Addictions

I can not recall the first time I ate at McDonalds. I remember my stepsister describing it as mickie dees and my Dad desperately trying to avoid it. The golden arches have travelled the world, a few even exist in Bangkok now, but would anyone describe McDonalds as addictive?
The term adddiction came to my eighties self in after school programs, it was the result of deformed drug dealers, marijuana and cocaine, the large dog detective that dared you to stay off drugs, addiction was limited to chemical substances, the word could not travel outside the criminal underworld. The origins of meaning are frivilous Derrida assures us, but its funny how one definition hijacked by a Reagen drug war can become so enforced, it causes the observer to ignore other symptoms deserving of the term.

Steam is a cloud based gaming service. It sells a virtual good downloads of video games. Steam could not qualify as an addiction under my previous variant of the term, but i wouldn’t hesitate to swoop down and buy a 75% off madness sale at any minute. Steam understands that consumerism is addictive, that if a price point is terribly low, the purhase becomes more compelling, never mind that virtual goods cost almost nothing to copy. When I bought batman arkham asylum for 7 usd i actually felt ripped off when I saw the same deal the next day, part of the purchase was its exclusivity, the fact that I logged in at the right time (side note in class right now and principal of school is talking about mc hammer in thai right now). Steam is addictive, but in ways that drugs aren’t. It is immateril omnipresent, a fix is as simple as a password.

The other night, convinced I needed to do work, i took a cab home. Stuck in traffic a few blocks from my house i got out and walked and boom! In a pc bar letting my batman game download. I even have a little canvas tote bag just for my games addiction. Everyday i get home and can’t wait to put it on. Games have a stopping point though, despite how much I enjoy team fortress 2, i still can’t play more than a few rounds with out a slight case of information overload filling me with dread. I remember in college chain smoking till i vomited, i couldn’t touch marlbro lights for years afterwards.
Addiction is a midddle groud, it exists because other things keep us from getting enough. Addiction is desire’s tumor, the way pleasure makes us sick, the destructive side of joy, but it is also punishment. When we finally got to mickey dees that day, the burger stung my throat, the pepsi burned, the fries were to hot, i cried in a litte yellow booth and was scared by a horribley pleasant clown, i didn’t want to go there again, but the pain persited, and you need another fry to balance the first one.

On Beatles Fans

Something about Beatles fans has always really annoyed me. It’s like they know some secret of life that eludes me. Even worse, the secret is supposed to be so obvious, that when I obviously don’t enjoy their music, they all just look at me like dude what the fuck is wrong with you.

Growing up the Beatles were aggravating, all their happy lyrics and the way they turned complicated issues into simple pictorial statements really rubbed me the wrong. There were like a ray of light trying to pierce an abyss, except imagine the sun has a submarine and is submerging itself in order to chase away the blues. Such is the way Beatles fans feel to me, ya know like you have to be happy or something is wrong with you. Which, granted, something is wrong with me, but The Beatles simplicity, their lack of emotional depth or complications, that they could just ya know write songs that simple really annoyed me and brings me no satisfaction. Everytime they came on the jukebox I always felt that slight dread, the day Revoltion 9’s grating radio feedback would become part of my everyday listening habits, when the stupid refrain from The Taxman would cease to annoy and the simple energy of the song would take over. I dreaded the moment that The Beatles became good to me when the icy waters of my soul would have to give in to their chimes and I would float away like a bird on pyschdelic jetsome.

Now we could argue that all great bands are built on such reputations. A lot of people don’t like Bob Dylan… I love him, but his last few albums have totally sucked. But unfortunately somewhere in the repetitive nature of broadcast, in the groups dynamics that keep us all in one uniform culture, we are repeatably exposed to other’s taste, but where Dylan might actually elicit a thought, The Stones might capture the alienation of racial or sexual minorities, The Beatles are always upholding a (yes I really am going to use this term) a status qou. They are the music of a generation that interpreted the sixities counter-culture as a break before suburbia, now mind you their values are better than many, they are after all anti-war and all that and when Paul McCartney goes out on a limb supporting the Dali Lama or whatever he seems quite sincere as much that Yoko and John had something to day, but I just really don’t like their music. So I’ve devised the following game for everyone to play.

Think of a moment before you liked band X. Now hold that feeling in your memory and repeat it. Now repeat after me, “I hate ____________.” Just say it, right now in front of the monitor. Do this everyday till you really build up a resistance to band X. Now look in the mirror everyday and remember that you have just defeated a part of the capitalist machine. Good luck Warrior =)

On a similar note, it would be interesting to get people who intrinisically dislike a certian music together in a room. i.e. a photo of people who hate The Beatles, a photo of people who hate The Rolling Stones, etc.

The Renaissance

The greatest periods in human histoty have involved the mass importation of ethnic knowledge from abroad. The Renaissance was essentialy the importation of Roman and Greek and especially Asian knowledge and ways of thinking & governing. Asians today are spending their lives accumulating new forms of knowing some detrimental to their ethnicity others cut off from ethnicity by colonialism just learning to reformulate their selves.

The past is rich and deep, it is full of ethnicities worth assuming and models of society and government far more well thought than many today, but because we sit at the top of the heap, we assume the past is inferior. The Western now is full of hubris, we think we are the most tolerant, the most open, the most humane etc, but It was the periods where the present had humility to the past that gave the present its most advanced and complicated forms and its greatest openess to its own potentiality.

Mach-20 by Laurie Anderson Fragment

This has been sitting in my drafts file for awhile. Made some minor revisions and decided to publish it because it’s 4 a.m. and I have nothing else to do. WordPress doesn’t let me embed you so you can watch Mach-2o here.

Laurie was able to take an idea like information and turn it into a sperm whale race by adopting the conventions of the research paper and folding it into a storybook. Her pieces like Mach-20 aren’t brilliant for their literal conceptual meaning, but the way they shift the topography of our ideas. By simply folding metaphors, changing the track of her thought, and wandering inspiridely through her thinking, she reintroduces wonder into a stale intellectual environment. But it brings me back to Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train, one of Randy Newman’s greater charms according to Marcus is that Newman’s inventive and self-conscious, Laurie Anderson on the other hand is inventive with consciousness. Mach-20 employs a kinda metaphorical thinking similar to the lyrical output of Bob Dylan and Stephen Malkmus, but she is able to move these totemic ideas into constellations that collapse in wonder.  Anyway, she caught a little euraka moment, but even better she manages to share the process of coming to that thought with us.

The Apocalypse / McCarthy / The Road

“Dreaming of Islands – whether with joy or in fear…is dreaming of pulling away, of being separate, far from any Continent, of being lost and alone” says Delueze in Desert Islands and other texts. The Deserted Island, that fabled space is inherently a place of Isolation. The Apocalypse is an Island. In it we find that simultaneous distance, yet desire for destruction that supposedly runs identity anew. The Apocalypse destroys all social identities, it cuts its subject down to alienation and into introspection. The stories are usually populated by a few sparse characters, hence there is rarely complete isolation, but their relations become strained, they lack the world of relations they once inhabited. Its isolation is unique because of the liberation it provides, yet it often brings to bear the price of destroying civilization, as one of the characters in Dawn of the Dead proclaims about Zombies, “They’re us!”.

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road all such pretensions such as Zombies are dropped. In the desolate Apocalypse, man is a cannibal. McCarthy’s book are usually rather brutal. They are studies in masculinity, but their bare frames are populated with ideas. The Road is something of a study in morality, its protagonists refuse cannibalism, but suffer greatly for their ethical fortitude. It is however the complete nothingness of the novel that makes it unique, McCarthy isn’t interested in anything more than the context, the novel’s characters never become clear, its plot is at most minimal, what McCarthy is in love with is the bleak alienation of the environment and the questions it can provide. The novel is full of cheesy little comments about God (which is interesting because so many Apocalypses are either ecological or scientific these days), but its the setting that matters, the way McCarthy manages to remove all hope of rebirth. His prose has always been iconic, landscapes become maps of the unconsciousness, alienation is cherished in mute bluffs and streams become stories. McCarthy is adept enough a writer to make his landscapes characters, and the environment is the most novel’s most developed character, but it says a lot about us the reader that we desire such environments, that desolation is our imagination’s playpen, and does it make us cannibals, that we desire alienation of this level, that we wish away humanity on occassion?

Stiglitz on the bail out plan

“Trickle down economics… sees the fundamental problem as a crisis of confidence. That no doubt is part of the problem; but the failure of confidence is because the financial markets made some very bad loans. That’s not just a matter of imagination or perception. It’s reality” link

It’s interesting that so much of libertarian economic theory relies on a kinda bluff. Ya know as long as people think you’re the best… etc. The Government bailing out finance companies shouldn’t restore confidence in them, if anything it means that the same people who made incredibly bad loans are still working at those companies…

Mr. Stiglitz goes further to point out that regardless of what bail out plan the finacial companies recieve, the U.S. economy is based on borrowing, housing prices still have a lot of room to fall, and the millions in devalued houses will have to cut their spending regardless of how their mortage is restructured.

Qoutes: Sontag, Eno, others

Sorry about the fact this blog is basically just a bunch of my links these days, anyway reading Sontag’s In America (it’s quite good, but the intellectual conversation she’s responding to is so familar to make many of the ideas trite).

“I can’t help thinking a person who sneezes in an absurd way is also lacking in self-respect. Why else consent to something so unattractive? It ought to be a matter of concertration and resolve to sneeze gracefully, candidly. Like a handshake.”

“And God is abetting all this. This longing for newness, emptiness, pastlessness. This dream of turning life into pure future. Perhaps He has no choice-though, in so doing, God the Star is signing His own death warrant as an actor, as the star of stars. No longer will He be guaranteed the major role in any drama of consequence attended by the most coveted, educated audiences. At best, minor roles from now on-except in picturaseque backwaters, where people have never seen a play without Him. All this moving the audience about will amount to the end of His career.

Does God know this? Probably he does. But that won’t stop Him: He’s a trouper.

God Spits. ”

It’s fucking hilarious, and a rather good summary of the movement away from religion dating around this time historically in the novel to Darwin and a harbinger of Neitsche.

“She wished she were in love, for being helplessly in love awakens one’s better self. But when marriage puts an end to that, it is deliverance. Love makes men strong, self-confident. It makes women weak. Friendship, though… that was another matter. Friends make you strong.”

“You are whatever you think you are… Whatever you dare think you are. And to be free to think yourself something you’re not, something better than what you are-isn’t that the true freedom promised by the country to which he was journeying?”

“The first morning he masturbated to the mental image of a fat brown walrus slowly turning from side to side.”

Clearly she had a deep understanding of male desire.

All qoutes from In America by Susan Sontag

And one from Eno via an old copy of Frieze:

“Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.”

Dan Fox qoutes it from Brian Eno,A year with Swollen Appendices, Faber and Faber, London, 1996

And finally Pynchon, ” ‘Explosion with out an objective’, delcared Miles Blundell, ‘is politics in its purest form.’ ” from against the day

p.s. added amazon referrals to make the blog more long-tail-ish.

Planned obsolescence in music?

Does anyone else find that if you listen to Maroon 5’s won’t go home with out you, the lead singer’s semi-Peter Gabriel warble begins to feel like a chemical fire headache burning in the back of your head? Anyone else think this might be intentional because they want you to buy more tracks? As mush as that the carbonation and salt in soft drinks make us slurp all the more, building over tired pop songs with a slightly twist brings the familar before we’re reminded of the exhaustation that lead us to give up on those dead ends long ago (no offense to Mr. Gabriel who made some fine pop albums in his time).

Anyway, I’ve been teaching my students songs lately and they’ve voted in a bevy of crunk-hop (Low by Flo-rida), Linkin Park, and of course Maroon 5. It’s amazing how hardcore these market research teams are these days, I mean Linkin Park’s Numb about nails the rebellious teenager thing as much as that Britney’s Oops.. I did it again was all about ya know, turning guys on accidentally, unintentionally, etc. I have a friend in L.A. whose roommate apparently sits around writing these things all day.

Park’s Numb at the very least seems to be a kinda paeon to Lacan’s idea of moving from the Imaginary to the Symbolic where ya know we decide our parents suck and move on to grossly over simply and reference an idea I’m not really the familar with. It’s promoting an agenda of psychological development that previous generations declared in form, but putting the ideas down lyrically. While ya know, glam rock separated itself from the hippies giving kids new identities to run around in, Linkin Park sticks with the tired and true hardcore-alterna sound while merely singing about the type of difference that used to be inherent.

I’m glad to see that the major labels have at least valued generational difference enough to conduct some market research into the average angry teenager and then proceed to co-opt them with rehashed teenage existentialism. It is perhaps telling that while a few plays of Police like Maroon 5 pop tire me, I have never really cut that bond of identification with my parents and hence Numb continues to have that subtle thrill and the glory of ya knowing breaking off from the mothership. Regardless, I am impressed as always with how well these people know their customers, as they track my every pirated mp3 play of these songs video windows media player, profiling my students’ basic personality types, and then making eerily accurate predictions of what next year’s generation will enjoy, although I get feeling they’ll be strangely like the last one, after all new bands cost money and copyright extension created classic radio so why not jerk off another generation for another year or so?

Qoutes from Mystery Train

As a former music critic, I know exactly how he feels:

“the white country music…there was a problem with that music. It so perfectly expressed the acceptance and fatalism of its audience… that the music brought all it had to say to the surface, told no secrets, and had no use for novelty. It was conservative in an almost tragic sense, because it carried no hope of change, only respite. By the early fifties this music was all limits.” Page 17

“Rock ‘n’ roll is suffering from the old progressive school fallacy that says if what you write is about your own feelings, no one can criticize it. Truth telling is beginning to settle into a slough where it is nothing more than a pedestrian autobiography set to placid music framed by a sad smile on the album cover… singers have dispensed with imagination and songs are just pages out of a diary with nothing in them that could give them a life of their own.”  Page 105 This perfectly describes Emo in everyway possible.

All qoutes from Greil Marcus

What is the most played space in Video Game history?

Architecture is reliant in the familar, the experienced, the experiences we build up behind it. Video games are mass Architecture, we might all know the Gehry Guggenheim, but how many people have walked in it compared with Super Mario Brothers? Rebuild a scale room model of a level from a video game.