my itunes says:

as with new year's resolutions we have no intention of completing, top ten lists have sprouted 'cross our media universe over the last week or so with no respite expected for the next month.

it's in the midst of this crass display of public self-indulgence i ask myself the question: why not mine?

so, with no apologies, disclaimers, and other ways of dodging responsibility, i give you my 2007 top ten albums played by my 'pod (as determined by the play count):

10. not saying just saying - shout out out out out
9. horn of plenty - grizzly bear
8. yellow house - grizzly bear
7. endless summer - fennesz
6. harmony in ultraviolet - tim hecker
5. the night - morphine
4. sound chambers - ehlers/hautzinger/suchy
3. recordings 1994-1997 - space needle
2. so tonight that i might see - mazzy star
1. musique pour 3 femmes enceintes - marc leClair (akufen)

uh huh.

that's it.

this episode sponsored by a very tasty white widow...

all men are mortal

so, it took a while, but i've finally finished simone de beauvoir's book.

all men are mortal.

a great existentialist in her own right, this book rivals the best of camus and satre, but from quite a different slant. whereas my periodic forays into existentialist fiction over the years have exposed me to protagonists that aim to derive meaning in the face of meaninglessness in their environment - whether family, occupation, society, or tragedy - beauvoir presents us with a narrator whose ill-accepted immortality embodies meaninglessness itself. she uses this device to show how the the secondary characters create meaning precisely because of their limited lifespan.

it's a fascinating, but extraordinarily depressing read!

anyway, my intention isn't to do a book review, but rather to compare some themes with a milan kundera book i read several weeks ago - entitled 'immortality', interestingly enough.

i had posted a quote from kundera contrasting paths to highways as analogues to ways of living one's life. highways lead us from one point to another, from one goal to another, not really allowing us to experience the joy in the moment. paths are made for us to, ah, meander. "a path is a tribute to space. every stretch of path has meaning in itself and invites us to stop."

now from beauvoir by way of a peripheral character, garnier, regarding inertia in the face of eternity: "we don't have to count on the future to give meaning to our acts. if that were the case, all action would be impossible."

it's in the present that we create meaning for our lives. if one is always looking towards the future, driving down that highway at full fucking speed, usually to the next societally dictated destination, we miss out on daily meaning and happiness.

it seems evident that beauvoir's goal in using immortality as the guiding gimmick was to portray the ultimate meaninglessness of grand schemes, plots, and designs. all of our petty ambitions, all desires to leave our legacy or mark on the world are for naught. with death, our ambitions die with us. kundera makes a point that our immortality can last for a generation or two, depending on our fame and the memory of us in others. beauvoir's response is to show her immortal man, fosca, eventually forgetting everyone because, eventually, everyone is forgettable.

one last quote from fosca before i go:

"now i understand them. it's never what they receive that has value in their eyes, it's what they do. if they can't create, they must destroy. but in any case, they have to rebel against what is, otherwise they wouldn't be men."

it all comes back to that, doesn't it? we have to create meaning for ourselves, in our lives. no one can dictate what sparks that fire within. we are our own gods, to create or destroy as we wish...

merry christmas, y'all.

"make me love you and know that you alone exist among all other women. then the world will fall back into shape. there will be tears, smiles, expectations, fears. i'll be a living man again."

- fosca in simone de beauvoir's "all men are mortal"

health

dudes, i am loving health!

i'm listening to their self-titled debut with a little help from some new bud - orange krush. for the first song and a half i thought i was listening to the new liars i'd picked up several weeks ago. the tribal drumming and the monotone vocal stylings are strongly reminiscent of the liars, although more their second-to-last album, drum's not dead, than their recent release. it was the other elements, like the deerhunter-esque guitar work, the droning electronics and even classic 80s hip-hop drum programming (track 9!), that motivated some movement off the couch to check out what was playing in the system.

and it was health!

i'll let pitchfork describe what i lack the energy to:

"sprinting through eleven tracks of orchestrated chaos in a breathless half-hour, health mixes the bombastic pound of boredoms, the skewed structures of deerhoof, the tribal thump of liars, and even the synth squirts of black dice and excepter."

to the last one, all bands i've seen and loved in the last year! but what an inspired mix of genres! boredoms - japanese psych-rock, deerhoof - experimental indie rock, liars - experimental indie heavy on percussion, and black dice and excepter - kings of the electro-acoustic noise scene. with the exception of boredoms, all the groups hail from brooklyn. so you think health was just sucking in all the local influences? nah, health's from l.a.

anyway, check it out. interesting, percussive, and engaging.

gotta go - cd just switched to sightings.

also some awesome shit, dudes...

devendra banhart

i just received my current issue of signal to noise (it's a journal of improvised and experimental music) and as i'm reading through the feature articles, i come across the cover story on devandra banhart.

i've been hearing banhart's name for the last year or so around nyc's music scene and know he's performed at a few of the indie rock venues around town. although he decries the label in the article, most reviewers and critics have slapped the 'freak-folk' descriptor on the music he and his bandmates produce. can't say it's really my thing - the focus is more on vocals/lyrics over experimental instrumentation.

anyway, the article ends with a quote from banhart that encapsulates the trip i've been on for the last several years.

"it's very strange but we have to be compassionate to our younger selves. i think that's why i'm so attracted to native american poetry and writing, which teaches us to walk with compassion. and i suppose it's why i'm interested in hindu spirituality because it preaches that love, happiness and compassion should not be dependent on anything but you. people say they're happy because they have kids or a certain job but it shouldn't be because of anything it should just be because."

yeah, he gets it. not that we should avoid the procreative urge (well, i am) or occupational ambition (i guess i'm kinda doing that, too), but rather that we should be extremely wary of establishing our happiness or fulfillment on these external factors. as supplements to our inner light, sure - although the zen buddhists discourage any involvement as the external world is the source of all suffering - but never as the sole basis for our happiness.

not being artistically inclined in any obvious way, i've always envied those that possess and exercise the creative ability. i believe that one maximizes their happiness by being their own creator, by recognizing the god within. it's this internal recognition that binds us to the infinite creative processes in our world and universe. i feel it's this bonding that produces the feeling of transcendence, of feeling a part of something much larger and infinite than ourselves.

that's one of the reasons i love participatory music - its ambiguity requires idiosyncratic interpretation to evoke meaning. the interpretive process is wholly unique and, therefore, a form of creation. sure, it's not necessarily something i can share with others, but it allows me a moment to experience something larger than myself. it's transcendental. and it makes me happy!

well, that was a bit of a ramble.

so, i might not be into banhart's music, but i can understand his sentiments regarding the nature of happiness and his motivation to create.

not much to chuckle at there, folks. it's that kind of day - cold, snowy, overcast, but beautiful and solemn.

enjoy it...

i'm riding a cab uptown...

yeah, that's what i'm doing.

right now.

is it blowing your mind?

just giving a shout out, complements of the juicy...

a show in brooklyn...

so, funny story:

a few months ago, at the recommendation of a good friend, i bought some tickets for a tiger lillies show. i was new to this group, but i'm always up for tunes that someone else exhibits a passion for. it usually offers something novel, an experience, at the very least. this show referral was from a fellow music-bud, a seeker of sonic sublties (oh hey, guys. say hello to the juicy!) so it meant more than most.

there was one momentous catch - this evening of live entertainment was happening in brooklyn!

hey, man, don't mock me. my abode's upper upper west side! i reside in the birthplace of cool, baby - harlem. so a venture out to another borough was no foray to the corner bodega, or even a trip to the theater to catch a flick...or two. a brooklyn visit required planning, determination, and most of all, ahem, desire...

i dialed up mi amiga el supremo, kara, and pitched the show. it took a second or two for approval - it was on the far side of a body of water, after all - but being the creature of curiosity that she is, not unlike this writer, she was in.

'road trip', we hollered!

yeah, so...

i know hollering 'road trip' in unison sounds a little gay. but, hey, we did it. and? and?!

fast-forward to a mid-december night, the day after the first major snowstorm of the year. the night of my agency's x-mas party. the night of two invites for manhatten-based shenanigans. the point is that there was an overwhelming, some would say staggeringly overwhelming, number of reasons not to cross that bridge into no-manhatten-man's land.

but i had mi amiga el supremo, and she with me create worlds of fun.

my music-bud, originator of the original referral, had emailed me the lyrics to one of the tiger lillies' songs the day prior. check this:

...uh, guess not. sorry. apparently i deleted them in a fit of inbox cleaning...

anyway, well written, political with a touch of humor. yet kinda aggressive. i liked it. anticipation of a good show and kara at my side was more than enough reason to forgo all and forgive the rest and set out on this trek.

after schmoozing with the executive management from my agency for an excruciating - and i do mean slow-removal-of-my-lil'-curlies-one-at-a-time-from-my-scrotum kinda pain - hour, i left to meet up with kara. this was about 6 pm.

we'd decided before to take the train, so when we left her place at about 6:40, we thought we had ample time to get to the venue. hopstop.com plotted the course with an estimated travel time of 56 minutes. the show start at 8. we were on schedule for a chill, hassle-free ride.

we took a puff or two of the requisite travel hit (always the juicy, my friends) and were on our way...

got on the 1 train at 103rd street. we easily procured some seats and settled into our train mode. train mode's just finding people to laugh at.

kara'n i are experts at train mode. those that have witnessed it and recognized our genius have called us grandmasters of this underground entertainment. it's not as easy as you think. many misguided individuals believe they possess the capacity to readily access train mode just because there is such a preponderance of the funnily-faced in this city. for sure, there are a lot of funny looking people, but train mode's more than just pointing out the obvious. the disfigured proportions and mouth-agape-inspiring attire gives you a second or two of funny, maybe enough for a guffaw or half-hearted chuckle. the genius lies in maintaining a continuous flow of gut-spasming, funny-as-shit observations, whispered behind raised hands and turned heads, for the duration of the trip.

yeah, we do it for the whole trip.

jealous?

juicy fruit helps. just helps, mind you - it can't augment what's not already there.

30 - 40 minutes and many annoyed glances later, the train arrives at our stop. and get this, it's high street! really! you want to get to the dumbo area in brooklyn? get off on high street.

after train mode, we were in the best of spirits - super psyched about the show and looking forward to some good tunes.

while still underground, i grab my phone to pull up the hopstop directions to ensure we use the correct exit. after doing a u-turn we find our way topside.

this is where the funny begins.

it's about 7:30, so we still have time to maintain a leisure pace and enjoy our first look at brooklyn in a couple of weeks. i think it might've been a couple of days for kara. why was i making a big deal about this trek to brooklyn, you ask, it we had both visited it as recently as that? whatever, man, it's still brooklyn.

the first sign of trouble: we get curbside and can't find the cross-streets our directions use to orient us. no worries. there's a dude on his cell and he sees us looking around, slightly confused. he asks if we need help and we tell him where we need to be. he points to where we should be - on the other side of eight lanes of brooklyn bridge traffic - and how to get there...he thinks.

we're cool. we're happy. i've still got a mild high going and the frigid air has yet to register as anything other than 'crisp.' we go in the direction he had pointed with such authority. i figured that he put us on the right path and sooner or later his directions would merge with hopstop's.

and it did!

this confirmation that we were minutes away from the lillies revived our giggles. we weren't positive of the direction to head in at the intersection, but hopstop said something about 'go left at brooklyn bridge' and in one direction we did see the unmissable bridge. off we went.

a minute or two later we come to a stop. the next street wasn't what it was supposed to be. 'fuck,' we murmured.

our high was slowly dissipating and the weather was losing its shyness. its hands were all over me. and, yes, weather's hands were fucking cold.

we turn around thinking the road we're looking for is in the other direction. we stomp back with noticeably less enthusiasm. even with a touch of doubt. we pass the subway station. we come to another unfamiliar and, therefore, unwanted street.

'double fuck,' i said, watching my breath crystallize in front of my face. kara suggests calling the venue; while she's doing that i pull out my phone to mapquest from our current location.

both results are inconclusive and we revert back to the hopstop directions. this has taken about 15 to 20 minutes. the show will start in about 15 to 20 minutes. we were almost completely un-high, a very uncool place to be when that place is brooklyn in sub-freezing weather with no idea in which direction to go.

then it hits one of us - i'm not being evasive here, i really don't remember whose insight this initially was - maybe we're not in brooklyn yet?! still in manhattan?! maybe when that oh-so-helpful stranger was pointing to where we should be, he was pointing to the shore on the opposite side of the bridge! maybe his vague finger-pointing towards the bridge and hopstop's directions meant the same thing: go across the bridge and your show will be right there!

could it actually be easier to walk across the bridge to brooklyn than take a train farther into brooklyn and backtrack to our desired location? cold and humorless, we shrugged and decided to give it a shot. so we're up on the bridge walking up the pedestrian pathway trying not to get run over by psychos on bikes exercising in the silliest of weather. really? you guys might be fit, but you're retarded as shit.

anyway, speaking of retarded...

being the optimists we are, kara and i were both trying to make the best of it. a quarter of the way across, we're still talking up the show, attempting to glean something noteworthy on our first bridge-crossing, enjoying the billions of lights from all the buildings of........manhattan?!

it seems we had been in brooklyn. yep, yes we were. there's the empire state building right over there...

i turn to stare at kara, seeing a reflection of my own despair in her eyes. we turn around. again.

we're just about to give up when, arriving at the pedestrian entrance we had used to start that fateful trek across the bridge, i notice another pedestian exit a little farther along. it looked like this one could get us to the other side of the eight lane exit ramp that kind stranger had said we needed to cross.

kind stranger, my ass. at times like this, i begin to believe in a god. a sadistic, petty little bitch of a god.

it turns out this pedestrian crossway didn't so much as cross the lanes as run parallel to them - right down the fucking middle.

8:15.

caged in by a fence on both sides of this sidewalk, we trudge pass our subway entrance. separated by two lanes of traffic, kara gets a glint in her eye and suggests we scale the fence. i laugh, haltingly. her glint doesn't go away. i point out the barbed and mean-looking tips at the top of the fence. her glint fades and resignation sets in.

our faces are frozen and our coats feel purely decorative. only in the distance do we see the exit from this pedestrian prison i regrettably misidentified as our salvation.

five minutes - hours? - later we arrive at an intersection. we're frozen and our bodies feel beaten from the wind and walking, but we're allowed out. we're free.

kara looks at me. i back at her.

'hey, we made it to brooklyn,' she says.
'yes, we did,' i concur.
'i have tenacious d on dvr back at my place.'
'i have some new american dad and xavier shows on my pod.'
'wanna head back?'
'yeah, let's head back.'

'we did make it to brooklyn,' she says.
'yes, yes, we did,' i concur.

only when we see the green globe of the train station in the distance do the smiles try and crack through our frozen visages.

hey. we made it to brooklyn.

that's worth something. right?

joke's on me!

so i'm reading the lastest time out new york issue when i come across the most hilarious of ironies. apparently, this edition's subject du jour (i guess, semaine) is critics, both professional and amatuer. various articles are interviewing critics, critiquing critics, critics critiquing critics, and critics critiquing the rest of us. yes, for sure there's a lot of criticisms being thrown around.

in response to a question assessing professional critics' feelings on the rise of the citizen-critic, linda steel of the new york post responds:

"the internet should come with a warning label: beware any blog that has the words musings, thoughts and ramblings in it. this is as clear a sign of the bad, boring amateur writer as deer poop is for a hunter."

if a meander isn't a musing or a ramble, i don't know what is! it's as if my blog's walking around with a bullseye on its forehead and a sign taped to its back, saying "shoot me in the face if you think i'm self-indulgent and dull!"

wow.

well, boys'n girls. you've been warned away by those paid to do so. any meanderings or ramblings encountered from here on out that don't reward with a chuckle or furrowed brow are solely the responsibility of your masochistic desire for bad, boring amateur writing or a congenital inability to be entertained. regardless, any perceived injury or compensation for wasted time can be addressed to...yourself.

until next time!

awww, babies!

fuck.

who needs them?

okay, y'all. i'm about to do an anti-kid rant. consider yourself warned...

oh, how i love the '...'! what better way to allude to just-slightly-ominous meaning than the ubiquitous '...'? even in a phrase as banal as "talk to you later...", that most plural of punctuation gives it a meaning of vague foreboding. like - will i really talk to you later? just a hint of the unknown. even google can't define '...'.

yes, i've tried.

my apologies, a juicy fruit-sponsored digression...

so. children.

procreation in modern society is a phenomena so devoid of logical justifications it blows the mind! well, at least the mind not fogged with the biological dictates to procreate.

speaking of dictates - juicy fruit's demanding another aside. well, less a demand and more a gently cajoling yet persistant - and at this point, increasingly annoying - "c'mon, dude. tell them what you're listening to. they'll want to know. c'mon. don't you want them to share a fraction of the bliss you're experiencing? don't be greedy, man. c'mon, just tell them..." apparently this'll be a post more about asides and digressions than any real anti-kid tirade.

i'm listening to marc leclair's album, musique pour 3 femmes enceintes. leclair's akufen, for those not in the glitchy know. this album's straight minimal house, unlike his work under akufen. i'm not usually a minimal house kinda guy - simplistic beat structures bore me after a minute or two. but there's a subtle, crunchy noisiness to the atmospheric electronics that keep these tracks sonically intriguing. it's perfect for a night of literary engagement accompanied by background music that doesn't pull you out of your book, but provides aural distraction when your thoughts pull your eyes from the page. nice.

procreation is so obviously concerned only with gene propagation. for the autonomous, sentient person, the procreative drive is almost psychotic. it requires one to cease making their own personal existence a priority. and be happy about it.

well, at least that's what all these new parents are telling us.

but they sure don't look happy. not that they don't have their game face up. but if you look closely you can see a slight tension at the corners of their mouth and a furtive glance in the smiley happy faces of the newly replicated.

and, that's it, man. you're life's over. not only do you not have the time to do anything, you don't have the quiet. sure, they tell us, children become your life and your priority. yeah, i get that. but why?

i kinda like being my priority. it's kinda fun.

yeah, having kids trip that neurotransmitter reinforcement system of endorphins and oxytocin making ya feel all giddy for being a part of this miraculous bonding experience. but heroin can make ya feel all giddy, too, while leading you down the path of personal destruction.

okay. that might've been a tad extreme. the juicy's just having some fun.

uh.

just had a thought. yeah, i know, every once in a while...

i was about to meander on that unrestricted procreation had its purpose in the heyday of humankind development, giving rise to the mass of progressive genetic mutations that modern man has benefited from. then it occurred to me that to deride unrestricted procreation, and even criticize others for succumbing to the tick-tock, was to assume that humankind had reaped all possible benefits of genetic mutation. that the next frontier of development for us is purely intellectual.

what presumption on my part! no one has any clue what the next stage of biological evolution might produce. we could be angels!

well.

huh.

i guess the only thing i can say with any gram of certainty is that kids are definitely not for me.

yeah, no surprise there.

sorry, guys. hope you enjoyed the trip.

if not, then i hope you had a whole lotta juicy...

yet another quote or two...

"what joy there is in this life. lifting past us always. what pointless joy."

and

"we are every second being born."

- richard powers, the echo maker

another amazing author with a penchant for descriptions approximating the ineffable. in 'the echo maker,' powers employs the context of neurological trauma to reveal the fragility of the self, humankind's insignificance in the larger scope of evolution, and the implausibility of love given the inherent psychoticism of consciousness.

yeah, give it a read...

"life is just death in drag..."
- xavier, the renegade angel

rand/friendship

i feel as if i grew up on ayn rand. not literally, obviously, - the hardy boys, encyclopedia brown, nancy drew were the original guilty pleasures - but, rather, in late high school and early college when my development began to occur outside of familial and community systems.

i think it was in rand's 'the fountainhead' where i encountered the phrase, "there is no joy in the possession of a mindless body." she was referring to the mating experience and how bonding with an individual that wasn't aware of your idiosyncratic awesomeness adds nothing to the development and maintenance of a strong and secure ego.

i'll go one step further and say that there's no joy in the possession of anything mindless - whether it be motivated by habit, routine, obligation, duty or whatever. sure, there's comfort, predictability, and even a measure of security, but the unbridled joy of confronting an experience with full participatory awareness of all sentient parties? i think not.

my boss was asking me after work the other day about my conception of friendship and the role of obligation in maintaining these relationships. she's a christian and regular church-goer, so i'm sure you could surmise her belief system in a focus group-tested (ah, i guess they're called congregations) scripture or two. so, in response to her query, i told her that my friendships tend to be very utilitarian.

before i get judged harshly by the one or two people out there that peruse this blog on occasion, let me define the term. a google click or two provides these two definitions:

1. the belief that the value of a thing or an action is determined by its utility.

2. the ethical theory proposed by jeremy bentham and james mill that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

my conception of friendship encompasses both of these definitions - the value of a friendship is determined by its utility, which is measured by the amount of happiness participants in the friendship achieve.

loyalty or obligation do not factor much into my friendships. few things irk me more than making those friendship 'maintenance' phone calls or get-togethers. we do those 'so, what have you been up to?' and 'how's the job/kids/renovations/what-the-fuck-ever' conversations. invariably, i care nothing for their job/kids renovations/what-the-fuck-ever. these most banal of topics had nothing to do with the origination of our friendship, so why maintain the pretense? if the friendship still retains that dynamic quality upon which it was initiated, then i'll do my damnedest to keep it going. but in the absence of that spark of shared curiosity...

a good friendship, a good anything i guess, is kinda like miles davis and his crew riffing and jamming off a shared theme. the experience is participatory, improvisational, and results in a unique outcome. the experience/interaction cannot be mindless. mindless friendships offer no growth, just baseless security in the fact that you're on somebodies list of friends. or that they're on yours.

what good is a name on a list? will these mindless friendships offer support in your moment of emotional crisis? do they result in those belly-originating giggles and guffaws that make you laugh until it hurts? produce insights that further your personal or intellectual development?

if not, then for what?

yeah, so possession of a mindless body or engagement in anything with a lack of awareness seems like a colossal waste of time.

and perhaps i've wasted enough of yours...

"...it dies so quickly, it grows so slowly. it's called love."
- new order, thieves like us

kundera

i love this writer.

from my first experience with him - the unbearable lightness of being - to my current literary foray - immortality - i've been completely enamored with his gift for creating thoroughly engaging, complex, multi-dimensional characters while expressing truths inherent in the human condition. i'm not suggesting that he's unique in that aspect, i'm just saying that i'm enamored with the way he does it...

a quote from immortality contrasting paths to highways:

"before paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and to enjoy it. what's more, he no longer saw his own life as a path, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed."

and more than most, american culture is a culture of highways.

he goes on to write:

"a path is a tribute to space. every stretch of path has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. a highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time."

we choose to live our lives as paths or highways. living in the present, seeking beauty in the everyday occurrence, or living in the past and the future, one's eyes forever on the next 'destination.'

the thing about highways is, accidents happen all the time.

nope. not dead. yet...

...although i've been incapacitated with the flu and bronchitis for the last three days. sure, that doesn't explain the last three months, but, ya know, what's a guy to do?

so, i'm back with a vengeance and i'm gonna knock you dead with some pearls! of wisdom!

psych.

no pearls here. just some ramblings. from some guy. stoned.

i think this is the first time i'm blogging from my new place. finally left that roomie situation i'd been in for the last year and a half. not that my roomie was a bad guy, he wasn't. living with him a year and a half is a testament to that. even at the height of my engagement in the midst of my youthful optimism and exuberance, i had only lived with my fiance for a year and little bit.

not that she was a bad gal. she wasn't.

i've lived alone for most of my adult life. gotta say i love it. every once in a while a woman will come along that i love more than my solitude, but my solitude eventually reestablishes dominance. i don't know about most people, but i need solitude to think. to grow. distractions make it easy to not grow.

god. and this city, this monstrous apple of a city has more than its fair share - than a couple cities' fair share - of distractions. people, events, happenings, incidents, things, toys. too many things. for me, at least.

i'm finding it incredibly hard to focus on myself, my growth, when confronted with the smorgasbord of goodies to engage in daily. hourly. right-the-fuck now.

sure, a central issue with me is my lack of discipline. i guess one could say...lack of commitment. surprise!

lacking a penchant for discipline and commitment make it next to impossible to forgo the goodies of this urbanized amazon and, instead, turn the gaze inward.

it's like i have spiritual adhd.

gotta get me some ritalin for the soul.

have any?

I think most people distract themselves through life...

huh?

yeah, it's been a while. whatever.

so, i'm sitting here engaging in one of my pastimes - reading liberal/progressive political blogs - and an epiphany occurred. maybe i should say almost occurred.

my apologies, it is a little muddled...

quick aside: merzbow's merzbird is on the system. what fucking incredible sonic nuances this man can project with feedback and static! i bend the knee in respect...

my epiphany. i was at dailykos.com doin' what i do - being amazed that conservatives don't see the *obvious* sense most progressive policies are based on. not democratic, progressive. it's, like, "really? are politicians that oppose these policies/courses of action that corrupt or retarded?!" even today with gonzales's appearance before the house judiciary committee, republicans - excluding specter, he's doing a pretty good job expressing outrage - should be fucking insulted their party leader, bush, is allowing gonzales to force this unmitigated crap down their throats! come on, this guy remembers nothing?!

for some reason, in the midst of my monumental puzzlement, i remembered robert persig's book, 'zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' and it's theme of the philosophical necessity of dynamic and static moral coding systems in material and intellectual development.

yes, yes, i'm smoking a salad of some leftover humboldt and silver haze. yum. tasty...

jealous?

i'm not going to even try and give coherent definitions for 'dynamic' and 'static' systems of 'quality.' i highly recommend -- he he, i said 'high' he he -- this book. it introduces an engaging and consistent (yes, engaging!) scientific theory that encompasses quantum theory, sociology, and philosophy. you'll love it.

...and it inspired me to get a motorcycle and teach myself to ride in college... VROOM!

the epiphany: maybe conservative thinkers are necessary to stabilize and institutionalize progressive thought for society's advancement. progress has to be grounded on something - it has to be progressing from a definable state. conservative thought tends to be traditionalist in nature, codifying progression of past generations. without the dynamic potential in progressive thought tamed and concretized into our societal framework by conservative processes - in essence, made static - then progressive ideas would only be experienced by the few capable of understanding them in their initial complexity. this limited dissemination of developmental knowledge could hinder the growth of the species. i think. conservatives are those that bring progressive ideas to the unwashed masses by a remarkably effective process involving simplification of thought/message, repetition, and utilization of irrational reinforcement systems.

that's a helluva run-on sentence. boys'n girls - caffeine and the green might seem like a good idea...

i say 'irrational reinforcement system' because the herd tends to lack the mental capacity to understand the inherent logic of progressive thought, so, therefore, require 'supernatural' reinforcement to engage in behaviors beneficial to our species.

yep, i said it. most people are too stupid to understand the logic in new ideas and the behaviors that follow and need it to be dumbed down and reinforced with the fear of hell before they'll act.

sure, i'm something of a misanthrope, but that doesn't make me wrong...

anyway, so maybe we need conservative thinkers to keep the herd in line?

welcome back.

american excess...

stretch hummer limos exemplify american excess - both militarily and materialistically - and the bizarre marriage that is the military industrial complex and its stranglehold over federal fiscal policy.

that's it.

they're not going to be pearls everytime...

sopranos and the perception of reality

i just saw last week's sopranos and a comment tony's son made in his therapist's office stuck with me. his therapist noted that he seemed depressed again, and the son responded with "why shouldn't i be depressed? everybody should be depressed. everything's so fucked. there's so many things to be depressed about."

he's right. the world doesn't function under the principle of justice, just the laws of science. completely amoral laws.

quasi-scientific ramble: perceiving the world optimistically is a function of our neurochemistry. our brains drug us into the delusion that there's a fundamental 'rightness' steering the course of events. research has proven this, indicating that 'normal' people have higher levels of a certain neurotrasmitter, serotonin, than individuals that have been diagnosed with depression. thing is, other studies have shown that individuals that are mildly depressed see the world more realistically than 'happy' people.

interesting.

our brains 'fool' us into believing things are better than they are so that our actions aren't paralyzed by the myriad cruel injustices that characterize our existence.

and they say drugs are bad...

quote of the month, perhaps year:

"the trick is in what one emphasizes. we either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. the amount of work is the same."

carlos castaneda

choose happy...

music musings...

...the best instrumental, lyric-less music create narratives as descriptive, structured, riveting, and cathartic as the best lyric-ful compositions.

good purely instrumental pieces introduce core elements, or characters, and weave an encompassing narrative incorporating secondary elements that provide counterpoint to the core elements.

non-lyrical music can evoke similar feelings as expressive vocalization - curiosity, anticipation, giddiness, darkness/sadness, anger, elation, and closure.

in some ways, instrumental compositions - in the participatory process inherent to subjective mediums - allows for stronger resonance as participation in an experience is akin to creation.

you're not limited by someone else's simplistic or incomprehensible verbalizations about a specific story.

its lack of structure - and forgive me for repeating ramblings from a previous post - allows for two general reactions, lack of interest if one doesn't have the imagination to make the experience participatory or engagement as one allows their personal understanding of the world to interpret and give meaning to the music.

resonance/harmony with others and the other.

to high to continue...

so...

so, i've started smoking again......cigarettes.

silly, huh? obviously, smoking is retarded. the vast majority of smokers know smoking is beyond the farthest reaches of silly. yet, we smoke.

i've been smoking on and off for about seven years. i had quit about three months ago, then...

spring in new york...

what better reason to stand outside feeling the rays hit your face, hear the warm wind in the trees, and take deep breaths of the, well, smoke?

the nicotine's not really my issue. i'm madly in love with all the behaviors and rituals surrounding the smoking process.

smoking after a meal while relaxedly leaning back in your chair.

taking a break from the office to go outside, look in the sky and inhale.

reaching behind you to grab that pack, still sweaty from that mind-tearing fuck.

something to do when waiting for a friend at the street corner.

the perfect excuse to get away from the bothersome at any social gathering.

a stalling tactic in the middle of an argument when your mind's gone blank.

okay, i'm wandering.

clearly, cigarettes aren't all i'm smoking.

time for a puff.

or two.

poop prose:

they popped out of my
painfully puckered posterior;
these putrid, yet perplexedly
proliferating pebbles of
pugnaciously pungent poop.

definitely, i was dismayed to
discern that the delectables
i had devoured the night before
had demolished my digestive
and destroyed my duodenum

leaving dangling
this
detritus...

i wonder...

i wonder if weed's pretty well documented impairment of short-term memory is related to it's capacity to enhance our perception of direct experience? yes, i understand that my beloved maryjane's an hallucinogenic, but it also facilitates attention and focus on whatever's occurring 'now.'

i wonder if short-term memory impairment is the byproduct of sensory information overload that happens when altered or, yes, stoned? perhaps cerebral resources are being allocated to receiving more input from our participation with the present rather than encoding that information?

which, of course, leads to the burning and slightly stinging question of the hour: is it more beneficial to immerse one's self in the present and maximize resonance or reduce our attention to the present and all its incredibly detailed and minute beauty to ensure encoding of a smaller amount of experience for future retrieval?

'course, the ideal would be maximizing resonance without hallucinogenic aid.

but what fun is that?

so, i'm bored...

not just now, but my life of late seems to have lost some of that sparkle that's responsible for spontaneous grinning and deep sighs of satisfaction. and it's not as if i'm not getting out and doing stuff, either. i live in manhattan. i see at least two or three live music shows a week. i get to the theater to see two three flicks a week. i don't watch much t.v. - just tivo'd entourage or sopranos (although project runway and top design caught my interest for the season.) i haven't been doing as much non-political, non-work related reading as i have in the past, but i still have a book i'm into (philip roth's counterlife - still) and a couple lined up. so what's the dealio, man?

i've always believed an active creative outlet is what most maximizes our ability to experience 'experience.' harking back to my previous post, individual/spiritual growth occurs in the present, in one's ability to perceive experience with as few cultural/familial/peer values degrading the present phenomenon. actively creating something - music, literature, any art or something completely unique coming from within - taps into something within the human creature that engenders exhilaration and feelings of connectedness with the larger world. i know i'm sounding a little new agey, but i'm not postulating a sentient 'thing' out there with a larger plan for us all.

the macro-physical world appears to conform to the principles of evolution, while the micro-physical world adheres to quantum physical properties. (massive disclaimer: yeah, i've read several books outside of college on these topics, but by no stretch of the hallucinogenic and fevered imagination do i consider myself anything but the most lay of laypersons on these subjects.) both evolution and quantum physics are theories describing the creative process on a macro- and micro- scale. creation is how and why we're here. even our social behaviors are governed by the ways we can create opportunities to mate with high-status partners.

my point is that creating is inherent to our being. so it makes sense when individuals say that they feel the most alive when creating. perhaps personal creation, on some level, resonates with the process of creation that's happening all around and in us in infinite ways forever.

perhaps personal/spiritual growth is about maximizing that resonance.

perhaps i need to find/create a creative outlet.

perhaps i've smoked myself retarded.

material success vs spiritual growth

okay, we're going to get a little heavy here. obviously, this has been one of those 'questions of the ages' - pursuit of material success and desires of the flesh (although they could be separated under certain philosophic conditions) versus spiritual growth and attainment of nirvana. yes, yes, lofty questions for a stoned dude, but who else - outside of philosophers, theologians, and some lawyers given the right amount of monetary compensation - would put this effort into it?

first off, i'm going to establish as a premise that they're mutually exclusive. sure, i suppose there's some guy out there that's fully attained one and sees no further goal but pursuit of the other, or an individual with some congenital condition allowing them to hold two goal systems that our culture perceives and rewards in totally different ways within their cognitive framework at once. if so, these are the uber-rare exceptions. yes, my evidence is more anecdotal than empirical, but if you've heard of a study, send it my way...

so, yes, mutually exclusive. primarily because the pursuit of either to their pinnacle requires total dedication and commitment. since the reward systems are totally different, i.e., money and its concomitant acquisitions versus spiritual growth and its concomitant aversion to acquisitions, they can't be achieved simultaneously.

now the million dollar or free question, depends what reward system you're operating from - which is better? 'course now we have to define 'better.' because i want to finish this post before i re-toke, i'll just tell ya. which system/pursuit makes you happier?

we can get into that bullshit about defining 'happy' but that's just silly. we know billion-dollar homes/cars/jewelry don't make us happy. we know this because people that have owned billon-dollar homes/cars/jewelry have told us so, in movies, talk shows, books, in person. okay, so believing what others want you to believe just because is a little insulting. i agree. so think about those moments of true happiness you've experienced in your life. was it really when you bought that car? or that house? or necklace? whatever? was it a moment of acquisition or a moment of experience?

and isn't that was spiritual growth requires - commitment to the world of experience? to allow each moment to be perceived in its entirety? more than anything, our perception of life defines how we experience life. by altering perception - refusing to introject cultural and familial value systems - to maximize experience, we allow the beauty of each moment to be experienced without value judgments and other conditioned schemata .

i believe that's when we feel our happiest - when we feel part of something larger than ourselves. part of a shared moment.

that's it for today, folks.

time to re-toke...

scarface...

so, roomie picked up scarface the videogame in pheonix about a month ago. he's been playing pretty regularly since then and is a little over half-way through. i'm watching him play right now. it's set in miami beach - where i spent my last couple of years before moving to new york. pretty nostalgic, i've caught a glimpse of my old neighborhood. kinda cool.

so, here's the funny thing - although you might be tempted to view me with incredulous amusement, rather then outright hilarity. the funny thing - i've never seen scarface. the movie. how does one miss a phenomenon so central to the american psyche? dunno. never really tickled my fancy. anyway, that's not what i'm here to ramble about...

something roomie said about the gameplay. he said that to get through some of these mini-shoot'em-up missions your play has to be "fluid." to get fluid you have to get your skill improved over repeated plays. obviously. the thing that interested me is his follow-up comment. "it's supposed to feel like a movie." wow. full immersion in this artificial universe to become part of the movie. i'm not criticizing, i'm a lover of movies, excepting most horror and extreme chick flicks - we're talking steel magnolia and the hours. so enjoying the movie-going experience isn't something i'm adverse to, but wanting to become part of the movie. hmm. not really my thing. total immersion into an alternate reality seems like a negation of the, ah, 'real' reality. again, periodic engrossment - just finished reading phillip roth's 'the breast' - is a multitude of things: cathartic, edifying, escapist, evocative. but total immersion negates who you are in 'real' life. the person you've become. sure, i've heard the argument that one is allowed to completely reinvent themselves in these digital universes. i guess. but you can't smell spring in the air in these worlds. can't see a band sweat and feel the energy of a live show. you can't enjoy the taste of good thai. or great pizza. and, for god's sake, you can't fuck. immersing yourself in a world devoid of these sensory experiences seems a little silly.

whatever.

i'm just some dude ramblin' away...

my first meander...

i'm listening to animal collective - forest gospel on hollinndagain - and i'm loving the internal image the intro evokes. the static, intermittent almost, toy-like percussion. very abstract. which is my preference for most music. i enjoy the participatory process of good* experimental music. the listener must contribute for the music to gain transcendence, almost to make sense.

my strong, visceral aversion to a lot of popular music is because of its strong, visceral aversion to participation. with simplistic lyrics and simplistic hooks and choruses, the music forces you down a path not of your choosing. i guess if you like being led in life, you must really fucking love the radio. and mtv. and bet. and pitchfork. and. whatever.

reader. do yourself a favor and purchase this album, pack a bowl of the icky, and enjoy...

* 'good' meaning whatever i happen to have learned to love in music throughout my development. i wouldn't presume to define 'good' for anyone else. although if i think it sounds like crap, i'll tell ya.

the debut...

wow. i guess it was inevitable i'd start a blog. why, i ask? so someone would read my writing, i snarkily reply...

it gets better, i promise.

maybe.

so, the vitals - i'm mid-thirties, live in manhattan, love the usuals (experimental music, philosophical fiction, a good flick, and a transcendental fuck), work for a non-profit (which approximates my income), and enjoy a puff now and then. politically, i'm left of left. socially, do what the fuck ever, as long as it doesn't adversely impact me.

what else? who cares?

me.

maybe.