Archive for November, 2007
Latest issue of a good online visual arts magazine is up.
I’m attending a wedding in three weeks and that requires a haircut, in the simplistic view of the mother-son relationship that demanded the idea. I had a peaceful morning Monday and when I went to get a haircut, I felt mildly accosted by the barber at Razor’s Edge, as though I’d violated his tranquil barbershop when the bell on the door clanged at my entrance. He had ESPN on as usual and I tried to placate the situation by pretending that I knew something about sports, or that I even cared.
I told my roommate later that I believed hair grew straight from the mushy material of the brain, poking through the scalp and bushing into what we call a hairdo, because I’ve been feeling emotionally different since my haircut.
I started listening to new bands again, indicating that the bitch period of my man cycle might be over for a while. I’ve been reading more and more over the last few days, and can even stomach discomfort better.
More importantly, I’ve been waking up with a wonderfully blank mind. I fall back asleep and play the lucid dreaming game, pretending to read books and signs in my sleep and feeling delighted at the impossibility of the act. The only violation to my placidity comes when I open my eyes and view the world in front of me: my book-bag, the messy room I left when I fell asleep. It’s only when I open my eyes that I’m faced with the external world, which not only requires effort, but engagement.
I don’t mean to sound anti-social. I’m introverted of course, but I’ll admit the world is rewarding and exciting. It’s the obligatory participation in it that offends me. Given truly free will, I’d still meet people, talk to them, grow afraid of some and toss away others. It’d just be nice to have that choice.
I think I should be more careful next time I get a headache. I didn’t realize my emotive philosophical existence would be so moved.
There’s a moustachioed man at the Burbank Airport reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, adorning a UC San Diego t-shirt. Behind him the people shuffle: a young women reminiscent of Jean Seberg and the French New Wave, somebody in crutches holding a pink bag.
I look up and he has switched books already. I knew it couldn’t last. The intellectualism of the American is a contradiction. I gush resentment toward this thought as a wheelchaired older woman forces my gaze to these words and I feel silly continuing.
My roommate and I walked out the door of our apartment and traveled in two directions. The airport shuttle driver came to pick me up. He was a young man who told me he hoped to be a stand-up comic someday. When we reached the airport, he was unable to break a $20 for tip. I went up the escalator and the clouds and was driven home by my parents on Wednesday night. My father talked about the weather and the fog.
We had Thanksgiving dinner the next day. A fog broke out in Malibu that turned out to be a fire. I’ll be leaving for Davis before the air quality gets too poor here from the smoke.
If you believe in symmetry, it’s entirely possible I’ll arrive at my apartment front door in tandem with my roommate and his bags.
This is in reply to this USA Today article on Twitter that Google found me.
My friend Mathias brought me onto
Twitter, a website that epitomizes Facebook’s Status Updates feature, as alerting your Twitter friends of your status is the only function of the site. And like many other sites these days, it permeates onto other devices, namely, our cell phones.
Andrew Kantor, writing for USA Today, disapproves of the service, citing information overload and frivolous updates (”time for lunch…. Hmm what should I have. Ssoooooo many choices”) as his major pains with the service. And he’s got a point.
But Twitter’s also a public bulletin board just for you and your friends, allowing you to do some interesting things, such as “crowd source” for information, where you post a status update asking a question and your contacts can reply. Or you can use it as a social bookmarking service like
del.icio.us or
digg.com, sharing sites and articles with your friends. It’s an intriguing idea.
Like all communication tools, they limit what we can say and how we can say it, but they also help reshape our thoughts and give us ideas we might not otherwise have had. I can’t imagine crowd sourcing via e-mail or the telephone with any urgency or ease, which are two critical aspects of crowd sourcing.
As more people use Twitter, the ways in which it is used will likely expand, but for now, it is just an interesting sort of toy .. a toy I hope you check out.
http://www.dehp.net/candidate/index.php is a site that lets you rate your position on the issues big media’s talking about (gay rights, abortion, border fence, etc.) and then produces the current presidential candidate who best matches your opinions. You’d be surprised.
My man is (apparently) Mike Gravel, who isn’t allowed to run due to a lack of funds (really? really??). He’s the guy that produced
this video as a promo for his candidacy. It’s him staring into the camera for a few minutes (breaking the artistic third wall, art cinema peeps), then he throws a stone into the pond behind him, walking away while the ripples expand and die.
Yeah.
Tomorrow I’m flying home to all that entails. It’ll be relaxing.
I borrowed a beautiful 1951 copy of Catcher in the Rye from the library. I picked another copy up years ago and never finished it. It’s a pretty good goddamn book.
I read a thesis on WFMU’s blog that communication tools (letters, phones, televisions, the Internet) not only enable their function (communication) but reveal something about the internal structure of our thoughts through their particulars. We have to remember that technology as a tool not only helps us express ourselves, but controls the method of expression. The example given was that it’s somewhat like a child with a hammer. When the child possesses the tool, he suddenly observes the nail-like properties in his mother’s good dishes and all other things. Now consider your speech patterns when you pick up the phone, or your movements in front of a webcam.
It reminds me vaguely of my first outings to music shows and discovering how incredibly differentiated the mediums of live music vs. recorded music are.
“Their CDs are round and their cassettes are rectangular, but that’s about all My Bloody Valentine has in common with anyone else making records these days. Together since 1984, this Irish-British quartet has been steadily reshaping the contours of contemporary music” - mybloodyvalentine.net
“Kevin Shields, the mercurial and elusive leader of My Bloody Valentine, confirmed that the legendary band has reunited in the studio for the first time since 1995, recorded new material, and that an album release is forthcoming, possibly as soon as this year.” - velvetmorning’s last.fm journal, citing thedailyswarm.com. Also reported on billboard.com.
I’m not sure if it’s true but it would make an amazing end-of-year record, my entire winter soundtrack. Here’s a track my friend Wes pointed out of Kevin Shields playing what could possibly be a new My Bloody Valentine song.
Please, please, please.
the people i once knew are still held as an impression in my head. i wonder how long they’ll stay there, and how different they are now?