The Glorious Future

As I've mentioned previously, I'm somewhat obsessed with the advancement of mobile technology. Most of my mythological ponderings involve the creeping repercussions of smart phones, and what I think they represent in terms of the very nature of information and how we interact with the world. It's interesting to me to be on the wave of such rampant technological innovation, and to see how quickly people adapt to the convenience of little magical boxes that would have been the subject of science fiction only ten or twenty years ago. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, now basically exists. Evoking the previously unattainable wonder of the Guide reminds us of where we were in the 1980's; to point out that I'm just talking about wikipedia on the iphone brings it immediately back down to the mundane. Oh yeah, I guess I can look up any topic I can think of with my phone...well, I've still got to go pick up the kids and then finish these reports before tomorrow.

Anyway, I just wanted to bring that up to point out something that somebody else made, obviously coming from a similar place. This Spigot isn't as needlessly philosophical as mine tend to be, but it is beautiful. Definitely check this out - explore the options presented by the site. As you're navigating the richly defined menus and musing aloud about what it is that you're looking at, think for a moment about what institutional entity could possibly fund such a professionally branded fictional device. This cost a lot of money, right? How long did they work on this?

And then, when you do find out who's behind this, that's the true gift - the moment where the surreal and the sublime intersect in a perfectly transcendent apex of wonder and confusion.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Pomegranate NS08

An Unsolicited Endorsement

I'm not promising anything here - my time on this planet is still stratified among a million different responsibilities, creative urges and necessary expenditures of my daily energy, but I wanted to poke my head in to mention something. This is a little off-tact for my blog, and perhaps a little too pointed for my usual bipartisan call to trivialism, but I'm going to go ahead anyway and recommend that every American should probably read Obama's "The Audacity of Hope."

So before you leave or gloss over entirely, a couple quick points and caveats:
1. Yes, the book title suggests that other names under consideration might have been "The Audacity of Rhetoric," "America: The Genericing," or "Look at me, I'm Barack Obama, I'm So Special, Naa Naa Naa."
2. Yes, if you hate the man now and are already convinced that he's wrong and radical, reading this book through that lens probably isn't going to rock your world (but it might, depending on the lens).
3. Yes, he already won the Presidency, so why am I still bleating on about him?

Well, he is your President now, so you might as well get to know him, right? A lacking familiarity with the man seems to be a common complaint among detractors. Others, subsumed by their adoration for his awesome stage presence would do just as well to read it - because contrary to the title, or the impression it gives of four-hundred pages of sweeping generalizations and feel-good epithets, like some sort of feature-length stump speech, the book is actually really good. If nothing else (and this is a fairly useless caveat to make given his other accomplishments of late), Barack Obama is a startlingly good writer. And more than a manual of political strategy or an egregious exercise in self-promotion, the poorly-named "Audacity of Hope" is a carefully wrought chronicle of the man's worldview, his perspective on everything from the constitution to the economy to what Americans value.

I personally think a more appropriate title would have been "Common Sense II: This Time It's Personal," because much like the works of Locke, the gravity of Obama's thought process is self-evident in his prose - unlike many politicians (and all pundits), Obama is not trying to energize his base or divine some all-encompassing theory; on the contrary, he seems genuinely concerned with finding language that will again allow Americans of different creeds to look each other in the eye, put down their talking points and look toward policies that will allow the country to move forward, guided by a careful consideration of the values that most Americans claim to hold, and yet never seem to agree on. His reflections on campaigning and acting as senator are honest and often self-effacing; he observes the climate of Washington and the immense pressure it imposes on politicians to become cynical, vote down party lines and only pay heed to those issues to which his or her constituents pay due lip service (and campaign contributions). While fully admitting that he is a Democrat and believes in typical Democratic principles, he observes the moral failings of both parties with an eye towards honest analysis and clear communication. At any rate, reading this book has lead me to to the conclusion that though he may be a stirring speaker, Barack Obama is also a brilliant thinker, even-keeled and incredibly circumspect. Some might see this as merely the impressive act of a calculating mind, a man keenly attuned to the machinations of politics and the words that will win him favor. But I think this book actually transcends the localized rhetoric of any one campaign or political cycle. Even if he wasn't a politician, this book would still be awesome.

Anyway, I'll leave it there, with an excerpt chosen to underscore the tone of his writing:

"In every society (and in every individual), these twin strands--the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity--are in tension, and it has been one of the blessings of America that the circumstances of our nation's birth allowed us to negotiate these tensions better than most. We did not have to go through any of the violent upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually remake themselves.
"But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.
"When this happens--when liberty is cited in the defense of a company's decision to dump toxins in our rivers, or when our collective interest in building an upscale new mall is used to justify the destruction of somebody's home--we depend on the strength of countervailing values to temper our judgment and hold such excesses in check.
"Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy. We all agree, for instance, that society has a right to constrain individual freedom when it threatens to do harm to others. The First Amendment doesn't give ou the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater; your right to practice your religion doesn't encompass human sacrifice. Likewise, we all agree that there must be limits to the state's power to control our behavior, even if it's for our own good. Not many Americans would feel comfortable with the government monitoring what we eat, no matter how many deaths and how much our medical spending may be due to rising rates of obesity.
"More often though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult. Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live in a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe, for example, that since 9/11, we have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism. But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and the most prudent Congress would struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally compelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic policies pay too little attention to the displacement of manufacturing workers and the destruction of manufacturing jobs. But I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands of economic security and competitiveness.
"Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don't even get to the point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don't like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people's sexual practices. Conversely, it's easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman's reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.
"In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. This is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedoms as evangelicals do of their right to worship."

Maybe that's a bit more than an excerpt, but I wanted to do justice to what I think this book accomplishes: elaborating on sound-bytes to the advancement of a central political thesis. This passage may still come across as too broad-reaching, but I chose it because it's from the beginning of a chapter, where he's setting an overall context for discourse. Does this sound like the musings of a radical? I hope not.

Legged Creatures

Watch now as I construct for you a complex analogy involving an octopus.

I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason to whether or not something catches my interest, whether I find myself invested in someone else's mythology or not. In the end I don't think there's any one thing that I'm looking for, except maybe a balance of all the different sorts of things that typically constitute fiction. When I'm first experiencing something, my nuance tentacles (or tentacles of nuance) reach out simultaneously to explore the terrain - some are seeking out story and characterization, and wrap their loving tendrils around every morsel they find. Others are looking for backstory, narrative voice, cultural context, political satire, religious symbolism, authorial perspective, literary allusion, twists, gimmicks and clever analogies. All these things. Sometimes there's a glut in one area and nothing offered in others. Typical "fantasy" is often like this, offering volumes of blow-by-blow historical background on people and places whose names have too many k's and not enough vowels. Once my "fake history" and "character archetype" tentacles have gorged themselves (which happens pretty quickly), I find myself with about thirty unsatisfied psychological appendages looking immediately elsewhere for sustenance. There are occasional acts of artistic genius that do meet my every need, and in these times I'm never sure quite what to do with myself. Watchmen was kind of like this.

A medium I have a very tenuous relationship with is video games. By their very nature video games involve world creation and exploration, which gives them huge bonus points on my Mythological Octopus Appreciation Scale (MOAS). But they usually stop there. This certainly isn't a rule, but between computer programmers, deadlines and the attention spans of their target demographic, there isn't much pull in the video game community for characterization or subtle machinations of plot (amazingly, this was much less true of games made in the earlynineties).

I actually find myself more interested in reading about games than playing them, browsing review sites and trailers for the most recent offerings then never thinking about them again. This is a purely unconscious act, and I honestly can't explain what the draw is; surely experiencing the product must be more satisfying than hearing someone else describe it? And yet, the reviews usually score better on the MOAS. Think about it. In a review I get a summary of the whole world of the game; where it starts and what points it hits along the way. I get a sense for what the goal is, and what it was like to accomplish it. If I'm lucky I might even get some insight as to what the game means in a larger context, whether it has any importance to the industry or to the person reviewing it. By comparison, the game itself can hardly compete (I think I'm probably in a niche audience for this sort of experience, but I recently ran across a game that offered commentary on the levels as a little bonus feature. As you ran around the lost temple swinging from ledges and looking for treasure, two of the designers would periodically chime in on what they were going for in the current area - how the puzzles had been paced to produce a certain emotional experience, etc. Needless to say, I was enthralled).

In a perfect world video games would all strive to encompass this much meta data. I often fantasize about such games, and I think it would be fair to call the premises of these creations "high concept." I have about half a dozen of them that rotate through my head on a kind of seasonal basis, each one drenched in totally unnecessary mythological depth (and when I use the word 'mythological' here, understand it to mean 'things I'm personally interested in'). When I'm lost in the pleasant haze of working out all the little details I'm convinced that my games would be immediately successful with everyone who played them. But I'm probably wrong about that.

Here's one of my ideas: the game would suppose the existence of a fictional video game company that had been active since the 1980's, a giant in the field along the lines of a Nintendo. Over the course of two decades and a dozen different gaming systems, this company had nurtured a now-veteran cast of video game protaganists, all of whom had appeared in dozens of titles over the years. In recent years the company's popularity had waned, and its characters, once national icons, were now mostly nostalgia fodder as a new generation of gamers moved on to the high-intensity low-value games of the modern era. This game (the one I'm describing) would be a retrospective on these nearly-forgotten characters, a kind of "Behind the Music" biopic (bio-game?) exploring where they were now. Each 'episode' would take the form of an extended interview with one of these gaming stalwarts - let's say "Flario" in this case. As Flario talks about the ups and downs of his career we get to play a level or two from the games that spanned it, starting with the blocky arcade sequences of his initial 1987 showing and working through time, including the misstep side projects ("Flario vs. Trigonometry" and "Flario Gets Sickle-Cell-Anemia"). His retrospective commentary is running through the levels and changes as we play, chiming in with "This was early in my career move, when they still had me wearing a green hat, they were convinced that was going to be such a big deal...not that you can really tell it's a hat, it's like six pixels..." When you awkwardly jump into a pit he would add, "Yeah, shoot, I've fallen into that specific pit about a thousand times. I wasn't very good at jumping then, and they wouldn't let me grab the ledge or anything, I just had to do that shrug-and-fall-in-front-of-the-screen thing. My contract was pretty restrictive in those days." It might get repetitive over time, but the first time you played it would be mind-blowing.

I've got like a dozen of these concepts if anyone's interested in taking one and running with it; they're all about this unnecessarily involved.

Important side story:

I recently got into a spat with one of my roommates. It was over something small and got blown way out of proportion, to the point where he's not really even living in the house anymore though he's still paying rent. I've been a little haunted about the whole thing the past couple weeks, and often find myself thinking about it as I walk to work, wondering whether I'm in the wrong and should apologize, or whether I acted appropriately and am just feeling codependant, etc. Anyway, when I got home yesterday I took off my work shoes and put them on the rack by the door, like I usually do. I've only had these shoes for about a week and I don't usually think much about shoe racks, so yesterday was the first time that I noticed an eerily similar pair sitting next to mine. On closer inspection, I realized that these were in fact the exact same shoes as mine - same brand, size, color, even the same basic wear-and-tear, so that I honestly couldn't identify which pair I should take as my own. In the same moment I realized that I must have been alternating pairs all week without even thinking about it. I wondered who they belonged to, and of my two other roommates (that I'm not in a spat with), one has smaller feet than me, and the other has gone away for three months to Chicago (where he no doubt took his nice dress shoes with him). This lead me finally to a profound realization, the indisputable fact that I have quite literally walked a mile in the other guy's shoes.

I think somebody's trying to tell me something (but I'm not sure what that is).

Environmentalism (Spoiler Alert: It's a play on words - I don't actually care about the planet)

I tend to think about the future a lot. Not in a goal-seeking, career-growth sort of way; it's really more of an abstract, pointless speculation sort of thing. Give me an entire day in a coffee shop with a notebook, and I'll come away with twelve pages of feverishly scribbled notes on the possible ramifications of the iPhone. When you do this professionally, they call it Futurology.

And there's a lot of hubub in the futurology arena about atoms and bits, how the world as a whole is moving progressively from the former to the latter and there's nothing we can do to stop it. This is a transition so natural that we won't even be aware of it for much longer - the closing of video rental chains because of digital downloads, the death of the DVD (and inevitable stillborn death of BluRay) for the same reasons, the obviation of personal snail-mail, file cabinets and dead-tree books thanks to laptops, e-readers and the Internet, and on and on it goes. People sometimes resist the concept of this movement, holding tenaciously to the mediums they love too much to let go ("People will never stop reading books! Nothing can replace them!"), but this is really just an act of preemptive mourning - there simply is no real debate to be had on the subject.

The cultural repercussions of this are staggering, obviously, and better suited to more robust futurologists than myself (a good discussion can be found in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital - I think he might've actually invented the Internet). I've been thinking lately about one specific ramification: as more and more commodoties are downloaded directly from the cloud (the current pretentious mot-du-jour term for the Internet), there's obviously less need to sell them in stores. Toasters and blue jeans will obviously never be digitized, but the prevalence of online shopping still means that brick-and-mortar stores can no longer compete with the cloud for either price or selection. Going forward, the only hope that physical retail spaces possibly have for continued existence rests with their ability to provide a shopping experience markedly more enjoyable than sitting at home in front of a computer (or really, sitting anywhere with an iPhone). In the Future (ie 2011), the only physical commodity of any value will be enjoyable environments.

We can already see this fact previsioned by the success of Starbucks, a company that decided to break into the coffee business 2000 years late and somehow came out on top, thanks mostly to earth tones and Jack Johnson. In hip young towns like Tucson, every strip mall is packed with food franchises emulating this strategy, trying to provide food, sure, but also (and maybe more importantly) a pleasant place to be for fourty-five minutes. The only major retail outlet seemingly bucking this trend is Walmart, where pale fluorescent lights bathe uncountable mounds of indiscrimate crap in some infernal representation of capitalism's worst excesses - the whole experience makes me think of Dante and purgatory and how maybe I should quit my life and work an orphanage in Africa to attone for humanity's evils. But I think Walmart's days are numbered (though that number may admittedly be quite high) - just by sheer girth and ubiquity it can compete for now with the cloud for price and selection on many of the cheap, crappy goods that people wouldn't think to buy online. But it's also kind of evil, so I'd like to think that's working against it.

This trend goes much farther than just retail. As globalization makes local community less inherently necessary, traditional stalwarts like churches have found themselves with fewer congregants. I was at a meeting recently where the main presentation was on growth strategy from a pariticularly successful megachurch. The megapastor started by admitting that the goal of his church, to bring people into a closer relationship with God, was actually impossible from an organizational standpoint. You can't just do that to people, and it's impossible to measure the success of your efforts with that well-meaning but totally nebulous yardstick. His conclusion was that the only thing they could even hope to succeed at was providing an environment conducive to forming a closer relationship with God. That's it. Just make the space. And, apparently, it's working. They have many thousands of people attending every week in a time when most community church's count themselves lucky to break fifty. I mean, whatever, I wouldn't want to attend a mega church, but the point stands.

So where's this all headed? I'm not sure. It means that libraries can still exist, even when books don't; people will still need a pleasant place to go and read. Maybe they'll serve coffee, and maybe the large touch screens in each corner of the building will just as easily browse music and appliances as they will books (I'm picturing a kind of iTunes-style CoverFlow thing on a larger scale). So they'll still be there, but maybe you won't be able to tell them apart from a Barnes & Noble or Virgin Records (as if those will still be around).

Of course, this is all assuming that virtual reality doesn't take off in the near future. As far as future-technology goes, it's made surprisingly few leaps in the last few years, but I suppose it's also inevitable. If that happens, maybe we can reclaim all those unsightly strip malls for community gardens. That would be nice.

The Trouble with Mood Lighting

(Ever since renewing my covenant with you, the reader, I have adopted a much more outgoing and socially conscious tone to my entries, speaking at length about the overtly self-serious topics of politics and religion,which many of you no doubt find regretful. But take heart, my hopes and dreams are still firmly anchored in trivial minutiae, and it is to that great cause which I devote this third and final lecture on moral relativity.)

Here's the thing. I do believe in a satisfying, intellectual sort-of-way that most people default to thinking about the world as either black and white or shades of grey, but I also have to accept that this premise is totally refuted by simple observations of American cinema. Generally speaking, people want a hero. Most people (if you exclude the French) feel uninvolved with stories that lack ethical polarity, where characters all mire around in the same indefinable swamp of activity that's neither very good or very bad, but just kind of...morally lame. We don't tend to like anyone in these kinds of fictional worlds, and maybe it's just because they hit a little too close to home - they make for poor allegory or fantasy fodder.

On the other hand, there does seem to be a large cross-section of the viewing public that embraces the opposite: clear moral tales where the good and evil factions are blown out into their opposite extremes. And I think many people rely on films and television for reinforcement and approval of the simplest black and white aspects of their beliefs. And yet, though low-brow action romps (where the Bad Guys are clearly marked as black-cloacked consciousless bastards - usually Asian men wearing sunglasses) may be incredibly popular, hardly anyone would accuse them of being good films, ie films of merit or importance. I would argue that the only films that can really get away with simple morality while still retaining some dignity are aimed at kids - grand epics like Lord of the Rings or Disney's typical offerings. Sure, the best of these attract just as many adults, but adults who are acknowledging at some level that they have chosen to enjoy a children's movie. Black and white ethics are stark and overly-simplified, which is perfect for kids. No one's going to fault them for that.

So if "great films" aren't going to contain obvious morality or a void of morality, where does that leave us? I personally believe that the true common ground, what people are really looking for from their cinematic landscapes, does not lie within the half-hearted swamp of 'somewhere in between,' but firmly in the worlds of both. Moral ambiguity is important - it makes for dramatic intrigue and sophisticated characters, but for whatever reason, the missing ingredient is almost always incomprehensible evil. Good is important too, I guess, but no one really struggles with Good, it's not a subject that keeps people awake at night. No, if Hollywood wants to bolster its sagging profits they'd do well to inject a little more unquantifyable menace into their recipe. And it doesn't have to be a really bad guy vs. a kind of normal guy, no (although this worked remarkably well in No Country for Old Men) - the evil just has to be in there somewhere, and it has to be dramatic.

Let me give you some examples, by illustrating what I consider to be "great" films. There's a risk here, that by showing my hand it leaves my whole argument vulnerable to subjective disagreement, but I'm willing to do it because I know I'm right. And also because these films we're chosen by other people. Here's the top 10 films from IMDB's top 250, as voted by the countless denizens of the Interwebs:

1.	9.1	The Shawshank Redemption (1994)	372,678
2.	9.1	The Godfather (1972)	317,736
3.	9.0	The Dark Knight (2008)	271,151
4.	9.0	The Godfather: Part II (1974)	180,116
5.	8.9	Buono, il brutto, il cattivo., Il (1966)	106,149
6.	8.9	Pulp Fiction (1994)	311,196
7.	8.8	Schindler's List (1993)	206,116
8.	8.8	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)	156,748
9.	8.8	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	217,063
10.	8.8	12 Angry Men (1957)

There are some dark films on that list. And those are the best (I'm going to mentally omit the last two, because I don't like Star Wars and 12 Angry Men kind of undermines my premise) rated films (in theory) of all time. Sampling selectively from the rest of the top twenty-five, we also get Psycho, Fight Club and The Silence of the Lamb, which all feature some pretty potently dark material, beyond the realm of most people's worldview comfort, balanced with a nuanced and very complex perspective on the vagaries of good and evil. Look at just the top three. Here we get multiple instances of confessed criminals, gangsters and vigilantes, all of whom balance poor decisions with good intentions, often trying to just make the right choice at important moments: doing right by their family and friends, fighting larger evils, etc. These films don't fit neatly into my dichotomy at all, and I think that's why they're effective. If you're going to subscribe to their worlds, the ethics aren't handed to you (or denied you altogether) - you've got to mull it over a little bit.

There's something else at work here, though. Ungraspable evil specifically goats most grey-vies, even those who normally find terms like 'good' and 'evil' impossibly over-simplified. If someone is kind of evil, and even if they've done something pretty obviously bad (like sexually assault someone), there's almost always room on the morality scale for sympathy. All you have to do is look further down the spectrum for perspective (ie people who have sexually assaulted lots of people) , and then you can start to think about what unfortunate life events must have lead to this person taking such a regrettable course of action. Well-adjusted, confident people don't spend their time dicking over others; human-on-human violence is almost always the result of fear or trauma or righteous indignation. No one really considers themselves "evil," and one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, etc. These are all platitudes obviously, but they're true, and doubly so if you've got a bit of divergent grey-ness to your worldview. But take someone who's unapologetically evil, inhumanly unremorseful, someone for whom there is no further on the morality scale to go (if you darken a pitch-black room, can anyone tell?) and that really gives something for everyone to chew on, regardless of ideological bent.

It Doesn't Matter if You're Black or White (Unless You're Into That Sort of Thing)

In my last entry I made the brief (but oh so compelling) argument that I'd found the true difference between liberals and conservatives, the atomic philosophical point that fuels the perpetually antagonistic stalemate of partisan politics and compels the twenty-four hour news channels into unyielding fervor. It is not about gun control, or abortion, or varying emphases on the term "freedom," nor any other conveniently superficial issue. No, it's simply a preference of expression - whether you believe that the 'answers' to the world's 'problems' should be expressed in terms of absolutes or thoughtful relativity, black and white or shades of grey. I'm going to write more about this now (and this time we'll see if I'm familiar with English words other than 'nuance' and 'distinction').

Even if you buy my first premise, you might be asking why I insist on linking the monochrome/greyvie population with the two major political parties. Won't such cavalier oversimplifications of people's hard-fought worldviews satisfy none and alienate all? Maybe. Actually, ironically, I bet that only the monochromes will feel put-off. The grey-vies will probably be pretty into it. Let's continue.

Black and White means Good and Evil, the basic proposition of traditional Judeo-Christian morality. Sure, everyone makes both good and bad decisions throughout their life, but at the end of the day you end up in one of two places: perpetual bliss or eternal damnation. There's no middle ground in finality, despite the middle ground of most people's decision-making career. Perhaps it's a matter of weighting percentages, as in you just need to shoot for 51% good to make the cut, but that seems a little arbitrary. For many it's a matter of having been saved by belief, so that their less-than-perfect track record on Earth is given a dramatic (and some would say unfair) boost in the final tally.

Eastern religion is usually attributed with the 'grey' slant on good and evil - there's no judgment here, both bad and good are necessary aspects of life, caught in an eternal dance where one never surpasses the other and neither ever disappear. This is the ying and yang, Shiva as Creator and Destroyer, and a whole rainbow of reincarnation options when it's all said and done. If you're kind of good, maybe you'll get to be a lion. If you're kind of less good, maybe you'll be a gazelle instead. There's no angst here as to whether the morality switch has been flipped on or off, because it's really more of a dimmer. The mood lighting of the soul. Am I saying that all liberals are Hindu at heart? Well, yes, but that's not very American, so no. I'd go with "kind of Christian," but...forget it, let's just call it Anglican and move on, shall we?

(I do think there is middle ground here, especially if you bring Emanuel Swedenborg into the discussion. Here we have a view of spirituality and the afterlife that seems compatible with both worldviews - DT Suzuki hailed Swedenborg the Buddha of the North for this very reason. This casting of heaven and hell still presents a basic dichotomy: Heaven is Good, and Hell is Bad. But, and here's the rub, there are infinite degrees within heaven and hell. Some people live "on the outskirts of heaven," others in the lower earth, or the desert, or to the north. There's a whole other heaven for polygymast Muslims who had the other nine commandments down. It's a varied place, with many shades.)

So this gets back to the political thing. I don't really care if you or I are grey or monochramtic in how we consider the minutiae of our lives, because we'll work with whatever we've got, but what kind of leader do you want? That's the question that I think most election rhetoric is really trying to get to. Do you want someone who will take a hard line on anything and everything, or someone who will thoughtfully muse on the possible repercussions of a given subject? Warrior chief or a philosopher king?

And I know you think I'm overstating the point, I hear your complaints, but in this case you're wrong. There are such thing as thoughtful conservatives, true. But when a grey-vie is reflecting on a situation, he knows there's no ideal outcome, and has already resigned himself to a compromise based on the various mitigating factors. The final decision is probably something like "okay, the best we could have done under the circumstances." A monochromatic worldview still allows for moral ambiguity, but only in the short term. The goal isn't to reach a compromise, but to make a decision - everything considered, is this good, or is it bad? And 'bad,' in this case, is an all-or-nothing proposition. Once the discussion's over, that thing, whatever it is, is not with us. Therefore, it is most likely against us (if you're unconvinced, just think Freedom Fries). And there's a good reason why most black-or-white decisions fall mostly onto the conservative platform. There are certain concepts that seem *obviously* good, like having babies. When you make the subject more complex, it becomes ambiguous, and there's no obvious good on the other end of the spectrum (not having babies?). If we're just shooting for 51%, this will fall back on the simplest good nine times out of ten. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Now, the next obvious question: aren't there hard-nosed liberals in the world, who make black-or-white statements about those very same ambiguous outcomes? Yes, there are athiests who get together in groups just so they can all not worship a god together. Yes, of course, and these people really are the worst human beings on the planet.

Election Special!

Like many people (specifically the kinds of people who also do this), I spend a lot of my time shoehorning other members of the species into neat little boxes. I’m not in any way proud of this, but when I’m interacting with people I don’t know very well I often find myself sizing them up, cataloging and indexing them for easier future reference. It comes out of insecurity I suppose, as if I need to make sure that their existence won’t shatter my preconceived notions of the world, that I can go on thinking the way I do about society and culture despite the addition of a new and unmeasured variable.

For the sake of efficiency I would really like to know just how many boxes there actually are, and I devote altogether too much mental bandwidth on this specifically fruitless pursuit. In many ways my mythology acts as a kind of workbook for this process, and I have the unfortunate tendency of burdening my characters with entire fundamental philosophies just so I can put them in a room together and watch them hash it out. Unless you’re George Orwell (and you’re probably not), that’s probably one of the surest ways to ring a subject completely dry of any potential nuance or depth.

My favorite classification system is the two-box model, always expressed as a fully contained absolute, as in: “There are two kinds of people in the world: the haves and the have-nots; those who have read Dostoevsky and those who haven’t; people who wash their hands after they pee, and people who don’t pee on their hands, etc.” I enjoy the audacity of these statements, the unapologetic finality of their formulation. There’s something invariably compelling in believing that a two-box declaration could be true, even if it does demean its subject by suggesting that an issue can be neatly divided into two mutually exclusive and polar opposite properties. I believe this is why so many of our foundational institutions are based on the premise of a two-box declaration - liberal or conservative, rich or poor, saved or damned, us or them - because they’re fundamentally easy to grasp.

My two-box-set of choice comes from Borges, who claimed that everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. I often pull this out when I reach an impasse in a debate, because I really do think it encapsulates an insurmountable difference in world view. And if I just can't agree with someone, I content myself with the admission that they're probably just a member of the other group (I'll leave you to guess which party I subscribe to, though I will say that Aristotle strikes me as a bit of a prick). The nuances of the distinction could make a blog entry (or a series of books) on their own, but it basically comes down to this: an Aristotelian believes that meaning and truth are found only in front of the eyes, and a Platonist believes they’re found behind them. Either the world exists on its own, and we’re here to observe it with our limited senses and do our best to describe our findings, or we’re the ones creating and experiencing the meaning all along, and we simply project our creations out onto the world. This is often recast as science vs. faith, or rationalism vs. empiricism (if you're a philosophy dork). Either way, I'm a fan.

In the past couple weeks, however, I’ve stumbled across what may be a new favorite. It’s a fairly basic formulation, but I think it neatly summarizes the national divide that dutifully rears itself every four years (much more often for most people) as Americans again decide whether it’s the Republicans or Democrats who will save/destroy the way of life that they’ve come to enjoy and rely on. Of course, many people are too mature to be goaded into this debate; they’ll tell you that all politicians regardless of title are liars and shameless opportunists, and these people are obviously correct. But for me that makes national politics just another interesting component of the American mythology, be it one that has further reaching implications (arguably) than what’s currently happening on Lost.

And no, my revelation is not that all people are either liberal or conservative. That’s flagrantly obvious and not even true on its face - very few people are explicitly either, though they may back one side or the other when up against the fence. No, I’ll let you guess the parameters of my new divide, as it occurred to me during the first official McCain/Obama debate a few weeks ago, hosted by Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren. When asked at what point a human fetus becomes a human life (which is an ever-so-slightly more nuanced way of rephrasing the pro-choice/pro-life debate), Obama answered,

“Well, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion because this is something I — obviously, the country wrestles with. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue. And so I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention. So that would be point number one. But point number two: I am — I am pro-choice. I believe in Roe v. Wade. And I come to that conclusion not because I’m pro-abortion but because, ultimately, I don’t think women make these decisions casually. I think they wrestle with these things in profound ways, in consultation with their pastors, or their spouses, or their doctors [and] their family members. And, so for me, the goal right now should be — and this is where I think we can find common ground — and by the way, I’ve now inserted this into the Democratic Party platform — is: how do we reduce the number of abortions? Because the fact is is that, although we’ve had a President who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down. And that, I think, is something that we have to ...”

And then McCain, for his part, answered:

“At the moment of conception.”

This was basically the tone of the entire debate. And it was useful to me, because it revealed a fundamental difference between the two candidates that I wasn’t expecting to see. That distinction has blossomed in a couple conversations I’ve had since then, to the point where I’m now willing to embrace it (until I’m forced to move on) as probably mostly true, and it goes like this: there are two kinds of people in the world (or at least in this election cycle) - those who believe the world is black and white, and those who believe it’s shades of grey.

Discuss.

I was going to expound on this further, but I think I’ve reached a logical word limit, so I’ll write more in a followup post.

Superheroes and Death Rays

Ah, back from my summer hiatus (pretty tidy excuse, everything considered).

I've been on a bit of a superhero comic kick lately, which is as notable for me as it is decidedly not-notable for people like me, for most every other white male twenty-something bachelor who grew up in the 80's. I've never really been into comics. I'm very into the concept of comics -- I find their ADD-friendly form factor fantastically alluring, but I haven't come across too many that pack the kind of soul-battering psychological heft that gets me through the day. The new Batman movie helped, spiraling me into a week-long mini obsession with the more 'distinguished' Batman comics: The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, what have you. The best of these for me was Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, where Batman visits the Joker in Arkum Asylum because he's genuinely concerned about their relationship. He's realized somehow that he and the Joker are not really people but actually the manifestations of polar opposite logical extremes, and as such will be perpetually locked in battle until one finally kills the other. This is really disheartening to Batman, and he wants to see if they can't just talk it out.

In general it seems like the Batman archetype has been especially fertile soil for comic writers, and almost every heavy hitter in the medium has had a crack at telling the Bat story at some point in his or her career. This might be because Batman is one of the few A-list superheroes who isn't actually a superhero, doesn't have any superpowers to speak of (other than the dubious power of 'super detective', attributed him whenever writers have to explain why Superman would ever want his help with anything).

Now, I'm not going to turn this into some kind of Batman blog (for the same reason that I am never going to ever mention Star Wars), but I do think superpowers are kind of a strange literary creature when you really think about what they are. I think about science vs. magic alot, how science has gradually replaced magic as our goto tool for causing miracles in a non-religious context. Literature (and perhaps reality) once relied on magic to both invoke and explain away supernatural phenomena - teleportation, curing disease, levitation, etc. At some point, maybe once Frankenstein was convincingly brought to life, we switched our metaphor from magic incantations to chemical formulas, the wizard traded in his wand for some brightly coloured test tubes, and we haven't really looked back since. My mythology relies heavily on technology as a foil for spiritual or supernatural 'magic,' and I'd argue that most allegories choose either one or the other (sometimes both) to get their ham-fisted point across.

But superpowers, they aren't really either. They've got elements of both, and sometimes lean more generally towards science (as in the cases of those countless misfortunate souls who fell into a vat of radioactive something-something and came out the other side with glowing eyes and a sweet leotard), but Superman's not a biological aberration, and he's definitely not a wizard. Maybe he's from a magic planet or something? I'm not really sure what to do with superpowers, but they're a pretty firmly entrenched pillar of the American mythology. If you're just following pop culture, watching the seemingly endless train of superhero blockbusters that grace our cineplexs, you might think that they were the only form of escapist fantasy the western world was really into. Maybe they're popular just because they require no background. They don't echo the traditions of ancient cultures or reflect the strange possibilities of human invention, they just simply are. Superman can fly, the Flash can run really fast (because of a ring? What's that all about?). End of story. Bring on the bosomy villainess and let's get on with this thing.

So, yeah, that's all I've got on that. In an almost unrelated note, I'd like to briefly mention some real life technological magic that's pretty entertaining. I'm referring of course to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (read: massive death ray), taking up 27 km of prime real estate on the France-Swiss border. I don't have any real reasons to bring this up, but I do have two fake reasons that I'm willing to justify if I must.

1) This thing actually might help bridge the disconnect between superpowers and technology, since photographs of it look eerily like they were pulled straight from a comic book:


(more photos here)

2. Trying to grasp even a basic understanding of what this thing does requires accepting statements that sound like the brainchild of Arthur C. Clarke on his third cup of coffee.
From wikipedia: "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons...When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics..."

The best bit is where the article admits that because an experiment of this magnitude has never before been attempted, no one knows for sure exactly what might happen. It has been cited by some (yes, actually) as a doomsday device, "as high-energy particle collisions performed in the LHC might produce dangerous phenomena, including micro black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles." If you have any free time I would really encourage you to pursue the fractal depths of this subject. I've found that the deeper you go, the more the material shakes off its conservative scientific mantle and fully embraces the pure indulgent joy of magical surrealism.

I will leave you with this gem, from the wikipedia article on vacuum bubbles (one of the apparently plausible apocalyptic repercussions of flipping the switch on the LHC). I will have you know that this excerpt is both a) properly cited from an honest-to-goodness scientific journal, and b) "the best piece of English writing" that my friend with a PhD on the subject of English literature has ever heard.

"The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."

Alan Moore's got nothing on that.

Back from the Brink

Oh yeah, I have a blog. I guess I should update it.

I've been incredibly drained lately, and I can't seem to figure out why. I'm worried that it might be the wearying hangover of indulging too much in my bloated and unwieldy mythology. Perhaps my brain has become so saturated with the desperate impossibility of turning my inner world into a full-time proposition that the remaining gorged pink mess is slowly suffocating my will to live. Faced with no escape from perpetual escapism, I'm now drowning somehow in the epic failure of my obsessive and unforgiving imagination. Or, more likely, I was bitten by a tick and have Lyme disease. I really hope that's what it is. I'm kind of obsessed with insects, and having such an intimate relationship with one would be pretty satisfying.

Anyway, before I die (or fall asleep forever), I'd like some opinions on whether fiction is a good idea or not. I go back and forth between the two camps - that good fiction can transport you to another world of ideas, perspectives and adventure, or that fiction is fun for little kids but otherwise pretty self-indulgent and irrelevant to the concerns of money and life and stuff adults are meant to think about all the time if they hope to retire / buy a house. This isn't an especially original debate, and I could fill my gullet with it by perusing Yahoo! user-groups if I so chose, but I'm actually not really interested in that question. At all. In fact, I don't know if I really buy that that debate even exists. Sorry I brought it up. Let me start over.

Obviously there is fiction out there that's meant for kids and undiscerning escapists, and this can take the form of genre novels or TV shows or movies or whatever. People don't really read anymore, so let's lump video games in there too. I think people used to be interested in "serious" fiction as an extended thought experiment, or applied poetry - the works of the Greats are all studies in language, classical philosophy and morality. But those topics are pretty much covered now, and so modern literature, or post-modern literature, or post-literature...whatever...books written in the past twenty years that do have swear words but don't have vampires, those books are left with a pretty uncertain place in our culture. I've tried getting into them, and they tend to be about nothing, except for maybe the wisp of an experience. They're fun sometimes, but they're not very relevant to my life.

I would bet that most people read a lot more non-fiction than fiction these days because it's okay to care about it, because it actually exists. Documentaries are quickly catching up with traditional narratives in the box office, real-life blogs dominate the Internet, and Reality TV is so big and obvious that even mentioning it seems like a waste of everyone's time. But there's a catch to all of this, the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and that's what I'm trying to get at. Real life isn't really inherently interesting; it only becomes interesting once you can put it into a story, contextualize it and impose on it all of the themes and arcs and plot of fiction, cut it down and carefully edit it so that the pacing is more palatable and identifiable. Non-fiction is only enjoyable once it has all the characteristics of fiction, at which point the difference between those two concepts is somewhat moot; a small quibbling difference in scripting and authorship and little else.

The reason I bring all of this up is just to encapsulate a major frustration in thinking about this mythology all the time: creating a world is pointless, because it's never going to be as good as re-editing the real world.

But here's another thing: I'm obviously not the first person to be frustrated by this, and we're now starting to see the classic process of fictionalizing non-fiction working in reverse. Follow me here, that would entail the non-fictionalizing of fiction. There are some basic examples - the whole fake documentary thing, This is Spinal Tap and The Blair Withch Project. But the process is also sublimating itself into regular narratives. The British version of The Office was meant to be a fake documentary, but when it came over here, the American producers ditched the premise but kept its trappings. The camera shakes and goes in and out of focus, it catches awkward angles and occasionally spies on people unawares between the blinds of a window. Arrested Development uses all the same techniques. Movies, too, have been doing this a lot - filming in real locations rather than back lot sets, permitting bad or awkward lighting and shaky angles. Adding YouTubey content, trying to emulate the runaway success of YouTube, itself yet another supposed nail in the coffin of purist fiction. I think glossy filming is the visual equivalent to careful prose; in both cases people instantly know that they're being sold something, that they're not just observing some version of real life. Take away the gloss and you've got something. Reality TV, if nothing else, exists at the perfect crossroads between these two approaches; at any point in time you can't tell if what you're watching is more real than it is fake - is it real people forced into unrealistic scenarios, or actors playing parodies of themselves in real life? The Real Housewives of Orange County truly is the transcendent medium of our culture. I'm glad we've got that settled.

So then, that's got fiction and non fiction squared neatly away. Now the real question: how does one de-mythologize a mythology?

Under the Influence

I've been traveling a lot the last couple weeks - France last week, back in Pennsylvania for a couple days and now in western Canada for a friend's wedding. Between the time zones and work thoughts I can't really tell whether I'm coming or going; without downtime to meditate on anything in particular I've been taking things more at face value, navigating life one moment at a time. Which is nice. Travel is about the closest thing I've found to true therapy for my affliction, because whenever I can take my daily situation for granted I immediately do; once stimulus is down I give my thoughts permission to wander off in richer pastures of their own. Which is also likely why I seek stressful work - it keeps me present. But with travel, all this travel - it also means a lot of airport and train time, and in those interstitial moments I've been fully enmeshed in the mythology, careening haphazardly through it as it touches off of bits of the landscape fleeting by the train window. I'm so deep in it right now that I couldn't even encapsulate it without signing a three-season sixty-episode contract, so I'll focus instead on something a little less indulgent (at least a tiny bit less indulgent).

My thoughts have still been swarming around the idea of a TV show, a serialized story about people in an office and the weird things that happen to them. The show takes place at an indeterminable point in the future, and though it starts innocently enough it invariably ends (about three seasons later, mind you) with one man at the center of the earth confronted with the controls to the planet. But I haven't been focusing on the whole arc recently, just the initial setup, the first few tactical movements that get the plot moving in an engaging direction, making it familiar-but-captivating enough that my hypothetical audience will track its inevitable path into weirder territory.

I'm going to get into the non-indulgent part in a minute, but first, how's this for a setup? In the intitial half-hour we establish that this show takes place some time in the future (when exactly isn't clear, nor is it vital), and that there are interesting, normal-seeming characters working together at the large and ambiguously motivated Spigot Corporation in some big city. Some are more motivated than others, more entrenched in the office politics of making and selling competitive and cutting edge hand-held electronics, worried about the overseas and youth demographics, worried about streamlining the interfaces and functionality of devices so that they can create a seamless work experience for the consumer, etc. Others are more focused on making their colleague's lives less pleasant and/or finding love in the cubicle across the aisle. Others still are hotly debating the course of government, worried about the larger scale issues of the world that can't be immediately felt in the daily grind of the office. This is normal life in the twenty-first (?) century. And then, suddenly, there are explosions, and lights going off and on, and network-tv sparks flying from computer monitors. People are running around and screaming and hitting their heads on the fluorescent lamps, and when everything finally settles down we find out that everyone is basically okay, but they are now trapped in the building. What's going on outside is unclear - it's political and societal, but by and large it's out there, and in here the lights are still purring and the walls are still intact. And for at least the first season, the Spigot Corporation's employees remain trapped in their sprawling work complex, living together and eventually even continuing their work. And the tensions of close-quarters relationships ensure enough melodrama for at least a 35% crossover audience with Grey's Anatomy, while I slip weirdly mythological science fiction material into the B-plot (and eventually the A-plot) of each episode. I could sell that, right?

But here's the deal. I'm not concerned with the structural padding of the show, only the themes that I'm able to introduce along the way. Among these are all the things I've mentioned earlier in this blog and countless more - the jungle, Internet spirituality, the forms, time travel, all of it. Even a space-adventure TV show fabricated from the unconscious workings of one employee's mind (though help me, I'd never explain it like that). And with all of these things, I'm completely convinced that I've hit upon original ideas never before imagined by the unsuspecting TV audience. While I know statistically that there really are no original ideas left (and philosophically, that original ideas aren't even a desirable goal), I still can't shake this obsession, firmly attached to the mythology that it is, that these characters and settings and plot-points are my own and no one else's. I don't think the ideas behind them are, or even the general themes, but there's still an undercurrent of elitism here that I would just as soon nip in the bud and get on with getting over myself.

So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to a couple protagonists from the show, and then tell you about the blatant literary influences that informed their creation in my mind.

The main character - let's call him Jack, because he's played in my mind by the same actor who plays Jack in Lost (whose season finale I'm pretty friggin pumped about). Jack's a higher-up middle manager at the corporation, in charge of overseeing the activity of many divisions. His mind is torn in so many directions by his work that he can no longer keep track of the chronological narrative of his life. Like the protagonist of Quantum Leap he wakes up every morning in a bed in some strange city and tries to piece his life together by the commitments on his schedule and the meetings he's reminded to attend. The only fabric holding him together is his own internal narrative of relationships and personal themes; otherwise he's one of the first true victims of post-time, moving back and forth through the time line of his life according to the dictates of his mind, and oblivious to the essential problems or exploitable opportunities of such a skill. I have all kinds of justifications for how this works, but none as evocative as the absence of justification in Slaughterhouse V. For all extents and purposes, Jack has become unstuck in time. So it goes.

Then there's the "other" main character - let's call him Locke, for the same reasons listed above. He works in the coding pit, exploring and defining algorithms of wireless connectivity and intuitive usability. His job is to make devices that will work the way that people expect them to, and even intuit what the consumer will want before they know they want it. According to the statutes of network TV stereotyping, this means that Locke is really into math and patterns (but unlike the statues of network stereotyping, he's more casually philosophical than humorously nerdy). In the course of his duties he's recently hit upon a very specific pattern that's been coming up repeatedly. It comes up especially whenever he's been able to distill certain complex functions (such as, "what people want") down to their basic formulas. Yes, just like the protagonist of Pi, Locke has discovered the "ultimate sequence" that holds within it the secret to life. And yes, just like in Lost, it can probably be expressed in a series of numbers, or at least some kind of wave pattern, that occurs repeatedly throughout the show.

I've also been thinking about a kind of "other world" that the characters of the show discover and explore through most of the first season. It's kind of like a virtual reality, kind of like the Matrix, kind of like a culmination of the Internet's potential, kind of like a half-dozen episodes of Red Dwarf, kind of like the spiritual world, kind of like a lot of things that probably aren't as connected as they are in my head.

En Francais

I'm in France this week, filming a promotional video for an exchange program our college has with the University of Bordeaux, and doing my best to play the role of a jet-setting photog type. I think I'd need one of those ratty Turkish neckerchiefs to do the part justice, maybe some chest hair and gold-rimmed sunglasses. Oh well. C'est la vie.

I've found that the mythology usually recasts itself significantly while I'm traveling. The worlds I create in my mind are like a strangely-wrought defense mechanism; they help me contextualize the events of my day in a way that I can process without constantly overturning my foundational beliefs. Though the parts generally stay the same (with periodic additions), the construction of the whole mythological world is always shifting to accommodate the needs of the moment. I'm inclined to think of this as a weakness, an addiction even, because it means I'm often not really taking things at face value, only selectively digesting those useful to my secret project. But it also may be a bit of a wash - I'm not convinced that anyone can fully embrace other cultures without some filtering through their own, and if my system doesn't lend itself towards hasty judgment of others' actions and beliefs than I could probably be doing a lot worse. This is my first time in the land of the frogs, so naturally my addictive self has been on the lookout for new mythological fodder.

Last night Sean (my colleague) and I attended a speech at the Bordeaux museum of modern art. It was being simul-translated by our correspondent with the University here, so we were there out of respect to her, not knowing ahead of time anything about the actual presentation. The subject was utopian architecture, focusing on a post-modernist "anti-architect" from the 1950's by the name of Yona Friedman and his gang of like-minded anarchist buddies. The work itself consisted of a series of crude geometric shapes overlaid on crappy photographs of Paris. But with each variation of that theme, with each minute change in sloppily applied color, the presenter had prepared a lengthy and exuberant discourse on the pure bliss of Friedman's genius. It was really about the most pretentious thing I've ever experienced, and I don't say that with disdain as much as with bemused wonder that the speaker could deliver the whole thing with a straight face. What looked to be a five-year-old's scrawled rendition of the planet became a prophetical journey into the networks of the future, an environment-creating machine, a discourse on the horizontal and vertical ideals, a land of dreams created by dreams, a confused, uncertain meditation on desire, private property and sex.

And the room was pretty full - and people were listening to the French translation through their headphones, enraptured. Sure, it was interesting in a removed, intellectual sort of way, but I was wondering the entire time how this phenomenon could have spear-headed an entire movement, when none of it, literally not a scrap of it, even existed. It wasn't even style without substance, but simply nothing. There were no buildings, no plans, no output. This man had devoted his life to the absence of a concept. Some lines on paper, and the words dream and architecture volleyed back and forth in every permutation available. In my professional opinion, we were listening to a lengthy justification of one man's creative reaction to his own personal experience of the world around him. And because we were doing that, his work existed a little more than my own mythology does. The difference being, this guy's life-long dedication to self-indulgence made him a hero (at least, in the eyes of this largish French audience).

I'm not jealous, if that's the reaction I seem to be getting at. I doubt this Friedman guy is very happy, after being allowed to delve this much for this long into his own disconnected psychological musings. What I am wondering, is whether someone like this could achieve the same level of fame now. In the 1950's I think trends were probably easier to pick up on. Mass media was still a debatable concept, and culture was more localized, more easily manipulated by some especially charismatic figure. By contrast, culture no longer faces a glass ceiling of exposure. The internet means that every idea in the world is equally available to everyone at any given time, and people can hop on and off of thought-trains on a whim; there's no scarcity of culture to drive the demand. It also means that people can wholly invent their own culture, which I think I've more or less done.

In a broader sense, I think the internet means that everyone must invent their own culture, that this activity is no longer limited to nihilistic post-modern artists. For example, living in France doesn't necessarily mean that you subscribe to French culture, except for maybe the stereotypical trappings clung to tightly by tourist bureaus: cheese, duck-fat, chain-smoking, etc. There's no reason that a person in France isn't wearing American jeans, watching Japanese TV shows and drinking Chilean wine. In fact, I think that's exactly what French people are doing. Or some of them, anyway. Others have chosen a different mish-mash of cultural elements to call their own. As is everyone else in the first world, choosing the bits of culture that resonate personally with them. This is one of the things I'm most obsessed with, and it feeds directly into post-time.

Now, what I'm suggesting here hasn't yet been fully realized. There are still swatches of culture that can be pinned down pretty neatly to certain geographical areas (like, for example, the fame of Yona Friedman, on a night when Grey's Anatomy was probably on). But I think that's where it's headed, and I defy anyone to come up with a convincing argument that it's headed some place else.

Overthinking the Interwebs

"Mythology creep" is a big issue for me. I spend most of my time fostering a massive internal mythology, and this process is largely flavored by my current environment and activities; the world around me seeps into my brain's deeper mechanics and the mythology-of-the-day paces itself by this rhythm. These days I work a lot with media; my job is really just the ongoing process of funneling media, diverting it off the main reservoir and redirecting it along a series of more focused streams and riverbeds. This means that I spend about eight work-hours a day in front of a computer, in addition to two or three hours of computer-based personal activities (including my twelve-step therapeutic regimen). So when I tell you that technology has played a prominent role in the mythology the last few years, you'll understand the emphasis with which I use the word 'prominent.'

Right now I just want to talk about how the internet figures in to the whole thing. Like most of my thematic obsessions, its tied directly to The Common Theme - the Swedenborgian concept of a viscerally graspable underlying spiritual reality. I hate trying to articulate the concept itself, because its exactly the sort of thing that language is really bad at, but here goes. The gist of the matter is that my thoughts are never coming directly from the physical world - that's obvious, I can't see them or taste them. I can however choose to do stuff in the physical world, and these actions will inevitably direct my thoughts down a certain path (diverting them off the main reservoir and down a series of more focused streams and riverbeds). I can also choose to focus on certain thoughts, or recall something lodged in recent memory, and what I dwell on is going to greatly affect my mood. There's a mechanism at work here, between the choices I make and the thoughts that I have (and vice versa), and the 'underlying spiritual reality' concept is just one description of how that mechanism might work. A description which I happen to think is true. While I'm walking down the street in Omaha, having a hypothetical argument with someone in my head who rubbed me the wrong way, my 'spirit' is simultaneously wandering amongst a society of hateful spirits, and it's their thoughts, their love of resentment, that is fueling my current mental fuming in Nebraska. I'm actually in hell in that moment, and in that moment hell is inside me.

I like to use this example to encapsulate the whole thing: when I was more of a teenager, every once in a while I would find myself in a conversation about the occult. Someone has a ghost story that happened to their uncle, and that reminds someone else of the actual haunted house they heard about where a dozen people or more have seen the same apparition of the dead woman in the floral spring dress. This goes on past dark, and at some point there's a discernible change in the room's atmosphere. Ghosts stop being this weird intellectual thing and become more of a remote possibility, and at any rate people are now looking over their shoulder every five seconds and will likely have a harder time going to sleep that night. I like to think about the spiritual reality mechanism here - that people have been talking about evil creepy spirits, and suddenly it feels like they're all around. Because, on a spiritual level, they are all around - they've been invited in, and are whispering gross nothings into everybody's ears.

So, the Internet. I was going to talk about that.

The thing with the Internet is that it provides (for me) a really conveniently excellent model of this spiritual reality business. Or, for that matter, the collective unconscious. In both cases, you've got this huge nebulous ocean of seemingly infinite possibilities. You can't index it or track its size, and yet to fish anything out requires only the will to do so (and a quick Google search). In one moment you could not have ever been aware that something even exists, and in the next you're presented with reams of information about it, web portals devoted to its preservation and forums to its discussion and encouragement. You can check something out once and leave it forever, or you can then adopt it as part of your regular internet routine, becoming an entrenched member of its community. And like the spiritual world, doing so requires very little more than simply the sheer act of curiosity. My internet browsing experiences are very much like this, and sometimes, depending on my mood, I end up in some pretty weird places.

Just to needlessly bring the two worlds together, I like to picture that some websites actually are hosted by ethereal servers in the spiritual world, that there are little pockets of hell with demons learning javascript and pumping out Flash ads.

I keep coming back to the idea that modern psychology is defined by the computer, which provided a mainstream analogy for component-based neurology to gain traction (different brain clusters process information differently, much like a CPU, RAM and hard drive, etc.) Before computers we were stuck explaining everything with tubes and steam, and had no use for things like the prefrontal cortex or limbic system. Does the Internet help explain the spiritual world in a similar way? Maybe it just confuses the issue. In my mythology the Internet always serves as a physical analogy to the invisible web of influences that connect humanity, but I might just be weird like that.

Quantum of Solace

So, that's a pretty good name for a post, eh? I think it nicely strikes the balance between obtuse and pretentious. I was looking for wording like it, and decided to go with it in honor of that being the name of the new James Bond movie, which I personally find hilarious.

Anyway. One of the most prevalent themes of the mythology, which finds its way into each new iteration, is the delineation of settings. The story never unfolds in just one environment - it almost always begins in a small town (or sometimes just an endless city squatting in the dredges of post-time), and then progresses along a variety of other locales, inevitably finding itself at the oil rig and subsequently the center of the Earth. These intermediary settings change around somewhat, sometimes there are more or less, but they don't ever change entirely - it's like I have a mental catalog of environments that my mythologizing minds draws from according to its needs (I think my dreams draw from the same source). It's really like any video game from the early Nintendo era. You know going in that at some point you're going to run across an underwater level, and later on an ice level (which you'll hate); often there will be a level where your ascending a giant tree and fighting off bees, but that's not essential.

Wherever I currently find myself in "real life" will usually determine at least one of the settings (ie a liberal arts college, a small town in England, the underground cave cities of central Anatolia, etc), though since these are based on short-term immediate influences, they usually don't make the final cut next time around. Most recently I've thrown an Islamic city in the mix, simply because I went to Turkey a while back. There's always a jungle at some point, as dense and thick and endless as the archetypal end-of-the-world city. The back story behind the jungle is always the same: this jungle lies at the heart of the world, wild and remote enough to have remained untouched by human progress, inhabited only by millions and millions of wild and mysterious jungle species. The characters happen across it by accident, pushing too hard against the limits of human endeavor, forced to confront nature directly for their sins against her.

You might at this point notice a common theme between the locations I choose - for instance, I think they all claim to be the most remote place on earth. They're also all fairly unpleasant places - at least psychologically. In a real story, where you care about the characters' emotional well-being and whatnot, I think my settings would tend to stress the protagonists out.

And for that reason, my mythology is not without safe havens. I would like to think that every setting has its own form of respite, and I often pretend like they do, just that I haven't thought of them all yet. I think about this mostly when I'm trying to frame the mythology as an RPG video game, which happens more often than I'd like to admit (save havens are really convenient in that context for restoring the player's health and creating save points, so it's important that they're distributed evenly). But really, there are only two (or maybe three) completely peaceful spots in the mythology. And they're all hot tubs.

I say that glibly, but aside from thoughts I might have about heaven and its blessed offerings, hot tubs are about the most peaceful thing I can think of. Whenever I'm stressed out or physically exhausted or otherwise over-stimulated, sitting in a hot tub would probably be my first preference of therapies. But the mythological hot tubs aren't just installed in the Undigestible Man's back patio. No, they're highly focused.

Back in the novel I wrote in middle school, I provided my characters with "Club Ignorance," a painfully allegorical locale where they could chill out when the psychologically-malleable terrain was getting them down. Finding it was easy and not particularly magic - it was located in a strip mall between a dollar store and a Chinese take-out. Once inside you'd find a normal strip-mallish foyer, with a curt person behind a desk to take your money and let you through a back door. In the back was an immeasurably large room containing nothing but trees and fog. The trees probably didn't have tops, but you couldn't tell because the fog inhibited vision beyond a couple feet. A person would wander through this hazy and silent forest, unsure of which direction they were headed, until they eventually gave up on finding anything - and at that point, they would happen across the hot tub. It would be simply inset in the ground, glowing slightly against the fog. They would submerge, lie back, close their eyes. And when they were finally ready to open their eyes again, they were still nestled in the trees, comforted by the bubbling water, ignorant of the outside world and its problems. Even now, every dead-end future city I subject my characters to features a Club Ignorance.

The other havens are similar, with just a slight change in allegorical significance, as is my wont. In the jungle there is another hot tub, a natural hot spring, located in the densest, darkest cluster of trees imaginable. The water is soothing and pleasant, free of the insect life that permeates other areas incessantly. There are babbling brooks nearby, some mossy waterfalls for splashing around in when the hot water gets to be too much. As much as the city spa is meant to evoke ignorance, the hot tub at the center of the earth, this time fueled by the kind of magma power you'd hope to find at the earth's core, represents the planet's very womb. I picture it even being kind of cellular and membraney, with a faint red glow.

When the Undigestible Man finds himself in a forsaken society at the bottom of the earth, picking over the dead bodies of the collective unconsciousness' shadowy forms, he discovers this last haven but quickly passes over it. Only once he's found the controls to the planet and must contemplate his next fateful course of action, then does he return to soak.

New Adventures in Escapism

Work has been ramping up again lately, necessitating focused bursts of escapism while I struggle to stay on top of an untenable and ever-expanding mountain of needs-doings and needs-thinking-abouts. I’m aware on some level that the stress is all in my head, that a different person in the same situation would be much less stressed simply because they would see it differently. Maybe that person has a mythology that copes better with too much to do and too little time to do it, whereas the one I escape to isn't really related to my daily activities at all. So then, do I have the power to change that? Could I turn my curse of mythologizing into a self-affirming career-management strategy by crafting a more work-oriented mythology? Could I turn Helmut Kravitz into a work horse, and skyrocket through the ranks of Capitalism?

Probably not. Unfortunately, the emotional pressure of the moment tends to define the situation on its own terms, and I don’t get much say in it either way. I’m either stressed or I’m not. So I’m left with a mythology only good for escaping to. But as far as that goes, I’ve been indulging a lot lately. If this were a real twelve-step group, I’d have to turn in my 24-hour chip and regretfully admit to zero days of sobriety.

I’m still thinking episodic-office-endtimes scenario, but I’ve lapsed back into thinking about whether I should actually *make something* beyond just thinking about it, completely destroying the hard-earned progress I’ve made so far with my therapy blog. I’ve been envisioning a series of short filmed episodes, five to ten minutes long, that could be aired on the intertubes and adored by the faithful audience of this blog. Each story would take place inside a small office, where I would use the lack of any budget or actors or set pieces to my advantage, letting the few actors I could pull together tell the story of their fantastic world-gone-mad from the contrastingly uninspired setting of the Spigot Corporation. It may sound boring, but that’s because I haven’t yet told you about the Pods - oh, the Pods, and the wondrous plot-twisting things they would do. I can't even bring myself to tell you about them or their awesome pocket-sized potential.

I’ve been fantasizing about the sinfully alluring motion graphics that would consist the title sequence, animated silhouettes telling the story of the mythology against a clean backdrop of color. The end of the sequence resolves to the Spigot corporate logo (which also happens to be the name of the show), and then, ingeniously, we zoom out to see this final image emblazoned on some device, a Pod, a TV, a computer screen, which would be different every episode. And in some way, either prominently or just as a subtle cue, that device would be the key to the episode. The clue to the puzzle.

I could, right now, hammer out full scripts and storyboards for at least five of these episodes, and cobble together the mental inventory of resources needed to see them to fruition. I’m really good at that part of the process - the immediate hypothetical assessment. What I’m not so good at is the enduring follow-through required of self-indulgent and hopelessly overwrought personal projects like this. I refer you to the now still carcasses of The Bishkek Daily Steingard, the Penguin Republic video game, etc. etc. I would like to think that I will return to these projects, and perhaps I will, but honestly, completely realistically, I would only be doing so out of a sense of obsessive task-completion. My mythological passions are largely escapist and rarely productive - to take on more would be choosing to further embroil myself in things that have no practical end or culpable artistic benefit.

Now, if I could make money doing them, that would be something.

Time Travel is Stupid, I Know, But I Can't Help It

Just to dredge up Southland Tales one more time, about half-way through the third act some basic expository dialogue lets us in on the "crux" of the plot: a rift in the fourth dimension (space/time) has opened up somewhere near Lake Meade, and as a result, many of the characters have been traveling through time all along. This is also meant to explain the weird behavior of the movie's supposed 'twin brothers' (thought it doesn't). Not until the fourth season of Lost do we get time travel as premise - Heroes had it from the start, but lost most of its audience when it became an easy solution to every problem in the second season. More directly science-fictiony stuff always gets there eventually, as does fantasy set in the current day (ie Superman), but that's a more natural progression.

Anyway, this is all in support of the argument I'd like to make that given enough time (and forgive the meta-pun), time travel will find its way into a mythology. If the world of the story isn't pre-limited, and one obsessive visionary (or in a pinch, a team of television producers) is given free reign to let the world continually incubate, expanding and growing beyond its wildest ambitions, then eventually the biggest thing that can happen will happen, and the only corner left to turn, though stupid, will be the ability to travel through time.

And sure, its introduced most regularly as a convenient fix for bad storytelling. It allows writers to kill off an entire cast in one blow, or detonate the planet without pesky repercussions. Also, it just doesn't make any sense, and no storyteller can really craft the web tight enough to sufficiently cover the gaping holes in logic and causality that result from the effort. But there it is anyway, time and time again (more incidental meta puns for your consideration), rearing its head usually when an audience is already fully committed to a world, so that maybe its sins will be looked upon more lightly.

Time travel is stupid, and obvious, and already done. Yes. But, as previously mentioned, my mythology also features time travel, and although it definitely is, I can't shake the conviction that it's somehow not as stupid, obvious and already done as all those other times.

I mentioned it in relation to Swedenborg, and I've had one of my avatars expound upon it further here , but I've never really gotten to the heart of what it's all about, mostly because I don't think I can. The thing is, my rationale for time travel isn't really a succinct and easy-to-encapsulate central premise, but more a loose constellation of concepts and observations that I've willfully taken out of context and crocheted into a blotchy quilt called post-time. It does involve cellular technology, Swedenborg's description of spiritual time, and the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, but narrowing it down more than that gets pretty tricky and convoluted.

I can tell you that I was initially struck by the idea in a college English class, while contemplating the observation that until a couple-hundred years ago, a person could know everything there was to know. All of the collected wisdom of art, science and literature was finite enough that it could be attained by a single person in one lifetime, and a handful of scholars and 'renaissance men' did just that. And then science grew too big for its britches, and since then the percentage of overall knowledge that a person can collect has been steadily shrinking, so that each generation of scientist or scholar must choose a smaller and smaller niche of study in order to achieve mastery of their subject. I was thinking about this in terms momentum. If this is a trend, where is it headed? Will we keep splitting fractions forever, defining a perpetual asymptote of scholarly ambition, or will we eventually transcend knowledge altogether? Okay, that sounds stupid, but now think about the Internet. As people are able to retain less and less in the grand scheme of knowledge, the Internet has made it so that the availability of knowledge is increasing at an inversely proportional rate (let's just say it is, for the sake of argument). The time it takes to attain knowledge is also decreasing steadily, to the point where I'm incensed if it takes longer than a fifteen second wikipedia search to find out something I don't know. So, to recap, our knowledge of the world and our ability to access that knowledge is increasing steadily every day; but, as a result, any given person knows less and less about the total state of affairs as time goes on, while they study more in-depth the nuances of a particular subject. Another result: ADD. We've all got it. There's just too much to know, and too many different items of information in a single day (or minute) that we need to access at any given point. It's all about learning quickly now, and not about still knowing it a day from now (because we can just learn it again tomorrow). People a hundred years ago would spend ten years learning one stupid thing, and now I'm ready to abandon the venture if I can't achieve satisfying results in the first couple minutes (and I may be an extreme case, I'll grant you that, but I don't even technically have ADD, and I promise you my kids will be even more impatient than I am).

So, lots of stuff. But, where does it all lead? For me, and my obsessive thematic mythology, it results in a world where people eventually have instantaneous access to all the information in the world, but at the same time zero ability to retain any of it. And so everyone is forced to live purely in the moment, unaware of what came before and unprepared for what will come next, existing practically in post-time.

I don't think it would actually work as a premise, but the office show iteration of the mythology that's currently grinding away like an ambitious round of Animal Crossing in my head sure thinks it would. Because although the results would be the same for every character in the mythology (the ability for time travel, for example, since no one would retain anything anyway, thus obviating the dangers of interfering with their past) they could each have their own perspective on what it meant. A Historian figure might draw on the rationale I just espoused, but a more quietly religious figure could just attribute it to the apocalyptic "end-times", as in, the end of time. When the 5000 year Mayan Calendar runs out in 2012, maybe time will just stop running.

And though it may seem stupid to have a cast of characters who couldn't remember what just happened to them, the beautiful thing is that it wouldn't actually matter, because normal people don't really act on the basis of what's just happened to them either. The way I see it, most people interact with reality on a day-to-day basis according to a set of preconceived themes. A life-long cop may begin to look at everything in terms of criminal and non-criminal; a psychologist, in terms of known disorders and defense mechanisms; a historian according to recorded historical precedent, etc. I know I'm obsessed with the world inside my head, but I think everyone else is too, just that most people happily mistake their interpretation of the world with how the world actually works. This explains why children tend to vote like their parents (or the opposite of their parents), and why one person's terrorist will always be another's hero. I'm venturing into some pretty preachy and over-generalized waters here, so I'll stop, but I'd like to just leave you with with the wisps of truth beneath the stereotypes and cliches I've laid out.

But what am I doing, defending myself? This isn't therapeutic at all! In fact, I think I'm back-pedaling. I can leave the Undigestible Man if I have to, and I can live without the Fish Master in a second, but if and when I do fall of the wagon it will be because of time travel.