We walked 4.4 miles to get to this movie, from South Berkeley to the El Cerrito speakeasy, north of Berkeley, much of that walk, once you get to the Ohlone Greenway, is along parks, fields, playgrounds, dog walks, bikers & joggers, & it's bustling at rush hour. Then, the 2-for-1 price showing of Benjamin Button was sold out! So we killed time at the strip mall for three hours waiting for the 9:15 show. I was happy to discover, while at Barnes & Noble reading More Information than You Require by John Hodgman, that on his quotes page by the frontispiece, he references Pierre Menard as the author for his Don Quixote quote. (The non-Borges Pierre Menard, no relation, is pictured in both images. Menard was a fur trader & beardless Illinois politician, not to be confused with Jorge Luis Borges' Pierre Menard, who was the author of Don Quixote.)
Benjamin Button, despite the oscar shark frenzy, is not one of the best movies. It's definitely a good movie, but I thought it fell short in bunches of ways. Like, when Benjamin Button is a middle-aged man in a teenage body, he sort of takes off around India with a bandanna. It would have been more interesting if he, like, kept dressing conservatively & was confused by the hippy culture developing around him. In that way & others, I felt they didn't really delve deep enough into the potential the premise allowed. Glean what afflicts him. Then, there's the Forrest Gump Dilemma. Was this movie too Forrest Gump-y or not Forrest Gump-y enough? By strattling this chasm it chose mediocrity over trodden paths, cliches, or originality. Next, there's the Big Fish hook: does anyone ever enjoy the scenes in the hospital where the history is being read to the infirmed elder? It worked in The Princess Bride, but most things that work in the Princess Bride don't work elsewhere. I call that the Princess Bride Conundrum. Lastly, there's the Brad Pitt Paradox. I'm taking suggestions for what the Brad Pitt Paradox might entail, but I reckon it has something to do with his simultaneously being a fine, subtle & intelligent actor & also whatever else he is - in short, tho, this wasn't his best role.
February 05, 2009
Movie Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
January 25, 2009
Burns Night 250 Preview: Neeps, Tatties, Vegan Haggis
We're throwing our annual Robert Burns Night supper, this year in Lake Tahoe. We spent the afternoon snowshoeing from in fresh powder. Burns was born in 1759, so this Robert Burns Day marks his 250th birthday. It is also Mr Quill's Birthday! Hoorah!
A full & glitteringly written itinerary for a Burns Night supper is provided by RobertBurns.org, I recommend it. I have several adapted versions of Burns songs which have developed over the years, including "Gorgeous Borges:" ("Borges was a Gorgeous Boy / Gorgeous Borges, Georgeous Borges..." &c., to the tune of Rantin' Rovin' Robin - - see video below for the original 2004 Burns Night performance), & one of the anthems for the Mimosas Witnesses, "Morning Mimosa", to the tune of "No Churchman am I" aka "Big Belly'd Bottle". We'll work our way thru all the standard poetry (Ode to a Mouse, Tam o'Shanter, et cetera) as well as a few personal favorites, such as Cock up your Beaver:
When first my brave Johnie lad came to this town,
He had a blue bonnet that wanted the crown;
But now he has gotten a hat and a feather,
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!
Cock up your beaver, and cock it fu' sprush,
We'll over the border, and gie them a brush;
There's somebody there we'll teach better behaviour,
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!
The recipe for vegan haggis I'm using this afternoon is here, it's basically a lentil loaf. Any complaints about not using proper haggis can be sent to the governor's office in Alaska: veggie haggis has a long & rich tradition in Scotland, & it's also damned near impossible to procure real haggis in California. Miss Williams & Mrs Eley-Nelson will be in charge of the Neeps & Tatties. (I learned, Mr Mary, that what the brits refer to as turnips are in this country called rutabegas, now we know.)March 23, 2008
January 26, 2008
Invitation: Burns Night 2008
Thank you to the ten people who attended our spectacular Burns Night last night. There was merriment, speechifying, songs & orated poems, vegan haggis on parade, absinthe, more absinthe, gay dancing, & a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges. Videos to be posted soon! Here's the invitation from Facebook:
Burns Night 2008 (On the Eventually of the Scottish Bard's 249th Year)
Come, bumpers high, express your joy,The bowl we maun renew it, The tappet hen, gae bring her ben!
Information
| Name: | Burns Night 2008 (On the Eventually of the Scottish Bard's 249th Year) |
| Tagline: | Come, bumpers high, express your joy,The bowl we maun renew it, The tappet hen, gae bring her ben! |
| Host: | James Welsch, Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Golden, Alaine Ball |
| Type: |
| Date: | Friday, January 25, 2008 |
| Time: | 7:30pm - 11:55pm |
| Location: | Hill of Virtue |
| Street: | _ Harold Ave |
| City/Town: | San Francisco, CA |
MapQuest
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Yahoo| Phone: | 415.---.1965 |
| Email: |
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January 21, 2008
Jorge Luis Borges Invents the Internet Forty Years before Al Gore!
Infinite Encyclopedia THEN NOW Life Is Like A Blog THEN NOW Nothing Is Forgotten THEN NOW Universal Library THEN NOW
In the Occasion of Ritual, posted immediately below, Mr Quill refers to an article I sent him from the New York Times, which reports that Borges wrote of several internet-like phenomena in his postmodern science-fictiony short stories from the mid-Twentieth Century,-- like the univeral library & the infinite encyclopedia. I'll post here in full the quotes from Borges juxtaposed by the New York Times. I partially agree with Mr Quill, that the article is bunk - I'm not so sure why Senator George Allen had to be related to a quote from Funes the Memorious. But I think the general notion is notable.
“Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously discarded. It is conjectured that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, ... guided and directed by some shadowy man of genius. There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination — fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.”
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia project that began in 2001, now has a total of more than nine million articles in more 250 languages. There are more than 75,000 “active contributors,” many of whom remain anonymous. As it grows and becomes ever more influential, its operating logic remains a mystery. A favored saying among Wikipedia’s contributors is: “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”
“Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. ‘I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began,’ he said to me. ... And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.”
The path from diary to blog to the frequently updated “microblog” has now descended to “life-logging.” Not content merely to record their thoughts or even daily activities, life-loggers record and preserve everything they see, hear, say and read during the day. The world-recognized early adopter is Gordon Bell, a 73-year-old computer programmer who wears an audio recorder as well as a tiny camera that snaps a picture every 60 seconds. A 2006 profile in Fast Company described Mr. Bell as at one time being “worried about filling up his hard-drive space too quickly.” He adds a gigabyte of information a month and figures that an average 72-year-old person would require one to three terabytes, “a hefty amount of storage.”
“I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke, every expression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory; I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making pointless gestures.”
There once was a time when a poet could assert that “the revolution will not be televised.” But today, of course, even a politician’s informal meet-and-greet will be recorded for posterity. Senator George Allen of Virginia learned this in 2006 when a tape of him calling his opponent’s videographer a “macaca,” a racially tinged epithet, spread like a virus across the state and, soon, the world. He lost his re-election bid.
“From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is ‘total’ ... that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. ... When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist.”
In announcing that an ambitious international project to digitize universities’ book collections had passed the 1.5 million mark, one of its organizers, Raj Reddy, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, proclaimed in November: “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language.” To others, the Internet itself is the Universal Library, where readers can search for recipes, medical treatments, barroom trivia or perhaps even Google themselves.
I also recommend this article from the February 5th, 2007, New Yorker, about Google's Quest for the Universal Library: Google's Moon Shot by Jeffrey Toobin.And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
November 14, 2007
Illuminations: Seven Prayers Frontispiece & Extant Prayer
I'll put up image files of this illuminated poetry book, Seven Prayers, over the next few weeks. The illustrations were done by myself, Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Golden, & Virtue; using colored pencils, paint & pens, & pomegranate & persimmon juice; on paper originally created by New Leaf Paper for the American Harry Potter books VI & VII. Click on the image to see it larger. The original text for "Extant Prayer" was posted here.
September 16, 2007
Extant Prayer
But I'll end my analogies there.
My last pair of pants, the one with the busted fly, has been sent back to the tailor's,
And suddenly, all those trips down the grocery aisle seem truly fulfilling.
Where are the courtrooms?
Where are the judges with fabulous white hair?
I will return to earth, God Willing.
We've been imploring desperately silently to an invisible superman
For four score years.
Now we're in the fourth dimension, we've vindicated each detail of his grand plan:
Dr Samuel Johnson has confirmed that he is allergic to his son's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle band-aids.
Does the boy have to scratch up his knees so often?
Every time we have this conflict you succeed with tears.
I loved my sexual organs, but they've turned into bamboo, which has been eaten by pandaids.
My soul-mate was considerably older than me, the wet nurse of a dead dentist,
Otherwise, she was intense.
She had the jaw of an Australopithecus afarensis,
But don't mistake her for some movie star from the 1940's!
I have learned to believe in social contracts.
Where my faith ends, the railroad to the silver country begins.
My treasure, do not abuse me, & do not confuse me with Jorge Luis Borges.
April 28, 2007
Music: S. Sandrigon, Gold Diamonds, Night Creature, & Drew Piston at the Sacred Grounds Last Night!
Last night I played a set of songs on my guitar, for a small but attentive crowd in the coffee shop in San Francisco. I was opening for Gold Diamonds & Night Creature, the elusive duo who rarely perform in public, followed by Drew Piston, all of which was lovely. Here's my set list:You're Welcome, Willie Stewart (Robert Burns)
Gorgeous Borges (Robert Burns's Rantin' Rovin' Robin with modified lyrics)
My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose (Robert Burns)
Song of Favors
Anacreontic Song
Love Minus Zero / No Limit (Bob Dylan)
Father Drank Himself to Death
Staff in the Hand
Father Drank Himself to Death (Snake Handler Version)
I'm Goin' To See My Lord
Gold Diamonds & Night Creature did all covers: a fifties dance song, a Sun Ra song, a James Brown sing-along ("For goodness sakes! take a look at those cakes!"), & ended with some Mariachi. (They once planned on starting a Mariachi band called Los Sphinctores.) They played a tiny keyboard (hooked to some pedals) & sitar, then switched to guitar & fiddle for the final Mariachi. The singing was beautiful, inspiring - Miss Jenny Ruth Crawford described it as "like A Mighty Wind to the future." Drew Piston sang songs of whiskey, guns, & complicated love. I like his lyrics. In one song, he changed one word (after his brother misheard it), from "ward" to "whore", making the chorus:I am waiting to see what you’ll say,
And the furniture’s been rearranged,
And there’s blood on the floor,
I am waltzing with the geriatric whore.
As for my set - I have never performed that Bob Dylan song in public before, even tho I first learned it many months ago. My guitar part is meant to sound kind of Merry-Go-Roundy, with the capo on the seventh fret. I sing it with the three songs before it to complete the "my love is like a" theme. Perhaps I'll tire of that theme some day. I wrote "Song of Favors" & "Anacreontic Song" four years ago - (around the time of the bombing of Baghdad, & I can still relevantly sing both. Both songs are based on the Burns love song, melodically & lyrically) - & have never published the lyrics, so here goes:Song of Favors (2003)
Met a wench on Basra Street,
La a-la a-lala, bop shu-wop.
Saffron soldiers drowned in heat,
La a-la a-lala, bop shu-wop.
Was she crushed neath fallen idols on the concrete?
Where the shadows of the mirrors & the lizard mosques meet?
Which favor of the tan gazelle will both of you deny?
Which favor of the tan gazelle will both of you deny?
From the West does my love rise,
La a-la a-lala, bop shu-wop.
With her eyes see I her eyes,
La a-la a-lala, bop shu-wop.
New Jerusalem's an eccho of the old one.
Time & space have died the victim of a tasteless pun.
Which favor of the tan gazelle will both of you deny?
Which favor of the tan gazelle will both of you deny?
Anacreontic Song (2003)
My love is like a cold, cold beer.
No really - she's more smooth than that.
Although she's more white wine, I fear
She hath no wine cork for a hat.
Anchor steam rose.
I see my love upon a mountain,
The one true bride, so bright & clear.
Although there's sadness in the fountain,
Her tears are eighty proof, I swear.
Anchor steam rose.
My love's the question in the vineyard:
Can the pin unpierce the rod?
My love's the song the seraphin heard
When they burnt their space twixt God
And all his ecchoes in this glass.
My love doth every lovely booze surpass.
Anchor steam rose.
-Richard Nixon, in Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, now on Broadway.
"We cower as you point your fingers telling us to support our troops. You and the smarmy pundits in your pocket -- those who bathe in the moisture of your soiled and blood-soaked underwear -- can take that noise and shove it."
-Sean Penn
"I told Mr. Penn what I thought of his second rate wordsmithery right on this show. Well, Sean Penn has accepted my challenge. I drew a line in the sand and he picked up the gauntlet. Soon we will see who has the stones to bring home the bacon. This metaphor battle is at the starting gate and I am ready for liftoff."
-Stephen Colbert
February 14, 2006
Book Review: "The Man of Feeling" (1986) by Javier Marías
Kar Wai Wong’s film, In the Mood for Love, tells of a love affair thru the eyes of the cuckolded spouses - the lovers are never seen. When the lost husband & wife realize the iniquity, they attempt to reenact it as they imagine their spouses would have done it, including details like meals & choice of words. The movie is endlessly sad. Marías’s narrator is similarly guessing, but about his own lost beloved. The character Natalia Manur is a phantom in the book, as if he in his dreams can remember the love for her, her situation & her affliction, but nothing of her spirit or beauty. The bulk of the content dwells on the narrator’s loneliness, an odd quality for a book about the attainment of love. Of course, we expect an opera singer to a be a megalomaniac, & loneliness is the ultimate selfishness. Love as a desire, when reaching for it or waking to find it missing, is man disconnected from the external, isolated from one’s perceptions - as a narrator, subjective & unreliable.
His selective omniscience relies on jealousy’s imagination. He can meticulously guess at the nights she spends with her husband, at the smell of his cologne, on if he is wearing his reading glasses or not.
Borges writes of a historian who uncovers parallels to Macbeth & Julius Caesar: “The idea that history might have copied history is mind-boggling enough; that history should copy literature is inconceivable...” The historian then comes to the conclusion that the conspirators had planned the assassination based on Shakespeare, to redeem their leader, who as it happened was the traitor. The dialog & action may be based on some trope, but the point of the story, “The Theme of the Traitor & the Hero”, is the shifting roles, the huge potential fluxuation in essence.
Marías plays with these shifting roles in his contemplation on husband-wife-lover-pander. He considers the waxing eccentricity of Hörbiger, the tenor who sings Otello, whose fading glory is accompanied by a refusal to start the opera until the audience is full. The theater has to hire more & more ushers to fill the empty seats as his popularity wanes & his reputation for tardiness is known. On his last performance, made-up as the Moor of Venice, “with the help of a small Japanese telescope which he sometimes used to inspect the vaster auditoria, he espied with horror an empty seat in the antepenultimate row of the right-hand aisle, [...] the magnificent Hörbiger stepped onto the stage, climbed down into the stalls area, strode through it, to the astonishment of an already irritable public, & sat down in that one accusing seat, thus completing the audience that had been his downfall.”
Was this an act of selflessness or selfishness? Which best befits the lover, or the true Man of Feeling? The husband has the object but not the passion, the lover the passion but not the object. The wife is reduced to the object, & therefore cannot be described nor remembered in dreams. The pander becomes the circumstance, & henceforth boundlessly mutable. Hörbinger, by the end, has completely bought his audience, & when he becomes the last member, absurdly self-fulfilling his love, it is the end of his career, his life. Manur has bought his wife, but each day he sees less of her soul. All the male lovers, either in the act of attaining or losing, are, like the desperate traveling salesmen repeatedly mentioned in the book, homeless. The love that ends in conquest & marriage or the love that ends in suicide are both loves of selfishness.
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