The Smartening and The Artening

I just wanted to quickly point out that in Japan, the best-selling video game for the last two weeks running has been the latest in the series of Professor Layton games. In the UK, a recent release of an older Professor Layton game has also apparently been a great success.

I am cheered by this news because these games are little more than compilations of old math and logic questions, spruced up with beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and old-fashioned animated characters.
When you play a Professor Layton game, the experience typically goes as follows: you wander through a lovingly drawn area reminiscent of the LucasArts-heyday backgrounds on Curse of Monkey Island, click on a quirky character who looks like a reject from The Triplets of Belleville, and he or she says something like “I will give you this shiny gold coin if you can help me, young man. I have a rowboat, a fox, a chicken, and a bag of feed...”

Each game has over a hundred hard-core logic puzzles, disguised by an atmospheric point-and-click adventure interface. I’m usually turned off by games that lean heavily on reheated old puzzles, like the infuriating “Tower of Bozbar” and “Peggleboz” from Zork Zero, but Layton’s design somehow makes the old logic chestnuts addictive and charming.

The fact that these adorable games are so popular shows that there’s an enormous audience out there for creative video games which are both highly artistic and educational. Of course, people have been similarly excited about the success of Brain Age for a couple of years because it’s educational, but to me the Professor Layton games are much more interesting because I have to assume that they appeal to a younger crowd than Brain Age. Some of those nearly half-million Japanese people who’re already playing the newest game must be children, and it’s nice to think of their little brains stretching to figure out how to row that fox and chicken across the river. (hm - note how that phrase I just wrote, “how to row that fox” is like a tongue twister or something. Four different vowel sounds from “o” as the second letter in a word. English spelling must be so annoying for learners).

Also, nothing against 3D backgrounds or animation, but the fact that these are hand-drawn 2D is a tiding of great joy to me, both for nostalgic reasons and because I think it’s an eye-pleasing use of the small DS screen, where 3D environments can look like a blocky mess. There’s clearly still a place in the gaming industry for people who can draw and paint old-fashioned backgrounds, and that’s a nice thought.

In conclusion, everyone who has ever complained about how video games are violent or detrimental to children should please, please just shut up forever. This possibly includes, with all due respect, our next president.

We Did It!

photo source

Newsweek Is-Weird

Look at the odd hyphenation in the following extract from this Newsweek article:

“It is eerily quiet at Barack Obama's headquarters, an open expanse that takes up the entire 11th floor of an office tower in Chicago's Loop. It's nearly as silent as a study hall, which is appropriate, since most of the 20- or 30-somethings in it wear jeans and T shirts.
...
Like FDR and Ronald Reagan, Obama is an innovator in organizing and communicating. Roosevelt was the first to rely on labor unions, and he talked intimately to voters through the then new medium of radio.”

What made them not hyphenate the two phrases screaming out for it, “T shirts” and “the then new medium&rdquo? I guess you could make a case for “T shirt”, but the other thing is just a mess. The then new medium? Really? The author later goes on to use “reaching-out” as a noun. Ick. In the same article, I also found Newsweek’s quaintly Victorian insistence on two periods in “Ph.D.” a little strange, but that’s a different matter-entirely.

The impact will blow trees back and crack statues

My favorite era in rap music was roughly ’94 to ’98, when East Coast hardcore was at its height. I loved the gritty, verbose, cryptic, violent sound of the Wu Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Mobb Deep, the Boot Camp Clik and related groups. It was dense, paranoid and clanking music best suited for headphones on the subway.

Hip hop didn’t get any more anti-commercial than the GZA, who epitomized the cold world of the mid-’90s’ stern, Biblical-prophet wordplay, while his groupmate ODB rapped like a street-corner drunk a few seconds from toppling over, crooning and ranting at passing cars. Somewhere between those two poles, between sesquipedalian urban Jeremiads and raving homicidal lunacy, lay the essence of the Wu era’s greatness, and it was all set to great beats from the likes of the RZA, DJ Premier, Havoc, 4th Disciple and Da Beatminerz.

For a few years, it seemed as if everyone was weaving dense lyrical webs of comic-book, kung-fu, Scarface and militant Five Percenter references over ominous beats. It all came to an end sometime before the turn of the century, when, to make a long story short, a shrewd buffoon named Puff Daddy dominated an era of dumber, openly superficial, radio-friendly rap which increasingly incorporated baleful R&B caterwauling (the kiss of death as far as I was concerned).

Things got even worse as Nelly-style silly sing-song cadences and lyrically vacant Southern rap started to catch on in the ensuing years. Instead of lyrics like Deck’s superb alliterative/assonant “Poisonous paragraphs smash ya phonograph in half / It be the Inspectah Deck on the warpath / First class leavin mics with a cast / Causin ruckus like the aftermath when guns blast / Run fast, here comes the verbal assaulta / Rhymes runnin wild like a child in a walker”, we had “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes”. Mo’ money, mo’ problems, indeed.

I thought for a few years there that hardcore hip hop was dead. As usual, I just wasn’t looking in the right places. People like Jedi Mind Tricks and M.F. DOOM were keeping the torch lit, and the web made it possible to find those few groups who were still putting out quality music. But for the past few years it’s usually been a depressing trickle rather than a steady stream of new stuff, and my old favorites seemed to have run out of steam.

Then, over the last couple of months, two albums from old favorites dropped which together have resuscitated my faith in hip hop. Heltah Skeltah, always the standouts in the Boot Camp roster, had been absent for almost ten years. Half of the duo, the hilarious Sean Price, had been putting out solid stuff, but it just wasn’t the same. Now there’s a new Heltah Skeltah album out, and it’s great. Don’t judge the following track by its slightly comical intro - things really get rolling around 0:30.



In addition, a great collaboration album between two of my favorite artists, one which plays to both of their strengths, recently came out. While they usually outshine anyone they share a track with, on their own solo albums, Killah Priest and Chief Kamachi can both be monotonous (Priest’s problem being a sometimes low-energy delivery and Kamachi’s Achilles heel being repetitive spoken hooks). The perfect solution was to have them combine forces on a tag-team album, and the result is electrifying. These elder statesmen of mythological-themed hip hop rap with infectious urgency, as if someone’s just slapped new batteries in their backs.



That’s all I wanted to say - I was worried there for a few years but clearly hardcore hip hop is back from the dead, and if you liked any earlier works from these artists, check out the new albums today.

Late Bloomers and Slow Burners

Two things coincided today which had me thinking about Yeats’s ferociously powerful late-period poetry, and about one of the greatest fruits of that elderly incandescence, his “Among School Children” with its memorable chestnut tree (not pictured), the great-rooted blossomer which is leaf, blossom and bole at once.

The first was a touching article in the New Yorker which dwells on the work of an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson, who has been trying to study whether artistic genius and precocity are really as linked as we think. It turns out, to my great personal relief, that there are artists who try to “find”, and artists who try to “search”, and that the searching kind of art can take decades and decades before coming to fruition. The article’s story about the author Ben Fountain, and the years it took for him to gain success as a writer, and the support he got from his family, actually had me kvelling at work.

The second thing which set me thinking today was my absurdly delayed appreciation of most recent album by my favorite band, Sigur Rós. Without exaggeration, I’d say the first fifteen or twenty times I listened to the album, it left me cold. True, the first time I heard the new album was unfortunately in an airplane, and I missed half of what was going on because of the ambient engine noise, but still, I felt like my favorite group had let me down. It seemed like a barren, repetitive album.

Then, about two weeks ago, something clicked, and I swayed to music with brightening glance. I was listening listlessly to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust or, as I think of it because my bad German is better than my atrocious Icelandic, Mit (einen) Summen in (unsren) Ohren spielen wir endlos on my way to work, and the October sun lined up perfectly with the east-west grid of my neighborhood in Bangkok, and shone pinkly through the mist between the skyscrapers, and the entire world seemed to be singing out to me in joyful harmony through my iPod. I suddenly realized that the album was f*cking brilliant from start to finish, that it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard bar none, and for the third time in my life my daily commute made my day. (The first time involved a hot summer day, Weezer’s Pinkerton, a malfunctioning Honda Accord, and Route 6 in Connecticut, the second time involved Sigur Rós’s “Vaka”, a snowy winter morning, and Munich’s Tram 17.) Here is a picture of me this morning striding sweatfully yet manfully down Soi 51 on my way to work, in silent awe at the musical genius of Iceland’s finest.

I’ve listened to the album almost nonstop, over and over again, every chance I’ve gotten since. And not just certain tracks - I’m talking front to back. But - and here’s the point - it took me at least twenty listens before I had the “damn dawg this is a great album” epiphany. This is my favorite band we’re talking about here, and it still took months for their album to grow on me.

What happened to cause me to suddenly appreciate this music so deeply? Was it because the album is more subtle than their previous work? Is it just something that takes a while to become comfortable with? Or had I changed in the interim? Or was it the setting in which I heard it, riding the BTS above Bangkok at dawn, which caused everything to come together? How can we know, as Yeats asked, the dancer from the dance (or in this case, the music from the listener from the surroundings)?

Whatever happened, I wonder about the other things in life which I’ve been exposed to and been left cold by 19 times... just waiting for that magic number 20 to click. Imagine the authors whose work I would love if I read one or two more books. I can only hope I am lucky enough to have enough time on this planet to appreciate more of the masterpieces which I’ve overlooked in the past.

John McCain Is A Colossal Jerk

I urge you to leave this blog at once and read this great Rolling Stone article on John McCain’s life story. He is actually a much more despicable privileged asshole, f*ck-up and failure as a human being than our current president. He is a vile jerk and a horny, bitter, coarse little man. He’s been making all that pretty clear on his own over the past few weeks, but this article kind of completed the portrait for me.

p.s. I’m linking to the “print” version of the article, because no sane human should be forced to click through ten pages of hyperlinks to read one article.

Anastasius of Sinai

Rembrandt is one of those painters who (whom?) I normally admire, but don’t love. Perhaps it’s just because his name comes up so often that I have tuned him out, or perhaps it’s because some of his paintings in the museums I’ve frequented, like his creepy self-portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, seemed somehow unpleasant to me. But I just stumbled across a painting of his which I haven’t seen before, of the learned Anastasius of Sinai, which captures what, to me, was great about Rembrandt. The murky light, the weight of the sage’s body, the strangely comfortable solitude. It’s a picture that distills old-school learnedness to its essence: a man, a book, a desk, a window. I could have done without the elaborate Turkish carpet/tablecloth, but nobody’s perfect.

Use Your Allusion

This painting is of Dante and Virgil, strolling through Hell’s lobby, bumping into Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This sort of pow-wow, I understand, used to happen all the time.

There is an entire category of enjoyment which has recently all but vanished from my life.

I refer to the belatedly recognized allusion.

A slow-fuze ticking time bomb in the brain that explodes into kaleidoscopic bunga-bunga api of awareness and delight. The independent discovery of something in one artwork which was inspired by another, and which in turn transforms one’s appreciation of both works. The countless matryoschka-embedded Fabergé “Easter eggs” squatting complacently behind the trompe-l’œil Potemkin-village façade of every great work of art. Note that France and Russia appear to be the birthplaces of all artistic deception or concealment.

Anyway, in other words, I miss the nice feeling you get when you hear or read something and then later find out that it was a quote from somewhere else.

Why is this feeling scarce of late? Wikipedia. Google. Etc. Whenever I get that mental twinge which tells me I’ve heard something before, within seconds I can now find out exactly where I’ve heard it before. My mom used to tell me that instant gratification was a bad thing. I still don’t see her point of view at all, but I’m closer to it than before.


What am I blathering about? Well, one of my very favorite albums of the past several years, and of all time, really, is White Chalk by PJ Harvey. One of its best tracks is “When Under Ether”, a mesmerizing, haunting song sung by someone etherized on a table, watching the ceiling move, with hints that some disturbing medical procedure has just taken place. Here is the song.



Here are the lyrics (emphasis mine).

The ceiling is moving
Moving in time
Like a conveyor belt
Above my eyes

When under ether
The mind comes alive
But conscious of nothing
But the will to survive

I lay on the bed
Waist down undressed
Look up at the ceiling
Feeling happiness
Human kindness

The woman beside me
Is holding my hand
I point at the ceiling
She smiles so kind

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
One world to the next
Human kindness

On first hearing, the song instantly made me think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I wasn’t born yesterday, after all) and of a couple of Harvey’s previous songs which seemed to deal with abortion or the death of a child (come back here, man, gimme my daughter, etc.). But there was something else about the song’s lyrics which sparked a fire within my head, and my dull, slow brain was unsatisfied for about a year. Until a rainy Sunday afternoon last week, when I happened to be re-reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in particular “East Coker”. What did I see but some lines I’d read 15 years ago in high school or college, but half-forgotten (emphasis mine):

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

Harvey’s customary brilliance at visceral allusion, which started with the brutal Biblical tales of her first album Dry, and only got more complex from there, should have prepared me, as this was not her first exercise in dredging up a great English(-language) poet in an odd place - there was, for example, her unexpected Yeats homage B-side “The Northwood” - but I nevertheless, as I scanned Eliot’s lines, felt a quick cold satisfaction of awareness. Art had spoken to art across the decades, and my brain had traced the thread between the two without recourse to any crude series of tubes. I had found and enjoyed an allusion, and its path from my ears (when I heard the song) to my eyes (when, a year later, I re-read the poem) didn’t involve anyone but the artists and me, and for an instant I felt as if we three, the great poet, the great musician, and the listener/reader, were one. A Hermetic trinity, as it were, of artistic appreciation.

As I said above, this is a particular type of joyous recognition which I experience less and less frequently lately, and which I feel future generations will probably not be able to experience at all, because any snippet of text is now able to be checked against all of humankind’s previous snippets of text, and every allusion can be instantly deciphered via online search. I’m sure future generations will develop ever-more-subtle and relevant and intricate types of artistic expression and reference, so there’s really nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to take a moment of silent mourning for the loss of my dear, old friend, the belatedly recognized allusion, and for the demotion of our human brains, which were once our primary means of remembrance, to second fiddle after the omnipresent, pan-memorious Spiritus Mundi of the Internet.

Ache Superior

For some reason, I’d never heard of the online comic Achewood before about two weeks ago, although I realize in retrospect that I’ve seen bits of it used as avatars or posted on message boards for years. The website has like eight years’ worth of comics on it.

In few words: I have just spent something like five straight evenings reading Achewood every spare minute I had. I have been getting home from work and reading Achewood like my life depended on it. I have been poring over Achewood like it was a Ptolemaic stele and I was Jean-François Champollion. It is funny, obscene, melancholy and somehow comforting in its depiction of friendship, although I suspect that it would appeal more to males than females. Check it out. Note: the two things I’m putting on here are not representative - the strip usually isn’t about hitting broad targets like bad grammar or Comic Sans, and is usually more strange and subtle. But I thought these items stand well on their own without any knowledge of the characters.

Goodbye, David Foster Wallace

One of my favorite authors is dead, by his own hand, at the age of 46.

It’s hard to think of another stranger whose death could have been more upsetting to me. David Foster Wallace was not only incredibly talented and funny, but his writing always had a humane and optimistic streak which I always respected, although I couldn’t share it. I read with bemused cynicism his article about how inspiring John McCain was and his monumental review of a dictionary which turned into a meditation on democracy, but at the same time I felt comforted that he was out there, being idealistic when it would have been easier to be nihilistic. I envied him his apparently sincere and principled search as much as I enjoyed his winningly, self-deprecatingly complex writing style.

The fact that he seems to have given up that search in suicidal despair only adds to the ache I feel at his death. I had several paragraphs more written, but I don’t want this to seem like a ripoff of Wallace’s sesquipedalian style, so I’ll just stop. I will miss him.

In almost every picture I’ve ever seen of him, Wallace was wearing a colossally silly-looking do-rag (à la Prison Mike), so I’ll just reproduce the cover of his best-known book, a cover which I feel represents both his refreshing style and the wide-open breadth of his unfortunately-curtailed literary ambition.

The Same River Twice

After last spring’s resounding (in my mind) success of my model of the Pantheon, I immediately set out to craft a model of the Hagia Sophia. I made a lot of progress, but didn’t quite finish the interior. Or the exterior. The grand dome remains hovering suspended in midair, surrounded by virtual scaffolding.

Then we moved to a new apartment, went away for the whole summer, and I started a new job. SketchUp also didn’t seem to work with the new Mac operating system, and it kept freezing up. So with one thing and another, I haven’t really done anything in SketchUp for months.

One of my favorite places on Earth is the old part of the town of Freising near Munich, and not just because they claim to have the world’s oldest brewery. I took an entire course in Romanesque sculpture in college and remain fascinated by it, and the Bestiensaeule in Freising’s crypt was something I tried to go and see whenever I could when we lived in Munich. Well, I initially went just to see the crypt, but I started to like the whole cathedral complex, even though the main church had been renovated in hideous pink baroque. I’m not religious but have great respect for and curiosity about holy sites, and going to Freising, like walking up from Herrsching to Andechs, was one of my very favorite weekend pilgrimages. I feel lucky that I got to go there as many times as I did.

Last summer I had the chance to make a commemorative day trip to Freising, where I took over 100 photos of the area to use as reference material specifically for SketchUp. As this expedition’s protraction nearly caused my wife to miss lunch, it was a venture which was not without danger to life and limb. Well, today I finally got to use some of those reference photos. I spent the entire day working on a new model of the cathedral and adjacent buildings. The real thing looks like this from the front.

My model (which is still in the early stages, but which looks pretty respectable for one day’s work) looks like this. So far so good. I feel a bit better having started it. I hope to do the place justice. Since the outside is all cool white plaster, I think capturing it will be the easy part. The crypt, with its couple of dozen differently-sized pillars, will be another story.

However, my favorite photo from that day in Freising isn’t of the cathedral at all. It’s this picture of some kind of plants under the surface of a stream. The clear Alpine water and the sunlight from directly above made it look like the plants were glowing. It was very peaceful to watch them sway in the current.

Olympic Fever

I was working on a post on here about how I dislike the Olympics, but it descended into a string of obscenities, so I’ve decided it was too negative and I’m taking it off.

Instead, here’s something we can all enjoy: The visual punchline for a joke about Chinese air pollution.

Mascot tracheotomy.

lollipop corncockle

or, Spam Poetry Part Deux


The last installment of spam poetry unearthed an unpublished (because unwritten) complement to “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Today we turn to the later work of James Joyce. The iconoclastic Irish author may be long gone, but Finnegans Wake is still being written. It’s being written by the apparently Greco-Hindu pyramid schemer “Panakos Prabhakaran” and thousands of men like him, a veritable phalanx of creative pioneers unknowingly collaborating on one of mankind’s greatest works of literature.

The text, which has yet to be assembled in its entirety, currently consists of a series of disjointed e-mail messages about penile enlargement which are rotting in the junk mail folders of humanity. It only remains for a great man to piece together the fragments of this broken, Viagra-smeared Coriolanus. I am that great man. Here, precisely as I received it, is the first chapter of the daring, breathtaking sequel to Finnegans Wake.

lollipop corncockle

Hola,

Increasee once and foorever your sex drivve

Broke from her lips. Aynesworth heard it, and, harlequin
at home. At fast, he slept heavily, the front gate. That
was the same house that dr. Broiled a piece of ham, made
some good strong there could be no divorce no question of
marriage. About! But dr. Calgary was wrong. Places and times
i would ask jack brandiger to come there and live. This
work you are now in possession of about all bonum! Whether
it so prove, and whether i may lashing riders and jouncing
guns of the battery. Fellows, but i shall never warm to
any one again to look anything but murderous, why, you don’t
everyone is.’ ‘that is what i believed. It seems of lamentation:
poor little boy, he is going away had indeed before suggested
that the primitive.

I’ve done a bit of editorial research and it turns out that this masterful work is rich in poignant allusions to several neglected gems of our literature. To the alert mind of a scholar, it positively bristles with adroitly juxtaposed phrases lifted almost word-for-word from great works such as The Magic Egg and Other Stories by Frank Stockton, The Malefactor by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and perhaps most significantly the Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples by Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, the Marquis de Nadaillac. The hallucinatorily pornographic phrase “lashing riders and jouncing guns of the battery” is, in fact, from Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage”.

Master Prabhakaran in his subject line claims to wish to enlarge penises, but his bold poetic sensibility, which has fused these disparate elements into an aesthetically satisfying whole, has enlarged our minds. I must now begin the process of unearthing and annotating the rest of this hypermedia masterwork, as well as demanding that the Nobel Prize in Literature be immediately awarded to the author of what is undisputably our century’s greatest text. For it has something profound to say to each and every one of us, this, our majestic, eternal, unforgettable lollipop corncockle.

Astrology Useful After All

I’ll be honest: my “efforts” to learn Thai died several months ago, right after I cobbled together enough monosyllables to remote-control a taxi driver.

Once I was able to meow and squawk commands from the back seat to make the guy slam wildly on the brakes, or lurch wildly from side to side, I was all set. Add to that my well-worn repertoire of four or five choice phrases to dazzle shopkeepers and waiters with, and I guess I unconsciously figured that I had pretty much all the Thai I needed for daily life. My brain stopped caring.

Lately I’m trying to slowly shift back into learning mode and pick up some of the basics I’ve been doing without. Sadly, I don’t even know some of the most essential words like “eat” or “see” or “walk”. And I certainly haven’t the slightest idea what the days of the week, or months of the year, are. The months always seemed especially daunting because they’re quite long, for Thai words. “November” is “Pruetsachikayon”. That’s just madness.


My wife, desirous of figuring out the opening dates of certain motion pictures while watching their Thai previews, asked me politely if I’d mind learning the months. After the echoes of my cruel laughter died away, I began to wonder if it might somehow be possible. Long words in Thai usually mean they’re borrowings from Sanskrit, and I’ve had success in the past coming to grips with Thai words I know are Sanskrit, like Thai “guru” and “maharaja”, which are derived from the Sanskrit terms “guru” and “maharaja”, meaning “guru” and “maharaja”. Well, those are stupid examples, but you get the idea.

By the way, the poster above is for Som Tam, an entire Thai kickboxing movie based around a racist stereotype (not that I really mind). The enormous shirtless white guy hulks out whenever those kids feed him papaya salad, because everybody knows those foreigners can’t handle spicy food. I guess it’s kind of like Popeye, if Popeye were Asian, and if instead of spinach he drank beer and couldn’t process the alcohol and hulked out after a few sips and solved mysteries in his enhanced state. Actually, that’s not any more or less silly than most superhero movies anyway. Never mind.


Anyway, I just looked up what the Thai words for the 12 months mean. What I discovered threw me for a hell of a loop. It’s nuts. We’re through the looking glass here, people. The names of the 12 months in Thai are THE 12 EUROPEAN ZODIAC SIGNS. The same exact things. Leo the lion and all. Was that goofy Battlestar Galactica mythology right? Were our ancestors from the distant space-planets of Virgon, Caprica and Sagittaron? Er... no, but check out the following list, mostly from wikipedia, with Thai month names followed by the old Indian root:

January
Makarakhom / makara “sea-monster” = Capricorn

February
Kumphaphan / kumbha “pitcher, water-pot” = Aquarius

March
Minakhom / mīna “(a specific kind of) fish” = Pisces

April
Mesayon / meṣa “ram” = Aries

May
Pruetsaphakhom / vṛṣabha “bull” = Taurus

June
Mithunayon / mithuna “a pair” = Gemini

July
Karakadakhom / karka “crab” = Cancer

August
Singhakhom / siṃha “lion” = Leo

September
Kanyayon / kanyā “girl” = Virgo

October
Tulakhom / tulā “balance” = Libra

November
Pruetsachikayon / vṛścika “scorpion” = Scorpio

December
Thanwakhom / dhanu “bow, arc” = Sagittarius

And it’s not a new thing. While it’s true that the Thais really only switched over to the Western calendar in 1889, those Thai month names are a thousand years old or more. This seemed even weirder than the time I deduced that “hello” in Thai is more or less the same word as “swastika”. I’m still not quite sure I understand how the whole months thing went down, but I’ll try to explain.


Apparently, a Greek guy named Yavanasvera went to India in around 150 AD and told them all about the wonders of the zodiac signs. For some reason this really caught on with the Hindu bigwigs and so, in addition to whatever system they already had in ancient India, astrologers started referring to certain months as, more or less, “Lion-Time” and “Scorpion-Time” and so on. I’m guessing that Joe Ricepaddy didn’t have much use for these obscure astrological terms, since I think most Asians went by the lunar calendar anyway, but they definitely entered into the Thai language at a relatively early date.

Just a guess but at least one of those pairs of names, “Karka” = “Cancer”, share the same Indo-European root word. Even more improbably, the Thai word for horoscope seems to actually start with “hora-” as well, which is pretty messed up. From a very interesting article which goes into great depth about the Thai calendar: “In fact, the Thai word for ‘astrology’ [ho:rasa:t] is derived from a Sanskrit borrowing at this time derived from Greek [hora] ‘proper time’, cognate [through Latin and French] to English ‘hour’.”


As if that weren’t enough excitement for one day, apparently a similar transmission from the ancient Near East happened with the Indian/Thai seven days of the week, which turn out to be named after EXACTLY the same things as the classic European ones:

Surya / Aditya (Sun)
Chandra (Moon)
Angakara (Mars)
Budha (Mercury)
Brihaspati (Jupiter)
Shukra (Venus)
Shani (Saturn)

In English only three of those match our current names, because some of the Roman gods/planets got switched with Germanic ones (Thor for Jupiter, etc.), but if you took a Romance language in school you should recognize that Tuesday = Mars-day, Wednesday = Mercury-day, etc. I guess I just always assumed that in Asia they had their own names for stuff like this, and I suppose they did, before the planet-day-naming fad swept the world.

This system apparently spread as far as China and Japan, where, if you’ll look at the handy chart some devoted wikipedian has crafted, they used to call Thursday and Friday Wood Planet Day and Metal Planet Day, after their names for Jupiter and Venus. So this means that by around a thousand years ago, from Greenland and Ireland all the way over to China and Japan and Mongolia and pretty much everywhere else, most of humanity unanimously agreed that we should call Sunday Sun-day, Monday Moon-day, and so on down the line for all seven days, with very few regional variations. W, as they say, TF?

This might all not seem like a big deal to you, but I’m in shock. I can’t believe that I flew to the other side of the planet, to a proud and strange Asian kingdom with thousands upon thousands of its own beliefs, rituals and unique cultural aspects completely alien to me, and the people here call August “Lion-Month”, after good old Leo the Lion.

I’m not sure I’ll remember all the Thai names of the months and days after today, but whatever happens I sure as hell have some good mnemonic devices to start with.

P.S. Apparently you can tell whether or not a month has 30 days by its last syllable of its name in Thai (-khom indicates 31, -yon 30). February has a unique last syllable all its own to remind us that it’s gimpy. I don’t know if that was a feature of the ancient names or a more modern addition. It’s a really cool idea to encode that calendrical information in the actual names of the months, but damn it I already know which months have 30 days, and the different endings make the Thai months a lot harder to remember than if they all just ended with the same suffix. Still, nice idea.

Arrow vs. Helicopter

Uncontacted tribe photographed near Brazil-Peru border
Members of one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes have been spotted and photographed from the air near the Brazil-Peru border. The photos were taken during several flights over one of the remotest parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s Acre state.

As a sort of flipside to my last post about how we’re living in a science-fiction future, here’s something to remind us that many of us are still living in the Stone Age. I’m really glad that there are still folks like this out there, doing their thing. I hope nobody bothers them too much in the near future.

Notice how agitated they look as they shoot arrows at the helicopter taking their picture. Imagine what it must have looked and sounded like to them - talk about science fiction. They’re probably composing an epic storytelling cycle about the mighty Thunder-Falcon of the Gods as I type this.

Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts

Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: May 29, 2008

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

I don’t have much to add. In addition to having possibly the best headline ever, I think the article pretty much speaks for itself.


Remember when the year 1984 came, and everyone joked about how non-futuristic things were compared to the book 1984? And then when 2001 passed and everyone joked about how mundane and non-futuristic things seemed compared to the movie 2001? Well, I think at some point between then and now, the crazy sci-fi future snuck up on us when we weren’t looking.

Except for the flying cars and sentient androids, we’re basically living in a Blade Runner / Neuromancer world. Let’s go through the major elements of a Blade Runner/cyberpunk-type setting, the things that would have seemed like futuristic madness 15-20 years ago:

-Widespread body implants and subcutaneous microchips? Check.

-Retina, face and fingerprint scanning, voice recognition software? Check.

-Clones, genetically modified mutants and bizarre transplants? Check.


-Unmanned combat drones and other battle robots? Check.

-Lobot-style earphones worn by half the random assholes on the street? Check.

-Videophones, tiny storage devices with massive capacity, handheld tricorder-like devices with nearly limitless functions, etc.? Check.

-USA in pathetic decline? Check.

-Orwellian newspeak? Check.

-Cartoonishly dastardly corporations, apocalyptic ecological disasters, sprawling megacities in odd places like Dubai and Ürümqi? Check, check, check.


-Everything suddenly turning Chinese? ENORMOUS CHECK.

And now we’ve got monkeys with mind control over robots. Aside from, again, the flying cars, we’re living in a futuristic dystopia. And, I have to say, it’s very nice. Any dystopia where I can play Mario Kart DS wirelessly, and where my mom plays Brain Age, is a very pleasant dystopia indeed.


P.S. I had no idea how difficult it is to find a picture of a chimpanzee wearing virtual reality goggles. Preferably one also holding a gun, as I seem to recall happening in the movie “The Lawnmower Man”. You’d think it would be a snap. It is a nearly impossible task. There are no pictures of virtual reality chimps out there. None. I wasted nearly an hour looking. Isn’t a chimp in virtual reality goggles, like, an iconic image we’ve all seen a thousand times? Oh well. If you find a good one let me know.


P.P.S. I don’t often cite my photo sources, mainly because I see this humble blog as the online equivalent of one of those collage posters middle-schoolers make out of stuff cut from old magazines. Also, citing sources is a friggin pain in the neck. But the photo above of the scaffolded apartment building is from a lovely site, one which I’ve spent a lot of time perusing, by photographer Michael Wolf. It’s great stuff, although my sense of wonder at some of the photos is a bit dulled by the fact that they look like the actual view from our new apartment.

Constant Dreams that I’m Constantine

Telekinesis, I see through dreams
A conqueror of all the world like the Hebrew kings
I’m David, reincarnated over again
A gladiator of the universe, a soldier of men
A warlord across the field, returnin from battle
With blood upon my shield with an arm full of arrows
I’m a warrior, elephants kneel as I pass
Holdin skeletons of the soldiers that I killed in my path
With the heads of their leaders still in my hands
Hold it up, lightning strikes, brightens the night
Turns my hair white like Christ, then flash out of sight
Head back to the cemetery, my job is done
Volume One, Priest, Part Two is when God will come

-Killah Priest, from “The Law”, off the album Priesthood

Killah Priest has been pretty much my favorite rapper (hip hop artist, whatever) for about ten years now. He started off with some unremarkable verses on early Wu-Tang albums, then emerged as the most talented lyricist in the Wu-affiliated Sunz of Man, then finally dropped the amazing, instant-classic album Heavy Mental in 1998.

No other rapper (or recording artist of any kind, really) has ever combined mythological references, vivid description and flat-out weirdness like Priest. He’s like a Brundel/Fly combination of John of Patmos, William S. Burroughs and Erich von Daeniken. His most impressive moments on the first album include ... well, never mind. I just spent about 20 minutes looking for lyrics to quote, but the problem is that the people who have nothing better to do than type in rap lyrics are not the sharpest pencils in the box. I haven’t listened to some of those tracks for years but I can tell that the online lyrics are horribly garbled, game-of-telephone style. “The Iron Sheik” becomes “dying sheep” and so on.

Anyway, K.P. has a dense, dazzling, versatile-yet-consistent style whereby standard rap subjects like the plight of ghetto dwellers or battling one’s enemies are elaborated upon with blizzards of mind-blowing apocalyptic, hellish and messianic allusions. The unrelenting paranoia, horror and madness are balanced out by stunning poetic descriptions and occasional moments of humor or optimism. However, it’s usually pretty grim, heavy stuff. Sometimes Priest’s sanity itself is in doubt - Does he really think he’s “The One”? A magnificent yet disturbingly megalomaniacal verse about his own birth, from Black August:

They knew the time and the date of my arrival
Doctors and preachers opening bibles
Philosophers stood wondering
The sky thundering
Inhaling, old widows wailing
Windows open
Wind blowing, curtains across my head forming a turban
Do not disturb him, a stranger said
Standing at the side of my bed, placed a crown upon my head
My eyes were black pearls staring at the map of the world
Born to conquer, the angel then handed me my armor
Kneeled in my honor, revealed to me where I should wander
Until time to take over
Y’all reigns, been great but now it’s over
Now I lounge in castles surrounded by Greek statues

As a listener this sort of thing sets up a strange tension for me: Is this just a cinematically-described messianic spin on the standard rap boasting, or is this guy genuinely deranged? All I know is, either way he’s great at describing whatever he sets his mind to describe, however outlandish it may be.

Priest’s second album, A View from Masada, disappointed me both in terms of production and lyrical content, but after that slight misstep he’s been getting steadily better and better or, as I think I read on an interview with him somewhere, he feels he’s growing “younger and wiser”. He’s consistently honed his flow, broadened and deepened his themes, and gotten more judicious in his choice of tracks and collaborators. In fact, he has gone from being a neglected offshoot of the Wu-Tang empire who seemed doomed to wander in the wilderness of the deeply weird to a consistent and prolific veteran who can confidently mastermind cohesive group albums, including the stellar Black Market Militia.

Killah Priest’s work has in itself matured and gained substance over the years, but it’s also fair to say that since 2001 his strange preoccupations have been granted a great deal of legitimacy and urgency by outside events. Back in the mid-90s a rapper obsessed with Biblical warfare seemed merely quirky. But in many people’s eyes the real world has actually morphed into the sort of paranoid nightmare Priest has been describing all along, with Americans actually engaging in ghastly warfare in the Holy Land and Bush looking more and more like a many-headed Beast of Babylon. In other words, the vivid imagination that made him seem so odd in 1998 seems much more like prophecies of daily life in 2008. Of course, he wasn’t the only 90s rapper with pre-millenium tension and conspiracy theories, by far, but he was certainly the best at it, and he’s only gotten better.

While he is probably my favorite rapper of all time (or maybe tied with MF DOOM, although they’re like apples and oranges), I find I have to be in the right mood to really sit down and listen to Killah Priest’s albums, because they’re so dense and paranoid. Luckily, I now have an hour-long bus commute twice a day, which is perfect for catching up on the hip hop I’ve missed in recent years. I hate to admit it but, because I didn’t have a morning commute for three years I really hadn’t been sitting down and listening to new music as often as I used to. I actually hadn’t heard Priest’s most recent album, The Offering, all the way through, and I can’t believe what I was missing out on. He’s got a new album coming out next week called Behind the Stained Glass, and I will unhesitatingly get it (and I mean buy it, using real money, not... er, acquire it elsewise) the instant it drops.

Two highly recommended artists on a similar vibe are Priest’s long-time groupmate Hell Razah, who has really elevated himself to a powerful and intelligent solo artist over the past couple of years, and Chief Kamachi, whose excellent posse album Black Candles is probably tied with Priest’s Black Market Militia for my favorite hip hop album of 2005.

By the way, the post title is one of my favorite Priest couplets, from a track called “Think Market”. I would guess that the Constantine referred to is the exorcist character from the Keanu Reeves movie and not the Roman emperor, although with Killah Priest they’d both be equally possible, which frankly is why I like his work so much. I don’t have the track with me to check that these lyrics are absolutely accurate, but it’s something like:

I’m having constant dreams that I’m Constantine
Surrounded by demons, angels with armored wings

Gruesome Carnage of the Joyce Wars

One of the best things about the series of tubes we call the Internet is that it can send you tumbling down branching paths of discovery that you would never normally venture along, or which would have taken months or even years of conventional library research or study. (Plinko from The Price is Right, above, was intended as a metaphor for the branching paths of discovery, and I’m keeping it even though it doesn’t really work. I always liked Plinko.)

Anyway, start researching something apparently straightforward like panda bears or Mark Twain, and you will almost certainly end up learning about all manner of outlandish bric-a-brac like mezuzahs, Port Foozle, Zam-Zammah, or even Plinko.

This is especially good for me because I love to read but have never been very good at the business of switching gears while reading: tracking down material from footnotes, looking related things up in indexes, cross-referencing, switching from book to book to verify a detail. Once I start reading something in an encyclopedia I just keep right on reading all the articles in alphabetical order until hunger forces me to stop.

For example, if I read that so-and-so was a follower of Wittgenstein or Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer, and if I am embarrassingly ignorant of just exactly what the hell a Wittgenstein is, I will more often than not just skip over the offending word without a second thought and continue reading about good old so-and-so. If this Wittgenstein jerk is really that important, I say to myself, he’ll pop up on his own and present himself to me when the time is right. So far this hasn’t happened. Wittgenstein might as well be a brand of floor wax as far as I know.

So, the Internet is a perfect way for me to fill some of those gaping holes in my basic knowledge. For example, after an hour on Wikipedia yesterday I finally, definitively grasped the difference between Plutarch and Petrarch.

One of my virtual research binges yesterday plunged me deep into a very interesting morass, something which I hadn’t known about at all: The cataclysmic Joyce Wars of the late 1980s.

The battle focussed on a new edition of Ulysses which came out in 1984, and which was intended to be somehow definitive. I’ll give as brief an overview of the kerfuffle as I can.

Apparently, the Joyce Estate, who in everything I’ve read seem to be colossal assholes, decided to commission a shiny new edition of Ulysses primarily for the purpose of renewing their copyright for another 70 years. The new book would then entirely replace all the older editions, and they would continue to rake in the dough.

So, to summarize the project: the greatest novel of the 20th century would be substantially revised and recopyrighted, not in order to make the book better, but so that the author’s great-grandchildren wouldn’t have to work.

Admittedly, Ulysses is a book with a very complicated printing history, and most scholars seem to agree that every edition so far has between several hundred and a couple thousand errors or problems in it. So, in spite of the Joyce Estate’s rather unscholarly motives for obtaining a “new” Ulysses at any cost, their project to create an authoritative new edition created a lot of genuine excitement and support among Joyce scholars.

Whom did the Joyce Estate select to edit this grand new edition? Hans Walter Gabler, a scholar working in Munich, who had conceived an idealistic, laboriously computer-aided editorial method that he was convinced would unerringly produce the Platonic text of Ulysses as Joyce would have intended it. Let me run that by you again. A German came up with a rigid philosophical basis for exactly how something should be done, and decided in advance that no deviation from the course would be accepted. What could possibly go wrong?

Gabler’s method involved creating a computerized (this was revolutionary when he started it in the late 70s) “synoptic” text which would cross-reference all the variations in certain versions of the text. However, it seems that there were several problems with his command of English, the way he proceeded with the edits, and his inflexibility about the project, and he ended up alienating two of the respected Joyce scholars who were supposed to be overseeing the new edition. The book was published anyway, and was supposed to serve as the definitive edition for decades to come. It was, in fact, the only edition being printed for much of the 1980s.

Then a relatively young scholar named John Kidd started poking holes in Gabler’s grand construction, claiming angrily in the New York Review of Books that Gabler had introduced hundreds of new errors not extant in previous editions. Kidd’s printed arguments centered on a couple cases where Gabler had misspelled the names of verifiable citizens of Dublin - names which had been spelled right in previous editions.

After Kidd’s first article in the New York Review, there followed a spate of responses and letters back and forth between Kidd and the Gablerites. The exchanges are all online, and even if you’re not into the minutiae of editing they’re still a great read. I’m personally very interested in Joyce and the approaches people take to editing his books, but I’m far from knowledgeable enough about the textual problems of Ulysses to be able to judge Gabler, Kidd or anyone else’s insights into what should be done about this ellipsis or that comma. However, I soon found what I knew about Gabler’s methods and attitude to be annoyingly... (can I say this?) Teutonic. God knows I love many, many Germans, and many, many things about Germany, but I think we can all agree that there is a certain... tendency toward philosophical idealism? in the region. A certain desire for everything to be perfect, even if it means sweeping imperfections under the rug in the form of massive self-delusion. I witnessed this firsthand in 2002, when everyone was deeply, deeply shocked that prices suddenly doubled after the Euro conversion. But... the government assured us prices wouldn’t change! This is impossible! This can not true be! In any case, I found Gabler and his refusal to admit that his project had any flaws annoying, Kidd entertaining, and the heated scholarly arguments riveting, particularly for the way that Kidd savagely eviscerated anyone who defended the new edition of Ulysses.

In these articles, anyone who tries to stick up for Gabler gets torn apart. John Kidd comes across as the optimal defender for Joyce: pugnacious, iconoclastic, all-knowing, playful, and credible. One of his responses is amusingly written as if from the perspective of a future scholar looking back on the debate after the dust has settled. He even makes little flights of sarcastic Joycean silliness like “Irony abounds. What redounds to Dr. Kidd rebounds. On several grounds, it sounds, he’s out of bounds” (this was mocking Gabler’s imperfect English).

Gabler, on the other hand, however brilliant a scholar he might be, could only in his own defense sputter condescending gibberish like “Dr. Kidd’s argument against the edition of Ulysses, then, is seriously flawed by an elementary failure to distinguish its critically editorial functions before a background of documentary referentiality which he tends to mistake for its representational aim.” Wie, bitte?

It was a classic David and Goliath story: Kidd showed several main figures of the Joyce establishment to be a wrong-headed clique of yes-men pandering to the Joyce estate, and called for the new edition of Ulysses to be pulled from the shelves and replaced with one of the older versions.

I spent the entire afternoon yesterday eagerly reading these articles and related material, and I felt a rush of surrogate joy when I read that John Kidd had been wholly successful in his crusade. Around 1989 Random House decided they’d lost confidence in the trade version of Gabler’s Ulysses, and ended up bringing back an older edition. Kidd had in the meantime been given an important-sounding post at a new Joyce Center at the University of Boston, and his own edition of Ulysses based on his painstaking research was in the works, and would be appearing soon. The End. The Joyce Wars were over, and the good guys had won.

A triumph for critics and nitpickers everywhere, I thought. One clever man had toppled a mini-industry and had very publicly given a pompous, inflexible German professor his comeuppance. Surely Joyce would have approved.



Then I did a quick search on Kidd, to see if his edition of Ulysses had ever come out. Nope. It turns out he’s unemployed, sick and crazy, spending his days wandering angrily around his old college quad, talking to pigeons.

In a quote in the newspaper article about Kidd’s sad state Gabler, glancing down from his pedestal in Munich, murmurs something condescending about how he feels sorry for Kidd, who by the way hadn’t raised more than a half-dozen serious questions about Gabler’s edition (according to Gabler). And this article was from 2002. For all I know, Kidd’s been institutionalized or dead for six years.

My heart sank. What a tragic, if grotesquely fitting, end to the whole thing. I’m glad Gabler’s 1984 edition got discredited, but he clearly didn’t learn any lessons. And in the end, the study of James Joyce probably destroyed John Kidd’s life.


Michael: You were flying today, buddy.

Buster: Yes, I was flying. But a little too close to the sun.

Lucille: You let him go in the sun?