Kablammo!

• The other day I was walking down the sidewalk, and a guy was coming the other way with his 3-or-4-year-old perched on his shoulders. As we passed each other, I overheard a brief snippet of their conversation. The father told the child, “…then you say ‘I’ll beat you up!’,” and the child dutifully repeated “Ah be chu up!”
  Did I mention this took place at around 11pm?
• I should marry the AFI Silver cinematheque, since I seem to love it so much, or at least become a member so each film becomes slightly less expensive. I’ve seen four movies there in the past three weeks, and probably at least a dozen this year, all of them very good.
• As it happened, I got in to work early yesterday, and thus got out early as well—early enough to hightail it over to the abovementioned cinema in time (or nearly in time) for a 4:30 matinée showing of And Justice For All. I’ve always enjoyed going to the movies by myself, and it turns out that what’s even better than that is being the only person in the room, and having what amounts to a completely private screening on a full-size screen. (And what’s even better than that is getting a pint of NELSON from the concession stand before your private screening.)
  I was enjoying the act of enjoying the movie so much, I almost forgot to enjoy the movie.
• In other news, I’ve reached a new level of complacency and consumer-whoredom. Not only am I not spending this week in a tent in the woods, but I also recently acquired a half-stake in an LCD HDTV. So it goes.

Yesterday and today I felt great, which leads me to believe I’m only happy when I’ve dug myself into a hole, or when I’ve made things far more complicated than they need be.

Alright, so it happened again. I suppose the question, then, is what is the pattern here and how can I try to forestall it from happening again.

It’s happened when I’ve been getting more than enough sleep; and when I’ve been rather sleep-deprived.

It’s happened in the depths of winter; and at the peak of summer.

It’s happened when I’ve seen my path drawing to an end, confronting me with a bewildering horizon of choice; and when I’ve seen a single unbranching track stretching off to infinity.

It’s happened alarmingly soon after I was sure everything was going to be fine.

It’s happened when I’ve been a slacker extraordinaire, and when I’ve been at my most diligent.

It’s happened when I’ve been drinking like a fish, and when I’ve been sober for a long time.

I wish I felt more upset about it, but I just want to take a nap.

Sleep was a long time coming last night, though I was exhausted. Today I decided to keep start a diary, but not a dream diary, rather a diary of the meaningless shit that races through my mind when I close my eyes. More often than not, it’s completely inconsequential and its relation to my waking life is tangential at best. Maybe airing it out will help it go away?

I should note that what follows is a largely unedited and entirely unfactchecked transcript of a representative sample of the random crap that evidently kept me awake last night.

• My relationship with money is abstracted to the point of absolute absurdity.
  There’s a line in a book, I think, which may have been by Vonnegut. It seems like the kind of thing he’d write. To paraphrase horribly, I am absolutely amazed that people are willing, even eager, to give me actual goods and services in exchange for slips of paper. Except these days it’s even more bizarre than that: the slips of paper aren’t necessary, and I can get goods and services in exchange for basically showing somebody a round-cornered plastic rectangle, which represents slips of paper. And it turns out the rectangle itself isn’t necessary, either; I can type a number into a website (whatever the hell that is) and get merchandise delivered to my residence. The number, of course, represents the rectangle, which in turn represents slips of paper. Some websites let you take it even another step: a checkmark or radio button which represents a number, which represents a rectangle, which represents slips of paper.

  So what do the slips of paper represent? (I.e., how far down do the turtles go?) It seems the slips of paper—and this may have been what Vonnegut(?) was getting at—don’t represent anything, really. There was a time when they represented bits of shiny metal, but in this day and age they represent nothing more than an implicit promise by the maker of the slips of paper not to print too many more slips of paper at the same time. And that promise is the enabler and the driving force behind our entire economy (whatever the hell that is).

  Could it be, though, that the slips of paper represent something more important, such as my own precious time and energy? Absolutely not. Well, perhaps in some kind of detached, purely rational sense, I can draw up some kind of relation between time spent and slips of paper (and in fact one could point out that I have entered into an agreement essentially stipulating a specific number of slips of paper for a specific amount of time); but viscerally, it doesn’t feel that way at all. Part of that is due to the miracles of direct deposit and electronic banking, which mean that slips of paper are often, in and of themselves, massive inconveniences that I have to go out of my way to even access. Everything is just numbers on websites, and the causal relationship between doing stuff and having the value of a number on a website change seems tenuous at best. It seems to correlate pretty well, but somehow it doesn’t feel causal.

  In short, I didn’t used to know where “money” came from, or understand the value of a dollar, or any of that; and people suggested that I would quickly find out when I started working to support myself. They were wrong. I still don’t know where money comes from, and I still don’t understand the value of a dollar. I’m aware that that’s a tremendous, tremendous luxury, and I suppose I count myself lucky for having this particular type of ignorance.

  But seriously though, I can just click my mouse a few times and end up with boxes full of books, CDs, DVDs, microphones, and whatever else my little heart desires. I just don’t get it.

• Criminal Justice: In what does it consist?
  As a course of study, I mean. (Note that I have not researched this at all; this has all been pulled straight out of my ass.)

  The first thing I thought of was “theories of rehabilitation”, predicated on the assumption that rehabilitation is a goal of ‘criminal justice’. This largely unsatisfactory answer led to two other questions: (1) What are the goals of criminal justice? and (2) What is the history of criminal justice? (Note that the questions, and their answers, are inextricably linked, or so I assume.)

  A list of goals of criminal justice, I should think, would include deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation (sometimes, but not always, in that order). The relative proportions of the three would necessarily depend on cultural and social mores, as well as available resources and a whole host of other factors. Hammurabi’s eye-for-an-eye justice system clearly has a minimal focus on rehabilitation; and perhaps rehabilitation as such didn’t even enter the equation until [temporary] imprisonment became a popular approach to punishment.

  Can retribution really be considered just? If I steal your checkbook and rack up tremendous debt in your name, I can be ordered to pay back the money. But if I paralyze you from the neck down while driving drunk, can I be ordered to make you walk again? What if I raid your pension fund, embezzle until your employer is insolvent, and scatter the money to the four winds?

  What proportion of Criminal Justice studies is philosophical?

There was more—a lot more, on both of these subjects and many others—but I think you get the idea. Rather, I’m tired of writing.

I’ve been spectacularly unproductive and unmotivated at work for the past week or so, and it’s really starting to bother me. Just can’t focus, and I feel like I’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Summer’s in the air, is it that? Did I burn myself out by actually doing my job satisfactorily for the prior two months? Why am I navel-gazing and making vague excuses?

Anyway.

I’ll finish writing this later, maybe.

My car gets 40 furlongs to the pint, or just under 46 fathoms per teaspoon. (Or, if you prefer, 37 cubits/mL; or 37.5 cricket pitches per shot.)

Any way you slice it, that’s pretty good mileage.

So we have:

• reception / receive
• deception / deceive
• perception / perceive
• conception / conceive
• interception / intercept???

What’s the deal with intercept? Shouldn’t it be interceive? Why does it get to be so special?

Looks like I still have a job today. Hooray?

So it’s that time of whatever again.

1. The Rolling Stones — “Jumpin’ Jack Flash (live)”
   If they were old already in 1991 when they recorded this, they must be downright ancient by now. And yet they have so much practice rocking that I guess it’s just second nature by now. Though as you might imagine the song loses a lot of its anger and urgency when the performers age 25 years.
2. The Pixies — “I Bleed”
   I’m pretty sure that what made The Pixies so great was their complete and utter lack of any musical knowledge whatsoever. Luckily, that approach worked great for them, and in their music you can hear every band of the 90s a decade earlier.
3. Smashing Pumpkins — “Mayonnaise”
   Decent song, but sadly it’s not actually about the condiment in question.
4. The Viscounts — “Harlem Nocturne”
   I love spring reverb, but what I like even more is a nice and throaty saxophone sound. Thankfully this song has both in spades. Also, this song (or one very like it) was clearly a big influence on Aavikko.
5. The Modern Jazz Quartet — “Autumn in New York”
   Go go gadget vibraphone
6. Hawksley Workman — “Tarantulove”
   Hawksley at his dirtiest and sultriest. Fucking great.
7. The Kinks — “Come Dancing”
   It begins and ends with a swaying calypso beat, and a guitar-organ combination that’s clearly meant to imitate a steel drum. As far as that goes, it’s quite well done and a very enjoyable song. But what makes it really shine is the middle eight, where they bring in a crunchy electric guitar playing a minor cadence or something. The change of key and tone is magnificent, and makes the brass section that comes in for the ending sound even happier in comparison.
8. Koer — “Mine munni”
   It’s basically a bunch of cursing over a basic punk beat, but again the bridge is just sublime. Ford Sierra . . .
9. Miles Davis — “Flamenco Sketches”
   Woo trumpet
10. Ministry — “Faith Collapsing”
11. Mussorgsky — “The Little Hut on Chicken’s Legs”
    Goddamn, Modest kicked some ass.

In other news, things are going pretty well.

None of these quite made it as its own post.

• Setting the scene: a few weeks ago I began reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, and soon after, I finished reading it. (I quite enjoyed it, incidentally, though at times it seemed distressingly prescient, as though some people had treated it as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary example.) I mentioned reading it to an acquaintance, and he recommended that I read Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London next, saying they were his favorite Orwell books.

  As it happens, last week I found myself unable to get Lodger‘s “I Love Death” out of my head. (This will become more important later on.)

  Also last week, I discovered that AFI Silver would be playing 七人の侍 (Seven Samurai), and the page about it also mentioned a film called Wild Strawberries, saying: “Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece is to cinema what Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is to the novel: the definitive ‘memory piece’ of the art form.” This caught my eye, since memory is something I find fascinating, so I had it in the back of my mind as I made my way to go see Samurai.

  I was humming Lodger to myself the whole way to the movie theatre, and after buying my ticket I had some time to kill before the screening actually began, so I figured I’d go to the Borders around the corner on the off-chance they’d be carrying an album by a Finnish indie-rock band. And maybe while I was there, I’d be able to expand my Orwell collection. Once I entered the store, I strode purposefully towards the music section, confident that I wouldn’t find the album I was looking for, and already consoling myself with the knowledge that my taste in music was hip enough that a faceless conglomerate with a brick-and-mortar presence couldn’t possibly satisfy me. Alas, they had exactly what I wanted, and I had to settle for being thrilled with my purchase. I vaguely browsed the music section a bit more, hovering over a best-of Country Joe and the Fish compilation before deciding against it, when I started looking for Bobby Bare Jr. As it turned out, this time I did in fact stump the record store, but since they did have some Bobby Bare [Sr.], I picked up an album of his that had a particularly glowing cover blurb: “Good-time outlaw country — One of the greatest live recordings ever!”

  Music in hand, I made my way to the “Literature” section of the store, confident that a chain of bookstores that stocked eclectic Finnish CDs would have Orwell’s novels. They did have about eight copies each of 1984 and Animal Farm, but no Catalonia or Down and Out to be found, other than as excerpts in a compilation. Fuck that. Disappointed, I decided to look for that Proust memory thing I read about earlier. I found the Proust section quick enough (“Or” and “Pr” aren’t too far apart) and started looking at the spines of the books. I had a dim recollection of hearing about Proust as a writer of short stories, so I paid more attention to the slender books on the shelf and ignored the enormous tomes. After a fruitless search, I finally looked at the huge books in the Proust section and realized that this Remembrance thing was waaaay the fuck longer than I’d been expecting. Oh well, so it goes.

  There have been a lot of times when I’ve wondered about the threshold of incongruity required for a cashier to comment on a purchase. Apparently this time I crossed it, since as he rang everything up, the guy exclaimed, “Country music and Proust!?“

• This Tuesday I discovered that my login for the timekeeping/payroll system at work had been deactivated. My supervisor got it straightened out in a few minutes, but it was still mildly disconcerting.
• I think I’ve crossed a Rubicon of sorts: I got a haircut today, without even being at the point where I’d been needing a haircut for weeks or months already.