David Lynch said, “Crew spent his life writing a diary from 1919 to the time of his eventual suicide in 1963. In that time, he lived confined to a dark room in Boston and, through newspaper ads, hired ‘talkers’ to tell him the stories of their lives. He then wove these histories into his own diary. Young women were a particular fascination. According to his brief bio, he bought them clothes, studied their moods, ‘fondled them,’ and gave them romantic advice. Inman’s edited diaries were published in 1985 by the Harvard University Press in two volumes. That’s where I first heard of him and his strange life’s work.” [read more]
Author Archives: scamper
The Design God
We’re down to the wire now. Tomorrow the review board will focus their arc lamps upon me and judge the efficacy of my labors.
My reaction? An impenetrable self-righteousness. My willful (and liberal) use of non-party propaganda during earlier presentations provoked much uneasy stirring among their ranks. To be precise, I referred to our earnest corps of workers as “[our] dedicated team of trained monkeys.”
Now I see my latest composition circulating much farther from my desk than I’ve intended, eventually finding itself among the true company troglodytes–those whose faces have never been blighted by even the hint of a genuine smile. And when these drones espy my wayward child, they look at one another with sparring-eyebrows cocked, yet say nothing.
I laugh in the face of their consternation. “Perhaps they have forgotten,” I bark with sudden irascibility, “that if they don’t enjoy the compositions then they’re free to bite me. In fact I invite them to bite me!”
Heads turn to where I was standing a moment before, but I’ve already left the room, bored with their puerile games.
Or maybe it would be more effective if I just pictured them naked.
America Has Gone Mad
The following are two of the most accurate, lucid accounts of this rogue nation that I’ve come across.
In The Times, John le Carré writes: “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.” [read more] [alternate link – until timesonline gets its act together]
In Time, Brian Eno writes: “How is it that a country that prides itself on its economic success could have so many very poor people? How is it that a country so insistent on the rule of law should seek to exempt itself from international agreements? And how is it that the world’s beacon of democracy can have elections dominated by wealthy special interest groups?” [read more]
Midget Pickles?
Wait. No. Midget pickles? Is that what it said? There’s a whole shelf of Del Monte midget pickles (sweet sweet midget pickles!) at the Safeway, and… no one’s saying anything about it. Where I come from, calling a little person a “midget” is about as savory as calling them–or anyone–a “fuckhead.” It’s not the same species of word, of course–as different as “wop” and “retard,” say. But right along those same derogatory lines, you see. I like pickles, and I like little people–and together I’d call them irresistible–but maybe I’m just out of touch.
How I Met Her
Mine was an aged building that sweat under the pressure to remain standing. Mold had bruised its damp walls, like storm clouds from an artist’s brush. White awnings like sails webbed freshly-carved stone buttresses hewn long ago, and that once seemed to herald a new prosperity. But these too turned a uniform gray. The moon was keeping me awake. The moon and seventy three chinchillas that had made a nest for themselves in my pantry.
I was lying on a mattress I call “Sadie,” watching projections of the phosphenes frolicking in my eyes when I saw the tear. In truth, I’d noticed the flaw in the wallpaper before, but from this angle the curled ridge looked far more prominent–more inviting. I leapt up, danced a little dance, edging gracefully over to the tear in the wallpaper, and heard as tiny feet skittered across linoleum in response.
With a graceful but precise maneuver, similar to those I’d honed in Central American jungle dales, I swung my arm around and caught purchase of the torn edge, and then stepped away from the wall, tearing the damp paper down to the yellow, varmint-stained moulding. And then I stood still in spent victory.
The webs between my toes tingled and I realized that I’d been standing for hours, staring at the newspapers that lined the walls beneath the faded wallpaper, spongy and moist. I pressed my thumb into a block of text and it gave away almost immediately. I felt something cold, and there was a sucking sound as I pulled my thumb free. I don’t remember which came first, the high-pitched ring in my ears, or the uninvited tears. My sadness, though, was absolute, and I sought solace in the fuzzy words on the pages I lived in. I curled up by the warped floorboards with my hand against a column about a provocateur who arrived by rail in NOLA.
Blah Blah Blah
In 1996 Alan Sokal, a NYU professor of Physics, published the article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in Social Text, a leading a leading journal of cultural studies.
His article was 100% intentional jibberjabber.
After it was published as a legitimate article Sokal exposed it as a parody in Lingua Franca, where he talked about the troubling “decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities.”
Priceless.
Innovative Interface
Some MetaCreations expats (including Kai Krause on the advisory board) had something to do with this. CoOperating Systems’ HelloWorld looks interesting, though, as with PDAs, I don’t know if it’s something I’d use–my comrades are all located in an area roughly equivalent to two pixels on the interface shown. And who wants to talk to them anyway?
Note also “CoSI’s” appreciation of subtlety, even in a web presentation: If you click on the right half of a screenshot it takes you to the next page, and the left side it takes you back. Clever monkeys!
(I can also personally appreciate the fact that Christopher Franke, formerly of Tangerine Dream, is also on the advisory board.)
Tearing Down Walls
There’s always a new guy. Frankly there are too many of them, and only so many hours in a day. This is why we usually remain tucked behind our little social membrane–the alternative would be interacting with every single person around us, and filling our precious and dwindling supply of brain cells with dozens of otherwise useless proper names.
If I can possibly avoid meeting someone, I will. I’ll tie my shoe or go to the bathroom or call in sick or move, just please don’t tear down that third wall.
Earlier this week I needed to confirm an assumption I had about the project I’ve been working on. I can usually work in solitude, but soon enough I became entangled in a complex series of events that all seemed to be leading toward an inevitable interaction with a new guy. The maddening bit is that I was pretty sure I was right in my assumption, but it was an essential piece of information just the same. I had to be sure.
Desperate not to meet the new guy, I asked a anyone else who might be able to help me–people I already know–but to no avail. As a last ditch effort I tried looking up the new guy’s email address, but he’s just too damned new to be listed. Plus I didn’t know his name. It was like all of the universe’s controlling forces had suddenly become legion in their campaign to foil me.
You know when you’re going to knock something over, and you think hmm… if I don’t watch out then I’m going to knock that over, and then you do knock it over, and it’s happens even more slowly because you predicted it, and now you have to sit through it and watch it happen for real? It’s terrifying and frustrating and banal all at the same time.
So I took my little piece of paper over to the new guy and asked him if this thing was supposed to be there, and he said yeah, and I went back to my desk, defeated.
This morning I was trundling to my desk along my favorite route when I passed the new guy in the doorway. I looked up at him, looked back down to my shoes, recognized him, looked back up, saw his cordial I know you expression, and met it with my own, sustaining it just long enough so that it didn’t look like a twitch. All that work drained the life out of me.
In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat there was a guy who enjoyed a neural disorder that rendered him unable to remember anything for longer than about 60 seconds. I think I can beat that if I really assert myself.
In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat there was a guy who enjoyed a neural disorder that rendered him unable to remember…
Building Walls
Nothing shatters this perception of free will more quickly than when you notice the razor wire-tipped fences between you and the grass. Why can you not walk on the grass? Seen from afar, the fog enshrouded hills of Berkeley are so moist and inviting, but when you get anywhere near them you come face to face with the fences. They’re everywhere, like cobwebs in your cellar. Are they to keep you out, or the happy cows in? The Central American expats who work on the new gate around the community refer to themselves as guardas. You’ve heard them laugh about it as they build walls around the big houses. Nor iron bars a cage your ass. Hey guardas, a few more bricks to seal the top and you’d make Poe proud.
Wait–You’re Serious?
The audience had barely finished roaring from that whole “Bush declares a National Sanctity of Life Day” thing last week when the inevitable question was asked: “How will Mr. Bush top himself?” This would surely be a challenge, but he has risen to meet that challenge with aplomb. Witness: “Bush plan gives huge tax break to buyers of big SUVs“. Sterling performance, Mr. Bush! Now I need to wipe the snot off my monitor.