White and Nerdy
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Add to My Profile | More Videos Community Organizing, Editing, Reading, Buddhism, Religion, Politics, Writing, Teaching, Martial Arts, Qi Gong, Massage, taking care of the fish, Gardening, Cooking, Publishing. Children.
I'd like to meet:
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Second language learners who are trying to create a "virtual community" which would facilitate their transition to English as a viable medium for a subculture's expression, particularly those in Hiroshima or greater Japan, at the moment, and it's always nice to see a lot of flowers in the spring. But I hope the tools of enlightenment begin to blosum everywhere. Someone who could walk me through this HTML process to jazz my page up a bit more; don't want to make it too noisey, loud, or distracting, kind of like the minimalist approach, but feel I could go there even more with some tweaking. Of course, eventually (this belongs in the "About Me" section) I will get around to clicking links and researching this myself. But it might be nice if the learning experience was accompanied by a new virtual friendship or the deepening of an existing one. Several of you out there have expressed needs on your profile which might be addressed with reference to some of my experience and education, and I would also be happy to share.
Anyone living in Kandy, or elswhere in Sri Lanka for that matter. Anyone living in or visiting Hiroshima. Anyone who doesn't understand Asia. Anyone who thinks they understand Asia. I would like to "virtually" meet you if need something edited. If you are an academic writing in a second language, you may find my services indispensable. Shoot me a sample.
I'm also very interested in Mongolia.
Music:
Boomtown Rats, Big Band Jazz, Swing, Blues, Jazz, Rock, folk; Bob Dylan, Moody Blues, Tracy Chapman, The Used and My Chemical Romance, Adam Ant, Glenn Miller, Cab Calloway, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, Phil Ochs, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, ELO, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Cebar, Tom Waits, Frank Sinatra, Billy Idol, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Tom Petty, The Beatles, Sara Vaughan, Bessie Smith, Five for Fighting, John Coltrane, some of Phil Collins, some of Peter Gabriel, James Brown, Boddy Holly, Indigo Girls, the Supremes, Muddy Waters, the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Mott the Hoople, Lou Reed, Cat Stevens,
Movies:
For years I've been a fan of the website www.rottentomatoes.com, which links you to revviews of movies. I was happy to puruse it the other day and find a review of the film, "Ghost Rider". It went something like, "For years scientists have been predicting that Nicolas Cage would overact so much that his head would burst into flames. It's finally happened." I got a chuckle out of that. Nicholas Cage is a very bad actor, and it's nice to see a reviewer agree with me on that. A bad actor can spoil a movie. Think of Nicholas Cage, Uva Thurman, Demi Moore. A good director can make a mediocre actor look good, think of Michael Douglas in "Black Rain". Basic Instinct was fun because it was set in San Francisco, and you had Michael Douglas doing the antithesis to his "Streets of San Grancisco" role.
All that was missing was a cameo from Karl Malden. Almost Anything these days;
"All the Mornings in the World" is one of my favorites, because it shows the beauty of musical genius and the depressing aspects of mediocrity. "Saturday Night Fever" has to be one of the all time greats, because it is so negative; there is no way out: a realized dark vision is hard to achieve in cinema. I've seen a lot of cartoons over the past decade, and many -- most -- like "Shark's Tale" are disappointing. But of course "Toy Story", "Finding Nemo", and "The Incredibles" were fantastic. "Dumbo" is one of my favorites. "Happy Feet" about penguins, which came out recently, is surprisingly good. On and off I've done movie reviews for newspapers and magazines, so this could go on. I'll keep adding as I think of things. Oh, "Without Anesthesia", a Polish Film, is one of my all time favorites. Has anyone seen the scene where the protagonist elects to have his tooth drilled without anesthesia by a heavyset woman dentist, who proceeds to tell our hero what a schmuck he is for not treating his wife (who is a bitch and whom we know has been cheating on him) better? The pain, the pain. Almost everything by Lina Wertmiller, Fasbinder; anything by Ingmar Bergman. Repo Man. I saw Marie Antoinette tonight: Could it have been worse? Looking forward to Spiderman 3 and Teenage Ninja turtles with the kids.
Television:
Don't watch.Except on You Tube. But for some people,
Television is their role model. Mom watches terrestrial TV, refuses to pay for cable. I swear the stuff is rotting her brain, and a few others over there in the US, too. I suspect it creates a climate of fear. Weird stuff. Stay away from it if you live in the states, is what I would recommend. In fact, and I attribute this to TV rather than print journalism, MySpace has been branded as something "they" do rather than something "we" do for so many of the people I contacted there (the US). Why does the use of a technology have to be viewed as a cultural marker? But then, the poohbahs at MySpace may be more than complicit in this. Under the networking section, careers which one can choose are quite limited, things like social workers (which some of the people who utilize MySpace seem to have need of) are not even listed as options. Ghettoizing people by their interests is criminal. Let MySpace be for everyone, and let's associate then with whom we choose, and be heterogenous about it if we're cosmopolitan enough to cope. Damn the marketing torpedos~! ..
Books:
I worked as an editorial assistant, assistant editor, and associate editor at three NYC Publishing houses, and have read my share of bad submissions and failed book attempts. Now most of my reading is connected with Asian history and cultural heritage, particularly the Buddhist religion and South Asia, though I've done a fairly through survey of Chinese and Japanenese historical and cultural studies. For awhile, I taught American History and so have read vairly extensively there, Daniel Boorstein being a favorite. I had the strange notion that people in Japan would benefit from learning English by participating in a Western cultural icon that involved books, and so read and taught the Harry Potter Series, an activity I still believe to be beneficial for English as a second language acquisition (although participating in MySpace is probably the single biggest boost one could give to budding foreign language acquisition). Lots of history, cultural studies, and anthropology. Louis Dumont is one of my faves. "Homo Hierarchicus". Rey Ileto. At one time I enjoyed reading the classics and a good bit of poetry. Of course I admired Fitzgerald, esp. "The Beautiful and the Damned", as well as Hemingway, John Steinbeck, etc., but I found myself particularly drawn to Thomas Wolfe, and also developed a special fondness for John Dos Pasos and Sinclair Lewis. And in college I read Chaucer, Pope, Dryden, Swift, Milton, etc.
Heroes:
"It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win. Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life." - Phil Ochs. Heaven / Talking Heads
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