oh yeah

+1

schnee gets it too

LMAO

rather, saying you understand the tao means you do not understand the tao.

yeah we're the stereotypes

Do you know what my Grandpa would've said? He would've said you're all a bunch of god-dammed fruitcakes. Then he would have thrown an empty beer can at you.

Because "cursorily" is dumb. It's just dumb.

r u getting sarcastic with me?

ive recorded this personal attack

Good catch. Yeah, what you said.

I'm gonna go ride my bike and then write something prosaic and mundane about it later on. 100 words max.

I rode my bike.

Nobody was out, except rabbits and one very bored-looking coyote.

I had fun.

There's another in the pipeline - which you'll probably hate, judging from your take on this piece of writing - and it's already been bought. So, yeah, "books."

More importantly, got a question for you-all: Iain Borden's book on skateboarding is, if anything, denser than mine, and just as prone to theoryspeak. He leans far more heavily than I would dare on names like Lefebvre and Foucault. And perhaps more seriously, he's never been a skater.

Despite this, the book was comparatively well-received by the skater community - I'm not sure if Thrasher or Transworld ever reviewed it, but a reviewer for Sidewalk, the British equivalent, said "There's absolutely no way I can do this book justice here...it's incredibly thought-provoking, especially from the perspective of actually being a skateboarder. I highly recommend it."

Now skaters are, for the most part, no more tolerant of bull**** than bike messengers/riders. So what do you think accounts for the fact that Borden's book seems to have pleased a very tough audience, while what I wrote for the most part just pissed you off? Do you think the fact that my piece was posted on the Web had anything to do with the difference in receptions?

With literary deconstructive criticism, you can take the manual for installing brake levers on your bike and turn it into a life lesson on gaining control. Or how you've just enslaved yourself, gone soft, stepped away from the edge, hidden behind the curtain of 'safety' which really offers no security at all but rather a false hope; a window into your past surrounded by the fuzzy curtains.

Yes. A book seems authoritative even if it completely packed with coherent though meaningless rubbish. A blog carries with it no more legitimacy then the drunk spouting off at the end of the bar because he loves the sound of his own voice. If your mind is primed to expect some deep truth about human culture it is easy to read that into the big words and fancy theories. If that somehow endows a deep meaning to your leisure activities all the more so. If it isn't then anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see through it.


The vast majority of post modern cultural studies are a farce of scholasticism. Theories are created and supported with the type of loose factual claims used by intelligent drunks in some meaningless argument. These are never scrutinized because the establishment that should do so has become more enamored with wordplay and exciting deconstructions then they have with relevance to reality. Such ideas are then accepted generally because they carry with them the weight of the phds that are entertained by them.

This particular online community often demonstrates its inability to accept anything that they determine was not born of themselves, take no offense. Many of the posts aimed at you were for the benefit of a few of this forums regular denizens. Their usual method are those catcalls etc that you saw, while some you probably noticed were critical but not needlessly insulting. Same as it ever was. It'd please the people I hang out with to be distinguished as separate from this group, some messenger may not like your writing style and generally they aren't shy about what they don't like, but only a rookie would have a "we" in their criticisms, nothing wrong with someone trying to lay some understanding down on anyones thousand yard stare, whether they're in that life or not.

Haha, that was spoken from a pretty postmodern perspective.

I enjoyed the article, as it defined what is easily experienced but is difficult to describe, like the taste of a ripe strawberry. 165 did have a point (verbose), but if that is your style, go for it.
The masses usually don't go for higher level thinking, as exemplified by Bill O' Reiley or the box office disappointment of "Idiocracy".

"Ow, my Balls"

haha yes, you're right. i'm glad i was able to fake my way through a lit BA and two masters, all with honors, while being functionally illiterate.

Any number of intervening factors could be involved, and while I haven't read the book in question, I would not ignore the possibility that it was good and your piece wasn't.

i don't think anyone here was "pissed off" by your article. i certainly wasn't. i just think it took something quite visceral and formalized it which generally takes what is interesting about something and what people are passionate about and strips it away. writing like this generally is far more interesting to outsiders who want to understand someone else's experience than it is to those who have experienced that which is being written about. when reading a discussion of their own experiences, those involved generally find that the written experience pales in comparison to the lived experience and thus doesn't hold much interest for them. the more academic the writing, generally, the more true this is. this isn't to say that your article is poorly written for the audience it was intended, but it being on the internet means that, inevitably, a larger audience will read.

"ambient informatics"?

Good attempt, and good quality for a blog, but if I saw this in print on a piece of paper I'd demand that the author be a little more to the point and do a little less theory-flexing. Real gangsta-ass bloggers don't flex words, 'cause real gangsta-ass bloggers know they got 'em.

And this is not to be a jerk, just some constructive criticism. I understand and like what you're going for.

I enjoy pissing contests like this one soooo much more than pissing contests about track drops and deep v's. An old roomate once told me that one of the reasons he liked skateboarding was because of the way it allows the skater to establish a different relationship with architectural elements in the environment. He was also working on his MA in art history so was also speaking from a more academic position than most skate boarders I guess. Since that conversation I have come to see riding a bicycle in a city (or any environment I suppose), as having a similar effect.
I lived in Chicago for 2 1/2 years before I started to commute by bicycle. Riding changed my perspective on different neighbohrhoods and spaces in the city. One misses a lot when taking public transit. I now look at the road differently. Before it was a forbidden zone, only for cars. Now I feel way more comfortable not only riding but walking in it as well. I have had several discussions with friends who ride bikes about how we have no problem walking down the middle of the street or sitting on curbs just hanging out. We attributed this tendency to biking often which allowed us to see the street as "inhabitable".
Maybe having these thoughts and discussions makes me a navel gazer and out of touch with reality but I think a lot of people take pleasure in parts of life for lots of little reasons. They may not be able to put them into words or even want to but I enjoy talking about them and appreciate that others do as well.

To be fair, I read it through and it's pretty good. I was just having a bit of fun.

I'm just allergic to academic analysis in the soft sciences; most get lost in the flowery rhetoric dutret refers to, and the type of person that enjoys that stuff most is often the worst at doing the activity being written about. They tend to confuse their linguistic constructs with actual knowledge.

What happens when networked sensors, screens and other information-processing devices are embedded in architectural and public space. I think it changes just about everything - privacy, politics, the experience of place...everything.

I wrote a book about it (some commentary here) and am teaching a class on a closely-related subject.

"They tend to confuse their linguistic constructs with actual knowledge."

bingo! not saying that that is the case here, but in general i find this to be true. "***********y language" is something that has always been a pet peeve of mine. sure, write for an academic audience, but elevate the writing with intelligent ideas, not 10 cent language. flowery language is typically used to hide conceptual inadequacies or compensate for the author's insecurities. i don't think that's the case with adam's article though. my issue with the article isn't the language, it's just the limitations inherent in analyzing a lived experience. same reason i hate most books that look at the punk/hardcore scene.

also, after reading about Everyware a bit, i really want to check it out.

This gets to the core of why writing and ideas like this make me want to draw the shades and spend the rest of the week reading old books. Now is not special. If you think now is special, you are wrong. If you don't believe me, go to a book store that stocks a lot of remainders and look at all the books from 2, 3, or 5 years ago that argued that now was special then. There are more where they came from down at the library, though most have been languishing unread since about two years after their publication date. If you still don't believe me, go read every decent political speech ever written and think about how most of them are based on the subtext that now is special.



You can draw a lot of ears your way by talking about how special now is; Thomas Friedman, for one, has made a substantial career and a pretty penny out of it, and politicians wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't work. But that doesn't change the fundamental vapidity of the claim.

I once read an essay titled "the big bomb and the little pill." It was hilariously illustrative of your point.