First and foremost in my mind is this: the marriage of Final Cut Pro and a 400 mhz iMac is rocky… currently on the rocks, as I look over and see the “Estimated Time” take about 10 minutes to move from “About 14 minutes” to “About 13 minutes”. I feel like a bit of a slave driver, pushing this once-cutting edge piece of processing power to its very limits, all so that young university-plankton (and by this I refer to the vast swarms of students who fill the bottom of the academic food-chain) might be tricked into being interested by a moving image or two, since mere ideas don’t seem to be enough.

{{ I am laughing as I write this. I have a slightly better opinion of our present-day student body than this. Perhaps… krill. }}

I try to tell myself that my Bondi iMac is just a machine, a passive, mute amalgamation of mechanical apparatuses and virtual tools sent to this earth to do my, or another’s, bidding. But I have read too much about our human history to really convince myself– after all, isn’t that what most civilizations thought of those they enslaved? Isn’t that what Michal Adas’ Machines as the Measure of Man is all about?

Nor is this an anxiety about revolt– I am not talking any Terminator or Matrix or any other fashionable paranoia– I do not fear my machine, I only sympathize.

As Henderson would say– “I admire rational people and envy their clear heads, but what’s the use of kidding?”. He of course was speaking of the dead– “For it so happens that I have never been able to convince myself the dead are utterly dead”- but I would quickly extend that thought to what we consider inert, or in any case non-sentitent; dead of a different order. After all, wasn’t my Mercury Cougar [now deceased] full of personality? Of indefatigable teen energy, despite its venerable 21 years? Did it not bear it’s name, Perdo, with dignity and verve? And wasn’t the crowning emotion of my tumultuous wreck not any reflection on my close brush with death but rather the sense of my own betrayal of a partner that had done nothing but serve me faithfully? And do I not suffer the anguish, to this day, of knowing that the Cougar’s last action was of sacrifice, that it had shielded my body and life with its metal-armored embrace and left me in a halo, untouched by the horrifying impact that so twisted & distorted the rest of him?

So there you have it. I suppose there is some name for that, a condition of mental unease that anticipates a certain type of life out of the inanimate… but then again, there are “conditions” for visionaries and dreamers and witches and ghosts. So, once again, what’s the use of kidding? There is far more in this heaven and earth than dreamt of in our philosophies (only my Horatio lies, crushed and alone, in a junk yard in Paso Robles).

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So then, on to the updates…

• The major addition is the Hockney’d Gallery Map in the Psychic Radio Comics section. I have never before put such large type on any page and I am not sure if I like it but it’ll probably not change until I steal another larger chunk of time to re-edit (so, not for a while…).
• A smaller change is on the comics’ index page, where I am testing out some links to the documentation (including the draft for my MFA catalog) and a few images from the Loft
• Of a less exciting order, I also made changes in the professional page, where I 1) altered my teaching philosophy a tiny bit, 2) made all the documents available in openoffice.org’s sxw format (I guess mostly as an advertisement that I am Linux savvy and that I support OS software & culture, etc etc etc), and 3) removed the (what I thought was) funny and self-deprecating “longer bio”… My mother, in particular, petitioned for its removal as she thought it counter-productive to portray myself in any light other than miraculous. I am not convinced, but her case is blindly aided by the fact that I wrote that many months ago, and am a bit tired of it myself. So it’s gone, until I think of something more amusing or start really going for jobs…

Could you handle more? I thought not… so, I think that’s all for the moment. Now, I might go eat some lunch. Perhaps more later.