07/25/2001

A bunch more messing around with Greymatter today.  Managed to screw it up so bad I had to re-upload and go through the whole configuration thing again.  Trying to stave off some depressed and ugly thoughts.  It's getting pretty dark in here,  and though traffic is back to next to nothing,  I don't feel comfortable talking about it.  It's supposed to be a journal, not a whine-fest.

What do you want from life?

Someone to love and somebody you can trust?

What do you want from life?

To try to be happy while you do the nasty things you must?

I was amazed that the Tubes live album was out of print in the US.  It's on my list of greatest live albums ever recorded.  Like Devo, these guys were "pioneers who got scalped."  I'm very glad I got the chance to see them several times.  There are some stories there, but not today.

Just some short takes.  Einstein as a guy with problems in his love life?  Einstein in Love sounds like a great read.  Sex and Physics details the authors search into the facts behind Einstein's personal life.  It's interesting to think that we might owe a debt to his first wife for the General Theory of Relativity.

Sometimes though, perhaps it's best not to delve to deeply into the personalities responsible for changes in our world view.  Mortimer Adler, the man perhaps most responsible for trying to keep the classics in print and in every living room, passed away a while ago.  I read some articles, and was thinking that I might like the guy until I read The Great Bookie today. Joseph Epstein, the champion of the sentence mentioned the other day, really does a number on him—  "His must have been an astonishingly high IQ, but his brain functioned in him like a bicep: a large and showy thing with which one cannot finally do all that much but menace and beat down other people."

I begin to think that whatever intellect I have is probably just a side effect of the caffeine.  Java Man details the history and social importance of caffeine in the present age.  It's a pretty convincing argument.  This was my favorite part:

What this flood of caffeine did, according to Weinberg and Bealer, was to abet the process of industrialization—to help "large numbers of people to coordinate their work schedules by giving them the energy to start work at a given time and continue it as long as necessary."  Until the eighteenth century, it must be remembered, many Westerners drank beer almost continuously, even beginning their day with something called "beer soup."

(Bealer and Weinberg helpfully provide the following eighteenth-century German recipe: "Heat the beer in a saucepan; in a separate small pot beat a couple of eggs. Add a chunk of butter to the hot beer. Stir in some cool beer to cool it, then pour over the eggs. Add a bit of salt, and finally mix all the ingredients together, whisking it well to keep it from curdling.")  

Now they began each day with a strong cup of coffee.  One way to explain the industrial revolution is as the inevitable consequence of a world where people suddenly preferred being jittery to being drunk.  In the modern world, there was no other way to keep up.

07/24/2001

Took the bandage off today.  Physically, everything is healing nicely.  Took the new shoes out for a test walk.  I like them.

Lots of weird stuff today, mentally.  News from Karen, that I probably shouldn't talk about yet, and negotiations with the hospital.  Who would have thought they were so eager to cut deals?  I made a deal on the removal of the screw;   they offered me 30% off if I paid cash, so I did.  $1300 beats $1800.  But the real shocker was today:  If I play my cards right, I can get the $13,000 surgery bill reduced to about $3800.  Now that's what I call a discount!

In the US, you really don't have a choice if you don't have medical insurance.  "Excuse me, I'd like to bargain shop, just let me lie here and writhe in agony—  I can't afford it."  Oh well.  I like walking.  I'm glad they fixed me up.  I'm still walking with a limp, but I think that should go away.  I really want to get back on my bike, but it's too damn hot anyway.  Best not to take too many chances.  It's one of those steamy, sultry, southern nights.

Another really great Kevin Smith real video, this time not having anything to do with grass. Yes, I'd really like to kick some ass too, but I'm really just a sensitive artist. . .

Though I'm sure lots of people have visited this one, I was fairly amused by Jeff Krulik's movies.  There once was a time that Gilligan's Island was on every channel.  You'd think there were profound messages to be found on a Three Hour Tour.  Ginger or Maryanne?

The oxymoron of the day is Primitivism.com.  I found John Zerzan's essay The Catastrophe of Postmodernism to be a fair summary of some big thinkers, though I don't necessarily align myself with his conclusions.

07/23/2001

Feeling a little better today, but I still slept too late.  It's hard to force yourself into a schedule when you really don't have one.  Got access to a server with no pop-ups with access to CGI, but it's slow as hell, and run on NT.  Greymatter doesn't like NT; there are hacks, but I don't think it's worth the trouble to mess with it.

It looks like it might be best to pack up and move the site.  Doteasy has been a good host, and the price is hard to beat— nothing.  If you register your domain name with them they give you 20megs.

I registered for five years, and recently upped the space to 50megs.  However, their cgi access price is just outrageous.  I located a UK company who runs servers in San Diego (how weird is that?) that seem to be just the ticket;  100megs of space will be about 50$ a year with full access to cgi and all that.

I'm not going to do anything just yet;  I still have to figure out Greymatter.  So far, I really like what I see.  I'll be able to include html in the posts so they needn't be monotonous and it will keep everything together into a more easily handled package.  It's a learning thing:  I become increasingly fascinated with the way that technology is changing information management.  Perhaps it is the right kind of glue to build a global village.

There are ups and downs.  Funny how quickly news changes:  Now, George Harrison is fine.  One revelation of the Invisible Light work was that music binds people together.  I'd always thought of it as a private thing, among intimate friends, but when you look at its influence in a broader social context the impact is striking.  It's no wonder that the MP3 controversy remains a hot topic, not just for its intellectual property implications, but for its deepening pool of socialization.

I was reminded of the dreaded "universality" of popular music when I viewed a Neil Young gig review from an Italian fan.  Nationality becomes really unimportant in these things:  there is a commonality of feeling when facing the power of Crazy Horse.  But there's a distance, a difference in the creation of "stardom" as well.  I've been thinking about the displacement of oneself from the audience as a person apart;  Is it really the only way to communicate on this universal level?  Do you have to give up being "one of the crowd" in order to contact the crowd? This seems paradoxical.

When I broke my ankle, it was an incredibly long crawl.  I discovered some interesting stuff.  I never stopped thinking.  I was constantly calculating the odds of being able to make it.  I wasn't so sure of myself anymore.  My feet have always been sure.  I never used to fall down.  I kept thinking,  "this is a new one, how do I figure out how to get out of this?"  Only one true lesson remains:  It's easier to crawl on grass than on concrete.  Reconstructing things, I passed out near the spot where I took this picture.  I passed out again, at the steps.  My apartment is around the corner.

Grass—  that's the ticket.    If you're going to fall down, live someplace with lots of grass.

07/22/2001

I'm pretty thrilled with the new Buffalo Springfield box set.  I'm not thrilled with the way I feel.  Taking a shower, the plastic bag over my leg opened up and now the bandage is wet.  I removed the outer part and re-wrapped it with a clean ace bandage, but my ankle is twitchy and uncomfortable.  But then, so's my brain.

Badger mentioned me in his blog a few days ago, echoing thoughts I've heard many times before:  "he delves into denser stuff than i feel like tackling in reading or art."  While I could say the same of him regarding his political commentary, the feverish rate at which I consume heavy stuff sometimes bothers me.  Secretly, I'd rather sit in a tree and learn to play the flute.  Like I've said many times before, people can only take me in small doses.  I've tried over the years to change into someone who isn't always spontaneously glowing from radioactive ideas, but it never works.  I can't stop thinking about stuff.

Just Gaming is billed as one of the most accessible works by Lyotard.  I don't agree.  The Postmodern Condition is a hundred times easier to understand.  In several sections, he uses the same phrase repeated three times, each time meaning something completely different.  Lyotard consistently redefines words like "pagan" to mean something totally different from the common use.  Over and over I had to re-read passages before I could even make sense of the sentences, let alone understand the content.  Lyotard for beginners?  I don't think so.

With that carp aside, I must say that it was worth it.  It's another case of postmodern appropriation of form to subvert content.  Written as a Platonic dialogue, it indicts all concepts of synthesis and consensus, while oddly arriving at one in the end.  Both of the conversants agree that there can be no supportable criteria for judgement, but we have no choice but to judge.  That's the gist of it, really.  I'll save you the trouble of deciphering it.  The reason why I was compelled to plough my way through it was it's discussion early on of the differences between descriptive and prescriptive discourse.  They operate as entirely separate and incongruous language games. The proof of this is presented in a confusing manner, but along the way some interesting points are raised.

What we call an "artist" in the usual sense of the term, is someone who, in relation to a given purport, the purport of the canvas and the medium of the picta, for example, proposes a new set of rules of the painting game.  Same thing for the so-called independent cinema, or for music.

(JFL 61)

I suppose one of the great discoveries I made along the way as a photographer is that you have to have rules. Without them, what you produce is incoherent.  To say that art has no rules is pure delusion.  Art has lots of them, and of course they are ready to be broken at any time.  There is no area of artistic production without rules:  to say "I will violate the rules" is to create a rule.  When you change the rules enough, you create a new game.

I choose my rules carefully.  I suppose that's why I've taken a hiatus from photography.  The old rules have run their course; it's time for new ones.  Some rules persist—  I still believe, like the old ƒ64 school, that obscurity serves no purpose in art.  I don't know what I'll do next—  but I know that it will be clear and hard.

I've started playing with Greymatter. I really enjoy doing the free-form thing, but the problem is maintenance and upkeep over the long-haul.  I suspect I'll be doing the online journal thing for a long time to come, so I need to figure out a system.  Greymatter is quite promising.  The major problem is that it requires cgi access, which I don't have on this server—  to get it would cost $90 per year.  So, I've set up a test account on one of those free services (with pop-ups) to check it out.

It was amazingly simple to get configured (I've never worked with cgi before).  The only real glitch were some chmod permissions which forced me to get FTP Explorer because the old tried-and-true WSFTP didn't support a cli.  Traffic around here is back to normal (one or two folks a day) so I feel less uneasy about perhaps trying it next month.  Pop-ups are really irritating.  I can place the blog in an iframe so the addresses and bookmarks won't need to change, but I don't like the idea of advertising for anyone.

Speaking of bookmarks, I've found that keeping this journal filled with bookmarked oddities far more useful than keeping track of favorites in my browser.  It's always overstuffed with places that I never remember why I bookmarked in the firstplace.  So I'm going to clean house a bit today, so I can delete them from my browser!

• Mike, you were looking for silly movies:  Weeeeee qualifies. Gonads and strife?  I suppose they go together.



• Ever feel the need to curse someone in a biblical fashion?



• The Journal of Mundane Behavior is no joke;  it's a serious academic journal.  I'll be spending a lot of time reading there.



• Bob Lee was kind enough to point out this great article about Black Flag from the LA Weekly.



• A dense and provocative article about The Physics of the Web made me reflect quite a bit.



• There are some great pictures of Steve Wynn and the Miracle Three at this site.



• Luke directed me to The American Literature Abuse Society quite some time ago. Too late for me, though.



• I don't know how I missed Mr. Epstein Regrets until today. This musing over perfect sentences and the proclamations of Internet liberation remind me of my own mixed feelings about what's going on.

On a final note, there was more devastating news.  George Harrison doesn't have long to live.

07/19/2001

I'm glad it's out.  What seems amazing to me is that the screw managed to get bent, even though I've only been walking on it for a few weeks.  A titanium screw at that— it really makes you respect the strength of body parts.  I can see why the surgeon seemed sure I could break it and leave it in, if I wanted to save some money. However, walking is very important to me and I didn't want to risk any further damage from screw parts rattling around inside my bones.

Though the valium injections were the high point of the experience,  I was also amused by some post-operative instructions:

• A responsible person must drive you home after your surgery today and remain with you overnight.  Do not drive for 24 hours.



• We suggest that you postpone any important decisions for 24 hours.



• Do not operate any dangerous machinery today.  This includes use of kitchen knives and other potentially dangerous household equipment

I nearly had to resort to calling a cab after the surgery; it was either that or wait around for hours waiting for my ex-wife to pick me up on her lunch.  Thankfully, that wasn't necessary— Karen got approval to go into work late.  Someone to stay with me?  Yeah, right.  Most people can't seem to stand my company for longer than a two hour class;  In four years I've had four visitors at my apartment, with an average length of stay (not counting one ex-girlfriend) of fifteen minutes.  Someone to remain with me for 24 hours?  Not in the last few years anyway.  A responsible person?  Other than my ex-wife, I really don't know any.

The caffeine headache induced by refraining from my typical daily beverages was more painful than the surgery itself.  But then, what do I know.  I'm on drugs.  Nice of them to remind you that drugs impair judgement.  An unexpected touch in the well written document.

The reminder to stay out of the dangerous kitchen is one I've violated as well.  Iced cappuccino is calling me, and steam fueled appliances are no doubt considered potentially dangerous.  My first act when I got home was to make a sandwich using a big sharp knife to slice the bread, before I read the instructions.  O well.

There have been some interesting literary news bits floating about:

• The War of the Baskervilles describes the controversy surrounding the authorship of this Sherlock Holmes story— one writer actually thinks that Doyle murdered the real author!



• Though I'm not familiar with CS Lewis, his works are also under scrutiny.



• Born as Foe sounds like a really interesting read about Daniel Defoe.  I really want to hear more about his attempt in the early 1690s to manufacture perfume from civet cat urine:  " The authorities repossessed the cats and reappraised them at a lower value, leaving Defoe stuck with the bill and a lawsuit from his mother-in-law, who sued him for her losses."

One of the scariest things I've read in a while though is Faking It. It's a story in the NY Times magazine about a fifteen year-old who is a top-rated legal advice source.  Unfettered by the need to read all those boring law books, he relies on Judge Judy and other TV programs for his information.  On the Internet, people preferred his opinions to those of people with prestigious degrees.  The article goes into great detail about Internet role-playing, and the shifting nature of postmodern "truth."   It also has a great deal to say about the impact of youth culture on technology.  Good stuff.

Neumu is popping up on everyone's hip list.  It seems promising, though I didn't see much in the current issue that interested me.  It has the same "information design" look that is everywhere you surf, with the same mythologizing section headers, but the writing talent seems above average.  I bookmarked it when it was first mentioned, but didn't find any articles that compelled me to read in depth.  Then, a few days later, a photographic gallery that was freshly installed really got my attention.

Hair, Sweat, and Guitars by Charles Peterson passed my content test.  Though the majority of his work is commercially oriented, the crowd stuff is a cut above.  I found a copy of his first book, Screaming Life, on ABE so I'm anxiously waiting.  There are always plenty of fan-boy books around scenes, and Peterson's scene was grunge.  But he doesn't seem to focus on the stars exclusively, so I thought it was worth a look.  Though the flash-blur trick is a bit heavy handed (I was sick of it by the late 80s), his sense of the moment seems pretty strong.  Peterson may not be top-tier material, but he certainly is worth more than a passing glance, unlike the daily snap-shots of the site's owner.

07/14/2001

There are some weird little bits of trivia about some of the photographs I just put up.  I had no idea when I took this picture that the fellow I've highlighted in the blue circle was Karl Hettinger.  A friend identified him later.  The name probably doesn't mean anything to most people.

There was a movie based on real life events called The Onion Field written by Joseph Wambaugh.  Two LA cops were kidnapped and driven to an onion field in Bakersfield, CA.  One was shot; one got away.  The one that got away was Karl Hettinger.  It seems very odd to me that he later moved from LA to Bakersfield.

It was sad to find out today that he's dead. On the site I found about dead cops, it says he died only a couple of years after I took this picture.  The article wasn't very upbeat: "He died a broken man who never was allowed to recover from the trauma of the kidnapping and his partner's murder."  He seemed happy the night I was in the same bar with him, but you never really know.

Most of the day, I couldn't access the site stats but I got everything to validate ok.  So far, only Django has told me that the gallery seems to be working.  The slideshow thing is a little funky, sometimes it has to be reloaded if there is a server bottleneck.  But I thought this inconvenience was better than expecting someone to click 120 times to make their way through.

Any thoughts? Please e-mail me.

Oh, and to set the record straight: I don't know where Baudrillard lives, I don't have any surgical equipment inside me that I know of, I don't know where to buy percocet online, and I'm not gay.   Not that there's anything wrong with that.

07/13/2001

Friday the 13th.  Huge thunderstorms started tearing up the sky just after midnight.  I stood at the front door; it was like a giant rave party.  Lightning froze the raindrops like diamonds in the air.  Waves of rain danced on the ground as if directed by a huge firehose just out of view.  The apartment boxes looked like silos in some old Midwestern dream.

Finished up Invisible Light.  120 images finally made the cut.  The site was approaching 20megs, so I increased my space to 50.  Discovered that the blog was unreadable in Netscape.  Fixed it.  I was just about to validate the gallery and make it accessible but the validator is down.  

I was searching for a picture of a Sunpak 622 when I found a mention of "a guy who used infrared in bars."  It made me wonder.  Was it me, or did someone else come up with the same idea?  It doesn't matter, but I get really flattered thinking that people were moved by my show.  Now you can see it here.  I want to keep the layout of the gallery clean, so I'll spill out some recollections here.

I first tested the idea on the top of Mt. Pinos in California.  Lots of folks congregate up there to look through telescopes.  The camera shop I worked for was holding a workshop with reps from the telescope companies and I thought it would be an ideal place to test out a flash that didn't hurt your eyes.  It worked.  People spent hours getting their eyes to dilate totally, and my little strobe didn't register much more than a faint red glow.  It was cold up there.  I liked bars;  they were warmer and the music was better.

The night I took these, I rushed home to process the film.  Using the basic exposure data from them, I went into a bar and went to work.  Three years later, I put the infrared work behind me, and started something else.  The most valuable lessons weren't technical, they were personal.  Ultimately, I figured out that I didn't need to worry about imposing on people so much.  If you gain their trust, it doesn't matter what kind of hardware you use.

I never did find a decent picture of the ungainly hardware involved, so I just threw it on the scanner and scanned it.  People always ask, and I figured it was easier to show.  A funny thought occurred to me last night— At the time that I was travelling back to the thirties in technique (flash bulbs would have been better than the strobes I used, but I never figured out how to coat them), photographic technology was moving into automatic focus, zooms, and all the things that people take for granted these days.  My experience with this hardware has made me totally disinterested in all that, including digital cameras.  Photographers make pictures, not boxes.

The best advice could give any aspiring photographer is:    Read lots of poems.

07/11/2001

Henri Cartier-Bresson means more to me as time goes by. When I was younger, I found him a bit cold and calculating, unlike my hero Kertéz. Perhaps I just saw the wrong examples, or maybe I wasn't ready to cope with the depth of his philosophy.  I bought America in Passing a while ago, and I spent a bunch of time looking at it today.  The silence in some of the photographs is deafening.  Found a great article by Phillip Brookman: Conversations in Silence.  It was like reading the thoughts inside myself:

But if Cartier-Bresson believes that it is impossible to really know a person, inside and outside, through a photographic portrait, what do his portraits really tell us about people?  After all, we can know the texture of someone's skin from a photograph, but can we see and understand what's inside?

This is the question that he is posing in his work; the answer lies inside the photographer.  Cartier-Bresson tells us that we cannot comprehend a subject's "interior silence" without this silence coming from the artist himself, from the connection of his mind, eye and hand.  Yet this connection — of thought, vision and action — is inherently present in his photographs.  By using the camera like a pencil or brush, a true extension of his interior thinking, he comes close in these pictures to perceiving what is behind the mask of the face.

Brookman is really sharp, and I'm not just saying that because he gave me a $500 award once.  It was the only money I ever received for my work as an artist.  It wasn't the money that was important: coming from him, it felt like an incredible affirmation.  The money was quickly spent on a root-canal.  It came just in the nick of time.

Some days are harder than others.  I thought emotions were difficult growing up; who would have thought that they actually get more intense with age.  Maybe it's just me.  Things are just too close to the skin.  I worked on the Invisible Light gallery some more, ordered some books, and can't stop thinking about photography.  I look at snapshot galleries on the web and wonder why it always meant so much more to me.

Stayed up late last night reading Electric Rhetoric by Kathleen Welch.  She defends Ong against the charges of bifurcation.  I got really upset with her characterisation of Romanticism as the enemy, though she modified it to be "neo-romantic modernism."  I'm not sure what I think of the book yet.  She is incredibly aggressive in her stance, but I must say that I really like her slant on the teaching of Rhetoric as developmental in critical thinking.  Welch proposes that the Isocratic bond between internal thought and external expression should be resurrected.

The "letting go" required when I did the photographs that became Invisible Light was a bit similar.  The internal process of experiencing the moment exceeded the external artifice of technique.  I couldn't think about technique, or I would have never taken a shot.  The heartbreaking thing was that after that discovery, I found that people only noticed— or talked about— the technique.

07/10/2001

Listening to Otis today.  Grabbed a boot called Satisfaction from alt.binaries.shn.  It's live in Stockholm, 1967.  Great but short.  So I added another killer live show from emusic, Live at the Whiskey.  One of the really amazing things about Otis is that he always seemed to be smiling.

Seems to me that making music should make people happy.  Surly? They Jest from the Washington Post explores some potential reasons why it is taboo for rock stars to smile.  I suppose Otis doesn't count.  He was a soul man.

MY SOUL WOULD SING of metamorphoses.
But since, oh gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.

Ovid— Metamorphoses

Luke pulled an interesting peppercorn from the dungheap: Global Orgasm Day.  Surfing along, I marvel at the power of the Internet to bring me a frivolous page like that, and then the next minute, I find myself reading an interesting scholarly paper, Reflections on Interactivity, seamlessly.  The paper speaks to the conflict involved between interactive, playful information strategies with the more fixed notions of knowledge.  Interactivity has a price:

But such outlook also exposes us to the risks of the new, to sudden conflicts, disintegration, fragmentation, and other unpleasant surprises. When science is more open to the whims of the imagination it may be more vulnerable to ridicule. Literature may lose the greatness of canonical values. The message in the new media may turn out to be hollow, mindless. Creativity could be compromised. Minsky already warned that total interactivity leads to chaos. He argued in the appendix to The Society of Mind that insulators are needed just as much as interactive links.

The insulators, I think, are the people themselves who provide the links.  I sample lots of people out there. I follow the links of only a few.  People I like.  That's why I wonder about the weird sort of social culture on the net.  Some of it seems inbred.  But with the potential for linkage, for networks, for people filtering content for each other, I'm not too worried.  I think the canons are safe.  They got there by consensus, after all.

I really must order Jonathan Rose's book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.  It is supposed to contain a lot of new information about the way the Great Books publication boom of the Victorian age promoted a rise in critical abilities among the working classes.  The appeal of classic literature will not suffer with the broader exposure that the Internet represents, in my opinion.  I think if anything, people will become more interested as accessibility increases.  Creativity will increase, not decline.  Being able to find forums to discuss common interests goes beyond celebrating the orgasm.  The Internet may provide the basis for a renewed celebration of the flow of human consciousness through the ages.  Great writing remains great writing, even through the acid test of public popularity.  In some ways, the Internet is all margin: the great will find its niche, even without the academy to promote it.  And in those corners, I hope, a thousand flowers will bloom.

But there's no arguing with the appeal of sex.  MetaGrrl lists How to Suck as her favorite piece of non-fiction writing.  For a less serious take on things, try Sex (and why not to have it), a pamphlet from the National Society of Pornographers.  Another helpful hint showed up on another random hop: Great Taste in Men Guaranteed.  Funny how these things seem to come in spurts.  If you're easily offended, be sure to skip these links.

07/09/2001

My first day in regular pants.  I decided that the sensitivity around the scars had lessened enough to wear regular long pants, so I can retire the cut-offs.  Trying to put a shoe on the afflicted foot is the next step.  I'm still not looking forward to it, but I really want to get out and DRIVE!

I'm still a little scared about the next surgery. It should be simple and straightforward, just taking out the screw that binds the bones together, but if my ankle flies back apart I'll be back where I started from. But anything has got to be better than allowing the damn screw to break.

I keep dragging my feet about the Invisible Light gallery.  It's mostly done, but there are missing images.  I hate to put it up and revise it immediately, besides it's not like anybody is filling up my mail box with anticipation.

Didn't go to sleep until 7am.  I finished Jarratt's book, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I've been spending a lot of time with Plato's dialogue Protagoras.  Reading to understand the logos of a work is one thing.  Reading to understand the techné is quite another.  Plato's easy to figure out. He steers every dialogue into a choice between bipolar oppositions.  Good and evil:  it's no wonder that Blake railed against him so.  But Protagoras the Sophist is a formidable adversary for Plato. Unlike the horribly slanted Gorgias, Protagoras really gets in some good points against Socrates.  He offers evidence that there are contradictions in the way that we address knowledge, highlighting the difference, but then moving on into a practical solution to the problem.  There are no Platonic absolutes in Protagoras' method.  

Things are seldom one way or the other.  Binary thinking ruins perspective in a world filled with greys.  There has been a change in digital thinking since Socrates.  I hadn't really put it into perspective until I read an article about Claude Shannon, a sort of Einstein of communication technology.  Shannon proved mathematically that by sampling at a high enough rate, digital technology could represent an error free method of transmitting information.  The key is in selecting a high enough sample rate. Narrowing the discussion to simple yes or no answers doesn't work; you've got to sample a high enough number of potentialities to arrive at any real knowledge. The educational views of Protagoras were like that: learn to recognize the error in the individual decisions before you can approximate the best probable view of the situation.  I've always been an analogue thinker.  I never thought about the possibility that digital could offer higher resolution or better certainty,  until I read about Shannon's work.

Jarratt's target is Walter Ong's simplification of oral vs. written culture.  She argues against the simplistic binary division espoused by Ong, though she does propose another: dialogic vs. narrative views.  Acceptance of uncertainty seems to be a root of Sophistic discourse, so it's very sympathetic to postmodernity.  In some ways, I think the reevaluation proposes an admirable alternative to simple binary division, replacing it with a network of choices that don't always lead to a pat conclusion.  However, it always starts with division.  It's cool,  or it sucks.

Gleckner's book points out the difficulty of resolving comparisons between even two items.  On one level, there is contrast: comparing two items in an abstract, inert, and non-interactive way to fix their difference.  Or they can be compared to propose complement: similarity, on the same abstract level.  The Platonic level of comparison is dialectic: two opposing points brought to resolution, or synthesis.  Gleckner argues that Blake's method of antithetical structure fits in a middle ground between the basic modes of compare & contrast and dialectic.  Antithetical structure does not have to be reductive. Gleckner does not make that distinction.  I want to work with this idea: perhaps stopping short of synthesis is more important than other critics seem to realize.  I cannot agree that the synergy between Blake's writings and artwork is dialectic. Blake hated Plato far too much to adopt his method.

07/08/2001

Sometimes the stuff out there on the web just blows me away.  People are complicated.  I suppose the thing that is most positive to me about the blogger phenomenon is that you know the time that something was placed into circulation.  Most web pages are like shrines that haven't been updated in ages, and often offer no clue whatsoever about when they were last looked after.  Sometimes you get a clue just from the appearance of the page, though.

Is the web going to rust? I don't think so, as long as people keep after their little hobby projects.

The most interesting shrine I've stumbled along in a long time is marymaclane.com.  It contains a section about a writer I've never heard of named Mary MacLane, billed as "writer, gambler, bon vivant."   But that's not the only attraction to the site.  There are a variety of other links, including a memorial to the site author's wife Elisabeth Pruitt-Brown.  I was looking for something about Shelley, and because of the quote on this page, I discovered this place.  Elisabeth died of breast cancer and suffered from multiple personality disorder.  Her husband has preserved a bunch of her writing here.  There were many other sections to the site I haven't explored yet.  Looking at the guestbook, it seems like it's been a work in progress for some time.  There is a diary section, infrequently updated.  The mixture of scholarly and personal on this site just floored me.  The only thing missing is any sense of timeframe; this is a site that I hope never begins to rust.  The author seems like a real person with complex interests and history.

I visited Purifiance a long time ago, and decided to try it again.  I don't understand why people insist on enigma.  I'm not sure what sort of design tricks it uses to force you into viewing everything in it's tiny hard to navigate window, but I can't help but feel frustrated by the posturing:

This is about healing, healing writings, healing thoughts, but is much more about growing.... it is about moving forward.

This is something I need more than I ever thought I would. this is purifiance. this is mine. don't mess with it. these are pieces of me. i am not my site. I am not you. I am not a poster girl for anything. .. this is merely a reflection of something that i am letting you to see. nothing more.

I'm glad she feels healed by photographing herself dressing up, by avoiding any real emotion and posting suggestive bits of her body for people to guess about.  I'm an open book, I guess.  I was thinking about deconstruction again.  Paul De Man originally called it demystifying.  Why is contemporary web design so mystifying?  I suppose I can't give up on the print concepts like tables of contents, or ancient concepts of narrative.  While I'll jump right out and say that my web site isn't me, like everyone else, I'll also say that it is the expression of things that I find to be interesting or important.  I see nothing to be gained by being enigmatic about it.  I see it as the creation of a space of sorts. There is no point in thinking of it as something that "i am letting you to see."  It's a place that wasn't here before, not a peephole into my life.

That's a good thing.  My life isn't much lately.  I'm really looking forward to the first time that someone I don't know emails me about this place.  I try to keep it fresh and rust-free; the front page is now updated with a random selection of poetry which will grow as time goes by.  In order to encourage comments, I'm adding an email link to terminate the posts from now on.  I figured out how to do it with JavaScript so that it won't increase my spam level.  I used to get email all the time on my old site, but solely because of my tradelist.  I'm too much of a space to trade music right now, though I've started an updated list.

Reading some of the Mary MacLane pieces makes me think about the scared anonymous creator of Purifiance.  Mary MacLane was direct and outspoken.  The writing comes off as raw and it never shrinks from the problem of identity.  She wasn't afraid to be a "poster girl".  If you're going to say something, just fucking say it already.  Like Mary MacLane.

I'm not a web designer, though I talk about web design a lot.  I muck about here purely for fun.  I suppose I fit the stereotype of artist because I think making the stuff is the best form of prayer.  I've got a problem with people who think that art heals.  Usually, it gives me a moment of release and even greater pain afterward— however, it's the only way I know how to celebrate living.  It fixes a moment of significance— no more, no less.  That significance is lost when people don't know what you're saying.

07/06/2001

I don't know when my fascination with Australia began.  Maybe it was the Scientists.  Maybe it was the Hoodoo Gurus.  Though both of these bands degenerated quickly, Stoneage Romeos, Mars Needs Guitars, and Weird Love had a big impact on me.  They reprocessed American culture into a more palatable form.  Maybe it's because they're a new country, able to bypass many of the mistakes we've made here.  Or, perhaps it's as an Australian friend Colin has said: "At least Australia only got convicts; America got the religious zealots" (paraphrased, of course).

Or maybe it's the accent.  I suppose I have a thing for women with accents because my own voice is so bland.  I was totally shocked last night to hear an Australian accent come out of Rachel Griffiths in Me Myself I.  I had no idea she was Australian. She convincingly plays a Southern California type in Six Feet Under with no accent whatsoever.  While the show got off to a shakey start, from the fourth episode on, it's been gaining momentum.  They nailed me with the last one, as they revealed Griffith's character has an IQ of 185.  This should make for some interesting twists: you don't find women portrayed as smart on television very often.

I suppose fascinations creep up on me slowly; I started researching her last night. Griffiths seems to be as intelligent offscreen as on.  This interview from 1998 reveals some very interesting stuff.  She seems genuinely involved with her craft, and is insightful on Ibsen.  Besides, anyone who would walk naked wearing only a crown of thorns in order to protest a casino in Melbourne can't be all bad.  Australians seem somehow closer to my concept of ideal "world citizens".  Americans can be so provincial as evidenced by Herbert London's essay Words Imperfect:

Multiculturalism means anything but tolerating many cultures—its central and overarching concern is a simple antipathy toward anything American.   If truth in advertising prevailed, multiculturalism would be called anti-Americanism.

What a putz.  As the head of an advising group on public policy, such an utterance is inexcusable.  I read lots of stuff on the net and it's hard to get an idea of the posture of the publications which proliferate.  London's essay on language really taints anything I care to read in his magazine American Outlook.  London certainly doesn't describe my American outlook.  I surfed into this site because of an article on postmodern architecture.  Debra Slivka's article Tumbling Towers doesn't reflect the bias of the editor:

Postmodern architecture is a model of inclusion, throwing every possible style into the mix—and some impossible ones.  Modernism's inventors were quick to repudiate their romantic progenitors, but postmodern philosophy never fully rejects the old regime.  Instead, the scope of its critique merely widens to include modernism alongside everything else.  Deconstructionist philosophy regards all belief systems (including its own) as mere constructs, structural blueprints that constantly change and resist absolute definition.  Everything is a work in progress, the innards all open and ready to be tinkered with.  Nothing is ever finished; there is no closure, merely history unfolding into the future.

What bothers me most about the popular understanding of deconstruction is that it exists to violate or repudiate.  I think it comes from the word itself: why not just say analyse?  By using the same prefix as destruct people confuse it with the Oedipal instincts of modernism.  This doesn't have to be the case, which is amply proved by the postmodern approach to architecture.  While Postmodernism does attempt to destroy the humanist myths, I think underneath it all is a desire to replace it with higher forms of humanism.

The acceptance of the game which underlies it all is the key.  There isn't any need to kill what is already dead.  The games surrounding intellectual property are perhaps the funniest of all.  Today's Sydney Morning Herald really had me rolling on the floor.  Nightmare on Bogus Street explains how street maps are filled with intentional errors in order to facilitate locating those who would dare violate the copyright.  Protecting the value of the cartography is more important than the utility of the map; how Postmodern can you get!

Short Takes:

100 Most Popular Internet Sites lists La Leche League at 98.  Breastfeeding needs online support?

HTML Hell— Why is it that sites that rant about bad design always look so stoneage?

I've seen worse, but The Web Page from Hell is pretty funny.

Women have taken over as the top net surfers. Somehow, I'm not surprised.