Last night was a quiet Thursday at my local bar. I got home from work a bit late after trying to take care of all the loose ends in anticipation of my week off. I went online briefly, had to reboot for some anti-virus updates, and read for a bit. As soon as I knew it, it was 9 o’clock already. The rain had let up and it was one of those misty nights where everything stays wet, and a lot of people have their umbrellas up for no good reason. I guess they just have a lower tolerance for moisture, but then how is an umbrella going to help in those circumstances?
Carina is clearly my favorite bartender of all times. I walked up to find her and Paul, their mountain of a doorman, hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the bar. She was wearing her reading glasses and smoking a cigarette. When she finished, we went inside to compare the books we were reading. She’s been reading a mass-market paperback of “Wicked”. I never got involved with any of the Gregory McGuire books, but it looked charming. She also recommended the books of Christopher Moore, and she made them sound very interesting. So many books, so little time!
I had my copy of “Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture”. Carina asked me what a Simulacrum was. (College graduates are always asking me these questions. If I don’t like you very much, my answer is “How the HELL should I know?!?”, but I’d never say that to my favorite bartender of all times!)
I confessed that I was only just beginning to figure it out myself. It helps me to use “Simulation” as a mnemonic, and conceptually it involves life in a world of broadcasts and reproductions. Beyond that, it’s difficult for me to say. Our world is drenched in ironic commentary that can only be ‘about’ itself. I used the example of owning/consuming CDs of music instead of being forced to see musicians play. I didn’t delve too deeply, but now that I’ve thought about it a little more, I would say that our primary experience of a phenomenon like music is the playback of a recording, and that every encounter with live musicians is tainted by what we expect from those perfect reproductions. Surely this is in the book somewhere, but: “The Original fails to live up to the Copy”. This process feeds back on itself, and can be taken further, to television talk shows, and celebrity debutantes getting in trouble, or any narrative that describes that process and therefore relies upon it for its existence.
Even if I’m wrong about that - I’m certainly close. What I just said is important in its own right, and is somehow related to what people are talking about when they know what they’re talking about. Did that make sense?
Well I realized that this charming anecdote played right into a thought I’ve been having recently. The challenge of explaining the term ‘simulacrum’ resonated for me. How much would I need to know to claim expertise on a subject like Semiotics, Critical Literary Theory, or Postmodernism? For that matter, what about Greek Mythology, Electrical Power Systems, Computer Programming, or Particle Physics? Couldn’t I just look it up on Wikipedia? Maybe I just have to bide my time, learn something that IS there already until the knowledge I seek comes on line.
Posted in music, ontology, bar-scene, photos, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:12:00 GMT
1:30am: I awoke to the sound of fire trucks. Lots of fire trucks. The first few continued off into the distance, but as more came, they stopped closer. They were ‘stacking up’. My half- asleep brain could figure out that the fire was only a block or two away based on that progression. It also implied that I only heard the sirens coming from my direction toward the fire. I shuffled around the apartment, checking the view from different windows, but I didn’t see much. So I went back to bed. But more sirens were roaming around outside my open window. I put on some pants and a jacket, grabbed my camera, and went down the alley toward 18th. I quickly discovered that the fire was closer than I had imagined - one of the apartment buildings on Adams Mill road, by the back entrance to the zoo.
Few of you will remember Gary Condit, the congressman who caused a scandal when it turned out he had an affair with an intern who went missing in 2001. I think that was the apartment where Condit lived.
As a photographer and not a firefighter, I looked to see what pictures I could take without getting in anybody’s way. I was disappointed. You have to cordon off quite an area of city streets to park seventy four fire trucks. I know it’s a lame excuse, but without the right gear, I was at a bit of a loss. Tripod and SLR would have been a better setup.
3:00am: Sight and Sound did their job within minutes. Smell took longer. I woke up again, a little surprised that my smoke detectors were not complaining. After all, one of them got pretty upset when I was cooking sausages Saturday afternoon.
I must’ve been having a dream involving that smell. Tucker was not around, but she had left her fan blowing IN her window, I snuck in and switched that off. I also closed the door to the living room to block the cross ventilation. I could see the plume of smoke across the way, and even though it wasn’t wafting in my direction, I could still smell it. I remember the last time it happened. I woke up in the morning to the smell of smoke, and out the window was a thin layer of trapped smoke low in the sky, beaten thin by some combination of wind, temperature and humidity.
I got a drink of water and tried to go back to bed. I guess I can’t really complain - at least *my* apartment wasn’t on fire.
6:25am: I woke up again. Crap! I wanted to get up at 6!
7:10am: I packed up and ran across to the coffee shop. Columbia Road was closed for several blocks. There was fire hose all the way up past Ontario. I took pictures of that. The novelty of my street emptied of traffic is one thing, but the geometry of hoses against fresh crosswalk markings caught my eye.
I’m hit part two of the Warsh book, so I thought I’d take a crack at Orhan Pamuk’s “Other Colors”, which I picked up Saturday night when I returned the Russian movie to Olsson’s. It’s medium-sized, but it *is* a hardback - with all the loss of portability that entails. On the other hand, much of the book is in short segments, so that’s perfect for bus-ride short attention span reading. How can it be that I idolize Pamuk to the extent that I do? He did win that Nobel Prize. (I can’t remember the book now (accept the challange, Evan!), but one Indian author mentioned his father’s private library and the day he discovered that all the exotic authors had one thing in common: Nobel Prizes.) I managed to read “Snow” when it came out, then I picked up “Istanbul” in paperback and thoroughly enjoyed that. Looking at “Other Colors” on the shelf the other day gave me the same feeling as when I first saw “Istanbul”: Now here’s a writer I should like… Why haven’t I read more of his stuff? I could never get very far with “Black Book”, and I contemplated “My Name Is Red”, but to no avail. I guess I really do prefer non-fiction, and in his case, I think the essays on life in Istanbul prepare me in critical ways to read the novels. One thing about “Snow” that sets it apart is that most of it doesn’t take place in Istanbul at all.
8:00am: It’s the same old Monday at work that I keep working over and over. Did I really believe that listening to Bruckner’s 4th Symphony would change that? We shall see.
9:15am: Can Herbie Hancock’s “Headhunters” do what the Bruckner could not?
Update
Although the fire only affected the one building, firefighters had a lot of trouble pumping enough water - that explains why they ran hoses so far past my apartment, and why they had to close so many streets.
What I saw at 1:30 didn’t look so bad, but I did get the feeling that they got a late start in fighting the fire. Now I feel terrible for making light of the situation. It just goes to show - you can live a block away from a disaster, but not be able to grasp the scope of it.
It makes some sense that they had trouble with water pressure - I’m always disappointed with mine - but hydrants are often connected to a separate, high-pressure main for this very reason. To me, this is part of our dimly-lit future: the old “They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t… X” Visible prosperity is often a matter of skimping on the factors you don’t see - millions living in slums or decaying pipes underground. Fancy fireproofing in building codes and expensive fire-retardant systems, but half a day battling a building fire that keeps flaring up again.
Posted in music, DC-roaming, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:38:00 GMT
Last night was a quiet Thursday at my local bar. I got home from work a bit late after trying to take care of all the loose ends in anticipation of my week off. I went online briefly, had to reboot for some anti-virus updates, and read for a bit. As soon as I knew it, it was 9 o’clock already. The rain had let up and it was one of those misty nights where everything stays wet, and a lot of people have their umbrellas up for no good reason. I guess they just have a lower tolerance for moisture, but then how is an umbrella going to help in those circumstances?