Be free!

I can't.

Why not?

I don't know.

Don't worry.

I'll try.

I mean it -- let go.

We'll see.

Amazon
Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers (NYT). A glitch at the amazon.ca (the Canadian
affiliate of amazon.com) revealed the identity of many previously anonymous
reviewers, confirming some interesting patterns for anonymous reviews (e.g.,
book authors who post positive reviews of their own books; authors answering
their critics; people manipulating the book lists feature). This article made
me question the weight I had put in the reviews -- and make me want to put more
value on named, trusted reviewers. At the very least, it's helpful to know the
reputation of a reviewer and some understanding of the motivation behind the
reviews.

The current issue of the New Yorker is
incredibly engaging. Some of the pieces that I've read are:

• Nancy
  Franklin writes about The Apprentice, which I've gotten hooked on. Somehow
  it speaks to some the current challenges I have in my own life.
• An amazing piece by David Grann on the Aryan Brotherhood, thought to be
  one of America's most murderous prison gangs. You'll get a taste of the article
  through reading the online
  interview with Grann. What hellish placess are these prisons. I wondered
  what influence the power of the Christian gospel can have in such dark places.
  It's time to learn more about ministries such as the Prison
  Fellowship; I once delivered Christmas gifts to children of prisoners
  in Richmond as part of the Angel
  Tree organization.
• A nice piece by the classical music review Alex Ross on how classical music
  got to there its current place in the US, weaving in his own how he grew up
  on classical music but discovered the joys of "popular music" as he got into
  his 20s.

The hoops
that a restauranteur has to jump through to open a new pizzeria in South Berkeley
does seem excessive. Where's my gourmet pizza?

I was surprised to find Avenue Books on College Ave in Berkeley closed. There's
no sign on the store windows explaining the situation; the answering machine
sounds business as usual. I always did wonder how long it would stay in business,
however. OK -- here's a Berkeley
Daily Planet article from January on the closing. Later: one of
my housemates told me about that there were going-out-of-business sales throughout
January. How did I miss them?

I should read The Berkeley Daily
Planet more often -- I was intrigued by stories such as Big
Food Court Planned for Gourmet Ghetto:

Already signed up to move in are Kirala, south Berkeley's well
known sushi restaurant and Cesar, the popular tapas-bar started by
ex-Chez Panisse manager Richard Mazerra, who has agreed to help
Modarressi as a consultant for the project. On the waiting list are a
number of other restaurants that are trying to meet the qualifications
Modarressi and Mazerra have set out for the food. Other shops the pair
are currently considering include a rotisserie and chocolate store.
Several local wine producers have also been approached about possibly
creating a small co-op space.

"We're not going to rent to just anyone," said Modarressi.

I signed and sealed my ballot for the UC
Administrative Professionals Election.

Hilary Hahn, the superstar 23 year old violinist, played last night at Zellerbach Hall. Since I had never attended a recital of a world class violinist, I thought that it would be a novel treat to hear Hahn play. Actually, the real reason I decided to go was that she had on her program the Bach Partita in D Minor, the ultra-famous piece that obsessed me two years ago in the form of Morimur. Although Krista, my friend and violinist, and I sat about 15 rows back from the front, placing us close but not that close to Hahn and her accompianist, I brought my shiny new cheap binoculars to take a closer look. It was silly of me to think that I could make sense of Hahn's graceful fingering and effortness bowing -- she made playing the violin look so easy that I began to doubt all the stories coming from my violinist friends about their struggles to master the instrument. Of course, Ms. Hahn was displaying the fruits of 19 years of disciplined training and abundant natural musical gifts.

Still, the playing seemed a bit too smooth, not gritty enough somehow. But then, what do I know?

To get a taste of what Hahn might be like in person, go listen to an interview with her on NPR. I particularly enjoyed her comments about JSB. (Yes, it all comes back to Bach in the end.)

NPR: You have said in some print interviews that "Bach is the touchstone that keeps me honest." What do you mean by that?

Hahn: I guess basically by that I meant that when I'm playing Bach I can't cheat on anything. You know, I can't have bad technique, forget about phrasing and I have to remember everything. Everything works together. So it's a great balancing act. It's kind of a mind trainer, something like playing chess or something like that.

I would like to write about a lot of truly significant things...but I'm too tired. Instead, I'll cull little pieces from what I've stored up in my wiki or Ecco file

Tucked
Behind the Home Page, a Call to Worship:

Mr. Reese and his Web site, www.tothenextlevel.org, embody an
increasingly popular strategy for evangelism in the Internet age. In
the segmented realms of the Web, said Tony Whitaker, editor of a guide
for online evangelists, sites that use overtly Christian material will
reach only people who are already Christians, while everyone else can
click by. Unlike Christian radio or television, the new medium calls
not for powerful religious symbolism or rhetoric but for the absence of
them, he said.

In culling through my pile of old issues of The New Yorker, I came
across David Denby's review
of Matrix Revolutions. The ending the essay made me ponder my own misconstructed
sense of helplessness, about which Tokyo
Story actually has a lot to say:

In the first movie, the lifelessness of the humans’ speech made one
doubt that humanity was actually worth fighting for. But if one ignores
the wilder speculative meanings that have been drawn from the series
(we are all wired together in a simulated reality), there remains
something halfway palpable in these movies: in a period in which
gigantic corporations and entire governments devote themselves to
promoting made-up realities, people may genuinely wonder what world
they are living in. The fact that so many intellectuals in particular
found “The Matrix” fascinating suggests how impotent they feel to
change anything around them. Movie critics, however, are fascinated by
the aesthetic life or death in the object right before their eyes, and
they tend to fight one machine or pod at a time rather than recast
their helplessness as a theory of subjection. It’s better, perhaps, to
win or lose small battles than to never start fighting at all.

This
21st-Century Japan, More Contented Than Driven:

China, long the center of Asia, fell under foreign domination in
the last century and a half. Japan, long content in its relative
isolation or as a tributary nation to China, went out into the world,
competing against the West and dominating Asia.

But China never lost its sense of being a great power and appears comfortable now in reassuming its traditional role in Asia.

I had been using the word incentivize. Recently, I heard someone use the word
incent. Which one to use? Perhaps neither
to avoid
jargon.

I went for the company but stayed for the football game -- much to my surprise. Generally, I'm a fair weather sports fan. However, because the game was so close and the ending so suspenseful, I had a wonderful time watching today's game. I'm still unhappy with CBS that moveon.org wasn't allowed to broadcast the winning ad from Bush in 30 seconds competition -- so we downloaded it and projected it on the screen anyways. All in all, a wonderful afternoon, save for the overeating of tasty snacks.

I was thrilled to see that Happy
Worker, a new company founded by my brother-in-law Kris
Schantz and my sister Shirley
Yee got some very favorable press
the last couple of days for its first upcoming product, the GeekMan
(TM) Action Figure. The articles I've found so far are:

• Toy
  fair booths flog classics, and GeekMan too
• Meet
  Geekman, Aquapets: Thousands of toys unveiled at T.O. fair:
• This
  superhero's a real geek
• Geekman
  among new toys on show

Interestingly enough, a number of the reporters make a point of
comparing the action figure to Kris. I must think that the resemblance
is purely coincidental.

At any rate, I've heard Kris and Shirley talk and dream about
their work for many months now -- and now it's nice to get a chance to
share it with my readers. GeekMan comes out on retail shelves on March 1....

The best time for me to write is the morning. That's why I need to get to bed
on time -- so that I can wake up and have enough presence of mind to write.
Let me just quote something I typed into my personal wiki this morning:

I need to hop in the shower in the next few minutes if I'm to have much hope
of getting down to work in a timely fashion today. I've had a good start of
a day so far. I got up at 6:30 am without too much trouble, after having had
a reasonably lengthy night of sleep. The foggy but frantic confusion that
is characteristic of many days is far away from the calm of the first minutes.
And so far, I've managed to keep centered. Morning is a wonderful time to
reaffirm important matters and to get back in touch with God and myself --
and thus, ultimately, with the larger world.

I've been saddled with a mild case of "who cares? what does it matter
blues?" lately. One example is that of the re-missioning meetings of
First Presbyterian
Berkeley. I had to fight hard to drag myself there, bedraggled by cynical
feelings about the process and possibility for change. Fortunately, the meeting
I attended humbled me -- and I learned how stupidly smug I can be.

After I got out of the shower, I wrote:

In the shower, I decided that I should start writing bold statements of what
I believe, think, and feel with hedging them. There is room for clarification,
qualification, and even retraction and repentance for them -- but I've been
stuck in a muddle for two long looking at the details when I'm not just coming
out to say what is really going on (for good or for bad).

I wrote a series of bold statements and was about to copy them into this post....but
I'm not ready to share with you what those statements are. Sorry.

During breakfast, I often read the San Francisco Chronicle. I always wonder what purpose it serves other than entertainment. The Chronicle does keep me somewhat informed.

This morning, I've been pondering (as I have on many mornings) some political
issues and how I might respond to them. Take for example, today's
editorial calling for Antonin Scalia's self-recusal in a case involving
VP Dick Cheney, who are apparently good friends and recent fellow-vacationers.
My first reaction was: "This is another blatant example of arrogant power."
As I reflected further, I wanted to ask, "Well, what are the precedents for
self-recusal in the Supreme Court? Should people who have an obvious and public
distaste for Cheney recuse themselves too? What's the difference?" No final
answers on my part -- but cooler thinking did help me to see the picture in
a more nuanced fashion beyond my definite partisan position.

There's more to say, obviously -- but I figure that since politics is something
that keeps bouncing around the foreground and background of my musings, I should
refer to some previous entries for some background. Here's some of what I found:

• I'm
  musing on what Laura wrote today
• Reading
  the SF Chronicle as Morning Ritual
• Steven
  Winn on truth and truth-telling
• Jon
  Carroll -- a columnist with whom I largely agree

Happy New Year! Gung Hay Fat Choy!

I'm sad that I'm away from the people with whom I have celebrated the Lunar
New Year most often, my own immediate family. Why am I sadder this year than
any of the many other years that I've been away from my family? Perhaps it's
because I'm all the more aware of how little I understand of these great (but
mysterious) rituals that informed my childhood and how much I wish I could connect
now to the past. I know that it's not just about the past; I can learn as much
as I can now about the past so that I can enter the future with new life and
energy. Now that I have a nephew, I have a great excuse to learn with him what
I hadn't learned 37 years ago.

Because of this unmet longing, I read a series of articles in the San Francisco
Chronicle about the New Year. If you too want to learn more about the meaning
of the New Year, go read the following:

• HOME
  FOR THE HOLIDAYS Gung hay fat choy! Bay Area families prepare for the Year
  of the Monkey
• Lunar
  New Year a multicultural celebration
• Toast
  to a New Year: Ten-course banquet demonstrates that wine does go with Chinese
  food
• Chinese
  New Year Event Guide

Before going in this morning, I was trying to write out in Chinese the various
new year's greeting but was having a hard time. When I have time, I will come
back to this task by looking at the following links:

• Happy
  New Year
• gong
  xi fai cai
• New
  Years 2004 from fufurasu.org

Did you know that today was Squirrel Appreciation Day?

On the putative universality of J. S. Bach's music from Why a bad playing of Bach is still Bach (Toronto Star):

Perhaps it is the very ability of Bach's music to survive a variety of approaches that provides a clue to its universality. As Rilling put it, a bad performance of Bach is still Bach, but a bad performance of Handel isn't very good.