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.