Nato Thompson pontificates

Boring Story #5

2010-03-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

Cauleen was exhausted. She squeezed her pillow and rested her head into it. Pushing through the din of her Ipod should could hear a voice, " Mr. Entewata, please report to the courtesy phone at gate 7. Mr. Entewata." Cauleen pushed her deeper into the pillow. She sure was cozy. She loved being cozy. She thought about how Mike and her had laid on the bed and watched Dirty Dancing. She had been about as happy as she could ever be. They had made out earlier in the evening and now the good part had come where they just rocked back and forth and spooned. Mike was a good guy. She could probably see herself getting married to him. He seemed ready. His father was a pediatrician and he was studying politics. He had nice friends and he probably wouldn't go bald. And he had felt so nice when they just laid on that bed. All warm. She reached up and tightened the scrunchy in her hair so it pulled her hair back and then, again, pushed her head into her pillow. Below her pillow she could see her feet in her pink slippers. The slippers poked out from beneath her flannel pajama bottoms. And on top she wore her favorite Banana Republic navy blue sweatshirt. It covered her body like a wool blanket. A wool blanket with sleeves. Perfection. She rocked back and forth in her seat and sucked on the straw of her diet coke. She loved diet coke. It was the perfect drink. Carbonated, icey, and like coke, but diet. It was just a bit less than coke but still pleasurable. She wiggled her toes. Her circulation was terrible. The air conditioning in the airport was certainly no help but even at home, her feet were so cold. She had two pairs of socks on and still, she was forced to wiggle. "Mr. Entewata, please report to the courtesy phone at gate 7"

Boring Story #4

2010-03-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

Jack was exhausted. He sat on the stage, under the heat of the blinding lights, trying his best to put on a good public face. But it was too hard. And come to think of it, he didn't care. What did he have to lose anyway? He looked over at his interviewer with teeth as bright as the lights, pale blue Italian blazer, and presidential hair... out of what womb are these men born? The interviewer was sharp, with edges that glistened, and a criss-crossing style that made mince-meat of Jack's empathetic groans. He knew they were killing him but he submitted like a Buddha fat from the harvest. Let them have their fun. I have exploded thousands of times above the horn rimmed glasses of the milk fed, letting my embers shower down over the picnic blankets and into the wet wine mouths of heated up high schoolers. I have made Americans in Iowa croon for the somnambulist sounds of Mizzipi and the walking dead of New York give credence to that ineffable garden out West. I gave them my years and I want nothing in return. What was, is now is, and that my friends..... is the best I'm gonna give ya. He skooched back in his chair and let the murmuring of the interviewer continue.

"Are a significant number of Americans precisely at an age when we enunciated the great society..."

That voice rattled in his head like a hangover. The shark was talking about Americans, hippies, this younger generation that moved along the streets of San Francisco with their placards, and their rights, and their demands. Communists. Most of em. But good kids. They want a just society and who can blame em? But they all have those peevish wimps leading them on, like Lawrence. Ironic really. The tight wads leading the flock and the world putting us together in a hot cross bun. A delicious bun. Maybe it was the great societies food? Paw! He laughed out loud. "No great society!" he guffawed to the shark.

"ie. the society that was actually going to produce politics as well as everything..."

Jack blurts out" As far as I'm concerned," but the shark cuts him off.

"are they disillusioned and does this have to do with the growth of the hippie movement?"

Disillusioned? Of course they are. Everyone is disillusioned. That's being an American. Sad and naff in the dew. Jack went on,

"In the first place, I think the Vietnameese war is nothing but a plot between the north Vietnamese and the south Vietnamese who are cousins to get jeeps in the country." He threw his hand up in the hair. Let them eat that bun. Lawrence. The audience laughed uncomfortably. Man, he was drunk. He knew his joke had a mean spirit in it and well, he felt mean. What was he doing up here anyway? He had written it all down. The words are there.

Sometimes, you just can't get them what they want. Sometimes, you know, you have to work. The spirit of America isn't there for you on a tv tray. You have to put some miles under your shoes, feel the rough skin of the the great lump between Cheyenne and Normal, and let the cold wind blowing from the back of a pick-up truck envelope you. There is a sweetness out there like that on a drunkards lips. Taste it if you can.

He felt himself nodding off.

Boring Story #3

2010-03-18T17:10:00.001-07:00

Melinda was tired. She sat down at the bar and stared at the golf game on the television. What do these guys do once they retire, joked her husband. Golf was from Scotland like her. She had told the young couple just that very thing only a few minutes ago. She missed her cat. He had such personality. He had a meow for every mood. In the morning it was more like mearoww and in the evening it got more sweet like meeeeoow. She had only had him for a year and she already considered him like family. I mean, who has a cat like this? She knew just how to pick him up. One motion with your arm. Up and onto your shoulder. He was black with white paws. Like he has a tuxedo on!

She was drinking scotch and soda and Edgar was absorbed in the game. She looked over at the young couple that was playing darts. Darts were invented in Britain you know. People there have dart boards in their own rooms with the backs of their doors covered in holes. It’s like swiss cheese but of wood. She told the young couple her knowledge about darts. She liked the way her white shawl sort of radiated in the peculiar black light shining at 3:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday. She felt elegant but at the same time, sort of peppy. Fun. You know. Tim, the bartender, was telling a story about almost kicking someone out because they were such knuckleheads. She liked the dog. It had long floppy ears like a lop eared rabbit. It had just been shaved for summer. You wouldn’t want to be a long haired dog like that would you? She put her face down by its mouth, and wrapped her hands around its soft, newly hair-cut, head. “You like your new hair cut don’t you? Don’t you?” She squished her face up real tight and smiled broadly into the dogs saggy face. She loved this. She always loves a good dog. Who doesn’t for Christ’s sake?

She got up from her chair and walked outside. The sky had begun to rain which let the humidity crack open a bit. Edgar would be coming out soon to smoke a butt. She sat on the plastic chair and lit up a Virginia Slim. Her fingernails rapped on the plastic covering of the outdoor tables. The young couple was still playing darts. She loved that dog, but she also loved her cats. Isn’t it great to smell that rain after it hits the ground?

Boring Story #2

2010-03-16T19:02:00.001-07:00

Terry was exhausted. It had been four days and all he had found was an eight year old who already lost an arm. Supplies were getting low and that scared him. The desiccated skyline loomed over him with the blinking caution light pulsing obsessively on the corner. Shattered windows and tipped over garbage cans surrounded his lumbering steps as he made his way back to the hang out space. Such tedium. He would eat and then go back to the room where the other bald ones would just huddle together like bats in a cave. He made his way back to his spot and felt the pulse of the other sweaty bodies next to him. It was like a night club without music. Just a dank sweaty closet in an abandoned bottling plant. He scooched into position and began to undulate his body as well. He gyrated as his bald head bounced back and forth. His mouth opened slightly and he began, with zen like attunement, to moan.

The next evening arrived. He was hungry. His right leg ached from sliding along the floor as he walked. His feet suffered from the numerous calluses he had built up since he had been bitten at the Exxon station three weeks back. Along with the other baldies, he made his way out of the bottling plant and out onto the streets. He headed north toward the suburbs. He liked them. It took an incredibly long time to get there, but he enjoyed the feel of strip malls, cul de sacs and the wide streets. Cities were too dense. Plus, suburbs had meat.

The meat would tend to stay there. They thought of it more like home and if you listened carefully, you could hear sobbing in the parks and playgrounds. You could hear the banging of nails as they still tried to keep you out. Terry would take the freeway to get there. He was just a slow moving car really. If he wasn’t able to make it back before dawn, there were plenty of hang out spaces for the baldies. One was in the back storage area of a CostCo. He liked that one because it smelled like cardboard. There was also the super popular one at the cinemas, but he hated that because the rooms were on a gradient which hurt his bad leg. Plus, when the hang out spaces were popular, he tended to have the unfortunately luck of undulating next to extremely hairy sweaty baldies that took up too much space (both physically and psychologically).

He exited off the freeway into a quiet suburb. The grassy side of the off ramp greeted him. The vines just making their way up the stop signs. One day, he thought, these signs will be covered in vines. One day, after the meat runs out, we will live in a garden again. He didn’t eat vegetables but he wanted to. He lumbered past the Dunken Donuts, and the Taco Bell, past the Walgreens, and the Wells Fargo Bank. He made his way down a side street where could hear the faint sounds of nails pounding into wood. There was fear there. He began his moaning and pushed on coming closer to the sky blue Victorian house with the Ford Bronco parked out front. The curtain abruptly moved as he watched a four by eight sheet of plywood go up suddenly in front of the window. Muffled screams could be heard as he made his way across the front lawn. I hope this works out, he thought as he tried to punch threw the plywood.

His arms were tired and his punches hardly made a dent. The meat sat safely inside. He made his way toward the back yard hoping they had left the back door open but no such luck. The house was secured. He spotted a tabbie cat darting into the neighbor’s yard. They were much too fast for him. The sky was turning light blue and he realized he would be making his way to the Clearview Cinema to undulate. He turned around and headed back.

Boring Story #1

2010-03-15T20:21:00.001-07:00

Kronar was exhausted. His calves ached from the two day climb up the steppes to the encampment. His shoulders burned from carrying the kill of half a dozen hares and an elk hide. It had been a good hunt, but soon enough, he would be back out. Food never seems to last.

He reached the clearing before dawn and his eyes rested on the circle of his tribe cast about on the hard dirt floor. Scattered about like cedar sticks, their bodies rested. Their long brown hair hung over their heads like a dense thicket and the glimmer of their rings and hairpieces reflected the slight glow of the crescent moon sinking along the horizon. They were a wealthy tribe replete with treasures from the lost sea to the edge of the empire. He looked down at his thumb ring. A panther’s claw with a ruby in the center showed him to be king. Morger slept with his hand clasped resolutely on his blade. Magel curled up like a ball at the outer edge of the tribe. Misel, the night’s watch, strode up to him slightly embarrassed that he had, yet again, not heard Kronar’s ascent. He shook his head and waved a finger at Kronar with a slight smile on his lips. Kronar threw him a plum he had procured in the valley and then set down in the middle of the circle for a few hours rest.

His eyes had hardly closed before they were open again to the sound of bodies shuffling. The crisp wet of dawn lingered over his body hair and the smell of morning entered his nose. He got up, feeling his bones crack into place, and dusted himself off. He walked over to Magel and nudged her. She needed to prepare the food for the day as the tribe would certainly be hungry. She would need to get the women together on this. He walked over to Misel and helped him with the fire. There was a special trick to twisting the wood and he showed Misel as best as he could how to do it. It’s all in the wrist and then a steady rhythm. In no time, he had smoke then spark then fire. The leaves and twigs burst into flames. In no time, the smell of smoke would have the entire tribe getting to work.

The men got up and inspected Kronar’s catch that the women laid out along the rope line. Yes, it had been good. The women proceeded to head out toward the river for the cleaning. The men gathered their rucksacks to forage some roots. The magic elder still slumbered under a large bush at the edge of the circle. His snores still ringing loudly with the only other sound being made, that of the crackling fire. Kronar was eager to mate. He grabbed Magel from the women group and led her to the center of the circle. He took her and she let him in as the smoke swirled around them. The magic elders snores blended in with the Magel’s heavy breathing. He rolled over and stared into the clouds. Dinner would be soon.

Recipe for Disaster

2010-03-11T22:56:00.000-08:00

Do not add water
Do not add food
Do not add home
Do not add a good mood

Do not add splashes of sun
Do not add fine friends
Do not add butter, nor bacon, nor bread

Do not add porridge
Nor the steam above the bowl
Do not add flannel underpants
Nor the tenderness they hold

Do not add lime
Do not add dreams
Do not add pickled herring
Do not add cream

Do not add Bob Marley
Do not add fresh cut lawns
Do not add Cinnamon Toast Crunch
Do not add Yoko and John

Do not add bourbon
Do not add leather chair
Do not add cigar
Do not add a nom de guerre

Do not add the banjo
Nor clarinet nor bassoon
Do not add the dance after sunset
To a soaring grand tune

Do not add the moonglow
On the arched back of the sea
Do not add the shade
Of the sycamore tree

Do not add the comfort
That the gentle world lends
Just let the nothing continue
Till the whole feast ends.

The Many

2010-03-11T22:48:00.000-08:00

It began when we were an I. Back when the plenty were the spare. When the rain was but a drop. And so it shall be told.

I would wake up at the end of the day. This was an improvement as it used to be that I would wake up on the shuttle watching the lights of the traffic makes some celestial pattern. My head would be nodding back and forth and suddenly, I was awake. Time went on and my ability to not know where and what was going on improved to the point where I actually made it all the way through work and didn’t wake up till the shuttle was on its way back to my precinct. It was a sullen feeling no coffee nor tea could cure. It’s strange really. The routine of my life was like an autistic kid plunking on one string on an out of tune guitar all day. Plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. It is a song you wouldn’t listen to. Something in the genre of a faucet you can’t fix or the snoring of an elderly man on an airplane.

When life is lived in this truly burned out state, you can play with time in a strange way. For example, as opposed to running in a linear line, you could secretly hopscotch through life. Just kind of bounce around. Each moment you make a pot of coffee is connected to the next moment you make coffee. Each moment you get heart burn is connected to the next moment you have heart burn. Each time you have macaroni and cheese is just one long yellow meal of mac-n-cheese. That morning I was in the midst of one long moment of feeling like a turd. One loooong moment of it. But that day, so it turns out, was special.

A new computer program did it really. I was in the far wing making my calls and checking the G.P.S. when I got word that an agent would be introducing new protocol. I was skeptical. Strangely, I was somehow deeply defensive about the naturally moribund system already in place. More new systems that would confuse the parolees and me making more paperwork for someone to feel important. This business (and it really is a business) is just too corrupt and I don’t even care. I will call it what it is, but I don’t particularly feel bad about it either. It is corrupt. But corruption, my friend, is just gods little way of reminding us that most people want to win. Not me. I lost track of the game a long time ago. So the agent showed up. Despite the look of consternation on my face I must admit feeling a pang of relief. My eyes hurt from staring at the computer too long. My legs felt that familiar end of the day atrophy sensation.

He introduced us to a new program for monitoring parolees. It was called I-Watch and as far as I could tell, that was what it was meant to do. You could simply watch. A modified tool for people whose job it is to look at people. I am a guard by the way. I protect you from them I guess. That is the thing with new programs. They always have some fancy name for something really obvious. I did programming back before I got into this and even worked in the field for a while. I just got laid off because, I kind of stopped caring. In a job like that you have to care even if just a little. So anyway, this obvious program was to allow you to see from the perspective of the parolee. Its purpose was to simplify our checks. We could at any moment know exactly what they were doing and we could always wear these clumsy microphones to talk to the parolee. Simple.

They then read a long list of what were appropriate questions, when it was appropriate to talk, on and on with an even longer and more tedious list of ethical responsibilities. It was one of those moments where in essence they are saying, we just invented an even more invasive technology, but will try to feel less insidious about it by reading a long list of appropriate behaviors that one should, but ultimately not, use. But fine. That is how it is. This new system would replace the calls. It was an obvious improvement. I realized I would no longer be staring at that map of Philadelphia any more. It was almost a part of me. I kissed that part good-bye.

And so I began to be the beta-tester for I-Watch. Initially it really wasn’t that different than making phone calls and watching a map. I would check in with the observant, see them at the quarantine center sitting at a computer doing nothing and would click out. Wasn’t much to talk about really. What would you say? So, are you sitting at your computer? The answer was obviously yes. Although there is something funny about watching someone on a computer in that I would be using a computer to watch someone looking at a computer. We could almost skip one of us or something. Anyway, so I would just click around. Of the fifteen observants I had under my watch, only one of them really did anything worth watching. That was Simon. What made him sort of different and worthwhile was that he would actually use his eyes. He noticed things. Hairline cracks in the sidewalks. Receipts in the gutters. The purses women tucked under their arms. The backs of people’s heads on the train. The flutter of leaves as a wind picked up. As tedious as that all sounds, I found watching the world through his eyes enjoyable. It passed the time.

As the days went on, I found myself increasingly on Simon’s page. Just sitting there. I would start by an early morning scan of the rest and then sort of relax with Simon. It was like cable but a bit different. For one thing, I could talk to him. Not that I did all that much. Not in the beginning. I would just let him know I was there. His cell was humble by most standards. He had these great RESISTANCE posters on the wall from the overthrow that blazed with strident reds and bold letters. He had some African sculptures he had made, a standard single bed with a grey cotton blanket and a bunch of books on horticulture he kept on a shelf. He had a routine as well. He would tie his shoes backwards. Well at least backwards from how I tie mine. He always placed his toothbrush with a clink on the sink. Dink. It was like the timpani in his day. Dink. He always downed his milk in the cafeteria in one motion. Just gone. His day work was a grounds landscaping. Talk about routine. I would watch glassy eyed as he would pull weeds up one after the other. The camera wasn’t perfect resolution and when he would really pick up speed the screen would turn into a swirling ocean of green. Just a blur of methodical movement. Woosh woosh woosh. I enjoyed that. I could see his hands turning up the earth and the roots poking out. You could almost smell it. I would sometimes say to him, you’re working too hard or help him out if I saw him miss something. He appreciated that and well, we began to be friends.

One afternoon, Simon took us on a walk. I had been talking to him about how he needed to mix up his rest-day. He always went to this far corner of this park and would just stare at the sky like he was stoned. But he wasn’t. I would know of course. And I enjoyed staring at that sky for a while. The sun would play dizzying tricks on the clouds and occasionally flocks of birds would make hypnotic specs as they flew by in formation. It was picturesque to say the least. After the first two hours of trying to stay tuned to his zen like meditation I would get fidgety and scroll through the other observants. One of the others, Fran, would avidly do crosswords and I would try to keep up with him. But it wasn’t easy really. I had to enjoy the way he scribbled out the clues as he went along. Frenetic swirling scratches in blue pen. Another observant, Midge, would spend most of his day looking at porn, which, well, is technically against the rules, but I let it slide, because, I kind of liked looking at it too. So, there were some distractions while Simon stared out at the sky. But this afternoon I spoke to Simon and asked if he wouldn’t mind doing something else. He was always very gentle and said he would happily. What would I like to do?

I asked if he wouldn’t mind showing me the people of the quarantine home. Who he liked. Who he didn’t. It would be a sort of human safari with my observant guide. This is Miguel. You will notice his bellbottom jeans, his dirty flannel shirt, his swagger to the left, the smoke stains on his fingers. He balls his fists up when he walks and he likes his shirts to show off the few hairs on his chest. His wallet hangs just above his back pocket with the black leather worn down in the corner. He looks like a tough guy because, well, he is a tough guy. This is Nicholas. He’s constantly discussing Cajun food. He has a slightly reddish beard and bad teeth. His left incisor is sort of yellower than the others. He has tired eyes. The kind that don’t ever seem to wake up. You can hear the southern twang in his voice and his evident pleasure with himself. I would look them over and Simon would whisper his narratives to me. He had a funny way of describing folks. Like me, he didn’t really have much of an opinion of people, good or bad. But he did enjoy describing them. I sometimes would have to tell him to be quiet so I could try to make my own opinion about an inmate. At the end of day, Simon went back to his cell. As he untied his shoes, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind upgrading his quarantine cell. Consider it a tour guide fee. It was perfectly reasonable and I set it up.

And so began that fateful dynamic.

Trading is what we called it. I get his body for a while and I do him favors. I figure of fifteen observants, I could at least have one target of leniency. It was a reasonable tit for tat. It was like getting cable for free without a narrative. I liked to think it was a reality television show without a story. It was just a series of obscure moments connected by a body in space. I would have Simon stare into the dishwasher with the safety door open so I could see the streams of water pour off the plates. Watch the sausage bits cling resiliently to the porcelain before tumbling effortlessly down toward the drainage bin. I was on a water kick for a while. We would go to the pool together and I could watch everyone’s slow limbs treading like they were conducting an aquatic symphony. Watch the crystal white water slap up against the side of the pool. Watch the splash glisten in the fluorescent light as the body of a speedo-wearing child bisects the undulating horizon. Head to a lake, get a canoe, put my head over the side of the boat and just watch the world move below. A rotoscope of smoothed over boulders, pebbles, tadpoles, ripples. A landscape below the landscape with an abundance of glittering golden hues. In return, lets say, Simon’s cell began to look possibly a little too upgraded.

I would go home after work thinking about everything I had seen that day. I would dream of the hubbub and the movement of the men down the narrow hallways. The jiggling of the perspective. The fuzzy edges of the frame. The hypnotic bounce of the camera as it took in a world that was supposedly out there existing. Radiating. I saw myself sitting in that canoe again. My fingers holding onto the metallic boats edge. My hair blowing in that dusk wind. I could feel my index finger on the threads of his shoelaces, tying them up backwards, making perfect bows. I rocked back and forth on that lake and watched the moon push past the sky and plunge down to the earth and buoy back the light.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that the word got out. Fortunately, it was Fran since, well, he was one of the more interesting of the rest. In essence, whether Simon told him or Fran figured out I don’t know, word got out that I was trading favors. I found out when Simon broached the subject with me as he woke up in the morning. Fran didn’t want to rat me out so much as wanted in. He wanted in on the trading. Rat me out or not, I had to comply. I was in a precarious situation. I liked Simon so much, but at the same time, there was an inflation going on with the trading. How much more could I provide without jeopardizing my situation?

I was heading down this path and I knew it was leading toward me getting fired. The same thing happened at my software job. I just began playing solitaire on the computer screen everyday. Watching the brilliant red diamonds lay out on top of the black hole clubs and spades. Often my eyes would unfocus and they were just a blur of stacked ruins. A digital tombstone for my hair’s breath of a life. I barely played. I just enjoyed killing time with a sort of passive aggression bordering on nihilism. Over and over the cards piled up on the screen. Whether I won or lost, I would just keep playing. I entered a wormhole of total dissolution and it felt fine. It wasn’t long after that I lost my job.

In this case, it was the same aggression but it wasn’t nihilism. It was like a dream so vivid you didn’t want to wake. You had to keep sleeping. Hitting snooze over and over as the mood of your slumber overwhelmed you. After considering it, I figured I would use each observant for a different set of desires. Simon would be for watching. Fran for doing. I started off so rudimentary. Laundry. Post office. I then graduated to much better tasks like visiting places I used to go. I decided to pay my niece Chloe a visit. She was my screwed up sister’s daughter who somehow managed to be a genius. For reasons I was never clear on, she liked me. She would make me stupid greeting cards when I would visit her that was so adorable. Like a drawing of ant carrying a leaf with a heading saying, “Small is big.” I have no idea what she talks about but that is part of her charm. So anyway, she was a crossing guard at her school and I just wanted Fran to have her walk him across the street. As part of her duties, she wore a big yellow plastic hat and a silver badge pinned to her shirt. That day, she was wearing a white skirt with snoopy on it and a bandaid on her right knee. Fran waited for the traffic and looked her over for me. She was amazing. I had this urge to tell Fran to pick her up and hug her, but thank God I refrained. That would have been a total disaster. Instead, he calmly walked across the street as she waded out into the road and blew her whistle for him to pass. There she was. Just out there doing her thing. Alone and on auto pilot for a moment in time. I felt a pang of wonderment and fear as I pictured her orchestrating this task in the cold wilderness of this world. How can something so small feel so whimsical and safe in this dread hole of a planet? I admit it was an odd request for Fran to visit Chloe so I really needed to pay him off. He found himself the proud owner of a year’s package of an extra free day per week. But who is kidding whom? A free day for Fran is a free day for me.

I must admit a fear that tickled the back of my throat as we pushed further and further into this symbiotic existence. My body was falling away and I would vacillate between panic and euphoria. I could sense on the horizon something like an afterlife on earth full of religious wonder. Not that I was religious by any stretch, but that I was strangely heading into untrammeled territory. I was an explorer of a psychological terrain heretofore unknown. I stook on a vista looking over a valley so vast and full of new fruits and vegetables, my mouth watered to descend and taste them. I really was on the cusp of something extraordinary. I could feel its importance as I delved deeper. There just wasn’t any stopping.

As time passed, we developed many maneuvers together to make this thing work. Fran and Simon would partner up on projects as I moved deftly between them giving them instructions. We even attempted basketball where I would direct them against other players. Admittedly, basketball was a clunky endeavor but I enjoyed trying it. Video games with people. It felt great. Contrary to every other experience in my life, this one got more interesting the longer I did it. I did occasionally have a desire to use them in what might be considered unethical ways. While I might have them both look at a hot girl from multiple vantage points, I stopped myself from ever acting on anything. These guys were my friends. I didn’t want to get them in trouble. But I could sense the temptation. My distance made my actions sort of, well, fake. I was one step away from moral responsibility. Maybe one step is all it takes. Would god consider this cheating?

But of course good things can not last forever and especially in a crappy job/life like mine. Word came down that I was being reprimanded for giving out too many benefits to the observants. My reward structure (otherwise known to me as my currency) was finally catching the attention of the higher ups. I had to scale back. This news wasn’t popular over in surveillance land, as I had to tell Simon and Fran that frankly the well was dry. They grumbled and Fran and Simon even went so far as to go on strike, refusing to let me tell them what to do. I would look through their eyes and find myself back on crosswords and shoelaces. “Oh no,” I thought. “What a total mess.” I couldn’t go back. Not to that dreary life of semi-living monotony.

I can’t say for sure who thought of it first. It was probably all of us at the same time, but the proposition was put forth that maybe, I could reverse the engineering. Maybe I could trade myself, just as they did? It would require sneaking them some gear but it was all rather simple in and of itself. A basic remote video camera was really all it required. The proposition was that I would trade myself after work and they would trade themselves during. Tit for tat. Maybe I was the tat. Who can say? So this got off to a clunky start. I found myself somewhat embarrassed following their orders as I made my way home on the train. When I would look through Simon’s eyes, he would look at the most amazing things. I, on the other hand, found myself desperate to be an interesting host. Trying to gain that luster of curiosity that seemed to emanate from Simon. Instead, they would use me to do the most banal of daily tasks like delivering goods and doing laundry. I really was a bit of a menial whore, but I acquiesced. This relationship would inevitably evolve.

In those last months, the world of myself, changed in crazy ways. I would have Fran’s dreams and he would have mine. I would hear him cough and cover my mouth. I would see a girl and he would turn his head. We used to have to tell each other with words, but rapidly, we began to develop silent codes. Simple typed instructions like “left” “smile” joy” “pain” would be enough to get the reaction we needed. We were becoming each other and at first I was scared. I was losing track of me. Not only was I losing track of me, but I liked the others more. I wanted out. I wanted another body and I had gained two. I realized that I didn’t need to worry whether Simon was looking at things or I was. Either way, we saw the same thing. We were looking. We were doing things. We were dreaming. It was just these bodies that separated us. Our minds were a dreamy sweet unit. These were my last thoughts. They fell away and I awoke descending into that valley, eating new fruits and vegetables that mankind will taste in abundance soon.

We became a squadron, a team. We learned to compromise in order to make the totality of who we were more potent. The sum of our actions out measured the individual parts in quantities too vast to count. It was an inevitability that was with us all along but only obvious in retrospect. We would look back at the past as thought it was a lost era in time. An era when we had been under a spell of mythic specific bodies. It was an era that was strangely claustrophobic. Now, we were together. Our wings could expand. We had agreed that the job holder would have to quit the job as the network for controlling this didn’t even require us being there. We could make this work anywhere, and why limit ourselves by having a part stuck in one place? We needed to expand and be constantly in mutual trading. We would work simultaneously and escape the banality of shifting between the parts. We became so versed in communications that we acted as one unit. One motion. One body. So the guard job was dropped and we were able to evade the parole by having parts outside the legal jurisdiction.

We gained new members. Their integration into our communication systems took some time, but as we expanded more rapidly, we developed a portion of the team that dealt specifically with integration. While we originally began inside the confines of a parole condition, we rapidly integrated non-parole parts. Free people if you will. The quantities of pleasure grew exponentially as we shared our efforts toward a collective service. Our bodies and minds intertwined in a collective energy so profound, we all could only gasp at the heavenly world that opened up before us.

We expanded rapidly across the free world. We were acutely aware of how strange we must appear to those not integrated into our being. The word got out about a growing cult. That is how they initially thought of us. A cult. So funny. We made agreements to not display any type of behavior too different from the non-integrated. Quietly, however, we were rapidly developing a new language and culture that mystified us. It was critical that we appear to the non-integrated as well, something extremely useful. Something productive. It was the maximizing of their individual efforts that was the lure for them to be integrated. They were so funny in the way they naively accepted their autonomy. They resisted us in the most vengeful terrified ways. As though integration would take their soul away. What a strange world. But how could they know?

I surely didn’t. I suppose I was born somewhere in the first movement. Somewhere around the acceleration phase of forty parts. I am familiar with a hidden origin story where the penal system had forced observation components on individuals. It’s strange, but there was a time when no one was integrated. Just parts everywhere. It is an odd way to start and I can’t say for sure why I am alive. But I am. I am some sort of new being that terrifies the non-integrated like crazy. It bums me out, because I really don’t want to scare them. I realize they are potential parts of me, but I have grown ok with not completely expanding. Its hard staying alive. Some parts of me are so tired of working on the expansion components and other parts are exhausted from procreating new parts. It is like my bodies hurt. Nonetheless, I am excited and scared. The world is so new and as vast. I see it from hundreds of thousands of angles and its luminous magic sparkles bright. It’s like mysterious eyes of a fly. I see in a kaleidoscope that reaches across the world in three dimensions with dumping waterfalls, blowing grass, the whirring of fans, the leaking of faucets, and the benevolent sunsets that bless the skies at all times the world over. The planet’s crisp wonder only magnified and expanded in ways that take your breath away. I have sort of escaped time. More exactly, it has stretched to contain what I am. I am ever and I know I am new. It is true I have a beginning but not clear whither my end. I am not like anything the world has seen, but soon enough the world we see itself through its own precious eyes. They are mine.

Good-Bye to a Riot (previoulsy published in catalogue for On Procession curated by Rebecca Uchill at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

2010-03-11T22:37:00.001-08:00

I remember going to parades as a kid and never quite understanding what was going on. Every time I heard the family was heading out to see the parade, I equated the affair with the rare times I attended church. I felt that creepy uncomfortable feeling you get when you are participating in someone else’s meaningful experience. My family never had the fold out lawn chairs. For that matter, we never had any of the proper gear. No coolers. No sunscreen. No visors with sunglasses. We would hover in the back and I would long for some fried dough. Standing in bored bafflement on a hot summer day, I would listen to the marching band and think, “I hate this music. Who sits back and listens to a marching band?” The marching band reminded me of the high school football teams with their near fascist-like stampede; my supposed peers falling over themselves desperate to enact the grand high school, John Hughes film narrative. The marching band screamed a victorious battle cry for the great blonde beasts of high school power. I would see the Shriners driving around in the little cars buzzing around like little gnomes. Why am I standing on the sidelines? I did like their tiny fezzes propped up on their heads with their tassels wiggling around as they winked at the ladies. But I intuitively sensed this was some hangover from the great generation. A mobile display of the good old days when patriarchal old men gathered together in lodges, watched blue movies with cards, beer and hackneyed Masonic rituals.

What did this have to do with me? I couldn’t understand why my family would stand on the sidewalks of our town and wave at various city dignitaries (the mayor, and the head of city council, and the police chiefs) as they drove by in some convertible Cadillac with their angelic daughters sitting with them. My parents were broke. The city gave us nothing. Boy, this sure feels alienating. Who cares about these people? At the time (the time being when I was 14), I found my mother’s sage advice becoming a reality, “Son, the world is a lot like junior high school. Get used to it.” Our local parades only validated this haunting truism. The parade had been effective in making one thing clear: I was an outsider.

Then, much later, when I was 31, I had the opportunity to participate in a parade. I was volunteering for a small non-profit art space, which had been, for the first time, invited to participate in the local State Street Parade. We held meetings to discuss what our float would look like and came up with a pretty bad idea (I think it was a girl in her bed with haunted monsters jumping out of a closet), but we were all eager to wear monster costumes. As I gathered in the parking lot in our appointed section, I watched the local marching bands getting prepped. The band members’ eyes popping out with painful nervousness. The tuba player fussing with the straps around his bulging belly. I saw the sweet little girls with their batons and their parents excitedly tucking in their outfits. It felt like I was watching my town get all getting gussied up. We were in some back room of the city, intimately choreographing some collective project together. As I marched through the town in an Oscar the Grouch meets Sponge Bob costume, and waved at (and scared) children, threw candy, and attempted to be entertaining, I realized being in a parade was far better than watching one. So many of the towns people were in the parade, we joked that the whole city should join in and we would simply march past each other in an enormous circle parading and looking at each other. Being in the parade, I realized that what I found so gratifying was the simple emotion: look town, I am here. I exist.

If I take my small alienated feelings from my first parades, and then extend them to the gratifying emotions I gained in my monster costume 17 years later, a shimmering line of tension emerges that makes the political power of parades come to light. Moving from a familiar ritual of social alienation (the parade is there to confirm your position as loser) to the center of attention at the center of the city (the parade makes you a winner) is akin to a gateway to junior high heaven. The parade becomes the red carpet of social acceptance. Being in the parade is a statement on the social body that says, “I’m here and I’m part of the grand ‘we’.” Joining a parade, I can only guess, can be a sort of social graduation or urban baptism. From the doldrums of your undignified aberrant outsider position, the parade can jettison your tawdry life into the Pretty-in-Pink limelight. And such an experience clearly has attracted a bevy of ‘outsider’ parades. Gay Pride, Puerto Rican Day Parade, May Day Parade, Cinqo de Mayo, Take Back the Night, and Ku Klux Klan (what is the name of their parade, for that matter?) all represent communities and identities demanding a presence in the fabric of cultural and spatial life in a city. “We’re here! We’re Queer! Get used to it,” the Gay Pride mantra tellingly goes.

Gay Pride was once a parade of liberation. Born out of the Stonewall riots of 1969 in Greenwich Village, this anti-puritanical street festival originally possessed a more severe tone of revolution. The Stonewall Riots erupted when police raided a popular transsexual bar in the Greenwich Village frequented predominately by people of color. In fighting back the police, the legend of the Stonewall riots circulated with an urgent underlying appeal: we will no longer be silent. Originally, part of Gay Liberation Day, the parade which emerged a year after Stonewall retained a productive defiance in its assertion of not only existence for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual community, but more importantly for rights. In the 1980s, the parades shifted away from the term liberation and moved toward Gay Pride. As of the 21st century, the Gay Pride parades are a fixture of contemporary life whose radicalness is still felt, but at the same time feel somewhat different from a rhetoric of revolution or liberation. In fact, tellingly much debate has surfaced on whether or not the parades benefit from being a party of excess or one for rights. What a wonderful tension to wrestle with.

Just previous to the summer of love and its various counter positions, the French political avant-garde association the Situationists were invested in producing alternatives to the social control of the city. They believed that our behaviors and emotions were produced through the control mechanisms of capital (both in terms of visual culture and the design of the city) and they referred to the study of this phenomena as psychogeography. In reaction to the Surrealists position that the imagination derives from the subconscious, the Situationists radically posited that the subconscious was structured by the formation of the city. If one wanted to alter the subconscious, one had to alter their relationship to the city. One of their multiple methods for accomplishing such a profound task was an ambulatory stroll called the derivé. The derivé is simply a walk through the city following ones moods and desires, and in essence, resisting the utilitarian and capitalist structure that moves us through the city. It strikes me as odd that the Situationists never discussed parades. How large groups of individuals moving through space can re-structure the veritable cerebral cortex that is the city. For, clearly, if our relationship to the city is at the core of our self-image, large groups of people collectively dancing, jamming and rollicking through the two lane byways must surely be its ultimate expression. As men in leather buttless pants spank each other, moustached dikes stride sleeveless up main Street USA and towering transsexual gogo dancers smile to the sky, the city’s brain mutates. The IRA and Protestant Orange certainly understood such powers as they wrestled for power with parades through the streets of Belfast to confront and redefining cultural, political, and social territories. When Hitler organized the Third Reich to dramatically trounce the streets of Berlin in cavalcades of swastikas and knee high glistening black boots, he literally felt like the brain surgeon of the urban body.

Maybe the Situatinists didn’t write about parades, because parades require permits. They have to be sanctioned by the state and thus, in some way, are not a dangerous threat. Contrasted with the riot, the parade seems a little more prepped and condoned. The riot on the other hand, feels wild, feverish, aggressive and furious. Rather than casting streamers and chewing gum, the riot runs with guns and torches, smashing private property, igniting and upturning cars. The riot explodes as the disenfranchised crash against the urban body in a sudden and feverish jolt. How enjoyable to think that such raw emotion lurks behind the pageantry of Gay Pride, Puerto Rican Day Parade or May Day. The ghost of a riot haunts the parade. I like to think of the mayor of my town waving goodbye to whatever social upheaval gave birth to its beginning. During the Rose Parade in Pasadena, I can picture the community leaders waving goodbye to the memory of the Watts riots and Rodney King riots. The little hand of the mayor’s daughters turning, robotically, to cast away the memory of the viewers’ liberation like a magicians’ charm. Poof! Good-bye riot. Hello victory march!

It is true that some parades are made as the legitimating stamp of approval for the powerful. We’re here. Our streets. Get used to it. While others, are perpetually in the throws of resistance. The ghost of social tensions and historic trauma feed each parade as a social writing happens with each pace of the foot or revolution of the car wheel. The best of parades, take their ghosts, dress them up, and let them lead. The social unrest becomes the death march of a powerful exaltation affirming life, death, existence and social space. And no city in the United States is more comfortable and skilled in such use of public space as the post-Hurricane Katrina city of New Orleans.

I spent much of last year in this incredible, complicated and culturally dense city. Amongst the wreckage of a community in the throws of social and political turmoil and trauma, I found the robust reality expressed by Michal Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. The parade, in New Orleans, is what the freeway is to Los Angeles. It is the fabric of the city. Traveling precariously between life, death, happiness, and agony, these emotional sojourns meander through the humid streets of the Big Easy beckoning all in attendance to collectively make their own rules. Beads, glitter, horns, body fluids and floats continuously plaster the sidewalks. A buoyancy of the imagination infuses the city’s cartography with possibility. All emotions are re-invented as you march with thousands of New Orleanians to the up temp blasting of the brass bands and the spontaneous eruptions from the increasingly intoxicated crowd; people dancing in front yards, on top of fire hydrants, slapping a stop sign, and in the back of their cars. There is no audience. Everyone participates. The city is a stage.

Almost every weekend in New Orleans, a new neighborhood will throw a parade referred to as a second line. These day-long parades were organized, and many still are, by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, a term used for the community organized social clubs that would band together to assist in funeral marches. The funeral feeds the march. Death is in the air. Like all things in New Orleans, everything is tempered with a deep understanding of tragedy. In these all day second lines, the social order is not only upturned, but one could go so far as to say that the social order is continuing to be defined. What happens in New Orleans is an ongoing dedication to a rule structure not in cahoots with capital or a traditional social order. As second lines maintain a regular schedule, one could say New Orleans runs on parades.

Unlike the clunky parades of my youth, New Orleanians don’t simply reflect their extant communities but use the parade to bring them to another level. The parade becomes a mobile collective space of becoming. The rules of the city are constantly up for grabs. The sidewalk is a dance floor. The porch is a bar-b-que pit. The street is a water slide. If the Situationists are correct, and the way we move through the city defines who we are, I want to be dancing on a fire hydrant and not waving from the sidelines. I want the memory of the riot to make those in power unsettled. I want the parade to unsettle the city. To give it the jitters. To make its waving hand shake, quake, and roll.

A Haiku from Contra Costa

2010-03-11T22:24:00.000-08:00

BUYING THE MILLER 12-PACK
THE PANTY LINES
IN HER PINK SWEATS

Boring Story #3

2010-03-11T21:05:00.000-08:00

Boring Story #2

2010-03-11T20:58:00.000-08:00

Boring Story #1

2010-03-11T20:44:00.001-08:00

Evolution in the 5th dimension

2010-03-11T19:36:00.000-08:00

Strange really. I mentioned this thought to some folks at Creative Time recently while they were shoving ice cream cake in their mouths for my birthday lunch, and well, they seemed not at all interested in the profundity of this idea. What if, in fact, all these thoughts I think are so compelling are in fact, old hat for most. What if, I am simply fascinated by ideas that most people find rather common place? While it may certainly be true, this would mean that I possess a vastly inaccurate perception of the order of things. Nonetheless, to the thought.

So, evolution. Whatever survives, survives. Whatever dies, dies. This process moving across genetic, cultural, geographic, climatic and numerous other conditions forces a sort of logic that tells a kind of story of survival. This story of survival can in fact be told either through an evaluation of how those conditions have appeared in a certain body or conversely how the body gives testament to the history of these conditions. Of course, most of the time that the story of evolution is told, we tell it from a certain perverse tautalogy that takes what is given as inevitable. For example, one can say that a butterfly is a certain color because its bright color makes most predators think it is poisonous. It might lead one to think that the butterfly mutated for this purpose of survival but that is inaccurate. It was just that the brighter colored butterflies over time tended to survive more. That is to say, it is the process of death and procreation over time that produces this process called evolution.

Now, this example we follow because we can see, with our eyes, the color on the butterfly and thus gauge its mutations over time. We can follow in the historic record how various mutations over time have visibly shown up on the body of a butterfly. Through this record we are able to deduce not only something about the butterfly but also about its predators. The body of the butterfly becomes a record of conditions of survival over time.

So what about forms of survival we do not yet understand? Certainly we must admit a great humility in our ability to understand the world around us. Certainly many empirical phenomena remain yet to be detected. That is to say, there are things that are affecting us that we still do not understand nor furthermore know about. Wouldn't it stand to reason that those phenomena that we have yet to understand or maybe, have a limited understanding of such as time itself, nonetheless produce a certain historic record in the genetic and bodily record? We are not only evolving in ways we know, but ultimately, in ways we do not understand. It is this strange thought that I find deeply interesting and exciting that nonetheless failed to impress my Creative Time cohorts as we ate delicious chocolate ice cream cake.

Torture as a footnote

2008-02-10T10:01:00.000-08:00

This Friday, Mira and I took a nice day trip out to Philadelphia. We were excited to see the puppets in contemporary art exhibition curated by my friend Carin Kuoni and Ingrid Schaffner. We had a wonderful drive down listening to Democracy Now. The focus of the show was that the 911 Commission's report apparently has a fourth of its footnotes obtained possibly through torture. They interviewed the director of the commission, Philip Zelikow, whose flipflopping and inconsistent (bordering on bizarre) defense made it clear that he was completely caught off guard by these allegations. "Hey don't look at me, the CIA did the torturing!", he seemed to be saying. In short, the 911 commission was aware that the CIA was probably torturing the detainees who were providing the information but didn't really want to know. They just wanted the information. More appauling than anything is that after explaining that the commission was actually concerned about how the information they were using was obtained, they asked the CIA to go back and get more information out of the detainees (obviously via torture). This absolute disregard for human rights on all levels of government makes you realize the depths of the 911 mania was taken (and still is). Now the CIA is under fire and everyone that went along with it is taking the Eichman defense ie. I was just doing my job.

Can you imagine the 911 Commission school of journalism? In the 911 commission school, if you are lacking some facts or information, you just go out and find those involved (or for that matter, someone nearby) torture them till they give you a good story, then put it in the footnote. PS. We made our source feel like he was drowning and when we came up for air he spun an incredible yarn, see footnote 7. My college papers could have looked so different with the 911 footnote via torture method. In fact, with footnotes as torture could be included as part of the Research for Dummies guide.

In thinking about the fact that the CIA has admitted to waterboarding three detainees, a few argumentative inconsistencies emerge. One is the question of whether one should not use torture for footnotes because, well, under conditions of torture, people don't tell the truth. Now, I don't know the research on this. I am sure there could be empirical research that goes either way, but clearly, it leaves room for doubt. How reliable is this material? The problem, of course, is that this line of reasoning also leaves one vulnerable to a discussion about whether or not information obtained under torture is useful. Given the myopic yet pervasive perspective of most game theory oriented people (otherwise known as a majority of folks in government and military), this question is simple: if a bomb was going to destroy a million people, woudn't it be more reasonable to torture one? This logic makes its way through every ethical issue in civil and national and international law and one must always beware of its corrosive implication. Under this logic, the national paranoia of terrorism becomes the perfect atmosphere for destroying all civil liberties. This has been said a thousand times.

But this is the weekness of focusing on the argument that torture makes the 911 commissions report invalid. Because one can trust testimony under torture. A. No one cares about the accuracy of the report anyway. It was such a bankrupt method from the get-go, why worry about its validity now? That is a losing angle. This basically leaves one open to the game theory logic that makes our rights exploitable. The better one is much more simple: torture is ethically wrong (that is why it is called torture). When we begin to torture people, our rights as citizens lose value. We undermine the basis of law and democracy when we talke the foundations of human rights away.

In a desperate political mood, Barak cuts the mustard

2008-02-07T13:42:00.000-08:00

Who isn't caugh up in the primary fever? It is very much in the air and like all things that grip a country, we can bet that we will embarrased about this moment later. Nonetheless, in this particular minute, I can't worry about political embarrasment. We are caught up in the winds of electorial political passion that only someone like George Bush & Co. could have created. Lets just look back painfully at the electoral set backs. Gore vs Bush vs Nader (round 1) in 2000. We all went green back then didn't we? Well good for us. Gore actually wins, but then Bush wins. Kerry vs Bush in 2004 (round 2). No one likes Kerry. Nobody. Bush wins. This time around the country really really hates Bush and the democrats are running a white woman and a black man in the lead up to the primaries. The nail biting is over. We have our chance. All aboard the big democrat capitalist ship! Fuck it. We concede. We can't handle Republicans anymore. We can't ignore electoral politics anymore. How did on the ground activism fair in the last eight years (?) Not so well. Electoral politics has coerced us into becoming enthusiastic about the elections! CHANGE! Please! Anything!

I am for Obama under the same trope as everyone else. I must say, I just lack nuance this time around. Hilary voted for the war (so did Edwards). I just can't support that. I can't even go into how pissed I was when the Democrats caved to the idiocy that was the Iraq War. Everyone knew Bush was using the trauma of 911 to shift bellicose energy toward his long-time desire to get a foothold in the middle east. No one was under any illusions. It couldn't have been more transparent. It was one of those political moments that you thought the country had gone crazy and well, lets face it, Edwards and Hillary both went along with the insanity. Barak didn't. Not giving into the mad, fascist disaster that was the last eight years, was simply not a bold thing to do, it was an obvious thing to do. I can't begin to say how caving into that type of pressure can only be the best rorschach test of their politics.

Now Barak is using this annoying language of bringing the country together. The rallying cry of bi-partisanship. What exactly does that mean? Lets hope he means that we need to get the working classes back to a more reasonable political platform and ostracize the hateful and capitalists. He also didn't mention anything in New Orleans about housing. Stregthen the levees, the schools. These are good things to do. But New Orleans suffers from racism and capitalism and levees and schools aren't going to solve that. (but right, it is better than HIlary and any republican). I feel that Barak might have a lot of Clinton-esque capitalism up his sleeve. Fortunately, he doesn't have a ton of Bush global aggression. We will have to see. Like most political activist types, we refrain from elections because, we also know, they make us look soft. I am almost positive that if Barak is elected there will be many policies that I find to be in line with the powers that be (I do hold out a shred of hope that he will really be bold and do something more radical on the economic front, but I doubt it). But now I am desperate. We all are. Eight years ago, he wouldn't have had my vote. But we now have eight years of Bush totalitarianism between and that folks, makes all a tad more gun shy in the face of electoral politics.

What does Bud Light want from men?

2008-02-07T09:36:00.000-08:00

During my recent voyage into obsession with the superbowl and the NY Giants, I was blessed with an unusal amount of football commercials. Particularly Miller and Bud Light commercials. I can't help but consider what these commercials say about my identity as a male. In fact, I have been thinking about what advertising does to the male self image in general.

Bare with me if my realizations are very dumb, but sometimes you go full circle to realize something quite obvious. Case in point, I recently realized that most advertising is geared toward a particular audience and thus adds for women are geared toward women and adds for men are geared for men. For example, models look the way they do, not for men, but in fact, for women. It isn't exactly accurate to say that fashion runway models don't reflect a circular relationship of body image and that is hardly produced outside the sphere of patriarchy, but nontheless, it is useful to bare in mind, that the target audience for much of the runway clothing is, in fact, women. Just like when I was walking along houston and 1st ave and I saw this massive American Apparrel add where this very thin girl is lying on her stomach with her ass sticking out. It was more than suggestive. Some grafitti activist types had written, "I wonder why women get raped." Well, is it that simple? I would think that the place to consider male self image would be the adds targeted at them. Clearly this add is geared toward women, right? Surely target marketing gears their images toward those that will buy from them.

I mean, ultimately, reducing rape to one image is a mistake in and of itself. But the grafitti on the sign really had me thinking. It was a provacation that I took seriously. Is it this add that leads to rape?

So, this leads me, in a round about way to considering these beer commercials. How, beer commercials lately have a very basic formula. The idiot guy surrounded by hot women, but at least he has his beer. In fact, the guy can never get it right. That is the major umph of those adds. This beer drinking football watching guy loves his friends, tries to get with hot women but messes it all up, and ultimately has his beer. These Bud Light guys just can't get anything right. They go to the opera, oops, bud light bottles explode in their jacket. Or, they ultimately, choose their beer over women. That is another version. He could have picked the woman, but he is driven by an overwhelming desire for bud light. It is a deeply anxiety driven ad (as they are supposed to be). But advertising itself, is a fear machine. It produces anxiety as its modus operandi. To think that every gender doesn't suffer under the hands of media is silly. Women have body issues shoved in their faces. Men have inadequacy issues thrown at them. But the point of many of the male adds, is, in fact, self hatred and aggression. Fuck it, the adds seem to say. It is an ethos of failure that they encourage with beer. Woe. Now that is a coctail of hostility.

Mira and I were talking about this last night. We were thinking how much the male image is now very much in line with a defensive, alienation. That is, men are advertised as dumb. Think Homer Simpson and Bart. Lisa is the smart one. The statistics that more women are going to college than men. Do you think this has anything to do with education being anti-masculine? Does this current depiction of male identity spawn from the anxiety produced by feminism? Of course it must.

But then again, football commercials are the easier ones. I mean, they are clearly gunning for a demographic who needs some real masculine massaging. But who doesn't need that? Sports commercial time is probably the easiest for finding basic masculine narratives. But not everyone watches sports. I think I will watch television and see how Charlie Rose commercials depict men. Be right back!

Alan Sekula advises that you watch The Wire

2008-02-04T20:38:00.000-08:00

It wasn't all that long ago when Alan Sekula stood up at a conference and asked poignantly, "Why is it that political theorists don't have as good as an analysis as The Wire?" His question resonated deeply in my mind as I witnessed, suddendly, two separate world colliding together in a swift stroke. I had been in Kassel when Okwei Enweazor and Alan Sekula spoke together on a stage about his Fish Story and his analysis of global capital. I appreciated Sekula and Enweazor's somewhat Marxist cultural theory, but well, Kassel? It all felt pretty corny and arty to me. But then, to have them understand that cultural mechanisms are happening outside the arts. MMMMM that smelled like tangible aggression. It all made sense. These worlds can collide. I get bored of the art world.

Stop. This phrase: the art world. Why do I continue such a thing? It could almost, but not quite, equate with my disdain for newspapers that validate the "war on terrorism". Such myths that only prop up the stupidity behind them. And to be clear about who is being stupid, it would be - the idea of an art world only props up the limited powers that be AND the idea of terrorism only props up the powers that be. The rest of us, meaning almost everybody, couldn't care less. Aside concluded.

So, the Wire. My favorite HBO show. It was once Deadwood which I must say was Shakespearean and character driven, at times trying to avoid the cliches of major media, at times failing in that pursuit, but ultimately, a completely revolutionary show. It opened the doors to the Wire as did the seminal television series The Sopranaos. It sounds almost pathetic, but the ability to have a flawed and almost hateful protagonist was a revolution in television drama. And also, in a more Marxist-Anarcho sense, the abilty to have a drama where the protagonist is aware of their place within the overarching scheme of power, that power is a field in which people must battle, this idea: it is useful and revolutionary.

Television drama? What a low hurdle we must cross... Nonetheless, when we do leap over it we feel absolutey ecstatic. It is like when Michael Moore has one of his over-driven propaganda films (that I love so much) where he assaults the power structure for being suckers to capital, and the anti-capitalist viewer sits there and thinks, "My god, this is what I think. Who the fuck paid for this?" It is this very 21st century feeling. Things can media-wise be ever topsy turvy. Rules were meant to broken in media land so what rule is held sacred? Hmmmm. I bet there are some.

So, the Wire. Ever watch it? Well, catch up. It is incredible. Not because it is a cop show. Who likes cops? Not because it sympathizes with exhausted educators. After Junior High School, I have trouble sympathizing with them. Not because of the tightly wound inequities of politics. Or the caught in the game ethos of Baltimore gangland. (although i must admit the show still makes being a gangbanger one of the more romantic positions in the show. maybe that is the case. I don't know) but alas, ultimately, no one wins. Power wins. It is a Foucualt/Bourdieu- inspired voyages, but more tangible. Bourdieu attacked sociologists as being caught up "in the game" but who would pay attention? Sociologists at a conference? Maybe. That is about it. Otherwise, he was shit out of luck. So, no worries, ideas can benefit from reasonable people like David Simon.

Because that is what is really happening right? Micro battles for power with larger logics of capital hovering over it. That is what is happening. But these micro-battles. The infrastructures outside our understanding. We need to understand their fights. But oh so many fights. How to compete with them all?

Up with Cults

2008-02-04T07:46:00.000-08:00

I was humming Beck this morning, "I got a devil's haircut in my mind." My mind wandered, as it does, towards his supposed connection with Scientology. I have always held a sort of affection for new religions. They surely aren't easy to produce and well, they tend to have a more contemporary feeling about them that I enjoy. Then I began to think about the Tom Cruise video that had caused all this scandal on YouTube because the Church of Scientology had aggressively moved to have it removed. In a Guardian article, it was stated that Scientologists believe it is ok to lie to non-believers. You must admit that is a premise that is most enjoyable. A religion that believes in lying is smart in my book. Ok to lie.

You know, I get cranky when folks get all worked up about the evils of scientology. Albeit, they do feel like a pyramid scheme and it is a bit corny to have a sea captain as your messiah, but at the same time, as I said, what about the sympathy for contemporary religions. Don't people have a soft spot for organized metaphysics anymore? I know we find it difficult to get past such science fiction inspired dieties like Helotrobus or Xenu Ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, but surely that is the point of a religion isn't it? Shiva isn't particularly non-comic-book like either. Jesus, well, true, Jesus is pretty dull. More indie-rock looking. Not from outer space. But lets face it, religion is supposed to take us on a wild ride toward metaphore. That is how it works. It transitions from practical rules (don't eat this meat, wash your hands like this, when a guest comes over uses these plates, don't jerk off) to more glorious drug induced arty rules, "When Helotrobus greets you, place a silver coin on his tongue". Surely we aren't so naive as to think that all metaphysics should be practical and rational. What kind of religion is that? That is the relgion of the how-to guide. I subscribe to the religion of how to put coolant in my Honda Accord. I suppose that is why I have always enjoyed Mormons as well. A giant slug guards the gates to heaven and Jesus came to the U.S. Both are great ideas. What? You want Jesus to only visit once? Ok, black people can't get into heaven. Oops. They should have really thought twice about flagrant racism. But lets face it, the big religions aren't particularly kind to 'others' either.

I have had it up to here with atheists or agnostics. Such a contemporary lazy approach.

What do you believe?

Oh, I don't know, something is out there, and we're here. You know, the basics.

What do you do when someone comes to your house?

Oh, I don't know. Let em in.

What do you do when your deity greets you?

Deity? My god is a glimmering mist. We just kind of happily dissolve.

See? Enough with self satisfied atheists. Down with soft unimaginative thinking. Up with cults. Up with organized bad ideas. Up with counter power organization in general. It leads to strange culture. In my formative years, I lived on a Christian commune outside of Utrecht in Holland. Many new people I meet worry that I was brainwashed or lived some sort of ascetic unimaginative life. But I just say, "we sang lots of songs." What? You don't like songs? Who doesn't like a good song? Do atheists sing songs? Well, they should! They could be glorious songs. Songs to make the universe weep with envy. The chorus could go, "I believe in a god, but he lets me sleep in Sunday. He has undefined attributes, and his only super power is an occassional ability to spy on me." That is a sweet song. What? True. It does sound like Beck.

A Natural Sensorium

2008-02-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

It is cold outside and I dearly love walking to Prospect Park with Mira, getting a coffee, a toasted bagel, and watching the birds fly over the lake. The air is crisp and I find myself bewildered by the patterns the birds produce together. Sometimes feeling like one entity, just this pulsing pattern of squawks in the sky. There is the swirling tornado shape where they glide in circles up up up and then down, producing a collective drain into the icey stratosphere. There is the hey, lets all head over there, mad panic where for reasons unknown, the birds head out to another section of the lake together. Do they work these things out in advance? There are the individual chase scenes where I always wonder, "Why are those two birds mad at each other? Is that a game they are playing? Love? Crankiness? Are these the wrong emotions to lob onto a bird?" An old man was feeding the birds and they all were whipped up into a feeding frenzy. I always latch onto a small bird who gets his bread consistently taken by the geese and mallards. Oh the poor things. I imagine myself with the bread and selectively feeding the runts. Feeding time is a time of justice, even in my mind. Good feathers! Have a piece of bread. You there, don't worry about your aggressive friends, I will throw this piece out toward the left. You didn't run fast enough! ugh, no wonder you are so small. The geese are always so demanding.

Sitting by the lake I watch other urbanites sit hypnotized by the goings-on of the birds. Is nature really healing? Really? I remember feeling somewhat mystified by my early 20s desire to become mystically alert by heading into nature. I am part of the legacy that feels that nature whispers genuine wisdom into us. As urbanites, it can be our piece of the garden of eden where we long for the tasty fruit trees and solace that inevitably accompanies the myth of nature. Buddha didn't lean against a freeway divider mind you. Nature is an experiential book. We collectively gravitate toward reading it. Sitting there. Dodging bike riders, joggers, men with metal scanning devices moving over the earth, and healthy yuppies. We sit on rickety benches and stare marvel-eyed at the rorschach test of maddening specs of white birds loving, feeding, yelping, pulsing like an ant hill. Nature, what do you want from me?

I remember living with my mother in the woods of Winchendon, Massachusetts. I had fled from the Bay Area because I was depressed to no end. I hadn't really intended to face nature really. I was looking forward to the couch more than anything. Slowly, I got used to heading out into the woods and just sitting there, hoping to spot a deer or even a bunny. I loved waking up to see the tracks in the snow of the animals that had scampered about the night before. As though, during the snow season, the earth was covered in tracing paper. Why, I could just follow these deer tracks to a deer bungalow. It is that simple. I remember sitting there in the snow and realizing that nature isn't quiet. It's loud. Cracks, pings and ticks abound. You could hear branches breaking in the wind, and that birds are far too gregarious. If everyone could shut up, I could hopefully hear the delicate steps of a deer or the ever so rare umph of a moose paw.

As I sat on a log with miranda today with my coffee spewing steam and her hair getting caught in her mouth from the wind, I once again thought about how our senses dim over time. They get selective. When I was young, I understood nature by the smell of dirt and the texture of bushes as I hid in them. I knew the stains of grass on my knees and the way sticks felt on my hands as I ran with them. I knew the smell of rotting apples, walnuts, and blackberries. The feeling of thorns across my arm. The familiar mud between toes in a river. Now we sit on a bench and stare across a lake with birds mimicking the bleary static of our eye-laden living. We push into a natural world with our eyes shoved forward and our hands in our pockets. Dirt is best when it is smelled and pushed between our fingers. An icey lake comes to life when your feet crack through the ice and the different temperatures slide along your leg as you fall in. Your nose can remember better than you. It is a scrapbook with few pictures in it.

Reminds me when natalie jeriminjenko said that we she can't stand the popular notion that we are bombarded with more information now than ever. As though our minds have never been put through such a filtering test. As our senses dim, we turn the light out on far more information that is out there. We privelege our eyes out of convenience and let go of the vast sensorium that would have us bristling with multiple forms of pleasure, agony and deliciousness.

Working Out as an Exercise in Conversation

2008-02-03T10:20:00.000-08:00

Working out these days.. It really isn’t even “these days” because it has never really happened before. The brief moments it did happen were when I was on the freshman high school football team. That is the last period where I regularly used a bench press. Then I faintly recall having a romance with the gym at the junior college College of the Canyons but what is peculiar about that period is I can’t seem to mentally fit it in. That is, the junior college period doesn’t fit in my general understanding of how my life shifted aggressively into the future. I don’t recall what year it was but it must have been around 1991. Actually, these events, that is things like working out, defined actions that come with environments and smells, are in some way a form of time travel. They currently allow me to sew these past two events (high school, post-high school and the present) into one awkward unified experience. I would even go so far as to say that my personality at each interval was more or less the same. That is: the gym produces an uncomfortable yet masculated me. That mixture of emotions that the gym produces is a particular concoction of me that travels through time and recognizes itself every brief moment it steps out onto this sweat filled, moaning stage. I remember thinking that the first step downhill is when you give these versions of yourself a name. I am not going to do it, but of course, it is tempting to call the gym-me: Brett. And we could call the writer me: Allen.
I like this idea that time travel is possible through particular memorable spaces of smell, orientation and environment. Surely, if I ever wanted to travel back to my days working at Del Taco it would be as easy as begging someone working there to let me behind the counter. I could move back in time and recall what it felt like to work for $3.33 an hour as the drink station supervisor. Wow. I could also recall the anticipation of saving up for my Ford Pinto Wagon and being in my terrible punk band Cows on Acid. You know that name Cows on Acid sounds like one of those band names that never really existed but somehow manages to exist on bad television. But in fact, this was the name of our band. Probably the lamest name of all time except my friend Anthony’s band, which was Overt Volition. That name clearly derives from the punk rock high school band habit of searching the dictionary for intellectual sounding words and then infusing them with something equaling ‘kicking ass’. Another example of that is the band, Ill Repute. Ugh.
So, right, I have been working out and it is peculiar indeed. I have one of these annoying personalities that really gets into something obsessively. It is like a fair-weather syndrome. I say fair-weather because the same thing is happening with me and the Red Sox. I used to hate the Red Sox and baseball altogether and then it clicked, if I like the Red Sox I can talk to about anyone in New England. And surely a modicum of small talk is strategically useful. Not only that but one must continuously put themselves through forms of personality calisthenics. Particularly around things like cultural taste where most of it is arbitrary anyways. Try reversing direction and liking the things you once hated. It can be difficult. I can’t actually say that I am always capable of such things. But when I manage to pull it off, when I manage to completely find myself obsessed with something I once hated, then I feel like I made some points on some out of this world personality score card.
That is how it is with working out. But then again… once you dip into the well of personality types you find nauseating, most times you learn what makes people tick. That mind/body thing is real. More real than I imagined. In the case of working out, I really should name the pre and post work out Nato, two different things. But I would hate to change my name to Brett. When I talk about how great working out is, I feel somewhat like a born again Christian where if I am talking to someone who doesn’t do it, they get this look in their eye like “woe, psycho path full of too much enthusiasm.” I think I might even start breathing hard when I start discussing it.
Ohhhhh.. that reminds me of an epiphany that is too good to waste. It must be written. Even at the cost of being pathetically tangential and self-obsessed, we must clean the mind of epiphanies. We must pour them until the body is just the well worked out body it once was. Here is the idea; I have often found that when the body desires something, it often compensates for it by talking about it. As though it can feed itself through conversation. The most obvious example, is when you’re hungry and you love just talking about what you should eat. As though each utterance is in fact a morsel: ribs, mashed potatos, chicken burrito, gnocchi, ahhhh! Particularly when people get drunk. That is the best. They feed themselves with their words. Egos need feeding and when people get drunk they often (I know I do) often speak in hyperbole because it tastes better!
So, working out… dear god. I don’t even care about this subject anymore. I’m hungry! Ribs!

-June 16, 2006

I wrote a poem today

2008-02-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

DOWN THE HILL THEY COME
wispy slitted wind rustles her sotted dyed hair
her gait down the pavement
a puddled mule
her shades on this brilliant eye popping spring
the milk of her husky crunked sweatshirt
she is a big girl
full of slip and slides and plastic flamingo porches
the mad hilarity of a thousand children
creeking out the cracks in her tennies
and he
his folded up baseball hat
covering a tangled morass of cobbed hair
his golden moustache stained in the conversation of smoked refuse
his torn jeans revealing a brazen sinfully white rusted knee
the mass of reds and yellows on his black shirt selling car parts to the growing cacophany of mad mad tikes
swarming the road with glee and mouths to feed
and they are holding hands
and it is this that i saw
peeking out from their counterintuitive black shrouds
flesh fingers bent together
holding softly as their feet push with umph against the asphalt
down the hill and into town
the cooing of their joining blanketing their steps
in a pale array of conjugal glimmer
like the candy sweet gust
of breath from the Aces drunks
that pours a cool shade over the glazed eyes along river st.
the poverty of my town swims sweetly in their fingers
the hobbled pace
of each their jeaned leg
resists
the pull
of the graviational descent
emptying out
onto Chase Avenue
and then town
spilling into the mouth
and trickling deceptively past its lips
the few that walk here
bare its mark
the path along the road
a place to emerge
from the dim glow
of cards, noodles and pillows
the day strikes light
accusingly along their shoulders
and weeds their condition for the cars to see
their lines in their fingers caressing each other
in the mournful brilliance of their affections

-April 16, 2006

The Bicker Board Game

2008-02-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

Ever had a fight in a relationship and almost completely not know what it was about? Or, have you ever been in a relationship where you don't quite understand it, but you are fighting all the time? Ever been confused by the almost rhythmic flow of aggression that certain couplings can produce in you? Of course you have! And I am now your therapist. I have never trusted therapy. I didn't need Foucault to discuss the problems of speech producing problems in order for me to sense a sort of obsessiveness about the therapy pyramid scheme. In fact, I often tend to truly trust the ever enviable belief that you can simply forget things into oblivion. Forgetting, the anti-christ of therapy, is probably the best medicine. Out of site out of mind is not an adage to be taken lightly! Therapy tends to attract the narcisstic and the last thing they should be advised to do is to talk about themselves. Alas!
Nonetheless, here is some advice to all you wayward lovers out there. As a caveat, I must say that this epiphane was not inspired by Miranda whom I get along with quite splendidly. No, this epiphane was the result of a collective assortment of past cantankerous relationships that baffled me to no end. So, lets call this thought: the bicker board game.
I think that many of the cranky moments in couplings happen as people tend to get to know their partner more than their language skills can compensate for. That is: just like a drive home, or learning to drive a car, as you get to know something/someone, your brain learns more and more about them. And as your sly brain learns about things, it tends to know things faster than it can process that knowledge into language. Such that, it can read passive aggressive behavior faster than you can know it is happening. This means that you can read when the other person is already being resentful toward you faster than your language skills can cognate that that is what is actually happening. In the inertia between your brain reading the other person's signals of disdain and you reacting to them, while at the same time your conversation is only about the taste of this bad linguini, you are thrown headfirst into a vertigo of aggressive subtlety to which you have no command. You are outgunned. Outgunned by the lopsided nature of your brain!
Passive aggressive behavoir is bad news. It is a skill of the most cunning, but often what happens to people is that parts of their brain are more cunning then they are. That is, they are able to emit signals without fully knowing that is what they are doing. The same goes for reading them. Duplicity isn't just a technique, it can lead to a tactical schizophrenia. BEWARE!
What to do about this malady, o-my-patient... ? Well, I think knowing this useful bit of information can lead to a certain sense of sobriety in the heated moments of couple bickerdom. Another good piece of advice... if you fight with someone a lot, get out of that relationship. I have been in many and well, I think the ones I hated most were the bickering ones. Oh, the agony of living. That moment of public yelling at each other or being in a public place with someone yelling at you on a cell phone. The horror! The easy going ones are the best and often the reason we fight with people is not because there is something inately cranky about them, but that the dynamic between us results in bad mojo.. Our secret brains deceive us. We are passive aggressive in our dance moves!
This will probably be my only blog of therapy and with that sense of assurance, I hope that it has profoundly cured you in most of your travails of love!
Sinerely,
Dr. Thompson
-March 27, 2006

Narcissistic Eulogy

2008-02-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

I received word regarding the death of a friend that bordered on acquaintance. I don't want to go into the details, but it shook me deeply. I have only had one other friend pass away and that was in high school, three of my four grandparents are alive.. in general I have somehow been magically or tragically sheltered from the hand of doom. But surely this distance only increases my anxiety for when I heard about his death, I was freaked out. I'm deeply terrified of death and the mention of it in proximity to my life puts such a low low feeling of dread into my heart. I realize, just now, that death is a minefield of cliches because one actually doesn't talk about it nearly enough and when they do they simply repeat the old adages that are unfortunately true. Well, at least given my pathetic socio-cultural position. If there is anything I can add to the discussion is only my constant resentment toward those that feel comfortable with their demise. I can't stand when people giggle when I say I am terrified of death. I feel as though surely I must be missing something for isn't that the great source of dread? Ah language doesn't cover it nearly enough.
My friend's death comes at a time when I have also begun to have renewed fears of mortality again. In my early 20s they haunted me to no end. Daily I would have a panic attack as I contemplated what oblivian could possibly mean. Unlike Kierkegard who said death makes a good dancing partner, dancing is the last thing on my mind. More like cowering and weeping. And Bataille, who used death and sex as this foil for catapulting all things in his existence, well, I am envious of his frantic poetry, but not for me. My little attacks of fear have returned lately. I'm not sure why. Maybe every few days, I have to stop in my tracks and stare into the world with the feeling that everyone is mad, mad, mad as the hills. That they don't particularly understand the tenuous nature of our existence and somehow, through a well honed skillset of forgetting, manage to complete their daily lives. I remember once being completely wiped out on mushrooms in San Francisco. We were driving into the city at sunrise.. I saw the billboards towering over the town and the cars clogging the freeways, the steam pooring out of manholes.. the morning bustle.. and I had this mortified realization that it was they, they, they, that were mad as can be. Ridiculously driving around as though nothing were happening while death and life hovered over this quaking moment. Argh. I used to have this terrifying thought that the reason most animals look terrified is not that life is cruel, but that they lack the ability to forget what lies for them beyond this one.
This sense of dread stays with me. I think of my friend and I almost envy him. In this strange way, he is there. He went there. Like being afraid to jump off the diving board, he went, buchunk, off into the sky and down into the blue fizzy pool. Maybe if I was around it more, this life would make more sense. The lack of death makes its appearance so strange and embarrasing. It's as though I'm walking around Twin Peaks and have forgotten the hideous face of Bob and suddenly he emerges laughing, laughing, laughing and I remember.. I must stay afraid.
I feel I have two options. One: I must spend a significant time before my death researching the most prevaling method for longevity and immortality. There is always a new idea and I will go with the best one. I have always thought freezing yourself, cryogenics, makes sense. I'm game. It may be a money issue, but I hope I can resolve that. Man, if I woke up, and my overweight great great great great grandchildren are gathered around me in the year 2147.. I would love it! I would laugh laugh laugh... This makes complete sense to me. I don't think our mortality is a given, but I do suspect the riddle won't be solved in my lifetime which only makes my feelings of dread worse.
The other option is to really cultivate my growing form of postmodern Budhism. That is, coming to terms with my own lack of subjectivity. It always seems to me that the lack of a subject and Budhism are almost the same thing. However, how to come to terms with such a thing has never sat well with me. There aren't a lot of guide books and the ones that are out there, all want you to sit by while life drains away. Breathing is good, but how good?
Ok that is all. I miss my pal. But it is hard to feel sorry for someone when their gone. It seems like a strange emotion. They are gone. All that is left is us. And soon enough.. we will be gone too.
-march 16, 2006

Vice City Tour Guide

2008-02-03T10:13:00.001-08:00

Strange experience: Last December I was walking around Miami for the first time in my life. It was late, I was drunk, the air was wonderfully warm and I had this uncanny feeling that I had been on that street before. I could almost sense my internal map telling me the direction of the beach, the direction of little haiti and little havana etc.. I could feel it because somehow I knew it. And then I realized what it was: I HAD been here before, in that Sony Play Station 2 game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It had taken place in Miami and after spending many many many hopeless hours car jacking, picking up hookers and listening to their incredible talk radio, I had learned how to drive around Miami. This was a genuine shocking video game meets life experience.
I then began thinking that video games could actually be fun ways to learn about towns. You could have the exact map of a city, you could have local bands playing in the clubs, you could see what beers were on tap where, you could car jack anybody and learn early on where the drugs can be scored. I mean this virtual tour guide thing could be a real hit. You're sitting at home in Houston and you say to yourself, "I wonder what it's like to walk around Tokyo." Well don't waste all that time being disoriented in the real thing! Buy the video game, get used to the town and then presto, by the time you land in the airport, you'll know where the subway is, what hotels you like, where you like to hang out, what type of cultural experiences are illuminating, which are simply onerous. I'm telling you the video game tour industry is the future!
-March 15, 2006

Pigging Out With Jesus

2008-02-03T10:12:00.000-08:00

I saw a poster at the mall that I just loved. It was set up like the last supper but sitting at the table was the cast of the sopranos, the cast of the godfather, al pacino (from scar face) and robert deniro. This poster, which is incredible, was sold at one of those stores where television, film and music stars (Brad Pitt, Bob Marley, Eminem, Tupac) are faux painted onto canvas and sold for $80. It is an incredible store. In fact, about as incredible as the motivational posters with silhouetted hikers and a sunset text reading: Achievement. Those are good too. But I digress (hey speaking of digressing, this is my second blog tonight, the last being so theory driven and somewhat unfun that I had to do this one as well). So, back to the the mob.
What social function does the mob serve? When casts of characters from different films and television shows miraculously detach themselves from their proper narratives and coalesce around Christ's table, what does the moment achieve for us? Well, what can I guess? First of all, would it be wrong to call this poster the last supper of modern masculinity? Although the television show The Sopranos pretends to position Tony Soprano as a guy that is coming to terms with his emotional shortcomings and on-going misogyny, the show derives its satisfaction from his inability to overcome it. That though he tries and tries, his inner man forces him to violence, aggression and women hating. I must admit enjoying the show so don't think I'm out to ruin Tony Soprano, but I can feel that dudes when they finish watching an episode feel more affirmed in their right to tell their "nagging girlfriends" to shut up. They probably feel better about slamming doors more or even wearing masculine-friendly necklaces. It's hard to resist the temptation. It is so glamorous (in a weird Jersey way).
And then, there they are, at the last supper. All of them eating like real men. Food hanging out of their mouths, bellies big under the table, well dressed and respected but still men. men being men with christ.. ribs, rings, pot bellies,guns and jesus... who wouldn't want that poster? but $80? hmm how about $30?
-March 13, 2006

Being Effective

2008-02-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

Being effective is difficult. If you find yourself in a somewhat bummed out mood and just feel like what you do isn't effective, well, you're not alone. There are alienated internetters everywhere hoping to make a difference without a road map of how to do so. Given this news, hopefully this new sense of community will not induce a euphoric sense of complacency. It is important to want to be effective. Of course, I'm speaking politically and socially, but ah, why reduce it to that.
See, I have this nagging thought that keeps growing in my mind and I am not sure how to resolve it.. Here is the riddle: If something you do doesn't produce material effects in the world, then it can easily be relegated as a simple positioning of one's subjectivity. That is, if I hold radical beliefs, but only in so much as I can retain the subjective position of radical without my beliefs translating into any actions, then isn't the point more about my identity than it is about effecting change? If I espouse radical theory (a la Deleuze, Lefebre, Lacan, etc. etc) but only use them as a device for social climbing strange graduate school hierarchies, then isn't most theory a form of identity social climbing? And doesn't this type of description apply to most of what is described as the radical left in the art world? Not to pick on us, but isn't this a tricky situation to deal with?
Here is another riddle: are there actions that can occur that produce positive social change that are unattached to any progressive ideology?
And finally: if such actions do exist, shouldn't these be the models we look toward rather than those positioned in a counterproductive niche of subjectivity?
Ok those are the riddles..
-March 13, 2006

The Great Cartoon Fiasco

2008-02-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

So, out there, somewhere, exists an enigmatic racist cartoon. You have surely heard about it. The cartoon from the Danish paper that has ignited protests worldwide... people have died over this cartoon! There are protests at embassies over this cartoon. Conservative British papers are getting into the action by defending free speech and in so doing re-printing the cartoon. Scottland Yard tells this paper they can't be assured police protection and the paper pulls the cartoon. This cartoon apperently has the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban telling suicide bombers as they get to the gates of heaven: I'm sorry, but we're all out of virgins..
Wucka wucka.
Now that is a racist knee slapper if I ever heard one.
But has anyone seen this cartoon? ?Well, isn't that the joke? You can only have the cartoon described.. Did you see it as I described it? Was it a Dilbert-sort of aesthetic? Maybe Doonsbury? Peanuts? What about Family Circle? Or maybe Farside? In what illustrative manner was this bad joke depicted? We may never know.. Hold on. I will now use Google to find out...
I will first put in the words: racist muhammed cartoon
It worked!
Much better than I ever imagined in fact. Wow. Now check out what I found:
"Why did Jyllands-Posten publish the cartoons? The Copenhagen Post explains: “Jyllands-Posten called for and printed the cartoons by various Danish illustrators, after reports that artists were refusing to illustrate works about Islam, out of fear of fundamendalist retribution. The newspaper said it printed the cartoons as a test of whether Muslim fundamentalists had begun affecting the freedom of expression in Denmark.”
Holy moly!
A test?! A test?! Now, that is sure one way to test your market. You know that thing you hear on the radio when that voice comes on, "This is a test of the emergency broadcast network." Now, while enigmatic, I would say that is a reasonable major media test. Actually come to think of it, that test is ridiculous too. (Might have to get back to that idea in a different blog). But this test? This is the Danish newspaper racism test? Can you imagine the New York Times saying, we printed these cartoons of exaggerated jewish film producers and bankers in order to test whether or not that might aggravate someone. Bare with us. We must conduct a test.
http://forum.newspaperindex.com/Mohammed-drawings-newspaper1.jpg
On the surface one might say that these protests are quite insane. Protesting a cartoon? Well, I don't really know. It seems like a perfect opportunity for the white white west to sit back and say, "Man, those people are fucking crazy! Protesting over a cartoon! Talk about needing a sense of humor!" But then again, what the fuck? How lame is it that a newspaper prints all these flagrantly racist cartoons in the name of freedom of speech? Now, liberals and conservatives can jointly castigate the muslim world as they pat themselves on the back for having a tremendous Western sense of humor. God, the west knows how to take a joke. We're just so flexible.
Funny it's the Danes that started this too. The Danes?!

-February 10, 2006

Contagious Lingo

2008-02-03T10:08:00.000-08:00

So, once in a while in my blogs, I will attempt to chip away at the various day to day experiences that prove that I am joyfully soul-less. I am often enamored with finding clues that validate many of my post-modern suspicions that I am simply a vessel for outside culture. I am a giddy sponge. I suck up what is around me. My favorite example is contagious lingo. Ever have a friend who simply has a way of talking that is particularly them? They have a cadence to their conversational style or an abundance of odd idioms? Do you ever notice when someone who has been around them, including yourself, they suddenly begin borrowing phraseology? Where you get that creepy and entertaining feeling that one person is slightly becoming the other? That happened to me and Matt Littlejohn. It also sometimes happens with Karyn Behnke’s wacko phraseology like ‘crankerpants’, ‘secretly’ and ‘butts’.
My crash course into Wittgenstein in undergrad left me slightly scarred. But the one thing it taught me quite well is: we are the words we use. We conceive of ourselves through language and language makes us what we know to be ourselves. The implication of this, of course, is that when you start borrowing your friend’s strange terms, you aren’t just borrowing language, you are becoming your friend. Your souls are gooing together into one lump of lingo. That is an odd thing to think about.
-December 18, 2005

repetition as crime against humanity

2008-02-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

This is an old thought but one worth considering. Time, as we know, is relative. But what is more elusive than just knowing that, is locating the implications of that in your own life. Ah, repetition. Ever notice that the first time you drive somewhere it seems to take a long time, but then the return trip takes less? Ah ha! A clue. That is due to the relative shrinkage of time due to repetition. The more we repeat something, the less relative time it takes as the mind processes time based on new stimuli. Now, what might this mean for us? Well, I distinctly recall when I was a temp worker horribly doing the same thing ever day doing telemarketing or in the mail room at Farmer's Insurance, that this repetetive form of existence was shrinking my relative life span. That I would look back on my life and see one instant of putting mail in a box. Or if you live in the same town too long, you are shrinking the relative time span of your life. Now, given that, to what degree are businesses which make its workers do repetitive tasks a la Fordist models of manufacturing, culpable of shrinking the relative lifespans of their employees? To what degree is forced repetition prosecutable as a crime against life? Can we defend our right to relative time as an inalienable right directly tied to relative existence?
December 17, 2005