Colin Marshall

I have no psychic powers

God, I am one laid-back S.O.B. these days. Not that I slack off on anything that matters — though I freely admit to an unconventional definition of what "matters" — but what I've stopped caring about could fill one of those infinite Borgesian books that contain all possible books. I try to reconstruct a list of my concerns from, say, teen age, but fruitlessly; it seems too complicated and confusing a project to even envision.

This sounds at odds, I know, with my usual reflections on Colin₁₃ through Colin₁₈, who I would normally have you believe possessed a certain fire of will that Colin₂₅ lacks. But I feel as if whatever I've lost in abstract "passion" has been recouped in sangfroid. I don't get many compliments about qualities other than my passable radio voice or my lack of clothing stains, but when I do, they invariably praise my total and utter equanimity. A few SAT words clunkily dropped in there, but you get my meaning, and besides, I couldn't summon anything smoother. The bleak fact is that, when you're not an athlete, nor a viola virtuoso, nor a chessmaster, nor Bill Clinton, nor a decent student, you lean pretty damn hard on what you've got and play the hand your dealt, even if that hand is something as unspecific as "composure."

I didn't always have this; it's more deliberately cultivated than innate. Even though everything may ultimately be genetic in origin, I'd bet my last dollar that this isn't proximately genetic in the sense we think of traits like hair color as "genetic." (Though, come to think of it, I'm not sure where that came from either.) Whatever its provenance, it seems to have leveled up in recent years. What was once confined exclusively to my demeanor has seeped into my very thoughts and judgments. Or perhaps "lack of judgments" is more appropriate. (Or "lack of thoughts," if you like.)

My previous iterations held strong opinions on a host of struggles as eternal as vinyl v. CD v. MP3, song v. album, capitalism v. socialism or yes Kevin Smith v. no Kevin Smith. My longtime opt-out of Israel v. Palestine continues, though I reserve the right to maintain my iron line re: Saving Private Ryan v. The Thin Red Line. But on the whole, I seem to have taken to heart the old adage of opinions' likeness to anuses in both their ubiquity and their stinkiness. Have I thus become an unmoored relativist? Nah. I still have ideas and observations about vinyl, CDs and MP3s, songs and albums, capitalism and socialism, Kevin Smith and the absence thereof. I still think about these issues, but it no longer feels quite so critically important that I stake out a position.

I'm reminded of a years-ago conversation with Chris, the Livejournalist Formerly Known as cobalt999 , where we discussed two models of intellectual development. One is where you adopt whichever position seems most plausible and then iterate from there: young communist becomes adolescent socialist becomes adult social democrat, young anarchist becomes adolescent Objectivist libertarian becomes adult somewhat less Objectivist libertarian. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. The other model is where you adopt positions in direct proportion to your certainty about them. So if you're five percent sure of the teachings of the Buddha, you're five percent a Buddhist. This latter has always been, and is now more than ever, my model of choice, but I've ceased to believe that the "ism" bits matter — I'll spare you the Ferris Bueller quote about isms, in his opinion, not being good — and that holds for everyone else as well as for myself.

I recently interviewed economist Steven Landsburg on The Marketplace of Ideas about his new book on the applicability of quantitative reasoning to broad philosophical problems. He has an unusual perception of religion: it seems to him that, despite how much people talk about god, very, very few people actually believe in god. Where on Earth, and especially in a country with healthily operating megachurches and Jesus camps, does he get that? The lens is surprisingly simple, one used by many an economist trying to figure the world out: look to actions, not to testimony.

If you're trying to gauge a population's belief in god by asking them, you're actually gauging that population's willingness to profess belief in god. This isn't unique to religion; polling a group as to whether they prefer broccoflower or Baconators^TM fails to capture the desired data for the same reason. The question to ask is this: how many people act as if they believe that an omniscient, omnipotent deity is really and truly looking out for them? Vanishingly few.

By the same token, how many people live — not talk, but live — by their stated convictions about truth, ideology, politics, culture and what have you? How many act in real accordance with their claims that, say, "peace is the highest good," "Kubrick's films are worthless," "things would be great if I could form a line marriage" or "if election x produces outcome a, I'm moving to Canada"? These may be somewhat fascinating lines to entertain and consider, but to accept, internalize, assert and defend? I dunno, man.

This is why it's stopped mattering to me how others position themselves on the usual spectra. So you're a "nihilist" "anarcho-syndicalist" who listens to "Daft Punk", eh? Great. What are those, checkboxes on your Facebook profile? Increasingly, my reactions to what I read, see and hear have either evolved or devolved away from the likes of "Yay!" and "Boo!" — for what are our reactions but heaps of signaling layered upon those two monosyllables? — and toward "Hmm..." Whether I agree or disagree isn't nothing, exactly, but it's nothing compared to whether I find it interesting. And if I don't find it interesting, it's in large part my own fault.

It's plausible that my immersion in interviewing has fostered this attitude. I find that in the most enjoyable interviews, the interviewers don't waste breath vigorously expressing assent with or dissent from their guests' points. Good interviews have questions (doi), propositions, speculations, hypotheses and prompts for specification. They don't have a lot of booing and yaying. (Notice which you hear more in those three-minute press junket abominations.) Yet they still have to be conversations, not one-sided facilitated speeches. Striking this balance, I have come to realize, is the essential trick of interviewing.

Even if you put audience entertainment to one side, you, as an interviewer, will never learn anything from your guests if you burden your limited mental bandwidth with the task of thump-upping or thumb-downing everything your interlocutor says. You become a judge instead of a receptor. As a very recent guest, told me, "My main opinion on politics is 'I don't know.'" He's also a man known to read most human behavior as social signaling and status-jockeying, which I would submit bears extreme relevance to this particular topic.

Though I didn't pick it up directly from him, my main opinion on politics, and on a heap of other big subjects besides, has also become "I don't know." Because how could I know? How could anyone know the answers to these broad, amorphous issues on which they pronounce with such vehemence? Please don't mistake this, however, for an abdication of my responsibility to be interested in politics, a move I would consider as ill-advised as adopting positions on all issues with absolute certainty.

Because, see, I feel that we, as humans, have not specifically a responsibility to be interested in politics but a responsibility to be interested, period. Do I have any evidence for this? Nah. But dare you refute my claim that, to the extent that I'm not interested in something, I fail at humanity? Everything is interesting — politics, sure, but also, economics, physics, bus route scheduling, fabric darning, etc., etc. — if approached from the correct angle. The instructor of a documentary class I'm taking stressed this on day one with a writing exercise: no matter where you are, no matter who you're talking to, no matter what you're looking at, there is something there by which to be fascinated, a worthwhile observation to make, an engaging story to tell.

Apropos both documentary and interviewing — on several levels — I see this weltanschauung, or a form of it, exemplified in the mind of nonfiction filmmaker, blogger (and icon) Errol Morris. This is a man who's crafted acclaimed film and television documentaries based on marathon, many-hour interviews with pet cemetery operators, turkey hunters, incoherent retirees, convicted murderers, unconvicted murders, falsely convicted non-murderers, cops, military police, astrophysicists, mole-rat researchers, topiary sculptors, nanobot engineers, lion tamers, execution device engineers, Holocaust deniers, former secretaries of defense, animal communicators, serial killer groupies, cryonics proponents, the stalked, squid chasers, medical oddity curators, Unabomber pen pals, crusaders against credit card firms, crime scene cleaners, masters of disguise, internet entrepreneur, television addicts, genius bar bouncers, mob lawyers, professional high school students, homicide aficionados and successful crash-landers of DC-10s.

I aspire to that. Not just in film, not just in media, but in life. This is the ultimate curiosity, the caliber that render's one's mind a permanently interesting place to be. Morris recognizes the existence of objective truth — in fact, he takes many and great pains to state and restate his recognition of objective truth — but his interest in the fictional worlds people build and occupy in their own minds remains unquenchable. imomus put well with this resonant observation:

I don't mind that something is propaganda, in other words is an obvious lie. It can still serve my purposes, for instance embody a kind of plot in which cynicism and negativity has been completely, consciously excluded. It matters less whether something is true or false than whether it takes me somewhere.

Note that Morris, despite his yen for documentation of his own trips into the small, fantastical psychological capsules of individuals, doesn't consider himself any less intellectually imprisoned than his subjects. Small concession to make, you might say, not exempting himself from the human condition. But isn't it all too rare for public thinkers not to declare or imply themselves cured of the malady with which they diagnose the rest of the world?

This is most visible by its unsubtlety in politics, especially political punditry. If you'll indulge moment of ideological asymmetry here, I find it even more pervasive on the left than on the right. Think of the endlessly multiplying theorists who, ostensibly defending the interests of the downtrodden common man, operate on the premise that everyone has been hoodwinked by corporations, crooked politicians and the military-industrial complex — everyone but them. But even outside this realm, certain types of claims set off my brain's automatic find/replace:

• "The Bush Regime plays the American public like a fiddle" = "I have psychic powers (to recognize and avoid the techniques of said fiddling)"
• "That work of art is pretentious" = "I have psychic powers (to know the artist's intention)"
• "Most people are lazy" = "I have psychic powers (to know others' willingness to work)"

This is why, when I hear someone I haven't met described as "opinionated," I tend to assume that means "dumb," "delusional, "too insecure to not to have an opinion," "believes themselves to possess superhuman brain abilities" or various permutations thereof. If only they'd just chill out a little bit. Maybe shoot a documentary or two.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 19. Igor and Gleb Aleinikov's I'm Cold, So What? (1987)

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I'm Cold, So What?. 15:35 min., b&w, 1987. By Igor and Gleb Aleinikov. Ubuweb's description:

The Brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov belonged to the first generation of independent filmmakers in the Soviet Union, who no longer worked within the studio system, but founded the 'Parallel Cinema'. Their films, like Western experimental film in the 60s, deliberately refused to conform to professional standards, and were thus rejected not only officially, but also by many filmmakers.

I should've known I'd run into a language barrier at some point. A great many films on Ubuweb hail from out of the Anglosphere — just have a look at the artist index, all Holmqvists, Wojnarowiczes, Richters, Terayamas and Duchamps — and most seem to have English subtitles, but sometimes, especially in the budgets of the experimental, there just ain't the resources for that. The Aleinikov brothers' I'm Cold, So What? would seem to be an example: it's shot in 8mm, it's got no sync sound and its titles are hand-drawn. Whaddaya want?

Though I can't claim to have missed nothing by my inability to read or understand anything spoken or written in the film, my enjoyment remains. The piece presents a series of bizarre tableaux, many involving cinematic voyeurism, blurring of the living-dead borderline and a healthy amount of stabbing, of oneself and of others. A catatonic fellow gets costumed as a ghoul; a literal tree-hugger, ecstatic in his arboreal embrace, gets stabbed; a bespectacled fellow with a Bolex-y camera goes around documenting it all.

The soundtrack begins as a monologue by one male Russian-speaking voice and becomes a dialogue when a female's, also, unfortunately, talkin' Russian, enters the mix. As far as actual linguistic comprehension, I've got pretty much nothin'. I know that nyet means no, and the man says it to the woman every so often, as if to cut down her erroneous conjectures. Several times, the man says a word that sounds like a cognate for "cinematography." The pair's tones and cadences suggest the man is explaining something complicated and the woman, not fully understanding, is popping in with questions and propositions. Can any Russian-speakers verify this?

Words aside, I found myself surprised by the goofy humor on display in the visuals. More than once, I thought of student videos I've watched from the past 20, 25 years. Then I realized something: this pretty much is a student video from 25 years ago! 23, anyway. The muddy black-and-white image and stern voices laid over it make the film feel as if it's much older than it really is. In reality, these are teens and/or twentysomethings from the 80s dicking around, shooting film, having fun and composing strange, striking imagery. It's foreign, sure, but not in every way it seems to be.

Meta-Think Your Way to $ucce$$!(tm)

This fellow with whom I'm developing a radio show has been looking for a way to Haiti since it took the wrath of YHWH (or whomever). I get the feeling that puts him in a distinct minority at this moment in history when more people want out of Haiti than ever before. But he's a trained EMT with the apparent habit of darting off to troubled places — most recently, Iraq — and doing what he can. Though no viable entrées have presented themselves, he remains on the lookout, if cautiously so. "I'll go where there's occasional explosions," he said, "but not necessarily where there's no food or water."

Whether or not you're into foreign disasters and/or combustion, statistics say you've probably taken a moment to reflect on how, no matter what work machination, obscure social struggle or pleasure search isn't working out in your developed-nation life, at least you're not in Haiti, Where They Have Real Problems. Some of you have no doubt seized the opportunity to loathe yourselves for having food, water and a modicum of material comfort yet not existing in a perpetual paroxysm of ecstatic gratitude. How dare I get worked up about my shower's low water pressure, you grumble. Think of Haiti, man. Haiti!

That this doesn't work reflects, to my mind, one of the most interesting conditions of humanity. David Foster Wallace wrote about this — more eloquently, of course, than I ever will — in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", or, if you prefer, "that essay about the despair-inducing cruise ship." Part of this despair was induced by the elusiveness of satiety. No matter how desperately Celebrity Cruise Lines tried to "pamper" its guests, and no matter how desperately those guests tried to attain satisfaction via said pampering, it never quite seemed to click, especially in Wallace's own case.

Maybe, he speculated while growing dissatisfied with the cabin that initially stunned him in its sheer advancedness and comfort-engineeredness, there's just some infantile part of each and every human being that simply wants, like that's what it's for. Acknowledging this might, for some, be akin to gazing down the abyss. Wallace himself seemed none too happy about it, though as we've now confirmed, he wasn't exactly a happy camper; his was having a good day if he could make out the shafts of light through the avalanche of meta-thoughts.

These meta-thoughts didn't trouble most of Wallace's fellow cruisers. Many were too busy conga-line-forming, skeet-shooting and midnight-buffet-gorging to entertain meta-thoughts at all. While I don't desire a mindset quite that unaware, I do regularly feel the stifling inconvenience of the meta-thought morass, how they crowd out regular thoughts and even actions. "Am I being tripped up by my concerns about how this sentence I'm speaking now will be received?" "How will my next planned actions be affected by my planning responses to whether or not this action goes as envisioned?" "Is what I'm doing now what I want to do, or what I think, I want to do, and to what extent does the distinction matter?" Criminy.

But meta-thoughts have given me a number of useful insights too, such as the "Would I respect me?" choice test. They've also led me to internalize the deeper realization that, indeed, the infant within us never shuts up, never stops wanting. But I don't find this conclusion depressing, or even disheartening; I simply draw from it that satisfaction is a product not of where you are, but of where you're going. To get calculistic, it ain't about your value, it's about your first derivative (and maybe your second). In this light, statements like "When x happens, I'll attain happiness" don't make sense, but ones like "While x is happening, I'll be happy" make somewhat more.

And here I've stumbled into using a forbidden word. Though it looks to have hit a downhill slope, "happiness research" is in vogue right now, and it's generated much hand-wringing: Are folk wisdom's guarantees about what leads to happiness wrong? Is an individual's happiness fixed and uninfluenced by events? Are folk wisdom's guarantees about what leads to happiness right? Is happiness even possible? I fight a personal battle against my impulse to write off all happiness research as dumb, though I do believe — reasonably, I'd submit — that the field's practitioners tend to miss the point.

Is getting "happiness" the goal of my life? Not unless you define "happiness" as "the goal of a human's life," rendering the whole inquiry worthless. I'd probably exchange away some amount of what's commonly perceived as happiness for other things — madder interviewing or writing skillz, for instance. And what is the stuff, anyway? Is it identical to pleasure? To aforementioned "satisfaction," which even I can't explain with any clarity? To numbers on a scale checked by survey respondents? These are foundational happiness research questions, I suppose, though that only makes the unavailability of answers all the more surprising.

The happiness research finding I do buy is the factoid, now tiresome due to ceaseless trottings-out — even John Cleese riffed on it at the 2004 UCSB convocation — that, beyond $20,000 per year, an additional dollar of annual income does not reliably increase one's happiness. This no doubt varies from place to place — different costs of living and whatnot — but I think the thrust is this: once you've got the bare necessities, more money might mean more happiness, but then again, it might not. (Let the "some do, some don't" ridicule of social science begin. Or, rather, continue.) This lines up with the notion of happiness as a by-product of positive change in one's life. Show me a parched, hungry Haitian successfully gaining food, shelter and running water, and I'll show you someone experiencing a hell of a lot more happiness than a real estate developer replacing one of his lesser BMWs with a finer BMW.

On a recent episode of his podcast, Adam Carolla talked about "rich white guy problems," that is to say, inconveniences that only pop up and seem major when you get to the seven figures: a delay on the shipment of one of your Lamborghini parts, for instance, or the party house's need for a new set of jacuzzi pumps. This naturally segued into commentary about entertainment industry talk on the Leno/Conan contretemps. "Only in this business can a guy walk away from his job, get 40 million dollars, and not have it be the best day of his life. People say, 'Sure, Conan's gonna get the money, but he'll be off the show, he won't be on TV, he's screwed.' What?"

But isn't he? At that level, I imagine it hasn't been about the money for a long time. Any gratification — call it happiness, call it satisfaction, call it whatever — thus comes from what you're doing, not how much you happen to be financially compensated for it. Pay a guy $21 million rather than $20 million to do a movie and he'll be, like, whatever. Give him more creative freedom and you'll see some real excitement.

That said, I personally reside at the point on the curve where an extra few grand — or, say, a double sawbuck left in the ATM — can greatly widen the smile on my face. Maybe this is a bad sign for someone my age, but when I saw sibilance link to a WSJ article about how a 22-year-old girl managed to make it in NYC on $30,000 a year, my reaction was not "Woah, how'd she swing that?" but a series of elaborate fantasies about all the things I could do with the impossible dream of $30,000. Hell, what couldn't I do? That's "thousand" with a T, people. (And yes, when I think about how Ira Glass famously made "only" $60,000 a year for a long time while working hard on the radio, my inner voice becomes Robin Leach's.)

The piece's subject had to do a lot of tacky bullshit to survive: living with three roommates in Brooklyn, smuggling wine into bars, dumpster-diving for bread, boiling chicken bones into soup. I don't even do that, but then again, (a) I'm in Santa Barbara, not New York and (b) this is maybe why I'm always a lot worse at saving up money than I expect to be. When Chris, a.k.a. The Livejournalist Formerly Known as cobalt999, told me that he'd saved enough over nine months of work — nine months — to engage in some extended "jetsetting," I was like, what the hell.

Never have I amassed an amount of money that would allow me to do anything remotely describable as "jetsetting." I realize, on some partially inaccessible level of awareness, that I could get that kind of dough, since I meet plenty of people my age who do. I remember hearing one guy a while back declare that one of his goals for the year was to "make $100,000," and it was plausible. Dude was born the same year as me, yet I stand a better chance of finding a hundred grand — even just in ATMs — than earning it. But I only know of heinously unpalatable means to legitimately score that kind of scratch. I imagine myself getting shouted at over the phone about how something I implemented isn't e-commercing right, or maybe leveraging some stuff in order to leverage some other stuff.

Either way, I assume I'd be forced into a work situation that would crowd out "recording interviews about whatever I want" or "never being in an office before 9:00 or after 4:00" or "writing thousands of words about my incomprehension at how those who make money can stand it" from my life, which would fall into the nose-cut-off-to-spite-the-face category of futility. If I really took this seriously, I suppose I could pull up stakes and go somewhere cheap; while Santa Barbara isn't quite to NYC's level of cost astronomicality, it's known at least-region wide as a pricey place to live.

Worse, the city's cost-of-living premium is inflated by demand for qualities I don't care about: sun, beaches, smallness, quiet. And my thinking about cities has been strongly influenced of late by a remark from the Berlin-based imomus, who, in pondering whether or not he could live in Osaka, offhandedly observed:

I've never seriously thought about living in Osaka before. I love Tokyo best of all. But increasingly, my outlook has Berlinified, by which I mean I regard expensive cities like New York, London and Tokyo as unsuited to subculture. They're essentially uncreative because creative people living there have to put too much of their time and effort into the meaningless hackwork which allows them to meet the city's high rents and prices.

This strikes a loud, long chord with me. I've bitched and moaned about how SB can't seem to sustain viable subcultures, and the expensiveness itself might be a considerable part of the problem. Those who want or need a bargain on housing go way out into the sticks, where there is not only nothing interesting but actually a negative amount of interestingness. (The land saps interesting nutrients from your bloodstream.) But as hard a time as I give this place, beliefs reside in action, not in testimony; if I didn't like it, I'd be gone, baby, gone. (Given, of course, the bucks necessary to move.)

I will thus, for the foreseeable future, stick to what I call

COLIN MARSHALL'S $EVEN-POINT PLAN FOR FINANCIAL $UCCE$$

• Make more radio shows
• Write more essays
• Conduct more interviews
• Shoot more videos
• Record more field recordings
• Write up more experimental films
• Compose more plans for financial $ucce$$

I can't think of any worse paths to wealth, but then again, I can't think of any better ones!

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 18. Igor and Gleb Aleinikov's Cruel Illness of Men (1987)

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Cruel Illness of Men. 9:58 min., b&w, 1987. By Igor and Gleb Aleinikov. Ubuweb's description:

The Brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov belonged to the first generation of independent filmmakers in the Soviet Union, who no longer worked within the studio system, but founded the 'Parallel Cinema'. Their films, like Western experimental film in the 60s, deliberately refused to conform to professional standards, and were thus rejected not only officially, but also by many filmmakers.

Some would be tempted to describe this film as "a bunch of random stuff" and leave it at that. But if there's any single lesson I feel I should be learning from the Ubuweb Experimental Video Project, it's that there is no such assemblage as "a bunch of random stuff." We're dealing with wrought projects here, not television static, and as such necessarily the products of directed human effort. That's not to say that rhyme and/or reason are always easy to suss out, nor that sussing out rhyme and/or reason should be the aim in watching avant-garde motion pictures — but it's one of the reasons I find it interesting to do so.

Under a score of abbreviated drones and freeform woodwinds, the Aleinikov brothers cut together a series of images, found and made, that look unfailingly bleak, industrial or both bleak and industrial: disused factories, clunky utilitarian machinery, strings of unsettlingly young violinists, old-timey group portraits with everyone's eyes scratched out. Interspersed are less overtly sinister but somehow eerier snatches of action, like a circling brood of crude stop-motion mice or a bunch of little wooden people chopping wood and sawing logs, all differently affected by the vagaries time and the physical world foist onto film stock.

About six and a half minutes in, the action moves to the inside of a train, where a normal-looking young fellow finds himself sitting across from a slightly less-normal-looking, slightly less young fellow in a suit. The soundtrack's drone becomes an ill wind as the suited man stands up and confronts normal guy, getting way too close for comfort. Another (relatively) well-dressed tough joins the fray, and things descend into a grappling match.

Igor and Gleb, two young, unconventional filmmakers coming up right after the end of the Soviet era, no doubt had feelings to express about their situaiton and that of their country. I nevertheless hesitate to read any grand statements into a production like Cruel Illness of Men. They put deliberate craft into it, though, and by nothing less than total receptivity can I learn from it. Claims about the moving image's ubiquity and subsequent devaluation in the modern day are tired, but there's a certain something to the notion that we write off visual constructions too quickly simply because there are so damn many of them around, of any degree of strangeness or conventionality you like. Think of how much that must not have been the case back in late-stage Soviet Russia.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 17. Doug Aitken's Blow Debris (2000)

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Blow Debris. 20:39 min., color, 2000. By Doug Aitken. Ubuweb's description:

Blow Debris similarly suggests narrative but prefers to offer it in the form of a drifting, almost aimless experience; the piece enacts a passage or journey as we follow a group of nude wanderers in a desert landscape. As with Electric Earth, what could be postmodern anomie becomes celebratory drifting. Aitken spurns a romantic nostalgia for a pristine past and its untrammeled landscapes in favor of the stories suggested by the discarded remnants and detritus that litter the expanse of the Mojave Desert. He also fetishizes the feeling of the desert. Even in the cool, dark space of the gallery rooms housing the huge projections, you sense the lassitude of the characters and time seems to slow down. And then things explode, time reverses, and you are compelled to walk around some more, from dislocation to relocation and back again.

This follows in the vein of Autumn and Electric Earth in that it offers a series of compelling images I haven't quite seen before. It differs from those in its wider purview. Where Aitken's first two pieces on Ubuweb stuck to teen aimlessness and urban wandering, Blow Debris gets all the way from the desert to the creek to the palm tree fields to the suburbs, no sweat.

Also like its predecessors, the piece starts out measured and exploratory but turns urgent and nutso. We see a roving pack of nudes emerge from their encampment of bright red tents, amble down dirt roads, climb rocks, push old couches end over end, examine electronic junk and drive cars. As the setting moves from the sometimes strikingly Lawrence of Arabia-y sand-and-brush landscapes to a carved-out basin to a creek under a bridge and finally to a sprawl of tract houses, things get strange. Stranger than a welter of naked people walking through a series of disconnected environments, I mean.

Powerful gusts of wind blow papers around. Couches explode. Bookshelves disintegrate. Detritus scatters across all visible space. Humans turn to ash and blow away. Utter destruction! This is what I've come to consider the standard Aitken end-stage turn, though greatly amped up from the other examples I've seen. (Clearly, the other videos didn't have the luxury of a demolition budget.) But then there comes a surprise reversal, à la Weird Science: via the miracle of reverse motion photography, all this decimated stuff assembles back into wholes and flies back into place.

Oh, and did I mention there's also a nude dude playing tennis? 'Cause there's a nude dude playing tennis.

Creating oneself

Not long ago, I discussed with some friends the seemingly odd phenomenon of web pages that teach you how to make small talk. I at first refused aloud to believe in their existence. "But imagine someone so spergin' that they can barely look straight at other human beings," one friend offered. "They'd get some mileage out of them."

Truth, but I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around the notion that one might learn how to converse with one's fellow man via deliberate, written-out instructions instead of the supposedly universal impulse to connect. There's a disturbingly calculating feel to it, like conversation is always a means to an extrasocial end for these people. As negligible as it might seem to some, the gulf between asking others about their lives because you're genuinely interested and asking others about their lives because some HTML file said so seems comically huge to me.

Yet it was not so long ago that my own social skills were teh sux0r. It's not like I grew up shifting my eyes, stammering at the ground and making unintentionally creepy overtures, but it did take an unusually long time for me to recognize the appeal of that whole "other people in the world" concept. I remember regarding most social situations, outside of gatherings with my closest friends, as fruitless time sinks to be avoided, or at least to be checked out of early so as to get back to whatever comic or computer game I was making at the time. The notion that I might speak to somebody I didn't already know was so alien that I didn't even realize the extent to which I unconsciously evaded it.

By thinking back to this time in childhood — by which I mean "my entire childhood and most of my adolescence" — I can empathize to a surprising extent with those net.antisocials desperately for the flowchart with which they can achieve effective social operation. Having over-internalized the importance of honesty at an early age, I came to find that telling the truth bit me in the @$$ as often as it helped — more often, in fact. I stuck with implausible truths rather than substituting plausible lies, with the ironic effect that I probably was thought more of a liar than the average, healthily lying kid around. Hence my tendency not to ask people how they were doing or what was going on with their various jobs and families: I didn't want to know, and to front like I did would, to my young mind, constitute some form of lie. And that would be bad!

So for the longest time, I spoke when spoken to, and when spoken to, my unstated (maybe even unacknowledged) goal was to escape the conversation as soon as possible, thereby minimizing the probability of boredom and/or embarrassment. Why was I like this? Some really simple guesses: (a) growing up an only child, I didn't have to interact with peers outside school if I didn't want to, and I usually didn't want to, (b) I quickly developed penchants for a variety of solitary pursuits like drawing, reading and programming, which could have been a natural consequence of (a), and (c) I wanted to engage adults in conversation, but my attempts at statements of substance usually drew only supercilious "Out of the mouths of babes!" laughter, and I eventually stopped touching that burner. (Also, I remain unsure how extricable the condition of "not being interested in anyone else" is from the condition of "being eleven.")

Only with the awesome power of hindsight can I see that this suite of dysfunctions is responsible for 40-60 percent of the suckage — conservative estimate — that has ever seeped into my life. I like to think that I have defeated these tendencies, and 100+ hours spent in conversation with famous strangers would seem to attest to that victory. Given the strong correlation between my ability to talk to other people on my life's x axis and achievement/interestingness on its y, it's no surprise that I published, on Twitter, this advanced formula:

(technical skills)(social skills) = (probability of success)

Seems true to me. Those I meet in possession of high technical skills and low social skills could make a lot happen in the world, but they lack access the channels that can use them. Those I meet in possession of high social skills but low technical skills could arrange an opportunity to do whatever they want in life with maybe three phone calls and an SMS message — but they have little of value to offer. (I refrain from trotting out the weary example of Paris Hilton.) Perhaps the two groups could work out a Freak the Mighty-style arrangement whereby the techies ride around on the shoulders of the socialites.

I know a lot more people who fall into the former group than the latter, frustrated types given to pissed-offedness at the world's never having adequately recognized their genius, their creativity, their wizardry with Python, etc. This might be a geek thing. Though my struggles to break into geek culture are well-documented, I've long since gotten comfortable with exile on its periphery, offering me as it does a slightly more objective-ish (as distinct from Objectivist) viewpoint on what happens within it. I can tell you that, if there's a primary reason geeks aren't into sports, it's that they already play one full-time: resenting the unreasonable workings of the non-geek world.

As hesitant as I am to bust out "most people" statements, most people probably fall in the "socially fluent/can't do much" end of the spectrum. You find a high concentration of this far end in sales departments of organizations the world over, or at least I do, and when I do, I can't help but regard them as I would space aliens. I'm almost in awe at people who can somehow carry on conversations with whomever happens to be around, regardless of interests, background or sensibilities. This awe is tempered by their yen for cliché, their ceaseless flogging of sports metaphors and their generalized dopiness, but neverthtless, these social creatures, even if hindered by a near-absolute lack of meaningful aptitude, go pretty far in life — way farther than the average uncommunicative whiz kid.

So the grousing about "it's all who you know" resonates on and on and on in geekier quarters, specifically among those whose geekiness-related skills aren't so incandescent that the remainder of humanity beats a path to their door to harness them. I myself have come to understand, if not enthusiastically champion, the reasons it's like this. Placing myself in the shoes of someone in a position to reward someone else for doing something — a pure fantasy, I assure you — I can't deny that, 99 times out of 100, I go for the known quantity rather than the stranger who might well do a "better" job. I'll take even a weak, third-hand pre-existing social bond over super-competence any day. When Merlin Mann says "good decisions and good relationships" make success, I don't think he's lying. When A.C. Grayling says "life is all about relationships," I don't think he's lying either.

Which brings me to clothes. Jesse Thorn, the mastermind behind The Sound of Young America and the man for whom I've written a Podthought each week for a year and a half or so, has begun a new project called Put This On. It's half a men's style blog on the order of A Suitable Wardrobe or Sartorially Inclined and half a men's style video series. The pilot episode is about denim.

Somebody started a thread about that pilot on Metafilter, which is not not a place where geeks don't not go. Some of the comments express fairly harsh opinions about the fact that anybody would create a whole series about something as insubstantial and confusing as what to wear. One opinion, which I suspect of sarcasm, runs as follows:

(Squeal) Oh! Fashion! It's Fabulous!!!11!! (end squeal)

Oh, yes, men. You too can become a slave to fashion! Step right up, there's no time to loose! Fashion, it's not just for women any more! now everyone can become a slave to the god of superficial appearances! Everyone who's anyone is doing it, so should you!

This one shows an amusing self-awareness:

I'm sitting here seething that there even exists a pair of jeans that costs more than $100.00 [emphasis mine, because how could I not emphasize that], yet I just realized I have a second Firefox tab opened to a discussion breaking down the costs one would incur if one were to build his own film-quality Stormtrooper armor.

And I think this sums up the attitude I'm getting at near-perfectly:

I already own a perfectly serviceable belt.

This being something of a sartorially dissolute age, I wouldn't argue that the sour puss about clothes exists only, or even primarily, within geek communities. (Its wreaks equally horrific consequences in what Madelaine and I have termed the "Casual Dad" movement.) But it's as clear a petri dish as any to observe it in action.

While I sort of get the un-meritocratic feel of the social sphere, the perceived difficulty of assembling an aesthetically pleasing wardrobe and the excitement to be had in engagement with fictional narratives, I find it very difficult to hear someone bitch about how it's all who you know, assert that style is superficial nonsense to be circumvented with a pair of Costco cargo pants or rave about this one season of Battlestar Galactica that "takes the characters to some really dark places." Specifically, I find it difficult not to beat the living crap out of them, for reasons I can't fully articulate.

The lazy dresser's implicit disregard for the rest of humanity has something to do with it. I've entertained fair-to-middlin' threadular interests for years, but the rise of Put This On and the constellation of internet style stuff that surrounds it has aggressively bumped those up to middlin'-to-strong. Naturally, I have taken such extreme measures as building a personal Alan Flusser library, organized for constant reference.

But style is not achieved by Alan Flusser books alone. Only with tireless augmentation and winnowing can one's wardrobe be refined. Alas, this entails a radical change to my current clothes-buying ritual, that is, only buying clothes when I've fallen into desperate need for them. In dressing as in wildlife, once the herd thins, things get exponentially uglier as pressure increases on the remaining specimens, and I've come to sense, and fear, the approach of extinction more acutely than ever.

I can chalk one up in the "not starting from zero" department based on the fact that I occasionally get complimented on my capacity for dressing myself. Though I have never thought of myself as a particularly adept wearer of clothes, I guess I do have some points in my favor:

• I own not just one, but many a "perfectly serviceable belt," and wear them without exception (unless I'm at the gym or something)
• I wear no t-shirts emblazoned with brand ads or other gauche-y text, and no t-shirt of any kind ever constitutes my outermost layer (unless I'm at the gym or something)
• Most of what I own actually fits
• Nothing I own has holes in it, patched or otherwise

Okay, so those last two (and possibly those first two) sound pretty lame, but you'd be shocked at the extent of the general ill fit and holiness of most Southern Californian clothes. I'm the first to call overblownness on the alleged "Nor-Cal"/"So-Cal" divide — the real distinction is east-west, and even that's bleached out when viewed in a global context — but there really does seem to be a style problem down here. My theory is that some sartorial retardation-causing poison leaks into the water supply, giving rise to symptomatic hoodies and flip-flops. (Not that the condition is unique to this area. I grew up around Seattle, land of the fleece and/or Gore-Tex^TM-clad faux outdoorsman.)

I realize this makes me sound like a fulminating, red-faced pedant, the miserable, useless kind of fellow incensed by the sight of white after Labor Day. But I'm not bothered by the way other people dress; I'm bothered by the influence the way other people dress might have on the way I dress. This falls in line with the overall attitudinal transformation of my adult life: every day, I give one less damn about everything out of my direct control, including the actions of others, and several additional damns about actions of my own. My thoughts about clothes represent this in microcosm: even if I currently dress five percent more presentably than the half-state that surrounds me, my wardrobe still feels shambolic.

This sparks a belated resolution for 2010, one designed to break the sparseness of my clothes-acquisition habits and to steadily lift the average quality of my outfit. Every weekend, I acquire one new non-shabby article of clothing. It needs not be expensive — in fact, I limit myself to fifty bucks per item — and it needs not be brand new, but it needs be aesthetically interesting and as wearably functional as possible. I've built up a comfortable buffer by acquiring a few items on the internet all at once — yes, you can successfully buy non-utilitarian, non-Reddit-y clothes here — but I'll keep myself paced from now on.

Whether you're talking about launching and maintaining good conversations or selecting and wearing good clothes, the operative issue is self-presentation. I consider that to be a chief aspect of living life in the same way that one would craft a work of art. I know that sounds stupendously fancy, but hear me out. Having accepted and even embraced, per the above, that I should only care about that which I can personally control, I arrive at the conclusion that the locus of my focus, as it were, should be the gradual iteration and refinement of what I, like, do. Both the clothes I buy and put on as well as the human interactions I execute (as opposed to the humans I execute) reside smack in the middle of this region of concern. While I certainly want to affect and create things external to myself, that will only happen as a function of my actions. If one wants to create art, it only happens as a consequence of creating oneself — and pretty much everything, I would submit, is art.

That said, does anybody know a good tailor in Santa Barbara? I don't know any good tailors.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 16. Doug Aitken's Electric Earth (1999)

Electric Earth. 15:01 min., color, 1999. By Doug Aitken. Ubuweb's description:

"A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what's around me." So says the lone protagonist of Electric Earth Doug Aitken's hyperkinetic fable of modern life in the form of a sprawling eight-screen installation that took home the International Prize at last summer's Venice Biennale. An uncanny cross-pollination of genre conventions sampled freely from music video, documentary, and narrative film alike, the work forged a weirdly precise portrait of urban angst, wedding installation to the vernacular vocabularies of cinema and dance. In Electric Earth as in Aitken's previous works, the landscape — here an anonymous expanse of urban wasteland — isn't a passive backdrop for human action, but rather its driving force. The blinking traffic lights, panning video cameras, and automatic car windows create an environment of jerky, accelerating rhythms that Aitken's young black protagonist begins to mimic, as if involuntarily. Projected on enormous screens in three adjoining rooms, Electric Earth is itself an immersive landscape of motion and fractured information, which viewers are meant to experience as much as to watch.

I happen to have just read about this piece in Michael Rush's Video Art, an informative if somewhat stiffly-written and -designed tome on the form. If memory serves, the "proper" way to view Aitken's work would have been in a gallery, surrounded in all directions by screens playing different segments of the protagonist's lonesome wanderings. That is, not as a compressed web video.

But a compressed web video is what we have to work with, and so a compressed web video we shall discuss. I must say, though, that even thus hindered, Aitken's got one sharp cinematic eye. He has the film's lone character, after emerging from a static-staring daze in his hotel room, stroll and then dance through a variety of dimmed, empty urban environments, each seen more strikingly than the last. (Most of these shots qualify as eminently stealable.)

Aitken's own commentary on the piece reveals that the kid's walkabout takes him through not just one city, but a seamless patchwork — if that's not an oxymoron — of several. The resulting invented metropolis presents an equally forbidding and strangely welcoming (or at least non-threatening) landscape of 99-cent stores, laundromats, brown barren stretches, car washes and barbed wire. The protagonist doesn't stop to examine; he just keeps moving. And occasionally busts some moves.

This guy and his reactions (or lack thereof) to his subtly unusual surroundings are interesting enough, but I personally took more notice of Aitken's mastery of what Ozu called "pillow shots," pieces of transitional imagery meant to connect two parts of a narrative without its own connection to that narrative. If the narrative thread in Electric Earth is the kid's walking/popping path through the city — and frankly, that's about as much narrative as I want these days — then the pillow shots are all the details, closely observed, of the built environment: harshly angular streetlamps, blinking brake lights, rotating satellite dishes and security cameras, car wash hoses that move on their own, some kinda gnarly water tower.

Like Autumn, this one eventually turns unsettling. The trouble seems to start when our carefree hero can't convince a Coke machine to accept his crumpled dollar bill. (Cokes in 1999, by the way? Only 75 cents. Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.) Soon, he's shirtless, jittery and hyperventilating as a disorienting streak of city lights surround him. By the end he's back to what I assume is his normality, casually heading down a tunnel in silhouette. Whether he's returning to stare at static for a while I can't say.


I spend sleepless nights pondering whether to make myself available to all — and only — sketchy, small-timey media outlets for Ubuweb Project-related interviews. If you own or operate a sketchy and/or small-timey media outlet, I can be reached at colinjmarshall at gmail.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 15.5. Doug Aitken's Autumn Redux play kit

Watching Doug Aitken's Autumn, I couldn't help but feel that its soundtrack was acceptable, but somehow nonetheless wrong. It seemed to me, and seemed strongly, that an altogether different track should have accompanied these shadowed, bleached, 1990s-shot impressions of teenage in slow motion.


I've only just realized which track that is, and, thanks to the bewildering power of the internet, we can all experience the its new, more powerful union with Aitken's images. The embedded player above contains Autumn, which you should mute first and then play.

Now immediately play the video embedded below. Start it as soon as possible after you start Autumn, then scroll back up and watch the latter with its new backing song.


Uncannily suitable, huh?

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 15. Doug Aitken's Autumn (1994)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Autumn. 7:28 min., color, 1994. By Doug Aitken. Ubuweb's description:

Aitken wanted to create three music videos, each with their own narrative, to be aired separately at different times as part of his commercial production. The resulting video, shown in galleries, fuses together the three separate narratives in a non-linear fashion. Located on the precipice between the oft-thought mutually exclusive realms of art and entertainment, Autumn stands as an emblematic example of Aitken's video practice, investigating the cultural numbness generated by the flow of media images.

Just reading about Doug Aitken's career as pre-viewing research got me so intrigued that I darted right over to the library and checked out his book Broken Screen, a heavily-designed compendium of short conversations about nonlinearity with luminaries no less luminescent than Carsten Nicolai, Mike Figgis, Rem Koolhaas, Alejandro Jodorowsky and, yes, Werner Herzog. Sure, I hadn't seen any of Aitken's stuff yet, but how could he not be just my kind of guy?

As regards Autumn, Aitken's earliest piece available on Ubuweb: I would totally watch an early-mid-1990s high school period piece with these aesthetics. Its starring elements appear to be two girls, a guy and a jet, of which at least three look highly era-specific. The fellow sports a buzz cut, necklace, Woody Woodpecker shirt, BMX bike, floor bed and retro lava lamp. The first girl, a brunette in low-top Chuck Taylors, has one of those angsty glares you can tell was shaped primarily by "alternative music." The second girl, with extremely short, artificially blonde-looking hair and a perhaps ironically-patterned flannel shirt, adopts what I've come to call the "failed pixie" look. At no point, from what I could tell, does anyone drink a Surge — but I wouldn't be surprised if someone did.

So maybe the character's aren't strikingly original in appearance, but were I a bigwig television exec, I would immediately commission Aitken to produce a series based on Autumn solely due to the evocativeness in which it places them. It's got the long shadows, blurred analog edges, solid fields of black, blinding patches of white and dreamy motion that simply scream the teen equivalent of mono no aware. A young filmmaking hopeful with a few pieces of vintage video gear and a Youtube director account could take this visual perspective and run profitably with it.

Semi-contrary to the description, the shots don't look so much like bits of music videos as they do bits of music video-ified life. But things turn frantic and creepy in the piece's final third, when the shadows take over. We see slow-motion video voyeurism, eyeball closeups, amped-up grain, scanlines and a host of other amorphously freaky things. What's more, the music gets all insistent. This may be too abrupt a genre change for mainstream television, but don't long-running fictional narratives thrive on that sort of thing? Hear this, whoever's gunning to produce the next teen hit: you might consider hiring a video artist from the 1990s. That's my advice.


Hey kids, tweet this: http://bit.ly/8xs7rq

Album one

I got everything I wanted from my trip to New Zealand. The more abstract side of the wish list included temporary outsider status, sweeping contextual shift and the feeling of displacement for which I thirst. The less abstract included hours upon hours of field recordings, made with my trusty Zoom H4n. (Beyond a few postcards, I desired no higher a climb up the ladder of souvenir tangibility.)

Spurning a compulsion to cut all this material into a coherent whole the moment I returned home — and, quite frankly, not feeling like taking on that kind of work so soon after re-entry — I decided I'd first need some distance from the journey itself. I wanted to approach the recordings as, if not pure sound, then at least as something purer than sonic detritus of the last few weeks. Not knowing how long I'd take to cross this threshold or what it would feel like when I did, I simply waited about six weeks.

Never having assembled multiple field recordings into an extended piece before, I pre-emptively quashed my fanciness by arranging them chronologically. The listener would hear the sounds in the order I captured them. On one hand, this introduces a neat built-in travel narrative — catching the train, then catching the plane, then exploring Auckland, then driving down to Wellington, then flying south, etc. — but on the other, I don't trust narrative. It's a double-edged sword, the other being the lethally poisoned edge of banality.

I figured I'd arrange for chronology and cut for aesthetics and interestingness, which still left me much freedom in the details — almost too much. Would I line the recordings right up against one another? Would I keep them discrete? Would I attempt to blend them seamlessly into a single sonic mass? Would the transitions affect realism, or would I cut from location to location without trying to construct plausible movement?

Any ideas I had about making the piece sound like a totally faithful, if compressed, journey from Los Angeles to Auckland to Wellington to Invercargill and back quickly went out the window, as (a) I had neglected to record in every location, (b) I soon determined that the listener wouldn't be able to identify what all the sounds were and (c) I myself couldn't identify what all the sounds were. The six-week distance at work!

This, of course, matters not; as enthusiasts of the genre know, field recordings are no more mere aural documents of people, places and things than cinema is a mere audiovisual document of human relationships. When Lee Patterson burns peanuts, does his audience care that they're getting the most realistic, recognizable representation of the sound of burning peanuts? Nah. They care that Patterson has recorded sound that's interesting; neat as his choice of source can be, it's merely incidental.

While my more prosaic New Zealand recordings are immediately recognizable — ducks, fountains, boat toilets, that sort of thing — I'm more pleased with those that have, with time, turned abstract. None but me could identify some of this malfunctioning technology, out-of-the-way ambience and esoteric machinery — and hell, half the time even I can't do it. If my goal with this piece were to convey the message "In New Zealand, I heard birds and ducks and cars and waterfalls and creaky floors..." I would just say — or, admittedly more likely, tweet — "In New Zealand, I heard birds and ducks and cars and waterfalls and creaky floors..." Certainly I'd have spent less on batteries that way.

But given sound as my media of choice for this project, I resigned myself to living with its complications. Being a fervent adherent of the "do whatever you can and then iterate" method of making stuff — also known as "suck, then rock" — my other resignation was to winding up with maerial that, given my inexperience with mobile, handheld recording in unpredictable outdoor environs, probably wouldn't sound especially good. I'm into field recordings, but it's not like I know anything about them — I just unsystematically stuck the mics in the way of whichever air compressions seemed richest.

Finally donning the headphones to assess the damage, I found that — shock, awe — my recordings sounded pretty decent! I mean, I'm not about to give Lawrence English a run for his money, but I definitely produced enough to work with. Some, especially what I recorded in the Auckland Art Gallery, sounded almost, to my ears, almost like "real" field recordings. Alas, I had slightly too little city (especially Wellington) stuff and slightly too much animal-and-forest stuff, perhaps, but what can one do — New Zealand's an animal-and-forest kind of place.

I can already tell that my greatest enemy in this larger endeavor will be Old Man Wind. I had a hunch this would become a problem even as I recorded, putting into effect my emergency "stand between the gust and the mic" deflection method. Despite my valiance, the wind's dreaded staticy booming still tainted several of my clips, but I feel I must have learned some important editing skill in my desperate attempts to seamlessly excise the distortion. Or maybe I just need better shielding than the sock that came with the H4n.

But to mask obvious technical problems represents the easier end of the decision spectrum. Given my self-imposed — and, to an extent, software-imposed — 60-minute time limit for the final piece, the complicated question of what stays and what goes becomes more confusing. Should the nearby thudding of moving furniture be included, even though it unexpectedly broke the ambient sound of the location I'd been trying to capture? Probably — it's a fine reflection of the randomness of life, etc. Should the recording-start jingle on my dad's video camera be included? Sure, though ideally not every five minutes.

And jeez, I can't even really articulate to you how I handled the issue of, having selected the precise in- and out points all the clips, how best to transition them into and out of one another. The process bordered on voodoo, but I can't say the result is alien. When I finished a "rough draft" with everything lined up and rudimentarily transitioned, I made like I was writing an essay: I went back, re-listened and re-listened and tweaked everything that didn't feel right until it did. In this process, and only in this process, did I learn the qualities of more "correct"-sounding transitions: bringing the second clip up to full folume before fading out the first, that sort of thing. (Naturally, this rule and others go out the window in certain special artistic sub-cases, of which there are dispiritingly many.)

But here it is, New Zealand Stories, mixed down and 192k MP3-ified for your listening pleasure. (Right-click the link and do all that "Save as..." business to save it on your hard drive.) Some notable memories it triggers in my mind include:

• 7:25 The Auckland Domain a biggish park in the very city you'd expect, and one of the several near-silent environments from which I somehow expected much recording material. I was surprised at its near-desertedness — save the presence of that giant protractor — but then I realized it was like 10am on a Monday. Quick, blame jet lag.
• 10:35 Yes, there is Māori-language media, which I insisted on watching. (There's also lots of Germany-centric TV, for some reason, maybe to cater to the hojillions of tourists from there.)
• 11:45 I didn't quite capture enough city sounds, but here are some I did. Recorded in some Auckland alleyway not far from Queen street where the East Asian restaurants flowed freely.
• 12:55 As soon as I head the Auckland Art Gallery's floor, I knew I had to have it. (The second-grade tour group was a bonus.)
• 20:16 The tone of Auckland's crossing signals emerged as an equal priority.
• 21:00 Located in what Kiwis believe to be the worst city in the land, Hamilton Gardens was quite possible the aesthetically nicest surprise of the trip. Most of that was visual aesthetics, of course, but nothing stops me from recording.
• 22:00 There were surprisingly few non-English speakers around — here are a couple.
• 23:00 I don't even know what song this is, but it's intruded on my life for at least a decade now. (In New Zealand specifically, my life was intruded-on by Cascada's "Evacuate the Dancefloor", which is big in Wellington clubs.)
• 27:08 A local dad unsuccessfully tries to point his kids toward a kiwi bird, which, like the rest of its species, spends 100 percent of its time digging for food.
• 31:35 Though most of New Zealand's children seem eminently non-precocious, I felt as if these two were, in some manner, precocious.
• 32:16 These are "kakas," birds that sidle up and bite your shirt. (They bite mine, in any case.)
• 37:00 This machine, which I can't even begin to describe, produced what was likely my favorite man-made sound to capture.
• 41:09 This is Fuel, quite possibly the finest 60s organ-jazz coffee bar in the entire Wellington airport. (They brought out my tea in a pink service, which I chose to take deeply personally.)
• 46:23 My only recording yet made while kayaking, or, if you prefer, while desperately struggling to keep my recorder from falling in the water.
• 47:43 As pure sound sources, I loves me some malfunctioning radios. (Especially if they're in the Dundedin Public Art Gallery, a neat place where I spent much time.)

I submit that it is not bad for a first field recording album, but your mileage may vary. Infinitely more important: it exists. It exists, and therefore is buildable-upon, preferably in places like Iceland, Portugal, Korea, Switzerland, Belgium and maybe Japan. Stay tuned.