Happy Thanksgiving:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAOQtp-3b48

Cheers

Step one...

Gradually, this e-Life is becoming extremely drab, the spiritual equivalent of living in some horrid 1960s tenement with low ceilings and scratched formica kitchen surfaces. I wonder what I am doing in it after about 15 minutes. Sure, I adore what you can find on U-Tube -- provided you don't read the mostly arrogant comments by people who would otherwise be doing time at a state institution to protect them from themselves. But there is so much that is perfectly bogus, especially relationships. The sheer narcissism of the Web... I even wonder, who would be interested in this crap that I am writing. Has it received a single visit since I started? Who knows, who cares? I say this quite frankly. It's the posterity thing, a private little time capsule you hope might survive your own demise.

I have had a number of thoughts on the subject since I began inspecting the Web and adding comments here and there. It is a depressing place. I would wish that people would be more social in their immediate suroundings, but there is so much opportunism, somehow the greed-generation is really revealing itself to be a disaster.

I am slowly going to pull out from all those networking sites that serve no real purpose other than fulfill some voyeuristic vision. I'll be cancelling accounts here and there, once I get a URL going. It may take some time.

Two interesting things: This weekend, I found a few exciting recordings of music by Frederic Rzewski, an American composer from, if I recall correctly, Westfield, Massachusetts. I lived in nearby Amherst for 5 years and probably should have used the opportunity to meet him and maybe interview him. I knew the "People United Will Never Be Defeated" variations for piano and was always flabbergasted by their breadth. Perhaps the best way to learn the history of music is to listen to this almost endless work. So this weekend, I found some clips of his Winsboro Cotton Mill Blues: It's modern music used for an incredibly pictorial purpose. And it is in the minimalist tradition, I guess. Of the four recordings (by Arciuli, Ferguson, Wright and van Raat), it is the van Raat I think I prefer. There is something icy in his performance, the dehumanising quality of a cotton mill roaring away is also all the more potent for the camera's poking around inside the Steinway. Best without the image... And kudos to the other three, the Arciuli is the most elegant, Ferguson and Wright are passionate in their approach, Ferguson has the millworkers really hammering out the cotton.... Arciuli: Perhaps a cotton mill in Italy somewhere, with some nice olives and cheese during the break and a little siesta... No, it's not that elegant, it is robust and dark, too... but listen to Arciuli's Beethoven Sonata # 32... it is a very perky interpretation of one of my favorite pieces of piano music.

Here's the Rewski.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJbROXEiwjY

The second little item that caught my eye is an event in Georgia (Caucasus) ... apparently someone took a potshot at Saakashvili.... I am posting (for posterity, before I shut down the MySpace site), my comment on the events of August there... I have made a few corrections, spelling and such...

Monday, August 11, 2008

The war in South Ossetia is confusing. Somehow for the
past 10 years it seems no one even mentioned the place, so it comes off really
sounding like something out of Pushkin, with brave hussars involved in duels of the favors of some genteel damsels. But there it is in the news, large as
life. I've been going through the pics and the reports. As usual, it's a case of
a few men throwing their useless and paranoid weight around, while most people
have to suffer, especially the average families. Children, moms, old people,
farmers eking out a living, the poor...

Sound familiar?

It is the story of wars the world round and through time. I can't quite figure out why the Georgian prez, Saakashvili, wants that dumpy little town so badly that he has to destroy it. Maybe if he should do some bulldozing on a construction site on weekends, that would satisfy his visceral need to rearrange the landscape. Does he believe, or does any Georgian or Russian or American for that matter, believe they are any better than, say, a South Ossetian, an Abkhaz, a Mingrelian, a Gagauz, an Uzbekh, an
Iraqi? If so, they are laboring under a severe delusion.

When we rot by the side of the road with half a face missing and legs turned into pink mist, it makes no effing difference. The worms and wasps don't care. So it would be really nice if people, chiefly men, could stop making life miserable for everyone else.

A constructive thought for Saakashvili: Dump S. Ossetia ASAP, you don't want a
budding democracy burdened down by some cantankerous people who want
independence. If they want to be beholden to Russia, then Go In Peace... That
was the great lesson from Vaclav Havel.... I remember traveling to Slovakia, in 1991:
whenever you spoke to people, they blamed the country's economic troubles on
everyone, from the Czechs and Hungarian, to the Roma (Gypsies), the Jews, the
Poles, the Russians, etc.... Only Slovaks were holy and pure. I think the Czechs are far better off on their own and they should thank Havel loudly and every day for having let the Slovak side of what was once Czechoslovakia sail into the sunset to do its own thing. "

Off my perch

Something is wrong.... I listened to to the following speech by Pres-Elect Obama.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd8f9Zqap6U

and realized that I, like many Americans and other English-speakers, know what PTSD is even without having endured Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam or other traumatic incidents....

Here is what happened... My inner eye kept seeing shoulders pivoting ever so slightly in an anti-clockwise movement. I saw the right arm resting on the lectern the way guys do when they are squeezing in between other guys at crowded bars. I felt slight nausea as I saw Obama's face morph into the Bush smirk -- the one he uses when he is about to shaft that planet... again.... I saw his eyes shifting to the right, questioning his Mysterious Creator (Rove, perhaps?) qwhether his lying was coming across credibly....

And I was about to throw my expensive acer screen somewhere in the general direction of the window screaming "Nooooooooooo!" But I caught myself in time as I realized this was Barack Obama, he was sitting in his chair looking confidently at the camera and .... and what?

He was speaking in coherent sentences. He wasn't smiling while announcing some disaster... He was just giving the skinny on what was happening, the G20 getting together for a nice meal and some hopefully productive chatter (though I personally suspect a public colonoscopy).

Good start.

Relax, folks, we can actually listen to this man without cringing. It's been a long time.

The continuing trashiness....

Truthiness, trashiness, bold and brummagem pronunciamentoes from South Carolina priests...

Anyone who thinks that the election of Barack Obama has taken care of racism and bigotry in the USA -- and in the world, non e vero, Sr. Berlusconi? -- is doing him/herself a colonoscopy.

Let us not confuse being there at the start and reaching the finish line.

I am thankful not to have TV. Having to see the female gasbag from Alaska around dinner time would surely make me anorexic. I found this in the New York Times, probably others have as well...

"What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”" It's a commentary by Dick Cavett

http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/the-wild-wordsmith-of-wasilla/?em

Enjoy...

World War One was hailed as the War to end all Wars, and it should have been thus. Instead, we are still somehow crying over the dead and being mildly romantic about "heroes" and such. The truth is still hardly being told, because we like it that way, we like to be lied to, since we do it to ourselves on a permanent basis. On this day, we should be pulling out our Lyn McDonald books, switching off the telephone and curling up in a corner for some difficult reading... McDonald wrote about the war from the soldier's standpoint, and from the vantage point of close observers of the tragedy unfolding, the nurses who cared for the wounded and dying, for example. Read The Roses of No Man's Land on an empty stomach.

World War One was the epitome of war: The rich and powerful fighting among themselves. On the battlefields, the soldiers and lower officers were not "led" anywhere, they were ordered into the meat grinder to be killed as sure as the sun comes up. The generals and the pols, all of them, should have been tried for crimes against humanity. That applies to those who start wars nowadays as well, our planet is too tight, too close-knit, to afford conflict.

I look at the Congo and wonder where do these imbeciles get their weapons from. And what is their aim, aside from raping, looting, killing, exerting power. Men against the defenseless. Bravo, slow clap. For the profit of armsmongers. Because whoever says arms are built for defense, has his or her head stuck in a place where the sun never shines. Ultimately, they are there for aggression and they will be used for that purpose.

Anyway.... World War One:
There was no heroism, none, the idea was: you got shot up or turned into pink mist for no real reason. Did any of those who profit from the war give a hoot? As a kid, in France, I still saw the old veterans. They had some benefits, a sign in the metro in Paris that reserved them a seat, and they had a few days earmarked for a dismal parade down the Champs-Elysées. Like most men, they just shut up all the time. Actually, there should have been parades of mourning by the mothers of all those kids shot up for nothing but the pleasure of three cousins and warlords. And of course the fellows who earned millions manufacturing phosphorus bombs (ooo, how chic!), phosgene gas, barbed wire, "liquid fire" as flamethrowers used to be called... Take all that useless hardware and multiply its potenty by about 1 million, and you have today. Lesson Learned? Killing makes money.

War is a disgusting spectacle (unpleasant shot, but real), a complete failure of human enterprise, and it should be treated as such rather than be whooped up as some sort of opportunity for heroism. The gloating when it is over is also a dismal spectacle. The damage wars do is not only in the immediate. It runs down the generations, the trauma spreading like some horrible DNA-driven canker. I can track it down in my own family, 90 years on.

As for "just" wars, they don't exist. In my books, there was no WW2, it was just the continuation of WW1. And one more thought before this 90th anniversary sinks into oblivion:

There are no civil wars but ultimately all wars are uncivil civil wars.