Facebook in Post Postmodernism

He signed onto Facebook, one of the earliest and most powerful social mapping sites that existed online. He was friends with both Daphne and Dela, in the same way he was friends with Tatiana; it was common for acquaintances to keep online tabs on each other. The key was to alert the former’s attention to the latter. His wall, an area where friends left comments, was relatively stagnant, with about one comment every four days. He needed to incite Daphne to recognize Dela’s existence. He clicked to Dela’s profile, to see a picture of her with Buckley and her parents at a nice dinner. Buckley’s cheesy grin and Dela’s sexy smile…there’s a good reason she was your first love…

“Hey hope you had fun at the concert. Let’s get some espresso soon :P Emoticon? Or no emoticon? No emoticon. Exclamation point? Ellipsis? No punctuation. It's just more for her more to interpret. It should be sporadic, a reminder, an apology, an acknowledgement. Halloween was in 2 weeks. He had to find out where the party was. He could take Dela, and then see Daphne there. Daphne would see him and be stunned. He would win.

21st Century Avant Garde Art

For those of you who haven't seen this, I think it's pretty characteristic of our post postmodernism. We love pure emotion - we laugh at it, mock it, parody it; I almost cried when I watched this for the first time.




Watch the above first.



Perfect. Not only can everyone relate to this, but even if you haven't seen the original you can appreciate the sound editing. Post postmodernism. This is funny. These people did a good job editing this. Now we can laugh at it and not feel embarrassed for him. Talk about self-conscious.

Sea of Consciousness

Why do we love the sea? Because we have absolutely no way of controlling it. Land we can build on, but unlike moutains - which even with great difficulty we can build on - the sea is wholly sublime.  The men who brace the ocean know that they have no chance of taming it - it's always in flux. Land is sturdy, water is not. The sea life - living on the ocean, sailing, boating - is a reminder of ubi sunt. Always changing - you can't build on it  - it will eat you, devour you, like it did the Titanic. The beginning of the 20th century was so proud. But after the war they realized their error, those late teen years make it clear.
As in adolesence, as in every century's adolescence. I'll live to see 2030 definitely. Will I see 2070? 2080? Do I want to live to see 2080? Meh. World's just getting nicer - more gentrification, now health care, less poverty. Leaning towards socialism, when Indians are all rich and happy and bodies don't float in the Ganges.
The sun sparkles on the diamondy water. Sailboats are like flags on the horizon. Muddled and in the vague distance, stray cumulus clouds hover in place. And the sun always fracturing into a hundred million gems, dissolving in the vast waste of distance.
Dayboats plough the ocean with jets of spray on their sides. I taste the salt on my lips.
Sea birds swoop. Barges truck. Faucets cry. Loose cirrus strands expand like a nebula.
Everywhere the sea does the same things, bobs and floats cresting; but nowhere is it the same. Like humanity. That's why we love the sea: because it reminds us of us.

That Big City Feeling

    
On a summer morning, when you walk along the street and people are beginning their days, you get the big city feel. It's inspired by sirens, or by the smiling face of another stroller, and it says to you, welcome, welcome to life, this hot day is another of many that you have been blessed with, and not just you, but millions of you, all beginning their days to do different things, in different ways, tens of millions, in areas and neighborhoods, commuting, relaxing, this is another day in life. It's the sense of volume that's distinct in the feel, it's the large apartment buildings and the early sun that do it, they let you know that this is another day, and that there are even other cities like this one around the world. There are billions of us, and we all cogitate and breathe alive, winter or summer, continents around the world, there are us.

The big city feel is different from the small town feel. The former makes you smaller because of your relation to the people living with you in the urbanscape. The small town makes you feel smaller because you see the landscape, and you realize that you're a creature inhabiting God's land, and that is different from a creature inhabiting a land that man has constructed on God's land. In the city, you have greater corporeal scope, you realize the body's relation to other bodies, as per Whitman and it can minimize your place, or enlighten you as you think of your relation to the multitudes.  In the country you have greater ethereal scope, you understand the futility of your place with relation to the passage of time, and it can make you appreciative or feel puny.

GD

A post postmodern dialogue between some New York writers at The Archive:

“I'm going to start a blog. It's going to be called GD.”
“Like god damn?”
“No it stands for gonna die.”
“Ahh.”
“It's going to be short posts about fuckin' shit that makes you wanna die.”
“Like fml?” says Gio.
“What's fml?”
“Oh, fml started as a blog?!”
“Yea.”
“Wow, that really went viral. I have a 14 year old cousin who says that.”
“What's fml?”
“It's a blog about bad things happening to this guy. It stands for fuck my life.”
“That blog sucks,” says Peter.
“It's actually really addictive when you first get into it.”
“So the first post is “I just ate a hot dog with no bun.”
“Shouldn't you be done by now? Your idea has been taken. It's been done. It's over.”
“I only have three posts so far, but the-”
“It's over. You're done.”
"It's really over? GD."

The bald eagle was panting yesterday.

Bach and the Waterbottle Fugue

Johann Sebastian Bach loved his god. He dedicated every Sunday to him, and every Sunday for three years wrote a cantata. A cantata is a medium length narrative piece of music with vocals and orchestral suites. He was a master, logged in his 10,000 hours, and could sit down and write a three hour piece of music as if he were taking a shit. Not in any way to reduce his cantatas; I use that metaphor to compare the excretion of his soul to the excretion of the body, a regulated overflowing of emotion and passion. But it is his fugues that are really spectacular. And what is most spectacular is the self-referencing nature of his fugues - for in the composition, he became literally inspired, as his soul took refuge in the music and he became dissociated from his environment, his personality, wholly subject to the nature of his creation, so that his soul became interwoven with his music with a slight pause in between. Then, on the level of the music itself, the weaving nature of those contrapuntal lines is so mathematically perfect that it is impossible to doubt his genius.

As I sit here writing these lines, trying to create a fugue of my own, it is summertime, and though it is not humid today, I have my fan blowing so that the wind washes over my face while asleep - it blows at my bed, and next to my bed is a sidetable. On the sidetable is an empty water bottle, that, amazingly enough, continues to rock back and forth from the way the fan blows. This rocking has not ceased for hours, it lasted all through the night while I dreamed of horses and nightingales and subways. It is incredible that the water bottle does not roll around in its rocking, to move away from the wind, that it does not circle like a top and fall over eventually, but instead rocks on its center, situated in a contrapuntal position, in balance with itself and the wind from the fan. And this to me is spectacular. I've come to notice that the rocking increases in amplitude in a cyclical way, like a sine graph, so that it rocks faster and harder, then slows almost to a standstill, rocking the while, then speeds up again,  rocking more violently, following the rules of nature, in its valleys and its troughs.