My daughter, like every other North American 12 year old, is caught up in the “Twilight” film and book series. And when she was younger it was Pirates.

I am considering this: that the present day fascination with pirates and vampires is because we live in a piratical and vampiric society, and this is a way to project our own self-disgust into a social spectacle that not only exalts these creatures, but is more a way for us to render evil fashionable, so we don’t see the vileness of the global and environmental results of our own common actions.

Pirates were considered vile creatures – we would hang them at the entrance to harbours, as a warning to all. Vampires, while fictional, were always loathsome creatures – just watch Nosferatu and see how creepy and disgusting they were considered. but now, we humanise and venerate these parasites, these vile corrupt murderous undead beings.

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than an undead parasite that lives off the blood of his lessers?

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than the pirate?

These are not people to admire – these are people to abhor. The pirate is not about finding new methods of helping rid society of disease and crime and violence – the pirate is all about aggrandising the self at the expense of society through crime and violence. The pirate doesn’t fight disease – the pirate is disease. The pirate is all about the gang, not the polity; the benefit and glory of the gang leader, not the common wealth.

The vampire is of another nature for as material and sadistic is the pirate, the vampire is metaphysical and seductive. The pirate operates through theft and actual murder. The vampire, being a creature of fiction, operates through parasitism and symbolic death. The vampire lives off of “precious bodily fluids” within the imagination of the audient. Previous media representations of vampires range from the bleak shabby elegance of Dracula to the ghoulish Nosferatu. With Ann Rice’s mythology of vampirism, the vampire, while still a wicked undead beast, was portrayed in much more humanistic terms – ,a href=”http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/sipa_Interview_Vampire_090325_ssh.jpg”>child vampires,, ancient vampires who could barely move, romantic and handsome vampires drawn into a disaster not of their own making.

As alluring and attractive and malleable such a fictive creature can be, they are, simply, parasites.

This is the other side of the capitalist ideology: you too can partake of the riches of this world and live forever – all at the expense of worthless dupes and victims whom you will feed on. You will carry the guilt, but learn to ignore the shame, and eventually revel and thrive in your parasitic madness. And internal to vampirism is the same failure of capitalism: what happens when you run out of victims, when the entire world is populated by vampires? What do you do when the engine of production has exhausted the planet’s resources and there is nothing left to profit on? The answer is the same: collapse and extinction.

This is never a point ever thought through, because of the dominant demands of short term necessity refracted through the lens of industrial destruction and capitalist exploitation. Hence, the mythology of parasitism must be inculcated at as young an age as possible, and so we have 6 year olds dressing as Dracula and Blackbeard and movies for teens like Twilight and Pirates of the Caribbean. The most impatient people, the young, are taught to look upon parasitism as just another and therefore acceptable, part of society. So, when they labour at some job for the rest of their lives, they won’t mind that a small number of parasites at the top are reaping all the rewards at their expense. They won’t mind that they, as members of the crew, make their living stealing from others.

This logic can go forward, and as usual, it is through comedy that this society deals with it most directly: the next example is a vampire pirate. And we have one: in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” in the form of Jack Sparrow’s father played by Keith Richards. It is well known that Richards is undead and a vampire. This can be said because vampires don’t exist, therefore any attribution to Richards as a vampire is as fictive as the notion of vampire itself. to feed this mythology, he regularly has his blood transfused in order to continue living his vampiric life, where over the years he has increasingly come to resemble Nosferatu, feeding off the ashes of his father.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Keith Richards the person. I have never met him, and I am sure he’s a funny and decent dinner companion. The Keith Richards I am addressing is the fictive and mythological Richards – the media creation of Richards – the only one history will ever really know as it writes the story and mythologies of our times. This Richards is a scary and demented derangement of party animal and cultural parasite – someone who has looted all the blues riffs ever known and sucked them dry of their essence and blasted them together in the form of his playing in the Rolling Stones music ensemble – a band who built their career upon defiance and the hint of revolution and then sold it all for millions of dollars, pillaging music history and sucking their fans dry of money for their records, performances, and ephemera in the process.

There is nothing sustainable about Richards – he is the drug-addled adolescent with half a century of practice under his belt, and looking worse for the wear and tear he has put himself through. The excess he has subjected himself to would have killed weaker men, and for that his persona takes on a character of the undead – the vampire – Nosferatu. due to his age and condition, Richards cannot be the face of acceptable vampirism to a new younger generation – so he is the vampire father of the pirate role model for the younger generation.

And the vampire? In the form of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, he is not some rotting husk – he is a rutting hunk, designed and delivered for the fantasies of teen and tween girls. He makes victimhood seem reasonable, as he and his clan are now “vegetarians” in a vampiric sense: they only drink the blood of animals. A more “sustainable” approach to industrial capitalism. Rather than chop down the forest to power the machines, dig up the coal and oil, and slaughter wild animals wholesale for the vampirism, as it mimics contemporary western food patterns of industrial meat production.

At core, they are still vampires. They are still parasites. They take one’s most precious possession, time, and give only illusions and fantasy in return, flickering page turning revelries of fictive space, making us feel good about being hapless victims of a vampiric system of global piracy.

In the mean time, the rivers are dammed up, the earth continues to warm up, and precious metals are ripped from the dying earth to make a handful of people fabulously wealthy. And we’re all OK with that because we get to watch vampire pirates on the screen.

To quote Brian Eno:

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others punctured
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble

Beak and claw, remorse reminder
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble
Back and forth and back to nothing
Keep them tidy, keep them humble.

Chop and change to cut the corners
Sharp as razors (shiny razors)
Stranded on a world that’s dying
Never moving, hardly trying.

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others plundered
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble.

Today was a long day. My most interesting writings were:

from the LEV list:

> so it is true, there still are people who do genuinely believe in
> society being malleable….
> i’ve always taken that for sentimental gossip…

Gee, you sound like someone who’s too cynical to believe in nihilism…
Pity that.

1. You don’t have to “reform” society – it reforms on a daily basis, it changes all the time. Repetition is a form of change. All you have to do is stand up for something and go for it. But if you twiddle your pomo thumbs you’ll just sit there. Twiddling your pomo thumbs. Also note: 100 years ago cinema was black and white, silent and passive and insanely expensive. Now performance cinema is in colour (often lurid, but that’s another issue) with sound, it’s active, and the means to do it are little more than a keyboard, a laptop, and a projector… Society changes. All the Time.

Also: in the early 1900s there was a strike at a mine in Colorado. People wanted to work only 5 days a week. The governor, who was in the pocket of the mining interests, called out the State National Guard Units and had them move on the camps. they fired into the strikers tents. All the men were at the mine, picketing, so the soldiers shot 24 women and children DEAD.

They died so people in the USA could have a 5 day work week.

There is absolutely nothing sentimental about brutal blind slaughter. People dying in order to change the world is not “sentimental gossip”. The hand wringing attitude that it is such only serves the interests of the likes of the crypto and not so crypto fascists who are presently running things.

2. Performance cinema must stand on its own, claim its own intellectual space, with its own theory and aesthetic. This must be articulated and the articulation must reflect the diversity and complexity of the the source material.
You can either help or hinder. I’d REALLY like it if you could help. I’m running myself broke to put this symposium on – (so far) no company has stepped in to help, no government has squeezed its teat to make this happen. This makes its free and open and very low budget but also of the highest possible integrity and purpose.

3. As performance cinema stands and articulates itself in time, our media culture will be that much more vibrant and interesting, and Bog only knows what will be born from it.

Got a note from Kim Cascone – hope to have lunch with him and his family this coming weekend. It’ll be good to see him.

Completed recording post audio for SEI down at Chris Tann’s digs in S. San Jose. He has a wonderful home theatre set up. Someday I will too…

Elizabeth is in swimming camp this month. She’s a sweetie bump. She showed me how to pronounce Montmartre. It sounded more like MonnnMarrr. God bless the good ship FAIS and all who sail with her.

The recall effort to remove Gray Davis is well underway. Ariana Huffington wrote a typically miguided article on Salon.com about it, and I felt I had to respond. I mailed the following, under the name “Ralph Spoilspot” to the Salon editors.

Huffington on Davis Recall

This is simple, and predictable and sad.

This is what will happen:

The sour grape Republicans at the behest of the idiot likes of Tom DeLay will push through the recall.

No Democrat with even a nanogram of party loyalty will step in the way of Davis. It is likely that the Republicans will field more than one candidate.

The Democratic voters will (again) hold their noses and vote for Gray Davis, and the Republican vote will be divided and lose the election.

A total waste of time and money.

And the worst part? A mental image that fills me with inertia: Gray Davis Gloating.

I’ll vote for Gray Davis, simply because I can’t see surrendering the governorship of California to the reptilian likes of Bush & Co. But frankly: Davis sucks. And the saddest part? He’s the best outcome of this whole sorry mess.

This is not a good time to be in California.

(2009: note to reader, Schwartzenegger swooped in and won the election.)

Today is another day. I don’t know what today will bring. Beth actually drove to cupertino to be at work today. she’s going out of town several days later this month for some training in Irving, TX. We have a friend, “Red” Nelson, who lives not far from there, so Beth will have someone to hang out with.

I’m planning to re-set up my studio after ripping it apart yesterday to do the recording at Chriss Tann’s place. Right now my studio is such a mess, I don’t know if I’ll get to it – I might just spend this morning cleaning the place, and then work on the cover for Dennis Young’s new CD, “Old Dog, New Tricks”.

I grew up with Dennis – he lived several blocks away from me, and his grandfather lived even closer. We were in some of the same classes in grade school, and our fathers were both on the volunteer ambulance squad. I remember playing in his grandfather’s backyard with him – some of my few really happy memories from childhood. Dennis is the percussionist in the group “Liquid Liquid”. They had a hit back in the day with the song “Cavern” which was sampled by Grandmaster Flash in the monster hit “White Lines”. That super bass/drum/percussion line is striahgt out of Cavern. Dennis is a great guy and I urge everyone to collect his music. It’s nothing like mine: he’s very involved with striaght ahead groovy funky beats w/ smooth vocals and soaring guitars. Really nice stuff. And *I’m* doing the cover for the CD… Gotta get cranking on that today. I did a rough a few days ago when I got the CD, but I want to present him with several alternatives, so I feel comfortable that he’s comfortable with what he’s getting. His pressing plant sent me the Quark Templates they use, so that will ease the development of the artwork considerably. I enjoy doing CD covers. I do them well…

Dennis Young’s WEBSITE.

Last night, after putting Elizabeth to bed I scampered down to Dimension7, (D7) to reconnect with the people there and get some more movement on the symposium. Sometimes I despair for performance cinema. There was some really nice wallpaper stuff there – abstract washy lines and forms that gently evolved into other, ummm, washy lines and forms – zero “content” but beautiful to look at. I missed the main attraction at 8pm. supposedly it was pretty good. Grant of D7 had some really striking stuff looping for a while. Gave me a few ideas about what I can do with SEI. One guy (I forget his name) showed up with a keyboard and laptop and Arkaos, and performed clips (processed in real time) of some guy dancing. Badly. It sucked. I have nothing against “VJ” work, but damn people : THINK before you project something… life is SO much more interesting than the lowest common denominator – it’s why I’m busting my back on this symposium!

Speaking of the symposium, So far I’ve received some nice stuff, from all over the world. I’m getting very excited about all this…

Once I put my studio back together, I’ll be editing SEI back together with the new audio tracks. This late afternoon will be spent web – job hunting.

Beth is in Dallas for a few days at an SAP training thingie for HP. Neither of us are big fans of Dallas, but we have a few friends in the area, and Beth hopes to see them when she gets there, esp. Judie. Already I miss Beth… Elizabeth was a bit of a pill early this morning, but not impossible. I gave her lots of hugs, and everything was fine.

Super busy today – editing video of SEI for performance, and reviewing the entrants for the symposium in September. Got another entrant; VJs from Quebec. Got email from Kim, Raul, and a lovely friend from my wacky old days in DC, Tonya. Stacy from Oz touched base as well. Good to hear from everyone. I wish I had more to say – I do, I just haven’t the time right now to put it into words…

Sometimes I think Beth, Elizabeth and I should be living in Europe.

Didn’t sleep much last night, but I slept well when I did finally doze off.

Getting more response to the Symposium. I developed a simple website for the symposium (SFPCS) and need to fix it up a bit. Get a few more emails out to people interested. So far, it looks like I’ll have people from as far away as Norway to come and speak, and performers from all over the place. It’s very exciting.

Right now, I’m up to my eyeballs editing SEI for a test performance/premiere at Goddard college in early august. Peter Nyboer’s been doing my software development, and he recently sent me the latest rev of our app (FLORENCE). I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to even test it!

Last night I made a yummy dinner of Runner Beans, Soy based sausage, a salad and Juice to drink. Cheap easy eats, and Elizabeth dug it. This morning had breakfast with Jerry (as usual of a Thursday) at All You Knead (as usual) at the middle booth on the right (as usual) and ordered eggs / bacon / pumpernickel toast and garlic potatoes with coffee (As usual) served by the ever delightful Michelle (as usual) who’s birthday it is today. We talked about video (as usual) and the horrific state of the world (as usual). Now, with a monster breakfast and enough coffee to give a bull elephant the jitters, I’m fueled and ready to edit a ton of video.

Political statement for the day: Fuck George Bush and his junta of greedy imperialist thugs.

18 JULY 03

Major Dream Action last night. Hardly slept. Finally faded around 2 AM. Up at 7.30 to get Boo ready for school. Last night had wild vision about understanding the universe as harmonic structures in higher dimensional space – it was if I could see the extra dimensions. Certain resonant harmonies resulted in different kinds of matter or energy. In this way, gravity was a kind of “leading wave” that easily resonated with other similar leading waves. The Cosmo. Constant went in the other “direction” and had its own harmonic structure – it was all these resonating frequencies – matter and energy were just the manifestations of them that I could “normally” percieve.

These were caused by a massive harmonic resonance – a huge number of giant waves all coalesced in one place as several harmonic forces all met at once. There was someone playing a singing bowl, and it grew so loud, it cracked. When it cracked, there was a shower of light, and it all spun off into all directions, even ones that haven’t the same dimensionality. Intense dream.

Today, I edit more video, and work on some music soudtracking, and pick up Beth at the Airport. Then it’s off to Elizabeth’s swimming lessons. A full day ahead. Yesterday I worked on the credits – they came out really well – and the cafe scene, which is going to be a lot tighter than I first expected…

20 JULY 03

Today is a VERY busy day. LOTS of editing to do. Got a note from Dennis Young – wants some more ideas for his CD cover, so I’ll get to that later this week, once I sort out a minor technology situation on my end. Got a lot of editing done last night, lost a bunch of it, but will simply have to re-render it. I’ll probably save that for tonight and re-render the whole thing at once, rather than in bits and pieces and waste my day with it.

Lately I’ve been listening to Kim Cascone’s blackCube( ). It’s very uncompromising sound. Very smart, rather dissonant and distilled. I approve.

Elizabeth had a sleep over at her friend Gabby’s house. There were six little six year olds there. Gabby’s parents get a medal. In honour of the evening, Beth and I did something we *never* get to do: go out for a spicy dinner and watch a movie that isn’t something cooked up by Disney or Pixar.

We went to Guymas in Tiburon. It was very good, and the view of Angel Island and SF is fantastic. I had a seafood mix (squid, octopus, coho salmon, mussels, and an assortment of veggies in some kind of spicy butter sauce) and Beth had skewers of lamb and chicken with various veggies. And Margaritas!!! Yum. We did some window shopping, bought a very nice bottle of Wine (Windsor Merlot, 1999 signature series…oOOoOOoo. We tasted it first – it’s very good) then went on to see a movie: Northfork by Bros. Polish.

It was very good, but not great. I’d give it 3.5 stars out of 5. I liked the magical elliptical plot that keeps you dangling and wondering. I loved the idea of the story – that a boy might actually be a de-winged angel, now dying, and soon to accompany other angels who have come to find him. I wondered if the boy was actually the angel of the town that was about to be submerged, and that as the town died so did he; and as the town entered the world of forms in history, so too, the boy ascended to his rightful place as an angel. I liked some of the acting – I thought Darryl Hannah and Nick Nolte were very good. They seemed to care about what they were doing. Some of the performances I thought were a bit flat, but sometimes it was hard to tell, given the exigencies of the characters. The worst part of the movie was the music. It was continuous, obtrusive, and never ending. As soundtrack, it was OK, nothing special in terms of composition, and could have been used very effectively. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. It was used VERY badly, and it bothered me. A lot. However, given the utter shite that normally gets pumped out of Hollywood to dull and distract the masses, this is well worth watching.

We got home, and basically passed out. We slept in till about 8 when the cats wouldn’t let Beth sleep any longer and insisted on being fed. We went out for breakfast – something else we don’t get to do very often. We went to All you Knead, in Haight Ashbury. We stuffed ourselves (their portions are large and very reasonabley priced) and we basically skipped lunch. Elizabeth is now out with her “godmother”, Bree, feeding kitties. Bree said she’d feed E. so Beth and I get a dinner to ourselves tonight… Yippie! I think I’ll cook something spicy… I have some tilapia defrosted in the fridge…

This afternoon, I’ve been editing sections for SEI. Sometimes I look at this and think : I’ll never get this done. Ever. I’m doomed. But then I start working on it, and little by little each shot transforms into a clip, and everything slowly clicks into place. I’ll be up most of the night and for the rest of the week working on this. It’s one of the linch pins of my thesis work.

Saturday, a few more submissions rolled in for the Symposium. Gotta work on that too, this week. Woof.

I also watched the interviews with Brakhage on the retrospective DVD I bought. He’s one of my heroes. That DVD is amazing and wonderful. Truly a remarkable document, and a must have.

Political Statement of the Day: Fuck Ann Coulter and her skanky fascist lunacy. People like her make me wanna clear my throat.

21 JULY 03

Well, the submissions deadline for the San Francisco Performance Cinema Symposium has finally passed and I am now BURIED in submissions that all arrived in the past 3 or 4 days. Ug. Some of them look Excellent, some look pretty cool, some are dreck. I am very excited by the prospect of this coming off in Spetember. I need to start focussing on the promotion and getting an audience. I’ve asked about a dozen corporations for money, all have either said no or have simply not responded to my request. Life is tough right now for everybody, I suppose.

Today I do more editing of SEI, and then start exporting clips into Florence. Florence is software I designed that was developed by Peter Nyboer. Florence is my mother’s name. I’m dedicating SEI to her memory.

Any time left over, I will work on Dennis Young’s CD covers. I’ll focus more on that towards the end of the week.

Political Statement of the Day:

There’s a piece circulating the web right now – about Bush’s trip to Senegal was completely insulting to the Senegalese and a bit of a disaster on the ground. It pretty much rakes him over the coals. Some of it is a bit over reactive (like whinging about Bush having his own meals – sorry, but poisoning is too easy, and given the violent evil things Bush has done since his usurpation of power, he’d be a fool NOT to bring his own food along…) but some of it is pretty spot on target about how Bush is basically filth. Pure and simple.

while I find such emailings informative, I also find them irritating, because there’s no DATE on the thing, the author’s name was taken off, so there’s no way to verify the authenticity of the claims made. So: a word to the wise on the left – IF you’re going to pass stuff around like that, INCLUDE the SOURCE and THE DATE. Otherwise, you’re just passing a likely story along. And likely stories, while entertaining, are not useful in building an historical case against the Bush legacy.

2004 can’t come soon enough…

24 JULY 03

Still getting submissions for the symposium. Got email from Ian Wallace – another chapter in our ongoing discussion about jazz and the audience. I got another rev of Florence from Peter. It fixes a number of things. I actually got it to crash the other day. I need to send Peter the log file. Today I set up SEI into Florence, and then rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

After I rehearse a few times, I will work on Dennis Young’s CD cover. Elizabeth is on an over-night camping trip, so Beth and I are going to have a lovely evening. It’s so nice to go on a date with the woman I love so very very much. Woo Hoo! Tommorrow I will work on more of Dennis’s covers, email pdfs of them to him, and then do more rehearsals. Next week, I have to prepare for going to Vermont, which means having to ship my CS2x to the school for performance and rehearse on one of my cranky old DSS1’s! I hope this comes off well.

26 JULY 03

Re-edited the trees section of SEI, so I can more easily cross fade between two different camera angles at once, making for a more fluid performance. Right now it’s too choppy and eats up too much keyboard space. Beth and E went to see Sinbad at the movie theatre, and then went to the park. Tonight, I cook up some din din and then tomorrow Beth goes to Texas AGAIN, and with E out of summer camp, I’m basically SCREWED as far as getting any work done is concerned. But I’ll have lots of fun playing with Elizabeth.

Last night I went to SomArts for the Electronic Music Festival.

I missed the first act, but the second show was Bran(…) Pos. He ran his voice through a mic into some processors. EVERYBODY who gets a mic and some processors does this. He’s just very systematic about it. I think the sutff I did in 1992 with processed vocals was intrinsically more interesting. I didn’t find his work that vital.

Next was DISC. DISC is a mix of Matmos and kid606. I found them loud and tedious. A big disapointment. I’ve listened to both Matmos and 606,so I figured this might be really interesting. It wasn’t.

The last act was O.Blaat. The music played was much more interesting than the presentation. There were several lights (incandescent and flourescent) strung about the hall. They would come on at seemingly random times, loosely affiliated with the music. The music was better than DISC, and was really quite interesting until the very end when it got so loud I had to leave. The lights were pointless.

Overall, a mediocre evening. But I ran into Charles K., Pam Z, and Dan J., which was nice – it was good to touch base with them. Afterward, Jef, Mark, and I went to Dylans and hoisted a few.