Tech Cathexis

This post on Quiet Babylon got me thinking this morning. Tim is talking about the bifurcated relationship between objects and their corresponding data, specifically, the separation of data from paper.

True, they are moving more independently of each other than they have, but what I am seeing is that our relationship with paper and the internet is reminding us that the magic of language never existed in the word's physical existence, but in its expression. The object never held any data to begin with, it only reminded us of how to have a particular data experience. Because, even though the Necronomicon is bound in human skin, you still have to read it out loud to bring the beast into this dimension, right?

But really--the history of magic, one of the original industries of signs and symbols, is full of the understanding that it is not just having the spell on an amulet, but the writing act itself, or the reading act later on. The media just acts as a plane of stasis for the meaning: the lines of the figure are the bars of the cage that hold the meaning in one place, ready to be utilized any time one with the skill (reading used to be one of the few material skills of the priest) happens by, and accesses the data.

The flip side is, even though the Internet may be the wildest, most evilest Necronomicon we've ever devised, there still seems to be fixation with the media on which the data is accessed. There is a tactile experience. Not just a "I like paperbacks in my hand" tactile experience, but a "how I interface my data is the magic by which it exists" phenomenological experience. Mobile devices, AR, instantly-updating personalized opt-in feeds, etc. It's magic, and we're fascinated by it.

So maybe you run the perfect paperless office, using the cloud, email, skype, Evernote, whatever, all through the palm of your hand. But I bet you've customized the crap out of it. Because your mobile device is yours, as much as your handwriting is. Why don't couples share mobile phones, when they've shared landlines for years? They share the minutes, the call-5-link-in plan, maybe even the same mp3s and calendar, but everyone's got to have their own handset, their own ringtone, their own background picture. The media may be disposable, but only because it is easily replaceable BY ANOTHER. A wedding or a prop dress is only worn once, but at the moment it was being used, it was irreplaceable. It was perfect. It was the only one, and this was because it was a symbol. The dress doesn't matter, it is what the dress means.

Objects with no meaning drift in and out of our phenomenal realm all the time, and we couldn't care less. Objects with transitory meaning transition out of our attention as soon as their meaning vacates. The data is infinite, in it's own finite space, but what we're seeing is that the object may not even exist at all, outside of its particular instance of phenomenological access. You can take my cellphone, but you better back up my contacts first. This is exactly how we few all objects, psychologically and phenomenologically. You are a human with a soul when I want to feel a spiritual connection to you, an obstacle when you are in my way, and a hot ball of desire when our bodies touch in that special way. Object cathexis, pure and simple. You may fill my heart with passion, but it is really your image which I am filling with my libidinal energy, to inflate you and give you meaning within my own head, whatever the meaning may be.

If my iPhone breaks the day I buy it, I'll mourn the loss. If it dies the day after my two-year contract expires, I'll celebrate the fortuitousness, and then trot down to the iStore. I don't know if we can really, as Tim suggests, change our relationship to object from this mode. If we did not fetishize objects, how could we ever interact with them? If we didn't love the look of our own blogs and twitter feeds as if they were our children, then why would we spend hours a day with them? Hell, if our children didn't act like our own little genetic twitter-feeds, then why would we even love them? I used to preach an anti-TV line. But then I realized how to get people to stop watching TV: stop TVs from spewing the sex, violence, and advertisements that people love so much. Without the meaning, objects cease existing. But until then, you be better off trying to cut off someone's leg than take away their stuff. (And if you like Melanie Klein's part-object theory, you might. Bad breast! Bad!)

I wouldn't say reducing material consumption is a lost cause, though. Meaning flows through objects, and is anything but static. The immediate step after investing oneself in an object, is to put it to work with other objects, directing the flows of meaning, and altering their expression and apprehension. So maybe the change Tim is talking about is possible--but to confront objects meant to die we would have to confront ourselves as objects meant to die. Desire and libidinal investment's power is typically its fullness, not its mortality. So this would take some work. But hey, existentialism is a popular thought object... so maybe in this dark times living towards object death is not such a crazy meaning as it might have been.

Glad to Mutate

Chris Nakashima-Brown has a piece on Strange Horizons called, "Nomadology". I could describe it, but maybe it would be better if I just let you read an exerpt:

"At the Royal Brisbane Country Club, the lower level of the clubhouse has been converted into interrogation facilities. Portions of the men's grill and locker room allowed to realize their immanent potential when the Homeland Guard recaptured the western suburbs and set up a beautifully landscaped gulag here, a mile or two outside the area under the control of the insurrection.

I am strapped to a banquet chair with hard plastic ties. On the wall opposite, the elusive face of Tiger Woods watches over his shoulder as my interrogator attaches the electrodes to my testicles. Is that a Mona Lisa smile the golfer wears, or some darker aspect? The predatory seduction of the child star.

The empty swimming pool through the window is a detention area surrounded by concertina. A thousand putative rebels rounded up at night from the surrounding municipalities shamble in the shallow rain puddles of the deep end, watched by black-uniformed sentries perched atop the lifeguard towers with assault rifles that intermittently glisten in the light of late dusk.

As the current starts to run through me, I hear the battery of lawn sprinklers kick in. The cascading shook-shook of watery machined spurts ejecting over the greener-than-real turf, unexpectedly synchronized with the waves of high-voltage spasms as they seize my corpus in a rictus of new pain."

Actually, I totally can describe it. It kind of reads like a soft-core "Roosevelt After Inauguration", by William Burroughs. This doesn't appear to be quotable online, but you can read an exerpt of it via a Burroughs Reader on Google Books here.

I like Nakashima-Brown's piece. I'm not the biggest fan of the enviable Burroughs; perhaps better to say that for me he has his moments, and then he also does not. Nor am I a really big supporter of topical subject matter in fiction. It's the atemporality thing--I personally stray away from anything that could date a piece of fictional prose. Like a friend of mine mentioned about rap songs and videos, you can tell instantly when they were outdated by the cell phones that cameo in the song. Fiction shouldn't strive to be universal necessarily, but it certainly shouldn't be looking for the thong-covered ass crack niche that is "current".

But "Nomadology" on the other hand, already feels dated, but in a powerful way, not one of obsolesce. It imparts the brittleness of history in the same way as these current events did when we first learned of them. It's all stuff that happened elsewhere to Americans, in another time and place. Maybe even a different world. Sure, we heard a lot about Darfur for a while. But atrocities, in the United States, always happen in the past tense. Facts always come to light after the fact, and then we condemn, and resolve to have it never happen again. Until the next time that breaking news uncovers what someone else was living with for days, weeks, or years, up until only recently.

And I think this is the real connection to Burroughs, not the shock value. "Roosevelt After Inauguration"... what, people were pissed about Roosevelt? Which one? Why? The whole thing sounds like fictional history, like Burroughs delusions of current events only existed in some drug-addled alternative dimension. But the real drug-addled alternative nightmare is real life, and history is the delusion. We know now that Roosevelt was a good president, because it says so in the history books. We know that Abu Grahib was a bad place, because we are told it is not so anymore. The truth of history is defined by it's nonexistence, and its segmentation to a volume of time and space that are divorced from the present. Both Nakashima-Brown and Burroughs bring the past to life in a way that can never die, because it is too bizarre to be killed. It's been zombified, and given chainsaws for hands, and had a clown mask sewn to its skin, and been installed with a 10,000-year rated deux-ex-machina-brand atomic power-cell, making it impervious to the ravishings of age and nearly unkillable. This horror has been inaugurated, and is going for four more years. Or is it four less years? History never actually happened if it's too horrible. We simply deny it by dating it; or does it do this to us? The story doesn't say, but I have a feeling those terrorist parties happen ever weekend, and on Tuesdays for Service Industry Night. You just need a flyer to get in.

The new Internet world is a strange place, and perhaps what is strangest is that things like car bombings still happen all the time. I'm glad someone is willing to document the strangeness in a way that can deliver the magnitude of history, without falling prey to the glossiness of aqueous-coated magazines, or the tiny fascisms of time, space, and plot. This is the job of literature, if ever it had one. As Roosevelt said, and I quote, "I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate."

Yum-Yum Means Holloween Candy I Have No Doubt

and one more... a seasonal one.



via Last Days of Man on Earth (you should probably read the post for context.)

Time for...

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Can we all agree that it is not now, nor has ever been, time for the percolator?



Add to file, "things I am glad to say have no doubt been broadcast into space".

And What Have I Done....

I've been playing with Wave for most of the afternoon, and it's been fun, but still pretty frustrating. It's a lot like moving into a new building while their still installing light fixtures. There is dust everywhere, many things don't work right, but mostly it's just exciting to be the new building and wander around, not really using the space, but just enjoying the new architecture.

There's all the stuff I could say about how it's amazing, etc, but I won't, because if you care at all I'm sure you've read it already somewhere else, in the near thousand blog posts that have just recycled the commonly held knowledge we all already saw in the video. So I'm not going to write about that, but simply record a few of my observations about wandering around in this new community center, just opened to the public, at least those willing to step around the ladders and buckets and stuff.

Why? Well, maybe that will be a little apparent by the time I'm done. Also, the reason you might be reading this either in Wave, or on a good "old-fashioned" blog might also be clear. But enough with the preludes, and let's get to it.

Firstly, none of the things I want to use work. True, I am writing a wave right now, or a "blip", if this new lingo is to be trusted. And after about five different "beginner's guides" I finally figured out how to search the public waves, so yes, I can do that too. But the Twitter functionality won't authenticate, and while I had some limited success getting a wave to show up on both a Word Press site and Blogspot, I would hardly call it really functional. So I'm stuck with... waves. Lost at sea. Adrift in the malestrom. Metaphors ad nauseum.

You see, this is really want I wanted to do--I wanted to use a single platform for instant web publishing. I wanted to open one control screen, and instantly slingshot my words to all the many repositories I keep on the network. I wanted to finally have one Google product to rule them all, and with the instant-update quality that is defining the mobile infinite-net. Instead, I am still trying to untangle javascript and making use of copious Ctrl C. I've written about it before... the dream of a easily accessible, atemporal network linking the contributing consciousnesses of the world in as much of a tangle singularity as it will probably ever get, what with our bizarre and varied tastes in personal hygiene and all.

But that's okay, because this is merely a preview of this game-changing, web-#.0-upgrading, temporal-continuity-destroying free web app. No need to get all broodingly philosophical on the first day, right?

Wrong! Look at these people! All of these villagers running around, pulling on the levers and setting up tents and shouting and waving their arms at their friends, trying to find the best space, and maybe even get a little something done before the porn bots and social media marketing gurus show up, as we all are sure that they will, as we cautiously peek out of the windows and at the horizon, keeping the children, old people and animals close, trying to build as many huts as possible before those vikings come over the hill.

Here are some interesting things that are happening:

- The Rush to Institute A Little Goddamn Law and Order: let some sysadmins in, and all of a sudden it's all wikipedia in here! Some wild west; more like a starving puritan colony where the few people left are desperately trying to use Roberts' Rules of Order to figure out how to get the corn to grow. We need a little less parlimentary procedure, and a little more Squanto! No, I'm kidding--I think it's awesome that there is already such a term as IBA (Initital Blip Author), and FIRM rules like reply-moderated tags, the seperation of document and discussion waves, and a thousand little convoluted discussions about etiquette. All of these are the sort of things that don't really need to be discussed, because just like the rest of the Internet, these rules will develop if it's going to make any sense at all. And yet they still are discussed, and politely discussed again. Because we're all educated people here, and we just love consensus! So groundbreaking, and yet so anti-punk-rock, it just tickles me pink. Google Wave really might be the next big thing, if people keep taking it so damn seriously!

- The Beginning of a New Era Starts...: When? I don't know, it seems like everyone's already been here for ever. All the good public waves have over a hundred comments, though this will probably end up being nothing as soon as they really open the floodgates. Maybe it's just that I can't get the Playback function to work, but it seems like Google Wave is going to have the same problem all new provinces and colonies have--everyone is too busy trying to survive to take down any history. Not that it's crucial to humanity to document these first few waves of the coming info-nami. Hell, the Internet isn't really exciting enough to keep a record. It's too big, too watered down, and too lumbersome to track each individual sweat gland of the beast, spitting moisture off into the tiny mossy filaments it is always trampling under foot. And yet, right now it seems like Wave is a community, or at least in some sense. The minute Wave becomes just another part of the Internet, that community will be lost. Anyone know where to read about the beginnings of Twitter? Something about some concert in Texas? Whatever, I'm just glad I started following Britney before she hit the million mark. But shouldn't somebody be writing something down? Who wants to be secretary? Nobody? Okay, cool. I mean, I'm not going to do it either. Just sayin'. This will probably seem pretty weird a year from now. But then again, time always does.

- JOIN US, BECAUSE WE'RE ALL IN IT TOGETHER!: But there is something kind of weird about these beginning times. I remember as a kid thinking it was so awesome that I could dial into a BBS and play tic-tac-toe against someone in another part of the state! I probably never played so much tic-tac-toe in my life as when my dad brought home a 14.4 modem. Times have changed of course, because now you can sign into Google Wave to play Sidoku against folks in Malaysia. But that's not all that's going on here. People are making rules, forming committees, and inventing new RPGs! People are making widgets, and handing out javascript samplers, and starting brand new photo pools, and talking about religion and the Internet and food and who knows what else. Everyone is getting into it, because it's new, and they want to get down. Hell, I'm trying to write some real time essays on it. Why? Because maybe it will be totally awesome, that's why. And at any rate, if something else awesome happens here, I'll be around when it happens. The numbers are still small enough that I can watch the public waves update, and be able to make sense of it. I can even recognize some avatars in the miniature view. We might as well be neighbors here in Google Wave. It's not just new tech, it's new Internet, and everybody's getting involved. And can you blame us? Remember how awesome the first Internet was?

And Other Great Prophecy: who knows what? Who knows what will be in the pipeline tomorrow? Who knows when stuff will really start to work? Maybe tonight. Maybe a week from now. Maybe when they finally release that hot gadget like they talked about and it works great and everybody loves it. Maybe not for a year, until the American Workers' Revolution is Wave-Cast, and the face of politics (and don't forget that pain in the ass, media) is changed beyond all of our wildest dreams. What? Don't worry about it. It's prophecy! We all know how awesome technology is, and now it is so awesome that we can all tell the future. Time has folded in half; time is a wave; periodization has reduced its wavelength to the infinitesimal scale of instantaneousness, and we are all a giant numeral one in the center of a sudoku grid with only one box. Shit is crazy, and you are/will be/have been there. So wave your hands like you just don't care. Because it's a new mediapocalypse every day, and if you don't sign in, you might just not even notice and instead do something else.

So until then, and for as long as it lasts, I'll send you my dispatches from the forefront of the bottom of the wave. You might not be able to read them, because they'll get lost in the cloud, or I'll forget to make it a public wave, or maybe you don't have an invite yet so all you see is a YouTube video rather than my words. But what is this if not a sign of the times, and proof of the cutting edge? Cultural incompatibility is the sign of big changes. Far be it from me to try and dumb down history for us. That's, like, some professor's job.





If you like this writing, or other stuff I've written, drop me a line, and the next time I clog the public wave feed, I'll make sure to add you. I know, this is kind of bootleg, but hey, this is Google Wave, baby!

Partners in Art

Well, I'm feeling much improved from my now-vanquished infection. Antibiotics--truly a triumph of modern times.

So I will now continue with my infrequent postings in the typical format, but before I do, there is one more acquaintance I'd like to share with you. There are many more than that of course, and I will try and add them as I think of them. This one, however, I fortunately remember.

The "M" I sometimes reference both here and on my Twitter feed is actually my lovely partner, Rosalynn Rothstein. She wears a great deal of creative hats, both the figurative and the literal varieties. But mostly she is doing two things: painting and arranging flowers.



And not just putting flowers in a damn vase either, but practicing the Japanese art of ikebana, and specifically, the sogetsu school. It's kind of like martial arts, in that they have particular styles and master teachers. I could try to explain the difference to you, but I'd just get it wrong.



The part that we can all appreciate is that it forms some awesome syncretisms between her flowers and her paintings. The flower arranging is all about balance, and both space and negative space, and throwing all these elements out of proportion. And her paintings, which she has previously referred to as landscapes, find themselves mimicking natural instances of balance and inbalance as well.



Her paintings are bright and colorful, rhythmic and abstract, and at the same time, they tend to put people off balance. Especially in Portland, the land of cutesy proportioned, baby-like animal paintings, they cut through the fog like uprooted trees and landslide scars. Nature may be totally sweet, but it's massive weight hasn't forgotten how to kick your ass. Bacteria, beetles, and boulders can all rend the flesh off your pretty little arms, and we should remember this, even when looking at the most delicate flower.



Rosalynn's work is available for viewing on her website, The Modern Forest, and is normally hanging around Portland somewhere. Right now she has a quilt sculpture piece at The Launch Pad Gallery, and some paintings at the Way Post. For the ikebana, there is always some around the house, and on our front porch. Sometimes she leaves them in public places as well, though those are not around for long. Especially in front of Stumptown, where people like to throw away pretty flowers. Damn you, Stumptown.

Please Stop Film, Turn Tape Over, Press Play.

My friend Jon, otherwise known as Lateral Hyetography, in addition to recording his own music produces the all-cassette label Really Coastal.



When I was in LA recently, Jon hooked me up with everything he had in stock: Theo Angell's "First Recordings", Antique Brother's "Hot Shit", and Bird Names' "Recession Vacation". (Bird Names is another venture of which I think I know, maybe two? of the current contributors.)



The selected cover art I've stuck here from Really Costal's website probably gives you an idea of the aesthetic. Funny how cover art will do that. In my two years reviewing music for a college radio station, I really found it interesting how sifting through the cover art will give you a pretty good idea of what the band will sound like. Thickness of paper and quality of printing will clue you in to the production quality of the tracks, and originality and artistic quality of the images will be a pretty good indicator of what it will sound like, and how good of a specimen.

But that said, and with the connotations that "all-cassette label" necessarily bring with it, there is a sort of music that cannot be produced any other way. The recording medium is part of the experience, and this holds true for torrented mp3, HQ 180g vinyl, scratched CD, or pristine cassette. When I put in the Antique Brothers tape into my crappy van's tape player, the only part of the music system that still works, and peered out of the rain-blurred windows on my way to work at 5:30 AM on an autumn Portland morning, it was precisely right. The echoing hues of the the tape matched my landscape with a soundscape for forty-five minutes, and then the tape reversed, dragging the long magnetic filament back to its origin.

Perhaps tapes, and the sort of music that must be recorded on tapes, are not for most people. But then again, most well-crafted art rarely is. This music is art music, because it meant to provoke something, not correspond to whatever the consumer already feels.

Pen and Ink Like Imagination Lassos

Amos Goldbaum lives in San Franscisco, and makes his living selling T-shirts on the streets.



He's also a pretty phenomenal artist, but I think the former is quite profound, due to my own ability to support myself with my work. The ability to intersect very creative work with something that the general public would like to, say, wear on a T-shirt is rare in this day and age.



At the school we both attended, I remember seeing his strange creations crawling across the walls of dorms, empty cartons of consumer products fixed to the walls with masking tape, and the odd book or pamphlet, produced who-knows-where.


His work, to me, is an interesting interface between the machinic, the animal, and the human, taking common-place sights and depicting them in an unsettling perspective. His ink and line form is perfect for the work, because it depicts shape while leaving it hollow. The uncanny, twisted shapes look like ghosts, showing just how uncanny it is to see people walking down the streets, strapped to the gills with machinery, as if nothing was wrong.



And at the same time, nothing is wrong, because these things are around us and in our minds all day, and we just go on living, from one day to the next. But are we okay? Do these creatures need our help? Are they trapped in their machinic assemblages? Or are they happily lurking, waiting to attack us if we try to pet them? Everything mundane is also uncanny, and everything horrifying is also normal.



You can either catch Amos on his Twitter feed, where he reports his daily selling location on the streets of SF, or at his website, where he has a very nice little store, and hundreds of images from his sketchbooks for your perusal. In addition to his own prints and shirts, he's also illustrated albums art work, a book or two, and done posters for local events. He's also had a few shows in the SF area, which you can see photos of on his site.

Friends, Philistines, and Countrypersons

I have an infection, and the constant hacking and coughing is giving me a nice little autumn writer's aesthetic, but I still am not feeling up to rattling off a philosophical tract at the moment, though numerous topics are flowing, especially after a great in-the-car discussion with Megan yesterday about intellectual property and folklore ethics. And other stuff too.

So instead, I'm going to do one of these curation things, where I take you on a guided blog post tour. It's not the most ground-breaking topic for a blog, or for the self-pleasuring world of the Internet for that matter, but it's something I've been meaning to do.

So without further ado, here are some people I know, who make interesting things.

They aren't linked by the type of things they make, or the style, or the potential interest to the "readership of this blog", but people whom I actually know in person, and not just via the Internet. Most of them I know from college, which for those of you who don't know, is a vast social system in america designed to sort and agglomerate human intellect during the end phase of pubescence. On the exit pipe side, here are some people who I ended up standing near, and who probably know more about me than my web auteur-ship typically exhibits, and who might have seen me shouting in various stages of undress at some point in time, which was probably not actually real.

The point is, among the various milieus and inspirations a person can inhabit and absorb in this atemporal, networked, year-of-our-data, there is still something to be said for those who have actually been seen going at it, making art, making gross body sounds, or just plain making a mess in some corner of the physical world. No genre here, man. Not even a categorical application of techne. No philosophical convictions or linked-in-thematic theses. But to paraphrase one of them, "I know some people, and now you're going to hear about 'em."

Beginning with the next post...

Behold, the pedal-powered panopticon

This has

post-peak-oil-crowd-sourced-maker-ready-augmented-reality-big-brother-favela-chic

written all over it.

But these days you have to travel simultaneously back and forward through a doom-plated meta-techno-apocalytpica time continuum matrix to really interest me.

I tell ya, some days it's just hard to keep up.