...50,642 to be exact. I am not saying they are good, but they are done, for now. Pending the inevitable revision, here is a very brief rundown of the plot, which is hazy but more or less there.

Shelly is 23, and something of a mystic. She's come to Denver to spread The Warm, her idealized vision of love for all beings. The problem is, Denver doesn't love her back. And downward we go into the plot...

Shelly gets a job working for Dick, a rich fat kid with A.D.D. who employs her as his housekeeper (and jesus christ does he need one) in exchange for room and board. During her first week of work, Dick gets dumped by a girl and almost kills himself, but instead he sends Shelly to the hospital after pissing off a homeless man and failing to protect her from  him. Unfortunately, Shelly is very otherwise comfortable working for Dick, so she attempts to work it out with him. To supplement her income and to have a reason to leave her luxury condo on Denver's ritzy riverfront, she gets a job at an architectural firm called DB Group.

Founded by Mssrs Sergey and Bivens, DB is a visionary firm with a mission to bring imagination and verve to the field of building structures for human use. Sergey is the resident genius, a "mad Russian" with a penchant for big thinking. Lacey is a junior architect, who butts heads with Sergey over plans for something called the "Death Wing", an expansion of an area hospital meant as a celebration of deceased area children. Sergey prefers a monumental approach, Lacey would rather work with the community to bring the desire of the grassroots to fruition. This conflict leads to Lacey leaving the firm, while continuing her own vision for the Death Wing.

Meanwhile, Shelly has fallen for one of DB employee's, an over-serious, purpose-driven receptionist named Billy [yes, that's four characters with names ending in "y", who cares?]. When Lacey splits, Billy leaves with her, while Shelly stays. This puts enumerable tensions on the Billy-Shelly relationship, compounded by the fact that Shelly is hopelessly devoted to serving Dick's every insane whim.

Against all odds, Dick then gets a job with a travel website as a writer doing gonzo-esque travel reviews. Shelly follows these from work and keeps tabs on him via email as he circles the globe. In the meantime, Sergey's plans for the Death Wing reach an apotheosis when he has a near-fatal plane crash, which gives him a vision for an insane schema involving a mile-high skyscraper, airplanes shaped liked vultures, flattened mountains, and something called The World Capital [I swear I'm not making this up, this is what I wrote... it's been a weird month].

Shelly starts feeling guilty for not leaving with Billy and Lacey, who'd become something of a hero to Shelly. She has fights with both of them, and then her self-loathing leads her to picking up a drug problem at the company Christmas Party. With Dick gone and Billy pissed at her, her elder brother Jared decides to move in with her, dragging along his hopelessly provincial fianceé Becky [yes, another "-y" name!], whereupon they hector Shelly for her drug problem and not making more of herself.

At the public presentation of Sergey's Death Wing plans, Lacey shows up drunk and gets in a huge debate with Sergey and Bivens, which leads to Shelly stepping in and taking sides with Lacey. The next day, she is fired. Feeling cold and lonely, she runs back to Billy, but they have another fight and decide to break up. Then she decides to force herself to love him anyways, and they continue.

Meanwhile, Dick returns, and Shelly starts giving him hand and blow jobs. This becomes a full-fledged love affair, which comes to a head [uh, so to speak] when Dick invites Shelly and Billy to NYC for a travel thing, and Shelly starts working as a writer for Dick's website. When they return, it is discovered that Sergey has died of a mysterious illness, and Lacey is back at the helm of DB Group.

To make a long story short, Shelly ends up telling Billy all about Dick, and issues a lengthy speech on Dick's superiority due to the fact that he is so completely addicted to the pleasures of consumerism and pop culture -- unlike Billy, the humorless self-improver -- that he is the avatar of some post-human future, that the only way for Shelly to spread The Warm is by destroying humanity [see the obvious Houellebecq influence?], and Billy is just a douchebag.

And... curtain.

Hey, I didn't say it was good.

Because I am a glutton for punishment, I have immediately started another month-long, 50,000-word writing spree, this one under the auspices of National Novel Writing Month. Join the pod, and rock on!

For the last 5 days I have had Michael Jackson's "Want to Be Startin' Somethin'" stuck in my head. Being as it is the lead-off track of the first pop album I was ever allowed to listen as a child (over and over and over again), it has a deeper resonance than any other jam in the Dancing Salamone repertoire, and hence a greater physical impact on my entire system whenever I hear it. Read: it's the best medicine money can buy. Winter has struck with an early vengeance in Colorado, and it seems the only way to keep cold is by shaking uncontrollabl. The people here are cold as well, and seem immune only to smiling at strangers or engaging in conversation. Were you one to assess your social value based on how well others reflected their impressions of you, you'd be at pains to think that anyone gave a shit about you. Which would be important, if you weren't dancing to Michael Jackson. Possessing one of the most viral rhythms known to R&B of the early 80s, "Startin' Somethin'" is less of a cultural artifact and more of a force of nature, which fills your entire body with the overplayed bassline and the call-n-response "Yeah Yeahs!" which dot the refrains. "The pain is thunder", in life and in love, but one need not let it affect one's core: that can be possessed by the unholiest of rhythmic, funktastic ghosts, which chase the blues away with a Blues more powerful. All of which is to say: with a groove this ferocious dripping from your brain and into your pelvis like bursts of plasmic rocket fuel, you just don't give a fuck. Let the cold world exist; your syncopated heart will beat with or without it.

It is the hardest thing in the world sometimes to do what you do best. There is so much shopping and cleaning and impulsive activity to be done (have you seen the Internet lately?) that the forces of resistance seem all but indomitable. This new novel is going in some very odd and weird directions, and it is going to take all of my power and enthusiasm to keep the monstrous wa/onderings of my imagination in check to form some sort of coherent Point or Story. As such, I'd just like to thank each and every one of my supporters for their time and effort in giving me the encouragement to keep going with this quixotic activity when the rest of the world is telling me to be a lawyer or an art director or an offshore oil rigger and to get on with the business of sending children to college.

You know who you are, and thanks.

Keep tabs here.

Gwen, myself, and Pashmina chillin' at the Appaloose Grill in Denver following Ritter's ascendency to the square state gubanatorial throne. (Thanks G for letting me steal your photo.)

don't ask, don't fucking ask:

As the night wore on, the little trail beneath the squirt lane became paved, and I saw the easternmost trenchs of WestmiNNNster glowing from their beds in the very old plains. I thought back to the ancient times, when this was just a simple grass prairie dotted with men in leather, working with wood and steel implements, begging the ground to yield but a morsel. Those same men today were killing each other for a handjob, liberating deathdrones from riverbed prisons, hijacking spacedockers and spitting on the sun with their enormous spitships. When the sun did flicker—and it was happening a lot lately—we instinctively all looked up, and cursed the unsupervised humans who’d waylaid it. Each flicker meant another 10 weeks of death and disease, and frizzled electronic circuits, messed-up navigation systems.

They were terrorists, plain and simple.

I came to the lip of a trench and looked within. It was a standard pinkneck colony, just like the ones back in Pennsylvania and Newfoundland. The cubicles were designed in Hipster Chic 27-A, an ancient medley of Art Deco and Superpixel forms, and the whole thing was lit from within by a commissioned clan of glow wrays who swam in between the cubicles in a  never-ending habitrail of transluscent walls and floorpanels. To live in one of these places was something like sharing bunkbeds in a coral reef, albeit your neighbors would hardly acknowledge your existence, so inured were they to present experience after working 40-, 50-, and 70- hour shifts for the Wonder Rich floating somewhere above.

I looked to the sky now, looking for the faint shivering outlines of an Observation Centre, a Wonder Deck, or Orbiting Pussy Patio, but saw none. I felt sad for my Asian fans. This trench was not interesting enough even for a middling Wonder Rich to build his invisible domicile on top of: so dreary was the existence of the residents within that even in their acute Neo Rich sufferings, even in their hopeless gazes and quests for something greater, they were found unbelievably boring. It was a perfect place to have a baby.

This is where we are on 11.9.06. By the way, this dude is fucking amazing. Go see him if he plays near you.

I am absolutely split down the middle on this Borat movie. On the one hand, it is fucking hilarious, funnier even than the best of Christopher Guest or, yes, Dumb and Dumber
(fuck you if you don't agree– that movie is the only saving grace of Jim Carrey's otherwise regrettable career). On the other hand, it is deeply, disturbingly racist towards Eastern Europeans, Muslims, and the “-stan” nations. If this is meant to be an "exploration and exposure of race", as some have contended, then it is at the expense of exacerbating those tensions. Even worse, the Borat character himself is juvenile and two-dimensional, fit for little more than a Saturday morning cartoon show on a xenophobic pirate television network, and little else.

You can equivocate all you want, but when it comes down to it, Sasha Baron Cohen is pulling an Al Jolson with his insulting, minstrel-sy depiction of a hapless, naive individual from a Third World country. This is Tom Green in blackface, plain and simple. The first ten minutes, when we are given a tour of Borat's home village (which is supposedly intended as a good-natured portrait of a National Geographic-esque locale, but is actually a cruel, heartless mockery), are unbearable. The rest of it, when Cohen turns his unrelenting gaze at the United States, is more nuanced, using Borat as an unbeatable foil to expose our nation's deepest contradictions. Does that make up for the ugly stereotype of a Kazakistani nincompoop? I ain't sure.

Yes, the movie is funny, easily one of the funniest I've ever seen. But does the fact that something is “very funny” preclude it from an ethical responsibility to the world community? Can we forgive someone his anti-social depravaties if he makes us laugh?  Can obscure Eastern Europeans be made into Uncle Toms and Mammeys just the same as American blacks were decades beforehand without similar moral qualms and repercussions? Are you kidding?!?!

Laughter feels good, but it is also easy, if not cheap. It is easy to laugh with your buddies at work–it is much harder to developed a nuanced, political viewpoint which sees the backwards ways of the underdeveloped world without being driven to parading them on the PoMo world stage for hipster white kids to feel good about themselves (I say this, of course, as a hipster whitey myself). It is the old battle between body and mind, between animalian hedonism versus cerebral cosmopolitanism… and I'm not sure we can have both.

The Cambridge-educated Cohen could have easily developed a more fictionalized, groundless character from an absolutely foreign location (i.e. outer space, or a deep-sea colony) to act as a better foil for the communal experiences of his live world pranks (the Pentacostal church, the rodeo, the southern dinner party), but he chose Borat, a doofus in the 21st-century blackface of the Arab mustache and ulullating machismo. He could have played a more extreme version of himself and exposed the same amount of insanity in American culture without hanging one of our global unfortunates up by their underpants.

But he didn't… and that's the biggest insult of all.

broke 20,000 today already. more:

I thought what it must have been like for my grandmother on those rare occasions when I looked up from my play exploits and acknowledged that there was a real person somewhere in that nexus of wool and camphor and moaning and platitudes. Her lipstick was forever unaligned with the real pink contours of her face, and her glasses were made of a crude polycarbon resin she’d seen in a CMYK-printed paper ad, but there was the quietest, faintest flicker of love and intelligence in that defeated, floating husk of old-fashioned biomechanical life, a flicker we’d all but lost somewhere in our transitions and improvements and augmentations. It was some product of her native constitution, the faint afterglow the homo sapien gave off in spite of itself; when it was wasn’t raping and pillaging and whining and moaning, it was tasting something that almost smacked and felt of love.

Call it the default middle-brow: chilean wine and N+1 Magazine (high brow) and South Park reruns (duh, low) courtesy of Allsp.com. It's been a long week; some Saturdays are best spent on solo projects =)

This is my grandfather, age 96 (soon to be 97). He is a master calligrapher, book designer, mapmaker, pipe smoker, and Catholic progressive who lives life at 100 miles an hour, often more so. That, to me, is a hero.

Huge debate going on in the comments section of the Borat post, check it out...

So I finally broke down today and went to see The Departed after my improv class was cancelled for the 87th time in a row. All I gotta say is... hey, rich italian director guy: can you please just end your career with a biopic on the history of connolis or something? Must you treat us, year after year, to this and that grim revelation of the tragic nature of reality? I mean, come on, another heartbreaking web of deception, capped by a [spoiler alert!] orgy of bloodshed to release the tension of two and a half hours of thick Boston accents and grown men in leather coats text-messaging each other!?!?

Ok, the text-messaging was a first. In fact, the whole movie hinges on the use of text messages. Jack Nicholson's mob boss has a mole (played by Matt Damon, a master of Alpha Male prickery) on the inside of the Massachusetts State Police Department , while in turn he is being spied upon by Leonardo DiCaprio's undercover state trooper, who reports to Martin Sheen's police captain. Given the tight, clandestine nature of their cat and mouse games, the only way the double agents can get any information back to their superiors is via the silent use of texting.

This, in other words, is a movie that could not have been made ten, let alone five years ago, which marks it as one of the most avant-garde creations of Scorcese's career. And that's not even counting the masterful use of Mark Wahlberg [HUGE spoiler alert], the jilted ex cop who exacts a final revenge on the Villains of the SMS.

Go see it, that's all I'm saying.

Quick: someone come up with an earth-friendly alternative to jet fuel, so I can rant and rave about things like this without feeling guilty...

Posthuman prediction: we tweak our lungs at the genetic level to get by on smog and jetwash. Just a thought. (And need we rave more over the beauty of sunsets across polluted horizons?).

Yeah yeah, 30k words. Volume is not the problem for me, coherence and consistency is. Latest excerpt (wherein the protagonist discourses on posthumanism):

They say that no augmentation will carry the sweat-stain of those who possessed said organs before they were received by you, but this is a patent falsehood: each self-surgery leads to a 2-3 week round of nightmares as the new part is integrated and the very faint muscle memories of that item are fed into the mainline brain system [and no I had not had a brain replacement, but we all new there were those who had]. These “compound sensations” serve to cause disequilibrium for an additional month as the self adjusts to the new realities and microbalances of organelle chemistry and everything else. Don’t ask me much about the science of it all, that’s all I know.

"How do you know when you need a new organ?"

When it falls off.

"And how often is that?"

Have you lived in the posthumous world?

Make no mistake: ours is a violent era. With the acceptance of augmentation came a new tolerance for the grosser threats to life and limb: anything short of murder was considered a misdemeanor, and murder itself was only a minor felony given the chances most of us had for re-commission (depending on money or time, whichever came first). Couple this new corporal callousness with the increasing speeds and shifts and changes—circulation transport fly-floating every which way, new buildings spawning and emerging and declining, the odd means by which we entertained itself, the increasing literalness of the cannibalistic Rich, concomitant with the consistent prevalence of old school dirt-and-blood-eating super humans of the lower regions (feral beasts all of them) -- and we’ve ourselves a recipe for continual disaster. Which is fine. We are a nation of corporal individuals continually on the mend, trading and downloading and recreating and offloading needed and not-needed parts alike.

Last night I took a break to see acclaimed Michigan noise band Wolf Eyes
play a set in Denver. While they look like speedmetal freaks, what actually emits from their stage of open suitcases and no drum set is something a bit like John Zorn as played by a trio of Iraqi insurgents: all explosions and tortured mutilations and screamed echoing through nowhere... and a saxophone. The first 20 minutes were sublime: a tense, droning, rattling clatter (with all of the stage lights out) which found deep tectonic rhythms before violating them with screaming blasts of feedback. Pro-noise hyperbole, of course, is its own genre of rock criticism, and I'll spare you any further description of what can only be experience firsthand.

I'll leave it to Pitchfork's Brian Howe to describe the feel of an actual Wolf Eyes audience (who would all be very amused to discover that there is an actual Mothers Against Noise activist group):

"[T]here's a social element of being seen "getting" noise; having a sensibility rarified enough to really "feel" the sound. This is expressed through an unselfconscious-looking mastery of a repertoire of gestures: The arduously raised and then triumphantly shaken fist, for example, seems to be a common way to signal that one has caught a tide of dark euphoria. It's impossible to say, even for oneself, how much of this is genuine and how much is show. But this superficial emulsion is the byproduct of a genuine search-- we go to rock shows for fun, but we go to noise shows looking for something."

... is BLDG BLOG, a collection of daily porn for an unapolgetic infrastructuralist and armchair architecture critic like myself. At least check it out for the photos!

This is a zine made for yours truly, the Austin-based SPACE SQUID, a cheeky blend of sex and science fiction that would make Samuel R. Delaney proud. In fact, I like it so much I've contributed a story for Issue #3 (one dollar yo!), something perverse about folks having sex with the aid of nanotechnology. Buy and enjoy...

I know not how old I am, nor do I know the precise age of Leroy. Each augmentation creates a scattering of the sense of self, each new addition makes it harder and harder to trust – let alone FIND – one’s intuition. I was not sure how or why I loved him, but it seemed to be a pattern in the making for some time. Nor was I precisely sure who or what he was: like myself, like so many others, there was no precise discrete singular consistent individual that could be called Leroy: if an entirely new person arrived to take his place while I slept, I would have never known. I used the frame “Leroy” because names were such quaint, beautiful things, and SJHAGHYABEIINNSMM was too hard to pronounce out loud. At any rate, I knew his web location, I knew his mind’s storage spaces on the Internet; at the very least, these I could commune with.

Thanks are due to everyone who's been reading this blog and has supported my work in word, deed, or silent appreciation. Thanks. I'll keep going now...

TV, beer, coffee, and writing: what I did the day after Thanksgiving. Happy stuff:

Look at this piece of wannabe, historicist, pseudo-Baroque CRAP. It looms just east of my own apartment building, and is the last stupid thing I see before retiring to my domecile each night. It's bad enough that it's another condominium wrought with cement and anti-modernist decor, but what's worse is they've PAINTED THE MORTAR BETWEEN THE BRICKS RED. Are you kidding? Did Frank Lloyd Wright not exist? Grrr.

Vote with your dollars people.

Yup.

Well, this was certainly not what I was expecting to come back to work today for...

No surprises for me here....

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

26 hours left and counting. I am down by 3000 words-- wish me luck!! Latest excerpt:

Jesus could not have predicted this. Buddha could not have predicted this. Hell, EINSTEIN could not have predicted this, this… mess. This ceaseless world mess. This chaotic eddy of existence, swirling in a million directions at once in the fetid tidepools of posthumous fabrications run queerly amok.

One cannot move much: the roar of life is too violent. Things—limbs, trees trunks, eye sockets and souls—are sliced off; the hurricane of occurrence is littered with chopped off bits of what were formerly people, trees, coherent organisms and life. This razorblade tornado, this living, jet-engined necrosis, this is the world we’ve inherited: a most exciting time to be alive, if such a thing were possible.

We each exist in a small round cubicle which hovers, dips, dives, and rounds bends in this ceaseless swirl of things going somewhere. And make no mistake: everything is going somewhere. The Amazon.com era was but a dim parody of this present state of constant production and consumption at every node of the exploding spiral network vomit which is our planet. Atmosphere? Spatial location? These barely signify any extant reality: I can’t – no one can – remember a time when things held still, where relationships were known, where boundaries were held. At 5 o’clock I could be 55 feet above what was once Omaha, at 5:01 I could be miles below the Caspian sea, held in place by a long streaming train of BananaFish belts or MephaMaggroMoocha game consoles or books by the controversial Alan Paulson Allan.

Today I typed my last of the 50,000 words for this month (50,172 total). That 50,000th word? "Worked". How appropriate. Uh, and in other news, I got layed off by Integral Institute. Looking for a designer? Let me know.