Life Lessons Learned at Medieval Times

   Last year for Sass' birthday, we went to Buddhkan.  This year, we stepped up our game and went to Medieval Times. In South Carolina. Please don't ask, because we're still not entirely sure what we were doing there.  And by "there," I mean South Carolina. We know exactly why we went to Medieval Times, and we don't regret it for a second. 

    Before entering the jousting arena, we were first corralled into a giant hall full of shit they wanted us to buy. Let the record show that the only thing we bought were twenty dollar goblets of margaritas. (Let the record also show that Sass posed for a picture with the King and Queen, they would have us believe, of Medieval Spain. See photo.) Aside from all the paraphernalia to peruse, there was also a torture museum. (Spoiler alert: If that was a museum, then so is the hallway between mine and my brother's room, which, for those of you who don't know, is approximately seven feet long.) Anyway, it was still a treat, just like car accidents and five alarm fires are a treat. 

    The Hallway of Horror (as it should have been called) had such tried and true devices as the iron maiden and the stocks. There was also a chastity belt mounted somewhat incongruously in a gilded frame atop plush red velvet. As we pondered the serrated iron jaws surrounding the vagina area, we also noticed there was a smaller, rounder type situation going on around where a butt hole would be. In other words, we realized, chastity belts were designed to ensure against butt sex, too, and now that I'm getting fucked in the ass daily by my 9-5 job, I realize that butt sex and torture have gone hand in hand since the dawning of wage labor.  

    What I'm trying to say is, things haven't changed as much since the Middle Ages as we would like to believe. If we think of that period as being hard, what with its rampant and incurable disease, lack of electricity and poor treatment of women, I think I would rather be a wench with the Plague than a recent grad with a telephone bill, because while we now have highly trained physicians and high speed internet,  we also have to pay for these things, and they're all expensive.  Money still doesn't grow on trees, so we still have to work to earn our living, and slaving away behind a desk for the owner of a company is really no different from a serf toiling in the fields for the lord of his fiefdom.  And while these days, our parents don't make us wear iron skivvies, instead, they put us through college, which serves as the modern-day chastity belt that keeps us from getting fucked in the ass by the real world. The second our graduation ceremony commences, we're unceremoniously yanked out of the iron cocoon.  We're vulnerable, and it hurts. 

    In school we were taught that the Middle Ages were brutal and unforgiving, but the fact that we were never taught what the harsh realities of  our own lives would be post-graduation, or how to pay a bill or find a good health insurance policy, for example - well, that's simply medieval. 

Haikus I Wrote in Numerous High School Notebooks and Found Today

Love, you wake me up

When even alarm clocks won't

You scream me alive

Tyrosine-kinase

You're the sexiest protein

Will you marry me?

Oh, Danny Skimmer

People say that you're awkward

And I would agree

A wanton wind blows

Through silent eaves and slows

Of these things love knows

La Classe Loves R-Fed

If La Classe were a country, then its national sport would be tennis, and its official religion would be Roger Federer (minor deities include Tony Danza and cheese).  R-Fed is hot, talented and has a great sense of humor.  He also speaks four languages, which simply puts La Classe to shame (official languages: English/Ben's pidgin French).  

But the biggest reason we love Roger Federer is the love he has for his wife, Mirka Vavrinec. 

Oh, La Classe.  What an evil axis of power you would be.  

"We live not according to reason, but according to fashion."

Or so said the Roman philosopher Seneca in the mid-first century.  If true, then it's worth checking out the Richard Avedon exhibition at the International Center of Photography, which runs until September 6th.  Avedon revolutionized fashion photography, transforming it into an art form.  Often, his compositions are so orchestrated and original that they seem entirely spontaneous, making you forget that these were shot for a magazine (usually Vogue or Harper's Bazaar) and not fortuitous moments caught by a photographer roaming the streets of Paris.  The clothes are beautiful, the women wearing them are beautiful, and Avedon captures and enhances both beautifully.  The old black and white stuff is the best, but Avedon worked right up until his final moments in 2004 (he photographed Obama soon before he died), so there's some modern color stuff too - featuring Gisele no less.  The ICP also has a great café, assuming the highly incompetent Russian woman isn't manning the counter, because homegirl - or should I say, дом женщина? - WILL  charge you three times for one café latte and forget to make it every time you coax her gently towards the machine.

But seriously, it's a great show and worth going above 14th street, (or below 59th as the case may be... Sass).  And though Seneca would have no idea what was going on, I needed an engaging intro. 

Tennesse Williams is my hero

Okay, so he's best known for writing plays (he got a Pulitzer for A Streetcar Named Desire), but Tennessee Williams (né Thomas Lanier Williams) was an incredible poet.  You should really read as many of his poems as possible, but for now, a taste:   

THE SIEGE

I build a tottering pillar of my blood

to walk it upright on the tilting street. 

The stuff is liquid, it would flow downhill

so very quickly if the hill were steep.

How perilously do these fountains leap

whose reckless voyager along am I!

In mother darkness, Lord, I pray Thee keep

these springs a single touch of sun could dry.

It is the instant froth that globes the world,

an image gushing in a crimson stream.

But let the crystal break and there would be

the timeless quality but not the dream.

Sometimes I feel the island of myself

a silver mercury that slips and runs,

revolving frantic mirrors in itself

beneath the pressure of a million thumbs.

Then I must that night go in search of one

unknown before but recognized on sight

whose touch, expedient or miracle,

stays panic in me and arrests my flight.

Before day breaks I follow back the street,

companioned, to a rocking space above.

Now do my veins in crimson cabins keep

the wild and witless passengers of love.

All is not lost, they say, all is not lost,

but with the startling knowledge of the blind

their fingers flinch to feel such flimsy walls

against the siege of all that is not I!

I'm back, and I took a hit of that kool-aid

Today was a good day. I met up with a friend of mine and Sass in Sheep's Meadow* in Central Park (*Sheep's  Meadow is not to be confused with The Great Lawn, which isn't actually that much bigger than the Sheep Meadow, which is maybe where the confusion stemmed from, which is to say that I did indeed confuse the two, which resulted in Sass getting a little touchy with me on the phone when she realized that I had led her astray "20 blocks!" by having told her that I was hanging with Eric on the Great Lawn when really Eric and I were luxuriating on the smaller, much more pedestrian and much less Great, Sheep's Meadow, which is, IMHO, equally as Great and perhaps much less pedestrian as it doesn't have softball fields on it, with children eating sand in the softball fields.) 

So after Eric and I graciously decided we would walk to the bigger lawn (more like 10 blocks, incidentally), we found Sass on the boogie blanket next to a softball field and sat down for what was to be an epic hour of shooting the shit. We talked about crazy aunts and Anthony Bordain, watched some babies eat cigarette butts, saw some judo nerds doing showy judo jumps, and had our hearts broken as we witnessed some kid get his little toy plane caught in a tree. Forever. Despite what his Dad was telling him. 

But more than anything, we basked - In the city, in our unemployment and in our utter lack of responsibility.  

Well, Eric actually has a job. He was also the only one of us to get a sunburn.  

On Twitter.

"It has been said that to write is to live forever."
- Tina Fey

"The man who wrote that is dead."
- Steve Martin

Those of you who follow obsessively the lives of this blog's three authors (so, basically, the authors themselves plus or minus Cynthia Princi xoxox) know that we've all recently begun to use the micro-blogging service Twitter. A bare-bones social network, Twitter assigns each of its members a webpage (for instance www.twitter.com/imsoftness) that displays the user's posts, each of which is famously (or infamously) limited in length to 140 typed characters. How many is that? This little paragraph has 510.

Unless the user locks his or her updates, anyone can view anyone else's updates. But like any good network, you don't need to visit every user's micro-site to see what's up: Twitter's homepage automatically collates and streams the updates from users you "follow."

Sound maybe like Facebook status, but with an arbitrary limit, and which you doubtless already have and ignore? You're not alone, but I disagree. I'm going to argue that Twitter's value greatly outdistances Facebook's, and that its presence signals the beginning of a turning point in human interaction. Twitter's value lies in the fact that it's designed for mobile use, it provides real-time access to information, and it creates a novel and meaningful kind of social relationship.

Designed for mobile

Lots of services these days boast a "mobile version." Yankees.com shows video footage of the game if you're at your desk; but if you're on the go and don't have a fast connection, you can view the mobile version of the site to grab the game score and the latest news.

Twitter doesn't have a mobile version. It is simply mobile. In fact, its seemingly silly 140-character limit is born out of Twitter's founders' wanting updating from your phone to be as easy as updating from the Web (SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, and displaying someone's username and a timestamp typically takes about 20 of those; 140 are left to the user).

It's the difference between "made for mobile" and "made to work on mobile" that makes Twitter location-agnostic. For instance, Gmail's great, and its iPhone platform is pretty nifty. But given the choice between answering an email now or answering it much more easily from home, I choose the latter. By equalizing the experience from the supercomputer to the Startac, Twitter creates an incentive to share exactly when sharing makes sense.

Access to new -- and new kinds of -- information: search.twitter.com

Real-time sharing enables real-time search. Real-time search avails us of a kind of information generally withheld from public consumption. Some at Google call it the "tacit," as opposed to "codified," information.

Codified information is, basically, facts. In conversations, not knowing a fact has become obsolete. The phrase "I don't know, period" has been summarily replaced by the phrase "I don't know, but I'll look it up right now." (Note: no one cool has ever said "period" out loud.)

Want to know the wording of the second amendment to the Constitution? The text is available online. Unsure at what time The Office is on? Same deal.

Google and the mobile Web can't answer every question, though. What if it's 9:04, The Office just started, and your question is "Is the show good tonight?" Right now, Google can't help you. To answer the earlier questions, there are official online repositories that make a living aggregating critical formative documents -- like the US Constitution. Or TV Guide.

Whether a four-minute old show is "good" is a question of opinions. It's tacit information, and it's only existed for 240 seconds. Enter Twitter, which can answer that question without a problem. Search on Twitter for "the office" and you'll see everyone everywhere who "tweeted" about it. Sure: not every 140-character bloviation is reliable, but you read more than one, and trends emerge. And because your sources, as it were, can update easily and from anywhere, getting lots of opinions quickly is rarely a challenge.

Your new "best friend"

Figuring out whether The Office is good is only the most trivial use of access to real-time info. As big a fan of Twitter as I am, I readily admit that good, usable information isn't always available on its search. Lots of tweets are about what your roommate ate and feels guilty about. Or the latest book your friend is claiming to have read to try to sound smart.

But you can be sure that more and better information is coming. Already we're discovering we have access to information we never thought we would. We can with some confidence answer questions like "Even though the Department of Traffic says they're ticketing anyone who parks on the grass at Coachella, is it really being enforced?" Or even "do you think it will be enforced?"

When we ask these kinds of questions, we allow to evolve our traditional understanding of a reliable source. The person I trust the most on Earth is Sara (followed very closely in a tie by Lia and Austin Sarat). But when I need to know whether the line at Chili's is out the door, the person I "trust the most" is the person who's there, tweeting. The person with the information I need -- previously completely unavailable to me -- is now briefly but critically part of my social network.

All of a sudden, the "social network" is more than our meaningless list of 500 Facebook "friends." In some sense, gathering information this way lets "social" mean social again. Humans are social creatures. Our survival and advancement throughout history have been tied to our ability to collaborate. Twitter gives us the ability to do better -- at literally anything -- by leveraging the information our fellow humans have stumbled upon. That's not a new thing! This concept of everyone making decisions with equal access to all the information in the world -- the tacit and the codified alike -- is often referred to as the age of information or the social Web. Some also call it democracy.

And so in closing (and at long last) I stress that "going social" doesn't mean amassing a longer list of iPhone Apps. It's not a joke or a fad or a bubble; it's simply what we've always done. Twitter may not itself be the next big thing, but if you don't find a way to share and to learn, you will be left behind.