So believe it or not, four years now and I'm still a heavy daily habituae of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" time-management system, originally a business idea that has grown into a quasi-religious movement among the Web 2.0 set, precisely because it works so incredibly well. And out of all the different ways one can work the system, I use the simplest and cheapest possible, nothing more than a paper notebook, a pen, and the calendar function on my Palm Treo; and as I was reminded tonight as I get set to finish yet another double-page spread of one of my action lists, buried inside my latest Moleskine, I'm also one of the messier GTDers out there, and that every time I post a photo of one of my action lists at Flickr I always get dozens of alarmist comments from fastidious workers of the system, who carry around a whole series of colored markers with them, and will spend an entire evening at the beginning of each notebook hand-inking rules and lines on each page, etc etc. The whole reason I love GTD so much, as I've said many times, the whole reason it's been so easy to stick with it daily for four years and counting, is precisely because there is no complicated methodology necessary (although can certainly be added if a person wants), no expensive equipment or software needed (although can certainly be added if a person wants), precisely because the whole point is to use the tools as little as possible, in order to spend as much of your day and evening possible actually getting things done. I had tried other time-management sytems before, and gave up on all of them pretty quickly, because they would either require learning a whole new way of doing things, or require a way that's counter-intuitive to how I normally do things, or require buying a bunch of new stuff before any of it would work, or require a bunch of prep work before any of it would work. I love GTD so much because it requires none of these things; literally, all you need is a one-dollar tablet at the neighborhood drugstore and a ballpoint pen to be on your way, everything else literally being supplemental, once you truly understand how the system works.

Anyway, since I'm about to close out this two-page spread soon, I thought I'd snap a photo and post it online, for all the more anal-retentive GTDers to cringe and groan at. Look at it! LOOK AT IT! Didi mau!

I've been spending some time in the last two weeks thinking about all this, about why I seem to be responding to the Beijing Games in such a passionate way, and I realized that it's actually for a whole number of small yet fascinating reasons; and since tomorrow's actually the close of this year's Games, I thought it was time for me to sit down and finally write about it all, because I imagine that a lot of other people are going through the same experience as me this particular year. For example, one of the biggest things for me is what I was mentioning in my last update here; these are the first Olympics I've ever watched on a high-definition television, something that's also the case with tens of millions of other Americans this particular year, because of the US's broadcast-television industry finally switching over to a digital format in just five months from now. And man, what a difference HD makes, I'm fuckin' telling ya! I imagine this is just still the newness of it all, of course, of just the stunning jump in quality that is made between standard-def analog and high-def digital television; but for right now in my life, I have to admit that I'm a bit of an HD junkie, and will watch just about anything in that format that any schmuck wants to pump into my home. (Why, just ask me how addicted I am to the local PBS station's 24-hour all-HD digital channel these days, even when it's just crap like volcano documentaries and sixty minutes of "Look! Pretty flowers!")

There's something simply unreal about watching the Olympics in high-def, like perhaps a science-fiction novel has sprung to life in front of my eyes and my brain simply refuses to accept what it's looking at; it's unreal to sit a couple of feet away from my monitor, realize that the bright and colorful events that I am watching are happening live as we speak, halfway across the planet, that I can see the individual hairs on athletes' arms, see the individual faces of the crowd when displaying a sweeping view of thousands of them. I know this sounds silly, but I keep imagining that I could simply step through the screen like a bad fantastical movie; I keep pushing my fingers against the plasma screen, in fact, wondering each time why my hand doesn't just pass through and suddenly show up on one of the several thousand expensive NBC high-def digital cameras they currently have over there.

Oh, and speaking of which, did you know that NBC has several thousand expensive high-def digital cameras over in Beijing right now? Because that gets me to the second big reason why I'm so obsessed with the Beijing Games in particular; because believe it or not, NBC is actually filming and broadcasting over 3,100 freaking hours of Olympics coverage this year, every single minute of which can be watched completely for free by any American at the NBC website, online and in a streaming format. ZOW! This is nothing new, of course, NBC's hunger for trying to bring extended coverage of the Games to American homes, in sometimes very forward-thinking and even occasionally outright experimental ways; for example, back during the '92 Games in Barcelona, a bunch of my friends and I actually kicked in to a big pool so that one particularly popular house full of slackers could order NBC's "Triplecast" coverage, basically three pay-per-view stations on cable right when pay-per-view first became technically feasible, where for a mere $170 flat fee you too could suddenly have televised access to hundreds of additional hours of event coverage besides what was being shown on broadcast and cable.

Of course, let's not forget that NBC lost millions on their Barcelona pay-per-view experiment (in fact, some estimate that they might've lost as much as $100 million -- NBC has never officially said); and that's why I applaud them so much for simply sticking all these thousands of hours of coverage up for free at the website this time, because I bet there were a bunch of executives within the company arguing that they should charge an outrageous subscription fee instead, and try their little '92 monetization experiment again to perhaps better results this time. Because that's the important thing to understand about this web coverage, is that a tremendous amount of it has actually been live over the last two weeks; and since Beijing is exactly 12 hours away from New York, this has made live events ironically easy to follow here in America this year, with their evening events happening in our mornings and their morning events in our evenings.

Essentially, it's been letting me watch the Olympics this year in the spirit that I've always wanted to watch the Olympics, in a way that I simply thought I would eventually have to attend an Olympics myself to actually do; that is, being a non-sports guy myself, it's not the actual sports that gets me so excited about the Olympics, not the thrill of waiting to see who won this event or that, of which horse-faced frat-boy swimmer won eight gold medals or whatever the fuck. No, no, I get excited about the Olympics for the same reason Pierre Frédy got excited, the French nobleman who singlehandedly founded the modern Olympic Games in 1894; I get excited because of what the Olympics says about humanity, about what it means symbolically for all of us as a global culture. (And psst, by the way, here's a random Wikipedia fact, that the founding of the modern Olympics is actually a bit more complicated than simply Frédy standing up one day and saying, "Let's put on a show;" turns out that high-minded Victorians had been staging athletic events since the 1850s being trumpeted as "modern Olympics," simply that Frédy was the first to organize a legitimately international committee to run such a thing, and raise a legitimately large amount of international support and money.)

I love the Olympics for the same reason stated in the official Olympic Creed, as defined by the governing international committee: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." Wow, how great, right? That's why I make sure to watch at least some of the Olympics every single time they're held; not to watch a bunch of spoiled Americans who are already pros devour up gold medals so they can add them to their multi-million-dollar Nike endorsements, but to watch the legitimate thrill of amateur athletes compete in pretty much the only event from their sport that actually matters. That's why I'm addicted to all the most obscure events of every Olympics, the archery and the weightlifting and the sculling and all the other stuff that barely ever gets any notice or coverage outside of the Olympics itself; these are the places within the Games where you see people competing purely for the love of the game, purely for the athleticism, purely as the IOC says to simply have an excuse to be there, to participate. This is why I love watching the Games each time they run around; I love watching that badminton player from Uganda win that country's first-ever gold medal, love watching that truck-driving shot-putter become a national hero for exactly one moment of his life.

And speaking of all this, I guess maybe this is the third thing that has led to me becoming so obsessed with this year's Games; that it's not just that NBC has been offering all this supplemental coverage online for free, but that (hallelujah) it's actually been working great as well. And let's face it, this is nothing to sneeze at when I talk about it; I myself, for example, own a crappy little sole-processor Mac Mini, one that's halfway on the road to fatally crashing as it is, so when I say that a Microsoft-powered online streaming video project works great on my stupid little home computer, that's saying something profound indeed. For example, one of the really cool options that has been working perfectly all week for me has been the "four-event" option you're seeing in the screenshot above; believe it or not, that's actually four live events you're seeing in that image, all of them being streamed to me at once, all of them working perfectly on my particular computer, which I was so astounded by I didn't even know where to start when first booting it up. (You can watch the events like this, then, if you want; or you can click on any of them to bring just it up to full-size; or you can click it again to turn it into a full-screen streaming image.)

This has been cool enough, of course, but NBC's online coverage has been a lot more than this; they're not only streaming all these events live, but then recording them and putting up the huge long files online too, so that if you miss an event you can go back and literally watch it in real time, as if you were watching it live. But not just that, but I guess each and every one of the 28 sports being represented at the Olympics this year has its own NBC chief and its own NBC crew; so every single section there has not only live coverage, not only long-term recordings, but daily synopses, a "best-of" video every single day, a plethora of five-minute "storytelling profiles" of that particular sport's stars, full write-ups at the site of that sport's history and rules and official Olympic history, all kinds of fun "behind the scenes" videos (you know, where NBC films the water-polo team all having dinner at a Chinese restaurant), etc etc etc. And it's not only concerning all the sporting events where NBC has bothered to put up professionally edited videos; they also have an entire page there just on non-sports Beijing reports, the Today Show crew running around the city being goofy, breathtaking videos of kites being flown in the Forbidden City, gossipy videos where gymnasts speculate which of them is the messiest over in the dorms of the Olympic Village, just all kinds of cool funny fascinating random things over there, just thousands and thousands and thousands of hours' worth (including, yes, a full digital version of the opening ceremonies, for those who would like to see them again without shelling out for that high-def DVD NBC is currently selling).



And then all this, of course, leads us to the next reason I believe I'm so fascinated this year by the Beijing Games in particular; not just the Games themselves, of course, but the fact that they're in Beijing, in a China that is suddenly and explosively in our global culture right now becoming one of the most fascinating places on the planet. Like many others, I too acknowledge that it's the eastern half of the world that is suddenly gaining a lot more importance in world affairs these days; it's hard to deny anymore, frankly, that China is destined to be a leader and shaper in world affairs over the next ten or twenty years, that it's certainly possible for them to actually have a bigger economy than America's once those twenty years are up (the first time since literally the 1940s that another country on the planet would have a larger economy than the US). Like many Americans these days, I find myself with a real fascination for this utterly mysterious, utterly secretive country, this country that has so deliberately walled itself off from the rest of the world for the last 500 years, an isolationist overreaction to Ghengis Khan that has literally been their state policy ever since; and in fact, I believe you can see these Games as Beijing's official "coming out" party, as this powerful country's first tentative steps into the wide-eyed world of wonder known as global culture.

In fact, I was just talking with a friend of mine the other day about this whole subject -- of whether it's still possible for an Olympics to have the kind of long-term historical impact on a city or country that it used to, which of course is why the modern Olympic Games have grown over the last century from an obscure elitist weekend party into one of the largest organized human gatherings on the planet. My answer, of course, is "yes," and I think you can just point to the Beijing Games for ample proof of this; because the fact of the matter is that I'm walking away at the end of these Games with a much different picture now in my head of what China's all about, versus the picture I had in my head of that country beforehand. I know that that is partly a false image, and that it's partly an artificially manufactured image; I don't deny that, just as I don't deny that there are currently around twenty Americans in Beijing who have simply disappeared over the last two weeks, all of them liberal political activists who most agree have probably been kidnapped by the Chinese police and are being very quietly held in some basement jail cell until exactly the morning after the closing ceremonies.



No, what I'm saying is this -- that in a post-9/11 world, I am trying as an American to get to a place where I don't judge an entire set of people anymore simply by the official actions of their official government. This after all was one of the most profound experiences I had as an American myself when traveling through Europe for the first time, in 2003 and '04; how I had arrived just expecting most random strangers to hate me because of being an American, to just randomly spit on me on sidewalks and the like, of how shocked and surprised and pleased I was that most Europeans were willing to simply accept me at face value. That had a big effect on me, and was a very emotional experience for me as a post-9/11 American to have; and ever since, I've become more and more determined in my own life to be this way too, to try to view people from other countries in simple individual terms, instead of a reflection of the people currently in power wherever they're from. The Beijing Games did a lot, a lot, to support and further this kind of mindset for me; for the first time in my life, it gave me as a random American a look at the average Chinese citizen in a way I've never gotten to see it before. Laughing kids on crowded trains. Jaded hipsters smoking cigarettes and growling in the backgrounds of every stupid tourist shot. Proud, conservative, middle-class shop owners, who you just know are spending their free time making contributions to whatever the Chinese equivalent of "Cute Overload" is.

This has ultimately been the most interesting thing about this year's Games of all for me -- of getting these glimpses into the general Chinese culture, the little moments we see in the background of these official events, all the little great moments captured by amateur Western Flickr members over in Beijing as we speak. This is what's ultimately had me addicted to the Beijing Games in particular, versus for example the Sydney Games in 2000 that I didn't watch that much of; because as incomplete as it is, as politically manipulated as it sometimes is, it's legitimately fascinating to get the small inside look at Chinese culture that these particular Games have afforded us, at a time when all of us in the West are thinking of China more and more and more. Because let's make no mistake, America is generally reacting to these Games with a nervous chuckle and silent bead of sweat trickling down the side of its collective face; a sorta "Ha ha, how great for them, how great that China is doing so well at the Olympics this year, how great that they spent forty billion freaking dollars on their Olympics this year, ha ha, how great they actually have forty billion extra dollars to spend on something like a stupid amateur sporting competition, ha ha, ha ha, oh Jesus Christ are we fucked ha ha, ha ha."

Most Americans won't admit to it, most Americans in fact don't even want to think about it, but that is how we're generally reacting to these Olympics; a certain awe over how well the Chinese have pulled it off, a certain disbelief over just how much goddamn money they spent to pull it off, a certain existential dread over what this says concerning what else China could do these days if they were really determined. The global order is changing, and it's changing rapidly; and how astounding that the Olympics would be held right at this moment right in the epicenter of where most of this global change is happening. How astounding that in 2008, this fruity French elitist Victorian experiment should still be so relevant, still be so game-changing an event in such a truly global way. This is why I keep watching the Olympics every time they're held. This is why I love them so much. And this, I'm convinced, is why I've been so much more into the Beijing Games in particular this year, versus all the others that have happened since I was seven years old, laying in front of the TV in my pajamas on a Saturday night, watching a cutie little oppressed Communist spin her way into gold and history.

The closing ceremonies are tomorrow. Will you be one of the billion people on this planet watching? I will. Hope to see you there.

I am not usually a fan of those time-wasting "create a cartoon avatar of yourself!" web services; I got intrigued, though, after coming across one at FaceYourManga.com, after seeing all the different kinds of portraits people were getting out of it, and how all of those seemed surprisingly sophsticated and unique, as if a cartoonist had actally sat down and sketched the whole thing out by hand. Anyway, I just got done playing with it, and here above is the result -- which as friends of mine here in Chicago can tell you, looks surprisingly similar to me in real life, given that this is just one of those junky kill-an-afternoon kinda free gimmicky places. I encourage you to check it out as well, if you're into that kind of thing.

Ladies and gentlemen, what has to be one of the best still images of a random moment on television the industry has seen in a decade. This is from "Mad Men"s latest episode, "Three Sundays," seconds before the ad agency finds out something shocking about a potential new client (which I'll let remain a secret, for those who haven't watched the episode yet). Combine dozens of such exquisite random visual moments each episode, with what is hands-down the smartest writing on the entirety of television right now, and you have yourself a show that continues to stun and amaze me each week. Sheesh, if it wasn't for "Mad Men," I wouldn't be watching any television at all these days.

Oh, plus, the award this week for best line has to go to junior executive Ken Cosgrove (who, let's not forget, is supposed to be the one who's been published in The Atlantic), while explaining to their boss that the woman he saw with their client the previous night is actually a hooker:

"I have her number, if you're interested." (Sneaky pause.) "I have lots of numbers."

A thought I had yesterday, while in a bad mood...

My generation, the so-called "Generation X," was basically in charge of the culture for around ten years, from approximately Clinton's first inauguration until September 11th. And what did we produce? What did we revere? Augusten Burroughs, grunge music, the politcally-correct movement, poetry slams, and an all-consuming obsession with empty pop-culture from the '70s and '80s -- that's what we produced. That's what we revered. And not only that, but we're directly responsible for all the crazy dark neocon things that happened in the 2000s as well; after all, there'd be no "Girls Gone Wild" (just to cite one good example) if there hadn't been a million whiny passive-aggressive egghead lefties running things right before "Girls Gone Wild," who for some reason thought they had the right to tell millions of other strangers what words they can or cannot say in public anymore. The anti-PC movement, the anti-intellectualism movement, was a direct result of Generation X rubbing political correctness and intellectualism in the faces of everyone around them in the '90s and early 2000s; and that's what directly led to hate porn, two terms of Bushism, the profound dumbing-down of the American television and movie industries. It's Generation X that has produced an entire nation of fat, uneducated children doped up on prescription medication; it's Generation X that has produced an entire nation of teenagers lacking even a basic concept of mature sexuality and relationship skills, an entire nation of teens who believe the search for a romantic partner to be some sort of cruel, profanity-laced, liquor-fueled competition. It's Generation X that is gleefully presiding over the downfall of the United States as a superpower, Generation X that is blindly sticking their noses into yet another celebrity gossip magazine while the US goes through one of its worst moments in its entire history, in fact what might possibly be THE worst moment in its entire history (if you count the official governmental approval of torture to be the lowest point the US could possibly reach, that is).

Generation X is the abortion of the 20th century; we are the bloody afterbirth of the ridiculous house-of-cards known as postmodernism. Our generation was born into shit, and we will die into shit; and in the meanwhile, the ten precious years we were actually put in charge of things, we made the entire situation ten times shittier than it already was. We are the very first generation in the history of America expected to be worse-off than our parents by the time we die; we are the first generation since the Great Depression who won't be able to draw Social Security checks in old age, given that the Baby Boomers are just about to start bankrupting the entire system over the next 25 years. Our entire generation is a fucking joke, a sad sick excuse for a generation that didn't end up doing one single positive or productive thing with its time or energy, the entire ten years it was in charge of the culture; and the sooner that history forgets about my entire generation in general, the sooner it skips right from the Baby Boomers to the Millennials, the better off we'll all goddamn be.

Like I said, I was in a bad mood.

(This entry is cross-posted today at my main personal website as well.)

It's hard to deny anymore that the US is in fact in the middle of another great depression, even when you just look at it from a simple legal definition; the actual definition of the economic term "depression," after all, is simply "a recession that lasts over 18 months," and we're in the middle of a recession that's now lasted for seven years without a break,  getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse at a glacier's pace, like watching slow-motion footage of a grisly trainwreck. For example, like a lot of other places in America, my neighborhood too has had a fast-food place go bankrupt within the last couple of years, and without those land-owners being able to find a single person in all that time willing to buy the space from them; that's literally it you're seeing above, a former Kentucky Fried Chicken about two blocks from where I live, a structure that is becoming more and more decrepid and dangerous with each further month it stands there abandoned. (In fact, this is the big hot new topic among local governments here in America, for you international readers who don't know; all these city councils are now starting to pass a series of tough new laws concerning abandoned buildings, of the minimum safety and security the landowners of those lots are expected to provide those buildings as long as they remain abandoned.)

I was just passing by it earlier today, in fact, while thinking about this interesting article I recently came across, published in The New Republic, that's been getting a lot of attention: in it, the author asserts that American metropolitan areas are now becoming more and more like the European model, that it's now the inner-city cores where the rich, educated and cultured want to live, and the outskirts and suburbs that are considered cheap, tacky, fit only for the poor and homeless and those accepting government handouts. I got to thinking about all this today, while passing this long-term abandoned KFC, and suddenly all at once I envisioned this entire series of possible events that could theoretically happen in the United States over the next twenty years, that would literally turn certain suburbs into post-apocalyptic Mad-Max-style wastelands. (Or maybe not literally that bad, but you'll see what I mean.) It's fairly proposterous, I agree, a series of specific events that would have to happen just so and in just such a way for this situation to come about; my main point, though, is that certainly a lesser version of the same nightmare could definitely happen in reality, and that depending on which direction our country heads after the 2008 election, is either more likely or less likely to actually happen in a lesser but still scary way. Follow me on this...

--As the foreclosure crisis in this country continues, it starts hitting middle-class suburbs hard; for example, entire planned-community subdivisions end up being abandoned, ones peppered with McMansions that had only been created in the '90s to begin with, to serve what was at the time an unending hunger for cheap, showy things that would put a person deeply in debt. Let's not ever forget that, that this is what started all this mess -- a national atmosphere that encouraged and rewarded people going deeply into debt so that they could own big, cheap, showy things. And even worse, some of these sleepy suburban city councils never get around to enacting tough abandoned-structure laws; it means, for example, that banks owning entire subdivisions worth of abandoned buildings are under no obligation to fix broken windows, board up holes, provide lighting or security, replace stop-signs or fix potholes, etc.

--This then makes most of the businesses in that suburb close up too, leading to giant abandoned malls, strip-mall ghettos, etc. Superstore centers where every third retail space is now just a burned-out husk, the remaining businesses such low-end places as bars, liquor stores, currency exchanges, and other ghettoized industries. And with no real way for any of these people to get around either, except for a series of dirty, broken-down, infrequent public busses -- not since the continuing oil crisis made car-ownership obsolete for everyone except the rich.

--Combine this, then, with the geographical inverse going on these days that I'm talking about; that the times when educated, cultured, middle-class people DO have enough money to purchase property, they almost exclusively wish it to be within the inner-city core of that metropolitan area instead, some funky loft a mile from where they work, so they can bicycle everywhere and not even have to own a car in the first place ("Yuck, owning a car, how...fucking suburban"), a clean and green-filled neighborhood full of quirky cool independent shops and cafes and whatnot, with none of the smog or crime or traffic or industrial ugliness that used to chase all the cultured, educated, middle-class people away from the inner-city to begin with. All that stuff is in the suburbs now; it's on the outskirts of the city where you now find the pollution and crime and unending traffic and infinite miles of cheap, ugly buildings and soulless strip malls.

--Combine all that and you can easily imagine what would happen; that these exact half-abandoned suburbs would become the new home for the poor, the homeless, the citizens of the so-called "welfare state," etc. As entire urban areas fill up wall-to-wall with exclusively happy, shiny little middle-class families, all the rest of that city's former citizens keep getting pushed farther and farther out, until they literally end up in these abandoned, burned-out husks of suburban planned communities. It becomes a matter of extreme choices, of picking the lesser of the evils:

*Try a government-subsidized formerly abandoned McMansion, now under the care of that metro area's public-housing agency? Except that the system is so corrupt and poorly funded, you never receive the resources to fix windows, to get electrical outlets to exactly work the right way again? In a neighborhood that's still 60-percent abandoned, so that your children's playlots are these dangerous, rotting, crime-filled 8,000-square-foot five-bedroom husks? With a former central park that used to be maintained with the property taxes of all those happy middle-class McMansion owners, now a trash-filled shantytown full of the mentally derelict who have been abandoned by the System?

*Or sign up for a unit at one of the new Orwellian housing projects being rapidly built out there by well-meaning but misguided do-gooders? The 21st-century equivalent of the cinder-block monstrosities from the inner city that caused so many problems within public housing in the first place? Basically, the equivalent of picking up Cabrini-Green, tripling its size, and planting it on the former site of an abandoned shopping mall in Naperville?

*Or take your chances and simply take over one of these abandoned McMansions or Kentucky Fried Chickens yourself, until you're either jailed or killed or die from a domestic accident or commit suicide out of sheer cosmic exhaustion?

I don't know why, but ALL of this suddenly popped into my mind simultaneously a little earlier, when walking by this abandoned KFC and thinking about this New Republic article; yeah, I know, I don't exactly have the rosiest outlook on life these days, I know, I know. Granted, like I said, this is highly speculative in nature; for a worst-case scenario like this to actually happen, after all, we'd have to start with there being another neocon administration in the White House in 2008, and I just don't think very seriously that that is going to happen (although you never know, I guess). But my point, like I said, is that I do definitely think that smaller versions of what I just described are definitely on the horizon here in the US; for example, there's no doubt in my mind that by ten or fifteen years from now, there will be entire suburban planned communities now abandoned, just a whole set of 100 young couples whose mortgages all came due at the same time, and with not a single one of them being able to make payment. And I do think that such communities are bound to become havens for crime and other sundry activities, an irresistable pull for bored youths, dirty and dangerous and literally like a post-apocalyptic movie at points. I could see that; or I could see an abandoned mall becoming the same thing. I can picture the empty pop-culture structures from my youth becoming a nightmarish metaphor for a hubris-filled America in the future. I can see a cutting-edge novelist from such a background suddenly become a surprise explosive best-seller twenty years from now, precisely from writing a cutting-edge metaphorical horror story exactly concerning what I just described, turning it into "The Big Project That Opened The City Dwellers' Eyes As To What Kind Of Squalid Nightmare The Suburbs Have Become, Since It's Never Talked About On The News And There's Never Any Reason For City Dwellers To Actually Go There."

Okay, enough horror tales for today; off to go write today's review at CCLaP, then to get out and have a drink among cute half-naked girls and try to cheer myself up a little. Jesus.

Hi Def Olympics! Hi Def Olympics! Holy crap, man! Let me be one of the million Americans who finally got an HDTV this year to admit that I've been mesmerized so far, the three days it's been going on, by watching the Olympics from China in high definition; it is like science-fiction, like watching something my brain keeps arguing shouldn't actually exist. Man oh man, talk about Toffleresque futureshock. I love it.

I'm sitting here on a Sunday evening, in fact, celebrating the end finally of one of the shittier weeks I've ever had (or at least in a long, long time -- stolen money, root canal, broken computer monitor, SIGH), celebrating it finally being over by drinking what I've always considered an old-man beer. See, for those who don't know, there's basically two centers in the American Midwest for cheap domestic beer, Milwaukee in the upper region and St. Louis in the lower, and with there being a weird regional rivalry between the two regions over which crappy watery domestic beer will be drank there. (This is very similar, by the way, to the rivalry that exists between the German cities of Cologne and Duesseldorf, I discovered while visiting those cities in 2003, except that their regional beers are of course much better.) Anyway, Miller is from the upper Midwest, the Milwaukee region, and of course since I grew up in St. Louis, I never drank Miller products regularly until moving to Chicago in the '90s, also located here in the upper Midwest (two hours from Milwaukee, six hours from St. Louis).

And in fact, of all the Miller products, I always think of the actual "Miller High Life" flagship beer -- you know, with its never-changed retro label and bottle shape -- as a distinctly old-man kind of beer to drink, the kind you associate (er, I associate) with greased-down hair and horn-rimmed glasses, some leathery-faced retired blue-collar worker smoking Salem cigarettes and having Jim Beam cocktails on special occasions. Tough old-man Industrial-Age beer, probably because this is exactly how my own grandfathers were, both of them former lead miners in southern Missouri, although neither of them were especially much of drinkers. (And if they had been, of course, they'd have been grasping the similarly unchanged retro red labels of Budweiser, being in the lower section of the American Midwest like they were.)

Anyway, I'm digressing, I'm digressing; I'm a little buzzed, on a warm summer night, happy with what's been finally recently been going on with me in the last couple of days. Because I realized, a big part of why I've been so frustrated and unhappy this summer is that my two big main plans for this year, the big new unknown challenging projects -- CCLaP's publishing program and virtual photography gallery, that is -- both had to be unexpectedly put on hiatus earlier this summer, because of the one computer I own with my publishing software on it (not my main computer, a Mac Mini, but my older one, a G3) unexpectedly suffering a fatal crash, and now me no longer owning the two thousand dollars in software I need to actually do CCLaP's publishing program and virtual (Flash-based) photography gallery. And so that has suddenly brought me a summer of feeling like I was treading water; a summer of merely doing my book reviews and the like at the CCLaP site, important to be sure for maintenance purposes, but maintenance work nonetheless. This is the whole reason I decided to open an entire arts center when I did, instead of just a publishing company or art gallery or merchandise company or thinktank or whatnot; I knew that if I was going to devote the next twenty to thirty years of my life to one thing, it'd have to be something constantly presenting new challenges, not something to easily master then spend decades trying to refine. (Yawn. Angry yawn.) And now that I've been spending the summer doing exactly that and nothing else, I've realized that it's been inspiring all these shitty things; crappy feelings, a sense of lethargy, more drug-use than normal, less exercise, less bicycling, less getting out, an unshakable feeling of listlessness, etc etc etc.

So I've realized this week, my life is basically begging for some big new challenging project, that it's time to simply acknowledge that the publishing program and virtual gallery are on long-term hiatus for now, and that I still have a plethora of possible new cool beneficial projects to dive into if I want. Because I do, of course; that's the beautiful thing about CCLaP's plans, is that I always have a couple of new project ideas at any given moment that I could theoretically take on at any time. So I've decided to finally embrace another one of them, as my big new autumn project, to take the place of the time and energy I was going to devote to the publishing and gallery programs; I've decided to finally open up something I think I'm going to call the Chicago Photography Network, or CPN.

Basically, it'd be a combined collection of related simple services, all geared towards the Chicago photography community; most of it, for example, will be based around a simple guide to the community at large and all its various wings (galleries, artists, museums, services, cafes that feature artwork, etc), maintained as a wiki, so that all registered users can add and edit the information found there if they want. Basically, think Wikipedia, except CPN will be less academic and less formal; there will be sections to add customer opinions, multimedia such as audio interviews and video features, a place at each entry to plug new shows, list events, etc etc. Or in other words, imagine an enhanced yellow pages, a separate web-page for every entry, with those artists and venue-owners (or their friends) always having the opportunity to join the community themselves, add more information to an entry, change what's there, fix mistakes without having to wait for a whole chain of communication, etc. And with a search engine, a glossary, a front page that highlights cool things magazine-style, etc.

Since you'll need to join to edit information, then, CPN will be a social network too; members will have profile pages just like Facebook, where they can post their portfolios, link to their personal and professional sites and Flickr accounts and whatever, list their CVs if they want, display their CPN friends and professional contacts, etc. And then this will also be hooked up to an events calendar as well; and again, not just administrators can add events, but any registered user, and hopefully even be able to import events from existing calendars, like maybe a gallery that already maintains one through Google or whatever, and also export the CPN calendar into whatever calendar system the user themselves uses at home. (That's the beauty of the microformat movement, after all, and why I'm a big believer in it.) And then finally, the website will have a big embedded Google map on one of the pages too, showing at once the locations of every venue listed in the network, as well as little embedded maps at the bottom of each individual entry.

The key to all this, of course, is that it's what the tech people call very scalable, the litmus test for all the projects I possibly take on through CCLaP or will in the future; that is, you don't need a optimal or minimum or maximum amount of participants to make it a useful and beneficial thing, but is a project that is literally offering benefits whether one person or a thousand are contributing to it at once. Based on lessons learned the hard way in the past, I don't believe in CCLaP taking on projects that have as a core premise, "This will need X amount of people contributing before it starts becoming really cool;" but at the same time, I don't want to trap myself with a project that only works as a small, intimate experiment, if all that hard work ends up paying off in a big way from an adopter standpoint.

The whole reason this came about at this moment, for example, is because I recently heard from the people who run a new arts-and-entertainment online publication here in Chicago, who are looking to start expanding the amount of coverage they give the photography community here, which like me they agree is under-represented online right now, and would probably respond really well to a group that stood up and sponsored some sort of solid online headquarters for such a citywide community. (And as always, I unfortunately am not in a position to mention this publication's identity until the project is actually up and running, because it's been proven in the past that my online haters will go in and try to actively sabotage those relationships if they find out the details in advance. Sad. Yet. True.) So to start with, it will be just the three of us, the two running that publication and me, quickly filling out the yellow-pages-type information for the several hundred photography galleries and museums found here in Chicago, as well as an events calendar that is as detailed as we can make it. That alone is worth running CPN; this was the original idea, in fact, was simply to get some sort of comprehensive guide to Chicago's photography galleries and museums online, in that it seems that even this doesn't yet exist, at least not in a way that's truly multimedia-friendly and truly useful. And to do it in a way so that people can make changes themselves, so that the three of us aren't constantly bogged down with hundreds of tiny bug fixes and typos.

We're hoping for this most basic stuff to be finished by October 1st, at which point we'll start officially announcing CPN at both our websites, running it permanently in the sidebars of both sites, even maybe throwing a joint party at a local bar for both our readerships, featuring free liquor and swag and whatnot. (Maybe.) It's at that point that we start in with part 2 of the work; basically, they're going to do a fun little video report each week this autumn about one photography venue or another (gallery, cafe, museum, etc), while I will start conducting and posting weekly IM-based interviews with Chicago photographers at the CCLaP site, featuring the chat transcripts with that artist's work mixed in. And then not only will we run this material at our respective websites, but repost it in the "multimedia" sections of those artists' and galleries' entries at CPN, along with making a big point of mentioning this to our respective proprietary audiences at the original entries.

The hope, then, is that this serves as natural advertisements for the network; and that as each of these galleries and cafes and artists are featured, as they mention the interviews and features to their own audiences, those audiences will not only check the features out but also the wiki entries they're designed to promote. And that some of them will stay behind, create an account, fill in more details at the basic entries found there about the galleries and artists that brought them there in the first place, especially if they just happen to be that gallery-owner or artist. And the more gallery owners and artists who come by, of course, the more who stay and become members and active participants, then of course the stronger and livelier the social-network aspect of it, the richer and more helpful the events calendar. And it suddenly becomes a self-feeding cycle, a self-sustaining community, a project that literally generates its own publicity.

And that of course is the final key to it all, is that neither I nor this publication will even be attempting to maintain any kind of proprietary control or ownership over this network, although admittedly I'll be the main administrator and the only one to be able to change things like page templates, CSS code, etc. No, what I mean is that the only "thing" we get out of it is to be known as "contributing organizations" to the Chicago Photography Network, and to have our groups' logos listed on the left edge of each page, under the "contributing organizations" section; but any other group out there who wants, who wants to permanently run a mention of CPN in their own website's sidebar, and who promise to add to the network regularly and promote it to their audience, can become a contributing organization for free as well, and have their own logo run on every page. Plus the whole thing will be released under a Creative Commons license, so that anybody who wants can take any of the information found there and republish it, even in paper form for a cover price if they want, and don't even have to be a contributing organization or anything. Perfectly for free. Perfectly legally.

That's the beauty of this as a potentially profoundly successful promotional project for CCLaP, because it gives me the best of what I consider all possible worlds, in a way that maybe is not obvious to everyone at first -- I get CCLaP's logo and link in the upper-left corner of every single page generated there, noticed by the hopefully thousands and thousands of people who will eventually come by, will get known as the main contributor and "big brain" behind the project, but will not have to deal with a million piddly little crap "it's a 6 not a 7" emails that arise with such comprehensive yellow-pages-style guides. In essence, I get a whole group of passionate strangers working for free to help promote me and my organization; and the whole thing works specifically because I give anyone who wants the opportunity to be promoted in such a way too, simply knowing that most groups will never go to the trouble of doing so. I love the idea of harnessing the power of an entire passionate, creative community, of building something much greater than the simple sum of its parts, and to have the entire thing ultimately serve as a subtle but overpowering advertisement for how freakin' great CCLaP is. That's worth more customer-wise than an entire year of full-page ads in the Onion; and believe me, I know because I actually once requested their rate card, that an entire year of full-page ads in the Onion runs at least half a million dollars altogether. This is what I mean; that seriously, no shit, something like a Chicago Photography Network done right will bring you more new customers, more new website visitors, than an entire year of full-page ads in the Onion, and will literally save you half a million dollars. And any group who wants to can sign up for this network for free, in exchange for a permanent mention of it in their own website's sidebar, and a promise to contribute regularly to it and to regularly promote it to their audience.

That's a lot of ifs, I know; but as the cliche goes, you'll never even have the chance of finding out what might happen until you put the structure into place, until you set the wheels in motion. This is a good thing for me right now, a big honkin' project for me to really sink my teeth into, something that could potentially pay off in a seriously big way if everything just happens to magically come together well. It gives my life a sense of purpose again, beyond simply another thousand-word review for the CCLaP site every weekday, beyond simply the things I've now established in the last year that work and work well (don't get me wrong), but now simply need to be maintained for the purposes of the people expecting such a thing every day. Each day a new review is up at CCLaP is another day I make three or four new fans on this planet, one of whom might eventually become a regular website visitor; and thus that part of it slowly, slowly goes, which is why of course it was the very first activity I started up through CCLaP, so that it could start doing its slow, regular work as soon as possible. It's time for something new, something that ups the stakes a little, and I think the CPN is going to be it; as always, I'll let you know more as soon as I know it myself.

I've talked about the following online several times before (including here at VOX just a little further below, or perhaps on the next page depending on when you're reading), of how I believe in this new mental condition that's recently come about because of the Web 2.0, which in an attempt to coin a phrase I call "Global Displacement Syndrome" or GDS; it basically can only come about in people who consume a massive amount of amateur creative content from around the world at once, usually through online means, just hundreds of photos at Flickr and hundreds of videos at YouTube every month, just like I've been doing more and more in my own life over the last several years. Because when you do something like this, you end up getting not only the cool high-end artsy stuff like usual, but also just a ton of casual and informal media from around the planet too, photos from birthday parties and school events, cellphone images of a neighborhood statue posted a hundred times a year to some moblog or Photobucket account, showing that statue in a hundred different states of weather and daylight. And I've said before, getting that kind of regular multimedia input into a neighborhood halfway around the planet from you makes you...well, not exactly a local, you can't exactly call it that, but no longer a stranger or simply a tourist to that city either, with you now knowing a lot more about that city each day than a simple tourist would know.

When you get too much input in your life like this, when you spend too much time thinking about it all like I have, then your brain can get into certain strange mindsets at certain times, which for me always seems triggered by things like warm summer afternoons, pot, laid-back European dance musicians, and a host of other things. And that's a mindset where it suddenly becomes difficult to determine rationally just what city you're in at that exact moment in your life -- whether it's Chicago or London or Frankfurt, Sydney or Seoul or Ljubljana, Rio or Toronto or Cape Town. In fact, it's like you're not in any of those particular cities at all, but rather a strange and mystical world where all these cities have combined into a tenth, entirely fictional one, one where you and all your online friends from these other nine cities are all living at once, a place just as real and concrete in your head as the actual physical city you're currently located in. And when I'm under the spell of GDS, like I've said before, I sometimes have these really strange experiences here in Chicago where I physically live; for example, when I look out the window next to my computer here at home (the image seen in this entry, taken just a few minutes ago), it's hard for me to tell whether I'm still in Chicago or maybe suddenly in another one of these cities just mentioned, that if I were to actually go downstairs and open the front door of my building, hell, who knows, maybe I just will find Barcelona or Oslo or Saint Petersburg right beyond.

I find myself getting into this mindset more and more with the passing years, the longer I'm exposed regularly to all these hundreds of casual photos and videos online from around the world, all the underground bands and artists I follow around the world all at once. The Social Singularity? The Coming One World Culture? Or just the sad result of too much Flickr, 420, and time alone? Hmm.