<nettime> Re: Deeply boring age

[fran ilich <ilich_030@hotmail.com>]

> It's a notion voiced by
> adolescents reading Hemingwway's "A Movable Feast," dreaming of moving to
> Paris. but not their Paris, for that would be a real plan. Instead, they
> yearn to move to the mythical Paris of the 20s, secure in their teenaged
> fantasies of befriending Picasso and Fitzgerald.
> 
> In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Buffalo, NY. My buddies and I would
> sit around in the freezing cold, drinking Canadian beer (it was cheap and
> had a higher alcohol content than American brews) and bitch about how boring
> everything was. At that very time, within walking distance, Hollis Frampton
> was making his Magellan Cycle of avant-garde films, Robert Longo and Cindy
> Sherman had opened an alternative art gallery, a bar called the Continental
> was mounting punk shows of every band that mattered, and Michel Foucault (in
> his first American teaching gig) was holding holding forth about the history
> of sexuality. Buffalo wasn't boring, I was.

i guess this sumes everything up, lots of people everywhere are complaining
about things that dont happen, only thing they forget is that in order for
them to happen, you have to make it happen. and with the internet the
feeling of boredom and nothing happens never can get multiplied very easily,
because no matter what kind of content we are processing its still in a
solitude or in a companionship which is quite different from going to a
party, etc... but things are happening and this reminds me of one of the
best contributions nettime has done to my life:

action is elsewhere.

and if you cant make it happen or you are making it happen, for sure its
still somewhere else, like a truth that its forever escaping and forever
being chased by yourself... like a loop of infinity. this makes me remember
a lot about my trip to serbia in the summer of 1999 which in part was
inspired by nettime, and then again it makes me acknowledge a lot of people
i see everyday in real life complaining that nothing happens in
cyberculture/tekno/etc, meanwhile they are just doing nothing, not even
reading a book.... or if they are doing it, they arent doing their own
thing, they are paying to much attention to media and the trends it
dictates.  and at the end you have to remember that the media has a big
power over people, and i dont know why, i mean i can uderstand why, but at
the end of the day in real life in one's life, media is nothing unless you
want it to be. and life and creation have to be experienced first hand, not
in a mediated fashion. so in a radical way..... cmon, people, dont be
boring. my lonely room and my ibook and my pile of books are full of life
and excitement even if my friends only come from time to time to say whats
up and maybe from time to time to even complaing why nothing is happening.
does anybody have a clue? should we blame the wto?

nos vemos en el futuro.

ilich.
editor @ large, sputnik.

http://www.sputnik.com.mx
http://www.neuroticos.com/borderhack

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