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TheTome /
SworDschoolYou are on the archive wiki. The new wiki is here. Things To Be Done With You In Habana Once Your Dead ---- 8/22 I'm beginning to appreciate how I really depend on the honest things. I'm like Warren Ellis now, insistent that the most honest place you can go is his own bar. 'Lies simply shrivel up and die in there', he says. Especially in his own favorite bar, he goes ahead to tell us, since it's there that douse you with sodium penathol as you enter, and torture you for days on end. I'm certain for Ellis and his playmates, this is just hazing you before they let you into the gang. In much the same way as owners of dogs the size of small lions with the weight to power ratio of ten thousand wolverines fail to see their pets as anything but puppies. And where mauling you into submission is just another way voicing affection. A lowtech equivalent of what Mike Nelson would no doubt refer to as givethingstochristie.com. It's in the spirit of such honesty that I'm beginning to re-appreciate my afternoon spitballing with Geoff and Ryan, and sometimes J. Honest coffee, honest discussion of tactics for Vampire: TES, honest appreciation of mounting allergies to our work, and honest assesment of my breaking into the market as a London food critic. Which is still a project in its tender stages I don't mind saying. In this New and Viscious age of Billy Joel hit singles rising to greet me, it really comes as no surprise that Geoff should give me a crack at reading PJ O'Rourke. Republican Party Reptile which seems to be considerate, inscisive and dead-bang on target for those societal politenesses and policies that are at once inane and civilization-threatening. His journalism is what one might expect to find in a thinking-man's Mad Magazine, like HST, but without the psychoses, neuroses, drug-induced ranting attacks and mockery of Ralph Steadman. Now I've got to figure out a way to steal the book on general fucking principle, although in my darker moments, I suspect that's exactly what he had in mind. Geoff that is, not PJ, not Steadman. Nor Dr Thompson for that matter. This is really only an elaborate way of saying I like the Fifteen Minutes essay, which I read on a weekday morning while watching eTV's magazine programme. This happened over breakfast, which is to say: a croissant, coffee and freshly-squeezed OJ. E, on the other hand, seemed to be running some article on Hemingway, immortalized as a bronze statue at the end of His Bar, the one he drank at while in Habana, which is where his summer house was. Well, near the bar was his summer house, not exactly in it, but who can really say with Ernst. Nevertheless, and maybe it was just the PJ O'Rourke, maybe the Michael Kupperman's Snake & Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret I'd read earlier the previous night, maybe the bad pizza, or maybe even any combination of any of the aforementioned, but while reading O'Rourke, watching this eTV magazine show, I got put in the mind for a What If? moment. Like Celebrity Deathmatch but without the claymation, I got to thinking what our world might have been like, had Hemingway been the Father of Modern Psychology and not Freud. I can see it now, Dacheries for everyone, and maybe a Mojhito once in a while. And if you think your past relationship with your parents is complicated, hell why not just fabricate another one for yourself. It's the dark and slightly lunatic side of what Louis Wolfson and Michel Foucault intended when they suggested from their separate little corners of history that we could all 'write ourselves out of mental illness'. Thinking about Freud as it turns out, was not such a bad idea at all. It would become necessary for my weekly trip to the Table where I came right up against what in the past would have been academically a disgrace, but these days passes for 'charming'. Conflation, meandering, , butchering the subject and then the sheer lack of good grace to continue to speak without being entirely certain. 'They're basically the same thing', she said with a Richard o'Brien-like out-of-place look about her. She, and there's no name I know to give her yet, her own I simply don't know, and others would be impolite, was of course speaking of tmisunderstandinghe Oedipus and Elektra complexes. Well no, they're not really. Firstly, which are the Oedipus and Elektra being spoken of? The Oedipus and Elektra of Sophocles and Euripedes, in other words the high Greek cathartic tragedies? Or the countryside folk tales that they become in the Roman imaginations, later collected in the Metamorphases by Ovid? Or does whosherface (no, now d@vid says her name is catherine) even mention that popular, as opposed to populist, theater of Freud's time was filled with translations of the tragedies penned by the hands of Wilbrandt and von Hofmannsthal, the socalled 'Jung Wien' generation? And later these german tragedies were adapted into opera by the hand of Richard Strauss? Or maybe we're talking about psychical mechanism of repression and desire as explained by Freud himself, loosely resembling the myths he saw performed as stage plays and opera in the Burgtheater on Michaelerplatz in the Vienna of the 1880s. And if this is the case, if Freud really does colorize his metaphorical analyses of interior psychic mechanisms with the popular entertainment of the day, then we have nothing more to fear in him than we do in Slavoj Zizek who bases his postmodernist thinking in the firm grounds of having read William Gibson and seen the Matrix, quite possibly in the same decade. But this is something else. The Oedipus that everyone so often refers to, and if you need a refresher, or even a catch-me-up go find Joan Hambidge's Inaugural in the library, is of course the Oedipus of Oedipus Rex tragic protagonist of the Sophocles drama. In attempting to avert the devasting reading of his first saying of the sooth (he will kill his father and marry his mother), he is parcelled off to a distant mountain with wolves, where it's hoped he will be eaten, except he's not. He's saved and raised by brigands, and eventually meets, at a crossroad, Laius, his royal father, who has in the meantime had his brigand father put to death, and kills him, irony of ironies, without knowing Laius's role in his brigand father's execution. Oedipus then heads for Thebes to confess his guilt to Jocasta, his mother and Laius's queen. He's barred from entering by a sphinx that has been terrorizing the city, but solves her riddle and is hailed as hero once he enters Thebes. Not wanting to spoil a good thing, he keeps mum about killing Laius, and eventually is seduced by Jocasta. A good bit into his reign as king, a plague arrives, unexpected as plagues often do, and threatens to wipe out the city. Consulting the oracle to Apollo at Delphi, Oedipus is told to confess his crime. He announces having offed Laius, still unknowing that it was his father. Things ease up but couldn't really be said to be going any better, enter the original soothesayer, and lo! Oedipus discovers his true crime, it's incest not murder, and it's happening as we speak, so to speak. He recuses himself, divorces his mom and pokes out his eyes in a Kill Bill vol.2-like moment of dramatic irony. That's pretty much Sophocles's work, which is an adaptation of an older myth to a religious framework. It's one play in a trilogy, but what Sophocles ignores is the end bit where Theseus redeems Oedipus after his girlfriend and savior, Ariadne offs herself when Theseus dumps her for her sister. Anyhow, one of the great treats of the whole Freud business is watching Oedipus move from a religious into a secular context. For Freud there is an opportunity here to exercise his shiny new theory of the the personality, which comes in three phases (id, ego, superego) and is distinct from his older conscious, unconscious and superconscious theory. His theory on infantile sexuality, which is perhaps the Oedipus catherine meant when she made her 'They're basically the same...', crack, is something akin to the following. The male child associates his desire for nourishment with a desire for the source of that nourishment, the mother herself. But already it is the father that possesses the mother, and possesses her sexually. The way around this then, to possess the mother, is to kill the father and take his place. Once this is achieved everyone goes home happy except for the father, who isn't murdered because the infant learns to repress his desires, the mother who becomes the butt of all jokes in the family, and the infant who represses every little desire for the rest of his adult life right up until he goes to work for the post office. As a result of this repression of the desire to kill the father, a kind of negotiated settlement is entered into between father and infant, where they can together joke about the object of their desire, the mother, and exclude her from their relationship. This bond having been established is what fathering the child is all about, and Bob's your uncle in Zim. Elektra, from what I've been reading over the weekend, is different in that the female child recognizes the genitalia. In Elektra, the female infant asks why the father possesses the mother, which is something the male infant never seems to think to ask. The infant's conclusion in Elektra is genitalia - the father has it present, but there's an absence in the mother. Though why the infant would perceive a vagina as an absence of genitalia is beyond me, but Freud seems adamant on this point. With Elekta then, the infant is torn between the desire to kill the father and rescue/possess the mother, and on the other hand, kill the mother and replace her in the father's eyes. The father of course, even more powerful than the mother, therefore more desirable. If that's the reading I've done in one weekend, you might very well ask, what's the point? What are we really left with SworDschool? What are you playing at here? Not Universalis, I can tell you that much for certain. The point is lousy and lousier academia. Or what passes for academia these days. There are at least four Elektras, the most articulate of which poisons her father after seducing him as an act of revenge for killing her sister as a religious sacrifice. They're not quite the same are they; agency with Elektra and ignorance with Oedipus? Oedipus is surrounded by dramatic irony, awash in an ocean he has no concept of. Elektra is articulate, arrogant and ultimately culpeable. It's the difference between Shakespeare's Hamlet, and his Macbeth, but that quite possibly fails to bring it any closer home. And how fitting it is that we should use Oedipus against Elektra to highlight the real issue here. What exactly passes for excellence, academically speaking, these days? Where do we now choose to draw the line between the charmingly patronizing notion that everyone is entitled an opinion, and the idea that it should mean something to be at this institution. We didn't wash up here from some foreign shore, and staying here means we've effectively locked ourselves out of the power structures of society. A friend once said to me: 'My teacher told me that you're either a leader or a follower. Well, no. I want to be the guy who sits on the hill, just watching the leaders and the followers'. Or to put it another way, why is it ok trump up shoddy knowledge of a thing in the stead of proper knowledge? There's way too much of that thing going around professional thinking these days, and why isn't it simply ok to say, 'I don't know, but give me a week in a library. Or on the net.'? Remind me if you will, exactly what we're fighting for. 'CRY, what shall I cry?/ All flesh is grass: comprehending' -TSE Coriolan I reckon the good thing that came out of it all was to see Adam's back. And with Alex and Michele there seems to be something left of that old ribald, risque, healthily disrespectful rambunctiousness jabbing into Polite Society that was at one time associated with the society. I suppose it's either that or having a world where everyone's entitled to their own opinion. And I have now seen firsthand how badly we need to engage a world where ignorance passes for agency.
Knight at the Opera ---- Ten Days Later I am well aware of how late this posting is, pertaining as it does at least in part to Dragonfire Innocence, but thereby hangs a tale. All that friday arvie, Mike and d@ve both had this Magical Faraway Tree-like look in their eyes of 'It'll All Be Over By Christmas'. But for me this was not to be. For Innocence was the start of something, and not an end. Which is to say, someone got started on me that Friday. And my god it feels good to have the bit in my teeth again. No matter how hairy things'll be getting. I re-met Shaun at Innocence. Erik(C - SunChaser)a's Shaun as he's known to most these days, or as I like to think of him now, Elik(Again: C not K, not that you had any reason to know... - SunChaser)a's Shaun. That sound you hear friends, is the door to Triad acceptance swinging wide open for me now. Golden Dragon Family, now fuck off. I re-met Shaun and sat down to a game of Con X, which on the whole, despite Shaun's best attempts, stirs me to thoughts of what Maggi Two Minute Noodles might do if they ever move into gaming. It's both dry and useful, the kinds of things your parents would be pleased by, safe in other words. Shaun recast us as generic FBI agents, which was best for a one-sitting, and the best part about it I think is that we could run nearly the full gamut of the investigation in one sitting. That's clever, but that seems to be the only thing that is, in the cursory glance I was afforded. The big thing about the night of course was the opera, FDR at the Baxter of Mozart's Magic Flute, and of course N leaving on a John Denver-like jet plane. FDR as it turns out is by no means Franklin Delano, but Final Dress Rehearsal. And I promise that there is nothing more electric than this. You get to see the performance at its purest. Everything that doesn't work, doesn't work at its best on FD night. There'll be no Magic tonight, Angelo Gobbato, director, joked, and not entirely in jest. There's a doglick review of 'splendid' that Michael Tuffin gives the production on the Cape Town Opera website. Which can easily be explained away by one of two theories. In the first positing, Tuffin is the kind of person, bootwipe and battery included, who would have found Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings 'charming' and a 'visual feast'. In the second, he mistakenly wandered into the wrong theater and sat down to a movie of Jean-Luc Goddard's. Alphaville perhaps, or maybe Le Weekend. In other words he's German about this, East German. On the one hand fearful of and loathing the cultural threat exerted by American shopping malls, and on the other, the Right Hand of Doom in this case, perfectly happy to eat at a Japanese-Chinese-Korean restaurant because that kind of thing Just Saves Time. The production was substandard, and I bought another ticket, to Opening Night just to be sure of this, N. not riding shotgun this time. Unless by 'riding shotgun' you understand 'in Thailand', then yes, she was riding shotgun. The Queen of the Night, a key role, had all the technical profficiency of an uncooked sheep's liver, and all the emotional resonance of Australia. No, parts of Australia could possibly be interesting at some level. She knew the words, I think that's the most polite thing to be said. Her Ladies seemed vaguely aware that this was a character role in which some acting was required. But that was at a level somewhere near 'academic', how they put it into play... well it wouldn't have been so bad to watch if the seats faced the other way. The kid playing Papageno did a spectacular task of attempting the role he played, but lacked the direction to make it consolidated. Notably, of the key players, only the Chief Priest stood out. He alone managed the comportment and the depth and the sheer technical mastery to produce his role properly and engage emotionally with the audience. No surprise there, he is a student of Virginia Davids, who has to date given the best performance of Aida I've seen. And that's my favorite opera. So why stage it at all, The Magic Flute? I'm told that Gobbato was not even in Capetown for more than half the rehearsal time. And that as a result that monstrous prima-ballerina-like Kamal Khan was entrusted with it. I'm reasonably sure that he we gotten Laughing Charlie Sizwe from Guggs to direct in Gobbato's absence, he'd have done a more honest job and not let a planet-sized ego trifle with the notion of a good performance. Alas... So why stage it at all? Especially since it was done three years ago, and under Gobatto's hand done expertly. Like that line from Eliot's The Waste Land, right at the end. 'The boat responded gaily to hand expert with sail and oar, like your heart would have responded'. That's not arbitrary as a quote. Put there for a purpose, it partly answers my own question. Mozart, for all the freemasonic overtures of this opera, is actually at his grandest here. It's here when questions of love are rooted deep within a struggle between religion and power. Zarastro strives for a world where the exercise of power is not arbitrary, where 'each one of us may decide their own future from moment to moment', as Frank Herbert put it. A noble quest and yet his only way out is an act of villainy. And there is the Queen herself, all-powerful, yet trapped in a struggle against her dead husband, one that she will now never win. There are no heroes in this opera, evenly the courtly knight, Prince Tamino is more a struggling idiot than an ideological challenge to the forces of darkness. Only villains left alive to tell the tale, what better way to paint a world such as ours? It's most likely the closest Mozart could ever get to something as richly textured and finely woven as Cowboy Bebop.
Driving Back; Lost Highway Found ---- August 5 There's a visit Ive been dreading to get, but Ill get to that in a minute or so. It means that now, without a doubt, certain things are true. And theyre true about a friend. Goddammitall. It was pissing down last night as N. and I drove back from the far side of False Bay. She'll be leaving shortly, next week shortly, in fact. Around about the time I'll be holed up in a darkened basement, watching old videos and cataloguing scenes and cinematic sequences. Shortly she'll be in Thailand, AND MAYBE SINGAPORE, scouting locations. So the time spent out of the city was a good idea. It gave us both a very Dawson's Creek-like moment to doubt our relationship as anathema to doubting ourselves. That's her. My views on the thing at hand were very different. I had a Steve ~McQueen? feeling all through it. And Ali ~McGraw?, The Getaway. I think that's apposite. Tuesday morning already people were flooding into the City, and quite possibly had been for some time. And we had the smallest sliver of time together, between our lives, before our lives kicked in again. Driving out to the far side of False Bay on tuesday was all about putting Jhurmany into perspective, and now, driving back, was all about putting tuesday into perspective. If there was a Getaway, it didn't kick in until driving back in the dark, with the rain pissing down. With the interior light on, I was reading a book she'd bought me while I was away. Something mildly sacreligious, something with a small row of teeth. James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand. I didnt have the heart to tell her I already had a copy in hardback. It's probably the best thing in the world to have expectations, it just occurs to me. With expectations comes anticipation and meaning. And the 'ability to fog men's minds', as Walter Gibson might put it. There's just something to be said for the incessant flow of words on a page and rain from the sky. Like Leopold Bloom, masturbating in a Dublin graveyard in 1904 in Chapter Six of Ulysses, while writing in the dirt with the other hand. James Joyce's Ulysses. It's called Hades, when Odysseus sacrifices a goat at the gates of hell, and converses with voices dead and gone. And added into the mix of all of this is the incessant driving back home. Two flows, continually colliding in ways that we can no longer safely predict. Driving back to it, I found a copy of David Lynch and Barry Gifford's Lost Highway I thought'd lost a whiles back. A horror story about being all you can possibly, and I went to her place to watch it, straight up at midnight. After that we made our getaway. Samurai: in the dark, with only a point of light as focus, I was recapping a horror-house videogame shooter that I played in Singapore. and, Executioner: my attention wasn't on the movie, or on her, but on my work, on Night of A Thousand Chess Pieces. And on that phone call, and the visit that would surely follow. If it came, and it did come, it meant that there was someone keeping track of me. They knew when I'd left, they knew when I'd be arriving. It's the wrong kind of visit, and it's the kind of visit that always comes from your friends. For this whole thing, no matter how often it plays out in my mind, there's an attendant scene from Martin Scorescese's Goodfellas. It's nearly the end, where Ray Liotta's character is in jail, and his wife is invited by Robert de Niro to take a look at a new project of his. She stares down that darkened alleyway, gripped by fear, knowing that if she walks in she'll never walk anywhere again. All the while Ray's character chips in, in voiceover: 'They always send your friends to do their dirty work'. Yeah. They do. I was on the far side of False Bay when he paid me a visit. Out in a mild drizzle, thinking that there's a perfect sound a cigarette makes while firing up tobacco in the rain. N was inside reviewing her notes for next week and the satellite was tuned into eTV. In about 20mins we'd be making a whole nother getaway, and I'd be reading in the rain, a book I already owned. I was supposed to meet K in Berlin after not seeing him for more than a year. But on the weekend in question, I was already making my getaway. Don't Look Back In Anger ---- August First 'The Chaos progresses splendidly, Evey. For my part, I believe the time has come to put things into a certain Order.' -Alan Moore, V for Vendetta Our Sister School, the University of the Western Cape has a quaint way of putting it, and they put it on there School Motto. 'Prospice, Respice', they say, the Latin imperative for Look Forward, Look Back. Or maybe more idiomatically astute: Envision, Remember. And that's Old World for: There's Something Strange as the Light of Day about putting your memories into a certain order. The argument has always been that taking photos in many ways neutralizes the potency of memory, and yet here I am on Frankfurt International, baggage all checked in, with nothing but time on my hands, searching desperately for some kind of memory, something singular to bring the Whole Shabang back to Waking Life, before it passes. The title of this entry's a little funny, Anger being the New Main Square in Erfurt, while Look Back In Anger is a clever jibe at the play by Osborne, or the Gallanger Brothers song if you don't know how to work the Short Loan Film Collection. Anger's also the place where the Nazis hang out, so taking your lunch hour there's probably not the world's best idea if your me, but fuck, when did I ever give a rat's ass. When I had to stitch myself together again, is probably the most immediate answer. Hell, turn's out popcorn does taste better with your own blood as seasoning. Outer the whole fucking conference, in an odd sorter way it's the Pakistanis I feel most sorry for. And there I was thinking it would be the Turks. Shit The Turks are so fucking far off the reservation when it comes to Muslim Identity, that they're barely hanging on. Politically theyre confronted on three sides by the US, by Russia and by Europe. They've lost tenure with all credibility as a culture, as an arab country and here in Germany particularly theyre a Wage Slave Migrant Nation that will never see their homes, German citizenship, or listen to Uncle Paul's Night Zoo. But with all their ass-creeping to get in good with Russia, with the US and to get into Europe, with all their auto-raped culture as a consumable commodity, there's something incredibly honest about wanting to just have a beer. As far as identity goes, its an affirmation, a positive quantity, something to do. Or maybe I like them because That Turkish Girl I tasted is the only girl I know to actually taste of strawberries. And when we get home we'll find out what N. has to say about the taste of strawberries on foreign girls. It's worse if she says nothing. Or maybe worse if I say nothing. But the Pakis, shit they're a whole nother ballgame. Let's Go To Amsterdam, the girls say. Let's get tattoos, Let's get Out of This Place, Let's be Good Christians, Because Good Christians Always Get Stoned. And all of this is a monstrous world of Neither PUT-UP Nor SHUT-UP. Turn's out I was the only one did my own thing, no Pardners-In-Crime on this one. And after all the BS is stripped away, we're left with one startling revelation about the Paki girls. It's the first time they're Away From Home, so it's time to flirt with disaster. But that's the level it stays at. And the saddest thing of all is that this singular identity is primarily defined in opposition to the acridly Islamic Identity promulgated by their countrymen. Fuck, with nothing but these choices I'd rather be Turkish, and that's asking alot cos that Brit Top is a scary motherfucker. In the words of the Virgin Mary, Come Again. So what am I really left with? Who the fuck cares, regrets. A small an painful list of things I shouldn't have done. Shouldn't gone to church with the Host. Shouldn't have told the host, that Roman Catholicism, his church, was responsible for the rise of Satanism as we know it today. Shouldn't told him that I realized that little gem while I was sitting in his church. Shouldn't have flirted with his wife. Shouldn't have flirted with his wife. Shouldn't have flirted with his wife in front of him. Shouldn't have tickled her in church. Shouldn't have made her giggle out loud, least not during the Service. Shouldn't have scared the Protestant Professor. Shouldn't have reminded him that Protestantism is nothing but diluted Catholicism and that if he wanted an alternative he should try Satanism. Shouldn't have told him that Satanism is the only honest alternative. Shouldn`t have beat up on the Nazi. Shouldn't have beat up on the three Nazi's. Shouldn't have beat up on the six Nazi's. Shouldn't have forgotten the antiseptic at home. Fuckitall. This is really all been about people who can't hold their freedom. Euro-Disney ---- 23 July 2004 It was a bad idea from the get go, after all what the fuck do europeans know about anthropomorphic mice and ducks talking and dogs named for planets. No the Magic Kingdom would never take root here. But Zee Jhurmans put forward an interesting case for the rise of instant pop-culture, just add water. if Michael Eisner wanted to do it right he should have taken history into account and opened shop in Why-MAH, which seems to be Zee Jhurman word for Weimar. Right there in the woods, with a nice touristic ~Zee Jhurman for touristy? setting for families to picnic and shit. and it would be called Disneyland Buchenwald. Its surprising how little has changed, the Death Camp Where People Died still operates on the same principled efficiency that is so characteristic of Zhis Nation. There's and Induction Video, sorry Indoctrination Video, sorry, I meant to say introduction video, in a cinema that smells uniquely Jhurman, because everythings so hot and sticky. And theres me wondering when the gassing, sorry, air conditioning kicks in. Theyve set up a quaint little Rick Moranis-like Little Corridor of Atrocities, mimicking everday life in a bunker, right next to where the queue to the Whore Monkey Rollercoaster starts. The Juden-hanging post, where arms where broken so Jews could be sent to Death Camps, is right next to the Ferris Wheel, near to the Crematorium. That would be where they burnt bodies by the thousands, the bodies no-one smelt. And the worst thing is that these misrable pig-raping sons-of-sows are proud of the tile that names the homelands of the victims, a tile heated to body temperature. sick gunraped chimps. why not just hang a Long Pig Leather Flag from the fucking pole saying: Fuck All Yall, You May Have Won, But We Bought The Movie Rights. Im so fucking sorry. Mea Culpa. I shouldnt have believed it was ok to show it. Amy yall were right when you said the Holocaust shouldnt be depicted. Not by hordes of fuckwits who treat it like fucking resort destination. Brendan, Mike, Nic - Im sorry about not setting up Sauniere, I'll do it when I get back next week. Im not staying a fucking heartbeat longer than I absolutely need to. Nic, happy birthday. Seaward how the fuck are you doing? And Im still fucking saddened about the whole Darren Scott thing. Ryan, if your reading this, fucking email me already. twogunmojo@mailbox.co.za, that goes for anyone else at home. even if its to go apeshit on me. Apeshit from Pakistan'd be better than this. Oh and: Alex I bought a Nintendo, and Seaward Im really sorry about Darren Scott man.
Ready For Tomorrow ---- 15? July 2004 in what way are any of us Ready For Tomorrow, was the big question on the hearts and minds of us all when Bill Gates released his monstrous, and monstrously affordable The Road Ahead, my personal copy a steal nearly two years back now, from a Hell's Kitchen second-hand book store (Hell's Kitchen of New York, New York, as Rene the Numbwit jazz percussionist once put it to me) for only five dollars, US. second-hand bookstores are not my favorite kinds of place on earth, theres usually an intermittent, but socially unavoidable musty smell to them, as some kind of rule of thumb. or maybe rule of law, where the must is imported from Dublin-stench in large earthenware jars with sporty afro-centric motifs. and secondhand books are never ok to buy. they always stink of your poverty as much as of their own former owners. but 'this was New York,' as Leonard Cohen so aptly put it, and Id managed to make it all to the far side of Hell's Kitchen, or Clinton as it's these days known, and all this without being mugged and by my standards that's just not trying hard enough, and after all of that, 5 USD and Bill Gates seemed like a small price to voice my appreciative dissonance. Still, The Road Ahead's much more biographical in its terse oftimes humorous, no I mean laughable, 200 pages and rates slightly ahead of Bill Clinton's My Life, which has the unpleasant upshot of sounding more like a Voda-care sales package than a bio. well in what sense are we Ready For Tomorrow, for me personally, god is in the details and the answer lies somewhere in the past day. and this whole Readiness question has me reeling and the stakes are really high, for Tomorrow I square off against the kind of Evil that conceives of NATO as an organization dedicated to preserving 'warald piss'. Tomorrow Im up against Zee Jhurmans, in the biblical sense of goodversusevil and they have, as Bob Dylan once falsettoed it, 'god on their side'. Right now, Im about two or so thousand away from finishing my fifth chapter of eight. it was easier to rewrite the chapter all night, producing 12000 shiny new words having fun, than to prolong the paltry 7 or so thousand that I had when this night began. Its quite honestly been one long night of Elvis, Costello not Presley, and coffee and the slow dawning of a terrible realization that I have educated myself out of polite society, and if things keep going so very smoothly, I will no doubt very shortly educate myself out of existence. Being then like the great spiritual assassins of old who are so arcane, so twisted out of normal human perception that they can no longer be perceived by those of mortal ken. My life has become a perpetual spiral of episodic splicings of Curb Your Enthusiasm, or MTV's new show Rich Girls, only with UCT and academia appearing for wealth and Hollywood. Coffee with friends became coffee with their girlfriends plus one sister who has reached the pinnacle of her world in being able to quote from Good Will Hunting and make it seem objectionable that I pointed out that, no 6 years was not a long time ago and the collective memory wouldn't have reset itself, Jung reckons that time to be closer 6000 years in fact. And if I shouldn't have pointed that out, I really shouldnt have laid bare the politics of interactions around the table as I saw them, especially unwelcome were my comments on the Sensitive Boy Who Was Learning To Play Classical Piano. And I really shouldnt have mentioned that the UCLA that she so dreams of attending was by far an inferior school to Columbia, and that 'having family in LA' was not a good enough reason to forfeit a decent education. But what in the seven shades of hell was I supposed to do against such sterling conversationalists as those who bring the fact that they know exactly why Mac Donalds' chips are so thin, why theyre now called freedom fries and no longer french fries, and that this knowledge floated to them while in a toilet in LA. We've now reached the point where its simply too easy to spot, in any given group, who's Jewish, who's Catholic, who's His Mom's Biggest Fan, who's In Love, who's all of the above or who's D- Other. Simply because we've already read Everyone Saying Everything about Everyone else. Every theoretician, Every linguist, Every psychologist, Every marketing researcher. And this monumental wealth of knowledge points to one glaringly vital clue. None of them have a goddam clue as to how predictable their subjects really are. None of them. Still, by far the worst thing to have been saying was, 'Well I really dont care if you believe me, I'll most likely forget your name when I leave'. |