Cultural Calamity

“In India, young newly married women are at the bottom of household hierarchies,” Ms. Coffey said. “So at the same time that Indian women become pregnant, they are often expected to keep quiet, work hard and eat little.”
[...]
“These mothers are the last persons in their families to have food,” Dr. Duggal said. “First, she feeds the husband and then the kids, and only then will she eat the leftovers.”
Article

Shoveling, Sax-Playing, Sketching, + Swimming

A great day.

How Buildings Learn

I am remembering this great book. A house is a sugar cube in a dish of water. My house is melting from ice dams.

Book
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
by Stewart Brand

Buildings have often been studied whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.

More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.

Green Bean Delight

Last night I threw a few pounds of washed and trimmed fresh green beans in my 12" iron skillet with olive oil, whole garlic, slices of fresh ginger, soy sauce, red wine, sweet chestnut goop (I found an unopened jar from Christmas 1998 and it was excellent), kosher salt, whole red chilies, rooster hot sauce, frozen corn, sesame seeds, 6 scrambled eggs, almonds, and cubed soft tofu! It was the most amazing meal. I had it for breakfast too.

Women Discover Sax (1919)

Afgan Policewomen

Article

BORING use of Wealth

These days, his shower curtain is from Bed Bath & Beyond in a nondescript white.

On the 35th floor of a two-bedroom rental overlooking the East River, L. Dennis Kozlowski lives with his new wife, Kimberly, in relative modesty — at least compared with his previous life as the extravagant chief of Tyco International.

Gone are the Renoir and the Monet. There aren’t any souvenirs from that iniquitous $2 million Roman-orgy birthday he threw in Sardinia in 2001, complete with Jimmy Buffett on guitar and an ice sculpture of “David” urinating Stolichnaya.

And there’s definitely no $6,000 gold-and-burgundy shower curtain — which landed him on The New York Post’s cover under the headline “OINK, OINK.”

Ten years and a lifetime ago, Mr. Kozlowski reigned as the archetype of avarice. This helped lead to his conviction in 2005 for looting nearly $100 million from Tyco, for which he served six and a half years in prison. That showy shower curtain was in his corporate residence on Fifth Avenue — paid for with Tyco funds — and came to symbolize a life of unabashed excess.

Article

Thermals

Thermal underwear, hat, scarf, and plush robe are my secrets to our New England Winter in my cold house. Job lot thermals on sale for 7 dollars!

Reading People

Asking a psychopath what remorse or guilt feels like is like asking a man what it feels like to be pregnant.
Article

I Would Love to Live with the Snowy Owls

Last night I caught a documentary on snowy owls. I am in love with them. I did see a barn owl once years ago when I lived in Providence. A bunch of crows were hurassing him and we looked out the window and spotted him. I used binoculars to see him up close and it was amazing. He looked like a tabby cat with wings. I would love to go live with the snowy owls.

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Snowy_Owl/id
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/magic-of-the-snowy-owl-full-episode/7963/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_owl

Children Having Children

Children having children often repeats the family cycles of narcissism and abuse.

Doctors, Dollars +Dementia

A Chicago psychiatrist pleaded guilty last month to taking illegal kickbacks of nearly $600,000 to prescribe an antipsychotic drug for his patients. The doctor, Michael J. Reinstein, also agreed to pay $3.79 million to the federal government and the State of Illinois to settle a lawsuit asserting that he had been involved in the submission of at least 140,000 false claims to Medicare and Medicaid. Law enforcement officials said he had prescribed clozapine for thousands of older and indigent mentally ill patients at 30 nursing homes and other sites.
Article

Argentine Blues Radio

I'm listening to the blues on an Argentine radio station!

Pulp Art:True Detective Mysteries Cover

Here

El Gato Chimney

Artist

Love Letters

I used to buy sheets of postage stamps and stacks of paper and envelopes every few weeks. I wrote letters daily after my swim. I credit my obsession with writing as stemming from letter writing. When I have an audience I bloom.

People laugh at me when I say "I'm shy" and now it seems I am no longer afraid of people. I am though even more disappointed by our current society. I am sad that we are in a robot-controlled alienating consumer culture.

I still want to live in a Brueghel painting and have dancing and acoustic music in the streets, sharing our bread and cider and telling stories. I have faith that the new generation wants this too.

Sacred Morning

This morning I woke feeling that every muscle had been used as a basketball. I remembered that I went swimming last night. I decided to roll over and dream some more. Morning is sacred to me. Morning is the blend of the unconscious dream state and the waking state. It is a precious and precarious time each day. Once it is gone it can't be found until the next day. I try to schedule any appointments for afternoon or preferably not at all. Each day is the invention of a life.

When I lived with musicians they started playing music while their tea water was boiling. Morning is pure and sacred.

Happiness Is Playing Saxophone

Happiness is playing my saxophone along with my favorite players playing on the cd player.
Doug James & Sax Gordon
by Sax Gordon & Doug James

Column McCan, Acknowledge the Despair

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it.

Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book.
― Colum McCann

Light Beam in Stairwell at 3:30 AM

I wake at 3:30AM to pee. I get out of bed and walk down the hallway to the toilet. An unusual light beam is bouncing in the stairwell from the parking lot. I peek over the hallway curtain. A black Ford sedan is trying to back up a hill, revving with blueish headlights on, stuck in the ice. A man with low slung jeans red boxers showing is trying to push the car backwards. Then one man gets out of the car and the two men are pushing the car. It moves backwards just enough to turn and drive away. The woman driver jumps out and one of the men jump in and drive it away leaving the woman and the man.