[dovate.com] » 2007 » April
Alright, after seeing this I no longer believe pot should be legalized. This is 4-20 in Vancouver. If I ever saw anything like this in Philadelphia I’d be deeply embarrassed. Not because of the drug use, but because of the absurdity.
I’d hate to be a clerk at the closest 7-11. I like how everyone’s coughing and no one’s doing anything:
Seeing nuclear blasts makes me feel very ‘emo.’ Fortunately, while I am in healthy collaboration with my emotional life, not much else gives me that ‘emo’ reaction. Either way, I feel like there’s something very, very wrong with detonating nuclear weapons. By wrong I of course mean destructive. With the first ‘very’ I mean the destruction we know and can measure. With the other ‘very’ I’m talking about the destruction that we’re too ignorant to see or understand.
Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project became well known for quoting very significant passages from the Bhagavad-Gita after the successful test of the first atomic bomb. Like Lincoln at Gettysburg he solemnly proclaimed: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…” and “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
He only actually thought of those quotes. According to his brother, he actually said:
“It worked.”
But anyway, the point of this entire post was to rerun a few images that I posted here before. Taken by Harold Edgerton at a distance of 7 miles using a lens with a focal length of 10 feet and a shutter speed of 100 microseconds, here are the first microseconds of an atomic bomb blast:
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Not too long ago, a boy named Michael Pjornipol looked puzzlingly into his bathroom mirror and wondered why anyone was looking back at him. He was vaguely high off the lingering effects of dirt-cheap weed spiced with rock cocaine. His nerves weren’t healthy and his hands shook like young maple branches in a spring breeze. He was afraid, but not of anything in particular.
He turned on the sink – cold only – and put water on a face that didn’t feel like his own. He looked again at the mirror and couldn’t quite believe that was him either.
Michael took three deep breaths and felt a little better. He squeezed his hands and pulled on his fingers one at a time. The tremors that shook his body before had faded into that slight twitching in his fingers. His stomach felt empty, but he didn’t feel like eating. Michael used the familiar hand towel draped over a small bar above the sink to dry his face. The towel felt nice, almost transformative.
He looked out the window and watched traffic pass by. He lived on a quiet suburban road, but could see the highway in the distance. He pushed the window up on silent felt tracks and pulled out the screen set behind it. Leaning out into the warm night air he listened for the highway. With his head beyond the walls of the house, he could hear the steady stream of traffic, punctuated by a truck downshifting or a car with bad exhaust system.
The sound relaxed him. The idea of the motion, its energy, the order of the traffic and the miracle of its liquid functionality made him feel better. He listened until his hands stopped shaking and he was too tired to care who or what stared back at him through the bathroom mirror.
OK, back to normal commentary. Today I take on war and public education. Here are a few things that will crush your will to care.
The whole thing is broken by design.
All wars, every single one that’s ever been fought has been fought over either land, resources or a combination of these two things. Leaders and power brokers of the time create wars by claiming that they’re about other things like God, ideology or the nation. This is true from from Egypt to Osama bin Laden. Anyone who says it isn’t true is wrong. Sure people fight and die for other reasons, but none of those dead people ever started a war.
Moving on, Public Education is under funded on purpose. An educated population is not in the best interest of the state. This is well understood across the third world. No one in the U.S. seems to notice or care. If you don’t believe me, then why are public schools funded by local property taxes? Why do private schools exist at all?
I was once in a class at Penn where all the students from countries across South America (the elite of their respective countries) made this point to us stupid Americans. “Why is it so hard for you to believe. You’re no different.” And we aren’t. I’ve mentioned these things before on this site, but they’re worth repeating.
With all that said, I endorse Michael Nutter for mayor of Philadelphia. Thank you and goodnight.
If posts dissipate and/or descend into bizarre confusing strings of prose, I apologize. I don’t believe in ‘blogs’ and still wonder why I have one. This site isn’t about my personal life. That would just be weird.
At the same time, my personal life finds ways to leech into my writing.
As a person who writes, I have a ‘voice.’ It’s that narrator that talks to you while you read this. Hopefully it connects with you and makes you want to know it better. That voice isn’t quite me, but it is a very real version of myself. It has my sense of humor and mode of observation. It’s honest, but guarded. It isn’t me; it’s a consciously constructed reflection. Sometimes - like now - that voice consumes all else, becoming overtly self-absorbed. The more self-centered it becomes, the closer this site approaches a legitimate personal weblog.
At the same time, as the division between objective and subjective begins to dim, details become scarce. I start writing intensely personal things about nothing. Like this. The result is a deeply inspired intellectual experiment. The fact of the inspiration makes this worthy to post for your (the reader’s) objective consumption. By the time you’re done reading it, you’ll have absolutely no idea what you just read, or know anything behind why I wrote it, but hopefully it was interesting.
In closing, here’s a song about waiting that’s been in my head for weeks. That’s all for now.
Hey everyone, I’m posting from Jury Duty. Actually I was granted a 2 1/2 hour lunch and came home, so in reality I’m just posting from home. What case am I on? Well I’m not allowed to say anything about it, but here’s a little clue:
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Donkey has his bray in court
POSTED: 1025 GMT (1825 HKT), April 19, 2007
DALLAS, Texas (AP) — Faced with complaints that his donkey was too loud, attorney Gregory Shamoun decided to bring his case directly to the court: he had the donkey testify.
Buddy the donkey appeared in court Wednesday. He walked to the bench and stared at the jury, the picture of a gentle, well-mannered creature and not the loud, aggressive animal he had been accused of being.
Shamoun was in a dispute with oilman John Cantrell, who had complained to the city about a storage shed Shamoun was building in his backyard in Dallas. Cantrell said Shamoun retaliated by bringing the donkey from his ranch and putting him in the backyard.
Cantrell complained of donkey noise and manure piles.
“They bray a lot any time day or night. You never know when they’re going to cut loose,” he testified.
Despite the donkey’s appearance, neither jurors nor Buddy had the last say — the neighbors settled their dispute while jurors deliberated.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
* Warning: self-reflective bloggy post.
Three years ago today was 7 days before the life I’m ending first began. I opened an old journal and turned back to three years ago today. Stuck between the pages was a 4-leaf clover and a bunch of words about leaving Rittenhouse Square.
“Well it’s been 10 years and I can finally say it,” I wrote. “Fuck Rittenhouse Square… I’ve been looking for something down this path for the last 10 years, I’ve filled these books with writing, I’ve met girls I’ve loved, girls I’ve lusted after, girls I never liked. I’ve drawn on the ground at 4 in the morning, listened to music, met friends, gotten drunk, high and watched 40 seasons come and go all from this bench.”
I went on to describe how I was sick of waiting. A month later I wrote, “I’ve felt sedate for a while now. My mind is keeping its inspiration to itself.”
A month after that I wrote, “I like to pay attention to my senses. Remain alert. I also enjoy dulling my senses. Numbing them. Numb hunger with food. Numb a day by relaxing on my porch with a beer. Numb desires with satiation. Eyes with sleep. Mind with dreams. Chaos with silence.
But tonight I have indigestion and a chill.”
A month later I wrote, “ Yesterday I touched the Atlantic Ocean, the sun setting behind me, turning the sea into a plain of silver.”
And finally, a month after that, on August 17, 2004 I wrote, “Why is the dude in the cowboy hat over there videotaping me?”
That’s all for now.
Today I was at a meeting full of people from cultural institutions across Philadelphia. It was a meeting about geocaching, otherwise known as scavenger hunts for techies. My place of employment will have a cache in an upcoming promotion put together by GPTMC.
Towards the end of the meeting, the guy from the Independence Visitor Center – completely unsolicited – leans over to me and says, “have you ever seen the Toynbee letters?”
This was the strangest moment of my day. My answer was probably the strangest moment of his. By the end of our conversation, he was headed straight for 4th and South (to see the last Philly original tile) and looking forward to the documentary.
I saw this guy on the way to work yesterday morning. I shouldn’t complain.
*edit: the title refers to his burden.
Just because I haven’t posted about the Toynbee Tiles recently, doesn’t mean my bizarre obsession has waned. The tiles go into winter hibernation every year. Spring snow or not, the season awakens them. They’re like the cherry blossoms.
For all those who visit dovate.com for it’s top-notch Toynbee Tile coverage, here’s a long overdue update.
Update:
On the documentary front, a preview has been created. Unfortunately that preview is secret. I’m told there are good reasons for this. As soon as it goes public, you’ll see it here. It looks great… but as I said, it’s a secret.
On the research end of things, the big 6 questions of who, what, when, where, why and how have been answered. Again, wait for the documentary. If you’re a tile fan, or even if you’re not, I promise that you’ll be both shocked and amazed by the epic of the tiles.
Question:
One lingering question remains. It’s been debated for years without an answer. Are the new style tiles spotted in Philadelphia between 2002 and today the work of the original tiler, or a copycat? In case you’re unfamiliar with the ins and outs of this ferocious debate, here’s a short synopsis:
Original Toynbee tiles appeared between the early 1980’s and early 2002. They were laid in streets across the United States and in 3 South American countries. These tiles come in several quantifiable clusters of shapes and varieties, but all are clearly the work of a single individual. As the 90’s wore on, original tiles became large, colorful mosaics, beautiful and ingenious. These are the tiles worthy of fascination. These are the tiles that caught the attention of most of the world’s tile fans.
Original tiles stopped appearing in early 2002.
Not long after, a new type of began showing up only in Philadelphia. They displayed shortened text (omitting in and on and sometimes replacing the word ‘resurrect’ with ‘raise.’) The font was also different and the tiles themselves were oriented in a new way. A copycat was immediately suspected by Justin Duerr and Bill O’Neill, the preeminent tile scholars of the time.
In September 2003 in an email exchange with Inquirer writer Larry Fish, O’Neill wrote of the tile at 13th and Chestnut, “It IS different, but it could be evolution by the same guy. The capital A’s, for instance, still are that odd bullet shape. I had a long discussion about (sic) Justin Duerr about whether we have a second perp. It’s almost too weird to think about. If there is a second one, is it a mere copycat, or a disciple?”
That was the beginning of the debate. Is there a copycat? I’ve gone back and forth for a long time, but recently started to believe that there has only ever been one tiler. This belief still goes against my gut, but less than before. If reason were the only measure in this investigation, the evidence for a single tiler is at this point nearly overwhelming. Some of the best evidence I can’t share, but this weekend something I can make public came to light.
Hybrid
Old style tiles disappeared and new ones appeared. There was no overlap of styles and until Saturday, no known transitory period.
For years I’ve thought I’ve seen a fragment of a tile near the 23rd street onramp to I-676 east. On Friday I confirmed it’s existence near 21st street and on Saturday morning photographed it. Like an archeologist forming the model of a hominid skull from a small fragment of jawbone, eyeing the remains of this tile, researchers can come away with a wealth of information.
The tile is a clear hybrid between old and new styles. The font is a mix of old and new style. The material and coloration of the tile is clearly old style. The appearance of the words Toynbee and Idea on 2 separate lines is clearly new style. That it was glued on a highway and not on an onramp is also new style. There is only 1 conclusion. This is a hybrid tile. This is some of the best evidence to date for the single tiler theory.
Alright, that’s enough obsessiveness. That’s all for now.
It’s 3AM, my arm is bruised, my hair is wet and my shoes are soaked with mud and beer. This isn’t a noble event, but I haven’t ended a night like this in a while.
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On my drive home a young man standing in the rain at 15th and Walnut Streets tried to flag me down so that I could pay him for a blowjob. He saw me, a man alone in a car cruising the streets after the bars closed and just assumed. Not being gay and otherwise uninterested in his services, I looked at him curiously as I passed through the intersection. He looked cold and wet.
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Years ago, at that same intersection about an hour later into the night, I was mistaken for a prostitute myself. It’s an event that’s stuck with me; so I mine as well write it out.
Me: the prostitute
In 2001, I dated a girl who never slept over. That meant that most nights I saw her, I’d end up walking her from my apartment at 23rd and Sansom to hers 13th and Chestnut. Even though she didn’t sleep over, she stayed with me late, usually until 3 or 4 in the morning. My walks home alone were strange and magical. When Philadelphia is quiet, you can feel it breathe. The city itself is like an enormous weight built on top of some strange mineral composite full of powerful magnetic properties. The city scrambles those signals into the bizarre thing that is Philadelphia.
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If you don’t understand my fascination with Toynbee tiles, imagine standing at Chestnut and Juniper at 3:30 in the morning – in the intense quiet of the city – and staring down at one. If somehow the city could grow eyes and look into a mirror, the reflection would be a Toynbee tile. That’s my fascination.
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It was a Saturday night at 4 in the morning and I was walking west on Walnut Street at 15th. I walked on the north side of the street heading towards my apartment at 23rd. I remember noticing the Philadelphia Weekly box, but I don’t remember what the cover story was. I was looking at it, when a small man approached from my blind side.
The shirt I was wearing was from the original I-Goldberg. I bought it for 90 cents years before. It was a faded bluish/turquoise button-up, with a large bleach stain and a faint stenciled 10-digit number emblazoned above the left breast pocket. I still have it in my closet, but I never wear it anymore. That night I had picked it up off the floor before walking my then-girlfriend home.
The man who approached me was very small. He was Asian – probably Vietnamese – and his English was bad. He walked with me step for step, an intense look in his eyes. He was fearful and eager. He said something that I didn’t understand.
“What?” I asked.
“Where do you want to go?” This time I heard him clearly. I didn’t understand what he meant.
“Do you have place to go?” He asked. I understood the eagerness in his eyes.
“No, no.” I said, shaking my head and putting up a barrier with my own eyes and body. “No.”
“I’m sorry.” He said in rushed breath. “I’m gay.”
He appeared deeply embarrassed and abruptly broke off. I continued on without pausing. That moment has been with me for years. When people talk about morality, these situations never enter into the debate.
At the moment he apologized for his desires and for his reason for walking the streets at 4AM, I wished that I actually was a prostitute. I wished that the family that he likely had didn’t have to pretend that he wasn’t who he was. I wished that he could have existed somewhere else. Nothing was as it should have been.
Kurt Vonnegut is dead.
In the past couple weeks I changed my favicon to a piece of his artwork, visited his site a dozen times, had several conversations about his books and started re-reading Mother Night. I went to bed reading it and woke up at 5:30 this morning trying to decide which piece of his artwork I wanted to buy for my new apartment… (which I’ll now never be able to afford) But that’s more than enough about myself.
Here’s a passage from Slaughterhouse Five. The scene takes place in a hospital. Rumfoord is a military historian; Billy Pilgrim is a veteran of WWII whose experience mirrors Vonnegut’s. Dresden was a civilian city in Germany that was bombed into rubble on February 13, 1945.
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Rumfoord talked to Lily about the bombing of Dresden one time, and Billy heard it all. Rumfoord had a problem about Dresden. His one-volume history of the Army Air Force in the Second World War was supposed to be a readable condensation of the twenty-seven-volume Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two. The thing was, though, there was almost nothing in the twenty-seven volumes about the Dresden raid, even though it had been such a howling success. The extent of the success had been kept a secret for many years after the war-a secret from the American people. It was no secret from the Germans, of course, or from the Russians, who occupied Dresden after the war, who are in Dresden still.
‘Americans have finally heard about Dresden.,’ said Rumfoord, twenty-three years after the raid. ‘A lot of them know now how much worse it was than Hiroshima. So I’ve got to put something about it in my book. From the official Air Force standpoint., it’ll all be new.’
‘Why would they keep it a secret so long?’ said Lily.
‘For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts’ said Rumfoord, ‘might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do.’
It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. ‘I was there’ he said.
It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord, had so long considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be much better off dead. Now, with Billy speaking clearly and to the point, Rumfoord’s ears wanted to treat the words as a foreign language that was not worth learning.
‘What did he say?’ said Rumfoord.
Lily had to serve as an ‘interpreter. ‘He said he was there.’ she explained.
‘He was where?
‘I don’t know,’ said Lily. ‘Where were you?’ she asked Billy.
‘Dresden’ said Billy.
‘Dresden,’ Lily told Rumfoord.
‘He’s simply echoing things we say,’ said Rumfoord.
‘Oh, ‘ said Lily.
‘He’s got echolalia now.’
‘Oh.’
Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say. But Billy didn’t really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.
Rumfoord went on insisting for several hours that Billy had echolalia-told nurses and a doctor that Billy had echolalia now. Some experiments were performed on Billy. Doctors and nurses tried to get Billy to echo something, but Billy wouldn’t make a sound for them.
‘He isn’t doing it now,’ said Rumfoord peevishly. ‘The minute you go away, he’ll start doing it again.’
Nobody took Rumfoord’s diagnosis seriously. The staff thought Rumfoord was a hateful old man, conceited and cruel. He often said to them, in one way or another, that people who were weak deserved to die. Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.
There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a wilfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went’ out at night, and then, when there had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, ‘I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war.’ Rumfoord sighed impatiently.
‘Word of honor.,’ said Billy Pilgrim. ‘Do you believe me?’
‘Must we talk about it now?’ said Rumfoord. He had heard. He didn’t believe.
‘We don’t ever have to talk about it,’ said Billy. ‘I just want you to know: I was there.’
For reasons that I won’t get into here, I recently came into possession of 2 books by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. I opened one of the books to a random page. I soon realized that the page wasn’t random at all, but instead a thick perforated insert like you’d find in a magazine. The insert read:
YES! Please send me a copy of What is Scientology?
Hardback $90 (includes shipping and handling)
Paperback $24.95 (includes shipping and handling)
But then I noticed the next page, (pg. 85) Chapter 11, The Anatomy of Failure. This is the opening passage of that chapter:
Two things are of paramount importance in Scientology. They are WIN and LOSE.
A person can be stuck in either wins or loses. (sic) This might come as a surprise that a person could be stick in a win, but the facts of a case are that a person is stuck in any reversal between intention or expectance. One knows of the man who lives forever after his having won the race and one knows as well the man who lives forever after the failure of his business…
Moving backward to Chapter 2 or The True Story of Scientology, let us read. (It helps to read this out loud. Please read this out loud.)
The true story of Scientology is simple, concise and direct. It is quickly told.
1. A philosopher develops a philosophy about life and death.
2. People find it interesting
3. People find it works.
4. People pass it along to others.
5. It grows.When we examine this extremely accurate and very brief account, we see that there must be in our civilization some very disturbing elements for anything else to be believed about Scientology.
These disturbing elements are the Merchants of Chaos. They deal in confusion and upset. Their daily bread is made by creating chaos. If chaos were to lessen, so would their incomes…
And that’s all the time we have time for today. If interested in reading further, send $25-90 to:
Bridge Publications, Inc.
4751 Fountain Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
No writing today. Just a picture of Ayers Rock or Uluru. (photo by Paddy Ryan) I’ve always loved this rock.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I woke up to the sensation of my brain thinking about a dozen things. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I decided to get out of bed, feed my brain coffee and read some local websites. Thank you PhillyBits for setting me straight this morning. I’ve never done this before, but I actually spit my coffee out from cracking up. This is Kermit covering the NIN song that Johnny Cash made famous:
I read that today is the 13th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death and decided to post some words and music to mark it. Instead of just putting up some little burning candle and sharing a heartfelt story, I’d rather make a stupid point that I think is important and post a couple of songs that you’ve probably never heard. But anyway:
The point
On March 1, 1994 Beck released his first big studio album, Mellow Gold. On April 5, 1994 – or just over 1 month later – Kurt Cobain went into his greenhouse and opted out of shit. There’s an indefinable affinity between these 2 super-pop-star musicians. What it is, is unclear. Whatever it is, it’s some larger cultural something or other that may or may not come into better focus in another 25 years.
What my point is, is that one could not have existed in that strange ambiguous podium of popular culture as long as the other one was still around. Not that it was a direct torch passing… but it was something similar. To borrow an album title, it was more emblematic of a sea change that was reshaping the cultural landscape on a much larger scale.
The songs
With that vague confusing point out of the way, maybe the songs will make it clearer. Both of them are rough, live and acoustic.
The first song (not a Courtney Love song as she claims) is called “Old Age.” If you like Kurt Cobain, I guarantee that you’ll like it. If you don’t, you probably won’t. It starts off with vocals that sound like a parity of their own style, but builds into something surprisingly complete and powerful. Stay with it and it will probably surprise you.
The second song is the last song played by Beck on a radio show at KCRW the day before the release of Mellow Gold. The song appears on no album and (including this performance) has only ever been played twice. It’s a completely innocent and youthfully angsty song scattered here and there with some of the best lyrics written that decade.
Maybe the multiple Oscars and the Pulitzer Prize have gotten to his head, but writer David Mamet continues to spread lies about his role in the epic of the Toynbee tiles.
In a recent interview with hipster-porn site suicidegirls.com, Mamet claims: “This is the weirdest thing that ever happened. I wrote this play [called 4 am] about a million years ago that was an homage to Larry King when he was late night talk show host on radio in the 70’s. A guy calls in and he’s talking about the film 2001 based on the writings of Arnold Toynbee. The Larry King character says, “I think you’ll find that 2001 is based on the writings of Arthur C. Clarke.” The guy says, “No, Larry. I believe that you’re wrong there. 2001 based on the writing of Arnold Toynbee tells us that all human life will be reconstituted on the planet Jupiter.” They had this rather silly conversation for ten minutes. It turns out that now you can go on the internet and look up Toynbee tiles. There are these tiles that are showing up all over the country that say in mosaic “Toynbee says all life reconstituted on Jupiter.” You can go to these links and they’ll tell you how to make these tiles and where to put them up.”
Loyal readers will remember that Mamet made a similar claim on NPR’s Morning Edition late last year. Through the assumed credibility generated by nothing more than name recognition, Mamet threatens to assume the “Toynbee Idea” as his own. This is no idle threat. Cultural barometer Wikipedia.com has already begun to propagate the “Mamet falsehood.”
Although most tile research is tight-lipped until the premier of Resurrect Dead, this particular controversy must be recognized and forcefully dismissed. In the possession of the Resurrect Dead team are documents pre-dating Mamet’s 1983 play. Included in those documents is a Minority Association statement acknowledging the first public disclosure of the Toynbee Idea. That disclosure occurred during a 1980 telephone call-in to the Larry King radio show. Mamet almost certainly heard this call and consciously or not, based his play on it. I have taken the wiki-liberty to update the wikipedia page accordingly.
Also interesting in the Mamet statement is the “You can go to these links and they’ll tell you now to make these tiles and where to put them up” part. This means that dirty liar, David Mamet may have in fact once sat at his computer and read dovate.com. If you’re reading this now Mamet, we’re on to you.
