ألف مبروك يا اهل مصر!!!

As CNN’s Ben Wedeman tweeted, “This revolution couldn’t have happened to better people. Patient, peaceful, good-humored, resilient, imaginative.”

RIP Guru

A while ago, Guru from Gang Starr died, which reminded me that I have the utterly awesome “Lovesick — Upbeat Mix” on a mixtape. I found it while going through my crap this weekend. I decided that I simply must have the digital file.

This proved difficult. I searched and searched and could not find a digital download from a reputable site because, it turns out, it came out on a 12-inch and wasn’t on the Mass Appeal album. “How was it that you have it on a mixtape?” I hear you cry.

When I was in Damascus a thousand 14 years ago, a guy who was staying in my hotel told me that there was a place in town where you could buy bootleg cassettes of pretty good albums. I didn’t have time to check it out out before I carried on my way to Istanbul, so the guy told me to pick a bunch of tapes from their catalogue; he’d buy them and give them to me when he saw me in Istanbul, where he was due to arrive a couple of days after me. If we didn’t meet, he’d just keep them.

One of the tapes I picked out was The Best Rap Album in the World…Ever!, which was indeed pretty great. And it was so nice to have an infusion of new music, because this was the Walkman era and I was thoroughly sick of the eight tapes I had been listening to during the preceding eight months in Egypt.

I ended up downloading an album of Gang Starr remixes from a dubious site, but if I end up getting a virus, it will almost have been worth it.

Looking up this track on the Internet also had the happy result of introducing me to Young-Holt Unlimited, who wrote the song sampled in the Upbeat Mix. I went and downloaded one of their albums, and I love it. You have to admire titles like “Doing the Thing” and “Funky is as Funky Does.”

Gaza is part of Iran’s empire? Wha?

This is just lunatic:

Israel has just embarked on a land invasion of the Gaza Strip after a week of aerial bombing. Gaza is bordered by Egypt, and was under Egyptian military control from 1949 through 1967. And yet in a startling rebuke to geography and recent history—and in testimony to the sheer power of audacity and of ideas—the mullahs in Teheran hold more sway in Gaza today than does the tired, Brezhnevite regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Gaza constitutes the western edge of Iran’s veritable new empire, cartographically akin to the ancient Persian one, that now stretches all the way to western Afghanistan, where Kabul holds no sway and which is under Iranian economic domination.

But it gels quite nicely with the virtual consensus among the political class that the biggest threat to stability in the Middle East is not Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land but rather…Iran.

One year Iraq is the big issue that needs to be dealt with immediately. The next year it’s Iran. Or some Iran-Syria nexus. Anywhere, anywhere, but Palestine.

job

I’ve been at my job for a full year as of today. Pathetically, this is the longest I’ve ever been at a job. And, unsurprisingly, I’m casting around for a new gig.

Resomolutions

Why the hell not? These were things I was starting to do/thinking of doing already but New Year’s gives me an excuse to share them with you, kind readers.

1. Substitute tea for coffee. It’s not like coffee is bad for you, but for some reason I wish I weren’t addicted to caffeine. Plus, antioxidants, blah blah blah.

2. Use more film. I had hardly used my film cameras for years, but traveling this year gave me a reason to dust off the Rollei. A couple of weeks ago I bought a whole mess of film from Freestyle Photographic supplies including a lot of 35mm for my two workhorse Pentax cameras, which I haven’t used in years. I plan to join the New York Camera Club in a couple of months, once I’m not so busy…

3. …studying to pass the UN’s competitive translators’ exam. Apparently some people take it over and over again and keep failing because it’s really hard, so I don’t expect to pass. But at least it gives me something to work toward, and unless I’m working toward something — anything — I get really depressed. I got the e-mail this week informing me that I’m writing it in one month, and I still have a lot of French to learn, which is why I’m at home on a Friday night. Well, actually, I’m home on a Friday night because I’m lame. But at least my lameness has always contributed to my excellence as a student.

4. Cook more. To this end, I bought mixing bowls today.

5. Save more money. It’s hard to save a lot when your hobby is the darkroom, and I’m pretty darn frugal as it is. But when you only have to do laundry once a month, that’s a sign that you have too many clothes and don’t need any more.

6. Finding a new job by the end of the year would be nice, and I’m already starting to look. But honestly, there’s probably virtually no other job that would pay me as much and have benefits that are quite as good, so if I’m still here at the beginning of 2010 it won’t be the end of the world.

[Added at 9:48 PM: stop overusing commas.]

Tony Karon gets it completely right yet again.

This is the best analysis of the current situation in Gaza that I’ve read yet. Just about everything in the mainstream press is blather.

Worst. Subway station. Evar.

It’s the 14th Street station on the F line. It’s gross and rat-infested even at the best of times, but tonight, coming home from the darkroom, I saw 1) a man exposing himself on the far north end of the platform, and 2) three rats cavorting not on the tracks but on the platform. Unacceptable.

In other news, this is why I still use film:

Ocean Parkway

In the summer I moved out of Ditmas Park to Ocean Parkway. It’s only about a ten minute walk from my old place, but it’s not Ditmas; people consider it Kensington, but that’s not terribly descriptive, because Kensington is a huge area. I tell people “Ocean Parkway,” because that’s more descriptive and if someone’s been down to Coney Island in a car they know what Ocean Parkway looks like (designed by Olmstead, it’s an official city landmark; it’s a wide street with bike paths and stone tables for chess, as well as beautiful old trees).

The most striking thing about the neighborhood is the ethnic mix. It’s a very Hasidic neighborhood. I live right next to a hundred-year-old synagogue, which I can see from my bedroom window. On Friday nights you see a lot of men walking around with the huge furry hats (like this). During Sukkoth I noticed a fair bit of merry-making in the ‘hood, and not knowing anything about the holiday (other than that the two major camera stores in the city shut down for ten days) I went to Wikipedia, where I read that

The word Sukkot is the plural of the Hebrew word sukkah, meaning booth or hut. The sukkah is reminiscent of the type of huts in which the ancient Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt. During this holiday, Jews construct and reside in sukkot small and large. Here families eat their meals, entertain guests, relax, and even sleep.

And then I was like, so that’s what all that hammering out back was about.

The neighborhood is also heavily Russian. In fact, I’m one of a mere handful of people in my building who are not Russian. There’s this little old lady who’s all of about four feet tall who lives on the fifth floor. I’ve ridden the elevator with her a few times and she really reminds me of Baka Katica, the grandmother of a Croatian cousin of mine: she doesn’t speak a word of English and even though she knows I don’t understand her language, she talks my ear off. One day we even managed to communicate. She asked me which floor, and I said, “šest.” (Six.) Then she said, “muž?” (Husband.) “Ne,” I replied.

“Studentija?” (I can’t write in Russian so I’m spelling these words in Croatian.)

“Ne.”

“Rubotnik?” (Or something similar; I recognized the “robo” part as meaning “worker.”)

“Da.”

[Look of surprise.]

There’s a really interesting little green grocer’s a couple blocks away which is where I buy all my produce. It’s one of the cheapest places to buy fruits and vegetables in the entire city, quite possibly. On the outside of the store it says, in Cyrillic, “Russian Store” (“Russki Magazin”). When you get inside there are these weird products, like 30 different varieties of honey from pretty interesting places: Lithuania, Greece, Moldova, and Bashkortostan, which I had never heard of before. The preponderance of goods are Turkish, but there’s a lot of stuff with Hebrew writing, as well as “Golan” brand pasta. At the cash register there’s a little donation box with Hebrew writing.

I can’t figure out where the two young women who operate the cash register are from. Today as they were talking to each other they were speaking a language that I couldn’t identify that had a lot of “kh”s in it. Like, in every word. It could have been Hebrew, for all I know. Then a man popped in, and one of the girls said, “Salam aleikum” to him, then followed it with “nasılsınız?” which is Turkish for “how are you?”

Across the street is a very similar grocery. One day when I went in, an east Asian woman was working the cash. Then as she was ringing up my purchases she started talking to her boss in Russian.

Governor-General

In this thread, I asked why the Canadian Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean, decided to grant Stephen Harper’s egregious request for the prorogation of parliament. I mean, she could have said no.

Spaz responded to my question, saying:

As for why, maybe she felt that given the economic situation that a newly elected government who faught [sic] an election in which the voters knew the economic climate, should at least be allowed to table a budget. And if it falls then, then it falls. Maybe we’ll find out in her memoirs one day.

But…the other day I was explaining the whole Governor-General thing to a co-worker and told her about how the GG has the power to veto legislation but never uses it. I’m now wondering whether the prorogation deal is a similar sort of phenomenon, that is to say, the GG could deny a Prime Minister’s request, but dare not deny it, lest she seem to be overriding the will of the people as expressed in the actions of the PM.