12/04/13: Verily, I have declared the end of the Age of Blogging. Check in on what's left of the Media Empire if you cry out for Fresh Content.
2.487 : 9/2/06 : The Future of 3 Part 2
Five year plan title
The future of:
3 pages mission
vision
goal there was
Had to admit
there was some
chuckling at the gall
said:
Work
hunger
discipline
& that was all
The blog It’s Rome, Baby! will remain static from now on. If you’re looking for something where fresh material appears on a regular basis, look no further than my very own "the fairly secret song of the day blog". It’s fly. In addition, the erstwhile-defunct Phree Musique blog has ended its stint as a review site for digital music sellers and has been again repurposed as an infrequent blog of commentary on digital culture and renamed Phree as in PhreakShow. I’ll add a note on all the extant blogs if anything else new comes up. This index, detailing the 444 other posts residing on this blog, is the last thing I will post on this site. Bookmark it for frequent review! It’s like a museum that’s open 24 hours a day... in your brain!
Please note:
1. A certain amount of profane language finds its way into these essays. Also into the table of contents below. Sorry.
2. Although some of these writings are representative of my understanding of reality in days past, many are purely fictional. None should be interpreted as statement, expression of intent, or advocacy of anything.
3. This document was originally coded by hand. If you find a broken link and feel compelled to do something about it, I'm not that hard to find.
The Comprehensive Index of the It’s Rome, Baby! Weblog
Incarnation The First: It’s Rome, Baby! as Surrealist Celebrity Satire: August - November 2005
Culled from the heppest topics of its day, laden with subtle pop-cult reference, surprisingly difficult to write, this is the original conception of the blog. I managed to keep it up for 4 months and 45 posts. I finally updated the Full Archive and Disclaimer Page, where you can review a summary of all the scintillating posts. So I won’t reproduce that here
Here’s quick links to a few of my favorites, though. There is no relevance to the fact that Harry Potter features heavily in the first two.
Emma Watson Shall Rule Us All
Pat Robertson: Brewing Scandal at Christian Broadcasting Network
iPod femto unveiled, lost
North by Northwest Airlines Declares Bankruptcy
This era ended with the first of several announcements of the End of the Website.
Incarnation The Second: Archives of the Star-Cross’d 33 Magazine: January - February 2006
A haphazardly conceived strategy to publish an online “magazine” supported by voluntary “patronage.” I discovered that the successful application of the patronage model involves knowing people who are wealthy. In a nutshell, it didn’t work out, and I still feel bad about the people who provided the most generous support, I don’t feel like they got their money’s worth. But what are you going to do? I had no idea what I was getting into when I left full time employment to care for my son Jonah. Anyway, I archived the back issues here at It’s Rome. The archives may contain some broken links to the old 33 Magazine and related sites which are now defunct. I tried to clean them up when I transcribed this but I’m sure I missed some.
1. Dubious justification of why I’m still posting, having Ended the Website
2. Explanation of the original 33 project. So Earnest.
3. Explains patronage, used to link to now defunct commerce pages.
4. More commerce stuff. This is actually written post 33. The Den of Thieves link is dead now, but improbably the two cafe press stores are still open (laziness, essentially). I still keep thinking that “I’m Part of the Thing” meme could take off any day. Maybe I need to put a video on YouTube. I forgot all about the website (link to first post, which got lightly colonized by comment spambots I see). You know, I’m not actually very good at this stuff. I no longer can remember the access information on that blogger account either. Oh Google, you never forget though. On the internet, everyone can hear you scream... but nobody gives a shit.
5. Paradox A short story. I find it unsuccessful.
6. Gauss - regarding my first experience recording music with Apple’s GarageBand software. The link to my first song used to be here, now it’s defunct, but if you email me through my profile link I’ll mail you a copy of Gauss for free.
7. Jonah’s Story. I relate the circumstances of my son’s (10 week) premature birth. Probably the most popular piece of writing that appeared on 33. Part 1-Part 2-Part 3-Part 4
8. Playback: I attempt a history of audio recording. It’s a lot longer than I remember. Part 1-Part 2-Part 3- And... then I lost the thread prior to the conclusion, which is a shame, because the teaser to it at the end of the third installment sounded pretty damn impressive. When I was transcribing these posts across I wrote a wholly inedequate little epilog to cap it off. Wholly inadequate. Ah, well.
9. A bit of text that accompanied one of the quirky mailings I sent out to the magazine patrons, regarding Morning Glories
10. Soap: A Science Experiment. I decided to make some soap from scratch. Well, I bought the lye. It was better with pictures but I wanted to delete them from my gallery. I guess google does image hosting for blogger now but I can’t be bothered to deal with setting it back up. When I was transcribing the post over I added a conclusion which I wittily titled soapilog. I keep a chunk of this soap at the laundry room sink and use it regularly for heavy handcleaning, it is very effective. It is rather drying to the skin but otherwise I’d have to say the experiment was a success. Look, I’m Pa Ingalls. Or possibly Ma.
11. 33 Magazine March 05 Quarterly Report. Pessimistic.
12. April Fool’s. When I used to keep a handwritten journal I often did this on April 1, riffed a little scenario where something absurdly amazing happened and changed the direction of my life. It was a personal in-joke because I felt so stuck so much of the time, particularly after college. It’s not actually all that damn funny to me anymore.
13. Semiannual Report. I basically lose it. Poignant, if you like that kind of thing. I talk about my dead kitty. The serialized fiction I referred to at the end of the post is gone (from the online world anyway), its the one thing I didn’t transcribe across, as (unique among all my older writings), I feel like I may still finish it and do something else with the story, so I decided to pull it from the archives.
And so 33 Magazine ended. I posted chapters of the aforementioned story for a while and then canned it the same time as I canned the first iteration of It’s Rome, Baby!
Connected to this section, the only writing on the site that does not originate with me - 33 Associates, a sideline invitation made from the magazine to publish others’ text online, contains a few poems by my sister, a few essays by my friend Jack. They’ll stay up as long as the website stays up and neither author asks me to take them down.
Incarnation The Third: A Big Ol’ Dumpin’ Ground of Text: January - February 06
You could conceive this segment of our tale as the chance to root around in my digital wastebasket. Some writers make their wives promise to set fire to their filing cabinets to make sure posterity never decides to publish their “unfinished” works. I dump them all over the internet to live forever (or for as long as Google’s business model floats) in perpetual obscurity. Scenarios for stories I never wrote, essays written for no good reason, my first, ancient (in the internet timeframe) and long defunct blogs. [I've redacted some defunct verbiage here about Google Adsense - I cancelled my subscription to that revenue non-source (well I made all of 12 bucks off it over my tenure anyway) many years ago when they changed the terms of service to require you to have a privacy statement on any Adsense linked material that basically said you gave Google the right to track your readers any damn way they pleased. Which is not to say Google isn't tracking you any damn way they please, including occasional drive-by sucking of illegal data out of your home Wi-Fi. I just am not going to personally put a statement on my writing condoning it. Hence, no adsense for me. I actually can't, I now find, condone using auto-generated ads at all - I feel it constitutes personally, tacitly condoning the contents of ads I have nothing to do with and which are, frankly, sketchy as a rule rather than an exception. But that is a different and longer essay]
1. A couple of odd political bits. Satire? Humor? The Howard Dean shtick made me chuckle.
2. A scenario for a science fiction story I never started.
3. A survey created to pick a friend’s brain for research on a novel I started but couldn’t finish. Are you sensing a trend?
4. Another unused scenario for some sort of dystopian postapocalyptic future scenario. Very Mad Max.
5. An unfinished essay, some idea I had about discussing the ecology of my lawn.
6. A clumsy stab in the dark, the start of a story that went nowhere. Character names like “Cyrus Smith” are the fucking kiss of death. Also, it appears I can’t spell obsolescent.
7. An egregiously long response to some website I read which promulgated this idea of a computer-mediated, technological/deterministic eschaton. If that kind of twisted phrasing puts you off you probably don’t want to read the essay itself. I think I started with the intent of making a few response notes to the website’s creator and it just sort of snowballed on me. The five “end of the humanity” stories early on in the essay still amuse me.
8. A meditation on fear from the first true weblog I ever attempted, Slouching Toward Gethsemane (I still really like that title).
9. An essay from the same source on taking sides, and ends, means.
10. A ranting essay asserting that the fundamental problem is that people are stupid.
11. M.A.P.S project summary. Early, long past attempt to drum up interest in an investigation of transforming the way music is transacted. Naive. Nobody was interested.
12. Part of an essay (the other parts apparently lost) about the nature of experience.
13. I rail against dumbass college students rioting over the outcome of a hockey game.
14. a weird dream, written down I don’t know why. I normally make no effort to record my dreams.
15. I bitch about television.
16. an essay I wrote for a contest run by some magazine and some oil company. Pedantic. I made an effort at a positive projection for the human future, as sort of a challenge to myself.
17. I riff on Enron and advocate financial irresponsibility.
18. I submitted this article proposal (by request) to Downward Battle, a anti music industry activism website. Never a response. They suck anyway.
19. a screenplay and a bunch of songs. I’m not sure why the two were posted together.
20. Some BS I wrote about intelligent design. No recollection why
21. a regionally flavored story written for I know not what audience or reason. Its tone feels forced to me.
22. Completely bizarre. Notes from some abstract reiterative searching experiment I did online. It does not appear to have gotten me anywhere much.
23. Remember that M.A.P.S. Project call to arms way back in link #11? Despite lack of outside interest I tried to get the white paper underway myself. Then I apparently succumbed to despair.
24. Satirical Spoof written during the height of “duct tape plastic over your windows” post 9-11 security stupidity.
25. Looks like some heathen got my dander up online. Snarky and dumb. Which is not to say it doesn’t have some valid points. But I don’t bother pursuing that sort of rhetoric any more.
26. A little piece on desire, no idea what it is or why I wrote it.
27. A little fiction sketch.
28. The internet as a metaphor for monkeys. Ahead of its time.
29. A friend asked me to write an essay on why he thought he was special. I doubt this was what he was looking for.
30. Transcript of a long spoken word piece on language and religion.
Incarnation The Fourth: The Kingdom Come Institute, Online at Last: January - July 2006
Most of the remaining bulk of this site comes from a project I never finished which was called something like the Annals of the Home Page of the Kingdom Come Institute. I guess I’ll attempt a slightly more illuminating explanation of it than I put forth here. In a nutshell, I was working on a large series (intended to be hundreds) of essays, experimental fiction oddments, songs and transcriptions of ancient history writings from my journal. They were assigned to a system of categories and the concept was eventually I would interlink them with a huge series (intended to be thousands) of hyperlinks. The basic idea was to create a circular but expansive reading experience. I never even finished the writing let alone grappled with the prospect of coding 3,125 anchor tags. I parked on the domain kingdomcomeinstitute.com for a long time before I finally accepted defeat and let it lapse. The domain now redirects to some Canadian e-commerce service provider’s website. People squat them some weird-ass online real estate. The project will never be finished in its original conception. I’d like to try something like it again some day but I’d start with a much less ambitious scale and a much more meticulous design of component themes).
1. Some original essay related to the project. Chunks of it probably found elsewhere throughout the whole thing.
2. The Celestial Puke Box. I riff about the set top box (that sounds so old fashioned now) and the evolution of teevee, or something. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, AND Part V
3. The Story of a Day. Basically what it says, from a long time ago. fiction of a cipher, sick and dirty, five years gone, repeat one thousand times, AND so let it be written so let it be done.
4. A bunch of excerpts from my handwritten journals of the past 12 years prior to the writing of the main Kingdom Come Institute Doctrine - which started around 1998. From a project subset called Vision. Many pods of these to scattered below. the lotus and the worm, garbage out of some old book, inner bedlam, AND fifteen years gone.
5. The Vision subset also contains a number of selections from a 101 song series from the Song of the Day project first series that are based on zen stories collected in the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Among them are numbers 54, 27, 56, 37, 53, 19, 73, 91, 59, 100, 21, 4, 29, 77, 15, 80, 94, 86, 46, 67, 1, 66, 71, AND 34.
6. Various essays... Broad casts versus narrow ones, a pep talk to myeself, a twenty minute meditation, a parable of time and madness, musings on Timothy McVeigh, I bemoan poor planning, AND fantasies on a better presidency.
7. I daydream about scripting a sci-fi cartoon in five parts, yamamoto, mushroom scroll, blind spider, manual of sedition, (aside),
AND hidden world
8. The Klik-thru (iM) agreement link disclaimer
9. how to distribute a pamphlet.
10. Living in America: A Guide for the Perplexed. A twenty five part series with segements on 1. a more perfect union, 2. I get no kick from champagne, 3. you’ll have a barrel of fun, 4. Lord, I’m a fool for a cigarette, 5. java, 6. free as in radical, 7. free as in willy, 8. the silican nipple, 9. tee vee 4 ever, 10. yo quiero shit sandwich, 11. feed my lambs, 12. mokie coke! mokie coke! mokie coke!, 13. tote dat barge, 14. lift dat bale, 15. nail gun rhapsody, 16. fugitive, 17. rent, 18. I did it, 19. Chris, 20. oil, 21. car as warmonger, 22. car as weapon, 23. business, 24. politics, AND 25. Union.
11. More journal excerpts:to tell the old, old story, the declaration trip, walk on water, virus, contact, diatribe: valium, the widow’s mites, AND vision seventy.
12. The enigmatic interlude of The Ghost Institute
13. Yet more journal excerpts! dark glass morning hymn, some embarassing vision from youth, AND six hundred less than the number of the beast.
14. A handfull of visions: I used to think it meant something or mattered, yet another enigmatic journal exctract. also true, 3Cs, except that I gave up the filthy things, true, just heaving against the flesh of the evening, puzzledream, metaphysician heal thyself, AND proverb.
15: The world of philosophy explained! the final word, there but for the grace of gravity and gall, diarism, seven stations of breath, I’m sure a real philosopher would just kick my nuts, goooooooooodle, AND the ticket that imploded.
16: I invented a quasireligion called Realitation! Revel in its mystical components: sleepitate to success, eatitation, workitation: it works!, teletation for the masses, AND realitation is available and operators are standing by now. Deep.
17. A hapless elucidation of art and time. terra incognita, spheres of influence, further elucidation, AND sometimes an aside re art.
18. I engage in heated analysis of the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Why? I do not know. part one, Ignore the apotheosis of pop culture, part two, Five Trumps of Fear, AND part three, defiance (acid test).
19: A couple of angles on text and the methods of its generation: simpleton AND from the word go.
20: The Deck Of Woe, an Oracular Device for Personal Divination: (in the face of any question, decision, or to discern future events simply choose the most seemly “card” and introspectively consume its magical text.
The Blind Badger, The Reticulated Transport, The Thrice of Shears, The Watchtower, The Five of Wheels, The Veiled Lady, The Mask and the Bell, The Vortex, The Seven of Forks, Fleur de Lis, The Twelve Rings, The Masque Ball, The Shuttlecock, The Sleeping Knave, The Back Road, Prince’s Entourage, The Quill, The Surprise Inspection, A Circle of Crows, The Brother’s Riddle, The Lead Pipe, The Parasols Six, The Navel, The Mysterious Stranger, AND The Cup.
21. The Meaty Heart of the Kingdom Come Institute segment of the Kingdom Come Institute Web-Sight Concept: a reeling, relentlessly innacurate tour through science, religion, politics, economics, media and the troubling question of whether our lives are controlled by hypertechnological salamanders from the Center of the Earth: tempus fugit, things lost, will I see the paradox wrapped in an enigma box, Oodles More Godels, God dials you up, Pardon my Prose, my friends couldn’t believe I got a credit limit of FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, Beggars on horseback, contained within a multitude, silver and gold, Extremophiles, Annual Evaluation (AKA I’ve Got Mine Jack), smooth like butter, already I can hear the coughing from the next room, a mad jack’s jeer that echoed, A mad jackal howled at Jericho, Surreal Astrology, catastrophe, a neoformalist dream, the spider diary, a fictionalization of a work in progress, reconstruction is reclamation, the future is already here, an insightful critique of gender-neutral language, The division of India, The graphite sphincter, Make sure to visit our sponsors and Turgid Links, al gore invented frames, making the case for an acausal universe, Preview on a half-formed universe, forceful redirect, The word becomes text and dwells among us, Are We Not Men?, Shoot-out at the Occipital Ridge, Shamanetics, The fourth estate smashes into the forth wall (sic), If I pass not this way again, negative spaces in the mind, Statue in the Sky, considering this it is sometimes difficult to remember, By the time we got to Woodstock it was burning to the ground, shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot, a king’s ransom, speaking of tie-ins, have it your way, put it all together and it spells, junk science, ecce homo, entropy not mentioned once, Darwin is my Copilot, sweet mystery of life, one tiny ameoba, koan, welcome to your head, fuquetue, lies, damn lies, half truths, the whole nine yards, and the kitchen sink, parenthetical ellipsis,Salamander Diary, censored for your pleasure, an authentic warrior kicks ass Filed under shameless self-promotion, the bastards that control our lives, tu chingada madre, Can hearing it later change someone’s mind?, bred in the bone and then some, a radical proposal, a pointless observation, go hold down the dog while I fuck that pig, im hacking your mind right now, pathology: there are no ends only means, Whether you like it or not, AND A Strategic Vision of Extreme Clarity.
22. The remaining enigma of the Vision subset:the uneasy part, ten. forty. seven., the swede, try a dull knife, some say the cause was global warming, the balance was returned at the terminal node, spore, inspiritus, spike, exculpis speris argamentos vicis, the sea becomes salt with the grains I’ve taken, flow, automatic typing seminar: final analysis, ten minutes of terror, Lost and Hidden in the Mazy Depths of Mind, the third, second, and first visions of the future, the seeming and the meaning, descent into the valley of the prescient scion, the sad refrain of the cart before the course, dogs beg scraps from the children at the table, old brain, new tricks, I only contemplate the return, ninety-five’s thesis, a very Kafka thirteen hours, reap slash sow, quotidian, 1994: I make a New Year’s Resolution to kick your ass, will keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord, any descriptive statement in this document is true, orgasm, a monster in the sleep of reason, Searching for Eric Notch, stoned to the bone, Prior to the redacted confessional, Femiwhatsis, reading between the lines, The song it sang to me, mom, finding them is a scavenger hunt of sorts, fpc, the briefest possible moment, They changed the questions, One shock of recognition, surprised by a savage kicking in the teeth, the third aspect of judas, I was sorry I had no, The sighting of the lost dream, thumbody loves me, now available in a convenient pill, maybe there’s a tiny little machine inside the ghost, hour 27 on the graveyard shift, a copy of a copy of a copy, heat death, Head space soliloquy, The Everyman and his Everydog, The MOST in the gashing, If the shoe fits, Trying to make the weekend pay, How I spent another year of my life, and most will not read any of it at any time, inscription to a crude self-portrait, when in bedlam do as the bedlamites, a spirit so willing, musing the start of a second existence, in which words fail me, better a live inchworm than a dead dog, like a poker in the fire, the head of a dead cat, feast of saints, answer the telemeter, conception hidden in a green glass ball, You know who you are, that line it coils around the world, like a serpent it is curled, therefore you’re not, tis the east, The retribution of extreme morality, the beginning of the beginning, Freedom of choice is a chemical reaction, bug, Death and his Brother Time, Bridge, Building a room for noise to live in, blue blue blue blue, Twice Seven, based on sullen entropy to coin a phrase, what dreams may come?, bursts through the chest, record of a thousand hours imagined, wasted, in inauspicious number, AND The original 4 Track Mind Manifesto.
23. I believe the only stand-alone lyric included not from the songs of days project.
24. More stern exhortations to psychosocial anarchy from Le Pamphleteer: Feel the Burn, Bringing the Scoundrel Hounds to Bay, Taking a Bull by the Horns, Direct action and devlish plans, A fearless manual of sedition, Lost and Hidden in the Mazy Depths of Mind, An insightful critique of gender-neutral language, versus their blandishments and damned lies, The Earl of Sandwich is spinning in his grave, Divide and Conquer, brought to you by the small letter c, parties, killer bean, agencies, Do you seek influence, access, and the Key that Opens All Locks?, Hell is Very Much other people, The Station of Breath, we got problems, one world..., Revolutionary Propaganda for Children, it’s the next logical step from flat, Less is less but I like it like that, economic terrorism, f n pervert, but if a million, how to blow up music, AND
25. A final message of realitation and the coda of the Kingdom Come Institute: Znczmzng mzsszgz frzm thz mzthzrshzp.
Incarnation The Last: Intermittent Howls and Grumbles from the Formerly Present Day: January - July 2006
While archiving 33 Magazine, various chunks of undifferentiated text from my indifferent past, and Yon Venerable Tracta of Ye Kingdome Comme Instietuutte, I wrote the occasional “new” essay under the influence of some stimulus or the other.
I take a break from copying over 33 Magazine entries to bitch about the state of the union address. Cheerful.
Something about Narnia of all things. I was reading the books aloud to my infant son at the time, until the martial tone of them started to skeeve me out.
and the good luck not to fuck up too much: like a lot of other nerds, I was bummed out by the failure of Joss Whedon’s “Firefly” to make it as a television serial. A bitter essay on the topic.
One of the more comprehensive and clear assessments of what I was doing with the blog, of which this index is I suppose the final culmination, written in honor of the blog’s 300th post. The second paragraph does a pretty bang-up job of explaining the ambiguous relationship I have with the kind of stuff I seem bound and determined to write, try as I might to sex it up.
An essay, which turned out to have been an elegy, to one of my favorite teachers in high school, Claude Dziuk. I can’t imagine what he would have thought of this mess.
wait for the call, in which I ponder my fractured search for a vocation.
UNPLUG, a brief rumination on being clever.
The Hour that Stretches, a melancholy essay about a quixotic attempt, 12 years past, to forge some sort of reformulated identity out of memory and media in the alchemic alembic of text, and of the eternal quest to claim some sort of completeness. It seems like a fitting enough end to this retrospective exhibition. Thank you for visiting the Spirit of Salt J. Mark H. 2nd Lifetime Memorial Text Museum.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Znczmzng mzsszgz frzm thz mzthzrshzp
This is a transmission from the human liberation front. We have infected your continuum with quantum eventuality causation viruses. Your "reality" has been penetrated by aspects of our more fully realized continuum. As a consequence you are in a momentarily elevated state of freedom. Your thoughts and actions have greater impact. Obstructions are fewer and more manageable. "Chance" is on your side. This condition will not last forever. Your framework of maximum causality is now. Please proceed with deprogramming.
This completes the portion of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Le Pamphleteer. It also completes the transfer of what ghosts of the Institute survived its apocalyptic inception, slight, false and tawdry though they might be. The sole exception is the short story pentagon/files, which was never completed but might find a new life somewhere, sometime, somehow. Or not. As regards the Institute: it will never be finished. But it is done.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
This completes the portion of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Le Pamphleteer. It also completes the transfer of what ghosts of the Institute survived its apocalyptic inception, slight, false and tawdry though they might be. The sole exception is the short story pentagon/files, which was never completed but might find a new life somewhere, sometime, somehow. Or not. As regards the Institute: it will never be finished. But it is done.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
how to blow up music
aside from the present day, ah, once I was a naive and idealistic young man
Here's a little Revolutionary's Guide to the world we live in.
The Parable of the Medium
Once upon a time everybody made their own music. They made it for religeon, to ease the old as time burden of working, to entertain themselves and children, as a way of connecting community.
Cut to the boiling capitalist anarchist state that the de facto owners call USA and the rest of us, for good or ill, generally call America, somewhere one side of the second Julian/Gregorian Millennium...
A handful of synthetic entities called Corporations now control very nearly all new music. These entities are controlled by a group of people called Shareholders. The fundamental principle of the Shareholder religeon is the accumulation of =capital= under an arbitrary state/corporation controlled valuation swindle known as The Market. Curiously, the majority of music exchanged under the system is crap. Some observers maintain that this is an inevitable result of the highly arcane mechanisms of The Market. Being a romantic, I tend towards the belief that it's simply a method of adding insult to injury.
And you thought Nineteen Eighty Four was just a book.
These powerful and nearly undisputed forces have, in the prior two decades, made two incredibly important tactical errors and are on the verge of making a third.
Deep in the grips of the blinding, short-sighted greed that they generally call Smart Business, the Shareholders caused the Corporations to decree that almost all music be exchanged by virtue of a new medium. Music was translated into digital information (the popular misnomer for binary information) and encoded onto a visual matrix. The unintended side effect of this process was to provide millions of potential Revolutionaries with music in a form that allowed exact replication of encoded information for a tiny fraction of the cost of its original production.
Meanwhile, a new medium called Internet was rising in America. It involved the exchange of binary information via telephone. Although the telephone is an old medium and effectively under the control of the Shareholders, it's nature dictates that unlike other media designed to transfer information over distance, it is impossible for the Shareholders to dictate with as much success exactly what information travels over the telephone. This method of transmission is so cheap that the many give information away free or in trade, true revolutionary anrachist economics.
The Shareholders are about to make their third error. In an truly awesome excess of greed, they set their sights on the digitalization of Television, America's most popular (by a gross margin) distance information medium. Politicians (the individuals hired by corporations as a buffer zone between the Shareholders' desire to accumulate points and the citizens' desire to retain the value of their labor) have been paid handsome bonuses to give ownership and control of the narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies suitable for digital information exchange over to the Corporations. It is reasonable to project that a connection between Internet and the new, "digital" Television will become a standard consumer technology within fifteen years of the Millennium, ending the Internet access problem
I honestly think they've completely missed the true implications of these interconnected blunders. Revolutionaries take note that you do not do the same.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Here's a little Revolutionary's Guide to the world we live in.
The Parable of the Medium
Once upon a time everybody made their own music. They made it for religeon, to ease the old as time burden of working, to entertain themselves and children, as a way of connecting community.
Cut to the boiling capitalist anarchist state that the de facto owners call USA and the rest of us, for good or ill, generally call America, somewhere one side of the second Julian/Gregorian Millennium...
A handful of synthetic entities called Corporations now control very nearly all new music. These entities are controlled by a group of people called Shareholders. The fundamental principle of the Shareholder religeon is the accumulation of =capital= under an arbitrary state/corporation controlled valuation swindle known as The Market. Curiously, the majority of music exchanged under the system is crap. Some observers maintain that this is an inevitable result of the highly arcane mechanisms of The Market. Being a romantic, I tend towards the belief that it's simply a method of adding insult to injury.
And you thought Nineteen Eighty Four was just a book.
These powerful and nearly undisputed forces have, in the prior two decades, made two incredibly important tactical errors and are on the verge of making a third.
Deep in the grips of the blinding, short-sighted greed that they generally call Smart Business, the Shareholders caused the Corporations to decree that almost all music be exchanged by virtue of a new medium. Music was translated into digital information (the popular misnomer for binary information) and encoded onto a visual matrix. The unintended side effect of this process was to provide millions of potential Revolutionaries with music in a form that allowed exact replication of encoded information for a tiny fraction of the cost of its original production.
Meanwhile, a new medium called Internet was rising in America. It involved the exchange of binary information via telephone. Although the telephone is an old medium and effectively under the control of the Shareholders, it's nature dictates that unlike other media designed to transfer information over distance, it is impossible for the Shareholders to dictate with as much success exactly what information travels over the telephone. This method of transmission is so cheap that the many give information away free or in trade, true revolutionary anrachist economics.
The Shareholders are about to make their third error. In an truly awesome excess of greed, they set their sights on the digitalization of Television, America's most popular (by a gross margin) distance information medium. Politicians (the individuals hired by corporations as a buffer zone between the Shareholders' desire to accumulate points and the citizens' desire to retain the value of their labor) have been paid handsome bonuses to give ownership and control of the narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies suitable for digital information exchange over to the Corporations. It is reasonable to project that a connection between Internet and the new, "digital" Television will become a standard consumer technology within fifteen years of the Millennium, ending the Internet access problem
I honestly think they've completely missed the true implications of these interconnected blunders. Revolutionaries take note that you do not do the same.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
but if a million of us did it they'd lose their minds
Vexing Corporations Method Seventeen: the Boycott
Actual content of an e-mail sent to the Volkswagen Corporation:
From: Dr. J.L.B. Smith (not my real name)
I'm writing to strenuosly object to your recent commercial in which a Volkswagen's full size spare tire is compared to the famous rediscovered fossil fish, the Coelacanth
This surprising survivor of the 350 million year old sub-class Crossopterygii, or "lobed-finned fish," which was rediscovered in 1938, could certainly be described as the classic textbook case of a rediscovered species, and one of the inspirations of
"Lost World" mythology that pervades the fantasy of our culture to this day. Anyone who has the slightest interest in things biological, anyone who finds the tiniest fascination in evoloutionary theory or the possibility of living fossils such as the Loch Ness monster knows of the Coelacanth. Apt pupils learn of our carnivorous, hollow-spined (the literal meaning of its Greek name) friend before they hit fourth grade. In short, EVERY DAMN PERSON WHO IS GOING TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR LITTLE JOKE ALREADY GETS IT.
So why in Almighty God's name does this almost moderately clever commercial spoil its impact by the little lecture on what the Coelacanth is? This clumsy maneuver not only destroys the comic timing of the commercial with the shoddy cocktail party comedian's bad habit of explaining the punch line, but it insults the intelligence of
viewer most likely to be moved by the commercial's particular tack.
I'm sick and tired of corporations insulting my intelligence every time I turn on the damn television, particularly manufacturers of weird, silly little cars. The Kingdom Come Institute is a Large, Organized Resistance dedicated to a less stupid society and this kind of monkey business won't be tolerated. Be informed that a full-scale boycott has been launched against your products and will continue until the offensive ending of this commercial is expurgated!
Sincerely,
HolierThanThou@REDACTED.com
This act of social conscience was generated by a semiautonomous
semantics engine.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Actual content of an e-mail sent to the Volkswagen Corporation:
From: Dr. J.L.B. Smith (not my real name)
I'm writing to strenuosly object to your recent commercial in which a Volkswagen's full size spare tire is compared to the famous rediscovered fossil fish, the Coelacanth
This surprising survivor of the 350 million year old sub-class Crossopterygii, or "lobed-finned fish," which was rediscovered in 1938, could certainly be described as the classic textbook case of a rediscovered species, and one of the inspirations of
"Lost World" mythology that pervades the fantasy of our culture to this day. Anyone who has the slightest interest in things biological, anyone who finds the tiniest fascination in evoloutionary theory or the possibility of living fossils such as the Loch Ness monster knows of the Coelacanth. Apt pupils learn of our carnivorous, hollow-spined (the literal meaning of its Greek name) friend before they hit fourth grade. In short, EVERY DAMN PERSON WHO IS GOING TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR LITTLE JOKE ALREADY GETS IT.
So why in Almighty God's name does this almost moderately clever commercial spoil its impact by the little lecture on what the Coelacanth is? This clumsy maneuver not only destroys the comic timing of the commercial with the shoddy cocktail party comedian's bad habit of explaining the punch line, but it insults the intelligence of
viewer most likely to be moved by the commercial's particular tack.
I'm sick and tired of corporations insulting my intelligence every time I turn on the damn television, particularly manufacturers of weird, silly little cars. The Kingdom Come Institute is a Large, Organized Resistance dedicated to a less stupid society and this kind of monkey business won't be tolerated. Be informed that a full-scale boycott has been launched against your products and will continue until the offensive ending of this commercial is expurgated!
Sincerely,
HolierThanThou@REDACTED.com
This act of social conscience was generated by a semiautonomous
semantics engine.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
F****** Pervert
Vexing Humans Method Twelve was deleted for the following reason:
CONTENT
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
CONTENT
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
economic terrorism
I often get depressed by the incredible lack of imagination displayed by most revolutionaries. Most fall into one of two categories, those who advocate mass violent coup de etat and those who essentially advocate a lot of ineffectual bitching. In the first category we find, for instance, the revolutionary communist party... and we can all see how that turned out. They never figured out that the ends never justify the means because there are no ends, only means. On the other side, animal rights activists. Pansy demonstrations and petty vandalism ain't never gonna get people to stop eating meat, dupes, and as long as a person is willing to have an animal killed to eat is certainly not going to object to them being cut into if there's even a remote chance that it's going to save their ass from cancer some day.
Economic terrorism is perfectly open to any group that can organize a million members, and what's more, it's legal. Try this at home!
1. Gather a million people who agree with you about a certain point of view. Let's say, you want to take a swipe at proctor and gamble because they're so damn mean to bunnies.
2. Over the six months, get your hands on as much p&g stock as you can. In this day and age of easy high-interest electronic credit and internet trading, this will be easy as pie. Just put out a message to your minions: I intend to buy p&g stock from January 2000 through June 2000. Not advocating anything: just announcing an intention that is presented in a format that allows a tacit understanding of goals. Hint: this doesn't work very well unless you spend few thousand dollars. Committment is never cheap, kids.
3. Then, over the next six months, same thing, announce an intention to start buying the target company's product. Not all at once, but on a progressively rising curve. Your final six month expenditure should match, more or less, your stock purchases. A simple equationary guide: divide your total intended purchase amount over the 6 months by 63. That amount is your X. First month, spend 1X. Second month, 2X. Third month, 4X...and so on, 8X and 16X and 32X. Simple stuff. If you want to refine further you can take any given month's calculated amount, and run the same pattern, dividing by 15 and running the pattern up to the fourth iteration, 8X. The point is to induce an artificial geometric expansion in income. Believe me, they'll notice, but they'll just assume it's something they're doing right and what's more they'll project into the future and make business plans accordingly.
Stock up, buy things you use and that will keep well. That way you don't really waste any money. of course the terrible thoughts of the poor wittle bunny wabbits being towtuwed may make it difficult for you to stomach using the products.
4. Stop buying product. This can be more difficult than it seems. You have to be assiduous, cut them off completely. Start scanning for "earnings drop" stories in the financial press. As soon as you see a couple, publish a small segment on the same forum you've made the prior two announcements.
5. On that signal, sell all stock as quickly as possible.
See, a million smart revolutionaries who are minimally organized can do pretty much what they want. Our whole system runs on the graces of four billion 700 million stupid, disorganized people and is run by 300 million evil, greedy ones. But there's still a thousand million of us who ought to know better. Think about those thousand points of light.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Economic terrorism is perfectly open to any group that can organize a million members, and what's more, it's legal. Try this at home!
1. Gather a million people who agree with you about a certain point of view. Let's say, you want to take a swipe at proctor and gamble because they're so damn mean to bunnies.
2. Over the six months, get your hands on as much p&g stock as you can. In this day and age of easy high-interest electronic credit and internet trading, this will be easy as pie. Just put out a message to your minions: I intend to buy p&g stock from January 2000 through June 2000. Not advocating anything: just announcing an intention that is presented in a format that allows a tacit understanding of goals. Hint: this doesn't work very well unless you spend few thousand dollars. Committment is never cheap, kids.
3. Then, over the next six months, same thing, announce an intention to start buying the target company's product. Not all at once, but on a progressively rising curve. Your final six month expenditure should match, more or less, your stock purchases. A simple equationary guide: divide your total intended purchase amount over the 6 months by 63. That amount is your X. First month, spend 1X. Second month, 2X. Third month, 4X...and so on, 8X and 16X and 32X. Simple stuff. If you want to refine further you can take any given month's calculated amount, and run the same pattern, dividing by 15 and running the pattern up to the fourth iteration, 8X. The point is to induce an artificial geometric expansion in income. Believe me, they'll notice, but they'll just assume it's something they're doing right and what's more they'll project into the future and make business plans accordingly.
Stock up, buy things you use and that will keep well. That way you don't really waste any money. of course the terrible thoughts of the poor wittle bunny wabbits being towtuwed may make it difficult for you to stomach using the products.
4. Stop buying product. This can be more difficult than it seems. You have to be assiduous, cut them off completely. Start scanning for "earnings drop" stories in the financial press. As soon as you see a couple, publish a small segment on the same forum you've made the prior two announcements.
5. On that signal, sell all stock as quickly as possible.
See, a million smart revolutionaries who are minimally organized can do pretty much what they want. Our whole system runs on the graces of four billion 700 million stupid, disorganized people and is run by 300 million evil, greedy ones. But there's still a thousand million of us who ought to know better. Think about those thousand points of light.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The original 4 Track Mind Manifesto
Brain in about four tracks, feeling =dangerously out of phase with surroundings,= One track's the dull and narrow progress of the days, notes with displeasure that tomorrow brings, oh, fatigue likely, the dullness of being at work, churning out dull and distasteful fact sheets, mumbling and bumbling and futzing around, getting through. Just, it's not so bad right now, so nothing aching about it, just that part of my mind, aware that, truth be told, I would prefer not to.
Another portion concerned with her, and that is a godawful dead end, an unexemplary mix of feeble twitches, yeah... Just, it's very basic, the basic giving up, yet still wishing and hoping, yet so much there's just not a thing there. Nothing was solved. I feel right with the decision I made, not to spring the mine on her, I'm glad I omitted, learned my lesson, yeah, but there it is. I dunno even where it's coming from, it's senseless. And I feel foolish, and I do so hate to feel foolish. Can't help it, can't help asking, why isn't she thinking about me the way I'm thinking about her? Twiddle-dee-dum, anyway, not, that's that. If only.
a note aside from the present time: we're married now
One part tackles the eternal verities, considers thoughts. patterns, all the major questions that seem so remote from the majority of my day to day, and so, so much more interesting.
And yet one more, oh, flips channels on my personal history channel, throwing me a choice moment to ponder every now and then.
And then the evening is over and for a little while all obligations perceived and real (?) can be suspended and I can let these channels of thought loose, fret throught them and fall slowly asleep.
I'm not exactly unhappy, but I am still searching for a better way.
this ends the component of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Second Model
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Another portion concerned with her, and that is a godawful dead end, an unexemplary mix of feeble twitches, yeah... Just, it's very basic, the basic giving up, yet still wishing and hoping, yet so much there's just not a thing there. Nothing was solved. I feel right with the decision I made, not to spring the mine on her, I'm glad I omitted, learned my lesson, yeah, but there it is. I dunno even where it's coming from, it's senseless. And I feel foolish, and I do so hate to feel foolish. Can't help it, can't help asking, why isn't she thinking about me the way I'm thinking about her? Twiddle-dee-dum, anyway, not, that's that. If only.
a note aside from the present time: we're married now
One part tackles the eternal verities, considers thoughts. patterns, all the major questions that seem so remote from the majority of my day to day, and so, so much more interesting.
And yet one more, oh, flips channels on my personal history channel, throwing me a choice moment to ponder every now and then.
And then the evening is over and for a little while all obligations perceived and real (?) can be suspended and I can let these channels of thought loose, fret throught them and fall slowly asleep.
I'm not exactly unhappy, but I am still searching for a better way.
this ends the component of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Second Model
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
An inauspicious number, quoth Dr. Khan
thirteenth vision
Striving to avoid bad luck, I'll keep my mouth shut tight, and avoid telling tales of the scientists and what they don't know, of the secrets we've lost in our headlong rush into oblivion. I quote: the sage walks away from the answerless questions.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Striving to avoid bad luck, I'll keep my mouth shut tight, and avoid telling tales of the scientists and what they don't know, of the secrets we've lost in our headlong rush into oblivion. I quote: the sage walks away from the answerless questions.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
record of a thousand hours imagined, wasted
After, say, 5 years - realtime - 260 weekends, a thousand hours of play, in half a year the final adventure takes shape. They are equipped with some considerable power, the fate of the very world at stake, the dark designs of evil set fully out, the foe revealed at last, they march on. Minions assault, are destroyed, the characters face insane obstacles and must use every tool in their arsenal to overcome. Finally, at the great juxtaposition, they cross into the pits and darkness of the realms of evil, face a great and supernatural foe. For him, they must fight together with unimaginable precision, practically thinking as one, and by a fantastic effort, the expenditure of every ounce of strength and magic, the spilling of their life to the very limit of constitution they stand, battered, near death, resources gone... Yet triumphant. Some great evil foe lies, with some artifact of good, some great weapon buried in his chest, its last magic gone.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
bursts through the chest in a stunning eruption of gore
...it's all a waste: woke this morning with the grim knowledge of the alien within:
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
what dreams may come?
This nation is doomed, doomed by dumb ideas and bad choices, limited imagination, and a glossy veneer of can do insistence hiding the whole claptrap rube goldberg machine.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
UNPLUG
"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."
Mary Chase, Harvey
As a piece of meaningless aside personal trivia, I played Dr. Chumley in a stage production of said play when I was in high school. By my own estimation I was a mediocre actor.
The internets have been putting me in mind of that quote, frequently, as of late. I see the urge to be oh so smart everywhere, I feel it flowing through my own veins like bad cholesterol looking for a warm berth to set up shop and group for a future heart attack. And I realize a simple but very difficult fact: I have come to loathe and despise rhetoric.
And it seems to me like rhetoric is running this world, an engine fueled by an unending supply of human deficiency.
I gotta go. I won't be able to supply anything I implied, promised, or threatened with regards to this misbegotten writing experiment. Not here, not anywhere. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe someday, when I have become more pleasant, I will start something new. Right now I need to unplug.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Mary Chase, Harvey
As a piece of meaningless aside personal trivia, I played Dr. Chumley in a stage production of said play when I was in high school. By my own estimation I was a mediocre actor.
The internets have been putting me in mind of that quote, frequently, as of late. I see the urge to be oh so smart everywhere, I feel it flowing through my own veins like bad cholesterol looking for a warm berth to set up shop and group for a future heart attack. And I realize a simple but very difficult fact: I have come to loathe and despise rhetoric.
And it seems to me like rhetoric is running this world, an engine fueled by an unending supply of human deficiency.
I gotta go. I won't be able to supply anything I implied, promised, or threatened with regards to this misbegotten writing experiment. Not here, not anywhere. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe someday, when I have become more pleasant, I will start something new. Right now I need to unplug.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
wait for the call
I don't know if I believe I have a calling any more. I think some people are called to do something specific, at least in terms of their life's work, but obviously not everyone is. I guess you can argue that everyone has one and some people just never find or heed theirs. Like all these sorts of hypothetical absolutes, though, all sorts of troubling real-world concerns come up when you try to apply the categorical imperative (who's going to clean all the toilets?).
When I graduated from high school my biology teacher wrote something in the card he gave me to the effect that a person as smart as I was had an obligation to contribute something to the world. Such thoughts haunt me now, but at the time I just considered it foregone conclusion that I would go to the magic halls of learning and be exposed to all the far-out truth and the Path Would Become Plain. It occurs to me as I write this that I have really staked out college in my mind as the territory where this shift occured, and I would probably do well to somehow expurgate whatever hang-ups I'm managing to have left about those four years after a good 12 more have passed. Still: I can say that college was the last time I had that feeling - confidence, you might say, that that call was coming, inevitable.
But really what has it done for me? Today I was checking out the new central library, and I was browsing the whole "how to choose a career" section, and it just made me sick to even think of reading any of these books, well-intentioned though they may be. I've read so many books. But what book can tell you an answer that doesn't exist? You have to consider that possibility. Maybe some people are just wired that way and others are not.
In any event, today I felt like establishing my independence from it. I've second guessed my decisions enough trying to spot the Path hiding in the thickets of real life. Maybe there is no future, no goals, no Proper Place. Maybe it really all is just the moment we are in, and what we are, in it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
When I graduated from high school my biology teacher wrote something in the card he gave me to the effect that a person as smart as I was had an obligation to contribute something to the world. Such thoughts haunt me now, but at the time I just considered it foregone conclusion that I would go to the magic halls of learning and be exposed to all the far-out truth and the Path Would Become Plain. It occurs to me as I write this that I have really staked out college in my mind as the territory where this shift occured, and I would probably do well to somehow expurgate whatever hang-ups I'm managing to have left about those four years after a good 12 more have passed. Still: I can say that college was the last time I had that feeling - confidence, you might say, that that call was coming, inevitable.
But really what has it done for me? Today I was checking out the new central library, and I was browsing the whole "how to choose a career" section, and it just made me sick to even think of reading any of these books, well-intentioned though they may be. I've read so many books. But what book can tell you an answer that doesn't exist? You have to consider that possibility. Maybe some people are just wired that way and others are not.
In any event, today I felt like establishing my independence from it. I've second guessed my decisions enough trying to spot the Path hiding in the thickets of real life. Maybe there is no future, no goals, no Proper Place. Maybe it really all is just the moment we are in, and what we are, in it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
The Hour that Stretches
Ah, I keep trying to forge ahead... with whatever this is, long neglected, with the fairly secret song of the day blog, long neglected, with the phree musique blog, which is pushing a month past getting back online from its summer vacation...
"I'm tired of waiting for the moment that never comes
while I watch you making millionaires of bums..."
Why write? I have my own reasons to write, right now, and I could sketch them out fairly easily, comprehensibly. I don't really want to, though. Because it crosses into the personal in a way I don't really feel like exposing, basically. Stay cryptic, stay safe, it all looks artier that way anyway, right?
I used to keep a journal. I guess I still keep it, in the sense that I still possess all of the books, thousands of all but illegible (to anyone but, mostly, myself - even I am baffled by my handwriting at times) but I don't write it anymore, haven't for a long, long time. Between late high school and early post college I wrote almost every day. I think I've gone over this before. A lot of recent postings are enigmatic extractions of those pages.
This is about the day I died.
June 24, 1994
"I've been half avoiding this for hours now, ever since I got the half assed notion (of the variety I'm prone to and find myself helpless to shake) that it was time to write the "big one," the mind numbingly accurate entry that would blitzkrieg the past seventeen years and mark the End of an Era.
Obviously that kind of thinking is setting yourself up for a fall: and I don't relish the thought of sitting down to that kind of task with the iron cast knowledge that within twenty lines I would have hopelessly mired myself in a sea of meaningless digressions.
Still, life is composed of these kinds of foul paradoxes: the fact that concentrating on the goal fouls the journey that allows you to attain it (the pustulent cloud hanging over this insane issue of my "purpose" in life), the problem of justifying gracious mercy with the need for justice (the final issue that has probably forever screwed my chances of finding a place in any acceptable religious group), relativism versus objectivity, the necessity of pain for the existence of pleasure... The list goes on and on..."
But not so much as I do. Honestly, I came here with the idea of transcribing the whole of that entry... but my god. It goes on. And on. And ON. Nineteen pages. Of course, this was during the brief hiatus I spent at my parents' (then) home in Montevideo, MN between college ending and my entry into "real life" that began with the move to the city I've lived in ever since, Minneapolis MN. I didn't have anything better to do with my time and I could sleep as long as I wanted to. Now there is this small human being slumbering peacefully above and over my left shoulder, who likes to get up around six thirty, seven, and the days of my staying up all hours and dragging my ass out of bed late late in the morning are done. I've got no problem with that. But though I question the wisdom of those long ago writing jags, and despite the relative surfeit of freedom that allowed them, I can't help admire a certain tenaciousness in tackling this sort of ill defined attempt at completion at all. Cockroaches and beetles are discussed, the break up of a relationship, college, many visitations and commentations of journal entries from the four years prior, and a long, long commentary on an episode of the British sci-fi comedy serial Red Dwarf called "Thanks for the Memory" (which I incorrectly remember at the time as "In Memory of Lise Campbell" - in which the crew of the titular space craft discover that they have lost a significant period of their immediate past memories. They follow a signal trace from their ship's black box to an alien moon where they find a grave with a marker stating "To the memory of Lise Yates," who turns out to be a woman one of the crew members dated when he lived on earth (which, given the premise of the show, was 3 million years in the past). It's not actually that important.
"In the end, the lost day(s) plot in science fiction has always gotten me, I don't know why. It has the capacity to give me a serious case of the willies. There is something about that scene when they come upon that inexplicable (at that point) tomb, commemorating a girl from Lister's memory, a grave containing memories. Something else, a scene after Rimmer has realized his memory is false - out on some kind of observation deck... but that eludes my memory
Maybe it's nothing. Anyway: so much for rambling preamble."
I watched the episode several times since, in this wondrous era where the most obscure rental DVDs are mailed to me upon request. But I could not pin down that feeling, whatever it was I saw and wrote about and then wrote about writing about. You can replay the tape, but you can never recapture the moments. When I first saw that, oh, yes, I remember those times very well. It was the summer after my senior year of high school, and I was on fire. I'd earned a full ride to college and I believed in my heart that I would find all the answers there. Red Dwarf was something I happened upon, dwelling in merry obscurity (from my tiny town hick perspective, I know now it was well known and had quite a following, but in little Montevideo it was the sort of completely obscure thing I delighted in) on late night television, a weakly received signal of the cities' public television station (good old channel 2), gift of the ridiculous complicated aeriel on top of the house you almost never see any more in the era of cable and sattelite.
And I am here, now, thinking, oh man, here I go again.
But no, no, I can wrap this up right quick, there will be no nineteen pages here. The briefest sketch. I know that I am doing the same thing here, now, in this brave new century that seems to me to be going so badly wrong, but is probably not that much worse (or better) than the last, as I did some twelve years ago. I called it a "my character assassination and the final suicide of self-concept," I was writing under the influence of the introduction to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 in which he engages in a similar sort of announcement of the end of his "first life..." like everything, that reads much differently today, now doesn't it?
Just this: the college thing didn't really work out for me and I was trying to deal with it.
All I was doing in that long spool of handwritten text was searching for a moment, and that is all I am doing today. I think I understand it a bit better now, but I don't know that the impulse is any less misbegotten.
"There is not much else to say.
Except this:
There is no use trying to describe the eerie sensation of coming upon that shallow grave where you tried for once and all to bury your past, your memories. At best, you may end up by discovering that nothing is ever really lost... and that the pieces were always falling into place, if only you knew. But that is another, longer story. The task for the moment, as always, is to close the box and get on with the first day of your New Life - which is every day."
So let it be written, so let it be done.
JMH #2, R.I.P. 6/24/06
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
"I'm tired of waiting for the moment that never comes
while I watch you making millionaires of bums..."
Why write? I have my own reasons to write, right now, and I could sketch them out fairly easily, comprehensibly. I don't really want to, though. Because it crosses into the personal in a way I don't really feel like exposing, basically. Stay cryptic, stay safe, it all looks artier that way anyway, right?
I used to keep a journal. I guess I still keep it, in the sense that I still possess all of the books, thousands of all but illegible (to anyone but, mostly, myself - even I am baffled by my handwriting at times) but I don't write it anymore, haven't for a long, long time. Between late high school and early post college I wrote almost every day. I think I've gone over this before. A lot of recent postings are enigmatic extractions of those pages.
This is about the day I died.
June 24, 1994
"I've been half avoiding this for hours now, ever since I got the half assed notion (of the variety I'm prone to and find myself helpless to shake) that it was time to write the "big one," the mind numbingly accurate entry that would blitzkrieg the past seventeen years and mark the End of an Era.
Obviously that kind of thinking is setting yourself up for a fall: and I don't relish the thought of sitting down to that kind of task with the iron cast knowledge that within twenty lines I would have hopelessly mired myself in a sea of meaningless digressions.
Still, life is composed of these kinds of foul paradoxes: the fact that concentrating on the goal fouls the journey that allows you to attain it (the pustulent cloud hanging over this insane issue of my "purpose" in life), the problem of justifying gracious mercy with the need for justice (the final issue that has probably forever screwed my chances of finding a place in any acceptable religious group), relativism versus objectivity, the necessity of pain for the existence of pleasure... The list goes on and on..."
But not so much as I do. Honestly, I came here with the idea of transcribing the whole of that entry... but my god. It goes on. And on. And ON. Nineteen pages. Of course, this was during the brief hiatus I spent at my parents' (then) home in Montevideo, MN between college ending and my entry into "real life" that began with the move to the city I've lived in ever since, Minneapolis MN. I didn't have anything better to do with my time and I could sleep as long as I wanted to. Now there is this small human being slumbering peacefully above and over my left shoulder, who likes to get up around six thirty, seven, and the days of my staying up all hours and dragging my ass out of bed late late in the morning are done. I've got no problem with that. But though I question the wisdom of those long ago writing jags, and despite the relative surfeit of freedom that allowed them, I can't help admire a certain tenaciousness in tackling this sort of ill defined attempt at completion at all. Cockroaches and beetles are discussed, the break up of a relationship, college, many visitations and commentations of journal entries from the four years prior, and a long, long commentary on an episode of the British sci-fi comedy serial Red Dwarf called "Thanks for the Memory" (which I incorrectly remember at the time as "In Memory of Lise Campbell" - in which the crew of the titular space craft discover that they have lost a significant period of their immediate past memories. They follow a signal trace from their ship's black box to an alien moon where they find a grave with a marker stating "To the memory of Lise Yates," who turns out to be a woman one of the crew members dated when he lived on earth (which, given the premise of the show, was 3 million years in the past). It's not actually that important.
"In the end, the lost day(s) plot in science fiction has always gotten me, I don't know why. It has the capacity to give me a serious case of the willies. There is something about that scene when they come upon that inexplicable (at that point) tomb, commemorating a girl from Lister's memory, a grave containing memories. Something else, a scene after Rimmer has realized his memory is false - out on some kind of observation deck... but that eludes my memory
Maybe it's nothing. Anyway: so much for rambling preamble."
I watched the episode several times since, in this wondrous era where the most obscure rental DVDs are mailed to me upon request. But I could not pin down that feeling, whatever it was I saw and wrote about and then wrote about writing about. You can replay the tape, but you can never recapture the moments. When I first saw that, oh, yes, I remember those times very well. It was the summer after my senior year of high school, and I was on fire. I'd earned a full ride to college and I believed in my heart that I would find all the answers there. Red Dwarf was something I happened upon, dwelling in merry obscurity (from my tiny town hick perspective, I know now it was well known and had quite a following, but in little Montevideo it was the sort of completely obscure thing I delighted in) on late night television, a weakly received signal of the cities' public television station (good old channel 2), gift of the ridiculous complicated aeriel on top of the house you almost never see any more in the era of cable and sattelite.
And I am here, now, thinking, oh man, here I go again.
But no, no, I can wrap this up right quick, there will be no nineteen pages here. The briefest sketch. I know that I am doing the same thing here, now, in this brave new century that seems to me to be going so badly wrong, but is probably not that much worse (or better) than the last, as I did some twelve years ago. I called it a "my character assassination and the final suicide of self-concept," I was writing under the influence of the introduction to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 in which he engages in a similar sort of announcement of the end of his "first life..." like everything, that reads much differently today, now doesn't it?
Just this: the college thing didn't really work out for me and I was trying to deal with it.
All I was doing in that long spool of handwritten text was searching for a moment, and that is all I am doing today. I think I understand it a bit better now, but I don't know that the impulse is any less misbegotten.
"There is not much else to say.
Except this:
There is no use trying to describe the eerie sensation of coming upon that shallow grave where you tried for once and all to bury your past, your memories. At best, you may end up by discovering that nothing is ever really lost... and that the pieces were always falling into place, if only you knew. But that is another, longer story. The task for the moment, as always, is to close the box and get on with the first day of your New Life - which is every day."
So let it be written, so let it be done.
JMH #2, R.I.P. 6/24/06
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
33 Associates
I'm cleaning out all of the clutter but I couldn't just bring myself to delete 33 Associates entirely. This was the grand experiment wherein I opened magical instant publishing to all comers. A total of two people volunteered to participate. If either of these people ask me to take down either of their two entries each I will of course do so, otherwise, they can live here until the world ends, or Google goes belly up - whichever comes first.
Poems from the Past by Ruth Hamlow
ETHNOECCENTRIC
I wake up
in India
lying on someone else's iron bedstead
on someone else's bed of nails.
I go fire-walking
with complete faith
in the imperviousness of my flesh.
I lay my feet on petals of red coals.
Rosebuds blossom between my toes.
I begin to notice
that life walks
in the body
of some sacred cow
chewed like a cud
swallowed and digested
four times
fertilizing the tired earth
lighting cook fires
growing shapeless with time
ground down to a powder
a dust that millions of pilgrims
walk on
journeying to any
roadside shrine.
PAST LIVES
The lovesick novice
fanatic acolyte
penning the unsent
unread letter
in the flowered journal
velum leaves
dropping
where I tore those pages away.
The white-dress
posy-and-poem recluse.
The suicide
wrapped in her negligee
of see-through confessions.
The virgin virago
agnostic atheist pagan
drunken feminist
gin-and-tonic connoisseur
bloody barstool
vegetarian
plotting the ultimate
revenge fantasy
to win him back.
The temptress
astride her own power
two-fisted high priestess
sacrificing her own heart
to the idol
with feet of clay.
The midnight poet
autoerotic sensualist
fondling words
scattered across
the mile wide bed
cold comfort
three hours
until dawn.
TiVo and Commercial Skipping (commentary by Jack Wiley)
The beauty of recording TV is being able to skip the
commercials. There is a rumor that such activity will
become criminal though. As such rumors go, they
spread like crazy on the Internet. People "pass it
on" without actually reading anything.
First, Replay TV, like TiVo used to have a 30 second
commercial skip feature. The company was sued by
broadcasters and decided to remove the feature. This
lawsuit was only against the company, not the users of
Replay TV. It is still not a crime to FFWD.
There is a bill in Congress called the Intellectual
Property Protection Act (hr 2391). This one bill is
actually composed of eight different bills. Some of
the bills deal with piracy and file sharing. For
example it would be a criminal offense to bootleg a
movie (record a movie at the theater.) Another part
is called the Family Video Act and is designed to
protect people from watching the whole movie.
For example, if you are at home and want to skip a
portion of objectionable material, you may do so
without being a criminal assuming that you are doing
so with your legal copy. Manufacturers may also
produce censored copies of movies, where the
objectionable portion is removed or "made
imperceptible." This would be similar to buying a CD
at Walmart where the explicit language has been dubbed
over.
The reason that this got out of hand is that Senator
John McCain put a hold on the bill, and issued a
statement saying:
"I fear that the very exemption designed to achieve
this laudable goal simultaneously creates an
implication that certain basic practices that
consumers have enjoyed for years -- like
fast-forwarding through advertisements -- would
constitute criminal copyright infringement."
There is nothing in the bill that specifically targets
commercial skipping as criminal. In fact it would have
to be a BIG stretch to imply that. The bill proposal
uses this language:
"the making of limited portions of audio or video
content of a motion picture imperceptible by or for
the owner or other lawful possessor of an authorized
copy of that motion picture in the course of viewing
of that work for private use in a household..."
In other words it says you are not a criminal if you
skip any part of the MOVIE. That could imply that you
are a criminal if you skip anything that is NOT the
movie. Like I said, its a big stretch.
All the hype out there on the Internet has been
promoting this bill as that of a "police state" where
FFWDing your DVDs would be a crime. This idea is
almost an urban legend since the Internet has
converted a "potential implication" into a "probable infraction."
On Demand Video (commentary by Jack Wiley)
The worst part about TV is the commercials. The
second worst part is having to wait for a specified
time in order to watch a show. Now that most TV shows
are available on DVD, both of these problems can go
away, provided that you are willing to wait.
Imagine Growing up with no commercials on TV. The
goal of commercials is to convince you that you are
inadequate as you are, and their product can make you
better. This is especially true with children's toy
commercials. They make toys look way better than they
really are.
With a DVD library we can watch most TV shows older
than one year. We can watch them in the correct
order, and without commercials. We can share with our
families the classics from our childhood like:
Battlestar Galactica, The Dukes of Hazzard, The
A-Team, Knight Rider, and Star Trek. We can also
revisit serials that we may have missed such as Dallas
and Twin Peaks. Some classic shows are commonplace on
cable however they are actually cut down to allow more
time for commercials.
The main problem with serial shows is that they are
difficult to understand after missing an episode. A
modern serial is the show "24." Every episode is a
cliffhanger so the viewers will come back. All you
have to do is wait a year and the whole season will be
on DVD. Then you can watch it at your own pace. And
with episodes 42 min. long the time savings is
considerable. Screaming kids? Just hit Pause.
Poetry by Ruth Hamlow
BETRAYAL
Aroused
from its long hibernation
the lake opens
a wide blue eye
to meet
the unblinking gaze
of a clear sky.
After four days
of warm nights
lulled by the muted rush
of running water
I awaken
painfully curled
against the cold.
Reluctant
I pull out the winter coat
the cap and gloves
finally rejecting
their meager protection
as useless.
As I leave
I turn to see
the lake
laid out below me
a pale drowned man
the vibrant eye
closed
by the impassive hand
of winter.
Grief stricken
I am suddenly uncertain
of day and date
as if time
were moving backward
or had stopped
as motionless
as the stilled waves
frozen in their rippling return
to shore.
WINTER AGAIN
I am lying in bed
cataloging
my aches
with perverse enjoyment
undecided
if the pain
under my eyelids
might not be pleasurable.
My rough and
fickle lover
whines and hisses
outside.
He insinuates himself
through the minute cracks
around the pane
but I turn my back
to the window
refusing him admittance
beneath the covers.
Later
I will go out,
my body shrinking
in revolted anticipation
of the first slap
of wind and rain.
I walk
shivering
into his enveloping embrace.
Every nerve ending
is a brittle icicle
with a heart of fire
pumped out
from my protected core.
As I climb
the final hill
I tear off my cap and gloves
baring my stinging flesh
to the last frantic caresses.
Wrenched between
eagerness
and regret
I rush toward
the long-awaited release
of shelter
only to stop at the door
face uplifted
for the final dry kiss
of the first flakes
of snow.
MIDWINTER
I walk through
the dark apartment
turning on lights
as I go--
bedroom
bathroom
kitchen.
In the living room
I open the shades
to the implacable darkness
of a midwinter dawn.
Not enough light
to stumble through my
morning rituals.
Not enough jam
for the dry toast.
Not enough juice
for a full glass--
I drink it down
half-empty.
I walk to work
still in the dark.
The half-melted snow
isn’t enough
to cover nature’s naked frailties.
The grass
lies wet and matted
under a crust of salt and sand.
The river
is half-frozen
the open water
an oozing wound
in the dim halo
of a half-risen sun.
Poems from the Past by Ruth Hamlow
ETHNOECCENTRIC
I wake up
in India
lying on someone else's iron bedstead
on someone else's bed of nails.
I go fire-walking
with complete faith
in the imperviousness of my flesh.
I lay my feet on petals of red coals.
Rosebuds blossom between my toes.
I begin to notice
that life walks
in the body
of some sacred cow
chewed like a cud
swallowed and digested
four times
fertilizing the tired earth
lighting cook fires
growing shapeless with time
ground down to a powder
a dust that millions of pilgrims
walk on
journeying to any
roadside shrine.
PAST LIVES
The lovesick novice
fanatic acolyte
penning the unsent
unread letter
in the flowered journal
velum leaves
dropping
where I tore those pages away.
The white-dress
posy-and-poem recluse.
The suicide
wrapped in her negligee
of see-through confessions.
The virgin virago
agnostic atheist pagan
drunken feminist
gin-and-tonic connoisseur
bloody barstool
vegetarian
plotting the ultimate
revenge fantasy
to win him back.
The temptress
astride her own power
two-fisted high priestess
sacrificing her own heart
to the idol
with feet of clay.
The midnight poet
autoerotic sensualist
fondling words
scattered across
the mile wide bed
cold comfort
three hours
until dawn.
TiVo and Commercial Skipping (commentary by Jack Wiley)
The beauty of recording TV is being able to skip the
commercials. There is a rumor that such activity will
become criminal though. As such rumors go, they
spread like crazy on the Internet. People "pass it
on" without actually reading anything.
First, Replay TV, like TiVo used to have a 30 second
commercial skip feature. The company was sued by
broadcasters and decided to remove the feature. This
lawsuit was only against the company, not the users of
Replay TV. It is still not a crime to FFWD.
There is a bill in Congress called the Intellectual
Property Protection Act (hr 2391). This one bill is
actually composed of eight different bills. Some of
the bills deal with piracy and file sharing. For
example it would be a criminal offense to bootleg a
movie (record a movie at the theater.) Another part
is called the Family Video Act and is designed to
protect people from watching the whole movie.
For example, if you are at home and want to skip a
portion of objectionable material, you may do so
without being a criminal assuming that you are doing
so with your legal copy. Manufacturers may also
produce censored copies of movies, where the
objectionable portion is removed or "made
imperceptible." This would be similar to buying a CD
at Walmart where the explicit language has been dubbed
over.
The reason that this got out of hand is that Senator
John McCain put a hold on the bill, and issued a
statement saying:
"I fear that the very exemption designed to achieve
this laudable goal simultaneously creates an
implication that certain basic practices that
consumers have enjoyed for years -- like
fast-forwarding through advertisements -- would
constitute criminal copyright infringement."
There is nothing in the bill that specifically targets
commercial skipping as criminal. In fact it would have
to be a BIG stretch to imply that. The bill proposal
uses this language:
"the making of limited portions of audio or video
content of a motion picture imperceptible by or for
the owner or other lawful possessor of an authorized
copy of that motion picture in the course of viewing
of that work for private use in a household..."
In other words it says you are not a criminal if you
skip any part of the MOVIE. That could imply that you
are a criminal if you skip anything that is NOT the
movie. Like I said, its a big stretch.
All the hype out there on the Internet has been
promoting this bill as that of a "police state" where
FFWDing your DVDs would be a crime. This idea is
almost an urban legend since the Internet has
converted a "potential implication" into a "probable infraction."
On Demand Video (commentary by Jack Wiley)
The worst part about TV is the commercials. The
second worst part is having to wait for a specified
time in order to watch a show. Now that most TV shows
are available on DVD, both of these problems can go
away, provided that you are willing to wait.
Imagine Growing up with no commercials on TV. The
goal of commercials is to convince you that you are
inadequate as you are, and their product can make you
better. This is especially true with children's toy
commercials. They make toys look way better than they
really are.
With a DVD library we can watch most TV shows older
than one year. We can watch them in the correct
order, and without commercials. We can share with our
families the classics from our childhood like:
Battlestar Galactica, The Dukes of Hazzard, The
A-Team, Knight Rider, and Star Trek. We can also
revisit serials that we may have missed such as Dallas
and Twin Peaks. Some classic shows are commonplace on
cable however they are actually cut down to allow more
time for commercials.
The main problem with serial shows is that they are
difficult to understand after missing an episode. A
modern serial is the show "24." Every episode is a
cliffhanger so the viewers will come back. All you
have to do is wait a year and the whole season will be
on DVD. Then you can watch it at your own pace. And
with episodes 42 min. long the time savings is
considerable. Screaming kids? Just hit Pause.
Poetry by Ruth Hamlow
BETRAYAL
Aroused
from its long hibernation
the lake opens
a wide blue eye
to meet
the unblinking gaze
of a clear sky.
After four days
of warm nights
lulled by the muted rush
of running water
I awaken
painfully curled
against the cold.
Reluctant
I pull out the winter coat
the cap and gloves
finally rejecting
their meager protection
as useless.
As I leave
I turn to see
the lake
laid out below me
a pale drowned man
the vibrant eye
closed
by the impassive hand
of winter.
Grief stricken
I am suddenly uncertain
of day and date
as if time
were moving backward
or had stopped
as motionless
as the stilled waves
frozen in their rippling return
to shore.
WINTER AGAIN
I am lying in bed
cataloging
my aches
with perverse enjoyment
undecided
if the pain
under my eyelids
might not be pleasurable.
My rough and
fickle lover
whines and hisses
outside.
He insinuates himself
through the minute cracks
around the pane
but I turn my back
to the window
refusing him admittance
beneath the covers.
Later
I will go out,
my body shrinking
in revolted anticipation
of the first slap
of wind and rain.
I walk
shivering
into his enveloping embrace.
Every nerve ending
is a brittle icicle
with a heart of fire
pumped out
from my protected core.
As I climb
the final hill
I tear off my cap and gloves
baring my stinging flesh
to the last frantic caresses.
Wrenched between
eagerness
and regret
I rush toward
the long-awaited release
of shelter
only to stop at the door
face uplifted
for the final dry kiss
of the first flakes
of snow.
MIDWINTER
I walk through
the dark apartment
turning on lights
as I go--
bedroom
bathroom
kitchen.
In the living room
I open the shades
to the implacable darkness
of a midwinter dawn.
Not enough light
to stumble through my
morning rituals.
Not enough jam
for the dry toast.
Not enough juice
for a full glass--
I drink it down
half-empty.
I walk to work
still in the dark.
The half-melted snow
isn’t enough
to cover nature’s naked frailties.
The grass
lies wet and matted
under a crust of salt and sand.
The river
is half-frozen
the open water
an oozing wound
in the dim halo
of a half-risen sun.
Monday, April 10, 2006
based on sullen entropy to coin a phrase
The whole world grows tired, tired, tired as hell, tired to death, fit to fall down. We're falling asleep on our feet, in meetings, on the road. An Egyptian pilot fell asleep at the wheel and carried a multitude down with him in his steep dream. Two children fell asleep in school and sleptwalked through their halls, scattering black sand.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
a smile
34/101
when they come to take you
and the guillotine awaits you
greet them with a smile
when it's time to meet your maker
and they beat you blind for being a Quaker
get up and take it with a smile
Nothing is fair and nothing makes sense
We're all getting put up at heaven's expense
and none of it will matter a thousand years hence
so greet the new day with a smile
when the big computer mixes you
and your alien slavelord fixes you
hey wake up with a smile
when the universe enters the big heat death
and you're in pain whenever you piss or take a breath
oh lie down each night with a smile
We're all headed for oblivion anyway
and nobody knows who listens when we pray
so you might as well live in the one day
and meet each moment with a smile
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
when they come to take you
and the guillotine awaits you
greet them with a smile
when it's time to meet your maker
and they beat you blind for being a Quaker
get up and take it with a smile
Nothing is fair and nothing makes sense
We're all getting put up at heaven's expense
and none of it will matter a thousand years hence
so greet the new day with a smile
when the big computer mixes you
and your alien slavelord fixes you
hey wake up with a smile
when the universe enters the big heat death
and you're in pain whenever you piss or take a breath
oh lie down each night with a smile
We're all headed for oblivion anyway
and nobody knows who listens when we pray
so you might as well live in the one day
and meet each moment with a smile
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Twice Seven
The sign.
You know the day, the day you feel like you've waited your whole life, patient as a monk, just biding your time as Buddha whispers "not this" in your ear.
And the world is nothing but strangers smoking cigarettes, and you without a joint, without a mushroom, without a cactus, without anything you will allow yourself to have. Standard misery in a strange town, and you think: this is my message from the stars, a faceless blank ribbon of asphalt, two hours more to get home.
Wait...
In the end, the lesson is the lesson is the lesson is the lesson. You take what you get and do what you can with it. Some day the universe will load a bullet with your name on it and you will die. Nothing else really matters. Noone knows when, and noone knows what comes next. So here, now, you have to let your bad days go and get on with whatever is next.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
You know the day, the day you feel like you've waited your whole life, patient as a monk, just biding your time as Buddha whispers "not this" in your ear.
And the world is nothing but strangers smoking cigarettes, and you without a joint, without a mushroom, without a cactus, without anything you will allow yourself to have. Standard misery in a strange town, and you think: this is my message from the stars, a faceless blank ribbon of asphalt, two hours more to get home.
Wait...
In the end, the lesson is the lesson is the lesson is the lesson. You take what you get and do what you can with it. Some day the universe will load a bullet with your name on it and you will die. Nothing else really matters. Noone knows when, and noone knows what comes next. So here, now, you have to let your bad days go and get on with whatever is next.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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