It's a Wonderful Life

Unfortunately the batteries in the camera died before we could get any shots of Shaunie and the girls together. Maybe another day.

Farmacia - Nada de nada y Te puedo abrazar

Here's a couple videos from a rather one dimensional Argentine pop band called Farmacia. For better or for worse, the songs will probably get stuck in your head. I think when I wanted to be a rock star, though I never envisioned something like this, I was a goof ball and probably would have ended up looking a lot like this guy on stage. I was always into the more pensive front man thing but I had enough energy to power a small city for a day in my 120lb lanky body and music was (still is) like a drug for me. Even if you don't end up digging these videos, remember one thing. At least they are having fun making music, I'm writing term papers.

FARMACIA Nada de Nada (video) from FARMACIA on Vimeo.

I have a double...

...and I guess he drinks mate and is either an M.D. or PhD. Pardon me while I go read Borges or Cortázar...I'm feeling very unheimliche at the moment.

http://www.mymateworld.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1486

This it what it looks like when you realize you still want to be a rock star.

"Scotty, beam me up some good vibrations"

My wife and I were watching The Beach Boys on PBS and they started playing "Good Vibrations," classic! Those familiar with the song will recall that they use a Theremin for that weird high pitched noise. I got excited and started to tell my lovely wife about the instrument. It's one of the first electronic instruments ever made and I included some information about the Theremin in a paper I once wrote on electronic music in film-scoring (Yes. I'm a card carrying nerd). Watch this clip and you'll recognize the sound from the Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations" or the early sci-fi films (30's-50's) out of Hollywood.

Caution, I found this gem on the Moog synthesizer website and it combines two of the nerds greatest loves, Star Trek (the old one) ans strange musical instruments. It's a thing of beauty.

What happens when you read an interesting blog-post at 5am after staying up all night finishing a film review: or how to play jazz and improvise.

In my Introduction to Theory class (601b 4.0 for me) here at UCI we have a class blog that has seen some good action as of late. My distinguished colleague caught my attention with this post about "The Death of the Author" and an album by the cool Icelandic musicians Sigur rós.

I don't know what got into me but it has something to do with the title of this blog post. Anyway, I responded with the following, which is probably incoherent and arrives at nothing:

Viva, Sigur rós! It's good to know they have fans here at UCI. Good point :), though there are some points that need to be made. The other day I was thinking about the eminence of the critic, or the interpreter in contemporary society. I would have to think about this more, but it seems like, outside of literature, 20th century U.S culture (and perhaps, western culture) values the interpreter or performer more than the originator or 'author' of a work.

Case in point, Sinatra baby! How many of the crooners that danced the nights away to Old Blue Eyes' booming voice know the names of the composers that wrote the songs Sinatra 'made his own'? The truth is, probably quite a few of them. But, look at pop music today.

Many of the music groups that are popular among 14-20 year-olds don't write their own music (this is especially true in pop and country music). Why does the director get all the credit/blame for a great/crappy film when there are so many other hands that stir the soup, including the writers? Why are actors so celebrated when all they do is play a variation on a theme of themselves, representing a person that the writer dreamed up?

Couldn't tell you the answer. Was there a rise of the critic/interpreter/reader/performer in the early to mid 20th century? Whereas in classical music the composer used to get top billing, it's now important that you buy an album with a great symphony orchestra AND conductor interpreting the composer's work. Maybe it has to do with "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," a phenomenon that has allowed the work of art to exists at a distance from the originator of the same.

Still, perhaps more than any other field, in literature we continue to give most of the acclaim to the author rather than the critic or interpreter of the work (with a few notable exceptions).

Whatever the case may be, I think reader-response criticism reminds us that, though the interpreter of a jazz tune, the performer of a role in a film or a play, or the critic of a literary work does create and is original in their interpretation of the work, it is always within a framework provided by the author/script-writer/composer, etc.

I would argue that rather than kill the author, Sigur rós (who do write their own tunes by the way!) acknowledged that once they create a framework or a limited artistic space, the work of art itself (in the example above, the music and the presentation of the same in the CD booklet) the receptor then is free to improvise, find significance, even create meaning within that framework.

After all, if we throw out the chord progression that Gerry Mulligan wrote for "Jeru" on the album 'Birth of the Cool,' Miles Davis has nothing to improvise from. He could play whatever he wants but it won't be "Jeru". Further, there are limitations within jazz itself that must be followed. If a tune is to sound like jazz, the V7 chord always has to go back to the tonic chord, and so on. The corollary for us as budding critics being, if we don't write a certain way and respect certain defined parameters, our work ceases to be literary criticism.

Was Barthes saying the same thing? I don't remember. I have to go back and re-read "The Death of the Author." Still, like :) wrote, "Maybe it's still possible to be original." Or maybe Oscar Wilde was right and "[m]ost people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Watch 'F for Fake'

-The Fake Orson Welles

(If you've made it this far, please let me know what you think. Am I full of hot air? Yes, I know I that I am, but what are your thoughts on the subject, dear reader?)

Pure Muppet Awesomeness! There's hope for the future.

Continuing Protests at UCI

The protests against budgetary cuts at UCI thus far have been poorly attended. However, the first large scale activity is planned for December 4th. Here I reproduce in full, an open letter explaining the reason behind the proposed protest and the planned actions of the occupiers:

Statement on the Occupation of Langson Library

November 23, 2009

STATEMENT ON THE OCCUPATION OF LANGSON LIBRARY

To Librarians and Library Staff
To the UCI community of students, faculty, and workers
To the media

By now you have surely heard about the actions planned for the evening of December 4, which seek to keep the library open overnight. We want to clarify our purposes and respond to possible claims by administrators and your bosses.

As students, we believe we should have full access to books, computers, and library materials before and during Finals Week. We also know that the funds exist within the UC system to maintain a fully-staffed, adequately paid 24 hour library on campus. Close to 8 billion dollars of discretionary funding is sitting untouched, and the UC has taken out over 6 billion dollars in construction bonds. This money comes from our tuition and our and our parents’ taxes, and we want a piece of it. Similarly, we are disgusted by the University’s negotiation process, offering library staff representatives the “choice” of layoffs or pay cuts; we want neither!

In taking over the library and keeping it open overnight Friday and perhaps indefinitely thereafter, we are exerting our agency as students and members of the UC community. We do not expect anything of you beyond your normal work requirements, and despite administrative claims to the contrary, we are not asking you to stay beyond your regular work hours. We only ask of you, and of the University, that we retain access to automated check-out machines, computer labs, and other basic unstaffed resources. We additionally condemn any attempts by the administration to shut off power or Internet access or lock the main doors.

Our only barricades will be our bodies so long as authorities respond peacefully to us, and it is our intent to leave the library cleaner than how we found it. We intend to use the space for teach-ins about the budget crisis, exam review sessions, study groups, and quiet study. On Saturday at 1pm, we will be holding a General Assembly for the UCI community to assess our ability to remain in Langson Library and consider our capacity for further action. Should you or your coworkers voluntarily choose to stay in the library for any period of time in order to assist us in any way, you have our humble appreciation.

This action is being carried out in solidarity with 15 prior occupations in the UC and CSU systems this quarter, and with the occupations throughout the world, most recently in Croatia, Serbia, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Great Britain. While this may be the first attempted occupation at UCI, it will not be the last. We will occupy the entire campus, building by building, until everything that has been taken from us is ours again.
Don’t let your bosses force you to work longer than you want to. Don’t buy into their misrepresentations and distortions of the facts.

LONG LIVE THE OCCUPATIONS!

In solidarity,
Students, faculty, and workers of UCI

Do Grad Students Dream of Electric Dissertations?

For some reason this flickering light reminded me of the refrigerator in Mike Wilson Reginato's book, El pugil. The scene is a bit more uncanny in person, the light makes an odd buzzing/clicking sound when it comes on, and the uneven rhythm it follows almost makes me feel like the light wants to tell me something. As soon as these thoughts hit my brain I thought of El pugil. If you havent' read it, I won't tell you why, get a hold of the book and dig it. If you have read it, you might think it's strange that I made this connection between the light and the icebox, I don't know why I did either. Maybe the sound the light makes when it goes on and off reminded me of Mike's description of refrigerator's sounds. For me, though, the coolest thing is that I thought of Mike's book, something new and fresh in my mind, rather than some old worn out referent. Often something will remind me of a Borges short story, or of Kafka, or of a movie I saw once. but this time I didn't think of any old canonical writers, texts or movies, I thought of El pugil, it is now part of my personal intertext, rad.


If you want to know more about the book, look here. And if you want to read some microcuentos and other cool stuff by Mike Wilson Reginato, go here. P.S. It's all in Spanish, sorry to the gringos.

To My Little Girl

Happy Birthday! There's nothing better than being your daddy.

HA! Take THIS Gilles Deleuze!

The body is the Figure, or rather the material of the Figure. Above all the material of the Figure is not to be confused with the material structure in space which is separate from this. The body is a Figure, not structure. Conversely, the Figure being a body, is not a face and does not even have a face. It has a head, because the head is an integral part of the body. It can even be reduced to its head. As a portraitist, Francis Bacon is a painter of heads and not of faces. There is a big difference between the two. For the face is a structured spatial organization which covers the head, while the head is an adjunct of the body, even though it is its top. It is not that it lacks a spirit, but it is a spirit which is body, corporeal and vital breath, an animal spirit; it is the animal spirit of man: a pig-spirit, a buffalo-spirit, a dog-spirit, a bat-spirit... This means that Bacon is pursuing a very special project as a portraitist: unmaking the face, rediscovering or pulling up the head beneath the face.

The deformations which bodies undergo are also the animal features of the head. There is in no way a correspondence between animal forms and forms of the face. In fact, the face has lost its form in the process of being subjected to operations of cleaning and brushing which disorganize it and make a head burgeon in its place. And the marks or features of animality are moreover not animal forms, but rather spirits which haunt the cleaned parts, which draw out the head, individualizing and qualifying the head without a face.¹ As procedures used by Bacon, cleaning and features here assume a specific meaning. What happens is that the man's head is replaced by an animal; but this is not the animal as form, it is the animal as outline, for example the trembling outline of a bird which spirals over the cleaned area, while the simulacra of face portraits, beside it, serve only as 'witness' (as in the 1976 triptych).

1.Felix Guattari has analysed these phenomena of facial disorganization: the 'features of faceness' are released and become equally well the features of the head's animality. See Felix Guattari,L'Inconscient machinique (Paris: Editions Recherches, 1979) p. 75.

From Tracy Warr (ed.) The Artist's Body, Translated by Liz Heron, Phaidon Press, London 2000, p. 197. Originally published as "Le corps, la viande et l'espirit, le devenir-animal" in Francis Bacon (Paris; Editions de la difference, 1981) p. 19-22.

Tron Reboot: Episode 1

I'm a fan of Tron, yes I am a nerd, yes I am excited for next years Tron: Legacy. This video is always good for a laugh when I need a quick break from school stuff, like right now.

"No Quiero, Triste Espíritu" de Luis Cernuda

Comparto con Uds., queridos lectores anónimos, uno de mis poemas preferidos. Para mí el poema revela una arte poética invertida del fantasma. El deseo de no volver, no recordar se opone a la naturaleza del fantasma.

Ahora estoy investigando la noción derridiana de la différance como modelo temprano de hauntology. Tal vez al fin del quarter tendré más que decir con respeto. Sólo sé que Derrida, en su búsqueda de “the otherness of philosophy” se encontró cara a cara con el fantasma.

No quiero, triste espíritu, volver
por los lugares que cruzó mi llanto,
latir secreto entre los cuerpos vivos
como yo también fui.

No quiero recordar
un instante feliz entre tormentos;
goce o pena es igual,
todo es triste al volver.

Aún va conmigo como una luz ajena
aquel destino niño,
aquellos dulces ojos juveniles,
aquella antigua herida.

No, no quisiera volver,
sino morir aún más,
arrancar una sombra,
olvidar un olvido.

Escenas de una playa llamada Balboa

Is this heaven?

Rockin SoCal in my Minivan

We're in CA now, and sometime I'll write about how this whole place is one big simulacrum, really, it's bizarre. We decided to keep our Idaho plates to save some cash and so that people would know why I was driving slower than them. We've gotten some strange looks as we get passed on the 405 or just in local traffic, I think some folks are surprised that there isn't a big potato in the front seat. For them, Idaho is a place that they once heard of in the title of a David Lynch film they didn't see, for me, it's the closest thing to home...I digress.

In honor of my minivan, I'm posting this rad video that my brother showed me. It's at once a homage to my g-ride and to my dad, because he used to rock the midi tapes and he worked with a bunch of guys like these for many years. But also, this is to inform you, anonymous CA driver, that when you pass me in your Mercedes/BMW/Lexus/Suburban/Acura, you can know that I am proud to be riding in my minivan.

Just for fun: Chaffetz on Colbert.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a District - Utah's 3rd - Jason Chaffetz
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

New Doubts Raised Over Famous [Spanish Civil] War Photo

I am reproducing this NY Times article by Larry Rohter in its entirety so you can read the whole thing. It's about the controversy surrounding Capa's famous "Falling Solider" photo from the Spanish Civil War. If you want to see the photos in a larger size, just link to the story below. There's a lot to be said here about history, photography, propaganda, memory, authenticity, art, and the list goes on. In other words, one could base their whole career researching this and similar topics. Particularly poignant is the quote by the Spanish Minister of Culture, Ángeles González-Sinde. He says “Art is always manipulation, from the moment you point a camera in one direction and not another.” However, it should be noted that he is a film director and deals mostly with fiction. Any thoughts on the subject? Does it matter if the photo was staged or not?

By LARRY ROHTER

Published: August 17, 2009

After nearly three-quarters of a century Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” picture from the Spanish Civil War remains one of the most famous images of combat ever. It is also one of the most debated, with a long string of critics claiming that the photo, of a soldier seemingly at the moment of death, was faked. Now, a new book by a Spanish researcher asserts that the picture could not have been made where, when or how Capa’s admirers and heirs have claimed.

Robert Capa/Magnum Photos

Robert Capa’s "Falling Soldier," from the Spanish Civil War has drawn both acclaim and questions over its veracity.

Robert Capa/Magnum Photos

A photo of another man from the same sequence as “The Falling Soldier.” A researcher has used the mountains to identify what he says is the picture’s correct location.

Robert Capa/Magnum Photos

Another photo from the same sequence.

Denis Doyle for The New York Times

José Manuel Susperregui, a Spanish professor, asserts that Capa staged his famous photo.

In “Shadows of Photography,” José Manuel Susperregui, a communications professor at the Universidad del País Vasco, concludes that Capa’s picture was taken not at Cerro Muriano, just north of Córdoba, but near another town, about 35 miles away. Since that location was far from the battle lines when Capa was there, Mr. Susperregui said, it means that “the ‘Falling Soldier’ photo is staged, as are all the others in the series taken on that front.”

Experts at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, where Capa’s archive is stored, said they found some aspects of Mr. Susperregui’s investigation intriguing or even convincing. But they continue to believe that the image seen in “Falling Soldier” is genuine, and caution against jumping to conclusions. “Part of what is difficult about this is that people are saying, ‘Well if it’s not here, but there, then, good God, it’s fabricated,’ ” Willis E. Hartshorn, the center’s director, said in an interview. “That’s a leap that I think needs a lot more research and a lot more study.”

Mr. Susperregui said he began his inquiry by examining the background of other photographs from the same sequence as that of the “Falling Soldier,” pictures in which a mountain range can be seen in the distance. He then e-mailed the clearest of those images to librarians and historians in towns around Córdoba, asking if they recognized the landscape, and eventually got a positive response from a community called Espejo.

“I didn’t tell anyone that this was connected with the ‘Falling Soldier’ because that subject is just so ideologically and emotionally charged,” he explained in a telephone interview from his home east of Bilbao. “But a teacher showed his class the photo I sent, and right away one of the students knew the place.”

Picking up where Mr. Susperregui left off, the Spanish press, led by El Periódico de Catalunya, a newspaper in Barcelona, recently sent reporters to Espejo. They returned with photographs in which the current skyline seems an almost perfect match with what is seen in the background of Capa’s photographs, taken in September 1936, less than two months after the Spanish Civil War began.

Cynthia Young, curator of the Robert Capa Archive at the I.C.P., said the new evidence suggesting that “Falling Soldier” was photographed in Espejo was “compelling, even persuasive.” The confusion over the site may have arisen, she added, because Capa “captioned so few of his pictures” during the trip, his first as a war photographer, and “very possibly didn’t remember” where he took the picture, probably leaving his agents and editors back in Paris to make a guess when they developed his film. No negative of “Falling Soldier” is known to exist.

Spanish historians say that though there was intense combat in Espejo in late September, no fighting occurred there early in the month, when Capa, then 22 years old, and Gerda Taro, his colleague and companion, would have passed through. Until “the end of September, there wasn’t a single shot fired here, just some aerial bombardments,” Francisco Castro, a villager who was 9 years old at the time, told El Periódico. “The militiamen promenaded through the streets and ate the best hams in town.”

An alternative explanation of the creation of “Falling Soldier,” one which the photography center finds plausible, is that Capa’s photograph, was taken “not during the heat of battle,” as Mr. Hartshorn put it, but during maneuvers, perhaps being done for Capa’s benefit, “and that there was a moment in which the exercise became real, and this is the result of that moment.” He added: “The supposition has always been that there was a sniper” who picked off the militiaman from a distance.

But Mr. Susperregui challenges that notion too, saying it “has to be entirely dismissed.” Not only were the front lines of the opposing sides too widely separated and “the aim of gunnery too inexact” to make that hypothesis feasible, he said, but “there is no documentary reference, neither written nor visual, about the use of snipers” on the Córdoba front.

The renewed debate about “Falling Soldier” coincides with the opening of an exhibition, previously shown in New York and London, of nearly 300 of Capa and Taro’s photographs and notes at the Catalan National Museum of Art in Barcelona. The wounds of the Civil War have not yet completely healed in Spain, and the country’s Socialist government has felt compelled to defend the photograph, still a symbolic image for the left, which lost the war to Gen. Francisco Franco, against accusations that it was staged.

“Art is always manipulation, from the moment you point a camera in one direction and not another,” Spain’s culture minister, the film director and screenwriter Ángeles González-Sinde, said after visiting the exposition last month. Even if the new controversy proves that the photograph is something other than what Capa and his admirers have always claimed it to be, she suggested, that does not detract from Capa’s genius.

The first sustained challenge to the authenticity of “Falling Soldier” came in the mid-1970s, in Philip Knightley’s book “The First Casualty.” But the tentative identification 20 years later of the dying militiaman as an anarchist named Federico Borrell, known to have died at Cerro Muriano on Sept. 5, 1936, seemed to quell that controversy.

Mr. Susperregui, however, visited the Cerro Muriano site and notes that it is “a wooded area, with century-old trees,” not at all like the open hillside shown in Capa’s photograph. His book also refers to an article published in 1937 in an obscure anarchist magazine as a tribute to Federico Borrell, in which a fellow combatant describes Borrell as firing “from behind a tree” when he was killed and adds that “I can still see him stretched out behind the tree that served as his barricade, with his unruly hair falling over his face and a trickle of blood dripping from his mouth.”

In 1996 Magnum Photos, the agency that Mr. Capa helped found and which was run for many years by his brother Cornell, issued a statement contending that the naming of Mr. Borrell proved beyond any doubt that the “Falling Soldier” photograph was genuine. Magnum did not respond to requests for an interview about Mr. Susperregui’s findings.

In the book Mr. Susperregui also dwells on what he regards as other contradictions in the received account. He notes, for example, that Capa spoke in various interviews of the militiaman being felled by a burst of machine-gun fire, not a sniper’s bullet, and that the photographer also offered widely varying accounts of the vantage point and technique he employed to obtain the “Falling Soldier” photograph and another, almost identical image shortly afterward.

The truth of the matter, the photography center’s Mr. Hartshorn said, is that “it’s like a detective story, the crux and core of which is that we don’t know.

“There is enormous speculation,” he added, “but there is very little to hang your hat on and say, ‘This is what we know.’ There are just too many moving parts and pieces that you can’t verify or prove.”

The Desks of the Dead

I was cleaning out my desk and I thought I'd leave a trace of what once was. For two years I saw Chris and Matt almost every week day. We took many classes together, studied like crazy men, worked on La marca hispánica together, we ate some good food together, we had great matertulias and we stayed at the office many nights together. I am privileged to count them among my friends and I hope we get to see each other again soon.

Why Nobody Should Ever Sale Anything

Watch this for context, not the whole thing, please. It's the 1986 Chicago Bears... DAAAAAAA Bears!



If you haven't wet yourself yet, watch this. I would like to see the notes from the meeting where the head of sales, fresh out of a corporate training, decided that this would unify his sales group and boost profits. He will forever be remembered as a turd.




The first guy was cool in high school. The second guy is pissed that he got suckered into doing this. The third guy is awesome. What about the rest of them?

"My experience is what I agree to attend to", or Why William James Was Right on the Money, or James 8:32

Winifred Gallagher was on Radio West today talking about her book Rapt. If you'd like to hear what she has to say, and I think most of you should want to, especially if you are my age or younger, then go here. If your older than me, and you feel drawn to technology, or you feel that your cell-phone or the Internet are necessities...you should listen too.

I've been mulling ideas similar to what Gallagher addresses for a long time. Recently, Elder David Bednar of the LDS church spoke along these same lines, experiencing things as they really are, versus the experience of the virtual. I think he was approximating many of these ideas expressed by Gallagher, though his purpose was distinct. If you'd like to read what he said, go here.

Again, there is much to say here, this could easily become a term-paper-length post...but I must attend to the thesis. The following paragraphs are some comments by Winifred Gallagher, taken from the amazon page for her book. Please read as much of the linked information as possible and listen to the broadcast, and then turn off your computer and walk away...like your David Laraway...ahhh yeahhhh.


"A wise research psychiatrist once told me that he had identified life's greatest problem: How to balance self and others, or your need for independence with your need for relationship? Since writing Rapt, I've come to believe that we now face a fundamental psychological challenge of a different sort: How to balance your need to know—for the first time in history, fed by a bottomless spring of electronic information, from e-mail to Wikipedia--with your need to be? To think your thoughts, enjoy your companions, and do your work (to say nothing of staring into a fire or gazing dreamily at the sky) without interruption from beeps, vibrations, and flashing lights? Or perhaps worse, from the nagging sense that when you're off the grid, you're somehow missing out?

Science's new understanding of attention can help shape your answers to this question, which pops up all day long in various forms. When you sit at your computer, will you focus on writing that report or aimless web browsing? At the meeting, will you attend to the speaker or to your BlackBerry? Research suggests that your choices are more consequential than you may suspect. When you zero in on a sight or sound, thought or feeling, your brain spotlights and depicts that "target," which then becomes part of the subjective mental construct that you nonetheless confidently call "reality" or "the world." In contrast, things that you ignore don't, at least with anything like the same clarity. As William James succinctly puts it, 'My experience is what I agree to attend to.'

The realization that your life—indeed, yourself--largely consists of the physical objects and mental subjects that you've focused on, from e-bay bargains to world peace, becomes even more sobering when you consider that, as the expression "pay attention" suggests, like your money, your concentration is a finite resource. How can you get the highest experiential return for this cognitive capital? By focusing on some screen or on playing your guitar? On IM-ing your old friend or joining her for a walk?

Considering the Internet's countless temptations and distractions, deciding how best to invest your time and attention when you're online is particularly challenging. Left to its own devices, your involuntary, "bottom-up" attention system asks, "What's the most obvious, compelling thing to zero in on here? That e-mail prompt? This colorful ad?" Fortunately, evolution has also equipped you with a voluntary, "top-down" attention system that poses a different question: "What do you want to focus on right now? Ordering that new novel, then checking the weather report, then getting back to work, right?" Sometimes, it's fun to just wander around online, allowing your mind to be captured by random, bottom-up distractions. In general, however, it's far more productive to focus on top-down targets you've selected to create the kind of experience you want to invite.

Along with making clear choices about what things merit your precious attention online, there are some other simple ways to protect the quality of your daily life from technological interference. Remember that your electronics are your servants, not your masters, and don't let them choose your focus for you. Abandon vain attempts to "multitask," because when you try to attend to two things at once—phoning while checking e-mail—you're simply switching rapidly between them, which takes longer and generates more errors. When you need to concentrate on an important activity, try to work for 90 minutes without interruptions, because rebooting your brain can take up to 20 minutes.

Most important, as you go about the day, bear in mind that by taking charge of your attention, you improve your experience, increase your concentration, and lift your spirits. Best of all, enjoying the rapt state of being completely absorbed, whether by a website or a sunset, a project or a person, simply makes life worth living. We cannot always be happy, but we can almost always be focused, which is as close as we can get. -Winifred Gallagher

Secrets Revealed: New Moon and the Surprise Plot Twists You Won't Read in the Book!

Not only does Edward not understand what a vegetarian is, he also has really bad vampire gas from only eating small animal's blood instead of the human blood that he needs in order to get enough protein. In this scene Bella inquires about Edwards unusually stinky vampire gas and why he always makes this "I'm concentrating" face when he lets one fly.

Mom's and women over 30 are still fantasizing about Edward Cullen though they continue to hide the Victoria's Secret catalog from their husbands.

Really? This is the guy women are getting excited about? I'm not much of a looker myself but this dude is a total douche. I called up an old friend of mine, Wesley Snipes and told him that I knew about this really wussy vampire dude that was conflicted about whether or not he wanted to be a vampire. Wesley told me he would take care of things.

Edward: Oops! I just let another one go, sorry Bella.

Bell: It's okay Edward, farting makes you like seven times more masculine than you already are.

Edward: Thanks for understanding my inner conflict. I just don't know if I want to be very masculine, this whole weak-sauce-vampire thing is really working out...I...huh, what? Nooooooooooo!

SWORDS, SLASHING BLOOD (not the vegetarian kind) AND GORE!!!

Blade: That's right sucka! Who's a vegetarian now?!

SURPRISE ENDING!!!!! HA HA AH AHA AHAHAA HA AHA HA HA AH AHHAHAHAH!!!!!!!

If you don't know who Blade is, look here.

Stephen Colbert: Keeping America Safe from Commies!

All the Names

The first chapter of my thesis addresses the notion of the dead returning to collect on some sort of symbolic debt. Zizek writes that the dead often return if "something [goes] wrong with their obsequies” or there is “a disturbance in the symbolic rite” (Looking Awry 23).



I thought of this, and many other ideas, as I read this LA Times article about an increase in the number of bodies being unclaimed because of the down economy. The above image from the story evoked, for me, passages of Jose Saramago's excellent novel All the Names. I think the photo shows a real version of what Saramago was getting at metaphorically. There are a lot of ideas intermixing in this sad news story, among them: a notion of archive that is subverted because it is made up of actual human remains, the notion of the name of the person representing their essence, the idea of the physical remains representing the essence of the deceased, the symbolic relation between the living and the memory of the dead. In a way, this is my thesis...it's only missing the fictional element and is, therefore, much more tragic. I wish I could write more, but I need to get back to chapter 2.

Fanfarlo - "Harold T. Wilkins, or How to Wait for a Very Long Time"

I have to admit, I'm very much out of the loop when it comes to current music. I'm approaching that age when I start to think that they don't make music like they used to and I don't recognize the names of any of the bands that my students listen to. Yet there are a few groups that I get really excited about listening to. They are, in no particular order: The National, Sigur Rós and Fanfarlo. Here is a decent song from a group that I hope to enjoy for years to come.

Un lugar en el mundo

I once saw an Argentine movie in my Hispanic Cinema class called Un lugar en el mundo, directed by Adolfo Aristarain. It was nominated for an Oscar but due to red tape was later revoked of its nomination. The story is about a family that lives a peaceful life on their ranch in spite of a local economic bully that wants the cooperative (to which the family belongs) to sell to a developer. I won't say more, just that the last scenes are what I remember most. One of the main characters says something like, "I can't leave. I've found my place in the world and this is where I belong". I'm eager to find my place and to stay there. I want to learn the placeways and history of the place I live, and then I don't want to leave.

A friend of mine told me that he and his family have drawn closer together since leaving Utah, the place they've lived since they were married, and moving to a place far from their extended family. While I don't know that he would call their current location "a place of their own", from what I've gathered, it has sort of fulfilled that function, even if it's a temporary thing.

When I was visiting St. Louis I felt a real peace, like I belonged there, at least for a time. There was a silence I experienced there, it was calming. There was a feeling of history and other things that were inviting. But my family and I won't be moving there.

I'm still trying to figure out why I made the decision I did, to go back to California. It's a place for me that is full of ghosts, a place that can't be my lugar en el mundo. I'm not the person I was when I left California and returning, as it always does, implies haunting. My ghosts will turn up from time to time, I won't even need to tease them out. My memories that are so connected to place will tease out the ghosts, and everywhere will be uncanny.

I was at once drawn to California and terrified by it. My feelings reminded me of what Freud calls death drive. In many ways, my decision doesn't make much sense. But maybe I need toreturn..."Acaso para exorcizar, de un a vez, los murmullos que mataron a Juan Preciado [vuevlo] a Comala" (Julieta Campos).