"Yet Being - what is Being? It is It itself. The thinking that is to come must learn to experience that and say it."

It's in your face, but you can't grab it. What is it? It's it. Remember this song?

"But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless...man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say."

"I am a patient boy,
I'll wait, I'll wait, I'll wait, I'll wait."

Ebbs and flows. This is how I explain to myself the endless vacillation between happiness and homelessness, satisfaction and disconcert, and the necessity for constant reorientation. There are ebbs and there are flows; I try and withstand both with a seriousness appropriate to life. I've consoled myself with Nietzsche: "The path to happiness is subterranean, requiring great seriousness." But it has been Nietzsche that has led me to desolation: "The secret to my happiness? A yes, a no, a straight line, a goal." My goals are obscure, opaque; for this reason my joyousness feels insincere. I have vague ideas of happiness achieved through an active work ethic, a metaphysics of labor. But I fear this is the last consolation of the slavish. I don't want to be a richer man, I just want to be a better man. I want to be a better man. Time to make a ch-ch-ch-change.

The following report by Channel 4 News, London, shows footage of the incident which led to the death of Ian Tomlinson, a victim of physical assault by a police officer while protesting against the recent Group of 20 economic summit. A British judge ruled Channel 4 was entitled to release the video, despite an attempt by the Independent Police Complaints Commission to obtain a court ordered injunction. The confrontation between Tomlinson and the officer is remarkably brief and of seemingly minor physical violence. Channel Four's reporting utilizes the array of cameras distributed throughout the protest site to spotlight the actions of the offending officer in the minutes leading up to his assault on Tomlinson, who was standing with his hands in his pockets and his back to the officer when he was struck. The video incident bears a striking resemblance to the video of a beat-down delivered to a student, by a cop, at a recent protest occupation at the New School. Both videos speak to the egalitarian nature of information distribution networks in societies where the proliferation of surveillance cameras and personal video devices truly has created panopticonic conditions.

I've heard that The Ronette's biggest hits began as pillow talk between Ronnie, the tempestuous 'original bad girl of rock and roll', and Phil Spector, her brilliant but completely fucking crazy husband and producer. That's hot. It must have been back when Phil was just crazy enough to be mistaken for passionate and uninhibited. Well, that soon passed, and by the time Ronnie left him in 1973, Phil had left the station.

The good die young; Phil Spector lived long enough to prove the point. Yesterday he was convicted of murdering Miss Lana Clarkson, a beautiful former B-movie star (Barbarian Queen). Shot her dead in the foyer of his mansion after bringing her home from the House of Blues, where Ms. Clarkson played the role of the 'waitress trying to make it in Hollywood'. Amazingly, Phil Spector is the first celebrity to be convicted of murder in Los Angeles in 40 years. His longstanding and well-documented obsession with firearms, along with his penchant for using them in a threatening manner, pretty much sealed his fate.

His stylist should do time as well.

"Hey, I heard a funny thing, somebody said to me, you know that I could be in love with almost everyone, I think that people are the greatest fun."

I once broke up with a girl, or rather, she broke up with me. We had a love of this band in common, and together we listened to this song, held each other, and cried.

I just learned that today marks the 15th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide.

This was a big deal for me at the time, and not just because I was one of the legions of dirty-haired, plaid-wearing Pacific Northwesterners for whom Nirvana's music had become something of reverence. In the days following Cobain's death, there were two suicides at the Seattle-area high school where I was flunking my freshman year. These only added tragic punctuation to the dozens, hundreds, of to-be-expected self-mutilations, tattoos, dropouts, etc. The school went so far as to hold a memorial service on the football field, and make grief counselors available to all students.

You must understand, by April 5th, the skies of Seattle have been constantly obscured by near complete cloud cover for over 6 months. It is life-stifling in a way only climate can be. Kurt Cobain was the product of this climate: withered, deformed, malnourished. Just as surely as such a climate breeds robust natures, it shows no mercy to the weak.