by Brooks Riley
Open Borders
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
The traveler comes to a divide. In front of him lies a forest. Behind him lies a deep ravine. He is sure about what he has seen but he isn’t sure what lies ahead. The mostly barren shreds of expectations or the glorious trappings of lands unknown, both are up for grabs in the great casino of life.
First came the numbers, then the symbols encoding the symbols, then symbols encoding the symbols. A festive smattering of metamaniacal creations from the thicket of conjectures populating the hive mind of creative consciousness. Even Kurt Gödel could not grasp the final import of the generations of ideas his self-consuming monster creation would spawn in the future. It would plough a deep, indestructible furrow through biology and computation. Before and after that it would lay men’s ambitions of conquering knowledge to final rest, like a giant thorn that splits open dreams along their wide central artery.
Code. Growing mountains of self-replicating code. Scattered like gems in the weird and wonderful passage of spacetime, stupefying itself with its endless bifurcations. Engrossed in their celebratory outbursts of draconian superiority, humans hardly noticed it. Bits and bytes wending and winding their way through increasingly Byzantine corridors of power, promise and pleasure. Riding on the backs of great expectations, bellowing their heart out without pondering the implications. What do they expect when they are confronted, finally, with the picture-perfect contours of their creations, when the stagehands have finally taken care of the props and the game is finally on? Shantih, shantih, shantih, I say. Read more »
Revisiting Racism
by Adele A Wilby
Although we know bias and racism exists in most societies, when put into coherent terms in the form of research the impact is stark and exposes just how much a part of life racism is for so many people. Booth and Mohdin’s (The Guardian 2018) article ‘Revealed: the stark evidence of everyday bias in Britain’ setting out the findings of a poll on the levels of negative experience, more often associated with racism, by Black, Asian and minority and ethnic groups in the United Kingdom(UK) does just that. Thus, for example, from amongst its many findings the survey revealed that 43% of those from a minority background had been overlooked for work promotion in the last five years in comparison with only 18% of white people who reported the same experience. Likewise, 38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shop lifting in the last five years, in comparison with 14% of white people. Significantly, 53% of people from a minority background believed they had been treated differently because of their hair, clothes and appearance, in comparison with 29% of white people. In the work-place also 57% of minorities said they felt they had to work harder to succeed in Britain because of their ethnicity, and 40% said they earned less.
That racism, and indeed anti-Semitism, should be relegated to the dustbin of history is an aspiration shared by many. Of course, it is doubtful that there has ever been a society where racism has not been present. Nevertheless, that is not an excuse for it to become an acceptable phenomenon; it is a scourge on humanity, and has been the source of barbarity and brutality, cruelty and humiliation amongst fellow human beings. Its perpetual presence also serves to remind us of just how little we have learned from its devastating and harmful impact on peoples and societies throughout history. Thus, the recent research and reports of racism in the UK evoked reflection, and reminded me of my personal experience of racism in the United Kingdom, and how I realised the full weight of the phenomenon after the death of my husband. Read more »
Poem by Rafiq Kathwari
THE VALE OF SAINTS
I drove up the Himalayan foothills
to Baba’s shrine
with my friend Masood
in a tired white Gypsy
with dodgy brakes,
urged on by my 94-year-old
mother at Hebrew Home
The Bronx
who said her father,
a wealthy ring-shawl merchant
patronized by the Maharajah,
had married three times
hoping to produce an heir,
but his wives proved barren.
Perhaps it was him,
Mother said.
Yet, he rode his Tonga
to the foothills, then trekked
to the thatched-roof shrine
where he tied a thread
to carved wooden roses,
prayed for a son.
Faith in Sufi mysticism
defined Islam in Kashmir,
commanding awe & respect
never shock & suspicion. Read more »
Way Back When: 1999
by Gabrielle C. Durham
In the immortal words of Prince Rogers Nelson’s party gem from 1982:
“But life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last . . .
“So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.”
So much fun stuff happened in 1999: rampant concern about Y2K; the movie “The Matrix” came out; Bill Clinton’s ongoing inability to keep his dick in his pants and subsequent impeachment and acquittal; former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota; U.S. military college The Citadel graduated its first female cadet; the Elian Gonzalez controversy raged in the States; and Cher’s single “Believe” was released.
But do you remember what you said? Do you remember when something made you laugh, not LOL? It was not actually all that long ago, TBH. Back in 1999, reading a text typically meant applying a highlighter, most likely in neon yellow, to the testable information in a book or handout that the teacher assigned. It has a very different meaning from today’s pithier text message. In a score of years, English has changed. Duh, language is always changing; that’s how it stays alive. But if we think about it at all, we think of language change as being in evolutionary terms – something that takes generations, but it actually happens much more quickly. Read more »
Endless Hours of Entertainment
by Joshua Wilbur
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” —Annie Dillard
According to a July 2018 report from Nielsen, American adults now spend more than 11 hours a day on average consuming some form of media. The study considered time spent on television, radio, apps on smartphones, apps on tablets, internet on a computer, game consoles, and other devices. The study excluded print formats, such as books, magazines, and newspapers.
Eleven hours per day is a lot of time. Even if we add print formats to the mix—with the implicit judgement that “book hours” are superior to those dedicated to Netflix or Instagram—the fact remains that the majority of our waking lives is spent in engagement with the creations of other people. More than ever before, we are socially-hungry, story-obsessed, entertainment-seeking creatures.
It’s easy enough to decry this state of affairs. Postmodernists on the Left have long cast a critical glance at consumer culture, commodity fetishism, and the struggle between greedy hoarders of capital and passive wage-earners, who, like the singing Prole woman in Orwell’s 1984, are free to amuse themselves to death. In the 1960s, Guy Debord characterized the modern West as a “Society of the Spectacle” in a book of the same name. According to Debord, “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” We prefer action shows to real adventure, rom-coms to actual romance, hi-def images to genuine experiences. Will Self, who just months ago wrote an essay called “The Printed Word in Peril” for Harper’s Magazine, described his impressions of Debord’s treatise in a 2013 article for the Guardian: “Rereading The Society of the Spectacle, I was struck yet again […] by Debord’s astonishing prescience – for what other text from the late 1960s so accurately describes the shit we’re still in?”
And yet, for all the well-placed critique, I can’t help but feel that Debord’s picture of people as ideology-drugged spectators reflects our reality in the worst possible light and, in any case, bemoaning it doesn’t get one very far. Read more »
Monday Photo
View from my 12th floor hotel room in rainy London in September, 2017.
Let There Be Light
by Carol A Westbrook
On the first day of creation, God said. “Let there be light,” according to the Bible. In most major religions, God creates day and night, the sun, or light itself on the
first day. To the ancients, the sun was God Himself–the Egyptians had Ra, and the Aztecs, Huītzilōpōchtli.There is something divine about light. Even a non-religious person feels a sense of something special when in bright sunlight.
Sunlight! We crave it. We open the drapes, we spend time in the sun, we gaze at the sunset, we build stone 
monuments to track it. In the dark days of winter we brighten our homes with candles and holiday lights. Winter religious holidays like Christmas and Chanukah emphasize lights and candles to brighten the darkness, while other holidays come during spring, when the days get longer. Many of us feel the need to travel south in 
the dead of winter, to get a few days of bright light and longer days.
We don’t need to invoke religion to explain our craving for light, we can look to biology. Light–specifically daylight–is a human need, almost as critical as food, air and water. We need the periodicity of daylight to control our bodily processes, in particular those which occur in a diurnal cycle, such as sleeping, waking, meals, drowsy times, body temperature variations, and fertility.
Hormones control this periodicity. These include cortisol, which controls blood sugar and metabolism, and melatonin, a sleep regulator. Read more »
Brighton Blues
by Christopher Bacas
“Eets beeg place. Millennium Theater. Brighton Beach. You see it. We start seven. Very good band. Leader has gigs coming up. I tell him you coming.”
Ivan gave me specs and I agreed to make it. Lack of guaranteed money, opportunity, entertainment, enlightenment or even a ride home won’t stop a true band kid.
Brighton Beach Station follows Sheepshead Bay. Turning west toward Coney Island, the train grinds into a corner, wheels shrieking. In front: an ocean bends light behind towering beachfront buildings. Beneath the tracks: awnings, Cyrillic signage, overflowing produce bins, foot traffic crisscrossing a wide street.
I arrived early, on a rush hour train. Across the platform, stylish, perfectly coiffed women, teenage to babushka, waited to go to Manhattan. Heading down, many feet vibrated the iron steps, filigreed bars on a 3D xylophone. Soulful Russian ballads and techno crackled from outdoor speakers mounted above cell phone shops and grocers. The Millennium’s unlit marquee appeared high on the left. Below it, a café spread onto the sidewalk. Read more »
It’s The Future
by Max Sirak
“Once in while you get shown the light / In the strangest of places if you look at it right.”
The Grateful Dead sing that. It’s a line from Scarlet Begonias that goes through my mind in moments of pleasant surprise. And, as this essay is all about an instance of encountering wonder in an unlikely place, it seems a fitting place to start.
Forgetting how incredible it is to be alive and how good we have it is easy. We swim surrounded in a sea of marvels that previous generations couldn’t have imagined and might’ve called magic. Yet, because this is our everyday and we’re used to living this way, we hardly afford this truth a second thought.
Our near constant confrontation with news to the contrary also works to warp the wonder from our world view. Authoritarian regimes with Populist flares proffer. Climate change and our dependency on toxic energy destroys our planet. Humanitarian crises span our globe. And these are just the first three counterpoints that came to my mind.
I don’t mean to diminish the threats we face. Our current plights are real and important. But, so too is staying afloat. Read more »
Monday, January 14, 2019
Dog Town
by Holly A. Case
There is a nice neighborhood in Istanbul called Kadıköy, which means “village of the kadı,” or “judge.” One might as well call it Kediköy, however: “village of the cat.” There are a lot of stray cats there, as there are throughout the city. Once I saw a poster with a photo of a cat that said “Lost” at the bottom, then a phone number (rather like seeing a sign on the beach with a picture of a shell reading “Lost,” then a phone number). The sign was taped to a utility box on the street. On top of the box was a stray cat, lounging. It looked a lot like the one in the photo.
A few years ago, I met a retired architect who came down to the promenade along the reinforced shoreline every morning to feed the stray cats. “If there is a heaven and hell, which I don’t believe there is, but if there is, I will go to heaven on their prayers,” he told me.
In a different part of the city, my friend Kerim—a tailor—begins his two-hour commute to work at 6 a.m. Six days a week he pets the stray dogs on one side of the highway, then crosses to the other side to catch the bus where he meets a second pack of strays and pets them. Recently he constructed a luxury home for a stray cat who had taken up residence at the bus stop. It’s a cardboard box wrapped in plastic (to keep it dry), with a styrofoam roof (for insulation), a bubble-wrap subfloor (also for insulation), cardboard flooring, and an interior wall-to-wall rag (for extra comfort). He proudly showed me a photo of it with the occupant just visible inside. Read more »
Monday Poem
In all cases, the goal is to move past literal life into the imagination
to render the almost—to express the mysterious ambiguity that is. . .
……………………………………………….. —Nicholas Dawidoff, writer
Almost
yesterday
I walked our yard
with a grandson
who toddled beside
in a state
almost
of disequilibrium
but he tended
his balance
and stayed upright
and the walk
we walked was
almost
something which would come again
when he’d walk with
his grandson —if his days
were almost
like mine
almost as lucky
restless
reckless
full
fettered
free
almost
happy as a calm
shifty sea
full and vacant as the hole
at the center of a wheel
around which
if it were not hollow
its rim would never spin
and there’d be nothing,
including me
but nada is nothing
we can imagine
or almost
be
Jim Culleny
5/22/17
The Hostage Taker in Chief
by Emrys Westacott
Like millions of other people in the US, I often begin the day by listening to ‘Morning Edition,’ the early morning news program on National Public Radio. Sometimes, though, I get so disgusted by the rubbish spewed by the politicians being interviewed, or so infuriated by the flimsiness of the questions put to them, that I just can’t stand it and have to take myself out of earshot. Friday was a case in point.
The topic, of course, was the partial shutdown of the federal government. Congressman Gary Palmer, a Republican from Alabama, came on to be interviewed. Here was the first question
“Both sides have to give in any kind of compromise deal… Where should the Republicans and the president be willing to compromise?”
Right there was where I’d had enough. It is simply nonsense that in every negotiation both sides have to compromise, moving toward some sort of shared middle ground. This is not the received wisdom when it comes to dealing with hostage takers. And that is exactly the situation the House of Representatives is currently in. Read more »
My Life in One Sobering Graph
by Shawn Crawford
(The following is an excerpt from Crawford’s lecture at the Lausanne, Switzerland conference of The Society of Data Analysts Committed to Reducing Any Complexity to a Single Sobering Graph. Researchers will remember the group’s acrimonious split from the Social Scientists United for Reducing Any Cultural Crisis to a Single Meme. In a classic dispute among the “hard” and “soft” sciences, the two sides exchanged a dizzying array of pie charts and Willie Wonka images with devastating captions to no avail.)
. . . I want to thank Professor Owens once again for his electrifying lecture on determining the outcome of any baseball season by crunching the data from a ten-game sample, reducing the number of games played by 152. Like so much breakthrough research, this also produced an unintended benefit: the freeing up of nearly 10,000 extra hours on TBS for reruns of The Big Bang Theory. I know we are all grateful.
I still remember Professor Owens bursting onto to the scene when his algorithm, pushing the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer to its limits, proved conclusively that Dewey had indeed defeated Truman. While his subsequent modeling has produced dozens of legislative fixes for this mathematical reality, we know the current gridlock in Washington continues to thwart his efforts.
When Dr. Harry Lutz from DataTorrent approached me about joining him on the cutting edge of the Sober Graphing movement, I knew I couldn’t say no. While Thomas Piketty appeared to be rapidly consolidating the research space in Sober Graphing, I reckoned Dr. Lutz had a clear edge moving forward: his proprietary Sober Index, able to finally tackle such vexing questions as does the bar graph illustrating the concentration of wealth since World War II achieve Peak Soberness as it relates to income inequality? Using a baseline of soberness, the realization of just how worthless a degree in the humanities will be, Dr. Lutz built out his Soberness Index with enviable precision.
But would Sober Graphing prove as chimerical as Shocking Graphing and Surprising Graphing in offering real advances? The number of graphs required in these areas had also become problematic: if it’s going to take three scatters, a 2-D pie, and a funnel graph to shock me, perhaps we need to revisit the biases lurking in our data field.
Lutz and I became convinced the Sober Index could help us express the answer to any seemingly intractable question in one elegant, sobering graph. Furthermore, we posited the level of soberness, correctly calibrated to the industry or society addressed, could effect lasting and measurable change. But before we tackled broader issues, we decided to test our hypothesis on a basic level: could the essence of my existence be explained in One Sobering Graph, or OSG, now the recognized nomenclature? Read more »
Perceptions
Down on Orchard Street
by Tamuira Reid
I met Arnie at a Cocaine Anonymous meeting the year before I got sober for the first time. I was high as fuck, eyes lit and hands fidgeting in my lap, then my jacket pockets, then my lap again. Maybe I thought being in a room full of non-high people would help even my scorecard with God. I had a lot of interesting thoughts back then, but I was usually smart enough to keep them to myself.
Arnie was wearing a neon orange trucker hat with the word “Grandma” scrawled above the brim in what looked like sharpie. His long, sixty-something body stretched out from beneath a threadbare track suit, and his sneakers were both untied. I remember being distracted by this, the laces calling my name, Tamuira, Tamuira! Come tie me! I would later learn, over our decade of friendship, that he was claustrophobic, and his feet needed so be able to “breathe better”.
And this was what I found most comforting about about Arnie; his weirdness, his eccentricities. He didn’t need drugs to take him into an altered state because he was already in one.
“Wanna get coffee?”
I rolled my eyes and lifted up my Styrofoam cup, thinking he was just another gross old-timer in the program, picking-up on a newbie.
“I have a sponsor already.”
“I’m not hitting on you, honey. I’m gay,” he said, grabbing a cookie off the table and breaking it in half. “Straight guys don’t do neon.”
“I’m not really sober right now,” I confided. Partly to get rid of him, partly to ease my guilty conscious.
“I can tell. Your jaw is like a goddamn meat grinder.” Read more »
Security Risk
by Samia Altaf
In October of 2014, a bunch of young men and women did their university proud. A couple of engineers, two finance graduates, a biology major, some finishing accounting and business degrees, and a clutch from the school of humanities and social sciences; Muslims mostly, two Christians, a lone Hindu, one Buddhist wannabe, and two oblivious to religion though aware of its place in other folks’ lives. They came together from Sahiwal, Karachi, Gilgit, Swat, Peshawar, Gujranwala, one from Quetta (non-Baluchi), and two from Delhi via the University of Texas. Though the majority of students and faculty stayed away, these young men and women with similar features and skin tones, in colorful flowing kurtas, chooridars, skinny jeans, funky T-shirts, and hijabs, got together to celebrate Diwali, a festival that celebrates Ram’s return from exile.
Diwali, along with Holi, if not officially banned, have been marginalized in Pakistan as “Hindu” festivals although in the multi-religious society of the colonial period they were celebrated with as much enthusiasm as Eid and Christmas. The largest Diwali celebration in Lahore was held at the famous Laxmi Chowk, home to the Laxmi building, a marvel of Indo-European architecture and once the throbbing heart of the local film industry. All citizens, men, women, children, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Parsis gathered to celebrate the return of Ram to Ayodhya at Chowk with the adjoining building lit bright with lamps.
Almost seventy years on, these young people united in defiance to mark this heritage of their plural past. Ignoring looks of puzzlement and disapproval, they lighted the little lamps—diyas—fired with mustard oil as in the past, each lighted lovingly, one at a time, coaxing the hand-rolled cotton wick to sputter and then hold its own—quite like the event—knowing in their hearts that nurturing the flame symbolized a larger, more tenuous, goal. So they celebrated Diwali, and, I suppose, their own lives for the evening was mellow and they are young and alive and still hopeful. (Wordsworth: what a joy it was to be alive). They shared Mithai, music, poetry, thoughts, laughter, tears, and hopes and dreams for this land and its people wondering about their own place in it. They worried about the shape of tomorrow’s world and asked what they could do to make it better. It was a celebration of hope and harmony arrayed against a background of doom and despair—would there really be a return from the long exile? Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
From Plato to Parkinson’s: Reflections on Dance
by Abigail Akavia
A group of young women performing exercises at the ballet barre and an angry mob chanting “lock her up.” These two situations, where the exact same action is performed by a group of people, may have more in common than it appears at first. Kinesthetic empathy, a recent topic of research for neurobiologists, dance theorists and a range of scholars and professionals in between, offers an interesting perspective on this issue, since it points to the emotional effect of physical activities carried out in group settings.
Empathy is a blanket term for a wide range of interpersonal phenomena: it is probably most commonly understood as an other-oriented feeling of concern or compassion. Empathy can also be defined as an ability to imagine what the other person is going through, or as an intuitive understanding of another person, including an understanding that is more physical than mental. Mirror neurons in the brain—for example, those firing both when we itch our foot and when we see someone else itching their foot—are probably involved in such a body-mediated and body-motivated awareness of the other.
It is remarkable that we can also feel empathy towards a fictional character, say in a book, a film, or in the theater. The latter situation is especially interesting because by understanding how audience members relate emotionally to what they see onstage we may gain access to how the audience as a gathering of disparate individuals becomes a group, a collective whose emotions and reactions can be manipulated and controlled. When the aesthetic medium is dance, the nexus of emotional reactions and physical experience is more obvious, even if not easier to parse; for it is through the body and without the mediation of words that we are “moved.” Read more »
Lice in the Fur of the Big: The Joys of Concertzender
by Joan Harvey
I no longer remember how or when I stumbled on Concertzender.nl, an internet radio station located in Utrecht, but it has been with me through changes in location, partners, through raising a son: it has been with me from before they had an English translation on the website and before people from overseas could make donations, before they had an app. According to the website, “Thirty-four years ago, a group of music lovers shared the strongly felt urgency to create a sanctuary where everything revolves around music, music and musicians having the highest word, music in (almost) all its facets can be listened to as it is intended, no boundaries are drawn between genres and styles, almost every music lover comes into their own and no concessions have to be made to non-musical secondary goals.”
Max Roach. Contemporary Korean music. Electronic female artists from around the globe. Artie Shaw. Italian “infernal industrial” band Satanismo. Schnittke and Ustvolskaya. “Theremin genius” Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Bach. Abbey Lincoln. Gregorian Chant. Songs by Kurt Weill. Music for the oboe family. Chanson. Motets. Makossa, the popular urban music movement originally from Cameroon. Mudhoney. Hummel. Liszt. Psychic TV. Frank Bridge. The Swans. Songs about refugees. Gogol Bordello. Bollywood Bhangra Disco Masala.
The is just a tiny fraction of the variety of music to be found on Concertzender. One click opens up a vast musical world. Read more »