You get out what you put in. Garbage in Garbage out. Read enough junk and you’ll write junk. Truisms, but there you have ‘em. I’ve been scrolling and scanning through pages of articles and websites online and most of the writing is thrown together with one eye on the clock and one eye on Google analytics. So when I called a halt today and picked up an actual book to read, the difference was like being offered clear well water after weeks of drinking soda.

The book I reached for is Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, a collection of short stories, stories that are oblique and moving all at once. Each one of these pieces is so thoughtfully made, that they make me embarrassed of my own recent flailing both in writing and visual art. I’ve clouded my palate lately, cramming too much junk info. The foundation of every one of Davis’ stories is the act of observation, something that would seem to to be so easy that we possibly for get how to do it. But the acuity of her perception makes it clear that much of what I think of as observation in writing is simply repetition. At every turn I encounter how much I overlook.

It’s funny that I wasn’t twenty pages into the book than I had an idea for a new piece. I think of my self as relatively democratic in terms of taste, liking to take a lot of things in. But there are times when that can be as big an obstruction as having nothing to bounce off of. Even the majority of what I read here on LJ doesn’t help, because so often its interest is social or emotional: I read things here to find out how friends are doing, not for their serious writing, which so often happens elsewhere. There are people here whose writing I admire but I don’t demand of them that they be meticulous craftsmen. Such expectations would be unfair. We are all writing on the fly here.

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SIIGS means Self Induced Information Gluttony Syndrome. I just made that acronym up. And the syndrome too. But I’ve been living it for a while, dosing myself with nuggets of mostly distracting information via my phone and computers. My concentration has been slipping and after a few hours in the torrent of news snippets, I feel stupider and strangely dispairing.

Most likely it is time for an information diet. I’m fond of Feedly, a program that turns all of my google reader rss subscriptions into a page of varied story tidbits. But after all that clicking, I have even less useful information than I did before.

And let’s be clear here: useful information is, from the artist point of view, information that leads to me making art in some form. I can trick myself and say that that I’ll use all of this stuff eventually, but if I am constantly dazed and dopey in the short term, there will be no eventually. Useful information sparks the creative impulse either by providing an inspiring example, or posing a problem I want to resolve. Useless information is just something I file away to make it seem like I’m doing something.

I know all the tools for dealing with this sort of behavior and this type of writing is one of them: I’ve faced this kind of willful distraction many times in the past. I’ve been missing my therapist lately ( now realizing that I’m coming up on the anniversary of ending therapy) and these are the sorts of skills he helped me develop.

Once again I must ask, distracted from what? And why?

One of today’s tasks has been the continuing digitization of my music collection, which is heading towards 300gb at this point, with still quite a few CDs left to rip. A lot of stuff I’m adding now is stuff that I bought for DJ purposes over the past ten years or so. Lots of compilation CDs that I got for one or two songs. I’ve decided to dump the entire CD into iTunes however, just to see what I does to my music mix. There’s going to be a lot of dodgy house music. I’m from the generation that looks at our music collections as some sort of badge of identity. So I can’t help but think that when random play throws up something that I wouldn’t consciously pick I should be somehow embarrassed. This will be a nice exercise in letting that go. At the very least I’m starting to approach that fantasy ideal of having every piece of music I own all in one place, equally available. When that occurs, what will it “say” about me?

Why save anything? There’s a part of me that wants to let it all go. (is it the same part that makes stupid mistakes like misplacing hard drives and cameras?). Collecting is a baffling impulse, self defining and self obscuring all at the same time. If I want to see another picture, I should make it dammit, and not look it up on line. But I’m not there yet.

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I watched this happen ten years ago to my old neighborhood, Fort Greene. It’s the beginning of the end for the neighborhood. Now will come the weekends of people wandering the streets “getting a feel for the area” and then the one of the big realtors will swoop in and then comes the pricing escalation until there is no choice but to leave.. The formula these articles follow also nauseates me: “never thought I’d leave Manhattan, now I’ve got a kid, got so much more for our Million than we would have gotten in Park Slope,” feh.

I know I should think of myself as the leading edge of the encroaching buzzards of gentrification rather than as some one distinct from them. I’ve only lived here eight years after all. But I can’t escape the feeling that the I’m being chased from neighborhood to neighborhood by the Times.

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How dop we know I’m not a professional photographer? I don’t follow the golden rule, which is always make sure that your batteries are charged and you have enough space on your cards before you leave the house. As it is, I’m down in Asbury Park, at the new house of a friend, and in the middle of a very fun evening, my Nikon’s battery died. So this is one of the few pictures I got of the Jersey Shore Roller Girls warming up for their Roller Derby match last night. There was a bunch of other things that would have been great to shoot, but c’est la vie, as Robbie Neville used to sing.

Even with the power outage, myself and Lolita have been having a fantastic time. The house is two blocks from the beach and the boardwalk, and our hosts are gracious and excited about their new place. Lehigh has been a bit badly behaved, I’m sorry to say, but that’s just been a bump in the proceedings.

Roller derby is a bit more of a finesse game now that it was when I used to watch it growing up. They’ve eliminated the banked track and the railings which means that there isn’t as much violent checking as there used to be. The players still go down (and we had one injury that was sever enough for someone to have to be helped off the track) but it’s no where near as brutal as it used to be. Since I’m someone who can’t rollerskate for a foot in any direction without ending up on my ass, I’m astonished by the skill displayed by these women maneuvering around the track and through dense clumps of competitors.

The whole thing has gotten a lot more campy too: every one has that is essentially a drag name. My favorites: For a player: Sharmaine Tank. For an official: Biroller Disorder DSM4, for an announcer (and singer of the National Anthem): Mannah Montana. And then there was the local favorite ref: Douche Springsteen, whose name prompted a local yahoo to bellow “Hey DOUCHE! You’re a DOUCHE!!!” Every single time he saw it printed on the ref’s back. Some people are very happy to have learned how to read.

After the event we hit the board walk for pizza and ices and a visit to the Pinball Museum which allows you unlimited plays on a hundred vintage machines. I managed to get a high score on SkyLab, a machine I used to play thirty years ago.

Today is brunch and then wending our way back home.

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Picking up and heading to the Jersey Shore for a couple of days. Looking forward to a little irresponsibility and camaraderie.

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Thank you internet for telling me about the existence of something I had no inkling of; namely the debut of Foreskin Man, the “Intactivist” hero whose new adventures promise to be hair raising if not so very wide ranging.

I get that the way to win hearts and minds is to enlist the next generation in your cause, and on the whole I feel that there are very few good arguments for guys to be cut, but I can’t look at this site without being skeeved. Take a look at the character bios and tell me that you want to spend time with any of these people. And the sub plot of a biotech firm engaged in a conspiracy to harvest foreskins? The notion of a “Museum of Genital Integrity”? There’s such a thing as overplaying your hand.

The idea of a world where the biggest problem for a super hero to tackle is curcumcision is oddly optimistic when you think about it. Or maybe Foreskin Man is just biding his time until he can take on all forms of genital mutilation. Hopefully we’ll see some cool crossovers – I’m personally praying for one with Big Boy.

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The time that is – much of the summer has slipped past and I couldn’t really tell you where. Same goes for the year. I start many days going , OK I’m really going to pull it together today, only to be sprawled out in confusion at the end of them.

Went with Lolita to see “Despicable Me” yesterday. I’d call it diverting, more than anything else. The pacing seemed a little weird – it’s 88 minutes, and could easily have supported another fifteen. As it is the characters are all hitting their beats of acceptance and transformation at a pace that reads as slightly perfunctory.

Spent some time in Phoenicia this weekend, part of it doing a short performance. Managed to incorporate a crying clown, so now we know that I have a sublime aesthetic touch.

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Lehigh gets a cab ride, and is mostly unimpressed. She’s been with my mom for almost a month. I’m happy to have her back home.

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