RE-ELECT EDDIE

Photo

Mon, 27 May 2013 23:48:39 -0400

“It’s untitled, of course.” cosmopsis: Here’s...

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:34:00 -0400

“It’s untitled, of course.”

cosmopsis:

Here’s my mom looking at a Cy Twombly at the National Gallery in DC, confused, possibly thinking it sucks.

Post-Flannery Southern thinking

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:00:50 -0400

“Now, let me just say that I like people. But I’ve found that few people have developed a capacity for empathy and/or imagination, which makes them terrible listeners. They just can’t understand what you’re saying about biscuits.”

permanentsmile: Bill Callahan - Old Blue (George Jones cover),...

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:28:00 -0400

permanentsmile:

Bill Callahan - Old Blue (George Jones cover), Nashville, May 1, 2013

Just before this video picks up, Bill said, I think this is one of the best concerts that’s ever happened here. Not in this room—in this city.

The first time I saw Bill was June 2001, a month after my high school graduation. I saw him two nights in a row. The first night he changed the chorus to “Strayed”: “Won’t you please, won’t you please turn that camera off?” The taper turned it off. The next night I grabbed the setlist and asked him to sign it. He looked down and said, “I’m going to need that back.” Bucking his reputation ca. 2001, he was very nice and chatted with this 18-year-old for twenty minutes. The option was open to go somewhere for drinks, but I didn’t have a fake and wasn’t a bad ass.

Concert bootlegs used to be exciting to me, but these YouTube videos are torturous. They trade my imagination of the event for evidence of the very worst, most flattened parts of it. They don’t allow room for singing along. They don’t allow the moment to feel bigger than it was.

I Instagrammed a photo of Bill during this song and captioned it, “Bill dedicated this George Jones song to me because he said he’s glad I’m in such a good place, thanks, Bill.” I felt guilty Instagramming during the show, as if Bill wouldn’t appreciate it. In 2001 I asked Bill what he’d like the audience to do while he played—because often he locks people in a death stare, you know?—and he said, “Dance.”

He seemed tired this week. The setlist was a bummer.

Bill is a character in my life. He has been around for 15 years. He is a steady and wise companion. He has facilitated many breakthroughs and some regrettable episodes. My humor and shirt choices have been influenced by him. I’ve also figured out that if you make that Bell’s palsy face, you can sing more like him. I’m thinking about writing him a letter to apologize for something on my last blog, perhaps as a way of saying some things that might be interesting to him about being a fan vs. being a person, but it’d be less awkward to let sleeping dogs lie.

I’m sorry that you can’t see the back of my head in this video. I was just left of the frame. The back of my head looks beautiful lately.

Who could have predicted on Saturday that today would be Earth...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:33:19 -0400

Who could have predicted on Saturday that today would be Earth Day?

Reactions to news

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:56:00 -0400

Why the rush to affirm humanity’s goodness or “look for helpers”? Why the rush to skip grief when something horrible happens?

(a) Imagine being a victim, or close to a victim, and hearing that.

(b) Imagine being a perpetrator and hearing that.

Talking in front of a room of people for two days then coming...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:51:00 -0400

Talking in front of a room of people for two days then coming back to the hotel and reading the evaluations is the most fun experience I can even imagine. Have you read that novel Remainder in which a guy wins the lottery and hires a village full of people to recreate one of his hazy memories? Like he hires a woman to live in the apartment below him and continuously fry liver, because the smell and crackle of frying liver is part of his memory, and now there’s a huge, expensive administrative apparatus working to dispose of the cooked liver and deliver more liver and clean grease from the air ducts? If I was going to pay people to create an experience for me, it would be this one of talking in front of a room of people for two days then reading their positive evaluations, more or less.

Obviously it feeds the most troublesome part of my personality, that which wants tangible validation without long-term investment. See also: OKCupid notifications, baristas who do you favors, strangers who compliment your clothes.

Denver dispatch

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 01:54:00 -0400

Things people have attributed to the altitude
Sleeplessness
Minor headaches
Dry skin
Bad bread

Things people have not yet attributed to the altitude
I listened only to Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” today
Lot of people who look like meth heads here

Golden country showers

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:03:58 -0400

Lately I spend a lot of time shuttling between the country and the city. This morning I thought that taking a shower in the country is nicer than taking a shower in the city because in the country I am never rushed (no one cares when I arrive at work), I am never a sleep zombie (I go to bed early), and I do not feel like I am missing out on anything while I stand there (my neighborhood is low-density, and few things are treated as urgent). In the city a shower makes me feel impatient, as if I could be spending my time better.

TIme travel, brain death, types of love seem pretty easy to manipulate

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 10:46:00 -0400

Pieces from Triple-Decker Weekly

We are approaching the time when we will be able to communicate faster than the speed of light. It is well known that as we approach the speed of light, time slows down. Logically, it is reasonable to assume that as we go faster than the speed of light, time will reverse. The major consequence of this for Internet protocols is that packets will arrive before they are sent. [R. Hinden]

Quantum Archaeology (QA) is the controversial science of resurrecting the dead including their memories. It assumes the universe is made of events and the laws that govern them, and seeks to make maps of brain/body states to the instant of death for everyone in history. Anticipating process technologies due in 20 – 40 years, it involves construction of the Quantum Archaeology Grid to plot known events filling the gaps by cross-referencing heuristically within the laws of science. Specialist grids already exist waiting to be merged, including cosmic ones with trillions of moving evolution points. The result will be a mega-matrix good enough to describe and simulate the past. Quantum computers and super-recursive algorithms both in their infancy may allow vast calculation into the quantum world, and artificial intelligence has no upper limit to what it might do. [Transhumanity]

Don’t mistake addiction for love. This is tricky because, neurochemically speaking, the two are very similar–studies have shown that when romantic partners who are intensely in love are exposed to photographs of their beloved, the brain regions that become activated are the same regions that are activated in cocaine addicts when they are craving cocaine. But even if love has some addiction-like qualities, healthy love is likely to involve other qualities as well, such as respect, trust, and commitment, qualities that keep a relationship strong even on those days when excitement and passion are not at the forefront. Addictive love, by contrast, tends to be more singularly focused on attaining those “highs,” whatever the cost. Partners whose behavior is unpredictable (e.g., they don’t call when they say they will), are, unfortunately, especially likely to keep you hooked, since their inconsistent affection keeps you on your toes and wanting more. If you are trying to break free from a relationship that feels more like an addiction than a loving bond, one strategy is to reframe your thoughts and emotions about that person as if they are cold, clinical biological processes in order to gain a healthy distance from them. For example, after a week of not calling Mr. or Ms. Wrong, you feel a wave of longing in your chest and think, “But I really do love him/her… I should call him/her right now…” Instead, you could notice that sensation and tell yourself, “Interesting, there goes my caudate nucleus releasing dopamine and producing a sensation of longing. Okay, back to work.” [Psych Your Mind]

Mozambique dispatch

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 03:04:00 -0400

China is colonizing the country and making it into a rice farm.

My Habitat for Humanity counterpart here—her sister is going to school in South Africa on an Oprah scholarship. She told me that expecting that I would find it exciting, and I did.

Mozambiqueans are very accommodating, even of broken Portuguese.

Group of American volunteers was super not into Neil Hamburger jokes; they had no interest in learning why the guests absolutely refused to drink the apple-based beverage at Paris Hilton’s party. May have lost credibility.

Comforts I miss: good coffee, using tap water to brush teeth.

Remember the time you took me to see Harold and Maude because I didn't know the meaning of the word "catharsis"?

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:07:00 -0500

If anything Margaret reminds me of Synecdoche, New York, because the world of the movie keeps expanding out and out. A story about complicated people should be complicated, too. I may prefer Margaret because it assumes that everyone is this complicated, not just the put-upon geniuses.

Margaret shares the milieu and preoccupations of Woody Allen movies but—this sense has been rising for a few years—makes their observations seem trite and self-serving. Look at the difference in how this movie and a W.A. movie treat a public accusation of anti-Semitism. Look at the difference in what this movie and a W.A. movie do with a student-teacher affair. Margaret cares about its female characters and wants to understand them, while W.A. movies tend to want to understand women in service of manipulating them.

Also, another note, have you ever seen a movie so coolly observe that there are ethics we take responsibility for and ethics we simply acknowledge? A movie with questions about urgency in ethics.

I’m making it sound like a cold movie, but it ends with everybody crying. Just really beautiful.

A robocall tells me when a member of the church has died

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:45:48 -0500

A robocall tells me when a member of the church has died

"Our contribution to the nation is that we didn’t create a black al Qaeda"

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:42:56 -0500

Tavis Smiley on “Django Unchained,” which I disliked and should’ve known better than to see:

Hollywood won’t get serious about making an authentic film about the holocaust of slavery but they will greenlight a spoof about slavery, and it’s as if this spoof about slavery somehow makes slavery a bit easier to swallow. The suffering of black people is not reducible to revenge and retribution. The black tradition has taught the nation what it means to love.

It’s the revenge and retribution that black folk are using to justify seeing the film, or what Tarantino has done, and that’s absolutely not the story of the black contribution to the nation. Our contribution to the nation is that we didn’t create a black al Qaeda. Look at all that black people have endured and gone through, and then look at the patriots that we have become. That’s the beauty of the black experience.

Parable

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:36:25 -0500

people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: in one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30.

“A Million First Dates”

Sister Corita Kent Right on

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:50:00 -0500

Sister Corita Kent

Right on

Unexpected benefit

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 10:55:00 -0400

So Africans they say “T-I-A” a lot, which stands for “This is Africa,” which isn’t a nationalistic slogan but is used to mean something closer to, “Of course the toilet doesn’t work; this is Africa.” Often they say “T-I-A” to encourage Americans to chill out because a bus is not on time or an appointment is happening hours late.

If you hate conference calls, a great thing about working with Africans is that you schedule many conference calls but rarely have to join one, because over half of them are canceled, missed, or will not connect. TIA.

Thank you, Naomi in Ghana, for missing today’s call. I have a headache and am dreaming of breakfast biscuits.

HOW OUR WORLD WORKS

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 15:02:14 -0400

HOW OUR WORLD WORKS

Last month I saw this coffin shaped like a sneaker. It’s...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:23:00 -0400

Last month I saw this coffin shaped like a sneaker. It’s from Ghana. I had a deep thought that is long gone. You can probably assemble it yourself: Ghana, very poor, 1990, AIDS epidemic, Nike, Brooklyn Museum.

"It now seems that the primary political effect of the economic crisis was not the rise of the..."

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 23:46:19 -0400

“It now seems that the primary political effect of the economic crisis was not the rise of the radical left, but of racist populism, more wars, more poverty in the poorest Third World countries, and widening divisions between rich and poor. For all that crises shatter people out of their complacency and make them question the fundamentals of their lives, the first spontaneous reaction is not revolution but panic, which leads to a return to basics: food and shelter. The core premises of the ruling ideology are not put into doubt. They are even more violently asserted.”

- Who Won the Recession? Capitalism - By Slavoj Zizek | Foreign Policy (via towerofsleep)