I Love Jack Horkheimer!

Jack Horkheimer is a great man for two (2) reasons:

1) He is the only person that has ever sat on a ring of Saturn. Observe:

2) When he looks up, he sees only stars. He doesn’t see his own hubris reflected back down on him. That’s because Jack Horkheimer is not an asshole, at least not during his 60 second spots on PBS.

Standing in stark contrast to Mr. Horkheimer are those who know the truth about what is beyond the stars. Please don’t take this to mean “Christians.” Well, take it to mean that, but also include all other religions (certainly Wiccans) and, most especially, atheists.

Let’s not delude ourselves, Atheism is a religion; it claims ultimate knowledge of the universe and of what happens to our mortal coil once we dot our eyes and rot.

I can forgive fools like this:

http://godisimaginary.com/

They are merely Christians in denial (most of their “proofs” deal strictly with the Bible and Christianity, as if Jesus encapsulated all religious thought). They still have a chance. One happy day they may realize that the true nature of existence is ineffable and unknowable. Hopefully that moment will come while they are taking a very satisfying dump.

Those who should know better yet have locked themselves into a small and petty hatred of “the people who don’t think like me” are the real charlatans. In fact, their assumptions are every bit as fallacious as the religions that they criticize.

For example, Richard Dawkins is an ass. He determines universal truth with the same shoddy tools used by theists, yet claims himself to be not as deluded. His proof, his mantra, is essentially this; science cannot prove the existence of God, therefore God does not exist. Last time I checked, science can only gauge things which are observable. God, by the very definition–omniscient, omnipotent, and beyond space and time–is unobservable by any method that we currently possess; God is an unknown quantity. To speak of such, whether in the affirmative or in the negative, is to claim the unknowable. Claiming knowledge about things unknowable makes you a pompous and witless ass.

Besides, who would you rather have a beer with?

[Richard Dawkins literally reading his own book from a pulpit.]

or…

[Jack Horkheimer contemplating the rings of Saturn.. or not.]

(Note: I make no claims as to the religious convictions of Jack Horkheimer. In fact, I make no claims as to my own religious convictions.)

Somebody made Boudin

I found the enormous, rotting, and vivisected pig in my neighbor’s front yard about two months ago, along with its attendant 5 gal. bucket of guts. Now, aren’t you lucky that somebody didn’t pick your yard to dump it in?

My Internet Semiotics Scoreboard now reads
STREET SIGN: 1
PRINTED PAGE: 0

Love

I think that one of the things that has slowed me from blogging more is the inherent difference in textual guide-posts between paper and e-paper. Words in books, on street signs signs, across a television, etc., inhabit distinct milieus, each with their own rules for being interpreted. The milieu in which words interact on the web is still in development. It is both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, it opens the possibility of complete creative control. On the other, it strips the reader of clues as to how to interpret what is being read. Where a word is is as important to understanding its significance as what it signifies. “Stop” can mean a lot of things, but if its on a red octagonal piece of metal, you know that it is your car that you are supposed to stop. That is language in its most simple and direct form. A traffic sign is about as pure a denotative sign as your ever going to get in life. It means what it is. In a story, say, in a book, the writer doesn’t need such directness. He or she has as many pages as necessary to convey a thought. Word strings may be built in such ways that the connotation of each word plays off the others to develop complex thought, even emotion. In this way, the yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Gilman’s much-analyzed short story becomes a powerful symbol of emotional distress. An “author” has time…

Are you still reading this? If so, you probably run against the main of internet “readers.” Most of us simply do not read that deeply into text “printed” on the internet. I sure don’t. I read what I think I need to and rip through the rest. Especially if it is written out in the traditional block form that we expect in a textbook or novel. The rapidity at which the web delivers information has created in the “reader” an expectation of knowledge-gathering while at the same time devaluing the mental work that it takes to assimilate that knowledge. I honestly couldn’t give you a synopsis of the article that I read ten minutes ago on Wikipedia. Nor would I want to, because the reader’s expectation of rapid information has allowed for information-sources that give no emphasis to valid information. And the cycle continues. The hermenuetics of the web is a mess. Image-words (certainly not “words” as commonly understood) by which information on the internet is conveyed are of a different synthetic vocabulary than what is used in other media. It seems to me that the Web is somewhere in between a street sign and the printed page. Readers expect brevity, but also want connotation; they want stop-signs that emote. In fact, considering the many and varied functions that this relatively new medium already serves (in any given day, we use it to work, play, communicate, shop, etcetera…), we need a communication system that compacts large amounts of denotative information into single signifiers while at the same time allowing the reader to understand the situation, the texture, of what is being said; Stop signs that bleed–and not necessarily mean stop, depending on circumstance and where they are found.

Denotative signs work quite well for data conveyence and commerce, but in terms of the “social network” that the internet aspires to be (and, perhaps unwittingly, has always been), they fall flatly short. The top of human sentiment that you are likely to achieve on the internet is posting comedic and/or gothic and/or sexy pictures of you and/or your friend skateboarding and/or “kickin’ it” while blasting out your currently favorite rock and/or hip-hop anthem on your myspace account. OMG!! LMAO!!

And that’s the problem. Did you read “OMG!! LMAO!!” the way it lays out literally, or did you follow the textual pattern that I was trying to develop? I’m sure that you did and its my fault if you didn’t, but the point is made; there is no way of knowing whether or not the connotation of what is written will be received. We have enough problems figuring out that shit with the old way of doing things, pen and paper, and now we have this completely new and everchanging medium to wrangle with. Depending on your mood, where you are, and how your browser translates this page, you may think that I wrote something dick when I was being nice, or something nice when I was being a dick. There is a long way yet to go between functional internet language and a truly new set of social expression.

I guess I could have made all of this a lot quicker by asking you this; think of your favorite book.

Have you ever seen a website that affected you as powerfully? That enraptured you and made you breathless for resolution?

Probably not; the textual guide-posts do not exist for such intuitive reading that by-passes the denotative and structural nature of internet communication. There are a lot of sites that awe me with what they do, but Oliver Twist knocked me to my knees. It did not need a function beyond what a young boy saw in the series of connotations that it delivered.

With its media capability, the web has the ability to achieve Art beyond what the printed page has done. It just needs to develop a functioning lexicon beyond base communication and spectacle. The cool thing is that the process is not only inevitable, it is one in which we are currently participating. So let’s peel that onion. I’ll supply some signifiers, and you tell me what they mean:

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> Keep Scrolling For Good Luck!!! !!! !!
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Love Is All You Need

Exciting News from the Keystone State

Phil “Punxutawney” Marmota Monax did not see his shadow(http://www.easternecho.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?4961), which I believe means that the troop surge will come early this year.

Fighting Them at Home

I do not live in Boston nor do I watch much Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but if you think that this looks like a bomb, you are an idiot:

five terrible facts of harrowing mundanity

I have been given the chore of writing five facts about myself and, in time-honored chain-mail fashion, select five other people to do the same. Thanks to Sara and the very long list of others who created the conduit by which this directive has reached me. Its actually kind of neat following the chain backwards.

Five Facts:

1. I actually have two blogs. I call my other blog a “notebook.” Actually, I call it “notebooks.” I put older blog entries into an archive that I call “The box on the top shelf of my closet.” Writing in this other blog, or “notebooks,” is the only thing that I have ever done consistently, other than archiving it in “the box on the top shelf of my closet.” I have tried to upload “notebooks” to the internet, but my CD-ROM drive keeps getting a paper jam. That last sentence wasn’t a real fact. I’m sorry.

2. I recently met an old guy named Joe who lives in a cave south of Eureka Springs, AR. The cave was actually pretty cool and Joe was a lot like Snuffy Smith, which was my grandfather’s favorite comic strip.

3. Science has ruined a lot of things for me. I often find myself depressed that there is zero probability of ever seeing a magic-using lizard man command his four ton Frost Beast to destroy an invading horde of inter-galactic murder-bots, unless its in a movie. That would make one bitchin’ movie, though.

4. I met the devil at the Battfield Inn in Vicksburg, MS, a quarter mile from the Civil War Park. He was a “talent scout” for Big Mama Studios in Memphis, TN, right off of Beale St. He had come to Vicksburg to stage a “talent contest.” Our drummer Charlie had decided that it was my band’s big chance for success. My problem with this line of reasoning is that it was completely fucking retarded. Unfortunately, my protestations hit a raw nerve in the band because Charlie really was completely fucking retarded. What I thought were well-reasoned arguments as to the inanity of “talent contests” in general actually served as acute observations of Charlie’s mental capacity, being as it was his idea. The band knew that by trading “a talent contest” for “Charlie” in the sentence “a talent contest is completely fucking retarded,” (a sentence that I actually said) they had their darkest view of Charlie revealed. It was a watershed moment. So we loaded our van and drove down to the Battlefield Inn, where we met the Devil. He had a goattee, male pattern baldness, and the remnants of a pony-tale. People paid him $100 dollars to sing two songs over a karaoke track. If someone’s family wanted to watch, it was $10 dollars a ticket. If your family or friends bought three or more tickets, the Devil would let you sing another song. One guy sang six songs. I heard the Devil tell someone with a video camera that the hotel didn’t allow filming without a permit, but that VHS copies of the performance would be available for an extra $25. There were lots of teen age girls dressed like Britney Spears and middle-aged men dressed like Garth Brooks. By the time it was our turn, I was pretty drunk, having been drinking since the moment I woke up in order to survive this terrible, terrible ordeal. I turned my amplifier to ten (we were the only people with instruments) and destroyed the pawn shop guitar that I had brought special for the occasion. After we were through, no one clapped, except for a big biker in the back, who I’m pretty sure was drunk too, who stood up and hollered, “Fuck Yeah!” Oddly, we were declared the winners. The Devil handed Charlie a photo-copied certificate for ten free hours of studio time at Big Mama’s. I later saw the devil quietly handing out certificates to all the participants. The next week, Charlie tried the phone number on the photo-copied cerrtificate. It was disconnected. The physical address for Big Mama’s turned out to be a parking garage. The band broke up soon afterwards, for obvious reasons. An interesting fact about the Battlefield Inn is that they have more parrots on the premises than any other hotel in Mississippi.

5. I have watched three people die. When I was two years old, I saw my brother get crushed by a tree trunk. It is my first memory. I remember my mom’s face framed by the Sun as she vainly tried to push the tree trunk off of him. I remember watching as his legs stopped kicking. When I was eighteen, I saw a man shoot another man in the head. This was in New Orleans on Annunciation St. somewhere near Clay Playground at 3 A.M. I saw the man’s brains spray out. I was about a block away and I ran as fast as I could. When I was thirty, I saw my wife’s grandfather die. It was the most peaceful thing I may have ever seen. He died in his bed surrounded by his family with his wife cradling him in her arms. The walls were painted blue and were nothing like asphalt under a street lamp or the terrible pain of watching helplessly as your mother tries to wrench herculean action from her too-small frame so that your brother’s crushed-in chest will continue to breathe.

That last one reads a bit heavier than I meant it to. But what are you gonna do? Some things in life suck. For instance, I know a CPA who adds “-izzle” to the end of all his words when he gets drunk, which is pretty sucky because he is a CPA. Wait, that’s SIX facts. Dammit!

Durrel and the Car

My dad was twelve or thirteen, thereabouts, when my grandfather had him drive a car up to Lake Village Arkansas. I don’t remember the reason why; they were selling it, I think. The stretch of road between Tallulah, Louisiana, where the car was, and Lake Village, Arkansas is mostly flat, but there is a sort-of hilly spot about ten miles north of the Louisiana-Arkansas line. “Hills” is probably too strong of a word for it, more like “folds,” or something else designating land that is not hills but not flat either. Regardless, there is a spot in the road that catches you off guard right as it curves up into the un-flatness. Being fourteen or so, my Dad hit that curve doing about eighty-five miles per hour. For about one flat second, as the story has been told to me, he was able to look four deer standing in the middle of the road dead in the eye. They were looking at him the same way as he was looking at them, with shit in their pants. Cars were heavier back then, so the collision sprayed deer-guts farther than most of us can probably visualize. Needless to say, the car was fucked. Once he got over a feeling that must have been close to giving Death a high-five, Dad did some walking to a payphone that was hopefully in the distance. He was fourteen or thereabouts.

Two and a half hours later, my Granddad shows up and spanks Dad to an inch of his life. Gramps wasn’t being cruel; that’s just the way it was in those days, and Dad shouldn’t have been doing eighty-five miles an hour. On the other hand, how the hell could you expect a thirteen year old, or thereabouts, to not do eighty-five miles an hour if you give him a brand new car and tell him to drive it to Lake Village Arkansas? Nowadays they don’t let twelve or fourteen year olds drive cars. Whether or not that is a good and jurisprudential law is beyond me. I do know that my dad had to endure shit that he never made me suffer through. I think the difference is that my dad’s elders expected him to not screw up. My generation seems to have lost that expectation. We’ve been told that we can avoid consequence all we want and the grand cornucopia of modern American life will still brim over with wonderful new toys. Its not my Dad’s fault though; he made me dig tractors out of the mud at four in the morning, even though he did wreck one bitchin’ car.

Moral of the story: if you crash into a bunch of deer on the way to Lake Village Arkansas, make sure to have a quarter for the payphone.