Seeing the world differently gets me all hot and bothered, so I was proper “psyched” when I read “Above the Past” in the New York Times and learned about NYCityMap, a Google Maps-esque wonder-function for seeing what New York City looked like, from overhead, in 2008, 2006, or 1924 (click the camera icon).  It surprises me how similar the older City is to the city of today.  Still, the site is worth some serious minutes of sepia-tone playing around.

Likewise, Phantom City takes the whole “seeing the familiar urban blahscape with new eyes” in the other direction, allowing users to imagine a New York of the near future. The phantom of possibility—a multiple ghost, mutating with each Apple press conference and MTA fail—courses unobserved beneath each skyscraper, each yard of pizza-spattered concrete.

It’s an appealing thesis. I read Warren Ellis and William Gibson and listen to Chromeo and watched Firefly and Bionic Six. I want a flying vespa inside a flying car, an Aibo that can floss my teeth for me… And yet I know these things will not be mine…

Both sites finally present not images of the past or future, but of alternate presents. 1924 is, relatively speaking, yesterday, less than the first twitch of a cosmic blink. And tomorrow approaches faster the more time we spend writing about it and trying to codify. We sometimes focus on far-off mirage-goals (nanorobots, peace, Aibo that can floss our teeths for us) while failing to take in the changes, more massive, brought on by the hyperwebnetz.

Where geography once took dumb European peasants in search of mangos and delicious syphilis during the Enlightenment, some new, hideous geography now takes America’s adventurers—not farther afield, to vast floating cities full of jaguar-gods and the beautiful Christ-less Passion of the potlatch, but inside, to the brains of the new anonymous ur-person, the mirrored hive-mind that circumscribes whatever future we elect.

Old geography presents the world as apprehendable as illustration, reduction, miniaturizaiton, visualization; new geography reduces an unpresentable pleroma-world of possibilities (194,000 results for “spondulix”) to a few hyperlinks, each of which concatenates to a few more; to a few more; to over 9000; to nigh-infinities, indexed and flattened by reduction (geography) to a few hyperlinks…  It’s a fugue, and it’s a new way of moving through time and space, and, hey, we’re all incredibly used to it, half a generation in…

Or maybe I’ve just had too much coffee today!

Have you appeared in a movie or TV show with someone who’s acted alongside someone who’s acted with Kevin Bacon?

Have you published a mathematics paper with someone who wrote a proof alongside someone who’s been published for having worked with prolific genius Paul Erdős?

It’s all delightfully, terribly confusing. Frequent Simpsons guests Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have their numbers (7).

What’s your Erdős–Bacon number?

And can you join us, Gentle Reader, in agreeing that essayist, nobleman, villain, genius, and primitive super-scientist Francis Bacon would surely have the lowest (best) Erdős–Bacon number, were he alive today or in the recent past?

Just imagine Viscount Bacon stridin down the set of Law & Order (Court Clerk With Food On Lip, 1 line), or Dexter (Miami Mel, serial killer who uses power of rational thinking to convince his victims of their unworth). Imagine him whipping out the gilt cellie and dialing up K-Bacon, just because he can…

“Whattup, Kev Beezy.” “Nuthin, Frank—whattup with you.” “Just publishin a proof with a prolific math genius.” “Word to that, lunch later?” “No doubt, tapas or bust.” “And we never bust!” [Francis hangs up on the clod.]

(&c.)

Viscount St. Alban, Original Ruff Rider:

Many moons back, my friend Seth, who writes under the nom de plume “Sparrow Hall,” asked me to work with my friend Sam, the rock paragon behind the bands Arpline and Courtier, to create a tripped-out hip hop song for the soundtrack to Sparrow’s new… novella?

He wants a soundtrack to a story? I thought, remembering McSweeney’s #6, for which They Might Be Giants and a few other decidedly un-crunk musicians created a soundtrack, one designed to exactly complement the stories in the journal from front cover to back.

But Seth’s idea is more grand in scale: He wants to publish stories and books that involve rich multimedia packages, including songs, videos, dances, &c., each of which reflects rhizomatically the progenitive central piece (in this case, a novella about love and memory loss called Two Blue Wolves).

I had a blast making “Stranger In The Strangest Land,” the ant-mentioning ekphrastic song-about-the-novella with Sam. I also ended up editing the novella.

And now it’s all finally available, on SparrowHall.com. Check it.

The soundtrack features music by a dude from Elefant and many other fascinating artistic souls, including several good friends.

Also, 15% of sales benefit the Alzheimer’s Foundation.

So once more, Gentle Reader, I murmur “check it” into the windy crevasse of the internet. Stories have finally entered the post-postmodern age.

Traditionalists may see the death of old media and the fracturing of style as threats to time-tested systems. Old writers likely want people to read books, dangit, and books written within clear limits of genre, even if those limits have only existed for a few decades. Each medium wins its hawks, and so each medium has mourners to bemoan its inevitable death.  But how much gladder am I to laud the comings of a form, the birth of a new literature, a new system of meaning, one made of transparencies and Japanese music videos…

These musings are really just to say: My friends P. D. and M. R. of What We Know So Far have been presenting for the last year or so a series of simultaneously low-fi/hyper-current lecture-operas about, among other rhizomatic topics, the internet—what it means, where it’s going, and how quickly information in general is mutating in the Twitter era.

The other night at 3rd Ward they presented a series of short… lectures (?) and videos, some of which I’d seen in earlier, less-polished (but always entertaining) rounds of composition. To sum it up quickly and perhaps badly, WWKSF’s work blends the words of Baudrillard and the images of ICanHasCheezburger seamlessly, so that it’s afterward surprising that the great French de-thinkers of the twentieth century weren’t inspired by the internet, but somehow prefigured it, perhaps by doing lots of awesome drugs, or by being really smart, or a mix of columns A and B.

For What We Know So Far’s bold and hilarious efforts to probe just what we know and how we know it, in toto, they receive this week’s Honourable Badge of Merit.

In related news, (i.e., the news of cat memes on the internet), I found a new favorite sentence of the summer, from the New York Times:

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent.

This sentence claims to describe a movie, District 9, which I hadn’t really wanted to see until reading about the Nigerian cat-food gangsters. I wonder now, rereading the sentence from beyond the stars, if the c.-f. gangsters ever heard of Athanasius Kircher’s anti-mellifluous cat piano, and if cats like aliens, or if aliens fall into the same category as other cats, vacuums, mops, twine, roaches, bees, human toes, and floss.

…Thanks to Booyah, an iPhone game that awards players “points” for completing tasks in real life such as “buying a pair of Nikes.” (Apparently, buying fresh Dunks has a value beyond protecting the feet from the elements/stylelessness.)

Says chief Booyah exec. Keith Lee:

“You’re not just getting a sword in a video game for completing a task… You’re creating a better version of yourself in real life.”

With reality augmentation in full swing, it makes good business sense for Apple and her drones to fill the market with Booyah-esque apps. They are recursive, after all. They have the capacity to award in-game points for playing the game - for buying Apple/Booyah/Nike products, for encouraging others to do so. In this way, they are “viral” IRL. They transport memes out of the space of pixels and ideas and into the space of def Nikes, cash money, and, well, the reality we see, or think we see.

As our reality is augmented (by us - we need no Big Brother to do it for us), reality IRL will resemble reality “in-game,” a la the dream-life confusion of Paprika or the stage-audience confusion of Synecdoche, New York. Each augmented human will be able to see, literally, the reality she wishes to see, though she will be increasingly hard-pressed to resist or even remain conscious of all the ads and meta-ads programmed into that reality. These meta-elements - ads inducing or allowing for augmentation - will create reality as it is seen and will not appear alien. Indeed, “real” reality will increasingly appear as a stark vacation-home compared to the “rich” and natural environment of the individual/individualized augmented mind.

To quote Mr. Lee again:

“There’s no shortage of business models here.”

Booyah!

Personally, I do need someone to award me “points” for accomplishing basic life tasks. I think my cat would be more useful if he could tally, using something simple like chalk and a blackboard, my total earnings for tooth-brushing, laundering, writing my novel, &c.

My brother G, an iPhone enthusiast, sent me an email the other day regarding a service call he’d made to AT&T Wireless. The email went, my emphasis:

word of the day… i learned from AT&T CUSTOMER SERVICE REP

frustrational, synonymous (i think) with frustrating… as in “i know that is frustrational…”

wow…

I enjoy pointless faux-Latin suffixes, and I enjoy words/signs that perform the very acts they mean to capture abstractly. The word frustrational is, albeit only mildly, actually frustrating.

I was not sure, after reading G’s email, that I’d ever feel frustrationalized, even if I knew I’d often feel frustrated. But I still laughed and copied the word into my mental florilegium, somewhere between frotteur and fulvous.

I then spent some hours editing the Atlas Obscura, an online encyclopedia of naturally or historically wondrous places and collections of curiosities.

If you’re headed out of town and want to see something besides yet another Denny’s water closet, search the Atlas. Waterfall of primordial blood? Check. Garden of poisonous plants? Sure. Living bridges made of massive entwined roots? Why not.

The Atlas is relaxing to edit and inspiring to read. Its entries are almost entirely inoffensive. They widen the world without challenging it. They are written to inform. Nothing about the project is harsh by design; the Atlas, like other moderated wikis, appeals to a broad audience.

So I was naturally surprised and even frustrationalized when the New Yorker, a once-notable journal of centrist politics, mediocre fiction, and blurry inscrutable cartoons about cat-psychiatrists and men trapped on desert islands with various supernumerary household appliances, published on its website this bizarre and seemingly off-topic review of a new patch of internet esoterica that I not only enjoy reading but actually edit.

The review is neither scathing nor adoring. The reviewer says she/he is “not immune” to the Atlas’ charms. But then the reviewer refuses to engage with the site on its own terms. The reviewer claims the Atlas is branded as a “club or society,” which isn’t true: The Atlas describes itself only as a “compendium” and “collaborative project.”

Inaccurate reporting aside, the tone of the review is off. Why does the reviewer mention Wes Anderson, for example? To my knowledge, Mr. Anderson makes twee, fantastical movies about immature man-boys of the type often played by the Wilson brothers. I like his movies, sure, and he does mention exotic, faraway places like Texas, but he’s hardly cornered the market on “exotic” or historical art.  (And the Atlas isn’t fiction. It’s nerd love pur sang. It’s an encyclo-freakin-pedia!)

The use of the name “Wes Anderson” in a review of a project undertaken by young scholars feels to me not like a valid jab at privileged knowitalls, but like a flailing attempt on the part of the New Yorker to participate in the discourse of hip. Their review of the decidedly non-twee Atlas reminds me of some technophobic friends’ scathing opinions of Twitter, a site these friends have never actually visited.

It’s not surprising that the fear of the unknown should follow us from the newsprint era into the era of the all-connective Web. Too, it’s not weird that the New Yorker should worry about its relevance. Frankly, it may not be especially relevant. It has clout; it frequently publishes good writing. But lots of magazines and sites publish good writing. Increasingly, clout is going to run downhill, from the dinosaurs to the more adaptable mammals of the publishing world.

I’m just surprised that the New Yorker would try to engage the world of cool, hip, twee, [insert adjective you think the New Yorker thinks is synonymous with "cool"] via a tactic so blatant. Like the chubby boy in fourth grade who can only let the pretty girl know he “like” likes her by spitting on her Bedazzled jeans-jacket, the New Yorker finds a cooler, younger site and wants to do… something… to/with/for it. But it ultimately proves a mite lost, unsure how to use its cultural clout and toward what end.

The Atlas has, in its first few weeks of life, garnered hundreds of followers from around the world, not to mention good reviews from Time and Metro. No doubt the New Yorker will continue to flail and look lost. I don’t need to extrude my syllogistic inklings very far to feel good about my own generation’s efforts to write well, explore the world, and perhaps - just perhaps - make it a little less of an old-white-dude-with-a-monocle kind of a place.

Friend and writer-adventurer Mr. Dylan Thuras (of the Atlas Obscura) recently brought to my attention the work of one Mr. Colin Low, author of both the best history and counter-history of the Necronomicon on the net.

Read in succession, Low’s Anti-FAQ and apologia for that Anti-FAQ explain what the Necronomicon is (H. P. Lovecraft’s recurring MacGuffin-grimoire, full of all sorts of evil gnostic gossip from beyond time and space), what it isn’t (real), and why so many would-be readers, myself included, care.

For my money, Low nails the book’s allure here:

I believe the importance of the Necronomicon is twofold:

• it is believed to reflect a modern consciousness of reality
• it is believed to be authoritative

As a lost evil text from another dimension, dictated to a mad Damascene before the First Crusade, the Necronomicon does not exist. But the possibility of its existence and the role it continues to play in literature, religion, and the rhizomatic maze-tunnels of the internet give it a special power over its would-be readers. One of the most talked-about artifacts to have never existed, the book’s form and content are indeed shaped by those who talk about it, making it a truly postmodern, truly potential text.

For those interested, various translations of the book exist. Versions based on the movies of Sam Raimi and Lovecraftian versions probably differ in the style and substance of their bulldada, but both will seriously up your hinter-culture street-cred.

In any event, hats off, Mr. Colin Low, to your exhaustive study of a fake book. You earn this week’s Honourable Badge Of Merit, the first to be given on this website.

Today, friends, is a glorious day, because despite all the petty and noble terrors of the earth, there is the internet, and it yields forth so many fructifants, some mango-like (lusty, wet), some pomegranate (jeweled, secret), some fig (sweet, gritty, leathern), others jerky (turkeyfied) or ape-brain (clay-y, monosodium glutamate-ish).

Here I have tallied only a small portion of the multiple lode:

• Vin Diesel loves Dungeons & Dragons. (Thanks to Julianne Smolinski, writer and professional genius, for the heads-up.)
• Billy Bob Thronton hates both Canada and acting. And isn’t all that into music, either. Which is strange when you think about the guy’s life, spent acting, playing music, and (at times) touring Canada. (Why do we do the things we loathe? Baudelaire couldn’t help us there; I’m not even going to try, je regrette.)
• My sometimes hero/sometimes nemesis Nicholas Kristof is bored by words, which I long suspected.
• Finally, I now know the joys of RSS (”really simple syndication”/”rich site summary”/”read sexy snippets”), thanks to (who else) Google. I feel like all the previous RSS readers were working too hard to promote themselves and not hard enough to show me the multiple Infinities of web content.

Of course, speaking of infinity, it’s gotta be nice to be Google: Like Dan Flavin, John Cage, Sam Beckett, you’ve got your discourse’s version of Minimalism on lock. You never have to do more work than [white page, Logo], as long as you back up said Minimal steez with un-fuckable-with functionality.

And with the help of said functionality, what day is not full of wondrous charm, here in the internet?

I write “in the internet” but can just as well write “through, via, by way of, thanks to, courtesy, all over, throughout the internet,” or any prepositional phrase that does not imply “through the internet,” since there is no mystic Other Side, no transcendent meaning, no final answer, no wizard behind the curtain (unless Vin Diesel is hanging out behind a curtain; that dude loves spellcasting).

The internet, without center, without king or tyrannical convention of democrats, may be the first true rhizome, the first deterritorializing machine, that which consumes and strips of transcendent meaning, applying all meanings to all surfaces to produce (more) all meanings (again, different). (And I am far from the first to suggest as much.)