How bad will it get when a barrel of oil is about to reach $100 and "robust" is fast becoming the go-to default adjective everywhere? I'm getting ready to hunker down for a long, long winter of disconnect. One local real estate broker peddles a "Tribeca Exclusive Duplex 9 Rooms" with the tagline "The Great Outdoors" and finishes off with this trump: the "sybaritic master suite with its own 1,100sf terrace is a wonder!"
Sybaritic, huh? wbf, to remain in the lingo? That's like calling an SUV "Armada." Nothing sells like a copy writer's cultural amnesia.
Speaking of trumps. The hairdo is currently offering this free advice: "Think Big and Kick Ass." Sounds like a plan. In this context, the Farmers Insurance Group's slogan is farking priceless: "Sanity Makes a Comeback."
2007-10-31
it's robust, stupid!
2007-08-29
crash courses in collision.
Yes, there are still those occasional moments where you need to recalibrate your sense of being in the world.
Witness Gary - I'm talkin' 'bout nephritic California gubernatorial candidate - Coleman, who has been reduced to shilling his visage on late-night TV commercials for CashCall, Inc., a lender of unsecured "loans that fit your lifestyle." They understand that "life can be unpredictable" and so generously deign to offer you 5 grand within a day: wired to your account with no collateral save "your signature." The deal clocks in at 99.25% APR and, at this level of fine print, your FICA score should be the least of your worries. You might as well sell your soul.
Then there is a 1970s anthem of suburban malaise, the one that promised deliverance in the dire absence of change for pimple-faced pubescent white boys. Their hedonist chant lost its final semblance of contrarian discontent the other day for good when "I wanna rock and roll all nite (and party ev-e-ry day)" was put to use as a means to get kids to brush their teeth.
And, just like wouldn't you know it, you're again forced to reflect on which is worse - face painters reappropriating the vicious iconicity of Schutzstaffel runes in the service of a pandering pop merchandise machine or the selfsame spirit of illusionary rejection transposed into a sensible pedagogical device. This one an investment that Mommies can tolerate.
But, while you concatenate these instances and take note that the rights to the Beatles song catalogue have now been extended to TV commercials as well, a degree of disconnect reminds you that not everything can be remediated as easily.
Here's a scene that drove home another dimension of collision for me last week, unrepentant rubber-necker that I am.
A white Lincoln Aviator with New Jersey tags slams into a parked van and crushes a Mexican immigrant delivering groceries in the early morning hours to death between boxes of strawberries. A fun Friday night on the town that may have started at Señor Swanky's or the Caliente Cab Company ends with airbags deployed and a grossly disfigured body lying under bright yellow police tarpaulin.
As the homicide detective on the scene banters casually with bystanders who have all the time in the world and tolerates their crude jokes with admirable equanimity, a young woman staggers past the crowd with her shoes in her hands. A Weegee moment. She is still too drunk and too absorbed in the effort of swaying along to pay attention.
"So you know what happened?" someone asks me and I point out the pile of human remains to him on the street.
After a pause, he informs me of his plans to use the camera feature on his cellphone. "I'm going to take a picture now?" Almost plaintively - as if he needs my absolution to do so.
2007-08-04
touch screen to resume.
Starting October 1st, taxicab passengers in my local parish will be forced to interact with yet another screen, a video system for news and fare information that commences each time the meter is hit. The relentless march of progress makes the voice of Adam West or Mr. Moviefone reminding you to buckle up seem so - I don't know, analog? Windows 95? Last century?
Taxi TV is chip convergence at work, a "fully integrated, one-of-a-kind customer service enhancement," according to the TLC enforcer, for payment and content delivery systems. Hacks can worry about about tracing data and GPS monitoring, but you get to flick around your credit card for an even further abstraction of exchange value, with a mandated transaction guarantee of two seconds for a tap with your plastic. An old-fashioned magnetic slide will take between five and eight seconds of data speed.
Luckily, there is variety, because four different types of Passenger Information Monitors (PIM) are offered, so you'll never know from whom you're going to get your news needs on the go until you sit down. What you're going to get has already been determined: VeriFone (with WABC 7online), Creative Mobile Technologies (with Clear Channel "NY10" from NBC Universal and Bank of America), TaxiTech (with Verizon and HSBC), promising "contextual interactive information" with "meaningful and targeted content" or the Digital Dispatch iView 8000™ that merely offers a "choice in information and entertainment from the content provider."
2007-07-28
will it do ya good?
Change is all around and you best be embracing it big time. No longer, too, the kind when you followed the river down to Gorky Park. Just gauge it by how much this news item disturbs you: the screen-on-your-screen app that gave us all tube vision is now working with "major content companies on video recognition technology as sophisticated as the fingerprint technology used by the FBI." Oh, Kay? Still not buying it?
Promises, promises - if only. The art of criticism has been reduced to an enterprise of celebration "in discovery and defense of the new," which, for want of a better voice, might be worrisome as well, but, then again, what else is there to say, given that looking back only distracts from the now? Perhaps another toast to non-idiocy. The distance between insanity and genius is only measured by success, said the media mogul, but it does look a little sad when down on the Street Journal-ists have to learn about subversive sarcasm and workers' solidarity by declaring that they "fly with Leslie." Well, I would fly with Leslie, too, but that doesn't count because my stock is merely virtual.
There is another kind of change, though, and it's already called "colony collapse disorder." That's the one that frightens me. No adverbial qualifiers necessary.
2007-07-12
if you plant koans, you get koans.
These are some of the current memes that briefly managed to shock me out of my bourgeois complacency:
"Ubiquity is the new exclusivity"
"Christian Porn" and MTV's "Engaged and Underage"
Bridgewater, Blackwater, and Clearwater
Darfur is a pesky "global awareness" default on Google Earth
"Alles Unbedingte gehört in die Pathologie" (Friedrich Nietzsche)
"Content counts most of all"
"To clarify, add detail"
"Dirty kuffar" on liveleak
"Наши"
And "gloves-come-off " gut feelings are (now and again) the benchmarks for standard deviations.
Then I zoned out once more.
2007-06-26
remember the à la mode.
Most of the brief and sideways-glancing observations that I have time to register can be dismissed as part of the vastly gratuitous work supplied by the information proletariat. It would seem entirely appropriate if the most frequently used word in blog titles were "rants," because such an explanation dovetails nicely with the particular energy expended by us nomademics - the impulse manifested in thinking that does not get annotated and channeled properly and therefore turns subjective and withers.
What this needs is the decision of the three-judges panel, their judgment we succumb to in the absence of a moral compass that decides whether it is reasonable to have sinewy dead Chinese dissidents advertise the commercial miracle of Bodies resurrected for the progressively new, while there is a serious debate about how we should not have flags raised at half-staff for the fallen and the declaration that "standards at Guantánamo rival or exceed those at similar institutions" counts as something worth contemplating.
I thought by now they'd have string quartets there to perform for the International Red Cross. And, in between, as the man says: We'll always have Perez, to cover the 30-mile DMZ of what really matters.
A salute here for the bark howl.
2007-06-21
a footnote on gesture.
In a city that is generally celebrated as diverse and cosmopolitan, the ubiquitous instances of uniformity in behavior stand out all the more starkly for their frequency. In remarkable numbers, younger white women walk around sporting amateur scowls while clinging silently to cell phones pressed against their left ears. This naively desperate gesture is meant to convey the fact that their presence is required elsewhere and that they are not yet convinced enough to pay attention to the moment - here, after all, is not where they ought to be.
Rather predictably, on the other hand, white men are rarely compelled to display such elaborate pantomimes of positioning. Their overall attitude is at best reducible to wearing flip-flop thongs in public, a gestural mode which merely captures the sense that the world is their bathroom.
2007-06-11
synaesthetic assessments.
The discursive registers last week came down squarely in favor of the judgment of Paris over and against any discussion of the legality of Gitmo incarcerations. Still, some things were worth waiting for. The show that made the greeting "whoa, dere he is" acceptable among educated people ended, interrupted -- an intervention turned interference.
Meanwhile on myface ("dotcom") and similar sites, the exegesis of Apple's iphone previews yielded screenshots that promise a standard web optimization: Apple Store, Amazon, New York Times (headline Democrats Take Control of Congress, with the image of "Palomino" Pelosi), Fandango (includes We Are Marshall in their Top Ten), Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia (googled via iPod entry), and the Fours Seasons Hawaii site. My bookmarks, give or take.
At the other end, it was difficult to distinguish where popular memes end and synaesthesia begins. But it now seems that decades can, in fact, be organized according to color schemes. The 'Ohs are shaping up to be characterized by tangerine and light gray. The '90s were sandy beige and sepia, the '80s turquoise and pink (allegedly), the '70s avocado and apricot, the '60s goldenrod and magenta, the '50s salmon and periwinkle, and the '40s eigengrau and burnt sienna. The '30s were green, I think.
It may help, though, to know that there are less than two dozen billionaires living in China, Brazil and Hongkong each, ten that make their home in South Korea or Mexico, and only eight among the citizens of Switzerland, Sweden, and Taiwan.
2007-05-16
the seven signs.
Observe. The following signs were on display last week, from billboards to bumper stickers, across three states:
1. Algorithm killed the Butler.
2. Your Closet is Scarier than Bush's Agenda.
3. Destroy your Porn Collection.
4. Motherhood - What a Glorious Career.
5. Your Liver is Evil and Must be Destroyed.
6. I Support Quasi-Fascist Automotive Fads.
7. All You Can Eat Mother's Day Buffet.
Aural sign assessment: bom chicka wah wah is going to be one obnoxious commercial meme.
2007-04-30
soul and form.
"The critic is one who glimpses destiny in forms: whose most profound experience is the soul-content which forms indirectly and unconsciously conceal within themselves. Form is his great experience, form -- as immediate reality -- is the image-element, the really living content of his writings. This form, which springs from a symbolic contemplation of life symbols, acquires a life of its own through the power of that experience. It becomes a world-view, a standpoint, and attitude vis-à-vis the life from which it sprang: a possibility of reshaping it, of creating it anew. The critic's moment of destiny, therefore, is that moment at which things become forms -- the moment when all feelings and experiences on the near or the far side of form receive form, are melted down and condensed into form."
Georg Lukács, 1910.
2007-03-29
exhibit a for the historians.
As if Hollywood writes its own ideology critiques for future collectors, the 300 top the boffo again and reach for the stratosphere of 200 mill within the first four weeks, Reign Over Me takes care of trauma and lets the healing process begin, Blades of Glory promises insights into aggression and victory in a time of war and the Hills Still Know What Eyes You Had Last Summer...
And the chrishun community gets a real shoutout this summer with Evan Almighty and The Reaping.
Until then, here are the red-flag four terms and phrases that indicate you are unfortunately faced with lazy thinking:
"germane"
"whether it be"
"aforementioned"
"task at hand"
2007-03-16
2007-03-02
an exercise in visualization.
Härr Hüttler does Gerhard "der Leasingvertrag" Polt, a Bavarian satire classic.
2007-03-01
inland empire.
Just for the record. Once the semi-pissy reviews have faded and once you have accepted that video will have a place on the big screen, David Lynch 's Inland Empire will prove to be the Finnegans Wake to Mulholland Drive, the Ulysses of Lynchian imagination. I leaped in joy and said, yes, this is one mighty fine movie.
On the other side of the spectrum, the rule of thumb has become that any film carrying the praises of Pete Hammond ("Maxim") or Jeffrey Lyons ("NBC") is to be avoided. On a really-needed-to-know-this basis, The Lost World was the first in-flight movie shown on the London - Paris Imperial Airways flight in April 1925.
2007-02-13
fuzzy on a molar level.
One of the most vexing issues to parse at the moment is the ways in which complexity and expertise are being redefined. Sure, information is the new currency and the permanent "overwhelm" is a function of the welcome democratization that wrests control of the soundbite (and, really, how long did it take for someone to coin the term blogorrhea? this is for the historians of the moment to record), the elevation of the minutiae and the arcane over the profound, the volume against the reduction, the thumbs up and the dumb down... yes, of course -- but all of this feeds into the problem of not knowing where to look. The real problematics of the age becomes: change is not good when you no longer know from what to avert your eyes. The Western dilemma, for lack of a better word, is that which turns public discourse into cultural autism because we cannot bear to look anymore while we are being forced to see.
2007-01-25
some numbers.
Here are the current numbers:
- Movies are now screened in Second Life
- "Cocktail No. 4" initiates happy hour at Gitmo
- The average city flâneur now encounters roughly five thousand advertisements per day
- 78 % of all NFL players are unemployed, bankrupt or divorced within two years of leaving the game
- The odds of The Departed winning the Best Picture Oscar are listed at 10/11
2007-01-15
2007-01-03
make no mistake.
We are, after all, at war.
This snapshot comes from the Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena, CA, with this year's theme of "Our Good Nature."
