Jacko is having a garage sale
do you think He'll come down from $4,000 for his transforming moonwalker head?
Embroidered Knee MRI Slice
Totally sweet knee crafty crap. from http://sternlab.org/2009/02/embroidered-mri-slice/
DO WANT: Ricochet by Lapierre & Dudon
Its a set of subwoofers with a reflective cone and LED lighting, filled with water– courtesy of the Yatzer Gallery
David Byrne Sighting: N.A.S.A.
North America/South America’s “The Spirit of Apollo”. The Song is “The People Tree” and despite the vintage Jurassic 5 sound, it is a good track.
Good Old Neon
The impression I always got from Wallace’s writing was of a man who was as ashamed of his self-obsession as he was of his authorial voyeurism. In The Nature of Fun he charts the development of the act of writing fiction from simple fun– onanism, to the vanity of writing for the praise and respect of others, and ultimately to the ecstacy of vanity, metavanity, where one games their own shortcomings and insecurities in pursuit of a better product. A better product isn’t the end in itself, but satisfaction is the only way to return to the pleasure of writing for fun. Wallace, outside of the explosion of obits, was not the writer’s writer, but he was a writer for the sake of writing. His work wasn’t to save me; It was to save himself.
To wit: an except from his commencement address to the graduating class of Kenyon on 2005:
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.
I suspect that asserting that a solid liberal arts education is tantamount to liberation from one’s own head is another attempt to game the system. Tedium is the state of being aware of tedium. When you write to entertain yourself, expect returns to diminish as you become more adept. The only real solution is to check out. Dave mythologized athletes. He flirted with greatness as an amateur tennis star. He fetishized the grace of the sport– the tapering cone of possibility from service to point in Infinite Jest. Professional athletes aren’t exceptional because they embody play. The are exceptional because they escape ego. Its Saturday night; I’ve already seen six post game interviews with winning quarterbacks. Their chests heave, they sweat, and they say as much as they can. They talk about how they executed their plan, they praise their team mates. Beyond that, they try to put words in front of something distincly pre-verbal. The mind has nothing much to say about turning off the mind, and doing something from muscle memory. In this respect, I can see the conection between Warhol and Wallace and an Olympian: they covet the mechanical, they wish they were dead. For Wallace, there was no return to the innocence of Sport. The only satisfying option, when you’ve tired of the game of keeping your mind interested, is to demap yourself.
All that aside, no man is an island. Just as play takes on the highest significance to spectators, Wallace’s writing has made me fel so connected. There are passages in Infinite Jest that absolutely skewered me. I set the book down like a DMT pipe, and imagined myself as someone utterly surprised to be shot in the chest, feeling the wet bullethole and smelling the chordite. He has amused me to tears, comforted me in my addictions, and ameliorated my alienation. His passing is only a confirmation that life is ultimately ending as it passes, and all victories are only Pyrrhic. The secret to pleasure, and joy lies not in games, or in pleasure, but in saving others. That’s why I’ll continue to lend out all the Wallace I’ve collected.
Labor Day
Long-time supporter and close confidant Packet passed through town over the long weekend. Following custom, we met at a kind of strip mall where the Walgreen’s is clearly the intended anchor, but Starbucks fills the role de facto. Starbucks’ bid to increase profits by breaking through their own clutter, and transcending their own brand identity has not entirely reached this– or any other– nearby location. Unfortunately, the wifi is still tethered to the humiliation of paying T-mobile to pay Catherine “not actually Hispanic” Zeta Jones to tend to the aging Michael Douglas’s pharmacological tumescence. People who delude themselves into thinking that their Organic Chemistry book knows whether its open in a coffee shop or a library, and people wearing honest, small-batch embroidered polo shirts, who delude each other into believing that Starbucks will lend a much-needed veneer of legitimacy to a shaky real estate deal designed to elevate them from base affluence to the kind of affluence that base affluence was always supposed to be dominate the prime upholstered seating. The menu recently expanded to include chalky fruit shakes that proudly carry the on the proud tradition of reminding you how much better this beverage could be if you had made it yourself if only you had thought of that before you agreed to meet here. Besides, inviting a friend over for smoothies has– at best– ambiguous symbolic meaning; At least a homosocial Starbucks date can be invested with the subtext of ironic consumption of the consistently acceptable.
Outside, a light fall breeze– the only real trace of the Katrina that nearly was but then wasn’t that had been skipping across a quarter of every news channel like vomit-as-seen-through-the-eyes-of-the-predator– made alfresco conversation a real possibility. The No Smoking sticker on the table had doubled in area, excising its tacit “please”. The increase in volume was welcome, as I’ve been openly begging somebody to tell me more forcefully to quit. We faced away from the glass wall– naked voyeurism tends to take hold– instead choosing to face one healthy middle aged man wearing a souvenir fun-run shirt (Marlboro Reds, abstaining), a thick, brick-clad pilaster, a coven of Koreans (assuredly Marlboro Lights, and menthols when they engage in transgressive dancing), three rows of cars, one empty row of spaces where cars have never and will never park, a strip of grass that looks exceedingly well-manicured, a busy road with intermittent sidewalks, and finally, a lonely bank framed by tall Southern Pines and the kind of sky most commonly associated with bad paintings of a nice day. Banks must be lonely in suburbia. The hierarchy goes: a bank that is old and in the bottom floor of a downtown building named for it (odorless), a lonely suburban bank with a familiar name with lots undeveloped land near by (cheap carpet and a room full of pens), the same bank with an Arby’s right by it (slight sauce smell), the Arby’s bank, only its some esoteric credit union (sauce smell more prominent), the outparcel bank in a strip mall(sno-cones don’t smell, but that’s what it smells like), the bank at the end of a strip mall (the bagel place next door), the bank between two stores (cacaphony), and the bank within the grocery store (put your head inside a grocery bag, and breathe mindfully). Note that keeping your money in a coffee can is still wildly popular not because of investment scandals, but because a coffee can doesn’t have to not smell. This is a game changer for whoever (starbucks?) figures out a business model for a place to keep money that is not in any way related to the idea of a bank.
Packet and I skip the Venture Brothers discussion, barreling through tentative stabs at music: Wale, Oneida, Byrne, Of Montreal. The meat and potatoes is the “Liberal Hate Blog” Daily Kos’s fever-dream of a theory on presumptive veep Sarah Palin’s GMILFhood by way of her Daughter’s loose morals and there not being too much to do in Alaska save “shoot stuff, ride dirt bikes, and just fuckin’ chill” (babydaddy’s words, not mine). My presentation of the facts was tongue-in-cheek; The glee I experienced in participating in this chapter of our great experiment in democracy was wholly above-board. It turns out that the way politics works is that the media is latently biased, the internet is manifestly biased, and your individual consumption and promulgation of bias turns human lives into a hybrid of a grotesque and a Moliere play upon which the “old media” feel safe in reporting upon because it doesn’t entail any actual journalism, and a lot of consumers of news seem to be talking about it. Repeat ad nauseum, then prepend all mentions of the story (apt word!) with “when will the __________ story go away?” Ride the feedback loop all the way to election day, hope that somewhere within the concept of democracy is the idea of both blood-sacrifice and the lowest common denominator. Pray that all of this window-dressing has somehow either picked the best candidate, or not frustrated whatever Jungian picking mechanism (relative height?) societies use for electing leaders. One day later, the red side can be accused of rigging machines, influencing global commodity prices, and fooling people into not voting, and the blue side can be accused of voting early and often, using union goons to firebomb red houses, and general anarchy. Where’s little Caylee Anthony?
Marlboro Red fun run (lets not even let that start to parse itself) couldn’t let the process work itself out. As soon as he reached the end of whatever chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows he was on, he loudly closed it, quickly got up form his chair, and observed at us that he hadn’t heard us berate Our candidate for his trespasses and lack of experience. We were gobsmacked: not so much at his audacity– his lack of decorum, or the way he purposefully avoided any posture or pause that invited discussion. I was agape on a deep level, as though the fourth wall had been broken not by the actors, but by the audience at home. I feel the incredible sickness of always performing. My vision slightly tunnels, my guts feel ninety seconds removed from a carnival ride designed to make you dizzy. I’m enfeebled by postmodernism even though it seems correct. The pierced veil folded right back over my vision as soon as he screeched away in his Honda. I can take some small measure of comfort knowing that his serious business was as disrupted as my droll nihilism.
