James has a really interesting first-hand account of the chess match between Blaine-in-a-box and a homeless man.

The game lasts in the order of six or seven hours. Watching intently, it is possibly to identify a weak, or seemingly inexplicable move. Blaine gives away a bishop very cheaply, relatively early on. Blaine and Greeff, though, are not Grand Masters, and to come along with a full stomach, nitpick the game and depart ten minutes later would be to miss the point. These are two players playing in exceptional circumstances. David Blaine, a third of the way through a feat of endurance, has not eaten for fifteen days. Francois is a homeless guy with a hidden disability.

My book club meets tonight. Having not read the book, I have the perfect chance to enter the conversation with the least of preconceived notions, the perfect mind freed from judgement.

It reminds of this remark of Borges:

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books

I'll also try to not read the book next month.

Here are two songs from Astrud Gilberto for a hot San Francisco day:

1. Nao Tem Vez
2. How Insensitive

At my old place near 17th and Valencia, I used to brag about how there were at least 12 different bars within *one* block. When I moved to Bernal heights, I knew that number was only headed in one direction.

Last night, when looking for a nearby bar, I realized there were actually only three in my immediate neighborhood. My first choice is probably the Wild Side West which has a nice back patio and garden and a pool table. Its also one of the best lesbian bars in the city, but they are non-lesbian friendly.

Then theres Charlies, which is modern and hip but cant seem to get its business off the ground. Its a great place if you dont mind seeing the same ten people there. Still, the owner tells me, they are developing a cool backroom and the place should take off soon.

Finally, there's Skip's Tavern which is usually described as a 'neighborhood blues bar'. The music is good but whenever I've gone there it has that feeling like a fight is about to break out in the next 10 minutes. This could be a good or a bad thing depending on your mood.

There's only two other bars worth noting on nearby Mission St. First is The Odeon which seems like a cool place but it also seems like its trying hard to be a cool place which, in the unforgivable calculus of cool, probably means its not. Still, I havent actually had a drink there.

Then there is The Argus which holds a place in my heart. The first time I walked in there (in the middle of the afternoon of course) there was only one guy there and he was reading a Shakespeare play as he downed his beer. I had noticed that the place had a whole stack of books against one wall and when you look closer you realize that they are all paperbacks of different shakespeare plays.

When I went back later (I had to return) I asked the bartender what that was all about. He told me that a bunch of guys (and girls) used to show up there every monday night and read shakespeare plays aloud, assigning roles, and getting drunker and drunker until all coherence, if there ever was any, was lost. Apparently, the group disbanded but left all its paperbacks, culled from used bookstores and yard sales, to the bar where patrons still leaf through them as they down their whiskeys or cheap beer.

Albert Carranza

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.