::REDEFINED::

If:

joy n.

Intense and especially ecstatic or exultant happiness.

And:

en- pref.

1. To put into or onto: encapsulate.
2. To go into or onto: enplane.
3. To cover or provide with: enrobe.
4. To cause to be: endear.
5. Thoroughly. Used often as an intensive: entangle.

Then:

enjoy v.

1. To put joy into or onto: He enjoys my mind.
2. To go into or onto joy: We enjoy ourselves when we talk.
3. To cover or provide with joy: I enjoy every inch of him.
4. To cause to be joyful: We enjoy each other.
5. Thoroughly joyful. Used occasionally as an intensive: Enjoy me.

 
::ICELAND AGAIN, I KNOW::

I have never applauded toward my laptop before. However, when its screen delivered this to me, I couldn't help but squeal, giggle, clap, and wiggle. If you click anywhere on this weblog, make it here: Link.

(from Alisa, with whom I'm having a Girly Night tonight)

 
::SHE CHOSE DOOOOOOWWWWN?::

A performance art group called Gelatin installed a human elevator shaft on a Los Angeles apartment building in 1999. Thirteen "very strong man (sic)" lifted people up to the roof of an apartment building, leaving riders "opened up to relaxation and happiness." I wonder if they formed their "buff arms" into faces and talked to their passengers, a la Labyrinth. Link.

(Confidential to passenger in bottom thumbnail photo: I love those boots!)

 
::DIS-APPOINTED::

The car next to me in the parking lot had a badge on it that read "LEV." I was very excited: was this a levitating car?

Upon close perusal, though, I read the phrase "low emission vehicle" below its misleading acronym. Damn.

 
::HIDDEN PLACE::

The opening track of Bjork's album Vespertine has special frequencies woven into it -- sine-curves of sound, over and under, strengthening the song like Kevlar.

These frequecies drown out ambulance sirens. I know this because, listening to the song on my way to judge a science fair this afternoon, I was nearly run over by an ambulance as I green-means-went at a traffic light.

 
::LAMP-TASTIC!::

Nik Willmore is my Personal God o' the Day. He designs and fabricates lamps -- throwbacks to vacuum tube radios, Sputnik-esque orbiters, and (my favorite by far) Buckytubes, specifically seen in the Prometheus lamp. His website: E-Dot. (Follow links to "Design" for the lamps.) His words: "E-dot [his website's little interactive thingy] is the Universe. You included. The e-dot is the Mind of God, the Cosmic Computer, the zero-size singularity which generates everything around us, space, matter, and time. I'm artist Nik Willmore."

(via BoingBoing)

 
::21 GRAMS::

The film 21 Grams is extraordinary. It seems that according to one ages-ago study, people do lose that amount of weight upon death. I take the study with 21 grains of salt: Link.

 
::THE BEAUTIFUL MOON-FACED ONE::

A feast for all senses: Kalachandji's Restaurant and Palace. The best vegetarian Indian food, ever, served in a Hare Krishna temple. Inexpensive, delicious, serene, and close to home!

 
::SINGULARITY::

Good Weather for Airstrikes

(For Ciro, because we're acquainted with condensation.)


I am a particle physicist, learning at last to slow light down.

Its momentum, stolen.
Did the wave calm,
or did the particle
slide to rest?
Its Brownian vigor
not pooled, not condensed,
but diffused like fine perfume
in a blurry uncertain sphere.


I am a computer with an overclocked graphics card.

Anything beyond our immediate world wasn't worth calculating.
Time and space unfolded before us.
Our future, fading in, twenty meters long.


I am an architect, building skyscrapers with tempered light.

Red beams
radiated
like steel girders
from a stoplight.

A silver ceiling
and marble walls
fuller than Fuller's
from a streetlight.

Mouths agape
no words, but tears
on a proscenium built
from a headlight.


I am the Stardust space mission.

We were trapped like particles from a comet's mane
in Aerogel of nature's making,
peering from within frozen smoke,
our path through it
a dazzling self-same trail.
that least dense solid
and this densest air
identical.


I am Neptune.

A blue planet
and a blue lord,
his aqueous ache
drifting like diamond
through atmospherical strata.

 
::COMPLETE::

I called it The Fog Project. It was an attempt to encapsulate the beauty of a glorious, deep night.

Now, instead of being a project, built of words by my syntactic hands, the fog itself projects. Its memory glows onto every soundscape; it murmurs its muted colours into every thought I've had this week. I will let it speak.

 
::WHEN THE GOIN' GETS TUFTE...::

I own the books Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte. They are beautifully published, and their illustrations do just that -- they make the topics more lustrous and flat-out seeable. The former "celebrates escapes from the flatlands of both paper and computer screen." Parts of the latter examine the data surrounding the space shuttle Challenger and posits a new visual analysis which would've precluded launch. Now, it seems, Tufte's got another book in the works called Beautiful Evidence, and a few pages have shown up on his website here.

Santa, I hope you're paying attention.

(via kottke.org)

 
::ABRE LOS OJOS::

For AM, who is dreaming probably.

Pleasure delay.
A big silly coat.
Cryotainment.
Tech support.
The girl who looks like Bjork.

Forgive me, I'm blowing your mind.

The little things.
There's nothing bigger, is there?

 
::I-KEA, YOU-KEA, WE ALL KEA FOR IKEA!::

Oh no. There goes my Roth IRA contribution for 2005.

 
::CREMISTRESS::

Wow. Here's a brilliant review by Wayne Bremser linking "Cremaster 3" to video games. An excerpt:

"The construction worker Mario moves in pursuit of Pauline, while Barney's construction worker, the Entered Apprentice, climbs in pursuit of the architect, Hiram Abiff. Both workers are presented with a single facial expression, no dialogue and no significant character development except their determination to move ever upwards."

Merriment ensues in the full article: Link.

(via Game Girl Advance)

NOTE: And it turns out that I was pretty wrong about the filling-the-elevator motivation of The Mason. Damn that I didn't know more about the Freemasons.

 
::GOT NO HUMAN GRACE::

Seen on a banner ad: "Need a face and a body lift?"

If I needed a face, I wouldn't worry too much about my need for a body lift. But that's just me.

 
::NEW BATTERIES::

Last night, I scoured my apartment for a pair of AA batteries so I could listen to -- yes, I'm still yammering on about this -- Sigur Ros's album Agaetis Byrjun through headphones, in its full stereophonic glory. I pilfered some from a boxed-away flashlight.

Headphones on, volume up, music around.

I first heard "Ny Batteri" (which, translated, means "New Batteries") while watching rain-tracks on my windshield turn a chrome stripe on a car into oscilloscopic fantasy. A strange texture is buried beneath the percussion and saxophony, and I couldn't tell what it was. Wood? Metal? Grinding gears? I still can't tell, despite bringing my eardrums closer to the sound. Only Volta knows.

I'm charting "Vidrar Vel Til Loftarasa" ("Good Weather for Airstrikes") for my "Fog Project." I hope to have it finished by the end of the week.

The tracks sped by, and I fell asleep, occasionally waking to those moments -- the moments all Sigur Ros songs seem to have -- when the secret comes. The drums kick in, the piano gets lonely, or the angels sing. I slept very, very well.

 
::BREAK THE HABIT, PLEASE::

As part of my work, I interact with museum visitors -- showing them cool science, talking about our exhibits, directing them to our auditorium -- but today, my deeply ingrained habits became embarrassingly obvious. I was asked by a woman, a stroller-with-baby and toddler in tow, where our restrooms were. I showed her to them, and my usual end salutation followed:

"Have fun!"

That was enthusiastically expressed as they rounded the corner into the bathroom. Sheesh.

 
::CREMASTER AND SLAVE::

Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle is a series of five films about psychosexual relations(hips). I saw "Cremaster 3" this weekend, and its three hours smashed, sliced, climbed, and dripped by while I sat, rapt.

At one point in the film, the protagonist positions himself atop an Empire State Building elevator car, activates the emergency fire sprinkler, and makes cement, which he dumps into the car. This goes on until he fills the car, when he lets the car fall, pulling the cords tight. Later, he goes to the Sky Club at the top of the building and runs wires, taut from the cords, onto a fixture above the middle of three elevator doors. The fixture becomes a harp.

The Maitre D' of the Sky Club opens and shuts the elevator doors, letting the swirling wind in the shafts harmonize. The elevator shafts become an enourmous bagpipe.

They had made the entire Empire State Building into an instrument.

I've never been to the Empire State Building. Now, I want to go there, to explore its interior through the lens of this film.

 
::A WAKE::

I flinched when I saw the sign over The Casket Store on I-75. It read, "Caskets Open to Public."

 
::TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE, FROM THE TRENCHES::

Kuro5hin is a geek-tastic weblog. Its logo has been a mystery to me, though, for a while. It looks like a close-up view of a broken-ended thread being put through a needle (considering the site's "threaded posts," it's a visual pun). It also looks like the Golden Gate Bridge, ripped off in its middle (and, post-dot-combustion, this is appropriate). Investigating, I find the real source, and it's better -- and geekier -- than my hypotheses:

"It is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which collapsed into Puget Sound near Tacoma, Washington, in November of 1940... It seems the engineers did not figure out the bridge's resonance (sic) frequency, and it shook itself into little bits during a fairly light breeze. It is a pretty famous example of bad engineering." (from the FAQ)

Bonus: The 5 in the re-spelled "corrosion" (named for the site's originator, Rusty) is an homage to Da5id, a character in one of my favorite books ever, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

 
::WEEKEND GAME::

This weekend, I have plans to go belt some karaoke tunes and attend the Dallas Opera's "El amor brujo/La vida breve." Conisder the gamut prepared -- now all I have to do is run it.

 
::DJ SHADOW::

This short piece by Brian Bieber reminds me of my friend Doug, who strikes continually great poses, and who, for this reason, always seems to have a swirling score of beats and bass around him. An excerpt:

"My DJ lays down some real hardcore shit while the doctor tells me the lump on my left testicle is just a benign cyst. The doctor starts to give me a little lecture about the importance of performing monthly checks on myself, but it's hard to keep a straight face because my DJ is wearing a surgical mask he found in one of the doctor's drawers and pretending to scratch his records with a tongue depressor."

The full piece: Link.

(via BoingBoing.)

 
::DYSON WITHIN REACH::

Last night, I attended a talk by the inventor James Dyson at the Dallas Design Within Reach studio. Amid high-dollar furniture units, he spoke, accompanied by swank engineering-cutaway animations on the screen behind him. My friends and I sat on this couch, drinking red wine (very carefully, as it was a cream-colored couch) and munching on crackers with tarted brie. A few highlights of the talk:

.: Buckminster Fuller inspired him.
.: He doesn't know who Dean Kamen is (I asked a question about interest in collaboration).
.: He's made a dual-drum washing machine which uses -- I love this phrase -- "epicyclic motors."
.: His company has developed a great way to diagnose problems via telephone: Put your phone up to a vacuum's wheel, and it'll rotate in a way that communicates, in binary, the appliance's use patterns and vital stats. He's not allowed to log what time you vacuum, apparently.
.: Japanese businessmen get really hammy at 4am.
.: He wore an amazing wool jacket that blurred from black to olive from the collar down.

All in attendance got a free copy of his book, which made me happy.

In other Design Within Reach news, their "Champagne Chair Contest" finalists are chosen: Link.

 
::NIGHTSWIMMING DESERVES A QUIET NIGHT::

I have driven through fog, dense fog, and dense fog just after dawn. None of this experience prepared me, though, for driving through fog-drenched Dallas in the middle of the night. This morning, the span between 3:00 AM and 4:10 AM was the most etherially beautiful series of moments I've ever felt.

(I'll elaborate once I can think beyond the wordless awe.)

 
::FATE::

Over the weekend, the top two shelves of one of my bookshelves collapsed. (Fortunately, they fell in and down instead of catalyzing a gravitational-potential-energy-fueled explosion into my living room.)

At the top of the reorganized heap rested Godel, Escher, Bach, the shadowcast initials on its cover realigning my perspective, tugging my vanishing point into its parallel branes, daring me to be smart enough to read it.

I accepted the dare. I've engaged in its recursive games and have triumphed. To show for it, I have a swirl of ideas -- connexions, hypermemes, fugues -- flying around my head. And I'm only on Chapter Two.

 
::TRUMPED::

Sometimes, I live in a fantasy land -- a fantasy land in which the sole purpose of rearview mirrors is to provide views of stunning sunsets when you drive eastward.

Sometimes, reality is even better -- when the western sun's light is bent, casting a mauve spotlight on eastern horizon clouds.

 
::GETTING MOONED::

Was it just my imagination, or did the moon's shadowy eyelid droop at exactly the same rate as mine tonight?

 
::DISC COVERY::

The aforementioned Sigur Ros CD, ( ), comes in a normal jewel case. Its back cover and spine are a ghostly pale silver, with a rough photograph of grass textured onto them. The liner notes, though, took my breath away; they're made of vellum.

Curiouser and curiouser...

The jewel case is embraced by a translucent plastic sleeve, unmarked except for two large parentheses cut out from the front, the Sigur Ros name in hand-written script below them, and, on the back, a small drawing of a boy, eyes closed and bundled for cold, who looks like he's sleepwalking. I love the former most; it's evocative of the way the parenthetical -- which is sometimes the most important -- is "absent," but by being set apart, is starkly there.

 
::FOUND ON MY DESK::

A print-out of a comic called Jerk City, starring Spigot, a flip-flop- and beret-wearing Beat poet. Spigot is standing in front of a garden stairwell, and the sentence (written, appropriately, in Comic Sans) in his "talk balloon" is:

MY JOB IS NOT TO EDUTAIN, BUT RATHER TO INFOTATE.

Aside from my dislike for use of "but rather," which is redundant, that's pretty cute. And what's a Beat poet doing working in the "edutainment industry," anyway? I'm overthinking this.

Thanks, secret comic-fairy!

 
::UNITY::

Buckminster Fuller's wet dream: Link.

 
::EIGHTEEN SECONDS BEFORE SUNRISE::

I inserted the CD. I pressed [PLAY >]. I turned off all the lights. I slid into bed. And my life became a heiroglyphic fantasy. I was a sarcophagus. On my back, prone and symmetrical, I lost myself in the gauzy depths, utterly rapt.

I was listening to the album ( ) by Sigur Ros. The band was new to me: the sweet sigh of the vocals, the lonely legato of the tone, the resonant ache of the guitar, and the grand flow of the piano. At some point, every melody turned inside out -- telling a new tale or opening a new door. Every track held a secret.

 
::GLOBE::

I. Overcast

A palely perfect ring around a
Swirled silver mantle
And a core of deep white:
The moon was his eye in photographic negative.

II. Atmosphere

I sense the layers
Of a body, a mind, a soul --
I fall toward the cynosure
Where I can finally breathe.

III. Condensed

The world

Is still.
Distilled.

Is taken.
Overtaken.

Is essence.
Quintessence.

Is a drop of breath on glass.

 
::UM, NO::

Best Buy has a poor classification system. Under the "Inspirational Books" header, I found Kurt Cobain's diary.

 
::ASKEW::

Thank you so much, JK, for making this dream come true. You're remarkable.

 
::SPIRAL::

In the shower this morning, my rinsed-off body wash swirled into the drain and gave me an odd "Powers of Ten" moment. I imagined that if I were a teeny-tiny creature on a tiny planet in the drain, I could look up into my sky and see a wonderfully defined band of celestial detergent:

The Soapy Way Galaxy.

 
::CADENCE::

This is the sentence that won't leave my head:

It's been a long day, really, and I just took off my scarf.

 
::ANTONYMBLE::

Catching up is the opposite of throwing up!

 
::OH-SO WORTH IT::

My back is sore today; I'm not used to making my spine into a helix.

The panging ache, though, reminds me of grandly operatic transposition, pale blue light, and the swift (r)evolution of our planet as the horizon drops under the sun.

 
::HOMOPHONE CALL::

Notes: I prefer complements to compliments. Raising to razing. And effects to affects.

 
::HELIOTROPHOBIA::

I've been asked twice in 12 hours if I ever thought of writing short stories. One request came from shared delight in masterful diction; the other came after a friend read this, described as "Lovecraftian" by said friend:

One day, on my way to high school, I glimpsed a potted sunflower on the side of the road. It was about six feet tall with a seed pod width of about a foot. The stem was a hardy green, and the tangled mass of organic matter behind its face was deep and dense. The sight gave me an immediate, visceral reaction: fear.

I didn't know why I felt that way, but over the next couple of days, bits of a dream I'd had as a child came drifting back into my consciousness. (Feel free to go as Freud-tastic you wish here.) I was walking in a field of tall sunflowers. Instead of doing the heliotrope thing and following the sun, the flower faces were following me. They moved, in a creepy stop-motion-photography rustle, watching me with their seedy eyes. I walked, deliberately, to the center of the field, where the largest sunflower grew. (I think of her still as the Queen.)

She leaned in toward me, her seed pod an easy three feet in diameter, and -- I woke up the instant before she ate me.

 
::SPANKIN' NEW::

Happy New Year!

I hostessed a shindig at my parents' house for an eclectic crowd of 20 or so. From the vast champagnehood of last night, a few notables:

Dance Dance revolving with the best of them.
Playing Tribond and not having to try to bond.
Switching from DVD to network TV, and finding the screen filled with porn; thinking, "God, I can't belive my parents left that tape playing!" while I, aghast, struggled to change the channel (I thought it was on the VCR-in channel, but it had been on Cinemax).
Talking Flatland, amazingly.
Having my Tarot spread explained.
Using indelible ink -- and hoping it works better than email.