Here, brought to you by conversations I had with my dad and computer glitches, are location markers for diners in Northampton, MA on a map of Paris.
Parrying His Own Tweets
One of the stops on my busy Thanksgiving sojourn was Matthew’s, where he and his mother attempted to coerce C’s experiences into a narrative about how texting is rotting the delicate minds of the youth of America, and god only knows what else. During the discussion I took it upon myself to point out that adults weren’t any less susceptible to the compulsions of constant phonography, but because that was orthogonal to what they were trying to get C to say it only held anyone’s attention as fleetingly as a “LOL” sent via text message.
I think that texting/mobile web abuse is related to the confusion I touched upon here, wherein people think this stream constitutes some kind of grasp on the world. Inundated with a steady stream of faux-information and faux-communication (fauxmunication?), people are too busy pressing buttons to wonder about the quality of things, which heads off some troubling questions.
This is the look — even as late as Proust — of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.
–Benjamin, Illuminations, 170.
Random Minutiae
Here is a blog post in which the author compares reviews on sites like Google Maps (or, of course, horrible places like Citysearch and Yelp) to the fragments that Benjamin collected for his Arcades Project. Now the author seems (from his post’s title, at least) to be amused primarily by the insight the “review” grants into the psyches of the dramatically overentitled, but I think it’s also intriguing inasmuch as our banker-hero decides that a place is cool, and then the obvious next step is to mold the place to her/his tastes. Everything homogenizes so much that you might as well remake all of it after your own tastes. Horrible, really.
At any rate, here are some pictures I took in the bath:
Yoshi high-fiving himself.
Slightly less chickey-leggy than the last shot.
Refreshed, I went out into the world.
Where the Watermelons Grow
So I’m down in San Francisco kind of soaking in the ambience. And also the rain. Went to the Trieste, and Vesuvio’s this afternoon, so I guess I’ve totally covered the authentic North Beach experience. As you know, I am all about the authentic experience.
And Occasionally
I make it out into the world.
