It's all around you, like smog. This train isn't bound for glory.
Background by Deak Ferrand, who pwnz.
If you were referred here by Technorati, please note that the entry you are looking for is probably the one PRIOR TO the one you were actually referred to, due to a bug in their indexing process. Please see previous entry.
The Great American Novel - is generally a road novel.
(Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, Naked Lunch, The History of Luminous Motion...)
We are away from home - we can long for it, but we can't go there. Twain tries to return Huckleberry Finn to his hometown, but we are not Ulysses, and eveyone hates that ending, and marvels at Twain's moment of cowardice - which he partially redeems by promising that Huck will "light out for the territories".
We are away from home, and we can't go back. We are not entirely familiar with our surroundings. We are in a foreign land, all our lives, and we must improvise, or try to get by on charm and by being openly naive. We are in motion. We have to find the new home to replace the lost homeland. The urge for home is never satisfied by a new home, though - it could only be assuaged, if that were even possible for us, by the original home.
I think people don't yet grasp the immensity of what is going on right now. They think they do, but they are thinking small, because they are small. Everything that has happened up until now was a prologue. Right now, we are living through the beginningof history, not the end.
Let me make it more vivid: Our proto-human ancestors developed fire, tools, weapons, and clothing. As a result, we have language, leisure, and wealth, and are mostly hairless. Later, we developed agriculture, and as a result we have religion and government. We developed the wheel, and as a result we have begun to develop spaceflight. We developed writing, which led to the development of individualism and democracy.
And then, for a while, nothing much happened.
Within the past two centuries, we have developed what may appear to be separate technologies, but which amount to a single shift: power generation, telephony, recording and broadcast media, and electronics generally, all of these converging on a global (and increasingly wireless) network of millions of computers.
If banging two rocks togther to strike a spark into some dried grasses made us lose our fur; if poking a seed into the soil led to the total upheavel of our social life; if a rounded rock or two mounted on a pole led to rocketships - what, then, will an instantaneous global communications network and universally accessible repository of all knowledge do?
Our descendents will forget our wars and the ideologies that fueled them long before they forget our technology.
Our forebears did not know what they were doing for (or to) us; similarly, we have no way of knowing what we are doing to (or for) our descendents. But precedent indicates that it will be - unprecedented.
Sometimes, it seems you wish to appeal to the values of ordinary decent hard-working people.
I wish you would make up your mind. You may speak of ordinary people or you may speak of decent people. But these are two different groups.
Ordinary people supported the fascists and Nazis. Ordinary people lynched blacks, beat up freedom riders, jailed civil rights leaders, terrorized the queer kids in high school, and voted for villains like Wallace and Bush. Ordinary people hate science and love superstition. Ordinary people love war; they are rabid nationalists. Ordinary people stifle and beat their children. Ordinary people can't drive for shit. Ordinary people enforce conformity through force and employment - the threat of joblessness is financial blackmail that keeps people acting as "normally" as they are able, and starves those who can't or won't fake it straight to death. Ordinary people overconsume and waste and render unclean. Ordinary people are destroying the environment, and may cause the end of life on Earth (or at least vertebrate life). Ordinary people, in short, are the main reason the world is unlivable, and Utopia unattainable.
Let's look at the KKK - some think of them as being like Stormtroopers, or perhaps reactionary guerrilla soldiers, or terrorists, or some-such. But no - look into them, and you will see that they are ordinary, hard-working people who love their families and their country.
I recently found a copy of an email I sent to my loved one perhaps two years ago, with Subject: Today. For whatever reason, it interests me, so I am posting it here in the hopes that it also does something for you. "Campus" is a private college in whose offices I worked at the time (not teaching, sadly), and "Town" is the LA-area city in which it is located. North Park is somewhere I grew up, and Balboa Park is the large urban park in whose nooks and crannies the benign heart of San Diego, (my hometown) beats.
[X],
It's very strange to me, but on the busride over here, and walking to campus I felt - different. In a good way. Free and clear, I think might give a notion of it. Everything was very vivid and nice - walking through [Town] was like walking through North Park years ago, and walking across campus felt like walking through Balboa Park as a kid. I felt like I remember feeling a very long time ago. The concrete steps were eminently look-at-able, with the texture, the moisture, the moss... all very clear and present. I feel, still, remarkably unburdened. Not anxious, angry, exhausted. "Ain't got no quarrels with God," as it were. But not hyper-agitated like something drug-induced or forced. No drama, no epiphanies, but also no problems to speak of.
It's weird, and I wonder - is this what it feels like to not be depressed?
[ FAIR WARNING:There are some links to Encyclopedia Dramatica below. If you are still capable of being shocked or offended atanything, or are naïve, and liable to click on links without considering first the possible consequences, don't go there. Period. And don't cry to me if you do. ]
If the level of noise in the media (old and new) is any indication, we apparently have a Problem. Sometimes it's discussed as a problem with DRM, or with Intellectual Property, or with Piracy (Yaaar!), but, really, it's always the same problem, which is the increasingly weak connection between the distribution of creative work and compensation for its production. Briefly: Everyone loves art, but no-one is ponying up the $$$. Which would be great, except it's not clear how anyone is supposed to produce the art, music, and writing in question without either (a) starving, or (b) having a trust fund. And when we expand the discussion to things like software, it gets worse. At bottom, anything that can be considered information is vulnerable to being redistributed or repurposed without being paid for, and everyone from the UN to [your favorite shitty band's name here] has their panties in a twist over it.
The deeper problem is that many involved seem to be pretending that the world hasn't changed recently, nor will it change soon. Of course, the world is always changing. And in the areas of production and distribution of information, we may as well have all moved to Mars, for all the good our old ideas are going to do us. insisting that our expectations should determine our outcomes doesn't have much of an impact on the facts, who are notoriously cold dudes.
The solution can only begin after we admit the nature of our situation, and then react to it as it is, rather than as we would like to imagine it. The typical attempts at solutions - iTunes, DRM, prosecution of end-users, attacks on sites like the Pirate Bay, suppression of tools and information which facilitate "piracy", and so on - are all basically attempts to live full-time in Disneyland. People become embarassingly infantile when they try to preserve the world they understand in the face of the actual world as it stands, which does not care if they are comfortable.
So, what is our actual situation? Simply put:
If something can be rendered as electronically transmissable information, it already has been, or will be next week.
Anything thus encoded has already been rendered copyable, unlocked, and unrestricted, or can be made so on demand.
(To which should probably, for Tradition's sake, be added Rule 34: There is porn of it. No exceptions. )
Add to this that making art out of other art has been a major source of new aesthetic modes for perhaps a century now (collage, sampling, détournement, scratching, etc.), and the fact that such an approach is rational and proper when programming. Repurposing others' work is a current project of our civilization, and stopping it is first of all futile, and furthermore the act of a philistine.
In short, "Intellectual Property" is collapsing, or, really, it's moot - and there is nothing to be done about it. Let's take a look at the term itself. "Intellectual" is clear enough - we're dealing with brain-children here. Well, people have always had those. What about "Property"? Well... have people always had that? I suppose, yes, in the sense of consumables, durable goods, and other stuff. (They certainly did not, in terms of, say, land. ) But did the first person to tell a joke expect that it would never be repeated? Did they demand that someone give them a fish every time their joke was used? More likely, they just hoped to get invited over for drinks and roast mammoth more often, and perhaps to have a fractionally better chance at getting laid. This tradition is carried out even now by the rock bass players of the world.
This will end up being far too long if I go through every art and every period of history, but think it through with me - what was a musician or an author or artist at each stage of history? Or a mathematician or scientist or philosopher? How did they eat? What did they own? What were the corresponding articles that could be owned? Hint: People hired musicians to play music, not to compose it. People paid for books, or for manuscripts to be copied - the pay going to the printer, bookseller, scribe or scriptorium, not to the author. To buy a painting, of course, you had to go the painter - that's because a painting is a thing. But, while a book is a thing, a text, as embodied in a book, is not.
Being a writer was never a job - it was a vocation, perhaps. Or a hobby. One participated in it because one was able to. Privilege was one way in. Working a day job was another. (I'll cite the lens-grinder Spinoza as proof that the day job option really was there.) The priesthood (a sort of combination of the previous two solutions) was another solution. But the best solution was patronage. If you were good, someone, hopefully, would notice; if not, you got a day job until someone did. This worked because there was a corresponding a social pressure for the affluent to be, as the cliché goes, "patrons of the arts". The artist got status from their work being read, heard, or viewed. The patron got status for supporting the culture by supporting those who contributed to it, or advanced it.
Now, this is limiting - what wealthy baron is going to support an author who wants to call wealth and aristocracy into question? And, of course, as society reorganized itself under new principles, new forms of production, and so on, new ways of creative production also emerged. Capitalism has a lot to do with this, but so do things like new printing technologies, which allowed for newspapers and other media that needed content-on-demand with minimal turnaround time - which noöne is going to do if you don't pay them for it. Or: The professional writer as a job category emerged. This is linked with the emergence of forms like the newspaper that did need to be paid for if one wanted the current version, andalso with the development of advertising - a still-relevant force on these here tubes. Similar stories can be told about the impact of recording technology on music, and of other social changes on the sciences, for that matter. This worked acceptably well for a while, until - now. The Great Interwebs Monster has swept the commercial-industrial model of creative production clean off the table, I fear.
Capitalism misconstrues the things it wasn't designed to model. (Witness what it has done to sex.) Patents, R&D divisions, and so on emerged to support the kind of commercially-driven production of ideas that we associate with new inventions, medicines, etc. But this is very different from creative work in the arts and letters, and shouldn't be - really, should never have been - the model for production in those areas.
As I've been insisting, times have of course changed, and in many ways for the better. The distance between creator and audience is quite small anymore - many bands now have fanbases in the low thousands, with whom they communicate directly through their websites. It is something of a mark of pride among music geeks to champion bands that have more members than fans. Nearly anyone can create and distribute music, art, or anything else online, probably not producing any durable media (books, CDs, etc.) on their own, and gathering such attention as they are able to gather. The age of superstars may be ending, and the age of the niche already has begun. It's been decades since bands started producing short runs of 7" vinyl singles - 500 copies used to be pretty standard, and I have the evidence in hand. 'Zines, and their current descendents on the web, tell the same story - if you produce something you believe in, and do so cheaply but sincerely, you will find a small, but equally sincere audience (many of whom will have their own creative projects) to share in the joy. The future is in Microfame.
But... Money?
My best guess at a solution to that problem is a return to the patronage system. Nothing, of course, will stop a suitably motivated but un-patronized person from pursuing their art - getting paid to write is quite different from being driven to write and needing to eat. For the unpopular but driven, day jobs remain available, and perhaps sleep gets lost, but the "starving artist" remains a viable personal myth.
How could patronage work under these new conditions? My thesis is that it already is working, and is simply taking time to be fully understood by everyone involved.
It is certainly possible (see SNOCAP) for the microfamous to impose on fans' goodwill to pay for recordings. Radiohead's recent experiment in soliciting voluntary payment for their work may give us some indication of how well that approach works. I suspect it will work just fine - except for the recording industry, who were, however, a bunch of greedy fucks who habitually ripped off artists anyway, so good riddance.
Another possibility, which seems to have worked out prety well for webcomic author Jeph Jacques, is the Shwag Approach. His strip, Questionable Content is, of course, free of charge, and, of course, partially suported by some modest advertising. Somewhere along the line, he started drawing clever T-shirts on his characters, and his fans started asking if it were possible to buy them. Not being an idiot, he started producing shirts, and now, if I am not mistaken, he works full-time on his strip and website, and supports the whole by working the schwag angle for all it's worth. (They are, I should add, very nice shirts.) Corresponding merch strategies no doubt work fairly well for bands, especially since wearing a pin, patch, or bumper sticker for a band noöne's ever heard of is quite the status booster in certain circles.
Of course, bands can perform at shows, and writers can give readings, and so on, as people are always eager to point out, but this doesn't work out so well if you can't travel, are unwilling or unable to perform, or if you are producing, for example, sample-heavey electronic music that can't be "performed" inany meaningful sense.
Others online have their own strategies - including the elegantly direct one of asking for money and gifts. We could call this the Paypal and Wishlist Approach, and while it might require sometimes showing some skin, it is rumored to work. A dollar each from 1,000 fans is just as spendable as a thousand dollars from a single patron. It could work better, if the idea of such "distributed patronage" became more commonplace. Like traditional patronage, this Micropatronage will work to the extent that there is a corresponding social value placed on being a patron. Once everyone stops paying for music, movies, and (perhaps) books entirely, this may become more realistic, as the basic problem - how to keep our creative workers fed - will become more obviously a problem. In the meanwhile, some amount of Merch may be in order.
Is all of this inadequate? It doesn't matter if it is. Our situation remains the same, regardless of whether we approve of it. Information wants to be free, and Anonymous is willing to coöperate with it. We must adapt or die.
I am not terribly interested in myself right now, so I would like to share with you some people in whom I am interested, as you should be, too, assuming you're not an utter tool.
It is little remembered in these dark days that America was once a nation of heroes. You found them on every street corner. Not all of them were born here, but they ended up here, and that's all it takes. You arrive in America, and you are reviled as a repulsive tick-laden foreign parasite for a while, until, eventually, you start telling people to fuck themselves, at which point it is conceded that you are One of Us. Since it was easy to die in passing over the oceans back then (the pterodons got many would-be immigrants) we were regularly infused with eugenically-enhanced blood. Proof:
Brother Theodore, having survived his childhood, the Nazis (not a joke - he was a literal prison camp survivor), and his own overzealous spleen, arrived here (with the assistance of Albert Einstein) and commenced making people laugh while simultaneously making them subtly uneasy. And he convinced them to pay him for this.More information available from the goodfolk over at Technoccult. N.B.: Do not miss the linked YouTube goodness! Here is a particularly succulent dithyramb against food. Relevant quote: "Evil that fails is evil; but evil that succeeds - is good!"
Tiny Tim had hair galore back when the Beatles were still in pompadours. He would hang out on the streets playing 1920s novelty songs on ukelele and singing in an inimitable falsetto. (Though he was, in fact, a baritone.) Somehow, he became famous as a result, and his many records are still available, and quite revelatory. Later he got married to the elusive "Miss Vicki" on the Tonight Show. The scholarly consensus is that Tiny Tim was a full-blood Yeti, and punk as fuck.
Joshua Norton, self-appointed Emperor of these United States and Protector of Mexico persuaded the people of San Francisco to treat him as such. The finest restaurants would feed him, and at more modest establishments, he would persuade them to let him include stray dogs in the proceedings - and all for no charge. His proclamations were published in the newspapers, and the money he issued was accepted in trade. Local gentry paid for his burial, monument, and funeral, and tens of thousands attended. Emperor Norton rules your ass, and mine. (He has also, it should be mentioned, attained beatitude in the Discordian faith tradition.)
Overall, I say unto you: Fuck Superman, Moses, Jesus, and even Michael Jordan. I know the inimitable indwelling light of the oversoul when I see it.
After reading the most recent comments here, I was struck by how dear to me my readers are. This 'blog has never had much traffic, mostly because I haven't made much of an effort to draw more eyeballs here. I suppose I should, on the principle that it is better to have more readers than fewer, but really I am just grateful to be read, and not moved much by statistics. The fact that here, readers can respond, and become co-authors in a sense, is also an innovation more remarkable than is generally acknowledged. The traditional distinction betwen creator and audience has been permanently blurred - maybe even abolished. And this conversational mode of writing is vastly more interesting to me than the strict monologue of traditional writing. It is simply remarkable to write something, and to then find out that someone has found some value in it, of whatever kind, and has something of value to offer in return. I try to be conscientious about making my entries potentially useful in more than one way. For example, I can imagine the recent posts concerning dreams working for people as amusing stories, or as food for philosophical thought, or as additional information about what our minds/brains do when dreaming. Perhaps people are just amused by my eccentric punctuation. It doesn't matter so much to me that people find in these entries what I intended them to find; it simply gratifies me that, through this odd medium, someone who I may not know at all has been, somehow, satisfied - or perhaps provoked. And so, thank you, gentle readers, for reading, and for making me more useful, in some small way, to my fellow humans.
And then I remembered - I have been read before! And my fellow authors and I were also each other's respondents and collaborators, almost as instantly. And it was good then, too. For once, many years ago, I bore the proud title of "peep", when I and others would leave art, poetry, memoirs, and reflections on the walls of the stairwells of the UCSD campus. This was a pretty remarkable scene, and I shall have more to say about it in an upcoming posting. In the meanwhile: Word to my peeps!
Really, (and I'm sorry if this seems odd) she chose to die. She was ill, and she mostly stopped eating - though she had a little pumpkin pie on her last night. I think not eating, which inevitably slows the body down until it finally stops, is an effective way of choosing not to continue. Eating is the Will to Live in action. She was old, tumorous, and probably on some level she (or her body) knew the game wasn't worth the price of the candle. I can respect that. She had a good run, enjoyed the fine companionship of her caretakers and her "sister", "Invariably", and was given a good home, a large cage, many tasty treats, and plenty of the things that make for a happy rat. And when it started to get uncomfortable, she checked out.
I can't help thinking of my mother's death, now. Sometimes, these days, I find it, perhaps, forgivable. And though I suppose I still disagree with her choice, I can perhaps respect it. She was sixty, and while she might have made it to eighty, she had little to look forward to in those last years. She was poor, her circumstances were perilous, and though she may not have acknowledged it, her mind was slipping - she must have known that. In time, her already poor health would inevitably have gotten worse. Alone, ill, unemployable, without significant family ties - well, perhaps she figured that sixty years was enough. She had got out of life what she could, and the prospects for more worth having must have seemed slight to her. And so she chose to get off the ride a little early, and call it a night. Maybe she was wrong, but the choice was hers, and perhaps I can allow her that freedom. We all go eventually, and who am I to tell her that she must take on the burden of stretching out the hours to the furthest limit of duration, just because it pains me to see her go, and go so brutally?
The essence of wisdom, some have told me, is to recognize that all is transitory. Perhaps there is less pain in giving in to that fact, and allowing the temporary beings we love to go when and how they see fit.
As it says in the Scrapetures:
"And so it is that we, as men, do not exist until we do; and then it is that we play with our world of existent things, and order and disorder them, and so it shall be that non-existence shall take us back from existence and that nameless spirituality shall return to Void, like a tired child home from a very wild circus." - Principia Discordia, pg 00058
Goodbye to all whom I have loved. I will remember you.
In the course of preparing the previous post, Dream Dream, the Universe helpfully provided me with some oddness, which I'd like to share.
I was doing some preliminary puttering about the 'blog, including revising my archive links, when I noticed that I needed to finish the recent dream series (I Dream I Dream, Dream I Dream, Dream Dream, I Dream I [forthcoming]). In particular, I figured the repeated-dreaming-of-waking dream should be next. Preliminary notes were made on this, and then I returned to patching up the archive links.
While I was in the side section, I glanced over at the links, and it occurred to me that by now, the anticipated revamping of silverladder (formerly the badscaryplace) must be up. It is - and has branched out into some interesting new modes and methods. Explorations ensued, which led me (by only a few clicks) to:
I was sleeping, and I woke up. Like any morning, I got out of bed, and began walking down the hallway to the kitchen to get some coffee.
And then I woke up.
I was amused - I would have to tell Mome about this. Dreaming of waking up! Worth a chuckle over morning coffee, at least. With this intention, I headed down the hall toward the kitchen.
And then I woke up.
Now that was a novelty and a half! Dreaming about waking and wanting to talk about dreaming of waking... Very amused, and eager to share, I got out of bed, headed to -
And then I woke up. Again.
This happened perhaps five times.
The last time, I was struck by the necessity of doing a little reality checking. Well, I could feel the solidity of the floor, and the world was vividly real...
And so it was, and so it is. Unless I'm just waiting to wake up again.
subscribe to my feed
