My friend, Kathryn Yu, had a photo ripped off by Ticketmaster.
I can only hope that there is some justice in the world.
Categories
Month: January 2006
Categories
Lynchian
“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s definable only ostensively – i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, where the deacon of a South Shore church gave chase to a vehicle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a high-powered crossbow, was borderline-Lynchian.
A domestic-type homicide, on the other hand, could fall on various points along the continuum of Lynchianism. Some guy killing his wife in and of itself doesn’t have much of a Lynchian tang to it, though if it turns out the guy killed his wife over something like a persistent failure to refill the ice-cube tray after taking the last ice cube or an obdurate refusal to buy the particular brand of peanut butter the guy was devoted to, the homicide could be described as having Lynchian elements. And if the guy, sitting over the mutilated corpse of his wife (whose retrograde ’50s bouffant is, however, weirdly unmussed) with the first cops on the scene as they all wait for the boys from Homicide and the M.E.’s office, begins defending his actions by giving an involved analysis of the comparative merits of Jif and Skippy, and if the beat cops, however repelled by the carnage on the floor, have to admit that the guy’s got a point, that if you’ve developed a sophisticated peanut-butter palate and that palate prefers Jif there’s simply no way Skippy’s going to be anything like an acceptable facsimile, and that a wife who fails repeatedly to grasp the importance of Jif is making some very significant and troubling statements about her empathy for and commitment to the sacrament of marriage as a bond between two bodies, minds, spirits, and palates…you get the idea.”
(from David Foster Wallace’s fantastic 1997 compilation A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again)
I discovered something strange today, and it’s made me curious.
Back during WWDC, I wrote a post about Flickr and it’s habit of causing real-world collisions, spurred by a post from Buzz Anderson.
So: I use del.icio.us, a wonderful social bookmarking app. Part of the functionality is that I can subscribe to bookmarks from people I trust or on subjects I’m interested in. Today, while riding the subway, I checked my inbox, and the top link was from Buzz:
Cool Cyber Dude on Flickr - Photo Sharing! *This* guy should win a Macworld Best of Show. Bobby and I have seriously been on the floor laughing for about five minutes after seeing this photo... to macworld photo humor virtualreality by ldandersen ... labeled as Online ... on 2006-01-13 07:56:08
Now, I’ve been to my Apple expos before, and I know the type that ends up in shots like these. And so, just reading this, I can only imagine what I’m in for while my Sidekick tries to load the photo. Certainly this would have to contain more than the standard geek t-shirt and possibly even more than the Apple dyed hair and/or tattoo that’s become commonplace over the last few years. This would have to be a truly unique geek to get someone like Buzz on the floor laughing for five minutes.
It loads. I looked. And then I died – not of laughter, but some weird mortified-and-aware-of-the-collision way.
It was, of course, a picture of my boss.
Adding to further the collision: the picture was taken by Mike Merill – who I’ve been bouncing email with because he works for Panic and was involved in getting me my Katamari shirts.
World! Too! Small!