Today the earth is made of Viking monosyllables: raw and wet and ripe and full. The sky is gray and low and close, and the earth is raw and wet and ripe and full.
Today is just this side of the calm before some storm; the wind is gathering, pregnant with anticipation, electric with possibility.
Today is urgent, insistent. There’s no time to lose. The iron is hot.
Today, all of us -- rowers, runners, bus drivers, geese -- are conspiring to create the world. We glance at each other with subtle, knowing smiles. We barely hold back our laughter at the sheer delight and nerve of building something that no one will believe.
Today the brooding world is tight-wound, wire-taut, skin-tense; at any moment it bursts.
Keep your carefree, blue-skied, springtime afternoons. Christ comes on a day like today.
29 August 2013
19 August 2013
Demon.
An ugly thing flew into my heart today and is trying to make its nest there. It found a tiny wound of rejection and solitude and started gnawing at it. It made a fire out of some resentment it had brought along; it threw fuel on the flame from my ample reserves of pride. Then it gathered up all the scraps of self-doubt lying around and nestled down cozily in them.
Go away, thing. Fly off, ugly dark thing.
Go away, thing. Fly off, ugly dark thing.
02 June 2013
Mexer.
This is it; this word is it. The keystone, the code, the fragment of DNA that maps the whole genome of Brazilian Portuguese. Or at least the whole big space it occupies in my imagination. Spanish's mover is so torpid; its menear is even worse. I mean it's to Spanish speakers' great credit that they move at all (in fact I'm pretty sure they do, much better than English speakers, notwithstanding to move's relative gusto). But mexer? There's a word that does its job. That subtlety. That verve. Imagine how the world could move with a verb like mexer. Or maybe couldn't -- maybe God put mexer in Brazil because he knew that's where it would fulfill the measure of its creation. Well, it worked.
16 May 2013
John 5.
For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.I was running at night on the Watertown side of the Charles, along the stretch where the path nestles right up against the river. As I ran I gradually became aware that the water in the shallows next to me was, well, troubled. It wasn't noisy or predictable, but every so often some part of the still surface would betray an isolated burble. I stopped, and walked down to the edge, and perched atop a rock that jutted out into the water, and watched. And listened. At intervals of 10 or 20 or 40 seconds, each time in a different place, the water would be ever so slightly broken. Silent ripples would race around the surface, hinting at an abundance of movement I could only murkily perceive. It seemed for all the world like the path of someone dancing in the air, with toes only occasionally grazing the water. I stared into the dark, hoping to catch a clear glimpse of the unseen mover. No such luck. Which was fortuitous, since I left there steeped in magic and contentment, knowing that some fish or some angel was having a ball.
15 May 2013
Godliness.
I just barely got back from a big, explosive, rumbly space blockbuster in IMAX 3D, shown in a theater attached to a furniture store which also features a trapeze school and human-sized flowers made out of jellybeans. It was a blast. It was a little stupefying to watch the credits roll the names of the thousands of people who helped craft that world. They did a bang-up job -- it is a big, explosive, rumbly world. I mean the flick was a total blast.
But there's more than one way to make a world. Just listen to these three guys in these nine minutes.
I spent as much time in this song today as I did in that movie. Have you heard Herb Ellis do that thing that makes a guitar sound just like a sigh? Have you heard Ray Brown treat every single quarter note like it's the loveliest woman on earth? Have you heard Oscar Peterson growl? Have you heard that groove??
That groove is a world.
But there's more than one way to make a world. Just listen to these three guys in these nine minutes.
I spent as much time in this song today as I did in that movie. Have you heard Herb Ellis do that thing that makes a guitar sound just like a sigh? Have you heard Ray Brown treat every single quarter note like it's the loveliest woman on earth? Have you heard Oscar Peterson growl? Have you heard that groove??
That groove is a world.
25 April 2013
Is Kanye West an emissary from the future?
I'm wondering because on Jesus Walks (2003) he quotes his own future song Hey Mama (2005). UNCANNY.
1:10
0:23
As always, Wikipedia destroys the mystery by informing that Hey Mama was actually recorded in 2000, citing an MTV interview. Still, it strikes me as pretty ballsy to steal from one's own unreleased track. I see it as a glimpse of Kanye's early clear view of the long game. He lays it all out in that 2003 interview, which paints his ambitions as kind of adorable: he "earnestly" says he'll follow up The College Dropout with Late Registration and then Graduation. "Is this an overly optimistic projection of his hip-hop future?" asks the author. "Maybe."
Nope. It's fascinating and kind of disorienting to look at this snapshot of the pre-Kanye world. Another anachronism is the reference to Yeezy's "typical disarming modesty." The nuttiest part is that it backs up the claim with quotes which actually do exhibit disarming modesty. "I gotta give myself the best chance because I don't really feel like I'm the best [rapper] out there." With a decade's hindsight, it's easy to forget there was a time when KANYE WEST knew how to say things like that. Who knows, maybe he is a time traveler, and in the future he went back to 2003 because he didn't like what he had become. Maybe this time he'll figure out how to be happy and peaceful and fulfilled. Only one way to find out. Imma let him finish.
18 April 2013
Oh Maybellene.
Why can'tcha be true?
I’m making a comparison, not drawing equivalencies. Until I can sit at my keyboard and feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my gangster-leaning arm -- as I listen to some artist who does for the Internet what Chuck Berry did for the Interstate -- I’m not going to pretend it’s an unambiguous step forward for humanity. But it’s pretty cool to be able to tell a computer to download all the data from a government website, crawl through it, and tell you the parts you care about. Or write a script for a game of Battleship! Who knows; maybe within another generation computers will get so complex that, like cars, they will become the exclusive realm of specialists. Like Chuck Berry, we live in a time when amateurs can still customize their own machines as an expression of personality and independence and creativity. Let’s do it, amateurs.
I wish I knew how to fix cars. I feel like in my dad’s generation, the minimum functional level of cultural savvy included the capacity to open up the hood of a car and poke around and pronounce casually authoritative assessments using words like “torque” and “gasket.” I can’t do that. I wouldn’t know a gasket if it punched me in the nose. Much less a torque.
I take solace in the observation that at least among my generation, I’m not alone. I don’t think the median twentysomething American knows much more about fixing a car than I do. And I blame the machines themselves. In 1959, when my dad was born, all cars had the same basic elements, and the way they interacted was transparent and reasonably intuitive. Not so now! Cars, like the rest of the world, are run by computers. I actually felt a stab of irreparable loss when I was listening to Car Talk a couple weeks ago and heard Tom and Ray mention “the computer.” I know, it’s the twenty-first century, and it’s their job to understand comprehensively whatever someone decides to put in a car. But it jarred. I don’t turn on NPR to hear Click and Clack talk about computers. I want to hear Carburetor and Spark Plug and Belts. I want to hear Gasket.
I mean the Gaskets are still there, of course. It’s just that they’re controlled by the computer. Okay, maybe the gaskets aren’t directly controlled by the computer -- I can’t actually say because I still don’t know what a gasket is -- the point is, fixing a car in 2013 requires some understanding of a computer. But the computer is made by a human, and I want to propose that what cars were to my dad’s generation, computers might be to mine. I don’t mean that we all have to be able to write machine code, any more than my dad’s generation was all professional mechanics. But I think today, cultural savvy increasingly requires familiarity with a basic toolbox that helps you bend computers to your will.
I’m late to the party. It took me a while to get excited about telling stories with numbers (there is another post to write about that). But lately I’ve been learning how to scrape screens and do some basic automation with Python, and it’s opened up a new world. Sure, real codeheads might guffaw at how infantile the stuff is that I’m getting excited about. (Although to their credit, I’ve found computer geeks in general to be indulgently supportive of humble outsiders who want to learn.) But that’s just my point: it’s not that hard to reach a level of basic conversance which, while not exhaustive, is still really useful. I can tell Python to go gather data for a paper I want to write, or tell it to email me when a band I care about is playing nearby.
This is empowering. Eisenhower’s interstate system opened up the country and helped create the abiding American myth of the Freedom of the Open Road -- and cars, as the vehicles for accessing that network, became the symbols of that freedom. As much as I hate to perpetuate a cliché as exhausted as the “information superhighway,” it’s really apt for this metaphor. The world’s data beckons, and the vehicle which now embodies the freedom of that network is code.
I take solace in the observation that at least among my generation, I’m not alone. I don’t think the median twentysomething American knows much more about fixing a car than I do. And I blame the machines themselves. In 1959, when my dad was born, all cars had the same basic elements, and the way they interacted was transparent and reasonably intuitive. Not so now! Cars, like the rest of the world, are run by computers. I actually felt a stab of irreparable loss when I was listening to Car Talk a couple weeks ago and heard Tom and Ray mention “the computer.” I know, it’s the twenty-first century, and it’s their job to understand comprehensively whatever someone decides to put in a car. But it jarred. I don’t turn on NPR to hear Click and Clack talk about computers. I want to hear Carburetor and Spark Plug and Belts. I want to hear Gasket.
I mean the Gaskets are still there, of course. It’s just that they’re controlled by the computer. Okay, maybe the gaskets aren’t directly controlled by the computer -- I can’t actually say because I still don’t know what a gasket is -- the point is, fixing a car in 2013 requires some understanding of a computer. But the computer is made by a human, and I want to propose that what cars were to my dad’s generation, computers might be to mine. I don’t mean that we all have to be able to write machine code, any more than my dad’s generation was all professional mechanics. But I think today, cultural savvy increasingly requires familiarity with a basic toolbox that helps you bend computers to your will.
I’m late to the party. It took me a while to get excited about telling stories with numbers (there is another post to write about that). But lately I’ve been learning how to scrape screens and do some basic automation with Python, and it’s opened up a new world. Sure, real codeheads might guffaw at how infantile the stuff is that I’m getting excited about. (Although to their credit, I’ve found computer geeks in general to be indulgently supportive of humble outsiders who want to learn.) But that’s just my point: it’s not that hard to reach a level of basic conversance which, while not exhaustive, is still really useful. I can tell Python to go gather data for a paper I want to write, or tell it to email me when a band I care about is playing nearby.
This is empowering. Eisenhower’s interstate system opened up the country and helped create the abiding American myth of the Freedom of the Open Road -- and cars, as the vehicles for accessing that network, became the symbols of that freedom. As much as I hate to perpetuate a cliché as exhausted as the “information superhighway,” it’s really apt for this metaphor. The world’s data beckons, and the vehicle which now embodies the freedom of that network is code.
I’m making a comparison, not drawing equivalencies. Until I can sit at my keyboard and feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my gangster-leaning arm -- as I listen to some artist who does for the Internet what Chuck Berry did for the Interstate -- I’m not going to pretend it’s an unambiguous step forward for humanity. But it’s pretty cool to be able to tell a computer to download all the data from a government website, crawl through it, and tell you the parts you care about. Or write a script for a game of Battleship! Who knows; maybe within another generation computers will get so complex that, like cars, they will become the exclusive realm of specialists. Like Chuck Berry, we live in a time when amateurs can still customize their own machines as an expression of personality and independence and creativity. Let’s do it, amateurs.
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