Returns

And so I return...after a summer hiatus due mostly to the firewalls and technical high fences that the IT gang of Indians working on the fifth floor of my building have imposed on us hapless users. This is how it will happen: I will write my posts as a google doc, then email it to myself, then catch that email in the iphone, then transfer the message content to my blogger app inside the iphone, and finally post from there for you to read.

Well, I am working on lots of stuff these days. A super duper secret musical project is on the works. Writing my thesis proposal. And listening to lots and lots of music, the musical flow is endless. I highly recommend Janelle Moene’s Archandroid. That shit is da shit. While dancing ‘Oh, maker’ (the first R-B-yish sci-fi post polka ever)....think about Monxito.

On the other hand, I highly discourage you all go seeing Inception. It kind sucks, and it is sorta pretentious. But not quite.

People can't be this fucked up...

Could this be true?:

“The real reason that BP is drilling this relief well is that they want to have a functioning well for recovering oil from the reservoir before they destroy the leaking well. In other words, BP is hedging its bets that state and federal governments will not allow further drilling after the spill is stopped, so they’ve hyped the necessity of a so-called relief well in order to guarantee their company’s access to the oil field once the crisis ends.”
- Don’t Blame Offshore Drilling by Christopher Brownfield, The Daily Beast

The President needs to nationalize the relief effort. Period. Among leftists, I am the most extremist pro-market/believer of capitalism you might ever find. And I am ready to debate my position for as long as necessary. Nonetheless, nationalization is what needs to be done. BP employees in the Gulf are to be magically turned into federal employees, the Fed is to supervise everything and to ‘politically’ own the problem (so there is at least some kind of reality-based incentive -like votes- for someone to do something), and BP is to foot the bill.

In a fit of madness, Chris Matthews uttered the terrible word that my Buddhist brain has been avoiding: execution. Yes, in China they execute people for shit like this. I stop.

Ohhhh. I can not fathom how such a nasty thing could be true. Not even from BP. Really. Not in a time like this. Not with the oil already 12 miles into the marshes. It can not be possible. Can it?

Cerati

I am not used to think about rock and roll divinities as mortal human beings. They were born to make noise, to rock it out, to inspire, to modernize our souls. And so it always comes as a huge shock when they get struck by the inevitable human plights of illness or death.

Last year, it was the sudden and devastating passing of Luis el Terror Dias, a giant of rock, the grand father of Dominican tuki tuki, a poet, a superb guitar player, and a close friend and guru of some dear friends of mine.

Last week, Ronnie James Dio. If you ever heard Dio's powerful tenor, it was impossible to imagine it ever being subjected to extinction. But today he is no more.

This week we desperately await for good news about Gustavo Cerati, Argentinean singer-songwriter, guitar player, and rock divinity. He suffered a stroke after a concert in Caracas, and is lying in a coma. The most optimist prognosis is plainly awful. Cerati, the consummate Buenos Airean yuppie, the cosmopolitan dandy with a shinning elitist soul, the over-affected tenor, the slick and moody Kierkegaard-look-alike porteño, only 50 years old and so near of being no more.

I would not understand and love Spanish rock as I do without Cerati and Soda Stereo, the band he led from the early 80's to the mid 90's. I would not love rock as I do without Dynamo, Soda Stereo's 1992 masterpiece. Elegance itself would feel empty without Bocanada, Cerati's 1999 awe-inspiring gem.

These moments, argh, they make me feel like a child: I just don't want Cerati to die. I don't want him to be paralyzed or bed-ridden. I want Cerati to blast it out forever. To be eternal. And so I cling. On the verge of prayer.

Ouch

Julio Aparicio gets gored...you know how I feel about that. He survived, but the bull was swiftly dispatched by a gang of manly matadors in very tight pants.

Slick Barry

Well my dear people, Obama is gonna do shit about the spill. Nada, rien, nothing. Why should he?

It turns out that even if the whole Gulf of Mexico turns into a frying pan of bubbly steamy oil, this biblical catastrophe is going to have NO impact on Obama's approval numbers, it is going to be of no consequence for 2012, and hence, he's gonna do crap about it.

Where is the GOP and its rabid, irrational opposition? -Drilling, baby, drilling and accusing Obama of being too tough with BP!

Alas, I expected, just because of cheap electoral politics, to hear at least one Republican say: 'the President is doing nothing because he is a rich lawyer from Chicago, an incurable elitist, and he does not care about people down South'. But no. The GOP is offering no leverage by numbers or polling.

Everything and everyone is conspiring to bring the oil right to our shores.

And what are we gonna do about it? -Vote Palin 2012.

Apple Cider

This article on Gizmodo is important, for it signals the shifting grounds of the technology wars: the blogosphere is cannibalizing on Apple. Suddenly, Apple is not THAT cool or innovative, or liberal or fun or creative. It is old, grumpy, resentful, capitalist, police-friendly; and Google leaps ahead of Apple.

Steve Job’s overeaction to Gizmodo’s breaking the news -and publishing juicy photos- of a lost, never-seen-before, super duper secret iphone 4, achieved something few of us could believe just a month ago: the techie-heads crapping on Apple. That’s what happens when a multi-billionaire sends the cops to the house of a harmless nerdy tech website editor.

There is something scary about Google’s drive for global domination. Its omnipotence and omniscience. Yet, it is somehow understandable and with many historical precedents: it is a business and it wants to be everywhere and be used by everyone. The strategy is simple: cast a wide-net and be everything to everybody. The sheer size of Google’s global empire has made it impossible for them NOT to adopt an open platform philosophy. It has been the only way to attract an impressively diverse customer base. So by keeping it loose, they keep it together.

Apple’s vision and philosophy are different. Apple, unlike Microsoft, is not interested in having 100% of the planet using their Macs. They have around a 5% market share and they are comfortable with that. The gross of their money, however, comes from elsewhere: ipod and iphone sales. In the last decade, Apple has been steadily marching towards a technological and philosophical close-down. An obsessive compulsion to have people experience their products in Apple’s terms exclusively has become evident. Though it is impossible to perfectly close a whole computer with a fully loaded operating system, Apple has been moving towards controlling more and more, the ways their computers can be experienced and enjoyed. They have done this by limiting choices and by devising proprietary technology that works only for that 5% of the world’s computers. With ipods and iphones they have achieved what was impossible to do with a fully functional computer: complete lockdown. All in the name of the Apple experience.

Meanwhile, like a cheap whore, Google keeps selling itself the world over. And the more it expands, the more open it has to be....and the more chaos it can potentially engender.

Google fought the China’s Communist Party to a draw. They took a stand, on principle. If Google was able to fight the People’s Republic of China’s government to a draw, it will crush Apple and its petty tyrant. Apple runs the risk of becoming not only a joke, but even more painful, irrelevant. That will not happen today. But just as Google’s strategy for world domination is a long term one, Apple’s demise will take years. But down it will go. Unless it opens up.

My Garden, China and Dio

My wife is away in China. And I am kind of lost. I have trouble sleeping. The only things grounding me are my daily yoga practice, my garden and my guitars. And, yes, spring.

Today, I have been tending my garden in the backyard, along with my downstairs tenant/friend/drummer, Jose Anibal. We have the drum set right here, I have my computer down here, my amp and my guitar, and the sun. We have been rocking it out to the enthusiastic applause of our four African neighbors. The tomatoes are gonna flow after this for sure.

This will be paradise perfect if only my wife, Libertad, were not in China. I miss her smile, her hands, her voice, her smell, all of her. She is the legged and roaming flower of this garden.

I feel insecure about my writing because she has not read it and commented.

I don't feel like commenting on politics that much. Only the oil slick is politically present in my brain, and the thought that my friends from New Orleans are moving out of there because it just too much.

Too much is also the fact that Ronnie James Dio, who gave us the devil horn fingers, died today of stomach cancer. And, that's how I feel: like a Rainbow in the Dark. RIP.

As you can see, I am rambling. That's what happens when Libertad goes to China, and when my guitars are near me. I feel no guilt though, this is who I am right now: incomplete and musical. And as Stuart Smalley would say: that is OK.