My Hypertext Journey into the Ninth Circle of Hell

I just got an email advertising a screening of a film called "Polis is This," so I decided to look it up. It turns out it is about the poet Charles Olson. One of the blurbs in the ad, from the Boston Phoenix, called it "The best film on an American poet ever." Another blurb, from somebody named Iain Sinclair, called it this:

"Coherent, topographically astute, witnessed."

After reading that sentence, I wikipedia'd "Iain Sinclair," and learned that he is a British writer and filmmaker whose work is rooted "within the influences of psychogeography."

Interesting!!

So I clicked on "psychogeography," and as you might imagine, I learned a bunch of meaningful facts.

Then I went back to the Iain Sinclair page and clicked on a link to an article about him in the London Times. Here's how the article began:

IT IS A CITY THAT forgets. It is a city of the forgotten. You can still disappear without trace in London. It calls to those whose one desire is to vanish. Here you can, in the old phrase, “go under”. Here you can “break”. The city is built upon lost things.

Unfortunately, my hypertext journey was forced to end there, because it turned out I had barfed all over myself and was drowning in my own barf.

Trendspotting

Here is the opening sentence of an essay by Alfred Stieglitz , from 1897, called "The Hand Camera - Its Present Importance":

Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.

I feel like Alfred Stieglitz wrote that sentence expressly for the Millennial Crier.

That is all.

SexyBack

19th-century Man: I've invented a magical new medium called "photography"! What shall we use it for?
Julia Margaret Cameron: Babies acting sexy!
All of the 19th Century [heartily]: Agreed!



20th-century Man: I've invented a magical new medium called "sound cinema"! What shall we --
20th-century America: Babies acting sexy!

21st-century Scientist: I've invented a magical new medium called "Youtube"! What--
21st-century Global Village: Do you even have to ask?




My Dentist: Clearly I should hang up pictures of sexy cartoon bananas all over my waiting room. There's nothing people like better to look at when they are just waiting.



Cartoonists: Except for cartoon cats acting sexy. That image arose from our collective unconscious at some point and we've been reproducing it ever since, as if it's something that humans naturally and intuitively relate to.




People across Time: We are such weirdos.

Me [slowly backing out of room]: Agreed.

the battle rages on

I'm glad Carly Simon's son finally stepped up and addressed the question "Who's better: Snoop Dogg or Carly Simon's son?" head on. Check his sick new version of the radio edit of The Doggfather's latest single on his myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/bentaylorofficial

oh, here's Carly Simon's son:


Isn't it cool when white people respect black people things? JK. Snoop Dogg isn't really a black person's thing. Isn't it cool when white people make jokes based on the assumption that they are clearly lamer than black people, and in doing so reveal how desperately they want to believe that some better, realer, cooler, not boring and lame way of life really does exist, even though we all secretly know it totally doesn't? Anyway, keep the dream alive and give a listen to Carly Simon's son! I'd here like to point out a similar structure in my argument about why you should never actually fuck a butthole.

Hey! how about let's forget that.

This reminds me that I've been slipping on the MC's "Holler of the Week" feature. This week's top holler went a little something like this:
me: Ooo girl, you're looking like like a young Carly Simon tonight
girl: ....
The girl turned out to be a horse fetus.
::::a-ZINGAGE!!!!!::::::
(cause Carly Simon looks like a horse fetus.)

News can be fun too!

cOoL lInk AheAd:
STUDY FIND DOGS, ROBOTS CHEER ELDERLY

Here's a cute story that reminds us that we are all just blind idiots who spend our lives randomly bumping into other blind idiots, and that we are all locked in private dream worlds (IMPENETRABLE!) where we make up lie-stories called cool things like "meaning," "value," and "love."



capitalists: let's play on that with our new robots.
me: FUCK YOU, CAPITALISTS! (desperately clingin' to my lie-stories...4 lyfe!!!!!!!!!)

So Hot Right Now: Essentialism!

The NYT Magazine, which has officially changed its name to the Gender Pseudoscience Times Magazine, has an interesting story on single-sex education:

On that November day in Foley, Ala., William Bender pulled a stool up to a lectern and began reading to his fourth-grade boys from Gary Paulsen’s young-adult novel “Hatchet.” Bender’s voice is deep and calm, a balm to many of his students who lack father figures or else have parents who, Bender says, “don’t want to be parents. They want to be their kids’ friends.” Bender paused to ask one of his boys, who said he was feeling sick, “Are you going to make it, brother?” Then he kept reading. “ ‘The pain in his forehead seemed to be abating. . . .’ What’s abating, gentlemen?” The protagonist of “Hatchet” survives a plane crash and finds himself alone by an insect-infested lake. Bender encouraged his boys to empathize. They discussed how annoying it is, when you’re out hunting, to be swarmed by yellow flies.

Meanwhile, in Michelle Gay’s fourth-grade class, the girls sang a vigorous rendition of “Always Sisters” and then did a tidy science experiment: pouring red water, blue oil and clear syrup into a plastic cup to test which has the greatest density, then confirming their results with the firsthand knowledge that when you’re doing the dishes after your mother makes fried chicken, the oil always settles on top of the water in the sink.

First of all, shout out to my boy Gary Paulson.

Second of all, what is Enlightenment? The use of knowledge to cast off the shackles of servitude. Or, to paraphrase Kant, the use of science to confirm your dishwashing technique.

Speaking to a group of sixth graders, Sax explained his theory that girls’ hearing ability is much better than boys’, as is girls’ sense of smell. The girls, just on the edge of puberty, sat utterly rapt, seeming to want to understand why their brothers, boy cousins, cute skater-dude neighbors and fathers were so weird. A few weeks after the lecture, Sax sent me a packet of color photocopies of thank-you notes he had received from the girls. One, from a girl with two fathers, read: “Dr. Sax, Thank you so much for coming to Burkes. . . . I had a smell in my room and my Dads couldn’t smell it but I could. I thought I was going crazy. It ends up there was a dead rat in the wall. Hope you come back soon.

There you have it: already one concrete benefit to Sax's line of inquiry. Let’s keep going down this path. Frankly, I don’t see how any of its costs or reverberations could outweigh that girl getting rid of her dead rat.

I’m positive that the anecdote about the dead rat rotting in the wall is an allegory for gender essentialism, but I'm still trying to work out the ending. Maybe the rat comes to life and eats the little girl, and it turns out that her Dads smelled the rat the entire time but had been willfully repressing it in order to drive her crazy. Then an army of little girls comes over and fills the house with buckets of oil and water mixture, drowning the rat. Then they do the Dads’ dishes, and all seems to be well again! But in the last sentence we (the readers) discover that the rat is still alive in a sewer, feeding off of anti-depressants and transfats, and growing stronger than ever as it plots its revenge.

Lookout, Kafka!