I’m trying to develop a taxonomy of stuckness, of the ways that I can’t work. It’s really helpful for me because if I can’t work — specifically, if I can’t write something halfway decent — I start to lose my mind; working is how I manage my depression and self-hatred, because yes I’m seeing a therapist already and no I don’t want to take medication at this point, and these things can only be fixed to a limited degree and that takes time, and in the meanwhile I want to minimize the number of late afternoons where I sit at the desk, sure I’ll never do anything again, figuring out how many pushpins I can bear to stick in my hand at once.
(I should write about the psychic economy of self-hatred sometime. It’s an intricate set of double binds, and laying this stuff out in public is a kind of exorcism, removing feelings from the protective, baroque involution of the mind. Binds: The loop where successfully doing something to your standards is a sign that you’re capable, and therefore all the other times that you’ve failed are a further indictment of your character. It’s interesting that self-hatred seems surprisingly underrepresented in literature but is the motor of so much great standup, that it can be so funny even as it crushes you within the vise whose screw you tighten and tighten. Anyway.)
The issue with stuckness isn’t that it happens but that it can be hard to identify and distinguish as such, and thus address. I call this the Whitehouse problem, after one of my favorite scientists manqué to get something disastrously wrong. The magnificently named Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse was a surgeon who became the chief electrician of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, with the job of figuring out how to get a signal through a poorly insulated cable running at the bottom of the sea. (He wrote some singularly entertaining papers on the subject.) To be clear, poor Whitehouse did quite a lot of interesting work, including developing and patenting his own rollerskates and the Electric Harmoniograph, a system for generating graphic notation from piano keyboards — but for the great bet of his life and his era he bet big, and wrong. The sea is a noisy environment for an electrically transmitted message; Whitehouse’s colleague William Thompson/Lord Kelvin wanted to address this by making the receiver more sensitive, better able to distinguish modulations in the signal. Whitehouse’s solution was the essence of brute force, building bigger and better induction coils to put more power through the line, eventually killing it and effectively melting it into scrap. Then, sadly, he did same thing socially: refusing any failure, he feuded publicly and at length with various parties, using sheer rhetorical bluster in the absence of much evidence to get his message across.
Being stuck, dearreader, is a delicate state. It has distinct forms. And the temptation is to Whitehouse things: pour on the willpower, the coffee, the focus, to make this work, right now, God damn it. Not to lose another hour, another morning, another day. As I get older I realize that my good sense and my willpower are mostly inversely proportional to each other — the more I lose track of my goals, the more I’m adrift, the harder I try, the more force I put into the system. An escalating feedback loop that ends with me as a flake of molten copper on the ocean floor (which is to say lying on the carpet in my office in the middle of the night, crushingly certain that everything I’ve done up to this point that’s been any good was a fluke, a run of luck that’s ended). What if we let things stay delicate, stayed attentive, and parsed out signals with the grace of Kelvin’s mirror galvanometer, a dot of light that can pull a message out of the sea? When I try to notice the stuckness, I see four distinct modes:
Physical factors. They can’t be ignored. Heat, cold, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, the café staff playing the same Cure record over and over. An uncomfortable chair. These things seem facile; I always think, as I fret about the jabbing ribs of some Thonet chair, about my beloved Osip Mandelstam, who could write on shirt cardboards with a stolen pencil while facing the Gulag — what am I complaining about? (Oh, dearreader, if you haven’t read Mandelstam: “The Noise of Time,” “Fourth Prose,” the “Journey to Armenia,” the rest of the prose, his poems, to say nothing of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s document of inhumanity Hope Against Hope — there is perhaps no better writer of dreams in the Western tradition, but the dreams he documents are Russia, language, Judaism, history, the coming of the Terror. This reminds me that I need to start my Mandelstam podcast.) But they are real and nontrivial factors, and too many days I’ve ground to dust trying to work in an unworkable place.
Out of your control. Like you’re waiting on feedback about an article, the one article you really want to be working on. You can’t do the most important thing, or you’re not sure what that is.
Emotional factors. Like I’m scared of a project, or I feel confused, creatively worthless, preoccupied with something else. (This one is hard because I often use work to manage these negative emotions, so having them keep me from working is hard for me to finesse.)
The necessary pause. Sometimes the creative process needs a break, a little search time, some listening and staring into space. You need to give the next step, the next idea, a chance to bubble up. Thinking, for me, is a mostly involuntary process; a real idea often happens as an interruption, a chance encounter that comes independent of any diligence on my part. A mentor of mine used to say that truth wasn’t a country you conquer but a cat you coax out from underneath the couch. Give it room, and quiet, to emerge.
I can work with my stuckness, I find, if I just acknowledge that it’s happening. Suddenly I no longer need to fight myself.
And having taken a break to calm down from deadline panic and write this instead, I need to get back to work.
Kafka read “The Penal Colony” in a Munich gallery one evening in November, in front of some paintings by Van Dongen and Vlaminck, to an audience of about fifty people. He felt as cold as “the empty mouth of a stove.” A woman fainted during the reading; other people walked out, and still others complained it went on too long. The graphologist Max Pulver had the impression that “a faint odor of blood was spreading” through the room.
(Noted from Jürgen Born, 1979, Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption zu seinen Lebzeiten, 1912-1924, p. 119.)
“You’ve seen that it is not easy to figure out the inscription with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.”
This is my planned schedule for HOPE — though HOPE being what it is I will probably immediately be pulled off course to have conversations, stare at things, and argue. Still. If you’re going to be there, I’ll be in at least some of these rooms at some of these times and we should hang out.
FRIDAY
1100 — Light, Color and Perception (B) Everyone will be blogging the State of Global Intelligence talk, anyway
1200 — Content of the Future (L)
1300 — Dan Kaminsky Keynote! (T)
1400 — Examining Costs, Benefits, and Economics in Malware and Carding Markets (B) Will be awesome
1500 — Arse Elektronika (T)
1600 — Cooking for Geeks (B)
1700 — Design of a Wireless EMG (B)
1800 — Tor and Internet Censorship (T)
1900 — Buying Privacy in Digitized Cities (B)
2000 — Towards Open Libraries and Schools (L)
2100 — Introduction to the Chip Scene: Low Bit Music and Visuals (L)
2200 — Electronic Waste: What’s Here and What’s Next (L)
2300 — Interaction with Sensors, Receivers, Haptics, and Augmented Reality (L)
SATURDAY
1000 — T+40: The Three Greatest Hacks of Apollo (L)
1100 — Video Surveillance, Society, and Your Face (T)
1200 — For Its Own Sake and to Build Something Better: A Primer on Neuroscience, Bat Echolocation, and Hacker Bio-inspiration (B)
1300 — Julian Assange Keynote! (T) Not to be missed
1500 — Modern CrimeWare Tools and Techniques: An Analysis of Underground Resources (B)
1600 — Snatch Those Waves: Prometheus Radio and the Fight for Popular Communications (T)
1700 — Privacy is Dead — Get Over It (T) Three hours, will be completely epic
2000 — The Telephone Pioneers of America (B)
2100 — Circuitbending (L)
2200 — PSTN-based Cartography (B)
2300 — A User’s Guide to Lulzy Media, the Pleasure of Trickery, and the Politics of Spectacle: From Luddites to Anonymous (T) Biella and my presentation! Come, critique, enjoy
2400 — Either Robert Steele’s tour of the espionage world, or the Saturday night Hacker Cinema
SUNDAY
1000 — Hacking Terrorist Networks Logically and Emotionally (B)
1100 — From Indymedia to Demand Media: Participation, Surveillance, and the Transformation of Journalism (T)
1200 — Simpsons Already Did It – Where Do You Think the Name “Trojan” Came From Anyway? (L)
1300 — TrackMeNot: Injecting Reasonable Doubt in Everyone’s Queries (B) My colleague Vincent Toubiana presenting on a very interesting project
1400 — Informants: Villains or Heroes? (T) Will be intense
1530 — Hacking the Food Genome (T)
1600 — Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology (L)
And I’ll probably be around for the closing ceremonies. I may have to slip away to do some work though. See you there, droogs.
The best moments are like watching people decorate a Christmas tree that’s spinning at 400 rpm, with every bauble hung for a moment before it zings off to explode against the club wall in a glittering shower of spicules of red glass
The moment of shock when, deep inside a knockout whirling solo, you could hear “My Favorite Things,” far down, the way you can see a wonderful simian monkey-trace in the big beautiful face of Jean-Paul Belmondo
(Happy solstice, dearreader. I love our little planet, swinging through deep and silent space.)
(This post is about music and has a bunch of mp3s linked from it. If you’d them all once, download the zip file.)
Early this January, I deleted all the music on my computer and vowed to listen only to music I’d never heard before for the rest of the year. (New albums by bands I already liked were permitted.) Objects, surroundings, sounds, tastes, have a way of helping to sustain the continuity of feeling and self, stringing the days together like pearls — and sometimes you need to stop being who you were. I used to do that by moving to another place, but I like where I’m living now, so: nothing but new music. The longest day seems like a good time to listen back.
This was the first thing I listened to, recordings of glossolalia from the astonishing collection Okkulte Stimmung. Divine inspiration and alien tongues was a good starting point (and oddly relaxing). (Seriously, find the collection if you can. Many recordings of things you never imagined someone captured on tape: Séance conversations with various dead worthies? Channeled beings from improbable planets? An astonishing ten minutes from an Egyptian exorcism conducted in جن language? All here. A box of wonders.)
You quickly realize, taking a vow like this, that you’ve kind of eliminated all the low-hanging sonic fruit. If you like a genre of music you’ve probably already heard all the big stuff. So you start digging. Or, if you’re lazy, like me, you jump to genres you know almost nothing about. Like girl-group tropicalia in the 1960s. And you find four sisters (named, perfectly and for real, Cybele, Cylene, Cynara and Cyva) who sing with a precision that could pick the hearts off a falling playing card, and who’ve created something like doo-wop with a wider emotional range, a touch of melancholy.
And you find out about Persian psych and folk music from the 1960s, too. (Plus early Algerian raï, but that’s a whole separate blog post full of dancing, public weeping, and trumpets — how can you help but love a form of music whose name translates as “Yeah!”) It’s so beautiful. This song is one piercing moment after another; by that delicate coda we stand like St. Sebastian struck with so many arrows of love and loss, but for once the arrows help us stand; their fletching helps us fly.
And about the tumbling-water piano work of Guèbrou, an Ethiopian-born, Jerusalem-based nun who plays like a collaboration of Scott Joplin and Lubomyr Melnyk — but comparisons don’t quite capture it. A fluttering music like a bird flown into a room and trying to find its way back to the open air, but utterly without panic.
And about this (from the AMAZING Ecstatic Music of the Jemaa el Fna) from Marrakesh in 2005. Run off moped batteries through terrible speakers, it’s an explosion of raw joy that acts as a permanent argument in favor of humans being ourselves in all our various ways. From that opening wall of guitar (?) noise, hang out in the Moroccan street until about 1:13, when something starts that’s like what the Velvet Underground might have become in a state of holy and radiant glory.
Of course you also come across things that are the kind of thing you would have liked, had you known — in my case, Virginia Astley’s curious and utterly dreamy album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, instrumental miniatures played as though in the middle of an English field on a perfect summer’s day. Birds twitter, boats creak with rowing, distant bells sound, and piano phrases cycle like bees going from one flower to the next. (This is the lushest track on the record, with its children’s choir; some of the others are downright dark, with a slight Wicker Man glow from burning August fields.)
Luckily bands you love keep releasing music, too, like White Hinterland/Casey Dienel — which began with pianos and magnificently detailed, loopy lyrics that told intricate stories about free spirits, old buildings, and the fate of a ladies’ man — who have transformed into something rich and fuzzy, as though a picture of their previous music had been taken and all that came through was the lens flare. And this seems like a good place to stop, in a black and silent sea, in a lake the sun has never seen –
(Short public service message time. Biella and I are going to be presenting at the NEXT HOPE this July (Saturday the 17th, 11 pm, “Tesla” on the 18th floor), and there’s something quite serious happening with one of our keynoters, Julian Assange of Wikileaks. What follows is an announcement from Emmanuel Goldstein of HOPE; check it out. And there’s never been a better time to donate to Wikileaks.)
In a story that continues to get more interesting with each passing day,
one of our keynote speakers for The Next HOPE is said to be in great danger
of being apprehended or worse by the United States government after a source
of sensitive information was arrested.
Our keynote speaker, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, published a video back
in April that showed U.S. troops firing on unarmed Reuters journalists in
Baghdad, killing them and wounding a number of others. Attempts by Reuters
to get this video through the Freedom of Information Act had failed. It was
only after it was sent to Wikileaks that the truth came out and a major
scandal followed.
But it didn’t end there. It seems that the alleged source of this particular
leak had struck up a conversation with someone in the hacker community named
Adrian Lamo. According to chat transcripts provided by Lamo, Army
intelligence specialist Bradley Manning admitted to the leak along with one
other video that has yet to be released. That video supposedly shows the
2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan which killed dozens of civilians. But
there was still more. According to a report in Wired, who claim to have
copies of the chat transcripts, Manning had also sent 260,000 diplomatic
cables to Wikileaks. This was supposedly the point at which Lamo felt he had
no choice but to turn Manning in, according to the Wired story. Meanwhile
Wikileaks will not confirm whether or not Manning is a source and also claims
to not have 260,000 diplomatic cables. And that’s where it all stands now.
So what does this all mean? According to a report in the Daily Beast, it
means Julian Assange is a marked man. In fact, former Pentagon Papers
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said Assange was “absolutely” in danger and
should “stay out of the U.S.” Meanwhile, in another report, an anonymous
U.S. official was quoted as saying of Assange, “We’d like to know where he
is.” JUST TODAY (16 June 2010), we were able to verify through sources that
there is “no question whatsoever” that Assange would be detained for
questioning were he to arrive anywhere in the United States.
Assange is scheduled to give The Next HOPE Saturday keynote on July 17 in
New York City. To make things even more interesting, Lamo has also been
planning on appearing at the conference and may now wind up facing a hacker
community who views his actions with, to put it mildly, disappointment. Lamo
claims he was put in an impossible situation and is actually a supporter of
Wikileaks, saying he even contributed money to the organization in the past.
That’s pretty much the story as it stands now. One person is in prison,
another is in fear of arrest or even physical harm, while a third is being
ostracized by much of the hacker world. We have not been immune from this,
having been subjected to a denial of service attack the day after the story
broke, ostensibly because of Lamo’s loose affiliation with 2600 as head of
our Facebook group, among other things. But that is a relatively small price
compared to the real hell being experienced by those involved firsthand.
We need to be clear on one thing. We find it reprehensible that Assange,
a journalist whose only mission is to reveal the truth and protect sources,
has to be subjected to this type of harassment. Wikileaks embodies all that
is sacred to the hacker mentality: freedom of speech and of information,
anonymity for sources, and a dedication to getting the story out, above all
else. This is why Assange was chosen as one of our keynote speakers and we
believe we all can and will learn a great deal from his words. That said,
we will not encourage any speaker to put themselves in harm’s way for us or
for anybody. But we will expend every effort to make sure that they are not
silenced and that their message will be heard by our attendees. We call upon
(but hardly expect to hear back from) the State Department and federal
authorities to ensure that Julian Assange can travel freely to our country
without harassment or detainment. We ask that you help us by spreading the
message “Let Julian Speak!” far and wide. If nothing else, the world needs
to know that such intimidation will not go unnoticed.
We also intend to do everything possible to support and strengthen the
Wikileaks organization. That includes helping to fundraise, establishing
links with other communities, and getting HOPE attendees to volunteer their
services. We can think of no group more worthy of this level of support,
especially in light of these recent developments.
As for the controversy itself, we will not avoid it. You can count on this
being a hot topic at The Next HOPE, wherever the story happens to take us
by then. As always, you can count on HOPE being lively, provocative, and
above all else, relevant.
(More soon on other topics, dearreader. In the meantime, spread the word.)
“Staring into the Sun is the latest ethno-folk cinema classic from Sublime Frequencies. Ethiopia is known to be one of the oldest areas inhabited by humans and presently has over 80 diverse ethnic groups. Photographer/filmmaker Olivia Wyatt explores 13 different tribes throughout Ethiopia in this visually stunning film. Traveling from the northern highlands to the lower Omo Valley, Wyatt brings together the worlds of Zar spirit possession; Hamer tribal wedding ceremonies; Borena water well polyphonic singing; wild hyena feedings; and bizarre Ethiopian TV segments; presenting an enchanting look at these ethereal images, landscapes and sounds from the horn of Africa.”
Bless Sublime Frequencies, constantly reminding us how much more interesting, rich, deep and marvelous is the field of things-humans-do than what we might settle for.
(In the brief few days between when I bought and sold my iPad, I was amazed at how vacuous and quietly oppressive Apple’s generic yuppie version of good taste has become. Taking Apple as the foremost example of current corporate best practice in branding: they have succeeded in producing the kitschiest version of modernism imaginable, drained of any potentially powerful or surprising theoretical or ideological content, any of the stuff that makes actual design practice vital and engaged, leaving only the bland surface affect, the interface equivalent of something like Dwell‘s clumsy knockoff interiors. Somehow, in the context of a rich person’s toy like the iPad, this recuperation felt even more coercive than it does in their other products. It made me think of the deep concern Jakob von Uexküll felt about the steady homogenization of human lifeworlds, in his terminology, the gradual loss of our diverse universes and possibilities for action. Things like living in New York and seeing documentaries like this one remind me, and fill me with happiness, that we are all of us rough-edged, beautiful, and fiercely strange animals.)
There’s been a lot going on. Threading the film to run in reverse:
I’m in a chair at home in Brooklyn, with an increasingly vegetal right foot: swollen, and mottled in patches with bruising like the peel of a banana. The puffiness of my toes gives them a budlike quality, as though they might split open into flowers in this humid weather. I was at a conference in Purdue over the weekend, a fantastic experience except for the part where I fell down the rain-wet stairs outside the Forestry building and twisted my ankle. Couldn’t walk on it at all for the first two days or so, and went squeaking around the long hallways of Purdue’s institutional buildings in an ancient wheelchair (named, on the plastic sidepanel, “Futuro”) like an extra in The Shining. Made it back from Indianapolis through La Guardia to Brooklyn with the kindness of strangers, airport wheelchair service, and a classic old-guy metal cane from a Walgreens (whose tick-tick-tick as I walk is an improvement over the giant-mop-bucket creak and clatter of my weight in the Futuro).
Things I had not really understood before:
How uneven and cracked sidewalks are, and how the deep puddles form right where the curb slopes to the street
You can’t hold an umbrella, a cup of coffee, or a plate of food and still get anywhere
Ramps and elevators are great, but often poorly indicated, so you end up circling around a lot (and rarely do they connect from one building to another — they’re often stashed off in odd corners)
I’m psychologically dependent on aerobic exercise and immediate personal autonomy, and doing without them even a little bit is very difficult
My arms are weak
Turning around in elevators is fun
Still, the conference was excellent. Met a lot of wonderful & interesting people. Gave this talk, which got some very helpful responses — and might bear some artifactual fruit, which is thrilling.
My foot often hurts and keeps me up at night, and when I’m semi-conscious the best thing I can find to do is primitive web design. So I finally finished my Walter Benjamin project — using a very basic version of the jQuery Masonry plugin to try to realize his idea of words and works piled up like the structure of a city assembled into a barricade. Reading and writing about Benjamin is my weird quiet hobby — he doesn’t really have a place in my day-to-day work, and I’m very emotionally involved in his ideas. It’s nice to finally get some of these longer, unfinished and probably unfinishable essay drafts up where perhaps someone can make use of them.
And this was the Friday before last, at the show where Oneida and Silver Apples played in front of a magnificent analog/digital light show by the pioneering Joshua White:
A blissful experience of sensory overload — which somehow, live and analog, is far more productive of a kind of immersive and ecstatic peace than purely digital saturation. At times it was drifting perilously close to recreating the overwhelming metallic shiver reported of the early Velvet Underground/Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows, or Toshio Mastumoto’s 1969 masterpiece of Pop SF overload — a major inspiration for the Kubrick’s stylization of Clockwork Orange — “For the Damaged Right Eye”:
(And for now I have to get back to my writing, dearreader.)
“[Goethe's] ingenious experiments with pin-holes allowing light into dark rooms, heating his penknife to high temperatures so as to have sheets of color spread across the blade, having films of oil catch the light by dropping oil onto water, brandy and other fluids, opening up fissures in rock crystals, plunging transparent heated glass into water such that the cracks exhibit colors of great beauty, and boiling chocolate so as to observe the color changes spreading across the surface of its bubbles … “
