Rats? Rats! Rats...

Power went out for our computers, phones and other communications devices for a while at work today. Took our internet a while to return, so Microsoft Paint was about all I had to work with. This is my representation of what my technical expertise led me to conclude had caused the outage.

Paperwork's Antithesis

Is paper shredding the logical antithesis to paperwork? 9 hours of cleaning out files yesterday followed by 2 hours of shredding today led me to pose this question.

Certainly each piece of paper I selected for destruction was, at one time, deemed important. Each sheet represented a job, done years ago. Communication, vital and necessary at one point; now incriminating, outdated, irrelevant or space-taking. Research, personal information, money, time--lots of time. Paper that once determined whether or not humans received healthcare, benefits, promotions. Now hoping only to become celebratory confetti or perhaps live out it's days of carbon-decay compressed into building material with millions of its closest friends. Seems the shredder acts perfectly as an agent of entropy, illustrating the physical principle of [paper]work degenerating into chaos. Momentary importance succombs to a final flurry of incoherence, emerging as senseless chaffe. What if we were to consider what the products of our 'todays' will be fit for in five years?


outrageously,

J. Luke

The Airports

Went to see Tommy, the musical based on The Who's album and movie of the same name, at the Rep last night. The show rocked (& opera-ed, I guess), but the best part of the night came on the way home. Michael and I mutually made a life-changing decision...

We will now be starting a band called the Airports. Naturally, with a name like this, we will singlehandedly revive the hair metal genre. This is the synopsis of our career, as told from the future:

• Takeoff--our debut album rockets us to the top of the charts. Meteoric rise puts us in the company of both N*SYNC and the Wright brothers.Our high-flying jams and sky-high performances quickly propel the band to cruising altitude. Superstardom, E.T.A.: now.
• Crash & Burn--met with harsh criticism, our sophmore-slump offering never really made its way out of the gate.
• Turbulence--roughly received by music elite, but hailed by headbanging concert-goers. Album cover warns of potential storms ahead, so you know you're in for a wild ride.
• Descent/Landing--This is the point when you realize we've finally arrived.
• Taxi--we were stuck in a holding pattern for a while, but this album takes the seatbelt warning light off our career and carries us safely to the jetway.
• "Final Destination"--unflappable ballad that slingshots our reunion tour and garners us a window seat on the return to the stratosphere.

effervescently,

J. Luke

The Allure of the Ascetic Aesthete

I'll probably write more on this later, but let me know what you think about it so far:



Van Gogh, foregoing food to afford oils and tobacco, choosing to paint in privation. Dickens’ artistically evocative ragamuffins. Bone-weary fingers, sallow-eyed, slack-jawed. Scratching out verse after wrenching verse by ubiquitous dullflickering candle. The tortured creative mind, appreciated only in death, living well only posthumously. Always in appositional opposition to their contemporary and colloquial ‘sellouts.’

Need the artist starve to death? Is wizening only achieved through withering? Must the lifetaking knife be rusted, blunted—requiring multiple brushstrokes to finish its gruesome gouache? Or do we merely hang this downtrodden story as a conventionalized backdrop to creativity, constructing separation to excuse and assuage the consciences of those who choose to never create?

Summer Project

Making my own version of this contrast collar and placket shirt will be one of my first projects this summer. And making the face in this picture will not be my second.

(Pic: Marc Jacobs Fall 09, from NYTimes)

working stiff

M.B.A., P.h.D., I.O.U.

clitsch. schling.

Mechanized. Petrified.

A tree ungrown, undead for a thousand years.

Sedentary.Caged.

Staged. Aged. Age-ed.

Ageless, aimless,

less less, less.

Processes: reality-disconnected-action.

Causes: effect-robbed.

Effect, responsibility: absolved.

Each human a blip

On [un]Nature's assembly line.

Value-added DNA.

And making a living wastes a life away.