Double-Take 

1. As the workers rolled the potted trees and shrubs off of the truck and toward the yard, I realized there was no way to know from looking whether they were setting up for a film shoot or for "real" gardening.

2. As the workers rolled the potted trees and shrubs off of the truck and toward the yard, I realized there was no particular difference between a garden used for a film shoot and a "real" garden: they're both cosmetic dressings designed to contrive an effect. Neither is more real or meaningful than the other.

The Common Cant 

“I am no blog reader,” “I seldom look into blogs;” “Do not imagine that I often read blogs;” “It is really very well for a blog,” —such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh, it is only a blog!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her laptop with affected indifference or momentary shame.

These news cycles 

These news cycles are impossible. Someone here wants to run a story on Haiti. Specifically, she wants to run a story on text message donations to Haiti. Truth is, if you're covering technology, text message donation was the story to come out of this earthquake. (Deaths of tens of thousands, and the destruction of a civilization, don't unto themselves net much tech news: devastation has a way of rendering gadgets useless. Not to mention it makes you realize they're stupid.)

Anyway, the operative word, "was": this was a story, a few days ago, when it broke, but now, already, it's over, faster than you can say "tsunami warning system." I mean, the New York Times has covered it for Christ's sake. By the time they get there, it must be over.

"You got an angle?," I ask. Her story already is an angle, so now we're looking for an angle on an angle, because without it, the readers are just going back to Conan and Leno. She doesn't have an angle on the angle, so I kill the story. No reason to run it without an angle on the angle.

Whoever said "Life is a river" never worked in news. Life is a fucking class-six white-water rapid full of boulders, and the boulders don't love you one bit.

"What else you got? There must be something else. RFID tags on aid deliveries? The American SUV finally finds a possible use, more appropriate than soccer practice, in the rubble of Haiti? etc."

"A tech story on Haiti? They don't have roads. They don't have buildings. There's not even electricity."

"OK, OK, I can work with that. These aid workers, these reporters—how are they charging their batteries? Can you get me a solar story?"

Google, riding a wave of karmic good will after its "Fuck you" to China: what if Google buys Haiti? Sergey could build his very own Caribbean Utopia from scratch. God knows they've probably modeled it all out already, some SimCity / Google Earth mashup game. Idealistic freaks. That's a story.

God, I hate disasters. This job depends on writing about shopping, and human suffering takes all of the fun out of consumption. All that sobbing on Fox News makes my job impossible. You want something visceral? Go see Avatar at the IMAX. It'll shake your seat. That's visceral.

"We're still going with the original cover for February," she asks. "Right?"

"Hells yeah we are. Can't let one little earthquake get in the way of the biggest news of our nascent decade. Hells yeah we're going with the Apple tablet cover in February."

The Zen of Social Media 

Twitter is like a koan: it is so obviously pointless, till one day, a gong goes off, and it's the explanation for everything.

Facebook is like Twitter, but without the gong.  Facebook is the sound of two hands clapping.

Stockpiling Status Updates 

(in case the social media sites go down again)

• is a waster of so much time.
• jots Post-It notes in his head.
• is hungry more often than not.
• goes through consecutive days wondering, "What did I do yesterday?"
• could smile more.
• has bad habits that he wants to break, and has other bad habits that he doesn't want to break.
• wonders if he's doing it all wrong.
• doesn't feel like going home.
• realizes that exhibitionism is a manifestation of insecurity.
• wants to circumnavigate; instead wanders aimlessly.
• feels the terrible press of so many things undone.
• could be nicer.
• wants to be happy when he's old.
• might have forgotten how.

Vampires Vs. Zombies (Ongoing) 

or, the History of the Internet, According to Horror

(The following post originally appeared on the SnapDragon blog, January 18, 2009.)

The Golden Globe nomination for Alan Ball's new HBO series, True Blood, reminds us of two things: we like vampires, and there wasn't a whole lot of great television in 2008. Stuck somewhere between gothic and camp, True Blood makes a point of being neither serious enough to be affecting, nor silly enough to be fun. It certainly hasn't been able to do both at the same time, like its more adroit predecessor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

What does any of this have to do with the Internet? That depends on how closely you subscribe to a reading of history sometimes popular among fans of the horror genre: All hitherto existing society is the history of struggle between vampires and zombies.

The theory, roughly, goes like this: symbolically, the vampire is powerful, often majestic and seductive, usually solitary. Zombies, on the other hand, are mindless, slow, driven only by appetite, and move in hordes. A period that is dominated by powerful individuals—dictators, charismatic CEOs, iconoclasts—will also be a period that glorifies vampires. A period that celebrates the masses over the individual will fixate on zombies.

It's a theory that probably won't hold up to much scrutiny, and I'll ask you not to give it much.

Buffy premiered on the WB in 1997 and played on that network for five years. (The show itself rose from the dead, for two more seasons on the UPN network, finally wrapping up in 2003.) This same period coincides with Wesley Snipes' Blade movies, and the creation of the Underworld film series—both of which lend credence to the idea that vampires were in the zeitgeist, though neither franchise is an especially proud addition to the vampire genre.

More to the point: this time period is, almost exactly, the first rise of the Internet, during which brazen, single-minded startup companies, led by egomaniacal corporate execs (who often worked—and played—till dawn) drove the NASDAQ index nearly in stride with the Buffy series: the NASDAQ's peak came weeks after the TV show's Emmy-nominated episode, "Hush," and the index's lowest point came in mid-2003, just as Buffy and her gang were leaving Sunnydale (and television) forever.

If you've read this far, then perhaps you're willing to consider what has happened over the period since then: vampires have gotten dumber (30 Days of Night) and tamer (True Blood); zombies have gotten faster (28 Days Later) and smarter (I Am Legend); and the web has shifted toward "crowd-sourcing" and the "smart mob."

The age of the intelligent zombie is upon us.

Killing Time 

After a while, you get tired of shooting people. That's natural. You get tired of shooting them in the head, in the leg, in the gut. You get tired of pulling the trigger, over and over. You get tired of aiming. You get tired of counting ammo, tired of reloading. Your hand gets tired, and your mind, too: your mind wanders. You kill by rote. You get a little bored. You're always putting one gun down, picking another one up, just to make your own life more interesting—to feel the kick of this gun, to hear the pop of that one. It doesn't matter which gun you use, in the end. They'll all kill people just as well. You love all your munitions equally.

You get tired, too, of stabbing people, bayoneting them, beating them with crowbars and baseball bats, beating them with brass knuckles, beating them with your fists. You get tired of tossing grenades and pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails, tired of laying down land mines and C4 and IEDs and bear traps. You get tired of the blood spatter, the cries of pain, the dismemberment, the incessant collapse of bodies, their piling up higher and higher, your stepping over them en route to new targets. You weave through buildings and courtyards and streets, sewers and subways and caves, always looking for something to shoot, but you're tired of all the killing. You can't even remember why you're doing it.

Oh yeah: because it used to be fun.

When finally you've been at it so long, all this killing, so long that your back is sore and your legs are numb and your trigger hand possibly permanently injured from repetitive stress, finally you concede that maybe it is time to stop playing video games, that perhaps they are violent and somewhat strange, and that maybe you'd be better off and happier if you just read a book.

Matter / Antimatter 

or, Will the Real Sarah Palin Please Stand Up (and Go Away)

For all the fear last month that the new particle accelerator at CERN would unleash a black hole and end life as we know it, the event came much closer to passing last night, on NBC's Saturday Night Live, during the very-near collision of matter (Tina Fey) and antimatter (Sarah Palin).

During the brief time the two of them shared the stage, they sped past one another nearly as quickly as a pair of charged protons, not speaking or even making eye contact. Though there was no explosion, and no evidence pointing to the elusive "Higgs boson," one thing that was a scientific certainty is the obvious contempt the two women feel for one another.

Blame it on the soft focus in the above photo, but it's really hard to get a sense of who hates the other more.

Never Egret 

The bastard behemoth Google never forgets. It is cold, digital, and cruel, to have stored so many emails. A simple, innocent search of old messages¹ pulls up a forgotten love letter², and the next thing I know, I'm unwittingly hurled down memory lane, bouncing off its cobblestones—so many long-lost affectionate promises, meant sincerely at the time, and now just false prophesies, like old torn-up lottery tickets. If I close my eyes, I can pretend the email arrived only yesterday: closing my eyes brings a spot of light; and opening them to today, it's a little darker.

Google lumbers on like an old elephant, never forgetting, while my own memory (and the life it constructs for me) flits about, here and there, with less pattern, a hungry egret flying among the plodding beasts, and never touching down, for fear of getting trammeled...

1. "Goose" was the search term, because I've started emailing myself recipes. How domestic...

2. From an unforgotten lover—because the message used the phrase, "goose bumps."

The Fall of Man, pt. 2 

Pixar's Wall-E

The polluted Earth has become unsuitable for life, and all humankind has fled in deep space cruise ships, leaving the movie's eponymous protagonist to clean up the mess. He wanders through an abandoned city, tirelessly tidying up, while also collecting the charming artifacts of a fallen civilization—Zippo lighters, a Rubick's Cube, and a VHS tape of Hello, Dolly!

Wall-E is a movie about the last man on Earth, except the last man on Earth is a robot—equal parts Mars Rover and Omega Man.

It's not unusual that the hero of a Pixar movie would be inhuman: to date, the Pixar filmography has starred toys, bugs, monsters, fish, cars, and rats. The closest thing to a human hero of a Pixar film is a family of mutant superhero freaks who hide their powers in order to assimilate.

(The villains of the films, on the other hand, are almost always people....)

But Pixar's preference for machines is the converse of Lucasfilm's: Pixar anthropomorphizes them till they are not only adorable, but also more human than, well, the humans. The toys, fish, rats, and now robots, are role models who teach the people in their world (and the people in the cinema) how to be more human.

The Fall of Man, pt. 1 

George Lucas's Clone Wars

The circle is now complete. When we left George Lucas, he had open disdain humanity, preferring the company of blue screens and Jar-Jar Binks to flesh-and-blood actors. His films have continued to push at the definition of "live action," gradually replacing his real-life actors with more and more elaborate digital puppets. (Cf. Jabba the Hut.)

And when he cannot pixelate an actor outright, Lucas seems to try his honest best to flatten any humanity out of their performance. I imagine him directing on the set of the original Star Wars: "That was good, but can you say it faster?" By the most recent Star Wars films, one wonders if he spoke to his actors at all.

Finally, Lucas has gotten what he seems to have wanted all along: he's purged the Star Wars universe of any real people. The Clone Wars, coming out later this month, is a full-length animated feature, set during the time between Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3.

Given the choice between working with Ewan MacGregor and Natalie Portman, and working with cartoons, Lucas picked cartoons.

The underlying structural message of the Star Wars films—the story being told by his choice of media (muppets and models and mattes, oh my!)—is that machines are preferable to humanity. It is a kind of digital fascism whose goal is the erasure of everything flawed and analog (i.e., actors). This story invariably leaks back into the script itself: though they are fighting hoardes of "evil" robots, the ostensible heroes of The Clone Wars are clones (and clones are machines: this is why genetic engineering is called engineering).

When we can distinguish the simulacra from the real, and choose the simulacra, the preference implies the obsolescence of nuance, subtlety, and all the humanities. It is indeed a phantom menace, and no longer far far away.

The iPhone is Not Jesus 

Even Gandhi had to wait in line for the new iPhone. He queued up an hour after I did, just as the sun was heating up. "Do you mind if I stand up there?," he asked, pointing to a spot of shade in front of me. "Fuck you, old man. Wait your turn," I told him.

Bruce Willis, who was queued up two people ahead of me, nodded his approval, and chimed in, "That's right, Macaca. We've been here since 8am this morning. Wait your goddamn turn."

Mary Kate Olsen fidgeted with her hair and hid in the shade offered by her umbrella. "How many do you think they have in stock?," she asked no one in particular.

Steven Hawking answered: "I heard they're already out of the 16GB."

"What did he say?, asked Gandhi from the back of the line.

A hot dog vendor rolled his cart by. "Water, five dollars." Mary Kate bought one and popped a pill.

"What are you all waiting for?," someone called out from a passing car. Bruce Willis shouted back: "They've got a new book at the library." The driver looked disappointed: "Nobody famous?" He drove off.

Lily Allen, who had been one of the first to arrive, came out of the store and showed off her new iPhone. She'd gotten a white one. She made up a little iPhone dance, and we clapped for her.

"You want another forty?," Bruce Willis asked me, passing me a lukewarm bottle before I could answer. "Could I have one?," Gandhi asked. "Sorry," Bruce Willis answered. "That was my last one."

The hot dog vendor rolled by. "Water, ten dollars."

Steven Hawking pointed to the front of the line: "I think John Mayer just jumped the queue."¹

The heat was too much for Mary Kate: she had to be taken home. When the store manager came out to announce there were only two iPhones left, we decided that the honorable thing to do was settle it by knife fight. I made short work of Steven Hawking, and when Gandhi killed Bruce Willis, the two of us walked into the store together, bloody and triumphant. The iPhone was delivered to us, shrouded in blinding white light, by naked angels.

"This is some tight shit," Gandhi said, already installing the free Light Saber app. "Totally worth the wait." Then: "What's your number? You wanna grab a drink?"

1. Just like Steve Wozniak.

Buy-a-Baby 

You've always been an achiever. You put your career first, and you worked hard to get where you are. You and your spouse have a lovely Brooklyn brownstone, an Audi Quattro you never drive, and a combined income that would be, in any other city, above average.

What now?

Just because you gave your healthy breeding years to the workplace doesn't mean you can't have your very own little Alina, Emily or Abigail. You can! After all, what would be the point of making all that money, if you couldn't use it to buy a baby on the Internet?

Browse our selection today and see if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.

The Great Outdoors 

It's spring, and I'm surrounded by the most beautiful scenes of nature that one could imagine: just through the window, on the other side of a thin pane of glass, there are rolling hills all the way to the horizon, and above them, an almost boundless sky.

A shame, then, that the "window" is my computer screen, and that the image before me is a photo of a place far from here, a place I probably will never visit, a place that quite possibly doesn't exist at all—a virtual landscape so remodeled by digital retouching and enhancement that it is quite literally nowhere: Utopia.

As we spend more and more time in front of our computers, under slightly green, unnatural fluorescent lights, in windowless cubicles, we're offered correspondingly more and more lavish landscape photos for use as our "desktop wallpaper"1—maybe to help us remember what the outside looks like? Except the colors in the photos are so saturated, it's not actually what the outside does look like.2

Outside gets farther away, while Utopia gets closer.

1. All major operating systems—Windows XP and Vista, the Mac OS, and the most popular distributions of Linux, offer nature-inspired desktop "wallpaper" imagery.

2. "Maybe the machines didn't know what chicken tasted like, so that's why chicken tastes like everything."

Victoria's Other Secret 

The World According to Facebook 

Or, Christopher Is, pt. 2

Yesterday, my mother asked me about the well-being of my sister's husband's brother's wife's father. "Huh?" That's my brother-in-law's sister-in-law's father, or, to put it another way, my own father-in-law three times removed.

If it is true that we are all separated by no more than six degrees of separation (and it is true, according to MSN Messenger), then my relationship with this person employs no fewer than four of those degrees. I have met my brother-in-law's sister-in-law, once, and I might have been able to recall her name, if someone offered me a hint of the first couple letters. I've never met her father, didn't have any ideas as to his health, and asked my mother how in the world she knew of this person.

Her answer?: "Facebook."1

(Unlike 99.9% of the Facebook population, my mother was born in the 40s.)

*      *     *

Unlike 99.9% of people born in the 70s, I am a regular user of Facebook. I know what superhero I am ("Rogue"), which German philosopher ("Heidegger"), and whether or not I'm a "hottie" (duh). If you're nice to me, I might "brew your a spot of tea," and if you're not, I might give you "the people's elbow." I can defend myself against the attacks of your zombie and vampire armies. I update my status often. And in the midst of all of this din of useless information, I failed to notice that there was something wrong with the health of my sister's husband's brother's wife's father.

Like 99.9% of the Facebook population, I was completely absorbed with stupid games and, ultimately, with myself. If the point of this software is to bring people closer together, then in this random sample of one time, it did not work.

*      *     *

There is a new feature in Facebook, through which the website makes its own recommendations about whom we should befriend. Its logic is fairly straightforward triadic interaction: "the friend of my friend is my friend." If several of my friends have a friend in common, then the software concludes that I, too, might know this person.

In other words, it mines out that second degree of separation, and shows a list it calls "People You May Know."

Looking at the list, I do in fact see some familiar names, but to me it reads more like, "People I Would Know, If Only I'd Been More Outgoing and Socially Confident"—friends of friends who might or might not remember me, if I were to click on the link to their name.2 Facebook offers me an alternate reality, where I can imagine myself at the center of a wider, and ever-growing, circle of friends—or at least "friends." I can know more and more about these people, what they're doing, where they're going, what music or films they like, whether or not their marriage (to someone I've never met) is working out3—without ever encountering them in the real world, in the future or in the past.

As for my actual friends, I'm not sure that Facebook draws us closer. Occasionally we'll get together (online) for a game of Scrabble, or I'll "throw [virtual] toilet paper" at them. But no more than that. And some days I wonder if that's the limit of what we have in common—if that is all our friendship ever was—and I worry that perhaps Facebook has become, instead of a collection of friends, more like a resting place for failed friendships, people with whom throwing toilet paper is enough.

1. I didn't even know my mom was on Facebook. She never "friended" me.

2. My friend Carolyn pointed out that this same list might also be "People You Hate, and Have Consciously Decided Not to Befriend in Facebook"—in which case, this new "feature" is a bit of an annoyance. She added too that I've never asked to be her Facebook friend, and that I've never mentioned her on my blog.

3. The single most remarkable moment of Facebook pathos I have yet to see—even more pathetic than my mother not "friending" me—was the moment when someone I know changed their relationship status from "Married" to "Separated", and announcement of the change was published out to the Facebook world. Compare with a lover's fight recently overheard: "You can break up with me," she said, "but I'm not changing my Facebook status!"

Lying Naked and Face Down (pt. 2)  

New York: a big enough city that it's easy to forget it's a small town. I try to pass off as coincidence the fact that, at various points during the day, I walked by Xxx Bxxxxx Street in Soho, and also Xxx Hxxx Street in Brooklyn—both addresses piled high with flowers and cards of condolence—the addresses, respectively, of the late Heath Ledger, and his former fiance, Michelle Williams.¹

To be fair, I had business in Soho, and the Brooklyn address is only a few blocks from where I live. Both locations really were on my way. Still, I traveled the extra block or two both times, knowing full well where I was going—yet each time, the pile of flowers (and the pathos) caught me off guard: whether I was surprised at my own sadness, or just pretending to be surprised for the sake of passersby, even I don't know for sure.

Either way, I'm forced to conclude that I'm actually upset, for reasons I don't fully understand. I am upset by the death of this person I never knew, and even in the midst of this upset, I think that's pretty strange.²

Celebrities thrive in life because they're so adept at wearing our projections, and I suppose it's no less true in death: I project onto the exit of this celebrity all of my own unrelated, contemporaneous sadness.

I am sad for all of the things I've lost in these last months—the romantic notions of that wonderful future I was supposed to have, a particular future I now realize I'll never see. I grew so attached to this one route to happiness that I'm having trouble imagining any other way.

And this death dramatizes my own loss of hope, and of imagined, better futures. ³

This idea (more than the death itself) shakes me deeply, shakes me so I can't sleep, till finally (and without irony) I too take a pile of Ambien, and lie naked and face down in my bed, hoping to make it till morning without dreaming.

1. Actual street addresses removed, once I saw Google traffic coming in, and realized stalkers (like myself) were using this blog as an instrument to disturb the peace of these mourning individuals. (We should leave them be, and find our own people to mourn...)

2. A friend of mine died this week. He wasn't a close friend, but he was someone I liked very much, someone I cared for and trusted; and I missed seeing him, even before he died; and now I miss him in a wholly different—and final—way. He has "left the building," and when he left, some of the air got sucked out of it, and it reminded me (the way it does whenever someone I know dies) of the terrible loud sound of nothing. It reminded me that our gradual accumulation of things, throughout our lives, amounts to nothing—because life is also about losing things, getting less and less, growing smaller, and then finally, sometimes loudly and sometimes quietly, exiting altogether. And I'm sure this week I've been conflating my feeling of loss for the one person with the more publicized loss of the other, the stranger, the celebrity.

3. A feeling I've not felt since the death of Nate Fisher (!).

Lying Naked and Face Down 

Nominations are in for the next James Dean, and we have a winner.

There is little for me to contribute to the Web-based discourse surrounding the sad passing of Heath Ledger. (Find solid, respectable eulogies here and here.)

But I'll add this much to the heap:

The press has almost universally zeroed in on the same few, lurid details—mainly:

1. Ledger was found [like Marilyn] "lying naked and face down" by his bed; and,
2. There were sleeping pills nearby.

These two facts have been summed up with the sort of arithmetic that tabloids are best at, to conclude that Ledger must have died from a drug overdose—which, though it's possible, is pure speculation, and I'm already sick of hearing it.

I'll wager that anyone who takes sleeping pills keeps them in the vicinity of their bed, because I'll wager that this is where these people would like to sleep.

I'll also venture that there were other things near his bed which have gone unreported—say, a bathrobe, a picture of his two-year-old daughter, maybe a few unread screenplays. According to the brilliant logic of the Associated Press, the proximity of these objects, like the proximity of the Ambien, should be sufficient to implicate them in Ledger's death, and the police should bring little Matilda in for questioning immediately.

[Even if drugs are found to be the cause of Ledger's death, I'm still unwilling to acquit that nearby pile of scripts, because one way or another, Hollywood must certainly be responsible for this regrettable loss.]

The news is stupid. I'm moving to a cabin in the woods.

Why I Can't Relate to Humanity 

Because on the one hand, there's the party-guy with the "famous" glasses, and on the other, the moralizing newscaster who felt it was her role to tell him how to live a better life (i.e., more like hers).

And there's not much room left in the middle for unassuming people like myself.

Blunt Trauma to the Head 

Hi there. I saw you from across the room. I couldn't help but notice you looking at me. And winking. What's that you're reading? Oh, I love Murakami! Yeah, I'm reading some of his short stories right now. No, I can't remember what they're called. No, I don't remember what any of them are about.

You have a Masters degree? So do I! Wow, we have so much—. Yes, so much in common. Look, we're already finishing each other's sentences.

Is that your dog? I love dogs. No, I'm not much of a cat person, either. They make me choke, actually.

Well, let me cut to the chase: you're looking for a smart, funny, sensitive guy, right? And I am a smart, funny sensitive guy. (To prove it, here's a picture of me in a bunny suit. Yes, it's me, playing the Easter Bunny at a charity breakfast for children. Yes, of course I do that sort of thing all the time.)

If you're looking for a smart, funny, sensitive guy, and I am one, then maybe we should meet? No, I mean meet. In real life. Yeah, offline—not email. Would you like to meet? No? OK. Well, I just thought—.

OK. See you around.

Christopher is ... 

Only a very vain, very bored person would post a month's worth of Facebook "status updates" as a blog entry, as if it has literary (or any sort of) merit.¹

So, here's mine:

Thanks to the miracles of RSS, you could, if you so desired, subscribe to this "blog." There's no way I would know if you did—but still, I'd think a little less of you: it's just not that interesting...

1. There's a website called One Sentence that allows people to submit narratives of their days / weeks / lives with only one parameter: the story must be told in a single sentence, resulting in equal parts banality and poignancy.

Terminal B 

The literal definition of utopia is "no place." A place that doesn't exist. Nowhere.

That's where I am.

It's not where I set out to go when I got in the cab. I told the driver to take me to the airport. But now that I'm here, an hour before my flight, I realize there's nowhere ("no place") I'd rather be: it's well-lit, relatively quiet, and it's a place that's simultaneously new (I've never been to this terminal) and also completely familiar: I can find my way around like an old hand, and I know all of the place's cultures and etiquettes: I put my keys in the tray and take off my shoes without even being asked.

The hour before the flight, having put aside all of the anxieties of "Will I miss my plane?", is pure luxury: free time that doesn't exist on any calendar, spent in a location that is between places—nowhere. Everything is artificial, in relation to my "real" life—and since our "real" lives are mostly constructed, a break from that construction, an hour at the airport, might be the more real of the two.

* * *

Yesterday, walking to work, I saw a billboard of the Marlboro Man. I haven't seen these around much lately: Big Tobacco's changing tactics must have the iconic cowboy on the lam, hiding out in caves or whatever. So this billboard image of the rugged, unshaven, weather-worn cowboy struck me in a way I don't think it ever had: I'd become un-numbed to it, and it had become unfamiliar and regained some of its original power.

In that moment, I dreamt about a life in the outdoors of the High Plains, sun and rain on my face, unfettered by walls or cities or clocks or any of the constructs with which I've chosen to self-identify—without my job or apartment, without my family or friends or hobbies or skills. I too could be horseback, wearing a chamois and a wide brim hat, drawing on a cigarette, with wild horses and snow-capped mountains behind me.

At that moment, I saw (as I sometimes see, as we probably all sometimes see) the entire set of things which I choose to define myself as if they were arrayed on a lattice, and through the framework of this lattice, I saw the Marlboro Man. The lattice—its pieces collectively adding up to what I call My Life—was designed (consciously? unconsciously?) to provide structure, strength, and stability. A cage whose bars could keep chaotic reality at bay, in favor or something calmer, more stable, and less real. Nonetheless, a cage.

"That's silly, I don't even smoke." And continued my walk to work. Like now I continue up the causeway to my plane.

Hyper-Mourning 

Introduction (by Way of Harry Potter)

My sister and I have quite a few separate theories about how Severus Snape isn't really evil and how Dumbledore isn't really dead. We've argued these at length, including specific textual citations, but I think deep down we know the truth, that he actually is dead and gone. I think we just can't face our own sadness at our loss: denial, they say, is the first stage of grief. Dumbledore is dead. Long live Dumbledore.

Now, this week, I'm dealing with two new shocking deaths and finding them hard to accept. I wake up feeling empty, and immediately set my brain upon inventing scenarios that might offer an alternate understanding of these two events. I'm genuinely sad. I'm in mourning. And it's somewhat embarrassing to admit, because these two people aren't real.

Part One: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar

I've been mostly shielded from death in my life: my friends are, for the most part, thankfully alive and well; I was young when my grandparents died, and the relatives who have passed have mostly been distant—geographically if not genealogically. As a result, I've developed a (quite active, vivid) fear that when my loved ones do die, I won't know how to react, that I'll react inappropriately, or, emotionally short-circuited, having no practice at the mechanism for processing these things, I'll react with no emotion whatsoever.

Real-life death is part of a natural cycle, predictable even when it's surprising, and meaningless. Sad, but not meaningful. Fictional death, though, is intentional and not-at-all arbitrary: some (malicious?) writer wills each and every death. To look for meaning in the death of a real person is futile; to look for meaning in the death of a fictional character is simply reading.

So I'm not embarrassed to admit that fictional death leaves me sobbing, metaphysically soul-searching and pulling my beard. Fiction, in all of its forms, is a emotional training ground for real life, a chance to practice at experiences that will (hopefully) be rare in our own lives. A safe place to try out mourning.

That is what I've been doing since last week, when Starbuck died. ¹

Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the derring-do fighter jock of the Sci Fi network's TV series Battlestar Galactica, was probably the show's most interesting character, carrying the series on her emotionally-unstable shoulders till exploding her ship like a Roman candle last week. The episode purported to be dealing with "Kara Thrace and her special destiny" (an idea the character herself mocked, saying it "sounds like a bad cover band"). I'm not at all clear, though, what was so special about her destiny: in the end, it didn't connect any plot points, offer any new insight, or have a higher end. Her destiny was simply to die meaninglessly, which isn't special at all.² It happens all the time. It happens, eventually, to each one of us.

So, in addition to the feelings of sadness and loss that accompany death, this fictional death opened up a third uncomfortable feeling, which was that this fictional (and therefore ordered) universe has no meaning.

Battlestar Galactica has always been more about faith than flying spaceships, and I was suddenly losing mine in its writers.³ As with their shocking second-season finale (when they turned the show inside-out by landing their entire fleet on a planet), this recent episode has me wondering:

Has Battlestar Galactica (hyper)jumped the shark?

Maybe they'll surprise me. Maybe Kara Thrace will have a special destiny after all, to take some of the sting out of the sadness...

Part Two: The Map Preceding the Territory

I'd barely had time to begin processing the loss of this first fictional character when I learned of the passing of another: French philosopher Jean Baudrillard died this week.

Ostensibly, Baudrillard was a real person⁴, though not to me personally: I never knew him and have probably spent more time (and better time) with Starbuck. Baudrillard occupied the same space as celebrities, situated closer to fiction than reality—so his death seems to me to belong more to the former than the latter, just like his life. My only connection to Baudrillard were the books themselves, which won't be significantly altered by the passing of the man. As if there should be a bumper sticker: "French philosophers don't die; they just get reissued." Baudrillard is dead; long live Baudrillard.

1. I realize I'm outing myself as an even bigger dork than most of you probably already imagine any time I so much as make reference to Battlestar Galactica—let alone admit it sometimes makes me cry. And on the subject of dorkiness, though I feel some urge to apologize for maybe spoiling this surprise plot twist, I'll have you know I myself discovered before I'd seen the show, by watching a headline pop up on the Digg "Swarm"—"Is Starbuck Really Dead?" That's how I found out.

2. That her final hours were guided by a cylon "Ghost of Christmas Past" doesn't make the death any more meaningful.

3.Writers who will no doubt be applauded for their "bravery" in taking this unconventional turn, as though throwing out the baby with the bath water is brave. It remains to be seen whether or not their baby will be reborn, i.e. in the bath water of a "resurrection ship"...

4. As real at least as the Gulf War.

A Definition of Irony 

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
— Samuel Beckett

The Irish, claimed Freud, are "one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is no use whatsoever"—a quote that usually comes to my mind after a few shots of Jameson's, when I get that hard-to-suppress urge to punch something. Usually, I have the (relative) good sense to pick an inanimate target, at least, so that the only person I hurt is myself (which I think is why people go into psychoanalysis in the first place...).

I'd like to posit a theory, based on the evidence provided by two of Ireland's more famous—Sam Beckett and James Joyce. Clearly the Irish have a refined sense of irony. ("Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.") And for an ironic, there's no higher station than that of a sad clown. The Irish are impervious to happiness because anyone with a heightened sense of irony is in love with his own sadness. Ever the aesthete, he will go out of his way to sabotage his own life, because only then can he fully savor its irony...

Where is My Mind? 

"Stop."

It wasn't on purpose, exactly, that I stopped writing blog entries, but as the days piled on, I decided to make a thing of it, a bona fide hiatus. My brain seemed to me as lively and buoyant as an emphysemic lung, the ideas coming out of it more and more stale and calcified, and I wondered if I needed to stop trying to pull paragraphs from it forcefully (like taffy), and instead wait till they would form on their own, light and airy, binding to themselves and growing into things of easy, ambiguous substance (like cotton candy).

To mix metaphors.

I waited. But the ideas didn't come. Instead I plodded between home and work, work and home, half-awake, for the better part of a month. I was animated but not energized. I huddled with the masses on the subway, lurched through the crowded streets, mumbled, groaned, and shuffled from place to place, with no electricity moving through my static mind. I was, in a word, a zombie. I was the walking dead.

And so I am today.

Brains.

* * *

The idea that our bodies might continue in the absence of our mind is archetypal, but the conflation of brain-hungry undead with Vodou ("voodoo") is erroneous: the zombie of Haitian legend is a different thing entirely from the walking dead to have taken over movie screens, game consoles and TV. No, this latter zombie—the zombie of George Romero, the zombie of Resident Evil—is the product of post-Industrial revolution societies only: these mindless drones that wake from the grave seem frighteningly synonymous with the mindless drones that wake from their beds and march toward Mr. Coffee every morning, march toward the shower, march toward the train, toward the office, toward the lunch room, toward the gym. They are the true creatures of habit. They are monsters of consistency.

Zombies, it turns out, are the hobgoblins of little minds.

* * *

"Do I have no hobbies because I have disappeared into my work?," I wonder, "or have I disappeared into my work because I have no hobbies?"

Leisure is the antithesis of work: you work so that you may earn money to spend on leisure. Your leisure time is spent in oblique contrast to the time you spend at work: it is the time you spend not-at-work. Work and leisure are inextricably bound up in one another, to the point that it is impossible for leisure to be anything other than another form of work, impossible for leisure time to be construed as anything but another commodity. As a child, when I played tag, or wiffle ball, or boys-chase-the-girls, my brain was free from the idea of work, and with it, free from the idea of time: I didn't worry if the time I spent playing was "well spent" any more than i worried about spending generally. Only now, as an adult, given a finite and measured amount of leisure time, am I in a position to wonder: "Am I relaxing efficiently enough?"

Leisure is bound up in work like death is bound up in life: as long as I am relaxing, I am working; as long as I am living, I am dying. My relaxation is a form of work. My brain is not free. I am neither alive nor dead. I am a zombie.

Brains.

Your Inner Toon 

I was arranging to meet a stranger at a crowded spot in Boston Common, before each of us realized we had no way of recognizing one another.

"How about a picture?," she suggested.

"I don't really have any good photos of myself," I told her. "But I do have this cartoon that looks a whole lot like me."

"Oh! Me too."

So we exchanged cartoons, and met at a crowded spot in Boston Common.

I haven't invoked the "B word" around here in a while, but ... can you say "precession of simulacra"?

* * *

Second Life keeps coming up in conversation, and it's not even me who keeps bringing it up. It's the New York Times, Business Week, the Boston Phoenix; it's people at work, people at the café. I'm not even particularly interested in Second Life.

Second Life (in case you've had your head stuck in reality) is a 3D virtual world: you create yourself an avatar and then ... do whatever you want. Second Life is a "massively multiplayer online" game, except it's not a game: there's no objective, there's no way to win. You don't team up into "tribes" in order to blast people with laser guns. Instead, most people seem to find themselves a spot of land and settle down. They set up businesses, and when they're not working, they meet up with friends or with strangers.

They do all of the things they might have been doing in their real life. Sorry—I mean, their first life.

The Sanskrit word avatāra means "descent," and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence.

* * *

It's good, I think, for people to get in touch with their inner "toon." If you can see yourself as a cartoon character, then it's harder to take yourself too too seriously. It helps like trying to imagine yourself as a Muppet helps. And likewise, I think it's good to be able to see others as cartoon characters: it's somehow easier to empathize and sympathize with them when they're drawn in bright colors and exaggerated lines.

Maybe it's because it's easy to imagine them with an anvil dropping on their head.

Now I look at photos of myself and they don't really resemble me. I look at cartoons of myself and they seem a truer representation.

Does that mean it's now hard for me to take myself seriously, at all?

Has my second life become my first life, and my first life faded into the background, into a lower realm of existence?

Ghost in the Machine, pt. 2 

I can't remember.

What was I watching when your careworn face showed up on screen?—reminding me, first of all, that you existed (I just hadn't thought about you in a while...), and then, only a moment later, reminding me that you didn't. You didn't exist anymore.

I really can't remember what I was watching.

Fact is, I've seen you a dozen times on TV, and it's never made an impression on me. Your craggy voice is what strikes people, and your tiny body, and sometimes they get a lucky hint of your intensity: more intensity per pound than anyone I've met.

But to people who know you, these things are already familiar, and the feeling from seeing you onscreen isn't much different than seeing you anywhere else. "I ran into Pamela the other night," I'll find myself saying to some mutual friend. "Where?", they might ask. And then I realize: Freaks and Geeks. A TV show.

* * *

That's where it was—Freaks and Geeks. I remember now. You growled something funny in that voice we used to call "emphysemic" (till we discovered this was actually true). And then you were gone.

And then I realized, you were gone.

I also have trouble remembering where I was when I learned this fact. Far away, that much is certain: I left you as suddenly and certainly as I left all of you, that whole crew. I learned it by telephone, from the woman who introduced us. I can't remember if we talked, or if it was a voicemail. I recall being shocked, though I don't know if that's a fair word: you sometimes seemed so frail that I wondered if you were dying from the moment I met you.

[They say we're all dying from the moment we're born, but you somehow turned this on its head: living right up until the moment of death.]

* * *

"How old are you, Pamela?", we'd ask now and then. We had an idea that you'd been around forever, that you were maybe a beauty from the silent film era; the math didn't work, but still it made sense, because you behaved as though you'd been there since the Beginning. The beginning of something, anyway.

You'd cackle at the question, that signature laugh: "Even the coroner won't know how old I am," you'd say, "on the day I die."

You were wrong about that. That's the day I learned—on the day that it no longer mattered.

Maybe it never mattered.

[I think I wanted an answer because I needed to know how fragile you were, how brittle. I wanted to know how hard to squeeze when I hugged you. Your refusal to answer was your way of saying you weren't brittle at all. Maybe it's also the reason you never told us you were dying. Maybe you thought that if you told us, we wouldn't hug so tightly anymore.]

* * *

I was in the northern part of California, you know, when they buried you in the southern part. Closer than I'd been, but still not close enough. I wanted to be there. I doubt you'd have cared; you never thought much of ceremony. I expected, as always, you'd stand and watch from the wings, halfway heckling, but also mouthing our lines as we spoke them: your silent support.

I wanted to be there and I wanted to bury you with a bottle of cheap red wine, and my love.

I'm glad to see you show up on my television screen now and then, answering a door, peering into a crystal ball, pulling on a cigarette—typecast somewhere between mystic and sight-gag. You'll say something in your husky voice, you'll laugh your signature laugh, and you'll be gone. And later, I'll think, "I ran into Pamela the other night.

"It was good seeing her."

The Softer Side of Suicide 

or, Why God Invented the Internet, Part One

Please don't even ask what possessed me to go to Google.com and type "painless suicide." Unexpected results included:

• Suicide discussion groups. Who, exactly, is doing the discussing?
• Pep talks. "The real pain comes after death, being burnt eternally in Hell."
• Soundtrack.
• I don't get this.
• and finally, something practical...

It all reminded of this little essay from The New Yorker a while back, about the most popular loneliest person on the planet...

False Face 

or, The Ids of March, pt 2

In a month of emotional upsets, I got an unexpected one the other day from what I thought would have been emotionally safe territory: MySpace.com.

"MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends."

[I have zero investment in MySpace; I have an account, but it's completely neglected. To be honest, I feel guilty any time I go to the site, because I don't belong to any of the MySpace demographics—I'm neither a high school student, nor a sexual predator trolling for high school students—so on the rare times I do log on, I feel like a poseur.]

Then I stumbled upon the profile of a close friend—and found I barely recognized her. A year ago I'd have felt qualified to write her profile. (This friend once asked, morbidly, if I'd give her eulogy when the time came...) Today, nearly every aspect of her profile came as a surprise: "About Me", "Who I'd Like to Meet", "Occupation", "Marital Status"...

Who was this person?

And her MySpace friends? Who were these people? (And, to the real point—why wasn't I one of them?)

I don't know how long I spent reeling from this snub before I realized—she's not on my list of MySpace "friends", either—not because we're not friends, but because a MySpace profile is a very particular representation, to a very specific audience ("Who I'd Like to Meet"). It is a false face.

* * *

Another friend debriefs me after her recent trip to the psychiatrist (because I'm not inexperienced in these things). She's spent a lot of time there trying to get a healthier balance between what they're calling her false self and her true self: "Our personality includes a false self which is what we show the world, and a true self which is who we really are on the inside. Our false self is a front that we use to show the world that everything is all right with us."

You mean, like an online profile?

You mean, like a blog?

* * *

I recently met someone through this blog. She sent a message out of the blue, "I sort of cyberstalked you and found your blog. Can I read it? I feel like I should ask permission."

That's when I realized that the blog is not me. It's a false face.

But at least it's a face I like...

* * *

Recently, I replaced the photo I had at MySpace with a cartoon version of myself. It seems more honest: it says, "This is me, but not really." I'll tell you all "About Me"—the "me" I use to show the world that everything is all right. The other face is still safely hidden away...

Left Weave Girl 

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper-real.
- Jean Baudrillard

There's a cute girl I keep seeing around town, and I run into her again outside of The Gap. When I see her this time, I can't help but stare: "Haven't we met before?" I stare straight at her for a full minute, which might have been really rude except for the fact that she is a poster.

Left Weave Girl is the "spokesmodel" for The Gap's latest ad campaign. She's the one who tells us to "Go left. Feel right." Whatever that means. And the reason I keep staring is that I might know her. Or I might not.

And I just can't tell which.

* * *

"Ohmygod, you look just like [MovieStarName]!" Not an uncommon thing to hear. It's a game people play—the movie stars we most resemble. But I have some friends in Hollywood who take this game to the next level. You've seen these friends of mine. They're the store clerks, the patients at hospitals, the crime victims crying to the police, the silently supportive wives. You've seen them in whatever space lies between the foreground and the background. My friends are not the stars of the stories they tell; they are the supporting actors—the proletariat of the dream machine. You don't know their names, but you do know their faces. And when people walk up to them to say they look "just like that person on TV," well, there's a chance they are that person.

That's why I spend so much time staring at Left Weave Girl. There's a fair chance Left Weave Girl is a friend of mine. But the longer I stare, the harder it gets for me to tell. I could call this friend and ask, but ... somewhere in the definition of the word "friend", I'd think it might mention that you should be able to recognize a friend when you see her.

* * *

If you sit close enough to a movie screen, you'll notice it's not quite solid. It's porous, full of small, almost invisible holes.

For the most part, I watch—consume—movies and television like everyone else. That is, I think of the world in which celebrities travel as inaccessible, just as unreal as the worlds which they depict in the movies themselves. Just as hyper-real. The rest of us could no more visit that world than visit Oz.

But in those infrequent and jarring moments when I see someone I know cross over to that other side—when a familiar face shows up on TV, or at The Gap—I am reminded of those small, almost invisible holes. I am reminded of the permeability of the silver screen. (People can cross over, but, like Oz, they can only get there through a fluke and the gale force of a tornado...)

* * *

Finally, I do check with my friend, to see if she is the Left Weave Girl. "I wish," she answers. "She's cute!" She writes me from a place called Lone Pine, California. She's making a cowboy movie. She signs off, "Yee haw." My friend is in Oz. She's hyper-real, after all...

The Finished Form of the Future Catastrophe 

Some days—and today is definitely one of those days—I wonder why we even bother. Why, when I woke up, did I bother stretching for ten minutes, riding a bike, or adding "super-food" blueberries to my cereal? Why did my neighbor bother to lock his doorknob and his deadbolt in a secure building? Why did that woman bother to run for the train? Why were all those people stuck in traffic on the freeway even bothering with work? Why did that man bother to add sugar to his latte? Why did the weatherman bother to predict the snowfall that never came?

Why bother with any of it, when no matter what we do, the news wires will always run stories like the one they ran today, the one about the woman who was found dead in Brooklyn, the woman who'd had her hands and feet and face wrapped in packing tape, who'd had a sock stuffed in her mouth, who'd been cut and tortured and sodomized and then strangled to death?

"The way her face was taped also could indicate the killer wanted to watch her face as she died."

Why do they bother telling us?

Why even bother?

* * *

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

* * *

Sometimes, when the thoughts in my head are loud but I can't wrestle them into words, I'll distract myself doing multiplication tables. Sometimes I'll cook, or mop the floor, to take my mind off things. Often I'll take a hot bath, hoping the feeling will pass, and that the noise in my head will go away on its own. And sometimes I'll think I should try to push through the feeling, should try to force my confusion and sadness and disappointment in mankind as a whole into words, a blog entry, maybe—even when the confusion and sadness and disappointment feel too big for words. Every once in a while, I manage to do that. Most of the time, though, I just think, Why bother...

Raison d'être 

"The unhappiest people I know these days are often the ones in motion, encouraged to search for a utopia outside themselves."
- Pico Iyer, The Global Soul

"All America is Disneyland."
- Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art

During my week-plus hiatus from blogging, I've been mulling a few ideas I think might be interesting, but whenever I sit down and start typing, all that comes out are little blips about UPN's Veronica Mars, Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor, and LucasArts' Star Wars Battlefront. I notice with some surprise that four out of my last five blog entries have been about movies.

Don't I have anything real to write about?

I have a few beers with my sister, the Anthropologist, who reminds me that, originally, this blog was going to be a form of travel writing. ("And travel writing is a form of ethnography," she says significantly—or maybe just drunkenly...)

I'm quick to point out—I'm a "travel" writer who doesn't like leaving his apartment. I don't take vacations. My favorite mode of travel is to relocate every two or three years.

* * *

Yesterday, I had this conversation with myself: "I need to go out. I need to go out. I need to go out." "I have nowhere to go."

What's so great about out? I have an impression that, no matter how much I get done at home, my day will be incomplete—will feel insufficient—if I don't leave the confines of my apartment. So I invent destinations for myself: I go to a café and order a coffee that I could just as well have made at home. I pay my $3, sit uncomfortably in a stiff wooden chair, feel some annoyance at the too-loud conversations around me, and go home. "There," I think. "Now I've had a full day."

I don't think this is particularly neurotic; I think it's a result of a false distinction we make between "real" experiences and virtual ones.

* * *

It seems only natural to assume there's a hierarchy that puts a trip to the stone beaches of Nice or the Buddhist temples of Cambodia on a higher tier than my forays to Veronica Mars' hometown of Neptune, to the "far, far away" planet of Coruscant.

If I believe this hierarchy in theory, I turn it upside down in practice, because, given the choice between actually traveling, and virtually traveling, I've mostly picked the latter. Add up what I've spent on movies, DVDs, and video games, and I could doubtless have seen those Cambodian temples by now, if I'd really wanted. And if this blog was meant to be a kind of travel writing, then I have to conclude, it's that kind: the virtual kind.

Not exactly a new idea: Rough Guide has been publishing travel books about the Internet for ten years now. Back then, this was a shocking idea—shocking and a propos—because it introduced the radical idea that the Internet was a distinct location, one where you could tour, visit, collect souvenirs.

Lately, I find the idea shocking—and incorrect—because it assumes that the Internet is a distinct location, when in fact, the Internet and its extended family of media-driven experiences are everywhere. The Rough Guide assumes that my experience of virtual things is a small set, distinct from my "real" experiences—when in fact, it is becoming a larger and more significant part of those real experiences. I'm hard-pressed to name an experience I could have which isn't mediated, packaged, marketed, purchased, and consumed. Rather than ask, "What is virtual," I'm left wondering, "What isn't?"

All America is Disneyland.

What's an Urban Sherpa to do? What's left, but these little "rough guides" to movies, videogames and television? The occasional restaurant review? This really is the stuff of life in the city...

* * *

The recently-released Xbox 360 boasts such genuinely impressive graphics that reviewers are describing the games as "photo-realistic." The True Crime series of games are set in Los Angeles and New York, on maps that have been built to mimic the real cities, down to the signage on the front of each convenience store. Google Earth offers its users "a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop: view exotic locales like Maui and Paris as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more."

You see where I'm going with this, right?

* * *

Travel writing, and even traveling, have many of the same problematics as ethnography: they are based entirely on the biases and expectations of the traveler. They are representations, only. And because they claim to be something more (more "real"), they are in fact less—less honest. As Baudrillard said, the map has replaced the destination, and the destination has ceased to exist...

Deucelion. Gomorrah. New Orleans. 

"An opportunity for us to come together in a way we've never done before."

- New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin describing Hurricane Katrina, in the days prior to the storm's landfall

"And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood."

- Revelations 12.15

It's a kind of perversion, isn't it, to be sitting here flipping through Internet photos of people's suffering looking for the "best" ones? Or to be visiting certain interactive sites that allow me to mouse over an image for "before" and "after" images? It's a kind of perversion that has me playing that Led Zeppelin song over and over (you know the one I mean), while I sit and try to image an unimaginable disaster.

"Crime won't help you, praying won't do no good."

There was a flood this morning in the basement and it soaked my futon, but it's just not quite the same. I'll admit my compassion has been a little slow to respond here: "A city built below sea level is underwater? This is news?" Would I have been more indignant if it were all a little closer to home—say, in a blue state? If the victims were more a part of the "new economy"? If the victims were, I don't know, more white?

There's something wrong with me, isn't there, with every single one of us who hasn't loaded up a rental van full of bottled water and driven south to the Mississippi delta? The death toll goes to the thousands but I spend some time worrying when I hear Fats Domino is missing. Who?

Walk the street, look around. Try to picture, how high is twenty feet?—and then try to picture adding that much water. Is twenty feet the second story window or the third? Is it above that Starbucks sign on the corner of your block? Does that bridge over there still span the river or has the river swallowed it up? When they say "Evacuate", can you do it, without those twenty feet? And if you can't, then when you break into the grocery store two days later because you haven't eaten or taken your blood pressure medication, will they call you a looter?

Now that bullets are flying and the Guard is nowhere to be found, do you want to rethink your position on the Second Amendment?

"Don't drop the potato."

"I'd always meant to go to Mardi Gras and now maybe I never will."

"Sandbags in a cesspool."

"An opportunity for us to come together in a way we've never done before."

"And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth."

Don't drop the potato. Laissez les bon temps rouler.

Climbing Up the Walls 

Do other people do this?

I found a song last night I can't stop listening to. I heard it on the radio, spent another hour tracking it down, and have played it non-stop ever since. I think I'm trying to make sure that every single time I hear the song, it's fixed to this moment in time, and vice-versa: I'm ingraining now with this song. In other words, I'm scoring the soundtrack of the movie of my life. What I don't know is if the incessant repetition is a symptom of some mental illness of mine, or the cause of one.

What must my neighbors think?

Hear Kate Rogers' cover of Radiohead's "Climbing Up the Walls"

Stranger Than Fiction 

or, The Movie of My Life, part 2

"I'm going to let you in on a little secret: every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it; don't wait for it; just let it happen. It could be a new shirt in a men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black, coffee."

- Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

"Damn good coffee!" exclaimed the passenger sitting next to me on JetBlue flight #176 from Seattle to New York. "Damn good coffee." He actually said this. I had to bite my tongue to keep from chiming in, "And hot."

This passenger had rung the flight attendant with what seemed to be a very specific, elaborate, whispered coffee order. The cup she brought back looked normal enough. She stood around, as if waiting for his approval, and he sipped it while she watched. That's when the phrase left his lips: "Damn good coffee!" And the phrase nearly left mine: "You've got to be kidding me"—not because I thought the coffee was bad, you understand, but because the passenger sitting next to me was Kyle MacLachlan, who, in the 1990s, as Twin Peaks' Special Agent Dale Cooper, enjoyed nothing more than a good cup of coffee, and maybe a slice of pie.

"And you," the flight attendant asked me. "Anything to drink?"

"I'll have what he's having."

* * *

PASSENGER ON MY LEFT: (nervous) Excuse me, aren't you Kyle MacLachlan?
PASSENGER ON MY RIGHT: (friendly, collected) Yes I am.

Awkward pause. No further conversation.

End of scene.

* * *

Movie stars in public. What a surreal phenomenon. Years of living in Los Angeles and working in (or at least near) the entertainment industry have numbed me to it a little bit; I've gradually chalked up the oddness to this:

Movies and television are alternate (better?) realities from our own. To see someone from that dimension in our world ruptures some kind of fabric; it is no less disconcerting than seeing a person from the future or from a faraway planet. "You are fascinating! You don't belong here!" In its best instances, the celebrity is like an errant cartoon character in our otherwise 3-D world, à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In its worst instances, it's as if the celebrity crawled, obnoxious and horrifying, straight out of the television set itself, like Samara from The Ring.

Kyle MacLachlan might have been coming from a mundane visit with his family, or a banal school reunion—but he brought a piece of Dale Cooper with him on to our airplane. Shouldn't he have to pay for two seats, like the woman with the cello, or the man with the pet cat?

* * *

I fiddle furiously with the brightness control on my little 4" JetBlue television, trying to bring it to life. No matter how many times I press the button, the screen will not come on. Typical: 230 seats and I get the one with the broken TV. Just to be sure, I try changing channels a few times and finally punch it in frustration.

Kyle MacLachlan leans over: "Actually, that one's mine. Yours is on your left."

Thanks.

* * *

Last month, while pretending to cast a movie of my own life, I wondered about the "rules" of the game. "If I have blonde hair," I asked, "do I have to cast a blonde actor?" The reason I asked had something to do with Kyle MacLachlan, whom Rolling Stone once described as the "boy next door, if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement."

He was right: it was damn good coffee. And hot.

Therapy 

What follows is an actual transcript with Eliza, the classic online therapist:

CHRIS: I've been really troubled lately

ELIZA: I'm not sure I understand you fully.

CHRIS: I'm having trouble sleeping.

ELIZA: Do you enjoy having trouble sleeping?

CHRIS: Of course not. I wake up tired and sore. I'm stressed out.

ELIZA: Did you come to me because you are stressed out?

CHRIS: Yes!

ELIZA: Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.

CHRIS: Well, I've been having terrible dreams...

ELIZA: Can you elaborate on that?

CHRIS: Sure. The other night, I had a dream I accidentally cut off my hand. I packed the severed hand on ice, and then I lost it.

ELIZA: Are you disturbed by your dreams?

CHRIS: You better believe it! Later the same week, I had another dream where the same arm had been severed roughly at the elbow. I got confused: I remembered cutting off my hand in the first dream, but I'd thought it was just a dream, with no consequence. Now, here I was with no hand—all because I'd lost it in a dream. I remember thinking, "Well, that was an irresponsible thing to do..."

ELIZA: What does that dream suggest to you?

CHRIS: I think it's odd that in both cases, I was maimed pretty horribly, but barely even noticed. Later in that second dream, I looked in the mirror and saw I was missing an eye. It was in there, but it was all white: the part with the color was gone. So in all three cases, I was damaged but didn't realize it.

ELIZA: (Long pause.) What is it that you really want to know?

CHRIS: What I really want to know is, What's the matter with me? Why am I stressed out? Why am I insomniac?

ELIZA: Don't you really know? Why are you stressed out? Why are you insomniac?

CHRIS: I'm dissatisfied with what I've become. Is that what you mean?

ELIZA: Do you believe it is normal to be dissatisfied with what you've become?

CHRIS: I suppose it is normal, isn't it?

ELIZA: Say, do you have any psychological problems?...

Try Eliza for yourself.

Death of the Author 

When Donnie Darko was released during the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, first-time director Richard Kelly took home the Grand Jury Prize (and the admiration of many of his peers) for his perfect balancing of suburban angst, science fiction, and schizophrenia. The film was simultaneously familiar and strange, and the uniqueness of its director's vision was undeniable: Hollywood had found a new auteur.

So, fans of the film may have been confused when, in 2004, Kelly released Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut. Wasn't the first film the "director's cut"? It was almost as though a "tangent universe" had opened up.

The first "directors' cut" I remember noticing was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: he'd reinserted some cut footage, including a dream sequence that actually changed the story a bit. I remember the revision of Luc Besson's The Professional, in which the pre-teen Matilde is so sexy she's uncomfortable to watch. These were scenes the directors wanted in their original movies, only to have the studios edit them out, to shorten the running time or appease the censors. These "director's cuts" make sense.

But as these things become more and more common, their significance becomes more and more confusing: Will the real movie please stand up?

The other day I got a desperate call from my sister: "I was watching Return of the Jedi and they changed it. They rewrote the music and now it's out of sync. This is awful."

George Lucas may not be everyone's ideal of "auteur", but he finances his own movies and he answers to no one—so if that first version of his movie wasn't the "director's cut," there's no one to blame but George. George, it turns out, wanted more special effects: he wanted more dinosaurs and prettier explosions. George gets what he wants—which is why it is impossible to get the original cinema version of Star Wars on DVD.

The text is moving. "Director's cuts" and "extended versions" and "unrated editions" add up to mean that there is no longer a definitive version of the film, only various edits and incarnations, none of which can be called the "real" version. Each installment of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy existed in one form in the cinema, but when released to DVD, each of the three films had both the cinema version and an "extended" version. The "extended" versions added scenes and gave new information about characters and their motivations. By mixing and matching different versions, various audience members could watch any of eight different narratives of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, each one offering up a slightly different "read." This doesn't even take into account "deleted" scenes excluded from any of these "final" edits.

Roland Barthes wrote that "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." Now, ironically, thanks to director's cuts, the death of the director is at hand. In lieu of any definitive edition of a film, provided with varieties of deleted scenes and DVD extras, we assemble the movie in our mind, into the edition we most prefer. In fact, with the right software and enough free time, we can literally make our own edit—we can cut out any scene we find dull or gory or self-indulgent, mix in music we like in place of the original soundtrack. We can splice our favorite films into a definitive "audience cut," a tangent universe to the many various versions with which we've already been provided.

The director is dead. Long live the director.

Identity Theft 

Here are a few biographical lines about Chris DeWan:

After some important years spent in Pennsylvania, Chris graduated from a well-reputed school on the East Coast and then found his way to California. He spent some time dabbling in the arts and in theatre, before committing to a career as a computer programmer and web developer, working for Apple Computer. An avid cyclist who has competed on occasion, he has also been known to color his hair, and sport various body piercings.

All of these things are true of me, but I'm writing them about the other Chris DeWan, Bizarro Chris DeWan, my doppelganger, whom I have never met. We came dangerously close once, probably as close as ten feet, at a party in Cupertino. I sipped a beer with my left hand, and he, like a mirror, with his right. He knew I was there. There was only a table of shrimp cocktail between us.

What happens when matter and anti-matter collide?

It's unnerving to have a double, worse than the worst Citibank "identity theft" ad—unnerving not because people unwittingly fall for the ruse, but because there is no ruse. Somewhere, out there in the world, there is another Chris DeWan—not simply a namesake (which would be inevitable), but another one of me. Presented with an almost infinite number of life's forking paths, his and mine crossed as soon as our names were etched on our birth certificates, and have continued to do so, often—even yesterday, when a friend of mine visited his blog instead of mine: "Weird how long it took me to realize it wasn't you; he works at Apple and seems sort of crazy in a funny way."

Philip Roth had Operation Shylock; I have Operation Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Of course it's all much ado about nothing. He and I will continue to live in peaceful co-existence, parallel but separate lives. We will act freely, make independent choices, and they will probably be the same. This will continue to muck up search engines until gradually, our identities according to Google have become one. I wish us both the best.

P.S. Kudos to Chris DeWan
According to Google, Chris DeWan is the Belvidere High School Athlete of the Week for golf, plays in a band, and is one of Los Angeles' hottest young indie actors. He has published photography of Glacier National Park, organizes Civil War re-enactments, and writes capsule reviews for Butterfly Books. He is a straight A student who has high expectations of himself and those around him. He is twelve years old, is in the seventh grade, and plays basketball. Congratulations, Chris!

Automobiles, Bombs, and Movies! 

"Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.... It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop."

As our elections fall more and more into the domain of a "media ritual," how much they are governed by the same (market) forces described in Adorno / Horkheimer's conception of the "Culture Industry"...?

Discuss.

It's About the Power, Stupid 

Donald Rumsfeld, Meet Nick Couldry. Nick Couldry, Donald Rumsfeld.

Poor Donald Rumsfeld. On paper, it all looked so good — Saddam's regime toppled and a "mission accomplished" over a year ago. But now everyone's calling on Rummy to resign. How could things have gone from so good to so bad?

Digital cameras.

It's those pesky photos from the front line, ruining everything. When the Senate Armed Services Committee asked Rumsfeld about alleged abuses in the U.S.-run prison of Abu Ghraib, his frustrated response was, "We're functioning — with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

Who knew that, in the course of bringing democracy to Iraq, freedom of expression would be such a setback? They are amazing, these newfangled digital camera things. You point them at what's in front of you, press a button, and instantly, you have an "unbelievable" photograph. Un-believable. Not to be believed. Contrasted, I suppose, with the believable photographs published by the Pentagon.

Believe it, Rummy. Now you know why they call it the information age.

Don't you just hate it when things get out of your control?

* * *

"Unbelievable photographs." One might suggest that it's unwise for a representative of the Defense Department, of all places, to pursue this line of thought. It opens up questions that might otherwise slip by unnoticed: What makes some photographs believable when others aren't? Were the photos from Iwo Jima believable? Was there something in the media coverage of the JFK assassination that might have been somehow less than real? What about the footage from Granada, Panama, or the last Gulf War? Who took these pictures (digital, most of them), and how is it we came to see those, and not, well, the "unbelievable" ones?

The events of Abu Ghraib, and the social, political, and media maelstrom which has followed, have grown into what Nick Couldry calls a "media event." Couldry doesn't coin the term in his book, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach; but his rigorous analysis leads to some conclusions about the media which Rumsfeld and his fellow spin-doctors would do well to understand.
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America's Fantasyland 

The golden age of New Zealand cinema is at hand. Even as Peter Jackson and his Lord of the Rings colleagues ship their Oscars back home, another film franchise is setting up camp in Wellington. The Walt Disney Company, along with U.S.-based Walden Media, is in production for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first in who-knows-how-many adaptations of C.S. Lewis' classic "Books of Narnia" series. The swordsmiths at the New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Workshop are firing up their forges to work on the project; they must be the busiest armorers since the Crusades.

New Zealand has proudly claimed The Lord of the Rings as its own since its very earliest press release: "It will certainly be the largest New Zealand feature film cast and crew ever assembled." Their pride must only have swelled straight through the recent Academy Awards, when host Billy Crystal quipped, "It's now official: there is nobody left in New Zealand to thank."

But is it New Zealand in particular that we should be thanking? The Lord of the Rings stands as a textbook example of what Toby Miller, John McMurria and company call the "new international division of cultural labor," a system of multinational co-production which, the authors maintain, helps Hollywood preserve its stranglehold on the financing, production, and distribution of the culture industry. In particular, The Lord of the Rings — a vast, three-movie, six-year project — demonstrates clear examples of both treaty and equity co-production. (Treaty co-production, according to McMurria, "is a strategy by non-US film industries to combat Hollywood's long-time domination of feature-film production and circulation," usually through state sponsorship and aimed at the preservation of a culture's property. He describes equity co-production, on the other hand, as Hollywood's growing tendency to include international partners in the financing of a film, thus minimizing its own risk while maintaining control over the intellectual property.)
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