I have been reading “Camera Lucida,” and I’ve also been having a massive geek-out and entries about each of those things are coming up. Also, the latter has still-unresolved drama so stay the-fuck tuned.
Tabloids
So I was standing in line at the Safeway down the street and I glanced, as I often do, at the tabloid racks. One of them was purporting to publish a list of the people Obama “wants silenced.” At the bottom of the cover was a picture of Whitney Houston, and for a minute I thought that Whitney was one of Obama’s mortal enemies. Sadly, closed examination revealed that there was an unrelated story about Whitney still being “addicted to” Bobby Brown. Too bad, I would have bought the paper.
Note to tabloid writers: I will take out a lifetime subscription to you magazine if you can write even a single story linking Obama to the Jon-Benet Ramsey case.
WTFIRLBSLOL
In case you haven’t been following along, the ladyfriend and I picked up a house. Some portion of this process was recorded for television. In fact, we’ve just soldiered through our last shoot, so I guess the completion of the process is official. I am landed.
My feelings about this are not wholly unequivocal. Up until about 9 months ago, I hadn’t really planned on buying property any time in my thirties, and I’m pretty sure I’ve always assumed that I just wouldn’t ever have a detached house. I mean, I’m not really the kind, right?
What this shift means is still up in the air, along with everything else until all the detritus around here is beaten into some semblance of order.
I finished reading The Aneid a little while ago and was struck by how transparent some of the propaganda was. I am, of course, not an expert, but it seems as if the narrative is composed of something very close to 100% pure bullshit. The aim of the bullshit was, you may have heard, creating a deeper link between the Roman (then) present, and the high-Hellenic past (although, in fairness, doing it by claiming descent from the noblest of enemies is exemplary of the sort of perversity possessed only by a genius.)
At any rate, I closed the book and glibly thought to myself, “That Virgil guy was like the Shill Oliely of his day!” And then I thought, “No, Joaquin, Virgil was awesome and Shill is. . . umm, whatever it is that he is,” or something. There were probably more obscenities in that sentence at the time. I’m a fan of those. Once I was done cursing, however, it was time for some idle speculation about why people who prostrate themselves to the powerful were once capable of being brilliant artists, but can’t get away with that sort of thing any more.
Like everything else that I feel ambivalent about, I’m pretty sure that a large part of this can be traced to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the hilariously outdated trash-fest The End of History and the Last Man Frankie Fukuyama, like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Jinkelheimer Schmidt before him contends that we’ve pretty much come to the end of history, and there is just a tiny bit of cleaning up (by which he means shooting Arabs) to be done before we can all be confident that we’re living at the pinnacle of human progress (even if some people have to live in cardboard boxes to support the greatness of our achievements.)
What Frankie accidentally predicted in all that garbage was that the arc of progress has really floundered. In the absence of a real opposing ideology to draw adherents away from, The West has basically stopped bothering to think of market economies as engines of progress. Without at least some vague hand-waving in that direction, great art, even great art as flagrantly political as The Aneid will only ever work as part of a counternarrative.
How It’s Going
So obviously one of the problems with having fucking around being your paradigm for getting things done is you don’t have much to show for it. I guess that means you’ll have to take my word for it, unless getting around to making this business functional a few weeks ago is impressive. Ha!
At any rate, I’ve also been pricking around with synths and Python, which has been fun. Sadly, the synths and the Python are not related. That would require a level of sophistication that I don’t possess in either of those realms. Sad emoticon.
My efforts, mentioned a while ago, to read through the journals of my youfs has hit a bit of a snag. Like A la recherche du temps perdu they are full of the most intolerable whinging, mostly about not having a girlfriend. Boy did that get old fast.
