Let your reality be imposed upon me. Some climate updates from the frogboiler; or, the torpor report, depending on your mixed-meteorological preferences for metaphors of body temperatures. My cultural stupor was briefly disturbed by the following, as a general sense of apprehension encroaches and a smug inability to understand begins to envelop us all:
The term Earth Browser.
A veteran of foreign wars peddling a "thirty-dollar" vinyl album (Buckingham Nicks) for the asking price of "5 dollars" on the street.
My local paper describing a party where wagyu beef has replaced truffles -- same cost, less ostentatious.
The lunchtime sight of a tie-less suit resolutely carrying a cardboard box with his office belongings towards Grand Central Terminal.
A graffiti tag on a wall on 3rd Avenue in Kips Bay: rumspringa. At least some Amish punks are still at it.
FTW: Nicholas Fehn, the person of our age.
The spam headers "please, respond me" and "get a professional sized pecker now."
My embrace of twitter, despite my vehement reservations.
The fact that Google receives a resume every 30 seconds (or about 20,000 per week).
"We seem to be experimenting some technological differences."
2008-09-25
words are the semaphores, the grand flags of communication.
at 18:37
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2 comments:
Lieber D. / C. / v.W. --
...and space and time alike are caught in the thickening web. I offer you a months-late slow-motion ricochet from a\
vagabond westerner who knows you only by your work in the 140-char degraded haiku form of the moment (What if tweet\
culture insisted upon a certain rhythmic patterning? Or that at least 20 chars be devoted to the praise of some kin\
d of natural -- or virtual -- phenomenon?). I offer you a glancing swipe, a counter-pattern, belated and almost cer\
tainly irrelevant. I offer you the all-too-common but strange and slightly unnerving spectacle of a little clump of\
language thought-through and carefully attended to by someone whom you know only as text, as a character in a game.\
You know Ophelia more intimately than you know me.
To wit:
The world runs to ground; Angelus Novus is treffend, all these decades later. But today's angel is buoyed by Prozac\
; ecstasy has been drained from the machine, and replaced with Botox, the embalming fluid of the age. Indeed, "emba\
lming" is perhaps the appropriate metaphor for the right now in which everything slimy has been replaced by the plas\
tic version of itself.
The exclamation of our time: "Whee!"
The children of the West, my co-workers, are new and shiny. They are uniformly filled with happiness, they are unif\
ormly filled with despair. They hike on the weekends, out to the hills, with signs that warn of mountain lions. Th\
ey carry mace, they hike in groups, they are always careful. And there really are almost no mountain lions left; th\
e frisson of fear is pure pleasure. The despair is hedged in with action, but it doesn't even rise to the level of \
"frantic." Despair for the children of the West is like a stone they carry in their pocket; even the agony has been\
rolled into a given form, and nobody doesn't know what to do.
Frost was right about the fire -- look at the rage of the net -- but wrong about the heat. Virtual anger is heatles\
s; we're all just fighting with images we generate ourselves. Arguing with ourselves. Falling in love with ourselv\
es. Who do we know as text? My Hamlet is not yours; your Miranda is not mine.
Could man be drunk forever. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
- M.
Lieber D. / C. / v.W. --
...and space and time alike are caught in the thickening web. I offer you a months-late slow-motion ricochet from a vagabond westerner who knows you only by your work in the 140-char degraded haiku form of the moment (What if tweet culture insisted upon a certain rhythmic patterning? Or that at least 20 chars be devoted to the praise of some kind of natural -- or virtual -- phenomenon?). I offer you a glancing swipe, a counter-pattern, belated and almost certainly irrelevant. I offer you the all-too-common but strange and slightly unnerving spectacle of a little clump of language thought-through and carefully attended to by someone whom you know only as text, as a character in a game. You know Ophelia more intimately than you know me.
To wit:
The world runs to ground; Angelus Novus is treffend, all these decades later. But today's angel is buoyed by Prozac; ecstasy has been drained from the machine, and replaced with Botox, the embalming fluid of the age. Indeed, "embalming" is perhaps the appropriate metaphor for the right now in which everything slimy has been replaced by the plastic version of itself.
The exclamation of our time: "Whee!"
The children of the West, my co-workers, are new and shiny. They are uniformly filled with happiness, they are uniformly filled with despair. They hike on the weekends, out to the hills, with signs that warn of mountain lions. They carry mace, they hike in groups, they are always careful. And there really are almost no mountain lions left; the frisson of fear is pure pleasure. The despair is hedged in with action, but it doesn't even rise to the level of "frantic." Despair for the children of the West is like a stone they carry in their pocket; even the agony has been rolled into a given form, and nobody doesn't know what to do.
Frost was right about the fire -- look at the rage of the net -- but wrong about the heat. Virtual anger is heatless; we're all just fighting with images we generate ourselves. Arguing with ourselves. Falling in love with ourselves. Who do we know as text? My Hamlet is not yours; your Miranda is not mine.
Could man be drunk forever. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
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