You Are Not Dreaming

Daydreamers

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible"

Lawrence of Arabia | Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Tom Hodgkinson – How To Be Idle

Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage
T'ang Yin, 16th Century

Here are some excerpts from one of my new favorite books, How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto that everyone should read. This guy weaves together excerpts from all the books you’ve always meant to read (Barrie, Baudrillard. Benjamin, Blake, Byron, Carroll, Chesterton, De Quincey, Doyle, Huysmans, Keats, Lawrence, Melville, Miller, Nietzsche, Orwell, Paine, Twain, Tzu, Whitman, and of course, Wilde) and insights that always lay at the tip of your tongue unvoiced. So here’s to sleeping in, dreaming, working little, drinking, smoking, long lunches, fishing, taking tea, going to the pub, friendship, conversation, napping, staying up late, and more drinking:

Let us be lazy in everything,
except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81)

As the Slow Food manifesto demonstrates, their philosophy reaches well beyond food, and can be seen as a protest against the dehumanizing mechanization of life:

Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.

We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.

A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.

May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.

For him [Dr. Johnson], to drink was to forget. “I have often wished for it, and often take it . . . [t]o get rid of myself, to send myself away. Wine gives great pleasure; and every pleasure is of itself good.”

Ernest Hemingway was an absinthe fan. I always liked his diary entry: “Got tight last night on absinthe. Did knife tricks.”

I myself have calmed down somewhat, and find myself in the strange position of having forsaken cocktails for real ale . . . The cocktail is really a corollary of the hard-work culture: extreme toil needs an extreme drink to counteract the misery. In a life where work and play are more closely mingled, the true idle life, then a gentler brew is perhaps all that is required. I suppose if we were really happy, there would be no need to drink at all, but a life without booze seems to me a pretty miserable prospect.

Planned schemes of merriment, as Dr. Johnson rightly pointed out, rarely turn into the best evenings, which are usually the unplanned ones, when you have abandoned yourself to fate and chance and chaos.

Sometimes, when I set to thinking about the various activities of men, the dangers and troubles which they face at Court, or in war, giving rise to so many quarrels and passions, daring and often wicked enterprises and so on, I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. A man wealthy enough for life’s needs would never leave home to go to sea or besiege some fortress if he knew how to stay at home and enjoy it. Men would never spend so much on a commission in the army if they could bear living in town all their lives, and they only seek after the company and diversions of gambling because they do not enjoy staying at home.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)

And conversation should really take place at night . . . Dr. Johnson found people who went to bed so irritating that he came up with the dictum “whoever goes to bed before midnight is a rogue.” The earliest carriages should leave at 2 a.m. and anyone who wants to stay up later should do so. For it is at night, free of the cares of the day, that the wine and the talk begin to flow. Hence the historical practice, long pursued in the UK, of drinking the most and staying up the latest as a matter of honour . . . One thinks too of the laudable Irish custom of bringing a bottle of whiskey to dinner, with nobody allowed to go to bed until it is empty.

What is good conversation? It is certainly not about showing off or shouting louder than the others. Some can talk and do not listen. Some listen without talking. Both are equally irritating. The great conversationalists can do both in equal measure. Indeed, if you talk without listening you become, in the phrase of my friend Marcel Theroux, a “jukebox of monologues,” awaiting cues for rehearsed speeches

Ideas emerge in conversation and are embellished, improved, contradicted or torn apart by the assembled company. Friends will come up with anecdotes that either affirm or disprove some notion. One’s ideas are developed, modified. They are taken down from the museum shelf, dusted ad put on view. And their true worth is revealed: the diamond turns out to be a piece of glass, the dusty stone a rare fossil.

“One of the reasons why so few people are to be found who seem sensible and pleasant in conversation is that almost everybody is thinking about what he wants to say himself rather than about answering clearly what is being said to him. The more clever and polite think it enough simply to put on an attentive expression, while all the time you can see in their eyes and train of thought that they are far removed from what you are saying and anxious to get back to what they want to say. They ought, on the contrary, to reflect that such keenness to please oneself is a bad way of pleasing or persuading others, and that to listen well and answer to the point is one of the most perfect qualities one can have in conversation.”
François La Rochefoucauld

For Johnson, good talk unified learning and experience. His biographer Walter Jackson Bate says he “prized activity of mind, a constant and ready exercise of the imagination in applying range of knowledge while simultaneously drawing upon acquaintance with ‘the living world.’”

“. . . I discovered the Spanish word madrugada, meaning “the in-between time.” At 2 a.m. you’re wishing you’d gone home earlier; at 4 a.m. it’s getting cold. But 3 a.m. has that magic about it. The rational intellect has vanished and you’re in the moment. The doors of perception are open.”
Interview with Bill Drummond of KLF

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I’d like to spend them, I’d reply: ‘Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams . . . provided I can remember them.’ I love dreams, even when they’re nightmares, which is usually the case.”
Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel

“It has always seemed to me slightly bizarre that we should queue up to sell our time to someone else. It’s a form of slavery, voluntary slavery. We think it’s great but it’s crazy.”
Charles Handy

I Found a Secret Garden!

Yesterday, stumbling around the East Village on our way to get some badly needed Vietnamese sandwiches at Paris, Rae and I stumbled upon something that I've repeatedly dreamed of finding. Through a small iron gate that I never remembered seeing before and down a short dark alley, we suddenly found ourselves in a large grass field with nobody in it but the two old ladies minding the entrance.

We had discovered the Marble Cemetery, a burial ground consisting entirely of hidden underground vaults leaving the land above empty. They've been fixing it up since 2000. It's free to the public but only open a day or so a month (mark your calendars). It's magic!


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Where the Wild Things Are

Confession time: I kinda sorta accidentally went to Comicon today. It was an absolute spectacle. I got to play the new GTA game for DS, watched people playing Dungeons and Dragons (during the day!) and saw a bunch of Kirk, Indiana, Wolverine, and Batman imposters walking around. The most exciting thing (besides seeing all the ridiculously geeky kids of the tri-state area running around looking deliriously happy) was seeing some of the leaked footage for Spike Jonze's long delayed Where the Wild Things Are movie. From the look of it, I don't particularly care if it's faithful to the book, I'm just in love with that moment of solar glare in the video below:

I Love Living in the Future

Thanks to Jordan I've just found out about this fantastic new single for the band Delaware, fantastic not for the music but for how it's presented:



True, it would be a little annoying to have to open every song in your library separately but I'd like the option. Maybe Apple will purchase and incorporate it into iTunes the way they did with CoverFlow (wishful thinking?).

I thought that would be hands down the most amazing technology I'd encounter that week until I read this on Pink Tentacle via BoingBoing:

"Scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs. Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity."

The scientists claimed that with advances in this technology we would be able to see a person's thoughts, dreams, or hallucinations but I find that difficult to believe, at least using this process. It's my understanding that the computer is only able to sort out what your mind is emitting because it has a clear example, a constant, to check it against. While I assume your mind emits the same signals for thought, without this constant it won't be able to identify the variable. And as far as dreams and hallucinations are concerned, do we really see them? And is this machine picking up the raw data entering our mind from the eyes or the data that our mind has finished processing and recognizing? And at what point do dreams and hallucinations occur? Is that monster in the corner added by the paranoid brain before or after the image is processed in your mind? I think we're safe for now.

It's not really surprising that both of these are coming out of Japan, the same people who are actively on their way towards building a space elevator...

Little Liam in Slumberland

Oh man, so last night I ate about a half pound of Gruyère and as a result had this crazy dream. I was on the set of Mr. Rogers but he was just kind of hanging out on a porch when this 10 year old breakdancer walks up with his cardboard and boombox and starts teaching him how to wave. Oh wait, it wasn't a dream:

I am so fried...

I've slept 4 hours a night for the past two nights and I am totally fried. I also seem to be noticing weird things. Last night I was walking through Washington Square Park late at night and there was a guy sitting straight up and motionless on a bench with a black plastic bag wrapped completely over and around his head. Then tonight as I was walking home I watched a little kid maybe 4 years old pop out of an empty Village Voice box like it was his little house. To top it off, yesterday on my morning walk to work I saw this (that I must have walked by 200 times without noticing):





[Victor the cleaner makes his appearance at the 5:38 mark]

Dreams on Tape & Feral Children

[Theme Music: The Beatles - Child of Nature (written and recorded by John while in India, later reworked and rerecorded as Jealous Guy)]

I was recently given the most amazing gift I could possibly imagine, a DVD of the 1942 live action version of the Jungle Book. I know I'm normally given to overstatement but this really really was my favorite movie of all time (that is, until I saw Short Circuit and Explorers). Rewatching it for the first time since the 80s made me just a little bit delirious. Knowing what was going to happen next without remembering having seen it before made me feel as if someone had somehow recorded a childhood dream I had and played it back to me, dredging up memories so old I didn't know I had them (I had a similar experience eating the dirt flavored Bernie Bott Jelly Belly beans that immediately took me back to being four years old and sitting in the rotting leaves and dirt under my porch). This was the movie that both led me to decide that the Black Panther was my favorite animal of all time and perfectly illustrated how I saw myself when I was running around all day playing in the woods, a child of nature, friends with all the animals and deeply pessimistic about the human world. Of course at the time I thought it was performed by real Indians (not by what appears to be a bunch of Guidos in brown face) in overgrown lost cities deep in the heart of the Indian jungle (instead of a Los Angeles sound stage). Friends would invite me to watch the cartoon version and if I only had the vocabulary at the time I would have said "What the fuck is this shit? Why would anyone settle for singing cartoons when they could have real panthers, wolves, monkeys, bears, tigers and elephants with a little kid running around with them?" I was going to post a little YouTube clip of it but then discovered that it's entered the public domain so you can now watch the entire thing (check it out at the 14:10 mark to see a toddler strolling around a den full of wolves!):



Apparently most feral children have been raised by dogs or wolves (here's a list). One feels inclined to develop romantic ideas about the purity of kids raised without human contact but it reality it doesn't seem to work out that way:

Coming Soon in 2016

I woke up this morning (an hour late) pissed off because I dreamt that I had bought a t-shirt capable of displaying animated patterns only to wake up without it. I was especially angry because it is clearly inevitable that these will one day be in production but I can't think of a technology more far off that I want so badly (except maybe a Star Trek-esque food replicator which could then be tweaked so that you could illegally download meals). Basically what I want is this:



But I don't want to have to settle for this or this.