Great Moments In 21st Century Music

If you love music, then Cecilia Bartoli singing "Sposa son disprezzata" will probably move you. Hopefully even if you're not a fan of opera. The entire performance is magnificent, but from 3:19 on is simply divine.

Italian	Translation in English
Sposa son disprezzata, fida son oltraggiata, cieli che feci mai? E pur egl'è il mio cor il mio sposo, il mio amor, la mia speranza. L'amo ma egl'è infedel spero ma egl'è crudel, morir mi lascierai? O Dio manca il valor valor e la costanza.	I am a scorned wife, faithful, yet insulted. Heavens, what did I do? And yet he is my heart, my husband, my love, my hope. I love him, but he is unfaithful, I hope, but he is cruel, will he let me die? O God, valor is missing - valor and constancy.

Great Moments In 21st Century History

I just watched the documentary After Tiller, which focuses on the issue of late-term abortions in the United States after the assassination of George Tiller, who was one of only five doctors in the nation to perform such procedures. The documentary starts off with a patient from Lincoln, Nebraska (my hometown) who traveled to Bellevue, Nebraska (a town about an hour away from Lincoln) to undergo the procedure.

It can really be quite disgusting in this country to see pretty quickly a bunch of elderly men sitting around discussing women's rights. Dr. Susan Robinson delivered an eloquent speech: "Women come here having decided that this is not a pregnancy that they can or want to sustain. And where does it come from that I get to say, 'Oh yeah? Well why? Why do you want to have an abortion? You explain to me. Justify it to me.' Why is that fair? What if you're just not a good storyteller? Why would it be okay for me to say, 'No, you've got to tell me a better story than that.' Because what I believe is that women are able to struggle with complex ethical issues and arrive at the right decision for themselves and their families. They are the world's experts on their own lives."

La Canción Desesperada

I've been reading some of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's work. He has some really beautiful lines. The words are lovely in their original Spanish, but also translate into English quite nicely.


"in love you have loosened yourself like sea water:
I can scarcely measure the sky's most spacious eyes
and I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth."

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"And when you appear
all the rivers sound
in my body, bells
shake the sky,
and a hymn fills the world."

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"Your knees, your breasts,
your waist
are missing parts of me like the hollow
of a thirsty earth
from which they broke off
a form,
and together
we are complete like a single river,
like a single grain of sand."

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"Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido."

A nine-year-old girl killed an instructor at a shooting range outside Las Vegas. She accidentally shot him with the fully automatic submachine gun she was being allowed to fire.

Her parents are extremely lucky the little girl wasn't physically harmed. But the mental anguish of shooting another person to death will certainly take its toll.

Welcome to America, where this unfortunate girl could not yet purchase cigarettes, operate a motor vehicle, attend an R-rated movie unaccompanied, or vote, but where she could spend her family vacation in a desert outside Vegas shooting military-grade weapons for fun.

What a world.

Should've known better than to watch 12 Years A Slave again. I saw it in the theater the day it came out, on a mild cool orange and yellow autumn afternoon in Minneapolis.

I guess in some way crying my eyes out makes me feel more alive, despite having been conditioned to be ashamed of my tears. Men aren't supposed to cry and all that bullshit.

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Next month it'll be four years since I've heard her voice. I remember the very last words I heard, where I was and the sound of everything.

Four goddamn years.

Barcelona's season is off to a good start, despite the absence of Neymar. He should be back shortly. Messi was on fire and the youth players/new signings impressed. I hope it's a good season for Iniesta and company.

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Looking forward to September, when Prince is releasing two new albums and Leonard Cohen is releasing one as well.

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Walked home from soccer listening to "needle in the hay" by elliott smith, thinking about things I wish I could look forward to.

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I wish I could study her body language every day. I want to be fluent.

I have a dream that one day she and I will watch the complete Buffy The Vampire Slayer series together. And then also The Wire. I dream about the laughter and the conversations that would happen. It would be so nice. Having a feeling with her was like having a whole new feeling.

It's not exactly MLK level, but it's enough for me.

I need to quit dreaming, though.

Great Moments In 21st Century Music

I've been listening to David Bazan's cover of the Vic Chesnutt song "Flirted With You All My Life" repeatedly. It's about death. Chesnutt was paralyzed in a car accident at the age of eighteen. He wrote and performed music until the age of forty-five when he committed suicide. Bazan is one of my favorite contemporary musicians, and this cover is great. But don't listen unless you don't mind being sad:

Flirted With You All My Life - David Bazan

Also, whoever uploaded this video called the songwriter Vic "Chestbutt" which is just awesome.

Great Moments In 21st Century Television/"Maybe the Jew's right"

One time Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert debated Islam vs Christianity:

the great debate

I finished reading Dave Eggers's latest book. His angst remains as the book is basically an interrogation about how abysmally disconnected all us cohabitants of earth are. It's about a mentally disturbed guy named Thomas (doubting?) who kidnaps and questions multiple people who have impacted his life, some he sympathizes with and some he despises, apparently in search of some kind of coherence. Basically he tries to wade through the chaos (disappointment) of his life to find some meaning amidst all the failure. He meets a woman named Sara (Bob Dylan has a beautiful song named "Sara" about his ex-wife and it involves the beach) on the beach near the abandoned barracks where he keeps his kidnapped persons and convinces himself that the purpose of all his actions was to lead him to this woman.

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Thomas: "Sara, I just want to get something I want. I don't think I've ever gotten any significant thing I wanted. You have no idea how weird it is to envision things and have them come to nothing. No vision has ever come true, no promise has ever been kept. But then there was you, and you were the promise that would obliterate all the disappointments of the past. Everything about you insisted on it. Your color, your hair, the way light projects from every part of you. You were the sun that would burn away all the putrid broken promises of the world."

Sara: "I wasn't that."

Thomas: "I know that now."

A shopping list worthy of Proust

I haven't purchased Diet Mountain Dew or "Flamin' Hot" Cheetos in at least four years. But I notice them every single time I'm at the grocery store.

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Picking up a copy of Dave Eggers's latest novel today.

Today I wish I could pack up a few books and some food onto a sailboat and float away. Sometimes the ocean waves are calmer than what's going on in my head and my heart.

I don't recommend walking in the moonlight by yourself through vacant lamp-lit parking lots while listening to "She's Out Of My Life" by Michael Jackson.

It's depressing.

And it doesn't help when the next song that comes on is Springsteen's cover of "Jersey Girl".

"Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull
and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my skull.

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
and a freight train running through the middle of my head

only you... you cool my desire.
Oh oh oh I'm on fire."

sigh.