what i'm reading to right now

Things have been busy with the wedding planning and stuff, we're only a month away! I'm so unbelievably excited. I went to Connecticut this past weekend and we got our marriage license, we met with the priest for our catholic wedding and went over a lot of the details, we made the dandiya for our garba—all very, very exciting! I've been reading a bunch though, on my commutes to a from work when I'm not riding my bike. Check out some of my latest reads:

• The History of Love: A Novel, by Nicole Krauss—This was such a delight to read. It's about an old man, Leo Gursky, who grew up in Poland during World War II, and still carries a lot of emotional trauma with him from his time there. during the most intense times of the war, he had to hide in an effort to make it seem like he wasn't really there, like he didn't exist. Now much older, he purposefully does random things to make sure other people recognize his existence, like spilling a full bucket of popcorn at the counter at the movies to see if people will turn their heads to notice, helping him believe he does in fact exist. his story unfolds as his son, an established author who's never known Leo, passes away and leaves behind chapters of a never-published book. a parallel story of a young girl name Alma who was named after the main character of a book call 'The History of Love' unfolds as her single mother who works as a translator gets a random letter in the mail requesting her to translate 'The History of Love' into English. The two stories eventually come together in the end, after a long unravelling of the history of the book this book is about. It's really good! Really well written, with funny, quircky characters who are also at times deeply saddening.
• The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini—Good Lord, what a depressing book! It starts in the 70s in Afghanistan. Amir is a son of a rich man who has a servent who also has a son who lives and works for them, Hassan. Amir and Hassan, although from different class backgrounds are best friends, but Amir has a lot of mixed ideas of what it means to be friends with someone of a lower class. He comes to points in the book where he has to decide to publicly stick up for Hassan or not, and his decisions follow him throughout the rest of the book. Amir eventually flees Afghanistan after the Russia's invasion and ends up in America, where decades later he has to return to Afghanistan and confront his past in a new way. It's very well written, with a lot of historical detail expressed through very real characters who were easy to connect with, especially being South Asian as a reader. The class dynamics within the culture of the characters, and how oppression propagates itself in many ugly ways through non-action was a screaming example of how messed up our world is, and how it gets to be that way generation after generation. But good Lord, what a depressing book! Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does... but still, probably a very real depiction of Afghanistan over the past 30 years.
• In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alverez—A less depressing book than the Kite Runner, but sad nonetheless. It was about 4 sisters that helped fight against an oppressive dictator during Dominican Republic's revolution, told through the perspectives of each sister as the story progresses. Another fictional book that was filled with history that was interesting to learn, written through a story that keeps pulling you through.

I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife and good Lord what a good book! It's about a woman, Clare, who's in love with a man, Henry, who has a genetic disorder that causes him to uncontrollably time travel. Concept alone, what a great premise for a book. The result of this relationship though, is that she first meets him when she's six and he's in his forties, cause he travels back in time to her childhood home. And he only meets her for the first time when he's in his late twenties. She already knows a lot about him and his future, cause she's known him her whole life, but to him she's a total stranger. The book takes their relationship from their very beginnings, all the way through them getting married and living the rest of their lives together. Sheena and I were reading it together, and I think we both really connected with the book cause the feelings they have about Henry randomly leaving for unknown lengths of time are similar to the feelings we have being in a long-distant relationship. We're constantly leaving, and constantly waiting to see each other again. That was like. Their entire lives. I finished the book in a week, staying up late two nights to just read. It's really well written, and the characters are so well developed, that by the end of the book you can hardly believe this is a work of fiction, existing in a world that the author created in her mind. It also takes place in Chicago, so there are a ton of references to places and streets and neighborhoods that I'm familiar with, so that was fun to read, too!

Siiigh Anyway. Other than the escape the books given me for the past week, things have been okay. Today's my cous's birthday (happy birthday, bro!) so we'll proly be doing something later tonight. Family drama is a cold front slowly moving in the from west, which is annoying and frustrating. But I'm one optimistic guy, so I'm sure everything will work out, one way or another. I was in CT this weekend visiting for her brother's birthday. We saw Spiderman 3, which was so-so, played some games, ate good food, and just hung out. It was fun. We also did some wedding stuff while I was out there, which was helpful.

In reference to the initial development of house music in Chicago in the late 70's/early 80s:

"Intriguingly, house took on exactly the same cultural role as hip hop had done in New York. Its original constituency was poor and black. Its energy came from djs competing on a local level. Its aesthetic was a result of djs, dissatisfied with the prevailing sound, rediscovering older music and recasting it in new ways.

Just like hip hop, house stole basslines and drum patterns from old songs (both musics were initially about creating a very minimal and repetitive version of disco). Its creative progression was a result of djs constantly introducing new elements to their performances to outdo the other guy. And house, like hip hop, depended on a fierce "do-it-yourself" spirit. Even the clothes which characterized house in Chicago—baggy and functional—were what would later be identified as hip hop styles throughout the world. The only fundamental difference was the tempo of the music, and that house accepted rather than rejected disco's gayness and its four-on-the-floor beat.

Some Chicago djs, like Pierre, can even recall battles, just like those between hip hop crews in New York, where a series of house djs would perform for the honor of having impressed the largest number of dancers—complete with mcs!

'A dj had to bring his own sound system, his own mc, and bring a big sign with his name on it. And it'd be in a big school gymnasium,' he recalls. 'Then another dj, he'd bring his own sound system, and a third dj'd bring his sound system. And you had to do your thing for like thirty minutes or an hour, and whoever's sound system and djing skills sounded the best won the competition.' Pierre even remembers losing a battle because he didn't have a particular record, 'Time to Jack' by Chip E.

Given the nature of the house subculture, it's no wonder, then, that for many years hip hop was virtually unheard in Chicago. Only in the mid-nineties, after house as a local phenomenon had gone resolutely back underground, could hip hop claim any kind of listenership in the windy city. Today, the musical spectrum on Chicago radio still has a high ratio of uptempo dance music compared to other American cities, but increasingly it succumbing to the swingbeat-style r&b and hip hop which now chokes the US music business."

from Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." — Martin Luther King Jr.

Have you ever heard about people talking about how the diamond trade is eff-ed up? About "blood diamonds" and "conflict diamonds"? I've heard these term before, heard people in passing saying that there are a lot of messed up things about diamond trade, but I've never understood what those messed up things were, and at the same time, I'd see all my friends buying their partners big-rock rings (unfortunately, mostly on loans...). Since I'm now engaged, and would like to give my fiance a little something to commemorate the beginning of our commitments to each other. I decided to do a little digging—that turned into a lot of digging—to learn about what is so messed up about diamond trade, and judge for myself if it's still a problem warranting me worrying about, or if it's all leftover hype from issues years back.

I started by looking online for information on problems around diamond mining. Amnesty International has a report about the the political environments in countries in Africa that diamonds are mined. From the report:

"The international diamond industry's trading centers in Europe funded this horror by buying up to $125 million worth of diamonds a year from the RUF (Sierra Leone's "Revolutionary United Front"), according to U.N. estimates. Few cared where the gems originated, or calculated the cost in lives lost rather than carats gained. The RUF used its profits to open foreign bank accounts for rebel leaders and to finance a complicated network of gunrunners who kept the rebels well-equipped with the modern military hardware they used to control Sierra Leone's diamonds. The weapons—and the gems the rebels sold unimpeded to terrorist and corporate trader alike—allowed the RUF to fight off government soldiers, hired mercenaries, peacekeepers from a regional West African reaction force, British paratroopers, and, until recently, the most expansive and expensive peacekeeping mission the U.N. has ever deployed.

Throughout most of the war from 1991 to January 2002, this drama played itself out in obscurity. During the RUF's worst assaults, international media pulled journalists out of the country in fear for their safety. Local citizens were left to fend for themselves against bloodthirsty and drugged child soldiers. Commanders often cut the children's arms and packed the wounds with cocaine; marijuana was everywhere."

Interesting, but a little too specific for me to really get the overall picture. So I started looking for books I could read to catch up on the topic. Unfortunately, most of the more recently published books I saw were from the 90's, and although they'd proly give me a good idea of what the overall problems were, I was hoping to get something a little more current to help me understand what the problems around diamonds today are, rather than speculating whether problems that were around 10-15 years ago are still around today and what they might be like. Fortunately, a book was just released this year called The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire. The book is written by a journalist as he travels to different parts of the world that mines, cuts, and sells diamonds to learn about how the whole system works.

He starts in the Central African Republic, an economically poor country, whose military doesn't get paid and begs on the streets for food to get by. The unspoken rule about political power there is that if you can occupy the capital building, you run the country. So the only paid military is guarding the capital building, the rest of the unpaid military leaves it's borders from neighboring countries barely protected. One of such neighboring countries to the south is the Democratic Republic of Congo, a neighboring county of where the movie Hotel Rwanda took place. The Central African Republic is a country that meets the standards that the diamond industry sets for doing business with (up until quite recently, the only standard was that the nation wasn't in a state of war as defined by the united nations), but the country is only physically capable of producing half of the diamonds they actually export every year. Where do the extra gems come from? The Democratic Republic of Congo is only a canoe ride away to the south, so the widely accepted speculation is this: rebel groups in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo fight for land ownership in their own countries of diamond mines. They have their people mine for gems while violently protecting it from being seized by other rebel groups. Once they have some diamonds, they'll slip them under their tongues or someplace easily concealed, canoe over to the Central African Republic, sell their diamonds in the black market for cash, and go back to their home country with money to buy weapons and ammunition with. The Central Africa Republic has no real resources to crack down on transactions like this, so they happen all the time, and because of it, it's almost impossible to really know where the diamond on your 1 carat solitaire ring came from.

In Angola, rebel militias have found that robbing diamond mines at gunpoint has become more lucrative than actually trying to mine them themselves. Militia troupes have gotten so paranoid that miners are trying to steal diamonds from them (by swallowing them so they can shuffle through their own waste the next day to pull out the diamond) that if they suspect a miner having done so, they'll kill them and cut them open so they can shuffle through their digestive systems to get the diamonds out of them.

Brazil doesn't have as extreme war-like political conditions as these countries in Africa do, but their labor works in very much the same way. Miners don't get paid unless they actually find a diamond. Miners can go months on end without finding even the smallest gem without getting paid a penny.

What makes the whole system around diamond mining even worse is how Debeers and other wholesalers completely take advantage of poor economies so they can see higher profits. If a miner were to find a gem that would sell in the final market for $10,000, they might get $100, more likely around $50. In nations where diamonds represent a major portion of their exports, and a major portion of their population's income, they're trapped in a system that keeps them economically poor while people further up the channels of distribution control supply and demand to a point where they can set their own prices and make huge, huge, enormous profits for their shareholders.

The more I learn about this stuff, the less and less I want to ever buy a diamond. If money is power, then everything we buy is a political statement. Why would I support such a messed up system by purchasing it's commodities? It's easy to say, "yea, but this stuff happens all the time, with everything you buy, there no way to get around it, so just buy a nice looking diamond and forget about it." But even if I can't get around supporting messed up systems in every dollar I spend, I can at least try to avoid it as much as possible.

(Sorry to all my friends who have bought themselves or their partners diamond jewelery if reading this brings forth nasty feelings of guilt... but those who are thinking about it, hopefully you'll find this information somewhat useful...)

In high school and college, I took some history classes, but I always did horribly in them. I could barely stay attentive in class, and I hardly ever did the reading, or memorized all the dates and names we were being tested on as we went from war to war throughout "world" history. Looking back, I think I was unconsciously frustrated at the fact that "world" history consisted entirely of the US and Europe, with a few side notes on China and the "exotic" Silk Road...

I'm only halfway through Two Lives by Vikram Seth. When I started reading it, I didn't know too much about what the book was about. I had tripped over a copy of it, and it was sitting on my 'books to read' list for a while, and it had finally come up. The book turns out to be a memoir about his grandfather's brother, Shanti Uncle and Auntie Henny, and starts when Seth leaves Calcutta to go to school in England, and spends much of his time in school with Shanti Uncle and Auntie Henny, developing a strong parent/child-type relationship with them that he holds dear for the rest of his life. After introducing his Uncle and Auntie, he goes on to talk about each of their histories, the 'Two Lives' that this book is about.

Shanti Uncle moved to Germany from India in the early 1930s to go to dental school, during which time he lived in the spare room in the home of a Jewish family, the daughter of whom was Henny, the woman who he would later marry. After going to dental school he moves to England to start practicing dentistry at around the same time World War II breaks out. After practicing in London for sometime, he decides to enlist in the British Army to be part of the dental corpse in the war, and this is where the book really got interesting for me. Since I didn't have too great a of a knowledge about WWII, I knew what happened, what countries were involved, why it was atrocious, but I hardly knew any details. So following the progression of the war through the eyes of an Indian man was interesting. Plus, I had never known that there were Indians in World War II. But thinking back, in the 1940s India was a colony of Great Britain. So when the British sent troops to war, they sent troops from their own country as well as their colonies. So it's no surprise that the Indians had a fairly decent presence in the war via Great Britain.

Henny, a German Jew, had befriended Shanti Uncle throughout his stay in Germany, as well as after he left for London and throughout the war. The section I'm on right now talks about how Henny and her family and friends were effected by the war, going into some detail on how some of her loved ones were not as lucky as her to have left Germany before the Nazi's started "exterminating Jews", and how her relationships she chooses to keep, and the new ones she chooses to create became really, really political. If she got any inkling that someone was or once was in support of the Nazi party, she cut off her relationship with them. It was interesting to see how Henny changed, but much of this section of the book was filled with letters between Henny and a pretty decent handful of people back home in Germany, some who moved to the US. For me, there were far too many people and far too many details to keep up with. Although it was interesting, it was hard to keep track of who she had stayed friends with and who she had stopped talking to as the same names came up in letters with other people.

So that's only HALF OF THE BOOK. I can't wait to see what happens next.

I’ve heard a bunch about del.icio.us over the past few years, so I decided to sign up and give it a shot. Basically, it's an online “bookmarks” account. So you can import your current Firefox bookmarks (and proly IE, not sure), download a little patch to add a few icons to your browser, and use bookmarks in a way where you can access them from anywhere on the internet. You can even make some available to the public, so your friends can judge how cool you are based on what cool websites you have bookmarked, Friendster-style. But what’s cool is you can see who else bookmarked the same pages you have, and take a look at their bookmarks, too. Sweet. Plus, once you start using it, the interface is sweet. Lots of cool no-need-to-refresh AJAX type stuff.

Check out my bookmarks. A bunch of them are boring-to-most-people tech related stuff, cause I usually only use bookmarks to keep track of stuff I’m searching for that I’ll have a hard time finding again. Other stuff, I just keep committed to memory and Google whenever I need it. But I started to try to bookmark other sites I visit, too. In case y’all are interested.

What I’m reading right now:

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger--This was written in like 1951, and it was an interesting read. It's about a white boy from a well-off family--his father’s a lawyer doing pretty good for himself--living in Manhattan. The story starts with him getting kicked out of an expensive, private high school, and takes you through the few days between then and the time he goes home to face the reality of his situation. His character is really kind of depressing, he’s really lost, he thinks everyone around him is a bunch of ‘phonies,’ so he never really gets close to anyone, he’s got a lot of anger and hostility towards the world, that he just shuts himself out from ever getting close to anyone. Granted, there are characters in the book that he proly wouldn’t get along with anyway, no one can expect to be friends with EVERYONE they cross paths with. But person after person, relationship after relationship, he just pushes himself away from people cause he thinks he knows better, when ultimately he’s really just scared, alone, and really, really confused about the world.

Check out this essay about another fellow minority artist’s experience. True words, my friend, true words:

"And here is what I’ve learned: As minority artists, we must create opportunities for ourselves and for one another.

We create opportunities by simply doing the artistic work faithfully despite the obstacles. And doing so with no promise of success. And doing so not for months, but for years.

The wise stonecutter knows that even though the stone may only crack on the 100th tap, it is really the 99 previous taps that make the breakthrough possible.

Like that stonecutter, minority artists must commit to the work—no matter how many doors slam shut. Because with every song we write, every dance we create, and every line we speak on a stage, we add a bit of momentum to the cause of minority artists everywhere. And this ever-increasing momentum will slowly create more and more opportunities for future minority artists."

What I’m reading right now:

The Bone People, by Keri Hulme--Taking places in New Zealand, the characters in this book try to reflect the lives of a few native Maori people on the island country. It’s mainly about three characters. Kerewin, who’s an artists living alone in a six story tower that SHE BUILT, spending most of her days playing guitar, painting, drinking whiskey, and reading (now THAT sounds like a life...). One day she finds a mute boy, Simon, who somehow made his way into her library, and after meeting his father, Joe, they all sort of become friends. Kerewin’s character isn’t one that seems to make friends too often, so at first she sticks around just to find out what the deal with the boy is. He’s getting brutally abused by his father, he’s mute, but has no physical impairment to prevent him from talking, and he’s stalked by horridly scary nightmares. But after some time, all three of them end up developing a trusting friendship. It's pretty cool, and some random parts of the dialogue are in the native Maori tongue, with a glossary in the back to help you know what they’re talking about. Sweeeeeeeet.

Planet Read is a project started by Google to help increase literacy rates throughout the world. They’ve started by adding same-language subtitles to Bollywood movies, to give people in India who have low literacy skills regular reading practice. That’s pretty sweeeeeet. In many ways, Google is beginning to scare me with the vast amount of super-detailed data they’re now collecting, but in ways like this, they somewhat redeem themselves.

What I’m reading right now:

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami--A few weeks ago, I saw After the Quake, an adaptation of one of Murakami’s other books, and shortly after I started this book. I’m almost done with it, and it's reaaaaaaally good. There are two parallel stories happening. One about a 15-year old kid who runs away from home to run away from an Oedipus-like prophecy, and to prove to himself he can make it on his own. The other about an old man who can’t read or write, but can talk to cats and occasionally makes fish fall from the sky. Throughout the book, flipping back and forth between stories, you can never really tell whether what you’re reading is really happening, or whether the character is existing within someone else’s dream. Or if the characters jump back and forth between reality and their own, or other people’s dreams. There are so many vivid, dream-like descriptions, that often remind you of things that happened or existed in the other parallel story. Like in the very beginning of the book, after the 15-year old kid first runs away, the old man’s story is introduced. He’s talking to a tomcat about a lost cat he’s trying to help a family find, and the way he’s describing this random lost cat is so similar to how the author initially describes the 15-year old kid. It's hard to explain, but it's soooo good.

Damn. So last Wednesday through this past Monday I was in mexico. HELLO. I went down there for a friend’s wedding, and it was AWESOME. It was hot as hell down there, but beautiful. I didn’t have a watch on all weekend, didn’t have a clock in my room. I just got up every morning when I felt like waking up. Chilled on the beach as long as I felt like chillin on the beach, with a tequila induced concoction in my hand, swam in the ocean, and just chilled all weekend. It was totally slowmotion. Then I come back to work and everyone’s back in the gotta-get-stuff-done mindset, and all I’m wondering is ‘where’s my freakin drink at?’ Worthless.

But the weekend was fun. I did some snorkeling, saw some cool fish and some coral. The first day we were there, my cousin and a buddy from work went straight out to ocean, and right at the shoreline we look down and there’s a little ray swimming around, like make a foot long, just a few feet from us. That was awesome. After the ceremony it was dusk and we were walking along the beach back to where the reception was going to be, and we saw this crab running along the beach. It kept come towards us and were getting a little freaked out, but then Paul put hit foot up, like with his heel on the ground and his toes in the air, and the crab nudged his way under his foot and just sat there. Like it was coming towards us cause it wanted to hide. Lol, that was cute. I also tried to scuba dive, but the waves in the ocean were too hard the day we wanted to go. Worthless.

Now I gotta get back to wrapping stuff up here. It looks like I’m closing on my condo on friday. PIIIIMP. I’m just waiting for something to come up and push me back another month, though. It seems like that’s been my story for the past few. Worthless.

I need to go somewhere and spend some time with just me and my sitar for a while. The whole time I was in mexico, I was ITCHING to get my hands on a guitar, or something. I was considering going to a guitar shop and buying an acoustic, cause I don’t have one, and I’ve been wanting to get one for a while, and it seemed like a better time then ever... I saw a guitar shop while I was in cab heading back to the hotel, and I was thinking I could just come back to where we were and check it out, but I never did. I tried talking to some dudes in the mariachi band that was playing the wedding to see if they knew where i could go to get a guitar, or if they might have had one they were trying to get off their hands, but language was definitely an issue.

I feel like I’m wasting away right now just going through the motions, when I should be using my time to do what it is that I love to do. But there’s a lot that goes into that. What do i do with my job? What do i do with my condo? I’m a smart kid, and I’m sure I could figure it out. I just gotta spend some thought and time on figuring it out before I end up feeling like it's more later than I already feel like it is for me. Worthless. This no-gigging thing isn’t making it any easier for me, either. I know its what I need to do, and it's what’s best for me to do. It's just frustrating playing the same shit everyday watching myself get better at the speed of a snail. I wish I could see my guruji more often so I could accelerate my learning. I am getting better in the areas I know I need to be, it's just, I wanna rock out NOW. There’s that Luke Skywalker in me coming out again, I know…

Anyway, I digress. If you’re still reading this, thanks. If you’re not, stop googling the Olson twins and get back to my website. You should be ashamed of yourself.

What I’m reading right now:

Last Night a Dj Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey: I needed some reading for the plane to Mexico, so I picked this up along with a few other fine pieces of literature. I’m about a quarter of the way through, and it's really interesting. It starts by making correlations with native cultures and DJ culture, and gets into the advent of radio and how it effected the live musician. It's amazing how similar fears and reactions were to radio and to digital music today. Like, it's almost exactly the same, and the outcome of radio was that musicians finally started using the medium to promote themselves instead of fearing it would take away their jobs as performers. It's now getting into how rock started as a form of rhythm and blues and how it separated to its own more independent form, and it's talking about some of the first DJs and club nights in NY, London, France, and what the culture and the people were like. Who the first DJ was two actually mix two records instead of playing one after another. The first DJ to mess with the sound space to pan sounds from left to right. The first people to starting using weird lighting effects with their music, and what some of them were. Like the dude that used to do lights at the grateful dead’s first gigs used to write stuff on colored gels, project them onto a wall, and pour water on the gel to wash the words away. How pimp is that? So I’m totally diggin the book, it's really freakin cool.