remember the à la mode.

Most of the brief and sideways-glancing observations that I have time to register can be dismissed as part of the vastly gratuitous work supplied by the information proletariat. It would seem entirely appropriate if the most frequently used word in blog titles were "rants," because such an explanation dovetails nicely with the particular energy expended by us nomademics - the impulse manifested in thinking that does not get annotated and channeled properly and therefore turns subjective and withers.

What this needs is the decision of the three-judges panel, their judgment we succumb to in the absence of a moral compass that decides whether it is reasonable to have sinewy dead Chinese dissidents advertise the commercial miracle of Bodies resurrected for the progressively new, while there is a serious debate about how we should not have flags raised at half-staff for the fallen and the declaration that "standards at Guantánamo rival or exceed those at similar institutions" counts as something worth contemplating.

I thought by now they'd have string quartets there to perform for the International Red Cross. And, in between, as the man says: We'll always have Perez, to cover the 30-mile DMZ of what really matters.


A salute here for the bark howl.

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a footnote on gesture.

In a city that is generally celebrated as diverse and cosmopolitan, the ubiquitous instances of uniformity in behavior stand out all the more starkly for their frequency. In remarkable numbers, younger white women walk around sporting amateur scowls while clinging silently to cell phones pressed against their left ears. This naively desperate gesture is meant to convey the fact that their presence is required elsewhere and that they are not yet convinced enough to pay attention to the moment - here, after all, is not where they ought to be.

Rather predictably, on the other hand, white men are rarely compelled to display such elaborate pantomimes of positioning. Their overall attitude is at best reducible to wearing flip-flop thongs in public, a gestural mode which merely captures the sense that the world is their bathroom.

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synaesthetic assessments.

The discursive registers last week came down squarely in favor of the judgment of Paris over and against any discussion of the legality of Gitmo incarcerations. Still, some things were worth waiting for. The show that made the greeting "whoa, dere he is" acceptable among educated people ended, interrupted -- an intervention turned interference.

Meanwhile on myface ("dotcom") and similar sites, the exegesis of Apple's iphone previews yielded screenshots that promise a standard web optimization: Apple Store, Amazon, New York Times (headline Democrats Take Control of Congress, with the image of "Palomino" Pelosi), Fandango (includes We Are Marshall in their Top Ten), Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia (googled via iPod entry), and the Fours Seasons Hawaii site. My bookmarks, give or take.

At the other end, it was difficult to distinguish where popular memes end and synaesthesia begins. But it now seems that decades can, in fact, be organized according to color schemes. The 'Ohs are shaping up to be characterized by tangerine and light gray. The '90s were sandy beige and sepia, the '80s turquoise and pink (allegedly), the '70s avocado and apricot, the '60s goldenrod and magenta, the '50s salmon and periwinkle, and the '40s eigengrau and burnt sienna. The '30s were green, I think.

It may help, though, to know that there are less than two dozen billionaires living in China, Brazil and Hongkong each, ten that make their home in South Korea or Mexico, and only eight among the citizens of Switzerland, Sweden, and Taiwan.

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