A loutish and insipic presentation of scurrilous incoherent ramblings and other dull tedious shite arranged in a convenient and affable chronological format.
There is too much instant communication and not enough time to contemplate or enjoy it. There are too many things to know and too many things to do and still nobody seems to know anything. There are too many mechanisms and too many gadgets and none of them are the right sort of gadgets that we have any control over anymore. If I had a hammer….a simple real hammer, not a hammer that is glorified staple gun or a working man’s Ouzi, but a real solid Craftsman hammer that I can hold over the head of the ten-penny nail of reason in my little fist of fury, I would drive that nail deep…drive it like a stake into the heart of the vampire world in which we dwell.
Both technology and temperament conspire against us, or, me. The unlimited world in which we live…the wired and wireless universe…is no where near as limitless and boundless as we’d care to believe. Communication which should be more expansive since any fool with a machine can reach a audience unimaginable in the Police Brutality Days of the late 60′s and early 70′s, is actually taughtly controlled by the vehicles we most commonly use to communicate. Twitter limits me to 140 focking characters or less. Not 140 words, 140 characters. Useless as a turd unless you’ve been arrested on visit to Azerbaijan, or have fallen down a crevasse after being chased by a polar bear…then it’s useful I suppose. But too many people ((that’s the REAL problem with the world, there’s just too many people and they’re no damn good)), find a urge to tell the world that they’ve got a boil on their bum. Facebook is even worse. You get to see the pictures. There seems to be some limits to the amount of characters as well. And while Twitter’s fascist chokehold on communication is fairly benign, Facebook seeming knows no bounds. But I’ll save that prize number 12 for another day. Sorry Malcolm Gladwell and those of short attention span with too much of the wrong sense of time on their twitching texting hands, with ME you have to do all 2,500 words, pictures, and the 2-10 minute musical outr0.
There are no shortcuts to actuality. I found this out a long time ago when I attempted to program a computer to write poetry. Unlike some of the computer geek types at the time who took it way too seriously (and still do), I wanted to embrace the machine world and bring a new and terrible poetry to life. So I devised a program in FORTRAN, of course, and banged away at the punch cards as though I were some college boy/man prodigy flogging his way through The Goldberg Variations on a Bosendorfer piano. A world, well…a little world, more like a satellite of Mars than a satellite of Jupiter…of words and phrases and other utopisms filled numerous boxes of cards. And when the punchcards were fed into the IBM 1620 in Green Bay and sednt off to the Univac mainframe in Madison and the machine was set in motion, poetry would emerge as though the machine were a modern day Walt Whitman or William Blake or T.S. Eliot. The conceit was that the machine would have a mind of it’s own. The machine was writing the poetry. The random, mechanized, aggregation of words, verbiage, phrases would have a brave and terrible beauty all their own. The problem, ofcourse, is that the machine DID have mind of it’s own….a mind that wandered into some nested DO loop never to return. When it found it’s way out, the epic realization on my part was that while the machine had a mind of it’s own, it clearly had no soul.
Now it would be nice if I could just look at Facebook and Twitter and say, “That damned machine!!” But unfortunately, it’s people, not machines. As they say, accordians don’t play “Lady Of Spain”, people do. Now maybe those people know something I don’t know. But unless what they know is the meaning of John Dryden’s poem Absalom and Achitophel, I guess I just don’t want to know. And meanwhile and meanwhile and meanwhile from MY stupid Twitter feed, me and my 12 followers and my 8 followees….some dude wants to fight Shaq, Yoko Ono babbles about changing the course of reality by interception, and Justin Townes Earle wears earplugs when flying to drown out the sound of the low rent suits. I’m with Justin Townes Earle on that one, the low rent suits.
But enough of this shite…let’s get on with the motorsports and the football and the beer…
I’m not sure if this brief interlude between posts meant that I needed the time to absorb some vital or essential knowledge about motorsports, football, poetry, music which I hate, science fiction which I also hate, or whether this interlude simply resulted from laziness or a lack of courage. Perhaps all of the above. Or none of it. The NASCAR Hall of Fame inducted it’s inuagural class, a pantheon of spectacular brilliance: Bill France Sr, Bill France Jr, Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Junior Johnson, and I watched every moment of it. The All Star race came and went and vanished into memory with a tumultuous finish. Kurt Busch grabbed the glory and the Million Dollar Check. I went and grabbed (the next day at The Firehouse) a tall glass of ice and a bottle of Miller Lite for the quintessential Polish Victory Lap that is my custom when Kurt Busch wins a race. And Kurt’s younger brother Kyle, whose hopes of winning the aforementioned race were dashed during the final moments while racing his teammate Denny Hamlin for the win, when Hamlin squeezed him up into the wall, and a few laps later Kyle blew a tire and that was the end of it. Or would have had Kyle not threatened to KILL his team-mate Hamlin. (More on THAT in a moment)
So all of the above, and all the stars in the sky. All of that and the REAL Super Bowl…the UEFA Champions League Final. Last Saturday in Madrid. Barcelona 2 Bayern München 0. Yes…the glory and grace of the game, and the glory and grace of Venessa Redgrave in the movie Letters To Juliet. Nothing and everything to think about. I watched the countless stars as they vanished, like the words I’m writing now.
I toss these words off into the darkness like little stones skipping across the moonlit water. Hoping against hope that they might rise up into the sky and shine there for at least one or two descending series of moments before dropping into the murky depth. After all, not many people take the time to dive into the deep water, to plumb the darkness for the sparkling treasure hidden there.
“According to THIS book, someday you will publish a photo of us on the Internet.”
Sometimes I just get caught up in my own format. It becomes a trap from which I can barely escape. Hopefully, by recognizing that and bringing it to light, I can indeed effect an escape. Format. Perhaps I should explain, and as always, I will try not to allow the facts to get in the way of the truth.
I’ve been using a format for my blog that primarily involves a synergy and/or a resonance with current anime shows that I have been watching. As y’all should have guessed by now, I stay on top of all the new shows. And I use screencaps from those shows for various expositional or comedic effects, or both. Also, I will sometimes dredge up an older show and go off on that. Format. Yes. Now the concept of format actually comes from my old SF Fanzine publishing days back in the late 70′s and into the 80′s when I lived in Minneapolis and published a Hogu Award nominated fanzineINTERGALACTIC STARBARN and also published zines for the two local APAs (Amatuer Press Associations, for those among you who are mundane — hee!), MINNEAPA ((used various titles there, also published quite few zines ananomously there under the nom de plume of Mark Heifer)), and one for STIPPLE-APA, titled ZINE. I also published a zine, entitled MY ZINE TITLE for the Chicago fandom’s local APA, WINDYAPA….although my first zine published there was entitled The Johnny Callison Show which was written live from the Convention Suite of Minicon 17 on Saturday evening April 18, 1981, and then published in WINDYAPA #6.
Format. Typeface, Masthead, Colophon, Comments and the layout thereof. I would use a format for each of my apa-zines and try and stick to it consistently. It was a small little obsession that was, to varying degrees, shared with my fellow fans. It would prompt such comments, like my comment to Robin Beal in WINDYAPA 11 ((which btw features my cover drawing of myself and fellow Minneapolis fan, Mike Wood (the late Mike Wood, beloved by all in Minn-Stf and longtime editor of MINNEAPA) arriving in Chicago…Mike flying in in the guise of a wood-duck, and me sky-skiing over downtown Chicago being towed being a Northwest (Bozo)Orieinted Airlines DC-10)): “Well by golly, this format is a real wicked drug. [Hi Gretchen.] I like yours. real easy to read.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines. Danicamania is here at last!! Yes, Evil Ones, Danica Patrick is finally here to save NASCAR. It’s real. It’s happening. It’s happening in the happening world. Scanalyze that name!! Christ, what an imagination I have!! There’s the obligatory GoDaddy.com video. Ditto!! She will be racing a part-time schedule in 2010 driving the #7 GoDaddy.com Chevrolet for JR Motorsports. Snappy!! Her first official stock car race will be the ARCA race at Daytona on Feb 6, 2010. Fabulous!! A smart move all the way around. A boost for NASCAR. Fuck that limp dick Drive For Diversity bullshit! It’s DANICAMANIA, Baby!! I can’t hardly wait!!
But I got to thinking about that news conference where they made the announcement with GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons and Kelly Earnhardt from JR Motorsports. If you go watch that video again, it seemed rather forced, strained, and far less entertaining that what you’d expect from an over-the-top company like GoDaddy.com….not that I was expecting to see Danica Patrick and Kerry Earnhardt mud-wrestle naked and take a shower together mind you. But it seemed almost amatuerish, unexpectedly so. Like something a couple of interns threw together at the last minute. And I think one of the interns forgot to make the applause sign….I mean, how hard is THAT….what does it take…a big red magic marker and a chunk of poster board? After all, Bob Parsons has a video blog wtf!! Hmmmm…..I wonder what’s missing from this picture. Remind me to keep an eye on the emotional dynamics underlying this as the weeks and days roll merrily along.
What they REALLY should have done is had a press conference done up like an episode of Queen For A Day. With Bob Parsons as Jack Bailey, and Kelly Earnhardt as fashion commentator. And if they could have gotten Junior himself up to wearing those goofy nerdy glasses announcer Gene Baker wore…it would have been perfect!!
Bob Parsons: “Would YOU like to be Queen for a day?”
Danica Patrick: “Oh yes, Bob. I really REALLY would!”
Bob: “So…what would you like if you’re elected our Queen?”
Danica: “I want to win the Daytona 500 and the Sprint Cup Championship and the Indy 500 and the IRL Championship. And that…that meanie, Dan Wheldon is….such a BEANDOG!! “
((Pssst! Cue that Applause Meter, interns!!))
Bob: “I now crown you Queen Danica….Queen For A Day!!”
And as Danica Patrick and Kelly Earnhardt walk off together into a brave new future…while Bob Parsons posts on his video blog his NEW trademark slogan: “Make every woman a queen, for every single day!”…. it should be duly noted that there is also a new King that hath been crowned.
When I began this war of words, or as I affectionately called it back then, blooging, the idea was fairly simple to me. My first bloog post, on June 23rd 2001 was thus:
Saturday, June 23, 2001
Test
This is a test of the BLOG concept. I’m not sure if I like this concept. But I shall toy with this for a bit until it grows tiresome and banal. It probably has already. I’m going HERE for a Beer.
posted by Michael Smith at 7:46 PM
Blogging had become, or was becoming all the rage, and as y’all will someday figure out, if something is all the rage, then I will rage against it. It took a descending series of moments, but once I grasped the gestalt tightly in my little fists of fury, the race was on. The stupid, the banal, the paltry, the insipid, the doomed, the bored, the damned, the quisling, the bored and the damned, and all the rest of that dross became grist for my sullenness. I tore through the hell of others’ bloogs with a vengence in an insect-burning, snake-roasting rampage that would have made Jack Barron and Morton Downey Jr. proud.
Proud…yeh…..that’s a pretty unreasonable quixotic notion, but….onward.
Rather than moving that hate-machine over here, I’m letting it burn where it is. But don’t think for a moment that I’m out of fuel….that all I’m going to do from now on is reenact a weekly supercollider experiment with particles of anime and particles of NASCAR.
There still are insects. And I have a magnifying glass. And the sun is very bright.
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