Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Psuedoptersins Sophistry Jones IV's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
10:20 pm	Protean Lunatics I've always been hopelessly American. I'm the guy who went to Europe and, after soaking in the slower, more nuanced approach to daily life and its pleasures, thought it was totally boring. The guy whose nearly-favorite thing to do ever (at least for a long time) was to drive around in a car, park in a parking lot and hang out, then get back in a car and drive around. The key thing to remember about Americans is that we don't have qualities and characteristics so much as we have tendencies. Tendencies toward restlessness and aimlessness are the big ones. Inattention to detail and a lack of focus are also huge: we can't decide on a great American novel, the American dream is poorly delineated, our culture is characterized by supreme vagueness and our history was never learned. We think these tether-less lives make us infinitely adaptable, able to change into anything and become exactly what we want. Without a past to change from and any coherent ideas of what to change into, we rarely become anything at all. Except more protean, less stable, more restless. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 10th, 2008
2:34 pm	Five Albums That Changed My Life (For the Better): The Prelude: A Thing for Music Today marks the first of a series of entries (okay, five) in which I will lay out the five albums that have so greatly improved my life as to deserve a highly illustrious journal entry (hence the title). I will be writing about each album at length, so unless you're already a fan of my selections, prepare to be very bored by what you find, as in my experience few things are as tiresome as other people's rapturous descriptions of the music they love. Still, sometimes you just gotta exorcize your musical demons, or muses, or angels as the case may be (I guess?). This one's the backstory, which any good tale should not have. Bear with me. When I was just a feckless yute (we're talking way back in late elementary school days of yore), I didn't have a taste in music, per se, as I really didn't listen to much music period. Both my mom and dad were rockers in their day, but their rather extensive collection was mostly on vinyl, and my mother didn't have the time or inclination to repair the old turntable, nor the temperament to blare Mott the Hoople about the house as we all folded socks. So essentially my musical development began as most do: haphazardly and carelessly, based on snippets of heard radio sounds and whatever tapes and CDs fell into my relatively uninterested hands. (The only CD I distinctly remember as intriguing at the time was Meatloaf's "Bat Out of Hell," and only because the CD cover is the most faux-badass image in the world: a undead biker dude soaring through the air on a wicked chopped hog above a burning post-apocalyptic hell-wasteland of New York City, one fistful of righteous lightning cocked back and ready to unleash on the titular Bat Out of Hell, a enormous rodent monstrosity perched on the Chrysler building, and apparently holding hostage some kind of hott angel woman who no doubt sports huge boobs. Obviously it made a big impression on me). The end result of this lackadaisical approach to music was a CD collection that, around the start of seventh grade, consisted entirely of a "Bach's Greatest Hits" kind of compilation, a Jimmy Buffet album, not one but two Beach Boys collections, Smash Mouth's "Astro Lounge," the John Williams Movie Themes collection, and another compilation of Gershwin songs (including the obviously tremendous "Rhapsody in Blue" and the well-nigh-equally tremendous "American in Paris" both of which I loved to death and listened to almost every night, accompanying each with private imaginary films that unfurled in my mind as I lay on my bedroom floor near the stereo, recreating the same characters and plotlines each time but constantly embellishing with new elaborations, dilemmas and flourishes). I also had a pretty sick tape collection, including the Ninja Turtles II soundtrack and Bob Seger's "The Fire Inside," as well as a couple Beastie Boys albums I'd dubbed from my friend Robby's CDs and even some early experiments in mixtape-making, the barest shell of a bad habit that I would later refine and expand greatly. Besides my own taste in music, or notable lack thereof, was the enormous, looming presence of my brother’s musical tendencies, which at the time leaned almost exclusively to punk rock (with minor detours into the Gin Blossoms and Everclear). At the time I pretty much followed my brother’s lead, so when he blazed trails into the into the truly odd and awesome world of the Ramones, I was right there behind him. My bro’s old copy of “Ramones Mania” comes a close second to Gershwin for heaviest rotation in my beat-up old Memorex CD player, and I treasured it immensely. Hearing that stuff for the first time literally expanded my mind. It’s a strange thing to say about the Ramones, but their simple, often stupid songs turned a latch in my head, revealing the potential, the straight-ahead energy, the force and sheer enjoyment that music can convey. But that’s a story for another time. Still, despite my deep and abiding passion for the Ramones, they were never fully my music. My brother had found them, and claimed them first, and as much as I embraced his discovery, I would always be to some degree an imitator. I had been awakened, but I had yet to stake a claim on my own turf. So there I stood as the curtain opens on my seventh grade year: an embryonic punk with no real musical discernment to speak of, a truly frail collection of albums, and very little interest in improving myself as regards things of the music-obsessed nature. God knows where I would have ended up had I continued down that path; probably saner, possibly more accomplished in some legitimately useful pursuit, certainly wealthier by a few thousand dollars. But I never would have heard the opening chords of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Incident at 57th Street” for the first time as I huddled on the floor next to my stereo, stunned and utterly absorbed in the sound, never rolled back the windows and let the wind blow back my hair as I cruised through the swamps of Palm Valley on a fresh license at the age of sixteen, the boardwalk-funk of Bruce’s “The E-Street Shuffle” blaring, and myself firm in the belief that life could offer nothing to improve on this, never found myself sweaty and exultant and half-stripped out of a wetsuit in downtown Jacksonville way past midnight, cranking the volume on min-van speakers to send “Kitty’s Back” roaring over an abandoned office-park parking lot, with my friends asking me why this sounded so good. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle” brought me all these moments alone; it was the first album that really lit me up and if it were the only one I ever discovered it still would have made all the expense, the frustration, the amazing waste of time that followed wholly worthwhile. But being “into music,” devouring music omnivorously and continuously as I do, has given so much more, so many transcendent, lunatic concert experiences, so much pathos and relief, so many moments of bonding over dopey songs, or great ones, so much sheer fun, so much beauty. I’m not a person who soundtracks their life, I don’t play music constantly, and I desperately need long periods of silence to stay sane. I’m not tragically smitten with one band or artist, I’m not in a scene, I don’t deconstruct the theoretical underpinnings of pop songs, I’m not even a musician in my own right. What can I say, though; I love music, I love people translating their experience into sound. I guess I just got a thing for it. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 30th, 2007
5:49 pm	Real Mature On second thought, I have a much better definition of maturity. Maturity is NOT BEING A STUPID JACKASS THAT CONTINUOUSLY MAKES CATASTROPHIC MISTAKES BY NOT THINKING AND NOT PAYING ANY DAMN ATTENTION TO WHAT HE'S DOING AT ANY GIVEN TIME. Jesus Christ, when am I going to stop making these amazingly simple and idiotic errors? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 12th, 2007
11:43 pm	An Open Letter to the Urban Poor of America Hear me out, urban poor. I'm not one of you, but you need to know what I know. You probably can't see it coming, but that's understandable; most of you don't really have a very good view. Look, I know what this sounds like, but it's not condescension, just a warning. They're out there, waiting for the slightest opening, slowly encroaching. It doesn't matter what kind of hellhole you live in. It hardly matters how many corner boys you gun down in one weekend, not anymore. They're coming. Soon, your block will be their block, and what it will become will be nearly unrecognizable. You'll be gone, although God knows where you'll go. Out into a blighted suburb, even further from the bright centers of civilization, or maybe to one of the many rotting post-industrial skeletons that dot the American landscape. Third-tier dead cities with no remaining reason to exist and no will left for reinvention will always have vacant rooms. But the real cities, they won't have you anymore. Not to say you never had your shot, your time in the sun. My God, you've ruled the roost for more than thirty years. Since the early 70s the cities have been yours. Sure, the shuttered rich and a substantial slice of dolorous, unsung working class stuck it out, enough ultimately to give an in to the forces that will eventually wrest you out entirely. But at the time no one noticed or cared about them. You had it all: the media hype, a roundabout but enormous political clout, the fear and attention of an entire nation aimed squarely at you. Now? Now you're just a specter, a bogeyman at best. At worst, you're chow for the conservative and liberal jackals. Your world of the ghetto was an unknown, then briefly bohemian, then a gritty distilation of every night terror of the American psyche. Now it's a pop culture fantasy, and the real ghettos ape the fake vision they supposedly inspired. Now that the ghetto's been successfully mass-produced, nobody gives a damn about the original model. The fascination's gone, and in its place big, unsympathetic, unknowning gears are turning. What did you think, that they left you alone because you'd won, you'd driven them out and staked your claim for good? Fat chance. They're coming now because for the first time in years you have something they want: proximity, the amenities of city living, a certain trendiness, and that adorable brownstone two-story that's going to look great when they fix it up. First the fringey types, the edgy hipsters not self-aware enough to know they're hip, the opportunist real estate agents and slum lords, then the gays, the tough-ass liberals, a smattering of broke and gutsy college kids, the idealists from other places who are invariably the ones who get stuck up coming off the bus at night, then the professional fixer-uppers, the early-adopter young professionals, the self-aware hipsters, and the cowardly liberals, and behind them all, the franchises and the yuppies. They're coming for you, and they're going to get rid of you with the same tool they've used in the past, albeit with a much different approach this time. They'll simply throw money at you until you gradually disappear. As for your problems, you'll get to keep those. After decades of urban decay, urban renewal, municipal government reorganizations, crime sprees and backlashes washing over you like huge, mute ocean waves, four words will finally shake your lives into pieces: urban living is chic. You ought to be terrified in New York, especially. Bed-Stuy and Bushwick ought to be pandemonium, a desperate last-chance stand against young professionals and skinny-jacket scenesters. Hell, even the Bronx ought to be nervous. They're not. I'm sure you're not worried up there, because in Philadelphia you're not paying any attention, and if it's happening here in a leading competitor for America's murder capital, I can only imagine what plans they have for you in New York, in LA, in Chicago, in Boston, in Washington, in Miami. What can you do about? Hell, I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't do anything at all. Maybe it'll make your lives a little better, though I don't really see how. Most likely you'll just get priced out and forced on. The ones doing it to you aren't an evil force. They aren't bad people; some of them are really very courageous. They're rejuvenating America's cities. It's just tough luck on you. You deserve a heads-up, urban poor. You do deserve at least that. So remember this letter. Don't say you were never warned. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
12:04 am	The Devil and Chris Scarduzio (Or, A Jersey Kind of Madness) Scarduzio first met the guy on the curb of the Acme supermarket. He was buying onions and shallots and these fancy kinds of spices because his mom was learning to cook. His mom was sort of Italian but really she was just from Philadelphia. She couldn’t cook worth a damn, and now in her early fifties she’d been struck by a fit of culinary repentance. Chinese takeout containers had featured prominently in Scarduzio’s childhood dinners. Scarduzio didn’t like leaving with only a couple bags when everyone else was rolling out these heaping carts; it was vaguely embarrassing, as if he had failed at grocery shopping in some small and visible way. Still, he had everything he came for, and the size and overabundance of the Acme set him on edge anyway. He chose the left side doors, an unusual choice for him, and be-bopped into the parking lot. He was testing out a new walk, a kind of rhythmic strut, to see if it matched his personality. Focused on his walk he almost ran into the guy on the curb, who didn’t even flinch at his uncomfortably close, be-bopping presence. The guy was eating Bachman’s Jax from a bag at his side, his eyes fixed in a thousand-mile stare on the Value City department store entrance way on the other side of the vast parking lot. Scarduzio suspected the guy wasn’t really looking at the distant and minuscule doors of the Value City, wasn’t really looking at anything at all. But he also thought it was possible the guy just had better eyesight. As it turned out, both these suspicions were true, yet another instance of Scarduzio’s unsettling accuracy of perception. With a renegade insouciance the guy had stuck one leg way out into the street, so that the mini-van drivers and Buicks exiting the parking were forced to cut a wide berth around one of his protruding, trashed Nikes. On his right side was a bottle of Acme Pineapple soda, a whole two liter with the cap screwed off and placed neatly on the curb. The guy watched impassively as a Crown Vic carefully avoided his foot; then, in jerky burst of movement he palmed the two-liter and took a quick slug straight from the bottle. Right then and there Scarduzio knew this guy was a raw dog. Scarduzio normally wasn’t like that, but he knew he had to talk to him. He was trying to figure out an in, maybe ask him for some Jax or something, when the guy released his grip on the two-liter and spoke. “Jesu,” he said, his voice raspy and unstable, “Jesu, this soda.” Then he broke down in inchoate noises, unable to continue, obviously in the throes of strong emotions. That was all it took. Scarduzio was hooked. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
2:03 am	When My Dog Died When I found out my dog was sick, and was going to die from being sick, I wanted to kill him myself. I don't know why, but I couldn't stand the thought of someone else, a stranger, coming in from somewhere else to put my dog down. A stranger's hands taking his life, pulling plastic wrap off some clinical, commercially sterilized needle, my dog surrounded by by all this strangeness, dying bewildered. It all felt like such an enormous betrayal. The thought of it was just impossible. But something had to happen; he was profoundly ill, his back legs were giving out, and soon he wouldn't be able to walk. It could be days, it certainly wouldn't be more than two weeks before his slow crippling was complete. His appetite was already fading. My God, the brutality of cancer. It seems like it kills everyone in my family. There was never a clear vision on how to do it. I had vague notions of a quick poison, a knife, something fast. I didn't have a gun. None of it mattered in the end. My grandmother was ill as well, and we left over Thanksgiving to visit her. My dog had to remain at the vet's, under special care in the kennel. He died there, in the company of strangers, held by a caring and wholly unfamiliar nurse. I cried so hard when they took me in to see the body. Everything had gone wrong with the way he died, and now he was lifeless, a corpse, and I missed him, and I stood over him crying with my mom at my side, unhinged by the tiny sliver of pink tongue jutting out just below his nose. And that was the last time anyone saw what remained of my dog. He was burned up and put in small plastic container; it sits on a shelf in my mom's bedroom, alongside old videotapes and photographs of people we once knew in New Jersey. That was the death he got, and it made me weep to see it. There were tears of shame also. I hadn't cried like that for any human being in a long, long time. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 5th, 2007
9:40 pm	META-COMMENTARY Did you see what I just did there? I posted my current musical selection under my entry! I don't think I've done that in about three years. When I started this journal I did it all the time, and I would almost always carefully handpick the song to create some kind of impression or cultivate an elaborate ideal-character for myself based on a very limited slice of my musical tastes. Then sometimes I just actually wrote the song I happened to be listening to at the moment, like I did this time. Actually, I can't really hear the song I'm supposedly listening to at the moment because I'm in a sort of lounge area that's open 24 hours a day where they also blare hip-hop 24 hours a day (really, this is true; I have been here at four in the morning in a brutally sleep-deprived state and "I Be on that Kryptonite" is still farting out of the speakers like a noxious, odorless gas, punishing all listeners in audible range. There is no way to turn it off, it is simply something we all have to learn how to deal with, like diabetes). So I guess that the current music I'm listening to is actually some offensively mediocre rap song. The chorus goes: SHAWTY WHAT'S YOUR NAME YOUR NAME SHAWTY WHAT'S YOUR SIGN YOUR SIGN SHAWTY WHERE YOU GOING- WHERE YOU GOING I will leave you to discern who the hell is responsible for this song. The point is, we can all agree posting your current music is to be commended, though often abused as a means of self-ego-boosting for those individuals who are committed to their musical selection as a commentary on their inner souls. Warning: not eating or sleeping sufficiently makes you stupid. IT MAKES YOUR BRAIN STUPID. This would be a better chorus for a song than the tired shawty this-and-that routine: SHAWTY YOU IS STUPID SHAWTY'S BRAIN IS STUPID SHAWTY NEXT TIME GO TO BED EARLIER SHAWTY EAT GREEN VEGETABLES THEY ARE HIGH IN POTASSIUM YOUR BRAIN NEEDS THAT TO BE SMART and so forth. Anyway, think about, R.Kelly! (Comment on this)
9:01 pm	American Hard Corps I received the most beautiful letter from an ex-girlfriend in the Peace Corps yesterday. It came all the way from Burkina Faso, one of those African nations with nothing, absolutely nothing: no resources to speak of, piss-poor farmland, endless problems with drought and insufficient water supplies, not even access to an ocean, as Faso is landlocked. She's there to teach English, French and chemistry to kids in some completely forgotten village, some backwater that's like the last place that God made. And she's learning so much. I don't know if she's enjoying herself per se, but I know she's maturing, growing, becoming even more human by the day and week. She's out there, gettting the facts, good and bad. Her life's not easy, that's for sure. But reading her letter made me want to join the Peace Corps tomorrow. It also made me want to buy a plane ticket to Burkina Faso, but that's another story. I know the Peace Corps seems kind of cheesy and outdated, especially in an era that's subbed out social entrepreneurship for idealism. I know that many people have had pretty miserable experiences in the Corps, and that, all things considered, quite a few Peace Corps projects yield very few lasting results. Still, it seems like that's almost the idea, and the idea is a good one. If you join the Peace Corps, you're not signing on to work with some gung-ho band of professionals with deep pockets and narrow, achievable goals. You're going to do precisely what most volunteers do: live a strange, fascinating and tedious life in some village, fail and succeed in equal measure, and get the facts about what existence is like for most people. And by "the facts," I don't mean just surface information about culture, social systems, history. I mean the real essential, meaty stuff, the info on what's really going on in this world: the poverty, the suffering, the simple joy, the effort, the stark unsupported challenge of working for a living. The Peace Corps is certainly not the only way to learn these facts, but from what I know it often presents them to you in a way that's not easy to ignore. That's not to say that "the facts of life and death" don't exist in America. It's just that here they're often obscured, harder to recognize outright. Everything in America is complicated, slathered under a layer of marketing, deflected by archetypal posing, masked by courtesy, or just hard to believe. Irony and a remarkable willingness to lie have crept into our hearts and messed with our ability to perceive honesty and reciprocate it. America has gotten lost in an artificiality of its own design. That's why the Peace Corps is essentially sound. We join it to offer what help we can to nations and people that need it, but most of all we join it to discover what the hell is going on here, without disguises. Sorry for the long discursion on a topic I suspect nobody really cares about. It's just something I've thought about a lot myself. I was going to join last year; if I had, I would have been gone by now. I realized back then that I didn't really know why I was doing it, and it probably would have been a horrible mistake. Now, I know why I would go, and I'm once again in the process of interviewing for a possible departure a year and half from now. Still not sure if I'll actually do it. Julia's letter makes the prospect more real, more frightening, and more tempting than ever before. Current Music: Tullycraft- The Punks are Writing Love Songs (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
11:56 pm	Dumping in America Man, you guys know this trend of high-concept, stylized non-fiction that just takes some minor historical incident or general thing that we all experience in life and spins it off into an entire book, a book that's psuedo-informational but really at its core just spins a ripping yarn or a series of ripping yarns? I think I need to get in on this trend, because dudes are making tons of money off this. So I have this idea for a book in the genre I described. It's called "Dumping in America," and will be a fascinating and sometimes hilarious take on the history and sociology of American bathroom habits. Just imagine the actual book, printed and bound, the dust jacket enfolding the board edges with military crispness. Now picture the book cover itself, the words "Dumping in America" perched at the top, unable to be refuted, maybe above an image of a toilet stall. The ankles and bunched-up pants of a man are visible just below the door. Perhaps the title words are arranged in a pyramid formation, with "Dumping" being the smallest and "America" being massive and bold. Or perhaps done in an inverted pyramid. Something about the stall must suggest a quintessential Americana, as well. A map of the fifty states splashed across the stall door, done up in red, white and blue, slightly faded to suggest a rugged sort of glory? This bears more consideration. Now tell me, would you buy that book? You and I both know the answer to that question. The answer is yes. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
11:05 pm	See Durham on Five Dollars a Day (Or Less)! Hey you! Are you a thrifty youth, "poor is cool" hipster type, or homeless guy? Are you plagued by a deep and persistent itch, an itch you can't quite scratch fully, an itch that runs so deep it may actually be subdermal, below your skin, perhaps located on the surface of a major organ such as the liver? Is this itch the ITCH TO TRAVEL? Do you like scruffy, slightly gentrifying, racially diverse dirty old towns with an unshakeable but subtle air of lasting Southern-style political corruption? IF you answered yes to all these questions, then good! It's cool that people are into all that kind of stuff. Now here's a bunch of information about how to live really cheaply in Durham, NC: Live in your car: Honestly, it's not that bad. People seem to regard it as some kind of really intense or desperate act, but there's not really much to it. You're still just some normal guy, you just happen to live out of a car. I've stayed in some rooms that were less appealing than my van. Obviously the larger the vehicle the better. Living out of a car is illegal in most cities and states, so try to be careful, and move the car around as much as you can. Safety is obviously a concern, but as long you can't easily be seen while sleeping in the car (which is usually the case), it's only an issue to the degree that your car itself is at risk of being stolen, and you shouldn't be parking in those kinds of areas anyway. Sleepy residental streets in decent neighborhoods are a good option, as long as you're either hard to spot or up early, before pedestrians start hitting the sidewalks. Smoke tobacco products and drink coffee: I am not in any way endorsing cigarettes; they smell foul, are really bad for the health, and worst of all (for the purposes of this guide) are expensive. I myself smoke a pipe and the occassional cigar, and I will advocate both of those, in moderation of course, and as a constructive alternative to cigs. The pipe is the definitive budget option; pipe tobacco can be very cheap (for the lousy kind, of course) and one bowl can often be smoked for 45 minutes or more. The advantage of both tobacco and coffee is that, in addition to their mood-enhancing effects, they act as an appetite surpressant. Downing a couple cups of coffee instead of lunch saves valuable money, provided you buy the coffee from a cheap place and don't drink fancy Americanos with emulsified cimmamon air puffed across the top or some such nonsense. Stock cheap foods in your car: Here I'm thinking of applesauce, Ritz crackers, cans of V-8, tortilla chips, and granola bars. Inexpensive, non-perishable, and surprisingly nutritive. Also, all this stuff can be transported easily when you're on the go. Excellent breakfast and snack options, but I would recommend eating a real meal at least once a day (every two days, if you're really stretching it). If you're buying from restaurants, eat your main meal at lunch- it's always cheaper. Bum extensively off friends: No explanation needed here. If you know someone in the area, utilize their couch or other largesse. Sure, it can get morally reprehensible, but to assuage your guilt, you can always wash their dishes and do other assorted clean-up to make the relationship feel more like an equal exchange and less like unadulterated leeching. Check the official University calendar for free-food events: Duke University, Durham's premier academic institution, is rife with opportunities for free food and drink, due to its overabundance of catered lectures, symposia, readings, etc. Check out the calendar for dates/locations of such goings-on; many are actually quite interesting, so enrich yourself, why don't you. Hit up the Duke Health site for paid experiments: If you're really hard up for scratch, check out Duke Health's website, where paid medical opportunities typically abound. Perhaps distasteful for some, but many experiments are pretty low-effort and non-invasive, so keep it in mind. That's all the time and tide allows for. It's obvious stuff, but it's important to KNOW BEFORE YOU GO. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 26th, 2007
11:41 pm	GODDAMNIT Goddamnit what is wrong with our generation? Other generations had to deal with war and economic necessity; they got shaken down by mobsters in protection rackets and sewed buttons on shirts instead of going to elementary school and dreamed of the day when they could scrape together enough money to buy some fricking furniture. We get vapidity, free-floating anxiety disorder, affected nervousness about the inequitable distribution of global resources, vague emotional tramua, and iPhones, and we can't even handle any of that crap. WHAT THE HELL GET IT TOGETHER MYSELF AND OTHERS OF MY AGE GROUP WHY DO WE SUCK SO MUCH? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
2:20 am	The Hero System "For twenty-five hundred years we have hoped and believed that if mankind could reveal itself to itself, could widely come to know its own motives, then somehow it would tilt the balance of things in its favor." Not so! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006
3:01 am	Weird Tales In honor of Halloween, a poem by Robert Creely! I don't know why. This is probably my third or fourth favorite poem. Bresson's Movies A movie of Robert Bresson's showed a yacht at evening on the Seine, all its lights on, watched by two young, seemingly poor people, on a bridge adjacent, the classic boy and girl of the story, any one one cares to tell. So years pass, of course, but I identified with the young embittered Frenchman, knew his almost complacent anguish and the distance he felt from his girl. Yet another film of Bresson's has the aging Lancelot with his awkward armor standing in a woods, of small trees, dazed, bleeding, both he and his horse are, trying to get back to the castle, itself of no great size. It moved me, that life was after all like that. You are in love. You stand in the woods, with a horse, bleeding. The story is true. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
12:11 am	The CIC (Central Intelligence Corporation) Google buys YouTube? Google teams up with NASA to open a joint, 1-million square foot R&D center for data mining and biological-nanotech-infotech convergence? China institutes a $1 billion education campaign to promote traditional Confucian values and open Centers for Confucius all around the country? In ten years Google Corporation, the CIA and the NSA will merge. In thirty years China will break up into a number of smaller corporate republics. In fifty years the United States as a coherent nation will no longer exist. THESE EVENTS ARE NOT UNCONNECTED. THIS IS NOT IRREVELANT. THIS IS YOUR FUTURE. I keep telling people to read "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" by Neil Stephenson, but to my knowledge no one has ever followed my recommendation. It's not so much that the writing or story itself is spectacular (although I really liked both), it's that Stephenson is more consistently right about the future than any prophet I've ever known. They were written in 1998 and 2000 respectively, and events and situations they describe are already happening less than ten years later. At first it seems like the books are just slick, hectic cyber-punk adventure stories. Only later do you realize that they've distilled the essence of what's happening currently and projected it ten, twenty, fifty years down the line with an accuracy and clarity that's disturbing. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006
10:25 pm	67,000 Miles Per Hour The problem with asking "what's wrong?" in any given situation is that the question sets off an infinite regress; you have to start moving gradually further and further back to get a handle on the answer until either the response bears no meaningful relation to the original question or the query gets so universal it becomes untethered, theoretical, and most likely unanswerable. Of course this can happen with any line of inquiry, but for whatever reason the "what's wrong?" question seems particularly prone to it. I'm excluding here obvious "what's wrong" scenarios; those that reference immediate physical peril, illness, internal revolution, shipwrecks, criminal activities, etc. Although these can, if one tries hard enough, set off the chain of regression, they typically have one or a discrete set of practical answers that make sense. No one moves beyond these immediate answers unless they're making an intellectual effort to do so, and that's not the kind of question I'm trying to talk about. This isn't a forced kind of regression, it's something that happens because you really don't know the answer, and you really do need to move back to acheive anything that satisfies you. It doesn't have to be a philosophical question, either, although that's obviously the richest mineshaft for this sort of thing. It can be in any field or discipline. Take a scientist, for example, who comes upon an insurmountable problem in his experiments. He starts with asking "what's wrong with the equipment?"; when this fails, he keeps moving back, asking what's wrong with the experimental design, the hypotheses that underlie it, the entire experiment itself. If he still can't find an answer, if he keeps moving back, he may find himself nagged by the ghost of a suggestion, that the problem is a deep and profound imperfection in science itself. So he moves back further, asking what's wrong with the scientific method, what's wrong with science, what's wrong with rational thought, what's wrong with thought in general. Eventually he must lose the wrong entirely and move only to the "what," until finally he reaches "What is?" and can go no further. That's if he persists at thinking something must be wrong, if he does not at some point choose to stop and simply believe that things must be right and explicable somewhere down the line. That's also if he allows himself to drop the "wrong," which is an important step and an important distinction, but really "what's wrong with what is" and "what is" are two very similar questions. Finally, that's if he allows scientific thought to be assailed at all, if he does not instead believe (as some scientists seem to do) that science itself exists in a holy void outside of the rest of the messy universe, that in fact science was somehow around prior to the existence of the universe at all, so that the question then becomes "what's wrong with the universe that it cannot be explained by science," to which the answer probably has to do with a bigger microscope. This is no dig on science and rational thought. Hippies be damned; we need rationality. It's just that rationality won, it's number one now, and I don't know why it's still trying so hard. Rational thought set to blow away all the mysticism, supernaturalism, ignorance and innmaterialism, and it did, it succeeded, or at least it got most of it. Now it's out the other end, the sole victor, and it's self-destructing because it's got nothing left to debase and has turned on itself instead. So the champions of rationality, or at least those that feel themselves to be their heirs, sense the old ghouls of faith and creed and superstition coming rattling back, and so wildly they tilt forward, quick and quicker into wreckage. That went kind of to a weird place. Originally I was going to write about America, and that was supposed to be the preamble. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
10:53 pm	Sic Semper Tyrannus I SAID WHY NOT TRY FIGHTIN A REAL AMERICAN PARTNER (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 11th, 2006
10:32 pm	I'm From Somewhere (with additional comments on the driving habits of the Indian population of B.R.) The thing is, Florida is somewhere in New York City. Florida counts for something; being from Florida is a differentiation, a drastic one depending on who you talk to. That's a rare experience for me. I know personally that I've been permanently imprinted by my locale, but it's not often recognized by others. Living in the suburbs and then going to college, I sometimes forget that places are different from other places. Living in Bellerose, Queens means straddling a number of uneasy lines. Bellerose itself retains a small-town USA style while hedged between the three-ring circus of urban New York proper and the edges of the real suburbs beyond it. The population is bizarre: middle and working-class Anglo and Irish-Americans, many of them elderly and some of them second or third-generation to the neighborhood, mix freely if often unhappily with huge numbers of Indian doctors, surgeons and medical technicians, enticed here in the 80's and 90's by major New York hospitals needy for staff. The family I'm staying with is not pleased by this Southeast Asian influx, and they're not always nice about it, at least amongst themselves. Their main complaints center on the driving skills of their Indian neighbors, and from what I've seen it's a critique with some weight behind it. They do seem to be geniunely bad drivers. It's not that they're reckless or speedy, it's in fact the opposite: many drive slowly, hesitantly, stopping short and moving in fitful spurts of speed and braking. Mostly it's just that they're completely opaque drivers; you can't figure out what the hell they're doing. I, on the other hand, like Indians generally, and am glad of their presence here. I like their food, I like their color schemes and elaborate images of wildly foreign goddesses in the windows of the Dipali Furnishings and Decorations down the street. I respect their success in this country, and I like the way the older women let the trails of their bright, billowing outfits drag through mud and wet gutters, without seeming to notice. Hip NYC music tip (straight from Soho, I won't say where): Kayne West is cutting a new single with the Gypsy Kings and Robert de Niro! H.I.H.F! (Heard It Here First). (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 21st, 2006
9:40 pm	Bellerose Ahoy SOME NEWS: 1. I am now officially writing this journal under the psuedonym "BRISCO COUNTY, JR.," in honor of that guy that looks like Bruce Campbell. 2. Starting May 31st, this journal will feature "BRISCO COUNTY, JR. Goes to New York For All The Wrong Reasons" as a weekly or probably less frequent update. BRISCO COUNTY, JR. is making poor life decisions in real-time! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006
11:12 pm	'Ternship Follies I'm in a quandary, a good kind of a quandary, and I'm turning to the most reliable source of received wisdom readily available (the internet, or livejournal, they both work) for advice: I must accept one of the following three internships by Friday, and I can't decide which one to spring for. So I'm taking a reader's poll. You may vote for one, or you may rank them serially by your preference, or you may do something else that hasn't even occured to me yet. The choices are, as follows: 1. Coporate Accountability International (in Boston): a non-profit that attempts, as the title implies, to hold major corporations (Coke, Nestle, Nike, etc.) accountable for the astonishing menagerie of lousy things they often do. I would be helping to organize awareness campaigns, writing up press releases and publicity materials, and also doing a lot of calling and e-mailing members about corporate abuses and upcoming events. In fact, they didn't seem to want to come right out and say it, but it seems like the majority of my time would be spent making phone calls. Like all my internships it would be unpaid; the most they would be able to do for me is throw a few hundred bucks my way for housing, and even that much is in question. I don't have anyone I could live with in Boston, and I hear cost-of-living is pricey in that town, so I would definitely be losing money over the summer, and I'm not sure I can afford that. On the plus side, Boston is so rad. Man. What a cool city. Also, I like the organization, and I think what they're doing is vitally important. The finances, though; the finances are not where they should be. 2. Hunger Action Network (in New York City): another non-profit whose main focus is on ensuring adequate food supplies for low-income people but which also does support work for low-income communities in general (helping people obtain food stamps and government benefits, education programs, backing laws and policies, etc.) My job here would be to analyze welfare policies recently passed by the state of New York and figure out how the Hunger Action Network can help work with and utilize them. It sounds pretty cool, although it could very well end up being miserably boring. Nevertheless, it's definitely the one that most applies to my line of study (Public Policy major). It's unpaid, as mentioned, but I would have housing: my second cousin is a tugboat captain in New York harbor (well, used to be until a few weeks ago, now he's a union rep), and offered to let me live with him and his family in Queens. I don't know him but hardly at all (I've only met him once), and while he's hilarious, loud, and very entertaining in an overbearing, New York kind of way, and living with him would be a crash-course in the kind of blue-collar lifestyle my family came from, he might be a tough guy to actually cohabitate with, and hard to take for almost three months. Fortunately, Hunger Action would let me work part-time, which would mean I could get a side job and hopefully break even for the summer. Also, I would get to live in New York, which while I would actually prefer Boston would be incredible anyway. 3. Community Reinvestment Association (in Durham, NC): yet another non-profit; the place does a huge range of stuff, from producing TV and radio shows to analyzing policy to organizing signature campaigns. The focus is on economic development for low-income communities, specifically the low-income Durham community. I would be doing real nuts-and-bolts kind of stuff, writing grant and funding proposals, answering questions from locals, making lots of phone calls (non-profits seem to really need people to make phone calls), handing out flyers on the street, that sort of thing. It sounds kind of like grunt work, but I think it would be good experience on the basics on non-profit work, and in terms of the organization's mission it's probably the subject I'm most interested in right now. In terms of housing, I would be able to live on the first floor of a ratty and cool old two-story house, with my girlfriend on the second floor directly above me, for a way cheap rent. The house is also full of excellent people whom I like a lot, and would love to live with, so it's guaranteed to be fun. I would almost definitely be able to work part-time somewhere, and I could also sign up for a one-night-a-week class at my school that would give me a housing stipend in return, so I could sock away the money. On the other hand, as much as I actually like Durham, it's where I spend my school years, and it might be an adventure to get away for the summer, just leave it all behind. Anyway, that's it, those are the choices. Cast your vote now! I await with bated breath. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
11:48 pm	Portrait of a Lady (or, A Suburb by the Sea) Remember that girl in school (it was always a girl), the one with the relentlessly sunny disposition, who was always on about how much fun things were, and how great this was, and everything was just generally good and funny and let's do a silly dance and laugh about it later, and she beamed at you and was flighty and you thought she was pretty neat and couldn't really figure out what her deal was, and then something terrible happened to someone you all knew, like one of your friends or accquaintances died, and when everyone else was wrecked over it she was just uncomfortable, and wondered, sometimes publicly, when people were going to stop focusing on the sad and the bad and get to the happy and fun again, and all of a sudden you felt like you saw her for what she was and were horrified, you thought she was cruel and rotten, and then later you realized that she must have been feeling the same way everyone else did, grieving and crippled and most of all full of fear, but that she must have been too terrified to go into that, to accept that that was her, so instead she rejected it all and put on this big song and dance that had her fooled but not you anymore, and now you just felt bad for her and bad in general and tired and cynical; but now much later looking back on it and her you're not sure if you're right at all, you think maybe your first notion was the true one, that she just didn't get it, that she was just too ignorant or oblivious to recognize how much horror there was in living and dying and she never would, that she didn't feel the fear and confusion other people felt, that through training or natural inclination she was a machine that killed those emotions in her so rigorously that they could hardly rage at all, that it was almost admirable, that she only felt sad once or twice a year and then only for a few hours at most, before that sadness was trampled in an endless procession of fringed pillows and cute purses and boys and laughs with girl-friends at dinners in chain restaurants? Anyway, my town is kind of like that. TO BE CONTINUED! (5 Comments |Comment on this)