My pet monster

So here goes:

About 18 months ago, I decided to indulge myself and get back into gaming. I started the process by making the terrible (and apparently common among adult gamers getting back into the habit) mistake of buying a gaming laptop (and nothing less than a souped up Alienware 11mx !). About a year later, I still had the best laptop I’ve ever had, but being unable to upgrade the graphics card (or pretty much anything) meant performance with new titles began to suffer.

Do not buy this book if you’re expecting to find out anything at all about 1984, as this writer seems to have been living on a different planet…Orwell completely fails to capture the uplifting vibe that was the pop explosion of the summer of ’84… maybe he lived in Norwood.

So I immediately thought “I wonder what else is out there?” So went through some random favourite classics, and look what I found…(highlights added)

On Slaughterhouse 5:

This book is a complete waste of time. It is so difficult to read as it jumps back and forth in time. There is no great climax and the stories within just seem to be included by the author to bulk it up.
Childrens crusade? HA! Childrens book more like!

Old Man and the Sea:

This "novel" was the worst "piece of literature" I have ever read. If you can spare yourself from the agony of reading a hundred or so pages about an old man and a fish, than do so. This book brought the worst period of my life to a dramatic climax. I was more miserable reading this book than when my wife divorced me and my parents disowned me. I now have no one but at least I don’t have to read this book anymore. Thank you god.

The Sun also Rises:

I read this as my first Hemingway,and I have to say that it was thoroughly underwhelming. The characters just hang around drinking, and saying things like ‘What rot!’. The dialogue is comical and unrealistic, and you have to ask yourself what exactly happened when you get to the end. The answer? Nothing. Lack of plot is usually mace up for by interesting character development and interplay, but all we have here is a group of rich conceited fops, gracing Europe with their presence. A waste of time.

Beloved:

It feels as if you suddenly stumbled upon the hallucinogenic dreams of someone who just watched "Roots" and then dropped acid.

Light in August:

This book tells a story that can be likened to a horrible traffic accident caused by mean, wicked, and spiteful people. In the traffic accident, everything is on fire,
but the cars passing by cannot refrain from slowing down to stare
at the decapitated head by the side of the road.

Peter Pan:

Peter is just an awful child, his arrogance and self importance outweighing any good that might be seen in him and Wendy is just such a girl that I found myself wanting it to end rather near the beginning. I just really disliked this book, it was, now that I really think about it, quite sinister. I just couldn’t see the joy that so many others have seen in it. I was more on the side of the mother who had her children leave and forget her.

Animal Farm:

Animals Can’t Talk!!
This book is terrible, I mean, I know it was written like ages ago like in the 50′s when movies were all about giants ants and stuff, but none of the animals on this farm were even radioactive or giant or anything, so who cares? They just kind of fight amongst themselves and that’s it! The whole book

God bless the interwebs.

What will you find?

Some examples:

“In most cases, being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.”

I agree. This way has proved itself for me when working with design teams as well as, a long time ago, when I was hiring my team at IOL (Many have done exceptionally well in their careers, such joy…)

“Almost everyone [women] first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them.”

Sadly accurate. So far the book is full of feminist observations that while not ground-breaking, are well articulated, heartfelt, opinionated and a joy to read from someone so bang in the heart of mainstream.

Last one, on the cult-like experience of studying and practicing improv comedy:

“Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path towards Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I look at the world, and it’s where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?“

I lost my identity card /Yehuda Amichai

I lost my identity card.
I have to write out my curriculum vitae
all over again for many offices, one copy to God
and one to the devil. I remember
the photo taken thirty-three years ago
at a wind-scorched junction in the Negev.
My eyes were prophets then, but my body had no idea
what was happening to it or where it belonged.

You often say, This is the place,
This happened right here, but it’s not the place,
you just think so and live in error,
an error whose eternity is greater
than the eternity of truth.

As the years go by, my life keeps filling up with names
like abandoned cemeteries
or like an absurd history class
or a telephone book in a foreign city.

And death is when someone keeps calling you
and calling you
and you no longer turn around to see
who it is

Me: Hey, listen – do you think any of the net-savvy literary theorists that you’re connected to has ever mentioned the connection between Bakhtin’s phatic function of language and things like twitter and other instances of ambient intimacy? [link, now broken]
She: could be, but I’m on the phone and then have to run. I’ll get back to you.  Hi, by the way!
Me: Exactly!

Lip-syncing was one of the genres which indicated the rise of YouTube and rising dominance of user-created video content. But why did so many people find it engaging as viewers or performers?

On a semiotic level, I find lip-synching fascinating, as it emerges as such prominent “sign of the times”. So this is my go at some “history of the present”…

Lip-syncing seems to me like the child of karaoke, it is the next step in a series of social activities centred around music. Additionally, both of them are socially acceptable ego-trips. Before both, we had sing-songs, with people coming together to sing in a group (The T-mobile singing flash-mob campaign looks more like a mass karaoke than a traditional sing-song).

With karaoke, the original performance remains the central subject of the performance. The performer becomes bigger as she connects with the original cultural artefact. Simply: I sing Bowie’s “let’s dance”, friends and strangers cheer, and for a moment – I touch glory.
The original self melts away, I’m now a vehicle for the song, and my gestures signify the original’s concept of stardom. I’m a prophet and my god is the original pop-culture artefact.
Many karaoke moments are compromised of people getting together to celebrate their mutual cultural history, performing the anthems of their youth, whilst celebrating their chance at feeling the kind of attention saved for pop-icons.

(Ah… Attention, the rarest resource of our times, the key ingredient in intimacy, unfortunately a magic ingredient in business, therefore coveted by many.)

One step beyond karaoke, Lip syncing is a purer ego-trip.
In lip-syncing, the original artefact is reduced to a soundtrack for the performance. The re-enactment of music is no longer as central, and, therefore, it’s importance seems reduced. While karaoke is an acting-out of a stardom fantasy, synching dismisses singing, therefore decreasing the imitation component, and indeed, more often than not the lip-syncer does not imitate the gestures of the original performer or any pop performer.
The vocabulary of lip syncing fuses three registers – the quoted mass produced style of pop videos ; a “tradition” of lip syncing gestures that is common to the genre and the peer group, often copied in “reply performances”; finally, it introduces the performers’ own style. While karaoke always creates a dialogue with the original performance, lip syncing, singing excluded, is more expressive of its performers own ideas and fantasies. The fact the soundtrack is identical to the original, rather than interpretive, shifts the focus to what happens on the visual level.
The song then become a soundtrack for the performers delight at her own mannerisms. The vocabulary of lip syncer’s gestures clearly focused on a dialogue between themselves and their peer group (and a reflexive dialogue with syncing genre itself). Syncers have their own private language, while karaoke singers try to merge with the big soul of music.

The famous Wayne’s World Bohemian Rhapsody scene embodies a bridge between karaoke led gen-x culture and lip-sync led gen-y culture. In that scene you can see the focus is still on worshipping the original, but in most YouTube creations, it isn’t so.

Karaoke, so often used as a metaphor for Postmodernity is a part of a culture of quoting, sampling, remixing. Lip-syncing is much closer to mash-ups, cut & paste – further towards the edge of postmodernity.

Personally, I see in lip synching a metaphor for adolescence. Youth tribalism is often unfairly accused of being vacuous and shallow, and lip syncing bundled with many other “online signs of the apocalypse”. But in fact, it is just a symptom of the struggle to discover individuality and authentic meaning in a mass-produced global culture. Both lip syncing and karaoke echo the dream of stardom, but oddly, there is more of the self coming across in lip-syncing.
As a viewer, with many instances of lip-synching, you often feel that beyond the allegedly narcissistic facade of conventions borrowed from leading-peers and mass produced culture, you get a glimpse at who those teenagers truly are. That’s why I find the genre strangely hopeful and optimistic.

* My thoughts on karaoke in this post owe a great debt to Israeli author and columnist Dror Foeyr. Who wrote “Tzadok”, a book about an international karaoke “star” and prophet, full of wonderfully charming, funny and insightful monologues. I wonder if he ever dabbles in lip-syncing.
** In the UK the term for lip syncing is miming, I chose the American term as the specific type of syncing I’m discussing has very much emerged in America.

And this kid was 7, maybe less. And he had this thing, for years, when he’d walk up to the mirror and watch himself for a while, and he’ll make faces and concentrate, and then he’d start crying. With big, round, wet tears. Often he’ll be truly bawling.

All this time he’d be staring at his own reflection in the mirror, and I seem to remember him having this intense look. Like he was amplifying and looking through it the same time.

Like he was trying to understand.
Who is this kid?
Why is he crying?
Whose body is this?
Why is it crying?
Whose kid is he?
What do those “crying” signs mean?
Who do they belong to?
And so on…

So lately I’ve been thinking this kid was a pioneer. It seems a lot of kids are doing that these days.
Or maybe he wasn’t and they always had.
Anyway, for some reason, nowadays kids are often quite happy doing it.

And in London they say: jyouknowhaamean?

Recovery, Java, Latency, Change, Art, RSS, Socialism, Elvis, Economics, Rotis, Analog, Location, Design, Snackr, Diversity, Violence, Prishtina, Enterprise search, Music, Elvis (again!), Prishtina (again), Matter (duh), The Pentagon (shiver), Elvis (lives!), Evolution, Ingrid Michaelson (lucky lady), Wildlife, Firefox, Elvis (never underestimate him ever again), Corruption.

End of page three, but it stays interesting.

There’s a web art installation waiting to happen here somewhere.

In the meantime – happy holidays and a happy new year.

(good night and good luck)

Here is me, modelling my kidney stones for Wired. Maybe I should release the stones themselves under a creative commons license, maybe they can be put to good use somewhere.

Source:

P.S. I’ve gone back to writing silly stuff on twitter. Check it out.

And I thought I’ve seen everything there was to be seen with Microsoft’s software.
I just took this screen-shot. On my FRESHLY INSTALLED Thinkpad.

If it wasn’t so sad, it would have been funny. (which it is)

P.S. no. Retry doesn’t work. It just takes a couple of seconds to think very hard, then arrives at the same conclusion.