Exploring Google Maps, especially the Street View, is an interesting way to artificially experience locations. Since they are captured at certain times and collaged together, there is something very uncanny about exploring a city in Google-dictated space.

I'm thinking of doing a "walkthough" writing/blog project that involves streets in San Francisco and the differences between the way I view these streets and the way Google Maps portrays them. What follows is only vaguely related to this idea, but serves as a introduction to my home in the world -- which is off the Street View grid, so to speak.

Bernal Heights, Approaches to Negative Space

Bernal Hill is the dominant feature of this neighborhood, as you can clearly see. I live at the tip of the park, if viewed as a triangle. Or, more specifically (and from a different point of view), I live here:

I've edited this map, which is clearly a Google Map, in order to convey the spaces from which the following Street Views were taken. The "views" all point toward a street that, some way or another, eventually takes you to my home. An interesting thing geographically about Bernal Heights is that it is a contained neighborhood on a hill -- Cesar Chavez to the North, Mission to the West, Cortland to the South (though Bernal Heights technically exists south of Cortland as well), and 101/Bayshore to the East. I will represent three of these four views, as Cortland does not have Street Views and any further south is outside my own personal experience of this section of town.

A: 101/Bayshore

This image, taken from a fast-moving highway, is an elevated view of Cortland Ave, which is not documented in the Street View function (fortunately or unfortunately).

B: Cesar Chavez and Precita/Bryant

The buildings in front seem to be blocking the sun. There isn't much light on this street at the moment. Precita Ave, which flows into Bernal Heights and parallels Cesar Chavez a block from this shot, is the quintessential street of a microcommunity: coffee shops, a restaurant, a corner store, a laundry, a cute park. It is the analog of Cortland.

C: Cesar Chavez and Alabama

Alabama is the most direct route to my house. The road rises steeply at the end and drops you off on a ridge that serves the many intricate pathways and tentacle-arms of Bernal streets. This shot is strangely put together; for some reason, the upper floors of a house on the street have been negativized. One wonders what this virtual (mis)representation does to the spirit of the space itself.

D: Cesar Chavez and Folsom

Folsom is a beautiful street lined with trees. This is another direct route to my house; it follows the road that straddles Bernal Hill and approaches the aforementioned ridge from a different direction. (This street will, perhaps, be my first "walkthough")

E: Mission and Powers

I never take this route, but it is important to conceive of Bernal Heights as a neighborhood with "options for escape." What I mean is this: Bernal's steep roads are only one line of flight; there are also numerous paths and stairways that allow pedestrians more freedom and creativity in the routes they choose. The point being, I could take Powers and, simply by orienting myself to the hill, could figure out two dozen routes to get home. This option is what is so charming about the neighborhood -- one can always have an interesting walk through Bernal Heights' meandering and hidden paths.

F: Mission and Cortland

Cortland is the lifeblood of Bernal Heights. Though Precita has amenities, Cortland makes Bernal Heights a legitimate neighborhood because it has one of everything: grocer, laundry, bar, restaurant, salon, bookshop, etc, etc. Coming down from Cortland to Mission is one of my most common routes and also one of the most fascinating -- Cortland and Mission are two totally different worlds: Cortland has families, a large lesbian community, and some of the upper crust; Mission is gritty and real, a mix of Latinos and young up-and-ups, and full of the life that makes San Francisco so charming while maintaining its "reality." In some ways, living on a hill is like living in the clouds; moving down the hill grounds my experience of what is real about this place.

ABC/Facebook and National Politics

I came across this article today and found it interesting. The ability to "follow" reporters in the field and possibly respond to the way they portray an issue is a complicated issue. On the one hand, I like the idea that we have extended the breadth of communication through the internet to the point that we have "full coverage" of everything, thus allowing informed, nuanced positions to be made available to everyone. On the other hand, this sort of full coverage means a loss in the spirit of change: as we collapse extension and duration into mere communication, change cannot manifest in the world-shaping ways. We no longer experience revolution, only the continual reification of the present moment, a history forever paused in an extended modernness.

Briefly, On Book Collection

Everyday needs a catalyst for inspiration. There is always the option to stay in bed, but waking up and engaging in something immediately -- cooking, reading, sudoku, crosswords, music -- increases the speed and intensity of one's thoughts. Activity is the active mode.

Recently, I have left the house each day with lists of things I want in my life. Because where I currently live is still sparse as far as furnishings go, I essentially set out to "furnish" my life. This isn't simply a desire to have something but more an active progression toward how I want to live in the world. This active progression never comes to an end. Rather, its destination is a utopia in itself: a mode of existing in the world that will never truly occur but is easily reducible to a possible description or image of existence. I've talked about heterotopias before, but there is a certain utility in the utopian vision of one's life that necessitates the idea of the heterotopia in the first place. As utopian conceptions intersect, you're left with being in the moment -- beautiful, tragic, sad, depressing, boring, lovely, and so on -- that is frozen outside the trajectory. It is interesting to come to terms with the notion that the way I furnish my life will never complete itself -- in some way, "feeling at home" in the world is accepting the inability to "complete" the home.

When I leave the house, I walk up Cortland Avenue to visit the bookstore. Furnishing my life with books is important as an act of collection that I find soothing. I have certain books in mind when I enter the bookstore, but I am also quite conscious of an overarching, socially inscribed value to authors and particular texts. Thus, when I move on from the bookstore to the man on the street selling books, I buy the "valued" book for a quarter.

Literally: I will never read the book. It falls in the pile of "valued" but does not overlap with my actual interests. But having it is part of the constitution of myself (which perhaps in this moment is broadcasting "fake") just as a bookshelf represents an individual's way of seeing the world. This isn't a totalized vision, but rather an interesting cross section of how one chooses to represent oneself. So, I buy books that I don't need and won't read for the purpose of having intellectual "capital", which can be freely traded using Bookmooch for books that I actually want to read and display on my bookshelf (which doesn't exist here, so all the books I've accumulated since moving to San Francisco are actually on the floor).

Just like the way I envision utopia but never realize that existence, I am always progressing toward a collection of books that will perfectly represent me. Obviously, the irony of this trajectory is that it goes to infinity, thus making my accumulation of books so excessive that representation becomes vague; the only thing conveyed is that I have too many books that I won't read. Simultaneously, the beauty of the infinite limit is that collection and "furnishing" are realized as active modes, as ways of articulating the spirit in ourselves.

Sound Maps and an excuse for Nomadology

The recent This American Life on various forms of cartography is one of the best I’ve heard (the one on Unconditional Love, which made me cry, is also excellent). The programs covers different ways of seeing the world through maps, which are interesting because of their hyper-specific orientation in and projection of the world. The section on sound maps – the harmonies and chords produced by the objects which surround us – resonated particularly well in light of recent experience I had on the San Francisco MUNI.

The story goes:
Due to a recent “incident” that occurred on Halloween, I have changed the path I take home from work. Instead of a straight shot from work to the bus, I walk up two blocks in order to take a different route home. This detour gives me several minutes to process the events of the evening: work, coworkers, my eating habits, my plans for the evening, and so on. Eventually, I reach the bus stop and get on.

The bus is always well lit and filled with a range of different passengers. Though the ride is seemingly entirely quiet, there is a permeating feeling of tiredness and intent; most passengers, it seems, are on their way home from work, locked into a closed space with strangers who happen to share the same obscure hours as they do. We glance ever-so-briefly, play different music into our individual headsets, look at papers left by those who came before, and always thank the driver at our stops. But getting off the bus, for me, is always the most profound.

Having spent twenty or thirty minutes on the bus – which resembles a place in limbo, where time does not physically manifest but rather emerges only as a static figure on the ticker – I get off at a stop which is quite dark. In front of me, the bus pulls away, its hum serving as a final, fading reminder of the plethora of noises that accompanied my ride. These noises, I immediately realize, comforted me in some way, assuring me of companionship; even if my companions were total strangers, we all shared the same bus, all located ourselves in the precarious space that is constantly moving without visual indication of being in motion.

I step off the bus into the street. The quietness calms me. The quietness alerts me to the emptiness of my new environment, which leads more directly into solitude. There is an image, in a movie that perhaps I’ve never seen but imagined in great detail, of the bus pulling away from a deserted street. The image is the exact moment when the bus finally moves away from sight, cutting off both visual and aural indication of its presence as it rounds a nearby corner. The environmental sound changes from a hum to a low murmur, an atmospheric sound composed by thousands of sleeping, breathing bodies in the darkened homes around me (the protagonist). And though I am calm, I realize that my wakefulness means solitude at this time of night, and I have been unwillingly thrown into this position.

Instead of idling in solitude, I begin to walk up the hill, which is quite steep, and my own breathing joins the sleeping chorus. Mine is heaving, more strained, but sparks within me a sort of tired bliss as my body tries hard to forget that my feet hurt from wearing dress shoes and standing all day. As the ground levels, my footsteps suddenly seem louder than before; I’ve become accustomed to the sound of night on these blocks and my steps serve as an uplifting beat that rises louder than the sleeping, breathing murmur.

Finally I reach my door, turn the key smoothly in the lock, and step inside. In this final transition, I realize that I have moved through various sonic environments, all of which affected my general mood:

The bus was a sleepy hum; the street was the murmur of solitude; the hill was a strained, rewarding effort; the level ground was an upbeat movement; and the turning key in the lock was a smooth, clear finale.


It’s worth noting the your sonic environment – the hums and buzzes of your home and workspaces – as a tool toward further understanding your personal practices of life and your own emotional sanity. Music theory aside (I’m ignorant here), we know what sounds beautiful to our own ears and taking the sounds around us seriously can potentially open up new ways of stimulating our ways of being in the world and serving as a strategy for changing our affectations. Though I felt solitude from the deserted street, my movement into new sonic environments changed my own feelings and allowed me to process further my understanding of myself in the world.

If nothing else, let this speak toward nomadology – a specific nomadology on the sonic plane.

Brain Age (2)

Since I've been staying on a couch in the Richmond District of San Francisco, which is pretty far from the heart of the San Francisco I'm looking for, I have taken up playing Brain Age 2 on my host's Nintendo DS. The game is basically several programs that are designed to increase the functioning of certain centers of your brain; these programs are "training" for the central goal of the game: to decrease your "Brain Age" to 20 years old, which has been defined by the game as the optimum age for brain functioning. (Mine began at 50, I'm now at 36 with an all time low of 35 -- so basically I'm middle aged.)

Though I don't agree with all of the implicit claims of the game, I have been diligently working every day to decrease my brain age. Part of what is interesting about the game is that you cannot continue to play during the course of one day to improve your brain's age; you must return daily, complete the training programs, and attempt to get a better score on the Brain Age test. The test itself is a selection of several random programs, some of which are extremely hard and some of which are extremely easy, which is obviously subjective. After completing three tests your brain age is calculated, and once you've logged a brain age for the day, you can't take it back and you can't try again.

So, every morning for the past week, I wake up and play the game. Though I am trying to lower my Brain Age, what I also end up noticing is my ability to function in light of the previous night's events. This should be self evident to anyone who spends a moment in reflection, but playing the game has come to serve as a humble reminder of the connection between my mind and my body and the ways I learn and expand my mental capabilities.

I'd like to believe that playing the game has improved my ability to count, memorize, and give correct change. It certainly has improved my Sudoku skills.

Found Note - A Bit of California Geology

I found this note that taught me something new about California. I feel bad for the individual who lost it, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn a bit about the geology of the state. I've made transcribed the notes in a more readable style, but the content is unchanged.

[Midterm of 4-7]

Petroglyphs - scratched patterns by native peoples.

CA deserts are arid = desolate kind of landscape

Ventifact - triangular shaped faces created by wind. Carved by consistent non changed winds -> sandblasting effect.

Sand accumulates to form dunes (Algodones Dunes (near El Centro))

*Chapter 7

Basin to Range Province characterized by 1 of 3 types of faults
1. Normal Fault + special type = detachment fault
2. Reverse
3. Strike-slip.

basin and ranges -> oldest rocks uplifted.

[October 11th]

Oldest rocks in CA in Basin + Range -> Metamorphic.
Basin - low land areas
Range - mountain areas

->a series of low land basins accented with mt ranges.

Fault = a feature that's formed when rocks are broken and moved along the break

Stress: causes rocks to break.

Tensional Stress (pulling apart kind of stress) - crust

What's strange about finding this sort of note is that this information is passed on out of context; it is meaningful on a surface level to me, the new reader, but perhaps crucial for the note-taker to get that A grade.

Google Maps Street View

Having recently moved to San Francisco, I've found that the housing market here is not only exceedingly competitive, but quite disheartening as well. That aside (I have another blog for emotions), today I found the wonderous/daunting Google Maps Street View.

San Francisco, being the darling cultural gem in gem in geeked out Silicon Valley, is one of the cities that Google has photographed so extensively as to offer a view of houses right at their front doors. Not all of the city has been shot so far, but I assume that will come shortly. Basically, one is able to view a Google map and, in some locations, shift the perspective to the street. Not only can I see where the house that I'm visiting is located, I can get a look at the outside of the place before I even take the time to go there.

Useful? Only sort of. But a good reminder that we must, from now on, be aware of the fact that vision is becoming total; its scale is widening, becoming more precise and having more depth of field -- which itself basically gives way to another moment of vision, as in Google Maps Street View. In the web 2.0 program, you can actually see people on the street who happened to be there the moment Google took the picture. They exist like some strange ghost-like presence, perpetually tagged into the landscape for the world to see. You can make out their faces, see their boredom, their hurrying steps, or a personal smile to themselves as they walk to work.

Diving in to see people heading to work, going about their day.

The map:


View Larger Map

The street:



Upclose, forever bonded to this simulacral space:

3rd World Farmer

One of my favorite blogs, Pruned, called my attention to a game called 3rd World Farmer.

The game is, as one could probably decipher, in the "third world." The point of the game is to raise your family and increase your earning potential. The game simulates common third world problems such as drought, revolution, and corruption, which all affect your ability to make a living. It goes into surprising depth for a flash-based simulation: you raise children who can either go to school (and so be available less for work) or get married and leave the farm (but earn a nice dowry), there are infrastructural building opportunities, and aging is a factor. To go directly to the game, click here (but look over the hunger related subtexts at some point).

The game must be a bit too easy once you get the hang of it, as I won in 26 turns. But the high scores reveal a much deeper obsession with actually making that Saharan farm worth millions. All intelligent people will understand this isn't a simulation per se, but a metaphor for the hardships and catastrophes faced by "third world" farmers. (Now you too can toil the African soil, but from the comfort of your first world nation.)

High Mayhem, Saturday ~ Loud Objects

I attended the High Mayhem Emerging Arts Festival and witnessed some spectacular performances. Among the notable (only one will be truly noted, digitally) was the Loud Objects, a New York duo who literally built their input in front of the audience.

It went a bit like this: two gentlemen set up a standard transparency projector -- the one they used to use in science class -- and secured to it a transparent plastic panel. With only a single input, the gentlemen proceeded to practice a creator-surgery (the almighty god sort) on the panel and the input, which was hooked up to large speakers in front of the projection. Creator-surgery, the word I have (regretfully?) chosen to describe their work, was a sort of construction of sound by soldering wires to the input on one end and circuits laid onto the panel on the other; as they soldered different combinations, different frequencies of sound were manipulated through the wires and the circuits, ending up at the input and eventually experienced (sensorially) by the audience.

(During one hilarious moment that I won't recount, except here, in a super brief aside, a bug flew into some superglue, used to secure the circuits to panel, but miraculously escaped and became part of the performance. I believe I heard one man shout out, minutes after the now-averted disaster, "where's the bug?" Please understand that the similarity between circuits, which are commonly 6-pronged, and bugs is not lost to me: I'm calling for papers discussing it.)

As the show went on, the sound became more and more complex; a beat emerged, oscillating tweaks and twangs intertwined in movement variations, and the audiences' pulses raced in excitement. We (us, that audience - a necessary component, as pointed out by my dear friend Jesse (now undergoing a sort of reversal creator-surgery at the moment: his wisdom teeth are being pulled)) watched from our bleacher seats as we witnessed the construction of both the input/instrument and the sound; The sheer unpretentiousness of the construction and subsequent manipulation made the whole thing, shall we say, enlightening.

A really phenomenal performance.

Hans Schabus, SITE Santa Fe, and installation loneliness

SITE Santa Fe, the contemporary art space on Santa Fe's Railyard District, commissioned an Austrian artist named Hans Schabus to take over their entire building with his meditations on the desert. From the essay accompanying the exhibition:

In Deserted Conquest (2007) -- an installation commissioned by SITE Santa Fe and the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States -- Schabus stages a series of confrontations (permanence vs. mobility; the grid vs. spiral form; artificial vs. natural; among others) within the New Mexico landscape that questions our beliefs about the desert and the American West. The objects in this exhibition -- a deconstructed mobile home, two videos, collages, over 100 tons of dirt, and an assortment of "found" items -- not only embody the oppositions that Schabus sets up, but also speak abstractly to notions of history, mythology, and alienation.

-- From the Exhibition Essay, which fails to mention an author's name.

As a whole, I enjoyed the space very much. Schabus makes huge installations out of mobile homes and the walls of old buildings, using their weathered and dilapidated aesthetics in contrast to the whiteness of the gallery space. He accents this with Cabin Fever, an interesting wagon wheel chandelier holding some two dozen candles, continuously lit and allowed to drip onto the floor over time.


In addition to these installations, Schabus takes some video footage from Yeso, NM, juxtaposing the loud, oncoming train with the dead quiet of the now ghost town. It was a stunning video that really resonated the emptiness of Yeso's spaces and the power and beauty of an oncoming train. The piece is called East, West, South, North



The title installation, Deserted Conquest is something like 10 tons of dirt packed down into a room that has its title emblazoned on the wall in steel. I imagine the space changes over time as visitors explore the empty room that is literally just full of desert dirt.

But what was most interesting, however unintended, was the fact that I was almost alone in this room. That is to say, I was actually the only patron in the entire gallery when I viewed it, but I was not the only human being. As I walked into the building, I was greeted at the desk and immediately headed into the exhibition (it was Friday, which means that there is no admission fee). I was tailed by a young woman, probably in her early twenties, who was carrying a walkie-talkie and was dressed in the casual, dark toned uniform of a SITE employee. She told me to watch my head on a specific, slightly hidden piece. This was our last direct interaction; after that, she casually milled about in whatever vicinity I was in the museum.

Now, I understand this is her job, but I felt sorry for her because she was obviously uncomfortable walking around with me but without interacting with me, basically "keeping watch" over something that hardly needed watching-over. I ended up feeling strange because I was wandering in Schabus' purposeful emptiness, an expanse that, like our romantic notions of the desert journey, seems best suited for solo exploration. Happening upon the space at the right moment allowed me such a solitary experience that was constantly disrupted by the woman guarding me throughout my viewing of Schabus' work.

Ultimately, I came to associate her presence with that of a ghost. She would not follow directly behind me, but rather wander between the rooms quickly enough to not seem like I was under constant surveillance. I instead felt like I was always vaguely being followed by something that, upon turning around, was just disappearing behind a corner.

In the end, this added to the experience Schabus sets up in his recreation of the solitude and expanse of the desert, as the ghost town of Yeso came to embody the dirt covered floor, leaving only a wispy trace of life that is always just behind you but outside of reach, outside of language, and experiencing something wholly different than you are.

The Luxury of Time

I had a chance to drive from Santa Fe to Nederland, Colorado, over the weekend, making the trip up and back in two days.

(An aside: I remember what Deleuze said about the American journey vs. the French -- it's an interesting take on something (today) we wouldn't necessarily assume. The American journey is the journey into the smooth, an escape from striation.)

In preparation for the seven hour journey, I uploaded some podcasts into my ipod. Though I usually listen to music, this trip I found that for such long treks listening to conversations and lectures open up a different sort of intellectual stimulation that were more metaphysically enlightening. I had previously found some In Our Time podcasts and downloaded a couple. Now, I can't seem to download individual podcasts or archived ones. Strange.

An interesting thing about aural media in combination with driving is that there is an intermixing of disembodied philosophical speculation and the movement of one's body in space. The landscape coming down from the mountains of Colorado into New Mexico presents a vast scene that is simultaneously endless and yet free of a daunting blandness; trees and vistas poke out of the fluid, lapping waves of the ground. Such a beautiful expanse paired with the spark of philosophical banter made me realize the luxury of the moment. These moments are few due to the constant distractive jarring of our normal lives in the milieu.

It is quite an interesting place to be -- contextualized in nature around oneself yet encapsulated in a vehicle that moves quickly along the ground. A sort of hovering in the Umwelt. Though surrounded by very technology that facilitates this experience, one feels in tune with the phenomenological thread at the edge of consciousness, and perhaps reveals that plane in which the two merge and emerge into one another.

As we align ourselves into the openness, we streamline the intellectual rhizome as is bursts forth from our bodies in space: like releasing a ghosted line of fog as we go along, we insist on the creation of form through the mesh of spirit.

Blackle - Google and Color Inversion

From Jazzy (and Lizzy):

Blackle
(.com)

because inverted colors are more sustainable. and, occasionally, more interesting. the (.com) is the actual site.



Another trick that serves the same purpose but operates system-wide (mac os x wide) is:

ctrl + alt + apple + 8

that inverts the colors on mac os x. It isn't an extremely advanced trick, but if you're running low on battery life and/or care about saving whatever energy you can, try it out. just don't try it with blackle on, because then you're inverting the already inverted colors, which means that you're totally counteracting whatever small change you were enacting.

From Another Space

I am posting this older blog post that was the sole entry on my old blog Autotechnomy, dated Tuesday, September 26, 2006

* * *

Finesse -- Virilio and Dance

"To me, dance is an extraordinary thing, more extraordinary than most people usually think"

--Paul Virilio


I need to outline my vision for the body's way of 'computing' technology in an attempt to set it outside of reducibility to technology. This is what I call finesse, the subtle and graceful movements of the body that can move and flow like a dance with the earth. It is a form of transcendence from the errors and misfiring that the mind can have when overwhelmed. It is conscious meditation, it is flirting, it is sex. It is the pulse you pick up on when you listen to music and can hear nothing else, the vision of god above the clouds during a sunset. It is the beautiful articulation of what it means to be inside your own body and mind.

But is it nostalgia? Finesse is what nostalgia wants to recreate. I don't rely on memories anymore. I rely on the movement of the body forward, to the experience when you start to speak and everything you say is perfect and completely coherent and everyone walks away beaming at you. It is the moment when you bring everyone to the same page in a book and learn from each other. It is, and has always been, love.

* * *

and by love, I mean spirit

The Master Cleanse Failure

After approximately 36 hours of fasting, I had to break the fast. Failure is painful, but I have realized that my relationship with my body and with food is important and cannot merely be sidelined for an experimental fast. That is not a justification as much as it is a more a need for proper context when embarking on such a journey. I had jumped into the fast in an excited manner -- which is the way to do it on a certain level because it keeps your attitude about the fast positive -- but didn't consider that its the best part of the late summer harvest and that I wasn't actually mentally prepared to forgo food for 10 days.

I gave up early, but I ultimately have drawn an understanding of my limitations. The fast could potential be undertaken at a later point, when I've had time to think it through. Besides, the spirit is intricately intertwined with my relationship with food.

The Master Cleanse

I've just begun the Master Cleanse, a fasting detox-diet that we all have been thinking about for a while. You can check out the cleanse here for a more detailed account.

Essentially, the Master Cleanse is a fast in which the Master Cleanser drinks 6-12 glasses of lemonade every day, as well as some laxative tea and a saltwater cleanse interspersed. It should be clear why the Master Cleanse is also called the lemonade diet. But the lemonade isn't powers or crystals, rather we compose it from fresh squeezed lemons (or limes, which we are actually using also), grade B maple syrup, a dash of cayenne pepper, and distilled water. The lemonade tastes pretty good, especially when you're hungry like I am now.

With that overview over with, I have to say that I'm excited about the cleanse because it gives me a chance to really escape from the horrible things I do to my body on a daily basis (smoking, drinking, and generally living). I'm concentrating on myself and attempting to reach out to and embrace the spirit, which has recently come to represent a broad spectrum of vague beliefs that I hold while simultaneously standing for extremely nuanced and specific conceptions.

Sometimes blogging taps me into the spirit, as it has now. I'm not feeling very hungry. I expect the next several days to be more interesting and fruitful.


Update

I oscillate between hungry and not; I have already come to appreciate my previous relationship with food and the general freedom it allows me. Also, it strange how much of one's day is taken up by food and food-related activities; I'm having trouble finding things to fill my day, which also serves to take my mind off the fact that I'm actually quite hungry.

Guacamole

This is not a food blog.

The Necessities

Ripe Avocados (4)
Red Onions
Garlic
Cilantro
Limes
Salt

Creation

(The ingredients above are only the base mixture for whatever sort of guacamole variation. You could add cucumbers, chopped spinach, or sauteed bok choy to it too, but start with this base (and don't add sour cream).)

Cut the avocados, remove the skin and the huge seed, and place the green meat in a bowl. Chop up about a handful and a half of onions into tiny cubes and add. Dice the a clove of garlic (or two) as well as the cilantro -- I like about a closed fistful of cilantro because it really makes the flavor. Obviously, less can be used. Add the garlic and the cilantro. Get two limes, cut them in half, and juice them into the mixture (~1 lime for every 2 avocados). I usually scrape the inside pulp into the mixture with a small paring knife. Add a thin covering of salt to the greenish mixture, then stir it with a fork. Don't whip it. Eat with anything.

Salads, Intensities, Rhizomes

Quite simply, a Salad Recipe that I conjured on the spot and is good enough to write down "to remember."


The individuated parts:

Snow Peas
Snap Peas
Mung and Assorted Bean Sprouts
Baby Spinach
Red Onion
Blackberries (and some juice)
Gorgonzola Cheese
Balsamic Vinegar
Celery Tahini

The construction of the whole:

I cut up the peas and the onion, one part onion to two parts peas. I threw in some bean sprouts and at that moment some fresh blackberries arrived from my backyard. I added one part blackberries (more would be fine), and placed the salad in the empty bowl in which they were picked. I added a splash of balsamic vinegar on top, then shredded some gorgonzola on top (a pretty liberal amount as its a crucial flavor). Then a dab of celery tahini, topped with a big handful of baby spinach.

Toss lightly but thoroughly, and serve.

A thought on opening-up, intensities, positivities, creations

Baudrillard claims that desire does not come up in Foucault's work because its place is already occupied by power; thus, Deleuze and Lyotard's theories of the schizoid and libidinal are analogous to Foucault's power-systems -> they are rhizomes, openings-up, continuities, etc.

Isn't it interesting (though this is one of Baudrillard's critiques) that the three take up different themes in similar ways, as if suggesting that the intensities and rhizomatic structures of the earth are ideas that have been teased and teased until their tangents emerge, their connections light up, and their systems channel information to and fro continuously.

Blogs, Frustration, and a New Idea

I am attempting to engage with questions of sustainability, consumerism, and what I call new "techniques of existence" in the technoscientific age. What concerns me most is the co-optation of "green," "environmental," "sustainable," and so on by business. That isn't to say that I am not guilty of buying so-called green products, but the sort of ignorant consumption that is promoted by blogs in general is quite disturbing.

For instance: today, I was searching for hacks and diy projects related to electronics and technology in general; eventually, through several tangents of RAID kits and wandering in the dark as to the fundamentals of modification and hardware hacking in general, I came across a "green hacks blog". What the "hacks" suggested, however, amounted to a basic tips sheet on how we can change our consumption habits to be more sustainable. What the blogger clearly misses is his reliance on his current lifestyle. He fails to see that consumption itself is a blight.

Combining these two ideas: a blog/site that offers step by step ways to reduce consumption of resources and encourages the development of symbiotics in human/earthly life.

For example:

an electronic switch stepup that allows circuits in the home to be shut off entirely. this would allow devices that are constantly connected to electric outlets, such as televisions and appliances, to be cut off from power flow entirely. The reason for this is that televisions and appliances have circuits that constantly use energy even when not on. So, besides computers and clocks and whatever else needs a bit of constant electricity, the rest of the power in the home could be totally shut down.

Maybe I'll get some more ideas later.

New Direction

Having completed my senior thesis, "Cyborgs, Posthumans, and New Techniques of Existence in the Age of Technoscience," I have found that I have less time than ever before. But soon that will all change, and I hope to expand this blog from a notebook into something more interesting and fruitful.

As the title of this blog still conveniently suggests, knowledge remains a large intellectual concern in my own thought processes; currently, I am interested in the ways in which we learn and experience the world through mediated sources as opposed to our sensorial being in the world.

My first question arises from differing practices of understanding and learning. An example comes to mind from my own life: I am trying to learn several foreign languages at the moment, as well as a computer-based language. For the cultural-linguistic languages, which are French and German (simultaneously!, or at least I'm making an attempt based on another assumption that I won't detail here), I have acquired a program called The Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is supposed to be a great, visually-oriented program that immerses the user in the language without "teaching" it in the strict sense. There are, for example, no conjugation charts or proper grammatical lessons that I have found thus far.

I still can't speak French or German, but my understanding of basic vocabulary and some elementary verbs has improved -- and improved far better than reading a beginners book on the language. The glaringly obvious problem with the program is that the immersion is one sided and digital, not heterogeneous and "actual". This is not so much a complaint as an observation -- I can't very well go to France or Germany at the moment, I understand that I'll need more language classes later, and so the program actually becomes the most progressive step toward these future endeavors because I'll have some basic understandings but no strictly formal education.

The idea here, and the one I find the most interesting, is the becoming-childlike that the language program has sparked within me; I hold to the belief that the ever-wide eyes of the child occur because it is always amazing at the surroundings and stimuli its taking in. The trick, for me, is to become-childlike in any endeavor, but with the abilities and sensibilities of someone much older. (I'm reminded of the film "Unknown White Male" at this moment that, though perhaps a hoax and surely a bit overdone, brings up this idea nicely.)

My experience with the program speaks to my understanding of experience-in-the-world as extremely important, but also the advantage of knowledge/memory (in this case, the program and its presentation of a language to be learned) that technology enables us.