I was watching "An Inconvenient Truth" and it made me think: dear po-mo acolytes, keep mistrusting metanarratives, global warming will come and bite you on the ass. If you think humans are this diverse collection of tribes with essentiallly no common interests and values and experiences, wait until everyone's brain is fried and see if it wasn't worth it to think universal.

I'll expound later, but I'm soo not convinced when someone claims virtue by saying "I've never done XXX". So you didn't break a taboo, and your tribe did not expel you. So what? Tribes are kindof passe' (as cute as it might be to dress up and howl).

OK, maybe I can live in this country after all. Ligeti on the front page of New York Times, a nice long article (longer than the European and South American newspapers).

I quickly checked newspaper headlines. Liberation, Le Monde, La Nacion (Argentina), all of them prominently mention Ligeti. Not New York Times. But, I'm delighted to learn from its headlines that "Despite Uncertainty, Lehman Posts 47% Profit Gain". Clearly, nobody gives a fuck in this country. Maybe I should live somewhere else.

So the learned media critics don't claim any more that the internet only creates insular homogenous communities of like-minded individuals, and prevents dissent and exchange of opposing ideas.

Why am I the last to learn that?

And what brought on the demise of this theory? Myspace? You log in to ogle some chick pix and then you get sucked into a debate on identity politics? Makes sense?

I burnt myself today
To see if my skin heals
I'ts hard to be so vain
when snout turns red, for real

So I was chatting with this guy (yes, online, yes, that site), and he mentioned he liked Xenakis (I'm still not convinced 'like' is the right word when referring to Xenakis, I'm not even sure he said he 'liked' him, perhaps he said he was influenced by him). Apparently you can find French (or Greek or whatever) avantgarde freaks in this town. I said, well, my favorite Xenakis piece hasn't ever been recorded, I taped a live performance on the radio, and I lost the tape. That was a long time ago. Then I did a bit of googling, and sure enough, I found a double album, on Amazon.co.uk. Nobody in the US sells this stuff. Actually, turns out they do sell it *from* the US, but not for the american market - this company, operating from Florida, sells CDs and DVDs on all the various Amazon sites, they just didn't bother offering this particular one on Amazon.com. I guess nobody cares.

So I ordered my CD from Florida through Amazon.co.uk, was charged in British pounds and got the CD in a shipment from Florida. I'm glad they didn't route the package through Europe. I've remembered this piece for such a long time, and what's perhaps interesting is how my tastes and perception changed. Amplified harpsichord and brass is still fun, but the rhythmic structure is almost neo-classical, and syncopated, which is somehow not so fresh .... I'm sure it's there's a mathematical model lurking somewhere in this, but I don't care, I care about what I can hear. So it's not as powerful, it's a different performance, that's for sure, but I think of Chojnacka (who, of course, is playing harpsichord) as a very dynamic performer, always trying to make as much noise as the instrument will let her. The goofy-childish melodies (involving just two pitches or so) are not as funny. The whole piece appears actually much less complex than I remember it, almost entirely transparent. Sort of disappointing, but not too much. Not as different from Kekrops (sp?) as I remember it.

Zapach mizerii ogorkowej w cieple popoludnie. Smietana i, hmm, koperek jak sadze. Niekoniecznie cos, czego mi brakuje, za czym tesknie, ale napewno cos, czego zapomnialem. Wrazenie, ktore kojarze z moja egzystencja gdzie indziej, nie nieprzyjemne, choc nigdy nie lubilem popoludni. Wciaz sie zastanawiam, czy staje sie ubozszy (tak na prawde ubozszy), zapominajac takie rzeczy. Ciekawe czy to naprawde smietana i koperek. Nigdy nie bylem mistrzem w rozpoznawaniu smakow i zapachow, ale ta czesc mojego mozgu, ktora reaguje na wrazenia tego typu dziala dobrze i pewnie pomija kore mozgowa z jej logika etc, wplywajac bezposrednio na moja pamiec i samopoczucie ... Bardzo mi sie nagle zrobilo analityczno-fizjologiczno-medycznie.
Siedze w ritual roasters. 5 po poludniu.

I stil can't believe it can be an adjective. What, like surly or burly? Please!