Folks at Google are probably not giving us a hint with “ex pat,” short for expatriate, but I wish they were. Yes, the example provided is of Pat, or Patrick, who, like most of us, want to venture off east- or west-ward over seas to more exotic places — as critique of America, or simply for better food — but simply stayed, for a mortgage, career, relationship, or other thing one is supposed to have. The big bros Google and Facebook know your IP location at all times, and should those vectors point to your office, living room, or bedroom, then let’s say it’s not your fault, but the fault of this internet who re-wired us into thinking that 4 hrs offline is some venture into dark mysterious non-connected places. A text that isn’t answered in 5 minutes is symbolic dust in the shape of a middle finger. True, the expatriate wouldn’t be so free were it not for ongoing travel logistics one attends to over email, but the inadvertent “ex pat” username is a good reminder of the tethers to which we are bound by carpal tunnelled wrists. I went canoeing yesterday with co-workers who were freaking out because they hadn’t checked their email in over 4 hours; some of us flipped, our cell phones and wallets floating down stream in neurotically sealed zip-lock bags. We came across a deer carcass who, from the degree of its decomposition, hadn’t checked its email in like 14 days. Holy shit, the river went.

Terry Gross with Jonathan Franzen

TERRY GROSS: A lot of people think we look very similar, would you care to comment on that?

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Well Terry, you do sort of look like a man; no offense, and I’m dating a feminist, so we’re on the same team here. Most women have long hair and softer features, which is where the problem is. I just think Americans really need to step back and realize it’s not all about capitalism and gender. My new novel Freedom aims to expose the underbelly and subconscious of the American pathos.

TERRY GROSS: Thanks, that was really touching — speaking of which, what am I hearing under the table?

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Well Terry, I’m under contractual agreement with my publishers to “pound away at [my] future,” and this moment I’m focusing on DNA.

TERRY GROSS: Gross.

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Franzen.

The top ten list just released [left] is almost identical as last year’s [right], except University of Massachusetts Amherst was dropped, replaced by Syracuse University. If you care about your future, the drive will take you approximately 4 hours and 23 minutes. If you have to cry in the car, please roll down the windows, as your tears will evaporate quicker. A good place to hide acid tabs should you be pulled over is under your eyelids. A good place to blow someone is America. The best way to get there:

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Using the clone stamp in Photoshop, artist Paul Pheiffer, in his digital print and video work, meticulously erases — or more accurately, imposes background space onto — surrounding areas, leaving one sole basketball player suspended in air without any context of ball, net, or other players. The result is uncanny and stunning, and initially brought to mind the Crucifixion, whose main character is also abstracted in front of a spectacle. The jersey design and player number have been removed, perhaps in wishful allegiance to John Lennon’s imagining that there were no teams or corporate sponsors. Galleries and sports stadiums function as modern churches, a place of worship [see related post]. Last night looking over this series entitled “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (ongoing, which began ten years ago), I was suddenly reminded of the lynchings against blacks, like a rope photoshopped out of our minds.

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I.

This morning I was listening to Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” on my headphones sitting outside drinking coffee, a 56-minute commitment to listen to in its entirety. The score is recorded live in one take; the instruments played so uncharacteristically that they sound put through a sequencer. Much of Reich’s music is about timbre, acoustic capacities, and the melodic “negative space” between syncopated notes. When some bass clarinets came in pulsing thick and strong, I felt deep droning reverberations in my chest cavity, so visceral it was, so moved by the spiritual score  — until I realized a large truck approaching behind me, shaking the ground, its driver the 19th musician.

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How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself.   — Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999)

As evasive her “one” pronoun dance is, Murdoch rings clear a concern and problem for many writers (concern for the cognizant, problem for the oblivious), that the writer, at the height of their creation, is not creating, but merely transcribing their experience veiled as character.

As Jonathan Franzen solemnly graces the cover of TIME magazine, we got to thinking who of his peers were also deserving of a cover on other magazines, and what those magazines might be. Here are our top picks:

Lamont Library, Harvard

Instead of ivy, mold crawls on the walls of my education. Of the eight Ivy League universities’ mottos, Harvard and Yale’s include “truth,” and Brown and Princeton employ “God.” My favorite is Darmouth’s, which speaks of a crying voice in the wilderness (probably referring to freshmen year in the dorms). In addition to Statistics 101, kids returning library books at Harvard are met with a lesson in the highly improbable. Graduating from where I did with the degree I did was my own lesson in the highly improbable, namely, a good career. I masochistically look forward to The Social Network, which partially takes place at Harvard. The first google suggestion for facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, besides his name, is “Mark Zuckerberg Girlfriend” — for success is not just measured at the bank, but by the lady next to you, her breasts and your eyes ideally pointing towards the same bright future.

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Photo Booth Mask by Mark Pernice

“Photo Booth Mask” is an actual mask rendered from a distorted image using Apple’s photo booth application; that he documents himself wearing the mask adds to the disembodied simulacra. The project may point to the absurd narcissism of the affected expressions usually made with the distortion effects, a kind of reverse aesthetic of trying to look grotesque. One is reminded of Francis Bacon, who fucked with faces way back; true, the camera changed painting, and now it changes sculpture, and with the latter, there’s an eerie leap from what ought to be two-dimensional to an actualized object, a transgression of mimesis.

Literature is a college party: throw in enough depressed people with personality disorders, and someone is bound to get laid. At around 11PM, the bad boys enter, high on red-bull and vodka. I miss the days of Hemingway or Bukowski, where manly self-destruction came from self-hatred and happened before the photo shoot. If James Frey, per the constant middle-fingered vector of his “fuck you,” is today’s “bad boy” (sorry Bret Easton Ellis, your suit’s too good), then we have lost the battle of soul grasping. Of course, he’s just operating off of the fake memoir public image disaster — but I just worry about someone, anyone, who engages with the world, a world in which one has acquired moderate success and comfort, with such affected and insincere hostility. I find Sartre’s 1964 Nobel Prize decline a much more compelling “fuck you”; that, or a gunshot to the head. Frey will be just fine. I’d like to think, save those two little fleshy spears, he’s just reaching out for a hug.

Haruki Murakami has a lot of issues (not talking about his various extra copies of The New Yorker in which he published) and being alienated in Tokyo with a hard-on is not one of them. Does thinking you have hypochondria make you a hypochondriac? What if you really suffer from thinking you suffer? I suspect Murakami, during and in between writing novels and their respective advances, has a handful of time on his hands — and should those hands be populated with parts of his failing body, then we are not to judge. Everyone loves a sensitive man, but lay off the Bengay.

I. Surrogate Book as Book

One is given not just a hypothetical cover of the book, but an entire surrogate book as a manifested object residing in space. This may point to modern painting’s preoccupation with the represented vs. the actual, or it may be some self-reflexive fetishism of books themselves, as if to congratulate the reader for picking one — that one — up.

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Artist Jane Mount paints other people’s bookshelves in her wonderfully playful and strikingly accurate “Ideal Bookshelf” series. That they are (I presume) actual collections and not imaginings, augments the idea of what is “ideal.” A quick click through is very enjoyable. Book designers may find it very instructive how identifiable a book’s spine is, a condensed version of the cover’s visual syntax.

With the new iPhone’s video chat, a second built-in camera faces the user, whose image is shown in the interface as a kind of tiny self-portrait. Of the many narratives instilled in their recent advertising campaign, a women tells her husband that she’s expecting (expectation being Apple’s entire marketing ethos). We the consumer become the husband, experiencing a half-life of their fantasy. In the ad, a perfect hand holds the phone — a model’s, though we accept it as the husband’s, faithful of the narrative.

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