the diary of antoine roquentin

Listen to Last Exit. LISTEN TO IT! Best album ever.

I got to this show later than any show I’ve ever gone to, they were playing Bellona as I went up the staircase at Webster Hall. Hearing “Under the Sun” live was fucking fantastic. It was this unending massage of layered guitar, synths, and painfully aching vocals. <3.

After the show, I saw a few lightning flashes and hopped on the L right as it started to rain. I’m not doing much else this week, and the kids have gone home. I started indoctrinating them with my taste in music…my cousin Alexis loves MGMT. Luhlz. Well, I should get to bed. I stayed up until like 5 a.m. last night. Fucking insomnia.

Categories: Ennui

So I just updated to the most recent version of MacSpeech Dictate. Version 1.5 is supposed to be way more advanced and with way better recognition capabilities. I’m not sure why, but the application seems way more responsive than the old version.

In the old version, when I would speak a paragraph or so it would kind of freeze for a little bit and the volume meter wouldn’t move it if I tried to turn off the microphone it wouldn’t do anything and then it would spit out a paragraph of 80% correct text.

Wow, this is fantastic. With my new expensive microphone and the new software, I’m getting no errors at all. Exciting.

We spent the past four days at my aunt’s house in South Jersey. Since I’ve been going to the gym the kids didn’t wear me out as much as they normally do, but I was completely unable to get any reading done. Even on the beach they never chilled out, always wanting to do something. It strikes me as odd that they never make sand castles or anything. Maybe it’s because they go to the beach like every other day.

I got a good tan, that’s for sure. It’s so nice to be home. I’m trying out this new backup service called SugarSync this week. It’s kind of like Dropbox, except for that it saves every version of a file that you are working on. For $99 a year, it also gives you this awesome web interface where you can basically browse your backed up files just like you are at your home computer along with every revision. I’m trying it out for a few months. I used to be so obsessed with backing things up, but when you don’t experience data loss for a long time you get complacent. Basically, if Gmail ever went down, I would be up shit creek.

Also, when I’m in college I can’t deal with the possibility of losing important files. With SugarSync, it even uploads the intermediate versions of documents as you are working on them.

I was never really gung-ho on online backup solutions because I used to be on such slow Internet and had such a massive volume of files to backup (I tried Mozy and CrashPlan), but with my FiOS, my 60GB allotment will have finished by the end of the week, if not sooner. We’ll see how good it is. I of course keep a local backup using Time Machine, but if my house explodes or something then all my files are gone. So yay for fiber to the home and yay for online backup.

I had this whole diatribe ready about how my cousins are being programmed to be served up for the war machine, but I just don’t have the patience. I feel like I’m the naïve one now to believe that we can have an informed citizenry. Alexis, after all, is only eight, but the endless barrage of advertising and branding I fear might be insurmountable. I try to put as many antiestablishment messages in, like:

Alexis: Don’t you like (insert thing marketed by Disney here)?
Me: I don’t watch television.
Alexis: Why not?
Me:I like to have my own thoughts. Don’t you like to have your own thoughts?
*no answer*

But even with my little digs at Disney and Burger King and McDonald’s and Chuck E. Cheese and Hannah Montana and 16 other Disney Channel shows that I can’t even remember the names to endlessly drumming in the message, my voice falls on deaf ears.

Consume. Consume. Consume. You will never be happy unless you consume. You will never feel good unless you consume. You must consume. Everyone else is doing it! You’ll be so happy if you just consume! Nobody likes the person that doesn’t consume. You don’t want to be them do you? So you’d better consume as much as you can right now!

Huxley is smiling in his grave.

And, of course, there are the bad behaviors that need to be worked on. Alexis, for example, will eat nothing. She only eats macaroni and like one other thing. We can’t get her to try anything she just doesn’t like it. She’s never had ketchup, yet she says she doesn’t like it.

Towards day number two, I got a bit fed up with it. It makes all of us a little angry, because she was just sitting there with one piece of fish on her plate with an expression like were asking her to eat hemlock to just have some fish before she has her pasta. So I said, “you know, there are a lot of children around here that would be overjoyed to have fish to eat. There’s a lot of children they can’t afford to have fish for dinner, they’re having grits or nothing to eat.” My grandma Jean started talking about how when she was a little girl her mother didn’t have very much food at all for the kids because they were very poor. The expression on Alexis’ face was priceless: she couldn’t even conceive of poverty.

Okay, small digression: they live near Rumson, which is basically the richest town in New Jersey. That whole area, Holmdel, Middletown, Long Branch are a social climber’s wet dream. The preschool that my other cousin Nicholas goes to, they won’t even talk to my aunt because she is not of the same “social class” as them.

I’m not saying they should have moved to South Central LA, but these kids are are living in a suburban bubble and are completely unexposed to reality. Still, they are great kids. Endearing, funny, and adorable as all heck, but they are setting themselves up to have the temperament of trust fund kids without the trust fund to back it up.

We had tons of fun while we were down there though. The first day we went to Point Pleasant and went on the rides with the kids. Alexis was thrilled to have somebody that would actually go on rides with her and my aunt had this huge book full of tickets for the rides, so it was basically unlimited fun.

Nick on the trucks.

Alexis making her ‘dragon face’ on the Spinny Dragons ride

The fam at the beach, LTR: My mom (the legs), Alexis, Grandma, my uncle Gary, Nicholas, uncle Jim, and aunt Gail.

My clothes are in the dryer and as soon as they are done I’m going down to the gym. I can’t believe we stayed there five days. I absolutely love my aunt and uncle and the kids, but I couldn’t work that whole week. That costs me a lot of money. Anyway, my mom and I were supposed to go to the city on Monday but I just can’t do it. I have to work every day I can this week, even though Drew is showing up on the 15th with his boyfriend.

Apparently the boyfriend has friends around here, so a part of me hopes I’m not going to be a full-time tour guide… although that would be tons of fun. I haven’t done any of the touristy things in the city for years. I think the last time I was on the Empire State building I was like 14. I meant to ask where they were staying, but it slipped my mind. We’ll see.

The good thing is I’ve made a major breakthrough in the redesign of my work site. Nearly all the work is conceptually done (I have the sketches and the CSS styles and all the PHP snippets, I just need to mash it all together with a consistent UI and make it work with the CMS.) That will be this week’s job, to have a working prototype by Friday.

I’m also kind of growing a beard-ish, mostly as Brooklyn camouflage.

Categories: Ennui

I’ve been having a pretty good Fourth of July. We went down to the pool for a few hours. I love swimming laps, and the deal is only sweetened by the town’s swim team coming down to practice in the afternoons. I have to not wear my contacts down there so I don’t stare.

I’ve been having all these complications getting my finances in order. Apparently because of the Chase/WaMu merger, my direct deposit is going to stop working in a month so I have to redo that. I sent in all information, but you know how it is with those things. It can often take a few pay periods until it starts working. So now I’m playing an elaborate game of trying to keep not one but two checking accounts in ample supply of cash. It’s not so bad though. I don’t really have as many bills here as I did in California. Well, I still spend the same amount of money but it goes to less things. I help my mom out by buying groceries (she’s on vacation from work), and take her to the city to do fun stuff.

She said to me last week on the L, “You know, when you were a kid I used to take you places and you would follow me everywhere. Now you are the one taking me places to see new stuff.” I like taking her out, because for the six years she lived here she didn’t really go out at all. I think next week I’m going to take her to Mondo, which is (hopefully) the equivalent of Lipstick in NYC. Sometimes it’s wonderful not to have friends that you can run into so you can just go somewhere and have a great time.

Sure, I miss running into Andrew at Safeway on my lunch break or into Christen at Naked Lounge after work, but for a while it’s nice to be somewhere where nobody knows your name.

Even though I’ve been telecommuting, I do have a fair amount of leisure time. And sometimes when I’m particularly stuck on an article I will take 10 minutes and read one of my books to get in the writing mood again. I’m not quite sure why, but I started reading this collection of essays that Molly lent me ages and ages ago called Reading Popular Culture. I’m about halfway done with it now, and it has just blown my mind with every page. So many things I have read in there I want to post on here, so here are my most favorite quotes ( I got co-opted onto that active reading bandwagon and underline things that are especially poignant).

The thing that really grabs me about this collection is that some of the essays are downright hilarious in their portrayal of rampant consumerism and unabashed advertising.

The process of consumption is creative and even emancipating. In an open market, we consume the real and the imaginary meanings, fusing objects, symbols, and images together to end up with “a little world made cunningly.” Rather than lives, individuals since midcentury have had lifestyles. For better or worse, lifestyles are secular religions, coherent patterns of valued things. Your lifestyle is not related to what you do for a living but to what you buy. One of the chief aims of the way we live now is the enjoyment of affiliating with those who share the same clusters of objects as we do.

Mall-condo culture is so powerful in part because it frees us from the strictures of social class. The outcome of material life is no longer preordained by coat of arms, pew seat, or trust fund. Instead, it evolves from a never-ending shifting of individual choice. No one wants to be middle class for instance. You want to be cool, hip, with it, with the “in” crowd, instead.

— From “Two Cheers for Materialism” by James Twitchell

The most startling revelation to come from [the fact that Burroughs starred in a Nike commercial] is not that corporate America has overwhelmed its cultural foes or that Burroughs can somehow remain “subversive” through it all, but the complete lack of dissonance between the two sides. Of course Burroughs is not “subversive,” but neither has he “sold out”: His ravings are no longer appreciably different from the official folklore of American capitalism. What’s changed is not Burroughs, but business itself. As expertly as Burroughs once bayoneted American proprieties, as stridently as he once proclaimed himself beyond the laws of man and God, he is today a respected ideologue of the Information Age, occupying roughly the position in the pantheon of corporate cultural thought once reserved strictly for Notre Dame football coaches and positive-thinking Methodist ministers. His inspirational writings are boardroom favorites, his dark nihilistic burpings the happy homilies of the new corporate faith. [...]

The people who staff the Combine aren’t like Nurse Ratched. They aren’t Frank Burns, they aren’t the Church Lady, they aren’t Dean Wormer from Animal House, they aren’t those repressed old folks in the commercials who want to ban Tropicana Fruit Twisters. They’re hipper than you can ever hope to be because hip is their official ideology, and they’re always going to be there at the poetry reading to encourage your “rebellion” with a hearty “right on, man!” before you even know they’re in the auditorium. You can’t outrun them, or even stay ahead of them for very long: it’s their racetrack, and that’s them waiting at the finish line to congratulate you on how outrageous your new the style is, on how you shocked those stuffy prudes on the heartland.

— From “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent” by Thomas Frank

Increasingly, films and television shows carry these hidden commercials. Often characters use certain products, the brands are prominently displayed, but the audience remains unaware that money has changed hands. New technology allows advertisers to have products digitally added to the scene, such as the Coca-Cola can on a desk or commercial billboards in the background of baseball games. At the very least, these “commercials” should be directly acknowledged in the credits. Writer and cartoonist Mark O’Donnell suggests that someday there will be tie-ins in literature as well, such as “All’s Well That Ends With Pepsi,” “The Old Man, Coppertone, and the Sea,” and “Nausea, and Periodic Discomfort Relief.” [...]

Cynicism is one of the worst effects of advertising. Cynicism learned from years of being exposed to marketing hype and products that never deliver the promised goods often carries over to other aspects of life. This starts early: A study of children done by researchers at Columbia University in 1975 found that heavy viewing of advertising led to cynicism, not only about advertising but about life in general. The researchers found that “in most cultures, adolescents have had to deal with social hypocrisy and even with institutionalized lying. But today, TV advertising is stimulating preadolescent children to think about socially accepted hypocrisy. They may be too young to cope with such thoughts without permanently distorting their views morality, society, and business.” They concluded that “7- to 10-year-olds are strained by the very existence of advertising directed to them.” These jaded children become the young people whose mantra is “whatever,” who admire people like David Letterman (has made a career out of taking nothing seriously), whose response to almost every experience is “been there, done that,” “duh,” and “do ya think?” Cynicism is not criticism. It is a lot easier than criticism. In fact, easy cynicism is a kind of naïveté. We need to be more critical as a culture and less cynical.

— From “In Your Face… All over the Place”: Advertising Is Our Environment by Jean Kilbourne

I really want to go down to the liquor store and get something to celebrate the holiday, but the chance that are they are open is one in a million. I’m drinking some iced Yerba Mate, which is good enough. I have been indulging too much lately on software. I’ve been using this program called Tangerine to generate playlists for my workouts. All those little shareware applications add up. $15 here, $25 there.

Speaking of workouts, since I got my gym membership last month I’ve been feeling so much more physically fit. I was undergoing so much stress in Sacramento that I just couldn’t eat right. Desperately trying to stay away from home as long as possible and eating out one meal a day killed my physical fitness. That usually wouldn’t be a problem because I would just exercise more, but since my knees gave out I couldn’t jog.

So I go to the gym and do the bike machine and the elliptical which have no impact at all on my joints. I’m in love with the bike machine, I have to say. I pedaled 15 miles on it last week. The bike machine has that kind of cathartic, extreme exercise rush I used to get from jogging. It sucks for the first 10 minutes, but once my heart rate is up and my cheezy Norwegian techno is blaring I’m like a machine. I thought it would be fun to post my workout mix:

1. Annie – Song Reminds Me Of You (A song about nostalgic songs…Yo dawg I like to listen to nostalgic songs about nostalgic songs so I can listen while I listen)
2. Crystal Castles – Courtship Date (Crystal Castles. Enough said.)
3. The Presets – Pretty Little Eyes (This is so my song. I listen to it on the subway all the time.)
4. Simian Mobile Disco – Hustler (I thought I’d get sick of this song, but it just gets better with age. Especially with seeing hundreds of people going ape shit and screaming out the lyrics when I saw them live.)
5. Prototypes – Danse sur la merde (Because sometimes, you just need to dance to the shit coming out of the radio)
6. Muscles – Sweaty (Tons of good Lipstick-related memories associated with this song. We did hug a few times, and it was special.)
7. My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult – Sex on Wheelz (so many good San Francisco / Sam memories associated with this song)
8. Peaches – Slippery Dick (because sometimes, it is just a fish in the Atlantic)
9. Röyksopp – The Girl and the Robot (incredibly catchy and the perfect beat for working out)
10. Tiga – Shoes (I have no clue what this song is about, but it’s damn catchy)

So basically, I was 180 when I left Sacramento, and I’m down to 165, my normal weight. I don’t think it’s possible for me to really get skinny without being a coke addict, it’s just the difference between being toned and not being toned. I’m noticing such a difference since I’ve been swimming and biking and lifting weights. I’ve never been affluent enough to afford a gym membership before, and it’s so great. Muscles are sprouting all over; it’s like that summer when I did two hours of my yoga class every day and felt so healthy.

I got my student ID in the mail last week which was very validating. I also got a new credit card with an astronomically high limit. I’m sort of tempted to buy a new MacBook and deck it out with 8GB of RAM. however, I know how much I hate paying off debt. I can totally motivate myself to work a lot if it’s for something that I want but working for something I already have is not a motivation for me. Also, I have a few unused gadgets sitting on my workstation table that I need to sell. I have a stack of laptop hard drives and my old cell phone (N95) that need to go. It’s just such a hassle to do all the Craigslist crap. I can see why those companies that sell stuff for you online exist.

I feel like I haven’t written in weeks. Nothing’s really changed except for that I haven’t been going to the city as much. I guess I just kept spending until I didn’t have any money left. At Camera Obscura, I realized after I had drank through $40 in about an hour that New York is just too fucking expensive. As much as Brooklyn is ultratrendy, it’s way cheaper to drink there.

Well, I think I’m going to watch a movie. I watched Red Desert last night, it was great. Michelangelo Antonioni is a genius. It really blew me away how little modern audiences would find identify with the characters. The movie takes place during a strike at a factory (things that most people have only heard about and definitely never participated in). The main character is a woman who is completely neurotic and desperately trying not to kill herself. Can you imagine such a character in a modern movie? Maybe these were art films even back then.

One of the themes of those essays has been that the drumbeat of consumerism and advertising makes it so that anything which makes us feel sad or contemplative and doesn’t leave consumers in a buying mood is not valuable. Everything has to be quirky and upbeat with long commercial breaks and tons of product placement. Hamburger phone, anyone?

Well, I’m off to watch another movie. I’m thinking of watching Vridiana.

Categories: Ennui