jeblog

phoku.1

existential game 2: competitive getting lost

Here the player lives in a city with which he/she is very familiar. The player gets on a bike and takes a different route than usual on the way to a familiar haunt or appointment.

The player will be judged by taking the differential of the number of additional, non-normal roads and the time it takes for him/her to reach his/her destination, compared to the time it takes on his/her normal route.

The prize will be having a camera attached to the player's bike, whose next new route will be projected from a jumbotron screen in Times Square. This will be part of a new reality program which will feature only one-time fifteen minute segments of normal, wacky Americans, and which will only be shown on a jumbotron screen in Times Square.

existential game 1: fingernail clipping competition

Trim your fingernails with your eyes closed. Bonus points for doing so while intoxicated. More bonus points for using only your teeth.

Players will be judged on lack of cuticles and perfect half-moon cuts. Also on how deftly dirt is removed in the process of cutting the nails.

The prize will be a reliquary containing the clipped fingernail slice of a major celebrity, to be named later.

left techie

Last night I went to an organizing meeting for an upcoming demonstration. What I'd like to note is that our meeting had digital representation: we had two folks on laptops checking certain websites devoted the upcoming demonstration.

The web has become a major organizing tool, such that even leftists, generally suspicious of technology, use it to generate opposition and to articulate a new vision.

I also have a friend who just moved to an egalitarian, off-the-grid community in the desert who is still making his living as a computer programmer. I consider him an important pioneer in the work of sustainable technology.

This is very different from when I began my life as an activist some 20 years ago. You would be lucky to find a working pencil back then.

The left has come a long way. I for one am happy to be able to have activist self and techie self co-existing peacefully.

The computer is a tool. It can be of great benefit to the movement for social change, as a long as we don't feel the need to put it on the altar to worship, or to exorcise.

brought to you by manchurian global

Yesterday I read Stuart Klawans review, in the August 30 edition of The Nation, of The Manchurian Candidate (two left thumbs up). I concur for the most part: fine performances, steady direction from Jonathan Demme, interesting updated story (and conspiracy).

Klawans points out one major problem with the film which speaks more to our society than to the film-making art: why a global, corporate hegemon such as Manchurian Global would need to employ the elaborate brainwashing and implanting as depicted in the film. Advertising and media supersaturation would seem to be enough.

As Klawans puts it: "Demme has filled The Manchurian Candidate...with examples of the actual mind-control technology that drills into our heads today: the twenty-four-hour, 360-degree yammer of cable news shows and talk-radio programs." Not to mention ubiquitous advertising.*

That's why I assert that sitting on a cushion meditating, or reading a book-- anything that entails throwing off the aural shackles of one or many of the electronic voices that surround us--is a revolutionary activity.

* I have a theory that the word "ubiquitous" did not become ubiquitous until ubiquity itself became ubiquitous--sometime in the mid 1990s.

homo editoris redux

Does anyone know the proper Latin for the title of the previous entry (homo editoris)? Does anyone read the (Greco-Roman) Classics anymore? I sure don't.

The Classics have been replaced by popular culture. Troy is now a big budget Hollywood set, featuring Brad Pitt's rippling pecs. And the Olympics has become a five-ring circus of melodrama and just-do-it machismo.

So when will we see video games based on the Greek myths? Perhaps we already have (Myst, etc.).

It would be interesting to parse the Classical, the medieval, and the Romantic in modern video games.

Possible Dissertation Subject #217

homo editoris

Already I'm editing. Editing yesterday today. Editing today for tomorrow. And, if I can swing it, editing tomorrow yesterday.

Some say that what separates us from the animals is that we are conscious that we are conscious. Others that we have a sense of humor (homo ludens). I would like to add: what separates us from the animals is that we edit.

jeblog productions

Here are some of the projects I hope to feature on jeblog. I write them here so that they'll be in the record and I won't be able to weasel out of the actual production of these productions.

1. Phoku. That's my neologism (I think--that is, I think it's a neologism and I think it's my neologism) for haiku combined with photographs.

2. Codexuality. I will be reading books, discussing as I do so the materiality of the book in the supposed location (the internet) of the supposed death of book materiality. It will also be an exercise in the post-literary nostalgia for, and romance of, the book. Proposed books: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau and Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne.

3. Spiritual Exercises for Cyborgs. Proposed projects are the Metta Machine and Wallpaper Blake. If I explain any more, it'll just spoil it...

4. Googlenooza. Exploring, tweaking, escaping (?) the stranglehold of Google on the zeitgeist.

5. Digital Editions. Multimedia editions of works in the public domain. First up: Incidences (1939) by the avant-garde Russian writer Daniil Kharms.

6. Digital fiction. Occasional forays into digital narrative. Planned projects: Columbia Depths: A Personal Geography.

7. Existential Game Log. Looking at how we (I, anyway) game the actions of everyday life; an explication of the ludic nature of Homo Ludens.

rambling already

I will also be commenting on my blogging, as I blog.

For instance, I intended the previous to be the first thing folks see, but of course it will be bumped below this one.

Which will quickly be bumped by the next entry.

Which completely reverses the received experience of reading a journal in a codex (book) format. There you read the author's first entry, here you read the last.

Which I find interesting. How structural arrangements (chronological, spatial, as narrative, as database) and paratext affect reading.

You'll be seeing a lot of this.

justify yourself

Given the mad metastisization of data on the internet these days, I feel a need to justify my existence in the blogosphere. I will here explain, before I even begin, the method to my madness.

Jeblog will be a series of intertwined logs.

Primarily, I will log my consumption of culture and/or media, from the somewhat contrary position of someone who believes that less culture/media is more.

Secondarily, I will log my own production of culture/media, such as virtual performance spaces, and installations, as well as various digital projects.

I will also be logging my work life as a web/graphic designer and scholar/academic, as well as some of my other avocations/interests/investments, such as music, activism, and buddhist meditation practice.

And then occasionally there will be something that doesn't fit into any category, with which, dear reader, you must deal.

I will aspire to concision in my entries and, most often, fail.

First favorite quote, from Samuel Beckett: "To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail."