The good old days

1) From "Learning to Fly," by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1991)

Well the good ol' days, may not return
And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn

2) From "Ultimate," by Gogol Bordello (2007)

There was never any good old days
They are today, they are tomorrow
It's a stupid thing we say
Cursing tomorrow with sorrow

3) Ecclesiastes 7:10

Say not thou: 'How was it that the former days were better than these?'
for it is not out of wisdom that thou inquirest concerning this.

The process never ends

1) A Dream, by Jorge Luis Borges, from July 6, 2009 issue of The New Yorker

“In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.”

2) The (Multi)verse(s), from Radiolab, August 12, 2008

In this episode of the program, Brian Greene says that if the Universe is infinite and if the particles that form the Universe are finite, then our world and everything we know about it must repeat endlessly and in endless variety. Just like a finite wardrobe can only me mixed- and matched a finite number of times before it must repeat.

He goes on to hypothesize about multiple universes contained within a single system. He compares it to Swiss cheese: the universes are the holes and the system is the cheese. In this model, everything is expanding — both the universes and the substance between the universes. But the system — the “cheese” — is expanding faster than the speed of light, meaning: faster than anything can travel. Therefore, no matter how fast something moves through the “cheese,” it can’t cross the distance from one universe to the next.

In this model, each universe is contained and finite, while the system as a whole is pervasive and infinite. Because our universe is finite, we would theoretically be able to know everything there is to know about it. But we would never be able to know whether the other universes we assume are out there are really out there.

Depends

1) “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams, (1962)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


2) from “Hand in Glove,” by The Smiths, (1983)

Hand in glove
We can go wherever we please
And everything depends upon
How near you stand to me

Look see the sights

1) from “Souls on Fire,” (1972) Elie Wiesel quoting the Baal Shem Tov

“The man who looks only at himself cannot but sink into despair, yet as soon as he opens his eyes to the creation around him, he will know joy.”


2) “From the Morning,” by Nick Drake, from “Pink Moon” (1972)



A day once dawned, and it was beautiful
A day once dawned from the ground
Then the night she fell
And the air was beautiful
The night she fell all around.

So look see the days
The endless coloured ways
And go play the game that you learnt
From the morning.

And now we rise
And we are everywhere
And now we rise from the ground
And see she flies
And she is everywhere
See she flies all around

So look see the sights
The endless summer nights
And go play the game that you learnt
From the morning.

As above, so below

1) “Powers of Ten,” Charles and Ray Eames, 1977




2) Log Lady Intro, “Coma” Episode 9, Twin Peaks, 1990

"As above, so below. The human being finds himself, or herself, in the middle. There is as much space outside the human, proportionately, as inside.

"Stars, moons, and planets remind us of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Is there a bigger being walking with all the stars within? Does our thinking affect what goes on outside us, and what goes on inside us? I think it does.

"Where does creamed corn figure into the workings of the universe? What really *is* creamed corn? Is it a symbol for something else?"

The Creator's Pride

1) From "The Laboratory," by Wislawa Szymborska

Tell the Boss,
and let him come see for himself!

2) From "The Tyger," by William Blake

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Surely/ Surlily

1)
Fine Point (12-22-2008)
by John Updike

Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel’s defeats—
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
by Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely—magnificent, that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.


2)
from “Dialogue” (1929)
by Martin Buber

I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. “In a way that remains inaccessible to you”— so I directly addressed the former clergyman. He stood, I too stood, we looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone,” he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood.


3)
final verse of “Sugar Baby”
from “Love and Theft” (2001)
by Bob Dylan

Your charms have broken many a heart and mine is surely one
You got a way of tearing a world apart, love, see what you done
Just as sure as we’re living, just as sure as you’re born
Look up, look up - seek your Maker – ‘fore Gabriel blows his horn


4)
from screenplay for “Doubt” (2008)
by John Patrick Shanley

FATHER FLYNN: There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. And I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.

Swelling the Rout

1) To an Athlete Dying Young, by A. E. Housman (1867)

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.


2) Ex-Basketball Player, by John Updike (1954)

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

St. Sebastian

1) St. Sebastian, Andrea Mantegna, 1480:

2) April 1968 cover of Esquire, designed by George Lois:

3) Screen shot from 1991 music video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," directed by Tarsem Singh:

4) Cover of Modest Mouse's 2004 album Good News for People Who Love Bad News:

Can it be this sad design/ Could be the very same

1: Scene from “The Wheel,” first season finale of "Mad Men"

Don

What is the benefit of that thing?

Harry

Uh… it sells projectors to people who already have them?

Don

Yeah. The wheel. Stacks. You store your slides in it and it’s ready to go.

Harry

I took pictures for the paper at Wisconsin; the machinery is definitely part of the fun. It’s mechanical.

Don

What’d you take pictures of?

Harry

Girls, mostly. You could go up, and ask them their names afterward, like you were going to put it in the paper. And some other stuff. Artsy-craftsy stuff. They gave me hell about it.

Don

Artsy, like what, like: relfection of a tree in a pond?

Harry

Uh, worse. I did a whole series that was just handprints on glass. You know the way it fogs up around your heat? Take it off, take a picture.

Don

Black and white, I suppose.

Harry

Of course. I was always fascinated by the cave paintings at Lascaux. They’re, like, seventeen-thousand years old. And then bison get all the attention, but they are also all of these handprints, tiny by today’s standards, with paint blown all around them.

Don

Signature of the artist.

Harry

But I thought it was like someone reaching through the stone, right to us: I was here.

Don bobs his head, falling asleep.

Harry

Are you okay?

Don

That’ll be all.

2: From “First Impressions” by Judith Thurman
June 23, 2008 issue of the New Yorker

“Peoples who practice shamanism believe in a tiered cosmos: an upper world (the heavens); an underworld; and the mortal world. When Clottes joined forces with Lewis-Williams, he had come to believe that cave painting largely represents the experiences of shamans or initiates on a vision quest to the underworld, where spirits gathered. The caves served as a gateway, and their walls were considered porous. Where the artists or their entourage left handprints, they were palping a living rock in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force beyond it. They typically incorporated the rock’s contours and fissures into the outlines of their drawings—as a horn, a hump, or a haunch—so that a frieze becomes a bas-relief. But, in doing so, they were also locating the dwelling place of an animal from their visions, and bodying it forth.”


3: Chorus of “The Caves of Altamira” by Steely Dan



Before the fall
when they wrote it on the wall
when there wasn’t even any Hollywood
They heard the call
and they wrote it on the wall
for you and me, and we undersood

In a ca-a-a-fe, or sometimes on a crowded street

ONE: 

Review of “Jasmin et Cigarette”

by Chandler Burr

For Etat Libre d’Orange, whose store is north of Hôtel de Ville in Paris, Antoine Maisondieu has performed a masterful trick. With Etat’s creative director, Etienne de Swardt, he has taken two radically dissimilar concepts and balanced them so that they are perfectly integrated and astonishingly distinct. The first is a fragile, delicate jasmine (stripped of the dirty indolic heaviness that the flower usually leaves behind). The second is a pitch-perfect cigarette. Not the stink of a filthy ashtray. (That, says Maisondieu, an ex-smoker, is "disgusting”) This is the smell of an elegant Frenchwoman in a cafe whose grayish-white plume mixes with the chic jasmine fragrance she just sprayed on. His perfume is named Jasmin et Cigarette, and it is the quintessential French combination: allure and toxicity, loveliness and poison. I asked Maisondieu how he did it. "It’s simple,” he said with a shrug. "We all know how to do a jasmine: Egyptian and Indian jasmine absolutes, some Hedione” — a molecule that adds light to a perfume — "some benzyl acetate for softness.” He paused. "The cigarette was a bit more complicated.” He used to love unfiltered Chesterfields "in the soft box, which have a slight apricot.” So he used hay essence, tonka bean (a flavoring in tobacco), maté from South America, galbanum (a raw green) and sage. The result is a masterpiece: one hears laughter in the cafe, with the faint sound of music from somewhere else.

TWO:

“My Cherie Amour”

Stevie Wonder

THREE:

Scene from “Ocean’s Twelve” 

with Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones

Melody Chain

1) Cab Calloway as Koko the Clown singing “St. James Infirmary Blues”



2) Young woman lip-synching to Mates of State cover of Randy Newman song “Beehive State”



2.1) Young girl watching You Tube video of young woman lip-synching to Mates of State cover of Randy Newman song “Beehive State”



3) Bob Dylan singing “Blind Willie McTell”

Be seeing you!

1) From “Free for All” Episode No. 4(?) of The Prisoner

“Good morning! Good morning! Any complaints?”
“Yes. I’d like to mind my own business.”
“So do we. You fancy a chat?”
“The mountain can come to Mohammed!”
(Hangs up phone. Door opens.)
“Mohammed?”
“Everest, I presume?”
“I’ve never had a head for heights.”
“How’s Number 1?”
“At the summit.”

At 42:15, after Number 6 wins the election and becomes the new Number 2, he walks out to meet the citizens of village. They stare at him blankly, and the beneath the scene we hear, "For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow/ The Bear Went Over the Mountain."


2) Ending of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro



Fiona was in her room but not in bed. She was sitting by the open window, wearing a seasonable but oddly short and bright dress. Through the window came a heady warm blast of lilacs in bloom and the spring manure spread over the fields.
She had a book open in her lap.
She said, “Look at this beautiful book I found. It’s about Iceland. You wouldn’t think they’d leave valuable books lying around in the rooms. But I think they’ve got the clothes mixed up—I never wear yellow.”
“Fiona,” he said.
“Are we all checked out now?” she said. He thought the brightness of her voice was wavering a little. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember Aubrey?”
She stared at Grant for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags. All rags and loose threads.
“Names elude me,” she said harshly.
Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some bantering grace. She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to Grant like green stems in rank water.
“I’m happy to see you,” she said, both sweetly and formally. She pinched his earlobes, hard.
“You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”
He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull.
He said, “Not a chance.”

You Can Always Come Back, But You Can't Come Back All The Way

1) Home Is So Sad
by Philip Larkin



Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.


2) From Act 1 of “The Cherry Orchard”
by Anton Chekhov



LUBOV. [Looks out into the garden] Oh, my childhood, days of my innocence! In this nursery I used to sleep; I used to look out from here into the orchard. Happiness used to wake with me every morning, and then it was just as it is now; nothing has changed. [Laughs from joy] It's all, all white! Oh, my orchard! After the dark autumns and the cold winters, you're young again, full of happiness, the angels of heaven haven't left you. . . . If only I could take my heavy burden off my breast and shoulders, if I could forget my past!


3) My City Was Gone
by The Pretenders
(slightly different example)



Well I went back to Ohio
But my family was gone
I stood on the back porch
There was nobody home
I was stunned and amazed
My childhood memories
Slowly swirled past
Like the wind through the trees
Ay, oh, oh way to go, Ohio

Like the Hodge Conjecture?

1) Commercial for the Knowledge Generation Bureau




2) "What Do Women Want?" by Daniel Bergner

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

So close

ONE:



“Me and the Bean”
performed by Spoon
(final two lines):

I am your shadow in the dark/
I have your blood inside my heart.


TWO:



Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda
(final two lines):

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

As the rain falls/ So does your love

1) From "Rain" by William Carlos Williams:

Unworldly love
that has no hope
of the world

and that
cannot change the world
to its delight--

The rain
falls upon the earth
and grass and flowers

come
perfectly

into form from its
liquid

clearness

But love is
unworldly

and nothing
comes of it but love

following
and falling endlessly
from
her thoughts

2) Passages from “Nettles” by Alice Munro:

"Stooping, butting his head through the weeds and against the wind, Mike got around in front of me, all the time holding on to my arm. Then he faced me, with his body between me and the storm. That made as much difference as a toothpick might have done. He said something, right into my face, but I could not hear him. He was shouting, but not a sound from him could reach me. He had hold of both my arms now, he worked his hands down to my wrists and held them tight. He pulled me down—both of us staggering, the moment we tried to make any change of position—so that we were crouched close to the ground. So close together that we could not look at each other—we could only look down, at the miniature rivers already breaking up the earth around our feet, and the crushed plants and our soaked shoes. And even this had to be seen through the waterfall that was running down our faces."

"Well. It would be the same old thing, if we ever met again. Or if we didn’t. Love that was not usable, that knew its place. (Some would say not real, because it would never risk getting its neck wrung, or turning into a bad joke, or sadly wearing out.) Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal."

3) From “Buckets of Rain” by Bob Dylan:

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets coming out of my ears.
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand,
You got all the love, honey baby, I can stand.

The Laboratory

Every day when I pass the Frontier Building on A Street going to and from work, it reminds me of the images of galaxies taken by the Hubble Telescope.



Specifically, I imagine the millions of galaxies stuffed inside of a single glass building, which in turn reminds me of the recurring theory of a Hollow Earth, where certain astronomers, starting with Edmund Halley, wondered if the entire universe existed inside the Earth, rather than outside it.



Imagine Earth as a racquetball, with a hollow interior. The entire universe we see above us — the stars, the moon, the sun and the planets — all exists inside this hollowed out space.

We’re in there, too, because the curved surface of the Earth isn’t the outer curve of this ball, but the inner curve. In this theory, if one could fly, this traveler would be able to fly through the entire universe and land on the other side of the Earth, if that makes sense.

Outside the ball is nothing, I suppose. Or God, maybe.

This all in turn reminds me of the atomic nucleus. And then of The Powers of Ten. And then of "The Laboratory," by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.

The Laboratory

Did it all
happen in the laboratory?
Beneath one lamp by day
and billions by night?

Are we a trial generation?
Poured from one beaker to another,
shaken in retorts,
observed by something more than an eye,
each one individually
taken by forceps?

Or maybe otherwise:
no interventions.
The transformations occur on their own
in accordance with a plan.
The needle draws
the expected zigzags.

Maybe until now there was nothing interesting in us.
The control monitors are seldom switched on,
except when there's a war, and a rather big one at that,
several flights over the lump of clay called Earth,
or significant movements from point A to point B.

Or perhaps thus:
they only have a taste for episodes.
Look! a little girl on a big screen
is sewing a button to her sleeve.

The monitors begin to shriek,
personnel comes running in.
Oh, what sort of tiny creature
with a little heart beating on the inside!
What graceful dignity
in the way she draws the thread!
Someone calls out in rapture:
Tell the Boss,
and let him come see for himself!

I first read that poem in this book. Weschler connects it to this painting, but the poem reminds me of this movie, released 10 years ago this summer.

Losing Idols

The Voxtrot song “Brother in Conflict” came on today. The last line of the song caught my attention. Ramesh Srivastava sings — screams, really, several times: “I had to lose my idols to find my voice/ lose my idols to find my voice/ lose my idols/ to find my voice.” Appropriate for someone who channeled Morrissey in early songs.

It reminded me of the Bob Dylan song/spoken word piece “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” Dylan performed this at New York Town Hall on April 12, 1963.

It’s a eulogy, but not for Guthrie, who was still alive at this point. Dylan obvious owed a great deal of his early work to Guthrie. This was Dylan saying goodbye to that influence and moving on to something new.

They’re actually similar, the song and the poem. Both rattle off in lost lists: “And this, And this, And this.” It’s the like “The Exorcist”: “The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you.” It takes a couple of shakes to get peanut butter off a spoon.

“The music is so much different and much more work-intensive than anything we've ever done before,” Srivastava told “the Austin Chronicle” last year. “You can accept the part of yourself that wants to write really accessible pop songs, and you can also accept the part of yourself that wants to write something a little more complex.”

The last seventeen lines of the Dylan poem:

Where do you look for this lamp that’s a burning
Where do you look for this oil well gushing
Where do you look for this candle that’s glowing
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist and turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You find God in the Church of you Choice
You find Woody Guthrie in the Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it’s only my opinion
It may be right or wrong
You can find them both at the Grand Canyon at sundown.

Eric Clapton said this about Dylan and the poem: “He’s a poet. Basically he’s a poet. He does not trust his voice. He doesn’t trust his guitar playing. He doesn’t think he's good at anything, except writing—and even then he has self-doubts. Have you heard that thing he wrote about Woody Guthrie? That to me is the sum of his life’s work so far. Whatever happens, that is it. That sums it up.”

Clapton, of course, being the one who inspired people in London to write “Clapton is God” on subway walls.

All of which begs to reference Exodus 20:19-20: “God said to Moses, “So shall you say to the Children of Israel, ‘You have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven. You shall not make idols of Me; gods of silver and gods of gold shall you not make for yourselves.” Repeated several times (Exodus, Levitacus, Deuteronomy) of course.

You have to lose your idols to find your voice.

The moon in June, crazy as a loon

Crazy stories from the crazy world of space.

First, a space trash catastrophe in the works as thousands of tiny pieces of debris orbit Earth. When one of these pieces hits something larger — like an abandoned rocket — the collision creates more tiny pieces of debris. If this chain reaction reaches critical mass, space becomes too dangerous for new crafts.

Second, a space trash catastrophe in the works as one astronaut drives 1,000 miles to confront the girlfriend of her astronaut crush: “Nowak — who was a mission specialist on a Discovery launch last summer — was wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol, and latex gloves in her car, reports show. They also found diapers, which Nowak said she used so she wouldn't have to stop on the 1,000-mile drive. Reports show that after U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman's flight arrived, Nowak followed her to the airport's Blue Lot for long-term parking, tried to get into Shipman's car and then doused her with pepper spray.”

Third, Google Copernicus Center is hiring.