Spring Verbiage

Orangeness 12:  Verbiage

The infogarbage spew is going full blast. You gotta love something that, to quote a Facebook post, sucks your brain juices. Now that we live in Turnipworld, we must emulate the Great Rutabaga and continue to forget everything we learned, even if we didn’t learn it till 2013. Wow, the celeb facts are flying at full speed. Jaw-dropping historical photos! Adorable celebrity moms! You’ll never believe what the Rutabaga said today! We may have to put up with this vegetable for years.

It’s not just social media (LIKE ME DAMMIT I NEED CLICKS), it’s sociopathic media. Another neck-snapping unexpected consequence of some Harvard dropout genius’ invention to ogle coed girls. Don’t you wish you had become an engineer instead of an artist? I still don’t know which way to insert the USB plug, which of course they knew all about back at MIT in 1968.

There is so much verbiage garbage that a mere paragraph on Facebook (CLICK ME I’M HERE ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT) of BuzzLanguage will not suffice. Let’s take a trip through the May garden of buzzing words, while endangered bees grab pollen for their doomed honeycombs:

We are hoping that the Turnip will “pivot,” a choice word for changing your stupid ideas while still trying to sell them. Turnip knows only turning towards the sunlight of public attention. That’s all he knows. You will not beat him by out-thinking him. He is, if you really must think about it, an “existential threat” and “categorically wrong.” Now what again is an “existential threat?” I believe that it involves a chain-smoking, unkempt French philosopher coming at you brandishing a Communist hammer and sickle. The French have seen all this before. And what is “categorically wrong?” I think I heard Barack Obama use it (correctly, too) so that must be some of that intellectual talk we need to forget about.

Have you ever seen a Unicorn? Yeah, the white Little Pony that farts rainbows? Well this Unicorn is now defined as a start-up company that is already worth a BILLION $ before it ever makes or does anything! We must be entrepreneurs, folks, and chase that Unicorn! How will we attain start-up heaven? Be disruptive! Outthink disruption: innovate new possibilities with Analytics. Big Data is your friend, even as it is sucking out your brain juice! (I WANT BLOG PAGE VIEWS! READ ME! No, blogs are too long gimme Twitter tweets!). Big Data knows your secret consumer desires. Do you have a role model? I want a role model, even if the words are so Boomer. Millennials agree, but what is a role model? Here’s a (somewhat edited) excerpt from an article in a real paper magazine:

“My definition of a role model is someone who maximizes their potential to push the boundaries of their circumstances with passion, purpose, integrity, and the sensitivity to know they are setting an example for others along the way….I can relate to the underdog story. He is showing us all how through belief in yourself, hard work and dedication, it is possible to achieve your dreams, prove your doubters wrong, and go from an underdog to a (star).”

Tell me about it. 

Passion! Purpose! Integrity! Believe in yourself - and work hard! You, too can become a DJ or an emoji designer or a Unicorn….or a turd of impressive size, weight, and fiber content.

O.C.D. in the parking lot

Orangeness 11: Obsessive Compulsive Parking

“Park Prettily,” I read at a car park in England. Nothing pretty about it, Brits.

I am edging back and forth, forward and backward, trying to place my Dorkmobile into a rectangular parking place. Go forward, go backward, turn steering wheel a little bit…Too much! Back up. See those worn-out yellow lines on the asphalt? You need to be 1 foot away from them on both sides. 12 inches, that’s all you get. Open the door and see 9 inches between you and the line. No, that won’t work. Your fellow unpretty parker will open the door and bang a dent into your door. My car is pocked with these mini-dents, there’s no way to avoid them. And I’ve probably doored someone else’s car dozens of times. 

Park Prettily. Back up again. NO WAIT someone is coming down the parking lot alley at high speed (at least for a parking lot) and you can’t see them because you’re in between monster “mini” vans that look like enormous sweet potatoes on wheels. Mine is equally oversized but rectangular and boxy rather than ovoid. The designers of this parking lot did their planning in 1991, when it was built. That sounds like yesterday, but it was more than twenty years ago and cars were not giant vegetables back then. You could actually park in one of their spaces without smacking your neighbor’s car door with yours.

It’s mathematical, trigonometric if you draw the lines carefully. A change of just a few inches as you back up is multiplied into a large arc in the front. You are making parts of a 270-point turn and inscribing an arc that moves along a virtual circle trying to move your wheels sideways while moving forward and backward inch by inch. But those other drivers haven’t stopped, they’re whizzing by in back of you and you can’t see. Ah, but wait, potato driver to your right is stashing her grocery bags in the back of the mobile and she is LEAVING. Time for you to find your wallet (another commercial adventure) and escape. But no, another vehicle whose size dwarfs the blob that just left has pulled up into the space. Not a vegetable, this is the crate the vegetables got shipped in. Let’s see them park prettily. 

Donald Trump as Vegetable

Orangeness 10: The Big Turnip

Whenever I see the word “Trump,” it looks like “Turnip” to me. And, y’know, that Trump person who’s all over the news kind of looks like a large root vegetable, the rutabaga who for whatever subterranean dirty reason is running for the Presidency. Well you know about me and vegetables, so what is it with Rutabaga that appeals to so many people? They say it’s because he allows people to think and say nasty things and get away with them. “He’s not a politician, he tells it as it is.” Really. This is your role model? I lived with someone just like that for all of my young life, my father that is, he ran his mouth just like Turnip but didn’t have the advantage of being filthy rich which excuses all bad behavior. There isn’t much I can say about Turnip that hasn’t been said before, especially since he’s playing us all with calculated advancements of schtick that titillate the media in vibratory doses. Yes, he’s a vegetable with an electric info-dildo that causes frenzy and even violence, while he looks on sucking it up. 

The info-dildo’s stimulation, of course, comes from the energy of burning info-garbage which I elaborated on in the previous Orangeness post. When you burn info-garbage you get a toxic pollution of burning media fumes and an overload of smokin’ emotion. Because this is how Turnip is the root of our current culture of emotional whipping. Check out your buzzwords! Jaw-dropping! Eye-popping! Shocking! (Number 7 will astonish you!) Stunning! You need to see this! You’ll never believe what happens next!  He can keep you rolling and remember, all attention during a campaign is good attention. Wouldn’t I love to have that amazing dirt-proof quality, that no matter what I did or said, my followers would still be thrilled with me. But do I really want to be a celebrity? Do I really want to eat vegetables so that I could generate more methane for my info-garbage trash fires? Or perhaps, in some jaw-dropping turnaround, Turnip will finally fall into the boiling pot and get mashed.

Infogarbage

Orangeness 9: Infogarbage

The Internet is a vast ocean, spanning the whole globe, even where it is land. It is an ocean of electronic information, not water. There is a reason why moving from site to site is still called “surfing the Net.” Every time you turn on that computer and connect, you are exposing yourself to the endless circulation of metaphorical water and allegorical salt. 

And, just like the real ocean, the Net-Ocean (fishing nets, that is, to snare you and your fellow creatures) has regions and seas, some clear and balmy, others polluted and full of harm. The bottom is lined with the shipwrecks of “dot-com” companies, start-ups, service providers, search engines, and the remains of once massive lords of the sea….Compuserve? Altavista? Geocities? Whale carcasses, all of them now.

There is now so much plastic and other pollution in the ocean that it has spun together to form artificial islands and a permanent layer of compacted material, harmful to fish and sea creatures. And the Ocean of Internet is going this way too, but the polluting material is not physical but informational. I call it “infogarbage,” and by now there is no place either in the ocean or on the Internet that has not been somehow compromised by it, even if it is tiny and hard to see.

Much blather, sometimes true blather, has been written about the “monetization” (lovely word, that) of the internet, and the frantic competition for people’s attention. The oil of the information age is attention, that “made-you-look-and-click” thing. See where I’m going with that metaphor. Oil, fossil fuel, is so essential that people will drill the bottom of the sea to get it. On the internet, monetized sites drill to the bottom of your brain and suck out the oil of your attention. Their sole ambition is to get people clicking on the site and sharing it on social media in international cascades of infogarbage, “going viral,” and thus showing that it is a suitable drilling platform for more attention, more ad space, more info garbage. And it’s cheap and can’t break and exude awful goo all over the shoreline.

What, you say, my time is my own, and if I want to click on celebrity facts or cat videos, why shouldn’t I? Yeah, don’t we all. But then I discovered that these obsessive little entertainments are provided by an enormous industry of spammy sites, which underlie the ubiquitous ads. Back in the ancient days just after the millennium, reams and reams of spam was delivered to us under a bubbling coating of word salad, shredded civilization aimed at defeating the spam filters which kept the pollution manageable. Now there is no need to elude the spam filters - we readers have BECOME spam, and we take it in every moment of our blenderized attention span. An enormous industry uses thousands and thousands of pseudo-informative sites to extract from us. You are a resource to be mined and exploited. If petroleum had consciousness, it would be you, bubbling up the pipe along with countless exploitation web sites.

They have names often compounded with “buzz” and “viral.” ViralRecall, BuzzBombed, BlitzLift, Lifescript, Bite the Buzz, Mindbuzz, PeekWorthy, ViralWorld, Mind Pause, Distractify, Viral Hog, Buzzify, PopnHop,Viral Recall, ViralIgniter, CoViral, Viral Scoop, Shareable, BoreBurn, Bored Panda, Boredom Therapy, DamnBored, Lifebuzz, SetViral, GuiltyFix, Flipopular, Viral Mega, and on and on. This protozoic proliferation of infogarbage sites is managed by a few “content management” companies such as “Taboola” or “Outbrain.” From these sources, massive rivers of info sludge pour into the Net Ocean. They deliver the basic output of tabloids from history: celebrity gossip and facts, grotesque freak shows, lurid crime stories, cute animals, sports, medical quackery, and of course, female cheesecake. Boobs, ass, and more boobs. The more you click, the more boobs you see. And eventually you will be set upon by malware, the hook under the bait.

You can see the evidence of these myriads of catch-you sites as “by-lines” under “sponsored posts” or even in supposedly legitimate “news” posts on Yahoo or CNN. You have probably seen and consumed material from millions of them. These sites can MAKE MONEY by renting ad space, and may be the basis of what is advertised as “how to make a fortune working only four hours a week.” Yes, if you create and manage 100 or 200 garbage sites, you’ll get royalties from the ads. Maybe only one dollar per site or 1/10 cent per click, but you’ve got a lot of them and it mounts up, so let’s create ViralBuzz and its permutations and go off to our warm beach in the Caribbean! More celebrity boobs, baby. What is notable about this industry is that it produces NOTHING. No craft, no food or drink, no helpful gadgets, no books or medicines or furniture…nothing except money.

So we are back by the ocean. It’s clear, blue and sparkling, and the rum drinks with the fruit in them are on the table, and your laptop showing the output of your 700 info garbage grab-you sites is hidden under the pillows. That’s the same ocean you’re polluting, but in an informational way. In the world of information, there are no limits. It’s jaw-dropping and mind-blowing. You’ll never believe what can happen next.

Epic House Clearing

It’s been a while, we know that. My last  “Orangeness” entry was in early October of last year, 2015. A week after that, my mother broke her hip in a fall at home. Twelve days later, despite attempts to repair it and rehabilitate her, my mother passed away aged 94. 

Since then my life has been seriously disrupted since I am the only heir and executor of her estate, and she left a load of stuff behind which has to be taken care of. So in these months since then I haven’t had either the time or the energy to post to the Orange. But it’s 2016 now, and February, the dreariest month of our year, so I need to get back to what I like. A sip of orange juice if you might say, though orange juice reminds me of my late father who was rather unsavory in his addiction to orange juice. 

Let me tell you about what was left to me in this epic passage of generations. Plenty of money, enough to pay a lot of taxes on, so I am now for the moment one of the greedy parasitic inheritors of unearned wealth. And a decrepit house in a Boston suburb, filled with 60 years of hoarded parental material, ranging from ancient decaying coats and clothes and shoes, to 60 years worth of financial statements and check stubs proving that my mother bought a bottle of milk in 1974. And my father’s piano, which a piano technician has proclaimed un-repairable. It sounds like an otherworldly dulcimer and I have recorded some untuned piano sounds to use in later ambient compositions. Last but not least there is the archive of my parents’ musical and artistic careers, which includes my father’s music and media recordings. With great effort on my part and Maggie, the archivist at Brandeis University, we were able to stash all of my father’s music material into the Brandeis Department of Music archive, where it can be accessed by anyone interested in the music of my old Dad.

Much more difficult to curate is the large collection of unsold art of my mother’s. My mother created a large amount of art with no intention of selling it. She just made it because she was compelled by talent to do so. Talent unfortunately does not mean money and in her day it was considered completely crass and low for an artist to market his - or especially her work. So my mother’s output is sitting slowly falling apart in the two back rooms of the rather small house. I have gotten a couple of them placed or promised to museums or collectors but the majority remains with the old house…and the mice. 

Yeah, I haven’t mentioned the mice yet. Not computer mice, real rodents, in their numbers, infest the house. I heard them scampering in the ceiling and behind the furniture. I did not see one, which is good because if I had I would have immediately decamped to the less infested Hampton Inn. The mice were feeding on old birdseed left in the room behind other things we couldn’t see. Even when we removed the birdseed the mousies kept coming because they had left stashes in their nests which they built all around the house in hidden hoarded places. Now mouses are cute, right? Mickey and Minnie? Three Blind Mice? They are NOT cute. They are vermin. And what I didn’t know about mice is that they pee and poop all over where they go, for territory and path marking. And this mouse effluent stinks unbelievably - worse than a skunk, if you have ever smelled that. Mouse effluent is also transferable. In that it contaminates whatever touches it, which in turn contaminates whatever touches that, etc. etc. I have been spraying Febreze and other stink relievers and I still smell it more than a month afterward. 

It was Christmas time and I was re-enacting the Battle Against the Mouse King, but I had no Nutcracker or Toy Soldier Army to combat them. My helpers set up traditional snap-traps baited with peanut butter and seemed to put a dent in their numbers, but what we really needed was a fierce cat who would rid the house of them gladly.

Work has been done. I need to de-clutter my own place, and every time I remove something, I either stupidly buy something new, or find more stuff. I’m like my mother. I have check stubs from 1987 in a big space-filling box. 1987, you are going to be history, if I can get to you. That’s almost mid-century, though I think my mother beat me in the long-term hoarding department.

The old living room still looks mostly as it was when my parents lived there, mid-60s style. But the antique dealers are at work. I am selling off furniture pieces one by one, though I can’t do that while I’m not there. I managed to get rid of the most well-known piece, the chair known as the “Womb Chair,” designed by the famous Finnish architect and crossword-puzzle fill in word Eero Saarinen. This chair is a famous mid-century modern design but I always disliked it. Once you got in it you couldn't get out. Sort of like being in a womb I guess. You would struggle to get your butt out of the deep back of the chair and then you would pop out wet and screaming to pick up your drink from the round cocktail table which my father built to go with all the other mid century stuff.

As I have stuff removed from the house in advance of selling it, I offered the chair to a local antique store specializing in mid-century modern housewares and furniture. It is supposed to be worth some money but there has been some deterioration over the years so maybe not so much. At least someone will buy it and it will find its way to a better home. I'm still looking for a  home for the art, which is large and difficult to display, and also smells of mouse pee.

I guess you’re up to date now.

February 14, 2016.

The Pope on the Pot

I took the Pope into the bathroom with me a week ago, when he was touring the Mid-Atlantic States region. It was sort of an audience, but not arranged by his protocol directors. The Pope went into the bathroom because he was on the cover of TIME magazine that week. As we all know, we want to take reading material into the bathroom when we, uh, plan on spending some time there rather than making a quick papal visit. We would like this to be quality time, but that quality depends on the diet, productivity and output of the sitter.

So I look at the kindly visage of the Holy Father, and I cannot quite shake the notion that he is looking back at me, even though his eyes aren’t directly focused on me. It’s like all those magical media items in the “Harry Potter” movies, where not only do pictures and prints move and make noise, but they interact with you personally. No! Don’t let the Pope see me on the pot! I’m so embarrassed. I put my hand over the Pope’s printed face. To use a more religiously appropriate situation, like an Orthodox ikon this picture is a “window to the soul.” Pope Francis’s image, clad in clean white tissue, made smoother by the work of holy Photoshop, is a transparency. Would I take an Orthodox ikon into the loo? Would I take a lavishly illustrated cooking magazine into the place where the post-digested remains of its recipes ends up? 

I have always had the primitive notion that things have consciousness. Depiction is communication. It is listening to me. And as our culture and technology get closer and closer to Harry Potter’s magical world (Internet connection for your dishwasher! For your underwear!) we will reach a point where the Pope could give us a blessing in our private quarters, and really mean it. If things have consciousness, can you insult them? I once said “Go away!” to “Siri,” the robotic voice of my iPhone, and she answered back, “What did I do to offend you?” I hurt a robot’s feelings! I know of people who take their Kindles and iPads into the W.C. with them, endangering their pristine shining screens with the splash of ritual pollution. 

I fold up the magazine. TIME is out of time and I will have to attempt another devotional session, helped by more prunes and an apology to Siri. Yes, sorry….I’m TOO POPED TO POOP!

Food Rave

You've heard Rants here. A Rant is a complaint, delivering negative feelings. A Rave is the opposite of a Rant: it's an enthusiastic declaration of positive appreciation. So here's a Rave, this one about the foods I love.

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I am holding a little slab of pure deliciousness. It is Orange, of course, but it is not a citrus orange. It is a dried apricot, known as a “slab” because during the drying process the fruit piece settles into a flat puddle of sticky sweetness. You have to forcibly remove the slabs from me or else I eat the whole package contents and get a wicked bellyache. Same with prunes and other items of dried delectability.

I’ve talked about foods I hate (any green vegetable), now I’ll talk about foods I love. Start with appetizers. The “appetizer” word just makes me feel good thinking about it. It is not an “app” that you load on your smartphone, despite how hipster menu-makers describe it. It is a collection of nodules of happy flavor that you and your friends devour first. Whenever I hear the word “jalapeño” in any food description, I know I’m in the right place. The time-honored thing to say when you get a plate of appetizers, especially nacho jalapeño appetizers is, “It’s a whole meal on its own!” Which of course is more than true, but you’ve already eaten it and are going on to the main course. Take a swig of your micro craft draft brew and continue.

Meat! Let’s meat up! There is no food more satisfying for me than meat. I am a confirmed carnivore. I tried being a vegetarian for 6 weeks one year and by the fourth week I was ready to slaughter the next Whole Foods customer I saw. I will never do that again (not slaughtering the customer, that is purely theoretical my friends!). You can prepare meat however you want it, and I will slink up to it on silent paws, waiting for my share. But it’s not just meat that occupies my plate ‘o’ plenty. I will eat potatoes done any old way, even though I hear that a potato comes from a plant. The secret is….cheese. 

Cheese! Wonderful fermented curdled crumbly slimy moldy essence of the primal whiteness of dairy! I will eat any food over which cheese has been applied, even tofu. Bleu cheese looks like zombie remains, smells like a swamp, and I adore it. Brie is covered by white fungus: More please. See how the Cheese melts its way through everything I love to eat! I am never without it, except while traveling, when I cannot keep it cool on the road. 

We are therefore building to a display of gourmand logic, built upon not those dreary food pyramid groups but on the feastable moment of my favorite treat foods. What has cheese, meat, starch, fried stuff, and peppers all at once, in one magnificent oozing cylinder? The CHEESESTEAK of course. Let me meditate upon this a while. It is a serious matter.

I simply won’t mention dessert. That is for another posting, another time.


I am holding a large container in my hands. It is my Offering to the Gods of Snack. (Or Slack, if you prefer.) It contains mixed dried fruit, almonds and cashews, and a few bits of milk chocolate. It is something I can always eat, as long as I don’t eat too much of it. (See above.) It looks like an old-time lottery or Bingo container from which tokens were picked. I hold the cover down and shake the container vigorously. Then I place it on the Kitchen Table and reach within. Behold, I have won the lottery. I have selected a PRUNE!