tothesound

Some questions I’m likely unqualified to ask

1) Four Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness (via waxy)

If by some chance you haven’t seen this or don’t want to click through, this is a game you can only win if you are the only person in the world playing. You don’t have to do anything but open it, and if it runs on your computer for 4’33” while no one else anywhere opens it to play you win. 80% of the comments are to complain that this isn’t really a game: 

“Some refining time and a V2 may be more productive than trying to be the internet’s John Cale. Would love to see more strange ideas but as you try to outwierd yourself and your peers, don’t forget that people actually want to participate in the games they play.”

I think this person probably meant “the internet’s John Cage”, not Cale, though maybe not, who knows. I’m not sure how one becomes the internet’s anything. In any case, my favorite response thus far is this one here:

“It makes me feel a little bit sad.”

Because why? Because it’s lonely? Because it’s boring? Because you don’t do anything?  Shouldn’t just the possibility of the game produce an actual experience of total joy that you can, for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, do something that absolutely no one is doing right now? Isn’t that actually the best idea ever? Proof of a unique experience? Natalie Portman’s approval?

2) Layer Tennis

I suppose a lot of Layer Tennis is supposed to be about design, but for me the best part of the whole thing is the idea of experiencing some of my favorite writers on the internet in something like real time:

“The commentator, on the other hand, must not only familiarize him/herself with both participants, but also reply to all ten volleys immediately as they’re posted. That’s ten 3-ish-minute bursts of creativity, 1 minute of spell checking, and 11 minutes of panic attacks, plus research, translating latin, and making stuff up.”

People write and read online for a million reasons, but one obviously is the immediacy of it. In that case, though, I still don’t have an exact idea of how immediate it is: anything posted on the internet could have taken either seconds or years to write. There’s a time stamp on this post but I’ve also eaten a bowl of oatmeal and five raviolis between the time I started it and the time I wrote this sentence. 

Live blogging is the obvious exception. It also, usually, sucks. Layer Tennis is different because most of the commentators are well-known, internet-established writers, writing about immediate artistic activity. It is all kinds of interactive: the designs, the forums, the ability for the commenting to influence the art, etc. A lot of it is extremely good.  Not that all of it is of vastly high quality literary merit, but there’s good stuff there– funny, clever things. Funny, clever things I know were written in the fifteen minutes prior to me reading them, which would never be possible without a computer.

I have no desire to turn this into a post about books vs. the Kindle et al because god knows we’ve heard that before, and really I’m embarrassingly unqualified to talk about electronic literature considering the opportunities I’ve been exposed to, but experientially this is unendingly interesting. To like reading a book is a physical experience, obviously– “the physical condition of a project always tells us something of its life experience as a material object.” It’s Distorte’s experience of reading Rabbit, Run: 

“The book was in tatters when I began and as I progressed it came even more to pieces. It was obvious that no one would ever read this copy again. I felt like I was consuming it utterly, in the same way as in computer games, when you open a chest and a tome emerges to impart something before dissolving into sparkling dust.

The emotional response to the physical act of reading is very particular, and there is no need to rehash this when you can just go turn a page. But what about temporally? What if I’m getting a similar kind of joy from reading something I know is taking place in a period of time I have access to? Not a decade/year reference, but an actual fifteen-minute interval that I, similarly, just experienced. 

I mean look at this!

“…I’m going to hit the head.

[time passes]

OK I think I just puked up something I’m going to need later…”

Everyone who read this in real time was just there in the time it took to write “[time passes]” and reading “[time passes]” means you aren’t allowed to forget the importance of time to this current reading/writing experience, which itself is a real experience, one of time passing, which isn’t really that different from turning a page maybe? Proof of the passage of time through the experience of reading? Not only that, but proof of a shared experience of time with not only other readers but with the author himself?

***

So there you have it, vaguely formed thoughts on two experiences of time on the web, unique and shared. In one year I will likely be able to win Four Minutes and 33 Seconds every time I play, and this post does not mean that I will be reading your Grammy live blog. 

There are not a lot of ways to leave your remains intact in San Francisco, legally. If you are a veteran, or a pet, maybe, but if that isn’t the case you can’t stay here: burials have been prohibited within the city of San Francisco for the last 107 years. Cremations, too, actually– there is no way to have your body cremated within the city’s boundaries, a San Francisco ordinance since 1910. A city-wide death ban seems to have that particular kind of foggy San Francisco romanticism, but it is, of course, a real estate matter: dead people don’t pay taxes, cemeteries take space. If you die here, you’ll likely be buried in the nearby town of Colma, a place with 1500 above ground residents and 1.5 million underground— an actual necropolis. Their city motto is the best of the whole country: “It’s great to be alive in Colma!”

The San Francisco Columbarium, built in 1897, is the only non-denominational burial place in the city of San Francisco with space left. After passing through various ownerships, the building was taken over by the Neptune Society in 1980 and Emmitt Watson was hired to clean up the place. When you go he’s still there. He sat me down across from him in the chairs, told me that the place was disgusting when he got there– a green slime over everything, rats and birds living inside– but that it was the process of cleaning up that let him learn about the people who kept their ashes there. He gave me a tour of the place, showed me the man who had his ashes stored in a Johnny Walker Red bottle, the one in the Chinese take-out box, the inside of a baseball. He knows the place, and the people, and will tell you genuinely that the job became his life.

When you leave the Columbarium he’ll give you a parting gift– mardi gras beads that hang from the walls of his office, maybe a remnant of his Louisiana heritage. He left at thirteen, he says, because he wasn’t going to drink from a different water fountain.

“If you collect the sweat I’ve dropped in this building, you could flood San Francisco.”

The last thing the place is is morbid. Morbid is a disease word, unwholesome, neither of which death necessarily is. Emmitt is intent on making the Columbarium a place where people will want to come and stay. Columbaria, before they were homes to urns, were buildings of compartments for doves and pigeons, which isn’t that hard to imagine when you’re there.

(photo)

Since the only funeral I can remember attending I’ve known I could never be buried anywhere because it is too weird to have a place where someone could come to stand over my bones. Cremation is the likely choice: my mother says she wants her ashes buried with a tree we’ve planted, so instead of visiting a tombstone and a plot of land we get to watch a growing thing. That’s a nice idea. I think for myself, if I could, I’d try to arrange some kind of viking funeral though I worry a little about the implied narcissism. But I like boats. It’s impossible for me to feel sorry for myself when I’m on a boat. The best way to be dead would be to be dead and not feeling sorry for yourself.

On the outside of the Columbarium is a stone with the words “In loving memory” and a name, where underneath the word “and…” is carved– the entirety of the who-else-and-what-else-and-what’s-next-and-who-cares of death, succinctly.