Following up on my post about the library/terrorism intersection, I decided to go visit the new downtown library today after dropping off Marco at the airport.

I haven’t blogged about Marco’s visit, mostly because I’ve been too busy enjoying it.

But I went to the new library. It’s the funkiest library ever. It instantly reminded me of the library in ‘Wings of Desire,’ but the comparison has more to do with how noisy the place is than what it looks like.

The building’s interior is a huge empty space with cantilevered layers ‘growing’ off a central core for each aspect of what a library does, the whole thing wrapped in a glass-and-metal skin. The walls of this huge interior space are at a 45-ish-degree angle, just perfect for reflecting voices up and down from section to section, with a little bit of diffusion to make the voices indistinct. In ‘Wings of Desire,’ heavenly angels dressed in trenchcoats, wander through a library unseen by the inhabitants. They can hear the internal dialogue of everyone present, the sound of which melds together into an indistinct whispering murmur.

The books are housed in a large rectangular spiral. I walked the entire length of the Dewey decimal system without encountering a step up or down. Empty spaces are engineered into the shelves to allow for expansion. The main problem for me is that there’s minimal access in-between the opposing up- and downward sections, so you generally have to go all the way to the ends to get across.

Once you get to the top, however, you can look through glass at the rarities. Books that would ordinarily be in some inaccessible room are still in an inaccessible room, but the walls of that room are glass, and you’re looking through the backs of the shelves at what’s inside. The top layer is also a reading room, with funky futuristic furniture and excellent views of downtown.

The downsides to this building have to do with being confusing as hell. The problem with postmodern architecture is that most people’s minds are still modern, so the buildings are confusing. That’s OK with me as someone wandering around seeing the place, but if I had a need for something specific, I’d be more than a little lost. As an example, here’s a picture of the elevator controls. Yes, the elevators are that color on the inside.

The other painfully obviously painful thing about this place is the crappy signage. Everywhere throughout the place, there are pieces of 8.5 x 11 astro-brite colored paper with things like ‘Exit ->’ and ‘Restrooms are on level 7a’ printed on them, stuck to the walls with masking tape. Granted, it’s day-glo colored masking tape, but it’s still a paper sign taped to the wall. Was this place designed without signs?

Mostly, though, I’m glad to have the world’s most mind-altering library in Seattle, and I hope to spend a bunch of time there.

I haven’t had much to say here lately. Real life took over for a while, but fear not! I’ll be back soon, obsessing over crap that no one cares about.

But in the mean time, I just wanted to mention that my hometown library system uses a secure web connection when you search their library. For instance, when you’re looking at the search results for such terms as ‘cryptography,’ ‘terrorism,’ ‘assasination,’ ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’ ‘crucial infrastructure,’ or ‘Ashcroft? Asshole!’ the results you get back will travel across the internet in an encrypted form.

Why is this notable? Because, it turns out, libraries seem to be the last places in America that care about privacy and individual liberty. The American Library Association has been keeping track of the recent erosion of civil liberties through the USA PATRIOT anti-terrorism legislation. For instance, did you know that the FBI can monitor your reading habits, even though you’re not under investigation? Well, they can.

There was also a recent story about the Department of Justice attempt to get librarians to destroy federal statute documents. Stated plainly: Ashcroft’s DoJ told librarians to remove copies of the law from libraries. If you wanted to know how federal asset forfeiture laws worked so you could get your assests back, you had to find out somewhere besides your public library. Naturally, once this story was publicized the order to destroy the documents was rescinded.

So when I noticed that my library search results were coming to my computer over a secure connection, I got incrementally happier, knowing that at least some people in this godforsaken country care about protecting my privacy from whoever’s snooping.

This morning I woke up at 5am, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m a lazybones sleepyhead with weird sleep hours, so this was a bit of a change, but the change wasn’t so bad.

Tonight, however, I’m in a zombie state. I can’t sleep, and I’m not awake. I’m in that state of consciousness where the dream world and the waking world intersect, and when that happens I have to talk to myself. I go on endlessly about all kinds of diverse topics. If I were to record it and play it back it wouldn’t make as much sense as one would hope.

It’s a bit like being high on marijuana. Some people get very verbal and talk about all kinds of diverse topics and make all kinds of plans that sound really good but which can seldom withstand the cold light of the next day. If you can even remember them the next day. This is where the term ‘pipe dreams’ comes from, in case you didn’t know.

But it’s a bit like that for me right now. The vague and unfocused dreamlike energy filters its way up into consciousness, finding expression through linguistic channels. Speaking and talking about all kinds of things, laying in bed. It didn’t help that I watched Charlie Rose, and he had Robert McNamara on, with the guy who made that movie about him, ‘The Fog Of War.’

McNamara was directly involved in the firebombing of Tokyo in WWII, where 80,000 people died. He was ‘in the room’ during the Cuban missile crisis. He was one of the architects of the Vietnam war. So my mind is reeling with these things. He contends that Vietnam and the other things were simply rational decisions which led to a terrible place. As in, it’s rational to *start* putting troops in South Vietnam, since you’re fighting communism, and subsequently it’s rational to add *more* because there are already some there.

In other words, he’s an asshole who lets circumstance take the blame. In fairness, he eventually broke from the Johnson administration over the war; everyone learns eventually.

All this eventually led me to think about who and where I was in the early/mid ’70s, towards the end of the war. I was a kid. I don’t have any memories of anyone in my family talking about the war. I don’t remember seeing it on the news, but I never really paid attention to the news. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the Vietnam war with my parents, ever. They for sure weren’t out protesting.

Until very recently, the Vietnam war has been an abstraction for me. Even though it was going on for much of my early life, I think of it as something from before my time. It’s been something to take out of its box and think about and manipulate for a while, and then put it back in the box when it’s time to move on to something else.

This in turn leads me to think of young people today, who don’t have a firsthand knowledge of the cold war. I wasn’t all that aware, politically, of the cold war, but I remember many times when I’d be half asleep, not unlike I am now, laying in bed, drifting off, and being startled to wakefulness thinking the missiles were flying overhead. It was always just a plane, and I always felt stupid for having that same reaction every time, but that fear was inside me.

This was during the REAGAN YEARS. Reagan. Bad. Bad. Bad.

Bad.

But just as I wasn’t aware of the war going on around me, young people today weren’t aware of the cold war that was going on around them. Instead of the missile-fear, they have the 9/11-fear. The fear of low-flying planes or car bombs or… something else entirely. I think if they’d had the missile-fear, Bush would never have been president. It’s the same cast of characters.

Getting back to McNamara: I’m sure that our current crop of assholes would tell you that they are victims, if you will, of circumstance. And again, that’s a total cop out. Defense Secretary McNamara crunched the numbers and said Vietnam could work. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld crunched the numbers and said we could deal with both North Korea and Iraq.

And here we are, with people like Robert McNamara telling people like Charlie Rose that, ultimately, there is no such thing as responsibility. Situation and circumstance conspire to cause reasonable men to do evil things, and, conversely, evil things are the result of situation and circumstance.

I’m done typing.

Guess what this is a picture of:

Give up?

It’s a raw image taken directly off the CCD of my camera with the lens cap on. It should be all black.

You learn interesting things about your equipment by taking long-exposure photos… Now to find someone to fix it. Hopefully it won’t be heartbreakingly expensive.

The other night I rented ‘The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavera.’ Actually, I rented the Skeleton movie and ‘Hidalgo.’ ‘Hidaldo’ capsule review: If you’ve seen the trailers, you know the deal, and all I need to tell you is that it’s competently made, lovely to look at, and thank Allah that Omar Sharif is still working. He’s the tipping point that makes this movie worth seeking out.

Be that as it may.

‘The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera‘ is an homage/spoof of… Well, come to think of it, if you’ve seen the trailer, you know the deal here, too. It’s an homage/spoof to/of schlocky/grade-Z sci-fi/horror movies of the 50s/60s. Not actually the 60s, but I had to put that extra slash in there.

Every aspect of this thing is played straight. It’s the movie equivalent of Civil War re-enactment, but much more funny. The script is tweaked so the intentional jokes ring just loud enough without spoiling the effect. In fact, what’s amazing about this movie is the fine line the whole crew walked between playing it straight and drawing attention to the fact that this is a spoof. Unfortunately, you have to be a total film nerd to appreciate how amazing that is, so this movie has a built-in audience limitation.

But it’s fun, and watching the DVD extras and listening to some of the commentary, it’s obvious that everyone had a blast making this cheesy movie.

Presstube. (It’s a movie preview. Your boss will know you’re slacking if you open it at work. If your boss sees what it is, he might send you off for random drug testing.)

Took another drive up the Stillaguamish river valley, this time to the Big Four/Ice Caves area. The picture above is the valley, looking out from the cirque where the ice caves are. Did I mention ice caves?

The caves are carved under a glacier by a combination of flowing melt water and warm air rising up the side of the mountain. You can stand near them in one place and feel the chill, but if you move a few feet a stream of warm air will warm you back up.

The hike up is an easy uphill mile, through old and medium-growth forest.

Typical to the ecosystem, there are a million rotten stumps lining the path. Here’s a really big one. It’s about 10 or 12 feet across.

I like the stumps because they illustrate the beauty of decay so perfectly. Everything dies, but when it does, it goes on to another kind of life. Life and death go together, but there’s something immortal congregating within us that divides and re-assembles into a different kind of immortality when we’re gone.

These are the kinds of things I think about in the forest.

Flipping through the TV channels last night, I paused for a moment on a channel I usually just zoom right through. It was TBN, the Tax-free Broadcasting Network (it’s actually the Trinity Broadcasting Network, a Christian evangelist network). I stopped because they were showing me a picture of Timothy Leary, and explaining how he was connected to Aleister Crowley and the gay rights movement.

Now, first of all, the breathlessly announcements that Aleister Crowley was the origin of the gay rights movement were silly enough, but then he kept pronouncing his name ‘a-LEESTER KRAU-lee,’ even after showing footage of Tim Leary talking about ‘AL-ester KROH-ley.’ They couldn’t even be bothered to pronounce the guys’ name properly, and I’m supposed to believe them when they say he instigated the gay rights movement?

What’s always interested me about Crowley (and I’m really not that interested in Crowley) is the context in which he developed, more than what he has to say or what he did. He did seek a cultural revolution, but so did a lot of other people, which is really why it happened. He also did a good job of self-promotion, claiming some kind of magickal influence over the whole process in order to dupe the small-minded.

The small-minded, like TBN.

I went to the thrift store yesterday. Wandered the aisles, looked at the heaps of junk piled on top of the clothes racks…

I eventually found a couple of cool things. One is a telephoto lens and filter that will fit my camera, and the other is a Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera. It’s the model that folds up into a slab just a little bigger than a paperback book.

I’m jazzed about the lens, mostly because it confirms my theory that as long as you aren’t in a hurry, thrift stores will provide you with what you need. I’ve been shopping around for a cheap telephoto lens, and also a UV filter, and wouldn’t you know it, I got both for $10 (the price of the filter alone).

Well, I was going to entertain you folks with some photography, but Xanga won’t let me. So I’ll just link to it here.