tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12438529872738381932024-02-08T05:24:53.691-05:00Word Synapsesinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-50322801811422863762009-10-13T12:41:00.006-04:002009-10-13T12:50:49.664-04:00The Wachowski Bros. film, Speed Racer (2008)<b><span style="font-size: large;">If you happen to know any 9 year-old stoners, the Wachowski Bros.' 2008 flick, <i>Speed Racer</i>, is just the thing for them. That’s about the size of it, with this weird, weird film. It’s target audience must have been kids in grades 1 thru 4. I’m tempted to say younger, but this thing is over 2 hours long, and in the beginning, especially, there is some odd, confusing time-shifting in the script. <i>Speed Racer</i> is based on a late 1960s Japanese television cartoon series, which itself was based on a manga from a decade before that. It wasn’t what we think of when we think of manga today--it looked more like Scooby-doo, for instance.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">The Wachowski Bros. (of <i>Matrix</i> fame) came late to the project, although it had floundered so much, they still had a lot to do with it, getting full writing and directing credit. I have to admit, I kind of liked the movie, even though, when it wasn’t dazzling with some virtually unprecedented, colorful CGI, it was following in the cheesy Disney footsteps of flicks like <i>Herbie the Love Bug</i> or any number of other Disney kids flicks that I considered too corny to watch even when I was a kid. More charitably, it also reminded me of <i>Willy Wonka</i>, especially the Johnny Depp remake. (BTW, Depp was originally cast in the lead here, but happily for all concerned, bowed out, replaced by Emile Hirsch, who did quite a good job with it. And in fact, it was a good cast, including Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, John Goodman, Matthew Fox, and Roger Allum (who weirdly kept reminding me, a LOT, of Christopher Hitchins). They did their best with what they had.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ehpxIrCNiVI&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ehpxIrCNiVI&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">The trailer</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Many critics were put off by the fact that there were three lengthy car race segments which they considered rather redundant. These were often really quite a lot like watching someone play a Nintendo game, and I’m sure this was quite consciously done. I imagine they had hopes of turning this into a successful computer game. There have been <i>Speed Racer</i> computer games, but as far as I’ve discovered, they have been based on the original.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">This clip shows a little bit of the cartoon, followed by the computer game:</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2vVvxOsbj9E&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2vVvxOsbj9E&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">There’s no denying, cinematically, this movie is head and shoulders above the original, which was rather crude in terms of its animation. The racing in the Wachowski version is not simply ordinary Grand Prix, but futuristic, deadly action on an impossible, rollercoaster sort of track. I was once a fan of Indy cars, and I kind of got into the races here. (Come to think of it, I was actually into the Grand Prix cars around the time this was a Japanese television show. I even made a model of the Chapparal. So... )</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">I see Speed Racer as a knowing homage to several very familiar entertainments for little boys. There are two lengthy and highly stylized fight sequences that are sort of Three Stooges gone ninja. John Goodman, suddenly revealed as a former wrestler, spins a ninja around over his head, and you half-expect to hear him go “Woop woop woop” like Curly, and his son executes the famous two fingers in the eyes attack. The Wachowskis were born in the late ‘60s, and this slapstick stuff was still on tv. So they’re framing the Japanese cartoon in a retro American context. If I were given the task of filming <i>Speed Racer</i>, I’m not sure what I would have done differently.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">There is, however, a pretty limited audience for this. Some of it requires an older child’s understanding, but a lot of it is more on the kindergarten level. As far as adults go, it’s clearly not for all tastes. It cost $120 million to make and closed in US theaters with a fraction of that in box office. It’s probably about breaking even at this point.</span></b>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-18272235820645179362009-08-24T00:06:00.000-04:002009-08-24T00:15:29.742-04:00Blippin' Jazz20090823<br /><br />Listening to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. Miles was working on it exactly 40 years ago. Some may disagree, but it’s my favorite Miles album, and that certainly is saying something.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=bitches-brew.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/bitches-brew.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Great Mati Klarwein jacket, too. I put it up on my new jazztrain profile on blip.fm<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=jazztrainlogo.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/jazztrainlogo.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://blip.fm/%7Ec7fgk">http://blip.fm/~c7fgk</a><br /><br />But here ya go, should you be interested:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Qn6yP7EiiK0&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Qn6yP7EiiK0&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /> <br />A funky, spacey sound.<br /><br />I think this jazz profile pretty much completes things for me on blip.fm. Maybe someday I might get back in a country / folk sort of mood, but it’s been many years now since I really have been into that. Every now and then I’ll listen to a song or even a CD, but I can’t say I’ve gotten into a particular phase in a long time.<br /><br />While you can search within blip.fm for music--and sometimes it’s necessary, because YouTube doesn’t have everything--yet--YouTube really is, as you probably already know, just an amazing treasury of clips. Mostly I’ve been exploring classical, rock/pop, blues, and now jazz, in that order.<br /><br />I’ve probably mentioned it before, but one of the nice features of blip.fm is you can link each profile to a Twitter account, which I have, and that enables you to meet some interesting folks. For instance, my first follower on my jazztrain Twitter was TheDaveHolland.<br /><br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jzvyKQZmZY0&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jzvyKQZmZY0&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="340" width="560"></embed></object><br /><br /><a href="http://blip.fm/~c74to">http://blip.fm/~c74to</a><br /><br />It seems that sometimes that’s updated by his people and sometimes by him.<br /><br />I was followed by Paul Winter after I mentioned on my classical Twitter<br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/musicaclassica">http://twitter.com/musicaclassica</a><br /><br />(linked to my blip.fm that I wasn’t in the mood for classical, but was instead listening to world music, like Kitaro and Paul Winter. This piece, Anabela, is beautiful with Brazilian guitarist/vocallist Renato Braz<br />and Winter sweetly playing sax. I used to apply the now rather musty label, “New Age,” to him, but “World Music” fits well now, because Winter has often incorporated Third World and Native American music, not to mention many nature sounds at times.sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-79235762029912713802009-08-10T22:00:00.000-04:002009-08-10T22:02:00.162-04:0024 Hours of Air Traffic (Animated Map)Fascinating 24-hour view of global air traffic. At first glimpse, I thought, wow, Europe is the center of the traffic. But I quickly realized that, of course, the concentration of flights follows the sunlight. People would rather avoid landing somewhere at 3 a.m., if they can help it.<br /><br /><object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uGEgltND0Tc&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uGEgltND0Tc&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-65416592493381866992009-08-10T19:06:00.000-04:002009-08-10T22:30:17.445-04:00Alan Moore on faces of different eras<span style="font-size:130%;">In the first text part of Watchmen, "Under the Hood," Alan Moore writes:<br /><br />"Moe Vernon was a man around fifty-five or so, and he had one of those old New York faces you don’t see anymore.</span><br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=1950sfaces.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/1950sfaces.jpg" alt="1950s group of men" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />"It’s funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they’re related.<br /></span><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=1980sfaces.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/1980sfaces.jpg" alt="1980s photos" border="0" /></a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">"Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see there’s a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."<br /></span><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=2000faces.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2000faces.jpg" alt="athletic group" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;">It's something that probably we all think at some point. I'm not sure. Is it the hair? The clothes? Or even the cameras, etc? Actually, one of the guys in the first photo (from the 1950s) looks something like one of the guys in the second photo, which is from the 1980s.<br /><br /><br />1950s photo licensed through Creative Commons from freeparking’s photostream at <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeparking/468956377/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeparking/468956377/</a><br /><br />1980s photo licensed through Creative Commons from<br />foundphotoslj’s photostream at <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foundphotoslj/334767030/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/foundphotoslj/334767030/</a><br /><br />athletic photo licensed through Creative Commons from lululemon athletica's photostream at <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/lululemonathletica/3491309891/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/lululemonathletica/3491309891/</a><br /></span>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-54480074935645050802009-08-04T02:26:00.000-04:002009-08-04T02:27:58.021-04:00Keith Olbermann attacks Congressmen owned by the healthcare industry<img alt="" src="http://x.myspace.com/images/spacer.gif" border="0" height="1" width="30" /> <!--- blog subject ---> <div class="blogSubject"> <span class="UIIntentionalStory_Names"></span>I didn't know anyone actually said things like this on TV. An extraordinary attack on GOP and Dem Congressmen who have been bought and sold by the healthcare industry. Please watch this video venom from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann</div> <!--- blog body ---> <br /><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/32277034#32277034">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/32277034#32277034</a>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-79825137608129185892009-08-03T00:47:00.001-04:002009-08-03T00:47:42.956-04:00John SinclairBack in 1972, John Lennon & Yoko came out with a politically radical album, Sometime in New York City, that Rolling Stone called “artistic suicide.”<br /><br />I was pretty much at my radical peak at that time, so I had no problem with it at all. Just about all the songs espoused radical causes, from Angela Davis to Belfast, feminism to legalizing drugs. On that subject, there was “John Sinclair”:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mbNQnQCZReY&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mbNQnQCZReY&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Manager of Detroit’s punkish MC5 band, Sinclair was also heavily involved with the White Panthers, a radical group that backed the Black Panthers. Wikipedia does a good job of filling in the rest:<br /><br />After a series of convictions for possession of marijuana, Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1969 after giving two joints of marijuana to an undercover narcotics officer.[2] This sentence sparked the landmark "Free John Now Rally" at Ann Arbor's Crisler Arena in December 1971. The event brought together a who's-who of left-wing luminaries, including pop musicians John Lennon (who recorded the song, "John Sinclair" on his Some Time in New York City album), Yoko Ono, David Peel, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and Bob Seger, jazz artists Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd, and speakers Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale.[3] Three days after the rally, Sinclair was released from prison when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state's marijuana statutes were unconstitutional. These events inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally, which continues to be held as of 2009, and contributed to the drive for decriminalization of marijuana under the Ann Arbor city charter (see Marijuana laws in Ann Arbor, Michigan).<br /><br />Well, here’s Sinclair, doing some poetry with jazz accompaniment:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/aa2WUksYGMw&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/aa2WUksYGMw&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Oh, and, as you can see, MC5 was a pretty exciting act:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iM6nasmkg7A&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iM6nasmkg7A&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-80953336699623101282009-07-27T21:55:00.000-04:002009-07-27T21:57:07.656-04:00A few words about the movie, 12 Monkeys (1996)Generally a pretty good movie! My main problems with it were:<br /><br /> a) Willis’ character was a major nutcase, violent, and not too bright, either. He’s supposed to travel back in time, not to prevent a biomedical event that kills most of humanity, but to seek information about the virus that would help those in the future deal with it better. Why on earth would you send him, of all people, back to the past on such an important mission?<br /><br />b) A few of Terry Gilliam’s art direction choices, especially the lab in the future, were absurd and detracted from the believability. He did the same thing, in spades, in Brazil. That can work in the sort of flicks Tim Burton usually does, but it’s just a silly diversion with something like this.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=twelve_monkeys_Blackred.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/twelve_monkeys_Blackred.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br />But I’ve always liked Willis, and Madeleine Stowe was very good.... Brad PItt is a bit over the top here. The fact that he was nominated for Best Supporting for this says a whole lot about how stupid and unfair the Oscars are....<br /><br />This was “inspired by” the famous French short, La Jetée, which we watched in junior year honors English. (Our teacher was media-oriented, and we watched quite a few important (and cool) shorts in class.) Anyway, “inspired by” is a good way of putting it. The movie uses the basic paradoxical time -traveling ideas of the La Jetée storyline, but of course, adds a whole lot to it in the way of plot and characters.<br /><br />I had actually written a little short story for 8th grade English class that was pretty similar (though a whole lot shorter). In that, the character travels back in time to prevent a nuclear war and ends up being the one who starts it.<br /><br />No doubt, somehow my subconscious traveled two years into the future to draw inspiration from my viewing of La Jetée....sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-71575336552264695592009-07-20T01:34:00.000-04:002009-07-20T01:35:53.922-04:00Moby, Coldplay, Walter Cronkite20090719 Blog<br /><br />I’m wrapping up day one of a three day weekend. Spent rather a lot of time online today, in a fairly idle way. Listened to Moby’s new album, “Wait for Me.” If you’re on Facebook, you can listen to it at <a href="http://apps.facebook.com/mobydownloads/">http://apps.facebook.com/mobydownloads/</a>. I thought it was kinda blah, actually. I liked Moby’s “18.” This is way inferior to that.<br /><br />And then I downloaded, free, Coldplay’s live album. Only listened to the first song of that, so far, which was OK. That one you can get at <a href="http://bit.ly/WTgiP">http://bit.ly/WTgiP</a>. It’s a zip file, but it’s OK. It’s definitely from Coldplay.<br /><br />I also listened to all of a CD that had two old 1965 Peter & Gordon albums, “I Go to Pieces” and “True Love Ways.” Here’s the thing: when P&G are good, they are very good. When they are bad, they are just awful. Their cover of Elvis’ “All Shook Up” is about the lamest recording I’ve ever heard. But that “I Go to Pieces” is sweet! They were one uneven act. And fairly often, Gordon’s singing was just absurd.<br /> This has been kind of a 60s day. The whole of CBS Sunday Morning was dedicated to Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS newsman who just died. I wonder if my Brit friends have heard of him? While he was a consistently important and reliable newsman, he is generally famous for three broadcasts, and the reason he is famous for them is precisely because he deviated from his usual, meticulous, factual reporting. People trusted him because of that reporting, but also because they could see he was a real person, with real emotions that came out during the momentous events he reported.<br /><br />The first, of course, was his reporting of the assassination of JFK. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen all of this. The guy taking the presidential seal off the podium where JFK was supposed to speak... Never saw that before. I was in the 4th grade, and I think I was home for lunch (I lived a few blocks from school and could walk home). I was (seriously) probably watching Bozo the Clown on Chicago’s WGN at the time. They probably interrupted it with a bulletin, which is probably why TV bulletins even now send a chill down my spine. But I really don’t remember anything until the part where I got back to school and the teachers were all crying and they had us watch TV all afternoon.<br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2K8Q3cqGs7I&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2K8Q3cqGs7I&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />Couldn’t find a decent clip of his Vietnam speech, but what happened was, he’d been over there and was very troubled by the loss of American lives. It was after the Tet offensive, and he believed he had to editorialize against the war, because the government and the military were simply lying. After his speech, President Johnson famously said, “If we’ve lost Walter Cronkite, we’ve lost America.”<br /><br />Finally, this is a short clip about his reporting of the lunar landing (which BTW happened 40 years ago today). In it, you can see his famous reaction, taking off his glasses and saying, “Oh, boy!” Overwhelmed:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/HwaA-hbvYF8&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/HwaA-hbvYF8&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-76980473741943347712009-06-07T22:02:00.000-04:002009-06-07T22:07:08.996-04:00Classical Music Notes from All OverI did not set out to write an entire blog about the current classical music scene at all, but one thing led to another:<br /><br />I’m listening to a CD of Gloria Cheng performing world premieres of late 20th century solo piano works by Steven Stucky (born 1949), Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994), and Esa-Pekka Salonen (born 1958). So right away, for one thing, I am hearing, for possibly the first time, “classical” music written by someone who is younger than me.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=PianoMusicOfSalonenStuckyAndLutosla.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/PianoMusicOfSalonenStuckyAndLutosla.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Such horror aside, the CD, <span style="font-style: italic;">Piano Music Of Salonen, Stucky, And Lutoslawski</span>, won the 2008 Grammy Award for "Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (without Orchestra)." Stucky and Salonen both studied under the Polish composer Lutoslawski. (Salonen, probably, better known to most as the Music Director of the L.A. Philharmonic & principal conductor of the London Philharmonia). From what I’ve heard of them, modern Polish composers favor the lyrical more than most others, especially more than a lot of 20th century Americans. I think that rubbed off on Stucky and Salonen a little, although some by the latter are more atonal. This piano music is more something I would happily sit down and listen to than some other modern works. Stucky compares it to Debussy, which I can see, and Stravinsky, which, not so much....<br /><br /> Speaking of piano music, the Van Cliburn Foundation has graciously posted on YouTube quite a few (maybe all) performances from the 2009 Van Cliburn competition and, in fact, streamed the whole competition live at http://www.cliburn.tv/, a fact which, sadly, I didn’t learn until just now.<br /><br />BTW, the winners were announced today: Gold Medalists (tie for first): Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20 (Japan) and Haochen Zhang, 19 (China) and Silver Medalist: Ms. Yeol Eum Son, 23 (South Korea).<br /><br />The YouTube URL is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/VanCliburnFoundation">http://www.youtube.com/user/VanCliburnFoundation</a><br /><br />Finally, I think I may have mentioned this performance when I first heard it several months ago on a California radio station. Recently on Performance Today they’ve replayed it: Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov's delightful work, <span style="font-style: italic;">Azul</span>, performed by Yo-Yo Ma with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Kahane.<br /><br />This was one of the best Performance Today shows I’ve heard and it included another finalist in the Van Cliburn Competition, Bulgarian Evgeni Bozhanov, who plays the Third movement from Piano Quintet in F Minor by Cesar Franck. You can hear all of this week’s episode of Performance Today at:<br /><br /><a href="http://performancetoday.publicradio.org/">http://performancetoday.publicradio.org/</a><br /><br />(I like to show the actual URLs so people know where they’re going.)<br /><br />Getting back to Golijov’s Azul, if there is one thing I’ve mentioned here that you should listen to, that is it. It is very beautiful, creative, and entertaining! It has a lot of cool percussion that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite jazz pieces, Pharoah Sander’s<br />"Astral-Travelling," which was on his album, <span style="font-style: italic;">Thembi</span>. Fortunately, this song is on YouTube!<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kmL1da8VhiE&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kmL1da8VhiE&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-11985904968407033992009-06-02T14:10:00.000-04:002009-06-02T14:14:42.265-04:00Conan Leno Letterman Ferguson Fallon & KimmelI don't think <span style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; cursor: pointer; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_0">Letterman</span> has to worry about his ratings. Hard to say how <span style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; cursor: pointer; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_1">Conan</span> will do. I think Leno was very lucky to have <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_2">Kevin Eubanks</span> as both a very talented band leader and a very likable sidekick of sorts, whereas I can't stand <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_3">Paul Shaffer</span>. <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_4">Max Weinberg</span> is a great musician, and they did some funny things with him, but he was not a real sidekick. I like <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_5">Andy Richter</span>, but they definitely need to tone him down a lot. I thought the cross-country bit was generally pretty funny, though long. I didn't think the monologue was terribly funny....<br /><br />I like Conan OK, but his monologues have always been very short, and the bits that followed were very uneven. I very seldom watch the guest segments. (And I don't like <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_6">Will Ferrell</span>, so I turned it off at that point and got back on with Pearl Jam--who were pretty good.) I'll probably watch Conan from time to time, but I may well just tape Leno and watch him then, I dunno.<br /><br />While I'm on the subject, I still really haven't watched Fallon at all. But from what little I have seen, I wonder if he has a dynamic enough personality to pull it off. From what I've heard, at least the writing is pretty funny. And I still can't believe he got <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_7">The Roots</span>! But I do like Ferguson best. It amazes me what he does with what little they give him.<br /><br />I just never got in the habit of thinking about ABC <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_8">late nights</span>. I don't even know when <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1243966642_9">Jimmy Kimmel</span> is on. I like him, but you can only watch so many talk shows. However, I do think, of all the people I've seen, he would be the best replacement for Regis. I don't know if there would be more money in it for him there or not.sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-82301327338926803052009-05-30T20:41:00.000-04:002009-05-30T20:42:06.742-04:00What if they gave a Rapture... and nobody left?<a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=88ReasonsWhytheRaptureIsin1988.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/88ReasonsWhytheRaptureIsin1988.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-20589949564770822312008-10-04T23:20:00.001-04:002008-10-04T23:22:06.997-04:00Love + Sex with RobotsIf I were me, but a college kid again, starting a psych major, I would--well, OK, I would still be most interested in courses that might explain why I’m such a screwed up individual.... But after that, I would be surely want to take a few courses in the psychology of artificial intelligence. Of course, to paraphrase Alexander Pope, the proper study of robots is man--at least as far as psychology goes.<br /><br />Anyone reading this already has a fair amount of experience with interacting with computers. Take MySpace. This corporation has chosen to have its users interact with a spokesperson, Tom, even though, for most people, it’s decidedly a one way interaction.<br /><br />Back when the blogs were down, I actually visited his site, looked at some of his blogs, to see if he had anything to say about the problem. His blog was on the musty side. His bulletins nearly always promote some new service or product.<br /><br />Wouldn’t we all be better served by an artificial intelligence MySpace friend who communicated with us on a regular basis about what was actually going on?<br /><br />Eventually, computers will be talking to us a lot more. If there is a MySpace, when we log on, we will probably be greeted by some avatar for Tom. (Hopefully, we’ll be able to disable him if we like!) Maybe, if they’re smart, we can chose it to be a lady avatar. Really, even with the current technology, it’s amazing how unimaginative MySpace is....<br /><br />Anyway, what brought some of these thoughts on is the book I’ve been reading (up to p. 110 at the moment), David Levy’s Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (2007).<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=love_sex_with_robots.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/love_sex_with_robots.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />This does eventually get as creepy as it sounds. Near the end, I’ve noted illustrations of mechanical devices, like the Stallion XL Sex Machine:<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=stallionxlsexmachine.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/stallionxlsexmachine.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Which, actually, is less creepy than the whole plastic fantastic lover notion for men. (I’m sure there are some for women, too.) Frankly, for me, personally, creepy isn’t the word. Silly. Silly is the word.<br /><br />But as for the sex machines, businesses are making them, people are buying them, with prices generally ranging between $1,000 and $2,000. And as far as the dolls go, once on some HBO show I saw some very expensive ones that were much closer to lifelike than the more familiar ones that look more like something you’d use as a beach raft. Anyway, while I look forward to what Levy has to say on the subject, clearly, such things will always be pretty damn expensive.<br /><br />And so, it’s much more likely that people will, in some way, come to love their computers and/or robots than that they will have sex with them physically. Levy explores this in a very persuasive, methodical way, beginning with the psychological theory of attachment, and the way our relationship with the mother extends to other relationships. He talks about the notion of transitional objects, like security blankets or teddy bears, that ease us away from the intensity of that original relationship. And then of course there are pets, and he has a lot of interesting things to say about our relations with them.<br /><br />I’ll probably back track to some of that in some other blogs, but as for computers and robots, one thing is very clear: even though most all of us understand that the computer is not a human but a machine, very many of us will react to it, in varying degrees, as if it were. For instance, if empathetic responses are programmed in, if the computer provides positive support, and so on, people have much more favorable responses to the computer (or the software), than if everything is conducted in a strictly no-nonsense, unemotional way.<br /><br />If an avatar is used and given a name and uses empathy--as in the case of “Laura,” a computerized fitness coach, people will be much more inclined to say things like “Laura and I trust one another.”<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=laura-bickmoreMIT.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/laura-bickmoreMIT.gif" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />[Laura, created by MIT’S Tom Bickmore a few years ago]<br /><br />Nearly all pet owners talk to their animals and some people even talk to their cars and such, so it’s no great stretch at all to predict that as AI develops (and it will, exponentially), we will be interacting with robots in ways that increasingly mirror human relationships.sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-10490580927360017642008-09-14T02:20:00.001-04:002008-09-14T02:21:39.431-04:00Eugene Sharp, non-violent revolutionary, and thoughts on the news<br />In the further downscaling of my life, my newspaper subscription ran out and I told them I wasn’t renewing it. So far, they’re still delivering it....<br /><br />Aside from the expense, it was getting environmentally embarrassing. Every day I would flip through it and immediately discard about 75% of it. Most of the stuff is online, anyway, and of course I check Reuters several times a day. Clearly, the days of the print newspaper are numbered, although they may last ten years or so. If you look at the financials of any of them, they all have a ton of debt, so they may not last even that long.<br /><br />I’m not entirely happy about it all, though. I don’t really like reading long articles online. It’s nicer with a newspaper. Perhaps some of the really good papers will hang on longer. So far, for instance, the Wall Street Journal seems more or less undiminished after Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of it. At the moment, I think it’s the best newspaper I’m aware of. Certainly the best in the USA. Its editorials are extremely right wing, but it consistently has these fantastic articles.<br /><br />Take, for instance, the recent article on Gene Sharp, who is sort of the Saul Alinsky of modern non-violent revolution.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=EugeneSharp5_JOELVEAK.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/EugeneSharp5_JOELVEAK.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br />http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122127204268531319.html?mod=hps_us_pageone<br /><br />It is at the same time a cool story about this obscure yet important 80-year old man and the sort of background journalism that has become all too rare:<br /><br />“Spread via the Internet, word-of-mouth and seminars, Mr. Sharp's writings on nonviolent resistance have been studied by opposition activists in Zimbabwe, Burma, Russia, Venezuela and Iran, among others. His 1993 guide to unseating despots, From Dictatorship to Democracy, has been translated into at least 28 languages and was used by movements that toppled governments in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.”<br /><br />The complete text of From Dictatorship to Democracy is available at:<br /><br />www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf<br /><br />Getting back to the subjecet of news in gerneral, up until recently, I had CNN.com on my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar, but I finally decided that CNN had degenerated into junk / tabloid news. Reuters is fairly decent....sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-77609654366840070782008-09-02T02:28:00.001-04:002008-09-02T02:31:22.461-04:00Oil RealitiesEvery now and then I read something in the paper that accurately describes something when nearly everyone else seems not to even get it. This time it was a column by the Waco Tribune-Harold writer, John Young. Waco as in Texas, where they understand the oil business.<br /><br />“Hear the drill-at-all-cost chorus and it will tell you that exploration in ANWR is about ‘energy security’ or ‘energy independence.’<br /><br />“No.... It’s about money. Not a drop of the oil that would be harvest in ANWR is ‘ours.’<br /><br />“It’s the world’s. It’s as much the dread Russkies’ as yours or mine. That’s the definition of a global market. Any free-market conservative ought to be able to explain it to you. ANWR oil would go in the same collective vat as any other oil.”<br /><br />He goes on to agree that, sure, it would, in a broad general sense, make some slight improvement in global supply, but it probably would not lower prices as much as reducing supply.<br /><br />Similarly, just recently, Iraq signed a contract providing $3 billion worth of oil to the Chinese. I bring this up, in particular, because I’ve always found the “No blood for oil” slogan puzzling. It was never explained how our soldiers’ blood was supposed to produce oil for us. It might in fact have been a good idea if somewhere along the line we might have asked for some oil in repayment for ruining our economy over the war. But, while there have been contracts here and there with Western oil companies, obviously, Iraqi oil is even less “ours” than the ANWR oil.<br /><br />If it were really only or even mainly about oil, obviously the thing to do would have been to simply settle up with Saddam, remove all sanctions, and carry on as before.sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-36275154384093158002008-08-24T01:09:00.000-04:002008-08-24T01:13:02.636-04:00Who is the third who walks always beside you?Yesterday I finished a book I’ve blogged a bit about before--Maria Coffey’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Explorers of the Infinite</span>, which came out earlier this year and has the subtitle: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes-and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communication, and Touching the Beyond.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=MariaCoffey-ExplorersoftheInfinite.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/MariaCoffey-ExplorersoftheInfinite.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /></span><br />Well, first off, it was a really entertaining, page-turner of a read, with lots of cool stories, mostly about mountain climbers. Stories about ghosts, premonitions, telepathy, NDEs, hallucinations, and such. She does a very nice job of agnostically putting forth scientific explanations for things while keeping an open mind and respecting the experiences of her subjects. It’s fairly clear, on the other hand, that she believes in a lot of what she’s describing....<br /><br />I’ve never been particularly interested in mountain-climbing myself given that, for one thing, I sure as hell don’t plan on doing any of it. It seems an even more dangerous and deadly endeavor than I thought. I think perhaps the majority of the stories in the book--including Coffey’s own--are told by those who lost loved ones to climbing....<br /><br />The most interesting chapter, though, dealth with hallucinations. Contrary to what you might perhaps think, I don’t have a lot of experience with such. I had one definite auditory one. Two visual ones that come to mind, strangely, were both shared with one or two others, and so, who knows, may have been real. There was the standard Breathing Sidewalk one....<br /><br />Anyway, my mom had some during her Alzheimer’s, and even--I guess, especially--secondhand, it’s disturbing. It’s often easy to ascribe them to some physical basis. Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, seizures, drugs. Still, when my mom saw dead people, it creeped me out. When my great uncle, in the late stages of Alzheimer’s himself, said, “I’ve seen what’s it’s like on the other side, and I don’t like it,” that was even creepier.<br /><br />Not just mountain climbing, but enduring arctic conditions seems to lead to a particular type of hallucination where one sees and even interacts with another being. I was surprised by Coffey’s explanation of the mysterious lines in T.S. Eliot’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Waste Land:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Who is the third who walks always beside you?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">When i count, there are only you and i together</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">But when i look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you....</span><br /><br />Coffey says these were inspired by the extreme Antarctic experiences of the explorer Ernest Shackleton, during which he believed a mysterious presence guided him and his crew to safety. (Perhaps Eliot mentions this in his footnotes. I’m too lazy to get out up and check.)<br /><br />Apparently, it is not uncommon for these apparitions to act as guides or aides. Anyway, Coffey discusses some research by Dr. Charles Houston that suggests that, in the case of mountain climbing, for instance, such hallucinations may be due to “miniature temporal lobe seizures, triggered by fatigue, low blood sugar, personal crisis, and anxiety.” To keep baggage to a minimum, mountaineers usually carry very little food and sometimes less than adequate clothing or shelter.<br /><br />Similarly, BTW, as Coffey herself points out, Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed had their visions on mountains, each talking to devils, angels, or God. I know Jesus was subsisting on the usual locusts and honey diet, Moses had been living on manna, and Allah only knows what Mohammed had been ingesting. And while there is a long tradition in several religions of mystics and holy men living hermitic lives on mountains, there are also modern mountain climbers and other extreme atheletes who practice their sports for the express purpose of experiencing altered states of consciousness.<br /><br />Surely there must be easier ways....sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-19521607448145637052008-08-14T01:58:00.000-04:002008-08-14T01:59:31.474-04:00The Spoken Word RevolutionDuring commercials or boring parts of the Olympics, I’ve been reading. I finished--which is to say, read most of--a book I’ve had kicking around here since the New Year when I was getting ready for my poetry reading: The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip Hop & the Poetry of a New Generation, edited by Mark Eleveld.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=spokenwordrevolution.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/spokenwordrevolution.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br />When I started reading at that event, it was something of a slam atmosphere, although not really a slam. It’s less so now. But I’m always interested in poetry read aloud, and this book comes with a CD of poetry readings, which actually, I haven’t listened to yet, although I added it to my iTunes....<br /><br />I’m not sure what’s up with the whole poetry slam thing these days. This book (which came out in 2005) has several memoirs of the movement’s beginnings in Chicago and elsewhere (like Taos). I definitely think it was very cool that the slam thing generated so much interest in poetry. I have no problem at all with mixing poetry with other media or using it as almost stand-up comedy or performance art. On the other hand, as just poetry, most of what is in this book is just so-so. I made some notes as I read it and then tonight I went through it again and, really, the only ones that stood out for me were Yusef Komunyakaa--who has won the Pulitzer Prize--and Regie Gibson. Interestingly, when I went looking for online versions of their poems, I found Gibson’s poem in a blog that reviewed The Spoken Word Revolution, and that blogger also singled out Gibson as the best poet in the book.<br /><br />I liked the Komunyakaa so much, that I checked his book of poems, Pleasure Dome, out of the library, and that’s the next book of poetry I’ll be reading. I think “Anodyne” would sounds quite nice read aloud, too, as you can hear for yourself here:<br /><br />http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/komunyakaa/anodyne.php<br /><br />Anodyne<br /><br />By Yusef Komunyakaa<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=YusefKomunyakaa.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/YusefKomunyakaa.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br />I love how it swells<br />into a temple where it is<br />held prisoner, where the god<br />of blame resides. I love<br />slopes & peaks, the secret<br />paths that make me selfish.<br />I love my crooked feet<br />shaped by vanity & work<br />shoes made to outlast<br />belief. The hardness<br />coupling milk it can't<br />fashion. I love the lips,<br />salt & honeycomb on the tongue.<br />The hair holding off rain<br />& snow. The white moons<br />on my fingernails. I love<br />how everything begs<br />blood into song & prayer<br />inside an egg. A ghost<br />hums through my bones<br />like Pan's midnight flute<br />shaping internal laws<br />beside a troubled river.<br />I love this body<br />made to weather the storm<br />in the brain, raised<br />out of the deep smell<br />of fish & water hyacinth,<br />out of rapture & the first<br />regret. I love my big hands.<br />I love it clear down to the soft<br />quick motor of each breath,<br />the liver's ten kinds of desire<br />& the kidney's lust for sugar.<br />This skin, this sac of dung<br />& joy, this spleen floating<br />like a compass needle inside<br />nighttime, always divining<br />West Africa's dusty horizon.<br />I love the birthmark<br />posed like a fighting cock<br />on my right shoulder blade.<br />I love this body, this<br />solo & ragtime jubilee<br />behind the left nipple,<br />because I know I was born<br />to wear out at least<br />one hundred angels.<br /><br />http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/ is a nice little site, featuring the very fine poetry of Seamus Heaney, Philip Levine, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Pinsky, Margaret Walker, Richard Wilbur, and Komunyakaa.<br /><br />Here’s the Gibson poem I liked:<br /><br />from The Spoken Word Revolution:<br /><br />in the year i loved your mother<br />(for my daughter safiya who needs to know this)<br />by Regie Gibson<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=regiegibson.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/regiegibson.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br />in the year i loved your mother<br />i lived a glorious death<br />i was satellite traveling between blood and star<br />a planet evolving through rage and grief<br /><br />in the year i loved your mother<br />was a time of drought and deluge<br />a season of rain and ruin<br /><br />between us much soil and water<br />an illiterate ocean of language and diction<br /><br />i arrived to her half broken half breaking<br /><br />in the year i loved your mother<br />we were drum and drone<br />a volley of polemic and ideal<br /><br />once i glimpsed you<br />waving at me from her mouth<br />as dawn met our shoulders<br />she whispered your name<br /><br />we became the thin line<br />between sea and mountain<br />valley and sky<br /><br />in the year i loved your mother<br />gravity abandoned me to her<br />she was vortex-a black hole<br />sewn into the belly of a continent<br />crushing all into singularity.<br /><br />grapewaswinewas<br />soundwassongwas<br />motionwasdancewas<br />dovewasvulturecirclingwaslandingwas<br />all that was : was herYYY<br /><br />the year I loved your mother<br />was the year tragedy tamed tongues<br /><br />we served ours stitched them into<br />one anothers mouths we grew fluent<br />in speaking pain.<br /><br />we brought stones from our pockets<br />traded them hurled them back towards<br />each others wounds and those that missed<br />were gathered later were used to build our walls<br /><br />she was an equinox of razors when i found her<br />an autumn of featherless wings<br />caught in this gale of a man<br /><br />your mother was: soft lips cutting calluses<br />from my knuckles<br /><br />a silk fist logged hard in my mouth<br />where it opened into a sunflower<br />widening in the crag of my throat<br /><br />in her skin i was cryptic blasphemy<br />transparent decoded holysinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-38505579722326013142008-07-20T02:12:00.000-04:002008-07-20T02:18:15.194-04:00The Lawn Liberation Movement<a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=RICHIERICHLAWN.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/RICHIERICHLAWN.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I just read a really good <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/07/21/080721crbo_books_kolbert">New Yorker article</a>, “Turf War” by Elizabeth Kolbert, about the history and future of lawns in America. (BTW, you can subscribe to The New Yorker via RSS, which I just did, although I came by this article by way of another RSS feed I use, http://pruned.blogspot.com--a blog about gardens, landscaping, etc.)<br /><br />I was pleased and amused to learn that what I have is a “Freedom lawn”!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">In “Redesigning the American Lawn” (1993), F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Geballe dub such a lawn the Freedom Lawn. The Freedom Lawn consists of grass mixed with whatever else happens to seed itself, which, the authors note, might include: dandelion, violets, bluets, spurrey, chickweed, chrysanthemum, brown-eyed Susan, partridge berry, Canada mayflower, various clovers, plantains, evening primrose, rushes, and wood rush, as well as grasses not usually associated with the well-manicured lawn, such as broomsedge, sweet vernal grass, timothy, quack grass, oat grass, crabgrass, and foxtail grass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Freedom Lawn is still mowed—preferably with a push-mower—but it is watered infrequently, if at all, and receives no chemical “inputs.” If a brown spot develops, it is likely soon to be filled by what some might call weeds, but which Bormann, Balmori, and Geballe would rather refer to as “low growing broad-leaved plants.”</span><br /><br />[End of quotation from the article]<br /><br />I personally never water the damn thing. I never fertilize it. I apply no herbicide. I deserve thanks! As for the water, the article says:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the (NASA-funded) study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.</span><br /><br />[End of quotation from the article]<br /><br />The herbicides and pesticides seem ultimately always to be toxic, carcinogenic, and/or environmentally damaging, particularly deadly to environmentally sensitive creatures such as tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees, which, as we no know, are experiencing severe problems like colony collapse for the bees and genuine endangerment to many of the amphibians.<br /><br />I am not such a radical as to dispense with my front lawn altogether, although on the side of my corner lot, where there are several tall pines, I have just let the needles form a mulch so that little lawn grows there. I still mow the front lawn with a gas-powed mower. But perhaps someday in the not-too-distant future we will be able to mow with <a href="http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/13290/14314/hysqvarna-auto-mower-solar-power.phtml">solar powered robot mowers!</a><br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=husqvarna.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/husqvarna.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />These Husqvarna solar-powered lawnmowers cost $4000 now, but that strikes me as being a price that, should they catch on, could come down well enough in not so long a time.<br /><br />As I’ve said before, the Freedom Lawn is pretty much where most of my neighbors are at these days. There are still several who hire lawn care guys who just go apeshit with the chemicals, yielding the bright green, homogenous Fascist Lawn. Down with the Herbo-Fascists!<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=SCottlawnad.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/SCottlawnad.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Scott Miracle-Gro adsinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-34479396549277957562008-07-03T00:18:00.000-04:002008-07-03T00:22:33.722-04:00Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First CenturyPBS had a pretty cool series called <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century</span>. It’s available on DVD and has a companion volume, as well. The series is worth watching. You see the artists (or sculptures, whatever they may be) at work, putting together a project, and they talk about it.<br /><br />As for the companion volume, it turns out that the one I’ve had kicking about the house here, checked out from the library forever, is #2, whereas I guess the two episodes I saw on TV were from Part One.<br /><br />Looking through the book was a lot like looking through one of my favorite magazines: <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Art in America</span>. I’m like, crap, crap, crap, wow!, crap, crap, wow!, crap, crap.... It was mostly crap. But two artists stood out for me. The most interesting by far was Gabriel Orozco, who seems to be mostly a photographer, but who does some things you could call sculptures or something. Orozco says:<br /><br />Another way is to deconstruct a cultural icon, because it is also a machine that has a function, and to remake it on its own logic.<br /><br />Well, when Orozco deconstructs something, he does it literally, taking apart a Citroen, removing its center, and putting the two sides back together! This view, in particular, was striking:<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=orozco-sculpt-003.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/orozco-sculpt-003.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />There is a lot of thought behind his photographs, as when he creates a simple terra cotta sculpture, and then takes a two-part Cibachrome of it:<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=GabrielOrozco-MyHandsAreMyHeart1991.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/GabrielOrozco-MyHandsAreMyHeart1991.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />[My Hands are My Heart, 1991]<br /><br />He does all sorts of stuff. Here, he adds a digital touch to a photograph:<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=GabrielOrozco-LightThroughLeaves199.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/GabrielOrozco-LightThroughLeaves199.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />[Light Through Leaves, detail, 1996]<br /><br />Orozco:<br /><br />A photograph might or might not become a work of art. In a way, it’s irrelevant because I think photograpy is a necessity for documentation....for memory. First it’s a necessity. Then, some of these photographs might generate enough thinking and contemplation to be exposed for consideration. But I don’t take photographs thinking they are going to be art. I take the photographs thinking that I need to keep the moment....<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=GabrielOrozco-CatsandWatermelons199.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/GabrielOrozco-CatsandWatermelons199.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />[Cats and Watermelons (detail)(1992, Cibachrome)]<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=GabrielOrozco-CatsandWatermelonsdet.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/GabrielOrozco-CatsandWatermelonsdet.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />[Cats and Watermelons (detail)(1992, Cibachrome)]<br /><br />There is slideshow of Orozco’s works at:<br /><br />http://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?artist=58<br /><br />The other artist who caught my eye was Korean-born Do-Ho Suh, who does a variety of installations. I liked his sculpture composed of dog tags...<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=Do-HohSuh-SameOne2001dogtagssculptu.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/Do-HohSuh-SameOne2001dogtagssculptu.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />[Same/One, 2001]<br /><br />and his description of the dream that led to it:<br /><br />I walked slowly, but I went into the stadium on the ground level. And then I saw this reflecting surface and I realized I was stepping on these metal pieces that were military dog tags. And they were vibrating slightly, vibrating and touching each other.... I saw central figure in the center of the stadium. It tried to go out of the stadium but it couldn’t because the train of its garment, which was made of dog tags, was too big.<br /><br />A begin being blog.sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-59949470522312198552008-06-23T00:16:00.000-04:002008-06-23T00:18:17.495-04:00Brenda Shaughnessy's Human Dark with SugarToday I was going to work in the garden, take an extra long walk with my dog, and start doing yoga. Uh, but I started watching the Cardinals-Red Sox game, which ended up being a really great game, 13 innings, and so while I vegged out for hours, I did manage to finish, in between innings and such, Brenda Shaughnessy’s book of poems, <span style="font-style: italic;">Human Dark with Sugar</span>, published just this year, actually.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=HumanDarkwithSugar.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/HumanDarkwithSugar.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br />You can tell, as you read along, that Shaughnessy has a high-powered intellect, something I usually like in women writers. Honest. This was all pretty much confessional poetry, Shaughnessy spilling her guts all over the place in twisty, quirky language. But the thing about confessional poetry is, if you find the poet appealing in some way, it can be terrific. If not, it’s like being stuck on a Greyhound bus with an over-bearing pain in the ass on a three-day trip across Canada.<br /><br />Being sexy is so important to humans, it’s repulsive<br />but what’s not to love? The way you pay in warm<br />soft cash, erasing cigarettes so cooly. Plus you’re so big.<br /><br />I warned you people, never sleep with the one you love.<br />Sleep with the others, make ‘em want you,<br />and you’ll love ‘em soon enough. Just use the body.<br /><br />These words are spoken by a dying moth on the windowsill. (In, um, “Moth Death on the Windowsill”)<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=BrendaShaughnessy.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/BrendaShaughnessy.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br />Brenda Shaughnessy<br /><br />A lot of her poems, maybe most, are written to some lover, husband, or other poor shnook (one of whom she makes a rather large point of having cheated on):<br /><br />As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.<br />I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,<br /><br />when it would be truer to say nothing.<br />I’ve invented so much and prevented more.<br /><br />But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,<br />in absolute quiet. In extreme context.<br /><br />To see you again, isn’t love revision?<br />It could have gone so many ways.<br /><br />This is just one of the ways it went.<br />Tell me another.<br /><br /> --from “One Love Story, Eight Takes”<br /><br />She’s clever. While there’s a lot of decent writing in these poems, much of it comes off like what happens after a Phi Beta Kappa says, “Let’s talk about our relationship.”sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-36642858434292988342008-06-12T10:28:00.000-04:002008-06-12T10:32:37.658-04:00Orbital Sciences to resupply the International Space Station with launches from VirginiaOrbital Sciences, a Northern Virginia company (I own no stock--wish I’d bought it in 2002...), is making Virginia a key player in the space program. Built in Virginia, the company’s Taurus II Medium-Lift Launch Vehicle (um,rocket) while lift its Cygnus Maneuvering Spacecraft into orbit from the MId-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, perhaps as soon as 2010, the year the shuttle program will end.<br /><br />The NASA facility on Wallops Island is just across a little inlet from Chincoteague, off Rte. 13 on the Eastern Shore. The beach you see behind the rocket (which is an illustration) is not Chincoteague, but south of it.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=TaurusII_Wallops.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/TaurusII_Wallops.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Over 15,000 rockets have been launched from Wallops since 1945, but until the state of Virginia agreed to fund necesssary improvements, the launch of larger rockets was not feasible.<br /><br />In the illustration below, the Cygnus Maneuvering Spacecraft, carrying one of the Interchangeable Cargo Modules, approaches the international space station.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/?action=view&current=Cygnusspacecraftapproachthespacesta.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/Cygnusspacecraftapproachthespacesta.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The company plans to be launching 4 to 6 of the Taurus II rockets a year from Wallops, including commercial satellites as well as theh NASA flights.<br /><br />None of this involves manned missions, though. NASA is returning to the space module concept--using a Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) called Orion, to be launched by the Ares I rocket--for probable lunar missions, perhaps around 2015. Probably won't be launching from Virginia....<br /><br /><a href="http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13352-orbital-sciences-to-develop-space-station-cargo-ship.html">Orbital Sciences to develop space station cargo ship (space.newscientist.com, 2/20/2008)</a><br /><br /><a href="http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2008/06/09/daily13.html">Orbital Sciences adds 125 jobs in Virginia (Washington Business Journal, 6/9/2008)</a><br /><br /><a href="http://hamptonroads.com/2008/06/virginia-serve-test-launch-site-space-station-resupply-rocket">Deal for resupply rockets seen as chance for Wallops Island site to take off (The Virginian-Pilot, 6/10/2008)</a>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-88041593387896202672008-06-11T12:17:00.000-04:002008-06-12T12:20:02.446-04:00Papoon for President! He's still not insane!From the <a href="firesigntheatre.com">Firesign Theatre</a>:<br /><br />Republican propaganda website endorses Papoon<br /><br />Infamous Republican propaganda website www.talonnews.com, which<br />used to employ Republican closeted gay prostitute Jim Gannon as<br />a journalist and send him to White House press conferences to<br />pitch softballs at Scott McLellan, has endorsed George G. Papoon<br />for President!<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=GeorgePapoon.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/GeorgePapoon.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.talonnews.com/news/2008/june/0609_papoon_blasts_off.shtml">http://www.talonnews.com/news/2008/june/0609_papoon_blasts_off.shtml</a><br /><br />The character of George Papoon originated on the Firesign Theatre’s 1972 "Not Insane or Anything You Want To" album, and also appears on the 2002 “Papoon for President” CD, which is available at:<br /><br />http://laughstore.stores.yahoo.net/firtheatpapf.html<br /><br />There’s a sample from Not Insane! at <a href="http://www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/album.php?album=pfp">http://www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/album.php?album=pfp</a> and the CD is available at:<br /><br /><a href="http://laughstore.stores.yahoo.net/firtheatnoti.html">http://laughstore.stores.yahoo.net/firtheatnoti.html</a><br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=NotInsane.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/NotInsane.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a>sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-76930563943183915062008-06-06T05:09:00.000-04:002008-06-06T05:11:52.092-04:00Daniel H. Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever NeedStarted another computer class tonight and then dozed off early, so now I'm up at 4:38 a.m., listening to Coast to Coast Am....<br /><br />Earlier, I read Daniel H. Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, which is out this year.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=johnnybunko-1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/johnnybunko-1.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It's sort of a 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in manga form, and as such was a bit of fun, but again, like most of these things, not exactly novel in its advice. All of these self-help books feed off each other, often explicitly. For instance, at one point, Pink mentions Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, whose book Flow I recently blogged about.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vczEyMy5waG90b2J1Y2tldC5jb20vYWxidW1zL28yOTEvcnViZW5mb3dsZXIvMjAwOC8/YWN0aW9uPXZpZXcmY3VycmVudD1CdW5rb3F1b3Rlcy1GbG93LmpwZw==" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/Bunkoquotes-Flow.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It's not every psychologist who appears as a cartoon in a manga, but as you can see above, there's Csíkszentmihályi!<br /><br />Anyway, Bunko is a young (looks about 13, actually) accountant who is one because his father told him to have a plan, go into a field where there are plenty of jobs, like accounting. Only Bunko really wants to be something else, art, etc.... He's very unhappy, and a cute young sort-of genie appears when he opens some magic chopsticks. Her first advice: 1. There is no plan. Eventually, there are six lessons:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vczEyMy5waG90b2J1Y2tldC5jb20vYWxidW1zL28yOTEvcnViZW5mb3dsZXIvMjAwOC8/YWN0aW9uPXZpZXcmY3VycmVudD1CdW5rb3F1b3Rlcy1MZXNzb25zLmpwZw==" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/Bunkoquotes-Lessons.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Along the way, there are some thoughtful little gems:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vczEyMy5waG90b2J1Y2tldC5jb20vYWxidW1zL28yOTEvcnViZW5mb3dsZXIvMjAwOC8/YWN0aW9uPXZpZXcmY3VycmVudD1CdW5rb3F1b3Rlcy1QZXJzaXN0ZW5jZS5qcGc=" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/Bunkoquotes-Persistence.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vczEyMy5waG90b2J1Y2tldC5jb20vYWxidW1zL28yOTEvcnViZW5mb3dsZXIvMjAwOC8/YWN0aW9uPXZpZXcmY3VycmVudD1CdW5rb3F1b3Rlcy1NaXN0YWtlcy5qcGc=" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/Bunkoquotes-Mistakes.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vczEyMy5waG90b2J1Y2tldC5jb20vYWxidW1zL28yOTEvcnViZW5mb3dsZXIvMjAwOC8/YWN0aW9uPXZpZXcmY3VycmVudD1CdW5rb3F1b3Rlcy1JdHNOb3RBYm91dFlvdS5qcGc=" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/Bunkoquotes-ItsNotAboutYou.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Makes sense to me, but probably, if you're going to shell out some bucks for a career book, you need some more specific help--for instance, on interviewing--than what you get here.<br /><br />A begin being blogsinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-71284013266065170482008-06-04T01:45:00.001-04:002008-06-04T01:45:59.909-04:00Blackwater Buys BombersHere’s something disturbing: Blackwater USA, the right-wing Christian mercenary company that Bush-Cheney have employed in Iraq has taken to buying bombers from Brazil. This showed up in my morning paper today, but actually, it’s not news at all. Military related blogs were reporting on this last summer.<br /><br /><a href="http://s123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/?action=view&current=SuperTucanos.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o291/rubenfowler/2008/SuperTucanos.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /><br />The planes they are buying are no great shakes. They look like P-51s, like the old Flying Tigers. In fact, these Super Tucanos are propeller craft. But they are bombers, and even though Blackwater has already been using armed helicopters in Iraq, somehow this strikes me as carrying the right to bear arms a bit too far.<br /><br />A begin being blogsinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1243852987273838193.post-40995755876866584042008-06-03T01:31:00.000-04:002008-06-03T01:34:23.272-04:00Tonight on CNN.com I came across a story about how Peter Gabriel was involved with this company that had created some software for your iTunes called The Filter. It creates playlists from your iTunes songs along the lines of, if you like this, you’ll like this. I dunno. Maybe I’d download it if I weren’t down to less than 2 GBs on my hard drive. I sort of create my own playlists, but...<br /><br />Anyway, this led me to a pretty cool blog called <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Bruce Eisner’s Vision Thing</span>. Eisner talked a bit about The Filter.<br /><br />Now, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Eisner">Eisner</a> started out writing for underground papers back in the day, later for <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">High Times</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Omni</span>. Later, IFYBW (if you believe Wikipedia), he was a leader of Linkage, a group that “brought Albert Hofmann to UC Santa Cruz in 1977 for his first public lecture in the US at a conference called "LSD: A Generation Later." The conference was attended by both counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary Ph.D, Alan Ginsberg, Ram Dass,” and others.<br /><br />So I surfed on to another Eisner blog in which he posted a video from a 1996 episode of <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher</span>. Originally, Timothy Leary had been scheduled to appear. He was dying. If you recall, Leary treated his death as a sort of Happening. But, as happens with the dying, he had a bad day and couldn’t make it. Among those who did were Robert Anton Wilson, the lovely former Mama Michelle Philips, and Bob Guccione, Jr., and they talked about Leary. One delightful highlight came from Wilson:<br /><br />Well, technically he went to prison for one joint of marijuana, fow which he got 37 years--a very strange penalty, considering it was six months in those day. The judge, on sentencing him, said his ideas were a danger to society, which is why the Swiss government gave him asylum after he climbed over the wall....They gave him the Leary Interpersonal Diagnostic Test, which he had designed back at Stanford. It’s a test to measure 64,000 personalities, and he answered all the questions so that he came out as docile, easily led, looking for leadership, so they put him in a minimum security prison, and he climbed a rope and went to Switzerland.<br /><br /> --Robert Anton Wilson, on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher<br /><br /><embed id="VideoPlayback" style="width:400px;height:326px" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="fs=true" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-6690946019037737370&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed> <br /><br />A begin being blog.sinappshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00813974314917836576noreply@blogger.com0