January 2011
18 posts
WatchInadvertent self-portrait. Or, How old were you today? Somewhere between 42nd & 50th.
People Power in Egypt.
People defying military rule, standing up to tanks, offering soldiers food, tea, and an occasional hug. Sound familiar? It would if you were in Manila in 1986, the year of the so-called People Power Revolution that finally toppled the Marcos dictatorship and started a trend around the world. The blueprint seems to remain the same (and I say this only with the dubious authority of hindsight): once...
Down Time.
I stare at them, these poems of mine, trying to tweak a line here, a phrase there, and I realize how incredibly weak they are, weak in their sorrow and their futility, yet these are my own gestures, my own life mirrored back at me, which I have tried, for all my shortcomings, to capture, preserve, memorialize. What audacity, to imagine a life so worthy of memorializing, to believe that...
A Mozart Story -- you have to read this.
My first Philharmonic chamber concert. One of the soloists, Rob Rinehart, introduces Mozart’s Duo in G Major for Violin and Viola with this story: Mozart, newly married, wants to introduce his new wife to Salzburg. They visit a friend of his, Michael Haydn (Josef’s brother) who has been ill, and cannot afford to pay his bills. The archbishop of Salzburg has commissioned Haydn to write...
WatchUnion Square. Shot with 8 mm vintage camera.
WatchTest clip from a video in progress. Shot with a Flip, edited on iMovieHD, reshot with iPhone using 8 mm vintage app.
The Politics of Hate.
There’s an interesting op-ed piece in the NY Times today that calls attention to the “reckless rhetoric” in politics, media and the internet. This may account for the violence of uninformed people like the young man who shot Gabrielle Giffords yesterday. I agree with everything Matt Bai wrote. Edward Said once said that ours is a politics of difference. In truth, that can be more...
What They Would do to Keep the Immigrants Out.
A hundred years from now, people will say, back then, circa 2011, white people actually killed other white people just to keep the immigrants out. What a bizarre, backward world we live in, my friends.
On Original Desire.
First book bought in 2011: While the Women Are Sleeping, by Javier Marias (New Directions, 2010). Bought at Housing Works Soho one dreary, rainy weekend afternoon. Here’s a haunting, memorable quote: “People can say what they like, and speak of abnegation, sacrifice, generosity, acceptance and resignation, but it’s all false: the norm is for people to think they desire whatever...
2 new year questions
1. When the Maya predicted the end of a World Age in 2012, were they perhaps referring to the end of Western dominance? 2. As technology redefines our idea of “privacy,” how do we redefine our sense of ethics? (I.e., yes, I know I can hack your private life, but what does my conscience tell me about that?)
