++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
http://www.gonzomarkets.com

http://www.rageboy.com/blogger.html
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"I warn you that what you're starting to read is full of
loose ends and unanswered questions. It will not be neatly
tied up at the end, everything resolved and satisfactorily
explained. Not by me it won't, anyway. Because I can't say I
really know what happened, or why, or just how it began, how
it ended, or if it has ended; and I've been right in the
thick of it."

opening paragraph
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers


"The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire.
Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades,
but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It
would be fought here, in our present..."

opening screen crawl
The Terminator


Valued Readers:

There is a section of this book I've been trying to write for a year
now -- trying, that is, to understand what it wants to become --
called "Reading Bookstores." It's a difficult practice to explain. I
say practice, not concept, because it's something I've noticed, over
the years, that I do. Though "practice" makes it sound way too
procedural. As if I have a plan when I go into a Borders or a Barnes &
Noble. Plans are obstructions if what you're looking for, something,
you don't know what yet, is not in this book or that one, not on this
shelf or the one over there, but maybe, if you let go of looking,
somewhere in the space between. Invisible yet calling to be seen.
Bookstores are full of ghosts for me, of ancient ancestors and unborn
heroes.

For instance, though it's sort of a sideways instance, I've lately
been coming across the word "triumphalism" -- I mean, more than once,
more than twice. I don't remember where. The first time I see one of
these things, these ghosts -- as in Zeitgeist, spirit of the times --
it's just another word, a phrase, idea. One of the billions swirling
around, connected I assume, to something, though I'm usually not at
all sure to what. Will the circle be unbroken? As if some southern
congregation is praying we will come to understand. What would they
need to know if they knew enough to do that? I am doing that myself.
Sometimes I think: if anyone followed me around when I'm browsing like
this, for hours at a time, they would likely wonder if I was sane.
Funny, because that's what I'm thinking myself. Is it just the sorts
of things that I've been reading, dipping into, just the pages I've
been hitting on the web? Is it just me, or is "triumphalism" being
invoked more often to explain... what? I'm not even sure what it
means. And the OED -- a dictionary, as Oxford University Press will
tell you, built on historical principles -- is of limited help here.
Because what it means, this echo I'm getting today, was not there
yesterday. What it means is lurking in that invisible delta.

Mekong, youkong, Ho Chi Min. Suit up, baby, lock and load, we're going
in. The source books on postmodernism -- what came before and what
comes after? because the ghosts will not just go away -- begin with
unintended irony. Ferdinand de Saussure taught a course in general
linguistics, they say, which was only reconstructed years later from
his students' notes. Digging, excavating, doing the dirty thankless
diachronic spadework. Ironic and thankless because he said, if I have
this right, diachronic history obscures synchronic use. Parole beats
langue like rock beats scissors. My father was a philologist. There's
a word I noticed one day had gone missing. Though I'm not sure what
that one means either. Paul de Man (yeah, I know all about it) wrote
an article in the title of which the word philology appears. I've been
meaning to read it one of these days.

And over there on that shelf, C. Wright Mills, who I liked as a kid
when he wrote about Cuba, is saying: "The sociological imagination
enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between
the two within society..." So there's that. And that, I think, is
important. Biography being the place of the ancestors. Biography is to
history as synchronic is to diachronic. And where the axes cross,
there you are. Hello. What am I doing in this bookstore on such a
sunny day, and what is this pattern I am making on the rug, crossing
from Anthropology to True Crime, from Literary Criticism to Science
Fiction to Current Affairs? If I left a trail of breadcrumbs maybe, or
better, some blacklight signature visible only to myself, would I
recognize the emblem it made? Would it maybe spell out, like a ouija
board's planchette, the question I am asking?

Don't worry if none of this makes sense. No need to adjust your set.
I'm the one who should worry. And I do. Because I think there is
something true hidden in all this obscurantism. Something clear and
clean and one of these nights, you know? I'm gonna find out, pretty
mama, what turns on your lights.

Ray tracing. Backward chaining. I am stuck with these metaphors. Help!
I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory. Down that
alley there, yes, getting warmer: right between those two cultures. In
the last two weeks (notice we're not changing paragraphs), at least
three people told me that I *had* to go see A Beautiful Mind. So I
finally did. Remember the scene where Nash is fooling with a cut
crystal hi-ball glass at that Princeton reception? Prismatic. I
remember seeing a book in Tokyo on the theory of reflections. The
brass in the men's room at Fujitsu was polished to a mirror finish,
and standing there pissing one day, I got it. There is a language for
this, I thought. The crystal splits the sunlight, tracks up onto this
other guy's bad tie. SFX, though you wouldn't necessarily know it took
a Cray to bring it off. Ray tracing. I am stuck with these metaphors.

I got it, yeah. But still I wondered: why me? Why did I *have* to see
*this* movie? Is it that obvious? Am I that transparent? And if not,
what do I think I've been doing here these many years now, writing all
this confessional stuff? See me, hear me... feed me, Seymour. Let me
show you these codes and ciphers. No, that's right, you're not
cleared, are you? I must take them to the drop box. Carefully checking
that I've not been followed. Better: I'll publish them in clear text.
"Within the code is a deeper code," I wrote. Click on the URL above.
See? No secrets here.

Yesterday Eric Norlin came over. Eric is one of my closest friends.
You've heard me mention him. He even has a website. Before he arrived,
I called Laurie: "You've met Eric right? I mean, you've actually seen
him, yes?" Just checking.

Last week, I posted this to my blog:

John F. Nash, Jr. - A Beautiful Mind
http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1994/nash-autobio.html

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I plan to. Here's a clip from the
real guy's autobiography on the Nobel site.

"...at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in
the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not
entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical
disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that
rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his
relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think
of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive
followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his
'madness' Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of
the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and
then been forgotten."

How few are conversant with madness. Because, I think, getting enough
distance to see it requires a critical degree of respect for what it
is. For what we are never completely, though we see with those same
eyes. A degree of compassion for what is looking out through us. And
maybe: looking out for us. Come, I will show you. Be not afraid. At
which point, if you're even halfway sane, you're quaking in your
boots. An interesting question then: if you're so fucking sane, how do
you recognize this fear? Why does it taste and smell that way? An
interesting answer: because under the hood, and despite the massive
disavowals, we all pretty much know what's going on here.

I went over my book outline with Eric, and about halfway through my
convoluted explanation -- this chapter talks about Kurzweil, Dennett,
Hofstadter, Minsky... this one of Darwin and Dawkins, Deleuze and
Guattari, Andy Warhol, Ultravox... -- I saw my garage festooned with
clippings from Life and Newsweek, Ladies Home Journal. Within the
code, a deeper code. See how this bit here connects to that? Look
closer. Diachronic, but with philology permanently deconstructed, we
missed it. And who benefits from this silence? There's a chapter
called "Gödel, Escher and Bachman-Turner Overdrive." Eric laughs. What
was their biggest hit, I ask him. I had to look it up on Google, but
he knows: Takin' Care of Business. "Yeah, that's right" I say. "The
Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th,
1997."

Visible shivers running down my spine: no fate but what we make it.

And looping back into biography, at whose intersection with history I
keep finding myself, I recall days in the brain lab at the University
of Rochester. You could have a bright future here, they said.
Neuroscience is just taking off, you could be in on the ground floor.
Wolves in the distance, calling. The moon on fire. "Trip Going Well,"
the headline read in the kiosk outside the corner store, and I'm
flashing on the Motor City 5, tears streaking the lead singer's face.
Stardrive stroking the mainframes, baby, and you are here. So yeah
sure, neuroscience. Little did they know.

Nor I. Talking with Hans Moravec at CMU. "You're fucking crazy, man.
There's more." And him saying, Chris, you're a hopeless romantic. Get
used to it. I was writing proposals to DARPA then, so who was I to
argue? Roger Penrose argued. That consciousness was not possible for a
machine. But his argument depended on some tricky read on quantum
physics so advanced, no one except his targets were inclined to parse
the "proof," so pffft! Who cares? Which, as it turns out, has been the
real question all along. Who wants to know? Wolfgang Pauli and Carl
Jung, working another dimension of the yet-to-be-unified field.
Synchronicity. Of course, I don't really believe it. Except when it
happens. The crystal splits the spectrum and the radiations match. The
pattern, as Bateson said, that connects. Or was it Chris Alexander's
pattern without a name. Regular expressions raised to another plane
entirely. Like a dream in which the phone is ringing, and you wake to
find it really is. "Congratulations, you've just won a free round trip
to Las Vegas." Yesterday afternoon. I was so angry, then so let down.
Spam from every possible vector. Noise on the lists. The network
darkening in all directions. Who benefits from all this silence? And
when did SkyNet actually go online? What was I dreaming then? Pieces
of yarn and string thumbtacked over feature spreads on summer reading,
South American vacation cruises, film reviews. In 1944, Jean-Paul
Sartre produced Huis Clos in Paris. The following year the United
States incinerated two cities in Japan. Nine years later, Alan Turing
ate a poisoned apple. No lie. No exit.

Reading bookstores. Hard to describe. So easy to imagine patterns in
the stars. An umbrella, an octopus. Do it again. Of course, they're
not really "there," any more than Orion or Scorpius, Andromeda, Draco.
Any more than the stories and myths, monsters and heroes we've
projected against the night sky since the dawn of... well, I guess
consciousness. Which Douglas Dennett will explain to you is all just a
terrible mistake. Or, really, any more than the rationalized trippings
of Douglas Dennett, and his cheerleading section: closet Extropians
watching their denatured cognitive skies for The Singularity, no less
fervent than evangelicals with an eye out for the Rapture, or hopeful
unidentified skywatchers for the grand re-opening of Area 51.

Conspiracy theories are another form of silence. Marginalization.
These people are clearly mad. We can safely write them off. They are
simply trying to make sense of their lives, imagining there is some
pattern. How pathetic, these trivial fantasies. How touching. Cold
comfort if you buy it, and you do. All the time. I know because I do
it too. I don't believe it either. Not really. There is no pattern, no
sense, no explanation. Just neural firings, random shadows of
perceived experience, pleasure, pain, so what? The only problem is, I
can't live this way. And neither can you. If you stare into an abyss
long enough, said Nietzsche, it begins to stare back into you.
Meaning, reading between the lines, that it becomes a projection, an
anthropomorphic constellation. A fanciful story about who wants to
know. Make my day. Right between the eyes. Nietzsche died mad, of
course, as we know. Sure, it was probably syphilis. Or the wages of
sin. Pick your poison. Another chapter of my book is titled Volunteer
Slavery - The Science of the Lambs.

It doesn't take a conspiracy theory to explain how we got here.
Backchaining works just as well. We got here somehow, right? It didn't
"just happen" and it serves someone's interest that we're here.
Confused? Sure you are. So why not buy something? A nice pair of
sneakers, maybe. A trip to Cancun. A new philosophy. You're a serious
person, right? No illusions. No lingering fears. You're not about to
be intimidated by some spooky old abyss. We have bioengineering, now.
We will shape our own destiny. We have artificial intelligence, honey,
right around the corner. Machines so much smarter than we are, we
won't even know what they're thinking. Though, we're thinking, they'll
probably be thinking how to clean up these carbon-based vermin that
keep trying to debug them. As if we could even follow the revised
requirements specs. Ah well, it's been a good run overall. Hasn't it?
Why be greedy. Might as well face up to the fact that we're finished
here, whatever it was we came to do.

What happened between 1936 when Chaplin made Modern Times and 1963
when Warhol said "I want to be a machine"? Download me, Jesus! Into
your immortal chipset, OS by Microsoft. Gives a whole new meaning to
the phrase, Blue Screen of Death.

John Connor, where are you now?

And then, of course, there's that little matter of time travel to be
resolved. Probably right around the same corner with AI. Funny how it
all works out in the end. The terminator even becomes your pal, best
dad a boy could have. Biography and history. Maybe, I thought, it's
time to get personal. And as soon as I thought it, a flash of
synchronicity dumped to my screen: People who bought that notion also
bought...

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
by Alice Miller
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465016901/entropygradientr

...which has nothing to do with gifted children. The original title
was Prisoners of Childhood, far more to the point. I can't say a lot
about this one yet, except that it was like a visit to the gypsy --
you know the one. This is my story, right down the line. And I'll bet
you five bucks it describes the abyss into which Nietzsche found
himself staring. Whose eyes were those staring back?

O Superman. O judge.
O Mom and Dad.
Mom and Dad...

The question is: what did Laurie Anderson know, and when? Before 9-11?
Well yeah, of course. As far back as 1986, the invisible hand was
already tipped:

This is the hand,
the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They're American planes.
Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?

Before the Internet and the dot.com runnup? Before the takedown?
Before our mongoloid pitbull president and Operation Enduring Freedom?
Before Enron? Yeah, a long time before that.

So hold me, Mom...
in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms.
Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.

Big Science. Hallelujah. There is no conspiracy. Not really. Yet all
the conditions have been met to resurrect Ronnie's Alzheimer's fugue:
the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, Star Wars. AOL keyword: SkyNet.

Alice Miller says the obverse of depression is grandiosity. And I'm
wondering, another word for triumphalism maybe? Small clues in the
grand scheme of things, as if we believed there was any Grand Scheme.
But wait. But think. There had better be one, even if we have to make
it up. Even if we go mad, become irrational, against all reason,
worship fire. Fire beats zero Kelvin any day. Believe it. Thus spake
Zarathustra.

When I began working on this book a year ago, I thought it would be
easy. I was planning to call it Voice v. Institution. Then I began to
ask myself what institutions are. I began to ask what voice is. And
worse: where it comes from. What's standing in its way.

Everything you've been told, a lie. Everything you've been sold, a
bill of goods. A wave of rage is building, awesome, terrible, and when
it breaks, the heart will speak. No fate but what we make.

I'll be back.

The Management

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