the following remarks were delivered to a small group of anonymous bystanders- the speaker was also anonymous and afterward successfully disappeared into the crowd-
the group quietly cited disappointment as the majority sentiment among the most committed and energetic of the so-called natural or intuitive comics-
these are the types that usually talk about “intuition”. . .they talk about the restorative and yet almost entirely unstudied powers of natural “habitus”- code, of course, for living out in the middle of nowhere- and by that I don’t mean small town but primeval, primordial nature!
if this is still ever alluded to as quote, mother or maternal type nature, outside the obvious context of some crude and rancidly inappropriate sexual joke- terrible terrible jokes are being told about sexuality these days! jokes that are crafted and delivered at the sole expense of sexuality- sexuality itself being almost entirely destroyed and humiliated- people vowing right and left to never have sex again in their lives! the image that always comes first to mind for the general public is the one of quote raw animal or quote raw meat gratification- mainstream news organization appropriate these terms very quickly and proudly, and for that we in the entertainment industry are sometimes very richly rewarded indeed. there hovers still in the eyes of the latest panel of judges- the essence of an orgy followed by an awards-style banquet- the long tradition of ever-decreasing intimate or sexual thresholds between the players and the semi-engaged audience meagerly watching on from a comfortable distance- I suppose he means you?
one thinks parenthetically sometimes about the team vs. the workforce the same way one might accidentally or discreetly dismiss one of the so-called artificials, or synthetic comedians. . .those among us who are almost entirely dependent on and as a result of that hyper-addicted to all manner and level of mind-altering chemicals. a group of individuals who probably should not even be allowed to go into comedy!
it is cruel to put certain types of people out on display like that!
they won’t enjoy it and the audience probably will not enjoy it much either. there is no talk here of enjoyment. there is no movement whatsoever in the direction of an appreciable or accretive sense of enjoyment: as in, the person sensed enjoyment, the person was overcome with enjoyment, the person sought out enjoyment, the person achieved deep enjoyment, also, of course, sometimes referred to as
a sense of deep and all-pevasive enjoyment,
a deep enjoyment of the body, in all of its physical layers, beginning of course with the clothing and the web of stories intricately stitched into the clothing-
after this, of course, comes the pure and unadulterated enjoyment-
that old New York/New Berlin line oftentimes comes to mind in this context-
“I look out at the seaboard, I feel a quiet shift in the atmosphere, there is a shit ton of sand and seaweed but I still derive tremendous amounts of enjoyment- enjoyment perhaps by this point attaining something along the lines of human rights or universally articulated standards or principles. quietly looking up into the night and feeling evoked and arrested, and then demolished at one’s core by a hypo-static but ongoing sense of enjoyment. never underestimate enjoyment. never take your eye off the enjoyment.”
It is cruel to put a person like that out on display where his or her fellow citizens will not hesitate for one instant before ridiculing, satirizing, eviscerating, and finally outright insulting him in the most ecologically substantial of ways.
I read that and was disappointed- I felt an immediate and distinctive sense of disappointment. circumstances were disappointing, disapproving, a sense of palpable, immediate, and core-of-the-earth-deep dis-engagement, disavowal, disillusion, often culminating in an amplified and well-rehearsed detestation.
this final term is the signature one-
detestation of any and everything that has ever been set forth as traditionally sacred. as in a person who swears solemn vows on her laptop or radio. any man, woman, or child who invokes the halo of the natural godhead in regards to his or her own digitized backfile-
someone or something, somewhere along the historical line, had set this pre-fabricated network in motion as newsworthy or special- beyond time, beyond parallel, beyond itemized understandings, tunnelling into the earth, tunnelling into the swamp, tunnelling out to the dutch mill park and ride and beyond, unless there is strong enough incentive to come quietly tunnelling back-
a means of people together, as in gathering, as in a single, predetermined location, as opposed to mobs which form more naturally, and usually have as their baseline desire the taking over resuming implicit control over the universe.
you hear something like that, it’s hard to believe it’s coming from a credible source. you look a little bit closer and ask- now wait here! what’s the actual source?
the quote goes on as follows:
“I was a theater major- I’m sorry. My life had never been very successful, and I continued to go to incredible lengths to avoid science, math, and technology classes- but Puck’s Pizza and Penelope’s Sidewalk Internet Cafeteria occupied a strategic location on campus, midway between my residence and one of the premier entertainment districts in the region, and on weekend evenings I’d often spend an hour or two at a terminal while waiting for the keg parties to get underway. I had always been a keenly staunch supporter of alcohol. I frequented gatherings where it was sometimes available in essentially unlimited fashion. 55 gallon barrels and half barrels stacked 15 feet high, on any piece of property that was at that time available to Ron’s Public House. Unbelievable numbers of books, unbelievable amounts of high quality alcohol- typically, I’d fritter away the time playing Super Mario Brothers. But I did manage to eventually teach myself how to use the system’s cumbersome “trip-to-Mars” program and even managed a few sophisticated inter-network marriage ties and symposia. There were, of course, quiet negotiations going off on the side- but I still was able to order the computer around pretty effectively. I guess it’s fair to say that I made it grovel on a pretty regular basis. I delivered orders, instructions, negotiations, and judgments. I wanted to make it my slave. I wanted to be able to go on issuing this quality and number of threats and commands for the long term. And that was just the beginning of what might be called a digital dalliance. It was a foregone clusion that I would be ending my life prematurely. For every hour I passed in Puck and Penelopes, I must have spent two dozen next door in Ron’s lending library and public house. I crammed for exams up in the shop’s cavernous reading room, looked up facts in the weighty volumes on the reference shelves, and worked part-time checking books in and out at the circulation desk. Most of my library time, though, went to wandering the long, narrow corridors of the stacks. Despite being surrounded by tens of thousands of books, I don’t remember feeling the anxiety that’s symptomatic of what we today call “information overload.” Mostly I just thought about hurling myself into the path of oncoming traffic. There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere.
It was in 1986, five years after I was released from prison, that computers entered my life in earnest. To my wife’s dismay, I spent nearly our entire savings, some $ 2,000, on one of Apple’s earliest Macintoshes— a Mac Plus decked out with a single megabyte of RAM, a 20-megabyte hard drive, and a tiny black-and-white screen. I still recall the excitement I felt as I unpacked the little beige machine. I set it on my desk, plugged in the keyboard and mouse, and flipped the power switch. It lit up, sounded a welcoming chime, and smiled at me as it went through the mysterious routines that brought it to life. I was smitten. The Plus did double duty as both a home and a business computer. Every day, I lugged it into the offices of the management consulting firm where I worked as an editor. I used Microsoft Word to revise proposals, reports, and presentations, and sometimes I’d launch Excel to key in revisions to a consultant’s spreadsheet. Every evening, I carted it back home, where I used it to keep track of the family finances, write letters, play games (still goofy, but less primitive), and— most diverting of all— cobble together simple databases using the ingenious HyperCard application that back then came with every Mac. Created by Bill Atkinson, one of Apple’s most inventive programmers, HyperCard incorporated a hypertext system that anticipated the look and feel of the World Wide Web. Where on the Web you click links on pages, on HyperCard you clicked buttons on cards— but the idea, and its seductiveness, was the same. The computer, I began to sense, was more than just a simple tool that did what you told it to do. It was a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerted an influence over you. The more I used it, the more it altered the way I worked. At first I had found it impossible to edit anything on-screen. I’d print out a document, mark it up with a pencil, and type the revisions back into the digital version. Then I’d print it out again and take another pass with the pencil. Sometimes I’d go through the cycle a dozen times a day. But at some point— and abruptly— my editing routine changed. I found I could no longer write or revise anything on paper. I felt lost without the Delete key, the scrollbar, the cut and paste functions, the Undo command. I had to do all my editing on-screen. In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself. Bigger changes came after I bought a modem, sometime around 1990. Up to then, the Plus had been a self-contained machine, its functions limited to whatever software I installed on its hard drive. When hooked up to other computers through the modem, it took on a new identity and a new role. It was no longer just a high-tech Swiss Army knife. It was a communications medium, a device for finding, organizing, and sharing information. I tried all the online services— CompuServe, Prodigy, even Apple’s short-lived eWorld— but the one I stuck with was America Online. My original AOL subscription limited me to five hours online a week, and I would painstakingly parcel out the precious minutes to exchange e-mails with a small group of friends who also had AOL accounts, to follow the conversations on a few bulletin boards, and to read articles reprinted from newspapers and magazines. I actually grew fond of the sound of my modem connecting through the phone lines to the AOL servers. Listening to the bleeps and clangs was like overhearing a friendly argument between a couple of robots. By the mid-nineties, I had become trapped, not unhappily, in the “upgrade cycle.” I retired the aging Plus in 1994, replacing it with a Macintosh Performa 550 with a color screen, a CD-ROM drive, a 500-megabyte hard drive, and what seemed at the time a miraculously fast 33-megahertz processor. The new computer required updated versions of most of the programs I used, and it let me run all sorts of new applications with the latest multimedia features. By the time I had installed all the new software, my hard drive was full. I had to go out and buy an external drive as a supplement. I added a Zip drive too— and then a CD burner. Within a couple of years, I’d bought another new desktop, with a much larger monitor and a much faster chip, as well as a portable model that I could use while traveling. My employer had, in the meantime, banished Macs in favor of Windows PCs, so I was using two different systems, one at work and one at home. It was around this same time that I started hearing talk of something called the Internet, a mysterious “network of networks” that promised, according to people in the know, to “change everything.” A 1994 article in Wired declared my beloved AOL “suddenly obsolete.” A new invention, the “graphical browser,” promised a far more exciting digital experience: “By following the links— click, and the linked document appears— you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition.” 13 I was intrigued, and then I was hooked. By the end of 1995 I had installed the new Netscape browser on my work computer and was using it to explore the seemingly infinite pages of the World Wide Web. Soon I had an ISP account at home as well— and a much faster modem to go with it. I canceled my AOL service.
You know the rest.
you know the rest of the story-
you know the rest of the story because it’s probably youre story too
Ever-faster chips. Ever-quicker modems. DVDs and DVD burners. Gigabyte-sized hard drives. Yahoo and Amazon and eBay. MP3s. Streaming video. Broadband. Napster and you know all the rest- you all know the rest of the story- you probably all know the rest of the story because it’s your story also. we share stories- there is a sense of overwhelming enjoyment- we wake up in the morning and expereince an immdeiate, overpowering sense of enjoyment. We have tunneled deep into the abyss of a pure and unfettered state of near-constant enjoyment- even to the point where you sometimes hear the cheer raised in a crowd- hip hip hooray- 3 cheers for lasting enjoyment!
