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Offline

Going to be offline for a little while. Cec and I are flying down to Berlin to meet Jeremy & Diana and hang out for a couple of days. It's going to be great! Never seen Berlin before, and haven't talked to Jeremy face to face since Chicago a year ago, and haven't seen Diana since, jeez, was it San Diego in 2003? Too long.

It's good to travel.

So this is Christmas

The Christmas thing really snuck up on me this time. I've been so busy I haven't been paying attention. I think part of it is that I don't have that much contact with surface culture any more. It's been ages since I've seen or heard any broadcast or "push" media, and that's kept me away from the mainstream advertising machine. Thank fox, I mean, lowest-common-denominator advertising and endless repeats of "seasonal" music are among the things that can turn the winter break into a nightmare (for some people).

Is anyone listening to FM anymore? Anyone watching broadcast TV?

Part of it is that I haven't had time to sit and explore whatever the mass culture has been brewing up lately, but another big part of it is a basic change in the way I've been consuming media (I can only talk about my own experience here because I really don't know what other people are doing). I realized today that my media consumption habits lately are almost completely "pull" focused rather than push.

I wake up and stream international news on the BBC feed. Not interested in broadcast, I'm pulling the information I want to me.

Then I bike to the train station and listen to podcasts on the morning commute, choosing to pull only the really specific content I'm interested in at that moment.

At work I might check Slashdot, Washington Post or the Onion a couple of times.

Evening commute I'm back to podcasting or listening to a chillout "after work" playlist on the iPod.

Then at night we'll usually watch a DVD or stream a documentary from the web. I might see or hear at most a handful of ads all day, and because those ads are attached to content that's geared towards a really specific audience (me, for whatever mood I'm in that moment), the ads are generally pretty tightly targeted on things I might actually be interested in.

It seems so strange to think that people just used to leave the TV on and be satisfied with whatever was getting pushed to them. It all seems to make so much more sense now. And because I haven't been saturated with insipid mainstream broadcast Christmas ads for the last month and a half, I can actually face this Christmas weekend without already feeling nauseous and violated.

So I guess that's good! Happy holidays indeed! Anyone else out there experiencing the same thing, or is it just me?

Anyway, if you do celebrate some kind of winter holiday this weekend, I hope it finds you all warm, happy, and fascinated.

Donnie Darko

Whoa.

Just saw Donnie Darko for the first time (cheers for the DVD, Sara & Rick). People have been telling me to see this ever since it came out and I just never got around to it.

This is gonna sound strange (because it's such a strange film), but watching it, I felt an almost scary recognition of what I went through in high school. If only the kid had been having horrible recurring nightmares of a nuclear first strike, it would have been complete (I was waiting for that bit but it didn't come). I guess I was a weird guy back then.

Jesus. Where do I start? It just reminded me of being a lot younger and less experienced, and trying to manage that transition phase between beleif in an ordained or at least ordered universe and having to reconcile oneself to a world where there is no Hollywood denouement, no deus ex machina, no possibility for even understanding what is happening or why.

Some people talk about this as the struggle between beleif in predestination or free will, and in a very convoluted way, that's how it works out in the movie. But of course as the viewer we're stuck with the absurdness of predestination and the limitations of free will. Donnie Darko gets to choose (or is at least made aware of) a kind of redemption for him... and Fuck knows any thinking or empathetic person would die to be given that kind of choice, but for the rest of us, there's nothing. No epiphany, no closure. Just this moment after moment, the world tumbling out of control in darkness, and all of us grasping at the faint hints we're given to the extent of our feeble ability to sense it all, to pretend to understand, to--at best, at best--try not to fool ourselves into seeing things that aren't there.

And to hold on to moments of beauty where we find them.

I wish I'd seen this a few years ago. Even better, I wish someone had gone back in a time machine and shown it to me around 1988.

Funny too because I've always had an irrational fear of a satellite or something suddenly de-orbiting and bonking me on the head... I found out there's even a name for it, "keraunothnetophobia." Look it up.

Evil Dick Escape Pod

Remember that scene at the beginning of that horrible 80s movie "Escape from New York," where Air Force One gets hijacked by terrorists, and the President hides in a silver escape pod that gets jettisoned from the plane just before it explodes?

Here's another case of truth mirroring fiction. According to today's Washington Post...

What will they think of next? Maybe the government will start doing that trick from the movie "Brazil"... Remember that part in the movie where they use black-uniformed assault teams to abduct political opponents by crashing through walls of their houses, and then they stuff the screaming victims into black body-bags before transporting them to a secret torture chamber?

Hey, wait a minute...

John Spencer

John Spencer, who played "Leo McGarry," the former White House Chief of Staff from the TV show "West Wing," died on Friday of a heart attack at the age of 58.

Man, what a drag. The West Wing is the only television series I've really been dedicated to since Twin Peaks aired 15 years ago, and Spencer was a big part of what made that show great. The McGarry character was flawed and tough, but Spencer played him with such humanity. He was just such a great actor, a real mensch. I'll miss him.

Overslept

I passed out exhausted last night after watching "The Quiet American" (good movie by the way), and by some miracle I actually slept 12 hours in a row. I haven't done that for years, and now I feel like my head's in outer space. Started the day with coffee, a Vegemite sandwich and a can of Red Bull to try to kick off some motivation. There are still a lot of things I want to do today.

I really needed the sleep though, it's been a crazy week. I finally more or less caught up with work that piled up during the Moscow trip, I was training two new employees this week (I have my own little communications sub-team now... as soon as everyone gets up to speed it's going to be great!), and also forced myself out to see Martha Wainwright on Wedneday night and out for dinner with an ex-coworker on Thursday. So not much sleep.

It was good to be out on the town again, good to imagine I can have something like a normal life if I really work for it. And Martha Wainwright was great- she's got an amazing voice (she's Rufus's sister). I was right at the front too, pressed up against the stage.

So tonight it'll be boys night out in Copenhagen (Cecilie had a girls night out a couple of weeks ago), and with luck I can put a couple of hours of work in on the book with what's left of the afternoon.

Hey I was just pulling together a playlist of some of the better music I've got over the last year, and I saw that Metric album I got in Vancouver in November a year ago. I can't believe it's been more than a year since I did that Seattle/Vancouver trip! And a year and a half since I did Toronto/San Francisco... Jesus, it's terrifying how fast it's all been going lately.

New Material

I decided not to work this weekend and try to get back to my own life for a change. Cleaning the place, cooking some food, being human again maybe. So by today I was relaxed and open enough to try working on this book-thing I've been trying to write for the past three years. I broke the 70-page mark, and another 40 pages of notes.

If there's some miracle and I actually do get some serious hours in a row in the near future, I feel like I may be able to put a dent in this thing. I can't tell you how happy I've been today to have time and to not suffer from writers' block... I feel like a real person again.

If you're really bored, I've put one of the new sections up here. It will be out of context though, so fair warning.

Maybe I'll wake up some bright day and realize that I've finally joined the Nomenklatura, and my biggest worry will be keeping my G&T filled as I sit at the typewriter... Sure.

The Owls are Not What They Seem

Holy fox! I just found out that The Company is sending my whole team to a two day retreat outside of Seattle before some meetings that we're going to have in mid-January.

Get this, the retreat is going to be at the same lodge where David Lynch filmed Twin Peaks! The place is called the Salish Lodge and Spa, but in the show it was "The Great Northern." I used to be a huge Twin Peaks fan (at least until it started getting crummy towards the end) and I really don't know how I'm going to get any work done when I'm at the lodge. I'll be too excited waiting for Lara Flynn Boyle or Kyle MacLachlan to walk around the corner. I'm like speechless.

I take back everything I ever said about that job!

Destroy Everything You Touch

Oh man, I just got the new Ladytron album "Witching Hour" from Amazon UK (It's still not in the Danish iTunes store for some reason). It's been on heavy rotation all day and it's really happening.

The music still has the same driving Electro feel as their last couple of releases, and the basic beats are still nice & simple. The layering of the tracks is more complex but this is classic post-80s electropop. That "Destroy Everything you Touch" track makes me wish I was dancing at Popscene or downing a G&T on a nice buzz at Beauty Bar while listening to this. (sigh)

Good music though. They'll be DJ-ing at Paradiso in Amsterdam on the 8th but I won't be able to make it. Vanja, if you're reading this you've gotta go and then send me a review!