Jackson West’s Obsessive Compulsion

I had too much work to get done last night to write up the GavinWatch party at El Rio. Long story short: It was fun; Eve, Beth and Mike were a riot as usual; Greg Dewar had a story involving Gavin pitching a hissy fit on his hands and knees; Dan Noyes is a really nice guy; Marc Powell looks good in a chicken costume; and I missed a bunch of people who I keep meaning to meet, including Cecilia Vega of the Chron and Steven Jones of the Guardian.

While I await Vega’s writeup and Kat Wade’s photos in the paper tomorrow, I’d like to shoot down any rumors or discussion regarding my ambitions for the office of Mayor of San Francisco, which appeared from the blue thanks to H. Brown. H., my man, I hope you aren’t smoking anything stronger than your prescription marijuana.

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Tonight was the Mayor’s third “Town Hall” meeting hosted at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in the Mission, which was just announced last week and sneakily slipped onto the Mayor’s web site with an earlier date. Of course, these campaign stops have also been called “Fake Question Time” and “The Gavin Show” or just “Infomercials.” In this case, he was there to talk up his health care plan — which even Gavin had to admit largely was the work of Tom Ammiano, who not only came up with a plan to cover all San Franciscans, but a way to pay for it by mandating that employers reimburse The City for covered employees.

Gavin, beholden to local business interests, was against the mandate until it looked like all the fawning national press he was getting for his part in the proposal would cease if the plan was shot down. Now the Golden Gate Restaurant Association is suing The City over the plan. Wouldn’t want coverage for over 80,000 uninsured San Franciscans to get in the way of profits derived by keeping service employee wages low, now would we?

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It was bad enough when I read the first story about the NYPD sending spies across the globe, including here in San Francisco, to collect ‘intelligence’ on perfectly harmless political protestors of all stripes — including the likes of Josh Kinberg, Billionaires for Bush and The Man in Black Bloc. Then I just happened to stumble on video from last summer of an obvious agent provocateur attack on a protest in Tompkins Square Park.

More recently, it turns out the City of New York is now asking that records of their underhanded work remain sealed “because the news media will ‘fixate upon and sensationalize them,’ hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests,” according to a follow up in the Times. And I have no doubt the SFPD is doing the exact same shit, though probably with less professionalism.

Please, America, come to grips with the fact that we very much live in a police state. Right now.

“How can I find absolutely everything Jackson publishes online in one place?” It’s a question asked daily by the millions worldwide whom I can count as my adoring public, certainly. Well, now there’s an easy answer! You can find it all at jacksonwest.com — updates to this blog, as well as my gig at NewTeeVee, messages from Twitter, check-ins on Dodgeball, uploads to Flickr and Blip and every other damn web service I use regularly can now be found there (or subscribed to via RSS).

How did I do it? Two tools — Yahoo Pipes and the rss2html php script. I used Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and massage the feeds into one mega-feed, and rss2html to display said feed with a dirt simple HTML and CSS template.

Feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments. Some of the item descriptions weren’t appearing well (such as image tag weirdness with Blip.tv’s mobile upload, though I’m sure T-Mobile’s jankiness is ultimately to blame), and it took a bit of trial and error to get the regular expression filters in Pipes to work how I wanted them to, but I’m pretty happy with it. Now I have to get back to real work.

I stopped short of putting my Google and Technorati vanity watchlists on my homepage, because that’s too narcissistic even for me.

I love it when I stumble across something timely that happens to address a bunch of the thoughts currently tickling the back of my head and gives them form. Boyd discusses micro-celebrities and narcissism online, but brings plenty of offline context to the table. Highly recommended.

The following excerpt is from the LA Weekly’s feature on the ten year anniversary of the Heaven’s Gate cult suicides:

Over several days, I took in Rio’s book, the screenplay, DO’s and the students’ Exit Videos, many hours of DO’s teachings, including a tape called “Last Chance to Leave Earth Before It’s Recycled,” the last three of which I discovered at the Los Angeles Public Library. The videos — a 12-tape lesson plan, along with the entire collection of the Heaven’s Gate suicide videography — which Rio believes were censored by the media, can in fact be checked out from the social-science stacks downtown. When I asked the reference librarian how these materials got on the shelves, he looked them up in the computer and said, “Someone from the public ordered them. You would be surprised the requests we get.” Later, I walked by another librarian as he got a call from someone looking for reference materials on comparative alien digestive tracts. “We don’t have information like that,” he explained with admirable composure. “No one on Earth does.”

Why do I find new religious movements so amusing? Probably because the already thin line between comedy and tragedy is almost entirely blurred. Talk about a surreal mix of humor and pathos.

In this case, it was only a few years after Waco, and the story had some sensational elements that resonated: the cultists were Trekkers and computer nuts, two social circles I was certainly familiar with. The leaders were of my grandparent’s generation, the followers that of my parents. It was about this time that I was studying early greek philosophy, and began to realize the conceptual line joining metaphysics with religion, and grasping that cults and sectarians were of a piece with each other and the history of all major denominations.

What makes Jesus’ story so much more believable than DO’s? I mean, besides the tacky taste in raiments, of course. But then, it’s the Boulevard of Broken Dreams touches that are simply the best.

The script incorporates the Heaven’s Gate cosmogony. Humans are bit players in a vast galactic drama, including at least one alien summit on Mars. The protagonist is a telepathic man-dog descended from the Atlanteans who has a crystal embedded in his forehead and journeys to Earth to grow a soul. Rio and OLLODY started the first version when the group lived in Pleasant Valley, Arizona, and DO decided that a screenplay would be a ticket to the masses. The first draft was several hundred pages long, and featured concept art for all the different alien races and ships. NBC, Rio said, was interested.

It’s all just so typical, it makes me want to squeal. So many prophets, and they all want to make their own Battlefield Earths. I jokingly call California’s homegrown technocults “The Curse of Joseph Campbell.”

Matching recent public Twitter quotes to famous thinkers throughout history, for no reason other than I thought to do it while stuck on the bus. I’ll be here all week, please tip your waitress.

Geniuses: Descartes, Heisenberg, Socrates
Photos: virtualfred, blandm, Viton
Quotes: Brandon P, Dan Miller, richat

Bwahahahahaha!

Ralph: “How come on Martin Luther King Day, people don’t run around pretending they’re black.”

The New York University Women’s Basketball team is headed to the Division III Final Four! Congratulations are in order. I went to a few men’s and women’s games when I was a student, and, along with the fencing team, they were the pride of the tiny athletic department (the club baseball team I played on, not so much). Best of luck to the team, I hope they bring home another banner to hang in Coles.