…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.

In the summer, one should sit on metal scaffolding and drink tea or Pimm’s cups and eat meze. The following paean to metal scaffolding did steal my heart, when I found it buried deep within a book about urban adventure and the history of New York, a book otherwise readable but at no other point cockles-stirring, poetical, or propelled by such singular, semicolonic grace.

What, in fire escapes, do I admire? Their universality: their equal utility across cities and neighborhoods; their economy of design: their rugged skeletal strength and transparent unity: their spontaneous novelty: the simply sturdy curves overlapping when viewed from a given vantage, filtering the masonry or brick: their constancy: sound as a dollar, firm as Gibraltar, unshaken by the decades, neglected yet shouldering their vital charge, clinging, like Ulysses to his barque, through hurricanes, freezing gales of winter: safely conducting bolts of lightning; supporting, as Atlas, the gravid snows of winter: the variation within an essential form, like the very snowflake, each unique yet all bound by unyielding laws of construction: their balance, supporting the disproportionate mass with the well-placed lever arm: their hospitality, Ralph and Alice being neither the first nor the last to avail themselves in the heat of summer, and this tradition remaining firmly in place throughout the urban world from New York to California and Hong Kong: their elasticity, swelling in the humid summers, shrinking in winter months like the boards of the Ancient Mariner’s ship: their uncomplaining servility in blurring uneventful years: their silent heroism in the teeth of a four-alarm blaze: their romantic accessibility, climbing from the sidewalk into the starry firmament.

—Invisible Frontiers, Lefty Leibowitz and L. B. Deyo, officers of Jinx (a defunct [?] Libertarian urban exploration group).

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.

This Saturday at 8 p.m., I’ll be playing the Logician in The Mighty Theater’s one-night-only production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a long, funny play about… well, conformity, drinking, logic, and rhinos, among other things. The show’s in Peekskill, at the Paramount. Here are the full details. And here is LoHud’s sneak-peak. Those in the Hudson/Westchester/MetroNorth region, check it.

FUN FACT: Rhinos are perissodactyls, or odd-toed ungulates. Looking up “perissodactyl” on Wikipedia yielded my new favorite sentence of the week, my emphasis:

In contrast to the Ruminant Artiodactyl ungulates, perissodactyls are hindgut fermenters; that is, they digest plant cellulose in their intestines rather than stomach.

And it went something like this. (Thanks to my brother G for the recommendation. I love true history. And cussin’, oathin’, &c.)

In other news, I have updated my own Vividly Unimagined Irrealities index.

In still other news, Pink Tentacle wins this week’s Honourable Badge Of Merit for his coverage of the strange and often powerful popular arts of Japan. If only I had the time, manpower, and paint to turn my own rice paddies into giant two-dimensional samurai…

The bluenesses of different eras recall different dreams of what sadness, thought, and hue finally are. The moods of the past may not be read perfectly, but they may be seen as motion, deep beneath an ice-clear lake, or the body behind a frosted sliding shower door. The blues of one painter are the pale turquoise of regret, or orgies ended; another’s blues are modernist, stark, mysterious, eye-entangling, and unyielding, like the gods of Lovecraft or the gazes of those who spurn us.

Ranking blues chronologically by their authoring spoils the fun by breaking trust with the great writers.

Ranking my favorite blues chronologically by their supposed authoring, as I have done just now, to see how they stack up in my head as I return to them, allows us to envision different cerulean heavens, many varieties of squid-bruise sea, and all manner of sad personages, casting mournful or perhaps hilarious sturgeon-faced gazes out onto unresponsive expanses of pampas and heath.

To the chrono-palette:

When Hoja remarked that my powers of imagination were all too limited, I remembered the mustachioed French turtles in our lily-pond, the blue parrots that talked with Sicilian accents, and the squirrels who would sit facing one another preening their coats before mating. We devoted much time and care to a chapter on the behaviour of ants, a subject which fascinated the sultan but which he could not learn enough about because the first courtyard of the palace was continually being swept.

—Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, set circa the seventeenth century.

Pamuk’s blue is the childhood color of imagination; the house is colored green; the grass is red; the yellow sky eggily holds up a black sun; etc. Like many great authors, Pamuk supercharges his novels with even more interesting but impossible to write fake books. Here, our blue is the sadness at never being able to read Hoja’s elaborate bulldada animalian encyclopaediae.

Rain, sun, two whole days of impenetrable fog, night winds whistling, winds far and near, nights of blue crystal, crystals of ozone. The graph of temperature against the hours of the day was sinuous, but not unpredictable. Nor, in fact, were their visions. The mountains filed so slowly past that the mind amused itself devising constructivist games to replace them.

—César Aira, An Incident In The Life Of A Landscape Painter, set circa the nineteenth century.

The games of Kandinksy, whom Gass quotes: Blue absorbs where yellow diffuses happily into oblivion; the one, a cat; the other, a tiring dog. This montane landscape is gray-brown to us now, sparsely green, but to the men who walked it before Twitter, the stones revealed depths of frozen flesh and layers of color, whole canvases used again and again by matrices of indecisive, chameleon crystals and minerals reflecting each color in turn, patient as their immobility could ever warrant.

Scolding and demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that shut and spread like a Frenchwoman’s) all had folded itself quietly about her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage changes from bright steel to soft purple.

—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, set circa the World Wars.

Dame Woolf here writes, in part, of the blue of quiet transformations. When my (blue) cat realizes I am leaving for the day, his gunmetal fur ripples as his body twists to leave the sill, abandoning cat-yoga to rush for the door and out into the fatal void-world where I live. (Just as I might try to leave earth in a spacesuit of duct-tape.)

The blue of the sky. Trees leant against. Bird stutter and the whisper of grasses. The Dead Father playing his guitar. Thomas performing leadership functions. Construction of the plan. Maps pored over and the sacred beans bounced in the pot. The yarrow sticks cast. The dice cup given a shake. Shoulder blade of a sheep roasted and the cakes in the bone read. Peas agitated in a sieve. The hatchet struck into a great stake and its quivers recorded. First-sprouting onion caught and its peels palpated. Portents totted up and divided by seven. Thomas falls to the ground in a swoon.

—Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father, set circa a dreamy, olden-timey now.

The blue of prophecy darkens the sun-colored supposedly free world in which we live. (Our world is darkened otherwise by the industrial blue of leadership functions, networking, thing-fetishizing, and so on.)

What pretty names, he thought. Indigo, sugar, ginger, cotton. The reddish flowers of the indigo bush. The dark blue paste, with copper glints. A woman painted indigo, washing herself in the shower.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, set circa now.

The shower again. A prismatic turn toward indigo. The thickness of paste. The painting of the self to reflect, what? The blue everywhere else, or the blues inside?

Or finally the thick landscape of blues, tangible, practically taste-able, that William Gass writes of—the realm of blues-set-beside-non-blues, to bring out their quintessential bluenesses—sadness, awareness, the rain, sex, and time?

So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp’s breath the smoke of the wraith.

—William Gass, On Being Blue, timely, timeless.

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.

Reading strong prose inspires me. 2666 makes me want to go to Mexico and solve terrible crimes, or to write a novel about a Mexican detective, or to at least publish a novel under the name Archimboldi. In the same way, I often find myself inspired to write while reading insipid prose. But even more than make me want to write, bad prose makes me think in a certain unfettered way.

Like making coffee or taking a long shower, mentally excoriating bad writing as I read it frees up parts of my mind normally reserved for creating anxiety. Newly unbidden, these anxiously creative parts think amok, farting forth strange ideas. (Demi-tangent: Steven Bach once told me that the most difficult narrative knots of screenplays often unravel in the shower. And what Steven said is true for all types of narrative writing, even if my screenplays will always be too long and too weird to produce.)

Sometimes, though, I can’t tell whether the prose I’m reading is bad or merely distinct, perhaps a little alien. I read a sentence, experiencing it as “bad,” enjoying its badness. Then I go back and see that it’s not bad in the way I thought it was. Maybe my reading was too literal, too schizoid, too connective, too green, too moon. Then I change my mind again. Reading this type of ambiguously “bad” prose, I become more and more reflective, until I lose the overall thread of what I was reading in the first place.

Take for instance this perfectly intelligible sentence from the article “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny” in the New York Times:

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming.

Nuns planting schools? It’s an image right out of the Codex Seriphinianus. For some reason, it struck me when I read it as overly cute, the wrong action. Planting a building, perhaps, makes a certain metaphorical sense. But would you say that you plant an institution, with staff and students and conflicting schedules and a night-janitor cleaning up a healthy smear of inexplicable bat guano in the computer lab? Given the calculus of schools, maybe they can be seeded or grown. But planting doesn’t do it for me.

Consider also the medieval/pastoral notion of a whole parish humming along together, literally. It’s a properly nun-like act, the organization of co-humming. Humming is harmonious, otherworldly, and communal in a chaste way. “Parish humming” conjures up an image of all of church-dense Brooklyn taking to the streets to join hands and hum a song by, I dunno, Journey or Beyoncé. (Probably Journey. Everybody sings that one fucking song, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” at karaoke.)

At the same time, we now have arboreal schools (or schoolchildren?), I suppose growing out of the tilled field of America (or knowledge?), and a bunch of parishioners (kept) humming, which humming doesn’t necessarily have squat to do with the arboreal school/kids. I find my orthography grows cluttered as I try to untangle the sentence’s metaphors. The images clash and, perhaps ecstatically, perhaps in a good way, kill each other off , as if in autumnal cannibalism.

By way of a sweeping conclusion, I should add that the nun-article is a good read for reasons other than the sentence about humming that tripped me up. Nuns apparently face a new inquisition from the Holy See, where lady-suits and reiki are still not cool. I know the Pope likes to preserve tradition and rigor, but nuns aren’t exactly the problem, are they?

Then again, perhaps the brides of Christ are tweeting and debating stocking-propriety on the boards of Nike Talk.

O modernity. You rock.

Fans of bizarre rap already know and love hyphy, a micro-genre from the Bay Area which is… well, bizarre. Suffice to say, hyphy is fun music. Think high-pitched noises. The 1990s. Artists like Keak Da Sneak, Mac Dre, E-40 (musically, if not categorically), and New York’s own DJ Eleven of the Rub.

Perhaps a clear introduction to the form is a song created from chopped-up sections of the Ghost Busters theme. Gentle reader, I present via hyperlink and heartily endorse “Ghost Ride The Whip” by Mistah Fab, a song about driving slowly while standing on your car, looking fly, wearing unexpected vestment, maxing/relaxing, &c.

Importantly, hyphy, a word Keak coined, is pronounced “high-fee,” not “hi-fi.” I hope an intrepid etymologist, philologist, or linguist (preferably Language Log’s Geoff Pullum) can one day trace in full the evolution of hyphy’s pronunciation. Until then, I classify it a minor, enjoyably diverting mysterium. Oakland’s version of my own hometown’s crunk.

MEANWHILE: The Sci Fi Channel needed a new look, a new steez, if you will. Some branding genius was banging his head against the wall. How could he ever possibly hope to make sci fi less, well, sci fi?

(Tangent: Fantasy got Peter Jackson, hot elves, lovably queer hobbitses, and a Halo-worthy final bodycount of about 90 million orcs dead, 1 Vigo scuffed. But the genre of speculative or science fiction has had to endure an endless parade of movie or television franchises resurrected in hideous zombie form. In fact, the only growth area in science fiction, at least in terms of massively popular culture, has been that of the zombie—though near-future vampires seem due for a New Orleans-inspired/tween-financed comeback.)

What was Sci Fi (the channel) to do? The answer, according to our hypothetical branding whiz, was to change its name to something unpronounceable and enigmatical: SyFy. I saw this word, this neoloogyism, in brilliant largeness on a poster at a bus stop and read it “sigh-fee,” because of hyphy. I read the copy around the word and found out that it is pronounced “sigh-fi,” as in “sci-fi” the genre, as in “Sci Fi” the channel. I shook my head and thought immediately of Mac Dre (RIP) and the other under-sung exponents of innovation and, yes, speculation in hip hop.

Zombies are all well and good. Sci Fi getting a metaphorical haircut to attract a new demographic is all well and good. But companies seeking to foster innovation in that strange zone between future-reading and art, between astrology and entertainment need to do more than simply repackage old concepts.

What Sci Fi et al need is the sort of willing-to-defy-popular-trends spirit that inspired Firefly, that inspired hyphy, that inspired crunk, that inspired the first rap records, and before that the first jazz jams in some broke dude’s basement in some hood I’ve never heard of, and before that Debussy, and Shelley, and so on, and so forth, back to the first cave-nerd to draw a Cubist bison fucking a waterfall.