This still fascinates me.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
the social network
The entire time I was watching this movie I was thinking about the monster Facebook has become.
True, Zuckerberg may have stolen ideas to put it all together, but the fact is this thing, this website that literally has changed the way society sees socializing, was put together on a few laptops in a dorm room. This worldwide revolution and all the controversies, lawsuits and mania that followed all stems from a few kids screwing around in their college dorm. Everything stemmed from an simple idea that came from a few college kids.
Kind of makes you think.
True, Zuckerberg may have stolen ideas to put it all together, but the fact is this thing, this website that literally has changed the way society sees socializing, was put together on a few laptops in a dorm room. This worldwide revolution and all the controversies, lawsuits and mania that followed all stems from a few kids screwing around in their college dorm. Everything stemmed from an simple idea that came from a few college kids.
Kind of makes you think.
Friday, September 17, 2010
unlike the indiana jones type
I saw this play about a month or so ago called "Six Guitars". It was a one man show, and the actor played six different characters, each of whom played a different style of guitar (jazz, metal, country, etc.) One of his characters was a classical guitarist (Spanish, at that), and this character tended to talk in grand metaphors, throwing out something abstract and humorous to the audience, then justifying it in a long-winded explanation. Entertaining, but valid at the same time.
At one point, he used a metaphor that playing guitar is "like being a snake"...cue dramatic pause, wait until the laughter dies down. His justification was that, as a guitarist, you continually make discoveries and have epiphanies about your playing and your view on music. Each new discovery, no matter how small or seemingly minor, if applied properly, can get you thinking about what you know and how it applies to your musicianship. Essentially, you shed your skin and take on a new coat. Maybe it's a whisper of a different hue, maybe its a noticeably different shade, or maybe now you're covered in tattoos. No matter what, things are different.
I just think that's kind of neat.
At one point, he used a metaphor that playing guitar is "like being a snake"...cue dramatic pause, wait until the laughter dies down. His justification was that, as a guitarist, you continually make discoveries and have epiphanies about your playing and your view on music. Each new discovery, no matter how small or seemingly minor, if applied properly, can get you thinking about what you know and how it applies to your musicianship. Essentially, you shed your skin and take on a new coat. Maybe it's a whisper of a different hue, maybe its a noticeably different shade, or maybe now you're covered in tattoos. No matter what, things are different.
I just think that's kind of neat.
Friday, September 3, 2010
it's oh so...
Lately I’ve found myself becoming more and more interested in silence. I’m just starting grad school so a sizable amount of my time lingering in the that very same silence has been sitting in new rooms with new people, everyone staring awkwardly at anything and everything except their peers, themselves desperately awaiting the professor to stop by and break up the tension a bit. It’s a bit juvenile, avoiding eye contact the first day, but it’s helped me realize that silence can very well become it’s own entity and swallow up a room. That silence is a beautiful moment, capable of highs and lows and the exact middle where no one’s saying anything because no one knows what to say.
At the same time I think there’s something vital to be said for mastering silence. For about three weeks I sat in on a conducting class, and the one thing that really hit me was the concept of silence in the preparation of music. The college’s new orchestra conductor, an animated yet cool spirit, taught the class. One day, he drove deep the fact that for a musician, a good part of your working and artistic life is spent in silence. You practice so you understand the music, and you perform the music once you’re ready, but that in between is when that silence flexes it’s grip. You contemplate your choices, determine what happens where, how to shape the phrases and how to say something original with words perhaps thousands have spoken before. Of course, you play things a multitude of times, work out the trial and error of every phrase in the expectation, and that is what makes it all come together, but before you can make noise you need to understand exactly what noises you’re making. And for that, you need quiet.
Right now, I feel good with silence. I used to feel like I needed to hear a constant stream of action, that it was the only way to feel I’m doing things worthwhile. Now, I’m actually ok with silence. Silence can be it’s own noise, stir up enough on it’s own. Besides, it gives me time to think.
At the same time I think there’s something vital to be said for mastering silence. For about three weeks I sat in on a conducting class, and the one thing that really hit me was the concept of silence in the preparation of music. The college’s new orchestra conductor, an animated yet cool spirit, taught the class. One day, he drove deep the fact that for a musician, a good part of your working and artistic life is spent in silence. You practice so you understand the music, and you perform the music once you’re ready, but that in between is when that silence flexes it’s grip. You contemplate your choices, determine what happens where, how to shape the phrases and how to say something original with words perhaps thousands have spoken before. Of course, you play things a multitude of times, work out the trial and error of every phrase in the expectation, and that is what makes it all come together, but before you can make noise you need to understand exactly what noises you’re making. And for that, you need quiet.
Right now, I feel good with silence. I used to feel like I needed to hear a constant stream of action, that it was the only way to feel I’m doing things worthwhile. Now, I’m actually ok with silence. Silence can be it’s own noise, stir up enough on it’s own. Besides, it gives me time to think.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
saturday night/sunday morning
Last night I cooked my first legitimate meal in my new apartment. Nothing special-just a stir fry. I've been having a strange time adjusting to this place; not out of regret or uncertainty, just...it didn't feel exactly like I thought it would. It didn't feel like "that place" I'd slowly make my own.
My kitchen is a bit cramped so, naturally, cooking in these new dimensions will require some new maneuvers and counter top space rationing skills. Balancing spices on the coffee maker, knives balanced just right on the rim of the sink for easy access, ingredients tightly assembled like an infantry awaiting orders—nothing new, I suppose, for anyone in a new kitchen who thinks they know what they're doing.
Somewhere between taking notes on how to manage this new space and tossing cuts of chicken and pepper in a pan, something marvelous happened. I cut into an onion. A big onion. Typically, cutting into a small onion in a big kitchen, unless one is prepared, would result in fumes stinging one's eyes and the general facial spasms associated with crying and yawning at the same time. Therefore, cutting a big onion in a small kitchen fucking hurts.
Right after the regret of the fumes came the revelation of the smell. The smell brought me back to my apartment in Milan, helping my Italian roommate cut up vegetables for dinner, the opening bottles of wine, the billiard-crack bubbling of salted water. That time before dinner when everything was just smells and promises made me feel distant and comfortable, that once I got through dinner I would be fully prepared to handle anything (or too full and euphoric to really care). The diced onions, the searing chicken, the oils sweating out their flavors, none of this provides any armor to the next day or the next term paper, the hassle of things breaking or expectations to meet. They provide acceptance and encourage wisdom, the blissful realization that it's all one thing after another, each random and logical consequence following as it may.
I like my kitchen.
My kitchen is a bit cramped so, naturally, cooking in these new dimensions will require some new maneuvers and counter top space rationing skills. Balancing spices on the coffee maker, knives balanced just right on the rim of the sink for easy access, ingredients tightly assembled like an infantry awaiting orders—nothing new, I suppose, for anyone in a new kitchen who thinks they know what they're doing.
Somewhere between taking notes on how to manage this new space and tossing cuts of chicken and pepper in a pan, something marvelous happened. I cut into an onion. A big onion. Typically, cutting into a small onion in a big kitchen, unless one is prepared, would result in fumes stinging one's eyes and the general facial spasms associated with crying and yawning at the same time. Therefore, cutting a big onion in a small kitchen fucking hurts.
Right after the regret of the fumes came the revelation of the smell. The smell brought me back to my apartment in Milan, helping my Italian roommate cut up vegetables for dinner, the opening bottles of wine, the billiard-crack bubbling of salted water. That time before dinner when everything was just smells and promises made me feel distant and comfortable, that once I got through dinner I would be fully prepared to handle anything (or too full and euphoric to really care). The diced onions, the searing chicken, the oils sweating out their flavors, none of this provides any armor to the next day or the next term paper, the hassle of things breaking or expectations to meet. They provide acceptance and encourage wisdom, the blissful realization that it's all one thing after another, each random and logical consequence following as it may.
I like my kitchen.
Monday, August 16, 2010
lefsetz seems cool with first drafts, so i will be, too.
My head is full of useless information, useless in that it doesn’t pertain to anything dire to the inner or outer workings of my everyday life. I can completely get by and live a happy, full and (preferably) meaning existence without the ability to quote entire bits of Eddie Izzard’s “Dressed to Kill”…but I can do it. No one really cares about the conflict between classical guitar titans Andres Segovia and Agustin Barrios, but I’m still as fascinated with it today as I was when I first heard the two didn’t get along so swimmingly. I can dance around the social implications of guitar neck widths, how Kerouac’s contradictions fed his mystique and Debussy’s yin/yang nature, and I can virtually guarantee that no one else cares. No one signing paychecks in my future, anyway.
It’s this kind of information that means nothing and everything. It doesn’t indicate work aptitude or ___, but it does indicate a pulse. I’ve been thinking lately that if you’ve never been fascinated with anything in your life, truly and unapologetically fascinated, you are damn boring. If you wake up, do what you need to do, go to bed and repeat without variation you’re probably the same kind of person who claps on one and three, content to a bland bread and water existence devoid of any resonating color or tone.
You’re also probably terrible in bed.
And it’s entirely your own damn fault.
There’s no intrinsic human need to like anything. It’s not essential to our development as a species, but it is sort of really, really important to how we define ourselves. It may be nothing more than the facts and arguments we can spout off at a bar anytime past the witching hour, but it shows a sign of life. True, there’s a consequence of overdose (i.e. watch Zooey Deschanel in any movie), but even then it’s an overload of personality, and I’d rather be bombarded with a million different shades than suffer through the monotony of a static grey.
Be crazy. Be conflicted and complicated. It’s far more fun than boring.
It’s this kind of information that means nothing and everything. It doesn’t indicate work aptitude or ___, but it does indicate a pulse. I’ve been thinking lately that if you’ve never been fascinated with anything in your life, truly and unapologetically fascinated, you are damn boring. If you wake up, do what you need to do, go to bed and repeat without variation you’re probably the same kind of person who claps on one and three, content to a bland bread and water existence devoid of any resonating color or tone.
You’re also probably terrible in bed.
And it’s entirely your own damn fault.
There’s no intrinsic human need to like anything. It’s not essential to our development as a species, but it is sort of really, really important to how we define ourselves. It may be nothing more than the facts and arguments we can spout off at a bar anytime past the witching hour, but it shows a sign of life. True, there’s a consequence of overdose (i.e. watch Zooey Deschanel in any movie), but even then it’s an overload of personality, and I’d rather be bombarded with a million different shades than suffer through the monotony of a static grey.
Be crazy. Be conflicted and complicated. It’s far more fun than boring.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
nick hornby is grand, just grand
I’m at one of my favorite places with two of my favorite things. I’m at a coffeehouse with a book and an espresso. I planned to come here, to this coffeehouse, to read this book while drinking this espresso. It’s a simple duo of actions in a setting I’ve engaged in and valued for years. Except, right now, I don’t want to read this book. Instead, I’m typing on my computer.
Backtrack.
A few weeks ago I watched I’m Not There, the movie based off of Bob Dylan’s life/songs/mythology. The plot of the movie jumps around six different vignettes, each one featuring a different actor playing a figure or a theme derived from the grand spirit of what enthusiasts and historians consider the Bob Dylan. Each one is different, lives a different life, tells a different story, but it’s all Dylan.
In a way, it’s kind of like the different lives we have, separate segments telling the story of the same person. Who you were in high school is different from who you were in college, the you with the first post-college job, the restless period you might have, all the way up to you now, the you who likely won’t be the same person you’ll be in three years. You have different goals, different values, opposing outlooks, separate ideas…but in a way I guess you are the same person. Who you inherently are never changes; you just lead different lives from here to there, dropping off your old life for the new one, hoping it will hold out until the next one comes along.
The thing you occasionally do is look back on your past lives as if you just bit a lemon. You sometimes cringe when you think about your old clothes, how you cooked, the music you listened to, the things you’d laugh at in another person today. Then again, you look also look at your past lives as what you knew and experienced, the things you learned and how you interpreted them, the culmination of your “everything” of that day and how it made you you.
Back to now. I’m not reading my book. I’m not reading it because I don’t want to. I’m not reading it because I know it’s too loud here for me to really appreciate and fully grasp what’s going on. A few years ago I would have soldered on, likely missing bits here and there while I subconsciously picked up on the conversations and clanking plates around me. Today, I know I can’t really do it and enjoy it. So, I turn on my computer and type. It’s what I’ve learned.
Backtrack.
A few weeks ago I watched I’m Not There, the movie based off of Bob Dylan’s life/songs/mythology. The plot of the movie jumps around six different vignettes, each one featuring a different actor playing a figure or a theme derived from the grand spirit of what enthusiasts and historians consider the Bob Dylan. Each one is different, lives a different life, tells a different story, but it’s all Dylan.
In a way, it’s kind of like the different lives we have, separate segments telling the story of the same person. Who you were in high school is different from who you were in college, the you with the first post-college job, the restless period you might have, all the way up to you now, the you who likely won’t be the same person you’ll be in three years. You have different goals, different values, opposing outlooks, separate ideas…but in a way I guess you are the same person. Who you inherently are never changes; you just lead different lives from here to there, dropping off your old life for the new one, hoping it will hold out until the next one comes along.
The thing you occasionally do is look back on your past lives as if you just bit a lemon. You sometimes cringe when you think about your old clothes, how you cooked, the music you listened to, the things you’d laugh at in another person today. Then again, you look also look at your past lives as what you knew and experienced, the things you learned and how you interpreted them, the culmination of your “everything” of that day and how it made you you.
Back to now. I’m not reading my book. I’m not reading it because I don’t want to. I’m not reading it because I know it’s too loud here for me to really appreciate and fully grasp what’s going on. A few years ago I would have soldered on, likely missing bits here and there while I subconsciously picked up on the conversations and clanking plates around me. Today, I know I can’t really do it and enjoy it. So, I turn on my computer and type. It’s what I’ve learned.
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