July 2004 Archives

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That's right, comments are fixed, along with the Guestbook.

First, let me just get this out of the way and state that the title of this entry should probably be the title of EVERY entry.

Anyway, I'm back from my vacation to Puerto Rico where my girlfriend and I celebrated our twelve-month dating mensiversary. Thanks to BooksOnStuff.com 1.7 for the congratulatory basket of fruit. I'll post some digital photos of our trip once the gf gets them to me. She's the one with the digital camera since I abhor all things non-analog.

Remember that watch they used to sell on TV that had a digital image of an analog clock? It was great. I should have bought one. Unfortunately, they were sold before I developed a sense of irony.

Highlights from the trip include:
- Renting a car and getting lost in the mountains in an unsuccessful attempt to find a mythical ferry-accessible-only restaurant.
- Braving Toyota Corolla-sized potholes in order to successfully find an amazing virgin beach.
- Tamales at Jimador Restaurant in Old San Juan
- Some other restaurant in Old San Juan with a name I can't remember, that claimed to be the oldest "gastronomical establishment" in the New World, in continuous operation at the same location since 1848.
- Mangos. I love mangos. Why we do not have more mangos in the U.S., I do not know. How did other non-local fruits like pineapples and kiwis get so much broad appeal when mangos are so obviously superior? Mangos need a better marketing firm.

So, I created a brand new guestbook and no one is signing it, except for one random stalker. Did you all not notice the new link at the top of the page? I figured a change to the central navigation system would be immediately apparent. Either: a) Everyone noticed the guestbook but no one cared, b) No one noticed, c) No one noticed and wouldn't have cared if they had noticed.

Well, I'll be going on vacation for a while and don't expect to get much blogging done. I'll be in Las Vegas this weekend for a stag party and then next week I'll be in Puerto Rico. Maybe I'll poke my head in on Tuesday when I'm home for a day and a half between trips. In any case, while I'm gone you can amuse yourselves by signing witty things in the guestbook.

Warning: The comments on MixedMetaphors.net don't appear to be working properly right now. You can still leave comments but it has some temporarily weird effects on the comment window, plus the "recent comments" sidebar isn't updating properly. Instead of fixing it, I've decided to post this message about it, because this seems more purposeless and inane. Lately this blog has been way too purposeful and ane, and I decided it was time to get back to my roots.

Note: I thought it would be funny to use the word "ane" as the oppisite of "inane". And, of course, I was right, it was funny. However, it got me to wondering, what's up with the "in-" prefix on the word "inane"? There is no word "ane" (or "nane" for that matter). I looked "inane" up in the Online Etymology Dictionary and discovered "inane" comes from the Latin word "inanis", which means "empty, void, worthless, useless". I assumed that the proper oppisite would be "anis", so I looked it up in a Latin->English Dictionary with no luck. Does the prefix "in-" not mean the same thing as it does in English? I am a fool who never studied Latin, so I have no idea. But, apparently, the "in-" in "inanis" (and hence, "inane") has nothing to with negation of any kind, as one might assume from the definition.

Other Note: I'll fix the comments later. In the meantime, please continue to leave comments. It still works, it just isn't as aesthetically pleasing.

Well, it finally happened. I was warned many weeks ago by Sidey.com 2.0 but I failed to see how upset it would make me. That's right: I now have an Amazon.com "Plog". A "Plog", in their minds, stands for "Personal Blog". First of all, let me just point out that ALL Blogs are "personal", so "Personal Blog" is entirely redundant. It's just a freakin' blog, no "P" necessary. Second of all, this is an obvious copyright infringement. First they steal and patent my idea for one-click shopping, then they steal the word PLOG!!! Curse you Amazon!

Just out of curiosity I Googled the word "Plog". All I can say is that my Plog did not show up in the first 1000 results.

McSweeney's Literary Magazine has created a mock dictionary that appears to be filled with humorous anti-Bush definitions. One hundred percent of the proceeds are going to anti-Bush organizations. It looks pretty amusing and they've rounded up many, many great authors to contribute definitions. You can pre-order it online.

Note: This post is intended to balance out my negative review of Fahrenheit 9/11. Apparently some people mistook my dislike of the movie as support for the Bush administration. Let me ask you something, if I simply accepted Michael Moore's "facts" without question, wouldn't I be just as bad as conservatives who listen unquestioningly to Fox News? Isn't that what you liberals are always yelling about? So how can you possibly get upset that I didn't like a documentary? I, as an American, liberal or conservative, consider it my duty to approach everything anyone says with skepticism, especially government representatives and celebrities. And Books On Stuff. Especially him.

Change brings both joy and pain. Without change we would be joyless and painless, we would be single celled organisms, content to endlessly bifurcate, reproducing indentical versions of ourselves forever, never mutating, never advancing, we would be perfect as we were, static and satisfied, yet painless, and, more importantly, joyless. Though, on second thought, binary fission sounds totally painful. So maybe we would have pain. Yes, we would binarily fission and we'd have no change, but we'd still have pain. Pain, it seems, comes both from change and no change. Such is life.

The point is that there has been change here, at MixedMetaphors.net. And this change has brought much pain. The site has been down (replaced temporarily by evil advertisements) as we have been upgrading. Or, rather, downgrading, since the site has been moved to a cheap, unmanaged Windows server. The site wasn't suppposed to go offline. But, alas, DNS was slow in propogating. Oh, DNS, why do you propogate so slowly? Why do you fear change? Do not be afraid, DNS, for change may bring pain, but it also brings much joy. Such as the joy of cheap, unmanaged Windows servers, humming along, providing clean and simple interfaces for doing everything, allowing monkeys to host websites. We salute you Windows, not for your ease of use, but for your monkeys. Because monkeys have much to say about change, they have much to say about pain, they have much to say about joy. We are the monkeys.

Seek Beauty Nowhere, Find It Everywhere. What does that mean? Who is this Aesthetic Man and, more importantly, what is he smoking? This sincere Aesthetic Man (as opposed to Kierkegaard's insincere version) is constantly aware of the asthetics of life. Sam (Sincere Aesthetic Man) knows that no matter what happens to him, no matter how down on his luck he may be, that, from an objective point of view, his life is aesthetically pleasing, hence beautiful, hence he is happy.

Yes, Sam is sort of hokey. He's got this banal conviction that "life is beauty", that the fabric of human events, woven together, regardless of individual blemishes, forms a beautiful tapestry. It's enough to make you want to smack him.

But Sam's no fool. It's not like he goes through life smiling at disaster, grinning at his own pain. The key is that he believes in life's aesthetic value from an OBJECTIVE point of view. He believes that if a totally impartial observer could view the world as a whole, could take in the entire story of human existense, then that observer would find it absolutely beautiful (and by "absolutely beautiful" I mean "absolute beauty".)

Sam (nor anyone other person) can ever be a truly objective viewer of humanity because, of course Sam (and every other person) is a part of humanity. A misanthropic hermit who lives alone in a cave is still playing his role in the human story. Truly objective observers might be: a) God, b) advanced forms of alien life who are able to watch all of humanity and all of human history at once. But that's not the point. The point is Sam's conviction that, if he WERE an objective observer, he'd see the beauty, even the beauty in the times that Sam doesn't actually feel particularly beautiful. This doesn't mean he enjoys, (let's suppose) getting beaten up and mugged, but it helps him realize that he is part of a dramatic storyline, a comedy of hitting bottom, a grander chain of events, and, therefore, it helps him accept the low moments.

It's similar, in a way, to Nietzsche's Eternal Return (here I go, bastardizing another philosopher), in that Sam accepts every detail of life exactly as it is with happiness. But it's definitely NOT the same. Yes, if Sam were to discover that Nietzche's Eternal Return were true, that he would relive his life exactly the same way eternally more and had lived it exactly the same way eternally before, he would look upon this fact as objectively beautiful, as art. But the departure from Nietzsche is that Sam really doesn't care. He'd pretty much look upon anything as beautiful. In order to accpet Nietzsche's Eternal Return one needs to accept every single moment of existence without a desire to change. If you say, "Yes, I'm happy with everything except for this one tiny moment," then Nietzche would tell you you're not happy with any of it, because to change one thing is to change everything. But Sam sort of steps outside this "happy with everything" or "happy with nothing" trap, because he sort of doesn't care. Change it, don't change it. Chang one thing, change nothing, change everything. He probably would look back at certain events and think that, subjective, it had might have been better had he not scalded himself with burning coffee, but he still accepts the moment. It's all beauty to Sam.

Questions to be answered in future posts:

Question 1: How does Sam live his life? Like anyone else? As a hedonist, seeking only pleasure? Why would he even bother getting out of bed if staying in bed is just as objectively beautiful as doing stuff?

Question 2: How does Sam know that life is objectively beautiful, or, perhaps more importantly, how does he manage to convince himself of the objective aesthetics of life?

Kierkegaard wrote of an Aesthetic Man, for whom happiness could only be found in a negative way, through the constant escape from boredom. I'm not pretending to be intimately familiar with this work... essentially, I've read Either/Or Part I where Kierkegaard presents us his Aesthetic Man intent on showing us his superior Religious Man in Either/Or Part II. However, I loved the Aesthetic Man so much I never got that far.

Kierkegaard's Aesthetic Man to me wasn't quite right. He spent all his time trying to find pleasure but found only boredom, he was searching for beauty in everything but finding it in nothing. He was witty and urbane, he was intelligent and funny, he was depressed and morose, he was a hedonistic, bored lovable loser. It was hard not to both like and pity him.

I could see how the Aesthetic Man's lament could be fixed in versions 2.0 and 3.0, the Ethical and Religious Man. Finding happiness in nobility of purpose or, ultimately, through God, does seem a logical progression. Yet, I couldn't get past 1.0. I couldn't make my peace with the lowly, physical, sensual Aesthetic Man. Until it occurred to me that Kierkegaard's Aesthetic Man was not an Aesthetic Man at all. He was an Anti-Aesthetic Man. He looked for beauty in everything but found it in nothing. Of course he was unhappy. He was a straw man, set up to tear down, an example meant only to demonstrate how his way of being was the WRONG way of being. Kierkegaard was trying to tell me that one cannot be happy as the Aesthetic Man because the Aesthetic Man is unhappy. And, that, my friends, is big-time begging the question.

So I wondered, what if the Aesthetic Man truly was the Aesthetic Man, instead of this warped, pessimistic brother, this Anti-Aesthetic Man? The true Aesthetic Man, rather than seeking beauty in everything but finding it in nothing, would instead seek beauty in NOTHING but find it in EVERYTHING. The Aesthetic Man would not be constantly bored, he would be constantly awed. He would, no matter what, see the beauty in the world around him.

Really, I'm not trying to discuss Kierkegaard, since I know too little about Kierkegaard. If any Kierkegaard scholars are reading this and thinking that I've got it all wrong, while I'd love to hear about it, I'm not really trying to contradict or refute his work. Kierkegaard's Aesthetic Man simply served as a starting point for me to think about what I consider to be the True Aesthetic Man.

This is the first in a three (or more) part series.

Though this blog is getting dangerously close to becoming a blog that actually discusses normal blog topics, I'm going to have to continue my series of "items containing content" in order to give my view of a recent documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11". I'm sure everyone else in the world with a blog is writing something about this movie, so what I'm about to say is completely unoriginal and unnecessary and is simply added drivel in a drivel-fueled blogiverse. But, screw you, I'm posting it.

First, a full disclosure: I'm a registered Democrat, though I have a tendency to be quite middle of the road. Persuasive conservative arguments from intelligent people often sway me. I don't particularly like Kerry, but I'm certainly not voting for (and did not vote the first time for) Bush.

I went to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" fully expecting it to be filled with misinformation and distorted logic. I expected to be both riled up by the idiocy of our government as well as pissed off by the unnecessarily misleading nature of the film, anger from-and-at both the left and the right. I tend to really dislike propaganda of any form, it usually has the opposite of the intended effect on me, yet couldn't imagine even bad-anti-Bush-propaganda would push me towards a pro-Bush sentiment, so I figured this movie would convince me of nothing but at least serve to get my brain grinding.

For the first twenty minutes or so, this is what I got. Vaguely interesting over-the-top conspiracy theory with a hundred holes in the logic. But then... then something happened that no one seems to be talking about, something surprising and disturbing: The movie started to suck. I mean it. It was boring. Unfocused. It contained many different unrelated too-long boring segments that didn't serve to back up any point, let alone the main point. Was this a government conspiracy movie? A "War is Bad" movie? A "minorities are taken advantage of and tricked into defending our country" movie? An "uncomfortably personal statement about human loss" movie"? I don't know. And, more importantly, I didn't care. Because it was BORING. I can deal with suspension of disbelief, faulty logic, loose ends, bad acting, smarmy voiceovers, unfunny jokes, inconsistent messages, unoriginality, and many other problems (only some of which occurred in "Fahrenheit 9/11"). What I can't deal with is a BAD, BORING movie. I can't even say this movie taught me something, because it showed me very little I didn't already know.

Now, looking at the reviews, it appears that the movie is doing very well, both critically and in the box office. It got "85% fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes. (For those of you unfamiliar, Rotten Tomatoes is sort of like MetaCritic, but with a tomato theme.) The negative reviews all seem to complain about the faulty logic, the ridiculousness of the conspiracy theories, all the things that, frankly, would have made the documentary much better. Everyone is so caught up in the pseudo-politics that no one is talking about the big, fat elephant in the room (no, not Michael Moore, I mean the metaphorical big, fat elephant) (the one that represents something everyone suspects but no one is talking about, in case you don't know what metaphorical elephants in rooms represent). And, to skip the metaphor and get right to it, the thing that no one seems to be talking about but everyone knows (please, don't let me be the only one in the world who knows this... don't let the whole world be as lacking in good taste as I suspect it might be) is that THIS MOVIE SUCKED.

[Note: If anyone can confirm or deny my tragic suspicion about the rest of the world being unable to judge decent film, I'd appreciate comments.]

Thank you for your time.