Now, you can say that it is pointless to try to seek some sort of deeper societal gestalt from pop culture, but let's face it, it's the culture we've got, and if we're going to take it somewhere we must start by determining where we are. But that's just an argument. I honestly believe that it's all just exactly what it seems. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for example, is a genre classic, a fine work of genius in American cinema. Like the Republic, it seems to be a book of many but it is in fact a book of only one.
The secret of Ferris Bueller's apparent narrative is that the central character is Cameron. Ferris is simply a foil. Now, you may protest, that Ferris has almost all the lines, but Cameron has the most important lines. He is the character who undergoes genuine crisis and emerges from it transformed.
In fact, Ferris is Cameron's Walter Mitty, a fantasy of a life lived free of restrictions. In fact there is only one character in Ferris Bueller, and he is unnamed. Ferris Bueller is a code name, the story of his Day Off a tale of a desperate attempt to save a soul from dissolution. Consider the totemic repetition of exhortations to "Save Ferris." Ferris is a symbol of a fundamental archetype of culture refracted through the strange lens of American culture, and the tale of an individual struggle with an entropic element of that same culture, a struggle which must not fail.
And of course, to merit inclusion in the Pentagon Files Ferris is a novel of five parts, cunningly contained in an acid jelly bon-bon of that mysterious drug factory, Hollywood.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
simpleton
I've been experiencing a lot of value out of working extensively with feeble little simpletext. At my job I work with the near-latest version of word for the mac, from office '98. I appreciate the fact that when I'm working with simpletext, my computer doesn't feel the need to correct my supposed errors (all too many of which are actually errors, certainly, but that's okay, it adds humanity and prevents lazy typing), it doesn't pop up some annoying and stone-stupid animation to =assist= me in my work (=hi there! it looks like you're too stupid to use help!=), and most of all it doesn't hassle me about my supposed overuse of the passive voice or so-called run-on sentences (they go as long as they need to, damnit!)
Ned Ludd, it should be noted, was not anti-technology per se, and so it has been noted that Luddite is a poor title for anti-technologism. I myself am not against technology (a stance that seems both ludicrous and meaningless to me) but like Ned Ludd, I know when I'm getting jacked around and I know when a machine is getting used to do the job. I haven't yet forgotten my first computer experiences with the old Apple IIC at school and my friend Roger's litttle TRS-80 at home, and so I can appreciate the virtues of getting down to business without all the bells and whistles. I also recognize that in the particularly twisted area of software commerce, it makes plenty of sense to tweak all sorts of useless baubles into a program so that you can release a new version. It may be good business but it is practically, aesthetically and morally wrong. Waste is never indicated. It takes very little to push out a horrendous quivering pentagon of semidifferentiated thought into the narrow corset of language, and to push this in turn through our fragile network of fiber optic and coax and copper wire and sattelite and thus seed whole continents with the germs of ideas. All the great spiritual geniuses of this world have warned us against greed, the desire for more than is needful. All I need is my simpletext, the appropriate tool for the job.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Ned Ludd, it should be noted, was not anti-technology per se, and so it has been noted that Luddite is a poor title for anti-technologism. I myself am not against technology (a stance that seems both ludicrous and meaningless to me) but like Ned Ludd, I know when I'm getting jacked around and I know when a machine is getting used to do the job. I haven't yet forgotten my first computer experiences with the old Apple IIC at school and my friend Roger's litttle TRS-80 at home, and so I can appreciate the virtues of getting down to business without all the bells and whistles. I also recognize that in the particularly twisted area of software commerce, it makes plenty of sense to tweak all sorts of useless baubles into a program so that you can release a new version. It may be good business but it is practically, aesthetically and morally wrong. Waste is never indicated. It takes very little to push out a horrendous quivering pentagon of semidifferentiated thought into the narrow corset of language, and to push this in turn through our fragile network of fiber optic and coax and copper wire and sattelite and thus seed whole continents with the germs of ideas. All the great spiritual geniuses of this world have warned us against greed, the desire for more than is needful. All I need is my simpletext, the appropriate tool for the job.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Five Trumps of Fear
There are five thematic lines in the Hughes masterwork Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Hughes makes the work of division easy by cunningly weaving them out of interconnected narratives dilineated by clear character lines of sight. The first and most obvious is the story of Ferris' day off, as spent with Cameron and Sloan. This is paralled in Rooney's day off of sorts, as a petty bureaucrat tumbles over the edge of madness and is punished in a manner gratuitous enough to suggest that there must be some guy out there John Hughes really hates. There is the story of Ferris's school, which is really just the original context of the story of Ferris' sister Jean. There is the story of Ferris' parents, a light aspect of comic relief that is nonetheless an essential part of the film's construction. Finally there is the most important story, the story of Cameron's internal life (that is, the story of his inward experience of the day that bears Ferris' name) and the crisis of personality that his degree of fear of his father and the future he represents, when forced into the forefront of his mind, creates. Repeated watchings reveal that there is a very distinctive character identification of each story line. For example, when Jean leaves school, the school line of gags and jabs at the dull world we can make out of learning drop off the plot. Cameron and Ferris pair up on individual character exposition scenes: Ferris with his monologues, Cameron with a much subtler vocabulary of deeply introspective non verbal elocution. Those two stories are always intertwined. It is really Cameron's day off, because he needs it more. Ferris says as much.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
defiance (acid test)
But what is the meaning of the tales told by the central six (his parents share a single plotline) figures in the five storylines of Ferris Bueller? The acid test, after all, of any narrative is its characters. Ferris' parent represent the kindly and protective instincts. Once we leave home, we all must parent ourselves as best we can, and our nurturing insincts allow us to foster a place for freedom and yet their overprotective tendencies must be outwitted or we will be held captive by overzealous love. The story of Ferris, Cameron and Sloan is a classic tale of the trickster, an affirmation of the principle that good will is sufficient to maintain the integrity of the course of freedom. Ed Rooney is a sad story, of the tyranny of small minds, obsession and self-importance. Society carries it's own fear, a complicated fear of loss of respect that hides the reality of a life poorly lived. Rooney is obsessed with catching Ferris because Ferris represents the life he has lost. The loss drives him mad: his eventual disgrace is augered by the way this loss creates a vicious desire to destroy in the only way he knows (a hell of a dent in one's future). His mean streak justifies the revenge fantasy of the consequences of his misadventures. Jean's story is a Prodigal Son variant, a cautionary note on the dangers of jealousy. But it is an uplifting tale, in the end, as her meeting with the, though amusing, equally cautionary Ferris-doppelganger character played by Charlie Sheen. He liberates her to, finally, Save Ferris when he needs it most. And Cameron? Cameron is the tale of how we must depose the dictators of our lives that would destroy us rather than let us disrupt their poisoned world. Cameron must break the back of the legacy of his father. It is not sufficient to merely learn it's measure: he must face it squarely and, as he says, take a stand.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
from the word go
Napkin, notepad, ballpoint or printer? A science type may tell you that math is the universal language because it carries no value judgement (amazingly many can utter such monstrosity without irony or humor). Now, I've got nothing against math, I've done a lot of math in my day. But I know that the math men will not tell you that math cannot exist without text, without normal language, and that every attempt to normalize math beyond the necessities of text has failed. Math is a construct of text. So if the universe runs on math that means the universe runs on text and that is thermodynamic predestination in a nutshell. Matha nd the common man. Suddenly your reading of these very words carries a potentially chilling significance. Your eyes are twisting space time into meaning, twisting in the terrible light that fills my own eyes at this moment, seeing backwards and forwards in time, as I deftly cross an imaginary line and deliver the punchline to the library of babel.
Napkin, notepad, ballpoint or maybe just light (and even moreso darkness), it doesn't matter - no matter how I put these words down they would have found you eventually because they were meant for you, I inscribed your name on this bullet of thought long before the words I'm using to express it were invented. So riddle this: Why are you reading, and what have you learned? Are you under compulsion, or are your free? Can you stop?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Napkin, notepad, ballpoint or maybe just light (and even moreso darkness), it doesn't matter - no matter how I put these words down they would have found you eventually because they were meant for you, I inscribed your name on this bullet of thought long before the words I'm using to express it were invented. So riddle this: Why are you reading, and what have you learned? Are you under compulsion, or are your free? Can you stop?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
feed my lambs
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 11
Alternatively, you might try eating your own foot. We have an ugly relationship with food in this country, it's hard to deny that. It's difficult to find anything to put in your mouth that isn't tremendously bad from the get go or sprayed to death with pesticides or chock full of chemical additives or just simply a sorry ass excuse for a vegetable grown in desperately depleted soil. Honestly, it's awful. Of course, that doesn't mean that we don't allow a whole lotta people to starve every day.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Alternatively, you might try eating your own foot. We have an ugly relationship with food in this country, it's hard to deny that. It's difficult to find anything to put in your mouth that isn't tremendously bad from the get go or sprayed to death with pesticides or chock full of chemical additives or just simply a sorry ass excuse for a vegetable grown in desperately depleted soil. Honestly, it's awful. Of course, that doesn't mean that we don't allow a whole lotta people to starve every day.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
mokie coke! mokie coke! mokie coke!
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 12
The only product I have a passionate relationship with is coca cola. To me it's still the archetype of my love hate relationship with my country. Here's this former cocaine quack remedy (cures the Blues, no doubt) that manages to transform into this sexy snappy timeless artificial icon, while still being a true juggernaught, core evil of the bland, ruthless, corporate variety. A Mega Product. A product that is itself Wealth. But I love it, really I do, like no other product. Cars, for example, I simply hate. I used to love my cigarettes but slowly it became clear that they are actually and quite unambiguously killing me, and we drifted apart (I admit I still think about them sometimes).
The term soft drinks, one presumes, is as opposed to hard drinks, as cider is to hard cider, if my astonishing analogical skills serve me. It's a neat comparison, kids can start out hitting soft drinks and then when they get to college they can really start hitting the, uh, hard stuff. There should be some sort of graduation ceremony with the ceremonial pouring of the rum and coke. Oh yes, it's called the post graduation kegger. Anyway, I live in the midwest and up here we call it pop. The fruity legal version of the same slang mentality that gave us smack, crack, and pot. I came from california though and I still tend to call it soda. Go figure. Anyway, they say that it is the single largest source of refined sugar in the American diet. Now if you knew anything about the amount of the world's sugar consumption (hint: it's large) and the scale of the world sugar industry (it's frighteningly vast and disconcertingly full of Dutch people), that fact might mean something to you. Don't feel bad! I don't know anything about those things either. I mean, I'm just, uh, guessing.
Anyway, pop, yes. We do drink rather a lot of it, you might call it an obsessive amount, considering that they say we're generally obese and prone to tooth decay anyway. Actually, just read Daniel M. Pinkwater's The Last Guru. It's all in there.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The only product I have a passionate relationship with is coca cola. To me it's still the archetype of my love hate relationship with my country. Here's this former cocaine quack remedy (cures the Blues, no doubt) that manages to transform into this sexy snappy timeless artificial icon, while still being a true juggernaught, core evil of the bland, ruthless, corporate variety. A Mega Product. A product that is itself Wealth. But I love it, really I do, like no other product. Cars, for example, I simply hate. I used to love my cigarettes but slowly it became clear that they are actually and quite unambiguously killing me, and we drifted apart (I admit I still think about them sometimes).
The term soft drinks, one presumes, is as opposed to hard drinks, as cider is to hard cider, if my astonishing analogical skills serve me. It's a neat comparison, kids can start out hitting soft drinks and then when they get to college they can really start hitting the, uh, hard stuff. There should be some sort of graduation ceremony with the ceremonial pouring of the rum and coke. Oh yes, it's called the post graduation kegger. Anyway, I live in the midwest and up here we call it pop. The fruity legal version of the same slang mentality that gave us smack, crack, and pot. I came from california though and I still tend to call it soda. Go figure. Anyway, they say that it is the single largest source of refined sugar in the American diet. Now if you knew anything about the amount of the world's sugar consumption (hint: it's large) and the scale of the world sugar industry (it's frighteningly vast and disconcertingly full of Dutch people), that fact might mean something to you. Don't feel bad! I don't know anything about those things either. I mean, I'm just, uh, guessing.
Anyway, pop, yes. We do drink rather a lot of it, you might call it an obsessive amount, considering that they say we're generally obese and prone to tooth decay anyway. Actually, just read Daniel M. Pinkwater's The Last Guru. It's all in there.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
tote dat barge
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 13
I maybe should have mentioned that nowhere in the bill of rights is anyone guaranteed a free lunch. And I think that this is right and proper. As the apostle Paul said, if you do not work, neither shall you eat. So you gotta work. And basically there's not much of a safety net anymore and they tell us that while it's all very fine and well that we continue to nuzzle up to the slop trough day after day, they must remind us that they have no choice but to reserve the right to terminate the relationship, for any or for no reason. Still: you gotta work. I recommend doing something you love or, barring that, living out your fading grey days trying to avoid the sight of the drying, twisted corpse of your strangled dreams. As Bill Holm put it, =Most do.=
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I maybe should have mentioned that nowhere in the bill of rights is anyone guaranteed a free lunch. And I think that this is right and proper. As the apostle Paul said, if you do not work, neither shall you eat. So you gotta work. And basically there's not much of a safety net anymore and they tell us that while it's all very fine and well that we continue to nuzzle up to the slop trough day after day, they must remind us that they have no choice but to reserve the right to terminate the relationship, for any or for no reason. Still: you gotta work. I recommend doing something you love or, barring that, living out your fading grey days trying to avoid the sight of the drying, twisted corpse of your strangled dreams. As Bill Holm put it, =Most do.=
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
lift dat bale
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 14
Ever read the back cover of a book and learn that the author had all these oddball jobs before they came out with the next big thing? Did you ever daydream about how that could be you? Well get crackin'! Personally, I started out my career as a lawn mower, tending the grounds and cemetary of the church where my father preaches. Then I was a stock boy in a podunk department store that went under due to a sudden case of walmart, then a dishwasher then a professional student (I was paid by the national merit corporation) then a cook then a professional student then a flunky in an analytical chemistry lab then a professional student, then an extremely erratic bid as an factory free agent then back to student, then plastics factory, legal document imager (we called ourselves scanners), janitor, legal document data entry drone (we were called coders), then a science researcher for a small non-profit, then a clerical free agent, then a germination technician in an orchid propogation laboratory, then some more short order clerking (I think I topped out somewhere around round 3 at company number 30. At this writing I'm doing a desk job for public radio. You get the picture? This fuckin' thing is Moby Dick, baby!
add a quick temp for Excel Energy's ill-fated "NRG" subsidiary, a year as an admin for a Dean of an online graduate school (Walden) and going on 2 years as an at home father and total commercial failure of a writer.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Ever read the back cover of a book and learn that the author had all these oddball jobs before they came out with the next big thing? Did you ever daydream about how that could be you? Well get crackin'! Personally, I started out my career as a lawn mower, tending the grounds and cemetary of the church where my father preaches. Then I was a stock boy in a podunk department store that went under due to a sudden case of walmart, then a dishwasher then a professional student (I was paid by the national merit corporation) then a cook then a professional student then a flunky in an analytical chemistry lab then a professional student, then an extremely erratic bid as an factory free agent then back to student, then plastics factory, legal document imager (we called ourselves scanners), janitor, legal document data entry drone (we were called coders), then a science researcher for a small non-profit, then a clerical free agent, then a germination technician in an orchid propogation laboratory, then some more short order clerking (I think I topped out somewhere around round 3 at company number 30. At this writing I'm doing a desk job for public radio. You get the picture? This fuckin' thing is Moby Dick, baby!
add a quick temp for Excel Energy's ill-fated "NRG" subsidiary, a year as an admin for a Dean of an online graduate school (Walden) and going on 2 years as an at home father and total commercial failure of a writer.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
X Successors
73/101
Ten successors
is there anything at all
to the stories that they
heard a holy call
Was he struck down in anger
or transfixed alive
on the moment of transcendence
next stop dimension five
Did he wield the stick in anger
was his method trial by fire
ten swam back out of the deep end
other ten swam under the wire
Ten successors and
a boddisahtva martyr
poleaxed by a touchy monk
while sniffing after the garter
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Ten successors
is there anything at all
to the stories that they
heard a holy call
Was he struck down in anger
or transfixed alive
on the moment of transcendence
next stop dimension five
Did he wield the stick in anger
was his method trial by fire
ten swam back out of the deep end
other ten swam under the wire
Ten successors and
a boddisahtva martyr
poleaxed by a touchy monk
while sniffing after the garter
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
terra incognita
Compelled by... what? duty or habit or nostalgia, who knows. Shit, who knows. What I don't feel compelled by is something I have to say, on the contrary I feel like I haven't got anything to say. The same the same the fucking same, confused and frustrated as hell at the realities, but are they? Is this shitty subsistence real? That I don't know. That one's the confuser. Maya, all illusion. And do I really desire the end of all illusion? Probably not, it is a deep thing to claim desire of. The illusions conceal pain as well as well as pleasure, most of all they conceal that paradoxical horizon where the two become one and neither matters. Well, I am about as far from that as I can get, as far as I can see it. And no clue how to get there, no maps, no directions, no charms or amulets, no signposts or roads, compass or astrolabe and for that matter no stars, no landmarks, no visions, I don't even know the name of where I mean to go. Terra Incognita, with nothing but a sure sense that I'm lost and a sneaking suspicion that I always have been.
Shorn of images, sleep beckons as always, oh, the most simple and accessible of escapes. The last always permitted, by and by. To sleep, perhaps to dream, oh to dream a dream of being free and for once not be baffled by freedom, just happy with it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Shorn of images, sleep beckons as always, oh, the most simple and accessible of escapes. The last always permitted, by and by. To sleep, perhaps to dream, oh to dream a dream of being free and for once not be baffled by freedom, just happy with it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
spheres of influence version one (proof of concept)
God
Meditation Spritual Christianity Childhood
Exploration
Religious
Entheogens Judgement Community Culture
Mysticism Fundamentalism World
Protest Religion
Dropping Out Politics
Culture & Society War Travel
Policy
Crime Work Environment Nature
Stress Industry Agriculture Lifestyle
Money Self Communalism
Sufficiency
Greed Simplicity Family
Words Calling Control
Passion Talk Marriage
Diet Sickness Distance
Age Smoking Friends Relationships
Hope Children Love
Death Afterlife? Sex
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Meditation Spritual Christianity Childhood
Exploration
Religious
Entheogens Judgement Community Culture
Mysticism Fundamentalism World
Protest Religion
Dropping Out Politics
Culture & Society War Travel
Policy
Crime Work Environment Nature
Stress Industry Agriculture Lifestyle
Money Self Communalism
Sufficiency
Greed Simplicity Family
Words Calling Control
Passion Talk Marriage
Diet Sickness Distance
Age Smoking Friends Relationships
Hope Children Love
Death Afterlife? Sex
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the first principle
19/101
The theory is the
empty and unfettered mind
sets down a bold stroke
and each that follows in kind
is a masterpiece
perfect and simple
led inevitably
through from the first principle
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The theory is the
empty and unfettered mind
sets down a bold stroke
and each that follows in kind
is a masterpiece
perfect and simple
led inevitably
through from the first principle
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The Giver
53/101
I just need a couple million
Build the machine and put the wheels on
I've got it all locked up inside
I'm ready for the ride
I just need someone to Give Me
What I'm missing to hire my Army
To round up my million men
And get ready to begin
I promise I'll act like a man of the Tao
And give it all back but I need cash flow now
the giver should be thankful for me
giving them some reason to be
I'll give one million a reason to
stand up and rise on cue
Take control and show the riddle
I'll laugh while it burns and play my fiddle
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I just need a couple million
Build the machine and put the wheels on
I've got it all locked up inside
I'm ready for the ride
I just need someone to Give Me
What I'm missing to hire my Army
To round up my million men
And get ready to begin
I promise I'll act like a man of the Tao
And give it all back but I need cash flow now
the giver should be thankful for me
giving them some reason to be
I'll give one million a reason to
stand up and rise on cue
Take control and show the riddle
I'll laugh while it burns and play my fiddle
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
further elucidation
And at another end of another year, regardless of the efforts of struggling entrepreneurs, workaday wage slaves, highly paid entertainers, regardless of who one nation's elected executive leader diddled or which small and relatively powerless nation was the subject of a =strike against terrorism,= regardless of whether the pope dies, whether you make your rent or not, whether she walks away from you and never once looks back, regardless, most of the value, the juice, the wealth of the wonderful 20th and soon to be 21st century technological paradise winds up in their pockets.
aside - I wrote that, it appears, August 24, 2000 (or at least that's the last time I modified it) which sort of disturbs me. Apparently the character of the near future was a little bit more obvious than then than it seems like to was to me now. One is always distracted from what they knew the whole time by the gaudy shock of the actual turn of events. As I learned a little more than a year later, I suppose).
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
aside - I wrote that, it appears, August 24, 2000 (or at least that's the last time I modified it) which sort of disturbs me. Apparently the character of the near future was a little bit more obvious than then than it seems like to was to me now. One is always distracted from what they knew the whole time by the gaudy shock of the actual turn of events. As I learned a little more than a year later, I suppose).
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Monday, February 27, 2006
aside re art
It’s a matter of fact that every once in a while what is good intersects with what is popular. It doesn’t happen all that often and sadly we’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t mean anything. At any given time, almost all of what is good must subsist and suffer in the ghetto of art.
sleepitate to success
The fundamental precept of Realitation is the realization of maximum human potential through the optimal utilization of time. Did some bastard in a shiny suit convince you that he had the answer to your shitty existence? Did you go forth with enthusiastic response only to find that you were expected to part with a serious chunk of the dwindling capital the acquisition of which plays a majority role in the shitification of your life, and spend all kinds of your tiny reserve of =spare= time to boot? Does it all just seem like more of what you're trying to get away from? Hell yes? Then you may be ready for the revelation of Sleepitation.
Listen: if you've got the time to sit and fret about what the hell is wrong with you then chances are the first and foremost arena of wasted time in your miserable existence occurs when you aren't even concious. There are vast numbers of people in this modern world who are chronically sleep-deprived. Yet any person is physiologically capable of subsisting indefinitely on four hours of sleep. Like so many things it's the old cliche: not quantity but quality. The quality of our sleep is shattered by the false and venal architecture of ideas that we are forced to endure because of the bloated wills of the spider classes, the Shareholders.
Maximum sleep is impossible to the person inured into the single idea of the world of subverted accomplishment that most of us live in. Impossible, that is, without appropriate assistance.
Sleepitation is an auditory program that takes advantage of the malleable state of the quasiconcious mind (the irrational state just preceding sleep) and the unconcious mind to impose a state of deep meditiative trance during which a wordless liminal (acting at the threshold of perceptibility) message conveying the overriding reality of a higher order of being implicit in every breath is injected into the deep structures of the subject's mental architacture. It is effortless and automatic in action. Available only through Realitation's Sleepitation Institute, for such a modest consideration that you'll be suspicious that anything so cheap could COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR EXISTENCE.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Listen: if you've got the time to sit and fret about what the hell is wrong with you then chances are the first and foremost arena of wasted time in your miserable existence occurs when you aren't even concious. There are vast numbers of people in this modern world who are chronically sleep-deprived. Yet any person is physiologically capable of subsisting indefinitely on four hours of sleep. Like so many things it's the old cliche: not quantity but quality. The quality of our sleep is shattered by the false and venal architecture of ideas that we are forced to endure because of the bloated wills of the spider classes, the Shareholders.
Maximum sleep is impossible to the person inured into the single idea of the world of subverted accomplishment that most of us live in. Impossible, that is, without appropriate assistance.
Sleepitation is an auditory program that takes advantage of the malleable state of the quasiconcious mind (the irrational state just preceding sleep) and the unconcious mind to impose a state of deep meditiative trance during which a wordless liminal (acting at the threshold of perceptibility) message conveying the overriding reality of a higher order of being implicit in every breath is injected into the deep structures of the subject's mental architacture. It is effortless and automatic in action. Available only through Realitation's Sleepitation Institute, for such a modest consideration that you'll be suspicious that anything so cheap could COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR EXISTENCE.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
eatitation
Turn on the news on any given evening and you are likely to hear that there are a whole lot of people that are overweight out there. This is a meaningless assertion, weight being an exceptionally subjective measurement, and really, who's to say just how much mass any person actually requires? We at Realitation tend to believe that the body acquires additional mass in preparation for massive expenditures of creative energy. Unfortunately, most are induced to squander that energy in paradoxical and foredoomed efforts to simply divest the body of its necessary physical counterpart. Naturally the body sets about acquiring more energy reserves and a vicious cycle ensues that is once again flatly misinterpreted by the status quo.
It is much more accurate to say that a lot of us have a very fucked up relationship with food. The forms this disorder takes are legion, but they have one thing in common. They reject the natural and proper enjoyment that is inherent and absolutely essential in eating and replace it with destructive forms of enjoyment that induce guilt, meaningless bouts of undirected physical activity, protracted periods of numb-satiated semiconciousness, and a host of lesser and greater evils.
Eatitations is a series of 500 guided eating experiences designed to reaquaint the maladjusted mind with the joy that should be intrinsic in the act of taking sustenance. In combination with a dedicated program of nightly sleepitation, eatitations gently reprogram the poisoned mind, opening it to vistas of psychadelic clarity where the gentle and healing virtues of nourishment are experienced as if for the first time. Many describe the ongoing experience of practicing eatitation as a return to the enviable state of the infant, taking perfect satisfaction in sustenance at the holy tit, an experience not a few of you missed out on, and you better believe it's where your problems started. In a word, bliss. It helps to be hungry when you start, and of course it is vital to work the official Eatitations system, available for a laughably tiny donation to Eatitations at Realitation, dedicated to the restoration of the complete individual.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
It is much more accurate to say that a lot of us have a very fucked up relationship with food. The forms this disorder takes are legion, but they have one thing in common. They reject the natural and proper enjoyment that is inherent and absolutely essential in eating and replace it with destructive forms of enjoyment that induce guilt, meaningless bouts of undirected physical activity, protracted periods of numb-satiated semiconciousness, and a host of lesser and greater evils.
Eatitations is a series of 500 guided eating experiences designed to reaquaint the maladjusted mind with the joy that should be intrinsic in the act of taking sustenance. In combination with a dedicated program of nightly sleepitation, eatitations gently reprogram the poisoned mind, opening it to vistas of psychadelic clarity where the gentle and healing virtues of nourishment are experienced as if for the first time. Many describe the ongoing experience of practicing eatitation as a return to the enviable state of the infant, taking perfect satisfaction in sustenance at the holy tit, an experience not a few of you missed out on, and you better believe it's where your problems started. In a word, bliss. It helps to be hungry when you start, and of course it is vital to work the official Eatitations system, available for a laughably tiny donation to Eatitations at Realitation, dedicated to the restoration of the complete individual.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
workitation: it works!
Is a third of your life or more given over to mindless tasks, meaningless busywork, aimless reorganization of organizations that are fucked in the first place, painful slogging through mountains of drivellous odd chores that seem designed merely to create more odious twiddling by some other misbegotten sod, fucking the dog, so to speak? Then chances are you have acquired that sickly extraneous appendage commonly known as a job.
When you were a child your work was to play and you engaged it effortlessly, with enjoyment (which is just a fancy way of saying with JOY), taking to each thing that was presented to you without questioning whither or wherefor, at peace with that which you were given to do. Many of you may be so ground down, greyed out and inured by that which is falsely called your work that you can scarcely remember those halcyon days. How the hell are you supposed to realize your MAXIMUM POTENTIAL when five days of seven or more are spent reinforcing the trivialization of your heart's desire? Quite simply it's impossible!
Workitation is a subversive program of mental readjustment designed to reconfigure your relationship with work during the course of your existing employment. A finely tuned system of scientifically constructed mantras, devious thought experiments, and undetectable (to the enslaved slave-lords appointed to manage your annihilation) breathing, posture and mental sense-imaging exercises designed to illuminate and magnify those moments of peaceful work that occur in every job whilst muting to a gentle drone all the unpleasant aspects of your hated occupation.
Available for a puny expenditure most likely less than you spend for the fleeting and unhealthy solace of processed snacks and beverages every week, the Workitation Manual is thoughtfully three-hole punched for inclusion in your existing employee handbook or any other standard binder that might suit your fancy. Be forewarned: many who have undertaken the Workitation program report surprisingly rapid rejection of their job environment forcing a bracing leap into the refreshing chill of unknown accomplishments, and some even report experiencing unexpected contentment in discovering the true work in their existing employment. Be careful what you wish for indeed!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
When you were a child your work was to play and you engaged it effortlessly, with enjoyment (which is just a fancy way of saying with JOY), taking to each thing that was presented to you without questioning whither or wherefor, at peace with that which you were given to do. Many of you may be so ground down, greyed out and inured by that which is falsely called your work that you can scarcely remember those halcyon days. How the hell are you supposed to realize your MAXIMUM POTENTIAL when five days of seven or more are spent reinforcing the trivialization of your heart's desire? Quite simply it's impossible!
Workitation is a subversive program of mental readjustment designed to reconfigure your relationship with work during the course of your existing employment. A finely tuned system of scientifically constructed mantras, devious thought experiments, and undetectable (to the enslaved slave-lords appointed to manage your annihilation) breathing, posture and mental sense-imaging exercises designed to illuminate and magnify those moments of peaceful work that occur in every job whilst muting to a gentle drone all the unpleasant aspects of your hated occupation.
Available for a puny expenditure most likely less than you spend for the fleeting and unhealthy solace of processed snacks and beverages every week, the Workitation Manual is thoughtfully three-hole punched for inclusion in your existing employee handbook or any other standard binder that might suit your fancy. Be forewarned: many who have undertaken the Workitation program report surprisingly rapid rejection of their job environment forcing a bracing leap into the refreshing chill of unknown accomplishments, and some even report experiencing unexpected contentment in discovering the true work in their existing employment. Be careful what you wish for indeed!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
teletation for the masses
Oh Gawd! After a numbing day that started with some strident and irritating noise yanking you rudely into consciousness and continued into a zombie monotony of irritating tasks broken only by the hasty consumption of state-approved stimulants and horrible garbage that can only be labeled food by the decree of a corrupt government, chances are when you've managed to drag your stunned and abused corpus back to the relative sanity of home you aren't up to a helluva lot more than flopping down in front of the magic box and hypnotizing yourself into a state of vague indifference through a massive infusion of brightly colored gavotting smears.
Take heart! In the spirit of the belief that there is no wasted time, the Realitation Institute humbly presents you with the Teletation Program, a cunning course of Transformative Viewing Encounters (T-VEs) designed to jerk you back into fully rectified focal awareness. This ain't yer mama's cable, no-siree!
Whether you consume a fat stream of digital content baffled through the latest hi-tech instruments or tune a heavily ghosted signal through a battered set of rabbit ears the Teletation Program allows you to turn the TeeVee Pardigm on its head, creating a feedback awareness of such staggering proportions that many adherents swear that the most abysmal regurgitation of celebrity tripe goes down like their very first Saturday morning cartoon!
The ugly servants of commerce labored mightily to illegalize the secrets of commercial transfiguration whereby the sullen power of advertisements is completely emasculated! Thrill to the explanation of the secret connection between enormous truck-things and bad tacos! Watch in wonder as the mind-boggling antitelevisiual opus =It's Rome, Baby!= (conveniently provided in your preferred video format) forever transforms your experience of the idiot box! Turn your television into Intell-I-Vision!
Can it be possible that the complete reformation of the non-stop shit storm you pay and arm and a leg for every year is available for less then it costs you to take your sweetie to the wretched abortion of the silver screen that fat bastard had the audacity to describe as a =non-stop thrill ride?= Not only is it possible - it is!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Take heart! In the spirit of the belief that there is no wasted time, the Realitation Institute humbly presents you with the Teletation Program, a cunning course of Transformative Viewing Encounters (T-VEs) designed to jerk you back into fully rectified focal awareness. This ain't yer mama's cable, no-siree!
Whether you consume a fat stream of digital content baffled through the latest hi-tech instruments or tune a heavily ghosted signal through a battered set of rabbit ears the Teletation Program allows you to turn the TeeVee Pardigm on its head, creating a feedback awareness of such staggering proportions that many adherents swear that the most abysmal regurgitation of celebrity tripe goes down like their very first Saturday morning cartoon!
The ugly servants of commerce labored mightily to illegalize the secrets of commercial transfiguration whereby the sullen power of advertisements is completely emasculated! Thrill to the explanation of the secret connection between enormous truck-things and bad tacos! Watch in wonder as the mind-boggling antitelevisiual opus =It's Rome, Baby!= (conveniently provided in your preferred video format) forever transforms your experience of the idiot box! Turn your television into Intell-I-Vision!
Can it be possible that the complete reformation of the non-stop shit storm you pay and arm and a leg for every year is available for less then it costs you to take your sweetie to the wretched abortion of the silver screen that fat bastard had the audacity to describe as a =non-stop thrill ride?= Not only is it possible - it is!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
realitation is available and operators are standing by now
WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?
Does it seem like the grave gentleman on the teevee is entreating you to subsist entirely on the uncertain kindness of some vague Superior Being and yet requires endless donations to carry out his =ministry?=
Has the complicated runaround they promised would make everything CLEAR left you running to the dictionary to find out if =clear= is a synonym for =poor?=
Have you experienced despair today?
Take heart, poor seeker! While the fakers trot out the la-ti-da the Realitation Institute labors ceaselessly to bring you the ultimate program of Peace, Fulfillment, Maximized Potential and Unimaginable Material Rewards! This is the Good Shit, not the Bullshit!
The exceptional generosity of a Mysterious Benefactor allows the Realitation Institute to make =Ideation: The Final Word on Enlightenment= available to you ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE! Think of the savings in therapy bills alone! This once-in-a-lifetime FREE offer will open your mind to the incorruptible light of Ideation, whereby each breath is infused with pure meaning (without any special effort)! There are no tapes or compact disks to buy, no prayers or mantras to memorize. Ideation occurs invisibly, transformation proceeding effortlessly from within. The process completes itself perfectly, leaving no messy residue of ill-considered prosthelytizing attacks on your friends and loved ones. When you have achieved the state of Realitation, only the experience remains. Due to certain unfortunate realities of the space-time continuum this offer is available for a limited time only, so please - ACT NOW!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Does it seem like the grave gentleman on the teevee is entreating you to subsist entirely on the uncertain kindness of some vague Superior Being and yet requires endless donations to carry out his =ministry?=
Has the complicated runaround they promised would make everything CLEAR left you running to the dictionary to find out if =clear= is a synonym for =poor?=
Have you experienced despair today?
Take heart, poor seeker! While the fakers trot out the la-ti-da the Realitation Institute labors ceaselessly to bring you the ultimate program of Peace, Fulfillment, Maximized Potential and Unimaginable Material Rewards! This is the Good Shit, not the Bullshit!
The exceptional generosity of a Mysterious Benefactor allows the Realitation Institute to make =Ideation: The Final Word on Enlightenment= available to you ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE! Think of the savings in therapy bills alone! This once-in-a-lifetime FREE offer will open your mind to the incorruptible light of Ideation, whereby each breath is infused with pure meaning (without any special effort)! There are no tapes or compact disks to buy, no prayers or mantras to memorize. Ideation occurs invisibly, transformation proceeding effortlessly from within. The process completes itself perfectly, leaving no messy residue of ill-considered prosthelytizing attacks on your friends and loved ones. When you have achieved the state of Realitation, only the experience remains. Due to certain unfortunate realities of the space-time continuum this offer is available for a limited time only, so please - ACT NOW!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the final word
breathe in
This is a true story. Once upon a time you were a water-breather, you existed in the same sea that gave all life to this planet and in that endless moment you were one with that sea, until across an unfathomable divide, a yawning unearthly chasm, there was a sudden perception that the sea was without and you, within. And as the inexorable tide of the sea flowed into you you gave a start of recognition and apprehension and for the very first time your mother realized that you were truly alive.
breathe out
When you were thrust or suddenly lifted into the pain of light the last of the sea was coughed from your tiny lungs and you knew without words or images that this was the worst thing that had ever happened to you. You were surrounded by deadly poison, a pestilent invisible sea of some occult fluid far too thin to do anything but invade and destroy the very fiber of your sad, weak, wet little being. You had only the dim and rapidly decaying memory of the safe warm sea that was to comfort you at the end of your existence. And only in that memory, only in the trust and hope that Whatever had granted you the singular bliss of that original existence would somehow make a place for you in this attenuated and unbreatheable world, you took your first leap of faith to
breath in
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
This is a true story. Once upon a time you were a water-breather, you existed in the same sea that gave all life to this planet and in that endless moment you were one with that sea, until across an unfathomable divide, a yawning unearthly chasm, there was a sudden perception that the sea was without and you, within. And as the inexorable tide of the sea flowed into you you gave a start of recognition and apprehension and for the very first time your mother realized that you were truly alive.
breathe out
When you were thrust or suddenly lifted into the pain of light the last of the sea was coughed from your tiny lungs and you knew without words or images that this was the worst thing that had ever happened to you. You were surrounded by deadly poison, a pestilent invisible sea of some occult fluid far too thin to do anything but invade and destroy the very fiber of your sad, weak, wet little being. You had only the dim and rapidly decaying memory of the safe warm sea that was to comfort you at the end of your existence. And only in that memory, only in the trust and hope that Whatever had granted you the singular bliss of that original existence would somehow make a place for you in this attenuated and unbreatheable world, you took your first leap of faith to
breath in
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
But for the grace of gravity and gall
You were cold and tired but you couldn't sit down at the bench because it was decidedly occupied, an ancient and decrepit bum curled up in a nest of newspaper and filth, dead to the world, perhaps all but dead in the unpoetic sense. So you stood with your back to his labored breathing and were momentarily crushed by the realization of every sin of this bad old world and the overwhelming guilt and culpability of your own silence and complicity in the face of this naked and unironic manifestation of the ultimate condition a fallen planet demanded of a sacrificed batallion of its inhabitants.
In that moment this knowledge is given to you: that bum breathes in peace and breathes out contentment, that bum lies in the palm of Gad and enjoys the only real freedom and rest and peace that exists, anywhere on earth. He sleeps a sleep the rich man only dreams of, he sleeps a sleep that you will never know as long as you need a bell to wake you in the morning to take up once again the desperate race to avoid his fate, he sleeps like Gad himself, catching twenty quick winks (in which timeless instant a plague of nations rises and is felled like grain), complete in his omnipotence and not simply needing nothing but in an eternal state of grace that Wills not to need a single thing. You are priviledged to read between the lines of yesterday's paper what was not written for you but which is always given freely, this:
"all the flashy cars
all the new leather jacket
all the flashy brand
all the high priced restaurants
all the pretty people
with their high style hair cuts and visa cards
...don't got, what he got"
There with but the grace of Gad go ye.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
In that moment this knowledge is given to you: that bum breathes in peace and breathes out contentment, that bum lies in the palm of Gad and enjoys the only real freedom and rest and peace that exists, anywhere on earth. He sleeps a sleep the rich man only dreams of, he sleeps a sleep that you will never know as long as you need a bell to wake you in the morning to take up once again the desperate race to avoid his fate, he sleeps like Gad himself, catching twenty quick winks (in which timeless instant a plague of nations rises and is felled like grain), complete in his omnipotence and not simply needing nothing but in an eternal state of grace that Wills not to need a single thing. You are priviledged to read between the lines of yesterday's paper what was not written for you but which is always given freely, this:
"all the flashy cars
all the new leather jacket
all the flashy brand
all the high priced restaurants
all the pretty people
with their high style hair cuts and visa cards
...don't got, what he got"
There with but the grace of Gad go ye.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
diarism
Neon Genesis Evangelion spins out its incomprehensible and ultimately fruitless plotlines somewhere rather more than just this side of midnight, rolling into daylight once again. I let it play unheeded on television, just a soundtrack, background. I own the whole thing other than the second final movie on videotape, a probably foolish impulse purchase on eBay years ago. It's like a sort of savage shorthand fugue on everything that's right and wrong about anime. The good work Gainax began, brought to completion in FLCL.
But this isn't about that. Just, setting the scene.
For what? Eh. Just one of those nights. A collection of more or less random conditions lead to this, another quiet contemplation, a restless and unsatisfied lull of a moment. I puzzle over these endless archives of relatively ancient history, stuff I wrote as much as eight years ago. The smoker days, the single days, the childless days, all so long ago now. I feel a glum nostalgia for cigarettes but the rest seems like a dream to me now. Was it ever thus? Evangelion segues into Cowboy Bebop. I already rented the whole thing on Netflix. Adult Swim clearly needs to get further ahead of my viewing sophistication.
They play these commercials for "Game Design" degrees from advertise-on-late-night-television type universities: I am briefly sorry for all the slacker stoner gamer pollyannas out there being led to a sad and lying hope about their future lives.
All of which brings me no closer to a resolution of the impulse that started me in the first place. Perhaps by and by after all of the Kingdom Come Institute files are uploaded, this will just adopt the nature of the my old paper journals, and I'll just sit down whenever the urge strikes and heedlessly reel out whatever garbage is floating on the top of my head. Which is not exactly an original direction, but what the fuck. Anyway, there's still hundreds of pages of Kingdom Come yet to come before we start mucking into that territory
But this isn't about that. Just, setting the scene.
For what? Eh. Just one of those nights. A collection of more or less random conditions lead to this, another quiet contemplation, a restless and unsatisfied lull of a moment. I puzzle over these endless archives of relatively ancient history, stuff I wrote as much as eight years ago. The smoker days, the single days, the childless days, all so long ago now. I feel a glum nostalgia for cigarettes but the rest seems like a dream to me now. Was it ever thus? Evangelion segues into Cowboy Bebop. I already rented the whole thing on Netflix. Adult Swim clearly needs to get further ahead of my viewing sophistication.
They play these commercials for "Game Design" degrees from advertise-on-late-night-television type universities: I am briefly sorry for all the slacker stoner gamer pollyannas out there being led to a sad and lying hope about their future lives.
All of which brings me no closer to a resolution of the impulse that started me in the first place. Perhaps by and by after all of the Kingdom Come Institute files are uploaded, this will just adopt the nature of the my old paper journals, and I'll just sit down whenever the urge strikes and heedlessly reel out whatever garbage is floating on the top of my head. Which is not exactly an original direction, but what the fuck. Anyway, there's still hundreds of pages of Kingdom Come yet to come before we start mucking into that territory
seven stations of breath
the second pillar of breath * inducing a vision in a state of unaltered personal consciousness * simply * choose to see and see * breathe freely and easily, seeing what has been chosen * imagine what you would do with a million dollars * buy a mansion * hire five best friends * start a movement * imagine a good place far away * far * simple * your spirit is already free able to see what it wants * your imagined imprisonment is an illusion * a failure of perception * choose to perceive what is before you * envision * breathe
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I'm sure a real philosopher would just kick my nuts
bringing us inevitably around and around to coginitive dissonance. The brain jockeys say that cognitive dissonance occurs when our beliefs contradict each other. Since we depend on our beliefs for our sense of self, the rightness of our surroundings, our mental equilibrium, we strive to avoid and discredit these sensations.
Here's Godel again. There are a lot of simple explanations of Godel's Proof. Here's the simplest: Take a piece of paper. On one side of it write the sentence =the sentence on the other side of this piece of paper is true.= On the other side, write =the sentence on the other side of this piece of paper is not true.= no sit with it for a while and try to figure out what's going on. It's actually more complicated than it looks. This is not Godel's proof: what Godel's proof does is to demonstrate that no matter what you system of symbolic representation, it will always be possible to construct this kind of statement: it follows the appropriate logic of statements but cannot be logically parsed. There's no point going much further with explaining Godel's Proof. There are plenty of books that address the topic, at least one of which has won the Pullitzer Prize. I don't think it's that important: it's just a systematic demonstration of paradox. The paper trick illustrates the principle just as well if you accept text as as self-consistent a system of symblic representation as any. If the first side is true the other side cannot, by definition, be true, and yet if the first side is false then the other side is true, making the first side true after all, but if the first side is true... And repeat and repeat and repeat. Your basic logical positivist will say that any statement like that is simply meaningless, and most of us consciously or not go along with that theory. It is not logic but cognitive dissonance which leads us to this conclusion. The paradox is in fact an indictment of logic, making logical positivism positively illogical.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Here's Godel again. There are a lot of simple explanations of Godel's Proof. Here's the simplest: Take a piece of paper. On one side of it write the sentence =the sentence on the other side of this piece of paper is true.= On the other side, write =the sentence on the other side of this piece of paper is not true.= no sit with it for a while and try to figure out what's going on. It's actually more complicated than it looks. This is not Godel's proof: what Godel's proof does is to demonstrate that no matter what you system of symbolic representation, it will always be possible to construct this kind of statement: it follows the appropriate logic of statements but cannot be logically parsed. There's no point going much further with explaining Godel's Proof. There are plenty of books that address the topic, at least one of which has won the Pullitzer Prize. I don't think it's that important: it's just a systematic demonstration of paradox. The paper trick illustrates the principle just as well if you accept text as as self-consistent a system of symblic representation as any. If the first side is true the other side cannot, by definition, be true, and yet if the first side is false then the other side is true, making the first side true after all, but if the first side is true... And repeat and repeat and repeat. Your basic logical positivist will say that any statement like that is simply meaningless, and most of us consciously or not go along with that theory. It is not logic but cognitive dissonance which leads us to this conclusion. The paradox is in fact an indictment of logic, making logical positivism positively illogical.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
goooooooooodle
It probably seems like a small and unimportant thing but there should be an umluat over the letter =o= in Godel, the famous (to eggheads with a penchant for tring to suss out the universe with exquisitely short lengths of twine) Viennese mathematician who in 1931 published a paper, fairly incomprehensible to damn near everyone , that more or less said you couldn't really trust math or logic. Mathematicians and logicians will explain at length that the proof demonstrates nothing of the sort, but they haven't got a leg to stand on. But that's not the point. The point is, there ought ot be an umlaut, that's two dots like a colon (:) only on its side (. .) on top of the =o= in Godel's name but there isn't for reasons that are not appropriate for discussion at this time. The Kingdom Come Institute is not in the business of explaining missing umlauts. The point is, even without this explanation it is fairly obvious to anyone who knows math history who I mean when I say Godel, and to anyone who doesn't it doesn't matter anyway. This is what Godel, and for that matter Bertrand Russell, are about. The tedious construction of an explanation of something that those in the position of understanding know instinctively, and the rest by definition will not understand and will not care. Nor should they: the symbolic logics of Russel, Whitehead, Leibniz, Godel and the rest are tedious in the extreme. You would do just as well to simply ponder what transpires when the inexhumable force meets the incontinent object. But for the sake of accuracy, try to imagine two dots over the =o= in Godel's name wherever it appears, unless in fact it is in reference to some other Godel who's name is spelled without an umlaut.
the ticket that imploded
Here's the thing though: paradox exists, can be easily demonstrated with pen and paper or charmingly simple illustrations like Xeno's race. Reality bears up admirably well despite this, the piece of paper emblazoned with =i swear to god the other side of this thing is true= on one side and =that's a fuckin' lie, man= on the other does not, in fact, explode and take phenomenological reality with it. There's a theory that our minds in fact hold the fabric of the universe together in the face of paradoxical mathematical collapse, but nobody has a very good theory for how we acheive this, and why it doesn't let us keep airplanes from crashing, or get us laid more often. Does the universe, in fact, run on cognitive dissonance, or our response to it? Or is cognitive dissonance, in fact, our response to what the universe runs on? Or both? Or neither?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
nail gun rhapsody
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 15
Well, if you work enough, really work and work and work, you do get one little benefit that your boss doesn't want you to think about: Unemployment Compensation. Now, there's only two ways about this, you gotta either get fired or get hurt. Getting hurt is less ambiguous, as how hard you're gonna have to work (oh, baby, you always gotta work) for this money depends on whether you get fired for reasons of merit or not. But don't let 'em tell you you can't get unemployment for being canned for being a shit ass goldbricker. That's a myth. But anyway, if what you really want is a vacation from your job rather than to absent yourself entirely, yes, that would be the workman's pal, workman's comp. Oh, you've thought of it. The nail gun poised over the hand... on squeeze... and pain, yes, but soon you'll be tended to, given drugs and a place to lie down.
Of course, once you get into the official unemployment machine, the fun's over. You have to deal with a lotta punks in this system if you want the state to write you a check. So, it's a partial solution at best, unlike the scandalous multi-credit card cash advance swindle. Which is even legal... up to the point you fail to return from Grand Cayman.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Well, if you work enough, really work and work and work, you do get one little benefit that your boss doesn't want you to think about: Unemployment Compensation. Now, there's only two ways about this, you gotta either get fired or get hurt. Getting hurt is less ambiguous, as how hard you're gonna have to work (oh, baby, you always gotta work) for this money depends on whether you get fired for reasons of merit or not. But don't let 'em tell you you can't get unemployment for being canned for being a shit ass goldbricker. That's a myth. But anyway, if what you really want is a vacation from your job rather than to absent yourself entirely, yes, that would be the workman's pal, workman's comp. Oh, you've thought of it. The nail gun poised over the hand... on squeeze... and pain, yes, but soon you'll be tended to, given drugs and a place to lie down.
Of course, once you get into the official unemployment machine, the fun's over. You have to deal with a lotta punks in this system if you want the state to write you a check. So, it's a partial solution at best, unlike the scandalous multi-credit card cash advance swindle. Which is even legal... up to the point you fail to return from Grand Cayman.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Fugitive
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 16
The thing is, being a con or a fugitive from justice is work too. Certainly, when I got a close eyeball into the world of electronic fund transfer, I realized that damn near anyone, with a little ingenuity and a little planning and one of the hardest night's work you've ever seen, could reap a respectable personal fortune by ripping off thousands of credit card companies for cash advances. There's a few tricks that would help you avoid capture, although as I say, I think that it isn't really illegal until you fail to pay it all back...
But what a drag, you know, hiding out from the big turmoil with wads of hard currency in some dull tropical paradise. And collecting all that plastic! It's crazy, though, really, to consider that two hundred bucks a day would make a million last some thirteen years.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The thing is, being a con or a fugitive from justice is work too. Certainly, when I got a close eyeball into the world of electronic fund transfer, I realized that damn near anyone, with a little ingenuity and a little planning and one of the hardest night's work you've ever seen, could reap a respectable personal fortune by ripping off thousands of credit card companies for cash advances. There's a few tricks that would help you avoid capture, although as I say, I think that it isn't really illegal until you fail to pay it all back...
But what a drag, you know, hiding out from the big turmoil with wads of hard currency in some dull tropical paradise. And collecting all that plastic! It's crazy, though, really, to consider that two hundred bucks a day would make a million last some thirteen years.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
RENT
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 17
I often tell my friends that I have a bad job habit that's enabled by my addiction to having a roof over my head. Most of us are still serfs because we don't own any property. And that's still basic denominator number two, in this brave new world. Landed gentry or hoi polloi.
Renting is an interesting dodge. Leasing a room. In a world where run down architecture is the dessicated husk of a more daring age, we are the new nomads, roving this country in massive unorganized packs, following weather or the ghost of Jerry Garcia or next year's financial boomtown or whatever it was they all thought they had pinned down in the sixties. Some drift into little towns and never drift out again, and that's fine. But listen: Owning property is the secret. It's your first step if you choose to go that path. If you're living in some shitty apartment in some shitty neighborhood, then you might as well be buying some shitty little house.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I often tell my friends that I have a bad job habit that's enabled by my addiction to having a roof over my head. Most of us are still serfs because we don't own any property. And that's still basic denominator number two, in this brave new world. Landed gentry or hoi polloi.
Renting is an interesting dodge. Leasing a room. In a world where run down architecture is the dessicated husk of a more daring age, we are the new nomads, roving this country in massive unorganized packs, following weather or the ghost of Jerry Garcia or next year's financial boomtown or whatever it was they all thought they had pinned down in the sixties. Some drift into little towns and never drift out again, and that's fine. But listen: Owning property is the secret. It's your first step if you choose to go that path. If you're living in some shitty apartment in some shitty neighborhood, then you might as well be buying some shitty little house.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I did it and it turned out okay.
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 18
All my friends tell me, wait until you own a house. And get some kids. And I say, yeah, yeah. Sure. We all know that's what it's all about, right? Owning property is where it all started, installing a roof over the head, and when you stay in one place long enough you want to give it a name, to seperate it from everything else, to say it is your home. But the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. Are the people named after the land, or the land after the people? But the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. What do we call ourselves, we nomads who roam a promised land? But the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. Thus words that represented abitrary constructs, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head, thus a language of meaningless constructs like near and far, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head, thus a world where the rights of the many are dictated by the few by voodoo spells of words and words and words. Fixed, fixtured, ceased wandering, the calcification of thought began, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
All my friends tell me, wait until you own a house. And get some kids. And I say, yeah, yeah. Sure. We all know that's what it's all about, right? Owning property is where it all started, installing a roof over the head, and when you stay in one place long enough you want to give it a name, to seperate it from everything else, to say it is your home. But the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. Are the people named after the land, or the land after the people? But the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. What do we call ourselves, we nomads who roam a promised land? But the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. Thus words that represented abitrary constructs, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head, thus a language of meaningless constructs like near and far, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head, thus a world where the rights of the many are dictated by the few by voodoo spells of words and words and words. Fixed, fixtured, ceased wandering, the calcification of thought began, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Chris
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 19
It's an old story but it still has a lot of meaning. Columbus, clearly a lousy mathmatician, thinks he can sail around the world and get a sea passage to India. So he starts sailing, runs into the other half of the dry world, and thinks, hey, it's India. There's some Indians. Well, they figure it out soon enough, but the name sticks. Indians, as we still call them, used to own all this property, if squatters rights mean anything, which at the time they did. They say they came across on land a long time ago. They had quite the little thing going. Mostly they are gone, killed primarily, in America's first bloody genocide.
The Indians, who didn't call themselves Indians because, unlike Columbus, they knew where they were, didn't think they owned anything. They had this crazy idea that it is senseless for some little ant to claim ownership to that which brought it forth and sustained it and eventually took it back into itself and abided far beyond its tiny little ant existence. They actually had a lot of similarly crazy ideas most of which are now lost forever. There is a moral of some sort here but I find it too depressing to relate.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
It's an old story but it still has a lot of meaning. Columbus, clearly a lousy mathmatician, thinks he can sail around the world and get a sea passage to India. So he starts sailing, runs into the other half of the dry world, and thinks, hey, it's India. There's some Indians. Well, they figure it out soon enough, but the name sticks. Indians, as we still call them, used to own all this property, if squatters rights mean anything, which at the time they did. They say they came across on land a long time ago. They had quite the little thing going. Mostly they are gone, killed primarily, in America's first bloody genocide.
The Indians, who didn't call themselves Indians because, unlike Columbus, they knew where they were, didn't think they owned anything. They had this crazy idea that it is senseless for some little ant to claim ownership to that which brought it forth and sustained it and eventually took it back into itself and abided far beyond its tiny little ant existence. They actually had a lot of similarly crazy ideas most of which are now lost forever. There is a moral of some sort here but I find it too depressing to relate.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the sutras (ii)
37/101
Penny by penny
stone by stone
another day another dollar
I work alone
saving up to publish
My invisible sutras
ten years or twenty
don't matter to me
maybe noone gets it
well what will be will be
until I publish
my invisible sutras
penny for the orphan
penny for the poor
penny for the widow
wish I had a little more
hope they read what they need
in my invisible sutras
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Penny by penny
stone by stone
another day another dollar
I work alone
saving up to publish
My invisible sutras
ten years or twenty
don't matter to me
maybe noone gets it
well what will be will be
until I publish
my invisible sutras
penny for the orphan
penny for the poor
penny for the widow
wish I had a little more
hope they read what they need
in my invisible sutras
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the true path
56/101
No coming
no going
the true path
no slowing
me down now
I'm in it
get on it
begin it
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
No coming
no going
the true path
no slowing
me down now
I'm in it
get on it
begin it
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the voice of happiness
27/101
I'd kill and I'd die
I'd give up my one good eye
just to speak in a voice of clear intent
I'd love to be enlightened
and have all my inputs heightened
but the hub is very tiny
and the spokes are very bent
they say the holy men
speak with tongues mightier than the pen
and voices unencumbered with duress
unrestricted by society
free to speak the heart's endless variety
how I long to hear the voice of happiness
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I'd kill and I'd die
I'd give up my one good eye
just to speak in a voice of clear intent
I'd love to be enlightened
and have all my inputs heightened
but the hub is very tiny
and the spokes are very bent
they say the holy men
speak with tongues mightier than the pen
and voices unencumbered with duress
unrestricted by society
free to speak the heart's endless variety
how I long to hear the voice of happiness
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
i used to think it meant something or mattered
A second small point: I think a lot. The kid's a thinker, needs a pillow for his head. Yeah. And so many thoughts, stories and memories, concepts and inventions, plans and dreams and snatches of lyrics, bits of science and philosophy, =legend religion and myth= as Lou Reed put it, so much just goes by me, and if it is indeed somewhere in my memory, I don't know where. I've thought of notebooks, even tiny tape recorders. But it never works out, I either forget the recording device or fail to use it. I only cull a few from my train of thoughts, to dry and shape. I hope that the best will stick, or come back around, I hold to my last optimistic belief, that nothing truly valuable can be lost, and that the place all such things seemingly lost go, to be held, is where we go when we die. Anyway.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
yet another enigmatic journal extract. also true.
Twister DNA Sliding door, out - Why why why? Dirt, etc...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
3Cs
There are three seas.
There is a sea of Earth, and the continents are the merest crust, vast and unimaginable masses of rock drifting through ages that none have known. No one can own one handful of dust of any of it. The continents are shadowed deep below in the molten core, ghost forms, perfect replicas in relative minature of the massive islands where most live out there lives and a few are foolish enough to say =this is mine.= Who owns the younger twins of the great tectonic plates? Where are the lines drawn to say this is ours and only that is yours? If you are on dry land then wherever you sit, wherever a foot is set down, you are connected to that sea, your weight is pushes against all of it that pushes up at you equally, cradles and holds you, dust to dirt to rock, the grand spherical cathedral gives provides a berth for you, the least of its gargoyles, to frighten away all the bad spirits that might hover on the other side. What could you possibly wish to own?
There is a sea of Air, always in motion, always signing joyously of the spirit of Gad. You live in this sea and by this sea and without this sea you cannot live. Homelessness is an option and starvation is a state but without air you will die right now, immediately, no exceptions. Can you catch it in a net, bottle it in a particularly becoming venue and sell it for exorbitant rates in the spas and botiques of the rich? We may destroy a little of its value but nobody yet has sucessfully managed to charge for the pleasure of breathing it. It is a public service, provided for free, twenty-four and seven. So just what do you think has been denied you?
There is the Sea we all call the sea, every one recognizing it as the cradle of all life and our first home. It's tides push our eyes up to contemplate heaven and down to seek the mysteries in the earth, it travels the whole world 'round unbroken, it even rides the sea of the air and comes down rain to feed every thirsting thing. It is the model and the message of the spring of living water, it resides in every low and hidden place, a million million unfathomed chasms deep in the chambers of the Cathedral. Hidden in its depths the whales still sing songs of an ancient chosmos, of the stars by which they navigate by methods unknown to any woman or man, of the long and distant shore that waits for us all. What shore are you beached on? Haven't you heard that you carry the Sea within yourself? Where are you going expecting to find something you don't already have?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
There is a sea of Earth, and the continents are the merest crust, vast and unimaginable masses of rock drifting through ages that none have known. No one can own one handful of dust of any of it. The continents are shadowed deep below in the molten core, ghost forms, perfect replicas in relative minature of the massive islands where most live out there lives and a few are foolish enough to say =this is mine.= Who owns the younger twins of the great tectonic plates? Where are the lines drawn to say this is ours and only that is yours? If you are on dry land then wherever you sit, wherever a foot is set down, you are connected to that sea, your weight is pushes against all of it that pushes up at you equally, cradles and holds you, dust to dirt to rock, the grand spherical cathedral gives provides a berth for you, the least of its gargoyles, to frighten away all the bad spirits that might hover on the other side. What could you possibly wish to own?
There is a sea of Air, always in motion, always signing joyously of the spirit of Gad. You live in this sea and by this sea and without this sea you cannot live. Homelessness is an option and starvation is a state but without air you will die right now, immediately, no exceptions. Can you catch it in a net, bottle it in a particularly becoming venue and sell it for exorbitant rates in the spas and botiques of the rich? We may destroy a little of its value but nobody yet has sucessfully managed to charge for the pleasure of breathing it. It is a public service, provided for free, twenty-four and seven. So just what do you think has been denied you?
There is the Sea we all call the sea, every one recognizing it as the cradle of all life and our first home. It's tides push our eyes up to contemplate heaven and down to seek the mysteries in the earth, it travels the whole world 'round unbroken, it even rides the sea of the air and comes down rain to feed every thirsting thing. It is the model and the message of the spring of living water, it resides in every low and hidden place, a million million unfathomed chasms deep in the chambers of the Cathedral. Hidden in its depths the whales still sing songs of an ancient chosmos, of the stars by which they navigate by methods unknown to any woman or man, of the long and distant shore that waits for us all. What shore are you beached on? Haven't you heard that you carry the Sea within yourself? Where are you going expecting to find something you don't already have?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
except that I gave the filthy things up, true.
I will say a prayer for you - yes, you - on a day not so far from now. When the day starts at midnight, when I am as far from the sun as I can be, while you lay sleeping, unaware perhaps that I even exist, I will be laying out my slips of paper and my cheap ballpoints, I will take a few drags from an unfiltered cigarette and leave the rest to smolder in offering, and I will say this prayer for you:
Rise up, little prayer, little verse, little song, rise up on the smoke and fly away. Fly to the one I pray for, fly and hover over them and let them gently breathe you in. Go, little prayer, I've put everything I know and do not understand into you, because I know that hidden in a seeming ocean of mysteries there is a truth that is not meant for me, that only they can understand. Go and never tell them the thought was mine first, because you were never mine, you were always theirs, before there was life, before there was earth, before there was time you waited unspoken, you waited to be said, by them and them alone.
And you will wake, thinking you remember a dream, the rich and tantalyzing images dissolving to nothing but a feeling even as the reality of it all settles down around you in its familiar pattern. When you need it, that prayer will be waiting to come to your lips, perfectly formed.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Rise up, little prayer, little verse, little song, rise up on the smoke and fly away. Fly to the one I pray for, fly and hover over them and let them gently breathe you in. Go, little prayer, I've put everything I know and do not understand into you, because I know that hidden in a seeming ocean of mysteries there is a truth that is not meant for me, that only they can understand. Go and never tell them the thought was mine first, because you were never mine, you were always theirs, before there was life, before there was earth, before there was time you waited unspoken, you waited to be said, by them and them alone.
And you will wake, thinking you remember a dream, the rich and tantalyzing images dissolving to nothing but a feeling even as the reality of it all settles down around you in its familiar pattern. When you need it, that prayer will be waiting to come to your lips, perfectly formed.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
just heaving against the flesh of the evening
It has already begun. It is inside you right now, I know it because you are reading these words. And no, reading the words does not make it happen, and reading the words is not necessary for it to happen, but because you read these words I know that it is happening. And that is all the explanation or justification of fate, of omniscience, of manifest destiny you need. I only ask one thing of you:
Call it forward. Don't break the chain. As soon as you are done reading this, open your ears and listen because you are being sent as a messenger. Someone is about to speak to you. It may be someone you have known all your life or it may be a complete stranger. What the say may seem to lack sense or relevance: it doesn't matter. It isn't important that you understand it. All that matters is this:
Breathe in. And as you breathe listen, listen as hard as you can, listen harder than you have ever listened in your life. If the words they speak seem inane listen harder, as if you're getting vital directions over a bad phone connection. Breathe in, try to piece through the static. Listen to them. Only if you listen to them, breathe in their words like the breath of life, can you give them the message, and preserve the chain.
Breathe out. Their message is in that breath, their words given back to them, transformed into a seed. Now it is in them as well. There is no need to tell them what has just transpired. It won't make any difference. There is no need to tell them to call the prayer chain forward. They will receive instructions at the appointed time. Your work is completed: you can go back to your own breathing.
Knowing: one day the last breath will come and there will be no more prayers from you. You will give up the ghost and the earth will be inherited by other walking spirits, and so on, and so on, until you are long forgotten, until we are all long forgotten. But the truth you breathe will live on forever, in you wherever you are, and in the world you leave behind.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Call it forward. Don't break the chain. As soon as you are done reading this, open your ears and listen because you are being sent as a messenger. Someone is about to speak to you. It may be someone you have known all your life or it may be a complete stranger. What the say may seem to lack sense or relevance: it doesn't matter. It isn't important that you understand it. All that matters is this:
Breathe in. And as you breathe listen, listen as hard as you can, listen harder than you have ever listened in your life. If the words they speak seem inane listen harder, as if you're getting vital directions over a bad phone connection. Breathe in, try to piece through the static. Listen to them. Only if you listen to them, breathe in their words like the breath of life, can you give them the message, and preserve the chain.
Breathe out. Their message is in that breath, their words given back to them, transformed into a seed. Now it is in them as well. There is no need to tell them what has just transpired. It won't make any difference. There is no need to tell them to call the prayer chain forward. They will receive instructions at the appointed time. Your work is completed: you can go back to your own breathing.
Knowing: one day the last breath will come and there will be no more prayers from you. You will give up the ghost and the earth will be inherited by other walking spirits, and so on, and so on, until you are long forgotten, until we are all long forgotten. But the truth you breathe will live on forever, in you wherever you are, and in the world you leave behind.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
puzzledream
the dream is that in the closet are five jigsaw puzzles of the sort that are stamped out of cardboard sheets by a die, rather than cut out of wood by a jigsaw. Actually, of course, there are more puzzles than just the five, but we consider those because of a particular quality they posess, which will be discussed later.
By the pictures on the box lid we can see what the puzzles represent. There is a tulip field in Holland, rising above this an old wooden windmill against an unnaturally blue sky full of fluffy white clouds. There is a night scene of the Manhatten skyline circa 1987, a time that Joe the Archtypical Cabdriver would later recall as a =bad year for New York,= (but pay no attention, it is how he recalls every year aside from the salad days of his Archtypical Brooklyn Childhood). There is a Oriental counterpart to the Occidental windmill, a field of red poppies with tiered pagoda in the background. There are three adorable puppies in a basket, one black, one golden, and one adorably spotted, mottled, and mixed. There is a tartan blanket in the basket which lies on a field of green grass. The final scene is an inconsistently lit interior of some well known cave or the other, a chaos of brightly colored mineral stalagtites sticking tight to the ceiling, stalagmites that might reach the top some day, glares off pools of water, shadowed yellow white expanses of limestone walls.
What is particular about these five puzzles is that someone has dumped all the pieces together into a single box. There is little hope of reliably sorting them by any other method than the construction of all five pictures. This will prove to be a surprisingly difficult and vexing task. Is that the blue of a Chinese or a Dutch sky? Is that bit of black with white specks stars in the night above the skyscrapers, or a glint of sun sparkling off the coat of a labrador pup, or is it a sparkle of water in a deep subterranean pool? The job is complicated by the fact that all five were stamped with the same die, and so each has exactly the same configuration of pieces. Limestone or golden lab?
The puzzles will be solved only as all puzzles are, by sorting out the edges and corners, by making piles of shapes and colors, by scanning chaotic fields of pieces searching for a match. In this case there will be more than the average amount of cursing attempts to =make it fit=. Confusion sets in, mingling concepts with images, a fragment of dark turbid water is thought to be the oily black opium of the poppy fields, a piece of highrise seems to represent all the busy European industry of Dutch commerce, adorable puppy noses all look the same. It is the work of long winter evenings, the worst in recollection, snow past the windows and even the indomitable city plows of Minnesota can't make it out every day. The last bit of windmill, of office window grid, of red poppy, of plaid blanket against wicker, of gleaming green stone, will find their place as the last snows melt into another spring of floods. The balance of disorder in the universe must be maintained.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
By the pictures on the box lid we can see what the puzzles represent. There is a tulip field in Holland, rising above this an old wooden windmill against an unnaturally blue sky full of fluffy white clouds. There is a night scene of the Manhatten skyline circa 1987, a time that Joe the Archtypical Cabdriver would later recall as a =bad year for New York,= (but pay no attention, it is how he recalls every year aside from the salad days of his Archtypical Brooklyn Childhood). There is a Oriental counterpart to the Occidental windmill, a field of red poppies with tiered pagoda in the background. There are three adorable puppies in a basket, one black, one golden, and one adorably spotted, mottled, and mixed. There is a tartan blanket in the basket which lies on a field of green grass. The final scene is an inconsistently lit interior of some well known cave or the other, a chaos of brightly colored mineral stalagtites sticking tight to the ceiling, stalagmites that might reach the top some day, glares off pools of water, shadowed yellow white expanses of limestone walls.
What is particular about these five puzzles is that someone has dumped all the pieces together into a single box. There is little hope of reliably sorting them by any other method than the construction of all five pictures. This will prove to be a surprisingly difficult and vexing task. Is that the blue of a Chinese or a Dutch sky? Is that bit of black with white specks stars in the night above the skyscrapers, or a glint of sun sparkling off the coat of a labrador pup, or is it a sparkle of water in a deep subterranean pool? The job is complicated by the fact that all five were stamped with the same die, and so each has exactly the same configuration of pieces. Limestone or golden lab?
The puzzles will be solved only as all puzzles are, by sorting out the edges and corners, by making piles of shapes and colors, by scanning chaotic fields of pieces searching for a match. In this case there will be more than the average amount of cursing attempts to =make it fit=. Confusion sets in, mingling concepts with images, a fragment of dark turbid water is thought to be the oily black opium of the poppy fields, a piece of highrise seems to represent all the busy European industry of Dutch commerce, adorable puppy noses all look the same. It is the work of long winter evenings, the worst in recollection, snow past the windows and even the indomitable city plows of Minnesota can't make it out every day. The last bit of windmill, of office window grid, of red poppy, of plaid blanket against wicker, of gleaming green stone, will find their place as the last snows melt into another spring of floods. The balance of disorder in the universe must be maintained.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
metaphysician heal thyself
A great deal of confusion can be avoided, and errors prevented, by a grasping of the full implications of a fact that is profoundly obvious and yet ignored by nearly everyone.
The true metaphysics... is Physics!
Meta refers to that which is around, apart, about another thing. Thus a metadialog is a dialog about dialog itself, a metaplay is a play about a play, metaanlysis the analysis of an analysis. Thus if we think that the =physical= is the phenomenological world which, Hume notwithstanding, most everyone believes is carrying out an independent existence all around us, guided by laws, patterns, and/or symmetries, then the abstract symolical interpretation of this world which is commonly called physics is more accurately termed metaphysics.
This is not even to address the fact that what is generally termed metaphysics is not, in fact, a true metaphysics, even if we are going to accept physics as the shorthand term for the study of the phenomenological. Properly metaphysics would be that which is about physics, which could only be viewed as logic and the other philosophies of the Rational. This leaves us with a problem of what to call that hazy and vaguely defined field of dreams, visions, the mystery of the timeless aesthetic, the fundamental nature of good and evil, and the meaning of life. I tend to think of it as The Problem.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The true metaphysics... is Physics!
Meta refers to that which is around, apart, about another thing. Thus a metadialog is a dialog about dialog itself, a metaplay is a play about a play, metaanlysis the analysis of an analysis. Thus if we think that the =physical= is the phenomenological world which, Hume notwithstanding, most everyone believes is carrying out an independent existence all around us, guided by laws, patterns, and/or symmetries, then the abstract symolical interpretation of this world which is commonly called physics is more accurately termed metaphysics.
This is not even to address the fact that what is generally termed metaphysics is not, in fact, a true metaphysics, even if we are going to accept physics as the shorthand term for the study of the phenomenological. Properly metaphysics would be that which is about physics, which could only be viewed as logic and the other philosophies of the Rational. This leaves us with a problem of what to call that hazy and vaguely defined field of dreams, visions, the mystery of the timeless aesthetic, the fundamental nature of good and evil, and the meaning of life. I tend to think of it as The Problem.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
The End of the Beginning: the 33 Magazine Semiannual Report '05!
Part 1: The Problem with a Hiatus
The problem with a hiatus, with pauses, when there is no imposed or defined limit (like there is, say, when you take a vacation from your day job) is that there’s really nothing to tell you it’s time to go back, to get back on the horse. Nothing but your own sense of the thing, and that can be a dicey proposition, as the long gap in this strange online thing I am creating demonstrates. And I know what happens, when that pause stretches out, because I’ve been on the other side of it, with other people’s online stuff, often enough. Anyone who bothered to read it regularly makes their regular visits, a few times, and then those visits stretch out, become less frequent, and finally it is given up as a lost cause. At best it becomes, perhaps, a link in some bookmark file, a reminder of something that held a small portion of attention once. Half a year along perhaps it is come upon again, browsing the attenuated extracurricular memory that the internet permits. Still nothing there: maybe the link gets deleted. I suspect that nobody who orphans a project of this nature for more than a month or two ever manages to get everybody back: attention is a fickle thing. So be it. I am determined to supply those who have provided patronage with everything that was set out in the terms I defined, and beyond that, this thing will serve whatever purpose it serves. It is entirely relevant to the subject at hand, that exactly what purpose that might be is something I became increasingly confused about over the course of the first half year of its existence.
So anyway, I don’t know exactly what’s going on with starting up again, because I’m right in the middle of it here and don’t have all that much idea about where it’s going. I can say with some precision, however, where this hiatus started: it started with the death of Tiny.
The day Tiny died I started to write something for this:
Tiny Bug Main, our sweetheart kitty, died today, Wednesday May Fourth, Two Thousand Five. After a long life and a slow and dignified decline we saw to it that he was able to have a peaceful death. My confidence that we did the right thing is matched by how sad writing that makes me. This is Tiny’s story.
We’re not sure how old Tiny is. Jennifer received him from a coworker at some long past job whose aunt (his former owner) had suffered a stroke and was going into a nursing home. The coworker thought Tiny was twelve, which would make him around twenty when he died. If so he lived to be a truly venerable tomcat.
I think it’s interesting: generally the lives of our pets are subsumed in our own, we usually get them at or near their birth, and accompany them through their deaths. But Tiny was a different case: he had already experienced relatively generous cat-span, from kittenhood well into cat middle age, under totally different management. He had a life before Jennifer (and eventually the two of us). It gave him a certain quality of experience. It reminded me that as small and brief as a life may be, it has its own singular view, memory, yes, in the end the only word that sums it up is experience. You can’t own anyone else’s and no one can own yours or take it away from you. Tiny was his own cat.
If I remember this is shortly after Jennie and I started dating, a couple years still before we moved in together. I remember that after she moved him in, to this garden level place she had on Garfield in Uptown, he straightaway hid under the bathtub for a couple of days. Of course he warmed to her. I believe he was the first pet she ever had living on her own. I fancied that he seemed to view the increasing frequency and duration of my visits to her with some alarm, and of course she was spending more time at my place as well (I had cable), leaving him to fend against boredom on his own. Beyond the bare facts related a paragraph above she didn’t know much of his history - being as how he belonged to an elderly lady of the aunt-of-a-lawyer type, probably he was rather doted on. It’s safe to say, at least, that he was seldom refused any desire in the way of food, because when he moved in with Jennifer Tiny was one fat kitty.
Yes, for most of the rest of his life Tiny’s name, inherited along with the cat himself, was a jest: he was a big fellah. Of only medium build, but of impressive girth, not flabby folds of loose fat but solid packed, dense lard like only a neutered tom can pack on. Big and fuzzy, this amazing, silky-soft gray and white shorthair coat. Golden eyes. A big handsome cat.
As I say, of course due to her natural charm, lovable person and loving spirit, Tiny quickly overcame his understandable reticence at the sudden, radical shift in his life and grew to dote as much on Jennie as his former mistress (doubtless also passed away by now) must have doted on him.
So I imagine it was a big shock to the system when he moved in with the two of us.
That was as far as I got. It’s been a long, long time since the death of a pet affected me as much as Tiny’s did - not, basically, since I was a young child. I don’t have much to say one way or the other about whether it is foolish or merely human to find one’s self seriously grieving over the death of an animal. Grief is grief, and interrogating its justification, or playing a game of relative importance with all the death that goes on always, all the time and everywhere, seems a truly pointless pursuit to me. It made me sad: I cried. I didn’t want to write about it anymore. And so time, as is its nature, stretched out. It starts with, I’ll finish that later, and then too much time passes, and other things crowd in, and pretty soon the whole train of thought is lost. Tiny lived and he died: he was a good cat, he had a lot of personality. I still miss him, it still makes me sad that he doesn’t exist in this world anymore.
But I will admit another, less sincere reason that made me reluctant to write and post about this small loss in my life at the time. It seemed, oh, like that sort of very personal, diary-esque, day in the life kind of thing you see so much of in personal writing on the internet. It seemed, in a word, like the kind of thing you’d read in a blog.
Part 2: It’s a Blog, it’s a Blog, It’s a BLAAAAWG!
I hate, hate, HATE the word blog. For starts, it’s a stupid construction. You don’t call a hat rack a track, okay? And what’s the deal with the underlying term, anyway? Web log? Ships have logs (which ships’ logs you don’t call plogs or slogs, by the by, now do you?) Captain Kirk has a log. Desk jockeys and would-be writers do not have logs. Maybe they have diaries or journals or news summaries or whatever. Add to these objections the fact that the resulting, inaccurate and misbegotten term you end up with just sounds stupid. It’s sounds like onomatopoeia for your cat horking up a hairball. Maybe it meant something to the people who coined it, but now it’s just symptomatic of society’s need to package and compartmentalize anything new and emergent for ready discussion in a five minute news blip. It’s a meaningless term, applied indiscriminately to a hugely diverse range of output which have almost nothing in common, except that they are online and (more or less) regularly updated. It’s just a medium. Applying stupid made-up terms to it is entirely counterproductive.
So every time someone would write or say something to me about my “blog” I just wanted to scream: “it’s not a blawg! It’s a magazine. That was my conceit. And I confess: the only thing that kept me from simply going outright and writing this very screed on this very subject, up to this point, was that, well, it seemed like the sort of thing you would find written in a (shudder) blawg.
Well, hell with it. It’s hosted by “blogspot.” I go to “blogger.com” to log into it. The URL for the thing is “waah.waah.itsnotablogitsamagazine.blogspot.com. It’s got that wretched most recent first organization designed for regular posting and regular consumption, useless for navigating serial writing, where the first thing written is the first thing that should be read, not buried somewhere in the all-but-unnavigable archives. It’s a blog. I surrender.
The irony is that this admission actually frees me from artificial restrictions. Who needs covers, tables of contents? It’s not like it’s a magazine or something... it’s just a blog! Damn the torpedoes!
But it still doesn’t tell me what its for.
Part 3: What it’s for.
I get very hung up on questions of this nature. What’s it for? What’s life for? I try not to but I do. It’s all very Philosophy of Art 101, what’s art for? And you just know you’re about to have a long, boring, contentious discussion which concludes absolutely nothing. Everybody ends up grumpily conceding that they are unable to supply an answer that does not seem either arbitrary and incomplete or else utterly subjective.
A while ago, I was having a conversation via email with a friend about some of the writing here, about the science in the article about making soap. The specific discussion was fairly esoteric, a couple of former students of science discussing nomenclature, but he said something that got me thinking.
As far as your blog goes I have always thought of it as a public writing portfolio of Jon. If you ever applied for a writing job you would be able to show it as part of your application or resume.
It was a comment that inspired a few thoughts in me. The first was, it reminded me that this was indeed one of my original objectives: creating a sort of more formal writing space that could serve as an accessible portfolio. Beyond this I hoped to raise a little money and encourage myself to keep at writing.
Well, I have to say it pretty much failed in all regards. This thing is a mess, trying to be too many things at once, articles and bits of weird fiction and sad little attempts to navigate some narrow space between humor and a straight up guilt trip trying to cajole putative readers into coughing up more cash. I would never in hell want to use it as a professional portfolio. It is what it is, and I really don’t have anything against it, but it’s just not that.
But it hasn’t really shaped up into something I want to pursue, in its past form, either. I still would like to write about Jonah’s early days in the hospital, that strange and harrowing introduction to parenting Jennifer and I got, but that isn’t where I’m at right now. I don’t even want to try to wrap up the series on music. I’ve been trying to write something original and significant on what the whole online scene means in terms of the creation and distribution of music for about five years now, and I’m ready to admit defeat. What that seems to boil down to is that, while the reality of digital transfer would seem to make the distribution of music accessible to almost anyone on almost any level possible, a combination of a dearth of decent filtering for the insane volume of output by the world population of musicians with wildly diverse levels of ability, combined with the utter inertia of “the industry,” and the fact that the interest the vast majority of people in downloading music seems to be mainly getting the same old garbage, but for free, are conspiring, now and for the foreseeable future, to make this supposed potential still very much a minor bit of noise in the face of the dominating blare of the business as usual of the recording industry, the multimedia conglomerates, and the broadcasting scam. Time Warner and Clearchannel, in a nutshell, are still mostly winning the war for ears. That’s not very well stated, but it still doesn’t seem to justify hacking out a couple thousand words to try to make it sound smarter. So to hell with that.
Part 4: All Bets are Off.
So this is the deal, then: all bets are off. The issue of a writing portfolio remains, but I’ve realized that it is something that needs to be created in its own right, tailored to fit the job, polished and presented in a way I don’t want or need this to be, and if I actually pull it together the way I think it would have to be, published in an online space that doesn’t include a URL component like “blogspot.com.” The issue of money is just one I have to deal with on a completely other basis. What part writing plays in this right here and now I don’t know, but anyway I’m going to stop pushing the patronage concept: it’s done all it can for me, and it’s time to move on to other opportunities. Beyond this there is the issue, illuminated and magnified for me by all these considerations, of just what it is I actually want to do. I guess that’s one I’ve been screwing around with as long as I can remember, but at the moment I’ve decided that the answer is that yes, I want to write, and what I want to write right at this moment is fiction. I have two serious projects in progress, novels, and that’s where I’m going to focus the vast majority of my time.
That leaves this. I could abandon the whole thing, I suppose. It’s not like I’m constantly getting hammered with anxious emails begging for more blog. But I’m not going to do that. Instead, what you get here for the time being is bizarre serialized science fiction for the masses, something old and mostly written that needs only minor editing for presentation, so it won’t take up much of my time. It’s not very well suited to this mode of presentation, but that’s life. I’ve had some entirely justified comments about the site being difficult to navigate, but after giving the matter some thought I’ve come to the conclusion that it mostly comes down to the fact of the way the software is set up, and it’s just not worth the effort involved to try to make it work all that much better.
The problem with a hiatus, with pauses, when there is no imposed or defined limit (like there is, say, when you take a vacation from your day job) is that there’s really nothing to tell you it’s time to go back, to get back on the horse. Nothing but your own sense of the thing, and that can be a dicey proposition, as the long gap in this strange online thing I am creating demonstrates. And I know what happens, when that pause stretches out, because I’ve been on the other side of it, with other people’s online stuff, often enough. Anyone who bothered to read it regularly makes their regular visits, a few times, and then those visits stretch out, become less frequent, and finally it is given up as a lost cause. At best it becomes, perhaps, a link in some bookmark file, a reminder of something that held a small portion of attention once. Half a year along perhaps it is come upon again, browsing the attenuated extracurricular memory that the internet permits. Still nothing there: maybe the link gets deleted. I suspect that nobody who orphans a project of this nature for more than a month or two ever manages to get everybody back: attention is a fickle thing. So be it. I am determined to supply those who have provided patronage with everything that was set out in the terms I defined, and beyond that, this thing will serve whatever purpose it serves. It is entirely relevant to the subject at hand, that exactly what purpose that might be is something I became increasingly confused about over the course of the first half year of its existence.
So anyway, I don’t know exactly what’s going on with starting up again, because I’m right in the middle of it here and don’t have all that much idea about where it’s going. I can say with some precision, however, where this hiatus started: it started with the death of Tiny.
The day Tiny died I started to write something for this:
Tiny Bug Main, our sweetheart kitty, died today, Wednesday May Fourth, Two Thousand Five. After a long life and a slow and dignified decline we saw to it that he was able to have a peaceful death. My confidence that we did the right thing is matched by how sad writing that makes me. This is Tiny’s story.
We’re not sure how old Tiny is. Jennifer received him from a coworker at some long past job whose aunt (his former owner) had suffered a stroke and was going into a nursing home. The coworker thought Tiny was twelve, which would make him around twenty when he died. If so he lived to be a truly venerable tomcat.
I think it’s interesting: generally the lives of our pets are subsumed in our own, we usually get them at or near their birth, and accompany them through their deaths. But Tiny was a different case: he had already experienced relatively generous cat-span, from kittenhood well into cat middle age, under totally different management. He had a life before Jennifer (and eventually the two of us). It gave him a certain quality of experience. It reminded me that as small and brief as a life may be, it has its own singular view, memory, yes, in the end the only word that sums it up is experience. You can’t own anyone else’s and no one can own yours or take it away from you. Tiny was his own cat.
If I remember this is shortly after Jennie and I started dating, a couple years still before we moved in together. I remember that after she moved him in, to this garden level place she had on Garfield in Uptown, he straightaway hid under the bathtub for a couple of days. Of course he warmed to her. I believe he was the first pet she ever had living on her own. I fancied that he seemed to view the increasing frequency and duration of my visits to her with some alarm, and of course she was spending more time at my place as well (I had cable), leaving him to fend against boredom on his own. Beyond the bare facts related a paragraph above she didn’t know much of his history - being as how he belonged to an elderly lady of the aunt-of-a-lawyer type, probably he was rather doted on. It’s safe to say, at least, that he was seldom refused any desire in the way of food, because when he moved in with Jennifer Tiny was one fat kitty.
Yes, for most of the rest of his life Tiny’s name, inherited along with the cat himself, was a jest: he was a big fellah. Of only medium build, but of impressive girth, not flabby folds of loose fat but solid packed, dense lard like only a neutered tom can pack on. Big and fuzzy, this amazing, silky-soft gray and white shorthair coat. Golden eyes. A big handsome cat.
As I say, of course due to her natural charm, lovable person and loving spirit, Tiny quickly overcame his understandable reticence at the sudden, radical shift in his life and grew to dote as much on Jennie as his former mistress (doubtless also passed away by now) must have doted on him.
So I imagine it was a big shock to the system when he moved in with the two of us.
That was as far as I got. It’s been a long, long time since the death of a pet affected me as much as Tiny’s did - not, basically, since I was a young child. I don’t have much to say one way or the other about whether it is foolish or merely human to find one’s self seriously grieving over the death of an animal. Grief is grief, and interrogating its justification, or playing a game of relative importance with all the death that goes on always, all the time and everywhere, seems a truly pointless pursuit to me. It made me sad: I cried. I didn’t want to write about it anymore. And so time, as is its nature, stretched out. It starts with, I’ll finish that later, and then too much time passes, and other things crowd in, and pretty soon the whole train of thought is lost. Tiny lived and he died: he was a good cat, he had a lot of personality. I still miss him, it still makes me sad that he doesn’t exist in this world anymore.
But I will admit another, less sincere reason that made me reluctant to write and post about this small loss in my life at the time. It seemed, oh, like that sort of very personal, diary-esque, day in the life kind of thing you see so much of in personal writing on the internet. It seemed, in a word, like the kind of thing you’d read in a blog.
Part 2: It’s a Blog, it’s a Blog, It’s a BLAAAAWG!
I hate, hate, HATE the word blog. For starts, it’s a stupid construction. You don’t call a hat rack a track, okay? And what’s the deal with the underlying term, anyway? Web log? Ships have logs (which ships’ logs you don’t call plogs or slogs, by the by, now do you?) Captain Kirk has a log. Desk jockeys and would-be writers do not have logs. Maybe they have diaries or journals or news summaries or whatever. Add to these objections the fact that the resulting, inaccurate and misbegotten term you end up with just sounds stupid. It’s sounds like onomatopoeia for your cat horking up a hairball. Maybe it meant something to the people who coined it, but now it’s just symptomatic of society’s need to package and compartmentalize anything new and emergent for ready discussion in a five minute news blip. It’s a meaningless term, applied indiscriminately to a hugely diverse range of output which have almost nothing in common, except that they are online and (more or less) regularly updated. It’s just a medium. Applying stupid made-up terms to it is entirely counterproductive.
So every time someone would write or say something to me about my “blog” I just wanted to scream: “it’s not a blawg! It’s a magazine. That was my conceit. And I confess: the only thing that kept me from simply going outright and writing this very screed on this very subject, up to this point, was that, well, it seemed like the sort of thing you would find written in a (shudder) blawg.
Well, hell with it. It’s hosted by “blogspot.” I go to “blogger.com” to log into it. The URL for the thing is “waah.waah.itsnotablogitsamagazine.blogspot.com. It’s got that wretched most recent first organization designed for regular posting and regular consumption, useless for navigating serial writing, where the first thing written is the first thing that should be read, not buried somewhere in the all-but-unnavigable archives. It’s a blog. I surrender.
The irony is that this admission actually frees me from artificial restrictions. Who needs covers, tables of contents? It’s not like it’s a magazine or something... it’s just a blog! Damn the torpedoes!
But it still doesn’t tell me what its for.
Part 3: What it’s for.
I get very hung up on questions of this nature. What’s it for? What’s life for? I try not to but I do. It’s all very Philosophy of Art 101, what’s art for? And you just know you’re about to have a long, boring, contentious discussion which concludes absolutely nothing. Everybody ends up grumpily conceding that they are unable to supply an answer that does not seem either arbitrary and incomplete or else utterly subjective.
A while ago, I was having a conversation via email with a friend about some of the writing here, about the science in the article about making soap. The specific discussion was fairly esoteric, a couple of former students of science discussing nomenclature, but he said something that got me thinking.
As far as your blog goes I have always thought of it as a public writing portfolio of Jon. If you ever applied for a writing job you would be able to show it as part of your application or resume.
It was a comment that inspired a few thoughts in me. The first was, it reminded me that this was indeed one of my original objectives: creating a sort of more formal writing space that could serve as an accessible portfolio. Beyond this I hoped to raise a little money and encourage myself to keep at writing.
Well, I have to say it pretty much failed in all regards. This thing is a mess, trying to be too many things at once, articles and bits of weird fiction and sad little attempts to navigate some narrow space between humor and a straight up guilt trip trying to cajole putative readers into coughing up more cash. I would never in hell want to use it as a professional portfolio. It is what it is, and I really don’t have anything against it, but it’s just not that.
But it hasn’t really shaped up into something I want to pursue, in its past form, either. I still would like to write about Jonah’s early days in the hospital, that strange and harrowing introduction to parenting Jennifer and I got, but that isn’t where I’m at right now. I don’t even want to try to wrap up the series on music. I’ve been trying to write something original and significant on what the whole online scene means in terms of the creation and distribution of music for about five years now, and I’m ready to admit defeat. What that seems to boil down to is that, while the reality of digital transfer would seem to make the distribution of music accessible to almost anyone on almost any level possible, a combination of a dearth of decent filtering for the insane volume of output by the world population of musicians with wildly diverse levels of ability, combined with the utter inertia of “the industry,” and the fact that the interest the vast majority of people in downloading music seems to be mainly getting the same old garbage, but for free, are conspiring, now and for the foreseeable future, to make this supposed potential still very much a minor bit of noise in the face of the dominating blare of the business as usual of the recording industry, the multimedia conglomerates, and the broadcasting scam. Time Warner and Clearchannel, in a nutshell, are still mostly winning the war for ears. That’s not very well stated, but it still doesn’t seem to justify hacking out a couple thousand words to try to make it sound smarter. So to hell with that.
Part 4: All Bets are Off.
So this is the deal, then: all bets are off. The issue of a writing portfolio remains, but I’ve realized that it is something that needs to be created in its own right, tailored to fit the job, polished and presented in a way I don’t want or need this to be, and if I actually pull it together the way I think it would have to be, published in an online space that doesn’t include a URL component like “blogspot.com.” The issue of money is just one I have to deal with on a completely other basis. What part writing plays in this right here and now I don’t know, but anyway I’m going to stop pushing the patronage concept: it’s done all it can for me, and it’s time to move on to other opportunities. Beyond this there is the issue, illuminated and magnified for me by all these considerations, of just what it is I actually want to do. I guess that’s one I’ve been screwing around with as long as I can remember, but at the moment I’ve decided that the answer is that yes, I want to write, and what I want to write right at this moment is fiction. I have two serious projects in progress, novels, and that’s where I’m going to focus the vast majority of my time.
That leaves this. I could abandon the whole thing, I suppose. It’s not like I’m constantly getting hammered with anxious emails begging for more blog. But I’m not going to do that. Instead, what you get here for the time being is bizarre serialized science fiction for the masses, something old and mostly written that needs only minor editing for presentation, so it won’t take up much of my time. It’s not very well suited to this mode of presentation, but that’s life. I’ve had some entirely justified comments about the site being difficult to navigate, but after giving the matter some thought I’ve come to the conclusion that it mostly comes down to the fact of the way the software is set up, and it’s just not worth the effort involved to try to make it work all that much better.
33 Klassics: April Fools 2005
Long into the night, after I'd wrapped up the March issue and the clock had dragged us all inexorably into a new month, I checked in on the email and found I'd received a long, rambling, and disjointed letter from George Lucas, renowned creator of the Star Wars movie series. There were a lot of asides about the beginner's mind, and a couple times I'm pretty sure that he was quoting directly from The Power of Myth, but the gist of it was this: I've made a lot of movies, and even more money, I've transformed the foundation of cinematic visual effects twice, but now, with the last Star Wars pretty much in the can, it all seems strangely empty.
The director, wrote Lucas, is the artist and author of a movie... but the scriptwriter is its muse and the script is what surrounds and penetrates it, and binds the galaxy of cinema together. It's that spirit that I've lost track of, Jonathan, he wrote, and for a long time I convinced myself that it was because text was a static medium that had come to the end of its significant development in the world of arts. All the so-called new ideas were just the old ideas over again, the hero with a thousand faces, and art must be of its times and this is the time of visual artifice, and I followed that path to its ultimate limits. But then I stumbled across Jonathan Hamlow Presents 33 Magazine and I understood that it was not the text that had stagnated, it was only my mind.
Jonathan, George Lucas wrote, I've stated several times in the press recently that after I was done with the first six Star Wars movies, I was going to go back to my roots, to the small and enigmatic. Jonathan, he wrote, the bottom line is that I want to work with you and I'll do whatever it takes to make that happen. And that was the end of the letter, except for a California telephone number.
Anyway, the practical upshot of all this is that as soon as I'm done with this post I'll be packing up all the archives of 33 in magnetism-proof boxes and getting on a plane, so, this is the end of the magazine: this is my farewell article. I'll work out compensation for the Patrons for whatever entertainment they'll miss, but you know, opportunity only strikes once, so I'm flying the family out to L.A. this weekend and for the next year I'll be working on a series of athletic shoe commercials with George. Again, thank you all so much for your readership and support.
Okay, so, April Fools. See you next week.
The director, wrote Lucas, is the artist and author of a movie... but the scriptwriter is its muse and the script is what surrounds and penetrates it, and binds the galaxy of cinema together. It's that spirit that I've lost track of, Jonathan, he wrote, and for a long time I convinced myself that it was because text was a static medium that had come to the end of its significant development in the world of arts. All the so-called new ideas were just the old ideas over again, the hero with a thousand faces, and art must be of its times and this is the time of visual artifice, and I followed that path to its ultimate limits. But then I stumbled across Jonathan Hamlow Presents 33 Magazine and I understood that it was not the text that had stagnated, it was only my mind.
Jonathan, George Lucas wrote, I've stated several times in the press recently that after I was done with the first six Star Wars movies, I was going to go back to my roots, to the small and enigmatic. Jonathan, he wrote, the bottom line is that I want to work with you and I'll do whatever it takes to make that happen. And that was the end of the letter, except for a California telephone number.
Anyway, the practical upshot of all this is that as soon as I'm done with this post I'll be packing up all the archives of 33 in magnetism-proof boxes and getting on a plane, so, this is the end of the magazine: this is my farewell article. I'll work out compensation for the Patrons for whatever entertainment they'll miss, but you know, opportunity only strikes once, so I'm flying the family out to L.A. this weekend and for the next year I'll be working on a series of athletic shoe commercials with George. Again, thank you all so much for your readership and support.
Okay, so, April Fools. See you next week.
The 33 Magazine March '05 Quarterly Report!
Three months into the experiment, March and my first quarter as a publishing magnate are in their closing hour.
It continues to amaze and perplex me how hard it is to write well. I've put down a lot of things here already that I am less than satisfied with, and there would be even more of it if I were less restrictive with what I actually do let get put down on the page. I can take a positive view of this, that I'm pushing myself into more difficult, tackling things I'm unsure of how to handle. It's too easy to rant about politics, religion, and philosophy (at least it is for me) and though I have been happiest with the writing I've done relating events from my personal life, my goal here is not to write a journal. From there it's exactly one step to becoming something horrible that rhymes with "frog" and must never be mentioned again.
Unholy neologisms based on irregular contractions (do you call a hat rack a track? A boat hook a thook? Gah, don't get me started) aside, I think I am working towards more personal account and more fiction in the coming issues. The former because I'm practicing here and you gotta write what you know, the latter because it is where I most want to develop. I've got a dogged streak of the essayist in me, and when you decide to mostly exclude religion, politics and philosophy from the table that's a tenuous basis for composition. I'll continue to hold forth, no doubt, but I want to push into uncharted territory.
I'm not going to dissemble, as a financial experiment it's almost a disaster, though I'll certainly come out ahead and I am having fun with the NO LONGER AVAILABLE benefits... but it just isn't particularly sustainable. Ah well, first and foremost you gotta do it for love anyway, though I am having to devote less attention to the writings for this and more to other options, and the volume of writing over the first three months has reflected this shift. My main reaction is still surprise and gratification at the great generosity of a number of my friends and family, so I can't call it a dissapointment.
I'm still hoping more people will get into REPLACED 33 ASSOCIATES LINK (SOON TO BE DEFUNCT). What could be easier, you email me whatever you like, boom, it's online in a couple days. Maybe judging everyone else's thirst to have their text available for all the world to read has led me to an exaggerated view of the attractiveness of this option. Comments are also sort of a bust, I never would have thought it would be easier to get people to pay than to respond, but there it is. I've got more patrons than comments, and half the comments are mine. The failure of the interactive? Maybe I just need to be more provocative. Any comments? Ha ha.
More to come.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
It continues to amaze and perplex me how hard it is to write well. I've put down a lot of things here already that I am less than satisfied with, and there would be even more of it if I were less restrictive with what I actually do let get put down on the page. I can take a positive view of this, that I'm pushing myself into more difficult, tackling things I'm unsure of how to handle. It's too easy to rant about politics, religion, and philosophy (at least it is for me) and though I have been happiest with the writing I've done relating events from my personal life, my goal here is not to write a journal. From there it's exactly one step to becoming something horrible that rhymes with "frog" and must never be mentioned again.
Unholy neologisms based on irregular contractions (do you call a hat rack a track? A boat hook a thook? Gah, don't get me started) aside, I think I am working towards more personal account and more fiction in the coming issues. The former because I'm practicing here and you gotta write what you know, the latter because it is where I most want to develop. I've got a dogged streak of the essayist in me, and when you decide to mostly exclude religion, politics and philosophy from the table that's a tenuous basis for composition. I'll continue to hold forth, no doubt, but I want to push into uncharted territory.
I'm not going to dissemble, as a financial experiment it's almost a disaster, though I'll certainly come out ahead and I am having fun with the NO LONGER AVAILABLE benefits... but it just isn't particularly sustainable. Ah well, first and foremost you gotta do it for love anyway, though I am having to devote less attention to the writings for this and more to other options, and the volume of writing over the first three months has reflected this shift. My main reaction is still surprise and gratification at the great generosity of a number of my friends and family, so I can't call it a dissapointment.
I'm still hoping more people will get into REPLACED 33 ASSOCIATES LINK (SOON TO BE DEFUNCT). What could be easier, you email me whatever you like, boom, it's online in a couple days. Maybe judging everyone else's thirst to have their text available for all the world to read has led me to an exaggerated view of the attractiveness of this option. Comments are also sort of a bust, I never would have thought it would be easier to get people to pay than to respond, but there it is. I've got more patrons than comments, and half the comments are mine. The failure of the interactive? Maybe I just need to be more provocative. Any comments? Ha ha.
More to come.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
six hundred less than the number of the beast
The lost vision was numbered, if it be known, but the number was no help in finding it: it was gone. And they could have felt maudlin about it, imagining it to be the finest vision, the truest vision, the most necessary vision. But it was not like a dream that passes swiftly in the morning, leaving behind traces that hint at some unsurpassed picture into a world of wonder. It was not like a briefcase left carelessly in the lavatory of the airport, releasing hope of its recovery over long days as attempts are made in vain to recreate its contents. And it was not like a thought that taps meekly at the back of the mind, asking to be paid attention to, or at the least written down for later consideration, that rebuffed takes flight leaving a remembrance of wasted potential. The vision was lost, gone, and it left nothing behind.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
some embarassing vision from youth
The venue of the vision of the old man and the lake bears every hallmark of a white trash upbringing. A deep maroon Camaro with two fat white racing stripes up the middle, with a stereo that weighed approximately as much as the air conditioner, both of which were industrial strength and tended to be run at full blast. The soundtrack is Led Zeppelin. The mental environment is profoundly twisted by good local herb.
The explanation of the vision is thus: The lake is virtue, the old man is each and any one of us, the endless circling of the rowboat is the eternal cycle of Song, which has circled the globe, always returning to itself, since long before life ever walked crawled swum or oozed across this earth, picking up and singing its piece as it went. The child at his feet is the future, each of us giving birth at a rate of sixty seconds per hour. His psionic message is ever the message of the past:
Learn from me. Learn from me. Do not repeat where improvisation is required. Be born at my feet but do not remain trapped with me at the center of the cycle, swim into the spinning waters and be free.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The explanation of the vision is thus: The lake is virtue, the old man is each and any one of us, the endless circling of the rowboat is the eternal cycle of Song, which has circled the globe, always returning to itself, since long before life ever walked crawled swum or oozed across this earth, picking up and singing its piece as it went. The child at his feet is the future, each of us giving birth at a rate of sixty seconds per hour. His psionic message is ever the message of the past:
Learn from me. Learn from me. Do not repeat where improvisation is required. Be born at my feet but do not remain trapped with me at the center of the cycle, swim into the spinning waters and be free.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
dark glass morning hymn
Come whispers travelling faster than anything, saying: bad news.
(somewhere behind a dark glass the sage whispers something about the darkness in the light and the light in the darkness, sorry sage baby, on this side of the curtain it only comes in one color and that color is)
Bad
news.
It comes with awareness of how tiny you are, one island of I in a sea of space, and it comes with a hot breath of shame for the nothing you can do, for the nothing you did, for your complicity in letting this world be less than it could be. And it comes with a sad relief, for the bullet you dodged, it was not meant for you.
It comes with a knowledge of the bell that tolls, of the gun whose magazine stretches into infinity, there is a bullet with his name on it and her name on it and his name on it and her name on it... And her name on it... And yours.
Your
name
on
IT.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
(somewhere behind a dark glass the sage whispers something about the darkness in the light and the light in the darkness, sorry sage baby, on this side of the curtain it only comes in one color and that color is)
Bad
news.
It comes with awareness of how tiny you are, one island of I in a sea of space, and it comes with a hot breath of shame for the nothing you can do, for the nothing you did, for your complicity in letting this world be less than it could be. And it comes with a sad relief, for the bullet you dodged, it was not meant for you.
It comes with a knowledge of the bell that tolls, of the gun whose magazine stretches into infinity, there is a bullet with his name on it and her name on it and his name on it and her name on it... And her name on it... And yours.
Your
name
on
IT.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The Ghost Institute
The Ghost Institute is not a thing but a tale, a story, a bit of a Faustian revision about a man who sought to translate into a machine not the contents but the action of his mind. He did not seek to replicate the processes of his mind, his goal was not to create a machine that thought as he did. His goal was not to create a machine that thought at all.
In his mind the man sensed something that was not any of the things he had been told a mind could contain. It was not thoughts, for he sensed that thoughts were nothing more than the waves upon the sea. It was not sensation, for these were the shores the waves crashed against, retreated, and returned redoubled to crash again. He sensed that something was occurring of which the waves, the sea, the shores were only a part, or a reflection. The action of his mind existed in spite and above and in between everything that identified his mind. He found that he did not identify with this thing at all, He thought of himself of his senses and his thoughts, the meat of his brain whose weight he could feel balancing atop his neck. And he sought to expunge it from himself.
He sought hard and searched his mind for the hints of its existence. When he felt that he was close to it he tried to capture the action in files that seemed to him to be small and incomprehensible windows into something completely seperate for anything he had ever experienced, and he felt that he must be near to an answer. He noted that the feeling seemed to travel forward, so he designed the files to travel forward. He saw that the feeling travelled backwards, and so he designed the files to travel backwards. He heard it vibrating to either side, and so he designed the files to travel from side to side. Where it felt random he wrote the files random and where it seemed to follow a course he wrote the files along a course.
The files of the Ghost Institute remain, somewhere in cold storage. The man could see no entrance into what he felt from the outside, and so he created no portal of entry. The man could find no exit from what he felt, and so he created no escape hatch from the labyrinth of the files. He himself had nothing to do with the files: he said they had turned out to be nothing more than more of what he was trying to get away from in the first place.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
In his mind the man sensed something that was not any of the things he had been told a mind could contain. It was not thoughts, for he sensed that thoughts were nothing more than the waves upon the sea. It was not sensation, for these were the shores the waves crashed against, retreated, and returned redoubled to crash again. He sensed that something was occurring of which the waves, the sea, the shores were only a part, or a reflection. The action of his mind existed in spite and above and in between everything that identified his mind. He found that he did not identify with this thing at all, He thought of himself of his senses and his thoughts, the meat of his brain whose weight he could feel balancing atop his neck. And he sought to expunge it from himself.
He sought hard and searched his mind for the hints of its existence. When he felt that he was close to it he tried to capture the action in files that seemed to him to be small and incomprehensible windows into something completely seperate for anything he had ever experienced, and he felt that he must be near to an answer. He noted that the feeling seemed to travel forward, so he designed the files to travel forward. He saw that the feeling travelled backwards, and so he designed the files to travel backwards. He heard it vibrating to either side, and so he designed the files to travel from side to side. Where it felt random he wrote the files random and where it seemed to follow a course he wrote the files along a course.
The files of the Ghost Institute remain, somewhere in cold storage. The man could see no entrance into what he felt from the outside, and so he created no portal of entry. The man could find no exit from what he felt, and so he created no escape hatch from the labyrinth of the files. He himself had nothing to do with the files: he said they had turned out to be nothing more than more of what he was trying to get away from in the first place.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
vision seventy
AND GAD SAID:
= TELL THEM
I'M THUMBODY
SENT YOU =
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
= TELL THEM
I'M THUMBODY
SENT YOU =
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the widow's mites
The evening has taken on that desperate quality of a man who's looking for something he needs - first he carefully searches, and finding nothing he searches, more and more meticulously, until hours have passed and his room is ransacked. Never realizing that this thing will never be found if he looks for it and will only turn up when he thinks he's little need for it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
diatribe :valium:
Is it any wonder? In this crazy fuckin' dog eat dog world, with everything going mad with the latest modern technological convenience at its bedside, when you could fit all the sanity and caring into a crack pipe and smoke it and feel nothing, is it any wonder in such a world as this, that we all wanna escape into fantasy realms? That we wanna imagine cities in the sewers and Magic Kingdoms? That we wanna get away from the horror of the loss that assaults us every day, from the threat of revocation that comes with every success, every gain, every happiness? That we bury ourselves between glossy pages jam stocked with free sex, beautiful palstic perfect people with no real problems and every time a happy ending? That men pony up millions daily to have some sweet voice tell them that they're everything they're not, that their pathetic self-ministrations are making some bored phone-sex honey squirm, when they should be told that their great sin is not that they're perverts but that they're cowards, afraid to care even for themselves?
Romance Fantasy SciFi Novel Soap Opera Sit Com Tabloid Spy novel Thrasher Thriller Feel good Fuck mag hard core live nude crack house whore liquor store valium vicarious society fucked-up blues
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Romance Fantasy SciFi Novel Soap Opera Sit Com Tabloid Spy novel Thrasher Thriller Feel good Fuck mag hard core live nude crack house whore liquor store valium vicarious society fucked-up blues
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
contact (the paranoid)
It seems to me that now God is not merely ignoring my polite, patient, and (in my opinion) extremely modest requests: He is quite maliciously delivering the exact opposite, actively tormenting me. It's really quite horrifying.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
walk on water
But the LORD, as usual, is cynically indifferent to my little thoughts of what I need... Staying in His place to put me in mine, as I wrote, elsewhere, on some pages that didn't survive.
Anyway. Better not to tempt Him, I'll keep my counsel as to my knee jerk reactions to the question of What is God up to?
And somewhere, somewhere some fat cat is getting fatter and richer by sculling off my sorrow, I don't doubt... By abusing my twisted sense of ethics: And yes, I would like to see a little Davidian psalmist retribution occur, see the bastards caught in their own corporate snares...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Anyway. Better not to tempt Him, I'll keep my counsel as to my knee jerk reactions to the question of What is God up to?
And somewhere, somewhere some fat cat is getting fatter and richer by sculling off my sorrow, I don't doubt... By abusing my twisted sense of ethics: And yes, I would like to see a little Davidian psalmist retribution occur, see the bastards caught in their own corporate snares...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the declaration trip (and me still battling this independence tip)
It's here, now, but here and now don't make no fuckin' sense. Living in a country that's had its fucking heart cut out, if it ever had one. Living in a country future historians, always assuming there ARE future historians, will call the beginning of the end. Where it really started. Not when Columbus landed, no. I don't think so. Back then, imperialism, it was just a vision, a dream. Little pockets that should have devoured each other, been devoured by their surroundings.
No. When men got together. And wrote something that sounded very much different, but what it meant, oh, what it meant was something like this...
We hold these truths to be self evident, that to the few has been given the unalienable right to devour what exists and to disgorge what is the pleasure of the few. To secure this right, government is imposed upon the many by the few, deriving its power from the divine edict of force.
And so on.
So the cancer was born. I do not know if the cancer is malignant enough to destroy this pretty water planet. I know well enough that barring, say, the second coming, I will not live to see the resolution, the end. Not in the classical sense, anyway.
Listen, nature is amoral, but she is absolute. That which is unable to sustain its life, dies. That which is unable to sustain progeny, dies absolutely. Get it?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
No. When men got together. And wrote something that sounded very much different, but what it meant, oh, what it meant was something like this...
We hold these truths to be self evident, that to the few has been given the unalienable right to devour what exists and to disgorge what is the pleasure of the few. To secure this right, government is imposed upon the many by the few, deriving its power from the divine edict of force.
And so on.
So the cancer was born. I do not know if the cancer is malignant enough to destroy this pretty water planet. I know well enough that barring, say, the second coming, I will not live to see the resolution, the end. Not in the classical sense, anyway.
Listen, nature is amoral, but she is absolute. That which is unable to sustain its life, dies. That which is unable to sustain progeny, dies absolutely. Get it?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
to tell the old old story
Ah, hell. What do I want?
What do I need?
What do I get?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
What do I need?
What do I get?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
black gold
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 20
You just can't talk about america without talking about oil. For many people in the world, the television oil drama dallas once defined their frame of reference for what america and americans are like. In that show, oil tycoons (a vanishingly small group of people) behaved very badly, swapping sexual partners and switching sexual orientation and killing each other and coming back with different features. In the real world oil tycoons behave very badly in much, much more boring ways.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
You just can't talk about america without talking about oil. For many people in the world, the television oil drama dallas once defined their frame of reference for what america and americans are like. In that show, oil tycoons (a vanishingly small group of people) behaved very badly, swapping sexual partners and switching sexual orientation and killing each other and coming back with different features. In the real world oil tycoons behave very badly in much, much more boring ways.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the utterly pointless exercise of denigrating the car
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 21
Driving is how americans get to work. Now in olden times, people didn't make such a distinction between work and life, when you got up you started travelling, gathered enough food for a while. Then somebody put a couple wheels behind a horse (knowing human nature, following some disasterous attempts at putting the wheels in front) and the first travelling occupation, warfare, was born. Which more or less brings us to today, since the car/oil economy was born under a recent conflict in that age-old get rich quick scheme, what we like to call the second world war. It isn't a particularly safe way to get around, and it isn't a particularly pleasant way to get around, and it isn't a particularly clean or cheap or efficient way to get around... But, um, well. Anyway.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Driving is how americans get to work. Now in olden times, people didn't make such a distinction between work and life, when you got up you started travelling, gathered enough food for a while. Then somebody put a couple wheels behind a horse (knowing human nature, following some disasterous attempts at putting the wheels in front) and the first travelling occupation, warfare, was born. Which more or less brings us to today, since the car/oil economy was born under a recent conflict in that age-old get rich quick scheme, what we like to call the second world war. It isn't a particularly safe way to get around, and it isn't a particularly pleasant way to get around, and it isn't a particularly clean or cheap or efficient way to get around... But, um, well. Anyway.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
unsafe at any speed
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 22
Like everyone else, though, I put my fucking life in the hands of these maniacs on the road every day, not by choice but by necessity: You know, I have to get around, and there are damn roads everywhere, and like the chicken in the jest of yore, if you wanna get to the other side you gotsta cross the road. Now, purposeful killing with cars hasn't yet reached the fever pitch it's destined to in this sick sick society, but heaven knows that it's only a thin membrane of madness between you and some repressed stockbroker type suddenly deciding to floor it in his mercedes and just drill a straight line until god decides to counterpunch him out of existence. Ain't that something. Well it won't be me, asshole, so kindly get off my case and stop trying to sell me stinking pickup trucks when I'm trying to watch TELEVISION!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Like everyone else, though, I put my fucking life in the hands of these maniacs on the road every day, not by choice but by necessity: You know, I have to get around, and there are damn roads everywhere, and like the chicken in the jest of yore, if you wanna get to the other side you gotsta cross the road. Now, purposeful killing with cars hasn't yet reached the fever pitch it's destined to in this sick sick society, but heaven knows that it's only a thin membrane of madness between you and some repressed stockbroker type suddenly deciding to floor it in his mercedes and just drill a straight line until god decides to counterpunch him out of existence. Ain't that something. Well it won't be me, asshole, so kindly get off my case and stop trying to sell me stinking pickup trucks when I'm trying to watch TELEVISION!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
God's Crumbs
Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 23
The only way to conduct business of any scale in this country is the market, which is an awfully dodgy gig. They all sell out to the ipo eventually. The market is the best invention ever, a sort of mutipurpose tool for world dominion. I mean, it's owned by a handful of people, who mainly organize things so they make money no matter what happens, and yet people think of it as some kind of vague and impersonal force. The whole bastardly economic science of market dynamics is based on the corrupt and false assumption that this is how value should move in a free economy. Nobody notices. But the general ignorance of the real ownership and payoff trends of the market pales in consideration of the fact that noone seems to notice that the only reason we have a market in the first place is that we cannot afford to do a tenth of what we're doing, so we invented this incredible confidence game to perform the appropriate magic spells to allow us to do whatever we damn well please with no thought of the future. Strangely, a very large percentage of us choose to work like dogs for next to nothing through the best years of our lives, while the tiny leftover minority chooses to live like kings and do nothing of value. What perplexes me is that they pass up the opportunity to live like gods. I guess they don't read the scientific press the way I do.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The only way to conduct business of any scale in this country is the market, which is an awfully dodgy gig. They all sell out to the ipo eventually. The market is the best invention ever, a sort of mutipurpose tool for world dominion. I mean, it's owned by a handful of people, who mainly organize things so they make money no matter what happens, and yet people think of it as some kind of vague and impersonal force. The whole bastardly economic science of market dynamics is based on the corrupt and false assumption that this is how value should move in a free economy. Nobody notices. But the general ignorance of the real ownership and payoff trends of the market pales in consideration of the fact that noone seems to notice that the only reason we have a market in the first place is that we cannot afford to do a tenth of what we're doing, so we invented this incredible confidence game to perform the appropriate magic spells to allow us to do whatever we damn well please with no thought of the future. Strangely, a very large percentage of us choose to work like dogs for next to nothing through the best years of our lives, while the tiny leftover minority chooses to live like kings and do nothing of value. What perplexes me is that they pass up the opportunity to live like gods. I guess they don't read the scientific press the way I do.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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