Sunday, February 29, 2004
Taint Moderne
"Hey, where are we?"
"Dunno. Hang on...<schmeck schmeck> tastes like London."
"Strange, I didn't bring any capital cities with me. Is it yours?"
"Nope, I'm fresh out of London."
"Nobody's fresh when they leave London."
"Yeah, 'fresh' ain't the right word, is it?"
"Neither's ain't. 'S not even a word, for that matter."
" 'T ain't?"
" 'T ain't."
"I think we're actually standing outside the Tain't Modern at the moment, aren't we? That's it over there."
"Ooo very bourgeois -- the crippling nostalgia for the past's clean innocence, expressed as a loathing for the corruption brought by progress: 'Taint Moderne', the curse of the middle classes."
"Dunno. Hang on...<schmeck schmeck> tastes like London."
"Strange, I didn't bring any capital cities with me. Is it yours?"
"Nope, I'm fresh out of London."
"Nobody's fresh when they leave London."
"Yeah, 'fresh' ain't the right word, is it?"
"Neither's ain't. 'S not even a word, for that matter."
" 'T ain't?"
" 'T ain't."
"I think we're actually standing outside the Tain't Modern at the moment, aren't we? That's it over there."
"Ooo very bourgeois -- the crippling nostalgia for the past's clean innocence, expressed as a loathing for the corruption brought by progress: 'Taint Moderne', the curse of the middle classes."
Objects in your future are closer than they appear
People view life through their rear-vision mirror.
I wish more people looked out their windscreens.
I wish more people looked out their windscreens.
St Pauls after dusk
Sitting with a pint and the weekend paper by the Thames outside Tate Modern, watching London's buildings' lights wake as hazy sunset fades and the dark swells up out of the concrete. Looking left across the river, framed in the sodium yellow streetlights shining up in the building corridors:
St Pauls sits in fat blue-grey stolid regard of the cheeky spiky wedding cake church down Ludgate Hill looking back up at St Pauls, contrastingly yellow-lit, dark chocolate shadows on its warmer stone.
Like a bemused stout older uncle leaning back stuffed from the now-deserted wedding-party table on the dais, feeling his belt stretch across what used to be his younger flatter belly, observing with vague blank surprise the little nephew crawl out from under a table in the main mass below and bounce to his feet startled by the suddenly noticed elder, stiff white rented tablecloth falling back behind him with a quiet clearly heard dry scuffing paff.
The tableau freezes: the two kith are still, eyes fixed on each other's, a silent touching of generations, across a gap no bigger than years. The time stretches, the moment timeless...
...suddenly breaks in a heaven shower of bricks and stone and dust and mortar avalanching, crashing, covering, piling, drowning, a sudden clattering thundering whispering roar that grows and grows and fills the ears, the mind. And then, somehow, without any noticeable pause or shift or change in the skull-shaking roar, it's fading and faded and now near-silence, a whisper. And the dust starts to clear, and misty forms take looming shape.
And St Pauls sits and stolidly blinks down Ludgate Hill at the wedding-cake spire looking back, cheeky, half-defiant half-unsure, and the dust slowly clears in the chill wind washing off the Thames and away, away over London.
St Pauls sits in fat blue-grey stolid regard of the cheeky spiky wedding cake church down Ludgate Hill looking back up at St Pauls, contrastingly yellow-lit, dark chocolate shadows on its warmer stone.
Like a bemused stout older uncle leaning back stuffed from the now-deserted wedding-party table on the dais, feeling his belt stretch across what used to be his younger flatter belly, observing with vague blank surprise the little nephew crawl out from under a table in the main mass below and bounce to his feet startled by the suddenly noticed elder, stiff white rented tablecloth falling back behind him with a quiet clearly heard dry scuffing paff.
The tableau freezes: the two kith are still, eyes fixed on each other's, a silent touching of generations, across a gap no bigger than years. The time stretches, the moment timeless...
...suddenly breaks in a heaven shower of bricks and stone and dust and mortar avalanching, crashing, covering, piling, drowning, a sudden clattering thundering whispering roar that grows and grows and fills the ears, the mind. And then, somehow, without any noticeable pause or shift or change in the skull-shaking roar, it's fading and faded and now near-silence, a whisper. And the dust starts to clear, and misty forms take looming shape.
And St Pauls sits and stolidly blinks down Ludgate Hill at the wedding-cake spire looking back, cheeky, half-defiant half-unsure, and the dust slowly clears in the chill wind washing off the Thames and away, away over London.
Meiotic Drive
Please god.
Just once.
Just ONCE let me meet a girl who's not reduced her life to a game.
Who's capable of living her own life. LIVING her own life. On whatever terms she chooses; they don't need to be her terms, just so long as she's chosen them, chosen to live by them.
Not a girl who's opted out because she's decided she can't win the main game. Not a girl who's afraid to play the game. Not a girl who's burnt all her physical capital and no longer has the energy to play the game.
But a girl who's actually observed that life outside the game is not only possible, but is so deeply, so fundamentally more rich and fulfilling than any brief cocaine-hit of Attention inside the game, than any evanescent crack-flare of girlfriend RESPECK inside the game, that any thought of throwing herself back into the sewerage, is revolting, is pointless, can only subtract from her life.
Because the thing with reducing Life to a Game, is that the best you can possibly hope to achieve, is Winning the Game.
And all the upsides, the joys and the happinesses and the realities the realities, all the upsides of living life rather than trying to win some game vs society, vs your "friends", all those upsides are impossible. They're not part of the game. You can't "win" them. You can only "live" them. And what good is that?
Relationship? It's a goal, not a consequence of how two people think about each other.
Sex? It's not part of how you feel about someone, it's a chip in the game, as powerful as you choose to make it when you play it. And you can change its value at any time afterwards by just changing your mind.
Intimacy? Easily imitated, a standard opener.
Terrifying if played against you late in the game by the player facing you.
The real thing of course has nothing to do with the other person, which is an odd Freebie because the vast majority of the players facing you, those who haven't developed high game skills, believe the opposite: that intimacy derives from actual feelings for the other person, that if intimacy is shown, those feelings are implied. So play your free fake card early to secure major leverage in the game.
Other people? They are a CRITICAL part of the game.
Or rather, what they think of you is.
Or rather, what YOU think they think of you is.
And so girl, you back youself and your life into a tiny trapped corner of poison paint, all dripping from your own hands and mouth and from those of your "friends".
And you wonder why the male game winners you keep scoring turn into nightmares of disappointment or abuse.
And only the randomly lucky get randomly lucky.
And you long for the wonder of the pure romantic dream.
And you reward only those who play your game.
* Sal, you dick, I don't happen to remember that tiny part of one book published 30 years ago, and the web's not giving me any useful definition in a hurry. Rather than ferret around in a physical library hoping against hope some fundamentalist hasn't been through with his scissors and a lighter and g(G)od's own mandate, why don't you just bloody tell me?
Just once.
Just ONCE let me meet a girl who's not reduced her life to a game.
Who's capable of living her own life. LIVING her own life. On whatever terms she chooses; they don't need to be her terms, just so long as she's chosen them, chosen to live by them.
Not a girl who's opted out because she's decided she can't win the main game. Not a girl who's afraid to play the game. Not a girl who's burnt all her physical capital and no longer has the energy to play the game.
But a girl who's actually observed that life outside the game is not only possible, but is so deeply, so fundamentally more rich and fulfilling than any brief cocaine-hit of Attention inside the game, than any evanescent crack-flare of girlfriend RESPECK inside the game, that any thought of throwing herself back into the sewerage, is revolting, is pointless, can only subtract from her life.
Because the thing with reducing Life to a Game, is that the best you can possibly hope to achieve, is Winning the Game.
And all the upsides, the joys and the happinesses and the realities the realities, all the upsides of living life rather than trying to win some game vs society, vs your "friends", all those upsides are impossible. They're not part of the game. You can't "win" them. You can only "live" them. And what good is that?
Relationship? It's a goal, not a consequence of how two people think about each other.
Sex? It's not part of how you feel about someone, it's a chip in the game, as powerful as you choose to make it when you play it. And you can change its value at any time afterwards by just changing your mind.
Intimacy? Easily imitated, a standard opener.
Terrifying if played against you late in the game by the player facing you.
The real thing of course has nothing to do with the other person, which is an odd Freebie because the vast majority of the players facing you, those who haven't developed high game skills, believe the opposite: that intimacy derives from actual feelings for the other person, that if intimacy is shown, those feelings are implied. So play your free fake card early to secure major leverage in the game.
Other people? They are a CRITICAL part of the game.
Or rather, what they think of you is.
Or rather, what YOU think they think of you is.
And so girl, you back youself and your life into a tiny trapped corner of poison paint, all dripping from your own hands and mouth and from those of your "friends".
And you wonder why the male game winners you keep scoring turn into nightmares of disappointment or abuse.
And only the randomly lucky get randomly lucky.
And you long for the wonder of the pure romantic dream.
And you reward only those who play your game.
* Sal, you dick, I don't happen to remember that tiny part of one book published 30 years ago, and the web's not giving me any useful definition in a hurry. Rather than ferret around in a physical library hoping against hope some fundamentalist hasn't been through with his scissors and a lighter and g(G)od's own mandate, why don't you just bloody tell me?
Saturday, February 28, 2004
Grammar's not what she was
I just re-ran across an email I sent recently in response to an automated reply. Oddly, I received no response.
--
> Thanks for you support
Me thank you for taking me support.
Question: without me support, what will mine grammar use to hold herself up with now? She am old, and become v.saggy.
--
> Thanks for you support
Me thank you for taking me support.
Question: without me support, what will mine grammar use to hold herself up with now? She am old, and become v.saggy.
Back once again with the Out-of-Print Master*
* apologies to my Lord Sir Mr Wildchild MacKenzie, Esquire and bar
"The Thin Man" is a movie always enthused about by elder critics but irritatingly never shown. Last week I ran across the original book in the Barbican--well, a 40 year old reprint of the 1934 original--so I grabbed it.
My god Dashiell Hammett can write.
Casual behind-the-scenes skill just pours off the page. Taut crisp dialogue you almost hear. A handful of words creates a full-fleshed scene. Descriptions and pace that vary with the narrator's mood : whirlwind times race past, langour lingers. Like you were standing in the same room, emotions and thoughts aren't explicit but veridically peek out behind words and reactions.
I just ran across a casual inflection in a phrase's grammar that altered how you interpreted the entire previous paragraph, and also disjointed the rhythm so you immediately felt the narrator struggling to waken while you oddly felt a little disoriented yourself. If I hadn't been trying just then to describe his style, I wouldn't even have noticed, other than feeling very "in" the story.
It takes a master to make it look so simple. He writes like Rolf Harris paints: unfancy tools and no pretension, an apparently slapdash brevity masking deep skill.
- quote:
- He was a plump, dark, youngish man of medium height, broad through the jaws, narrow between the eyes.
- quote;
- The doctor--a colourless whisp of a man with the snuffles-- came in, clucked and sniffed over my side, got the bleeding stopped and the bandage on, and told me I would have nothing to worry about if I lay still for a couple of days. Nobody would tell the doctor anything. The police would not let him touch Morelli. He went away looking even more colourless and vague.
- quote:
- I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes the result was satisfactory. 'Aren't you Nick Charles?' she asked.
A few broad fast strokes sketches a scene so tautly richly recognisable it leaps off the page, throws you round the room, then bursts out the door and down the alleyway knocking over the garbage cans. You lever yourself off the floor and dazedly turn the page while the cats are still yowling outside.
Holographic 3D on your desktop
Ever wished you could see real 3D pictures floating above your computer or in place of your TV? The sci-fi ideal but in real life? See all those funky graphics as real objects? See those Baywatch babes really bound out of the surf towards you?
Well, manfully restraining the urge to say "To experience REAL 3D, just walk outside, you nerd", and oh! how that restraint has cost me emotionally, it is actually possible. There's even a way to bring it to your desktop PC for about $50 more than a normal monitor, using standard cables and standard software.
From this intro link to Hitachi's recent announcement, check out also this picture and this picture, and then read this Overview and Comparison of the key 3D screens.
And if anyone DOES have $20m to invest, my offer holds.
Well, manfully restraining the urge to say "To experience REAL 3D, just walk outside, you nerd", and oh! how that restraint has cost me emotionally, it is actually possible. There's even a way to bring it to your desktop PC for about $50 more than a normal monitor, using standard cables and standard software.
From this intro link to Hitachi's recent announcement, check out also this picture and this picture, and then read this Overview and Comparison of the key 3D screens.
And if anyone DOES have $20m to invest, my offer holds.
Saturday, February 21, 2004
My legs, my legs
"Ohhh...ohhhhhh... help, help, I can't feel my legs."
"Why do you want to feel your legs?"
offended "They're LOVELY!"
"True. True. So, why can't you feel them?"
*sob* "My arms are too short."
"Oh you poor dear. Here, let me."
"WhooAHooo! I say...whuff!...do you...hey!
...Thanks."
"Why do you want to feel your legs?"
offended "They're LOVELY!"
"True. True. So, why can't you feel them?"
*sob* "My arms are too short."
"Oh you poor dear. Here, let me."
"WhooAHooo! I say...whuff!...do you...hey!
...Thanks."
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Aunt Ethel squeaks
2004? Oooo that's much more expensive than when *I* was a pup. Used to be tuppence. AND they'd throw in a side of lamb. And not your modern "Caffeine-Free Diet Lamb" oh no no no. We used to have to wade for three days through the billowing waves of runny saturated fat just to get to the meat. In bare feet. On our knees. AND it tasted like proper lamb, not this modern cardboard plastic frozen nonsense, oh no.
Things aren't what they used to be.
Even THIS won't be what it is.
Things aren't what they used to be.
Even THIS won't be what it is.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
More email:
RE: S's Birthday Bash
>Thanks for the beers and the company last night guys - considering the
>number of vodka shots I had last night, I feel surprisingly ok
ditto
>- apart from the fact that I'm back at work
Oh that's it, rub it in.
Us doleys spit on your puritan work ethic
(note to self: remember to apply for dole)
(note to self: this could involve personal initiative -- allow extra time)
(note to self: maybe tomorrow)
>How was the Curry??
parp it was parp not too parp bad, except for parp various amusing sound parp effects today
parp
>and it burns burns burns
>the ring of fire
>the ring of fire
more the wind tunnel of fume
world war one had Mustard Gas. world war three will see vast billowing clouds of Curry Gas drifting across the landscape, leaving behind them only scorched earth, burning trees, and unrotting corpses -- their still-watering eyes dripping yet onto heedless faces now frozen forever in expressions of sheer horror. up-wind, gasmasked men wearing no trousers trudge forwards, chewing remorselessly the potent fuels delivered to them by bored-looking banglas on little scooters who always circle the block three times before finding them.
>Happy Birthday Mr G. I feel like death, you'll be pleased to know.
"if you feel like death but don't have the time, try new dial-a-death! death to your door in 30 minutes or world war three, whichever comes first. you have our Personal guarantee.
signed,
Mr Faceless Corporate Bastard, Incorporated and Rich, thanks so much for asking."
>Thanks for the beers and the company last night guys - considering the
>number of vodka shots I had last night, I feel surprisingly ok
ditto
>- apart from the fact that I'm back at work
Oh that's it, rub it in.
Us doleys spit on your puritan work ethic
(note to self: remember to apply for dole)
(note to self: this could involve personal initiative -- allow extra time)
(note to self: maybe tomorrow)
>How was the Curry??
parp it was parp not too parp bad, except for parp various amusing sound parp effects today
parp
>and it burns burns burns
>the ring of fire
>the ring of fire
more the wind tunnel of fume
world war one had Mustard Gas. world war three will see vast billowing clouds of Curry Gas drifting across the landscape, leaving behind them only scorched earth, burning trees, and unrotting corpses -- their still-watering eyes dripping yet onto heedless faces now frozen forever in expressions of sheer horror. up-wind, gasmasked men wearing no trousers trudge forwards, chewing remorselessly the potent fuels delivered to them by bored-looking banglas on little scooters who always circle the block three times before finding them.
>Happy Birthday Mr G. I feel like death, you'll be pleased to know.
"if you feel like death but don't have the time, try new dial-a-death! death to your door in 30 minutes or world war three, whichever comes first. you have our Personal guarantee.
signed,
Mr Faceless Corporate Bastard, Incorporated and Rich, thanks so much for asking."
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Duck!
I ran out of oxygen today. Apparently I hadn't been keeping my payments up, running up a huge oxygen debt without even exercising.
"First I've heard of it!" I protested. "Where's my bill?"
"On the front of your duck."
"That's not very helpful."
"Your duck's attitude's not my problem."
That's true, so I thanked him and tipped him, but he wasn't expecting that and lost his balance and fell over. He wasn't happy, and informed me, but I pointed out his emotional state was not my problem. True, he said, and thanked me and tipped me. So there we both lay, side by side on the footpath, staring up at the sky, chatting amiably about nothing till I ran out of oxygen.
"First I've heard of it!" I protested. "Where's my bill?"
"On the front of your duck."
"That's not very helpful."
"Your duck's attitude's not my problem."
That's true, so I thanked him and tipped him, but he wasn't expecting that and lost his balance and fell over. He wasn't happy, and informed me, but I pointed out his emotional state was not my problem. True, he said, and thanked me and tipped me. So there we both lay, side by side on the footpath, staring up at the sky, chatting amiably about nothing till I ran out of oxygen.
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