Two ears and a tail

Spain's most famous torero, José Tomás, has been gored. He almost didn't make it out of México, where he was on tour. Didn't know they had international bullfighting tours.

Up there is José Tomás with a bull's tail on one hand, two bull's ears on the other.

I know you know what I think.

;-)

I'm no Dutch Bag!!!

That's my bike up there!!! Literally. Photo from Robert Caplan, for the New York Times. Yes, my bike was featured in the New York Times. About three years ago. So, why write about it now?

That bike is pure me. Scruffy and misleadingly disheveled, but loyal, dependable, tough and hard working. I keep it looking that way on purpose. See, I live in the South Bronx, and there are still plenty shady characters around. And they also have to make a living. One of them once told me: 'stealing bike tires, copper cables and ladders is a tough job, but someone's gotta do it, and that's me!' My bike has survived, chained in the sidewalk, for five years. It is chained with two super tough military grade nuclear hardened chains. But the two times I've been a lazy ass, and have used only one chain...ha ha ha, those fuckers: two back tires gone, 35$ a piece. They let me know that they are watching me. Keeping me sharp. Last time I almost got into a knife fight with a 400 pound lady -with nasty body odors and a worst dope habit- who I KNOW for a fact that took my tire.

That bike I use almost everyday to shop my veggies half a block away. Why not walk? Because I own a bike and I take it out for a ride as much as I can. That bike cost me 12 bucks. That's a bit more than my family's daily portion of vegetables. I bought it legally (right in front of the precinct) from an old Puerto Rican dude...I exchanged it, bartered it...gave him my old race bike, got this one.

Well, the point is that the other day I saw this brand new Dutch bike riding around my hood. Foreign person riding. I did my research because it happens that I've seen a few of those bikes around Tribeca (on my daily meditation walk)...those bitches start at 800$. I could buy 67 of my 12$-bike for that price. It also happens that they are the latest fad according to the NY Times, who is always on top of such urgent items. Dutch bikes are in?! Well, yes.


Dutch bikes are very heavy, making them a pain to handle in NYC's crowded spaces. They are slow and you know what NYC thinks about slow; they were designed for a city with no significant slopes (Amsterdam) and for commutes that average 10m. Long story short: they are not NYC friendly. Actually, they are a nuisance and plain dangerous on these streets, where bikes have to be supple and tough to rough it out with cars, pedestrians, buses, etc. But again, just as with Apple products, my beef is not with the poor bikes, it is with the stupid people on top of them.

When I saw that Dutch bike in my hood, I could only think that my bike: a) had been in the NY Times, b) offered me an excuse to yell to the 400 pound women to go fuck herself and that she was very ugly (a favorite line of attack in street confrontations, it always works!) in front of everybody. That incident cemented my reputation as a crazy unpredictable dude, and the creeps have been mostly friendly from then on. c) Is living proof of my philosophy: extend the life of what you have and tinker with it. d) was only 12$.

What was that person doing with a Dutch bike in the South Bronx? Was it an omen that more Amsterdamers are coming our way? I have been thinking about opening a bike shop if more Dutch bikes are needed....I will sell them for 1200$ a piece. I could buy 100 of my 12$-bike with that much cash. Customers will feel very European, and I will feel very South Bronxean. It is a tough job, but someone's gotta do it!

The Green Softness

Almost from the moment I became vegan many friends and acquaintances have confessed thinking deeply (and secretly) about veganism, animal rights, the necessity of killing animals, etc. Some have even considered doing it themselves. Some have moderated their animal intake. A few have even taken the leap towards veganism.

All of this without me inviting them to do shit, without me preaching nothing to them. Mind you, I am full of possible sermons I would LOVE to give; I am packed with statements I would want to jam down people's ears; but I have always instinctively felt that in the case of veganism (dealing with something so culturally significant and so personal as food) it is better to lead by example. People are naturally curious as to why I made the choice, and they ask. And I pleasantly answer. I already have the story all weaved out. My thesis, Peter Singer, joke, seeing the light, joke, personal benefits, how fun it is to cook vegan stuff, an environmental micro-statement, etc.

But, it is HARD. Because, yes, while I do think that it is more efficient to just let people be themselves and not throw sermons at them, I REALLY believe that people eating animals just because their taste buds control them ('ooohhhh, I see, but I just love lamb shanks soooo freaking much!!!!) is morally wrong. Period.

Most people, I think, do it just because of good ol' ignorance. They just don't know. I was one of them. That's perfectly fine with me. I am neither the most compassionate guy around, nor the smartest...and I changed. So, I assume that if I could do it, anybody can. But then there are those who DO know or understand, and who feel threatened, or feel judged by me (they are right about that one!), and they want to fight...and I am all Ric Flair baby, go for it, swing my way.

What is strange is that for those, I ALSO have a standard answering kit. It is louder, more strident, more aggressive, but the message is the same: try not to hurt other sentient beings unnecessarily asshole, you know better.

It is such a hippie, Jesus-wannabe answer!!!! Behind all the ethical paraphernalia that's what it all boils down to. Such a huge lifestyle change because of such a trite and common-sensical reason. Yes, that's the truth. There is nothing glamorous about it.

I try hard to be soft when a dead-ender comes my way. Because I have realized that the real reason I get mad is because it still maddens me how being vegan has unexpectedly changed other areas of my life as well. That is the most dramatic change. It is not about not having lamb shanks.

Believe me: if you are willing to question how and what you eat, you are willing to question the way you do almost everything. And that means a richer, but more difficult and complex, sense of what the human will and freedom are. You just learn not to operate by following your 'gut' automatically. And at times that can be paralyzing, frustrating and exhausting. The truth is that while I am way beyond those mythical lamb shanks, I am still adapting.

That paranoid feeling

Lately I have been rather worried about a paranoid feeling, an aura, an unspecific sensation, that Steve Jobs wants me -personally- to buy an iPad. I know, it sounds soooo self-centered!!! But it is a feeling similar to the Hinckley-Jodie Foster things that almost killed Ronald Reagan. But, still, Steve’s voice is the self-proclaimed voice of progress and techiness, and I’ve always seen myself as a progressive, so there is a strong sensation of cognitive dissonance; because I just don’t recognize the voice of progress anymore.

It seems that the new progressive injunction is: BUY MORE STUFF!!!! And the first item in this new party line is the iPad. A 10” shopping mall; a shopping mall light enough to rest in your lap. That is not the beginning of progress, that is the beginning of debt and mental slavery.

For from what I’ve read, the iPad does not lend itself to even medium level creative work. Difficult to write in it, photos are better edited in a regular computer, and the devise does not have what it takes to do acceptable levels of music recording. It is a devise for you to play stupid games, surf the internet, buy music, buy movies, buy tv shows, buy apps, buy books, etc. More, more, more.

In truth, I began being extremely concerned since seeing the photo of one Rey Gutierrez, with an Apple tattoo in his hand, in the NYTimes. It has worried me because the trend is clear: to be a hardcore consumer, in debt and a mental slave will become stylish, hip and cool in a very short time.

I have done some serious music recording in a computer. I have edited video. I have built complex websites. I have done serious photoshoping. And I have always used a PC. And the issue is not PC vs. Mac. The issue is between thinking intellectually honest people and posers. I have never understood why ‘creative’ people claim so easily that Macs are obviously better for creative stuff than PC. Not true. They are certainly not worst than PCs. They are just about the same. I prefer a PC, but not because they are better. Simply because I know how to work better in them and (very important) all of my Latin American friends in South America use PCs and file swapping, software piracy, etc. is easier -for me- with a PC. But I have also worked on Macs and they are...the same. It simply depends on what you are doing, how well versed you are in what you are doing, and how new or old the computer is, software system requirements, etc.

I have an instinctual need to ‘see’ and exercise ‘opting out’. No Mac, no PC. These days I am using a Linux-based operating system. And I do some creative work there (like typing this), because it offers many choices and I can tweak and tweak and tweak, and at times I switch back to Windows because I know how to do somethings better in that platform.

But it has come to pass that I have known some people that own a Mac because they want to feel they are intelligent and part of the creative class. And it gives me nausea. Literally, it is a very serious aversion to Mac cult in general, not to Macs as such.

Since when creativity can be had in a supposedly simpler, easier, stylishly designed and VERY expensive machine? How can people be so stupid as to buy that idea? I am not a PC person, I just want the tools that allow me to create freely, that allow me to tweak, to go in-depth into multi-layered options....it is called freedom. The more of it, the better. If Mac offered more of that than a PC, I would own a Mac. But, still, I wouldn’t wait in line for hours to get their latest crap.

I read a few years ago that Apple stores are one of the best places...to meet beautiful people. Wow. Why? -Because it has other Apple users!!! People just like you!!!! And the best place to meet people more similar to you, your own tastes and interests? -Your bathroom mirror.

There is a creepy desire for sameness and that elegant minimalist elitism in Apple’s stuff. There is a worrying laziness in the idea that you can be creative the easy way; that the way to creation, the road to it, is supposed to be easy, stylish and expensive. But now, good God, not even that. Because now here is the iPad. And it is not about being creative anymore (in fact Apple and Adobe, the owners of Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash are in a mud fight right now); now it is about being a stylish consumer, about owning things designed for the use of retarded people, and about feeling hip and in the avant-garde of technology and creativity because you own a 10in shopping mall. It is ironic that many Mac people that I know don’t own a TV set because that is -you know- soooo mainstream, but now they will probably carry a perfectly developed buying machine with them at all times.

It is scary to watch how the world might be on the road to getting even more consumed by consumption, how it might become easier still for posers to get away with their destructive shit (the people driving gentrification in this city? Most of them are mac users!), and how the world of art will become even more inane and irrelevant.

Yes. Because technology and tools make or break an art piece, or an artist. And stupid tools will generally result in stupid art. And artists will get even more stupid and more full of shit and eventually gallery managers and curators will have to do all the talking, because thanks to their closed, ‘easier’ to use and very expensive machines, artist will forget how to say intelligent or relevant things. It is beginning. I have seen it.

And this brings me back home. I like that Latin American ideology of artistic modernism where it is about the raw joy of struggling and giving birth to a product or piece, about being able to get inside things and understand them and either enjoy them as they are or conquer them for the better. It is about engagement. About creating stuff with intelligent and OPEN machines (the reason why all of the musicians I worked with from Latin America, who happen to be some of the best musicians I have ever met or heard, mostly prefer PCs).

Obviously whatever you prefer is perfectly fine with me. But if you prefer to be a Mac user, be specially aware if your other behaviors might be affecting rent prices in your hood (they probably are), and PLEASE don’t get a stupid Apple tattoo.

The conservationists

Sad but true. If they could, billions of poor people around the world will probably go to their local Walmarts (or national equivalent) and buy thousands of gadgets, unnecessary home appliances, their 128 toilet paper rolls super savings package, four or five 3D plasma TVs and so on. They will probably also own a huge SUV, eat a lot of stake, and will for sure yell ‘drill, baby, drill’ at their preferred political gatherings.

It would be an egregious effort in global positivism to think that the ‘conservationist’ practices of most of the world’s poor come from anything but sheer necessity. Their TVs last 30 years and their cars 15, and their radios count their age in the decades, primarily because there is no money for new stuff.

Yet, there is a part of the common folk, at least in Latin America, that cherishes their ‘conservationist’ practices. People that take genuine pride in their magical abilities to make things last forever. These people develop a deep sense of ownership of their stereo sets, for example. They have opened their TVs and soldered new transistors or changed vacuum tubes; they have repaired their own stoves and know how they work; they can identify mechanical mischief by ear; washing machines, fans, and cars are eternal beings in their hands.

Some will argue that in a way it would be more environmentally efficient to have new appliances and cars because they are generally more energy efficient, but the answer to that legitimate concern is:

a) not all new appliances use less energy than older appliances (although LCD and plasma TV’s are more energy efficient than old TVs in a per square inch basis, the fact that new TVs are generally larger in square inches makes them use more energy than the average traditional TV set).

b) there comes a point in which from so many changes/repairs and upgrades done to any given appliance one has to ask if the appliance is ‘itself’ anymore. After all, even the human body almost completely regenerates itself -at a cellular level- in around 7 years.

c) many of the repairs and upgrades that these conservationist do are done precisely to make things more efficient, to do more with less, do things faster, or expands any given appliance’s capacity.

That is how I have SEEN it work in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina and so on. It is probably how it works in other developing parts of the world as well.

There is a higher-culture component to all of this as well.

And there is a lesson to be learned from this attitude. Once things are brought forth to the world, once they are here with us, progress is not necessarily attained by developing new things, but there is a value in letting things be useful and operable for as long as it is reasonable. True, most people in the developing world would rather have a new 300in super duper plasma LCD web capable 3D-ish TV, but learning and knowning how to make that early 80’s TV set last, a skill most commonly found amongst the world’s poor, is a value in and for itself. For once, you are not buying the latest Sanyo crap that is soon to be outdated by the newest Sanyo hot crap. Two, while making things last you learn about how things work, you acquire a better understanding of mechanics, electronics, physics, the behavior of plastic, cables, etc. and that is even democratic because, as they claim that Foucault said somewhere, knowledge is power. Three, my late 70’s rotary dial TV set keeps me active, and a bit healthier, for it just doesn’t recognize some of the remote control’s commands, and yes, I have to stand up and turn down the volume myself. Weird, but nice. That makes me feel like I am in control.

Junk-ism, cellphones and my well-traveled PC.

In La Paz, Bolivia, there is an open market just for bartering and exchanging used goods. I give you my used pen, you give me your used lighter. And then you can exchange that lighter next week, or next day, for -say- some pliers. And on and on.

Today the Times ran this article about the new usages people around the world are finding for their good ol' regular cellphone. Having no cash to spare, and no readily available broadband, people are inventing new ways of keeping their cellphones 'cutting edge'.

The idea is not about having something new, but about getting out the most of what you already have. This is not a philosophy, this is the way things are in most of the developing world. You just don't buy the iPad (a devise people still don't know how they might be able to use) or the latest cellphones, or a new car, or the upgraded iShit, just because you can, you simply extract the most juice out of what you already have.

I guess I had that frame of mind when I bought a PC and beat the crap out of it for 9 years. I juiced, pressed, exploited, re-wired, put more RAM, a new-but-used hard-disk, and eventually just plainly canibalized that computer. There are still parts lying around the basement, this past weekend the speakers from that Jurassic PC provided the soundtrack for my backyard's Spring cleaning.

That computer of mine, at the beginning I used it even as an answering machine, radio-receiver, wrote my thesis there, my wife wrote her thesis there; 'it' lived in Quebec, Montreal, Williamsburg, Fort Green and the South Bronx, at one point the poor thing was just a fax machine...but I kept it. Because I could still manage to get something out of it.

However, it is not only about keeping what you already have. It is about finding new uses for it. It is a parallel growth of usages, instead of the use and replace paradigm. You have something really existing, a thing, in the world; for example, a cellphone, but instead of adding more cellphones or 'better' cellphones, you try NOT to keep on giving birth to new phones endlessly, and hence adding more crap, more stuff, more junk, to our world, but rather invent new uses for the stuff that already exists.

I guess that I am trying to organize some kind of techno-environmental thoughts in here, but some philosophical ideas are also begging to be heard....and so, I will stop and continue later. This will be a multi-post micro-project.