Catching up: Overload, barricade, immobility
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.)