Virtual Memories

I’m not sure what resolutions I can make for 2006. In the past year, I read more (and more deeply) than I ever have, experienced that revelation of love that culminated in popping the question to Amy, and did all sorts of charitable activity. I didn’t write as much as I want, so maybe that oughtta be it.

My big project (and those never work out for me, so it’s silly of me to mention it) is to read a lot about urban planning and city dynamics, to get a better idea about the historical development of American cities. If that leads to an essay of some kind, you’ll be the first to know.

Another resolution: I resolve to revamp my music-oriented Mad Mix blog and post more often. I have some ideas for a new graphic layout for it, and a way of making sure there’s a substantive post at least once a week, but it’s a matter of execution (as ever).

Here’s yet more Proust, quoting a doctor:

“Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not kow what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have experienced, Madame.”

That said, Woody Allen’s films have sucked for more than a decade now.

New Year’s Eve is usually a time of reflection and drunkenness, dear readers, and I hope you all engage in plenty of both tonight. I’ll do a little reflecting right now, but no drinking, since it’s morning and I allegedly have standards.

The official VM fiancée & I are heading over to Café Matisse tonight for a five-course New Year’s dinner. It’s an early meal, so we’ll have time to get hammered at home tonight. Last year, we watched the first two Lord of the Rings flicks before the clock struck 12. We’ll have less movie-time this year, so we might just groove with Sun Ra instead.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to Princeton for our traditional New Year’s Day get-together with our friend Cecily, who will likely grill Amy about all sorts of wedding plans. We’re still trying to figure out what (if anything) I oughtta get engraved on my wedding ring. It won’t be this.

How would you go about recapping a year of your life? The gist of mine: helped Dad deal with / recover from heart surgery; proposed to Amy; read Proust; walked around a near-empty city.

There are plenty of other details, many of which you longtime readers have been subjected to: bought her a ring; gained new perspective on 9/11; bought a giant TV; saw a world of comics-geeks; moved this blog to a new provider, then a new platform; visited Cracker Biodome; watched Ric Burns’ 8-part documentary about New York City; read plenty of other writers. There’s more for a recording angel to catch up with, but there’s only so much room for memories. Sez Marcel:

If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was not so merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our present mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build on top of what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintraille had just opened up.

All of which isn’t to say much but Happy New Year, everyone. Live well.

I’ve been reflecting on Proust for the last few days. Here’s a passage about going home again:

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But there are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night’s rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue — if the latter does not itself cease — fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramification and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations.

I promised I’d post the New Orleans pix from last week, including the Katrina Ridge Christmas display, and here they are:

Pictures from Katrina Ridge

Pictures from the French Quarter

Enjoy!

I like some of Rem Koolhaas’ designs. And I enjoyed a bunch of Delirious New York.

That said, I don’t believe there’s any way that his CCTV building in Beijing will actually stand.

What do Jews do on Christmas? According to this video from SNL, it’s a little different than my rendition of Jewish Wonderland a couple of years ago.

Speaking of videos from SNL, you should check out The Chronic of Narnia.

Our trade deficit widens.