The Friday Shuffle
Undress Me Now - Morcheeba
Six Million Ways to Live - Dub Pistols
You Are One of Us - Halou
Get Down Moses - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros
Shut Your Mouth - Garbage
Bed - Moby
Dissolved Girl - Massive Attack
Blinded By The Lights - The Streets
2wicky - Hooverphonic
LoveTown - Peter Gabriel
This week's been hell. Just want to go home and be with my rock-star wife, write a while, and take my blue-screen medication of BSG and House.
Friday, February 03, 2006
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Rosetta
If true, this explains a whole lot about human behavior, from politics to brand loyalty to addiction.
It also starts to explain what I was musing about a few days ago.
If true, this explains a whole lot about human behavior, from politics to brand loyalty to addiction.
It also starts to explain what I was musing about a few days ago.
Superblah
I live in Seattle. I could care less about the Superbowl. I just want it to be over. I want all the hype, all the articles, all the fluff, all the new-found city-proxy pride politics to just drop off the face of the earth. Seattle doesn't care that much about sports (no one got this hot and bothered when the Seattle WNBA team when they won their championship a year back), and no one gave the Seahawks a second glance until a couple games before the playoffs, and then the Fan-Zerg Overmind spread its creep all over this damn wet burg until you can't go anywhere without seeing team colors or the big, blazing "12" (a symbol for the 12th man, that American football psychological tool where the fan is recruited to be part of the warrior tribe through his vocal support, not by actual effort).
I'm not going to talk about how much sports players make, or the billions more that the owners rake in. I'm not going to get all high-minded, talking about how we could be paying attention to larger things right now (Darfur, Iraq, illegal domestic wiretapping). I'm not going to mention the subtle and overt ways American football appeals to proxy masculinity and patriotism while being rampant with advertisizing and violence. No, I'm just fucking sick of every other thing in this town being about a football game that won't matter a week after it's played.
Sunday, I'm going to keep my head down, do laundry, and finally put to use all those Miyazaki animes I have saved on yee ol' DVR.
Song of the Day
DJ Shadow blends Radiohead and George W. Bush. Finally found it after searching the Web for months. Last night, I hit the right alchemy of search words in Google, and the fates smiled upon me.
I live in Seattle. I could care less about the Superbowl. I just want it to be over. I want all the hype, all the articles, all the fluff, all the new-found city-proxy pride politics to just drop off the face of the earth. Seattle doesn't care that much about sports (no one got this hot and bothered when the Seattle WNBA team when they won their championship a year back), and no one gave the Seahawks a second glance until a couple games before the playoffs, and then the Fan-Zerg Overmind spread its creep all over this damn wet burg until you can't go anywhere without seeing team colors or the big, blazing "12" (a symbol for the 12th man, that American football psychological tool where the fan is recruited to be part of the warrior tribe through his vocal support, not by actual effort).
I'm not going to talk about how much sports players make, or the billions more that the owners rake in. I'm not going to get all high-minded, talking about how we could be paying attention to larger things right now (Darfur, Iraq, illegal domestic wiretapping). I'm not going to mention the subtle and overt ways American football appeals to proxy masculinity and patriotism while being rampant with advertisizing and violence. No, I'm just fucking sick of every other thing in this town being about a football game that won't matter a week after it's played.
Sunday, I'm going to keep my head down, do laundry, and finally put to use all those Miyazaki animes I have saved on yee ol' DVR.
Song of the Day
DJ Shadow blends Radiohead and George W. Bush. Finally found it after searching the Web for months. Last night, I hit the right alchemy of search words in Google, and the fates smiled upon me.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Head Cleaning
Tycho over at Penny Arcade has been writing about the vile art of stealth campaigning on the Internet. While some people get all panicky-wanicky about chimeras, this is the thing that gets my dander up.
First, it was spammers, free-market assholes who decided long ago that your email needed to be clogged with offers to increase penis size. Next, it was trolls, those obnoxious shadowselves on the Web who exist only to go into message boards to derail the topic with half-ass invectives. You can find them around poliblogs if you care to look, and if you want to see a bunch of grownups devolve into screaming partisan apes.
Now, thanks to Tycho's spying eye, there's uncovered a new breed. Power hypers. Super plants (hrm, back to chimeras again), hired to take up several accounts on a numerous message boards to casually promote whatever they have to. Films, video games, other consumables. It's been done in bars here in America for years, and the practice is not a stranger to shopping malls. Think pro-corporate guerrilla theater.
What bothers me about these corporate-backed stealth shills is that I've given up on TV and radio and even movies as being ad-free zones. Ads are everywhere, even when you don't think about it. Commercials on TV or in magazines at the gym. There are ads in the newspaper I work at. Ads on billboards I drive by in my car, which is a rolling ad if you want to get all meta about it. When I have my iPod and I'm in the gym, people can tell by the snow noodles I have leading up to my ears that, yep, he's got an iPod. Perfect non-logo advertising. Yet, all those adverts are out there, overt, arguably honest. When you read a newspaper there's a visual demarcation between the sea of text and the graphics of an ad. In TV, the ad appears when the actors aren't on stage (although that's slowly changing, take Coca-Cola's product placement in "American Idol"). You can tell ads in magazines immediately. All sorts of visual cues.
On Internet message boards, the medium is still text, so the blurring of someone's personal commentary and viral marketing takes on a sinister feel, as if we're being tricked into a diluted reality of corporate truth. Or maybe it's a symptom of the cause. We've entered a stage in communication where everyone can have their say. Everyone's baggage and research is on the table. You can believe it or not. At this point, we've evolved a set of filters in our brains to accept that there's certain tribes. Democratic tribes, Republican tribes, "Lost" tribes, iPod tribes, Kanye West tribes, and so on....devoted to the cause and being pain to the heretics haters who troll the boards. In a way, it was simple. Walk into a poliblog or a brand's message board, and you got where everyone stood. Spend enough time, and you get to decipher the ballet of the faithful and the outcasts, tearing into each other in a moebius strip of false patriotism, bad logic, and that empty-calorie wit of snark. Predictable.
With the subtle injections of corporate-fueled comments, the filter gets all shaky, breaking down into a series of ratty holes and you wonder who has been fucking with your perceptions. You got fed another commercial, against your will, under the radar. No defenses ready. It's all dishonest, but your growing victimhood of having the mindbomb advert all over your clothes won't get anything clean. You can't unthink what you got fed to you. Meanwhile, a piece of you darkens to think that the sneaky bastard who pwned you is off doing it all over the Web, hiding under a million aliases. You wanted at least a fair fight. You get tired of the government lying to you, as well as the mainstream media failing to be informative. Instinct alarms in your head keep you away from the American media. You can whitenoise government officials. But the Web, where you hang out, where you hope and pray and want there to be a meritocracy, that's been hit with by a corporate graffiti artist and you're just sick of everything being branded, everything being a commercial.
A year ago, I figured out that the 21th century is going to be a battle over spiritual, mental, and physical colonization. Stealth hype like this may not push it over the edge, but it's part of an invisible trajectory where people are going to say "enough." What's going to be interesting is how it'll play out here in the states, where 70% of the economy is consumer spending. If people stop paying attention to the ads in a desperate attempt to clear their heads, what's next?
Tycho over at Penny Arcade has been writing about the vile art of stealth campaigning on the Internet. While some people get all panicky-wanicky about chimeras, this is the thing that gets my dander up.
First, it was spammers, free-market assholes who decided long ago that your email needed to be clogged with offers to increase penis size. Next, it was trolls, those obnoxious shadowselves on the Web who exist only to go into message boards to derail the topic with half-ass invectives. You can find them around poliblogs if you care to look, and if you want to see a bunch of grownups devolve into screaming partisan apes.
Now, thanks to Tycho's spying eye, there's uncovered a new breed. Power hypers. Super plants (hrm, back to chimeras again), hired to take up several accounts on a numerous message boards to casually promote whatever they have to. Films, video games, other consumables. It's been done in bars here in America for years, and the practice is not a stranger to shopping malls. Think pro-corporate guerrilla theater.
What bothers me about these corporate-backed stealth shills is that I've given up on TV and radio and even movies as being ad-free zones. Ads are everywhere, even when you don't think about it. Commercials on TV or in magazines at the gym. There are ads in the newspaper I work at. Ads on billboards I drive by in my car, which is a rolling ad if you want to get all meta about it. When I have my iPod and I'm in the gym, people can tell by the snow noodles I have leading up to my ears that, yep, he's got an iPod. Perfect non-logo advertising. Yet, all those adverts are out there, overt, arguably honest. When you read a newspaper there's a visual demarcation between the sea of text and the graphics of an ad. In TV, the ad appears when the actors aren't on stage (although that's slowly changing, take Coca-Cola's product placement in "American Idol"). You can tell ads in magazines immediately. All sorts of visual cues.
On Internet message boards, the medium is still text, so the blurring of someone's personal commentary and viral marketing takes on a sinister feel, as if we're being tricked into a diluted reality of corporate truth. Or maybe it's a symptom of the cause. We've entered a stage in communication where everyone can have their say. Everyone's baggage and research is on the table. You can believe it or not. At this point, we've evolved a set of filters in our brains to accept that there's certain tribes. Democratic tribes, Republican tribes, "Lost" tribes, iPod tribes, Kanye West tribes, and so on....devoted to the cause and being pain to the heretics haters who troll the boards. In a way, it was simple. Walk into a poliblog or a brand's message board, and you got where everyone stood. Spend enough time, and you get to decipher the ballet of the faithful and the outcasts, tearing into each other in a moebius strip of false patriotism, bad logic, and that empty-calorie wit of snark. Predictable.
With the subtle injections of corporate-fueled comments, the filter gets all shaky, breaking down into a series of ratty holes and you wonder who has been fucking with your perceptions. You got fed another commercial, against your will, under the radar. No defenses ready. It's all dishonest, but your growing victimhood of having the mindbomb advert all over your clothes won't get anything clean. You can't unthink what you got fed to you. Meanwhile, a piece of you darkens to think that the sneaky bastard who pwned you is off doing it all over the Web, hiding under a million aliases. You wanted at least a fair fight. You get tired of the government lying to you, as well as the mainstream media failing to be informative. Instinct alarms in your head keep you away from the American media. You can whitenoise government officials. But the Web, where you hang out, where you hope and pray and want there to be a meritocracy, that's been hit with by a corporate graffiti artist and you're just sick of everything being branded, everything being a commercial.
A year ago, I figured out that the 21th century is going to be a battle over spiritual, mental, and physical colonization. Stealth hype like this may not push it over the edge, but it's part of an invisible trajectory where people are going to say "enough." What's going to be interesting is how it'll play out here in the states, where 70% of the economy is consumer spending. If people stop paying attention to the ads in a desperate attempt to clear their heads, what's next?
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Grand Entrances
From various points on the Web, I give you the American Book Review's top 100 best first lines from novels.
In my humble opinion, they left out this one. J.G. Ballard's "High Rise," a book I had to go to London to get.
"As he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months."
Granted, I'm not too keen on the flashback opening, but the action of eating a dog on a balcony, as if sipping a morning's OJ, is enough to grab attention as well as representing the tone for the rest of the novel, one that's influential to what I'm working on.
Either way, the list gives a good schooling on how important that opening sentence is for a writer to craft. You need to bring something special in the first words or you may as well call it a day.
From various points on the Web, I give you the American Book Review's top 100 best first lines from novels.
In my humble opinion, they left out this one. J.G. Ballard's "High Rise," a book I had to go to London to get.
"As he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months."
Granted, I'm not too keen on the flashback opening, but the action of eating a dog on a balcony, as if sipping a morning's OJ, is enough to grab attention as well as representing the tone for the rest of the novel, one that's influential to what I'm working on.
Either way, the list gives a good schooling on how important that opening sentence is for a writer to craft. You need to bring something special in the first words or you may as well call it a day.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Four
And so, last night, all four of them were reunited. They all slept together in the Big Bed. The two cats, properly lazy and content with both humans home, curled into the Big Male who Scooped The Poo Box and the Big Female who feeds them. They purred and curled into the warm humans, twitching with cottony, floaty dreams of chasing a bug or seeing the yummiest bird in the entire universe perch outside the window.
The woman, meanwhile, curled into her husband. Silently, as if well-rehearsed for centuries, they turned their bodies to keep the cats on the bed while holding each other in an intimate convex only lovers can achieve. She had returned from a distant land of heat and family, and the return to the Big Bed, back to the arms of her lover and husband. And he, the husband, found himself in a sea of deep sighs, the contented species of exhalation, having her back after a week. The Big Bed had grown too big, and he found himself adrift without her. Now, order would be restored and the house would be alive again with song, laughter, love and the warmth that makes living worth while.
Outside, the rain lightly fell on the ferns and the trees, all beginning the long, seasonal revival of green. The smell of damp earth wafted through the open window, and the humans and cats inside dozed in a loving pile, surrounded by the white noise of rain and the gentle caresses of cotton, flannel, body heat and nature.
And so, last night, all four of them were reunited. They all slept together in the Big Bed. The two cats, properly lazy and content with both humans home, curled into the Big Male who Scooped The Poo Box and the Big Female who feeds them. They purred and curled into the warm humans, twitching with cottony, floaty dreams of chasing a bug or seeing the yummiest bird in the entire universe perch outside the window.
The woman, meanwhile, curled into her husband. Silently, as if well-rehearsed for centuries, they turned their bodies to keep the cats on the bed while holding each other in an intimate convex only lovers can achieve. She had returned from a distant land of heat and family, and the return to the Big Bed, back to the arms of her lover and husband. And he, the husband, found himself in a sea of deep sighs, the contented species of exhalation, having her back after a week. The Big Bed had grown too big, and he found himself adrift without her. Now, order would be restored and the house would be alive again with song, laughter, love and the warmth that makes living worth while.
Outside, the rain lightly fell on the ferns and the trees, all beginning the long, seasonal revival of green. The smell of damp earth wafted through the open window, and the humans and cats inside dozed in a loving pile, surrounded by the white noise of rain and the gentle caresses of cotton, flannel, body heat and nature.
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