Hong Kong

The films of Wong Kar-Wai are convincing me I would really like Hong Kong, but I have discovered that In the Mood for Love was actually shot in Bangkok. I will go there too, then. I like music in this film, and the accents.

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Cast iron pot

The combination of leeks, olive oil and orange juice is serving me well.

I sauteed three sliced leeks in olive oil, in the cast iron Dutch oven my mother regrets having handed over to me. I had juiced three oranges and I added the juice to this, and stuffed the rinds into the cavity of a chicken along with some coarse sea salt and a large handful of raisins. I seeded the chicken under the skin with many sliced garlic cloves and just a few thin red chiles (chile de árbol) which had dried.

I put the chicken into the pot, and added two sliced sweet potatoes, two sliced turnips and a parsnip. Then I covered the pot and simmered it slowly, for an hour or two, until it was done. The chicken was really flavor infused, an actually interesting meat.

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A definition of narcissism

My understanding is this: with narcissism the core problem is that no solid identity actually formed inside of the person. So instead they make up who they would like to be in their head and then write a script for themselves for how they are supposed to act and how others are supposed to act towards them. Basically they simulate being a person, but there is no person inside of them. When they are exposed and it becomes obvious there is no one inside they react with either shame or rage.

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Les mardi gras s’en viennent

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Soy Joaquín

My student’s father is a retired coyote, she says.

We had this poem in elementary school and I found it hackneyed, but I do not now.

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Gianmarco sings folk

It’s cold today and the cold always makes me think of the Andes. Here we have a traditional recording of Edwin Montoya and his group from Puquío.

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Larra

All those academics who talk about “time management,” and have never read this, have truly missed out.

[S]i mañana u otro día no tienes, como sueles, pereza de volver a la librería, pereza de sacar tu bolsillo y pereza de abrir los ojos para hojear [los pocos folletos] que tengo que darte [ya], te contaré cómo a mí mismo, que todo esto veo y conozco y callo mucho más, me ha sucedido muchas veces, llevado de esta influencia, hija del clima y de otras causas, perder de pereza más de una conquista amorosa; abandonar más de una pretensión empezada y las esperanzas de más de un empleo, que me hubiera sido acaso, con más actividad, poco menos que asequible; renunciar, en fin, por pereza de hacer una visita justa o necesaria, a relaciones sociales que hubieran podido valerme de mucho en el transcurso de mi vida; te confesaré que no hay negocio que pueda hacer hoy que no deje para mañana; te referiré que me levanto a las once, y duermo siesta; que paso haciendo el quinto pie de la mesa de un café, hablando o roncando, como buen español, las siete y las ocho horas seguidas; te añadiré que cuando cierran el café, me arrastro lentamente a mi tertulia diaria (porque de pereza no tengo más que una), y un cigarrito tras otro me alcanzan clavado en un sitial, y bostezando sin cesar, las doce o la una de la madrugada; que muchas noches no ceno de pereza, y de pereza no me acuesto; en fin, lector de mi alma, te declararé que de tantas veces como estuve en esta vida desesperado, ninguna me ahorqué y siempre fué de pereza. Y concluyo por hoy confesándote que ha más de tres meses que tengo, como la primera entre mis apuntaciones, el título de este artículo, que llamé: Vuelva usted mañana; que todas las noches y muchas tardes he querido durante ese tiempo escribir algo en él, y todas las noches apagaba mi luz diciéndome a mí mismo con la más pueril credulidad en mis propias resoluciones: ¡Eh, mañana le escribiré! Da gracias a que llegó por fin este mañana, que no es del todo malo; pero ¡ay de aquel mañana que no ha de llegar jamás!

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Mulher rendeira

So this, from radios of long ago, turns out to have been a song from from O CANGACEIRO.

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Nicholas Shaxon

Tax havens are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists, spivs, celebrities or Mafiosi – but banks.

Shaxon is really smart and I learned about him from Hattie.

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Why criticism of the prison industrial complex is important

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

–Adam Gopnick, “The Caging of America,” The New Yorker, 30 January 2012.

Read the whole thing.

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