Changuinola … is revenue, saith Tom Paine. Here’s the latest adventure in this realm. I’m wrapping up a nine-day stay in the City, and have some time at long last to record a few of the many, many impressions. The Friday after Michael Jackson died I met some friends at a Soho apartment and we listened […]
Category Archives: Comments on Life
The purpose of despotic government…
05-Jul-09I know they have the best wireless service in the area. But anything is better than alliance with tyrants. I’m currently at minute 33 on hold, after speaking with five different service representatives over the past two hours. My story? In September I brought a Verizon technician out to my cabin – Verizon is the […]
Last Night in New Orleans.
29-Apr-09The last page of a very nice chapter. As always, it’s hard to know what I’ll be taking from here until I’ve arrived at the next place. But I know I’ll know what it means to miss New Orleans.
“Drugs” by the Talking Heads.
23-Apr-09A link to this song can be found here. Sometimes the value of a song is the sense it conveys of inner experience. This is true of the Talking Heads song “Drugs.” There is not much musical structure to it. Its value depends a great deal on its production: I have heard live performances which […]
De Fatigatione Sedentaria.
29-Mar-09I am afflicted by restlessness from time to time, together with the blues. I’m depressed every year in January (this year was no exception) and April (last year was no exception, and I’m not expecting an exemption this year). But now I am noticing that often these feelings go together with impatience at the chairs […]
Institutions and the Living Individual.
13-Mar-09If you want to know why Andrew Sullivan has such a huge readership, look no further than this lovely bit of confession that surfaced on his blog yesterday: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/believing-throu.html#more Despite being a generation older than most of his readers, he expresses precisely the feeling so many of us share, of being a living soul in […]
Learning to Drive.
15-Feb-09Is there anything in the world more lovely than Suzanne Vega? Besides the voice, the music, the esprit, the face, the whole thing, she’s a New Yorker who gets it and passes it on. The link brings you to a delightful article she wrote about learning to drive (as a 43-year-old, in the city; my, what […]
God, this man is nothing but good news.
22-Jan-09A NYT piece on Obama’s lifting of Bush administration secrecy rules here. The gist: The new president effectively reversed a post-9/11 Bush administration policy making it easier for government agencies to deny requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act, and effectively repealed a Bush executive order that allowed former presidents or their heirs […]
The Conditions of Life.
06-Jan-09Gandhi said that every man should clean his own toilet. Today I’ve taken a new step forward by installing my own. My old toilet cracked when I left water in it before leaving for Christmas – the water froze and broke its ceramic mold. It took me a few days to prepare […]
Edward Said’s Last Tin of Tobacco.
04-Aug-09http://dnasab.net/2008/09/ Some oddities from the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. They had a case of relics from the life of Edward Said, the famous scholar whose fame has perhaps not done much good (for my essay on Orientalism see here). Why in the world we should be interested in his last tin of tobacco I […]