The desert of the real.

Jacking in.

It has only been 8 years but the principal plot mechanism of The Matrix is already feeling dated. All of the worrying about finding landlines seems hopelessly antiquated and a little silly. Surely Morpheus has a few vintage Airports stacked somewhere in the Nebuchadnezzar.

The Matrix is, however, the final artifact of the cyberpunk movement and it is a bit unfair to criticize it for keeping with some of the trappings of the genre. [And the race to find ports made for some pretty spectacular action sequences.]

It is little surprise then that William Gibson in Spooky Country slyly takes a stab at the genre he helped create. “Virtual reality?” asks Hollis Henry, “she hadn’t heard the term spoken aloud in years, she thought, as she pronounced it.”

Spook Country, Gibson's second novel set in contemporary times, reveals an entirely different cyberspace then the one he first envisioned in his seminal work Necromancer. Hackers are no longer porting into a consensual hallucinatory matrix. The future turned out to be far stranger: cyberspace is virtually everywhere.

In a brilliant turn, Gibson takes the logic of Web 2.0 and applies it to everyday reality. The once bemoaned "desert of the real" comes alive with locative art installations and user created metatags.

Imagine donning a visor on a personal tour of Notre Dame. For a couple of euros you can download an official tour guide where little information bubbles populate your field of vision describing various stages in the cathedral's history. When you reach the belltower, a holographic overlay would recreate scenes from the 1939 movie adaptation of Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.

Since Web 2.0 is not about the dissemination of official histories, but the proliferation of multiplicities, you would, of course, also have downloaded alternative metatags -- perhaps a Medievalist's analysis of the breathtaking stain-glass windows and your friends' personal opinions of the architecture from their visit the year before.

Marginal glosses for the cyberage.

Gibson's idea of locative art is provocative, yet Spook Country never fully capitalizes on it. Instead, it is relegated to an abandoned subplot as Gibson explores the exploitation of Iraq War funds -- and the book suffers for it.

While Pattern Recognition, one of the great novels of the past decade, was overflowing with ideas and novel terminology, Spook Country feels oddly barren. It is telling that the reviews I have read of the work touch on the exact two moments that had my imagination spinning -- Gibson's literary development of locative art and his application of technological analysis on the seemingly incongruent field of Medieval History:

“Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been a purely signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.”

OPINION: Rickrolled.

I was thinking of developing an elaborate ruse to get you all to fall for the classic internet bait and switch, but this video is amazing enough to stand on its own.

File next to Steve Winwood's Higher Love in my heart.

The possibility of nothing.

Surely this was a lucid dream.

The functional Sweedish bookshelf seemed tangible enough, yet its books repeated in some obscure Fibonacci logic. Their inner text indecipherable.

Apparitions drifted by oblivious to, or perhaps simply ignoring, my presence. Some fragile pact to maintain peace in such blatant disregard for the sanctity of the private sphere.

Walls had been conveniently removed -- the creator's tacit condoning of my unannounced surveillance. Glimpses into fictional habitations.

Or was this merely evidence of that caesura between my left and right hemispheres?

I pondered all this as I sat adrift in a room sea of chairs.

Hiatus

It was in 2001, on our trip to London, when David and I realized how American television has it all wrong. As you all know, they don’t do TV seasons over there. They do series. And every series is more or less independent in terms of its production schedule. If a show is popular, they’ll make another series. When they get around to it.

It’s pretty much the same system that HBO and the cable networks have adopted... with great success.

See, my theory, which you can see from my post about The Simpsons. Is that people get tired of things. And sometimes you need a break, even from things you love, before you ready for more.

A hiatus, if you will.

But what this is really about, is a hiatus of seven years and four years respectively. The Smashing Pumpkins released their last commercial album on February 29, 2000. The last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired May 20, 2003.

And in both cases, I’m glad it’s over. Mostly.

The new Smashing Pumpkins album came out a few weeks ago, and mostly I’m pleased. It has a few great songs on it. Great enough to make me okay with the rapid flaws on the album and in the “reunion” concept of this new Billy Corgan solo album. (As many die-hard Corgan fans might argue, the Pumpkins were always mostly just Billy and not James Iha or D’arcy.) After all, Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain are the other original members to return. Which definitely leaves some holes in the album.

As a whole, I would agree––as one critic put it––that the album has the feel of “well, how does Billy Corgan feel about the social and political issues or our day.”

It does, though, occasionally rock.

On the hand hand, there is Buffy Season Eight, which kicked off on in March... as a serialized comic book. And since then has completed the first story arc (the four-part The Long Way Home) and a somewhat-interesting one off (The Chain). And it’s really, really good.

It’s not surprising Joss Whedon has written most of the issues so far. And he outlined the entire story. So the feel of the characters the stories is spot on.

Now I just need to figure out what else I miss. Hmm. I guess it’s been a while since I’ve played a good 2D Metroid. Or a good 3D Mario. But I don’t miss Halo yet.

"And whinge and moan and diss."

A Venn diagram of fútbol fans and dancepunk fans would reveal an intersection set of exact one person: me.

But MLS has recklessly cast aside any semblance of strategic marketing to appease the only person still clamoring for a sequel to New Order's "World in Motion." Check out the MLS website and you can stream The Rapture's reworking of their classic 2006 hit W.A.Y.U.H. into a rousing New York Red Bulls anthem.

Is there anyway I could love this band even more?

Speaking of football, preseason has started up meaning it is once again time to lace up those virtual cleats, jockey for electronic autographs, and enlist the aid of fantasy players.

I know Mark loathes the sport and Ben can only manage two simultaneous thoughts, but perhaps there are lurkers out there who would be interested in joining our Fantasy Football league.

Last year, my spectacular winning streak ended catastrophically in the first round of the playoffs, but I am hoping that a few lucky midseason pickups will once again counterbalance my woeful lottery selections and catapult me into the cyberl33t.

So once again I ask of you: Hagan juego?

No gods, no kings, just man.

BioShock has the best villain since robotic Hitler in Wolfenstein 3D:

Ayn Rand.

Drawn and Quartered.

It was one of those days. A particularly foul day.

My concussion had blossomed into a full-on migraine. The dull throb turned sharp every time I opened my mouth. A vexing irritant for someone like myself.

Downtown parking was a fiasco. Garage traffic inched along like a funeral procession. A eulogy of horns mourned my former lack of mobility. Construction thwarted my feeble attempt to acquire Voodoo doughnuts for my loved ones. Downtown's parting gift: a nail embedded snugly in my back-left tire. A delightful souvenir of my day.

My patience reservoirs were completely dry. A situation only sleep could remedy.

The next morning, not feeling substantially better, I set off to Les Schwab to assess the damages. Financially and existentially I expected the worst.

The cost: free and a simple request to remember them the next time I purchased tires.

All of the corrosive cynicism of the day before washed away. I would have cried if the store manager hadn't met my blank amazement with such nonchalant stoicism.

I drove off to the mall to get fitted for my tuxedo. I found a parking spot immediately.

It was one of those days. A particularly good day.

Netflix Two Cents: Planet Earth

Planet Earth (2006)

Verdict: Required viewing for all of humanity. Truly sublime in its moments of utter beauty and horror.

I made pickles!

Beyond the Zero

"You were in London," she will presently whisper, turning back to her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past, "while they were coming down. I was in 's Gravenhage" -- fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile's lingering -- "while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven't even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there's so much more, so much none of us know..."

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -- guessed and refused to believe -- that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children...

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 212.

It took an entire month. An all-consuming month. But I finished Gravity's Rainbow.

The book comes saddled with enormous expectations. The New Republic called it "The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." Its publisher touted it as "a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first." Culturally, it has become less a work of art in-and-of-itself than a literary rite of passage; a sort of post-modern trial of ordeals to test scholastic tenacity and fortitude.

Which is a shame. Because the book is a real joy. Occasionally tedious and difficult, yes. But compulsively readable. It is a text of inexhaustible meaning; a boundless source that could inspire a lifetime of hermeneutical play.

Pynchon sifts through the war-torn semiotic debris of Western Civilization and thematically toys with rocket science and chemical engineering, Tarot cards and the Kabbala, Pavlovian psychology and scatter-plot statistics, Golden Age Hollywood Cinema and Harlem jazz, the military-industrial complex and international capitalism, Teutonic mythology and Rilkean poetry. It is a dazzling web of meaning and countermeaning; a text which operates on mutually exclusively registers which ultimately deny any unequviocal meaning.

The image of the rainbow -- the rocket's parabolic journey from launch to impact -- becomes a symbol of "saturnalian density" by book's end. It comes to represent Europe's romantic and fetishistic obsession with death incarnated in the V-2 rocket. But it also carries with it a terrible sense of historical fatality. That circumstances once set in motion cannot be undone, that the very arc of the rocket necessitates its own fall.

And while I cannot offer any extended exegesis - that would necessitate a few more read-throughs and some heavy charting - I thought I would share with you one of my favorite scenes.

While traveling through the Zone, the vertiginous space of immediate post-war Germany, Tyrone Slothrop, the novel's picaresque anti-hero, is enlisted in a quest to find an orphaned child's lost lemming. After days of fruitless searching, Slothrop begins to suspect that the lemming may not in fact exist and perhaps the child is being lead by some maniac faith, some suicidal impulse...

"That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor, William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape has already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table."

"Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles."

"Aw, shit."

This prompts a brief analepsis in the narrative focusing on the peculiar William Slothrop, a swineherd spiritually tortured by the annual slaughter of his entrusted and trusting hogs.

William must've been waiting for the one pig that wouldn't die, that would validate all the ones who'd had to, all his Gadarene swine who'd rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying... possessed by innocence they couldn't loose... by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life....

William spun this into a theological tract, On Preterition, on those that God passes over for the few he chooses for salvation. Taken to its logical extreme, this meant sympathy for Judas Escariot, a figure as essential to the historical jigsaw of salvation as Jesus. This, of course, was a heresy none of the spiritually or economically Elect wanted to hear and the pamphlet was promptly banned and burned.

Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back -- maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up...

Why Events Unnerve Me

I saw The Simpsons Movie, and I don’t think I really liked it. But for some reason, I’m not really sure.

I still love The Simpsons. And while I may have said, in the past (long ago... we’re talking days or even weeks) that the new episodes aren’t funny. After seeing the movie, I’m not really sure that the case anymore.

It seems to me that the “problem” The Simpsons has is the same problem that “Itchy and Scratchy” had in the classic “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” episode. There may not be anything wrong with The Simpsons, except that we’re just all kind of tired it.

Which is exactly what I thought of the movie. It was good. I laughed a lot. But I was bored. Bored in the same way I’m bored when I watch TV. (In other words, I would have been fine if I had had my DS or laptop to keep my brain busy while I “watched” the movie.)

My point is, that I’m no longer going to criticize new episodes of The Simpsons for being not as funny as the old ones. Maybe they are. I now realize that I am completely incapable of judging them on their own merit, and not with the knowledge of what has already been said or done in the last four hundred some-odd episodes.

To The Victor Go The SPOILERS!!!1!

This post will spoil the ending to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But I think you should have finished it. It’s almost been two weeks and it’s a wicked easy read.

Harry Potter is dead––for some twenty or thirty pages that is––and then he comes back to life in a superior and enlightened form and, because of his self-sacrifice, is able to protect from evil everyone he loves.

Which, although almost surprising, was clearly foreshadowed earlier when we saw somewhat leading grave stone inscriptions: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” and also, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

“Oh,” I thought, “Harry will die. Sacrifice himself. But then come back.” Because, as all of you (except probably Ben and Sam) may know, Jesus already did that.

It really isn’t that shocking. Rowling is brilliant in her literate and functional bricolage of elements as diverse as Magical Realism and the Detective Novel. All while assembling and sticking to one of the most challenging, centered and diverse plot lines I know of. Jesus is better known than either Dupin or Borges or Garcia Marquez.

But it could be somewhat surprising. This is Harry Potter we’re talking about. The secular Humanist anti-Christ. The boy witch who solves all his problems by relying on his own power.

Personally, I think the most interesting thing about the new book is that Rowling’s characters somehow continue to disavow the concept of religion completely while at the same time believing in the concept of an immortal soul and an afterlife. (Maybe I missed something, but those two concepts seem, well, tied together.)

Anyway, that’s how I feel. But you don’t have to take my word for it.

Goldsmith's two cents

MIA - Kala (2007)

When I first heard MIA shortly after the release of Arular, my initial reaction was something along the lines of "this is hipster trash." But as the album became increasingly ubiquitous I soon found myself getting her hooks stuck in my head. It wasn't until I discovered Piracy Funds Terrorism that I was 100% sold, but I've been a fan ever since. Her hip-hop roots are what drew me in, and with Kala, it is to her hip-hop roots that she has returned.

As good as the hip-hop driven tracks on this album are, I'm equally impressed with the others. Several of the songs are totally unlike anything we've seen from her in the past. Paper Planes, for example, is an indi rock sounding track with typical MIA playfulness. The chorus uses several gun and cash regiser sound effects in place of lyrics.

I can't say I fully grasp it, but there's a message/statement that definitely comes through in this album more than in her last. There are consumerist/capitalist/political references throughout the entire album, and despite her irreverent style there's clearly something there. The track Hussel features an artist by the name Afrikan Boy, and he raps about how he sells sugar on the motorway, how his mother told him to be an accountant, and how he doesn't pay taxes. Maya opens $20 by saying, "...like do you know the cost of AKs up in Africa? $20 don't mean shit to you, but that's how much they are." (It's an awesome track sampling Where Is My Mind by the Pixies.) And even beyond these overt references, the whole album feels far more self confident than Arular, and at times sounds almost confrontational, which to me feels like something of a statement in and of itself. Kala is a playful and rebellious celebration of our globalized culture by and for our malcontent generation.

I can safely say that I like Kala better than Arular, but perhaps not for any of the reasons listed above. At the risk of sounding overly sentimental and/or delusional, this album has for the first time made me feel like a member of a global culture/community created by, and belonging to, my generation. I don't necessarily think it's revolutionary, but I do think it's a (or at least my) first glimpse of the potentially positive cultural side effects of globalization.

One could argue that this was achieved years ago when The Beatles were globally played and universally embraced, but I think this different. Along side Maya on this album (as a Sri Lankan Tamil herself a member of one of the most marginalized and impoverished groups of people on Earth) are Aboriginal children, Africans, Americans, etc., and they have together produced a pop record which will likely prove to be appealing to a generation of people all over the world. It's a record that wouldn't have been possible a generation ago. It both represents and appeals to the first truly global generation.

Taken as an argument there are a million ways to poke holes in this line of thinking, but I get a really unique feeling when I listen to this album. Like, maybe there is still hope for a world community that isn't totally exploitive and trigger happy, and maybe our generation will start humanity down the right path. I'm sure Janet, Nancy and Scott all said the same thing, but the world is different now. For starters, Janet didn't have a copy of Magical Mystery Tour a month before it was released, now did she?

"I put people on the map that'd never seen a map."