Other Lives

To each being, several other lives were due. - Rimbaud

Today I am a novelist, blogger, flaneur, and fluxy post-Situationist "mark on the dérive."

Yesterday I was an artist playing lead vocals for an impromptu mix-band called Electronique Écriture (we have since broken up).

The day before that I was a sentimental art historian pining for the good old days of net art when nobody knew what they were doing and would never, not in a million years, consider moving to New York to "find a gallery."

The day before that I was a digital photographer and mobile phone "cinematographer" capturing new streams of data for a forthcoming film project that I am still imagining (hint: if all goes well, it will end up becoming part two in my "Foreign Film" series of feature-length works that models itself after what we used to call film but that now feels more like a new media narrative environment that integrates aspects of expanded cinema, net art, mobile blogging, and electronic literature into its conceptual framework).

The day before that I was a glutton, eating two breakfasts (a bowl of quinoa-corn flakes with grapes, raspberries, strawberries, mango, banana, plums, blueberries, blackberries, figs, raisins, dates, and soy milk [all organic/bio, naturally] and a huge poppyseed bagel with smoked salmon and cream cheese), two lunches (new age ginger and vegetable pasta followed by North African vegetarian couscous with numerous [spicy] side dishes), one mid-day snack (salade nicoise), a small loaf of organic nut bread, a round of fresh goat cheese, two mangos, one and a half avocados, a slab of sesame-almond tofu, two bottles of French red wine, a rare Belgium beer made by organic monks (yes, the Trappist monks themselves are also organic!), five cups of espresso, two bars of 76% Venezuelan extra bitter dark chocolate, actually two loaves of organic nut bread (with hummus and pesto liberally spread atop their lightly toasted crusty textures), one cup of real hot chocolate (not the usual "pre-mix watered down with milk" variety, but basically melted dark chocolate with a small amount of milk mixed in so that it pours), a double scoop of homemade ice cream (bottom scoop praline made with pine nuts, top scoop made with figs which turns the ice cream a luminous bright red so that you feel as though you are sucking the velvet blood out of a passive cone-victim), one half of a melon, a Zen smoothie (peach, mango, banana, soy milk), three servings of ratatouille served with a side dish of rocket (arugula) with fresh cherry tomatoes and thinly sliced and very aged Parmegian cheese, a bowl of cured black olives soaking in a pool of fragrant olive oil with a hint of rosemary and thyme, five pistachio baklavas, and many other things that I can't remember, especially after the unexpected hit of Absinthe that one of my colleagues insisted I drink as a way to get over pining about the good old days of net art (which is itself a fictitious pining, since the good old days were never as good as some would have you believe, and besides, is twelve years really that old?).

Tomorrow I will be a producer raising funds for yet another project that will be a multi-media documentation of various digital personas whose liquid identities enable them to create an internetworked art-making machine out of the scraps of data left behind on the other World Wide Web, the one that has its secret protocols, handshakes, codes, and missing links. One day the public password for this underground WWW will finally be revealed so that everyone, even the consuming masses, can experience the ultimate pleasure one derives from becoming the kind of "live currency" that turns dreams into actions thus enabling themselves to destroy the replicant agenda of the all-pervasive corporate media.

(And soon, yet again, I will be a Professor, as always, narrativizing these fluid personas and experiences via an ever changing array of imaginary plug-in filters that I prepare especially for the occasion [of teaching].)

---

Metadata: net art, literature, writing, food, art, music, life