Keeping an Eye on the World Going by My Window

Super Tuesday

2008-02-05T16:58:00.000-08:00

So I just went and voted in the New York Democratic primary. For Hillary Clinton.

I can hear the attacks from Obama supporters already, and even if I never hear any, I can imagine them. Obama is almost universally acclaimed. The most unlikely people are making their enthusiasm known. I do not trust them. The few political commentators I do trust, such as Digby and Bartcop, tend to support Hillary, and I agree with their reasoning. Despite all the talk in the media atmosphere about "unity" and "bipartisanship" I expect this to be the dirtiest presidential race in history, regardless of who the Democrats nominate -- remember Gore? remember Kerry? -- and the Clintons are combative enough to stand a chance.

It should go without saying, after the recent performances by a Republican president, a Republican congress, and a largely Republican-selected supreme court, that it's important for the Democrat to win.

As I post this the polls are still open, so I have no idea what happened in today's national sprawl of primary elections. But I've had my say, and it's behind me now, or rather the nomination contest has left me behind, and all that's left for me is to watch -- and, if I have something to say, speak.

Dear Zwinkies

2007-07-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

You are horrible. Please go away.

Images

2007-04-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

Zardoz as a post-apocalyptic action flick (yes, I've just seen Grindhouse).

Images

2007-03-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

Images

2007-03-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

Single White Album

2007-01-24T06:58:00.000-08:00

It's a bit late, what with even CDs being pushed into obsolescence by downloads, but I do like to play with my audio files and in doing so recently came up with my optimal one-LP version of The Beatles, the white album.

Side One

Back in the U.S.S.R.
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
Savoy Truffle
Sexy Sadie
Martha My Dear
Blackbird
Cry Baby Cry
Mother Nature's Son

Side Two

Dear Prudence
Happiness Is a Warm Gun
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Piggies
I'm So Tired
Why Don't We Do It in the Road
Good Night

The Songs

Back in the U.S.S.R. First, I decided to keep the original opening and closing tracks. Anyway, kicking the album off with this musical hot rod, which gleams with the airstream style and crazed attitude of McCartney's beloved old-school rock 'n' roll, was one of the few things the Beatles did right when they sequenced the songs on this great but ill-assorted album.

Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey Putting this together I wanted to undo the facile contrasts and random clashes of the original sequencing and use songs to reinforce each otherand build. For example, the original track in this position, "Dear Prudence," is as different from "Back in the U.S.S.R." as can be, a serenely cyclical pastorale with warm lyrics of friendship and encouragement that make it Lennon's answer to "Hey Jude" (or the Beatles answer to the Byrds' "Goin' Back.") But this shot of clangorous energy keeps up and adds to the momentum. Also, I tried to move songs as far as possible from their original location to defamiliarize them, to jolt a little newness out of these overfamiliar recordings. When I heard how fresh that abrupt guitar-and-drums introduction sounds here, I knew it was working.

Savoy Truffle The third fast one in a row. Also, the third singer-songwriter, which gives the first three songs a nice intorducing-the-band subtext. A nice change of texture, too, from spiky to smooth.

Sexy Sadie I tried four fast ones in a row but it didn't work. But this provides continuity with "Savoy Truffle" on another level by matching its sugary-sour minatory tone. Anyway, I love the sound of this song, as well as the similarly-recorded "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and "I'm so Tired," especially the grainy shimmer of the guitars.

Martha My Dear Yes, a contrast. I'm sorry. Moving this here was a last minute fix. But I like how it works. This and "Sexy Sadie" have similarities as well: medium-tempo songs that address a female character by name, so the contrast between "Sexy Sadie"'s smoky late-night cabaret and "Martha My Dear"'s sunny parlor isn't altogether random. One of McCartney's best and most overlooked songs, full of adroit tempo shifts and lovely scalar frills -- the fast bit in the middle, where strings augment the hard rock even more excitingly than in "Glass Onion," is one of my favorite Beatle moments -- it's also a good transition to the acoustic bloc.

Blackbird Acoustic hippie pastoral was the major new trend the white album incorporated, and no version would be complete without this exemplar.

Cry Baby Cry Why play around with this stuff? It's things like finding out how perfectly this follows "Blackbird." A curiously forboding song, it unfolds in the shadow of an ominous drone suggested (mostly) by the piano, while inspired touches like the drums' flamenco-like stutter in the chorus loft it into the (overcast) sky, a puff of aural mist from Strawberry Fields. Don't forget to trim the murmured dialog at the end of the CD track, which I say belongs at the beginning of "Revolution 9," because....

Mother Nature's Son This follows naturally from the McCartney coda of "Cry Baby Cry": it's the same instruments from the same session, though the guitar and percussion switch channels to try and hide this. I especially like the horns, which have a chilly, restrained power I associate with John Barry (or Anton Bruckner), and loom in the distance of this remarkably evocative song like snow-capped mountains.

Dear Prudence Perfect as a lead track in itself -- it's a tour-de-force that deserves to be shown off -- it also recalls the acoustic bloc at the end of side one without repeating it.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun "Dear Prudence" does set us up for the deceptive acoustic opening rather well, doesn't it? The exact musical equivalent of an R. Crumb comic.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps I tried to push this back further but then it stuck out in a corny way as the climax of the album.

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da A song I always considered almost as obnoxious as "Don't Pass Me By," but too popular to leave off any realistic version of the album. But it sounds good here, benefitting not just from different surrounding tracks, so that it provides relief after "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" but, I think, from coming late in the album instead of early, giving it a slight tinge of retrospective melancholy.

(This post is under construction.)

Images

2007-01-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

I love these subdued '70s tones. Shades of Jeff Jones and Frank Frazetta.

Images

2007-01-18T23:45:00.000-08:00

"O Consuella!"

2007-01-14T04:24:00.000-08:00

Eye, Third Eye, and Tabernacle

2007-01-13T19:27:00.000-08:00

Another silent essay, defining one cluster of images and story points to suggest the web of implicit connections that holds it together.

Okay, almost silent. This is a little oblique even for me, so I'll cheat a little and provide captions -- descriptive captions, that is. For explanations you're on your own.

Above, Zed's view through Zardoz's eye as it carries him to the vortex. Below, May, one of the Eternals, the vortex-dwelling illuminati behind the false Zardoz-religion, ponders a display of Zed; the size and placement of his head recalls Zardoz.

May takes Zed to her biolab inside the looking-glass pyramid for study. Behind her, a display shows the view from her Tabernacle-crystal ring as it penetrates Zed's eye to reveal his inner essence. Below, May receives immortality as a Tabernacle-crystal is implanted in the third-eye position.

Zed first encounters the Tabernacle, the entity that runs the vortex, in the form of Arthur Frane's ring. Below, Zed gazes into the haughty Tabernacle itself, but without understanding that the crystal is merely a host for photons structured into a computer: an artificial intelligence made purely of light.

Trapped mentally by the Tabernacle, Zed finally escapes by killing his reflection. Your explanation of that one is as good as mine. Below, Zed regards his defeated adversary, the now-tamed Tabernacle, and gives it to May as she and her followers flee the doomed vortex.

The Vortex

2007-01-07T20:56:00.000-08:00

Late at night, posting what I always do when I'm too tired to write but feel the urge to post anyway: images.

Random Question

2007-01-05T22:04:00.000-08:00

Which is easier to make a model airplane out of and why: a banana peel or a wet sock?

If you fed banana peels to an infinite number of monkeys until they vomited, one would be sure to puke up a model airplane, whereas that wet sock isn't even a wet sock, it's a used condom!

Zardoz Screenshots

2007-01-03T15:53:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted for over a month but still my site counter registers a trickle of hits, a spectral half-life composed of random searches and old links. Recently I noticed many hits were coming from the same Google page, which must be preserved in a link somewhere -- but where? -- a page of results for "Zardoz screenshots." On it, my site has moved up steadily from the second page to the top five.

That's what I get for trying to be campy.

As this is the largest response my blog has ever gotten, I can only oblige, even if you web rats never leave comments. Here's an index of Zardoz screenshots on this site:

Zardoz, the science fiction film (3)
Zardoz, the horror movie (part of my Halloween horror theme) (6)
Zardoz, the horror movie II (6)
Zardoz, the horror movie III (6)
Zardoz, the fantasy film (6)
Zardoz, the fantasy film II (6)
This post (2 old/3 new)
Zardoz: the Vortex (7)
Zardoz: Eye, Third Eye, and Tabernacle (9)
Zardoz: "O Consuella" (3)
Zardoz, the head film (6)
Zardoz, the head film II (6)
Zardoz, the head film III (6)
Zardoz, the head film IV (6)
Zardoz, post-apocalyptic action film (6)

Incidently, these screenshots are not from the DVD. They are from a VHS tape of a cable showing sometime in the late '90s. Despite not showing the full widescreen image -- and, looking at some of the images here, you can see where they were trimmed -- it comes much closer to the theatrical images I remember; rich, darkling, painterly. The DVD, though it's gotten good reviews, looks way too bright and clear to me, as if some unsympathetic technician had turned the knobs all the way up.

The creator of Zardoz, John Boorman, talks a little about its look and its cinematographer in his autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy. "I had the great Geoffrey Unsworth as cameraman on [Zardoz]. He was a soft-spoken, courteous man, with the air of a distracted wizard. When colour arrived, cameramen continued to light as they had done for black and white, using shafts of direct light to separate objects and differentiate the various planes. Film is two-dimensional: lighting and camera movement are concerned with creating the illusion of a third dimension. In the black-and-white days on a typical set you would see a forest of black flags, arranged to allow slivers of light to pinpoint particular spots. Geoffrey, however, realised that colour did the job of distinguishing objects from each other, and that direct light made the colours very harsh and brash. He devised a radical new approach to colour lighting, using only indirect soft light. He combined this with diffusion filters, wide-open apertures in the lenses, and smoke on the sets, to soften and blend the elements together, rather than differentiating between them. It was the absolute contrary of the former style, attempting to meld the characters and the settings together, rather than differentiating between them. The result resembled an impressionist painting.

"The studios hated this technique. Subjected to mass, high-speed printing, the picture would tend to collapse into a fuzzy mush. It also looked murky on videotape and television. Today, the studios demand a crisp, sharp image, although all cameramen now use Geoffrey's system of indirect lighting." I wonder if something related happened to the DVD.

Some of you not only look at these images but upload them. Curiously, it's always one of the same two:

I sense a pattern. Think they'd prefer these?

Images

2006-11-18T05:26:00.000-08:00

Random Question

2006-11-17T04:29:00.000-08:00

If mud is dirt plus water, what is clay?

Geological deposits of mud slowly turn into clay, just as deposits of plant matter turn into oil. While mud is dirt plus water, plants are dirt plus water plus sunlight. That oil contains energy and clay doesn't shows that the energy in oil comes from the sun.

However, unlike plants, which resist gravity by staying in place, mud always follows gravity, soaking it up as it goes. Just as the stored sunlight in oil is available as energy, the stored gravity in clay is available as solidity. Heat forces oil to yield its energy, and heat forces clay yield its solidity.

This solidity made clay an ideal construction material, but eventually dwindling clay reserves forced humanity to find substitutes, such as stone, metal, and -- ironically -- wood. Now, with peak clay far in the past, clay is only used for a few expensive trinkets like pottery.

Images

2006-11-14T10:42:00.000-08:00

I've already talked about my screen capture games. Now, with Halloween past, here's Zardoz the fantasy film.

Vote

2006-11-06T16:06:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, the U.S. elections. In the morning I'm off to vote for John Hall over the Republican incumbent, Sue Kelly, to represent our district in the national congress, and incumbent Hillary Clinton, to represent our state. As everyone reading this probably knows, the Republicans are the majority party and they've been doing a horrible job -- corrupt, fanatical, irresponsible. And they always vote as a bloc, so even the nice ones must be judged by the party and not as individuals. I hope those of you who are eligible U.S. voters vote for the Democrats too.

Link

2006-10-31T04:17:00.000-08:00

A story for Halloween....

The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

Clark Ashton Smith

As an interne in the terrestrial hospital at Ignarh, I had charge of the singular case of Rodney Severn, the one surviving member of the Octave Expedition to Yoh-Vombis, and took down the following story from his dictation. Severn had been brought to the hospital by the Martian guides of the Expedition. He was suffering from a horribly lacerated and inflamed condition of the scalp and brow, and was wildly delirious part of the time and had to be held down in his bed during reccurent seizures of a mania whose violence was doubly inexplicable in view of his extreme debility.

The lacerations, as will be learned from the story, were mainly self-inflicted. They were mingled with numerous small round wounds, easily distinguished from the knife-slashes, and arranged in regular circles, through which an unknown poison had been injected into Severn's scalp. The causation of these wounds was difficult to explain; unless one were to believe that Severn's story was true, and was no mere figment of his illness. Speaking for myself, in the light of what afterwards occurred, I feel that I have no other recourse than to believe it. There are strange things on the red planet; and I can only second the wish that was expressed by the doomed archaeologist in regard to future explorations....

Read the rest....

An excerpt:

Octave had turned toward us now, and he stood in an idle posture before the open door, like one who has finished some ordained task. I was the first of our party to throw off the paralyzing spell; and pulling out a clasp-knife—the only semblance of a weapon which I carried—I ran over to him. He moved back, but not quickly enough to evade me, when I stabbed with the four-inch blade at the black, turgescent mass that enveloped his whole upper head and hung down upon his eyes.

What the thing was, I should prefer not to imagine—if it were possible to imagine. It was formless as a great slug, with neither head nor tail nor apparent organs—an unclean, puffy, leathery thing, covered with that fine, mould-like fur of which I have spoken. The knife tore into it as if through rotten parchment, making a long gash, and the horror appeared to collapse like a broken bladder. Out of it there gushed a sickening torrent of human blood, mingled with dark, filiated masses that may have been half-dissolved hair, and floating gelatinous lumps like molten bone, and shreds of a curdy white substance. At the same time, Octave began to stagger, and went down at full length on the floor. Disturbed by his fall, the mummy-dust rose about him in a curling cloud, beneath which he lay mortally still.

Conquering my revulsion, and choking with the dust, I bent over him and tore the flaccid, oozing horror from his head. It came with unexpected ease, as if I had removed a limp rag: but I wish to God that I had let it remain. Beneath, there was no longer a human cranium, for all had been eaten away, even to the eyebrows, and the half-devoured brain was laid bare as I lifted the cowl-like object, I dropped the unnamable thing from fingers that had grown suddenly nerveless, and it turned over as it fell, revealing on the nether side many rows of pinkish suckers, arranged in circles about a paIlid disk that was covered with nerve-like filaments, suggesting a sort of plexus.

Images

2006-10-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

FAQ

2006-10-25T22:54:00.000-07:00

Why do you publish posts that are nothing but screen captures from Zardoz?

I'm fascinated by the visual. I choose a black background because images would look good against it, even though I knew it would make the text harder to read. But I've been putting off the replacement of the copy of Photoshop that died with my old computer ever since this blog began -- time and money, you know? -- and I don't have a scanner or drawing tools, and I don't want to copy images from elsewhere on the web. That leaves the screen images I capture with my gizmo for turning VHS tapes into DVDs.

Screen captures especially fascinate me. The first images -- Lost Highway, Apocalypse Now, the Sailor Moon series in its amusing DiC incarnation -- were just images left over from making old menus, but I liked posting them enough to start accumulating images with posting in mind. I've always meant to write about these movies and use the images as illustrations, especially Pierrot le Fou and Lost Highway, but the images are also interesting by themselves. Screen caps embody narrativity, haunt the imagination with their phantom contexts. I chose Pierrot le Fou and Zardoz for how many good images they seemed likely to reveal. Looking for these is the visual equivalent of close reading, and gave me many of the ideas I want to write about.

Many games can be played. For example, the first three Zardoz images were chosen to give the movie a science-fiction sleekness it doesn't really have (and to show the principles, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, and Sean Connery), but then -- when I had the idea a few days ago of Halloween-themed posting -- I looked for images that made it look like a horror movie (displaying some of its better visual qualities in the process). I enjoy it, and thought you might too.

Images

2006-10-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

Random Question

2006-10-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

What did you dream when you ate a spider while sleeping?

Candy from a Spider

Eagerly, I emptied my trick or treat bag on the kitchen table. Some of the candy moved -- candy worms inching, candy bugs scurrying, candy bats circling my head. Others performed in place -- laughing candy gremlins, candy fireflies flashing colors to go with their flavors, candy pumpkins that expanded in the fresh air.

A candy spider lept from the bag to the tabletop to the wall. When it found a nice clean corner, the spider would spin candy webs until it was empty. Those were the best.

I caught a candy bat with my thumb and forefinger and placed it on my outstretched tongue. The bats would be beautiful in the holo, but up close they were just noisy blurs that threatened to get stuck in my hair.

I smiled at Mom's aircam, which had followed me all night.

The spider had finished a web. I leaned over and wound it up with a finger, careful to leave the spider. As I sucked on it, sweetness sparkled in my mouth like candles of flavor in a dark cave.

More candy struggled out of the pile to show off. Dancing candy mushrooms, jumping candy toads, a candy preying mantis that caught other candy so that they hopped around inside its transparent body.

A second web was done. Absently, I pulled it loose and savored it.

Still more candy appeared. Candy ghosts, drifting wisps of vapor with cartoon eyes. Hooting candy owls, slinking candy black cats. It was tempting, but I knew better than to eat too much. Besides, it seemed a waste to eat it now instead of later when it had all run down.

When I sucked on the third web, something crunched in my mouth. The spider. I hadn't been paying attention. The spider was edible, but I felt a pang of loss at the thought of all the webs that I would now never eat.

A bad taste spread from the crunchy bits of spider. Chemicals for making the webs? I was puzzled, then alarmed. It almost tasted like a real --

Horror

2006-10-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

Fear and fire are alike. Notice how easily they combine in the common image of people sitting around a campfire listening to a scary story.

Now picture the terror of a primordial band as an advancing forest fire consumes their territory. Another living simile, another shared aspect displayed.

Why do people like horror stories?

For some people, that's a real question. Horror stories show awful things happening. They intentionally make us feel unpleasant emotions: dread, revulsion, shock, supernatural terror. Where's the pleasure? Surely horror must desensitize us or, worse, teach us to enjoy its atrocities.

Think of wildfires, of refugees under dark smoky skies leaving their homes behind. Think of walking down a street late at night. Even now, in the 21st century, fear and fire can blaze out of control, become wild forces breaking through civilization. They can drag us back to the primordial night.

Have you ever built and lit a campfire? It's fun. In high school a friend of mine borrowed a plastic lighter and sheepishly returned it the next day empty. He'd been tripping the night before and had watched the flame, transfixed, until the fuel was gone. The domestication of fire was, and is, a big thing.

If the idea of horror bothers you, think of it this way. Just as the campfire is tame fire, the scary story, the horror paperback or horror DVD, is tame fear. You can turn it on and off. It's fear you control. That's how pleasure becomes possible. A primal force, bent to human wishes though a prism of artifice -- or art.

Images

2006-10-21T02:01:00.000-07:00

I've decided this is my Halloween movie.

Quotes

2006-10-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

"Why did you try to stop me from going back upstairs that day?"

She managed to smile, although her eyes were already spilling over with tears. "I didn't know it really mattered to you. I didn't want us to miss the train."

It had been a small thing, an unimportant thing. For some reason not clear even to him he had insisted on going back upstairs to his study when they were about to leave the house for a short vacation. It was raining, and she had pointed out that there was barely enough time to get to the station. He had surprised himself and her, too, by insisting on his own way in circumstances in which he had never been known to be stubborn.

He had actually pushed her to one side and forced his way up the stairs. Even then nothing might have come of it if had he not -- quite unexpectedly -- raised the shade of the window that faced toward the rear of the house.

It was a very small matter. It had been raining, hard, out in front. From this window the weather was clear and sunny, with no sign of rain.

He had stood there quite a long while, gazing out at the impossible sunshine and rearranging his cosmos in his mind. He re-examined long-suppressed doubts in the light of this one small but totally unexplainable discrepency. Then he had turned and had found that she was standing behind him.

He had been trying ever since to forget the expression that he had surprised on her face.

"What about the rain?"

"The rain?" she repeated in a small, puzzled voice. "Why, it was raining, of course. What about it?"

"But it was not raining out my study window."

"What? But of course it was. I did notice the sun break through the clouds a little, but that was all."

"Nonsense!"

"But, darling, what has the weather to do with you and me? What difference does it make whether it rains or not -- to us?" She approached him timidly and slid a small hand between his arm and side. "Am I responsible for the weather?"

"I think you are. Now please go."

-- Robert A. Heinlein, "They" (1941)

I didn't notice it at first. David [Bowie] had to point it out to me. On a nice balmy Hollywood late afternoon, a storm was going on outside his window: rain, thunder, lightning, the works. Outside all the other windows in the house there was calm and sunshine.

I stood there looking at this thing, sort of numb, but then snapped out of it, resumed my Angie Fix-it role, and proposed reassuring points about the eccentric California climate and the deceptive topography of the Hollywood Hills.

I did a pretty good job, but all the same it took a long time to pacify David after this latest manifestation. He didn't get to sleep until quite late that evening. And before I myself went to sleep, I had to struggle for some time with the thought that my explanations weren't quite as convincing as I'd have liked them to be.

-- Angela Bowie with Patrick Carr, Backstage Passes (1993)

September Girl

2006-10-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

September. The sky cools. The impurities settle out. Here, up in the Hudson Valley, the sunlight is so clear that even beaming sideways through the late afternoon there is just the palest tinge of champagne in its color to betray that the star at its center is yellow and not white.

September 22. My birthday is the autumnal equinox. The sun crosses the celestial equator. A time of equipoise, just as a birthday is balanced between past and future. Summer becomes Fall. Virgo becomes Libra.

Always a sad time. Maybe because I've always lacked for social skills, and this is about the time of the new school year when it would become clear that I had failed once again to find a place. Maybe it's autumn itself, the disappearing animals, the waning sun, the leaves fired up with mad plant colors -- apricot, pomegranate, banana, orange, eggplant -- as the green, the good, chlorophyll decomposes. Maybe it's the clarity.

Clarity is always sad.

Images

2006-10-12T16:32:00.000-07:00

Random Question

2006-09-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

For your birthday, your aunt gave you a maple syrup dispenser shaped like a rooster. Please write her a thank-you note:

Dear Aunt Misky,

Thank you for the wind-up maple syrup dispenser. The way it lurches around the breakfast table pouring syrup on pancakes and waffles is darling. Unfortunately, every time I serve eggs it tries to fertilize them.

Your loving niece,

Ouish

Images

2006-09-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

Link

2006-09-21T10:34:00.000-07:00

From Bruce Sterling:

I Saw the Best Minds of my Generation Destroyed by Google

Los Angeles, 2026.

Ted got busted because we do graffiti. Losing Ted was a big setback, as Ted was the only guy in our gang who knew how to steal aerosol spray cans. As potent instruments of teenage social networking, aerosol spray cans have "high abuse potential". So spray cans are among the many things us teenagers can't buy, like handguns, birth control, alcohol, cigarettes and music with curse words.

I tried hard to buy us another spray can. I'm a street poet, so really, I tried. I walked up to the mall-store register, disguised in my Dad's business jacket, with cash in hand. They're cheap, aerosol spray cans. Beautiful colours of paint, just screaming to get sprayed someplace public where everybody has to see what's on our minds. The store wouldn't sell me the can. The e-commerce system simply would not allow that transaction. The screen just went gray and stayed gray.

That creepy "differential permissioning" sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just... magically off limits. It's a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative... Jesus, I love those words... Where was I?

Right. We teenagers have to live in "controlled spaces". Radio-frequency ID tags, real-time locative systems, global positioning systems, smart doorways, security videocams. They "protect" us kids, from imaginary satanic drug dealer terrorist mafia predators. We're "secured". We're juvenile delinquents with always-on cellphone nannies in our pockets. There's no way to turn them off. The internet was designed without an off-switch.

So my pal Ted, who stupidly loved to tag his own name on the walls, got sent to reform school, where the security is insanely great. Me, I had a much higher grade-point average than Ted, but with no handy Ted to steal spray cans, the words of the prophet have vanished from the subway walls. So much for my campaign to cover the town with graffiti street-stencils of my favourite teen pop stars: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

Read the rest....

Postmodernism

2006-09-11T05:50:00.000-07:00

Once, centuries ago, you died in the same world you were born into. The world changed, but slowly. Then it began to change more quickly.

The important thing is how much it changed during an individual lifetime.

First, people noticed that everything was changing. That was the nineteenth century, the era of progress. Then, in the twentieth century, they noticed that everything was changing. The amount of change in a lifetime had become complete. The world you were born in completely disappeared during your life, replaced by another one. This was not mere progress, even when the change was for the better, and often it wasn't. Even when there was a net benefit, there was the old world dead, its wreckage washed up on the beach in "The Waste Land" and Ulysses. And the new world coming? Utopia or dystopia? That was the modern experience. Modernism was the response.

And still the rate of change increased.

Why should that make a difference, once the amount of change in a lifetime had become complete? But it did. Not only did everything change, but it had time to change again. In a different direction.

Modern change was linear. It had authority. There was the old and the new. The present moment could be split into the residual, the dominant, and the emergent. This new kind of change was different. In it, the new is soon old, and not in a linear way. There, standing in the shadow of the new new, this new, the old of the future, is no longer the verdict of history upon the old old; it lacks finality. In a way, the death of the futuristic. This new kind of change is, to use the term that sums it up in one nuclear paradox, post-modern. That which is in response to it is postmodernism.

The first evidence of the postmodern I noticed was in politics, around 1980, when conservatives spun reaction as an emergent force, and liberalism and progressivism, seemingly emergent by definition, as residual -- old-fashioned, obsolete, in the process of being left behind. What was residual and emergent was now the subject of unlimited interpretation, no longer determined by a historical narrative. A moment of intellectual vertigo, epitomized by the claim that what I had thought was reality was just another religion, namely "secular humanism," that deserved no priveleges over the others.

Postmodern politics weren't inherently reactionary, but, at first, the reactionary kind stood out more clearly as something new: the election of Thatcher and Reagan, the Iranian revolution and Khomeini, the mass enthusiasm for the new pope, John Paul II. These did share a characteristic of postmodernity: the need for something unchanging, permanent, timeless, to cling to. I don't say that in a patronizing way. It's frightening. A world where everything is insecure.

Art, also freed from historical narrative, ranged through time and global space. I'm thinking of movies and pop music, but the same is true of high culture. In pop, the new thing was postmodern groups like Talking Heads and Blondie, deeply into revivalism and global sounds.

This essay began in my mind with a thought about two common words, "classic" and "quirky," that aren't obviously significant or connected with each other. I hear them a lot. I read them a lot in magazines. My thought was, that they are significant, connected, and very postmodern. Something -- a shoe, a screen persona, a building, a food -- is "classic" if it is self-contained enough to retain its effect in spite of the endless, corrosive change going on around it. Something, usually some art object like an indie movie, is "quirky" -- by implication, merely "quirky" -- if it has an individual quality that deviates from the aesthetic dominant. Before postmodernization, such a work, if it was good, would have been emergent -- "advanced," "progressive." But the emergent, as a category, no longer exists. The aesthetic spectrum is no longer a line between past and future but a plane or space with a center, typified if not defined by the "classic," and an edge, occupied by, among others, the "quirky."

In postmodern politics, the argument over what is and isn't progress can be replaced by other, more substantial criteria -- fairness, say, or justice. Postmodern art is more problematic. Maybe we can say that it has to be invented by each artist, and that is as it should be.

Futurelessness has a great future. While the rate of change in the physical world may be slowed down by dwindling resources and negative consequences, the technology of cultural change -- communications, knowledge, the information systems of the symbolic order -- is sure to expand. In other words, change is here to stay.

Random Question

2006-09-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

What spells can you cast with magic markers?

10. Draw notes on keys, remotes, and other small objects: when you're looking for one, the note plays.

9. Get TV shows renewed or cancelled by writing letter grades on the screen.

8. Spy on people from afar by drawing eyes and ears on their walls.

7. For insomnia, write Zs on a pillow; as soon as you lay your head on it, you fall asleep.

6. Draw videogames that work.

5. Flavor water by drawing fruit on the glass.

4. Better than a joy buzzer: draw fangs on your palm.

3. Write a spell with a waterproof marker and stay dry in the rain.

2. Make people think you're crazy just by drawing weird patterns on your face.

1. Use highlighter on your monitor screen and the text you mark becomes funny.

Image Hosting

2006-09-05T09:02:00.000-07:00

Random Question

2006-09-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

Why don't you ever wear a scarf? It doesn't need to be cold outside for your neck to feel naked.

Isadora Duncan.

Quote

2006-09-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

An artist does not know that he is advance-guard, he must be told so or learn it from the reaction of the audience. All original composition -- classical, standard, or advance-guard -- occurs at the limits of the artist's knowledge, feelings, and technique. Being a spontaneous act, it risks, supported by what one has already grown up to, something unknown. The action of all art accepts an inner problem and concentrates on a sensuous medium. Obviously if one has an inner problem, one does not know beforehand the coming solution of it; and concentrating on the medium, one is surprised beyond oneself. Art-working is always just beyond what one can control, and the thing "does not turn out the way I planned." (In the best cases it is just beyond what one can control, and one has indeed learned to control the previous adventures up to that point, has acquired, as the ancients used to say, the habit of art that now again, in act, is in a present and therefore novel urgency.)

-- Paul Goodman, "Advance-Guard Writing in America: 1900-1950" (1951)

Link

2006-09-02T23:07:00.000-07:00

From Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Cannabis:

Top 10 Pot Studies the Government Wishes It Had Never Funded

10) MARIJUANA USE HAS NO EFFECT ON MORTALITY A massive study of California HMO members funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) found marijuana use caused no significant increase in mortality. Tobacco use was associated with increased risk of death. Sidney, S et al. Marijuana Use and Mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Vol. 87 No. 4, April 1997. p. 585-590. Sept. 2002.

9) HEAVY MARIJUANA USE AS A YOUNG ADULT WON’T RUIN YOUR LIFE Veterans Affairs scientists looked at whether heavy marijuana use as a young adult caused long-term problems later, studying identical twins in which one twin had been a heavy marijuana user for a year or longer but had stopped at least one month before the study, while the second twin had used marijuana no more than five times ever. Marijuana use had no significant impact on physical or mental health care utilization, health-related quality of life, or current socio-demographic characteristics. Eisen SE et al. Does Marijuana Use Have Residual Adverse Effects on Self-Reported Health Measures, Socio-Demographics or Quality of Life? A Monozygotic Co-Twin Control Study in Men. Addiction. Vol. 97 No. 9. p.1083-1086. Sept. 1997

8) THE "GATEWAY EFFECT" MAY BE A MIRAGE Marijuana is often called a "gateway drug" by supporters of prohibition, who point to statistical "associations" indicating that persons who use marijuana are more likely to eventually try hard drugs than those who never use marijuana — implying that marijuana use somehow causes hard drug use. But a model developed by RAND Corp. researcher Andrew Morral demonstrates that these associations can be explained "without requiring a gateway effect." More likely, this federally funded study suggests, some people simply have an underlying propensity to try drugs, and start with what’s most readily available. Morral AR, McCaffrey D and Paddock S. Reassessing the Marijuana Gateway Effect. Addiction. December 2002. p. 1493-1504.

Read the rest...

I was especially struck by this one:

4) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER, (PART II) In a 1994 study the government tried to suppress, federal researchers gave mice and rats massive doses of THC, looking for cancers or other signs of toxicity. The rodents given THC lived longer and had fewer cancers, "in a dose-dependent manner" (i.e. the more THC they got, the fewer tumors). NTP Technical Report On The Toxicology And Carcinogenesis Studies Of 1-Trans- Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, CAS No. 1972-08-3, In F344/N Rats And B6C3F(1) Mice, Gavage Studies. See also, "Medical Marijuana: Unpublished Federal Study Found THC-Treated Rats Lived Longer, Had Less Cancer," AIDS Treatment News no. 263, Jan. 17, 1997.

Random Question

2006-08-31T19:51:00.000-07:00

Do you believe that forks are evolved from spoons?

What a silly question! You obviously don't understand evolution.

With the arrival of spoons, food faced extinction. Food adapted in two ways. Some food evolved into simpler structures, like beans or macaroni, that could reproduce in greater numbers. Other food grew in size until it was too large for spoons. With no natural predators, this larger food threatened to unbalance the entire ecological system.

Forks and knives evolved together in response to larger food. What species they branched out from is less important than the evolutionary niche they filled. Nature is a complex system of relationships, all interacting to maintain a balanced whole. Without forks and knives, ever-larger food would have dominated the world. There would be no cities, no roads, just giant cheeseburgers floating like islands in the grease-mottled seas.

Image Hosting

2006-08-27T15:13:00.000-07:00

More from Pierrot le Fou for the Rigorous Intuition Board. I uploaded my old VHS, the entire flick, to my computer and I've been glomming screen captures at leisure, a fascinating process. The movie spins off great images by the hundreds. It's ideal for the images-only thread, the real cyberspace location of all the images parked here under "Image Hosting."

Though stripped of context, the images here do have themes in common, such as guess-the-movie and my-favorite-films (excluding the Sailor Moon captures in the preceding post). In case you can't guess the movies, the first "Image Hosting" back in July showed Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman in Lost Highway, and the second, the water buffalos who appear so significantly and symmetrically in Apocalypse Now, followed by a symbolic double exposure of Martin Sheen reading about Kurtz, actually the perigee of one of Apocalypse Now's many slow dissolves -- a technique and even a word that seem peculiarly appropriate.

As I said, I uploaded Pierrot le Fou and I've been glomming images ever since. The direction, by Jean Luc Godard, and the cinematography, by Roaul Coutard, aggressively explore the source material -- not just the moody, hardboiled paperback original it's based on, Obssession by Lionel White, but all the sources of the footage, such as the cast members and the locations. Then Godard and the editor, Françoise Collin, aggressively explore the results, taking apart all the internal connections to study each element in isolation while, at the same time, making new connections with the outside world of 1965 -- pop culture, the generation gap, Third World revolution. That may be why to aggressively explore it with a digital window -- to skip back and forth, to pause, reverse, slow, freeze, capture -- turns out, counterintuitively, to be more enjoyable -- exciting, involving -- than to watch it passively in a theater.

"The best way to do it is with scissors." --Alfred Hitchcock

Image Hosting

2006-08-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

I, Oracle

2006-08-21T17:51:00.000-07:00

One of the places I post regularly is the Bartcop Forum, a satellite of the pro-Democratic site Bartcop. Needless to say, things were grim there after election day, 2004, so I did something I'd never done before -- start a new topic -- to try to cheer people up.

"Bush won the election like the Americans won the Tet Offensive"

November 4, 2004

Bush's victory over Kerry -- and for the sake of argument I'm giving the election numbers the benefit of the doubt -- should be compared to Nixon-McGovern in 1972 and Reagan-Mondale in 1984 before it is assessed. Those were 49-state landslides. Bush barely survived.

In Vietnam the Tet Offensive was defeated by the Americans, but the real story was that it happened at all. The official narrative of the war was shattered.

That's what happened to Bush, though characteristically he will act as he got his 49-state landslide anyway, hoping this will make it seem as if he did. Instead of a blue elite besieged by a red majority -- the official narrative of the conservative revolutionaries -- we now have blue forces that are almost equal and potentially superior to the red. In retrospect, despite a few more years of political war, in which the red forces wield superior weapons like the Supreme Court, the 2004 election will be remembered as the turning point in the conservative revolution, the moment it became obvious that it would fail.

There were no replies, and my post drifted quickly into obscurity. Yet it records one of those moments of perceptiveness that I almost always fail to leave any record of, so I hope you'll forgive me for bringing it up myself.

Random Question

2006-08-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

The profile page cues them up. I smack them onto the next page to score posts.

You're trapped in a well with a goat and a slinky. Describe how you will escape.

Do you think I'm going to tease the goat until it turns around and kicks me up out of the well and use the slinky to break my fall? What am I, a clown? That is so not going to happen.

I sacrifice the goat to the Great Old Ones and the slinky and I exchange bodies. As the slinky I walk up the wall. They can do that, right? Then, once I'm out of the well, we revert to our own bodies. The goat's ghost blames the slinky, and they fight at the bottom of the well for all eternity.

Quote

2006-08-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

Against a wall of one of the narrow gray corridors on the eighteenth floor of The New Yorker, there used to be long, ugly shelves, also painted gray, where the daily newspapers were kept in separate cubicles. The New York Times, The New York Post, The Daily News, The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, The World Telegram and Sun, The Journal American -- the last three still existed then, though they were foundering -- piled up, were read, became crumpled and disordered, but never seemed to be removed until the shelves were full. Most writers and editors did not arrive at the office until noon. Young writers, and very old writers, as they do at most publications, tended to come in early and work late. Each morning when I came in, I used to head for the cubicle that held The Daily News. The News horoscope, it seemed to me, though far from sunny, was reliable. The Dick Tracy comic strip was in an inspired phase....

One morning when I arrived, the News was gone. This was not serious. To miss a day of Dick Tracy was a bit like missing an episode of a soap opera. One could catch up. Several days passed. Each morning I came in earlier, and then earlier still, hoping to catch the News at the moment of distribution. I suspected the messengers. One or two messengers seemed always to be sitting, either chatting or reading newspapers, on the depressing little brown couch in the last bleak corner of the lounge -- which was rapidly being crowded out anyway by the ever-encroaching walls. But no. When the messenger came to put the newspapers in their cubicles, The Daily News was not among them. The next day, I arrived before seven. There it was. I took it to my office, read and returned it. The next morning, standing beside the cubicle, was Edmund Wilson. "Have you seen The Daily News?" he said, with consternation. "I can't find it anywhere. I've been following Dick Tracy...."

-- Renata Adler, Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999)

Image Hosting

2006-08-16T23:08:00.000-07:00

More screen captures from an old VHS tape. Since "Image Hosting" has turned into a favorite movies topic as well as a series of suggestive images for the Rigorous Intuition Board, and this one's a little obscure, there's no reason not to mention that this sequence is from Pierrot le Fou, a Jean-Luc Godard film from 1965. Tres pop, oui? And no, I don't know whether Odorono is a real brand, Pete Townsend got the name from this movie, or whoever wrote the subtitles in 1969 got the name from The Who Sell Out.

Link

2006-08-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Mark Gibbs at Networkworld:

08:52 Welcome to the Microsoft Windows Horizon operating system. Today is July 10, 2012. The temperature outside is 105 degrees Fahrenheit, the wind speed is 40 knots gusting to 80 knots, the air pollution level is extreme and the UV level is dangerous. The Homeland Security Threat Level is red.

09:03 To log on, please enter your name and password. Thank you, your account is valid. Please touch the fingerprint scanner. Thank you, your fingerprint is recognized. Please look into the retinal scanner. Thank you, retinal scan passed.

09:05 Please place a drop of blood on the analyzer. Thank you, your DNA is recognized. We note your sugar and albumen levels are high. Your health insurance provider has been notified and your doctor informed as per the Miller Limbaugh Computer Users Health Reporting Act of 2008. The mandatory $1 health check fee will be added to your Microsoft Service Account.

09:06 Please say: "I accept all license terms and conditions and surrender all legal rights to any and all compensation in the event of loss of time, data or employment due to use or misuse of any Microsoft products and services." Thank you, your voice profile is recognized.

09:07 Please wait.

09:15 Microsoft thanks you for your interest in Windows Horizon (aka Vista 3). To ensure this is a valid copy, we will now enter the authentication phase.

09:20 Microsoft has been contacted over the Internet and your connection speed has been verified to be adequate. The verification process can be speeded up for a $5 fee added to your Microsoft Service Account. Say or click "yes" to log on quicker or "no" to skip and continue.

09:21 Thank you, your logon has been accelerated.

09:31 Please wait.

Read the rest....

Quote

2006-08-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

...In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and that devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind....

-- Saul Bellow, Herzog (1965)

Unscheduled Outage

2006-08-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

We are experiencing technical difficulties. First, a box said my floppy disk was full. I opened the file with all my drafts and notes for future posts to see if it was okay. It was, but when I closed it again everything except the first twenty lines or so got eaten. Ouish!

I fell into bed, knocked out. By the time I had recovered sufficiently to think of copying the other files, the disk wouldn't open at all. It was unformatted, the box said. Had I lost the whole thing?

I started a new disk, but soon that was even worse. The evil box claimed the disk wasn't there at all, that the drive was empty. That allowed me to hope that the first disk was recoverable, since the drive, not the disk, was at least part of the problem. In this new frame of mind, it occurred to me that I could save my work on the hard drive, something I'd gotten out of the habit of doing years ago. We now resume our regular scheduled programming.

Image Hosting

2006-07-29T02:10:00.000-07:00

More screen captures.

Random Question

2006-07-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

Long, drawn-out, indistinct booming as thunderstorms prowl up and down the Hudson Valley. No matter how hard it rains, the air stays hot. Welcome to 21st century weather. When a storm passes overhead, the windows darken as if night was falling. Time to cheer myself up by hijacking yet another random question from the profile page template.

You're in the grocery store with a broken cart. How will you ever be that hungry?

Waiting for a good question? Anyway, I always grab a plastic basket instead and zoom between the slow moving carts like a motorcycle in a traffic jam. It's part of the cheap bitch diet.

Now that I'm thinking about shopping, I am hungry. I could go for my favorite sandwich right now: sliced turkey and jalapeno Monterey Jack cheese in a whole wheat pita. The cheese obviates the need for a condiment, so it's easy to make, and the pita holds it together well enough that I can eat it while surfing the web.

Image Hosting

2006-07-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

Just a couple of screen captures for the cool new images-only thread over at the Rigorous Intuition board. If you don't recognize the source, I'll get around to it when I discuss my favorite movies.

Random Question

2006-07-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

What would you wear for camouflage if you were hiding in a gingerbread house?

What is this? Are these the girl questions?

Since I don't live in a fairy tale, I have to take into account what a moldering, verminous, disgusting wreck our little house would be. How would I camoflage myself? How about as a cockroach? Or a rat?

No, what I think I'll do is spin around and disperse my protoplasm into ten thousand modules so I can not only conceal myself but scare away all contenders as a swarm of fake army ants.

Next.

Meet My Avatar

2006-07-26T18:36:00.000-07:00

It seems I can't upload an image to my profile page, but I can upload one here and link to it.

In case you don't recognize her, this is Sailor Moon's academic nemesis, Miss Haruna. Don't forget who you're talking to.

Random Question

2006-07-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

Why waste this on my profile, where readers will just get sick of it anyway, when I can wring a whole post out of it?

Your superpower is that you smell like dandelions whenever someone lies. How will you maintain your secret identity?

Why would I want to maintain a secret identity? That's a very marketable ability. Imagine the value to banks, lawyers, and corporations. I'd just have to watch out that I don't get kidnapped by an intelligence agency.

Next.