Human Shields videos from May 2010

Here are three videos of songs my band Human Shields performed at the Rockfact Music Club in Münchenstein, Switzerland, on May 8, 2010.


Sundowning

Human Shields | MySpace Musikvideos


Long Enough

Human Shields | MySpace Musikvideos


You Know I Know

Human Shields | MySpace Musikvideos

You can also view these videos on the band's Facebook page.

Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1983

It was a Sunday evening, and I had already gone to Grateful Dead shows at Frost Amphitheater at Stanford on the Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and I was exhausted and wired, but I went to see Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Keystone Palo Alto anyway. I was right at the stage, to the left of SRV's mic in the middle of the stage, and quite close to his wah-wah pedal. After he played two of his fast instrumentals, he stepped over to that pedal and started doing this crazy stuff with it, and I could not really see him, but I watched his left-handed shadow playing on the back wall. Here's what he did (from a different 1983 performance):



And the moral of Stevie's story is: don't ride helicopters during storms.

Beyond Genes

Here's the next book I'm translating, due out next year: Gottfried Schatz, Jenseits der Gene. It's a collection of columns on science that Schatz wrote for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung; it was a best-seller in Switzerland. It's an honor to be translating a book by such a prestigious scientist ("co-discoverer of mitochrondrial DNA"? I'm impressed!).

Five articles in one newspaper

Today's International Herald Tribune contains not the usual one or two interesting articles but, count 'em, five!

There's an article about five neuroscientists taking a kayaking trip off the grid (and off-line), in which they reflect on the ways that the brain responds to the information society and to their temporary escape from it. (It's a little ironic that my response to this article is to want to provide a link to it for my friends.) My small version of the same is that I did not go on-line at all on Sunday (not even with my iPhone), and that it is always a bit of relief to "disconnect" myself.

Robert Pinsky's review of Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance, a new study of the first century or so of movable type and the central problem printers faced: how can you make money from publishing? Pinsky praises Pettegree for refraining from comparisons between then and now, but it's certainly easy to do so, given that Pettegree argues that printers only made money when they focused on "news, sensation, and excitement." So there was no Golden Age of printing when people bought classic literature and philosophy and read them; sensationalism has always been the best way to make money with printing and publishing.

Timothy E. Williamson's opinion piece on the imagination has a dozen or so fascinating points in it, but for me the best point is his brief discussion of the contemporary philosophical contrast between "contexts of discovery" and "contexts of justification":

In the context of discovery, we get ideas, no matter how — dreams or drugs will do. Then, in the context of justification, we assemble objective evidence to determine whether the ideas are correct.

I've come across this idea quite a few times before, but I've never seen it explained so tightly and clearly. (Well, my student Michael Luscher explained the distinction in my verse-novels seminar in 2009, but we were discussing Christoph Ransmayr's Der fliegende Berg, so that discussion was in German, and I did not register that he was using the German equivalents of these terms. Now, in retrospect, I can see how appropriate and precise his use and explanation of the terminology was!)

Then there's Lawrence E. Joseph's article on the threat caused by solar storms, which can produce huge bursts of electricity that destroy transformers on Earth, and Paul Krugman's vigorous defense of the Social Security system in the U.S. against its detractors.

This post is an excercise in multi-tasking, in a way, with all the different points it has to make, and is thus subject to the analysis that appears in the first article I linked to, about the kayaking neuroscientists. But it's worth noting that I read all these articles in the newspaper, and not on-line, in the old-fashioned way—that is, in a desperate search for "news, sensation, and entertainment". :-)

On the Night Watch

Here are three poems by Ciaran Carson from his collection On the Night Watch, which has just come out in North America with Wake Forest University Press (and which was first published in Ireland by Gallery Press). It's another winner from Carson, a radical change in approach and tone that is completely successful. (Just as an aside: of his many compelling works, I find his verse novel For All We Know to be the most compelling of all; I wrote about it here.)

Music as skin

There are passages in Göran Sonnevi's Mozart's Third Brain (translated by Rika Lesser) that are just exactly perfect, such as this one:

Music covers us with skin, touches with skin
We are painfully described there, even in great delight

The feeling of being surrounded by music, and touched by music, as something physical, even erotic (skin on skin), and the way that overwhelming music can be painful and delightful at the same time. At my last Grateful Dead show (March 18, 1995), which was also my wife Andrea's only Dead show, she turned to me during the space jam and said, "It's really scary." But that's just why I loved it!

Diego Rivera's Deep Water Horizon

Here's another poem from New Verse News: "Diego Rivera's Deep Water Horizon," by Alan Catlin. It reads like an ekphrasis of a non-existent Rivera mural; I'm sure that's a category that somebody has written a dissertation about somewhere: descriptions, in poetry and fiction, of non-existent works of art.

Still, even though it doesn't bother me enough to keep me from appreciating the poem, I did stumble on one feature of this poem: the three lines ending with prepositions (lines 3, 5, and 8; of, of , and from). None of those breaks seem well placed to me; they interrupt the syntax of the phrases and sentences they are in. That's not necessarily a problem, but here, there's no gain in the effect of the poem as a result of the interruption. Nor is there a metrical pattern that is being followed and which has led to these particular breaks.

The Daily Blab

And here's another poem I just read on-line and liked: Earl J. Wilcox's "The Daily Blab." Perhaps because I just returned from vacation and had had my mail held and my newspapers stopped while I was out of town. But I'm not planning on pretending to be dead.

At Lowe's Home Improvement Center

I liked Brian Turner's Here, Bullet a lot, and this poem on Poetry Daily today makes me think I'm going to like his new Phantom Noise even more. This brings the war home in multiple ways. As Neil says, "I'm living with war in my heart every day."

The Poem and Its Secret

I was on vacation last week when my translation of Durs Grünbein's essay "The Poem and Its Secret" was the Poetry Daily prose feature for the week. You can find the essay here, and you can buy the book, Bars of Atlantis, through the link there, too!

Acht Lernschwester

I've known this painting by Gerhard Richter for a long time; I saw the original in Winterthur back in the late nineties. But I only just learned, quite by chance, that these eight student nurses were murder victims! I am reading, editing, and commenting on a manuscript of a novel by a friend of mine, and one of the characters, a nurse herself, mentions one "Richard Speck" as an example of the kind of horrible criminals that there are in the world. Curious, I googled and found a Wikipedia page about Speck and his crime, and immediately I wondered if Richter's painting was of his eight victims. For detailed information on the painting and its background, see this blog post.

Loopholes

So here's Suarez playing goalie when he's not allowed to, which led to a last-second penalty for Ghana against Uruguay last night. But since Gyan missed the penalty, the match went to a penalty shootout, which Uruguay won.

Arguably, then, Uruguay was rewarded for Suarez's cheating. That's one way to look at it, but really it's a loophole that a player can exploit: stop a certain goal, get sent off, and hope the opponent misses the penalty. (They later showed Suarez's reaction from the tunnel when Gyan missed the penalty.)

And loopholes are inevitable: every system of rules has loopholes that people can exploit, and all attempts to close the loopholes lead to the creation of further loopholes.

Violent Femmes in Berlin, 1992

Tom Phillips has just published a really nice short essay on the Violent Femmes over at Eyewear, and it made me remember my one VF concert. It was at the Waldbühne in Berlin in the summer of 1992, and the show opened with Lyle Lovett knocking me out with his wonderful "Church":

I went to church last Sunday, so I could sing and pray,
and something quite unusual happened on that day.

Then came Bonnie Raitt, and then the Femmes. I don't remember their set very well, but I remember being very impressed by their energy and power; as when I saw REM a few years earlier, I was surprised by how much "harder" their sound was live than in the studio.

The highlight was in Lou Reed's set, when he brought out Bonnie Raitt and the Femmes' Gordon Gano to be the "colored girls" on "Walk on the Wild Side," and then he let Gordon sing the second verse. But before he began singing, Gordon said, in pretty good German, "Erst möchte ich sagen: Lou Reed, er ist geil, ja?" ("First just let me say: Lou Reed, he's cool, isn't he?") And then Gordon sang that second verse, and it was a shock to hear Lou's half-talking, half-singing replaced by the beautiful voice of a former choir boy.

Wallace Stevens on Language Log

I like the effect here: in a discussion of the word "operandum" and its use by B. F. Skinner, Mark Liberman brings up a Wallace Stevens poem that contains the word and imagines Skinner and Stevens "getting together of an evening to swap neologisms." (I like that use of "of an evening," too.)

(Perhaps this little note will get one of my Stevensians to comment on Liberman's post.)

The Swifts

Here's another one I first read on the Poetry Daily app on the iPhone: a dizzying poem about a huge flock of swifts, "The Swifts," by Linda Bierds. Yet another great poem from the New England Review!

One August night, ten thousand.
Four thousand now, in this long, September dusk.
Some repeaters, staying over.

Movie

Using haikus as stanzas often leads to exceptionally tight writing, as here in Norman Schwenk's "Movie," on Poetry Daily today:

the twin towers shown
as an establishing shot
saddens many films

There's something to be said for capturing something in words that others might already have noticed but never quite fully registered.

I first read the poem on PD's new iPhone app, which is excellent.

Poetry-wise on the iPhone, I've also been enjoying Poem Flow and the Poetry Foundation's new app.

World Cup note, Group G

Everybody thinks that the only issue in Group G is whether Brazil or Portugal will be in first place after the games this afternoon. But here are the standings:

Team	MP	W	D	L	GF	GA	Pts
Brazil	2	2	0	0	5	2	6
Portugal	2	1	1	0	7	0	4
Côte d'Ivoire	2	0	1	1	1	3	1
Korea DPR	2	0	0	2	1	9	0

Yes, it's unlikely that the standings will change much, but given how helpless North Korea was against Portugal, and given how explosive the Ivory Coast can be, and given that the last time Brazil and Portugal played, Brazil won 6-2, it would not be completely and utterly miraculous (it would not be like a fifth set in tennis that goes to 70-68!) for the Ivory Coast to still qualify.

Let's say Brazil beats Portugal 3-0 (which is not an extreme result). Then the Ivory Coast has to win 6-0 (which is extreme, but as I said, not utterly unlikely, given NK's weakness and IC's offensive potential). That would put IC and P in a tie, and they would have to draw lots. So any nine-goal swing, with B and IC winning, makes it possible for IC to advance (7-1 for IC and 3-0 for Brazil would have IC advancing on goals scored, for example).

I do not, repeat DO NOT, think this is what's going to happen, but I thought I'd go on the record with it, just in case it does happen, so that I can pat myself on the back about it. :-)

Vertical Realities

Here's a line that quickly characterizes someone:

... he always chooses his luck and clothes one size too small for him.

The whole poem, "Vertical Realities," by Luljeta Lleshanaku (translated by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi), has this sense of how the barest of brushstrokes can imply a world. The collection Child of Nature is available from New Directions.

Claudia Roth Pierpont's "Black, Brown, and Beige" is a review of several recent books about Duke Ellington, but it concludes with an image of Charles Mingus that brought tears to my eyes:

Two years before Ellington died, in 1972, Yale University held a gathering of leading black jazz musicians in order to raise money for a department of African-American music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone evidently unhappy with this presence on campus called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but Mingus refused to leave, urging the officers to get all the others out but adamantly remaining onstage with his bass. “Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music,” he was heard telling the police captain. (And very few people successfully argued with Mingus.) “If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’ ” Once outside, Gillespie and his group set up again. But coming from inside was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit, which, that day, became a protest song, as the performance just kept going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling.

Who else but Mingus would have come up with an act like that? Well, maybe Charlie Haden, who dedicated "Song for Che" to freedom fighters in Angola and Mozambique while performing in Lisbon in 1971. See here for his version of the story.

Astonishing Confidence in the Self

In Mark Lilla's recent article on the Tea Partiers in the New York Review of Books, he comes up with one of his wonderful summations of a situation:

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

But I would add that these "new Jacobins" are not just American, as I have seen the same combination of public pessimism and private optimism in Switzerland as well. Many Swiss are just as skeptical of public institutions as Americans are (especially of what they call "Schulmedizin," that is, mainstream medicine) and just as optimistic about their own perceptions of the world ("the homeopathic treatment worked for me"). So while Lilla has perhaps correctly diagnosed the Tea Partiers here, he has limited the scope of his observation too much: what he identifies as "classic American traits" may once have been uniquely or at least especially American, but they have gone global as well—or at least Swiss. (Or does this have something to do with democracy?)

Perhaps someone will say, "Well, Andrew, what about your own 'astonishing confidence' in yourself?" But I am not skeptical about public institutions, and I try to understand my own experience as anecdotal (no matter how fun or funny the anecdotes are) and not representative of how people are and how the world is.