with the leaves | three burials

Brutalism

2009-03-19T19:17:00.008-04:00

This is the latest installment in Nicolai Ouroussoff's architectural tour of Europe and Russia. It is an attempt to enter the debate on the value of brutalist architecture which dominated in the post-war era and which I most associate with Boston City Hall in the United States. Le Courboussier's design for Chandigarh and Oscar Niemeyer's for Brasilia are also often exhibits in the case against this thread of modernism.

Ouroussoff does a nice job balancing between the different camps in his description of Robin Hood Gardens in London. For example, the small detail that the architects shortened one of the two buildings to bring in more southern light is important and inspired. Also, the gentle bend of both buildings is quite beautiful. But the physical and social isolation and lack of public safety are familiar to anyone who has read about, visited, or lived in public housing towers in the U.S.

These conditions are not a necessary consequence of the architecture but the result of lack of money, opportunity, and hope. While I am usually sympathetic to explanations that feature externally imposed structural constraints on people just trying to survive, the critics of brutalist architecture focus on the wrong structure. It is the society -- not the buildings -- that chooses to warehouse poor people in public housing, overcrowded schools, and prisons.

Karate Kicks

2007-12-30T02:38:00.000-05:00

Radiohead, Bangers and Mash from In Rainbows CD2

Makes me want to do karate kicks and chops in the air.

Ramblings

2007-12-16T17:49:00.000-05:00

These are the ramblings of a man in solitude,
in search of a past that didn’t exist.
The emanations of a ghost
in search of a soul that may be lost.
Who are you? Yo soy fantasma, he says
before being apprehended to disappear forever.

When I am alone, I like the dark, I like the night.
It gives a comfort, a protection, a cover
against all those who otherwise might come out
and live while your ability to live is disabled.
Or at least, that’s what you think
or want to think.

This is not despair, not even close.
This is how I become alive,
not a momentary life from a high,
but the application of one’s mind and intellect
that builds upon itself, to create again.
From death, life.

This is not poetry, not even close.
Just the ramblings of a man in solitiude.

The Celery Room

2007-12-09T18:35:00.002-05:00

My friend Rick recently posted on a week from our high school days when we spent time in Chicago between debate tournaments at the Glenbrook high schools. I read his post and remembered some things similarly and other things differently. It made me think about memory and affect and how we each tell stories from our lives. Here are some of my reflections on that week:

My cousin Bimal was generous in allowing us to stay in his dorm basement and gave us the box on which we played Led Zeppelin. But the room was windowless and had the distinct odor of celery, probably from the industrial carpet on which we slept.

Our four sleeping bags filled the entire little room. Rick was (and is) funny as hell but often made jokes at the expense of his slower, less clever friends (we were all his straight men, basically). As a result, Rich, Bob, and I would periodically attack him on the sleeping bags, getting back at him for all of the clever funniness that we had borne for the prior three and a half years of long trips in the school van. Rick would say something clever and annoying and one of us would yell, GET HIM, and we’d pounce. It was great fun.

Rick and I felt we were on the cusp of being one of the better high school debate teams in the country, but I think we both understood that we had not broken through when we needed to perform. There was that debacle at the end of my junior year that Rick mentions in his post, as well as other times when we dropped an elimination round too easily. We went 6-0 at Bronx Science our senior year and lost to an excellent team from Texas in double-octafinals. We dropped in the first elimination round at the Tournament of Champions in Kentucky (a lot of the structure of our competition was based on college sports, which I didn't understand then). We went quietly our junior and senior years at the Harvard tournament, as far as I can remember. We beat our intra-district rival, Hen Hud, with some regularity, but did not overcome the best team in the state, Stuyvesant, until Catholic Nationals our senior year. That was one tournament at which we finally fulfilled our potential in the semifinal round, though even then we lost to a talented but not overwhelming team from Chicago helmed by a now-famous law professor and Supreme Court lawyer in the finals. At the first Glenbrook tournament, we came close to beating a great team from Westminster in the quarterfinals with a “disadvantage” that we had created but were stymied by a missing piece of evidence in the “link” section of the argument. We spent some time in the main Northwestern library that week searching for it, but could not substantiate the argument. That missing evidence stands out to me as emblematic of our standing in the debate world and our inability to make the necessary breakthroughs.

We didn’t drop a ballot at the Lexington tournament after we were ignored by the Harvard Roundrobin selectors, but unlike Rick I don’t remember beating two roundrobin teams there. No great teams were competing at Lex and we won the final round against the junior team from another intra-district rival, Edgemont. We had great expectations for the National Tournament held in Cincinnati, Ohio in June of our senior year (and passed up the prom for it, though that was a fine decision in light of what I now know about proms) but once again went quietly and did not make it far into the tournament. Rick had a lot of fun there with friends from other schools in the “Holidome” Holiday Inn where we were staying and I went to King’s Island and rode roller coasters with my debate coach.

The future law professor from Chicago, his friend from Manchester, Massachusetts who won the National tournament, and our intra-state rivals at Stuyvesant had an intangible drive to win and maybe were just brighter than we were. It makes me wonder about where we came from, our family backgrounds, and our schools. There were teams just before and just after us at Lakeland who made it on the roundrobin circuit, so the social inequality explanation probably does not fly. Rick and I happened to be the best team in our class at Lakeland but I'm not sure that we shared the drive that other teams had on the circuit.

I have debate dreams with some regularity. I am competing again, given the chance to go back in time and make up for lost opportunities. It’s telling that I also have law school dreams, when I think of making up for those lost opportunities. In these time machine dreams my stomach clenches as I recall the anxiety of competition. In my waking life, I wonder how I could have spent so many weekends in my high school years with that stomach-clenching feeling before every debate round and at every elimination tournament. The way I remember those years may be a product of how Rick and I approach our lives. I tend to tell stories about myself with a decidedly negative, self-critical slant, as evidenced on this blog. Rick tells stories differently, though he has confronted sadness and uncertainty in his own life. I think he is probably a happier, more generative person than I am and I'm thankful for his continued friendship, especially because in my early adulthood I have been drawn more to friends like myself who tell stories and remember life episodes in a minor key.

One last memory from the celery room. Before I left, I had asked out a girl who was also on the debate team. She had said yes and we were going to go out when we got back from Chicago. She was my first girlfriend. I wore her scarf in Chicago and it smelled of the girlish perfume that she used. I also copied the lyric sheet from the record sleeve of the Peter Gabriel album So for the song In Your Eyes. I did that before Say Anything was a glimmer in the eye of Cameron Crowe. I was a happy guy that week. I don't dream about that part of my adolescence, meeting a girl who loved Ronald Reagan and wearing her scarf. But that thread of the reality of those years may fill out my memory: friendship, pre-college quirk, regular escape from soul-killing suburbia, and, yes, even some competitive success.

Ceremony

2007-11-19T09:57:00.000-05:00

Radiohead. Via Crackers United. Ceremony was written by Ian Curtis and released as New Order's first single. Have listened to it countless times because it is Track 1 on New Order Substance. Performed here by the world's best rock band (at least at the moment).

breaking "the code of not going nowhere"

2007-09-13T13:07:00.000-04:00

The Ghetto Film School in the Bronx.

Boyz/Bird Flu

2007-08-03T13:43:00.000-04:00

M.I.A.!

Dig

2007-07-24T23:04:00.000-04:00

Incubus

It's Okay

2007-07-06T17:07:00.000-04:00

I saw Pearl Jam twice on their 2000 tour, on August 24 at Jones Beach and then a week later in Camden, New Jersey. It was a tough tour for the band. Nine members of the audience died during their performance at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark and Ed Vedder’s marriage broke down just after Binaural was finished and the tour started (on the basis of things he’s said in the years since). My girlfriend at the time (“GF”) thought that Ed looked like Jesus Christ, which is highly ironic in light of his “I’m no messiah” complex. It is true that he looked thin and ravaged when we saw the band at Jones Beach. The show was less about joy and defiance than mere survival. (I know this may sound over-the-top but we Pearl Jam fans take such things seriously.) At a key moment, as the band segued out of Daughter, Ed picked up a piece of paper and told the audience that he had a part for us. He started singing the words to a song by the Portland band Dead Moon and we echoed during the chorus:

it's okay, you don't have to run and hide away
it's okay, i love you anyway
it's okay, you don't have to run and hide away
it's okay...
this is my chance, this is my life
this is my hope in an alleyway
this is my choice, this is my voice
there may be no tomorrow, now
this is my plea, this is my need
this is my time for standing free
this is my staff, this is my day
and the world is never safe
it's okay, you know i love you anyway
it's okay, you don't have to run and hide away
it's okay, it's okay
it's okay...

You can see what we saw that night (the turn to It’s Okay takes place at 4:02):

GF and I had taken a break in our year and half old relationship that August. I had told a mutual friend that I would be proposing to her in January, but that moment had passed and I resisted the relationship on the rationale that we fought too much. We did fight, on street corners, in apartment stairwells and cars. After one particularly bad fight when she was threatening to leave my apartment at 2 a.m. and I was yelling in that stairwell, I wondered what I had become. I kept repeating lines from Springsteen’s “One Step Up” to myself:

Another fight and I slam the door on
Another battle in our dirty little war
When I look at myself I don't see
The man I wanted to be
Somewhere along the line I slipped off track

Of course, I loved her deeply and she made me very happy. I have a picture of us at a diner with out-of-town friends the morning after my thirtieth birthday party. I loved her so much that morning and I was holding onto her so tightly that she had to tell me to loosen my arms around her. She had gotten me to invite all of my friends to a dinner and assembled a book of their contributions in my honor. They had made pages of words, photos and drawings for me. It’s the kind of moment that might occur maybe two or three times in your life, if you’re lucky.

When I think back to that relationship, I always remember taking GF to those Pearl Jam shows and I cringe at the memory. She was still so in love with me, even as I expressed hesitation and asked for “time off” from the relationship. She put up with the conditions of a Pearl Jam concert: lots of white male teenagers drinking beer and wondering loudly how they could approximate the spirited moshing of a past half-generation from the Evenflow and Alive videos. We got free tickets to the Philadelphia show by walking around the venue to register new voters. GF gamely tried to register these sloshed kids and when we got our tickets sat down heavily in the midst of the crowd, tired from our interactions with the drunken masses.

When I mentioned this episode to her during a phone conversation a few years after we had broken up, she told me to forget about it. She had moved on (and now has a husband and daughter) but I was holding on to the memories. I had met an amazing woman on a trip to the west coast a few months earlier, someone who I thought might make me very happy, and perhaps I was pleading for release. When I told GF that I needed her forgiveness, my voice broke and I started sobbing on the phone. She said to me, you need to forgive yourself.

When the Ship Comes In - Dylan

2007-07-04T11:31:00.000-04:00

This is what realization might sound like:

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Oh the seas will split
And the ship will hit
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
Then the tide will sound
And the wind will pound
And the morning will be breaking.

Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they'll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.

And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they're spoken.
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.

A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck,
The hour that the ship comes in.

Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.

Yes!

Pyramid Song

2007-06-25T18:04:00.000-04:00

Radiohead

Follow the Inner Voice

2007-06-11T12:25:00.001-04:00

two poems to inspire and contemplate during difficult times:

WALK ALONE

If they answer not to thy call, walk alone;
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
Open thy mind and speak out alone.
If they turn away and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
Trample the thorns under thy tread,
And along the blood-lined track travel alone.
If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,
With the thunder-flame of pain ignite thine own heart,
And let it burn alone.

-Rabindranath Tagore

HARD TIMES

Music is silenced, the dark descending slowly
Has stripped unending skies of all companions.
Weariness grips your breast, and within the draped horizons
Dumbly ring the bells of hugely gathering fears.
Still, O bird, O sightless bird,
Not yet, not yet the time to fold your wings.

It's not melodious woodlands but the leaps and falls
Of an ocean swelling with drowsy thunder,
Not a grove bedecked with flowers but a tumult heaved with foam.
Where is the shore that stored your buds and leaves?
Where the nest, the branch that offers shelter?
Still, O bird, my sightless bird,
Not yet, not yet the time to fold your wings.

Stretching in front of you the night's immensity
Hides the western hill where sleeps the distant Sun;
Still with bated breath the world is counting passing time, and
Across the shoreless dark obscurity, a crescent moon
Has thinly just appeared upon the dim horizon.
--But O my bird, O sightless bird,
Not yet, not yet the time to fold your wings.

From upper skies the stars with pointing fingers
Intently watch your course, and from the deep, death's impatience
Lashes at you in restless, leaping waves;
And sad entreaties plead from the farthest shore
With hands outstretched and wailing
'Come, O come!' Still, O bird, O sightless bird,
Not yet, not yet the time to fold your wings.

All that is past: your fears and hopes and love's illusion;
All that is lost: your useless words and lamentation;
No longer yours a home nor a nuptial bed strewn of flowers.
For wings are all you have, and the vast firmament of sky
And the dawn steeped in darkness, losing all direction.
Dear bird, my sightless bird,
Not yet, not yet the time to fold your wings.

-Rabindranath Tagore

Needle in the Hay

2007-06-01T02:39:00.000-04:00

Elliott Smith

Either/Or

2007-05-31T15:14:00.000-04:00

I learned today that the Elliott Smith record is inspired by a book of essays of the same name by Soren Kierkegaard. Apparently, Kierkegaard set out the stages of existence and contrasts a life of aesthetic pursuit with one of ethical commitment. I came upon all of this information while doing internet searches related to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, which is one of my favorite novels. Percy created his narrative after reading Either/Or and the passage from empty pursuit to commitment is a compelling framework for his story (and that of many others to which I am drawn, including High Fidelity and Sideways).

Why was I Googling The Moviegoer? Because I am having a particularly empty day, wasted morning, wandering my neighborhood, ending at a cafe where I sit and surf while another draft of my article is due to my bosses at work. This follows a phone conversation last night with one of my best friends (with whom I share a general career trajectory) during which we discussed (1) his recent triumphant speech to an audience of public interest lawyers and his stunned mother, (2) his upcoming sabbatical leave, the second in three years, (3) his litigation on behalf of a detainee at Guantanamo, and (4) my recent withdrawal from a conference in Berlin in July on the advice of the aforementioned bosses. He is a good man and a good friend, as close as a brother to me in many respects, but I can't help but be depressed after we speak on the phone. So I awoke in a hole and I stay bored and listless, unable to engage with the work that I must do. I think of alternate careers and (laughably) curse my own freedom to write at a cafe.

Plane tickets and hotel reservations for Berlin are cancelled. I withdraw from the panels on which I was to speak. After (1) being one of three people in a group of twenty at a conference not to be selected for publication in a book two years ago, (2) being passed over for consideration for a higher position in my workplace, (3) watching friends with my qualifications make more money and acquire greater purpose and focus as they age, and (4) having close friends be surprised when I am selected for some honor, such as a speaking role in a graduation ceremony, I wonder when the indignities will cease. My aspiration for a life of ethical commitment remains out of my grasp because of the life preferences of my partner and the simultaneously purpose-killing structurelessness and imprisonment of my work as currently constructed. Others tell me how good I have it and to remain in pursuit of their goals. I want to not wake up in the morning.

Body of War

2007-05-31T00:30:00.000-04:00

Powerful trailer for a new documentary called Body of War, with songs by Eddie Vedder. A live performance of the song No More is here, but the images from the movie in the trailer are much more affecting than seeing Eddie on stage.

Fantasy - Across the Universe

2007-05-28T11:29:00.000-04:00

What is fantasy? Is it an illusion, an escape from the humdrum of everyday life? Or is it an experience more real than the material one lived amidst strife, struggle, and the adversity of the world. An experience so real that it impels us through the strife, struggle, and adversity.

Dylan wrote that the mythical images and visions in his head conjured up a world more real than the one he was living.

These are some of the questions that I think about upon reflecting upon Pan’s Labyrinth.

Ofelia lives in a time of civil war in Spain. Her pregnant mother is in the throes of desperation, and finds security in a tyrannical husband after her husband, Ofelia’s father, died. Her mother wants Ofelia to call her new husband "Father" and tells her it’s only a word. Ofelia calls him "Captain." Ofelia and her mother move in with the Captain at a hillside post, where the Captain commands a group of Franco loyalists intent to crushing rebels in the countryside and their notions of an egalitarian society.

Ofelia finds refuge in her stories about fairies and magic, which her mother does her best to discourage.

But Ofelia is not an ordinarily girl. She is followed by a fairy, who summons her to a labyrinth, where she meets a faun who tells her that she is a princess who has been summoned back to reopen a portal to a mythical world where she can take her rightful place beside her true father and mother.

In order for her to arrive there, she must accomplish three tasks. And that is where our story and Ofelia’s magical and frightening adventures begins, while the Captain is attempting to exact control over both his camp and the rebels.

We all live in at least in two worlds, or at least I do. The one we live outside, and the one we live in our head. Both needs to be tended to, cultivated. If the one in my head is not properly nourished, guided, and honored, it will lash out. That is why I write, although not as much as I should.

That is why I listen to music, read, and watch movies like Pan’s Labyrinth. That is why I love and hug my daughter.

Maybe I expect too much, that others around me must share the same world as the one in my head, and maybe that is not realistic or possible. And the fact that others don’t or can’t share it makes me undermine my relationship with them. Perhaps that is too judgmental. Maybe the world in my head is for my head and the other creative souls who are receptive to it.

I don’t know what I want but I know I must honor my inner world. I just don’t know how.

Maybe there will be a faun or fairy to guide me. Maybe there will be magic. Maybe the signs are there and I have yet to read them.

What makes me laugh? Am I able to let go? Am I able to see the fantasy in me and around me?

On another note, I am very excited about the upcoming movie, "Across the Universe", with a backdrop of Beatles lyrics, songs, and lives.

My growing preoccupation with notions of fantasy have brought me closer to the Beatles. I listen and I hear their songs differently now. There is more depth to their meanings.

Words are flying out like

endless rain into a paper cup

They slither while they pass

They slip away across the universe

Pools of sorrow waves of joy

are drifting thorough my open mind

Possessing and caressing me

Jai guru deva om

Nothing's gonna change my world

Images of broken light which

dance before me like a million eyes

That call me on and on across the universe

Thoughts meander like a

restless wind inside a letter box

they tumble blindly as

they make their way across the universe

Jai guru deva om

Nothing's gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter shades of life

are ringing through my open ears

exciting and inviting me

Limitless undying love which

shines around me like a million suns

It calls me on and on across the universe

Jai guru deva om

Nothing's gonna change my world

Jai guru deva Jai guru deva

"Heroes" (1977)

2007-05-22T00:56:00.000-04:00

David Bowie/Brian Eno

All Music Guide:

Not even ending up as a Microsoft commercial theme could quench the sheer power and beauty of "Heroes," arguably David Bowie's finest individual song throughout his varied, fascinating career. The story of its inspiration got a bit muddled over time -- it might have been two employees at the recording studio near the Berlin Wall who Bowie saw in an embrace, or simply two random strangers in the shadow of that Cold War symbol. But inspired by that and with the collaborative help of Brian Eno and, with a jaw-dropping set of solos, guitarist Robert Fripp, Bowie, his backing band and producer Tony Visconti created a true classic. Clearly drawing from the various German influences he had absorbed while still relying on the dramatic power of rock and roll, the song becomes an anthem, Fripp's exquisite work at once celebratory and an electric requiem. That feeling of valediction is reflected in Bowie's lyric about individual connection and response in the face of a crushing, anonymous outside world -- but it wouldn't be half so grand without Bowie's simply breathtaking vocal. Starting with an almost conversational tone, by the end of the song he's turning in a performance that could almost be called operatic, yet still achingly, passionately human.

A Sonata for a Good Man and Woman. When I go to Berlin this summer, I aim to visit the Stasi detention center shown in The Lives of Others as well as the Hansa Ton Studio where Bowie recorded his Berlin trilogy with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti and where U2 recorded parts of Achtung Baby with Eno and Daniel Lanois. Bowie was rooming with Iggy Pop and trying to overcome a cocaine addiction in Berlin; U2 nearly broke up because of artistic differences before writing One together. Fascinating (though, of course, not intended to trivialize the savage political history of the place and time).

The Banality of Song Lyrics

2007-05-20T03:55:00.000-04:00

Pitchfork’s Rob Mitchum minces the new Wilco record, Sky Blue Sky, and calls it “dad-rock.” A sentence from the review:

Case in point, the drowsy opener "Either Way" sleepwalks through a list of indecisive sentiments ("maybe you love me, maybe you don't") before breaking for a Cline solo that's straight-up Weather Channel Local on the 8s.

These are the lyrics of Either Way in their entirety:

Maybe the sun will shine today
The clouds will blow away
Maybe I won’t feel so afraid
I will try to understand
Either way

Maybe you still love me
Maybe you don’t
Either you will or you won’t
Maybe you just need some time alone
I will try to understand
Everything has its plan
Either way
I’m gonna stay
Right for you

Maybe the sun will shine today
The clouds will roll away
Maybe I won’t be so afraid
I will understand everything has its plan
Either way

It’s not Dylanesque poetry but even on the page, those lyrics are something more than a list of indecisive sentiments. Anyone who follows the band, even loosely, knows that a large percentage of the songs on the last four Wilco albums concern Jeff Tweedy’s sometimes quite frayed relationship with his wife (and more generally, with anyone outside of his alienated self). It’s possible that that knowledge is required in imbuing the lyrics to Either Way with a greater meaning than Mitchum recognizes. But if you listen to the song, it sounds like a prayer: for the sun to shine, for fear to abate, for greater understanding of your self and your place in the world (best analogue in the Pearl Jam song catalogue: Sometimes on No Code, also an album opener). It’s in the way Tweedy sings it, with a question and a catch in his voice in every line and with hope for self-knowledge. “Maybe you just need some time alone” suggests trepidation and a situation just about spun out of control. The tentative resolve is more meaningful in light of this sense of genuine risk.

Either Way is not even one of my favorites on SBS and I still see in it much more than indecisive sentiments. This may be a result of the compact struck between artist and fan, the agreement that they will do their expressive best and we will give full faith and credit to each of their paintings or chapters or songs. (No one pays me to pick apart music, so I can speak as a member of the flock rather than as a theologian.) It strikes me however that the banality to which Mitchum alludes is a fundamental attribute of popular music when words and lines are read in isolation and apart from the context of the songwriter’s and listener's life and passion. It is roughly analogous to judges like Antonin Scalia who (sometimes, when it fits their ends) seek to read legal language in “plain text” rather than finding meaning in the words through a broader reading of the historical moment in which a statute was first passed and adapted to fit the current context. It feels to me like a lazy or ends-oriented approach to both law and music criticism, rather than a genuine attempt to engage with the text. Mitchum wanted to find that Sky Blue Sky is dad-rock so he lifted a few lines from the first song and made light of their banality.

In the commentary track to Moulin Rouge, I believe during the Elephant Medley (one of my favorite movie scenes of all-time), Baz Luhrman talks about how music transforms words into poetry. He’s right, of course, and that’s why the film makes such splendid use of modern pop music. Another film more centrally about music that I just saw earlier tonight, Once, has a humorous scene in which the male protagonist strums and sings his romantic history to the female lead on the back of a bus. It is genius because the history is at once banal (his girlfriend cheated on him) but incredibly meaningful for these two people falling for each other. And singing the words allows the cynical, lonely singer-songwriter to add underlying emotional depth, to express how he feels and to connect with this lovely new woman who has come into his life. All of the songs in Once have this quality and provide a rationale for an otherwise questionably fast melding of interests and understandings between the two leads.

The transformation of plain words into something much more profound and connective is magical, alchemical, two separate acts of faith by the songwriter and the listener. It’s an essential part of what makes modern music so important to me. After all, life itself is mind-numbingly banal. It is only through magic, alchemy, and faith that we gain the fortitude to persevere.

Mistaken for Strangers

2007-05-15T14:46:00.000-04:00

The National, record out May 22

For Ganesh

Heartbreaking

2007-05-09T00:55:00.000-04:00

High Times by Elliott Smith, on a double record out today called New Moon.

The Language of Survival

2007-05-07T16:37:00.000-04:00

In Un Coeur En Hiver (A Heart in Winter), a violin maker played by Daniel Auteuil reaches out of his shell to draw the intense interest of a gifted young violinist played by Emmanuelle Beart. His more charismatic business partner is having an affair with her and he sees her professionally at first, at their workshop and her practices. Eventually, he finds himself hovering outside of the studio where she is recording Ravel and goes with her, through an outpouring of rain, to a cafe where he tells her that he loves to see her speak. His quiet but intense presence, ascetic and dedicated nature (he lives in a bedroom at the workshop), and interest in her is magnetic. His subsequent actions are mutedly shocking and an audience shivers at the sight of a cold heart laid bare.

There are more than a few times when I have sat in a car or at a table in a restaurant and done what this "protagonist" does to the young woman in the film. I have abandoned relationships at all points in their life cycle, from infancy to adulthood. After I have destroyed a fledgling relationship, I have been joyous and experienced the relief of freedom from a small suffocating box. In all of these relationships, there are moments of great happiness, but the imperative to break free of another and to resist the unbundling of a tight ball of emotion somewhere inside of me is too great. With loneliness comes freedom, of a particular variety, free to stay within myself and not communicate the feelings I so desperately want to submerge. I am able to act out. No one is there to push back, except my own most destructive and undermining of selves, burdening my mind with guilt and faithlessness, even as I experience my "freedom."

I think of these things in the context of my current relationship. There are days on end when I am unwilling to communicate with anyone. My commitment to solitude is my strongest quality and dates back to my earliest consciousness. The fact that I spend my time in isolation sleeping and seeking solace from television and the internet (much as Ganesh does) makes me question whether it is solitude that I defend. It seems more accurate to call it alienation, from all living people.

There is a wonderful exchange between two friends on love and solitude at Modal Minority, stemming from a Rilke quote partially excerpted here:

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

The writer and his friend have an illuminating debate about the meaning of love between two people, one arguing for Rilke's joint solitude and the other for deconstruction of the self, a merging into the other and his God. The writer concludes:

And yet, and yet. I cannot help but feel that my friend and I might have but a single conception of love. I cannot shake the suspicion that, in love's strange geometry, infinite distance and intersection are one and the same.

Each must, out of his private suffering, find the language that allows him to survive that suffering.

As I work through my feelings in my current relationship with my patient partner, I search for my own language of survival. I don't mean to elevate my "private suffering." I am privileged and empowered beyond my own belief. But I have yet to successfully negotiate a path between my solitude and my deconstruction. It is a crowded path on which I walk with many friends. In our collective search, there might exist a constitutive grammar for our language of survival.

Rage Against the Machine

2007-05-03T02:12:00.000-04:00

The return of RATM:

Rage Against the Machine was just angry, and nearly all business. Back together for its first show in seven years — others are to follow, at least through this summer — it went precisely back to where it left off. Where Manu Chao was noisily border-crossing, setting off sampled sirens to suggest close-range urban bustle, Rage wants its audience to feel the fear and dread of places where the working classes die in their uniforms, and a violent urge to disobey.

Part of the band’s sound, and part of its riffs, come from the hard midtempo funk of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, but their songs are far more rigid in every way — feeling, design, sentiment. Given such a long layoff, the band played hard and well. Still, seven years isn’t such a long time, and all was much the same: Zack De La Rocha’s enraged whine lives intact; Tom Morello still makes his guitar rant and spit, his control over the wah-wah pedal and his guitar’s kill-switch undiminished.

The crowd bounced like springs, and yet, on another level, the music came off almost purely as a political project. Only in a version of Afrika Bambaataa’s “Renegades of Funk” — with lines like “every time I pop into the beat we get fresh” — was it clear that this was only a rock band.

Sky Blue Sky

2007-05-03T01:26:00.000-04:00

Listen to the new Wilco record here -- ff to On and On and On

Brooklyn show June 26

All My Friends

2007-05-03T01:09:00.000-04:00

Franz Ferdinand covering LCD Soundsystem's All My Friends New Order-style

Odyssey

2007-05-02T03:17:00.000-04:00

I feel like Odysseus, many miles from home. Not necessarily literally, but spiritually, a sense that I have not realized my place of belonging in this world, my true identity, my core self.

I am reading this book, Care of the Soul, A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life by Thomas Moore. It was given to me by my friend Marathon who undoubtedly read it in his own pursuits of understanding.

The section on Father in the Myth and Childhood section revolves around the Odyssey by Homer.

I remember reading the Odyssey in high school and recall being entranced, perplexed, and fascinated by the story, its mazes, its parallels, and lessons.

The sense of life as a great adventure in one’s journey home. This is true in anyone’s life, whether we realize it or not, I suppose. The question is how many twists and turns do we face along the way, how many detours do we find until we realize the path we are walking on.

In my present situation, I have often thought that I was in some distant outpost of such a journey, that I have been detoured so significantly, that I am no longer even on the map.

But this book provides me with a different perspective. "A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul."

When I read that, I thought to myself that in my struggles, I have strove to uncover the terrain of my soul, and many times, I did not like what I found. That my experiences, my struggles, my despair have not been in vain, that I am pushing and being pushed to find myself, and in the cocoon of my recent existence, which at times feels suffocating, that I will uncover, realize, and push out to a new found understanding and identity, a transformation of my character.

My decision to marry was one more exploration of the universe, and the answers I am looking for may not be there. But the answers, its questions must still be pursued.

My challenge is to be a man, a Man. When I married, I did not marry as a Man. I was still a child, or an adolescent, or pre-Man. That circumstance is one of the underlying causes of the angst and fault lines in my soul’s terrain now.

So, I take heart, knowing that my journey continues, and with each day, a new experience, and a new realization emerges.

The one thing I can hold onto is my truth, the truth of my experience, my assessment and evaluation of what is transpiring. For honoring the truth of my experience is the foundation of cultivating my soul, the raft that I create traversing this great Ocean of Life, and my constant friend and companion.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought....

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me---
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads---you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are---
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Excerpts from Ulysseus by Tennyson

I am glad that I decided to shut my practice and find something new, something challenging in a different way. It is a sign that I am trying to be my own person, create my own identity. Yes, I wanted to create my own practice, but also it was very much tied to M’s support, hopes, and long-term plans. Also, I did not feel myself being able to grow being in a isolated office, not stimulated by the company of other colleagues and the daily intersections of people and experiences that are prevalent in a larger office.

So I push off professionally, and I seek to push off personally as well. So I do, and so I must.

Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Light My Way

2007-04-26T10:16:00.000-04:00

Don't believe what you hear
Don't believe what you see
If you just close your eyes
You can feel the enemy

I have dreams of knives. Knives lying in front of me on the ground like snakes or sharks circling me. Not piercing me but inching ever so close to me, my stomach, my body, slithering next to me as I feel their sides. I do not know if there is blood.

I am hungry. I go to sleep hungry and wake up hungry. My stomach cries. I finally eat what I wish and yet my stomach still cries.

I was watching MSG’s Fifty Greatest Moments at Madison Square Garden, and I saw the piece on Michael Jordan scoring 55 on the Knicks after his return to basketball from retirement.

As I saw MJ darting and slashing and mesmerizing the Knicks, the court, the audience, I remembered what it was like to think I could do that. Not play bball like him, of course, but to think I could capture that raw energy that elevates himself and all around him, that makes one stand still in awe. I used to think I could aspire to such excellence, maybe not fully achieve it, but aspire to it. What happened to that energy?

I was talking to my friend p-dog and we reminisced about how we aspired in our respective crafts to capture that vitality, that dynamism, to embody that inspiration, and how it has been lost, or forgotten, and how we are striving to recapture it. P-dog is struggling to reflect it in his work. I am trying to remember what it feels like.

I am chemically imbalanced. I am experimenting with the Wellbutrin XL dosage. Used to be 300mg a day, then 150mg a day, then 150 mg every other day at night, now back to 150mg every night. When will I find the right mix?

Should I stay or should I go. I think that if I set off on my own, I could find myself and find my happiness without expectations of someone else. I will still struggle with depression and deal with the anxiety and loss of leaving and not seeing my little moon as much.

It will not be a panacea but I can’t live miserably. Why do I live miserably? It’s easy to blame the other person for not acting and reacting the way you think they should or the way you think that could help you. But what is the other person to do when she sees a dark cloud standing in front of her.

I am so angry but I can’t express it, angry at myself, my spouse, my parents, my family, friends, at the situation. I wish I could be myself and express my anger, my frustration, my hurt. I wish I could be like Jordan, and express the rage of being your best, of trying to be your best.

Someone like Jordan exhibits his artistry yet while doing so, he was gambling, cheating on his wife. What does that mean?

P-dog said that maybe that when one focuses on the brightness that one possesses inside, maybe one does not care so much about the consequences to others. I think that happens, as so many artists are committed to their crafts before they are loyal to the ones around them and what does loyal mean? Does one stay loyal when they themselves are deteriorating?

One thing I do know is that I must follow the light, my light, the light within, and let that light take me where it may. First I have to find that light.

Sometimes I think I have arrived here because of my own arrogance, that I thought I knew what I was doing, that I was achieving something, accomplishing something. But what have I achieved, and at what cost?

In my negative thinking, I can see and hear my friends laughing at me or saying things about me, I don’t know what. But that I failed, that I deserved this. That I brought it on myself. Maybe I have. I always thought I was doing what I wanted or thought I wanted, or thought was right. Maybe my motive was not pure, not right. Maybe it was just a mistake, but maybe there are no mistakes and it is a road that I am to take to my final destination, part of my exploration of the universe.

God, I hope the latter is the case.

D says that knives are important instruments. Surgeons use knives to operate. Knives are what cuts the infant’s umbilical cord from the mother. Knives are what carve beauty and art. What must I carve and what things, attitudes, mindsets must I cut off from my existence.

Can I carve off the extraneous, unhelpful things, and find the light within.

So I try to find the light, and I will try to follow the light.

Baby, baby, baby, light my way.

Brianstorm

2007-04-25T16:29:00.000-04:00

Arctic Monkeys

Dedicated to my friend B____.

Why the Natural

2007-04-23T08:31:00.000-04:00

I have always had an affinity to the movie, the Natural. I’ve never read the book. But the movie pulled at my soft points. A story about a young man who has immense talent and promise as a baseball player but because of immaturity and circumstance is not able to actualize it.

So after a brief encounter with stardom, he vanishes and is not heard from again until he is in his mid 30s. At that point, he has redeveloped his skills but is a middle age player who no one gives much a look.

But something remarkable happens. He is able to demonstrate the talents and skills he has always had. In the course of doing so, he reunites with his childhood love and explains to her that he had lost his confidence, thus explaining his disappearance.

I identify with that story because I feel at the beginning of my professional career, I was at a position where one could say that I had a certain talent and promise and the future opportunities seemed limitless. But things happened. I was suffering from depression. I got sidetracked. I was immature, emotionally dependent, and the place from where I could have fulfilled my promises was gone. I had left it, maybe even unceremoniously.

I never really understood the wisdom of stepping back and assessing the situation. I never really stopped to think of what type of relationship I wanted to be in, or the type of dynamic I wanted to create for my life.

If I did think about the life I wanted to create, it was more material boundaries, not the emotional connections.

So here I am now, in my mid 30s, with the products of that thinking with the material boundaries that I imagined, but not necessarily the emotional connections. I am still suffering from depression, and am not able to have the fulfillment that I want in my relationship, in my life, and I ask why.

Will there be a point where I will begin exhibiting the talent and potential that I once had. Will something remarkable happen to me? It already has with the birth of my child but something that unlocks my personality, unlocks me to be myself. Something that unlocks me from being infantile and dependent.

Something that lets me thrash the ball of life with my own Wonderboy, a release of all the anger and frustration and disappointment and emotion.

I yearn to be at peace. I long to have my gifts, talent, ability, and creativity freed.

Law, Politics, and Alienation

2007-04-21T12:57:00.000-04:00

It was good to see multiple and widespread calls for new or strengthened gun control laws in the moments following the tragedy at Virginia Tech. It was a rare case in which proponents of a "liberal" political position were able to frame an event so as to advance their position. Conservatives have been especially good at framing and claiming events for the advancement of their ideology and electoral prospects, while liberals have sought to complicate rather than simplify the public understanding of these same events.

That being said, an article in the Times today complicates the liberal narrative of the VA Tech tragedy prescribing the need for more gun control laws. It indicates that we had the right federal law on the books to stop Seung-Hui Cho from purchasing the guns that he used to kill 32 people. Anyone who has been involuntarily committed due to mental illness is proscribed from buying guns. Cho was ordered by a state court to submit to an evaluation and outpatient treatment after complaints by two female VA Tech students. Virginia's definition of "involuntary commitment" differs from the definition implied in the federal gun control law. Thus, the court-mandated evaluation and outpatient treatment did not prevent Cho from buying guns under state law but it did do so under federal law. There seems to be another gap, perhaps because of that differing standard, in state reporting of the court findings on Cho's mental state to federal authorities for incorporation into the background check database for gun purchases.

It seems that we could deduce the following from this story: (1) no new federal law was necessary to stop the killings; (2) the state either intentionally or negligently failed to report data to the federal government that would ensure compliance with federal law; and (3) (bringing it back to the conservatives) the Bush Administration has failed to adequately implement and enforce a federal law that might have stopped the killings. Political mobilization and subsequent allocation of resources for enforcement and reporting were the essential elements missing in this story.

One additional thought: the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" formulation used by gun advocates is often made fun of by progressives who appropriately see their framing and lobbying as an extensive effort to protect the profits of gun companies. But perhaps progressives ignore the "people kill people" formulation at our own peril; the NRA is not likely to be a strong lobbying force for expanded mental health services in schools. VA Tech, the Maryland sniper attacks, and Columbine are indications of a torn safety net, some reparable by new laws and programs (more likely in the area of mental health than gun control) and others that can only be mended through a broadly felt impulse to befriend and comfort lost souls at the margins of our families and communities. We either don't want to talk about the scapegoating and alienation of outsiders -- because then we would all be complicit in the loss of life stemming from these tragedies -- or we want to outsource provision of comfort and care to government, which presently is unwilling and incapable of handling the natural and man-made disasters in New Orleans and Iraq. What is our responsibility in this environment and how do we plan to fight the alienation of our own children?

The Natural

2007-04-21T00:45:00.000-04:00

We all thought Roy Hobbs was a myth, fiction, the product of Bernard Malamud’s imagination. Little did we know that he played for the Yankees and his name was Alex Rodriguez.

A-Rod hit two more home runs tonight, and although the Yankees blew the game in the late innings, the A-Rod show is taking on superhero dimensions.

After belting 10 home runs in the first 14 games, including two titanic walk-off 9th inning shots rescuing the Yankees from defeats, A-Rod, already with one homer in the game, in his third at-bat struck an arcing blow to the opposite field that barely cleared the wall in distance, but was hit with such force and gravity that it appeared that centerfielder Coco Crisp, in his vain attempt to jump and catch the ball over the fence, was thrown back over the wall simply by the brush of the ball’s movement into the Red Sox bullpen.

Those are images clearly reminiscent of the Natural, similar to when in 1985, Darryl Strawberry hit a ball off the scoreboard clock in old Busch Stadium in St. Louis. All that was missing was the fireworks.

And that’s what we’ve been getting from A-Rod on what seems like a daily basis.

Now, Malamud had Hobbs go through a slump or two in his magical season, but Hobbs ultimately carried the team to the cusp of glory, before striking out in his last chance to send the New York Knights to the pennant - Malamud’s touch of tragic reality. Hollywood wouldn’t settle for such a downer. So Robert Redford hits a mammoth homer shattering the light tower and cascading sparks of fire from the short circuited bulbs as Redford floats around the bases.

A-Rod will go through a slump or two this season, although at this rate who knows. But the question is what ending is in store for A-Rod this fall? A tragic miss at the end of another superlative season, or a Hollywood finish with a championship as he floats on the adulation of fans knowing that he is now and always will be a true Yankee.

WIP: This week

2007-04-18T11:57:00.000-04:00

Poor people are not well served by the kind of advocacy currently taught and reinforced in most law school clinics. The spread and expansion of law school clinics has been driven by two main justifications: preparation for practice and community service. Clinical legal scholars have, in turn, reflected and promoted a paradigm of practice rooted in client-centeredness. This paradigm offers a pedagogical system to underlie the experiential and service goals of law school clinics and also reinforces a governing form of practice in all sectors of the legal profession, including public interest law. This article argues that client-centeredness and its pedagogical correlates – simulation-based skills training and a nearly exclusive focus on the relationship between a single lawyer and a single client – is not sufficient to sustain effective public interest practice. The context of public interest practice has shifted because of the erosion of the regulatory state, the turn to market-based approaches to poverty and community development, and the infusion of immigrants into the low-wage agricultural and services sectors of the American economy. In addition to more traditional law reform activities, public interest lawyers must now participate in efforts to mobilize people to fight for their interests, particularly in the absence of protections once offered by the state. Client-centeredness relies on a practice narrative that does not accurately portray the reality of public interest practice in this moment and is, therefore, inadequate preparation for public interest practice. Law school clinics driven by a social justice mission can play a key role in public interest practice by participating in mobilization efforts, supporting and stimulating democratic resistance to market forces, and developing newer forms of practice to advance these goals. This shift in clinical focus is an important element in the preparation of students entering public interest practice.

But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you being to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be....

2007-04-16T23:03:00.000-04:00

From the New York Times obit:

"Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No. 1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

`The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,' he wrote.His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, `The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.' "

Appearing on the Daily Show, circa 2005?: [cut and paste the link]

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtmlml_video=18090&ml_collection=&amp;amp;amp;amp;ml_gateway=&ml_gateway_id=&ml_comedian=&ml_runtime=&ml_context=show&ml_origin_url=/shows/the_daily_show/index.jhtml&ml_playlist=&lnk=&is_large=true

The following captured Vonnegut too:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/opinion/13fri4.html

Kurt Vonnegut

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: April 13, 2007

If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.

Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of disillusionment. But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.

He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end. He says not only what no one is saying, but also what — as a mild young person — you know it is forbidden to say. No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith.

So you get older, and it’s been 20 or 30 years since you last read “Player Piano” or “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Vonnegut is not, now, somehow serious enough. You’ve entered that time of life when every hard truth has to be qualified by the sense of what you stand to lose. “It’s not that simple,” you find yourself saying a lot, and the train of thought that unfolds in your mind as you speak those words reeks of desperation.

And yet, somehow, the world seems more and more to have been written by Vonnegut and your life is now the footnote. Perhaps it is time to go back and revisit that earlier self, the one who seemed, for a while, so interwoven in the pages of those old paperbacks.

BQE

2007-04-16T20:41:00.000-04:00

morning soot --
inch behind a cement truck
revolving drum

Lost Classics: Common People (1995)

2007-04-15T21:21:00.000-04:00

Pulp

One Half-Year

2007-04-14T18:22:00.000-04:00

03 Pretty (Ugly Be...

June 2004: Hell’s Kitchen, New York

I felt so ugly before
I didn't know what to do

-- Elliott Smith, Pretty (Ugly Before)

I walked to my car, after watching former friends in a comedic cabaret performance (the less said about the performance the better). My former friend, someone I had lived with and gotten close to, had performed in a set of skits. Every laugh from the audience was an insult. His current roommate brought over my former friend’s mother prior to the show and she hugged me. I was wearing my battered blue Volcom Stone hoodie, a uniform for most of the year. I clung to it (it gave me power when I was otherwise flickering, especially in social settings) because I had found it at a thrift store across from Powell’s in Portland, Oregon the prior year during one of my solo driving trips.

I stumbled to the car in a haze, clutching books given to me by someone who liked me. She had given me a few of the Pramoedya Ananta Toer novels. I was unable to sustain a coherent conversation with her. She hadn’t liked me much a few months earlier when I was another soulless desi boy from the suburbs but then had seen me speak on a panel on the post-9/11 immigration sweeps. As she attempted to engage me in the back of the ratty theater and I mumbled my responses, desperate for her to leave me alone, we were watched by another woman with whom I had broken up a few months earlier. As with most sensitive and intelligent people, her quietness coexisted with a sharp observational quality. She saw the Toer-reader pass the books to me and she saw her attempt to engage me. It was a banner year, three hearts broken (or dented or cracked or whatever), not including my own.

I was an outcaste amongst a small group of Brooklyn friends, mostly desi, and the exclusion oppressed me. No one spoke for me in the group or did anything about my absence at gatherings, other than a few who met me for individual dinners and explained that they regretted the circumstances. The callousness, complicity, and small-mindedness of my former friends pushed me over a ledge into a deep hole. I want to say that it was deeper than any hole in which I had been submerged earlier in my life but as I consider the statement I can’t say it. Each period of my life – adolescence, college, law school, San Francisco, Brooklyn 98-02 – has been marked by a deep hole out of which I have not been sure I could surface. I withdrew into my pilly blue hoodie every time I ventured out of my apartment and I mumbled responses to people that I met. My trust in my self and others was degraded.

* * *

July 2004: Isla Holbox, Yucatan

An embarrassing poem
Was written when I was alone
In love with you

-- Wilco, Wishful Thinking

[journal entry] Started vomiting from Palenque to Cancun. Palenque felt off – the heat during the day caused me to gasp for breath, which was a precursor to the breathlessness I felt in my feverish dream-state last night. The town was so dingy, such a change from San Cristobal – which one starts to think of as representing Mexico, wrongly. Not the height of suffering on any scale, but it makes you think about how alone you are and you become as scared and sad as a child. The rest of the time we have our rationalizations and self-understanding – it all falls away as you are vomiting into a garbage can and shitting your pants at the bus station.

* * *

December 2004: Los Angeles, California

can't count to
all the lovers i've burned through

-- Sun Kil Moon, Carry Me Ohio (via 5 Acts)

I escaped to L.A. before the Fall semester had been fully extinguished, ostensibly to work on my writing in the company of a friend. I shipped out two boxes of books and papers and set about trying to work in various places, including the UCLA law library, Peet’s in Westwood, and a house in Santa Monica where I was staying. What I did is very familiar: I allowed my sleep schedule to get completely off-track, staying up all night and sleeping during the day; compulsively shopped for music; watched every movie released during the late-year Oscar glut; avoided my friend and his family, even as he attempted to draw me into his structured life; got drunk on New Year’s Eve with another friend and pretended to be attracted to random women at bars and on the street; and obsessed about my loneliness and took long drives to random places at odd hours.

I had effectively broken things off with another woman before I left New York, a brilliant, joyous, and perplexing person. That relationship had lasted a month or so, just short of the length of the relationship with my sensitive, intelligent friend earlier in the year. The perplexing one was scheduled to visit her family in Southern California and we had spoken about getting together, but she called one day and told me she couldn’t see me. She had given me refuge during a difficult year. When I returned to New York, I claimed to have gotten my work done during the month in L.A., when in fact I had written just a few paragraphs of my article. I let the precious moments fall out of my grasp.

Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-14T13:23:00.000-04:00

(via wilcoworld.net)

Lost Classics: Subdivisions (1982)

2007-04-10T15:50:00.000-04:00

Rush

Telegraph Avenue

2007-04-08T19:25:00.000-04:00

Press play

07 Gone.mp3

I found myself on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on Saturday, dodging crowds of students, the mentally ill, and street vendors selling band logo patches. It occurred to me that I had navigated this obstacle course on a semi-regular basis ten years ago when I lived in San Francisco. On Sundays I would refrain from responding to messages left by my aunt and cross the Bay Bridge in my Honda Civic hatchback (that I could barely drive, as it was a stick shift with a sensitive clutch and I was not adept) in the early afternoon. I would proceed to Vik's Chaat House, where I would eat and be an audience for the FOB groups and couples who studied at the university or worked in tech. Then I would drive up to Telegraph to hit Amoeba Records and Cody's and Moe's Bookstores.

As has been the case for most of my last twenty years, it was a solitary existence buoyed by musical and literary consumerism. I was dating a woman -- I was 27, she was 22 and just out of an undergraduate business program -- with whom I was in a long distance relationship for six or seven months. Our parents were family friends from the old days in Westchester and we were basically pre-engaged at the end of month one.

I had finally broken up with her after spending a weekend with my law school friends at a conference in New York. We were all meeting in the hotel lobby to go out for dinner on Friday evening and my good friend and his wife were sharing an armchair. When I sat on a sofa across from my girlfriend, she noticed. At some point that weekend another friend took me aside and gently scolded me, asked me what I thought I was doing with this young woman. I had no good answer and we broke up on Sunday. After we had the conversation and she cried, we went to see Secrets & Lies at the Quad on 13th Street and I contemplated how to break this secret to my parents.

When I returned to San Francisco I felt triumphantly relieved of a relationship that I had been struggling to sustain for many wrong reasons. The first days of April 1997 were to be glorious and I planned a few quasi-dates, including one with a brilliant Stanford Law student with whom I had briefly worked. She was bi, had short spiky blond hair, and was a progressive intellectual. She talked about seeing hawks on a trail in Marin County. She represented my future rather than my past. (We went out once. I don't remember if there was a lack of chemistry or whether I made her unattainable myself.) After that short euphoric period (not hyperbole, it was truly euphoric) my life settled into what I described above: coffee at Starbucks on 9th and Irving in SF, followed by the drive to Vik's, and CD and book shopping on Telegraph.

I was obsessed with reinvention in that period, needing to remake myself to be the man I wanted to be but not knowing how to do so. Instead, I shopped and wandered. I had good friends and went on hikes and saw my uncle and aunt periodically. I also did some good things at work (one of the programs I co-founded has flourished in the last ten years). But I most remember that sense of heaviness and lost-ness and my attempts to abate those feelings with Telegraph Avenue.

I felt the heaviness again on Saturday. I found some used Sigur Ros CDs (track one from ( ) caught my attention in the film After the Wedding) and successfully fought off any book-buying. When I went to Cody's and Moe's in those days, I was hungry for intellectual content and searched for critical legal writing and the more academic work of Cornel West. Now I am less enamored with the glamor of intellectualism, having failed in spite of many opportunities to earn depth of thought through hard work in the intervening ten years. In fact, I can now barely stand to browse the law and critical theory shelves and found myself looking for mysteries by Walter Mosley and George Pelecanos in the Pocketbook section.

When I had a quick meal at House of Curries on Durant just before my taxi ride to the airport for my overnight flight, I took in all of the desi kids and Berkeley families eating together in small groups. I sat at a large table for four, with my crinkled yellow/red paper Amoeba bag. I thought about 1997 and all that time had and had not changed.

Press play

Sigur Ros - 2002 (...

Someone Great

2007-04-03T01:19:00.000-04:00

Listen to this poignant track from the new LCD Soundsystem record. (via kissatlanta)

Calexico Covers "Ocean of Noise"

2007-04-01T16:33:00.000-04:00

Beautiful live cover of Arcade Fire. (via Stereogum)

Serenity

2007-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things that I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

This is the Serenity Prayer. Something I have known for a while because it is a mantra of Alcoholics Anonymous and other addiction related programs. I know because my dad is a recovering alcoholic.

This evening, my mom and I went to his 10th anniversary of his sobriety at his AA group. I have gone to AA meetings on occasion since my dad started going to them, well over 10 years ago. Mainly, I went during his anniversaries, when there was a celebration for him.

Tonight, he and another member shared 10 year anniversaries, and a woman celebrated her 5th year anniversaries.

I always feel a kinship when I go to these AA meetings. Now, I don’t have an alcohol-related problem, but there is something about the men and women there that I feel I can identify with.

Of course, the fact that my father is one of them is one reason. But also the fact that those men and women experienced and/or are experiencing things that I have witnessed, and have felt.

Right after graduating from law school, before I realized that I was on the cusp of suffering from a major depression, I attended Al-Anon meetings which are for family members of alcoholics. I found them useful but at the same time, I felt weird about going to these meetings with folks on a Saturday evening when I could be doing something more fun, not that I had those options necessarily, and being with these folks who were for the most part older than my mid-20s self at the time.

But the fact that I could be part of a support group was comforting, even if I could not or did not fully let myself be free to express my thoughts in those meetings. I did not go that many and probably not too consistently for that to really happen. Also, it was before I started my individual therapy so maybe I had yet to feel at ease about my self-disclosure, although I seemed to do it fine with friends.

In any event, the group my father belongs to is mostly made up of middle-age and older white men, made up of blue collar types, bikers, with some women who fall in the same mold, and an occasional person of color. My dad may be the only professional, but I don’t know that and maybe that’s my bias without really knowing what the folks in the group do.

Tonight, besides my dad, there was a light-skinned black man or maybe he was Latino or even Indian, and there was a half-Korean, half-Polish guy, who looks Asian.

The last guy was one of the speakers. What he had to say was really powerful. I mean what he said and what any of them say is not a polished speech or anything. In fact the half-Korean, half-Polish guy (let’s call him Jimmy) started by basically saying that he has a lot of anxieties, he rushes things, he needs to learn how to calm down, and the coffee he was holding in his hand while speaking wasn’t helping matters.

But as he settled himself, he told us about his upbringing, how he was an A student, exceptional athlete up until high school, when his dad left the house, or was kicked out. That’s when he started drinking and getting in trouble.

His dad, who was Polish American, was an alcoholic. He had met his mother while he was stationed in South Korea during the Vietnam War days. He was born in Seoul in 1972 so he was around my age.

He told us he was Polish by saying his last name ends with "ski", and that he’s from New Jersey. He was pretty funny at times, telling us that when he went to high school at Newtown High in Elmhurst, he was just amazed that no one spoke English.

Anyway, what moved me about what he had to say is that he always felt out of place and alone whereever he was. In Korea, kids used to make fun of him because he had the dad with the gold hair. And growing up in New Jersey, he would get the whole "chink", "gook" thing, although as he pointed out - he’s not Chinese.

Alcohol made him feel accepted, made him feel confident. Alcohol led to drier substances that he became hooked on. Jimmy’s dad died while Jimmy was studying at Queens College. His dad was 44 and suffered pneumonia which caused him to develop seizures leaving him in a coma. Jimmy said the fact that he was an alcoholic made him more vulnerable to his condition deteriorating so fast.

He then told us that he went to Japan and got married (to the enemy, he says tongue in cheek, since he’s Korean), had a daughter in 2000. His low self-esteem affected his relationships too. As he said, oh, you like me. Wow, great. I can’t believe it. Of course, his alcohol problems caused him to lose his family, his jobs.

When I go these meetings, I feel comfortable because while I don’t have a drinking problem, on some level I feel I share the underlying root cause of the drinking problem for these folks. Maybe it’s depression, a sense of not fitting in, low self-esteem, not feeling loved enough, not feeling accepted.

So these folks talk about those underlying problems and how drinking was the outlet, and now they are finding a new, constructive way to deal with those issues.

I feel I could use a support group. I don’t qualify to be an alcoholic. (I’ve denied having a drinking problem so many times by now, you must be thinking, maybe this guy has a problem). But maybe I could go to some group dealing with depression, or a group for folks who are having issues in their marriages. I could use a support group.

I particularly appreciate that I identify with folks in the AA group, not on the basis of their race or ethnicity, but because of their condition, their feelings, their insecurities, anxieties, and hope for a new way of living.

That’s why I think I’ve always had as many issues relating to folks who are of the same ethnicity as me as folks who are not. Because it is less about ethnicity and more about who I feel comfortable with, personality, and past shared experiences.

I hear the stories of folks who have been through hell, who saw their life as a prison, and somehow their lives turned around. That gives me hope. I feel at times that my life is stuck, that I can’t find the key that can unlock my spirit so that it can infuse my personality and bring it to life. That I can have the courage to take steps to liberate me from my inertia and confusion.

A support group would help.

I have seen how my dad benefits from his support group. I know he feels that he is in a very difficult situation. How much of that is objectively true, and how much it is based on his perception I won’t say. But he feels he has few outlets, and few people that affirm him.

The AA folks affirm him. At the meetings, he comes to life. All the good things about him come to life.

And so I believe that I could benefit from this social support. I will see what outlets there may be for someone like me.

The bottom line is that the testimonies of the AA members gives them strength and gives them hope.

And seeing that hope, I can feel hope too. My own quest to find myself, to liberate myself continues.

Happy 10th Anniversary, Baba! You’ve done well!

May I have the serenity, courage, and wisdom needed to liberate myself.

Lazy Eye

2007-03-31T03:15:00.000-04:00

Silversun Pickups

To Hell with Blogger - lnf

2007-03-29T15:46:00.000-04:00

To hell with Blogger. I had posted this once, and then I attempted to insert one link - linking Gogol's name to a website about the author Gogol. As soon as I did that, Blogger cut my piece in half.

Nevertheless, I am still determined. Notwithstanding this stupid Blogger word processing system which has conspired to prevent me from posting my inner most thoughts, I persist.

What I was trying to say before I was previously interrupted was that I, for the first time, bought the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. It is amazing to hear how revolutionary and groundbreaking it sounds, for its time, and even for now.

The inside cover talks about how the Beatles wanted to do something different, something that would remake their music, and themselves. In so doing, they remade music itself.

It reminded me about when I was reading the notes to No Direction Home by Bob Dylan where it talked about the impact of Like a Rolling Stone. The combination of the music, lyrics, melody, the length shattered everything that was expected from a rock song, or any song.

As it said, nothing could ever be the same again.

These themes resonate with me because I am looking for my Sgt. Peppers, my Rolling Stone. Something which will remake me, my perspective, my existence heretofore.

In one sense, the birth of my daughter has already done that. But I feel as if I have yet to tap into my creative and intellectual energies.

I saw the Namesake last week, and the film really moved me. I cried from the beginning to nearly the end. There are many parallels with my own life: the Bengali immigrant story, the experience of having a namesake. But what moved me was first, the sense of home I felt in seeing this Bengali family on screen. The familiarity, warmth, intimacy, safety, comfort - things that maybe I don’t fully feel at home now. It’s better, but seeing the film made me reminisce about my growing up. That is not to say that my upbringing was some utopia. Far from it. But that’s for another story.

More importantly, was the quest of Gogol to find himself. He who was named by his father after the author Gogol. His father’s words echo in my head, Explore the world, you will never regret it.

For long, Gogol did not embrace his past, but his father’s death forces him to confront it, and then the breakup of his marriage gives him the jolt to go and explore his past, himself, and who is to be.

I am looking to find myself. I am searching to find what inspires me, motivates me, thrills me.

I am looking for my breakthrough moment which will liberate me or begin the process of liberation. Maybe it has already begun.

Finding the steps towards my liberation and having the courage to take those steps, that would be the greatest accomplishment of my life, the greatest accomplishment of any life.

And so what if I've been able to fix this post the way I like it, for this morning’s travails, to hell with Blogger.

Art Can Be the Way People Live

2007-03-28T20:20:00.000-04:00

"We can approach our lives as artists, each and every one of us," he said. "It's a choice people have. You don't have to make houses the way people always have. If you choose to, you can make every action a creative act."

You've Got to Hide Your Love Away

2007-03-26T01:15:00.000-04:00

I Am Sam Soundtrac...

Your Soul to Keep

2007-03-24T22:27:00.000-04:00

I’ve been hearing my biological clock tick since I was a small child. Not so much the negative pressure to have children before it’s too late that most associate with the clock, but more the positive yearning to have a baby in my life, a little wriggly thing for which I could care and watch grow into a little being.

I am an only child and this explains some of the yearning. I was an intensely lonely child and it seemed to me that only a baby brother or sister could pierce that loneliness. It was not that I was unloved by my parents, it’s just that I was alternately bathed in 125 percent of their gaze, concern, and attention and then lost them completely to the social-cultural work that they did nearly every weekend for a good part of my childhood. In my grand plan, I would win an ally, someone to divert parental attention while I did what I did on my own – read, listen to songs on the radio, watch TV – and who would give me someone to play with and talk to on the afternoons after school when my mom was not at home or at the church halls where my parents organized meetings and events for the Indian community. I think in my early vision of this eventuality, I pictured a boy who was like me in physical description and mental disposition but different too, perhaps a little more mischievous and garrulous.

At a young age (I seem to tie all significant occurrences in my childhood to when my dad was 42 and I was 8, for no apparent reason other than the understanding of age that I gained at that point in time) I used to ask my parents why I could not have a little brother. My mother – starting a mode of relation that would repeat itself over and over until the time that coincided with the start of my first adult relationship in college – revealed too much in response. In 1972 there had been another baby, a little boy, he had died in a miscarriage, caused by the stress on my mom imposed by her sister-in-law in New Jersey, and while my mom was in the hospital my father had gone to a family gathering celebrating his brother’s birthday (items 1 and 2 on my mother’s bill of particulars against my father). The lost fetus had no sex but I pictured a miniaturized boy like myself, lost in a puddle of human matter and blood. We had been so close and then things had gone terribly awry. I came to understand that my parents had been unable to conceive since then (again, too much goddamned information).

When we went to India in 1980, we decided to adopt a child. My mother’s sister in Bombay had adopted a little boy whom we all loved and she connected us with an agency. We met a social worker at her office in the central city and she interviewed each of us in succession. She was beautiful, modern, English-speaking, and she seemed to care and want the best for us and the little children that were in her charge. She asked me why I wanted a sibling, and I said I wanted a little brother, “someone to play with and stuff.” She gently explained to me that when a family already had a boy it was their policy to make a girl available for adoption. That was a new thought for me. I thought: What do girls do? Would she play with me? Yes, she too would relieve me of my loneliness. I would be a big brother and protect her and she would think I was the greatest big brother in the whole world. That would be pretty cool. (I would have read The Bridge to Terabithia by this point and may have thought of the sweet relationship that developed between the boy and his little sister in the novel.) I was on-board with having a sister and let the beautiful social worker know it.

The social worker came to visit my grandfather’s flat – where we stayed on visits with another of my dad’s brothers and his big, bossy wife – as a proxy for the home visit that she was required to make prior to adoption. My kaka and kaki had no children and had cared for my father’s mother while she was bedridden with arthritis for nine years until she died in 1976. Now they took care of my grandfather, who was quiet, authoritative, and quick to anger. But he was sweet to me and we had become very close when he had visited the U.S. for most of 1977. I remember leaning into the folds of his soft dhoti cloth, listening to his stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and taking in the not-unpleasant smell of snuff, which he carried in a little tin box with a flip-top. The flat was a somewhat dingy three rooms and a great blue veranda, sink in the entrance hallway, the toilet a hole in the floor with a wooden chair placed on top. My grandfather would bathe me every day using buckets of hot water that my uncle collected in the morning. The putative purpose of the social worker’s visit was that she was a college friend of my mom and wanted to spend some time with her. (My parents had decided not to reveal their plan to anyone until things were closer to final.) She sat in our living room and was friendly and observant. Then she left and we hopefully anticipated her approval of our application.

The little baby was tiny and my mother held her in the backseat with the social worker and my masi while I sat in the front and strained to look at her. She was wearing an old-fashioned pink bonnet and was swathed in a blanket. I think she was born small and fragile. We took her to a doctor for a check-up and then returned her to the social worker until all was final and we could take her back with us to the U.S. Later, my parents would discuss whether she was especially pretty or not: my mom would say yes, my dad would say no, not especially.

She never made the trip and we came back to our house in suburban New York sadder and a little more broken then before we had left. My grandfather had said that he would fast to death if we brought the child to his home and the immigration rules dictated that my mom would have to remain in India with the child for up to six months, which of course was long enough for my grandfather to bring his threat and curse to pass. My grandfather said that he was opposed because the child’s status was unknown and it was likely that she was born of a prostitute, thus lowering our family’s status in society (as if our extended family did not have enough degrading scandals under his leadership) and that he feared that the girl and I would have illegitimate relations at some point (again, highly ironic and ugly in light of certain family history in the generation before my father’s). My parents gave in then. It’s only recently that I have understood how they betrayed themselves and their marriage in that moment. You face a situation and make a decision, and it permanently alters and colors your life, until the moment you die. (When my grandfather died in 1994 when I was in law school, I chose to interview with corporate firms for a summer job rather than make the trip to India for the funeral.)

As I have aged into my thirties, a few of my girlfriends have questioned my desire, burning just under the surface, to have children. In my two most recent serious relationships, that desire has been perceived as undermining my feelings for them. Am I with them so that I could have children? Did I really love them? My unrequited yearning has collided with their feelings of anxiety about childbirth and their contemplated loss of self. It doesn’t help that I used a picture of myself with the infant daughter of a friend for my internet dating profile or that my gaze is drawn to every baby and child that we cross on sidewalks and in restaurants.

Many of my friends have had children (most are on their second now) but only one has given me an official role in his daughter’s life, as a godfather. Unfortunately, now three years old, she is across the country but I keep up with her (with a tender heart) through my friend’s blog. (Most recently, she got up from her big girl bed in the middle of the night and fell asleep on a pile of laundry in the hallway.) The couple above me just had a little girl and I hear her plaintive little cries when I am putting myself down at 3 in the morning, after a night of internet surfing or work or drinking with friends. It makes me happy to know that she’s there, above me.

Who am I? Lost and Not Found.

2007-03-21T14:20:00.000-04:00

I want to write a definitive statement of who I am. I don't like myself. That is not entirely true; I like my spirit and what that represents. But how that spirit manifests into my personality, crystallizes into human form, I don't like.

In realizing how I feel, I am apt to blame others - my wife, for presenting a difficult and challenging presence in my life, although I would face those difficulties and challenges nonetheless; - my parents, for not guiding me to understand my personality, my depression, and the fact that my happiness should be paramount. It is easy to blame, of course. But ultimately, I assume the final responsibility of how I feel.

And since I assume the final responsibility, only I can change and transform how I feel and myself. The problem is that the paths towards those changes and transformations are paths I don't know or don't see, and the ones that I do see are ones in which I stand paralyzed from taking steps.

That is why I feel like a failure; I don't seem to be able to get out of this paralysis. I think this is why people contemplate suicide, because they live with pain, and they can't bear it anymore, and don't see how the pain will ever end.

I have a daughter, and I know to her, I am no failure. But how do I live for myself.

I was really moved to start writing here after hearing a NPR piece about depression by someone my age, 35, who deals with it. He even analogizes the Matrix, which led my wife to question whether I actually was the author.

My wife, she is a good person. A rough personality, particularly for me, but a good heart and soul. S he deserves so much better, a loving, affectionate, enthusiastic husband, who is a good provider, all the things that I can't seem to be.

I probably deserve better too, the chance to feel better about myself. But how? How do you make that happen?

Writing is a release, a means, not necessarily the panacea. I am lost and not found.

The real question is who am I? Who is lostandfound? Attorney, intellectual, family man, political, community person, who am I? How will I remember my life and how will I be remembered?

As someone who suffered and in the process, helped a few folks along the way?

If I am not meant to do anything great, whatever that means, than should I not at least find my inner happiness? Isn't that the ultimate measure of greatness or success, even if you achieve worldly greatness.

That is why I feel as if I failed or am failing. I can't seem to find happiness.

So then what? I am lost and not found.

Why Three Burials - Redux

2007-03-20T22:56:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to be writing now on this new site with my buddies. I may not be able to transfer my previous posts here, but I'll provide this link: Three Burials, and repost my first post plus the comments, including the fabulous rap by ganesh, as I continue my explorations here.

-----------

Originally Posted December 14, 2006

I chose Three Burials because I decided I would try to keep a blog around the time I saw the Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the movie by Tommy Lee Jones. This blog is not a tribute to that film but I found the title to be an apt metaphor on which to choose a title.

That being said, I did find the movie to be well done. Some friends had good but not glowing reviews. I admired it as a testament to one man's devotion to a promise made to a friend and his own sense of justice.

For me, Three Burials represent the three times in my life in which I have faced major or near major depressive episodes. At least these were the three most identifiable times. Before the first time, which was a couple of years out of school, it is possible I had some minor shocks or episodes but I did not recognize it as such. The second time was two years into my marriage, and the third was earlier this year.

In this metaphor, each episode is akin to a death. Hence the Three Burials. But from those deaths, there is creation. And that is what I hope this blog will serve as - a forum for creative expression and thought, and observations about politcs, society, and life. That is being very broad, I know. But that's how I see it now.

So a burial need not be an endpoint, but a doorway to another realm. Some call it reincarnation, others see it as a resurrection, but in either form, it is creation. This blog is not meant to glorify or romanticize death by any means, particularly the notion of death as taking one's life. Rather, I am trying to look at how depressive times can be like one being in a cocoon, and as the time passes, something beautiful emerges.

Well, anyway, I may just go ahead and change the title if this whole thing gets too morbid.

Since this is my first post, I thank Ganesh at Brooklyn Masala and PJAddict for encouraging me to write, even if it is a few sentences. I hope I will continue to keep posting and not be one of those blogs (who have taken all the cool names) where the posts have stopped a few years ago, but the damn cool names are still taken.

See ya later.

-----------------

Ganesh said...
right on, buddy! this is great, and you express yourself really well!
December 14, 2006 5:55 PM

lbc said...
you're the man. i've bookmarked your site and am now going to check it 20 times a day, like i do with brooklynmasala. it's nice to have talented brothers. . . .
December 14, 2006 8:29 PM

Ganesh said...
ok, i'll admit that i live on this site now. i've stopped eating and spend my days in prayer for more blog posts. keep 'em coming, big guy! ok, i'm ordering take-out now.
December 15, 2006 9:41 AM

Ganesh said...
take-out was tasty but not as tasty as more posts. yummm....D-lish, baby!
December 15, 2006 9:58 AM

Ganesh said...
This is what I wrote on the way to work this morning:

Yo, yo! One, two, one two.
Yeah, I'm a blogger.
I'm hip to that fact.
I can't paint worth shit,
and don't ask me to act.

I just write words
to make the ladies swoon,
profound thoughts
to make your mind go BOOM!

Now there're two fly gents
I'd be happy to see
Enter the Blogosphere
WITH ME!

Yo, yo! One, two, one two.
Yo, yo! One, two, one two.

Hold it, man! What's that sound?
It's the new beat rhythms
of lostandfound!

My boy's tearing up
the blogosphere
Shoutin' out in Queens
I'M HERE! I'M HERE!

But what the fuck's up
with that motherfuckin' name?
He ain't lost for shit!
My boy's in his game

with eloquent words
to express his day.
Instead of mere black and white,
he shows us the gray!

Respect the gray...Respect the gray...

Yo, man, spit out the ground
you just fuckin' licked'
cause sauntering over
is smooth PJAddict!

He gets his name from a Seattle band
that he followed 'cross the States,
singing notes in every land.

When my boy starts his blog,
he'll school us soon on songs.
Fuck that art and law shit, man...
Let's go right us some wrongs!

So these are my boys
in the GetFreshFunBunch.
We always meet for dinner
'cause we ain't got time for lunch!

Yo, i said we always meet for dinner
'cause we ain't got time for lunch!

December 15, 2006 11:50 AM

lostandfound said...
ganesh,that was awesome. i didn't know you wrote such amazing rap, but of course, rap is nothing but poetry put to beats, and poetry flows out of ganesh like honey out of a bee.

rap on! rock on!

lostandfound, maybe i'll switch to lnf
December 15, 2006 4:20 PM

Ganesh said...
post today, bro, even if it's just a few sentences.
December 18, 2006 9:27 AM

tamasha said...
OK, I just almost died laughing reading these comments.

The elephant-man is right - keep them coming!
January 1, 2007 10:03 PM

lostandfound said...
thanks tamasha, the elephant man (i like that name) has mad skills, an inspiration to us all.
January 2, 2007 12:50 PM

So Here We Are

2007-03-17T15:05:00.000-04:00

Neon Bible

2007-03-15T20:51:00.000-04:00

Been listening to Neon Bible on my way to and from work in my new (used) trusty Honda Civic. It's a pretty astounding record:

* Though (2) Keep the Car Running is rousing and urgent, the record really starts with the quiet and dark (3) title track
* Everyone has heard (4) Intervention and it is even better clean (and without the annoying DJ at the end!), the pattern of a build-up to an almost-orchestral close reoccurs on this record over and over and never gets monotonous
* (6) Ocean of Noise is the first great timeless song on the record, stunning musically and lyrically, even better than the excellent Crown of Love on Funeral, it sounds like the accompaniment to one of Ganesh's outstanding personal posts on Brooklyn Masala, ending with wailing, mournful horns and strings
* I hear the influence of Joy Division and New Order in (7) The Well and the Lighthouse, but maybe it's in the ear of the beholder, as the breakdown is more doo-wop than British postpunk
* Critics keep saying (8) (Antichrist Television Blues) is Springsteenesque, maybe it's the first person "Dear God I'm a good Christian man," the despair and desperation of a man losing his faith in the face of the conditions of his life
* (9) Windowsill is the second great timeless song on this record, anchored by the refrain "I don't want to live in my father's house no more," maybe the best song in circulation about life in the Bush years ("I don't want to fight in a holy war"), it's about leaving Texas and taking refuge in Montreal, the paradoxical power of modern music ("MTV, what have you done to me?"), with a simple metronomic guitar chime as its foundation, the lyrics rise and fall majestically, like seeing the valleys and mountains of the Canadian Rockies from the air

* Like Keep the Car Running, (10) No Cars Go is hopeful in the midst of the dark observations of the other songs, it is also rousing and compelling, reminiscent of Rebellion(Lies) on the last album, the multiple musical parts (including a fluttery flutist at the breakdown) are wonderful and create an aural soundscape for the escape ("Women and children, let's go!/orphans, let's go!"), closing with the patented chorus of AF voices and a lifting orchestral arrangement
* (11) My Body is a Cage is the third great timeless song on the record, fusing the personal and political themes of the record, despondent ("I'm living in an age/that calls darkness light") but hopeful ("My mind holds the key"), listen for the full power of the pipe organ at 2:10 and a final upward, swooping turn at 3:35 with a moving organ part that is a fitting end to this record

I want to compare Neon Bible to Joshua Tree, but it wouldn't be entirely correct. The great songs on NB are greater than on JT, though JT is a total masterpiece from first song to last and this record picks up steam as it progresses. Maybe it's more the lyrical content, the feeling beneath the songs, and the creative musicality (it would be a treat to have AF produced by Eno/Lanois at some point). I hope that when you get the record, you enjoy it as much as I do.

MLK, Obama

2007-01-16T23:55:00.000-05:00

I had hoped to write something about MLK day yesterday but did not get around to it. But today's news of Barack Obama announcing his decision to run for President is historic and honors the legacy of MLK.

There have been other African Americans who ran for President: 1972 - Shirl ey Chisholm (first African American woman elected to Congress), Jesse Jac kson in 1984 and 1988, and (I am sorry to have to mention this) Alan Keyes sometime in the 1990s. There may have been others.

Obama brings something different than those candidates. He has a transcendent quality which allows non-Blacks to view him as not just a Black candidate while at the same time he is not viewed by those in the Black community as abandoning his roots or heritage or the politics of the Black community. It is an intangible element, an element that B obby Kennedy certainly had. That different constituents and communities are able to view him as representing the best of their particular values, and by embodying a spirit which is broad enough to attract disparate communities, he is seen as a uniter, and thereby, in him, they see hope.

I would say Jesse Jackson had a transcendent quality in his oratory; he could inspire and galvanize you right out of your seat. And if you listened to him, he preached a philosophy that sought to unite the poor and the middle class to fight against common enemies of greed, poverty, and economic hardship. That was the Rainbow Coalition. But he was never viewed seriously outside the Black community; he was viewed as too radical, too outside the mainstream. I don't think it was his involvement in the civil rights movement, but certain anti-Semitic comments which were alluded to him. In any event, I supported him.

I was too young to know much about Chisholm's campaign, and I am not even going to mention Mr. Keyes, and will refrain from using the moniker given to him by Borat out of respect for MLK.

But Obama is the real deal: community organizer, attorney, state senator, and Senator. He also carries the imprimatur of elite status which for better or for worse soundly establishes his mainstream acceptablity: graduate of Columbia Unversity and Harvard Law.

Some say that he is too inexperienced to serve as President. Of course, it was another Illinoisian who ran for President after two years in the Senate and a stretch in the state senate: Abraham Lincoln. Those are high standards to meet and it is not fair to raise such comparisons.

But what Obama brings is the ability to inspire people beyond the ordinary politics, beyond partisanship, and most importantly for me, still bring a progressive vision to people. I have always believed that a progressive politics is not just a liberal or conservative one but one that demonstrates that social justice, and economic opportunity, among other progressive values benefit the majority of poor and middle class people.

Another parallel characterstic is that while MLK and RFK both opposed the Vietnam War during their times, Obama is also steadfastly against our current war in Iraq. The progressive vision is that misplaced militarism is not consistent with a just and conscientious society. Such militarism deprives resources that can ease the suffering of many people, whether it is economic hardship and poverty, lack of health care, lack of housing, inadequate education, and the list goes on.

MLK said it best in his historic 1967 antiwar speech at Riverside Church:

"A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. S o I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

I dare not say that Obama is akin to MLK, and only time will tell if he can inspire the populace like RFK, but I am encouraged that his candidacy may push the country's politics in a new direction.

When MLK was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was in Indiana giving a speech to a Black audience when the news came in. He delivered the news to the crowd and in his eloquence captured the outrage and anger of the people and offered a way to channel that into a transformative politics.

In honor of MLK, in the words of RFK, and in the hopes of a Obama candidacy that can inspire people the way those two leaders did before both were assassinated within two months of each other in 1968:

Indianapolis, Indiana - April 4, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy

Ladies and Gentlemen - I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because...

I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

For those of you who are black - considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible - you can be filled with

bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

(Interrupted by applause)

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

(Interrupted by applause)

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Darryl Hunt Free!

2007-01-12T00:01:00.000-05:00

Tonight I had the opportunity to see an excellent film which tells a tragic but ultimately triumphant tale: The Trials of Darryl Hunt. It is the true story of a man wrongly accused, convicted, and sentenced for the murder and rape of a woman in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The woman was white, Darryl Hunt is black.

The incident took place in 1984, and it wasn't until 2003 that Darryl Hunt was finally released from prison, after numerous trials, appeals, and hearings.

In 2004, even the U.S. Supreme Court denied Darryl Hunt a last chance to have a new trial. But where the legal system failed, faith and science working together brought Darryl's freedom. Faith, of course, because of the firm and unwavering belief of Darryl and his supporters that he was innocent and he was right, and that the truth would prevail. Science because it was the emergence of DNA testing technology which was able to finally exonerate Darryl.

Darryl's faith and commitment was so strong that after serving five years, in 1989, he was offered a plea deal before the start of his second trial that he would be released on time served if he pled to a lesser murder charge. Despite the fact that Darryl could walk out free, the fact that he would have to admit commiting a crime which he did not do was against his conscience and self-integrity.

There are so many stories of wrongfully convicted or imprisoned persons finding and gaining their freedom: Ruben Carter, Nelson Mandela, and so many others that we hear about. There are fictional tales too such as Shawshank Redemption or The Count of Monte Cristo.

It may appear that after a while, you may feel that you have heard this story many times, and the tale of the wrongfully imprisoned would not affect you.

But I can tell you that this story, as I am sure all of these similar stories, will leave you heartbroken and thrilled no matter how many times you have heard a story such as this.

The combination of racism, corruption, negligence, and criminal conduct by the police and District Attorney's office created a personal hell for Darryl which through his faith he was able to survive.

There seems to be something about someone who is wrongfully imprisoned and seeks his freedom which seems to talk to me, and many folks I would think. Maybe because such a person evokes sympathy and is an example of injustice clearly defined. Maybe it is because we see an innocent person suffer unnecessarily, and we identify with him especially if he is also good and decent. Or maybe it is because we ourselves find ourselves in circumstances that we cannot necessarily control or change, circumstances that we think may be limiting, restricting, or even imprisoning, and we don't see how we will emerge from it. And we see the story of someone like Darryl Hunt, and how he maintained his faith while acting to win his freedom, and we are inspired and humbled that we too should persevere and have faith.

In the film, Darryl's strongest advocate, Larry Little, who had organized the Black Panther Party in North Carolina in his earlier days, says the struggle is akin to man trying to move a mountain with a shovel. It is an impossible task, but to not make the effort in light of the circumstances would drive you crazy. So you fight, not knowing if you will win, but so you can have your sanity, your dignity, your sense of meaning in this world. That is all.

I remember reading the Alice Walker book, Possessing the Secret of Joy, many years ago after I got out of college. It is a book dealing with genital mutilation in Africa, and at the end of the book, when the protagonist faces the firing squad, the message is laid out before her in a banner unfurled which reads, RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY!.

Well, I think I have spoiled enough plots and endings for one post. I want to encourage people to learn about different organizations fighting for wrongfully convicted persons. Some of them are listed at the film's website. These include:

North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence
The Innocence Project
Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama
Truth in Justice
The Center on Wrongful Convictions
The Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice
Southern Center for Human Rights

------------------------

Another dimension to the issues surrounding prisons deal with how certain counties and districts use prison populations in their census to qualify for funding, social services, political representation via redistricting, and many other resources while the prisoners themselves see no fruits from this practice. In fact, prisoners cannot even vote. One cannot think of the Constitution's original sin of acceding to slavery in exchange of counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person for census enumeration, thus allowing slaveholding states to benefit from the slave population both in their labor and their physical presence, while providing them no rights or liberties.

An excellent website and group addressing this is Prisoners of the Census.

Godfather's Revolution

2007-01-01T00:24:00.000-05:00

Just some addtional reflections on James Brown and his legacy. I was listening to the Underground Railroad, an exceptional hip hop show on WBAI - 99.5 FM on Saturday nights from midnight to 2 A.M with Jay Smooth.

He was comenting on the significance of JB. An interesting point that he made was that yes, many recognize him for the innovative sound and music he introduced, and some recognize him as a pioneer of hip-hop by providing so many of the foundational beats which were sampled and the basis of many a hip hop track.

But, according to Jay Smooth, his influence went a dimenstion further. Prior to his sound, the focus of American music was the melody with the rhythm or percussion being the background. What JB did was place the rhythm or percussion in the foreground and made that the focus relegating the melody to the background. As a result came the explosive and electric sound that we identify JB with, and which so many afterwards adopted.

This departure went one step further: in making the rhythm or percussion the foreground, he did not limit the rhythmic sound to just that of the drum. Instead, every instrument from horn, guitar, organ, piano, and even the voice became a percussive instrument. The beat was elemental in every expression of sound. Thus, we hear the horns and other instruments in the now familiar herky-jerky, stop-and-go sound.

The fact that the voice could be used as a percussive instrument was revolutionary in American popular music. Of course, that tradition existed for ages in the African and African American music and oral tradition.

However, its use by JB laid the foundation of rap itself, which became a musical genre completely centered on the fact that the voice is a percussive instrment, the rhythm, the beat itself.

Understanding that dimension of JB's influence allows one to see that it is no wonder that so many hip-hop and rap artists looked to JB's music for their elemental beats. Hip-hop and rap was a part of an innovation that JB had himself introduced in American popular music, and which embodied age-old African and African American practice: the power and prominence of the beat, the rhythm.

This was the revolution which the Godfather wrought.

Little Moon

2006-12-29T00:28:00.000-05:00

One of the joys of my life is my 19 month old daughter. Let's call her Little Moon. Why? Well, she has a list of favorite words: cat (the first English word she spoke - my parents have a cat), plane (we live on the route to JFK airport so whenever a plane flies by overhead, she rushes to the back door to see it fly into the distance, and proceeds to say bye-bye), and of course, moon.

One of her favorite books is naturally, Goodnight Moon. That is where she learned the word while reading the book with her mother who diligently taught her this and many other words she now knows.

She is very sharp in identifying images of the moon. It could be the actual moon in the sky - full or crescent. A picture in a book. Or funny enough, any image that resembles it. One day we were walking down the steps to our basement. The stairs are wood and have random carvings on it that came about naturally and over the years. As she is walking down the steps holding my hand, she sees a little curve line creating a lighter shade in the dark wood. The line can't be more than half an inch. But sure enough she points to it and says, "Moon!"

That was very sweet.

We have a routine where after I come home, we will go to our bedroom and I will turn on the cd player and we'll dance to songs. I started this after I bought the Best of R.E.M. cd, so when we dance it's to R.E.M. The first track on the cd is of course, Man on the Moon. So as we are dancing and looking at ourselves in the mirror in our bedroom, as soon as she hears the refrain, "Do you believe, they put a man on the moon, man on the moon," she will join in and say "Moon!"

Another game we have is playing ball. Our basement is such that the stairs come down in the middle of the basement so that you can walk around the stairs in a circle. We have one of those big bouncy balls, the kind that you see in supermarkets in those receptacles stacked up high, about the size of a soccer ball but light as air. So we would kick the ball to her and she learned to kick it. I'm pretty sure we started this during the World Cup or around then. She kicks funny. It's not a kick where you bend your knees and let your calf portion generate the momentum. She does a straight leg kick, scissor style and it's so cute because you know she's trying.

So in the basement, I try to get her to play soccer with me and kick the ball. Except whenever we start doing that, she, for some reason, wants to just run and run around the stairs in the circle fashion. That's her enjoyment and excitement. So what I try to do is to kick the ball to her as she's running, and at times she will kick it if it comes in her path. But the game for her has become to avoid being caught by the ball as I kick it to her. So she runs and runs, and I try to catch her by kicking the ball in her direction so the ball reaches her and so she can kick the ball.

My enduring image is of her zooming across the basement tile floor around the bend of the stairs while I am just at the previous bend, as I try to kick the ball in vain to reach her as she, her back to me, disappears from my view.

She has become so fast that I can't kick the ball at each end and catch up to her, so I cheat and wait til she comes around and laps me basically and kick the ball to her then.

These are the joys of Little Moon.

-------------------

Comments:

Ganesh said...
dude, this was a wonderful post! i especially love the paragraph describing dancing to REM when you get home from work.you should make a post about how LittleMoon calls every animal a cat.
December 29, 2006 12:53 PM

lostandfound said...
you're right. but she's graduated to calling a dog, a dog. except now she calls other four legged animals she can't recognize, like rabbits and squirrels, dogs!
December 29, 2006 1:22 PM

lbc said...
great post. hurray for little moon!
December 30, 2006 3:59 AM

tamasha said...
You should set up a video camera (or whatever they're called these days) to record one of your dance sessions. It will make her roll her eyes when she's 15, but it will be really special to her later.She's got quite the sparkle in her eyes.
January 1, 2007 9:59 PM

lostandfound said...
hi tamasha, that's a great idea. it's so easy to let moments slip by without saving them for later.thanks for the compliment. do you have kids?
January 2, 2007 12:48 PM

Sujata said...
I think she looks like me, don't you think? When I was like 2 with the crazy curly hair? And I cried all the time? And you would be like uhhh, why are you crying? Haha, yup, she is SO like her pishi!
January 2, 2007 4:19 PM

lostandfound said...
sujata, yes, you're right
January 2, 2007 5:17 PM

James Brown is Forever Alive - lnf

2006-12-26T00:40:00.000-05:00

James Brown is dead. No, not the 1992 L.A. Style track which tried to negate the need for soul in dance tracks. The real living legend, "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" is really gone, having passed on Christmas Day.

JB was a special figure in my own exploration into music, soul, race, and expression. I don't know when was the first time I saw a video of JB, but I knew it was electric. I think it was on Video Music Box, the afterschool rap music show on Channel 21 that showed all the cool videos.

Seeing JB do his moves just made me want to be like him. And so when I was alone in my own room, dorm room, or apartment, I would get the hair brush out like it was my mike, put on the JB tape, and let it rip. For me, he represented a certain fearlessness about himself. Not afraid to let his soul come out, let it all hang out. And I admired that, primarily because my own personality was not like that. But certain situations or songs would bring that out in me, and I liked that new me, as fleeting as it was.

So JB was a reminder of what can be, of what I can be.

He was also a pioneer of sound and beat and dance, influencing the whole of hip-hop and rap. He contributed many great tracks which have a life of their own: I Got You (I Feel Good), Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, Say it Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud, Sex Machine, just to name a few.

Watching him and listening to him was a liberating experience. It is like how they say, when one person is liberated, it cannot help but have a liberating effect on those around him.

Sex Machine affirmed my machismo. I'm Black and I'm Proud was the basis of one of the placards we used during an anti-racist march after the beating of a young Indo-Caribbean in Richmond Hill. Our placard read "I'm Brown and I'm Proud." Newsday ran a picture of two little girls, twins actually - maybe 6 or 7, each holding signs saying "I'm Brown and I'm Proud."

So I was not such a follower of JB where I went to any of his concerts or had a big collection of his albums - I had some. But his influence on me and the world extended far beyond his music.

And so, even as his own personal history was uneven and, at times, troubled, JB was a legend, a true American original representing agony and exultation, pride and pain. Most importantly, he did it with soul, his soul, which he was never afraid to express, and which in turn liberated so many others to express their own soul, even if it was for a brief moment with the hair brush while alone in one's world.

'Tis Not Too Late to Seek a Newer World - lnf

2006-12-18T00:58:00.000-05:00

Since this is the first blog that I've ever started, I am uncertain of really what to write. I look at my friend's blog, brooklynmasala.blogspot.com, and I think, man, that is how a blog should be or at least that's the way I would like to create a blog - part storytelling, part reflection/journal, part history, part art and poetry, and part political news and exhortation.

But I'm not there yet, nor do I have ideas of how to get there. So I'm focusing on just getting my thoughts down on the screen, and see what flows.

I'll start with some major influences, though they will date me.

But before I do, I revisited my friend's blog and saw that his first entries were very much like journal entries - a series of thoughts, reflections, and experiences. No graphics and very simple. So that makes it a little bit more manageable for me.

Among my influences growing up were reading about figures such as Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Gandhi - very common figures I would say for anyone influenced by progressive politics and social justice issues.

With Kennedy, I was fascinated by his transformation or evolution toward the end of his life and political career, how his politics seemed to have depth. That there was a underlying philosophical and poetic influence to his politics, thus giving him a passion that a regular politico just doesn't have.

I remember reading Arthur Schlesinger's book and Jack Newfield's book on Kennedy and was inspired by references to poetry, Greek and otherwise.

One such poem that I really liked was this poem by Tennyson. The title is Ulysses, and it refers to the great epic, the Odyssey. But I knew it from the line "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."

IT little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

What drew me to this poem, aside from Kennedy's own liking of it, was the sense that life is arduous, full of struggle, but nevertheless there is and can always be new beginnings. There is also this sense of a kindred spirit between Ulyssess and his fellow journeymen. It reminds me of the bond I have with my close friends who I have known for such a long time, and while we go through different stages, relationships, phases, jobs, locations, and struggles, we, together, push forward to inspire each other to reach the new frontier.

--------------------------

"How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things

Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.

We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

---------------

Comments:

Ganesh said...
hey bro, i love the poem, and i love tennyson. i especially like the lines:I am a part of all that I have met;Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.i love that you're blogging, bro! i never knew that you were influenced by RFK. have you read Parting the Waters yet? both PJAddict and i really like it. definitely read it.
December 21, 2006 11:13 AM

lostandfound said...
yeah, i've been influenced by rfk's life since high school when i did a report on him. i was affected how his brother's death made him melancholy and how that transformed his politics and worldview.
December 21, 2006 4:55 PM

lbc said...
One of my first memories of lostandfound was driving around Delaware County trying (not very successfully) to investigate bad conditions in public housing. He exclaimed, "This is just like Bobby Kennedy and his men doing an investigation!" That's when I knew I had a long-term friend in the car.Good post.
December 21, 2006 10:08 PM

Ganesh said...
This post has been removed by the author.
December 22, 2006 9:05 AM

Ganesh said...
when was that? when we were in college?(sorry, typo before)
December 22, 2006 9:06 AM

lostandfound said...
yeah, i remember that well. that was when i realized lbc was a cool dude and we would be friends.maybe like my freshman or sophomore year.
December 26, 2006 2:27 PM

"the way people talk about loving things, which things, and why"

2006-11-30T12:13:00.000-05:00

This is exciting architecture and urban development:

Seeing the Seediness, and Celebrating It

Blockages

2006-11-16T23:57:00.000-05:00

From a note to a friend:

i go through periods when i shut people out for no good reason. i gravitate toward easy marks in close quarters, so as to avoid the hard work of excavation and explanation that occurs when i speak with an old and knowing friend. this is particularly the case when my good work is shadowed by writer's block. i have to lie to people and make them think that everything is alright, when i am fucking up a good job and remain frustrated with my inability to express my thoughts and ideas to the wider world. it's a funny thing, this writer's block which seems to cause speaking blockages as well.

Lost in the Plot

2006-11-13T16:39:00.000-05:00

Though the Montreal band the Dears have a new and well-regarded album called Gang of Losers, I love the band for a single song from their last album. Whatever it truly is about, "Lost in the Plot," twinned with the following video, continues last week's theme of secondary school alienation, in this case of a young Black child in a northern white world.

Reasons why I love the video and song:

The combination of still and video photography;
The kid;
His valiant effort to dance to Motown-inflected indie rock;
The "Our love/don't mess with our love/our love is so much stronger" refrain;
Lead singer Murray Lightbourne's bright yellow maracas, which he throws to the ground at the moment when the song accelerates to its end;
The quick sequence of still photographs at the end of the video as Lightbourne wails "I promise not to cry any more";
The child's sad eyes;
Ending with a photograph of him on a snow-laden landscape.

I can't speak with any knowledge about the videography, such as the bright glare used to obscure the band through most of the video, though those techniques seem to make it visually textured and interesting. Regardless, it is the picture of the lonely child on a snowscape that hits me hardest.

Speaking as a Child of the Seventies

2006-11-10T19:01:00.000-05:00

Before going through successive periods listening to WFAN in early October (baseball) and Air America in late October (politics), I would tune in a few different rock stations on my way to and from work. One morning as I came to stop for coffee, the old Bon Jovi song "Runaway" came on Jack FM or Q104 or some such station. It struck me that programmers at rock radio in New York have engaged in a conspiracy to rob me of my post-twenties identity, still vulnerable to deftly aimed stabs of aural memory, back to a time when I was very much an outsider, because of my skin color, fondness for books and politics, and lack of athletic ability.

Until the Seventh Grade, I wore my hair in a side part plastered down by Jabakusum coconut oil. As I moved through high school, I found a home in the freaks and geeks world of debate and speech. In the school where I spent most of my time, I was a bespectacled oddity, not black or white, with wrists that you could encircle with an adult thumb and index finger. Though I had many stresses during those years, my central drama, all the way through college actually, was my yearning for girls. The songs I heard on the radio and listened to on cassettes described an alien world of relationship and romance, exultation and desolation.

During my senior year in a class called "Leadership" (for reasons that remain unclear), the smart, preppy-dressing kids (no real preps -- the school was too working class, Jewish, and Catholic) who played soccer and tennis and bridged various social gulfs in our public school loved Bon Jovi and knew all the words to Livin' On a Prayer. (My high school was united in purpose and deed only one time while I was there, for a contest to write a metal band's name on slips of paper that would win us a concert put on by the radio station K-ROCK. Everyone worked on those slips of paper: jocks, nerds, preps, and the vast, silent, unnamed majority.)

I don't miss those days. And though I now work in a converted junior high school very much like my old schools, I am a fully formed person, mostly unafraid to be, with co-workers and students who share my values and value my personhood. And the music of this self is Pearl Jam, Wilco, Bloc Party, Broken Social Scene, Ryan Adams: modern, with shades of "classic" from an earlier era. But that doesn't stop the radio programmers from trying to keep me down and I remain subject to these Bon Jovi memories.

How I Wish for You Today

2006-09-25T10:12:00.000-04:00

After a visit to the exhibit on Sikhism at the Rubin Museum of Art and nearly missing a sighting of the Dalai Lama in the lobby of the museum, I went to see the film Old Joy at Film Forum. The emphasis on art related to Buddhism was an inadvertant though seemingly appropriate preparation for the film. Though my eyes closed during some of the early scenes of nature outside of Portland, Oregon, I was fully engaged by the time the two protagonists reach the hot springs at which there is a moment of connection in their friendship. I was excited to see the film because of the endorsement of my favorite film critic, who imbued a personal narrative with political meaning:

Yet if Mark and Kurt’s excursion resembles any number of classic adventures across time and space, the film is also insistently about this specific moment in time and space. Namely, an America in which progressive radio (actually, snippets from Air America) delivers the relentless grind of bad news that Mark can only listen to without comment and with a face locked in worry, a face on which Ms. Reichardt invites us to project the shell shock, despair and hopelessness of everyone else listening in across the country.

(Dargis does something quite similar in her review of Half Nelson, though the politics in that movie are much closer to the surface.)

I was not quite sure what to make of the film on Saturday night, but I found myself thinking about it this morning on my drive to work. The melancholy of lost affection is so strongly imparted by the characters; it is difficult to resist the impulse to contemplate one's own lost affections and the attenuated or diminished desire for connection to friends and family. In New York, 9/11 caused many of us to be jarred out of our complacency and diminishment, though the pull of work and the push of everyday life in the city quickly regained strength in our lives (at least for those of us who did not lose people at the towers or in the wars that have followed). This film quietly disturbs, perhaps only for one Monday morning drive to work. But it disturbs nonetheless.

Long Road, performed by Eddie Vedder and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan in 1998 at the Not In Our Name concert from The Sky I Scrape.com

As My Tail Lights Fade

2006-09-20T14:52:00.000-04:00

I saw the film Good Will Hunting again a few days ago. I'm not sure why I return to it periodically (Manohla Dargischaracteristically slices and dices the plot in her recent feature on Matt Damon). I think the movie seduces me with the idea that we are all like Will Hunting and have infinite talent to contribute toward human progress and personal happpiness, but it is only our inner demons -- eradicable with a hug from a working class therapist -- that hold us back. As we attempt to prop up our flagging will and drive toward some goal, these kinds of stories raise hope.

But should they raise hope? What does a fictional genius character from South Boston who prefers to lay brick than work at McKinsey ("McNeil" in the movie) or the NSA say to me as I struggle with my more prosaic challenges and potential? Can repeated viewings bleach out the meaning and play instead to our over-stimulated emotional sensitivities? I don't know about the deeper question of the influence of fictional narratives on our lives, but the scene in the movie in which Affleck sets Damon straight and causes him to start living with courage rather than in fear always gets to me. I know it doesn't happen in a single conversation with a best friend, but it seems plausible as a turn that life could take.

A Wave Came Crashing

2006-09-17T19:58:00.000-04:00

Listened to the waves today and felt deep peace from the eclipse of neighboring conversation by the sound and the connection to the sun. Last summer days in New York and I took one for myself. As I grow older, this ritual becomes more important to me, especially in the last days when Autumn is imminent. It means I don't do a hundred other more directly important things, but so be it. I paid little mind to the others there today, unlike during other visits, and felt the surroundings more deeply.

Kindler Gentler Policeman's Hand

2006-09-15T16:12:00.000-04:00

Here's some video that's killing me presently:

It's kills me to watch a young band sing an explicitly political song with the immense audience moshing in the mist.

Man on Leash -- One Month Later

2004-06-06T15:26:00.000-04:00

The two pictures depicted in this mural in Iran are iconographic representations of U.S. imperialism and racism. The picture of an Iraqi prisoner on a leash held by a white soldier was the one that hit me hardest. While the nonconsensual sex and simulated sex between prisoners was sickening, i couldn't help but feel that at least some of the outrage was fueled by intense homophobia in the Middle East and the United States. Don't get me wrong, those acts forced upon prisoners by soldiers were terrible, but I remained cognizant of the way in which homophobic demagogues could use those pictures to further demonize those who engage in consensual relations. The leash picture represented something more fundamental: harkening back to slavery and the Trail of Tears, the dominion of whites over people of color, and the emasculation and degradation of men of color. Most Americans reacted to the pictures with shame because they identified with the white soldiers (and most of those pictured were white, as far as I can see). But I didn't react out of typical liberal guilt: "this is not America, those soldiers are degenerate and don't represent me, how can I distance myself and my country from these acts?" Those pictures looked like America to me and they evoked the tragedy of the embrace by people of color of a country whose "exceptionalism" has been rooted in colonial racist notions of white supremacy. We are American but we are also the man on that leash.

The Believer on Elliott Smith and Music Fandom

2004-06-06T15:24:00.000-04:00

This is an outtake from the new issue of the Believer, an outgrowth of the McSweeney's literary/community service movement started by Dave Eggers. It is from an article by Gina Gionfriddo on the death of Elliott Smith and the author's attendance at a candlelight vigil in the East Village. This excerpt rang true to me on a number of levels:

All of this got me thinking about my own musical fanship and the nagging sense of shame that accompanies it. My friends have trained me to treat the ferocity of my musical passions as a shameful secret. The message seems to be this: Listen to whatever you want and like whatever you want, but temper your enthusiasm to suit your advanced age (I'm thirty-four). Praise moderately and possess no evidence of devotion aside from music. That is to say, no "merch," unless intended ironically. . . .

I bought the issue for the Carrie Brownstein/Eddie Vedder interview but this article and an interview of David Byrne by Eggers were much more interesting.

My Architect at Cinema Village

2004-04-19T15:23:00.000-04:00

It has been out for some time, but I finally got a chance to see My Architect on one of my Sunday solo movie trips into Manhattan. The film is poignant on the relationship (or lack thereof) between visionary architect Louis Kahn and his son Nathaniel. It also beautifully captures the monumentality and spirituality of Kahn's later work. The architecture critic Vincent Scully contends that Kahn was channeling the divine spirit in creating his vast church-like buildings, such as the Salk Institute, the Philips-Exeter Library, the Indian Institute of Management, and, most grandly, the capital buildings in Dhaka. A Gujarati architect named Doshi who shared a last meal with Kahn, believes that Kahn was a mystic who understood the spiritual meaning of matter and nothingness.

A Bangladeshi architect named Waras brings this aspect of Kahn's work to a brilliant and extremely poignant summation at the end of the movie. As he is speaking to Nathaniel, Waras starts to cry in appreciation for Kahn's gift of the bricks and mortar foundations of democracy in Bangladesh. He says (paraphrased), "he loved us so much to give us this gift, and though he did not give you the kind of love you seeked, his love was for all people."

It was particularly ironic that Kahn was given the opportunity to build a mosque as part of the Dhaka capital complex, while being deprived of commissions for synagogues in Philadelphia and Jerusalem. In this time of fundamentalist polarization it was especially beautiful to hear the call and see Muslim men praying in Kahn's mosque.

I am generally suspicious of the personalization and anecdotalization of ideas and politics (even as I engage in a form of it here and in my work). However, it seems to me that Nathaniel Kahn has succeeded in illuminating the ideas in Kahn's work through his personalization of its discovery. It's a moving journey.

In addition, it seems clear that Kahn found in India and Bangladesh the kind of support and engagement with his ideas that he never found in his home city of Philadelphia. I think this is due partly to the remnants of internalized racial inferiority felt by subcontinentals and partly to the grand aspirations of these countries to remake themselves in the wake of indepedence, led by visionary statesmen such as Nehru. They seemed to understand and respect what Kahn was trying to do and helped the son understand it as well, twenty-six years after the death of the father.

A Fan Falls in Iraq

2004-04-15T15:22:00.000-04:00

Learned of this soldier's death on a Pearl Jam fan board that I check periodically.

"Kevin Kolm, a former lacrosse star, was a music fan so passionate about the band Pearl Jam that he had the title of one of the grunge group's earliest hits, 'Release,' tattooed on his back, his father said.

Yesterday, four of his friends emblazoned that same word, as well as the date of their buddy's death, on their arms in an act of remembrance, Thomas Kolm said."

Corporal Kolm and his friends sound like the kind of fans who I might stay away from at a Pearl Jam concert -- big, white, potentially hostile, etc. However, his untimely death makes me focus on the war that is raging and that claimed 68 American lives and many, many more Iraqis last week. While the media is getting better about sharing the consequences of the violence, the war is so far from urgent in most people's minds, even for the activist students with whom I work. I think this might partly be due to the class and race stratification separating people I spend a lot of time with from those who are serving in the military. It also might be due to the stratification within activist movements into pigeon-holed categories divided by "issue." The anti-war march that I attended in New York in March was largely white and seemingly upper middle class, with very few people of color in attendance, unlike the post-9/11 immigrants rights rallies that I have attended. Amongst progressives, there might also be some satisfaction in seeing Bush's war go so badly. Whether it is apathy, class or "cause" stratification, or the progressive wish for the fall of Bush, our inattention to the war has made us complicit in the deaths of people like the 23-year-old Kevin Kolm.

Here are a few lines from "Release" for the late Cpl. Kolm:

i see the world, feel the chill
which way to go, windowsill
i see the world's on a rocking horse of time
i see the birds in the rain
dear dad, can you see me now
i am myself, like you somehow
i'll ride the wave where it takes me
i'll hold the pain...
release me...

Long Winters at Northsix

2004-04-10T15:21:00.000-04:00

I went to see The Long Winters at Northsix in Williamsburg last night and came away as a sort of fan. Generally, I stay away from seeing shows when I haven't heard the records (which is a damn stupid way to take in the music scene in New York in light of the terrible radio options). I went to this one because of the connection of the band with the post-grunge Seattle scene that includes Death Cab for Cutie. I'm crazy in love with the new DCFC record, Transatlanticism, as well as the Ben Gibbard "side project," The Postal Service. (For the record, all the cool kids (like my purported friend ____) were into DCFC at least 3-5 years ago; they're too popular now but I don't care. This is what happens when you go to shows based on what you happen to hear in the atmosphere, but I digress.)

Anyway, Long Winters is led by this incredibly funny doofy blond guy named John Roderick. He's literate and amusing and kept playing corny classics by request from the audience between his own music, like Hot for Teacher and Barracuda. I don't have any of their records, but a song named Cinnamon (with a Neil Young tag in the middle) and another called New Girl just took off and propelled the young hipsters in front to bounce to the music. I saw a guy with long hair put his arm around his friend because the music was making him so happy, it was pretty damned sweet. This tall promoter dude was called to the stage because it was his birthday. He had been swaying with his uber-pregnant girlfriend throughout the show. The band also called up some guy from Brooklyn named Andrew, who was decked out in full Beacon's Closet ware, to sing along for a song. Yet another sweet young man, who hesitated to sing into the mike at first and eventually was enthusiastically harmonizing with Roderick.

As usual, I was self-conscious because I was there alone and was once again the only person of color in the hall. Today I find out that John Roderick is older than I am, which makes me feel slightly better about my solo Friday nights, while some friends are putting their kids to bed or working on computer theory papers or law review articles. The thing I usually get from these small shows is a great deal of respect that the folks have on stage for their craft. Maybe because I cannot play music (yet), watching them "at work" inspires me to pay more attention to my craft (whatever that may be). So, okay, I was not at home writing my life's work, but I was inspired by the band and the joy of the crowd.

Prashad/Hampton on Solidarity and Struggle

2004-03-20T15:20:00.000-05:00

I'd prefer to quote others than to stretch my usually quite prosaic thoughts to blog-worthiness. So I initiate the excerpt series with Vijay Prashad from The Karma of Brown Folk, quoting Black Panther Fred Hampton:

"Solidarity must be crafted on the basis of both commonalities and differences, on the basis of a theoretically aware translation of our mutual contradictions into political practice. Political struggle is the crucible of the future, and our political categories simply enable us to enter the crucible rather than tell us much about what will be produced in the process of the struggle. 'Some things if you stretch it so far, it'll be another thing,' Fred Hampton explained. 'Did you ever cook something so long that it turns into something else? Ain't that right? That's what we're talking about with politics.'"

Obama for America

2004-03-18T15:18:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama has impeccable liberal credentials and a nuanced view of race rooted in the exploration of his own ethnic and geographic identity. Charlton McIlwain at The Gadflyer has an interesting look at the upcoming campaign against investment banker Jack Ryan. One of McIlwain's arguments is that because race is omnipresent in media coverage of the candidate and there is the usual bombardment of stories about Black crime on local news, Obama will have to battle a Willie Horton effect each day of the campaign. I don't imagine that this is a new fight for Obama, though it will take place on a big stage. The question is whether his candidacy will challenge entrenched assumptions about race and change the rules of the game for future African American candidates. This depends on whether the candidate and his supporters proactively talk about race, class, and identity. I'll be looking to local observers of the campaign for greater insight on how this issue plays out through November. This is one of the important meta-stories embedded in what most observers think will be a successful electoral campaign.