Another up-all-night. I’m sitting here with the morning sunlight drifting in my window like a breeze.

I watched this movie, one that the landlord had left behind. It’s called ‘Umberto D.,’ and it’s by the same director who made ‘The Bicycle Thief.’

It’s about how hard it is to be old. The setting is post-WWII Italy, a hard time indeed, even if you’re not old.

Apparently, this movie is part of a movement in Italian cinema, called ‘neorealism;’ the camera spends a lot of time watching people do things like make coffee, have awkward moments, and go to bed. At the same time that they’re realistic, however, the characters are all allegorical, which might explain the ‘neo’ part. The old man’s struggles represent the desire to continue living. His dog, to which he is very loyal, represents the enjoyment of life. His landlord, sometimes running a brothel, sometimes entertaining high-society guests, represents (of all things) the universal impending mortality. The maid is Italy struggling with the after-effects of war. And so forth.

It’s well-written, well-acted, the direction is top-notch, and the cinematography is far above most anything going on in the US at the time. Too bad I didn’t like the then-fashionable open ending, wherein the compelling realism aspect is jettisoned in order to end the movie with a question mark. (The old man doesn’t kill himself and the dog by walking in front of a train, because the dog freaks out and runs away. The old man follows the dog, who is now afraid of him. Eventually he charms the dog back into trusting him by throwing a pine cone as if it were a ball. Man and dog play happily in the park, no care that he has no place to live.)

What I disliked most about this movie is that it takes at face value the realities of living in a city like Rome. That is, it offers no critique of social norms, even as it critiques government policies such as reducing pensions to the elderly. It presents people as weak and unable to live up to an Italian social norm, never condemning the system.

Of course, since social norms act as stand-ins for the inevitability of mortality, that’s a difficult critique to make. Which is why it frustrated me.

Watched some TV tonight. Two brilliant things stuck out like an (ahem) sore thumb.

First was David Letterman. I was flipping through the channels and there was Dave with a doctor in the guest chair, and they’re giving a recipe for a pasta dish. The doctor begins unwrapping a bandage from Dave’s thumb. It turns out Dave had sliced his thumb open while preparing the dish at home, so while the doctor put three stitches in the gaping wound, the guy in the deli down the street made the pasta dish.

There was brilliant side-by-side video of Dave’s bleeing thumb with sutures being applied, and a guy sauteeing onions and tomatoes.

It’s this kind of surreal entertainment that restores my faith in television as a medium.

The other brilliant thing was that Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were on Charlie Rose. I love Laurie. My heart sank when she hitched up with Lou, but really, the New York art junkie thing is probably more her style than the unemployed guy with no real form of artistic expression beside his ‘blog.

Be that as it may. Lou spent most of the time talking about Andy Warhol, and Laurie looked like she was maybe having a not-so-good day, or maybe she was stoned or had recently ingested LSD. Or maybe she’s really like that.

Hearing their discussions reminded me of the very few art people I’ve had the chance to sit down with and really hash out Big Meaning kind of stuff. I’ve had so few of those experiences for a few reasons: Firstly, there aren’t that many people to have the discussion with in the first place. Second, I suck at meeting people. Third, they’re probably out there wondering who they can trust to open up in that kind of way.

I was thinking specifically about David, dharma buddy of long ago. We sat for hours at a stretch in that taqueria at Richmond and, uh.. Heh. I’ve forgotten the street names in Houston. But we sat there for hours arguing about Buddhism. People would come in and eavesdrop for a while and roll their eyes, and eat their burrito or whatever, and then leave, and we’d still be there talking about emptiness and the bodhisattva vow.

Or, more accurately, he’d be talking about that stuff, and I’d listen for a while, and then interrupt and steer a little bit. That’s where I’m best: steering. I sit and watch people get close to the rhetorical precipice, the one they really don’t want to go over, the one that scares the crap out of them so their whole system of reasoning conspires to disallow their considering it, and then I point it out to them, such that they understand that it isn’t the end of the world, and I’m not here to fuck up your shit, just to help you get ankle-deep in the big scary wading pool.

It was all so easy with David, because it was all one-to-one, and he’s pretty far along.

Before David it was the Marxists. There were some poets who would gather and I liked that they were talking about Big Deal stuff, but I could never really align myself with any of their arguments, because they all believed they knew the whole story. What was needed, they’d say, was a radical reinterpretation of history and culture, furrowing its fertile ground and planting the seeds of revolution. Sounds like fun, but mostly wasted effort. I’d offer that, perhaps, maybe, uh.. maybe what’s needed is that people stop seeing each other as commodities (nods of approval), kind of like you people are doing right now (nodding stops). I gave no indication of making a joke, because I wasn’t joking. Not in that sense, anyway. Moment of silence. The truth isn’t so sexy as planning to turn the world into a Marxist paradise.

I remember going to the coffeehouse one time, and running into this group, and there was this lovely young woman who repositioned herself to sit next to me. She was slim and petite and was wearing a purple velvet thigh-length Jackie O. style dress with matching elbow-length gloves. A pearl necklace hung around her lovely little neck, and her hair was in a tight bun behind her head. She can’t have been too far out of high school. She fiddled with a long cigarette holder like the prop it was. She turned to me and asked,

“So. Are you a radical?”

All I could think to say was, “I believe in whatever works.”

“What do you mean by that? It’s a yes or no question.”

“I believe that there’s a time to be radical, and a time to not be radical. The good of the people can only be achieved by what’s effective, not by what’s idealistic.”

“Oh.”

She turned away and re-entered the discussion at the table, ignoring me.

Wading pool too deep.

Ok, so this is a severely geeky thing, so if you’re looking for macro photos of flowers or descriptions of how hard it is to be me, you’ll want to skip this one.

The story is this: There’s a usenet newsgroup called comp.lang.objective-c. People talk about the Objective-C language there, obviously enough. There are some old-timers and some new-timers, and, as with any other newsgroup, there are a few topics that always lead to an overly-long thread that borders on turning to a flame war.

On c.l.o-c, the topic is +new versus +alloc/-init. I can’t adequately explain this argument, other than to say it’s a case of someone being sort of stuck in the past (the +new faction, comprised of one very stubborn person), those foolish enough to argue with him about it (the +alloc/-init faction), and those who come along and provide a mediatory ground (the ‘Use +new if you want, use +alloc/-init if you want’ faction).

The current incarnation of this thread has lasted about a week.

Now, being me, I want to participate in this discussion. But I really don’t have anything to add, because there’s nothing to be added that hasn’t been said. Nevertheless, I composed a witty reply. I just haven’t sent it, because then I’d be feeding the trolls.

So I present my post here, instead. I do this because I had such fun writing it, not because it’s worthy, or even because any Xanga folk will get its humor.

The names have been changed to protect the guilty (me):


Someone wrote:

> Someone Else wrote:
[..]
> > Of course, the fact that most people who create objects in Cocoa don’t
> > explicitly call _alloc and -init, but instead use precisely a
> > higher-level abstraction as offered by class methods that wrap around
> > instance allocation and initialization for the ‘standard’ case,
> > completely passes Someone by.
>
> The “convenience” methods are exactly proof that +alloc/-init itself is
> not convenient, and that replacing the method +new by +alloc/-init is a
> mistake.

The convenience methods are exactly proof that [[NSWhatever alloc] init] is no more or less convenient than [NSWhatever new]. With new, one must initialize the object with meaningful values after calling new, just as one must initialize the object with meaningful values after calling alloc. Convenience methods wrap whichever of these two ungainly strategies one is wedded to into a single method.

Thus, since you and Someone Else have proved that convenience is really the only overriding factor in whether new or alloc is better, I demand that makers of frameworks remove +new, +alloc, and -init from their root object classes. They should do this in favor of convenience factory methods, since convenience factory methods are so much more… convenient. Anyone who authors a class should be forced to learn the objective-C runtime inside and out, in order to continually re-invent the object allocation wheel within the context of constructs such as:

@implementation Thing
// convenience method. designated initializer. (and how.)
+ (Thing *) thingWithValue:(id)someValue
  {
  // something very complicated goes here.
  }
@end

Reuse and portability are quaint, outdated notions. Complexity is convenience. Ignorance is strength. War is peace.

The world has one hour to comply.

Domestic, Not Imported

I’m discovering a new world of domesticity. I always hated and resented chores as a child, like doing laundry or cleaning my room. I think it was because it was someone else’s schedule, or standards, or needs. It didn’t arise out of my on-again/off-again work berzerk rythms. I didn’t even know I had work berzerk rythms until a short while ago, at least, not in the sense of understanding that it could be a useful personality trait.

While I lived with other people, I didn’t do many chores. I’ll own up to it: I was a lousy housemate in many ways. But the justification I’ll try to pass off on that is the same as the one above; the demand was made at the wrong time, or the work to be done didn’t have much to do with me, or my other contributions were ignored in the process. (I won’t talk about the concrete pathway, Shui House. )

So here I am, all alone in a house, and on the one hand, the overwhelming pressure to clean up my own crap is pretty great if I’m not managing it. But on the other hand, I can ignore the overwhelming things and do other things that are potentially just as important. The overwhelming things will get less overwhelming later, or I’ll get the momentum happening and just breeze through them.


Yesterday I got the momentum to instal the low-voltage lighting system the landlord left. The lights themselves had been stuck in the ground, but the wiring was still in a box in the garage. It’s about as hard to install these things as it is to connect a speaker to a stereo.

And, of course, since there’s going to be lighting, the beds have to look nice, so I did some weeding. In fact, I did a lot of weeding. In fact, I weeded most of the back yard, even in places I didn’t even realize it needed weeding.

And I really enjoyed it. I even mowed the yard, in a fit of obsessive order-making, to trim the borders where I had weeded.

All a product of being alone, of having space to enjoy these things away from anyone else.

While growing up, things like yard work were about responsibility; they were about filling someone else’s needs, and I didn’t realize they could be about my pleasure. (I’m reading what I just wrote, and I’m thinking, “Oh, geez. I’m so middle class.”) I’ve enjoyed keeping the plants alive, but only just now have I had any sense that keeping my landlord’s yard nice is a self-justifying opportunity.


Meanwhile, the neighbor to the east came home, and caught me watering the front yard. She was putting seeper hose out to the area of my yard that’s shared with hers, where some roses are planted close to the road for everyone to enjoy. We talked about garden-y, homeowner-y things. I ended up on her back porch drinking margaritas and helping her fix a broken garden hose.

Life is strange.

I didn’t ‘blog this a few days ago and it’s probably too late for most of you to catch it, but here it is anyway:

The PBS show POV aired a really great film called ‘Boomtown.’ If you get the chance to see this thing, do it.

It’s a documentary about Native Americans who sell fireworks on the 4th of July, but serves as a powerful and entertaining meditation on sovereignty and the ways American and Native cultures overlap. It’s not about Natives playing victim, it’s about Natives working and struggling and succeeding.

Of special note is the fact that you get to hear Beaverchief (along with others) sing the Dreamer’s Song, which always fills my heart with joy. So you know it’s powerful medicine. If you go to the web site linked above, and find your way to the trailer, it’s the song you hear.

I’ve mentioned before my abiding love of Richard Thompson, and I’ve been listening to him a lot lately. Mostly because I left ‘Mock Tudor’ in the CD player in the car. But that’s beside the point. If I didn’t want to listen, I wouldn’t.

There are some free MP3s of his over at his web site, and you if you have to pick one, it should be ‘Vincent Black Lightning 1952.’

That aside, I want to present, for the amusement and edification of anyone who cares, one of Mr. Thompson’s most bitter candies, ‘Crawl Back (Under My Stone),’ which is genius in the way it blends harshness with tenderness, desire with repulsion, anger with need, all wrapped in a metaphor of (or perhaps is a metaphor for) class struggle.

“I want to be middle class
Floors and ceilings made of glass
I just want to be free.”

Go ahead and listen.

Some late bloomers in my garden:

Open Government Information Awareness

“Mission

To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America.

To allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.”

Go look and see.

Here are two things that are true about me:

I can’t smell, which is like being blind in your nose, which is why I’m fascinated by the way things smell. I ask people what things smell like, in the hopes that maybe they’ll be able to relate it to me. Like, I asked someone what baking bread smelled like, and they said it was something like the taste of a penny in your mouth. So I put a penny in my mouth, and it was totally unlike what I had imagined. I also doubted that the person really knew what they were talking about.

I’ve also been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is the interpersonal analogue of being blind. I’m forced to be relatively ignorant of non-obvious social heirarchy. Imagine a young wimpy male gorilla not knowing that if he challenged the silverback, he might end up dead. Or that if he hangs out with the females all the time, the other males won’t accept him. That’s me.

So I ask people what it means to be part of a social heirarchy. Most people deny that social heirarchies exist. That’s how things are in the USA at the beginning of the 21st century; people don’t even realize they’re someone else’s mark.

I’ve tried to glean information from gender differences, and I don’t like what I see. Women totally get the short end of the stick, and, by and large, are willing participants. They stand by their man. They make allowances for inequities within power structures (I’m thinking about how there’s never been a woman president, and how it seems unlikely that there ever will be). And so on. And men are quite happy to shout down progressive currents within gender definition. I’m ashamed to have a penis from time to time, quite frankly, because the only way to change the state of affairs is to become the silverback, smash all opposition, and dictate the change into existence. Pun intended.

I look at race relations for clues. There’s a clear cultural dividing line, which is how I see it so easily. The minorities are moving forward through sheer numerical advancement, though. And there’s blend; interracial marriages either break cultural barriers or transcend them. Blended children simultaneously bear the burden of those barriers and put the lie to difference.

And I look at how small groups organize. There’s someone in charge, and this someone’s wisdom or lack thereof dictates what happens for the group. The group is happy with this, because all the risk is carried by the leader. This seems like a system whereby everyone is guaranteed not to be enjoying themselves, simply so that risk can be avoided, or so that ego can be stroked. And where friendship is dictated by either leadership ability or sheepish qualities. I don’t want that. I’m an equal, even if you don’t realize it yet.

The only place that seems to work for me is intimacy, which is, of course, where there’s the greatest risk. And it typically ends up not working anyway. I’m not just talking about romantic intimacy, but the general way I approach people. I know them already, and they haven’t yet remembered me. It’s a lopsided intimacy that I enter into because I really am clueless how else to do it.

Well, not clueless, but unable in the moment.

I’m so completely freekin’ sick of hearing people shoot off fireworks.

Just a faraway POP. Then silence. Then I get back to whatever I was doing. Then, a while later, another distracting POP. Then silence. Repeat.

Geez, folks. Keep ‘em in your pants for a while. Wait until it’s dark at least, OK? I know it’s Seattle, and it won’t get dark until 10pm, but why ruin the value of the fireworks like that?

This has been another installment of: Crochety Old Man Homer.