to the one borough

I'm in New York again, Brooklyn to be specific. Again, the silence. I still don't have a place to live, or to work, which is the one thing I need to secure when I get back to Seattle after Thanksgiving.

Yesterday we went to the MTA museum and walked around in old subway cars. We ate lunch at a Vegetarian Chinese resturant and sitting near us was this wonderful group of elderly people. For Dawn there was a woman with purple sequined shoes and purple glasses who insisted we eat at a cafe on West 83rd who had steamed eggs. I chatted with an ancient guy named Jay who was known at the table as being their human garbage disposal as anything they wouldn't eat he sure would. He was a Russian immigrant and vet of the Korean War. I told him my mother was grateful for his service. That seemed to make him really happy in a way I don't think I'll ever understand. But it's true. She is.

I read Paul Auster's Oracle Night on the flight over, cover to cover. Really good, better than the last few books of his I read, and personally overwhelming - but the end I still have a problem with. A punishment of sorts is meted out in such a cruel way that it just strikes me as too much. Yet it's inevitable in the text.

Right now I'm slogging through Lewis and Clark's journals. Still hunting for where it all went wrong.

I've been writing a lot lately. It feels good.

I carved "Dawn Rules" in wet cement last night, at the corner of Ocean and Atlantic in Cobble Hill.

And for bedtime reading, who wants to soothe themself with insight into the mind of an actual interrogator?

Information is the beginning of interrogation, and if there is none, if there is no language between you and the detainee, sometimes you will use more power. That I presume is what happened in Abu Ghraib.

Link

Dawn and I talked about the past and the present yesterday. Like many things, we disagree. Dawn wants to live in the present, which is admirable, and which is what I wish I was capable of. But our day was set in the past, in old subway cars and in the memories of elderly people. And our future, me wanting to carve and set in stone some name for future reference. She talked about some distant instinct she has about the far future, how it cannot be focused upon because there is something horrible on the horizon. And for all my love of the post apocalyptic, all my nightmares and daydreams about that possibility, I still feel holding her hand and being around her that there is a truer possibility, that everything shall still go on.

uh oh

John McCain, returning to his senses, on global warming (not climate change as they would have you believe).

"The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin," he said, "and now there are robins all over their villages."

Link

your first association with coffee

This is so fascinating I need to seperately link this. An extended interview with Papaille. Here he discusses his first commercial work: helping Nestle sell coffee in Japan, which had a "near religious" attachment to tea.

One of my discoveries was that in order to create the first imprint of a word -- when you learn a word, whatever it is, "coffee," "love," "mother," there is always a first time. There's a first time to learn everything. The first time you understand, you imprint the meaning of this word; you create a mental connection that you're going to keep using the rest of your life. And to create this mental connection, you need some emotions. Without emotion, there is no production of neurotransmitters in the brain, and you don't create the connection. So actually every word has a mental highway. I call that a code, an unconscious code in the brain.

What did your work for Nestlé look like?

It was really to tell them, for example, that the Japanese don't have a first imprint of coffee. What first imprint they have is tea. And so when you go into this category, in what we call taxonomy, mental taxonomy, it's like a mental category they have, and you cannot compete with this category. So you have to create the category. And so we started, for example, with a dessert for children with a taste of coffee. We created an imprint of the taste of coffee. And then we acknowledge the Japanese want to do one thing at a time, and the Swiss understood that very well. They start with this kind of a product. They start selling coffee, but through dessert, things that were sweet, get the people accustomed to the taste of coffee, and after that they followed the generations. And when they were teenagers they start selling coffee, and first there was coffee with milk at the beginning, and then they went to coffee, and now they have a big market for coffee in Japan.

Papaille and the reptilian

higher brain functions

The best documentary I've seen all year... (In a year when the documentary was supposedly ascendant, fuelled by stunts and rhetoric)... is viewable online with some other exceptional content here:

Frontline: The Persuaders

Douglas Rushkoff investigates modern marketing in 90 minutes. It's a good, scary laugh for the first half, then veers off into really interesting territory when he gets to two interesting characters: Cloiteau Papaille and Frank Luntz. Papaille has taken his psychological work with autistic children and communication barriers to the world of advertising, where he believes he can decipher a reptilian code that belies all the innate instincts of people, deeper than what can be communicated with words. It may sound a little ridiculous, but it was Papaille who years ago advised Cadillac and Hummer to build more aggressive, larger cars - despite knowing full well there was no rational reason for them.

Luntz is the Republican pollster who brought you the wonderful phrases "climate change" to replace "global warming" and "death tax" over "estate tax". Luntz is especially gifted at finding the language that causes emotional reactions in focus groups, which he then pawns off at great cost to politicians, whether or not that language is in fact true.

Then there's the database that's floating out there somewhere with every purchase you've ever made, every car you ever bought, and a resulting demographic niche to match.

This is what it is all about. Perception and control of that perception. The first half is harmless because it's so obvious all the creatives from the big agencies are clueless and insecure. The second half is mortally frightening because you see that some very smart individuals freed of morality are making a killing doing research into finding ways to appeal to our basest instincts. And I really mean base. It's all about the reptile...

ulysses went for longer

I'm on the road again starting tomorrow... Unfortunately I've had to leave the Bay Area rather suddenly, and I apologize to all the friends that I didn't have time to drop by. I knew the fifth was my move out date and intended to lacksadasically slack my way to that date with packing and lots of visits, but the John Kerry campaign needed my effective if entirely futile help.

I'm headed to Seattle for at least three months. After that, there's no telling. I'm going mercenary. I'm going to crash at my sister's until I have my own little place in Seattle, where I plan to hole up and do a lot of editing for the next few weeks.

My home phone will be disconnected from tomorrow on, so please shoot me an email if you need to get my mobile number. I will be on the road for at least two days, however, with no email.

I leave tonight, then, with an ode penned by someone else to that stretch of highway that I'd probably call home, more than any other place in the world... Yeah it's a strip of asphalt, but somewhere just off it I was born, and somewhere just off it I used to dive, and it's the one place I've been I will always want to go back to.


Take a long drive with me on California One. And the road a-winding goes from golden gate to roaring cliff-side and the light is softly low as our hearts become sweetly untied beneath the sun of California One.

Take a long dram with me of California wine. And the wine it tastes so sweet as we lay our eyes to wander and the sky it stretches deep. Will we rest our heads to slumber beneath the vines of California wine? Beneath the sun of California One.

Annabelle lies, sleeps with quiet eyes on this sea-drift sun. What can you do? And if I said, O it's in your head on this sea-drift sun. What can you do?

and on and on...

Straight up, post election, they were lots of angry calls saying that the youth vote did not turn out.

Not entirely true. It turned out in greater numbers than ever before. Just like with every other group.

If it were up to 18-30 year olds, however, based upon exit polling this is how America would look, as according to Dan Droller's excellent Music For America.

deja vu all over again

Greg Palast, writer for Harper's, BBC television, The Observer, The Guardian, and the reporter single most responsible for exposing Katherine Harris' role in Bush's seizure of Florida 4 years ago, finally weighs in on this election and an important fact: vote spoilage.

Palast is not a conspiracy theorist. He is an investigative journalist and every assertion he made about Harris removing voters from the rolls in 2000 (54% of whom were African American) has come to pass as true.

Kerry Won. . .

modernity and history

SPEED THE COLLAPSE

Fight on.

This is my five minute rant I just scrawled on the barsuk message board to all the disheartened young people there.

Here are my final thoughts.

Kerry's concession, heartbreaking but as ever from him full of integrity. Despite the stakes in Ohio, I believe he feels the showout in the popular vote means that he must renege in terms of starting to help heal the divisions on this country.

Everything was not in vain. Yesterday I had a democratic experience that was entirely futile but at least made me appreciate the process. I was volunteering at a phone bank and got a senior citizen who was isolated and housebound having just had a stroke in Nevada. He wanted to vote for Kerry, but didn't ask for an absentee ballot in time because he didn't know he was going to have a stroke. He'd made calls to get a ride to the polls, knowing that he'd need to be supervised because of his poor health, and no one ever called him back.

I got on the phone and called the Nevada headquarters demanded someone go get him and last night at 9pm spoke to him and he had made it to the polls and voted and he wanted to graciously thank young people for standing up for people like him.

I am furious at myself. That anger I'll reserve because I could've done more of that, and all of us could. For the greater world I will feel saddended. But I'm not going to give up.

This president has shown criminal levels of negligence. It's time to set aside the election and focus on pressure to all our members of congress and Senators to hold accountable all the lies that have come out of this administration. That is part of our wacky process, and it must proceed. We can't give up on that. We can do something.

More than that and more importantly, I believe the general populace of the USA who are truly earnestly saddened need to mobilize and do something non violent, demonstrative. Not to ourselves, we can concede defeat and admit a majority of voters wanted this president - but we need to show the entire rest of the world that they cannot judge our character dependent on this neoconservative administration.

I don't even know what that entails. I'm sitting here at my computer, packing up, having been depressed all day, but I'm quietly gathering myself back together again. This is one of the most crucial defeats I've ever felt in my life, and it's such a low blow that I know that it can only make me stronger.

For the first time in my life over the past six months I have called my represenatitives, I have volunteered time to a presidential candidate... And I'm not going to give up. I'm going to keep doing this for the rest of my life.

Our generation supposedly had nothing to show to feel or care about. We do now. It's our responsibility to do something with that still. If there's something we can do in John Kerry's honor it's to see that at the age of 27 he helped mobilize a peaceful and rational force that made the public aware that the war in Vietnam was wrong. It did help end the war.

He lost, so we need to take up that mantle again. We need to unify with one clear goal. That is declaring that we have lost the policy battle over votes, but we will not give an inch until they cannot afford this needless war.

Nick in Death Cab spoke of flags, of not having one. I think we should bring back what the Vietnam Veterans Against the War used - an upside down flag. Initially Kerry didn't want to use this - thinking it was disrespectful. It turns out to be a Naval code signal for distress. From the topmast the flag is turned upside down, to indicate help is needed.

We need to reclaim the American flag. Because the exit polls showed that it wasn't the economy, social issues, or the war, or even security that decided this election. It was this concept of "morality". That's a larger ideological fight against ignorance to be waged another day. The rest of American who did vote for Bush know in their heart of hearts that the war in Iraq is pointless and we do not feel safer. Now we have to hold those people accountable.

In the meantime, I am going to start plans for a the 10 million slacker march on Washington, to show the rest of the world there's still a lot of us who are proud Americans who do not agree with the direction this country is headed in.

Fight on.

Save the world.

Vote for John Kerry.

If you read this today, regardless of affiliation or who you ultimately choose, please make sure to get out your vote. Decisive win will be predicated upon turnout. Large turnout means we have restored a vitally missing part of our experiment in democracy - participation.

Let's avoid the silliness of court battles. That will only be achieved by getting out the vote.

If you go through the archives here you will find links to the most egregious, damning pieces of news commentary on the dangers of a Bush presidency. I believe they portray a person who sadly cannot lead this country in the right direction any more. Basically my argument is essentially conservative: George is a monarch. He believes he has hereditary right and divine right on his side. Couple that with arrogance and you have the worst traits of our nation embodied in our president. Arrogance by itself is not entirely dangerous. Ignorance can be naive and forgivable. But combined they are representative of the worst qualities in America, the lineage of all acts done in our name that usually come at the end of a gun. He is not an idiot, he is not a cartoon. I feel in some ways sorry for the man. His debate with Ann Richards years ago shows an agile, graceful speaker, if blunt and to the point.

We cannot in these times of imminent peril throughout the world allow the greatest military might to be in the hands of someone who believes God is speaking directly to them and guiding them. History gives us these rulers constantly. You think we'd know better by now. Because they never accomplish anything for the greater good. They are tyrants. We cannot fight an enemy who is devoted to extreme religious ideology by combating it with the same.

If John McCain were running for president, I wouldn't say a word. I'd just say vote.

But that's my final line, today. Save the world. Vote John Kerry.

---

Disregard cable news, exit polls. There is only one way to pull this off. Turnout. Get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote. If there's record turnout it will be a decisive Kerry win. That means we can avoid the silliness of court appointed presidents. So remind everyone you know, every relative, every friend... Write emails, call, get everyone together in a car and get down to the polls, and make your decision.

when i was a child, i spake as a child (je est un autre)

The non summarized version might be a ltitle too much, as articles in Nature tend to be (i.e. heavily academized, or written in that vague, very difficult and obtuse language, "acadamese") but this summary of findings is really cool.

Cracking the speech code.

__

The remake of Dawn of the Dead is pretty bloody fantastic.