stevengharms

Recently my recuperating (and thanks for all the well wishing, well-wishers) patient and I were watching Kill Bill 2 as it is playing on Encore at the moment (look, the cable bill is already 120 a month, to add more movies i’m looking at a 2 C-note bill, and that’s just insane) and I noticed two things.

David Carradine is a great actor. I always thought of him as the scenery-chewing Kang, but this is undoubtedly the role he was born to play. His lethality is only assisted by the fact that he is an excellent raconteur. His stories and pop-culture philosophy (hallmark to Tarantino’s films) instead of being cute and needlesly quirky as in Tarantino’s previous films (Reservoir Dogs’ “Like a Virgin”, Pulp Fiction’s “That’s Mamie van Doren” etc.) it advances the characters so well. Out of the grisly visage of Carradine it’s just great filmmaking.

I have another observation but it might be a spoiler, so I’m putting it in the Read More section… (more…)

We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats, “But one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.

Veselin Gatalo of the youth group Urban Movement Mostar, Bosnia via BoingBoing

My beloved has become very sick with a virus that has rendered her lethargic, weak, and many other unpleasant things.

I’ve been trying to keep the house clean (who wants a filthy place when sick), keep the pillows fluffed, the waters fresh, the soup warm….etc.

I’ve been tending her these last several days and have had no time to really write here about whatever miniscule trivialities float into my mind.

I hope everyone’s turkey day went well - mine was spent with my sick baby serving her a thanksgiving meal I whipped up on a moment’s notice: a store bought rotisserie breast, green beans pepper and sunflower seeds, mashed ‘tatos, and cranberry sauce. We watched “Big” after that.

The night before we’d been at emergency care from about 3 to 11. My poor darling had been obliterated by dehydration.

It’s hard to believe that two years ago about this time I was gambling on the muggy shores of Sydney harbour.

Anyway, my patient is sleeping in the other room and I’m re-reading some Kerouac at the height of his Zen mysticism: Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels — trying to find some lessons in compassion.

I keep remembering Thoreau’s brother’s death (from teatnus) and how he saw his eyes begging for air…horrible, horrible to contemplate, to bear.

I’m gonna go sit beside her and watch her labored breathing now.

The man who taught a generation to “wax on / wax off” has gone on to that great koi pond in the sky. Farewell Noriyuki “Pat” Morita.

On November 10th, Elle and I had the opportunity to attend a lecture given by self-help guru, Dr. Wayne Dyer. I had first come across his teachings is “The Power of Intention” about 2 years ago.

It was during the winter of my discontent when I had just returned to the US from Australia. During my sub-equatorial sojourn my dissatisfaction with life, the universe, work, myseslf, pretty much everything had festered into a black buboe.

As Emmylou Harris says:

The the they don’t tell you about the blues when you got ‘em / is you keep on fallin, for their ain’t no bottom, there ain’t no end /

I think that the program that started the dig-out from the hole I’d dug was that program. Don’t get me wrong, it took many more days and weeks with stumbles and regresses to extricate myself from the bounds I’d fashioned for myself, but I ultimately made the slog out.

As I worked, assembling Ikea bookshelves and listening to “The Power of Attention” I understood, primally, cellularly, how to start the change.

Success, like depression, like the exhilitory thrill of solving a Sudoku, is a spiral: an exponential exploration. One seed can feed 1 to the power of two, three, four…n in success. Depression works in the reverse, taking half over half over half until you’ve nothing left save the half idea of the possibility of a starting point. Dyer’s presentation jumpstarted by infenitesimal grain of progress and my being knew it through and through.

My cells told me to contribute to KQED (see entries: ) and I did. A year later I renewed my support and that seems to have put my name on an invite list and. In early October I was invited to attend the taping of the follow up to “The Power of Attention” on living an inspired life.

It sems to me, now that I reflect upon the content of “The Power of Attention” centers on helping the listener realize an essential truth of enlightenment: You are a carrier of a divine spirit: indestructible, powerful, beautiful, and whole. This connection can never be severed, but the connection can become rusted, corroded, and the satellite can forget his binding to the source.

Dyer rarely goes into the religious connotations by calling The Source, God, but if you’re of a particular religious persuation, he seems to have no problem with you attributing the properties of “The Source” to that divine identity.

Living a life connected, and aware of the connection to Source, is living the life in spirit that is to say the inspired life. This presentation, to begin airing in January 2006, speas of six benefits of living the inspired life. I’ll not list them here, despite having scribbled them in my Moleskine because I want to help preserve the PBS revenue stream and I think that Dr. Dyer’s delivery is much more lively and informative than much my scribbles.

The venue was that fanastic monument to San Francisco’s love of Art Deco, the Masonic auditorium on California Street. I hadn’t realized that it was California street’s broad avenue that had so impressed the designers of Grand Theft Auto: Sand Andreas that they mimiced is structure in the game play (although they never put the accurs’d San Francisco traffic - thankfully).

One of the hallmarks of George W. Bush’s inarticulatenessspeech-giving has been the presence of a key phrase behind his simian head whilst speaking so that the audience, in lieu of having their eardrums grated by a the cheese rasp that is his rhetorical skill, can get the talking point phrase that he was going to repeat over and over again anyway.

I am speechless to this, found at LadyBunny via A Socialite’s Life.

Many of us have a big jar of coins at home. My jar was a Hansen’s Grape juice (originally purchased at the Trader Joe’s on 9th and Harrison in SF in 2002). Over the last 3 years I’ve been filling that jar and finally topped it off. Now, rolling this into coin rolls would be a distinctly un-fun and laborious affair. Likewise, Coinstar takes an 9% cut out of what you bring in….until now!

Coinstar recently partnered with some major e-tailers such that they will waive their tax and give you 100% provided you convert your coins into the goods of an e-tailer….including Amazon. Now amazon sells everything, so why not go with them.

So I took my voucher for $180.00 last night and went a bit nuts. Here is the product of my mania.

“The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives”
“The Sandman Vol. 8: Worlds’ End”
“The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones”
“The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake”
I already have v.1-6

“Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”
Recommended by The League

“Eddie Izzard - Dress to Kill”
This is so funny it hurts

“Harper’s Magazine” It’s a very smart magazine

“The Prize : The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power”
Trying to understand Dick Cheney

“The Kite Runner”
Trying to understand the Afghan mind

“Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”
“Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden,
“Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons
“Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire”
“Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror”
“The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage)”
How to undo what 8 years of Bush government will have done

“The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Canto)”
“The Sicilian Vespers : A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later
“A History of Venice (Vintage)”
“A Short History of Byzantium (Vintage)”
Studying the Fall of other Empires

“The SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL: MASTERING THE TRANSITION TO THE INFORMATION
“Revolution in The Valley”
The High Tech Marketplace of the Future, and Past

“The Burial at Thebes : A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone”
Classic Tragedy

“Germany: A New History”
“The Worldly Philosophers : The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great
Miscellany

Nicky Hilton asked the following outrageous question:

“I just want to say to these writers, ‘I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?’ I feel very accomplished for my age.”

To which was replied:

Nicky Hilton asked, “I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?” I would like to repond to that. When I was 21, I was busy working toward my Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Minnesota. I was the first to synthesize the compound okadaic acid — shown to be the leading cause of breast cancer. - Steven F. Sabes Wayzata, Minnesota

This was brilliantly noted at: CollisionDetection via bOINGbOING

I love my Apple, pretty much all the time.

When I was a sophomore in college I made my first own computer purchase: Apple PowerBook 190cs. It had this rich color screen that was bright and it was only moderately back-breakingly heavy. It kept a charge about a good two hours and ran all the basic MS productivity apps. What wasn’t to like?

It was on this system that I dialed into the University of Texas VAXen and Unices. I wrote history papers and fancied writing a novel or two (didn’t really pan out). I took that computer with me overseas and taught it to suckle at the teat of 240volt - it never complained.

Upon returning I came back to an Austin that was chanting the name of Dell - I tried it out the x86 side of the street. I enjoyed my rich polygons and Quake - but within 8 months of frustration with Windows sucking I returned to my heart and soul roots - I became a Linux guy.

It started innocently enough, Red Hat 6, compiling, tarring, detarring, trashing crappy winzip for gzip, learning pipelining and Perl. I set up tools to help me find that computer in the sea of the Internet, I was blissed.

I came out to Silicon Valley at the heigh of the party. No one used Windows - everyone was on SPARC stations laughing as MyDoom variants brought weeping marketing bozos to our feet begging, hoping, and praying someone would patch that crappy OS they had foisted upon them.

Then came project CD burn or DVD burn. And man Linux just didn’t have it. The fonts were ugly too (i know this has changed, yes I’ve seen Ubuntu, and yes I recall the Veronica Mars dialog on the matter).

I love the power of unix, but i wanted fonts, and backgrounds, and easy multimedia burns, and that begat my flirtation with the iMac iLamp.

Furthermore, when in San Francisco don’t bring your PC. No one there uses PCs. It’s a town of art and beauty. Don’t call it ‘Frisco either.

The iLamp was beautiful and elegant, the screen rich and bright. The OS was smooth and rock solid. I had the best of both worlds: Mac beauty, Unix Power, and no interference from an annoying OS.

Ultimately the iMac flirtation led to the Powerbook of Joy so smooth and aluminum, so quiet, so beautiful. It’s smooth like Zen gardens or the Japanese countryside. It is hot on the legs (best used on a desk).

I went with my girlfriend recently to buy a replacement for her HP which unceremoniously lost its hard drive. As I walked through the local Fry’s i noticed that all PCs looked very cheap. As Will Shipley of Delicious Monster noted, and I’m paraphrasing here, “PC users don’t care about beauty or extras, they only care about suffering as little as possible as cheaply as possible. They made that stance abundantly clear when they settled for the Windows experience. “

I looked at the options. All of them had flimsy plastic cases that had “Multimedia control panels” (aka an LCD with 4 buttons for manipulating your music CD) smacked onto the edge. It was uneven, not a nice neat rectangle, but this oblong turd of plastic that had no sense of symmetry or balance. They all have these really annoying super-glassy looking monitors. I want my monitor to look like a matte piece of fine paper - not like my dentist’s aquarium. My poor girlfriend had been using my laptop for the last few days and in those days her tastes for taste had re-awakened, she had taken a bite of the Apple of knowledge and couldn’t really stomach the taste of the sloppy production of the commodity PC industry.

We headed, PC-less, back to the front and passed down the Apple aisle. With its white and silver the row looked like “2001”, it visually promised what the future was supposed to deliver (Right Elroy?).

When I was living in Holland I was struck by an idea: Whenever they built something that had a function, the form was not a total afterthought. Essentially it was: “If we’re going to build it, why not make it beautiful?” For those who look to the bottom line to explain why not, you’ll never get it, and that’s OK. For the rest of us, there’s Apple, de Kooning, and fountain pens.

Two down: “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “Walk the Line.”

I really enjoyed “Good Night, and Good Luck”. This is a great movie and I cannot recommend that you go see it soon enough. It is the story of Edward R. Murrow’s dismantling of the McCarthy’s terror apparatus. Edward Murrow never was complacent about the role that the media can play. He never stopped questioning the role of the media or the danger that corporate influence in the news machinery represented.

Memorable quotes:

“See It Now” can’t take on the Hearst press and McCarthy at the same time”