"A public sexual culture changes the nature of sex, much as a public intellectual culture changes the nature of thought. Sexual knowledges can be made cumulative. They circulate."
—Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal, p. 178

Friday, September 26, 2003
2:29 PM
0 comments

Last night, the first night of The Wire's Adventures In Modern Music Festival, LJM and I were watching one of the guys from Wolf Eyes honking on a saxophone, and she turned to me and said "How come every time I go to a show with you, we end up in Lost Highway?"

Thursday, September 25, 2003
2:14 PM
0 comments

Last weekend I watched Lost In Translation, which features shots of Tokyo set to the music of Kevin "My Bloody Valentine" Shields. I also watched Demonlover, which features shots of Tokyo set to the music of Sonic Youth. Is there a zeitgeist happening here?

On a different note: last night before bed, I watched The Pianist, which, among other things, strikingly dramatizes the devastation that the Second World War unleashed upon the urban spaces of Europe. The images of Warsaw in ruins must have affected me, because all night long I was plagued by a series of dreams set in a postapocalyptic America.

Wednesday, September 24, 2003
2:35 PM
0 comments

Imaginary Year, my serial narrative project, is three years old today.

Today also marks the beginning of the project's fourth volume, Homes and Utopias. This is a good time to jump on, if you're a new reader.

Labels: projects, writing

Monday, September 22, 2003
1:01 PM
0 comments

I'm loving Michael Warner's book The Trouble With Normal, and in keeping with this week's theme of lists I thought I'd post this passage:

"New fields of sexual autonomy come about through new technologies: soap, razors, the pill, condoms, diaphragms, Viagra, lubricants, implants, steroids, videotape, vibrators, nipple clamps, violet wands, hormones, sex assignment surgeries, and others we can't yet predict ... Civilization doesn't just repress our original sexuality; it makes new kinds of sexuality. And new sexualities, including learned ones, might have as much validity as ancient ones, if not more."

I had to use Google to figure out what a violet wand is. I feel so square.

Friday, September 19, 2003
1:13 PM
0 comments

The inclusion of "infrastructure" on last week's "notes for a contemporary novel" was directly inspired by Sanford Kwinter and Daniela Fabricus, two contributors to the Mutations volume on the contemporary city.

They write:

"[Infrastructure] is water, fuel, and electrical reservoirs, routes and rates of supply; it is demographic mutations and migrations, sattelite networks and lotteries, logistics and supply coefficients, traffic computers, airports and distribution hubs, cadastral techniques, juridicial routines, telephone systems, business district self-regulation mechanisms, evacuation and disaster mobilization protocols, prisons, subways and freeways and their articulated connections, libraries and weather-monitoring apparatuses, trash removal and recycling networks, sports statiums and the managerial and delivery facilities for the data they generate, parking garages, gas pipelines and meters, hotels, public toilets, postal and park utilities and management, school systems and ATM machines; celebrity, advertising, and identity engineering; rail nodes and networks, television programming, interstate systems, entry ports and the public goods and agencies associated with them (Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Security Agency, Internal Revenue Service, Food and Drug Administration, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms), sewers and alarms, multi-tiered military-industrial apparatus, decision engineering pools, wetlands and water basins, civil structure maintenance schedules, epidemiological algorithms, cable delivery systems, police enforcement matrixes, licensing bylaws, greenmarkets, medical-pharmaceutical complexes. internet scaffolds, handgun regulations, granaries and water towers, military deployment procedures, street and highway illumination schemas; in a phrase, infrastructure concerns regimens of technical calculation of any and all kinds."

This list is practically a Ballard novel unto itself.

Wednesday, September 17, 2003
2:00 PM
0 comments

A colleague here at the university recently gave me a list of her favorite movies, in exchange for a list of mine.

Here's my list, in no particular order:
Slacker
After Life
My Dinner With Andre
2001
Wings of Desire
Delicatessen
Ran
Do the Right Thing
Vertigo
any by Hal Hartley but especially Amateur
any by David Cronenberg but especially Videodrome
any by Jim Jarmusch but especially Stranger than Paradise
any by David Lynch but especially Eraserhead

The "any but especially" directors are undoubtedly my favorite directors, but, strangely, I don't feel like any of them have made a "masterpiece": each film in their body of work has some fatal flaw in either design or execution. Or maybe it's less the "fatal flaw" problem and more that what I like about these directors is the way that their films work in conjunction with one another: the way particular themes recur from film to film, in new and surprising ways. There is no one film that could be said to succinctly stand in for the entire body of work, but, taken together, the entire body of work makes one vast masterpiece...

Monday, September 15, 2003
1:26 PM
0 comments

Guiding principles for a contemporary novel:

• "cryptonarrative"

• maximum novelty

• a quilting of discontinuous textures (as in Mutations)
  

• increased mystery

• information / misinformation

• politics / fake politics

• news / fake news

• conspiracy

• economics / networks / technology / infrastructure

• global scope

• "endless tangled scenarios" (Thomas Pynchon)

• "a vertigo of interpretations" (Jean Baudrillard)

• "random sampling and aleatoric choice from an infinity of possible objects" (Benjamin Buchloh)

• the pulverization or granularization of "story"

Labels: writing

Thursday, September 11, 2003
11:29 AM
0 comments

cosmopolis

Cosmopolis, the new Don DeLillo book, is something of a disappointment. The book's primary set-pieces—an anti-globalism protest, a hip-hop performer's funeral, a rave, and a Spencer Tunick-esque mass gathering of nudes—all feel slightly stale: there is nothing here as inventive as White Noise's Airborne Toxic Event or Most Photographed Barn In America; nothing here as accomplished as Underworld's "super-omniscient" Giants-Dodgers game.

That said, there are some interesting thematic threads woven throughout the book. Like DeLillo's last novel, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis permits the appearance of elements which are overtly fantastic. In this novel, the super-natural is embodied by two pieces of image-capturing technology (a surveillance system and a camera-watch), which are so sophisticated that they begin to display events that have not yet occurred.

These devices are the most dramatic symbol of one of the book's central thematic concerns: the predictive capabilities of technology. The protagonist, Eric Packer, is an asset manager who has made millions by accurately predicting the inherently unpredictable fluctuations of currencies, with the assistance of sophisticated information-gathering technologies. The book seems to suggest that as these technologies improve, they grow ever-closer to penetrating the veil of the future.

Thinking about this reminded me of something that ex-hacker Steve Steinberg mentioned over in the Boing Boing sideblog, which warrants quoting at length here:

"[T]o be a hacker in the late 1980s was to know something profound about the nature and degree of connectedness before everyone else ... today, an equally singular and premonitory view is coming into focus at a few of the edgier hedge funds on wall street.

[...] we have all heard that companies from Wal-Mart to Cheescake Factory rely on sophisticated data mining to run their business. Every customer is analyzed 43 different ways until They know what you will buy before even you do. Even ignoring the enormous gap between rhetoric and reality, these algorithms are at best myopic. Like the idealized model used in undergraduate physics -- no gravity, no friction -- these companies imagine their business in isolation.

But money flows through a network with thousands of significant nodes-- to partners, from customers, away from competitors. The airline industry has come the closest to this kind of holistic analysis, thanks to their penchant for collusion.

But right now the only people who really want to see how all the pieces fit together -- to datamine entire industries, economies -- are on wall street. Coincidently, the web has already made many businesses so transparent that an outsider can know almost as much as management.

Surely, with enough determination.. a lot of bandwidth, some fast computers... somebody will build the first detailed map.. a topography of money flows.. to see what's next."

Labels: book_commentary, capitalism, information, technology

Tuesday, September 09, 2003
11:09 AM
0 comments

I have gotten e-mails containing SoBig.F-infected attachments sent to me roughly four hundred times in the last three days. According to this Symantec brief, the worm will de-activate on Tuesday, which might mean some relief, although computers infected with the virus may attempt to contact a server to download an update which could start a new wave.

If your virus software isn't up-to-date, consider downloading Avast! (free for home users for non-commercial use). Consider this a particularly pointed suggestion if you use Outlook as your e-mail program and have me in your address book.

Sunday, September 07, 2003
9:51 PM
0 comments

Yesterday Chris and I went to Gary, Indiana on a mission of drifting and collecting. It was an excellent afternoon. We couldn't get into the Gary Works but we managed to get some nice recordings beneath an underpass and by the train tracks.

We also explored two abandoned buildings, which a little Internet research reveals as the ruins of Union Station (1910).

Afterwards we followed a rough trail into a grassy area, which turned out to be home to some fantastic giant spiders. See some photos of them, and other photos from the afternoon, here.

2:29 PM
0 comments

Sorry about the lack of updates. It's been a busy week. I started teaching again on the 25th, last Monday, and I'm still trying to nail down the vicissitudes of my new schedule. There are some new books and CDs listed over there in the sidebar, though.

Thursday, September 04, 2003
1:27 PM
0 comments