[NetBehaviour] Marc Garrett's 1st Valentines Day experience...

[Edward Picot]

Marc -

This is so wierd! I seriously like the soundtrack, and I include your 
narrative in that. To me, the strangest aspect is the insistence that 
the Valentine picture represents you "as a robot" pulling your own heart 
out. Assuming that the picture at valentines_day.htm is meant to be the 
same one described in the mp3 - which seems a reasonable inference - 
then it's a very odd representation of a robot. The only thing that 
looks robotic about it is the elbow, which seems to have a hinge in it - 
and, I suppose, the fact that the figure is smiling as he contemplates 
his own pulled-out heart, although this suggests a freakish reversal of 
normal human feeling rather than robotic detachment. And why would a 
robot, if it really was a robot, pull its own heart out? Why would a 
robot even have a heart? What comes to mind is something like the tin 
man in the Wizard of Oz, who hides a sentimental soul inside a 
mechanical exterior - so, "robot" as in "metallic outer shell" rather 
than "mechanical all the way through".

Where the piece really works is that this is really explained, or 
illuminated, by the contrast between your reading voice - wry, 
self-deprecating, but obviously human - and that hammering, pinging, 
rather frenetic music. There's a real sense of human consciousness being 
captured inside some kind of unstoppable machinery - and maybe what this 
machinery really equates to is not your hard, robotic exterior, but your 
uncontrollable emotions; because what really drives the story is the 
fact that you "thought you were in love".  The real machinery here is 
the irresistible driving force of infatuation, the delusions it drives 
us into, the things it makes us do, the risks it forces us to take 
against our better judgement - risks which are both appalling and 
liberating. As you say yourself, "What can you do?" and "Sometimes you 
have to fuck things up".

- Edward