The Grumpy Owl

“Last, but not least, the man who probably better than anyone else understands the psychology of the Attentäter is M. Hamon, the author of the brilliant work Une Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel, who has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:

“The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of Anarchist, whose mentality is the aggregate of common psychic characteristics. Every Anarchist partakes sufficiently of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate him from other men. The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,–opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,–endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.”

To the above characteristics, says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanour, frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and courage beyond compare.”

–Emma Goldman; The Psychology of Political Violence

Tags: anarchism, aranrchy, emma goldman, the psychology of political violence

“Media stars are spectacular representations of human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles.  Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life – the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversification of productive activity.  Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner.  Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labour, they mimic by-products of that labour, and project these above labour so that they appear as its goal.  The by-products in question are power and leisure – the power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and omega of a process never questioned.  In the former case, government power assumes the personified form of the pseudo-star; in the second, stars of consumption canvass for votes as pseudo-power of life lived.  But, just as none of these celestial activities are truly global, neither do they offer any real choices.”

–Guy Debord

The Society of the Spectacle

Tags: lady gaga, mia

Honour is obsolete.  The culprit, as usual, is the modern era and its devices. A better word than obsolete might be endangered.  Due to habitat loss.

It has always been a difficult value to uphold.  It’s one of duty as opposed to pleasure.  The honourable choice is very rarely the easy one.

When we think of honour, we often think of the large and historic examples. We think of Oates walking into the snow to die so that his party might live.  We think of the most extreme cases and there honour sits:

Strong and divorced from our day to day routines. A museum piece of expectational people on the outreaches of human experience.

But it’s usually a much smaller thing.  A matter of keeping appointments and doing what you say.  The Yakuza, who have a notorious fetish for honour, demand punctuality.  They know that a person who can’t even be on time, can’t ever be depended on for jail.

You won’t make the Olympics if you don’t do your push-ups.

And it’s these little exercises in decency that are vanishing. Not because people are bad but because they are unnecessary.  When they go, the big actions of honour will go with them.  As a sport, it requires a lot of training.

I’m not attempting to draw any ethical conclusion here.  I’m not saying that the world requires honour (though it once did) nor am I going on some Socratic rant against the youth and their perceived lack of ethics.

What I am saying is:  The world has changed in certain fundamental respects and certain fundamental values will change with it.  Honour is one of them.

When stripped of all Klingon, Mafia and military sentimentality, honour, like most social ethics, is a function of communication.

pic nicked from here

For many years, to meet someone, you had to set up a time and a place.  You would both travel to the destination.  Effort was expended and you both expected the other person to be present.

Plans had to be kept because they could not easily  be changed.  Not showing up, when someone travelled half a day to meet you, was a real asshole move. It was dishonourable.  All you really had was your word and breaking it was so serious a faux pas that people would show up to duels, where they had a good chance of being shot, and whole armies would show up in fields to battle each other.

Often at prearranged times.

The telephone might have been the first serious techno-blow to honour.  It allowed for quick changes to plans.  You still had to catch the person at home but, instead of sending a missive to inform them that you would fail to keep your word, you could now just pick up the phone.

You just had to do it before they left the house.  If you were really lucky, you just explained yourself to their answering machine. Phew, you thought.

pic nicked from here

With this small habit changed, it should come as little surprise that we saw less of the big acts of honour.  That the people who still took the concept seriously were criminal organizations who couldn’t use the telephones and remained dependant on appointments.  For the rest of us, the soil had been contaminated.

New technologies, such as the Web 2.0 and mobile computing devices are not just change in scale from the telephone but a complete change in type.  Unless you’re in the mob, dealing with an old person or just paying lip-service to an obsolete institution, these techs made appointments obsolete.

We live half-hooked up to the hive mind, reacting to the people near us, whose locations we now know.  There is no need to plan ahead, hold to our word about meetings or be on time.  Rather, our paths cross or they do not.

There is no need for honour.  Who can possibly hold to their word when they have tweeted so very many of them?  Who can develop bravery when they can criticize behind a fake name or no name at all?  People will take the easy path.

For better or worse, that’s generally what people do.

People’s words will become divorced from their actions, becoming noise, their actions divorced from their personality, becoming persona, and their integrity divorced from their work, becoming slavery.  A sort of sycophantic, childish cowardice will be the norm.   A bleating whine between cheek kisses.

With honour failing to be a necessary, let alone important, part of our ordinary dealings, it will not appear again in our extraordinary ones.

Is that good?  Is it bad?  You’ll get no opinion from me.  I have no idea.

But I do believe the world is fluxier than it’s ever been.  Things move faster, change quicker and make more noise.  Whoever coined the term websurfing was more accurate than s/he could have known.  Because of the internet, today’s social world is a liquid place, moved by waves, pulled by undertows and occasionally spraying you in the face.  Sometimes there’s even a shark.

Like surfing, rapid adaptation is of much more use than dogmatically holding the course you planned.  Unlike surfing, there will soon be no shore left to return to.  Even the real world seems below social media water.  Just look in any big-rich-city cafe.

We just have moving liquid.  Endless.

A new system of ethics will emerge from all this weird new tech (hopefully before it’s replaced by the next generation- just once, I would love to see morals catch up to technology) it seems that people just crave fame.

I don’t know why but I see a lot of that.  Motherfuckers really seem to think they deserve acclaim.  Guess that’s what happens when the media raises your kids.

If celebrity is the only place people want to go, the only shore they want to reach, then we’re fucking lost.  Way out at sea and about to start eating each other.

But all that is probably hopefully a temporary thing.

The death of honour is not.  It’s always been private value and the modern world is very public.  Online, we’re all turned inside out.  Honour will die and it will be replaced by a society of snitches.  The opinions of others and a lack of privacy might even be a better check on our actions than our own consciences.

I don’t know.

But I do know this — we’re going to find out.

Tags: ethics, honour, web 2.0

There are few things in life as rare and beautiful as a no hitter. In the whole history of Blue Jays baseball, only one has been thrown by a Blue Jay.  It’s not something you see everyday.  As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen one.

It’s a magical moment. The only fellow who ever threw a Blue jays no hitter, Dave Steib, caught the homerun ball that broke up Halladay’s no hitter with two outs in the ninth.  Tell me that’s not magic and I’ll tell you you’re blind.

Because it’s magic, there are some weird rules about the whole thing.  Superstition is the government in this territory.  It’s the only thing that makes sense.

While it’s happening, the words “no hitter” must never be mentioned by anyone lest speaking its name jinx it.  If you look at the bench, late into a no-no, you’ll see the pitcher sitting by himself, shunned by his peers and alone with his thoughts.  At the apex of achievement, there is only solitude.

Whatever a pitcher might do with the rest of his career is irrelevant.  Throwing a no-hitter makes you one of the greats.  If you were a hunter, this is like shooting a unicorn.  Who cares how many rabbits you killed?  You once shot a unicorn!

The magic governing the no-hitter is very clear for the team throwing it.  For the other team, it’s a bit shakier.  There are certain unwritten rules.

You should probably never bunt to break up a no-hitter.  I say probably because I think it’s okay to bunt to break up a no-no.  A bunt is, after all, a type of hit.  And it’s not the job of the opposing team to ensure the no-hitter.  Their job is getting hits.  What makes a no-hitter special in the first place is that it has to be earned.

But what is not okay, what can never be okay, what is just plain fucking wrong, is what AJ Pierzynski did to Rickey Romero in the eighth inning of a no-hitter.

He pretended to be hit by a pitch to reach base.

The next batter broke up the no hitter with a home-run.

Although he pitched one hell of a game, this is how the very young Rickey Romero looked after losing his no hit bid.  And why not?  He may never do that again.

No one knows or will ever know if Romero would have thrown that no-hitter if Pierzynski had not of cheated his way to first.  Maybe Pierzynski would have broken it up himself with a single up the middle.  We’ll never know.  We were cheated out of knowing that.  And the man who did it is just plain fucking scum.

He disrespected the game, the pitcher and himself.

It is just not the sort of thing that you do.  Ever. You don’t fuck around with a pitcher throwing a no-hitter.  You beat him or he beats you.  You play the game, you don’t play the umpire.    If you want to be hit by a pitch, you step into one.  You earn your base and you take your medicine.

And when you don’t, the umpires should make you.

But umpires miss calls and make mistakes.   Like cops and judges, they’re just humans in serious looking uniforms.  I can forgive their fallibility but not their stupidity.  Why an umpire would believe any acting job sold to them by AJ Pierzynski, who has a history of this bullshit, is beyond me.

The law failed.

It was time for frontier justice. In baseball, that means Mr. Pierzynski gets hit by a pitch.  Next game, first at bat, first pitch.  You hit the fucker and watch him drop.

This may sound savage but it used to be a big part of baseball.  There were a species of pitchers called headhunters who acted like the enforcers on hockey teams.  If you tried any bullshit up to and through the 1980s, you would get yourself hurt.  And some bullshit like this?  You might have a hard time stepping into the box against anyone for a while.

I don’t know.  I’ve never heard of anyone trying some bullshit like this.

Cheating is a part of baseball.  So is hard-nosed play.  Those things are baseball.

Ty Cobb, who was baseball’s most notorious villain, often sharpening his cleats to use them on defenders when he wasn’t attacking black people for “disrespecting” him in elevators, once said: “Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men.  It’s no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out.  It’s a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.”

But those who would invoke the Cobb defence should remember that he was a Nazi son of a bitch and then reflect on something else he said:  “I may have been fierce but never low or underhand.”

Ty Cobb would have reached base by reaching base.  If he had to knock the shit out of the first baseman, mess with the pitcher’s mind or put his face in front of a fastball to get that base, that’s exactly what he would have done.   Would he pretend to be hit?

Not fucking likely.  That, my friends, is pink tea.

But that’s what AJ Pureshitski did.  It’s what he’s known for doing.  It’s why things like this happen to him and everyone cheers when they do.

In baseball, as if life, you can’t prevent assholes from cheating you.  It will happen.  Even though they should know better, no matter what incredible magic they’re cheating you out of, assholes will come along and they will cheat you.

But in baseball, unlike in life, these assholes have to step into the box against your team tomorrow.  And that’s when your team has to be there for you.

A.J. Pierzynski pulled his act on a Tuesday night.  I heard about it on twitter while at work.  He stepped back into the box on Wednesday.

The wife and I attended the game.  We were amongst the very few who did. Wednesday’s game was an all time low for attendance at the Skydome.

There’s something to be said for a quiet stadium.  You can hear every heckle and cheer.  The game is as intimate as anything at Christie Pitts.  It’s like you’re hanging out with the players and no one is really a stranger.  You’re part of a very small and dedicated crowd.  The people at this game know baseball and love it.

We got ourselves some good seats.  Right behind homeplate.  Beside us, with stopwatch and stack of papers, sat a scout for the New York Mets. (He took the above picture.)  In front of us was another from team unknown.

We were in a well of professional baseball knowledge, radar guns, stopwatches and charts.  This was a real treat.  For while my love of the Blue Jays is of the heart, my love of the game is of the brain.

My love of ballpark footlongs, however, has to do with my belly.

Pitching for Jays was the hard-throwing Brandon Morrow.  A frustrating guy to watch.  His fastball is in the mid to high nineties, his curve-ball can be devastating and his change up, well, his changeup needs work.  So does his control.  He’s not known for throwing a lot of strikes.

But, far as I was concerned, he only needed to throw one.  Right into the back of Pierzynski.  A straight ahead, no nonsense 96mph sphere launched from 60 feet away.  Something that would hurt.  Something to give A.J. something to cry about.  I wanted to see blood on the diamond.  Wanted to see if A.J. bleeds red.

Justice had to be served.

When A.J. Stepped into the box, there were boos and heckles aplenty.  Everyone thought they knew what was coming.  Brandon Morrow, who looked like a nervous kid, came set on the mound.  He wound up and threw. Up and in.

A brushback but not a bean.

Not good enough.

“ALMOST!” I shouted.

And that was it.  The moment was over.  A.J. never got his comeuppance.  Not even when the Blue Jays were down by ten runs and the game was lost, did they hit him.  They walked him.  They pitched around him.  With an open base and the soft hitting Omar Vizquel on deck, they pitched to him and he got an RBI.

No justice was served.

Brandon Morrow with one pitch could have become a fan favourite.  He could have sent a direct, clear and much needed message to the American League about what happens when you fuck with the Blue Jays.  He could have shown some character.  He did none of that.  He mollycoddled a scumbag.

Yet, we stayed and watched the whole 11-1 drubbing of our team.   Baseball isn’t always about winning, you see.  It’s about philosophy, the crack of the bat and the double play.  These are all uniquely beautiful things.  The score is just the score.

And I was happy we stayed because the most interesting lesson about baseball, games and the people who play them came last.  In defeat, it often does.

As A.J. moved towards his dugout, late in the game, after dealing with a crowd who wanted to see his blood, he did a very strange and sweet little thing.  He gently tossed a ball towards a kid in the stands, giving the child a souvenir to treasure and making a lifelong fan out of him. It made me smile.

That A.J. guy’s not all bad, I thought. But that kid should have thrown that ball right back at him.  Because A.J. is pretty fucking bad and even Hitler liked dogs.

Its not an excuse.

Tags: A.j. piersynski, bean, blue jays, no hitter, rickey romero, toronto

In the 1980s, Domino’s Pizza created and ran its famous Noid campaign.

The Noid was a creature who carried a gun that made your pizza cold.  It was remarkably successful series of ads.  Just like “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” or “Where’s the beef?”, its catchphrase, “Avoid the Noid”, became part of the American parlance.

This was all fine and dandy for Domino Pizza.

Not so much for Kenneth Lamar Noid.

Kenneth was a mentally unbalanced chap who believed the ads were a personal assault on him, cooked up by Tom Monaghan, the head of Domnio’s Pizza.

Kenneth did what any reasonable crazy  person would do:  He stormed into an Atlanta Domonio’s Pizza with a .357 Magnum.

He took the employees hostage for five hours, demanded  $100,000, a copy of a trashy novel, a getaway car and a pizza.  He only got the pizza.

This week —INSERT YOUR ASTROLOGICAL SIGN HERE– I want you to be like Kenneth Noid.  Take back what’s yours.  Even if you fall short of your goals, you might still get a free pizza and the psychological help you need.

Tags: avoid the noid, noid

YouTube – Monty python – universe song.

pic nicked from here

It’s a habit of youth and one that too few people ever grow out of: Building oneself a box and getting stuck inside it.    A human will assign themselves a category and then play that role out.  I’m a punk, they’ll decide.  I like this and hate that.  I’m a feminist, I hate this and like that. And so forth and so on.  Their personality is a check-list.

In a sane society, it would be considered a form of retardation.

Our society, however, is far from sane.  We consider an identity to be a personality.  When talking about who someone is, we often describe them in short-cuts and symbols:  That’s Joe: he’s a Chinese, hippy art student.

Why, you almost feel like you know the fellow!  But you don’t.

The bad news is that Joe might also describe Joe like that, even to Joe.  In that case, he doesn’t even know himself.  All he knows is the check-list.  Where he conforms to the category and where he differs from it.  But his personality?  Who knows what the fuck that is?

Not Joe.

The categories often seem passed down from on high, like stone tablets from the hand of Hollywood Moses.  The jocks do this, the preps do that, poets live like this and bankers live like that.   A thousand movies reinforce these stereotypes and a million people act them out.  It goes on and on.

It all seems oh-so-very real.

But it’s not.

It’s all just some shit, invented by some dead bozo to explain something he didn’t understand.  Those stone tablets are cardboard.  These identities were created by people who know no more than you.  They all shat sitting down.  And most of them are long dead anyway.  So how much fun can they be?

Just the other day, at the football game, I was sitting close enough to get a good look at the cheerleaders.

Like any painted corpse, they seemed attractive.  Looking closer, I saw that the whole thing was a glamour.  Their faces were average, their bodies unremarkable and their sex was some bleached teenage fantasy.  But all that was hidden behind a series of symbols.

They had pretty girl, blonde hair.  They wore pretty girl boots and had pretty girl make-up.  Pretty girl skirts and pretty girl pom-poms.  You see all of that, all of those short-forms for beauty, and you conclude: That’s a pretty girl. Yet, stripped naked and given plain hair, I doubt you’d think the same.   They’re only average.

Their beauty is just a glamour.

Sadly, so are the bulk of personalities.

It’s something I try to avoid in myself.  I never describe myself with titles and categories unless I’m kidding and I flinch from any attempt to press me on the matter. Pressed further, I can quickly grow irritable and rude.  Calling people by categories is as vulgar, stupid and ignorant as racism or astrology.

I attempt to dress with a complete lack of subcultural references; no buttons declaring allegiance, no t-shirts celebrating bands who celebrate some way of life and no haircuts that make a statement.  A simple exploration of colour, texture and fabric, concerned only with quality and written within the confines of the suit.

The suit is not genre.  It’s language.  The English language. Same as I speak.

And if even this has become, to twits, some sort of subculture, that’s their problem.  Not mine.

I have my own problems and my obsession with suits is a psychological one.  In James Gilligan’s book: “Preventing Violence” he claims that shame is a necessary ingredient in any violent act.  Though time weakens the daily blow, my past causes me a great deal of shame.

While drunk, I acted badly towards stranger, friend and family alike.  Things were done that can never be undone.  I’m lucky to have any friends left.  I had become utterly repugnant to myself.

I wonder how many of you know what that feels like.

Some, I’m sure.

It’s a shame so complete that it can’t rationally be dealt with.  There’s no talking to it, no explanations or excuses and no conversation.   It’s a place beyond apology.  Something you can’t reason with.   Luckily, there are tools other than rationality.

To regain any sense of power or control over my own life, I needed to commit an act of violence against myself.  By my reasoning, I should have taken blade to gut.  But doing so would have been yet another selfish act, only punishing those around me who had already endured so much, only punishing them to salve my battered conscience.  They did not deserve that and I did not deserve to feel better.  Live in shame.  Fight through it.  Keep my mouth shut.

Denied the easy route, I instead took obsessive power and control over the thing closest to my body.  My wardrobe.   My every suit is an act of violence committed upon myself.  It’s become a pleasure but it started as a bludgeon. I’m something like a torture victim who suddenly finds themselves interested in S&M.

pic nicked from here

As such, it’s deeply irritating and offensive to be categorized based upon my clothes.  It completely denies my personal truth in favour of some hand-me-down reality, often spoken by some half-smart pedant, who doesn’t know the first god-damn thing about the subject they’re speaking on.  Not from the gut.  Only slightly from the head.

None of this was easy for me.  I did not accidentally shatter my whole image of myself as a decent human being and painfully rebuild myself from the scraps just to become someone else’s fucking cliché;  to easily fit into their prison and be chained by their ignorance.  Not a dandy, not a writer, not a blogger nor a Taurus.

I am, first and foremost, Ryan Oakley.  Everything else is just trees snapped by a storm.  None of it can stand in front of the force of will and personality.  Just as you are you, I am me, and neither one of us needs to be a category.

pic nicked from here

Give me a shovel and a piece of earth and I’ll happily dig a rut until you bury me in it.  Adventure is for bored people just as fucking is for horny ones.  I find the careful maintenance of my routines to be adventure enough. Yet change does occur because change is an asshole like that.

Some people talk about “good change” and “bad change” but change is entirely amoral.  Calling it “good” or “bad” is the goofy habit of a lazy mind.  (As such, it’s something I regularly indulge in.)   When measuring its goodness or badness you’re either looking back at something, in which case you’ll always think it was a good change, or you’re trying to predict something, in which case you’ll just be wrong.  Good/Bad doesn’t matter.  It has no real cost/benefit analysis.

It’s more accurate to measure these things in terms of disruption.  There’s highly disruptive change and change you hardy notice.  Losing your job or keys would be highly disruptive.  A divorce might not be.  It’d depend on the last time you saw your wife.  It could just be a letter and some papers to sign.  But mentally, you might lose your shit.

There’s no problem too small for imagination to make worse.

pic nicked from here

If being sober for years has taught me anything, it’s that every single day is pretty much the same.  The mistakes differ, are hopefully corrected and new mistakes arise from them.  Beyond that, the walk to work remains the same, the things I do at leisure are the same things and the places I go are the same places.  My perception of this static physicality is all that changes.  My moods and thoughts evolve quicker than my surroundings.

Yet I always knew that. Difference is, it used to frustrate me.  Drinking was a sort of prison break.  I didn’t do it to escape from problems, I did it to create new and exciting ones.  I’d look at a bottle of Jack Daniels and wonder:  “What fucked up scenario is in you?” Could be anything, really. And therein lied the fun.

But my days of rampaging adventures are over.  That sort of thing no longer appeals to me.  These days, I value dependability, predictability and efficiency.  I like the trains to run on time.

pic nicked from here

The last thing I want to do is explode my world.  It may seem odd to you – I really have no idea how things seem to you– but I used to want to explode it every night.  Now I want to decorate and improve it.  This leads some to regard me as an emotionless robot but what the fuck do they know about another man’s heart anyway?  And while it’s true that I can be a cantankerous cunt, this grumpiness belies a deeper contentment.

It is with some wariness that I regard the few little changes that are now taking place in the physicality of my life.

pick nicked from here

I’ve dropped a shift at work, cutting about a quarter of my income but gaining a four day weekend.  This was a fairly easy choice to make.  If I couldn’t afford to do it, I wouldn’t.  I can so I did.  Still, it’s a change.  I’ve been on the same schedule for a couple of years now.  This extra day off is a bit of a curve-ball.

Right now I’m trying to establish a new day-to-day routine.  Having more time often means having more time to waste.  I wish to avoid doing that.  But it’s difficult to set up a new routine.  You have to wrestle it from distractions until it becomes automatic.  Then it’s all gravy.

Counter intuitive as it may seem, as part of some minor cost-cutting measures, I’ve also purchased my first cell phone.  Bell Canada had become impossible to deal with.  We were losing internet every time it rained, thus paying for a service we often lacked.   (You might have wondered about the recent slowness of my post production.  Now you know.)  I’ve switched over to Rogers and cancelled my landline.  Rogers will have their own problems, I’m sure, but as things now stand it’s better value coupled with less problems.

People who have known me for years are shocked that I’ve gotten a cell phone, more so that I’ve got a blackberry.  Frankly, I’m a bit shocked too. If a telephone number wasn’t a modern necessity, I’d just get rid of all phones.

I hate talking on the contraptions and I hate being on call.  I dislike people being able to easily contact me.  This device adds too much fucking ambiguity.  People might suddenly feel free to cancel, knowing that I’m not on route and out of contact, they might want to make immediate plans to do things and, within 24 hours of getting the thing I’ve already received my first text message assigning me a chore.

I now have a little chaos machine.

More communication just means more complaining.

This change will probably be the most disruptive of the lot.

By having one, I lose a certain rustic charm but can perhaps make that up in ferocious, mechanical super-plugged-in- cosmopolitanism.

pic nicked from here

If being a hypocrite bothered me, I’d also have to stop bitching about what cellphone companies are doing to Africa.  But being a hypocrite doesn’t bother me.  Being a hypocrite is the only thing that makes civilized discourse possible.  We’re all guilty and we’re all complicit in this dirty, old fucked up world.  And the worst people are those who think their portion of blame is less because they made a lifestyle choice.  Those are the people who become fanatics.

People only call each other hypocrites to use someone else’s actions to excuse theirs.   I have some more blood on my hands from this device but those hands weren’t exactly clean to start with.   If justice ever comes to us, I’m not going to the gallows claiming innocence, ignorance or that I was just following orders.  I’m not asking for quarter, nor am I granting it.  Fact is, I can live with some dead Africans if it allows me to get phone-calls.  That’s the fucking problem.

pic nicked from here

But we all know that part.  The sooner we admit we know it, the better.  Being evil is one thing, being unable to look directly at it is quite another.  Reduces your ability to correct.  Fills you up with shit.

And one thing I’ll continue to look directly at, no matter how full of shit they may be, is the person in front of me.  No phone interruptions over coffee and dinner.   I’m going to treat this thing as my new pocket watch.  It will only come out of my pocket in company when I need to make an ostentatious display of boredom.  Problem is, our society is so utterly bereft of subtly, I doubt anyone will even notice.  I’ll probably need to remove my pants and shout: “I’M BORED!” to get people to put down their blackberries long enough to be entertaining.

Also, I’m going to start smoking hash.

People call me names in spurts.  Last week, I was dubbed a contrarian about three different times by three different people.  It struck me as peculiar.

I knew the term but only ever heard it applied to stock brokers – those who look at what everyone is doing and invest in the opposite.  But it also means someone who takes a contrary position simply to disagree.

It’s a much nicer word for those people than what those people might otherwise be called.  “Contrarian” almost sounds like a job. Or an excuse. “You really must forgive the chap for shitting in the salad bowl, he’s employed as a contrarian.”

Although I love a good get out of jail free card, I must, ironically enough, disagree with the title being applied to myself.

(more…)

I just wanted to point out an example of how lies are built into any medium.  There is always a process of editing and editing is a lie.

Here is my photo of Amie Scott at The Phelp’s protest:

And here is one that appeared on Flickr:

So what’s true?

They both are.  But they both give you a different idea.

Having a suit built specifically for me has been a dream for a long time. The experience has, to date, exceeded expectations and taught me things I did not expect to learn. I’ve decided to spend a few posts sorting through some of these reflections.

I could be called shallow and I have been called pretentious. I don’t mind. I am shallow and I am pretentious. To paraphrase someone, we’re all in shit but some of us are swimming to the surface. In my tailor’s shop I had my first –I hope, not my last– breath of fresh air. It felt good. The world made sense.

The difficulty is isolating my favourite part of the experience. If pushed, I would say that it was the fitting. Lengths were taken, quirks assessed, widths looked at and I was quickly and efficiently turned into mathematics by an expert.

It was utterly inhuman and, yet, at the same time, utterly human. As the physicist Niels Bohr once said: “There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

I was turned into something not myself — a representation on paper that will be turned into something else not myself, a suit. To do this properly, there could be no sucking in the gut, no standing funny or making my arms different lengths than what they really are. There could be no lies.

Something as pretentious as a bespoke suit can only be built upon a foundation of honesty. The more complete the truth, the better the lie. In comparison, off the the rack clothing pales, pukes and dies. It even fails to be a trivial truth, becoming its opposite. And the exact opposite of a small truth is not a small untruth: It is a big lie.

Mass produced clothing is built along standard lines. It is not built to fit us; We are supposed to fit into it. This is affordable. Frugality has always been insanity’s last argument.

The appeal of mass production is that it makes things cheap and available. This may be a good thing. For some people. But, we must remember that, aside from cheapening goods, it also cheapens human life.

There’s real people enslaved in real sweatshops, so that we may avoid paying the real price of anything. To make what? Mass produced, cheap clothes. We might as well be wearing uniforms. Most of us are. Take your Nike Swoosh and replace it with a Nazi Swastika. At least they never lied about their feelings towards the individual.

We do. In every advert we’re sold a big lie about mass production making us unique.

Well, it doesn’t, it can’t and it won’t. You are already unique. The odds against your birth were astronomical and your genome is complex. It’s the same for the slave who stitches up our sneakers. Their life is special too. It’s wasted and destroyed so we can afford crap we don’t need and probably don’t even want. Some animals, I suppose, are more unique than other animals.

Arguments in favor of slavery are always economic. They’re always supremely practical for everyone other than the slave. Above any sort of racism, plantation owners were concerned about the cotton industry. This makes it worst.

We never did away with slavery. We used sharecropping and then, when moving goods became cheap enough, we outsourced slavery to the third world so that we might continue to reap its benefits while better avoiding its ugliness. We actually took slavery and made it worse. We still use economic arguments to justify it.

But that’s politics and that’s money. As someone who writes fiction, I am more interested in art. And art, to me, is two things:

First, it is well-developed craft. I’ve seen double-plays in baseball that have more artistic merit than some books. From the look of the shirts I’ve seen, my tailor has some pretty well-developed craft. I’d even say one of them is a triple play.

Second, art is the application of philosophy to reality. A bespoke tailor takes my philosophy about so much – honesty and lies, individualism and off the rack personalities, formulas and thoughts- and applies it to something real.

His accomplishment is increased because it happens in the medium of clothes rather than that of painting, literature or film. He must adhere to the reality of the honest human form, while other artists must obey or disobey only a series of abstract rules. A painter can put pants on his creation’s head or a nose on a cheek. A tailor does not have that luxury. I respect that discipline because it is real.

This view may make me shallow and it may make me pretentious. I hope it does. Art is shallow and pretension requires truth.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKYALsp-sIg&rel=1]
It looks like the porn industry is switching over to blu-ray. This, of course, means that HD is dead. You can just forget all about it. If porn goes blu-ray, HD is beta.

Porn has always been a driving force behind technology. It’s the reason VHS and the Internet succeeded. Combined with the army and space exploration, it’ll be what really gets robotics moving. It is a huge player and one that cannot be trivialized.

Humans face three — and only three — fundamental questions of equal importance. Our whole lives are an attempt to answer these questions. All of our stratagems and techs, thoughts and feelings, our horrors and our kindness, friendships and marriages, our greatest shames and our shameful greatness is based on our search for answers and what we do when we get them.

But no one likes to bluntly ask the questions. They cut too close to the truth and it seems to diminish us. We’d rather believe great and noble things about ourselves; that even if our actions were bad our intentions were good. The truth about humans scares humans. It should. We’re fucked up.

The three fundamental questions every person must face are these: Who do I kill? Who do I fuck? Where do I go? That’s it. There is nothing else.

Kill, fuck, search. That’s humanity.

This is why most of our techs either come from the military, pornography or space exploration. It’s why all of our art celebrates either martial prowess, sex, searching or combinations thereof. All of our celebrities do — or claim to do — one or all of these things better than the average person. Our religions are all based on that great unknown – death – and all fuse rules about fucking and killing into our exploration of it.

Fuck. Kill. Search.

That’s it.

And it’s always been the same. Even before we explored space we built things to help us climb a cliff or cross large bodies of water. We were searching for something to kill or fuck. Maybe a deer. But there’s not many deer in our urban centers so we kill other humans. It’s as perverse as fucking a deer but it happens.

And those of us who don’t kill humans or fuck antelopes find other things to kill and fuck. Maybe concepts. But we attack some things and fuck some other things. Love to kill and kill what we love, search for more and do it all again.

We only listen to others talk about it so we can get better at it. We talk about where we’ve gone and can go again so that other humans will want to fuck us and not to kill us. Maybe we’ll take them with us. But that’s all there is.

Search. Fuck. Kill.

I know some people will read this and think, well that Ryan is pretty grumpy and this view is pretty bleak. I don’t think it is. Like I said, our lives are formed by how we answer these questions and how we act upon those answers. That’s where morality exists.  The driving questions are amoral as dirt.

Pretending that they’re unreal is just hiding from them. It’s becoming prey to them. You cannot defeat these questions. You might as well run off a cliff believing, like a Loony Toons’ character, that ignorance of gravity will save you.

It won’t.

Fuck, kill, search. Then who, where, when, why and how. That’s all there is.

This year “Edge” asked some of the sharpest tools in the box what they’ve changed their mind about. It’s interesting reading. Although I recommend that you peruse the essays for yourself, here’s a few of my favorites.

Sam Harris: Mother Nature is Not Our Friend.

Rupert Sheldrake: The Skepticism of Believers.

Paul Davies: I Used to be a Committed Platonist.

Rudy Rucker: Can Robots See God?

Martin Rees: We Should Take the ‘Posthuman’ Society Seriously.

Jesse Bering: I Have No Destiny (And Neither Do You.)

Scott Atran: The Religious Politics of Fictive Kinship.

Lee Smolin: Although I have changed my mind about several ideas and theories, my longest struggle has been with the concept of time.

Martin Selgiman: We Are Alone.

Robert C. Shank: AI?

And those are my favorites. I’m sure that you’ll find your own. I found this via Robots.net.

The only thing I hate more than celebrities is the concept of celebrity. As far as I can tell, the whole thing is designed to sell soda pop and running shoes. It revolts me.

This may be an odd thing for a waiter with a fanclub to say. If I understood myself better, I would explain it. But I don’t and I can’t. My only genuine thought on the subject is that I’ve watched corporations co-opt every cultural object I’ve ever loved.

I’ve played my part in that little drama. Whatever scam they’ve thrown at me – I’ve fallen for. I’ve been boondoggled, ripped off, conned and colonized more times than I care to admit. They sold the shit and, like a good little consumer, I ran out and bought it.

All I hope is that, when it happens, I have the sense to see it, the humility to admit my error and the pride to never let it happen again. I usually fail.

Over the years, a celebrity has fronted every scam that has ever been run on me. Big stupid grin, product in one hand, big check in the other, promising a feeling or lifestyle that just isn’t there. Fame is the pope but money is the god. We’re all on bended knee.

But, you get a bit older and hopefully you learn a few things. I’ve learned this: Co-option works. It’s even better than suppression. I’ve seen scenes that even violence failed to destroy ripped apart by fat contracts. Absorb and assimilate your enemies. They make you a profit while you cut their legs out from beneath them. This strategy’s absurdity is only matched by its efficacy. Co-option works. Celebrity works.

In 2007 we witnessed the birth of micro-celebrity and its twin viral marketing. This is not coincidence. This is the essence of both. Without one, you would not have the other. It’s not even a matter of there being an evil twin. They’re conjoined.

When I attend a party, I see people taking pictures of each other. The next day I see these pictures online. Everyone has become a celeb and paparazzi. You can tell how important the photographer is by the size of their camera and how important a person is by the amount of cameras on them. All of that, of course, can be and is faked.

More dangerously, it creates a vortex of self-absorption; a subject I know something about. This will lead to self-destruction. I already see the mini-media and reality diverging.* Reality will win. It always does. No one has a good time, they just pose like they’re having a good time. It’s no fun but it sure looks that way.

We used to call people like this posers. They used to be subjects of mockery. Now we envy them and see something there — something that is not there, has never been there and never will be there. Celebrities aren’t even celebrities. They’re a marketing strategy. They are not important. They just look that way.

We’re starting to look the same.

It too is a lie.

But I’ll keep playing my role in this little drama. I’ll keep my fanclub, try to seize the only high-ground available to me — sartorial — and I’ll put myself on the image market — be there and be square. I’ll sell that grumpy brand of honesty to anyone who’ll buy this shit and if no one wants to buy, I’ll give it away. I’ll even review books knowing, as I do, that publishers don’t care what I think. I’ll keep doing it all and then I’ll do some more.

My reason? Co-option works. We’ve been given instant distribution and all the soul-stealing, photo-techs we could ever want. These are powerful tools. My hope is that we can co-opt celebrity and destroy it while making a profit for ourselves. My worry is that it will destroy us and make a profit for the same assholes who always make a profit.

Time will tell who wins. But it’s up to us to decide what time thinks.

*I actually saw this divergence, while drunk, in September 2005 and wrote a very short sci-fi story about it that Neometropolis bought. It’s available for free as a PDF on page 25 here. (27, if you count contents and cover.) At the time, the editor told me he had no idea what I was talking about but liked it anyway. I wonder if it’s still incomprehensible. Probably. I was hammered. Anyway, this post just wouldn’t be complete without some self-marketing.

I know a lot of people who hate each other.

Artists who hate bankers who hate musicians who hate fashion people who hate scientists who hate writers who hate hippies who hate scientists until all the Whos in Whoville are just a hateful mess who just want to defend their Whos from the other Whos on the other pile of dung. But, surrounded by each tribe, I’ve sat still like a good owl, occasionally asked “Who? Who?” and I’ve found worthwhile people.

Roses growing out of shit.

I sometimes wonder why I’m even allowed to wander through all this manure, plucking the pretty flowers when and where I find them. One reason is my hatred of all of these groups. I hate every tribe. Even yours. Even mine. Give me an actual individual any day. I’ll take one. And, having found one, I’m actually quite nice. I say some strange, insulting and disconcerting things, I know, but I’m well intentioned. Probably even a bit naive. That surprises people and gets me into trouble.

Another reason, related to the first, is my distance. I never quite fit, never have anything invested and am therefore impervious to attack or flattery. Kissing my ass is useless. I can’t do a thing for you. I won’t kiss your ass. You can’t do a thing for me. All the things I want are not the things anyone can give. I’m out of the game. More importantly, the game is out of me. This makes me honest. People can trust my compliments and, when they’re insulted, write it off to my general disposition.

But the most important aspect of my mobility through shit is also the most misunderstood: My suit. The world is that shallow. Unfortunately, we are talking about shit and it’s not shallow enough.

People see the clothes and look for meaning, often thinking that I’m trying to be something. They dig at me, accuse me of things, invite me to places, ask questions, reach conclusions, poke fun, demand advice and, to my way of thinking, generally act pretty goddamn rude. They believe that I have dressed for their benefit. I haven’t. They think this is a lie. It isn’t.

But I’ve never been able to clearly articulate my thinking on the subject. I’ve grabbed pieces here and there. Some interesting rules from the Dandy set, some humor from The Chaps and even a few things from the punks. But none of it has been quite right.

In my private moments, I’ve thought that clothing is very similar to writing. (A crucial difference being that money buys vocabulary.) Like grammar, there are rules but you can say what you please; talk cliche shit, write a poem or do both. You won’t be the first or the last to do any of that.

The beauty of clothes is that it’s divorced from any meaning other than itself. It’s a pure symbolic system of applied logic. Colors, fit, design, everything is suggested and nothing is directly said. Unless you wear a T-Shirt with a logo on it. And that’s a manifesto or a blog post – not a story and certainly not art.

Once I understood this, I started composing my outfits.

I have no talent. That’s fine. I’ve never had a talent for anything. I suffer from such a dearth of natural ability that I even doubt its existence, choosing to believe, rather, that skill is just a measure of how far effort will take you.

So I try hard and some people think even that is bad. I don’t ever know what to do except try. They can keep complaining but I’ll just keep trying because what the fuck else is there? I have no idea and I don’t want to find out.

And I’ll make mistakes. That’s fine. I’m not vain; I just look that way.

As time goes on, I’m learning (slowly; I’m stupid to boot) and I seem to be getting better at dressing. At least by my own standards. Effort pays and it pays more than my job. My vocabulary remains limited. I can live with that. Restrictions birth creativity even if they don’t buy bespoke suits. Ideally, when I hit the end of my skill, I’ll hit the beginning of my money. If that happens, it’ll buy me a few more years. Then nothing.

So, I have these private thoughts but it’s a hard thing to summarize. It takes hundreds of words. It’s also a window to my thinking that I’ll never open to impolite strangers. They look like burglars to me. Crackheads eyeing the stereo.

And, like I said, I’ve never been able to clearly articulate my thoughts on this subject. Luckily for me, someone else has.

Danielle from Final Fashion and BlogTO –a rose in shit if there ever was one– wrote an excellent post about judging fashion design. One of the links lead to an essay by Paul Graham called “Taste for Makers.” It shocked me to find this essay in the fashion manure; one that neatly encapsulates and integrates my opinions not only upon clothing but also on fiction. The artists hadn’t figured it out, the writers hadn’t and the scientists were miles off. But fashion — Fashion got it.

Surprises like this are why I leave the house to wade knee-deep in the shit. Before this, there were two books and one essay on writing that I would recommend to anyone: “The Elements of Style“, which I also see as a guide to dressing; Zinsser’s “On Writing Well“, which is a user friendly version of The Elements; Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” which also teaches clear thought and speech. To this list, I now have to add “Taste for Makers.”

If you write, I’d suggest that you read it. If you dress, I’d suggest you read “The Elements of Style.” Either way, it’s time we all came down from our respective dung-heaps to see what the dreaded others know. After all, a rose grown in different shit is still a fucking rose.