NY, NY

Spent the day on airplanes, to arrive, exhausted in NY, NY at about 5 east coast time.  It’s now ten east coast time but Carol and I are still in west coast time, so it’s just seven here.

tsquare 

 

We ate at Virgil’s Barbeque, excellent greens, cheese grits, macaroni and cheese—Carol had bbque brisket.  I had fried chicken. Turns out Virgil’s is just a half a block from Times Square. 

 

See picture.

 

Also they had a huge screen with a huge M and M on it, so I took a picture of that too.

 mnm

 Tomorrow, I will truck over to the MOMA and observe some pictures.  And probably I’ll go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Lot 21

 

parkinglot4
 Please note inter-galactic falling objects.

 

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They intend to replace my beloved parking lot, formally and formerly known as Lot 21, with this stinking little picture.

 

essb

 

 

Actually they intend to replace it with what’s in this fruity little picture of some sort of hazy airbrushed reality.  Apparently, four buildings will go up, as far as I can tell, that might be called collectively the Education and Social Science Building.

Specifics are offically as follow:

Gevirtz Graduate School of Education – 4-story building, approximately 97,300 GSF of classrooms, faculty offices, meeting rooms and related staff support spaces. College of Letters and Sciences – 4-story building, approximately 96,700 GSF of classrooms, faculty offices, meeting rooms, film screening rooms and related staff support spaces. Center for Film, Television and New Media (CFTVNM)- 2 story, approximately 15,570 GSF theater building with 298 seats.

For a total cost of somewhat over 101 million dollars.

It is scheduled to open sometime in 2009.  Fat chance.

Dumb and dumber

 

parkinglot3

 

Hard hats are now necessary because of objects falling from the sky.

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Yesterday was the last day of class.  I always get bummed in the last week of class.  Maybe that’s when I most feel I have managed over ten weeks to move a pile of sand from one random spot to another.  Or could be I will miss seeing the students.  Each class is different, and UCSB is just big enough that chances are I won’t see a one of them again, unless they want something.

 

I tried to watch that movie, Borat, on DVD that I had read about.  But I gave up after 30 minutes.  I hadn’t laughed once.  Maybe you have to see that one with an audience.  I wonder what people were laughing at.  The sudden realization of their own bigotry perhaps?  Maybe that’s why I didn’t laugh.  I am not surprised by my bigorty.  This is America.  I am anti-American because I am an anti-bigot.

 

 

I was mildly amused at the image of Borat taking a dump in a planter box outside some building on a street in NY, NY.  Stupid rube!  I was back in the 70s watching some damn, boring German film about alienated youth who seemed, for some reason, to spend a lot of time driving along the border between East and West Germany, back when the two Germanies were split up, and out of nowhere for no particular reason, one of the guys gets out of the car and goes and squats on a sand dune and takes a dump.  I didn’t know what the point was, but I remember thinking that a person would have to be pretty relaxed or need to take a crap pretty bad to do it right there on camera like that, because no special effects were used in this instance.  I mean this dump was not digitally enhanced.

 

Whatever happened to alienated youth?

 

Census data indicate that only 24% of all households follow the pattern of the “traditional” family: a father, a mother, plus kids, dog, cat, and so forth.  Only 13% of all households feature a father, a mother who stays home and does not work, plus dog, cat and so forth. The number of single people of both sexes continues to rise, as does the number of households with an unmarried man, woman, plus kids.

I see Nissan is putting out an SUV called the Armada.  Where is Sir Francis Drake when you need him.?

 

Smogged

parkinglot2

Some progress was made on the parking lot since Tuesday.  More of the blacktop has been moved away and earth is showing now, as well as dust when the tractor goes through.

 

avroom

 

 

The digital data projectors are stored in this room, along with cables and other odds and ends. I dropped off my cables and keys at audio visual place where one gets the audio visual stuff as I do at the end of each quarter.  Then I have to check them out again for next quarter.

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Yesterday, I got my car “smogged” as required by California law.  I was happy the old 86 Volvo passed, but sad to learn it churns out about 25% more pollutants than your average up to date car.  But I drive it less than 7000 miles a year so maybe that makes up for the pollution a little.  The smogging cost over 50 dollars; and the fee for the registration was over 50 dollars. 

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I recently read that in the 19th hundreds in the US fifty percent of all children did not make it past the age of 10.  If a person turned 21 in the year 1900, there was a fifty per cent chance that one of that person’s parents was already dead.  The world wide average life expectancy doubled in the 20th century from 30 to 60 years of age.  The average life expectancy however has risen in significant part not because people are living longer but because the infant mortality rate has been very significantly reduced.  There has been a 10% increase in life expectancy at the upper end.  Whatever that means.

 Women live longer than men, though men, in the industrial nations are catching up, and the affluent live longer than the poor.  Certainly the notion of class is a social construction, but is living a shorter amount of time because one is poor a social construction? 

Accidental Snap

This is an accidental photo.  I had just taken a few snaps of my parking lot and I must have failed to turn off the camera because when I loaded the files onto my computer, this photo showed up. 

 shadow

I didn’t know it was there.

I feel dizzy looking at it because I know that shadow is my shadow and so I am looking at myself upside down.  I have no idea where the camera was pointing when I took this snap because I was not aware I had taken a snap, but it must have been pointing behind me.

 

shadow2

 

 

 

Here I am right side up.  I feel less dizzy looking at it this way; though this way I certainly do look as if I had a pen head.

 

I like this accidental photo partly because it reminds me of a De Chirico painting.  I have liked his paintings for a long time.  They are sad and remind me of the passage of time.  Shadows play a big role in his paintings.  Usually they are very long—those shadows—suggesting, I believe, the end of the day.  In the picture below, the little girl rolling the hoop has a shadow behind her, but she seems herself painted in the same color as the shadow.

chiraco 

 

 

Continue reading Accidental Snap

Parking Lot

This is my parking lot.  Or this was my parking lot.  Now my parking lot is no more, just a bunch of chopped up blacktop.  But in this area my parking lot was once located.  It is no more.

parkinglot1 

I miss my parking lot.  I started parking in that lot in 1976.  So I parked in that lot for over 30 years.  The walk from my lot to my office is not that far.  But now because my parking lot is no more I must walk at least 4 times as far as I previously walked.

Moreover, I have to park in a strange lot with which I am unfamiliar.  I feel like an interloper in that lot.  That lot has a parking structure in the middle of it.  I do not like going into the parking structure because you drive and drive sometimes looking for a spot and you see one over there but because of the way the structure is constructed you know you won’t reach that spot in time because you will have to drive around to hell and back to get to that spot.

So I park in a spot past the parking structure, out in the open air, and to get to where I want to go I have to walk through the parking structure.  I have to cross two roadways that sometimes have cars whizzing by in search of a parking space.

I feel endangered in the parking structure.  And then I have to cross a bike path.

My old parking lot had a stand of eucalyptus right in the middle of it and trees all along the far side over by that white building.  But over Christmas break, they came in and cut all the trees down.  And then one day I drove up and there was a gate where I used to drive into my lot.

Life goes on, I guess, but without my familiar parking lot.  I hope I can adjust.

The Anxious Praire Dog

At one time I had a book on anxiety, a collection of different kinds of articles, semi-empirical on anxiety.  One, I remember, speculated on some kind of evolutionary connection between intelligence and anxiety.  The word, intelligence, as used in this context seemed to have less to do with intelligence as a thing penetrating the mysteries of the universe and more to do with military stuff.  The CIA for example is the central intelligence agency.  People who work in the organization, anxiousdogwhile not themselves necessarily intelligent, seek out intelligence.

Intelligence here would seem allied to a view of the world as engaged in conflict or as posing dangers, from another people, perhaps, or the elements, to one’s particular tribe and within that tribe to one’s self.  Intelligence, in this light, would seem integral to survival.  The more intelligence one might acquire of possible, potential looming disasters or attacks by known enemies, the more one might prepare to meet and greet these possible eventualities.

Anxiety appears—not as fear per se—but as a heightened awareness of possible things in the environment that one ought to fear or that might prove deserving of fear, depending upon one’s intelligence. In the tribe certain anxiety prone individuals might stand then as outposts or guards against threat from without.  Certainly, the best guard at night, the one least likely to doze off and thus pose a threat to the entire tribe, is the anxious fellow, the one a little jumpy even in what might appear to be “normal” non-threatening circumstances.

Such a fellow leans outward as it were, via the senses, into the environs.  He notices things that go bump in the night.  Over time, he might even notice patterns or signs that portend or seem to portend coming events.  The sound of a twig breaking in the dark makes him jump.  He is like that prairie dog seen on television, the one who sits high on top of a mound, constantly scanning the sky for signs of the hawk that might come swooping down at any second to carry off one of his kind. 

If the anxious scout gopher does gather intelligence on an incoming hawk, he lets out an alarm so that his fellow gophers may seek shelter or at least flatten themselves upon the ground. The behavior of this anxious gopher, by sitting so high up and out in the open himself, has been seen as a sign by some of the possibility of “altruistic” behavior in the animal kingdom.  Certainly this is not the case.  The anxious prairie dog seeks above all else to save his self and if others are also saved so be it.  The fact is the anxious prairie dog in light of his anxiety simply doesn’t trust anybody else to keep an eye out. 

The work of the anxious prairie dog is isolating because, anxious as he is, he knows threats may arise not only from without but also from within.

Blissfully Unaware

That my particular death thing may have a biochemical element doesn’t mean that there isn’t more generally some sort of death thing.  People die of course and I can’t help but see death as the central defining fact of what was called, when I was going to college, human experience, as contrasted with animal experience.

cat 

 I am fairly certain my cat is not haunted by its own morality or is in any way remotely aware of the fact that it will cease to be and is therefore unaware even that it exists.  I know my cat “is” but I don’t think she does.  

She might, if attacked, “fear for her life,” but I think really that she is instinctively afraid of damage that might come to her but not of the possibility of her non-being.  I think cats may grieve but not because something is dead but because something is gone or missing. That this missing thing, if dead, can never return just doesn’t figure into her calculations.

So death, the fact and the awareness of the fact, is something particularly human, perhaps even the central defining characteristic of what being human is.  If I may say that.  One’s death is always in the future, so death is bound up intimately with the capacity of the human brain to look into the future.  Or, let us say, since no one can look into the future, that because of an awareness of the future, human beings have long wished to look into it, to predict, by means of such things as astrology or palm reading or auguring from the guts of animals, what might be.

This awareness—that there is a future—is what has allowed human beings, not to predict it, or look into it, but to prepare, on the basis of memory, for it.  It is as if civilization or society, as a collective construction, is built to live past any particular human being and to represent in that way a transcendence of death of the individual.

We are perhaps not that different from the Egyptians.  We too build our pyramids in which to bury ourselves.

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My cat remains blissfully unaware that it exists. 

Continue reading Blissfully Unaware

A Necessary Rationalization

The year my death thing kicked in was not a good year.  That was the year my English teacher threatened to kick me out of his class because of the bad things I said and wrote about him.  That was the year too the coach asked me if I wanted to quit the basketball team because my attitude wasn’t right, he said.  I didn’t know anything was wrong with my attitude, and I didn’t know either that I stopped talking for most of that year until years later when one of the parents said something about it and said they were worried.

Now I wonder if that wasn’t the time my depression started to kick in too.  My death thing, as I said, was not some random cognition but an actual sensation of some sort.  I have read that the biochemistry of the adolescent brain is still in flux and I know that quite a number of types of mental illness kick in for males in their late teens and early twenties.  Prime time for schizophrenia.  So that sensation might have been some sort of biochemical shift, or blip, or glitch in the old brain.  What the connection between this blip or glitch was and the “death thing” I couldn’t say.  I doubt there’s any connection between a biochemical shift and an awareness of death.

I don’t recollect having thought of myself as depressed at the time.  But I didn’t have a word for that either.  People didn’t talk about depression much.  I guess I would say I felt lousy and the old lady would see me moping around and ask what was wrong, and I would say, Everything or Nothing.  That’s what it felt like too: everything or nothing. 

 I suppose I was lucky to have found Dostoevsky at that time.  All of his books are about death, dying, suicide, the threat of suicide, people that die, or should be dead because they are such goddamn crappy people.  Raskolnikov kills an old lady for no clear reason and goes around the rest of the book thinking about suicide.  Suicide or insanity—those seem to be his choices.  I do know that reading Crime and Punishment the first time made me feel as if I had been saved.  Not exactly that, I guess, but at least somewhere, some time, people had been who might have had an inkling of what was going on inside of me at the time in 1962.

And through Crime and Punishment I came upon the diverse existentialists who opened up a whole new world of death and misery that made me feel at home.  OK.  It was a bit of a stretch. Most of these people lived over in Europe and didn’t speak English.  I had to go abroad to feel at home, still that was better than nothing.  How could I not feel that “shock of recognition,” as I think Edmund Wilson called it, when I opened up The Rebel and found Camas saying the first and the most basic question for the philosopher was, “Should I kill myself?”

Rationalization

fosterfreeze

So what with the death thing and the “serious” novels I was starting to read around that time, I began to think I was profound or deep maybe or something like that, and other people of course were not.   So while they all went off to the prom, or got drunk and drove around in their cars doing whatever, I was at home in my room alone and thinking deep thoughts, while they were off doing the trivial things high school kids did back in 1962. That was a pretty good rationalization of my social ineptness—that word isn’t strong enough—though not good enough to keep me from feeling pretty damn out of it on occasion.

Not out of exactly, just lost.  I didn’t know enough about what I was missing in the form of a “normal” high school social life to feel out of it.  So I just trucked on with the death thing like a monkey on my back.  Sometimes, I figured, though this was later on, that I was born in the wrong century.  Maybe I should have been born back in the 19th century when half of all kids didn’t make it past ten years old.  Or maybe even earlier than that, back during the Middle Ages, during the plague when people were dying all over the place.  Hell, I could have become a priest and fit right in.  I could have gone around giving sermons on the ever present presence of death and how this life was a veil of tears and soul making and so forth, and really gotten my heart and soul into it.

But in California in 1966, it didn’t look like anybody was dying.  I had at that time only met one dead person and that was my poor cousin that I didn’t like very much.  And since nobody was doing it, nobody was talking about it.  I don’t remember the topic popping up in any sort of casual conversation, as in, oh by the way, but isn’t death sort of terrible.  I couldn’t find a way to introduce my obsession into conversations about cars, sports, girls, and getting drunk.  There just wasn’t a niche anywhere in the social ecological system of high school for a kid who went around thinking about death all the time.  And since nobody was doing it—dying I mean—my bringing up the subject was likely to be taken as a conversational downer.

This is all mixed up with any manner of chicken and egg problems.  Did the death thing—since it really did exist, and I wasn’t faking it—keep me from fitting in?  Or was the death thing a kind of rationalization of my lack of fit.  Or maybe I really just didn’t fit in because I thought too much and was the only kid at my high school to have read Crime and Punishment and the death thing was a way of feeling there was something special or different in me that could justify my persistent sense of isolation.

That’s a picture of non-dead young people back in 1962 hanging out at the burger joint and looking as if they are auditioning for American Graffiti.