I want my money back for the Arular album and the 2005 show at the Echoplex, please.


In one of many contradictions that seem to provide the narrative for Maya’s life and art, Ikhyd was not, as she had repeatedly announced he would be, born at home in a pool of water. As usual, she wanted to transform her personal life into a political statement. “You gotta embrace the pain, embrace the struggle,” she proclaimed weeks before Ikhyd was born. “And my giving birth is nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.”

As it happened, Maya, who is 34, gave birth in a private room in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “Ben’s family insisted,” she told me a year later, when we met in March for drinks at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in nearby Beverly Hills. Before the Grammys, Maya and Bronfman moved to Los Angeles from New York, buying a house in very white, very wealthy Brentwood, an isolated and bucolic section of the city with a minimal history of trauma and violent uprisings. “L.A. is a lovely place to have a baby,” Maya said.

“We went to the Grammys, we had the baby and we bought the house,” Maya said as she studied the menu, deciding on a glass of wine and French fries. “A month later, all this stuff was happening in Sri Lanka” — the Tamil insurgency was being defeated amid reports of thousands of civilian casualties — “and I started speaking up against it. And then, within a month, I found out my house was being bugged, my phones were being tapped and my e-mails were being hacked into. I was getting death threats, like ‘hope your baby dies.’ The biggest Sinhalese community is in Santa Monica, people who are sworn enemies of the Tamils, which is me.” She paused. “I live around the corner from Beverly Hills, and I feel semiprotected by Ben and, if anything happens to me, then Ben’s family will not take it. Jimmy Iovine, who runs Interscope, my record company, said, ‘Pick your battles carefully — don’t put your life at risk,’ but at the end of the day, I don’t see how you can shut up and just enjoy success when other people who don’t have the fame or the luxury to rent security guards are suffering. What the hell do they do? They just die.”

Maya’s tirade, typical in the way it moved from the political to the personal and back again, was interrupted by a waiter, who offered her a variety of rolls. She chose the olive bread.

Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. “I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”

AFTER BUYING THEIR home in Brentwood, Maya and Bronfman, whom she met in New York shortly after the breakup of his band, the Exit, decided to build a recording studio in the house. “It was very grown-up,” Maya recalled when we were in L.A. Bronfman, who is tall, soft-spoken and protective of his fiancée, now works with Global Thermostat, a technology company that is working on ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and is a founder of Green Owl, an environmentally conscious record label and sustainable-clothing line. “Everyone got so freaked out when they heard we bought the house,” Maya continued. “When we moved in, we imported all our English friends. Suddenly, everyone was living with us — eight people at once. For the first time, I had something called the comfort of your own house, and it turned into a commune: they all came for two days, and they never left. My producer, Blaqstarr, was living there. And then Cherry, who sings with me, was staying with us. And Rusko, who was also producing, was there all the time. My brother arrived. And in the end, we had three people to a room. We ended up buying a second house for everyone to live in.”

Here is a picture of a fig tart. I eated this tart. Well, not this one. But one like it. Once.

This fig tart is a present for you. It is a bribe. Because I am sorry I haven't posted in a long time.

I thought I was done with having things to say. But then I realized that will never happen.

Also, I have been working on a side project. And it is demanding, like an annoying child.

Also, things happened. Lots of things. That kept me from writing. Little things, big things.

My hub cap fell off my car for one. And then I had to run down the street and get it and then also, get on my hands and knees and put it back on.

After, my hands were black. And then I had to find a place to wash them.

Also, my cell phone started oozing a radioactive...ooze. I think it was gel from the screen. And I thought I had ear cancer from the ooze. It got in my hair! Gross.

Also, my kidney was hurting one day. So I thought I had kidney failure. Then I remembered the Bodyworks exhibit. The healthy kidney was pretty and bluish pink. And tiny! Cute kidney!

The diseased kidney didn't even look like a kidney. Just vomit on a kidney-shaped thing.

Then I imagined my kidney looking sad and vomit-like. I couldn't write about this, do you understand?

Also, I was busy judging myself and beating myself up for being wrong.

Then I read the NYT article about MIA and had someone else to judge so that took the pressure off for a while.

I will post it for you to see. My favorite part is when she talks about people dying in Sri Lanka while eating truffled french fries! Also, she lives in Brentwood. What kind of person does that, even?

I saw Daljit Dhaliwal throw a chair at someone once. And now whenever I see her on TV I have to change the channel. Or I ask whoever has the remote "change the channel! change the channel!" while I cover my ears. I don't want to catch what she has. And you can catch things with your ears. Like ear cancer.

Also, I have been reading.

There is so much good writing in the world!

It makes me laugh. It makes me happy. It makes me sad.

It makes me feel not alone. Then it makes me depressed about not posting on my blog.

Thank you for reading my blog!

Yesterday incapable of writing even one word. Today no better. Who will save me? And the turmoil in me, deep down, scarcely visible; I am like a living lattice-work, a lattice that is solidly planted and would like to tumble down.

-Franz Kafka

Silverlake

Stores with names like "Rags," and "Rubbish." Stores that sell offendingly expensive handbags, vintage retro-modern chairs, hand-blown contorted glass bowls. These pieces arrange themselves on bamboo floors, prim coffee tables, severe shelves, looking bored, effete, a little pained.

This is the worst kind of purgatory; the offhand cruelty of being labeled with the distinct purpose of invoking the meanness of irony (I feel for you, Pilot Inspektor).

And to spend your life feeling like less than what you really are. Until, I suppose, it is all over. And to realize that you were never rags or rubbish all along, but quite the opposite.

This is inanimate Greek tragedy on the eastside of LA.

Via M

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

“ ‘Metropolis’ is the most iconic silent picture of its day, mainly because of the visual ambition and virtuosity of the film itself,” said Noah Isenberg, editor of “Weimar Cinema,” a book about early German films, and a professor of film and literary studies at the New School. But until now, we didn’t have the full story. These additions are really essential to understanding the full arc of the narrative.”

Flight 01 from Nickolas Peter on Vimeo.

via Nick

I think we ought to read only the kinds of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

-Franz Kafka

Finite

adj.

1.

a. Having bounds; limited: a finite list of choices; our finite fossil fuel reserves.

b. Existing, persisting, or enduring for a limited time only; impermanent.

2. Mathematics

a. Being neither infinite nor infinitesimal.

b. Having a positive or negative numerical value; not zero.

c. Possible to reach or exceed by counting. Used of a number.

d. Having a limited number of elements. Used of a set.

3. Grammar Of or relating to any of the forms of a verb that can occur on their own in a main clause and that can formally express distinctions in person, number, tense, mood, and voice, often by means of conjugation, as the verb sees in She sees the sign.

4. (Mathematics) bounded in magnitude or spatial or temporal extent a finite difference

5. (Mathematics) Maths logic having a number of elements that is a natural number; able to be counted using the natural numbers less than some natural number.

6.

a. limited or restricted in nature human existence is finite

b. (as noun) the finite

7. (Linguistics / Grammar) denoting any form or occurrence of a verb inflected for grammatical features such as person, number, and tense