Jethro Tull be damned, we're stuck here, in a permanent state of entering an unknown future that we dynamically create ourselves. I'm talking about the "now," the place where the gurus and power-enlightenment boys urge us to focus our attention.

As a cocktail-napkin shorthand, you can see the value of this prescription because it's too easy to structure a modern psychosis around the diachronic heuristics of "then" and "later," the past and what is yet to be; and a blurred point of view results when a steady hand fails to grip the camera of awareness tightly enough. All right then, we'll fasten our lobster-bibs a little more snugly and concentrate on cracking the carapace of the moment with the mallet of meditation.

The outraged diners at the next table, infuriated at the splatterings of your efforts to wrestle with the thrashing anaconda of identity consciousness, will usually step over to have a word with you: "Ah, pardon me, but my wife and I are trying lead our displaced search for a constructed sense of self over here and..." You know how that turns out. Apologies all 'round and a slice of Bad Faith cheesecake for dessert.

In the garden of actualization, it's always been critical to know just who it is that you are. Used to be fairly easy, since Podunk Corners was a three-day ride on a shot-sprung buggy to anywhere else. But today's metaphor is one of transplanted nationalities, blended dialects, the transactional currency of defining the self as a series of prior locations and sequences of events. It's a recipe for schizophrenia, since it regards warmly the idea of tradition and native culture—a quilted patch of social fabric—whereas an urbanized consciousness condemns the same thing as being hopelessly provincial and somehow sadly deprived.

We can't have it both ways. But we do.

Same thing goes for our national identity. We're pinned on a blasted battlefield between an army of verdant Luddites and fundamentalist neo-conservatives, and our choices are polarized between the bicycles of rationality and the sport-utes of consumption, demitasse or ubergrande. Sort of like those psychology experiments where the researcher goes out to conduct a survey and loses his front teeth in a mindless mugging.

The strip-mall mentality of empty capitalism cries out for a new consciousness, a better way of being. There's nothing that ice-picks the heart more sharply than seeing a crushed Wendy's cup in a parking lot because the sheer waste of the thing, the disposable mentality of rapid consumption that turns our resources into garbage is the postscript to a world gone wrong; yet the person who discarded the waxed yellow cardboard is at least two generations away from persuasion.

Laugh if you like at the suburbanites who've chosen to live in sterile walled bedroom communities, but attend to the linguistic and consumptional barriers that similarly divide us as a people. Culture is, to state the obvious, the negotiated creation of the present.

Black-Market Esteem

Spotted an unusual story at the UK Guardian: With pot and porn outstripping corn, America's black economy is flying high. This article focuses on the economics of our parallel market for illegal goods and services. Among the findings:

• As a cash crop, marijuana outsells maize.
  
• Americans spend more on illegal drugs than on cigarettes.
  
• Commercial pot growers can serve sentences far longer than those for murder.
  
• Hardcore porn revenue equals Hollywood's domestic box office take.
  
• Americans spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined.
  
• The US leads the world in export of explicit sex videos.
  
• In 1997 about 22,000 porn websites existed; the number is now closer to 300,000 and growing.
  

"Black markets will always be with us. But they will recede in importance when the public morality is consistent with our private one. The underground is a good measure of the progress and the health of nations. When much is wrong, much needs to be hidden."

Ouchimus Maximus

Did you see this one yet? Climber amputates his arm, hikes to safety. According to reports, Aron Ralston, 27, of Aspen, Colorado, was climbing in Blue John Canyon in southwestern Utah when a 200-pound boulder fell on him, pinning his arm. When his water ran out, he faced a tough decision.

Using his pocketknife, he amputated his arm below the elbow and applied a tourniquet and administered first aid.

He then rigged anchors, fixed a rope and rappelled to the canyon floor.

Dragzilla

Whatever first came to mind when you read that title was probably correct.

Dragzilla is a short film that explores the inner confusion and angst-driven rage of a "New Jersey drag queen who grows 50 times her size after buying black-market makeup." Doncha hate it when that happens? No, not the gigantism, but the editorial conundrum of selecting the appropriate possessive pronoun. This is the kind of thing they run at the Arlene Grocery Picture Show, an indie film festival set up to counter snobbhorrific showcases like New York's Tribeca Film Festival. Mark Morford of the SF Chron points out that if you make this show, you can also catch The Anti-Santa, in which "Santa Claus gets a lobotomy to cope with the commercialization of Christmas."

One More Thing

We didn't need to see this, from the Greenville (SC) News: Chicks Roost In Private With Show Looming. You have to gag at all of these bird puns the group is generating. They're at it again today, too: Chicks Hatch Sassy Show To Launch Tour.

They should be tarred and feathered for this.

11:02:27 AM