(peachstapler.com)



(sisterlouisa.com)

Sister Louisa's an Atlanta based artist.  She (the artist is male, but uses the "sister Louisa" alter-ego for his work) collects paintings like the above and paints somewhat ironic slogans on top of them.  The style seems like it would get old fast, but I was stuck in a small room filled with her work this weekend and it actually became really awesome.  The kitsch keeps building on itself, and you get this kitsch/anti-kitsch dichotomy - the work ends up arguing against both those categories.  Or, at least, tricking the viewer into making that argument themselves.

That's what I'm worrying about tonight.

I don't usually think about kitsch, though it's probably been an important topic since Barthe danced around it in his Mythologies.  I'm actually wiki-ing the definition of kitsch right now.  I wonder how Rousseau's related to it?

Writing this down's probably gonna put another line of shadows under my eyes. I've heard you don't regain lost sleep. So maybe you just get used to feeling sleepy, or maybe you've got a surplus when you're born. All those nights in the womb.

I was thinking about drugs earlier tonight, and that got me to thinking about substances in general, and from there, experience.

I seem to have a similar relationship with all those things, and I couldn't quite picture it until laying against my pillow a few minutes ago. I wasn't sure when my eyes were closed and when they were open, I was that stage before sleep, taxi-ing at the runway. When I realized they were open, I closed my eyes again tight and saw phantom red splotches against the backs of my shut eyes. They reminded me of the maze Pac-man runs through, the lines a deep red.

So I thought of myself as Pac-man, and maybe everything I experience was consumed just like one of those pellets he eats. Each of the experiences is entirely separate from its predecessor, and the only way Pac-man knows where he's been is by remembering a trail of not-there pellets.

This isn't too bad, but I'm not sure if I'll ever encounter a plan linking each of these separate experiences. If none of the experiences is better than the other, why work towards any one experience?

Um.

I lost my train of thought in that last paragraph. Yesterday was probably Blake's anniversary. Spent some time talking with Hyman today. Mainly about cooking, and cooking schools. I bet she makes a mean crepe. (wtf is the unicode for accented letters?)

PS: Found it!

Finished second page. (10:50). Have begun adding random endnotes to paper. Example: "Interesting discussion of this phenomenon in a Scientific American article entitled “The Tyranny of choice” (www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0006AD38-D9FB-1055-973683414B7F0000&ref=sciam&chanID=sa006) and a lecture entitled “The Paradox of Choice” (www.glumbert.com/media/choice)"

["The Paradox of Choice" as footnote, Originally Published 2006-12-12 19:20:00]

My friend Zack called a few hours after he had picked Britney up from the airport. I missed the call, but when I called back he told me he had gotten engaged. I felt a powerful urge to run.

The temperature's dropped 20 degrees since Monday.

I watched Ratatouille and Stardust recently. They were both good. Ratatouille was especially good, Stardust was barely good. Though the Captain Shakespeare character was a pretty cool interpretation of Gaiman's original. Have any of you read the book/comic? I wonder how close the movie version was to the source material.

Ratatouille had some cool scenes for synesthesia enthusiasts.  (Between Fantasia and Waking Life, I can't decide which is a better simulation of synesthesia)

Also, Tropa de Elite. Awesome. It's this ultraviolent Brazilian film about gang wars.  Worth watching just for the first 15 minutes.

Oh!  Thanksgiving!  My brother stayed in Charlotte, so it was just my parents, myself, and my aunt Mary.  Not bad.  We spent the meal arguing about politics, but it wasn't too horrible.  Actually a pretty good discussion.  I watched TV for a bit before bed, and almost every commercial was telling me to wake up at 4am and shop at their store.  I don't understand it.  If a stranger on the street told you the same thing, you'd tell'em to go fuck themselves.

Thinking about synesthesia simulations prompts some interesting thoughts.  You'll occasionally notice that cultural thought for an entire decade is wrapped around certain psychological phenomenon.  I'm pretty sure it was hysteria in the 1910's/20's.  I wonder if synthesthesia's managed to infiltrate the cultural radar this decade.  It synchronizes pretty well with "cyberspace" type conceptualizations of the Internet.

The more time I spend in offices, the more sense Rousseau makes. Not that I think the guy's anything short of completely batshit, but I suppose he's useful to read as a sort of reflection of his times + how he influenced Marx.

I think, in 100 years, the invention of the office, as in the physical environment, the box we store people in, the cubicle - these images will be the stereotypical pictures of our time, just like pre-civil war south had the plantation, and ancient Rome had the coliseum. I can feel it working its way into me, and sometimes, I worry that my memory of Chicago will be entirely dominated by florescent lighting and offwhite walls.

EDIT: That's the scary part. This whole thing is viable. There's really no rational reason not to finish college, than return to Cube World. It wouldn't be too hard to get a job in a box doing something I can tolerate, working in editing, or management, or something. But I don't want to do any of that, and I'm getting to the point where, each moment I do one thing, I dig deeper into the life of always doing that one thing, or always living in that one city, or always something something.

So, now what?