col’s blog

my dad always loved george carlin. him and richard pryor. and as a kid i didn’t quite get the appeal but i grasped the sense that these guys were cool badasses who cut through the BS in a way that made lots of grown ups love them. as the years unfolded, i never did develop much of an appreciation for george’s standup. i saw him as a sort of creepy, cranky negative guy. a hard-edged complainer, which didn’t sit well with my good girl sensibility and rosy demeanor. but as i became more authentic, allowed myself to get angry about all the shit in the world, i’ve begun to dig on george more.  there was a great interview with him in the november 2007 issue of interview magazine where he defines success as “finding something you love, finding that you’re good at it, and being recognized for that.” simple and true.

and here’s another one of his quotes i once posted here on col’s blog that i think is worth rehashing:

“I don’t like ass kissers, flag wavers, or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn kids, somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, ‘there is no i in team.’ What you should tell them is, maybe not. But there is an i in independence, individuality, and integrity.” –George Carlin

art − ash and i saw the david byrne “play the building” exhibit, right by the staten island ferry, a week ago. we enjoyed it. it was one of those shows where you go, you see it, you get it, and you leave. unless you’re a hipster out cruisin’ for dates, in which case you linger and prepare pedantic pickup lines for dudes with mustaches and chicks with femullets. speaking of uber coolness, i still haven’t made it over to the murakami exhibit, but shall shortly. and damnit i missed the telectroscope thing in brooklyn, whereby you can look through a telescope and see (and wave to) people in london.

film − linda and i saw the satc movie. i really liked. it’s a showcase of these four wonderful characters, and an homage to friendship, and liberated women living life on their own terms. i was late to the satc party … i only started watching after the 3rd or 4th season … early on i was a snob in the “it’s shallow and frivolous” camp. i only had eyes for SFU. but once i gave the show a shot i realized there was much more to the characters and the entire dynamic. i also understand why so many people are threatened by what the show represents … women going after and getting what they want, enjoying pleasurable things, sustaining themselves through their own wits, charms and relationships rather than relying on men and traditional institutions like marriage to take care of them.

zen shit − sunday after yoga i stopped off at the east west bookstore (a favorite zen col hangout) and picked up another title – “meditation” − by indian mystic and guru osho, whom i’ve been reading a lot of lately. made my way over to the water and read, lazed there most of the afternoon on a sweet perch. time passed and group of people came by and sat around me on said perch. at first i was irritated because their banter was distracting me from my book. but once i started listening i discovered that they were a meditation group … and they were talking a lot about osho! the leader, a lovably crazy hippie lady, had known him well … she was talking about building a sod worship center in india. the students shared their troubles and concerns … both abstract and specific. how they struggle with silencing their minds … and are addicted to the mental drama in spite of knowing it’s no good for anybody. one woman couldn’t stand being paid $40 an hour for her engineering skills due to the bad economy (she’s used to receiving double that). another was worried about her green card coming though. another still was saying that he can’t see himself riding out a desk job for the rest of his life. together they brainstormed about creating a food cart business that caters to manhattan professionals — healthy, organic, high-end indian food. they discussed the leadership team, distribution and their marketing plan. they were interesting, warm and i felt like a part of their group (and sort of was). a lovely day by the water.

Nuestras vidas son los ríos
que van a dar en la mar,
que es el morir.
Allí van los señoríos
derechos a se acabar
e consumir.
allí los ríos caudales,
allí los otros medianos
e más chicos,
allegados, son iguales
los que viven por sus manos
e los ricos.

Stanza 3 from Jorge Manrique’s “Coplas a la muerte de su padre“

(Translation)

Our lives are rivers, gliding free
To that unfathomed, boundless sea,
That is death
All earthly pomp and boast
Is swallowed up and lost
In one dark wave.
The mighty torrents that stray,
The brook that pursues its way,
And tinkling streams,
There all are equal; side by side
The poor man and the son of pride

“I’m a top line melody guy,” Bono tells writer Amy Wallace in a story that hits next week in the January issue of Condé Nast Portfolio. “That’s what I do. I understand harmony. I understand rhythm. But I sell ideas - musical, political and, in this case, commercial ideas.”

Says Bono: “So many great painters, great musicians, great geniuses ended up with nothing. With broken hearts in rooms with broken windows. I want to see artists sitting at the table that decides the outcome of their lives.”

BONO CREDO: SELL IDEAS
ELEVATION: NO PROFIT MOTIVES
The New York Post 12/16/07

i don’t open the rolling stone magazine that they keep sending to my house. despite my not paying. despite my persistent entreaties to “please cancel!” it keeps coming and coming. it’s either got an old/lame act on the cover or it’s another god damned anniversary issue. oy vey. no single media outlet has much influence anymore. but thankfully there are fabulous filters like bob lefsetz to bring the (rare) good shit to our attention. this was in today’s post entitled “chris rock on the music business:”

Chris Rock: Music kind of sucks. Nobody’s into being a musician. Everybody’s getting their mogul on. You’ve been so infiltrated by this corporate mentality that all the time you’d spend getting great songs together, you’re busy doing nine other things that have nothing to do with art. You know how shitty Stevie Wonder’s songs would have been if he had to run a fuckin’ clothing company and a cologne line?

RollingStone: Plenty of rappers say, “I’m not a rapper, I’m a businessman.”

Chris Rock: That’s why rap sucks, for the most part. Not all rap, but as an art form it’s just not at its best moment. Sammy the Bull would have made a shitty album. And I don’t really have a desire to hear Warren Buffett’s album - or the new CD by Paul Allen. That’s what everybody’s aspiring to be.

We live in a weird time. No one knows who’s smart - we just know who makes money. “Hey, somebody invented Viagra! We don’t know their name, but we know Pfizer, because they make the money.” That guy made a pill that keeps your dick hard, and nobody knows who the fuck he is. The pharmaceutical companies are like fuckin’ record companies. There’s literally the Bo Diddley of medicine walking around, not getting his royalties. He signed all his fucking pill publishing away.

(”Rolling Stone”, Issue 1039, November 15, 2007, page 157)

___________________________________________

One of my favorite quotes about the movie business comes from Lynda Obst’s book, “Hello, He Lied”:

“If the writer gives good meeting, he’s a lousy writer.”

there was more to the post, which you should go read for yourself.

chris rock, such a truth talker. love. he’s totes right about everyone trying to get his mogul on.

INDIE WEB SITES MAY WIN WITH WRITERS’ STRIKE
10-26-07 New York Post

I love the idea of a writer’s strike causing the rise of indie outlets. I like to see the people with heart and brains stand up for themselves and value themselves. Don’t give away your juice for free. Realize you don’t need this shit – this shit needs you. Lots of writers and creative types lose control of their own careers because they fail to grasp the importance of profiting from their own work. It’s not about greed. It’s about independence.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.─ George Elliot Middlemarch

Filters are important. What people, information, ideas, art, experiences, joy do you let in? For me, it’s a daily struggle not to allow television and other media sources dictate my views and perceptions of the world and other people. Those things have a place, but they shouldn’t be too big of a place. So much of it is garbage. I also struggle not to be overly influenced by past personal experiences (childhood and subsequent). That’s harder for me than tuning out media noise.

I try to keep my eyes and ears and brain open to the new. Sometimes, I think I might be on to something. The idea of anticipatory systems keeps popping up in everything I read and experience. Last night I got deeper into Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, and read with great interest the early impact that certain philosophers had on his worldview. I stopped and reread this passage twice:

Kant distinguished between two kinds of truths: (1) analytic propositions, which derive from logic and “reason itself” rather than from observing the world; for example, all bachelors are unmarried, two plus two equals four, and the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees; and 2) synthetic propositions, which are based on experience and observations; for example, Munich is bigger than Bern, all swans are white. Synthetic propositions could be revised by new empiracle evidence, but not analytic ones. We may discover a black swan but not a married bachelor or (at least so Kant thought) a triangle with 181 degrees. As Einstein said of Kant’s first category of truths: “This is held to be the case, for example, in the propositions of geometry and in the principle of causality. These and certain other types of knowledge … do not previously have to be gained from sense data, in other words a priori knowledge.”

Later on he changed his mind though, and grew to reject Kant’s rigid distinction between analytic and synthetic truths …

A proposition that seems purely analytic — such as the angles of a triangle adding up to 180 degrees — could turn out to be false in a non-Euclidean geometry or in a curved space (such as would be the case in the general theory of relativity).

This morning, I saw a man on the subway reading a book called The Black Swan and I did a double take wondering to myself “black swan, where’d I hear that one before?” (I had a feeling it was the Einstein book, and I just, moments ago, confirmed that.)

Then, when I got to the office and booted up my compie, the new feedreader I am trying out delivered this Forbes.com article into my world: You Can’t Predict Who Will Change the World, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the black swan book. An excerpt:

We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past–but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future.

The current discourse in economics, for example, is antiquated. American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows us to capture the randomness of the environment–the cheap Black Swans. This works not just because of competition, and even less because of material incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith nor those of Karl Marx seem to be conscious of the prevalence and effect of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style cause-and-effect, and cannot accept that skills and payoffs may have nothing to do with one another.

Ah yes, more shit talking the cartesian bias and celebration of randomness. I’m not going to buy the book, because between Freakonomics and Blink and all the others, I’ve already read it fifty times at this point. We get it guys: life is nutty and unpredictable. That’s also what makes it so fun. And I have a hunch that, pretty soon, we will start valuing human intuition too, and those who know how to see what is and what will be. The kind of stuff that financial models and recommendation technologies cannot pick up. The ultimate human filters …

“Truth is the vision closed eyes see.” – Octavio Paz

1. i am reading walter isaacson’s biography of albert einstein and enjoying it thoroughly. things i most love:

– his rebellious streak and disdain for authority and conformity
– as a young man, he was constantly being rejected and ignored by established academic and scientific communities. they couldn’t compute his brilliance – it was beyond them. he wanted their approval and acceptance so desperately yet when he didn’t get it, he decided that they were dumb and he kept going.
– he didn’t want to settle into a boring bourgeoisie life

2. i am watching the new fox business channel on mute. it looks really cheesy (shocking!).

3. my cousin kate who lives in boston is my kindred spirit, my sister from another mister. our grandma was an artist, and we all have that strain in us. kate said, “on the weekends i just go wandering around the city, finding different people and things.” we both love wacky stuff. then this morning she sent me her horoscope and said it reminded her of me, which made me happy.

don’t be surprised if, in the middle of a conversation, your mind starts to wander today. at first, you might think you’re just entering an introverted, ‘i want to be alone’ phase. but in reality, you might just be bored with the method of discourse. getting ideas across by explaining them with words is so uncreative! try singing your reply, or jotting down a quick haiku that is expressive of what you’re thinking. it’s up to you to push people into communicating in more meaningful ways.

it also reminded me of how my older bro bri and i would torture my little bro kev by refusing to talk for extended periods of time … we’d only sing in his presence. bri: remember that? kev: sorry dude. kate: thanks. xoxo

4. everyone should watch the ellen de generes show. her motto says it all: laughter is the best medicine.

in the past 72 hours i

1. overheard a bum on the street saying to another bum: “and then mel gibson told danny glover he better check himself…”
2. told my pal david i saw apocalypto (and enjoyed it) and he told me he was disappointed in the racist portrayal of the mayans. he also said mel was a douche to the locals and crew who worked on the film, and this article corroborates that.
3. was almost hit by a raging man in a fed ex uniform driving a bicycle on the sidewalk at mach speed. as he passed he shouted out: “i should have hit your ass!”
4. watched part of gilda (via netflix)
5. saw a really cool documentary called toots and met the filmmaker, the subject’s granddaughter. it’s an incredible history lesson on new york city. and an interesting family history as well. (still playing at the quad cinema on 13th st.)
6. got my hair cut and colored (spent a boatload on it, oy!).
7. had clips duty, whereby i get up early on weekend mornings and scan the contents of 7 newspaper web sites for stories about my employer. this call to duty occurs approximately every 4 weeks. i find it highly annoying, and i kvetch about it to everyone.
8. ate a piece of chocolate cake and invoked the bill cosby routine about it.
9. got another email from my cuz in iraq, telling me he likes my halloween costume idea.
10. drank too damn much prosecco and stayed out until 3:30 a.m. though it hurts, it was delightful and i totes like bragging about it right now (32 going on 13).

I play it cool / And dig all jive / That’s the reason / I stay alive / My motto / As I live and learn / Is: Dig And Be Dug / In Return. — “Motto” by Langston Hughes

Had a real New York moment last night involving a masseur I’ve been going to for a bout 2 years now, Chris, a Chinese dude who works at a spa near my apartment in the West Village. He gives a good massage and his reflexology skillz are off the hizzo. I go to a lot of different places in the city for massage. I believe in its powers to rid your body of tensions and toxins and accelerate healing.

Last time I saw Chris, he told me on the down low that he’s also working at another salon in Chelsea where they charge $25 less. Naturally I followed him there, going for my first appointment in the new digs last night. The place was a lot nicer, and Chris was so appreciative. When we were done he asked if I wanted a cocktail. His English isn’t so great so I didn’t know what he was saying at first but then he went over to the corner and started loading ice into two plastic cups. I excused myself to use the bathroom and when I came back the manager was there. She was an immaculately dressed and made up woman with a very sympathetic, welcoming smile.

Chris insisted that I enjoy my Kaluha on the rocks and who was I to turn away on this hospitality. We clinked our plastic cups and sipped our liquor and all three got to chit chatting. I asked the woman how long she’d been open, how was business, etc. Chris started saying how he always enjoyed drinking with customers back in China. I only understood about 50% of what he was saying … the woman, who I believe is his wife or girlfriend, translated. She said that Chris was a performing artist back in China. A singer and dancer. And in China “just like in America” artists need another source of livelihood so Chris became a physical therapist. I asked if he still performs, and he said hold on, let me do one for you. He explained his routine first … something about the moon overhead and the green grass below … and then busted into it. LOUD. Loud melodious singing and swishing about. It was so unexpected. Here was a man who’s been taking care of my body for a couple of years and I was only now learning something personal about him. After the traditional Chinese song he busted into, no joke, the Morris Albert cabaret lounge classic “Feelings” (I can just picture Bill Murray belting it out as Nick Winters).

I applauded and we talked some more. They wanted badly to pronounce my name correctly. I told them it was a Gaelic word that means “Irish girl.” The woman said I look like a girl. That I have a childlike face and hair. I thanked her for that. Said I try to stay young in my heart. “Forever 21,” she said. “Yeah, that’s where I bought this dress,” I said. We both laughed, and it was true.