Give me more pocks. Give me the ones with maps on their skins. Give me the ones that wear freckles, nodes, weird sinkholes & dimples. Give me anything but plastic, smooth, resiny, Red Delicious lacquer. Give me fewer apples, give me more mottles and dapples.

They feel better in my palm. That satisfying gruffness of texture. Greeting the hand like a wool mitten. Supermarket Granny Smiths are inert in the palm like a cold steel handle.

The first few times I visited the Inwood farmer’s market, I made my new friends: the Golden Russet, The Stayman Winesap, the mysterious apples with only 3 digit numbers for names. I’d recently read Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, still wild over the part where he visits the apple orchard to end all apple orchards: some vast biteable catalogue of endless variety & shape, with apples little bigger than walnuts, apples that tasted like oranges and pears, apples with strange wild feral flavors and wrinkled skins like prunes (I’m paraphrasing loosely from memory). And now here they were in front of me, cousins of the ones he’d written of, heaped pell-mell in wooden crates, stems still on, cratered, pitted, unkempt and brazen. Their supermarket sisters elsewhere in tidy rows, tired and vacant like well-dressed children on SSRIs.

I walked the market stand, watched them. Every one was a personality. Some sassy ones, some cowed ones, some martyrs, some firebrands, some braggarts. One had what looked like a bad rash. Little peppery indentations tinged red around the stem. I was afraid to bite it. And when I did I saw that the red had suffused the white flesh beneath, as if a wound. My girlfriend told me later that hail could cause this, when the apple was first forming. The taste was unaffected, but watching the subterranean patterns formed by the hailrash transformed how I ate. I marveled at the designs while I chewed, seeing the pink wound-roots of this apple’s history.

Golden Russet became my favorite. Its flavor was crisp and subtle and always only flirted with sour and sweet, could never commit, just weaved around taste buds leaving trails of honey and almond and walnut behind. It clove in even wedges from the tooth, as if built for biting. I can imagine its taste and touch now, as vividly as when I had one months ago, which I almost can never do with food.

Mottles and dapples, so many of them. Those weird magic blends of flavors, complex and lingering, all bred away to the blunt blow on the tongue of Red Delicious and Granny Smiths. And all that rich wild topography of appleskin sieved and filtered and winnowed down to familiar cheap flashy supermarket wax-sheen.

I had always thought all this was silly. People crowing about varieties of apple, squash, oyster. Wine. Whatever. Seemed indulgent, idle, snobbish. Neo-hippyish and offensively granola. Ponytailed prissiness. But then you taste or experience something that wakes you up. Makes you revel in your senses, reminds you you have a tongue, a nose, sense organs built to know and hold so much more than you had realized was out there.

Like when you first try yoga and you feel some weird part of your back or thigh light up and crackle with pain-pleasure, some backwoods territory of your body you never even knew existed. And you stop, you take a breath, and you think: “shit, I live in this thing, and how much of it am I really aware of?” Even a lowly little apple can make you feel the same way, can cause you to marvel at how broad sensory experience can be and how much within it there is to sample — and how much of it that unpredictable variety people actively seek to curtail.

Nature is so vast, yet we choose to cull and promote such a small swath of it. As if resenting its enormity, its reckless variety. Whether it’s flowers, tomatoes, apples, anything that can grow and be consumed — we try to control and shape and create a demand, and anything wild and untameable & strange — anything that isn’t easily marketable — we shove away until we forget it ever existed. It’s part of what we do as humans, and must do — and at its best, it’s a beautiful act of harmonious tending and shaping (think Bonsai). At its worst, it’s petty and fearful; small-minded and profit-thralled.

We think we know Nature, its growths and types & creatures and patterns, but none of us ever will, even those of us who want to. Most of us only know the safe and manageable images of it we’ve created from it or forced upon it. Like growing up thinking all deers are Bambis, all elephants Dumbos, and only animals in cute hallmark cards are worth trying to save.
    

(broken)	(unbroken)	(broken)

Nature will save itself. Nature always innovates — in flower terms, “breaks” — whether tulip or apple or superflu. It wreaks wildness out of the shapes we impose, expect, plan for. And this is why we love it and are troubled by it. Its gorgeous chaos & defiance.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

                  

   

It has become evolutionary at this point to admire and worship our man-made, synthetic versions of nature and ourselves — while also denigrating/ignoring the original reality from which they came.

As animals and plants become extinct, our fascination and even preference for artificial representations of them [stuffed animals, cute photoshopped hallmarky dogs and cats, remarkably life-like fake plants] dominate. It’s easy to see why — we can extract from the originals all that makes them safe and easy and forgo the figurative thorns (fake plants that don’t stink, rot, have imperfect petals, aphids; stuffed animals or robo-animals that aren’t temperamental, biting, are perfectly obedient, have no excretory functions, are docile, and are able to receive passively all our fantasies and projections).

We weren’t content to extend absolute mastery over nature. Now, annoyed with captive nature’s occasional recalcitrance, or just plain annoying Otherness, we scrap it and make it in our own image, like Gods.

The most fascinating aspect of all this is how it turns inward, upon ourselves. Unable to accept the beauty of variation and imperfection, we will turn to human simulacra more and more — there are already on the market incredibly expensive and highly-lifelike female sex-dummies. Genetics, cosmetic surgery, these aren’t innocent practices, over time they embed this idea in the collective unconscious: “we will not tolerate our own variation and that of others. we will airbrush ourselves and others to make everyone safer to everyone else’s eyes and sensibilities. there is something ugly and frightening about people who don’t conform to our safe expectations, and it’s our duty to remedy this”. And the more people internalize this script, the more they seek to externalize it and inflict it on others.

This is all born of fear. It is a kind of self-directed fascism, an inability to tolerate nuance and variation, a hunger for the imposition of strict standards for what is appealing and what is not.

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   
          

   
   
Here’s a report of 20th Century Fox having unfavorable movie reviews yanked from You Tube.

Is anyone surprised? The net makes truth & opinion so much easier to access, so ubiquitous, it’s inevitable that it be corrupted and stymied by those with the will and force to do so.

The net, welcomed with so much teary-eyed idealism in its early years, and now in its accelerated, endlessly-fractalled adolescence presenting all sorts of pains and frustrations to those with something to suppress or revise — be it corporation that can’t handle criticism or individual who is embarrassed or alarmed to find traces, ghosts, echoes of him/herself on the net (I think of coworkers of mine who get contorted in endless knots of conscience over harmless pictures added to their profiles and which they now realize can be viewed by a mistakenly-added manager or boss).

The net makes you accountable. The net holds a mirror right up to you. It’s going to intensify as info about people and entities/companies/corporations continues to burgeon; data mining/exchanging in the medical and marketing and social networking sectors is astonishingly widespread. And if you’re not ready to own up, the net doesn’t give a fuck. You’re either going to have to accept yourself as individual or entity or do what Fox is doing here, and scrub very hard with the biggest steel-wool brush you can find until the spots are out. In vain of course, since in the time it took you to scratch out one blemish, ten thousand more appeared. Whack-a-mole in an endless prairie with a billion new squinty critic-bloggers for every fifty you bash. Pointless cyber-crusades against armies of deathless data.

In a way, Fox is only doing what most of us do in the small sphere of our own lives — redact until the story’s right, photoshop away until that Facebook shot looks perfect. They just looks even more villainous because, well, they’re 20th century Fox.

Obviously the stakes are higher when a corporation with more power and resources than an individual uses its clout and dollars to suppress truth. This is more momentous and damaging than when an individual tries to bowdlerize their wikipedia entry.

Still, the underlying assumptions tie both acts together: truth is mutable, is a function of what can be spun, shown, suppressed; surface-truth (what we present to be the case) trumps actual truth (what is actually the case).

How often have you, in your own life, tried to edit your story? How many sentences restructured, whole passages struck? How subtle the tweak, how skillful the erasure, or how crude the demolition? If there was a Wikipedia entry about you full of everything you’ve done, would you do your level best to edit until the reportage turned into fable? Until all events which could provoke criticism were excised? Or would you look at yourself full in the mirror, flaws and all, and own yourself, take responsibility for all you are?

Let’s rail & rail often against 20th century Fox and any other corporation or company that seeks to silence opposition through cowardly suppressive measures. But let’s also consider our own complicity in this culture of selective presentation, of endless redaction, of failure to own up to and accept ourselves with integrity. We may find that even in the age of deathless data we, like Fox, still imagine we can and should run from ourselves, scramble in futility like people trying to dodge raindrops in a thunderstorm.

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

The paintbrush shown in the above video is a remarkable piece of technology. It’s eerie but breathtaking to watch a human being capture complex, varied patches of color, texture and motion and reproduce it all with a flick of the wrist.

At the same time this is essentially just another sampling technology, taking the camera to its next logical evolutionary stage: not only snap the world out of context, but repurpose it in real-time.

As sampling technology then, it has the same potential to be used to honor its medium (I think of Edgar Varese’s musical compositions, or some of the soundscapes in a Public Enemy song) or debase it (contemporary pop which lifts entire melodies and motifs from older artists, slaps on a new lyric and calls it a new composition). It all depends on who handles the technology.

Still, at the risk of seeming all Ludditish, all I see are people creating more distance (or having distance inserted) between themselves and life through technology like this. I think of all the concerts and live music I’ve been to in recent years where, more and more, the audience is content to view everything through a lens, snapping away, only occasionally putting aside the camera to experience the event unmediated.

Or botanical gardens I’ll go to where people rush up to a bonsai tree, or orchid, or kiku flower, snap a few strained photos and hurry off to the next shot, never pausing to experience the subject in its immediacy, apart from the impulse to contain and preserve — and sample.

People are being conditioned to relate to the world outside of them as opportunities first & foremost for sampling and capture, whether by camera or this new LED-paintbrush, & not as opportunities for real, developed, fully-rounded experience.

Many will answer a concern like mine with: “Well, um, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”
 (Read More . . .)

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com
   

   

(10 more like him here)
   

19th century thinkers like William Paley argued for the existence of God based on brilliant, beautiful, complex designs in nature — flowers, trees, bird plumage.

You might as well argue for the existence of God based on the ten astonishingly repulsive submarine lives in the link above: Alien forms so ugly they resist all aesthetic valuation. With walleyed gill-flutter they shatter the mirror and slither into the soft void beyond, where symmetry, harmony, color, line & beauty all become meaningless. They’re defiantly themselves, in silent, weird, ultra-pressurized pitch — Holy fuck, look at these critters.

My throat catches when I scan them all. The glutinous blobfish. The estuarine rockfish, severe & implacable as an Olmec head. The wheezing porcine lumpfish.

Why do I start to feel this way? Is it because I catch myself finding them wretched and laughable, ridiculously abhorrent, and then become ashamed with myself, knowing they can’t help how they were made?

Is it because I feel humbled in their presence, their ancient miles-removed presence, so coldly distant from mine that they might as well be martians wriggling among asteroids?

Is it because I feel smaller and uglier & more pathetic compared to their spiny, encrusted, cartilaginoid, mucoused, jellied but unselfconscious & heedless & glaring faces? More purely themselves in all their horrorshow gristle than all of us with our dissembling and meta-shit and second-guessing?

There they are, these deeptrench lives, captured in shock at the foot of ours, drinking all our drainage, our oldest and strangest cohabiters, blinking and mouthing in black while we feed them more plastic.

Lists.

LISTS.

SWEET JESUS POTATO GUNS we love our lists.

Can I please have a day of Internets without another godforsaken Authoritative Top Ten List of important shit befouling my screen?

I remember seeing High Fidelity years ago and thinking: damn. People love lists. An entire film based around a man’s list-rank organization of his love life’s vicissitudes. & I remember simultaneously liking and feeling odd about that. It tapped into the geeky anal organizer in me, but it also felt cheap, easy, hydrogenated, canola-oiled, sort of throwaway and disrespectful of the experiences under discussion in the film.

Since then it’s only gotten worse, in media, art, blogs, & I’ve become increasingly alarmed at everyone’s insistence on reducing history & day-to-day experience to a tidy assortment of ratings, rankings — everything crammed through this OCD quantitative sieve.

It’s as if we don’t trust experiences unless we can package them & stamp them with a tag/number — so much anxiety in every step of that machine-like categorization. You can feel it pulsing behind the numbers, a teeth-chattering, skittery little ghost-droid, antennae frantically waving, robo-tentacles eager to seize more data parcels to slot & secure. Hell, I’ll be doing it at the end of this post.

The uninterrupted modern brain/eye-fuck of data datadatadadtaddtatdtatdata must make us this way. So much info hailing down upon us from every source that all we can do is try to make ourselves bots in the face of it: analyze, arrange, parse, order, next data set please.

My mother called me yesterday to hear my voice.

I said: “Mother, what are the top five reasons you love me?” She responded readily, with a tagged data set including supplemental links to her & my amazon wishlists.

I felt 6.5 EU (emotional units) of love at that instant, and we exchanged relational signifiers before disengaging our info-relay.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008