Wish me luck...

My final exam for my Physiology of the Brain course is a week from today.

Wish me luck.

Also, my new favorite song in the world is Greg Phillinganes "Behind the Mask." I found a great web page that traces the evolution of the song (in essence: Yellow Magic Orchestra to Michael Jackson to Eric Clapton) which blew me away. I'll post it as soon as I can find it again.

Current mood: anxious
Current music: Behind the Mask

p.s. Dudes, if my hippocampus is damaged between now and next week, there's no WAY I'm going to remember what I learned in this course - it handles the consolidation of memory!

As I've said before...

January is blog month, so here I am with a whole year's worth of projected posts in my head!

And here's one that actually makes it on screen:

This week, we in the museum admin offices (a few blocks from the museum itself) are moving up one floor in our building to make room for some of the museum's artifacts collection (the stuff that isn't on display), which will be moving into our old floor.

I get an office now, which is good. Formerly, I had a cube right by the front door (sort of with my back to it, ugh), and I got asked everything from "Where's Triple A?" (they had leased the building before we moved in) to "Will you sign for this UPS package?" It was distracting. Plus, all the noise of people talking to each other, playing music, on the phone, etc. etc.

Best of all there is a fan that blows air (neither heated nor cooled) that provides white noise, and I love the white noise. In fact, at home I sleep with a noisy air purifier, lest I go crazy at night...

All my stuff here is still in boxes, making for a disjointed week. I can't decide how to arrange the file cabinets, shelves, etc. Do any of you have a feel for feng shui? If so, please advise. My back now faces the wall opposite the door; I know that's good, and in this regard it's already so much better than my spot downstairs.

Aside to Ms. Vera... do you know anything about the film Neverwas... i.e. have you seen a preview, been asked to review it, know when it's coming out, etc.?

So, our lil band got played on the radio this past weekend, we also played our best show yet at a fairly big venue, we kept hearing a guy yell "REAL indie rock." It was our friend Ean, but it was still sweet of him. (CB: thanx for your order, tis on the way!)

I made no resolutions this January. I'm going to stay exactly the same! The world will change around me but I shalt not yield!!!!

xo
veezy

Go Pope!

"'In today's consumer society, this time [of the year] is unfortunately subjected to a sort of commercial 'pollution' that is in danger of altering its true spirit, which is characterized by meditation, sobriety and by a joy that is not exterior but intimate,' the pope said in his traditional Sunday blessing.

"'Assembling the Nativity scene in the home can turn out to be a simple but effective way of presenting the faith to pass it on to one's children,' Benedict added.

"'The Nativity scene helps us contemplate the mystery of the love of God, which is revealed to us in the poverty and simplicity of the grotto in Bethlehem."

Got this from a blog I tend to look at, Left I on the News. They got it from FoxNews, of all places.

Maybe KZA is right. Maybe we should post when it occurs to us. It's worth a shot.

Against Interpellation

Did anyone else notice that the Post-It on the far left of Susan Sontag's Mac gives the directions of how to open a new file in Microsoft Word? (Visible in the paper version but not online.) Now I know that I'm a computer snob and that I have no right to make fun of people who cannot find their way around the most basic computer interface elements (even commands that haven't changed in twenty years). I know it's not the same as having a Post-It that says "Start car here" on the ignition switch in your Toyota. And I know it's not like never glancing at the embossed plastic icon in the dishwasher that shows that flatware should point downward. But it is funny (to me) that the person that Times types routinely trot out as the smartest person of the 20th century--someone who managed to be a monument to learning and bookishness but not, yuck, an academic--would need notes (several, really) to remember how to use her computer.

[Now, before you accuse me disrespecting, let me tell you that we love Susan. What I've read of hers has usually been fascinating. Plus, she sat behind Anne and me when we watched Fiona Shaw perform Eliot's Waste Land. It was all very highbrow, and she'll be missed.]

Greybeard Paroli de Malnova Objekto

If you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas, I’ll save you a trip to my Amazon Wishlist and tell you that I’d like just about anything from here. You may know the Lester Bangs piece on the Godz or maybe, like me, a part of your mind requires Spiritual Unity and Heliocentric Worlds. But you may not know the extent of this remarkable experiment in good vibrations. Is there anything that more perfectly exemplifies the excitement and excesses of the 1960s than this? Scorsese’s Dylan feature, though rather interesting in its middle-aged way, doesn’t come close.

I was reminded of the improbable, beautiful story of ESP Records by this interview with ESP’s founder, Bernard Stollman, and I’ve already spent too much time looking at the artwork, reading the descriptions, and playing the samples. If nothing else, be sure to read the story of Lowell Davidson, composer of “Dunce” and just cool looking dude. And it’s not just jazz, either. Try some Pearls Before Swine if you’re more of a songs person.

Yesterday, I gave away my four-track to a student with big ideas about his songwriting future (if only small ideas about things like how to play a C chord). I can only hope that he’ll accomplish as much as Mij, the yodeling astrologer. All we can do is offer words of encouragement and hope that the tape is running when the inspiration comes.

From the interview:

I didn’t have the education or the preparation to take on being a patron in the arts. I didn’t have the money and wasn’t affluent. But I did go to my mother at just about that point [1964] and I said “I’ve found what I want to do (I was 34, so you can imagine I wasn’t a kid), I’ve found my calling. I’m going to document this whole community of desperate composers of improvisational music.” When I went to her I had an idea to start a record label, and I wanted my inheritance. She gave me $105,000 which in those days was a fortune—now, you multiply that by ten. So in eighteen months, I produced 45 records. I wasn’t what you’d describe as an aficionado of the music; it was something I could do that was meaningful. I could document it, and the choices I made—well, in most cases I didn’t know what they sounded like [before recording them]. Marion was playing with Burton Greene; I liked Marion’s music, and so by this process I captured a whole community.

To Valbert: my dyslexia continues, as I meant to say that the Withholders first podcast sounds like “EXP,” not “ESP.” Forgive me. Mi fari ne paroli Esperanto.

This Attic Emphatic

Does anyone here remember FORTH? Well, this blog is starting to feel a little FORTHed, if you know what I mean.

While we’re dwelling in the past, why shouldn’t I tell you, too, that I began to see signs a week or two ago that he is back. A few more channel surfing excursions and a couple of pop-up ads later, I knew it was true. Some sleuthing at Amazon tells me this must be an “exclusive” release, and a visit to Walmart.com and I’ve found the mother lode. It’s true, the man who helped me give up Dr. Pepper is back, and we’re only just pawns in his game.

Okay, Garth Brooks’ soon to be failed comeback isn’t all that interesting to me or you. I know “Low Places” but absolutely nothing else, and I don’t feel that I’ve been all that victimized by his reign. I’d probably say that Garth Hudson and David Brooks have caused me more pain. But, still, Garth Brooks’ insistent mediocrity makes a little more sense today than it did back then.

Perhaps like so many others, I really stuck on Garth’s fame because it seemed so wildly undeserved. Yes, there are bad, bland, and shameless pop acts everywhere. And, Steve Colbert’s defense of country music notwithstanding, there are even more in red states. But that’s just the thing. Today—seeing Garth again—I cannot get over the idea that he paved the way for W. That after Garth it was possible for willful, entrepreneurial types to seize positions of cultural or political power without even pretending to be anything more than smirking placeholders of granted authority. Sure, the hat must be invoked. The drawled common sense must flow. The predictable blather of family and baseball and America must issue forth. But real talent or actual convictions? These things are just too dangerous for those millions of Americans who have decided that democracy means never having to hear anything that you don’t already know.

The Doctor is.............Out!

ALAN ALDA (NARRATION) This show is all about listening to the calls of the wild and trying to decipher them - always with the assumption that the sounds in fact have a meaning, a purpose in the animals' lives. But before we go on…Is it all utilitarian? I mean, is any of it, you think, just because it feels good? (Scientific American Frontiers, April 8, 2003)

One of the more stunning things I learned this week was that all dissertations written in the school of education at my university must be quantitative in nature. I surely knew that many or most education PhDs relied on “data” and statistics, but I guess I’m a little taken aback that one cannot write a reflective, interpretive, theoretical, or historical education dissertation without hiring a statistician. Does anything more need to be said about why our schools are in such a sorry state? Oh my!

And it gets worse. Surely I’m not the only one who ruined his Saturday breakfast with an early perusal of the New York Times Magazine and the latest installment this culture’s favorite game, Who Needs the Humanities, Anyway? I’m referring of course to “The Literary Darwinists,” an unflinching bit of publicity for another batch of morons who want to look at the world through the grey lens of bad science. Guess what? Even Jane Austen’s fabulous wit, coruscating irony, and fascinatingly twisted characters offer evidence of the “hard-wired” behaviors of this pulsing, urgent, flawed creature, man.

Never mind that this is biology at its dopiest or just Puritanism in disguise. Never mind that “hard-wired” is goddamned figurative language. Never mind that Elizabeth Bennett isn’t a real person. Never mind that Jane Austen wasted her fertile years on writing, not reproducing or that Darwin, Freud, and all decent scientists (even Sherlock Holmes and Horatio Caine) are themselves storytellers. No, we are post-humanities, and even the most bookish types exude a kind of glee in dismissing (and starving) any types of research or analysis that deny the lazy certainty of measurements, counts, and equations.

Now I’m not knocking good science or cures to cancer or Tang or all that. But, whether it’s Maureen Dowd’s annoying biologistic androphobia or E.O. Wilson’s smug anti-Gastonism, it gets under my skin. My monkey brain makes me want to smash something. There are a lot of ways around this, if anyone even wants to bother. I always recommend Althusser’s Reading Capital. Just the first forty pages simply undress these worst ideas that we build our jails with.

A hundred years later and Conrad’s Marlow still has it right:

"The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the while. 'Good, good for there,' he mumbled, and then with a certain eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather surprised, I said Yes, when he produced a thing like calipers and got the dimensions back and front and every way, taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little man in a threadbare coat like a gaberdine, with his feet in slippers, and I thought him a harmless fool. 'I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there,' he said. 'And when they come back, too?' I asked. 'Oh, I never see them,' he remarked; 'and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.' He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. 'So you are going out there. Famous. Interesting, too.' He gave me a searching glance, and made another note. 'Ever any madness in your family?' he asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. 'Is that question in the interests of science, too?' 'It would be,' he said, without taking notice of my irritation, 'interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot, but . . .' 'Are you an alienist?' I interrupted. 'Every doctor should be -- a little,' answered that original, imperturbably. 'I have a little theory which you messieurs who go out there must help me to prove. This is my share in the advantages my country shall reap from the possession of such a magnificent dependency. The mere wealth I leave to others. Pardon my questions, but you are the first Englishman coming under my observation . . .' I hastened to assure him I was not in the least typical. 'If I were,' said I, 'I wouldn't be talking like this with you.' 'What you say is rather profound, and probably erroneous,' he said, with a laugh. 'Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun. Adieu. How do you English say, eh? Good-bye. Ah! Good-bye. Adieu. In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.' . . . He lifted a warning forefinger. . . 'Du calme, du calme, Adieu.