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Make a donation with your credit card via Paypal _________________________________________________________________ 05/20/06 the contradictory assumptions of ethnographySuppose "Western" perspective is not superior. This opens up the problem that if a culture doesn't want TB vaccine, or employs slavery, we have no right to intervene. On the other hand, suppose "Western" values are superior, the argument that it's the power differential that gives rise to the apparant superiority is still valid. There's no a priori way to judge which set of values are superior without evoking a measurement of collective power. I think there's a fundamental problem for qualitative social research, since the rise of the so-called relativist/constructionist theories. The research assumes that he or she can construct a somewhat un-biased narrative as if he/she is some alien life form, some sort of fly on the wall that looks at a system without causing some sort of disturbance. I think the fundamental assumption of qualitative social research should START not at the particulars of culture, or it becomes extremely incoherent. (i.e. gee whiz, look at something the Paupa New Guineans do that NOBODY else does!) At the same time, isn't such an approach intrinsically Western/scientific and in a way hedgemonic? Let's for a minute ask the question of what would an ancient travel writer do. He'd describe the tribe with his unique perspective, with all his biases and racist comments and whatever else, exposing them utterly. Perhaps the assumption of ethnographic study needs to be, first and foremost, a realization that we are human beings studying other human beings, and hence, biases are inevitable and probably even insightful. the hell, does ANYBODY understand what I'm talking about? This train of thought is really clear in my mind but it takes some serious effort to actually write down in a clear fashion. Geezus bloody Christ. 01:56:24 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 05/19/06 grand gesturesSo NPR triggers the desire to write a newsletter on high/popular music and some grand narrative about the cultural convergence and democratization of art and on and on. The thing is, the more I think about these topics the more I realize that I cannot write about them in a way that wouldn't sound bigger than they should be, which is to say, strictly academic. Ultimately, I think, cultural criticism is pretty bad writing mostly, and as smart as they may sound, and perhaps even in an insightful way (think Edward Said), it's just simply not the way I want to write. I think my goal is to write clean, precise prose that is lucid and coherent. I'm not going to write political prose. I'm not going to be florid stylistically. My model is Russell. This should be useful for the future when I start writing best-selling popular science books on Tai Chi and become bigger than ten Nobel laureates added together. Boo Ya! 01:10:18 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 05/12/06 the end of the Bandana eraWhen I walked home today I was accosted by a couple of Hispanic youths asking me if I belonged to the "Blood" gang. I politely denied it. They told me that it's for "THe blood" and "they'd jump me for wearing it." This has happened before though the possiblity of getting "jumped" hasn't really been raised. So I think the era for red bandanas is coming to a close and the era for red baseball cap is ushered in. I mean, it's strictly utilitarian. My hair is too long. That is all. I don't want to get shot or beaten up for it. Honest. 18:43:36 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 05/06/06 crazy travel storiesjust finished Vikram Seth's superb "From Heaven Late" a minute ago. It occured to me that I could write a book like that. In the sense that he went te college in Britain. His English couldn't have been much better than mine prior to that. What would be MORE important though, I think, is if i could write something in CHINESE about traveling in India. Sadly I think my literary capabilities in Chinese has pretty much gone to the toilet at this point. I guess it's only fun to write when you don't need to rely on writing to survive. Plus, isn't it true that I'm less interested in the act of writing than the reason, biological or otherwise, behind its production? 20:56:39 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 05/06/06 'tards are getting more than meThis story might not help, but the blog is simply, simply hilarious 19:30:32 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 05/06/06 loyaltythe question of what I should be loyal to, to a particular nation-state, a particular set of ethno-cultural catechisms, some sort of secular Universal system, the Constitution of United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights--how the fuck am I supposed to balance all these often conflicting standards? 19:11:43 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 05/03/06 water
so on my way home walking I was thinking about this discussion of what exactly is better about Western society. The immediate conclusion is the maximization of agency. It seems that this is a positive effect: widow wants to marry a man, let her. But, in our free societies, if you are still doing badly, then either: (1) you are lazy and you deserved it or (2) you got stuck with a really bad set of genes/circumstances. Either way there's nobody else (except maybe God) to blame. Isn't that worse? It makes me think about sex. People are free to get laid as often and with as many as they want. But then they don't want to have sex with some shy, inexperienced guy. The shy inexperienced guy gets ostracized just like the widows in India. He has nobody to blame. Maybe he's too ugly. Maybe he's not willing to play the game. Whatever. The point is, he's in just as much of a pickle. I swear, sometimes when you think about it more carefully, social relativism really has its virtues. 20:00:04 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 05/03/06 alienstwo nights ago I had a rare opp to think about the illegals and had a debate about it with someone. While the causes themselves are not as interesting, I did find out a bit more about my own character. I can sympathize with an ambiguious argument too much: It's very easy to make me realize that two sides both have some merits in a political process and it's hard for me to commit to a particular cause passionately. I was in bed eyes wide open thinking about this and I realized that I cannot be a politician. Or maybe if you are doing it professisonally then you just do wahtever is deemed most analytically advantageous. Is that the D.C. mentality? I'd be a horrific politician with zero passion. But I guess I could be a pretty good physician, as I'd rarely be outraged by different groups of people. the trouble though is the following. It's easy for me to see why people are right. It is easy, all too easy, for me to see why people are wrong at the same time. "People". People aren't so eager to make technical compromises like I do. Most people have more "passion". I have more Hegelian anti-thesis. People hate me. I'm forever marginalized. Joy! 13:57:11 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 04/29/06 inebriated againa pathetic feeling of loneliness and angst and anger and the desire to tell everyone in the world: FUCK YOU. The best friends are made in misery and rage. so, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit. Yeah, like I fucking care about you, ever. Shut the fuck up before I rip your fucking asshole apart. 02:43:03 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 04/28/06 why i like Americansmost of my "friends" (i.e. people on my Facebook.com list) are Americans. And, they are all pretty nice people. That is not to say that this is a representative group of folks, considering that even though I lived in a "Red State", I pretty stayed in bluer parts. One things is for sure, the Americans (and future Americans) that I know are pretty darn nice folks, even the ones from the Red States (or even, gasp, self-identified conservatives.) It's becoming sort of unfashionable in certain circles to think that Americans and American values have any legitamacy, and I disagree with that. I think upon self-reflection, the things that I don't like isn't "American."--i.e. the rude manners, the insolence, the rough insensitive jingoism. It's simply a reflection of people's socioeconomic status. Someone coming from a rich family with a pair of doting parents inculcating the virtues of Mozart is pretty unlikely to be petty. So, there's the conclusion. I like Americans. I just dislike poor Americans. I'm pretty evil, I know. 12:20:08 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 04/28/06 snappin' and 'shopping
what is this guy thinking? I wonder...something sinister, I'm sure of it. 00:23:50 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 04/28/06 photoblogging and "flickring"So I went to downtown and had a little snapping session. And I've started to enjoy the benefits of "flickr" and I saw some guy reading a book
and some bald guy leaning against a wall
some girl, god knows what she's thinking about
some girl wearing a Che shirt and looking all suavy
but it deteriorated into this...
then I heard a lecture by Steve Pinker:
and thought about how taking pictures of pretty girls...god, is that part of human nature? But yes, I'll be snapping like Austin Powers. 00:12:12 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 04/13/06 seders of the worldSo I went to a friend's house for a passover seder, which was very enjoyable and entertaining. On my way back I started thinking about all these issues concerning festivals. Jews have lots of festivals, and most of them religious. In East Asia, the festivals are much less based on organized religions, but more based on farming rituals/history. There aren't any official Buddhist festival in China, even though Buddhist was doubtlessly a great influence on Chinese culture. Although I suppose it is true that many of the Japanese festivals are very Buddhist in nature. Take the Chinese "mid-autumn festival" as an example, the legend was that a beautiful woman married a great warrior who shot down eight suns with his arrow, and that enraged the gods and they fled to the moon. People eat mooncakes and visit their relatives. So in a sense it's similar to the exodus mythology in the formation of a festival, but at the same time it doesn't have as many elements of turmoil. It's sort of a very introspective, sadish story, which is exactly how I can characterize the Chinese--a very sort of subdued, yearning sort of populace--in contrast to the Jews, which are almost invariably adaptable, industrious, but I guess very vagabonding sort of a tribal existence. Not to make this a bit more ideological on my part, I think in a way this shows a certain set of universal features in human culture: the desire to belong to something, the necessity to have an institution, a community, some sort of social ritual that binds. Rituals that often evoke a kind of supernatural/historical event. Human beings want to remember things, commemorate things, and from the past we try to live a better future. 12:37:03 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 04/01/06 agro-agroWent to a little talk about globalization and refugees. Nicholas Kristof was so good at making it all very emotional. The thing is, he's not making an empty appeal about Darfur. What he's describing isn't isolated. There are many many thousands of people, displaced, persecuted under the premise of whatever political movement there is, or just subjugated under utter poverty. I know a little bit about that, as I can at least read a language that is used by more than 200 million people who live with less than a $1 a day. But what about rural India, rural Mexico? I can only imagine the same tragic story happening every day, all over the place with nothing for me, personally, to do. Sometimes I sit in my little swivel chair weeping about this. Poverty? You've gotta be kidding me. But I just can't stand the narratives anymore. I have to say, my non-existent political leanings have really gone the way of praticality. Forget who's right and who's wrong. Forget morality. Forget law and order and any such highfalutin values. Forget religion. We have to stop the killing. Stop the starvation. Stop having people shitting in a pit and dying of infectious diseases. Am I just getting old? 18:47:46 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 03/24/06 The ManSaw this documentary made by Hu Xingyu at Columbia's Chinese Documentary Showcase. It sounded pretty neat from the get-go and it ended up being awesome. It was about this 38 year old dude, Old Su, who was a graduate of the Beijing Film Institute, and got assigned a job in Inner Mongila because he's Mongolian. (I'm 1/4 Mongolian, so that instantly brought a sense of closeness.) He's, short, fat, bald, unkempt, unshaven, and quite masculine for a Chinese guy, perhaps it's the Mongolian gene. But he bitches and moans about woman and his plight of getting kicked out from the school he was working at. He goes to the brothel. He drinks a lot and pukes. He weeps in his sleep. He walks around aimlessly in that little industrial city in the Western, underdeveloped part of China. His friend shoots sparrows with his BB gun, as some sort of expression of disenfranchisement. Old Su wanted to get married, but as he doesn't have a job he can't. He signed up at the matchmaking agency and got involved with some woman. She eventually dumped him. The whole film was shot in DV and there is this sense of aimless boredom, this passive aggressive crsis that permeated the slightly sad, drab lighting. Yet somehow I can completely sympathsize with it. That crisis of an artist, stuck in the world that he was not meant to be stuck in. Old Su, despite all his misogynistic, chauvinistic woman bashing, wants desperately to be with someone. I look at him and I think to myself, wouldn't that be a great guy to be friend with. The filmmaker had a little Q&A session afterwards. Old Su stayed at his apartment and he was part of the film. The filmmaker told us that after the film was made, Old Su finally got married recently. His friend got married as well and now has a one year old daughter. The filmmaker, though, brought this movie all over the world to the festivals, and is looking for a girlfriend. The strange life of an artist. 23:27:26 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 03/22/06 more good moviesWalter Salles, the direct who brought us the very indulgent The Motorcycle Diaries (1996), made a very cool movie called Terra Estrangeira (Foreign Land) in 1996. I had the opportunity to watch it at Columbia's "world leader forum" this week. I'm not afraid of giving you a little spoilers as most of you will probably never go watch a black and white Brazilian film. As one of my Indian colleagues said, who cares about anything that's not Indian. Well, hell you are all missing out on some seriously good stuff. Paco, the young protagonist, set out to a fatal journey through the fog of post-colonial reality. The camera works, amazing. The plot, admittedly, was very Hollywood heavyhanded at places. I mean, this is a gangsta movie and someone's gonna get killed in the end. But the small details with the family and the dancing and the light and dark, exquisite. I saw a hitchhock yesterday. One of his earlier talkies. It struck me that hitchcock seems very alien, and Salles seems entirely home for me. Somehow that beautiful suburban california life isn't as real as the drive, that perpetual drive, in a car, through the country, down the road, home away from home. That feeling of rootlessness. If there's anything that our world has given us, it's this feeling. It doesn't matter where you are, Lisbon, San Paulo, New York City, if there's a home in your heart, you are already home. Man, am I getting sentimental. Poor bastard. So Salles is going to direct On the Road in 2007. Hopefully he's not going to butcher it. Bang bang bang! 23:50:39 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 03/22/06 profiligate capitalismpeople have been asking me about how well my merchandise store has been doing. well, don't ask. i won't tell you. meanwhile, you really ought to buy something cause I've got some good shit out there and you are really missing out. It's going into the MoMA I swear. i was up late reading. good fun. i have been cutting my TV time, and I don't know if it's necessarily a good thing. working more than I used to but less than i ought to. thinking a lot more than i should. can i ever get lucky. the reality of incompetence. i mean, my ipod cracked. i really shan't count on my luck. would i rather be John Lennon than James Watson? Anyday, my dear vermin, anyday. My mom reads my blog and she thinks I should either (1) quit writing per se or (2) write all the gory details of my rather boring dating life so she can read about it. should I make stuff up? I'm debating. Oh, yeah she's on the other side of the Pacific this week, trying to find me an arranged mail-in ordered bride. A really hot girl just walked out of the computer lab. Do you need anybody? Anyway, i was on Facebook the other day, and I added all those people from high school like a maniac. It cost me a couple of hours of very valueable sleep. 20:02:16 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 03/11/06 a couple more things about pro-globalismmy last newsletter had to do with me enumerating the positive potential of globalization. i read some articles and it seems like the hard data are on my side. the world bank statistics point to a very dramatic rise of living standards all over the world, but especially in the developing world, in the past twenty years, and after WWII, among other things. The problem that I see at this point has to do with the fact that if you are a radical anti-globalist, then you are essentially saying that all multinational coorperations, institutions should get out as fast as they can. This leaves the developing world with nothing. I see it as a very evil ideology. sure, you can escape the charge that you'd never be a fascist, but it's easy escaping your responsibilty. they've got nothing but their native "culture". It is pretty astounding. An example would be pulling out a supply of cheap antibiotics because the natives believe in spiritual or traditional medical practices. Is this hedgemonic? You bet your ass it is. Is this necessary? Hell ya. In fact, I find it completely unacceptable and highly irresponsible to simply pull out in such circumstances. Does technology give us the right and responsibily to be paternalistic, under certain circumstances? Absloutely. I dare you to challenge me on this example. Anti-globalization is not a consistent, systematic paradigm. It's a reactionary, albiet reasonably reactionary, ideological bias. There's no viable practice that can be proposed by anti-globalization. It's only a negative normative standard. by telling us that globalization needs to be aware of its hedgemonic tendencies, anti-globalization has done everything it can do for us.
it has become increasingly unpopular to call certain culture "primitive" and other culture "sophisticated." And it is reasonable to assume that Chinese painting is as legitamate as Dali. But, it makes NO sense at all to say that a horse is not "primitive" compare to a car, and squating outdoors is not "primitive" compare to having a clean flushing toliet. It makes no sense to claim that people would rather die en masse of infectious disease than take effective Western medicine. It makes no sense to claim that people would rather wear crappy handmade shards than factory textile. It's very irresponsible to push these very basic needs aside and claim that these exsting tribes can just take care of themselves. At least, I don't believe it. I think it's evil. I think it's evil to let a child die when we have effective treatment for it. I think it's evil to not provide flushing toilets. At the risk of becoming a broken recordplayer, I find it evil to be radically postmodern in claiming that human desires and needs are strictly socio-cultural. There are, at the very least, the 99.5% genetic uniformity which grants us the same sort of biological needs. Let alone the ethical basic human rights. God I'm really blabbing in the middle of the night aren't I. 02:40:58 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 03/10/06 automatic updatesthis is the first entry that was written without using Frontpage. i wrote a C script that would automatically load an update file. It took me forever. 15:43:00 | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 03/08/2006 in the interest of timelast month a lot of things happened, but they are all of a personal nature and hence i shall not indulge the liberty of posting them on this website. if you would like to subscribe to my newsletter, please E-mail me. otherwise, i'm trying very hard to finish The Varieties of Religious Experiences. I find that I'm constantly running out of time. When I'm in a rush I get a lot more done. Axel wants to write a book called "the leisure of the theory class." I find that highly apropos. Repetition sucks though. Sometimes I wish I could just quit it all and make some movies. Even pornos. But I wanted to be a doctor? That sort of unwavering childhood dream became this sort of expansive adolescent desire to be safe. I really care very little about my grades, and yet I'm compulsive to work for them. Even today I wonder, am I actually diligent, or am I just a smartass who is, in all fairness, pretty lazy? I would rather be the latter though I suppose I could value the existence of the former. People who work really hard could only excel later in their lives: Malcolm Gladwell's new theory. So, those who are smartasses, if haven't accomplished anything by the time they are 30, they are probably pretty much over. We need a quantitative analysis of literature. It's time. Is there something the critics can agree on? If there is, then it wouldn't go beyond statistics. Is the personal nature of literature defying the existence of universal "laws". This feels rather compartmentalizing. See, you think i'm just saying these things to appear smart, but really it's my brain, it just spits out these tidbits. What is a "tid" anyway. Is it like a tit? This is REALLY how I think, pretentiousness notwithstanding. Is this a thought disorder, or am i just too lazy? This compels me to think that William James is the workaholic, and Henry is the lazy one. I thought about moving this blog to E-blog. Tried it, didin't work. I guess the best way is to just make my blog easier to edit. I'm going to write a program that let's me do that in UNIX, instead of having to FTP it everytime. Also, I added the comment option. As it were, I'd rather have comments directed to me and I'd like to avoid the whole comment-spam situation. So just follow the link. 12:09PM | Comment/Question _________________________________________________________________ 02/09/2006 you can learn a lot from TVcoming back from a jog, I turned on the TV only to find an old episode of ER lulling away. Here's the shocking exchange in its glorious exactitude:
This is not Sex and The City. This is a multi-Emmy winning serious drama with lots of quaisi-social/political commentaries. This is the "mainstream voice" of American television and ranked for many years as the best show on TV. Indeed, this is how young, virile studs in America are supposed to behave. Women want to hear it in a straight face. So, the dorks of America, are you listening? Recently I've discovered that TV could really teach you a lot, not in terms of being "book-smart" (stop with all the PBS raving already), but really being able to identify what is it that most people feel when they interact with others. So, if you are a budding Marxist intellectual trying to get in touch with the common men, my sine qua non advice is to watch lots of TV. _________________________________________________________________ 01/26/2006 the trademark moanThose of you who know me are probably aware of this special "aw...." sound that I make when I encounter a story like this:
The author then went on a chapter on aggression. For some reason I had to make that sound. For it's somehow a bit cinematic. I guess kids are cruel. For some reason I'm particularly sympathetic to outcasts like that, even though I don't think in all honesty I'm an outcast myself personally. I think I have this strange awareness of a particular kind of human suffering. That bitterly ironic, almost incompetent kind of suffering. Something not just painful, but completely sappy. But yah, such a scene definitely arouses that strong "aw....." response floating out of my throat. Is this the reason I feel somehow being a physician would be a good job? I suppose by being particularly sympathetic to the weak, there's a sense of being strong. It's not all that great, in that it presumes a certain lack of agency. _________________________________________________________________ 01/23/2006 conflict of interestOn Sunday, I saw a football game. I really saw halves of two football games. It was the dreg of the playoffs, ironically. My favorite QB buddy delhommie got rattled like a schoolboy. BigBen's good, obviously, and there's nothing but jealousy on my part. Does anybody else think that he looks like Will Farrell? The point is I couldn't believe how emotionally involved I was with just a few passing moments of good games during the playoffs. All of the sudden I start to understand what's the the thing about sports that people liked. It's not the competition. I mean, it is partially about the competition, but really when you get down to the bottom of it, every game itself is pretty boring. Every play is pretty boring. So it's more about this overall arc, this trajectory, the story of some god fearing, neighbor boy rising from obscurity to national limelight. It's the male version of American Idol. The final outcome, obviously, is so mired is luck that really most of the sports writing and analysis, at least about football, borders on bullshit. Yet somehow it gets exciting, this emotional rollercoaster that compels people to follow through and fantasize: what if I was that person, holding that ball, yelling, screaming, floating in air, being buried in a stampede. It's interesting how you can't tell something you did or you think when you are with a woman. But you can do that with a man. Can gay men sympathize with this? I don't know if it has anything to do with sex. It's more likely a conflict of interest. There's something adversarial about life. That women often don't get. Life is a game, and I play to win. There's just no way around it. But really, life isn't (just) a game. And whoever thinks that it is seems to be missing a large piece of that puzzle, or just curiously refusing to be mature. The best part of parenthesis is that you can read a sentence two different ways and they would sound different. The precursor to hypertext. _________________________________________________________________ 01/23/2006 east meets westat the recommendation of a friend i went to Brooklyn's "venue" Galapagos. Philip Glass was there, playing his little electronic piano. He played a short piece called Metamorphoses 2. I think he has not been very innovative since the late 90s. Still, being a UChicago institution, like James Watson or Milton Friedman, I had to root for him like every Joe rooting for his favorite quarterback. The show was rampantly organized by his protégé John Moran, who studied with him when he lived in Nebraska. Their first piece consisted of him laughing as if intoxicated and his partner singing a weird Japanese song in circles. Very minimalistic, and the audience laughed inappropriately. The last piece which was very interesting, was him playing a record of the Goldberg Variations while making his Japanese neighbor performing a series of mundane actions on stage in repetitive cycles. They seem to be in sync with the music and created an eerie mood of life oscillating, or congealed as if time was some kind insect inside a block of soft, red jello. the venue itself was pretty cool too. It had a large pool of standing water in the front, reflecting the dimly lit metallic frame of the building and rippling with every passing step. Williamsburg is too artsy for me. Everyone and his grandmother looks like some sort of experimental fashion designer. What's the point. What's the point of doing science? Really. Physically. The reason i hate capitalization is that I like e.e.cummings. And you know what, i always write like this and if you don't like it you don't have to fucking read it. So suck it. Fucking dumbass. _________________________________________________________________ 01/13/2006 basement bhangrasort of gate-crashed a bhangra party yesterday till 2AM. My friend told me that it was more of a Latin dance club but it ended up with a heavy flavor of Southeast Asia. There was a dancing instructor on the stage. Some moves were learned. Passive voices were used in this paragraph. Beers were drunk. Drunks were dancing. Sweating pigs were dancing. Cute girls were spotted but not captured like flags. Apologies were not accepted. I need more sleep if I were to not rave like a lunatic. Recommended, but too expensive. It's at this place called SOB, variously interpreted as son of bitch, south of border, sound of brazil etc etc...i've made a policy to not post any pictures on my blog unless i took the pictures personally. P.S. I archived some of my old entries cause Frontpage was actin' funny when I try to edit a large page. _________________________________________________________________ 01/12/2006 bad dreamswaking up in the middle of the night, after being chased after a short, stout, German accented, socially awkward Nazi who tried to kill me and my wife with a knife. The only way out was wearing a gray confederate uniform and telling him you can't live like this in the U.S.A. Waking up, feeling utterly by myself. Thinking about all my solitary friends I wonder if they each have that moment of dread. Divorce rate is more than 50%. You flip a coin. You win. You lose. And yet it's another one of those things in life that you know it may be impossible and yet you still have to do. Were there someone there, asking me, "hey, just had a bad dream? don't worry it's okay." then maybe i wouldn't feel the desire to speak to a camera like this. to talk like a narrator in a film without an image. sitting in the dark, typing in front of a bright screen. this is when you appreciate Proust and Joyce the most, not for their pretension, but for how meaningless grammar had become. How meaningless that shift of tenses, that semicolon. perhaps i ought to call someone. but there's nobody that i could call without being intrusive. the result of independence + dysfunction of the po-mo world. how can so many people get a divorce. you can try to jovial about it really but i guess people are just not meant to be stuck to each other. but to all those old couple out there, if there aren't anything awfully egregious, I say give it another chance. All those balding, graying, should've died of a heart attack 20 years ago but never did guys out there deserved a bit of that solace, if not for anything else, just a bit of that camera time. reeling on a thread, fishing without a bait. _________________________________________________________________ 12/26/2005 strike, etc.this may be my last entry before the new years. a bit of celebration is underway, a bit of Coltrane, a bit of that chummy, full-bodied cigar. the transit strike made me think a a lot about things, but not so much that i could write a whole newsletter about it. So i guess this is the place for a little recalcitrant semi-rants. I don't really have sympathy for the train conductors, as much of a liberal as i could claim to be, with their average salary more than twice as much as mine. And yet at the same time, I realized that I could empathize. I could understand why they were doing what they were doing. People come to live to fight for whatever is to their benefit. Money, reproduction, social status, a little power here and there, a little query into the Ultimate Question. I can understand all that. I can understand the government too. Or the millionaires. Or the immigrant premeds that I despise so much. yes. such strong self-loathing. Everyone trying to get that part of what they believe is just, the invisible hand moves with imperfect but functional checks and balances. I met a young post-adolescent high school valedictorian turned Duke Univ. BME freshman. He said his greatest fear in life would be not being able to get into med school. He said the reason he wanted to be a doctor was so that he could "help people." I was about to puke right there and then. I told him my reason was "so i could kill people." He failed to see the dead-pan humor in my existentialism. I pretty much despise such holier than thou pieces of excrement and their little sticks up that precious little cloaca, as I've said already. But really, can I blame him? Can I? A good friend of a friend said in a line to a Bresson movie that he liked Christians even though they could be so clueless. "I just like to see more people so invested in something." Me, I prefer to be absolutely, positively invested in absolutely, positively NOT invested in anything. Take that Stanley Fish. _________________________________________________________________ 12/04/2005 john adams and his post-minimalism voice
i just realized that I haven't posted a pic for a while. so here's one, the composer looking all pensive and shit. that bastard. he even showed up at the concert himself. bah, composers get no respect these days. ______________________________________________________________ 11/29/2005 teahousei saw a nice production of Teahouse by the Beijing People's Art Theater in Mandarin. The troupe is one of the best in China and the play is widely considered to be a classic. It did not disappoint. It reminds me of, at various points, Ozu, Death of a Salesman and One Hundred Years of Solitude. It also makes me think about how much the British empire shaped my life as it is. How much colonialism and the culture of Western Thought influences generations of subaltern everywhere, from the depth of Arabic taverns to the old school Beijing teahouse. The vicissitude of the characters is not a set of particular experiences. They are universal experiences, like spokes on a wheel of history that repeats itself. At the end of the play the director arranges to have one of the communist songs played in the background and it is creepy as the old protagonist hangs himself in a moment of desperation and hopelessness. The director probably wants to bring about a sense of renewal and hope from the eventual arrival of the communists. But instead, it brings out the dreary associations and the irony: the playwright, Lao She, committed suicide at the height of the cultural revolution. The students at Tiananmen square were beaten to a pulp by the CCP, just as much as they were by the KMT decades ago. something about the play is so eerily "structualistic," and "post-colonial." The multilinear plot yields a similar group of characters that are oppressed and distorted not only in China, but all over the world. The chaotic nature, the schism of personality and identity, all this is so reminiscent of so many stories I've read in the past. The dialogue is in a hugely traditional Beijing accent and it makes the characters seem loveable. The only thing that I didn't like was the slightly melodramatic overtone. I think I would have appreciated a more understated approach. The same objection I have with Macbeth, I guess it's somewhat not legit, as theater is supposed to be melodramatic and exaggerated in some ways. _________________________________________________________________ 11/19/2005 dalai lama and the empirical braini suppose the highlight of this year's society for neuroscience meeting, which i had the good fortune of attending, was the presence of "his holyness" (as the hostess so inappropriately addressed him). His theology could be described as more liberal than scientists. For that I had to really give him props for it. He said if the Buddhist scripture contradicted modern empirical data, then the scripture must be abandoned. In fact he told his monks that they need to study science. what's even more shocking was his attitude towards "neuro-ethics." He freely advocated neurological surgery and drugs as viable options to obtain nirvana. (probably to the great dismay Tom Cruise) I guess the scientists were pretty shocked about that as well. The question/answering session was amusing. He was really funny and seemed to be a really lovable character. That's probably why all the hippies loved him so much. He was totally the crazy drugged out type. _________________________________________________________________ 11/02/2005 the life of JesusI just saw La Vie de Jesus by Bruno Dumont. He stayed afterwards
and gave a little discussion section. He told us that he didn't like
'composition' and picked all the 'actors' from where he wanted to film,
which was rural France. The psuedo-actors had 'poor farmer kids' accents. It
was violent. It had lots of explicit sex. It was almost pornographic. There
were lots of really ugly looking people. The photography was really good: by
creating a sense of motion, he made certain parts of the landscape acquire a
'depth', on a 2-D surface. _________________________________________________________________ 10/25/2005 miniaturize earthStumble It! (a Firefox extension) sent me to this little website. The website is this little cute flash file that enumerated the various inequalities of wealth on earth and says things to the effect of "here if you have a fridge and a closet, you are richer than 75% of the people in the world." this comparison is bogus and trivializes the travail poor people who live in rich countries. someone in America might have a fridge and a closet, and a TV and even a car while he's at it, but he still can't afford to get fresh fruit and vegetables or fix a leaky roof. Is he really richer? He's certainly no happier. Access to resources and absolute wealth relate in a strange way and it's certainly not linear. and the purpose of websites like this is to ask for money. This can be seen as being counterproductive in many ways. People who want to help the poor of the world should go and check it out first. I think that's a fairly reasonable request, before making donations. _________________________________________________________________ 10/11/2005 the red and the whiterecently i've been doing a lot of thinking about a lot of seemingly unrelated subjects (as usual), such has playing Go, and the Bhagavad Gita, and rural anthropology, with a bit of that noodlin' (catching enormous catfish with bare hands). I really should've done comparative studies of rural cultures, instead of this nonsense of science of the CNS. Why is it that hillbillies seem so fascinating? They are like their own tribe of sorts. The Simpsons is such a brilliant show. To understand anything about contemporary America, you just have to watch it. The southern blacks used to (still) call poor whites "woodpeckers" because they were noisy and had red hair. The sheer scot-irishness of that weird slightly plumb around the midline/waist area coupled with a thick Southern accent and that leathery red skin (per long sun exposure). It's like a race in itself. red goatee for the middle aged father, skinny, freckled face for the young ones. They probably get pissed off too. I want to read the Grapes of Wrath again. Is there a bit of that universality that I was looking for so hard? Weirdly, it's totally different from Willy Loman. Cause, Willy...he just looked different. I need a bowl of rice and an abacus right now I feel like my DNA is evading me. In one episode of Rosanne, Dan was arrested, and when he returned home from jail, Roseanne said that the family was now officially poor white trash, and began to dance. _________________________________________________________________ 09/04/2005 uncommon entertainmentbeing able to read another language is definitely a strange asset. I browse this bulletin board of eager Chinese immigrant parents form time to time. Recently I saw this amusing post:
I don't know why this was so amusing to me, but I just couldn't stop laughing. I don't know if it's the irony, the "corruption" of the system or that barest display of that first generation insecurity. There's something decidedly "Jewish" about it. I've realized that in this sense I'm also an anti-Semitic. I don't know exactly which part of it is so wrong. I mean, what, hard work coupled with this uncanny ability to see through the bullshit and exploit, what's wrong with that? I just don't like it. I hate people like that. I don't even know why I hate people like that. Somebody psychoanalyze me. Plus, even if I did know why I hated people like that I probably still will continue to hate people like that. I guess at least it's sort of funny for no good reason. Just as an addendum, here's a brilliant response from John Cage criticizing the over-zealous (Asian) parents:
I couldn't have said it better. _________________________________________________________________ 07/30/2005 unanswerable questionsbrowsing through the New York Times, I found an article written so eloquently...
Then I saw Richard Posner as the author. That made a hell of a lot of sense to me. it was backed by data, and oh so convincing. What Posner was claiming however, has a particularly post-modern feel to it: whatever is now seen as "the truth", seen through the lens of consumerism and an effusion of choices of consumption, is merely what people were brought up with in the first place. I think Posner takes the view that there's in fact a true fair and balanced way of looking at politics and social issues, namely "the scientist's way", "the disinterested attention", a combination of intellectual skepticism and anti-ideological pragmaticism. Is he more or less idealistic? As I was reading his article and nodding along in tacit agreement, I suddenly had this insight that perhaps I'm exactly like the rest of the American public. The difference is, I was inculcated the set of values Posner was advocating, just like how most Americans were taught to look to "god" (as an example) for truth as youngsters. Sometimes I couldn't help but agree with the literary critics a little. What makes Posner think that he knows best? Why is his (and my) particular approach the best modulus operandi? Is there an actual, intrinsic superiority in enlightenment and rigor and articulation? Or does it, in fact, as the postmodern theorists proclaim, only reflect some implicit form of socio-cultural-economic hegemony? Unanswerable questions that compel me to go into science, rather than humanities. _________________________________________________________________ 07/21/2005 julie delpy is so hotthe lack of desire...neurotic to the core, the same thing. nothing much that changes us, disposition. sometimes i wish i'd go to a (monetary) monastery in Asia, just to clear my mind, see all the monks. then i realized that i'm LIVING in a monastery, that is called grad school. then again, i often visited a monastery when i was young. monks are such weird things. i wondered. once i went home with my mom and i started telling my mother that the monks are bad sons because i read somewhere in the...hold that thought for a minute...how do you like the word "pussy". i love it. how did it ever evolve. i mean, the etymology. how did we turn into such perverts. it's like you've stuck in it so many different places now it doesn't even matter any more. the particular sensibility, the wired Notre Dame. computers. saprophytic. eschatology. the murmurs of meaninglessness. god her hair is so amazing i just want to touch it. the way a woman talk. and yet i have to wait because they are all just girls. _________________________________________________________________ 07/11/2005 racial irrelevanceYet another hilarious ad from Craigslist
Hahahahahahahahahahahahah.... also check out Http://www.bitterasianmen.com, apparently written by another MD/PhD student. Here I cringe... _________________________________________________________________ 07/10/2005 the book vs. TV rivalryI wanted to write a much longer something about this topic but decided instead to condense the matter into a much shorter monologue. Is TV/movie always worse than a book, a position so often taken by the slobbering intellectual elite? Clearly, anything that has the word "always" in it is almost always false. The best TV/film adaptations trump the mediocre books from which they came by a long shot. (Go read the novel Forest Gump.) If reading is truly as active an exercise as many claim, I wouldn't be falling asleep going through my spankin' new pages of New Yorker after dinner. The power of the visual language lies precisely where ordinary language does not: all the nonverbal social cues, from the twitches of the faces to the nuanced body language, and the interconnected shots brimming with subtle emotional undertones of a surrounding. Is it a wonder that we have a name for someone who buries himself in books: a nerd? One who neglects the importance of visual language is often deficient in social know-hows. Visual language contains no less information. It's not "less active" an activity. It's just information presented in a different form. And the quantity of information is probably significantly higher. (See Shannon's information theoretic analysis applied both to vision and linguistics.) The argument that language leaves space for imagination is also untenable. Someone who lived in a rural place all his life would never be able to "imagine" appropriately what "urban decay" looks like. That is, except with the aid of images he derived from a TV. Our language is most often used to represent our visual, auditory experiences. Without having some fragment of the actual experience, our brain cannot reconstitute such representation into anything remotely accurate. This is also why I think TV and other mass media vehicles that recreate the immediate visceral experiences (radio, for instance), in fact transmitted and propagated information to such a degree of completeness and with such a high bandwidth that the written word could never begin to fathom. It is also why I surmise that the visual language of our age is the most important tool for globalizing information. Traditional language, sadly, only creates and reinforces boundaries. The scary thing is, if we take a Marxist viewpoint, we'd see that ever since the dawn of civilization traditional language was used and abused by the powerful aristocrat to subjugate the economically less fortunate. Traditional language is hard to learn. It's much easier to dress someone so that he looked rich. It's very hard to coach someone to talk as if he comes from privilege. And, it's next to impossible to teach someone to WRITE aristocratically if he wasn't trained from a very early age and for an extended period of time. The slobbering intellectual elites are not interested in making people "better" readers and writers (that is, to read and write like an academic), as such skills, in this day and age, are becoming increasingly unnecessary for an ordinary person in a developed word. Rather, by reinforcing such illusions, the slobbering intellectual elites attempt to keep their often underserved lofty position in society. They want to remain the priest with scrolls who read Latin and told everyone right from wrong. There's a time and a place for traditional language. Namely, in the academia. Also in exposition, explicit learning. But to say that this is the only way, the best way, the right of learning seems sorely fascist and constitutes a rather egregious form of politicizing information. Most books are boring. Most TV shows are not as boring as most books. It's that simple. If you can write books that are not as boring, people will read it. It's called democracy. I think it's pretty legit. _________________________________________________________________ 07/05/2005 the grandmother cellChristof Koch recently reported in Nature recordings of single neurons tuned to specific objects like Halle Berry's face. They recorded from patients undergoing epilepsy surgery. I only became aware of this because the NYTimes reported it. The New York Times science section seems to be fixated on astrophysics and neuroscience. Or maybe ecology. Or archaeology. something people care about and willing to money for to read about. I'm glad people seem to care about neuroscience. On the other hand, I feel like I'm selling out. I wonder if there is a "vanity" cell. _________________________________________________________________ Older entries have been archived here, and here.
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saturday night, a new concert by a professional traveling group playing
some of