Brain Hammer

Happy Labor Day Everbody!

Don't go thinkin' I'm an anarchist or a socialist or nuthin', but I thought this would be a nice time to get drunk on beer and meditate on Bob Black's essay “The Abolition of Work”:

“No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us [will] want [to] act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of same debased coin.”

. . .for the whole thing, dig the link.

September 2004. Australia. “Evolving Artificial Minds and Brains” International Language and Cognition Conference.

January 2005. Germany. “Phenomenal Consciousness and the Allo-/Ego-Centric Interface” Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective.

Interview meme again.

1. Leave a comment saying you want to be interviewed. (especially people I don't know well yet)
2. I'll reply and give you five questions to answer.
3. You'll update your LJ with the five questions answered.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

Excellent questions posed by . Un-spell-checked answers by me.

1. So what's your story? Are you a writer? Artist? Musician? All-around creative guy?

Short answer: yes. Long answer: My main current gig is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Dig the Capitalization) and my research primarily concerns philsophical problems that arise in the application of computational models in understanding the neural bases of consciousness and cognition. Whew. I've only published non-fiction so far, but hope to publish some fiction in the next few years. In the past I've done stints as a musician and a cartoonist. In my free time, besides drinking and fucking, I like to build robots and paint.

2. Hey! I dig Bone Saws too! Have you ever had any invasive surgery? If so, what happened? If not, what's the closest thing you've ever had to being under the knife?

In the early nineties I combined my enormous tolerance for pain with my bizarre antipathy for medical doctors to create the world's most explosive appendix. The gangernous gunk scraped out of my abdominal cavity almost killed me. Maybe I was halucinating from all the morphine, but I seem to recall my surgeon saying to me in post-op, “You are a moron.”

3. Your user info says you reside in New Jersey. I went to Asbury Park once for a concert and found a dead dog and a dead seagull not 20 feet away from each other on the beach. I need some reading recommendations. Hit me with some of your favorite novels.

I'd like to think that the dog and seagull killed eachother in a Tarantino-esque Mexican standoff. Re: my lit pics, I always like to recommed Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist though it's not really a novel. His The Tetherballs of Bougainville is, though, and it is also excellent. And I dunno if you dig genre fiction, but Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix is my all time favorite piece of sci fi. Runner up is Greg Egan's Diaspora

4. There's this part in that movie Troll 2 where the Goblins are eating this girl and it's witnessed by a really dorky guy who says in a forced, unconvincing, monotone voice, “They're eating her!…….. And then……… they're going to eat me!…….. Oh my Gooooooooooooooddddddddd!!!!!”. It's hilarious. If you had to battle any movie monster, which would you choose to throw down with?

There are multiple criteria to satisfy here, so I'm just going to have to go with multiple monsters. It would be fun to defeat one of the man-sized stumblers (like Frankenstein's monster or the Creature from the Black Lagoon) by simply running quickly behind them and pushing them over. For a real thrill, I would dig taking on a giant like Godzilla. The thought of hiding in a building while he smashed one after another looking for me is just too cool. I'd also love to flamethrower John Carpenter's TheThing, cuz, damn, I love that movie. Sorry, I love monsters so much. I want to fight them all.

5. Once in a while I wonder if I was born much too late. If you could live in any time period apart from this one, which would it be? Why?

I'm a future junky, seriously. I can't wait to see what's next. Regarding the past though, I would pick either Ancient Greece or Early Modern Europe and try to be one of the few dudes that pretty much knew everything that was known at the time. And I'd write a treatise or two about it.

Argh! My fucking web browser keeps crashing while I attempt to Google the search string

“project mayhem” +”war on terror”

That's what you get for violating the first rule of Project Mayhem, I guess.