Take it to the source
Here’s a man who took his feelings to the source (Dick Cheney) and said what many people may have rehearsed to deliver to any number of gobshite politicians. This, however, was the bullseye of all possible recipients.
this clip features the part of the movie where Ben Marble, M.D. says “Go F*ck Yourself Mr. Cheney”
This clip is from Spike Lee’s When the levees broke — a four part requiem. If there was any justice a great deal of the people in that documentary would actually be elected representatives for you’d be hard pressed to find a more articulate and dignified group of people. When you see the indifference these people have suffered it would make you wonder if “to have known some kind of real suffering” should be a prerequisite before you can stand up and represent anybody. Just the way you can’t operate a blood pressure cuff without showing you’ve grasped biology. There’s a great soliloquy in one of the final acts from an activist Fred Johnson (?) where he points out who these politicians work for. It’s bang on because even now in the aftermath there’s next to nothing being done to help these people and throughout the film you get little sense of the people through the politicians. You hear the words: business, resources, state guard, federal, city, you even get the mayor describing taking a shower in Air Force 1, (verging on blasphemous in the context of what’s happening outside in the streets), yet very little reference to their people.
City in the turbine
So here’s something peculiar, there has been an explosion in the number of place to get your nails attended to. I cannot fathom where all these extra nails are coming from. If there was a population explosion … those nails would not be needing such extreme attention, just a pair of 75 cent scratch mitts.
Along with the now familiar sight of big pits dug everywhere awaiting the pouring of foundations for half million dollar condominiums (often where rental buildings used to stand –I’ve counted three flattened in a few block radius from here) it’s becoming apparent that folks will only be able to drink coffee, get their nails done and have the choice of fourteen sofa shops. They will be unlikely to be able to buy a loaf of bread or pint of milk because of the way the city is changing. Jane Jacobs warned of the dangers of this.
It’s all part of the turbine that’s decimating the place in advance of the 2010 olympics. I love the luge and the bobsleigh like any other, but the socio-economic inequality and further poverty that’s a byproduct of this turbine is frightening: there’s no mention of plans for social housing, the cost of living is hopping up, the ordinary citizens are dodging swinging cranes and closed pavements while some property developer rubs his tummy. Sport should be for and of the people. They raised a flag to celebrate three years til the event. (To a chorus of nearby protests) The big sweeping brush is getting ready. To dispose of “eyesores”, to push people further to the margins, to create new cycles of poverty. The sport gets lost in all the click of powerpoint presentations, the bidding for marketing contracts, the building of audacious facilities. Yet the actual sport has far more incommon with surviving the adversity of the alleys in the city, gathering up empties. Nobody ever won the bobsleigh clicking on a computer.
On a similar theme of risky endeavours…
Here’s a link to a video of a skydiver whose parachute failed to open, as he jumped from some insane height, but fortunately he was saved by a bunch of thicket bushes. He’d a camera on the front of his helmet which captured his descent:
Crane brain?
Which part of the brain is responsible for insisting one must scale a crane? Is there a polar opposite to fear of heights in the brain? Some part that improves the higher you put your head up into the air?
A new craze for climbing Britain’s highest cranes, taking a picture of yourself and posting it on websites is seizing self-styled ‘urban explorers’.
Example of a man parachuting off one can be found on the reliable video source for much human lunacy youtube.
I once witnessed a young man ride a small bicycle down the very steep side wall of a set of stairs. I spied him at the top, ready to attempt this urban devilment and felt if he was about to risk his cranium someone ought to bear witness to it, so put down my shopping and settled in. Another man stopped and we debated whether or not he’d do it. Several other mutterers stopped and expelled how stupid he was. Whether or not he was stupid was unlikely to change his mind as he was perched up there on that bicycle and appeared to be a few stages beyond weighing up the risks involved.
Eventually he not only rode down the skinny, mad steep wall but performed this exceptional jump when he took off. The stranger beside me was so overcome at the sight of it, he grabbed my arm and we both shouted in surprise when he got to the bottom that what he’d managed was incredible. Beside us a confused mutterer shrieked he should stop wasting tax payers money.
Not that I’d be heartily recommend people drive bicycles down walls, but the young fella had as much chance as making it to the bottom as not and yet we were exclusively fixated on the likelihood he might not.
Medical school in the front room anybody?
Can’t be the only one out there with medical envy… not sure if it’s the white coats, the strolling about with pencils in the pocket, the pulling across of those unfortunate curtains or just the ability to stare into someone ear with intrigue on its top setting. I fancy the most likely envy is the ability of doctors to stay awake as long as they do.
The only time I had television channels I spent the entire televisual time on Channel 42 watching those three pronged fork yokes puncturing dodgy gall bladders. I had to cut it out when one day the much younger Puffin climbed up beside me and clunked me on the nose with his plastic hammer and announced he was giving me a Rhinoplasty. Should add that I was constantly dizzy watching those procedures, but reminded myself to stick with it, since medical students pay thousands of dollars for such information and here it was gratis thanks to the TV channel trial offer on a postcard.
It’s a grateful day when one finds handy medicine with no pictures: Andrew Cunningham writes and narrates a major new 30 part narrative history series charting the development of western medicine. Six weeks of radio programmes in this series.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/medicine/
Unlikely you’ll actually get any directions on how to deal surgically with bursitis, but who can miss episode 7 about fever. TV adaptions of books owe so much to the flannel patting rituals fever requires at the side of the four poster beds as the husband/ wife watches their loved one pass on from the doorway. Even today with a packet of tylanol extra in the cupboard fever still has that threatening quality that drags you back and forth to the forehead, esp if presenting in a small Puffin. It’s rather like a politician you can’t trust exactly how it presents itself.
O’Neuro: the insula
Curious bit of the brain that could come in handy if you’re trying to say give up the smokes or interior decorating magazines..
From today’s NY Times:
According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.
They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.
The rest is here
Based on that last sentence all my mutterings about Dvorak and human despair may only be apparent if you’ve got the same insula. At the risk of repeating myself it would be very helpful for everyone to carry a diagram of their particular brain, thus in a moment of intense conflict people could whip out their various diagrams (rather than usual left hook style reaction) and compare and contrast instead of creating new patients for maxillo-facial surgery on a Monday morning.
Alphabetical inferiority complex
Glory be, glory be, L’alphabet, L’alphabet.
10.20am, during one of our peut-etre more seismically challenged days, myself and the Arabic language face a trial separation as I declare to bloke beside me I think I’ve reached the end of the road. We are being dunked into the pan of the alphabet and let’s just say there’s more carrots in there than I bargained for. Each letter has 4 different ways of being written depending if it’s at the beginning of a word, medial or final. Many of them look remarkable similar to begin with, so having felt a little faint at the sight of them all as singles, it’s unfathomable that there are now three different other versions that do not look a great deal like the isolated version. The purpose of the isolated version is still a mystery. Perhaps they are only used on tie pins or for decor purposes?
Every-time the teacher asks me a question she erupts in an affectionate set of giggles in anticipation of my answer because my attempts sounds a little more yodelling than the others. I do have the best arm waving though. But by the time I conquer ‘this traffic bollard is bothering me and can I have a shampoo and set’ arm waving may be out of vogue.
Generally I feel I’ve been raised in an inferior language when I contemplate the complexity of this script and all it’s variations.
I’m certainly overwhelmed but afterwards sunk in the library in literary ventures I find myself imagining writing that script and then begin to copy and practise the first six letters and find it surprisingly comforting like knitting or swimming must be if you’re good at it. I cannot understand why I am so compatible with it until it all makes sense. It’s written right to left, so it’s got to be in the left brain, which is where all my pigeons roost.
O’Yikes.
Seismic scientists say there is a greater probability of a major earthquake on B.C.’s South Coast in the next week, following a series of minor quakes that have worked their way up from Washington.
Books become all powerful in the event of the shakes as they rain down from the shelves. Put on the bicycle helmets.
Dvorak
Here’s a quote from a piece John Berger wrote in Le Monde diplomatique back in 2003. The whole piece Written in the night: the pain of living in the present world can be read here:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27a/113.html
It is a little more than a century ago that Dvorak composed his Symphony From the New World. He wrote it whilst directing a conservatory of music in New York, and the writing of it inspired him to compose, 18 months later, still in New York, his sublime Cello Concerto. In the symphony the horizons and rolling hills of his native Bohemia become the promises of the New World. Not grandiloquent but loud and continuing, for they correspond to the longings of those without power, of those who are wrongly called simple, of those the US Constitution addressed in 1787.
I know of no other work of art which expresses so directly and yet so toughly (Dvorak was the son of a peasant and his father dreamt of his becoming a butcher) the beliefs which inspired generation after generation of migrants who became US citizens.
For Dvorak the force of these beliefs was inseparable from a kind of tenderness, a respect for life such as can be found intimately among the governed (as distinct from governors) everywhere. And it was in this spirit that the symphony was publicly received when it was first performed at Carnegie Hall (16 December 1893).
Dvorak was asked what he thought about the future of American music and he recommended that US composers listen to the music of the Indians and blacks. The Symphony From the New World expressed a hopefulness without frontiers which, paradoxically, is welcoming because centred on an idea of home. A utopian paradox.
Today the power of the same country which inspired such hopes has fallen into the hands of a coterie of fanatical (wanting to limit everything except the power of capital), ignorant (recognising only the reality of their own fire-power), hypo critical (two measures for all ethical judgments, one for us and another for them) and ruthless B52 plotters.
Here’s the sublime cello concerto that he refers to, coincidentally the one I felt encapsulated the narrative of human despair a few posts ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJcEbYfJ6XU
Part two
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3o8bVwPXLUw
Part three
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nkNQYqVEQk
There’s nothing like consensus, what? I shall restrain myself from a string of compliments about Mr Berger’s work and simply say reading his books is like the experience of jumping between rocks as a child. Each one you land on another small victory, a reminder of all the possibilities that exist, of voices missing from literature. What will we do if he dies? Learn to jump backwards, or add a half twist between stones, or hope for new outcrops.
Mad Notion 362 and the mittens
I have taken affirmative steps toward another of my notions this morning the acquisition of a smattering of the Arabic language. The early signs are that it’s more promising a feat than the barmy attempt last week to read a cello concerto.
The class is none of this let’s start at the very beginning with the alphabet. It’s more of a turn on the pan and start boiling approach, so an hour into the class we were asking each other for our phone numbers and replying with very useful phrases like I’ll be calling you next year or la, la, la, get out of here, you must be joking I’m not giving you my number. Because of the turn on the pan approach we were also telling each other we were doctors. There’s none of this interrupt the class while 12 people ask for the specific name of their job — much simpler to just all claim to be doctors. Al doctoraah.
What an incredibly gender specific language it is! Different ways to say how are ya? if you’re talking to a man or woman. Infact different ways to say everything. The only mild relief came when I realised by virtue of being a female I had only to ask the questions appropriately to males and females and could relax about having to reply as a bloke. Until this dawned on me it was a very intimidating prospect.
Handily the class takes place on a campus with a very acceptable large arts library. I spent a long time getting cosy with the French literary canon, then chanced upon Beckett’s theatrical notebooks in German, which also took a while because I had to see how long he could keep up that neat writing on that squared paper. It became slanted by Endgame. There was at least a whole play where it did not slip remotely to the right. Most impressed. I couldn’t stop recalling the hand cramp of youth.
Followed that with a nice uplifting injection of Flaubertian cynicism to emerge to the exit and discover quelle horreur my bold and stripy mittens, always admired by people under age 5, were gone. I had to revisit every stop along the French literary canon to see had I tucked them on the shelves. When you’ve lost your mittens among it, the French literary canon is even bigger than you thought and those shelves are like caverns. It looked likely the French canon had eaten my mittens and all joy of literary meanders threatened to evaporate until hark I spotted them next to a man playing a complicated looking video game, who looked a little startled as I was reunited with them beside his elbows and exclaimed loudly my undying love for them and waved them in victory at the library staff, which prompted outpouring of lost black leather glove last winter story from woman behind desk.