February 08, 2007

yogurt vs. gasoline

I blogged about the Neistat Brothers way back in the day. But I just checked in on their website again for the first time in a long while and couldn’t resist another shout out. Definitely can’t get enough of their videos, that’s for sure.

Go to neistat.com.
Click on movies.
Choose Yogurt vs. Gasoline (might have to scroll down a bit).

There are many short videos on this “movies” page that are pretty sweet, but this one in particular caught my fancy: I’m a sucker for the bicycle vs. car theme.

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June 14, 2006

summer reading list

The summer reading pile started small. A trip to Mercer Street Books (at Bleecker and Broadway, smack dab between the east and the west Village) around midnight on Saturday night left me with a very do-able three titles. But my hope of how many pages I can read a day inflated like a housing market riding a bubble with my visit to the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore City on Monday (eight books, 2200 pages). Here is the annotated list as it stands now (notice the few math books thrown in here in case any of the faculty find my blog — gotta make it look like I’m doing me some math this summer!):

(in rough order of priority)

Old School by Tobias Wolff
His story “Bullet in the Brain” has stuck with me ever since I read it five or so years ago. This is his a novel (maybe his only one). I’ve started it. It’s okay so far. Set at a east-coast prep school in the 60s. Nothing earth-shaking.
About A Boy by Nick Hornby
People have been telling me I need to read some of his stuff, and I liked High Fidelity (the movie) quite a bit. That’s all it took to get me to drop $8 on this puppy at Mercer St.
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
When I was at Harpers in ‘01 we rejected the title story for this collection. I thought it was a mistake, but the fiction-picking editorial sessions saw some serious pissing contests between the editors, especially when they had an opportunity to show how edgy they were by rejecting a story by one of the hippest writers around.
“The Mayflower Moment: Reading Whitman during the Vietnam War” by Patricia Hampl (found in I Could Tell You Stories)
Recommended by my friend Josh. He’s political. He studies American Lit at Penn. He said I should read this for a nice treatment of nationalism and a folksy, populist notion of America. Or something like that.
Classification and Regression Trees by Breiman et al.
Mmmmm, math….. Looks like I’m going to be doing some work on these kinds of predictive models this summer, and this seems to be the definitive book.
Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaassen
Recommended by gribley as a good anti-corporate page-turner.
Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws by Manfred Schroeder
Couldn’t resist this as I used to do some research on chaos theory (as an undergrad) and I’ve been intruiged by power laws since I’ve been doing more stats and reading some Malcolm Gladwell…
Geralds Party by Robert Coover
Enjoyed The Universal Baseball association over spring break, figured I’d try another.
Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell
I’m feeling like never having read any Russell is a glaring gap in my mathematical/philosophical history.
Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner
Recommended by musician, sage, mystic, all-round-crazy guy John Kruth.
Essays in Analysis by Bertrand Russell
see above.
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
People have been telling me to read this for a long time. It’s very long.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Also long, but I think I might have a better chance of getting into it now than when I started it as a over-earnest high school senior.
The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) by Robert Coover
It’s short (maybe 30 pages) and by Coover.

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January 19, 2006

last gulps of free time

It’s a quiet night at home, the last non-schoolnight weeknight for quite some time, as classes kick into gear Monday. As if to make up for lost time over break, I’m in mental cramming mode, trying to squeeze in all the little bits of everyday life that are sure to pass me by once the grind starts again. Here’s a selection of what tonight found me doing…

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December 05, 2005

miracle on 34th street

I have been to America and back; walked into the sea of multicolored lightstrands, porchhanging icicles, waist-high candy canes lit up and planted in the ground like small totems, air-filled holiday icons (santa, rudolph, the grinch), and toy trains that patiently pirouette on on their wooden tracks; taken in the inflatable illuminated snow-globes complete with styrofoam snowstorm, santa and sleigh; seen the parade of cars a block long waiting without a hint of rushhour traffic impatience for a chance to steer their way onto the block, rubberneck from the confines of the vehicle (it’s cold outside, anyhow), and snap a picture with their downloadableprintableemailable digital camera; seen the (sweet) streetart of snowmen made out of old 28” rims, the christmas tree of hubcaps, the crab constructed of sautered shovel-head and garden trimmer blades.

Just one block away from my home, this is Hampden’s own most photographed barn in America. Where t-shirts are sold commemorating the event (“boh ho ho! Merry Christmas!”), people come to gawk because they’ve heard that’s what you’re supposed to do and we’re in the holiday spirit anyhow, and folks line up and file somberly past creshes as though at a viewing.

“What was 34th Street like before it was photographed?” I say. “What did it look like, how was it different from other blocks, how was it similar to other blocks? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”

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November 21, 2005

a revolutionary edumakation

We watched a sweet German flick, The Edukators (dir. Hans Weingartner), on Saturday.

Basic plot: band of three revolutionary 20-somethings break into houses of the rich while the cats are away, rearrange furniture and belongings without stealing of damaging anything and leave a note saying “Your days of plenty are numbered.” (Here’s an online taste of their shenanigans.) Of course, complications develop: they take a prisoner, they fall in love, they question the revolution. It’s a movie that feels close to home. The characters and conversations are familiar — just replace the young adult post-communist European angst of the Edukators with ruminations and calls action to on environmentalism, monopolistic two-party politics, globalization, etc…. that seem to dominate the political dialogue in countries whose rebellious youth is too young to remember communist rule on their home soil.

And there’s a great dinner-table scene. Great because it puts at the same table a young idealistic revolutionary with an older, conservative member of society. Like that sweet dinner table scene in “I [heart] Huckabees” where Mark Whalberg reams out the conservative, religious SUV-driving father, it’s that conversation you always wanted to have with the person that you’ll never meet.

So it does drag a little in the middle (130 minutes long) and has a quick hitting, hard-to-interpret ending (we had a different read on it than my folks who coincidentally also watched it this weekend). All in all, though, this movie quickly attained the status of “must recommend and talk about with friends”. Get there.

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May 18, 2005

Star Wars: Don't believe the hype

This just in from the BBC:

A US consulting film has calculated the film’s release has cost $627m (�342m) in lost productivity.

Consulting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas said the buzz about the film would prompt many people to skip work for daytime screenings.

John Challenger predicted the loss to companies based on absenteeism caused by the other prequels, the proportion in full-time work, and their average pay.

“Of course, these estimates are probably on the conservative side in light of the great reviews the moving is receiving,” he said.

I just hope Mr. Challenger took into account the time that he spent putting together this report. Talk about hype. Sheesh.

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May 07, 2005

There goes the neighborhood

cambridge-freeway-plan.GIFHere’s an old (or so I’ve been assured) picture of a proposed highway bypass ramp that would, according to my calculations, be visible from my bedroom window. (For orientation: you can see the Charles River and the BU Bridge crossing it in the lower left-hand corner.) Like any good citizen with a the revolution will not be motorized handlebar sticker on my bike, my first reaction is pure righteous indignation. That said, I’ve been reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this week (to decide if I want to spoil it with the new movie). The first scenes made me feel a bit like Arthur Dent, the bumbling and somewhat charming earthling hero of the book, as his house is prepared for demolition to create a highway bypass.
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.
We learn soon after Arthur that the Earth is about to be destroyed by an interstellar spaceship for “the building of a hyperspatial express route through our star system”. Leave it to a good sci-fi writer to put things in cosmic perspective.

[pause]

That said, I’d still get my ass in gear to stop a concrete invasion in my ‘hood.

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May 04, 2005

A Rocky sense of freedom

Last night was the first time in a while that I had watched some TV. A friend has TiVO, so we skipped around between the Sox game and various recorded goodies. If I ever do become a TV-watcher (please no) it seems like TiVO would be the way to do it. Commercial-free, finds the shows you want, when you want, etc…

I got the crib-notes version of Rocky IV, skimming to the best scenes here and there (training scene with 80s music, Rocky’s mourning scene, the fight). I don’t remember the Cold War much other than reading about the collapse of the USSR on a family vacation in the southwest and my dad telling me that I should remember this moment. So Rocky IV makes me think about that older different culture of fear and and the national enemy of the 1980s (back when bin Laden was on our side, kind of). Rocky’s good ol’ American rhetoric is “I’m doing this for myself and my family”. And Ivan Drago, the Soviet muscle machine prototype, calls out in his final moments “I fight for myself” (or something along those lines), a revolt against his fatherland trainers who have been engineering him towards human perfection. To top it off, Rocky tells the hostile-turned-friendly Soviet crowd that he felt them change toward him during the fight and that he knows they are capable of more change.

It’s a fresh reminder of the historical context to current political debates. It sounds obvious, but to people (like me) born late enough that the Cold War was really over by the time young-adult consciousness set in, a lot of the lessons and dynamics of this conflict are not ingrained. For example, Rocky IV reminds me why people have a bad impression of communism (cold, bald men breeding blond-haired human machines for the state) when I think of it as an innocuous localized ideology espoused by my hippy friends. But it’s also a reminder that the freedom that we enjoy here in the US comes from an intellectual and practical tradition of individualist values and self-reliance.

It’s where that individualism turns to self-interest and in turn empire that I start to fall out of love with the ideals of this country.

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April 02, 2005

I blinked

Last night, biking home along the Charles, just after passing underneath the BU Bridge, a obese white woman was standing next to the embankment and her stopped car (tail lights on) was right there along the Storrow 500.

Things happen quickly. A few speed walkers pass me going the opposite direction as I approach, I pull on my brakes a bit, she asks “Can I use your light to look for my phone I just dropped it down the embankment?”, I see a large-ish man get out of the car to my left and start to lumber towards me across the bike path. “No, sorry, I’m running late getting back,” I call out over my shoulder as I lean into my pedals again and distance myself.

My heart was racing, I felt like I had probably just spoiled these people’s night by running away from an innocent situation. People stuck on the side of the road, innocent enough. They need help. I’m the nice biker who goes by and I stick it to them. But I saw something there that I didn’t like. Within moments, the good little disciple of the culture of fear that I am, I was generating headlines about the biker mugged or worse on his evening ride. I started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Blink” the other day. Within the first thiry pages or so, he makes an interesting case for how people are remarkably adept at making split second decisions with just a glance’s worth of visual information. He cites archaeologists and art historians who spot fakes in seconds after curators and their hired teams of validators spend months doing chemical sampling and stylistic evaluation, and describes the example of a researcher who looks at videos of a married couple and can predict with statistically significant accuracy whether the couple will divorce.

Gladwell is good. He’s a New Yorker writer, author of “The Tipping Point” which is being read by all kinds of businessmen, entrepreneurs and network-theory academicians now because it talks about how trends and fads catch on. But, as my dad pointed out, he suffers from an “acutely American disease” — he sees too much the rosy side of things, dwells on the shiny, happy, innocuous examples. In “The Tipping Point” he talks about how the trend of penny-loafers catches on in the Village in NYC, how social revolutions get started. To be fair, he does talk about suicides and smoking as social trends a bit, but briefly. And he doesn’t talk about the sticking power of hatred or anger, and how that can become a trend, despite a wealth of historical examples. I haven’t finished “Blink”, but I wonder if he gets into the negative sides of split-second decisions, instead of dwelling on these leading aristocratic examples of divorce and art.

I chose to speed away from these two people who didn’t look like me, likely screwing them over, and missing an opportunity to spread some good smaritanism because I had fear. This seems to be a definite underbelly to split-second decision making. Do I decide which of my new classmates I am going to befriend in the first five minutes of the first class? As if to caution me away from this reasoning, my rear tire went flat in the next half mile after I passed the couple. Karma?

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March 30, 2005

I'm big in Japan

I just finished Haruki Murakami’s latest, Kafka at the Shore. I had always found it easy to disappear into one of his books and not emerge for a week or so. If you have never sampled Murakami’s narrative nectar, he has one protagonist whose personality manifests in a new character in each novel. You know this guy, he is the soul-searching, sex-hungry, sensitive and self-aware male (sound familiar yet?) and he is usually accompanied by between one and three mysterious and sensual women with supple ear-lobes. The books read on the one hand like a good Clancy page-turner, complete with murders and lots of sex but then, oh yeah, there’s also nuanced Japanese folk-religious and philosophical undertones.

Specifically, I like the humbleness of the characters, the way that they are in gentle awe of the very tangible spiritual forces that course through their lives. My little book on Shinto has a few little nuggets that give a good description of this folk-religion:

Kami are the object of worship in Shinto…the term is an honorific of noble, sacred spirits, which implies a sense of adoration for their virtues and nobility. All beings have such spirits so in a sense all beings can be called kami or be regarded as potential kami…
Among the objects or phenomena designated from ancient times as kami are the qualities of growth, fertility, and production; natural phenomena, such as wind and thunder; natural objects, such as the sun, mountains, rivers, trees and rocks; some animals; and ancestral spirits.

The direct worship and appreciation of the natural world stands out to me from these descriptions. I think of the thunder and rain in Rashomon, the deep dark woods in My Neighbor Totoro. Shinto is more than a religion, it’s a several-millenia-old way of life, a set of values. But when I think of the original values of American life that relate to the environment it’s a frontier ethic, that of conquering the wilderness. U.S. culture is a culture of selfishness, right? And the effect of that selfishness on me is these phrases: “I want good food to eat” or “I need to live in the country and work in the city or escape out to the wilderness in my car” or even “I want to reproduce”. I am guilty of all three of these sentiments. Even though I’m far from religious, could that selfish sensibility in my culture and (dominant societal) religion be forcing me to think this way. God (is He out there?) cares about me and my sins, he will listen to me and forgive me. I don’t like the external validation process implicit here, the judgement of my actions by someone else’s code of morality. But three core values in Shinto took root as I read Murakami: reverence (for nature), equity (there’s no central diety) and tolerance (“to those who worship kami, ‘Shinto’ is a collective noun denoting all faiths.”)

So I think my point is that cultures form around religions. Japan’s population is getting older, a sure sign of a population that doesn’t procreate enough. Or isn’t selfish enough to want to. It’s us selfish ones we need to worry about, although as Taus points out in his recent post, educated people�(is this some measure of social awareness? if so, i’m a little wary.) aren’t reproducing fast enough to replace themselves, just like the Japanese.

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March 25, 2005

this is a test

This is a test. Nick is not responsible for this content…

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