“shine a light” at the imax theater reminded me
1. i need to go to the dentist

2. keith richards is a genius

3. darryl jones is not an ‘official’ member of the band despite the fact that he has been their full-time bass player since 1993, and ronnie wood, who is also a replacement, is an official member. this is ronnie wood:

this is darryl jones:

4. if you can play one note with conviction, that is better than playing a lot of notes with less conviction. buddy guy teaches us this. he also teaches us that if you stare really hard into the camera while you play that one note, then that’s even more conviction!

5. “sympathy for the devil” by jean-luc godard is better than “shine a light” by martin scorsese, and it’s also better than “gimme shelter,” even though “gimme shelter” is really good.

internet works at our apartment for the first time in a month.
i’m working on a new record of original songs called “i secrete yuppie juice”

marian and i just got back from seeing genius aaron siegel’s mysterious event at the chocolate factory in long island city. he’s continuing it on Friday and Saturday at 8 PM, and if you have a heart, a feeling way in the world, a way of feeling things and wanting to explore the world, you will go. it was amazing! aaron and i have just completed work on a new record of free jazz duets.

do you want to see a harry smith film set to ‘misterioso’ by thelonious monk? yes!

Ted gave me a field guide to survival, recently, so now all I need in life is a solar panel (and maybe parkour skills). Anyway, solar panels seem to require a lot of research and I’m not sure where to start.
Someone’s selling a secondhand solar panel on Craigslist. Is this a good model?

I’m concerned that I’ll shell out for one, hang it in my window, and then find that I can only power half my laptop for three seconds. How do you get a sense of what they power and for how long?

A friend of mine, M. Pasternack, was recently trying to sell his “iSight” computer camera on Craig’s List. One of the responses he received was this:

hi,
I would love to buy your eyesight if it’s still available. Please let me know. Thanks!

best,
Matthew

Which is connected to this:

from an essay by jonathan rosenbaum on “eyes wide shut”:

“As Gilles Deleuze noted in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, “In Kubrick, the world itself is a brain, there is an identity of brain and world”; Deleuze singles out such central images as the war room in Dr. Strangelove, the computer housing HAL’s circuits in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining as examples of what he meant, to which I might add the racetrack in The Killing and the training camp in Full Metal Jacket…And in each film the brain, the world, and the system connecting the two start to break down from internal and external causes, resulting in some form of dissolution (The Killing), annihilation (of the world in Dr. Strangelove and HAL’s brain in 2001), mutilation (of the brain in A Clockwork Orange and the body in Barry Lyndon), or madness (The Shining and Full Metal Jacket, which also chart respectively the dissolution of a family and a fighting unit).

“Building on Deleuze’s insight, critic Bill Krohn has proposed, in the only plausible account I’ve read of the structure of Full Metal Jacket, that “the little world of the training camp…is portrayed as a brain made up of human cells thinking and feeling as one, until its functioning is wrecked first from within, when a single cell, Pyle, begins ruthlessly carrying out the directives of the death instinct that programs the organ as a whole, and then from without by the Tet Offensive, the external representation of the same force.” As a result, in the second part of the film “the narrative itself begins to malfunction” along with the group mind, exploding “the conventional notion of character” and drifting off in several different directions.”

A headline from today’s New York Times:

Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit 

Every couple months, there’s a new comment on my old Sheila post. Another one just arrived:

Yes, I’m another gullible victim. I fell for the ‘Tatiana Aarons’ experience on the last weekend on March. Well, at least I’m not the only one.

Horray! Join the ranks of the unwilling!

Meanwhile, here is a wonderfully understated video about cars from the Alan Lomax Collection.

And Williamsburg, before you bought your first pair of Converse.

And Sam’s Dance Progenitor.

And a bunch more.

(Bloggers, is there a way I can post flash-player videos sdirectly to the blog?)

Hi guys, I live in Rio now.

I really really suck at Portuguese!

More soon!

i just got the following email (name has been redacted):

I put some thought into my response, and after sending it, decided to post my answers on this blog, with the notion that other young & aspiring fiddlers may be inspired by my wisdom. Once again, names (other than mine and that of the fiddlers i list as being personal favorites) have been removed. Here is my advice to the young fiddler:
“hi [NAME REDACTED],
thanks for writing! let me see if i can think of some tips:
learn by ear!
focus on having good rhythm!
find fiddlers you love and try to sound as much like them as possible! my favorites are sue sternberg, tommy peoples, and bruce greene.
focus more on playing well than playing fast!
good luck!
sam”