barefoot is legal

It’s like trying to learn anatomy by studying clothing. This is what I say when Tracy asks me how to interpret the world. Not trying to feign wisdom, I’m just really tired of clothes, especially shoes. But really, don’t fuck with me, do you respect me enough to be clear? This isn’t what she said, but I worried that’s what she was thinking so I began for real.

Are we magic? Let’s assume not and accept we’re made up of stuff that obeys the law. So some bit of light hits your eye and does it register immediately deeper in your head? Nope. Something takes some nonzero time to wriggle down a neuron path and only later take on a color. Even though it’s probably a really short amount of time, this means that everything you see is actually some refraction of what happened in the past. Same with everything else you get from the outside. We’re just in some deluded bubble out of time here, a world of yesterday at best.

And is this nipple mauve? Or, the nipple of a few moments ago at least. All we know is that it’s bouncing certain types of frequencies and not even a frequency has color. We ignore most of them and concoct some beautiful deranged representation. Call it mauve. Forget the sophomore tedium of whether we share them and instead revel in the fact that your yellow is a glorious hallucination of your own personal creation, however unchosen. A world of figment pigment that exists nowhere in the universe outside your head. Same with everything else you get from the outside, texture, taste, and tone. It’s all otherwise a colorless unity, maybe some more energy here, less there, but nothing without us providing both the paint and the veil.

Tracy keeps this in mind and tastes my mauvelessness. She swims or bobs in this glory for a time before the bottom falls out. This endless abyss isn’t even black. Does she shudder or ripple? I can’t really tell, but I roll onto my side and face her. I tell her she’s beautiful. What do you mean by that, she asks.

grow up

I enjoy Freud and find that some of the worst pedantic empiricist technophile types (among others) really don't like him, portray him as a joke, etc. But the idea that early childhood things persist in maybe altered form into adulthood seems just totally beyond doubt to me.

Language acquisition, for instance, is largely complete by the age of 7 and remains basically unchanged after that. The main tool that you use to express yourself was built by an idiot child (you, formerly), the finest, grandest sentences you construct come from the tools you came up with on your own when you were a toddler. Little You came up with a way to pronounce 'dog' or any other word and the now version of you, upstanding adult that you are, still use that same pastel cartoon pronunciation.

This is of course not the same stuff that Freud was talking about, but it's related, and it's not clear how many other things work in a similar fashion, how many other things are fixed in your head as a child and persist into adulthood, still in that childish form but in a way that we no longer acknowledge as childish.

This sort of thing came to mind when I was doing some class with a group of I guess dionysian anarchists, who were talking about the toys that were used to lure dionysus out and kill him or something. It was fun and it made me think about how our innate ideas (rationalist, Kantian) shape our lives, how things, childish or ancient, persist through time and are expressed in weird ways because whatever fodder we're given, we can't help but use those innate ideas to construct our perception. We've had the same innate ideas as long as we've been anatomically modern humans, and though they probably shape experience is hyper-abstract ways, it's fun to pretend that we can discern their workings in comprehensible ways. Even if they're silly: Zeus impregnating daughter persisting into Polanski's Chinatown, The labyrinth living on as a corn maze.

everett

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I spent the first part of my childhood in the house above in Everett, WA. It's on a gravel road and I still drive by it at least once each time I visit home. While my mom's mom was still alive, we'd make appearances at church every weekend (plus sunday school, though minus my dad who is a vocal anti-religionist) and afterwards we do a driving tour around the nice parts of town, always the same route around Rucker Hill. Gloomy Sundays around the port, eating church donuts. We'd wind around small lanes looking at the views of the sound and the fancy houses. These big houses grew into a sort of lore amongst me and my brother and my cousins and it was jarring to discover in high school that one of my basketball teammates actually lived in one. A highlight for me as a tiny kid was this stone drinking fountain and bench on the residential sidewalk

When I was in college me and my girlfriend watched all of the twins peaks available to us at the time. Which was a lot because we had Scarecrow video nearby so both versions of the pilot, both seasons, and fire walk with me were at hand. It was a very intense relationship and this gave the show a heightened quality. We broke up and a few years later I was in Oulu Finland at this heavymetal bar called Hevimesta (Hevi comes from the English heavy, mesta comes from the Russian место meaning 'place'). I took a picture of their downstairs cash register:

I'm usually basically agog at the nature of reality and how the fabric of existence feels against me, and these are thoughts that Twin Peaks explores too in its own way. That's fun as far as that goes and I enjoy the TV episodes and the movie. But it also does fuck with my sense of reality seeing not just snoqualmie falls but streets of my hometown in that universe. Laura Palmer's house is right along the route we would take after church. This is a screenshot from Fire Walk with Me. You can hardly see the motorcycle peeling around the corner and maybe make out the drinking fountain

Buildings play such a prominent role in the story, lodges and also residential homes. So it especially makes me feel weird when they're inside Laura's house and all I do is focus on the familiar lights of the port outside twinkling in the darkness through the window 

solipsism

When I was a kid I sorta had a sense that I had gotten lucky. I seemed to live in ~The~ important country, in a beautiful area (though to my kid's brain, unmarked and neutral), athletic, smart, and white. We weren't well-off, but we seemed normal, more or less reflected in the Simpsons (though we only had one bathroom). I entertained thoughts of solipsism before I learned that word, though never really believed them, they were just fun to think about.

I think back on this now when I think towards the future. Who really knows how things will play out, but I think it seems safe to say that things will get increasingly erratic, at least from climate change. And I sometimes entertain some scenario of things really falling apart around me as I physically and mentally fall apart into senescence, and how that would at least be sort of poetic.

yonic south

I'm quarantined in essence from work, which has meant so far that I've done no work and my plans of weaning myself off twitter have been stillborn. I've been at home for 2.5 weeks recovering from surgery and am now going to continue to kick around here indefinitely. I ducked out of contact early yesterday to go see this Olivier Assayas movie Irma Vep, mostly because I really loved his Clouds of Sils Maria.

The movie is fun and cynical but becomes something very different a few times throughout and especially at the end. It's also got this unselfconscious 90s vibe (it was released in 1996) that makes for me what would otherwise be a pretty cold production, extra vivid. The first minute plus of this video is not remotely representative of the rest of the movie, but it's badass and certainly representative of this tiny bit of the movie. 

The sonic youth song in the above clip has it's own video which is about Karen Carpenter (a love of mine).

The above song and video surely must have been inspired by Todd Haynes's Superstar, which is just brutal. Not much to say that hasn't already been said about it though

Sonic youth have also done a scuzzdream cover of Superstar, but my favorite Carpenters song is On Top of the World which I used have my go-to karaoke song back when I was yearning the hardest for some sort of feminine normalcy. I still yearn for it, but with less urgency, which is a shame

imagine

The quote attributed to basically everyone is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. 1) the first one entails the second. 2) it's hella easy to imagine the end of the world. 3) Imagining *anything* novel is always going to be harder than imagining the negation of something. I bet people in the feudal times could more easily imagine the end of the world than they could the advent of capitalism.

That quote is bandied about as if it's deep, but I think it's kinda banal

come and see

The internet says Francois Truffaut says there is no such thing as an anti-war film, and when I first read that, back in undergrad, it really struck me and I suspect it's largely true. No matter how gruesome and heinous and bewildering a war movie, it can be seen through the lens of stiff-upper lip, this is the sacrifice we make to keep you safe. The more intense and horrific the movie, the more selfless and noble the sacrifice. It also reminds me of this thing an ex wrote about depictions of sexual assault: https://queenmobs.com/2015/03/7272/ fwiw.

There's another movie quote, this time from Roger Ebert (who I read and reread all the time like the true middle-browler I am) who says all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are. This too has largely rung true for me, the saddest, bleakest good movies fill me with a renewed zest for life like all good art does.

Last friday I walked alone over to 16th and Valencia grabbed a coffee and drank it in silence before going to the Roxie to watch Come and See and I think that's an apparently impossible good, depressing anti-war film and I've been kinda listless since.

I suspect it's a successful anti-war film because it doesn't really focus at all on the soldiers, there's no identifying with them and their struggle (though from what I understand Belorusian partisans had a righteous cause) and only one scene where we want some soldiers to kill others (the weakest part of the movie imo). It does a lot of slow POV shots and shots of innocent people just staring at the camera, like pleading with the viewer. Maybe it was other things too, but more so than other movies it made me fear war.

It also depressed me. After the 2008 'financial crisis', from what I read, we've only doubled down on the things that caused it in the first place. I think this might be the case on a longer timescale wrt to the wars of the 20th century. We've doubled down and the 'never again' refrains seem pretty empty and po-faced to me.

Though maybe I was just in a sort of fragile mood when I went in. I'm still recovering, still look weird, and I especially mope about not being able to use facial expressions easily. It makes me think of the pictures of early facial reconstruction for war victims that I've seen, sort of blank stiff disfigurement. Or for that matter, Roger Ebert after he had his lower jaw removed

mars

I'm often baffled by the rich, they say and do things that make me thing they are just profoundly stupid, like for instance elon musk's thing about the universe or something likely being a simulation. Of course who knows what's going on with reality, but where do you get 'likely' from? Like how fucking stupid can you be?

But, there's always also the chance that they're not so dumb and are putting up some sort of absurd front to hide their heinous truer selves. and I suspect this about the plans to leave the earth, colonize mars, etc, from musk and bezos and others. 

the impending climate shit is so shocking and hateful, but even if the absolute worst comes to pass, the earth will still be a million times more habitable than mars. Leaving earth to inhabit mars or outer space or anything is just beyond stupid. It's hard to express how much less hospitable anything other than earth is, even compared to antarctica or the sahara.

So why go so far as to develop tech and strategies for these things for places as wildly uninhabitable as mars, when earth is sitting right here? My guess is that these guys aren't being stupid, they're just masking the development of bunker technology intended for use on earth when/if shit gets really bad. 

This makes the most sense to me, though I'm open to other thoughs

Only Colombe

This song just pierces me. I'm terrible at parsing lyrics and I half-suspect these are just cryptic nonsense, but this just makes me want to dance or writhe or strain. I listened to it on repeat when cleaning up and moving out of my last room. The sun was in through the window on the floorboards that used to be under my bed. I was sorta straining and pirouetting and clenching my fists to it

spirit

Humans have a tough time conceiving of things that are neither deterministic or random, but some things seem to defy that sort of classification, for instance langauge. Descartes as read by Chomsky looks into this, but the basics are easy enough for anyone to introspect on: What you say is not random, it's generally appropriate to the context at hand. But it's also not determined by that context, you can say whatever you want in response to a question.

Now you might say that it actually is determined, just via countless things working in concert below consciousness, which gets to the heart of this as a free will issue. Free will is annoying to argue about. Its most ardent opponents simply presuppose that it can't exist, they presuppose that everything is deterministic or random. Chomsky says that it's phenomenologically as real as anything could possibly be and it's only a dogmatic insistence on determinacy and randomness that casts doubt on it. He considers it potentially something akin to a rat trying to understand the concept of a prime number: something our minds just aren't equipped to grasp.

blah blah blah, in short, I buy it. I buy it as much as I buy anything. Human free will expressed in language is a unique thing in the known universe and that's what drew me to study language in the first place, a sort of species chauvinism/narcissism/wonderment (that and jokes). The non-deterministic and non-random is in my opinion a source of wonder and an indestructible source of power. Whatever propaganda or advertisements or pr or intimidation is thrown at it, there's always going to be this force, protected by our profound ignorance, that we can't snuff out.

Still, the forces of propaganda etc work to a frustrating degree to distort and obscure that power and demoralize or numb people from realizing it. It sounds like new-agey bullshit, but I think trying to stoke and harness that power in people is a really beautiful and galvanizing thing to do. There are a ton of ways to do it, in my experience workers fighting the authorities over them is the best way. It gets right to the core of the issue, but I'll probably write about that later.

merge

a fun thought I've had on linguistic history and one that I haven't seen expressed elsewhere:

So in Syntactic Structures (/LSLT) Chomsky looks into ways to formally capture some linguistic facts and starts off with some simple finite state automata. He shows that there are some facts about language that these simple machines are too weak to handle. Like, they are formally not powerful enough to capture the facts. In light of this failure, he says that we need something more powerful to capture language AND we should scrap finite state automata. This is fine, though he just as easily could have said: we need something more powerful to capture language IN ADDITION TO finite state automata. This is not nutty as there are some phenomena that might be sensibly captured by these (I'm thinking 'flat' stuff like iterated adjuncts, coordination, etc.)

Ok, so he goes on and looks into phrase structure grammars. As you might expect he finds that these do not succumb to the same failures as finite state machines, but he also uncovers some shortcomings for these more powerful devices. The difference here is that the failures are not those of formal power, but of explanatory adequacy: they can capture the facts, but only in ungainly and unenlightening ways. In response to this he says: we need something more powerful to capture language IN ADDITION TO phrase structure grammars. the more powerful thing is transformations, things that that in this case take the structures created by phrase structure grammars and alter them (they move things around, delete them, substitute in things, etc). Echoing the above paragraph, he could have just as easily said: we need something more powerful to capture language AND we should scrap phrase structure grammars.

But he doesn't, and for the longest time I just assumed that the reason he didn't say we should scrap them is because their failures were of a qualitatively different, weaker type. Not formal expressive powerful, but explanatory adequacy. These things coincide here, but there's no real logic tying them together from what I see. So it's kinda odd, or at least not immediately justified, that he does not scrap phrase structure grammars here. Though he's a smart guy and I trust him and so did a lot of other people and I'm sure he had his reasons.

Fast forward to, um, 93/95, and we are met with merge, which is a real departure from phrase structure grammars (though x-bar technically is the first real diversion from them, it's not in ways that matter really here). With merge as we know, the same process that builds structure also is responsible for moving things around. That is, structure building and transformations are collapsed. Or, more interestingly put: there is no more phrase structure grammar, only transformations, only putting two things together.

This is basically the step that Chomsky seemingly arbitrarily avoided way back in 55/57, just delayed by 40 years.

alignment

Our best estimates have it that humans have been doing language for 100,000-200,000 years, which is just an unfathomable amount of time. And though we (I) often think of people back then as some sort of dusty troglodytes grunting and pounding, these were anatomically modern humans and just as 'smart' or witty or whatever as you and me. So I think this means that we've had funny people making language jokes for longer than we've had civilization. I marvel at how many absolute gems have been lost to history, never recorded, evaporating in seconds throughout the ages.

A bunch of things (at least 2) have to align for a language joke. One (not my best) for example is a tweet I made that read "hilma klint af". The artist's name is Hilma af Klint (the 'af' is a preposition like 'von' or 'de' in other last names) and she had a very singular style and was very cool, she's been around as a concept for awhile, but in the grand scheme of things, an instant. Her existence has recently and probably only transiently clicked into alignment with 'af' being used as shorthand for 'as fuck' to modify adjectives. hilma klint af

Even though this is not a super inspired wordplay thing, I think it illustrates the chance alignment of these things. Hilma Klint af would not have made any sense 10 years ago and might no longer make sense in a few years. Moreover, it only currently makes much sense for a sliver of online people who know of her. When I make a spoonerism that fails, eg: bus ride russ bide, I sometimes wonder whether it's just ahead of its time, or I'm in the wrong subculture, etc. There are so many future jokes and so many obsolete ones. My mind starts to reel as I try to think of all these sorts of jokes flitting in and out of existence for tens of thousands of years in untold thousands of languages.