Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
C orn Dolly Cottage is getting somewhat dismantled as we pack up and move out; the pleasantly-shaped black grillework on the banister, curly “S” shapes I have not seen since childhood, are naked and visible once again, no longer metal skeletons to the fixed flesh of coats and scarves and gloves and backpack. This move has so far seen Irit doing most of the packing whilst I laptop fiddle. (It’s disturbing how one comes to prefer “whilst” to “while” once on this Island; it used to sound totally pretentious and anachronistic but now seems better in some sentences. There must be a difference in the meaning. Like between who and whom? Yes, I think so. If I put “while” there instead, the main actor is me, and she’s doing whatever she’s doing at the same time, whereas this way she’s the main actor.) When we left Italy six months ago I did all the packing — she’d already been here three months — so I have my excuse. Also, she has more stuff — lots of clothes indeed for someone who wears jeans and no makeup. Women.
Moving seems easier this time. We’ve got a man with a van arranged and storage booked for the interim three weeks. And for those interim three weeks: I’m USA-bound, babies, and Irit’s going to Israel. So Parries is going on vacation! I mean, no, we’ll still be parrying on, but from a new location: downtown Los Angeles. There’ll won’t be much grand touring though, unlike previous trips, like last time in 2004 wherein I drove from Toronto to Las Vegas via Long Island in nine days all by myself. No, I’ll be sitting in Daniel’s apartment or probably a nearby wifi-enabled cafe, and then going to Bikram Yoga classes at the actual headquarters itself, possibly occasionally being in class with the man himself if he’s there that week. So that’s nice. So never fear, clients: work will continue at our usual heady pace.
I’ve been reading Bikram’s book. My aunt Myra got me it for my birthday. I’d never read it before though glanced through it, and it’s great to read it at home then get led through a class by an instructor. He is very Aristotilian and I love it. By that I mean he believes in starting at the bottom and laying the groundwork, rather than at the top. He’s saying that the focus on fixing the mind should come after the focus on fixing the body, which underlies the mind. Well, no, putting it that way is creating too much of a schism between the body and the mind. They are connected — mind is yang, body yin if you like — but the body is the base, and work on that will begin inevitably to start working on the mind.
Bikram’s method of yoga parallels David Allen’s method of personal management (you knew the comparison was coming…) in that they are both comprehensive and, controversially, ground-up systems. Comprehensive in that Bikram strengthens my entire body, GTD orders my entire agenda, and neither requires any other systems or methods to complete its life-changing work. Ground-up in that both initially eschew the higher things, instead focusing in Bikram’s case on the body rather than the mind, in Allen’s case on what’s on your desk here and now, the mundane, rather than life goals. Of course, both Choudhoury and Allen acknowledge the importance of these higher things, it’s just that their experience teaches them that in order to address the higher properly, a person must first build a strong foundation in the lower.
And though I can but dimly see it, I sense that both systems can be applied in time to higher things too, essentially breaking them down into more manageable units like the lower things.
And the two systems actually complement each other very nicely, as they can be seen as sharing some values — comprehensiveness, ground-upness, the potential power of each individual — and yet they benefit entirely separate yet related realms: Bikram’s system the yin of body, Allen’s the yang of mind. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is good for the Jews!
Previously
Notes and Chords on the Levant Right Now
Nextly
Pursuit of Hashemesh
Great article. This would be helpful to build personal management with the help of Bikram’s method of yoga that is unique from other methods.
Thanks for this interesting article.