| September 2, 2009 | Snoop Blogg: Snoop Dogg's Yoostar Performances |
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Snoop Dogg stopped by Yoostar's studio in NYC to record some videos for the site. His performances were off-the-hook. (And ya'll know how I'm a HUGE fan of Snoop's.) Check 'em out:  Snoop and CostelloLou Costello gives Snoop Dogg a hard time in this classic clip from "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."  Snoop as Jason VoorheesSnoop Dogg plays slasher Jason Voorhees in this scene from "Friday the 13th."  Snoop Likes It HotMarilyn Monroe flirts with Snoop Dogg in this classic scene from "Some Like It Hot." Notice that Snoop is gesticulating with a chicken wing in this scene.  Snoop as "Blacula"Snoop Dogg gets ready to bite Ketty Lester when he shows his fangs in this scene from "Blacula."  Snoop as BogeySnoop Dogg appears in this "Casablanca" scene alongside Ingrid Bergman. Snoop smoothly delivers Humphrey Bogart's most iconic line: "Here's looking at you, kid." Here's a link to a page where you can view all of Snoop's videos on Yoostar. posted by Jess Barron @ 3:18 PM 
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| June 30, 2005 | "Something I've been Meaning to Tell You..." |
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A few months back, my friend Andy took me aside one night when we were hanging out with friends. I could tell he was gathering up the courage to say something important. "Jess, there's something I've been meaning to tell you." he said. I was immediately nervous. Ever since JP took me aside that morning in 2000 and gave me a frank talk about the necessity of wearing a bra, I get a bit anxious out when my friends have something the've been meaning to tell me. My mind was scanning through possible manners faux pas, misbehaviors or misdeeds I might have committed. Was I being mean to someone? Was I dressing slutty? Did I have really bad B.O.? "Don't take this the wrong way..." he continued and then paused. You probably already know this but "Don't take this the wrong way" is a good indicator that you really don't want to hear what's going to be said next. Andy looked at me -- I swear almost pityingly. "Some of your other friends and I were talking and we all agree that..." he trailed off again, trying to make sure through careful wording, perhaps, that what he was about to reveal would not excessively hurt my feelings. I tried to appear as calmly curious possible, so that I could entice him to come out with it and end my painful suspense. "Yes? What is it? You can tell me. Don't worry." I felt like I was encouraging him to stab me or something. "Well, it's just that..." he almost paused again, but thankfully continued after a moment. "You really, really need to get an RSS feed for your blog." I could tell he was embarassed for me. It was true that my personal website had remained stuck in 1997 or 1998 -- I still handcoded the HTML, I didn't have a way for readers to add comments, and I didn't have an RSS feed. Yes, I felt a little bit sad when Andy hit me with the harsh reality of the sad, outdated state of my long neglected but much-loved website. But I was sure glad I didn't have really bad B.O. that all my friends were talking about. Andy, this RSS feed is dedicated to you and our brave, frank chat a few months back. You can now easily add my blog to your My Yahoo! page (or your favorite RSS reader). Anyone else -- if there's some flaw with my real-life person or my website that you need to bring to my attention, there's always email. And now, comments. You can thank Andy (and Allyson and others) for bringing that to my attention too. Labels: allyson, andy, blog, rss, web posted by Jess Barron @ 12:25 PM
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| January 27, 2005 | Los Angeles, I'm Yours(?) |
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"There's a city by the sea A gentle company I don't suppose you want to... Oh what a rush of ripe elan Languor on divans Dalliant and dainty Los Angeles I'm yours..." -the Decemberists "Los Angeles, I'm Yours" (a bitter love letter to the city off of a decent album) "Are you moving to Los Angeles?" several friends emailed and called to ask me this week, after reading Wednesday's LA Times article about Yahoo!s new office in Santa Monica. Though I am not among the group of Yahoo! folks who have been told they must relocate to LA -- you know how I like to keep you all guessing. As you know, I love San Francisco and my friends here but the truth of the matter is -- though I live in San Francisco, I don't work in San Francisco. Sunnyvale is such a long commute -- 2 hours each day down the traffic-encrusted, ugly 101 freeway that runs through the middle of Silicon Valley. When you work 12-hour days and then commute 2 hours round-trip on top of that, it really doesn't leave you with very much "life" left for experiencing the city, seeing friends and going to movies, or well, anything except maybe sleep and sometimes eating. The only time I see my friends and go out in the city is on the weekends. And even that is so tough -- because by the time friday rolls around mostly all I want to do is curl up in my bed and not go out to a club see a band. So, the option to live in Venice or Santa Monica and work at an office in Santa Monica seems rather appealing to me. As does the ability to be part of the group of people building Yahoo!'s editorial, news, and content realm. As someone who's worked in an news programming job at Yahoo! for the past 3 years, it's awesome to see the company getting behind the ideas of media and content, once again (after a bit of a hiatus after the dot-com downturn). Plus, as you know, dear readers -- unlike most people who love San Francisco, I also love Los Angeles. By doing this, I am breaking one of the cardinal laws of San Francisco, which is "You must look down dismissively at Los Angeles." I'm sorry -- but Los Angeles is much more of a cultural center than Sunnyvale, California. And Silicon Valley has at least as many ugly strip malls as LA. And plus, the housing and rental prices are still (a bit) cheaper down there. These are things I am thinking about. Labels: commute, dotcom, la, sanfrancisco, santamonica, sf, web, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 4:47 PM
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| November 9, 2001 | California -- It's the Cheese |
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"Happy cows make great cheese, and happy cows live in California." --a cheesy quote from California dairy farmers’ ubiquitous "It's the Cheese" tv ad campaign. "California is the only state that touches both Mexico and Canada." --Mindy, my (actually quite) intelligent friend who received her B.A. from Vassar. Three things: 1. It's November 9, and it's 75 degrees, and I'm wearing sandals. 2. As of next week, I will have lived in my loft for one calendar year. I'm actually planning to stay here one more year. This fact may not sound exciting to you, but this will be the first time since I was 17-years-old (ten years ago) that I've lived in the same dwelling for longer than 12 months. 3. I really do love California. Well, mostly I love Los Angeles and San Francisco (I can say with some certainty that I do not love Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, San Diego, or Davis. But I will admit that there is still something interesting about places like Pasadena, pre-fab Palo Alto, and Sausalito.) Though I do not unconditionally love all the other California cities, there is something I do love about driving the 5 from bottom to top, my eyes lingering along the vast bountiful fields filled with fruit year-round, intersected by elaborate aqueducts, and lined with neat rows of plants and trees. As I reach northern California, I can't help but ogle the gorgeous soft rolling grassy green hills. Unlike the jutting mountain-like hills of New Hampshire or Vermont, northern California's hills seem take special care not to block out the sun. Sometimes I think I'm one of the only people who loves both San Francisco and Los Angeles. I am, quite possibly, the only person foolish enough to admit in writing that I love Los Angeles a bit more. A few days after moving to SF last fall, I was invited to a loft party in SOMA. While being introduced to a woman around my age, I accidentally mentioned that I had just moved to the city from Los Angeles. Her immediate self-satisfied response was, "Well, at least you're in a better city now!" I tried to explain to her that not everyone is completely brainwashed that the Bay Area is the best place to live, but it wasn't worth getting in a bitch fight and/or shattering her idea of reality. When I lived on the East Coast in Boston in 1996, I always assumed I would move to San Francisco. SF was so cool -- it was the dot.com epicenter -- (and I was already working at Monster.com and completely bought in on "The Revolution," as stupid as that now sounds.) Los Angeles seemed sort of tacky in comparison. When I was trying to get my employers at Wildweb to pay for my transfer to Los Angeles in 1999 (from Boston) my friend and manager, Eliot, a former Angeleno, had warned me, "People in the Bay-Area treat Los Angeles as if it's this big, dumb dog. And Los Angeles maybe kind of just accepts that stereotype, because I don't think LA really cares about the image as much as people might think. But anyone who lives there knows that LA actually has a lot of things, particularly in Los Feliz and Silverlake, that are just as cool, if not cooler than anything they have up there. Plus there are more artists." With Eliot's assistance and a bit of luck, I did end up being transferred from Boston to Los Angeles, and when I arrived there, I found a place that was so strange and filled with people who all had huge dreams and bizarre quirks. I was convinced, and still am, that it had to have been created by someone's imagination like some kind of trippy cartoon. The way the sunlight hits the buildings at 3 in the afternoon, the shadows and colors are so dramatic, you constantly feel like those scenes in a movie where they close-up on the lover beaming down over the beloved's face. (I swear I wasn't much of a romantic until I moved to Los California.) I know, no one's supposed to love Hell-ay, but I did. I fell in love with the city no one was supposed to love, just as easily as I fell in love with the goofy messed-up boy in my life who was daring me to love him. When my friend Jeff and I decided to go west just over two years ago, he was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which he loved, except for the sweltering summer heat waves that kept everyone inside hovering around an air conditioner. Jeff and I had been friends since we were fifteen. We grew up in a Massachusetts suburb and met in a public school Latin class. Three years after my graduation from Vassar, I was living in Cambridge, MA and hating everything about the uptight Bostonian East Coast attitude. I had already been bitten by the Burning Man bug, and realized that the majority of Black Rock City's inhabitants hailed from the West Coast. "When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering. The thing is to have a lot of people in the center of the world, wherever that happens to be. Then things go glimmering." I beckoned Jeff to move west with me, peppering my speech with lines from "Absolution," one of my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories. Two of our other friends Paul and Hillary already lived in the City of Quartz. Paul lived in Santa Monica studying architecture at Sci Arc and Hillary lived in Hollywood and worked in acquisitions at Fox. Jeff became convinced. The only decision was whether to find an apartment in cool-kid Los Feliz or out by the sparkly ocean in Santa Monica. Our jobs on the Westside dictated our choice, and I found that I could be happy living anywhere in Los Angeles, even in West LA where we were surrounded by UCLA kids and families with Spanish-style bungalows with immaculate lawns. Maybe I loved Los Angeles most because I hit it at an interesting time in my life. I was really ready to begin everything. I wanted to dance all night to glam rock in Hollywood clubs with strippers and guys in bands. I wanted to dress even more flamboyantly. I wanted to learn to rollerblade while watching the sun set over the ocean and licking the salt from my lips. Maybe I loved Los Angeles because I hit it at an interesting time in its life. I saw the entertainment dot.com bubble from the inside. My P-2-P MP3 start-up company was headquartered in Beverly Hills and majority-owned by mogul Michael Ovitz. The people I met were writers, photographers, painters, musicians, and actors (some whose names you’d recognize, and some who you would not), and they didn’t all hail from New England or go to college in the Northeast. They had their own unique dreams and they weren't doing these things just because their families expected them to. A few weekends ago while walking barefoot on San Francisco's Ocean Beach, Mindy and I were speculating about which, if any, states could successfully succeed from the Union. "California is probably the only one that could do it, right?" I ventured. "Well, California is the only state that touches both Mexico and Canada," Mindy said. "California doesn't touch Canada!" I exclaimed, and both of us immediately started laughing. "I can’t believe I said that," Mindy said, while still giggling. "It's stuff like that that makes people in Washington and Oregon hate Californians." I admitted that I sometimes pictured the map that way too. I suppose that confirms it -- we're officially Californians now. Labels: california, jeff, la, losangeles, mindy, quotes, sanfrancisco, sf, web posted by Jess Barron @ 8:39 PM
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| October 23, 2001 | Yahoo! Giveth and Yahoo Taketh Away |
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Today I received a whole bunch of emails from various people complimenting my Zelda Fitzagerald site -- The Legend of Zelda (which I created back in 1997 and have been badly neglecting lately due to my short attention span and myriad other interests). I thought that was a little bit strange, so I went and looked at my referral logs -- which I also neglect (unlike many other web journalers who seem to have much more energy than me), and I discovered that Ask Yahoo! linked to my site today as an answer to someone's question about where to go online to see Zelda's art. They described my site as "an exquisite 'fansite.'" In other Yahoo! news, I think Yahoo finally scrapped its exclusionary "cool people" category -- go look, it's completely empty. Poprocks.com had been listed there since 1997, and now that Yahoo isn't deeming me cool, I feel so alone in the world. Will somone else officially endorse me so that I can feel better? In other un-cool news, my bright blue hair faded fast. I must be showering too often. I really need to cut down. Cleanliness is overrated. Especially for a girl who now has hair the color of a dirty aquarium. It's turning into a mullet too. posted by Jess Barron @ 6:23 PM
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| August 20, 2001 | Start-up and Go |
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You never know the true meaning of fear until you receive a fat packet from the IRS with your name on it. Last week the IRS sent me a letter saying how I owe over $4,000 in back taxes on my 1999 earnings (payable immediately). After freaking out and feeling guilty and trying to decipher why they were accusing me of lying on my taxes, I figured out it was due to an error my (also) now-gone start-up company WildWeb.com made in its payroll. In its defense, WildWeb was owned by about three different parent companies during the course of the 1999 calendar year and had about as many different names and URLs including, "Wild, Wild Web" (the now defunct TV show), Getwild.com, and One Zero Media. Two of the parent companies reported my earned income to the IRS in duplicate W-2's, so it looks like I made a humongous amount of money that year. An amount of money that a 25-year-old whose job title was writer and then editor should NEVER have been earning. But then again, now that I know how much these start-up companies were spending on our Aeron chairs... And now I hafta somehow prove that this company that no longer exists made a mistake with its payroll. I guess this is yet another negative thing about a past history filled almost completely by working at companies that no longer exist.
posted by Jess Barron @ 12:01 AM
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| August 19, 2001 | The Price of Sitting on Aeron |
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When we were all congregated at Camille's wedding this weekend in Seattle, Steve told us that he actually *attended* the Scour auction last week where all the office furniture and equipment we had used while working there was sold off. I always knew that Steve had an odd fixation with the morbid and bizarre... Among the items to be auctioned off he noticed Selena's monitor -- still covered in Power Puff Girls stickers. Sounded kinda sad. Of course, there were at least fifty Aeron chairs being auctioned off. When we worked at Scour I never realized my ass was sitting on a $700 chair. I actually find them to be less comfortable than regular old Office Max chairs, but then again -- I probably had mine all adjusted wrong. (A few months back the ergonomics lady at Microsoft told me that my desk was 12 inches too high for me...) posted by Jess Barron @ 11:22 PM
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| May 3, 2001 | Merchants of Cool |
So, I spent some time today on the Frontline "Merchants of Cool" site. I read almost every page, and I've been talking about it at work non-stop. The interview transcripts are the best part. My absolute favorite stuff is said at the end of Crispin Miller's interview where he says:
Labels: web posted by Jess Barron @ 1:38 PM
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| September 13, 2000 | Dour Day for Scour |
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The evening I returned from Burning Man (I arrived in Los Angeles at 11:30 PM after unpacking my campmates' trucks in Sacramento and then driving for 7 or so hours), I had a full tape of messages on my answering machine. Among them was a message from my boss, Lawrence. He said, "Jess, it's really important that you call me. I have some news, and it isn't good. You can call me at any time." Well, I thought to myself, they obviously layed off the web production department, and my friends Selena, John, Steve, Lawrence, Arlene, Tim, and Michele and I no longer have jobs. Before I allowed myself to get too upset, I decided to call Lawrence. It was around midnight, but he said it was all right to call, so I did. As it turned out, Scour had not only layed off the production department, they had layed off *everyone*. Engineering team, business development, ad sales, everyone. Only the 12 founders will be staying onboard to try to keep the company afloat through the lawsuit over peer-to-peer file-sharing. Apparently, some big investors they were expecting to receive funding from, pulled out due to the lawsuit. (I guess they didn't want to invest millions of their dollars in a company that might be shut down in the near future due to a federal ruling. Go figure.) So, on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, Scour's founders realized that they had completely run out of money and needed to let everyone go. I had missed the emotional "suprise" company meeting on Friday afternoon where everyone learned that they were being let go with only one week's severance pay because I was out braving the dust storms at Burning Man. The weird thing is, I didn't freak out too much about hearing this. I suppose I'm getting used to my start-up jobs just disappearing overnight without much warning. CollegeBeat went under in the fall of 1998. WildWeb went under in the fall of 1999. So, I guess I'm just embracing the fly-by-night "anything can happen" mentality. Labels: scour, selena, startup, web, wildweb posted by Jess Barron @ 10:23 PM
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| May 29, 2000 | We Like the Cars, the Cars that Go "Boom!" |
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This past Saturday night while en route to a party, my car exploded in my friend Chris's parking garage. Well, it didn't really explode. It just went "Boom! really loud and scary-like, when I put the key in the ignition. The doorman inside the building even heard the "boom!" And then the whole thing was dead, and there was smoke coming out from under the hood. It was very scary; you can even ask JP. We couldn't understand why a new Beetle that had just turned two-years-old would do something like that. It didn't stop us from going to the party, though. Chris kindly drove us, and we put off calling a tow truck until our return. Chris works at Anteye, this website where users submit their film and video shorts. I met Chris through Kim, one of my friends from home who I've known since 4th grade. They went to U Miami together. The party was cool. Chris and his friend Patrick are absolutely hysterical. I pretty much forgot about my car's demise until we returned to Hollywood later that night to call the tow truck. It cost $220 to tow my car from Hollywood to Santa Monica Volkswagen. Grrrrrr! And I don't even know what's wrong with it yet, since it was a holiday weekend and no one has been in to look at it. I seriously hope that this mysterious problem is covered in my warranty. Cars should not just go "boom!" JP and I went to another party that Chris invited us to on Sunday. It was at some producer guy's house in Santa Monica. He had a huge deck that overlooked the ocean. It was gorgeous. But it's in a weird part of Santa Monica and it took JP and me two hours to find the place. At least we were able to entertain ourselves in the car by playing Hole's "Celebrity Skin" and every mix tape we had access to. Labels: beetle, la, losangeles, party, web posted by Jess Barron @ 7:33 PM
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| March 29, 2000 | Scour=Seinfeld 90210 |
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I really *am* living inside a cartoon, or perhaps some twisted-micro-topic-dissecting Seinfeldian sitcom. Yesterday at the office (i.e. Scour.com in the 90210), Camille was telling me about her bizarre mayonnaise phobias (brought on by working at a sandwhich shop with a woman who licked the spoon while transferring a large vat of said oily-eggy substance into smaller containers) while we were snacking in our office's kitchen (which like kitchens at most decent start-up companies is always well-stocked with Pop Tarts, Red Vines, Kit Kats -- I couldn't find a website for Kit Kats, but I did find The Kit Kat Ranch, a bordello in Nevada, Corn Nuts, M&Ms, Pretzels, assorted sodas, and Perrier), when Kris wandered in. Overhearing our conversation, she said, "You think that's gross? You wanna her something really gross?" and then proceeded to tell us about the "universal sponge." According to Kris, one of her girlfriends is married to a guy who used to do something very dubious in his bachelor days. When this friend of Kris's was first dating this guy, she discovered that he would use a sponge to clean his toilet, and then use that very same sponge to wash dishes. It was his "universal sponge." Camille and I were shocked and repulsed. Caroline (who was photocopying in the vicinity) could not believe it either. The way we see it, sponges can make a progressive one-way transition through household tasks (for instance, you can use a sponge to wash dishes for a week or so and then when it gets older it can be used for cleaning counter tops or the sink and then when its even older, it can be used to clean in the bathroom), BUT once a sponge is used for something other than dishwashing, it CANNOT make the move back to being a dishwashing sponge. There need to be some lines drawn. You should not have a "universal sponge." Apparently, this guy has learned the error of his ways and now subscribes to the separatist transitional theory of sponge usage. In any case, I'm just glad I never ate dinner at his house. Later in the evening, I was eating take out vegetarian in the conference room with the rest of the web development team, when it came up that I had gone to school at Vassar (that kind of stuff always comes up -- that's precisely why people go to sorta pretentious-y schools like Vassar in the first place) and Ilya, one of our site's founding engineers, said, "Oh. You went to Vassar? I know some people who went to Vassar." "Were they guys or girls?" I asked. (A fairly reasonable question.) "I'm not sure," he responded. "You don't know your friends' genders?!?" I started cracking up. He explained that he couldn't remember which of his friends went to Vassar, and therefore since he didn't know which friends were the ones, he wasn't sure of the genders. I guess it makes sense. Sort of. From there, we heartily launched into the topic of whether robots had genders. We all agreed that we naturally assumed that R2-D2 and C-3PO (sci-fi savants the web engineers immediately announced they were played by Kenny Baker and Anthony Daniels) were male, although R2's gender is left somewhat ambiguous. Out of nowhere, John insisted that Moffit the Daggit from BattleStar Galactica was played by a monkey. Nobody else believed him. "That's an urban legend. Moffit was just a puppet," Shac said. So, we pulled up the Internet Movie Database on the overhead projector, and did a search for Battlestar Galactica, and found that Moffit wasn't listed. That didn't solve any of our problems. "Does the IMDB not list animal actors?" I wondered, appalled at this unfair treatment. Sure enough, we looked up Lassie, and there wasn't even a mention of the series' star. Then we returned to our Daggit debate, and after some dedicated searching on John's part, we found The Battlestar Galactica episode guide which tells that Moffit the Daggit is played by "Evie the chimp." Score one for John. Labels: camille, la, losangeles, scour, vassar, web posted by Jess Barron @ 4:55 PM
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| March 26, 2000 | The Perils of Web Production |
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On Friday Allyson sent me Project Zapster, the Sucksters' silly scheme for ending Napster's reign. (Speaking of Napster, did you hear about Wrapster?) Then today she sent me Carl Steadman's latest -- Let's Do Launch, which is hysterical and 100% accurate. If you read that and Can We Go Live With This?, you'll know everything you need to know about a day-job in Web Production. But don't tell anyone at Scour that you heard about that here. I don't wanna end up like these peeps. posted by Jess Barron @ 6:04 PM
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| March 20, 2000 | My In-box's Loss Will Be Your Gain |
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On the orders of the IS guy at my work (Scour.com), I'm cleaning out my Microsoft Outlook in-box, because apparently I'm taking up way too much space on the company mail server. I hate to delete stuff; I save everything. It's a disease. I'm an electronic pack-rat. I guess I'm just afraid that for some reason I'm going to need that e-mail from December 16, 1999 telling me about cool myCaster online radio stations or the one from December 14, 1999 sending me to Chickenhead's Geriatric Erotica site. My In-Box's loss will be your gain. I will now post some of the zany URLs that my friends and co-workers have sent me over the past 4 months: posted by Jess Barron @ 5:55 PM
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| February 23, 2000 | The "C" Word |
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Yesterday evening when I returned home from my start-up job (I'm a Product Manager for Scour) at (the not unusual time of) 10pm, Jeff began lamenting the changes he has seen in the web over the past few years. He ranted and raved against consumerism and e-commerce and talked about how the Web has moved away from what it was initially all about -- a community of diverse personal expression, with all of its clumsiness, wackiness and arcane beauty. Strangely, despite the fact that I have had a personal website since 1995, when I was a senior at Vassar and built a \personal site called "The Dungeon" with my close friend Mindy who shared and encouraged my technological obsessions, I played devil's advocate with Jeff and argued for at least an hour with him -- asking why e-commerce was *so* bad. After all, e-commerce (and the future promise of e-commerce) is what allowed and continues to allow me and him to fall into lucrative and somewhat creative web jobs. We argued passionately for at least an hour about whether content and commerce can mix without corrupting the content. And both of our arguments contained numerous contradictions. He raged against consumerism ("Fight Club" style), but admitted that he loves IKEA. I allowed that there are some huge media conglomerates controlling what gets said/written about movies, books, and politics, but then added my purposely inflammatory closing remark, "We were born to sell out." Sure, I get pissed that I never have time to update my personal website because I'm burnt out on the web after enduring 50-plus hours of eyestrain per week at my day job. There are only so many hours per day a person can spend in front of a computer monitor with hands and fingers making tiny movements on mouses and keyboards without suffering from eyestrain or repetitive stress injury as longtime web diarist Justin Hall does. And I have bills to pay. A whole lotta bills. Ever since my first job working as a copywriter at Monster.com I have always heard managers and higher-ups proclaiming that "Content is king" while asking their creative teams to come up with some infotainment and advertorials. So, as my annoyance with my own laziness (or exhaustion?) and apathy (or web burn-out?) was reaching a melt-down point --(would I ever give my personal website a much-needed overhaul -- fix links, change outdated information, etc?), I noticed an article this morning on Wired, called "The Web The Way It Was" which talked about something which I had noticed for the first time last summer when I noticed that someone with a blog had linked to my website. Perhaps Blogger or one of these easily-updated sprawling blogging tools was just the solution I needed to get myself writing in my web journal on a regular basis. Labels: jeff, scour, startup, web posted by Jess Barron @ 2:18 PM
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| June 1, 1999 | Did Pynchon Prophesize Cyberspace? |
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The other day, I read an academic paper that presents the idea that Thomas Pynchon prophesized cyberspace and The Web with "Gravity's Rainbow." Of course, this is an idea that I, of all people, enjoy latching on to. In my re-reading of the book, I happened upon a passage (which the author of the paper points to) that, to me, really supports his hypothesis. It is a dialogue between Tyrone Slothrop and his father that occurs toward the end of the book when Slothrop's consciousness has pretty much dissolved. The fragment begins with the father saying: "Son, been wondering about this, ah, 'screwing in' you kids are doing. This matter of the, shooting electricity into head - ha-ha?" The son replies: "Waves, Pop. Not just raw electricity. That's fer drips!" They talk about "keying waves" and comparing it to dope and "vacations" away from "Realityland." Then the father says: "Listen Tyrone, you just don't know how dangerous this stuff is. Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back? Eh?" This sounds exactly like any paranoid technophobe's argument in the 1990s about limiting kids' use of computers, video games, and the Internet. The best part is Tyrone's final response in this fragment: "Ho, ho! Don't I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? ... Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there... Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But we can live forever, in a clean, honest purified Electroworld -" Perhaps plugging into "electrofreak dreams" and is what I'm looking for in my projecting of pieces of myself into cyber/hyperspace via the Web. Labels: book, internet, web, writing posted by Jess Barron @ 8:01 PM
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