The Proposition

I watched The Proposition (trailer) last night at City Cinema, and, while it was an excellent movie, the thought crossed my mind about 3/4ths of the way through it to just get up and walk out. Not out of disappointment, but out of shock. This is definitely a movie where, if I was watching it at home, I would take many breaks and pauses before finishing it.

I'm not normally one to flinch at violence in movies, either. Normally I am the one least likely to be scared by a horror movie or set on edge by suspense, since I often find myself thinking about how a certain effect was done, how they made the blood or explosion look that way, rather than suspending my disbelief and thinking that the monster on the screen was actually doing that to the beautiful actress who was actually getting hurt.

But this movie occupies a different mental space. It's not the on-screen violence, so much as the idea of it. Between the dustiness and half-hearted, minimal buildings, and the open spaces that still feel cramped and claustrophobic, the very idea of the setting itself, 19th century Australia, becomes frightening.

The characters thrown into the land become twisted by it, the main villain quotes poetry, but you never know where his knowledge of it came from, you only imagine him living some remotely normal existance in Ireland before finding his way to Australia and having his humanity twisted around and warped into the monster depicted in the film.

Something I noticed while watching the movie is the skilled way music is used. A peaceful panorama will have background music filling the audio space, letting you relax and focus your mental attention on this harmless audio signal, but then the music is taken away, leaving you to face the ensuing on-screen violence with undivided attention. Sort of a reverse Clockwork Orange effect, where the music is the comfort, and taking it away primes you to be exposed to something horrible.

The other aspect of why the violence of the movie was so gripping was that it wasn't limited to the villains. The administrators were arguably just as savage in their doings as were the three brothers that they are trying to catch. Between administering punishments for the sheer sadistic pleasure of public beatings and hangings to the waging of war against the Aboriginees, it starts to look like the only difference between the good guys and the bad guys is self-awareness. The Australian outback seems to reject the presence of these European colonists like a body rejects an incompatible organ, poisoning it until it stops functioning normally and becomes toxic to everything around it. The contrast with the Aboriginees goes without any special mention, because it's so obvious that one must posess an entirely different set of cultural DNA to thrive there.

Accepting that I have Social Anxiety

Lately I've been unhappy with myself in how social life has been. I'm always on the edge of a few different social circles, never completely immersed in one in particular. I've been characterized as a "ghost" for my tendency to flit in and out of groups and gatherings. I've only very rarely felt like I was completely accepted into a group.

I'm always baffled by how people develop little catphrases and coded language, and can have an instant radar for when someone isn't using them right.

I've always found social events pretty terrifying, often at something like a formal dance I'll find myself out in the hallway hyperventilating and recovering from a panic attack from being in a crowd where everyone was moving around and I seemed to be the only one in everyone's way, not behaving according to the proscribed algorithm.

There are a few different reasons for all of this that I can think of. I'm going to spread out my thoughts about all of this over a few posts, because no one reads long posts and I don't have everything clear about what I want to say right now. but I do have to form into words a statement accepting myself being the way I am right now, and telling myself to not beat myself up over an awkward moment or time when I had to just leave some gathering or other.

The way I interact with the world is, by necessity, fundamentally different from the way most people are able to. This is unavoidable. I know people like to say "I don't notice your handicap" to me, but unfortunatly this isn't an ideal state of affairs. It's part of who I am that I can't recognize you when I pass you in the street. I've probably lost friends or potential close relationships because of some incident where they thought I was slighting them by just walking by, or not going up to them when out some place.

I'm thinking about actually digging out the white cane I have and just carrying it around, not to use but just folded up with the red tip showing as a signal, not to get out of my way, but to understand when I don't make eye contact with you or whatever.

This sort of combines with a fear of rejection and wariness of agressive or overbearing people that came from not having a good social environment in school, and I'm finding developing close friendships rather elusive.

One social misstep by me or someone else towards me that made things awkward has led me to just flee from a whole group of people and start back at square one. It's strange how it's easier to salvage a friendship out of an all-out fight where everything gets aired and exposed and dealt with than it is to overcome a misunderstanding or not meeting someone's image of you.

Anyway, I write about myself because I can't stand the idea of boring someone to death talking about myself in person, so I shouldn't do the same disservice to a bunch of blog readers.

So I think I'll go and see a movie by myself, and maybe go see a show tonight and enjoy myself because I enjoy music, and not be disappointed because I wasn't an integral part of the group socializing that will be happening.

The ‘Just World’ Fallacy

I've just now come across the name for a particularly insidious little brain parisite that causes the most frustrating logical hoop-jumping among people in order to justify their lack of concern for others, the Just World Phenomenon. From WikiPedia:

The just-world phenomenon, also called the just-world effect or just-world hypothesis, refers to the tendency for people to believe the world is "just" and so therefore people "get what they deserve."

One study gave women what appeared to be painful electric shocks while working on a difficult memory problem. Those who observed the experiment appeared to blame the victim for her fate, praised the experiment, and rated her as being less physically attractive than those who had seen her but not the experiment.

In another study, subjects were told two versions of a story about an interaction between a woman and a man. Both variations were exactly the same, except at the very end the man raped the woman in one and in the other he proposed marriage. In both conditions, subjects viewed the woman's (identical) actions as inevitably leading to the (very different) results.

Studies have shown that those who believe in a "just world" may be more likely to believe that rape victims must have behaved seductively, battered wives must have deserved their beatings, that sick people must have caused their own illness, or that the poor deserve their lot.

In this way, if something good (like a job promotion) or bad (like an injury) occurs, people attribute the occurrence to the person, not to a chance turn of events. For example, some people feel that those living on the street are homeless because they are too lazy to find a job, rather than considering alternatives such as bad luck or mental illness. Likewise, if someone invests well and is rewarded by it, most people believe that the person is smart and a good investor, instead of it being chance.

Closely related cognitive biases include hindsight bias, the illusion of control, the halo effect, self-serving bias and the fundamental attribution error. The effect could also be explained in terms of cognitive dissonance theory.

God, Karma, The Universe, The Invisible Hand, all of these are names for that little deception we commit against ourselves, that things happen for a reason and that there's no point getting worked up over it, and that we are being good people if we don't make waves and go about our own business and try not to do anything wrong ourselves.

Blaming the victim is pretty obvious and noticeable when people do it nowadays, and it usually gets called out &emdash; at least in the case of violence against women, though the tendency hasn't gone away by any stretch.

The wider phenomenon remains, unfortunately, and you have to wonder how people would cope if that little safety net separating them from the rest of humanity were taken away. If people actually took to heart the phrase "whatever you do to the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me."

To be happy in one's own self, to accept one's self and be content, to notbe caught up in desires and attachments, along with a refusal to sit by while injustices happen in the world, is the most dangerous combination to those who live off of injustice.

Memos: Rocking the MEPIS Edition

• So I'm writing this on my laptop running the latest MEPIS LiveCD Linux distribution. I'm pretty impressed so far, wireless networking and my USB mouse worked right away, no sound though, but it's a laptop and Linux has always been sketchy with Toshiba laptops. It comes with enough applications to keep a person productive in an emergency, say, landing at your grandparents' place and having to do a little work without disturbing their spyware-ridden Windows installation.
  
  I haven't experimented with storing my home directory on portable media like my iPod yet, I'm sure there's a way I just don't really need to so I'm not going to investigate too much. Thumbs up for what it is, though I'm going to stick with Windows until my next computer purchase which will certainly be a Mac.
  
  
• Did anyonee else notice how quickly the streets and sidewalks dried up after the brief torrential downpour we had? Just goes to show how hot it is here. Not used to that.
  
  
• I'm noticing how getting bored with a certain social networking website or community weblog or message board will inevitably cause you to lose contact with some of the members that you mainly stayed in touch with through a given site. What do you say in that situation? "I'm sorry, it's not you, it's MySpace"?
  
  
• I'm just noticing now that KDE's icons are still fugly. Maybe Germans just can't do design. It's like, some shmuck of a programmer was stuck with the job of doing the UI, and read somewhere that items in an icon should be at 45 degree angles to each other, so he does this fro every single one, and never breaks the rule, so you end up with an application bar that looks like it has spikes angled up to impale your mouse pointer. Sure Windows is ugly, but it's a familiar ugly, so it doesn't intrude on my sense of aesthetic fen shui quite so much anymore.
  
  
• Note to GNOME developers: Having new windows pop up in opposite corners of a screen is lazy UI programming. Go in and come up with a proper window placement algorithm that takes more than 3 seconds to design, fercrissakes. Programmers are the laziest people onearth, sometimes.
  
  
• OK, this Linux business is getting on my nerves now, and these little fish swimming aroundin a task tray program while I have no sound aren't helping. Time to reboot. If this CD is ever warmed by the heat of a CD-ROM drive ever again I'll be slightly surprised.
  

Charlottetown's Live Music Scene

This is a reply I wrote to someone who posted a message complaining about a lack of diversity in Charlottetown's live muxic scene.

The original thread is here. This is the reply I posted:

It could definitely be a lot worse. I lived in Fredericton for years and it was basically either you learned to like jam bnads or you went without live music.

And yeah, I've noticed that I've been going out during the week and staying in on the weekends because most of the bands that are halfway interesting are playing here during the week, but if a touring band is coming through this part of the country they're going to want to be in Halifax or Saint John on Friday and Saturday and if they come here to play an extra night during the week I'nm going to be there, because that's bloody lucky of us to get that.

Frankly a city as small as Charlottetown is and as isolated as it is really shouldn't be getting the acts it does.

And don't fool yourslef, the majority of the bands playing bars in Halifax aren't cutting-edge underground punk acts, Hali also has its share of workaday cover acts for the 35+ crowd, it's just less likely to run into that tehre because there are more bars period and things are less mashed together.

I'm not without my complaints about the music scene here, but new bands not getting a chance to play gigs isn't one of them.

Memos: All Patched Up With Empty Words

• Well, I don't know how many of you know all of this, but the Shoreline festival, which I missed this year, had its last day cancelled, with none of the organizers in sight. Huge shitstorm ensues on the Internets, naturally. Then the organizer, who was nowhere to be found on teh day of the cancellation, comes on Mainstreet and gives vague explanation about weather and safety and something about possible refunds, but no details and no promises and nothing concrete. Sounds, frankly, like a boss I used to have. The kind of talker who can string you along forever, who'll lie ot your face, know you know he's lying, and still do it, because calling him on it, and does it anyway. The personaltiy type that fails at something, so naturally tries to do something even bigger next time around. It's all very poisonous.
  
  That said, I'll take back the comparison if people actually get a third of their ticket price back.
  
  
• A couple of blog posts of people who were at the show: Martha and Aimee. Music festivals are such fun times, makes me wish I had gone anyway jsut for the first two days of muddy, rainy chaos. Maybe I'll make some proper plans to hit up Evolve in August.
  
  
• I'm making quite a lot of progress using EarMaster. I am much better at pinpointing individual notes than chords. It doesn't help that the MIDI chord that the program plays plays all the notes exactly at the same time with no millisecond delay to possibly hear the single notes. So you really have to learn the 'flavour' of each chord or even the simple combinations of 2 or 3 notes. Very interesting, this kind of drilling is something I should have been doing long ago, but it's neat to have a proper tool for it.
  
  
• Dinosaur Jr. are playing a date in Halifax in September. God I'm excited. September will be officiall my second annual 90s revival month, after seeing Pearl Jam twice and KMFDM last Fall. Matt Good and Melissa Auf Der Maur's show the year before getss honourable can-con mention as year 0. At this rate the Smashing Pumpkins will be playing a reunion show in my back yard in 2 years.
  

OK, I'm off to trivia, even though I have no idea if anyone else is actually going to show up. That's OK, I wouldn't mind testing my knowledge against the rest of the room.

Another Quiz

Stolen from Jaymi, who rules.

You Are Rain

You can be warm and sexy. Or cold and unwelcoming. Either way, you slowly bring out the beauty around you. You are best known for: your touch Your dominant state: changing

Juan Cole: War on Lebanon Planned for at least a Year

I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it that Israel aren't acting with a plan to rescue two captured soldiers. The way they went about going after Lebanon's infrastructure, including ports in the North, and now Christian-run television stations who were broadcasting inconvenient imaes, is a sure enough sign that this was planned.

Juan Cole now lays out the bloody details: Link.

Matthew Kalman reveals that Israel's wideranging assault on Lebanon has been planned in a general way for years, and a specific plan has been in the works for over a year. The "Three Week War" was shown to think tanks and officials last year on powerpoint by a senior Israeli army officer:

"More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail."

The Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the summer, in part because they know that European and American universities will be the primary nodes of popular opposition, and the universities are out in the summer. This war has nothing to do with captured Israeli soldiers. It is a long-planned war to increase Israel's ascendency over Hizbullah and its patrons.

I'm mostly posting this as a lure to get you to read Cole's blog every day. He's been the best source, along with Robert Fisk and a few others, for unshaded news from the Middle East.

Cole is now facing a wide-ranging right-wing smear campaign, which was successful in blocking him from getting a position at Yale university.

Cole is one of my personal heroes, not just for his political blogging, but for a history of standing up for principle in the face of entrenched, corrupt power structures. This is nothing new for him, and he's handling his anklebiting opponents with the kind of fierce grace I can't get enough of in proper, angry prose.

Homage to Catalonia

“I believe that libels and press--campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist cause.”

Reading Homage to Catalonia was an incredible eye-opener for me and my understanding of the Spanish Civil War. I haven't read any proper historical text of the war, the most detail I have gotten was from novels and in the biography of Dr. Norman Bethune, who developed a mobile blood transfusion station while helping the Communists.

Most of the accounts of the war that we have seen were sympathetic to the Communist faction of the Government side in the struggle against Franco's revolution. The divided character of the government forces, made up of rival leftist political parties and the government, was not in the interest of the narrative of the time, of a struggle against encroaching fascism, that the UK and France and the U.S.S.R. wished to be accepted.

The most striking part of the dynamic of the relationship between the U.S.S.R.-backed Communists and the native-born anarchist and Marxist resistance movements which originally gought back Franco's attack was that the Communists were the most stridently counter-revolutionary force in Spain, directly on the side of the government. The speed that a revolutionary force becomes a force for the status quo is astounding. The system of military alliances in Europe meant that Stalin's U.S.S.R. was better off with a strong, capitalist Western Europe than a chaotic one in the midst of revolutionary workers' uprisings. Orwell, by chance of where he landed when he arrived in Spain, ended up being one of the few foreign witnesses to the conflict between revolutionary and communist forces, as well as having seen what real worker revolution looked like in the Andalusian region of Spain, where even ccommon forms of speech such as "senor" and "usted" fell into disuse in favour of genuine, non-ironic use of "comrade" among all previously divided classes.

In fact, watching the way the communists used propaganda and their channels to foreign press to control the narrative of the war is, for me, an even more compelling illustration of the power of information than 1984 was. Not only because it was real and not a science-fiction novel, but also because of the more interesting narrative of trench-warfare that the historical account is wrapped in, and his expression of actual fleeting hope at the site of what a real worker's revolution might look like, only to acknowledge the ultimate futility of the dream against entrenched greed and human nature.

Authors who have fought in real wars seem to be the most capable of exploring the darkest capabilities of humans in power that I've read.

I can't do the looming warning Orwell gives in Homage to Catalonia justice here, go read it. It's a short enough read that you can polish it off in a couple of hours, but as a foreshadowing of Orwell's vision of the power of information control, it's very chilling.

Amusing Myself

Well, I'm not going to Shoreline this year. Rides kept falling through and it just became too last minute. I've been feeling a little isolated and alone in a crowd lately, having that feeling multiplied and stretched over 4 days might not have been the best situation to put myself in right now, anyway.

Maybe I'll do something constructive this weekend, like seriously get into this ear training software that I just bought, EarMaster Pro, as a way to make up for the massive amounts of self-destructiveness I'm missing out on.

I've been really exasperated about the news lately. But even more with myself when I noticed that more Iraqi civilians died yesterday than the total number of deaths in Israel and Lebanon so far due to this conflict. But Iraq is old news, apparently, and reporters can still safely walk the streets in Haifa and Beirut, and so even my attention was grabbed by what's exciting and new. There's something very very wrong happening in the world right now, and it's brought on by the industrial nations, even as they looked so dazed at the G8 conference a week ago.

I'm currently reading, basically in one sitting, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, recounting his service at the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. Bet they never mentioned this part of his life when you read 1984 in Grade 12, did they? I may or may not write a longer post about it, I don't think I have any serious idea that I could contribute anything new by writing about it, so I'l ljust tell you to go read it. It's legal to find it online and read it in Canada, because the copyright term of it, and the rest of Orwell's work, has expired.

Don't Play With It At Work

Someone was using his Blackberry on the toilet today. I was standing at the urinal and all I could hear from the stall was "click click beep.. click click beep".

I made sure to finish up and leave before they came out so I wouldn't lose any and all respect for whoever it was.

Guns, Germs and Steel

Well, that was quick. I finished the rest of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies this afternoon. Actually the whole book was a rather quick read, not at all like a more academic history text full of necessary-to-read footnotes and assumed context.

Essentially what the book lays out is the idea that while no race or ethnic group can be said to be inherently superior to another, let alone that racial characteristics might explain why Eurasian societies have come to dominate the world stage, rather that a series of environmental factors came together to create a positive feedback loop that encouraged adoption and evolution of an agrarian and city-state-based society over a hunter-gatherer one.

The key assertions of the book are:

Presence of large numbers of suitable plant species for farming - while every continent (Diamond refers to Eurasia & Northern Africa as a single continent, for the purposes of historical interaction, with the other continents being sub-Saharan Africa, Australia & New Guinea and the Americas), Eurasia, specifically ancient Iraq, referred to as the 'fertile crescent', contained a larger number of plant species, such as wheat and olives, that were able to be domesticated almost by accident, with gathered seeds cast away then taking root and growing new plants, making it fairly obvious to ancient people that this process could be taken advantage of. And with the ability to domesticate one species of plant fairly easily, a sedentary lifestyle was possible, thus giving more time and opportunity to experiment with more difficult-to-cultivate plant species.

Along with a variety of domesticable plants, Eurasia, specifically the Fertile Crescent region, is also home to the five most important large domesticated animal species, the cow, horse, pig, goat and sheep. By contrast, the Americans and Australia had no analogous megafauna, save for the Llama, but it was never brought out of its native region of the Andes, and was never kept in large numbers. Having cows and horses around allowed Eurasian peoples to plough fields and thus increase agricultural productivity.

The rise of city-states: The most important consequence of sedentary lifestyles and increased food production of agricultural societies was the increased population density that they allowed. This gives rise to two important advantages agricultural societies have over hunter-gatherer societies, the ability to wage war for longer durations, and as a breeding ground for infectious diseases that jumped from domesticated animals to their human keepers, who would eventually develop a resistance to them, but which was not shared by hunter-gatherer societies that they might come in contact with. This is how Desoto came across entire towns devoid of people in the Mississippi delta, smallpox had gotten there a couple of years before his exploration party.

Agricultural societies can fit more people in an area of land, many hundreds of people per squire kilometer compared with about 1 person per square kilometer for hunter-gatherer societies, and can grow at much faster rates. The average gap between children for hunter-gatherer societies was about 4 years, since a mother could only realistically carry one baby around with her when moving camp, but in agrarian societies the gap is only about 2 years between children. And with growth comes the need for territorial expansion, and thus the historical muscling out of neighbouring societies when encroached upon.

Geography and Communication - Eurasia differs from the other continents not only for being larger and having a wider variety of domesticable plants and animals, but also for being laid out in a relatively East-West orientation, whereas Africa and especially the Americas are very much oriented in a North-South fashion. In the Americas, your neighbours a few hundred miles to the North or South live in a markedly different climate and environment than you probably do, which makes growing season, soil characteristics and climate different enough to hamper the spread of crop technology from one area to the next. Mexican corn could not be easily transported further north to the Appalachian region and grown there, for example. This is why the native American societies that did develop some form of agriculture did it relatively independently.

The geographical layout of Eurasia permitted more solid communication and trade links between East and West, where natural barriers existed in the Americas, like the jungles of Panama and deserts of Northern Mexico which effectively isolated the Aztec civilization from the Incas to the South and the Mississippi Delta population to the North, or in Africa where North Africa was cut off from the rest of the continent by the Sahara desert.

The open communication links from East to West in Eurasia meant that interactions between neighbouring societies created a cross-pollination of technologies and ideas, and competition drove the development of newer and more efficient means of producing food. Diamond's central thesis is that this communication and interaction is what allowed talented and inventive members of Eurasian societies to fully realize their potential for discovering new technologies, while farmers produced the food that allowed the inventors to have such specialized pursuits.

What I found the book lacked was an exploration of the cyclical rise and fall of city-states based on their resource consumption patterns. Most notably, why is the "fertile crescent" now a desert? He refers to the ancient area now known as Iraq as the "fertile crescent" dozens of times throughout the text without tackling this question. In fact, the resource consumption and deforestation that goes along with growth in population and increasing agricultural production isn't explored at all. Nor is the unsustainability of most of the historically significant Eurasian empires that grew to dominate their own time periods. Rather, the progress of Eurasian societies was largely treated as a steady march forward, with the other societies around the world mostly staying as they are until they come in contact with Eurasian expansion and are either subsumed or exterminated.

The main assertions of this book were covered in a less complete, but more environmentally-focused way in Thom Hartmann's book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which I found to be a much more compelling read. Diamond's book was more of a deliberate and systematic laying out of the factors behind how and why the world's civilizations developed as they did, while Hartmann's book brings it into the context of how the mindset created by this dominating and ever resource-hungry culture is creating our current environmental problems.

I'll write a longer piece, perhaps more than one post, about Hartmann's book soon, I want to give it a proper treatment since it is a more compelling and eye-opening book than Diamond's basic treatment of history.

I still recommend this book, though, as a good foundational history of how the world came to look the way it does, and for the tidbits of information about the development of the first writing systems and early agricultural technologies. Part of why I love reading non-fiction is that even if you don't end up being overly compelled by the text, the information you gain from reading it is still useful and interesting to carry around later, as long as it's accurate and well-researched, which Diamond's book is.
Technorati Tags: Books, Book+Reviews, Jared+Diamond, History, Sociology

Memos: Full-sized posts are for overachievers

• Michael Schumacher's won the last couple of Formula One races, in the United States and in France, with the season leader, Fernando Alonso, finshing second today. It looks like a definite Ferrari resurgence for the last part of the season, but because of how the points system works, Schumacher will need Alonso to finish out of the points a couple of times to have a good chance of winning the championship. This is ironic because the points system was changed from 10-6-4-3-2-1 to 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 to prevent Michael Schumacher from running away with the title too early.
  
  
• Was up ridiculously early today, partly because I didn't pay attention to what time it was, and just saw that it was light out so I got up and walked the dog and made a cup of tea and had a lovely, silent morning. I didn't realize that it was probably only 05:30 or so until I turned on Speed TV and instead of the F1 race, there were dinky little GP2 cars zipping around the Magny Cours track. Definitely beats stumbling out of bed and trying to wake up in the shower and having to get ready for work. Weekends rule.
  
  
• I'm about 2/3rs of the way through reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, where he tries to explain the path of human civilization and the factors that led to the current balance of wealth and power in the world. I'll write a full review when I've finished, but so far it's pretty well-written and I can't disagree with his points. He doesn't say much that I didn't already know from some source or another, about the birth of farming and language, and he hasn't dealt much with historical cycles, such as the rise and fall of empires, only treating history as a continuous progression by Indo-Europeans with China developing more or less in parallel. Perhaps this will come later. So far I'd say it's worth the read if you come across it.
  
  
• Even though I live on an island ringed with beaches, I've spent more time on the beach in Mexico than I have here. This should change. Who's got a car?
  
  
• I wonder how many Americans and other nutjobs and douchebags who are getting all lathered up about the happenings in the Middle East right now know just how many Christians are getting killed in Lebanon right now. Probably not many. CNN certainly hasn't mentioned it that I've heard. It'd muddle up the us vs. them narrative too much.
  
  
• Leo's Thai Palace is going to be moving to Kent St. across from Mojo's Pizza. They'll have more room, but won't be close to my house anymore. Go and try the Panang Pork. God damn it's good, and quite spicy if you ask for it that way. One order easily feeds 2 people.
  
  
• In other restaurant news, I've heard that the very best shawarma in town is not at one of the usual suspects, but actually out in the Charlottetown Mall food court, at a place normally known for big, greasy hamburgers. I shall have to investigate. I'd still trade every restaurant-made shawarma in town for one guy with a cart on the street selling them like in Ottawa, though. He could follow me around the way the hot dog salesman follows Homer to funerals and operating rooms.
  

Memos: Musical Moments and Meanderings Edition

• Saw The Jimmy Swift Band last night. It was the smallest venue I have ever seen them in. Usually I've seen them at the Chestnut or the Social Club in Fredericton, and last year they were on the stage at shoreline in front of a couple of thousand people. So having them on the little stage at Hunter's was quite a nice little treat. They've also improved, in my opinion, since their hard-charging maritime touring days in the heyday of the enigmaticjam band days of 2002. They no longer feel the need to stretch out every song, people have gotten over the "OMG that bit of soloing had notes from STAR WARS in it!!" imaturity, and they've play their songs as a more typical rock band would, edging closer to a Pearl Jam type aesthetic, where jamming it up in the middle of one or two songs is a treat rather than the core of the live show. The jamming is just as good, it just doesn't get tedious. I also still adore Craig Mercer's voice. Also, hippie dancing, a.k.a. swaying, is still fun even when you're all grown up and you had to change out of your suit and tie to go to a show.
  
  
• My new friend, Jon, boyfriend of a co-worker, played a few songs at open mic night at Baba's on wednesday. I have to say I quite liked them. They were all light-hearted and humourous, one song called "Skirts in the Summer" that gave off a pretty resonant Pixies vibe, a song about his dog Ralph that was very bouncy and wouldn't be out of place in a good childrens' singer's act, and a love song that musically actually sounded a lot like Tenacious D, which is not a jab in any way, since aside from their lyrics, "the D" are very adept at making music.
  
  
• The new radio stations that just launched on the island don't do much for me at all. The rock station is basically hoping people will stop listening to Big Dog if they do the exact same thing as them but have island commercials. And Ocean is so innocuously targeted at people who only want to hear songs they already know that I don't imagine they'll know how to introduce new artists to their playlist. I would be a little less ticked at the new stations if I still had my CHTN to fall back on, but they took that away from me in the bargain, so I'm left with CBC and my iPod. If only CBC Radio 3 was a broadcast station.
  
  
• last.fm had a site relaunch today. My morning was music-less because their homepage only showed a teaser message, "get ready for operation depth charge". Around noon the site relaunched, the big improvement seems to be more instantly-updated information about what you and your contacts have been listening to. There's a nifty widget that throws together the last bunch of songs anyone on your contact list has listened to all in one list. It also looks like it will generate new recommendations more often than just once a week. Of course, just as I was telling people about the new site it promptly crashed and wouldn't load for most of the afternoon. Load testing - learn to love it, kids.
  
  
• Thinking about buying a new guitar. I'd like something with a little warmer tone than my old Fender Squire which I basically decided to keep until I got serious about playing music in a band or somesuch and then I'd get something better. But since that never really happened, I now have more disposable income so I can just go ahead and do it only because I want to and for no other reason.
  
  
• Still debating on going to Shoreline this year or not. A lot of what made last year so great, having a tight-knit crew to camp with, the elation of escaping a shitty job, becoming one with the cosmos and humanity, won't be a part of it this year if I did go. If someone is going and has an extra spot in their car, though, let me know and I could be pretty easily swayed. Also, Sabrina, can I borrow your tent if I do decide to go? I'd take Pants' but a 5 man tent is a bit much for probably just me. The lineup this year includes De La Soul and Xavier Rudd, and you can have tons of fun at a music festival if you decide to look for it.
  
  
• Go listen to Okkervil River. Now.
  

Insomniac Wikipedia Tidbits

A few pieces of clearly useful knowledge I now know thanks to my inability to sleep like a normal person.

• Moose on road warning signs in Newfoundland are sort of hilarious.
• Conan O'Brien is not a fan of Sweden.
  
• The Land of Nod from Genesis was not a geographical place. Rather, 'nod' meant to wander, but 'land of wandering' was a mistranslation in the King James Bible, instead Cain was merely banished to wander.
• After flour and water and salt, Play Doh contains Kerosene.
• Sketch-22 has its own Wikipedia entry. Weird.
• Saint John has the highest concentration of industrial activity on the East Coast of North America north of New York.
• Surf Music was considered a separate form of music from rock'n'roll back in the time of the Beach Boys, and was only subsumed later on when rock came to be more of a universal term. Before that there was a surf vs. rock split in California that was similar to the mods vs. rockers split in England.
• GEOS for the Commodore 64 fit a colour graphical user interface operating system into 64k of RAM. Amazing.
• The building toy Construx was discontinued in 1988. This makes me sad that I gave all mine away.
  

A Day Without Time

Lately I've been examining the causes of unnecessary stress and unhappiness in my life and doing what I can to minimize or avoid them. Obvious things like not getting involved with people who are self-absorbed or overly cynical, not bringing up old injustices or slights if they're in the past, and trying to detach from attacchment and desire for things that aren't core to my wellbeing or happiness.

One of the things I've always felt the most stress about is time. We always think of time as a constant drumbeat that never speeds up or slows down, that it is the one thing we have no control over. We observe the world through our senses, as we process our perception of the world, we learn to fine-tune our attention, to filter out distracting or unhelpful sensory input. If we can tune out street noise and focus our vision away from unpleasant things, why can't we affect how we perceive time as well?

So I've been trying an experiment at work, since I always found myself thinking about what time of day it was, wondering why things were taking so long, wondering if I should start something even if it's almost lunch time, to try and put these thoughts out of my mind the first thing I've been doing when I sit down at my desk is to take off my watch and put it in my pocket. Then I set my computer to hide the clock in the corner of the screen and just sat down and started working.

Now, perhaps in the same way as our perceptions control our thoughts, perhaps our expectations will shape our experiences, but I've been amazed how noticeably more smoothly my days have been going. If I feel like a coffee, I'll go get one, if I don't then I won't inturrupt my thoughts just because it's coffee time. I've gotten just as much done in the last half hour of Friday afternoon as I have at any other time of the day.

But most importantly, my mind isn't constantly worried about what time it is. My choosing to not perceive time has loosened its grip on my consciousness.

On a fundamental level, biologically, our brains do not operate on a set clock the way computers do. We can experience an entire dream in less than two minutes, and the split second of a car accident can seem like an eternity. When we sleep, an entire night simply slips by unnoticed. Clearly, imposing an external measure of time on our brains is a totally unnecessary constraint on how it's capable of working.

Our heart rate speeds up or slows down as our body needs it to, we don't run to the beat of a ticking stop watch, we control our pace by listening to the signals that our body gives us. Why don't we listen to our brains the same way we listen to our bodies when doing physical tasks?

The amount of worry and stress we put on ourselves by sleeping with a digital alarm clock staring us in the face should tell us that perhaps working with a clock on your wrist and on your computer screen is also going to be harmful.

Imagine a great writer sitting at his or her typewriter trying to pour out the spirit of his inspiration with a little digital clock Protruding onto the page out of the top of the typewriter. The absurdity of such a superfluous torture in this context should tell us a thing or two.

Pet Peeve

This is a public service announcement:

If you say “howareya’” as if it were a single word, and say it in a way that makes it clear you don’t care in the least how the person you are addressing is actually doing, you are probably an asshole.

That is all.

Edit: Moe puts it very well in comments:

i think i know what you mean maybe. maybe not exactly the speed in which it's said, but the speed in the whole encounter.
it really pisses me off when people pose that question, and then just keep plowing through not waiting for a response.
don't ask me a question if you don't want the answer please.

# Posted by moe : 9:49 PM

What Colour is Your Aura? Quiz

Stolen from Circe

Your Aura is Violet

Idealistic and thoughtful, you have the mind and ideas to change the world. And you have the charisma of a great leader, even if you don't always use it! The purpose of your life: saying truths that other people dare not say Famous purples include: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony Careers for you to try: Political Activist, Inventor, Life Coach

Nimue

Got to hold Sabrina's niece, Nimue, for the first time last night. She's 3 weeks old, and I'm pretty sure I've never held a baby that young before. This is the first baby that a friend of mine has had while we were close together enough to visit. There really is an instincual tendency in mammals to find all babies cute, evven when they burp and cry and do all the disgusting things living creatures do.

Humming to her and her feeling the vibrations of my voice through my chest and arms was one of those profound, small moments that I talked about yesterday. When I felt her react to my voice and stop crying so much and finally pay attention to her pacifier it wsa probably the closest I've felt to another human being of any age in a very long time.

Dreaming Beautiful Music

I just woke up from a dream, where I was somehow dropped into the setting and plot of a television drama series where relationships build up and fall apart like clockwork, where everyone is beautiful, where style is subconscious, in short, exactly where I would be most uncomfortable.

But at the end it had a scene where a singer performed what had to be the most beautiful and touching song of hope and pain ever composed. I can only remember one piece of the lyrics, and the sounds of the backing instruments, strings played perfectly in synch with the movement of the aging singer's nodding head. The singer, filled with pain like Tom Waits but young and somehow naievely hopeful, holding his guitar like it was the only thing he could touch that would respond to him, and fearing to ever lose it, holds it like a dying friend, so gently that it feels like love, but with the ghost of firmness and desperation lurking behind the the hands and arms.

His eyes are closed, or looking up towards the ceiling and welling with tears. As if by perfect Jonathan Demme direction I see the necks and tips of bows of violins moving along, not as separate instruments played by other people, but as a projection of the sound coming from the singer's aching, longing heart. In a movie with too much flash they would be holographic images springing directly from beams of light.

There is only available light streaming in in irregular waves from the window to a nighttime city.
The pained love song has been done so many times, only because every man who attempted it, from Sam Cooke's brilliance to James Blunt's questionable attempts, has been becauuse we all know we shouldn't attach ourselves to something that will hurt us the way these human entanglements do, but we continue on because to stop would mean to die to the only part of life that really is meaningful, not our considered and refined intellectual assessments, but our unblinking and unavoidable self-knowledge of feelings and emptiness, that compel us to form true connections to others.

As the singer goes into the chorus, singing "I'm not strong enough to love you..", afraid of what will happen, your heart sinks in time to the descending melody. You feel sad, but more deeply than your sadness, you feel that centered and strong feeling of a bowling ball lowering through you to plant you firmly to the ground that you get when you meditate. Self accceptance is willingness to accept pain and loss and realize that it's just another sign that we are conected to others, the most affirming idea there is.

The melody is in my head, but I'm too scared to go over to my guitar and try and reproduce it. I'm not good enough. I am not a songwriter. I can only pluck out the paths blazed by real songwriters, who did the hard work of cutting through the jungle of notes and tones and left a path behind to follow.

And the words are there, but I seem to be only able to talk about them, I'm not brave enough to present them in so bare a form as a set of 4 line verses that tells a story in a way that makes people want to hear it over and over.

What I'm afraid is that if I don't produce this dreamed-about perfect song, that what I do create will not be worth anyone else's time. I'm afraid of presenting the small stories to the world and letting the meaning arise from them in combination, uncontrolled, instead of trying to produce the final meaning myself.

The most beautiful poetry is written about the smallest of objects and the thinnest slices of existence. Not the life of rising hopes and confronting rejection that we all live, but a single moment from a single round on that journey when the force of it all hits us in full.

Lewis Black - Nothing Sacred

Remind me to never read autobiographies by people who have just become famous in the last few years.

All I caan say about Lewis Black's book, Nothing Sacred, is that it doesn't make me think any less of him as a comic. But it definitely cements his place as a comic and not a comedian. Yes there's a difference, which may reside solely in my own head, but a comedian is someone who's material is humourous in itself, and can be read on a page and still be funny. A comic relies on his performance abilities to draw laughs. The very best stand up artists combined elements of both, like Bill Hicks' much copied sound effects combined with his insightful social commentary.

Lewis black has built an entire career out of his delivery, but as it turns out, the thoughts and insights he has are entirely predictable. He's just really good at putting a voice to your internal crankiness about the weather or government that you think they deserve.

So the humour content in the book is quite a disappointment. Unfortunately the life story part is also pretty sorely lacking. Lewis Black's life just isn't that interesting, at least not the part he decided to write about. Much better accounts have been written about peoples' boring office jobs, their first LSD trips and moving away to college. Basically switch the place names around and you've got the life story of every reasonably intelligent American boy luckily enough to be squarely middle class but not too comfortablely so.

The narrative ends just as things might have conceiveably gotten interesting, after he abandoned an ill-fated theatre troupe and before he pursued stand-up comedy as a career. Yes, that's write, a famous stand-up comic writes an autobioography and neglects to include a single chapter of his real road to fame and success.

This is why 'fresh' autobiographies are often so bad. That part of his life probably isn't something he's fully digested and extracted meaning and significance and symbolism from yet. As of right now they're still jsut a bunch of stuff that happened, but haven't yet been turned over enough times in the subconscious to extract a little pill-sized life lesson from yet. So instead we get half-assedly told stories about student activism and his mother, the substitute teacher with such a famously sharp wit that she could stop a junior high class in its tracks, a story he told without mentioning, or even making up, a single thing she might have said that was so famously sharp.

This is just bad writing, and the only parts I chuckled at were recycled in whole chunks from his act, so I was mostly remembering how funny it was when he actually was up on stage saying them for the first time.

I'm afraid this is just plain bad writing, and a huge disappointment. But a good secondary lesson can be taken away from Black's example, that it's not so much what you have to say but how you say it that grabs people's attention and sparks their imagination.

A Front Door, A Back Door, and a Royal Tandoor