Latest Parries
December 2012
Some Consumer Affairs
I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
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.
B oth 24 and Lost are now in a phase of looking back in self-celebration. Part of the surprise magic and hardness of 24 was that characters you came to know rather intimately, having shared kinetic tension with them through naughty hours of the night, get killed off. Now what they’re doing is giving us little treats: oh look, the camera pans over, driving Chloey is her husband. Oh look, the man in black is Bill Buchanan, looking increasingly like a yoga instructor. Oh look, it’s Aaron Pierce, ma’am. Much of the gang is back, even one we thought was dead, Tony Almeida. Jack Bauer is still relentlessly himself, rock of America, but the stature of everything around him seems somewhat diminished.
And now on Lost, the gang is back together again to return to the island. Though as Kate says to Jack, who’s giddy about their having just slept together, they’re just on the same plane, they’re not together. Jack wakes up, his eyes flickering, and we think, wait a minute, are we being shown the very first moments of the very first episode again? The note in his hand: are they revisiting the moment to plant that note? And I do love this, how they use the television’s narrative conventions that we all know but don’t really know we know, then break them spectacularly; here Jack runs out of the bushes but instead of reaching a beach he wobbles on the edge of a gigantic waterfall. Pretty cool. Then we see the scene again at the end of the episode. Time-filling? A nod to the spiral downwards into insanity that this show threatens to take all its characters and viewers?
The two shows do seem to share an important theme that’s pretty philosophical: the ever-churning nature of loyalty. When life is happening fast, ie, unlike the life lived by most of us out here in the dahk, then loyalties can be superceded, enemies become allies, allies enemies. Its… complicated, as the Facebook relationship field allows. This is Darwinian; life happens fast. It’s Nietzschian; everything changes, mutates, grows, withers, even truths. Mayhap it’s our cultural attempt to knock ourselves out of a trance that the comforts of modernity seem to imbue: that everything will be the same tomorrow as it was today. It kind of is, except we grow drier, there are new people who look more like we thought we did than we actually do, mainstays in our lives sicken and die.
Brian asked me what I think of Facebook last night as he made his increasingly regular call while picking up dinner after work in a timezone 5 hours behind. It’s a very sophisticated system used by very many people to do very silly and trivial things. A recipe for world domination. I don’t know. I’m reluctant to write on people’s walls, as the conceit goes. I’d rather they commented at my blog and I commented at theirs. Is that old-hat, since people aren’t really going to have blogs in future? Facebook’s just not private. I feel like taking myself off it. Curmudgeon.
Previously
The Curious Case of Benjamin Buddha
Nextly
Namaste, Dharma Workmen