Latest Parries
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Exemplary, 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 and wrote up my own thoughts.
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.
March 2009
Namaste, Dharma Workmen
What do the Lost characters mostly want these days? It’s not to get off the island. Increasingly, the island is just where they live and love. If anything, they’ve found home — or, rather, their home found them.
I f there is one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere. Because places that I once longed for are now more or less where I am, and the places where I did the longing are more or less where I long for now. Seeing this laid out in my mind’s eye enables the short-circuiting of the longing process. It’s not the place necessarily that I miss, rather instead I’ve become habituated to the practice of longing for another place. Alone it doesn’t stop the longing, but it does provides strong armor against longing should I remember to pick it up.
Signs of the Old Times
Monday, December 8th, 2008
Last Monday I travelled with my Dad on a cheap Ryanair flight from Bournemouth to Glasgow for a day. We drove from Prestwick Airport to my old town, Newton Mearns, and stopped at the garage opposite the Mearns Cross Shopping Centre to fill the windscreen wipers with water. This shopping mall was my prototypical one, the primary, the mythic; it’s here I entertained myself while my mother shopped for vegetables at Imrie — still there 30 years later! — and it’s here my Dad had his own shop, with the accompanying atmospherics. And yet, perhaps because I’ve waited too long, or perhaps because of the miserable grey weather, or simply because the human magic ineluctably fades with age, but today I saw the place as a rather ugly and anonymous periphery of a rather harsh city, Glasgow.
Miserable-looking Yet Mythic Mearns
Monday, December 8th, 2008
But this very lack of excitement can and should be harnessed. Newton Mearns is the place that I used to sit and daydream about in Israeli school after we moved away. While the teacher droned on I’d sit and draw maps of my hometown and imagine I was walking the streets near my house. I’d imagine there was a portal that I could walk through and be on those streets and then walk back through it again to come home to where my parents now were for dinner. Perhaps this is when longing for elsewhere became a bittersweet solitary pleasure; at least it exercised my imagination, which in itself is one of our great pleasures.
Hadassah and Vine
Sunday, June 20th, 2004; Even Sapir, Israel
Previously
Ebullience, Please
Nextly
Stop Yesterday