A Fun Little Puzzle

I just read this intuition confounder from Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Brian Eno, and it's really messing with my head:

You want to tie a ribbon around the Earth (which we assume to be a perfect sphere for the sake of this hypothetical story), but you accidentally cut the ribbon a bit too long — you're off by a metre. If you distribute the excess ribbon evenly around the circumference of the Earth, how far above the surface will it hover?

Math nerds, resist the urge to work it out, and just take a guess. It's meant to test your intuition. The actual answer, which I've verified with basic geometry and put in the comments section, will astound you.

This bit of mind-blowery is brought to you by Edge.org's list of interesting thinkers' favourite "deep, elegant, or beautiful explanations," Eno's of which is "The Limits of Intuition." Thanks, Jenny, for the endlessly fascinating link.

The Nature of Desire

Lately I've been feeling like I sort of actually get what J. Krishnamurti's always talking about. I mean, he's always had something valuable for me, philosophically, whenever in my life I've picked up any of his collected writings. But these days it's like I go for a walk and I can totally catch my mind doing exactly what he says it does, like deep in there at a fundamental level, and then the catching itself puts a stop to it and everything is just as it is for a few moments. It's very exciting, which of course sends my mind back into webs of desire and memories and hope and all the rest of it...

This short commentary in particular, which I read on a bus to Dartmouth the other day, really opened up some important spot for me. I don't know whether it'll do the same for you, but I thought I'd share it, just in case. It's from 1958.



My flu is completely gone now, by the way.

Sicko

Got the flu over here. Yuck. I'm cranking the heat in the apartment and spending a lot of time under the covers. Unfortunately, I'm also quite busy with work, so not as much rest as I'd like to get. But that means income, which means I get to eat, so hooray, I guess.

I'm also working on a couple of musical projects, one of which should see the light of day around the end of the month. The final stages are a little boring and time-consuming, but I think it's going to be worth it in the end. Stay tuned.

And, by the way, if anyone ever gets the chance to see a local musician named Gianna Lauren perform, they should jump on it. Caught her last weekend and it was just jaw-dropping. Here's a vidya.



Now back to the blankets...

Beach Day

Ali and I took a little drive to Lawrencetown Beach on the weekend. It was a cold January afternoon, but plenty of crazy people were still out there surfing. Here's some cool pictures Alison took. Nice textures, hey?

We Now Return Our Regularly Scheduled Program, Already in Progress

Feels good to be back into the swing of things. Work is trickling in appropriately, my yoga class started up again last night, and there's generally been a lot less partying. I have still been socializing some, but in a more low-key way. Dinners, brunches, dog-walking, watching full seasons of crappy TV shows, and the occasional rock jam or show. Oh, and I went skating once last week with a few friends... OK, I guess there's still plenty of social life going on.

Not that I didn't enjoy my holidays. My parents came to visit for a few days, and we had a great time wandering around Halifax and eating lots of great meals together with Alison.





There were also plenty of parties and shows to attend, many litres of soy nog to be drunk, and lots of around to be sat with a crossword puzzle or a good book. So I was never bored or anything, but it just all gets a bit... unstructured, after awhile. It's counterintuitive, but I seem to need limits on my time in order to get anything done. A very bourgeois problem to have, I guess. Anyone else feel that way?

Let's Make 2012 the Year of Conscious Attention

"'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

David Foster Wallace
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Another Green Year

Happy 2012! Hope everyone had a fun New Year's Eve and a regret-free New Year's Day morning. Here's my resolutions for this year. I guess I prefer to think of them more as aspirations to keep in mind, rather than things to be dogmatically resolved about. Anyway, thought I'd share them with you (see #2). Anyone else got any for the record?

1. Listen.
2. Share.
3. Be more committed to the truth than to a pat answer.
4. Be more committed to love than to any particular self-image.
5. Accept what life brings with gratitude, enthusiasm, and even enjoyment.
6. See projects through.
7. Keep up relations with the people I love.
8. Meditate twice a day.
9. Exercise daily.
10. Get enough sleep.
11. Read more fiction.
12. Write more poetry.
13. Play music daily.
14. Don't worry about money.
15. Look for beauty and mystery everywhere.

Year's Best Listening

Top ten time. Gonna make it short and snappy this year. Lots of quiet and/or instrumental stuff. And minimal colour palettes, interestingly. Titles link to sample YouTube "videos." Here it is:

Bad Vibrations - Black Train
Heavy stoner punk Halifavourites and all around delightful power trio.

Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil
Wacky, catchy rock songs for kids with ADD and good taste.

Destroyer - Kaputt
Bowiesque Canadian weirdo puts his pompous songs through an '80s pop machine.

Dog Day - Deformer
Just a duo now, and we may miss the full band, but those songs!

Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
Like slowed down acoustic Sonic Youth with Beck prettying it up.

Jürgen Müller - Science of the Sea
Not actually a rediscovered soundtrack by a '70s German oceanographer, but beautifully convincing.

The Oscillation - Veils
I already told you about this one. Postpunk space rock. (If you like it, also check out Suuns in the Honourable Mentions.)

Radiohead - The King of Limbs
I'll admit I was disappointed at first, but I've come around. Definitely a grower.

Tape - Revelationes
Gorgeous Swedish ambient post-rock.

Walls - Coracle
Gorgeous British ambient dance-pop.

Honourable Mentions:
The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
Suuns - Zeroes QC
tUnE-yArDs - WHOKILL

Lest my brevity convince you otherwise, please understand that all this stuff is really great. Try some, buy some, fee fi fo fum!

Tree's Ready!

Just a small one, but I think it looks pretty nice...

Good Mail Day

Hey, check out these cool belated birthday gifts I got in the mail today from my sister. Tintin cap (from the upcoming movie, I presume?), suitable for softball wear, and a music box that plays "Imagine." Imagine that!

Thanks, Eri. Yer great.



I also got three Christmas cards and the latest Guardian Weekly. And no bills!

Merry Xmas!

Speaking of Christmas cards, I just found out about these great ones you can order online. Wish I'd known in time to send some out — maybe next year. I swear I didn't write the copy myself, by the way.


In related news, Alison and I watched Hannah and Her Sisters last Sunday. I hadn't seen it in ages, and forgot just how great Woody Allen used to be. Happy holidays!

Blowing My Own Design Horn

Although this is the time of year for a freelancer when work slows to a trickle (soooo broke right now!), it's also when I get to be my own client on an annual project — the corporate xmas e-card. I just finished sending out this year's, and I'm kinda pleased with how it turned out.

Sweet Jaime

Forgot to ever mention that I finished watching the entire first season of The Bionic Woman. The final episode was the one I remembered as my favourite, where a little girl's dead mother seems to be destructively haunting her father, always when the girl's asleep. Turns out (spoiler alert!) that the girl has telekinetic powers she didn't even know about, and her unconscious mind has been using them when she's dreaming to try to make her dad spend more time with her. It's a real spooky one — the climax is kind of like The Exorcist or something.

Also included in the box set were all the episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man that Lindsay-Wagner-slash-Jaime-Sommers appeared in before she got her own show. That meant I got to hear Lee Majors crooning this beautiful love song... many times! 70s TV was crazy!

Occu-pecha-kucha-py

I went to Halifax's ninth Pecha Kucha event on Wednesday night. It's a semi-regular series of informal presentations, usually in a bar, limited only by their format — 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each. Anyone can present, and what they choose to talk about or do over the course of their allotted (20 x 20 = 400 seconds =) 6 minutes and 40 seconds is up to them.

The format was invented in Japan, and the name, literally translated, means "chit chat." Sometimes there's a theme that presenters are supposed to stick to, and sometimes it's completely open. Wednesday was a theme night. It was originally going to be all about the Occupy movement but got broadened to include any "Changemakers." This allowed a marketing executive to sneak onto the bill in order to cite horrifying statistics about how technology has taken over people's lives and remind us that we all know who Jared, the unappealing Subway spokesguy, is, while repeating the phrase, "I'm not saying this is good or bad — just that we have to learn to take advantage of these changes in the ways we communicate."

Otherwise, though, it was a pretty enjoyable evening of enlightening ideas presented to a full house. Many of the presenters were people who have been actively involved in Occupy Nova Scotia, and some were just folks with suggestions toward making our city more of a livable community and less of an unhealthy structure imposed on us by the interests of big business. I came out feeling a little less doomed and alone.

I'm not sure what's going on with Occupy NS itself these days. Haven't heard too much from their corner since they were evicted. I'm still hoping to see a large group march into City Hall in order to carry our corrupt mayor, Peter Kelly, outside and dump him in a garbage can. But maybe they're working on something a little less shortsighted and juvenile. Sure would be funny, though...

Here's one of the most succinct and on-the-mark summaries I've read of our current politico-economic situation. It's a letter to the editor from November 25's Guardian Weekly.

The captains of finance have been declaring for decades that a free market, without governmental intervention, is the only possible basis for a free and democratic society and the only basis for a sound economy, with market forces cleansing the economy of inefficiencies.

During the global financial crisis, the captains of finance lined up to demand that governments throughout the world subsidise the stock markets and the failed financial institutions. This shows that the captains of finance believe that the market cannot be left to market forces.

When the prime minister of Greece recently called for a referendum on a proposal to radically alter the structure of the Greek economy, the world of international finance reacted with horror and stock markets plunged. Since then, international pressure has forced the replacement of the elected Greek prime minister by an unelected banker.

This shows that the captains of finance believe that capitalism and democracy are fundamentally incompatible. If they are, then, capitalism has to go. The Occupy movement seems to have grasped this.

Imre Bokor
Armidale, NSW, Australia

Give that guy some slides, and get him on a stage!

Conexiones

I had a weird congruence of unrelated readings recently. Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times has been a source of uncompromising but sensible wisdom for me in the form of one chapter every morning for the past week. The other morning, the chapter called "Hopelessness and Death" had this particularly stern bit of advice for me:

Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what's going on. Fear of death is the background of the whole thing. It's why we feel restless, why we panic, why there's anxiety. But if we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.

I was still thinking about that one a lot the next day when I picked up Barometer Rising to continue reading it for my book club. You probably already know this, but it's a historical novel by Hugh MacLennan that takes place in Halifax during the week of the first world war when the Halifax Explosion occurred. I hadn't gotten to the catastrophic event yet, but I was enjoying the description of Neil MacRae's lonely wanderings around the town on a misty December morning — as well as the familiar view of the Halifax Harbour he encounters — when I came to this passage:

Spread below him, the town lay with the mist concealing every ugly thing, and the splendour of its outline seemed the most perfect, natural composition he had ever seen. He thought now that a man could only know the meaning of peace when he no longer reached after the torment of hope. He had lost Penny, with whom there might have been happiness. Now there was no need to argue or justify himself any more; unhappiness could no longer have meaning, for there was no longer anything positive for him to be unhappy about. There was nothing to worry him. Last night he had relinquished the last thread of ambition which had held worries tight in his mind. But the beauty of the world remained and he found himself able to enjoy it; it stayed a constant in spite of all mankind's hideous attempts to master it.

Besides the obvious connection to the first quote and the eerie similarity to my own surroundings and recent mood, the resemblance of this selection, in the context of the Pema Chödrön reading, to some lyrics I wrote years ago for an Our Igloo song called "Note to Self" also immediately struck me:

The body in your bed, it isn't you.
It might as well be dead; it isn't you.
I know it tells you what to feel.
I know that others tell you too,
But they're not you.

This winter morning is a dream.
Look at the harbour — it's a bowl of steam.

Pretty weird, right? Something is definitely trying to tell me something, was all I could think.

Then this morning I was reading an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, himself possibly the king of farfetched connections. It was a short piece called "The Wall and the Books," about the emperor who built the Great Wall of China and also burned massive numbers of books in an attempt to eradicate the country's history before his rule. The last sentence of the essay seems to come from nowhere:

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces molded by time, certain twilights and certain places — all these are trying to tell us something, or have told us something that we should not have missed, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic reality.

That one was enough to inspire a short poem and a long music mix in me. Enjoy! (The title links to the mix download, all in one file. Track listing below.)

Out of the mystery we unfold,
Wait,
And patiently behold our history
That we might penetrate the mystery.

Imminent Revelation
1. Black Mystery Has Been Revealed - Roland Kirk
2. New Grass - Talk Talk
3. In a Silent Way - Miles Davis
4. Lonely Woman - Ornette Coleman
5. Undo - Björk
6. Kalimanko Denko - Bulgarian Women's Choir
7. Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli: Kyrie - Jeremy Summerly
8. How to Bring a Blush to the Snow - Cocteau Twins
9. Touched - My Bloody Valentine
10. Blue Jay Way - The Beatles
11. Irene - Caribou
12. Giuggi - Alessandro Brugnolin
13. Lacunar Amnesia - The Caretaker
14. If - The Flaming Lips
15. Bonus Track 1 - Jonathan Richman
16. No One Asked to Dance - Deerhoof
17. Don't Let It Bring You Down - Neil Young
18. Debussy's Arabesque No. 1 - Isao Tomita
19. Oceanic Beloved - Alice Coltrane
20. The Big Ship - Brian Eno
21. The Colour of Spring - Mark Hollis

Later That Night

Winter Trees

Here's an idea that came to me yesterday for a photo series. I was thinking about the growth of plants as a pulling, rather than a pushing force — like the sun is pulling them out of the earth — and I realized that if you look at them upside-down you get a sense of that kind of gesture. I've decided to carve a niche for myself in art history as the upside-down trees guy. What do you think?

Awk You Pie

Just want to share a pretty funny article from this week's New Yorker. I guess this is the kind of thing popular online life ruiner Facebook is good for...

Occupy NS got evicted on Remembrance Day, by the way, when they went too far by moving their protest from in front of City Hall to a seldom-used park for the day, in deference to the veterans' memorial service. They'd even had the nerve to plan this temporary move in conjunction with the veterans and the mayor's office weeks in advance. Can you believe the impudence of those unsavoury hippies? No wonder the mayor felt justified in having the police physically remove them in the pouring rain during a day of national reflection on the costs of freedom.

Found: Gratitude

Well, a sunny day, spontaneous brunch with a friend, and a bit of birthday shopping, and the world suddenly seems like a much more appealing place. Moods! What is the good of them, that's what I'd like to know.

I bought three new books with the 50 bucks my mom & dad gave me for my birthday — Sunset Park, a new novel by Paul Auster, whose New York Trilogy I recently read and enjoyed a lot; Girl with Curious Hair, David Foster Wallace's short story collection that I have somehow overlooked; and When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön, Buddhist advice-giver extraordinaire. Funny how the purchase itself of this last book almost immediately made my times feel less difficult. Maybe that means I don't have to read it anymore — just put it on my shelf and smile. Although I'm pretty sure one of the chapters in it is NOT "Go Out and Buy Something for Yourself."

Anyway, thanks, Mom & Dad! Lots of great stuff to dive into now, once I've finished Barometer Rising for the book club I've joined at the library (thanks, Kristina!) and Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne's travel-and-eco-musings-blog-turned-into-a-book that Alison gave me, also for me birthdee. Thanks, Ali!

Anger v. Sadness

Sometimes I feel like life is light and full of wonder, like a dream. But lately it just seems hard and mostly pointless. And people, those creatures who can be so delightfully unpredictable and love-inspiring, strike me these days as a bunch of thoughtless, selfish babies, myself included. I try to maintain some detachment from this unhelpful point of view, but it keeps sucking me back in. Hopefully it won't last long.

Maybe I should stop reading the news. This from the Guardian: "'Irreversible climate change in five years' — The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels. The last chance of combating dangerous climate change would be 'lost for ever,' according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure."

Or I could just get all punk rock and let my anger out in blasts of self-expression — that can be quite liberating. The Lodge played a show tonight, and I think it was a decent one, but I mostly felt like I was just going through the motions. My finger, though, which I'd cut earlier in the evening chopping vegetables, bled all over my bass, so that at least felt pretty rock 'n roll.

Here's an angry but uplifting video from Naomi Klein that makes me feel somewhat better. I wonder how she maintains that balance. I couldn't even finish Shock Doctrine — it was just way too upsetting. Do you think John Lydon was right to assert (repeatedly) that "anger is an energy"? Or is it just one of the ways we mask our sadness so that we don't really have to face it? I dunno...