A fellow who calls himself danamargo on YouTube made this video for a great song by Sharon Robinson from Leonard Cohen’s 2001 album Ten New Songs called “Boogie Street”:

The video creator didn’t answer this question when someone asked it in the YouTube comments: What is the movie that supplies the images used here? The leading actor and actress look familiar, but I can’t place them, so I can’t look it up.

Having reached (well, passed... long passed) the end of her patience with the coconut-heads, greydoe is preparing to return to the United States. She’ll probably move shortly after the winter holidays, and I’ll likely follow within a couple weeks to a few months. The tricky part is, she/I/we don’t know where we’re going.

We’re best friends, and ideally we’d like to be within easy visiting distance of one another. Neither of us are really attached to any particular place in the US. So we could go anywhere... except that we both have our needs and wishes, and they’re not quite the same.

( What we want )

So... does anyone have a suggestion for what Internet resources would help us find our new home? Where can I find comparative tables of the relevant information? Specific nominations are, of course, also welcome.

Some folks have suggested I should be an independent “Geek Squad”... fix people’s computers and make a little money. After 60 hours of struggling with greydoe’s computer, I know why I don’t do that. I really hope I get to go many, many months without opening up another computer case.

( Geek Whining... )

Last I checked, the mother... good little machine is working just fine. If I never open it up again, it will be too soon. But tomorrow I get to take it back to DJ, connect it to the router, and wait for the cable guys to come and install Internet access. (Past experience has shown that they require serious watching. Past experience has also shown that it’s 50:50 that they wil show up when they say and actually have everything they require to do their job.)

Dear Costa Rica:

I realize you must put stickers with a listing of the ingredients in Spanish on food products imported from the United States.

Please stop pasting them over the English preparation instructions. We gringos are the only ones who pay twice the stateside price to buy this stupid shit, anyway.

KThanksBye

After putting my bedclothes in the washing machine, I realized I’ve lived here for nine months without turning my mattress. So I lifted it up to flip it left-for-right... and discovered $25 (precisely, 15,000 Costa Rican colones, just over $25 if you were to convert it at a bank today) on the boards supporting the mattress.

I have no idea what this means, but I don’t think it can be bad.

“These cellular patterns have been lovers for millions of years and they aren’t about to be put off by these recent little intellectual patterns that know almost nothing about what is going on. The cells want immortality. They know their days are numbered. That is why they make such a commotion.

“They’re so old. They began to distinguish this body on the left from this body on the right more than a billion years ago. Beyond comprehension. Of course they pay no attention to mind patterns. In their scale of time, mind is just some ephemera that arrived a few moments ago, and will probably pass away in a few moments more.”

— from Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

I’m sorry that this video is blocked in more places than it’s available. Hell, it’s blocked in the country from which I uploaded it. (If anyone knows of a better place to upload rare videos — really, I’m not trying to cut in on anyone’s income... but there’s a lot of terrific art that will never be seen because of brain-dead content protection bullshit — let me know.) Anyway, for those of you who can see it, the original video of St. Teresa, from Joan Osborne’s Relish:

Or not. Apparently, I can’t embed it, either.

HERE is a link that, according to YouTube, will work in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Guam, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, The Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Spain, The United States, and The United States Virgin Islands.

Edit: Pointless invective removed. YouTube and their Google masters no doubt have little practical choice but to do as they are doing. It does, however, lead me to hope that there is, or will be, a “next YouTube” that can position itself to be less vulnerable to this sort of nonsense.

Even a workaround that worked wouldn’t help for things that can’t be posted on YouTube at all. It seems to me that a great number of videos are fast becoming “orphan works” just because nobody can figure out how to make enough money from them to make it worth the content industry’s trouble to license them — and so, of course, there certainly wouldn’t be enough money for anyone to gamble on a fair use defense. Kind of a Catch-22 for those who don’t even care to make any money off disappearing artwork, but would like to keep it alive.

What got me started on this was noticing that the DVD compilation of Dire Straits’ videos, Sultans of Swing, doesn’t include their video for “Skateaway”; nor is it to be found anywhere on YouTube. I gave up trying to post a copy of that, though I’ve considered posting just the video with perhaps a second of sound a minute in to use for synchronization, so do-it-yourselfers could assemble a copy. (The audio is exactly that of the album track.) But I decided that would probably annoy more people than it would please, since most people who searched for it and found it would be staring at a silent music video with no idea how to assemble a usable copy.

Alonzo Garbanzo is my YouTube idol. Here he is with one of his own songs:

(click on the graphic above to read the WTF? story)
(or maybe it’s an attempt at the Streisand effect — in which case, I just helped)

“Have you ever considered, Willard, any real freedoms? Freedom from the opinions of others? Even the opinions of yourself?” — Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), “Apocalypse Now”

A Song for Independence Day

I told my friend Avery Corman, the author of Oh, God and Kramer vs. Kramer, “It’s really hard writing fiction. You have to make everything up.”
“Come on, Paul,” he replied, “you’ve been making stuff up your whole life.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but that was journalism.”

Linked below is a good and clear explanation of the current financial crisis, in the form of a book review:

The financial system does have a useful social function to perform, and that is to make the real economy operate more efficiently. Some human institution has to collect a nation's savings and put them at the disposal of those who have productive ways to use them. Risks arise in the everyday business of economic life, and some human institution has to transfer them to those who are most willing to bear them. When it goes much beyond that, the financial system is likely to cause more trouble than it averts.

Background: Who was Claude Rains? Of what Bob Dylan song is this a parody?

Because what the world needs is more white boys with keyboards doing the Bo Diddley beat... Johnny Otis and I (somewhat confused by Eric Clapton) bring you: Coises does the Hand Jive (in three part harmony).

It won’t be easy,
I’m sorry, but it won’t be easy,
It’s just that
This,
This is how you get somewhere.

You can cry, or
Not, it doesn’t matter...
I’ll be waiting.

My recording of my song “Heartbeat” is now on my website.

Comments and suggestions regarding the mix are welcome.

Now, I guess, I have to write some more songs...

Searchlight is now on my website. I wrote it just after Thanksgiving, and today I finished recording and mixing it.