I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western Sea – the circle almost circled;
For, starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia – from the north – from the God, the sage and the hero,
From the south – from the flowerly peninsulas, and the spice islands;
Long having wander’d since – round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again – very pleas’d and joyous;
(But where is what I started for, so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?)
-Walt Whitman
walt whitman
My recent obsession with walt whitman’s poetry was, ironically, inspired by a Levi’s jeans commercial that featured whitman’s poems “Pioneers! O, Pioneers” and “America”. After my last post, it seems like this was just what I needed in my life. Just thought I would share that.
welp, its happened again. every now and then i just get that feeling in my bones. maybe its because fall has fell (even in los angeles) and the cold air has me all full of piss and vinegar. maybe im just that age where my soul is all tough and sinewy and my body is not afraid of pain. i just want to build something. i wanna pull a ryan gosling in the notebook and build a house. somewhere to settle down and live. but i want it to be my house, my blood and tears. my snot and hammered-thumbs and back-aches and sunburned back and cracked skin. i feel like i can do whatever i want with my hands and maybe i need to find out if i actually can. but i need it to be me. i think its just a guy thing – every man worth his nuts just wants to build, to make things grow.
its just restlessness. i wake up every day and go to work and i like what i do. but i wont be able to do these things all my life. someday ill have a family and a real job and responsibilities and the fear or anger or desire will fade away. and after that, when everything left of my body has softened and slumped and wasted away, what will be left of this young man? maybe im just thinking too much and i need to find a hobby.
ive been thinking of my favorite movies of 2009. welp, its pretty self-explanatory. with that said, the movies i most want to see from this year that i havent seen yet are: the hurt locker, UP, zombieland, a serious man, the lovely bones, up in the air, funny people, drag me to hell, benjamin button, the imaginarium of dr. parnassus, public enemies, and paul blart (just kidding on that one)
movies i dont want to see: star trek, avatar, anything with nicolas cage (except the rock, con air or raising arizona), sherlock holmes, 2012, terminator salvation
let the right one in - adolescent vampire love stories are the new teen vampire love stories
movies that were good but didnt make the cut: the hangover
best movies i rented from netflix this year but werent from 2009: o brother, where art thou? (gotta love a Homer rewrite), the king of kong, vicky cristina barcelona, tell no one (SWEET movie!), milk, diner (one of my all-time favorite throwbacks), american teen (really entertaining and interesting documentary of high school life from several students perspectives), the wrestler, let the right one in (best scary movie ive seen in a long time… it wasnt that scary, and it was scary in the right ways. and also like twilight, except good and scandinavian), i am trying to break your heart, do the right thing, man on a wire
man on wire
in the order in which i saw them…
Coraline
coraline: maybe its because i watched this on the plane to seattle (which i was real excited for) or maybe because im a sucker for this kind of claymation/pixar sort of thing, but i liked this movie. it had a certain… i dunno, charm. dont take my word for it.
In Adventureland, Jesse Eisenberg’s character learns that amusement parks aren’t the only place with games rigged for the honest and trusting to always lose. Upon hire, Eisenberg is deemed a “Games” guy, a group comically reserved to the intellectuals and introverts unworthy of being ride operators. The main characters running around with “Games Games Games” printed on their chests is the perfect exemplification of Greg Motolla’s well-written, subtle script.
its hard to describe this kind of movie without sounding naive or childish for thinking movies are like real life, but its comforting to know that other people have gone through similar experiences with growing up. how do we find happiness in the midst of seemingly endless boredom and blah? how do we handle these “once in a lifetime” character building events that shape our lives? lifes all about luck and chance sometimes, you just gotta make the best of it. besides that, kristen stewart has a weird, surly appeal that is somehow irresistible to me.
500 days of summer
500 days of summer: again, in avoidance of repeating myself or sounding like a total idiot who thinks movies are real life, this is hard to explain. dont keep reading if you havent seen this. i think this movie stood out in how it demonstrated that a lot of times we remember things the way we want to remember them, and not how they actually were. in other words, sometimes the grass is greener in reflection than in reality. sorry for the weird analogy. but i really liked the relationship perspective from the male side and the falling in and out of love thing.
inglourious basterds
inglourious basterds: i think this is one of the more polarizing movies from the last few years. i would put christoph waltz’s nazi officer up there with daniel day-lewis from ‘there will be blood’, forrest whittaker from ‘the last king of scotland’ and javier bardem from ‘no country for old men’ for ‘most realistically scary person from a movie’ from the last decade. with that said, i think i fell in love with melanie laurent in this movie. dont read anymore if you haven seen it yet. i think the part that sold me on this movie was towards the end when the basterds are plotting to kill all the nazis while the nazis watch a propaganda flick. the nazis in the crowd all laugh and cheer as the american soldiers are picked off by a sniper. within a few minutes, the real life crowd is laughing and cheering as the nazis are picked off by the basterds or burn in the theatre. after i thought about it, i felt kind of bad for rooting for the various forms of revenge that form the plot of this movie. really, we all share a little hate or prejudice in our hearts, its all about what side we are rooting for.
district 9
district 9: i think this movie had the most unrealized potential of the group. i hoped they would play out the symbolic prejudice a little longer – i mean the movie takes place in south africa. its not like it was a secret what this movie was implying. by the end i think it slipped into too much of a shooter. the action and special effects were great but that stuff just doesnt impress me as much as when i was, say, 12. maybe im getting old or maybe im an elitist, i dont know. i think they could have said a lot in a subtle way but balked in order to make a more appealing movie for the masses.
on sunday morning bon iver played at the hollywood forever cemetery in hollywood. this would be odd enough, but for some reason everyone thought it would a good idea to have the concert at sunrise. my last post was about the bon iver show a few days earlier at the hollywood wiltern, and how it seemed to bring the crowd and band together. in a weird way, the sunrise show had the opposite effect but not in a bad way. the gates opened at 12AM and the actual concert began at about 6AM. in the meantime, a two special playlists selected by justin vernon himself and a few other bits and pieces were played to keep everyone busy. walking in to the show i passed by the grave of johnny ramone and a ton of old, rich jewish lawyers and other folks of that ilk. throughout the night it was unseasonably cold for LA and a thick fog rolled in. at one point i left the comfort of my sleeping bag to go to the bathroom and walked by a bunch of stone sculptures that looked incredibly lifelike, considering you could barely see 10 feet in front of you through the fog. palm trees rose tall and slim through the night, with only their tops visible. it looked like perpetual black fireworks hanging in the air. the whole “seating area” was littered with blankets and sleeping bags, some lit up by small purple LEDs, with people playing and sleeping and eating and often times miserable at the weather and other various activities. in a way it reminded me of some sort of techno gulag.
you can watch the sun come up in that clip but the sound quality is not so great.
around 5:30 a bunch of orange clad monks blessed the crowd and the stage with a rhythmic chant. i wish i had a camera or video to share because it was incredible. ive never heard anything like it and there was an entranced silence from the crowd throughout the prayer. finally at 6 bon iver emerged and played the show – the exact same set from the previous show (minus one song). at first the morning was still dark and the crowd was encompassed in night; justin admitted he couldnt see anyone because of the bright lights shining in his face. after maybe 4 songs the sun began to rise and slowly the audience emerged and we could see the depth of the crowd. the sky changed from orange to pink to white and the fog remained, scattering a weird light all around, like sitting in a bowl of bright colored soup. as the set list progressed, everyone warmed and seemed to wake up. i dont remember justins exact words but the whole thing seemed very surreal and even he admitted it was probably the weirdest thing any of us had ever done. i hope i have expressed how eerie and “out of body” the whole thing felt. the whole thing just seemed to float in with the fog and back out. i have never been more tired and i am probably too old to ever do that again, but it was a real interesting experience. it felt completely from another universe. at the end of the show justin said “lets do this again, maybe. maybe never…” seeming to suggest that he, like the crowd, had no idea what to think of the whole thing.
here is the playlist from justin vernon. also, the movie “bottle rocket” was played halfway through the night, followed by parts of the documentary “Planet Earth” which I think really confused a lot of stoners.
last night i got to see bon iver play at the wiltern with californias newest resident. bon iver has long been my favorite but he has always eluded me in concert… UNTIL YESTERDAY. lets just say i had a huge “boner iver” all week
the general appeal of bon iver’s last cd, For Emma, Forever Ago at least to me was the rhythmic thumping, whispery falsetto and lyrics that perfectly encompass loss/surrender/resurrection. these musical attributes are easy to relate to, but somehow seem to rarely surface in such an honest and vulnerable way. now i have been to a lot of sweet concerts in my day, but last night was pretty unique. all of these things i love about bon iver are not singular to him alone; other bands have similar talents. everyone in the audience had connected with bon iver’s music through this artistic talent and very candid music and i have never seen this kind of artist/audience connection in a concert before. but in almost every song i found myself “playing along” with the band, whether it be slapping hands together to form the beat or singing/shouting with the chorus. in two songs in particular, “the wolves” and “skinny love”, we were encouraged to shout along, even prompted by justin vernon with “louder… LOUDER” slowly working us up in to a fever until at certain points the audience volume met the guitar harmonies and pounding drums. the music was not drowned out by our noise, nor were we subservient to the band -we came together as equals and justin vernon’s song became our music. it was as if we were an instrument played by the band, our voices bouncing from the crowd to the stage and back. it was pretty cool. especially in “the wolves” which at the very end builds to a cacophonous crescendo asking “what might have been lost?” and then slips back into a sublime hum. it felt, to me at least, that all of the emotion and feeling that went in to original making music had again surfaced and together, bon iver and audience were sharing that moment of creation. all in all i left the concert feeling like i had just made art, which is weird but it was definitely a cool concert experience. other highlights were the two encore songs – “swimming songs”, a cover of loudon wainwright and “worried mind” along with megafaun (since it is there song after all).
at the end of the show bon iver (and megafaun, his old friends and a surprisingly strong opening act) said something along the lines of “thank you for allowing us to do the things we love, and you owe us nothing”. but at that show i at least felt an enormous debt of gratitude for what we all just shared.
so you might say my blog well runneth dry recently. i have been busy with school/lab work and some other things (see below) so i havent been keeping up with my blog. today i noticed some funny searches that people used to get to this website. the 5 most popular searches from the last 30 days are: hagfish, wolverine vs. hulk, hulk vs. wolverine, lenin, obama communist. yes, that is what its all about.
anyways, a few weeks ago i was suckered in to buying a few small canvases and some acrylic paints – which turned out to be a pretty awesome purchase. i have painted a bunch of paintings and even though i wouldnt consider myself a good artist, they do make me feel more at home in my apartment. plus after spending many days painting from the minute i get home from lab until the minute i go to bed, skipping dinner and every other healthy behavior in the process, i think i may have diagnosed myself with mild OCD. honestly though it has been fun to have some sort of hobby to look forward to, even if i just painted things other people have already done just because i liked them. and i have dropped 8 pounds from malnutrition, but i dont think i needed them anyways.
pasadena fire
also i am trying to get my ass together for a few 5ks in the fall so i have been trying to run a lot more.
finally, on friday and saturday of this week i will be seeing bon iver (!) play at the hollywood wiltern at a cemetery, respectively. yes a cemetery. doors open for that show at midnight and justin vernon has hand selected 5 hours of entertainment until sunrise, at which time he will rock our faces off with music. i will talk more about that after the big day.
bon iver
i am very excited about bon iver, but if that hasnt come through in todays post its because i am tired. tired from watching the best show in the history of television: the wire. if you havent seen it and want to maintain some semblance of normal life, avoid the wire at all costs. if you have ever wondered what crystal meth is like but you want to keep all of your hair and teeth, you should check it out. i blacked out last night and when i woke up i was cooking a season 1 disc on a spoon, so…
omar from the wire - the baddest homo ever
and on a final note it is fire season in southern california! you may have read about some fires in pasadena, about 30 miles from where i am right meow. below is a picture i took of my apartment of the smoke plume. this fire was so bad you could see it from space. let me explain this a little better… LA goes nuts every now and then, whether it be the death of a famous celebrity or a fire or something. a few weeks ago some guy claimed he had a bomb and was going to blow up the federal building (half a mile from the hospital where i work none the less). anyways, the secret service intercepted and a bunch of roads were blocked and traffic backed up but everything turned out ok. fastforward two weeks or so and i woke up one morning to this mushroom cloud and i thought they finally got the feds. then two weeks after that the space shuttle landed in the mojave desert, which made a sonic boom heard and felt all through southern california. so in other words, in the past 3 months or so in los angeles i have thought death was imminent… and now i dont wonder why im getting gray hairs.
lately it seems you cant turn on the tv or radio without hearing about health care reform… it seems everyone is an expert even though most everyone has no real understanding of the economics or logistics of our nation’s hospitals. anyways, according to this article i read on NPR’s website, one of the insurance companies former PR executives has been encouraging health care reform, claiming that insurance companies have been scrambling to prevent expensive, but much needed, reform to the health care system.
communism!
i think too much of the conversation about health care has been taking place between people who A.) have no connection to the health care industry and B.) have no understanding of the economics or logistics of hospitals and major health care reform. the reality of US politics is the people who make all of our national decisions (and in the case of the media, shape our opinions) are tragically underqualified and often working not in the name of our collective interests but instead their own private agenda. i digress, but let it be known that i work in one of the largest US hospitals (not for the hospital, but in the hospital) and i still feel like i am under-informed on the whole health care reform process. below i have attached three news articles from the economist, my favorite and most reliable news source, that have helped me understand the current health reform bill. furthermore, i found this article (with quotes from UNC’s own jonathan oberlander, no less) on npr’s website that i think explains a lot of the confusion and hyperbole surrounding the bills – as the same scare tactics have been used agains health care reform for a hundred years..
without sounding overly preachy, although that time may have already passed, i have talked a little here and there with various surgeons and doctors and residents here at the #3 hospital in the country and i cant seem to understand the opposition to the bill. it seems it concurrently saves money, increases quality and coverage as well as more specifically defines the standard of practice. it just makes logical sense from the patient and health provider point of view. i think the only good reason i have heard why it has taken such harsh criticism is that it is democratically sponsored and could potentially uninflate the enormous profits made by insurance companies. otherwise it seems like people are cookin up a big ole pot of american bulljive about why this bill shouldnt pass. i welcome concerns, questions and criticisms.
today i talked to a friend i hadnt heard from in a while. ive noticed recently that these sorts of conversations always go the same way; hows life, what are you doing these days, where are you working… after that the dialogue pretty much always dries up. as if the only connection we can still make is the physical names of places and all things prior have washed away. all of those important events and relationships from our youth that we thought would last forever have since eroded through years of new friends, new places and major changes in our life. which got me thinking…
once as young adults we laughed and argued, enjoyed the best of the world and most mundane of ordinaries, and otherwise did all the things that people do in good friendships. years of such accumulation have piled mounds of these memories in our limited brain space, and eventually some are squished out or in the least mashed up enough to barely contain the whole original. like true darwinists, the weak of our memories have died off while the success of our favorites has guaranteed their permanence. some of the best remain, sure, but even these take some prompting, whether it be a familiar song or the smell of grandmas backyard somehow transported through time and space to reappear here, today. and then there are the more obscure memories which are only relived after finding a formerly lost and forgotten photograph or an old birthday card, some physical connection to the past that’s possibly half remembered and half filled in with sepia-toned patches.
today i got to thinking about the latter type of memory. one late night we all sat on the sidewalk as a good friend was about to move away. in our twenties, these types of changes seem to happen all the time and without much noise and racket, but to a kid the world may as well have stopped spinning and sent us all careening into the night. the world changed forever for us that night, and one of us (in my head i seem to think it was me, but of course we all know how time can make our memories into liars) said something like “things are going to change for all of us in the next year (as we go off to college) but i just know we will all be back together again someday… i have faith in us”. maybe that day is still to come but…
a hard days work
is it time and the sheer bulk of new things that happen during college and into our adulthood that dull us to these moments, have we become numb to what we once felt? had the naivete of youth put bastard words into our mouths so that we thought a commonplace moment was so much more novel and dear? did the child in our hearts really believe so much more in what we had, or did we just not know what else to think?
someday will i look back on to the memories i hold most dear today and roll my eyes with a wry grin, remembering the how vulnerable i was to sentiment? or will these days and the people within them burn themselves into forever?
today i read an interesting piece from the may 2008 edition of harper, Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits. in general, the piece is about a corollary to the pseudo-economic Parkinson’s Law which states that ‘consumption increases to meet the supply of resources (but not the other way around)’. the supposed ‘faustian fault‘ of modern society is that we have forgotten how to create a reasonable limit to our lives; if our resources are in theory so prolific that we couldn’t forseeably consume them all, what is to stop us from wrecklessly burning through our worldly supplies? a great example from the essay:
The entire contraption of “Unbridled Energy” is supported only by a rote optimism: “The United States has 250 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves—enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.” We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition.
Faust
further, the essay goes on to explain how humans have come to see the world as a bottomless treasure chest:
Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible. A small place, as I know from my own experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.
space junk
to paraphrase the conclusion, there is no way we can go back and undue the wastefulness or re-evaluate the efficiency with which we consumed the first half of our petroleum resources. only now, with maybe half of the original supplies, we can consider ways to change our habits.
i know this is so zeitgeist, bashing the wasteful habits of generations on a blog without providing any suggestions to fix the problems. i just enjoyed the article and thought i would pass it forward. anyways, my dad forwarded me some information about a new type of wind power generator (i guess i should explain that my dad works in the renewable energy/wind power section of General Electric’s renowned power and infrastructure division). i put some pictures below and some specs on the device, which i think is a pretty cool idea but probably not the solution to all the worlds troubles.
Magenn Air Rotor System (MARS)
magenn deployed above arctic research
MARS vs. conventional turbines
how it works
The Advantages of MARS over Conventional Wind Turbines are:
1.low cost electricity – under 15 cents per kWh
2.bird and bat friendly
3.lower noise
4.wide range of wind speeds – 2 to more than 28 meters/second
5.higher altitudes – from 200 to 1,000 feet above ground level are possible without expensive towers or cranes
6.fewer limits on placement location – coast line placement is not necessary
7.ability to install closer to the power grid
8.mobile
9.ideal for off grid applications or where power is not reliable.
