I got a call from an army recruiter just now. He asked me about my plans for the future and I told him I didn't want to divulge any personal information. He pressed me and I said that I have major objections to the military as a whole and I don't want the army to play any role in my future. Then he accused me of sounding "anti-government altogether."
The thought that this phone call could have put me on some list is as frustrating as it is frightening.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Saturday, December 24, 2005
I have had a string of waycool dreams the last few nights.
Last night, I dreamt that I was a disenchanted Bruce Wayne who had put up the Mantle of the Bat to escape all the hype that surrounded Batman. I lived on a hill and had an amulet that allowed me to transform into a squirrel or Andre the Giant at will. The house across the street was inhabited by criminals, and they had kidnapped a girl and were holding her for ransom. I decided to invent another superhero alter-ego by the name of Spook who was bound by none of the shaky morality that Batman had to adhere to; I took Andre form, dressed in lots of sweaters, wore two beanies and a mask. I picked up a big stick, swooped down upon my antagonists and proceeded to kick ass for half an hour.
The same night, I had a dream about reformatting The Hello Sequence. That wasn't as cool.
Just wanted to share.
Last night, I dreamt that I was a disenchanted Bruce Wayne who had put up the Mantle of the Bat to escape all the hype that surrounded Batman. I lived on a hill and had an amulet that allowed me to transform into a squirrel or Andre the Giant at will. The house across the street was inhabited by criminals, and they had kidnapped a girl and were holding her for ransom. I decided to invent another superhero alter-ego by the name of Spook who was bound by none of the shaky morality that Batman had to adhere to; I took Andre form, dressed in lots of sweaters, wore two beanies and a mask. I picked up a big stick, swooped down upon my antagonists and proceeded to kick ass for half an hour.
The same night, I had a dream about reformatting The Hello Sequence. That wasn't as cool.
Just wanted to share.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
I've created another webspace in which to lurk.
The Hello Sequence
It is an online index of my best writing. As I write a lot, it should be updated a lot. The layout is spartan for two reasons: 1) I think the internet is too cluttered with irrelevant graphics and 2) I'm bad at web design.
Hope you like.
The Hello Sequence
It is an online index of my best writing. As I write a lot, it should be updated a lot. The layout is spartan for two reasons: 1) I think the internet is too cluttered with irrelevant graphics and 2) I'm bad at web design.
Hope you like.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Monday, December 05, 2005
Sunday, December 04, 2005
I was walking back from the library, listening to songs, I looked up and there was an elderly man coming the other direction. I was in a fantastic mood, ready to greet him with a grin.
When he saw me, he was about twenty feet away and crossed Scripps Lake Drive to avoid me.
Shortly thereafter, I passed a family who briefly made eye contact, broke it and didn't return my greeting.
I'm sick of this. One moment of baseless fear renders a vegetarian with a backpack full of poetry into a bearded menace.
As nice as Scripps Ranch can often be, I'm getting claustrophobic.
When he saw me, he was about twenty feet away and crossed Scripps Lake Drive to avoid me.
Shortly thereafter, I passed a family who briefly made eye contact, broke it and didn't return my greeting.
I'm sick of this. One moment of baseless fear renders a vegetarian with a backpack full of poetry into a bearded menace.
As nice as Scripps Ranch can often be, I'm getting claustrophobic.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Last night I met Death in my sleep, a prolonged nightmare, surreal and vibrant. I dreamt that I had terminal cancer, massive and rotting somewhere hidden.
And so intensely I felt the sadness, an immense anger at having life stolen from me, so early.
I sat with my parents, weeping, thinking, "Now I have less than a year to come to terms with everything." Alienation, tangible mortality, a nauseous funeral dirge.
And in a hazy twilight I saw a group of small dragonflies. Letting one land on my finger, I think "Their lives are so short, so fleeting, but they don't care. All I can do is simply live, simply die."
Then I wake up, dazed, startled, relieved, laying for a while in the darkness, staring at nothing. I think about the millions for whom the nightmare is not a dream.
Air has tasted solemnly sweet today.
And so intensely I felt the sadness, an immense anger at having life stolen from me, so early.
I sat with my parents, weeping, thinking, "Now I have less than a year to come to terms with everything." Alienation, tangible mortality, a nauseous funeral dirge.
And in a hazy twilight I saw a group of small dragonflies. Letting one land on my finger, I think "Their lives are so short, so fleeting, but they don't care. All I can do is simply live, simply die."
Then I wake up, dazed, startled, relieved, laying for a while in the darkness, staring at nothing. I think about the millions for whom the nightmare is not a dream.
Air has tasted solemnly sweet today.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Be With Those Who Help Your Being
Be with those who help your being.
Don't sit with indifferent people, whose breath
comes cold out of their mouths.
Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.
A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.
If you don't try to fly,
and so break yourself apart,
you will be broken open by death,
when it's too late for all you could become.
Leaves get yellow. The tree puts out fresh roots
and makes them green.
Why are you so content with a love that turns you yellow?
-Rumi
Be with those who help your being.
Don't sit with indifferent people, whose breath
comes cold out of their mouths.
Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.
A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.
If you don't try to fly,
and so break yourself apart,
you will be broken open by death,
when it's too late for all you could become.
Leaves get yellow. The tree puts out fresh roots
and makes them green.
Why are you so content with a love that turns you yellow?
-Rumi
Sunday, November 27, 2005
I decided to pester Rushkoff some more.
My letter:
I just read your June article in Arthur. Sorry, maybe you've already heard everything I'm about to say.
Basically, I think if people in your position, who have the means and the eloquence to spread awareness about the sketchy nonsense perpetrated on us by the media overlords, unplug and throw in the towel, you're going to leave an entire generation out in the cold.
I'm still reading Playing the Future, and it pointed me to an interesting realization. People my age communicate with a very refined lexicon of media references; pop culture defines a huge part of our identities and even the semantics with which we communicate. I would even say that the scattered deconstruction and reorganization of media tidbits into cohesive images and ideologies, much as a hermit crab gathers detritus from the ocean floor with which to decorate its shell, has led to a valid and nuanced culture. After thinking about this for a while, I looked down to realize that I was wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt, and as shallow as it may seem, I feel like these pop culture entities that we've all grown up with constitute a vibrant and important new pantheon in American mythology. True, our gods would rather sell us cheap shit than help us improve the world, but the media space is nearly as tangible to us, as inherent a facet of our collective consciousness, as the physical. And yeah, sometimes it all seems like wolves herding sheep, but it's our medium, our vehicle for collaboration, innovation and evolution. Daddy just hasn't handed over the keys yet.
I do, however, agree that the physical space is ripe for the freeing. Just standing around in a group is now grounds for suspicion. My friends and I have gotten kicked out of public parks at six in the afternoon just because we were there. Whaddya gonna do?
-Matt
His response:
If you, the kind of person who has equal access to the tools of media as anyone, don't quickly realize that you are in a position of greater power and leverage than I am, then we are lost.
So, young people, I say it's time for an extended montage as we all find the power within us to rise to the occasion. I plan to run up mountains holding boulders and try on funny hats. But I jest, the man has a point.
My letter:
I just read your June article in Arthur. Sorry, maybe you've already heard everything I'm about to say.
Basically, I think if people in your position, who have the means and the eloquence to spread awareness about the sketchy nonsense perpetrated on us by the media overlords, unplug and throw in the towel, you're going to leave an entire generation out in the cold.
I'm still reading Playing the Future, and it pointed me to an interesting realization. People my age communicate with a very refined lexicon of media references; pop culture defines a huge part of our identities and even the semantics with which we communicate. I would even say that the scattered deconstruction and reorganization of media tidbits into cohesive images and ideologies, much as a hermit crab gathers detritus from the ocean floor with which to decorate its shell, has led to a valid and nuanced culture. After thinking about this for a while, I looked down to realize that I was wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt, and as shallow as it may seem, I feel like these pop culture entities that we've all grown up with constitute a vibrant and important new pantheon in American mythology. True, our gods would rather sell us cheap shit than help us improve the world, but the media space is nearly as tangible to us, as inherent a facet of our collective consciousness, as the physical. And yeah, sometimes it all seems like wolves herding sheep, but it's our medium, our vehicle for collaboration, innovation and evolution. Daddy just hasn't handed over the keys yet.
I do, however, agree that the physical space is ripe for the freeing. Just standing around in a group is now grounds for suspicion. My friends and I have gotten kicked out of public parks at six in the afternoon just because we were there. Whaddya gonna do?
-Matt
His response:
If you, the kind of person who has equal access to the tools of media as anyone, don't quickly realize that you are in a position of greater power and leverage than I am, then we are lost.
So, young people, I say it's time for an extended montage as we all find the power within us to rise to the occasion. I plan to run up mountains holding boulders and try on funny hats. But I jest, the man has a point.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Monday, November 14, 2005
The cycle of writing the UC application essay:
"I am so detachedly ironic and self-deprecating! Lol!"
"I am very serious indeed, and can use many-syllabled words in odd combinations to create startling disconnects."
"I am really just a nice kid who reads books, I like the rain and watching sunsets. I am way modest."
"I have established a comfortable equilibrium between my desire for eccentricity and meaningful content."
"Aaaaagh, aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh, deadlines, aaaaaaaaaaaaagh, beaurocracy, aaaaaghfuckhasdhfahsdfhh, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH CHRIIIIIIIIIIIST AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!"
"I am so detachedly ironic and self-deprecating! Lol!"
"I am very serious indeed, and can use many-syllabled words in odd combinations to create startling disconnects."
"I am really just a nice kid who reads books, I like the rain and watching sunsets. I am way modest."
"I have established a comfortable equilibrium between my desire for eccentricity and meaningful content."
"Aaaaagh, aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh, deadlines, aaaaaaaaaaaaagh, beaurocracy, aaaaaghfuckhasdhfahsdfhh, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH CHRIIIIIIIIIIIST AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!"
Friday, November 11, 2005
The Year of Midnights
And I said
how dare you your blondeness
walk amongst the cake eaters
with dirty little clouds
and
Sex is a weapon, a WEAPON
because they don’t have this
anymore,
they don’t have this
plastic skidrow headtrash
They’ve lost sight,
they’ve forgotten,
the many sitters in living rooms,
they’ve forgotten.
Yeah.
And I said
the only way your world moves
is an earthquake
And I said
they don’t understand
how close
is a soul
to pavement and night.
How dare the moon
skewer itself
on shattered bottles.
I’m going now,
and leaving pennies
on the tracks.
And I said
how dare you your blondeness
walk amongst the cake eaters
with dirty little clouds
and
Sex is a weapon, a WEAPON
because they don’t have this
anymore,
they don’t have this
plastic skidrow headtrash
They’ve lost sight,
they’ve forgotten,
the many sitters in living rooms,
they’ve forgotten.
Yeah.
And I said
the only way your world moves
is an earthquake
And I said
they don’t understand
how close
is a soul
to pavement and night.
How dare the moon
skewer itself
on shattered bottles.
I’m going now,
and leaving pennies
on the tracks.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
I got really upset about Rupert Murdoch buying MySpace, so I wrote a distressful letter to Douglas Rushkoff. And he totally responded. The same day. And I almost crapped my pants with surprise.
Here's the correspondence.
Hello, Mr. Rushkoff. My name is Matthew Louv, brother of Jason, whom I hear you are giving Timothy Leary's coffee table. That was considerable news back at home.
I'm writing to you because I'm distressed by Rupert Murdoch's purchase of Intermix. Basically, I feel like my generation (I turned eighteen last week) is about to be steamrolled by corporate America and we lack any discernable avenue of resistance. Jason told me the other day that people my age are, statistically, the most complacent and trusting generation in history, and I believe it. Those who understand that they are being subtly exploited are either passive about it or rattle off diatribes justifying complacence in the face of media onslaught, about how "if they want to fine-tune their advertising to suit my tastes and make my internet experience that much more enjoyable, more power to them." Those who do not understand, being the vast majority, are totally defenseless.
I feel so passionately about this that I persuaded my father, a journalist, to write a column in the San Diego Union Tribune on the subject. I'll tell you what I told him: I really feel like the preservation of free space on the internet is a secondary issue to preserving free space in the minds of people who don't have the faculties to analyze the bombardment of stimuli they experience every time they turn on the TV or log on to the internet. A lot of the people who use MySpace are children, and these subversive tactics are setting a precedent in their mind that advertising is an inherent facet in not only their virtual experience but also their social; that corporate power permeates even the most personal aspects of their relationships with other people. The internet has inexorably changed the way people my age interact with each other - in many ways I think it allows us to be more intimate - and such a prevalence of manipulative advertising has poisoned the well.
I am sick to my stomach of media conglomerates bidding for ownership of my thoughts. I can't tolerate the saturation of substanceless pandering that dominates pages like MySpace, but I simultaneously feel a great sense of ownership, like MySpace has become so central to the collective youth experience that we shouldn't have to acquiesce to having our modes of self-expression sold to the highest bidder. I've tried to find non-corporate alternatives to MySpace, but there are none.
I am curious about your opinon on this issue, and whether you can offer any solutions. Mainly, I just think major advertisers' newfound interest in the internet poses a major threat to our intellectual integrity, and I hope commentators such as yourself will be vocal about it.
Thanks for taking the time to read this,
-Matthew
Yeah - I wasn't an Intermix user but I did hear the sad news.
I've been writing articles against the commercialization of the net
for, gosh, about ten years, now. There's a couple of hundred columns
that all say the same thing, in one way or another, on my site. I get
whacked for it every time, often by bloggers looking to make money
off their sites and seeing my concerns as attacks on their hopes to
make a profession online. Unfortunately, they can't see the forest
for the trees.
For what it's worth, I feel your pain. I pitched an OpEd to the
NYTimes when that deal went down, but they didn't bite, alas. I don't
know anymore if the best strategy is to hit from the top down or the
bottom up. Or maybe both.
Still, things can only get so bad before people turn to truly
alternative media. And that will always exist. Right now, you're
right. Kids are pretty satisfied, or think they are, by what the
corporations are providing them. So all I can do is continue to make
media that tries to wake them up, keep doing talks at colleges around
the country, make a few documentaries exposing MTV and the like, and
hope for the best.
I just can't find a better answer than education and a bit of
stimulation. If kids can be shown that chilling with one another is
more satisfied than doing it alone under the spell of some marketer,
then things will start to change. Find the others, conspire with
them, and have as much fun as you can. That's the best weapon. Deep fun.
And of course, it's really as much up to you as it is to me. Maybe
more so. I'm some relatively old guy, now. You're the actual target
of all this shit. Conspire with your friends, and do it as equals
with as little ego as possible. Past movements were killed and are
still being killed by people wanting to be stars. That just won't
work in a collaborative future.
all best to you - and let me know what you're doing,
Douglas
Here's the correspondence.
Hello, Mr. Rushkoff. My name is Matthew Louv, brother of Jason, whom I hear you are giving Timothy Leary's coffee table. That was considerable news back at home.
I'm writing to you because I'm distressed by Rupert Murdoch's purchase of Intermix. Basically, I feel like my generation (I turned eighteen last week) is about to be steamrolled by corporate America and we lack any discernable avenue of resistance. Jason told me the other day that people my age are, statistically, the most complacent and trusting generation in history, and I believe it. Those who understand that they are being subtly exploited are either passive about it or rattle off diatribes justifying complacence in the face of media onslaught, about how "if they want to fine-tune their advertising to suit my tastes and make my internet experience that much more enjoyable, more power to them." Those who do not understand, being the vast majority, are totally defenseless.
I feel so passionately about this that I persuaded my father, a journalist, to write a column in the San Diego Union Tribune on the subject. I'll tell you what I told him: I really feel like the preservation of free space on the internet is a secondary issue to preserving free space in the minds of people who don't have the faculties to analyze the bombardment of stimuli they experience every time they turn on the TV or log on to the internet. A lot of the people who use MySpace are children, and these subversive tactics are setting a precedent in their mind that advertising is an inherent facet in not only their virtual experience but also their social; that corporate power permeates even the most personal aspects of their relationships with other people. The internet has inexorably changed the way people my age interact with each other - in many ways I think it allows us to be more intimate - and such a prevalence of manipulative advertising has poisoned the well.
I am sick to my stomach of media conglomerates bidding for ownership of my thoughts. I can't tolerate the saturation of substanceless pandering that dominates pages like MySpace, but I simultaneously feel a great sense of ownership, like MySpace has become so central to the collective youth experience that we shouldn't have to acquiesce to having our modes of self-expression sold to the highest bidder. I've tried to find non-corporate alternatives to MySpace, but there are none.
I am curious about your opinon on this issue, and whether you can offer any solutions. Mainly, I just think major advertisers' newfound interest in the internet poses a major threat to our intellectual integrity, and I hope commentators such as yourself will be vocal about it.
Thanks for taking the time to read this,
-Matthew
Yeah - I wasn't an Intermix user but I did hear the sad news.
I've been writing articles against the commercialization of the net
for, gosh, about ten years, now. There's a couple of hundred columns
that all say the same thing, in one way or another, on my site. I get
whacked for it every time, often by bloggers looking to make money
off their sites and seeing my concerns as attacks on their hopes to
make a profession online. Unfortunately, they can't see the forest
for the trees.
For what it's worth, I feel your pain. I pitched an OpEd to the
NYTimes when that deal went down, but they didn't bite, alas. I don't
know anymore if the best strategy is to hit from the top down or the
bottom up. Or maybe both.
Still, things can only get so bad before people turn to truly
alternative media. And that will always exist. Right now, you're
right. Kids are pretty satisfied, or think they are, by what the
corporations are providing them. So all I can do is continue to make
media that tries to wake them up, keep doing talks at colleges around
the country, make a few documentaries exposing MTV and the like, and
hope for the best.
I just can't find a better answer than education and a bit of
stimulation. If kids can be shown that chilling with one another is
more satisfied than doing it alone under the spell of some marketer,
then things will start to change. Find the others, conspire with
them, and have as much fun as you can. That's the best weapon. Deep fun.
And of course, it's really as much up to you as it is to me. Maybe
more so. I'm some relatively old guy, now. You're the actual target
of all this shit. Conspire with your friends, and do it as equals
with as little ego as possible. Past movements were killed and are
still being killed by people wanting to be stars. That just won't
work in a collaborative future.
all best to you - and let me know what you're doing,
Douglas
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
You look up and you can see the knobs actually
see the knobs
Climbing up on the couch to turn a light on
you can sit down and actually
turn the light on
Go play barefoot on various scrapheaps
hanging from ropes, over rocks, glass
and your friend falls hurts himself
and you run,
run,
And now a white streak at seventy an hour,
streetlights too tall to reach,
that will be forty dollars please,
and how about
your friend there?
How about
your friend?
Someone turn out the light,
please.
see the knobs
Climbing up on the couch to turn a light on
you can sit down and actually
turn the light on
Go play barefoot on various scrapheaps
hanging from ropes, over rocks, glass
and your friend falls hurts himself
and you run,
run,
And now a white streak at seventy an hour,
streetlights too tall to reach,
that will be forty dollars please,
and how about
your friend there?
How about
your friend?
Someone turn out the light,
please.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Ponderously, I sit feeling irritated. My cat, licking his crotch feverishly, beeps repeatedly.
"Oh, the cat is beeping."
Then I realize it's coming from my mom's purse, sitting next to me on the table.
I prefer the reality wherein cats beep.
Don't play Dynasty Warriors for five hours. It makes your writing bad.
"Oh, the cat is beeping."
Then I realize it's coming from my mom's purse, sitting next to me on the table.
I prefer the reality wherein cats beep.
Don't play Dynasty Warriors for five hours. It makes your writing bad.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
I haven't been making posts because my life has been swallowed by books. I have had little time to produce any content, only to consume.
Here's the best poem I've ever written.
How to Read a Poem
One e. e. cummings, cleaned and preserved before shipping, was passed out to each group.
Naturally, everyone was missing some scalpel or another but everything was squared away as best as could be hoped.
Slowly, uncertainly and after much consultation of e. e. cummings anatomical diagrams and careful scrutiny of lab instructions, the poets blossomed like pink flowers.
A girl at the back of the class screamed suddenly, asserting between shrieks that her e. e. cummings had smiled at her.
The teacher, amused by the girl's enthusiastic terror, motioned to the pale mess that lay on her table.
"If your e. e. cummings wasn't dead before, he certainly is now."
Here's the best poem I've ever written.
One e. e. cummings, cleaned and preserved before shipping, was passed out to each group.
Naturally, everyone was missing some scalpel or another but everything was squared away as best as could be hoped.
Slowly, uncertainly and after much consultation of e. e. cummings anatomical diagrams and careful scrutiny of lab instructions, the poets blossomed like pink flowers.
A girl at the back of the class screamed suddenly, asserting between shrieks that her e. e. cummings had smiled at her.
The teacher, amused by the girl's enthusiastic terror, motioned to the pale mess that lay on her table.
"If your e. e. cummings wasn't dead before, he certainly is now."
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Monday, August 22, 2005
Friday, August 12, 2005
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Friday, July 29, 2005
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Recently, for a couple of weeks, all I did was sit in my room with my laptop and play Doom. If any of you have never played Doom, here is the basic premise: You are a marine. You are in space. There are also demons from Hell in space. The demons from Hell want to kill you. You have a shotgun. Needless to say, it's the most awesomest game ever coded. It's so awesome that they made a movie out of it starring The Rock.
For a visual recap:
=
After I beat Doom I started playing another favorite, called Sim Cinema. It's a bare-bones emulator of the film industry, in which you pitch movies to different studios and follow them through to completion, building on your company's reputation with each success. These are my favorite movies:
Blood Sport 3: The Blood Sportening
Description: The year is 2030. Space combatants must battle in a space underground fighting circuit for the title of Space Champion of Space Fighting. Let the space ass-kicking commence.
Tag Line: Makes Speed look like a slow space ride to space grandma's space house.
Outcome: Successful, Critically acclaimed
Billy Bob Thornton Swears and Drinks
Description: For kids!
Outcome: Successful, Critically acclaimed
Skipper: Who Let the Dogs Out? Into the Water? To Free-dive?
Description: The world of free-diving just got a whole lot funnier! Youngster Tim Shelley discovers that his dog Skipper is a free-diving prodigy! But will the cold, dogmatic free-diving establishment allow Skipper to compete?
Tag Line: Who knew that dogs could free-dive? I sure didn't. What a hilarious and unlikely circumstance!
Outcome: Successful, Critically bashed
Bill Nye: The Murder Guy
Description: A botched lab demonstration leaves television personality Bill Nye horribly disfigured. Watch in horror as Nye carves a bloody swath across the country to seek revenge!
Tag Line: Beakman is fucking dead.
Outcome: Major bomb, Critically bashed
Anaconda 3: Snakes in tha Hood
Description: Can a racist cop and a misguided band of urban criminals learn to overcome their differences in order to avoid certain death at the hands, or teeth, of giant snakes?
Tag Line: Snizzakeizzledizzle.
Outcome: Successful, Critically bashed
Roadhouse 2: Roadier House
Description: Driven to madness by the inexplicable abundance of tasteless nudity in his life, Patrick Swayze goes on a mission to manually remove the trachea of the president himself!
Tag Line: Swayze don't care.
Outcome: Blockbuster, Critically acclaimed
Porno: The Movie
Description: When young housewife Ashley Smithington discovers a leak in her ceiling, she calls repair serviceman John Spratley. But the roof isn't the only thing he'll be servicing.
Tag Line: "I'm here to fill your crack."
Outcome: Blockbuster, Critically acclaimed (Note: this movie made it to #6 on the list of the 20 highest-grossing films of all time, above The Lion King and below Forrest Gump.)
Poo Poo
(critical note: this one's vintage, probably from around sixth grade)
Description: A documentary of poo.
Tag Line: Poo! Crap! Dookie! Butt Nugget! Fun!
Outcome: Successful, Critically acclaimed
=
After I beat Doom I started playing another favorite, called Sim Cinema. It's a bare-bones emulator of the film industry, in which you pitch movies to different studios and follow them through to completion, building on your company's reputation with each success. These are my favorite movies:
Blood Sport 3: The Blood Sportening
Description: The year is 2030. Space combatants must battle in a space underground fighting circuit for the title of Space Champion of Space Fighting. Let the space ass-kicking commence.
Tag Line: Makes Speed look like a slow space ride to space grandma's space house.
Outcome: Successful, Critically acclaimed
Billy Bob Thornton Swears and Drinks
Description: For kids!
Outcome: Successful, Critically acclaimed
Skipper: Who Let the Dogs Out? Into the Water? To Free-dive?
Description: The world of free-diving just got a whole lot funnier! Youngster Tim Shelley discovers that his dog Skipper is a free-diving prodigy! But will the cold, dogmatic free-diving establishment allow Skipper to compete?
Tag Line: Who knew that dogs could free-dive? I sure didn't. What a hilarious and unlikely circumstance!
Outcome: Successful, Critically bashed
Bill Nye: The Murder Guy
Description: A botched lab demonstration leaves television personality Bill Nye horribly disfigured. Watch in horror as Nye carves a bloody swath across the country to seek revenge!
Tag Line: Beakman is fucking dead.
Outcome: Major bomb, Critically bashed
Anaconda 3: Snakes in tha Hood
Description: Can a racist cop and a misguided band of urban criminals learn to overcome their differences in order to avoid certain death at the hands, or teeth, of giant snakes?
Tag Line: Snizzakeizzledizzle.
Outcome: Successful, Critically bashed
Roadhouse 2: Roadier House
Description: Driven to madness by the inexplicable abundance of tasteless nudity in his life, Patrick Swayze goes on a mission to manually remove the trachea of the president himself!
Tag Line: Swayze don't care.
Outcome: Blockbuster, Critically acclaimed
Porno: The Movie
Description: When young housewife Ashley Smithington discovers a leak in her ceiling, she calls repair serviceman John Spratley. But the roof isn't the only thing he'll be servicing.
Tag Line: "I'm here to fill your crack."
Outcome: Blockbuster, Critically acclaimed (Note: this movie made it to #6 on the list of the 20 highest-grossing films of all time, above The Lion King and below Forrest Gump.)
Poo Poo
(critical note: this one's vintage, probably from around sixth grade)
Description: A documentary of poo.
Tag Line: Poo! Crap! Dookie! Butt Nugget! Fun!
Outcome: Successful, Critically acclaimed
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Monday, July 25, 2005
I saw The Island last night. Entertaining and well crafted, but Hollywood can take its product placement and fucking choke on it.
I am sick of being a target market. I am sick of corporations vying for ownership of my mind. I am sick of people who watch the Superbowl "just to see the commercials." I am sick of consumerism, materialism and the total absence of coherence and discernment that allows it to continue.
There are better ways to live.
I am sick of being a target market. I am sick of corporations vying for ownership of my mind. I am sick of people who watch the Superbowl "just to see the commercials." I am sick of consumerism, materialism and the total absence of coherence and discernment that allows it to continue.
There are better ways to live.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Way back in May, going to school made my head feel like my underwear used to after PE, so I figured I'd need to escape to somewhere strange and interesting when summer came. I got on a plane and flew six hours to my brother's spartan apartment in Queens, where I would sweat much and sleep little.
Imagine walking around with your face wedged into someone's ass crack, all the time. That's more or less what it feels like to exist in New York during July. Compound with that the peculiar rhythm of thousands of bodies in constant motion and the sound of a hundred different dialects and you begin to get an idea. And if you're savvy enough, you can ride through the city's metal arteries to basically anywhere.
Being solely responsible for your health and safety instills in you a great deal of confidence; a power over your life that you can flex with tangible results. On this trip I discovered the transformative properties of spontaneity. Doing things on impulse makes the world glitter, and you invite cool weirdness into your life, try it.
I'd like to share what I've learned, but that's impossible. My whole has expanded.
Imagine walking around with your face wedged into someone's ass crack, all the time. That's more or less what it feels like to exist in New York during July. Compound with that the peculiar rhythm of thousands of bodies in constant motion and the sound of a hundred different dialects and you begin to get an idea. And if you're savvy enough, you can ride through the city's metal arteries to basically anywhere.
Being solely responsible for your health and safety instills in you a great deal of confidence; a power over your life that you can flex with tangible results. On this trip I discovered the transformative properties of spontaneity. Doing things on impulse makes the world glitter, and you invite cool weirdness into your life, try it.
I'd like to share what I've learned, but that's impossible. My whole has expanded.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Friday, June 24, 2005
Monday, June 20, 2005
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Thursday, June 16, 2005
I found this site that allows you to generate a random poem from the contents of a website.
This is the Tribulations in Phobitopia poem:
Tribulations In the WallOf Montreal
posted by Matthew Location:San Diego,
California, United States
In it, on the sidebarmargin: 0; 0
comments
Sunday, June 08, 10/10/17/2004 01/12/
2005 06/11/20/2003
11/22/2003
05/02/01/
22/2003 03/09/08/2004
06/07/2003 02/22/2002 11/2003 12/28/2004
05/15/2005 I stare at
him before, out
of text in the
sidebarp. { : margin:
0; padding: 5px p { : 0; } . {
6px; } /* links */ a:active { color: #999; : background:
url http://www.blogger.Template Style Name:
Matthew at 4:02 26/
2005 03/
20/2002 11/2003 09/01/2002
11/14/
2004 06/2003 03/
2003 03/06/
2003 05/04/06/06/12/
28/2002 10/11/16/2005
04/24/2003 11/30/2003
01/25/2003 05/
23/2003 08/17/2003 09/
2003 03/
26/2002 12/
2005 06/27/
2003 12/
27/2004 02/26/2004 04/2004 06/
11/2005 The
pe...
This is the Tribulations in Phobitopia poem:
Tribulations In the WallOf Montreal
posted by Matthew Location:San Diego,
California, United States
In it, on the sidebarmargin: 0; 0
comments
Sunday, June 08, 10/10/17/2004 01/12/
2005 06/11/20/2003
11/22/2003
05/02/01/
22/2003 03/09/08/2004
06/07/2003 02/22/2002 11/2003 12/28/2004
05/15/2005 I stare at
him before, out
of text in the
sidebarp. { : margin:
0; padding: 5px p { : 0; } . {
6px; } /* links */ a:active { color: #999; : background:
url http://www.blogger.Template Style Name:
Matthew at 4:02 26/
2005 03/
20/2002 11/2003 09/01/2002
11/14/
2004 06/2003 03/
2003 03/06/
2003 05/04/06/06/12/
28/2002 10/11/16/2005
04/24/2003 11/30/2003
01/25/2003 05/
23/2003 08/17/2003 09/
2003 03/
26/2002 12/
2005 06/27/
2003 12/
27/2004 02/26/2004 04/2004 06/
11/2005 The
pe...
The setting: Meanley, after school, today.
The perp: A smallish, ambiguously-ethnic douche face wearing a Nautica shirt, shorts and gold necklace.
The event: I am standing, waiting for my ride when I hear from my right, "Yo SON! Serra high school's GAY!" My mind reels for about ten seconds while I stare at him before, out of the swirling chaos, enough synapses connect to make my face look a little confused. The kid turns to his friends. "Yeah, he used to go to Serra."
...............
The perp: A smallish, ambiguously-ethnic douche face wearing a Nautica shirt, shorts and gold necklace.
The event: I am standing, waiting for my ride when I hear from my right, "Yo SON! Serra high school's GAY!" My mind reels for about ten seconds while I stare at him before, out of the swirling chaos, enough synapses connect to make my face look a little confused. The kid turns to his friends. "Yeah, he used to go to Serra."
...............
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
I have just completed my twenty-minute epic documentary "The Teenager's Guide to Possession: A Crass Course in Demonology," a chronicle of my attempts to become demonically posessed by playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to rock music. If you'd like to see it, come to Ebel's room tomorrow during fourth period.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Manipulative dickheads
My brother has an oft-repeated phrase; "Sometimes I feel like this whole world was made just to annoy me." That's pretty much exactly how I feel when I read about slimy jackasses like these guys who spend their lives coming up with innovative ways to coerce you into buying things. It's not even the buying that bothers me, it's brand loyalty. It's the idea that someone could be mentally complacent enough to buy into that saccharine, nauseating SHIT that saturates most media. It's people who watch the Superbowl just for the commercials. I mean, God DAMMIT.
I'm beginning to believe that mainstream American culture is intellectual anathema. It's such a dull, life-denying consensus reality. Flags. Pickup trucks. Bush. Britney Spears. Freedom. Elimidate. Maybe that's a completely trite thing for me to say, but at the crux of it all is a pleblian psychology that reduces all concepts to their most rudimentary forms. And it's in my head too! It's horrible and I want nothing to do with it.
My brother has an oft-repeated phrase; "Sometimes I feel like this whole world was made just to annoy me." That's pretty much exactly how I feel when I read about slimy jackasses like these guys who spend their lives coming up with innovative ways to coerce you into buying things. It's not even the buying that bothers me, it's brand loyalty. It's the idea that someone could be mentally complacent enough to buy into that saccharine, nauseating SHIT that saturates most media. It's people who watch the Superbowl just for the commercials. I mean, God DAMMIT.
I'm beginning to believe that mainstream American culture is intellectual anathema. It's such a dull, life-denying consensus reality. Flags. Pickup trucks. Bush. Britney Spears. Freedom. Elimidate. Maybe that's a completely trite thing for me to say, but at the crux of it all is a pleblian psychology that reduces all concepts to their most rudimentary forms. And it's in my head too! It's horrible and I want nothing to do with it.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Friday, June 03, 2005
Thursday, June 02, 2005
As taken from www.bigbangtango.net:
What is the Tango?
In Frankfurt, Germany, a Russian physicist thinks that he’s spotted a sociology of basic particles. Now he wants to talk to photons.
In Tel Aviv, Israel, a physicist/microbiologist has been studying bacterial colonies and thinks he sees a linguistic pattern—a Chomskyite deep structure, a language—in the communication between single-celled beasts. In a paper published in the leading journal of physics, Physica A, the same Israeli physicist has made an even more shocking claim—that bacterial colonies have consciousness.
In Moscow, a mathematician/physicist at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been pondering quantum mechanics and has concluded that electrons and photons have to make decisions, they have to make up their “minds.”
And in New York City, the founder of a field called paleopsychology thinks that there are common threads between the German’s sociology of quantum mechanics, the Russian’s “emperor electrons,” the Israeli’s sentences “spoken” chemically by bacteria, the Israeli’s bacterial mass mind, and the mass passions aroused by superstars of human culture and of history, from Michael Jackson and Prince to Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
In modern science all of this should be viewed as blasphemy. It’s anthropomorphism, clear and simple. Humans make decisions. Photons and electrons don’t. Humans have language. Bacteria have no such thing. They can’t. They don’t have tongues. They don’t have that critical churner of words and paragraphs—a brain.
The time may have arrived to remove this taboo. Those who’ve labored hard to purge anthropomorphism from their vocabulary may have been the real sinners. They may have been anthropo-chauvinists in disguise.
When we apply words like attraction and repulsion--words that come from human physical and emotional experience--to quarks, protons, and electrons, we may simply be playing on a basic fact of nature. Evolution--and I mean the full sweep of evolution from the big bang to today--is iterative and fractal. The same simple principles show up over and over again. Principles like attraction and repulsion are the tools with which the self-construction of the universe began. They ruled over quarks, photons, and electrons 13.5 billion years ago. They were the master forces of the big bang.
The human high plateau of consciousness, emotion, language, culture, and immersion in the opinions of others is unique. But it's just another form of quark-dance, one it took quarks 13.5 billion years to invent.
The practical consequence? Sometimes bio-patterns can help solve puzzles in physics. Sometimes clues from human psychology can help solve problems in microbiology.
I’m the New Yorker mentioned above, the founder of paleopsychology. I call the social dance-steps of the inanimate and living cosmos The Big Bang Tango. And the concept of the Big Bang Tango is beginning to catch fire.
When the Tel Aviv physicist studying bacteria, Eshel Ben-Jacob—head of the Physics Department at the Raymond & Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences at Tel-Aviv University--sent a draft of his upcoming article, “Reflections on Biochemical Linguistics of Bacteria,” I scribbled the usual notations in the margins. One note pointed out that the paper’s facts hint that bacteria have something that strongly resembles human culture. Then I gave the reasons. Ben-Jacob and his co-writers felt the comparison was accurate, and included it in their text.
When the Moscow mathematician, Pavel Kurakin, at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, sent his paper on “Toy Quantum Mechanics with Hidden Variables,” it bristled with forbidden words. According to Kurakin’s theory, a quantum particle receives “queries” from particle detectors. Those detectors “duel” for the particle’s attention. Some of these “pretenders” receive only “refuse” signals. One lucky detector wins the particle’s favor and is blessed with the particle’s visit. In other words, there is competition and communication—a basic Darwinian twosome—at work on the quantum level.
How, I asked does a quantum particle make its decision on which signal to accept?
Who wins what Kurakin call this “lottery”? Says Pavel, “…Query signal intensity is proportional to |psi|2. Detectors win proportionally to their query intensities.”
In other words, in the quantum world, the strongest thrive. But the weak subordinate or die—a rule that shows up in the evolution of stars, galaxies, living beings, minds, emotions, politics, and history.
What’s wrong with these conversations? What’s wrong with Kurakin’s characterization of the rules of the cosmos as “natural fascism”? What’s wrong with Ben-Jacob’s claim that bacteria “send messages,” use chemical “words,” have “a chemical language,” and “can conduct a dialogue”? Or that bacterial “swimmers enter a ‘consultation phase’, during which they divide and communicate until a ‘collective decision,’ is reached”? Or worse yet, that bacteria have “chemical foreplay,” “chemical courtship,” “interpret” the state of the colony, reach a “majority vote,” and, if they have “valuable information announce this fact”? What’s wrong? Every single word of this is scientific heresy.
Plastering human qualities on everything we see is precisely what science has labored mightily to avoid since roughly 1650. Anthropomorphism is the stuff of witches and Church elders—of magic, superstition, and religion. Anthropomorphism carries all the Dark-Age intellectual baggage that folks like Galileo, Hooke, van Leeuwenhoek, Newton, and Voltaire snatched with difficulty from the fists of clerics, alchemists, and potion makers and threw away.
There's a claim implicit in the work of the colleagues I've stitched together on the Internet, a claim that in my work is as explicit as hell: many of the patterns we regard as solely human are not. We share basic rules and stratagems not just with ants, lizards, and chimps.
It's beginning to look as if we share such basics as communication with quarks, abilities like decision making with quantum particles, and complexities like the deep structure of language with bacteria.
Our aversion to anthropomorphism is arrogance in disguise. It's anthropocentrism--a failure to see that we carry in us patterns we've inherited from ten billion years of inanimate evolution, evolution that built the raw material of your finger tips, your blood, your brain, Bara's, my wife’s, Chris Anderson’s, and mine.
We woke up in the 20th Century to something Aristotle once suspected—that we are political animals. Are we clever? Yes. But we are clever beasts. Thanks to 20th Century figures like Wolfgang Koehler, Paul MacLean, Neil Miller, William Hamilton, E.O. Wilson, and Franz de Waal, we caved in and finally fessed up to the fact that many of the things we do and feel we share with reptiles, lab rats, apes, and chimps.
Science is on the brink of yet another revelation. We share many of our “human” qualities with more than just our cousins in the clan of DNA. We share these qualities with atoms, stars, and galaxies.
Is this airy-fairy, New Age wishful thinking, or is this genuine science? If it’s valid, science is in for more than just a minor change. It may be on the brink of what many of its practitioners wish for consciously but fear deep in their hearts, a cataclysmic viewpoint-flip, one that could undermine the validity of their life’s work—a Thomas Kuhnian paradigm shift.
The paradigm shift is coming. I think I hear it rumbling. In fact, as the New Yorker whose been splicing these disparate strands of the Big Bang Tango together, I’ve staked my life on it.
This ties in so perfectly with everything I've come to believe about the world. The Big Bang Tango is an idea I've been gnawing on for a long time and it has a name now. Howard Bloom is a genius.
What is the Tango?
In Frankfurt, Germany, a Russian physicist thinks that he’s spotted a sociology of basic particles. Now he wants to talk to photons.
In Tel Aviv, Israel, a physicist/microbiologist has been studying bacterial colonies and thinks he sees a linguistic pattern—a Chomskyite deep structure, a language—in the communication between single-celled beasts. In a paper published in the leading journal of physics, Physica A, the same Israeli physicist has made an even more shocking claim—that bacterial colonies have consciousness.
In Moscow, a mathematician/physicist at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been pondering quantum mechanics and has concluded that electrons and photons have to make decisions, they have to make up their “minds.”
And in New York City, the founder of a field called paleopsychology thinks that there are common threads between the German’s sociology of quantum mechanics, the Russian’s “emperor electrons,” the Israeli’s sentences “spoken” chemically by bacteria, the Israeli’s bacterial mass mind, and the mass passions aroused by superstars of human culture and of history, from Michael Jackson and Prince to Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
In modern science all of this should be viewed as blasphemy. It’s anthropomorphism, clear and simple. Humans make decisions. Photons and electrons don’t. Humans have language. Bacteria have no such thing. They can’t. They don’t have tongues. They don’t have that critical churner of words and paragraphs—a brain.
The time may have arrived to remove this taboo. Those who’ve labored hard to purge anthropomorphism from their vocabulary may have been the real sinners. They may have been anthropo-chauvinists in disguise.
When we apply words like attraction and repulsion--words that come from human physical and emotional experience--to quarks, protons, and electrons, we may simply be playing on a basic fact of nature. Evolution--and I mean the full sweep of evolution from the big bang to today--is iterative and fractal. The same simple principles show up over and over again. Principles like attraction and repulsion are the tools with which the self-construction of the universe began. They ruled over quarks, photons, and electrons 13.5 billion years ago. They were the master forces of the big bang.
The human high plateau of consciousness, emotion, language, culture, and immersion in the opinions of others is unique. But it's just another form of quark-dance, one it took quarks 13.5 billion years to invent.
The practical consequence? Sometimes bio-patterns can help solve puzzles in physics. Sometimes clues from human psychology can help solve problems in microbiology.
I’m the New Yorker mentioned above, the founder of paleopsychology. I call the social dance-steps of the inanimate and living cosmos The Big Bang Tango. And the concept of the Big Bang Tango is beginning to catch fire.
When the Tel Aviv physicist studying bacteria, Eshel Ben-Jacob—head of the Physics Department at the Raymond & Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences at Tel-Aviv University--sent a draft of his upcoming article, “Reflections on Biochemical Linguistics of Bacteria,” I scribbled the usual notations in the margins. One note pointed out that the paper’s facts hint that bacteria have something that strongly resembles human culture. Then I gave the reasons. Ben-Jacob and his co-writers felt the comparison was accurate, and included it in their text.
When the Moscow mathematician, Pavel Kurakin, at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, sent his paper on “Toy Quantum Mechanics with Hidden Variables,” it bristled with forbidden words. According to Kurakin’s theory, a quantum particle receives “queries” from particle detectors. Those detectors “duel” for the particle’s attention. Some of these “pretenders” receive only “refuse” signals. One lucky detector wins the particle’s favor and is blessed with the particle’s visit. In other words, there is competition and communication—a basic Darwinian twosome—at work on the quantum level.
How, I asked does a quantum particle make its decision on which signal to accept?
Who wins what Kurakin call this “lottery”? Says Pavel, “…Query signal intensity is proportional to |psi|2. Detectors win proportionally to their query intensities.”
In other words, in the quantum world, the strongest thrive. But the weak subordinate or die—a rule that shows up in the evolution of stars, galaxies, living beings, minds, emotions, politics, and history.
What’s wrong with these conversations? What’s wrong with Kurakin’s characterization of the rules of the cosmos as “natural fascism”? What’s wrong with Ben-Jacob’s claim that bacteria “send messages,” use chemical “words,” have “a chemical language,” and “can conduct a dialogue”? Or that bacterial “swimmers enter a ‘consultation phase’, during which they divide and communicate until a ‘collective decision,’ is reached”? Or worse yet, that bacteria have “chemical foreplay,” “chemical courtship,” “interpret” the state of the colony, reach a “majority vote,” and, if they have “valuable information announce this fact”? What’s wrong? Every single word of this is scientific heresy.
Plastering human qualities on everything we see is precisely what science has labored mightily to avoid since roughly 1650. Anthropomorphism is the stuff of witches and Church elders—of magic, superstition, and religion. Anthropomorphism carries all the Dark-Age intellectual baggage that folks like Galileo, Hooke, van Leeuwenhoek, Newton, and Voltaire snatched with difficulty from the fists of clerics, alchemists, and potion makers and threw away.
There's a claim implicit in the work of the colleagues I've stitched together on the Internet, a claim that in my work is as explicit as hell: many of the patterns we regard as solely human are not. We share basic rules and stratagems not just with ants, lizards, and chimps.
It's beginning to look as if we share such basics as communication with quarks, abilities like decision making with quantum particles, and complexities like the deep structure of language with bacteria.
Our aversion to anthropomorphism is arrogance in disguise. It's anthropocentrism--a failure to see that we carry in us patterns we've inherited from ten billion years of inanimate evolution, evolution that built the raw material of your finger tips, your blood, your brain, Bara's, my wife’s, Chris Anderson’s, and mine.
We woke up in the 20th Century to something Aristotle once suspected—that we are political animals. Are we clever? Yes. But we are clever beasts. Thanks to 20th Century figures like Wolfgang Koehler, Paul MacLean, Neil Miller, William Hamilton, E.O. Wilson, and Franz de Waal, we caved in and finally fessed up to the fact that many of the things we do and feel we share with reptiles, lab rats, apes, and chimps.
Science is on the brink of yet another revelation. We share many of our “human” qualities with more than just our cousins in the clan of DNA. We share these qualities with atoms, stars, and galaxies.
Is this airy-fairy, New Age wishful thinking, or is this genuine science? If it’s valid, science is in for more than just a minor change. It may be on the brink of what many of its practitioners wish for consciously but fear deep in their hearts, a cataclysmic viewpoint-flip, one that could undermine the validity of their life’s work—a Thomas Kuhnian paradigm shift.
The paradigm shift is coming. I think I hear it rumbling. In fact, as the New Yorker whose been splicing these disparate strands of the Big Bang Tango together, I’ve staked my life on it.
This ties in so perfectly with everything I've come to believe about the world. The Big Bang Tango is an idea I've been gnawing on for a long time and it has a name now. Howard Bloom is a genius.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Faces flow past in angry harmony,
Blinking towards the ground in silent protest of the day’s persistent ending.
I stand close as families scatter listlessly like unbending watercolor insects across a shadowed landscape,
Ink streaking forgottenly from rhythmic feet.
Monday, May 16, 2005
As taken from my Ebel notebook:
Turkish Remakes I'd Like to See
Turkish Rush Hour: A zany beige-meets-beige comedy romp in which two fast-talking, loose-cannon cops must retrieve a diplomat's stolen daughter. Jackie Chan's fantic physical comedy is recreated by combatants calmly passing a clay pot back and forth while gently kicking each other in the shins.
Turkish I, Robot: Turkish Will Smith is embroiled in a vast conspiracy to make the human race obsolete with intelligent robots, represented by Turkish children wrapped in blankets and aluminum foil with empty beer cans taped to their heads.
Turkish Pirates of the Caribbean: Johnny Depp's inebriated swarthiness is emulated through actual drunkenness, and his pithy banter is reduced to incomprehensible strings of vowels heard through layers of static. The original movie's sweeping, intense battle sequences are simply cut directly into the Turkish version, spliced with shots of Turkish fishermen jumping up and down in a boat while crewmembers behind the camera throw smoke grenades at them.
Turkish Rush Hour: A zany beige-meets-beige comedy romp in which two fast-talking, loose-cannon cops must retrieve a diplomat's stolen daughter. Jackie Chan's fantic physical comedy is recreated by combatants calmly passing a clay pot back and forth while gently kicking each other in the shins.
Turkish I, Robot: Turkish Will Smith is embroiled in a vast conspiracy to make the human race obsolete with intelligent robots, represented by Turkish children wrapped in blankets and aluminum foil with empty beer cans taped to their heads.
Turkish Pirates of the Caribbean: Johnny Depp's inebriated swarthiness is emulated through actual drunkenness, and his pithy banter is reduced to incomprehensible strings of vowels heard through layers of static. The original movie's sweeping, intense battle sequences are simply cut directly into the Turkish version, spliced with shots of Turkish fishermen jumping up and down in a boat while crewmembers behind the camera throw smoke grenades at them.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Coolest dream EVER:
In the future, a massive climate shift brings about a near-apocalyptic worldwide hurricaine, and out of the scattered remnants of the Earth rises a great hero - ME - a cunning and infinitely resourceful agent of chaos who crushes his enemies with the might of a god. Between sweet makeout sessions with tons of fly honies, I visited my impenetrable fortress BEYOND SPACE-TIME where I navigated vast mazes of secret tunnels and admired my extensive arsenal of futuristic assault weapons, which were largely unneccessary due to my uncanny ability to TOTALLY WAIL on any assailants with crazy, limb-flailing martial arts.
Yes! My subconscious rules!
In the future, a massive climate shift brings about a near-apocalyptic worldwide hurricaine, and out of the scattered remnants of the Earth rises a great hero - ME - a cunning and infinitely resourceful agent of chaos who crushes his enemies with the might of a god. Between sweet makeout sessions with tons of fly honies, I visited my impenetrable fortress BEYOND SPACE-TIME where I navigated vast mazes of secret tunnels and admired my extensive arsenal of futuristic assault weapons, which were largely unneccessary due to my uncanny ability to TOTALLY WAIL on any assailants with crazy, limb-flailing martial arts.
Yes! My subconscious rules!
Monday, May 09, 2005
Sunday, May 08, 2005
into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-colored twilight
i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermillion departure
swim,sayingly;
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and,ashes)
-e.e. cummings
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-colored twilight
i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermillion departure
swim,sayingly;
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and,ashes)
-e.e. cummings
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Monday, May 02, 2005
It often takes an hour of wallowing in the dry heat of Kaloustian's class to motivate myself to make a blog entry.
"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" proclaims Massoud from the back of the class. Substitute does nothing.
School is ugly. It's like your underwear after a hot day at school. GOD, it's hot and gross and my head hurts and "Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" Soulless myrmidons patrolling the campus looking for children to bully, grades, grades, grades, the dumb nauseating pulse of the top ten at lunch, the smell of cheese everywhere, hot sun, I VOMIT YOU OUT, I EXPEL YOU FROM MY BODY LIKE A SICKNESS. I reclaim dominion over my life, they get no more anger, no more floorspace in my head.
"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!"
Love something.
"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" proclaims Massoud from the back of the class. Substitute does nothing.
School is ugly. It's like your underwear after a hot day at school. GOD, it's hot and gross and my head hurts and "Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" Soulless myrmidons patrolling the campus looking for children to bully, grades, grades, grades, the dumb nauseating pulse of the top ten at lunch, the smell of cheese everywhere, hot sun, I VOMIT YOU OUT, I EXPEL YOU FROM MY BODY LIKE A SICKNESS. I reclaim dominion over my life, they get no more anger, no more floorspace in my head.
"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!"
Love something.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Thursday, April 14, 2005
I'm definitely not the first person to say this, but comic books are really an under-appreciated medium. I've probably read about sixty comics in the last two weeks and I can say with confidence I've gotten more enjoyment and stimulation out of them than all the obligatory school reading I've done in the past three years combined. Here are my favorite titles:
-The Authority: Imagine a hedonistic Justice League floating through ultra-space in a sentient spacecraft fifty miles long who fight sadistic villains, power-hungry dictators and aliens in massive, bloody melees often resulting in extensive civilian casualties. Groovy beyond description.
-Animal Man: An animal rights super hero book. It's not lame. The writer manifests himself as an alien to try to subdue characters he can't control.
-The Invisibles: Basically the source material for The Matrix but way, way cooler. Members of the crew for the movie were actually given copies of the comic for research. Young, sailor-mouthed highschool anarchist is inducted into a faction of occult guerillas, it is CRAAAZY.
-Transmetropolitan: Gonzo journalist of the future wields a diarrhea-inducing gun against politicians and eats human body parts. Patrick Stewart wants to make a movie out of it.
-Hellblazer: Inspiration for the movie Constantine. Only Hollywood could translate a swarthy, blonde Englishman into Keanu Reeves.
-The Books of Magic: Harry Potter was a totally inferior ripoff of this series, from the same guy who did Sandman. Needless to say, it will rock you.
This man writes comics that will make your face turn inside-out.
-The Authority: Imagine a hedonistic Justice League floating through ultra-space in a sentient spacecraft fifty miles long who fight sadistic villains, power-hungry dictators and aliens in massive, bloody melees often resulting in extensive civilian casualties. Groovy beyond description.
-Animal Man: An animal rights super hero book. It's not lame. The writer manifests himself as an alien to try to subdue characters he can't control.
-The Invisibles: Basically the source material for The Matrix but way, way cooler. Members of the crew for the movie were actually given copies of the comic for research. Young, sailor-mouthed highschool anarchist is inducted into a faction of occult guerillas, it is CRAAAZY.
-Transmetropolitan: Gonzo journalist of the future wields a diarrhea-inducing gun against politicians and eats human body parts. Patrick Stewart wants to make a movie out of it.
-Hellblazer: Inspiration for the movie Constantine. Only Hollywood could translate a swarthy, blonde Englishman into Keanu Reeves.
-The Books of Magic: Harry Potter was a totally inferior ripoff of this series, from the same guy who did Sandman. Needless to say, it will rock you.
This man writes comics that will make your face turn inside-out.
Monday, April 11, 2005
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
I'm in Kaloustian's class, there's a sub, I have an hour to kill. I shall write.
Looking for colleges got a lot easier when I realized how completely disenchanted I've become with mainstream education. I want nothing to do with it anymore. There is a college I am seriously considering in Washington where they don't evaluate you through grades; only through written assessment. And the students assess the teachers as well. You make your own curriculum. It's small. It's different.
I met with one of the higher-ups at UCSD and even she doesn't think the UC's are all that great for people like me. Colleges like UCSD are way too big for any kind of recognizable community to form, everyone's scattered, your professors shirk their responsibilities and you end up being taught by grad students and many can't even graduate until year five because they couldn't get the classes they wanted or needed. It also seems to me like these colleges are based on the same systems that high schools and middle schools are: churning out a product. Molding a student, not a person. School thusfar has given me very few useful, applicable skills, and if anything, my ability to process information effectively has been severely hindered by it. I want out. With that realization came optimism, and for the first time ever I'm actually excited about my education.
Yeah, and fuck middle school. Seriously.
Looking for colleges got a lot easier when I realized how completely disenchanted I've become with mainstream education. I want nothing to do with it anymore. There is a college I am seriously considering in Washington where they don't evaluate you through grades; only through written assessment. And the students assess the teachers as well. You make your own curriculum. It's small. It's different.
I met with one of the higher-ups at UCSD and even she doesn't think the UC's are all that great for people like me. Colleges like UCSD are way too big for any kind of recognizable community to form, everyone's scattered, your professors shirk their responsibilities and you end up being taught by grad students and many can't even graduate until year five because they couldn't get the classes they wanted or needed. It also seems to me like these colleges are based on the same systems that high schools and middle schools are: churning out a product. Molding a student, not a person. School thusfar has given me very few useful, applicable skills, and if anything, my ability to process information effectively has been severely hindered by it. I want out. With that realization came optimism, and for the first time ever I'm actually excited about my education.
Yeah, and fuck middle school. Seriously.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Saturday, March 19, 2005
It's the hidden logic of the internet that I can say words like "love" and "God" without embarassment. I can see hundreds of us bearing our chests to our screens, a thousand and one midnight confessionals. We're really quite vulnerable, yeah? Why hide behind boxes, isolated, hurting? We don't have to be distanced. Everything we say to each other doesn't have to amuse. We can be honest, we can be honest.
We can bring it out in the open. Those things you think about when you can't sleep can become realities if you want them to. We don't have to be half-humans anymore, we can find each other.
We can bring it out in the open. Those things you think about when you can't sleep can become realities if you want them to. We don't have to be half-humans anymore, we can find each other.
Monday, March 14, 2005
I'm now convinced that one's enjoyment of life is directly proportional to the amount of sleep they are getting. I got fourteen hours of sleep last night, it lends perspective.
Dreariness gone. Things make sense. Information is processed logically. It's like open-access to your whole brain and everything glows.
I spent yesterday dancing with the strange and beautiful things of the sea. Massive, flowing, eating beings. I hooked a shark and just stood there, holding on to it, helpless and absurd. The staggering simplicity of the thing is incommunicable.
The Young Man and the Sea
Dreariness gone. Things make sense. Information is processed logically. It's like open-access to your whole brain and everything glows.
I spent yesterday dancing with the strange and beautiful things of the sea. Massive, flowing, eating beings. I hooked a shark and just stood there, holding on to it, helpless and absurd. The staggering simplicity of the thing is incommunicable.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Saturday, February 26, 2005
By the time I was out the door, my cat had already pounced and I could hear muffled squeaks.
My cat killed the baby rabbit we'd been seeing in my backyard for a week. He stared at me blankly with it hanging limply out of his mouth.
It died quickly. The more I thought about it, the less sad it was. My cat had millions of years of killer instinct to compete with. Death isn't evil. It simply is.
My cat killed the baby rabbit we'd been seeing in my backyard for a week. He stared at me blankly with it hanging limply out of his mouth.
It died quickly. The more I thought about it, the less sad it was. My cat had millions of years of killer instinct to compete with. Death isn't evil. It simply is.
Monday, February 21, 2005
Homework hurts my soul, and that is not an attempt at comical hyperbole.
There is nothing more discouraging than the knowledge that you are about to apply yourself to something irrelevant, that you are about to unwillingly concede to dance like a little monkey and talk about Marta going to the supermarket, repairing her lawnmower and volunteering at the community center.
Just let me get drunk on the afternoon sun and sit empty-headed and lovesick, which is more important that all the God-damned textbooks in the world stacked on top of one another. There are destroyers of beautiful things, and don't ever forget that.
There is nothing more discouraging than the knowledge that you are about to apply yourself to something irrelevant, that you are about to unwillingly concede to dance like a little monkey and talk about Marta going to the supermarket, repairing her lawnmower and volunteering at the community center.
Just let me get drunk on the afternoon sun and sit empty-headed and lovesick, which is more important that all the God-damned textbooks in the world stacked on top of one another. There are destroyers of beautiful things, and don't ever forget that.
Monday, February 14, 2005
Damn-ed Hallmark.
Woke up, showered and thought about all the girls I'm not dating. Happy "Wallow In Misery" day.
Walk into first period, math, there's a quiz.
Straight to Woods-Petties, Spanish, there's a quiz. However, Señora gave me a chocolate and it seems like she's warming up from her "act like a surly fuck-o to Matt Louv" phase. Halfway through the period my lip starts bleeding and won't stop. Bloody kleenex stuck to my face, I rise to my feet and proclaim to all, "Happy Valentine's Day!"
Then I shot Kaloustian with rubber bands.
Home, I cleaned my room and listened to Dead Kennedys. Dead Kennedys fix all.
What a fabricated holiday. Lotsa love to all, despite.
Woke up, showered and thought about all the girls I'm not dating. Happy "Wallow In Misery" day.
Walk into first period, math, there's a quiz.
Straight to Woods-Petties, Spanish, there's a quiz. However, Señora gave me a chocolate and it seems like she's warming up from her "act like a surly fuck-o to Matt Louv" phase. Halfway through the period my lip starts bleeding and won't stop. Bloody kleenex stuck to my face, I rise to my feet and proclaim to all, "Happy Valentine's Day!"
Then I shot Kaloustian with rubber bands.
Home, I cleaned my room and listened to Dead Kennedys. Dead Kennedys fix all.
What a fabricated holiday. Lotsa love to all, despite.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Friday, February 11, 2005
I am so bored with us.
Cleaning my room, listening to the radio and I find myself changing the station every couple minutes because I simply cannot tolerate the commercials they play.
"Allo, zees ees Francois, from France, zee countree of luvvv. Zees Valentine's seezon, take your spezzial someone to a bistro..."
Vomit, vomit, vomit. We are SO ARROGANT.
Sometimes I feel like America's a film I have to scrape off the back of my retinas and burn out of my ear canals to have any kind of coherent, real-human-being thoughts.
Our culture is godless, yet we ourselves are not. How do we allow our good sense to be stripped away and replaced with such meaningless trivialities? Is this our consensus reality? Lives of spiritual complacency playing to a soundtrack of car commercials?
Smash it all to pieces and build something pretty out of it. At least I'm trying.
Cleaning my room, listening to the radio and I find myself changing the station every couple minutes because I simply cannot tolerate the commercials they play.
"Allo, zees ees Francois, from France, zee countree of luvvv. Zees Valentine's seezon, take your spezzial someone to a bistro..."
Vomit, vomit, vomit. We are SO ARROGANT.
Sometimes I feel like America's a film I have to scrape off the back of my retinas and burn out of my ear canals to have any kind of coherent, real-human-being thoughts.
Our culture is godless, yet we ourselves are not. How do we allow our good sense to be stripped away and replaced with such meaningless trivialities? Is this our consensus reality? Lives of spiritual complacency playing to a soundtrack of car commercials?
Smash it all to pieces and build something pretty out of it. At least I'm trying.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Two relevant poems by Kenneth Patchen, an angry pacifist.
'O Fiery River'
O fiery river
Flow out over the land.
Men have destroyed the roads of wonder,
And their cities squat like black toads
In the orchards of life.
Nothing is clean, or real, or as a girl,
Naked to love, or to be a man with.
The arts of this American land
Stink in the air of the mountains;
What has made these men sick rats
That they find out every cheap hole?
How can these speak of greatness?
Push your drugstore-culture into the sewer
With the rest of your creation.
The bell wasn't meant to toll for you.
Keep your filthy little hands off it.
O fiery river
Spread over this American land.
Drown out the falsity, the smug contempt
For what does not pay...
What would you pay Christ to die again?
"And When Freedom Is Achieved..."
You have used a word
Which means nothing.
You have given a word
The power to send men to death.
Men are not free who are sent to die.
Only those who send them are 'free.'
You should have freedom stuffed down your fat throats.
Those poems were written in the thirties.
'O Fiery River'
O fiery river
Flow out over the land.
Men have destroyed the roads of wonder,
And their cities squat like black toads
In the orchards of life.
Nothing is clean, or real, or as a girl,
Naked to love, or to be a man with.
The arts of this American land
Stink in the air of the mountains;
What has made these men sick rats
That they find out every cheap hole?
How can these speak of greatness?
Push your drugstore-culture into the sewer
With the rest of your creation.
The bell wasn't meant to toll for you.
Keep your filthy little hands off it.
O fiery river
Spread over this American land.
Drown out the falsity, the smug contempt
For what does not pay...
What would you pay Christ to die again?
"And When Freedom Is Achieved..."
You have used a word
Which means nothing.
You have given a word
The power to send men to death.
Men are not free who are sent to die.
Only those who send them are 'free.'
You should have freedom stuffed down your fat throats.
Those poems were written in the thirties.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Over the past couple of days I've had a lot of time to reflect, and I've come to a few conclusions.
For some reason, this year seems much more draining than any other. Everyone I've mentioned this to agrees with me. It seems like all of us are worn out, like we're sick of the institution and sick of each other. There seems to be a mutual animosity that's emerged just below the surface.
Time to make our lives our own again. If we stop allowing school to damage us, we stop empowering it. We need to reclaim our minds and our relationships, because school mentality will not stop until both are torn from us and mangled into something we don't even recognize. Time to start being interested in each other again. Time to start being kind. Time to start learning on our own, and learning from each other.
So this is what I ask of you all: do everything in your power to instill your lives with positive energy, however you may do that, because the rest of us will benefit and we can make our collective existence into something constructive, rather than the dreariness that it currently is. Our happiness is our own responsibility.
For some reason, this year seems much more draining than any other. Everyone I've mentioned this to agrees with me. It seems like all of us are worn out, like we're sick of the institution and sick of each other. There seems to be a mutual animosity that's emerged just below the surface.
Time to make our lives our own again. If we stop allowing school to damage us, we stop empowering it. We need to reclaim our minds and our relationships, because school mentality will not stop until both are torn from us and mangled into something we don't even recognize. Time to start being interested in each other again. Time to start being kind. Time to start learning on our own, and learning from each other.
So this is what I ask of you all: do everything in your power to instill your lives with positive energy, however you may do that, because the rest of us will benefit and we can make our collective existence into something constructive, rather than the dreariness that it currently is. Our happiness is our own responsibility.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
My dad gave in and booked another trip to Alaska this summer, same place we went last time.
I can't express what a relief it will be to fish there again, last trip was the most peaceful experience of my life.
I encourage all of you to try to seek out places like Kodiak, places of natural beauty. They've made such an impact on me.
Pictures
I can't express what a relief it will be to fish there again, last trip was the most peaceful experience of my life.
I encourage all of you to try to seek out places like Kodiak, places of natural beauty. They've made such an impact on me.
Pictures
Saturday, January 01, 2005
New Year's Eve, party at Emily's house. Her house is haunted; many stories I'd rather not dwell on. Ansel leaves a digital audio recorder in an empty room upstairs and leaves it to record half an hour of white noise. Later, we hook it to a guy's car stereo and listen to silence for ten minutes when...
"................................BLUOACHTOAURFLARORLAAAGH!!!........"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!! WHAT THE FUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!"
Ansel is so startled that he rewinds the tape to the beginning. We listen to the entire thing again, and the sound is gone.
"AAAAAAAAAGH!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! I HAVE TO WALK HOME TONIGHT!!!! FUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"................................BLUOACHTOAURFLARORLAAAGH!!!........"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!! WHAT THE FUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!"
Ansel is so startled that he rewinds the tape to the beginning. We listen to the entire thing again, and the sound is gone.
"AAAAAAAAAGH!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! I HAVE TO WALK HOME TONIGHT!!!! FUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"