For the spring equinox, after a little fruitless tramping about downtown in search of alum, I went uptown on the metro with Lunar Moontooth to hangout at an equinox party. It was ok for a while, you know, when we arrived the party had already just started and there was a small circle on the church basement floor chanting around a candle. When we came they broke up the chant and they invited us in to have some food with them.
There was a miso based soup with extra quinoa in it and a variety of dips made from lentils and there was some flatbread and there was a box of factory stamped cookies all wrapped up in seven layers of different plastic. And after all that we sat down and started playing the drums in a circle and some people played the guitar and some people yelled into the microphones and we just basically played music and let it go wherever it wanted.
And I guess all the riffs being played were these kind of pseudo raga things on the guitar and I guess most of the chanting tended to be this kind of undirected wailing inspired by Native chanting and singing and everybody was riffing and wailing and drumming and the rhythm never really locked itself into a groove and it just got me thinking about the places that we ex-Europeans seem to want to go when we are getting in touch with our spirituality. It just seems like we always feel that we have to appropriate the rituals and riffs of others because of a paucity inspiration that we can draw from our own heritage … or maybe the problem is that when white people get spiritual about their own past it always ends up with everybody putting on a brown shirt and jackboots and marching up and down the town square yelling shit about gassing all the undesirables.
And ok, I admit that I took the guitar for a while and I was playing Indian riffs, too, and plus I play the goddamn sitar anyhow so who am I to talk? Perhaps I should have learned to play the lute instead. But then in another way, and you all know this, the idea of a pure heritage is a joke anyhow. Nobody comes from anywhere and, especially in a place like North America, the cultural influences of the entire world collide and break apart and reform in new ways and some of those ways are awesome and some of those ways are just fucking awful.
Jazz, for all its African influence, would never have been anything without European instrumentation and structure and without Yiddish music mingling with the African rhythms and so on and so on. The equinox jam may have been a flake fest, but I guess it had every right to exist.
Nevertheless, it was too much for Moontooth and she got up and put on her boots and marched out. A few minutes after this, deciding I liked her more than the jam, I got up and went to see where she had gone.
There were all sorts of stairwells escalating in different directions in the building and I followed one up and found myself in a kind of residence full of shared bedrooms with unmade beds and tangled clothes over chairs and a prevailing stench of unwashed socks and then there were and half washed dishes in dark communal kitchens decorated with tack boards filled with brochures for local events and a whiteboard with all sorts of names on a chart lined up with all sorts of domestic duties those names were supposed to be doing that week. It was creepy and ghostly to be there and the odd energy of the missing residents troubled me and I left, stepping over a mountain of shoes and boots left in the doorway.
Another stairwell led me to a long hall with a series of closed apartment doors in it and this hall with brightly lit with florescent tubes and smelled overwhelmingly of spaghetti sauce. There was the noise of TVs coming from behind the doors and a few people talking and I went down the hall, out the fire door, down the rattling fire escape and back in the front door of the building and then there was Moontooth in the front hall, reading up on some jumble of posters taped and tacked up in the front hall.
It's too noisy down there, she told me.
Upstairs, I said, there's a hallway that smells like spaghetti sauce.
We went up and as we did a muscle bound man in a green army tee-shirt with a long ponytail down his back came out and intercepted us in the hall. Could he help us? No, we were just exploring. Well, he began to explain, with a sense of apology that was underlined by the solemn expectation that we should leave, this is a private residence, and it's unnerving for us to have people come up her unexpected. We just like to walk through open doors, we told him. Well, he said, if you want a tour, you can call so-and-so. Do you want her number? No, we don't, we don't care about that, we just want to explore. Well, he said, it's a private residence. Do you smell the spaghetti, we asked. It's not spaghetti, he said, it's popcorn, maybe?
And then we were gone into the night, we went up a few blocks to the chess café and ordered a few hot brown drinks from the girl behind the counter who was only sixteen looking but could have been the star of a Thompson Twins video is only she'd been born in a different era with her dangling chequered shirt and her asymmetrical haircut and her too large broad brimmed hat hanging down askew over her eyes. All sass, too, she was and she joked with us and gave Moontooth a free hot chocolate.
And we set up a game and I lost a bishop almost right away and demanded a restart and was refused under all circumstances and from there it sent ok and I controlled the middle and chipped away a lead and I even think I was steps away from a checkmate with Moontooth's queen toppled and most of her other strong pieces clattering around in the plastic bucket beside us while at other tables intense knots of old beardy men hunched over games, yelling with delight and anger at each moved piece and –you know they actually get into fights with each other over this shit—said miss sass from behind the counter. It's amazing. It's amazing to watch the combatants slamming their hands down on the playclocks…but Moontooth and I play slow games and we like to think things out.
And I was almost winning, did I mention that? And then the lights dimmed and they closed the bar. They closed the bar! I was winning. How often to I actually beat my perennial chess partner in chess? Where is the balance in the universe, I ask you?
March 25, 2009
March 23, 2009
Miss Pacman.
We were talking in one of my classes this week about the politics of code on the internet; this is to say that the sites you visit and the way you respond to those sites is always going to be limited by the way that the internet itself is coded. In part this is an aspect of the language in which the pages you visit are programmed and in another way it is an aspect of the infrastructure that supports the internet itself. In the case of the latter, the infrastructure of the internet, there is a big push and pull between a variety of parties:
first, the government has to always decide how much it is going to regulate the internet (striking a balance between the concept that internet access is now an essential service, like water or electricity, and should thus be available to everyone in a reasonably unfettered way, or, that the internet is a dangerous source of material that could harm the rule of law in a given nation and needs to be strictly regulated, and the impulse to stay in bed with big business and support the transformation of the internet from a fairly open source information sharing resource to a giant online mall). The government in Canada, thus far, has done a very good job of capitulating to corporate interests and denying Canadian citizens completely honest access to this potentially useful means of participating in the public sphere. Nevertheless, government intervention or non intervention to a large degree determines the manner in which users will end up doing their surfing.
Second, The corporations that provide internet access (and increasingly the content viewed during that access) also create an infrastructure; particularly in the sense that they want to turn the experience of being on the internet into one that hardwires users into consumers. Every time a person consents to allowing cookies, or consents to sign up (even for free) to view the content of a site, or allow third party software, or anything like that, anytime anyone does one those these things, this individual is consenting to give up personal information to a corporation that will be used to created more targeted marketing and create more lists of things that consumer and all consumers like him or her are into. The object is to sell the use more shit and to keep the user surfing around places that have the potential to sell the user more shit all the time.
The corporate ideal (if you think about a conglomerate like AOL Time Warner) is that all the time a user spends on the internet will be spent surfing sites that are somehow affiliated with AOL Time Warner. Thus, everything the user does from e-mail to checking out online music to checking out vacations to checking out porn or whatever will all be contained within the envelope owned by that corp. and thus will at all times have the potential to funnel profit back into one of the tentacles of the corp.
Thus, the more that a corporation swallows, the more time that a user is forced to spend time on the internet solely for the purpose of conspicuous consumption. Even the idea of having to give up something to get something (i.e., personal information for content) creates a psychological environment where users are bated into the concept that they can’t truly function in a public space unless it is for the purpose of conspicuous consumption.
So, anyhow, from here we obviously went into a discussion of Foucault’s vision of the city as a place that has been structured for both maximum efficiency and at the same time maximum visibility. I leave you to read Discipline and Punish if you don’t follow me here. The point I wanted to make was that it is nearly impossible to visit the downtown core of a city now without raising a great deal of suspicion from all of those who are watching the core (either consciously as security guards or police or unconsciously, with their snap judgments on what is and isn’t proper behavior, as regular fellow citizens) if you do not travel in the guise of the conspicuous consumer.
Consider what would happen, for example, if you decided to go and stand in a mall for a while but you did not buy anything and you did not have any baggage in your hand and you did not appear to be in the mall for any particular purpose. It is quite likely that a security guard would come along at a certain point and ask, probably politely, what it was that you were doing there. If you did not or could not answer, or that you answer was that you were just standing there because you felt like it, it is quite probably that the security guard would ask you to leave the premises (at least this is what always happens to me). If, however, you attempted the same stunt, but holding shopping bags and other items that it was clear that you had just bought, it is likely that it would take you much longer to get thrown out.
The same applies to most downtown spaces. People just seem to have more purpose when they are walking around with bags or they are walking somewhere looking like they are on their way to pick up some bags full of things. In this way the downtown core of the city has been refigured into a space that is commercial and not necessarily a place of leisure. Even public parks (especially in Montreal) now have an anti vagrancy law, thus encouraging people who are out on consumption adventures (like people on dates and tourists) from being troubled by the sight of people who are only in the parks because the like being in parks or they have no other place to sleep.
This is the way that cities can be coded. I then told the class (somewhat more contentiously) that another example of coding is the Lonely Planet Guide. Let’s say, for example, that you decide to go on a trip to India and you buy the Lonely Planet and follow it. You will find that you end up staying in the recommended hotels and eating at the recommended cafes and visiting the recommended sites and along the way you will keep meeting the same people (mostly scruffy looking backpackers from Israel and Austria who look just like you and have the same snooty attitude about how in touch with the local culture as you are and who dislike you as much as you dislike them because of the fact that all of you want to experience something new and feel like you are the first one to experience it, as though each one of you was Dr. Livingstone reborn, but all you find at the end of the day is that you end up back at the same hostel as everyone else listening to a CD of Indian Flute with a trance beat and talking about the best way to get out to the beach) all the time.
It’s a bummer, but it’s because the whole thing has evolved into a kind of code that the visitors fall into and it dominates their whole trip and the locals play into it too and they provide the service that they think the visitors want and then you go home and look at flicker and realize that 75, 000 people have already taken the same photo of the same swami standing in front of the same temple holding the same snake as you did. Om shanty shanty om.
Well, said my class, it’s a code but it’s different from the internet of the city because it’s a voluntary code. If you decide to walk one block past where the Lonely Planet says you should, or you go one café over from where the guide says, then you will end up at a place that is twice as cheap and three times as local and there won’t be a tourist in sight. You really will be Dr. Livingstone…or maybe Lord Clive would be a better example in this case.
Anyhow, I thought of the Lonely Planet Guide because one time I was travelling in India along with my sister, following the guidebook (sort of) and somewhere along the line, sick of travelling on trains and staying in hostels with the same people and the same sort of people, we decided to get off the beaten track to see what sort of adventures we might find.
To this end, we decided to visit a place that the Lonely Planet expressly said was a complete waste of time and a shithole, to boot; a sea coast town in Andhra Pradesh known as Vijayawada. Truly, it’s not such a bad place (if anyone from there is reading this, it’s not such a bad place); although it tends to lack a lot of the glamour or touristy attraction of some of the larger cities in India. It is a flat town but it looks down between two large masses of land along the course of a river’s mouth into the Pacific Ocean. If the same location were located in the south of France or in Italy, I feel sure that it would be the playground for billionaires, but things can only be where they are. I have no idea what industry or trade keeps Vijayawada running and I’m not particularly curious to find out. There sure weren’t any damn tourists there, though, billionaire or otherwise.
To make a long story short, without any guide as to what we could do for fun in Vijayawada, we decided to wander around the streets to see what sort of things were happening. There was one fellow who tried to trick us by telling us he wanted to take us to his favourite restaurant; this involving getting in and out of numerous taxies and going round the city in circles presumably to get us completely lost, but in the end he fails to trick us because we just got bored of his tricks and wandered off while he in the growing distance and dusk grew increasingly abusive about our decision to desert him.
Mostly people in Vijayawada left us alone; and this was a testament to how far off the beaten track this place was. When you travel along the Lonely Planet route there are people trying to take you for your money at every turn. The relationship between the swindling locals and the aggravated tourists becomes a kind of symbiotic dance after a while and they learn how to respond to each other and how to move around each other, but in Vijayawada people just watched us go by with a kind of passing disinterest, like chaw chewing cowboys leaning up against wood rails outside the saloon.
The one exception, though, was when we decided to stop into a local arcade to pass some time by playing video games. This place was really a throwback: they had all these old beaten up videogame machines, the tall ones that look like voting booths that I used to play Jungle Hunt and Galaxian on at the back of the Shop ‘n’ Bag when I was so short that the joystick was parallel to my neck while I played. And before every machine was a wiry teenage kid hammering at the smooth and hand greasy knob of the joystick while his friends crowded ‘round behind him cheering him on. And as we passed each machine, decided where we were going to drop a coin to play we came upon a surprising revelation: every single machine was loaded with Miss Pacman. The entire arcade was devoted to this single game.
I got this said my sister. And indeed she did have it. We had been playing Miss Pacman on our home Atari 2600 for years. It was like picking up a language we had been born with but had not spoken for a few years. It was a thing that would come back to us easily and even the replacement of our old comfy basement, with its scattered cushions and toys, by the dingy light of the arcade and the murmur of Telugu teenagers was not going to be enough to stop us. We knew this game.
My sister got a machine and began to play. Level one flew by, level two flew by, level three flew by. A few other people in the arcade gathered behind her and began to watch. Level four, level five, level six. A murmur was running through the crowd now. This is such bullshit she said. Level seven, level eight. Now there were all there, cheering her. Level nine, level ten. It became clear at a certain point that she was going to play forever. The crowd was going mad. It was like they had never seen a Miss Pacman player like this before. She could have been their queen. They would have toted her high upon a litter, feeding her little white pellets (or maybe rice idlys) at her whim. Finally she got bored and she just walked away from the controls. Anyhow, she said, I’ve played this game before. You do it.
Now it was my turn to take the controls. Another murmur ran through the crowd. Could the brother be as great as the sister? Did the genius gene run through all their blood? Level one. I died twice. Half the people walked away to their own games. Level two: success. Level three, I died again. The rest of the crowd wandered off. You are bullshit, my sister said.
first, the government has to always decide how much it is going to regulate the internet (striking a balance between the concept that internet access is now an essential service, like water or electricity, and should thus be available to everyone in a reasonably unfettered way, or, that the internet is a dangerous source of material that could harm the rule of law in a given nation and needs to be strictly regulated, and the impulse to stay in bed with big business and support the transformation of the internet from a fairly open source information sharing resource to a giant online mall). The government in Canada, thus far, has done a very good job of capitulating to corporate interests and denying Canadian citizens completely honest access to this potentially useful means of participating in the public sphere. Nevertheless, government intervention or non intervention to a large degree determines the manner in which users will end up doing their surfing.
Second, The corporations that provide internet access (and increasingly the content viewed during that access) also create an infrastructure; particularly in the sense that they want to turn the experience of being on the internet into one that hardwires users into consumers. Every time a person consents to allowing cookies, or consents to sign up (even for free) to view the content of a site, or allow third party software, or anything like that, anytime anyone does one those these things, this individual is consenting to give up personal information to a corporation that will be used to created more targeted marketing and create more lists of things that consumer and all consumers like him or her are into. The object is to sell the use more shit and to keep the user surfing around places that have the potential to sell the user more shit all the time.
The corporate ideal (if you think about a conglomerate like AOL Time Warner) is that all the time a user spends on the internet will be spent surfing sites that are somehow affiliated with AOL Time Warner. Thus, everything the user does from e-mail to checking out online music to checking out vacations to checking out porn or whatever will all be contained within the envelope owned by that corp. and thus will at all times have the potential to funnel profit back into one of the tentacles of the corp.
Thus, the more that a corporation swallows, the more time that a user is forced to spend time on the internet solely for the purpose of conspicuous consumption. Even the idea of having to give up something to get something (i.e., personal information for content) creates a psychological environment where users are bated into the concept that they can’t truly function in a public space unless it is for the purpose of conspicuous consumption.
So, anyhow, from here we obviously went into a discussion of Foucault’s vision of the city as a place that has been structured for both maximum efficiency and at the same time maximum visibility. I leave you to read Discipline and Punish if you don’t follow me here. The point I wanted to make was that it is nearly impossible to visit the downtown core of a city now without raising a great deal of suspicion from all of those who are watching the core (either consciously as security guards or police or unconsciously, with their snap judgments on what is and isn’t proper behavior, as regular fellow citizens) if you do not travel in the guise of the conspicuous consumer.
Consider what would happen, for example, if you decided to go and stand in a mall for a while but you did not buy anything and you did not have any baggage in your hand and you did not appear to be in the mall for any particular purpose. It is quite likely that a security guard would come along at a certain point and ask, probably politely, what it was that you were doing there. If you did not or could not answer, or that you answer was that you were just standing there because you felt like it, it is quite probably that the security guard would ask you to leave the premises (at least this is what always happens to me). If, however, you attempted the same stunt, but holding shopping bags and other items that it was clear that you had just bought, it is likely that it would take you much longer to get thrown out.
The same applies to most downtown spaces. People just seem to have more purpose when they are walking around with bags or they are walking somewhere looking like they are on their way to pick up some bags full of things. In this way the downtown core of the city has been refigured into a space that is commercial and not necessarily a place of leisure. Even public parks (especially in Montreal) now have an anti vagrancy law, thus encouraging people who are out on consumption adventures (like people on dates and tourists) from being troubled by the sight of people who are only in the parks because the like being in parks or they have no other place to sleep.
This is the way that cities can be coded. I then told the class (somewhat more contentiously) that another example of coding is the Lonely Planet Guide. Let’s say, for example, that you decide to go on a trip to India and you buy the Lonely Planet and follow it. You will find that you end up staying in the recommended hotels and eating at the recommended cafes and visiting the recommended sites and along the way you will keep meeting the same people (mostly scruffy looking backpackers from Israel and Austria who look just like you and have the same snooty attitude about how in touch with the local culture as you are and who dislike you as much as you dislike them because of the fact that all of you want to experience something new and feel like you are the first one to experience it, as though each one of you was Dr. Livingstone reborn, but all you find at the end of the day is that you end up back at the same hostel as everyone else listening to a CD of Indian Flute with a trance beat and talking about the best way to get out to the beach) all the time.
It’s a bummer, but it’s because the whole thing has evolved into a kind of code that the visitors fall into and it dominates their whole trip and the locals play into it too and they provide the service that they think the visitors want and then you go home and look at flicker and realize that 75, 000 people have already taken the same photo of the same swami standing in front of the same temple holding the same snake as you did. Om shanty shanty om.
Well, said my class, it’s a code but it’s different from the internet of the city because it’s a voluntary code. If you decide to walk one block past where the Lonely Planet says you should, or you go one café over from where the guide says, then you will end up at a place that is twice as cheap and three times as local and there won’t be a tourist in sight. You really will be Dr. Livingstone…or maybe Lord Clive would be a better example in this case.
Anyhow, I thought of the Lonely Planet Guide because one time I was travelling in India along with my sister, following the guidebook (sort of) and somewhere along the line, sick of travelling on trains and staying in hostels with the same people and the same sort of people, we decided to get off the beaten track to see what sort of adventures we might find.
To this end, we decided to visit a place that the Lonely Planet expressly said was a complete waste of time and a shithole, to boot; a sea coast town in Andhra Pradesh known as Vijayawada. Truly, it’s not such a bad place (if anyone from there is reading this, it’s not such a bad place); although it tends to lack a lot of the glamour or touristy attraction of some of the larger cities in India. It is a flat town but it looks down between two large masses of land along the course of a river’s mouth into the Pacific Ocean. If the same location were located in the south of France or in Italy, I feel sure that it would be the playground for billionaires, but things can only be where they are. I have no idea what industry or trade keeps Vijayawada running and I’m not particularly curious to find out. There sure weren’t any damn tourists there, though, billionaire or otherwise.
To make a long story short, without any guide as to what we could do for fun in Vijayawada, we decided to wander around the streets to see what sort of things were happening. There was one fellow who tried to trick us by telling us he wanted to take us to his favourite restaurant; this involving getting in and out of numerous taxies and going round the city in circles presumably to get us completely lost, but in the end he fails to trick us because we just got bored of his tricks and wandered off while he in the growing distance and dusk grew increasingly abusive about our decision to desert him.
Mostly people in Vijayawada left us alone; and this was a testament to how far off the beaten track this place was. When you travel along the Lonely Planet route there are people trying to take you for your money at every turn. The relationship between the swindling locals and the aggravated tourists becomes a kind of symbiotic dance after a while and they learn how to respond to each other and how to move around each other, but in Vijayawada people just watched us go by with a kind of passing disinterest, like chaw chewing cowboys leaning up against wood rails outside the saloon.
The one exception, though, was when we decided to stop into a local arcade to pass some time by playing video games. This place was really a throwback: they had all these old beaten up videogame machines, the tall ones that look like voting booths that I used to play Jungle Hunt and Galaxian on at the back of the Shop ‘n’ Bag when I was so short that the joystick was parallel to my neck while I played. And before every machine was a wiry teenage kid hammering at the smooth and hand greasy knob of the joystick while his friends crowded ‘round behind him cheering him on. And as we passed each machine, decided where we were going to drop a coin to play we came upon a surprising revelation: every single machine was loaded with Miss Pacman. The entire arcade was devoted to this single game.
I got this said my sister. And indeed she did have it. We had been playing Miss Pacman on our home Atari 2600 for years. It was like picking up a language we had been born with but had not spoken for a few years. It was a thing that would come back to us easily and even the replacement of our old comfy basement, with its scattered cushions and toys, by the dingy light of the arcade and the murmur of Telugu teenagers was not going to be enough to stop us. We knew this game.
My sister got a machine and began to play. Level one flew by, level two flew by, level three flew by. A few other people in the arcade gathered behind her and began to watch. Level four, level five, level six. A murmur was running through the crowd now. This is such bullshit she said. Level seven, level eight. Now there were all there, cheering her. Level nine, level ten. It became clear at a certain point that she was going to play forever. The crowd was going mad. It was like they had never seen a Miss Pacman player like this before. She could have been their queen. They would have toted her high upon a litter, feeding her little white pellets (or maybe rice idlys) at her whim. Finally she got bored and she just walked away from the controls. Anyhow, she said, I’ve played this game before. You do it.
Now it was my turn to take the controls. Another murmur ran through the crowd. Could the brother be as great as the sister? Did the genius gene run through all their blood? Level one. I died twice. Half the people walked away to their own games. Level two: success. Level three, I died again. The rest of the crowd wandered off. You are bullshit, my sister said.
March 15, 2009
I dreamed last night I was on the boat to heaven, and by some chance found a bottle in my fist...
I dreamed last night that I went to see you and I had a camera and I was taking your photo. We were sitting side by side on a bed and you told me you were getting married. You were getting married and you were going to settle there down at the end of a narrow cobblestone street that always seemed to be wet and there was a clock tower looming overhead. I guess, I said, then this is the last time we'll ever be together like this; only just realising at that moment that it was true and this really was the last time. Yes, you said, with a sudden seriousness that locked all the jokes we'd just made and the kisses we'd just shared in an uncrackable safe and flung them down into the sea, this is the last time. With this I woke, dear diary, and set to work instantly uploading my movie.
I never imagined, although I should have known, that the process of editing would take exactly five times longer than the process of filming and that 18 minutes of raw footage can only become 5.4 minutes of raw footage through 10 hours of somewhat stressful (because of the difficulties of working with the editing software) but on the whole generally entertaining work.
And then I came home, just catching a bus, at the end of St. Catherine and Du Fort that took me halfway home at chilly 4am squeezed in against the wall by an old lady who I only gradually realised smelled like dried shit on a cloth and a bus driver who braked so hard that each time the bus stopped I was nearly thrown from my seat. And then at St Laurent and St Catherine, as I lingered a few minutes waiting for the night bus, there was one leggy transvestite wobbling down the street on impossible stilettos with xer legs all but exposed in fishnets and xer ass barely covered by a think slip of black silk.
And then another one came down and cornered a well dressed man and I heard them start to negotiate a price like two seasoned business types and then they turned and the transvestite led the man down into the peepshow booths. And then up by Sherbrooke a man passed with all his worldly things lashed across his spine in a great jangling mess and there were pots and pans and old shoes swinging and grungy on their tattered laces and one of his feet was bound entirely in a nest of white plastic bags and he limped visibly, slowly, dragging himself west with his weight on a twisted walking stick.
My next movie will be better. Next time you will be my wife not someone else's.
click. and wind. and click. et ave, Caesar.
I never imagined, although I should have known, that the process of editing would take exactly five times longer than the process of filming and that 18 minutes of raw footage can only become 5.4 minutes of raw footage through 10 hours of somewhat stressful (because of the difficulties of working with the editing software) but on the whole generally entertaining work.
And then I came home, just catching a bus, at the end of St. Catherine and Du Fort that took me halfway home at chilly 4am squeezed in against the wall by an old lady who I only gradually realised smelled like dried shit on a cloth and a bus driver who braked so hard that each time the bus stopped I was nearly thrown from my seat. And then at St Laurent and St Catherine, as I lingered a few minutes waiting for the night bus, there was one leggy transvestite wobbling down the street on impossible stilettos with xer legs all but exposed in fishnets and xer ass barely covered by a think slip of black silk.
And then another one came down and cornered a well dressed man and I heard them start to negotiate a price like two seasoned business types and then they turned and the transvestite led the man down into the peepshow booths. And then up by Sherbrooke a man passed with all his worldly things lashed across his spine in a great jangling mess and there were pots and pans and old shoes swinging and grungy on their tattered laces and one of his feet was bound entirely in a nest of white plastic bags and he limped visibly, slowly, dragging himself west with his weight on a twisted walking stick.
My next movie will be better. Next time you will be my wife not someone else's.
click. and wind. and click. et ave, Caesar.
March 12, 2009
Art by Jennifer Marr
As you know, I host work by my friend Jennifer Marr on my website. Here is some of her recent writing (and she claims she is going to produce more; so if you like it please contact her and encourage her).
March 9, 2009
untitled
One afternoon, while strolling through the Agora:
1.1 Glaucus: Apparently I am part of a trend that I didn’t even know existed.
Socrates: What trend are you part of that you didn’t know about?
Glaucus: Well, it seems that in reaction to the instantaneous information some people feel compelled to post about themselves on sites like twitter, some people have been doing this thing called slow blogging. Slow blogging is a thing where a person who makes a blog takes their time and really tries to write something long and considered, as opposed to simply blowing out mind farts every twenty minutes or so. The other thing is that these slow bloggers also like to take as long as they possibly can between posts sometimes going so long that their readers are almost ready to give up on the blog and then lo and behold, up comes a new well crafted post that sucks everybody back in.
Socrates: And what is your point?
Glaucus: My point is that this is what *I* do! I must be a slow blogger because I write really long posts and I take way way too much time between each one and everyone who reads my blog always complains that I never write anything! Before I thought I was just lazy, or at best more focused on other matters in my life, but now I realize that I am part of a movement. I belong!
Socrates: I think you are just lazy. Maybe that movement does exist, but you are not a part of it. You are not taking long gaps between your posts because you are trying to make any kind of point; you are doing it because you don’t have the motivation to write anything, or maybe (at best) because you feel like you have something better to do.
1.2. Glaucus: Now look over there, Socrates, do you see those people with the strange hair? Those are Emus, right?
Socrates: No, those aren’t Emus. Those are Floggers. Remember I was telling you about them? They dress up kind just like that and they share photos of themselves dressed up like that.
Glaucus: They look the same as the Emus to me.
Socrates: But the Emus only wear black. They have the same haircut, but they only wear black.
Glaucus: So then how are Emus different from Goths? Don’t Goths just wear black, too?
Socrates: Yeah, but Emus are more emutional then Goths. That’s the difference.
Glaucus: But they have the same hair as these people here.
Socrates: Yeah, kind of. You know what bothers me about these Floggers, though, it’s that they don’t actually have any kind of cause or reason for being. They just dress up that way and then go hang out at malls. At least with some other youth fashions you could say that there was some kind of cause…even Emus, you know, they are like the sensitive kids and they come together because everyone else is beating them up…even Punks, they have some kind of social message they are angry about (however addled it is), but Floggers just have nothing, all they do is use the technology available to them to distribute photos of themselves using the technology available to them while dressing up in stupid clothes. I just wish they were trying to address some social issue, but they really aren’t.
Glaucus: Well they look the same as the goddamn Emus to me.
1.1 Glaucus: Apparently I am part of a trend that I didn’t even know existed.
Socrates: What trend are you part of that you didn’t know about?
Glaucus: Well, it seems that in reaction to the instantaneous information some people feel compelled to post about themselves on sites like twitter, some people have been doing this thing called slow blogging. Slow blogging is a thing where a person who makes a blog takes their time and really tries to write something long and considered, as opposed to simply blowing out mind farts every twenty minutes or so. The other thing is that these slow bloggers also like to take as long as they possibly can between posts sometimes going so long that their readers are almost ready to give up on the blog and then lo and behold, up comes a new well crafted post that sucks everybody back in.
Socrates: And what is your point?
Glaucus: My point is that this is what *I* do! I must be a slow blogger because I write really long posts and I take way way too much time between each one and everyone who reads my blog always complains that I never write anything! Before I thought I was just lazy, or at best more focused on other matters in my life, but now I realize that I am part of a movement. I belong!
Socrates: I think you are just lazy. Maybe that movement does exist, but you are not a part of it. You are not taking long gaps between your posts because you are trying to make any kind of point; you are doing it because you don’t have the motivation to write anything, or maybe (at best) because you feel like you have something better to do.
1.2. Glaucus: Now look over there, Socrates, do you see those people with the strange hair? Those are Emus, right?
Socrates: No, those aren’t Emus. Those are Floggers. Remember I was telling you about them? They dress up kind just like that and they share photos of themselves dressed up like that.
Glaucus: They look the same as the Emus to me.
Socrates: But the Emus only wear black. They have the same haircut, but they only wear black.
Glaucus: So then how are Emus different from Goths? Don’t Goths just wear black, too?
Socrates: Yeah, but Emus are more emutional then Goths. That’s the difference.
Glaucus: But they have the same hair as these people here.
Socrates: Yeah, kind of. You know what bothers me about these Floggers, though, it’s that they don’t actually have any kind of cause or reason for being. They just dress up that way and then go hang out at malls. At least with some other youth fashions you could say that there was some kind of cause…even Emus, you know, they are like the sensitive kids and they come together because everyone else is beating them up…even Punks, they have some kind of social message they are angry about (however addled it is), but Floggers just have nothing, all they do is use the technology available to them to distribute photos of themselves using the technology available to them while dressing up in stupid clothes. I just wish they were trying to address some social issue, but they really aren’t.
Glaucus: Well they look the same as the goddamn Emus to me.
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