Mainlining vanity.

The man was insane, thought Dennis. This was an investment-bank executive? He sounded more like a preacher working the inspirational-speaker circuit. He was on a six-way overdose of smugness, as if vanity-packed heroin needles hung from his every vein: as a Jew, he was Chosen; as a Calvinist, he was Elect; as a Protestant, he was in personal communion with God; as an American, his destiny was manifest; as a New Ager, he was one with universal Energy; and as a successful capitalist, he was the animal at the top of the food chain. Any one of those things was enough to kill you. This guy appeared to be mainlining all of them at once.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 4: Hoarding & Wasting. Work in progress.

Chinese Prices ALWAYS!

The names didn't matter. No one thought they did; no one thought about them at all. They were just placeholders, numbers expressed as proper nouns. Even the stores' names didn't matter. No one was bothered by the fact that Best Buy was as ridiculously hackneyed a name as Downy fabric softener or Ivory soap. It didn't matter. 1995 was long past the point where people took postmodern pleasure in mocking mid-century advertising literalism. It was the lifestyle associations that mattered, and the name that they were associated with was nothing but a handle, an icon, an empty plastic bucket. Coke could just as easily have been -- was, in fact -- Pepsi, Snickers Baby Ruth, McDonald's Burger King, Popeyes Church's KFC. Even Dennis' own employer's name was merely an unfortunate historical accident that no one paid attention to. It didn't matter if the founder's name was or wasn't Walton any more than it mattered that that long-dead man's long-dead company had once proudly wrapped its stores in banners that read "100% Made In America." Buying American was a lifestyle myth once profitable to market to; no longer. Buying at Chinese Prices Always took its place. One day it too would die. It wouldn't matter if the sign out front said Walton's Five-and-Ten or Shanghai Mart or Accenture Global Tradeplace LLC; the candy bins would always be up front. Across the parking lot, the Fernglen or Glenlake or Lakewood 12 would keep shoveling out ever-larger grocery bags of popcorn and hogsheads of fountain soda and keep tearing out seats to accommodate the wheelchairs of those whose ankles couldn't bear their body weight; on every corner, the McTaco Burger Churches would keep slinging ever-larger quantities of ever-cheaper salt-and-sugar delivery devices and keep adding additional drive-through windows for its ever-growing base of customers who were too ashamed to, or physically incapable of, getting out of their cars.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 3: Gluttony. Work in progress.

Sorry, Walter Benjamin.

Sure, computer-generated porn makes perfect sense. Even considering the advanced state of modern medical technology, there are still physical limits to the human body. Aren't there? Surely there must be a few left. Either way, there aren't any limitations to the virtual realities that computers can generate -- in three-dimensional high-res, with naturalistic shadows and lighting and photo-realistic textures bit-mapped onto every surface. Here breasts are bound by no physical limits of saline bags, here models need no quarter-inch of makeup, here photos require no retouching, here chainsaws are used as dildos and no one's the worse for wear, here every girl is fourteen and has eyes as big as saucers in fear and trembling anticipation, here every boy is not leather-faced and beer-bellied but handsome, young and cut, here children can be as young as you please and no one gets arrested, no one gets sued, no one needs anyone's permission or releases from models because there are no models and there is no anyone: there's nothing but 256 colors assigned to little squares arranged into a matrix, and behind that matrix the 1s and 0s that tell machines how to generate the matrix, and behind those 1s and 0s there's only more 1s and 0s, those of animation software packages and more machines, there is no human original, no aura, Walter Benjamin, no fragile bag of blood somewhere back there that could wash away the sins of mechanical mediation, no physical or legal limit -- no limit whatsoever save what the engineer can enable, what the designer can imagine and what the market will consume.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 2: Lust. Work in progress.

Fogs.

Tuesday rolls around and the marine layer with it, thick and damp and low, as if the Pacific were smothering the Los Angeles Basin in a warm, wet blanket. It's not the sort of fog you might find elsewhere -- not the icy knifing fogs that cartwheel down the streets of San Francisco, so animated and charismatic that you can't help seeing the faces of murderers in them, nor the static fogs of Massachusetts, monstrous banks hundreds of miles wide that silently materialize in place, not at all icy but just below the temperature of a human body, just enough to make you think that you can stay outside as the microscopic droplets of water on your skin silently suck the warmth out of you until you suddenly realize that you've lost core temp and it's too late, you've got a cold or something worse. No, the Los Angeles marine layer is more like an apology, more like the gentle Pacific's saying Sorry, you're about to get a sunburn, you'd better cover up. Or maybe You didn't forget what weather looked like, did you? But she just wants to protect you from the sun's harsh rays. She just wants you to be well-rounded. She doesn't want to ruin your day, so around mid-afternoon she gathers her gauze up from the city and takes it back out to sea to keep it cool and damp, returning you to your regular programming.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 1: Limbo. Work in progress.

Snap, Crackle, Holy Ghost.

A two-part message says conflict: one-two punch. It's in motion: left, right, left, right. A three-part message is stable, like a tripod. It's complete: it's got Snap, Crackle, Pop! That's the seed right there of every story; that's world literature in three words. Even the meanings, sounds and word-lengths (all three) fit: you slip into a snappy start; you crrrrackle through the development, as cracks open up in the story and things get crackin'; and then you Pop 'em in the eye, send 'em out with a kick in the pants, Biff Bam Boom! Earth, Wind & Fire? Three-cheese bagel. Blood, sweat and tears? Triple-Berry Blast. Past, present, future? Coats, soothes, relieves. Father, Son and Space Ghost? Triple-protection! Three bears, three pigs, three mice, three meals, three Stooges, three strikes; what a Breakfast of Champions. We Try Harder. Why? Just do it: ABC, RBG, that's how easy love can be. Veni, vidi, vici with a triple-blade razor. i'm lovin' it!

Excerpt from American Inferno, Prologue. A work in progress.

Yalie-In-Chief goes nucular

Re: Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

What I can't stand is that Obama insists on saying "nuclear" -- as if it were a nucleus at the center of an atom and not, as we've learned from our current Yalie-In-Chief, a nuculus. (Which I believe is a type of cloud formation, isn't it? Cumulo-nuculus?)

Bush is himself excellent evidence in support of his own argument that simply throwing money at an education doesn't necessarily result in having one.

Patriotism.

And it's not just me. Here's just one sample from a friend's e-mail that came in this morning: "The BBC said that this election has wiped out America's original sin of Thomas Jefferson owning slaves whilst proclaiming equality for all. Obama's win has rekindled a sense of Patriotism that I have not felt since I was a little child."

YES WE DID!

OH MY GOD. I can't believe it. I can't post anything at the moment more than an incoherent, jubilant, BARBARIC YAWP. Last night in Athens was a celebratory madhouse: people crying, strangers hugging each other, everyone congratulating each other, people streaming out into the street to call their parents and friends. There was one line in Obama's acceptance speech that sent chills down my spine. It was when he said, in effect: for those of you who have doubted whether our Founding Fathers' dreams of the American Ideal, the Great Experiment, were possible anymore -- tonight you have your answer. The crowd went berzerk. They started chanting, at the top of their lungs: USA! USA! -- this crowd of Democrats, liberals, college students. For SO LONG we've felt embarrassed about our country -- have had to apologize to people when we went overseas or met foreigners on our soil. "Yes, I know -- the United States is ugly these days. Warmongering, unjust, unilateral, uncharitable, anti-intellectual. But we were the site of a Great Experiment in human governance -- once." Shouting USA! USA! has for so long been something that generally only big crowds of Republicans could do. The rest of us -- the people who REALLY care about values and about the American Dream -- have had to take small pleasure and cold comfort in dissent, in serving our morally unhinged nation by being its Loyal Opposition. NOT ANYMORE! It felt SO GOOD to be able to be truly, madly, unabashedly proud of our country again -- to hope that we might once again be a moral leader among the nations of the world. And it's possible; it's happening. Did you hear the interviews of the people all around the world who stayed up late to watch the election results come in? Germans, French, Kenyans, Japanese people -- people all around the world, in whose eyes we've fallen, were last night talking about American like it was 1945 again, saying what a great nation America is, expressing hope that it can become a moral world leader once again.

Digga Digga Town

If you Google (and can we still use that verb? or must we be Cuiling things now?) the phrase "digga digga town," you'll get nothing. No results at all. Does that mean that the phrase exists nowhere, truly, on the mighty infinite Internet? That no upright hominid has ever typed these 16 characters into any document online? I don't know how exhaustive Googling something is. Perhaps if we Cuiled it. But it's a shame, because "digga digga town" is Jim Morrison has just done, about an hour ago, at the beginning of "LA Woman." Oh I know, he's widely supposed to have "just got into town." But that's not what he says. He clearly says "digga digga town," and it's a shame that, apparently, no one's looked into this.

PS: I admit that it's possible that Jim's saying that he "digga leena down," but I haven't Cuiled that.

PPS: About 5 minutes after I posted this entry, Googling "digga digga town" no longer returns zero results. It returns one: this entry. So my faith in Google has been restored.

The Jawbone bluetooth headset and wind noise in a convertible

Have you been trying to find the best bluetooth headset to deal with wind noise, especially while driving in a convertible? If so, then you've undoubtedly read all about how the best noise-cancelling headsets can't do much of anything about wind noise. Holding out hope? Don't. When it comes to even relatively mild wind noise, bluetooth headsets suck. I tried three of the allegedly most wind-and-noise resistant -- the Plantronics 510, the Blue Ant Z9 and the much-touted Aliph Jawbone. The Jawbone was the best of the three, and also the most expensive -- but it still isn't half as good as the regular old handset, with no bluetooth headset at all, when driving in a convertible with the top down and the windows up.

What I did NOT find was very many sites with audio recordings of how the headsets performed in wind -- and the manufacturers' own promotional recordings aren't to be trusted. There's one excellent site that I did find: a thorough comparison, with postings, by Dan Craft at SiezeTruth.com. Since Dan didn't include any recordings of the Jawbone, I've included one below. While the Jawbone was the best of the lot, its outgoing audio in a convertible with the top down at anything much over 40 mph is peppered with spikes of wind noise every few seconds, and much more unpleasant for your listener than if you use no headset at all. Dan concludes that the best bluetooth headset for driving in a convertible with the top down is no headset at all, and I concur.

The solution? We might have to hold out until either the makers of The Boom come out with a bluetooth version, or until Motorola releases (what was) the Invisio Q7, a true bone-conduction headset which, unlike the Jawbone, uses no external microphone at all, but instead digitally reconstructs your voice from vibrations in your ear bones. Nextlink (the original developer of the Q7) released a few pre-production models before selling it recently to Motorola, which will release it who-knows-when. Early reports from these pre-pro Q7s were that they suffered from tinny sound, but that wind didn't affect them at all.

Until then, take a fashion hint from The Royal Tenenbaums' Baumer and strap your cellphone to the side of your head with a tennis headband.



(2007 Miata convertible, top down, windows up, 60-70 mph, backdraft windscreen, not much engine noise, very little cockpit wind)

The efficiency of free markets.

"Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of competition—they are but another form of the phrase 'to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.' A government official has stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter dollars a year through adulterated foods; which means, of course, not only materials wasted that might have been useful outside of the human stomach, but doctors and nurses for people who would otherwise have been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten or twenty years before the proper time. Then again, consider the waste of time and energy required to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would do. There are a million or two of business firms in the country, and five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and worrying, the balancing of petty profit and loss. Consider the whole machinery of the civil law made necessary by these processes; the libraries of ponderous tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers studying to circumvent them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the hatreds and lies! Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and haphazard production of commodities—the factories closed, the workers idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the starving populations! Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent. Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities, made necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates; consider the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital energies; consider the office buildings, the waste of time and material in the piling of story upon story, and the burrowing underground! Then take the whole business of insurance, the enormous mass of administrative and clerical labor it involves, and all utter waste ..."

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, 1906

Poetry and poverty.

"It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets—the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and inconvenience and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned money they spent, in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation and uncertainty they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect powder—a patent preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of course it had not the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had the misfortune to drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards set in a coating of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of this, and no more money to throw away, had nothing to do but give up and submit to one more misery for the rest of their days."

- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Letter to a young secularist (pace Rilke)

More specifically, Letter to a young secularist (raised in and having rejected radical Christian Evangelism) having a depression/existential crisis:
______________

> Everything is okay for the most part. I'm just terribly unhappy,
> to the point where I've lost motivation for everything. Maybe
> I'm just having an existential crisis. Maybe I need Jesus. ;-)

Dear X:

For what it's worth, here's my take on depression/misery and its causes. Since you mentioned existential crises, I focus maninly on (3). (3) is also, ultimately, the bottom line.

1. Depression caused by external stressors. A chronic single or a couple of simultaneous big misfortunes overwhelm someone's normal emotional resources. If there's a chronic stressor, it's important to end it. May often require meds to break the cycle and get back to (3). See below.

2. Purely physiological. May very well require meds and therapy to break and resume (3).

3. Normal. Happiness isn't a given. It's not a default setting. Unfortunately. It's necessary to construct structures in one's life -- goals, activities, call 'em myths if you like -- and to work on them in order to give oneself a sense of accomplishment, progress, meaning. That's the primary engine of day-to-day happiness. Triage measures -- meds and therapy -- don't and can't replace that meaning-structure / happiness-engine; they're designed merely to free up a person so that they can get out of bed and back to the business of creating those goals/activities and plugging away at them.

(3) is precisely what "Jesus" -- religion -- is: a created structure of goals, activities and rewards. The reason that religion is a popular meaning-structure/happiness-engine is that so much of it is arbitrary: effortless actions (speaking magic spells) can produce infinite rewards (eternal bliss). (3) is also easier for religionists because religion is a widely- and strongly-enforced myth structure. Crises of faith are strongly discouraged. It's very easy to go from day to day with utter certainty that the religious meaning-structure you're committed to and working on is Right, not just a hamster wheel: everyone around you is utterly insistent that it's so.

(3) is more difficult for secularists. You've seen through the Big Meaning-Structure, i.e. that it's just a hamster wheel, just a tool for generating self-satisfaction somewhat arbitrarily. That calls all other meaning-structures into question. Help others? Do good work? Write or paint? Teach? Make friends? Influence people? Why? Aren't they all just hamster wheels? To a scary extent, yes -- and voila, that realization is what we call an "existential crisis." If a secularist wants to be happy, he has to "re-enchant" himself. He picks a structure (goal/activity) that he sort-of believes might be worthwhile, and that he has at least some interest in and capacity to do, and he persuades himself, like the religionist does, that it really is worthwhile. And it's not pure delusion: it's worthwhile to be happy. It's perfectly fine to answer, when asked "Why do you do X?" that "You've got to do SOMETHING." Of course, the more you can persuade yourself that X has value, the easier it is to do it.

(3) is the most difficult for FORMER religionists. Growing up in a religious environment is like being conditioned to live on pure sugar: the meaning-structure requires minimal input for maximal reward and is universally acclaimed as True. Self-enchantment for former religionists is difficult: non-religious meaning-structures a) require harder work-input, b) offer less fabulous reward-outputs, and c) are far less universally acclaimed. It's an obstacle, but it's soluble; you have to a) lower your expectations and b) make an additional effort to form a little mini-religion, as it were, around yourself: a religion of fellow artists, fellow teachers, fellow writers, fellow freaks, fellow gamers, fellow serial killers, whatever the hell your meaning-structure is.

"To be is to do." Sartre. If true, then non-doing = non-being, and non-being doesn't sound like it'd feel very nice. So all the above boiled down to a one-word injunction, would be: "Do."

There's an important flip-side. The above is all, obviously, totally un-Zen. If Zen were reduced to a one-word injunction, it'd be "Don't": don't strive, don't desire, don't self-enchant, don't do anything at all. But this is just a tool of Zen -- what you do in brief periods of meditation -- not the goal of Zen. The tool is designed to clear your mind of everything customary and habitual, of all the crap you've been TOLD to want. With a mind cleared of other people's crap, it's easier to sense what YOU actually enjoy, value, want to do. Then you get up from your meditation and go out and do it. That's the goal of Zen. Zen is really just a programmatic method of disenchanting yourself from crap and re-enchanting yourself with something better and more reliable. There's a wonderful little book called "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki that's available everywhere. Suzuki was the cat who brought Zen the US in the early 20c. Check it out. Also, if you don't have Kahlil Gibran's little book "The Prophet," get it. Two little books that are worth as much as a truckload of Wellbutrin.

Spengler, Obama, dissent and distribution.

Re: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html


What an excellent essay.  Extremely well-written.  And a very interesting fellow, this Spengler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spengler_%28Columnist%29

I'm not surprised that journalists are turning to Obama's familial background to try to get some insight into his character.  Spengler's right: we hardly know the guy.

I loved Spengler's acidic characterization of anthropologists as "the curators of soon-to-be-extinct cultures," and of how Bush "squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world."

But I take exception to one of the fundamental premises of his argument: that the sort of dissent he attributes to Obama (via his mother and wife) equals "hatred of America" or presages “handouts.”  Neither equation is necessarily the case. 

Dissenters usually see themselves as patriots, not traitors.  This isn’t an unreasonable assumption on their part.  One needn’t make any unweidldy value-judgements about whether a culture’s headed in a “good” or “bad” direction at a given time in order to characterize its dissenters as more patriotic than treacherous; one must merely assume that mainstream thought -- received wisdom -- usually deserves critique and can stand improvement.  A reasonable assumption.  And if true, dissenting critique might be wise or foolish, but its motivations are constructive.  And if we WERE to venture into “unweildy value-judgements,” there are a lot of very bright and patriotic folks today, of both political persuasions, who make cogent arguments that America has drifted alarmingly far from its founding principles.

As for handouts, Spengler oversimplifies.  The sort of dissent he alludes to is socialist, ergo obviously top-down redistributive.  What’s NOT obvious is whether that sort top-down redistribution is more expensive, or is worse for the economy, than the sort of bottom-up redistribution we’ve seen a resurgence of since 1980.  Again, one needn’t come down on either side of the (eternal?) debate between supply- and demand-siders; but one SHOULD acknowledge that it’s not cut-and-dried, and that both sides can legitimately critique each other’s (re)distribution policy.

There’s a deeper premise lurking behind Spengler’s position: the fool’s errand of libertarianism.  All societies redistribute.  The very nature of social living -- mere law -- IS distributive.  What constitutes “fair” social interaction isn’t given; it’s precisely what law (social agreement) stipulates.  Every society -- every group living impacting each other -- has to muddle through who gets what of how much there is to go around.  Some societies choose to distribute wealth narrowly, others widely -- but it’s all (re)distribution, and its nature is according to values that we choose, not values that alight on us from an alien planet.

A Mighty Fortress

"There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or
hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and
ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or
hundreds of millions of "true believers"; each damns all the others, with
more or less heartiness -- and each is a mighty fortress of Graft."
- Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion, 1927

Acceptable absurdity.

''Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities'' - Voltaire

Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

is NOT pleased.

Someone's not

Someone's not
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

there.

No.

No.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

My friend Nate is 'not listening.'

Abuser.

Abuser.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

My friend Nate is keeping Blumenberg 'in order.'