This is just too funny. From CNN:

McCain aides had said that Joe Wurzelbacher, also known as Joe the Plumber, would appear with the Republican presidential candidate at his first campaign event in Defiance, Ohio.

“Joe’s with us today. Joe, where are you? Where’s Joe? Is Joe here with us today? Joe, I thought you were here today,” McCain said during the rally.

A campaign aide later said Wurzelbacher had “decided not to come” and may join McCain later Thursday.

But reached at home, Wurzelbacher said it was “news to him” that he was supposed to be at the McCain rally. Wurzelbacher said nobody from the McCain campaign confirmed he was attending the event and called the incident a “miscommunication.”

Contacted by CNN a second time, Wurzelbacher said the campaign only called him to confirm after the event in question already took place.

Wurzelbacher also said he had gotten an initial call about coming to the morning rally, “but no one called back to confirm,” and he was “not happy” that McCain had called out his name and he wasn’t there.

He said he would try to meet up with McCain later Thursday. McCain’s schedule calls for events in Sandusky, Elyria and Mentor, Ohio.

Wurzelbacher later complained that he didn’t like how he had been “rolled out” by the McCain campaign, and from now on he’d be “going rogue,” speaking directly to the media, ignoring his handlers and watching out for his own aspirations. Influential conservatives planned a meeting for November 15 to decide how to proceed with the GOP. Despite Wurzelbacher’s rollercoaster ride, lack of a license and revelations that wardrobe purchases totaling more than $150 were made for him by the McCain camp, conservatives conceded that he clearly represents the future of the party.

8-)

I’m reading Claude Levi-Strauss’s The View From Afar, which contains a short essay entitled Schizophrenia and Cosmopolitanism. As always, I have an interest in most things having to do with schizophrenia from an intellectual standpoint. In this essay Levi-Strauss is trying to draw some parallels between the features of schizophrenia (dualistic splits, identification with celestial bodies, sensation of internal organs re-arranging themselves, etc.) and features of a Chinook myth. The final conclusion is that the features of the myth were borrowed from other tribes with whom the Chinook had commercial relationships, and in some cases reversed or trans-figured.

This borrowing, in a cosmopolitan culture, looks alot like cut-up or collage to me. Many of the photomontages I’ve done for the last 20 years have a quasi-mythical feeling, and the essay starts to explain that. I’ve always felt this about surrealism, and there is overt exploration of the unconscious as revealed in “random” placements and re-placements.

I was wondering today if Burroughs, John Cage and Duchamp, the artists I consider the paragons of the 20th century, had ever met or been in the same place at the same time.

We’ve been watching the early episodes of 24 lately. I love intersecting story / POV plots in general. Crash and 13 Conversations About 1 Thing come to mind. They do a great job in some of the title prologues of showing the same scene from separate cameras. This is like a sort of temporal cubism, which is a kind of reversal of the collage technique (explosive vs. collective / implosive).