Toronto
Besides that, I got to explore the city of Toronto. Things I liked:
(Nota Bene: if a reader is here: please don't take these posts seriously, they are half-fiction, written for myself for an imaginary audience, and some are decades old, if I had time to go back and read them, I'd probably delete or modify most of them)
Documenting this because there are always people who will tell you that sexism and feminism are things of the past--
Monday Oct. 2, 2023, 8:10pm - walking home on sidewalk at 116 - Hadley St. intersection, a man in the passenger seat of white sedan yelled out at the top of his lungs: "YO BITCH GET OUT OF THE WAY!" in white NE (standard) American English. He sped off and turned right on Silver St.
Friday Sept. 20, 2023, 2pm - on route 47 heading towards Northampton, I was closely tailgated by a white man (between 20-30 years old) in an old faded red Toyota truck. I was going 5 mph over the speed limit hoping he would stop. Eventually he passed me on my left, rolled down his window and stuck out his middle finger and drove like that for another 5 minutes.
I called the police both times. We need to talk about masculinity, sexism, and cultural supremacy in K-12.
"The word 'rats' came out of his mouth with a rich, fruity sound as if he was gargling with melted butter."
In Shibuya, Tokyo there remains a Tower Records. Some may remember Tower Records from the 1990s. The Tower Records in Shibuya is massive, there must be some 6-8 floors of new CDs and vinyls. When I entered the building yesterday, I was mind-boggled and impressed! In the US, I haven't seen any major stores selling new CDs since the early 2000s. I had given up on CDs in 2012 when I left New Zealand and didn't want to travel with the weight. Since then, over the years, I had complained to family members and friends about how complicated it is nowadays to simply play an album. You can turn on Youtube or Spotify, but they're full of commercials, interruptions, and glitches. You can pay for those services, but who are you paying? Where? And even if you pay for those services, you still can't simply play the album chronologically, you have to make sure everything is charged, logged in to, or connected to Bluetooth (which for me, a hearing aids wearer, nearly always takes several attempts). Meanwhile an anonymous source take your cookies and personal data. And then you forget your password, or the internet is down, or your credit card expires, or they won't let you cancel!! Uggh!
I spent 9 years without music until two years ago when my other half gifted me a straight-forward single CD player. It's so easy, you just make sure it's plugged in, you push Eject, insert a CD, and that's it! It works 100% and it has made my life better. But it was tricky to find new CDs, most artists in the US don't sell their music in CD format anymore.
Returning to Shibuya on a hot sunny summer day. Tower Records. It was full of people of all ages browsing CDs, talking to their friends and the salespeople about albums, people listening to CDs together with store-owned headphones. Tokyo (so it seems to me) is good at maintaining things, especially older technology. What I saw at Tower Records didn't seem like a nostalgia fad or trend, but a continued and sincere interest in old and new music. Tower Records is obviously a business, but a pretty accesible (and now small) one where the positive social life seems to outweigh any harm. The CDs cost around what they costed in the 90s, $15-17 USD (plus 10% tax free discount for foreigners).
A couple observations occurred to me:
1) the face-to-face community that used to exist around music isn't there as much as it used to be. It might exist in Tokyo (with all their 165 live jazz cafes), and maybe in some college dorms, but I don't see it elsewhere. Sometimes people share Spotify playlists, and occasionally I will "save" something on Youtube, but I don't end up listening for the reasons above. The excitement and socialization are not there anymore, not like it was with a mixed tape/CD. Time has sped up, capitalism has become more exploitative, politics are in the way, and life has become more solitary and virtual. At Tower Records I ended up buying two new CDs (Japanese artists: Shibusashirazu and Humbert Humbert) and I got excited walking home with these in my backpack, I was going to enjoy this--albeit alone!
2) most albums are already uploaded to Youtube. So why buy the material form? For me, it was for convenience and to support the artist.
3) there's a shrine to Michael Jackson on the 7th floor of Tower Records alongside a table overflowing with fresh flowers.
I just heard in a documentary that it took Leonard Cohen 7 years to write the song "Hallelujah."
"Ducking away to write feverishly. If writing two words a day is a fever."
"The city is the place where women had choices open up for them that were unheard of in small towns. and rural communities. Opportunities for work. Breaking free of parochial gender norms. Avoiding heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Pursuing non-traditional careers and public office. Expressing unique identities. Taking up social and political causes. Developing new kinship networks and foregrounding friendship. Participating in arts, culture, and media. All of these options are so much more available to women in cities."
--Leslie Kern
I'm teaching a class about the agency/power of everyday things and objects (of the Spanish-speaking world). We are starting with some poems by Gloria Fuertes and Pablo Neruda. I could not find translations to Fuertes's poems, so I translated them in case anyone in this cyber space is interested:
Things, Our Things [Las cosas, nuestras cosas]
Things, our things,
they like to be loved;
my table likes me to rest my elbows,
the chair likes me to sit in the chair,
the door likes me to open and close it
just as wine likes me to buy it and drink it,
my pencil falls apart if I pick it up and write,
my closet trembles if I open it and peek in,
the sheets are sheets when I lie on them
and the bed complains when I get up.
What will become of things when there are no more people?
Like dogs, things don't exist without their owner.
----------
The Typewriters [Las máquinas]
The dreary office
humanized itself at night
there was a light typing sound.
The typewriters were writing
--to one another--
love letters.
a sustainable form of urban transportation ; )
1- an alive human being at customer service is called an "agent" or "representative."
2 - often you don't need to waste time listening to the automated phone tree. You can simply dial zero (0) to speak with an agent/representative.
3 - if the agent/representative doesn't know, don't waste your time, you have the right to ask "can I speak/chat with your supervisor?" Often that will solve the problem.
4 - if you can't pay your medical bill, call the local hospital/clinic to ask if there is a solution to reduce the payment or to pay over a long period of time. Very often there is. If that doesn't work, call your health insurance company, but be prepared to wait on the line for a long time. See #2 above.
5 - never pay full price for something sold at at a regional or national company/franchise. This is too vast to explain right now, but there are infinite ways to save a percentages here and there. For example, see Rakuten, credit card cash back, and store "point" cards. Also, most companies will offer 20-25% off on your first purchase or when you sign up for a store card with them. (Warning: getting involved in acquiring discounts and cards here and there makes paying bills much more complex, there's a higher chance you could make a mistake and end up with a late fee.)
6- if you get a late fee, and you have a good record of paying on time (e.g., credit cards), call the company and explain the mistake. They will usually offer a "one time courtesy credit." In other words, they will often remove the late fee.
7 - if you're fighting a billing mistake, ask for the name of the person with whom you are speaking. They won't give you their full or real name, but they will usually give you a first name or their work ID number. Document this along with the day/time you spoke with them and what they told you. You may need this information later and, the more specific it is, the more convincing it will be.
8- at regional and national companies, do not believe discounts, free things, memberships, or fee that are presented clearly before you. They are presented with exciting hype and they promise to save you money, but that is often not the case. These are often tricks and I've seen them become more complex and sneaky over the years. For example: Costco's membership fees, Xfinity/Comcast's bundle packages, cellphone deals, and car dealerships. Ask lots of questions, even if the agent/representative gets aggressive (don't be scared, aggression is not usually a problem, usually the agent/representative hates the company as much as you do).
9- if you sign up for some kind of membership, carefully read the fine print. Usually you will automatically be billed for the following period without any warning.
10- be very careful signing papers at the doctor's office/clinic/hospital. Read the fine print. Often they will ask you to sign papers that entail sending your address to a third party and that third party will send you a surprise bill.
11- if you cannot solve your problem with a business with the tips above, 4 other recourses come to mind:
a. if you paid with a credit card -- mark the charge as "fraud" with your credit company. Call the credit card company and explain. They will ask you to reach out to the company. Tell them you already did and they may be willing to try to speak with the company on your and their behalf.
b. I have never used it, but there is a non-profit service called the Better Business Bureau. You have the right to file an official complaint here for free. Supposedly, many have found a fair response this way.
c. for smaller businesses, you may receive a helpful response from the company by leaving a negative Google review. (However, most of these problems are not caused by small businesses.)
d. if you have money, you can hire a lawyer.
"I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all … I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many."
-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet
"...the word place turns up in common phrases such as "a place for everything and everything in its place" or "know your place" or "she was put in her place." In these expressions the word place clearly refers to something more than a spatial referent. Implied in these terms is a sense of the proper. Something or someone belongs in one place and not in another. What one's place is, is clearly related to one's relation to others. In a business it is not the secretary's place to sit at the boss's desk, or the janitor's place to look through the secretary's desk. There is nothing logical about such observations; neither are they necessarily rules or laws. Rather they are expectations about behavior that relate a position in a social structure to actions in space. In this sense "place" combines the spatial with the social — it is "social space." Insofar as these expectations serve the interests of those at the top of social hierarchies, they can be described as ideological. The example of the business can be extended to society as a whole. Just as the business has a social hierarchy, society has levels of power and influence related to class, gender, race, sexuality, age, and a host of other variables. Similarly, the building in which the business is located has spatial divisions, and the world outside is divided up into segments—houses, streets, public places, libraries, shops, and so on. Just as in the business, there are expectations about behavior in these places that are related to positions in the social structure. Many of these expectations are written into law. Most, however, remain unstated and taken for granted."
In these digital pics I tried to capture the sublime feeling of an ineffable otherworldly day at Hosokawa sensei and Takami san’s house, two hours southwest of Tokyo. I didn’t have a tripod, so I used any flat surface I could find.
(Unfortunately, I couldn’t capture the fragrant smells: after-rain pine, cedar, tatami (straw), raw wood and some kind of sweet grass.)
Hosokawa sensei and Takami san helped design their house–the most sublime and original house I’ve ever been in–I call it the “ki no ie” (tree house). The design is simple, light, and vertical. It consists of 4 raw wood floors with two hollow square centers, like wood lofts on top of one another, each floor and each room are visibly connected to the others. There are NO interior walls between the rooms or floors! (A little bit as if an American backyard deck was in the shape of the number 8 and was replicated and stacked on top of one another, but more solid).
Then there was the generous vegetarian meal they made for us. Most of the ingredients (bamboo shoots, mushrooms, “amasake” = a hot sweet rice drink) came from their garden or the nearby mountains, and, of course, so beautifully presented.
Then there was the study or seminar space as one of Hosokawa sensei’s retirement projects. (This will be a dream for many professors.) He created the “seminar no ie” (seminar house) an independent retreat space for linguistics/pedagogy grad students to come and study and hold seminars or “tertulias”! Again, the same warm bright wood, tatami architecture, and fresh wood smell.
The overcast weather saturated the color and made everything rich and quiet like a novel.
If that wasn’t enough!… another retirement project (and another professorial dream): with their students and artist friend, Ryu Motosugi, they built a cafe gallery, シュマン・デュ・ボヌール(chemin du bonheur)!
Lastly, gentle company and conversation amongst 5 people who didn’t share a common language but who spent their lives studying how to communicate with those whom we don’t share a common language!
Here’s to creativity and kindness! ありがとうございます!
Last night I saw what was maybe the most exciting performance I've ever seen. I don't have the music vocabulary to describe it, and from what I've read online, their whole concept is to be undescribable (their name, Shibusashirazu Orchestra, translates to "Don't Be Cool Orchestra"). those who know me know I'm all about "heterogeneity" and flexibility and that's what this group performed. for 2 hours they fused and improvised jazz, 1950s exotica, psychedelic, rock, ska, klezmer, other sounds I had never heard before, and whatever visually inspired all that. i kept thinking of the D+G's idea of exploiting the medium to see what experiences it can create. that's what they did. it was loud. instruments made sounds that I didn't know they could make. and to add to that, my hearing aids, which always distort sound and differently in each ear, fit the situation well (but were triggered in ways they weren't programmed to deal with, the right one was capturing high frequencies as loud squeals, I had to remove it, so what I describes only comes from my left ear). when the big instruments rested, i could hear the xylophone, like turquoise water, it was really nice. the bananas reminded me of Dalí's baguettes. And as was typical of Tokyo jazz clubs, the space was tiny, air was thick, everything was sensorially dense and shaking, no screen mediation (except my phone). I wish I had had a better camera with me. this video clip is from my old phone.
over-exposed, low contrast, and with a lot of grain.
I’m attracted to messiness, blurriness, and long exposures because as I get older and as a sure-fail level of perfection and productivity is more and more demanded around us, these other characteristics are a welcoming respite and they visually articulate my sensorial experience and my default state of mind (which is almost always looking backwards confusingly)
really, the results remind me of a flashback within a Fellini movie or some of the 1920s architecture magazines from Barcelona
"...procesos de de desclasificación [...] dejamos de ser lo que representamos y dejamos de hacer lo que nos está asignado y nos mostramos capaces de una voz y una acción que ni teníamos ni nos era legítima. [...] dejar de estar "clasificados", es decir, organizados socialmente en clases o categorías."
este artículo es alucinante, en texto e imágenes.
un triple proceso de recopilar la casas, la vida y las imágenes fragmentadas por el tiempo y el humano.
el bombardeo --> el montage --> un artículo de CTXT
cemento/bombas, papel/tijeras, ojos/pantalla
por nuestro colega Sebastiaan Faber
muy util para lxs que enseñan cultura visual/historia material en español
La extraña vida póstuma de un inmueble madrileño y otras historias de la Guerra Civil
socialmente útil y multi-aplicable:
eldiario.es/interferencias/15M-Hannah_Arendt-escucha_6_772782718.html
[. . . ] "la escucha tiene que ver con cierta decisión casi inicial del 15M de no buscar representantes y apostar por la igualdad. Desde esa decisión se presupone que todo el mundo tiene algo que aportar o que decir. Y no son malas condiciones para escucharse. Si hay alguien que encarna la autoridad, pues se escucha a esa figura y punto, si es que se escucha a alguien. Pero si estás en un movimiento más plural, en el que la autoridad no es claro dónde está, entonces la palabra de cualquiera cobra valor. Lo que importa no es que el otro diga la verdad, lo más justo o que esté en la vía revolucionaria verdadera. Lo que importa es escuchar porque eso favorece la emancipación política del otro. Favorece una palabra inesperada del otro, una palabra que puede hacer que recoloques tus esquemas sobre lo que son las cosas.
Amador: Recuerdo que a veces alguien que hablaba en asamblea se ponía nervioso y los que estaban escuchando agitaban las manos para alentar con ese gesto a que esa persona continuara. Y es que esa persona que titubeaba estaba intentando encontrar sus propias palabras. Pero recuerdo también cómo los brazos se levantaban en aspas como muestra de rechazo cuando se notaba mucho que alguien se traía un discurso ya cocinado de casa, sin escucha de lo que pasaba en la plaza.
Jordi: En las asambleas había una preocupación enorme porque cualquiera hablase, especialmente las personas que podían tener menos carisma o facilidad de palabra. Es la idea de “inclusividad” tan importante en el 15M. Cuando escucho al otro, estoy incluyéndolo. Y más aún cuando es una persona que tal vez nunca participó en ese tipo de procesos, que no tiene mucha seguridad para hablar en público, etc. Esta especie de interés a priori sobre lo que va a decir el otro es una de las grandes fuerzas de los movimientos como los que tuvieron lugar en las plazas de todo el mundo." [. . . ]