post-endtimes blues - robotson.com

minifesto #3 criticism of public space and plea for the...

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:18:00 -0400

minifesto #3

criticism of public space and plea for the carnivalesque

1. WHAT SCARCE PUBLIC SPACE IS LEFT in our western cities, particularly here in the US, lacking even the charms of a vibrant street performance culture, which in europe as least is regarded as an asset to tourism. The great majority of commonly held terrain consists of roads and sidewalks, places where the only legal purpose for inhabiting them is to be traveling somewhere else. What open courts and squares that remain are so heavily regulated as to render them little more than waiting rooms to rest in for a moment between shopping expenditures, and they are rapidly being sold off to private interests to that effect.

The financialization of all spheres of human life is taking hold. Political speech, small vendors searching for subsistence, youth groups and communities looking for a place to have their own culture, homeless people driven to the margins, all under assault in our public spaces - governed by codes and regulations which must then be administered by bureaucrats with guns and sticks. This is all done in the interest of “public safety,” where public safety is understood to mean a status quo that cannot tolerate any deviation from the wishes of the prevailing commercial interests. This is the logic in the plague of capitalism.

All of this works to reinforce the dominance of the money-sign, the constant reorientation toward its materialist values and colonization of dreams. Wherein our language of possibilities is constrained to the discourse of economic feasibility. The dearth of public space serves this end by keeping us separated, isolated in our homes in the one-dimensional intimacy of a spectator attached to a screen. When we are among people, among the sights and sounds of them - the smells, the sensations - deep memories of humanity stir in us, deep lingerings of the imagination that capitalism can recapture and recuperate but never completely eradicate.

What we have gained in consumer luxuries we have lost in communal culture. Farmers markets and art walks and street fairs are a poor substitute for a commons. The bread and circuses that are supposed to keep us in line only highlight the emptiness of consumption and its simulated desires. We must reject the spectacular society that reduces us to mere spectators and set out on a project of radical transfiguration of public space to resist alienation and foment possibilities for community beyond capital.

2. WHERE DICTATORS REIGN, humor can unite the people to uprise. Where money dominates, free creative play can subvert. Where the state escalates force, tactical frivolity can delegitimize all that power which must always take itself so seriously.

The use of satire to critique power has been documented in antiquity from Greek drama to medieval festivals into modern times witnessed in the globalization submit protests, with a lineage of revolutionary artistic theatrical movements in between. In this spirit we call for carnivalesque rebellion, to re-imagine public places, and imbue them with new meanings created through shared collective experience.

As the fool employs wit to make fun of the king, our goal is to create tactics that can liberate us from being restricted subjects. Our revolt is not armed with weapons of destruction but with tools of creativity. We aim to promote spontaneous revelry to transform the mundane. To use theater to parody authority. To employ costumes and props out of surreal dreams brought to life. To invent games that turn the world upside down. To re-sacralize the world around us and find the sublime in transgression. To prove that revolution is always potentially right around the corner.

This is not a fantasy of a final apocalyptic battle of good versus evil, or of a storming of the gates to a monarch’s palace. Hegemonic power today is understood to be global, decentralized and diffuse, impossible to completely overthrow by symbolically toppling some specific site. No, this is a dream of a proliferation of localized resistance wherever there is oppression. This is a call to widen our conceptual understanding of what it means to inhabit shared spaces in society. To develop a practical body of philosophy informed by what we learn from each other in praxis. By building bonds of trust with one another, gathering for common purpose outside the mediation of capital, we demonstrate that alternative visions of human organization are possible. In the face of a constantly adapting dominant narrative, the vitality of the carnival can provide a deep well of inspiration for the evolving strategies required by our counter-hegemonic project.

minifesto #2 communique on theatricality, style and...

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:50:38 -0400

minifesto #2

communique on theatricality, style and content:

THE SCENE: some touristy walkway, a suitable place perhaps for busking or street preaching. An old fashioned fire and brimstone moralistic didactic speech would not be uncalled for, substituting capitalist sociopathy for the nebulous questionable targets of the “satanic panic” hysteria in the 80’s.

—REJECT the idol worship of the unrepentant GREED on Wall Street, the HERETICAL church of celebrity status and LUST for power and influence! Turn away from this CORRUPTION of the soul! The fate of humanity depends on the outcome of this SPIRITUAL WARFARE! Every advertisement is a salvo against your divinity!—

Then a crowd gathers around the preacher, as a formation of dark clad monstrosities descend on the area to convey their apocalyptic message of doom and gloom. An elaborate choreography of secret gestures is performed by trained initiates. The plants in the crowd erupt in celebration of the mock spectacle.

Appropriate religious forms and iconography. Pomp and circumstance must be ridiculed with great care and attention. Rituals and ceremony. Hexes and sacrifice. Subterfuge and subversion through joyous revivals and mysterious processions.

Employing anonymity to empower a radical authentic expression. The use of masks to tell a story. Conjuring a sense of wonder. Collective pseudonyms, collaborative authorship. Magicians dressed like corporate espionage ninjas. Simple templates to encourage breaking the fourth wall, blurring the lines between performance and reality, the living theater of imagination puncturing through the hyper-real geography of the modern terrestrial codified civilization. Death to the death-life of alienation!

MINIFESTO #1 We emulate the straification of society, within...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:48:39 -0400

MINIFESTO #1

We emulate the straification of society, within the intersectional modes of oppression in the production of identities.

Identities are always incomplete, unstable, in flux.

Regimes of control are continuously producing identity at every relation, every interaction.

These produced identities are never totalizing completely, even as capital continues to widen its internal limits, although often the effect of this production is like a static image, a kaleidoscope of overlaid images that give the effect of stability. But in not being completely totalizing there is always unclaimed terrain, an uncolonized segment forced into fissures and breakdowns of the dominant narrative.

We embrace the flux of identity in order to wedge a space, to apply leverage, to have a place to stand to begin the task of deconstructing the intersections of power from the inside out. As individuals we embrace a nomadology, a wandering identity. We form affinities and become a horizontal tendency, as our project is a collaborative effort toward the dismantling of empires through the creation of our own societies.

COLONY ZERO Taos, New Mexico we had a good stay, reunited with...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:05:04 -0500

COLONY ZERO
Taos, New Mexico

we had a good stay, reunited with a buddy from new york who I hadn’t seen in almost five years. He was an early supporter of my poetry, some of his compatriots had emigrated to los angeles a while back and that’s how we were connected, some 8 years ago or so I left my comfortable life in the midwest to become a postmodern beatnik hobo poet, doing spoken word and selling chapbook poetry zines out of a motivational tape salesman’s suitcase that I found at a garage sale in minneapolis.

We landed in Taos to see an old friend, now tending to a cafe, representing for Bohemia in this strange desert land, the motif a hyperspace of platonic south-western molds, little art galleries and tourist traps around the squares, hollowed out by winter, waiting for warmer days to be flooded with the people visiting and the locals emergent from their hibernation. you couple up in cold times, make arrangements for body heat.

I imagine a dynamic of an overturning population of young and old, families that came out to make earth ships, rich people looking for a new age sanctuary, the flight of the young people for larger seas.

it’s one of those counter-cultural vortexes, a nexus of currents flowing in from other such places that share a reciprocity with each other, the psychic geography of the terrain and climate- the identity of a place and how the people who inhabit it identify with and represent and reproduce that identity in their philosophies and practices. so here has lodged itself a desert punk aesthetic - the burnt out husk of a utopian communal dream haunting us from the vector of the past; land pirates forming the temporary autonomous cafes in worn out shacks under open sky- the future too a ghost that looms gloomy in its apocalyptic pronouncements.

ethic of adaptation: to presuppose the fall of civilization, to anticipate the chaos. not to will it so into being, but to acknowledge a reality that exists in the fissures of institutions and the inability to account for our collective actions, oppositional logic widened by its own limitations. I am colonized by the teleology of western civilization (which I can find no trace of) - barbarously imposing my totalitarian all-encompassing worldview perspective on any abstraction I can find. submit to my domination and I will give you the tools to liberate yourself, I will Shepard you thru the maze of gurus, poet philosopher sovereign truth blender cryptologist over-codifier. all this jargon for the file, on display in a ridiculous circus of discourse. criticizing the utility of utilitarianism and other such fundamentals so as not to drown in the useful fiction.

somewhere between magical thinking and scientific method;

the third way, democratic shamanism, a radical singularity of symbolism in the sensory apparatus subsumed into immediate attention. shedding layers of meaning in the joy of experience. we are sensual creatures.

for an alienated service economy, community is hedonism.

ROADTRIPS

we planned to head out west, my friend returning his rental car to the airport in Albuquerque, and we’d worked out a rideshare with a guy passing thru town on his way to the west coast by looking on craigslist for rides in cities further east, when no searches and ads turned up any leads in our desired time frame locally. a day of driving. our host had been on the road all night, so we helped him drive, shared gas, conversed. we discovered we were all predisposed to travel and taking people as they come, open, friendly. driven this route back and forth now a few times. the desire to see the world while you still have the energy. a self-selecting crowd that picks up hitchhikers.

TUCSON

helped drive different legs of the trip, stopped to take pictures by the Very Large Array and had a nice drive through the state roads through Gila forrest. trading daring stories of mobile living. arrived on university campus bar strip parking lot turf and waited for our ride to meet up with his friend inside a sports bar to watch the end of the game, while we guarded the minivan with all our bags inside. we’d bonded over the day’s drive and we were all delirious from respectively being up all night, catching naps in shifts- I did the last couple hours of the drive after we discovered a sparkplug had blown out, and we drove on with one less cylinder firing while gas fumes permeated the car. have to fix it tomorrow in tucson, he says. we all sat with scarves over our faces and the windows down while I sputtered up the hills and coasted where I could.

in advance I’d looked up an online contact on recommendation from a mutual friend, who picked us up and gave us shelter for a few hours before our phoenix contact could come get lost trying to find us on the outskirts of tucson. we set up the transmitter beacon and relayed our coordinates while he drove around aimlessly cursing his GPS device’s soothing synthesized female voice.

while we waited, we sat and absorbed the charm of our hosts and their space. a lovely couple on the outskirts of Tucson. the indigenous people lived for ten thousand years subsisting on the desert plants, everything that grows here is edible, they tell us. a nice home, the happy husband working on cutting tile to lay in to the porch, a menagerie of creatures kept, snakes, fish in tanks, cats and dogs, turkeys and other fowl in the backyard. I had never met these folks but we had mutual friends we were both very close to, and traded stories from around the time that we had all been running in the same circles but never crossed paths. now we were pleased to have finally gotten to come together, and by the time our buddy from Phoenix made it there to pick us up we were telling each other how great it would be to be able to get together again and wouldn’t it be nice to run into each other in LA some time and I wish we could stay longer and all those sorts of heartfelt things.

a long time spent since I had slept much more than a short nap in a car. we’d logged plenty of miles from Taos to Albuquerque to southern new mexico to arizona to Tucson to Phoenix and finally landing in some suburbs to get to take a bath for the first time in some days and relax at the happy home of our buddy, secure in his gated community, a homeowner able to offer us each our own room for the night. I retired, digesting all the successful habits that lead to this moment and gnawed on my own arm leaving little bruises, considering submission and domination of the self and being the observer internalizing surveillance society and the headtrip of the modern politicized identity.

PHOENIX

Super Bowl Sunday, we went out to the mountains and did target practice against a foreground of stone, in the desert, firing high velocity projectiles at old shotgun shell cases. It was the first time for me since being a lad in south dakota when I had been too timid to handle a .22 rifle with my older cousins. a few hours in the hot sun feeling the great leveling power of the guns in my hand. afterwards we barbecued and watched the football game. the halftime show was a brilliant illuminati mind control initiation black mass spectacle befitting of the cultural moment, exactly the kind of bread and circuses the America we made required. everything seemed correct, appropriate. even pushing into the dark after the European dinner party. even losing track of time and waking up the next day unsure of which house you stayed at, which day it was on the roadtrip itinerary - this insecurity and not knowing has become normalized.

NOMADOLOGY

a great stroke of fortune that we found this benevolent soul who was driving from Oklahoma City headed thru New Mexico and relaying us to Arizona— before we parted ways he’d told me he was continuing on to Los Angeles after he got his van fixed, and just so happened I was staying a little outside the city off of the interstate out west —- so that next day I awaited him coming out to pick me up. a spot of coffee while he came in to chat for a while before our departure, and I said goodbye to my friend and travel companion from New York, who was bound on a plane back to the big city in the next couple days. and that was the end of our adventure together for the time being, and I made some intentions to head out east again some day, having not been back out there in so long, talk of the coming spring and summer days and loose plans. that chapter was finished, and my story then began to head to Los Angeles to reconnect with my tribe out there, where I have been most active in recent times.

I make a lot of vague plans about which direction I will head in the coming weeks and months, and notions of where I’d like to be, but I’ve learned that you can’t really make fixed plans as you move with the current streams you navigate. You stop in eddies for a while to whirl around here and there, perhaps swimming upstream some times, but generally having to move where opportunities present themselves. a degree of flexibility is required for this, so you plan to keep things open and leave schedules tentative at the horizon of the event. when approaching it you start collapsing possibility clouds down to the vapor of praxis as you find yourself shuttling, arriving, leaving, constantly in flux. shifting perspectives that remain undefined until the moment you reach across the galaxies between yourself and an other- and open up ground for new terrains, new geographies, new mappings to locate ourselves in again, on new playing fields that can dissolve the self-contradicting internalized conflicting forces that play a role in making identity and contribute to shaping us.

some place to stand in an age where theory evaporates any hope of a meaningful way of knowing anything. nomad tribes form affinities and redefine space through recombining together continuously in dynamic tension. we create a place to inhabit that offers us possibilities. the only way to subvert domination is to create our own alternatives to it’s necessity.

dressed like a con artist carney magic man with rainbow...

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:42:47 -0400

dressed like a con artist carney magic man with rainbow suspenders and jangling bangles, packing up possessions to relocate and filter from scene to scene, promising a story, a promising narrative, a binding role play with inclusive notions of living together and caring for one another. when we were on the road we split our take evenly and shared the bagel with avocado in the morning, no matter what we had, we all made use of it, kept each other alive for another day to return to the spring market fair, settling in to the sidewalk with suitcases stuffed full of art, the women displaying decorative bits of handcrafted jewelry and modified pieces of clothing, romantic nomad charms hanging from strings. the artist with his mixed media photographic prints on found reclaimed wood, burned copies of experimental films, a visionary discipline negotiated over chatter of influences and the long explanation of how we got from here to there. the poet standing at the corner banging public sculptures to rattle the metal frame and reverberate big drum percussive pulse while shouting out lyrical cries of inner child hungering, on edge on the hinge of turning a corner and disappearing, etherial, ephemeral, ghostly, like a figment of imagination spied out of the peripheral corners of eyes.

stop to listen and take in the characters, slumming it with real street artists, real life modern day beatnik hobos living this mode of performance that represents authentic counter-culture still alive and timeless, good to eat longer than most worst artificially preserved industrial slop and grime everlasting. people hunger for spiritual sustenance thru creativity and magic wonder defying reasonable description. illusionists and theatrical players take note: accentuate the positive, leave some mystery to the imagination, don’t explain the trick.

walk by the smell of jasmine in the berkeley dusk time. so many pleasant neighborhoods to contrast with the dingy street life of half-crazed homeless persons and weird crust punk hippie run-away kids and that whole seedy underbelly, or the all night strange times of the underculture of San Francisco, sitting at a bus stop eating ice-cream with a young woman telling me about the sexual politics of couch surfing, how it’s completely reversed for a woman rather than a man. a man is looking for a girl to take pity on him, want to shack up with him. a woman has to protect herself from what these lecherous boys may want of her. what would be appealing to me would be potentially threatening to her. the contrasts of our comparative experience, the differences stark but the sensibilities of life lessons learned surfing the slack and living on the road are of a common thread.

big dreams and big plans, trying to stay focused on the most manageable tasks. gonna take some ongoing amount of time to get your personal religious movement off the ground, to occupy the new church and start your own gatherings where artistry is the act of worship and we are the spiritual leaders we’ve been waiting for. even as I grapple with questions of cultural appropriation and syncretism, wondering where the appropriate line is, even as those questions swirl in my mind as people tell me that it really is a sign of respect for one people to emulate another, even if it is a misguided sense of respect. of course I don’t want to deny any serious earnest seeker of wisdom the opportunity to explore a tradition foreign to themselves, indeed, I take my own ideals piece meal from where I can source them. but there is an offensive point it can be taken to, I’m sure that sensitive people would understand that and if they were aware of the history and struggle that underlies the cultural interactions that proceeded the day we find ourselves in, they could appreciate why someone would be protective of their own birthright that may itself remain elusive to them. yet I know that nationalism is a failed approach, that the identity politics left to us from the previous century are too limited in scope to bring together the human family. I am sure that isolationism and xenophobia are dead ends. the new mythology is global, the new story is one of a world with no horizons, no people just over the mountain range to punish. only us, our brothers and sisters and the hardest thing to do in the world, to care for one another and love and dream and dare to reduce all the old boundaries to dust, and bootstrap a hip growing worldwide sensibility to the new world empire’s long shadow casting over land and sea.

in the trenches of reality, the whole totality of life is beyond...

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 23:43:53 -0400

in the trenches of reality, the whole totality of life is beyond the morality of good and evil, it’s easy to characterize whole groups of people or make strawmen out of hypothetical pitiable creatures of society, but all in all each person is in their own phase, mode of being, adding layers and stages to their existence. there is no linear path toward freedom or happiness or wisdom or spirit or being, yet we mesh with others and take their explorations into account when we are developing our own frameworks.

all the elusive mysteries telling me that this moment is alive, the world is intelligent. the universe is made of consciousness. the ultimate ground of existence is this kind of energy that turns into self awareness in a sufficiently complex nervous system. we learn self reflexivity from ideal thoughtless void, channeling and rambling our exultation to much excitement. you never learn the perfect truth in taxonomical terms but working within agreed upon relative frameworks we can metaphorically describe our experiential observations and compare the terrain we’ve encountered. cartographers sharing unique maps of the common phenomenon of the solitary depth and interiority of the human condition.

life is an open ended experimental process. I saw a guy on telegraph avenue scooping up free boxes of books left out for perusal. he said he lists them on amazon and makes hundreds of dollars a month driving around scooping up these random books. I guess it’s worth his time, that’s a job you could do. infinite approaches to things and it isn’t always necessary to have a plan or follow the conventional path. so we lazy intellectuals tell ourselves to justify our periods of inactivity. my only obligation is to produce, I tell myself, as I scowl about some unfinished project lingering in the back of my mind.

it’s good to go where you’re wanted and needed, but you can’t be everywhere at once. stroke of luck that you showed up when you did, the weather finally started to turn nice, and of course you found out who was still around and got to spend some quality time, rambling about the inconsistencies of some conspiracy or other. probing questions and long nights of consideration, half baked thoughts, ideals, vivid dreams. wild speculation. provocative declarations.

I don’t know where any of this is going or how to make ends meet, I fold space and curve one-dimensional manifolds over onto themselves and stretch myself so thin I become transparent. an infinite coming of age story in he effort to become a classic character in life, an archetype for the ages! what more is there to aspire to? D-I-Y spirituality, anarchy, choose your own fate and write the script as you go along, just in time.

all jacked in and wired up becoming one with the machine total immersion wave a hand in front of his...

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 01:22:25 -0500

all jacked in and wired up becoming one with the machine total immersion wave a hand in front of his face. gonna go check up on every lead and make sure the connections are tight, diagnostics and work-arounds and troubleshooting. bandwidth and throughput and traffic, ins and outs, sends and receives, the electric nervous system, the transmission of feeling thru sound impulses, the re-encoded frequencies on display.

a hive of activity, as they say. all these technicians turning through the building, talk of their time on the island, the rhythms of travel and when this one or that one are returning. discussion of the craft, shop-talk. napping in the corner to the pulsating beat.

the stand-up comedian with a routine about parenting advice, how you don’t want it unsolicited, especially from someone without children. I just say I read some report about a study about this or that, maybe you might want to check it out, that kind of thing. trying to be overly gracious. thump thump thump thump

not going to overly expose anyone or thing, and keep my best stories to myself and only share them in the company of the common ally.

some kind of potpourri in his hat, no magic rabbit. just more liquid nutrition and that chill coastal breeze. south enough to miss any serious waves from the earthquake in Japan. following streams of information pouring in overnight, watching the reactor burn online wondering what the cable networks were saying. they were probably talking about twitter or Charlie Sheen.

Interesting times of old curse of yore. post-millennial tension like we overstayed our welcome. there ain’t going to be no positive post-singularity world without some trauma along the way. but why not hope for utopia? it’s just that it’s always grossly different than you ever could have imagined - and the outcome of neo-Luddite hippies and religious fundamentalist terrorists in a world with machine to brain interfaces and designer drugs and cheap molecular sequencers in the garage isn’t necessarily benign or pretty but how else are we going to have a talk about the ethics of technology? the moral trajectory of our engineered destiny? man at the helm of his own fate, the ultimate responsibility. and we still don’t seem mature enough. oh well. we’ll see what this rising generation can muster with it’s networked hive mind and global eye scouring the planet’s awareness. a flash mob be-in general strike at the profiteering of the old world mentality. the new morality of a worldwide culture awakening…

trading pirate data, running installations, hooking each other up. a modicum of technological knowledge in a minimum of required fields. expanding the breadth of understanding, getting a sense of the undercurrents despite a lack of deep analysis. curating opinions and perspectives, positions and views, the inquisitor, examining the common arguments with the man on the street.

push the stroller, wash the pots, sweep the rug, fold the clothing. if you put soap in this iron skillet his mother will kill you, remember? clean out the workspace. trim facial hair, groom nails. make todo lists and manage time effectively.

or just take another nap. nap and stretch. mmm

on the tech beat, getting back to my roots. evangelizing...

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 21:21:56 -0500

on the tech beat, getting back to my roots. evangelizing networks empowering the streets. decentralized and democratizing. part of that band of mutants that scavenged usable scraps of machinery to put together our utility belts, our gear fascination, our dinner table etiquette around mobile devices is generationally different than our forbearers. the old tune in turn on drop out left the cities after a while and retreated to wooded hill, to big cliff drop mountain lodge and communal fire, the neo-luddite hippie with an ax to grind but no automatic sharpener. i live in cities. my subsistence strategy revolves around that first stage of enclave in your urban environments. that crash pad is a launching pad as well. but where those of us who live in the margins continue to require a foothold to survive, those who support us appreciate our nomadic perspective, and there is some overlap, no one is truly on the road at all times (except foolish dreamers like me. but even I must own one giant couch for the world to crash on some day)

the bleeding edge is expensive. but early adopters beta tested the kinks and the costs are always falling. the weapons systems found new purpose as hackers and artists looked at their designs and foresaw new applications. tinkerers and do-it-yourselfers transformed the world we live in and we are witnessing it morph before our waking eyes. impossible to predict the future but tracking trends feels rewarding. big upsets come as less of a surprise to the data nomad with his ear to the ground. travel light, stay flexible and pull up camp when you see the terrain shifting around you.

sync your life to the cloud, distributed across multiple services, a global stage with many actors to serve as the checks and balances in a world marxism and capital could not have designed or prophesied. resources become scarce so live lean to begin with. non-state actors and old institutions crumbling threaten the established order, so question fundamental assumptions and stay on top of global developments. surround yourself with the best thinkers of every discipline, young and old, discuss movements and watch for the signs of serendipity to guide your intuitive faculty.

the public bus around the LA metro is a reasonable fare. the screen behind the driver runs advertisements and news reels, the head of the state department cautiously announces preparatory moves against a dictator in Africa. the robot voice announces intersections approaching on the transit line. I mapped this out before I departed, I sent messages ahead to arrange a meeting point, thinking not much further than the next room to sit down in and pour into whoever may listen and share. not much concern with the next meal or which roof to sleep under or how to get back to the stash of longer term possessions - these things will work themselves out in the city and the hours that become days.

as quickly as rails and clocks conquered the landscape and telegraphs linked up the continents, switching stations and routes around everywhere carry ghostly voices, satellites and cell towers birthed new industries and every human grew new prosthesis for telepathy. this quickly integrated into our lives, and became accepted as necessity, while the no-income futurists such as myself waited to buy in to platforms that made sense, looking for ways to hack limbs off of the old business models, he latest and greatest devices don’t come cheaply and the monthly rates they are tethered to make them more expensive than even traditional access to computing power and communications. so my mobile can now send short message service text messages and place voice over Internet protocol calls to wired and wireless telephones for a fraction of the cost of the old way of doing things, and I am one step closer to trimming recurring expenses to bare minimum, willing to invest in the companies that empower the user.

riding thru Hollywood typing up these thoughts with my thumbs, headed to a party. said my parting well wishes to the excellent couple who took me in, even during their own time of need. the kindness we are sharing will continue in the future, this much I know. all the gadgets make it easier to stay connected but it’s the people that make life worth living. travel well, partners.

swedish pancakes in the pacific palisades with Henry Miller and...

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:22:10 -0500

swedish pancakes in the pacific palisades with Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac reminiscing about big sur over breakfast and ping pong while I’m reformatting my harddrives making backups wondering where I was when I woke up this morning - loving from a distance is more fun than being with a flesh and blood human being and all literary worlds blending into each other

"When a man has reached old age And has fulfilled his mission, He has a right to confront The idea of..."

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:38:34 -0500

“When a man has reached old age
And has fulfilled his mission,
He has a right to confront
The idea of death in peace.
He has no need of other men;
He knows them and knows enough about them.
What he needs is peace.
It isn’t good to visit this man or to talk to him,
To make him suffer banalities.
One must give a wide berth
To the door of his house,
As if no one lived there.”

- Meng-tze (quote found on Hermann Hesse’s and Henry Miller’s front doors)

what do you mean by the last line: "a mask to wear for the world of time in another go round this orbit I stay bold" why a mask?

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:53:31 -0500

the mask is like our personae - something we project for society to represent ourselves that is not necessarily as good a representation of us as much as it is an image of ourselves that we would like others to see us as. sort of, “the character that we play in the world.” I’m using this idea of the ‘mask-as-persona’ as a metaphor for people in general - for the individuals’ experience. people don’t really exist without others; the human experience is a social one, solitude notwithstanding (as you can always come back and write the book about it).

so in the context of the verse it’s kind of like a nod to reincarnation, only more arbitrary. since this is the mask I get to decorate and wear in this current incarnation, I’m gonna be practical about it, but also i’m still gonna put my own mark on it and make it something unique that I think is a good reflection of who I am. and then it’s really a matter of being able to know yourself (which of course is a never-ending project).

stay hungry, listen to your heart

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:05:17 -0500

successive reiterations of the process. making models and mockups, self-financed by selling the prototypes.

money is not the only currency. I deal in abstraction, a joke is a story is a song is a poem is a dance is a dream is a painting is a picture is a trophy is a talisman

a mandala a maypole maze a walking meditative quality in the firesign Bohemia

explosive propulsion driving coastal boundary exploration finding limits self-fulfilling prophecy the destiny you manifest at the end of the world on a fault-line on the precipice of the newest synthesis of all available information

a talisman, an alchemist’s secret handwriting gibberish to throw you off, symbols on the fringes of the institution to obscure their true purpose, a mask to wear for the world of time in another go round this orbit I stay bold.

a person who wants to live forever doesn't smoke cigarettes.

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:23:26 -0500

the narrative structure of my life, right now, is problematic. where is it going is what I’m wondering. I want to be open to new experiences.

this conversation could start in different ways. you might live to see the life extension technology really take off. Is mankind destined to destroy himself? You can think about fate and prophecy, about myths like the fountain of youth, about an artificially intelligent therapist that you tell your problems to, that you take your hopes and dreams to like a fortune teller.

there’s an oracle for that. recreate life, reanimate the living world, read into everything like an historian reading over pictograms, pouring over the landscape like old notes leftover from a biographer. creativity thru visionary thinking, seeing, transcribing, transcoding. the magic ritual of symbolic reasoning - shifting a meaning, reclaiming linguistic terrains wholesale thru appropriation.

a person who wants to live forever doesn’t smoke cigarettes. I know it’s a filthy habit but I don’t want to quit right now. more power to ya if you’re healthier than I - but I don’t want to live in a world where it’s mathematically impossible to hurt myself. the old drive to dense analysis of risk calculation.

at least a world wherein the transcendent is still possible, not just a button you can press over and over again. brave new living thru chemistry and the sensible engineering of negligence out of the equation. but the human desire for meaning makes this kind of engineering seem horrible so we reject any attempts to take away our free will, our spirit, our liberty, the consciousness as sole director of itself making decisions unencumbered by any external influence - that kind of fallacious thinking got me nowhere and we’re now here and what to do about it. subservience to the march of technological progress and the resistance thereof.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:53:00 -0500

Shifting Baseline Syndrome by robotson

every little bit

that we move within

makes us further on

to deliverance

from eternal sin

and commercial bliss

never knew what -

came before this.

see ya next fall

have a nice trip.

have a nice day,

nice while it lasts anyway

put the glasses away

we don’t have to display

what we’re after today

because after today

doesn’t matter you say

its the profit we made

don’t have to explain

what it costs to be great-

role that we play

master of all domains

with our goal that we’ve made

to control time and space

situation change

downgrade upgrade

sideways or

stay the same - hah!

but you boil hot

never noticed the

temperature

up inside the pot

remember our haste when

the baseline has shifted

new boss is the same as the old

a new generation

is starting to listen

historical trends that’ll show

walking around down town in the cities

looking around at all the conviction

It must be so nice to have all this assurance

that everything’s normal and running so smoothly

tomorrow will wake up and no one will be lost

everyone makes it to work at the same time

economy ties the whole planet together

we’ll have world peace under one dollar sign

remember our haste when

the baseline has shifted

new boss is the same as the old

a new generation

is starting to listen

historical trends that’ll show

I wrote and recorded this song during my last night in Minnesota...

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:06:05 -0500

I wrote and recorded this song during my last night in Minnesota on a long stay visiting family and friends, to be the soundtrack to some clips i shot while I was in town. Its sort of a sappy love letter to the people that I care about. enjoy!

Downtown Minneapolis has these wonderful things called skyways...

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 10:17:26 -0500

Downtown Minneapolis has these wonderful things called skyways so you don’t have to walk in the cold. (Taken with instagram)

cross streets (Taken with Instagram at colfax and 22nd)

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:18:29 -0500

cross streets (Taken with Instagram at colfax and 22nd)

LIVING IN THE FUTURE (part 1) so I’m in the middle of like three...

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:09:00 -0500

LIVING IN THE FUTURE (part 1)

so I’m in the middle of like three different chats on my laptop, when a friend of mine video calls me from japan where he is visiting. he tells me he’s gonna take me to the anime and manga capital of the world, and we’re walking down all these alleys lined with technology stores and its daytime there and almost 11 PM here.

I’m on wifi and he’s on 3G (but they have better bandwidth in japan) and the video quality isn’t the greatest but it is still an amazing feat, and I’m happy that a video call supporting version of skype just came out before the new year so in 2011 I can see my friends instantly on the other side of the planet while on the go - and awe and tremble with excitement at the possibilities inherent in:

living
in
the
future

we stood on the roof of the warehouse and watched the sunrise...

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:56:51 -0500

we stood on the roof of the warehouse and watched the sunrise with the minneapolis downtown skyline in front of us, and welcomed the new year.

hello world

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:22:31 -0500

hello world