[schizophrenia]
"Is the mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the adrenals?"

--Aldous Huxley
(The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell)

+++

Tibetan book of the dead
Journal d'une Schizophrene by M.A. Sechehaye

+++++++

 
People want to react to something. If it's exactly what they're expecting, they won't react to it.

+++

 
Flash fiction from Smokelong Quarterly:

I Am Waiting for My Dogs to Die
by Davin Malasarn

 
To buy:


Best of Tin house literary magazine
AGNI magazine (w/Jhumpa Lahiri)
Corrine Bailer Rae CD
Eugene Bullard: "Black Expatriate in Jazz Age Paris"
The Africa Diaries: An Illustrated Memoir of Life in the Bush

 
It took a while to discover what the lessons were, to realize what this year brought. But I've finally learned. I've learned to do the best with what I have, to do the best with what I've been given. I've learned to be at peace with what comes.

+++

 
"Sometimes inconvenient situations, problems, or difficulties conceal opportunities for growth; very often in the heart of difficulties shines the light of a precious jewel. It is therefore wise to welcome what is inconvenient and difficult."

+++

 
Hoosiers
(Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey)

+++

 
Books recommended by Stephen King:

Peyton Place
The Sea-Wolf (Jack London)
McTeague
Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Gerald's Game (Stephen King)
George Pelecanos
Dennis Lehane
The Plot against America
The Great Fire (Shirley Hazzard)
Theodore Dreiser
Reflections in a Golder Eye (Carson McCullers)
All the King's Men
The Beans of Egypt, Main (Carolyn Chute)
The Greenleaf Fires (John Gould)
The Quiet American (Graham Greene)


Chekhov's recommended reading:
Maupasssant

+++++++

 
Director Joe Maggio interview:

http://www.encoremag.com/magazine/features/brave-new-film-world.php

+++

 
"My dad told me, 'It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success,' and it took me seventeen and a half years."

--Adrian Brody

"Careers, like rockets, don't always take off on time. The trick is to always keep the engine running."

--Gary Sinise

+++

 
"Like many of the combat stories heard in Vietnam, the fabric of the story-telling would become part of the tale, believable only given the access of the teller to the powers that write the histories. I've since come to believe all history is like that, the lower-class men having the least influence and access, and even those men who survive the epic battles are very rarely capable of describing them correctly, having knowledge perhaps of only a section of the land or sea they fought on; thus the history of the world comes down to us in teleological myths often justifying the vision of life necesary to the present age."

--A Child's Night Dream
Oliver Stone

+++

 

W.O.L.V.E.S
Krumbsnatcha


Artist: Krumbsnatcha f/ M.O.P. Lyrics
Song: W.O.L.V.E.S. Lyrics
Uh-huh
We wolves baby, we wolves

[Krumbsnatcha]
A full moon make my blood curl
Got me stuck in opposition in the underworld
Savage beasts, like wolves when we roamin these streets
And work for least, fuck peace, go to war with police
Some call the priest, there's a demon in ya hood schemin
Catch me out the six leanin, with the nine steamin
Ain't that 'cha BM
The sound of the glock sound like rocks in Watts
I point a Ruben at'cha crew and give you somethin to watch
D.T.'s, Feds, and NARCS, exchanging shots
In broad day 'til the first one lay when he pop
And if I pull and you pull,
the one to get to get it worst be the last to burst
ICU status, wih the phattest nurse
Gat holders chuckin them burners, with the fat pollers concealed
But quickly leave a veal through your widow's sheild
Reckless, connected like a Nexus, for your necklace is on
Formin like Photron and bomb

[Chorus:]
[Children] Y'all police best be ready!
[Snatcha] If your tired of seein niggas gettin beat in the street
[Children] Y'all police best be ready!
[Snatcha] For all my hungry ass thugs that be tryin to eat
[Children] Y'all police best be ready!
[Snatcha] For my people in the ghetto, get up off of your feet
And let the wolves out! (Unh)
And let the wolves out! (What!)
And let the wolves out! (Unh)
Let the wolves out!

[Billy Danze]
Yo I been labelled a bad guy since birth (why's that)
I was put on a part of the earth with a turf,
its rugged never smooth
(What have you got to loose!)
Not a damn thing
That's why I holler "Ante Up" when you holler "Bling Bling"
How do I survive? I strap up all my heat
I get out on the beat, I find a way to eat
See William never sleep, you think it's somethin sweet
And I will kindly li-li-li-li-lift yo' ass up off your feet
Shackle me in chains, tamper with my brain
Spit a ten digit number when you call me by my name
Their system has been aimed
For every 211 and every 187, my niggas is to blame
What happened to Diallo is a motherfuckin shame
How 'bout if I spit .41 that you were in the game
ALL disrespect intended, to any lieutenant,
who feel offended, by the way I represented, BITCH!

[Chorus]

[Lil' Fame]
I put it down, M.O.P. spit FIIYAHH!
Show 'em what we stand for, YES SIYYAAH!
All I need is my niggas, my guns and, my CD's
And I'ma ride, fuck N.Y.P.D.
The STREET cops, patrollin them HEAT
Goons be holdin 'em but fuck 'em
We lay 'em down like linolieum
GHETTO WARFARE! brroom, buck! We grip eight on
The pop'll pop off, that's how we do in Brooknam
Let the wolves out! Huh, all day
For my niggas gettin money that hustle in hallways
Get'cha money mister (mister) it's a (it's a) new day
Don't mistreat the literate, cuz you could get it two ways
Behind bars, or six feet deep
So be careful who you fuckin wit
Motherfuckin you fuckin with the UH, OH, UH, That's the truth
It's the beatdown, derranged, gun poppers, salute!

[Chorus 2x to fade]

+++++++

 
Gore Vidal
Point to Point Navigation

Architect: Kazuyo Sejima
Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007)

_______

 

Flash fiction:


Blank by Peter Mehlman in SmokeLong Quarterly.



Everything by CB Anderson in SmokeLong Quarterly.

+++

 
Kim Addonizio

Rejection letters—Get used to them. “Butch it up, Kim,” said my writer friend Lisa Glatt, once when I was whining to her on the phone. If you don’t want to be rejected, don’t send out.

Better odds of acceptance: work seriously for 7-10 years first before sending.

The logic: just because it’s rejected doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Just because it’s published doesn’t mean it’s any good.

And: The work is more important than the publication, but you may not really understand that until you are published.

Also: it is actually very easy to get published. Somewhere. By someone. Once that happens, it will not be enough. You will want to be published somewhere else, somewhere better. Then you will want books, then awards for the books, then big grants and fellowships and endowed chairs, and then eternal youth. The desire to publish is usually composed of a dash of desire to give one’s gifts, like vermouth in a double martini. The drink itself is ego and insecurity. I call this the Pinocchio Syndrome: Publish me! I’m only a wooden puppet writer! Make me a real writer!

The work is more important.

If you achieve success in publication, further rejections are inevitable.

+++++++

 
SouthWest Airlines: Ding!

+++

 
NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE

For Some, the Words Just Roll Off the Tongue

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: November 22, 2006

For the big dinner on Thursday, perhaps a plump bird stuffed with Stephanie and served with giblet civil, accompanied by roast Londons, a bowl of performs with pearl unions, and marshmallow-topped microscopes. And, for dessert, city a la mode, followed by a confession.

No, your eyes do not deceive you. But if you were a lexical-gustatory synaesthete, your tongue might — and you would already feel full.

People who have synaesthesia — a rare condition that runs in families — have “joined senses.” They “see” letters or numbers or musical notes as colors — a capital A will be tinged red, or 5 plus 2 will equal blue, or B.B. King will play the yellows.

Rare as that is, there is an even rarer variation, said Julia Simner, a cognitive neuropsychologist and synaesthesia expert at the University of Edinburgh. Lexical-gustatories involuntarily “taste” words when they hear them, or even try to recall them, she wrote in a study, “Words on the Tip of the Tongue,” published in the issue of Nature dated Thursday. She has found only 10 such people in Europe and the United States.

Magnetic-resonance imaging indicates that they are not faking, she said. The correct words light up the taste regions of their brains. Also, when given a surprise test a year later, they taste the same foods on hearing the words again.

(Synaesthetes are hardly ever described as “suffering from” the syndrome, because their doubled perceptions excite envy in many of us mere sensual Muggles.)

It can be unpleasant, however. One subject, Dr. Simner said, hates driving, because the road signs flood his mouth with everything from pistachio ice cream to ear wax.

And Dr. Simner has yet to figure out any logical pattern.

For example, the word “mince” makes one subject taste mincemeat, but so do rhymes like “prince.” Words with a soft “g,” as in “roger” or “edge,” make him taste sausage. But another subject, hearing “castanets,” tastes tuna fish. Another can taste only proper names: John is his cornbread, William his potatoes.

They cannot explain the links, she said. There is no Proustian madeleine moment — the flavors are just there.

But all have had the condition since childhood, so chocolate is commonly tasted, while olives and gin are not.

And, sadly, even her American subjects don’t seem overwhelmed by salivary Thanksgiving memories.

Dr. Simner tests hundreds of words, and when she was asked to check her list for today’s dinner ingredients, she came up with “Stephanie” linked to sage stuffing, “civil” to gravy, “London” and “head” to potato, “perform” to peas, “union” to onions, “microscope” to carrots, “city” to mince pie and “confess” to coffee.

But, alas, no turkey. Or cranberry sauce.

“I can give you a whole fry-up English breakfast,” she said apologetically. “But not a Thanksgiving dinner.”

+++++++

 
Child's Night Dream
by Oliver Stone

 


Eugene Bullard


+++

 
Lan Vo
2629 Pali Highway, at (808) 595-2207
Honolulu, Hawaii

 
MOBY
One of these mornings

One of these mornings
Won't be very long
You will look for me
I'll be gone...

One of these mornings
Won't be very long
You will look for me
I'll be gone...

One of these mornings
One of these mornings
Won't be very long
Won't be very long
You will look for me
You will look for me
I'll be gone...
I'll be gone...

I'll be gone...
I'll be gone...
I'll be gone...
I'll be gone...
I'll be gone...

You will look for me
I'll be gone...
You will look for me
I'll be gone...
You will look for me
I'll be gone...
You will look for me
I'll be gone

One of these mornings
Won't be very long
You will look for me
I'll be gone.

+++

 
Books:

100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Melissa P.)
The Scent of Your Breath (Melissa P.)

A crazy occupation (Jamie Tarabay)

Band:
A Bande Apart

+++

 
Donald Rumsfeld resigns. 11/08/06

+++

 
THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH
Frantz Fanon

"In the industrialized countries the peasant masses are generally the least politically conscious, the least organized as well as the most anarchistic elements. They are characterized by a series of features--individualism, lack of discipline, the love of money, fits of rage, and deep depression--defining an objectively reactionary behavior."--pg. 66

"Racism, hatred, resentment, and 'the legitimate desire for revenge' alone cannot nurture a war of liberation." -- pg. 89

"The colonized man is an envious man."

"...it is common knowledge that for 95 percent of the population in developing countries, independence has not brought any immediate change."

"In 1945 the 45,000 dead at Setif could go unnoticed; in 1947 the 90,000 dead in Madagascar were written off in a few lines in the press; in 1952 the 200,000 victims of repression in Kenya were met with relative indifference--because the international contradictions were not sufficiently clear-cut. The Korean war and the war in Indochina had already established a new phase. But it was above all Budapest and Suez which constituted the deciding moments of this confrontation."


"...Western financiers are wary of any form of risk taking. Their demands, therefore, are for political stability and a peaceful social climate which are impossible to achieve given the appalling situation of the population as a whole in the aftermath of independence. In their search, then, for a guarantee which the former colony cannot vouch for, they demand that certain military bases be kept on and the young nation enter into military and economic agreements. The private companies put pressure on their own government to ensure that the troops stationed in these countries are assigned to protecting their interests. As a last resort these companies require their government to guarantee their investments in such and such an underdeveloped region."--pg. 60

_______

 
"He also reveals that my condition has a name: it's a depression. Officially, then, I'm in a depression. The formula seems a happy one to me. It's not that I feel tremendously low; it's rather that the world around me appears high."

--Whatever, Michel Houellebecq

_______

 
The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
The Electric Kool-Aid Test, Tom Wolfe
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Stanyan Street and Listen to the Worm, Rod McKuen
The Poet Assassinated, Apollinaire
The First Cities, Audre Lord
One Dimensional Man (Herbert Marcuse)
The Maerican Challenge, Schreiber
Soul on Ice, Eldrige Cleaver
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

_______

 
Reading:

Whatever, Michel Houellebecq
(others by him: Platform and Elementary Particles)

The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

_______

 
Look for Louis Norton's story, "Owls"

_______

 
Kitchen Confidential by NY chef Anthony Bourdain

_______

 
Artist: DJ Shadow
Album: Six Days
Year: 2002

_______

 
Nice restaurants in Nairobi:

Tamarind restaurant


Carnivore

Trattoria Restaurant

African Heritage Cafe

 
"If your nose runs and your feet smell, you're built upside down."

--The Sopranos, S6D1

 
"Pain is temporary. It may last a minute or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place."

--Lance Armstrong

_______

 
Song "Danke Schoen"

_______

 
1 star Michelin Restaurant in BEAUNE, FRANCE
Le Jardin de remparts

Geneva, Switzerland club
La Sip

Trendy Geneva bar/club
Contre Jour


_______

 
Memphis Style Bar BQ


The Pig
612 N. La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036

_______

 
Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets. So love the people who treat you right, forget about the ones who don't and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said that it'd be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.

+++

 
"A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens."

Dune

+++

 
"In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in 12 years, we'll be voting for plants."

--Lewis Black

_______

 

THE FIFTH MOUNTAIN
Paulo Coelho



Notes from the author:

Whenever I though myself the absolute master of a situation, something would happen to cast me down. I asked myself: why? Can it be that I'm condemned to always come close but never reach the finish line?... It took a long time to understand that it wasn't quite like that. There are things that are brought into our lives to lead us back to the true path of our Personal Legend. Other things arise so we can apply all that we have learned. And, finally, some things come along to teach us.

+++

 

BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS
Frantz Fanon


"...if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men."

Louis-T. Achille (1949)
"Insofar as truly interracial marriage is concerned, one can legitimately wonder to what extent it may not represent for the colored spouse a kind of subjective consecration to wiping out in himself and in his own mind the color prejudice from which he has suffered so long. It would be interesting to investigate this in a given number of cases and perhaps to seek in this clouded motivation the underlying reason for certain interracial marriages entered into outside the normal conditions of a happy household. Some men or some women, in effect, by choosing partners of another race, marry persons of a class or a culture inferior to their own race and whose chief asset seems to be the assurance that the partner will achieve denaturalization and (to use a loathsome word) "deracialization.""

"It is the racist who creates his inferior" - pg. 93

"When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle." - pg.116

"It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: 'Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.' And I found that he was universally right...Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro." --pg. 122

+++++++

 
"Intothinair" by Mocean Worker

"Extreme Ways" by Moby

+++++

 
NY TIMES:

Publisher to Offer Inside Account of Al Qaeda Operative

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: October 2, 2006
Basic Books says it will soon publish what it calls the first inside account of life as an Al Qaeda operative.

“Inside the Jihad: My Life with Al Qaeda, A Spy’s Story,” by Omar Nasiri, is a first-person narrative of Mr. Nasiri’s time in an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the 1990’s, followed by a stint as a spy for a Western intelligence service.

The book, which is expected to be announced today and is scheduled to be published on Nov. 20, is a “detailed portrait of a complex man” with a “unique and chilling perspective,” the publisher said in a press release.

But promoting “Inside the Jihad” will be tricky. “It will not be a traditional book tour,” said David Steinberger, the chief executive of the Perseus Books Group, whose imprints include Basic Books, Da Capo Press and Running Press, among others. “There will be no author signings and no Oprah appearances and no morning shows.”

Omar Nasiri, after all, is a pseudonym for someone who lives in hiding at an undisclosed location abroad, where he wrote the book over the last year. Mr. Nasiri will give only a few interviews, timed to the book’s release, and given his ties to Al Qaeda will be unable to enter the United States. One of the interviews is expected to be with the BBC television program “Newsnight,” but his face and voice will be digitally altered to protect his identity.

In the absence of an author able to speak for his work, the publisher is depending on other sources to lend credibility to “Inside the Jihad.” Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Osama bin Laden unit within the Central Intelligence Agency, read the manuscript before publication, Mr. Steinberger said, and key facts in the book were vetted by members of various European security agencies.

Some consumers may be squeamish about buying a book written by a former Al Qaeda member, reformed or not, Mr. Steinberger acknowledged.

Still, he added, “There’s only one way to get an accurate inside view of what goes on in Al Qaeda. The value of understanding what goes on there outweighs any other consideration.”

_______

 



NY times article:




Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is to Blame

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: October 3, 2006
They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.

But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.

The two women were being evaluated for epilepsy surgery at University Hospital in Geneva, where doctors implanted dozens of electrodes into their brains to pinpoint the abnormal tissue causing the seizures and to identify adjacent areas involved in language, hearing or other essential functions that should be avoided in the surgery. As each electrode was activated, stimulating a different patch of brain tissue, the patient was asked to say what she was experiencing.

Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who carried out the procedures, said that the women had normal psychiatric histories and that they were stunned by the bizarre nature of their experiences.

The Sept. 21 issue of Nature magazine includes an account by Dr. Blanke and his colleagues of the woman who sensed a shadow person behind her. They described the out-of-body experiences in the February 2004 issue of the journal Brain.

There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich, who was not involved in the experiments but is an expert on phantom limbs, the sensation of still feeling a limb that has been amputated, and other mind-bending phenomena.

“The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence,” Dr. Brugger said.

Scientists have gained new understanding of these odd bodily sensations as they have learned more about how the brain works, Dr. Blanke said. For example, researchers have discovered that some areas of the brain combine information from several senses. Vision, hearing and touch are initially processed in the primary sensory regions. But then they flow together, like tributaries into a river, to create the wholeness of a person’s perceptions. A dog is visually recognized far more quickly if it is simultaneously accompanied by the sound of its bark.

These multisensory processing regions also build up perceptions of the body as it moves through the world, Dr. Blanke said. Sensors in the skin provide information about pressure, pain, heat, cold and similar sensations. Sensors in the joints, tendons and bones tell the brain where the body is positioned in space. Sensors in the ears track the sense of balance. And sensors in the internal organs, including the heart, liver and intestines, provide a readout of a person’s emotional state.

Real-time information from the body, the space around the body and the subjective feelings from the body are also represented in multisensory regions, Dr. Blanke said. And if these regions are directly simulated by an electric current, as in the cases of the two women he studied, the integrity of the sense of body can be altered.

As an example, Dr. Blanke described the case of a 22-year-old student who had electrodes implanted into the left side of her brain in 2004.

“We were checking language areas,” Dr. Blanke said, when the woman turned her head to the right. That made no sense, he said, because the electrode was nowhere near areas involved in the control of movement. Instead, the current was stimulating a multisensory area called the angular gyrus.

Dr. Blanke applied the current again. Again, the woman turned her head to the right. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

PG 2:

The woman replied that she had a weird sensation that another person was lying beneath her on the bed. The figure, she said, felt like a “shadow” that did not speak or move; it was young, more like a man than a woman, and it wanted to interfere with her.

When Dr. Blanke turned off the current, the woman stopped looking to the right, and said the strange presence had gone away. Each time he reapplied the current, she once again turned her head to try to see the shadow figure.

When the woman sat up, leaned forward and hugged her knees, she said that she felt as if the shadow man was also sitting and that he was clasping her in his arms. She said it felt unpleasant. When she held a card in her right hand, she reported that the shadow figure tried to take it from her. “He doesn’t want me to read,” she said.

Because the presence closely mimicked the patient’s body posture and position, Dr. Blanke concluded that the patient was experiencing an unusual perception of her own body, as a double. But for reasons that scientists have not been able to explain, he said, she did not recognize that it was her own body she was sensing.

The feeling of a shadowy presence can occur without electrical stimulation to the brain, Dr. Brugger said. It has been described by people who undergo sensory deprivation, as in mountaineers trekking at high altitude or sailors crossing the ocean alone, and by people who have suffered minor strokes or other disruptions in blood flow to the brain.

Six years ago, another of Dr. Blanke’s patients underwent brain stimulation to a different multisensory area, the angular gyrus, which blends vision with the body sense. The patient experienced a complete out-of-body experience.

When the current flowed, she said: “I am at the ceiling. I am looking down at my legs.”

When the current ceased, she said: “I’m back on the table now. What happened?”

Further applications of the current returned the woman to the ceiling, causing her to feel as if she were outside of her body, floating, her legs dangling below her. When she closed her eyes, she had the sensation of doing sit-ups, with her upper body approaching her legs.

Because the woman’s felt position in space and her actual position in space did not match, her mind cast about for the best way to turn her confusion into a coherent experience, Dr. Blanke said. She concluded that she must be floating up and away while looking downward.

Some schizophrenics, Dr. Blanke said, experience paranoid delusions and the sense that someone is following them. They also sometimes confuse their own actions with the actions of other people. While the cause of these symptoms is not known, he said, multisensory processing areas may be involved.

When otherwise normal people experience bodily delusions, Dr. Blanke said, they are often flummoxed. The felt sensation of the body is so seamless, so familiar, that people do not realize it is a creation of the brain, even when something goes wrong and the brain is perturbed.

Yet the sense of body integrity is rather easily duped, Dr. Blanke said.

And while it may be tempting to invoke the supernatural when this body sense goes awry, he said the true explanation is a very natural one, the brain’s attempt to make sense of conflicting information.

 
"No war can be conveyed over a distance. Somebody sits eating dinner and watching television: pillars of earth blown into the air; cut--the tracks of a charging tank; cut--soldiers falling and writhing in pain;--and the man watching television gets angry and curses because while he was gaping at the screen he oversalted his soup. War becomes a spectacle, a show, when it is seen from a distance and expertly re-shaped in the cutting room. In reality a soldier sees no further than his own nose, has his eyes full of sand or sweat, shoots at random and clings to the ground like a mole. Above all, he is frightened. The front line soldier says little: if questioned he might not answer at all, or might respond only by shrugging his shoulders. As a rule he walks around hungry and sleepy, not knowing what the next order will be or what will become of him in an hour. War makes for a constant familiarity with death and the experience of it sinks deep into the memory. Afterwards, in old age, a man reaches back more and more to his war memories, as if recollections of the front expand with time, as if he had spent his whole life in a foxhole."

_______

"The French ruled Algeria for 132 years. Only the Portugues in Angola and in Mozambique, and the Afrikaaners and English in South Africa, have had a longer colonial tenure."
_______

"The war in Algeria lasted seven and a half years and, with China's and Vietnam's, was one of the biggest wars of liberation...

The war ended in defeat for France. But Algeria paid a high price for their victory...

One tenth of the Algerian population--more than a million people--died in the war. The killed, the murdered, and the napalmed go by the name of chuhada--the martyred.

--The Soccer War, Ryszard Kapuscinski

+++++++

 
"She's got no training for this kind of thing."

"To go to bed with a man and lie to him? She's a woman. She's got all the training she needs."

"I don't think I can get her to do it."

"You mean it'll be difficult."

"Very."

"Well this is not Mission Difficult Mr. Hunt, it's Mission Impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park for you."

--Mission Impossible 2

+++

 
"Qualifications?"

"Rape, murder, arson and rape."

"You said "rape" twice."

"I like rape."


xxxxxxxxxxx


"Where you headed, cowboy?"

"Nowhere special."

"Nowhere special... I always wanted to go there."


Blazing Saddles

 
++++

Artist: Banksy (http://www.banksy.co.uk/)

Films:
Flight of the Phoenix (1965)
They shoot horses, don't they?
Young Frankenstein
To be or not to be
Witness for the prosecution (1957)
Enter the Dragon (1973, Bruce Lee)
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock)
Why we fight
Twelve angry men (Sydney Lumet)

++++

 
"We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out."

--Full Metal Jacket

+++

 
The Shrimp paste on Sugarcane with steamed vermicelli at the Vietnamese Pho 87 Restaurant is incredible!

Pho 87 Restaurant
1019 N Broadway Los Angeles, CA 90012-1405

+++

 
Making your own luck means preparing yourself for opportunities before they arise.
--Ram Charan

 
The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.
--Saul Alinsky

+++

 
"The difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes. A bartender with scar tissue all over his knuckles will hit faster and harder than a karate-trained novice who has never been bloodied." --pg. 97, Hell's Angels, Hunter S. Thompson

+++

 
...the best of times and the worst of times.

+++

 
In Berkeley. A nice Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph Avenue:
Finfiné restaurant


To do: stay at the
Claremont Resort and Spa

 
I'm so sad. It's hard getting through these days.


+++

 
"Male rats deprived of maternal conflict during infancy exhibit serious disturbances in sexual behavior, especially in mating rituals." --pg. 51

"...Historically, such beings have existed. Human beings who have worked--worked hard--all their lives with no motive other than love and devotion, who have literally given their lives for others, out of love and devotion; human beings who have no sense of having made any sacrifice, who cannot imagine any way of life other than giving their lives for others, out of love and devotion. In general, such human beings are generally women." --pg. 77

August Comte - the sole purpose of religion is to bring humanity to a state of perfect unity.

--"The Elementary Particles" by Michel Houellebecq

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"Living is difficult, dying is always a sorrow, and the concept of a God who helps us to face those two challenges can bring infinite relief: I understand it well. In fact I envy those who believe." -P. 185

Plato: war comes from human passions. Only man makes war. - pg.22

--The Force of Reason, Oriana Fallaci

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"There is not much difference between [exorcism] and... witchcraft of the blacks... In fact, it is even worse, because the blacks only sacrifice roosters to their gods, while the Holy Office is happy to break innocents on the rack or burn them alive in a public spectacle."

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons

+++

 
Reading:

Platform by Michel Houellebecq
The collected stage plays of Paddy Chayefsky


+++

 
I have to think about whether or not this is the life I can live: the life of a director in Hollywood. It's brutal, destructive, and the uphill battle is never-ending. I have to find my peace within it, my sense of self. I cannot afford to let it kill me. And so I must find moments to pull away, to focus on other passions, to develop other parts of myself. I have to create some kind of balance: the filmmaker and the person.

I will figure this out.

I will make it work.

+++

 
There was a time I believed in us, believed in the purity of what we had. Our future. There was a time when I knew we would last. I had painted our future for the next nine years.

Now it seems so far. The silence etching huge distances between us. No one could have told me that we could end, that we would end. That I was the one who would end it.

What went wrong?

+++

 
"I think writing requires the same kind of attention, of commitment, of love, that people do. To be faithful to a story even when it fails me, to come back to it again and again when I worry that I may never make it work, that it may always disappoint me, that everything I've put into it could be lost--to know this, yet still keep writing--what could that be, if not love?

...Because when I sit down, like this, in the middle of the night, pen in hand, something outside of myself tells me to keep going, for hours, to never, never stop... until it's not me writing the story anymore, but the story writing me."

--Margo Rabb, short story How to tell a story

+++

 
Great movie:
"DER TUNNEL"

by Roland Suso Richter (with Heino Ferch).

+++

 
For a few days, things will seem to improve and then suddenly there will be this crash and I'll be down again (crawling and fighting to get back up). I'm fragile, weak, and exhausted. Also trying to figure out how to keep fighting and if I have the necessary stamina.

A car crash. An argument last night with my partner. Laundry today followed by a searing depression.

Hoping to emerge from this.

+++

 
Went for a drive. Just through the streets. Thinking about a lot of things, my life right now, what I need and want out of it. And after beating my head against the wall for the past month, I feel at peace suddenly. I know how to maneuver through the Hollywood machine. I know how to make it work for me. I respect the largeness of it, the fact that it operates on it's own. I'll be okay now. I feel it.

And on a more personal note, I've let C go. I wish him happiness. I only have good feelings towards him. It feels good to be in this place.

----------

 
A good movie on the French resistance against the Nazi's in WWII: Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows

__________

An incredible book: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

"In 1992, there were 2,154 murders in New York City and 626,182 serious crimes, with the weight of those crimes falling hardest in places like Brownsville and East New York. But then something strange happened. At some mysterious and critical point, the crime rate began to turn. It tipped. Within five years, murders had dropped 64.2 percent to 770 and total crimes had fallen by almost half to 355,893... The New York City police will tell you that what happened in New York was that the city's policing strategies dramatically improved. Criminologists point to the decline of the crack trade and the aging of the population. Economists, meanwhile, say that the gradual improvement in the city's economy over the course of the 1990s had the effect of employing those who might otherwise have become criminals.... The changes in the drug trade, the population, and the economy are all long-term trends, happening all over the country. They don't explain why crime plunged in NYC so much more than in other cities around the country, and they don't explain why it all happened in such an extraordinarily short time... How can a change in a handful of economics and social indices cause murder rates to fall by two-thirds in five years?" - (pg. 7)

"Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the "work" will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer." - (pg. 19)

"One of the most infamous incidents in NYC history... was the 1964 stabbing death of a young Queens woman by the name of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was chased by her assailant and attacked three times on the street, over the course of half an hour, as thirty-eight of her neighbors watched from their windows. During that time, however, none of the thirty-eight witnesses called the police... In the case of Kitty Genovese, social psychologists like Latane and Darley argue, the lesson is not that no one called despite the fact that thirty-eight people heard her scream; it's that no one called because thirty-eight people heard her scream." - (pg. 27)

"In the late 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to find an answer to what is known as the small-world problem. The problem is this: how are human beings connected?... Milgram's idea was to test this question with a chain letter. He got the names of 160 people who lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and mailed each of them a packet. In the packet was the name and address of a stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Each person was instructed to write his or her name on the packet and send it on to a friend or acquaintance who he or she thought would get the packet closer to the stockbroker... Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in five or six steps. This experiment is where we get the concept of six degrees of separation." - (pg. 35)

________

 
Was reluctant to read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini but have started it and it's actually very moving.

...

 
Just finished Be more chill by Ned Vizzini

From Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond:

"The greatest single epidemic in human history was the one of influenza that killed 21 million people at the end of the First World War. The Black Death (bubonic plague) killed one-quarter of Europe's population between 1346 and 1352, with death tolls ranging up to 70 percent in some cities." --p.202

"In 1942, in the middle of World War II, the U.S government set up the Manhattan Project with the explicit goal of inventing the technology required to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could do so. That project succeeded in three years, at a cost of $2 billion..." --pg. 242

"When Edison built his first phonograph in 1877, he published an article proposing ten uses to which his invention might be put. They included preserving the last words of dying people, recording books for blind people to hear, announcing clock time, and teaching spelling. Reproduction of music was not high on Edison's list of priorities. A few years later Edison told his assistant that his invention had no commercial value. Within another few years he changed his mind and did enter business to sell phonographs--but for use as office dictating machines. When other entrepreneurs created jukeboxes by arranging for a phonograph to play popular music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected to this debasement, which apparently detracted from serious office use of his invention. Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music." --pg. 243

"Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death." --pg. 277

"New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world's 6000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese." --pg. 306

 
Now is the time to heal and to move forward.

 
"From then on I began to measure my life not by years but by decades. The decade of my fifties had been decisive because I became aware that almost everybody was younger than I. The decade of my sixties was the most intense because of the suspicion that I no longer had the time to make mistakes. My seventies were frightening because of a certain possibility that the decade might be the last."
--Memories of my melancholy whores, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 
This feels like a car crash, like I've smashed straight into something and all the pieces of my life are up in the air. Maybe I'll catch all the pieces, maybe it'll just fall apart around me. I've lost one, for sure. The rest, I'll have to see. I'm funtioning right now on a bare minimum. Just making it through the days. I guess it's time to step back and appreciate what I DO have, to take a step back and reevaluate where I am and where I need to go. Yet with all the evaluations, I can't think of the immediacy of the situation because it's too much right now. Too much on my shoulders.

Strange. This feeling.

 
Currently reading...

Underground Voices: a collection of short stories (editor: Cetywa Powell)

Just finished

My War: Colby Buzzell