Dissatisfied

With some of the older posts now, a feeling that I sort of caught coming early and hence stopped posting until I figured it out. Still havent entirely, but I have a few ideas.

Serious town! Too much so in some cases. Dunno. Not visual enough, certainly.

What I -like- about the internet is that it fosters a kind of communication similiar to driving with people for a long time. It’s basically my favorite mode of parliance with people. It exists also in playing video games with people for a while, and sometimes (though rarely) in watching movies. It exists very much so in instant messaging and facebook, and is a kind of a richer species of the chatroom phenomenon oof being in a dark room with a collection of people.

The idea is that the conversation is never -quite- done, but that it tolerates gaps and silences much moreso than does face to face communication. In a car this is thickened by the unnaturalness of trying to face interlocutors and by the amount of time spent around them in one sitting. The distance (and at night the quality of the silence) collects until it is a kind of permeable barrier. It allows simultaneously for a phenomenal amount of privacy as well as comraderie. The internet fosters and creates this kind of thing with time-lapse communications like blogs and forums. What’s neat is that the longer the intervals and the more thick the barriers, communication can become more associative. So like, posting a song to a youtube video’s comments is a responce..etc.

Dunno. Anyway no idea when/if more consistent posting here. But I think it has something to do with graphics.
If I ruled the internet it would look like this:

In the time

I have been not posting I have been to New York, to the NYU debate tournament, spent a week in Williamsburg haunting the college, and then a week later the William and Mary debate tournament.

Lots to digest.

I will relate only this as my excuse for not posting.

[New York, my friend Daubert's apartment:]

Me, him, and my friend Brandon are talking about tons of stuff, Daubert is playing rap music – at some point he mentions the benefits of using vocal recorders to keep track of one’s thoughts..etc. Immediately I flash back to Allen Ginsburg’s recollections of Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy, Neil Cassidy infamous (in my memory, if nowhere else) for using this technique and therefore deeply tied to it. I see it’s use as walking in his shadowed footprints. I freak out, make religious apologies and decline ever touching the device. I read the collected coorespondence of Allen and Neil in the Swem library at William and Mary 3 years ago, I know better that to walk with that ghost or ever look like him, ever do as he did.

[Williamsburg, the basement of a house]

I’m talking to a member of the Virginia Tech team and playing beerpong (badly, I was distracted. Sorry TJ) — the Tech guy asks me what’s on my shirt. The shirt was a gift, Wittgenstein’s face above ‘Silence.’ I relate the beginning of an endless praise of my secret dead boyfriend, and at some point (perhaps I was speaking quickly, excitedly. I get that way around debate – old habits and high spirits) he says: “Do you know Neil Cassidy?”

Stalked, all the way home.

The beast that ate Allen Ginsburg’s heart.

Anyway. More later.

HBO’s Rome

Was an impossibly good presentation of the colors and textures of the Roman World.
It was comical inasmuch as the cost of production was what got it shut down and the Romans were in themselves notoriously gaudy, but still, it’s what sold me on the show entirely.
I mean, like, I think the writing and the acting was tremendous as well, but the show existed for me in the sets and the costumes.

It was a similiar experience to me as watching David Lynch’s Dune, which although it took exceptional canonical liberties (sound guns, facial diseases..etc) was still I thought exceptionally true to the texture of the world of Frank Herbert in a way that was dissasterously lacking in the much more textually true Sci-fi adaptation.
The walls looked like they should, the costumes were appropriate, there was a strangeness and a grittiness that suffused the sets much in the same way that the love of fresco and of graffiti is palpably present in Rome.

I never watched Deadwood although I have heard it described as being of a like-mind with regards to that feeling of authenticity being central to the aesthetic of the show. I have never particularly been fond of westerns, being as they are translations of the archetypes present in the samurai films of the east into western costumes, but I suppose I can’t say that I have never seen a good one being that I watched Firefly with unbridled love and enthusiasm.

Oh Joss Whedon. Can you be the bridge between myself and People of the Earth, We Are the Neptunes ?

I wonder, as I listen to that album, what it was in that sound that attracted the attention of the men who made it. Was it Deadwood? Was it some older instantination of the theme?

Im thinking about pitching an ecology article to Dragon magazine. That would be pretty kickass I think, and I think I would be good at it.

I was thinking the other day how much Rome season 1 (I have never watched season 2) gained for me when I started to concieve of it as the prequel to I, Claudius - the BBC production that my father introduced my family to. It actually darkens the tenor of the Augustus found in that production very attractively, showing the shrewdness that only later turned towards trying to set in place good family ethics out of a sense of frustration at having been denied that.

It is easier for me to appreciate the softness of the BBC Augustus when recalling the sequence wherein Pullo is aghast at the ease with which a young Octavian commanded him to torture a man under interrogation.
Here then is the mind that could outthink even Calilgula’s occasional genius. The coin from which the empire was struck that stood in good stead for so long despite so many terrible transactions.

Anyway. Dragon Magazine. That will be fun. I used to read them endlessly when I was younger, and usually I was reading exactly for this quality which constitutes the texture of the worlds proposed. I used to read older ones, with articles on panache and non-weapon-proficiencies. The steps that the game worlds took to be something other than just mechanical representations of combat.
I -love- mechanical representations of combat, and I would like that to be clear, but for some reason I am also compelled by the things which support and color that combat – the behind the scenes stuff that increasingly wizards of the coast has left to auxilliaries like the magazines and the fan produced content.

I understand their decision, I think, but it was such a shock reading the new Monster Manual when I had grown up with the old that I hope they will allow me the opportunity to get in on the game.
I feel like they started moving away from what I wanted without consulting me. I looked up and the bard was gone and the gnome was a monster and monsters didn’t have manualized ecologies anymore.

Well, here I am Wizards. Let’s talk.

Britney Spears

Oh man! Pharrell totally did work on Blackout!

The tangled webs we weave! Hahahaha

Pharrell, for real

There’s a great bit I find fascinating about Pharrell Williams, when it comes down to it.

Comparing videos for the song Senorita and some behind the scenes footage is illuminating in several respects.

This for instance, is from the recording of “Let’s Take a Ride” and here again is Senorita which I think I might have accidentally watched 43 trillion times now. Good.

Anyway.

They are hugely divergent in their presentation of the two performers, and it’s a really entertaining divergence, or at least I think so.

3:35 in the Take a Ride footage, or just about there, has Pharrell remarking on a specific voice action of Justin’s “yeah but you did it before,” as in achieved a specific effect, a timbre or pitch or stress that was ‘correct’ in that position. It’s really obvious in the background footage that Pharrell considers, and this is a clearer way of putting this than I have managed before – to be his instrument.

For the entirety of Senorita it is obvious that ‘in practice’ – that is, in public, it is in fact quite reversed. Here Pharrell is literally an instrument – a drummer – while Justin charms the girl.

Now what’s cool is that because of the fact that Justin is such a good instrument, there is no, or appears to be no, malice in Pharrell’s ‘objectification’ of him. Of course recognize that the voice with a trained mind behind it satisfies even Douglas Hofstatder’s requirement for the successful sampo, the machine which can edit itself. Justin can do as the recorders that Pharrell uses typically do, he can ‘bring that back’ in reference to specific timbres or tempos of his own performance. But he can also improvise, and contribute ‘non literally’ or by speculation against his hypothetical vision of the eventual performance for which the piece is intended.

Similiarly actually in my mind at least, there is no real damage done to Pharrell in appearing in the video as ‘the beat man.’ I think he plays a very good set up man to the improvisation of Justin in the bar, indeed they function elegantly together (this exchange might not be in that youtube video, but in the beginning Pharrell is literally his opener) -
P : ‘sing a song.. about this girl’
J : ‘talking bout’ this one right here?’
P : ‘..yeah!’

and they’re off. The whole song, lyrically, sounds kind of like a competition between Timberlake and Pharrell to begin with, a war between making her dance and making her watch. A two-man grift, ala American Gods.

I find Pharrell particularly interesting because the assemblage that I have of him, my impression of him, is one that I have accrued essentially by the methods of neuromancer, quoted here describing how it took Linda, the protagonist’s principle romantic interest:

“I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane’s account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient’s scan. When she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it – she had no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her.”

pg 259, Neuromancer

Some shadows here of Umberto Eco again and his Jorge.

Of course I have substantially less an idea of who Pharrell actually is, for all that I know he likes Star Trek and know where he grew up. A few film clips and some facts do not a reading make for. Neuromancer is a motive diviner, in the book, he is the thing which can ascribe the correct motive to behavior – that is recursively retrieve the mind that made choices by studying the choices made. He is one half of the spell that Marie-France casts in the novel, the other is Wintermute the statitician god, the measure of how things will and must proceed. He is the thing which can predict which choices a mind will make by perfect (or near perfect) knowledge of circumstance.

Neuromancer chides Case at one point for thinking that to live within it’s construct of randomly accessed memory, it’s artifical book of the days of a life, is somehow less than to live in the world. Case has entered into Neuromancer while not under its power, he has essentially conciously viewed the unconcious of the two-part mind that Marie-France’s demon took the shape of. To so see Neuromancer is to become Wintermute for at least a time, and Case knew therefore the full number and limit of the world that was the ground of the personalities that Neuromancer gave rise to. Pg 258,

“He knew the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
‘But you do not know her thoughts,’ the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing’s heart. ‘I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference.’”

Listening to Pharrell’s “Heartbeat” is to me a recapitulation of this sequence of Neuromancer, and one I prefer to Zion Dub.

Nicole: ‘She say’s she feels it in her heartbeat.’
P: ‘It may feel old to you, but to her it feels new.’
Refrain
P: ‘She aint you, she aint me, when she dance she feels free.’
Nicole: ‘Which makes her feel like the only one’
P and Nicole: ‘The only one the sun shines on.’

Regardless of the sun shining, what’s clear is that it is this quality that makes her ‘one’ at all. This is what Neuromancer claims to have given Linda, the ability to make claim to feeling. The qualia of individuality.

N*E*R*D is his statemen of this, although I would hazard based off the star-trek that my read on at least this bit of him is satisfactory. “No One Ever Really Dies.” We can, even from the dead, assemble adequite strength of them to constitute a presence. Dan Akroyd at some point defend ghosts existing on the ghost busters dvd behind the scenes stuff. I get what you mean Dan Akroyd, we still cool dawg.

Fucking Socrates.

Pharmakeus of the greek school of thought – he describes himself similiarly to how I would have when I was speaking, but I didn’t know it until now, long past when I was done using that description of myself actively. I am trying to expand it actually, because it really is one of my favorite selves – when I was at a New Years party in DC I slipped into performance fairly often, a consequence of attitude and circumstance. It was a lot of fun, and I was at ease in many ways that I don’t get to be in the normal course of things. I debated for a very long time, Alan, which actually I have not I don’t think of made explicit reference in this blog. I was on APDA, an association that very often, although it did not have to, served as future-lawyers-of-america.

Anyway, Socrates:

“The art of disputation, then, is not confined to the courts and the assembly, but it is one and the same in every use of language; this is the art, if there be such an art, which is able to find a likeness of everything to which a likeness can be found, and draws into the light of the day the likenesses and disguises which are used by others?”

Further:

“Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore he who would be an orator has to lean the differences of human souls – they are so many and of such a nature, and from them come the differences between man and man. Having proceeded thus far ins his analysis, he will next divide speeches into their different classes: ‘Such and such persons,’ he will say, ‘are affected by this or that kind of speech in this or that way,’ and affected by this or that kind of speech in this or that way,’ and he will tell you why.”

The comparison is made to medicine – a poor translation of Pharmakon, and one I think categorically misunderstood by the westernized conception of that term. Here medicine is as the natives would have understood it, and the native Greeks as well – much closer to the native american or Mexica conception of the term. Asiatic also I imagine, although I know probably less about the strictly oriental chapters of this idea’s story. The Yakuza are in some ways my template for Tathriel, in the novel.

The house of canon, but here kanon, as in Pharmakanonical – the artists guild in the city, and also the house of liars, the thieves guild, and the lawyer’s guild as well, the force equivalent in the American economy/government as “the guild of the lobbyists.” They are the cities principle critical chapterhouse, though not it’s sole one, there is also Torcao’s aspirant-house-adjunct and a number of more transient fads, think of them as disorganized and irregular patterns that were none the less discernable cultural trends – they lack any recognized body of spokespeople to define, delimit, and direct that trend.

I should note that some of this is my reaction to William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” – a book that I find absolutely marvelous. In my city, you see, Socrates does not get executed – instead he is the chief of the Sophists – I am constructing (or trying to, the aim of my art is such) ‘Wittgenstein’s City’ in the way that Plato constructed his own, and perhaps a little of Socrates’ as well although I dont know how much. I think Alciabaides is a some of Plato, some of Phaedrus too, which is strange.

Anyway I’m currently trying to draft this scene, it takes place in a visual mashup of the Borgata and HBO’s Rome, essentially – a casino in Cadere, the eight walled city of the Rules of the Octaire – essentially adjacent city states – but extremely adjacent, ala Bregna and Monica from Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux.

The scene is meant to take place on a number of levels, one of which is a neuromantic shoutout to Pharell Williams? Hahaha he’s from around me, apparently, which I didn’t know until I listened to Senorita a billion times and looked him up on wikipedia. I acted against his former highschool in a one-act play festival in the 9th grade. Wacky.

I’m trying while I write the scene to come to grips with the Royal Nom, the great nomic which is the central game of the city of Cadere – what Neil Gaiman calls the “Game of You” -the naming circle of tensions from which word meaning emerges. In essence the game exists as background radiation to all other games, and so when in the casino a player may, at whim, invoke the game, and submerge a portion of any other game within it.

It’s not unlike the ‘make a rule’ category in the drinking game Kings, although it has certain differences. So any player may establish a suite of alternate and optional rules for like, Craps, for example – some odds-altering transformation and then the house asseses the odds created by the rules and players may choose to take the bet or stick to the basic game. It allows some degree of player participation within the social tenor of the circle – they may “lighten the mood” and create more whimsically bizzare games (like being able to at notice switch between black jack and spanish 21), or they can “make dares” and create more difficult challenges, like very difficult prop-bets.

The work goes and goes Alan. I hope I get to be caretaker of an island for a while, that would be baller in the extreme.

Sometimes its easy to forget

That I used to be a classics major, Alan.

I’m spending all this time with postmodern scholars and Bruce Lee and Musashi and Wittgenstein, and I forget sometimes about my roots.

I spent yesterday reading over The Symposium, which was fun, and it got me thinking about the Greeks, and that got mixed up with the Justin Timberlake stuff / Batman, oddly, which is a really recent and colorful example that I am coming to enjoy more and more.

Anyway the Greeks had this Justin Timberlake figure, this pop-star magician hero. Oddly he was Jason, of the Argonauts, the ill fated husband of Medea. The man who enchanted an enchantress, drew the grandaughter of the sun into his story and did it so well that she used -her- magic to give the fleece to him.

Jason’s power was distinct, although related, to Odysseus, who was the cunning one, closer in his skin to Achilles than to our Jasno. Odysseus told the cyclops that his name was ‘No Man’ and when the cyclops was wounded, near fatally, it bellowed out across the islands: “Brothers! Brothers, No Man Has Blinded Me!” and his brothers each said: “So? Great. Go back to sleep.”

That’s clever. But John Gardner tells about Jason’s magic, the ability to live and to tell the tale in such a way as to defeat all other’s philosophies. And more, he does not mind being honest. Odysseus is somewhat like Tzeentch to me – too averse to simplicty. Unable to free himself from his own game. Jason could, as Bruce Lee could – could set aside the pattern he had created and “strike on the broken rhythm” – the half beat.

Of course it was Medea who upstaged him, this showman, setting aside her motherhood and reclaiming her veil by murdering her children. How broken Jason must have been, to learn finally in that moment not merely that his sons were gone, but that also he had always been the weaker of the two performers.

“Oh woman, you have destroyed me.”

Hahaha, Jason did not have Justin Timberlake’s resilience, nor his access to video equipment.

But for serious.

http://www.42entertainment.com/ — (I love bees)

+

http://www.cyanworlds.com/news/ — ( Myst )

=

THE FUTURE.

Basically

I dont understand why Google (which I refuse to link to, despite my desperate wish to be as religious as Wikipedia – though perhaps that impulse’s governing is one of the things that makes Wikipedia sacred as opposed to useful – whatever) doesnt answer Achewood‘s call by way of William Gibson.

Not only did homeskillet write basically a whole book about the semiotic/cultural relevance of this precise problem as a mythological theme, he also is the exact kind of ‘sensitive’ that would be useful to pulling this off. Brother predicted an internet. That’s gotta be worth something.

I’m working on building my own analogy of Justin Timberlake to Bruce Lee and Wittgenstein to the level that it is as plausible. My attempt to respond in good kind to Hoffstader and ‘yell back.’ Also my way of suggesting that it is equally bewildering as to why Justin Timberlake doesn’t hire me as his critic.
Gibson is amazing at it, for serious.

William Gibson is my key between Frank Herbert’s ‘geeky sci-fi’ to Hoffstadters ‘genuine scientific geekiness’ – it functions well as a translation I think, and both authors Herbert and Gibson’s works are nearly explicitly about the birth of conciousness – i.e your ‘miracle stuff’ Alan – the story of magic.

Godel Escher and Bach is, to me, chiefly a grimoire as Alan, you might understand it. That is part of my fascination with it.

His work on Godel exists for me in the work of Frank Herbert in the spot wherein the spotlight has burned a hole through the floor. To me the ‘water of life’ is his ‘Theorem G’ – the thing which despite it’s transparency never loses the power of pharmakon, which is here in dune placebo – the water of life is merely water. The chemicle formula to ‘shorten the way’ literally – bring water to Arrakis. Like a bucket. The thing which turn the worms into water all at once – make them dissapear and dry on the desert and no more spice and no more anything. The ultimate revenge for the ultimate joke which was the closely guarded secret of the bene gesserit ‘awareness spectrum narcotic’ – the analog here complete if you take Joseph Campbell’s “The Masks of God” as the Bene Gesserit “Azar Book,” which I think you should – the book which tells the masculine secret of the apotheosis of item into god-item, play into entheoplay, game into nom, or system into self referential system.

Melange is the key to seeing the unseeable, – melange, that is mixture, or the joining of distinct performances to one another by way of meaningful pattern. Godel, Escher, and Bach, all to look at one thing – this single expression in the heart of mathematic. This one little thing guarded fiercly and one raw truth to charm all guardian.

I would be an Awesome critic for Justin Timberlake, is all I’m saying. I have, for a long time, made a study of the names of his part in it.

That’s my firm belief at the moment, stated clearly, albeit in more than 3 words.

By the James

Which is a horrible river, in case you were wondering – ala Spirited Away, a thoroughly -used- waterway.

Anyway I was at a beach along the bank working on analogy chains for Justin Timberlake – the lines of story and reference that make his presence in my work communicable and sensible.

This old guy came by who I had never met, asked me what I was reading – I had my copy of Godel Escher and Bach.

I explained a little, trying to convey more of the feeling of the work, or my feelings towards it, rather than the content because we had just met and I had no idea how to explain it on that level.
He, as it turns out, was an engineer, principley interested in the relation of math to music, which is a refrain I have heard before in GEB (and other places) – but interestingly he explained to me in a way I had not been able to access prior how physics entered into it. The graphs which are the physical depictions of vibration, or the pathways of frequency.

Harmony, he talked about, as an almost (though not precisely) arbitrary agreed upon scale of related notes which were ‘good’ because they were discernably different and yet pleasingly related. Entangled, so to speak.

Haha, things to think about. It was very sunny and I lost track of him at some point, it was clearly something he loved to talk about and did not often get the chance to. I recall he made mention of eight notes, an octave scale, carved out of the mutual pleasure of scientists and very little else. A pan-pipe; eight hollow staves set to ringing, eight drums to beat, eight tongues tangled.

I thought about it both ways, in the sun. Here was this man telling me things I wanted to know, that would be practically -useful- for me to know, that content-bound into the coded knots I’m trying to weave around Justin Timberlake, and yet here -also- was this man who, for all I knew, was like the Otter-Man – just some impossibly sad stranger with his collection of similiar interests in an alien light.

It made me think of when I first came to the internet, lo these many years ago, and read accounts of -other people- playing Dungeons and Dragons. What a revelation! And what a cheat! It was like the tapes on fastforward in Microserfs for me – here was a way to just -steal- the stories of others. To mainline the experience of like minds. Oh man what a hey day was my youth on the internet.

Right now Penny Arcade is doing a big Dungeons and Dragons thing, and it (the game in general, although also their game given that Tycho is one of my archetypal Bards, and the very voice of my friend Bahie) is on my mind a lot given my preoccupations with shamans and bards and magicians in general at the moment.
I remember reading about a guy whose huge campaign was ruined by Roar stealing his villain and the spear of Longellus. Does anyone even remember Roar?
I remember reading the apocryphal account of Eric and the Dreaded Gazebo, which would later become a card in Munchkin – and less famous stories that were no less precious to me. Top ten lists of frustrating villains, with a politician who worshipped a dead water goddess and was unaware of her death, protected by the adoration of children in his political environ.

Much of my imagination must have been like the cutting room floor of Dragon Magazine, although again I would bet with slightly more charmed wide-eyed-ness.
How much of me is built of that gift I attribute Justin Timberlake? The ability to, with no ill grace, pull the GEB trick – import someone’s loop into your own. Tangle their hierarchies with yours until the branches are all in runes.

It’s been a strange day Alan and the new year approaches.

Patton Oswalt: “this world rocks and it don’t ever stop.”
Good night.