| Penn & Teller PCC articles by Penn Jillette | Reprinted with permission. |
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I'm not a musician but I love playing my bass guitar. I've written
a few songs and done a few gigs with bands. I've played and
screamed on a few albums (all very limited releases on independent
labels. Pick one up in a cut out bin and hold on to it. If you're
lucky - I'll get really famous, die a newsworthy photogenic death
and you can sell it for a couple 1991-dollars pure profit). When
I feel my bass guitar strap across my back, the phlegm in my
throat, and the hard wet metal of the microphone scraping against
my teeth, I am rock and roll. I'm Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Patty
Smith, Elvis Costello, Too Much Joy and every 12 year old that ever
had a radio and a mirror in his or her room.
My definition of "rock and roll" is personal, not universal, I've never smoked marijuana, drank a beer, or talked about rain forests on MTV. I'm already middle-aged, I don't smoke, I wear seat belts and condoms (occasionally at the same time) - but when I'm rocking on my bass - "I hope I die before I get old." I don't do science on my computer. I write, I file, I send and receive mail. I use spell checkers, grammar checkers, phone dialers and data bases. I can format a disk and write a batch file but I don't program or number crunch.
I'm just lowly end user, but when I'm sitting at my computer
writing, or better yet, when I using all those great excuses not to
write like organizing my hard disk or tweaking my When I used to sit at a typewriter I felt like a hack. When I sit at a computer I'm still just writing jokes but I'm using a machine made of human ingenuity and efficiency beyond my wildest dreams. When I was a kid, the word "computer" meant HAL in 2001. And don't tell me the Space Odyssey was an anti-technology movie - yeah, HAL went a little goofy toward the end but HAL was the star. HAL ruled. All I wanted then was to touch a real computer and now I have 4 on my desk. I've heard painters talk about what the paint means to them, not the art - the paint itself. How they like the smells of it and the crusty feel of dried paint on their hands. It reminds them that they're creating with their hands, it's primal, it's brightly colored mud. I like sitting in the dark except for the glow of the CRT. I like the click of my keyboard, the cool modern feel of plastic, the cursor made of light, and I love that my mouse is a comfortable old friend when 6 years ago I'd never seen one. Any computer is outdated the second I get it out of the box and that gives me joy that there is some progress in our world. Computers will get more user-friendly. We, the Nerds, are no longer the computer majority. They will soon be as common and easy to use as refrigerators. But, to me, they will still mean the scientific method, logic, problem solving, and the real miracles and wonders of the modern world. My computer means something to me and if you try to put an astrology program on it, I just might smash my guitar over your head. "Talking 'bout my generation." |