The Sometimes Blog
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#offli

October 15, 2012 – 12:15 am

At first the quiet was unnerving. Around the world and all at once browsers stalled, then froze, then GPFed; screens flickered on and off; cursors stuck to their place; a torrent of half-regurgitated, self-reflective musings of millions dwindled very fast, then died forever instantly. Phones died; iPads died; WiFi SSIDs slipped away from this reality, one by one, like bored party guests, unapologetic and hurrying to the door.

We were alone with our thoughts.

It was unnervingly quiet. Normally we would raise a communal cry that would shake the foundations of the earth – like we did on that great Livejournal blackout of 2007, or the smaller, frequent ones on Twitter; but our means to raise such cries were all shut down. The media that would inform us of the tragedy died too. We turned with unfamiliar hands to radio and television but, for the first long minutes after it all flickered away, the old news reported old news. We were indeed alone. Some of us speculated whether this loneliness was how Man lived before – and, shaken, others turned to touch or talk to family and pets.

It was quiet – and then, after many scary minutes, an army of sounds invaded: neighbors’ conversations and the sounds of cars driving by and dogs exchanging howls; and televisions and radios all around, reporting old news. They were all there before, but useless, unheeded. With horror, we asked ourselves where all of that noise hid so far and, then, fearfully, if it would ever go back there again.

Minutes turned into hours, but nothing came back and nothing lived and no one would tell us what happened. We left our devices, dead, on tables, and looked up, and got out, and met IRL, and talked nervously for hours, and listened to neighbors’ conversations and television shows and dogs’ howls.

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Can You Be Too Good At Cooking?

June 19, 2012 – 1:44 pm

The six hundred and twenty-five dollars’ Modernist cuisine will get a cheaper home version, Modernist Cuisine at Home, which only costs one hundred and forty – or about 33 Big Macs.

I’ve only browsed through so far, and I can say that this project is a feast for some senses. It’s passionate, which is important. and it wishes to be definite, which is a sign of hubris. It also marks a trend in cooking which I thought I enjoyed: a serious attempt to understand food in resolutions which can only be called geeky.

But lately I’ve been getting a little bit of indigestion looking at some things people do. I can’t really defend this feeling – it is, after all, an issue of the gut – but it seems like there’s a big dose of greed. Food is enjoyed in moderation, and without it food is something else. Just the ink used in Modernist Cuisine, for example, weights 43 pounds. Molecular chefs offer food that’s too smart to eat and doesn’t evoke those little emotions that food evokes.

I’m not sure I’m on the right side of this. Maybe the thought of others being more geeky-obsessive than me just feels strange. In the meanwhile, if you’re really serious about cooking, you’d do very well with Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking.

 

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Damnit, Steve

October 14, 2011 – 2:01 am

For some decades now, Steve Jobs was being Steve Jobs so we won’t have to. So now we have to – otherwise the world of technology will once again be ruled by those who “just have no taste, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and don’t bring any culture into their product” – unregrettably successful but with “really, third rate products”.

My friend Tomer Lichtash wrote (or remixed) an iKaddsh for Jobs. Lots of people payed homage to the dead genius, but of all of them, the only person who’s iMac I destroyed by spilling mediocre Grappa all over it was Tomer Lichtash. They say karma can travel half way around the world. If, by spilling said Grappas on said Lichtash’s iMac ignited the fuse that ended with Job’s demise, I deeply apologize.

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Opening Remarks

August 23, 2011 – 10:39 am

I intend to do very little writing in here. That’s how you know I’m busy actually writing.

And yet, an online place of one’s own is so important, especially in this nano-age of social networks that own your updates and give them the shelf life of unrefrigerated milk. Everybody needs a place to stretch his own legs. A place to voice one’s opinion. To do so in the cool quiet of his own piece of land, not the hum and din of the Agora.

Somewhere, in short, to procrastinate.

This is also not a blog. It is not meant for your enjoyment. I will not entertain. It’s a sometimes-blog, meant for my own creative release. (If you inadvertently enjoy it anyway, I take no responsibility). It’s not a vehicle for fame; in fact, if you’re reading here at all, it must mean that I’ve killed eleven people and set myself on fire and you’re a reporter wondering what happened.

(If that is the case, don’t be daft. Don’t ask my neighbors if they knew. Of course they’d tell you I was quiet and polite. They don’t want their property value to go down. Ask my ex-girlfriends).

I have other places you should go read in: tryscersfic is a Twitter-enabled flash fiction experiment that goes badly for at least three years now; This Was Last Year is an online novel, written in progress, scheduled to start failing from September 6th. I also write about Internet culture and technology, though most of it is in Hebrew. Now you see I lied: this site is useful. One column to the right you could see all that – where it says grab box – plus some other short-shelf-lived witticisms I post on Twitter.

See, you’re glad you stayed all the way till the end.

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Breakfast

January 31, 2010 – 6:18 am

I drove around and got to your house accidentally. So I sat there with the windows rolled down for the cold night and I looked at your windows, and they were dark. I turned the radio on, I smoked a cigarette, but I was uneasy. I changed the stations, I rolled another cigarette. I put the seat down and I thought perhaps I’ll stay there for the night, and I almost lulled myself down with a thought of how, three years ago, I waited down here on the nearby bench, drinking one of six beers I had in a bag I got from the all-night store, sitting across the street from you like I am now, looking at your windows as I do now, watching your silhouette as you were pacing the room, phone to your ear, trying to get hold of your shrink who was in another country. You told me to get out and I said no, this won’t fly with me, it may have worked with other men but not with me, woman, and you went into a panic attack, and you were pacing, and you were crying, and I was standing there and there was nothing I could do.

So I took my keys and I waited outside and I was looking up the number for your shrink when she’s abroad with my phone on a neighbor’s wi-fi, and I texted it to you and I watched as you talked and I saw how your pacing eased and calmed as you did. And then I drunk the second beer, the third, the fifth, the last.

I thought of that night and it was a familiar country in my head, and maybe if the cold was less biting just then, it would have been enough, but I was still uneasy, and I got out of the car and I jumped up and down a little, trying to keep quiet and looking at your window. But that didn’t work, and so I got up to your place and broke in, quietly, and sat like a thief in my armchair in your dark living room.

I sat there, staring, betrayed, at your new drapes, twitching my legs and wanting to smoke. I took off my shoes, taking care to leave them by the chair in an orderly fashion, and I went to your bedroom door and I almost sighed out loud with relief when I saw you were sleeping alone. I don’t know what I would have done that night if I saw you there with somebody. I sat there on the bed next to you, watching you breathe, and breathing with you, and then I lay down, and then I curled into a ball and watched you like this all night, matching a breath for a breath. And when the sun came up sufficiently I got up gently and closed your bedroom door and I made you breakfast. Quietly as I could, and nothing too fancy so the smells won’t wake you. One piece of bread, very lightly toasted, one piece of bread toasted almost black, with the edges cut off, on the edges of the plate, and a simple salad — lettuce I ripped by hand because I couldn’t find the knife, and some cheese — tried to arrange them all nicely on the plate, and I put my shoes on and I closed the door behind me. I often think of it, and about many things like that, and of what you might be thinking to yourself as you’re eating those breakfasts.

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On The Piazza

October 10, 2009 – 3:07 pm

A man stands in a semi-crowded piazza. It’s like this every night. Europe. The buildings and the fountain and the people are ornate, ancient. Maybe eastern Europe. I’m standing there and listening to him. A couple of ancient people do the same.

He’s got keen eyes, twinkling. He’s holding a typewriter to his chest between both hands. Not hugging. His fingers dance on the keyboard. He’s playing the typewriter as he would play the accordion. He’s good. In my head his music sounds good. Other people in the piazza seem to agree: some woman says somewhere, “He’s a poet!” He’s got a hat laid out on the sidewalk, but facing down. In this strange, good music, it seems reasonable to assume the hat is being worn by someone who just finished drowning himself in the piazza. He’s got a cardboard sign next to the hat. It says “Remember to use punctuation!” Like that, with the exclamation. More and more people gather to hear the poet. He’s probably Charles Bukowski. His fingers glide effortlessly over his instrument. I’m trying to catch his gaze but his eyes glide too, like his fingers, over me, over each man and woman in the crowd. Now there’s a real crowd, yeah, and they push me back, now I have to stand on tip toe to try and catch a glimpse of these gleaming eyes. The music changes.

You’ll never got out of the piazza, I’m thinking.

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The House (M.D) Does Indeed Always Win

September 19, 2009 – 4:18 am

Why wouldn’t there be another casino-beating, stake-shuffling Ocean caper – an Ocean 14? According to an IMDB contributor, Steven Soderberg gave up on the idea after Bernie Mac’s — Frank Catton — untimely death.

Cause of Mac’s death? Well, he did have Sarcoidosis. But he died of pneumonia.

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The Old Man of the Internet

July 4, 2009 – 12:45 pm

Excuse me for the nostalgia, but it’s become way too easy to know things. Way too easy to IMDB that actor who was in that movie but also in that TV show. Too easy to get info so you never have to wonder. Googling is too fast for wonderment to even present itself. Everything is there before you asked it. Everything is not astounding. Everything is thus unimportant – there’s no need to memorize it, it will always be here.

So as our memory circuits rust, our imagination stays limp. It’s an old truth that questions always arise and always must be answered, and as old a truth that when hard data doesn’t present itself, fictional data appears like an understudy. Why did lightning strike that hill? Why, it was the lord of such things from his dwelling place high in the sky. What is his name? Well, it is Yeush, the master of despair. Where is his dwelling place? Oh, it is a palace on top of the highest mountain, where his sits upon his gilded chair, waited upon by his beautiful, pregnant concubine Hara. Lightning used to mother pantheons; now it begets a Wikipedia page the content of which there’s no need to remember.

It wasn’t always like that. Even though the television people called it the Information Superhighway, it used to have much less information, and the road was narrow, and the ride was really very bumpy. Information was scattered, prosaic and hard to get to. Searches were hard and long, not Google-fast, when you were stumbling through Lycos to get at pages written by Geocities citizens. While searching you had time to wonder, you’d have time to invent. You’d have time to work on your memory. Who was that actor in the movie? Wasn’t he that guy who’s that son of that other guy? From the movie? What was that movie called? We must really watch it together sometime.

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Meditations In Emotional Transcendence

February 8, 2009 – 5:14 pm

Is life covertly good?

It may very well be, and our perspective being what it is we may never be able to find out. This shabby room, its peeling paint, the curtains tattered and gray with dust — it may be happily sheltering us from a dark storm raging outside, but we can’t tell; the yellowing blinds are drawn.

Our friends may love us, we don’t know; all we know is that we hate them.

There may be hope for everything: are dreams might be still intact. We see the crack that runs through them. There’s no way of telling how deep it goes.

And love might just be lurking happily around that corner, but what face will it assume once get there? How will we know, with all the faces staring blankly just around each corner of each city, which of them was sent for us? And if it is indeed the right corner? We are all like packages sent for each other, but all our post labels fell; now we wander aimlessly, bump like atoms, and we can’t even ask: excuse me, am I for you? Are you for me?

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Yellow Fields

February 7, 2009 – 10:05 pm

Ah, Sh. We never met, and already I think you hate me. I tried to tell you something but got a little tongue-tied, and you hushed me brusquely and turned away; I stood there after for a while and stared at nothing. I couldn’t tell you how ripe my love for you was already, because you could never agree to understand. No honest woman ever will. But that, often times, is love: a man looking at a woman through a window, and while he is struck, falling, wounded, she never sees his shadow on the floor.

Now I heard you went with a man from the top floors, and I am glad; for suffering things no honest woman should ever suffer, you are now better than honest men. We’ll meet some day, maybe waiting for the elevator. I’ll be the man looking down and trying not to cast a shadow.

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