I Hate Soulja Boy

Words escape me.

kooba

I mentioned the other week that I've kind of got a thing for Cuba. And honestly, who doesn't? I think it's pretty tough to call yourself a humanist and not have some sense of admiration for what's been done down there in such a short time. And even if you're not, and you don't, you can surely admit that Fidel and Cuba at least fill a role the likes of which we're never likely to see again. It's iconic. It's like Brando died all over again.

Anyway, I was reading an article just the other week about the possible changes that Cuba might have to endure now that Raul's in command, including big box stores, convention centers and Pfizer plants. Just like Puerto Rico. It takes a little something away, I think. Puerto Rico is a great example of what capitalism does to people with nothing to offer but cheap labor and a view. The death of romance, as I understand it.

Today, I stumbled upon an article all set to appear in the March 3rd issue of the New Yorker, which gives a little bit of an overview of Fidel's rise and decline. Kind of like an obit for a presidency:

And that it should end so ingloriously! No fighting to the last man at the battlements, no martyr’s surrender to an assassin’s bullet, only a creaking, shuffling exit through the ward’s doors, hospital gown flapping. We are less than a year away from the half-century marker of a most astonishing marathon, but even this artist of endurance must bow to fate and acknowledge that it’s time to go. Vámonos, Fidel: no one is standing in the way.

[From The New Yorker]

NYT Baghdad Bureau

Keeping the NY Times love train rolling, I happily (or at least willingly) report today that the New York Times Baghdad Bureau blog went up yesterday. It boasts the contributions of reporters, correspondents and photographers living outside the Green Zone. Its name is also a mouthful.

It's worth a look, if that's your thing.

Bloomberg Out

As it turns out, the final word from NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg goes something like, "I'm not running for President, but . . ..

Since Hillary has clearly shown that she hates Obama on what is seeming more and more to be a personal level, maybe this Bloomberg's decision has something to do with being Obama's running mate after the dust clears. I think they'd certainly make a compelling pair.

eh?

The Silence

I didn't watch the debate tonight. Did I even have to?

Instead, I took a chance on Ingmar Bergman's The Silence. You know - that Swedish dude who died last year after making what seems like one film per year for the entire 89-year span of his life. Now that's something. I was born after the era of two albums per year, so this sort of statistic still floors me.

Anyway, I'm sure it beats the hell out of watching Tim Russert for two hours. You should try it some time - Democracy's not all it's cracked up to be anyway.

Limbo

Some waves after a picture of Barack Obama wearing traditional Ethiopian clothing during a 2006 diplomatic visit (including, natch, a turban) were shot out of somebody's rectum, somewhere, and found their way onto the Drudge Report earlier today.

All indications are that it was released by a staffer with Hillary Clinton's campaign - which in recent weeks has increasingly used manipulative, lowdown and sometimes just plain stupid tactics to try to get its digs in where it can on the current frontrunner. This includes last week's accusations of speech-stealing.

But what really frosted my balls was reading the response offered by Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams:

Enough.

If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.

This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry.

We will not be distracted.

[From Politico]

So lemme get this straight: Clinton staffer releases inflammatory pictures and attaches inflammatory implications. When Obama camp responds with 'WTF?' Clinton's official word becomes, 'So what do you have against Muslims anyway, huh? Our candidate would be honored if your campaign were to call her a closet Muslim.'

We now return you to your regularly scheduled reading about zombies, Hollywood shenanigans and football.

March-May Doldrums

The Oscars. Can't say that I enjoyed it, but I watched it. And that's what counts.

I did, however read a writeup from this morning which pretty much affirmed everything I already knew - that the only good American actors left have either already won, are too weird, or are no longer willing to take the exploitive roles that tend to get attention. Or we're just kind of tired of their shit.

So we turned to Europe.

I'm down with Tilda Swinton. Power to Javier Bardem. Marion Cotillard is cute as hell, even if I suspect that her Edith Piaf getup fits under the exploitation category mentioned above (the sort of thing that two-time winner Hilary Swank has really embraced). Daniel Day Lewis is the sort of guy who does very few movies but does them all justice. Especially this latest one.

Anyway, go ahead and read the article. Yknow, for pearls like the following:

After shaving its head and driving drunk around the globe with no panties, calling itself the Antichrist, and finally abandoning its children, totaling its SUV and getting its ass kicked in the parking lot of the Persian Gulf, America is realizing that it is internationally loathed, broke, soulless, tasteless, fat, drunk, malicious, greedy and stupid, and has been generally behaving like a lousy excuse for a world superpower for long enough to lose all its friends and position.

[Lifted from Salon]

I'll miss this award-season circlejerk.

Shorts

I've never made my adoration for Salman Rushdie a secret.  Never even tried.  He's got a piece of short fiction in the Feb. 25th edition of the New Yorker, and you ought to read it.

Also, after stomping the crap out of Fredonia earlier this evening, the Oswego State Lakers will move on to the SUNYAC Championship against Plattsburgh next Saturday. If you live in Oswego, this is good news. If you do not, you probably didn't even read this far. You jerk.

Hillary drinks the kool aid

Overall, a pretty tasty soundbite, and one that she'll likely rehash many times over in the coming weeks. I'm just a little put off by the fact that, after months of trashing Obama for being a little too much of a thespian – a bunch of gut-punching lines and little else - she seems to have put her toe on the other side of the line. Granted, it was a closing remark, and closing remarks aren't a great place for policy.

Is she trying to out-Obama Obama? Whatever she was doing before obviously wasn't working.

Anyway, presenting for your consumption, Hillary sings kum ba yah:

She do

Just out of curiosity, what has Hillary ever actually done?

That isn't even being facetious. Hill's beat-down mantra of "He talks; I do" is beginning to seem more and more like a beat down suit of armor. You read stuff like this . . .

"If your whole candidacy is about words, they should be your own words."

. . . in response to her campaign's recent allegations about Obama's cred turning out to be chickenshit, and you realize that she's only trying to say, My campaign's never been about words, so of course I don't write anything I say. I'm too busy doin.

What are you when you start puffing about hypocrisy at the expense of saying something constructive about whatever it is that you stand for?

A Bush-era democrat. Weak, shrill, impotent politicians.

What a hoot

Looks like John McCain's already in bed with the lobbyists.

get it? get it?

You dog. You dirty old dog. Honestly, I thought the only dudes who get hot girls half their age were named Jack Nicholsen. But no, John, you're at the cutting edge. Leading the curve. Redefining what it means to be 71.

Living the American Dream. God bless you. God damn you.

Fidel, my belle

MEXICO CITY — Fidel Castro stepped down Tuesday morning as the president of Cuba after a long illness, ending one of the longest tenures as one of the most all-powerful communist heads of state in the world, according to Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party.

[From The New York Times]

I'm sure you've read all about it by now, but this took me be surprise. Going to Cuba was always a dream of mine - I've read enough writers, Hemingway wannabes all, to know that Cuba was truly a place where you could go for something completely. Probably the last place on Earth where they don't accept American dollar bills, the currency of the world.

That was all pretty vague-sounding but I'm strapped for time.

Now, however, with Fidel gone there's even the off chance that Cuba and America might even reconcile their differences. Open the borders and let in the Acapulco shirts. Which is exactly what I'd be if I were to go - an Acapulco shirt, I mean - because I lack the essential confidence to act like a tourist even when on vacation. My biggest failing as a human being.

Anyway, RIP. So what if he was a murderous bastard - he was one of the last romantic things in this world.

kill

Pentagon Unveils Rogue Spy Sat Shoot-Down Plan

Sometime in the next 11 days, a Navy cruiser is going to aim a missile just above the atmosphere, and try to take out a malfunctioning spy satellite before it crashes to Earth -- and maybe releases a toxic gas in the process.

Defense Department officials detailed the shootdown operation, in a briefing with reporters Thursday afternoon.

The 5,000-pound National Reconnaissance Office surveillance satellite was pronounced dead just a few hours after it was inserted into orbit, on Dec. 14, 2006. This January, the U.S. military realized that the satellite was beginning its descent down into the atmosphere, Deputy National Security Advisor James Jeffrey noted. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be much cause for concern; objects of this size plummet into the Earth's atmosphere all the time. But this satellite contains a full tank -- over 1,000 pounds' worth -- of the rocket propellant hydrazine. And there's a small but real risk that the tank could rupture, releasing a "toxic gas" over a "populated area," causing a "risk to human life.

[from Wired]

Hold on, dude. I've already seen that one.

memry

I found Launchball the other day.  Try it out.

Does anybody else remember The Amazing Machine?  I remember it was a game that came installed on my family's first computer, when I was eight.

The premise was that you had to solve puzzles using simple mechanical components - lightbulb, hammer, toy rocket, electricity, trampoline, lever, conveyer belt, gear, candle etc etc.  You placed them in certain configurations to make (of course!) an amazing machine designed to maybe throw a cat into a bucket, or drop a bowling ball onto a goldfish bowl.  And then you let 'er rip.  Sometimes it worked, oftentimes it didn't.

I wonder sometimes why these are the parts of my childhood that I can remember in any detail. I've already forgotten my first kiss.  I can't remember what I got for my last birthday.  I'm good with faces, but I have to cheat for names.

Memory's such a fickle bitch.

The Illusion of Continuity

The first time it was explained to me, Paul Virilio's Aesthetics of Disappearance kind of grabbed me. In a nutshell, it studies the nature of whatever it is that we omit whenever we record something, the perhaps infinite amount of unrecorded space between each photographic frame that remains unrecorded due to the slideshow nature of photography.  

The red line is what we see.

It reminds me of a kid asking his mom what color his guts are, and coming away disappointed because he understands that they will always be closed in, separated, in darkness, from him by a barrier that is very important to keep in one piece.  The mystery is essential and the answer lies only a few inches away.  You want to get at it, but a lot of things depend on the fact that you never will. And then you hear that the Japanese have created frogs with transparent skin, and that kind of puts everything on its head. Anyway, I began to think about it in math terms. If a film is a record of reality, and all we see in the film are select frames (thus omitting whatever comes between), the following would stand to reason:

Image (Illusion of Continuity) + Unrecorded Space (???) = Reality

But using some mathematical property that I can’t name - commutative property, maybe? - the following begs the question: after you’ve extracted 24 frames per second of reality, what can we call the unrecorded space? How much of it is there? Can you quantify it? Can you even divide time in any meaningful way (i.e. are we missing out on, say, 15 frames of reality per second?) in the first place? Or is it all just a reflection of the very natural need for the illusion of continuity?

Here’s the equation, rearranged:

Reality - Image = ???

Regardless of whether I’m thinking about this too hard, I remember it being very difficult not to imagine, for just a moment, about what a person accomplishes by removing the images from reality, as postulated above. Is burning a photograph you just took a way of returning to reality, from the unreality associated with using a picture as evidence of reality in the first place?

I don’t think so. Not exactly, anyway. It’s all a lot to process, and I don’t think that reality (the honest stuff, the stuff that disappears every second and is impossible to record) is understandable in simple mathematical terms. If it were, it would somehow take something away from what I like to call the Beauty of Life.

No, I’d like to believe that there’s no such thing as a reality we could ever figure out.  Not like the way you beat Donkey Kong. No, real life is more like Pac-man - a succession of increasingly difficult challenges that might end somewhere, level three hundred sixty nine, only nobody’s ever been good enough to make it there. It is so difficult that it exceeds whatever humans are capable of. For all general purposes, endless. Kind of like the asymptote to the line of the Ultimate - maybe we’ll keep getting closer, closer higher higher, flirting with each other as the X between gets smaller and smaller and of course we’ll never meet, we and The Ultimate.

And if I'm wrong, If we ever do, I bet it’ll be the Japanese who get there first.

Foosball

A creative writing professor I once had suggested that I submit an old piece of writing (maybe I shouldn't say 'old' - I wrote it a few months ago) to a creative writing contest, theme: football. 

I'm new to all this, never having believed that anything I could write could be publishable. Even now I don't suppose that much has changed - I still don't think it's good enough. What I wrote, about my weird worship of a certain football player and how it has impacted my life, is too vague, probably takes too many creative liberties, probably isn't effective at what it does.  

This is all just a preface.

See, I've always had this thing for Ricky Williams. He was probably the first player in whom I ever had any real investment. Of course it helped that he played for Miami, my team. But what truly made him so interesting was that, unlike the rest of the guys mentioned above, his downfall didn't seem like a product of his own dumb vanity.

But let's start at the beginning. Williams, a Heisman winner, was drafted out of Texas by the Saints, who all but sold the farm to get him. He was traded to the Miami Dolphins for only slightly less after three seasons. He was softspoken, even seemed intellectual - the kind of guy who always wore his helmet to interviews. He spent two seasons with the Dolphins busting balls and heads, setting team records, becoming the league rushing champion.

And then, after his fifth season and just one day before training camp began before his sixth, he abruptly retired from football forever.

It soon became clear that Ricky, a lifelong aficionado of weed, had failed one too many league-mandated piss tests. So he embarked on a journey of self-enlightenment, deciding that money, fame, football were too much for any truly conscientious person. After bouncing from a surfer commune in Australia to India to a yoga camp in California, he eventually settled on becoming a holistic medicine man. An ascetic.

From this - Dreadlocked Demon, wreckin ball of defensive lines, corner confounder, dissector of secondaries, hero of my youth:

To this:

And that was that.

I don't want to go into the intricacies of fan anguish, because nobody's interested in hearing about that. Just realize, those of you who are not into sports, that it can make or break a Sunday.  And seeing your favorite player turn into a guy who gets the Sprite catchphrase (commercial sez: "Image is Nothing") all mixed up (Ricky sez: "Image is Everything") and then really takes it to heart, makes it public enemy number one in his own head, is really the sort of thing that makes you reevaluate whatever it was you saw in him in the first place. Is his entire life philosophy built on the tenuous bedrock of a single, misremembered commercial? Takes a little something away, doesn't it?

Anyway he came back a year later and played a half season. Then he got busted again, left again, and played football in Canada. Then he came back to Miami for the third time, near the end of last year, ran six downs, got squished by a linebacker and tore his pectoral muscle. By the time he's ready to play again, it will be September - time for another season and time to see if he can hang with it this time.

Maybe all this that I've been writing about is in line with the thing I've got for Randy Moss (I can still see Moss on the telecast, sitting on the bench before the game, eyes closed, calm as the buddha, the rest of his team hopping around and headbutting each other, as if he just didn't need that sort of adrenaline to help him out there on the high wire). News of Osi Umenyiora's eccentricities (NSFW on account of an arty nude picture) just made me like the guy even more. I am also reminded of the Vikings sex boat scandal from a few years back.

For the same reason that Orson Welles, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain make such compelling figures, there's just something about self-destructive football players that just makes them easier to root for.

Anyway, that's what my piece is about. I'll be submitting my piece within the next month or two. First, I'll have to obsess over it for a little while, and probably edit it until I've wrecked the original spirit.  All in a day's work. Hoho.