borrowing internet is a dicey enterprise

I was going to write about city culture but I think I'm wrong.

 

Basically, it was a diatribe. New York, despite being the biggest city in the Union, has no obvious signs of specific local cuture beyond a strange taste in fashion and a few neuroses. This may indeed be true for most of manhattan, but I'm too tired to analyze further.

 

What it may instead indicate is the obvious- that the culture of place is not easily distilled into a commodifiable entity. In the case where it is (varieties of alcohol, funny skirts, et al), these items usually lose their connection to any local ritual. Where it's both definable and not completely alienable (the weather and shoreline of southern california, for example, or their proximity to mexico, if that counts), this trait is usually diffuse and vague.

 

That's right, diffuse AND vague. One adjective is not enough description for a writer as poor as I.

 

In any case, my initial (reactionary) comment is easily refuted by the fact that I could easily recognise a snapshot of a New York street out of a dozen such. Yes, this is urbanism, not culture, but screw you, they're the same. There is a quality, it's just not easy to distill without writing a novel without Gatsby in it or something.

 

Or something. I'm shining tonight. It's probably just more difficult to recognise culture in New York because cultural traits are unconsious in their purest state, and this is the most self-conscious place I've ever been.

 

I was in a bar, and the bar had five televisions showing billiards, but no pool table.

 

 

techno-womb!!!

Living in a pedestrian city it's easy to see how people use technology to insulate themselves. I'm talking about cellphones and ipods. The latter is a simple form of isolation-- the apple commercials play it out perfectly, silhouettes on a single color. There is no context, only a generalized idea of one. Cellphones are slightly more complicated. I passed by a woman crying on a park bench last night. Had she been pretty enough I probably would have asked her what was wrong. This shallow presupposition was pre-empted, however, by the fact that she was crying on the phone. This is obviously a different way to shut out your surroundings and neighbors, by keeping in close emotional contact with someone else far away. It's a displacement, not a shield. That being said, it's hard to meet people in a city where everyone has a four-inch talkative friend on their shoulder.

When I went out last night I forgot my keys. By the time I got back John had fallen asleep. I had to pee. Bad. So I went to a bar around the corner, just lame enough that only two compulsively lonely people and a bored bartender were there. I struck up a conversation with two of them (the transvestite poet left when I sat down). After getting two life stories that started off maudlin and got progressively more so, I emerged with very contradictory emotions. First and foremost I felt alone. I felt more alone talking to those two than I do camping in the middle of the desert; I felt divorced from myself, from my future. That being said, I also felt very powerfully the fact that a person lives behind every window on every upper floor, and that they have selves and futures as well. Ghostlike, if I want to be dramatic about it. Anyway, I leaned on the buzzer and John let me in. I felt sick all day today.

ray charles is dead (and so is regan)

In addition to stealing wireless internet from my neighbors, my new apartment comes fully equipped with mystically free basic cable. The caveat is that we only get fox, upn, pax, and every strange public-access channel known to man. The horse-racing channel. Korean TV. My favorite of the low-rent networks, however, is C-Span. For the past 48 hours, they have been showing Regan's funeral. This is simply footage of people walking in front of a casket, continuously, with a break every two hours for the changing of the guard (which itself moves at a comic 2001-esque pace.) Watching this 15-minute, 3-salute ceremony was humorous, because C-Span chose to leave the sound on. There is no spoken command, music or even audible footstep in the entire ordeal. The ceremony takes place in a gigantic cavern of a room, in which every cough and cellphone ring is hystericaly amplified and echoed. A small child made the same high-pitched noise every 15 seconds for two minutes, with a wonderful counterpoint of aborted cellphone rings as the harmony. This is news in real-time, people. It's restful. It's dry comedy. It's also reassuring that, despite the faster and faster editing in film and television, there is still the boredom of real life somewhere on the tube.

There. I tied that one up. I actually found Regan's death and the subsequent hubbub to be thrilling, mostly because I was born on the day of his attempted assassination. This links me cosmically to a person I hate abjectly, which adds a theatrical quality to my life. I only wish it could have been someone else.

56 hours a week

I've got more free time than working time (or maybe it's the same on average.) I have no children and my girlfriend lives a few hundred miles away. I'm not involved in a charitable cause and my work is also my hobby. I'm going to turn into one of those professional appreciators, aren't I? I'll read and listen and watch and I'll develop taste. How can I avoid this?

-Play video games or do other such mind-numbing things.

-Walk. A lot. Or perhaps exercise.

-Make friends and talk to them (this is highly unlikely).

-Sleep more.

-Write more.

-Learn to knit or build model trains.

Once school has finished, it's rather daunting to realize that one is now completely responsible for how interesting one is. I can't rely on classes and lectures to bring conversation to the fore. I was prepared to commit to work. Now I have to commit to play.

long time no see

I am now in New York City. I dislike typing the same words in the "City" and "State" blanks in online forms.

Short List: Things at Work that Make Architecture Depressing

1. The phrase "p-lam."

2. The phrase "furr-out"

3. Carpet swatches.

4. Flashing details.

5. Vinyl wall base.

6. Interior elevations.

7. Chair rails.

8. Aluminum mullions on sidelights.

9. Spandrel glass.

de-siting

Seeing as how I'm moving to a city that I've spent a total collective maybe 36 hours in, it's not surprising that I own maybe 6 or 7 maps of Manhattan right now. It's amazing how many ineffective maps can be produced of the same area. You'd think they'd start cribbing off of each other or something, that people would realize marking all of the subway entrances the same color, regardless of which line they are is just a bad idea.

In any case, the one thing they all have in common is the small blank square with "World Trade Center Site" written inside of it in tiny script. How did this become the accepted terminology? Not "FORMER world trade center site" or "future memorial site" but simply the name of the former buildings with "site" afterwards, as if it was waiting for something. However, this does make a lot of sense:

*ahem*

1. The place where a structure or group of structures was, is, or is to be located: a good site for the school.

2. The place or setting of something: a historic site; a job site.

3. A website.

Definition 3 nonwithstanding, this usage of site makes some sense. Not an official memorial (which, if it ever goes up, with be almost certainly dissappointing and overwrought). Kind of like driving past where your old house used to be, and pointing to the K-mart that is now there. There's the site of a crime, a gravesite, a historic site-- all three apply easily. What is kind of disturbing, however, is the uncertain temporality of the word. Site implies past, present, and future conditions. The actual destruction was so traumatic that we've chosen to completely remove this square of land from the boundaries of time, like it's the moon or stonehenge or the pyramids. It's immense, too large to comprehend, so instead it's a "site," a detatched locale that is placed on a pedestal.

I think this area needs a de-siting. The new plans proposed now that they've figured out there's not enough money to build everything look very promising in a de-siting sense. They show interesting, but non-monumental, pedestrian parks and plazas. I don't think this city needs a pit going 100 feet into the earth, or a waterfall, or even a 1,776 foot tall skyscraper (symbolically bile-producing in my book). I didn't mean for this bit to turn into a diatribe on antimonumentalism. However, I can't wait until the hole in the skyline stops being a hole.

This is not a rendering. I swear. The fact that this is not only theoretically possible but budgetable, salable and buildable brings up a lot of issues for me.

the big big [media] whoredom

I was talking to Melissa today over vietnamese food. I was explaining my burnout recovery / method of dealing with boredom when I'm home: read profusely, listen to music and watch incredibly bad movies with only a beer as company. I realized that my objectives are different with each form of entertainment. I'm a notorious music snob-- at least with pop music. I stick to the more esoteric, difficult neighborhoods of rock, with occasional cheap forays into country and blues. In reading I run a similar fun-but-challenging gamut, but I allow myself more leeway with the occasional dirty escapist pleasure (mostly sci-fi novels from my childhood). I'm less picky with text. In movies I get equal amounts of pleasure with art-house flicks and awful action movies (provided there is beer). The editing and dialogue of The Transporter is easy enough to decode to make the hour and a half entertaining. I'm also able to get enjoyment out of bad-cinema disgust, whereas bad music just makes me want to leave the room. Maybe it's the added detail and complexity in a movie that makes this possible; maybe it's just the influence of my friends that has made me so tolerant of lousiness in one and so abohorrent of the same in another.

I'm not going to pretend that there's any worth in treating all art as worth thought. In any medium, I'm a firm believer in quality-- at least that quality, as a concept, is valid. Recognising it on my own is often somewhat difficult, but I have no problem enlisting the help of my friends, websites, and the occasional book or newspaper. The issue is more in the nature of analysis itself-- should I be enjoying the experience itself or the mental dialogue that is created? I can watch awful, campy films but still think about them-- picking them apart to see how they are made, second-guessing the director, the actors, the editor. The same thing applies when listening to insipid, formulaic music-- I pay attention to the production, the bassline, the lyrics, figuring out what committee or focus group or fashonista decided to EQ the guitar or sequence the melody or select the theme.

I read an article in adbusters a few months ago that suggested this sort of experience is damaging to our mental health. It is easy to slip into a zone where everything is worth analysis-- every bottle and can in every movie becomes product placement, every truck on the highway is part of some evil globalising economic force. It's a kind of distracted attention-- no serious meditation on a single theme, rather a schizophrenic constant reevaluation of the same idea, the idea that our world is fucked up and that that, itself, is kind of pathetically, nihlistically funny.

I know I'm not like that. At least, I hope I'm not like that. I'm not flexible enough for yoga and I don't affirm anything, but I'd like to believe I'm capable of coherent, meditative thought. It's a good thing I'm moving to the loudest, fastest, most distracted city in the union.

meta-blog pt. 2

So this is not a journal. But it's not intended for an audience the same way as previous attempts at personal internet expression; here it's more of an "if you build it they will come" ethos. The problem with that is that if someone actually does let me know this is being read then that will change my intentions; the audience is no longer fictional.

That could be good and bad. The pieces would have to be tighter and more comprehensible. I'd have to care how this site looks. But then I'd be proving myself to people through text. Weblogs are all, at some base level, screaming for attention. The moment when I start proving I'm cool by name-checking books, movies, and cds, that's when this becomes untenable. Spreading uninformed opinions and worthless musings is excusable; acting solely to spread knowledge of your good taste in media is an infraction punishable by death.

wherein i confront my past

In my profile I claim that this weblog is primarly for organization. I'm obviously sidestepping the issue that posting your journal on the internet is different that writing in ballpoint in a blue mead notebook. However, it's not as different as it should be. Back when I kept a journal in a blue mead, I was still, for some reason or another, writing for an audience. I was probably more likely writing for a fictional future audience, perhaps after the journal had been published in hardback after my untimely death. That's what it's like being a lonely teenager. After that, I actually did start a website, where I kept a rudimentary weblog, with semi-regular postings and even an archive. I actually did this twice, once in high school and once in college. Each lasted about a year and then disappeared. These spurts of productivity coincided with (of course) periods of change and frustration. None of this has changed (except that popular culture has provided me with an easy, boilerplate posting process).

The question of the audience is still important. I'm writing this ostensibly as a journal, but with the possibility of an audience there is obvious provisional editing. Thus this is not a record but rather anonymous communication; it's a hopefully-less-pathetic version of a cry for help.

That's not the whole story, either. My writing skills tend to veer between pathetically self-depreciating plainness and baroque wordy overkill. This is probably as much a sort of mental game, like playing chess alone. I guess that's where the title comes in.

I've always been terrified of brain damage. As a kid I would monitor myself periodically to check and see if I had been getting dumber. Afraid of Alzheimers at 8. I'm still wary of Cruzfeldt-Jakobs and alarmed about the cheesecloth-like quality of my memory. I'm operating in a state of emergency; paranoia as fuel, a "nervous system" in its most basic sense. None of this is really helping me to figure out if I'll like New York.

123 testes throwaway joke

This is an e-mail post. Just read a few blogs. Hope this does not become habit. Contrary to expectations, this was a postive experience-instead of losing faith in the originality or worth of my own writing, all I could think about was how I'd like to talk to some of these people. They seem to have interesting taste in books and film, and ideas that prove they're not just assimilate-and-store mechanisms for trendy thought. Odd that reading something on the internet would disarm my cynical reflex. I don't know how anyone makes this a habit, though.

filler, no killer

I should probably write the obligatory meta- piece about writing, the nature of a public journal, audience etc but I don't really feel up to it tonight, so I'll just throw in something lame and call it a day. I always wrote paper journals as if they had an audience anyway- a textual exhibitionist from the start. A drink of water first, however...

I really like my parent's backyard. I can't call it mine as I've never really lived in this house, nor do I really think its size or location are that wonderful. But the trees in the back just kill me. In the fall, if you're out back on a windy night, you can actually hear the wind moving. Wind isn't a continous force. It's a mass of air that moves around like it wants something, and on the right night when the leaves are dry you can hear it coming in from far off, and then spiral in and eddy in the tall trees next to the pool. If I wasn't so paranoid I'd like it more.

Something about this house brings out secret fears of zombies and serial murderers. I'd like to think I'm generally a laid-back, don't-lock-the-doors kind of person (this is probably untrue), but in this house every horror movie plays out a sequel with me as the victim. I shower with my eyes open, I always have a light on (even though lights attack zombies), and my back is never to the door. It's probably due to the fact that I'm the only one in the basement.

If I end up living in, say, southern california or arizona or new york, I'm going to miss basements. They beat attics ten to one. It's like a gigantic couch cushion fort was created out of your entire house. There are concrete floors and exposed beams, and cool windows that open onto semicircular corrugated steel.

wherein i meet a legend

I went with my father today to a car museum. It was a private showing, just him and other random Kansas City businessmen of idiosyncratic linkage. One old man, who looked 60 but was probably 80 or 85, was simultaneously irritating and fascinating; he was clearly wealthy and completely satisfied with it, and had a love of non sequitors and bland statements which I wish I could share (I also wanted to throttle him). His name was Harlold Meltzer or something like that, I think. After witnessing the rise and fall of the Studebaker, when we were leaving, I asked my dad who the guy was. My dad, who I found out later does some business with him, instead of talking about his personal knowledge, the man's hobbies, work, or the like, instead said "Harold and his business partner, in the early 20's, invented Spam." This man had invented Spam. He had sold it to the army in World War II. He had then sold the rights to Hormel and made a ton of money off of the stock."

=======
I just tore through my books stored in boxes in my closet at my parent's house. They moved after I went to college, so everything is still packed, four years later. After pulling aside mounds of Gibson, Vonnegut and Philip Dick novels, i found one of my favorite childhood books -- "Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things." I was a really boring kid. This book is still great, though. Harry's not in it. I'll have to write the editors; if horseshoes and long underwear make the cut, this one's got enough pop culture panache to have it's own section.

I feel like I've met a celebrity, this old man in a driving cap and peachy-pink short-sleeved polo shirt. This man invented Spam. Spam is not a wonderful creation; it is not record-breaking in technology or palatability. It has, of yet, had no huge effect upon the world as an object or food. As a concept, however, it has made it through the worlds of military ration and sensible nuclear-family kitchen staple, past the realm of last-resort cheap meat for the homeless and impoverished, into the realm of the uncertain signifier. Monty Python made it funny. It's often placed on t-shirts with the names of bands cleverly placed in the same font where the logo used to be. Most importantly, it now represents the millions of penis-enlargement and home-mortgage messages that are sent to the very corners of our electronic world.

It is utterly rediculous that this should sit so heavily on me. This man's creation is going to outlast his life; it's a household word. What does he think of this? I'd interview him, publish his story, but it would probably make a really awful book. It would make an equally awful special-interest story in the local newspaper. Nobody should care that this man invented Spam. I would try to wrap this up with something poignant, 'a la This American Life, but it's kind of embarassing and largely pointless. There is no thesis statement here. I met the guy that invented Spam.