PHOTO: MICHELLE STRAUSS OHNSTAD

"Organizationally, we were committed to to a few basic principles: Treat everyone with as much respect as he deserves (and no more), Avoid people who appeal to our vanity or ambition (they always have an angle), Operate as much as possible apart from the "music scene" (which was never our stomping ground), and Take no shit from anyone in the process."

-Albini

Should I Drive An XKE or a Tractor?

No good links to The Young Adults "It's A Complex World". Anyway, an utterly obscure reference. YouTube has this.

Bukowski Stealth Tribute Header

I think Buk wd like the idea of a tribute page in a bar. Whether Terroir|Tribeca is too fancy to have earned his appreciation we will never know. We do know that when he died, the last bar at which he was a regular cancelled/reduced their riesling order since it was his constant consumption of the stuff that kept inventory moving.

RIP MALCOLM

Saul Bellow is my Co Pilot

WWSBD?

"It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband. "
— Saul Bellow (Herzog)

Twitter Ate My Blog, Then Had My Mind For Dessert

Twitter is reenacting the development of tech & communication but at jump cut speed. We, the participants, are experiencing this meta evolution in dizzying fashion. Even Google and Facebook's respective arcs of development seem normal and measured by comparison.

The history of film was an accelerated version of the history of painting--and with painting as a model that medium accelerated pretty wildly. But even with Eisenstein, Riefenstal and other formal innovators it still took a few decades to get to Godard. There may have been other formalists I am not thinking of but JL Godard seems to represent the meta-moment, when narrative conventions are well enough understood to be truncated. The editing form also becomes part of the content. Literally "cut to the chase".

The evolution from the days of your Geocities site to your carefully designed & manicured Home page to a blog like this one to, to, to: 140 characters and being at a benzedrine fueled cocktail party 24/7 seems to have happened in the space between the frames.

I haven't posted to this blog for awhile and honestly it seemed like a kind of (outmoded)scrapbooking activity which might or might not address the question of "what am I looking at or thinking about" but it was never clear if I was really communicating or just writing a Dear Diary in public.

The nutty-as-a-fruitcake feedback loop of Twitter lets me know my ideas were heard in some fashion. Perhaps closer to brainstorming at a fun party with a lot of slightly drunk & hyped up smart people. I also think years of working in restaurants prepared me for the multithreaded bullshit sessions, sparring, goofing off and, lately, pretty interesting moments of connection with others.

At the same time, is it intoxication that leads to further insight or am I just turning into a drunk? #Infohaulism. Hrrm.

The metaphor of alcohol seems appropriate in many ways. Infohaulism is much like alcholism. As an occasional purveyor of webstuff for clients I have felt like an Alcoholic Sommelier of Information (tm). It's the hard stuff and I not only give out a tasting glass of the latest toys, tools and concepts. I am hitting my own private stock but my vices are not limited to boutiques. Infowise, I gleefully devour Sterno as well as Burgundy for breakfast often side by side. Twitter gave me a place to put all of that monkey-minded surfing, reading, clicking. Even worse, I got sugar pellets of approval at irregular intervals to reinforce my shitty habits. (Not my insight, I will attribute when I remember)

Am I preparing a yummy meal that will also sustain or (as Merlin The Mann said recently) am I just manufacturing potato chips all day and all night? Not even the cool kind, it often feels like we are mechanically, obsessively forcefeeding one another car trunkfuls of rotten Pringles.

The "We Were Promised Jetpacks" side of this: all the cool toys have been appropriated by businessman douchebag types. Is the ecology of Twitter somehow resistant to being digested this way b/c it empowers Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions graduates of Al Jaffee University? Or are we doing Satan's work for him by developing such advanced Weapons Of Mass Distraction?

Enough for the moment.