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Saturday, November 30, 2002
she comes and goes II
only rock & roll
om mani padme hum
3:22 PM | link |
she comes and goes...
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I was just looking for something else on my hard drive. Something a
little more recent, though not unrelated. Don't ask. Instead, I found
this email I sent to David Weinberger in mid-98. Believe it or not
(actually do), this was a precursor to our initial conversations that
led to The Cluetrain Manifesto. David should in no way be implicated in necessarily sharing these odd notions.
He does, however, have a pretty good rap on the Talmud as early hypertext. I offer the following historical artifact FWIW.
YMMV. I would not frame these ideas the same way today, though I
still entertain them in modified form. Some say
she's like a rainbow... |
From: Christopher Locke [clocke@panix.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 1998 10:18 AM
To: David Weinberger
Subject: the web and the rock
> I'll be on The Vineyard learning how to properly drape a
> sweater over my shoulders with a single knot of the arms
> around my neck.
sounds so... Jay Gatsby. perhaps a little polo? or at
least croquet...
the longing. when we first talked about this I invoked a
Buddhist perspective. historically, early Buddhism -- the
Theravadan or Hinayana school -- saw Passion, Aggression
and Ignorance as the big-three "poisons" -- and calls them
such. Passion = desire of all kinds, not just sexual,
although any monastic setup sees that as a primary big
deal. I'm not well versed in the history (or the
philosophy; it's deep and voluminous) but by the 5th-6th
century CE (i.e., 1000 years after Gautama Buddha) proto-
desire begins to be seen as bodhicitta -- literally, the
seed of awakened mind -- essentially same desire as the
poison "variety" and thus the foundation of the non-duality
that will later flower as the Vajrayana in Tibet. I learned
this not from books but from a teacher in the direct lineage
of that tradition, Chogyam Trungpa (who is dead now but
has reincarnated on amazon.com).
I have certainly never talked about this in email, rest
assured.
shift gears/change metaphors.
much of the best 60s rock-n-roll always struck me as
colored by this non-duality, at least to a degree. it was
the acid surely; it could have been just me, I suppose,
but the artists were coming from the same place, as we
might have said back then. one of the deepest resonnances
involved sex-as-something-else. at the same time it wasn't
not-sex. here's what I mean. when Hendrix sang...
I have only one burning desire
let me stand next to your fire
...was he (just) talking about some chick? this music
could easily accompany the iconography of Vajrayogini,
consort to Vajradhara, embodiment of primordial, awakened
heart. in this iconography, the two are usually depicted
fucking.
the eastern stuff turns many off -- and for god reason;
it's mixed up with silly notions of brain-dead happy-go-
lucky mystical bullshit filtered through tripsters and
hucksters who never had a clue. but go back to hundreds,
thousands of rock references to sex, love and desire and
you will find this "other" dimension. it's what gave the
music a depth almost unrelated to the doo-wah girlfriend
ballads of the 50s.
don't you want somebody to love
don't you NEED somebody to love
you better find somebody to love...
one of my favorites from the period is little known now
but an amazing anthem from the Kinks:
As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset
I am in paradise.
Every day I look at the world from my window...
or the Beatles' Day Tripper
got a good reason for taking the easy way out...
it took me so long to find out... I found out.
she's a big teaser...
maybe it was just a backseat liaison, but I never heard it
that way. the "Day Tripper" of the song is, after all, a
pun, an allusion to some other instantiation. Lenon was
famous for precisely this kind of thing. Closer to Joyce
than Elvis. there are better examples than I've used here.
The girl with kaleioscope eyes perhaps. follow her down to
a bridge by a fountain...
and later, the Police in "Every Little Thing She Does is
Magic" are singing bhyo over and over in the background.
this is a tantric seed-sylable associated with mandala
construction and other stuff I can only guess at. I
doubt Sting knew much about it either, but it's not
there by accident I think.
even though my life before was tragic
now I know my love for her goes on...
closer to the present, U2's Desire...
Yeah, lover I'm on the streets
Gonna go where the bright lights and the big city meet
With a red guitar, on fire,
Desire
She's the candle burning in my room
I'm like the needle - needle and spoon
Over the counter with a shotgun
Pretty soon, everybody got one
And the fever when I'm beside her
Desire
She's the dollars
She's my protection
She's a promise
In the year of election
Sister, I can't let you go
I'm like a preacher
Stealing hearts at a traveling show
For love or money, money, money
Desire
Bono is shaped, above all, by Irish Catholism. "She moves in
mysterious ways" -- yeah, that's probably his steady date.
Right?
The "she" of Desire is the same dark goddess of the Stones'
Heartbreaker...
Heartbreaker, pain maker
I'm gonna tear your world apart...
...Kali, the terrifying dark side of the mother archetype.
still, she is The Beloved -- source of life and object of
all longing when enough layers are scratched away.
this obviously goes a little deeper than the web, but it's
what we long for. though few might admit it, it's what we
seek everywhere and seldom find.
her eyes were clear and bright
her voice was soft and cool
but she's not there...
yet
see her shake on the silver screen.
god, I gotta stop doin this shit. and no, I'm not sure what
it means. if it means anything.
in the darkest night,
r. tuesday
1:51 PM | link |
Thursday, November 28, 2002
Bag & Baggage Turns One
4:04 AM | link |
The NY Times on Blog Sisters - A Mixed Bag
It's wonderful to see Jeneane Seessum and Blog Sisters hit the bigtime. However, this article is flawed in so many ways. It's unfortunate, for instance, that the goal of one of the women bloggers chosen -- as representative of the blog scene in general we are given to presume -- is to cook every dish in a Julia Child cookbook. Cool, I suppose, but hardly a great leap forward for women online. Out of the frying pan and into... the kitchen? And why all the references to knitting blogs? This is an article about women finding their voices on the web? Excuse me? And why the same old warblogger hit magnets, all men, with NY Times trackers assigned to them -- and to no women? There's some cogent criticism showing up on the Blog Sisters site, and I'm sure we'll see more before the day is out. I know Jeneane spent a lot of time with the writer, pointing her to various worthwhile sites by both women and men, so the article's muddied thinking and conflicting signals cannot be laid at the door of her informants. Except for maybe Virginia Postrell, of whom I can say no good; I basically hate her dumbbell dynamist/stasist hogwash. But more about Ginny another time perhaps.
This NY Times piece could have been a watershed document; instead, it comes across as sloppy and confused. Too bad. But kudos to the sisters, who much deserve high praise for their flash and sass, balls and brash, and a ton of damn good writing. Personally, I could give a shit about geopolitical harangues and yet another, deeper round of techno-fetishism. If it weren't for what (many) women and (some) men are blogging here about their hearts, their lives, their work in the world at large, their dreams, there wouldn't be a whole lotta reason to log on. Wonderfully, there's plenty of reason, though it may be a little -- oh no! oh dear! -- irrational. But here's an idea: why don't we sing this song all together. Open our heads and let pictures come...
3:39 AM | link |
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
On Professionalism
Tom Matrullo wrote something today -- blog
saliencies -- that made me think of the following. It's a passage from the introduction to
Gonzo Marketing...
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In addition to being a sort of indie-Indy, I also think of myself as An Amateur and a Dilettante. The caps are there to echo the title of the movie, An Officer and a Gentleman � though as you're already finding out, I'm neither. At its heart, gonzo is animated by an attitude of deeply principled anti-professionalism in the best sense. And there is a best sense. Historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin once wrote: "Democracy is government by amateurs.... The survival of our society depends on the vitality of the amateur spirit.... The representative of the people...must be wary of becoming a professional politician.".
Here, amateur clearly doesn't mean incompetent or unskilled. It doesn't mean unprofessional. But professional-ism is something altogether else. Over time, any functional specialization tends to forget its relationship to the larger social context it was created to work within and serve. Instead, it concentrates on developing an inner sanctum of specialists who talk among themselves in a private language inaccessible to outsiders. Almost without exception, such professionals despise amateurs. Or worse, accord them a patronizing form of faux eye-rolling patience.
Related to "amateur" is the even more pejorative term "dilettante" � someone who practices a craft or studies a field of knowledge in which he or she is not a "recognized professional." But the etymological roots of these words tell a different story. Amateurs do what they do for love (from the Latin amare), while dilettantes are not mere casual dabblers, but instead are inspired by delight (from the Italian dilettare by way of the Latin delectare). But delight and passion for the work are precisely the qualities professionals tend to lose first. The opposite of professionalism is what Zen master Shunryu Suzuki called "beginner's mind" � an ability to look at the world with fresh eyes and an open spirit..
Boorstin's observation can be equally applied to the commercial sphere. In marketing, just as in government, professionalism tends to hew unimaginatively to its own timid orthodoxy. It does not provide leadership, enthusiasm or the kind of impassioned personal engagement that has come to be called gonzo. In stark contrast, business professionalism tends to be arid and passionless, narrowly focused, self-involved. However, this doesn't mean that everyone in business fits this damning characterization. Far from it. In my own experience, there are many more lively intellects at work in the workplace than the misbegotten "corporate communications" coming out of those places would lead one to believe. There's often more going on in today's corporation than today's corporation would care to admit. New life is growing between the cracks in the corporate edifice, and it's spreading like a weed.
...I round the corner in Covent Garden and hear what sounds like Coltrane wafting up the block. Bent into his horn as if in fervent prayer, a musician is laying down fat splashy bop notes in the rain, punctuating the oblivious crowds of pre-Christmas shoppers. His saxophone case is open for donations and I drop in a ten pound note. He's surprisingly good to be playing in the street. Seeing the denomination, he jumps up and presses a compact disc into my hand. I turn it over. Karlsax Online it says.
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3:28 PM | link |
Rebel without a pause
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There are days, today being one of them, when I feel called upon to justify myself as something more than a mere online prankster. This may be impossible, I tell myself, perhaps too late. Perhaps I've devolved to a degree that there's no coming back. I worry deeply about this between bouts of maniacal cackling. It must have been more than a little obvious to those who bother reading this blog and my decreasingly frequent EGR sends that this year has indeed taken its toll on my mental and spiritual faculties. Some ask if I've gone mad. In the past, I never had to pause and think before answering. Now I find it an interesting question. I can't remember if I was mad before. This is possibly one of those Bad Signs you hear about.
It is at such moments that I often Google back in time, trying to find some semblance of my former self. Like those notes that guy writes on his body in Memento. "You already had a ham sandwich at 4 o'clock. If it's 5 o'clock now, you are not hungry." Anyway, here's a clip from a piece Jack Schofield wrote about me in The Guardian last May before I lost it. On the edge and trying to stay there. In my line of work, that isn't always easy.
For the full article, click on the headline above or The Guardian grafik. Jack, take it away...
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Locke went from MCI to IBM, but there he was forbidden from writing or
talking to the press. Bored and frustrated, he started an email newsletter,
Entropy Gradient Reversals. That's where RageBoy was born, pouring scorn on his
employer, and where Locke developed his voice. EGR was read by internet mavens -
it was the only way to find out what he was thinking - but it often had as much
or more to say about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. The running gag was RageBoy
escaping from his chains, insulting readers, and goading them to unsubscribe,
before Locke managed to regain control and apologise, or not.
It was often very funny, sometimes intensely moving, full of ideas, and
beautifully written. It was, in short, the sort of thing no conventional
publication would allow, but it couldn't be stopped on the web. Locke's response
to IBM had been: "I'll write on the web: these people are so dumb, they're never
going to find it." They did, of course, but as his boss said, "since you quit 30
seconds ago, I don't think there's anything they can do about it".
He went back to Boulder, Colorado, where his love life took twists and turns
as engaging as any soap. "I am trying to live my heart online, and it's dicey,"
he says. "We're giving ourselves permission to act like humans online, and we've
never had that permission before. We fail and we make mistakes and we're broken,
and there's a lot of juice in that. I'm kind of on the edge, and I'm trying to
stay there."
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2:55 PM | link |
About Corante's Copyfight Site
3:06 AM | link |
No Redeeming Social Value (for E. Norlin)
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Sure, that's the way it was back then. Get ripped on acid and do oil paintings of buxom sluts. The chicks were dying for another hit of weed, and they'd do anything for it. We'd send them down to the corner store for a giant bag of Oreos and a gallon of ice cream. With munchies like that, who had time for sex? Unless it was meth. Then, sure. All night long. Opiated hash for the crash. Rent was a trip, but the babes all had trust funds, so hey, have another hit of windowpane. C'mere sweetie, let me look into those big blue eyes of yours. Or are they mine? Oh, and fuckin-A look at that, you got six legs now! Aaiiiieee! Goo-goo-ga-joob.
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1:34 AM | link |
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
from The Bombast Transcripts
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"Wandering barefoot on the Lower East Side of New York,
over a thousand dollars cash in my pocket, looking to score, bring back for the
holy freaks the one good thing. Odysseus adrift. Also in my pocket, the Tarot,
the Waite deck I'd just bought that day. I went into The Eatery on Second
Avenue and my waitress saw the cards. 'I was raised by Gypsies,' she said. 'I
will tell you about the trumps if you like.' I had just dropped another tab and
had little time left, I knew, but she sat with me and pointed to each of the
major arcana, the Lovers, the Fool, the Tower, Death. Then stopped. 'You have
two Magicians,' she said."
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7:46 PM | link |
Paperback Writer
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The Bombast Transcripts and Gonzo Marketing have both come out in paperback editions. Just in time for the Holidays! If someone you know is weird (and who doesn't know someone who is) either or both of these would make lovely, thoughtful gifts. Or fuck it, buy 'em for yourself.
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from the Introduction: "A certain humility has been lacking of late in American letters. I'm here to change that."
Los Angeles Times: "...fast-talking, rule-breaking, opinionated..."
Publishers Weekly:
"...it's Locke's own history as an early artificial
intelligence/cyberspace pioneer that informs his most damning critique
the co-optation of the Internet. In the early days, people who knew
how the Internet worked 'were mainly using it to fuck off We thought
it was important to fuck off.' ... Resurrect William
Burroughs, Charles Bukowski and Ken Kesey, add a dash of Dilbert and that's
RageBoy."
Amazon.com: "With The Bombast Transcripts, Christopher Locke (a.k.a.
RageBoy, that iconoclastic cybervoice of dissonance, disdain, and all things
provocative) is leaping from your screen to your bookshelf. Look out. The
scathing rants from the creator of Entropy Gradient Reversals -- probably
the most wittily outrageous, cryptically observant, and eagerly puzzled-over Web
zine ever to pollute the airwaves -- are explosive."
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A Harvard Business Review Top-10 Business Book of 2001
An Amazon.com Top-10 Business Book of 2001
Amazon.com:
"Truth be told, Locke seems more like a social critic or humanist at heart than a
marketing consultant, and his essential disdain for corporations (which are
anti-human, he declares, despite all their philanthropic tootle) leaves the
reader wondering whether he really wants e-commerce to effectively pervade the
Web's truly democratic, populist microcommunities for its own purposes. As his
wonderfully cranky cult Web zine, Entropy Gradient Reversals, and his
alter ego therein, RageBoy, have proven, the man's a smart, witty, broadly read
cyberpundit. In Gonzo Marketing, he tweaks everyone from Disney, Time
Warner AOL, and IBM to fellow biz-book writers like Seth Godin (Permission
Marketing), and if you read it first for its own eclectic, acerbic delights
and second for a postboom e-marketing primer, you'll be rightly pleased."
A Reader: "I once mentioned a book by this author and it got me a job. Mentioning this one
will probably get me a fat lip."
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3:32 PM | link |
Monday, November 25, 2002
Lest We Forget...
 
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Gonzo Marketing:
Winning Through Worst Practices
By Christopher Locke
eDesign Rating: 8.25 out of 10
It's not entirely necessary to channel Hunter S. Thompson before putting Locke's "worst practices" of marketing to work. But the famously wacked-out author—along with Nietzsche, Joseph Heller, and the Blues Brothers, to name a few surprise guests—is the inspiration behind this unconventional business book. The co-author of the wildly successful The Cluetrain Manifesto, Locke lays out his revolutionary marketing agenda with plenty of straight talk, pop culture metaphors, and profanity to hold our attention. (He warns readers from the get-go that this is no "over-the-counter alternative to your regular insomnia medication" like most of its neighbors on bookstore shelves.) But it's not just Locke's writing style that sets it apart from other books of its kind; his ideas—marketing is irrelevant when it comes to the Internet, companies lack the personality to speak in a real way to consumers—are sensible, if shocking. As Locke sees it, the Internet has already created forums for conversations between people of shared passions and interests, so businesses should use their employees to become engaged in the market. Real stories from real people about real enthusiasm are at the heart of the Gonzo approach. Gonzo Marketing is an essential, entertaining read for anyone working in today's Internet business. Review by Stephanie Saulmon
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8:40 AM | link |
The Ongoing Debate Over Digital Copyright
I firmly believe in the widespread availability of strong encryption
security technologies. My other interests include civil
liberties and the special problems posed by the
interaction of technology, public policy and the law.
As written, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
now is being violated by millions of ordinary citizens.
My position is that copyrighted material should be protected
from large-scale unauthorized copying, but not at the expense of
reasonable consumer expectations, nor in ways that hinder innovative communications networks such as the Internet.
My talent is lap dancing.
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7:57 AM | link |
Find the Water Opossum!
5:30 AM | link |
An Exercise in Weather Prediction & Semantic Taxonomy
The old woman in her killed a girl who turned into a parrot while
watching July unfold. Lightning killed a man and his jaguar walking to the
store. Faint winter's dawn to one another, we were pointed out
afterwards, asked to remember the river. On her arrival in the
afternoon, she is a treasure that at once seeks the death of those she
loves, and on Thursdays, in control during a storm of
provocative language, using words she prefers along the river's bend tree
sunset cars your jungle your antenna. A girl hit by inauspicious grief,
homespun vignettes of death, got across the river as lightning killed
two others. Highly visual when displayed in the area outside. She
lingers around for birth, will break the boat beyond beginning. He
seems to have embraced blood as a weapon, as a world, as a kind of
wildlife in her vulva, in a voice peculiar to himself. Joy only to
end in a haze of pain, a garden continuing to believe in
afternoon, a mistake he's not inclined to answer for. The cervical
instincts, pilgrimage, the tactile image of the colony lighting cherry
trees on fire, treading that way one last time, dangerous language
protecting pain, a darkly fascinating world. Horse, shark, fox,
disastrous fetal membranes rupture, releasing the doctor. Adventures
in morality must find their death up the creek we lived by. Django
Reinhardt inspired gypsy swing, deliciously, he thinks. That he can
does not speak to everything she loved. Where everyday chocolate
language so much more serious flew over tiger-dolphin-jaguar thinking
of eternity, another way of representing jazz piano. Shattering, life stops at nothing to further
its own fireworks. Simultaneously measuring a snake she has
facilitated with her own obsessive love plants, an injured woman
laments how sacred life still is to her fatal beauty. Lightning his
imprisonment, his ultrasound image, a bitter understanding of the
causes born and ending in a cervical star, a scar, fluorescent
antibodies, this hidden treasure that once sought tragedy. In the
beginning, everything was fine. A weapon a hundred times more deadly
than this awkward mistake. Not willing to see it through until the
story ends that he does not want to end. He thinks he
can encompass what he must preserve, that morality finds its roots in
the vulgar, that merely opening a door is unsatisfactory. He is off to
Memphis. Fox, squirrel, river otter, brown pelican, rat, his eight
persons were treated in Africa for a while, waiting to catch his less
than direct but more passionate love. Yourself the dislodged identity
of slavery, hostile in a thin wedge of mourning. It cannot idle its
coming to an end. Little and little to the killed, he walks along the
beach, every man his man, while seeking the courage to continue. Raven
himself killed by jungle, by lightning, by a tree, by construction
workers while chopping wood. And love? A girl uses her imagination. A
war not just to swear revenge, but therein to find the lurking world
outside. Tuning a TV antenna, he hones her indescribable sorrow to an
edge, to intimacy: the language of murder, incest, perversion,
the luster of gold, not demeaning or tawdry, the murder of oppressive
sorrow. And passion opens the door on a velvety bulb of jungle, the
misery to rest beneath the waves of midday sleep or amnion sea. The
appearance of prayers to the inconsiderate multitude, the first
people, the workers, those who play in their own presentations.
Persevere to the end, when all this death is not the grief
of the she-wolf who ruptures, releasing a girl using her imagination to be
released from three medical fishing reunions. An enormity of heart, a
captivating look into refurbished half-hearted creatures shed away
suddenly, blown apart by tented statues, slowly through the
senseless murder of his sister, this hidden story that I understand
the causes, born and separate, will my interest in familiar
narrative, soul, liar from the beginning, twisted, thirty
year monsoon. An old man on a tractor cutting hay. Others,
the spotted owl, refreshing, the doctor for once not on a trip.
Reciprocal lovemouth of the Tahuayo, their powerful tobacco under a
tin roof trial, the very opportunity, the giving of beauty. He was
going to prove that power over traditionally secured waterfalls had
fallen to thoughts of resignation, both real and hysterical, the end of
joy, the challenge of being alive, jaguars and tigers, horseback
riders. It doesn't pay to be fatalistic. A card turned up, turned down, turned
over, the inhabitants practice treachery while attending a school
picnic. Our unremembering image went to her, became a boat, a wolf.
Tell the story of jazz these days to a child whereof the end in
darkness, the end we would like to concentrate upon, gives us courage
while standing in such innocent obscurity. That we want to end, and sex a jungle, love, that we can
all delight in, a velvet glove a
thousand times more deadly than these iron-fisted dreams. Of the rest you
remember little. The kind words, offhand smiles, the fond goodbyes.
The albatross that crushes out the soul. But that's all right. But that's just you.
A woman out walking is a woman walking easy. Lightning killed a ten year old girl.
You are basking in the
sunlight. Lightning killed one man.
[The text above is the result of concatenating certain subjectively selected phrases from the output of several google queries, which results were thereupon sliced & diced and seriously rearranged, then edited a bit. Not much. Well, no more than necessary. Few words were changed. A handful. OK, a couple fistfuls. However, every attempt was made to preserve the original meaning.]
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3:01 AM | link |
Sunday, November 24, 2002
My Other Psychiatrist Is A Weblogger
Let RageBoy show you the town, Little Lady.
you got no car and it's breakin' my heart
but you got a driver and that's a start...
Memo from Turner:
Weren't you at the Coke convention back in nineteen sixty-five?
You're the misbred, grey executive I've seen heavily advertised.
You're the great, gray man whose daughter licks policemen's buttons clean.
You're the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine.
Come now, gentleman, your love is all I crave.
You'll still be in the circus when I'm laughing
laughing in my grave.
5:28 PM | link |
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"RageBoy: Giving being fucking nuts a good name since 1985."
~D. Weinberger
28 October 2004
www.flickr.com
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More of Chris Locke's photos |
Until a minute ago, I had no photos. I still have no photos to speak of.
I don't even have a camera. But all these people were linking to "my photos."
It was embarassing. It's still embarassing. But I'm used to that.
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what I'm listening to...
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egr on topica
on yahoo groups
(way)back issues
egr home
terms of service
It is too late.
TECHNORATI
BLOGDEX
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