27 posts tagged “buenapark”
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.
Just posted a lengthy review of the novel "Little Children" to the website for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com -- you're now reading every day, right? You've mentioned it at your own blog by now, right?). I ended up really loving the novel, actually, and a big part of that was because of the ways that author Tom Perrotta shows the silly elaborate rituals that many people in their early and mid-thirties will engage in, that they think is 'grown-up' behavior but is actually as immature as their teen years (hence the title of the novel) -- such as how many of the men in their community participate in this evening "Fight Club" style intramural football league, where teams will meet at the expensively Astroturfed high-school field once a week, a group of accountants versus a group of cops for example, and spend a night illegally pounding each other with no refs, the only rule being "the first one to quit is a faggot pussy," and with the hordes of former frat dudes spending the entire evening calling each other bitches and slamming each other's chests together in torso high-fives.
And sitting here finishing my time at Holiday tonight, I realize -- dude, that's just like the fucking trackball bowling videogame found in bars like these! How many times have we who are secure in our masculinity and adult choices we're making in our lives sat in bars with such machines, and watched a group of drunk, insecure, date-rape assholes spend the night getting ALL GEARED UP BEHIND THAT TRACKBALL, DUDE, and put up a leg and get all behind that push, and WHIZZ THAT LITTLE COCKSUCKING WHORE round and round until getting a strike, YELLIN' AND SCREAMIN' AND HOOTIN' AND HOLLERIN' AND HIGH-FIVIN', all their terrified little girlfriends in the corner and sucking down Sex on Beaches and trying to blot out as quickly as possible what horrific unsalvagable situations they've gotten themselves into.
Seriously, a pretty great book. I encourage you to stop by the site and see what I have to say about it. Man, for the rest of my life these bowling videogames are now going to creep me the fuck out.
Hey, I'm out again, at Holiday again, having Guinness and a grilled-cheese sandwich and mashed potatoes. It's Saturday night, give me a freakin' break, I want to be out! Damnit, I may even get on my bike later and pedal down to Lakeview, and maybe get in a little trouble old-skool Belmont and Clark style. We'll see!
Earlier this week I read the first half of this slim new-age self-help guide called "Happy," by this guy who apparently teaches a class at Harvard on "how to be happy," which apparently is the most popular class currently available at Harvard (yeah, roll eyes here, I know). And that's why I stopped reading halfway through, frankly, is that the book's mostly a bunch of obvious new-age claptrap about positivity and empowering visions and the like. One of the things the author suggests you ask yourself, though, is what exactly the definition of 'happiness' is anyway, which I've been doing this week and have realized is much harder than it sounds. The best I can do, in fact, is come up with things that can lead to happiness, while also acknowledging that I don't know what combination one needs to truly be 'happy...'
--The absence of pain.
--A sense of accomplishment.
--A sense of inner peace, of acceptance of oneself and one's surroundings.
--The sensation of pleasure.
--The sense that one is contributing to the world, instead of simply consuming its resources.
Here I am right now, for example, at Holiday Uptown in my neighborhood, currently pretty happy, but only because of a combo of little things -- because it's warm, because I'm outside, because I'm having a beer and am a little buzzed, because I've gotten a lot accomplished today, because half-dressed hot nerdy girls keep walking by me, because I just got done with a good mid-distance bicycle ride, because I've eaten, because I have a satchel full of just-published edgy small-press books, that I got for free because of living in a city with such a large and well-funded library system. And this doesn't even count the more existential reasons I'm happy -- because I live in a city I love instead of hate, because I'm starting my own business and am my own boss, even if that means barely any money right now, because I'm doing something with my time that I feel is adding something constructive and meaningful to the world, versus (for example) using my creative talents to be selling fucking hamburgers for some soulless multinational corporation. Sound haughty? Well, that as well is part of what makes me happy.
So what's the magic combination? Well, that's the fun part of life, isn't it, of discovering just what that combination is. I can tell you this, though, that the older I get, the more sure I am that is has almost nothing to do with the things preached to us in a consumerist capitalist society -- the accumulation of wealth, the accumulation of possessions, the getting ahead of your fellow humans, the long hours and little rewards and endless frustrations of most white-collar jobs. It's not just a thing for hippie undergraduates to believe in, I keep realizing more and more -- that the quest to simplify one's life, the effort to enjoy the current moment instead of deferring your entire personal life to the twenty years before you die, is of paramount importance to having true happiness in your life.
Er, that's all. End of line.
I was a good boy tonight; got every single thing with the new CCLaP website (cclapcenter.com) working except the commenting feature, and got tomorrow's Obsession of the Moment and book review written in advance, so am now rewarding myself with a Pabst Blue Ribbon and grilled cheese sandwich at Holiday Uptown in my neighborhood, a rare nighttime trip out for me because in general I can't afford it, in the company of a bunch of hot, drunk hipster females, which of course is always a pleasure. I don't necessarily have to be directly interacting with my fellow humans to be happy -- in fact, I've discovered that it can often make me annoyed rather than happy -- but that I do at least need regular time around other humans, periods where I feel like part of a society and not so cut off in an online netherworld like most of my day is spent. Always good to get out occasionally and have a beer among the hoo-mons.
Enjoying CCLaP yet? Book reviews bitchy enough for ya?
A sudden cold streak has clashed today with the warm weather here, producing a fog as thick as pea soup; here, for example, is the view from the Sheridan el platform, as I wait for the train that will eventually get me to Pearl Art Supply (Chicago and Wells), where I am shopping today for drawing supplies. More later!
Argh! The weather people were predicting yesterday that it would get into the 60s here (15C) today; my plan, then, had been to go to Pearl Art Supply below the Chicago brown-line stop in the morning, to pick up some drawing supplies (but more on this later), then to a bath store to pick up some smelly new soap, then to a cafe for a little coffee and sketching, then my first bike ride of the year to the Music Box, to see David Lynch's latest movie, Inland Empire. But alas, of course we can't simply be blessed with a nice day here; as soon as the temperature shot up, it of course started raining, which it's continuing to do six hours later as I write this entry, which meant that all my plans got canceled. Sigh. Here's hoping that tomorrow maybe goes a little better, or at least is a little dryer.
Spotted at Emerald City coffeehouse, Sheridan and Irving Park Road, Chicago -- a coffee device with a curiously Modernist (or Mod) logo attached to it. My 'modar,' in fact (or natural ability to spot Mod things in public) has been in overdrive recently, ever since deciding to base the first wave of my Second Life prefabricated houses off the architectural and design style. It was only 45 years or so, after all, since the height of the style's popularity; there are still lots of original examples to spot in a place like Chicago, not to mention the contemporary companies who have adopted classic Mod ideals.
Okay, so maybe it's not the last SRO in the entire neighborhood, but it's definitely the last one in the area where I travel a lot; I pass this building quite a bit during my regular errands, in fact, and always spend at least a moment or two thinking about it when I do. SRO, for those who don't know, stands for "single room occupancy;" in other words, a living space that consists of a single room, including the cooking facilities. In our modern times, of course, it's only a slim minority of the population anymore who don't live in an apartment under a long-term lease, or a house/condo under a mortgage; a century or so ago, though, it wasn't unusual at all for just a ton of young single men to live in such SROs, as they traveled the country quickly or held low-wage jobs.
Anytime you see a scene in an old noir film between an anti-hero and a scummy "hotel" clerk, a staple it seems in that genre, that's an homage to the SRO industry that used to dominate big cities during the Industrial Age; Chicago in particular used to be littered with such SROs, with a fair amount of them still open even 13 years ago when I first moved here. SROs are not exactly something to be nostalgic about, or to wish to still stick around; they're a feature of film noirs for a reason, after all, and the few left are even seedier than average. But still, once those few that are left finally close down, I doubt we'll ever see SROs in this country again; it's a moment of American transitory history that I'm in a position to capture in a small way, which is why I decided to do so.
So as followers of my Second Life adventures know, I had been planning this month to open a new adults-only blog for the environment called "avatar;" but I've now officially decided not to, in that it's harder and harder for me anymore to attend popular events there on my low-end computer, which I'm afraid would keep me out of the adult clubs that would be the heart of "avatar"s content.
So instead, I've started looking again into a business idea I've had for six months now; a prefab building company called "Fabb," which would manufacture space-age ultra-modern homes for a variety of environments (FabbBeach, FabbForest, FabbGoth, etc), using a series of modular units that customers can either mix and match on their own, or buy from us in pre-arranged layouts. (Think IKEA meets Habitrail -- now you've got an idea of my mental picture for the project.) Such a thing could be highly profitable if I do a good enough job; I just did a little research last night, in fact, and learned that it's very common for good starter homes to go for L$1,000 or more, and for large complex structures to sell sometimes for $10,000 (approx. 40 American dollars, or 20 pounds, or 30 euros). If I could get to a place where I had several hundred types of modules available (between layout and color choices), and a plethora of prebuilt homes, I could pretty easily make the same kind of money I had been planning on making through ad sales at "avatar." At the very least, it'd be cool if I could get Fabb to pay for the in-grid costs I have; my membership fees for next year, a land expansion, etc.
Of course, I still have awhile to go before I can start bring in serious money -- I need to become a better builder, for one, and need to learn a lot more about both texturing and scripting. Got any SL classes or destinations for builders you'd recommend? Drop me a line at [ilikejason at gmail.com] and let me know.
