Hey, even David Byrne has problems with canceled flights. Good description on his blog.

I keep pondering how images (via advertising and movies and tv) tend to drown out words (via books, newspapers, poems).

As I listen to Proust and think about his descriptions of his experience of awaking after sleep, I suspect that no series of images can provide the intricate and resonant meanings he wrings from his prose. There is something about language that leaves room for thought. And there is something about images that can reach into our brains and grab our attention and limit our response.

Maybe this is just my own anachronistic impulse not to give up words for images.

I still like images of course. I’m just wondering what the zillions of visual messages I receive daily do to my meager ability to think a more complicated idea through.  As well as what they do to my ability to appreciate the visual arts and the visual nature of my life in general.

I think this bombardment makes me more suspicious of  strictly visceral visual attempts to communicate. (Did you know they have developed illuminated signs for the sides of busses now?)

I like the visual which can pull my attention deeper (that would be a good movie or work of art). But visual messages that are designed for me to “consume” (like ads or bad movies or tv shows) either numb me or cause me to react stubbornly and attempt to resist their impact.

I manage this resistance by talking to myself about what is happening.

You know. Talking with words.

I still haven’t received my class evaluations from last year. Last week I changed my “uniform” a bit by going in with my hair down. I did this because my head was bothering me and it seemed more comfortable with it down.

Before that I had sort of conducted a little experiment with my appearance in the classroom. For an entire term, I kept my hair in a bun and wore a black suit and tie. Before that every class I had taught remarked on my appearance.

I was curious what the evals would say if I was more calculated in my appearance.

I actually figured out from class response that my appearance was probably critical during the first couple of weeks as students formed their first impression.

I have asked the secretary for evals from last term and she said she just hasn’t had time to do them.

Right now I am feeling pretty free of college. Thinking seriously of making this my last term to make more room in my life for writing and recording.

This morning I got up and washed my hair. I plan to leave it down because that’s what’s best for it when it’s wet.

Good grief.

My current class seems to be a good one. They don’t talk much but their homework and quizzes give evidence that their brains are working. If I was a bit better teacher I’m sure I could pull more out of them.

As it is, I think I am satisfied with just trying to teach well.

I will give myself the summer to finally decide if I want to go back to teaching in the fall.

And maybe they won’t ask me back anyway.

Who cares?

This is cool. A wiki type news gathering site called Assignment Zero. Once again I read about it in today’s New York Times.

Fields
and
fields
of
rape
seed
flowers.

I walked down to the local coffee shop and graded papers this morning. I still have a tension headache which I have had on and off since being in China. Can’t quite figure it out. It feels like the headache I get when I quit caffeine. Maybe it’s alcohol withdrawal since I haven’t been drinking. Who knows? Anyway I got all the papers graded that I meant to today.

This is a full week coming up. Rehearsals or performances every evening starting tonight through Saturday evening. Plus teaching. Trying to pace myself a bit.

Several online movie sites were mentioned this weekend in the New York Times:

GreenCine.com
Jaman

EzTakes

Apparently, these sites have movies that you can’t get on DVD or Netflix. I haven’t played around with them yet. They do cost money and according to the articles they often have their own proprietary software to watch movies on your computer (sooprise). But I do like the idea of being able to access obscure movies. They sometimes are the more interesting ones to me.

Info is in the following NYT articles. I think you need to be an online subscriber to read these.

The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse by A. O. Scott NYT 3/18/07

The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You are Patient) by Manohla Dargis 3/18/07

Little Films on Little Screens (But both seem set to grow) by Noah Robischon 3/18/07

Yeah those militia people are crazies with southern or western accents, right? Check out our own homegrown crazy from Holland. Terry Gross interviewed Journalist Jeremy Scahill the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. The audio will be available after 3 PM today.

Quote from Fresh Air site: “Blackwater USA is a secret army based in North Carolina with a sole owner: Erik Prince, a radical right-wing Christian multimillionaire. He controls 20,000 troops, a military base and a fleet of 20 aircraft, but most people have never heard of his organization.”

Yesterday morning I got up and wrote the little vignette in the previous post. Alas, TDS metrocom, my internet provider, was down. I called their 24 800 number and there was a recorded message: If you are calling from Michigan we are aware that our sevice is down and we are working to restore it.

It came back in about fifteen minutes and then went away again.

When we returned from our spring break vacation, the little house next door had a new “for rent” sign in the front yard. The little family who had lived there for several years there were gone. The house seemed neat and tidy as though ready for inspection prospective renters.

At one time a little girl and her mother lived there. more

One of China’s 54 recognized ethnic minority groups. They make a colorful 5 colored sweetened rice which tasted exactly like rice and sugar. It was a long bumpy ride in a “loaf” van. Jeremy kept the driver company. Pics.

Click here for waterfall pics.

1. 學而

[1:1] Confucius said: “Isn’t it a pleasure to study and practice what you have learned? Isn’t it also great when friends visit from distant places? ”

from Analects of Confucius translated by Charles Muller.

This is interesting. I take an interest in studying and practicing. Recently I visited a distant land. Hmmmm.

The rest of the analect is less applicable:

“If people do not recognize me and it doesn’t bother me, am I not a Superior Man?”

Maybe in my heart of hearts I somtimes feel smugly superior….. at least I know I am loved and often I am not recognized. By that I mean that people seem not to seem me or seem to see someone they shun (this is here in Holland Mich I’m talking about). Heh.

Eileen was frustrated the other day because no one at her workplace (which is a LIBRARY) knew anything about the “Ides of March.”

Education is a wonderful thing, n’est pas?

Most of these people have degress. At least I think they do. Not all of them.

Here is the wiki poop:

Ides:
A day in the Roman calendar, that marked the approximate middle of the month, i.e., the fifteenth day in the months of March, May, July, and October, and the thirteenth day in the other eight months. The word ides comes from Latin, meaning “half division” (of a month).

Wiki has an entry on Ides of March itself.

I heard a particularly snide piece on Politics UK on BBC radio last night. This morning I tried to find it on the website to listen to it again, because I thought maybe I misinterpretered it. It seems to already be gone from the site.

They were talking about UK racism under the guise of a discussion of free speech. It seemed that some public figures were being taken to task for letting the mask slip a bit and saying what all free white people were saying under their breath. Sound familiar?

When I visited the UK it was obvious to me that there were as many problems with racism there as here in the US. This is quite an indictment since homegrown hate is so prevalent here. At the time (a few years ago), I could detect little discussion in the UK media regarding this.

Since then I have noticed more discussions around “immigration” in the UK press. I put it in quotes because sometimes people put in this category were actually born in the UK (or in France for the French version of this prejudice). Their skin is the wrong color and they have the wrong accent and they are young and scary.

The UK seems to be less hypocritical about its class system than the US. In my view, that doesn’t make the class system any less wrong.

But I have read and heard very little about the UK’s racism.

However you color it and in whatever country or situation, racisim is good old hate and fear of the other, something that creeps into every human situation unless the humans involved are very aware and trying to be their best. Even then, some failure is inevitable along these lines.

I think one of the commentators on the BBC said that one could not consider a certain person a racist.

This is a very entitled formation of understanding: that I am not a racist because I don’t have identifiable personal feelings of hate and fear of the other.

I think racism can also be (and often is) more institutional than that. It’s much different to restrain your own feelings of hate and fear than somehow stopping courts, laws and military actions (fill in your own instutional preference here: church, school, and so on) from doing the dance of subtle but certain hate.

When mob sentiment gets its good clothes, desk and telephone and looks out at the less fortunate and determines who goes first and who goes last and who doesn’t get to go at all, you are looking at institutional injustice (like racism) pure and simple.

This is why in the US when O.J. Simpson was found not-guilty people of color cheered. Despite his sleeziness, O.J. had beat the unbeatable thing: a system designed to keep people repressed.

Here are some pictures of the great food we ate in China.

Just listened to phone messsages from yesterday. David called to say that my Mom and Dad made it safely to California and that he had picked them up and all was well.

Wow. David Byrne sure has
an eye for the bland surreal
beauty of suburban USA.

Check his recent blog
entry out about wandering
Valencia, an LA suburb, and
being on the set of
some TV project. Very cool.

China hotel room pics

My vacation seems to have restored my equilibrium to some extent. What this means is that after just getting back from a trip to the other side of the world, most of the concerns that were preoccupying me before I left seem to be not so important.

Instead, I have been thinking a lot about writing and recording.

Today is the last of three days of plunging back into my routine. After this evening’s rehearsal I don’t have to do anything until Sunday. This is good.

Yesterday I was playing a 13th century melody on my guitar thinking how much I like the sound of my old Martin guitar. After a week away from doing music, the sheer sound of the notes was a pleasure to me.

I decided to use this little melody for the prelude on Sunday and add instrumentalists to it (violins, viola, cello).

I also pulled out an old song (Empty Sounds) and rewrote the lyrics just a tad. I am looking forward to getting back to recording.

I hope I am able to preserve some of the perspective I gained from getting away.