This article by Kurt Andersen in vanityfair.com is well-written and insightful. The premise is simple: style, culture, fashion -- "things" -- have not changed as much between 1992 and 2012 as they have in other 20 year gaps from 1945 onward. Check out the cartoon illustration at the top of the article.
When I read the header paragraph, I caught a whiff of something I've been obsessing about for a few months now: postmodernism. I did a search for the word in the article, and it's only used in one place to talk about architecture (the "other usage" of the word; the legitimate, easily-defined usage). But, I think Andersen's article is essentially about the wider cultural phenomenon of postmodernism, as it's loosely defined as the disruption of a linear, progressive history.
Postmodernism, to me, means the death of culture. There's not going to be anything worthwhile left to consume, except maybe pranks and jokes. It's a sad state of affairs to be living in, and it's unfortunate that I had to be born into this era.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the article. Nothing new is being made -- all that's left for culture to accomplish is navel-gazing:
Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it's all about dreaming of the past. Our culture's primary M.O. Now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms.
Why is the postmodern influence so potent now? Maybe it has something to do with technology:
Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it's an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we're experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts.
Bringing it back to economics and politics:
Meanwhile, the thing driving all the populist rage, right and left, is the unprecedented flatlining of economic progress: Americans' median income is just about where it was 20 years ago, as unchanging as American style and culture.
Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise.
Explaining the mechanism of "staying the same" in a little more detail:
We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle -- economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation.
Finally, a hint of apocalyptic thinking in the last paragraph:
As the baby-boomers who brought about this ice age finally shuffle off, maybe America and the rich world are on the verge of a cascade of the wildly new and insanely great. Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper.
Anyway, whatever. I wish I could write like that. Even if I could, I doubt I'd be able to make a living as a writer, just because people don't do that for the most part. It's similar to fantasies of making a living with your own art. Basically I'm doomed to a life of marginal employment. Remind me why I'm supposed to stick around?
I think a good solution to my guitar playing might be to play socially in some way -- to play for other people or with other people. The only issue would be getting over my performance anxiety, but I think that's happened to some degree, in part because of the MFA program. So maybe now I can go be a rock star. Except there are no more rock stars -- no one wants to play rock music anymore, with good reason: it sucks, and the tired old paradigm of drum kit, guitar, bass, vocals, and possibly keyboard is dead. There's more innovation going on in hip hop. So many things are dead. It's hard to keep track.
I think this blog is getting out of control. All the new stuff with the audio is making it feel so complex and scattered that I don't want to do it anymore. I think maybe I'll just get back into the practice of writing, except it might suck for a while until I can get back into practice. In the meantime I'm just sitting around watching 90's movies. I think that's pretty much my principle hobby, especially now that I'm no longer allowed to eat for pleasure and to the point of gluttony. Me Chinese, me no care, me do p p in your hair.
I do have a little 3 minute partial audio blog I made this morning (or yesterday...I don't remember since I took a long nap today) that I guess I'll post. But I think writing is a better medium for ze blog, with some pictures thrown in to make it look interesting. Maybe I can occasionally do some sound thing and post it with html5 audio if I think of something I want to do, but doing the blog in audio form decreases the quality of the text.
Maybe today will be an image-less day. I don't really feel like drawing anything, or even taking any pictures. It's dark, and I've already photographed everything in my apartment that's remotely interesting. That reminds me: I was supposed to clean today.
I saw "The Machinist," a psychological thriller. I'm not crazy about psychological thrillers, because I find I stop caring about what happens when I learn or figure out that everything is taking place in the main character's head. In order for these types of movies to retain appeal for me, there has to be some ambiguity and uncertainty as to what's real or not -- I should not be able to figure it out. That was a nice thing about "K-PAX," although that was perhaps not strictly a psychological thriller despite operating in some of the same territory.
I read a Wikipedia article on Aztec cuisine.
Most sources describe two meals per day, though there is an account of laborers getting three meals, one at dawn, another one at around 9 in the morning and one at around 3 in the afternoon.
That's what I did today, and yesterday. I don't mind it much; I don't get very hungry in the evening, although when it starts getting dark I look at the fridge and plan what I'm going to have for breakfast. The problem, for the past two days, has been this chili I make. I calculated the calories from the ingredients, and it comes out to about 600 calories for a large bowl, which is about twice the calories in Wendy's chili. Admittedly mine is denser and less liquidy, but still -- it seems extreme, as in, if I were estimating just looking at my chili I'd estimate the calorie contents of a bowl to be a lot less than that; maybe 500 or 400. 450, probably. But it's really just so damned good that I can't resist making it, and taking a hit on the amount of food I'm able to eat that day. I guess usually one batch of chili lasts two days.
I've dieted in the past with some success, but the weight always came back. I decided to try something different: instead of approaching it like a "diet" -- that is, some behavior modification to be forced on one's self and then discontinued when the desired goal is achieved -- I decided to approach it as "a new way of eating that I can do for the rest of my life."
I looked at calorie calculator sites to determine how many calories a person my height and age requires, arrived at "2500" as a nice round, approximate number, and simply eat that much food a day. If I go over, I distribute the excess to subsequent days of the week (this is all done on MS Excel) so it ends up being a matter of staying within a weekly calorie budget rather than a daily one. That flexibility is helpful. Here's a daily entry in my Excel diet journal (click to see a bigger version):
I'm finding that I can do it -- that I don't get overly-hungry or feel deprived. And, the best part is that it seems to be working, albeit more slowly than weight loss efforts have worked for me in the past. However, I think that slowness is a good thing; they say that a slow, steady weight loss is the best way to ensure that the weight is kept off.
So I have high hopes, and am in a good place, emotionally and self-esteem wise.
20 minutes of talking, this time with guitar. I don't know about this format, man...I just don't know. For one thing I guess it means the webcomics are being put on hold for the moment, and I think those might have started to come into better quality with practice. Perhaps the same thing can be said about these podcasts. Anyway, I guess if you don't want to listen you don't have to. But still -- I'd like to make things that people want to consume.
Also, here's a photo of my wall. I liked the way the little patches of light looked. Unfortunately you can see that dark stripe at the top. I do need a new digital camera. But, it's not a big priority.
I'm wearing a 48 hour heart monitor, which I will take off on Saturday and then return to the cardiology place on Monday morning before I leave. I had some heart palpitations and fast heartbeating not associated with exercise that I was concerned about, and so am getting them checked out. I doubt they'll find anything unusual. I'm supposed to make a note in a journal and press a button on the monitor when I feel an unusual sensation (pain, palpitations, fluttering, rapid beat, etc). The Roxette song "Listen to Your Heart" was coming to mind earlier. I kinda like it.
I look like some kind of cyborg with this thing strapped to me and electrodes connected to my chest. Beep beep. I need to find a way of making my podcasts more planned sounding. I think the way to do that is with some informal notes in front of me -- just a list of topics would be helpful, because I'm going into this totally cold.
If this were on Youtube it's doubtful I'd get many views.
Mr. Teegin talks for 9 minutes and 59 seconds about html5, Facebook, birthdays, puts it on pause a lot, babbles about babbling, an idea for a guitar audio blog, guitar strings, Randy, postmodernism, his birthday, the weather, and podcast length.
Goddamn, those html5 audio control are butt-ugly, at least on Chrome. I'm trying to do something to them with CSS, but they're not very responsive and end up looking worse. I think there are more sophisticated things you can do with Javascript and JQuerry and whatnot, but I don't know how. They're much better looking on Safari (perhaps predictably), and on Firefox. Google needs to take Chrome's html5 interpreter to the beauty salon, or maybe even the plastic surgeon.
Google is in a weird place when it comes to design: they don't seem so concerned with looking good or style as an important thing in and of itself (which I think could be an oversight), but instead with design augmenting functionality or communicating a message. In a sense, Google's visual ethos is more conceptual than Apple's, and certainly more intellectual and "geeky;" Google is more geek, and Apple is more hipster. I don't think Google's approach to design is necessarily a bad thing (look at some of the doodles they've put out over the years), but sometimes you see hideous results like their audio controls, as seen above in my browser (I'm a Chrome user).
I'll start up my four graphical browsers and take screenshots so you know what I'm dealing with (the following are just images -- you can't play them):
iOS 5 Mobile Safari (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch)
Firefox 8.0.1 for Mac
Safari 5.1.1 for Mac
Chrome 15.0.874.121 for Mac
BLECH. Google has a serious problem here: the grey is too light and just looks like mud; it doesn't have that steely or slate technological quality. The blue progress bar clashes with everything and is garish and hidous, and the font is huge and blocky. This is not a serious issue on its own but compounds the overal problem: the arrow, font, and volume control are done in #ffffff white, which in many cases -- including this one -- is a design mistake (although it works better on the iOS controls). It's like a perfect storm of bad design: the overall size, font, colors, and shapes of the controls make Google Chrome's html5 audio controls look like some weird military project or bit of medical technology not for civilian use. Here endeth the crit.
I'm out of the Internet Explorer loop now, although it'd be nice to be able to test how it's interpreting my markup (I sometimes don't like saying "code" to refer to html/CSS). I think there's at least one website that'll give you screenshots from a bazillion browsers, but if I recall correctly it takes a while (but if you pay for premium service, you get served right away...scumbags).
It turns out I need both an mp3 and an ogg version of my soundfile -- Firefox won't play mp3s, and Safari won't play oggs. Awesome Chrome, of course, will awesomely play both. Apple can suck it. Mozilla will be allowed its inherent flaws because it's a geeky open source thing and gets some leeway with that label, and because we expect it to be weird and idealistic rather than usable (it might just be a licensing problem with the mp3 format, something that comes up occasionally). Perhaps one day my iPod (note proper capitalization conventions, ghost of Steve Jobs) and iMac are going to take notice of all the Apple-bashing I do and break themselves in revenge.
The problem with audioblogging is that the files are 10 megabytes each. I don't know that I'm going to do this every day.
I was going to write about democracy and how it sucks, but I forgot what I was going to say. Basically, the old "tyrrany of the majority" argument.
I'd like to date a magic girl who appears to each and every other man as his ideal, and drives him insane with envy. Successfully competing with other men, in and of itself and apart from its results, constitutes a significant portion of the mating dance. Undermining other men, and making them feel bad and jealous, might be as important a goal as finding and loving a mate; consider that men want to have the biggest penis in the locker room as well as the bedroom: "I'm a fighter, not a lover."
Life might be about continually fighting people whose goal it is to "bump you down a notch." I've heard a few women say they'd like to smash the faces of pretty women who get all the male attention, and make them ugly so no man will ever look at them again. When establishing hierarchy, it is important not only to make sure you succeed, but to make others fail. There's a poignant quote about it in fact:
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. - Gore Vidal.
What does this say about humans? That they're bad and evil? No -- only that they're social animals, first and foremost -- that they judge themselves and their successes and failures by the metric of other people; being the best means nothing unless someone else is the worst. You hear "You shouldn't compare yourself to other people" all the time, and it's become a cliché. In fact, it's ridiculous -- comparing yourself to other people is what humans do. Asking someone to do otherwise is like asking them not to have sex or not to eat -- certainly possible, but made difficult by innate biological mechanisms.
So many people In my life over the years have worked to "bump me down a notch." I feel like I'm just now coming out of that. I only have five minutes left to blog...pretend the world is ending...what shall I say?!?!?!?! I might not get home in time to edit and post and finish this entry, let along make a webcomic. That shit just doesn't work if I have other things going on. Maybe if I do this blog in the future when I have a job I'll just do the webcomic. That's probably safer, anyway. Nobody likes bloggers, or fat people, or fat bloggers; those are the worst.
God I don't feel like drawing a comic today, or really like blogging. I have social activities to do today, man!
I wish I could code and do science-y stuff. I hate that I'm just a sloppy floppy artist-type person. I'm sure this makes all the sciency people grin with schadenfreude, since I've found that they often want to be more artistic. Grass is always greener, I guess. But the best scientists are creative, and into visual stuff like anime, or science fiction, or other things like that. I think "art" is just a shadow, a ghost, a tiny little subculture of people that sprung out of modernism. Modernism must have been an amazing thing when it happend in the 1880s or whenever -- what a time to be alive and be an artist. The question is: what do you do now? What fits into this epoch?
I got home about an hour and a half ago, and forgot I had this blog here to finish. If I were really bad I'd slap some paragraph tags on it and upload it as is. FUUUUUUUUUUU I STILL HAVE TO DRAW WEBCOMIC
I'm tired :(
It's weird the way screen resolution hasn't changed much since the 1980s. We use millions of colors to make things look photographic, but we're still dealing with the same big ol' block pixels. I like my webcomic style: working small, with solid colors; it's reminiscent of the way I used to draw on the Mac when I was a young teenager. In may ways I feel like I peaked early, and never really got much better after age 10 or 11, in any respect. I might blame the move to the USA if I were in the mood for oversimplification. No, I think I more blame my parents' divorce. Hope they don't read this and feel guilty. I wonder if there's some way to recover from the bad turn my life took after age 16.
I got a good night's sleep last night: 10pm - 6:30am. Maybe I'm becoming more diurnal now. I should really avoid naps during the day, but sometimes the day just gets excruciating and I have to take a break from it. Maybe exercise would be a better thing to do than sleep. But it's bad weather now -- cold and rainy. When I get back I might look into martial arts training.
I should have studied graphic design or animation, or maybe even illustration. Maybe it's not too late. But I have a self-destructive anti-employment impulse that makes me want to position myself so as to be resistant to enslavement by some company; for example, "studying" postsecondary, generalized, theory-based fine art. In some sense it was an incredibly stupid thing to do (in the sense that it prepares one to perform no service anyone is willing to pay for, outside of teaching more MFAs in the same tradition, which is pretty funny if you think about it), but at the same time I'm glad I did it, or at least that's what I tell myself. At any rate, I don't really feel I have control over what happens to me, and just have to make the best of the series of disasters that is "life."
For one thing, my degree is a good excuse for being marginally employed for the rest of my life; I look at an MFA in visual art (with maybe some exceptions at $30k/year schools with focuses in animation or design or whatever) as a license to be a bum while still clinging to some social status. And I don't really see anything wrong with that, either -- society has set up silly standards that base human value on money and employment.
I think I either need to run my own business, be a homeless bum, or engineer some combination of the two. At some point, maybe in February when I get back from my break, I'll sell, store, or junk everything I own and go on a "walk-about." Or at least, I'll try to find a job and move out of this apartment, because I feel like I'm going crazy here. I want to be in a better location. London is a nice place in that you can live in the heart of it all, such as it is, for not very much money. However, you can live on the shithole periphery of it for even less money, which is someting that I have chosen to do and which is something that I don't really think is worth it after a year of reflection. If I can find a job here I'll stay here, except it gets too hot in the summertime. But that seems hard to avoid, unless you flee the East. Calgary?
I wish I knew how to program. There's so much expressiveness and creative potential there, and building things that work is fun. It's like an adult version of tinker toys or some similar thing with mechanized parts. I think this is the engineer's instinct, which is pretty similar to the artist's instinct: make stuff, build stuff. Actually I run into similar problems with art: I just don't have the explicit tool knowledge to do much. It sucks. I've tried to learn to code on many occasions and failed each time, so I think it might be time to put that dream to rest. I might just not have the brain for it.
What's something else I could do? Oil painting? I think I'm looking for a magic bullet -- something that will be perfectly easy and fluid and inspiring, and have no difficulties or stress or hitches that go with the learning and execution process. Probably such a thing doesn't exist, although I'm pretty good at cooking, and have an instinct there that seems to move more fluidly than my creative process in other areas. But at this point I'm just exhausted from the process of getting some inspiration, paying for school, and then coming out and finding that nothing has really changed. I wish I knew how to do everything, and didn't forget how to do what I've learned after not practicing for some tiny amount of time. Some of this may be the fault of my brain injury; I maybe didn't forget how to do things quite so fast before acquiring the damage in my right temporal lobe, but it's hard to get a grip on the way you before a brain injury and the way you are after one, allowing considerations of natural changes to the brain that take place over time due to aging and experience.
Maybe writing is what I should do. Writing or cooking. Really, I could be content if I made my money with any kind of creative thing, as long as the hours weren't too long and I had time to do my own thing on the side. I have a limited amount of energy, and like to sit around and watch TV a lot. Really in some ways I'm just tired of being alive. I wish things were easier and more enjoyable for me, and that I weren't so mentally and physically deficient.
I only lost .5 lbs last week. A 2500 calorie limit produces a slower weight loss than 2200, seemingly out of proportion to that 300 calorie difference. However, it might be worth it to not get hungry and not feel deprived. On a 2500 cal/day budget, I can still account for impulsive indulgences like the other night's 1800-calories-in-1-hour chili binge and not suffer too much. I'd almost rather take up some form of exercise than eat less. I could try turning it down 100 calories or so to 2400, and see what happens there. Maybe that would be ok. But 2200, as I used to do, is too few calories.