(Originally published on October 31, 1996, in a letter addressed to Ben Voos in Germany)
Just received your latest terrific turns of phrase. Forwarded the whole thing off to a few friends. You've done it again with that web site. Minimal. Elegant. Thought-provoking. I voted. The lined box to the far right, which was in essence, voting with the herd. I studied long and judiciously at the boxes before making my choice. What was I choosing? The one which reminded me of feelings I associated with something pleasurable? Or did I pick the ugly one out of the crowd because I am prone to exhibit low self-esteem at regular intervals? Or, perhaps I simply not know why but went with the leader, thinking others' good taste was what I had in mind when I explore a path of raw nerve?
That's a tough one. I immediately thought of lines drawn in with chalk generally in athletic arenas, basketball & tennis courts, uh, the far left box with the rose colored demarcations, right angles, parallel lines and yellow diamond, but too late...no it's not, I just went back and voted a second time, this time for the first box. The absent of controlling rules worked to my advantage. I see your liquor bottles made the cut again, as did the kingdom of the grid blip.
I'm really embarrassed by my slow entrance onto the WWW. Just bought that new Mac 8500. It's allowing me, finally, after days of organization to bring some order out of the mess of HTML files and graphics I've been creating, storing some here, some there, inadvertantly losing some to the trashcan monster it seems more than once...
Your queries about domain costs: Paid $75 to have a third party register the iMote.com name and paid $100 for the first two years of registration, after which I will be billed $50 annually to maintain ownership of the iMote domain name. That's the sum of it. The German full Internet charges you mentioned are rich...home ISDN line service is the BIG deal here in my neck of the woods. The tiny nearby state of Delaware recently passed a law mandating a $29/month ceiling for residential ISDN service anywhere in the state of Delaware. In the District of Columbia however, I cannot even GET residential ISDN line service, and they want over $500/month for a business hook-up.
Actually I applied for a rates and service spec from the Telephone Company a month ago and it never came. Seems in this polarized city a widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, as usual, is the culprit. Big business and big government versus 50% of the population at poverty level being left in the dust by a crisis-building tax revenue shrinking middle class fleeing the gang-infested city for promises of cleaner suburban living. Problem is the crime and the gangs are moving right along to the suburbs in the same moving vans with these noveau bourgeois parents who always think it is somebody else doing the troublemaking...
Meanwhile, kudos again on creating an interesting site. And don't worry about what your EXPERTS say. They are saying the same thing here. Ripsnorting business and smiley faces are what makes this country get a hard-on for anything. Lord knows it ain't flashy nude television gameshows (like you Germans). America is a full-color gloss Pollyanna, but after a rough gamble with freedom and artificial habits up the nose, she's beginning to show some cellulite and wrinkle. I smell tragedy in that rag...
GT
Showing posts with label Voos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Voos. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Saturday, July 07, 2007
TAKING A CHARGE IN A ZERO SUM MOMENT
Originally published on May 29, 1996
Hey Ben—dialing for symptoms and synonyms has me spinning doughnuts around my memory. You wrote:
Caught up in words as they are. "Work" means "making money" and free-time is meant to be for recreation. In Germany, in the mid-eighties, when unemployment was a popular discussion, one heard of the "human right to work". This was twisty. I wonder why people need someone to tell them what to work, although they need some money I anticipate. Well I'd welcome NO WORK...
Yes, mt German friend. My wife's mother recently lectured her on the topic. With this common interpretation sharp on her peacewhittling tongue, she was of course probing with ages rich mother-in-law cynicism MY own twisted state of NO WORK. Meanwhile, I acknowledge that I appear to jealous acquaintences quite blessed among men for lack of a regimented work burden, or entitlement, depending one one's perspective. My wife has been convinced finally that I am best kept at home in the privacy of my whirling mind and Dollhouse, near her cold indifferent fingers but warm toasty heart. I admit I feel rather insecure anywhere else, and tend to drink myself into an explosive reproach to the bickering myths of strataculture every time I step out into the bustling city of lights, armed with little but the urgency for escape from any number of circulating yet dreaded theories of night which haunt me.
I am rather, yes, busy making a contortionist's name for myself, or else in the minds of my severest critics, busy hiding names and nuances behind barstools and bushel baskets of cloudy arguments where lightning strikes swiftly and severely against the surface of old arguments whose welcome is long gone, you pick 'em, as they say in the sporting world of betting chances against the winds of the great guffaw.
With only slight exaggeration, I work every waking moment. My wife complains that I cannot find rest, which is only partially true, a fuzzy subset, if you will, within a greater set of misguided certainties and regimented responses we are taught but must toss away as foreign to our means of survival. Fuzzy logic, or educated guesswork, informed interpolation, however, is the grace the unequipped will never face, and for their ignorance they will perish with their lessening winds. My dreamstates are work, are tools, are kids in teh sandbox and I embrace them just as most do at the movies peering into someone else's dreams and ideological documentation.
But back to the idea of work and money. My wife pays nearly all the bills. This is true. She feels the burden of her job, of course, but she brags about what it brings her in prestige and buying power of argument and freedom when dealing with the host of projects at our command, insecurity or not. If I bring in a dollar, I give it to somebody else, usually her, or to the computer industry. I am an accomplice within the digital revolution, a footsoldier, an enlisted tattooed man, a homefront evangelizer as I peer beyond the garbage and confusion from my Dollhouse perch which serves me well.
Surrounded by mediocrity and predjudice, the greatest practitioners of liberal slander slither all around my disguise. My sockets burn sometimes with the urge to fly somewhere I can explode past meaning into the netherland of pure synchronicity. And this rainy season meanwhile is driving all the Dolhouse yard bugs inward, ants and cockroaches multiplying themselves and immigrating to my turf as if they "owned the joint". Fighting against the corruption of the material is the only fight worth dying for, but dying is a losing cause. I hate dying.
WORK IS ENERGY. Money is a contaminating conversion and byproduct, safe only in proper prospective, because money corrupts everyone who surrenders to it. Opinions are always made about money. Even the most discrimating poor among us, myself included, gaze upon it and are corrupted with envy and violence in strident persuasion to obtain it, or saddled with an indifference that leads us into wretched arguments for obsessive compulsive choices as concrete and ugly as money ever was.
Pure work frees man from the analysis of money. Am I a hypocrite for pointing this out? Am I a hypocrite because I love to spend money? Am I a hypocrite because I have argued, successfully it seems, to remain at home, supported by a woman who is hardly Artist or fraud, simply to allow the chips to fall where they may? Am I a hypocrite because I am aging, ugly and fat, conspiring to destroy faith in humanity's surge to crawl up from the tidal mud known as the Anti-Hip instead of being that dazzling, thin, strategically well-placed well-pocketed and quasibeautifully hip? The trickledown economies of Art and Finance are not dissimilar; as Ezra Pound's crackling contentions about art, economics, and war, and William Gaddis in his terrific novel—The Recognitions—have revealed.
You have postulated Ben, that "people get occupied in a way, they forget to handle NO WORK. You know that, I suggest, but do you also know that contemplation, the force of passivity, I mean not producing, maybe on a journey? Oh, yes, you are a gardener too. Many people have to work, to ease their artificial bad conscience."
If I say I am a writer, or a painter, am I less so because no mote has called me up on the telephone to offer me a job or a contract? Am I any less a gardener if no one has offered to snap a polaroid of my roses or send me on an all-expense paid holiday to the Alpines to discuss breeding techniques. Does it matter whether I eat poorly like the beast I resemble, or whether I eat like a fat French chef buttering his own bread in Paris? The human right to work and the human right to be hip are not too far apart on the GT scale of impossible tasks among so many and so stupid a population always electromagnetic & naked in the catbird seat, but ever so snobbishly none the wiser...
But we, despite our best attempts to avoid or embrace these symptoms bunkered down in stodgiven ratios of human production and consumption, radix fuzzy but still redicking and drunk from the fountain of fair green idealism, we too succumb to the same pitfalls in one flavor or another as any other poke even as we like to feel superior and just a bit more enlightened in comparison. We struggle against struggle not knowing how to slip the knot that binds us.
Basically Ben, I feel most people desire everything they think they can handle. Most of us don't know when to start OR stop the false lures of desire outside the domain of self-interest. The few who know the ropes either play them to bizarre lengths or avoid them with the meanest of miseries. The rest of us argue ourselves straight into a double-edged niche, and so it becomes us, our sentence for which parole is repeatedly denied, despite any makeshift theories to the contrary, we or some other highly paid or dollar dead genius devises for us in teh meantime.
GT
Hey Ben—dialing for symptoms and synonyms has me spinning doughnuts around my memory. You wrote:
Caught up in words as they are. "Work" means "making money" and free-time is meant to be for recreation. In Germany, in the mid-eighties, when unemployment was a popular discussion, one heard of the "human right to work". This was twisty. I wonder why people need someone to tell them what to work, although they need some money I anticipate. Well I'd welcome NO WORK...
Yes, mt German friend. My wife's mother recently lectured her on the topic. With this common interpretation sharp on her peacewhittling tongue, she was of course probing with ages rich mother-in-law cynicism MY own twisted state of NO WORK. Meanwhile, I acknowledge that I appear to jealous acquaintences quite blessed among men for lack of a regimented work burden, or entitlement, depending one one's perspective. My wife has been convinced finally that I am best kept at home in the privacy of my whirling mind and Dollhouse, near her cold indifferent fingers but warm toasty heart. I admit I feel rather insecure anywhere else, and tend to drink myself into an explosive reproach to the bickering myths of strataculture every time I step out into the bustling city of lights, armed with little but the urgency for escape from any number of circulating yet dreaded theories of night which haunt me.
I am rather, yes, busy making a contortionist's name for myself, or else in the minds of my severest critics, busy hiding names and nuances behind barstools and bushel baskets of cloudy arguments where lightning strikes swiftly and severely against the surface of old arguments whose welcome is long gone, you pick 'em, as they say in the sporting world of betting chances against the winds of the great guffaw.
With only slight exaggeration, I work every waking moment. My wife complains that I cannot find rest, which is only partially true, a fuzzy subset, if you will, within a greater set of misguided certainties and regimented responses we are taught but must toss away as foreign to our means of survival. Fuzzy logic, or educated guesswork, informed interpolation, however, is the grace the unequipped will never face, and for their ignorance they will perish with their lessening winds. My dreamstates are work, are tools, are kids in teh sandbox and I embrace them just as most do at the movies peering into someone else's dreams and ideological documentation.
But back to the idea of work and money. My wife pays nearly all the bills. This is true. She feels the burden of her job, of course, but she brags about what it brings her in prestige and buying power of argument and freedom when dealing with the host of projects at our command, insecurity or not. If I bring in a dollar, I give it to somebody else, usually her, or to the computer industry. I am an accomplice within the digital revolution, a footsoldier, an enlisted tattooed man, a homefront evangelizer as I peer beyond the garbage and confusion from my Dollhouse perch which serves me well.
Surrounded by mediocrity and predjudice, the greatest practitioners of liberal slander slither all around my disguise. My sockets burn sometimes with the urge to fly somewhere I can explode past meaning into the netherland of pure synchronicity. And this rainy season meanwhile is driving all the Dolhouse yard bugs inward, ants and cockroaches multiplying themselves and immigrating to my turf as if they "owned the joint". Fighting against the corruption of the material is the only fight worth dying for, but dying is a losing cause. I hate dying.
WORK IS ENERGY. Money is a contaminating conversion and byproduct, safe only in proper prospective, because money corrupts everyone who surrenders to it. Opinions are always made about money. Even the most discrimating poor among us, myself included, gaze upon it and are corrupted with envy and violence in strident persuasion to obtain it, or saddled with an indifference that leads us into wretched arguments for obsessive compulsive choices as concrete and ugly as money ever was.
Pure work frees man from the analysis of money. Am I a hypocrite for pointing this out? Am I a hypocrite because I love to spend money? Am I a hypocrite because I have argued, successfully it seems, to remain at home, supported by a woman who is hardly Artist or fraud, simply to allow the chips to fall where they may? Am I a hypocrite because I am aging, ugly and fat, conspiring to destroy faith in humanity's surge to crawl up from the tidal mud known as the Anti-Hip instead of being that dazzling, thin, strategically well-placed well-pocketed and quasibeautifully hip? The trickledown economies of Art and Finance are not dissimilar; as Ezra Pound's crackling contentions about art, economics, and war, and William Gaddis in his terrific novel—The Recognitions—have revealed.
You have postulated Ben, that "people get occupied in a way, they forget to handle NO WORK. You know that, I suggest, but do you also know that contemplation, the force of passivity, I mean not producing, maybe on a journey? Oh, yes, you are a gardener too. Many people have to work, to ease their artificial bad conscience."
If I say I am a writer, or a painter, am I less so because no mote has called me up on the telephone to offer me a job or a contract? Am I any less a gardener if no one has offered to snap a polaroid of my roses or send me on an all-expense paid holiday to the Alpines to discuss breeding techniques. Does it matter whether I eat poorly like the beast I resemble, or whether I eat like a fat French chef buttering his own bread in Paris? The human right to work and the human right to be hip are not too far apart on the GT scale of impossible tasks among so many and so stupid a population always electromagnetic & naked in the catbird seat, but ever so snobbishly none the wiser...
But we, despite our best attempts to avoid or embrace these symptoms bunkered down in stodgiven ratios of human production and consumption, radix fuzzy but still redicking and drunk from the fountain of fair green idealism, we too succumb to the same pitfalls in one flavor or another as any other poke even as we like to feel superior and just a bit more enlightened in comparison. We struggle against struggle not knowing how to slip the knot that binds us.
Basically Ben, I feel most people desire everything they think they can handle. Most of us don't know when to start OR stop the false lures of desire outside the domain of self-interest. The few who know the ropes either play them to bizarre lengths or avoid them with the meanest of miseries. The rest of us argue ourselves straight into a double-edged niche, and so it becomes us, our sentence for which parole is repeatedly denied, despite any makeshift theories to the contrary, we or some other highly paid or dollar dead genius devises for us in teh meantime.
GT
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