(click for full-size)
Paranoia, the destroyer. To the tune of the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks On Me.”
1/30/2007
Executive committee
I submitted 3 panels to SXSW for @cdbaby & @bookbaby – please vote! Thanks!
Anatol’s chess variation
My son’s not a bad chess player, considering his age and the fact that he’s just as happy to play any other game with me, but he invented a delightful variation this weekend which I’d like to share:
– Set up pieces on first three rows anywhere you want; you can make one adjustment after your opponent does the same.
– Pawns move forwards as normal, but they capture sideways instead of diagonally.
– Night pieces are now queens, and the queen is a knight.
He’s also experimenting with a “towering pieces” move, where you can move your piece (via a legal move) onto another of your own pieces; then, you move that tower forward as the top piece would move, remove the top piece from the board (it’s “taken”), and move the bottom piece from there as the bottom piece would move. But I prefer playing his original variation without it.
Alan Lomax’s archive of field recordings now is available for free online!
In 1995, I was running the Philadelphia Music Conference, one of the country’s largest music/business gatherings. It was that year when I discovered world music – and I used to drive my staff crazy playing discs like “Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest” when they wanted to hear Pearl Jam.
So I called Smithsonian Folkways and offered them a deal: I would give them a grand sponsorship to the conference, and they would send me their catalog – every single CD in their world music collection, and hundreds of cassette tapes. I treasured this music greatly, and it influenced my composing and changed my life.
To go beyond their catalog, I had to go scour through Goldmine, libraries, or NYC record stores to hear great music at the margins. But today, I discovered that much of the work of the great folklorist Alan Lomax is now online to browse and listen, for free.
Now, you can watch videos of Appalachian folktales and hear shepherd’s tunes from Azerbaijan, all in one place – and see the cultural heritage of our species beautifully laid out. It’s an embarrassment of riches – which you shouldn’t be too embarrassed to plunder. Enjoy.
Donate 70 cents to charity and get some great poetry!
My first book of poetry is now live on Amazon.com! Buy the book – it’s only 99 cents – Amazon.com takes 30%, and 100% of the rest will go to Camfed USA Charity (the Campaign for Female Education in Africa).
http://www.amazon.com/Female-Figure-Possibly-Venus-ebook/dp/B007S1KNBK
My first book of poetry is now live on Amazon.com!
When I was at the San Francisco Writers Conference for BookBaby, I participated in the late-night poetry reading – and the poets encouraged me to publish my own work! It’s a collection of poems on love, desire, romance, relationships, and the artistic endeavor.
Please buy the book now – it’s only 99 cents – Amazon.com takes 30%, and 100% of the rest will go to Camfed USA Charity (the Campaign for Female Education in Africa).
You can get your copy here:
http://www.amazon.com/Female-Figure-Possibly-Venus-ebook/dp/B007S1KNBK
Father to a 7-year-old existentialist, part 2
Yesterday, Anatol brought these home from school. He was asked to do some writing about what he wanted to be when he grew up, and what he hoped his legacy would be. This is what he wrote:
and
RIP Peter Bergman
Peter Bergman, founding member of Firesign Theatre, died last week. If you haven’t heard them, break out your headphones and check out my two favorite albums of theirs (both on Spotify and iTunes): “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers” and “How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All”
Their work was a huge influence on me – I first heard the Firesign Theatre in college, when I played their albums so many times that the grooves on the records wore thin. These weren’t merely comedy recordings; they redefined spoken word recorded performance: stereophonic cinematic plays, best through headphones, even better with dwarves. They played with language not just as hipster word-poetry, but to reveal important truths about the nature of conscious experience – while managing to be as ghastly funny and frightening as the expanding universe itself. Many consider “Dwarf” to be the greatest comedy record ever made, although I tend to play “How Can You Be…” more often.
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/09/firesign-theaters-peter-berg.html
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/firesign-theatre-p163/biography
10 – HAVE A SNACK / 20 – GOTO 10
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This vivid piece of photojournalism, taken in extremely arduous conditions, documents elusive first-person mental states. Here, in the war zone of Fairfield, CT, we braved the forbidding terrain of a middle-aged Jewish lady’s kitchen. The woman was extremely accommodating – until the boxes of snack food started flying around the kitchen, crashing into her cabinets.
This photograph addresses three of my primary intellectual concerns:
Focus and attention. Here, Elif is beckoned by the siren call of snack food, and she’s literally pulled, zombie-like from her work into the kitchen.
Balancing short- and long-term goals. Friends and lovers often endeavor to reward each other and share pleasure in ways which are harmful to their wallets, society, or their long-term goals and future selves.
Butts. A picture is worth a thousand words – yet, while the English language contains hundreds of thousands of words, not one of them does full justice to the marvelous beauty of a woman’s posterior.
***
Here’s a version I mounted on a card for Holmes stereoscope viewers:
Father to a 7-year-old existentialist
Last night, we were eating dinner at a stargazing gathering in the Mojave desert. Anatol made a comment about death, and I commented, “That’s my little existentialist.”
Anatol: “What’s an existentialist?”
Me: “Existentialism is a school of philosophy which was big after World War II… you know, Camus, Sartre… OK, it means that even if life seems absurd, you have to create your own meaning…”
Anatol: “I don’t understand.”
Me: “Suppose I were to ask, what’s the pupose of life and why are we here?”
Anatol: “We’re here because of the explosion of a supernova!”
At this, the scientists at the table from NASA and JPL pricked up their ears.
Me: “No, I mean… let me put it this way: A lot of people believe in God, and that’s OK, but suppose you don’t – what do you think, then, is the meaning of life?”
Anatol: “The meaning of life is 42!”
The whole table laughed.
Anatol: “Daddy, can I go roast some marshmallows now?”
My 7-year-old is quite proficient in finding his own meaning and living sincerely and passionately, and I’m here to help him roast those marshmallows.
