livewire voodoo

Digital screen in the new plaza under construction in downtown Baton Rouge. I kinda hope it stays like this.

William Gibson, Neuromancer
Premiata Forneria Marconi, Storia Di Un Minuto
Brainticket, Celestial Ocean
John Cage, Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake
Brad Mehidau, Places
The Bad Plus, Never Stop
Ornette Coleman, The Complete Science Fictions Sessions

• Brainticket is the only ticket you need.
  
  
  Brainticket, "Era of Technology"
     
• I'd like to think there are layers of techno-irony involved reading a digital copy of Neuromancer checked out from the library on the iPad while riding the bus home, but really it seems second nature to me. For Case, the protagonist in William Gibson's novel which introduced the word cyberspace in its first chapter, the pains of going back to analog attack him in his dreams.
  
  But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach a console that wasn't there.
     
• I don't talk about my day job much because here's why: I've been watching this data replication job fail over and over, each time for one small little glitch that happens ten minutes into the process and so you have to re start it. It's like teaching someone to ride a bike except when they fall or get scared, you have to go buy a new bike.
  
  Oh, wait, it worked! Maybe I just needed to channel my frustrations into this screen instead of that one. Now to see if I can make the schedule work. It didn't.
  
  Again, this is why I don't talk much about my day job.
    
• It's screen separation anxiety. Once when my co-teacher was giving our class on the virtues of being unplugged, I basically had to sit on my hands to not check Facebook or email on my phone while he was talking.
     
• That is one of the many things to look forward to on our week in Ireland over the holidays, where I suspect the WiFi will be as spotty as the Guinness is foamy and there are castles and leprechauns and I might be able to wander a dreamland of something besides electric sheep for a bit.
  
  
  
  Or, because I'm like this...
  
  
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