This was two years ago. This year I just couldn’t get up for the trip to Austin. Seeing Steve Collins stateside that year was nice. Steve introduced me to Immediatism via his website a long time ago.
To be “too busy” for the Immediatist project is to miss the very essence of Immediatism. To struggle to come together every Monday night (or whatever), in the teeth of the gale of busyness, or family, or invitations to stupid parties—that struggle is already Immediatism itself. Succeed in actually physically meeting face-to-face with a group which is not your spouse-&-kids, or the “guys from my job,” or your 12-Step Program—& you have already achieved virtually everything Immediatism yearns for.
(From Immediatism vs. Capitalism.) Today is a repeat of about a week ago for some nonspecific reason. Listening to Sun Kill Moon and being sad.
An actual project will arise almost spontaneously out of this successful slap-in-the-face of the social norm of alienated boredom. Outwardly, of course, the project will seem to be the group’s purpose, its motive for coming together—but in fact the opposite is true. We’re not kidding or indulging in hyperbole when we insist that meeting face-to-face is already “the revolution.” Attain it & the creativity part comes naturally; like “the kingdom of heaven” it will be added unto you. Of course it will be horribly difficult—why else would we have spent the last decade trying to construct our “bohemia in the mail,” if it were easy to have it in some quartier latin or rural commune? The rat-bastard Capitalist scum who are telling you to “reach out and touch someone” with a telephone or “be there!” (where? alone in front of a goddam television??)—these lovecrafty suckers are trying to turn you into a scrunched-up blood-drained pathetic crippled little cog in the death-machine of the human soul (& let’ s not have any theological quibbles about what we mean by “soul!”). Fight them—by meeting with friends, not to consume or produce, but to enjoy friendship—& you will have triumphed (at least for a moment) over the most pernicious conspiracy in EuroAmerican society today—the conspiracy to turn you into a living corpse galvanized by prosthesis & the terror of scarcity—to turn you into a spook haunting your own brain. This is not a petty matter! This is a question of failure or triumph!
(Emphasis mine.)
I’m hopefully going to a loaned office today to work on a complete re-write of SWIM that instantly formed in my head as I tried to lay down for a quick nap late yesterday. I’m going to try to use this non-SXSW time to get a large chunk of that done.
Update: a nice brisk ride down to the west end + database design + building the models out in Rails + finding babysitter for tonight + getting paid has all made for a MUCH improving day!
I am a little scared of learning a whole new language, but damn if I didn’t get it today like I never was able to before. Time to cozy up with that Rails book I never sold! I’m going to do that and explore some of the popular PHP MVC frameworks concurrently.