The UC Berkeley Music Library does not circulate CDs except to graduate students in the Music department, so I go to the Berkeley Public Library in its recently-renovated beautiful building downtown. Like the Urbana Free Library, my old haunt back home, the classical music selection is rather extensive, especially if you browse the shelves of LPs in the back. I realized that I have the habit of enjoying pieces in concert and then never listening to them again, so I’m trying to rectify that and also improve my knowledge of the Canon of Western Music™
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Author Archives: Anand Sarwate
nc in the b-sphere
Noam Chomsky now has a blog. No comments though, which can be taken as (a) he doesn’t want to hear your bloody comments, or (b) not worth his time to deal with trolls and spammers. From the trouble Kevin Drum has over at Political Animal, I’m betting more on (b).
in my ear
Music I’ve been listening to lately:
- I — The Magnetic Fields
- Fantasma — Cornelius
- Black Angels — George Crumb, performed by the Kronos Quartet
- String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2 — Charles Ives, performed by the Lydian Quartet
- Mingus Moves — Charles Mingus
we are a brutal kind
Go read Susan Sontag’s essay in the NY Times Magazine. Well worth the read, and points out things that I didn’t even realize about the Abu Ghraib photos. For example, the photos we saw in the papers were significantly cropped. Sontag also makes explicit the connection between pornography and these photos, which is something I had been mulling over for a while. The real kicker is her comparison to other visual recordings of torture. These photos are not like those of the Nazis, who did not place themselves in their photographs of atrocities. They bear a much closer resemblance to photographs of lynchings, “which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.” Indeed, as Sontag says, those soldiers are us.
To quote the Shins, “we are a brutal kind.”
publications
I waste an inordinate amount of time, but today I decided that if I couldn’t focus on work I’d at least do something useful, so I made a template for publications. Of course I’m using CSS, so the style is completely configurable to your colorscheme preferences. Thanks to John Owen’s advice page for the reference to CMU’s Robotics Institute style, which I stole and CSS-ified. I’m a scripting ignoramus, but I think with a little work I’ll be able to make a PHP script which will let you enter the information in and then generate the HTML for you automatically. Naturally, it’s not the perfect format for all people, but it has enough in its barebones-ness for the “busy researcher.”
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leftovers
I made two good dinners in the last two days and now I have leftovers. Sunday was pan-seared tuna with a soy-kaffir-lime glaze, soba with wasabi vinaigrette, and eryngii mushrooms (I think that’s what they were) simmered in mirin. Tonight I lucked out and found this shiitake and asparagus risotto, which I had all of the ingredients for, thanks to the Berkeley Farmer’s Market, with the exception of the wine. I went to the corner store and got a Bella Sera pinot grigio, simmered away, and had a tasty meal.
And to top it all off — fresh cherries at $0.79 a pound from Oakland Chinatown. Delish.
out with the bjp
For someone who takes great care to declare his identity separate from Mother India, a country of which I have only been a tourist, I found myself overjoyed at the recent elections there, in which the Hindu fundamentalist BJP was thrown out government by an irate electorate. The Congress party, which some of my relatives support, is only the lesser of many evils, but since they can’t form a majority government either, they will be forced to work with others on the left.
The BBC characterized the elections as a demonstration of India’s “anti-incumbent” trends, but Sudhanva Deshpande thinks this is bunk. I’m a little dubious myself of the economic policies that will be formulated by the new govenment. I find myself unconvinced by the old-school return-to-pastoral-life attitude of Mahatma Gandhi, but the free-for-all globalization that went on in the last few years (including an Enron power plant in Maharashtra) was clearly not the way to go.
All in all, I am hopeful, but not too hopeful. And Congress is so much better than the BJP that it makes me do a little jig, even in these times of no good news from abroad.
Thirsty Ear
There’s a petition to Save The Thirsty Ear. Apparently the administration wants to close it down. Goddamn it, the Ear was one of the best things about MIT — open late, cheap beer, seedy decor, good conversation, friendly staff, and close to Kresge Little Theater. So if you’ve ever been there and had a good time, go and Save the Ear today.
sailor mongering
The US is pressing criminal charges against Greenpeace for “sailor mongering.”
Sailor mongering was rife in the 19th century when brothels sent prostitutes laden with booze onto ships as they made their way to harbor. The idea was to get the sailors so drunk they could be whisked to shore and held in bondage, and a law was passed against it in 1872. It has only been used in a court of law twice, the last time in 1890.
They are being tried for stopping ships bringing in illegally harvested Amazonian mahogany from Brazil. This brings up two questions: is this like charging the Mafia on tax evasion, and how many more ridiculous naval laws are there from the 19th century?
quantum focus
Download Prof. Biswas’s exciting game Quantum Focus! It will teach you about quarks and uncertainty and all that good stuff that they write about in plays like Copenhagen so that the vast majority of middle-class folks who know nothing about physics can feel privy to secret knowledge. Esoteric no more! Physics demystified and fun! Safe for all ages.
An Ergodic Walk 