Mixed Messages

skeevy things in Chicago

2009-05-29T16:51:00.004-06:00

an ongoing list.

Portajohn's in the forest Preserves.

scary things in Chicago

2009-05-29T16:51:00.002-06:00

an ongoing list:
Side-windowless vans on the southside

INTERPRETIVIST

2009-05-28T10:36:00.001-06:00

The thing about facts on the ground is that they don't leave the ground.

Man war

2009-01-14T17:14:00.004-07:00

I guess there's a fight in the world of people who write ads that run during football and are geared towards football fans. This is about the word "man-" as prefix.

Howie Long, in a truck commercial* ridicules some poor schlub about a feature on his truck. Long, who is a former terrifying defensive end and square of jaw, calls this feature a "man-step." This poor guy, whose jaw is out of square, and is designed to overall seem less virile and competent than Long, has made the womanly** choice and bought a truck that has a feature that is convenient. The wuss.

Then, there are radio ads for some sort of body wash. I didn't get the particulars of brand/specific product name whatever. It's narrated by former Eagle defensive-lineman current-ESPN walking heart attack Mike Golic. He talks about using the body wash to take care of your "man-suit."

The ads use the prefix to 1) make something seem less masculine and 2) make something seem more masculine. A semiotic disagreement.

"Man-step"echoes the Seinfeldian "not-a-purse/man-bag." I'm surprised that Long doesn't call it Euro.

"Mansuit" is there to make men think it's ok to care if they smell terrible or not. Because men can't care about this even one tiny little bit unless they wrap it in several layers of masculine talk.

So when "man' is used as a prefix, how am I supposed to feel?

BTW, Both dudes are in TECMO Superbowl, BTW. Long is better.

*goddamn them and the flood or urine-colored lite beer ads during football.
** obv. I'm using this on THEIR terms as pejorative.

Kafka was right

2009-01-08T11:07:00.002-07:00

Today I was asked to install some software that I had never heard of on a machine that I didn't know existed. The Requestor gave me incomplete instructions for the wrong version. This is all I have to go on. It is with this in mind that I suggest Franz Kafka as the one true Prophet of modernity, having seen deeply and truly into the great dead heart of the 20th century.

This is the absurd engine of our insane economy: rituals and rules.

And Kafka was the best at this because he wasn't all like "ha ha you want that in triplicate too?! but instead showed us the voluntary terror and dread of living under the dominion of the unkillable behemoth; the fear and angst of the glacially-paced death we invite bureaucracy to inflict on us all.

AM/PM

2008-05-19T06:36:00.003-06:00

AM/PM convenience is now in chicago. They have brought a plague of ads. Really a plague of one ad. But! RE: the slogan: "Too much good stuff"
Dear AM/PM, that's exactly the problem. Love, me.

Classic rock is killing me

2008-05-19T06:33:00.005-06:00

We listen to classic rock at work: 97.1 The Drive. They play "the greatest music ever made." Jerks.

So I hear a lot of songs over and over again. After they become wallpaper, totally background, certain patterns can pop back out, like the swirls in the ceiling that suddenly look like a face. One thing that grabbed me. The song: "Rock and Roll Heart." He says he "gets off" (ugh) on "screaming guitars" in a song which has a dramatic lack of them. In fact, the last time Clapton was around a screaming guitar was probably 73 when he made a record with Duane Allman.

the internet

2008-01-16T19:31:00.001-07:00

wins
again.

Sorry Brittanica

2007-12-13T19:35:00.004-07:00

...you lose.

Image from this article on wikipedia.

James ellroy

2007-12-13T18:58:00.001-07:00

is quietly (in some sense) writing the great, sprawling American paranoid, post-modern, modernist novel. It's taking him year and it's coming in installments but shit is it good. Next one due next summer. Oh yeah.

so like...

2007-12-12T21:17:00.001-07:00

the semsester's over. I have a few hours of free time. I have no idea what to do with myself. Should I spend two days drunk at museums?

bent my wookie

2007-12-12T21:16:00.001-07:00

Ice Storm! I ran ten miles in an ice storm on sunday. Then, while walking to my car, slipped and fell. I remember thinking "don't fall on the laptop." I didn't. But my ibook's case is bent so it doesn't sit flat anymore. I think this all looked pretty comical fromm across the street.

Ack!knowledgemments

2007-12-11T17:06:00.001-07:00

Is it wrong to give shout outs to breweries in the acknowledgements section of my thesis? Significant thoughts were thought and words were written while under the influence of their products. Yay Avery. Yay New Belgium. Yay Goose Island.

Thesis blog

2007-11-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

This just in: Clifford Geertz is a goddamn genius.

So I haven't really been putting the process down in the old internets. Oh well. I wonder. The discipline of the diary (cf. guitar Craft's diaries)--is that a discipline I need? I mean, I've already got so many. what is the value of discipline anyway? why am I asking this? I'm sort of existential about it: you do it so that you can do it. Huh. I guess blogging is about saying nonprofound things. so here I am.

chicago weather forecast decoder ring

2007-10-18T15:50:00.001-06:00

90 percent chance of sever thunderstorms means it will be a nice day, but breezy.

10percent chance of light showers means you're going to get soaked and hit by lightening.

Things that happen when you're in Grad School

2007-09-20T09:49:00.003-06:00

Your wife falls asleep on your copy of Oreintalism.

your world is wireless and full or terrible douchebags

2007-09-04T20:11:00.001-06:00

Why are all thes cell phone commercials showing how their tech enables you to be an annoying and rude person? I like the sidekick ads where all the kids organize a shopping cart race in the supermarket. I wish someone would just stick their foot out and trip one of 'em. On the plus side, it seems like a perfect opportunity for some Laslo Letters-type thing where you start a letter writing campaign about how in times of terrorism and heightened security, it's irresponsible to show this kind of subversive action in public places.

But Whatever. I'd like to do a study on the portrayal of anti-social behavior in connectivity-themed advertising. I think maybe I'd find that these companies were privileging tech-mediated (Their tech of course) interaction over non.

The eye is naturally drawn...

2007-08-31T15:13:00.001-06:00

100_0749
Originally uploaded by earixson

This photo, where I clearly state that NO ONE is topless, is my most viewed photo on flickr.

On being tracked down through facebook etc.

2007-08-31T14:43:00.000-06:00

To what extent do I owe it to old and former friends to be objectified by their nostalgia trips?

blogging the thesis

2007-08-30T12:45:00.001-06:00

I think I'll blog the process of completing my master's thesis. Today, I'm reading "Interpretation of Cultures" by Clifford Geertz. More to come.

on music, youth and develpment.

2007-08-30T12:19:00.001-06:00

I just turned 30. I think I'lll make the party's theme "The Music of my youth," as I symbolically kill the latter. That (along with a question from my wife) got me thinking: what was it about the msuic that I love(d) that I found so compelling that i integrated the music and the culture surrounding it into my own personhood?

Womens' voices were particulary and dramatically different. I can't even describe the gulf between heather Locklear in leather in the background of a Motley Crue video and PJ Harvey. Hearing "Dress" and "Rid of Me" was a stunning experience for a teenage boy. The similarities to my own experience (uncontrollable lust, discomfort? with the display of my body) and the differences.

Here's a further example: my class song was Far Behind by Candlebox. My friends and I mounted a write-in campaign for Life Sentence by the Dead Kennedys. Which one said anything? What the hell was candlebox on about? That mushy, mealy, content-free lyrical style of Candlebox was even then an affront to everything I know about anything.

what I'm saying is what Morrisey said so much more succinctly: The music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life so hang the DJ.

so now that I'm old, now what? I started a bad with another old dude. We're walking the line between nostalgia and progress so far. There are things that I just cannot pull off; they're not cute anymore. But remember: Andy summers didn't join The Police until he was 32.

Ethics and Consumption

2007-07-13T10:57:00.001-06:00

SO it's easier for me to go to the store and get potable Fijian water than it is for a Fijian, living in Fiji, to do the same.

cf. Steven Landsburg's argument that not consuming is the same as performing undirected, random acts of generaosity or charity.

cf. Prof. Dierdre McCloskey's contention that ethical consumption does not = the downfall of our modern capitalist economic system. Relevant passage:
"Nothing would befall the market economy in the long run if we tempered our desires down to one car and a small house and healthy foods from the co-op."

on transcendence

2007-07-13T10:55:00.001-06:00

So I'm reading Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues. Not because I agree necessarily, but because it's interesting. And well written. But there is a section on love, the virtue--as opposed to what I ask myself as I make that clarification--and there is the idea that transcendence is necessary, that love cannot come from humans, it must somehow be participated in even though it is transcendent. [[I'll have to clarify this.]]

Anyway, I'm thinking: transcendence is a drive, not a goal. Once transcendence has been achieved, then it is no longer transcendent, as it now belongs to the sphere of the subtranscendental- or the 'merely' human. Sorry. I'm too much of a humanist to use merely without reservations because unless you are talking cosmology, people and human activity is pretty much it. The mind precedes its objects, as the Dhammapadda says, and the collective mind precedes the realm of human experience.

ANyway, transcendence is not achieved; it is performed. The drive to extend the realm/sphere of human experience necessarily changes (expands?) that realm which then must expand towards the new transcendence. It's a never ending (possibly eternally (for certain values of eternally) recurring) process.

Thus the transcendent doesn't come from anywhere but from us
Q: is this true, or at least a useful definition of, transcendence then?

Related musing on teleology: what if certain processes are teleological, but continue on aimlessly once the telos has been reached?

Science!

2007-06-19T11:25:00.000-06:00

James Howard Kunstler on the social sciences, more or less:
"Thus, a Jacksonian student of landscape can observe a Red Barn hamburger joint, he can remark on its architectural resemblance to certain farm structures of the past, measure its dimesnions, figure out the materials that went into building it, record the square footage of its parking lot, count the number of cars that come and go, the length of timethat each customer lingers inside, the average sum spent on a meal, the temperature of the iceberg lettuce in its bin in the salad bar--all down to the last infinitesimal detail--and never arrive at the conclusion that the Red Barn is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community." The Geography of Nowhere, p.124.

So another semester comes to a crashing and messy conclusion

2007-05-06T12:11:00.000-06:00

Jeez. How many of these have I seen. 2 for an associate's, 4 for B.S., and now one down for the Master's. Damn.

Funny, though, how they all end up the same. I end up cranky. I apologize again to my wife for this. Each end comes, of course, with the question, "what now?" Quo Vadimus, to quote a sitcom that currently resides, on DVD, somewhere inside my storage unit. The immediate future has an answer: Thesis. (Doom doom doooooom.) So that oughta be fun.

But also: why? I ddn't have to do this. I had a career. I was good at it. I even enjoyed it at times. I probably have some deep-seated desire to make a difference. The reasons for this are pretty deeply rooted in my childhood. I would call this phenomenon overdetermined. And it's in the face of unrelenting and overwhelming evidence that Franz Kafka was right (Bumpersticker idea?)-- you can't make a difference. But you have to. That's the existential question-- it's in the Plague, and the Phenomenology of Perception and Beckett (I can't go on....I'll go on): Whatcha gonna do? and I guess we all say yes, but some try to be more emphatic and Bloomish, and at that point it's better to black out the text than to ask "why," because the blacking out is at least action, and the asking becomes divorced from action and so a dead end.

So I've learned a thing or two. Cause I didn't know that before.

Draft Day

2007-04-28T10:27:00.000-06:00

the NFL draft is today. I just wrote a paper on how the draft is like any economic bubble--specifically the Dutch Tulip bubble, but whatever. The point is that no matter how much informmation is available about a player, what matters more to that player's value as a draft pick is the talk about that information, and the force of history. Why else so many WR taken in the first draft when so many f them are busts? I mean, Marques Colston was like a 6th round pick and I'd take him over any of the WRs taken over him last year.

I wonder if I should ust present this paper on wednesday instead of the paper I have yet to write.

UPDATE: Calvin Johnson, GaTech WR, just went #2 overall. Will he be a Torry Holt or a Marcus Nash? Keep in mind he was drafted by Detroit (http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/Article.php?Page=776)

it's hard to blog

2007-03-11T22:43:00.000-06:00

when you are up to your eyeballs in chi-square and Spearman rho tests for correlation and you barely know what this shit is. Plus! populations sample parameters. I don't even know if I know the right term. Damn. Aren't there any good textbooks on this stuff?

the worst possible conditions for studying

2007-03-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

The worst way to study is to be on the L platform, while on the other side of the little shelter a dude is cackling and pounding on the divider.

wipeout

2007-01-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

I went for a run this morning. I tripped on my pants and wiped out in the road. I seriously skidded. I'm completely ok though. I guess it was all forward motion that got converted into heat between my clothes and the road instead on my face and the road. or something.

doofuses

2006-12-10T16:38:00.000-07:00

doofuses (doofii?) don't like non-doofs. That's what makes them doofuses.

what is up is grad school

2006-12-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

I have to write like, 40 pages total by tuesday afternoon. I'm seriously working hard here. It beats my old life in several very important ways. One of those ways is that I am drinking beer while doing this work and IT IS TOTALLY OK. Up yours, being a systems administrator.

Also of note is the presence of my wife's cat, who could never come keep me company in the server room but is totally rubbing her head on my knee right now. Hegemony tells me she likes me but i know it's just dinner time.

Blog it up!

2006-12-09T13:41:00.000-07:00

I'm about to.

marriage

2006-10-20T15:38:00.000-06:00

Being married is like being insane: the scope of your life increases by 100% and you have NO CONTROL over that new territory. Seriously, it's like, What's my left hand doin'? I don't know!

Note: this musing was inspired by laundry day.

ECON 101

2006-10-05T10:34:00.000-06:00

The other day it was raining. I stood waiiting for the bus, getting wet because my rain jacket is "water-resistant," not "water-proof." On the bus, a couple of older black women had cut open old plastic groocery bags and made bonnets out of them. I paid like $75. They paid nothing. Who was dryer?

musings on the state of capitalism.

2006-09-27T17:52:00.000-06:00

I just imagine myself walking into the groocery store and saying..."do you have any sort of product that might help me to wash fruit?"

2006-03-05T20:31:00.000-07:00

The oscars featured a montage of epic movies. The moral was that you could only truly appreciate these at thhe theater. I.e., don't stay home hunched over your PSP. But where are you gonna see Ben Hur or The Sound of Music at a theater? Durrr.

environmentalism and doom

2006-01-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

Maybe environmentalism is just prolongin the suffereing. The sooner we, as a species, poison ourselves, the sooner the Earth can peacefully get on with the business of waiting for the sun to turn red giant and swallow it.

Unless without humans to eat them metahne-farting cows will cause a runaway greenhouse effect and the next thing you know, we've got Venus Mark II going on.

I would just like to point out...

2005-12-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

That the coors commercial about how Coors will cool down a hot day is currently playing. it starts the 2004 Super Bowl champions, the New England Patriots. It is hot. A Coors train comes through the stadium. Classic rock plays. A breeze blows the cheerleader' skirts up. Coors is GOD.

Culture of empties

2005-04-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

Reading these descriptions of the commercials that will comprise the new Coors campaign made me almost unbearably sad. Except for this book I was supposed to read in 7th grade called "winning" about a highskool footbal player's courageous life after becoming a parapalegic, I've never read anything so pathetic and empty.

Direct quotes, describing wat happens after a beer is opened:

The music gets louder and the party gets better.
People are so refreshed that they start dancing and the party gets better.
Coors Light can turn a dreary hot summer day into a wonderful icy-cold experience.
It was all a dream...or was it?

Ok, I made one of those up. i get this intense feeling of deja vu when I read these. Also a feeling that all culture is futility.

And the abyss stares back.

2005-03-25T08:19:00.000-07:00

File under: pure complaining
Sheesh. You'd think that after I just bragged about how good I am at getting things done I would in fact be getting things done. But no. I'm on spring break I guess, but I have a metric buttload (15% larger than the imperial) of things to do for school. I might not graduate on time. My job is killing me. My current insurer doesn't cover meds I need to breathe, so I spend both a lot of money on meds and a lot of time not really breathing all that great.

At least I get to go home now.

2005-02-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

What the heck is up with Mission of Burma? Where the heck do they get off breaking up for 20 years and then getting back together and making a great album like it was no big deal? It doesn't sound like a pale imitation of the originals. It just sounds like the next MoB album. Yesterday I turned off the best song, "Wounded World," on my CD just in time to catch the new Green Day. Oh man. There was What's Wrong With Music Today(tm) and the cure for it right there.

Getting things done.

2005-02-11T08:16:00.000-07:00

I've been seeing a lot of this stuff around lately. The "Geting things done book" is everybody's darling these days. It seems needlessly complex. As a full-time Sys admin and a full-time media studies student, I'm under the impression that I know a thing or two about getting things done. So, here's my own recipe for productivity (and increased charisma and improved body odor):

If it is a thing to do, do it.
If you need to write it down to remember to do it, write it down.

That's about it.

I wonder what's behind the productivity industry. If I remember right. this is only the latest in a long line of people selling you a thing that will help you be more productive. Why do people flock to these crutches? Adding a ritualistic aspect is perhaps a replacement for plain old obligation motivation.

Adding this insane process to every item that drifts across your transom is just going to bog things down.

blog post

2005-01-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

The best blog post is the one about how I'm so blah and uninspired that I can't work on my paper or on my HP-UX system. I'm bored and restelss and I already ate my sandwich and apple so I have nothing to look forward to all day. When I go home I absolutely have to do some homework, some of which is math homework, and I'd rather take a nap but then I'll never get to sleep and then waking up will kill me tomorrow. Maybe I should move over to LivJournal. Current Mood: neurasthenic

The destruction of ethics.

2005-01-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

So, I've like totally got this Media Ethics class. Anyway, in the discussion, media ethics come up (surprise) and the values that come up the most are things like: objectivity, fairness, accuracy. You know, the ususal. And I was thinking that these values never get anyone anywhere. How about some new values and goals for journalism?

1) Be informed. Is this asking too much? Can the white house press corps ever know enough to actually report fairly?

2) Be understanding. This replaces "objectivity." This though was poked out of my head by the works of William Vollmann. The way he digs into a situation, whether in reporting, or in historical fiction goes beyond the idea of objectivity and goes deep into honest atempts at understanding.

and now there's too damned much going on around me at work for me to think clearly.

2005-01-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

I was in Chicago over Labor day. I took this for my photojournalism class. I don't have a digital camera. This was taken on Kodak Gold 800 iso film with my trusty old Pentax MXII and scanned using a Nikon something or other negative scanner. I've got other cool photos, but no more access to the scanner.

Children play in front of a video-screen fountain at Chicago's Millennium Park, Sunday, Sept. 5, 2004, after the Chicago Jazz Festival.

sheesh.

2005-01-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

It's been a long-ass time since I blogged. Last semester was pretty rough and I didn't get much sleep and I didn't feel like subjecting blogger to my ridiculous ravings.

So:
I've noticed a trend in music. I don't even know what to call most of the stuff on 93.3 FM here in Denver, so to explain it, I'll say that all these bands are 1) Stone Temple Pilots' fault and 2) so very lame. Staind is a great example. The message of this stuff seems to be sensitive, yet macho. Like, I'm so sorry (sung to female (probably wearing jeans whose waist is too low! (I can't believe that I just wrote that, but jeans are officially out of hand))) that I'm so tortured and angry.
It's very sensitive, (Look, babes, I'm talking about my feelings) so that the members of these bands can get laid, and macho (remember dudes, I may be telling this chick about my feelings, but I'm still totally dark and tough) so that they don't get beat up.

I wonder how well this works? I'd think that pure, swaggering rock bravado gets plenty of chicks. That's right, I've seen The Song Remains the Same. And I'd also think that even though these guys aren't like your easily beaten up sensitive poets-with-lutes-types, that they invite beatings with their lameness.

Maybe it's a market-type situation and the wants of groupies have changed in this post-AIDS world so the behavior of the bands has to change to keep up.

I don't know. I'm just glad I have a CD changer.

An Equation

2004-09-23T06:25:00.000-06:00

The market for something to believe in is infinite* + facts and resoning are ways people justify their already-held irrational, emotional beliefs**= The role of TV news and the role of Advertising, intertwined as they are, today.

Explanations. The first term, which I think can be used as a constant in any "equation" describing human behavior, is simple: People want to believe, badly. (careful where ye put that comma) I think what makes this phrasing so apt is the treatment as a market. I am selling a THING, it's main feature is that it is SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN. The actual content isn't important outside of it's function as being a thing to believe in. Think of it in terms of survivability. Those that are things to believe in that appeal to broader samples of hosts, live and multiply and prosper. And eat brains. Sweet sweet brains.

Term 2 just describes the normal mode of functioning for people.

News and Advertising, indie and mainstream, have evolved into the right side of this equation.

* This is one of those things that I ran across that struck me as not just true, but very true. The other stuff on Hugh Macleod's site is good, but not as good as this.

** this is my own synthesis of several things that've drifted across my transom in the past few years. I swear there was a study that seemed to point to actual experimental evidence of this, but I can't find it right now.

Artsy Fartsy

2004-08-17T13:57:00.000-06:00

Peter Bagge thinks that Shakepeare wrote "hokey, unintelligible 400-year old situation comedies," and I'm going to have to agree with that sentiment. The Tragedies and the Histories, I think, still have the power to excite and to stir, but the comedies are lame. It's hard to think that a work is funny when every joke needs an explanation. Heck, even the explanations don't help. What's all that about cuckolds and their horns? I even took a Shakespeare class and no one was able to explain it. (aside: I wonder if Ulysees (which I find funny still) will continue to age well. Maybe in 400 years it'll be an unintelligible mess. Maybe it is now.)

Anyway, that's not the point of the essay, and it's only a small part of what I agree with here. I disagree on small points, but I'm on board with the whole.

Art= commerce. It's easy for snobbish hipsteres to forget thhat the pop song ("oops, I did it again"), the blockbuster movie, and the vacuum cleaner are all art. All art done for a paycheck and with evident resultant compromises, but art. NB: Less money doesn't mean less compromises (correlation != causation and all that), it means different compromises. Poor movie maker can't make rad explosion, but can do what he wants. Rich movie maker makes rad explosion but it must please people so there is a ROI. The tricky thing is: would important art not get made without state funding? Is state funding more liekly to generate self-indulgent crap? If an artist will not create his/her art without a grant should we care?
Bach and Bethoven got state funding. huh.

The other thing I liked was about art that is supposed to "make us question our assumptions about...blah blah blah," or "blurs the lines between gender and butter..." or whatever. This art is fucking coercive man! Which is an inherently modernistic (dare I say reactoinary?) viewpoint masquerading (in the form of an unintelligible mess) as a post-modern redefinition or recontextualization (NB: these things do exist in non-hollow shell form). Good art would contain both an intended message, and plenty of room for interpretation. Or it could just be beautiful. That's still allowed, right? What? No?

I was also reminded of a great exhibit on Modernism (the art movement, not the worldview) that I saw at the Minneapolis Institue of Arts. They had an Electrolux vacuum cleaner sharing gallery space with Target's new Michael Graves products. Target is big in MN, and was a big funder of the exhibit. The romanticism of modernism, the starry-eyed promise of technology as better living gave us well-designed, cool-looking kitchen appliances. This is great, and I think that we're seeing a swing back to this aesthetic. Your blender can be art. It's OK.

Where I disagree is that I get the impression that Bagge thinks there is no room for the navel gazing installation and performance art. I, on the other hand, would just like to see a whole lot less of it.

Fun with context.

2004-08-17T13:56:00.000-06:00

When Technical Documentation goes bad.

I particularly love #1 and #24.

#1 is pure hilarity. Can't any product be used by one kid to hit another kid? What makes this one so special? Why was it thought necessary to show this? Well, because of the rage.

#24 suffers from a huge context problem. Don't put a helicopter in this box? just a general "no helicopters?" What?

Of course the lesson from most of these is that the encoders were assuming that certain information would be had by the decoders. When a fool like me sees the helicopter box without any other information, I get confused. Can you guarantee that no serviceman would be similarly confused?

Lazinees. Cab drivers. Reportage.

2004-07-30T09:05:00.000-06:00

CJR, which should just about be required reading, points out my favorite bias in media. The laziness bias. Stronger than any political ideology, stronger than and advertiser's pressure. Laziness. In short: A lot of reporters are interviewing their cab drivers instead of actually doing some real work. Question: is there anything at all to be gained from man-on-the-street interviews? Reporters always give it this twist, like "here's a man on the street. Here's an average joe. This is waht people really think of [Candidate *|proposition *|enron]. Aren't I great for cutting through all the talking head bullshit? Bow to me! And what do you know! The man on the street agrees with me almost exactly!"

blah.

I float down the Liffey/I'm not here/ This isn't happening

2004-07-29T07:58:00.000-06:00

Came across a mention of what Joyce once said Finnegans wake was about:. That the Wake is a dream and that the dreamer isan old man dying by the Liffey. Sparked a little recognition is me, having just read some Beckett. The last two books of the "trilogy" seems to be the last sparks of a dying sentience. old men (or a head in a jar(!)) telling free form stories from the past. We know that Joycve and Beckett were friends, and both were interested in Jung. I wonder if they weren't both trying to explore the disintegration of a mind.

What's interesting about the thoughts of a dying old man anyway? This: Traditional walls between subjects and subjects, subjects and objects, objects and objects all begin to crumble, and the subjects and objects begin to spill over onto each other. An old man, with 70-80 years of awareness, from prelingual to post-, thoughts running like heavy rain in gutters, with old connections broken and new ones made every second. Traditional timeflow is dostorted: What happened when? Is it happening now? What came first, second, third?

For the reader who wants to be active, this stuff is great. The reader gets to decide who, what, when, and where, out of the nonauthoritative material on the page. Like a whodunit, sort of. So the reader is left to find what heshe wants in the text.

It's funny to look at the two different approaches (if that's what the Wake actually is. If it isn't, is the effect any different? hmm). Joyce with his baroque, multi-layered, punning prose v. Beckett with his pure economy of style. Wildly differring techniques leading to a similar endproduct. Ultimately writerly texts.

hypertext arrives

2004-07-24T14:35:00.000-06:00

Hypertext never really took off the way its inventors and visionaries thought it should. Why? It's a lot of work. Creating a well-structured hypertext document with relevant links is an editing nightmare.

It's also a pain to maintain. Links go stale as whole presences drop off of the web. F'rinstance, if you want to talk about James Joyce, one of the very best references on the web is just some guy. If you create a document that has links to his site, what happens if any of the myriad things that can go wrong does, and his whole site goes away? Your doc is affected. You need to fix all your links that used that resource.

Plus! The amount of discretion put into determining which links are valid and which are invalid.

Now, with a couple of Firefox extensions, all that stuff is irrelevant. The Googlebar has a context menu option to "search for selected text." This gives you web, news, image, dictionary, and newsgroup search of whatever term in a doc you feel like searching on. The action is slightly more convoluted than a straight click-on-a-link, but it's much more seamless than copy-and-paste, or type-into-a-search-box. Now the user has control. Which words or groupings of words are you interested in? What kind of search are you interested in? The reader gets to choose. All the author needs to do is write. Authorial and editorial control are still completely available. But if the authro didnt bother to hyperlink the word "gnomon" to a good definition, the reader is about one second away from doing it himherself.

What's great is that this recognizes the impermanence of the web. There may not be a google in the future, or a dictionary.com, but a simple select and search can point anywhere. It will take advantage of future technologies (a multimedia search, a better image search, &c.).

Hypertext is coming closer to realizing its potential.

EDIT:
I just realized that this works best going from specific to general. Like, if you see the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" and search on it, you'll fond out more than you ever wanted to know about zero-wing. But if your doc has the phrase "meme" and you want it to go to a flash animation of the AYBABTU song, then the right-click thing isn't going to work real great. hmmm.

Poor Michael Jackson

2004-07-22T06:32:00.000-06:00

MJ is such a micromanager of his image, but it's completely out of his control. In fact, the results of his PR campaign (including his face) are pretty much opposite to the intended effects.

Look, for example, at the "King of Pop" title. Googling the two phrases "Michael Jackson" and "King of pop" gives markedly different results than if you do the same search with the word "proclaimed" added.

Apparently (I can't verify this) MJ instructed MTV to refer to him by his royal title. So you do get a lot of instances of news sources (ABC, CNN, &c) calling him the "self proclaimed" king of pop. You can also find a fan run petition that professes to not know the reason that the media do this, and urges you to sign, so that he can be the proclaimed "king of pop" by his fans. So. Is he the King of Pop or not? Both, kind of.

His face is another issue. He's had an extensive amount of work done on it (I imagine blowtorches, vats of acid, and lots of cackling from the doctors) and then denied having the work done. In the process he's, instead of looking ageless or beautiful or whatever, become a poster boy for celebrity-flavored insanity.

Or how about "blanket"? To protect (ostensibly, of course. I can only go with stated intentions) his kid, said kid has only appeared in public covered in a blanket, and is only referred to as blanket. I can't imagine that being great for the kid, and it certainly doesn't make MJ look like a protecive, responsible father shielding his offspring from the limelight. He just looks too nuts to function and too rich to lock up for treatment.

He's never going to get back into control. #1 reason is that it's jut to easy for a news source to do a feature on how wacko he is. News people are like most people. Lazy. If they can get away with showing a clip of MJ dangling his kid out a window (taken by someone else's news crew), raising their eyebrows, saying "Wacko Jacko," and calling that a news segment, they will.

Plastic: Gov. Schwarzenegger Evolving Into Caricature Of A Caricature

2004-07-21T10:24:00.000-06:00

Plastic: Gov. Schwarzenegger Evolving Into Caricature Of A Caricature

I think this is great. Saturday Night Live comes up with characters based on Arnold Shwarzenegger's public persona (a media construct). Now, more than 10 years later, Arnold uses the phrase "girlie-men," which originated in the Hans and Franz skits, in his official capacity as governor (Another public persona. You know, serious, republican Arnold). Arnold-The-Gov has now co-opted this phrase; he's subsumed this element of a parody of Arnold-The-Actor into his new self. Neither of these are Arnold himself by the way. So, what we have here is a four-fold removal from Shwarzenegger himself:

Arnold-the-actor. From Conan, Predator, The Running Man, &c.
Parody of Arnold-the-actor. They're here to pump you up.
Arnold-the-governor. Since he's supposed to save CA from the budget crisis, this is related to point 1.
Arnold-the-governor's use of parody catch phrase.

I think I need a Venn diagram instead of a list. Ouch.

And a bunch of people got offended, which isn't very interesting.

Gin.

2004-07-21T06:58:00.000-06:00

On my way in to work, I keep seeing this billboard. It says:

This is the Sign Your Friend Said You'd See If You'd Gone Too Far.

It's an ad for Beefeater Gin. It's really similar to the Ketel One magazine ads I've been seeing ("Attention Ketel One drinker, this is a Ketel One ad...blah blah blah.) in that it has
1) a white background/black text foreground
2) ad text that does not refer to product, but to the advertisement itself.

I can't imagine this approach working real well. What's the hook? That the company is so free of artifice that they can be trusted? That their product is also artifice-free? I'ts probably just about being different enough to get the product name stuck in one's head.

I think that the Ketel One ads work a bit better. They refer to the actual product in the text, albiet obliquely. So I knew what they were for without going to Google, which is what i had to do to find out what the Beefeater ads were selling.

And they're not so confusing and ambiguous. It's hard to argue with that statement. -Yes, the Ideal Reader says, it is an ad for Ketel One. The Beefeater Billboard is much more ambiguous. In the context of selling us something to pickle our liver in, the phrase "gone too far" has quite a few separate connotations, and it resists contextual disambiguation (to borrow a phrase from Stan Kelly-Bootle (I like how it gives agency to the phrase is question)). Like this:

Interpretation one(probably what they are actually trying to convey, I think.)Have we passed the party? Must we turn back? Turning back from this billboard would put us in 5 points, which let's face it, is not where the target demographic's friends live and throw partys.

Interpretation two. This is an advertisement for something that is a physical location, and you just passed it. Like those much clearer "you just passed Bob's knives and Navajo souvenirs!" billboards. This reading is supported by the fact that the actual product (gin) is displayed in the lower right corner and is hard to see as you're trying to dodge slow moving RTD busses and still make all the green lights on Broadway.

Interpretation three. Your drinking has gone much too far. You've hit on my wife/sister/pet once too often. You've left the halfused contents of your stomach on my front steps again. You need help. Since you won't listen to reason, I bought ad space on a billboard. Yes, you.

Ahhh.