Work and Fun; Mind and Body

I own a Windows Mobile device, and it doesn't suck. It's about a sexy as a Swiss army knife, but I can get it to do just about anything I want it to. In particular, I was really excited to discover that Pandora built an app for it finally, so now I can feel smug about not paying for satellite radio while I'm driving out of bounds. Assuming cellular coverage. Assuming that I will ever drive like that again.

I live in the miracle spot on the planet, where I can walk to almost everything, as I just now did again to have my blood drawn. They took me right in. Almost primitive. Almost medieval. My insurance will pay, thank God, for my driving too much and throwing a clot to my lungs. Or was it the stresses and strains of the move? Or just genetics? Or bad luck. La la la la la.

The real problem with Windows Mobile in its current embodiment is that there are way too many clicks required from too many different buttons to get anything useful done. Interestingly, I heard right directly from the mouth of someone I know who was once at the very pinnacle of the marketing for this version, that Microsoft was then divided about the direction of mobile toward business or entertainment. The device, officially, was a kludge. It didn't know what it wanted to be.

I've held in my very own hand now both the iPhone and the Android. They make my Windows Mobile phone seem primitive. In particular, web browsing seems actually to work, without requiring endless fussing and waiting for non-mobile-optimized screens to come into view. With Windows Mobile, it's a crap shoot whether you will be able actually to use the web.

The current intel on the topic indicates that Microsoft will make a clear distinction going forward between the business and the consumer version. Pretty much the way they did with Vista for the desktop. Following on a trend they began with XP.

As somewhat of an insider to why businesses refused to move beyond XP, I beg to differ just a tad from the conventional wisdom; that it was the hefty horsepower requirements for the hardware, or the security and learning curve hurdles for the IT staffers. In plain English, they just added more complexity without granting any game-changing cool. There was no real payback for investments against users' learning curves. And you couldn't trust that it would simply work.

I had Vista on my work laptop, and it didn't suck. There was no real stretch for me to swap out old metaphors for newer ones, so my learning curve from the operator side was about two seconds.

But there also wasn't really any new return apart from a somewhat cooler interface, and the shift would be a burden to people who just wanted to get their work done. Actually, plenty of times, it did get in the way of me getting my work done. Too many ways in to the same spot, or something like that. Too many clicks from too many different buttons.

I got tired of the whole game and took to Linux, which, frankly, is just as big a pain in the butt, but without anyone to complain to. No pay, no complaint. It calms me down, even when I have to blow time figuring stuff out. At least no-one's gaming my enthusiasm.

I'm a little bit embarrassed to find out just this morning that there really is a better browser out there for my primitive and uncool phone. Opera. It's a cinch, and fills in my cool-lust for a moment longer while I wait for the Verizon contract to expire so that I can afford new hardware. Which I will contract for just before the cooler stuff comes out. Which doesn't make me any stupider than you are.

What makes me stupid is that I pretty much figured that Microsoft's browser would be as good as any. It still surprises me that it isn't. What could they be thinking?

I'm in no position to say so, but I do think it's a big mistake for Microsoft to keep their commitment to this big fork in their road between work and play. My daughter swears she wants a Blackberry now, because she really can't stand touch (she's a thumb jockey, with speed you wouldn't believe). And the Blackberry was supposed to be a purely business product. But she's all about communication, and not at all about business. Plus, the price attracts her. She'll be disappointed simply because that's in her nature. But there's no arguing against someone's wants, you know?

Microsoft's spokespeople, and um, their higher ups, are known for being a bit, well, touchy on certain subjects. So, a recent headline was funny in an obvious kind of way, when it announced that Microsoft gets touchy at the pornographic trade show. But really, touch is what it will be all about, for business or pleasure, and Microsoft might be about to get a clue again. From Apple. As always.

And speaking of Apple, a funny news item today pointed out that Steve Wozniak has both an iPhone and an Android. But my boss, friend, and partner in business crime, who owns an Android and improbably just had his first chance to play with an iPhone the other day, points out that Wozniak was what had to depart from Apple before it could find itself. Jobs is a fashion designer. Woz is a computer geek.

From the vantage of Windows Mobile, the new Android on HTC hardware looks about as cool as the iPhone, but the boss assures me it's not. Google has welded itself in to the point that it's done what Apple does, but without the designer chic. Of course the Woz would like it. He's a geek like Bill Gates, and not a proper nerd the way Steve Jobs is. I might be mincing my words, but how would I know? I'm just some guy.

Steve is the Mom, which is another word for benevolent fascist dictator. Trust me, I know this. I've read my Dr. Suess. Mom gets in the way of your having fun, depending on how you look at her. Or she makes it possible. But in any case, you'd better do what she says, unless she's like my Mom, in which case she spoils your fun in other ways, like making you feel as though you must succeed for her to be happy. Which pretty much protects you against all kinds of fun. Ever.

My own Mom will be praying for me to get that job representing China to the world. Yeah, yeah, I love your new love, but get a job and make your Mom happy. Well, maybe she's just jaded on the topic of love. Maybe all of us must push the ones we love toward that flame which nearly killed us, by any other name. Do like I say and not like I do. Love is what imprisoned me. A job would be liberation. Build your prisonhouse with a necktie on it.

The prisonhouse of language is still and always will be what kills us in the end. The one big taboo remaining now is not what people look like, but what they talk like. It's alright to be big and black and beautiful.

But if you want to be in power, you have to talk white, which our mayor here in Buffalo does to some comical degree. You'd think he was doing a Saturday Night Live skit of a black playing white, but then I'm challenged about what's earnest and what's ironic. I don't know him at all, and I just moved back here, so for all I know he really is a homie. I'm sure he just can't help it.

Windows has always seemed like a really nerdy snooty attempt to be as cool as the Mac, but more, you know, businesslike. The folks over at Apple just got tired of trying to sue MS for ripping off its graphical interface ideas, which were granted to the world by Xerox in the first place, OK! Just like the Beatles got tired of trying to sue Apple for their record label and probably gave up the fight when Apple put in the sosumi sound which was plainly a punny rip-off of the Beatles' ownership of the Apple name in the music space.

And last night as I was reading my Kindle owners' manual (I still think that's about the funniest thing in the world, like if you can read this, then, um, you really don't have to, ha ha, get it) I vaguely remember a Beatles "tribute band" being up on TV. Public TV, needless to say, since commercial TV would never air something so, well, um, nerdy. Imitators of the Beatles, who sounded better than the Beatles ever did. Rain, maybe? Mockery being the highest form of flattery, right?

So the point, dear reader, is that there is no such thing as meaning which does not descend somehow from metaphors rooted in the body. Microsoft, of course, is still living in a universe where the mind/body duality holds true. They should get a clue, and so should we all.

Well, so is Apple which is the analog of the Cherry 2000 up against Microsoft's earnest marketing Goliath (central casting is such a hoot). Google coyly slips in as if they were really just rolling out of bed, dressing the way those kids do down at the cool coffee shop. Just another version of the Cherry 2000, if you ask me, where dressing down is a way to dress up your inner hotness.

In actual fact, there is no way to tease the mind from the body or vice versa.

The earth isn't suffering a population explosion. I should say, the earth won't suffer a population explosion, just like it won't suffer any more wanton lust. Regulated lust, of the sort which 50 somethings who are eligible for AARP experience, is about what the world needs more of right now.

And you know, at my age, you can actually fall in lust with words and words alone. It's become a cliche with Facebook, that place where you can reconnect with the hotties you failed to score with back in the day. And I've become a non-sequitur. Which is where I belong.

One thing I know for sure though is that it's always the fashionistas who control our destiny. They help to guide our lust, which, frankly, is toward ever more of what the young want. So much so that we end up wanting the young, which is just gross.

Back when I worked in a boy's boarding school, the joke was that saltpeter was added to the food to keep the lust factor down. Which wasn't such a funny thought for the teacher crowd. I only know I gained a lot of weight, which I'm still struggling to shed. Certain documented cases of misplaced lust prove that something wasn't right at that place, beyond a reasonable doubt. (reordering analytic English is such unmitigated fun).

The earth requires some analog to that fictitious agent supposedly also used in prison. Which in Arnold's case went right to his head. We all know about the rest of body builders' body parts. Well, I don't, but it's funny to say, like "nice Hummer; sorry about your penis" which you really wouldn't want to say out loud in public since you might get beat up. But then I have the earnest legal structure to back me when I take on hizzoner. These lawyers take everything so seriously, when all that's meant is punny fun.

The mind stands in for the body standing in for the mind, metaphorically speaking, which is the only way speaking ever happens, and which is why machines will never quite do it for me. But if all they want is $50 to put a piece of hot technology in my hands, what the hell. I know I'll be disappointed, just like all those guys who frequent pay-for-sex. But I can't really help myself. I can't get anyone to talk to me in person.

And there's just too damned much reading to do. I have to curb this writing.

So, here's a funny thing which happened in real life just now. My Microsoft Windows PDA super-nerdy Internet connected device stopped connecting to the Internet. Really. I didn't drop it, I didn't do a thing but look at it. Of course I felt mildy guilty for having loaded up the Opera browser, which I immediately removed. Then I did what they call a hard reset. Then I spent an hour or so on the phone with a really nice tech-guy from Verizon, and they'll be sending out my warranty replacement.

But - and here's the good part - I resisted techo-lust. It was pretty easy, considering that the really cool stuff is in a state of near perpetual flux now, and I just can't wait to see what's after what's next. Plus I really shouldn't be signing new contracts without having a job. The poor guy sounded alarmed: "will you be leaving us after your contract expires?" Oh no, I said, wondering if I really need such an expensive contract with such good coverage if I'm going to be walking everywhere.

But getting wired and staying put isn't so easy either. They still expect you to have a phone to carry the DSL, or a TV contract to carry the cable modem, and the FiOS is way out of my sight. Hmmmm. It's still cheaper than cellular, though.

Now, there's an anti-lust treatment right there. Do the math, and see how much she's really charging for your disappointment. Sorry to carry on so long. This started out being funny, and then the cosmos played another joke on me. Random? What's random? Who's being random?

More Kindling to Warm Your Heart

Last night, before the Golden Globes, I was getting more practice reading on my Kindle. It's odd: You read a book, but you can't really read a Kindle. You read a book on a Kindle, rather rhetorically like you might read a book on an airplane, say. And it comes with an owner's manual. A freebie that I haven't bothered to read yet. Why should I? If it isn't that transparent, then it can't beat reading on a book. What might I be writing in, on line? Surely, I'm not writing a book.

I was reading David Foster Wallace again. He makes good practice because he uses so many words which the built-in dictionary doesn't find. He likes footnotes so incredibly well that you can directly compare joysticking the cursor to flipping in and out of place while reading more conventionally. The only thing I really minded is that you can't reverse the direction of "back" - like if you flip around too far, it's nearly impossible to get back to the place you flipped past. There should be two joysticks, which reminds me of a funny joke Ricky Gervais made about his whatchamacallit right on broadcast TV and never even got bleeped.

There's probably a keystroke combination. I should RTFM! You do wonder, though, what people will eventually mean when they say things like "going on-line" down the line in our future. Will kids imagine hanging out from clothespins when their parents threaten to put them up on line if they get out of line? Like maybe to market them on whatever eBay has by then become.

Not even a good sleight of hand artist, I recently amazed some kids by showing how you could tap out a number on a phone without a dial. Buttons I mean. I wonder what goes on in people's heads when they say "dial up" if they've never seen a phone with a dial. Hmmmm. It must be like beaming up, only way more old-fashioned. With funny sound effects.

Foster Wallace's essay was on just this matter, authority in American English, and what is really meant by "standard." Hint: It's not what used to be meant by standard! To my read, he gets right to the heart of the matter, exposing the double-speak of political correctness, for instance, which ignores the fact that all language reads the speaker as much as it might inform the listener. That when you refer to someone as "weight challenged" you really want to be noticed yourself as one who would never even notice when someone's fat. As if. Those really nice-seeming oily people are really only wanting you to love them. And you thought they were being nice to you?

Kids getting beat up for being different, he wants us, the readers, to understand, is a necessary part of making sense. If you can't depend on the rules of discourse, then your very life might be in jeopardy. Lessons must be taught. And for me the very best part was when he exposes schooling as the very place which disempowers those who weren't fortunate enough to be brought up inside the voice. You are wrong wrong wrong and stupid.

This Martin Luther King day, NPR takes note of the fact that the overwhelmingly white citizens of Newton Mass. have blacks in each of their executive slots; as mayor, governor, and president. And that the big thing about this is that nobody notices. "It's no big deal".

I think that Foster Wallace might remark how remarkably white the speech is of each of those executives. No, actually, he does remark that. Before the fact, as it were. These leaders learned their lessons well.

And so the fact of difference and discrimination takes on a more occult form, beneath our surfaces and fault lines. We get distracted by the obvious. Almost as if someone were trying to fool us. Smilingly. They are.

On the way to the bus back to the Big City this morning, where she lives right under one of those Bowery Bridges where I once had my teeth worked on under laughing gas when it was a rougher place, my daughter wondered if there is any chance of a big earthquake here in Buffalo. Where sub-hurricane winds cause the frame house which houses my apartment to rock. Yes sweetie, we are perched right above one of the earth's great fault lines, but our houses won't come down. We've inherited margins for error still premised on former glories. When architects built to impress the newly rich with sound structures representing older money. And the fault is very very old by now. Tectonic pressures must have been displaced to elsewhere.

Pat Robertson really should go straight to hell for suggesting that he can read God's will on the face of earth's disasters. And he should go back and learn to read his Bible. There's no mystery about why tragedy strikes hardest among those without margins to address it ahead of time.

So - true story - I spent all last week falling in love all over again with a real life rhetorician. Someone who makes a career of what David Foster Wallace throws off his cuff and then has the temerity to off himself about. And then you have no way to know if you should be mad at him for taking out that little chance for making actual sense of a senseless world, or the world for making someone feel that alone for getting things which other people just yell about. If you believe him, he got beat up a lot back in school. He seems earnest enough. I believe him.

And I don't know how to deal with my absent lover now either, who had to go back home to the same town where Foster Wallace did himself in. For crying out loud! Sometimes it adds up to more than I can take, and sure yeah, I understand perfectly that it was a chemical imbalance and had nothing at all to do with how he felt inside (!!!), which is how I feel sometimes when I can't find a soul to read me. Either. It feels like your love resides in California, and you're worried it might fall off the face of the earth from some big fault line. Sheesh, and Holy Cow!

Too bad there aren't explanatory tags alongside God's work, the way there were for us, arm in arm or hand in hand or just strolling side by side when the syncopation of our steps worked more easily that way, as we visited closed museums, and sepulchral - literally - empty ones whose signs outside said "open."

Schoolkids in one basement gallery were putting up photos taken around Buffalo, to illustrate juxtapositions of justice and injustice. Beside each photo was some text, which became almost like poetry up against those pictures. "I know your executive director! She used to work for me . . . " I drop names shamelessly, and so how could anybody love me?

Pictures and text both striving to see some hope in the cracked and graffiti-ridden collapsing edifices. You must see this show! And then study the way the school decomposes curriculum into something kids might actually be interested to do. The crack ridden fallen elderly faces, slump shouldered. Falling down in place, like Buffalo's estimation in the world. Is there any life here at all, or has anyone actually residing here already suicided redundantly, with ugly nasal accent, rhetorically incorrect. Surely, this is not a place for love.

Niagara Falls Is

Is there even life here, in a place where if you knock on the door while the museum is setting up its next exhibit, some very nice and open person will take extravagant time to explain the background, the context, the sequences of accidents which did lead up to this place here and now which even were it open would not attract a crowd. Good bye and thanks ever so much for your generous explanations. You almost feel like blowing kisses.

James Joyce's words are archived here. People came from all around the world to celebrate Bloomsday, whatever that is or was or might be, and congratulate themselves for having learned how to read something which I have tried and tried again to get through. Still feeling almost as though I have. Now these words are illustrated with photographs. The words themselves on display. As artifacts.

Then what is love if not the meeting of minds which no longer have to take care of what they say out loud. The gloss is the thing itself, and the picture won't either capture or destroy what you would have seen without it. The clothes are off. There is more voltage, though, with strangers, or so I hear. Bosh and balderdash, I say.

That evening we went to see 84, passing by the Albright Knox we wondered what all the cars were about. And then, after the fact, I discovered the notice that the director himself would be there to answer questions about his documentary "Up the Yangtze." This is what I should have been doing, right? In preparation for recommitting myself to the critical task of interpreting China to the world. Up yours?

By strange coincidence, the very next day my sweetheart and I trekked to East Aurora which is home to the Aurora Theater and the Roycroft institution, which were the sponsors of the missed event at the Abstract Expressionist Heart of the World right here in talking proud Buffalo. There we strolled through a world devoted to the art of narrating craft on its face. With - I was informed - grammatically incorrect iconic statements such as "speak well of every one if you speak of them at all," a kind of writing which Foster Wallace also confessed would drive him wild.

The Roycrofters celebrate the look of the written word itself, in ways which would defy my Kindle to display without taking all its memory, now devoted to up to 1500 titles in a tome the size and heft of a single paperback. Words adorn the very beams of the dining room at the Roycroft; "Moderation" in its barroom. Exalted words on entry and exit through the beamy wooden doors.

What then am I to make of this absence all around the central regret of Friday evening? Or the books lined up at the bookstore, each one of which I longed, palpably, to read, but collectively all of which would render me a pauper on paper. Perhaps I can check them out on-line with my Kindle from the library (no, they won't lend me one, should I check out my punctuation?)?

So much to do, and so little time. It was the Burchfield-Penny which had Hubbard aphorisms on display. They had poetry too up against the wall in a corridor devoted to Native American art. Depicting pictures depicting scenes depicting life as Native Americans struggled to live it among the rest of us. Little Chief is one I remember in particular because it reminded me of the name of a friend who sold Iroquois Beer in the name of his father, the Chief.

We strolled a theme out in public. Even the beautiful old school we walked by displayed the name of its architect helpfully on a placard just as I asked the question out loud. Reality was being animated. The Golden Globes liked that version better too. Avatars of reality, really. Amazing. The architects names are also in the URL for the picture, if you get curious.

But I do know all about the Yangtze River and why the government of China had no choice but to damn [sic] the three gorges, and all the people and history there within to be inundated now, forever. I didn't really need to see that documentary, so vividly documented by its absence. Why would my viewing be enhanced, by narrations from its director who can only tell me what my heart already understands? It's very much as if I were being there.

It is the role of man to leave his imprint on the landscape. To inscribe regularity, in the form of words, upon the very vistas themselves. And thereby to internalize those brushstrokes nature would have made, all by heartless self, without man. Alone? As if nature could possibly know what to do without us.

Sure, China has gone too far now, bringing up to date the necessity to channel the rivers which otherwise would change course willy nilly and destroy farms and farmers. To stockpile grain and salt against the famines. To regularize life, to orchestrate with words the bureaucratic structures which can render something civilized and that much better than chaotic otherwise savagery. They use the term chaos to rationalize a lot.

Sure, we have too. Gone too far. With carriages whose opulence we don't even notice would put to shame the gilt ones at some museum which once carried royalty. Decrepit carriage houses here in Buffalo would make castles in most of the world, and they crumble from disuse. On alleyways not even mapped by Google (whoops, wrong again, I slander). New skyscrapers reach too high. We are in no position to chastise China. They were symbolically required to do what they have done also. Their Sacred Object is the Word itself. Ours requires lots of footnotes.

It would be trivial enough to change the way our distributions work. It would be as trivial as changing the way we lust. For ever larger houses, cars, boats and breasts. I'm spent. I want for nothing. I want. Nothing. Whew, I nearly lost my breath there, at Christmas, you know, in fact.

But, you know, I'm not a big fan of something to replace capitalism with, which would only accentuate the bureaucratic authority of SNOOTS who make the poor people feel even more economically challenged than they were without them to point it out. And the Golden Booty award winners were all very careful to discount their importance, up against that of Precious, so big and beautiful and black. I'm down with that.

Yes, Virginia, there is love in Buffalo. Snow mistaking that.

In Memorium

In Conclusion, the End, Finally, Finished? Hardly.

I took a few friends with me last night to 84, a new and young multi-media enhanced re-presentation of George Orwell's great work up on stage. The reviewer in the Buffalo News was harsh. But I also was left dissatisfied, reaching for that vertigo I feel every time I read the book.

Imagine! Disappointment at falling short of paranoia.

But they didn't bring the work explicitly up to date. There were no direct references to Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. I wasn't informed about how Information Technology doesn't improve our odds. I didn't hear the voices of our current leaders apologizing for what they must do to non-citizens in the name of our vanished dreams and aspirations; in honor of manufactured fears.

There was no palpable sense that we have already traveled through that glass, falling short only in the fact of our creature comfort. We manufacture pleasures, in service to the Sacred Object.

Earlier in the day, walking the streets of Buffalo to discover the Karpeles Manuscript Museum on the premises of the former Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist. Finding a declaration - or was it a proclamation? - of Thanksgiving signed by Herbert Hoover just after the stock market crashed. For our abundant harvest and prosperity. Finding more of his words there, carping about how FDR was destroying all hope that the American spirit could prevail. Feeling powerful deja-vu, all over and over again.

This after learning that I indeed did make the final cut to represent China to the world. Mini-truth or illusion, Martha Washington? Take your pikk. This after another day of talking about whether the past was any more solid than the future shall be. My memory is so terrible for plots.

I only remember that reading 1984 shook me. I can't remember how or why. Watching it again on stage - brilliantly rendered, with multi-media enhancements - felt only like a rehearsal of cliche. As though we all have grown that far beyond what clearly is still omni-present.

Touchpoints in my past are documented, remembered as well by friends. Still, the plot I choose would be the one which fails the most to belittle me. It informs my current actions, in truth to what I do believe I have been. Cringing just a little if someone reminds me of some alternate reading. Something I might have missed.

My future then so much more under my control, based in part on how I do inform my past and so I must be bothered by China's spinning certain facts beyond their peoples' reach. Spinning something which would elicit better resolution toward the future. Still, we do it better here on the other side of the globe. We paper over shortcomings in service to our future dreams. Reaching ever higher for technical solutions to the misery of humanity.

My fear is that much greater that China will be seen only as the embodiment of some yellow hoard without understanding or care for truth, justice and the American way. It would be that much in error to read the Orwellian takes on history as celebrations of what we do. At China's center there are leaders no more (or less) flawed and self-serving than ours are. Two parties provide at least as much cover as does one party prevent internal debates from spilling out in public.

In America, you may easily seem honest by your stated opposition. In China, there is more discretion about what may be displayed in public. Still, the term "communist" rankles. But any more than does "democracy," against what we practice privately in our back rooms?

We still have at our center the fictional Big Brother in the sky. In China, in place of the once and future emperor, they have the Party, resolved will of the people if only they would understand it. Shorn of symbol, they retain the structure which has managed throughout history to assimilate its opposition.

The Heavens are fixed and stable, apart from the occasional wandering star. The Earth, under heaven, will shift beneath our feet. The rivers wash away mountains; earthquakes turn housing to rubble, crushing lives and shattering illusion. Symbolic Man is cosmically in the middle, bringing heaven's constancy to earth.

We do this with dams and irrigation. We plan our cities wisely, right! We study the earth's fluctuations so that we may bring them back in line. Except that earthquakes and hurricanes happen whenever they please, and then we are that suddenly reminded of what we might have done more easily and cheaply had we but planned ahead. Outpourings of love after the fact do nothing about the safety which would not fit in among the clear and present imperatives of daily life.

Outpourings of outrage at the petty corruption which allowed school buildings to be constructed poorly so that they would crush the innocent only children beneath them can only undermine the critical faith in the good will of the party toward future betterment for all. These are not trivial matters to adjudicate. The words cannot come easily; and the outrage, from mothers, cannot easily be assuaged.

There will come a tipping point, after which the people's trust cannot be earned by oil on water calm in the wake. Where the promise of future prosperity is itself undermined by things right in front of the face. Where filters on information can only highlight what has been left out.

And in the meantime, there is surely something Americans can and must learn from China's traditions, reflecting them back in our own words. So the Chinese themselves may see the best in themselves. And find something good in ours.

Pause

I must still sing a song of innocence, in love with guilty pleasures. I mourn the dead of Haiti. I mourn the shattered dreams from Katrina, from Tsunami, from Allah and from Jesus. I mourn that bureaucrats must do what they must do. I mourn the loss of leaderhship, in a world addicted to the promotion of superstars.

Still, I celebrate today, the omni-present, where there is so much left to do.

Audience Rules! Google Out of China

Google did it! Instead of mouthing more mealy rationalizations about engagement, Google pulls back now from the world's biggest market, in protest against the Chinese government's controls against the free flow of information. They had previously drunk the water of compromise, and now they take it back, realizing some basic collision with the company's own core values. If they aren't interested in the free flow of information, who is?

Before we debate that point, I myself now, inspired by Terry Gilliam's latest cinematic romp, must practice sleight of hand. While you are paying attention to the diversion of Google's seeming to do the right thing by you, I am going to conjur my own audience. Shazzam, and you are there.

Evangelicals do this all the time, tapping in to that proto-illness of most peoples' brains where powerful words, authoritatively spoken, excite some sort of belief-system focused on some leader at the pinnacle of some trued structure.

Schizophrenics do this to some clinically mad degree, rehearsing rosary patterns of words as if for dear life; sometimes even unsettling their interlocutors' certainties about what really counts as worthwhile. If they can even get an interlocutor, which is usually pretty unlikely. There is always madness in perfect trust in any human-generated scheme.

These edifices of trust - the churches, the schools, the corporations - are composed of the attention paid by earnest subscribers, in no position themselves, alone, to be certain of anything. Traditionally, the church in robes and gold and ceremony, could legitimize its stand in place of you and me.

Now, at one extreme, we have be-gowned and celebrated universities, whose rationalizations of the world around us must be trued by earnest peers whose own works are "published" and read by others whose readerships are also better than you or me. There is a highly elaborated system for legitimacy, which in these United States keeps our Big U. at the very top on the globe. If we don't blow it, we may yet remain, thereby, economically in power.

At some other extreme are ever-growing institutions legitimated only by the financial contributions of their adherents. To many of us, these evangelical businesslike edifices look for all the world like giant confidence games, supported only by some occult cadence, high production values to the show, and the tired jadedness of common man toward robes and institutional self-promotion.

Which is a really funny observation if you were to think about it.

Google and Microsoft and proto-universities like the Singularity Institute, gain their legitimacy by your purchase of their product, or by your being subject to their advertizing, or by your belief in guru representations beyond the reach of institutions for sanction. Pick your poison, someone's always trying to take advantage of your gullibility.

When you, the public, are asked questions for your answer en masse, the way they so stupidly do in California, the very act of voting makes you complicit in a massive crime against humanity. Complex and difficult matters must be distilled into some truism which will become a proxy litmus test to determine if you prefer the blue or the red pill.

Should education be worth more than incarceration? Should real-estate taxes be capped? Can we trust our elected leaders to represent us? The serpent eats its tale. (at least pikk.com makes good sport of it, rabid fans) We must bind the hand which leads us.

No authority now is trusted; no structure can be made worthy of your belief. I'd like to be willing to die for my country "in an instant" like so many soldiers say that they are, but I really don't know what my country is. I really would like to know, once again, what it is beyond family and personal friends which has earned my full trust and loyalty.

In China, on its citizens' behalf, the government will violate the terms of service of its business partners - which is an extremely civil way to put what they are doing - conducting industrial espionage to expose its own citizens who would like some trued stories about the behavior of that self-same government to be aired in public. Very bad things will happen to these people.

Google's discovery leaves it in a position of no real choice. If it is not to be complicit in what are criminal acts on the face of them.

Other corporations, as I have written extensively elsewhere (don't you just love such vague references?), can lay back behind layers and layers of deniability and keep focus on whatever core business widgets or services they are pandering. We don't always know what might be done in our name, but we do know that we are only interested in bringing profitable wares to market.

But Google's in the business of information; trust in them depends utterly on their commitment to the freedom of information. Otherwise even rubes would understand we're entering the world of Orwell's 1984.

Chinese citizens understand that their fate is collective. Their lives are palpably better on a daily basis, thanks to their single party rule. Strong resolution at their top is never subverted by oversimplified questions asked of under-qualified deciders. While our red and blue resolve themselves into almost perfect opposition, guaranteeing, virtually, that there can be no direction other from the one which will be far too little, far too late. When true leadership is so urgently called for.

And just as we might not want to look too closely at what we are asking our young men and women to do in our name in Afghanistan or Iraq, the Chinese people are often just as adamant about what they don't want to know.

The only fact which really matters is whether the preacher is more interested in gold and glory than in God. Has self perpetuation trumped belief? Do leaders' actions defy their words? Must we hamstring them with direct propositions so that they may do their dirty deeds in trickier ways beneath our notice?

And so, dear audience of non-existent readers, I make this representation to you. There is no thing which I will write which you must take on any kind of faith. I will not make extravagant claims about the future, nor willingly make statements which cannot be substantiated against piles and piles of facts. I will not stray beyond the bounds of reason, nor fall prey to temptations for the rhythms of magical thinking, either as receiver or transmitter. You will know it when I lose my mind.

Most writers, I must imagine, would feel far too naked doing this kind of writing. Well, some have told me so. Where you have no good idea who it is you're writing to. Where you have no particular expertise which makes you the person to go to for good intel about the latest moves of this or that corporation, nor for interpretation of the latest happenings in the world around us. I have no editorial board to assure you that what I write will be this side of outlandish, nor in the vein of what you've paid for.

But, sorry to say, writing alone for just me in private fails to engender my own trust in me. Toward the one side, I might write as do those myriad bloggers now who rehearse for you daily observations about their personal lives, and seem to speak for your heart as well. You comment profusely, yeah yeah yeah, that's what I think too. Or you're a jerk.

Toward the other, there is nothing which I have so fully developed to say that I can work it out book length for your to judge in and by its completion.

I have inklings is all, of certainty, in the end, as it were, and trace the direction toward it here, each day out loud, as if a crazy person writing to myself. But the certainty I seek forms no kind of utterable nor embodiable truth; these are absurdities I just can't believe in.

I have no faith in that sort of perfection in words, nor artificially intelligent robots, nor transhuman decency beyond our belief here and now. I have no faith in even trued words' endurance in any perpetual sense, and the perpetual me falls short within a range I can be comfortable with myself.

That of which I am certain relates to you, dear audience. That there is no such thing as writing which can make sense to a single soul alone. *poof* You're there because you must be. And the power is all yours.

As in these supposedly United States, we must learn to liberate our leaders from the veto power of the least among us, whether small "frontier" states or illegitimate institutions. To do that, we must find a way to trust them. And that in turn must be liberated from the process for producing ad copy on what used to be called Madison Avenue.

This strikes me as almost inconceivably difficult to accomplish. You, dear audience, are so freaking willing to believe the most absurd things, based on some trust in the speaker engendered only on the basis that they make you feel good about yourself. You are falling down on your job. But I have faith in you.

OK, I've got an interview now, for painless suicide in public. Like everyone else, I must eventually agree to work for the Man (Not that one! You know, the one who runs the economy, stupid) or starve. I would represent the government of China, in their cultural outreach to America. Placing Chinese language teachers in our schools. Interpreting Chinese cultural history and values for your edification and enlightenment. Hopefully, leading you to fear and loathe them less, so that we may become partners, China and the U.S., in this better world abuilding.

Is my ambivalence palpable? Is there any way now that I can trust myself? My representations there in private, how will they match this public nakedness before you? Stay tuned! I might just have a legitimate job, or they might just remind me that I have yet to learn to fly a kite. I will do the right thing, of that I'm certain, whatever the hell it is. Or the deciders will do it for me.

Sheesh!

Perpetual Emotion Machine; Guilty Pleasures

There, I did it. I managed a two-part title, divided by a semi-colon. I think that was the style when I last did academic reading. I've probably got it wrong, though, since I'm no good at punctuation. It might have been a colon.

Is there anybody out there who actually still wonders why, for instance, digital "content" cannot be protected in a way analogous to the old embodiments of ink and paper, or vinyl for songs? Is there anybody still innocent enough to take up a credit card offer of impossibly free money and then think that they can use the card without burying the low interest debt under usurious rates for actual usage? Do you still wonder why the banks prefer to take their hits with credit card fraud, rather than to plug the holes the way the Europeans do. And they don't go so very far in that direction either . . .

Once you realize that you are meant to feel responsible for the collapse of the economy, these trivial mysteries evaporate like fog in sunshine. The game is to dangle candy right before your nose, and then to be certain that you feel responsible for taking it. You bought the house, you signed for the credit card, you downloaded the music for free, and you belong in jail. We will present you with horrifying examples of innocent naifs, in jail while still cute and preppy.

Your parents teach you this as children, strong fathers spanking you for wanting what the adults take freely. There would be nothing terribly difficult about using some variant on public/private key encryption to register who's the owner and who's the purchaser, and to allow you to lend out your copy for ever decreasing returns to the "original" owner. We're not waiting for some technological breakthrough,

There is no real trouble creating credit cards which require a secret key to unlock. The funny thing is that even when they are not allowed to hold you reponsible for the fraudulent debt racked up in your name, it's still not worth their while for banks to do this. The reason simply is that you can be, thereby, made to feel responsible, and their letting you off the hook deepens that feeling. You are magically indebted twice for your own failure to protect your identity. And we'll gladly sell you supplemental policy to protect it.

The critical thing is for you to want, and digital media proves over and over again that there is no limit to your willingness to pay and feel guilty about it, no matter how lavish the freebies become which are dangled before your eyes.

I read artificial books now because the real ones have become too pricey. Except that I can't help noticing that this ephemeral copy still costs more than a conscionable price from only a few years ago for one I could lend to my friends and recirculate.

But, it is true, I can download many classics - Moby Dick, for instance - from the Gutenberg project, and I can publish my own blog for free. So, let's be clear here, I'm no Luddite complaining about what has been lost to progress. I just want my government back, and for the actual honest leaders to be sent to Washington on my behalf. I want people who are smart enough to understand their briefers, strong enough to withstand debilitating compromise, and jaded enough not to be tricked by sleight of hand.

Then I will give my baby candy, whenever I am having some myself. Which isn't all that often, to tell you the truth.

Rain Man

Someone has to make this observation, so it might as well be me. Rain Man - in real life Kim Peek - was lacking the corpus callosum, which is the neural tissue which connects the hemispheres of the brain. As you, gentle reader, already know, I find Julian Jaynes' thesis compelling: that it was the "breakdown" of inherent divisions between the hemispheres of the brain which occasioned consciousness.

This trivial seeming thesis has yet to make the main stream, and perhaps as with all things scientific, I am making only a metaphorical read of what more disciplined minds read with more disciplinary understanding. The thesis may add nothing new to research and advancement in our collective understanding of consciousness; of how the brain works.

But the metaphorical read is compelling too; that as with Kim Peek who has been called a "walking Google,", we each "store" much more knowledge than we are, consciously, aware of. Rain Man's savantism was not evidence of some excess capacity. It was, rather, evidence of an utter absence of any inhibition.

There was no organizing principle to Kim Peek's collection of words and facts and snippets from that stuff which he could read - each eye taking its own page - at whatever rate his hands could crawl them.

Now the literal Google seeks to make the idea of "real time" search more actual; better embodied. And we will be able, therefore, to understand less. Just as Rain Man had no useful intelligence. All noise without a signal.

The missing link in Kim Peek's intelligence, of course, was that "me" filter, composed largely of emotion, which enables us - those of us both less idiotic, and less savant - to make intelligent statements about what we read. It enables us to button our shirts and make reasonable decisions. It keeps from us, thank God, most of what we already "know".

There is no mistaking the fact that poor Tom Cruise was so taken with this notion that he found a religion to embody it. For religions, being invented out of whole cloth by a science fiction writer must be one step up from having the deed done by a horse thief, although it doesn't seem to make you more adherents than those Mormons get.

If the film which I just re-watched, starring another savant actor from the Church of Scientology - John Travolta in "Phenomenon" - truly is a Scientology-style Christ-like story, which I'm pretty sure it is, then they, at least, are onto this idea that most of what we know is inhibited. Although they seem to target emotion as the thing which blocks it out.

You can grab a pair of tin cans to get started along the Scientology path, and learn from the feedback loop of some dial on some meter how to remove the blocks which prevent you from becoming "clear."

This must be particularly valuable for actors who must inhabit personae other than their own. Get your "me" filter shut down, and you can be anyone you'd like. Which works pretty well to get you roles, up to and including that of President of the United States, just in case you were wondering how GWB pulled it off. Or the great one himself, Ronnie Raygun. Thank God Sarah Palin will only be a talking right wing head as the freshest new face on Foxy News, which is pretty much where she belongs. I thought she was gunning for the role of female Hitler.

People without inhibitions in the way of the roles they play can get right into your comfort zone through a kind of border invasion which leaves you helpless to respond. An expert salesman, selling you a car by daring you to call the bluff and suggest back to him the obvious; that he truly is a sociopath in this context, without any care at all for what is best for you. The more he believes it himself, the more dangerous he becomes.

He seems so nice and so earnest, that expert salesman. These transactions are always a one-way street. You are far too earnest to challenge his seeming decency.

By definition, there are no such abusers among the downtrodden in the context of the streets who don't belong in jail. But if you're on the other end of the spectrum, there's no limit to how high you might arise.

I am your friend, I care about you, I agree with everything you feel, and won't ever ask you to break it down, to analyze it, to true it against any facts. You are right, have always been right, and I am here to give your rights their voice. Huzzah and tear down the castle walls! (disclaimer, I value the role of salesman more than you do, and don't tend to be a do-it-yourself shopper. I was killer once, at selling bicycles. And yes, I believed myself what I was saying. And yes, I was fooled sometimes)

Most of us slow down and retreat when we feel that mob that we are part of moving into action. We blush to think that we would take advantage that blatantly as the oily womanizer does. We feel a sense of fraud directly proportional to the scope of the stage we climb up on to.

Those who have no such inhibitions are rewarded with corporate leadership roles, super starring someone who actually does believe himself better than what the lottery rules of random picked out of the hat of humanity. (True disclaimer: I actually do believe that many of our corporate titans are better at what they do than is their blasted competition. Some of them also hide better what they're truly good at. Marketing is not the same as invention. The better mousetrap hardly ever prevails.)

Our emotional filter works on the stuff in our brain way before we can put our decisions into words. Before we can rationalize them and give them voice. That's how our character gets informed. That's how our words become us.

Last night I was at dinner with three other people each of whom brought to the table direct knowledge of life in Central America. Central America is where our United States threw its weight behind oppressive regimes which outsourced violence and murder; to the extent that our politicians could smugly feel that they truly were only protecting the rights of US corporations properly to exploit the riches of the earth which would otherwise not make their way to market. Aluminum, Copper, bananas, coffee, and inevitably the drugs.

There are murders still, in the name of our self-indulgent desires, whose chain of payoff is so many links long that the local thug who would ingratiate himself with the local boss really does have nothing to do with your tiny decision at the supermarket. Or on the dark streetcorner scoring dope.

I was plenty embarrassed to realize last night at dinner that I myself once knew that much more about Central America than I now do. Because my very own left-wing angst, no matter how much I read nor how hard I try to inform my actions, is all focused where the main stream media shines its light.

I know all sorts of relevant facts about Iraq and Afghanistan, and al Qaeda in Pakistan. My opinions are very well informed and even better formed in their certainty, even while I give our president a pass on the assumption that he must be that much better informed still. And meanwhile, I don't even bother to sort the facts from Central America. Neither does the Church, which still disavows, I'm told, the socially uplifting work of the "liberation theologists" left behind there.

There is tremendous hope in this revelation, no? That the spotlight of public attention is both what inhibits understanding, as well as what makes it likely.

There is a pearl of wisdom, which has by now become as smooth and enlarged as an old chestnut, contained in George Lakoff's work about how the right wing has succeeded in "framing" all political debate by choice of words and contexts.

In the largest sense, if you can manage to get nearly the entire reading and thinking public focused on the Middle East, you can do anything you'd like, say, in Central America. A sucker punch by any other name. You win the debate by simple repetition. Too bad Chomsky and Lakoff don't see eye to eye.

No matter how nutty the Scientologists really are, there might be more fact than the rest of us would credit, to the power inherent from the process of getting "clear." Facts beyond imagining, standing at the ready behind the Hoover Dam of metaphoric inhibition. Or was the dam the metaphor?

We do know that for the purpose of our Internet searching, the once powerful notion that we could find our needle in the haystack by resolving all the linked choices made by the "mob" is tired and old beyond belief. No matter how quickly Google renders up the millions of "hits" against your clever wording, they will never be able to program in the metaphoric categorization which enables even the stupidest among us to "get" what's right, before we ourselves quite know it.

So, search engines will figure out, as we at Hoover Blanket, Inc. already have, how to give you, the searcher, sufficient clues that you can find your own way in among the thicket of noise so far beyond even Rain Man's capacity to digest.

Even if he could read it, there's no computer in the world which could click through those millions of "relevant" hits, arranged in descending order of their relevance to everyone else on the planet. As if the beauty of your lover would cause her to arise to the top for the mob. Well, I suppose that it might if you are a Hollywood celebrity, but I hardly think that's a position from which generalizations can, nor certainly should be made.

And your brain too can adopt new framing metaphors. And suddenly the world is new.

It very much does seem as if the mob still rules the day, and we are sports fans out of context. We act in public the way the hooligans do in the stadium. "They" tell me our sports fan shere in Buffalo - as with all such measures of quality - are at the very bottom of the heap; for war-painted drunken brawling ending in arrest. I'm pretty sure we're not so low as Eurotrash following their style of football, but then I'd be way too scared to find out. I know you're certain that suicide in Buffalo is redundant, but not for me, dear reader, not for me.

I start with love, a feeling my body still manages to teach me, as my own personal root metaphor. I start with your ear, wet kisses there still cause the rest of me to melt, and then I take that knowledge and apply it to the world. Where women such as Sarah Palin, no matter how good she is in bed - and believe me I'm nowhere near man enough to want to find out - seem to operate from a root metaphor of power. There is the muscle and there is the siren call of the body imagined naked. Power still corrupts. Especially when deployed in seeming earnest.

The facts I choose from my own personal imaginarium get trued against my own root metaphor, as do all facts. If you're a Christian, then my root metaphor is the same as yours. Not the strict father. The feminine in ascendant, against Him in a trajectory toward female earth. Christ was, after all,  a wimp too. We only celebrate who we would be in his place. An angry Titan. Bolstered by a mob.

Where Am I?

Where is me? I came across some old writings this morning, perfectly attributable to me. But if they had been expropriated, I'm not sure I would have known it. I find myself, sometimes, and sometimes I am strange. Sometimes I am more interesting than I thought I could be, and sometimes, or course, unreadable.

I really do wonder if I have any prior claim on being me. I'm watching Dad now, ever so slowly disappearing beneath what gets called dementia. I've loved him well. But sometimes I can't remember those days long ago when I would bring someone home and they would comment to me how sorry they felt that I had to suffer such belittlement and abuse. Their comments were enlightening.

Have I risen above any sense that I could be belittled now, or have I rather internalized the distortions, and become something less than I once was? I know I have a hard time finding anything terrible or sad about Dad's decline. However much television ads for memory enhancing drugs might urge me to.

Am I that callous? Friends and family have said that they are praying for me, since the time of my recent and nearly deadly health emergency. Have their prayers been answered? I feel no worse for the episode, and rather grateful - with no object for that gratitude - to have been granted both the experience of hospitalization and the insights gained for my better health.

Looking back, therefore, I would have resisted prayers to prevent what happened from happening. I find such things sacrilege, as though we would be superior to God's will. But then I find talk of God's will or mine to be so much meaningless twaddle. I have moral choice. The rest, I'm not so certain about.

Perhaps my own memory is that poor already that I cannot place what I did and when. I know in vague terms where I might look to find things. I have file cabinets. I have various accounts on various websites, on some of which I post things. Who can remember all their passcodes, and if they are all the same, then there is near inevitability that one crack will crack them all, the more of them you make. I try to keep secret drawers for myself with clues.

But if someone were to make a claim that you, meaning me, have made this outrageous statement, I might be convincable that it was mine even though it wasn't. I think that could be true on both the positive and negative side. Did OJ really believe his own innocence? Did Lord Jim really black out. Was I really that intelligent and clever once. I'm sure I am no longer. And George Bush; was he just making shit up?

Do televangelists have faith, does Rush Limbaugh really believe his own philosophizing, is there such thing as an honest politician? My God, will I have to give them all a pass, then? On the grounds that I myself know not what I say or who I am.

But I will not recognize defamation, calumny, exhortations to cause harm nor claims for my own superiority, since in my knowledge I have never felt such things. These things do not become me in any case. So if you find them, you have misread me. If criticized, I will make corrections, since I know that I am quick enough to anger. Judgemental of poor behavior. I've been known to flip a bird, though on average I'm pretty sure I get flipped off more often. None of us can be good enough drivers to avoid it.

And there are things which really should not be touched on in writing. I am transported that far beyond myself today.