Grrr... Just talked to one of my colleagues, who is on her way to a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. I've really wanted to go to Baku for a while, to do some research, and it would have been cool to have a relatively safe environment (a presumably secure hotel on the company tab) to branch out from.
She goes to Azerbaijan and I get sent to Dallas (sigh). Reminds me of the time a couple years ago when there was a conference slot open in Tokyo, and another one open in Detroit. Between me or my boss, guess who went to Tokyo and who went to 8 Mile? (I did give my regards to Eminem when I got there).
I have no right to complain.
Starting to see a glimmer of dawn with the new apartment project. Insane amount of work but looks like I'll be moved in in May, finally. After that, more parties, more socialism, more writing. Between that being done and starting to work less hours at my day job, I'm really looking forward to getting my life back a little bit, maybe rejoining the world.
Couldn't sleep last night and I'm not sure why. I should be over the jetlag by now. Maybe it's a combination of work stress and moving stress (can't wait till I'm finally in my new apartment). Or maybe it's the full moon or something.
Even though I'm crazy busy these days, Warren Ellis is someone whose words I consistently try to find time to read. He has an eye for the darker side of pop culture and is really good at distilling out these random fragments that say something about where we are and where we might be going. I think his cultural commentary is at least as interesting as his books were, which I don't have time to read any more.
Here's a good piece he came out with recently, talking about what it means to be a "public intellectual," and how that operates in the post-millenium blank space we're in now. His operative phrase--which I like a lot--is "Quit muttering and tell me where you think you are today, and what you think it looks like."
Culturally, I kind of feel like we're back in the very early 90s again. The 80's had ended, the Cold War was gone and with it the set of assumptions that we'd been operating on for as long as most of us were alive. No one knew what to do with the 90s yet, and the marketing hacks hadn't yet settled on Grunge as the "next big thing."
The difference now is that we have the War to fixate on till the next big thing arrives. It's not culture--well, it's not really pop culture--but I do think it's interesting that designer camouflage clothing is all the rage now, both in the US and here in Europe.
On a side note I was trying to explain the difference in cultural context between Chicks on Speed and Kathleen Hannah/Le Tigre the other day. I came up with "Chicks on Speed is to Naomi Klein as Le Tigre is to Patricia Ireland."
Cultural criticism (or even deep analysis) isn't activism, but at least it's a start.
Back in town, and exhausted. My first day back to work somebody called in a fucking bomb threat while I was on the train on the way back home. Bomb shmomb, I was jetlagged out of my mind and just wanted to get home and get some sleep. Welcome back, right?
As always, I've got lots more material queued up than I have time to talk about. Spent the weekend rebuilding my new apartment, and plan spending the coming week drying out my liver after the abuse it took throughout the conference in Dallas. My biggest regret is that no one got a picture or an .avi of me one of my company's chief developers singing "Hard Day's Night" together in the middle of a karaoke set in front of several hundred loaded partners.
Well, actually, maybe I don't regret that so much.