Monthly Archives: January 2009

John 5:8 And Jesus said, Arise, take up thy mat, and walk. Luke 7:22 Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk… the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor […]

From Ryne’s Sandberg’s 2005 acceptance speech at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Smarmy conservative David Brooks quotes this in today’s sort of beautiful column on social reproduction.  I’m for trusting your experience as the first and last word. But: doing that within the context of others’ experiences over time. Institutional structure and tradition are crusty-sweet […]

Yesterday morning, I finally went to practice around five. Corporate brand signs blazing in the Los Angeles witching hour, and gotham-dim streetlights whose inadequacy once allowed an errant car to hit me straight in to ashtanga. In the dark I strongly imagined my brother, on an art expedition to the Arctic Sea. They drive for […]

Here is a radical (or maybe just a grown-up?) theory of learning… What if the big story of “lessons” to be learned in a practice room (or wherever) is: that the knowledge is always already ours for the taking? What if all the lessons are just freely available and free of charge? What if the […]

I had wondered if I would feel the right way when I first lost someone close. Would the appropriate emotions arrive, or would I find some way of taking advantage of, or maybe running away from, the event? For the first days after it happened, what I felt quietly was both my loss and his […]

I was in MacArthur Park this morning, practicing with friends in a grand century-old house that’s been a mansion and a craft shop of sorts, a fraternity, an apartment building, and now an ashtanga space. This—bohemian, in your erstwhile livingroom, with a man repairing furniture in the kitchen, a Salvadoran woman walking by the windows […]

(Ghost Ship soundtrack) The Editor rolled over in his sleep the other morning and said, Soy un naufrago. He’d been watching Shogun, the 1980s epic of cultural insensitivity about an Englishman shipwrecked amid samurai intrigue in 1600s Japan. But Naufraugios—shipwrecks—refers in to the West Indes. It’s what Cabeza de Vaca, the 1500s sailor who was […]

Or, Secret Society Solitaire Last night began with Dom Perignon 1985, a kind of woody downtempo bubbly that looked like brass. There is this brilliant guy, friend of a friend, who has been saving that bottle for years until his novel went to press. Since the publishing industry is as fucked as sociology this winter, […]