Justin's Links

bathroom revolution: clintonism

My bathroom is very streamlined. Very modern, maybe even chiq. That means there's no real good place to have a stack of magazines and periodicals. So, I have one book on my toilet. Have had, for the last few months: a slender, small, plastic covered little red book of Quotations from Revolutionary Party Chairman R.U. Sirius.

Last night my brother noticed the book, and said he enjoyed the part on "Clintonism." And I quote:

"...Paul Krassner surprised us by reporting that he was friendly with a couple who were also friends of Bill and Hillary's. "Real close friends, and frequent dinner guests," as Krassner put it. "Clinton is one of ours," he added.

I don't think that Paul was telling us that Clinton was a yippie or even a radical. I think he meant that the Clintons were moderately hip and sophisticated, politically-progressive baby boomers. Krassner went on to say that they had been infiltrating the system since the early 1970s, always looking towards the Presidency.

As the result of that conversation, and a few other admittedly scarce bits of evidence, I've always viewed Clinton as waging a subtle strategic battle to bring at least some liberal, humane values into a sclerotic American political system and an increasingly harsh and fascistic culture. I now view the battle as not only lost, but abandoned. And therein lies the unique tragedy of America's first semi-hip President.

I have warm feelings for Bill Clinton, which have waxed as the new President struggles to clearly state moral rectitude and empire-building. But I don't have much to base my feelings on, except as Clinton was fabulous and flawed. I mean he did weasel, and lie a bit, prevaricate. That's not exactly cute. But he was smart, obviously so smart. A terrific communicator. A yearning to be loved by so many people. An unstoppable eagerness to please. What will I find nostalgic about Bush, I wonder? His flaws too, cute mispronunciations. And he'll likely appear canny in the rear-view mirror too.

Anyhow, tough to think that liberal politics and counter-culture values might have been pegged to that flawed character. I like to believe that America is becoming a more tolerant place; sometimes the popular political pendulum seems to have swung away from that. Perhaps Sirius is right; either way he's pithy.

christmas coverage

My hair was long; I was thinking to grow a ponytail and pull it back from my head so as to better show the areas where my hair is thinning on either side of my face above my temples. But it was taking a while, and I was getting restless. Several friends taunted me effectively about my shaggy growth (mostly direct from the Cassidy cut over a year ago). My last deliberate style I enjoyed (besides 9 year old) was the mullet Jane gave me - something about the small tail at the nape of my neck really appealed to my vanity.

I like haircuts from friends - a collaboration. So Robin reinstated some deliberate style, based on my vanity, with her own modifications. Here's a picture of us before the cut, when I had more hair:

I would have to describe it as lesbian mullet - because of the pulled-forward gel-mod style, with a sort of cut bangs jag that curves around my face, and still the tails. It meets the most important qualification of a radical hairstyle: it amuses me. Secondly it makes me feel like a slight badass, because people don't know whether I understand I have a hacked haircut or if I'm just insane. A taste of the time I had the uni-dred. Actually it's probably a mix of neatly crazed and fading fashion - the faux-hawk was tired when I first got it. Fortunately I have the lesbian thing going for me.

My mother looked askance at it all weekend; I tried explaining the mullet was a haircut of the French aristocracy in the 1700s but that didn't carry much water. Here I am, freshly cut, shaving my mustache off before I sneezed and blew it off; photo by Robin:

Judy gave me red-striped long-underwear; Mom gave me some cast off green slippers; I dressed like an elf with my new haircut.

My brother was on hand from England - nice to see him.

My mother's wrist is still in a cast, so I did most of the cooking under her supervision. She gets her cast off in a week or so; she's counting the days.

primary directive

Every few months I forget my primary directive: be comfortable with not knowing. The universe has dark and light; entrust oneself to change. Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity! Relax.

When I forget my primary directive I get in a frenzy. It builds quickly - I trace thought furrows I've dug deep in my mind: who am I? Why am I here? What can I do? Am I purposeful?

And there is much gnashing of teeth, casting about for new careers, contemplation of radical shifts. I suppose one could argue this time is important for understanding, contextualizing self - figuring out where I fit in. What kind of image I want to try on. But it's silly, really. I don't do much work, creative important personal work, during these periods. I do a lot of fretting, of calling friends and asking them general questions. I express insecurities and get back vagaries.

My Mother gave my Step-Father a video camera just after they were married, so he could record his golf strokes and watch himself and improve his game. It wasn't long before that camera made its way into my room, and I started taking it on family vacations. I had a number of tapes of my grandparents talking about their life and relationships; last year my Uncle took those tapes, and some tapes my Aunt recorded, and put together a two-volume DVD set of family lore. Today, each member of our family received those family history DVDs.

It's fantastic. My Brother mentioned wanting to put on "It's a Wonderful Life" this evening but I didn't see how that could be more fascinating than the rest homes, the grave yards, the small churches, and the tableside chats with the people that made us. There was so much ethics in what they said: working hard, not judging sinners, putting in more than half the energy in a relationship to keep it going. And the exhortation that resonated most strongly with me: "The amount of money ... does not help you if your health is gone." What my Grandpa said - my posture has been on my mind lately. I'm letting the web tie my limbs, arching my back towards the past and my shoulders towards a ground-bound future. Time to apply more conscious posture to life.

reason

knew there was a reason staying up not sleeping -

My DVD worked - I output ten short films onto something I'm proud of. It's got sound loops and menus and even scene selections and my major creative work from the last few months. I mean, holy shit, it plays back on a TV through menus. These computers man, they give us media power.

In a moment of searing honesty, my neighbor confessed to noticing that people at my recent party left conversation with him after just a few minutes. Repeatedly. Because, he said with a downcast eye, he's too negative and pessimistic. He's offered to meet me out front of my house, to drive me to the airport, in about one hour. That will be 5:10am. Gotta pack! And stop clenching my jaw.

love others quickly

leaving town tomorrow - I can feel some velocity return. Preparations, presents. The world gears down for a holiday as the economy of family lurches into high gear. Everywhere is shoppers - I'm bringing home my favorite salad dressing: bottles of it for my nearest and dearest.

School is a lurching frenzy too - a steady buildup to finals, a spastic effort to finish all you're worth for a semester and then you're left with free time. Weeks of it. One friend, she immediately went to start temping to make some money to pay for her time in Myth Making school. She's a film school student who works for her education.

I had a party, and I finally started opening my mail. I discovered an invitation from the person with whom I lost my virginity - she turned 30 before I did and we missed each others parties.

So I'm preparing for the road. Calling old girlfriends, and new ones, the gal my mom never liked, maybe we can meet after dark after family events, after greek food, and even after christmas church - I'll take off my tie but maybe leave on my vest and borrow my mom's aged old tank and drive to some tenament if she'll have me.

My brother will be there, which means spectacular speculation: each day spent filling the night with visions of all Chicago has to offer. He'll plot and prod us to visit clubs and plays and parties and bars and my hope is that he'll wear himself out with the planning and jet lag and fall asleep early so I can go out and spend some quality time with my lips locked around someone I find beautiful.

Like Thanksgiving, I was expecting to cook, but my mother's neighbors are hosting a large feast and we're invited. So I'll be mingling with another family, which is fine because I don't see much difference - fewer shared memories seems to be about the sum of it. I love dearly the people I see year after year but I can learn to love others quickly.

one to thirty

tomorrow is my thirtieth birthday. Hurrah! I made it! I didn't choke on a thin heroin balloon in the Mission district of San Francisco or freeze in a puddle of brown urine in a Japanese backwater lodge. I haven't caught any life-threatenening diseases, how hard I've tried. Haven't gotten myself shot in spite of a few close calls.

Limbs all present and accounted for. Eyesight deteriorating but usable. Hey I should make a web page about my poor vision -

I'm thirty; that's an age when I'm supposed to have some sense of my strengths and weaknesses. What do I have to show for myself? A several thousand page hypertext about my life to date? more writing! keep up! or explore other media.

I wonder what my life's work is. Living! That question of purpose looms less large with years. Life can be an art. I want to make art. I want to have kids. But right now I just want to get my shit together.

Wondering what to do with this personal holiday, I thought I might be alone. Facing some black page and writing. Wandering in the forest. Maybe I should have -

but Ben talked about his own birthday collective, friends came and stayed together in tents in a warehouse space and my mind was suddenly blown open. I realized I liked holidays and I'm always working to understand and augment intimacy. So I planned a birthday patterned after my Christmas experiences growing up - relatives coming from far and wide and sharing bathrooms and eating each other's foods. I opened my house for a three day thirtieth birthday party and invited friends I spoke with to drop by, sleepover and talk.

To jump-start it all, I invested some of the frequent flyer miles I had piled up - I spent 150,000 miles to fly Svante and his family over here - his 2 year old daughter Lo, and his baby-mama Anna. Svante was the reason I visited Scandinavia over ten times during my 20s; he found my web site in 1995 maybe and promoted me as a speaker there. It lead to a ton of work for me and a chance to visit places like Arbrå and Demonbox with him. So I thought I would repay the favor and use a far off visitor to anchor this party.

Open-ended: come over and hang out! I said. Anytime between Friday and Sunday. It was dangerously unstructured - some friends threatened to disrupt anything too peacable and sensitive. But enough people showed up with good intentions - with supplies from Sharon's basement I brainstormed art activities for the daylight hours, so Saturday people sat with scissors and glue and sparkles and crayons and made masks and hats and drawings and sculptures.

The entire weekend was girded neatly by loving food - the first day I was in a panic because my self-appointed chef Lulu didn't arrive until the night and I had nothing to feed my guests. Fortunately I had some perishable mail waiting - Ryan had sent a cooler full of Salt Lick BBQ we devoured until Lulu arrived. She then proceeded to feed us pecan pancakes with strawberry syrup, homemade refried bean tacos. Blessed vegetarian love magic. Gentle food binding! A reason to wake up. I baked cookies and cauliflowers - three flavors of cauliflower including chili-lime-butter cauliflower which was everyone's favorite. Who knew?

People came and left. Some slept inside, some slept outside - somewhere between five and seven people were sleeping here both nights. I was worried beforehand - about blankets, about one tiny bathroom. About forks. But it went well enough to almost be considered relaxing. Not what one thinks when one imagines a "three day sleepover 30th birthday at my house." I didn't have designs on debauchery, but it's hard to imagine predominant sobriety with that much unfocused time. Still, somehow that's what emerged - Robin wrote on her site afterwards: "I went expecting to sleep very little and drink a lot - but the exact opposite occurred".

So it was a healthy affair. Perhaps the heart of that was a conversation on Sunday morning - around a table a group of us sat; I asked each person to talk a bit about the year behind them, the year ahead, and some personal goals. It was fascinating to hear my friends present themselves; many of them are facing choices about what to do with their lives - where to live, what work to pursue. People in motion, reaching for fellowship outside of their locality.

This stood in marked contrast to the Swedes, Svante and Anna, who spoke of having so many wonderful nearby friends in Stockholm where they live, even in their apartment building, that they can share child-rearing, work and social pleasures together. They were the last to leave, Tuesday morning; we spent Monday enjoying the wintertime sun and surreality at Venice beach boardwalk. It was strange to think they would be landing in a place dark at 3pm and snow deep just a day later - deep in community bound by heavy weather.

Leaving me all this social energy to absorb in the sunshine of a starkly empty home. The days after this party were tough. There was a bit of a crash, a depression really - I was sick, my house was empty, I had memories and left-behind crafts to handle. And I think that was good, like pickled ginger for the mind. I was left from my birthday with a portrait of my social surroundings. Many of my fellows appeared to be in flux, inbetween a commitment to ideals, a curiosity about family-making, a desire to get a handle on money and some urge to settle mostly in spite of their hyperactive curiosity.

I was left wondering who I was - do I have too many choices? Thinking back to the talk around the table it was easy to wonder if too much travel or exposure had left some folks listless. It was a nourishing occasion, I think - what I wanted: friends mingling like family, familiarity, proximity, surrounding, creativity, making stuff, enjoying people, casual. The fire pit stayed lit for most of the weekend. There's some strength in that. Maybe enough strength to stand back and see myself with less fear.

Some of my life-choices appeared in high relief. What am I doing in school? Does that really match my goals? What about some of the long-term intimate relationships in my past that are now more distant? Could I have worked them out better? Should I have? Have I learned the lessons I needed to, to be a better partner in the future? Do I want to keep from being alone?

I stood in the doorway of my empty office - set up as an ideal I remember it from my cyber-maven twenties so it's neck deep in media products and screens. No space for clay or paint, I notice. Not much space to roll the bones. I've hemmed myself in with circuits. And that's fine, and optimal some nights.

But maybe it's not too late to switch up. It can't be too late! It's still only yesterday, with a bit of tomorrow and a ton of today. Man I got a few phases ahead of me, right? Aging is evolution.

but I can see a life taking shape around me - I'm not dead but I have to cop to my choices and the life they outline. For one, my terrible computer-aided posture: I am a web wraith, you can see the curl in my bones. Someone this weekend said I had translucent skin.

Post party is the first time I've been sick in about a year. After quarterly coughs, I learned how to be well - guzzle Emergen-C and sleep a lot at the first signs of sickness. But the party planning pushed me into a throat scraper. So I have chicken soup on the stove, and I'm drinking white wine from the bottle. Something to take the edge off the ache in my back.

Tomorrow on my birthday I have a meeting about the USC Interactive Media department web site. I think I might catch a museum show of plasticized bodies (close as I'm likely to get to cadavers just now). There's a 7.30 showing of The Life Aquatic with Souris and Silvio; I expect that will bring me some joy (like their photos did). With brewer's yeast on top. Great pleasures here. Always work to be done to be worthwhile, to contribute. I feel strong for the people in my life. Touched, honored, grateful.

A month of winter break confronts me now - I'm waitlisted for a 10-day silent meditation retreat in the middle of nowhere - ten days of no talking, no reading/writing, just sitting silent. I'm eager to see what that would do to me, after I get over the media-withdrawl shakes I mean.

But I'm waitlisted, and if I don't get in there's plenty of other projects to keep me busy. I say to myself, when are you going to pick one? Pick one thing and just do it? Heh. I've decided to grow a mustache. Until it hangs over my lips! All sixteen blond hairs. Why not? Something to do when you're thirty.

One Sixth

My semester has officially come to a close. I would say I feel a great sense of relief to be homework and task free for the next few weeks, but I've overplanned a bunch of work and collaboration and energetic socializing to keep me from approaching relaxation.

One semester done - one sixth through my time in grad school. Wow! Thinking about the rapid passage of time makes me ever more eager for this project; time passes, it might as well be in some guided stimulation. At least at this point -

People ask me, how is school? How do you like the program? What are you learning? Here's excerpts from a letter I wrote recently on that subject, included below. For another perspective on my school/social context, you can photos from an Interactive Media Division party I hosted at my house last weekend.

USC Film School's Interactive Media program is very young; that's clear. There are experienced faculty, who have put time in on some respectable projects. Not so many from the commercial video game side of things, but digital artists, online game makers, experimental interactive media makers. There's a slight slant in the program towards interactive media art, which reflects the fact that they have just begun integrating a new focus on games.

I'm a first year student; I have eight required classes this year. None of them are about games specifically. I'm learning about film, writing, animation, production, collaboration, interactive media theory. All of which seem important. Other students grumble that they want to make games, and they want commercially-focused classes where they learn how the market works. I don't care so much, I'm happy to learn the other material first - it's a three year program, I figure we'll get there in time. We touch on games in our other classes just a bit, but I have the feeling in a year or two, they'll probably start the game track students off with something game-oriented immediately.

Specialization is a challenge here - we just had some first-year students build an experimental arcade game cabinet that used physical movement of the machine mapped onto game controls. That's the sort of interactive installation art that we've seen the faculty present - if the first year students studying games were spending all their time writing game design documents, they might not have done something outside of the screen like that. So I like this little bit of forced mingling, at least in the beginning.

We spend time with the other students, future TV and film writers and producers. I have the feeling that's not going to last, but I hope it does. Many of them seem to have a mix of admiration and dumbfoundedness for the Interactive Media Division students: they're not sure exactly what we study, but they keep hearing video games are the "next big thing." We're such a few folks in a much larger division; sometimes we seem to be a little bit off the collective radar of the film school. I'd like to see some grassroots-style spreading of the Interactive Media charm with some regular open houses for the whole film school to see some of our games and projects and maybe just play some games on our big screens.

There's a great aura of possibility here. I'm hip to it - I thrive on it. Envision something, and it seems like they'll say yes. There's dynamic people coming through, there's money around, there's facilities. The only drag for first year students seems to be required classes. Maybe it's because I'm about 5 years older than most of the other students; I've got some additional perspective: this program is young, so it's listening to student ideas. But the students need to come up with and push their own agendas. That's not coming easy to all of them.

I'm trying to figure out how I feel about students playing games in class. We're studying games; is it alright to play Worlds of Warcraft during lecture? Or play Yahoo Word Puzzles during student presentations? I think it's rude, but I wonder if I'm just old-fashioned. I'm doing some research on effective means of maintaining class focus during "Backchannel" - internet-enabled collective knowledge sharing during class - using chat, shared documents, search results projected onscreen during lecture to promote student engagement. Gotta keep up with the kids.

I knew that the program would be project-oriented going in, still it's been a whirlwind of films and Flash applications. Terrific fun, I must say, looking back on my first semester. Learning to make films was magic. Part of the Hollywood vibe that the school has - there's some problems there, but the magic goes a long way.

My chief problem with that part of the program: we're making digital media, the Interactive Media program encourages us to use the web, and personal weblogs to write about our school assignments, but the film school says they own every inch of tape we shoot, and we can't share our videos on the internet. That bugs a few students, and seems to point out one of the areas where the Interactive Media Division is on a different, more future-friendly track than the surrounding film school.

We've had these great Wednesday night meetings, where the division gathers, speakers come in, they serve food, we have some chatting. It's a good social thing. Not enough parties throughout the year perhaps; people were working hard. I would like to see more game nights, more social events (ie, off campus with alcohol). I'm doing my part; I just had a division party this weekend, and faculty and students mingled into the wee hours. That made me happy as a host.

So that's a bit of a first semester data dump. My next semester, we're going to have a brief unit on games. Will I be designing any games in Spring 2005? It's not clear. Several of the students have gotten very fired up about a grant (from EA I believe), sponsoring student-driven game design projects. A friend of mine is listed on four of the seven teams; he wants badly to make a game next semester so he's charging ahead into that. It's a sort of entrepreneurial approach that seems healthy - a few of the first year students have really pulled themselves together to bring ideas to the table. So there's learning outside the classroom, which I expect to ramp up.

Most first year students move to LA about three weeks before school starts, so this first semester is a time to get their lives together, establish themselves in a new city and a new work/learning situation. I'm expecting second semester some of them will exercise more of their preferences, demanding more of what they want from the program. We'll see.

Me, I felt like I had so much on my plate in school, and I'm expecting next semester to be the same. I took on a lot of responsibilities and relationships; I want to maximize my time on the ground. I'm enjoying the sort of start-up environment where I can make my own breaks.

Final Schoolwork Film Posted

Finished my final schoolwork film yesterday:

A video essay about interactive media, literacy and vocabulary, and video games. Interviews with Malcolm McCullough, Liz Goodman, Doug Church, Jessica Hammer and Greg Costikyan.