everybody’s clever nowadays

I only sort of mean that. Actually I don’t really mean it at all. I was thinking about the Great Big Web Crescendo, the Digital Swell, this Pixelly Everpresentness and the Gadgetisation of Everything (call it what you will)… and the line from the end of Rubber Ring — everybody’s clever nowadays — has been stuck in my head ever since. It even led me to indulge in a bit of a Morrissey stint on the cross-trainer at the gym yesterday — an interesting choice of soundtrack, given I don’t choose the Pope of Mope to accompany me in any kind of sweat-related activity, ever.

I have to say, though, that You’re the one for me, fatty, was especially rousing. Perhaps even worthy of a permanent slot in my woefully underutilised gym playlist (although for the sake of accuracy here, neglect of the playlist is only a byproduct of my altogether woefully underutilised gym membership).

I think about the everybody’s clever thing a lot. With regard to technology, I mean. I can’t really help it. It’s sort of my job to talk about it in a work sense [it being the impact of technology on our lives, with special focus on the improvements technology brings]. But it spills over into everything, unstoppably.

I can’t possibly go into this in detail right now. It’s 1.55am. So I will cut right to my roughly-hatched conclusion, boiling it right down to pretty much nothing. Technology is awesome. But we will always be stupid, however awesome technology gets.

And for all its vaunted benefits, technology will never save us time. Because any time it saves us we pour right back into it. Because our attention spans are so rent asunder, and our time so divided in the face of the Availability of Absolutely Everything at All Times, that we lose any time we might have gained having to operate in a default headless chicken mode, trying to remember what it was we were doing 30 seconds ago. Um, I think I might have overstated my case there.

It’s 2.09 now. Tomorrow is a public holiday, which means I have no set bedtime. I have 500 words to write now before I can sleep. Although I might settle for 250 words + a promise of very good writing behaviour (not likely) tomorrow. 

all things, everywhere, all the time

(And here, now.) I think I might have just been on my way to bed. But my Morrissey hits (yes, hits) marathon hasn’t quite finished playing out and I have half a glass of wine just sitting here… Plus it needs to be at least midnight before I can even begin to entertain the idea of a pillow.

These charming little mountain houses caught my eye just now. They’re probably not entirely structurally sound. But they’re beautiful and whimsical and just a little bit ethereal, which means they can get away with all the flimsiness in the world, should they wish to. Slipshoddily pretty is okay. Defunctly ugly most likely isn’t.

Morrissey makes me feel extremely happy. It’s odd. Maybe it’s an inverse proportionality sort of thing. All he needs to do is sing something like when will you die?  or I’ve changed my plea to guilty because freedom is wasted on me and I’m all awash with inner warmth and magnanimity.

Two things before bed. Or maybe more. I’m hardly one for counting.

Oh, and one before I start: I have been training Sylvie to do seal tricks. She’s like a mini panda crossed with a meercat. And also, just quickly, I just discovered sloths are cute! I think I thought sloths were the same thing as amoebas – somewhere in my head I must have made them interchangeable. Thank god for Google for clearing everything up. I might have gone forever without knowing the difference.

Right, but seriously now.

1. I have a real thing for pictures and stuff you can touch. Words are okay, but I’m a bit over them to be honest. I think that’s why I spend so much evening time on sites like A Journey Round My Skull and Anonymous Works. (And fabric and ceramics websites, etc.) Just filling my eyes with things I don’t have to think too much about. An antidode to the day’s ant-march of text and all its attendant braincramp.

I have finished studying until February. And in February I am going to study pretty (and also ugly) things — actual things, not just things represented by words — for a whole year. And it counts, credit-wise, towards all this postgrad nonsense I’ve got myself in for (which is quite possibly the most awesome loophole in the academic system that I have ever discovered). I think I have to use words to talk about the things, but I can live with that. This year’s study effort was fucking fucking awful. I hated it all. But pretty things will be okay.

2. This internet caper is quite something. I know I say that a lot. Quite soon I will have finished Christmas shopping for the entire family, on both sides, and I will not have set foot inside a shop to buy even one thing. (That’s no exaggeration, either — I have wrapping paper left over from last year and I have made all my cards. I might need to buy some more ribbon, though, although I think I am actually going to improvise, in a craft-Macgyver sort of fashion.) And as of today our wine is delivered to our doorstep. I’d order groceries online, too, but I have a bit of a thing for aisle-meandering. 

More stuff than you could poke even the giantest stick at, day or night. Morrissey would possibly not approve. Not that I would ever dream of supposing what Morrissey would or wouldn’t do — that would be bordering on the sacrilegious. As for me, it just makes my little head hurt, but mostly in a good way.

skull stuff

By God, this internet thing is something else. Just when I’m yawning in the face of Facebook and thinking it has nothing new to offer me, a whole new world opens up to me out of nowhere (but not on Facebook, usually, might I add) and I’m beguiled all over again, woozy as the first time it happened… but now without the accompanying screech of dial-up. The great cyber trapdoor swings open and a pixelly pool of glitter forms before mine eyes, all oasis-like and sugary.

All last week I was obsessed with all things astronautical. But I woke up yesterday morning and it had passed, leaving a small well inside me ready for my next bout of short-lived rapturising, which is usually not very far off.

I’m listening to the new Brian Eno album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea, in my new office. Both are extremely good.

Jillyfran called tonight to tell me a funny internet story. The internet is downright CRAZY!

I have been reading Kristin Hersh’s new memoir, Rat Girl. It’s fucken excellent. I just want to be her friend. That probably sounds weird, but I’ll put it out there anyway.

Sylvie’s back to stockpiling leaves, Doozer style, like never before, each leaf warranting its own squeaky fanfare. It’s how I know she’s happy. Her happiness, of course, being directly proportional to the number of leaves I wake up to find strategically placed in the bedroom doorway in the morning. She is also having a love affair with carpet. Until a month ago she’d never seen carpet before in her life.

Today I created a new email rule (I couldn’t automate it, though, so it will need to be manually applied): any email containing a word that wrongly ends in z — or should I say endz in z — will be deleted, irrespective of what else it might contain. I can’t imagine anything worth sticking around for in that kind of email, anyway. I stopped going into shops bearing wrongful Zs in their name a long time ago. Come to think of it, to be honest, I don’t think I have actually ever set foot in one in my life (just scoffed at the signage from afar, probably — what an uptight and boring little pedant I am). 

And now for the skull stuff and my latest internet fixation. Now that I have got Google Reader properly working for me again, and now that I’m not giving every spare minute of my day to hideous brain wrenching, I am free to stumble and marvel at leisure (well, not quite at leisure… that might imply that I didn’t have to earn my keep in ways that don’t — always — involve surfing the net).

In quieter times I keep an eye on The Rumpus and there, yesterday, I discovered A Journey Around My Skull. And, in particular, Psychic Explosion and the works of Adolf Hoffmeister. Fucken hell. And man that site has got a LOT of brilliant stuff on it. I’m dedicating at least part of my three-day weekend to giving it my undivided attention (as well as practising my conference talk, but we don’t talk about that). As well as getting ideas for new bookshelves on the book porn site.

That reminds me, soon — when I have even more time on my hands — I am going to update my things I like section and include all this stuff. Like Bookshelf Porn and A Journey Around My Skull.

The other day Frankie resumed. It’s on. She has a slightly different sense of humour this time around. It took me by surprise.

Bax in a box

Bax found a box with his name on it and made it his own. He’s not really one for photo opportunities, so I had to get a photo of it toot sweet, as Kath and/or Kim would say.

Speaking of French, I’m actually in the middle of internet stalking (well, trying to track down) my French friend Marie. It turns out there are quite a few Marie Lamberts in Paris. So I’d better get back to it… I may be some time…

this is not to scale

Sleep FTW.  Three-day weekend FTW. I woke up at 9pm tonight and made this out of old stuff and a bit of Photoshoppery. It felt awesome. I drank wine and put music on. That felt awesome too. It felt a bit like the good old me back again.

A few notes for my own personal operating manual, as witnessed in the last couple of weeks. (Not that I will learn from or pay any heed to these notes, of course… that would make far too much sense.) >>>>>>>>

1. I need pottering time, big time. If I don’t get it, I start making up nonsensical lyrics to songs. Like the fonts song I started making up today to the tune of Kokomo (a sure sign I’m spending too much time in Microsoft Word), which so far goes: Tahoma, Verdana, Gothic and Lucida…

2. I can do late nights or early starts. But not both at once. Actually – who am I kidding – early starts and me are pretty average and probably not to be advised under (m)any circumstances.

3. I like agreeing to stuff. And helping. And then I get to about 2 in the morning, the bones in my neck locked rigid, and I’m staring, possum-like, matchstick-eyed, at piles of A3 scribbles and a junkyard of an inbox and going ohfuckohfuckohfuck. 

4. The internet has absolutely screwed my attention span. But the internet is part of my job (and I love the internet!), sooo… sayonara attention span… I never liked you much, anyway.

The other thing I noted today – which doesn’t really fit in my life manual but seemed noteworthy all the same – is how much of a giant crush I have on Hugh Laurie. It’s quite weird, really. It’s probably on a par with the crush I used to have on Richard Greico once upon a time. 

I also spent a bit of today writing about dog shit and what to do with it. It was one of those what the hell am I doing moments. But Sylvie and I cracked up about it (she is being just the most playful little sprite at the moment… totally out of character) and put it down to being character forming.

(Seriously, though, you can ask me anything about what to do with dog shit in public spaces and I can tell you.)

Tomorrow I get to see Caroline, who I haven’t seen in ages. She’s getting married. I was just now thinking about us years ago, traipsing around Melbourne buying every secondhand sex manual we could get our hands on, along with old 70s recipe books (for their pictures of gelatinous puddings, mostly). We knew exactly what we were after back then. We were singleminded and utterly resolute in purpose.

I was also thinking of my Melbourne poem, which probably makes reference to the Kama Sutra and Angel’s Delight. But the poem is purely a paper-based artifact, and it is currently living in the Sweetman archives, so maybe some other time.

Oh, and some other things. We just bought a house and little old katyink is one year and one week old. They grow up so fast. Over and out.

no evil star

Or maybe I should call this My Secret Internet Life, but I’ll get to that later. If I can get rid of my dead leg and hold the most utmostest concentration, that is. Ow.

I typed that about 10 minutes ago and then lost complete concentration. As I am wont to do. But in my dithering I did (re) find this:

… I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root
and the real green thing will come

which is from this.

And I also found some other stuff. Plus I remembered the sleep game I played last night with myself at about 2 in the morning.

It went something like this (and I think you’ll see the pattern forming if you squint at the sequence very closely and cross your fingers and toes all at once):

Alvar Aalto, Basil Brush, Coco Chanel, Danny de Vito, ee cummings, Fred Flintstone, Greta Garbo, Harry Houdini, … , James Joyce, Ku Klux Clan, Lucy Liu, Marilyn Monroe, … , … , Peter Piper, … , Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek……

Okay and I’m bored with that now. It didn’t actually help me get to sleep, anyway, because I kept getting stuck. And when I got stuck I got agitated. And I also sort of overheated (in that cloying itchy-wool way you get when your mother tries to pull a tight jumper down hard over your head and it won’t go and you see stars and your skin flashes and prickles… and really you were warm enough already without the jumper).

I have a frustrating head. Sometimes I don’t know what to do about it. But night time head is the worst. Night time head can be a bad, bad thing to be lugging around (and so firmly attached) in the dark.

Today I noticed the daphne in my garden for the first time. I walked into town and saw girls with bare legs. It just seemed so audacious and wanton. And strangely summery. Bare legs! I cancelled appointments and felt good about it. I wore jeans to work and felt a bit scrappy.

This evening I accidentally discovered a blog I had set up and completely forgotten about, called NO EVIL STAR. I was trying to bluff forgotten passwords and hack my way into another blog (not this one). I thought I’d finally cracked the pesky code, set about my business, only to discover I was in an entirely alien blog (but also one of my own making, apparently, which was vaguely worrying to me but also perfectly harmless).

I still haven’t worked out the code to the blog I really need the code for. But I think I might do some resuscitation work on NO EVIL STAR anyway. God knows why and what rambling paths I will take it down. But why not.

(And what we have here, with NO EVIL STAR, by the way, is not an enterprising digital spirit creating yet another floaty ego in the digisphere. Oh, well, it might be a bit of that, minus the enterprising. But really it’s just old fashioned procrastination wearing very modern clothes. And on that note, back to some shit about symmetrical communication or something. Bye.)

the sky in postcards

It didn’t look anything like this today. I am about to drink brandy and warm my feet. Baxo is huddled behind the warm awning of my laptop screen. I am listening to Boomin’ Granny. I used to put it on repeat and let it go all night, just that one song. If you can call it a song? There was something calming about it. I saw you in the check out line – you dropped your coupons – and you were looking fine.

Just before, woefully underclothed at the bus stop, I had time to think about the Blog Explosion. (Funny how when you put capital letters on something it looks that much more noteworthy and like a Real Thing.) It wasn’t really a lofty or particularly probing train of thought. I started by thinking about myself. Which is a hard thing to help. I wish I could. I would like not to think about myself. It would be so much easier if I didn’t wake up with myself every morning. Not that I’m making excuses or anything.

So, an approximation of my bus stop thinking process:

ME: I should write that media release when I get home.

ME: But I should probably write a blog. I haven’t had the inclination to write anything whatsoever in ages.

ME: I’ve got nothing to say. God I’m boring.

ME: Or is it that everything else is boring?

ME: But I have to write something. 

(Picture me now squinting, straining for subject matter, coming up with nothing. A man carrying plastic bags sits down a bit too close to me. The bus at the corner honks louder and longer than is strictly necessary at the daydreaming driver in front, chastising them for their green-turning-arrow-oblivion. Plus it’s cold. It’s getting late. It’s nothing like anything you might see on a postcard.)

From there I wondered about our compulsion to blog. Not just to blog but to digitally proliferate with such fervour that the big ball of matter that is the internet doubles its volume every 11 hours.* 

I get it, most of the time. I get being online. I get why it’s good. I know what I like about it. I stay away from the dumb stuff. The web delights me. It is such a strange monstrous nebulously spongy thing. It’s one big bottomless cyber maw, rejecting nothing. It is revolutionary in big and small ways. It is also a bit revolting.

But the web is just a thing. We put it there, filled it up and made it what it is today (and a mere half of what it will be 11 hours from now). It’s just a macabre over-inflated warped hall-of-mirrors reflection of ourselves. The world’s newest biggest dumping ground, twinkling inside the lit-up husks of our computer screens.

In part the web interests me in the same way garage sales do. The casual but grubby voyeurism. The sheer boundaryless democracy of it. The bargains to be had and the pathos to be felt. Bobbing-headed car-dogs and posies of scented plastic flowers and desiderata plaques mixed in with pristine children’s encyclopedias, unchipped Crown Lynn and art heirlooms that haven’t seen the light outside the hicktown shed for decades.

But going back to me thinking about blogs as I waited for the bus, what I ended up thinking was: why do we do it? What is this human need… This need to chatter away about nothing?

Sometimes in the dark of night I like to personify the web. Metaphoricise it, if that’s even a word. It’s a game I play now that I’ve stopped putting Boomin’ Granny on repeat all night long.

Like: a giant driftnet catching flotsam and jetsam and stuff like the plastic shit you pull off six packs of beer.   

Or a big lucky dip barrel.

 

Or. Actually I’m out of ideas now. You could give me some more, if you felt like it. I would like that. There’s a comments thingy down below which allows you to do that sort of thing.

Now it is brandy time. On that, Lord Byron was enbalmed in a vat of brandy. I am the picture of restraint by comparison.

* A few years ago IBM predicted that by the year 2010 the web would double in size every 11 hours. I’m not sure if it worked out bang on prediction. Someone told me the other day the web now doubles in size every week. But who are you supposed to believe in this day and age? [And, whatever you do, don’t take it from me.] Someone also told me that 1500000000000000000 bytes of new information was posted to the web last year. Well, true or not – and I’m sure it’s probably staggering – a number that big means absolutely nothing to me. It’s like saying infinity plus one. 

I buy things off the internet in the dead of night (& don’t know what the hell they are)

Last night I said I would call this post I buy things off the internet in the dead of night etc, and so I did.

This is our official Damien Hirst internet purchase. It’s a photo of a bunch of unravelled TDK SA 60 cassette tape.

A friend came over for dinner the other night and said:

“Is that a real Damien Hirst?”

To which I said:

“Yes. Why yes it is.”

Never did I think I’d say that. Seemed like quite a strange exchange. I liked it, though. Considering I can’t really afford a million trillion + Euro bejewelled skull or a shark in a giant vat of formaldehyde. I think that’s probably part of the reason I purchased this online (in the dead of night, as the title so cleverly points out). And also because we collect this kind of abstractly music-related paraphernalia for the music room we don’t yet have. But I can see it already, this room, and I know exactly how it is going to look. (Kind of like I pre-order food in my head ages in advance of going to an old favourite restaurant where I’ve memorised the menu.)

The photo is called (and I quote):

“The scariest form of eroticism of a human memory chasing its own dismay.”

The thing that troubles me is that I don’t know what it means. I have tried hard to coax the meaning from it, but nothing. Just a big jumbled clump of tumbleweediness.

Do you know what the meaning is? I’d like to know. Really I would.

The words sound nice all put together, and the tangle of tape is suitably dark and shiny. Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe that’s all there is. Or else I’m missing something. Am I? Missing something?

head full of quandary

I sound a bit emo when I say that. I don’t really have a head full of quandary – no more than usual, anyway – we were just listening to Hissing of Summer Lawns, which started this. And having lamb shanks. Which is now the new Monday night thing. Sitting down to unhurried food, completely offline. (Don’t tut. I know how it sounds.)

I am on a glue break. I have to do do screen-gluing in small doses. Not for fear of asphyxiation (it’s not that kind of glue) – just because it’s fucking boring.

Things I thought about today:

capital G god

So I got most of the way through an article online today. That in itself is not remarkable (and neither is what follows, by the way). I was thinking it was pretty good. I was thinking, this is pretty well researched and constructed. Then capital G god came into it and all credibility was ruined. I stopped reading, suddenly cross. My attention span went the way of my hand-me-down, standing-on-last-legs faith in an instant. (I should probably say, though, that the faith itself took much longer to go, whittled back to whatever it is now over a course of maybe 20 years.)

Admittedly, the kind of stuff I was reading does occasionally have capital G god come into it. I usually let my eyes glaze over in those bits and read on, looking for the out. It’s really only when I’m not given an out that my heathen heckles start to  give me grief. It’s not the going to hell part that irks me. I’m pretty well reconciled with that. It’s the you duped me into thinking this was a rational argument and then you brought capital G god into it thing. I’m sort of regretting bringing god/God into this, now that I think about it.

What else?

the tiny parcel that arrived in the mail for me today, wrapped in brown paper

I didn’t know who it was from. It was tightly sellotaped, a cardboard pillbox. Inside there were two spoons for my spoonboard, from Pam and Dusty. One was from Mahora School and the other from Whanganui (at least I think that’s what it said – the writing is pretty small). I hung them up straight away. Not many people make a good spoon these days. Not many people send me carefully wrapped parcels wrapped in brown paper these days. 

dead-of-night panic (& the dangerous allure of internet wisdom)

What I [maybe] discovered today, drifting noncommitally in a long thin tide of search results, is that the most common time to awaken to night anxiety is around 3am. Apparently it’s the witching hour for the subliminally mentally frazzled. I don’t know whether to store this information away somewhere safe or chuck it back into the miles of surf like a frayed tennis ball. I don’t know how much to read into my weekly 3am wakeups now. Pure coincidence, or something more emotionally sinister afoot? Who knows. And do I really need to…

I should really get back to the glue thing.

trash and treasure

This is the post where my blog stats will go through the roof, a total blip on the seismograph. I’m predicting it now. For no other reason than I am going to mention s*x. And if there’s one thing people search on…

But let me start somewhere else. I’ll get around to the sex part in good time (although if you’ve wound up here by accident, looking for something salacious, then I’d move on right now).

By virtue of what I do – work in IT – and just because of a general curiosity about the technosocial landscape*- I often find myself marvelling at the sprawling great thing that is the internet and trying to conjure metaphors and analogies for it. My most favourite physical evocation/parody of the web is Dave Chappelle’s internet skit. Damn it’s funny, and kinda true.

I love the internet. I love its beauty and its shoddiness. The uncanny serendipity and the glorious smut of it. The strange juxtaposition of breaking news and fat women in white knickers. The epilepsy-inducing pop-ups and those dastardly Nigerian scamsters. The starbursts and strobing banner ads all mixed up with the poetry of Wordsworth, say. It’s outrageous. It’s wonderful. 

It’s one big giant mess of warped context, bad grammar and sickeningly infinite possibilities. It’s sensational and voyeuristic, the not-so-incognito domain of five-minute fame and deferred loneliness. The place where hubris runs unchecked and falls from grace are spectacular, and spectacularly public. It’s all schadenfreude and porn and a ringtone for every song you’ve ever heard (and will never want to again, after the ringtone hits town).

I love finding things. I almost love losing them again moments later, and my impossible internet goldfish brain. I am still a bit dubious about my weird compulsion to reach for the gold shiny thing in my wallet and wake up in the morning only to remember I am now the proud owner of something I don’t need. Or worse, something I don’t even want in the logical light of day.

There’s so much trash, and so much treasure. That’s the thing.

I grew up in Otahuhu, South Auckland, NZ. A pretty dangerous neighbourhood and sometimes the clothes would get stolen off our clothesline. Someone got stabbed at our local McDonalds and we never went there again. But the thing was, I didn’t have a rugged childhood at all. I grew up within a green, very English gated community within Otahuhu, totally at odds with everything outside its walls. I guess you could say I was protected and privileged. I went to school in the city. 

As children you can pretty much reconcile anything. It was just how things were. One world in here, one world out there. We were allowed to walk to the dairy at the top of Golf Road but no further, and only in a group.

Anyway, in Otahuhu itself there was a colossal barn, an emporium of sorts, called Trash ‘n Treasure. Sometimes, even to this day, I still fantasise about it. It pulled no punches. It housed exactly what it said it did: trash and treasure. Some nights I lie there trying to remember all the rows of wares. Buttons, imported junk, ceramic elephants, net curtains. That kind of thing. It was like a very early prototype for the $2 Shop, but on a far grander scale.

I think that was the moment when I fell in love with trash. Or maybe, more correctly, I fell in love with sifting through all that junk and siphoning out the treasure amongst it. I think that’s maybe where my first impulse to collect came from.

Tonight on my way home from work it dawned on me that the internet is a similar kind of triumph of bric-a-brac. It’s just like Trash ‘n Treasure.

I drove through Otahuhu for some reason not so long ago (maybe on a detour to the airport?). Trash ‘n Treasure shut up shop years ago, but for some reason I just wanted to do a drive-by and remember it being where it was.

I find some awesome shit on the internet, is what I am trying to say. My current favourite is www.therumpus.net, specifically Stephen Elliott, whose emails I receive every morning, along with Seth Godin’s. Both are high points of my working day.

Today a nice man gave me a self-hypnosis file just for doing him a small favour. I started playing it at work, just out of curiosity, but had to stop as it was putting me to sleep. I reckon Twitter is the best advertising in my world. Yesterday I literally ran from the office to buy a book I heard about via tweet. It was this new one, by Rachel McAlpine (the woman whose web words coaxed me through a mammoth deep-end of a web project last year, quite coincidentally).

Just before home time today I succombed to the velvety clutches of Amazon and bought as many Stephen Elliott and Seth Godin books as I thought was acceptable. One of which was My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats me Up.

Which leads me onto the sex thing. Lately I have been doing a bit of research, let’s say, although I can’t say too much about that right now or I may give some upcoming stuff away. The whole writing sex thing intrigues me. I really like talking to other writers about writing sex scenes. I used to squirm writing sex scenes. Sometimes I would even giggle aloud a bit.

Now I really enjoy it. It’s such a strange thing, but also quite liberating. But then there’s always the voice in the back of my head going your grandmother is going to read this!! Which makes me go a little bit funny and make me want to go back to PGness.

As subject matter, writing about sex and trash and treasure are probably tenuously linked. What am I trying to say? That there is beauty in baseness… in the carnal…? Na, I don’t know. Bedtime. Time for my self-hypnosis freebie. 

One small parting example of why I love the internet, though, from earlier this evening. I was looking for images of trash and treasure. So I googled ‘beautiful trash’ and what should come up but a picture of Kim Kardashian. Priceless.

* Adam Greenfield used this term in his session at Webstock a couple of weeks ago and I instantly resolved to steal it. He was one smart, smart dude.