if you're a moody bastard like me, you love depressing poems during supposedly festive times.

Happy new year. I believe this one is from the 1920s or so. It has long been one of my favorites. Pour yourself an amber-colored dram of peaty scotch, and have fun reading it out loud.

Mr. Flood's Party
by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird." He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: "Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will."

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim.

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!"
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
"Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

"Only a very little, Mr. Flood—
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do."
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—

"For auld lang syne." The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below—
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Lovingly lifted from poetryfoundation.org.

time, office, holidays

I've had a never-ending series of commitments when I'm not at work, but at work...? The slow drip, drip you hear is the sound of my work ethic collecting in a thin puddle at my feet. Sure, my phone's been ringing a ton, and I've had a few fires to put out here and there, but the driving challenge has been to find a way to make time go faster - something it turns out I'm completely unable to do.

Drip, drip.

Write a memo that no one will pay attention to? Send an email that no one will read till next week? Or simply sit here and stare at the wall, hoping something happens other than drip, drip, drip?

Tonight's excitement: green peppercorn beer from The Brewer's Art in Bawlamer and a re-fi on the condo loan. Five a and a quarter percent, here we come!

Tin and Tin again

Dealing with flawed works of art is challenging. Tintin fans know this quite well, for despite all the innocence in those books, there are several instances of ugliness.

Most good pieces about Tintin end up exactly where this Economist piece does: acknowledging that Herge was immensely flawed as a human, but that the Tintin books succeed exactly because of their flaws. Wildly imaginative - borderline expressionist, really - tales such as "Tintin in Tibet" stand as testimony to this. There's also a great POV on the topic, for all the PBS-lovers out there.

The oncoming Spielberg/Peter Jackson feature is already causing some predictable consternation. If this guy is right, I may be retiring my Captain Haddock shirt soon but I really don't think it will come to that. Lord knows a lot of things I've enjoyed quietly over the years are now BIG and SPLASHY: Revolutionary Road, Blindness, Watchmen, and now Tintin. I surmise that the next move will be someone filming a Glass family saga starring Ben Stiller as Seymour Glass?

Still, good for my tastes. They needed to see other people, and see other people they did. I'll be here waiting for them to come home.

"Shit happens. People change."

Updating a previous item on my sister's (and hence, I assume, all of her sub-Y generation's) slang choices..."Shit happens, people change" is my sister's favorite new refrain, to be deployed only in relation to trivial topics. As in:

Me: Hey, I thought we had lunch plans today?
Sis: Well, you know. Shit happens. People change.

I love it and promise to begin overusing it starting right now.

Christmas + Brazil = sexytime?

Google image result for "merry christmas."

Google image result for "feliz natal."

Two risque images to none, on the first page. The result is less lopsided than I would have thought. Maybe the nonstop tantric sex parties in Rio are slowing down a bit?

A confusing read.

I've called attention to this article in non-virtual circles, but wanted to mention it here too.

The gist: man in Iran is spurned by woman. He gets back at her by throwing sulfuric acid on her face, leaving her disfigured and blind. She invokes Islamic law and turns down offers of retribution money: instead, she wants an eye for an eye. Literally. Courts agree, and the man is sentenced to have five drops of sulfuric acid dropped into each eye.

Huh? I get caught up thinking of the logistics of the punishment. What's the concentration of the acid? Is it one drop, wipe, repeat, or is it five drops in a row? What's the time interval between drops? Who carries out the sentence?

Also, you know the expression that says that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind? Indeed.

2008: The year of my fantasy success

Stats on the year:
-gold trophy in 14-team fantasy baseball league (Carlos Zambrano's no-hitter on a Sunday night late in the season, in a stroke of cruelty, got me into the finals by helping me beat a huge Cubs fan.)
-gold trophies in both fantasy football leagues
-currently leading fantasy basketball league (though not for long)

Honorable mentions: 3rd place in rotisserie NL-only fantasy baseball league, somehow.

Yeah, me!

Family! Family!

Grandmother and aunt are here from Rio. The cumulative effect at my mom's house - the two sisters and mom - is deafening and exhilarating. My aunt is loud, brash, playful - I guess there's some precedent in the family for that, but I'm never sure where it comes from. Also, she was wearing this weird necklace that looked like it was made of meatballs.

One of her favorite expressions is to refer to the U.S. as a "colossus." THis usually happens in relation to fairly trivial things, like...I don't know, good olive oil. "See this? It's Italian. Not like the cans of Portuguese mazola we get. That's what happens in a civilized country: you get choices. This country, I tell you, it's a giant. A colossus."

They are off, to big box stores and such, running down lists of want's from relatives: laptops, cameras, and so on. I think now I'm old enough to appreciate how much these trips mean to my mom, to have her sister and mother travel this far to visit her. I don't have any particular thoughts about it other than to say that this is the feeling I expect to get from the holidays.

But as a practical matter, I am much more worried about the fantasy football championship. I have been freakishly good at fantasy football - I can't remember ever finishing in worse than 4th place, and I am in the championship game in both of my leagues. I expect to lose both, just as I expect to be handily defeated for the first time in fantasy basketball this week. Ms. Citizen is struggling with a cold, trying to get some sleep.

Oh, look, the Titans' defense just scored. That's good for me.

Well, for once I started writing without a particular message in mind. Maybe later this week I will post some mixtape tracklists I've been working on. Life seems languid right now. I have half a poem sitting at the edge of my mind, and I know exactly 3 things that I want to say in it. But I haven't been bothered to write it down. Short weeks ahead, hopefully wintry ones. Our smart car got its first bumper kiss from some asshole last night, but I've forgiven him already. Off to the Verizon Center, for the ongoing punishment that is the 2008-2009 Wizards season.

Since it's a Sunday, I'll give you one more good line. I was talking to EDS about the complete Bill Evans / Village Vanguard sessions. There's a three disc set that collects all three sets from that Sunday afternoon - definitely one of my all-time favorite jazz events, and to have it all in one nice package is just so reassuring.

We were talking about the incredible vibe of that show - Evans playing slow, ponderous, gorgeous music. Scott La Faro chiming in melodically on the bass, ten short days before his death as the result of a motorcycle accident. Motian brushing the drums, afraid to cause too many ripples. Then we were silent. EDS offered: "It's a Sunday in there, you know? Everyone in that club has got to go to work the next day."

Good line, EDS. It's a Sunday in here too.

"I only like living, that's all." - John Ashberry.

My corners are pretty bright. That's what happens when you're 31.

I'm happy that my 31st birthday landed pretty close to the release of the "Brighten the Corners" reissue. Owing to the Napa trip, I actually didn't get a chance to listen to it until this week. And in anticipation of the reissue, I had abstained from all but one song on this album for close to a year. (The one song is "Transport is Arranged," and that one ended up on a Baltimore-themed mix that I made this spring.)

The nice thing about this album is...that it's just so nice. Compared to Pavement's more abrasive sound, this is definitely the one that sounds the most mature and calm. That's also its downfall in a sense - that it's too pleasant to be anyone's favorite Pavement album. But it does contain a number of fantastic mid-tempo songs that feature some fine moments of Stephen Malkmus-isms. Through the distorted prism of his lyrics, you hear someone worried about aging, about finding a permanent place in the world. And if you don't agree, tell my why else would this album include a lyrics sheet for the first and only time in Pavement history?

Alex Ross has a great essay about rock lyrics in general and Malkmus's in particular here. My favorite moments on the album are the fragments of logic that emerge out of a seemingly light-weight moment. They cause you to re-evaluate the whole song - "Simply put, I want to grow old / Dying does not meet my expectations..." Malkmus declares in his quasi-aristocratic whisp in the same song where he confesses - or perhaps mockingly teases? - that he wants to cry when thinks about "the mental energy you wasted on these wedding invitations."

For all the sweet moments, there are some cruel ones - like the line, "this slap is a gift / because your cheeks have lost their luster." But there is, on the whole, a truly inviting warmth and playful spirit that inhabit the album (and the best outtakes, like "Harness Your Hopes.") I'm a sucker for Malkmus gently teasing the left - he sees elves though "the liberaaaaaaaaals claim they don't exist but I know they do, yeah," - and he complains about how he's "sick of being misread / by men in dashikis / and their leftist weeklies..."

The pure Pavement moments are the best. "One of us is a cigar stand / and one of us is an incandescent blue guillotine." No idea what that means, but when you get into the rest of that particular song ("Old to begin") you hear Malkmus repeatedly calling himself "old to begin / I will set ya back set ya back set ya..." This was as close as pre-Terror Twilight Pavement would come to a break-up song, with the implication being, I think, that one of the two people is about to be figuratively decapitated and smoked.

And I've always had a soft-spot for the cheekiness spoken-word joshing of "Blue Hawaiian" - which includes the meaning of aloha, warm thoughts about the definition of 'home,' and a great bit of self-referential wit: "If the capital's and it's followed by a T, then it's probably me!"

I was listening to "We Are Underused" this morning on my way in, expecting to hear in it the same snide commentary on being a hyperliterate over-educated affluent person whose gifts are going to waste in the professional world, when I heard the song in a different light entirely. The verses alternate between exhortations to thank the host for a great roast and droll commentary, in the stulted manner of polite dinner conversation. I had it all wrong - the "we" isn't a post-collegiate smart-aleck, and the people doing the under-using of the "we" aren't our parents' generation. The "we" is all of us, and we are underutilizing each other by engaging in soul-crushing dinner parties and polite banter instead of fully exploring each other's humanity. Maybe.

I should probably say something about the B-sides, but I won't. They're good. Prevous reissues of Pavement's albums have been successful because those albums sounds just as great now as they did then. The cool thing about this one is that an album that was only so-so at the time actually sounds great now.

And Malkmus was my age when it was recorded! Look at that. I just tied the whole thing up in a neat little package. I should change my screen persona to "no-unresolved-plotlines citizen."

Enough disjointendess for today. Till tomorrow, or some other day...

The world is not what it should be.

Charles Lindblom, below, on one of the reasons why stat-driven policy analysis can lack authorativeness. I just love the last few sentences.

A common failure to achieve an authoritative solution to a problem arises because critics or skeptics of the solution can – and do – allege that the problem has been incorrectly defined.

Suppose we begin, as an excise in defining a problem, with the family “Why Johnny can’t read.” To specify the problem more precisely, someone will suggest that the problem is one of reading difficulties among certain urban ethnic groups. But then it will be said that the problem is one of inadequate family incomes for these groups. And to that it will be responded that income itself is not the problem; the problem is basically a deficiency in the family’s ability to implant an incentive to learn to read in children. Hence the problem becomes that of the inadequacy of the urban ethnic family as a social institution – an institution that is failing to perform its required functions. That may provoke the suggestion that the problem is one of defective socioeconomic organization; socioecomonic institutions do no integrate these families into normal social functioning. But perhaps, then, the problem is one of faulty political organization in the society at large, since presumably the right kind of political decision could remedy the faults of the economy, the structure of urban society, and the place of the family in it.

At this point someone is also certain to suggest that politics is not an independent influence on economy and society, being itself dependent upon them. It might then be proposed that the problem is one big interlocked problem of social organization – to which formulation one may or may not add some further problem specifications, such as that the phenomena of social class are the “real” problem. But problem definition at this level can perhaps be counted on to produce another abstract formulation. Any big interlocked problem of social organization, it will be suggested, can only be understood as a product of history and culture. The problem, then, is a fundamental one of a historically produced culture that is inadequate. From which it seems only a small step to the conclusion: the world is not what it should be. That is the problem.

Charles Lindblom and David Cohen. Usable Knowledge – Social Science and Social Problem Solving

San Francisco and Napa in bullet-points

SF
-I had my first In n'Out Burger! Upon telling a room full of people about it just now, I was also told that this is far too cliche for me, but what can I say? I've been to San Diego and Anaheim a pair of times recently, and te In n'Out has eluded me. When we saw one right after passing the Golden Gate Bridge, I didn't hesitate.
-Visited University Village in Berkeley, formerly the site of the grad student housing where I grew up. It now looks like the suburbs rather than a joyously campy left-over from the Dharma Project or something. Also, it likes rules.
-One of the Pyramid brewpubs moved into the old neighborhood in Berkeley! I stumbled upon it and killed two hours in there. Yum.
-The BART is so simple to use that it's almost complicated.
-SF busing: good. People on SF buses: hmmm.
-"Ah-eet Ash-buuuhy": much funnier with a thick French accent.
-The actual Haight: eww. Wanted to wear a full-body condom.
-The two places where I felt somewhat unsafe in SF: Tenderloin, Haight.
-The two places where I dodged human feces on the sidewalk in SF: Tenderloin, Haight.
-The two places where I heard people talking about their probation officers: Tenderloin, Haight. Draw what conclusions you will.
-My first visit to Amoeba. Picked up a Townes van Zandt, Ted Curson's Tears for Dolphy on cd (already have it on lp), some Unrest-related sideprojects from Teenbeat, and some Smokey Robinson.
-If I lived in SF, the only reason I would go to the Haight would be to visit Amoeba.
-Maybe people who visit DC feel the same way about Adams Morgan that I do about the Haight?
-Lots of love for SF though. I love the seediness as much as I do the yuppieness.
-This one's a delicate point: in SF, I was pleased to find that I was sketched out by white people. On the east coast, it just so happens I think that most threatening people you see on the street are not white. I don't want to speculate about the many socioeconomic factors at play, but to this day I remember the first time I had a white cab driver who spoke fluent English. It was in Boston, by the way. I also remember the first time I saw a black man in a suit in Brazil. Both were equally jarring to me at the time. Anyway, in SF you actually encounter sketchy white people. This is a relief, especially if you derive pleasure from finding that you are a class-ist rather than a racist.


Napa
-Pretty. Boring. Spendy. But very pretty. I can't tell if a whole week here would be fantastic or deadening, but I would like to try someday.
-Domaine Carneros: fantastic, worth the visit. Go, Taittinger!
-Schramsberg: fantastic, worth the visit. Their rose is a bit sweeter than Domaine Carneros'.
-People in Napa are amenable to my motto: "Rose is the new microbrew."
-Chateau Montelena: didn't do the tour, just hit the tasting room. Well worth it, though. The estate/reserve cabernets are special.
-I love the fact that you can ship wine to DC.
-Stumbled upon a recommendation to Provenance, which was also quite nice.
-The petrified forest? Not actually rock-trees! Just trees which have had their molecular strucuture has been totally replaced by, uh, something resembling rock. Silica or something? Ash-y things? Anyway. It was a good non-wine outing in Napa.
-On the way out, we visisted a place called Bouchaine that was recommended to us a few weeks ago. It was 60 degrees or so. We sat out on a porch, tasting something called a pinot meunier, with palm trees and vines in sight. We went on a self-guided tour, picked grapes off the vine, and took lots and lots of pictures. The tasting was $5 a head. Not to be missed. A great place to stop by on your way out if you're heading back through Oakland.
-I would like to think I have a good palate, or at least a decent one. I think I do, but I also think that the best way for me to learn about a wine and to recognize its characteristics is by sitting down with it and drinking a few glasses. There's a sameness that creeps into the tasting routine, created as much by the progression (chardonnay-zin-pinot-syrah-cabernet-riesling/gewutrz, more or less) as by the fact that a little sippy sip of wine tastes like just that to me: a little sippy sip.
-Auberge du Soleil was memorable: I had foie gras, scallops in a curry sauce, and morrocan-spiced duck. We drank a 2001 syrah, in honor (cheesily) of the year we started dating. For contrast, we had some great mexican takeout too.

Photos and more thoughts to come later, I suppose.

driving sideways

fun with shutter speeds from the shotgun slot. I just like blurry pictures, I think, but I pretend I'm going for "moody."

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

What I learned from watching "The Holiday"

This chap?






















He has no compunctions about nailing you in his sister's bed.