Good morning. Welcome to Radio Deconstruction. Today I'll tell you about Gogol Bordello's God-Like. It is the ugliest song I know.

Not the worst song, not the saddest song -- though there's a lot of sorrow in there, if you look -- but the ugliest. It's unflinching, and an interesting example of calculated, artistic use of ugliness as theme.
( oh some natterin's a comin' )

I work in San Francisco. Most days, I ride the Caltrain to work and back. Sometimes, when I have a social engagement in the East Bay, I walk a mile or so to the BART station and ride that into whichever station suits -- one of the Oakland stations if I'm visiting folks there, or Fremont for another group. Some days back, I was walking through a ( Read more... )

Like any other disguise, beauty is something worn from the inside out. Intangibles such as posture, and posture's more mobile cousin, carriage, communicate to the back of the brain. Not just to the observer, but to the self. 'Fake it till you make it' is an understood self-modification technique -- behave calmly to induce calm, appear confident to ( Read more... )

deirdremoon and I were talking over lunch, and I mentioned a good conversation amywithani and I had with ikkyu2 over dinner last Friday. We'd been talking about behavior patterns and pattern-breaking in general. It's a hard thing to do -- often even diagnosis (identifying the pattern to break) is nontrivial. deirdremoon and I started talking about ruts v. habits, and she asked me to ( Read more... )

So, let me tell you about the time I met God.

It was summer of 1998. I was working out in Pleasanton. I was on break, or heading out to lunch, or some such thing. Out in the parking lot. A tree was green in the sun.
( Seized by a terrible and overpowering beauty )

I know a lot of unhappy people. I remarked on this a few years ago. I don't know how to teach people to be happy, which is occasionally irksome, as it would come in handy. But -- and I'm not claiming any personal credit for this -- I seem to have the knack of it, myself. I was just realising yesterday, about a month after the most profound personal ( Read more... )

I think about happiness a lot. Yeesh, that sounds incredibly gothy and mopey. Rest assured I'm not going to go off down Angst Lane just yet. But I do think about the nature and provenance of happiness, given that, well, I like being happy ( Read more... )