Do you believe in talent? Please define the word and defend your position.

“There IS a responsibility to the audience,” he said. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to these kids–we don’t want to release anything we can’t handle.” We talked about magic and Aleister Crowley. Jimmy said that Crowley has been maligned as a black magician, whereas magic is neither white nor black, good nor bad–it is simply alive with what it is: the real thing, what people really feel and want and are. I pointed out that this “either/or” straitjacket had been imposed by Christianity when all magic became black magic; that scientists took over from the Church, and Western man has been stifled in a non-magical universe known as “the way things are.” Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.

“Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin,
And a search for the elusive Stairway to Heaven”
by William Burroughs
Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975

00110001 00110000. A reflection, of the kind stylized under internet-based logos ever more increasingly, not only actualizes an object and propels it into space, but implicates a pristine white surface on which it stands.

00111001. An empty white room is a good place for a logo. A white room, if one considers the etymology of white (white blood cell, white wedding, white house), is a good thing, a room of one’s own without an angry Woolf, a good place to write.

00111000. A wall on which one writes one’s thoughts is not graffiti, for graffiti is written on walls by the marginalized other, a group who has been unfriended irl. In real life, people have less friends.

00110111. Your facebook wall is not the Berlin wall, or the Great Wall — a place to keep others out — but the Wailing Wall, a daily place of prayer, where hopes and dreams are stored.

00110110. If you are followed, your wall is on somebody else’s feed. You do not reflect on your wall, but type whatever. When someone says whatever, in that suburban ghetto way, they are dismissing you. A baby bird, a tiny twitter, chirps “feed me.”

00110101. In Caravaggio’s “Narcissus” (c.1599), the eponymous young man, in love with his reflection, is transfixed by its residence on the surface of a pool. Narcissus, in Greek, means “sleep, numbness.”

00110100. Narcissus cannot leave his reflection. Unable to differentiate between himself and his image, he wastes away and dies by the pool. He partied like it was 1599.

00110011. No one considers Pequod’s reflection on the sea, as it was not in a white room, but on a blue circle. The light, one presumes, is turned off in Beckett’s room, so his room is black. When Benjy Compson closes his eyes, he thinks the room turns black.

00110010. At the end of a difficult French film that was excruciatingly boring, you see a black box with the word FIN inside that box. You will write on your wall about seeing that French film, and how you only watched half of it, because half of the time you were reading the subtitles.

00110001. Every word is a subtitle in the film of your life, directed and shot in real time by you. Congratulations. You, in a white room, not reflecting on things, just reflecting.