I saw The Black Rider at ACT last night. It’s a play by William S. Burroughs, music by Tom Waits, and directed by Robert Wilson.
It was AWESOME. So spot on in so many ways, and I learned many things about theater from it. Perhaps I’ll write about it later when I have more coherent thoughts.
300th post, hooray!
Via Open Access News, a good article on the ethics of publishing from the Yale Daily News. Peter Suber has the following addendum:
Here’s the missing half: if there aren’t OA journals in your field, or if your short-sighted promotion and tenure committee narrows your options, then you can publish in conventional journals and still provide OA to your work through self-archiving.
More appropriate for someone in my position is:
As students and young researchers, you may not yet enjoy ultimate control over the journals in which you publish. You may prefer to place your personal advancement over public access to your work — and while the entrenched hierarchy continues to reward this behavior, you’ll meet little opposition. But before you fire off that next manuscript to Cell, consider this: scientific journals exist to record and disseminate the research results, not to make publishers rich or restrict access to vital information.
Of course, I’m in a computer-savvy and web-savvy field, so it’s not so much of an issue. But there should be an ArXiV for other fields as well to help people disseminate faster.
Of course, since Berkeley is a place of extremes, it is no surprise to me that the few Republicans here are Extreme Republicans (TM). They’ve decided to invite, along with the “California Patriot,” noted bigot and revisionist historian Michelle Malkin to speak on campus and make the case that Japanese internment during WWII was a good thing and that we should do lots of racial profiling now. I’d go, but I have way better things to do with my time.
Over at Cultural Sabotage, Ranjit states the following objective:
We seek to decriminalize artistic expression. No graff writer should ever end up in County. Instead, we seek greater opportunities for artistic expression, specifically in the form of funded art programs and MORE LEGAL WALLS, particularly in neighborhoods under threat of gentrification.
I have the Dead Kennedy’s California Über Alles blasting through my crappy office headphones. It seems oddly appropriate now that we have an Austian governor, though Arnold and Jerry Brown don’t really fit together in the same space in my head. Of course, Jerry Brown is now running for Attorney General, so maybe the song will make a comeback.
California is so weird.
I went to the Curiosa Festival last Saturday at PacBell park. I’ve never seen a baseball diamond converted for a rock concert, and I was a bit underwhelmed. We had seats in the balcony, which means they were seats and didn’t allow us to wander between the first and second stages. On the second stage, the best act by far was Head Automatica, although their strutting and prancing got a bit old after the second song. The main stage had Mogwai, The Rapture, Interpol, and of course, The Cure. All of them rocked.
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Apparently the Ohio Republicans are in the Bertholt Brecht Room at the convention. I’m not sure if I should be horrified or amused. Probably amused.
from Lapin Lapin
by Coline Serrau
LAPIN:
[Lapin makes his way to the front of the stage.]
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to make you my monologue. I love my mother very much, I love my father very much, and my brothers and sisters too, I’m very glad I’ve landed in this family, they’re very nice to me, it’s really as if I was one of them, they’re even quite sure that I am.
I arrived here in a spaceship and the ethers injected my fertilized egg into my mother’s womb one day when she was fast asleep with her legs apart. Like a breath of fresh air, an invisible puff of wind, I entered her and grew, feeding on her.
I still don’t know why they sent me here. But I see everything that happens with the eye of a stranger. I have powers, but I’m not using them for the moment. One power I have is that I see everything. This completely changes the way I feel for people.
For example I know the cure for every illness, for every misfortune. It’s horrible, it’s as if it was written in white chalk on a blackboard in front of my eyes. And I also see written on this blackboard that for the moment it wouldn’t do any good if I were to tell these cures.
So I observe their misfortunes in silence, I watch them grow and flourish like beautiful plants and I don’t tell their cures. You, out there in front of me, I’ve learnt you. One day it may perhaps be written on my blackboard that it will do some good to tell these cures.
And now I can see something written on my blackboard that is a bit useful for me to tell you. The cataclysms that are going to descend on this planet won’t bother anybody. There’s nothing interesting for the ethers here. They already possess your resources. They observe you, and they don’t have any feeling for you.
The big difference between them and you is that they know they aren’t the center of anything. And now I can see it written on my blackboard that it won’t do any good to say what I still could say, and nor will the last thing I said mean anything. Right, I’ll go to bed. My love to you all.
I played a game of checkers with spare change today at Brewed Awakening on one of the square-tiled tables that extend like teeth from the south wall of the coffeehouse. I haven’t played checkers in years, so it was a bit difficult to remember good strategy, but I had a particularly stunning three-jump capture, including a newly-kinged piece of my opponent. Actually it wasn’t a King, it was the Proletariat. In the end, true to life, Marx was toppled like the stack of pennies that was his representative.
We had to play checkers because we lacked the coins to play chess (one side heads, the other tails). Our favored coin-to-piece assignment is:
Pawn — penny
Rook — nickel with a dime on top
Knight — nickel with a penny on top
Bishop — penny with a dime on top
King — quarter
Queen — quarter with a nickel on top
In total, $1.27 per side, which is a bit steep, but the chess set comes rife with symbolism.
The nickel is the thick weight of cultural expectations and mores. The queen is weighed down with the nickel, but it is this burden which makes her strong. The penny is the common person, the Public, pawns in our struggle. The knight then is a person elevated, riding atop the cultural expectations. It is not a glorious position. Regular movement in the straighforward manner of pawns is forbidden. Instead the knight is shifty, representing an individual who manipulates culture and dodges responsibility. The dime symbolizes religion in its multifarious forms. The bishop, high in the hierarchy, uses religion to oppress and keep down the people. The rook represents the high tower on which religion places itself as the arbiter of cultural mores.
As you can see, with this symbology we can see chess for what it really is. It is not a mere game with which to pass the time, but a model for the clash of contemporary societies, slaughtering pawns in an eternal struggle for the board, which in the end is an empty plain, devoid of the corpses which are conveniently whisked away at the instant of death.
UPDATE: spelling fixed — sometimes I wonder what all this “education” was for.
An Ergodic Walk 