On Becoming a Real Adult

I think I now understand what the expression "to drink like a 20 year old" means. As I notice the first thin streaks of grey weaving in and out of my hair, I console myself to the fact that I'll turn grey fairly early with the likelihood that I'll be Ian McKellen silver, which is really the best grey to be. However, my most recent wanderings through Hess Village, Hamilton's equivalent of George street in St John's, have left me feeling rather alienated. When my friend Rob was in town a month ago, he ended up taking a swimsuit model home (actually to our mutual friend Johnny's home) almost effortlessly from the burrito bar Ché on Hess street.

I wandered from bar to bar this past Friday surrounded by the utterly indifferent. I think the only thing I actually do miss sometimes about drinking in St John's was the fact that the bartenders treated me as a human being. Here, I was a paycheck and an irritant. Any activity that caused a pause in the flow of money behind the bar is cause for ejection. Though this isn't really a difference between St John's and Ontario. There were bars like that all along George street; I just never went inside them.

The bars I did frequent were more relaxed places, either where you could see good music, or just have a few congenial drinks in a friendly atmosphere. There are places in Hamilton like that. Where I used to go to Roxxy's, CBTG's, and The Ship for music, I now have 33 Hess and The Casbah. Where I used to go to Roxxy's and The Spur (may it rest in peace) for friendly liver destruction, I now have The Winking Judge and the other spots on Augusta street. It's a bit farther from my house, but still entirely worth the fifteen minute walk. A person can always find the places that are welcoming to them if they look.

In fact, I never liked the meat market, customer-as-commodity style bars. Whenever I went to them, no matter what city I was in, I always had an awful time. So I suppose I never drank like a 20-year-old, even when I was 20. When I was 17 years old, I looked like I was 25. Now that I'm in my mid-20s, my hair is slowly starting to turn silver. Perhaps I'm finally growing into the character I always have been, after a fashion, a sardonically happy writer drinking pints of beer in a bar that's not too loud and where everyone comes to know my name. There are some places where I've never been comfortable. I just need to stay away from those places.

Posts about my continuing voyage into Marcel Proust (pretension, check!), my thoughts on the Watchmen film, and the Wittgenstein biography will be forthcoming, especially now as my term's work is starting to smooth itself out.
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I have become positively addicted to this song, a perfect cadence of rhythm and regret. A song that's a couple of years old from an outfit called Beirut. They mostly do instrumentals with instrumentation and melody inspired by European folk song, but song structures closer in style to contemporary rock.

Many Falling Men and Women

Every week or so, I read through the New York Times obituary section to see who has died, and if any of them are interesting to me. I discovered a few days ago, the death of Ernest Trova, described in the headline as "Falling Man artist." I was immediately intrigued, though even more fascinated to discover that this was a completely different person from the Falling Man that I first thought they were talking about.

You can see a picture of Trova's statue at the linked obituary, and I was fascinated when I found out this existed. I think it makes an intriguing parallel for what I think was a transformative moment in world history. The intellectual movements that dominated the twentieth century shared a yearning for perfect rationality, societal unison in accordance with a master plan. The fascist and communist political movements, Le Corbusier-influence architecture of segmented machine-like functionality, the uniformity of mass production systems. I could go on, but I won't. Also, I should qualify that there was rebellion against these ideas that had equally powerful affects on humanity: the explosion of democracy and its freedom-encouraging offshoots. But these democratic ideas articulated themselves as rebellions and reactions to the totalitarian conformist ideas. Without the power of totalitarian structures in human society in the twentieth century, I don't think the democratic movements would have developed in so many diverse ways as they have.

Here's what this has to do with Trova's Falling Man. This is a sleek, perfectly crafted image, symmetrical along many axes, and implying a spherical perfection. Trova's sculpture is crafted in strict conformity to a very simple set of rules. Man is made into an abstract, sterile shape. Now contrast that with this image, Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman. It's visceral, bumpy, irregular, asymmetrical, disturbing, and violent. This is an image of death that was so frightening to people that it was quickly hidden after its initial display. We stare in awe and quiet contemplation in Trova's Falling Man, and are made physically ill by Fischl's Tumbling Woman.

Not everyone I know takes Sept 11 seriously. I had one friend who said her strongest reaction on the day was being happy she got the day off school. I have yet to be able to explain this moment better than Don DeLillo did in his essay, "In the Ruins of the Future."

"[Sept 11] was bright and totalizing and some of us said it was unreal. When we say a thing is unreal, we mean it is too real, a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so bound to the power of objective fact that we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions."

It's hard to find a better symbol for the totalitarian conformity to the simple idea than the architecture of the World Trade Centre, two giant rectangular prisms reaching high into the atmosphere. Their destruction was a moment of chaos, blood splattering, fire exploding, shards of glass flying jagged, dust hideous and liquid choking and invading every orifice. This constituted a kind of final proof that the totalitarian perfection of the 'modernist' idea was a sham, a dream that only made those who held it laughable. Only idiots still hold onto this dream after its final shattering.
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An internet update: I am now tweeting. So far, nothing from my phone, because that shit costs money. But when I'm in my house or at a computer, I'll be telling you exactly what I'm doing. I might not go so far as some do with their twitter accounts, but more of my minor brainfarts will be on the internet for all to ignore.

The Trials of Busyness and Performance Anxiety

All two or three of you who read my blog regularly may have noticed that I haven't been updating as frequently as even I would have liked. Part of my mission statement for Canadians Lost in Canada was to blog somewhat less frequently, but make the posts higher quality. Not necessarily longer, but punchier, more thorough, and a better read overall. Anne Hathaway post aside, I think I've succeeded in this regard.

But the delays in my blogging lately have come from simply being busy as all get out. My philosophical work is rather intense, with a paper on extended mind theory of which I have to write at least a first draft before next Thursday, when I am inundated with essays for my first year course for which I'm a tutor. As well, my survey course on Gilles Deleuze requires some fairly intense reading and quick bursts of writing that occasionally become exercises in stream of consciousness philosophy. These seem to be working, but I don't yet know why or how. I also have a conference at which I'm presenting a paper on flaws in philosophies of language that privilege reference as an essential source of meaning. This is in just over a week, in Windsor.

Simultaneously, and at the same time, I've begun working for the Graduate Student Association here at McMaster, fully aware of the irony involved. Earlier in my university career, I worked for The Muse, which at the time (2001-4) had one of the most antagonistic relationships imaginable with the undergraduate student union. It is an antagonism I still hold for the Canadian Federation of Students. One of the reasons I enjoy my work with the McMaster GSA is because despite being members of the CFS, my colleagues share my antipathy for our national affiliate. Once our current organizational overhauls are complete, I hope to do some actual lobbying of the university administration, which seems willfully incompetent and inattentive to students' needs.

I also have a book to finish. My novel, A Small Man's Town, is in the final stages of writing, with only one major sequence of about 30-35 pages left unwritten, and my second-last sequence almost complete. Depending on how things work out this summer with Deidre, my unbelievably enthusiastic illustrator, I should have a publishable text within a few months, and a manuscript by sometime in April. Soon I'll have to commence a task that is far more gargantuanly difficult than actually writing the book: finding an agent and getting a publisher. This is more of a summer project, but the preparatory stages have to be done over the next month or so.

Among my other summer projects will be gaining an encyclopedic and critical knowledge of every major debate in contemporary environmental philosophy, possibly relating it to my current course work on extended mind, or as I like to call it, world-integrating cognition. Also, I hope to write several short stories I've sketched over the past year, as well as a paper critiquing the law of identity. Somewhere in all this, I hope to foster some kind of functioning personal life beyond work.

But one nagging difficulty when it comes to blogging is performance anxiety, especially when I compare my own writing to the living, breathing work of hallucinogenic theatre, Joe Rogan.

I remember Joe Rogan most fondly from the classic 1990s sitcom Newsradio. His personality in real life is exactly the same. His work on Fear Factor, which consisted of goading people into humiliating themselves with pain and risk of exposure to deadly disease for moderate amounts of money, was not his artistic high point. His blog, which I've linked above, is a masterwork of the freest of free thought. One of my longest of long term goals in philosophy is to work out how to make all these kinds of ideas make sense to sane people.

Perhaps a Lady Really Can Love a Robot

So the AV Club has a column called The Hater, and they recently did a walkthrough of the newest Jamie Foxx single, "Blame It," concluding that "there ain't no party like a Ron Howard party because a Ron Howard party don't stop." This is one of those phrases George Carlin talked about in one of his routines which you just can't conceive hearing or reading, ever. This is because a phrase like that line about a Ron Howard party is so discordant with all our presumptions about how reality works that even though it makes grammatical and semantic sense, it's difficult to understand.

This isn't a post on my worries about Jamie Foxx, who seems to be following the J-Lo path to personal and professional insanity. Foxx toiled in relative obscurity as a comedian, aside from a run on In Living Colour, until his acting career took off thanks to films with Oliver Stone, Will Smith, Tom Cruise, and finally his Oscar-winning performance as Ray Charles. But now that his music career is taking off, he's in danger of becoming a ludicrous, laughable parody of an R&B singer. But I'll let Jamie Foxx control his own destiny. The Soloist looks schmaltzy but good, and next year's Law Abiding Citizen seems promising.

Now watch this video and tell me if you notice anything weird. I mean, aside from Ron Howard monopolizing all the white girls at the party, while all Jake Gyllenhaal can do is talk to the one girl everyone else is ignoring, asking if she's ever seen Donnie Darko.



Jamie Foxx, in terms of his voice in this song, is indistinguishable from T-Pain. They're both so heavily autotuned that they no longer have human voices. They speak as the machine. This is one step above MC Stephen Hawking, and I think this is fascinating. Here we have an R&B ode to drunkenly fooling around with random men and women, sung with the voice of a robot. This is the genre that, more than almost any other theme, focusses on sex, love, articulated with a smooth, organic, human voice. There's something cyberpunky and beautiful about this image of an R&B singer removing all the organic qualities from his own voice. A blood red lighting scheme evokes the visceral, the organic. Sex drips from every scene and movement of the camera – even from Ron Howard. Jamie Foxx is shot in constant closeup, the proximity itself erotic. And he sings with the voice of a machine. This is cybernetic sex, cybernetic liquor, cybernetic R&B, cybernetic Ron Howard.

If you haven't noticed, I still find the Ron Howard thing a little weird.

Think about the traditional boundaries between human and android that this voice breaks down. Whole new vistas of sexuality are spreading open before us, as silicon and carbon unite to create something entirely new. I get the feeling that this has already been done in at least a hundred Japanese animé films, but it's still an intriguing idea.

Although – Ron Howard?

A Man for Whom Pain Was His Life as a Man

My journey to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was long and needlessly complicated, probably like that of most people. I first heard of it as a film that was based on a book, but I was more interested in other Terry Gilliam films, like Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits, or Brazil. This was during high school sometime. Then when I came to university, I worked with a sports editor at The Muse who could not string a sentence together, but held incredible admiration for this man Hunter S Thompson.

A few months into my first year, a bunch of my friends and I went to an on-campus screening of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I watched it for the first time chugging rum from a plastic bottle, laughing uproariously at the madness on screen. I remembered virtually nothing of it. One friend, who had organized the screening, was a few rows down on a couple of hits of acid. During the opening bat hallucination sequence, he had a rubber bat hurled at him from my row, freaked out, and ran away.

Since then, I have seen the movie a total of five times, only once while I was sober. I only learned more about Hunter Thompson in the flurry of tributes written upon his suicide in 2005. My friend who had dropped the acid during the screening said it was because he couldn't take living in a country under George W Bush. But as I read more about him, I understood that this was a man of incredible will, who would never buckle down to a political enemy, even one he found so repulsive and horrifying as Bush jr. No, this was a man who could not bear the physical pain of being alive anymore. He had destroyed his body, and he would not allow it to restrain him anymore. His funeral services, with his ashes launched from a giant fist-shaped cannon built by Johnny Depp, were suitably epic and weird. It still took me almost four years after this to read his most famous book.

I can understand its reputation among my friends as a manic drug comedy. It's filled with scenes of "bad craziness" of all kinds,
vivid descriptions of the wild alterations that drugs can do to a human body. Thompson's hallucinations veer disturbingly close to the actual experience of the world, not as revelations of some true nature, but of seeing all that there is and always was more accurately, with greater clarity. He was a man with an incredible insight into American ideals, capitalism, the fear of freedom, conformity culture, and his own corrosive flaws. Better writers than me have already talked to death Thompson's skills describing the items of this list. But of the last, he is most subtle in his descriptions.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins with a quote from Dr Samuel Johnson, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Thompson wrote with an elegant voice, his words flowing in a torrent, a river slicked with oil and lit on fire. In his voice, perhaps, he was most human. But the book depicts a man for whom paranoia, fear, bitterness, and existence on the edge of madness were the constants of his life. His drug intake is not to gain some kind of transcendence, not to find some plane beyond humanity that some philosophers call the vertical or the overman, and that some religions call nirvana.

The peace he sought was the peace of the wild animal, the peace free from thoughts of spiralling complexity. In drugs, he sought to become pure simplicity. Thompson's moments of sobriety in this book are his moments of greatest depression, greatest wretchedness. The joy returns as he becomes less human, as he becomes more drug, more movement, than man. The Thompson of this book is a man for whom humanity is torture, and to escape from that torture is to remove all complexity. Drugs are his means to this end. I loved this book, its wondrous flows of words, its comedy of satire and depravity. But this book terrified me as well, with its picture of a humanity degenerate, worthy only of being escaped, utterly hopeless. All Thompson's talk of 'The American Dream' that he and Oscar Acosta search for is ironic. This dream is the dream of the stupid and the willfully blind, like the cops at the district attorney's conference, or the gamblers/lizards who populate the casino.

My friend was wrong about Thompson's suicide in more ways than the one I mentioned earlier. George W Bush would not have been intolerable to Hunter S Thompson. He would be inevitable. Thompson would kick himself for not expecting this laughing fool, perhaps surprised that he had not risen sooner. W is the paradigm case of the stupid and the blind. No, Obama is the man incompatible with Thompson's worldview. This is a man who inspires hope and love in his rhetoric, and embodies that in his family. He's ambitious in his policy, and believes that Americans can overcome their impulses to pettiness and spite, becoming neighbours and brothers. And he is sincere in this belief. That is a man of which Hunter S Thompson could not conceive.



Among the few acknowledgments of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is thanks to Bob Dylan, for "Mr Tambourine Man." If he had lived long enough to see American politics today, perhaps he would have understood this song not just as a dream and a refuge, but as a prophecy or a foreshadowing.

"Let's Go Visit Little America and Eat With Forks!"

Over the past couple of weeks, my friend Rob was visiting as he slowly made his way back to Newfoundland from Seoul, where he had been teaching English. This is a social phenomenon I find fascinating, that so many young people, humanities majors mostly, are going to Asia to teach English on year-long contracts after graduation. The pay is often very good, and a lot of their expenses like moving costs and accommodation, are taken care of by the company. I know growing numbers of people who have done this, are doing it now, or plan to. I've sometimes joked about how eventually, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai are going to develop neighbourhoods with significant numbers of North Americans and their white or biracial descendants, just like Chinatowns and Little Toykos in Western cities.

Little America, self-contained cities of whitish people in a few high rises.

I think at some point in the future, I'll write a book about some of these English teachers, fictional of course, based loosely on the stories of people I know who've gone to Asia. I might go to Korea myself after I finish my PhD, mostly just to do first hand research for this book, which I might call Little America. It sounds like an incredible kind of journey to take, and there are lots of ways to approach the scenario, many hooks to hang stories from.

Korean culture is far more conformist than we're used to in North America. Rob describes how enthusiastically a whole class of elementary school students joins in denouncing one of their fellows when they commit some minor infraction. "Teacher, he's chewing gum in class!" In Canada, a kid who does that gets beaten up at lunchtime. But in Korea, the first one to tell on somebody gets popularity points.

There's almost no homegrown rock music in Korea. Older people listen to traditional music, and younger people listen to K-Pop, which I've sampled at the bottom of the post. Some of these songs are actually pretty catchy, even though the members of the groups are even less differentiated than the members of the old American boy and girl bands. You can't even tell which one is the Cute One™. They're all goddesses. One is usually a little more badass than the rest, because she's the one who does cheesy raps in the middle of the song. I say cheesy raps, because Lil Wayne could eat these people for breakfast.

There is a stereotype here in Canada of the Westerner going to teach in Asia and coming back with a hot Asian girlfriend or wife. It happened to my friend Dave, whose wife is Japanese. But Rob told me that many women in Korea look to Western English teachers as someone to cheat on their boyfriends with. There are many one night stands, but it's almost as if the experience is just to cross one more item off their bucket lists. "Slept with a Westerner. Check." The dynamic on the whole is about consequence free sex, which is attractive in some ways, but tiring in others.



And yes, Korean businessmen really do act that way when they're excited.
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Incidentally, the title of my almost-finished book has changed again. It's called "Small Man's Town," and I think it's going to stay that way. I had trouble saying "Laughing Lovers" out loud to people. But "Small Man's Town" gets to the heart of the book's major themes much better. I think of it as my love letter to Newfoundland and Memorial University, especially since I doubt I'll ever want to go back on a permanent basis. But it's also kind of a breakup letter, and "Small Man's Town" delivers that very directly and clearly.

Clichés About Power Corrupting . . .

I support Barack Obama, and I wish that he wasn't in this mess, but in a way, it seems unavoidable. Three of his cabinet appointees have hit trouble because of tax irregularities that, if their ubiquity among Obama's prospective cabinet is to be taken as a guide, is prevalent among most rich people in America. I was especially sad to see Tom Daschle resign from his not-yet-appointed position today, since I know from his career as Senate minority leader in the 1990s that he would have done good work on the health care reform project that Obama wants to tackle before 2012. However, the fact that he owed well over $100,000 in taxes that he never paid for his driver was just too blatant a screw up to recover from.

He would have gotten the votes in the Senate to take the job, but Obama's whole project for his administration is to run government differently. What I found especially sketchy was that since he lost his re-election bid in 2004, he has earned over $1,000,000/year working for a health care lobbying firm. While Daschle was never a registered lobbyist, he worked for the firm, and they made use of the many connections Daschle had throughout the government. Daschle had become too much of an establishment Washington political figure, and in the past few days, we've seen how he's come to inhabit many of the worse qualities of that description.

I've been reading Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, over the last few days. In one chapter, he describes a trip he took hitching along on a private jet to Silicon Valley to visit Google headquarters. He found the American tech industry facing some major problems, like a steadily shrinking number of young Americans with the qualifications to work in technology development, and the dearth of blacks and Latinos among those few Americans graduating with advanced degrees.

He also describes a train trip he took to a small town in western Illinois, where a highly profitable Maytag plant was about to shut down and move to Mexico, simply to garner even higher profits based on cheap, if less dedicated and skilled, labour. He talked with people who failed to benefit from incompetently run retraining programs, and one recently-unemployed man who had lost his health insurance, and faced going far into debt to finance his son's live-saving liver transplant.

He called this last story something that a politician misses by spending too much time in private jets.

Briefly Commenting on a Writing Soundtrack

This post is a brief diversion from a short paper I'm composing for one of my graduate courses. It's a 1000 word interpretation of some ideas I find interesting in Gilles Deleuze's book Nietzsche & Philosophy. Quite a few folks I know tell me that they can only work in silence, and I actually find silence more distracting than having some kind of semi-regular noise or sound in the background. My mind tends to wander in silence, and I find myself thinking about (so far) unrelated philosophy, ideas for fiction, or food I need to buy. So having some music of any kind playing in the background actually helps me focus my energy, and increases the pleasure of writing.

This song is a recurring item on my working soundtrack at the moment. And I will make no apologies for it.



My thoughts on the movie Milk which I saw last week, and the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which I finished (for the first time) a couple of weeks ago, will come later this month.