Convolute B: Babinski Reflex

We're waiting for Halloween and I have a composition notebook. The design is speckled and the font is wide. The cars filter past the stadium on the game day.

Convolute A (Apple Store)

The mall is the modern arcade. It teems with the modern archetypical figures of the window-shopper, the family, the teenager, etc. The brightest store in the mall is the Apple store. Outside the Apple store is a line of people waiting for the new iPhone. The release is hyped. They're next to a small vendor selling iPhone cases.

I, meanwhile, had a question. I had to inquire about the queue, but that was for the newly released product. I asked the last person in line about this subject. They directed me inside the store where I asked an associate (who was looking at his iPhone) how to order a new charger for a MacBook Air. He looked up from his phone and gave me advice that I already knew or could have looked up online. But, before one questions the value of these living conduits of information, one should take note that I would, sometimes, much rather take advice from a live person instead of parsing through the information online.

Speaking with an Apple Store attendant made me conscious of what extent we are people, what extent we are machines, and how frequently we navigate between the machine-human-world and the physical world. Walking into a store where someone is engaged in a remote world underlines the simplicity of this interconnectivity.

(Un)Trending: New Google Reader

Today, the Atlantic Wire reported that the e-community was upset over the end of Google Reader. Apparently, changes to the site will entail a redesign that discourages the usage of the share and circulate buttons. The consumer response seems to suggest that the urge towards migration to the relatively-new Google+ is to fault for the unfavorable upgrade. However, what I found fascinating about the article was their uncertain attitude towards Google's abilities as a social network.

The article mentioned, "It turned out Google wasn't so bad at social networking after all." There is still media doubt, apparently, at Google's ability to social network, which suggests the continued unease of internet communication. Perhaps, this sentiment is still popular with the press, but let's look at the mall in future posts.

The mythic poetry of Walter Benjamin stills rings true as long as we have the collective imagination. Benjamin wrote, "the collective dream energy of a society has taken refuge with redoubled vehemence in the mute impenetrable nebula of fashion, where the understanding cannot follow" [Ba1,2].

Thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Now, honestly, I don't feel terrible that I'm not present in New York right now.

The video feed from Democracy Now looks emboldening. I have seen footage and notes by other bloggers and individuals in the media industry. I watched people hold up their iPads and document the instance of the young, blond women who were maced on Wall Street. I also observed footage:

If you read the comments on the video, it becomes unclear whether the individuals are affiliated with the banking industry or if they are individuals at a restaurant. The contrast is the fashion of today's documentation on one level. The above scene brings to mind a selection from Benjamin as taken from Ba1,2.

Benjamin wrote, "the collective dream energy of a society has taken refuge with redoubled vehemence in the mute impenetrable nebula of fashion, where the understanding cannot follow."

The need for segregation of space in the video above (the street versus the restaurant) maintains the distance between the perceived ruling and subordinate classes. I find it interesting that the technology is present as a recording device on both levels. There is the level of the street with the media and individual lens as well as the level of the balcony with the personal computing device.

The preoccupation of the subordinate classes with the fashion is obscuring the message. As the message becomes, obscure, I am afraid that nothing will happen from this movement. The school is not the refuge for manifest social change, instead, it serves as a class-regulating institution without the financial aid to address the entire body. The institution is class-regulating in the sense that it reinforces social constructions of value, assigns these a monetary value, and rewards or punishes accordingly. I hope that from this venture the educational system will receive more funding that it can provide more of its students with need-based financial aid.

Now, me, I am not a banker or philosopher. I would not enforce monetary standards on an individual to assign them value, nor would I deign myself well-learned enough to apply gradients of intellect to the individual.

I do not know what is best for the country.

It would be difficult and perplexing for one to express outrage in a way that is not attuned to the sensibilities of the audience. I have been told that is not polite to question the mechanisms of modern society. I can consider a revolution, an ideological change, or the upheaval that makes a nation question its entire basis. The educational system is the most important systemic organization. I am in favor of anyone who has ever wanted to be treated equally, I don't find it entertaining, and I hope the schools become involved in this debate.

Do I find it immaterial?

I don't know.

CITGO Update

The sign was removed after disinterest in selling the sign was expressed. The sign has been moved to a friend's studio.

The CITGO Gas Station Sign I

This evening marked the beginning of an Independent Art Study; may I have your sign for the purposes of art?

The attendant was sitting behind the glass. He wore colored lenses. I asked him if I could have this large, white sign for CITGO gas that was on the side of the business. The signs were next to the trash. I wanted to take the sign to an art gallery for them to hang on the wall. I thought about the movie Trash Humpers.

We picked up some pizza. The pizza joint was located next to Mediterrano and covered in soft lighting. The other structure in the building was for a therapeutic health practice. The first row of parking spaces in front of the Cottage Inn were for the delivery drivers. The row of spaces was empty. We took the food home and talked about Lean 6 Sigma. The sign was waiting near the gas station.

Once, I met a gas station attendant who told me that it was a dream. He made noises like the pow-pow of guns when he was bored. I asked him if anyone there had ever been robbed. He said no one had and pointed at the glass. The glass was thick, rainbow, and looked like light. It was a long walk to head from HQ to a gas station.

The sign turned out to be immensely heavy. A friend and I slugged it on our shoulders to our domicile. We had to stop frequently. I was carrying the sign by the "C" and he was dragging the "O." We tried to walk out of sight behind trees. We had permission to take the sign, but cars kept slowing down. I realized that this sign was going to be site for the misunderstanding of a century. A minivan playing loud music halted in the middle of the thoroughfare.

We crept quietly along a cul-de-sac where sunflowers swayed in the dark rain. He wanted to drop the sign. I took a strap from my jacket and wove it through the "C." The adventure reminded me of what I would have imagined going t.p.ing felt like as an adolescent. On one block, a lady started to walk her two dogs in our direction. They wouldn't stop barking and she went inside her home. She had one of those pumpkins that was carved to look like vomiting. I thought the pumpkin and small dogs were aptly suited to compactness of the sidewalk space.

We were almost there. The big water tower was obscured by the houses. The ground was covered in a film of leaves. I looked relative to my own direction. There was a house where the occupants were all already wearing Halloween costumes.

They said, "Now, that's a scavenger hunt. They stole a CITGO sign!"

The wee little dogs kept yapping, their beer pong game continued into the night, and that is how, I believe, we might have accumulated a sign to pass on. I want to see what happens to this in the same way that I think someone did about dollar bills.

I wonder what it would take to do a geocache about one used gas station sign that's about 10 feet long. I'm thinking of the whole "Where's George" campaign and how that revealed interesting patterns in the flux of human movement with currency. Any further updates about the CITCO sign will be noted in regards to #independentstudyproject and accompanied with a numerical value.

Spot On Spotify: "Let's Talk About Airtime"

Web 2.0 Summit is hosted in San Francisco this year from October 17th to October 19th. There are a variety of speakers including the Sean Parker. Parker is currently dedicating much of his time to develop Spotify in Stockholm.

He suggests that much of the industry being created is influenced by licensing issues. There is also a confluence of media based on the individual user creating social media in the shadow of larger institutions developing such materials.

Parker's interview (below) at the Summit gleans fascinating insight into the creation of Spotify. His public persona is still heavily influenced by his estranged relationship to the music industry. Parker's recent platform development is a collaboration between Facebook and the social music media industries. The brand then purports to bolster its power on the basis of viral distribution packets.



This initial program interview was not without digs at the Boulevard and Parker's persona. The interpersonal drama between Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg is still predominant in their recent press coverage. The press noted that Parker's first tweet, reportedly, was "Sorry, Zuck, I had to do it eventually." But, Parker does makes clear, informative points about his understanding of media in the interview at this conference.

Parker's theories suggest that the media we use and the platforms we adopt characterize more than our consumer profiles. The consumer crowd still searches for a distribution of music without the mediation of existing, top-down structures. The existing structures governed by entrepreneurs like Parker and Zuckerberg might evolve in a similar manner. For now, the strength of Parker's public speaking is that he acknowledges that his interests as a shareholder will temper his opinion. He admits they negate his ability to extensively and publicly critique the organization. He is unable to address whether products like Facebook usher in a level of "creepiness" due to his financial obligations.

Are we, as a public, capable of accounting for this flux of data? Who is keeping track of whatever or whomever is creepin' on our data?

every book on bookshelf one

collected poems 1947-1997 allen ginsberg
the book of promethea cixous
catch-22 joseph heller
sodom and gomorrah marcel proust
italio calvino cosmicomics
the abridged journals of sylvia plath
the invisible man ellison
ulysses joyce
the phantom toolbooth norton juster
gravity's rainbow thomas pynchon
wuthering heigts bronte
cain's book trocchi
slouching towards bethlehem didion
the famished road okri
mrs. dalloway woolf
the night of the iguana williams
girls who wore black johnson and grace
tales of eta hoffman
tropic of cancer
empire of the senseless
great expectations
orlando woolf
the stranger camus
the complete stories franz kafka
the voyage out virginia woolf
motion sickness tillman
richard yates lin
alice's adventures in wonderland & through the looking glass carroll

Guitar Picks from Amnesty International (Recommended)

BAROQUE SPACE

David Beer and Roger Burrows

Scholars Beer and Burrows suggested in the Journal of Consumer Culture in 2010 that there was a new type of consumer influence by Web 2.0. Beer and Burrows hypothesized that there are patterns of capitalism on the web. These trends are similar to the ones reflected in what could be considered physical reality.

They mention that the new consumer should be called the craft consumer. The craft consumer is grappling with the inchoate conception of identity that arises when the traditional lines between the producer and consumer are blurred. Beers and Burrows briefly suggest that this is a stable consumer identity.

I cannot help but compare them to Walter Benjamin when he hypothesizes that the writer Baudelaire is pre-occupied with the self-same individual. The self-same individual is the literary subject and self-subject. who strives for individuality. Incidentally, both the postmodern and modern individual attempts to distinguish their own identity within a miasma of information.

For Benjamin, this was the world of the novel taking place amongst the death of poetry. For Beer and Burrows, it is against the backdrop of the modern web. The literary field has been transmuted to the web. Given the cult-like morning of Jobs that has occurred in the media of this past week, we can assume that the web is the new utopia of our society. In order to further investigate the web, we should look to the scholars who have studied utopias.

Scholar Christine Buci-Glucksmann published a piece back in 1984 that mentioned three types of utopia.

Buci-Glucksmann's Three Types of Utopia:

'Catastrophist' utopia

Anthropological utopia

Transgressive utopia

Her writings and further elaboration on the these themes are discussed in "The Utopia of the Feminine," an essay that appeared in Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Basically, Buci-Glucksman posits that there is a connection between the idea of the feminine and the perception of space, notably, how utopias are presented in writing. I would like to posit that her third type of utopia, the transgressive utopia, is what characterizes the current cultural genesis on the web.

This last type of utopia is contingent upon a "praxis of purely imaginal space" that "forces people to think together a number of apparent opposites" (94). Welcome, then, to the transgressive commericial utopia, emphasis mine with influence cited to Buci-Gluckman, Beer, Benjamin, Burrows, Jobs et al.

Five Tracks for "Computer Scientists Don't Ask Questions," 33 1/3 Records

Track One
"The Gente Decente of Financial Aid Departments, i.e. You 'Old Bastards, I Need Monies for Revolution'"
Track Two

"Auguste Comte Doesn't like You, Either."
Track Three

"Show Me the Crazies in Your Humanities, and I'll Show You Monopoly Money."
Track Four
"I Should Have Gone to Medical School/ When I Don't Know What's Wrong, Baby" (DuWhop)
Track Five
"Clarissa Don't Explain; There is a Subreddit for That"

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