Fractal Aspiration and the Information Age

I found myself trapped helplessly in a surreal node of technology-fuelled narcissism not hours ago. (If that sentence hasn't sent you scrambling for the close-tab-button, then I hail you as an ardent fan, an insane person or a poor, sad, suffering friend.) I am, as you may know, a mediocre and massively lacadaisical bloggifier. I am also desperate to become an owner-slash-user-slash-worshipper of a 3G iPhone (the latter piece of beautiful techwork magick being harder to come by on this island than hot hens' teeth cakes).

Prima facie, blog-lust and gadget-greed seem almost unrelated impulses, akin only in that they both concern information technologies. But just now they collided about me in a breath-taking demonstration of fractal resonance and dharmic disdain that caused me to feel, for a moment, utterly oppressed. The active (bloggerly) and passive (consumerist) poles of my technophilic individuum positively copulated in front of me - like junkies in a cinema - when a friend produced an iPhone from his pocket with an infuriating flourish. With a few deft strokes upon its obsidian obverse, he pulled up a full florilegium of my bloggic endeavours, crisp and bright and full of my own ridiculous words - at once inflaming my need to possess this daedal device, and engorging whatever pathetic sub-routine of my vainglory programming it is that compels me to write such things as this.

Just then, in that instant, I felt like a rat in a maze. An incredibly well-dressed rat, in a very dingy, kitchly appointed maze, placed there, manipulated and keenly observed by some demonic, emergent intellect - some preternaturally dexterous tendril, stretching lazily, backwards through time from the dark, asymptotic kernel of the technological singularity in whose vortex of inevitability I spiral and spaghettify into ego-death even as I type.

...

And I really want that Shazam app.

My Hair NIRVANA!

Blogsperiment 1

So I generally don't like my hair. It's not like it's hideous, but I like to have my appearance just-so, and my hair simply doesn't cooperate. There's too much of it, it's too soft, and my hairline is weird (a messy combination of licks and crowns), resulting in a disobedient annoyance. I have experimented with various hair strategies over the years, some of which have been briefly successful but unsustainable, others long-lasting but, in retrospect, deeply regrettable.

I had it cut about two weeks ago, and I'm ready to announce that it's the best haircut I've ever had. There's nothing extravagant going on - it's short and nicely thinned out - but mainly the hairline has been dealt with in some ingenious way that makes me look like a normal person. It just all sweeps to the side effortlessly. And for those occasions when one likes to be a little more noticeable, the cut is amenable to all sorts of flicks and spikes and dashing does. Success!

But I now find myself terrified that I won't be able to get it like this again. I went to my usual place and gave my usual instructions, so I must conclude that the x-factor was the girl who cut it. The problem is that I didn't ask her name, and she's a little tricky to describe, given that she's one of about eight six-foot-tall, blond, Eastern Europeans wenches who work in the place. I'm pretty sure she's not the one who told Shane: "YOU NEED VAX!", but that elimination is of limited use outside of the LGBT Society room. I even began to recognise the quality of the cut as I went to pay, but happened to have only exact change, and didn't want to get into paying by Laser and tipping separately, so felt unable to ask her name, or do anything but flee (My Tipping Etiquette HELL!).

Now, short of asking for that huge Slav girl with the three-inch-long scarlet fingernails, the clumsily applied lipstick, the permed-to-death hair and the atomic blond dye-job (Her Peroxide NIGHTMARE!), I'll probably have to settle for whatever chav-butcher happens to be idle when I next walk in. My Impending Haircut of Uncertain Quality DISASTER!

Symmetry, Beauty and Vindication

This is one of those appallingly parochial posts that can only ever be of interest those who know me in the real world. It is also appalling in that it has no substance but a link to another site, in this case an article on mindhacks.com. And so, if you don't know me, and have never been ridiculed for judging potential paramours on the basis of their bodily symmetry, do ignore.

For those who know what I'm talking about: Ha! It's science, bitch.

Oh - what's that you're thinking? Who's that hot guy? Why is he relevant? Well, he doesn't exist! (Read the bloody article.) He's a computer generated, supersymmetrical phantom. And it's been scientifically demonstrated that he'd be better at giving you an orgasm than somebody very similar but with an asymmetrical flaw. I rest my remarkably well-proportioned case.

The Tragedy of the Ganymedeii: Chapter Eight - Spite and Foresight

Argon Ganymedes, lowliest scion of the ruling tribe of great Artinth, and high priest of the god Philotos, returns to the stone halls of his people, flush from the ecstasies of recent victory. Behind him his army revelling, and in its wake, the slaughtered remains of the might of the hundred nations of the Archipelago. The shores of the Tetraproskinine Sea are red with Greek blood, and song of the defeat of Artinth's rivals roars on the Four Winds.

The weary priest Argon rushes with the last gush of battle-fever to deliver his tidings of triumph to the assembled chiefs of his people. But he finds the Synedrion already convened, deep in counsel and dark in humour, and a shade of menace forestalls his eagerness to make report. King Kopritos, smiling in his face but growling in his voice, beckons that his nephew seat himself where he stands, on a pew next to the great arch. Argon notices that Queen Mataiodoxea is standing on the oratory dais, and that she had been speaking when he arrived. Menace now hard in his chest, Argon swallows his triumph, bows to his Queen and waits for her to continue.

Mataiodoxea bows deeper than is proper and, as she rises, begins:

"News travels fast, I see. So zealous is his love for his master that our prince and priest Argon abandons holy war to defend him. If only your love for your nation were so great, we may by now rule such lands as befit the greatness the gods mean for us."

"If you mean my master Emeno, my Queen - he is dead and needs no defending," says Argon.

"He cannot be defended, that is for certain. So you have been told that we were to speak of his treachery at Enotita, and you leave your legions even as they ready for battle. You will, I trust, allow me to complete my address before..."

"If only to learn what his treachery was, my Queen," responds Argon, knowing that the news he came to give must now be kept, for a time at least, and that a battle of words must first be fought. Of course, he is not so unsuspecting as he is forced to feign, as the dying prophecies of the priest Emeno at Enotita ensured.

"I thought I knew the man."

The Ganymedeii congregated laugh mutedly as Mataiodoxea turns her back upon the priest and raises her voice to her King.

"We are a nation of noble blood and divine ancestry, my Lord. The favour of our god, Glorious Philotos, comes to us from birth. And yet the high-born amongst us are forced to barter for this favour from mere priests."

The Ganymedeii, abashed by Mataiodoxea's fervor, bark in dutiful consent.

"The Enotitian Oracle saw weakness in Artinth that day, when a feeble priest and his simpering abettor slew the Golden Ram and wet their womanly hands in its holy ichor, while the great lords of the Ganymedeii stood back in abeyance."

These words, well chosen, wring shame from the men of the Synedrion, and the humour blackens still more.

King Kopritos, from his tall throne, says in hymnal voice: "Philotos must have his priests - which are the deserts of any god - and his priests may serve his people well. But they must know their place. Our god's true blessing is in our blood, and only those strong in that blood may properly stand before him."

"And who is fool enough here to think that wise Emeno forgot his place," screams Mataiodoxea, "but rather forsook it for a higher one belonging to my Lord Kopritos! And his acolyte, Prince Argon, for mine!"

The men of the Synedrion, now rapt and enamoured of the contents of their own veins, stamp, shout and swear, and cast wounding looks at the young priest on the low pew. From amongst their raucous ranks is heard the word "Traitors!", at least twice over.

Bolstered, the Queen continues bitterly: "Since the reign of my Lord's uncle, the mighty Kokkinotrichos, this priest of thin blood and his cunning old master of blood thinner still, have usurped the name Ganymedes, and ordered the power of Artinth to their own ends. At the Olympiad games, at the Bacchnal of the Hermaphrodites, at the Hunt for the Golden Ram, at the audience with the Enotitian Oracle, at the Convocation of the Nine Hierophants - at these times when the eyes of all Greece were upon us - the anthem of Artinth played to the beat of their cheap, priestly cymbals."

Now the angry mutterings in the hall have frozen to an ominous silence, and a violent stillness surrounds Argon. Mataiodoxea prowls the hall triumphantly.

"Now even Philotos abandons us. What more proof do we need that Artinth sickens? Our patron god spurns the blood of the Golden Ram and is silent from prophecy."

"Untrue."

Speaks Argon, quietly but clearly. His small voice is answered by a baffled pause, as Queen Mataiodoxea turns about, open-mouthed, to face him.

"A prophecy was made, my Queen, though the Oracle herself was silent. Emeno, as he lay dying at Enotita, was even closer to the gods than she. Philotos spoke through him, to me."

The Queen tries hard to laugh, but manages only low hiss.

"You would counterfeit prophecy to save your skin. The priest blasphemes. Treachery and blasphemy, men of the Ganymedeii!"

"Is it so strange to think that Philotos would speak through his own high priest rather than a foreign sibyl?", replies the priest.

"Tell us, then, this prophecy, Argon," says Kopritos in a mocking whisper. Mataiodoxea cups her ear and leans towards the priest. Argon stands and walks to the foot of the dais, and speaks.

"Glorious Philotos said this. His favour turns to poison in the blood of the Ganymedeii, and the only antidote is humility. His last gift to Artinth is a test. Before the Feast of the Vines, he will deliver unto his people a triumph greater than any they have known. If they humble themselves in the face of victory, they will be great forever. If they become drunk with pride, he will wipe them from the face of the earth, and they will be lost to history."

The voice of prophecy rings ever true, and even in doubt, the Ganymedeii are sobered more than they understand. But their Queen recovers quickly, and responds:

"You are not very good at prophecy, priest, nor, it seems, was your predecessor. The sun rises in a few hours, and brings with it the Feast of the Vines. Should we wait for news of this great victory, or shall we find another way to soften the anger of our god?"

"Let us wait," says Argon.

New Bookcase. My life rearranged.

I bought a bookcase in Argos today. I need it because, after a room switch in the house since we changed housemates, I have reduced bookshelf privileges in the sitting room. It's all very complicated. It's an extra deep, three shelf high case, in faux-beech that I thought would suit the various other woods in my room, but, having situated it, seems distinctly wrong. It contains books rather well though.

I have relocated most of my books to it, though I was allowed to leave some where they were. It just so happens that the case is perfectly sized to hold all of my books on the esoteric, and not a one more. So now all of my weird books are safely in my room, and my novels and other exoterica, which comprise a beleaguered minority in my collection, are out for everyone to see. This is slightly disappointing, in that I enjoy the odd, lingering glances directed at my stranger volumes during parties, as well as the conversations that ensue. But having my occult library safe and in one place is pleasing too. It is quite satisfying to see it all at once, knowing that its colourful rows are undiluted by unmagickal chaff.

(Not actually my books. Mine are generally paper-back and much less impressive. I will one day have a library that looks like this. Not that it matters - the words inside are exactly the same. But still. One day.

As it stands, my collection is more or less as follows: five books by Crowley; ten others on Ceremonial Magick (mostly Fortune and Regardie); five magickal sourcebooks; eight on chaos magick; one on neuro linguistic programming; ten on comparative religion; six on mythology; ten on the Qabalah; three on alchemy; seven editions of grimoires; thirteen exoteric treatises on the occult; a dozen miscellaneous others that still warrant shelving away from novels and such. That's more than eighty in all. I have about twenty more that I looted from the remains of the Fortean Society, which was derecognised in college two years ago, but which are generally less germane to my interests, though still, undoubtedly, weird by most people's reckoning. They are under the stairs, where I expect them to stay.

Yes, it is rather satisfying seeing it all there - crammed together between those cheap chipboard planks. So much oddness and brilliance, madness, mischief and power. I wish I could just shove it all in a blender and stick a funnel in my head. I have such a bad memory, and read far too slowly - I can never contain it all at once. And it's only an incipient library by the standards of any real magickian. Which is why Ars Memorativa - the mysterious practice of augmenting the memory to praeternatural capacities by various secret techniques - is of increasing interest to me. So, to those who know me, if you witness me pause after I've been presented with some important information, close my eyes and wriggle on the spot as though I'm mentally navigating a garden maze - you know what I'm doing. Kind of.

Diary of the Dead - a four star horror

Or so says Empire. I'm writing now with Empire April 2008 open on my lap to the review of the film, which I have just been to see. It was largely upon Empire's recommendation that I asked some friends along to see it with me. I have always trusted Empire - their reviews are fair and sophisticated, and take into account the fact that every cinema goer has a weakness to genre, be it a penchant or a pet hate. They are not above praising a film on grounds other than serious artistic achievement, and acknowledge also things like sheer cool, enjoyable mawkishness, decent scares or well-achieved pastiche. Now, however, I wonder whether they should become a little more discerning.

Kim Newman is a specialist in cult horror. This means that he is disposed to enjoy silly but effective shocks. It also means that he should have a highly developed taste for horror movies. Here is his "Verdict" on George A. Romero's latest "Something of the Dead" offering:

As raw and vivid as a despatch from the front line, this melds content with fright in Romero's classic style. And outstanding exercise in showing the kids how to do it.

FOUR STARS

The film is laugh-out-loud awful. There was no immediate way of telling this for the first ten minutes - no early give-aways. The opening sequence revealed nothing but the low standard of acting one was to expect for the rest of the film, but one doesn't mind that too much in horror. It was only at the end of the first quarter or so when, after growing unease carefully engendered by the director in his uncompromising use of dreadful dialogue and a seemingly entirely undirected cast, when one character uttered the following lines:

"I've just shot three guys. And that woman."

"It hurts... bite... it hurts."

... that we finally realised that this movie was going to be enjoyably bad.

The film had a habit, that was so reliable and complete as to convince me that it was meditated, of appearing to avoid universal horror clichés, only to suddenly introduce them at a later point in the story, amplified as though pressure had been building from the attempt to resist. The central cast had most of the stereotypes - the character-free protagonist; his strong-willed girl; the tough guy; the nerd; the slut; the wise old man. But no black guy! A horror with no black guy!? Nobody to be sassy, obvious, gregariously terrified, ghetto, ingenuously comical, morally untainted and quickly dead? No. Until the end of the first third of the film, when three hundred black guys leap out of the bushes brandishing big, black firearms. And each a perfect black guy stereotype. And each with a gaping chip on his shoulder about the tyranny of nefarious whitey (now happily undermined by the small matter of a zombie epidemic). In the twenty minutes that will, in future historical accounts and film courses, be referred to as The Black Guys Sequence, these three hundred black guys proceed to instantiate every single horror black guy cliché ever observed. At one point, while trying to track down a zombified colleague who had wandered off into the bowels of the Black Guy Base, the following scene transpires:

(Three hundred black guys with huge guns slowly stalking around and through stacks of crates and supplies in a dark warehouse, scanning for movement.)

Some Black Guy: I see him! He's there!
Some Black Guy: Damn!

(Three hundred simultaneous volleys from automatic weapons deafen and light up the high ceilings of the warehouse. Silence. Pause.)

Some Black Guy: Phew!
Some Black Guy: Damn!
Some Black Guy: Whoah!
Some Black Guy: Got him!
Some Black Guy: Let's have a look.

(The black guys cautiously close in on a prone corpse of a black guy. One black guy leans in and rolls it over.)

Some Black Guy: OOOOoooh SHIT!
Some Black Guy: That's not him!
Some Black Guy: Damn!

Brilliant. Another of the time-delay clichés concerned set pieces. By the half way point of the film our cast had run unconvincingly terrified through: 1) a dark forest, 2) a college dorm, 3) an abandoned hospital, 4) a dark basement and 5) an abandoned warehouse. As I registered this I joked to myself, "He's going to find a way to put them in a gothic castle before this is over". Cue gothic castle. No really - a big, creepy, stone castle with wood-panelled rooms, a big library and swords on the wall - in Pennsylvania. I know it rhymes with Transylvania, but come on!

One might have been tempted to think that it was deliberately stupid - like those cheap movies named after the kind of film they are trying to parodise - except for the fact that the Maestro Romero was very clearly trying to make some rather heavy statements. The film is shot with handycams - the conceit being that we are seeing events from the perspective of the student film project which they interrupt. The protagonist becomes obsessed with documenting the disaster and, hilariously, takes little breaks throughout the horror, and the plot, to edit and compile. Romero, you see, was neither able to resign himself to the concomitant limitations of the style - absence of music, linear narrative, chaotic photography - that Blair Witch had the discipline to accept; nor imaginative enough to plausibly relieve these limitations, like Cloverfield with its sad little flashbacks, and its discreetly effective rhythmic, tension-music approximating background sounds.

Romero nevertheless cleaves to the conceit because it was his only excuse to incorporate his diatribe against the media, which now, apparently, includes bloggers and hackers. (Hackers!? There hasn't been a credible sighting of a hacker since 1995.) This diatribe is hamfistedly expounded in clumsily didactic little interludes comprising of real-life file footage of shootings and lootings and Man's Inhumanity to Man Top 100 Distopian Video Nuggets, accompanied by narration in the lachrimose voice of the strong-willed girlfriend, whose survival of her protagonist boyfriend means the task of finishing the film, as well as editing and adding the score (seriously!) is left to her, as she awaits death in a panic room in a gothic castle in Pennsylvania, as zombified golfers shamble through the grounds.

These ernest interludes might possibly have been somewhat easier to take seriously if each didn't follow immediately after some of the film's more slapstick moments. One second an Amish deaf-mute is scything himself through the face, and within a flash of static we're lamenting the mendacity of the media and the callousness of the authorities in times of emergency. Now were watching the feisty Texan wench speed off to rude survival in the only means of escape to the sound of banjo music, then we're weeping over the end of civilisation as we know it. Two such extremes of emotional input cannot be tolerated in the same week, never mind the same film, nevermind the same scene. Bah!

If I had gone to see this film alone, I would have been embarrassed for being there, annoyed with myself for spending €6.70 on what I should have known was going to be a piece of crap, and intent upon raising my standards when it comes to what I choose to see. But because I went with three other gays - Otter, Bee-otch and Biatch - it was the most enjoyable 95 minutes I've spent in a cinema in ages. After all that - thank you Kim Newman. And what the hell were you thinking!?

A lost cause in Oklahoma

I stumbled across this while working through reddit.com today - a favourite time-wasting pursuit of mine. It's a... speech, I suppose one might permit oneself to call it, delivered by Oklahoma State Representative, Sally Kern, and recorded without her knowledge. In it, she pits herself against an insidious, burgeoning Leviathan which, it seems, is devouring American culture from the inside out. So powerful is this malignant force that, she ominously prefaces, she endangers herself even by speaking about it.
Homosexuality. Or, as Sally Kern renders it, hoh-moh-sexu-AH-lih-teeee. You should listen to the file, but here are some of the more piquant claims she makes:

• Studies show, no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than, you know, a few decades. . .
• I honestly think it's the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.
• They want to get them into the government schools so they can indoctrinate them.
• ...They are going after our young children, as young as two years of age, to try to teach them that the homosexual lifestyle is an acceptable lifestyle.
• You know, gays are infiltrating city councils...did you know that the city council of Eureka Springs is now controlled by gays -- they are winning elections.
• One of my colleagues said We don't have a gay problem in our community...well you know what, that is so dumb. If you have cancer in your little toe, do you just say that I'm going to forget about it since the rest of you is fine? It spreads! This stuff is deadly and it is spreading. It will destroy our young people and it will destroy this nation.

At first it didn't bother me too much, thinking of this woman as the equivalent of a rural county councillor. I can imagine similar jeremiads ringing in the rafters of provinical town halls here in Ireland, and it doesn't bother me greatly. But then I realised - remembering my West Wing education in American politics - that a state representative is a hellofalot closer to a TD. (If I imagined for a moment that I had any readership outside of the country from which I am writing this, I would explain that a TD is a Teachta Dála - a member of parliament, the highest elected representative position in the Irish parliamentary system.)

This leads me to imagine how outraged and terrified I would be if a similar recording were to surface, featuring the voice of a member of Dáil Eireann. Quite, is the answer, in case you were wondering. But that's the very thing - it wouldn't. It couldn't. It just isn't a part of Irish politics. It is the ultra-violet of the Irish political spectrum - it definitely exists, but you'll never see it. You might feel the nagging, unhealthy itch if you're in it's presence for long enough, but that's it. And it's not because journalists aren't so sneaky or resourceful here as in America, it's because the politicians know to keep their mouths shut. I remember Jackie Healy Rae's ridiculous, leather caipín wearing son grumbling something about his discomfort with the idea of homosexuality a few years ago, but his nascent stand against the prevailing attitude shriveled and blew away before the soundbite could be editted. The North, of course, is an entirely different matter, but that's a hideous place anyway, and I couldn't care less.

Reflecting upon it, it's not actually very clear why extreme attitudes towards homosexuality are never heard in Irish politics. Sure, the Irish populace is, on average, less given to bigotry than the American populace is, on average. But to say that homophobia does not exist here would be blindly utopian and utterly wrong. Nor is it the case that Ireland is the one nation on Earth whose politicians are immune to the myriad idiocies that run rampant in their electors. Of course there are bigots in the Dáil, and of course the average TD is no less likely to be uncomfortable with homosexuality than the average publican. But then, why don't we hear anything like Sally Kern's diatribe? Is it out of some savvy sense of the expeditious - a realisation than progress will only ever bring this issue in one direction, and that resistance is futile? I'd like to think so, but that might be to give too much credit. Is it apathy? Are our politicians actually incapable of exercising their political wills on an issue that doesn't directly involve money? Or is it because of people like David Norris - who is loved even by those who loath what he stands for? Who can really stand against him and seem like anything but a poe-faced ogre and a spoilsport?

I just don't know.

When I read or hear things like Sally Kern's masterwork in stupidity and craziness, I inevitably imagine myself having, somehow, been given the opportunity to reason with their authors. I imagine how I would try to make the case for tolerance; how I could foment better understanding and disabuse her of her paranoias. Sometimes, however, it's just too much to deal with, or the idea that I could sway the conviction is so fantastical as to offend my day-dreaming faculties. Sally Kern is one of those, I think, who demonstrates how the line between irrational prejudice and flat-out insanity can be difficult to discern for so many. She has gone to a place where logic is either of no use or comes at a really, really bad exchange rate.