On Analog Time vs. Digital Time
17 Saturday Dec 2022
Posted 2022, Commentary, India, politics
in17 Saturday Dec 2022
Posted 2022, Commentary, India, politics
in14 Monday Nov 2022
Posted 2022, 22TimeTrav
inIt’s Time Trav number three!
This is the third of a series of posts entitled Time Travel in ’22 with MTK (categorized 22TimeTrav) in which I link back to the archive to posts from on or around today’s date. Meta. In this case it’s links from the month of November over the last 31 years.
IN THIS MONTH, NOVEMBER, I …
31 years ago … was “Carter Ryan” News and Sports Radio Anchor on Intercontinental Radio Taiwan (ICRT)
27 years ago … wrote an article about Rigo 95 for *surface magazine and began a ten year friendship with him
26 years ago … wrote some poems
26 years ago … witnessed the death of a close family friend and wrote about it
22 years ago … covered the Florida Fiasco of the 2000 Election for George magazine
20 years ago … wrote about the off-year elections and accused the Bush Administration of fascism
18 years ago … wrote a public letter to Senator Barbara Boxer beseeching her to contest the election
17 years ago … summarized the tremendous amount of work I did for Pacifica Radio
16 years ago … wrote this poem about changing India
15 years ago … wrote and self-published a poem as an artists book
14 years ago … wrote a detailed analysis of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai
12 years ago … was downtown in San Francisco as the Giants won the World Series
11 years ago … began a book about technology and society called Plug/Unplug
10 years ago … created this blog! and took footage of pelicans and coastal california
9 years ago … covered the 40-year North Oakland tradition called the Turkey Shoot
7 years ago … a poem about the maddening flow of time
6 years ago … did some work about Bob Dylan after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature
5 years ago … some art and kayaked Lake Austin with my son
There you go: thirty-one years of Novembers in:
Taiwan, India, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and San Antonio.
I never sought recognition or made much of an effort to promote myself. That’s why I put everything here. I still seek help to publish and produce both work from the past and current work and am, as always, open to proper collaboration that could get me wider reach, without compromising the identity I have worked so hard to maintain.
Best,
mtk
25 Tuesday Oct 2022
Posted 2022, 22TimeTrav
inIt’s Time Trav number two!
This is the second of a series of posts entitled Time Travel in ’22 with MTK (categorized 22TimeTrav) in which I link back to the archive to posts from on or around today’s date. Meta. In this case it’s links from the month of October over the last 38 years.
IN THIS MONTH, OCTOBER …
38 Years Ago … at twilight, I took this picture with 35mm film of Matt Sherwood and John Gentz
28 years ago … Kenny Trice took this picture of me having a cigar on Ocean Beach
27 years ago … I wrote a poem entitled “Memorandum” – (really liked this one, think stylistically it was ahead of its time)
26 years ago … wrote more poetry in my journals
25 years ago … wrote my first koan. And a short story called, “We,” – the editors of The New Yorker hand-wrote a rejection on one of their cards that read, “this is more like one we’d publish,” or something like that. Was thrilled to receive that, I remember
24 years ago … MY THIRD NOVEL! “Karna’s Conflict,” was completed. Originally typewritten in three days, this unappreciated gem was posted online before and during the Millennium
23 years ago … wore a shirt that read “Fuck Rudy,” to the Sensation exhibit at Brooklyn Museum of Art, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to censor it
20 years ago … produced this music video with Frank Sosa using footage by A.P. Ferrara from the massive protest against war as a reaction to 9/11 that was held in Washington, D.C.
19 years ago … I covered the Recall Election that installed Arnold Schwarzenegger Governor of California for Pacifica Radio and BBC drive time radio in the UK
17 years ago … completed the artist’s book, dereliction, which now resides in the permanent collection at Stanford. I was very proud of that one. Hello, Stanford? Get in touch.
15 years ago … recorded the sound of an F/A 18 Jet as it screamed over my head during Fleet Week in San Francisco
14 years ago … finished a short story I had been working on for the previous seven years, entitled: “Before You Came.”
13 years ago … attended Steph Curry’s first game and filmed it with digital camera!
12 years ago … The Giants won the pennant and I was with the fans at the yard
11 years ago … ended my campaign for Mayor of San Francisco
10 years ago … the Giants won the world series again
8 years ago … they did it again
5 years ago … reviewed “Manhattan Beach,” by Jennifer Egan
There you go: thirty-eight years of Octobers in:
San Antonio, New York, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco.
I never sought recognition or made much of an effort to promote myself. That’s why I put everything here. I still seek help to publish and produce both work from the past and current work and am, as always, open to proper collaboration that could get me wider reach, without compromising the identity I have worked so hard to maintain.
Best,
mtk
10 Wednesday Aug 2022
Posted 2022, 22TimeTrav
inThis site is a treasure trove of memories. I created it when I was 40, updated it when I was 50, and now at 55, I am blogging here contemporaneously. Today begins a series of posts entitled Time Travel in ’22 with MTK (categorized 22TimeTrav) in which we link back to the archive to posts that are on or around today’s date.
ON THIS DAY I …
30 Years Ago … photographed families on two-wheelers in Taiwan.
25 Years Ago … mailed a ‘letter to the editor’ of The New Yorker magazine.
17 Years Ago … recorded cicadas in Kamakura, Japan.
12 Years Ago … wrote the very first post for Giants Baseball Corner, entitled, “Eleven to Eleven in the bottom of the Eleventh,” it’s a perfect memory.
10 Years Ago … took a photo of summer flora in Oakland.
8 Years Ago … wrote about my concerns for the Buddy Calk Trailhead of the Leon Creek Waterway in San Antonio, Texas.
5 Years Ago … wrapped up Giants Baseball Corner, it went on hiatus for three years, and wrote an explanatory post about what you could find here, since that was the year I added all the other stuff.
There you go: thirty years of August tenthishness in:
Taiwan, NYC, Japan, San Francisco, Oakland and San Antonio.
with love from,
M.T. Karthik
Space and Time Traveller
17 Monday Jan 2022
Posted 2022, Commentary, conceptual art, essay, literature
inJanuary 17, 2020
The machines subtly took control of time from humanity and almost no one noticed.
This base-ten cult of decades, centuries and millennia seized all of culture in the space of five score years and became the first salvo of the machines, culminating in the agreement among them known as 2000.
I was born into a continuous and ancient culture, untethered to such limitations, which soared to intellectual, philosophical, cultural and artistic heights. We invented chess and a concept of zero and many other philosophies that spread from the bosom of our land outward across the continents in your (retroactively named) first millennium.
Until we were brutally interrupted by the Europeans in their savage centuries – of using ships to travel everywhere and subjugate everyone else in the name of a ‘civilization’ we found and still find invasive, crass, physical, brutish, short-sighted, arrogant and ignorant.
They learned what they wanted to learn, what profited them, quickly though … and were great at taking credit for others’ thoughts and ideas by dehumanizing them (for, among other things, the unwillingness to debase oneself to damaging another for one’s own gain).
So yeah, suddenly, in the exact middle of their second millennium, for five centuries, they administered this vicious, dehumanizing, racist projection upon the world, culminating in continental-sized land grabs that attempted to genocide hundreds of nations of millions of people, whom they mistakenly called Indians and Blacks.
We watched all this from the other side of the world where we too were forced to absorb the Europeans’ assault, – mostly the British. We, too, then experienced the God-complex and scheming manipulations they used to elevate themselves and bend us into submission.
Thus, just as their second millennium came to a close, and a so-called Post-Colonial Era was granted by their philosophy, we are also among the hundreds of millions that shook off the yoke of their subjugation.
My existence straddles millennia.
And I don’t know when you’re living, but we now awake daily to contemplate the possibility of our complete and total eradication, not necessarily at the hands of the violent, but perhaps as a result of what the Europeans’ half-millennium has wrought, for better or worse. They build, protect and insure their clubhouse built of racist social truths for the 1%.
Their defensiveness and insecurity in the slow realization of their failings, cripples us, as we try to do the slow, age-old work … of pacifying, indeed tranquilizing the bellicose nature so quick to emerge in the grunts.
It awakens flash anger and violent explosions that have devastating effects upon hundreds of thousands of families and innocents.
It maintains white-supremacy and racial dominance. It continues and worsens insidiously by promoting loudly and at huge international volume, those who continuously relate their narrative, culminating in the ugly raw capitalist burp that is Trump – a P.T. Barnum in the White House who thinks he’s God.
(beats)
It quietly silences those telling parallel history – by eliminating them from the formal base-ten digital record in the Internet amongst the saved data. And makes them unpopular by drowning them out and by any other means necessary. Facebook is the perfect machine for this.
This means, in some cases, making the truth unpopular by any means necessary and substituting a social truth for the real truth by any means necessary.
They have not yet fully seen how what they have done was wrong nor apologized nor shown remorse nor asked genuine forgiveness nor sought to restore what was.
Instead they have created their own history that labels these millennia, establishes the calendar and when the day begins and ends and uses globalist terms for engagements that are ferociously capitalist, in which money is the almighty and war for resources is perpetual. They declare themselves the victors of these continental land grabs and centuries of slave-ownership.
On the clock we live under at the dawn of their third millennium, they drive the engine of our world madly forward at an increasingly unsustainable pace.
My name is Karthik and I am a human born in Tamil Nadu, India, and raised in the United States of America for the past 50 years. I am well-educated and read daily a large amount of contemporaneous information and data about our times. I am unemployed and divorced from all ideology.
I am not selling anything and I am not looking for a job.
I am merely trying to communicate how sickened and embarrassed I am by the USA. And to beg you to Stop. Unplug. Slow down. Get back to who you really are. You are lost and running at a breakneck pace.
When you’re lost, don’t run at a breakneck pace.
Stop.
Calm down.
Collect data and evaluate the current situation, what is actually in front of you.
Organize and Re-order your priorities to the immediate.
Immediately, a quarter of a million and rising to a third of a million Americans are dying, actively, of an unprecedented viral pandemic because we, as towns, cities, states and a nation have failed so completely to organize consistent, universal policy to control spread.
Stop.
Think about what YOU are doing. Each day. To prevent spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus and monkeypox.
26 Wednesday Apr 2017
26 Wednesday Apr 2017
23 Thursday Feb 2017
Posted birds
in02 Monday Apr 2012
Posted photography
in05 Monday Apr 2004
Posted audio, journalism, Los Angeles, performance, radio
in13 Friday Feb 1998
Posted journal entries, NYC, reviews
inTags
1998, Band, Big, cafe, David, Dinkins, fez, Karthik, m.t., Mayor, Mingus, mtk, new, new york, ny, the, time, york
2/13/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noonish on a Friday
Yo, I was set up … by Mingus
and knocked down … by The Mingus Big Band
over gin and tonics at the Fez.
Last night after work I went to a lecture by David Dinkins, former Mayor of New York, sponsored by The New School. It was a part of a series of lectures taking place this semester entitled, “Media and Race Relations.” Dinkins feels like a really positive old guy. Very forthright and direct and even-handed. He read a prepared speech and then fielded questions from the crowd of maybe twenty or thirty people on hand. The speech was rhythmic and well-paced, addressing the topic in general terms and peppered with a couple of extemporary examples.
He did not say anything too unusual, said what the ex-first-Black-Mayor-of-New-York-City-who-was-embattled-throughout-his-administration-and-who-lost-re-election-by-the-same-slim-margin-he-won-by-first-time-round might be expected to say, that, and I’m paraphrasing here, things under the current administration pretty much suck … unless you’re rich. That the crime rate being down is a good thing, but that it was his previous administrations programs that were primarily responsible. That the current Mayor is a bully. He defended himself against the main controversy of his term.
He is a politician after all and was obliged thus to say some things about America and “this great City,” and so on. He spoke eloquently about the disparities of this city, though. Mentioned that the infant mortality rate on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is 5.4 per 1,000 live births and in Fort Green Brooklyn, less than twenty miles away, it is 24 per 1,000 live births. A frightening and sad statistic. He mentioned another statistic that I found staggering: regarding the media and it’s treatment of women and women’s issues.
In a recent media study, he reported, it was found that when a person is referred to in the Main section of the paper, 86% of the time it is a male person, in the business section 85%, and in the Metropolitan sections 76% of the time references are to men. Of the occasions when women are mentioned in the paper, more than 50% of the time it is as a perpetrator of some crime or in some other negative connotation.
These numbers are weird and I can not understand really how they are conceived. I’d like to look into that.
It’s funny how a thought becomes a statistic becomes a fact and a part of social truth. Paz: “the North American … substitutes social truth for real truth which is always disagreeable.” Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950.
The lecture was good. I look forward to the next one in the series by the Reverend Al Sharpton.
(Afterward, I came back here to the office and edited the third draft of “Mahmoud Singh.” It’s a good first story for New York. I feel tired of it now though. It doesn’t breathe enough. Need to make a new one. When? When I get some peace of mind.)
MB made 9:00 reservations for us at the Time cafe and Fez Supper Club.
While I was waiting for him at the school, I was chatting with the security guard and a young woman who was also waiting, to meet someone after class. I said to the guard, “You’ve heard of home-sickness, right? … what do you call it when you have no home and yet you feel a sickness? That is, you have no place to be homesick for but you feel a sickness for a home that exists in your mind?”
The young woman said, “Identity Crisis.”
I waited for MB at my building until ten minutes to 9, then we hopped in a cab to the club at Great Jones and Lafayette streets in the East Village. Arrived right at 9 and went in. “Time” is labyrinthine with an upstairs glass-walled, fishbowl restaurant and then a blue archway leading to an inner red-boothed bar, both filled with the pretty people and then a stairwell down into the sanctum, a blue walled hallway leading to the supper club known as The Fez, where we were met by a beautiful young bronzey Black woman wearing a wireless headset who was responsible for seating us. Girl was fine and had a sweet smile. I said to her, looking as deeply as I could into her eyes in the darkness of the low-ceilinged club, “it must be difficult walking around with disembodied voices in your head.” and I smiled. She looked puzzled at first and then was actually interrupted by the voice in the headset to which she responded first and then smiled that beautiful smile and said to me, “Yeah, it gets a little confusing when it’s busy.” Fine.
We sat and ordered a round of drinks. MB had the usual. I was hungry and ordered some Salmon which was not great. It was boring and tasted like nothing except the sauces and spices which were hardly placed on the plate. Even the supposed blackened salmon with wasabi-vinagrette that sounded so nice was boring food, and too expensive.
The deal on the gig was that the cover was $18 and there was a two-drink minimum, but you could stay for the second set once you were inside. Dinner was not included and we were wearing serious critics ears after dropping so much bread for the much-hyped Mingus Big Band. Much of it was choice of course, because I wanted to estimate the place, quality of the food, seating etc.
I spent three bucks on the coatcheck and 18 to get in and 63 on drinks and dinner. That’s $84 for the two of us with the show included. We were there at 9:00 and the show started at 9:30.
The set up:
The Mingus Big Band is a Workshop group that plays the music of Charles Mingus. They opened the set by telling us they were going to play some music they hadn’t practiced fully, that they hadn’t looked at in a long time. It was odd. The performance started with a chart called, “Slippers,” and they were literally signalling and calling out changes and sections to one another. It felt crowded and unrehearsed. They were working shit out while they played. It gave MB and I pause. We figured we had been taken. $18 and the drinks for this? We are new to New York, him a year and a half and me a few months, we didn’t know any better than to attend the Mingus Big Band, thinking we’d hear some Mingus wicked-like.
They were struggling their way through the shit when I actually wrote on a napkin at one point, “MINGUS DONE 20 YEARS and STILL KICKING ALL Y’ALLS ASSES”
The band also recognized their benefactor, Sue Mingus who was in attendance, a blonde, short-haired (business cut) older white woman with a kindly, smiley way about her. Then they introduced a Mingus contemporary, one Mr. Howard Johnson who played in a Mingus septet at one point and who charted an arrangement of “OP,” a tune originally written for Oscar Pettitford. Mr. Johnson was to direct the band in playing it. He introduced it with some discussion about his relationship with Mingus and then actually took a moment to remind the band of some changes and notations. Again it was odd. Like a practice session.
They flubbed the shit out of it so badly they had to be counted into the “D” section. It was almost comical. But occasionally our thoughts crept to how much we’d paid to see the show.
The set break came and we decided to take a little stroll around the block. We got back to try to find some better seats, since the second set was less crowded. The sweet hostess with the headset made a little small talk with me and smiled that beautiful smile again. She led us to a pair of seats front and center. Many people left, but there were several sticking around for the second half.
The Knock Down
Bam! How can I describe the second set to you without explaining that we were HAD! The dark, low-hanging ceiling of the Fez filled out with the radical sounds of Mingus! It was crazy. It was like a different group came on. They were wild and soloing like crazy and just out of this world. Hollering and yelling and playing tight tight tight Mingus licks like they weren’t even the same band as the first set. It was too much. MB and I kept staring across the table at one another and laughing. They completely turned us around. It ended with a raging take on Better Get Hit in Yo Soul which knocked the doors off the place. It was two different gigs: a rehearsal/workshop and a straight ahead performance! Cool.
An instructor from the New School is the bass player in the band and he had a student come up and jam on harmonica at the gig, too. It was right on to be associated with the cat. Big-ass shoes to fill, and he did so respectfully and with modesty. Even had some skills, too.
The deal
The Mingus Big Band plays at the Time Cafe in the Fez Club. $18 for both sets OR with student ID, $10 for the second set only!!! They’re saving the shit, man. Go second half!!! And find yourself the soul of Mingus kicking through a 15-piece, sweet-ass, tight-playing, booty-kicking band. The food’s overpriced unless you get something like hummus or chips, and the two-drink minimum is worth it if you’re coming in that late anyway. Mingus Big Band, a nice time.
So yo, I was set up and knocked down by the Mingus Big Band over gin and tonics at the Fez.
Afterward we walked for a while and ended up at the Coffeeshop on Union Square for a bite to eat, then I cabbed it home. Expensive nights are all too much fun in NYC.
Peace.
<Break>
working vacation
13 Friday Feb 1998