| Oh why not |
[03 Dec 2009|07:59pm] |
Can you tell I'm procrastinating in order to avoid this boring ass business paper? Anyhow -
The religious experience, however, is beyond granting man a hedonic status or spiritual complacency. To the contrary, the religious experience is fraught with pitfalls and continual challenge. G-d, if man finds Him, does not relieve the G-d-seeker of his imperatives, but imposes new ones. Religion enriches life, gives it depth and multidimensional visons, but does not always grant man the comfort and complacency that nearly always spell superficiality and shallow-mindedness. The homo-religiosus is wanting in mental balance and harmony to a greater degree than the mundane type. His mind seethes with antinomies and anthetic problems and questions that will never find their solution. - Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Sacred & Profane; Hazedek [1945]; Gesher vol. 3, no. 1 [1966] reprinted in Shiurei HaRav pp. 4-6
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| Oh come on |
[03 Dec 2009|02:13pm] |
http://joule.marnanel.org/ is STILL down.
I like the fact that he's trying to sell his book. Or his poetry. Because we REALLY want to read that fucking poetry. I mean, hell, I love to read amateur poetry. And get me to a poetry slam and I don't feel bored or tired or the slow enroaching approach of death that will judge me for wasting my time at a fucking poetry reading at all.
I want to know who is friending me and who is reading me. Because I'm that kind of a narcissist. And it's been MONTHS since he tried to apply the joule program to twitter and got it all fucked up. You would think that he would fix it now.
or maybe he really thinks that if he keeps it down that people will really want to read his poetry.
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| Boundaries |
[03 Dec 2009|02:07pm] |
As I was saying about Boyology, the book doesn't really talk about sex. It talks about "boundaries" and how to say no to sex. When trying to be Just Friends with someone the issue of boundaries is going to come up because even if you don't intend to cross boundaries you will. Or she'll keep moving the damn boundaries without telling you. Which is why you should never try to be Just Friends with anyone that you're smitten by - even if you aren't one of those deluded assholes who thinks that When Harry Met Sally is a guide for dating. Oh sure, good platonic friends become lovers all the time but it never happens if one of those friends ONLY wants that. In that case, good platonic friends become really awkward strangers.
But I digress.
Anyhow, in the struggle to maintain a friendship with someone that you're smitten by, the issue of boundaries may come up.
For example, my client just told me that the platonic friend whom she told to never talk to her again (because they had a pissy fight over money when she loaned him money for a hooker and he started minimizing her getting beat up) and then took back as a friend (because he provided a wealth of information about his roommate who had been outright using her for months in text book passive sociopath modus operandi - and of course, once she stopped paying his phone bills for him, he called her a psycho bitch) well it's been getting tense.
Because even though they talked about it and talked about it and talked about it and he TOTALLY is only a friend now and he says that (roll eyes together) well he does break boundaries.
Like a couple of weeks ago when she was watching a boxing match and he called her up insisting that she talk to him. Because he had this awesome idea. You see his friend was in town with an Eight Ball and they were talking and they thought it'd be awesome if she came over, did cocaine and fucked them both.
Apparently, offering a strictly platonic friend a three way with yourself, another dude that she's never met but is totally cool because he brought the cocaine, is crossing boundary lines.
Good to know. I'll keep that in mind.
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| Catch & Release |
[03 Dec 2009|01:59pm] |
Jennifer Garner movie. Not terribly earth shattering. Good enough to waste a couple of hours with. I like romance movies where I can believe that there's a real romance there. I couldn't really believe in the love story of this movie but I like Jennifer Garner and Tim Olyphant (although any movie he's in where he doesn't say "I'm the fucking sheriff" or cocksucker feels weird) and Kevin Smith. And all the characters are likeable. Which is probably why Kevin Smith's inclusion in the cast is appropriate. In a Kevin Smith movie, you never get the feeling like you are watching compelling plotlines. Even with Zack & Miri Make a Porno which is a love story that I do believe in, I don't really feel driven by the plot. Most of his plots are VERY basic if at all existent and usually they get in the way of the bits.
I might be getting this from somewhere else, but Kevin Smith makes hang out movies. They aren't compelling or intense. Their strength comes from the fact that you feel like you are just hanging out with old friends and shooting the shit. And who doesn't want to hang out with old friends and shoot the shit?
The only reason I mention this movie is because the commentary track references the movie maybe 5-6 times and the rest of it is just Smith and the director shooting the shit. It's the most Kevin Smith of commentary tracks for the most Kevin Smith of movies not directed by Kevin Smith.
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| high school, redux |
[03 Dec 2009|01:52pm] |
I seem to be on a high school nostalgia kick in many ways. I'm rereading The Catcher in the Rye (surprised that "sensitive as a goddamn toilet seat" is a line that I've been using without citing sources for years). I bought Howl from ebay. Three different versions (one illustrated, one a book about that poem only and the collected works of Allen Ginsberg - well up until 1980. I mean I could buy the latest version which is the collected works up until his death in 1997 but I really don't want to read poetry about fucking little boys. Speaking of which, was Amiri Baraka EVER a good poet or was I just on a "Kill Whitey" kick when I was reading his stuff at first. I mean, shit, The Dutchman is utter crap and just an excuse for him to go on a rant against the evil WHITE JEW chick. And his other poems and plays have ranged from uninspired to purposefully provacative but nothing you couldn't hear at a Nation of Islam rally.)
Both of those are coincidental actually. The Catcher in the Rye was in the queue (I read four books at the same time. Two paperback and two hardcover or trade paperback. Two of those books (1 paperback and 1 hc/tp) are chosen well in advance by their position on the bookshelf. Once I finish one book in this set, I read the next one on the shelf and add other books to the end of that queue - usually takes me two years to go through the queue as I discovered when I reread Confederacy of the Dunces. Yes. It's a little OCD but I read 4 books at the same time and it's nice to not have the queue.)
And I actually got back on a Howl kick because of The Gilmore Girls. Season two has a bit where Peter Petrelli (sorry, I know that actor from Heroes) steals Rory's Howl poem and then returns it to her with notes because he's all sensitive and shit because he also loves the most awesome poem ever written.
Yes, it made me really like The Gilmore Girls which I thought I would (my stories keep getting compared to The Gilmore Girls after all) but that moment was cute. Especially since they are bonding over a poem about crazy people dancing on the edge between mental illness and beatific beauty (see how I use the one meaning of "beat" in the sentence. Ain't I clever?) and talking about the best minds of the generation being fucked up the ass by saintly motorcyclists and the like.
I also just wrote a book report on The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. For pay, but my choice and that Beatles movie with Bono playing Ken Kesey (or a Ken Kesey type) reminded me of it.
What I find fascinating is that I live in a community full of good little frum kids (yeah most of them are in their late 20s but they are still so damn innocent) who never really went through these phases. Hell, quite a few don't even know about Lilith. The one girl that I consider to be the one girl that actually gets me (which leads to a whole new set of problems) and whom I consider to be the strangest woman I've ever met recently said that she didn't like Rent because she's too conservative for it. And the songs weren't very good. But she really considers herself to be a good little Bais Yaakov girl who is rather offended by all this moral laxity in society (when she's not watching South Park or talking about serial killers or telling dick jokes). I suppose that's why she never got into the Charles Manson book since she never wanted to run off and join the hippies as a kid.
The rest of the community are not so contradictory. They might have heard about The Rocky Horror Picture Show but they would never go.
It's very strange to be around these people at times. I personally went from getting very excited by all this anti-authoritarianism and alternative spirituality stuff to realizing that almost everyone else was into it so was it really that cool to finding 90% of it rather odious, but still with nostalgia. When I was first excited by this stuff, a lot of the excitement came from the belief that somehow someway it was offending someone. Some of the affection faded when I realized that I had to accept the material on its own merits. But now I'm living among the someones who would be offended.
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| Dating Books |
[03 Dec 2009|01:24pm] |
Every so often, I can't resist reading a dating book. And of course, most of these books are written for women with that whole "what are men thinking? Let me tell you." tone going through it.
Apparently, we like sports. And we honk our horns and get into fart jokes. Or something like that.
Anyhow, Amazon Vine sends me free stuff (check out my reviews on Amazon. Totally say I'm helpful.) and this last time they finally figured out that their inventory is bigger than their reader base because they offered four books instead of the regular two. (Their deal is they send 2 on the 3rd week from a limited list - that's usually when you have to be fast because the DVD's, the food and the software goes fast. Even if you don't want the DVD's or food or software, you want to get them since they are easier to review and they require 75% of material being reviewed. Then the fourth week they open up the list and offer another 2. The big list has been getting bigger lately. I think there are about 200 books to choose from.)
Anyhow, I chose Boyology which seems to be a dating book for 12 year old girls to negotiate that world of high school dating. Strangely enough, it's a very chaste book. There's really no mention of sex beyond "will he put his hand around you in the movie theater" material. Actually, I just looked ahead and THERE is some mention of sex but mostly it's about setting boundaries and No means No and how not to get raped. So it begs the same question that most of these dating books for teenagers beg which is "but what if I WANT to have sex?"
Reminds me of this article in Glamour or whatever written by a Mormon Comedienne talking about being a 27-year old virgin and how many creepy guys she has encountered, but in the end she really decided to stay a virgin until marriage (all the frum girls loved that thing - especially the ones in their late 20s who won't admit to having vibrators) but of course, that article ends with an interesting bit of sexual tension with her making out, almost naked with her boyfriend and stopping him and it leading to some uncomfortable conversation. I assume that as soon as she wrote the last line of that article (which was an advertisement for her book about being a smart aleck female comedian with cobwebs growing down there) she went back to "snuggle" with that boyfriend and ended up fucking. At least in my limited experience fucking virgins, really all it takes is a little patience and a stance of "whatever you decide is fine with me. No. Don't worry. I'm not pressuring you." (especially not then when I had spent most of my high school career not getting any and I was in a constant state of shock that any woman would unhook her bra for me. Of course, I did NOT say that honest truth which was "Hey lady, it's ok that we're not fucking because I'm just happy to play with your tits.")
But anyhow back to Boyology - the book geared toward guiding teenage girls into the dating waters and telling them what teenage boys think without mentioning sex (so the 10% of the time when they aren't masturbating). It's odd. I mean it's not much different than other dating books I've read like Nice Guys Sleep Alone or Love is Hell or the rest of the bunch in that it tries very hard to state clear rules. Give a framework which includes male stereotypes (although everyone is a bit of a stereotype in high school) but really, it gives an illusion of control.
But like all dating books, it misses the main problem which is that it doesn't matter what BOYS (in general) think or feel; but what ONE PARTICULAR one (male or female depending on your preference) thinks or feels because that's the one you gotta negotiate with and fight with for the rest of your life (if you're monogamous. I am.) And as a chaste heteronormative book, it provides an interesting illusion about dating norms and sock hops that never existed; but I suppose it's nice to engage in the illusion.
And she also quotes what Plato says about boys which cracked me up considering that if she was honest about the context, it totally doesn't fit with the theme of the book.
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[03 Dec 2009|12:43am] |
Seriously, this is what a client wrote in his bionotes:I want to work as a stockbroker in New York. My dad always said:” If I can make it New York, then I can make it anywhere else in the world.” So his dad liked to quote Frank Sinatra songs. His dad sounds more useless than my dad.
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| Taleb, pt. 2 |
[02 Dec 2009|09:18pm] |
I did find Fooled by Randomness a little better than Black Swan but for the most part both books are rather long discourses on the fact that Shit Happens. And there is quite a bit of schadenfreude in it because smug asshole stockbrokers making a ton of money are the kind of people you want to see cry.
However, the book does say some pretty good things about how most traders are blindsided when the market finally turns against them. Especially when the market is being artificially inflated. But it seems like the people who are up to their elbows trading this stuff and making tons of money on junk bonds, real estate, subprime mortgages and Collateralized Debt Obligations (Yay! CDO fuck y'all!!) really get blindsided when their stuff crashes. The weird part about it is that anyone outside the bubble can tell you that these things are going to fail eventually. CDOs were based on credit card writeoffs and the debt collectors eventually collecting on those debts.
The one problem is that those people who are credit card writeoffs don't become credit card writeoffs overnight. They spend quite a few months before the credit card writeoff trying to pay their damn bills. Once the company writes them off, they've pretty much ruined their credit. So why bother paying it off when they can just wait 7 years for it to fall off?
And of course there were more write offs since the geniuses at the credit card companies lobbied to make bankruptcy harder.
Anyhow that's just one example of a toxic fund that is really ephemeral but people buying it and selling it as if it will ever have be solvent. Of course, the financial world is much more complicated and intricate than a layman's knowledge can grasp easily - which is why these funds keep showing up. There are some types of investments that are justifiably complicated and profitable. And then there are investments like junk bonds or CDOs which are complicated in order to play a shell game.
So yeah, Taleb's book is pretty good. And it's popular because all the experts talking about the economy being strong royally fucked us all. And this book is saying that the emporer has no clothes and that these people are just lucky.
He does have some interesting metaphors - like playing Russian Roulette where the prize is $100,000 but doing it once a year for 30 years. Or the infinite monkeys on the infinite typewriters and the one typing Iliad. In the case of the latter, he says that trusting a money making trader based on old success is like expecting that monkey to write The Odyssey.
Of course, I think he might be overstating things. Playing to the plebs.
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| Obladee Obladah - is that some esoteric Hindu chant? |
[29 Nov 2009|03:31pm] |
Writing a paper on South Asian aesthetics. The best I can really come up with is Bright. And loud. And pomo by Western standards.
But I liked the fact that they have no shame about riffing on the Beatles in this bit. Makes me wish I watched more Bollywood (even though i'm sure I'd get sick of it)
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| Odd |
[25 Nov 2009|12:53pm] |
So in the world of Walker Texas Ranger ("the eyes of the Ranger are upon you...") drug dealers and bank robbers meet in hot night clubs that are presided over by Ru Paul? Good to know.
And why is Ru Paul calling himself Bob in this episode. Do self-respecting drag queens run around calling themselves Bob?
And on Facebook, people are joining the group to Support World AIDS Day. Not AIDS awareness day, just AIDS day. So is the point of World AIDS day that AIDS is awesome? How do you you support World AIDS Day? Have sex without a condom? Pick up anonymous tricks? Share a needle with your local junkie? Go to Africa and get a blood transfusion?
Or should we just sing the song?
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| Crap. Just realized |
[25 Nov 2009|11:54am] |
I suppose I'm going to have to renew my frumster account. You know - actually pay for the thing too.
Bollocks.
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| Bad Guy trope that needs to die |
[25 Nov 2009|11:24am] |
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I think the most tiresome Bad Guy trope is the one that keeps killing his subordinates. Oh sure, you can say that the pharaohs buried their slaves in with the pyramids but that was centuries ago. Can't the bad guys find another way of buying silence than just slaughtering these poor worker drones? One would think that killing off vast swaths of employees would be slightly more expensive than buying a comprehensive health care plan.
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| Television and DVD as I work |
[25 Nov 2009|11:22am] |
Ok. I finally just had to put What About Brian to the side and wish that I had never seen that horrible crappy show. I avoided ThirtySomething when I was somethingTeen because I hated that self-involved yuppie crap. The second season did vary it up a little on the whole "Brian loves Marjorie who loves Brian's buddy with the wandering eye and the married couple are trying to fuck around behind each other's back" formula - but just barely. And not nearly enough to keep me watching all that crap.
Now I am watching Walker Texas Ranger. The production values are cheap and can you really make a guy talk by throwing landmines at him? But it's good cheesy idiocy. I borrowed Season 6 from the library, I believe. It begins with his girlfriend getting shot and in a coma.
I love the fact that almost every weapons dealer and subordinate decides that it's a good idea to get in a fist fight with Chuck Norris.
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| What About Brian - a JJ Abram show |
[24 Nov 2009|02:22pm] |
Sometimes watching a television show on DVD doesn't work. The first few episodes of What About Brian have already started to bore me. In every episode- Brian picks up a hot chick and gets laid.
- Brian pines for his best friend's girlfriend/fiance and they have weird awkward moments before reiterating that they are FRIENDS
- Patricia Arquette gets shuffled off to the side in some dull "I want a Baby" plot.
- The married couple wants to have an open relationship. They almost fuck other people but it doesn't quite work out that way. They end up together but there's a lot of potential for extramarital fucking.
Oh wait. It looks like the married chick is fucking in an SUV. Ok so maybe there IS going to be a plot development.
Does it get better. I trust JJ Abram produced shows to go SOMEWHERE even when they seem to be wheel spinning (season 3 of Lost) but I don't know if I want to borrow the second half or even watch the rest of this DVD set.
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| Love Advice |
[24 Nov 2009|01:04pm] |
So in the past month, I had ANOTHER fight with the friend who I'm quite fond of. It lasted a month. I was TRYING to put us on a Just Friends plane. Realizing that she worries about me made me think that I could get over her and use that worry as a vaccine. As in maybe she's not in love with me, but she's a very good friend and she cares so that's good enough. I'll take it.
( recap of the fight and then some speculation as to why people give advice )
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| The DEEP part of the college experience |
[24 Nov 2009|12:45pm] |
Like many college freshmen, I read my share of DEEP books - Eastern mysticism, drugs as spirituality, neo-pagan texts, hippie books and books that try to interpret Christianity through a Buddhist prism. Of course, the beats were in there as well as Henry Miller's zenfucking manifestos (I have no money, no resources, no hope. i am the happiest man alive). Much of it is embarrassing. Did I really think that Richard Bach was deep and multilayered? How did Starhawk's hippie rambling impress me so much? Why didn't Tom Robbins get me laid?
However, I can't completely regret it for the following reasons- SOME of those books still hold up. Howl is stil my favorite poem. I just bought the Illuminatus Trilogy again and going through it, I still laugh. I think I'd like Naked Lunch if I read it again.
- This kind of questioning led me to Judaism. It's odd that my current friends spent their year after high school getting brainwashed in Israel. I spent it looking for a community of similar hippies and freaks. So my current friends could have been part of the Jonestown massacre but I could have been a Manson family member.
- Most important - I'm NOT impressed by shit like Dan Brown.
Although that last one might be a drawback since I have trouble not sneering when normally intelligent and erudite friends say that they are reading him or have his crappy books on their shelves.
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| Love follies |
[24 Nov 2009|12:42am] |
In a recent round of "Damnit, why am I in love with this frustrating woman who insists over and over again that we are only friends and not even very close friends at that" (answer in one word: endorphins. Answer in a phrase: Every time I see her, I lose all rationalizations and I'm reduced to a grinning idiot - even when I am mad at her - ESPECIALLY when I am mad at her. Addendum: I kind of like the way we stare in each other's eyes when we're fighting - I'm not sure if that's eye fucking exactly but then again I never understood that term) I saw my friend Gavriel who is one of the few friends who knows about this situation and finds it almost entertaining (his reaction when I told him that this woman moved into the neighborhood: "You're screwed")
Anyhow, I mentioned the opposite of her - the good friend that I wish I was enamored with. And Gavriel said that this friend (let's call her B) has a lot of guys saying that about her.
Damn.
That kind of sucks.
Forget that whole meme that came down to "the reason why girls don't go for nice guys is because self-described nice guys are creepy assholes" there is a definite reason for that thought that goes beyond creepy loner types thinking themselves nice - and lonely. There's also the fact that almost every woman (ok everyone) who has ever been frustrated and pissed off over a jackass manuver of the SO has said the same thing. After the initial round of "All Men/Women are assholes!" of course.
It's the "Why do I date assholes? Why can't I meet and fall for a NICE GUY" (and if they are particularly clueless or cruel, they will say it in the presence of a platonic friend who they know is rather enamored and they might even add that gut twisting "like you" to it.) Now it seems that women do this more than men.
But there I was last Shabbos saying the same damn thing about B.
And apparently there are a lot of guys who really wish they could fall for B. Hell she's studying for a good career and she's really sweet after all.
Maybe sparks are overrated.
But regardless, hopefully we are keeping this away from B.
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| BLACK SWAN by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, aka "Shit Happens" |
[24 Nov 2009|12:29am] |
So I read Black Swan as part of a book report that I may or may not do. I read it at first with interest because he was talking about the ways that people don't anticipate the major events (9/11, the war in Lebanon, the 1987 market crash) but once the event is over, they pretend that they can make sense of it. In other words, Shit Happens. The material about his childhood in Lebanon and how 1000s of years of peace was shattered in a couple of months. But then he starts talking about how he's a trader and he has a lot of sabbaticals to think of philosophy. Once he starts giving lessons in basic Logic (If A means B, that doesn't necessarily mean that B means A - or all ducks are grey but not all grey birds are ducks) and driving it into the ground, I got bored and took it back to the library (I also discovered that Wikipedia has a very detailed description of the book so 5 page paper no problem)
However, my interest in the book died before the Basic Logic. It died when he wrote a fictional story about an author who writes a philosophical novel that mixes personal anecdotes with philosophical discourse. The author is so unique that she writes all dialogue in foreign languages. At first she's a nutcase who is bugging agents and publishers on a daily basis. They give her advice. She doesn't take it. She goes to Creative Writing classes but those classes only tell her how to write by PAST WRITING SUCCESS and not how to write something unique or new (you can raise an eyebrow now) and finally she is so frustrated she puts her book online.
Next thing you know, a small press picks it up. It becomes an overnight success. Everyone wishes that they were agents and everyone claims that they could have seen it. Because no one was expecting her success, it's a Black Swan. Now forget the fact that this is a fictional character who is loosely based on the author, here are the reasons why this story is fucking annoying.
1. That tale is the same tale that every mediocre writer tells himself. It's the John Kennedy O'Toole story. If you aren't getting published well that doesn't mean that your prose is clumsy and that your ideas are stupid. Oh no. It means that you are a precious little flower and you are just too unique to be understood by those meanies in the Creative Writing classes. But SOME DAY, you will find a market for your torture porn romance. No, really you will.
2. Philosophical novels are NOT NEW. Or unique. Aldous Huxley wrote them. Simone de Beuvoir wrote them. Ayn Rand wrote them. Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Repair is one. They all have one thing in common - they are really fucking lame. Ok, I just remembered Kundera who kind of rocks but there are so many novels that are simply excuses for characters sitting around discoursing on the author's great philosophical MESSAGE that you just gotta hurt him.
3. When talking about history or economics, the whole Black Swan/Shit Happens discourse is fairly deep. When talking about Art - particularly any art created since the Romantics rolled Neo-Classicism in a ball and threw it away - you can't really act like overnight successes are anything new. Granted 95% of all works of art (books, movies, etc.) are copies of past successes (conspiracy theories, spy novels, paranormal romance, etc.) but everyone is still looking for that NEXT BIG THING that will hit zeitgeist proportions and which everyone else will imitate. So Black Swans aren't so much unique as sought after. And just because a book is of a particular genre doesn't mean that it's crap. Wuthering Heights was a gothic romance. Dracula came after 80 years of Byronic vampires but it was the first great vampire novel.
After that bit, I couldn't take Taleb seriously. And most other reviews said that it was just as annoying as I felt. So back to the library it went.
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| I blame endorphins |
[22 Nov 2009|03:06pm] |
I just remembered a scene in Henry & June where Hugo says that Henry seems so sad and messed up and Anais replies by shouting "well at least he has someone to make him so crazy" or something like that.
I wonder if I am addicted to this craziness. I mean I already fall for control freaks and women who aren't into me. I do like unrequited love. Maybe the fantasy works too well for me. And maybe I want to be crazy in love and it's only possible if it's not real. Unrequited love - that never leaves you.
And I know all the great advice. I've said it to myself. Too many fish in the sea. Just move on. Go out there and date and you'll forget about her. All good. But it's not the right time. The only thing that has ever worked in these unrequited crushes is time.
( blah blah blah )
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