but clothes is not all

Here is the simple truth about Cary Grant: he was the best and most important actor of the last hundred years. He didn’t reinvent acting like Brando, he didn’t fatten himself up like Robert De Niro or starve himself like Christian Bale. He wasn’t burly like Gable, and he didn’t smolder like Mitchum. Instead, he played slight variations on the same character for the majority of his career, he wore a suit better than anyone in Hollywood, and he made acting seem like living. Over the course of his long career, Grant fixed standards of what it meant to be “debonair” and “a man about town” — everything he did, on screen and off, seemed inflected with panache and grace. Or, as my professor from undergrad used to sum him up: “The man knew how to wear clothes.” Indeed he fucking did.

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solo el tiempo dira que no fuiste tan malo

to Alama you should return

The song “Naci en Alamo” (“I Was Born in Alamo”)[you tube rendition] is a soulful and stirring lament of Gypsies living in Europe today. It’s a song about displacement and homelessness and ultimately about nostalgia for a birthplace that was never home. There is no home, there is no homeland, there is no place of origin.
No tengo lugar
Y no tengo paisaje
Yo menos tengo patria
Naci en Alamo
I have no place
And I have no landscape
Still less do I have a homeland
I was born in Alamo
Like the history of the Gypsies, the song itself has become an archaeological enigma. It has crossed so many borders and been sung in so many languages that it is no longer easy to determine its roots or which precise Alamo, in either Spain or Portugal, the song is about. Even now, Naci en Alamo roams a pathless Odyssey around the Mediterranean, no less homeless than a Gypsy. The word “Gypsy” itself turns out to be a conundrum as well. Gypsies, who speak Romany, refer to themselves as Roma, not with the exonym Gypsy. (Roma is the plural for Rom, meaning “man”—no relation to Romania.) “Gypsy” in English, just like the word gyftos in Greek, may be derived from gipcya, with a possible derivation from egipcien, because Gypsies were mysteriously believed to come from Egypt—which also means from far away, from elsewhere, or just simply from goodness-knows-where. Etymological dictionaries also suggest that the word might derive from the Greek for untouchables, athinganoi, hence zingaro in Italian, tsigane and gitan in French, gitano in Spanish, ţigan in Romanian, cigano in Portuguese. The real origin of the word, like the real origin of the people, is lost in time. There is no origin.

men who ate oranges

Translating my first novel ohhhhhhhhh yeahhhh.
Sad because baby lost WINGO cars only got YESTERDAY GROWLS

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god particle

Weizmann Institute of Science astrophysicists have been prominent in the experiments that have shown “promising signs” of the existence of the Higgs boson — the “God particle” — that provides a framework for all of the subatomic particles in nature and has been sought for decades.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the CERN research center in Switzerland said in an excited announcement on Tuesday that it found some evidence in its experiments of the existence of the elementary particle. It was suggested in 1964 by six physicists, including University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs whom it was named after, as a way to explain mass.
The sub-atomic particle called Higgs is the one piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has not been proven to exist, and some scientists believe that the model will have to be rethought if the Higgs is not found.

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How monotonously

How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.

Lewis

not digging Buddism

  I suspect some bad gurus have fallen prey to mystical nihilism. They may also have been corrupted by that most insidious of all Buddhist propositions, the myth of total enlightenment. This is the notion that some rare souls achieve mystical self-transcendence so complete that they become morally infallible—like the Pope! Belief in this myth can turn spiritual teachers into tyrants and their students into mindless slaves, who excuse even their teachers’ most abusive behavior as “crazy wisdom.”
I have one final misgiving about Buddhism—or rather, about Buddha himself. His path to enlightenment began with his abandonment of his wife and child. Even today, Tibetan Buddhism—again, like Catholicism—upholds male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. To me, “spiritual” means life-embracing, and so a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexual love and parenthood is not spiritual but anti-spiritual.

the Forever City

For a time in my adolescence, I was nuts about the idea of Rome, but to me it was hardly more than an idea, and a poorly formed, misshapen idea at that. I had never even been to the place. I was still in Australia, where, thanks to an education by Jesuits, I spoke a few sentences of Latin but no Italian whatever. The only semi-Romano I knew was actually Irish, a sweet, white-haired, elderly Jesuit who ran the observatory attached to the boarding school I had attended in Sydney, and who, from time to time, would travel to Italy to take charge of its sister institution, belonging to the pope (Pius XII, aka Eugenio Pacelli) and situated at Castelgandolfo, outside the Eternal City. From there, he would bring back postcards, sedulously and with obvious pleasure gleaned from their racks in various museums and churches at 10 to 20 lire each: Caravaggios, Bellinis, Michelangelos.
Where could one see the real thing? Only in Rome. How would one know what feeling in religious art actually was authentic? By going to Rome. Come down to it, how would one know that art of any kind was any good? Mainly—if not only—by going to Rome, and seeing the real thing in the real place. Rome would be my entry door to Italy and then to the rest of Europe. And with that would come sophistication and taste and possibly even spirituality.

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