Damn, This Lung Is Heavy
Co. Achewood.
After nine splendid years of headaches, sore throats and money thrown toward my own demise, I've decided to Stop Smoking. Period. I spent the entire day on campus wearing a nicotine patch and it has been considerably less harsh than I thought it would be. I've “quit” twice before. The first time was a January several years back; it was a month-long group challenge of resolve, inspired by needing a month of recuperation from a December spent in the guise of Hedonismbot. The second time was just a few months ago when I stopped smoking for a week due to being more sick than I had ever been sick before. I was fine, honestly, until I had to actually leave the house and go to school, where I found myself surrounded by the vice. I gave in before the withdrawal tics turned me into a someone's Modern Dance thesis project.
...and now I'm done. Fin. Kaput. I swear that I will not turn into an evangelist and will still be as fervently pro-smoker's rights as I have ever been. I leave you with a small excerpt from David Sedaris' quitting essay “Letting Go” and one of the more bizarre Disney shorts I found while researching for this post on MetaFilter.
It’s one thing to give up smoking, and another to become a former smoker. That’s what I would be the moment I left the bar, and so I lingered awhile, looking at my garish disposable lighter and the crudded-up aluminum ashtray. When I eventually got up to leave, Hugh pointed out that I had five cigarettes left in my pack.
“Are you just going to leave them there on the table?”
I answered with a line I’d got years ago from a German woman. Her name was Tini Haffmans, and though she often apologized for the state of her English, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any better. When it came to verb conjugation, she was beyond reproach, but every so often she’d get a word wrong. The effect was not a loss of meaning but a heightening of it. I once asked if her neighbor smoked, and she thought for a moment before saying, “Karl has . . . finished with his smoking.”
She meant, of course, that he had quit, but I much preferred her mistaken version. “Finished” made it sound as if he’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes, three hundred thousand, say, delivered at the time of his birth. If he’d started a year later or smoked more slowly, he might still be at it, but, as it stood, he had worked his way to the last one, and then moved on with his life. This, I thought, was how I would look at it. Yes, there were five more Kool Milds in that particular pack, and twenty-six cartons stashed away at home, but those were extra—an accounting error. In terms of my smoking, I had just finished with it.
I Am The Loudest!
I've had a New Yorker subscription for nearly a decade now and the single best humor writer I have read is Simon Rich. He has all the qualities of an author I would generally despise, for both aesthetic and personal reasons: preciousness, McSweeney's-style absurdity with double the wordcount, an age within two years of my own. And yet, even without looking at the byline, his pieces crack me up like no one else's in the magazine. Here is an excerpt from "Hey, Look", a log of imagined eavesdropping:
Fifteen:
“Hey, look, that kid is reading ‘Howl,’ by Allen Ginsberg.”
“Wow. He must be some kind of rebel genius.”
“I’m impressed by the fact that he isn’t trying to call attention to himself.”
“Yeah, he’s just sitting silently in the corner, flipping the pages and nodding, with total comprehension.”
“It’s amazing. He’s so absorbed in his book that he isn’t even aware that a party is going on around him, with dancing and fun.”
“Why aren’t any girls going over and talking to him?”
“I guess they’re probably a little intimidated by his brilliance.”
“Well, who wouldn’t be?”
“I’m sure the girls will talk to him soon.”
“It’s only a matter of time.”
If your formative years were anything like my own, that should sound embarrassingly familiar. Here is the rest of his work for the New Yorker:
Regression Analysis
Dashiell Hammett wrote two seminal hardboiled detective fiction novels: Red Harvest and The Glass Key. The Glass Key was later made into two films; one in 1935 and another much more popular version in in 1942. The noir stylings of the 1942 version were used as the visual/thematic basis for the 1946 Bogart classic The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler novel.
The Big Sleep was then used as the framework for the Coen Brothers' film The Big Lebowski. That's not all for the Coen Brothers, however. A line of dialogue in Red Harvest was used as the title for their film Blood Simple and The Glass Key was used as the plot source for Miller's Crossing.
Akira Kurosawa's classic ronin film Yojimbo had two big influences. The plot clearly came from either The Glass Key or Red Harvest, depending on who you ask. The visual styling came from classic American Western films. The favor would be returned when Sergio Leone remade it as the Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars. Yojimbo would later be taken back to its Prohibition-era roots when remade again as the Bruce Willis action-noir Last Man Standing.
Perusing The Stack
(Hello, due to extenuating circumstances, your regularly scheduled Griph will not be posting today. Instead, he's unchained me from the radiator to fill in for the Thursday post. I also update Pre-Sonic Genesis semi-weekly, should you find yourself interested in even more novelties of questionable worth. -CJ)
For the past month, I have found myself summering in scenic Lincoln, Nebraska in an effort to leave behind the harsh Texas sun for the merely capricious heat of the midwest. Unfortunately, this means leaving my limited social circle behind, which leaves lots of time to devote to the endless variety of media available to any technologically enabled person these days. If you are anything like me, and may God have mercy if so, then even living as spartanly as possible you tend to acquire media faster than you can readily consume it. So rather than focus on one thing in particular, you tend to form a vanguard of the few things that strike your interest and keep it nearby to pick at almost randomly. You have your own name for it, but I call mine The Stack.
Bachelor Living, Summer 2010 Collection
So with two hours until this needs to be posted and absolutely no idea what to ostensibly entertain his faithful audience with, I decided to fall back on the narcissistic standby of trumpeting my own self-interest in a quick look at what occupies the half dozen hours between deciding I need to go to bed and actually falling asleep.
The Corner - David Simon and Edward Burns: If you are reading this and have not watched David Simon's sublime HBO show The Wire, I am not going to lecture you about why that is incorrect. The Wire is one of the greatest television shows to have ever been aired, you already know this. The show is not just good, but it is objectively good. Science can put it under a microscope or set the DVD over a bunsen burner for a half hour, but thirty reports out of thirty reveal hey this is a very good television show guys. But before The Wire, there was The Corner, a book David Simon wrote after following a group of speedball addicts and dealers around the slums of Baltimore for a year straight. The Corner was made into an HBO mini-series, which more or less became the basis for the first season of The Wire, which largely took place on the same streets that Simon wrote about in The Corner, but with (mostly) fictional characters on both sides of the law. The Corner is absolutely gut-wrenching and visceral, to the point where the gonzo-journalism starts to wear at your soul. Simon and Burns don't pull any punches on the war on drugs, and definitely do not have an answer (Season Three of The Wire revisits this, down to a few word for word scenes, with a harsh look at why both sides of the law wouldn't be able to handle a sudden legalization of the drug trade). But while they have no easy answers, they know the current system isn't working. The works of Simon were a major factor in my need to switch to attain a Bachelors of Social Work, and I can't recommend them enough simply as a starting point into the preciously small library of work that tackle social problems without being preachy.
Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther: Due to the choice of dreary name and needlessly wordy and opaque album title, Midlake's 2006 sophomore album The Trials of Van Occupanther can and has found itself criminally ignored. This is, predictably, a shame, as Midlake are one of the best Americana-twinged bands in recent memory.
The album gets compared to Fleetwood Mac fairly often, and that's not entirely an inaccurate way of looking at things. The band relies on lush seventies style production, with every instrument playing warm and a little fuzzy over analog synths older than most people reading this. The band relies on softly sung vocal harmonies barely hovering above the instrumentation, both of which are appropriately understated considering the subject matter - a bizarre magical realism exploration of isolation on the American frontier. Or at least that's how I hear things. Think of it as The Decemberists, but you are fifty times less likely to punch the members in the throat. But don't just take my word for it; in grand Come On Let's Go tradition, here is a music video showcasing the opening track:
Cabelas Big Game Hunter 2010: Hey, listen. I am not a strong man. Sometimes, the allure of cultural garbage is just too strong. And the allure of a free Gamefly account that seems to permanently never actually send you anything you actually want to play is even stronger. So here I find myself taking part in what I can only describe as genuine hunting pornography. I really doubt that there is a secret society of hunters that whisk potential recruits around the world to stand in glowing blue circles to open fire on an endless parade of foxes, but you sure can pretend there is for a few dollars and the endless shame of the game taking permanent residence on your achievements list. As an added bonus, there is a veritable party boat of homoeroticism that I have a sneaking suspicion is intentional, given the developer's cheeky self awareness popping up in achievement titles like "Metal Deer Solid"
Of course, there's tons of other stuff there, some of which I will savor, some will just get a cursory glance before being thrown back on The Stack, potentially never to emerge. Out of all the problems our information saturated society has saddled us with, The Stack is probably the best of them.
The Black Iron Interview
“Thank god I'm not crazy. I have real enemies. It's a tremendous relief to discover that someone really is after me.”
In 1977 Philip K. Dick gave a rare public interview during a French science fiction convention. In the first section, he speaks about the difference in respect the science fiction writer received in the US and abroad, specifically France.
In the second part, he speaks about his literary upbringing in Berkeley.
The third part is by far the most interesting. Dick describes a break-in he experienced that his lawyer credited to “the government.” He goes on to speak about illegal surveillance, COINTELPRO and his self-ascribed status as Enemy of the State. Dick also reveals that in his research for The Man In The High Castle, he stumbled across the etymology for “egghead.”
A Man of Genius Makes No Mistakes
I took three essay-based exams today, in a row. While waiting for the final one to begin, I sat through a number of English Majors discussing in detail the, sigh, “physics and metaphysics” of a certain TV show's series finale. I was wincing the entire time, mainly because I'm entirely sure I sounded exactly as they did the few days after the Sopranos came to its own inglorious end. To celebrate both the completion of my exams, here is something related both in content and pretentiousness:
For those interested, here's a collection of Joyce's love letters to Nora Barnacle. They read like a cross between glossolalia and a cybersex transcript. So, y'know, nothing new.
The Gernsback Singularity
Like a vintage wine, the near future of the mid-1980s only grows finer with age.
Phantasia Press hardcover art. Artist unknown. Click for the king-size version.
Phil’s Rapture
Philip K. Dick would have turned eight-one this last Wednesday. I’ve previously written about him, within the scope of a Scanner Darkly, but for his birthday I’d like to claim the first miracle that will hopefully lead to his eventual beatification.
By way of the combined efforts of Hanson Robotics, the University of Memphis, and the University of Texas, Arlington, (along with the consultation of the Philip K. Dick Trust, PKD was returned to the land of the living. Well, sort of. In honor of his exploration of the meaning of human being-ness, he came back in the form of Phil the android. Certainly this man-machine would bomb the Voight-Kampff test about six seconds in, but considering it was a hunk of machinery, its bestowed abilities were impressive
The robot was fully autonomous. In other words, it operated without human intervention. it tracked people coming in and out of the room with face recognition software, and would greet faces that it knew. It listened to verbal input, used complex algorithms that incorporated LSA to generate a response, and would respond verbally using speech synthesis. - The Philip K. Dick Android Project
Now, in 2006, Phil was on his way to Mountain View for a private showing to the employees of Google. Now, Phil was clearly unwilling to be displayed in such a manner to the company who will, eventually, be able to bodily recreate you from your browser cache and email archives alone. In protest, Phil pulled off a vanishing act: first the body, and then the head.
Admittedly, this is a tragedy. Hundreds (if not thousands) of hours – along with $750,000 – were put into Phil’s meticulous research and construction. And, quite unfortunately, Hanson Robotics’ lawsuit was dismissed.
However, I have a feeling that on the day he is genuinely needed, on the day that the robot uprising is in full swing and mankind is on the brink of destruction, Phil will return to us and bring peace. Call it an inkling, but that android is out there, somewhere, learning, thinking, becoming more and more human by the day.
Picture courtesy of the PKD Android project blog.
There Goes Another Novel
I've taken ill these last two days, so original content will have to be put on hold at least for a while. Considering today was spent intermittently napping and checking Google Reader, here are some fun links:
These two have been around a while, but they're always a blast. Strange Sisters and Gay on the Range collect covers of 1960s lesbian and gay pulp novels, respectively. They go anywhere from nostalgic and sentimental, to adorably campy, to just plain weird. There's also a few in disguise; purporting to be exposes ("Gay" slang dictionary for novelty purposes only) or "dramatizations" of vile, villainous and, dare I say, immoral acts of homosexuality. Now you'll have to pardon me, my newest shipment of completely straight physique magazines just arrived.
BoingBoing did a story on Cactus, a 24-year-old Swede who seems to release a new video game every third breath. Air Pirates resembles what I would have preferred last night's fever dreams to look like. If you don't feel like clickin' around or watching videos, here is the direct link to the download portion of his website. Cactus Arcade, a collection of seventeen (seventeen!) of his games is the brass ring.
New York Shitty presents Victoria Belanger's photos of a hamster inside a tiny recreation of the 4 train.
...and it is back to convalescing for me. Before I go, however, I'd like to remind all of you to keep track of the upcoming elections. Gay On The Range has declared a dark-horse candidate, so let's all remember to vote for...
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