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.

OOPS.

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.

HOLY SHIT.

He puts on an old record
and the needle goes up and down
and blood runs into the grooves
and turns around
and around and around.

Why has everyone stopped dancing?

Woops, murderers own the planet.

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.

An excellent music video.

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.

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

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.

Click.

Bunker-Mentality

This site is a most flawless encapsulation of everything I loathe about marketing.

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!!!!!"

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.

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

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.

Drink up,
your whiteboy sadness.
Bottoms up,
you’ve got the keys now.
A toast,
how precious your many suicides.
Here’s to you kid,
for not caring
that you are loved anyway.

Here’s to you, kid.

The general cold freshness
of sunlight and rain in awkward union.
The wind smells like chlorine,
the air bleached of our unconscious sins.
It looks like an important storm,
come to make the sky bleed forgiveness.

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.