Baboon Palace

NOT CHEAP

2006-08-25T18:26:00.000-07:00

http://samuel-beckett.net/wolfgang.html

I MISS CHRÉTIEN

2006-07-05T20:45:00.000-07:00

From CBC.ca:

On the occasion of U.S. President George W. Bush's 60th birthday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will come calling Thursday with the gift of a brass belt buckle and an RCMP Stetson.

[...]

During his time in office, Bush has received other gifts from Canadian prime ministers including an Inuit sculpture, valued at $350, from Paul Martin in 2004. In 2003, Jean Chrétien presented Bush with a wooden pen rest, estimated to be worth approximately $20.

MAYBE THERE'S A LITTLE YUSUF ISLAM IN ALL OF US

2006-06-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Jedermann sein eigner Fussball says:
this girl at the festival said "hey you look like cat stevens"
Jedermann says:
i was like "wow thanks!"
Jedermann says:
even though i don't know what yusuf islam looks like
Jedermann says:
"a young cat stevens" she adds
Miss E says:
neither do i
Jedermann says:
she was a volunteer walking around, she had a red festival shirt and a walky-talky
Jedermann says:
it was like a walk-by compliment, it was nice
Jedermann says:
i assume
Jedermann says:

Jedermann says:
hahaha
Jedermann says:

Miss E says:
that looks nothing like you!!
Jedermann says:
WHAT
Miss E says:
that woman was clearly insane
Miss E says:
well you both have beards
Jedermann says:

Jedermann says:
come on
Miss E says:
no
Jedermann says:
:(
Miss E says:
you have short hair and glasses
Miss E says:
and your hair is lighter
Jedermann says:
but the beard
Miss E says:
and you have hair on your chest, don't you?
Jedermann says:
yeah more or less
Miss E says:
what does that mean
Jedermann says:
it's not like thick matting
Jedermann says:
it's just sort of sparse and weedy
Miss E says:
no but it's present
Miss E says:
this guy is hairless
Miss E says:
and your hair isn't curly
Jedermann says:
well i'm sure he waxed for the photo

SPLENDOR SOLSTICE

2006-06-21T22:36:00.000-07:00

Today is the longest day of the year.

It is 10:29 PM as I type this, and the sunset's last fingers are only now fading. I just got home from a tour around EARTH: The World Urban Festival.

(click for larger images)

It was pretty awesome to see, there were all kinds of tents and trailers and shipping crates and so on with weird little art projects inside. It being a big hippy fest, there was the obligatory (and awesome) anti-Bush agitprop, courtesy of the New Forms Media Society.

The Public Dreams folks burned a 14-foot demon effigy, in celebration of the solstice. I missed the start because I was too busy walking around looking at all the awesome happenings. I was on the wrong side of a barbed-wire fence when I finally noticed it.

Tomorrow (Thursday) I'm going to the Global Hiphop event, which starts at seven and promises to be quite dope.

CHRISTIAN ROCK ROUNDUP

2006-06-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

Since I've developed an mild allergic reaction to irony, it's been difficult to consume media without breaking out in a painful and unsightly rash. I've been immunizing myself by listening exclusively to Christian folk-rock. This is the roundup:

Danielson - Ships
Oink Ratio: 0.901

Plugged by Pitchfork as one of this year's best new records, I decided to take a chance with it despite getting burned by the new Scott Walker, about whom they were even more glowingly enthusiastic. I know Walker is a hero to all discriminating music snobs, but I just can't get past his operatic vocals, no matter how open-minded I try to be about it. It wounds me; I find it excruciating and unlistenable. Maybe he's being ironic? I don't know.

Danielson's Ships, on the other hand, is currently my favorite album of the year. I didn't even read the Pitchfork review before snagging it, so I had no idea that he was so keen on Jesus until I watched the trailer for the much-anticipated-by-me Danielson Family movie, Make a Joyful Noise HERE.

While not as overtly Christian as the earlier Danielson Family discs, the album is inarguably informed by band-leader Daniel Smith's religious fervor. "My Lion Sleeps Tonight" is a straightforward retelling of the parable of the prodigal son, set to minimal guitar chording; "Bloodbook On The Half-Shell," the album's stand-out track, begins as a sing-a-long about book collecting, crescendoing into heavy guitar dunts and Smiths inimitable squealing about the bible.

To me this album sounds a like a harder-rocking Polyphonic Spree, and that's definitely a good thing. Ships is also my highest Oink ratio at the moment, making it a solid investment all around. Highly recommended.

Danielson Family - Tell Another Joke at the Ol' Choppin' Block
Oink ratio: 0.219

I decided to give this a chance after enjoying Ships so much, and I was not disappointed. The songs on this album really show the refinement of the Danielson formula, starting slowly with oddly disjointed guitar lines and xylophone plinking, building into lush choral climaxes.

The catchy riffs and eclectic vocal style, (which I absolutely love), saves this album from the well-deserved kitch ghetto of most religious pop music. Rather than setting religious themes to straightforward rock music, a cynical and transparent gambit to use music as a delivery mechanism for a message, a saccharine-coated pill to fool the kiddies, Daniel Smith has developed and refined a musical sensibility all his own. It's a sort of Hegelian synthesis of popular religious music, rejecting the futile struggle at balancing "music-in-itself" (thesis) with the religious message (antithesis), instead cranking both the music and the message up to eleven. Daniel Smith isn't concerned about alienating unbelievers by using unambiguous Christian expression, such as in album opener "A No No"'s repeated refrain 'I love my Lord! I love my Lord! I love my Lord! I love my Lord!' Etc.

It's tough to transcribe Danielson lyrics without using lots of exclamation points.

Half-Handed Cloud - Halos and Lassos
Oink ratio: 0.279

Half-Handed Cloud is the solo project of John Ringhofer, a contributing musician on Sufjan Steven's staggeringly excellent Illinois album. Halos and Lassos is an understated work of simple, Sunday-school-like hymns, with Ringhofer's modest harmonies over acoustic guitar, lo-fi drum machine and charming 8-bit synth lines. Unassuming up-tempo sounds for a sunny Sunday morning.

I wasn't super into this album at first, but it's really creeping up on me. I've had the chorus to "Foot On The Brake" stuck in my head all evening.

Current 93 - Black Ships Ate The Sky
Oink ratio: 0.065

While Danielson and family bring a joyful message rooted in familial celebration and healing, David Tibet's oppressively bleak concept album Black Ships Ate The Sky explores the darker elements of Christian symbolism, as inspired by Book of Revelations eschatology. This hallucinatory epic is about the rise of the Antichrist in the form of Caesar, the return of Jesus, planetary Israel, flaming skies, etc.. You know the drill.

It's not an expression of Christian faith so much as an exploration of a baroque, medieval Christian symbolism of domination, destruction and renewal. Tibet's intensely cataclysmic imagery is underscored by subtle, repetitive acoustic guitar and droning cello. Very spooky stuff, and, remarkably, it successfully navigates around the Scylla of maudlin melodrama and the Charybdis of bathos, a rare feat for goth poets.

Repeating throughout the album is "Idumaea," interpreted by various guest folksies, including Will Oldham, Marc Almond, Clodagh Simonds and others. Oldham's track is particularly striking.

It was totally worth the soaking I'm taking on my share ratio. You really have to get in on the ground floor with this obscure shit. Oink is worse than the stock market.

PATRICIA IS MISSING

2006-06-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

Shakes writes:

so i have some friends that live in seattle. and these posters started
showing up. please note that "the cuff" is a leather bar.
(www.cuffcomplex.com), which im not sure if it makes things weirder, or more understandable.

THE HOLOCAUST WAS A TERRIBLE THING

2006-06-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

Here's an awesome ten-minute movie about writer David Rakoff being driven to a reading in Boston by Dave Hill, his "Author Escort." Made me lol.

REVIEW: JPOD by DOUGLAS COUPLAND

2006-05-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

I was browsing in Book Warehouse during my lunch break today, as I often do, and I picked up Couplands new book, jPod. After reading the first two sentences,

"Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."

I closed the book, placed it back on the shelf and then inserted a thin stiletto blade into my left ocular cavity and then up into my frontal lobe, jiggling it back and forth in a "windsheild wiper" motion. Why?

DRUNKY MONKEY

2006-05-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

Because Toby asked for it, here's another post about monkey fluid related program activities.

Drunk monkeys mirror people

Monkeys drink more alcohol when housed alone, and some like to end a long day in the lab with a boozy cocktail, according to a new analysis of alcohol consumption among members of a rhesus macaque social group.

A follow-up study will examine whether monkeys under the influence also feel compelled to sing along loudly to classic rock anthems.

WHY MUST THE MONKEY SUBJECT POOR TIMMY TO THE HORRORS OF HIS VARIEGATED FLUIDS? THE GODS THEMSELVES, THEY DO NOT KNOW.

2006-05-10T17:02:00.000-07:00

Monkey Fluids. Your number one source for monkey fluids.

INFINITY AND BEYOND

2006-05-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

I'm re-reading Infinite Jest, finally. I found a nice first-edition hardcover at Pulp Fiction this weekend and decided it was time for another round. I can already tell it's going to be even better the second time.

Sometimes second-hand books contain underlining or marginal notes. I like that. Highlighter or ink marks are vulgar and distracting of course, but you usually don't find those in used-book stores, more in libraries. Last summer the library hung enormous skrim vinyl banners printed with blown-up pages on which people had made extensive, sometimes amusing, notes and lines. I doubt the authors of the marginalia ever saw those banners, but I wonder what they would have thought of their notes being put up on display like that. It would probably be like someone enlarging your grocery list and hanging it in an art gallery; not really an invasion of privacy, but it would still seem kind of creepy I would think. Probably worse, because your grocery list doesn't broadcast your failure to make sense of Milton's Paradise Lost. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But I enjoy sparse graphite marginalia, it's like a little window into someone's private experience with a book. Especially a book as great and enormous as Infinite Jest, you know someone spent a lot of time with it, stared at it for hours and hours, and the pages contain evidence of the attention. It's part of what makes a book object-like, as opposed to a neutral medium for information like a computer screen. It's sort of trite to say so but my moderate bibliomania involves a serious affection for books as physical things.

The previous owner of my Infinite Jest had underlined the following words:

- hirsute
- roil
- espadrille
- vectors
- cirri
- martinet
- anomalous gigantism
- infantophile
- hypophalangial
- etiology

That's just the first seventeen pages. As a list of words to look up, it struck me as odd that they included "infantophile," which seems like a word any English speaker could pretty easily puzzle out, and "vectors" which is pretty much ubiquitous. But yet they didn't underline a word I had to look up: "lapidary." A lapidary is someone who works with semi-precious stones; from the latin "lapis," meaning stone. So I underlined it.

BREAD GIRL

2006-04-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

I went to a situationist art performance yesterday. The description of the event was: She puts on a suit made of bread and lies in a field and hopefully the birds eat her suit and not her. Fun!

Riding my bike to the park at the designated time, I saw other hipsters mingling in small groups. There were some video cameras set up. Clearly I was in the right place. Ten minutes later she was spotted ambling slowly down Main St., dressed in this enormous breadsuit that made her look like the Stay-Puff'd marshmallow man, or some kind of chunky, B-movie Martian. The alien angle was accentuated by a guy using some sort of theremin-esque knob-twiddly gizmo to make spooky outer-space noises.

A man dressed in a tuxedo was pulling a wagon filled with bread, handing it out to the spectators and telling us "It's for the birds." There were a few seagulls circling. The breadgirl made her way to the center of a ring of benches, and we began tearing off pieces of our loaves and throwing them at her, "feeding the birds." She stood in the centre of the circle with an absurd grin on her face, a rictus of ecstatic satiation.

The breadsuit was amazing.

The tuxedoed gentleman occasionally shouted "They're coming! They're coming!" In reference to the birds, presumably, which had still shown no interest in the bounty.

PLEASE RISE FOR THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

2006-04-28T17:27:00.000-07:00

Dance, Monkeys, Dance.

THIS MADE ME CRY

2006-04-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

President George Bush today ordered a temporary suspension of environmental rules for fuel, making it easier for refiners to meet demand and possibly dampen prices at the petrol pumps.

Bush also announced steps to ease environmental standards governing fuel grades.

Easing the environment rules will allow refiners greater flexibility in providing oil supplies since they will not have to use certain additives such as ethanol to meet clean air standards.

Great! I'm starting to think that crazed eco-fascist Pentti Linkola is maybe on to something.

I recall how ten years ago on the first noon of springtime heat wave, at the finest Häme, at Kalvola's Heinuinlahti, on the open waters of Vanaja I spent my summertime rowing, observing and admiring nature. Cuckoos were cuckooing and divers howling, and that was the kind of life which brought contentment for a friend of nature. And then a top class outboard motor, which started out from a beach, of maybe fifty, maybe hundred horsepower started roaring, and drove in circles at that bay making tight turns, roaring for hours. Then I understood that there can't be any possibility of brotherhood between men, and that I will hate and detest and loathe this kind of person and similar people till the end of my life.

THIS MADE ME LAUGH

2006-04-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

From metameat:

Myself, Pica, my sister and a friend go to see Donald Davidson give a talk at Stanford. In the dream he looks like Donald Sutherland and is giving a rock concert instead of a philosophy lecture. That makes sense; at this point my dream-knowledge has him confused with Nick Lowe and Brian Eno. He plays a few songs and soon they don't seem familiar any more. I realize that he is neither Nick Lowe nor Brian Eno, and that his songs are really bad. Pica and I look at each other with displeasure; at least we didn't pay for this. Davidson now seems like a goofy old man, a brilliant philosopher who has no call to be pursuing this vanity rock career. He is giving the audience hopeful smiles; the whole thing has become sanitized adult-contemporary rock. The band starts up with "Sing, Sing, Sing" and a bunch of old people come onto stage and start swing dancing. "What about the qualia problem?" I call to Pica. "I bet he has interesting things to say about the qualia problem." I look down at a printed program and see that the concert isn't even a third over; still to come is a kitschy "Musical Trip 'Round the World," a multi-part concept piece called "Aria," and lengthy tributes to all of Davidson's family and friends. We decide to bail.

I DIDN'T WANT TO JOIN YOUR STUPID CLUB ANYWAY

2006-04-24T19:42:00.000-07:00

So I was thinking about joining this tennis club at Trout Lake Community Centre. I called the contact guy, Murray, a few weeks ago. They still had openings, but he needed to appraise my skill level, to make sure I knew how to play, because most of the players in the club were pretty experienced. After a few days of trying to schedule a time we could meet up for a try-out I gave up. And the weather was mostly crappy anyway.

But it's been nice out for the past few days, and Murray called me after work today to see if I wanted to hit some balls around and maybe still come out for the club. I had some time before the show tonight, so I figured what the hell and biked over to Trout Lake after dinner. Murray talks with an affectless deadpan of facts and figures. He was wearing a faded white trade-show T-shirt advertising some sort of accounting software, tucked into pleated white shorts. Although Murray would drastically out-play me on the court, I was just as clearly dominating in the style department. He explained in great detail the club policies surrounding ball usage and resuage, (two cans are opened per meet (one per court). At the end of the meet they the sell the used balls for one dollar per can, or sometimes people just take them), and other rules and regulations.

Anyways, we rallied for a while. There was a bit of friction when he asked me to "volley from the net" and I didn't really know what he was asking me to do. He was unable to explain himself in more detail, and simply repeated VOLLEY FROM THE NET several times, in an increasingly irritated tone. I figured it out.

Afterwards he reported to me that there were aspects of my game he thought were good (forehand, serve) but that my backhand and net game were weak. He hedged around for a while how everyone in the club has a lot of experience playing doubles and strategy and so on. So I didn't make the cut.

I wasn't really expecting to want to pay $50 to join the club, but I still felt a little dejected on the bike ride home.

GIVE UP YOUR BOOKS, PUT AN END TO YOUR WORRIES

2006-04-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

I've been following this week's discussion on Leiter Reports and Crooked Timber about the value of analytic, professionalized philosophy. I like the CT thread a lot better, though it's interesting to see how divergent those conversations have been.

Marcel Duchamp would create readymades upon request from buyers. Often the buyer would already own the object being purchased from Duchamp. He made a dozen reproductions of his famous R. Mutt urinal. Collectors would call him on the telephone and ask him to baptize their urinals, and he would oblige, if the price was right. To create a readymade, he would simply designate it so, an act of creation very much like the act of naming. He didn't even need to leave his studio, he could create art from hundreds of miles away, over the telephone. Duchamp was a magician, a priest.

A sufficiently sophisticated art is indistinguishable from philosophy.

Kite surfing is the hot thing this summer. Down at Spanish Bank there were dozens of people out on the water, twisting and skating along under their sails. I forgot my camera, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Abandon the ship, we only need the sails.

Predictably, the Crooked Timber thread became yet another tribunal on Derrida. I've never read Derrida, but I have read Rorty on Derrida, and since I adore Rorty I always fall on the side of the Derrideans. Or at least on the opposite side from people who think we need theories to tell us whether reality is really real, or whether Derrida is sufficiently enthusiastic about believing in the actual existence of the world. To each their own, I guess.

I have no culture, myself. Or rather: my culture is a contradictory mash of pop fragments and scavenged bloody giblets of the Western canon and shit I read on the Internet. Not that I'm complaining, I'm just saying.

Basically, I lack seriousness.

That's what I was thinking about during Waiting for Godot the other night. It was my first experience with that play, although obviously I knew what it was about since I'm not a philistine and I'd just read two excellent biographical essays about Beckett this week, so I knew what to expect.

The idea that you can't appreciate a sophisticated work of 20th century literature unless you've studied it in a classroom and internalized a set of interpretations fills me with horror and existential despair: the perfect emotional stance from which to appreciate Waiting for Godot.

Here is a short play inspired by Waiting for Godot:

Le Troisième Homme

SCENE: an empty street. Dim, gauzy lighting suggests early morning. SAMUEL enters stage-left. He wanders about erratically for several minutes, as if lost. Producing scraps of paper from his coat pocket, he looks, examines his surroundings, then puts them away again.

Samuel: (muttering) Terrible, terrible... Just awful...

JOSEPH enters stage right, carrying a briefcase and walking determinedly.

Joseph: The library is two blocks that way (points).

Samuel: What is that to me?

Joseph exit stage-left.

Samuel exit stage-right.

CURTAIN.

LEONARD COHEN FOR GOVERNOR-GENERAL

2006-04-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

Leonard Cohen is my favorite Canadian poet. Not that that's really saying a whole lot -- I'd be hard-pressed to name five Canadian poets.

Beautiful Losers is brilliant, and I have a Sunday morning ritual of putting on the first CD of Essential Leonard Cohen, when he was more about the folk guitar and less about the smooth jazz stylings of the second collection. A girl I worked with at the bookstore was completely obsessed with him; she even wrote a one-woman play about it called Not a Shiksa, which she performed at last year's Fringe Festival. Very awesome.

Leonard Cohen performed in concert on CBC Television. I only caught a part of it, but it struck me as unusual that, instead of singing in that inimitable golden rumble, he was fucking his backup singers, live, on television. The three singers were each crouched on all fours, lined up in a row facing the audience with that familiar bored/stupid look of porn actresses on their extremely made-up faces. Cohen would mount each in turn and recite a short free-verse poem, on the subject of love. The stage design was quite minimal with black curtains, tastefully lit. Massey Hall, perhaps? The television cameras cut to different perspectives, but the audience was never shown.

I remember thinking: That's weird, how can CBC possibly get away with showing this?

I really wish I could remember the poems.

BLOGGY STYLE

2006-04-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

Time for a fresh coat here at the Palace. Let me know if anything looks effed-up to you.

BALLISTICS

2006-04-10T18:26:00.000-07:00

I am amazed by people who can update their blogs with relevant facts and insight multiple times a day. It must get really tiresome, and not-blogging is so very very easy. The nonist is off "redesigning," which I guess is some kind of counterculture lingo meaning 'bong hits.' Now dadahead is gone too, maybe forever? Without them I am reduced to reading actual books about actual dada.

Specifically, Anabelle Melzer's Dada and Surrealist Performance. She mentions a piece by Tristan Tzara, the originator of Dada at the famous Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 Zurich, which struck me as a remarkably prescient commentary on the state of the blogosphere in the year 2006. Tzara recalls the performance thusly:

Announced as "Dada," I read aloud a newspaper article while an electric bell kept ringing so that no one would hear what I said. That was very badly received by the public who had become exasperated and shouted: "Enough! Enough!"

THE WRITER

2006-03-29T08:40:00.000-08:00

I picked up the first issue of Wholphin, McSweeney's new quarterly DVD magazine. It's a collection of short films and such. Some really excellent material, but my favorite is The Writer, a short cartoon by Carson Mell.

Here's a clip from The Writer: Part 2. Funny stuff.

Check out the rest of Carson's movies while you're at it.

PILLOW FIGHT CLUB

2006-03-25T16:33:00.000-08:00

Fun at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

See my flickr set here.

I also recorded a video (WMV, ~10 MB).

THE WORLD IS ALWAYS ALREADY ENDING

2006-03-20T18:47:00.000-08:00

So are you tired of all these awesome posts yet? Ready for something sloppy and derisive? Me too!

Check out this NYT piece about the dying art of conversation. Did you know that there are more, worse conversations now than in any other time in human history? Your suspicions have been confirmed: The past was way better than the present. Conversation was awesome back when everyone was Cicero or Montaigne or Hume and everyone hung out in salons all the time, but people now are dipshits. Especially Americans, of course.

The article is not at all worth reading, but I want to point out this typically anemic paragraph:

O.K. But listen to "talk" radio, with its combative recruitment of allies; or "talk" shows in which guests are promoting themselves or their products and hosts are prepared with leading questions; or "talk" news shows in which conversation becomes a form of shouting. Look at our isolating iPods, at text messaging with its prepackaged formulas, or instant messaging with its iconic smilies, so necessary to make sure the telegraphic prose is not misunderstood. CUL8R.

Prepackaged formulas? Is the grapheme sequence {CUL8R} inherently worse that the sequence {see you later}? One is prepackaged and the other is not, I guess.

And again with the frackin "isolating iPods." Truly, if it werent for those dreadful WALK MEN, (and newspapers and magazines and scenery), our buses and trains would be idyllic oases of stimulating, non-formulaic discourse and informed democracy.

Aside from that, the article is paltry. The prose is so stiff and lifeless I'm having trouble deciding if it's meant to be a mockery of it's own thesis? I mean, if you conclude your stilted, boilerplate essay about the decline of conversation with the paragraph, practically undergraduate in it's earnest banality,

"It is an ideal worth talking about,"

you may feel a sting. That's irony fucking with you. And irony only hurts; it never helps.

Anyways, I look forward to the year 2050 when conversation will have died completely, because of neurocasting.

ENTROPY

2006-03-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

I rode my bike to the library yesterday. The sun was warm, though there remained a slight winter chill in the air that made my ears ache when riding into the strong wind. I had to return Wittgenstein's Mistress, which was a few days overdue. I'm glad I held onto it so I could get to the end, which was surprisingly satisfying for a plotless stream-of-consciousness novel. I can't recommend that book highly enough. I bought a second-hand copy of David Markson's other experimental novel, This Is Not A Novel, but I haven't started it yet. Wittgenstein's Mistress is a plotless novel with only a single character, while This Is Not A Novel kicks it up a notch, having no plot and no characters either. I wonder if it's a novel?

The route I take to the library follows Adenac through a semi-industrial area, to the path around False Creek past the Edgewater Casino. It's a nice way to get downtown, and a pretty popular bike-commuter route. It was early afternoon when I started my ride, so I only saw a few other cyclists. We smiled at each other as we passed, reflecting each other's pleasure at being back out on two wheels a long sunless winter. The streets and sidewalks seemed unusually empty.

On Adenac, in front of the blank facade of a small textile factory, a black Corolla stops, all four doors opening, and four women get out. They represent diverse ages and ethnicities. A middle-aged asian woman get's out of the drivers seat and behind her a younger blonde. When the blonde gets out, a grey fedora-style hat falls out behind her. She walks in front of the parked car towards the sidewalk, not noticing it. As I ride by I slow down and tell her she's dropped her hat. I assumed it was hers, but I suppose it could have been left in the back seat by car's owner, who is probably not the blonde woman. People rarely sit in the back seat of their own cars. She smiles and says thanks, I say no problem and smile back.

About a block from my building, an elderly man crosses the intersection ahead of me. He strikes me as 'elderly', but he might have been only in his mid-fifties. He has a gaunt face and a careful, fragile gait. His hair is long and white in the back, but shaved from his forehead and temples back to the midpoint of his skull. I think to myself that it's a pretty avant garde hair style and that he must be an artist or a Hare Krishna maybe. Half-way through the intersection he reaches to get something from his pocket (a handkerchief?) and a piece of yellow lined paper, folded and well-worn, falls to the street. He continues walking. I pass through the intersection a few seconds later, and I stop to pick it up. I enjoy reading the ephemeral notes that people write to themselves. After I lean down to collect it, I decide that it may be something he needs, so I call out to him -- he's about fifteen paces up the street now. I ride over and tell him that he dropped it. He examines it, confused at first and then he recognizes it. He tells me that he had a stroke recently and that there are certain things that he has trouble remembering, and that he (or perhaps his wife or doctor) wrote these things down on that piece of paper. Sort of like Memento, I guess. I wish I could have seen what was written down there. He showed it to me but I couldn't make out the handwriting at a glance.

So that was my day finding random things that people drop. I was present at just the right moment to catch these two objects; a few seconds sooner or later and they would have disappearred anonymously forever. Imagine how often this happens without anyone being there to notice. Objects must be constantly pouring out of people's pockets and cars, into the world.

ENLIGHTENMENT

2006-03-13T09:38:00.000-08:00

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Even if you can't get rid of the heat, as long as you can get rid of bother with the heat, your body is always on a cool terrace.

(Photographs courtesy of the fabulous Miss E. Brant.)

MODERN PAPERFOLDING MAY BE LOOKED UPON AS A STRUGGLE TO BREAK OUT OF THE TYRRANY OF THE SQUARE

2006-03-07T21:30:00.000-08:00

Today I took a writing test, as part of the interview process for becoming a full time course developer, instead of a contract media developer ("pullin triggas fo tha scrilla"). The test was to write an instruction guide for making a paper airplane.

The story of modern paperfolding technique begins with Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno (1864-1936). Unamuno's writing was influential on later existentialist thought and he is often compared to Kierkegaard. Like the Danish philosopher, he interrogated the boundaries of reason and faith and his aim was to understand life in its complex emotional and intellectual dimensions. He was skeptical of rationality and resisted systematic philosophizing, preferring fiction as the medium of his ideas.

In 1902, Unamuno produced a supposedly humorous exegesis on the subject of an origami called "pajarita," which is Spanish for "female bird." (The Japanese refer to the same shape as a dog.) In doing so, he altered the course of European paperfolding away from the square and towards bird-based designs. I say "supposedly" because it's hard to imagine the author of a line like

"There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish."

would be likely to create a sentimental treatise about a paper bird.

Is how my instructions would have begun if I'd been able to do some research first.

MCLUSKYISM

2006-03-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

Top 10 Mclusky song titles:

10. Join The Mevolution
9. Dethink to Survive
8. The Habit That Kicks Itself
7. Without MSG I Am Nothing
6. Rock vs. Single Parents
5. The Difference Between Me And You Is That I'm Not On Fire
4. whiteliberalonwhiteliberalaction
3. Reformed Arsonist Seeks Child Bride
2. Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues
1. Dave, Stop Killing Prostitutes

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

2006-02-26T14:53:00.000-08:00

Have you heard of "Stargazing"? I heard about this a few days ago from a co-worker. It's a twist on speed-dating, apparently, where instead of having a 5-minute conversation you sit across from each other without speaking, silently appraising one another. Then I guess you fill out a little score card, and move along to the next person.

I suppose the theory is that we can be distracted by the content of words become insensitive to unconscious, subliminal signs of attraction, (body language, dilating pupils, wafting pheromones, etc.). These are, after all, what's really important.

(I don't know if these sessions ban perfume and cologne, but I bet that would help. Or maybe they should abandon all pretense to civilization and just have everyone circle the room inhaling deeply from each other's armpits and/or genitals and then honestly reflecting on whether that's a scent you could tolerate having next to you every night for the next 6 mo. - 2 yrs.)

I'm not sure what my point was. Maybe something like: Sentences, like stars, can dazzle us, but they cast a very dim light to see the world by.

Or maybe that's just so much bullshit, which seems likely considering I used sentences to communicate all this to you, anonymous internet stranger. But at least they're silent sentences.

HAPPINESS

2006-02-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

A good article in the New Yorker about happiness. I found this paragraph on the etymology of the word 'happy' especially interesting:

People who have scant control over their lives are bound to place tremendous importance on luck and fate. As McMahon points out, “In virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for happiness is cognate with luck, fortune or fate.” In a sense, the oldest and most deeply rooted philosophical idea in the world and in our natures is “Shit happens.” Happ was the Middle English word for “chance, fortune, what happens in the world,” McMahon writes, “giving us such words as ‘happenstance,’ ‘haphazard,’ ‘hapless,’ and ‘perhaps.’ ” This view of happiness is essentially tragic: it sees life as consisting of the things that happen to you; if more good things than bad happen, you are happy.

SUCCESS

2006-02-19T10:43:00.000-08:00

What would it mean to be successful? Will I ever achieve success? Is it possible to lead a rewarding life without world-renowned accomplishment? What’s the point?

Before I was successful, I used to ask myself these questions a lot. Back before I achieved major, widespread recognition and accolades for my achievements, these questions used to haunt me. Depression and self-deprecation, brought on by a nagging sense of failure and immutable determinism, felt as if they were my most constant and reliable personality traits, as fixed as DNA.

Toiling away in obscurity, it’s difficult to keep up one’s self-esteem. One of the best things about being successful is that everyone is constantly telling you how great you are and paying you all kinds of attention. There’s a real tendency to overindulge in this kind of ego-stroking, yet ultimately masturbatory form of social engagement. You may feel a little guilty at first, maybe because you personally know half a dozen people who you feel deserve adulation far more that you, and maybe you secretly suspect that your work is overrated and possibly you are the victim of an elaborate practical joke, but go ahead and overindulge anyway, you deserve it! Well probably not you personally, but I deserve it, because I’m successful. I’ve come to realize that self-worth does not come from inside, but is given to you by other people; specifically, strangers who are pleased with that awesome thing I did that made me a success.

Another great thing about success, and I really can’t exaggerate how fabulous it is, is how attractive it makes you to the opposite sex. Impossibly attractive women who wouldn’t have given me the time of day before I was successful, (and if they did, I would have mumbled something inane and looked at the floor), seek me out at parties. They laugh at my jokes, even when they aren’t funny. Sometimes I tell unfunny jokes on purpose just to see if they laugh. (They do.)

Just look at Robert Crumb. That guy is an ugly, creepy weirdo, but as a successful cartoonist he could take home a different girl every night and they were game for any perverted sex act he could imagine, no joke. The evolutionary underpinning of this behaviour is pretty obvious; I think about that sometimes, and it makes me a little sad that we are all so driven by the clockwork of biology. I also sometimes wonder why anyone at all was willing to fuck me before I was a success. But whatever the reason, to all those wonderful charitable women I want to say: Thank you. Thank you very very much.

Of course, expectations run high when you’re a success; everyone wants to know what my next amazing project is going to be. I haven’t really had any good ideas for it yet; it’s hard to find solitary time to think when there are so many parties to go to, galas to attend, panel discussions to participate in and so on. But I’m sure something will come to me eventually.

BUDDHA KEN

2006-02-18T19:13:00.000-08:00

"Ken, heartbroken, traveled the world in search of himself, making stops in Europe and the Middle East, dabbling in Buddhism and Catholicism, teaching himself to cook and slowly weaning himself off a beach bum life."

Mattel's New Ken Doll: "He's Been Backpacking Through Tibet"

Bloch: "People just get confused when a man is more sensitive, he’s more in touch with his spiritual side, he’s been writing poetry."

Anchor: "He’s wearing a leather jacket."

Bloch: "Well, his jacket is leather...his jeans are torn. He got them in Italy. He’s been backpacking through Tibet."

DID SOMETHING HAPPEN IN THE NEWS THIS WEEK?

2006-02-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

Here are a some brief thoughts about Dick-Cheney-shot-a-guy-in-the-face-gate.

1. The consensus seems to be that he was probably drunk. That's boring. Much more amusing, yet still pretty plausible, is the idea that he was playing a round of The Most Dangerous Game.

2. I wish Hunter S. Thompson were alive to see this.

3. A lot of commenters brought up the fact that what we should be discussing is the fact that Scooter Libby fingered Cheney for authorizing the leak of classified info to discredit opponents of the Iraq war, (as if Patrick Fitzgerald is waiting to see what the news headlines are before deciding whether to proceed...). As far as political scandals go this is kind of unserious I guess. And yet everyone recognizes an ill omen when they see one.

Beware the Ides of March, y'all.

MUTINY AT BLENZ

2006-02-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

EXCUSE ME MR. FREY BUT WE HAVE SOME WHIRLWINDS HERE WE'D LIKE YOU TO REAP

2006-01-29T16:30:00.000-08:00

Over at Video Dog they have a series of clips from Oprah’s interview with James Frey. Frey literally squirms. He and Oprah dance around the particulars of what happened when to whom; every time Frey admits to some 'artistic license', (like the fact that his girlfriend killed herself by slitting her wrists instead of hanging herself in the shower; and when this happened he wasn’t in jail, but was merely in Florida), the audience wails and Oprah looks like she just found out there’s no Santa Claus. Frey’s publisher, Nan, really gets to the meat of it.

Nan: I do not know how you get inside another person’s mind…

O: This is my point, Nan… because then anybody can just walk in off the street with whatever story they have and say “This is my story.”

Nan: That is absolutely true. And people in publishing and editors…

O: Well that needs to change.

Nan: No you can’t stop people from making up stories. We learn by stories.

O: You can if you’re going to call it a memoir. You can make up stories and call them novels, people have done it for years.

Nan: A novel is something different than a memoir. And a memoir is different from autobiography. A memoir is an author’s remembrance of a certain period of his life. Now, the responsibility as far as I am concerned is… does it strike me as valid, does it strike me as authentic. I’m sent things all the time and I think they’re not real, I don’t think they’re authentic, I don’t think they’re good, I don’t believe them. In this instance, I absolutely believed what I read.

Of course there’s a difference between a novel and a memoir, and a novel does not become a memoir just because you were thinking about yourself when you wrote it. She is saying that memoir-writing is not reportage, and that publishers, editors and writers should not be held to any kind of journalistic standards in this regard. I agree, and I don’t see that it’s much of a problem. The Frey case is not really generalizable because the entire problem was created by Oprah herself, when she publicly went nuts over the book, and so Frey played to Oprah’s expectations, realizing his gravy train was coming in, and almost certainly at the behest of his publisher. If there’s more than that going on, like if the book really was shopped as fiction and then marketed as memoir, then that’s not good either, but on the scale of injustice it’s pretty close to the bottom. I’ll become outraged at that right after I’m done writing angry emails to all those “teen” porn sites whose models are CLEARLY over thirty. It was Oprah who celebrated Frey, trumpeting the importance of his factual account for informing the very serious and real problems of actual people. Frey was just too greedy to be up front about his perspective on “emotional truth” and so forth. That makes him a common or garden dipshit.

But the real purpose of this post is to tell you all about a memoir I’m reading right now, Nick Flynn’s ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY. It’s a memoir of Flynn’s relationship with his father, an alcoholic vagrant whom he meets for the first time in his adult life while volunteering at a homeless shelter in Boston. It’s a pretty good case study in what Nan calls “authentic.” Particularly affecting, I thought, was a passage describing his father’s last attempt at honest employment before being arrested for fraud and spending two years in county jail. I’ll reproduce it here, because it’s so damn good:

As the winter ends, Jonathan finesses a place to sleep and steady pay in exchange for painting a house the upcoming summer in Cambridge. Jonathan proposes that he and Scotty become partners, fifty-fifty. The owners, a couple he met at an art opening, will be in Sweden for the summer. Free rent, easy work, steady cash, my father plans to rewrite his novel in the evenings and on weekends. Scotty, wary, knows Jonathan always tries to get something for nothing, always tries to get over. But he imagines they’ll put in a few good hours each day, make their way through. A house is a finite project, after all. The worst that could happen is what always happens – that Scotty will work harder.

The job has a charge account at the hardware store—paint, brushes, scrapers, drop cloths. Jonathan charges his coveralls—white, denim, professional. If he has someplace to be later in the day he wears them over one of the Brooks Brothers suits he’d charged to my grandfather ten years earlier (As president of a company I had to look the part). He likes to keep a brush and scraper in his back pocket, even if he doesn’t use them all that much. The first morning Scotty wakes up at seven and Jonathan’s already up and drinking coffee, wearing his spotless coveralls. They sit at the kitchen table in the pleasant sun, suffused with good fortune. Mid-May, the owners won’t be back until September, no urgency, summer spread out before them. They can work half days if they choose. They can take three-day weekends. They can stretch it out. Scotty follows my father’s lead, says he isn’t worried. The owners left five hundred to start off, when they need more it’ll be wired. Sounds fine. Scotty says he wouldn’t mind quitting early some days, getting into the studio, keeping up with his sculptures. Yes, my father agrees, that’s what’s important. Anyone could paint this house – they chose us because we’re artists. In a few years they’ll be able to point to this house and say, Jonathan Flynn painted that. That’s worth something to people like this.

They talk briefly about how to begin. The bushes need to be wrapped in tarps, pulled away from the house. The ladders laid out, ratcheted up into the eaves, the scraping begun. The scraping, followed by the puttying, followed by the priming – the preparation, they agree, this takes time. Scotty puts his coffee cup in the sink and pulls his paper cap over his eyes. My father reaches for the bottle of Johnnie Walker that has been centered on the table the whole time. A drink to our good fortune, he proposes, pouring a shot into his cup. The scotch, Scotty will later learn, is charged to the owners as well.

Every morning this is how it will play out – first coffee, a piece of toast, maybe a shot. Then Scotty will climb the ladder and continue scraping where he left off the day before. Jonathan circles below, the paintbrush in his back pocket, surveying, pondering, taking stock, pointing to spots Scotty’s missed. Jonathan prefers to stay off the ladders, focusing his energies on the porch. By ten or so Jonathan says he’s making a run to the hardware store, doesn’t return until nightfall. Shattered. It doesn’t really matter – they’re keeping track of their own hours. Still, within a week Scotty begins quitting at noon. Then he starts skipping days.

By mid-August Scotty’s vanished. My father circles the unpainted house. Three months and not even the scraping’s done. The porch has been primed, as high as he can reach, and now he must start in with the ladders. He doesn’t like ladders. That low-life, he mutters, leaving him in the lurch, after all he’s done. Sorry-assed kid. The owners are due back in three weeks. Yesterday Jonathan had to tell the husband, by phone, that it might not be done in time. This made the husband bullshit – he’d been wiring Jonathan five hundred every month, always heard glowing reports,fine fine, and now it’s still undone? Jonathan’s cut off from the money, if he wants the balance he’d better finish.

At this point Jonathan realizes that he’s been too conscientious. All that scraping and priming was just so Scotty would feel needed. No one will notice the eaves anyway, no one will climb a ladder and look that close. As long as it gets a fresh once-over. Jonathan sets the ladder, brings a scraper for a quick scrape, just the big stuff. A paper bucket half full with the final coat. No time for primer, not anymore.

A little hungover, maybe even still drunk from the night before, he climbs. Maybe a little hair of the dog, why not? – forty-four, son of near-aristocracy, father of three, soon-to-be-famous author, forced to creep around roofs in the sun, to work beside morons, for goons. As he falls he thinks, If you are hurt they will come with their ambulances, they will put you in bed and feed you, they will let you rest. Or maybe that’s just what I’ve thought, the times I’ve fallen.

A brilliant anecdote, it captures perfectly the rationalizations and ironies of being a fuckup. Whether or not anything like this ever happened, it sounds authentic to me. What’s more, the powerful final sentence acknowledges the space between reality and authorial imagination, and that events, whether remembered or related second-hand, are coloured by individual experience, and not in a way that could ever be fact-checked, and anyways why would you want to. It’s not like Flynn is on T.V. counseling alcoholics based on the lessons in this book.

I didn't really see the same kind of sensitivity in A Million Little Pieces, which I felt had neither subtlety nor any real attention to honesty; it was like reading Chuck Pahlaniuk describe life as an addict: punchy, graphic, outrageous. (I still enjoyed it, and, to be fair, I read it while hiding in the stock room at the bookstore where I used to work, so maybe not the best environment for a sensitive reading…)

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S NOT BOOTY

2006-01-15T13:42:00.000-08:00

Here's a jolly little video!

Captain Ahab - I_CANT_BELIEVE_IT's_NOT_BOOTY.mov

This is not in any way safe for work. At all. YOU ARE WARNED.

I CAN'T STOP LISTENING TO THIS SONG

2006-01-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

Rework - Anyway I Know You.mp3

I've had this song on repeat for the past hour, it's kind of hypnotic. All the rework songs are pretty decent and totally worth a listen, if you can tolerate the blinkin' linkin' on the rework site. I stumbled across Rework while trying to find out whether the members of Add N to (X), one of my favoritest groups ever, have produced anything else lately.

I discovered that Anne Shenton has released an album and a single as "Large Number," which you can sample here, at the Large Number website. I can't wait to get this album. Hurray for bleep-bloop robot sounds.

UPDATE!!!HOLY

Shenton's newspaper, Dedworth Echo, is super funny and awesome. Here's a sample:

A TWO WEEK CHEESE CRUISE AROUND THE CANALS OF BERKSHIRE!

The enjoyment of your CHEESE CRUISE depends on all aboard following the VERY STRICT RULES. The LOWER CHEESE BOARD caters for first timers although it is advisable for all guests to spend the first week below, getting familiar with the lighter cheeses ie DAIRY LEE, BRIE, PROCESSED CHEESES & VERY MILD CHEDDAR.

AT THE START OF THE SECOND WEEK YOU WILL BE TOLD TO GO TO THE UPPER CHEESE BOARD (OPTIONAL) WHERE THE MORE ROBUST CHEESES WILL GREET YOU IN ABUNDANCE. THE CHALLENGING STILTON, SCOTTISH BLUE, THE VERY STRONG ORKNEY SMOKED, PECORINO, CAMENBERT AND GORGONZOLA. INTENSE? YES. EXCITING? VERY, BUT ALSO VERY SATISFYING

ENJOY YOUR CRUISE

You can download the Echo from the add n to (x) website.

SUFFRAGE FUNNIES

2006-01-05T00:06:00.001-08:00

Amanda at Pandagon links to this comparison of David Brooks' latest column with anti-feminist literature from 1968, demonstrating a remarkable degree of correspondence.

Yes yes, very amusing and so on. The point is, this reminded me of these old editorial cartoons lampooning the suffragettes, which I will now display for your viewing pleasure. These were collected for Syncopated Volume 2, a very fine comics journal indeed.

A good editorial cartoon tells us something about the target; a bad editorial cartoon tells us something about the cartoonist, which in these cases seems to be a deep-seated fear of emasculation. So join me, internet friends, at we journey back to a magical time of non-stop dicks and pricks, when men were men, women were women, and men were terrified of women. (Click for larger images, natch.)

Maurice Ketten, 1913

Maurice Ketten, 1913

Rodney Thompson, 1913

C.W. Kahney, 1914; Donald McKee, 1914

Donald McKee, 1913; A.B. Walker, 1914; J.R. Shauer, 1913

FEDERAL INTERAGENCY COMMITTEE FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF NOXIOUS AND EXOTIC WEEDS (FICMNEW)

2005-12-28T13:10:00.000-08:00

In The Voice of the Desert, Joseph Wood Krutch records his observations while living in the Sonoran desert near Tucson, Arizona. Much more than a guidebook or nature catalog, it is an ecologico-philosophical study of the life and origins of his natural environment. Krutch presents a subtle interpretation of desert life, probing the landscape not in a rigorous or statistical fashion, but simply by living in an environment and asking questions of the other occupants of the world he encounters. In particular, the question: how did it [the saguaro cactus; the roadrunner; the spadefoot toad; the grand canyon; etc.] become that way? Krutch reads the life and geography around him with great humility and wisdom. He writes:

Men of most races have long been accustomed to speak with scorn of the few peoples who happen to live where nature makes things too easy. In the inclemency of their weather, the stoniness of their soil, or the rigors of their winter they find secret virtues so that even the London fog has occasionally found Englishmen to praise it. No doubt part of all this is mere prejudice at worst, making a virtue out of necessity at best. But undoubtedly there is also something in it. We grow strong against the pressure of a difficulty, and ingenious by solving problems. Individuality and character are developed by challenge. We tend to admire trees, as well as men, who bear the stamp of their successful struggles with a certain amount of adversity. People who have not had too easy a time of it develop flavor. And there is no doubt about the fact that desert life has a character. Plants and animals are so obviously and visibly what they are because of the problems they have solved. They are part of some whole. They belong. Animals and plants, as well as men, become especially interesting when they do fit their environment, when to some extent they reveal what their response to it has been. And nowhere more than the desert do they reveal it.

This quote struck me as capturing something important about two really excellent documentaries I watched this weekend, Grizzly Man and Rize.

Grizzly Man is the story of Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor, (apparently he was beat out by Woody Harrelson for the bartender job on Cheers, and this utterly destroyed his fragile ego.), also former alcoholic and drug addict, who decides to devote his life to “protecting” a group of Alaskan grizzly bears (which live in a protected wilderness area). For thirteen summers he films the bears and lives with them in the “grizzly maze,” where he gets lost in his private fantasy world in which he is King of the Animals. He becomes increasingly paranoid about the park rangers, hunters and poachers who are conspiring to do him harm. He treats the bears like pets, giving them cutesy names like Mister Chocolate and playing out his elaborate fantasy of being one of them, being their loving master. It’s hard to tell how much of it is genuine craziness and how much is him being driven by his camera.

He’s very much aware of his camera; his film is both a self-conscious product he is crafting and also a record, so it’s difficult to judge where the craft ends and the record begins when it comes to Treadwell’s motivation and self-perception. Director Werner Herzog interprets him as a filmmaker and an artist, making a convincing case for Treadwell as a nature film auteur, an outsider artist whose movies present his own tortured and complex psychology under unique, compelling, and utterly baffling circumstances. As a filmmaker, Treadwell was craftsman-like, obsessively re-shooting scenes of narration for his story of the bears and his own naïve philosophy of life.

This is apparently a not-too-uncommon story. As one of the last great untouched wildernesses in the world, Alaska attracts this sort of Thoreau-inspired misanthrope, looking to throw away their humanity and achieve a kind of purity among the beasts. Another person who tried to use the wilderness to satisfy private fantasies of transcendence is Alex “Supertramp” McCandless, immortalized in John Krakauer’s book Into The Wild. Alex, like Treadwell, finds the human world corrupt and banal; he hitch-hikes to Alaska with no supplies except a 10-pound bag of rice. All his courage and resourcefulness is for nothing when he falls ill and starves to death, huddled freezing in an abandoned Winnebago, the victim of misfortune to which he was made vulnerable by his own hubris.

McCandless and Treadwell both come from upper-middle-class families. For both of them, their home life seems loving, well-fed, and supportive. Both lived in a society sheltered from the kind of adversity and constant mortal danger which has been the norm through most of human history, and which is still quite abundant today; in South Central Los Angeles for example, where pop glamour photographer David LaChappelle finds the stars of his own documentary, Rize.

Rize begins with the story of Tommy the Hip Hop Clown, a charismatic entertainer who has spawned a multitude of ghetto clown troupes. That's right: hip hop clowns. Already you can tell this film is amazing, right? These communities have developed their own frantic, sort of ecstatic style of dancing. Tommy the Clown has a sordid history as a drug dealer and a Very Bad Person, who overcomes this by inventing a new character for himself and playing it to the max, essentially becoming that character. He performs at birthday parties and generally acts as a father-figure to a lot of kids who’s dads are gangsters, or in jail, or dead. So kids paint their faces up like clowns and dance like crazy lunatics.

Then some of these kids grew up and kept pushing the style further, (because there’s nothing else to do in Watts County except join a gang). As a mature form, called "krumping", it is adapted to its surroundings and shaped by its unique hardships. It is, in a word, authentic.

Although Treadwell survived for a surprisingly long time, he never fit his surroundings. He was a fraud and a trespasser. He tried to change the nature of bears and foxes to match his own solipsistic idealism: the goodness and purity of nature in contrast with what he perceived as the degenerate fraudulence of human society. The only known cure for fraudulence is death, and Treadwell ultimately did succeed in fitting his surroundings: by becoming food and earth he finally managed to give up his humanity once and for all, which is what he was after all along.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE IS SPEAKING TO YOU AND HERE IS WHY

2005-12-22T16:24:00.001-08:00

Chad Harbach contributes to N+3¹a discussion of David Foster Wallace's career.

David Foster Wallace’s 1996 opus now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit.

I couldn't agree more. I lent my copy of Infinite Jest to a friend, and I said exactly that (absent the stellar metaphor) when I saw it on his bookshelf, unread for the past five years despite all my desperate cajoling and prodding.

1. N+1, issue 3. The currently featured story, The Reading Crisis, is also a must-read. I find myself agreeing so hard that it feels like I have to pee.

TWO SCIENTISTS

2005-12-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

The citizens of Abdera wrote to Hippocrates crying for help, because their great atomic scientist had gone mad. Hippocrates was long delayed. When he arrived with his bottle of hellebore, the weeping citizens led him to Democritus, where he sat unshod, dissecting animals and making notes in the book on his knees. Hippocrates asked why he was doing it, and he answered that he was looking for the causes of madness in the parts of beasts, and he demanded what had detained Hippocrates. He answered, "Family matters, engagements, money and other business." Democritus roared with laughter -- that men called great so waste their lives, marrying only to fall out of love, seeking wealth without measure, making wars to no purpose, and in peace overthrowing one tyrant to set up another. Hippocrates listened to his railing and, turning to the people, told them to cease their lamentation, for Democritus was not only sane but the wisest man in Abdera.

From Warren S. McCulloch's 1962 essay, "Where is Fancy Bred?," collected in Embodiments of Mind. In addition to being a great scientist and philospher, he had a rather compelling visage:

THE WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS: IS IT A QUAGMIRE?

2005-12-11T10:02:00.000-08:00

Reasonable people have come to the conclusion that the war against christmas is unwinnable. We must pull out, cut and run, let the terrorists win, and give timetables for breaking Christmas without buying it. We must end this campaign before more innocent people are wished "Merry Christmas" OH GOD PLEASE WHY.

Certain lunatics see themselves as righteous defenders of (the word) Christmas. Yet they seem immune to the irony of using "Merry Christmas" as a synonym for "Fuck you." Thus does the dreadful logic of escalation lead us inevitably to subvert the very values which we claim to defend. War is hell, my friends.

One of the cultural values that Christmas represents is the power of belief. I saw Polar Express in 3D at the IMAX on Friday. It was part of the office christmas festivities, and I felt like I should participate, and it actually wasn't bad. The animation was nice, but the message of the film bothered me, that there is something flawed and morally weak about doubting. The character arc of this genre is familar: child on the cusp of puberty begins as a sullen skeptic, doubting the existence of Santa. The child goes on a magical journey to learn that if you only believe with all your heart, you can MAKE THINGS TRUE, and see (or hear) what is hidden from the skeptic.

In Polar Express, this journey ends when Santa Claus arrives on the scene. The boy cannot hear the jingle bells jingling. Shaking the bells as hard as he can, no sound comes out. But he's the only one who can't hear; everyone else seems to hear them just fine. There must be something wrong with him. He convinces himself that he can hear the bells after all, and that they make the most beautiful sound ever. This is considered a moral redemption and he is rewarded by receiving a personal gift from Santa(/God).

For some, this is a laudable way of forming beliefs. For myself and others, not so much. We believe that skepticism is valuable, and that doubt should be rewarded as much as beliefs created by the need to be a member a club, or to acquire some other good which supercedes the good of believing truth.

Haha just kidding. Merry Christmas!

SINCE EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT

2005-12-05T17:50:00.000-08:00

Wow lists!

BOOKS I READ IN 2005

1. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
This book describes the adventures of a crazy homeless writer in Norway. Guaranteed to crush your will to live.

2. Oblivion by David Foster Wallace.
It's by David Foster Wallace!

3. Pastoralia+Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders
Saunders has a very distinct style, with little variation across these two collections of stories. Fortunately Saunders is totally effin hilarious.

4. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
I'm gay for Leonard Cohen!

5. The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
This book rocked my world, it is inventive and perfectly constructed. Maybe the only book I read last year actually published in 2005!

6. Siddhartha+Demian by Herman Hesse
Hey hey hey
I have nothing to say!

7. Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier
I just read this last weekend. Another downer book. This is an intensely sombre graphic novel about a kid whose mother dies of cancer and whose father goes insane. After that, it gets really depressing. Fun fact: Hornschemeier is the only cartoonist of his generation to take a degree in philosophy. Coincidence?

8. Vox+Fermata by Nicholson Baker
Porny! Vox is a novella transcript of a phone sex chat session. Fermata is about a guy who is able to stop the flow of time for everyone except himself, and he uses this power to thoroughly admire boobs. Summaried like that, they sound just like any of a billion other cheesy jerk stories that nobody cares about anymore since we all have broadband. Vox and Fermata are different. These books subvert the genre conventions *unh* of erotica to shed light on the complex network of internalized irony *buh*... of modern... *spooge*

BOOKS I STARTED BUT DID NOT FINISH

1. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann is kicking my ass. It is unquestionably the finest book I didn't read this year. It's the kind of book that is so epic and perfect that it's a little bit scary. Also, it's huge.

2. Atonement by Ian McEwan
It's good, I guess. Atonement seems like a pretty straight-up Austinean study in social anxiety, and if that's your bag then no problem. I stopped reading right before the crucial plot moment where the lovestruck young gentleman accidentally delivers to his secret admiree an early draft, (containing various lusty and ribald sentiments), of a letter of chaste romantic intent he has written. Perhaps someday I will find out how it all plays out, but I lost interest in discharging the mechanism that McEwan had so craftily arranged. It seems like a good place to leave off; I felt like I got the gist.

3. The Tesseract by Alex Garland
I really liked his first book, The Beach, but this one failed to make me care.

NEW HARUKI MURAKAMI STORY

2005-11-20T09:33:00.000-08:00

The Year of Spaghetti.

I really liked this one.

I still haven't read his latest book, Kafka on the Shore. I was working at Chapters when it came out, and I was stoked about it. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is one of my favorite books ever, (and which seems wildly underappreciated compared to Wild Sheep Chase or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), and I've liked everything else he's written. But then when it arrived, the cover was UGLY. I don't know why I have such a negative reaction to it, but that image definitely repels me. I even took the dust jacket off to check out the actual book, but the hardcover was ugly too, somehow. It wasn't that the creepy cover made me not want to read it, but shelling out $35 for the hardcover... it's a package deal. The last new hardcover I bought was David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, which was, of course, crushingly brilliant and also had a wonderful cover.

Speaking of great looking books, I was pleased to find John Dewey's Art As Experience at the second-hand bookstore across the street; the cover, designed by Robert Sullivan, is suberb.

I prefer designs which are simple and use colour sparingly and honour the text. Here's another one of my favorites:

It doesn't fuck around, you know?

My favorite example of bad cover art I've seen lately is from a paperback edition of What Philosophers Think, an anthology contemporary philosophy.

I don't think I'm being excessively Freudian when I observe that this...

...looks an awful lot a girl with a dildo up her ass.

WHERE ARE THE ROBOTS?

2005-11-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

"Sooner or later, if we want a decent society -- by which I don't mean a society glutted with commodities or one maintained in precarious equilibrium by overbuying and forced premature obsolescence -- we are going to have to come face to face with the problem of work." Harvey Swados

So, I’ve been temping at this office in for the past few months, developing software training material. It’s nice to have a reliable income again, so I can purchase nice things and feed myself. The actual job I’m doing is easy, yet involves a bit of thinking every now and then, brief spurts of tactical cognition, followed by long stretches of tedium. Like most white-collar jobs, it doesn’t really require any serious education or technical training, except to the extent required to fit in socially. The people there are nice, but it doesn’t really matter because I can wear headphones all day if I want. It’s nice :)

I work in order to enjoy the time that I’m not working. I have no serious emotional investment in the fortunes of the company I work with, and the work itself is not inherently fulfilling, about the best that can be said for it is that it’s comfortable. The product of my labour is almost purely conceptual. No longer forced to sell actual commodities to the public, my current role is at an extremely meta level on the great chain of capitalist being.

I’ve been thinking about work a lot since reading James W. Rinehart's exceptional study of Canadian labour history, The Tyranny of Work: Alienation and the labour process. Work is such a fundamental activity to our present lifestyle, it's easy to forget that the social and environmental factors that sustain it are temporary, contingent phenomena. In the general sense, the origin of our concepts of employment can be directly traced back to the industrial revolution and the technological developments which followed. It's striking what a drastic change in human activity this was; in 1901, 40 percent of Canadian labour was directed at agriculture. By 1981, this number had shrunk to 4 percent. Of course, just because a combine is doing your job doesn't mean you can retire. The rise of the office worker, including managers, the technical trades, clerical work and sales, grew from 15 to 52 percent over the same 80-year period. Should we call this progress?

Probably. I’m not humpin’ straw out in the weather and I get fast Internet access, which is nice. But it isn’t perfect. For one thing, work remains largely a boring, repetitive, "rationalized" activity. Also, fatal disruptions to our way of life, (peak oil and massive ecological disaster to name two favorites), are virtual certainties, according to some. We live in a temporary world of constant flux; we are alive, and someday we will not be alive. Do you really want to spend most of your days working? What is to be done?

Party our asses off, according to the Work Less Party. They are a forward-thinking political party motivated by fact that our present consumer-capitalist system is unsustainable, and we’d be best to let it die with dignity rather than have it accelerate into a terrible flaming oblivion. To promote their message of laziness as a moral necessity, (which I fully support, by the way), they recently released their documentary film, Alarm Clocks Kill Dreams: The Movie. The screening at the Van East Cinema was packed with Commercial Drive denizens hoping, perhaps to catch a glimpse of themselves on film. According to the camera operator, the last time the theatre was so full was for The Matrix. The two movies are actually similar, in the sense that both films present a vision of a future of slavery, war and environmental disaster, the reality of which is hidden from the average person by the spectacle of consumerism.

ACKD is a series of interviews, footage from various events around Vancouver, and stock educational film footage from archive.org. To be honest, I found it hard to watch: It was sloppily edited, poorly organized and went on way too long. These sort of technical criticisms are mostly beside the point, of course. The motivation behind the movie has everything to do with proselytizing their worldview and nothing to do with th details of movie-making. The rough editing can be attributed to the desire to show the movie before the Vancouver municipal election (today!).

Part of the WLP modus operandi is putting on goofy, Situationist International-style performances like a “Rat Race” around the art gallery or handing out speeding tickets to people rushing around downtown, throwing huge raging parties, staging naked Critical Mass rides, etc.. Their Michael Moore-inspired trip to Raytheon was pointless and should have been cut from the two-hour documentary. (Guys: when someone says they work in “QA”, they mean “Quality Assurance,” not “Question and Answer.” Hahaha!) They do not, however, consider themselves “joke” candidates simply engaging in political theatre. They are running in earnest and they believe in the necessity and of change and the importance of injecting some appreciation of the larger trajectory or our society into the political discussion.

By far the most articulate interviewee was Tom Walker, the Vancouver-Point Grey WLP representative. He was the only one who seemed to have a command of the relevant facts and the ability to make a reasonable argument. Other candidates seemed not to be able to go much past vague and sort of naïve generalities like “ride your bike to save the planet,” or “our society is linear right now, but we need to make it more cyclical,” if you get my drift. (Hippies.)

We, human beings participating in a larger economy, are both consumers and producers. Both of these roles are important to our overall happiness and well-being. The advisability of exchanging our productive lives in order to drive an ever-accelerating consumption is one of the great deceptions of consumer capitalism. So I agree with the philosophy behind working less and working differently, but in practice my feeling is that the sorts of changes that are necessary to implement a truly sustainable economy are beyond any non-revolutionary political solution. I agree with Rinehart when he writes:

“The transforming potential of such enterprises is constrained by market forces and the necessity to generate profits. The only genuine solution to alienation involves a total restructuring of the workplace, the economy, and the state…. The most intransigent source of alienation is the market, which transcends national boundaries and exerts its centripetal pull over even the most reluctant nations.” (pp.209-10)

Is it possible to convince people to just step off the merry-go-round? I doubt it. Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but I feel like the potential convincing enough people to choose to be poor, (which, really, is what it comes down to), no matter how essential for the continuation of live on earth, is pretty slim. I suspect the Work Less Partiers feel the same way, and that this explains the oscillation between serious political activism and the embrace of mockery and dancing and hedonism while waiting out the apocalypse.

THE FIRST RULE OF BOOK CLUB IS DO NOT TALK ABOUT BOOK CLUB

2005-10-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

Reading is something I spend an awful lot of time doing. Why? What's the point? As a Ferengi would say, “what is its value?” I’ve been attempting to formulate my thoughts on what it is that I think I get out of the books I read, now that I can no longer justify reading by reference to any potential professional concerns, as I could while a grad student. This first short episode is almost entirely negative and hostile. Sorry for that, but hey, that’s me for ya’.

When someone tells you they read a lot of books, they usually think they are bragging. It's an announcement of one's refined intellect and disdain for the masses, one which you almost always find paired with denigration of tv, which I call "televion" because tv is a nickname and nicknames are for friends and television is NO FRIEND OF MINE. (That's from a Mr. Show sketch -- did you catch that? If so, then you obviously watch television and are therefore a subhuman mediocrity, sorry.) Cf., this thread at Conversational Reading where both Scott E. and the mysterious M preface their enthusiasm for Lost, (a televised entertainment program which happens to be quite shitty), with exculpatory expressions of generalized hostility toward television.

Obviously this has a lot to do with social class, and people who self-apply the title "book lover"(/"television hater") are often singling themselves out as the sacred vessels by which real cultural value, (as opposed to disposable cultural detritus), is transmitted. Plebs watch television, the cultured elite read books. This attitude is mostly unjustified, and it irritates me on a number of levels, almost all of which are illustrated in this review of Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.

English majors of all types will also enjoy the parlor game of totaling up the titles they have already consumed. (I made it to 45 but only by cheating a little: I'm pretty sure I never actually got more than halfway through The Red and the Black and while I have read three P.G. Wodehouse novels I'm not at all sure they were the ones she listed.)

This paragraph typifies all that is bad and wrong with book culture. Let me count the ways:

Score-keeping. This drives me nuts. Don’t get me wrong, I do it myself whenever I read books about books; I loved Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead, partly because she wrote so enthusiastically about Elias Canetti's Auto-Da-Fe, which I had read just prior, (and which, incidentally, contains the origin of the title of this blog.) When I feel a strong connection to a work of art or literature or film or whatever, there's nothing I enjoy more that for brilliant people to discuss why they also felt strongly about it. You see, if I'm engaged by the same books as people who are professional book-lovers of great renown, then my tastes are validated and I feel like I'm not the only one who thinks about life and art in a certain way. It's a good feeling, but it’s a sort of masturbatory self-congratulation that should really be kept private.

The most embarassing part about the reviewer’s score-keeping is that she cheats. She didn’t read The Red and the Black, but counted it anyway. This is disgraceful not only because she felt the need to inflate her own grade ("I'm giving myself an A+ in reading!"), but also because The Red and the Black is among the finest novels I've ever read.

This brings us to the second major irritant in that review: Undergraduate Nostalgia. Did you notice the reference to "English majors"? Well, she doesn't mean people who actually majored in English. It's meant as shorthand for a certain type of person:

Non-English majors read to inform themselves. But English majors read because they like to.

However, as I was reading (and enjoying) Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, it occurred to me that there is a sizable third group that ought to be recognized as well. These could be called the über-English majors: people who, long after school is done, continue to read exactly the same kinds of books required in lit courses. They are often also book club-participants. For them, hurling themselves into weighty books is a pleasure that is most delightful when shared by others.

This attitude is so completely opposed to my own personality and tastes that my head spun around like Pazuzu after reading that paragraph. I am not, nor have I ever been, an English major, and frankly I resent the implication. (I don’t really mind the appellation “uber-English major” though, because it implies that I am superior to English majors, which happens to be true ^_____^.) Also, I would sooner hurl myself down a concrete flight of stairs than join a book club.

Going back to the first quoted paragraph, the reviewer refers to the act of reading a book as "consuming" it. Connect this choice of words, (which in poker is called a “tell”), to her professed desire to read books in public and the result is: Conspicuous Consumption. This sums up everything that I despise about the contemporary cult of the novel.

In The Books In My Life, Henry Miller expresses a sentiment which I’m inclined to agree with, (I’m paraphrasing because I don’t have the book in front of me): One should strive to read as few books as possible. Reading is just another form of passivity and inaction; as the Brian Jonestown Massacre song says: Thought - Action = Shit. Unless your professional concerns oblige you otherwise, read only those few masterpieces that speak to you utterly, which give insight into the hidden depths of one's character and provoke an almost religious experience. Anything less and you'd be better off building some shelves or cleaning out the refrigerator. A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but good advice nonetheless. Most importantly, unless you happen to be Susan Sontag or Henry Miller or some sharp mind who has spent time thinking very seriously about such things, keep it under your hat.

Joining a book club, (or writing a blog! touché!), is the mediocre mind’s way of circumventing the essential loneliness and inactivity of reading. By sharing one’s opinions with others, reading becomes reified as social activity, but a feeble and debased activity. Nothing new is created, no value beyond social gratification and mutual congratulation. This is reading not for it's own sake, but as a lifestyle accessory stemming from the desire to be known as the sort of person who reads serious books.

HOLY BEAN BAG BEGGAR, BATMAN

2005-10-05T20:25:00.000-07:00

From craigslist:

WANTED: bean bag bean - $4

i want a big of beans for my bean bag.
near joyce STN perfer

NIGGA WUT

THE BROWN BUNNY

2005-10-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

It's a masterpiece.

You may remember the film acquiring some notoriety at Cannes in 2003, when Ebert called it the “worst movie in the history of the festival” and compared it unfavorably to his colonoscopy. (And really, could you ask for a better metric for the quality of a movie-going experience than its similarity to an invasive rectal exam?)

Ebert later backed down, when Gallo cut some of the extensive footage of a black van driving off into the horizon and added footage of Chloe Sevigny sucking on his cock like she expects candy to come out. Without having seen the Cannes version, this seems like a wise editorial decision. But don't worry, there's still plenty of screen-time devoted to Gallo driving through mid-western suburbs and down mid-western highways, and driving at night, and in the rain. Driving into the sunset? You better believe there's footage of driving into the sunset.

Your appreciation of this movie will depend in part on how high your tolerance for Sensitive Vincent Gallo is. There's a video he made, (for a song that he also wrote and performed himself, of course), called "Honey Bunny," and it features hot, semi-nude women rotating on a stool, in various suggestive poses. The video ends with a close-up of sensitive, bearded Vincent Gallo, weeping sensitively. He just loves women so darned much! (You can watch the video at Sputnik7; it's quite amusing.)

Brown Bunny is very similar. Like Honey Bunny, it's a self-indulgent expression of male guilt, but it also happens to be brilliant. Vincent Gallo portrays a sensitive, tortured motorcycle racer named Bud Clay, driving to Los Angeles from somewhere east of Chicago. Along the way he has sort of hallucinatory, context-free encounters with various women. For example, a young convenience store clerk flirts with Gallo, who responds by asking her to come to California with him. She sensibly replied "I don't even know you, Mister." Gallo begs pitifully, "please come with me? please?... please?... please?... please?... please?... please?" She finally says "okay," and then, while she's packing her bags, Gallo drives off alone.

The film embodies an aesthetic and dramatic minimalism; the viewer has plenty of space to reflect on the few gestures each scene contains. The various stops along the way to Los Angeles, (the young store clerk, visiting Sevigny’s parents, tenderly kissing a woman at a truck stop, being propositioned by whores, etc.), contain almost no action and very little dialogue, resembling scenes from memory or daydreams, inert and internal. The word “daydreams” is wrong; it makes them sound trivial or fanciful, which these scenes are not. They all contain a sense of desperation, of fraudulence and disappointment, which culminate in Clay facing his dreadful failure as a human being. It’s honest and unflinching and not very sexy.

I wrote a few more paragraphs, contrasting this film with Gus van Sant's Last Days, but Blogger ate them and now I can't be bothered. They contained great erudition and critical savvy, I assure you, but now they are gone forever thanks to a unrecognized object in Blogger's python code. Personally, I always preferred Perl.

THE BALROG WAS THE TRUE HERO OF LORD OF THE RINGS

2005-09-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

I've started doodling at work lately. I frequently have to copy large files over the network, which takes about a minute, a long enough time to get bored staring at the windows Copying Files dot dot dot animation. So I draw little pictures sometimes. No big whoop.

The trouble with working from home, which is also the completely awesome thing about it, is that I can blow three hours drawing ridiculous shit and playing with photoshop. I spent the whole morning doodling this idea I had while I was in the shower.

The Boy Who Mistook His Bicycle For A Hat.
Also, something about a woman walking her toaster.
I don't know.

I was surprised how much trouble I had drawing a bicycle from memory. I kept thinking: where do the pedals connect to the frame? Which is strange, because I see bicycles every day and yet I can't inspect the mental image carefully enough to draw one. It's also hard to draw circles. And who has time for spokes? Not me, that's for sure. Fuck spokes >:(

THIS WEEK IN COOL SHIT

2005-09-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

My new favorite illustrators.

My new favorite choose-your-own-adventure comic book thing.

My new favorite giant pink bunny.

via Drawn

I AM A COPY OF MONTY CANTSIN

2005-09-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Dadahead has posted a wonderful and uplifting list of quotes about Dada.

Dadaism is great of course, as is situationism and postmonsterism, among an uncountable infinity of other isms very much deserving of your time and enthusiasm. Among these is Neoism, which names the simultaneous emergence of the new ('neo') and the well-defined ('ism').

There is no way to become a neoist, and therefore no reason to do so. Neoism strongly recommends that you do your very best to embrace all other isms before turning to neoism.

Neoists communicate primarily in the form of brief koans or parables or performances, such as the following:

Two girls wearing silver overalls and Monty Cantsin-look alike masks visited Monty Cantsin. The first girl said: "I bet this is an allegory." The second said: "You have won." The first said: "But only allegorically." The second said: "No, in reality. In allegory, you have lost."

Or:

When you try to explain something you often end up in confusion. Meanwhile if you try to create confusion you might come up with a perfect nonsense.

Or:

Wearing sandwich boards that said in English & French: "Neoist Parking Meter Action - Pay Me to Go Away"
& wearing a parking meter hood over my face, I stood at empty parking places
& waited for cars to park there. Then I followed the drivers when they left their cars with an impassive face & my hand out-stretched mechanically. The drivers all avoided me by walking somewhere where I wasn't - after which I left a Neoist Parking Ticket under their windshield wiper. Finally disgusted by what I thought was a mediocre response to my imaginative begging, I started to walk back to the LOW theatre. En route, 2 guys stopped me & asked me what I was doing. When I explained, they thought it was so funny that they pretended to get out of a car & gave me money.

Neoism is the invention of Istvan Kantor, who gave us the name Monty Cantsin.

Cantsin is a name chosen/invented by Cantsin to refer to an international star who can be anyone. The name is fixed, the people using it aren't. What is usually an egoistical role (star) becomes abstracted by its disassociation from a particular person. When someone thinks/feels that the star context/advantage might be useful, they can "wear" the Cantsin identity.

It's fair to say that Monty Cantsin is motivated purely by sexual desire.

If you wish to understand Neoism, write down again and again the same word: Neoism. Do it until you get really sick. Then run into the bathroom and take a shit. This is a simple everyday exercise to keep a very close and continuous contact with Neoism.

There are endless meditative action routines to keep our body and mind in total awarness of Neoism.

Amen?!

L'OREAL IS PEOPLE

2005-09-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

Hm this is sort of disturbing.

A British newspaper said that a Chinese cosmetics company was using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe.

Agents for the firm, which could not be named for legal reasons, have told would-be customers that skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot is being used to develop collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments, the Guardian newspaper said following an undercover investigation.

"The agents say some of the company's products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is 'traditional' and nothing to 'make such a big fuss about'," the daily alleged.

Well hey I guess it isn't a big deal then. I suppose I was being culturally insensitive there for a second. Now I see that rendering dead bodies into cosmetic products is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Just as reasonable as shooting prisoners, perhaps.

BELIEVER, N+1, AND THE EVISCERATION OF FALSE HIPSTER GODS

2005-09-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

Has everybody read the NYT article about The Believer and n+1? It's long, but definitely worth it.

I've always enjoyed the Believer, I like their sense of humour. I've never read an actual physical copy of n+1, but the few samples I read in their archive leads me to believe that maybe they are haters. But I don't really know.

I don't have much to add, except to point to the resulting melee at The Valve. One of the n+1 editors, Marco Roth, pops in to clarify his position on blogging versus print publishing, and there's a spirited discussion about Wes Anderson's status re: hipsters and racism.

SCHOOLS FOR MULES

2005-09-09T09:36:00.000-07:00

John Emerson thinks that liberal arts degrees are bullshit.

I spend most of my time studying liberal-arts-type stuff on my own. It's my substitute for TV. Books are one of the least expensive forms of entertainment, and if you've got a halfway decent library in town, books are free.

There is really only one sacrifice you'll have to make if you read all the time: if you do that, you can forget about being normal. People will regard you with suspicion. More successful people will fear you because you're smarter than they are and are suspected of having a bad attitude. Self-made men and bitter, unsuccessful people will despise you as a failure. Slackers will avoid you because you're too serious and think too much. So you basically have to give up on all normal human relationships, but given today's baseline for normal human relationships, you may come out ahead on this.

A STEADY TRICKLE OF STICKY TREACLE

2005-08-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

I wasn't expecting company. However, since I've had more visitors so far today than I've ever had in an entire week, I thought it might be a good time to assemble the Baboon Palace: Year One retrospective, (with director commentary!). So join me, friends, as we take a look back and revisit some of the piercing insight and cutting-edge Internet humour that has made Baboon Palace the new media juggernaut of tomorrow, today!

If you've come from Leiter Reports, you're probably familiar with his "no bullshit approach." I do things a little differently here, using a methodology I refer to as the "all bullshit approach." The only important thing is to relax. Without further ado,

Baboon Palace, Year One: Comments (0)

OVER THE EDGE Those dippy futurists at Edge are always good for a laugh. How much progress do you think Hollis has been made on the Web of Good Advice since last June?

STOP BEING JERKS Hey this was pretty funny!

CHOKE A review of a Chuck Pahlaniuk's book, Choke, obviously.

DELIVERING THE ROBOT VOTE Campaining among the machines. Compare this with Aristotle from "Over The Edge" for extra amusement.

DAY JOB Have I been working at a bookstore since November??? Killing myself now.

PEOPLE DO IT TO THEMSELVES A screed against marketing, aka. lying. Another blogger, who shall remain nameless, had a big problem with my pro-authenticity stance in this post and then deleted his link to my blog, probably while weeping big salty tears.

CHOKING ON ASCII BONES A pointless tragedy in eight panels.

L'ART Begins with flatulence and ends with vague pronouncements about the nature of art. Can you spot the difference?

DISCOVERY CHANNEL An inspiring tale of discovery and laughter and sharing.

LIKE A MONKEY READY TO BE SHOT INTO SPACE

2005-08-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, the remains of Hunter S. Thompson will be fired out of a cannon. With luck, his residue will drift like pollen through the atmosphere creating an unstoppable epidemic of crazy weirdness. NOW MORE THAN EVER the world needs people who see how weird the going is getting, because it seems to me that this whole new American fascism thing is getting a bit out of control.

I suppose I'm biased, I get almost all my news from dadahead and Leiter Reports. You should pay attention to Brian Leiter, he's a one-man two-fisted justice parade on a worldwide hostility tour, cracking Republican heads together like coconuts while kicking a creationist in the face. It's wonderful catharsis, but it doesn't make me feel too cozy or optimistic about the future. It's sort of like listening to the couple in the next apartment get drunk and scream at each other every Saturday night: a perverse voyeuristic thrill tempered with the realization that no one is ever likely to win the argument. Not in any constructive way, at least. Now more than ever we need Hunter S. Thompson and his cache of weaponry.

I've also been thinking about John Lennon lately, another tragic dreamer murdered by a nutcase. Flipping through a book of Rolling Stone covers yesterday, I came across this famous photo:

I learned that Lennon was shot just hours after that picture was taken. Pretty crazy, no? I also learned that his last word was "Yeah." The police at the scene asked "Are you John Lennon?" and he said "Yeah." This reminded me of some lines from the Flaming Lips song Suddenly Everything Has Changed, and maybe this part is about him:

I stood up and I said yeah.
I spoke up and I said hey yeah yeah yeah...

And it seemed to cause a chain reaction,
it had momentum it was gaining traction,
it was all the rage it was all the fashion,
the outreached hands had resigned themselves to holding on to something that they'll never have,
and that's too bad.

But in reality there was no reaction.

I'd never really got "into" John Lennon or the Beatles, up until a few months ago when I picked up Acoustic Lennon and Magical Mystery Tour. I'd listened to the Beatles as a young lad, maybe around eight or nine, on this super chunky tape player I can barely remeber. This was a solid piece of machinery, about ten inches long, six wide and three deep, made of thick moulded black plastic with huge white playback buttons and the big red "RECORD" button. I can remember sitting under a desk in the dining room with headphones on, listening to Revolver. Yellow Submarine and Helter Skelter were the only songs I can remember really liking, and when I started to get "into" music, it was all Aerosmith and Black Sabbaf, and Guns'N'Roses and shit like that.

I liked the Beatles not because of personal enjoyment but as a vague gesture of acknowledgement that they were, in fact, good. I also never bothered to finish Lord of the Rings even when I'd read plenty of the derivative genre and played Dungeons and Dragons and generally lived in a subculture inspired by LOTR, it just seemed like common knowledge that it was an amazing masterpiece and I could never seem to fully enjoy things that everyone else has already experienced and approved. For some reason I placed a very high premium on originality, much higher than it deserves; I've never been capable of working inside a "normal science." Well-mapped terrains don't seem to hold my interest, however objectively wonderful they might be. This is a form of mental illness that can be a great blessing when combined with exceptional creativity, genius or willpower. More typically it's a recipe for impotent solipsism and baseless feelings of superiority.

Hunter S. Thompson was the real deal, a human being who somehow stumbled into his destiny and ran with it to the bitter end. I can't say I miss him, but I'm glad that he lived.

THE FUN HAS BEEN ALL USED UP

2005-07-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

I was going to share with you two very exciting and inspirational videos, but I left it too long and now they've both been taken down.

The first was Clutch's Burning Beard video. Maybe it will work again soon, it's a great song and and a great video.

The other was Balancing Point, which looks like it's gone for good. So instead, here are some pictures of rock balancing near Second Beach. UPDATE: Balancing Point is available here.

The fellow stacking these stones was quite dedicated to the art, and he'd covered a sizeable stretch of beach with these balancing sculptures of various sizes. A fine day's work.

WE MADE SOME NEWS

2005-07-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

First Chapters store in B.C. votes for union representation.

PEOPLE ARE JUST SO STUPID SOMETIMES

2005-07-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

Field Maloney doesn't get Wes Anderson.

After being rescued by Gene Hackman's performance in The Royal Tenenbaums, USS Anderson finally ran aground last winter, with The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Rather than develop as a storyteller, Anderson appeared to have floated off to an adolescent never-never land where everyone wears Lacoste, colorful and quirky toys abound, and a vintage emo soundtrack gets piped in whenever a little poignancy is required—a Michael Jackson ranch for the Salinger set.

First of all, I would hardly say that The Royal Tenenbaums was rescued by Gene Hackman's performance. He was great of course, (Wes Anderson did, after all, write it specifically for Gene Hackman), but so was Angelica Houston and pretty much everyone else in that movie. (I have mixed feelings about Ben Stiller, but whatever.)

My real problem is with people who disliked Life Aquatic, and apparently there's a lot of them. I just can't understand it. Consider the highlighted sentence in the quote above: those are supposed to be complaints. Maloney is complaining about colour and quirk and the fact that it had a poignant soundtrack. (Am I part of the "Salinger set" then? What if I thought Catcher in the Rye was boring?)

Personally, I wouldn't call David Bowie or Mark Mothersbaugh "vintage emo," whatever that is. And I sure as FUCK wouldn't call Seu Jorge's acoustic covers of David Bowie songs, sung in Portuguese, "vintage emo." More likely I'd call them "completely awesome in every possible way." Here are some other great things about Life Aquatic:

Jeff Goldblum's "I'm A Pepper" shirt
the script girl is always topless
they have a script girl
the bond company stooge is also a human being
they all have matching Team Zissou speedos and matching Team Zissou pyjamas
they call their guns "Glocks"
the interns share a Glock
Willem Dafoe (period)
Steve Zissou can snap his fingers underwater
there is a sauna and a hot-air balloon on the boat
and so on.

And that's just the crazy surface weirdness. More importantly, and completely unlike Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, credible adult relationships transpire. The colourful, childlike system of metaphor that forms Zissou's neverland of boyhood fantasy -- celebrity ocean documentarians and crayon ponyfish and natural wonder -- is home to a very honest and unironic story about fatherhood and mortality and other grown-up themes. If you didn't like the movie, or thought that it was full of "hipster irony", I guess you just weren't paying attention and should probably watch it over and over again until you realize how wrong you were. Or maybe, like Field Maloney, you just have no taste or sense of humour.

Life Aquatic is among Wes Anderson's best movies, easily better than Rushmore and maybe even better than The Royal Tenenbaums. If Owen Wilson would rather cash in with movies like Wedding Crashers, where the best line (an Owen Wilson original!!!) is "Scientists say we only use 10 percent of our brains, but I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts," well, that's just terribly sad and disappointing. Jesus what a horrible line. It doesn't even make sense! And Maloney thinks this supports his theory that Wilson was the brains of the operation? That just makes me want to slap my own face.

Also, that we-only-use-10-percent-of-our-brains cliché is total bullshit. Scientists do not, in fact, say that and I wish people would stop repeating it. Clichés are bad enough when they're true.

CAUTION SQUIRREL

2005-07-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

(9:15:10 PM) Scortt:   HOLY SHIT
(9:15:17 PM) Q-bert:   eh?
(9:15:31 PM) Scortt:   dude a squirrel just fucking crawled in my window!!!
(9:15:42 PM) Scortt:   it's hiding behind my laundry basket
(9:15:48 PM) Scortt:   what the fuck should i do????
(9:15:51 PM) Q-bert:   haha!
(9:16:05 PM) Q-bert:   I don't know. Catch it with something, I guess.
(9:16:13 PM) Scortt:   with what?
(9:16:11 PM) Q-bert:   a towel?
(9:16:15 PM) Q-bert:   or blanket?
(9:16:21 PM) Scortt:   good call
(9:16:27 PM) Scortt:   i'll let you know how it goes
(9:16:30 PM) Q-bert:   good luck

SOME TIME ELAPSES...

(9:24:47 PM) Scortt:   ok here's a status update
(9:25:21 PM) Scortt:   catching the squirrel was not an option
(9:25:27 PM) Scortt:   they are fast and i am scared
(9:25:39 PM) Scortt:   anyways, it's been corralled out into the main hallway
(9:25:44 PM) Q-bert:   rad.
(9:25:49 PM) Scortt:   i was trying to get it out the front door
(9:26:12 PM) Q-bert:   meh. It's out of your apartment. It can be an adventure for someone else now!
(9:26:13 PM) Scortt:   i got it down it to the second floor, but then it ran past me back up to the third floor, and is now hiding behind a door
(9:26:16 PM) Scortt:   dead end
(9:26:31 PM) Scortt:   i'm hoping it'll just climb out the hallway window
(9:26:42 PM) Scortt:   or it'll be a thrill for one of the dogs
(9:26:50 PM) Q-bert:   you might want to put a post-it near the front door: "beware of squirrel"
(9:26:58 PM) Scortt:   yeah good idea
(9:27:14 PM) Scortt:   CAUTION: SQUIRREL
(9:27:35 PM) Scortt:   man that was fucked up
(9:27:46 PM) Q-bert:   yeah. I've never had that happen, that's for sure.
(9:27:50 PM) Scortt:   at least it wasn't a raccoon

THE FUTURE IS NICE

2005-07-03T20:16:00.000-07:00

Conversational Reading pointed me to this flippin' hilarious review of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, by Laura Miller. I'm usually not overwhelmed by her reviews in Salon, but maybe it's just that Laura Miller is no Heather Havrilesky and Salon is, well, Salon.

Incidentally, my internet crush (/e-fatuation) on/with Heather has now gone full-blown after reading this extensive report on the hopeful rise and tragic, spluttering failure of Suck.com. (She wrote for Suck as Polly Esther.) I thought it was interesting, (and sort of exhausting), but it's probably not worthwhile to anyone who doesn't know or give a shit who Carl Steadman is.

To sum up: the Internet bubble exploded and burned up everyone's magical Internet money, Suck is dead and Plastic is boring, and if you don't read Rabbit Blog then you are probably gay.

EVERYBODY LOVES DFW, EPISODE 19844

2005-06-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace delivers the commencement speech at Kenyon College. For some reason, Conversational Reading thought it was a "bit of a letdown." I'm not sure what he was expecting, but it's pretty darn insightful from where I'm sitting. Here's an exerpt, but you should read the whole thing anyway because it's great.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship –- be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

STATIC IN THE ATTIC

2005-06-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

Hey this is a very interesting study!

Majikthise points out that more people seem to believe in haunted houses (37%) than believe that ghosts (32%). From this we must logically conclude that five percent of houses are haunted by non-ghosts (possibly a bigfoot or Samsquanch).

I was trying to find some comparable statistics for Canada, and I came across this article about UFO sightings in British Columbia. Did you know that there are over 300 sightings here every single year? Mostly in Surrey you say? I dunno it's crazy. I only mention it because the article contains what I believe to be one of the more superior sentences of the English language:

"I like to consider myself skeptical," said Heather Anderson, director of the B.C. Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society, a three-year-old organization.

That's.......terrible. :(

Anyways, you should continue reading after that sentence, because they go on to describe the B.C. Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society (BCGHRS)'s highly skeptical investigation into the mysterious case of what may be a haunted apartment complex on Marine Drive. I don't want to ruin the surprise, but it turns out there are ghosts there.

Wow actually that page is like an insane bottomless pit of craziness that never stops giving. Take John Kirk, president of the B.C. Scientific Cryptozoology Club and tireless protector of Samsquanch habitats. He has no time for baseless fantasies like ghosts or leprechauns or pirates. "We have absolutely no interest in the paranormal whatsoever," he says. "Our entire investigations are based on the principles of science. And we have arrived at conclusions rather than beliefs."

SFU psychologist Barry Beyerstein responds to Kirk and his ilk:

"Some of it is kind of a chip on the shoulder, wanting to prove the experts wrong," he said. "[Or that] despite the fact we've messed up the world and polluted it, there are some creatures that are too smart for us and keep out of our clutches and ... remind us that we aren't so smart after all."

Turns out we actually are so smart after all! Go us!

Here's some Canadian stats about paranormal belief: a 2003 Ipsos-Reid poll about "God and Other Mysteries."

CAREER DAY

2005-06-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

There's a well-known statistic to the effect that the average modern first-worlder will change careers three times in his or her life. Breaking into a new field is always difficult, not just because of the income disruption, but also the simple fact of self-reinvention. Whenever you drastically rearrange your life, people are going to be skeptical. It's not their fault, they're just too timid to grab life by the balls and squeeze out their just desserts. The important thing is to stay positive, stay focused, believe in yourself, and know in your heart of hearts that you will succeed. So, with that in mind, I've decided on my new career:

I'm going to be an astronaut.

Now, I know what your thinking, "Canada doesn't need astronauts, we don't even have spaceships." "You have to be in good shape to be an astronaut, and you can barely walk up a flight of stairs without crying." "Space is for fags." Well friends, that's exactly the kind of stinkin' thinkin' that keeps people from achieving their dreams.

I know I make it sound easy, but it certainly is not. Staying focused and positive is hard work. During my Astronaut Training Sessions, (lying down in the bathtub with my snorkel), I sometimes have exactly those kinds of negative, "rational" thoughts. But then I just remind myself: Would Jesus have become God if he had thought about it "rationally"? No sir he would not have. Exactly.

BECAUSE LIFE IS PRECIOUS AND GOD AND THE BIBLE

2005-06-07T09:06:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a few things since I quit smoking dope and cigarettes. One is that the Internet is actually totally fucking boring. I've also started having really vivid dreams and I'm horny all the time, I guess to make up for being emotionally dead for the past two years.

Last night I dreamt I was at the bookstore and the power had gone out, there were candles everywhere. While engaged in some co-ed rough-housing, I developed a stigmata: I noticed my chest was covered in blood, pouring out of this wound on my right side. In the reality of the dream, the wound was an injury acquired earlier which had been opened in the course of the energetic foreplay session. In actual reality, my wound is on the left side, but it was identical with the dream injury. Anyways, there was blood everywhere and the cut was sort of bubbling when I breathed, so I decided to go to the hospital. Like I said, the power was out, and when I went outside I saw that everything was covered with ice. I got into the car and started making my way to the hospital and discovered that the brakes didn't work. (The dream car had about ten different pedals, which I could barely reach.) I was starting to get pretty flustered and said, out loud, (in the dream), "This can't be fucking happening!" Of course it wasn't, and I woke up at that moment.

* * *

The reason I've had to quit smoking is that last Saturday that I had a "spontaneous pneumothorax." This is where bubbles on the surface of the lung called "pleura" -- they're a kind of congenital defect -- randomly explode and then your chest cavity fills up with air and blood and then you die. I had one before, about five years ago, and I was in the hospital for a week with a tube in my chest. Not fun.

The facial expressions in this medical diagram are uncannily accurate.

While I considered my options, I made some breakfast, then had a shower, then finally packed my bag with stuff I'd need at the hospital, (Ian McEwan's Atonement and a sketchpad). Then I walked down to the bus stop and waited for the 99 B-Line to Vancouver General. I knew I had a few hours at least and I felt very calm, serene even. It was pretty surreal. Some guy at the bus stop kept trying to make small talk. Even through the pain and existential reflections related to the brevity of life and so on, I was still checking out girls. The bus took forever, but eventually I made it to the Emergency Room.

When I got to the hospital I began the first in an seemingly endless sequence of questionaires. No, I have no allergies. No, I'm not on any medication. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say the pain is about a four. Maybe a five. I don't know, I actually had a really hard time answering that question, which I was asked about five times a day for the next three days. I decided to go with five, and then just increment or decrement depending whether it was getting worse or better. It's good to have a system. In my first triage interview, the question was to ascertain my level of urgency, selected from a drop-down list consisting of:

1. Resuscitation
2. Emergency
3. Very Urgent
4. Urgent
5. Not Urgent
6. Crybaby

Ok, I'm making the last one up, but the others are accurate I think. It took the admitting nurse a few moments to decide on a category, while she consulted a chart pinned to the wall just out of my line of sight. I was relieved when she chose "Very Urgent," because I knew I wouldn't have to wait very long.

* * *

When I finally got a bed AND a room, I was given yet another questionairre by my nurse, Lolita. One of the questions was about whether I had any particular religious affiliations or rituals which needed attending. "No thanks, I'm a nihilist," I said. "I believe in nothing," I added, for clarification.

"You read a lot of books and you don't believe in God?" she asked incredulously, as if these two attributes were mutually exclusive. I indicated that this was accurate. I felt we were beginning to diverge somewhat from the literal text of the questionairre.

"So why is it that we have two nostrils instead of one?" You see, she felt that the fact that we have two nostrils was an strong indication of God's design and His love for humanity. I wasn't about to argue Intelligent Design vs. Evolution while being prepped for surgery, so I just smiled and adopted a bemused expression, as if to say "A clever insight! I will ponder this deep and interesting question at a more appropriate time."

* * *

The rest is boring and involves laying in a hospital bed for three days on morphine and then laying around at home for a week. THE END :(

KILL YOUR IDOLSa short review of Ryan

2005-06-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

One of the main lessons of Ryan, Chris Landreth's short computer animated biography of Canadian animator Ryan Larkin, is the same as this season's other computer-effects extravaganza, Star Wars Episode 3, and that is: child prodigies rarely pursue a constant upward tragectory. Whether it's a spectacular, violent flame-out like Yukio Mishima, (or Anakin Skywalker), or the more common gradual descent into creepy irrelevance of, say, Saul Kripke, your own is always the toughest act to follow.

Ryan Larkin joined the National Film Board in the 1960's at age 19, and created three short animations, Syrinx, Walking, and Street Musique, all of which are included as extras on the DVD, along with Landreth's two other computer-animated shorts, the end and Bingo. All of these are worth seeing; the contrast between Landreth's work, with it's dark humour and pomo ironic self-awareness, and the simplicity, psychedelic beauty and personality of Larkin's work, is remarkable. There doesn't seem to be a single stylistic or thematic point on which Larkin and Landreth converge. It's a strange and unfortunate choice of subject matter for Landreth.

The major failing of the titular animated feature, brought to the forefront in the extended documentary, is Chris Landreth's grating moral tone. Instead of offering us insight into Ryan Larkin, instead it shows Chris Landreth's uncharitable and indignant impression of his subject, drawn in the shiny mechanical realism of pixel-shaded polygons.

The perspective that Chris brings to his feature is that Larkin's story could cease being a tragic one if only he would take up Chris' generous offer to stop drinking and become a brilliant animator again. As if being a brilliant animator is an simple binary property which has merely lain dormant for the forty years of Larkin's "retirement." Chris himself clearly has issues with substance abuse, and we're treated to a short, sepia segment noting the decline of his mother due to alcohol. In the extended documentary, after showing his animation to Larkin, who is understandably horrified, Chris tries to justify his work by claiming that he put his own weaknesses and demons into the film as well as Larkin's. This is a flimsy cover; while we're treated to great detail and specificity regarding Larkin's personal failures and general debasement, Chris' troubles are only hinted at. And anyways, Landreth's film cost one million dollars to produce, and as an engineer for Alias-Wavefront, (a Silicon Graphics company), I'm sure he's doing just fine for himself. To compare his own struggles with Larkin's is demonstrates even more his own failure to understand the nature and tragedy of young genius.

What Chris fails to understand is that geniuses, just like everyone else, are perfectly within their rights to abandon their talents. Just because you're born gifted doesn't mean you have to stay that way; we're all free to bash our brains out with drugs or drink until we fall down. Larkin doesn't owe us anything.

And let's make no mistake, Larkin's work is pure genius; Walking and Street Musique are both masterpieces of visual art. That's two masterpieces to Chris' zero. Give the guy a break.

(If you want to know more, here's a fairly extensive biography of Ryan Larkin from Animation World Magazine.)

LIVEJOURNAL vs KRIPKE

2005-06-01T17:27:00.000-07:00

LiveJournal wins.

MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER DIE

2005-05-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

You know, it's hard to get blogging regularly again once the momentum's been lost. I really don't understand how people can churn out posts day after day. Maybe it would be easier if I had a "hook" or a mission statement of some kind. I guess my niche is in flippant, dismissive posts about academia and the scientific priesthood. For example:

Futurologist predicts that "realistically" we'll be able to store our consciousness on a computer in the year 2050. It's articles like these that make me wonder if futurology is really a scientific discipline at all. It seems a lot more like astrology to me, but instead of reading the motion of Jupiter and Saturn, furturologists read Wired Magazine.

Here are some choice quotes from Ian Pearson, futurologist of the future:

"The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a human brain." Okay.

"Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're trying to design in a computer." Durrrr.

"It [the conscious computer of the future] would definitely have emotions - that's one of the primary reasons for doing it. If I'm on an aeroplane I want the computer to be more terrified of crashing than I am." I guess in the future the laws of physics will be fear-based.

And finally, "We can already use DNA, for example, to make electronic circuits so it's possible to think of a smart yoghurt some time after 2020 or 2025, where the yoghurt has got a whole stack of electronics in every single bacterium. You could have a conversation with your strawberry yogurt before you eat it." I have no idea what any of this means, but that's probably because I haven't been trained in the rigorous futurological methodology of "making shit up."

* * *

So there you have it folks, some delicious Baboon Palace-brand mockery, fresh from the brain of me. Let's see a strawberry yogurt top that!

Stay tuned for more exciting posts to come, including the depressing story of my recent near-death experience. Plus: a very special guest post coming soon! I hope!

STAR WARS EPISODE 3

2005-05-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

It totally wasn't as bad as I expected! I watched it in the privacy of my living room, mind you, so I could tune out the horrible talking bits while folding my laundry.

Good:

- Ian McDiarmand is excellent as Palpatine/Sidious.

- Light sabre battles, light sabre battles, and then a few more light sabre battles.

- Um, special effects? Although Episode 3 fails spectacularly in every dramatic or human element, it makes a damn fine Universal Studios-style movie-ride.

- Darth Vader shaking his fist at the sky and screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" (I originally put this in the "Ungood" column, but I've decided that this is actually super wicked awesome!)

- The very very end, after the credits, when we see Captain Kirk sit up in bed and say to Spock, who is dozing peacefully next to him, "I just had the strangest dream...".

Ungood:

- Any time at which anybody talks to anybody else, for any reason.

- Droids making cutesy "Uh-oh" noises.

- Video game clichés. The action scenes play out with video-game logic instead of movie logic. The worst example of this is the final scene in which Anakin and Obiwan are battling while jumping on floating platforms in a river of lava. If there's a more ubiquitous and shopworn video game cliché, I'd like to hear it. Episode 2 was bad for this (and many other reasons) as well, what with Anakin's race through the gauntlet of hydraulic presses. The action scripting throughout clearly influenced more by Super Mario Brothers and Quake than by adventure serials or Seven Samurai, which get so much lip service from Lucas and his blowjob brigade. The movie as a whole feels organized into video-game action, on the one hand, and cut-scenes, which fill us in on the story to move the action along the next level. The acting is on par with most video-game cut-scenes, and it's no accident that most games allow you to skip them.

- Obiwan not delivering the coup-de-grace to his student, who lies screaming, dismembered and on fire. Instead, he berates him for being a bad friend and then leaves. What an asshole. I'm sure he'd walk over and give you a big hug if he had any arms or legs or skin, you fucking baby. Obiwan is overall the most grating and unsympathetic character in the whole movie, which is really saying something.

MOUSTACHE POWERS ACTIVATE!

2005-05-13T22:12:00.000-07:00

I swear I will update this blog soon! In the mean time, please to be enjoying this quiz, courtesy of dadahead.

You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.

Postmodernist

94%

Idealist

75%

Cultural Creative

75%

Materialist

63%

Existentialist

56%

Modernist

50%

Romanticist

25%

Fundamentalist

25%

What is Your World View?
created with QuizFarm.com

INVASION OF THE PANCAKE PEOPLE

2005-04-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

"Did you hear what happened tonight? What happened tonight? I saw a pancake person. You did? And what did the pancake person say to you?"

Richard Foreman is good at naming things. He's a dramatist whose Ontological-Hysteric Theater is now showing his final play, THE GODS ARE POUNDING MY HEAD (aka. LUMBERJACK MESSIAH). He recently stopped by Edge.org to bounce a theory off the resident technofetishists, futurists and AI theorists: Does this renaissance make me look flat?

He wonders if the basically instantaneous access to vast tracts of information is destroying the value of internalizing cultural knowledge and history; the depths and intricacies of a classical education drained away by a bilge pump named Google. It's terrible, really. (As a side note, I used Google's "define" feature to make sure I knew what a bilge pump was, because here at Baboon Palace we value analogical integrity. Does everyone know that you can type "define: x" into Google's search and it will return definitions of x? It's awesome. I love you, Google! You are magical!)

Foreman writes:

I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

The most interesting responses, I think, are by Stephen Johnson and Rebecca Goldstein. Johnson correctly points out that the old "information overload" trope is a sham: informaton technology has increased our ability to sift through huge quantities of data, not the opposite. Goldstein, on the other hand, accuses Foreman of being a luddite, comparing his fear of computer networks with Plato's disparagement of written word. You see, Plato thought of books as capable only of dumb, mechanical repetition, rather than dialogue and persuasion, the real source of human knowledge and understanding.

It seems to me we've come full circle. Books have long now been the repository of cultural knowledge and learning, and now that networks are threatening to usurp this role, we find ourselves reverting back to the ancient discursive, social model of public knowledge.

Or not. At any rate, I find it distinctly odd that anyone would identify the metaphysical foundations of personhood in something as banal as research methods. Who would have guessed that the answers to problems of personal identity would be uncovered by Library Science?

THE CLOCKS OF THE UNIVERSE ARE CHIMING THE HOUR OF 'NOW'

2005-04-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

I read this essay by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, linked from Arts&Letters Daily, entitled "Intellectual Marijuana: comics and their critics." It's about what the literati has had to say about comics over the years. It includes a nice, witty one-liner from Dorothy Parker, whom I love.

Oh hey, I have a witty one-liner too. Ready? Here it is: "Can I get some sexual chocolate with this intellectual marijuana?" Heyo!

But seriously, that article kind of sucks and is boring. There is no real analysis, just a binary "approve/disapprove" from various intellectuals and critics, and the conclusion is is nothing more than "comics are now studied." Which is no big deal, really, anyone can study anything these days. I remember as an undergrad reading an essay titled something like 'A Marxist-Feminist Interpretation of Madonna's "Material Girl."' Merely being studied doesn't quite have the cachet it used to, which I personally think is great. Here in the postmodern era, we know that interesting things can be said about any area of culture if you're smart and creative enough.

They do mention how great Krazy Kat is, but without describing what it is, or giving any hint as to why ee cummings "would pen a paean to Krazy Kat as a “living ideal” superior to “mere reality.”" Krazy Kat was drawn by George Herriman, and was first published in 1913; it features the titular cat acting out humorous scenes of social, racial and sexual alienation, and who, in a recurring gag, get smashed in the back of the head with a brick, thrown by a Jewish mouse named Ignatz. Here is some Krazy Kat, pour vous:

Zip...POW

Self-reference is common.

More can be found here: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/crocker/.

There's nothing inherently "high-brow" or "low-brow," satisfying or empty, improving or corrupting about a media. Smart, creative, funny people (like George Herriman) can say smart, creative, funny things in any media, and it will be worth looking at, thinking about and laughing along with. When Heer and Worcester warn us that "intellectuals are fundamentally divided about the worth of comics, and there is always the possibility of a backlash," I wonder what this division amounts to. The word "fundamental" seems to indicate that the disagreement is deeper than just the 'nay' side believing, contingently, that no-one has yet managed to write a worthwhile comic. Perhaps it's the combination of words and pictures that makes it an inherently debased form of literature, with the brute semiotics and literal-ness of the Image intruding upon and corrupting the sublime abstraction of the Word? I don't know. Someone should write an article about it, maybe.

READYMADE

2005-03-29T15:01:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Octavio Paz's brilliant survey of Marcel Duchamp's art. What Duchamp is most known for, or at least the context I knew him in, is the "Readymades". These are ordinary technological artifacts made into art by the minimal act of baptism by an artist. "Fountain," a urinal signed R. Mutt 1917, is the most recognizable example:

A perfectly ordinary piss fountain.

Paz explains it better than I could:

One stone is like another and a corkscrew is like another corkscrew. The resemblance between stones is natural and involuntary; between manufactured objects it is artificial and deliberate. The fact that all corkscrews are the same is a consequence of their significance: they are objects that have been manufactured for the purpose of drawing corks; the similarity between stones has no inherent significance. As least this is the modern attitude to nature. It hasn't always been the case. Roger Caillois points out that certain Chinese artists selected stones because they found them fascinating and turned them into works of art by the simple act of engraving or painting their name on them. The Japanese also collected stones and, as they were more ascetic, preferred them not to be too beautiful, strange, or unusual; they chose ordinary round stones. To look for stones for their differences and to look for them for their similarity are not separate acts; they both affirm that nature is the creator. To select one stone among thousands is equivalent to giving it a name. Guided by the principle of analogy, man gives names to nature; each name is a metaphor: Rocky Mountains, Red Sea, Hells Canyon, Eagles Rest. The name -- or the signature of the artist -- causes the place -- or the stone -- to enter the world of names, or, in other words, into the sphere of meaning. The act of Duchamp uproots the object from it's meaning and makes an empty skin of the name: a bottle rack without bottles.

. . . [In] the end, his gesture is a philosophical or, rather, dialectical game more than an artistic operation: it is a negation that, through humor, becomes affirmation. Suspended by irony, in a state of perpetual oscillation, this affirmation is always provisional. It is a contradiction that denies all significance to object and gesture alike; it is a pure action -- in the moral sense and also in the sense of a game: his hands are clean, the execution is rapid and perfect. Purity requires that the gesture should be realized in such a way that it seems as little like a choice as possible: "The great problem was the act of selection. I had to pick an object without it impressing me and, as far as possible, without the least intervention of any idea or suggestion of aesthetic pleasure. It was necessary to reduce my personal taste to zero. It is very difficult to select an object that has absolutely no interest for us not only on the day we pick it but that never will and that, finally, can never have the possibility of becoming beautiful, pretty, agreeable or ugly. . . ."

DISCOVERY CHANNEL

2005-03-26T22:29:00.000-08:00

Since the dawn of time, man has sought to locate the essential characteristics which distinguish him from the animal kindom. Early on in the history of mankind's great climb towards self-consciousness, Plato defined man as a "featherless biped." This conclusion was quickly and satirically defused by Diogenes of Sinope, who plucked a chicken and set it loose in the Academy, shouting "Look everybody, it's Plato's boyfriend! Oooooo!" He then made kissy noises; this is still widely considered the most devastating argumentative coup de grâce in all of philosophy, before or since.

In the face of this humiliating yet delicious counterexample, Plato secluded himself in his study to rework his theory. He emerged triumphant, amending his definition to "featherless biped with broad nails." We see the theory developed in this recently-rediscovered fragment of a Socratic dialog, entitled "Diogenes":

...
Socrates: Well, Diogenes, surely we would agree that what is essential to man must be nothing more than the forms which only he possesses, among all creatures upon the earth?

Diogenes: I can see no reason not to grant this, Socrates!

Socrates: Well then surely we must then admit that the gall bladder, a common organ possessed by many beasts of the field, to say nothing of women!...

(Crowd of Boys: λoλ!)

Socrates (continues): ..surely, no matter what the spiritual beliefs of the priests and poets and hoi polloi as to the locality of our immortal soul, this will not do as a definition of man.

Diogenes: I find myself strangely unable to raise an objection, Socrates. But what definition do you propose?

Socrates: You will surely admit, will you not, that man walks upon two legs, like chickens, ducks, and various other avian, an not on four legs as does the dog and horse and goat?

Diogenes: Any man with his senses in tact must surely agree!

Socrates: And yet, unlike fowl, man lacks feathers, does he not? Diogenes: Indeed this is so!

Socrates: And so we must conclude that the form essential to man is that of a biped, lacking in feathers. No man possessed of his faculties could object to such a definition!

Diogenes: Yet I am still troubled, wise Socrates, for yesterday I was walking in the marketplace and I saw that some local farmers had laid out chickens, whose feathers had been plucked out. So must we not conclude that the absense of feathers is not necessarily something which is unique to man among the bipeds?

Socrates: .... What?

Diogenes: Well, there were these chickens and you said, remember?, you said that um chickens were bipeds, and well these chickens, the ones I saw, didn't have feathers, and uh featherless bipeds?

Socrates: Right. Well. Did you happen to see their fingernails? Did they have sharp talons? Sharp, narrow, pointy talons perhaps?

Diogenes: Verily they did, Socrates!

Socrates: Well there you have it, man is a featherless biped with broad nails.

Diogenes: My eyes burn with the light of the truth, great Socrates!
...

And so on. This amended postulate was widely disparaged as merely adding another epicycle to a theory already far too baroque for the practical purposes of distinguishing which sorts of objects one may legally have sex with. Diogenes' response will never be known; many historians surmise he was killed shortly after the release of the work, while attempting to shave an orangutan.

In recent times, as our knowledge of the animal kingdom has increased, many traits once thought to be exclusively human have been found among our non-human earthmates. Even that sublime activity, once commonly thought to be most exclusively and paradigmatically human, has been found among the primates: laughter.

Up until the discovery of the so-called 'chuckling monkey' in the jungles of Borneo, the ability to laugh was prized as the unique domain of homo sapiens, along with the use of language and the missionary position. Much like Fleming's discovery of penicillin, or Reese's investigations into the chocolate and peanut-butter, the discovery of the chuckling monkey, (parapithecoidea risae in Fleagle's taxonomy), was entirely accidental. The strange hooting laugh of the p. risae was first reported to the scientific community in the field journal of the adventurer and naturalist, Sir Jamison Horksbotton, who wrote the following:

Today my men and I came upon a colony of tree-dwelling primates, and, exhausted from our long and perilious trek, we set up camp to rest and further observe the interactions of what I believe to be an heretofore unidentified species. They do impress me as being unusually intelligent and social, and they watched intently as well set up our tents and prepared our meals. When Jonathan Hudson, my research assistant, slipped on the rind of a breadfruit, the uproar of hooting and clapping from the monkeys was deafening.

I immediately apprehended the necessity of repeating the experiment, and urged Mr. Hudson to duplicate his antic as precicely and accurately as possible. Again he crashed to the jungle undergrowth atop the misplaced peel; the response from the assembled monkeys was again greatly appreciative, but not quite as overwhelming as the first attempt. Successive experiements saw increasingly diminished responses until, after perhaps a dozen repetitions, they became silent and disinterested and moved off into the jungle.

This report provided the first indication that the vocalizaton of p. risae was an expression analogous to our own sense of humour. The immense value of this discovery could not have been conceived by the Horksbotton expedition.

As the news of Horksbotton's amazing discovery spread through the scientific community, speculation ran wild as to the exact nature of the vocalization, and it's relationship to the human faculty of laugher. Debate raged between researchers in anthropology, biology, psychology and primateology, as scientists scrambled to stake their claims on the new species. Was laughter really not as unique to humans as we had once thought? Could the instinctive responses of the "chuckling monkey" to humorous stimulus teach us more about our own sense of humour? How, exactly, could such a contingent faculty evolve in a species only barely related to humankind?

Specimens were brought into laboratories by the hundreds for more carefully controlled research, and the jungles of Borneo for a time resembled the gold-rush Klondike. Competing groups of researchers and their hired mercenaries scoured the jungle in search of more colonies. Jaded and malarial graduate students called it "panning for monkey gold". Known groups of the species were defended mercilessly, culminating in a shocking incident of cannibalism involving an team of German behavioral psychologists who caught an Australian biochemist surreptitiously extracting DNA from a colony they (=the psychologists) had claimed.

In any case, the voluminous empirical data strongly indicated, to everyone's surprise, that the laugh-response was much more than a primitive analogy or caricature of man's refined sense of humour. Studies published simultaneously in the Journal of Primate Studies and Contemporary Psychobiology agreed: The primates had nearly infallible humour-detection mechanisms. If something was funny, somehow these monkeys knew it.

The response was so reliable that scientists quickly saw a thriving market for their new discovery. The established laboratories began renting their sample colonies to movie and television studios. Sitcoms and feature films could be calibrated accurately against the p. risae response, instead of using notoriously unreliable humans, who would often complain of "not getting it." The monkeys always got it, and Hollywood would never be the same.

NIP TWEAK LOL

2005-03-26T17:54:00.000-08:00

"Hey pal what's with the tattoo? Are you some kind of....... HOMO?"

The picture is completely safe for work, as long as your workplace doesn't have a problem with queer mermaids or reacharounds or huge spurting gay dicks. Here in Vancouver we call that "Casual Friday."

WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDMA

2005-03-25T14:13:00.000-08:00

A great post over at Dadahead about the surrealist painter Dorothea Tanner.

Salon: If you could change anything in your life, or lives, what would it be?
Tanner: More color in my dreams.

PUBLIC ART

2005-03-18T18:43:00.000-08:00

THAT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE BEGGING TO ME

2005-03-10T18:39:00.000-08:00

Here's a totally awesome dragout beatdown over the use of the phrase "begs the question." I imagine people sobbing face-down on their pillows about how this phrase doesn't mean what they say it means. Please help, won't somebody do something oh please god WHY . "Definitely a fight worth fighting," says some earnest commentator. Perhaps, but how can we fight this ignorant menace?

There was some suggestion of retreating to the ancestor of the phrase, "beggars the question." Hahaha. Abandon label! Fall back! I repeat, Fall back!

Losers.

I prefer a more forward-looking approach. To win this battle, we must free ourselves of the mistakes of past idioms. Here are some suggestions for alternative phrasings to describe the act of implicitly assuming the truth of some conclusion while trying to convince someone else to believe it :

Raping the consequent
Taking the Little Professor for a walk
Mocking the weasel
Screwing the baboon <----- personal fave
Slipping Rohypnol into the hemlock

That's probably enough to get people started. Feel free to make up your own, just so long as you get my express, signed approval first. I can't have just anybody using phrases to mean things. This is serious business, right up in this joint.

That reminds me, will people please stop referring to perfectly ordinary, run-of-the-mill spliffs as "blunts"? A blunt is when you wrap your dope in a cigar paper. When you use regulation-size papes and then call it a blunt it is very confusing!!!

Next week: hedge -emony or hegg -emony?

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to take the Little Professor for a walk.

NOSTALGIA

2005-03-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

I was going through some of my old notebooks this morning. The oldest notebook I still have is from my last few years in Ontario, roughly 2001-2003. It's not really a journal, just a book to keep scraps of info, notes to self, addresses and phone numbers, grocery lists, driving directions, etc.. All the short half-life data necessary to manage daily existence.

It still sort of works like a journal. It reminds me of the kind of things I was doing three years ago, looking for apartments, (I moved about five times in those three years); planning for Burning Man and other camping trips; taking notes on metaphysics and epistemology. It's amazing how many numbers it takes to get around in the world.

Anyways, I found the following written on two pages. I have no idea why I wrote this or what it means, but I suspect it contains some deep truth, either of the universe or my own psychology:

KLMN
RSTU

H1..H4
J1..J4

J K M
S
H Y
U

S

R U

M(J) L(H) U(3,H)
S(J) R(H)

L:GHJK
S:XYZ

An early effort at absurdist poetry perhaps? It's pretty sub-standard, I'll admit. Still, it has a nice visual rhythm to it, IM(H)O.

DESTROYROCK&ROLL

2005-03-03T10:12:00.000-08:00

This Friday @ Open Studios

JAKE FAIRLEY: Kompakt, Paper Bag Records

Rock meets techno in a dive bar in east Berlin.

"Jake Fairly makes the (electronic/rock) connection all the more explicit with mumbled vocals remenicient of Joey Ramone with a staticy sound that has more in common with garage rock grit than techno polish." NEW YORK Mag

BEN NEVILE: Telegraph

crate full o' surprises.

KONRAD BLACK: Wagon Repair

electrotech. Konrad busts up the dance floor with his original hard rocking sound.

ROBERT ROBOT: Intergalactic Future Rock

intergalactic funksmanship and bleeps.

FRIDAY MARCH 4th @ OPEN STUDIOS
#200-252 East 1st Ave
Show Starts @ 10.
RSVP: 604.648.2752
$10

ON THE SUBJECT OF GREAT LYRICS

2005-03-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

An URGENT REQUEST from Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES.

YO WORD UP, HERE COMES A SHITHEAD

2005-02-25T16:48:00.000-08:00

Why are bloggers like rappers?

[R]appers' and bloggers' self-importance also has something to do with the supremely annoying righteousness that rides along with those who believe they're overturned the archaic forms of expression favored by The Man—that is, whitey and/or the mainstream media.Ninety percent of rap lyrics are self-congratulatory rhymes about how great the rapper is at rapping, the towering difficulties of succeeding in the rap game, or the lameness of wanksta rivals.

This guy sounds like a douche. I can't believe he seriously wrote "whitey." (Also, notice how the sentence doesn't make any sense at all. Is "whitey" one of the forms of expression favoured by The Man?)

Aesop Rock - Commencement at the Obedience School

The harvest appeared less plentiful than last season
I imagine sloppy seed handling avoke the stroke of tardy planting
And the crops we'd have harnessed in mid November
It only brushed the blossom bracket then soon sacrificed
Lives to icicle jackets when the frost hit
I sunk to find the walk beneath the mosses
Where the planted tunnel pass after the rains have run their courses
But alas the portraits of these frosted corpses tortured in the grass
Off of distorts or pour the one tall glass and nauseous
And I'm asking you, why's this spy supply hiding in strangers
When they know atop the food chains I could spot biters for acres
Now be gracious, these minstools turn a bully's psycho civil
By dissolving the candy coated image down to the pixels
Yelp bringing the self-stop freedom brigade investors
And the studies connecting one hit wonders with dust collectors
Puts it down, and it's down beneath your sappy sing alongs
So stick it further down, we'll let Dante decide which ring I'm on
Nova, the elders took positions and advance march
Parts playing a scheme parking the rain in my canteen now I'm like
Point: I guess I could spare a splash for a couple of heads
Counterpoint: During my famine I never got broke your bread
Well equation of intrigue, yes, yes, let me fed sit for a bit
These 'tensils need soaking before I hand out token
"Shut the fuck up" drama like Kabuki with a heart of dirt
Skull fucked cross bones hence my birth it hurts

The Beatles - Love me do

Love, love me do.
You know I love you,
I'll always be true,
So please, love me do.
Whoa, love me do.

Love, love me do.
You know I love you,
I'll always be true,
So please, love me do.
Whoa, love me do.

Someone to love,
Somebody new.
Someone to love,
Someone like you.

Love, love me do.
You know I love you,
I'll always be true,
So please, love me do.
Whoa, love me do.

Love, love me do.
You know I love you,
I'll always be true,
So please, love me do.
Whoa, love me do.
Yeah, love me do.
Whoa, oh, love me do.

Well so what, we all know that 90% of everything is crap, especially when it's taken out of context and you have no sense of humour. But how does this insightful characterization of raps, and the rapping rappers who rap them, relate to blogging? Josh Levin brings the analogy home:

Blogging is a circle jerk that never stops circling: links to posts by other bloggers, following links to newspaper stories about bloggers, following wonderment at the corruptions and complacency of old-fashioned, credentialed journalism.

More importantly: will it stop jerking? (I'm guessing no.)

Wait, how is that like rap? Who cares, that line is golden.

CANADA: THE NEW POLAND?

2005-02-25T12:02:00.000-08:00

“We simply cannot understand why Canada would in effect give up its sovereignty – its seat at the table – to decide what to do about a missile that might be coming towards Canada.” So says Ambassador Paul Cellucci, in response to the announcement that Canada will not participate in the Mythical Defense Shield.

So our seat at the table is contingent on giving the U.S. military to free run of the continent? Usually discussion takes place at a table, but this table seems to be one where everyone must already agree. I dare say, this table sucks.

Regardless, if I had seat at the table where people decide what to do about an ICBM heading towards North America, my decision will be to go completely fucking bonkers, just like everyone else sitting around this worthless table, all of whom will be deeply involved in their own personal psychotic breakdowns.

A successful nuclear strike against a North American city = instant fascism; no recognizable context for discussion exists on the other side of this event. It's meaningless to talk about "making a decision" in a scenario in which a big American or Canadian city gets vapourized. The undisguised rule of force is the only conceivable outcome.

And make no mistake, even under the most favorable conditions imaginable -- no clouds, foreknowledge of the exact launch time, complete technical schematics for all objects involved -- missle defense has failed every test. If it actually were a matter of deciding whether to shoot down a nuke or not, I would vote: yes, please. But that's not really a live option, now or in the forseeable future.

You guys are dicks. :(

MAKING A MOCKERY OF MIMESIS

2005-02-24T09:48:00.000-08:00

As a child I found spirograph disappointing. I liked the pictures on the box, (produced by highly skilled artists, no doubt), but I'd always mess it up by slipping off the little wheely gears. The round ones weren't too bad, but I had to stick close to the center. Those long tongue-depressor shaped gears were fucking impossible! There is no way you can make that thing go around without slipping off the wheel, making a jagged pencil gash across the paper, totally ruining everying. So the only spirographs I could produce were boring wavy circles. I knew from an early age I would never be a spirograph artist.

Maybe it's my lack of coordination. I still remember in kindergarten we had to trace these squiggly maze patterns, and I couldn't follow the lines properly. I got in trouble because the teacher thought I wasn't taking it seriously, but I was. That's right: I flunked tracing.

All these painful spirograph memories came rushing back to me after visiting Kinetoh (courtesy of Rhizome). Kinetoh is a generative art project. Generative art just means that instead of making images yourself, you're building mechanisms and rules, analogous to spirograph gears, which are used to produce images. You don't even have to hold the pencil in the little holes!

Kinetoh is a contemporary update to this activity, using a computer, (a Mac, no doubt), to simulate the plasic gears, assigning them chaotic properties which transcend the physical, modernist periodicity of spirograph. Or something.

Perhaps Manik of Rhizome can explain it better:

Kinetoh dismantles the models of the last avant-garde by creating the simulacrum of such from software programs capable of imitating, nearly perfectly, those materials that belong to classic art, like pencil, charcoal, and watercolor. These images stand as the mimesis of art that is inherently non-mimetic.

What sort of a crazy kaleidoscope of avant-avant-garde boundary-interrogation have we stumbled into?! I feel dizzy!

Or, also, the virtual reconstruction of the end of high Modernity. Instead of targeting a movement well-established and recognizable, like Abstract Expressionism or Conceptualism, Kinetoh's strategy is to examine the second line and not so well-explored spaces in Modern Art.

Can I get a "subversive"?

Just because of this, they maintain subversive potential.

HEYO!

THE FUTURE

2005-02-11T23:03:00.000-08:00

I believe that genetic programming will someday allow us (rich people) to create a custom-designed servant race to perform all the remaining unmechanized menial labour that we (rich people) currently have to pay poor people to do.

The genetically-designed servant of the future will have a humanoid body and the head of a dog. It will have opposable thumbs and be slightly more intelligent than the higher primates. It will be capable of understanding small subsets of a language, but incapable of producing it.

The canine appearance will be settled on after significant market research, focus-grouping and analysis of fMRI data. Early prototypes with more human-like facial features will be found to raise unsettling ethical questions in the mind of the potential buyer, while feline variations will be judged to be too "feral" and threatening. Cats, apparently, don't scale very well.

The "Canine Humanoid Intelligent Assistant" (CHIA) will score highly on averaged consumer emotional-response metrics like "familiarity" and "trustworthiness," while remaining comfortably, undeniably sub-human. CHIA pets average about four feet in height; they stand upright and have a noble, dignified posture with no ape-like slouching. Their bodies will be covered in dog-hair, but they will wear clothes anyway.

In the future, there will be a CHIA pet in every home.

Oh, and everyone will be freakishly deformed.

This is a glimpse into the future.

MY NEW FRIEND

2005-02-10T18:38:00.000-08:00

ME

2005-02-03T15:55:00.000-08:00

(photo by Miss E)

Scortt: i never look at a camera when i'm having my picture taken
Scortt: never
Scortt: that way it doesn't steal your soul
Miss E: good idea
Miss E: that should be in your blog
Miss E: helpful hints for not letting things steal your sould
Miss E: like don't put your penise in the vacumm cleaner
Miss E: it will steal you soul AND your seed
Scortt: hahaaha penise
Scortt: je suis une penise
Miss E: je le sais
Scortt: hahwesjhsjf

L'ART

2005-01-31T17:35:00.000-08:00

A man in a blue suit left the Italian restaurant just four paces in front of me, turning right to walk the same direction as me. I was already gaining on him, I walk fast because I like to get where I'm going with a minimum of extraneous detail. He was about fortyish, stocky with black hair coiffed and gelled. Approaching to pass on the left, just a pace behind him, he peels off a long quacking fart, obviously saved up during the big meal. I giggled the rest of the way to the video store. Am I retarded?

But seriously, have you ever pondered the true nature of art? What is art? Why do we do it, whatever it is? If martians came down and watched us, would they get it? If art were a flavour of ice cream, which would it be? If art just went away, would you notice or care? What can scientists tell us about art?

The last question and also the one about the martians are discussed in this excellent series of posts at Mixing Memory. I found them interesting, especially the first one about the foundations and justifications for studying art via neurology.

The neuroscientist Zeki wrote, "Art has a biological basis. It is a human activity and, like all human activities, including morality, law and religion, depends upon, and obeys, the laws of the brain." I guess that depends what it means to obey a law of the brain. Law or tennis or marriage obeys the law of the brain in the sense that only things with brains can engage in those activities. This seems trivial to me, like the claim that it's really just atoms all bumping and bonking around, or turbulence in the quantum foam. Since I reject all supernatural shenanigans, I guess I agree. Metaphysics: solved.

Onto the epistemology, where Chris (of Mixing Memory) follows the Zeki quote with:

If art, both in its creation and appreciation, is a product of brains, then it stands to reason that we may gain valuable insight into the nature of art by understanding how it acts on our brains. Specifically, we may be able to utilize our knowledge of the workings of the visual system, and its connections to emotional centers of the brain, to understand why certain themes, forms, and schemes can be found in art across cultures, and why some works of art are more aesthetically pleasing than others.

The explanation is backwards. It seems blatantly ridiculous to use our understanding of the visual cortex which, while being the most thoroughly mapped and understood part of the brain, is understood hardly at all, (to say nothing of the areas responsible for emotion), to 'ground' visual art which has been produced, criticized and discussed extensively for quite some time now.

Rather, what Zeki and Ramachandran and others are doing is using the data of cross-cultural visual art preference to test their neural theories. If the latest visual cortex schematic was unable to account for commonalities in visual preferences, the neurology would be revised, not art. Broad aesthetic generalizations are being used to inform our view of visual processing, not the other way around. This may give us a great deal of insight into neurology, but it's unlikely to change our feelings about Picasso to be told that the multiple combined perspectives of cubism causes a pleasant increase of activity in the face-recognition area of the brain.

The neuroscientists are modest in their aims. They don't think they can explain all of art, that would be foolish, just roughly 10% of it. My guess would be more like 1%, but that's kind of a wierd thing to say anyways. What proportion of art is currently explained? What happens when we've explained 100% of art?

At the video store, I rented "How to Draw a Bunny," an excellent documentary about the artist Ray Johnson. Here we see the other 90-99% of art in action. Ray Johnson was a true zen master, for whom 'art' was something more akin to religious devotion than 'visual aesthetic pleasure'. He lived his art with full seriousness and total irony. One scene shows Ray at a backyard party conversing with two bemused young artists, explaining to them he was a performance artist who is presently engaged in a performance of the serious artist who is discussing his work. This scene explicitly captured the sense in which his art was not just visual depictions on a flat surface, but were self-reflective comments upon themselves. His work contains frequent self-references to the visual, social, cultural and commercial roles played by the works themselves, and his own role as an artist. In stark contrast to the infantile mockery of most absurdist art, what is remarkable about Ray Johnson is how he embraces these roles with honesty, wit and gravity even while demonstrating their absurdity.

He was an artist full-time. His collages, called "moticos", and performances, called "nothings", (and include such diverse works as whipping a cardboard box with his belt and showering Manhattan with foot-long wieners thrown from a helicopter), were not his occupation, retired from in the evenings and weekends to take part in normal life. Like a zen master, he was able to live life with grave seriousness and utter dedication and self-mastery, while at the same time never ceasing to actively create brilliant nothing.

His art cannot be explained by reference to the goings-on in the temporal lobe of the viewers of his paintings, and it remains unclear to me in what way the neural facts ought to "ground" the discussion. Nobody will ever whip a cardboard box with a belt like Ray Johnson could, just as no one will ever sit silently on a piano bench as masterfully as John Cage.

SCHADENFREUDE

2005-01-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

Nice sweater.

"WHAT SCIENCE IS" (EPILOGUE)

2005-01-15T23:16:00.000-08:00

In the nine preceeding chapters of this volume, I have succeeded in objectively and conclusively showing the careful reader exactly how it is that science gets hooked onto the real, by which I mean the really fucking robustly real, world, while non-science does not, or does so only by happy accident, (to be later verified, clarified and set straight by our newly disciplined scientific methodology). Now you're ready to get out there and tell us who are the scientists and who are just "frontin'", and who should therefore "step off".

But wait! Before you fire up the Science Detector (see chapter 5) and get out there in the field to tell everyone what's what, make sure it's calibrated so that creationism, roughly the notion that some facts of the world are explainable only by appeal to agency outside of natural causation, doesn't count as a scientific theory. That would be embarassing! This calibration is straightforward, in fact I've taken the liberty of highlighting the scientifically "queer" entities in a soft lavender hue. You'd be surprised how many people neglect this simple procedure!

In this brief epilogue to my momentous contribution to intellectual history, I will discuss this blog post by John Wilkins, and share with you my uninformed and ill-considered thoughts about science and postmodernism. I've earned it!

First, I have to jump on the fact that he discusses modernism, in the sense of a precursor to post-modernism, while seemingly unaware of fact that it's the name of a kind of literature. Here are some of it's attributes. In particular, the first and fourth point are suggestive of certain qualitities often described as "post-modern."

Perspectivism: the locating of meaning from the viewpoint of the individual; the use of narrators located within the action of the fiction, experiencing from a personal, particular (as opposed to an omniscient, 'objective') perspective; the use of many voices, contrasts and contestations of perspective; the consequent disappearance of the omniscient narrator, especially as 'spokesperson' for the author; the author retires from the scene of representation, files her or his fingernails (says Joyce).

[...]

Language is no longer seen as transparent, something if used correctly allows us to 'see through' to reality: rather language is seen as a complex, nuanced site of our construction of the 'real'; language is 'thick', its multiple meanings and varied connotative forces are essential to our elusive, multiple, complex sense of and cultural construction of reality.

It's easy to see the seeds of what is now called postmodernism in these literary developments, especially the attitude toward language and narrative as something to be played with, something non-representational, something with a life and structure all it's own. When Wilkins, going on the working assumption that postmodernism is an outgrowth of modernism in architecture and fashion, says "[p]ostmodernism began, I suppose, on the assumption that buildings and styles need to be livable," my top-hat literally flew off and began twirling around in the air a foot above my head. Literally!

Here's another list, by the same professor, of some attributes of post-modernist literature, and showing roughly how it treated its ancestor, (very roughly indeed). Generalize these attributes from "literature" to all texts, including science, philosophy and math texts, and everything else under the sun; one gets, (in my almost totally uninformed opinion), a pretty recognizable picture of what people mean when they call an attitude "postmodern," and also what people who see the pursuit of timeless truths as the only respectable intellectual endeaver find threatening. See, in particular,

a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience
parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form
the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society
a crossing or dissolving of borders -- between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres, between high and low culture
a sense that the world is a world made up of rhetoric -- of language and cultural constructs and images and symbols, none of which have any necessary validity

And so on. It's not hard for me to get into Wilkins' head and see how a "research programme" on the basis of these principles looks pretty ridiculous, like children playing a game of pretend, aping the jargon of real scientists doing real hard work uncovering totally goddamn true truths. It's like working in an office where someone always just blatantly fucks around surfing web porn all day, but still keeps collecting pay and getting promotions, while you work your ass off like a good boy. The sense of being taken for granted that a lot of scientific researchers and hangers-on feel is similar but less justified, and not just because, hey, you could jerk off all day too if you wanted. They, (scientists and their philosophical cheerleading squad), resent the fact that they are tested by the world and become hard by it, while postmodernism allows "a sheltered workshop for intellectuals who did not want to engage science." I don't particularly see a problem with having shelters for unscientific intellectuals. Personally, I don't blame them, the actual activity of doing science is extremely boring and tedious, and as a genre of literature, (as science is to the philosopher of science and other outside interpreters), it's an acquired taste.

Postmodernism, as it's hinted at above, would indeed be a devastating and absurd perspective from which to run a laboratory, or to accept in the dialogue of the professional scientist in the act of getting his science on. Postmodernism is not a way of pursuing consensus about the character of the natural world. In fact, it often rejects the very motivation behind seeking such consensus. It's not a scientific theory. To say on the basis of this, as Wilkin's does, that it is therefore "anti-science," and categorize it with creationism, is obscene.

Creationists, and anti-science advocates of any kind, fail to appreciate [that science exceeds individuals]. To them, science is some corpus of beliefs that an individual has to accept, the way one has to accept the tenets of capitalism or the religion of humanism or whatever is their bête noir. They do not see that one can be a node in the scientific enterprise even if they do not share any beliefs with their fellows, so long as they treat evidence and inference the same way. One cannot do theology unless one accepts the core beliefs of that discipline. One can do science no matter what one believes.

Well, it's not true that one can do science no matter what one believes. For example, if you're a creationist who believes that truth and explanation consists in appeal to scripture and supernatural agency, you are barred from doing science. Rightfully so. Scientists are interested in theories which make predictions, which are then used to create devices for reliably controlling, and sometimes exploding, some feature of our environment. Scientists go about understanding the natural world by observing the results of controlled interactions, interpreting data, talking to other scientists in a community, making predictions, observing results, in an endlessly self-refining cycle. As soon as the creationist decides to admit observation as providing better evidence for truth than divine revelation, he can again take part in scientific activity.

Anyone can "do science" in the sense of making predictions and testing them on the basis of some model or theory, whatever one believes, true enough. Claiming this as the only worthwhile intellectual pursuit, the only way of getting at the really truly objective truth of the matter, is exactly the sort of pomposity that post-modernism was designed to ridicule. Postmodernists, while engaged in whatever activity this label suggests, have little interest in "treating evidence and inference the same way" as scientists.

TWERPS

2005-01-15T16:36:00.000-08:00

“In order to bite the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. That's the only reason twerps do it. It's all that turns them on.”

-- Kurt Vonnegut, on why a person would insert a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his (or her) ass.

From Paris Review.

Unfortunately, you can't read the whole Vonnegut interview online. The Dorothy Parker one is really great though. Her every thought and opinion is so clever and witty, people assume that the cleverness is the whole point, that she's not serious or doesn't mean what she says. Or at least she assumed that people assumed this, and she was probably right. It's either that, or because she was, you know, female.

"A 'smartcracker' they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it, wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."

QUESTIONS

2005-01-12T10:19:00.000-08:00

I was sent a link to www.20q.com via the RHIZOME mailing list. It came with this paragraph of interpretation:

Most artists interested in the relations between media and consciousness are familiar with the 'Turing test,' a procedure which forces us to confront how an artificial intelligence might be able to pose as human. The '20Q test' may soon become just as important for media artists. Invented by Ottawa-based developer Robin Burgener, 20Q is a version of the traditional 'twenty questions' game in which an online intelligence reads a human player's thoughts with startling accuracy. Working with some 10,000,000 synaptic connections, the website is even able to account for false steps in players' reasoning. The more people visit 20Q, the better it gets at guessing, making startling connections based on a logic that transcends any one individual's ideas (the site's handlers even claim that it 'seems to be developing a warped sense of humor' all on its own.) The '20Q test' turns the 'Turing test' around. In the latter, an artificial intelligence can pose as authentic. In 2OQ, one experiences how 'authentic,' personal thoughts can be reduced to chains of connections that seem completely artificial

I guess that's pretty cool. I have a sort of love/hate relationship with anything AI-ish these days, just because so much of it seems like a complete joke, and for a long while I was had. (FOOL ME ONCE CAN'T GET FOOLED AGAIN.) Well, maybe not a joke, there's plenty of great AI out there behind the scenes, just nothing like the mechanical colleagues or slaves we all thought we'd be fraternizing with by now.

Fifty-five years ago, Turing thought that in fifty years we'd have machines that would be capable of enjoying the taste of blueberries and cream. (When you reflect on the fact that he was saying these things amidst the huge, hot mazes of vacuum-tube and wire that were the computers of 1950, his optimism is even more astounding.) Instead, we got folks writing quirky little knowledge bases like

BEER -> IS_WET;
BEER -> IS_DELICIOUS;

and then hooking it up to a query system and simple grammar parser to create dialogs like

Is beer wet?
> yes
Is beer like water?
> yes
Is beer delicious?
> yes
Is beer made with hops?
> PARSE ERROR 2838659!!!! 'UNKNOWN OBJECT OR PROPERTY'

And then the authors says something like "Hey, it at least it knows that beer is wet and delicious! Now all I need to do is apply for grants to pay research assistants to type billions of objects and properties and relations into the database. Then we can ask it anything and, (as long as it can be answered through valid inference on stable, uncontroversial objects), it will tell us!" As a result you get CYC, a worthless bloated monstrosity to which graduate students are ritually sacrificed to feed it's terrible hunger. Or so I've heard.

Anyways, 20Q reminds me of this research programme, only without the pretension to creating something useful as a result. It solves AI's "tell me something I don't know" problem by making the whole point to tell you something you do know. Very clever. It's a neat little toy you can play with once and say "haha wow I WAS thinking of a banana!" and then forget about forever. This is the MIT Media Lab approach to AI, which has long given up on representationalist, knowledge-base AI, and instead devotes itself almost exclusively to creating art and novelties. A big improvement, for sure.

However, contrary to the author of the quoted passage above, I did not feel in the slightest as if my authentic, personal thoughts about a banana were being reduced to a chain of "artificial" connections. Truth be told, I wasn't even thinking of a banana, I just answered the questions as if I were thinking of one. I was instead relying on the mysterious ability of sentences to be true of some things and not of others. Turns out, it doesn't really make a difference.

I'll be really impressed when someone comes up with a system which plays a reasonable game of "Questions," from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. That would be great.

VADER BABY

2005-01-09T19:48:00.000-08:00

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to you in regards to, arguably, the world's greatest Star Wars fan, Jeff Tweiten. This name may not mean anything to you, but you may recall his exploits: Jeff was one of the guys who waited in line for over three and a half months outside Seattle's Cinerama for Star Wars Episode II.

Well now Jeff is at it again. As of January 1st, Jeff set his ass down on the concrete, and he's been there ever since. He will be there, in fact, for over five months until 'Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith' is released. I believe he allows himself ten-fifteen minutes a day to shower across the street at a Hotel (someone saves his space in "line"), but other than that, Jeff is Seattle's latest fixture: an odd mix of devotion, philosophy, and human spectacle. Most people, of course, think of this stunt as ridiculous, and the knee-jerk reaction is always to write him off as some type of lunatic fanatic.

I am writing to you because this is not the case, and someone with prominence in the science-fiction/fantasy community needs to take notice of him. Briefly: Jeff is not an attention-seeker or a local media hound, he will continue his wait with or without any recognition from the wider world; rather, Jeff is someone who, as odd as it may seem to conventional society, feels deeply motivated by the idea of "waiting" for things of value, [I personally would have put the scare quotes around "value", not "waiting", which is literally what he is actually doing. --ed] and in a consumer driven, materialistic culture he sees as spiritually drained, this is where he's putting his time and energy down as a worthy investment. All Star Wars fans are moved by how these films capture mythic themes of heroism, discipline, and inner strength, but I would wager that very few of them have been as thoroughly transformed by these ideals as Jeff Tweiten.

I can tell you this: I have had the pleasure of meeting many astounding and impressive spiritual 'masters' in my time - I have my Masters of Divinity from Columbia's Union Theological Seminary, and I worked for many years with the Venerable Lama Pema Wangdak here in New York City and throughout India, but until the day I die, Jeff will be in my own personal top 5 list of the most creative and uniquely powerful individuals I have ever met. A successful artist from Bainbridge Island, Jeff's genius comes not only from his talent, but from that unique ability to truly transcend the opinions of contemporary society in his path to let imagination re-create him. I recognize that this still sounds like a raving fanboy at best, and a complete lunatic at worst, but here's the proof that Jeff's the real thing. Are you ready? JEFF WAITED OUTSIDE IN LINE FOR A MOVIE FOR OVER FOUR MONTHS! And now he's at it again!! I don't think any of us can really have an accurate idea of what this entails. The elements, the mental and physical demands alone would surely weed out anyone who was simply crazy or posturing. Jeff is neither, and maintains his vigil with grace, compassion, and humor.

Remember: while I'm writing this, Jeff is out on the street. He's out on the street while you're reading this, too, and while you go for lunch, forget about all of this for a few hours, and then revisit it again in your mind, Jeff is still out there, right now, on the street, waiting for Star Wars. You may very well forget about this for months, and it won't be until April that you'll think about it again, but Jeff will still be there, constant, disciplined, a mad hatter bodhisattva manifesting as the one thing all the stuffed shirts out there will be sure to mock and look over: a sci-fi fanboy on crusade, a modern Don Quixote who is unimpressed by the siren appeals of modern culture, and instead has chosen to wait for something of true value and excitement. Whatever any of us - or him - feels about the Star Wars films, (I know his favorite is still 'Empire Strikes Back') is irrelevant, it is the ideals behind these images that moves him, and it is to these timeless and unpopular ideals that he has committed himself. [Actually, what I think of the new Star Wars movies is highly relevant to how big an idiot I think Jeff is (hint: a big one). -- ed] Jeff is not without a sense of irony, and perhaps it is all the more appropriate that this seat of American monasticism finds its most dedicated and insulted hero waiting for a big-budget juggernaut blockbuster.

My point is this: people should sit up and take notice of this guy. Someone fantastic and funny is happening in our midst, and when we look back to tell the story ten years from now, do we want to be one of those ants who lacked vision and mocked him, or one of his fellow crickets who played the violin all winter with him, just out of the sheer joy of myth and fantasy? What are you waiting for? What are any of us waiting for? People should get the word out, write up a story or two, and show Jeff some support. You can reach him at superfan1138@waitingforstarwars.com.

Thank you for your time,

Michael Ellick, M.Div.

Yes what are any of us waiting for, hm indeed.

This is Jeff's blog.

This is Jeff's movie.

Here are a few inspirational poems in tribute to Jeff "Bodhisattva "Messiah" Quixote" Tweiten:

* * *

Jeffrey,
lonely cricket,
blind ants deride your faith.
Will you weep as the credits roll?
You should.

* * *

Waiting for Godot,
He sees only Chewbacca.
Laugh it up, fuzzball.

* * *

There once was a man from Seattle,
Who dreamt of a light sabre battle.
Five months long he waited
for this urge to be sated,
in a pose reminiscient of cattle.

* * *

MASTER GUTEI

2005-01-05T13:54:00.000-08:00

In ancient Japan, there was a zen master named Gutei. Every day he would walk through the village near his monastery, where he was a sort of local celebrity. During his walks the peasants would ask him about the nature of Zen, and he would reply, (with that look of serene mischief practiced by those who have knowledge of the Absolute), by raising his index finger. The folk found this reliably amusing, laughing at the absurdity of the no-liner. They were simple folk.

Eventually the local youths began to imitate Gutei, and one young man in particular, the son of a wealthy local merchant and a naturally gifted actor, became renowned, (amongst the few thousand illiterate peasants in and around his village), for being able to perfectly immitate the look of good-natured mystery and exact finger positioning utilized by the zen master, duplicating the precise height and angle of the joints, the location of the other four digits, the curl of the wrist, etc..

Hearing of this immitator, Master Gutei approached the youth one day and asked him the nature of zen. This new reversal of the old routine created a buzz of excitement among the villagers observing the exchange. When the young man responded to the master's question by raising his finger in his carefully-studied way, Gutei seized him and sliced off his finger. The peasants stood agape in confused horror, and the young man clutched the bloody wound and let out a short gasping wail. Gutei picked up the young man's severed finger and held it up, and the young man was enlighted.

And so the enlightened young man, through the pain and shock of his sudden disfigurement, adopted again his studied look of divine mystery and raised his middle finger to Gutei.

GOTTA GET MY STUFF DONE

2005-01-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

The latest blog craze sensation.

BLOG BLOG BO BOG BANANAFANA FO FLOG

2004-12-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

I don't update this site that often. Truth be told, I actually delete about one in four posts I write. I strongly believe that this is good practice. (If you think the recent posts have been horrible, you should see the tedious crap that didn't make the cut!)

It's like my blog is saying: Hey, slow down everyone! I don't expect you to visit every day! Just relax and take some quality time to yourself, you deserve it.

If I ever felt guilty about my minimal productivity, I would just wander over and visit Campzine, and that would make me feel better. It's about quality not quanitity, I'd remind myself, before returning to my busy schedule of not posting.

The way I figure it, a lower volume of posts at least gives the illusion of them each being of higher quality. Each post is compared not to other posts, but to the sad empty feeling of seeing a blog with no new updates, just like how gambling is more addictive when the payoff is sporadic. Eventually, you begin to hate whatever the most recently posted topic was, and the feeling of relief at not seeing it at the top of the page makes the infrequent blog that much more engaging and rewarding.

But now Bob has gone and promised to update every single business day for a month, with callous disregard for everyone's valuable free time, the principles of behavioural conditioning, or making other blogs look bad. Nice one, jerk!

Oh well, there's always good old reliable Heather. She never updates! It's great!

SATURNALIA

2004-12-21T17:16:00.000-08:00

Happy solstice everone!

AND THE AWARD FOR BEST NAME FOR A WEBSITE GOES TO

2004-12-17T22:43:00.000-08:00

Rocklopedia Fakebandica.

I can see that website being really useful whenever I want to look up information about a band that doesn't exist.

Maybe you're trying to remember the name of that band from Heathers, that has the hit single "Teenage Suicide: Don't Do It!". You look under H for Heathers, but everything is alphebatized by the name of the band, which is convenient if you're looking up a fake band whose name you already know, but you don't know which movie or tv show they're from. And the search box is broken, so no cheating!

HIGHLIGHT FOR SPOILERS!!! : The name of the band is Big Fun, but you already knew that because you are secretly still totally crushing on Wynona Ryder and/or Christian Slater, even though as adults they are creepy and spent. "Teenage Suicide: Don't Do It!" was written by Don Dixon and can be found on his 1993 album, (If) I'm a Ham, Well You're A Sausage, which is also a pretty great name.

TALES FROM THE WORLD OF REALITY

2004-12-16T21:48:00.000-08:00

There's a kid who shines shoes outside the store where I work. Let's call him "Shoeshine Kid." He looks in his early twenties, and he has two Husky dogs. He's very friendly and professional. Although his donation jar is in plain view, and his vagrancy is apparent, he's not pan-handling. He performs a valuable service, and takes pride in his work.

He asked me whether anyone complained about him in the store. I said no, not that I'd heard. I can't imagine anyone complaining about him. He's courteous and respectful at all times. He doesn't evoke pity or horror like the shambling addicts who pan-handle from the Starbucks patrons next door. He's by far the most agreeable and businesslike of all the street characters, none of whom posess the same respect for the principles of good customer service.

Take "Decrepit Wheelchair Man", for example. DWM pan-handles outside the mall across the street, and his legs work perfectly ok. The wheelchair is just a gimmick, an embellishment of the sense of misfortune and disability that attracts donations . The Shoeshine Kid and I agree that this is dishonest.

The two of them had an altercation today. It began with Shoeshine Kid loudly informing passers-by of the fictional nature of DWM's schtick. Enraged, DWM calls him a junkie and a crackhead and meth-head. This hit a sore spot with the Shoeshine Kid, who does not do drugs and knows that everyone suspects that he's a junkie, just because he's homeless in Vancouver. No, people, he's just poor.

He responds to this slander by jumping up, taking his shirt off and yelling, "point to a fucking track mark!" Meanwhile folks doing their Christmas shopping walk faster and keep their eyes down. He repeats this challenge a few times to emphasise the fact that no such track marks exist. Defeated and unwilling to stick around to suffer humiliations from the semi-naked Shoeshine Kid, DWM rolled off, trailing a string of slurred curses.

Then we both went back to work.

HEAR WE ARE

2004-12-09T19:35:00.000-08:00

J. David Velleman, philosopher, wonders into the blogosphere: "How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values?" The ensuing "conservative critique" is fantastic. And by fantastic I mean a completely predictable train-wreck.

Some gems:

"Mona": I was astonished that none of the women's studies courses I took even MENTIONED Ayn Rand, much less had us examine her works and philosphy. [I will never stop laughing at this.]

"R": As a bush-supporting agnostic pro-choice gay marriage-supporting hybrid car driving non-white immigrant college student on a very liberal campus in a very blue state, i find this site very amusing.

Dr. David Layman, full-time part-time college teacher: I am willing to read what you have to say, but I want to warn you: it will be very difficult to get to get me to believe that you really want to hear me. I have spent years being insulted, denigrated, and alienated. I have listened to (and read and, best I honestly could, taught) liberal "arguments," astonished that presumably sophisticated people really expect people to follow their "logic."
[For best results, read this passage in your whiniest, suckiest dork voice. Be sure to physically emphasize the words "arguments" and "logic" with air-quotes. Really get your shoulders into it!]

"Former Democrat": The ultimate point of the work you have committed yourselves to do is to learn how to win elections so that you can implement your ideas and policies. May I offer some simple pointers? Join a bowling league and golf league.

J. David Velleman, philosopher: The blog is not about how the Left can win more votes away from the Right: it's not about political strategy. Nor is the blog intended to contain arguments by the Left addressed to the Right: it isn't a Blue vs. Red debate, nor even the Blue half of that debate. It is meant to be a discussion about how liberal ideas and values -- understood in the broadest, most inclusive sense of the word "liberal" -- might be re-considered and re-expressed so as to facilitate real communication and dialog across political divisions.

"MarineWife": So David, what you're saying is, regardless of the stated intentions of the website, you don't intent to listen or contemplate conservative ideas as compared to liberal ones. You say you want to communicate liberal ideas better. For what reason? To get more votes and win control of making policy. ... You asked to talk to the right, and hear we are.

At which point J. David Velleman's monocle popped out and landed in his brandy snifter.

PEOPLE DO IT TO THEMSELVES (THAT'S WHAT REALLY HURTS)

2004-12-06T21:07:00.000-08:00

The success of an advertising campaign is predicated on cynically exploiting psychological loopholes through cheap behaviorist trickery, and also on trust. This paradox, comparable to the mystery of the holy trinity or a zen story, (a sublime truth packaged as a blatant contradiction or absurdity), inspires a great deal of meditation and transcendental reflection on the extra-logical character our big dumb universe.

The currently fashionable response to this contemporary mondo is to simply ride piggy-back on communications which are trusted inherently. Agencies are now developing schemes to break into the economy of trust that now exists only in casual conversation between acquaintances. This long-ass New York Times article offers a grim vision of the present, in which this awful project of commodifying conversation bears fruit.

The ad industry has always been devoted to setting up lifestyle models for imitation, and is now agressively targeting the twin impulse: desire to be imitated. Perhaps people wear Brand X not only because of the instinct to imitate others, but because when they see others with the same brand, they feel they themselves are being imitated. Branding as multi-level marketing scheme.

We suggest that the mechanisms involved in infant imitation provide the foundation for understanding that others are 'like me' and underlie the development of theory of mind and empathy for others.

BzzAgent is just a systematic way of convincing people of their high position on the cultural downline. The free sausages they receive from Santa Fe Sausages for being double-agents are not just juicy and delicious, they are also tokens of the consumer's value as a prototype to be emulated. Their meaty payola marks them as cutting-edge early adopters, innovators, original sources of imitation and cultural value. This is the psychological payoff.

In exchange, the product receives their complete trust. In social situations, it's pretty easy to tell when someone is honestly communicating or if they're making a sales pitch. Honest enthusiasm is hard to fake and is exhausting, thankless work. Ad agencies have cut the Gordian knot by getting a small number of people to trust the product for reasons, (and this is the important part), that have no tangible connection the actual comparative quality or usefulness of the product. Everyone else hears the message from a trusted source, or at least a source more trusted than paid advertisement. The psychological manipulation is effectively hidden from view.

I wonder where this behavior would fall under the usual classifications of imitation: no problem was being solved, no goal was being copied, and no reward was procured. Manifestly fascinated by the infant's predicament, the juveniles' imitation seemed emotionally charged.

In order to get along with our fellow humans and successfully communicate with them, we simply have no choice but to assume that other people are mostly truthful. A language in which most statements are lies is not a language at all; this is a truism whose ramifications were thoughtfully explored by David Lewis, among others.

Now, I don't really think the situation is as desperate as all that. We won't end up all lying down on the sidewalk like in that Radiohead video just because people endorse products for ill-considered reasons. It's just yet another inexplicable source of baffling idiot-static, like the New Age section at the bookstore: mostly harmless yet disproportionately obnoxious, for reasons that are difficult to articulate but seem to circulate around a vague feeling that stupid or naive people are being manipulated for cash, and that I would like some cash too even though I think angels and lovemarks are dumb.

None of this is to imply that I'm somehow above this banal imitation-game so popular among the hoi polloi. Certainly not! It's merely the systematization that I object to. If you glance to the right, you will see my current choice of music and reading material. The implication, of course, is that you should read and listen to these things too. Trust me.

(Thanks to William Gibson for the link.)