Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Friday, August 30, 2013

Tales of Business Woe #1: beware the feeder


The copier ate my originals. And they had ink signatures on them.

Oh, man.

I got them out the other end - they were stuck, I pulled them loose as carefully as I could and then - just look. Macerated, torn, crumpled, all but digested, but oh okay. I guess it is recoverable.

This will not mar the accord. I will be able to smooth, flatten out, scan, then clean up the digital rips without altering a jot of language - who is to know the difference? And nothing at all shady about this.

But somewhere, in the back of my mind, in my cabinet of ink originals, this thing is going to sit. This contract is going to look so dumb, if they ever ask to see it again! It will look - what? Deliberately demolished! Smooshed, halfway torn in half and a big corner off, floating separate in the clear cellophane envelope we use to keep it together.

It will look like we're the kind of outfit who is like "got one signed! A sacred agreement - HERE'S HOW WE TREAT THESE!!"

Man, I hate what this piece of paper, looking like this, says about me.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

I'm an Istist. I practice Ismism.

There it is. Pretty much.

What The Heck Was I Going On About In This Years-Old Draft? #1: Modernity Vs Modernism

I think it depends on whether one is talking about modern as in modernity or modern as in modernism. Big difference, really. Plain old modern, modernity - that is just as you say: the up-to-date way of doing things in the world, and in whatever sphere. But "modernism" was a movement in art, culture, philosophy, and psychology obsessed with modernity's impact, and with debate over the direction modernity should take, in disparate fields. As a particular school of art and culture, it's about as "modern" as apple pie with a scoop of ice cream is a la mode. ("of the current fashion")

Modernism hit during a time when humankind was on a powerful upswing, in many ways. The Enlightenment had given a shiny new coat of varnish to science and rationality; religion's death grip on public policy had been significantly weakened, if not broken; monarchy's hegemonic hold was falling by the wayside left and right (to revolutions of better or worser sorts). Literacy and literature were ascendent. Even medicine was beginning to get a clue! Industrialism and technology were transforming the way we work, communicate and travel. Naturally, each of these little revolutions had its downsides (industrialism's came in for the biggest share of angst) - and so naturally modernism, obsessed as it was with modernity's impact, was a movement that embodied both an optimistic and a critical strain. Modernism had a particular morbid fascination with alienation, supposedly caused when beings who "naturally" are attuned to old ways and slow pace are suddenly plunged into our bewildering array of color, sound, speed and smoke.

Oh, alienation is real! To be sure. But the idea that modernity is the cause of it is idiotic, as should have been immediately apparent. These fools didn't read the ancient Greeks? Or Ovid? Augustine, for Christ's sake? No, they just wanted to gum their lips and go gaga over the trains and smokestacks and oh my god what's to become of us now that wool-stretchers are being thrown out of work by automatic wool-stretchers and wow how impressively modern and emo we all are, look how tall and squarish our buildings are.

Pathetic. Childish.

Sometimes I think modernists invented nostalgia. But no, that's not at all true - nostalgia is a constant, just like alienation is. Human nature doesn't change. Particular, human attitudes towards change don't change. They just get clothed in new fads. Perhaps it would be better to say, modernists invented The Nostalgia Crisis.

In short, modernism is dated and quaint. Modernism's concerns seem incurably fusty to modern eyes. The stuff that modernism ballyhoo'd as spectacular advance seems now as ho as hum gets. We expect leaps of progress now, the way the olderns expected flowers in spring. The bad stuff that was decried back then, now seems either silly (much of the moral hand-wringing), or just a necessary cost that if we work hard enough, we can mitigate (pollution is an evergreen).

From the forgoing, modernism sounds a bit foolish, but harmless overall. Alas, it was not harmless. The real, enduring legacy of modernism was in art. Because modernism was not only obsessed with the impact of the new, and the clash of the old and new. In art and culture, modernist critics drove modernist creators to fetishize newness itself. Or more accurately: to fetishize novelty. Novelty of conception (novelty of art theoretical conception, as dictated and defined by art criticism) was enthroned, not merely as art's highest virtue, but as art's purpose. The plastic arts - painting, sculpture - had been pinnacles of culture! Their highest aims, nothing less than truth, beauty, the ennoblement of the human spirit! Modernism changed those virtues for a low, grubby goal: "We've seen this already. Show us something new."

Can it be believed that artists accepted this?

They EMBRACED it. They thought the trade looked great! Art critics offered artists legitimacy without fetters, and a smartsy, complicated explanation - anything the plebes didn't "get," it's their fault! The philistines. You just keep giving me new versions of art theory to write about, smartly, and I will make you look smart - and relevant. Art took that deal with both hands, and on clacked the shackles. Art was enslaved, made subordinate to art criticism.

Modernism is the moment when that happened. Modernism is when art crowned art criticism king, and was repaid in drudgery and blood sweat. Art criticism brutally whipped its subjects onward: "Show me something new! Your works that do not advance art critical theory mean nothing! Produce ever-more-meaningless, worthless works, just so long as some novel technique or conception is employed!"

Modernism's obsession with novelty has eaten art (and itself) alive. It's left a very interesting corpse, perhaps. For there were masterpieces produced along the way! Works of truth and beauty that did ennoble, even working within the oddball and utterly misconceived modernist constraint. The method may have been bankrupt, but there were masters at work in it: so masterpieces were inevitable. And each of those individual masterworks lives forever, as any truly great work of art is timeless and immortal. But at what cost, the method. Art itself, put at the disposal of novelty, made slave to criticism, has been first starved to death by modernism, then taxidermized, put on exhibit, and corpse-whipped - by postmodernism. Even the most idiotic and trivial new approaches and theories have been found out, and mined dry. Nothing to build on there. Not for artists who still remain convinced, hypnotized, that the only thing worth doing is to push some grubby little art critic's envelope for him.

After art critical theory exhausted modernism, postmodernism turned to criticism itself as the next form of art: art as the means of criticism. Art as commentary upon art, and upon modernism. Meta-art. This didn't take long to get stale, either.

Perhaps with first novelty and then snarkiness exhausted, truth and beauty may come back around? I'm not holding out much hope. People's faith in the new is inexhausted. Creators are busily working new media dry, and will remain convinced that novelty is the signal virtue of creativity until they finally tire of binding and cutting their feet and stunting their growth just to fit into shoes small enough to walk down the smaller and smaller avenues that remain "unexplored."

Anyway. I did and do like modernity. Modernity is as fresh and current today as today is!

Modernism, I've got a criticique of, around here someplace. If I ever get around to putting it down in definite form.

But tell us what you really think, dogimo!

Monday, August 26, 2013

Saturday, August 24, 2013

All Clean Before You Were Ready to Be

Do you ever have so much good, hot soapy water that you wish you had more dirty dishes to wash in it?

Can We Agree to Disagree?

CERTAINLY!

When I was born, or when I realized I had been, at least (and all that that entailed), I agreed to disagree with the universe. Or anyway I agreed with myself that I disagree with the universe.

So we're already there! On every point. Let's start from there! Start from disagreement, nothing acrimonious mind you just an acknowledgment that we came from widely separated places, along broadly divergent paths past widely different views to get here. Why should we assume agreement at the outset? We probably don't agree, and this is fine. The difference between persons should be a source of fresh wonder, daily! - not chagrin. So let us assume we disagree! From the outset, and then - come to agreement, happily, wherever we happen to, every chance we get to do it truly.

No one ever needs a new, fresh agreement with me, to disagree. That's a given when you walk in. And welcome! It's a welcome place, isn't it? This one? The universe, I mean. Well I think so anyway. I wasn't expecting agreement on it!

I think not expecting agreement from the universe (or on it) is the one single key to feeling welcome within it. A natural part of it.

Of course, anyone is 100% welcome and free to agree with me as well - on any point! They don't need my agreement for that, either. They don't need my permission. It would simply be a fact of their agreement with a point that I also hold. Agreement with me is not the issue. They happen to agree with that point.

Hell. If any point is true, it wasn't because I held it.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Cornedbeefand#

I need to post a pic of my next pair of running shoes on facebook or twitter or something with the hash-tag

#dotheseshoesmakemyasslookfit

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Doodeloo #96

Epic Poem Alert! The Dreamlance Saga, Now Occurring Over at A Pocketful Of Poesy

Hey, those of you who are interested in poetry, get a load of this alert!

Over on my poetry blog A Pocketful Of Poesy - which, if you haven't noticed this, is The Best Poetry Blog on the Internet (and which if you have noticed that, you are somewhat fucking crazy) - we have early sights of what appears to be, possibly, an Epic Poem. At this point, each individual episode is standalone, yet here we see aborning, all inchoate and as-yet-unformed all the hallmarks, the earmarks, the birthmarks of what could easily be (or with what mighty labors could become) an Epic Poem.

So that's pretty rare these days! Good ones, anyhow. Sometimes you try to read one, and it just goes on and on and you yawn, how boring - but for a good comparison, check out the action on these! So far, I rate it worth a look. I'm pretty surprised at how pleased people are going to be with these.

We have episode one, which occurred before I quite was aware what was going on. It's called a dream, Or, A DREAM.

Next, in sequence, we have: Dreamlance II: The Quakening,
Dreamlance III: The Quakening,
Dreamlance IV: The Quakening (An Interlude),

and that's about it so far. Maybe some mists and stirrings of part V, on or about the fecund loins of my mind's imagination, or what passes for it, or what makes passes at it - don't ask me to understand how the creative mind's eye of the brain works! I suspect we'll all find out when we die or die trying, anyhow - and the answer, whatever it is, is bound to seem disappointingly small by then.

So in the meantime, enjoy these poems! If you're not delighted by at least three out of four or five of these (as I write more), well that may say more about you or me than it does about Epic Poetry.

But to be honest, I'm not sure.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

SHHHHHH! shocking SEX CONFESSIONS! Pt. naughty

I confess that without prejudice to the totality of anyone's personhood, I find the spectrum of shapes, traits and forms typically embodied by female human beings to exert a powerful attraction. Bearing in mind, this is a stunningly diverse array of traits and typical forms! None of which exist in opposition to others, or seem to occupy a particularly dominant place in the hierarchy, at least for me.

DON'T BE SHOCKED. It's natural what you're into, people!! Just because I happen to be very up front and at peace with the good things within me, with the aspects of others which awake me to the powerful pull to a goodness they have, that can't be bad. Please don't assume I'm a PERVERT just because here I am, just as the Lord God made me. CHOCK FULL of positively Darwinian urges. And when I say "positively," I mean these are positive things. All they do is awaken one, powerfully, to a certain part of the ranges of beauty that exist across and within humanity. So is that bad? Some people like poppyseeds!

Let's face it, some aspects of persons present to our senses, immediately. An awareness of the powerful attraction some of these aspects can hold doesn't come at the expense of ANY of a person's aspects that may present later, which may not be instantly evident. Heck no - if anything I tend to assume a natural curiosity and wonder towards aspects of emotion, intelligence, personality which only come through the more you know a person. My natural posture is to assume these will prove to exist in abundance. That's my natural posture because in practice, it almost always proves to be the case. Anyone who limits or dismisses the worth of a person beyond just the frank shape figure and form they throw across your vision - that person is a DORK.

However, anybody who takes a frank admission of attractedness to a certain range of typical shapes, figures, and forms, an admission such as I've made here, and concludes from it that I am prone to a limited, dismissive attitude towards others, an attitude that diminishes aspects other than the sexualized aspects of a person's form - SUPER dork. Anyone who concludes that about me, that's like, the last dork from a whole exploded planet of dorks, whose dork parents shot them into space to come here, where the yellow solar rays of our system only INCREASE AND MAGNIFY their dorkiness, to the point where they're capable of spectacular feats of dorktitude like that.

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

FUGITV

This is a TV network I want to start: 24 hour round the clock tv channel, running down in order round the clock over and over the top most wanted criminals, (or OK, I guess, technically "suspects" might be the technical term in some cases) and hot most intriguing fugitives from justice, with documentary segments, call in segments (where the viewers can give theories and tipoffs, sightings) and etc.

In fact, if somebody called in on the 24-hour trace-phone tip line with a "hot tip" on a positive sighting of a top fugitive, and FUGITV tv had an affiliate in the area (they contract out to various bounty hunter / bail bondsman types who are willing to wear the cameras and sign the waivers) who could coordinate with the tipoff person, vet the quality of their tip and greenlight a live op, it could go suddenly LIVE breaking into the normally-scheduled programming with a LATE-BREAKING EXCLUSIVE! Naturally, with all the due notification of the cops as the law requires, although I suspect that the affiliate's process of validating the tipoff would land FUGITV about ten steps ahead of local law enforcement on the collar. You can't, after all, assume every whacko calling in with a tip is on the level!

I think people would be glued to that shit. Especially certain people of interest.