Rosen's "Praeludium" / TiddlyWikis

If you want to read what I'll be presenting on in this Friday's Literature meeting at work, you can view the document here. It's the Prelude to Robert Rosen's book Life Itself. Pretty odd stuff (esp when you remind yourself that this is a book about biology--a book that claims to address Schrodinger's question, "What is life?" I'm still not sure whether Rosen is profound or something of a very learned crank. But he does have one very good point--biologists are largely silent on that fundamental question.)

I'm really hyped about using TiddlyWikis--I'm going to try to do my Lit Mtg presentation using one, instead of PowerPoint or even KeyNote. We started one at work as a way to collaboratively write a draft manuscript about the model we're working on (actually, we're using a ZiddlyWiki for that, so we can store it on a server). And I created another TW Monday night to serve as a BookLog. Check it out.

Evening @ the Commonwealth Club & in the Mission

Yesterday--even though it was a Monday--was a good day, reminded me how good life in this city can be. In fact, the whole weekend was like that, but more on that later, hopefully.

But yesterday--the weather was glorious, clear, sunny, and warm. I went down and across Parnassus to the library in the afternoon to find a book ("What is this think called Science?" by A.F. Chalmers--got to read up on scientfic induction) and read a bit in preparation for the literature talk I have to give Friday. Felt lucky to sit there with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands to the north, Golden Gate Park and the ocean to the west.

Almost on the spur of the moment decided to head downtown after work to hit an event at the Commonwealth Club. Aaron Peskin, President of the SF Board of Supervisors, in conversation with the COO of the Club. It worked out perfectly--I used NextMuni.com to catch an inbound N-Judah, as if it was sitting there waiting for me when I took the elevator down to Irving St. Twenty minutes to the Montgomery St station, which put me (thanks to choosing the right exit--a key in navigating undeground public transit) right at the doorstep of the Club's building.

Some complimentary wine during the reception, a bit of browsing their nice library, one the 2nd floor above 2nd & Market--even before the event itself, I was thinking again that I really ought to spring for a membership. Where else can you hear speakers ranging from
Bill Frist to Steven Levitt to the RZA?? Each of those guys will be speaking over the next month!

Listening to Peskin speak about the issues facing the city was fascinating and stimulating. I took copious notes, which I really should go through and write up.

Afterwards, back down to Market and down into the Montgomery St station, but this time down to the BART level. Five minutes to wait for a train heading my way, maybe 10 minutes to 24th St. The plan was to meet Anj, Emily, and Greg at the Attic, just across the street from the BART station. I didn't get through to anyone's cell, so I took a walk around the block--down the Osage alleyway to 25th, across to Mission and back up to 24th--so that I could take a few more graf shots. Here are two; Check the rest in this Flickr set.

After a quick Bud @ the Attic ($2 on Mondays), we walked around the corner and had excellent pupusas for dinner at La Santaneca. Yet another little spot to hit in the 'hood for cheap eats.

Yes, all in all, a good day and evening in the city.

Graffiti archaeology

Capp @ 17th St
Originally uploaded by suman_ganguli.

A whole month passed w/o an entry! I've mentally been composing a summary of the past month, but that will have to wait, since I'm at work (and trying to focus on actually getting some done).

I did do a couple posts over at dillytaunt, our new (but so far fairly quiet) group blog. (Don't ask me about the name--ask fatmango).

I'm always pleasantly surprised (amazed actually) that some folks are still dropping in here and reading. Both Arjun and Simeone told me they liked my 'walk to work' essay. I would still like to follow through on that idea of making it a photoessay. A positive development is that (as of Friday) I've started lugging the camera around--check my Flickr photostream for my latest uploads. Quite a few of those are yet more Ukraine photos that I uploaded over the weekend (we've got almost all of them up, so we should finally be mailing out the link soon. I have also been meaning to write up something about the trip to go out with the photos, but that hasn't happened yet either.)

More specific to the idea of taking some photos of the walk to work, however, is that I started taking some shots of graffiti in our neighborhood. It's another thing I'd been thinking about doing for a while, but I was motivated to finally start after Anj pointed out this NYTimes article about the Graffiti archaeology site, which in turn led me to the Flickr Graffiti Archaeology pool.

The SF photos in the Flickr pool inspired me to get started. Check my own baby SF Graffiti set. I added that handful of shots to the Graffiti Archaeology pool, which elicited a comment--a mini-dialogue, in fact--regarding the piece pictured above. It seems the hype about Flickr being a social forum is in fact true.

A footnote: Flickr got mentioned in a couple NYT articles about last week's London bombings. This Arts essay in particular is primarily about how the events got covered on Flickr. I happened to take a look at Flickr's Hot Tags list on Friday, and of course "londonbombings" was up there. But as that Times piece points out, most of the photos weren't of the events itself, but one or more steps removed from them.

A walk to work

The weather has been beautiful here in SF ever since we got back to town last Wednesday (actually, I hear it was beautiful ever since we left!). This morning it was such a pleasure to be walking outside, that instead of turning from 18th St onto Mission, in order to catch the shuttle at 16th & Mission, I made an impulsive decision to walk all the way to work. It's only the 2nd time I've done that in a year and a half, the other time being sometime last summer or fall. I did walk home a handful of times last year, but I've yet to do that this year. (It was on one of those walks home last fall that I randomly found Mario playing tennis on the Dolores Park courts, just days after he'd arrived in town!)

It was a pleasant but somewhat sweat-inducing walk. (Thanks to the pedometer that Anj now regrets getting for me, I now know how long the walk is too: approx 5500 steps, or about 2.25 miles.) The walk across 18th Street, from Mission to the Castro, was nice. It was good to get out of the usual rectangle defined by our place and 16th & Mission that I typically walk every day. As I walked by Tartine, Delfina, DPC, and the park, it occurred to me how rarely I get over even that far. Also got to see the signs of 18th streets continued gentrification, and reminded me of this SFBG BizNews column about that topic, which I had planned to do a post about. I may still do a longer post on that--in particular, about how I keep thinking that the move of Fabuloid to a Mission
storefront seems like a significant one for the neighborhood: the first upscale boutique on Mission itself.

I kept going, past the glorious park (one couple playing tennis), through the Castro, up Upper Market and up into the the hills (what some call the "Swish Alps" apparently, as I read in last year's SFBG's Best of the Bay, where it
lost out to the Tandoorloin in the category of "Best New Neighborhood Name"). The views from up there--back across the Mission to the bay and across to the East Bay--are wonderful. (If you don't want to hike the hills up there, take the 33 Stanyan from the Mission to the Haight, or vice versa, since its route snakes through there. And you can even check when the next one is coming on nextmuni.com.)

One of these days I'll have to follow through on my plan to walk from our place to the top of Twin Peaks...it's not all that much higher. But I crested where Corbett intersects with Twin Peaks Boulevard, and then descended down in Cole Valley. This part of the hike I wasn't so excited about, I suppose since I walked nearly every variation of it when we were living on Saturn our first couple months in the city, and I was commuting to work on foot.

I'd loaded up the Shuffle with some fresh tracks in the morning, including all the BE tracks, which I'd just ripped. And as I headed up Parnassus, I had one of those iPod moments, where the shuffle algorithm's computation aligns with your time, place, and being: the BE intro kicked in just as I arrived at the edge of campus.

The weather being so nice facilitated a nice SF sort of weekend. Friday afternoon on Pier 23, followed by dinner in North Beach; Saturday on the beach in Marin, followed by La Taqueria takeout for dinner; drinks Sunday afternoon at the recently renovated Cliff House. It's been occurring to me how SF isn't oriented towards the ocean--the only times I see it
are when I climb up to the top floor of our building and take in the view. So this past weekend was a nice exception to that.

Postscript: Last fall, when I was regularly biking across the city and into Golden Gate Park on Sundays for our soccer games, I thought of doing a photographic essay of the ride. Should still do that (even though I haven't made the ride since early Dec; in fact, the last time was when I got caught in the Muni tracks at Church & Duboce and wiped out!), and also do something like that for this walk to and/or from work. I'd been thinking about how I should start carrying the camera with me.

Ukraine photos on Flickr

Now that we got DillyTaunt up and running (or at least jogging), I'm trying to figure out how to divvy up my posts between there and here. I think what'll happen is that most of what I was putting up here--the political, musical, literary--will instead go over there; and this will become more of the personal--the what, where, and when of me.

E.g., here's what's been happening the last couple weeks: we were travelling, to Ukraine and Istanbul. Just got back Wed night, and still getting over the jet lag. If and when I find the time and piece of mind, I'll write something up. (My track record on this is not good. I've only written up two days of our two-week trip to South America (here and here), and that was 5 months ago.)

I did start organizing the couple hundred photos we snapped. Got them into iPhoto, and also got two iPhoto plugins which will get me to finally start using iPhoto and Flickr: Flickr Export and Keyword Assistant. (Aren't these freeware/open source programmers great? I think I might donate to these people, if I use their creations as much as I'm anticipating I will.)

So started tagging our Ukraine photos and uploading them to Flickr. Check my growing Ukraine set of photos.

reading list: Ukraine & Istanbul

Here's the reading material we brought with us for this trip:

Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, by Anna Reid. I came across a reference to this book in an article last Nov/Dec, during the Orange Revolution (. I started it about a month ago, nearly finished with it. A great introduction to the history of (the) Ukraine--very readable and accessible. Reid was a journalist based in Ukraine, and her chapters on various episodes of Ukrainian history are framed by her own contemporary travels around the region. The only complaint I had is that I would have liked to have read more about certain topics. (For that, I suppose there is this or this.)

The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov and The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Both these volumes were birthday presents from Ina and Bogdan. I subsequently bought a copy of Gogol's Dead Souls, and considered bringing that with us as well, but I left that at home, for after we return. Anj started reading The White Guard about a month ago, and just finished it this morning--she enjoyed it. I'll probably start it at some point during the trip. Bulgakov is not an author I knew of, but he's one of the giants of 20th century Russian literature (Bulgakov--although he wrote in and about Kyiv--was Russian by ethnicity, and wrote in Russian). We'll probably learn much more about him next week, when we will hopefully visit the Bulgakov Museum, in the house where he lived and wrote The White Guard.

I started reading the Gogol tales earlier this week. I'll probably just read the Ukrainian tales on this trip, and leave the St. Peterburg tales for later. I've gotten through the first two so far--"St. John's Eve" and "The Night Before Christmas." Not at all what I was expecting. What I was expecting was some sort of serious and detailed naturalistic depiction of 19th century Ukrainian life--the stereotype of Russian literature, owing to Tolstoy, I suppose. But the first two tales were riotously fantastical, and the language...it's a challenge to keep up with, as a blurb on the back of the volume put it, "the onward rush of Gogol's prose, at once disheveled and uncannily precise." I wouldn't particularly recommend those first two stories, but it may be that he was just finding his voice in those early stories. I just started the third in the collection, "The Terrible Vengeance," and it's seems to be much more readable. It reminds me of the only other Gogol I've read, Taras Bulba, in that it's the story of a Zaporozhyian Cossack. In fact, I may have to reread Taras Bulba while we're here--Ina has the copy I have her a couple years ago, just before she came for that first summer she spent here.

Istanbul: The Imperial City, by John Freely. Found this one on Amazon, and looks to be a good find--a combination of a detailed history of the city (and thus of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires), together with a travel guide to the city's monuments and historical sites. Anj started reading it on the plane--she's finding it informative, if somewhat dry.

I didn't bring any Turkish fiction with us. I did read a novella by Yeshar Kemal's over the past couple weeks, The Birds Have Also Gone, which wasn't particularly rewarding. I'd been half-intending to get a copy of Memed, My Hawk, or something by Pamuk, but that didn't happen.

Just arrived in Kyiv

Anj and I arrived in Kyiv a few hours ago. It's almost 2am here now. Our flight from Munich arrived at KBP (Kyiv-Borispil) at 11pm--about 45 minutes late, because we sat on the tarmac at MUC for a while and took off late. Lufthansa overall was good though. Direct from SFO to MUC--long (11 hours) but not bad, a short layover at MUC, then the short hop east to here.

Ina and Bogdan met us at the airport. No problems going through passport control and customs. A quick cab ride through wide and empty roads into the city and to Ina's apartment, which is quite comfortable. The building's not much too look at from the outside, and the stairway area is rather shabby--Bogdan thought the building is pre-Soviet--but the interior of the apartment looks to have been recently redone. I'm most impressed with the bathroom--a small washing machine, and an ingenious pulley-driven towel rack system over the tub.

Also the cable modem--as fast as ours in SF. Same modem in fact.

Tomorrow--we'll go around Kyiv a bit. Ina has to go the university she's affiliated with; in fact, there's a seminar series happening these few weeks, and we may attend a talk on the Orange Revolution tomorrow. Then tomorrow night we board the overnight train to Odessa.

I'll try to do a post tomorrow with the planned reading list for the trip.

one more on Yalta / Drezner's blog

After seeing the post I put about Yalta last week, Anj pointed out
another NYT article from yesterday's paper that sums up the debate; go
here.

In looking for that article on the Times website, I came across another one from
Sunday's paper which is tangentially related. It's written by the
historian who penned the Slate essay on Yalta that I mentioned in that
previous post. But this one is about his experiences filling in as a
guest blogger for Daniel Drezner.

Drezner's blog seems to be one of the more prominent
academic/political blogs out there. I first came across it during
Ukraine's Orange Revolution. (I was going to include a link to some
of his writing in the post(s) I did at the time on Ukraine. See his entries from
November of last year.) Since then, Drezner wrote this essay for
our alumni magazine about being an academic and a blogger (he's a poli
sci prof at the UofC).

Bush on Yalta

Wanted to post a couple links before I file away the e-mails by which they came to me. On Tuesday, Anj sent me this article, which appeared ironically in the Strib, that criticizes Bush's speech in Latvia last weekend. Then later the same day an e-mail from Slate featured this column, which also criticizes Bush for stabbing FDR and Churchill in the back.

I was wondering about Gwynne Dyer, the author of the first article. A Google search turned up that Jack Lessenberry had written an interesting column about him (here) in February. I started reading Lessenberry's column when I used to pick up a hard copy of the Metro Times each week in Ann Arbor. I've continued to read him online. But I think I must have missed that particular column about Dyer (which strongly recommeneds Dyer's book, Future Tense : The Coming World Order?)

From Latvia, Bush of course went to Moscow, and then made a stop in Tbilisi before heading to Western Europe. This story about Bush doing a Georgian jig caught my eye. But the visit to Tbilisi also reminded me that I'd been meaning to post the link to this interesting documentary I caught on KQED a few months ago (part of the fantastic Independent Lens series).

Architecture links

A few architecture links I've been saving to put up:

• The NYTimes ran this prominent and positive review of the new Walker Art Center in Mpls. Remarkably I haven't been back to MN since Suvranu and Kriston's wedding, meaning June 2002. We'll have to try to get back sometime this year finally; if we do, we'll have to check out the new Walker.
  


• Just today, the Times had this review of the new Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Another spot to visit someday.
  


• Saved this link for the Times review of the new Caltrans District HQ bldg in downtown LA. Passed that on to Arun, who hit me back with this link to a Slate review of the same bldg.
  
  That link led me to a few others on Slate by that same writer, Christopher Hawthorne, including this photoessay on Koolhaas. I didn't save any of the reviews of his celebrated design for the new Seattle Public Library from a year ago, but after digging around on their site for a bit, found this extensive archive of articles.



• Speaking of public libraries, I've been getting over to the SFPL more often in the past month. A couple times to the Main library, whose architecture I rather like, and a couple times to our Mission branch. (One of those trips to Main, picked up a nice book in the small bookstore operated by the Friends of the SFPL: "A Free Library in This City", which embeds the history of the SFPL within histories of libraries in general, and of the city of SF. And the book was only $5, as it is here.



• Addendum, May 11: Just came across one more, a column by the prominent architecture critic Witold Rybczynski on "Chicago's Magic Kingdom", i.e., the Millenium Park in Grant Park.

Last.fm

Much more on Last.fm later. For now, I wanted to see if the code they provide works: click on the following button to listen to a radio stream based on my last.fm profile:



Currently playing: "Chapter 13 (Rich Man vs. Poor Man)", one of my favorite tracks off of Resurrection. Before that: a 13-minute track off of Danny Hathaway Live, a J-Live track, a Biz Markie track, a track off of Kind of Blue....Hell, you can see for yourself what's being played on my last.fm page. Although the tracklisting there is an interleaving of the radio stream tracks I'm listening to right now with tracks being played through iTunes running on our computer at home. After dowloading the iTunes AudioScrobbler plugin yesterday, I've left Party Shuffle going so as to add more tracks to my profile.

Broken beat

After doing that reggaeton post last night, I thought I might do another one or two posts introducing and collecting some links on certain musical subgenres. Check back here for a post on broken beat. A few of the links I'll work in:

Broke n' Beat Radio: "A Nu Jazz and Broken Beat mix show based in Philadelphia"

Benji B's Deviation show on BBC Radio 1xtra

This article from the Bay Guardian

Riddims by the Reggaetón

I'd been hearing about reggaeton here and there over the last few months--maybe I saw a disc in Cancun's jukebox? A flyer for a reggaeton show ended up on the sidewalk outside our place. Glanced at some mix CDs by local DJs at some show(s) we hit, and then a couple weeks ago read this blog entry by Jeff Chang (more about Chang and Can't Stop Won't Stop in a future post).

At the time I didn't follow the link to the Raquel Cepeda Village Voice piece that Chang links to. It was only today, as I was cleaning out the past few weeks' VV e-mailings that I opened up that article:

Riddims by the Reggaetón
Puerto Rico's hip-hop hybrid takes over New York
by Raquel Cepeda
March 28th, 2005 3:07 PM

The article is good primer on what reggaeton is and where it comes from ("an approximately 20-year-old fusion of dancehall, born in the poorest neighborhoods in Puerto Rico, with mostly Spanish-language rap and tropical rhythms"); and who to look out for (according to Cepeda: Ivy Queen, Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, and Tego Calderón. I'm thinking Cepeda is a writer to be trusted on matter like this. I'd been saving a Powell.com review-a-day from Salon of And It Don't Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, edited by none other than Cepeda.) It even comes with an accompanying compilation of links to sample the music online: Riddims on Demand: A Reggaetón Download Feast.

So I read the VV piece around lunchtime today. As I was walking back from 16th St. along Capp and passed Balompie Cafe, a concert poster caught my eye: Ivy Queen and Daddy Yankee at the top of the bill for a show at the Cow Palace in a week. Interesting coincidence, I thought.

After swinging by home, I strolled down S. Van Ness to the Post Office (to drop some checks for the taxman in the mail), made some phone calls while sitting in the sun outside the 24th St. BART station, and then walked back up Mission a couple blocks. Poked my head in a couple stores, and then saw that Musica Latina (Mission Music Center) had the same concert poster in the window. I took a look at some of the titles hanging behind and displayed under the counter. I didn't see anything I could recognize as reggaeton, and I headed toward the front door, but the store was quiet, so I had the chance to askthe guy working the counter if they had any reggaeton. Turns out they had plenty. His first recommendation was what I ended up walking out with--a CD/DVD set titled Chosen Few: El Documental, with the CD a collection of 25 tracks, the DVD a documentary about the music--all for only $10.

(If it turns out I and/or you need more: Guy also pointed out a 2CD/DVD set--top tracks from the past few years + the videos; while Chang recommends this mix.)

That remarkably affordable price is possible, I think, because it appears that the scene is still DIY and indie. There's no major label intermediating between the artists, the record store, and me. It may be because the hype hasn't yet filtered into their executive offices, or because reggaeton's creators have consciously held on to their creative capital. A Daddy Yankee quote in Cepeda indicates it's a mix of the two factors: " 'Reggaetón artists have learned a lot about business by studying hip-hop's history. Hip-hop had people who abused it and the first artists were taken advantage of,' says Daddy Yankee. 'We learned from it. And much like early hip-hop, the record labels ignored us.' "

I was taken aback to find, at the bottom of a flyer tucked inside the jewel case for El Documental advertising itself and some other upcoming releases, these words: "the freedom movement: FREEDOM is a movement of artists and producers who own their creative works which we deliver everywhere at revolutionary FREEDOM prices"

Speaking truth to power, and more power to them. Check the group that put out El Documental: Urban Box Office, which has lots of audio samples (and is selling El Documental for $7!).

Fukuyama on Weber

Brady told me he's still checking on me, so I'll keep up the new spate of entries, with a UofCentric post:

I was just cleaning out some NYTimes Books Update e-mails from the past couple months, and came across an essay by Francis Fukuyama on Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism titled "The Calvinist Manifesto."

Figured I'd save the link for if and when I ever get around to reading Weber. Weber's book was one of those handful of texts that it seemed like everyone at the UofC intersected with in some core course, but it was one that I missed out on. I was talking about this when I was hanging out with Jon Groat when I was in AA last summer for SMB, and so I borrowed his copy of his bookshelf (along with a couple other sociology books he recommended, all of which have merely been sitting on our bookshelf since then).

Another one of those UofCentric texts that I missed catching while there--and that I was recently thinking that I really should read--was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. I've had a copy of that one all along--I received it as a high school graduation present, paired with another such text: Tocqueville's Democracy in America. (Who gives such a present as a high school graduation gift? A UofC alum, naturally.)

Tocqueville I did read, in my Soc class, but I've been thinking about revisiting ever since. Which bring me to another link I was going to post...

The current Atlantic Monthly's cover story is the first in a series in which Frenchman Bernard-Henri Lévy reprises Tocqueville's journey through America:

The Atlantic Monthly | May 2005
In the Footsteps of Tocqueville
How does America look to foreign eyes? This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, our keenest interpreter. We asked another Frenchman to travel deep into America and report on what he found by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Edward Rothstein--who we learned, through his piece on Bellow that appeared last weekend (look here), was a grad student in the Committee on Social Thought (can't get much more quintessentially UofC than that)--wrote a piece on Lévy's project that was in Monday's Times: "Touring an America Tocqueville Could Fathom."

Freakonomics: Steven Levitt and Roland Fryer

Back in August 2003 I blogged (here) a link to a fascinating NYTimes Mag profile of a young UofC economist named Steven Levitt. (The original NYTimes link doesn't yield the full article anymore, but at the time I found this link that does.)

I was reminded of that profile because, first, the NYTimes Mag ran another very interesting profile of a young and unconventional economist a couple weeks ago: a profile of Roland Fryer, headlined "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America" (pdf).

The profile mentions that Fryer has collaborated with Levitt. In fact, both profiles were written by the same guy, Stephen Dubner, and now Dubner and Levitt have published a book on Levitt's work, titled Freakonomics. Just came across this excerpt in Slate, which describes some work of Levitt's and Fryer's on a typically atypical (and controversial) subject:

A Roshanda by Any Other Name
How do babies with super-black names fare?
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Posted Monday, April 11, 2005, at 3:32 AM PT

The book's website is here.

Update (Sun, April 17): I was going to mention that Levitt & "Freakonomics" reminded me somewhat of Gladwell and his "Tipping Point", in a superficial way--popularizations of clever and counterintuitive explanations of social phenomena. Coincidentally, the newest addition to the NYTimes' op-ed roster of op-ed columnists, John Tierney, wrote a column for yesterday's paper about a public discussion between Levitt and Gladwell: "The Miracle That Wasn't"

Saul Bellow roundup

I'd been thinking about blogging something about Bellow after a spate of essays about Augie March appeared last year, with the 50th anniversary of its publication. Below are a bunch of links that appeared after Bellow died last week.

First, for reference: the lengthy NYTimes obituary.

Also in NYTimes: A nice essay by Ian McEwan that ran on the op-ed page, centered around the barking dog of The Dean's December, touching on Bellow's stature among contemporary British writers. McEwan mentions this edition of Augie March with an introduction by Martin Amis which I'd like to pick up (searching for that link turned up links to this edition with an intro by Hitchens, and this nice Amazon feature by Aleksandar Hemon).

McEwan's essay includes a passage from Herzog which is, interestingly, as Hitchens cites in his Bellow obit ("He Was an American, Quebec-Born: Saul Bellow's legacy"), the epigraph of McEwan's new novel Saturday. More on Saturday in a later post (incl Hitchens' review of it), but for now back to Bellow--here are the famous lines from Herzog:

"Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs..."

Of Bellow's novels, I've only read Augie March (in the summer after my first year of grad school, spent back at home in MN) and Ravelstein (about a year ago). I didn't feel like I really "got" either--in particular, I never really cracked Bellow's peculiar language. Which was the reason I gave up on Henderson the Rain King about 50 pages in. But in addition to a re-reading of Augie March, I'm adding Herzog (and perhaps The Dean's December and Mr. Sammler's Planet) to the near-term reading list.

Herzog is cited by Dave Eggers as "my favorite book, by anyone, anywhere, anytime" in this Slate collection of Bellow reminscences, which also has short pieces by Stanley Crouch, Hilton Als, James Atlas. While those were written in the days after his death, Salon's collection culled their selections from writers recounting their impressions of Bellow over the past 50 years. Slate also ran a piece about "Editing Bellow."

Returning to the NYTimes: there was the obligatory highbrow literary appreciation by uber-critic Michiko Kakutani ("Saul Bellow, Poet of Urban America's Dangling Men"), and two shorter, more anecdotal pieces: one by Brent Staples ("Mr. Bellow's Planet")
and one by Edward Rothstein ("Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow, Let Down Your Hair"). (Seems as if it's obligatory to headline these Bellow pieces with an allusion to a Bellow title--in which case I don't the last one.)

Both Staples and Rothstein were grad students at the UofC--their pieces come out of their (rather different) interactions and encounters with Bellow in Hyde Park. For my own small remembrance of Bellow, I was thinking I would pull out my copy of Staples's memoir Parallel Time and read the chapter about his stalking of Bellow in streets of Hyde Park. The piece above complements the Parallel Time chapter, with Staples evoking gossipy discussions of Bellow's latest novels taking place in Jimmy's. (As I've written before, I'm a fan of Staples's writing. I included in that entry links to two more of Staples' literary essays, one about Naipaul and one about Phillip Roth & Anatole Broyard.)


Finally, Bellow's city is of course Chicago (one of the reasons I feel a connection to him, even if I don't feel as if I have any sort of deep appreciation of his work). But the Times tries to claim him as <"A Writer Captivated by the Chaos of New York" as well.

Chavez's Bolivarian revolution

Haven't been over to OpenDemocracy as much recently, but I did skim some of this essay about Hugo Chavez, and wanted to save the link:

All change in Venezuela’s revolution?
Ivan Briscoe
25 - 1 - 2005

After winning two elections and one referendum, defeating a coup and surviving four general strikes, Venezuela’s maverick president Hugo Chávez seems impregnable. But where is his “Bolivarian revolution” going? Ivan Briscoe reports from Caracas on a convulsive, divisive, history-haunted social experiment.

Common - The Corner video

Time for another resurrection of the blog. So it's appropriate this post is about Common.

I must have signed up for the mailing list on Common's site a while back (something I've done at way too many websites, though I still don't get an unmanageable amount of spam somehow).

Nothing much had come through Common's list lately, but this weekend I got an e-mail promoting the digital release and the video for his new track, "The Corner." I've listened to it a few times over the past month. It was either leaked or surreptiously released digitally, as it appeared on a bunch of audioblogs around the same time. I got it from this post on Soul Sides, the one audioblog I've been frequenting most frequently. Brady later pointed out that it had appeared on others, such as this post of Cocaine Blunts.

Enough with the audioblog links. Here is where you go to view the video for "The Corner", which I highly recommend you do, esp if you've spent some time in Chicago. Some highlights: plenty of shots of the lake and skyline (to give you a warm embrace, so to speak)...cruising South Side streets ("the stories told by Stony and Cottage Grove")...Common rapping on the corner--down the street from an El station...numerous shots of el trains and tracks (reinforcing the idea that a motif in Common's writings is public transportation as a public space: "sometimes I take the el/to gel with the real world...")...the projects (Robert Taylor & Ida B Wells?)...

Overall, Kanye does a good job directing.

Had a thought to put up some other hip hop links, related to the few shows we've been to in the new year (Questlove spinning a set at Club Six in back in January, Crown City Rockers tearing the roof off of The Independent in early Feb, and the Stones Throw show at Mighty a couple weeks ago (for which you might find the flyer here))...I'll maybe come back to those in a future post.

(Although the show wasn't all that, it's alway interesting to drop by the Stones Throw site. For example, they've got something up about the upcoming release of a compilation of psychedelic West African funk/soul...and a peek at the DJ Rels page revealed a 30-minute RealAudio mix, which I'm listening to and recording right now (with a new and hopefully improved version of iRecordMusic) ).

One last link: surfing to Common's site led me back to okayplayer.com, which I hadn't visited in a while. Got to make it a point to put that back into the daily operation, if only for The Boondocks. Check out today's edition here.

South America: Dec 21 (Santiago wineries)

At this rate it's going to be next December before I finish recapping our trip. Here's an account of our next day, Monday Dec 21:

This was sort of a wasted day. The downside of being on a tour where the itinerary is set--this day was spent visiting two wineries on the outskirts of Santiago. Anj and I (esp Anj) aren't all that into the winery-visit thing, so in retrospect we would have liked to have spent this day otherwise. To explore Santiago, say; or, as Anj pointed out, we could have made a daytrip to Valparaiso. (The latter seems esp appealing after reading what for me was the best chapter of "Clandestine in Chile"--"Two of the Dead Who Never Die: Allende and Neruda", regarding Valparaiso and nearby Isla Negra. )

Eugenio and Marcelo picked us up at the hotel and drove us to Cousino Macul, a small winery. There was the usual tour of the cellars, the big oak barrels, the tasting. We did meet a couple interesting people. Unlike the subsequent tour of Concha y Toro, there were a few other younger people on the tour with us at Cousin Macul. One was a Portugese guy, who it turned out had was in the final days of a five month trip through Central and south America. He had started in Cuba, travelled through Central America (incl a 4 week Spanish course in Guatemala), and then to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and finally Chile. We also met a young Brazilian couple from Fortaleza (in the NE of Brazil, as we later looked up). I ended up exchanging contact info wih the guy, as he expressed interest in visiting San Francisco (and esp after visiting Rio, we hope to travel through Brazil sometime). He spoke English rather well--turned out he had spent a year of high school in Washington state as an exchange student.

We drove from Cousino Macul towards the site of Concha y Toro. I wrote in our journal that Eugenio started discussing Pinochet and Allende with us, but don't remember specifically what. We did make an interesting stop at a scenic roadside spot (in San Juan?). There were stone blocks memorializing, Eugenio explained, an assassination attempt on Pinochet; it took a couple questions before we understood that the town had erected this as a memorial to Pinochet's bodyguards who died defending him. (It must have been the assassination attempt in 1986 described here.) A couple photos here.

After lunch on the patio of a nice place across from the entrance to Concha y Toro, we endured the lengthy tour there. The grounds were beautifully landscaped, and featured live chickens, pheasants, and sheep wandering arounds, but the sun was intense and the tour was the usual. It was mostly older (and no doubt wealthy) Americans on this tour; we met, for example, a trustee of the University of Alabama who was playing with his fat new Nikon digital camera.

On the drive back to Santiago, Anj and I got to tag along for the first "professional visit"--a stop at a private hospital, Clinica Santa Maria. It was very modern and clean--better facilities than usually encountered in the U.S.--but private and rather expensive. In fact, the prices for seeing a doctor, for a night in the hospital, etc., were listed up front, on the wall as you checked in. This was an unplanned visit, but Eugenio got the receptionist to find a doctor who spent a few minutes talking with us, and walked us through the emergency rooms.

We got dropped off at the hotel, and walked over to Cerro Santa Maria. Oddly, we had to sign in before entering the park. Cerro Santa Maria was another spot that I thought I vaguely recognized from "El Gringuito", and as in the movie, and as Anj and I had noticed elsewhere, there were a number of PDA-uninhibited young couples. I was surprised to later read Littin mention this in "Clandestine in Chile" as well: "What most caught my attention that Friday, after so many years away, was the number of young lovers strolling the terraces that overlook the river. Arms around each other's waists, they seemed to be loving one another slowly, heedless of the time slipping away pitilessly. Only in Paris had I seen so much loving in the streets, and that was years ago. I remembered Santiago as a city of private sentiments. Now I found myself witness to s sight that had gradually died out in Paris and was, I thought, gone from the world. I thought of something that I had heard not long before in Madrid: 'Love blossoms in times of the plague.' "

Some photos we took at Cerro Santa Maria here.

We walked back along the sidewalks of O'Higgins Boulevard, which were now packed, with people going home from work, and going in and out of the stores. We stopped in a couple, as I started looking for soccer jerseys. The stores were packed, department stores that could be in a U.S. mall. But I was unsuccessful in finding any soccer gear, until we noticed that one of the blind street merchants--there were quite a few--had Argentina and Brazil t-shirts. I bought one of each for him, for 4000 peso apiece (approx 6 dollars). Another street vendor who sat next to him, this one with sight, helped complete the transaction.

Eugenio later mentioned to us that the government has encouraged and licensed such street vendors. Conversely, we noticed how few beggars/panhandlers we encountered in our limited experience walking around the city.

We had dinner that night at Le Due Torri, a nice Italian place not far from the hotel, on the recommendation of the concierge. This was our first extended experience trying to order in Spanish. Although the waiter didn't speak much English, he was patient and helpful, and even pulled out a Spanish-English cheat sheet from his wallet (though after we got our orders, we thought he may have had some stuff wrong on his cheat sheet).

After dropping off the parents, Anj and I headed off the Suecia, the nightlife district. Since it was Monday, it was pretty quiet along the 3 or 4 blocks that were lined with bars and clubs. We could envision it being quite a scene on the weekends. Many of the places had people outside trying to recruit passersby into their joints. After walking the whole length, to the river, we walked back to one of these places, "Louisiana" where one guy had hooked us by talking to us in English as we walked by. Turned out he too, had spent quite a bit of time in the U.S. In fact, he'd spent much of his childhood in Miami, where his parents had moved--until he got deported a couple years ago, after getting involved with some gangs, which led to an armed robbery of a jewelry store.

We had a couple beers at that spot, listened to a sort of folk-y singer do some covers of American songs from the '70s (he looked what I imagine is a Chilean stereotype, kind of hippie-ish, with long hair and an acoustic guitar--though I'm not sure where I picked up that stereotype), and then cabbed it back to the hotel.

South America recap: Dec 20 (Santiago)

My first stretch of blog-rot since switching over here to blogger at the beginning of November. Been meaning to write up an account of our trip since we got back three weeks ago, but haven't found (initially) the time nor (subsequently) the energy to do it. Time for another resurrection...

Wanted to write up a recap of our trip to South America before the recollections start fading. Though this time we did a better job of keeping a journal, so I'm going to work off those notes, and of course add some links here and there. I'll also try to tie my writeup to the photos we've uploaded to Shutterfly; the whole bunch is here, but I'll break them up and intersperse links to specific photos in my account.

The travels actually started Sat, Dec 19 in Miami. Anj and I got there in the morning, after a red-eye from SFO. We found Anj's parents at the hotel near the airport where they'd spent Friday night, after flying from Detroit the previous day. The four of us spent Saturday driving around--lunch on Calle Ocho in Little Havana, a drive to Key Biscayne, and then to South Beach, where we had an early dinner before driving back to the airport for our flight to Santiago.

We flew in to the airport Sunday morning (Dec 22), over the mountains. After getting through immigration and paying the fees, we got our luggage and found our group--our guide for Santiago, Eugenio, and driver Marcelo, and the couple that completed our tour group, the Smuklers of Santa Monica.

The sun was intense, but the weather was pleasant. My recollection of the drive from the airport into the city center is that it was fast and efficient--a big wide highway into the city, streets mostly devoid of people in the city. Some of my most vivid memories of our family trips to India are of those initial taxi rides from the airport through the length of Calcutta--the chaotic scenes and inching paces of those first-impression rides were nothing like this first impression of Santiago. Though to be fair, the same trip in Calcutta today is nothing like it was in the 80s.

It was interesting also to later read Garcia Marquez's rendering of Miguel Littin's account of his return to Santiago in "Clandestine in Chile", which Anj and I read only later in the trip: "Santiago was a radiant city, its venerable monuments splendidly illuminated, its streets spotlessly clean and orderly....Starting at the historic Central Station, designed by the same Gustave Eiffel who built the tower in Paris, the endless Bernardo O'Higgins Boulevard flowed before our eyes like a river of light."

Since it was the middle of a Sunday afternoon, we didn't see the monuments illuminated, though we did catch glimpses of this over the next couple evenings. The streets did indeed seem orderly and clean, though not spotless. There was a profusion of graffitti, certainly--which probably wasn't there in 1985, when Littin returned to a Santiago under Pinochet's rule, after 12 years in exile.

(Most of the graffitti was typical uninspired scribbled tags, but occasionally we saw something cool this this.)

Eugenio pointed out the Central Station as we turned on to O'Higgins Boulevard, where our hotel was located. Unfortunately I don't remember seeing the Moneda Palace, though Eugenio must have pointed it out to us as well, since at the time I didn't even begin to understand its historical significance. The passage above from "Clandestine in Chile" continues: "All at once, the Moneda Palace loomed into view on my side of the taxi like an unwelcome apparition. The last time I saw it, the building was still a burned-out shell covered with ashes in the aftermath of the coup."

We checked in to our hotel, the Plaza San Francisco (from one SF to another, for me and Anj)--a nice if somewhat stuff hotel, with a great central location that unfort we didn't have much to take advantage of. Even though Anj and I had had two straight nights of red-eye flights, we didn't get to rest right away, since we had a city tour for the afternoon.

The first stop was the Museo Precolombino, a not overly large but extensive enough museum of pre-Columbian art and culture. Eugenio gave us an enthusiastic, informative, and extensive guided tour of the exhibits--art and artifacts of the cultures of Central and South America that thrived prior to the arrival of Columbus and the Europeans: Aztec, Mayan, Incan, Mapuche, and others. (See these photos.)

This was certainly a good way to start the trip, with a primer and reminder of Latin America's pre-Latin culture. But in retrospect the visit to the museum stands out as in contrast to the rest of our itinerary, where it seemed like European cultures had largely supplanted overt signs of those areas' pre-Colombian cultures. In Chile the connection is still perhaps still there, with our guide Eugenio stressing that many Chileans, himself included, are proud of their Mapuche heritage (see the last photo in the link above of Eugenio explaining "Tres Siglos de Plateria Mapuche"). But in the Lake District of Chile, it was the German character of the culture and people that stood out; in Argentina, the synthesis of Spanish and Italian cultures; and in Rio de Janeiro, the synthesis of Portugese and African.

Architecturally as well, what stood out in the cities of Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Rio was the diversity of European styles that were exhibited. Eugenio had pointed this out on O'Higgins Boulevard as on the ride from the airport to the hotel, and it was on display again in Plaza de Armas, Santiago's central square, which we walked to from Museo Precolombino: Spanish, French, Italian, modern. The canonical postcard from Plaza de Armas is the sleek glass skyscraper towering over the ornate Italian-style cathedral. (See these photos of Plaza de Armas.)

After a walk through the cathedral (also named for San Francisco!), we got back on the bus and went to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, with its striking views of the sprawling city surrounded by mountain peaks.

(I recognized Cerro San Cristobal, as well as a couple other parts of the city that we caught glimpses of over those two days, as sites of scenes from "El Gringuito", which I'd seen in November at MCCLA. Related note: Anj noticed this review in the NYTimes last week of "Machuca"--also a Chilean movie set in Santiago, about a young boy's coming-of-age, but
this one is set in 1973. Turns out the director of photography is none other than Miguel Littin! The latest issue of The Nation also had a review.)

From Cerro San Cristobal we drove through a posh neighborhood--palatial homes set in the hills above (north of?) the city--followed a stop at a lapis lazuli shop.

We finally got to rest at the hotel for a few hours. While Anj napped, I turned on the television, figuring that there had to be some futbol on. Sure enough, as I was to find throughout the trip, there's rarely a lack of futbol to watch. I found a few channels worth
then--a Spanish La Liga game on ESPN+ (Sevilla v Real Betis, en vivo), and a Chilean league game on ESPN. Caught the end of a program about the history of the game which preceded the latter on ESPN, with some footage of Eusebio from the '66 Cup.

A nice feature of staying in a hotel in a large city that caters to international (and in particular business) visitors is the selection of news channels. Flipped through CNN International (seemed so much superior to the CNN you get in the US), BBC World, RAI, TV5, .... It reminded me of the turning on the TV when we stayed in a Marriott on Juhu beach in Mumbai. I was amazed at the number of languages you could hear.

I couldn't sleep or even sit still, so I ventured out to check my e-mail. The rates for the computers at the business center in the lobby of the hotel were exorbitant, so I asked the woman working the desk for directions to nearby internet cafes. I walked across O'Higgins Boulevard and through a couple pedestrian-only streets. Though it was Sunday afternoon and perhaps only half of the stores were open, there were still a large number of people out. I walked by some semi-organized performers--a dance troupe--and a number of bookselling stalls, reminding me a bit of Calcutta, before finding an internet/call center, where I got on a computer, wrote some e-mail and made a quick blog entry.

Dinner that evening was at the hotel restaurant--ceviche, beef, wine, our first taste of pisco sour.