ago (I'm being generous) and he absolutely should have been gone by midway through last year. It's hard to say whether we should just get out of Iraq, or whether we have the responsiblity to stay there until things start to look a bit better. (Which may not happen.) I'd like to hear what other people have to say about this - I find it very complicated. It's easy to say that we should never have gotten ourselves into this in the first place (as most rational people did before the invasion), but much more difficult to say what our policy should be now.

This one goes to Tarek...but not exclusively

I though you might like the philosophical overtones of this dialogue, from Krleza's The Glembays. Translated by your very own...

Hollow drawing-room conversation, or philosophy?

LEONE: Obscure is the world inside us, my dear, good Beatrice—so obscure. “Es gibt zwei Stämme der menschlichen Erkenntnis, die vielleicht aus einer gemeinschaftlichen, aber uns ubekannten Wurzel entspringen, nämlich: Sinnlichkeit und Verstand, durch deren ersten Gegenstände gegeben, durch den zweiten gedacht werden!” [There exist two trees of human knowledge, which may spring from the common, but to us unknown root: sensation and reason. With the former we perceive things, with the latter, we think.] Sinnlichkeit und Verstand, leave it to one Kant to illuminate this obscure world inside us! Indeed! A Propos: Kant! Last night, I found a solid achtundvierziger edition of Eueler’s Mechanics, hidden inside an armoire in my room. This Euler, with his differential equation, perceived things more lucidly than Kant ever did! And, if you please: forty years before Kant! Euler’s Mechanics was first published in Saint Petersburg sometime around seven-hundred-and-thirty-six! And the Critique, if I am not mistaken, was published sometime around seven-hundred-and-eighty-nine! (The fall of the Bastille! A curious coincidence of nature: La Grange was born in the same year as Euler’s Mechanics: thirty-six!) Yes! What is it that I wanted to say? Oh, right? That which is absolute, mathematically crystal-clear, was elucidated by Euler forty years before Kant, and, moreover, Euler is more logical, more consequential: he expressed the Unknown in a formula! This is essential: mathematics, symbolically speaking, comes closer to the Unknown than speech or image. A mathematical formula can clearly express that which neither image nor speech can, or even music, which is, respectively, still the most mathematical. To speak speech and to express oneself through speech is artism, an altogether artistic dilemma, and Kant wrote in the style of his own time, on the wings of rhetoric, in elevated Swabian: “auf den Flügeln der Ideen!” He wasn’t able to find adequately precise material for his expression: in this, precisely in this consists Euler’s relevance and greatness! As for me, the more I paint, the more I become convinced that da Vinci was absolutely right: the thing can be determined with precision only by means of an abstract mathematical coordination. And there you have it, my internal contradiction: instead of being a mathematician, I paint. With this internal fissure, what more can a man cultivate besides dilettantism?

ANGELICA: I don’t know, Leone… I beg of you, don’t be offended, I wouldn’t want to upset you, but after our conversation last night, I could never get past the thought (I thought of you practically all night), that is, I could never get past the impression—that you exaggerate in your speech! I am afraid that you take everything as wit! You are an especially witty joker. You are willing to ruin all your life-long labors for the sake of one witty combination, all the honest passion of your labors. You are willing to compromise yourself for the cultivation of wit! And I’ve kept silent during these seven years. Thinking in the service of wit is distinctively foreign to me. “Der Unterschied einer deutlichen Vorstellung von einer undeutlichen ist bloss logisch, betrifft nich den Inhalt.”[The difference between a clear and an unclear premise is only in logic, and not in its content.” And into the realm of truth one can only enter through the heart, Leone, only through the heart: through logic and witty words, never! Jede Logik ist nur eine Scheinlogik, ein Blendwerk! [Every logic is only an appearance of logic, an ornamentation!]

LEONE: So all that remains for us is the Dominican qualitas occulta?

Three Directing Projects

Here are three little exercises from my Directing class.

Project 1:

An adaptation of the rhyme:

Rain on the green grass
Rain on the trees
Rain on the rooftops
BUT NOT ON ME!

It didn't rain so I flipped it.



Project 2:

I wrote this one. The music is a single track of Josh's guitar from Fields of Industry covering Bear Mountain Picnic.



Project 3:

My directing teacher wrote this. The couple has just had a big fight, and the wife is supposed to be pregnant. It is cheese, I know.

When I'm Alone Absolutely, As When You.

If you want to kill yourself, why don't you want to kill
yourself?
Now's your chance! I, who greatly love both death and life,
Would kill myself too, if I dared kill myself...
If you dare, then be daring!
What good to you is the changing picture of outer images
We call the world?
What good is this cinema of hours played out
By actors with stock roles and gestures,
The colorful circus of our never-ending drive to keep going?
Kill yourself, and maybe you'll finally know it...
End it all, and maybe you'll begin...
If you're weary of existing, at least
Be noble in your weariness,
And don't, like me, sing of life because you're drunk,
Don't, like me, salute death through literature!

You're needed? O futile shadow called man!
No one is needed; you're not needed by anyone...
Without you everything will keep going without you.
Perhaps it's worse for others that you live than if you kill
yourself...
Perhaps your presence is more burdensome than your
absence...

Other people's grief? You're worried
About them crying over you?
Don't worry: they won't cry for long...
The impulse to live gradually snatches tears
When they're not for our own sake,
When they're because of what happened to someone else,
especially death,
Since after this happens to someone, nothing else will...

First there's anxiety, the surprise mystery's arrival
And of your spoken life's sudden absence...
Then there's the horror of your visible and material coffin,
And the men in black whose profession is to be there.
Then the attending family, heartbroken and telling jokes,
Mourning between the latest news from the evening papers,
Mingling grief over your death with the latest crime...
And you merely the incidental cause of that lamentation,
You who will be truly dead, much deader than you
imagine...
Much deader down here than you imagine,
Even if in the beyond you may be much more alive...

Next comes the black procession to the vault or grave,
And finally the beginning of the death of your memory.
At first everyone feels relieved
That the slightly irksome tragedy of your death is over...
Then, with each passing day, the conversation lightens up
And life falls back into its old routine...

Then you are slowly forgotten.
You're remembered only twice a year:
On your birthday and your death day.
That's it. That's all. That's absolutely all.
Two times a year they think about you.
Two times a year those who loved you heave a sigh,
And they may sigh on the rare occasions someone mentions
your name.

Look at yourself in the face and honestly face what we
are...

If you want to kill yourself, then kill yourself...
Forget your moral scruples or intellectual fears!
What scruples or fears influence the workings of life?
What chemical scruples rule the driving impulse
Of sap, the blood's circulation, and love?
What memory of others exists in the joyous rhythm of life?

Ah, vanity of flesh and blood called man,
Can't you see that you're utterly unimportant?

You're important to yourself, because you're what you feel.
You're everything to yourself, because for you you're the
universe,
The real universe and other people
Being mere satellites of your objective subjectivity.
You matter to yourself, because you're all that matters to
you.
And if this is true for you, O myth, then won't it be true for
others?

Do you, like Hamlet, dread the unknown?
But what is known? What do you really know
Such that you can call anything "unknown"?

Do you, like Falstaff, love life with all its fat?
If you love it so materially, then love it even more materially
By becoming a bodily part of the earth and of things!
Scatter yourself, O physicochemical system
Of nocturnally conscious cells,
Over the nocturnal consciousness of the unconsciousness of
bodies,
Over the huge blanket of appearances that blankets nothing,
Over the grass and weeds of proliferating beings,
Over the atomic fog of things,
Over the whirling walls
Of the dynamic void that's the world...

One more thing

This is my official prediction for the way things will end up on Tuesday night:

House:
Democrats gain 20 seats to win the House. They'll have 221 seats, and the GOP will have
214.

My official, hopeful estimate for the Senate:
Democrats gain 7 seats to take control of the Senate, 51-49.

Unofficial, worried estimate for Senate:
Dems only get 6, and things are tied, 50-50. Cheney breaks tie votes, so GOP barely holds on.

Governor of Michigan:
Granholm wins by 9%.

When I'm Tired.

You speak of civilization and how it shouldn't exist,
At least not as it is.
You say that everyone, or almost everyone, suffers,
From human life being organized in this way.
You say that if things were different, people would suffer less.
You say things would be better if they were how you want
them.
I hear you and don't listen.
Why would I want to listen to you?
I'd learn nothing by listening to you.
If things were different, they'd be different: that's all.
If things were how you want them, they'd be how you want
them, fine.
Too bad for you and for all who spend life
Trying to invent the machine for producing happiness!

I concur.

But before you do, make sure you study the ballot proposals, and don't make the mistake I did by waiting until the very last minute and having to learn about them in half an hour so I could get my absentee ballot in the mail before my statistics midterm. I ended up only voting yes on prop. 5, the one about education funding. The others are all confusing, and the parties haven't been taking a stand on any of them except prop 2, which is VERY BAD and hated by all sane people. (Both the Dems and GOP are against it.) My general approach to these things is that if you don't feel entirely comfortable voting for them, then don't - they are really difficult to change once they've been passed. It's hard to figure out which interest groups are pushing these proposals, and what the complicated ramifications can be. I voted for number 5 because it looked good and was endorsed by the Michigan Education Association, the teachers' union.

For help, turn to some non-partisan resources:
League of Women Voters: http://www.lwvmi.org/2006voterguide.htm
Citizens' Research Council: http://crcmich.org/election/

To see what your ballot's going to look like, go to www.publius.org


And, at the risk of being controversial, I would reiterate that the Governor's race is still really close, and that, as much as I respect those who prefer to vote Green, supporting Granholm is very important. She has done a genuinely good job in very difficult circumstances and fixed a lot of the shit that the Engler administration fucked up. She's doing a good job, and should be rewarded. If you care about the environment, education, social services, and open government, I would strongly suggest returning the Governor to office. She said nice things about me, as well.

Remember to Vote

...If you're able. I may have been disenfranchised (absentee ballot mix-up on Ann Arbor's part), so do it for old Graham.

Simply incredible.

I saw this about a year ago, and it blew my mind. This is Tayshaun Prince from his college days in Kentucky. The last shot looks to be from about 30 feet out.

I've been working in a coffee shop

This one customer keeps bringing in this ENORMOUS lab / golden retriever-type dog. It is seriously enormous, and dumb as a rock. The lady is really weird too, she seems like she's lost some marbles. Not like 10 out of 100 marbles, maybe only 3. But definitely some missing marbles.

You see, she always gets her bag of food, folds down the top, and puts it in her dog's mouth for him to carry. Then she turns to us and gives this look like, "Check out my dog, eh?" But everyone's already seen the trick, and no one is impressed. Even if we were impressed, no one would give her the satisfaction of a reaction because she's a show-off, and just so damn proud of her stupid dog.

One day my boss, Dave, was like, "Look, you can't bring this huge dog in here, he takes up the whole aisle, sheds fur everywhere, and people have complained. The woman flips out and says, "It's a Seeing-Eye Dog. It's allowed anywhere I go." And Dave was like, "I don't understand. You aren't blind." The woman got all huffy and left.

The next time she came in, the story was pried out of her. This dog has paperwork proving that it took Seeing-Eye training. But the thing is, the dog FAILED its test, rendering it unusable to a blind person. So this woman bought the dog from its trainers, and passes it off as a real Seeing-Eye dog just so she can bring it everywhere she goes! She's NOT BLIND.

And that is just one New Yorker out of 8.2 million of them.

I was reviewing some undergrad chemistry stuff and I came across this, which basically tells me that the last 14.999999999 years, 364 days and 22 hrs have been pretty boring:


"If current views are correct, about 2 hours after the start of the universe the temperature had fallen so much that most of the matter was in the form of H atoms (89%) and He atoms (11%). In one sense, not much has happened since then for, as fig. 1.1 shows, hydrogen and helium remain the most abundant elements in the universe."

Aunt Jane & Uncle Josh

On Monday evening, Jane and I became the proud Uncle and Aunt of Gram Lane Everett Willbrandt. The hat on his head was knitted to look like a pumpkin.