I posted a link to someone's little rant about Anaheim that's come back to haunt me; what thoughts were my own got drowned by a complaint of misunderstanding, some of which I know.

How do you do Anaheim? Drive down Beach Blvd. It's the chief thing I lament about southern California: you absolutely need a car.

It's not that Beach takes you through Anaheim directly.  But it's a way to really see the place on the ground, to see real people and real places. 

You'll see Koreans, Filipinos, Indians, Mexicans, Middle Easterners, Vietnamese, Africans, African Americans, and yes, some white people but the Real Wives of Orange County will be limited. 

You'll see skater boi trying to do an ollie onto a curb while you're at an intersection.  A dream and a trick - that's what I had when I lived there.

You might see a gang banger. Or a kid trying to look like a gang banger. In either case, don't look to hard; it's a sure way of getting beat down.

From Beach you can branch off - if you took La Palma east in my day you'd hit Book Baron. It's closed, but you needn't branch far to find something similar. 

You can still take Katella over to Angel Stadium, home of my favorite baseball team.  When Justin and I were there for a game we were asked if we were "down for the cause." 

Further south you hit places like Stanton.  If you want some Indian food made by Indians for Indians, this would be a good place. For each nationality mentioned previously, ditto.

Along the way there are other things to find: basketball courts where kids live like LeBron, enormous cemeteries, record stores, cruiser bikes, coffee shops -

The thing about it is you have to look.  Anaheim is not the downtown that is so obvious the tourist bus drops you off and you go looking for the faux local hangout.  There aren't tour buses with retirees and honeymooners...

... well there are, but they are at Disneyland, if that's your thing.

But if you're like me you want to see real people, eat real food, mellow out and find things.

Next time I'm around I'll fight the urge to head up to Pasadena or Hollywood and kick it in the OC.

This post feels a little vague though so here's a call out to the people I know there or nearby right now: how does one "do" Anaheim?

"I heard a good snippet on NPR today... "

Don't you love how so many people like me, "NPR nerds," converse around that opener?  One testament to age is hearing oneself talking, methinks.

It was an interview of Joe Wright, under whose direction the film Atonement was created.

Wright was talking about how he doesn't read quickly, a capacity that I share despite my love of a good book. But he said one of the things about that is that you live with the book a little longer; the characters, the time period, the themes - they inhabit your life in a more permanent way.

That's a bright side for me because a lot of the why in my reading is the ability to travel without moving or to get away from myself. 

I'm currently reading Foreign Land and with it, the experience of being 60 years old looking back and forward in life.  What really added to the story was that my father, who is also 60, stayed with us and inspired a lot of the sympathy and empathy - the emotional response I have to the story.  I'm soon to finish but having a story live with me for a month is a welcome impact on thoughts and daily life.

I wonder, for instance, about Cornwall. I read so many Enid Blyton books that painted too  idyllic of an English seaside - something which I can now see a little better with retirees, boredom, and open questions of meaning, purpose, and adjustment.

I'm also struck by the emotional range of the older protagonist (if one could call him that). I had thought, before this, of an older man more self assured, anxious for solace, and with it the requisite nostalgia,

This year I've got to live through some interesting books and I'm making it a goal to write reviews again. First Draft reviews that will hopefully sound like what they are: my attempt to hold onto the experience the book gave me and figure out if there's a larger meaning. I hope not to sound pedantic. I hope not to offend anyone, but in the last year I've realized that fear of offense is what makes the most silence.  I've thought about big disclaimers or password protected entries - it may come to that but ultimately I will just write what's on my heart. Apologies in advance, but they will be for feelings, not for what I write.

"Anaheim, California should be paved over, if it weren’t already... "

Dervala writes about her experiences going there for the last 6 months. There's a lot I wish I could disagree with, but can't. My solution to living in Buena Park, Anaheim's northern cousin, was to get on Interstate 5 and drive north.

pi:

This week I've done updating around a few of my websites. It began with a few reports from friends that my pi page was down. I'd known as much but because I made it a long time ago and lost the original code. For geeks: I used Reflector to disassemble the original assembly and then cobbled it back together. It works now for all of you who are just dying to know what the 69,000th digit of pi is.

phoDak (oPhoto):

I also got around to some long overdue updates to phoDak (software which I'd originally called oPhoto). It started with some comment spam that was advertising porn.  I'd seen comment spam before but never on a new photo. I'd periodically clean things up, but didn't feel a dire need to write any code (laziness!).  But I couldn't take a chance with that kind of spam since it's the site related to me that people visit most often and also because someone may confuse the link with something I put up there. 

After disabling comments for a few days I used the following strategy:
1. I leveraged an Akismet library.
2. I added a picture/word because it seems to work well for Jeff Atwood.

If things are still getting through I may do a few more things like enabling some sort of "mark spam" link for people to get rid of bad comments. The worst case scenario for me would be to disable comment visibility until it was approved. 

In the process of doing that update I thought I'd roll in a feature people have asked me for quite a bit: the camera settings I use on the photos.  I'd been a little apprehensive about it because the first thing it will do is show how much of an amateur I am since my settings are more often than not quite bad.  But I've been needing to get more purposeful about really learning my camera rather than trying to compensate with photoshop. I'm doing my Canon 20D no justice by maintaining willful ignorance.

I updated my photo upload page which, get this, has never had a password.  Of course the URL is unknown except to me but it still was an irksome little thing that I finally got around to doing.  It's still got a secret location but I can rest easy that my heroes wouldn't think less of me.

Hobbitwerk:

My final software update (is anyone awake at this point?) is that Hobbitwerk now aggregates from this blog rather than the error message it's been displaying since I pulled the plug on my old blog on Userland.  I'll also be updating the blog link from it to seruyange.com/david along with the picture preview.

That's it for updates, stay in touch.

From an entertaining letter my friend writes:

Sawadi ka!
Bangsai Village was pretty darn cool!  It is everything one would dream a village to be.  It was quaint, green, guardedly friendly with visitors, and serene.  When I arrived, Urai-my host and I rode bikes to the local Buddhist temple.  As I was concentrating on keeping as close to the edge of the narrow road as possible without trying so hard I fall into the surrounding greenery, I was marveling at the lotuses doing their best to pretty up a mucky pond, the expanses of rice paddies swaying in the wind, and the canopy of trees giving a brief but welcome respite from the sun.  I kept thinking to myself, "I love this!  I should be wearing one of those bamboo triangle hats!"  As much as Urai is a typically diminuitive Thai female, she is just as generous in her hospitality, kindness, curiosity, and industriousness.  Man, could that girl work!  In fact, that's pretty much what she would do from 5-6 in the morning until about 6-7 at night.  And she's a young-un ( or at least what I would like to think as young at 30 years old)!  Her mother could probably kick my ass at 78!  She pretty much has the same schedule as Urai but wakes up a little earlier to make food for the monks who come rowing down the river at about 6:30 every morning.  Thai food is made completely from scratch-none of that pre-made preservative crap that we/I eat.  I made green curry and tom yam/yum soup and I had to scrape and squeeqe fresh coconut until my fingers were raw and sweat was nearly dripping into the fruits of my labor.  I also helped to feed a monk one morning-but don't worry I didn't give the venerable elder my food-it was Urai's mother's cooking.  Buddhism is closely tied to the culture and is an integral part of one's socialization and socializing in Thailand, especially in small close-knit villages that are somewhat the equivalent to the American version of Cheers.  The only unpleasant, unidyllic part of my stay in Bangsai was the Thai massage.  I didn't know that an 86 year old women with a gummy smile could have such powerful hands and feet! Yes, feet!  For those of you who picture a relaxing massage given by a young petite Thai beauty with a tropical flower tucked neatly behind her ear, well, think again!  This great grandmother stepped all over my body, including along my more intimate seams.  I was worried I would be made infertile, but Urai informed me that she's been giving massages along with delivering babies for 60 years, so I guess she knew what she was doing, and I was the fragile foreigner who kept repeating "bow-wow!" which means gentle in Thai ( but I wish it meant could you please just stop because this is really painful and I'd rather be at the gyno than lying here with your footprints all over me).  Ok, I know by now you're dying to hear about porn, prostitutes, and Pattaya, but that'll have to wait till my next update because I'm sure I've lost your attention after green curry-if you're anything like the students I'm teaching anyway!  More about that later, too!
La-konn, Sawadi,

Y/L

Have a look at these. Gas stations seem to speak their own language.

Most people who know me well know that I love books. In fact, my secret hope is to build a personal library - I found some good inspiration today here.

This post really began last week when I was at church. A video was shown for missionary work around the world and it struck me, over and over, that the only African's I see within this context are poverty stricken, malnourished children whose long gazes into the camera are designed to inspire pity.

I was thinking of The African Child as I knew him or her, my friends growing up all gifted and rich in so many different ways: Arthur, a skinny 10 year old who made the school's varsity soccer team and dazzled us with on-pitch heroics, or Paul, the rowdy ball of obstinacy who wasn't afraid to challenge authority. I kept thinking about these children and how far they were from that picture and lamenting, as many Africans do, the imagery of Africa as seen in the west.  Arthur is a pediatrician these days and Paul is a social activist and their stories are not unique among the lot of us that grew up in Nairobi.

But back to that voice thing I couldn't find words that were short and punctuated to describe my reaction. I'm too given to long stories and invisible connections. 

So this morning I ran into a talk at TED by Andrew Mwenda, a fellow Ugandan. His words put together everything that I was thinking but with a lot more directness and challenge in their tone.

For some time Justin has been releasing a mix of what he’s had in rotation, riffs from a collection of music that encompasses more than just sound. It’s a novel voice, one which I’ve looked forward to after each week of work. Experiences created: recently it was on a trip to Kansas City that I heard Ryan Adams softly singing Wonderwall, and tonight it was an evening on the deck with bratwurst on the grill while my iPod sounded out Devil Town for the end of my journey through the week.

I was that kid who – upon the rabid crush with girl X – would produce from the very corners of his music collection, a mix tape as a gift. It was no small task of meaning and I can remember the labor, even now, though I did it many times. What I didn’t understand then that I do now was that it wasn’t a gift; it was an attempt of mine to weave a narrative into music to be read by its listener. It wasn’t the lyric, the tricky beat, or guitar chord. It was a language of its own, the language of music, often unheard by the listener.

But I was that kid who heard things: up late at night, listening to Jazz Hour on Voice Of Kenya, that kid who listened to the twice dubbed Bach concerto, the one who would replay songs from memory to pass time on the long bus rides home. There was always something in the music itself, abstracted away from the physical aspects: the tape, the album art, and the logical explanation. Something living in between the sound atoms that were smashing together to form the vibrations on my eardrum that made it more. It was more and it was indescribable.

Perhaps it’s not just hearing. It might be that synesthesia – that you hear a track and it causes synapses in your brain fire off simultaneously: where you were when you heard something, what you were doing, what you are doing, whether you’re up, or down, alone or in a crowd –an all encompassing thing that I have to resign myself to calling the language of music.

I’ve never had real words for music, but I remember going to Hollywood to shop at Aarons and overhearing people talk – a well known DJ I recognized talking about electronic music with the words “pop” and “crunch” and “glitch”, the guy in front of me by the information booth asking about artists in terms of artists “… a soul sound, but more bluesy like a Memphis Minnie sound” – and being amazed at their ability to match human language to music. And that I understood what they were saying the way an amnesiac would gaze at something and recognize it without a context for how they knew.

Things can’t be cemented in spoken language the way they can in music. Perhaps that’s why it’s so special, why crushes get mixtapes, why radio stations and disc jockeys have “followings”, why those who hear the language of music fiendishly collect and listen, recreating and creating moments for the future, present, and why those who somehow bridge what is written and what is heard are to be treasured. It's why, when my friend A's father died in the Ukraine, she packed her things with tears falling, listening to his music. I know she'd never heard it quite like she did that day.

It’s that moment in Boston, with all your friends around you, when an unexpected slide guitar grips you while your head is spinning. A kind of permanence that can becomes an ambience you can reach into at any point along the future.

It’s the first time you hear something and you realize that you’ll never forget that this was when you heard it for the first time, and that the song will follow you through your life like an old companion.

What’s following me to bed tonight is the avant sound textures of Valgeir Sigurðsson. I’ll remember.