When I was young I wrote a piece about the “word processor”, how it wasn’t for me. How I preferred the typewriter, the clangor of the carriage return, pointing out how it was in those moments I was slobbing correction fluid on the page that the work had time to breathe… I waxed romantically about how Beethoven hadn’t need a synthesizer, how you could hear his struggles, his imperfect tortured beautiful heart within those staves!
I proudly gave my asshole scientist old man a copy. “This is such bullshit,” he said, in that encouraging manner he had. “People have been writing this nonsense article since the advent of the stem engine, since eli whitney and the cotton gin. I mean the wheel is technology; fire is technology!” Ge cited the books of DH Lawrence, – and then there were the luddites, themselves… Motherfucker up there in his bunker with his pre-personal computer array printing out massive rows of utterly unintelligible numbers on one endless dot matrix roll, letting me know what was what…
Me, I was green as the driven snow still but I kind of liked that fact. And the old man’s vibe was a stone downer for sure, man. Anything that the masses were for I was somewhat against, instinctively. You can already see how the roots of the Urban Luddite were beginning to sprout…
A few years after that, already having written a fair amount of words in little notebooks, typing them out later, and when I had a good enough batch I would take the bus down to UCLA, where you could tent IBM Selectric for a dollar an hour at the Powell library. Time was money, and you had to get the shit right the first time, really etch it in there. This was the m.o. for several years, as I tried to find my way as a writer.
Six, seven years later I take a real job, land a girlfriend, move out to some place in the in the valley and spend time with Microsoft Word. Pretty soon I realize, Well, actually this is much better really… and it was all over for the typewriter at that point for me..
But technology marched on, and as the world grew increasingly delirious over the new gadgetry at its disposal, I found myself at odds; I favored the old technologies, the analog things, the rasp of the needle landing on the vinyl, that ectra hit you got out of hitting the tape a little too hard, the messy truth you could arrive at by not scrubbing every little pixel clean, tuning every word just so.
When I arrived at the term Urban Luddite several years ago now, [five six seven?] It immediately struck me as an umbrella I could do a lot with. And it’s funny to me too, its like Urban Outfitters, Urban Ramen, just slap an Urban in front of anything and you can garner a chuckle I would imagine.. I mean it’s an oxymoron, right: How can you be a luddite and still be living a modern existence in a large American city, driving a car, and surfing the internet, and even peering into the evil eye of Facebook itself and letting the waves of the cultures pose bathe over me and fuck my psyche up just as much as the next guy.
But here’s the thing, this site isn’t really about being a “luddite”, its not really about extolling old technologies, maybe a little, but it’s a subtheme at best.. It’s really more of a springboard to write about any old damned thing I feel like writing about. It’s as much about alienation, and driving through this world alone, searching, having lost one’s voice to the ubiquitous chaos of the culture. A vehicle to use my real voice, to say the words I really want to say. And if being adverse to the status quo is primitive, or clichéd, well bring it on, I say. I am not afraid of the cliché; sometimes the real clichés are so right in front of you that you don’t even see ‘em till they reach up and slap you right in the face…
There are many Urban Luddites in this world* – indeed I am but one lowly half luddite, spiraling through the void, but I though it was time I out pen to paper, as it were, and begin to really write again, and somehow that title –Urban Luddite – it has just generated a wealth of ideas inside my antiquated old soul, and its nigh time we launched the sucker!
The Urban Luddite 