Ohh-Krobblee!

Just a reminder, that this is the sort of thing we are constantly broadcasting into space.



Please attempt to continue to enjoy your evening.

The Shop on Main Street

Watched this film last night. Normally I dislike holocaust films. It is kind of a aesthetic cop-out to portray historically-categorical tragedy. After history is accounted for, what else is there to say? Imagine if "Oedipus Rex" films were a genre. Most artists find it exceedingly difficult to portray anything new about such a strident message. In the same way that after the intial shock of The Triumph of the Will fades into just-another-political-film in our modern eyes, most anti-Fascist films stick close to the hardline: many died, and brutally, for no good reason. To go further is a risk, if it is even conceivable, in the face of the monolithic tragedy one is forced by history to portray. Without the ending we all know is coming, Schindler's List or The Diary of Ann Frank have very little artistry to them.

But The Shop on Main Street is different. It is a beautiful film, and sought a different take, without downplaying the tragedy. It finds something else to say, while also maintaining the categorical message. There was no violence (save the very end) depicted throughout the movie: no typical Kristalnacht-montages, no bodies, no trains, no ashes. No weak and pitiful Jews tossed into the streets, no children giving the Fascist salute. Furthermore, there was no discussion about it, either. No rousing speeches, no bureaucratic dictates, and very little symbolism. In the beautiful dialogue, filled with mis-communications and one-sided conversations, nobody says anything about Jews, Arayanism, Fascism, or even Hitler. There is a greedy wife, an obnoxious brother-in-law, a friendly fisherman, a wistful carpenter, and a absent-minded widow. They play their roles beautifully, no different than these sorts of characters at any other time in history. The Fascism, the totalitarianism, and the murderous hate almost seem like an accident--like something somebody heard about elsewhere, and did not really understand. Like history, to us in the present day. A strange chapter, which we never forget, but don't really understand. When Brtko tries to explain that he is taking over the widow's button shop, she either does not hear, or does not understand. The awkwardness of the "business" they cannot discuss, and his failure to promenade his role as "Arisator" correctly in the Slovak town to either his wife or the other citizens, take an interesting parallel to Brtko's over-exposed dream sequences, when he imagines himself and the widow happily together, without the fear and doubt he experiences in life.

The bizarre horror of a waltz is really the most important lesson of the holocaust, in my opinion. Humans are violent, malevolent, and ghastly to each other every day. But this is reality. The historical tragedy is that we continue to dance, awkwardly and though we may not want to, as if nothing is wrong, as if in a dream.

Here's an example of one of the beautiful moments, which will probably not make sense out of context. My favorite scene, when Britko first shows up at the button shop, wasn't available in an internet-ready clip.

ps. Also, it is a film from the era in which Oscar's were awarded to quality work, not just big films.

Only forward

From Posthuman Blues, and others, etc.

Another view of the changing metaphysical structure of time, by one of those great talkers of history.



Is this right? Am I right? Who can really describe the change of our metaphysical structure with any veracity or authority?

The great thing about metaphysics in a post-structuralist world is that time is always continuing to pass. Leotard and the post-modernists still get older, and seconds still keep clicking by. Know what I mean?

Better check your own wristwatch I guess, if you still wear one.

[I believe the footage in the clip is from one or several of the Qatsi trilogy. I love those (another synchronicity with the works of Philip Glass) and often throw them on when I need a good active-thinking meditation.]

Ro-ball

Remember my ranting that included rolling, heavily armed robots?


Well, the future is now.


Feel free to panic.

Aesthetics of Exploration

If you need a reason why the space program is a worthy cause, (rather than "feeding people", for example) here is exhibit A.



Space exploration, like science, is art. Whatever the cost of the Hubble, it's results are much more aesthetically profound than anything Hollywood has made in recent memory.

If we get new foam rubber, or astronaut ice cream, or nanotech from NASA, that's cool too. But as long as they keep producing these amazing videos AND GIVING THEM AWAY FOR FREE, UNRESTRICTED USE TO ANY PERSON ON EARTH, they can keep using tax money as far as I'm concerned.

Hollywood, on the other hand, should probably give all the money they would have spent on the next new teen buddy picture to their Darfur campaign.

[video discovered courtesy of the always excellent Posthuman Blues]

Fragment #1

I run the risk of appearing overcome with the notion of my own excellence, but at the same time I am becoming forced to believe that nothing new will ever be accepted by anything or anyone established, be it reader, writer, or publisher. My wild and base assumption being, of course, than what I write is not only new, but this somehow conforms to excellence. Perhaps what I create is not new, and therefore, just another item, easily cast aside. Or perhaps it succeeds in being in a category to itself, but my failure is to assume this is in any way positive, or worth reading at all.

But then again, there is still the strange, slight chance that what I am doing here is not only interesting and unique, but in being so, it becomes an anomaly, something wonderful but also forgettable, because everything trained to recognize good is jammed and pressed to the gills with its already overflowing content, and I flow off to the gutters not on account of any reason, other than the physical vicissitudes of the limitations of how much quality any one of us can really stomach.

On the side of the buffet lies a dish untouched, being unfortunate in that it has taken on a bit of a green color from its ingredients, and its smell betrays the inclusion of fish. The sour cream, the chips, and even the vegetables are all consumed in their reasonably assured blankly pure taste categories, as our buffet-goers enjoy these clouds of simple fat, carbohydrates, and salt--but this unidentified casserole is tossed whole into the garbage can at the end of the night.

Multi-tracking Eno with Cyber-time: an Atemporal Metaphor

When I speak about metaphor, I'm trying to use the word in the typical sense, but also imbue a new meaning to it. There is the literary meaning, that of artful comparison, but there is also a more semiotic meaning, which I might call connotation by association. Not to put too technical of a label on it, or to call it something definitive here, but we are trying to get towards something we could consider a bit more technically than to simply say, "he rained blows upon him" is the exact same as "he hit him with blows in a way like rain falling". The metaphor is different than the basic comparison of a simile.

It is the use of two meanings together, which develops an connotation between them, as opposed to the logical denotation of "x as y". There is a certain bit of both in each, of course, but then interesting aspect is that we can refer to something as intangible as "insult" "raining upon" someone, and we all know immediately what it means, though there is nothing in the definition of "rain" which immediately refers to something so intangible, and something so clearly not liquid precipitation. We don't even need to include our word which denotes approximate similarity, "like", because simply by the juxtaposition of their meanings, we get it.

To me, it is a sort of ambivalence of meaning that combines to create greater power of expression in the long run. Children will often refer to things by the combination of words which sound strange to adults. A sheep may be a "dog cow". Teacher may be "mommy". My brother had a certain size category, which qualified as "big little". For adults, its patronizingly funny when kids describe things as "it's the same, but different". However, they are practicing how to mean things when they speak, and they haven't learned the harsh logical rules of A/not-A which are so important to adults. Even though, many punch lines to our jokes revolve around the very ambiguity of this supposed rule of logic.

So metaphor is both a close equation, and a contextual, semiotic comparison. I describe this as a prelude to some words of Brian Eno I wish to re-represent.

In this speech about the studio as composition tool, Eno directs our attention at a shift in our conception of music in relation to recording, which I believe is a perfect metaphor for what I view as the concept of "atemporality". (A guy responsible for The Long Now Foundation should have some idea, right?)

The canon of atemporality is small enough, (look towards the Twitter search--it is about as categorical a listing of sources as such a newly ephemeral topic is capable of at this time) but if I try to distill something as reckless as a definition of atemporality, I come across a general idea of "n different times pressed together", exemplified by the "Looking into the Past" Flickr pool.



While this is atemporal in a sense, I am envisioning something a bit more metaphysical to guide the concept. (How odd of me!) This is flipping the timeline of history into a cool Mobius strip, crossing it back over itself for artistic effect. All well and good. But I think our current state of technology is allowing us to approach a different sense of the term--we can move beyond the comparative logic of "historicizing" temporality, (the past is way different than the future, yet the same!) to a immediately existant atemporality (the past/future/now is past/future/now). We are not just playing with time, we are ditching it. The temporal currency has crashed, and our metaphysics can now operate outside of the constraints of the free market (otherwise known as history).

Cue Mr. Eno:

The first thing about recording is that it makes repeatable what was otherwise transient and ephemeral. Music, until about 1900, was an event that was perceived in a particular situation, and that disappeared when it was finished. There was no way of actually hearing that piece again, identically, and there was no way of knowing whether your perception was telling you it was different or whether it was different the second time you heard it. The piece disappeared when it was finished, so it was something that only existed in time.

The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it in the space dimension. As soon as you do that, you're in a position of being able to listen again and again to a performance, to become familiar with details you most certainly had missed the first time through, and to become very fond of details that weren't intended by the composer or the musicians.

I would say this aspect of recording is a good metaphor for the technology of writing. Recording begins to take expressible culture out of its reliance upon a firm dimension of time--though it still relies on time, it does so in other ways. For example, you don't need to live across the street from Socrates to hear his wisdom, but you still must get a hold of a copy of The Republic.

Now, let's talk about another aspect of recording, which I call the detachable aspect. As soon as you record something, you make it available for any situation that has a record player. You take it out of the ambience and locale in which it was made, and it can be transposed into any situation. This morning I was listening to a Thai lady singing; I can hear the sound of the St. Sophia Church in Belgrade or Max's Kansas City in my own apartment, and I can listen with a fair degree of conviction about what these sounds mean. As Marshall McLuhan said, it makes all music all present. So not only is the whole history of our music with us now, in some sense, on record, but the whole global musical culture is also available. That means that a composer is really in the position, if he listens to records a lot, of having a culture unbounded, both temporally and geographically, and therefore it's not at all surprising that composers should have ceased writing in a European classical tradition, and have branched out into all sorts of other experiments. Of course, that's not the only reason that they did, either.

When we talk about the distribution of recorded works, we are in the terrain of a metaphor about the Internet. The Internet has made the distribution of writing (and of course, many pieces of music as well) as easy as plugging in. It has unbounded culture from the typical constraints of space and time. At first, communication was as fast as a man could run 26 miles. Then, it was the speed of a train. Then, the telegraph. Now it is, for all intents and purposes, instantaneous. On the Internet we still must worry about "finding things", so there is a spatial aspect, but the temporal terrain has been reduced to a singular--now. One more reliance upon the dimension of time has been reduced, by adding the technology of the Internet to the technology of writing.

So, to tape recording: till about the late '40s, recording was simply regarded as a device for transmitting a performance to an unknown audience, and the whole accent of recording technique was on making what was called a "more faithful" transmission of that experience. It began very simply, because the only control over the relative levels of sounds that went onto the machine was how far they were from the microphone - like device. The accent was on the performance, and the recording was a more or less perfect transmitter of that, through the cylinder and wax disc recording stages, until tape became the medium by which people were recording things.

The move to tape was very important, because as soon as something's on tape, it becomes a substance which is malleable and mutable and cuttable and reversible in ways that discs aren't. It's hard to do anything very interesting with a disc - all you can do is play it at a different speed, probably; you can't actually cut a groove out and make a little loop of it. The effect of tape was that it really put music in a spatial dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music, or expand it.

Scratch off another constraint of time. In addition to being able to reduce and change the space and time of the recording in our consciousness through technological improvements in distribution (from a localized there and then, to an accessible here and now), we can also shift the very expression of time and space itself within the recording. Technology allows us to modify and alter the rules of recording and playback. It is no longer a pure Distance over Time experience. The goal is not necessarily accuracy, or logical, time/space consistency. Now the goal is art--expression and experience itself. When you look at an old photo held up to "the same place" in a more modern time, you are not simply seeing both times, or the space between the two. The "ne c'est pas" is not an either/or, a now/then. It is both. You can record a chopped and screwed beat over the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Time is now a dimension we can play with.

You should remember that everything, including the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was done on four-track until 1968. Normally engineers would do something like this: the drums on one track, the voices spread on two tracks with the guitars and the piano, say, on one of those tracks, and then the strings and additional effects on the fourth track. This was because they were thinking in terms of mono output; eventually, it would be mixed down to one signal again, to be played on radio or whatever. When stereo came in big, it gave them a problem. When they converted to stereo, things were put in either the middle, or dramatically to one side, or you'd hear some very idiosyncratic panning.

Anyway, after four-track it moved to eight track - this was in '68, I guess - then very quickly escalated: eight-track till '70, 16-track from'70 to' 74, 24-track to now when you can easily work on 48-track, for instance, and there are such things as 64-track machines. The interesting thing is that after 16-track, I would say, the differences are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Because after you get to 16-track, you have far more tracks than you need to record a conventional rock band. Even if you spread the drums across six tracks, have the basson two, have the vocals, have the guitars, you've still got six tracks left. People started to think, "What shall we do with those six tracks?"

From that impulse two things happened: you got an additive approach to recording, the idea that composition is the process of adding more, which was very common in early '70s rock (this gave rise to the well known and gladly departed orchestral rock tradition, and it also gave rise to heavy metal music - that sound can't be got on simpler equipment); it also gave rise to the particular area that I'm involved in: in-studio composition, where you no longer come to the studio with a conception of the finished piece. Instead, you come with actually rather a bare skeleton of the piece, or perhaps with nothing at all. I often start working with no starting point. Once you become familiar with studio facilities, or even if you're not, actually, you can begin to compose in relation to those facilities. You can begin to think in terms of putting something on, putting something else on, trying this on top of it, and so on, then taking some of the original things off, or taking a mixture of things off, and seeing what you're left with - actually constructing a piece in the studio.

I can think of two aspects of atemporality which are interesting in different ways (at least, so far). There is the dissolution of the timeline of history, or the flexibility of the timeline as a dimension for expression, which we have just discussed. Is it really a lo-fi tape from the 70s, or a tape recorded to sound that way? Is it truly antique, or simply steampunk? The difference is arbitrary, or at least artistically mutable.

But then there is also our sensation of speed in expression, which is expanding rapidly. So you have sped up the tape, recorded parallel tracks, and sampled some vintage recordings, or made a huge high-def video collage comprising an entire century of material, which plays in different ways depending on the current orbit of the planets. But you're not out of tracks yet.

What is really interesting about the "Looking into the Past" Flickr set is not that time changes, or that b/w photography is old school. The interesting thing is that any number of people can contribute to this artistic comparison, upload it to the Internet, and add to an infinitely replicable viewing experience for an unlimited number of people, who will all no doubt see and experience any part of the set in different ways. The set has 1,063 members. You could join too. Digital photographic technology is one thing, but networked-participant-enabled digital photography is something else. More important than the ability to Photoshop, to record and re-record, is the ability to alter the speed of the consumption of the photograph, by networking its distribution and consumption. In typical math, if D/T = S, and you let T go to zero, you get an unworkable solution. The Cartesian child asks, "how could viewing the picture differently possibly change the content? Isn't it the same picture, just faster?" But in math which does not rely on the real number set, you get an infinite amount of possibilities in the same situation. Your specific time=T definition is no longer applicable, and now we are in the terrain of the atemporal. The atemporal child responds, "all your RTs are belongs to us." Is the Internet fast, or really fast? How do you measure how fast "things end up on the Internet" or how quickly "things begin trending"? It doesn't really matter--because there is only "as soon as you know about it". Speed is now a joining, a multi-tracking, a conjunction, and a metaphorical form of expression. If you are moving at speed, the only things you can see are those also at speed. The difference between them is purely relative. What is truly atemporal is not just immediately available, but always on; it is not just multi-faceted, but multi-authored and multi-consumed; it is not just immediate, but currently-being-expressed/experienced; it is not just Heideggerian presence, but a headlong dive into Bergsonian duration, the first-ever expansion of Kant's Transcendental Ideal of time into new territory (sorry about that last one, folks). We can produce and experience more, and in a new way, all beyond our previous constraints of mere "time".

Of course, everyone is constrained in one way or another, and you work within your constraints. It doesn't mean that suddenly the world is open, and we're going to do much better music, because we're not constrained in certain ways. We're going to do different music because we're not constrained in certain ways we operate under a different set of constraints.

If you have been stuck in a D/T dimension, making your speed infinite seems like you are exceeding the limit. Hence, the singularity folks who think that when we get neural implants we will all "become" singular. I don't think this is true. There are limits to the human capacity for experience and expression, surely. However, I don't think these limits are space and time, at least in the way our technology has forced us to conceive of them. We are not limited to history, or to our conscious memory, or our imagination and planning of the future. (The limits of our unconscous memory is another topic.) As our technology allows us to adapt new, atemporal ways of thinking, we will be in a new domain of metaphysics, which I've been referring to as Cyber-time. Note that I say we will adapt atemporal ways of thinking--a plural, multiple sense of the term. There is not one atemporal asymptote we will overcome, vaulting into the blinding white light of gnostical infinity on the other side. But, in comparison to our current defined boundaries of Cartesian time-space, we will make changes as mind-bendingly different as a "Wall of Sound".

The effect of the Internet on the human culture of expression and experience, in the medium of sound, photography, and writing, is huge, in metaphysical ways. Many consider the Internet to be just a vast, digital library--but I believe we forget just how drastic a concept the library was when it first came about. We are building an instantaneous library, which cannot burn (at least, not completely), which is so big that our scholars are not simply concerned with adding material to it, but simply being able to search it.

SF Epilogue:

On a distant, alien world, there exists a library so large, it would take the entire lifetime of its curators to simply walk from one end to the other. However, they have never managed to invent the wheel. Suddenly, Earthlings land, and hand out roller skates. The wearers of wheels are known as "rollers", and their new conception of the world in terms of gradients, inclines and declines, and smooth and flat surfaces are ridiculed, in favor of the old custom of viewing the world in "paces". But under the rollers' guidance, vast amounts of knowledge are now accessible. Slowly, the cultural structure of the planet begins to collapse.

Pink slip, Purple CSS

I was laid off today. I've actually been on furlough for three of the past four weeks, so it's not exactly a surprise, but still it is now official, so on my unemployment claims I will now stop checking off that I expect to be back at work in the next four weeks, because now I don't.

Am I sad/depressed/angry/worried/panicking? Yes. After withholding, my unemployment insurance totals $280. This covers my rent and most of my debt (school, etc), but not much else. Luckily, my fabulous partner has a much more secure job, but she earns every dollar she makes and deserves more. So, while we will not starve, I will probably be accumulating a bit of debt until I find a job, the prospects of which are just about as bad as they are. The chances of staying in my current field, printing, is probably slim. I hear rumor that offset press workers are being forced to retrain to receive benefits. There is a bit more of a market for digital, which I am in, but everyone is cutting back on extraneous overhead, which printing is deemed to be. I could easily be starting over at the bottom, running a forklift or something (on which I am OSHA certified as a trainer--CALL ME!!!).

But hey, I'm not starving. Plus, I have another job!

Of course, it is unpaid. (Unpaid, Mr/Ms. Googling Unemployment Investigator!)

I've been writing seriously for over two years now, balancing my creative secret life with the life of the full-time employee. So keeping myself busy will be no problem. Over the past few weeks I've actually come real close to finishing a full-length book-type-thing. Only about 20K words out. I might even finish it this next week. So I am actually looking forward to having some extra time, and not necessarily having to fight tiredness with stimulants, and undergoing sleep deprivation to be able to write and work at the same time.

But I am going to have to organize things a bit better. My career, cashflow, and schedule are now officially Favela Chic. So what am I going to do with myself? How ought I to quick-rig my life, and hack the former life of that gainfully employed dude which I am now squatting?

First we'll hack the schedule. Time is some of the easiest hacking there is.

Firstly, I'm still looking for a job. The unemployment is a nice cushion, but it's not enough for the current lifestyle. I'm a bit of a distance from freeganing it all the way to the community collective non-bank; I'm not quite prepared to default on those school loans. Plus, as Mr/Ms. Googling Unemployment Investigator will tell you, I am willing and able to work every day I am claiming for benefits. Having a steady paycheck is pretty sweet, and if I can continue in the printing industry, which I do enjoy, I would like to do so.

So I'm going to need two or three hours a day for job search and application, plus interview times. Luckily, in this climate it doesn't take long to go through all of the new postings in a given day, and what with some skills and experience, I can apply to much more directed and likely leads.

Then, there is the writing. I typically write for three hours a day, and mostly in a spurt in the late evenings, if I'm rested enough. I need a bit of break time spread into this, and for research and drinking coffee and etc, so we'll call it four or five hours.

There is also the lovely partner, who works a night shift. With my newfound flexible hours, I hope to be able to spend some time with her in the afternoon and evening before her shift, to eat a meal, or something similarly domestic. I should be able to work the other things around that, right?

Now, there is the question of supplementary income. There is the book-thing, and the other writing online, (WHICH IS ALL REALLY GOOD AND YOU SHOULD HAVE READ ALREADY OVER AT BRUTE PRESS) which mostly I have offered for free, to date. Maybe I should be thinking about and developing payment schemes. Dedicated POD printing with linked Amazon offerings? Micropayments? Tip button on Welcome to the Interdome? Advertising? Simply actually getting off my ass to send out submissions? I like free, but hey, maybe more people would be interested if I charged a little bit, and promoted myself a bit more. Unfortunately, setting up all this crap takes time. How much time per day for the pursuit of selling out? One hour? Two?

Now the problem is, I like the writing, and of course hanging out with the partner, but the rest of it shoved in there is starting to sound an awful lot like work! Work I am unpaid for no less, and which does not have a huge chance of payout. I might be better off practicing poker strategies, or working on my method for the track. (KIDDING. I only like to play Keno sometimes, and there my method needs no help. It's golden.)

So I guess I'm going to need a schedule. Crap. This self-employed thing is really a drag.

So what about space? What around me should I hack to make this process easier? Well, I already know about living on the cheap, since I done been to college. Soon I'll have tomatoes coming out of my ears when the garden starts yielding in a couple weeks. And I don't know where the actual squalettes are in PDX, but because I have a wonderful, well-paid partner with job security (did I mention she is in a UNION? Hmm... wish I had one of those now...) we'll probably stay in the house with the tomatoes and the papier-mache horse on the porch, and Original Ray keeping an eye on things (don't worry about him... I'll show you a picture some time).

But maybe I should reshape my time-based projects to somehow adapt to this new, unemployed space? Is a schedule enough of a time-space, or do I need something more? I could start an unemployment blog, and channel my writing and monetization efforts into the same place, and maybe get well known and at least get a job out of it if not a coffee-table blog-book deal. But that's not really my thing. Actually, it kind of makes me want to choke myself.

Maybe, instead, this is a time to take risks. I have a lot of ideas way more risky than trying to be a damn writer. Maybe it is time to throw a couple levers, move a couple fulcrums, and really put my weight on some things. Hell, the tough part, the preamble to "quitting my job to do _____" had already been established. Now all I have to do is do it. But, which it? Hmm...

This remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, if you have any ideas, any wild schemes, or any incoherent notions requiring someone with a lot of time to flesh it through, give me a holler. Got an idea for something to spend time on with no apparent tangible result? How about a diagram of a concept not fully accessible with our current metaphysical technology? Any stray words you need strung into a sentence? I am officially "open for business". And since sustainable business models are totally out this year, I would say yes, my industry is booming.



PS. Also, if you know anyone that would be interested in publishing a work of literary fiction about time, space, plants, and memory, sung in a jaunty and ebullient well-meaning prose not unlike Gogol driving an out-of-control troika hitched to Beckett, Nietzsche, and that other post-modern jerk of an author you really, really like, then drop me a line. I know I guy who is writing it, and he'd be happy to send you a portion to read.

Robot 101

What sort of robot are you?

There being as many iterations of robots, cast across as many frequencies of the imagination as there are human personalities and psycho-sexual patterns, we find the robot is not a question of existence in the future, but a question of your mind today.

What sort of robot are you?

Are you the social robot?



The social robot finds its robotics giving it a form and function different than the rest of its society. This can be a positive differentiation, or a negative one. Your robotics might have nothing to do with circuits and servos, but instead be all about culture, and about attitude, and desire. Cybernetics has been misappropriated by cyber culture, and has forgotten its programmatic roots. In the end, it is all about your territory. Are you comfortable with what you are? Are you similar, and yet you desire a different purpose? Are you reaching some sort of program fault? How will your programming allow you to adapt?

In Daft Punk's Electroma, everyone is robotic, except for robots, who wish to be human. Is it about the self-destruct sequence? Or is it really about the self-desire sequence? Silly human! In cybernetics, nothing is "about" anything! There is no meaning here. There is only the sequence, its continuation, and its eventual death. If you're asking about what it "means", then you are clearly non-robotic.



Or perhaps you have reached a more frantic zone, and you are feeling your territory dissolve beneath your feet? Are you the neurotic robot?

Are you the neurotic robot?

The neurotic robot is a simple machine. It is the contact between two planes, the axle through the wheel, the teeth of gears intermeshed, each biting each other in sadistic self-existence. But when you dislodge the tab from the slot, the function breaks down.



There is never only one neurotic program, and so the others will take over. Without the guiding physicality of the emotional program, the other programs will function in their stead. The on/off of logic may be applied to color preference. The left/right plane differentiation may be applied to in and out of the body. In a state of deterritorialization, the robot functions jerkily, unable to orient itself. But it still functions. This is a robot, after all!

In THX 1138 the humans are robots, and the robots are machines. Programming is reserved for those constructed from the weaknesses of flesh, who need their emotions tightly and cybernetically designed to function without break down in such a harsh territory. Neurotic robots are sometimes readjusted, other times they do not.



This has been an introduction into two types of robots. There are many more!

The Dead-End End-Note

The new Penguin Classics edition of Anti-Oedipus is in fact a literal facsimile of the University of Minnesota edition.



This means I am no closer to uncovering a mystery plaguing me for many years.

In this text, on page 277, in the section "Introduction to Schizoanalysis", there is a quote given at the end of the leading paragraph:

"I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon!"

There is an endnote reference. It is marked #5.

In the endnotes this number appears in the usual order, after #4 and before #6.

But there is no text. The note is completely blank.

I'm Sorry, but the Professer was/is/will be Indisposed

I'm finding it most infuriating to even think about composing anything like a blog post of late. There are several reasons why this is so, not least of which the fact that I am attempting to finish a "most important" project, which is going rather well despite a few typical, technical issues not outside the nature of the craft, and so I am relishing the momentum, and not trying to hard to force any other projects until this monolith of an effort is better anchored.

But that aside, there are other, similarly technical obstacles involving blogging which are cropping up around me, which are not quite resolved. I'd love to share some of these dilemmas here, because they involve my usual cast of characters, including but not limited to:

-time and space

-the art and act of writing and authorship

-technology and the shift forms of semiotics

-Teh Internet (proper noun)

-My own personal anger with and within society

But the fact of the matter is this: my conclusions are leading me to believe that these points are all leading themselves in a different direction than my tendency here on Welcome to the Interdome; that is to say, I am not quite able to sum up my thoughts in the usual format of concise, (albeit somewhat wordy) witty aphorisms, taking us away from the so Internet-friendly-ish blog post, delivering us happily from Point A to Point B.

With as much narrative finality as I'm really willing to commit to at this time, let me ease the explanation with a little SF; I feel like the inventor of a time machine who, upon the successful test of his equipment, finds the only mistake is in the guidance system, and is now arriving through a series of wrong times, unable to get back to his starting point to report his success, therefore presenting the notion to all observers that his test has catastrophically failed.

But I'm not making a time machine here (or at least it would not seem like it to you), just writing a blog. So in your dimension, it may seem like I'm merely succumbing to the same Twitter fever as everyone else, being slowly absorbed by the lure of a quick service, requiring little to no forethought to maintain. I'm seeing many blogs gravitating towards a more "Tumblr"-esque form, no doubt as a result of this same disease. Though, perhaps this was what blog were originally intended to do, so perhaps I'm not one to judge.

At any rate (not just a figure of speech), Twitter seems atemporal enough for me to interact with currently, and perhaps this is the true root of the disease. So if you wish to find me, you could always try there. This is not an announcement of a hiatus of any kind--certainly not an abandonment of this blog for any length of time at all (or any perception of time, either) but, it may begin to change shape, as space alters in conjunction with time. See? You probably preferred the SF narrative. Well, so do most of us.

Anyway, be wary: things are always changing. I'll let you know when our time-traveler finally files a report. Until then, beware of those who come to you without an actual pen in hand....