Wooden door frames don’t keep you very safe. I acidentally locked myself out of my bedroom…

I didn’t even kick it very hard.

Mine’s cost me about $1000 in the past two weeks.

Beyond their expense though, I hate their noise and their traffic and their pollution and most of all the fact that they are why I don’t have trains.

Fuck them. Fuck cars so, so, so very much.

I just heard this song for the first time today, on the radio (AM 1690, thank you for existing… I’m sorry it took so long to find you). What an incredible historical reference :

WHEN THAT MAN IS DEAD AND GONE
(Irving Berlin)
Al Bowlly - 1941

When that man is dead and gone
When that man is dead and gone
We’ll go dancing down the street
Kissing everyone we meet
When that man is dead and gone

What a day to wake up on
What a way to greet the dawn
Some fine day the news’ll flash
Satan with a small moustache
Is asleep beneath the lawn
When that man is dead and gone

Satan, Satan, thought up a plan
Dressed as a man
Walking the earth and since he began
The world is hell for you and me
But what a heaven it will be

When that man is dead and gone
When that man is dead and gone
When they lay him twelve feet deep
I’ll be there to laugh, not weep
When that man is dead and gone

What a day to wake up on
What a way to greet the dawn
Satan’ll take him by the hand
To meet old Gerring, look what, man
When that man is dead and gone
When that man is dead and gone

Some fine day the news’ll flash
Satan with a small moustache
Is asleep beneath the lawn
When that man is dead and gone

What a day to wake up on
What a way to greet the dawn
When a certain man is dead and gone

• A character in the movie “The Holiday” stated that “In the movies, we have leading ladies and the best friend. You’re supposed to be the leading lady of your own life, for God’s sake.” I am not sure what this means, but I am trying to incorporate it into my life. Hello world…I am a leading lady!?!

• Ballerinas cannot punch.

• It is 2008, and I can still dunk. This translates to I am not old…yet.

• The election system needs to be revamped…
- Today, I felt a little disenfranchised. The fact that I essentially had to vote for my third or fourth favorite candidate in the party that I reluctantly vote in shows that there is a problem. After primaries in around 5 states, we have a system where candidates drop out before the vast majority of America has a chance to have a say.
- Let us please have a discussion about voters in Iowa. They are not automatically better voters, more informed voters, better judges of character, etc.
- Let us at least acknowledge that although this year’s election has been noteworthy in the sense that for the first time we have a viable woman candidate and a viable African-American candidate, the next president will be rich. This has not changed. No matter what Obama’s background is or what his name is, he is still a graduate of Harvard Law. This is not your average American. This is not a paradigm shift.
- Let us please have a real discussion about what it means to vote. Should we vote for who we think will win? Should we vote for who is winning in the latest poll? Should we vote for who we would rather have a smoothie with? Should we vote for who is raising the most amount of money? Should we vote for who makes us feel the most inspired but have no idea what the person stands for? Should we vote for who has the same demographics? Should we vote for whom we think will handle issues the way we think they should be handled? This real discussion needs to happen. Without this discussion, we go from election to election without an educated and informed voting public. An election determined by the uninformed results in what? Imagine the changes we could create if we demanded education of issues, public stances of issues by the candidates, and people actually knowing what they are voting for.
- Let us at least acknowledge that election coverage is a joke. Let us take the Democrats for an example. Obama entered the race on February 10, 2007. This is almost a year ago. We have all of the advantages of year long political coverage, many forms of media to get stances out, and most still could not tell me what are the specific differences between Obama and Hillary. Part of this is the voting public’s apathy. Part of this is the election coverage that treats it as a “horse race” not an election. Part of it is that our candidates do not state their platforms. No matter what side you end up on. The reality is that Obama does not speak in specifics…hardly ever. He gives a great speech. He gives an inspiring speech. He creates hope in the public. However, hope does not pay heating bills. Hope does not pay mortgages. I am not picking on Obama. Every candidate is guilty of this, but many Americans, however, will be casting a ballot today for Obama and not be able to tell you what he wants to do. This is the problem…Not necessarily Obama.
- Let us have a real discussion about privatization. Is the free market really better? Is it really always more efficient?
- Let us have a real discussion about Blackwater. Do we want to have private militaries? Do we want to have a private intelligence company that they are in the process of building as we speak? Do we want to have a private army that is fully armed and running around our cities as Blackwater was doing in New Orleans during Katrina? Is this a good idea?
- Let us have a real discussion about economics. We have a voting public that still believes in some form of trickle down economics. What is wrong with the average American when they would support a system that gives more money to the rich in hope that a little bit of the vast benefit that we just gave to the rich will trickle down to the rest of us? I understand how language and framing an issue can determine how we think about the issue, but trickle down economics does not even sound good for us and we support it.
- Let us have a real discussion about Corporations and the stock market. We have a candidate in Romney that made a fortune off buying corporations, laying people off, and reselling the company for a profit. The average American does not think that there is anything wrong with this because he is acting in the best interest of the shareholder. What is wrong with us when the average American lives from pay check to pay check and depends on a job to make this work, but yet we are ok with someone placing the needs of a rich shareholder’s account balance over the job of the worker that actually pays for food?

• Finally, I am apparently in a ranting mood this week…

k : hiya
IL : Hello
k : how goes
IL : mixed. I’m right on the precipice of not knowing anything and learning a lot

Aren’t we all.

A friend of mine is on death row. I recently asked him for some advice on what to say to my little brother who is going through a defiant time in his life. In response, my friend on death row stated that “a hard head will make a soft ass” due to being behind bars…

I stumbled across a fascinating article last week, called A Defence of the Book, in which the author bemoans the transformation of educational media. In particular, Professor Wall worries that the new technologies that provide content trivially and at low cost, without forcing one to examine the greater context, diminish actual understanding.

I find this a fascinating discussion. I come from a mixed background, in which I voraciously read anything I could get my hands on throughout my youth, excelled in my English courses and then chose a different path for my career, majoring in Physics and Computer Science at University.

I have a troubled relationship with both books and technology. That is, I’ve seen technology do wonderful things, but remain skeptical of it’s vaunted universal curative properties. As for books, I love them deeply, but have long had difficulty with the very concern being illustrated by Professor Wall; I often find it difficult or impossible to absorb much of the material. I find I can read a book, enjoy it immensely and within weeks forget much of what I had found so wonderful. This must be a failure in my method, or else a flaw in my brain, but the end result is that I must acquire new information (I won’t call it knowledge) if not on a Just-In-Time basis, at least shortly in advance of when I will require it practically. For non-practical reading (by which I mean, I suppose, anything not related to my work or some specific short-term task), I often retain only general impressions, or images of particular scenes, but seldom actual passages or, say, the philosophies of each character.

I have considered that there are ways in which technology might assist someone like me in absorbing what I read, apart from trolling Google and the various news groups for discussions relevant to the book, or accessing scholarly works dissecting or examining the work, neither of which are particularly convenient from my easy chair. Perhaps my use of the word “convenient” has already demolished any hope I have of convincing Professors of English that my arguments have merit, but I can’t help but feel there must be a compromise, that it ought not be required of me to read each book at my desk, with my notebook and references at hand. Or, worse, that I be forced as students once were to practically live in a library, tracking down dusty tomes in the hopes of illumination.

In my pursuit of solutions, I’ve followed technology fairly closely, and am constantly on the lookout for something that meets all of my desires; so far, finding only disappointment. I will not even consider laptops, pocket-pc’s, PDA’s or the like, as I find them inadequate in too many ways to discuss briefly. Instead, I’ll confine myself to discussing those devices that seek to specifically emulate bound paper, under the general title of “eBooks”.

I have a number of aesthetic issues with these devices, not least of which is a deep affection for the texture and smell of ink and paper, not to mention the heft and solidity of a bound novel. But attachment to the physical attributes of the books are perhaps not germane to the thread we’re following here. To discuss, rather, the functional attributes of books, I’d start with what I think is the most crucial element lacking in current books — electronic and paper both — and that is a robust mechanism for annotation, citation and cross-reference. These are simultaneously those functions that would, I think, go furthest towards improving upon the classical book enough to make the transition to eBooks tolerable, and mitigate my feelings of aesthetic loss.

Consider annotation, in which I might select a passage and write into the document a synopsis of the passage as I understand it, or a reminder to research it more thoroughly, or just an exclamation of joy because the author has so perfectly expressed an emotion or thought. This can all be done non-destructively, and stored right with the content of the book itself, which is not possible with normal books. Of course, I could keep a journal, and I know that many people do, but can’t get past the overhead of managing it, not to mention the impossibility of searching it efficiently or easily linking notes with each other and finally, again, feel that keeping a pen and pad near me at all times while reading is burdensome to the point that I simply won’t consistently keep it up.

For fear that I might continue writing for the rest of the day, I won’t go into depth on the remainder of the potential benefits I perceive, but perhaps can highlight my favorites. Consider books that :

• contain cross-references to other resources that are specifically related to the current passage, page or chapter, accessible with a single tap of the pen,
• the ability to join discussions on a text or a passage directly from within the context of the book,
• the possibility that the author might release an explanation or further comment on a book, or section thereof, which could be downloaded automatically into the reader
• automatically generated suggestions for further reading, based on the subject matter itself or comments from previous readers, and
• such low-hanging fruit as an integrated dictionary and thesaurus with sensitivity to the era in which the book was written, and other language tools perhaps specific to the work or author (as with, for example, James Joyce or Gene Wolfe).

And of course all such devices will be capable of storing many books on a single small storage chip, the benefit of which ought to be clear.

I don’t in any way claim the inherent superiority of such a device to a true academic examination of a work of literature (or even a thorough reading of a technical reference or science text). Nonetheless I do believe that it would provide the ability for those without access to, or time for, such intensive study to get far closer to understanding than they might otherwise.

And of course, by “they” I also mean “I”. As I said before, my ability to retain the works that I read would almost certainly increase dramatically. In the meantime, I have two or three (or ten or twelve) new novels I’d like to read, and one or two that it’s time to work through again, in the hope that I’ll finally remember them.

The circumstances by which I came across this apparently famous speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt aren’t worth mentioning. What is worth discussing is how far we’ve fallen in my eyes.

The speech was given in Chautauqua, New York in 1936 here are some excerpts from the full speech:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

“Nevertheless—and I speak from a long experience—the effective maintenance of American neutrality depends today, as in the past, on the wisdom and determination of whoever at the moment occupy the offices of President and Secretary of State.”

” It is clear that our present policy and the measures passed by the Congress would, in the event of a war on some other continent, reduce war profits which would otherwise accrue to American citizens. Industrial and agricultural production for a war market may give immense fortunes to a few men; for the nation as a whole it produces disaster. It was the prospect of war profits that made our farmers in the west plow up prairie land that should never have been plowed but should have been left for grazing cattle. Today we are reaping the harvest of those war profits in the dust storms which have devastated those war-plowed areas.”

“If we face the choice of profits or peace, the Nation will answer—must answer—“we choose peace.” It is the duty of all of us to encourage such a body of public opinion in this country that the answer will be clear and for all practical purposes unanimous. …”

” We seek to dominate no other nation. We ask no territorial expansion. We oppose imperialism. We desire reduction in world armaments.

We believe in democracy; we believe in freedom; we believe in peace. We offer to every nation of the world the handclasp of the good neighbor. Let those who wish our friendship look us in the eye and take our hand. “

It seems that while the times may change, the issues don’t. So I ask you… in light of the fact that we once had a nation that would elect a president both intelligent and eloquent enough to give this speech, how did we get here?

You and your wife are about to pull away from the whole foods parking lot when a tall mid-40’s man leaves the bags he’s loading into his car to flag you down. When you roll down the window, with a big smile he says to you “All of the happily married couples I know are with women from foreign countries!”
How do you respond?

All B and I could do was laugh uneasily say “uhh thanks?” and drive off. I have no idea? Is this something like reverse racism? How did he know we were married? For that matter, how did he know she was from a foreign country?

For that matter, why did this guy feel so compelled as to quit loading his groceries, walk over to us and flag us down to say that?

Sometimes I like to read while sitting down on the toilet. I admit it. I know it sounds bad, but I at least try to only read materials that will remain in my possession to cut down on the nasty factor…

I do this at home, and I do this at work. Sometimes the change of scenery is nice, and it tends to help keep me awake if I have a lot to read that day. This morning, I was sitting in a bathroom stall reading, and a man walked into the bathroom. He went directly to one of the stand up urinals, and he began to urinate. I am not sure if he even knew if I was in the bathroom. While the man was urinating, he just started letting farts fly as loud as he possibly could, and this made we wonder. What is the proper etiquette in this situation? I know it is a bathroom, and I know that this behavior would be perfectly acceptable if he was sitting down on a toilet, but is this an acceptable action if he is standing up to urinate with no intent to dispose of solid waste?

—————

Late addition – I was in the bathroom again. How do people look at you straight in the eye as they walk out without washing their hands? Shouldn’t they at least play the game by running some water?

It’s occurred to me, just today, that one of the strangest things I’ve ever encountered is a friend’s therapist who, turning to me and shaking my hand, says, “I’ve heard so much about you.”

Your strangest moment.
Spill.

on the Interwebs…

Back in the day, people didn’t have the Internet, they had to read zines, they had to go out to record stores to hear music, and they had to look around to find shows or music. With the Internet, people can find things easier, and as a result, they might not be into it, because they’re not putting any effort into it, and it has very little meaning to them. Kids today can go on the Internet and find everything and be into a scene without actually investing themselves into it. Regardless of the whole who-is-and-who-isn’t “punk” argument, that’s just a dishonest way to live.

– Eric Urbach of Static Thought in Punk Planet #78

on the use of digital technology in music

I always like recorded music to take me somewhere different. I don’t want to listen to some shiny new record and think, “I know what keyboard he used. I know he used a state-of-the-art studio. I know what outfit he was wearing.” . . . I want to be transported to a different place and time and to have a mood imposed on me that just stumulates my imagination or my heart or stirs my emotion. So when I hear a shiny bullshit record with 808’s pulverizing me like I’m stupid, as if I can’t make up my own mind, and I need to be physically assaulted with bass.”

–Edan in Punk Planet #78

on technology = progress

The reason the analog stuff is cool to embrace is because humanity has a tendency to place blind emphasis on evolution and forward progress, or at least the illusion of it. Progress is more of a humane, soulful, spiritual thing. Progress is not owning a car that can parallel park for you. That doesn’t progress *you*, that progresses the technology.

–Edan again

I suppose I spend a lot of time writing responses to articles I read on the web here… a product of Memestreams, of course. At any rate, I read this article by one Claude Willan and found it quite fascinating, but I have a rather different take on the whole thing.

Willan concludes his piece by saying

Until we can find our own vision to aspire to, maybe Borf and Andre the Giant are all we have.

We are clearly meant to identify with the emptiness the author feels, his lack of place or purpose. Or, rather, not his but “his” in the collective, generational sense. I largely agree with the facts being presented, but interpret them differently.

But I’ll come back to that in a moment.

I feel like I should start by saying that I’ve never really grasped the notion of “generations,” since it always seemed to me like people were being born an dying pretty much all the time and that this general cyclic meta-grouping was kind of arbitrary. That is to say, one’s “generation” has everything to do with common philosophical themes and popular media and that it’s basis in date of birth hardly regular enough as to be predictable.

Therefore, I’m going to roughly group my 28 year old self in with the 21 year old author and use pronouns like “we”, “our” and “us”. I’m not gen-X — again, to the extent that I understand the meaning in the first place — and gen-Y, as I’ve heard, is so indistinct and non-descript that it essentially captures the same sort of existential no man’s land the author so dishearteningly expounds upon.

Further, and it may not need to be said, but I’m really only talking here about the United States, perhaps even being broad enough to include “the West” as a larger element, but certainly not the entire world. The author states

… this hailing of “American youth” displays a paradoxical lack of awareness of our generation even as it tries to pin us down. There’s no such thing as “American youth” — or British youth, come to that, these days. That’s exactly what we’re not — a body, a set.

and I think his essential point is correct. There’s little enough cohesion among youth of a similar age which would permit such a generalized reference to have any real meaning. I’m going to discuss this further, but one of the reasons for that, I think, is that the concept of “similar age” has itself changed lately. In ages past, 10 years difference in age was probably less of a gulf than it is today. I am certain that the day-to-day experience of college now is substantively different than when I left a mere 6 years ago. But I think this is a small part of it.

While arguing that modern youth are not “a body, a set” above, Willan does bring up the notion of collectivism and particularly the way in which the internet fosters that sort of anonymous social interaction. I don’t think he’s quite making incompatible statements here; he’s arguing that the anonymity is what strips us of our icons — our Ginsburgs and Kerouacs — and establish the emptiness of our generation’s social fabric.

He’s not wrong, but I think he crucially overestimates the negativity of that position. Decrying the barren musical landscape which lacks towering edifices of meaning — “no Bob Dylan, no Bruce Springsteen” — misses the fact that that landscape has Connor Oberst and Thursday and Radiohead and Bad Religion and Del and The (International) Noise Conspiracy and Ted Leo and Avail and the Eels and Rage Aginst The Machine and The Refused and, well, I could go on.

This complaint that music now is all commercial dreck, stuffed down our gullets by multimillion dollar market campaigns, is made without the slightest mention that it’s been that way ever since the modern recording industry coalesced. Payola is an old concept, now made sneakier, and we’ve long had visions of Elvis in movies that were barely plausible vehicles for his music not to mention variety hours with such blatant commercial intent that it’s laughable now.

No, music isn’t worse at all, it’s better, if the metric is how many voices are presenting something of meaning. That these artists are harder to find now, that they don’t stand quite as tall amongst the otherwise unremarkable background, is a function of the fact that this landscape I’ve been discussing has changed. We see more now. The resolution is higher, and where once we could only see giants amongst noise, we see millions and millions of artists, and find it that much harder to locate and elevate those which would formerly have stood out so clearly. So we’ve traded our 10,000 foot monoliths for a profusion of smaller, but now distinct, pillars, spires, minarets and citadels. How can one look out upon that and despair? It’s a vision of rich, genuine art, and it’s not theoretical in the slightest.

I see this likewise on the net; the transformative technologies we have now, the unprecedented pervasiveness and spontaneity of communication — textual, audible, visual — virtually guarantees that no single phenomenon will massively outstrip all of the others. This is the “Memestream” writ large, if you’ll allow it. People don’t have time or inclination to focus on one author or star… there’s always more coming behind. Or if people do focus on one individual or movement — and they will of course, banding together around a common thought, ideal or notable person — there are a million others as well, and unlike previous times, you can see them ALL. Even 25 years ago, the landscape would be dominated by a few voices of extraordinary volume. These voices are but a tiny fraction now, and their movements or groups cannibalized by the countless others out there. The network is the beginnings — only the beginnings — of this great leveling, which is being held back, as all change, across all time, by the inertia of the old ways. But it will happen.

In one passage, the author states :

We’re a voiceless generation. We have nothing we can point to and say: “This is us, this is where we stand.” We’re lost and silent and we don’t know what to do about it.

Again he conflates truth but misses something larger; the lack of voices that Willen describes is anything but. It’s rather a superfluity of voices… a grand cacophony that lacks cohesion or purpose because it has a million disparate meanings and purposes. Of course this is more difficult to process than the old, simpler system, where people could rally behind a movement or scene and really conceptualize themselves in relation to it. One thing that’s happening is that people are, more and more, realizing that that’s all bullshit. It was an outgrowth of a system in which control and access was centralized and so therefore were the themes and ideas. We don’t have that now. Despite the heavy hand of Copyright, and entrenched interests, control and access are decentralizing and the result is this explosion — a controlled explosion, to be sure, and far from the overnight multimedia art extravaganza you had been expecting, yet still hardly minor change — is a mess. That the mess hasn’t yet sorted itself out is simply a byproduct of it’s newness. We may be lost, but we’re not at all silent. And we won’t stay lost. We’ll get there.

The form these changes have taken thus far is also sort of predictable, in retrospect (I’m taking a lot of liberties in saying that, i know). I’ve noted before that our generation is more than a little bit obsessed with the value of the reference. Our pop culture is absolutely rife with it. The Family Guy is perhaps the most perfect example… an insane show with an absolute minimum of temporal consistency and virtually no plot, comprised of little more than a rapid fire series of references to itself and other pop culture iconography. And it’s *great*! We love it, eat it up. Our parents don’t get it. The Simpsons did the same thing, though less and not so brazenly, much earlier, of course, and there are tons of other examples.

The point is that we’re a “generation” that is obsessed with the notion of referential value. In-jokes and novelty are the coin of our social exchanges, and the structure of the web and it’s billions of blogs and flickr’s and meta-blogs and trackbacks and youtubes — that’s all perfectly in line with our mentality. I’m not going to assert which is a cause and which an effect; in fact, I rather suspect there’s something of a feedback loop involved.

So, you want to attach some kind of label or attitude or philosophy to our generation, that’s it. We’re meta. We’re a jumble of people who feel detached and disenfranchised at the very moment we’re just the opposite of that. Because it’s overwhelming. It’s unprecedented. Sites like Memestreams (and Digg, and Metafilter, and, and, and) try to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it’s too hard yet, and the landscape still too much in flux. And beyond that is the thought that maybe the distinction between wheat and chaff isn’t the right metaphor; that in fact what we now call “wheat” is retroactive and that any number of other bits might have been so, if only they’d been bubbled to the top or caught the collective attention.

If Generation X was “The Lost Generation”, then ours is the generation which is finding them, and everything else too, exploring every nook and cranny, exposing any hint of clever or interesting content to whomever might appreciate it.

I think we’ll find, 40 years hence, that when we look back on this “generation” what we’ll see is that we were the heralds of the decentralized universe of creation and consumption. That we are not something more, that we haven’t yet got the reins quite in our hands, is, perhaps, unfortunate, but it’s hardly the sort of melancholy non-existence proposed by Willan. Rather, it’s a vibrant, challenging and fascinating universe to experience. That I can’t now apply some simple and concise descriptor, slot “this generation” in just the proper place in the Great Universal Card Catalog of All Time is immaterial. That we live in such interesting times is all that matters.

We have network television. That permits me hours of reality shows, murder dramas, hospital shows, laugh-tracked half hour comedies and expose-obsessed news programs. The hours I have spent drooling on myself is embarrassing. But I have developed a new theory.

Newspeople strive to present shocking stories to the public. Should we know about them, possibly. Do we need to know about them in exclusive 2 hour specials repeated over 2-3 weeks? Of course not.

Tonight I saw a little on the pretty blonde Florida teacher who had an affair in her first year of marriage with a fourteen year old boy. She’s gotten a lot of press and it’s probably my absolute stubbornness NOT to give her attention that I cannot remember her name. She insisted that through a variety of reasons, she had never developed the psyche of an adult.

“How come you never learned that it was wrong? That there are certain things you do not do, you do not do in a civilized society?” — Debi Newberry, Grosse Pointe Blank

I know a lot of people whose parents neglected them in one way or another. And yes, I know it is traumatic; I have my own minor demons from time to time. I also know it can be incredibly difficult to bypass them. But somewhere, in the quiet that remains in the place of a missing parent or role model some other kind of influence takes hold and I really have to question why people never realized what they did, do or will do is wrong.

And for some of those confused aggressors/victims, however you want to look at them, I wonder if their disapproved acts are not somehow glorified by either the attention or what appears to be a growing popularity of their addiction. With the internet, but especially with network exposes, sexual predators get air time. They get press. Attention.

How much subversive attention do we need to give people with problems before it starts appearing like we’re glorifying them?

bill waterson (january 30, 1989)