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.

Richard and crew took lots of fun photos at the Fairbanks event this last weekend!

That isn’t to say that there’s not an art in knowing when and how to ask, but not many people just volunteer to be a part of your project, so it’s important to ask — and to accept a “no” gracefully and with good charm.

“In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes.” The Guardian

Hunter and Sophie, two more of my favorite things.  <3

Easter’s coming up, and I know some of you love the holiday, and quite a few more of you love the chocolate, so!  Dyeing eggs was always my favorite thing about Easter, even more than trying to find them the next morning.

If your local stores haven’t been inundated with dye packs, here’s handy instructions on how to dye eggs using natural dyes.  If you feel like going the full distance, here’s instructions on how to make real chocolate filled eggs.  These always fascinated me as a kid, they’re much easier to make than you might imagine, and they’re so much fun to crack open, especially when they have a surprise inside!

Or, if you’re a lazy, discount chocolate muncher like me, pick up some Peeps at the store, along with chocolate bars and graham crackers, and make S’meeps!  They’re delicious and slightly subversive, just the way I like my post-holiday candy.  You can also microwave them — just be careful, the Peeps don’t actually lose shape when they’re heated, so stick to about 15-20 seconds and let them cool first, lest you end up with a burned finger / Peep bite!

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.”