...so now then...

Surfing twice, snorkeling twice, hours upon hours of beach time, pounds and pounds of ahi. I've read: Rabbit, Run by John Updike, The Road by Cormack McCarthy. Currently reading: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace and Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow. I love the University of Hawaii radio station - it played two Francois Hardy songs, back to back, today.

See...

A map, for reference:

More Oahu Images

The swell on the North Shore was 9-12' today; out-of-season greatness courtesy of a storm in the Gulf of Alaska. If only I was the surfer I used to be: able to ride any wave less than double overhead with confident mediocrity. I got some great video of the swell at Waimea and along some of the reefs between here and Haleiwa.


If you pull up the bigger version of the above image you can see a couple guys trying to drop in on this thing.


As our neighbor, John, put it: "A winter swell at the end of March: what more can you ask for?" I like how, on days like this, the air fills with salt spray everywhere so there is a haze in the air.




Jaime's travels in Haleiwa and lunch at Banzai Sushi.



The table set for dinner tonight. We have cooked for ourselves twice - fresh ahi both times, cooked merely seared. From our deck you can hear the swell thudding on the rocks at Waimea and occasionally see a spray of foam erupt over the rooftops across the street.

The View from Here

The only photo I've take so far: the view from our deck.

Synechdoche

I just finished watching Synechdoche, New York, which may be the best film I've ever seen. It makes me wonder whether, when we look back at the literature of our time, we will count screenwriters among the masters of the written word. Film is a visual language and when you consider the multifaceted mastery of language consisting within SNY, Charlie Kaufman stands among the greatest authors I have ever encountered.

Tension/Release

The pairing of tension and release is the soul of music. The key of a song begins with the tonic. The tonic is a comfortable place by the fireplace and all the other tones are the experiences that build character and give you something to think about when, later, you get some time to relax by the hearth.

I heard Donald Fagen say in a radio interview that sometimes when he writes music the lyrics sort of begin to appear, suggested by the tones, harmonies and melodies in the instruments. I think a lot of musicians have that experience. In Fagen's music the instruments produce as much tension as has ever existed in popular song. Incidentally - maybe consequently - the words of Steely Dan songs probably demonstrate the possibilities for the use of lyrical tension and release better than any others.

Fagen's lyrics do seem to mirror his music, especially, in that his songs have a veneer of cheerful beauty, but there are so many dark tones. Considered carefully, the darkness often subsumes the light. So the lyrics themselves have a tension and release. But, wherever the vocal adventures take you, there is a tonic. If you wish and so long as you are willing to be selective, you can remain in the light.

Check out:

Post-post...modernism.

I just finished reading an essay by David Foster Wallace entitled "E UNIBUS PLURAM: television and U.S. Fiction". Because I've been thinking of re-immersing myself in my erstwhile pastime of writing, I found myself paying special attention. The essay's ultimate concern, inartfully paraphrased, is "what do we do in an artistic and literary world where irony and skepticism (i.e. postmodernism) has moved out of the fringe and into the mainstream and so permeated the culture that it is no longer effective except as an instrument of stasis?"

Postmodernism was itself the inevitable end to the rebellion that blossomed in modernism and was a proper destruction of old reactionary values. But when rebellion has reached its end, as DFW effectively argues has happened, what next?

DFW argues that a new-sincerity is the answer. He also alludes to this argument in other essays.

The question that remains for me is: how do you distinguish new sincerity from old sincerity; what makes it "new"? The answer that immediately comes to mind is that the writer, or whomever, must look at the ironic and the sincere with the same sincerity. The hipster crowd at the self-aware dive bar listening to the latest ironic cover song played by a bunch of starved-looking musicians must be treated with the same sincerity and interest as some Folks at a lunch counter that is across the street from the tractor dealership and next door to the bank named after the town it's in.

But that's only my immediate answer and if I could reliably answer intellectually-dense questions so quickly, I wouldn't have to practice law.