iPhone Abstainer
To the tune of “Daydream Believer”?
As I contemplate giving in and getting an iPhone, thus joining the rest of the planet in being perpetually networked, located, and informed, a deliberate contrary resolve NOT to do so is growing stronger.
The pros and cons:
PRO
If I’m on unfamiliar turf and suddenly remember that I need something from a Walmart or a Walgreen’s or a PetSmart, I can find one nearby. (Presently, I have to save it for a separate trip.)
If I get lost I can get found again quickly—particularly helpful to one who tends to allow barely enough time to get to appointments.
The camera. I can document my life and observations like a good blogger. I am not an image person, but describing things, like sketching things, takes time and energy. A snapshot may not be worth a thousand words, but it is a thousand times faster than a thousand words.
Google, for conversation enhancement and curiosity feeding. At home, I’ll run to the computer and look something up just for the hell of it. I could see taking that functionality portable.
CON
(Note that some of my cons are precisely the things that other people would consider pros, and are even the flip side of my own pros.)
I do not want to be available to e-mail, Facebook, etc. all the time. (I’m addicted enough as it is.)
I don’t want to be staring at a screen any more than I already do. My eyes are forgetting how to focus beyond two feet away.
I do not want to have music, pictures, and the Internet available to me while riding the train, walking on the street, or waiting in line. I want to be forced to look at and eavesdrop on my fellow humans (so I can get depressed by how many of them are hunched over their iPhones or iPads or umbilically swaddled in their iPods). If I really can’t stand it, I’ll carry something to read. (For the preceding reason, probably NOT a Kindle.)
I like getting lost. Some of my best adventures and discoveries happen by getting lost. (You’d think I’d love having my own GPS because, like a stereotypical guy, I tend to stubbornly avoid asking for directions. And I’ll use a map. So why not an iPhone? Because it is one of those sense-imprisoning, sense-dulling electronic devices that take us out of the freshness of the real world and into this glazed-in, stale, stuffy perpetual airport that is the virtual world. Lemme out!!)
I like looking at things better than I like taking pictures of them, especially because getting the picture often jostles aside looking and seeing. (I didn’t get a picture of the new WTC, but “in the silver light of a rainy summer evening, it had a swooping curve like one of those mermaid Mae West dresses that nip in at the ankles, only leaner and sharper; and it had a string of starry construction lights for buttons. The bumps on my skin tingled and twinkled like stars in response. The growing shaft, silver as the silver sky, plunged stilly up out of the earth with that vaunting, rocketlike defiance that makes skyscrapers take your breath away.”)
I don’t know yet which impulse will win. The contrarian impulse may prove to be too quixotic, isolating (with no TV and no steady companion[s] I’m already living on the moon), and just plain inconvenient. I would feel like a sort of retro-pioneer, prowling a deserted antediluvian frontier where a few living fossils still find their way by deploying their senses in three-dimensional space, and obtain information by exploring or asking somebody.
All By Myself
Slept late; sat here in a daze of relief all day, working on and off, hardly moving because the kitten (spayed yesterday, that violent word like a sharp tool) is all right. Close to 7 I remembered with a start that I had a ticket to a theatre production somewhere downtown at 8. It was a preview of this, which is based on one of my all-time favorite books. I keep giving the book to people but no one seems to love it as much as I do (ever notice how often our impassioned gifts of the food, books, or clothing we love fall flat with the recipient, and vice versa? Taste is induplicable), so I went by myself, dressed up in my half-assed way. Nobody cares but me, and there’s a freedom in it.
It was at Rector and Greenwich Streets, way downtown. I never did know downtown well and I know it even less now, so I tried to Google a subway route. Google Maps was way wrong. Turns out the number 1 Broadway line train from Sheridan Square would have taken me straight to the doorstep, but Google Maps didn’t have a clue of that. It told me I had to come upstairs at World Trade Center and go back underground around the corner at Fulton Street.
And so it was that I came up out of the subway right in front of the growing shaft of the new World Trade Center building. Faster than I could react consciously, I got goosebumps. It doesn’t look like all that much from a distance, so it caught me off guard that close up it was so awesome, silver against a silver sky. I can’t find a picture that looks the way it looked. Just one more reason to break down and get a fucking iPhone. (Or is it? If I’d had an iPhone I wouldn’t have gotten lost, wouldn’t have been startled by the building close up, wouldn’t have walked by the worn-thin gravestones in Trinity Churchyard and felt bracketed by the extremes of American history, wouldn’t have had to ask surprised strangers for directions. It seems to have happened in the blink of an eye: no one looks at anyone anymore, no one gets lost and has to find their way using only their senses.)
I don’t know if the play would have made sense to someone who didn’t know the book as well as I do, but I sat breathless on the edge of my seat and, at certain key moments, cried. The emphasis on dreams, which I need to reconnect with, and the director’s essay in the program, full of Taoist ideas about the virtue of uncertainty, told me I was where I belonged. It was mostly beautifully done, with scrims and large-scale video projection that transformed the simple set into a dreamscape — much truer to the book than the PBS film adaptation released in 1980. It could have been even better. Afterwards I found the adapter/director at the door and thanked him, told him the one scene I wished he had done more with, and how one of the actors needs to speak up. I didn’t go on and on, but his eyes looked for escape; it was a busy moment for him, and I am neither young and beautiful nor old and important, so nobody cares what I have to say. And I don’t care that they don’t care. I’ll say it anyway, or not. It doesn’t matter.
There’s an absurd freedom in not mattering at all, wandering like a neutrino (the particle that interacts with nothing at all, but passes right through matter) through an island of 5 million striving, connected people. I have a feeling that later on, when my life is more mundane and perhaps more structured and companioned, I’ll be nostalgic for this.
“There’s nobody left!”
Is this serious? Nope! It is a bit NSFW (and loud!) but I’ve been getting laughs with this….. I love the very last line.
Fun with Cannibals – or – What the F*ck is Up with Canada?
In the last few days the Western Hemisphere has seen three new notorious cannibals chew their way into the news.
The first story involves the Causeway Cannibal Case here in sunny Florida. Some Haitian emegre allegedly goes nuts on ‘bath salts’, strips off his clothes, assaults a homeless man, who he then strips naked before stripping the flesh off the guys face with his teeth. In broad daylight. On the side of the road in Miami. (I contend that in his drug induced stupor Rudy Eugene got his Haitian zombie lore and his American zombie lore all mixed up. I also contend this case isn’t as unusual as you might think down here in sunny Florida. Florida is really REALLY fucked up.)
The most disturbing two details* about this case so far are that (a) several people appear to have ridden by the assault while it was happening and didn’t do much about it, and (b) that pictures of the victim (who has lived, so far, with 75-80% of his face torn off) post-attack have appeared online in numerous places.
* The most disturbing BIG PICTURE item is that this occurred at all.
I’m not going to link to this story as it has received enough publicity, and on the off-chance someone here hasn’t heard about it yet and wants to know more can find the stories easily enough. Just watch out for the pictures. (I haven’t seen them, and don’t want to see them. Beyond the gore is the simple fact that I would feel like I was violating the victim’s privacy in most indecent fashion.)
This morning another cannibal attack was reported to have taken place in the Baltimore Maryland area.
Behind the door of a townhouse on Terrapin Terrace in Joppatowne, a house of horrors. It’s here police say 21-year-old Alexander Kinyua confessed to eating the heart and parts of the brain of a missing man. Police say Kinyua’s brother went down to the laundry room of the house and saw a blanket on a box. He pulled off the blanket and saw two metal tins. Police say he opened them and saw a head and two hands. When Kinyua’s brother confronted him about this, police say Kinyua said they were animal remains and not human.
The brother then got his dad. The dad went downstairs and the items were gone.
Kinyua’s brother called police.
“Human remains, specifically a head and hands, were recovered on the main floor of the residence,” Sheriff Jesse Bane of Harford County said.
Police believe they belong to 37-year-old Kujoe Agyei-Kodie, a family friend who was living at the house.
So, that makes two. Kinyua, BTW, is Kenyan.
Tonight a bizarre story out of Canada went off the deep-end. Yesterday a foot and a hand were sent via mail, the foot to the ruling Conservative Party’s HQ while the hand was found en route to wherever. It was determined that the suspect was a male porn star named Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, aka Eric Clinton Newman aka Vladimir Romanov. Okay, so far this is pretty fucked up, and I immediately thought of Walter in The Big Lebowski, “You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know about it, believe me.”
They were after the porn star because police found the torso associated with the foot and the hand near Magnotta’s apartment building (he was a ‘model’ tenant), which led naturally enough to his apartment, where the killing and the dismemberment took place. And the cannibalism, The Sun now tells us. (Yes, this means some crazy Canadian fucker was running around chopping up people and eating them. This MUST have been an episode of South Park.) It has been reported that Magnotta left a video behind of the killing, dismemberment and cannibalism.
Also, the diveresity freaks can now breath a sigh of relief – Magnotta is white, so the spectre of having nothing but black cannibal stories has come to an end. No more nasty old tropes here!
But this is only part of the weirdness. Apparently Magnotta had become known to The Sun several months back because of rather disturbing videos he had posted, among other things. The Sun interviewed him, leading to The Sun asking authorities to investigate Magnotta for being, well, psycho. The authorities ultimately weren’t able to do much, in part because they didn’t know where Magnotta was. If you want to know more you can read about this case here. I’m not going to post details about his prior videos. (Annie, you’ll want to skip that link.)
Other details about Magnotta have emerged. He’s allegedly bi-sexual and bi-polar. He has dated (allegedly) a paedophile serial killer, Karla Homolka. He wrote a blog on how to disappear completely. According to The Sun, police believe he has fled to Europe. Back to The Sun’s reporting:
Two days later a misspelled email was sent to The Sun.
It told of the writer’s love for London and warned: “Well, I have to say goodbye for now. But don’t worry, in the near future you will be hearing from me again. This time, however, the victims won’t be small animals. I will however, send you a copy of the new video I’m going to be making. You see, killing is different than smoking… with smoking you can actually quit.
“Once you kill, and taste blood, it’s impossible to stop.”
Our reporters were convinced it was from Magnotta.
And so on. All this leads one to ask, What the fuck is up with Canada that it is out-weirding Florida? This is way more fucked up that the bath-salt zombie case down here.
…
Finally, I want to go on record. The Causeway Cannibal chewed a hapless homeless human being in Florida. I live in Florida. Kinyua the Kenyan Kannibal self-served his mordantly macabre meal in the Baltimore Maryland area. Some of you may recall that I lived in the Baltimore Maryland area for a few years. And the Canadian Cannibal killed his vic with an ice pick. I had nothing to do with any of these cases, and I’ve got witnesses that place me far away from the cuisine, er, crime scenes! I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way you can prove anything!
Here’s a post I did a year ago. My thoughts haven’t changed.
It’s Memorial Day, which used to be called “Decoration Day,” a holiday begun after the Civil War to honor the dead. It was originally meant both for the sake of the fallen and to promote reconciliation. The month of May was the obvious season, as flowers to decorate graves would be in greater profusion than at the the anniversary of the end of the War in early April. The exact date of May 30 was established in the North, because no battle had been fought on that day. It was settled that Veterans’ graves were to be decorated and civic memorials for the fallen soldiers held.
“Memorial Day” gradually became the more common name as the United States fought more wars, and it became almost universal after World War II. The name wasn’t officially changed, though, until 1967.
Aside from both the official purpose of the day and its popular…
View original post 704 more words
Perseverance Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing.
(Pace Vince Lombardi.) This is a big theme with me. It’s the central tenet of my worldwide karate school, whose all-purpose salutation, OSU! (used rather like “Shalom” to mean hello, goodbye, I hear you, I understand, I’ll try hard), is a contraction of Oshi shinobu, “endure under pressure.” It was the epiphany I had from reading the incredible story of the Hubble Space Telescope (I highly recommend this book) . It is the biggest lesson experience—of not persevering, at least as much as of persevering—has taught me.
But what I want to share with you right now is a very small, seemingly trivial example. A puzzle.
An acrostic puzzle, in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, that I worried at like a tenacious terrier all day. I’m usually pretty good at these puzzles, in which crossword-type clues below provide letters to fill into numbered spaces in a passage from a book, above. The initial letters of the solved clues below will spell out the names of the author and the work. As you begin to spot the shapes of words and sentences in the passage and to fill in missing letters, these in turn help to fill in the answers to the clues below. It’s an enjoyable interplay between two kinds of guesswork—solving clues and seeing word-and-meaning gestalts—and I’m much better at the second kind. Often I’ll be able to solve only a few of the clues, but putting just a scattering of letters into the passage may enable me to begin to see what it says. (This is the same autistic-savant talent that once won me a car on Wheel of Fortune.)
So yesterday, when I tackled last Sunday’s puzzle, which my dad had saved for me with one clue filled in, it was an affront to my amour-propre and a challenge to my chops. First of all—no fair!—the answers to three of the clues below (J., “First name of this quote’s author;” Q., “With R., author who wrote about J.”; R., “See Q.”) seemed to depend on having already solved the passage. (It was even worse, and better, than that.) Then, as the passage began to take shape, it didn’t make any sense. OK, that looked like “Young people” at the beginning, but “Young people at the most”? “Young people on the moor”? These young people had something—did it really say “thirty books”?—”in their pouches,” or maybe “in their pockets, or hanging on the pommels of their saddles.” Huh? “Attached books to my ears as pendants”—books? Can’t be. Even more confusingly, as more clues came clear, the “author” of the passage seemed to be a fictional character, Cyrano (J.) de Bergerac, written about, of course, by Edmond (Q.) Rostand (R.). This puzzle was breaking all the rules!
I kept hitting a wall, putting it aside, doing some work, listening to my parents’ delightful anniversary reminiscences about what they were doing on and around their wedding day 70 years ago, and then coming back to the damn puzzle. I couldn’t leave it alone. It was a matter of pride, but far more, a matter of dogged, ornery curiosity. What the hell? Finally, this was it—and it still didn’t make any sense:
Young people of the moon can have thirty books in their pockets or hanging on the pommels of their saddles. They need only wind a spring to hear one. I attached books to my ears as pendants and went for a walk in town.
~ de Bergerac, The Other World
Weirdest of all was that it seemed to be a description of an iPod, as sported by a lunar gaucho, or ???
The payoff for my perseverance (in my experience, it always rewards!) came when I Googled this enigma. Who knew there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, on whom the fictional lovestruck swordsman was loosely based—a fierce enthusiast of nascent science, a founder of the genre of science fiction? And that, in a book “historically referred to as Voyage dans la lune, ‘A Trip to the Moon,’” but which Cyrano insisted on titling L’Autre Monde ou les états et empires de la lune—a book written in 1650—Cyrano, like Leonardo, had imagined inventions that wouldn’t exist for 350 years? Books attached to my ears as pendants?!
And here is the whole book! And here is a succinct tribute to Cyrano’s “revolutionary spirit.” And here (breaking my usual rule) is a pretty good biography on Wikipedia, in which we learn that Cyrano influenced Jonathan Swift.
Moral of the story: if I had given up on that puzzle, I would never have learned any of this.
I, Weed.
Unknown and therefore unchecked by public opinion, without any ‘stake in the country’ and therefore reckless . . .
That’s how the English anti-Semitic writer Henry Wickham Steed explained the “unfair advantage over the natural-born Viennese” that enabled the successful Jewish businessman or financier, arrived from Galicia within a generation or two, “to prey upon a public and a political world totally unfit for defence against or competition with him.” This is from The Hare with Amber Eyes, a page-turner of a memoir by a descendant of one of those Jewish banking families, who follows the fortunes of a collection of Japanese netsuke he’s inherited to trace his family’s rise and fall in, seeming assimilation into and convulsive expulsion from, Parisian and Viennese society in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Yes—I’m actually finding the time to read a book!!)
Why do I quote this? Because, having been immersed in ecology and natural history lately, I recognized, with a start, pretty much the exact same language that ecologists use to deplore and traduce invasive, opportunistic species.
Not having coevolved with the rest of an ecosystem, these species have no natural constraints on their growth, such as predators, and no “stake in the country”—no dependence on the evolved, stable balance of the ecosystem. Similarly, the Jews who fled Galician pogroms for the cities of Central and Western Europe in the 19th century didn’t “know their place” because they had no place, and this enabled some to be immensely successful. Like invasive plants they thrived and found new niches in soils disturbed by change, and they accelerated change. With invasive plants and animals, ecologists—like the “blood and soil” defenders of Europe’s settled, traditional order—try to restore the status quo ante of an ecosystem by programs of exclusion, confinement, and if that doesn’t work, eradication.
Does this analogy make me feel more sympathy for the defenders of tradition? No, as a Jew—an opportunistic weed myself—it makes me feel more sympathy for kudzu.
The analogy is hardly perfect. Invasive plants, marine organisms, goats, rats, or cats can really overrun an ecosystem, outcompeting or just plain eating unique endemic species ill equipped to adapt. A small minority of Jews can hardly be said to have done the same to Western European civilization—which, if anything, they enthusiastically adopted and arguably revitalized—though it is sobering to realize that that’s exactly how the “blood and soil” nativists saw the financial success and cultural ubiquity of a minority of the minority.
But it should make us question the impulse to try to restore ecosystems or societies to the way they were. Biodiversity is an irreplaceable trove of genetic creativity, but nature itself is quite heartless toward it. Nature’s one constant is change, even though it goes in pulses that our lives are sometimes too short to perceive, and change is never all good or all bad; it destroys as it creates. For further examples, we need look no further than the arrival of Europeans in North America . . . or the emergence of an upstart, upright species out of Africa.
Lagniappe
n [AmerF, fr. AmerSp la ñapa the lagniappe, fr. la + ñapa, yapa, fr. Quechua yapa something added] (1844) : a small gift given a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase; broadly : something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure
~ Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition. Kindle Edition.
It’s a word readily traceable to the New Orleans area. Quechua, though?? They’re in Peru. How the heck . . . ? If that word could talk . . .
It’s always sounded to me like cream, with a cat lapping it.
It occurred to me just now as a word for this time of my life. Others are optional, light, superfluous, unnecessary. For almost four decades I lived with and was necessary to someone rooted in necessity. After an upper-middle-class American upbringing, I appreciated the way that staked me down and sorted me out. I was never very good at, or very interested in, luxury or frivolity or even fun. Not that I was Puritanically averse to them, they just seemed like a very small and dispensable part of life. (By “fun” I do not mean “humor,” by the way. Humor and necessity share a bloodstream.)
But this part of my life is sheer luxury. It really doesn’t matter what I do with it. There’s great freedom in that, but also absurdity. It’s up to me, at my discretion, to fill this free gift of time. I could rush out and find more necessity to submit myself to (become a nanny to a small child, or a hospice volunteer), but right now I have a strong sense of been there, done that. If it puts itself in my way, that’s something else (I do intend to use my Feldenkrais Method training to design a workshop for caregivers), but seeking it out seems almost like a panicky cop-out from braving another mode and beat of living. I’ve had trouble getting a handle on it.
Somehow, the word lagniappe helps.
Ambiance 