Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I don't have much analysis to offer. I'm just writing to say this is probably the most amazing, most fucked up film, and play, ever.

local neighborhood blight

blight has a bad rap. poor blight.

this particular blight was home to a person for the first 6 weeks or so that i lived on christian street. the person was there, seated in that shallow doorway on the left, covered in a mountain of garbage and rags every day and every night, all day and all night. the smell was pretty overwhelming. you really had to be on the other side of the street to avoid it. then, one day, the person was gone and replaced with yellow tape, although the smell is still around. i think he or she died, but there's no way of telling if that is in fact the case, and if it is, when it was that the person died, and if it was a long time ago, why nobody thought of checking earlier, and if someone did think of checking, just how they'd go about it.

but i'm kinda glad the blight is still there. can't explain it.

the medium is (just) the medium

a lot of people think they know and understand the revolutionary changes of the 60s -- i hear so many assumptions and generalizations about "what was happening" back then, and i've been known to make a few of my own. those theories are probably all bullcrap b/c most of the people making them weren't actually around in the 60s. but regardless, i'm gonna make another one of my own right now.

see, i have this feeling that back when the kids became the leaders of the world -- when the music and art of the youth became it, became the avant garde -- the thing that was revolutionary was the substance of what the kids were championing. like, rock & roll or whatever were amazing because of what they actually were, not because of the transistor radios that were broadcasting the music to the kids.

today, the kids are still in charge, but there's no substance to what they're championing. it's all format. like, we're watching the youth not because they're going to lead us to amazing new art and music, but because we want to see what technological innovation they're going to adopt next.

the funny thing about all this is that many of the web 2.0 technological innovations have been created/advertised expressly as things that will help people be more enriched by the opinions and interests of others. social networks are great b/c they help you find more music that you're interested in, help you locate others who like the same fashion as you, blah blah BLAH. there was this mac ad that i saw last year that read:
-------"PCs are for the stuff we have to do, like pie charts and spreadsheets. Macs are for the stuff we want to do, like photos, music and movies.
------Macs are everything you need to get the job done. (And start having fun.)
------With Mac OS X, iLife ’06 and built-in iSight camera, the fun starts at just $1,299.
------Mac Mini is ready to connect to your existing monitor and keyboard – and you’re ready to start having fun with your photos, movies and more."

the ad really weirded me out when i saw it, so much so that i wrote it down. only now am i putting my finger on why. i think this over-inflated emphasis on the "fun" of the content makes for a weird fetishization of art that totally vaccu-sucks the stuff that's interesting right out of it. i don't want to be told how to interact with/given a framework for the artistic things in my life, and if someone's going to do it, i certainly don't want it to be a corporation like Apple. when it comes to the web 2.0 stuff, "mutual interests" are a totally artificial and weird way of meeting people. i mean, aren't there people in your life who have different interests from you, and that's exactly what you like about them?

or maybe this is all just me. i'm fully ready to acknowledge that the reason i'm so annoyed about this is that, as much as i'm interested in technology, i'm actually a curmudgeon who's behind the technology curve because the interactive computer screen simply hasn't captivated me the way it has others. but i won't fully yield that just yet. i have this itching sensation that things were better before. and even though i wasn't there, i just can't shake it.