Here is a bad line to use: while watching a group of beautiful (men/women) walk down the street, say “check out the group delay on that ass!” My thanks to Michael Baker for inspiring this moment of prelim-studying delirium.
Monthly Archives: June 2003
Witty Schisms
In high school I was sitting at lunch with a bunch of my friends, and my friend Hadas was singing something, and as a friendly jibe, I said “Hadas, could you pick a key?” This was the wrong thing to say. I didn’t mean it to be hurtful, of course, it was me trying to be funny I think, but it fell short. In any case, now it’s this little joke between us, which is good, but I wonder how many other inadvertant witticisms I have made have actually been mean. Sometimes I lay it on a bit thick, after all.
I’m not sure what made me think of that — I think I just wanted to use the phrase “Witty Schisms” as a entry title. Maybe I should start up a blog for research papers so I can write up summaries and post them for my browsing pleasure. But I think that might be just a little too geeky, even for a website called ergodicity. Ooh! A new play entitled “A Website Named Desire.” Some sort of strange hypertextual Tennessee Williams-esque cyberpunk play. And “STELLA” could be the STrategic ELectric Laser Android. Hmm….
Re: Sample
His name is Nyquist, but he never uses it. Some of his aliases on the street are Lo-Pass (when he MCs on the music show Impulse Train), Kompressor Kommandante (in Germany), and Kitchen Sinc (for his side projects). He represents the LTI Crew, and his rate of innovation is amazingly high for the fast-paced music industry. Check out his frequencies and you’ll get a response from your ears that will blow your mind. Once you sample, you’ll hold on to that sound and never let go…
I went to an art museum in San Diego, and there were the exhibits of bowls, plates, pots, and so on, which are not art in the same way that a painting is art, because the pots and so on were used. Music is always being used, though. For example, there is some music I would designate as “study music.” Listening to Orbital makes me more productive, but I don’t think I could really see myself going to an Orbital concert, or actually playing Orbital over and over again just to listen to it. It occupies the background in my aural landscape. On the other hand, I find it almost impossible to do anything but listen when I hear some Beethoven piano sonatas, or some REM, etc. I bet if I thought really hard about it I could come up with a playlist that would have fixed-time breaks.
Squarepusher goes both ways though — some of it I background, and some of it I can’t. It’s pretty awesome either way though.
Secret Rendezvous
by Kobo Abe. This is a truly bizarre Japanese novel. It reminded me a lot of Abe’s last book, Kangaroo Notebook, but also of some of the more surreal novels of Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance in particular). The protagonist is a shoe salesman whose wife has been taken away in an ambulance. When he goes to the hospital, he discovers that she has vanished and tries to investigate, only to find himself caught up in the system of sex-crazed patients and sexually dysfunctional hospital staff. This is not a book for the sex-squeamish.
Like other of Abe’s novels, the outlook on life is pretty grim, but many of the situations he constructs are hilarious, especially the interactions between the narrator and his boss on the investigation, who wants to be a horse (and has found a novel way of achieving this goal). The book is told through a series of notebooks from the investigation, written by the narrator (who is forced to refer to himself in the third person for much of the time). It is hard to keep track of time in the writing, but the breaks between the formalism of the investigation and the narrator’s comments in the middle is one of the fun parts in the reading.
All in all, I wouldn’t say this is Abe’s best book, but it has a surreal quality about it that fans of Murakami or of Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found In A Bathtub would like.
Don’t know why…
I had thought San Diego would be sunnier than this, but I guess it’s gloomy in June. Yesterday we checked out some museums and walked around Balboa Park a bit but avoided the zoo. We saw a line outside of the zoo that was not at the zoo’s entrance. It was a line to get into the zoo’s food service job fair, and it was pretty long. Given the number of unemployed people in the US now, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m guessing the number of openings available was well below the number of applicants. The country is in pretty sad shape, I think.
If I had decided to blow off work for 4 days and stay in Berkeley, I think it would not have been nearly as relaxing. Going out of town is a necessary thing for me (but not sufficient). Next time, however, I am going to figure out how to avoid LA traffic.
My new juggling technique
Is unstoppable. Too bad it’s got a poor order of growth. ‘Nuff said.
I’m headin’ down to San Diego tomorrow for fun in the sun. Time to take the new car on it’s first big highway trip – gotta figure out how the cruise control works. I used to like driving on the highway, but a cross-country trip in a Ryder truck will beat that out of you pretty quickly. Actually, Kansas will beat that out of you in a slow, painful, soul-crushing way. And parts of Wyoming. And northern Nevada. Next time I want to take the scenic route.
I’ve seen a lot of people hawking the Socialist Worker newspaper in the last few days, which is baffling to me. The campus and town in general are more deserted than they have been since I moved here, so it seems like inopportune time to start a big promotion campaign. Dan’s analysis was that this way they don’t get ignored by the mob or get lumped in with the other people vying for the attention of passerby on Telegraph. I’m not entirely sure I buy that — I think it might just be that the Socialist Worker movement is out of touch with the community in which they are operating. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I wish Jim’s Big Ego would come and tour the left coast sometime. But I was informed by Ram that Gotan is playing in SF on July 8!
Smart Alec’s
Telegraph and Durant. This is a no-red-meat burger and sandwich place on Telegraph, serving the college lunch crowd mostly. The veggie burger there is pretty good, and the service was pretty fast, although I did go there at a kind of slow time. The fries were nothing to write home about, but they were crispier than I expected. I didn’t investigate the garlic fries, but they are probably good for warding off the vampires who inhabit Telegraph.
All in all, a decent $5-$6 lunch on southside if you’re in the mood for a veggieburger or a chicken sandwich. If you want a real sandwich and not something grilled, I would still say Intermezzo’s is your best bet.
Calisthenics
I just made a big fool out of myself presenting the “work” I have done. It’s time to become a less sloppy person by getting some mental calisthenics going. A healthy regimen of precision, clarity, and hard work should do the trick.
Avocado and cream-cheese sandwiches rock my world. At this rate I’m going to be morbidly obese by the time summer is over. Maybe some physical calisthenics would be wise as well…
Ben and Nick’s
On College Ave slightly south of the Rockridge BART station. Ben and Nick’s is pub of the old-beer-advertisements-on-the-wall variety. The highlight my experience there was the framed “PBR Wall Calendar” from the 50’s with the “Blue Ribbon Girl of the Month.” It made PBR seem so clean and pure, compared to those slut beers like Miller High Life.
The food was standard California pub grub, nothing particularly special. I had the “Nicken Sandwich” which was served on white bread, and I’m not sure I could have changed that. The default salty side-dish is tortilla chips — fries are extra. I probably should have gotten the fries, since ketchup and tortilla chips just don’t seem to go well together. The whole thing was not very greasy though, which was a big plus in my book.
All in all, not a place I would go out of my way to visit, but if you happen to be in the area and want to grab a beer, you could probably do much worse.
Pushin’
I have no idea why pushing round things with pointy wooden things on a green fuzzy thing is so fun, but it is. And I have no idea why my ability to push them around well should matter to me, but the thought did pop into my mind that I should get better at it. I think that if I could understand why these things are fun I could get a PhD in a different department from the one that I’m in.
An Ergodic Walk 