Double Flee A

I've heard of a way of studying writing that is based on retyping books by the greats, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc. I think this can be spread to other disciplines and I even asked a friend if he wanted to collaborate on a shot-by-shot remake of Plan 9 from outer space. He declined.

Other things I'd like to remake:
McDonald's commercials, especially the new ones with the black kids dancing around with french fries, centering on "I'm loving it". My way would change a few, but not too many, details. I'd want them to slide right by the couch zombies that could just as easily be watching any other commercial, whom only the basic message is still able to penetrate: "Ah, it's got a good beat, looks fun, I'm loving it, think I'll let that one into my subconscious and whenever I see it again I'll buy what they have. Am I hungry?" I'd have homeless people in the background, looking wistfully at the french fries dancing by. I'd also brand every item the dancing kids are wearing, and show just the beginning of a girl jumping rope falling on her ass. And the main kid would have a gold tooth or a cavity. I can't decide which.

A complete remake of Saturday Night live episode. Only purposefully un-funny. Using the same jokes, as close a cast as possible, but dead.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ok, wait, I think I've got the nature of consciousness figured out. It's an emergent property of the complex subsystems of the brain. Enough things were put together that they interacted in such a way as to automatically configure a new management resource, which was free and unexpected. It can't exist without all its parts, so in itself, it's imaginary and hence easy to argue about.
The ease of arguing about consciousness and over every other "god-shaped" thing comes at a cost to the rest of us, the ones who invented light bulbs and democracy and wheels. While some people earnestly harvest sensitivity and realism, involving the presence of mind that naturally accompanies some and that others refuse to grasp, the sky-god drones toil to master modes of speech I find annoying... this rhetorical speech and logical non sequiturs (both spin) are tools that should be studied in primary schools, because they have so many forms and purposes and are so politically prevalent in modern life. Children should (at least have the option to) learn to effectively configure their speech in such a way that would make them less quick to judge and accuse, that would open their minds to greater objectivity. That process may begin with speech itself.

Anyway, I wrote a while back about a crying baby and asking its parents at what age a human stops crying because it's a person that wants something, and starts doing it when it actually feels sad. If you didn't read that entry, the parents were foreign and didn't understand a word of it. Anyway, after I asked a few doctors, a pediatrician was actually willing to turn that one over in his noggin, and he said five or six years old. I asked him if he understood that I was seeking clarity in what the question I'm asking really was, and we talked it out. The answer is pretty much this: In order to clarify the question, we have to clarify "sad", which I was willing to redefine as "loss", a form of or reason for sadness which is easy to pin down. In order for that to happen, the person has to possess a certain degree of self-actualization in order to feel that one is adequately connected to something to feel disconnected. Babies are far simpler than that, and even at two or three people ape the reactions of adults in a pantomime of emotion, but at five or six, that changes. We become emotionally independent. What a crying person does is react to a loss in this case, and that is seemingly a linear causality field, but it's far from reductive, as most men who have dated women under thirty can attest. People cry for other reasons all the time. Sadness emerges. Sadness might be thought of as a measurement of independence that cannot be easily provoked. I think you can probably get hysteria and confusion and hatred, and a host of other mass-producible feelings out of a person, but sadness seems smarter to me. Looks like an emergent property (crying) points to the emergence of mind, and what we ought to do is to make a computer that can cry (and doesn't want to) to run everything. Because a computer would never, ever come up with "god" as a reason for existence.

posted by dale @ 11:05 PM