I prostrate my mind before you tonight after hours upon hours of television-watching with the dog, which has given me a headache that could kill the pope and still have enough left over to take down a couple of those fancy Swiss guards of his. And I do this for your amusement.

At least try and look grateful.

What I want to talk to you about tonight is the strange things that the hyper-connected world that we now inhabit — that we’ve allowed to come into existence around us — produces all sorts of strange privacy implications that we could never have imagined.

I’ve been playing around with Foursquare lately. (My account, which is quite boring since I don’t go out to bars, which is the target market for an application like Foursquare.) It used to be that Foursquare was only available in selected cities, but now that it’s opened up to use from basically anywhere, there have been a flood of somewhat… interesting ‘venues’ added to the service. Many people appear to be adding their houses, and it was in this context that I noticed this venue: “House of skanky bitch“.

I first saw in on the mobile app on my phone, and chuckled, building up an entire history for the location. “I bet whoever set that up for that location knows that the chick who lives there doesn’t use Foursquare, and really does consider this the house where you go for booty calls.” I imagined a check-in list as long as your arm of various guys marking their territory, a digital record of the, yes, skankitude of this residence.

A side-note, getting back to my incredible headache: I wonder if this is what people with coprolalia feel like. This headache is making me feel like typing fuck over and over again. Fuck. Doesn’t make my headache feel any better, though. Fuck.

I pulled the House of Skanky Bitch up on my computer to actually, you know, check my raving, sordid imagination against reality, and it turns out I’m a horrible misogynist. If I’m guessing correctly from the fact that just three people have ever checked in there, all female, it’s self-titled and entirely self-deprecating. All three have obvious homes of their own that they’ve checked in at as well, with similarly horrible titles.

The broader point here is this: I now know an awful lot about Christina A., Sammy B., and Sonia M. that I doubt they’re comfortable with me knowing. For Sonia there, a prodigious Foursquare user, I now have not only a list of places she’s been lately, but I could, conceivably, work out when she’s out drinking and either track her down all stalker-like or go rob her guaranteed-empty house. I have her full name, via her Facebook page, as well as her major. She has a formspring page where people can ask her anonymous questions, a twitter account, and a blog. Googling her common username soniamonia turns up a further wealth of information.

My point is, we regurgitate an enormous amount of information into the world about ourselves these days without even thinking about it. Sites exist to call attention to this: Please Rob Me got a lot of press attention when it was launched as a proof-of-concept automation of mining Foursquare listings to find empty houses, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a page on location-based services that’s an interesting read.

It doesn’t matter, of course, what groups like the EFF say, or the dire warnings they give. These services are too tempting to stay away from, and their default settings won’t be changed by 90% of their users, and everyone will eventually know where everyone else is all the time. Who knows if that’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s the next step in the evolution of the internet.

Now, I’ll let you know where to find me for the next, oh, 12 hours or so: in my bed, praying to whatever god might be listening that my head stops pounding long enough to let me go to sleep. I swear, I’m never watching television again. Stuff rots your brain. Literally.

The speakeasy exists in American culture as a wonderful relic of the Prohibition era, when gathering together under the same roof as a bunch of other people in order to get sauced was completely illegal unless you all happened to be drinking wine and having little crackers to go with it.

It’s a relic of a time when not every piece of information was archived and easily searchable, as it is today. Except for some minor exceptions, where venue owners want to either create that exclusive atmosphere or are engaging in actual illegal activity, that sort of thing simply doesn’t exist anymore. It’s only possible to be obscure through an act of will in the Age of Google; thirty years ago that was the default condition. This is not a judgment — it’s merely an observation. Perhaps this state of affairs is better than the alternative, perhaps it’s ruined our sense of proportion. It’s hard to tell when we’re in the middle of it.

In any event, with the death of obscurity, the counter-culture lost its ability to be underground in any real sense. This isn’t a new problem for the counter-culture. After all, accusations of selling out have dogged those arrayed against popular culture for as long as there has been a division between what the masses enjoy and what the elite, self-selected seekers enjoyed. (Did ancient tribes, sitting around the campfire, accuse their shaman of ‘dumbing down’ the esoterica of the rites for mass consumption? Might rivals have risen up as ‘purists’, claiming to be closer to the ‘source’, where yet more esoteric mysteries awaited for the striving seeker?)

“Counter-culture” is a neologism, really. It sprang into existence in the late 1960s to try and apply a name to the social upheaval that was marked as anti-war, pro-sexual-freedom, and most definitely interested in toppling the dominant culture of the time, that of the growing bureaucratic technocracy of JFK and Johnson. Subculture, although an older word (originally used to simply describe, in a technical sense, the various currents within a society), also took on the somewhat negative connotation of something illicit at this time.

The counter-culture existed for a deeper reason than giving the disaffected of every generation a refuge, where they could meet other alienated citizens and try and figure out how to combat what they saw as structural rot. It stood as the challenge to a consensus — any consensus, be it a political one, or an economic one, or even simple broad cultural agreements. When that vanished, and the counter-culture merged with mainstream culture, that dialectic was lost; there is no longer any large-scale systematic way of seeking truths that the mainstream does not accept or recognize. Worse, there is no longer a way to speak Truth to Power from an ‘uncorrupted’ position — everything has been touched by the mainstream now, and there is no hiding place from its reach. No one has the moral high ground.

So there is no counter-culture anymore. Fine. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as generic British characters say on the television. I don’t need a counter-culture; I have my niche grouping, where everyone already gets me, and likes the same bands that I do, and reads the same blogs, and we all follow each other on twitter. The echo chamber is complete, total, and suffocating. And if we don’t consider the deeper meaning of our acceptance of the mainstream, well, that’s alright. I’m sure somebody’s thinking about this stuff, right?

Right?

Part 1: Whose Monoculture Is It, Anyway?
Next: Discontents; or, Handle With Care

There are rules.  They may not be spoken, written, or heard.  But these rules can be felt.  They’re known, and for the most part they are followed.  There’s a few technical terms for this process.  Enculturation.  Socialization.  The world forms around us, guides us, and tell us to follow these rules.  Or else.

There are players.  There are the type of players who play by the rules, and then there are the players who refuse.  Playing by the rules is safe.  The game goes as planned; the result is rarely a surprise.  The risk these players, the rule abiding athletes, face: is to themselves.  A predictable life.  A safe game.  The end result can often times be underwhelming, making them wish maybe just once they’d played dirty or even warmed the bench.  If only they’d taken a moment–just watched for one second.

The rule breakers don’t have it much better.  What is there to gain by abstaining from play?  Sure, make your own rules, face the consequences for breaking their rules, refuse to play once in a while.  But eventually the game will go on without you.  It passes you by, oblivious.  And even if you stay in the game, you take the chance that the other players won’t like to play by your rules.It’s getting to be that time of year.  February 14th, and the joy that it brings.  That last sentence was written in sarcasm, for those of you who don’t read it fluently.  This year I’ve been thinking a lot about the game.  The rules.

To some people, it’s a Hallmark holiday at best.  Why should one day out of the year be any different?  You can show the people you care about, well, that you care about them all year, every day, any day you choose.  But these people probably don’t.  They’re playing by their own rules, however admirable they may be.  If you’re team doesn’t know your rules, you’re finished.

Some people go all out.  Flowers and chocolates and stuffed animals and dinner.  And dessert.  They’re playing by the rules.  The rules of clichés, and obligatory romance.  But, lets face it: who doesn’t want to be picked to play on that team?  At the very least, for the dessert.  Try and convince me you couldn’t go for a cookie right this second.

For others, it’s a day to drink the feelings.  Eat the absence.  Even the kid who’s picked last knows the rules of the game.  Knows what it means to be picked last.  Sometimes we forget just to turn our heads to the side, and realize there’s half the team benched right along side us.

But sometimes it can be nice to sit it out.  No pressure.  Playing the game, either by the rules or against them, can be a lot of work.  Take that moment to get your head back in the game.  How do you want to play?  What rules can you break?  What rules will you follow?  It doesn’t have to be black or white.  Sometimes it’s nice in the gray.

At the end of it all, when the pitch is quiet and the wounds are wrapped, it doesn’t really matter.  Scores are just numbers.  Trophies will be handed out all over again next year.  Players are traded, and others retire altogether.  What’s going to do you the most good, isn’t winning.  Loosing sucks, but you learn.  In truth, it really is how you play the game.

I didn’t listen to all that much new music this year — maybe about half of my music purchases were backfill for my collection, rounding out artists who I had most of their work, but not all. That said, there were a couple of albums that stood out for me this year. Most can be found on emusic, where I get most of my music from, and which I heartily endorse. (Last year’s list from me can be found on my personal website.)

Veckatimest, by Grizzly Bear

I first heard this album on the overhead play at work, shockingly enough. It took a while for me to process what I was hearing, because it kept coming on in snippets while I was doing other things. The album is filled with things you’ve never heard before: strange distorted guitar on “Hold Still”, a vast, soaring, roaring climax of noise on “I Live With You”, and the incredible build of the opening “Southern Point”. After getting my hands on this, I went back and started listening to their back catalog, and I can’t wait for what’s coming next.

Yesterday and Today, by The Field

The first album by The Field was one of my favorite albums of 2007, but I was worried that it would be impossible to follow it up. After all, it was such a simple conceit: repetitive micro-sampling. How could Alex Willner evolve the music without it turning into self-parody or avoid sitting in one place and getting boring? Well, he pulls it off: These songs manage to expand his musical vocabulary without losing what made the first album so listenable; “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” has vocals, even. “Sequenced” feels stretched out and languid, “The More That I Do” a sonic-ping-infused dance track, all introduced by “I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet”, which perfectly recaps everything he’d done on the first album.

Florine, by Julianna Barwick

This is an album that defies categorization. Nearly every sound on it is Barwick’s voice, shifted or modulated (in real-time, no less, for her performances) to create these haunting, echoing, beautiful soundscapes. I picked this up because Warren Ellis kept going on about it, and my first reaction was: “@warrenellis It’s like someone’s singing how the planets orbit around the sun. Stunning.” It really is an amazing album, worth listening to just for the sheer imagination of its construction. “Choose”, in particular, is a glorious exercise in how to build something out of nothing at all — and likely to put shivers down your spine to boot.

Fist of God, by MSTRKRFT

I picked this up more-or-less on a whim — and I am so glad I did. Big, crunchy beats matched with smart lyricism? “So Deep” is a disorienting, tri-tone laced synth experiment, while the admittedly-unrepresentative “Heartbreaker” features the multi-talented John Legend on piano and vocals, with MSTRKRFT stepping back and letting him shine. The rest of the album is packed with fast, aggressive songs, perfect for getting fired up. The album got a strangely muffled reaction from critics on first release, and, I’ll admit, it took me a while to come around on it — but once I did, it’s been on permanent rotation.

Bitte Orca, by Dirty Projectors

Bitte Orca is not an easy album, on the surface, all odd-sounding time signatures and oddly-pitched singers. Stick with it, though, and you find some beautiful indie music buried amongst all the thinking and strangeness. Dave Longstreth, the lead singer and group’s mastermind, has crafted an album that makes you want to coo along with the girls on “Temecula Sunrise” and just flail your arms around as “Useful Chamber” explodes through your speakers. It’s delightful, joyous listening, and you can’t wait to see what they’ll do on the next track.

Potato Hole, by Booker T. Jones

Potato Hole is Booker T. Jones’ latest solo album, although he gets help from back-up artists Drive-By Truckers (!) and Neil Young (!!). It’s a great non-vocal record, the songs evenly divided between bouncy rockers and introspective, meandering soul. Jones wields his organ like a singer on his cover of OutKast’s “Hey Ya”, where Jones takes the part of André 3000, and like a thudding percussion section on “Get Behind The Mule”. It’s a great album, loaded with hooks and passages that’ll be stuck in your head all day, leading friends to wonder why you keep humming organ music.

Man of Aran, by British Sea Power

British Sea Power were asked to create a soundtrack for the 1934 silent documentary Man of Aran, about the hard-scrabble lives of the natives of this tiny archipelago off the western coast of Ireland, and turned out this beautiful piece of ambient post-rock. Aside from the weak cover of a track from The Twilight Zone of all places, “Come Wander With Me”, the album is vocal-less. “Boy Vertiginous” into “Spearing the Sunfish” is pulse-pounding, “The North Sound” has this brilliant off-kilter violin spiraling through it, and “It Comes Back Again” is a nicely introspective, dirge-y track. I can’t speak to how it stacks up as a soundtrack to the film — haven’t seen it — but as a stand-along piece of music, it’s great atmospherics.

Merriweather Post Pavilion, by Animal Collective

Animal Collective is a truly divisive band — either you love them or despise them. Their latest, Merriweather Post Pavilion, won’t win them any new fans, but it’s a fun, bouncy record for those who don’t mind their particular quirks (Yelping! Shimmering noises! Weird sound effects!). “Summertime Clothes” is a delightful song, all bubbles and thuds, and if it doesn’t get you bobbing along, you have no soul. And you’ll want to sing along to “My Girls”, even if you can’t make sense of the words. The second half of the disk is somewhat of a letdown, after the manic energy of the first, but it’s still a strong album overall.

Tarot Sport, by Fuck Buttons

Fuck Buttons’ debut album was on last year’s list, and their follow-up is even better. Where Animal Collective just nibbles at using noise in their songs, Fuck Buttons embrace the noise aesthetic completely, creating fascinating pop music which doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before. Walls of white noise meld with disorienting samples merge with primal rhythm tracks merge with high-flying melodies into an album that never seems to repeat itself. The very first track, “Surf Solar”, explodes with vitality, and never lets up.

Actor, by St. Vincent

The cover is shockingly generic for what’s contained within. Annie Clark, the only member of St. Vincent, perfectly nails the line between “cute” and “creepy” on this one, whereas her debut, Marry Me, was just a hair too pleased with itself sometimes. “Save Me From What I Want” has one of the odder sing-along choruses you’ll ever come across; “Black Rainbow” builds so cleverly as to not even be noticed until the song as suddenly demands you pay attention to it. Later on the album, “Just The Same But Brand New” is a twinkling example of perfectly-constructed dream-music.

There were also a couple of EPs I really enjoyed this year, but I’ll save those for another post.

“This is the comic I’ve wanted to write all my life–a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFOs… you can make your own list. And when it reaches its conclusion, somewhere down the line, I promise to reveal who runs the world, why our lives are the way they are and exactly what happens to us when we die.”

–Grant Morrison

At a certain point as you read though the seven volumes of The Invisibles, Grant Morrison’s psychedelic magnum opus, you have a realization as to just how deeply, deeply knotted the book gets.

Somewhere between the tantric sex, the esoteric black magic, the deep-cover agent in so deep they ended up going deep-cover against their own side, and the anti-government anarchist paranoia, it hits you: this is a story told by an unreliable narrator, about characters who themselves are unreliably narrating their own lives to each other.

This has everything to do with the metaverse that Morrison creates within the comic. King Mob, the bald-headed nominative leader of his cell of Invisibles, describes the universe that the Invisibles inhabit as the three-dimensional intersection of two higher-dimension universes, one full of the purest evil, the other a shining utopian paradise. Their interplay creates the muddled state of the Invisibles universe, and the evil universe is in a constant struggle to exert its control over it, for reasons even King Mob is unclear on, but it’s implied that there will be an apocalypse of some fashion, as well as “eternal slavery” for the actual three-dimensional universe of the Invisibles.

That’s just one explanation, and admittedly only one of the slightly more lucid ones, of the cosmology of the Invisibles. Other important pieces involve a “three-dimensional slice” of a higher-dimensional being, which both created the universe from itself and is trapped within it, and appears as a big silver blob of… something, the truth of the existence of every god from every pantheon you care to name, the secret English alphabet consisting of 47 letters, which is used to give names to things that do not exist within the classical 26 letter one, and in fact cannot be experienced without the knowledge of the supra-alphabet, and so on and so forth.

Animal Man, breaking out of the frame

Two of the characters, King Mob and the time-traveling witch Ragged Robin, visit the “intersection” of their universe and the utopian one, a place known as the Invisible College, and King Mob pulls a stunt reminiscent of Morrison’s work on the superb — and infinitely less esoteric – Animal Man: He steps out of the frames of the comic book itself and manipulates them from the margins. Robin, of course, can’t follow what King Mob’s doing, of course, and the appearance of it to her is completely unimaginable to our own experience.

It’s really mind-expanding reading, honestly. It doesn’t hurt that every collection involves at least one major gun-battle with the forces of eternal oppression, as well as a refusal to shy away from the sexual lives of the Invisibles themselves — or self-censor their bodies as they engage in said acts. Ragged Robin appears topless a number of times — and, just so you don’t go running down to the store to pick a volume up for some mid-afternoon thrills, so does a 90-something woman. (She then proceeds to have sex with an astral projection of a 30-something man from 60 years in the future, because she told him that that was what she recalled happening in the past. Closed time loops are funny like that.)

But back to the unreliable narrators. The nature of the reality that the Invisibles inhabit is one which is deeply informed by the actual form of the story being told through them — that is, a fiction using words. The world of the Invisibles is entirely made of words; it doesn’t take more than a well-placed word to being something into being. That’s how the magic works, after all.

It’s implied at one point that one of the reasons that the world appears the way it does is because the words used to describe it wouldn’t allow it to appear any other way. The general populace of the Invisibles universe is enslaved, in a sense, to the words they’ve been taught since before they can remember; that “this is how the world is” blinds them to how the world actually might be, or how it might become.

The other side of the coin is the root of the textual undermining of the book’s cosmology — that is, actions within the Invisibles universe are treated just as importantly, if not more so, than words themselves. This stems from a cursory borrowing from Zen Buddhist thought that characters occasionally make reference to. The idea of constant, incessant change is the backbone of each cell of the Invisibles, and the be-ing of that change, which cannot be described in words alone, as the antidote to the words which infest the culture the Invisibles are struggling against.

It’s much like how comic books themselves work; comic books are a constant battle between the descriptive powers of the written word and the visual impact of the illustration on the page. Scott McCloud wrote an entire book on this theory of competition within the comic form. Only by acting outside of the language of words can someone be liberated from their effects, and only by words can someone be saved from the constant primacy and immediacy of actions, which do not allow for contemplation.

It’s really a great big sticky mess, and the book revels in the straddling of boundaries, of that need to incessantly change everything about oneself. One member of the group is Lord Fanny, a transvestite from South America who passes as female but has no interest in having the actual sex-change operation performed. She’s a witch, and the culturally-transgressive nature of her body is integral to the boundary-breaking of the witchery she performs. (She also has a lot of sex, but that’s mostly off-page. Even this comic — or its publisher! — has its limits.)

So the entire book is one enormous meditation on the nature of fictional realities. One one level, anyway. On another, it’s a meditation on our own reality’s inherent instability, intellectually, as it relates to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (the idea that our thoughts are shaped by our language, since we can only “think” about things that we have the terms for). On another, it’s a cool story about how everything’s a conspiracy, and how only by shooting a bunch of people and blowing things up can things be brought to justice. On another, it’s an essential window into the paranoia and ennui of the counter-culture of the ’90s, and how that came across in fiction.

And yet, it’s not really any of those things. The Invisibles is the sort of book which feeds off of what you come into it with, which is strange for a book that appears to have such strong opinions about, well, everything. But that it talks about everything is part of the reason it’s so fluid. The vast proliferation of theories, explanations, and Truths within the text allow for the reader to build their own version of events around them, carefully selecting the parts that support their theory and ignoring the bits that don’t.

The ultimate postmodern comic book, then. It’s metatextual, self-aware, form- and genre- conscious, and forces the reader to choose between various interpretations of events. It’s a classic for a reason.

“In Katmandu, much to my shock and surprise, I experienced [...] a full-on, Tibetan, Sci-Fi Vision of All SpaceTimeMind As A Single Complexifying Iteration Which Is The Larval Form Of A 5th Dimensional Adult Entity.”

–Grant Morrison

One of the tragedies of our time is that we’ve caught up to our future.

Star Trek, in the mid-60s, posited that there would be something called the “Eugenics Wars” in the late 1990s. Gene Roddenberry didn’t worry about making up this rather silly (in hindsight) bit of canon arcana, because, after all, 1999 was the distant future! Who cared what some sci-fi television show in the 1960s said about it?

(Later generations of writers would fill the ensuing plot hole when the 1990s failed to erupt into open warfare between normal humans and genetically-modified superhumans by simply saying it was a “shadow war”.)

Of course, Arthur C. Clarke provided us with the most enduring example of reality overtaking future history with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Our own version of humanity seems uninterested in space compared to the busy beavers of his book; an established lunar base, with a second generation already being born there as natives? Tourist flights into low Earth orbit?

The late Victorians and the fashionistas of the Jazz Age had no qualms trying to peer into the future.

Postcards were printed up over a century ago predicting that in the year 2000, we’d all have personal zeppelins, that cities would be covered in glass roofs to keep out the weather, and buildings could be towed around by steam-powered locomotives.

People in the year 1900 didn’t have the weight of specific predictions of their own to meet. There are no “In the year 1900…” texts from the year 1800. People in the year 1800 had no reason to suspect that life a century from then would be substantively different than it was at that time. Sure, the politics might change, but the Enlightenment had ended. The intelligentsia figured that everything that was going to be known was known. Deism was on the rise, a society based on Reason was either about to come about or was already ascendant. Surely, there could be no more massive changes than what had already occurred!

Blame the death of the future on our “conquest” of space. When Star Trek (there’s Roddenberry again) famously called it the “final” frontier, it represented the End of History, especially for the Western World. After all, the frontier was how we defined ourselves throughout the entire Age of Discovery, American Manifest Destiny, Colonialism from the 15th century on up. With the planting of the American flag on the moon on July 20th, 1969, the entirety of the human drive to expand and explore, then ongoing for five centuries, reached its apex.

We didn’t realize it at the time, of course. Wernher von Braun saw the moon as an inconsequential pebble on the way to Mars. Popular fancy was captivated by stories of moon bases, orbiting space stations, and rocket flights for the middle-class consumer. We put fins on our cars and listened to our children tell us they wanted to be rocketmen when they grew up.

The delightful thing was how soon this bright, clean future was going to happen. Computers would make all the hard parts easy; within, oh, twenty years, those smart young men with the button-down shirts and mechanical pencils in their breast pockets would take care of all the issues. Why, by the mid-nineties, it would be considered as inconsequential as getting on an airplane!

We have been disabused of the notion of continual progress, even as the world keeps progressing around us. No, that’s not quite it. We’ve lost the sense that all progress is positive. This has never been a constant in society; thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment were entirely convinced that the new ‘scientific mind’ of the era was a positive development, but the Victorians were much more skeptical by the end of their century as to the achievements of the ‘progression’ of the previous devotions to Reason and Scientific Inquiry. (We have this backing away from the legacy of the Enlightenment to thank for Marxism and Anarchism, among other radical societal theories.)

Our own postmodern condition — and our cynicism about our own prospects — have seemingly turned our eyes from speculation about our own futures. We consign this thinking to well-paid and out-of-touch “futurists” who work for large multi-national corporations and think about what the consumer of the future may look like, and what they might want to buy. We talk in grand abstractions, “Trends” and “Microtrends“, and even then, we’re talking about the next five years, maybe the next decade. Of course, talking in specifics just seems silly as well: George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years talks about Mexico becoming a world power, and Japan and Turkey teaming up against an American-lead alliance, which strikes most modern readers as more than slightly implausible.

And then there’s the futurists of the Singularity, who believe that, at some point in the near future, humanity will have its cognitive functions surpassed by our computers, leading them to exponentially improve themselves, the consequences of which are our own sublimation into the silicon brain, and a utopia of abundance and the end of scarcity for all.

Being enthusiastic about the future is viewed by many to be a sign of Pollyanna-ism, of being simple-minded, of not thinking critically. Our futures are increasingly dystopian: the eternal urban sprawl of Gibson’s Neuromancer and Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the fundamentalism and (occasionally self-inflicted) gender-inequality of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, the horrors of 1984 and Brave New World.

We need to start thinking big again. “Think globally, act locally” is crap. Act globally. Make something that will last a thousand years. Don’t let your fancy schooling, and the peace of the environment you find yourself in, lull you into thinking this will last forever. Plan on how to make the whole world a better place, and then do it. Don’t think that the future’s going to be terrible, because, if history can be trusted to teach us anything, it’s that things keep getting better, and they get better because people *make sure* they get better.

So get out there and make sure the future is good.