Short-Selling Economy Class

Feeling very pleased with myself, having thumbed my nose at the "green shoots" forecasted by the media-financial complex, which continues blithely watering the meltdown's fields of economic ash with the same bullshit "we're in the green" koolaid. "But, but... it has electrolytes!" How you like dem yellow weeds, asswipes?

I was holding out on purchasing my roundtrip Honolulu-to-Seattle ticket from about a month ago, taking the against-the-consensus advice of Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini that this was another bear market rally which would end sometime this summer as fundamentals are still a mess. You could say I was, "short the economy/coach aisle seat market." I was getting nervous watching oil tick up to 73 a barrel last week, with flights edging up to 420+ dollars, the WGB meat getting to weeks away when rates start hiking, but I held out. So when I woke up yesterday morning to read "Stocks, commodities fall, oil plunges" then found William Chatner's lucky ninja stars flying around my email flashing, "Flights to Seattle just dropped 10 percent!", in some small, Hoekstran way, I must've felt a bit like Dr. Doom, utterly vindicated in his predictions of the crisis after being laughed off stage at Davos the previous year. Like Nassim Taleb, scoring 100% plus returns for his hedge fund after shorting the 2008 market. I had listened to the right people, made an educated guess, and been rewarded with 80 dollars. Flexed my economus maximus. I think I'll actually sleep well on this flight.

Aliens

Possibly part of something larger, we'll see.

Working title.

Aliens


“I know it’s not fucking Ridley Scott here.” Darren’s fingers fluttered in that arachnoid sign language from planet Film. “But I need more terror, more… Just imagine you’re out of weed, or the Salvia shadow-monster is coming after you again.”

“Uh, ok, man. It’s just kind of hard to be frightened without some scary shit like, ‘right there’, you know?” Joe’s glazed eyes, droopy with psychoactive, were obstacle enough to squeeze convincing fear out of, acting skills and motivation aside. Perhaps fear could be brushed on in After Effects. It seemed they could do anything in After Effects nowadays. Dump in a script and some Chinese kids, bake a few hours, out popped a DVD.
“Fuck, I told him not to burn before the shoot,” Darren made the coffee-grinder-in-the-throat sound, a sound he might make at misbehaving toddlers, if he’d had kids. Valerie, who’d been leaning against a cardboard-box version of the Nostromo, uncrossed her thin arms, and rolled her differently colored eyelashes in sympathy.

“Focus, Joe.” She applied some extra “action grime” charcoal make up with a Q-Tip to Joe’s cheek with the grace of a calligraphy artist polishing a turd, giving Joe’s soon to be eviscerated character whatever believability hand-up she could. Darren and Valerie had for a time been sort of going out, as much as two young Artists can be said to be dating. Most of the time it felt more like a co-invasion: exotic entities that happen to be tentatively occupying each other’s space, exchanging culture, sometimes bodily fluids.

“Action,” no zing in it. Darren had given up on the pretentious hand motions as well by that point. The big-auteur-idea filmmaking session had evaporated down to complete left brain level, pure technicality of just getting the damn thing to work.

Two more takes, a few hundred more gigs of less than award winning performance. Darren tried rubbing the fail of it all from his eyes, failed, “I think I need a smoke. Ok one more, what the hell, right?” Valerie crossed to the other side of the set, getting a bit closer to the radioactive expanse of the green screen.
“Watch the fill lights, Vic, don’t want to have to hand-strain Herr protagonist out of the footage. Ok, let’s go. Action.”

For the thirty-seventh time, Joe clutched his space marine-black spray painted AR-15 airsoft rifle like a teddy bear, erratically turning left and right.
“Sergeant? Sarge? Where the fuck is everyone?” Darren zoomed the camera in like the extending, saliva-drizzling tongue of some Bosch nightmare creature. Joe whipped around on the count of five. Counting out fucking loud. Fix it in post.

Darren awaited Joe’s look of stoned bedazzlement that was supposed to pass for raw deep-space horror. That retarded fucking “O” of the lips. That black hole. That zero that was Darren’s chance of making it into a film festival. That gaping perforation in the hull of this film that threatened to suck the cargo and the crew out, exhale it away like so much pot smoke into the vast emptiness of weed-space. Where no one can hear you scream but the blurry UFOs and little green men that inhabit that smoky void in the American consciousness.
Which was why Darren was sure there was a problem with the LCD screen when he saw something approximating real fear or at least shock happen on Joe’s face. Darren confirmed it with his own eyes then swallowed the exclamation of relief crawling up his throat. Sweat beaded on his lip as he willed his body to perfect stillness, the red eyed recording camera like a rare, infinitely valuable, and incredibly dangerous species.

“…And cut, holy Chris Cunningham’s nipples, cut!” Darren leapt several feet into the air, nearly knocking the tripod over.

“Mmm, nipples…” Joe seemed stuck in the scene, his eyeballs showing ivory all around, jaw snapped off its hinges or something.

“Nipples, for the win.” Darren, completely absorbed by Joe’s recent abduction by skill, turned in time to catch Valerie’s nipples; wine colored Martians perched atop modest twin arcologies on the lunar white surface. “Thank me by kindly driving us to the nearest Subway, I’m starving,” she pulled her clever-ass t-shirt down and gathered her make up paraphernalia back into a handbag made out of a piece of jump rope and stitched velvet.

“What- The fuck! Val, was that entirely necessary?” Darren mentally punched himself as question sputtered past his tongue, he could almost taste the stupid. Why did he say that? Joe was already packing green nuggets into his porto-pipe, pulling out a lighter, holding the weed out like an offering. A ritual welcome from weed-space. We come in peace. Darren ignored it, turned back to Valerie.

“Hey, ‘that’s a wrap’, right? Get over it, Queen Victoria.” She rolled her eyes and hop-tripped her way across cardboard props, a wind machine, and puddled costumes littering the floor.

“Yeah. Come on Joe, let’s go. Oh, good work there, man. Stellar.” Darren began unscrewing the camera so they could review the footage over dinner, but stopped halfway through. He told himself that it would just be too much ponderous trouble to bring it, but somewhere he knew that he didn’t really want to see the scene again. Afraid, even.

Cramming That Graham

Pulled an all-nighter *making* schoolwork. Must be the Twilite Zone. My head certainly feels how a theremin orchestra sounds.

Zero History

Zero History, a novel in progress, by William Gibson.

I like the title a lot. Some reflection:

"The future" is and always was a map of a fake territory. It is entertainment. However, without any map at all we become paralyzed, so even a fake map can provide initial direction, even if it is rarely ultimately the right direction. Thus "futures" survive. Willy Lee rockets boldly charted out intergalactic federation before a nation came together and reached upwards. Cyberjockeys first jacked across a new world's neon constellations, created new myths to sail by, tentative models to take to the money people. The future promised Star Wars, I-Robots, and Cybertopia - we got decaying red stars, automation, and Google.

But now we are seduced by ever sexier futures and dwindling soundbite-sized "now", all whilst history is regooded -- the signified is stripped from signifiers, packed into a brochure and McDonaldized. We become blind to history and its non-linearity. Thus our pattern seeking mind fabricates theories, draws whatever lines it can on the last two data points: this quarter's report, this season's pants, this election cycle's buzz issue, the last 140 characters, today's housing price index.

The future is fake, a con, a Ponzi scheme -- but when there is zero history, it's the only game in town.

Minobot 2

This is day three since the end of the second trip esoterically and affectionately referred to as "Minobot 2: Hawaii". More accurately, it is +55 hours 32 minutes since my girlfriend's return landing on the still glacial but gradually thawing Thoth-scape of planet Canada. Her soul still reeling in along the Pacific Ocean's pineapple express, along with half a flash disk's worth of jpeg-coded memories from my old Nikon. The smell of wet hair. The smile of sea salt pinkened eyes just before a long kiss. The full mammalian heat of another cocooned in bed, time counted not in precise ticking LEDs at the corner of a screen but passing in the flowing rhythm of breaths, moist verses of love tingling the ear punctuated by the call-response chorus of shared ecstasy cascading through channels that were dead for years. Ambient tides of consciousness drawn along the continuum of brilliant sunset and glimmering moonlight.

But each time, when you're in a long distance relationship there's something that doesn't come back. That doesn't return once the haze of jet lag, cultural and climatorial dissonance clears, that you can't beam across on Facebook or Flickr, that isn't misplaced on a lamp stand and Fed Exed up a week later. We'd known each other passingly, the occasional IM chat, for about two years on an online message board, and have been together (as digitally possible) for the past ten months and it has been truly wonderful. But as profoundly miraculous and earth-shifting things like Skype video chat and online communities are for potential connections and the world as a whole, there are some things that get lost in the translation to those mediums. Unfortunately, neither of us are quite in the position to immigrate just yet, however we are working on it. Each time we meat it's like that brief and Japanesely evanescent moment in Benjamin Button when Benjamin and Daisy are exactly the same age. It's a week of deeply analog and intense togetherness to make up for so many months of physical absence, a series of honeymoons. And this time has been particularly amazing, and not just because it was in Hawaii. But then it always ends, and every time the tear hurts more, this trough being very tough for both of us. Reverting back to my old patterns, everything felt strange and empty. The internet and books seemed dull and distant, even food seemed not to taste as good. Neither of us had spent more than an hour in front of a screen the whole time and our eyes and necks hurt, as though that extended nervous system for navigating the world of text, image and Youtube had to be re-evolved. Her missingness in my bed is almost palpable now, without all those little nuances of the physical, the warm rhythm of presence. It has gradually improved though, especially since we are still audio and visually connected.

We're counting back down to launch again, Minobot 3 in T-minus approximately five months, this time my turn to fly. But soon we'll make the full and permanent relationship evolution to meatspace.

GR's fantastic Minobot 2 photoset






Also, apologies dear readers, I forgot to the post this entry, from the first day.

Minobot 2 hath commencethed, two hours British Columbia jet lag and GR is playing circadian tag in the Green Room next to my 486 motherboard Death Star sets, delayed soul tractor beaming in along transistor valleys.

A relatively relaxed day. We were all over each other at the airport, then came back to the labyrinth, set her stuff down, had a brief nap (among other things), then took a scenic tour through downtown Honolulu to my second favorite secret bodysurfing spot, *Point Panic. (Obama's is also my #1 favorite but it was kinda a bit too scenic a drive for today (30 mi), but we'll get there) Point Panic also happens to be the Mecca of Japanese tourist-wedding photography (perhaps taking its name from the sweaty oriental grooms). The location of Panic provides the perfect photogenic parallax of a happy couple's entwined form against a postcard-sized Diamond Head and Waikiki. (Funnily enough, the exquisite angle is partially a result of Point Panic being the largest landfill, extending the beach some half-mile out to sea, for a panoramic view of south Oahu.)

Surf was somewhat up, but unfortunately, the onshore breeze was tearing down the perfect 2-4 sinusoidal swells into hairy webs of white noise. So, I opted to sit with GR at the edge of the boulder-wall, out of the frame of any marital photography, and just take in the tropical ocean and sun with her. Quite literally at times, the onshore breeze was a bath of fresh sea salt as the waves burst upon the rocks. Very pleasant.

We stopped at Zippy's a must-eat for the world-famous chili, Portuguese bean soup, and a taste of the unique Hawaiian 'mix-plate' cuisine style. (I also used to wear the Zippy's chili bucket on my head while ripping on the guitar with Junk magic at Chinatown art-bars, GR remembered.)

Back at base we had Meet The Parents 2, which went over quite well despite a little anxiety initially about the mom-girlfriend talk. (My parents both like GR, you are totally in the green hun! My sister too of course. Smile ) Exchanging of gifts, the Canadian 'Sasquatch Droppings' chocolates were a hit, introductory chatting. We all even all got to kick out the plastic jams on the new national sport: Guitar Hero World Tour. I of course performed the opening ceremonies with a bit of Dragonforce, then mom, dad, sis, and GR all joined the band. GR's got an amazing voice, rocked the house with the Fleetwood Mac. Dad would've taken us back to Hotel California if it didn't require so many shots, instead telling it like is with Steely Dan's 'Do It Again' (me on virtual sitar). Games, anthems, and bonding, good times.

I am amazingly happy GR is here and it still hasn't quite sunk in yet.

Video Star

Been a while since I rockstared the 'Tube, so finally cut my tender little fingertips on rust-caked strings and my vocal chords on cherubically high-range singing. Here I am, in all my unplugged, videogenic glory. X)

Video Star

Video Star (just the song, higher quality)

***

turn down that lighting
put on that shade of lipstick
show me the scene you've been hiding
imagining that im the screen that you kiss

lights and cameras
it's the last take we've got

cause you're my
video video star
video video star
cause there's
no one else could play your part
no there's no one else could play my heart

i've collected all of your posters
hung them up on my iphone wall
the rising star at the top of my myspace
my world is your stage when your webcams on

lights and cameras
it's the last take we've got

cause you're my
video video star
video video star
cause there's
no one else could play your part
no there's no one else could play my heart

we'll make up our own script
we'll frame every moment
put it for all the world to see

magazine covers
ecelebrity lovers
through the looking glass we'll be

and when it's all over
the credits are rolling
we'll make the documentary

yeah we're all stars
yeah we're all stars

***

Also got an e-mail from the digital media teacher job, looks like I'm going to be starting training on Friday!

Sprawl Fight Shorts

Sprawl fight shorts