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. "