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EGR - DiChirico Fends Off the Spectral Bats of Andalusia
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Christopher Locke
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Mar 21, 2001 22:43 PST
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EGR is graciously underwritten by Entropy Web Consulting
http://www.rageboy.com/ewc/people.html
"Industry Heavies Saying Nice Things About Us, For Money."
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you laugh, you pay
http://www.amazon.com/paypage/P1VDASQRND02WA
thanks to you, it's working!
Now at 75% of Our Goal!
$743.45 From Retarded Fuckheads Like You!
Valued Readers:
First off, for all of you who wondered if I was soliciting, no.
Gangbangers, dear hearts, are people who belong to gangs. The state of
cultural literacy is really plummeting out there. Nonetheless, you
wouldn't believe how many offers I got. For all the good it would do me.
Remind me to tell you sometime about the unfortunate incident at the
State Fair tractor pull.
Second off, for all of you who have been kindly (and otherwise)
inquiring about Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, yes,
it's done. Sined, seeled and delivered. David Goering called me this
morning from Perseus Publishing to say he liked it. Said it was a
fucking work of art. Good thing too. David Goering runs Perseus
Publishing and could have easily asked for the money back. Seeing as he
didn't, it'll be out in October. I'm putting together a chunk of it to
stick online. Naturally, you'll be the first to know.
Third off, a French "Wired-style" publication (their description) asked
me to send them something relating to the revolutionary potential of the
net. I mailed them a letter bomb. The replacement editor then called and
said, no, we meant an article. So I wrote this thing here. No, they
said, that's too long. And could you make it a bit more concrete. So I
cut it in half and took out all the funny bits (yes, there are funny
bits, dammit!). They loved it, even though that version now doesn't make
any sense. Frogs, what can I say? Not that this one does either, but
hey, did that ever stop me from sending you anything?
btw, the first reader to correctly guess why the two lead quotes are
grouped together wins a live wildebeest and a year's supply of chainmail
pantyhose. Ready? OK.
Toward a Poststructural Poetics of Cyberspace:
or, Deriding Derrida and the Horse He Rode In On
"Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!"
La Marseillaise
"There's nothing you can do that can't be done..."
All You Need is Love
Lennon & McCartney
In May 1968 I was planting beets and corn and dropping mescaline.
Later, sitting on my back porch blowing a soap bubble, I tried to
imagine a world in which such a thing was possible. Suddenly and with
some considerable amazement, I realized I was already in it. Needless
to say, I was pretty high. At the same time, barricades were going up
all over Paris, an insurrection that lives on in our collective
memory like first love. In Spring, a young man's fancy turns to tear
gas. A few years later, Mick Jagger, having missed all the action,
lamented that "in sleepy London Town, there's just no place for a
street fighting man," but demanded sanctuary nonetheless: "Ooh, a
storm is threatening... my very life today..." Human culture is an
endless palimpsest of commentary on the commentary written over
whatever comments came before. Later, Foucault would echo the power
of the pendulum, Julia Kristeva would explain intertextuality, and in
time Tim Berners-Lee would implement the platform. Now -- gimme
shelter! -- it's all connected. And we've been tripping on the
connections ever since.
One of the connections to Paris '68, now hyperlinked at
nothingness.org -- how existential, though one suspects Camus would
be scratching his head -- is The Society of the Spectacle by kingpin
situationist Guy Debord. This tract brought a heavy hit of dada and
surrealism into The Movement, and argued, I think, that it didn't
quite know where it was moving to -- in fact (stop me if you've heard
this one) that there was No Way Out. Huis Clos, baby. I have to say
"I think" because I never read the book. Ergo sum a bit confused
perhaps. But I did see the book jacket once on a TV program that
showed it on a web page as reproduced in Le Monde. Debord says "The
time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite accumulation of
equivalent intervals." Ah yes, how true. But kind of weird because a
couple years earlier Jean-Luc Godard shot a movie in Paris tricked up
to look like another planet (which, I understand, didn't take much
doing) -- Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution -- in
which a character named Alpha 60 says "Time is the substance of which
I am made. Time is a river which carries me along. But I am time.
It's a tiger, tearing me apart..." Coincidence? Yeah, probably. I
never saw that movie anyway. I got the quote from The Internet Movie
Database.
At any rate, situationism ultimately led to a film about the Sex
Pistols in which Gary Oldman, tricked up to look like Sid Vicious
(which did take some doing) sings Frank Sinatra's trademarked theme
song, "I Did It My Way," just before OD'ing on heroin. *So*
postmodern. All this is explained in Greil Marcus's tour de force
work of pop music criticism, Lipstick Traces, which I do mean to read
one day soon. For all his influence on the Yippies at the '68
Democratic convention (I'm guessing Jerry Rubin had spies on the
Continent), Debord seems to have been a humorlessly doctrinaire sort
of guy, sullenly complaining about the seamless and inescapable
spectacle of late capitalism simply because he couldn't get it to do
anything interesting. But art requires patience. And history is not
predestined. It is, however, littered with petty control freaks
peddling fascism tricked up to look like freedom -- a disturbingly
simple disguise.
Look: sure, we all love a good riot. However, the real problem -- if
I may wave my American flag proudly for a moment -- was way too much
Marx and not half enough synthetic psychedelics. Not to be
chauvinistic about it, but we did have the best labs over here, you
know, while all you people had was that cheap opiated Afghani hashish
cured in camel piss. Duck Soup will only get you so far.
Yesterday, after starting to write this (and wondering, as much as
you are now, where all these random thoughts were headed), I bought a
book by Peter Watson called The Modern Mind. It's an encyclopedic
overview of 20th century memes and the rich intellectual milieu they
have interacted with one another to produce. A tangled web, you might
say. I bought a cappuccino and lit a cigarette -- the strongest drugs
I allow myself these days -- and immediately turned to the concluding
chapter. Dr. Watson, I presume, believes in science and rigorous
analytic philosophy. He likes universities a lot but does not like
the muddy sort of thinking he associates -- though he doesn't say it
in so many words -- with the imagination. "Scientific/analytic reason
has been a great success" he writes, while "political, partisan and
rhetorical reason... has been a catastrophe." Oh dear.
Everyone is trying to control something it seems. Steer it left,
force it right. The serious work of the mind is to prove that those
other poor bastards are dangerous idiots, who, really, if there were
a Just God, would be forever silenced -- in the interests of an Open
Society, of course. Ah, Popper, the amyl nitrate of rational logic!
And there's a long tradition of this sort of thing, evidently.
Somebody once told me Plato wanted to get rid of the poets. Did he
mean kill them, I wonder? If anyone out there has actually read The
Republic, please send me email.
Power demands to be taken seriously. But the Internet is rolling on
the floor laughing, deep wracking intertextual guffaws. The web is
awash in oh-please-stop-I-can't-breathe hypertext hilarity. Of
course, we are not qualified to join in the more serious forms of
cultural discourse and debate. We are not specialists. We are not
experts. Unskilled, unschooled, our anthems come not from the
hallowed halls of higher learning, but from the vox populi arena-rock
of Pink Floyd: "We don't need no education. We don't need no thought
control." Oh double-dear. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Mere
Napster. Mere Gnutella. Mere-to-mere networking. Meanwhile Sony
Records wrings its metonymic corporate hands, bemoaning the fact that
we cannot hear the falconer -- of copyright, ownership, control. As
e.e. cummings once wrote: "Humanity I love you because you are
perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down on it." Meanwhile, we're going like:
"Falconer? What falconer??? Dude, what are you even *talking* about?"
Thanks to the Internet, global culture is out of control. As are deep
jungle rain forests. As are the stars, the night, the music of the
spheres. Go look at a soap bubble, as I finally did (straight) many
years later. Look closely and for a long time. Just before it bursts,
you will see millions of swirling, impossible colors. Imagine a world
in which this world is possible. Imagine the Stones still blasting
away from the past but with greater urgency than ever, "Love, sister,
it's just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away..." The barricades are
gone, but the truth remains: we won. And all that time, I thought I
was just hallucinating.
We won? We who? Shit, I guess I *was* hallucinating. And oh yeah that
reminds me, I've lately been reading this terrific and enormously fat
volume:
Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art,
Literature, and Thought
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674541375/entropygradientr
It's part of the research I'm doing for an article that will run in
Harvard Business Review just before Gonzo comes out. I'm thinking to
call it "Screaming at the Demons in the Elevator Shaft: Spiritual
Proctology, Marketing Prophylaxis and Public Relations." Maybe that's
too long though. I dunno. Send ideas.
xoxox
The Management
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