Fallout from the Blog Bomb

July 30, 2004 / / 17 Comments

Is it anti-communitarian of me to say that I’m wryly amused by all the ‘bloggers’ jostling like wee piggies for a nipple at the Democratic convention? That jockeying for pole position in the anecdote-race to be the first to fellate the rich and powerful is a teeny bit distasteful to me?
Will I get in trouble (again) with all those otherwise good and smart people who are all a-twitter about the fact that they really really matter now? Now that they’re inside the chalk borders of the pentagram? I mean, it’s cute, all right. Sure. Like the wallflower become belle of the ball. And having them tell themselves, and us, in public, how it’s a sign that the heavy elements of democracy are sinking through the clouds of the blogosphere, like the glittering dusty fallout from the Blog Bomb, back onto the heads of the Common People? That a change is a-comin? That’s precious, and may even have a kernel of truth to it. More power to ’em. But.
But I’m still waiting, and still looking, for one — just one! — who has the bravery and the cockeyed gonzo ballsiness to rip a few new assholes in the purveyors of all that sanctimonious ‘America The Great’ autowankery, and, say, fling an empty Royal Reserve bottle at the stage while Joe Lieberman does his coattail ride into obscurity. Metaphorically or otherwise. And then write about it. In realtime.
How I wish that there were a few writers there splashing their talent (and cocktails) all over the web. Not just permalink patriots and also-ran digerati, but mad bloggy bastards who’d give me some stank, some snark, a few laughs. How I wish Rageboy could’ve gone and kicked out the motherf–king jams, or dong_resin, or Golby the crazed. Whoever. Just somebody whose panties don’t go all damp at the idea of getting spattered with John Edwards’ sweat.
I don’t want to see digital snapshots of you posing with some other blogerati dildo or fawning over some Real Celebrity, framed with a bit of Commentary Lite, damn it. I want you to write something that will make me laugh and weep and want to go and break a bottle over someone’s head (or laugh and weep and give somebody an equally random big ol’ kiss on the lips), then dance like a tarantula-bitten gypsy. Something to fire me up a bit! I want a Hunter S Thompson, by god, a Mencken, somebody with a bit of rage and a bit of juice in ’em, with too many damn words and a talent for juggling them. Someone who sees the opening, seizes it, then drives a juggernaut of text right through the quivering greasy middle of it, while lesser mortals scatter in fear for their lives.
Hell, maybe there are bloggers out there doing that at this convention. If so, point me to them. If not, well, get me a plane ticket and a pass to the Republican Clusterf–k, and I’ll do the damn job myself.
Never send a blogger to do a wonderchicken’s job.
[Update : Well, OK, this is pretty damn cool. But I’m stickin’ to my knee-jerk contrarian guns, damn it!]
[Update 2: Well, besides the Mighty Fafblog, even if I do have my suspicions that Fafnir and Giblets aren’t actually there. Still: fafferrific or faffelicious? You decide!]
[Update 3: Oh, crap. Me and John Freakin’ Dvorak. I’m turning in my decoder ring.]
[Update 4: f–kin’ A, Tutor, my old nemesis.]

A Political Dream

July 9, 2004 / / 6 Comments

I had a dream last night. A glorious technicolour dream. A political dream.
In my dream, Candidates Kerry and Edwards realized that Dim George and Snarling Dick were going to pull Osama Bin Laden out of their asses at some opportune moment before the election, and crucify him on the White House lawn. Plant the cross in a pool of scented oil to keep the saudi cooties from spreading, invite the bloodclan and Fox News and Dad, and rouse the tribes to a tumescent, frantic headline-crawl apogee of Republican vote-lust. But in a tasteful way, with very little mention of anyone having to go and f–k themselves.
My dream-representation of the light dawning in the Johns’ minds was a tableau of them making cute anime ‘O’s with their mouths while rolling their eyes upwards toward a shared thought balloon in which Dick Cheney was holding the severed head of Osama up by its hair, letting the blood drip onto a Diebold voting machine. It was way cool.
So Franken-John and Pretty-John decided to go proactive. Winning, Kerry declared in his endearingly halting, tone-deaf way, is as much about kicking… some… mother…f–king ass as it is about proactively leveraging mission-critical paradigms in a time-sensitive fashion. Edwards popped up in front of him to declare that the only way to make America strong, to unite America again, and to preempt an October Suprise that would make America unstrong and disunited, was if the two of them were to hunt down that bastard OBL themselves, and beat the chickenhawks at their own game.
Yeah! said the crowd. Woo!
And so, enlisting the aid of a bionic monkey named Limbaugh (because robots and monkeys are funny, and a robot monkey wins by default (until the bionic monkey pirate shows up, at least)), the two boarded a Black Hawk helicopter and departed from an undisclosed location into the free and democratic mountains of America’s Newest Ally, Afghanistan. This wasn’t just any helicopter, mind you. This was way better than the Campaign Bus they figured on using off the get-go. Yes, this was a stealth chopper, and its shiny new Kerry/Edwards vinyl appliqués were replaced with other shiny new ones, ones shouting stuff like ‘Death To America!’ and ‘Jihad or Bust!’ (but with barely-legible disclaimers underneath in tiny little print, just in case somebody got the wrong idea). These guys were clever, canny combatants, and they had good media advisors!
With Lurch resplendant in Ramboriffic headband and shiny plastic nippleless muscley-torso, and co-John working his best assets and looking simply stunning in his floor-length silk gown, they combed the arid hills of the Afghan-Pakistan border in their OsamaChopper, setting down each evening as Allah’s sun sank into the dusty haze to lay traps for the Bad Guys. Candidate Breck Girl strutted his silky stuff while bandolero-strapped Candidate Kerry lurked in the shadows with Limbaugh and waited, guns akimbo, frowning for the film-school interns with the digital video cameras. Waiting for their quarry to strike the bait.
Waiting, and drinking whiskey, because that’s what men do when they’re hunting outlaws with a bionic monkey at their side.
That’s when I woke up with a start, all sweaty and disoriented. I hope I never have to see that look on my wife’s face again.

Surfacing

July 5, 2004 / / 4 Comments

*pokes head above the oily surface of the waves, all Sheen-y from Apocalypse Now*
I’ve been keeping my head down of late, snarfing up Warren Ellis‘s astonishingly cool Transmetropolitan during the afternoon, reading The Collected Philip K Dick at night before the sandman whacks me one in the medulla oblongata, filling in the spare moments with more bittorrented Takashi Miike movies and old episodes of Space Ghost and The Kids in The Hall. The things I gotta do to hotwire my brain now that I’m drug-free. It’s a damn shame.
Anyway, some strange and marvellous textual creature is soon to be born out of all this non-bloggerly activity (if not Athena-like parthenogenetically spoinged from my forehead, then perhaps appearing on the scene in a more, er… cloacally ichor-dripping kinda way (and then presumably slouching towards Bethlehem or something), which should be big fun for everyone involved), I hope, but then again, that might just be indigestion.
Stay tuned. Or not. I never know where the hell I’m going with this stuff.
*plays tape backwards, hoping that it’ll look like he’s re-submerging and that nobody’ll notice the ripples are going in the wrong direction*

Blue Water Virgin

June 6, 2004 / / 13 Comments

It’s late December, 1992. I’ve been living a life of madness and booze, sex, drugs and slightly dodgy rock and roll for months now. La Passionata is the name of the boat, and Marina de La Paz, or, more accurately, the anchorages just off it between the mainland and the mangrove offshore sandbar called El Mogote, has been my new stomping grounds. La Paz, Baja Sur, Mexico.
La Paz Clouds.jpg
How I got into this life of drinking and sailing and drinking and sailing and drinking a whole lot more is a bit of a blur, but burned bronze and blonde-streaked, skinny and intent on squeezing as much random fun as possible out of every glorious day, I’m happier than I have been in a long time.
But I can also feel my personality disintegrating, or at least that’s how I phrase it to myself in my saltwater- and beer-stained journal. Maybe the sun and the booze and the whippets and speed and the untrained scuba dives, the days out at Isla Espiritu Santo and Isla Partida hunting fish and lobster and cooking them for the women we’d picked up at the Barba Negra the night before, and the nights back at the bar again running up our tab with the long-suffering owner, Jose, have taken their toll, finally.
Looking back on it now, I don’t know how I could have gotten tired of it — sometimes I’d give my left nut to be back there again, careless, happy, exalted and gloriously befuddled, swimming with whalesharks and flirting with vulpine German tourist girls, being lulled to sleep by gentle motion of the hull in the swell and the quiet slap of warm water against the fiberglass.
I’m tired of waiting in port, looking at the charts of all that crinkled Pacific coast running down all the way to Panama, I’m feeling the effects of all that recreational chemistry, and I’ve been offered berth on a boat so much bigger than La Pass — 71 feet of waterline! my own cabin after sleeping in the salon and getting my head stepped on by whoever else crashed aboard on any given night! — that I’ve made the decision to jump ship and head across the blue water with Elmo’s Fire. And the boys on La Passionata will meet up with us down the coast, they promise. Probably in Vallarta, in a month or so. A little time away from the 24-hour party people will be good for me, I reckon, and so I move my single bag over to Elmo, and dance around a little in my own little two-bunk cabin, up under the bow, before I get to work.
Gran Baja From El Mogote.jpg
Elmo’s Fire’s been tied up at the pier in front of the Hotel Gran Baja for years. It is averred by most that Michael, the hard-boozing but indestructible Englishman who’s been living aboard since the owners disappeared — one dead, one in jail for trafficking, one lit out to parts unknown, it is said — is really the black sheep Viscount Ashley, and survives off a yearly stipend from the Good Family in exchange for a promise to stay the hell away. Whether that’s true or not I don’t care — I’ve heard enough tales tall and wide in the past months to last a lifetime, and I don’t care much whether they’re fiction or not, they are such glorious mythical water in which to swim. Michael is a good man, and kind, if scatterbrained in the boozer cruiser way, and universally acknowledged to be a fine sailor, veteran of several TransPac races.
A few days later, less than a week before Christmas, and we’ve picked up a new crewmember at the Barba Negra, which, with Michael’s squirrely girlfriend, makes four of us to manage this Ocean ’71. The weather has come up — Chabasco weather in the Sea of Cortez is like hurricane weather over in the Gulf — and we’re riding anchor, tucked safely into the south-facing Bahia de Los Muertos south of La Paz, waiting with nine other boats to make our break for Mazatlan. Nobody’s moving. Michael’s getting itchy. I’m scared sh-tless. ‘Bay of the Dead’ is not an auspicious name for the departure point of my first bluewater sail, not when the wind’s howling down from the north at 40 to 60 knots.
Finally, about 9pm, Michael snaps, calls the rest of the cruisers on the open channel cowards, and tells us we’re making sail.
I’ve spent the last few hours working on the SatNav, and it seems to be working as it should (for the first time in months, apparently), and I tinkered with Iron Mike, the autopilot, earlier in the day. With only a few months experience on the boats, that’s about all I can do, other than follow orders, and cook dinner. We motor out past the headland, into the swell, Michael points the pointy end into the wind, and we do our deckmonkey thing and haul the mainsail up. The swell rolling down the Sea of Cortez is huge — it feels like 8 metres, but it can’t be more than 4 or 5, probably. That’s enough. I’m scared. The night is young, and very dark.
Michael is standing behind the wheel grinning through his scraggly white beard now, and as he brings us around to the east, the mainsail catches the wind, and Elmo heels over, hard. The lee rail is buried in wake, and in a matter of seconds, we’re flying along east-southeast ahead of massive following seas. Dale and Lenore go below, and I sit with Michael in the open cockpit, and he teaches me some of what I’m going to need to know. My watch will be 4am to 8am, and the weather could get better or worse between now and then. I sneak the occasional look over my left shoulder at the waves towering over us, and it’s even more sphincter-tighteningly scary than the foam and black water coursing along the deck where the rail on the lee side of the boat is well and truly underwater. I concentrate on his lessons.
It’s a few hours later — after midnight — and the weather has gotten heavier. The SatNav tells me that we’re well and truly out in the blue water now, but it’s the same dark, foamflecked and howling maelstrom of wind and wave it was when we were mere minutes offshore. The difference is that I know we’re many many nautical miles from land now. It’s the first time for me.
I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared, but my sailing (and drinking) adventures in the last few months have gone some way towards acclimatizing me to functioning while terrified. I am taking some small pride in my impassive mien when particularly hard gusts push the boat over further, or rogue waves wash through the cockpit. This is going to be OK, I think to myself.
This is when Michael, who’s been letting Iron Mike steer for the past hour, I find out, and just resting his hands on the wheel, decides he might as well have a drink. Michael never has just one drink. Neither do I, if truth be told, but then I’m not the f–king skipper on this little passage.
There is one rule that my friends back at Marina de La Paz, most of whom are boozers of an intensity and dedication I’d rarely seen before — and this is saying a lot — have drilled into me. You drink in port or at anchor; you do not drink while under way. You do not do it.
Michael cracks his first beer. My eyes go round, my sphincter goes loose, and tightly-wound escalates to underwear-staining. Brown Alert! It doesn’t take long to figure out that other than Michael, I’m the most experienced sailor on board. And I don’t know sh-t.
By 3am he is pissed, semiconscious and prone, wrapped in a poncho on the downwind bench of the cockpit. Beer cans are rolling around, awash, in the cockpit. Our other two crew members are below, sleeping, presumably. I am behind the wheel, and the seas are getting heavier, to the extent that the autopilot whines and chatters in protest as it struggles to bring the bow around in the wake of maybe one in five of the huge waves that are sliding beneath us. I disengage it and take the wheel.
For the next 3 hours, I steer that massive boat through the storm. My only time before this behind the wheel of Elmo’s Fire has been a couple of hours running before the wind from La Paz down to Bahia de Los Muertos, before the winds came up. Er, yesterday. I’m way out of my depth. What Michael told me before he passed out — that to jibe the sail in these winds would snap the boom — keeps running through my mind, and though I try to keep our course as easterly as possible, the crash and rattle of the sail when we come down off the peak of some of these waves hammers at my confidence.
Still, although there are perhaps one or two gusts or monster waves per hour, enough to make me jump and struggle to keep the boat under control, I begin to get used to it. Michael snores away, through spray and hull-slam, and I try to keep the cigarettes I’ve been chainsmoking dry, and begin to understand that I have not failed, and that we probably won’t die. I realize that this night may have been the most important test of my mettle so far in my young life, where I had to rise to the challenge and master it, and that I was doing it, by god.
The horizon begins to lighten before 6am. I’ve never been so happy to see the sun before, and as the skies begin to grow bright, the winds fall away, and the swell begins to recede. Or that’s what it feels like, at least. The monsters that loomed out of the dark shrink away, and in the light of day, fear seems silly and unworthy and unmanly. In instant retrospect (just add sunlight), terror gives way to adventure.
By the time the full disc of the sun detaches itself from the eastern horizon, I can see land, a bumpy darker line above the dark water. Tempted by the memories of too many pirate movies as a kid, I shout, only a little maliciously, ‘Land ahoy!’ Michael starts into wakefulness, squints at me, nods, creakily limps over to the rail and pisses, then relieves me of my watch. I light us a couple of cigarettes, pass one to him, and move over.
Soon there are sounds below, and the smell of coffee wafts up from the gangway.
We’ll be in Mazatlan by sunset. And then we will sail south.

On board Pilgim in Marina De La Paz.

Now Isn't That Special

May 31, 2004 / / 17 Comments

Thanks to your generosity, friends and neighbours, the tip jar I put up last week filled up quickly, and the grand total came to enough to pay for year of hosting plus a few bucks extra.
That made me very happy. Thanks again to everyone who helped out.
But Paypal arbitrarily and inexplicably restricts me from transferring any more than US$100 total out (even if the balance is higher than that), unless I add a credit card number, a restriction of which I can’t recall being notified when I created the account.
Problem is : I don’t have a valid credit card. I know that this marks me as a freak and a sport, to be warded off with a crucifix and hounded out of the village by torch-brandishing consumers, and I accept that. Korean banks will not give me one because I’m a dirty foreigner and I do not hold one with a Canadian bank, as I have not lived there for more than a decade and do not plan to again in the forseeable future.
So there’s money just sitting there, and I have no idea how to get at it. Paypal won’t allow me to add my wife’s credit card, for example, because her surname (in the way of Korea) is different from mine, and the surname field on the You Must Give Us Your Credit Card, Little Man page is not editable.
Which leaves me up sh-t creek without a sh-tpaddle, as Jim Leahy would say, because I still need to transfer $50 to my new hosting reseller before he sends Frankie and Rocco around to bust my kneecaps.
Anyone got any ideas how to get around this?

Thanks

May 24, 2004 / / 4 Comments

My heartfelt and humble thanks to the folks that have kicked a few bucks (or a lot of bucks, in some surprising but very welcome cases!) into the hosting kitty over the past few days, by the way. I’ll leave the button up over on the left, I guess, should anyone else get the urge to help out.
As it stands, though, I have enough for a year or so of hosting now, I think. You people rock!
I promise to try to write more in future. Although given the post just to the south, there, for example, that may not actually be a Good Thing. Your call.

I Wish It Weren't So

May 15, 2004 / / 11 Comments

I’ve put off doing this for a long time. It makes me feel weird and a little ashamed. But when the going gets weird…ah well, you know the rest.
My good friend and kind host, who’s been providing a home for this site gratis for the last few years, isn’t going to be able to do so much longer. This wouldn’t be a problem if I could reasonably spare the bucks to pay for my hosting, but the sh-tty thing is: I can’t.

willworkforfoodchicken.jpg

So I’ve finally taken the plunge and set up a paypal account tip jar, and if you’ve gotten any pleasure out of my ranting and babbling over the years, and you’d like to do the equivalent of buying me a couple of beers, as thanks or as fuel for more of the same, well, I’d be in your debt. I’ll use any dollars or euros or yen or shekels thrown my way to keep this site online, and if folks do kick in, I promise to try and write more frequently as a token of my appreciation.
I’m putting a button over in the left column as well. You have my heartfelt thanks if you decide to shoot me some coin, friends.
Edit: Nuh-uh. Long since deleted. If you want to help me out and get some hosting for yourself, go here.
In happier wonderchicken news, the contract for the upcoming book has arrived, and all systems look to be go, so if I end up rich and sexy and famous out of the deal†, the beers’ll be on me. It’s a promise.
[Update : †Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.
Also, I just realized I probably put up my little ‘help me, I’s monetarily disadvantaged!’ plea here at the worst possible time, as blogger wallets snap shut all over the web thanks to the MT 3.0 brouhaha (man, I love that word), making a sound like distant automatic weapons fire. So go give Rageboy some money, if you can only afford to help out one weblogger with a tip jar and a bad attitude this year. It sounds like he might need the help more than I do. And he’ll kick my ass if he doesn’t get his meds.]

On The Turning Away

May 13, 2004 / / 26 Comments

It’s hard to get your balance these days. Turn over a bucket, hop up on it, perch there precariously, look around as the cascade of chitinous black beetles surf in on surges of liquid shit. Pull up your pantlegs as the wave breaks around you and the brown spatters fly, squeak a bit, pray that the bugs (and the rats whose glowing eyes you see in the murk around you) don’t know how to climb.
Which is a melodramatic way to say that I don’t quite know what to say. Got some outrage? Get in line, sucker. Got something to say about rapin’ and torturin’, about beheadin’? So does every other Right Thinking Citizen, and by crikey, they’re making sure that those somethings are heard.
Let’s roll. Stay the course. Bring it on. Cut and run. Never forget. I’ll be back. Duck and cover.
Wait, that last one doesn’t fit in, does it? At least not yet.
It’s getting hard to stare unflinching into the actinic glare as the doors of hell swing open these days. The impulse, even after we’ve been bombarding ourselves with images like goatse and tubgirl and Daniel Pearl and Michael Jackson’s face, graveyard-joking all the while to show how tough and desensitized we are, is to turn away. To stop tattooing those horrible pictures on the sensitive cauliflower folds.
But each new iteration exerts its sick fascination, and the rays of doomlight — shining from Lynndie England and Nick Berg, from Madrid and Kabul — glitter over our mental horizons, lighting up the whole mediated clusterfuck as it whips itself into ever-bloodier froth. The tender-fleshed, bright-eyed Friends-consumers we were only show up in the quietest moments. Our shell-shocked outrage-fatigued palimpsest faces are hanging out in the wind, just like our asses. Can’t really make out the old stories of who we were on our faces anymore, and can’t make out the new stories either, scrawled in blood and filth, littered with copyright and trademark symbols and viagra ads and homemade porn and watermarked photos of piles of naked bodies.
Not piles of corpses. At least not yet.
The impulse is to turn away. But we tell ourselves that it’s weak and unworthy to avert our gaze. We’ve been told that it’s our ethical responsibility to bear witness, to see with eyes clear the evil that’s done in our names or otherwise, to understand and remember it, to prevent it ever happening again. Possibly at the risk of losing the chance to stop it, but pay that no never mind.
We love freedom. They hate freedom. We love liberty. God bless America. Down with the Great Satan.
We’re gonna shove democracy up their asses until they love us, just like Mike Tyson.
But not turning away can lead into an addictive room of mirrors. Bearing witness changes from a duty and a rite to a habit and a vice. The feed only gets notice when we unhook it, and we’re not fed the world by our umbilicals, we’re pulled further out of it. Schroedinger’s cat doesn’t die unless we see it happen, but if we’re watching it on video, it doesn’t really matter which way it goes. Kill ’em all and let god sort ’em out.
So we watch. We stagger from table to buffet table, dyspeptic and enervated, mildly turgid under our loosened belts. We snap and grin with our cams and camphones, and our photos are products that refer to themselves, not us. Our kaleidoscopic images proxy the world, and let us maintain the illusion that we aren’t really a part of it, and that the bad things are happening over there. That those chants and tribal signifiers that make us feel so good and so strong and so right actually mean something other than ‘go team’.
Smoke ’em out. Read my lips. No blood for oil. Support the troops. Rock the vote. Not in my name.
It becomes easier when everyone else is Them. We didn’t saw off poor Nick’s head, it was those scum, those vermin, the evil-doers, those others. We didn’t stick blunt objects up prisoners’ asses, either, or rape them or set dogs on them, we didn’t rip those kids apart with our amusingly-named ordinance. That was other people, a few bad apples, and they’re not us! We’re consumers of the images, don’t you see? We didn’t make this world! We didn’t maim that boy! It was them. Them! We didn’t slit Daniel Pearl’s throat, we didn’t knock over the gravestones, we didn’t fly airplanes into the World Trade Centre! We didn’t sell arms to Saddam, we didn’t sell arms to Iran, we didn’t ask for the double-anal pissporn, we didn’t do any of that shit. We are watchers. Watching makes it real, and watching keeps it separate from us. Watching is a noble act, at least until it gives you a hardon.
The basic truth gets obscured. What’s the difference between Osama bin Laden and George Bush? There isn’t one. What’s the difference between that fucker Amrozi who set the bomb that killed my friend Rick and me? There isn’t one. What’s the difference between the animals that sawed off Nick Berg’s head and the animals that beat prisoners to death at Abu Ghraib? There isn’t one. Between the Pope and Saddam? Between that old lady in front of the TV in a trailer in Alabama and that old lady digging up roots in a field in Kazakhstan?
We are one. We are all meat and electricity. And if there is more than that, we are all equally a part of that divine More. Or none of us are.
These ones go to 11.
I remember standing when I was maybe 14 in a circle of faces in the icy parking lot of the only arcade in town, out in front of what used to be Sonny’s hardware store. It was snowing, and I was in my shirtsleeves. Someone had yelled fight! and we’d all tumbled out past the steamed-up windows, out of the humid warmth into the snow. I can’t remember the names of the two combatants, but I can remember their faces. And I can remember the faces of the people watching. They were avid. Grinning. This was different from the clumsy, reluctant pecking-order school fights I’d seen (or been a part of) before. This was the real thing. One of the two was already down on the ice, on his back, eyes unfocused, by the time I took up a position on the outer edges of the ring of spectators. He was clearly finished. That didn’t matter, apparently. The victor hauled back his heavy winter boot and kicked the prone one in the head. I remember most clearly the sound, and the way that the head moved on the slack neck, and the colour of the blood on the ice. One kick, two, three, then someone at the front of the ring stepped in to stop the fun.
The look I saw on many of the bright tight faces was disappointment. That was the first of many fights I saw in my violent little hometown over the years, and the pattern was never different, except that in later years the fights were always fueled by alcohol. You go down, you get boot-fucked. It was a thing common enough that we had created a special name for it. Some people died, some needed reconstructive surgery, some were barred from entering the village limits. Being big and strong and stronger still of liver, and having good friends around at all times, I never got bootfucked. Being me, I never bootfucked anyone, though lord knows I there were times that I wanted to. In a legendarily violent town of 3000 people, you quickly understand the rules of retribution and revenge.
When I was in 17, I read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. It hurt. It put images in my head that I didn’t want in there, that are still in there more than 20 years later, and I hated him for it. The abstraction of brutality, the matter-of-fact articling of such utterly transgressive violence twisted my melon and started me wondering where it might lead.
Well, now we know.
Even back then, even as a callow teen, I defended his right to have written it, though I was inclined to want to punch him in the face for having done so, were I ever to meet him. Growing up media-starved (and smart, drunk and angry) in a town where you could choose between two CanCon television channels, where there was no movie theatre, no bookstore, only a tiny library and not even the dream that such a thing as the internet might ever exist, it was a rapid education I received in those three years between my freshman witnessing of my first bootfucking and the graduation ceremony of reading Ellis’s deadpan fantasia of dismemberment and death. The first lessons stay with you the longest.
Today I can find movies and photos and paintings and stories of the same and worse, three clicks away, without even breaking a sweat. And as often as not, these things really happened.
My impulse to turn away usually wins out these days. This may be the wrong thing to do. When a puppy shits on the floor, we rub his nose in it (or at least we used to, in less kind, gentle days) for a reason.
But I guess I realized at some point that there is something I can do about a man who starts a war, perhaps, but there is little I can do about a man who kills and dismembers another person, unless that person is me. And there’s still less I can do about a man who aquires money or fame writing about it.
Or, you know, a woman.
I also realized somewhere down the road that whether it’s fiction or photo, documentary or gore-flick, fake or genuine, no representation of violence is anything like the real thing. Our frisson of revulsion, our predictable and pointless anger at the perpetrator, our self-serving hollow vows of ‘never again’, our demonization of the other who would so transgress those ethical standards we hold out as self-evident, our self-congratulatory conviction that we‘d never do anything like that, and our complacence in the face of the indisputable fact that everyone, everywhere seems to be doing it anyway…. well, what are you going to do? Cheer the killer monkeys on? “We are nihilists, Lebowski. We believe in nothink!” Been there, done that, and it’s a dead end too.
I haven’t got any answers. But I am pretty sure that regardless of whether you have nightmares about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (or the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre) or the horrors of Abu Ghraib, no matter how accurately and horribly that fact or fiction is captured and portrayed for you, these things are to the real experience of violence as American beer is to the real thing. fucking close to water.
No wait. I mean – ‘a weak approximation’.
But the killer monkeys just won’t stop. And sometimes, you just have to turn away, all the while realizing that if you haven’t got the stomach for the imagery, you would be destroyed by the reality.

Fireworks

May 1, 2004 / / 1 Comment

Long time since I’ve done this. My apologies. And yeah, not much to say at the moment that isn’t too angry to want to preserve for the ages.
Rather than hunt-n-peck out the diatribes that have been orbiting my brain and screeching like scalp-furrowing harpies of late, and instead of, like, bringing everybody down, man; instead of pointless wonderchickensian ranting, I invite you to enjoy some possibly-relevant and heart-lifting music.
One of my faves from the fine and excellent Canadian band The Tragically Hip, downloadable as always for the next day or two [4.8Mb]. [Update : Link removed after two days. Sorry!]

If there’s a goal that everyone remembers
It was back in ol ’72
We all squeezed the stick and we all pulled the trigger
And all I remember is sitting beside you
You said you didn’t give a f–k about hockey
I never saw someone say that before
You held my hand and we walked home the long way
You were loosening my grip on Bobby Orr
Isn’t it amazing anything’s accomplished
When the little sensation gets in your way?
Not one ambition whisperin’ over your shoulder
Isn’t it amazing you can do anything?
We hung out together every single moment
‘Cause that’s what we thought married people do
Complete with the grip of artificial chaos
And believin’ in the country of me and you
Crisis of faith and crisis in the Kremlin
And yeah we’d heard all that before
It’s wintertime the house is solitude with options
And loosening my grip on a fake cold war
Isn’t it amazing what you can accomplish
When you don’t let the nation get in your way?
No ambition whisperin’ over your shoulder
Isn’t it amazing, you can do anything.
Next to your comrades in the national fitness program
Caught in some eternal flexed arm hang
Dropping to the mat in a fit of laughter
Showing no patience tolerance or restraint
Fireworks exploding in the distance
Temporary towers soar
Fireworks emulatin’ heaven
Till there are no stars anymore
Fireworks aimin’ straight at heaven
Temporary towers soar
Till there are no stars shinin’ up in heaven
Till there are no stars anymore
Isn’t it amazing what you can accomplish
When the little sensation gets in your way?
No ambition whisperin’ over your shoulder
Isn’t it amazing what you can accomplish, eh?
This one thing probably never goes away
I think that this one thing is always supposed to stay
This one thing doesn’t have to go away

New Day Dawning

April 16, 2004 / / 15 Comments

The general election here in Korea has come and gone, and the results are being characterized as a democratic victory for the left, the first one since, well, ever. As is usually the case when people resort to such sledgehammer thud-dullard simpletongue™ words as ‘left’ and ‘right’ or ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, though, that’s a simplification that does as much to obscure as it does to illuminate. The Uri (‘Our’) Party has won a clear majority, and as the presumptive representative of the young, the disenfranchized and the reform-minded, it may represent the first significant shift in the political landscape in Korea since the initial stumbling steps towards real democracy 16 years ago. It gives me some hope for the future.
The final numbers of parliamentary seats, of 299 total, are :

  • Uri Party:152
  • GNP (Grand National Party) :121
  • MDP (Millenium Democratic Party):9
  • DLP (Democratic Labor Party):10
  • Others:7

The Uri Party, formed in November 2003 by a band of breakaway MDP legislators after months of the kind of factional infighting that has paralyzed Korean politics since there was such a thing, is the party Noh Moo Hyun said he would join, and for which he publically expressed his support a couple of months back. This infraction of election laws — public servants and elected officials are (somewhat inexplicably) barred from expressing support for a political party — led, along with charges of corruption from the mind-bogglingly corrupt GNP, who held a majority in the assembly, to his impeachment last month. A ruling on that impeachment by the Constitutional court is still pending, but the disgust felt by the vast majority of the population at the hypocrisy of the impeachment, made clear in pre-election polls, has been hammered home by yesterday’s election results. Few outside the oligarchy took kindly to the Lord of the Flies stink of the impeachment, and most who are not locked in to that corporate-sponsored network of bribery and kickbacks — sometimes hyperbolically referred to as the Korean Disease — had any interest in seeing it rewarded.
But the story is deeper, I think, than mere political bullsh-ttery. It’s a story of young against old, of modernity against tradition, of the emergence of a wired netizenry and an unwired elite, and most of all, of a culture rooted in a neo-Confucian world-view that is simply not acceptable to a majority of the population that understands that the strict vertical hierarchy of such a world-view serves only the old, the male, and the wealthy, while rightly cherishing the elements of the ideology (made the state ideology more than 500 years ago, during the Choseon Dynasty) that support the fading communitarian underpinnings of the Korean spirit. Korea is widely held to be the most orthodox Confucian nation in the world, and for good reason.
In an essay on Confucianism and Korean communitarianism, Professor Park Hyo-chong writes :

In Korea, there is no concept such as the self or “ego”, which is radically disassociated from mutual relations or social context. If one could identify the concept of the self, it would turn out to be the “encumbered self”. Korean communitarianism tends to provide individuals with a strong sense of a place, identity and a role in a community, whether it is a political order or the family. This is a core meaning of the thesis that relations rather than persons matter. Individuals cannot be defined in their solitude but in their relations with others. A person is said to belong to some particular category of social roles or family roles.
As suggested earlier, the roles of ruler or subject, father or son, husband or wife, among others are thought to be of prime importance. The priority of relations over persons has been characteristic of Confucian culture of which Korea is a part. This is in contradistinction to Western liberalism which emphasizes the value of individual uniqueness, which is but the “unencumbered one”.

What Professor Park does not mention, perhaps because it militates against his thesis (or merely because it’s tangential to it) is that this definition of self in terms of relationships with others has a dark side as well. In today’s urbanized Korea, if there is no readily identifiable relationship between one person and another, that other is summarily ignored, or merely disregarded as a sort of speed bump in the road of daily life. Not to say that Koreans won’t struggle mightily to establish some sort of relationship, no matter how tenuous, if they wish to interact with you (the seemingly overpersonal questions about age, marital status, religion and so on that so annoy newly arrived foreigners are examples of this in action) — they do, and will. But if there is no reason to do so, the default mode of interaction with strangers often seems to be brusqueness to the point of derision. Rude by the standards of an overly-sensitive Canadian like myself, but not so much impolite as simply a way of managing one’s way through life while buried in a complex, dense web of relationships, relationships through which one defines oneself.
This dependance on a web of relationships and the tendency to simply ignore those with whom there is no first-order relationship through blood or money or alma mater creates an ever-thicker wall between the haves and the have-nots. This is one of the things that has helped empty the countryside of young people, as they seek both fortune and contacts in Seoul, and has made a good part of an entire generation of young adults simply give up if they did not gain acceptance to one of the ‘good schools’. It actually is about who you know here, in a very real and destiny-defining sense.
But this is far from the worst of what Confucian values have wrought, despite the communitarian benefits they have sown.
For those not entirely hip to the Confucian two-step, I wrote a little bullet-point summary of some of the underlying human taxonomy it requires in an old piece on linguistic relativism.
Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships (although of course there is much, much more to the system of thought) :
1) Ruler and subject
2) Parent and child (teacher and student)
3) Husband and wife
4) Older and younger person
5) Friend and friend
All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last.
The implication is clear, I should think, and for anyone with any knowledge or experience of the differences between the old and new guard in Korea, it should be easy to divine the pattern : man over woman, old over young, teacher over student, ruler over subject.
It is this structuring of duty and fealty, of dominance and willing submission, that underpins a great deal of day-to-day life in Korea, and, I believe, has been one of the guiding forces in the evolution of Korean politics, just as it has been in all things here. It’s a force that is fading, or more accurately, being transformed, but it still has deep and mostly unquestioned influence in the relationships between Korean people in both the personal and the public spheres.
The one constant in Korea, as the cliché goes, is change, though. One of the alarm bells that anyone who was paying attention might cite was a UNICEF poll back in 2001, that showed that among Asian 17 nations surveyed, Korean young people had the lowest levels of respect for their elders.

After the UNICEF findings created such a stir — 20 percent of young Koreans surveyed said they had no respect for their elders, compared with 2 percent on average for the other East Asian nations — the daily Joong Ang Ilbo newspaper weighed in with its own poll. The findings were somewhat more hopeful, but 49 percent still said there were few elders they respected, blaming changing social values, out-of-touch adults and their corrupt ways.
“Who is there to respect?” asks Kim Young Soo, a 27-year-old restaurant worker. “The president? Politicians? Lawyers? Teachers? Parents? They’re all hypocrites. They preach Confucian values but turn around and have extramarital affairs with young women that undercut the family.”

When the mostly old, mostly male politicians and teachers are unfailingly corrupt and obviously unworthy of respect or fealty, and when the very foundation ethos of the cultural history that they cling to demands that that respect be paid, things start to fracture.
Beatings of students by teachers, like this one captured on a camera phone recently, are not the exception, and only go part of the way to an explanation of the disgust and anger most young people and many of their elders feel with the state of things. Although it’s little discussed in English, for example, it is standard procedure for public school teachers to accept bribes and gifts from parents in order to ‘do a better job’, or pay special attention to their children. Arbitrary exercise of power, corruption, and disregard for rule of law are everywhere.
And young people today, thanks to penetration of broadband internet into upwrds of 80% of households in Korea, know that that’s not the way it needs to be. They’re angry that the moneyed elite, all of whom, with very few exceptions, graduated from one of the Top 5 universities in Seoul, have developed an insular network that locks out anyone from the wrong class, or the wrong province. They’re angry at the university entrance examination system, which theoretically offers a level playing field, but like the continuation of the old yang-ban government service exams that created a small de facto nobility and a vast population of peasants and outright slaves during the Choseon Dynasty that it is, they realize that the game is rigged against them. They know that if they don’t jump through the hoops presented to them by an archaic and entirely anachronistic education system, in which they can only excel by putting in 18 hours days throughout their entire public school careers, greased by the liberal application of their parents’ money, they have little to no opportunity to rise to the top. They know that anything can be bought, and everything is, and they’re sick of it.
Then, last year, when a man who had not attended university, who came from a peasant background, who spoke plainly, whose background was as a human rights lawyer (and to rise to that level, he had to repeatedly retake his qualifying examinations), when this most unlikely of people to actually be put forward as a candidate for president of Korea, when this totally unexpected watermelon seed suddenly squirted out of the scrum — well the young and the disenfranchized elders voted for him in droves. For better or worse, he represented the truly revolutionary idea that you might not need to be part of the oligarchy to succeed.
And when, after being blocked and bullied at every opportunity by the bought-and-paid-for money men who held the majority of the seats in the assembly, after wobbling from crisis to crisis, he was impeached in what was clearly a power grab, ostensibly for the kind of corruption of which it was abundantly clear so many the impeachers were equally guilty, the outrage went ballistic.
All countries are well-stocked with corrupt politicians, of course. Korea may be cursed with an overabundance of them, but ordinary people, especially the young, are clearly not willing to bow down for them much longer, as the watch the scions of the tiny overclass ride blithely past so much abject poverty, safe behind the tinted glass of their Chairman sedans.
It is entirely possible the Uri Party will end up being as mired in corruption as the others, and equally possible that the chaebols like LG, Samsung, Daewoo and Hyundai that own the country and its politicians outright will buy up the new power brokers in short order as well. It is likely that the bickering and internecine backstabbing that has been the hallmark of Korean politics since they were occupied by the Japanese (and further back than that, of course) will cancel any forward momentum. The young, who, while idealistic, are also fatter, lazier, more selfish and less driven than their parents and grandparents, may continue to think of the evil bastards up in Pyongyang with a misguided, romanticized fondness right up until bombs start to fall.
Will it mean that the education system will be reformed? Probably not. Will it limit the power of the oligarchic chaebols and their rentboys in the assembly? Doubtful. Will it bring about greater rule of law, and more respect for individual rights? I’m not going to hold my breath. Will it break the strangehold on money, power and the future of the latter-day Gangnam yangban? Hell, no.
On the other hand, this deliberate break from a rule by corrupt corporate whores, this disgust with a perpetuation of the status quo that weakens Korea and its people in every measure but the monetary, this understanding of the power of democracy a decade and a half after the country became democratic in name if not nature — perhaps this means a new day is dawning. It’s the first real step in the right direction of this magnitude that I’ve seen in 8 years here, and it will, I hope, mean that the transformation of this society, massive and rapid as it has been, has only begun.
Now let’s just hope as more pegs are knocked out from under the rotten superstructure that there are people with the energy and ideas to build on the traditions, the drive, and the indomitable spirit that has brought Korea to where it is today.
And that Kim Jong Il doesn’t get any bright ideas.

It was the best of wonderchicken, it was the worst of wonderchicken

March 31, 2004 / / 28 Comments

So my big news this week is that I’ve been asked for permission to allow some of my writing here to be published in a book that is intended to gather ‘the best of writing on the web,’ to be released this summer by a publishing house in New York.
Back in 2001, I started writing this weblog for a few different reasons, and over the years, those reasons haven’t really changed, although I have discovered some new ones that keep me going. My life was going through one of its periodic upheavals, the transplantations I seem to need periodically to help me thrive, when I uproot and fling myself (and this time my wife) and my meager collection of possessions halfway around the planet again, and I thought it would be fun to write about it in a journal that I wouldn’t end up losing in the shuffle, like I have so many others.
My memory is spotty at the best of times, and (I’m not sure if it was Cory Doctorow or someone else who coined the phrase, but to them I offer thanks) I really liked the idea of having an outboard brain, a kind of inverse memory hole that I could dip into to help me recall who I was and what I was thinking in bygone days, when I looked back from some far-future vantage point.
I also love to write, plain and simple, and though I’ve never studied writing in any other way than the tattered-and-wine-spattered-paperback-in-a-hovel romantic way of youth, people kept telling me that I was some kinda kick-ass…. word putting down guy. Me write pretty someday. So I thought that if I wrote in public (although my ‘public’ was pretty thin on the ground for the first while), it might be a way to keep me honest, keep me writing every day, and through sheer practice, that I might become better at it. I think I am a better writer after almost 3 years of this stuff, when I make an effort, so mission accomplished there. Although one of my great failings as a writer and a man is that I don’t often make much of an effort. Ah well.
As many who read my stuff regularly know, I’ve been travelling around the planet for about 15 years now, and writing about it, when the mood struck me. My semi-secret dream has always always been to make a living from doing so — travelling, writing, meeting people and drinking their odd, skull-cracking native beverages, writing about that, and moving on, weaving a bit — but, as has been my habit since I was a kid, I never really did much about the dream, hoping that somehow I’d just be discovered. Bad habit, and one I’ve tried to break many times. Comes down to ‘an external locus of control as a result of childhood bereavement,’ the literature told me, back 20 years ago when I was trying to figure out why I was such a lunatic, but that’s neither here nor there, perhaps.
It seems now that I have been discovered, and in a way that might, if I’m both lucky and determined, help me to realize the dreams I’ve always had about writing — not fame, or much fortune, or even the cocaine and hookers so much, but just a dream of being free to wander and write about that, to read and think and drink and write about that, and to make enough money from it to live, and continue. Or it might not. Either way, I’m thrilled.
Others have ‘discovered’ me too, over the past few years, and helped me and encouraged me, or pointed to me and praised my work (or called me an idiot in a comment thread and roused me to rages as eloquent as I could muster), and I don’t think this book offer would have come about if it hadn’t been for those people. You know who you are, and there are many of you, and I thank you all. You are one of those ‘other reasons’ that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, reasons that I love this and will keep doing it.
So the book will be published in a couple of months, and I hope that everyone will buy at least five copies for themselves, and a few more besides for their grannies and orthodontists and paperboys and so on. It will, I think, be a book well worth the buying and the reading, and should occupy a place of pride on the toilet tank of the best homes in America. I say this not because I’m going to have some stuff in it, but because of the superb work of the terrifyingly talented other writers alongside which my paltry scribblings will stand. The list is impressive, and I will share, when it is finalized. It stands now at 26 writers, I believe.
Have I finally become an A-lister? Hell, I don’t know. Not even sure what that means anymore. Am I starry-eyed, dazzled by the glare of the spotlight from Old Media that has swung my way? Sure as sh-t, I am. Am I overly enthused because I’m actually going to be included in a book that includes the word ‘Best’ in the title? Yeah, probably. But I am aware that many of the people I consider my virtual friends in the weblogging community have several (or many!) books already out there, without sharing author credit with 25 other writers.
Still, this is a big moment for me. I’m having a Sally Field moment, and I am still uncynical enough to hope that it might be one of those Big Moments in my life, like the one almost 3 years ago that started me doing this in the first place.
This is where you come in, friends and neighbours. Although an editorial board (including the publisher himself, an editor from the New York Times, a Yale professor and New Yorker contributing editor, a Time Magazine columnist and a best-selling fiction author) have already read and thumbs-upped a few pieces from each of the authors selected for the book, and a group of three readers will apparently be going through my archives (and those of the others who will be contributing) mining for gold, I’ve been asked to submit a list of 5 or 10 pieces that I consider to be my best. A number of pieces out of the union of the resultant lists will then be selected for inclusion in the book.
I hoiked out some of my faves a while back, and whacked them into a new ‘Uncrappy‘ archive list, which includes some of my personal favorites, but I find that what I think of as my ‘best’ is frequently different from what you folks think. I thought that Typepad bit a couple of days ago was Comedy Gold, for example, but it garnered little more than a collective ‘huh’ from you, the Readers. Go figure.
So, I ask you a favour, friends. If you have a favorite or favorites amongst the bits I’ve written over the past couple of years, then I’d be forever in your debt if you’d consider whacking a link (or just a description, if you can’t be bothered searching) in the comments thread attached to this post. Whether from my ‘Uncrappy’ best-of list, or not, could you tell me what your favorite bits of wonderchickensian blather are?
Then, when you give a copy of the book to your garbageman, you can point to one of my pieces and say with pride (or shame, your call) “I picked that one!”
Many thanks.
Update : Here’s the lineup for the book. In fine company, am I. Hoping I don’t look like a rube by comparison, am I. Stop talking like Yoda, must I.

Walkabout

March 25, 2004 / / 9 Comments

Went for a wee walkabout with an automotively-blessed buddy on the weekend, and took a few pictures. Here are my favorites from a pretty average bunch. Line on the left, one cross each.

green.jpg
lichen.JPG
rock.JPG
eaves.JPG

Type, Type Everywhere

March 23, 2004 / / 4 Comments

Although I’m not really too exercised about it one way or the other, I tend to think more along the lines of Mark than Shelley on this whole TypeKey furor. I must admit TypeKey seems a little like using a hammer to turn a screw to me, but we shall see.
In the meantime, though, I have taken it upon myself offer some more superterrific BumpyCase product enhancements for Six Apart to continue building out their weblogging product line. It is with great pleasure that I submit these modest proposals to leverage the brand, exploit synergies, capture market share and monetarize conversation. TypePad and TypeKey are only the beginning! We have nothing to lose but our privacy!

  • TypeVote – More accurate than Diebold (MS Access backend optional), and totally free from hanging chads! If you’re a voter, get yourself a TypeVote weblog, and really make an Emergent Democracy©™ difference! One blog, one vote!
  • TypeShop – Route all your monetary transactions through your blog! Blog about that sandwich you had for lunch, and ask your grocery store to subscribe to your RSS (Really Simple Shopping) feed, and leave that shopping list at home. Get people to buy diapers for you! The possibilities are limitless!
  • TypeONegative – Cluetrain Item #3172: Healthcare providers are conversations! Or goth metal bands, maybe.

    • Still fleshing this one out.

  • TypePod – You’re not an A-lister until you have an iPod, and what better way to build brand synergy and leverage the design-fetishizing metrosexual music pirate demographic?
  • TyppelGanger – Buy out the drunkmenworkhere autogenerated weblogging technology and let the code write you into existence. No need to do it yourself anymore! That’s so 2001!
  • TypeFire – Hit a button, generate a comments-thread flame. Why waste valuable mental CPU cycles trying to come up with another way to say ‘You’re a donkey-raping sh-tweasel’ in yet another post that includes political commentary with which you disagree? TypeFire will reduce your fifteen-minute-nemesis to charcoal at the click of a button, and get those valuable clickthroughs happening too!
  • TypeAzon – Plug your weblog and yourself straight into the bookflogging mainline! Webloggers read books, right? Well, Google is already useless for finding anything other than Amazon-affiliate clicksinks when you’re looking for information on books, and shifting units is what it’s all about, kids, so why not jump into the moneypool?
  • PadThaipe – Damn, that Thai food is yummy.
  • TypeUp – Want to hold a pomo-moblog-emergent-market-journospam-osphere conference and maybe soak the blogrubes for a few simoleons while you’re at it? A TypePad/MeetUp mashup is the ticket for inviting people who are guaranteed to breathlessly validate your wildest techo-utopian blather!
  • TypeZilla – Serving no other purpose than to piss off IP Lawyers Who Don’t Get It yet. Lessig-approved and somehow licensed under Creative Commons, so it’s got that street-cred every hip weblogger so craves.
  • TypePoint – Taking a page from Microsoft, throw together some leftover code and half-baked ideas and call it a Knowledge Management system. Or portal. Or workgroup document storage. Or something. Hell, we don’t quite know what it does, but it stresses the server something fierce, so it must be good, right?
  • TypeSpam – Hey kids! You know those other webloggers got them some dollars, right? The internet’s awash with disposable income! Use TypeSpam to generate targeted-demographic, GeoURL-enabled, realtime book-sales monitoring, results-oriented weblog comment-thread advertisements for your online drugstore! It’s viral, it’s centrally managed, it’s smartly styled, and it’ll get your Googlejuice flowing!

Kombinat is just the beginning, my friends. This is not your father’s blogosphere.
Now put me on the payroll, already.

Blog Korea, Blog!

March 17, 2004 / / 21 Comments

Although I have long since stopped talking about Korea much here at the ‘bottle, except when something smacks me upside the head, an active and vibrant community of Korean webloggers (mostly expats or ex-expats, writing mostly in English, but including some Korean folks and the occasional surge of multilingualism) has sprung up. I haven’t been following any of them until recently, except for the occasional Friday night beer-fueled drive-by-commenting, but my newfound appreciation of aggregation inside Bloglines has got me out there reading them, finally.
Although there are some talented, insightful writers out there in K-land, and many who certainly know more about Korea than I do, the Korean Kluster is probably the most insular, self-regarding echo chamber I’ve ever seen in weblogging (other than perhaps the warblogger circlejerk that reached its zenith between 911 and the beginning of the Iraq Mistake, with whom some of the KK’s netizens share their political leanings), and if you’re careful you can get dizzy following the logrolling in ever-tightening circles. Don’t step in the blog-jizz! This is one of the reasons I eased myself out of posting about Korea all the time, back a year or two ago — I didn’t want to be perceived as a one-note writer, and the fact that I live in Korea is merely an accident of geography and economics and matters of the heart, not the overriding central fact of my existence. And to be honest, the vast majority of waeguk-in (foreigners) I meet in Korea are damaged, ranting weirdos, with whom I’m happy to have minimal interaction.
Than again, that’s what people say about me, too. In a nice way, of course.
The other reason that I’ve had little to say about the Land of The Morning Traffic is that I’ve found myself a job and a place to live that is extremely pleasant and comfortable, and I’m happier than a pig in sh-t, as they say back in the homeland. I simply can’t get charged up for a good rant, when most of the things I’ve been distressed, annoyed, or astonished by here are not things I actually experience any more, here on my corporate Fantasy Island, and hell, I’ve already complained about them enough anyway.
But as I was doing my thrice weekly workout today, sweating it out on the treadmill, hooked up to the headphones and watching BBC World on the TV conveniently mounted at eye level in front of me, I heard such thuddingly inept analysis of the current impeachment debacle from one of the talking heads on Asia Business Report that I found myself talking back to the monitor. In ungracious tones. Unquietly. Which drew some sidelong glances from the other treadmillers, not surprisingly. See also : damaged, ranting weirdos.
This guy — a kid really (damn kids today, working for merchant banks and appearing on TV!) — has appeared on Rico’s show (whatever happened to that dropdead gorgeous woman they had anchoring the show last year? I miss her) before, but had never been tapped to speak about Korea. It was clear why he hadn’t.
I won’t go into details of how laughably far off-base his ‘analysis’ was, but it inspired me to write up a little primer on the last 20 years or so of Korean politics and why we are where we are today, whether you want it or not. Most of the people who read this site do not do so because they’re in search of anecdotes about life in Korea, I’m sure, but I love this place, and I resent it as much as any Korean does when the reality of what is happening here is totally lost by some dipsh-t on TV who gets his information from USA Today.
Stay tuned for an Impeachment Primer, coming to an empty bottle near you, as soon as I bloody well get around to it.
In the meantime, here’re some links to some of the Korean blogs out there that I’ve noticed of late. I missed the Other Friday Five last week, so this can be my atonement. I’m still accumulating a roster of KK reads, so I have no doubt missed some good ones, but since them fellas tend to ink to each other so incestuously, you shouldn’t have much of a problem blogroll-surfing around to find more. If anyone has any suggestions that I should add to my rounds, feel free to add them in the comments thread.
Share and enjoy.

Trunkless Legs of Stone

March 16, 2004 / / 2 Comments

You know, I think I just figured out the insidious† plan behind RSS and all that other alphabet soup feedy XMLy stuff!
(I know it’s not insidious. Cut me some slack, already.)
Remember when I took Dave Winer to task for — among other things — being saucy enough to say ‘weblogs are publications,’ thus discounting the possibility that they might be anything else? No? You might remember me saying ‘weblogs are punk’, though. The problem there, of course, is that I never actually said that. Ah well, onward and forward.
Well, I’ve been using Bloglines lately, mostly to stealth-read a metric assload of weblogs at work that I might not otherwise get away with — or have time for — reading. This is all to the good, although it is always mildly enervating and ego-shrivelling to see how many incredibly talented, passionate people there are out there, and look upon one’s own works without trembling. You know, those vast, trunkless legs of stone. Still, a bit of self-abnegation makes you stronger, right? What doesn’t blog me makes me blogger.
Anyway, I realized out of nowhere while reading this post from Yule Heibel that by reading an aggregation of posts from all over the web, I was reading a publication of sorts, a dynamically-created, ever changing one, and I all of a sudden figured out what Dave was on about, maybe, and realized that from that perspective, the ‘publication’ thing made some sense (even if excluding other ways of thinking is still not on). I think I got an inkling of what Shelley was pushing back against recently too, in terms of the implicit impetus, if not requirement, to strip her photos from her feed, even if they were integral to what she was trying to get across.
See, there was a discussion around the old neighbourhood a year or two back about whether the blogosphere (yeah, yeah, I know you hate that word — shut the f–k up about it already, will you?) can be fruitfully described as a space, and if so, how. My contribution was to offer that I felt it very much to be a space — you know, metaphorically speakin’ and all — and the kind of space I felt it to be most like was the sea.
I said :

Sites. Like websites, geddit? (Didn’t telegraph that much, did I?) So, connecting the dots, I’m calling the net the ocean. Big-ass sites like Metafilter or Yahoo are ports, smaller ones are anchorages, bloggers are sailboats, and their web logs are their ship’s logs. We meet, raft up, party down, separate and go on our merry wandering ways. We record where we’ve been. We talk about what those places have meant to us. There are living things swimming around down there, deep in the darkness. There are the IP plankton packets that are the very lifeblood of the sea. A whole ecosystem down there. There are submarines and sailboats, there are ocean liners skirting the Tropic of Cancer, there are freighters plying the trade routes, planes occasionally passing overhead, and the odd dot-com Titanic, lying in pieces on the ocean floor far beneath, slowly decomposing.

And so I realized that reading the weblogs of my friends (and other animals) in an aggregator like Bloglines, convenient as it may be, totally trashed that metaphor for me, even as I understood more clearly that the metaphors others may choose to use to get their heads around it all, even if different, may have some oomph to them too, once I see where they’re coming from.
Not that that was in doubt, but it’s always the experience of the light spontaneously going on that really gets something stuck into your head.
I’ll keep using Bloglines, because it’s useful. But for me, this is a journey, and I’ll probably continue to think of it like this : if we meet on the open sea, or in port, and you throw me a line, or I you, we can raft up, cook a meal, empty a bottle or two, spin a few yarns, and then sail off on our compassless ways again. Column inches? Each to their own, of course, but that just doesn’t do it for me.

Echo and the Bunnymen

February 24, 2004 / / 20 Comments

You’ve got to be joking. Honestly, I think my brain’s going to explode. I was ready to leave this behind, and now I’m not so sure.
First, David Weinberger writes an essay that quite ably argues that although there may be echo chambers per se, at least in terms of politics (which is a very minor slice of the whole pie, of course), on the web, there are in fact a multitude of them, and as a consequence we are able both in principle and in practice to expose ourselves to a greater range of opinion and interpretation than we might otherwise be. The space (if it can be well-described in spatial terms, a discussion long-past and best left buried under the azalea bush out back, perhaps) as a whole isn’t an echo chamber, he argues, if I understand him correctly: it is a vast concatenation of echo chambers, varying in their vehemence and level of groupthink, and thus benign. A metachamber, not ringing with echoes at all, but with the grand hubbub that is the sounds of the little echo chambers (occasionally with a population of one) singing into the void.
I’d argue that this is saying precisely nothing. I would argue that the weblog world is getting topheavy with pundits and supastars and, heaven forbid, leaders, who may (or may not) have gotten there from sheer merit, I admit, but that this trend is making thinking about the medium taste more like top-down pearls before swine than I’m entirely comfortable with.
I would argue that it is a tautology that the internet is a group of groups, and those groups, as a result of human nature, tend to organically accrete around shared common interests and beliefs, just as they do in the real world, and further that it is easier on the internet to be mobile between groups, sometimes radically different ones. This, I agree, is one of the great things about our digital lives. Unfortunately, unlike in real life, it is also far easier for participants to express themselves in ways more extreme than they might do in their ‘real lives’, and the echo chambers where there’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop of — shall we say — excessive zeal can turn evil or stupid or both very quickly indeed. But this isn’t what Dr W is talking about, I don’t think.
He says

We believers need a chance to get together, too. Sure, BloggerCon permits contrary points of view, but it’s distinguishable from the “Pro or Con” conference in tone and topic. And that’s a good thing. BloggerCon helps build community and advance thought by letting us be passionate, without having to back off, argue for fundamental principles with which we already agree, and persuade others of the legitimacy of our enthusiasm.

And I’m not entirely sure that I agree. Why is it a good thing, exactly? I suggest that the less writing (isn’t that what this is all about, out here in the ASCII (sorry, UTF-8) world? the writing?) and the more self-congratulation that goes on, the less relevance personal websitery seems to actually have to anyone, including its practitioners.
Next (and I don’t mean to get all up in David’s face, but he started me on this) Dr W anticipates a second Bloggercon and mentions that Dave Winer is planning to “ask each of the moderators to work ‘Nuking the Echo Chamber’ into the discussion”, and notes that Winer asks “How do we methodically and systematically overcome the tendency for echo chambers to form and self-perpetuate?”
Ahhhhhh-hahahahhaha. Stop me before I kill blog again.
Am I losing my mind here? Is Dr Weinberger not a weblog-writer (brilliant and talented, intellectually grunty, fiercely sexy, all that, sure, OK — I’ve nothing but respect for the man even when he’s as wildly off the mark as I feel him to be on this) who is among that gang of Usual Suspects that show up at all of these blog conventions and conferences and so on and then tell us all about them (blogging about the talking about the blogging, which is often blogging about the blogging in the first place), whether we’re interested or not, who is a shaper, most certainly, of both the weblog universe’s thinking about itself and the old media’s perception of webloggers as well, is this fine fellow pointing to another of the Usual Suspects — this one even more of an 800 pound gorilla in the field, and one who’s running yet another of these conferences, at bloody Harvard no less — and praising a decision to have panel discussions at another blog conference about avoiding echo chambers ? With a straight face?
Am I insane, or the last one left who isn’t? Is plain old irony supposed to make me laugh this hard?
I wouldn’t care, honestly, if it weren’t a matter of many of these folks guiding and shaping so much of our thinking about weblogs and web writing and all the various activities that fall under the ‘blogging’ umbrella. The echo chamber in which Dr Weinberger unapologetically places himself, I submit, is the only one that is truly dangerous to our Happy Fun Shiny Weblog World at all, because it is the one from which so much of the thinking we take as common currency trickles down to us mere, bits-only mortals. Or is it only me that thinks that the Usual Suspects have an overly strong influence in the way we think about this stuff, that their frequent meetings in the world of atoms consolidates and extends that influence, and that sometimes it feels as if there really is an emerging Cabal™? Is it only because of the corner of the metachamber in which I find myself? Am I missing all the constellations of new voices who haven’t gotten linked as a result of what they write rather than who they’ve met?
Honestly, I’d really appreciate some help figuring out if I’m talking complete bollocks here, and developing unhealthy signs of compulsion in my semi-demented criticism of blog conferences. Is it just sour grapes because I’m poor as a church mouse and live half a planet away from all the action? Shouldn’t the tyranny of distance not matter any more? Is it only me?

Bells and Chickens, Armpits and Underpants

February 23, 2004 / / 6 Comments

Here’s a story of The Young Wonderchicken for you. 1989, I think it was, my first year in Europe.
We’d hated Italy, the Bearman and I, and there was no real reason we could point to and say “That’s why this place sucks, damn it!” The previous month or two of wandering southward from Edinburgh — where I’d been drinking Bulgarian wine, taking long windswept nighttime walks on the Portobello promenade and getting romantically involved with underaged Scotswomen for the past four months or so — without agenda or schedule or much in mind beyond cherchez les femmes and cherchez le booze, had been glorious and, if not precisely successful in the femmes department, had at least been steeped in liquor and spontaneous goofiness.
Italy had been a bust, for some reason. I remember writing about the ‘little bastard pasta-pounders’ in a letter to our amigo Rick, a level of (comedic-) vituperation that back in my more peaceable days was unusual, unless I was three-sheets a’ranting. Torino, Pisa, Roma. We just couldn’t seem to find any pleasant people. Or get into the rhythm of it, somehow. The highlight had probably been our unexpected discovery of a bottle of Seagram’s VO in a dusty little booze shop in Rome, after a long day of Vatican-seeing and footsore street-wandering and clumsy pre-pubescent pickpocket away-shooing. It remains one of my clearest memories of that time, seeing that ridiculously underpriced bottle sitting there, a beam of sunlight cutting through the dustmotes like the finger of god and illuminating the golden elixir within as the bleedin’ choir invisibule of liquor descended and sang tinny little hosannas in our ears. Perhaps a holiness hangover from Pope City, which, though impressive in a crenellated, gilded, retro-poofy kind of way, left me with a feeling more Disney than Dante. We took that bottle back to the slighty hostile hostel, and drained it in the basement lounge in the company of a batsh-t insane Tasmanian who had attached himself to us when he saw we had some of the good stuff.
So we’d just given up on it, and caught the train straight to Brindisi, where an overnight ferry would take us to Greece. I was hoping that Greece would be The Place. Paris had lived up to my romantically-elevated expectations, and even surpassed them. It had been a surprise, actually, steeped as I was in far, far too much of Miller and his Nin, and Hemingway and his gin, and all the other Americans that wrote filthy hymns to the city. Not to mention the gaggle of gloomy Frenchman that every 23 year-old of a certain disposition takes much too seriously. Our weeks in Paris had been a time of great joy, and our week of detox in Aix-Les-Bains afterwards, down at the western foot of the Alps, had been just the counterbalance we’d needed. But Italy? Well, not so much. And so I had high hopes for Greece. I was all Colossus of Maroussi‘d up, I think I claimed at the time.
We’d been on the boat from Brindisi to Patras a few hours, I guess, when we began to feel a need for some liquid refreshment. Happily, beer was sold, and though back in these days our tipple of choice was good Canadian rye whiskey, our flexibility was much improved by our recent wanderings, and we purchased as many cans as we were able to carry. That turned out to be quite a few more than was strictly advisable, but that’s the way of these things when you’re young, dumb and full of…well, joi de vivre, I guess.
The way of these things also is that our hilarity (and no doubt our beer) smoothed introductions with some of our nearby fellow-seafarers, two guys who turned out to be wandering Eurodrunks themselves, another Canadian and an Irishman. The Canadian was a good ol’ beef-fed Alberta boy, profane and pussy-struck, making us feel rather weedy with his many Tales of Concupiscent Conquest. His main goal in life seemed to be the procuring of prostitutes in as many nations as possible, and he was keen to share his accumulated wisdom on this arcane topic. The Dublin-based Irishman was a skinny, hyperkinetic, weaselly fellow, short and self-conscious, and for a member of the backpacker crowd, where your story-telling is your one universally-exchangeable currency, unusually reticent to share any personal details. Still, after some initial missteps — the Irishman responded to our fanboy-queries about U2 with ‘that Bono’s fookin’ sh-te!’ — we were soon rollicking on the high seas. Our two new buddies purchased and packed over to our corner of the deck a staggering number of cold cans, and, concerned that the small concession that sold the beer might close, the Bearman and I also replenished our slightly diminished reserves as well, just in case.
We played some dominos, and told tales of our travels. The Canuck, an oil worker, had many, mostly involving ‘the ladies’, predictably, the Irishman few. They seemed boon companions, though, thanks in part to the beer, and the odd sense of relief we felt at getting out of Italy. The Bearman and I, newbies at the game, had only a few tales to tell, but made up for lack of quantity with quality — shamanistic firelit Tale Of The Hunt dances and gutteral shouts to indicate, for example, our dismay at the advanced age of the ladies of the evening inside the dimly lit, heavily draped precincts of that brothel in Pigalle, for example. Stories were swapped with increasing animation and jocularity, until about the third or fourth time that a steward showed up to tell us that the ‘Captain is very upset and wishes you please to be silent’. We were pleased that the Captain would take personal notice of us, and asked our long-suffering friend to invite him down for beer. I don’t recall him accepting, sadly.
It all gets a bit hazy at that point, but I do know that we didn’t get off at Corfu, where I’d hoped to stop on the way, enchanted as I’d been by Lawrence Durrell’s Miller-influenced Black Book (and remembering his brother Gerald’s luminous juvenilia from high school, where we’d had to read them for English class). When I woke up it was early afternoon, and I was draped across a couple of hard plastic seats with a rivulet of drool running down into my right ear. The usual, in other words. We were approaching Patras.
The hangover started to lift as we finished going through customs, and the four of us decided, as you do, that we might as well travel together for a bit, at least as far as Athens. We decided too that the wisest course of action was to grab a room and find the nearest bar, in that order.
We found a room with three beds, and I offered to take the floor and pay a little less. More money for beer, I thought, pleased with myself for demonstrating fiscal responsibility. Couldn’t be more uncomfortable than the plastic ferry seats had been, and the place looked relatively free of vermin. We dumped our gear, and as the sun started going down over the sea again, found a taverna. It was bright and crowded with friendly, happy drinkers. There were beautiful women, mugs of icy beer set down in front of us if we so much as raised an eyebrow, and what the Bearman would describe in later years as ‘the best damn chips I ever ate’. I remember turning to him at one point, happy, and saying ‘We’re home!’ And it felt like we were.
Many hours later, I was swimming up out of my alco-coma to sounds that I’d grow used to in Greece over the next 10 months — bells and chickens. It wasn’t unusual for me to wake up, in those wandering days, not knowing with any certainty where I was, or even who I was, sometimes. I quite enjoyed that blank slate feeling, sometimes, to be honest, and this morning I was feeling pretty damn groggy. I’d been having a magnificently erotic dream, involving several of the women who’d been at the bar the night before. The odd thing, though, was that as I started to cross that line from not knowing if I was awake or not, and not caring, particularly, into being quite certain that I actually was awake, the sexy sensations weren’t diminishing. All this only took perhaps 5 seconds, as the gears in my mind caught, slipped, then caught again.
I realized that there was a hand in my underwear. A rather busy hand. ‘Rrrr?’ said my brain. I didn’t remember any particular success with any of the women in the bar last night. There was also a face buried in my armpit. ‘Rrrr!’ said my brain, ‘That’s not right!’ I opened my eyes, and there was the Irishman, one hand down my boxers, sniffing the living daylights out of my left armpit. I was suddenly wide awake.
I smacked him one in the head, and he looked up at me as if I’d hurt his feelings. Although I wasn’t so much angry as I was discombobulated and disoriented and dehydrated, I pointed to his bed with some authority, and tried to say with my eyes ‘get back there or I’m gonna get mad. You wouldn’t like me when I’m mad!’ He slowly clambered back into his bed, and as he silently watched, I moved my blanket over to the patch of floor between the Bearman and the oil-worker, who were still snoring away in blissful ignorance of the absurd little drama, and pointed vigorously at his bed to indicate that I would prefer that he stay there. Then I went back to sleep.
We all woke up a few hours later, ate a greasy, glorious breakfast, and left for Athens. Nothing more was said of armpits or underpants.
So there’s a little story. I wrote it for you because I have nothing really to say about all this gay-marriage brouhaha in America other than it’s criminally stupid that it should even be something that people are upset about, and because the Bearman is going back to Greece in a couple of months with his Cypriot-Canadian wife and I wish I could go, and I woke up the other morning thinking about Greece. I hold no resentment to the Irishman who woke me up by fondling my junk — it seemed a funny way, even at the time, to wake up on my first morning in Greece. And I don’t think I’ve ever met a female backpacker that didn’t have a tale, at least in those days, of unwelcome fondling by some creepy guy in a hostel somewhere.
I’ve never been one to be angry at individuals for their folly and their weakness, beyond an occasional rant or two. En masse, maybe, yeah. I just love to stir up the sh-t, and I’ve done some of that in recent times, sure, but that’s only because it was fun. I’m all about the love, honest. And I loved Greece. It turned out to be one of the greatest places I’ve ever been, and I miss it sometimes.
It has a special place in my heart, if not my underwear.

We're On A Mission From God

February 16, 2004 / / 14 Comments

My mission to annoy and alienate as many Very Important Bloggers as possible (for street cred, daddy-o!) continues apace. The hum from the hive rises threateningly when it is disturbed. The sound soothes me. I step back, then, drawn by the hypnotic throb of the multitude, step forward again and take another f–king whack at it.
No, really. I like to be liked, honest, but I’d rather truth-tell than ass-kiss. Be a lot easier if I had a clue what the truth was. Still, I’m not a-gonna pucker up, either way.

dominatetheweakandlonely.jpg

Looks like I picked the wrong month to stop sniffing glue.

Uncrappy

January 26, 2004 / / 5 Comments

I’ve got a new EB gadget for you that I’ve been compelled to whip up after literally thousands hundreds dozens not a single solitary request. Still, it’s something I’ve been planning to do for a while, even though I wanted to keep this design free of the crud-accretion that plagued the last one.
Way down the left-handside there, under the stack of coasters, is a box of past posts which I consider to be relatively Uncrappy. Highlights. You know. There’re some missing, but I’ve managed to hit a few high points going back as far as the end of 2001, so far. If you Daypopped in with the crowds or are otherwise new to my stuff, you may find some dusty relics in there somewhere that you like. The whole list can be found here, if you’ve got a few hours.
Can you feel the excitement? The electricity in the air? The whole axle-snapping, gear-grinding power of it? Can you hear the crowd going wild?

whoopdeedoo

No? Me neither.
Ah well.
A warning in advance though, to be fair : the content to be found yonder in the archive includes a short description of Dick Cheney’s penis. But if that’s not a highlight, I dunno what is.

On Writing, or Of Tits and Medicated Monkeys

January 26, 2004 / / 11 Comments

One of the things I talked about in my long screed the other day was that I don’t really give a damn how well someone writes on the web, as long as they have something interesting to say. This is, of course, only partly true. It’s always more complicated than that, as annoying people are known to say with exasperating regularity.

More accurately, what I was trying to say was that passion and energy can be more important than accuracy — it was true for punk rock, and I think it can be true with writing on the web as as well. When I teach English (as a foreign language), I talk to my students about the differences between ‘fluency’ and ‘accuracy’ and how, although both are important, spoken communication depends more on fluency, at least for their purposes. There are differences between the types of language you use, depending on where you’re using it. You know, register.
That isn’t to say that if someone writes execrably, that I have the time to read them, usually. I love good writing, and I knows it when I reads it. There’s just too many textsongs being howled into the void out there to waste too much time on bad writers, at least when they are both bad and boring. There are plenty of ‘good’ writers out there that would bore the tits off a medicated monkey, too, if the monkey in question had them (and health care insurance). But there are also plenty of unpolished writers who through their madcap, determinedly-amateurish bang and crash manage to transmit some of their enthusiasm and sweet madness, regardless of the clumsiness with which they wield their tools. Now these folks, I like. I’m one of ’em, at least on this site.

The best of all possible worlds is great writers who have interesting things to say, and who say them with passion and creativity. There are more of those around than I ever thought possible, before this weblogging thing took off.

This is, of course, obvious.

A couple of people (it could possibly have been the same person, but masked under an all-too-easy InTaRWEb pseudonym, but I suspect not) took me to task for the following paragraph from my long rant the other day :

I’ve been casting about for a way to frame my thinking about weblogs and weblogging lately, as I’ve watched with a mild dismay apparently shared by others down the street about the way in which the tang and tenor in our neighbourhood of neighbourhoods have been changing in these post-blogdiluvian times. I hadn’t found the key I needed until this morning, and it was, amusingly, courtesy of Dave Winer.

One of my critics, after I sent an email asking why he had decided the writing wasn’t that great (though he liked my site design and ideas), offered a useful editorial-style breakdown of the things he thought were wrong with it (“Maybe x instead of y?”, “Do you really mean ‘mild’ here?” and so on) to which I responded with sincere thanks for the input, but also with an arrogant comment that I knew exactly what I was doing when I wrote the paragraph, and a suggestion not to teach his grandmother to suck eggs, basically. That I appreciated the input, but there was nothing there I didn’t know already.

The second critic (‘Fozzie Bear’), if indeed it was a second, popped into the comments thread to offer, all in caps, the following commentary, after quoting that same paragraph :

“THAT WAS THE WORST THING I HAVE EVER READ.”

with no real reason why it might be THE WORST THING he or she EVER READ, and no explanation of either what was wrong with it, or why he or she was so exercised over its clumsiness. Double-posted the comment, even. I imagine my interlocutor so quivering with apoplectic rage that an essay containing so egregiously crappy a paragraph could receive so much praise and attention ’round the web that their finger was all a-tremble with barely-contained fury as they clicked the ‘Post’ button.

So I deleted it. f–k that noise. If you can’t be reasonably civil, you’re not welcome here. And if you’re going to say that sort of thing, civilly, you’d better back it up with some examples of your own senses-shatteringly glorious prose. Walk the walk. Jaybird ass, alligator mouth.

I regret deleting the comment, but it was first thing in the morning, and my actions tend to be a bit… precipitous before my first coffee. See, though, I bring it up again because it’s amusing to me, because it dovetails so nicely with what I was actually saying in the essay, and what I was quoting, and reinforces one of my points. I’m compelled to pull out my Eggers rantquote again (and I know some people seem to hate Eggers, for some reason – I’m looking at you, Steve) :

What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a f–kload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

and I myself said

Write well, write badly, whatever, just create. If you are saying things that stir people, they will respond.

If you can’t write well, write with such passionate muscularity that people stand back and go ‘whoa!’ Make things, reach out to people. If you write well, keep doing it, and get better, and don’t kiss ass for personal gain. If not, just go, bash that keyboard, make a hideous, amateurish squall, one to which, if it has some kernel of glorious truthtelling, people will respond. The mass amateurization of nearly everything is good. If you’re a gifted amateur, the world will beat a path to your, er, door.

(That paragraph could have used another editing pass, too, maybe, but so what?)

It amuses me that after posting an essay in which I tried (amongst other things) to make a point that passion is more important than style, there were those who would criticize me for the style in which I wrote it. That’s the way of these things, though, isn’t it?

I wrote that long piece in one two-hour coffee-fueled sitting (after reading the comment I linked to about parties and publication at Joi Ito’s site), off the top of my head, after a week or so of thinking about the topic occasionally, ran it through two editing passes, and posted it, all before lunch. It wasn’t meant to be a polished, long-pondered think piece. I don’t do those on my website, much. It’s a weblog, for christ’s sakes! I shoot from the hip, pardner. I ain’t no citified essay-writin’ girly-man! You know, all that crap.
The paragraph that my two critics took issue with was clunky, though, I admit. I’d probably rewrite it, if I gave a sh-t.

But this is a weblog-thing, see, and although I have nothing at all against editing after-the-fact for my worst offenses against clarity or readability (and I might yet go back and fix it up a bit, since thanks to the massive response it looks like it might be something that won’t just disappear off the radar forever once it’s below the fold) normally I wouldn’t bother. I write on my weblog the way I talk, for the most part, and I made a conscious decision to do so. I can write in other styles and registers, and have, for money and everything. For the most part I choose not to, here.

Although the money wouldn’t suck.

I said what I wanted to say, for my own benefit and no one else’s, to be honest, even if I am happy, again, that it struck chords in people. Although I am confident that I can (at times) kick texty ass, I know that I have many weaknesses, blind spots and outright failings as a writer, too. I’ve never studied this sh-t. I’ve read everything over the years, basically, but I never done did no text-larnin’ about the litterchur and stuff. I’m trying to become a better writer, because it’s something I love (and I think I have gotten better after 3 years of writing in public), but I’m not trying all that hard to write deathless prose, here.

If the paragraph that people quoted and criticized did suck, and I agree that it wasn’t exactly, er, optimal, that’s fine. It didn’t matter. The essay was one of the most popular I’ve ever written, even with a clunker or five (that I might have fixed up if I’d done a third editing pass), and bang hoopla! there’s my point about passion and commitment over spit and polish again.
When a band is up on the stage, they don’t stop when the guitarist hits a sour note, go back, and make him get it right. It ruins the experience, kills the party, puts out the fire, interrupts the flow.

Weblogs are all those other things I mentioned the other day, and a million more besides, including, sometimes, a performance. Don’t let the critics and parasitic parsers of other people’s passion put you off, friends. Write from your heart and gonads about things that you care about. If there’s a clunker or three in there, forget it or fix it fast, move on, and keep the song rolling.
Your audience just may love you for it. Mine seems to†.

When I (or you) write the great Canadian (or whatever) novel, we can do a little more editing and rewriting then. Maybe.

[†Opinions to the contrary are welcome, as always, as long as you don’t step on my dick too hard.]