Parallax View

King of the Jailhouse, Queen of the Road

The problem with being king and queen of the (art) world is that you have no personal life: kings and queens sit next to each other on thrones, ministering to subjects, conducting affairs of state.  Looking outward, in parallel.  They do not look sidelong, at each other.  They do not conduct affairs, with each other.

Admittedly, the Kingdoms to which I have been temporarily admitted were small, perhaps not quite worthy of the term, and the subjects a bit recalcitrant and not perhaps aware of their status.  But the kings - all of them saw themselves very clearly as kings, with serious responsibilities to their people and lands.  Their personal needs might extend to wanting (or tolerating) a consort, but only as a strategic necessity.  Perhaps an alliance to extend one's influence.  Perhaps just someone to share the workload of State, which is both increasing and endless.

But finally I have left the Castles in the air.  I have seen them for the prisons they are.  I am finally free of an idea, which has bars at least as strong as those of iron and steel.  I am free, I am free, I am finally free. 

Times Square

After the conference I headed to midtown to see Wong Kar Wai speak.  It was sold out but I was hoping someone would be selling a ticket.  Unfortunately besides being sold out, it had actually happened the night before.  So, lacking a lecture, I found myself in Times Square at dusk on Friday: lights, crowds, noise, activity, everything in all directions, a choppy sea of chaos.  Lots of people, gawking, consuming.  And money, money, the whole thing is money.  The kind of thing I usually avoid at all costs.  But somehow I loved it; I loved the lights! 

I took up residence on the median strip right in the middle where I just stood, slowly turning around, for almost 45 minutes, taking pictures like a tourist, listening to my iPod with one ear, doing my New York trick of walking half a pace slower than everyone (they clear a path and flow around you), repeating to myself, "I love lights!  I love lights!" 

Despite the fact that it's anything but radical self-reliance, it's the closest thing to Burning Man I've experienced in the default world.  Not of course the participatory democracy part, or the DIY creativity.  But the overwhelming sense of awe and activity, and the millions of lights: blinking, moving, ebbing, fading, surging, competing, traveling, flickering, shining.

3327

Sadly, I didn't get Tesla's old room at the New Yorker.  But I did manage to get one also divisible by 3, and it is actually a pretty good fit for a designer.  It's all beige satin and art deco lines like the lair of a 1930s movie star.  I'm ready for my close-up (to be photo-mapped onto an avatar in less than 5 minutes).

Virtual Destiny, Manifested

I believed that Richard Branson had his sights set on Mars all day Tuesday until about 4pm.  But of the people likely to propose a viable plan for Mars colonization, Richard Branson is definitely one of them!  Plus, since April 1 is my birthday, I should believe in the joke for awhile. 

Of course visions of Perky Pat come immediately to mind.  If PKD's colonists obsessively played a version of Second Life to alleviate the boredom and vertigo of pioneering, then I suppose I'm well prepared.

Think locally, act globally?

Facebook use highlights a discrepancy in how we think about social groups and fame.  The tendency is to act like you're going into a party with friends - you log in, see updates from people you know, advertise things about your own life, see what’s happened since you were last there - a persistent, asynchronous multi-user conversation.  You might also have comments or friend requests from friends of friends, or people in groups you've joined, or other pings and attempts at contact, which makes you feel popular and, in a way, famous.  The word is getting out!  Other people are finding out how cool you are!

And therein lies the rub.  It is not a private party with your close friends, or even wider circle of acquaintances.  It is broadcast to the whole world.  It shows up in the whole world's feed as if they knew you; all they have to do is find you.  And they can, because you make that easy.  The more you post, the more groups you join, the more friends you have and events you blog about, the stronger your signal is.

It is self-promotion, but inadvertent in a way.  Because of the emotional illusion of intimacy, of just sharing things with your core tribe, you are perhaps more open than you would be up on a stage, or even on TV with a giant camera in your face.  You have essentailly notified all these others of your existence, and invited them into your personal space (digital though it might be).  Which is fine if it's Horton out there.  But not everyone feels so kindly towards Who's.

One in a row

Back to running, after almost an entire year.  Went (count 'em) a whole mile!  Next up: 2.

The Mediated Gaze

Cue glass harmonica.  Ok, imagine you're the TV.  There are the people on the couch, gazing intently at you, cheering on your microemotions, empathizing with your changes in state, dropping their masks and letting raw, naked - well, something - emerge from their relaxed faces.  Now imagine you're a camera.  Make a video of them staring at you like that.  Now watch the video (they are gone now).  It should be unbearably intimate, but it's not. 

There's an invisible wall between you and them.  Despite the fact that they are staring right at [the camera], despite the fact that they hold [its] gaze, the connection is not there.  It feels, remarkably, even less intimate even than sitting next to someone watching TV, because although in that case you're not looking at them, at least then you can feel their presence sideways.  Voyeurism is a cheat.  There is no way one can mediate intimacy - once it is interposed, it is gone.

It's madness, I tell you

Recently discovered an excellent 1936 essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald where he analyzed, in over 6,000 words, his nervous breakdown at age 39.  I have a soft spot for reading about nervous breakdowns, especially when written well: Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Tolstoy.  At first I thought, writers are prone to "the edge," and if they write well they can write about anything well, and it is true that I like the other work by these authors also.

But then I realized that it's more than that.  By analyzing madness, one describes the negative space of sanity, thus describing its outline with greater precision than can be done while one is safely ensconced within. 

Daniel Waterhouse is my co-pilot

2008: finally finished Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.  I was dragging it out because I didn't want it to end.  I started it back when the first volume first came out, in 2002 maybe? then put it aside, then picked it up again when I was living in Europe and realized he was writing about the places where I was.  I am happy to report that main character Daniel Waterhouse, my hero and yours, finally got his due. 

After 3,000 pages of being an also-ran: not as intellectual as Newton, not as politically savvy as Eliza, not as literate as Samuel Johnson, and not as adventurous as Jack Shaftoe, Daniel ended up creating something bigger than all of them.  He had, as somewhat of a surprise even to himself, engineered an entire new social, economic and metaphysical system, one based on pragmatism rather than superstition, and one where values were at once both manifested and sublimated - as currency.  The one we now have.

But then it occurred to me that the entire epic was an Ode to the Project Manager, because Daniel ultimately was exactly that.  His role in hindsight turned out to be checking in with all the players and making sure the politicos were talking, the techies were tinkering, the enemies foiled, and foiled again, and the Money was happy.  His Author tried to have him invent the computer.  But instead he invented the "process" - which preceded and will ultimately outlast computers, or any other technical thing.

What Would Jesus Buy?

I have a new article up in the latest issue of OtherZine on Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, a performance artist troup who perform "gospel interventions" at malls.  Can your paycheck be saved? Can you?

Also featuring a bonus track from my old band, Girlfriend2000: "Let's Go Shopping!"

Inventory Folder

Contents of apartment:

Air mattress
Card table
Computer
Self

At some point I will have to take everything out of Inventory (in RL, my storage unit) and rez it in-world.  As soon as I decide on a world.  Which hasn't happened yet.

More Weight

Facebook is almost Mercerism.  I don't even like social networking, on the computer or much otherwise, but I had to get a Facebook account as we're evaluating social networking apps for work.  And even though I signed up as my avatar name, and posted as little as possible as first, I find myself adding and augmenting, and commenting, and reading up on others, and jonesing for the app when I am away from it. 

I realized that the draw Facebook has is the community of friends and acquaintances, the slight social buzz you get going into a party where you know just enough people to make it interesting, and you have a reasonable expectation that at least some of their friends will be interesting too. 

That's what drew people to Mercerism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  They would log in because of the social space, because when hooked up they could feel the emotions of everyone else who was logged in at the same time, as they all projected onto the character of Mercer, a webcast of an old man toiling up a barren mountainscape, in search of the enlightenment at the top.  While climbing, he would be pelted with rocks: few at first, then more, and more.  The rocks would cause real physical injury to everyone who was logged in; as a counterpart to the shared empathy, there was shared pain.  The social high they got was only limited by the amount of rocks they could tolerate being hit with - before reaching some totally empathic merged nirvana, they would suddenly let go of the handles and be logged out, when a particularly big virtual rock hit them on their real heads.

Facebook and other apps of course do not have direct emotion sharing, any more than any mediated relationship, which is all of them.  But it is not too difficult to imagine computers eventually hooked up to sensors and electrodes and biofeedback devices that would complete the physical picture.  And yet even without that, Facebook still emits a powerful emotional draw.  Where is my Mood Organ?  I think I will dial it up to 11.