bord du rasoir's blog

I really, really like this man.

Heading into the most racially diverse contest yet in the presidential campaign, Obama took to the pulpit at Martin Luther King Jr.'s Ebenezer Baptist Church on the eve of the federal holiday celebrating the civil rights hero's birth 79 years ago. His speech was based on King's quote that "Unity is the great need of the hour."

"The divisions, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame the plight of ourselves on others, all of that distracts us from the common challenges we face: war and poverty; inequality and injustice," Obama said. "We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing each other down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late."

Obama has called for a new kind of politics that he says should appeal to people's hopes, not their fears.

NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer, Jan. 20, 2008

I honestly feel the most important issue any U.S. President faces is correcting the obstacle that the undue influence of lobbyists creates to the democratic process. When America significantly reforms this lobbyist problem, a truer state of democratic affairs will be realized. The corrupted motivations behind Iraq War, Healthcare, and other federal government spending—spending that advances the causes of the lobbyists far more than the needs of the people of the U.S.—will dissipate. The waste and greed will stop. Democracy will be restored. This is not some lofty idealism; it's logic. Lobbyists are a form of cancer that must be removed from the body of Congress. This is the cause of Obama's I most readily identify with. As a junior U.S. Senator, he has already drafted and helped to pass legislation that makes the exchanges lobbyists have with Congresspeople more transparent and more difficult. Moreover, he's done work of the same nature in the Illinois Senate for years.

Obama, by his very nature, is a consensus builder, a populist. He knows which issues are most important, which to be the most vocal about, which have the most merit to build consensus around. Hillary, however, by her very nature, is a divisive figure. Even, if by some fluke, a divisive figure like her should beat out a Republican for the Presidency, half the population would end up hating her as President, as half the population now hates Bush as President.

Barack Obama from one year ago:

Please help me out by filling out this questionnaire.

It's my 11th draft; I give a presentation on the whole process Wednesday night.

QUESTIONNAIRE HERE

My friend Todd's little brother is the bassist for this band that's been around for a little over a year now. I saw them for the first time last Fall, and I've seen them a couple of times in the past month. They're definitely among the most entertaining live performers I've ever seen, next to Of Montreal and Billy Joe of Green Day. They're as clever in their live presentation as they are in their recorded lyrics and musical arrangements. Todd designed the artwork (shot the photos & everything) for their last CD:

Adventures of the Felice Brothers

Here are six songs that I like the best from their latest and earlier CDs:

01 Frankie's Gun!

03 Hey Hey Revolver

05 Helen Fry (She's A Master Of Disguise)

04 Your Belly In My Arms

10 Where'd You Get The Liquor

10 Mercy

Fri., June 8, 2007 – Roma

•    Early in the morning, like 7 a.m. or something, everyone gets up, eats breakfast, and heads out for one of those stereotypical tourist double-decker bus tours. Breakfasts at The Quirinale are always really nice — croissants, toast, jam, scrambled eggs, etc. — the one notable that sticks out is I’d eat slices of Italian deli meats (soppressata, mortadella) by themselves, although I suppose you were supposed to make sandwiches using the croissants.

•    We do the double-decker bus tour from the open top of the bus. There’s audio to go along with it, but the quality’s not so great. We see all the sites — The Coliseum, The  Roman Forum, etc.

•    After going around the entire tour once, we decide to stay on the bus for it to take us back to The Coliseum. My Uncle Coleman, who is sixty years old, about 6’ 7” and four hundred pounds or so, with bad knees, says he’s had enough and takes a taxi to go hang out in his hotel room the rest of the day. This’ll be a running theme on the trip; he’ll take a taxi back to the hotel several more times. But he’s been to Italy several times before and in a very real way he’s one of the reason why we’re even able to all go on this tour. So, he’s got that kind of authority to just break from the group whenever and do whatever he wants.

•    So, everyone but Uncle Coleman takes a tour of The Coliseum with Roberto, a comically misogynistic native Roman, who raises his fist and forearm every time he mentions something like how only virgins were allowed to sit with the men in the lower levels of The Coliseum while all other women were made to stand at higher up levels — something like that, I may be getting particular details incorrect, but the gist is that he has an ongoing joke about being misogynistic, high-fiving random guys on the tour after saying something derogatory about the status of women in ancient Roman society. My aunt has a little shining moment when she comments in response to one of his many satirically self-mocking misogynistic remarks, “…and look what happened to the Roman Empire,” alluding to the fact that its collapse might have had something to do with their lack of inclusion of female perspectives in the running of their empire.

•    After The Coliseum tour, we take a free tour with another tour guide, Jennifer, who is conducting this tour in order to promote her tour of The Vatican Museum the next day. We tour a former Pallatine palace that sits atop a hill that overlooks The Roman Forum. The palace is now little more than floors and a few walls, but Jennifer is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable historian and crams the tour with more ancient Roman history than the average person would ever care to know.

•    After the Pallatine tour, my aunt takes my three cousins and myself on her own self-guided tour of The Roman Forum. My mom and dad decide that they’re all toured out and head back to the hotel to rest. My aunt shows us the spot where Marc Anthony is said to have given his “friends, Romans, countrymen” speech, although obviously those words are Shakespeare’s. She shows us the spot where passionate Julius-Caesar loyalists brought his body after seizing it and burned it, so that his body would never be able to be taken anywhere else, and so his final resting place would be in Rome. Then, she tells us about the first time her and my uncle had come to The Roman Forum and were in front of Julius Caesar’s place of cremation, surrounded by twenty Japanese tourists. Rather than showing interest in Caesar’s final resting place, they were enthralled with my uncle, specifically the size of him, 6’ 7” and probably upwards of 500 lbs. at that time back in the late ‘80s. So, the way my aunt tells it, each and every one of the twenty tourists approached my uncle and asked his permission to take their photographs with him.

•    That night, we rendezvous at the Piazza Di Spagna (Spanish Steps) as we’d done the night before, and we eat at Re Degli Amici, as we’d done the night before.

I am not sure who, if anyone, will read any of this, but I will be making a serious of posts that chronicle everything my family and I did while we were in Italy for ten days this past June. I'll post all in text, hopefully all tonight, before posting photos in a few days. That is IF those photos are recoverable from my Dell laptop that is currently in a computer shop somewhere in Brooklyn after being taken out of commission by spyware or malware or something. Without further adieu, day one:

(I would've been clever and written "day one" in Italian if I wasn't so all-encompassingly ignorant of Italian. Also, I'm aware that using the Italian rather than the English version of place names is easily interpreted as pretentious, but so be it; I think it's more than a little silly that there's even an English version of place names like Italia or Roma in regular use - it's not like there's even a speck of difficulty pronouncing either. I guess that was further adieu.)

    * 8 – 9 A.M. – Plane Arrives at the Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport; I’d stayed up for most of the 9-hour flight over and noticed that the horizon to the north never fully went dark – there was always a hint of light blue there, even in the dead middle of the night.

    * 9 A.M. – Taxi Shuttle Bus Passes Ruins, Aurrellian Wall (as in Marcus Aurelius), and The Colluseum; they seem to pop up out of nowhere – huge archaic structures from the 1st and 2nd Century B.C. amongst all the more modern structures – 15th or 16th Century I’m guessing; we whiz past in the shuttle bus – it was a pretty cool introduction to Roma.

    * 10 A.M – Noon – We check in at our respective hotels, The Quirinale and The Monteleone, both in the center of the city; my dad and uncle sleep-in while everyone else (my mom, my aunt, three cousins and myself) eats at a closeby restaurant that isn’t too great, isn’t that bad either; my aunt complains that they never play Italian music in restaurants and stores in Italy – that they always play sort-of-crappy American music – which is true, the only time we hear anything that sounds Italian is when a ten-year-old-ish Gypsy boy plays songs on his accordion outside a restaurant

    * There’s a moment at lunch in the restaurant when my aunt begins listing off all the activities and sites we NEED to do and see that are right here close by us. And my mom responds, lethargically, worn out from jet lag, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere to see nothin’. All I want to do is go back to the hotel and rest.” So, my cousin Rob repeats what she’s just said, in an Italian New York gangster accent, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere ta see nuttin’. You wanna carry me? Fine. Ya got sumtin’ fa me to see, ya can bring it in here. Otherwise, I ain’t movin’.” This starts my mom and aunt on a giggle fit that lasts several minutes – spurred on from their exhaustion.

    * So, we go back to the hotel. We all sleep like five hours, from about 1 P.M. till 6 P.M.

    * 6 P.M. Onward – We stop at the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Di Spagna (The Spanish Steps, named for the Spanish Embassy that they’re adjacent to), and eat dinner at Re Degli Amici, a small restairant near Piazza Di Spagna, that we’ll revisit several times throughout the trip. Here’s what I wrote to Heather just now about our experience at Re Degli Amici:

    * “We got a lot of attention in Rome from this one little restaurant called Re Degli Amici (i think it translates to something like "with some friends"). They liked us because we ate their four times and we were a big party, 8, at one point 9 people, and my uncle is a very large, charismatic and memorable guy who orders for everyone and orders lots and lots of food. So at the end of every meal they'd bring us Lemon Cello (which is basically pure alcohol plus sugar and lemon). One night, one of the managers brought out a vat of Cello to show us how me personally makes it by letting lemon rinds soak in the alcohol for 30 days before adding sugar and serving. And the last night that we ate there, before we'd even ordered, they brought us all out Champagne. Oh yeah, and a note on the lemon cello - it's like really small, you just get a shot, that everyone would take small sips of, because it's incredibly sweet and incredibly strong.”

    * One thing I forgot to mention in the email to Heather about Re Degli Amici was the second-to-last night there,... my uncle and aunt cajole my cousin Allison into singing for the owner of the restaurant. She is hesitant, but egged on by the owner eventually goes through with it, apologizing beforehand for her poor Italian, as my aunt wants her to sing something in Italian, something from a Puccini opera, I believe. It was well passed ten o’clock, probably approaching midnight, we were finished our meal all the way in the back room of the shot-gun-like frame of the restaurant, there was maybe one couple up in the front room. Otherwise, all the other patrons had gone. She sang so loudly and so powerfully that after she was done, the owner joked that he was afraid she’d break his glasses and said, “Next time, we do a duet. I am baritone.” Then, he sings a bass tone and says. “I ‘a very small, thin man, but very deep voice.” He is a very jumpy, animated, charismatic host – always joking around, shaking hands, telling stories, asking questions, etc. He is an elderly man, who looks a hell of a lot like Presidential Candidate Ron Paul now that I think about it.

I wrote this up on my livejournal. I am quitting my job. I explain there. Here is my livejournal: http://bord-du-rasoir.livejournal.com/

I am flying to Rochester this Saturday morning (tomorrow). Hopefully, I will visit Cornell and the University of Rochester. If I don't, I am okay with this, as well. No regrets. I am also attending a lecture at the Rochester Institute of Technology (entitled "Why Did Natural Selection Leave Us So Vulnerable to Disease?" by Dr. Randolph Nesse, M.D.) and visiting Canada and Niagara Falls for the first time in my life. I will return to New York City on Wednesday morning.

This song came on my iTunes playlist today.

Iron & Wine - Such Great Heights

Iron & Wine

Some time ago, I uploaded and posted about this song.

It has new meaning to me now. And this version definitely trumps the other.

This is the kind of song I'd like to write.