May 16, 2005

Booked and B&E

A ticket out of this town, because in the words of Final Fantasy;

"Montreal might eat its young but Montreal won't break us down."

So in 48 days I will be outta here - I just had this really strange and peculiar paranoia basically, "don't tell people when you are leaving cuz you will get robbed. and really that would suck."

Message to any would-be housebreakers: I mostly own houseplants, and this computer which is old enough now to qualify as one of the computers Reboot would happily refurbish and give to a community group.

I broke my own stereo months ago and have no television. Plus I have a vicious lesbian guard cat who will tear your eyes out and shed white fur all over your black cat burgler outfits.

To assess the roots of that little outburst and to piss my dad off I will tell a little story;

I recently borrowed a chunk of money from my dad; and when I was ready to pay it back I called and left a message saying can you email me or leave me a message with your account info please..

Dad responded by email and the subject header was "bank info"

He wrote;

"hello dear,
I am going to give you my bank information but in order to confuse any hackers or sneaks I will hide it in the body of this message."

What follows are a bunch of paragraphs that make no sense. Until I realize that he has written a phonetic code with his bank number buried in it somewhere.

So I write back and say;

"Thanks dad... I'll figure that out and then deposit your money...you nut."

he writes back;

"Well... I guess it is a little silly, the subject header did say 'Bank Info' after all.."

That's right the family all come by it honestly we also talk to houseplants and believe in fairies, what's the opposite of machivellian? naillevacham that's what we are, naive and also a little transparent I guess.

I hope this doesn't offend you dad, I find it's one of the nicest qualities in the world to be born with.

So there housebreakers, I dare you, steal my old shit, I don't even have any cds you want. They're all esoteric indierock.

...On hanging out by the virtual south doors smoking a cig and pretending I don't care

Somehow the above story makes me think of all this technorati hullabaloo going on about the top 100 bloggers, I always kind of thought the blogosphere was 50% open publishing phenom and 50% a popularity contest .. I guess it was only a matter of time before there needed to be a list posted in a bathroom somewhere.

Remember those lists in high school;

hottest chick,
easiest lay
gives best head

What else was there...Luckily my life has been too rich and full to remember the torturous vocabulary of high school popularity contests. All I remember was that one year I was number 10 in the hot-chick list, except that was the year I went to a "progressive alternative school" so there were only about 30 girls to choose from, and many had baseball bats (handily called bitchbats) which they would have used to clock said listmakers if they had heard they were listed. I had no bat, hence I was number 10.

So there, fuck lists. Give me a bat.

Perhaps it is human nature to give a rank to each other, part of a darwinian impulse which also explains why some of my houseplants fare better than others and why a pine forest will always be full of pine trees and no birches.

I prefer to think of it as a bad habit like smoking or failing to say thank you. Ranking makes it easier to focus ones vision on what appears to be most important, without allowing for a diversity of views.

But wait, you say, what about rewarding excellence. Good point, and I am sure that Amber Greenspan (northern secondary hot chick for three years running) never forgot the admiring glances she received while traipsing the halls of my alma mater.

I don't think the problem is the recognition, its the numbers and the titling. What if technocracy just asked for shout-outs of people/ blogs who seemed important for vague and sometimes completely arbitrary reasons. What if we could all submit headings and not just use theirs? what if, what if: All I am trying to say is that it is how rankings are framed that create the hierarchy of values.

Okay it's true I have always been a fan of the overlooked and the unpopular, have always been a member of that elect group too.. But come on people, self-publishing is not supposed to be about being popular, it's about being true to yourself.

Or have I just commit one of those naive blunders my family is famous for...

The focus thus far has been what voices are being left out of the list, which reminds me of second generation feminist art historical critiques, in which women painters who had been left out of the white-male (and western) pantheon were "re-discovered" by feminist scholars.

The third generation began unpacking the privelage of the of the art-historical as a rational for arts value, and questioned the hidden values (genius-myth, avante-garde, market-value) of the standard being used to proclaim something a "a work of art". By the the third wave scholars and artists started actually looking at the cultural production of women, and questioning the worth of the dominant narrative, rather than trying to fit women into it.

It is disturbing to see that the categories chosen by technorati also seem to use the same rational and western approach as those traditionally used to determine the market value of a creative enterprise in a capitalist economy. What is avante-garde? What will sell well? and who did it first?

A reification of standards in a domain which previously had less obvious throttling techniques is a big problem. I don't want to see a really creative terrain (the blogosphere) reduced to a set of principles or worse yet "rules" about what represents quality. And I don't want to see a top 100 established by any group, regardless of how open and accessible they are trying to be.

Wow that really turned into a bit of a rant. I should go get a coffee and chill out.

Continued from main page..