Unlost, or Cell Phones and the Age of Colliding
Posted: August 4, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cell phones, china, facebook, fear, iphone, modernity, n+1, twitter, urumqi Leave a comment »I wanted a map. The only unmet desire I had from my warped old clamshell cell phone was access to a map. For this desire I had a perfectly symmetrical argument: I will never again be lost. No more will I get off the subway and not know which way is North, nor realize I’ve forgotten to write down the address of a party or meeting room. No more will I stare at the dumb faces of buildings, trying to match their bricked frames and shaded windows with an arrangement of numbers and letters, whose only real order lies in some old civic planner’s papers, which even she’s forgotten by the time I’m trying to find the outlines of her work in the gloaming streets of outer Queens.
The Case Against History, or Same-Sex Marriage and Human Digestion
Posted: April 15, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: barbarianism, bible, digestion, facebook, gay marriage, hammurabi, history, incest, love, mano a mondo, marriage, michael thomsen, religion, the case against history Leave a comment »It’s sometimes unflattering to look back at the record of history one leaves behind. When I was twelve, I remember the mortification I felt when my dad brought home a video camera with which he intended to record one of his classes. He let me and a friend record ourselves yammering into the lens, and when we took the video tape out and replayed it on the television I felt like I was looking a poorly formed worm in a baggy t-shirt. My voice sounded somehow pig-like. The thrill I’d felt in seeing the glinting new piece of technology suddenly turned to resentment. “Get that stupid thing out of here,” I thought.
