paolo freire - prose fragment

“Please tell me you didn’t park on the deck Miranda.”
“I didn’t.....I didn’t, baby. And you know why I didn’t?” Their voices fade as they pass by me. I hear their footsteps passing too, in that narrow walkway which exists as a secret path from street to parking lot between my apartment complex and the next. I’d just taken a shit and was enjoying myself, reading Paulo Freire on the toilet. There was the mild odor of my excrement in the air, and sun shone through my tiny bathroom window onto the pink bathroom tiles. I wondered if they could hear me, if they could smell me through that small, high window. How would they feel if they knew I was there? What would they think of the slim, red volume I was holding between my hands?

< hello world />

the internet is a funny place. my current home, los angeles, has a lot in common with the web. all the wildeyed post-babble you've read about LA is true, plus its got a little grit (not grime there's an overflow of grime) and some really excellent food. the internet too has a culture, in the best, non-clinical sense of the word, and i think that soon digital networks will be the central medium of western culture - like the movies were. after celluloid and silicon (ha ha ha) where will the zeitgeist go?

just today i found (via william gibson's blog - where you can see high and very far away the spiral arms of military systems...) a youtube video of sheep art. farmers, presumably australian, used digital video, LED lights, and some pretty sophisticated sheepherding to create animated art, and to re-create animation. just search "sheep" and "art" and "LED" and "mona lisa" on youtube. i'm not going to embed this video, because the experience of typing those things in and actually finding something is one that i think's worth sharing.

that's art in the present. here is some scholarship of the past, archaeologically revived: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucalt in a debate on dutch television. Their debate is genteel, civilized, erudite, and awesome. You can even read a transcript of the entire debate here, and there is also a book containing more interviews with each thinker.