Today on the way to work my daily bus-time reveries were interrupted by the gentleman sitting next to me, who quietly and somewhat sheepishly brought to my attention the fact that I bear an uncanny resemblance to Sylar, a character on the hit NBC television series Heroes.

It was the second time a complete stranger on public transportation has informed me of this fact and the fourth time in five days that someone I've been introduced to has mentioned the resemblance.

I don't watch the show but apparently Sylar is an arch-villain who controls people and things with his brain. I suppose this association creates an unfortunate social hurdle for me, or an advantage, depending on the situation.

See what you think:
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
Exhibit D

Price tags

In the ideology of capitalism, the value and meaning of all things is understood by the dollar amount that the almighty market confers upon them. We may be queasy about evaluating the price of a human life in terms of money, but there is no doubt that this sort of evaluation can and is being done. It is, after all, the final frontier in a long history of capitalizations (or "privatizations") that include plots of land, song lyrics, certain plant seed cross-breeds, quantities of pollution, the lives of animals, the holy bible, and the one-click online shopping experience. And the color burgundy, as Robb discovered the other day while looking at the packaging of a bag of shredded cheese from the store--burgundy is trademarked as the "trade dress" of food manufacturer Sargento.

Granted that capitalism is a deeply rooted way of understanding the world that you and I most likely share (to one degree or another), it can be revealing to step completely inside of this value system for a moment in order to take a look at our values. Or, in other words, to put a mouth where our money is; a money-mouth that is capable of bluntly telling us what we care about: Tom Engelhardt compares the market value of an American life versus that of our fellow humans who happened to be born on other parts of the earth.

Whitecaps of white noise

Fitting that Canadian sound explorer Tim Hecker sculpts seven and a half minutes of almost completely undifferentiated fuzz into a track called "The Work of Art in an Age of Cultural Overproduction." Fitting because he realizes that one has to start dealing with the reality of life in a big, viscous glut of cultural junk.

Obviously the social condition of cultural obesity has something to do with the fact that the primary way that I, an individual here in the beating heart of the media empire, am able to come to terms with my own identity is to cross the coveted threshold from media consumer to media producer. To lay down some tracks, to shoot and edit a film, to write a book (my memoirs!), to be interviewed on some documentary, to put some dumb video of myself online.

But in what sense is it socially desirable to add my voice or your voice to the already deafening roar of cultural white noise? There are too many records. Too many films showing in too many theaters. Too much must-see video programming. Too many new releases, too many staff picks, too many best-sellers. Too many logos, too much smart design play, too many fonts, too many slick magazines, and way too many clever advertising concepts. Too many photos taken of ourselves and too many of our friends in interesting places and positions, too many attempts at interesting angles. Too much data accessible on too many PDAs at any time and any place. Too many people eating lunch alone, accompanied only by one of those wireless cell phone earpieces. Too many mp3s. Too many "relevant" churches posting too many sermon podcasts to be played back on too many video iPods. Too many blogs with too many posts. And too many sleek Apple laptops cranking out this blather.

Maybe in some way cultural production can still be valid, but I can't imagine any worthwhile piece of art that doesn't first respond to it's relationship to all of the other cultural, virtual, enticing, bite-size media bits trying to edge it out for a second of our attention. Which is why tediously slow washes of barely harmonic sound that demand at least an hour of listening time is about all the cultural product that I can keep down these days.

And I know that the right thing to do is to not get so easily seduced into the belief that I exist to propagate of my own "unique" perspective on the world via the free market apparatus.

But I do get so easily seduced. And I start to make things. And I start to recommend cultural product like the artists above or the video below as an antidote to an overload of cultural product. Why do I do it, the thing I don't want to do?

Here is a great video.