By the way my brain works. I can put off a certain task for, in some cases, literally years, and then one day I sit down and very dutifully plan out exactly everything I need to do today and in what sequence and okay let's get on with it - and I find myself doing something totally different and before I know it it's done.
This morning, between typing out "Okay, I need to get dressed and head for the Metro right now" and actually getting up out of the chair, I casually did the long-overdue troubleshooting of a problematic project - a better contemporary English translation of the Turkish "Bir Demet Yasemen" lyrics than I've found online - and finalized a set I think really works. I remember starting this during a faculty meeting at least two years ago. And now it's done. (Gothic as hell, naturally; the original was evidently halfway there already.) But I still need to get dressed and get out.
The evidence is abundant: I will never be linear. And yet the important stuff inevitably does get done, usually on time. I just have to get used to the idea that operating my brain is not like driving a car, it's more like riding a horse who's never quite been tamed (which was pretty much my relationship with the only horse I ever loved).
This dovetails nicely with the video from Bruce Sterling that I posted yesterday on Facebook...in it, Sterling points out that there's nothing inherently "green" about just buying crappy cheap products instead of more expensive, more durable ones. When we save money by assembling the IKEA stuff ourselves, what happens to the concept of craftmanship? And is buying a new bed every time you move (because IKEA products so seldom survive disassembly and/or moving) really cheaper or "greener?"
The author of "Cheap" makes some interesting points about the impact of globalization on American workers as well: the "squeezed middle class" now has to compete with workers in nations like China (where, in a bitter irony, "Communism" effectively means "no human rights for the working class"), so American workers' salaries and benefits can be held down, which creates more incentive for those same American workers to buy the cheapest available products, even when doing so undermines their own livelihood.
It's enough to make your average Evil Genius rub his hands with glee. By using enormous, environmentally-disastrous cargo ships to impose unprecedented economies of scale on the transportation process, the big discount chains and manufacturing cartels can merge workers in China and workers in the USA into a global serf class wherein citizens of democracies lose out economically as producers because they have to compete with citizens of totalitarian states, then gain as consumers of those goods. And do global serfs deal with their economic hardship by buying less? Why would they, when instead they can just buy cheaper?
Results of this Noble Experiment in basically giving away your music WHILE selling it at several other price points: (1) all 2500 of the DSSUBS sold out in less than 30 hours - that's $750,000 in a little over a day; (2) in the first week sales grossed $1,600,000 (and remember the difference between gross and net here is gonna be pretty damn small, especially compared to Music Biznis standards of "my son-in-law's cocaine habit is part of the cost of producing your album"); (3) the product still topped Itunes' top selling downloads - this is at ITUNES back when people still had to pay plenty for a DRM-crippled version of the file - an instrumental, atmospheric, somewhat avant-garde product from an artist who hadn't had a hit in years, product that was anything but commercial and widely available for free beating out artists like Coldplay and Justin Timberlake.
Which I would say we should be teaching in schools, except that, even beyond most science and philosophy content, its implications are staggeringly impractical.
Except maybe for ( this )
( One answer: )
Realistically, though, I know he's thinking "Oh, hey, Papa's sitting in front of his computer, this is a good opportunity to hop in his lap." And the high degree of correspondence between "times when I'm sitting in front of my computer" and "times when trying to do something seemingly simple but evidently overwhelmingly complicated in Vista makes me want to cry" is creating the anthropomorphic illusion.
Patti Smith says: "This is what I know: I am here for a purpose. The purpose changes. Gifts that are not mine, children who are not mine, an angel who is not mine."
Today the garbage truck came and picked up the little blue "Get Well Soon" teddybear signed by everyone in Devyani, and several pounds of paperwork from her last job, and some candy and tea from when they cleaned out her desk. And today I'll fill up another bag, I guess, after an hour or so of staring at things wondering where, if anywhere, they belong.
She is not in the candy, she is not in the tea, she is not in the bags of bath & beauty products I can't for the life of me figure out how to dispose of.
But at 3 AM in front of the main stage at PEx Fest I saw-felt-saw her dancing her ass off to DJ Every Day's killer deep techno set. It seemed so natural at the time but it blows a hole in me to remember it now...and the next day I confided this insane moment to a dancer who had a special bond with her. She said she's seen K's face in the audience at one of her recent performances. And yeah, it seemed so right - of course she'd be there. She is so much with us...why then do I miss her so much?
I am living and working and trying new things whether or not they scare me and I am loving my life and making things work...like any other refugee/exile. And every now and then I glance over my shoulder and see everything I've lost slipping beneath the waves like Atlantis, going up in flames like the library at Alexandria. This must be what the last speakers of dying languages feel, knowing there are poems and songs and stories that will never again be heard in this world.
Nobody knows who Judy was, and so Judy will never tell me stories of the young girl I never knew but will always love.
And like any other refugee/exile I go on, doing my new work and inventing my new world, humming the songs of my homeland to myself even while feeling them fade from my memory. I fought a war for love, for years, and lost everything but love and love's debris. And now there is peace all around me and the silence that comes to vacant lots when the last circus tents have packed up and left, never to return.
The best thing about not eating out as much as I used to? Kiva.org.
Quite possibly the best thing about the internet? Kiva.org.
One of the best things about teaching this past year? Hearing kids talk about their latest kiva.org projects.
The best thing about kiva.org? Seeing that my $57.50 of microloans etc. is gonna cost more like $40 because of what I've already been paid back by previous lendees from just the past few months.
The worst thing about kiva.org? Looking around my studio at some of the stuff I've spent more money on than a year of $50 monthly kiva.org microloans, gathering dust. But then someone drives by in a pimped-out Hummer to make me feel much better. Thanks, asshole. (No, really, I sincerely mean it, both parts.)
Now we know his real cause of death: drowning, somehow, in, um, sleaze.
(2) Governor Casanova: "In (the Argentine homewrecker) I've truly found my soulmate, but I'm still trying to fall back in love with my wife."
You starry-eyed romantic, you. How'd that line go over at home? "Darling, the other woman is my soulmate, but I'm trying to fall back in love with you." I don't think that would ever work for me in a bar, even if I preceded it with "I'm the governor of South Carolina."
(3) I went to WalMart (had to spend a student's giftcard). Yeeg. 'Nuff said.
(4) Saw Rob Thomas perform on "Ellen" at the gym. I'd very much like to beat him up now, please. His puppydog eyes and passionate delivery are excruciatingly earnest for someone whose lyrics never get past the most banal stoner cliches. It's like watching Bono perform a stack of Hallmark cards after some potent bong hits.
But Rob Thomas, like the governor of SC, like people who use "literally" to mean "no seriously dude I like totally mean what I'm saying," don't give a damn what I think of their insipidness. They aren't talking to me. They're talking to Walmart, and Walmart is listening, and Walmart approves.
So what is TRIBAL?
( Read more... )
Most of the people in my life were born when Google was. Obama and Bush are the only presidents they've known. They don't remember a time when MTV played music videos. They don't really remember a time when people listened to music on the radio, for that matter, or bought cd's in stores. So if I were to try to tell them "There was this guy who broke through the color barrier for musicians at MTV and had the biggest selling album of all time, that's at least three kinds of "Huh?" to them.
Billy Mays, on the other hand, is current, annoying, and undeniably good at his work. Oh, and dead. I doubt if most of the people who knew his name will miss him; many will be relieved.
A tribute band? At the 9:30 Club? On a Friday night in the summer? Unheard of!
Needless to say, they've suddenly sold out the joint, and added a second show for later in the evening, which also sold out immediately.
He died as he lived: eclipsed by more marketable, less original celebrities.
(Disclaimer: I ain't hating on MJ. This is not about him.)
http://mediamatters.org/blog/20090624002
Okay, I finally get it, the thing with the whiteface in the Rolling Thunder Revue...the key was remembering that Mick Ronson (of all people) was the one wailing behind you on that immaculate "Isis" that bridged the Velvets and Zeppelin (with the best "YES!" in rawk history): you were trying to invent Glitter Folk, weren't you. "Renaldo and Clara" really does capture this fascinating era when Ziggy Stardust was overlapping with the Back To The Land movement, and you're there in the crossfire, Billy Jack hat and pancake makeup, fur coat and Leadbelly and Johnny Cash covers, a wailing fiddler to your right and Mick Ronson to your left.
In a parallel universe somewhere it all actually worked. In this one, nobody remembers that Zeppelin was initially inspired by the Incredible String Band and Roy Harper, or that David Bowie first came at us trying to be Joan Baez. And the phrase "Dylan's Glam Period" somehow never occurred to anyone, maybe because "Renaldo and Clara" remained hidden so long.
You never did,
The Kenosha Kid
This sets a really important precedent, especially because of all the money involved. Just maybe this case might be enough to teach public school systems that there can be more than one side to a story in which a teacher is accused of doing something outrageous. The semi-official policy of my school system and Loudoun and many others has been for many years that teachers, especially male teachers, are considered guilty until proven innocent; maybe now that they've been hit in both their pocket book and their PR they'll consider a more nuanced view.
Oh, and the Supreme Court says school staff forcing a thirteen year-old to strip because she might be hiding prescription-strength ibuprofen is out of line. Duh. But check it out: female staff forcing a girl to strip was, in the school system's opinion, defensible enough to take all the way to the Supreme Court, but Ting, on orders from his principal, taking possession of one file of a topless girl as part of an investigation was enough of a moral breach for the county to demand he either resign or face criminal charges.
Educators - especially male ones - must never forget that, no matter what kind of reputation they've built for themselves, in the eyes of their employers, they are generally expendable pawns.
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/09/l
THIS is why we used to have a Constitution (and why the Magna Charta wasn't enough). As soon as your government starts having a few secret rules and/or rule exemptions to help with some sticky problems, you no longer have Rule of Law, and you inevitably have more and more power-junkies applying the same loose interpretations to even minor problems, and most of the time the public won't even find out about it because a culture of official secrecy has set in.
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