the crucible of fame

The crucible of fame concentrates raw talent into consumable products.
That product? It's people seeking out the presence of other people set in dramatic action.
People crave distracted, imaginary experiences.
It's time out of the world spent in a mental fiction of its making.
These fictions are pieced together from a patchwork of sensory data, symbols, and experience both then and now.
Fame's crucible is a sociopolitical function.
It delimits the talented few into entertainment genres, which are carefully managed.
The talented initiate aspires to the style and virtuosity of the current famous entertainer.
Through a symbolic conversion the initiate steps our of the shadow of her idol, the star who let her express emotions and experiences perhaps through a song.
This song and its tones awaken an ancient human impulse: complex and under symbolized emotions.
How many love songs does it take to get to the center?
In the process of becoming a star the initiate becomes a product measured by its popularity. 
Statistics plot the rise and fall of it through sales figures

it's obscene double

I spent my life trying to distance myself from that loud, often comic, and ultimately self-effacing performance art known as Iron Jack. That name was a persona, a dramatic mantle assumed by my father probably starting at some moment in the mid-1970s as he was coming into his own in a rapidly changing occupation known as ironwork. I distanced myself from him for a number of reasons. First, he spent his time with his progeny and namesake, my older brother, shaping him into an athlete and belittling his intelligence in the process. That's the other reason for my distancing. It was partly self-imposed and partly through a performance on the part of my parents to stereotype me and my brother into the nerd and athlete role respectively. The problem with stereotypes is that they are ill equipped to furnish a subjectivity that encompasses the subtlety and contradictions in us all. Being the stereotype that I was and the stereotype that they granted me I was left to be addressed as that stereotype and to consider myself in light of it. This had the effect of alienating me. And this alienation is what drove me to my room alone to contemplate who I was, and to shut out what I found to be shallow interactions with him. Finally, as he was a construction worker, he told me that I should use my intelligence to avoid his profession. He didn't identify with me as well and as a sign of fatherly love he wanted me to disown what he was, so that I could find the space in which to imagine a different life for myself, a life carved in the times afforded around an occupation. With little guidance, little emotional support, and a lot of prickly avoidance of interaction I had little in a way of a public self, that same self that furnishes the trim and veneer of an identity. We are, after all, public to ourselves in our own mirrored regard. And my god I hate what I saw in the mirror, first as a small child because I felt that I looked like a girl, second as an adolescent because I was so damn short, and continuously since puberty because I was practicing strict self-control (repression) and fought with a negative self-identity (depression). The behavior cycles that sustain these were a cancer, an affliction, that continuously punctuates my life the way a blister in a rubber tire causes the wheel to bump each time it's run over. Again and a gain this doubt, this self loathing creeps in, slowing me down, removing my ability to think clearly, ruining my chances at sustaining a worthy, vibrant self.

What is that self? It's the aura of thought displaced in time. It exists, in time, only as the the substance of actions that people take--brute data. The totality of a self is always partially hidden in any instance and that which fills in the absence is a mind's self experience. That hybrid entity of thought and body process is a self. We access, nourish, and sustain it in moments of meaningful activity. That also is where we change it.

The most common barrier to real change is habit. Habit need not share the same logic as a symbolized self because the logics of practice that give meaning and metaphor to habits follow the salient features of an environment and a history of experience. In other words, when habits and the symbolized self become self-supportive the history of experience must be re-written. That requires an active intervention, in time, to establish new routines and new ways of regarding the self, which can be both mental or activity-based routines. The self is a product of mental awareness that is both a process in and outcome of how we regard and maintain ourselves. Innovating routines of awareness and activity produces different outcomes. Yet if for some reason we choose to be lazy and self-castigate we can either self-motivate or fail by some, ultimately, self-imposed measure. Here's where I am.

I've had this cancer growing in me for a long time, a cancer of self-loathing and self-doubt; the kind that paralyzes action and leaves you in a swirl of self-pity, self-ridicule, and ultimately covert inaction. It went into remission some time in the early 2000s. I had a brief moment of self-realization as I entered a job market, a shitty one mind you in light of the largesse being soaked up by many who had graduated with my degree. But at that time I was me, and sadly enough I was living in my father's home, eating dinner at my mother's every week night and intermittently on weekends. The same thing: eat dinner, drink a pot of coffee, watch syndicated TV, go home, get high, watch a little more TV, get up early, get to work early, work on flex time, tag content, save file, leave, beat traffic, start mom's dinner, greet mom and her husband, eat dinner, drink a pot of coffee, watching syndicated TV, go home, get high, watch a little more TV ...

That, that is what my father would have done. That, that is what my grandfather did. That, that is what I was doing. I had not distanced myself not one bit from my father in habit. Maybe in mind I did, maybe, and every time that I realized how closely I resembled my dad that wave of self-loathing would come crashing down on me.

I left that job in search of even higher education. Up and up I went, reaching some institutionally imposed zenith called a doctorate of philosophy, doing it all on the U's dime, teaching courses, reading, taking notes, writing papers, discussing ideas. Loved it. The cancer was in remission.

Then the habit caught up to me. I had this technology adoption fetish and attempted to be the expert on computers, media, and so studied these very things and practiced a rather inconsistent parody of the 'technology expert' when I helped others with computer-related problems while the problem I was studying in those books was the meaning and use of technology in societies. Rarely did the twain meet, and surely the twain32.dll driver that often caused hang-ups between the scanner and the desktop computers in the media center had little to do with this connection between technologies and the conservation of power outlined by the neo-Marxist writers that I was reading.

In my attempt to be the computer expert I adopted too much technology, let loose technology over my decision making, and thought that, like Sebastian Mahfood had told me, that clever database of quotations from all the books I read would become the fastest, most efficient way to search from keywords and use searched content to improve the speed and accuracy of my research writing. What I did instead was became a rather impotent yet faithful curator of this megalith of "knowledge," and in time it became bigger, more imposing, and smarter than me. I had more available than I could recall. I had created something that I thought would service me in writing my dissertation, but instead I spent hours building, maintaining, and curating the database while reading, simply to address an anxiety about my writing's authoritativeness on the subject. That distanced me from the disciplinary content required for my major.

And there I was, before a file I entitled 'das Notes.' I filled it, perhaps, until the last days of my attempts at writing my dissertation, dutifully performing my curatorial duties. What I had done between finishing up course work, completing my oral defense, and that moment when I turned my back on the whole academic project was simply curatorial work. In my belief in this filing and search system that I had created I had simply relegated myself from the role of an author and  critical thinker to that of a bureaucrat and desk clerk. I became more concerned with page numbering, spelling, cell formatting, and heuristics for data entry than I was with actually producing writing. What writing I produced had that flavor of ideas without direction, and so the last pieces that I submitted to my advisor went unread. She was smart enough to realize that I was floundering. She was also smart enough to put me from the front range, to the back burner, to a hot plate, and finally to an insulated soft-pail lunch box in some unused room of her metaphorical life. That's where I went cold, stale, uneaten.

I spent a few years drunk and on-line, trying to piece together a life and in the end established a routine to meter the usage of my money and live alone oblivious to the world and people around me. My neighbors kept me company at times, but even they were living in some fantasy world of their own making just with a little more mooring in a reality of other people and an outdoors routine: leaving the city, going to work. As I grew weary of the academic jobs I could acquire I realized I had become one of the many underclass of academics who, with or without a PhD, find themselves in the belly of a machine that squeezes your learning into lecture format, drains you of your dignity, and keeps you alienated from faculty life and overworked. The gulf between the lecturers paid per class and the professors working toward tenure is like the gulf between the colonial occupiers and their pet servants culled form the local population. While the local help knows the customs and can speak with decorum and propriety to the occupiers; while they may even support the values and customs that the occupiers imposed to maintain the occupiers' rule and fragile world view, the locals are simply help, and when they're not needed they're interred to the slums in a denatured cultural and social landscape of a colonial holding.

My covert inaction, that seed of doubt undid what I had spent four years to set up: my final project toward completion of my doctorate. I filed it away, the doubt subsided, and that squeamishness that the blinking cursor caused did as well. I was looking for a change.

My dad was downright pouty when he asked me if I had found work. Sadly, he sat in his recliner as he talked to me with his face to an episode of "How Stuff Works" on the television. He never looked at me in the face once. In fact, he rarely looked me in the face. I did the same. I didn't look too many people in the face either. Hell, I had no skills to network. All I had were a pair of working hands, a strong body, and a mind that could get in its little escape pod quite willingly for hours at a time. In the routine of manual labor I could simply get lost in the process and emerge mentally unscathed by the ordeal. And so, after some tongue biting, I joined the iron workers.

Being an iron worker today doesn't mean as much as it did, say, in mid century when all the big iron skeleton structures were emerging across the country. Then, you had to be good at tossing and catching red hot rivets and equally adept at putting them in place before it burned through your mitt while another guy either swung a sledge hammer at it or used a helldog to pneumatically bang it into place. Then, ironwork was an all-American trade that resembled some of the movements of baseball, required some of the same hand-eye coordination, and took a lot of grit to do the work. An old-timer spoke of the scarred and the scary men who were in the occupation when he entered out of the Navy. Then, there were little safety standards, a man could earn a decent living, and my god, the work was rough and the talk even rougher.

Now, being an iron worker means competing against several other organized labor professions who intentionally poach your work in a market with dwindling acceptance of the 'union' label. Hell, I joined anyway, and found myself in what was left of the occupation: a buddy club, full of ethnically similar men, a few women, the token black, and all of whom had a name that was recognizable to the old-timers because almost all of them were legacy appointments to the trade. Their fathers, brothers, uncles, or some sacred other had been in and vouched for them. My father got a few heavy hitters to vouch for me and I got in. I read one of my recommendations because I had to hand them in with my application along with a few white lies about my place of residence. I read Danny Pacewic's recommendation. It was a short, but carefully composed statement of my ability.

I got in without a hitch. These ironworkers are mostly a fast-talking storytelling bunch. Everyone wants to tell a hundred stories about the other guys and themselves and for good reason. You spend 8, 10, 12 hours, a lifetime with these men and they become your family, your support network, your life. You reflect them; they reflect you. The work you do together can be scary, dangerous, sometimes monotonous, but ultimately fills you with a sense of accomplishment. You turn a muddy hole into a building, a blank span of a river or ravine into a bridge, or you simply rig up tons and tons of equipment and materials and place it for other occupations.

Enough with the platitudes.

I smell like that man that I knew to be my dad. When I was a kid I remember riding along in his truck, seeing elements of his occupation: a pair of safety glasses a stub of soapstone for marking steel. I have those elements in my car. I have that same short muscular armed physique. Put a pair of tinted safety glasses on me, a hard hat, some work boots and I could pose as an obscene double for the early 80s era Iron Jack.

An Iron Jack I'm not. Hell, not even my brother could assume that name. He's "Little Ball of Hate," a name that reflects both his stature, his weight, and his mood. As with Iron Jack, the name and the character implied are caricatures. I'm done pretending that I'm some cartoon for the entertainment of others at a job site. I do get razzed, but I do try very hard to keep my mouth shut for the duration of the day. Talk I make is about the work, how to do it, and why it's done this or that way. I don't watch or play sports, I don't hunt or fish, I don't drive a big truck or race motorcycles. And in so choosing I've preemptively cut off nearly all small talk that I could make with ninety percent of the guys with whom I work. Outside of shop talk I am simply not there.

So be it.

I'm not here either. The I and its Me are the practical fictions of symbolic interaction of which I limit when I'm working. Perhaps I'm simply angry, disgusted. I'd say that's accurate. I'm not actively looking for work. I'm not actively doing much of anything other than procrastinating. I guess that cancer, that thing that led my ancestors to cease activity and live a life of laziness and leisure is what I'm doing. All that I have done that is different is armed myself with a bunch of book learning in order to diagnose it as a choice not to participate in an economic, political, and social system that is fixed in its inputs and its outcomes.

That's a convenient excuse for the self-fulfillment of one's inheritance.

gRaFfiti

What have I been doing? Better yet, what do I do?

Graffiti.

The spray-paint-can-and-otherwise artists would probably scoff at allowing a rube like myself into the fold. I'm a rube. This I know. This is true.

My anxieties in even fancying that I'd have some magic connection once the word was uttered thus placing myself into a category of similarity with the graffiti artist issue from encounters with the ephemeral cnidocyst surface of a simulated world whose very fabric is a searchable data object. My encounter with it is simply a function of search. The natures of the places found conform to genres, some of which reflect strategies for search in that they focus on being found by keyword. But even the related environment reflects this same purpose algorithm of taking compiled information about your click behavior to reflect that back to you in 'recommended' links to click.

It's a trap.

It's a maze of choices, each one leading to some tantalizing thumbnail of a well-silhouetted female body that may or may not exist, at least, for one tenth of a second thus comprising a frame grab that could exist, be chosen, and made to represent the link to a several-minute video presented to elicit a response sought in the first selection. And here's the rub. We are telegraphing our desire to a vast cloud of computation that produces for us more of what we want. And more of what we want is constantly repackaged to us in various different ways simply to generate clicks

Clicks, keystrokes, time, so much time, spent completely distracted, as if before a casino slot on some bus vacation with a dreaming, endless pile of retirement loot from which to spend, spend, spend. This model, this model of behaviorally induced robbery is a clever scheme under which to lock people into cycles of distracted machine operation. The operation of a machine dramatizes the robbery into an interplay between the playful gesture of the machine interface itself, the person as a drone to a rewards-inducement algorithm for payout programmed to perfectly upset that player over time in order to keep him or her there until the last cent of her month's retirement allotment has been spent. That model, as it stands, is simply a way to sell consent to financial oppression. As long as the overhead from the proprietor to keep the player playing, distracted, and hopeful doesn't outpace the spending by your average player you're in business. And that's it. The horizon is simple: find better ways to induce people to keep playing, losing, and feeling hopeful.

Hell.

There is no hope in their model. No. It's simpler than that. It's in the interface itself. Did you ever watch a video poker player slap those bright, clicky, illuminated, rectangles? It's automatic, rhythmic, and it all happens in split seconds. Reflex. Puffing on a cigarette. Drinking a refreshed light beer. Tapping a screen and a few lighted rectangles as the turn applies. This constellation of behavior is induced at every turn by drugs (beer and cigarettes sold stool-side), emotional tenor (gaming machine interface, its gaming environment), rewards (ultimately this is money paid out but positive beeps and lighting schemes apply; also, let's not forget the haptic satisfaction of the buttons themselves).

Hell. Let's reveal the kinds of things that I do that warrant no merit, time, or any stop in this philosophical blarg. I am oppressed by the very thought of being searched. That being said, trolling has taken on a new significance. To end a long and sometimes tangential diatribe I'll provide evidence of how I interact in an intellectually engaged manner with the general public given the available means of persuasion.

Gasp:

In the beginning was the word.

I am sorry God.

The fright of freight.

When you enter into a long-term, long-distance trek across space you resign yourself to being freight for vast quantities of the duration of that trek. You are merely weight or mass being calculated into the ship's course as it is being plotted.

Being thrown across space in a ship dramatizes the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This dasein--this "thrownness" into the world, this living, as it occurs, already along a trajectory--is the very specific context for travel's occupants. And both living and alive they are reduced to that very thing as noted above: freight.

Space travel, as it was penned in the late 19th century and marketed to the world after World War II, reflects a pinnacle in science, technology, development. The next stage, the new tomorrow, the future, exists out there, up there, anywhere but here. Yet, the concession we make as half-animal half-ideology cyborgs is to become the basest of things in an equation furnished by science to calculate and plot a course.

What is our destination?

Up.

What is up? In most instances beyond the obvious, sensory kind, up is a metaphor with a positive association. Up is the proper orientation to many economic trends, yet the manufacture of these perhaps operates upon a presumption of reporting the kind of news that underlings want to report to superiors and the rosy-lensed eye that business owners want to cast upon their outlook. These owners, those superiors are in the up orientation in the vast and vaguely pyramidal structure of social organization. If anything it is our beholdness to certain spacial metaphors as value orientations that are grafted upon the world that smuggles in a reality to back those values up. And it is these metaphors that will distract us from the base existence we live as we submit to the ever-long journey of progress toward up and out.

What does it feel like to pilot a billion dollar ship? Any more I would suggest that the captain of that ship, this floating nuclear-powered city is simply dressing for the steering wheel. I had this dream once, as a child, of my parents' and my aunt and uncle's automobiles driving themselves. That, to me, was a terrible nightmare. That is the manifestation of spooky action at a distance.To float effortlessly across a distance, unaided by any known force goes against a deeper understanding of one's relationship to the world as an ambulatory organism. To float down river has meaning. The river is the means of one's conveyance, and its broad banks provide a brief outline of an immediate future in that course. To roll along the ground in an unpiloted automobile is something stranger, spookier. It forces an unknown upon the journey.

Scientific and technological progress, as we frame it through space travel, pushes the envelope of human constraints. Tucked into a capsule, hurling through space for a long period of time, the occupant is not piloting the craft to mars, that vector was programmed into the craft itself. Maybe, just maybe, the pilots will have some control over the final orbit and descent to martian soil. And what is the pilot to do? The traveler, after traversing a great length of space for a great length of time, will take soil samples, some pictures, and walk about. Strange isn't it? This bleeding edge of science and technology is rife with mental fitness for a long high-tech journey of solitary confinement. This bleeding edge of science leads the captain of this trip to simply follow the orders programmed into the ship and the journey itself for the sake of what ever scientific imperatives there may be. This traveler in the capsule is a seed, a living remnant wrapped inside a non-living, yet highly sophisticated shell for the means of protection and conveyance to a distant land.

And the finality of embodying one's scientific habits into habitable technology leads that very subset of the originator of ideas into an operator of its mechanisms. So the person becomes a thing, the very thing, which is the condition for thinking: communication.

The person, as speaker, becomes the dramatist for spoken ideas.

Florida

I read an article about the destruction of orchid habitat brought about by the housing boom in Florida. I had to stop and consider what would motivate a person in search of natural beauty and warm Gulf breezes to destroy that very premise in the making of a community "fit" for living.

The best I could do to summarize the experience was a cowardly resort to ad hominem.

Florida is full of scared, aging white men with guns who pay no mind to the world around them but rather to the World that charges admission to see a denatured houseguest version of nature do tricks for entertainment.

Word usage and self-discipline

A few weeks into my doctoral program at the University of Colorado I was attending my qualitative methods course, which was taught by a professor who had co-written a book on the subject and who, by most regards, was a giant in this methodology. Some of his earliest work were diamond exemplars of how to conduct qualitative methods and produce publishable work from it. He had since moved on to write award-winning qualitative research and cultural studies pieces about aspects of the nuclear defense industry, namely its memorials.

This experience was a vivid one, and perhaps it's a collapsed composite of several warm fall evenings in that lecture room with the sounds of the undergraduates playing music and socializing in the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court outside our window. I remember him commenting, in an aside to the lecture topic, on the drums wafting in through the room's open window. "New tribalism," he said, and I couldn't help but think that this man was out of touch. But I was just out of touch with him and his ways. And in the process of learning those ways he taught me a lesson about word usage.

At one point during our discussion that evening I engaged the teacher and the class as I had learned through twenty years spent in the classroom by asking a now-seemingly overused question: "Is this a good or a bad thing?" Instead of responding to my question, he responded to my choice of words. He told me to substitute for 'good' or 'bad' 'more useful' or 'less useful.' To me, that seemed like the essence of pragmatism, a distinctly American school of philosophical thought. Not only was he trying to teach me to be less vague but to focus on the use-value of my focal concern. So, for example, if I were to 'go native,' so to speak, in conducting qualitative research, would that be more or less useful given a certain set of circumstances under which I, as a researcher, were to conduct and eventually produce my research? I was, at that time, 25 and at the zenith of my youthful, dogmatic idealism. Elders, such as this man, were equipping me to steer off that lemming's course leading to the asymptote of a dream figure: perfection, superlatives, up, up, away, death--scholarly or otherwise.

As I said, this experience was a vivid one, and adjunct to this classroom moment was one, before class, at my chest-of-drawers, in my home, across town, in Boulder. There, I had taken the last pill from a bottle of Vicoprofin prescribed to me by an oral surgeon who had extracted four 'wisdom' teeth a few months earlier. During a moment of doctor-patient small talk as he stereo x-rayed my head to plan his attack on these four aspects of my wisdom he asked me what I did. At the time, I was a starry eyed intellectual whose future lay before him. I told him that I planned to study organizational communication to which he offered that pat response: "What's that?" I gave him a seemingly sufficient response concerning communication, representation, and workplace identity as they relate to the meaning of the work itself to which he responded: "Well, don't go around organizing hospital nurses because then they'll demand better working conditions and pay." Here was an oral surgeon, of the old school, wearing a somewhat colorful surgical scrub, counting me among his many thousands of extractions, providing a rather gruff and decidedly Midwestern professional's response to what threat he thought I posed to the order of any organization, especially his. I suspected that he mistook "organizational" for "organizer," which isn't far afield of what many can and want to do in my field but who get subverted by the pay coming from the executives who request them as 'consultants.' I wonder where that surgeon is now? He could just have easily retired in Edwardsville as in Florida, I'm sure, handsomely either way. Me? Well, I just took out the trash this morning, and I am sometimes indistinguishable from the detritus of my life. Translation: I am of my shit, unlike Joe Oral Surgeon, who followed a recipe for success and who, through hard work, intelligence, race- and sex-based institutional privilege, and imposing, athletic build bullied his way through school and into his respective field of work. I, the meek and distracted person I was, ended up taking out the trash at 5 a.m., with leftover soup heating on the stove, coffee brewing, cat mewing, and decided that today was not a good day to visit the Ironworker's hall, the access to which was handed to my by my father. Why? Well, I decided that instead of framing my choice in terms of 'good' or 'bad' I decided to frame it terms of use-value, and my god, what I am doing now is so much more useful than speaking to that high school clique known as the unemployed labor pool, sitting at a cafeteria table, "shooting the shit," awaiting a job call.

mental, illness

Mental, illness is a state of mind accomplished through the coordination of an emotional affect and a sense of self, which attempts to adopt that affect into a 'real condition' of its existence. Mental, illness occurs at the point that one's self identity (self)abusively re-enacts this emotional affect after the underlying chemical or neurological state that precipitated it has waned.

Mental, illness is a state of mind that, through time, becomes a component of self-identity. Over time and through the aid of legitimating institutional discourses this albeit 'administered' self becomes a reality through bureaucratic workings and health care diagnoses. And what was once a private experience with a state of mind becomes a performance, a public stigma, a sick role, carried potentially for life.