Preston the Cat: R.I.P.

2012 Talks

What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology? (with Dave Allen, David Ewald, Rick Moody, Jesse von Doom, and Anthony Batt)
2pm, March 14th, Room 16AB
(Please note new room!)
Austin Convention Center
SXSW
Austin, TX

My Books

I was Assistant Editor on Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, which is available from The MIT Press and fine bookstores all over.

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is an anthology of interviews with all kinds of minds. Disinformation named it "among the most important books published in 2007," and Erik Davis called it "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so."

I have a little piece in Disinformation's first book, You Are Being Lied To, a compendium of dissent, which also includes essays by Noam Chomsky, Howard Bloom, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Zinn, Richard Metzger, Alex Burns, and Mark Pesce, among many others.

Shutter to Think

August 02nd, 2010 | No Comment | Category: Marginalia

Suspected to have been dead for years, Preston the Cat finally received the call yesterday. He stayed at my parents’ house for seventeen years, through the tenure of two horses, and outlived Priscilla the Cat, Winnie the Dog, and Hershey the Goat. Like his archenemy, His Own Tail, he never liked me much, but we were almost friendly during his last days. At the time of his death, I only have one Preston-inflicted wound requiring a band-aid.

He is survived by Cindy (his initial owner), Moms (couldn’t care less about a cat), Jack (his primary caretaker who affectionately referred to him as “Worthless Furball”), myself, Push Broom, and his best friend Basket of ‘Tatas. His scowl, tail-hating neurosis, and intermittent but incessant knocking on the door will be missed.

Further Posting:

Respond / React:

I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.

I am currently an Assistant Instructor corrupting the youth at The University of Texas at Austin, where I am also pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic. This site is where all of these things play out. It’s where I think aloud about all of the above.

I’m an aging BMX/skateboard 'zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. The pages and staples have long since given way to links and scrollbars, but the rest is basically the same. I still ride bikes, and I still skateboard. I do still commit quite a bit to actual pages, too. Read on »