I'm moving to St. Paul

Yes, that's right! 

I'm jumping ship, abandoning my post, packing my bags and several other clichés besides and setting up shop in St. Paul after living in Minneapolis for more than ten years. This is likely to be the last post I will have written west of the Mississippi (I generally leave my laptop at home).

Doubtless many so-called "conservatives" and even some moderates, unduly influenced by latter-day media punditry, would love to point to this as further evidence of the ostensible decline of the city I'm leaving, and would assume that my move was in some way motivated by factors such as "concern about crime", increasing "lawlessness", or "unrest" as it supposedly relates to ongoing well-publicized (and more than a little overblown) issues that every metropolitan area in the United States has been contending with since at least the start of the pandemic, if not the middle of the last century. 

But unfortunately for them, none of those things happen to have anything to do with my decision to leave Minneapolis.

As it turns out, the main reason I'm moving is simply that I found a better apartment with slightly more space (the one I've been living in for the past year or so is tiny and cramped) and with a floor arrangement much better suited to someone with a small music studio. Additionally, unlike my current building, with its paper-thin walls, proximity to a major thoroughfare and relatively small number of units, the new building I'm moving to promises to be much quieter during the daytime and evening hours, entailing a substantial improvement over the sudden and distracting booming noises that often accompany anyone just entering or leaving the premises. Let's face it, if you're a home studio musician and almost everyone around you routinely makes more noise than you do while you're trying to work, this is a serious problem.

So I'm really looking forward to not being constantly and unavoidably informed of the comings and goings of absolutely everyone who lives in my building at all times, and having a view that incorporates trees and a skyline (!) instead of overlooking a parking lot and some random people's backyards. And I'm eagerly anticipating being able to walk across my living room without tripping over any cable runs. I think it's going to work out just fine, and I can't wait to resume work on my projects once I'm all settled in! There may be a slight gap in my updating of this blog as a result of this process, but probably not a very long one. I've a great deal more to write about, should I be so lucky to get around to everything... 

Frozen splendor

It's still the heart of winter here in Minnesota, and if there's one thing we certainly have a lot of at this time (besides seasonal depression and an increasingly imperiled international reputation), it's frozen water.

Ice. Snow. It's literally everywhere you look, the encroaching effects of climate change notwithstanding. While for many of us in the temperate north the ubiquitous presence of ice crystals starts to severely wear out its welcome at just about precisely this time of year, one must admit there is a certain beauty imbued in the phenomenon on occasion. And so in the manner of the late, great John Berger, I present a short "visual essay" to this effect via some of the most picturesque scenes which have manifested themselves over the past several winters.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite all of the destruction human beings have wreaked upon our world, it's still a beautiful planet. Let's hope we find the means and the will to help preserve what's left.

Technical note: All photos were taken with my old dumb phone at 1280 x 960 / 72 dpi resolution. Not too bad, eh? Maybe someday I'll get a proper camera, but at least the upcoming 5G rollout might actually force me to upgrade my photo resolution in the not-too-distant future!  

Next up: I'm moving to St. Paul.

Animal verbs

beef up
chicken out
egg on (not really an animal)
pig out
have a cow
ham it up
rat on
snake by
pussyfoot
horse around
eat like a horse
piss like a racehorse
monkey around
play possum
ferret out
henpeck
dovetail
crow
hawk
duck
goose
dog
ape
parrot
worm
fish
snail
outfox
tail (not really an animal either)
bug
vamoose (just kidding)

 

I was surprised by how many I eventually came up with, starting from an original list of only four. I was also surprised by how many items on the list were different kinds of birds. It would of course be fascinating to compile lists of animal verbs in other languages as well; sadly the only language I'm familiar enough with so far to do this convincingly is English. Any suggestions along these lines would be most welcome. I also considered expanding the criteria by including other types of animal idioms besides verbs, like "as the crow flies" or "toady", for example. But I figured this might easily result in a list so voluminous that it would begin to take up a somewhat disproportionate amount of time relative to some other things I've been trying to accomplish lately. So, I guess you'll just have to be content with the list as it currently stands, at least for now.  

Astronomy extravaganza!

There has scarcely been a more exciting time to study the cosmos. 

Not only is the astronomical community celebrating the long-awaited arrival of the powerful infrared-sensing James Webb Space Telescope at its observation post at L2 late last month in preparation for its complex mirror alignment process, brand-new mosaic images of the Milky Way using radio waves released last week revealed a heretofore unseen population of magnetized filaments stretching a hundred or more light-years across the heart of our own galaxy:

 

 

Discovered in the 1980s by Farhad Yusef-Zadeh at Northwestern University, the new MeerKAT images revealed ten times the number of strands that were previously thought to exist, enabling statistical distribution studies to be carried out for the first time. Their origin and precise structural characteristics, however, remain a mystery.  

 

Additionally, a mysterious starlike object thought to be a repeating transient has been detected in the direction of the constellation Norma in the Southern Hemisphere. You can read more about transients and the recent discovery here, or just watch the video below:

 

And finally, as if all of this wasn't amazing enough already, NASA has just released a new gallery of incredible images via its Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Here's a gorgeous composite of supernova remnant Casseopeia A, for example:

 

These days it seems like hardly a week goes by without some major milestone or exciting new discovery taking place that expands our horizons and sheds even more light on our unique perspective within the evolving universe. And with the James Webb coming online in the next few months we can anticipate even more incredible vistas opening up that will no doubt reveal tantalizing clues about the origins of the cosmos itself. 

All of which amounts to a very welcome reminder, at this challenging juncture in history, that it is truly a wonderful time to be alive as a human being, despite the enormous obstacles we face that all too often appear insurmountable. It's genuinely inspiring to take a step back and look at just how far we've come as a species, considering that literally none of what is now routinely achieved and commonly understood was even thought possible, or barely dreamt of, only a few generations ago. 

At a time when there is so much strife and division among people, it's good to be reminded that when humans work together toward a common goal, we can achieve great things. 

A brief, friendly reminder

Owning a gun does not make you safer. In fact, scientific research overwhelmingly suggests the opposite.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed published April 22, 2015, David Hemenway of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health summed up the issue succinctly:

“Can reporters please stop pretending that scientists, like politicians, are evenly divided on guns? We're not."

It's a pity that basic facts like these are so routinely ignored in the aftermath of widely publicized tragedies involving firearms.

Works in progress

It ought to be one of the most basic observations of any philosopher worth their salt that the perceptual objects, whether substantive or ideogrammatic, taken to exist outside of ourselves in a manner that is no less real, solid or permanent as the way we are apt to consider those very same selves, do not exist as fully-formed notions taken all at one glance, in a single instant. The permanence and solidity are all illusion. Everything in our perception changes. We survey the realities we inhabit, constantly moving from one perceptual configuration to another along a unique path both forming and informing the instants of our lives, never to be duplicated.

But it does not go nearly far enough to say that the objects of perception are merely perceived, at one time or another, from a variety of angles. It isn't just that we view the same object under many different lights, so to speak, or aspects, in the manner of a Cubist painting, while each perceptible entity remains essentially unchanged underneath the veneer of our peculiar perspective. Doubtless it is true that our perspective is always changing, and it is certainly to the credit of the experimental artists of the early 20th century, like Braque and Picasso, for calling the phenomenon to our attention.

 

                      Georges Braque, 1913, Nature morte (Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs)

 

Rather it is as if each of our perceptions is, to borrow Duchamp's apt phrase, a readymade, called forth as an object not so much by virtue of what it supposedly "is", underneath it all, in terms of bare essence, but according to the endlessly malleable content of its own immediate subject-hood. It is not the what-it-was-to-be (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) or "quiddity" that determines the essence of things, but the "what-it-IS-to-be": now, in this very moment; an eternally open question that is never completely answered, save perhaps by the inevitable but incomplete erasure of the next perception, the next moment in our existence. 

 

                          Marcel Duchamp, 1917, Fountain

 

And so the "is", the esse, the être, ser, essere, sein, etc., the "to be" in any language, is only ever a turn of phrase, belying the accumulative essence of everything, the geologic mutability of thought. Like islands ever forming and dissolving again under the plastic flow of raw volcanic turbulence, every object or idea, even that of ourselves, is a work in continual progress. We create those works through the process of living our lives, always retaining some parts while discarding others, according to the judgements we enact along the way. We are always the author AND the audience, the subject AND object of that which only appears to persist along our temporal trajectories.

Derrière les yeux verts

Mais mes rêves, ils ne sont pas si vides
Comme ma conscience semble être
J'ai des heures, seulement solitaire
Mon amour est la vengeance qui n'est jamais libre...