I realized that I registered litwack.org through some weird ancient registrar for ten years in 2001, and I think they exist but I can’t remember the password I gave them and the recovery email is to a defunct Hotmail account I used to have before Google was in advertising. So that’s one problem. The other is that I hate WordPress so much, so fucking much – it’s like when I use a Windows machine, I just assume there are viruses and spyware – well, with WP I have to assume that because I missed a point release some Ukrainian web terror bot has rewritten all the affiliate codes in links in my archives and installed itself as a secret superuser that will some day erase all my posts and replace them with Hate Forest videos.
So anyway, I need to switch to something more secure and also hosted so I can stop paying my tiny internet hosting company money like it’s 2003 because hello, Amazon S3 and EC2 exist and are more stable than you ever gonna be, independent hosting company, no offense. Some serious bloggers are actually switching to Tumblr and I like Tumblr a lot but I’m thinking more Squarespace. Ideally I’d like to get everything in balance so my thin stream of Google AdSense revs pay for my Squarespace account. I think I want to hire someone to set up Squarespace for me, do the whole-blog export/import, work on a theme to my specifications and do some AdSense SEO magic. All optimized for the iPad (ideal viewing) and iPhone. (Hey guess what you can’t install an adblocker in mobilesafari~~omg) If you know anybody who does shit like that, please comment.
I’m working on a post about video games and ethics, or something. Coming soon. By soon I mean this year.
The word of this week has been “demulcent,” from the Latin demulcere, to caress. Pectin is a demulcent and so is honey, as the doctors in the house know. Honey is some crazy shit. Imagine removing the bee and the flower and making a synthetic honey with the same physical properties from scratch. Impossible. Honey, with all the toil and death that goes into it, is super metal – in fact, Judges 14:8 has a great theme album.
I just bought an Atwood Nibble pocket tool for my keychain. Beautiful. Will replace the stock pic when mine arrives and hopefully murder it with a matte DLC coating at some point. Atwood’s UFO knife is my (and my sister’s) favorite folding knife ever. Totally bonkers. I see a Chris Reeve Sebenza in my future – possibly with mammoth ivory inlay – but the UFO is just next level.
This is Andrew Mukamal, Kelly Cutrone’s assistant from the show Kell On Earth. As Andrea pointed out, we kind of look a lot alike. I mean, he’s a lot skinner and gayer than I am, but beside that, yeah. We like a lot of the same labels, too. Like I wouldn’t rock Dick Owens boots, but I would wear one of his fencing jackets or something. I would go out in a Prada cape if I had one. Props to Andrea for monitoring basic cable and discovering the resemblance.
For reference, this is me from a while back when I was thinner and had longer hair.
What a weird decade just happened. Seriously. I have a couple forward-looking notes.
IN
Curation. I know I’m one to talk, but I can’t handle any more accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Digital or analog, no difference. To return to an old refrain: quality, quality, quality.
OUT
I don’t know, everything. Brian Eno said recently that we’re living in a “stylistic tropics,” which is a sweet way to put it. But I think that means nothing’s cool, not everything. Look at poor chillwave, a not even year-old musical micro-genre (which I like, by the way) that has been hated on since demos of unreleased albums under its chilly umbrella appeared on Mediafire. It almost seems like once something flocks together enough to be named, it’s finished.
PREDICTIONS for the 10s
It will be shocking how fast books and magazines leave their corporeal shells when it all goes down. At first, yes, it’ll be rich nerds with their iSlates and college freshmen saving money on textbooks but by 2020 Coby will be selling a $12 reader with a Google Books interface at the train station. And at some point you will gaze upon your hoard of A-C size paperbacks and think to yourself, I have read these, and weigh getting all that space back against the cost of repurchasing a digital copy of something when you need it. And you will divest.
I think rapid prototyping is going to make it into the home. I do. Part of the allure will be the post-consumerism of it, making things when you need them and then throwing them back to be remade when they’ve served their purpose. Momus has more on the dream of a 1:1 production/consumption society, which is what I hope we’re headed towards.
There’s going to have to be some kind of reckoning between people who are committed to social justice and those who aren’t. This is not a democrat/republican issue or a religion/doubt issue, it’s the future versus the past. Aaron Schwartz wrote recently on the shifting of the Overton window re: slavery and murder, both of which were perfectly acceptable in American history as long as you were targeting the right ethnic groups. Put in proper perspective, there’s a lot of insane shit going on right now domestically. 49 million of us were living in food-insecure households in 2008. In America. You can’t think clearly if you’re hungry; you can’t function. We have way too many people in prison, for the wrong reasons. One group of citizens has legal rights another group is denied. If you can reflect on these facts without being upset on some level, you have a chip missing. And yet many among us seem to be missing that crucial part. Something must go down between these two tribes. I realize I sound like a humorless socialist but I’m not against classes or capitalism, just for some FUCKING MINIMUM STANDARDS OF LIVING FOR EVERYONE. This is not an unachievable utopia, it’s Denmark with guns and Jersey Shore.
I have quite the clothes-crush on Acronym; I own four jackets (down from seven) and an indispensable bag I take with me everywhere. Naturally I’ve become a little obsessive about the brand, and recently I scanned this article from Relax for a friend of mine – it shows an archive of some of Mr. Hugh’s pre-ACR designs for Burton, Recon, and others. UPDATE: Errolson was kind enough to send me the English translation of the article, which I present to you at the bottom after the images. Amazing!
I just bought a pen and ink drawing by Shintaro Kago, who is an insane, brilliant manga artist. I managed to pick up the cover to Antlion Versus Barabara Girl (アリ地獄vsバラバラ少女) – it echos another one of my favorite pieces of his, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have it. Many excellent pieces are still available – ordering instructions are here. NSFW!!!
Happy Thanksgiving everybody. Not to get all sappy on you but the older I get, the more I am exclusively thankful for my family and the wide array of wonderful people in my life, without whom I could feel and accomplish nothing. Having said that, I’ll be back on Friday with pen and ink drawings of Japanese girls with their heads splitting open and cows fish flying out.
I write 