I'm watching the convergence of cognitive neuroscience and physics. Succinctly, how do we perceive the world and what illusions do we create?

The work of Gazzaniga among split-brain patients:

In a wonderfully elegant experiment, a group of researchers led by Michael Gazzaniga at Dartmouth College showed pictures to the right and left hemispheres of a split-brain patient and then asked each hemisphere to pick another picture to accompany the one originally presented. The right side was shown (through the left half of the visual field) a house with snow and, logically enough, it picked a shovel. The left hemisphere was shown a chicken leg (through the right half of the visual field), and it picked a chicken head-also quite logically. The experimenters then verbally asked the patient to explain his choices. The left hemisphere was the only one that could articulate an answer, but remember-it did not know why his right counterpart had chosen a shovel, since the information about the house with the snow did not cross the severed corpus callosum. The patient's answer was as astounding as illuminating: "Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken [which was true], and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed [which was coherent, but completely false]." In other words, the left hemisphere acted as an interpreter of the worldview of the individual and fabricated a just-so story to fit all the available data!

These sort of experiments have shown that the left hemisphere is in charge of our worldview, of the paradigms we currently hold about a variety of aspects of reality.

So theres enough evidence that volition is a carefully constructed illusion. Our higher brain may be nothing more than a deluded emperor who is kept in the dark by his cunning subordinates.

The first communications between the right brain and the left brain must have been like a spark gap being ignited. This is where Jaynes comes in who speculates that the 'unified brain' is a recent development. That our ancestors carried two brains and that they believed the authoritative whispers of the left brain were direct messages from the gods.

Autistics, like Tito, must bind together the different experiences of reality to create a larger view which we create seamlessly.

How does all this apply to physics? The deepest illusion we maintain is that of the notion of Time. We cant define it. When we sketch it out mathematically, it just behaves like Space and yet we "feel" that it is so fundamentally different. The illusion we maintain is that there is a coherent narrative of events or that there is a narrative at all. Not only the future, but also the past is being created at this very moment. These are the ideas that John Wheeler is pursuing.

All these little things, like a swarm of flies on a summer day.

I was away for the weekend. I slept. I swam. I read books (William Golding Free Fall, The tale of Monkey ) I played the piano. I watched the stars. I drank wine and ate dark chocolate.
I lay in the sun. I played scrabble. I got a massage (shaitsu and reflexology). I talked about swimming (How do bodies glide through water?) I laughed with a performance artist (not at her) and played word games with a red-haired (the color of yarn) girl. I talked about hawks (some ethereal play. how do hawks inspect the world? Are we below their notice?)
It would have been an even better weekend had I not forgotten to bring the coffee.

In The monstrous and the marvelous, rikki ducornet explores the sense of the fantastic. She has a list of Optical pleasures which i found too good to pass up. I've reproduced pieces of it here and added links where appropriate:

Any number of things set off my chronic weakness:

-Edward Lear's paintings of parrots, Man Ray's photograph Glass Tears, the glass of Emile Galle...the ceramic dishes of Bernard Palissy...

-Paradises, true and false: the Tea Palace in Mantova is a prime example...

-The serpents painted by Jacopo Ligozzi, anything painted by Bosch or Maria-Sybilla Merian...Tenniel's illustrations for Alice

-A mural painted by Max Ernst for Paul Eluard's house called Au Premier mot limpide..

-Tumeric....the books of Jurgis Baltrusaitis

-Palenque

-The entire bestiary of Aloys Zotl

-Capricorn beetles

-..a glass by Dale Chihuly...

-The original edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica of 1768-1771.. Plate LXXIV (Book Two) contains the following:
1. an Electrical machine
2. a Cloud machine
3. an Elephant
4. an Echeneis
5. an Elater
6. an Erinaceus or Hedge Hog
7 & 8. Ermin and Ermine (Heraldric Crests)

The English version of the collected works of Georg Buchner has this to say about "Danton's Death":

The powerful theatricality which a modern audience may recognise is all the more suprising, since there is no evidence at all that Buchner was a theatre-goer or had any real conception of how a play was staged. Furthermore, he wrote the play not from any deep love of the theatre, but in a feverish rush, in five weeks and under constant threat of arrest, because he was desperately short of cash. Possibly it was this very naivety and haste that lent such freshness to his approach.

Well, that english was from an Amazon preview. I am reading "Dantons Tod" as a piece in his Werke Und Briefe. Its a small German hardback (pub 1968) that I have owned since 1992 as part of a small collection of German books a friend gave me back then.

At about noon yesterday, LB called me and told me she had an extra ticket to go see the Dalai Lama who was in town. She had gotten the ticket from a Tibetan friend of hers who as a small girl had followed the Dalai Lama into exile.

I was asked by another friend who couldnt attend (it was USF students mostly and then Tibetan friends and media) about what my perception was of the Dalai lama in person. Did he have an aura, a presence?

I'm not sure I was in the best position to judge since the event took place in a basketball gymnasium. Thats not the kind of location, at least for me, that usually inspires transcendence. (A counter-example would be a Catholic Mass I attended a couple years ago at the summit of Mt. St-Michel, on a cold foggy french morning shortly after seeing a dead man in Paris. It is in this way that moments are constructed.)

I know he giggled a lot. Having not really heard him speak before, I was unsure of when he was joking or when he was serious. The strongest impression he gave to me was of someone who had achieved some measure of happiness.

There have been some recent articles on the subject of happinness. Also, some recent research seems to suggest that the practice of Buddhism does indeed make you a happier person.

Like most others, I am happiest when I am deeply engaged in the "now", in the present moment, engaged in a task that is stimulating or meaningful. But I cant exist only in the now. I also need to look up and see that the future itself will be full of grand surprises, undiscovered joys.

After the lecture, LB and I went to this great french bakery where I ate a Duck and Prunes sandwich while we chatted briefly about the lecture, about her friend and Tibetans in exile. The small moments did seem more pleasant so maybe his presence did have a calming effect, a lingering radiance.

I've been recently playing around with Terragen, a fractal landscape generator which is quite easy to use for a beginner like myself. It has a wide following as well. And, although its is mostly used to generate static pictures, the community has started using it to generate planets and fly-overs.

I created the above picture in about 10-15 minutes. Its amazing how far this has come. I think I created my first fractal mountains on a silicon graphics box in 1993. It was just a crude wire rendition but I was so excited even then at the potential for realism.

Several burning man refugees are on their way here. Time to unfold couches and search for spare blankets.

While I was at my parent's house, three other houseguests were there too. In addition, they had some sort of party two out of the four days I was there. My parents are social creatures who thrive on having others around.

I'd walk around the house and, even if the room was empty, i could sense the presence of everyone else. I walked by the kitchen once and an unattended pot was mysteriously boiling. Walking back through a while later, the pot had disappeared and there was the faint scent of tea in the air.

I'd see some item, maybe a book or shoe, in one room and then later see it mysteriously appear in some other part of the house soon after. This happened enough that I started to suspect there was some sort of Underground Railroad for household objects.

I am trying to find more information on SuperBarrio. Most articles on him date from the late 90's.

The figure of Superbarrio combines the circus-like atmosphere of masked mexican wrestling with modern political ideologies. He is a sublime performance artist and political activist. He dismantles corrupt politicans by casting them as ridiculous and laughable straight men - not as sources of fear and power.

His first presence on the world stage struck me as one of those moments when a people's ideas and will becomes so strong that it manifests into reality. As if he was willed into existence. His masked hero routine also resonates with those other masked populists - The Zapatistas.

For all these reasons and more, Latin intellectuals adore him. Here is Alberto Rios:

Superbarrio appeared a number of years ago when the police were evicting someone from a low income house. A crowd formed in the neighborhood, saying, "Don't do this, don't do this." Suddenly, a costumed, masked wrestler appeared, jumping up onto the bed of a truck. "Stop!" he said. "I am here. Superbarrio!" He gave a speech: you can't do this, and I stand for this and that. Sure enough, everybody rallied to the call, and kicked the police out of there.

Superbarrio started showing up in different places. But he didn't look the same in every photograph. It became apparent that different people were wearing the costume. This was brought to his attention. "Superbarrio," he was asked, "how come you look different in each of your photographs?" And he gave one of the best retorts of all time: "It is because I am everybody." What a great subversive notion, that the superhero is the people! It was a wonderful rallying point. And what other hope is there? Why not this?

Make your own Super Barrio Man Masken!

Here is a sample of what I've been listening to lately. Japanese Garage Metal:

Electric Eel Shock's - Puma
(thanks to beatbox for the file)

I'm spending the rest of the afternoon reading in the back garden at Progressive Grounds

This week Step into Liquid is playing here at the Embarcadero theatres. A friend from high school told me about it. He and I both went to school with Brad Gerlach, one of the featured surfers in the movie. This isnt a huge surprise. My high school, in a small beach town in San Diego, was a small surfing magnet school. Surfing was a dominant culture and you could surf for your phys. ed. requirement.

In the photo of Gerlach linked above, he is doing tow-surfing. The waves he is surfing are so powerful that it is next to impossible to paddle into them and so as the wave breaks, a surfer is literally towed into the wave. Its as dangerous as it sounds. And Brad is one of the best in the world.

Caspar David Friedrich

You know when you are sitting there silently and then suddenly (this all happens in an instant!) your head turns because you thought you saw something move? Perhaps it was a shadow that played across the floor or an artifact of the wind (though your mind uneasily suspects it may be a mouse scurrying for cover.) Thats been happening a lot to me recently and nothing is ever there. Still, I am compelled to look each time.

This little visual trick fascinated me as a kid. It seemed to come from deeper inside me, beyond volition, that instinct to turn and look. Are the shadows real that I see or were they too deceptions of my mind? How could I say i was in control of myself if I could not understand my own mind?

Equally impressive to me was that capability we have (the solution must be immense and devious) of picking out such tiny movements in such a large visual field. Years later, I got so much enjoyment of the method that astronomers use to find comets or other moving objects in a large starfield. Not with computation of course but by flashing two overlayed images (like an animated gif) and letting our magnificent eye hone in on the moving target. An old slide projector will do the trick too.

"If life is a cabaret, Pink Martini is the band in the existential orchestra pit." - CMJ New Music Monthly

Pink Martini is one of those bands that people discover either by accident or because a friend has talked about them glowingly. After this discovery, they become like a secret treasure. The woman who cuts my hair just recently told me, out of the blue, how much she adores her Pink Martini CD.

I went to school with both Thomas (bandleader and pianist) and China (singer) and lived in the same (upperclassmen) House. Thomas threw some of the best parties, the kind people still talk about to this day and are referenced in urban legends pages

If you have a chance to see them live, dont miss it. The stuff they perform could fill several unreleased albums. And China's voice is even more spectacular, whether she sings in Spanish, French, Japanese or Croatian - I am not kidding.

Here is Song of the Black Lizard from their album Sympathique. The song was I believe written by the writer Yukio Mishima for a bizarre movie that he wrote the screenplay for and in which he played a small role. But, you should go out and buy the album.

I am posting some good info (list of free programs) that I got from Roderick. It appears that the worm has hit a lot of people:

I have personally used the 1st on the list of each group with an ADSL connection through aol proxies on a W2k OS - I confirm they work well.

Firewall
Sygate Firewall This product backtraces more nodes than my $60 McAfee!
Zone Alarm A respected program by all accounts but untested by me.

Anti-Virus
AVG Anti-virus by Grisoft
Avast3, Free for home users May have to dig about on the page, but it is free for home use only.

SpyWare Killers (Removes all those naughty little cookies and advertising programs that arrive with so-called free programs.)
Spybot, non-commercial So good I sent him $20
Lavasoft Ad-aware However rumoured to let a few 'selected' cookies remain on the system

Trojan Killer
Swat-It I havent tried this myself, the free links are in the left lower frame area.
I hope you find the links useful.

I was reading about coded phrases in music, in this case Miles Davis and his musicians. A tight musical outfit always struck me as the perfect example of how different people can work synchronously, almost as one - even more so than the rapidly intertwining legs of a tango dance.

Music also forms a nicely closed system. As in the coded phrases, musical language is being used to talk about music itself, laying out hints of what the next series of progressions will be, future changes in tone and key. The remarkable thing is that even these phrases were never articulated or translated into language. As the author says, "The "explicit verbal instruction" in Miles's music never existed, not even in the preparation of pieces... it is clear that the so-called "coded phrases" were never formalized in the sense of a priori agreements or even arrangements. "

The musicians, like the listeners of a piece, were acting on instinct. Its hard to describe how a piece of music really makes you feel. It communicates directly with the language of emotions which is much more rich and complex than the pale language of words. To say that a piece is mournful or joyous is to burglarize it of everything but the obvious.

She, my cousin, my sister, reminded me of how we all played as children. I was lost in thought it seems, concocting some new game or pastime. Her and my brother were partners in mischief.

I was cruel to you, she admits as she smiles. Her husband laughs at the understatement. Yes, I said, but you were also the person who taught me how to swim. A small bit of cruelty was just the thing I needed.

A: All your favorite movies involve spaceships dont they?
me: What?! What do you mean? My favorite movie is Fellini's 8 1/2!

(pause)

me: Come to think of it, that movie does have a spaceship in it...
A: Aha! I knew it.

I was part of a Flash mob this afternoon. The email arrived and told us to go meet at different bars in the Mission organized by our birth months. Then, sometime between 1 and 2pm we were to be given instructions on a slip of paper by an organizer as to what to do next.

So we went, three of us to Dolores Park cafe. There we found others and the organizer and received our next set of instructions. They said we were to all leave the bar/cafe at 1:57pm and arrive at a certain spot in Dolores park. At 2:05 pm we were all to form circles with everyone there and await what happened next.

It was fascinating. At 2:05pm, two hundred random people suddenly assembled in Dolores park near the childrens area. What happened next? We played a 200-person game of Duck, Duck Goose. People running frantically, counting heads, screaming like children.

At 2:17pm everyone dispersed in different directions as suddenly as they had appeared. The instruction sheet told us that if anyone asked what had just happened we were supposed to lie. Flash mob over.

(I also ran into Michelle who is throwing a burning man fundraiser party tonight (her sister says: you are throwing a party to raise money for a party?) It is tonight from 9pm to 5am at 333 Fremont St. She mentioned she has some djs spinning trance and downbeat. It should be fun and surreal.)

I stopped by Borderlands books and picked up a copy of The Sparrow today. I started reading it in the hot sun, with a cup of strong coffee in hand, listening to monkey radio

Paul writes i only wish i could somehow make time stand still so i could really experience and savor my life. am i too greedy?

If we start with this, a succession of moments, then most of us are madly sprinting from one foreseen moment to the next like people caught in a rainstorm. We catch glimpses of our next shelter and race towards it, oblivious.

When the present is immense and beautiful, we want to grasp it, hold it tightly as two lovers hold each other as they part, fighting uselessly against the current of moments.

If only i could re-imagine her in my mind as a fully realized creation, he thinks. If I could carry her inside me so that that the dreary seconds expand again and become timeless. So that we could create our own small universe with its own laws of physics and halt the flow of time.

Beijing street scene, Marc Riboud

The last few years of my life have been a heroic attempt to avoid working. When I left [big Silicon Valley company] in 1998, I thought I'd just live on my savings for a while until I decided what to do next. But this was 1998 and only a month after leaving I got a random call from an ex-co-worker who said he he had heard I was free and he had loads of VC money in his pocket and would I join him. I said sure.

Only a year or so later, after some dissatisfaction with some other co-founders, I and the VP of Sales, who had become a close friend, left that company to start our own company. Again, getting money for our project was not difficult at all.

That company is where I still work now. We have had our share of turmoil, of expansion, of contraction. But I have been able to draw a good salary and also have the free time I need to travel, work at home or just mess around. Last month I was able to go to Europe on a whim. My partner decided at the same time to skip off with his wife to the south of France.

Now, this same small company is in the process of growing fast. These last few weeks I put aside my usual compunction and focused, and worked. If all goes as planned, we should be hiring soon and perhaps opening a new office. All this in the midst of a recession.

But for me this means that I can now put into action some plans I have had for the past year.

New Moon by Rufino Tamayo

So much is happening and yet nothing is happening at all. I dont seem to be able to write or speak or tell a story. Well, here's something.

I had a wolf in my house this past week. This is no allegory but a real incarnation. The difference between wolves and dogs is i think that wolves, more ancient creatures, are still aligned with their packs and less so with the broader world of people, of society, of dog parks.

She was fierce and willful at times. She was strong and cunning enough to all but destroy a cage and discover some hidden latches. She could not be contained. If she was upset she would rip a book from the shelf and tear it into pieces. The floor looked like the aftermath of a parade.

Other times, she was like an overgrown puppy. She would follow me around with soft eyes and stay as close to me as possible, sometimes pressing against me even as we walked. At night, she demanded attention and if you did not provide it, she would bite your feet or curl her body insistently on top of yours.

When enough was enough, she was exiled to the backyard. She would in most cases pace near the window, watching you carefully with her cunning eyes.

Last friday she was handed over to a rescue organization. The transaction took place in the parking lot of a Safeway, in the suburban east bay. It was like one of those gangster movies - precious cargo being exchanged under the cover of a public space.

Baila la Cumbia!

Cumbia is one of the world's great dance grooves. It is made up of merry guitars and accordions, torrid brass, and insistent, deep-toned drums and percussion, pounding out a lopsided, strutting 4/4 rhythm with a kick like nitroglycerine.
-The Rough Guide to Cumbia

It originated in Colombia but this is the music that fills dance halls in Mexico past the onset of darkness. Men with greasy hair and sharp suits. Women with backless dresses and short skirts. All wildly swaying their hips. The music is hypnotic, cowboy music, rural trance.

Here is Cumbia Sobre el Rio from Celso Pina, who is infusing cumbia with modern elements from rap and reggae.

I have been playing with light and how it falls around me. Translucence and shadows.

I grew up in a sleepy surf town but felt most at home in downtown manhattan. Cities are where I grew up, where my emotions developed (like the rough shine of tarnished copper.)

I think that I can feel time, that movement across spaces and habits of being. Sometimes it is abrupt, like a door thrown open, other times graceful, like a body moving through silk curtains.

I'm gonna eat you little fishy!

Fishy is a very relaxing game

Me, swimming with the fishys (sort of)

The Creation of the Birds by Remedios Varo

The imperfect mirror

if you make something perfectly symmetrical and then give it a small fracture you have an almost-symmetry. The nature of these things is that whereas in symmetry the focus is on the whole, now the focus is on the fracture.

Because we are all different, we are fascinated and consumed by different problems. Sometimes our individual obsessions may even define us. We are a unique accumulation of obsessions. One of my obsessions has always been the imperfect mirror.

The first place I discovered imperfect mirrors was in physics. Our universe is riddled with slightly fractured mirrors and yet physicists generally do not make a big deal of this.

Take for example, reversal in time. Forget all that entropy stuff you have been fed. The truth is that even particle processes are not reversible in time. Well, actually, most processes are with the exception so far .. of one! "Only the weak nuclear force appears to violate this symmetry, and this so far only in the behavior of the neutral kaon."

This is a good example of a fractured mirror. The same is true with actual mirror symmetry. If you held up a huge mirror to the universe, all physics you see happening in the mirror (objects falling under gravity etc) would be physics that happens here too. Well, once again with the exception of just one sort of interaction "Mirror image of a charged weak process has never been observed."

I have always understood, I think, that only imperfect mirrors can exist. Unbroken symmetry is an ideal only, a construction of our minds. For us to know left from right, light from dark, past from future, a transgressor must exist who by crossing the boundaries of the mirror brings the whole thing into definition. We can only tell light from dark because of the shadows.

On the 11 hour Virgin flight, I kept listening to Junior Senior's move your feet. I have found that it is difficult to dance in your seat.

They also had 50 movies you could watch. This is Chavela Vargas' la Llorona , a haunting song, from the movie Frida.

I have been back now for several days but feel as if I am still settling back into my life in san francisco. It feels as if I am still waking up, as if I have emerged from a dream.

(For no particular reason I mention that the spanish word for dream is sueño (pronounced 'swen-yo') So, to say 'she dreams' I would say 'sueña' (swen-ya))

Orginally, I was going to visit old college friends. First, Dan in Heidelberg who works as an astronomer for the Max Planck Institut. Then Ian and Jessica in London. As it turned out, I spent most of my trip, 10 days, in Hamburg or traveling around Northern Germany with Mina.

First was Berlin which I mentioned below. Then Hamburg where we played scrabble in cafes and walked along the Reeperbahn and I learned about Barbapapas. Then Kiel, where we sailed on the Baltic sea and saw fireworks on the Bay and I saw Blandine again who seemed to be tailing us everywhere.

I also spent some time in odd cafes where we ordered two spezzi and yet paid 30 euros. I recommend you check the bill if this happens to you.

The Hamburg Harbor was magnificent. It was an enormous labyrinth of machines and shipyards and cranes and even water-filled residential byways. After taking a boat through the harbor we took an elevator down to an old beautiful tunnel still used by cars which are lifted up and down and then creep slowly beneath the waters along narrow lanes that were originally meant for horses. Walking along these tunnels was both strange and wonderful.

The whole trip was composed of moments like that. Short but timeless episodes.

These last few weeks have been amazing. It was more than a dream because it was real. When we wake up and we long to return to our dreams it is because we miss that sense of being in the present, of acting out something beautiful. In our dreams we can imagine and feel happiness (just as in our nightmares we can imagine horror) But that happiness is also real, as real as anything else. It is not imagined.

London Town
(posted from an internet cafe in Trafalgar Square)

Waiting to meet up with Roderick then later Ian and Jessica.

I will post a lot more soon. This is a marker. I need to write about Kiel and Sailing and The Reeperbahn and barbarabar and about my adventures with M. and Blandine and Thorsten and Ricarda. Theres a lot more but I cant write about it all.

Mini-golfing in Berlin
(posted from Hamburg)

When you visit a city and stay with locals, a different side of the city presents itself to you. Locals know the best bars, the best cafes and the usually hidden parts of the city. The inverse of this is that they are blissfully unconcerned with the aspects of the city usually laid out for tourists.

The best example of this was when walking near the city center with Mina and Sophie and Mizha. I was walking next to Mizha and he points out, as a side comment, an afterthought, ' Oh. This wall here is part of the Berlin wall, you know.'

The funny thing is that we had been by here before but nobody had bothered to point this out before. The wall was not a destination or a thing to be ogled at but had been part of our travels all along, interwoven with our walks throughout the city.

The entire visit was like that, full of impromptu moments:
- We found what I am convinced is the best and cheapest pizza in Berlin.
- We watched Sophie's womans chorus belt out folk songs at a club in East Berlin, with their teeth blacked out and dressed in garish clothes.
- We stayed in a flat in East Berlin thick with artists and heavy smokers
- Walking near a children's park, we stumble upon a strange, spinning contraption that looks like it violates every safety law one could think up and is surely illegal in every other country in the world. The five of us spend the next hour jumping on it and laughing and narrowly avoiding death.
- We played miniature golf in a small park teeming with locals. Sophie bests us all. My own scorecard is full of too many funfs and siebens.

I overslept but it is a sunday so that is ok. The bbq yesterday was exhausting. I played host, watched friendships form among strangers, had old friends and new friends drop in. MV tells me that she thinks this party was fantastic because the number of people was just right and everyone spoke to each other instead of hovering inside their clique. The party ended with the italian neighbors dropping in with champagne and vanilla ice cream. Now that can be added to the wine and desserts that went unfinished.

I was woken up by a call from M. and as I race to the phone I stub my toe against the corner of the bed. So I answer the phone as I am howling in pain. M. asks calmly 'Ummm, is this a bad time?'

M. couldnt make it to the party but we want to see each other before I go off to europe. We have coffee near Dolores Park and she tells me about strange dreams she has had. Somehow the conversation turns to topic of light and darkness and of how we maneuver in this world among so many uncertainties and about moments, beautiful, ravishing moments of revelation. Later at Adobe books we discuss Jung and Jaynes and Burning Man.

Later, after leaving M., I run into Z. I havent seen Z in a long time and she looks good. She seems to be with her boyfriend and he has no idea who I am.

Later, A. is stumbling at me with blood running down her nose and face. She had fallen right before I arrived. I grab her and offer to take her to the emergency room. But she seems to be ok. It was the shock that had disturbed her.

Tonight, I leaned back in a hottub. The twilight was just arriving and I watched the stars, brightest first, make their appearance in the sky. Their appearance seems so random that I am moving my head back and forth excitedly as if looking for meteors. Only after enough have appeared do I remember that these strange new things, seemingly random, also form familiar constellations.

A few things:

This article (via drinkme) reminds me of how little we still know about our own social dynamics. I wonder if we will ever be able to separate our instincts from our own volition or if we have even phrased the question properly.
I'd always thought that to be truly "human" was to recognize and overcome petty instincts, to look beyond that and try to overcome the stereotypes of your own background, to look forward and realize that each of us embodies a place and a large list of subscribed precepts. But if you go too far in the other direction and try somehow to transcend it all then you may be leaving behind too much.
Aren't concepts of beauty and passion and good and triumph based fundamentally on our own ability to weave something complex out of something simpler, to intellectualize our instincts?

I am co-hosting a bbq on saturday. It should be fun. I am not generally the party-host type but my co-host is more of one so i am drawing on some of her social energy. Its also a good chance to use the garden and a good excuse to clean the house.

I am flying to europe next week. I am taking the infamous san francisco-frankfurt direct flight on United. Its a 12-hour flight but made more bearable by the fact that I'll be flying business class (put more simply, all the liquor i can drink.) I'll be in Heidelberg, Hamburg, Berlin and maybe Amsterdam. I'm tempted to cut out Amsterdam since I've already been there twice in the past couple years.

El museo de Xul Solar

Pola X is Carax's adaptation of Melville's Pierre (yes, the author of Moby Dick). The film manages to be as wild and impenetrable as the novel. Themes of incest, love, death mingle casually. The protagonist has everything and discards it all. He sheds his wealthy garb and descends into the other world, the world that has always writhed at his feet.

Unlike most descents into madness and hell, this story has a peculiar quality to it. His quest, his attempt to find the "great lie" that flows like a muddy undercurrent, is not as he believes, the quest for a universal, a shared and vital preoccupation. It is as we discover merely his own tangled misconceptions, his naivete about the mechanics of the world and about the slime-covered rocks upon which he has always planted his feet.

Ultimately, the protagonist of Pola X is like a hermit who emerges into civilization and informs us tired inhabitants of his wide-eyed observations. Unless he can tell us something new, unless he can re-weave our scattered threads into somthing at once coherent and also miraculous and new, he will lose our attention. Not every stranger is a Gulliver or a De Tocqueville. Some are just lost and wandering souls.

I saw this after Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) in what was for me a micro-festival of French cinema. These two films are unalike. Whereas images of Pola X will quickly fade, the images from Vagabond will stay with me for a long time.

The wandering soul in Vagabond, a young homeless French woman, is not pretending to be anything other than what she is. The film collects her story as best as it can, the pieces of her life that she has left with strangers. Their attempts to define or understand her, to draw her character, are really statements about how they view themselves in the world and how she has redefined them. In this sense, she is like a mirror to others.

The girl from vagabond is compelling because she is frighteningly real. The film has the feel of a documentary and I walked away from it stunned at the questions it had slyly posed. Who are we besides the impression we have left with others? Some who encounter her despise her lack of self-regard; others envy her freedom. What does it mean to be free and what shackles have we already accepted and tucked beneath our sleeves?

Dore draws Tennyson's Elaine

Free Oysters

Ok. How come nobody had ever told me that you can get free oysters every Friday evening at El Rio? Delicious, creamy oysters too.

Well, nobody that is until last week when I was at an art opening. I was talking to the artist and some other guy and somehow the subject of oysters came up. You know, she confided to us, El Rio has free oysters every friday evening and they have been doing this for like 20 years!

She said she was there all the time and so the three of agreed we would all be there the following friday. Not surprisingly, I was the only that held to that appointment.

Still, the place was lively. I found the oyster line and soon discovered that I had walked into a Cheers-like atmosphere of regular oyster fiends who convened here every friday. They were only too happy to welcome me into the fold, giving me all sorts of newbie advice like how to hold your newly-acquired oyster so that you would not drop it as you rushed back to re-join the oyster line as soon as possible.

Also I found that dealing with the mildly crazy oyster lady who opened and dished out our oysters seemed to involve some other unwritten rules. But these things were beyond me as a beginner.

So I got my fill, shared a couple drinks and waved goodbye to the oyster people. But, I'll be back.

My parents have just told me they are spending the month of June in their house in Mexico. This is a house they have been working on, off and on, for about 10 years. They plan to retire there and it is now finished.

Its a small house, with mediterranean touches, and an adjoining cornfield. My father built a little bright yellow house in the cornfield which also serves as a small guesthouse.

It is in the mexican state of Michoacan which is lush and tropical. Like most rural tropics, the area has its disadvantages - regular insect seasons, unreliable power and other services - but also advantages such as gorgeous scenery (local jungles and volcanoes) and delicious local fruits.

I am a fan too of the tropical weather. The kind where the sky is sunny and clear one moment and then the next, stormclouds fly in like angry gods, rain pounds heavily against the stones, thunder roars in your ears and, perhaps an hour or so later, the clouds move on and the sky is again clear.

These colonial villages in Mexico have a distinct european feel. Few people have fridges; you buy your fresh bread everyday from the baker, your meat from the butcher. Everyone buys their fruits at a central market.

The designer and architect of my parent's house is my uncle Jorge. He is one of those multi-faceted men, brilliant in his own peculiar way. He has been a figure in Mexican politics, has founded charities, runs his own scholarship fund, promotes authors (he recently handed me a strange book on metaphysics which I dont quite understand) to publishers, builds houses, lobbies governments, and has been working hard to bring rural parts of Mexico into the modern world.

Here is a picture of him with my parents house in the background.

selection effects

I thought at first that I would use this weblog to talk about ideas. I have ideas all the time and they come quickly, evolve rapidly and often though not always become something fully formed.

Sometimes, as when i want to pursue something further or drag it out over several days, I'll write a note to myself. But this note is incomprehensible to anyone but me. More often though it will just remain a note in my head.

I rely almost entirely on my memory for appointments and meetings, for addresses and phone numbers. So, it is the same with ideas. But the problem is worse because ideas, unlike phone numbers, can also mutate rapidly, join with other thoughts in my head. So soon after I write something down it becomes stale and no longer relevant.

I do enjoy reading other idea weblogs. It seems that other authors are able to overcome this problem I mention above and present their ideas in small digests. The key, like many things we discover in life, is a selection effect at work. Let me explain.

Many people think they can meet other people at bars or parties. What we all know however is that bars and parties are great for meeting the type of people who like to go to bars or parties. The introverts who would rather spend an evening with their books are much more difficult to find and thus, at least for me, much more precious.

In any case, a similar selection effect is at work in the weblog world. It favors ideas that can be presented in its format - small digests, cluttered with links. Or long asynchronous conversations.

My best ideas have been "whiteboard" ideas often presented in a small social setting. That is just how I work. I can think fast and develop something new for you while you watch. Then I can retreat, let some more ideas infect the original, and soon after, present something to you that is original and new.

By the time I finish writing a post, even a short one like this one, I have already revised it in my head many times.

Through recommendations or whatnot, these are the books i am going through next (all summaries from Amazon):

Our Lady of the Circus by David Toscana

The Amazing Mantecon Brothers Circus, a down-at-the-heels roadshow of freaks, failures, and outcasts, dissolves after its arrival at an abandoned Mexican town. With no water, no food, no clocks, and no mirrors, the characters in Santa Maria confront, often humorously, the very essence of life and survival.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

In this novella, written in 1976, narrator and authorial alter ego Hanta meditates on the 35 years he has spent at a hydraulic press in a dark cellar, compacting waste paper and books proscribed by various regimes. Though he no longer weeps or protests when rare treasures appear in his press, the books that he must destroy become his whole life, his only companions.

The Life of Insects by Victor Pelevin

This time, Pelevin sets his story in a sleazy Crimean resort town, where his characters eat, drink, make merry, make love... and turn into insects. This is no soft-focus allegory: the author is superbly specific about his entomological creations.

New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought by Todd G. Buchholz

In this revised edition of a book first published in 1989, economics is accessible, relevant, and fascinating. It's even fun--for example, when he uses the cast of Gilligan's Island and Henny Youngman jokes to explain complex economic theories.

Islandia: The Epic Underground Classic by Austin Tappan Wright

On his death, Austin Tappan Wright left the world a wholly unsuspected legacy. Among this distinguished legal scholar's papers were thousands of pages devoted to a staggering feat of literary creation - a detailed history of an imagined country complete with geography, genealogy, representations from its literature, language and culture.

Man Walks into a Room by Nicole Krauss
The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi

If you read mysteries for insights into other cultures and different periods, this excellent translation of the first novel by Akimitsu Takagi, who became one of Japan's leading crime writers, is an eye-opener

...and
the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed
the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O
that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like
fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes
and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and
the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and
Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the
rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and
how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he
asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my
arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts
all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will
Yes.

James Joyce, Ulysses

I lose my keys because I am absent-minded and I sometimes wonder whether I have lost other pieces of myself here and there, tucked inside my books, dropped stupidly at a street corner, left behind in some former house. Days go by and it feels as if there is something i need to remember, that this day has its own undusted place and has been re-ordered, remixed, lost in the shuffle and chaos of my past. These pieces of me are gone, likely forever. In these small moments, the past lingers like a dull echo, a faded photograph that has lost its color and brilliance.

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.
...
Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
...
[Fear] seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a worldess darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

-from Martel's Life of Pi

I learned piano on my own. By banging on pianos I managed to deduce some of their patterns, decipher some of their encrypted beauty.

Much of what i created, I discovered later through a smattering of theory, was in minor keys - particularly A-minor and F#-minor - with many of the bass lines formed as simple triads. Minor keys are the musical incarnation of dark romance, of passion and abandon.

This week i started playing piano again. I picked up the sheet music for Tiersen's Valse d'Amelie (mp3 file), which seems to be well within my range.

Two MP3s:

Black Box Recorder - These are the things
Blackalicious - Make you feel that way

Random thoughts while walking to work today:

- The evolution of childrens drawings as a cultural map. When I grew up, all of us kids drew the same car, the same house, the same trees. The car was boxy with an ample trunk, like a Ford LTD. The house is a small frame house with a working chimney. The tree was a stick with a bush of green leaves perched on top. Where did these cultural figures come from? To start with, I grew up in San Diego, where few houses have chimneys. Are kids of today drawing cars that look more like SUVs?

- In college, studying physics, I would rarely read entire papers - short though they may be. I read abstracts and summaries. And from the digest I would then work out on my own how the authors had developed their conclusions. More times than most, I failed. Stumped, I then skimmed the paper to see what I had missed. Often the authors had taken another unexpected line of thought entirely. But, it is good to see the problem from many perspectives, to not be channeled into an inevitable train of thought. Most ideas are not inevitable, it is us that decide to make them so.

- Reason and logic will only take you so far. Devout fans of those two will find their world constrained. I am a fan of the unexpected leap. The intuitive flash, the unexpected insight that does not seem to follow from anything else. It is a willing blurring of the world. Often it is a matter of becoming unattached from words and terminology. A devotion to words is a devotion to the knives which carve up the world. Some ideas are unexplainable and we can only gesticulate and point.

- Some precepts have been hard for me to learn and accept. As a kid, I didnt understand how science could proceed without being one large tautology, like a dictionary that explains every word in terms of another word. But what word is fundamental? What are the axioms? (my teachers considered me hopeless and i failed my elementary school science classes)

- I am reading The Life of Pi and it is a wonderful parable. Our struggle through life is reduced to a story about a boy and a tiger drifting on a boat. Their survival is a mutual struggle. Pi manages to control his fears and hopes and anxieties as he confronts life in all its naked horror and beauty.

- Monday we skinny-dipped in a small pool carved from the stone out under the trees and the glorious sun. A family of deer strolled by and gave us wary looks.

Gone for a few days to celebrate a friend's birthday.
We are headed here, where you should go too when you have a chance. It is not the type of place that is well-advertised. More of a word-of-mouth type thing.

This is one of the best spots in California. The big decisions here are whether to sit and read your book, get a glass of wine from the kitchen, or go soak in the tubs. There's a shallow pool great for lying down in and staring at the stars.

Today was my first day back climbing at Mission cliffs. A few months ago I badly sprained my ankle. I was on crutches for a while and when I did start to walk again it was a slow, painful thing. My ankle remained stiff and its only recently that it regained the range of motion that it once had.

I am an amateur climber but I can see the appeal. Staying aloft, clinging to the wall, requires that you focus entirely on this one task. There is no room for daydreaming or stray, idle thoughts. Each step is like a puzzle element. You calculate the moves that are both safe and that will lead you on a sure path to the top.

I am tempted to write more here about my younger days, but I will do so later. Surfing had this same appeal. Beyond you and the ocean there is nothing else. For the moment, the rest of the world seems futile and immaterial and this thing, you and your surfboard and the unsteady waves and the lurking depths beneath you, have the capability of infusing your mind with a sense of meaning.

Die hard surfers have the same sometimes vacant look of serious climbers. They discovered another world and part of themselves now resides there. This world is not so serious when you realize, when you know deeply, that it is only one of many.

My interest in astronomy was awakened when I was 16 years old. Through a recommendation from an older classmate, I went to the Thacher SSP program.

The class size was 36 and we were all housed together in a mountain campus for six weeks. This sequestration made us all very close. Many couples formed among the co-ed group and strong friendships were forged. One friend of mine, made that summer, lives in Germany now where he works for the Max Planck Institut. Another works as a cryptographer here in the Bay Area.

Besides lectures and other activities, our main project was to observe a particular celestial object and spend the summer tracking it across the sky and calculating its orbital components. We were broken up into teams of 3 students and assigned to track the orbit of some celestial body - we were lucky to get the comet Giacobini-Zinner which was then streaming through the solar system.

We used an old telescope that demanded heavy involvement from us. It had no tracking mechanism so 'tracking' consisted of one of us staring into a small guidescope for up to an hour, picking a tracking star, and keeping the telescope focused on it by making fine adjustments to where the telescope was pointing. It was hard work but the end result is that we had helped to make new observations which we collated with other "real" astronomers across the globe.

The experience transformed me, it drew me in deeply. I still remember all of it, the luminescent stars, the fleeing little comet and us three kids in a small observatory, bleary-eyed and bathed in infrared light.

Buenos dias, profesora! Como esta? Yo soy musica.


(Me saying the above (wav file))

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Jorge Luis Borges

The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.
Agnes De Mille

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
Lawrence Durrell

Most summers as a child, my family would make its way down to my grandmothers house in Mexico.

The house was not what it once was. Before my grandfather died, they had had not only pigs and chickens but also cows and a small stable of horses. My grandmother, to make ends meet, had sold off most of the livestock and even sold off tracts of land.

Nevertheless, the now small house still had its charms for me. In Mexico, many houses are built around a central patio. The patio is open to the elements and is surrounded by covered corridors. The rooms of the house are off of these corridors, surrounding the patio. When it rains, for example, the safest way to get from room to room is of course to walk around the central courtyard. But, the best and fastest way, certainly for a small child, is to run madly through the rain.

My mother would pass the summers cooking and gossiping with neighbors. All the people in the small village would walk from house to house to stop and chat, moving almost synchronously, like some large coordinated dance. Children, including my brother and I, would hop around like cats, climbing random fixtures, sitting at first quietly and then making sudden, unexpected dashes, playing with slingshots and soccerballs, whatever we could find.

My father would spend most of his days sitting in the sun listening to old records, Beethoven, Mexican mariachi, Benny Goodman, even Chuck Berry. He would invite over his own friends, other men, and together they would concoct some new liquor, usually a mixture of tequila and the juice of an exotic fruit.

My father also often had some project, or perhaps better said, some crazy idea that occupied him wholly throughout the summer. In these schemes, he would recruit us kids since we were cheap labor and were always game for something new.

One summer he declared to us kids that after some initial investigations of his own, he had come to the conclusion that there was hidden treasure somewhere in the walls of my grandmothers house.

There were old stories and rumors, he explained, that sometime during the Mexican Revolution, my grandmothers house had hosted a small cadre of bandits (for some reason the word bandit always summons up for me a picture of an unshaved man with an eyepatch) and that the bandits had arrived with stolen treasures. Apparently they had left the house to go one some new raid but then never returned, presumably either captured or had a bad run-in with other bandits. In any case, my father concluded, the treasure must still be inside the house.

And so it began. My father was our commanding general. We were his dutiful lieutenants. He had made a rough sketch of the house and pointed out to us where he believed the treasure might be hidden. Our first task he explained was to scout out likely hiding places. He showed us how we should knock on walls and listen for the sort of non-thud sound that would betray the presence of a hollow.

In retrospect, I do wonder why my mother showed no reaction to having a small army of neighborhood kids stalking through rooms, knocking on walls, crouching in corners. She must have dismissed these antics as the impenetrable games of children.

The next phase arrived rather quickly. My most vivid memory is of my brother telling me excitedly that something had been found and that even now my father was out back excavating it. I ran out behind the house and discovered my father kneeling on the muddy ground with his hands reaching into some hollow he had dug up. I've found it! There's a metal box buried in the walls!, he turned to me and said in triumph and then returned to his work.

My father did indeed make a find but it was less than he expected. The metal box was an old ammunition container and inside the box was no treasure, it was nothing but paper - old receipts, tax documents, scribbles. This box more likely held the secrets of an old tax dodger than of a pirate. Still, my father diligently studied all the papers, hoping some new mystery, perhaps a battered treasure map would be revealed.

It was in the following days that the women of the house, to their horror, discovered my father's excavations. They were outraged that he had been digging small holes in my grandmothers house, all for what they considered a childish game. My father, under their stark glare, made a sheepish confession.

It was hard not to feel pity for my father and, at first, we did help him to undo his destruction. But my mother, in a fit of vengeance, deemed that my father would have no help. That it was his idea, not ours and so it was his burden.

I wouldn't say my brother and I were happy to be characterized as unwilling pawns. But, if it meant we got to run off and play while my father plastered walls, then so be it. The rest of that summer was fairly miserable for my father although some of his elder friends did come to help him, mixing strange tequila drinks with him and listening to old records as they leisurely rebuilt my grandmothers house.

I was recently reminded of this post I once made on Metafilter. Don't miss the excerpted correspondence with Fender Tucker near the end of the thread.

I learned of Keeler through the website of Richard Sala. And I learned of Sala because i stumbled upon a book of his, hidden in some stacks at a used bookstore.

The book was the Chuckling Whatsit, a strange and riveting tale about a mysterious and powerful totem. The story is dark and Victorian and Sala manages to tread on that fine line that joins the humorous and the macabre - not too unlike Edward Gorey. The plot involves secret societies, ancient mysteries and convoluted sub-plots all woven together with a dark sense of humor.

It is not odd then that Sala's website provides one of the few links to Keeler on the web. The Keeler society is itself a sort of secret cult, hinted at by writers such as Neil Gaiman and William Poundstone.

notes

-She walked in like royalty. We loped around her, covering our faces.

-Symmetry exists because of imperfections. The mirror gives itself away because of subtle reflections. Otherwise it would be a habitable space. Time forward is not the same as time backward. No matter how abstract the mirror, it always has a fault.

-Denouement is underrated. Too often the fall from climax is so abrupt as to make our stomachs turn. Listen: The man has stopped singing. The chorus now chimes in, cradles us in their voices, softly lays us down.

-Truth is like an explored landscape. Unreachable truths are like far-away lands that we can only point to and wave our arms. We clamber back and forth; metaphor and analogy are our only crude tools. But what if the tools we need have not been imagined? (A is like B presumes B)

-Our world is manufactured by our community, our friends. It is a universe of consensus. As we jump to different circles we re-discover the proliferation of worlds.

-Our arguments follow the same pattern. The rules of rhetoric were discovered long ago. Often we willfully delude ourselves that we are making progress. To think otherwise is unbearable.

-We are storytellers. Our life, when drawn for others, has the straightforward drama of a classic narrative. The text has been cleaned of the ugly and the inscrutable. But have we left out the most important parts?

-We are so anxious to create meaning out of patterns that we create them out of nothing. An unrelated sequence of events becomes a cataclysm. Two insults in a row become our downfall. One unsolicited kiss becomes our salvation.

since i was a child, i have always been covetous of images. i always felt there was never enough time to really "see" and experience everything around me. i craved the possession of images past and present, and the creation of my own personal dreams, symbols, and future.

i started taking pictures to remember -- documenting and recording images i could not trust my mind to hold completely and accurately. but over time, i realized that through images, i could not only capture moments of significance, but also moments of beauty, that in themselves had worth in the vicarious experience of their viewing. in addition, by capturing those small moments of beauty all around us, and by focusing and re-experiencing that beauty, i possessed another tool to determine my own mood and consciousness.

This is the introduction to my friend Paul's fantastic Asia project. Paul got his start in the world of New York fashion photography. As his roommate in Manhattan, I used to watch for him on TV's Fashion File, sometimes catching glimpses of him at the end of the runway, taking pictures of Naomi Campbell or other models who strolled in front of his lens.

Now Paul, an amazing photographer who has studied with Mary Ellen Mark, turns his camera to Asia. The sequences of images are a gorgeous visual narrative, like a wordless novel.

Speaking of the private, I have been reading ostinato, which is neither poetry nor prose, but rather a biography written in the language of emotions. Reading it, I become hyper aware of my own emotions - the sensation and images that make them up. And how interesting and disappointing that so many of his emotions are about sex and pain and the small deaths we suffer as we live. I'd like to think there was more. Love for instance. But, Love is primarily a selfish emotion.

So writes my friend and she is right; for the thought raises in me the larger question of how we can escape the old philosopher's conundrum of reducing all actions and emotions to mere solipsism. The "other" it seems in the best case can be much more than a reflection of ourselves or a pool into which we cast our wishes and dreams. They can also be an expansive gateway, a secret door, which when unlocked can seem to open up a wider world.

The reflection of ourselves, unlike a simple mirror, always brings something back with it, an alien cargo, which makes this more substantial than an illusion, much more real and substantial than a hall of mirrors.

Alexandria, a city at once sacred and profane; between Theocritus, Plotinus, and the Septagint one moves on intermediate levels which are those of race as much as anything - like saying Copt, Greek and Jew or Moslem, Turk and Armenian... Am I wrong? These are the slow accretions of time itself on place. Just as life on the individual face lays down, wash by successive wash, the wrinkles of experiences in which laughter and tears are utterly indistinguable. Warm casts of experience on the sands of life...' So writes my friend, and he is right; for the Interlinear now raises for me much more than the problem of objective 'truth to life', or if you like 'to fiction'. It raises, as life itself does - whether one make or takes it - the harder-grained question of form. How then am I to manipulate this mass of crystalized data in order to work out the meaning of it and so give a coherent picture of this impossible city of love and obscenity?
-from Lawrence Durrell's Balthazar

A fund-raiser for a Burning Man construction. (Those are friends. I am not pictured)

jury duty

My jury service ended today. Overall, I feel that i did my small part at combatting injustice.

The accused men were two black men both of whom attended a large party at a well-known bar here in San Francisco. The more serious of the accusations (six counts in all among the two men) were that these two men had committed battery against san franciso police officers, that they had resisted arrest and provoked violence.

I like to believe that I have a fair and open mind about these things. Most of my direct experience with the police, with law enforcement, has been through my younger brother, a tattooed rebel who has served jail time here and there. I know, from him, that at times he has been treated unfairly, been the subject of quick accusations and, for many police officers fits the profile, both in his looks and demeanor of a 'usual suspect.' But, I also know that he can be a bit of a scoundrel sometimes, that much of the jailtime he has served has been, from our family's perspective, well-deserved.

The case I just heard lasted about a week and we deliberated for about eight hours total before coming to a unanimous decision. The first jury poll showed that we were unequally divided with the slight majority of us weighing in with a 'not guilty' verdict. Others were undecided and a few were convinced of the defendant's guilt.

I was surprised at how civil, fair and open-minded my fellow jurors were. Maybe I had watched too much tv an expected it to be contentious. But, we heard each other out, carefully reviewed everyone's notes, went over the details of the testimony both from the defense and the prosecution witnesses. As we discussed the details among ourselves, more and more inconsistencies emerged, across all testimonies.

I know from my readings and from having known a defense attorney very well that witnesses can be unreliable. Our memories are fallible and selective. When judging someone's recollection of an event, you have to also take this into account and not assume that direct contradictions in testimony necessarily assume that a witness has willfully lied. In some case, we actually found the opposite to be true, that some independent testimonies were -so- similar as to arouse our suspicions.

Those of us who argued for 'not guilty' relied on a couple tactics. The first was to remind our fellow jurors (and ourselves) of the distinction between 'not guilty' and 'innocent'. It seemed clear to me and to others that a lot of misconduct had probably occurred on both sides that night. But, our role here was not play impartial judge and award guilt or innocence. Our very narrow role was to determine whether the prosecution had presented us with enough compelling evidence to determine whether -these- specific defendants could be convicted of -these- specific charges. Its an important distinction.

The second tactic among all the jurors was to look at credibility. It was generally agreed upon that both sides (prosecution and defense) had deep flaws in their case. Despite the small errors of memory, there was gaping holes in the prosecutions case that were enough to make me (and many of us) uncomfortable that two men could be convicted on this basis. Or, to put it more personally, that you or I could be convicted on nothing more than this. It was not a matter of pointing out that police can be untruthful (they can) but, in our case, merely pointing out that police can be human, and like all us humans, flawed.

After eight hours of talk, of the discussion of the finer points of the case, we slowly came to agreement. Each of our fellow jurors felt inclined to agree, if they had not done so earlier, that they could not uphold an abiding conviction in this case, that they could not walk away and feel, say a month later, that they had made the right choice in voting for a conviction.

We all voted Not Guilty on all six counts.

I should add here that one mistake made by the prosecution (and to a lesser extent by the defense) was to underestimate the intelligence of us 12. In many cases it was clear that loaded words were being used to try to sway our view of events, strong words that should not have been used. If such introduced prejudices are not supported by the testimony of your witnesses, they are likely to backfire, causing the jury to more cleanly pick apart your case, looking for other signs that they have been manipulated and, ultimately (and this is a prosecutor's nightmare) casting doubt on your entire presentation.

Starkeffect's too cute Think of Me from the new Metafilter Music site.

Read more about mic in track, to see where these sound samples are from.

This is the right moment to be here. Poised between two imperfect moments. Conversations at the bar, the dj plays latin jazz and salsa, This feels like a ballroom of friends or of friendly strangers. We are drinking at the bar, me sipping the lone manhattan among a small sea of cosmopolitans. As the music picks up, a pack of people arrive, mostly women, dressed in wild colors, walking in like a samba school, refugees from another affair. The men arrive later. They eye the women who are nodding their heads and bodies, swaying to the drums, the rhythm. The whole place has soon erupted and, somehow, I am also in the middle of the dance floor, hips moving in a south american style. We have all collided now, the giggling girls from earlier, the men in pursuit, the strangers at the end of the bar. We are all sharing this moment.

On the next day, the sun is breaking the sky open, dissipating an early morning rain, reflecting itself endlessly in a patchwork of quivering puddles. The local coffeshop is full of us, all of us drinking coffee, reading our books and newspapers, squinting at the sun.

Between pain and pleasure there are three
creatures. One looks at a wall,
the second puts on a sad disposition
and the third advances on tiptoes;
but, between you and me,
only second creatures exist.

Leaning on my forehead, the day
agrees that, in truth,
there is much accuracy in space;
but, if the happiness, that, after all, has size,
begins, alas! in my mouth,
who is going to ask me for my word?

To the instantaneous meaning of eternity
corresponds
this encounter vested with black thread,
but to your temporal farewell,
corresponds solely what is immutable,
your creature, the soul, my word.

- Cesar Vallejo, from Payment of Bones (1923-1936)

If you happen to get invited to the San Francisco Ballet because a friend has an extra ticket and you go and you love the performance, with its sublime production of the germanic nanna's lied, then you should also grab some dessert downstairs, rushed, in an intermission, chocolate served between the dances.

Now twice someone has mentioned Taco Portal, a psychedelic trance affair at San Francisco's Border Cantina. This is irresistible. I will be there next thursday or next.

A good friend hands me a ticket to go anywhere in the world. The ticket is to anywhere, so the farther the better I suppose. But how do I balance distance with desire?

Travel always evokes an exciting sense of escape, of at least temporary freedom. Its a fusion of the novel and of the tempting idea of losing oneself in time. One is able to reset oneself, to at least shed this restlessness, if only temporarily.

The challenge is to throw yourself into time with no structure and not succumb to boredom. To find a way to focus on a present where events follow each other in natural succession and each task seems immediate and necessary.

Travel is imminent.

I am doing jury duty this week. A criminal case at the San Francisco Courthouse. And that is all I can say about that. Except that it is taking up all my afternoons.

A rough night amidst dreams of spirals. I tell very few people that I dream of spirals so this is an admission of sorts. I think in spirals. I do calculations in my head with spirals.

I have tried a few times to put on paper the shape and dimensions of my dreams. But, in my head, I can zoom in and out at will and so I have no sense of scale, no fixed reference for these things, these mathematical organisms.

They do have an orientation. I associate numbers with points on the spiral. The number 10 is at about what I'd consider 9 o'clock on a clockface. The number 1000 is also at that orientation, on the next trip around the curve. Then, surprisingly, the next number is about 1 decillion - 10^33. I can not be sure that that is where these numbers stand. As I zoom in to discover them, the larger spiral loses its focus, I am in too close, and I am left looking at the local topography.

Sometimes, in my head, I will quickly zoom in, hoping to discern the local shape of the curve. It's not smooth, I have gathered that much. There are bumpy sections on its spine, some bumpier than others.

The number 13, for example, has given me a lot of trouble. It seems somehow to have an odd place among the folds of the curve, as if it is not always there or as if the curve takes an unexpected twist. This has, for me, practical implications since I do even simple addition like this, by climbing along the curve.

Ask me what 8+5 is and, half the time i will tell you it is 12.

A few quick things. The Robots have Feelings Too show coming up here in San Francisco. A lot of great stuff - much of it online at the website above. I'll try to find time to visit.

Two unrelated friends talk about Thomas Struth.

I've been getting a lot of good music from Radiovista. The current playlists are right here. I've been looking forward to each new mix. Eclectic, fantastic stuff.

My friend Lisa writes me to let me know that she is on the cover of a Polish art magazine. That is her on the left in the above pictures, wearing a skirt and wielding a red light saber.

The magazine Raster is online and looks interesting even if, like me, you dont understand Polish and have to settle for looking at the pretty pictures (ooh! Nan Goldin.)

When I think of Lisa, I still think of her as I knew her in college and I think of play-doh carrots. She used to buy orange and green play-doh and make hundreds, no thousands, of tiny play-doh carrots - small enough that you could roll them between two fingers.

She left these carrots everywhere, she kept them in tiny boxes and also let them run wild all over her room. Sometimes, at unexpected moments, like when removing a book from a shelf, out would come a little stream of carrots.

I am still not sure whether this was some sort of art project or whether it was just playful obsessiveness. With Lisa, I'm not sure there is a difference.

It was winter in Paris - early january. The day was clear and cold. Days earlier, I had just celebrated New Years with L. on the rooftop of the Centre Pompidou. Now, we were on an urban train on an overland route. We were near the river, riding through a desolate, semi-industrial area - clumps of scrubby bushes, parking lots and distant buildings providing the only source of scenery. The train had slowed down, presumably because of traffic ahead.

The action unfolds in a moment even though, in retrospect, in memory, the scene has the quality of a studied documentary: L. shouts. Oh my God! It's a man!. She is excited but nobody moves. The passengers, paging through Le Monde or engaged in hushed conversations do not move. It is a dark comic moment. I gently remind her that she should exclaim in French which she speaks well. Un homme! C'est une homme la! Then the passengers start moving. One man seems to be already talking to the conductor on the speaker at the end of the car. The train comes to a halt. We all look at each other and wait. As the train car door slides open, we see the young conductor standing next to a sprawled man.

The man on the ground could have been any man. He looked like a young professional. His shirt had flown up a bit though and my attention was drawn to his exposed belly, the waistband of his checkered boxers, these minor indignities. He was on his back, head slightly turned as if he had just received a tough blow in a barfight. He also had a line of blood which ran down from his mouth.

The moment seemed unreal not because it had drama but because it lacked it. It all seemed so banal, so stupid, a band of dusty commuters, a conductor acting through a script, the equally young doctor in blue jeans who was summoned and leaned down over the corpse. I look around at the other passengers and notice one of them, a woman, has stayed in her seat and is quietly looking down at the floor in front of her.

Then, as if a hospital curtain had been quickly invoked, the car door closes. The conductor is gone and the train starts to move again. We all realize that the man near the tracks is still there, unattended. Where is the police, we are thinking? Were they called? What if the man had been murdered and the murderer was still nearby? Nobody was there to answer our questions.

The train enters a tunnel and then pulls gently into the next stop. The car door opens up to reveal a few hapless commuters, who had been impatiently waiting for our train. The woman I had noticed earlier clutches her purse tightly as she walks out the door. I can hear the receding clicks of her heels as she disappears into the tunnels of the station.

Eric Drooker is responsible for many of my favorite New Yorker covers. It is not all just eye candy. Take a look at some of the graphics on his site, many of which are fiercely political, with themes of riots and imprisonment and injustice.

The newest band getting regular play around here is an Icelandic band - Mum (pronounced 'moom')

The music is quiet but lifting, the sort of small harmonies one might hear in the dawn after an icelandic snowstorm, at least in my imagination. One of their tracks you can pick up on the playlist (see below) I am including two more here:

1. there is a number of small things
2. the land between solar systems

Saturday, March 22, 2003

The above image is a sketch by the architect Lebbeus Woods. Woods is notorious for his fantastic creations. Formally, one might regard him as a deconstructivist architect. He is less interested in amending current architectural programs than in re-defining the role of architecture. For him, architecture arises out of the landscape as a new organic form - it is an extension of the inhabitant and the environment.

At first, Woods' visions seem like glimpses of an alien environment - strange antennae, irregular walls and bodies and cells which seem like components of an unknown biology - or like a building in mid-construction with scaffolds and half-completed bridges. It does not look like a building that was designed for human habitation. But, that is the point. Woods sees designs as templates, as elements of an externally imposed order. Gravity is itself a constraint which must be defied (or more accurately, ignored)

He has worked with and is an admirer of Johansen. Johansen in turn is an advocate of a native, organic architecture - a nanoarchitecture which might arise as the fruits of a genetic method. Johansens latest imaginations are also an architecture of defiance, an attempt to redefine the bare notion of an enclosed space. As chaos intrudes on the constructs of a community, a new design, post-apocalyptic, emerges. This is the architecture of decay, the architecture of the imagination.

I once wrote this:

Each of us is an ever-changing chorus of voices, a small tribe of motivations, trying to advance their own desires. Nominally, one of those voices is in control but sometimes overthrows can occur as when we lapse into a cult or fall in love. A schizophrenic is not someone with "extra" voices", it is someone whose voices have lapsed into anarchy.

This still stands. And the idea goes back to Jaynes. We are not a unified whole but rather a loose collection bound together with thin rope, a bouquet of personalities.

This world has shaped me but it has not shaped all of me. There are aspects of myself and of others that are more difficult to instruct, to change, to persuade. I do not feel that I have conscious control over my deepest fears. I will still jump at noises in the dark regardless of how safe i know I should be. I will still feel, though reject, pangs of guilt or envy or lust at moments beyond my control.

Perhaps this sometimes ignoble element of ourselves is our core, the inner brute, the constant within ourselves upon which our other selves cling. Ultimately they are slaves to this inner passion. To fall in love is to command all of our resources, our charms, our words, our talents all bent to the will of this spirit inside.

When I walked into her bedroom, her walls were soaked with red paint. The scent was strong and pleasantly toxic. She sat, cross-legged, smiling, her mind carefully toying with some new idea. What do you know about the Kabbalah, she asked. I dont know anything, I said. Jewish mysticism, ancient scriptures. And so she returns to her inward gaze. It was always like this. She seemed always to be in the midst of unraveling life, knowing in her own mind, that the world as we saw it was a mere mask, an adornment. She loved to explore these depths, the sometimes grotesque faces of this world that may have best been left unrevealed.

I once remarked that she reminded me of an Egyptian Princess, like a dark Cleopatra. I'll admit that I could have imagined her from an old black and white movie, emerging fully-formed, with those black-painted eyes.

San Francisco Resources

The best website for SF nightlife is SFStation.
Flavorpill has a nice weekly calendar with recommendations.

For more out-of-the-way events, try the underground list, Squidlist. You can sign up at their site but you will quickly get flooded with email. I prefer to consult this nifty calendar that some guy built.
The Squidlist is the only way to discover things like the power tool drag races.

You can find my playlist of 35 here.
This was inspired by an idea of Mina's.

Much of the earlier stuff is music heard around my house as a child (not the pink martini!)
My mother, I knew, had a crush on Camilo Sesto. She told me so as she played his music, a secret smile across her face.

Most of the rest carry other meanings with them. On them hangs a story or a place or a time.

"Shhhh", my grandmother whispered. "I will tell you the story that never ends. Now listen, Ricardo. Deep in an old forest, untouched by men, where animals had not yet forgotten how to speak to each other, there lived a little rabbit, a small creature who made his way in the world by living off the fruits and plants of the forest. Every morning he would rise early, right before dawn and hop out of his burrow to greet the sun, embracing the new day. 'Today is a good day!' he would tell himself silently. The world is alive and I am a creature within it! After finishing his breakfast, he would setout to greet his friends."


His friends were many and included other animals - the thrifty squirrels, the wise owls, the chirping birds. As he greeted each creature, they would share stories, their plans, their misfortunes, tales about their day. My grandmother would vary the story each time. Perhaps the squirrels were concerned about lost food or one of the birds had injured its wing. Little by little, my grandmother was constructing a small world, a fixed place in my imagination. After the rabbit had made its rounds, he would inevitably encounter the fox. The fox was a suspect character, speaking in double meanings and it was clear that he intended to eat the rabbit. The rabbit, thinking quickly, proposes that he tell the fox a story and if the fox is pleased then he would let the rabbit go otherwise he would be eaten. The fox agrees, thinking that he could eat the rabbit in either case.


And so the rabbit begins,"Here is the story. Deep in an old forest, untouched by men..." My grandmother would continue, retelling the story, with small variations up until the rabbit met the fox again and, if I was not yet asleep, would continue, going deeper, telling the story within the story within the story... El cuento de nunca acabar.


This story my grandmother would whisper to me as a small child, intimately, as I lay in my bed. Her soothing voice, the story which was familiar and yet kept unraveling in my mind - provoking small questions (What happened "after" the story? Were the rabbit and fox trapped in an endless game?) were the last fragments of this world that I carried with me into my dreams.

This photo was taken from the loft where I lived in NYC - the corner of West Broadway and Houston.






Back then I was working as a consultant in Manhattan and living with Paul and Teri. Paul is now a photographer. Teri is a high-profile investment banker.

I moved to San Francisco in 1996 just as the Internet Boom was unrolling. I turned down an offer for an executive position and employee #5 at this new startup called Thestreet.com (yes, that one) to take an executive job in San Francisco launching a new division for a major company.

I left them in 1998 to start my own company, the first of two. That second company is where I work now.

I graduated fromn Harvard in 1990. If you are a fellow alum, drop me a line. I was in Adams House.

My interests are scattered throughout this weblog. Its intent is personal and its main audience is a close circle of friends. I have no intention of adding comments at the moment, but I always welcome email (banubula at yahoo) If you frequent weblogs, I also occasionally post on Metafilter as vacapinta.

Curious as to what I look like? You can get some glimpses in this image-filled post I made on my last birthday.

This consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual history. Separation is sometimes experienced as a wound that marks an internal division, an anguished awareness that invites self-examination; at other times it appears as a challenge, a spur that incites us to action, to go forth and encounter others and the outside world. It is true that the feeling of separation is universal and not peculiar to Spanish Americans. It is born at the very moment of our birth: as we are wrenched from the Whole we fall into an alien land. This experience becomes a wound that never heals. It is the unfathomable depth of every man; all our ventures and exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome the separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow-beings. Each man's life and the collective history of mankind can thus be seen as attempts to reconstruct the original situation. An unfinished and endless cure for our divided condition. But it is not my intention to provide yet another description of this feeling. I am simply stressing the fact that for us this existential condition expresses itself in historical terms. It thus becomes an awareness of our history. How and when does this feeling appear and how is it transformed into consciousness? The reply to this double-edged question can be given in the form of a theory or a personal testimony. I prefer the latter: there are many theories and none is entirely convincing.

The feeling of separation is bound up with the oldest and vaguest of my memories: the first cry, the first scare. Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sindbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.

When was the spell broken? Gradually rather than suddenly. It is hard to accept being betrayed by a friend, deceived by the woman we love, or that the idea of freedom is the mask of a tyrant. What we call "finding out" is a slow and tricky process because we ourselves are the accomplices of our errors and deceptions. Nevertheless, I can remember fairly clearly an incident that was the first sign, although it was quickly forgotten. I must have been about six when one of my cousins who was a little older showed me a North American magazine with a photograph of soldiers marching along a huge avenue, probably in New York. "They've returned from the war" she said. This handful of words disturbed me, as if they foreshadowed the end of the world or the Second Coming of Christ. I vaguely knew that somewhere far away a war had ended a few years earlier and that the soldiers were marching to celebrate their victory. For me, that war had taken place in another time, not here and now. The photo refuted me. I felt literally dislodged from the present.

From that moment time began to fracture more and more. And there was a plurality of spaces. The experience repeated itself more and more frequently. Any piece of news, a harmless phrase, the headline in a newspaper: everything proved the outside world's existence and my own unreality. I felt that the world was splitting and that I did not inhabit the present. My present was disintegrating: real time was somewhere else. My time, the time of the garden, the fig tree, the games with friends, the drowsiness among the plants at three in the afternoon under the sun, a fig torn open (black and red like a live coal but one that is sweet and fresh): this was a fictitious time. In spite of what my senses told me, the time from over there, belonging to the others, was the real one, the time of the real present. I accepted the inevitable: I became an adult. That was how my expulsion from the present began.

-Octavio Paz, from his Nobel acceptance speech