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.