I have an Onion page-a-day calendar (given to me by my sister). Over the past month, I began wondering what my calendar would display on my birthday.

Yesterday I flipped to Nov 25 to find a full-page picture of DNA. Somehow that seemed appropriate.

(It's "genetic sequence CHP-48/OZ-379," the "series of genes which predispose the subject to eat entire goddamn bags of chips at a single sitting.")

Tuesday, November 26, 2002
8:48 AM
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Here's my description for the course I'll be teaching next semester:

This course will examine some of the contemporary trends that have emerged as a result of new communications technologies, such as the Internet and
cellular phones. Particular developments that we will examine may include: peer-to-peer and file-sharing networks, weblogs and warblogs, the LiveJournal network, net art, electronic literature, online trading, online personals, message boards and listservs, massively multiplayer online games, MOOs and MUDs, homepage cultures, "smart mobs," and the Global Positioning System. This course will also investigate some of the writing that comments on network culture, including criticism, ethnographic analysis, and science fiction. Participants in this course will be asked to produce a research paper looking into a particular trend of the culture, as well as several smaller projects.

If anybody has any good suggestions for readings, well, you know how to use the "comments" feature.

Labels: personal

Wednesday, November 20, 2002
5:19 PM
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I've added some new weblogs to the "others" sidebar over there to your left. Some of them, like Umami Tsunami, are ones that I've read for a long time which have merely been left off due to oversight, others, like Steven Johnson's weblog, are new reads but seem very promising.

Small pieces loosely joined blah blah blah.

Oh yeah, along these lines, I should point out that Ana Skyfish's LiveJournal is back. Thanks to Lia for the heads-up.

Tuesday, November 19, 2002
11:21 PM
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As a result of using Amazon.com as a sort of all-purpose research tool, my "recently viewed items" panel currently contains both Behind the Green Door (the vintage porn film, which Amazon doesn't carry, by the way) and The Reproduction Revolution: A Christian Appraisal of Sexuality, Reproductive Technologies, and the Family.

What a life!

Monday, November 18, 2002
7:47 PM
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First snow of the season last night in Chicago.

Sunday, November 17, 2002
11:22 AM
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If you're interested in what a culture in radical transition might look like, you could do worse than to study Southeast Asia. Over the past few decades Southeast Asia has emerged as a unique crossbreeding of traditional agrarian culture with industrial age technology and American cultural exports. The resultant culture has produced a wealth of genuinely unusual hybrid music. Let me refer you to Trikont's collection Ho! Roady Music From Vietnam, which serves as an excellent documentation of a scene in which Vietnamese funeral bands imitate Western musical forms (bluegrass and hip-hop among them) on traditional Asian instruments...

Things grow even more complicated with the interesting case of the Sun City Girls. They're American, but they've traveled widely in Southeast Asia. The end result is that their music ends up (occasionally) sounding like a Western imitiation of Southeast Asian musicians imitating Western forms... that is when it doesn't end up sounding like freakout jazz or spoken word.

Anyway, they're playing tonight in Chicago; I can't wait. Chicago Reader critic Peter Margasak provides all the necessary preface: "For a San Francisco show in 1992 the band members simply played a tape of chirping crickets, performed skits, and ground marshmallows into the floor with their feet."

Labels: culture, music_commentary

Friday, November 15, 2002
2:46 PM
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So it's been brought to my attention that I need to see a doctor. I don't have a doctor here in Chicago, but I do have health insurance through my employer, so I figured "how hard could it be?"

Ha ha.

Around noon I was flailing about in an automated answering system that claimed not to have any record of me, and every time I tried to speak to an actual human I was told, by a recording, to call back during normal business hours. Keep in mind that this was at noon. On a Thursday.

I eventually figured out that my employers had switched insurers over the summer (I guess I missed the memo). CIGNA is the new insurer, so I need to throw away my old Unicare card and get a CIGNA card. No biggie. Of course, the area of the CIGNA website where you can request a card requires you to enter your "CIGNA HealthCare ID," which should be the "first nine numbers on your CIGNA HealthCare ID card."

...

[insert punchline here]

Thursday, November 14, 2002
5:16 PM
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Two weeks ago or thereabouts I saw Punch-Drunk Love, the new P.T. Anderson movie, and I've been kind of turning it over in my head ever since.

My office-mate D., who hasn't yet seen it, asked me today whether I thought it was good. I don't know that I'd say good, exactly. It's bizarre.

I do think it works as an interesting exploration of genre. It is part romantic comedy and part California noir, two genres that don't sit easily with one another. And they're linked by a creature from another genre altogether: Adam Sandler, who plays a sedated yet recognizable version of his normal man-child.

All this genre-play pretty much rules out any sort of naturalism: Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum complains that he doesn't believe "in any of the characters on any level." But I'm a postmodernist, so that doesn't really bother me.

I'm more troubled by the misogyny that seems to percolate throughout the film: all of the women that Sandler's character encounters are caricatures, from his seven shrill, malicious sisters to the phone-sex operator who seeks to sink her claws into Sandler and gouge him for all that he's worth. Emily Watson, the film's "good" woman, has no more dimension than the "evil" ones: lacking any sort of demonstrable evidence of an interior life, she serves essentially as a cipher, a glowing beneficence that surrounds no core.

But then again maybe this is the point? Is it possible that the film is investigating misogyny rather than replicating it? Maybe we're seeing the women filtered through the consciousness of Sandler's socially-cloistered character—a consciousness which might be ill-equipped to do anything more than reduce women down into cartoons? It's worth noting that Anderson has shown great interest in exploring misogynist characters elsewhere, perhaps most particularly through the character of Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia.

Definitely worth seeing, and not as simple as it looks.

Labels: media commentary

Monday, November 11, 2002
3:15 PM
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Torill writes an interesting post about overlooked forms of feminine playfulness:

"[C]reative playfullness or playful creativity is present in knitting, in cooking, in decorating. Decorating a modern house as if it was a farm house from last century is a role-playing project as serious as the reconstruction/recreation works of live-action role-play gamers: hunting down the perfect pattern for the crochet lampshades in order to give the electric lights that home-spun touch, working on the store-bought furniture for days in order to make it look like it has been used for years, scrubbed with green soap every day and sanded twice a year for generations, camouflaging the television inside a rosepainted cabinet . . . This is a playful make-believe, advanced games of dolls and house."

Her post was inspired by Shinyspinning, a compelling-looking research log about women, technology and games.

Labels: play

Wednesday, November 06, 2002
9:06 PM
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There's been a small flurry of recent writing about nihilistic suburban daredevils lately, mostly commentary on Jackass : The Movie.

Eric Zorn, of the Chicago Tribune, writes:

"...this movie is a series of experiments based on the question ... [w]hat if?

What if someone attached bottle rockets to his roller skates or tried to shoot them out his rear end? What if a quartet in panda costumes ran amok through a nightlife district? What if a tattoo artist tried to ink a smiley face onto a customer's biceps in the back seat of an all-terrain vehicle speeding down a bumpy road?

What would happen? How would it feel? What would we learn? How would others react?"

I think Zorn may be onto something (although I'm nonplussed by his assertion that these questions "[seem] to intrigue men far more than women"). For a long time I've been putting forth a hypothesis that action movies, in general, were driven by a similar spirit of inquiry. I feel like the genre, as we understand it, is inextricably linked to the rise of technology that cannot safely be pushed to its limits. People have a clear sense of the destructive potential of the technology that surrounds them, but in everyday life they don't get an opportunity to explore that potential. The result is an appetite for answers. What would happen if you drove a bus off a bridge? Or crashed a helicopter into a skyscraper? Or fired a rocket launcher at a taxicab? The best action movies answer these questions, and help us to understand our world that much more clearly.

Consequently, I believe that the rise of believable digital effects will kill off the traditional action movie. The "answers" that action movies provide no longer satisfy us if we can't be certain that the crashes or explosions we're seeing are real. We suffer from the possibility that we're seeing a false answer, an animator's idea of what an exploding jet might look like. (I see the relevant paradigm shift happening right around 1992, Schwarzenegger's year off between the morph-heavy Terminator 2 and the career-killing Last Action Hero.)

The result? A craving for "more reality." Jackie Chan, "reality programming," Jackass, and a thousand suburban kids who want to do it themselves. I don't know whether to fret for the future of our world or beam with a perverse sort of pride.

Monday, November 04, 2002
3:16 PM
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Last weekend I went away with Chris, for an extended recording session in Michigan, at his parents' beach house. We recorded a nice array of stuff: a multitracked drone-and-cymbals piece; a long psychedelic jam with chants, handclaps and a thick wall of shifting guitar feedback; and a series of beach field recordings, including the sound of scraping a burnt log and a short improvisation where we used our feet to scuff sand around on the back of an abandoned surfboard.

We had a wonderful time, but I got back to find that my bike been stolen. (A few days later I had this dream, about being burgled, by a "weird-looking blonde guy" who may well be myself.)

That (and my cold) got me feeling pretty down for a while, but I got a pick-me-up midweek when I learned that new photos had been posted from last June's Spring. Spring is the conference / temporary autonomous zone / adult camp that I've helped to run for the past two years, and some of the people in these photos are among my favorite people in the whole world.

There's also some nice photos of me, too, for those of you curious about that sort of thing.

Sunday, November 03, 2002
10:04 AM
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Here are all of my past Halloween costumes that I can remember, in roughly chronological order.

vampire (or something else requiring black cloak)

knight in armor (mistaken repeatedly for robot)

the Red Skull

woman

Sloth, as part of Seven Deadly Sins group costume

Jesus, as part of Jesus / Virgin Mary / Satan trio

post-suicide Kurt Cobain, as part of Kurt / Courtney duo (Tip!: pink cake frosting matted into hair simulates shattered brain reasonably well)

Minos from Dante's Inferno

Morton Salt Girl (Was catcalled by both women and men: personal high-water mark)

a tree (Comment from crowd: "that's a good look for you")

I can't remember a single costume from junior high or high school—I know I dressed up some of those years, but I can't remember any of the costumes.

Labels: personal

Friday, November 01, 2002
6:37 PM
0 comments