BY OYL MILLER

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities, contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and change, who dropped out in favor of following a creative muse, publishing zines and obscene artworks on the windows of the internet, who cowered in unshaven rooms, in ironic superman underwear burning their money in wastebaskets from the 1980s and listening to Nirvana through paper thin walls, who got busted in their grungy beards riding the Metro through Shinjuku station, who ate digital in painted hotels or drank Elmer’s glue in secret alleyways, death or purgatoried their torsos with tattoos taking the place of dreams, that turned into nightmares, because there are no dreams in the New Immediacy, incomparably blind to reality, inventing the new reality, through hollow creations fed through illuminated screens. Screens of shuttering tag clouds and image thumbnails lightning in the mind surfing towards Boards of Canada and Guevara, illuminating all the frozen matrices of time between, megabyted solidities of borders and yesterday’s backyard wiffleball dawns, downloaded drunkenness over rooftops, digital storefronts of flickering flash, a sun and moon of programming joyrides sending vibrations to mobile devices set on manner mode during twittering wintering dusks of Peduca, ashtray rantings and coffee stains that hid the mind, who bound themselves to wireless devices for an endless ride of opiated information from CNN.com and Google on sugary highs until the noise of modems and fax machines brought them down shuddering, with limited and vulgar verbiage to comment threads, battered bleak of shared brain devoid of brilliance in the drear light of a monitor, who sank all night in interface’s light of Pabst floated out and sat through the stale sake afternoon in desolate pizza parlors, listening to the crack of doom on separate nuclear iPods, who texted continuously 140 characters at a time from park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge lost battalion of platonic laconic self proclaimed journalists committed to a revolution of information, jumping down the stoops off of R&B album covers out of the late 1980s, tweeting their screaming vomiting whispering facts and advices and anecdotes of lunchtime sandwiches and cat antics on couches with eyeballs following and shockwaves of analytics and of authority and finding your passion and other jargon, whole intellects underscored and wiped clean in the total recall 24/7 365 assault all under the gaze of once brilliant eyes.

http://www.internetpolyglot.com/

Hirst Books is going to publish my Anthony Ainley biography!
…now I just have to WRITE it!

Lately I’ve been reading “Love Me” by Garrison Keillor, and luxuriating in e very word of it. About a Midwest writer who moves to New York, away from his modest home, his amenable marriage, to discover what happiness really is, and all the affairs he has in the meantime. Not a particularly happy book, but not actually sad, either. Keillor has a particular way of telling a story that just is. It’s personable and personal, vague and incredibly specific, and even if he tells a real story, touches on a gritty subject, he’s always kind, deeply and truly gentle to his readers, and for the most part to his characters too. I really appreciate that.

“For reasons mostly having to do with arrogance and stupidity, young writers waste years attempting to impersonate goodness and inner peace. Bad move. What you really want to write about is greed, anger, pillage, thievery, corruption, eye gouging, meanness, shameless grovelling, that sort of thing. And lust. Always lust.”

Fantastically detailed book art from the Anagram Bookshop.

I would actually like to be made into a book when I die, and if I am very lucky, my friends will write their memories in it.  The leather is obvious, and what’s left can be turned into graphite pencils — there’s often quite a lot left after a cremation that has to be ground up, instead, I think whatever isn’t burnt should be stored in a reliquary like this.  Seriously, I think it’s just about the most awesome tribute I can think of.

Anyway, this talk is part of The Actors Gang WTF?! Festival.  WTF?! because they’re pressing on with a heavy schedule despite the fact that most theaters have seriously cut back, because it’s cheaper to do nothing.  In Tim Robbins’ words, “We’re not very good at doing nothing.”  So they’re doing more than ever before.  I support that sort of thinking wholeheartedly… and if Gore Vidal is involved, so much the better.

A lot of their events are free or “give what you can” and the rest are $10-$15.   Excellent.

There’s more at Jim Hines blog.