a weekend of parks and recreation II

...we're all lying in the gutter...but some of us are looking at the stars-------oscar wilde

...or at the tops of trees, at least...now that it's already the following weekend, i'm finding it difficult to muster up interest in last weekend, despite how interesting i remember it to have been...perhaps the pictures will fill in the gaps in my words...perhaps really none of this matters at all...

[really i'm too depressed at the moment to write anything interesting: transmission in car is shot and can't see girlfriend this weekend, trapped at my parents' house...hearing that a cousin killed himself...mom has more [skin] cancer...a sparse, sombre thanksgiving]

i have creepy premonitions of being an old man trying to find these entries as a nostalgic way of reconnecting with my younger self but not being able to find them---though the reality is probably going to be that, sometime in the future, a great internet server purging will take place and those not willing to pay up in order to maintain their postings will have said postings erased to make way for paid cyber real estate...or that much of the server infrastructure we currently use are like dirt roads which will be demolished and 'paved over' with the latest information superhighway triple intergalactic bypass surgery...now, i'd surmise, is about tail end of the '40 acres and a mule' phase of the internet [free, encouraging, expansionist]...just wait until the 'twenty-first century manhattan cut-throat housing market' phase [maximum runaway profitization]!

choose your apocalypse! please leave your personal favorite in the comments section of this post----it'll be erased eventually,  anyway; so, have fun with it at least, humoring yourself and me in the process!

sorry....

while driving to deep cut gardens, i spied a sign that said 'fossil beds' on the side of a typical road! having just read about the new mammoth [literally and otherwise] finds in colorado, my head swam with intrigue...the sign below awaited me in the parking lot:

poricy brook fossil beds! my inner 8-yr-old grabbed the wheel and steered me down the path and over brook onto its muddy banks. the water cold, my hand numb...plunged into the mushy gray clay to excavate some ancient sea creatures which had last been alive tens of millions of years ago, when the sea actually covered what is now 10 miles inland:

how surprised i was to find that the fossils weren't even fossilized, the organisms still being in evidence, and the rock not being fully solidified [unless i'm way stronger than i realize].

after 20 mins digging i was cold enough to continue onwards towards my original destination, deep cut gardens:

glistening, bronzed, autumnal redwoods!

formal gardens with volcanic stone walls...

art nouveau/celtic twists in the cypress groves...

even a whimsical dragon with googly eyes created out of this weeping pruned tree!...all off an ordinary, winding road in monmouth county, nj...

a weekend of parks and recreation

...not the tv show but the 'real' thing...

perhaps hearkening back to my time living abroad last year, i'm finding myself being able to act like a tourist where i live. it's a blessed feeling to be able to unabashedly, non-ironically explore my own backyard and it seems that having monmouth county as my backyard [until february 2011] is an especial blessing.

within 20 mins. drive i have my choice of excellent parks, county and otherwise: hartshorne woods, huber woods, deep-cut gardens, tatum park...this weekend i've made it to all of them in glorious, cool, clear november weather, plus an unexpected bonus i spied while driving by...

i finally found the back [rocky point] entrance to hartshorne woods, a sprawling enough park to get lost in! luckily the weather cooperated, i had my camera and good hiking shoes---off i disappeared into a rambling, scenic 3-mi loop trail. before that, i came to an unexpected old military concrete bunker sporting this neat graffiti:

back to the trail---i hoofed it in front of a large, loud gang of about 25 kids...who never managed to catch up to me, even with my stops to soak in the scenery, like...this unexpected and mysterious concrete shaft vent in the middle of the woods:

where did it go to? what was it used for?

 the trail bent around the south side of a rocky hill, complete with views of the navesink river, to which it eventually led:

the scenery celebrated itself as if it were an old dutch etching or an expressive hudson river school painting! reeds swayed, wavelets lapped...and i felt myself [like i do] reverting to an edenic state, as if seeing the scene for the first time after coming upon it at the end of a thousand-mile migration with my tribe; but, alas, i have no tribe...and i did want to jump into the navesink like a black lab...but i did not.

'auto-tune the news' is news to me

i remember reading, a while back in college, a short, yet dense french postmodern book called 'noise' by jacques attali.  ah, how i used to search in vain for clues to living in these types of impenetrable gobbledygook books---but i do remember one phrase which, at the time, struck me as being as important as it was cryptic: that the musical instrument of the future [written in 1985] would be the video camera. being a musician who was studying video, i filed away the comment...

cut to a few days ago when my friend james sent me a series of links to peruse, one being to the auto-tune the news channel on you tube. instantly, after watching and listening, i was struck, not only by attali's prescience, but by the brilliance and total 'now-ness' of the art of the gregory brothers
---the creators of the channel. the 'now-ness' or cultural relevance to what it means to be human at this time, is so rare in most creations [which mostly look to other people, at other times, or, heaven forbid, look nowhere at all] and constitutes real art in my humble, aging book!

in other words, here are three young brothers and one wife who are offering a playful, engaging, artistic, thought-provoking and musical answer to our culture of constant media bombardment. they're not whining about it! they're making yet more media, yes....but media that's on our side.

below is the famous-for-the-moment 'bed intruder' song---as i type, this video has had over 42 million hits and has, i imagine, turned the gregory brothers art into a full-time career!! the creation is based on a news story of an intruder breaking and entering an apartment in the projects and getting in bed with a sleeping resident. here i think of the long-running folk and blues tradition of turning current events into songs...

first, here's the original news story source material for the song:




now, the song [response]:




no, the gregory brothers aren't the first to play video musically, however. even back in those heady, postmodern theory-soaked days of the early early 90's, i remember being exposed to the emergency broadcast network's [ebn] then-hot-off-the-press video loop music and performance. see an example below:





compare, contrast...talk amongst yourselves about digital patchwork quilts...

how i learned to leave the force and grab a firehose

now, some context: the above is a picture of my boss taken about 25-30 years ago. it sits propped up against the stereo in the shop to provide sometimes much needed comic relief. for a while, each time i looked at it [or even imagined it] i burst out laughing---imagining, as i was, a jerry-lewis-like outburst of sound to accompany the visual.

one can almost imagine that this picture proof of goofing off on the job was the reason that my boss has run a guitar repair shop for the last 20 years and is not still an officer of the law-----hence, my title to this post [with passing reference to dr. strangelove].

transparency

i sit here on a friday night, missing my long-distance girlfriend terribly---wishing nothing else but to invent the killer app machine to conquer time and space...gosh, while i'm at it, i'd get creative and splice, dice, mix and sample her anachronistically into parts of my life she didn't make it into the first time around...i enjoy the endless possibilities to myself...

of course new media technologies find new ways to put us 'in touch'....these said technologies, made mostly by men [female tech designers, engineers, developers speak up now to prove me wrong!], seem to be remarkably conducive to pornography [one can, here, cry the end of civilization as we know it with xbox's 'kinect' which responds to player gestures---what a great porn medium!]...if even a simple generalization about the male sexual psyche is true----that men need to 'see' what's going on to get turned on----then it can be said that males are 'hardwired' [sorry!] for pornography and, by association, advertising. joseph campbell called anything pornography that induces a desire for an object whether it be a car, fridge or flesh and blood; so, according to his elegant formula, all advertising is pornography, since advertising's only job description is to generate desire! in fact, all celebrity-fed media is pornography! to consume media is to be flattered that one's eyeballs [attention] are the coveted prize, though, in the end, your eyeballs are attached to your wallet by a long chain...

during the past week, while consuming my political pornography, i've reflected on david mccullough's mammoth biography, 'truman' about----surprise-----president harry truman and how i'd like to throw it at president obama, not in order to physically injure him [though it would, weighing in at a whopping 996 pages!] but in order to show him how to face a mid-term elected opposition congress: with pluck and toughness. even in 1946-8 the republicans were the party of 'no', their smear campaigns working public opinion polls against the president despite a booming post-war economy, which refused to devolve into the economic disaster the naysayers prayed for. [apocalyptic fetishism is yet another form of pornography---live and well----- which, in my mind, is akin to the fad of jerking off while attempting to strangle oneself---in order to have more intense orgasms] even then, conservatives wanted to cut people from the social security roles, deny relief aid to a freshly-devastated europe [leaving them wide open for soviet take-over in the process], and ignored truman's push for low-cost housing for veterans and....[gasp] a national health plan....sound familiar? read the book now, barack!

on the phone---another great porn medium, invented by a man---a friend and i wondered about the theory of efficient markets, rational actualizers and the decision-making process during political contests [like we do]...sounds fancy, but the take home was this: how can a voter ever hope to make an informed, rational decision for a candidate when there is absolutely NO transparency in the available information about the candidate, where in fact, lots of money is spent to produce the exact opposite effect, opacity?

what with our sex buttons frantically pressed constantly on top of the need to make decisions without any tools with which to do so...NO WONDER WE'RE CRAZY!!! insanity is the only sane response to the cruel experiment in which we're the subjects...

more transparency, please! with everything....so i can, with my male psyche, glare at the pubic [turned public] hairs of politics, marketing, the medical establishment, media, paranoid alarmists, etc...well, no...i already know they all have no clothes...

the future luxury of anonymity

did something abnormally normal last night: went to the mall, ate and saw a movie--'the social network'. a saunter through the monmouth mall almost inspired me to poetry of the post-postmodern: i gaped at the face-slapping irony of glitzy window-loads of sportswear being peddled to overweight, and in certain cases, obese teens and 'tweens'...immediately i realized that this was the fate of pretty much all of us against the leviathan of total consumer media saturation, as it must be...for why would a self-assured, healthy person need discretionary products in order to feel good about his/her self? the answer: they wouldn't and don't. so, go ahead...be an elite athlete, you fat fuck! or at least buy the sneakers...

as a child and pre-teen, i never felt like i had to wrestle with the cunningest of cunning madison ave minds...even the most well-meaning and well-prepared of critically-thinking adults are hopelessly outgunned in the cultural showdown for hearts and minds--hearts are subliminally won, while the mind shuts off and is pulled along. meanwhile, children are just dead fish in a barrel. not a chance! what's even worse is that the whole enterprise of a mall is like a giant tv of constant commercials, through which you can walk and only spend your way out, interbred with a low-lying, child-level checkout aisle candy rack: the kids grab, the parents pay and are converted into child-abusing curmudgeons if they don't. in fact, i feel that any dissent from or critique of the system instantly makes the critique-er/dissenter into the same. i feel it now, writing this modest blog entry. to even question malls is to hate puppies and children and sacred cows. [no, i don't hate any of the above.]

speaking of that: another sad moment for me...seeing boy scouts selling popcorn at the mall in order to fund their existence. i fondly remember being in the scouts, but don't remember having to do anything remotely as commercial and separated from 'community service', which was an integral part of the entire scouting experience! i felt bad and gave them money without accepting the popcorn. this action seemed to blow their minds even while they thanked me. good scouts...

so, the movie...as a film, it was very good, engrossing even to a non-gen-y-non-facebook-user...i see the facebook phenomenon as strikingly similar to my mall experience, actually: a non-place space to be where everybody is and to see what everybody else is doing. in a word: gossip. in the old world: the town square. my intuition about the trajectory of such an enterprise: right now represents an age of digital communalism/feudalism, wherein everybody except the old wants in---if i may map the historical development of [western] economies onto the development of the internet as a commercial medium...next, i feel that colonization can/will happen, pulling developing nations into the fold [just like getting them cars and cigarettes----new markets, my son, new markets!]...

once everybody's in the pot and being stirred, we'll have to pay---probably a premium---in order to get out....just like at the mall, just like the suburbs vis-a-vis the city! the future luxury of anonymity! this stage would represent the 'bourgeoisie-ification' of our internet society. a current example from our commercial culture is paying more for products without the cheap and sometimes harmful additives expedient to industrial mass-production, but not necessarily to humanity. in an age of total or near-total connectivity, anonymity will be a sought-after/bought-after privilege.

this past week, at the shop, a co-worker talked about the hypothetical tooth-implanted music chip we'll all have...it then came to me that we'll probably have to pay for silence, too....we already do: exclusive living away from the noisy mass, vacations...'getaways', in a word...pay to get away...away...away from....you and you and you and you....

econ-ned

economists SHOULD calculate the cost of everything having a cost...the cost? priceful....

t.e.a.t.

...total entertainment all the time....

some old artwork i did...still agree with its cynicism...please, by all means, have a suck...

beach bum

i don't look happy about the fact that each southern-california-type day we've had this 'indian summer' i've hit the beach after the shop...but i have been quite pleased, taking advantage of living 'down the shore'.

roots and rootlessness

...so...in the face of last post....what would my 'roots' be? in which cultural milieu would i find my melodies, dances and participation in an authentic way? i know that 'authentic' is a very slippery slope, indeed---especially for a suburban white guy like myself who inherited a culture of 'no-culture' [or ALL cultures, depending on how one looks at the issue]...on a side note, i just heard an npr interview with robert plant, who claimed the same 'culture-of-no-culture' for himself whilst ignoring and actually denigrating his 'real' native, ancient, well-established anglo-saxon culture...african-american music spoke to him from across the atlantic....and the rest, as they say, is history...

back to me: where i grew up was settled by the dutch and used for farming since the 1600's. before that, i've heard it described as 'prime indian hunting grounds'....so what would that melody sound like? ironically, i've also heard it said, and found it to be true, that the dutch don't really have music of their own, and thus are avid catalogers of the music of others. did the rootlessness of the dutch rub off on new jersey suburbia, literally planting a root of rootlessness? i listen to the amazing dutch radio station, concertzender, as i type this...

recently i received a forward from my mother of an email from my cousin who has been involved more than anyone in the family in plumbing our geneology. three pictures were attached. one is believed to be my great grandmother:

..stern, czech, classical...these seem to be my authentic roots. her brother, named josef franzl, [if she in the photo is indeed my great grandmother] was a well-known, accomplished french horn player with various groups in nyc during the early 1900's; well-known enough for my cousin to have gotten in touch with a horn collector who recently bought a lot of franzl stuff on ebay! this is blowing my mind...i searched the new york times archives for mentions of josef and there are a few concert announcements. supposedly he composed, too. that would be a holy grail for me: find and procure franzl manuscripts!

melody/memory

an interesting thing is happening as i'm able to hold a pick and play guitar again, after 10 years of battle with the you-don't-want-it condition, focal dystonia. during the entire past ten years, along with losing control of the fine motor skills in my right hand, another curious neurological wipe occurred: that i was practically incapable of perceiving melody!! melodic continuity was just as scrambled as the kinetic instructions to my right hand! now, however, both activities are sprouting some exciting new growth...i believe the two go 'hand in hand'...

my 'amelodia' was almost the more frightening of the two conditions. picture a sampler with a memory of 4-5 seconds only able to reproduce a clipped mockingbird form of music. however much i tried i couldn't anticipate or perceive music, melody and/or meaning beyond the 4-5 sec. limit! it simply would be processed. i was stuck in a very short loop, indeed. my mind could only collage, rip a few words and paste them on a small surface and was denied the richness of original paragraphs and chapters. an ocd adhd rut.

it feels to me now that my body was experiencing [and still is, though to a much lesser extent] what our culture,  especially music, has experienced over the past 30 years. a self-fulfilling rut. imitations of imitations ad infinitum---the effects of total media saturation...the telephone game converting english into unintelligible chinese whispers....ooooh, and how horrible that feeling feels! another notion comes to me: that melody transmission is rooted in identifiable strains of culture [now reduced to 'genres' or 'styles']----not knowing the songs is not knowing the dances is....not knowing and not being able to participate in the culture in a meaningful way...melody is meaning...and losing melody is losing meaning, a huge chunk of language!

i welcome back melody and meaning in my life....and hope they stick around....its been lonely, fragmented and frankly nonsensical without them....

coming up for air and sea

so....since last entry i've relocated to my new temporary boathouse residence in highlands, nj ['where the jersey shore begins' and it does] and started a guitar repair apprenticeship program. any move is difficult even when it's as physically easy as mine was: i moved myself in one car in about 20 mins. [i've moved about 15-20 times over the past 17 years, depending on what one defines as a 'move'] ah, no matter how hard i try, i can't escape my father's business [moving]!

yes, i'm alive and well even if i haven't been able to call you---universal winking irony would have it that i should move to the only [literally] small spot in monmouth county not serviced by my cellphone company!

oh, it feels so good to get into a shop with tools...so many things philosophical and spikey that i can say, but i'll try to sum it up: for years i've felt like an imposter and in certain respects i have been...my roots are blue collar, no matter what heady proclivities i've developed. i'm very far from anti-intellectual, but i've always felt the discrepency between me and the educated/ivy league/intellectual people with whom i've associated over the years. the discrepency comes down to class. yes, that elephant in the american parlor!

mercury retrograde

my girlfriend pointed out to me the astrological fact that the planet responsible for communication and ideas, mercury, has appeared to trail 'backwards' in its orbit across the sky---a condition also known as 'retrograde' by ancient astronomers/astrologers. if the planet ruling communications and other 'mercurial' fiefdoms is appearing to move in the opposite direction, what effect could, almost logically [in a medieval way] be anticipated? that all one's communications can be botched, undone, untied? yes. no wonder my head has felt turned 180 degrees...

i don't know if a small planet very far away is responsible, but i do know that this past week had been a communications DISASTER with my said girlfriend as well as with my attempts to find an apartment at the jersey shore. other co-varying factors most surely are: the fact that i'm using craigslist almost exclusively in my housing search; that i'm searching in new jersey...after two solid months of banging my head against the wall [to make myself feel BETTER], hours of driving, being told off and blown off, this morning i've finally had a moment of closure in my housing search!

dare i share my most interesting housing search snafu?

the listing was modest and no-frills enough: share my beautiful home. large, wi-fi, your own kitchen, yard, friendly black lab, etc. i think the black lab had me sold on it before anything else. the owner was difficult to understand over the phone due to her accent [or was it mercury?] but we talked and worked out a time to see the apartment. i pull up: very nice neighborhood! grand, new house! very promising! i meet the landlady, the kids, the dog...everything great so far. the space is expansive---the whole basement floor, in fact. the landlady tells me she isn't a private person---leaving me to wonder about the significance of having said so...though the comment verged on classic-segues-into-pornography, i didn't dwell too much on it.

next day, i left a voice mail message, informing her of my decision to take the place. then i waited a number of days for a reply. then she leaves me a voice mail message, asking me what my decision is...and that she can only accept the rent in cash, being that she isn't supposed to have tenants in her house. didn't she get my message? cash?! red flags! next, i e-mailed her saying that i wouldn't want to put myself into such a precarious housing situation, in a place where i'm not supposed to be. she writes back: no one can tell me who can or can't live in my home. i want someone to live in as a family member, who i can rely on when i'm not here...[and charge them CASH for the privilege?]

translation: she wants help with her two children since she works so much....er, don't people get paid to do that, not pay to do it? after a sherlock holmes-ian line of questioning, i discover her true motivation! in the same way, my girlfriend and i needed hours of telephonic emotional archaeology to unearth what we really have been trying to say to each other during the past few days...[we're better now, thank you!]

damn you, mercury, moonwalking across the sky!

can run, but can't hide from the hive mind!

maybe it's just me...or my changed perceptions since having joined the 'blogosphere' in my minor way...

or...

that the decline of our higher education has hit the journalistic marketplace, to which would-be hopefuls aspire and therefore imitate...

but...

these days, at this time, i'm finding it truly difficult to read [practically] any journalism!!! mostly, i skip to the comments section of most articles. through the noise and blather and asian knockoff product spam, i can usually recognize some intelligent debate and interesting personal perspectives, which i would expect the journalism to provide. metaphorically, i'm thinking of articles as we've known them as photographic stills. the wiki [comments] appendage to the article creates a more 4d-time-based medium, say, like video...

i'll boldly venture here: metaphorical photographic stills, no matter how well done---even though they may be beautiful or accurate----can't really tell us in a comprehensive way about how we live at this moment, at this time...on the face of it, it's presumptuous that a single mind can have anything even remotely accurate or interesting to say about the multitude that is---and always has been---the american experience. even a cursory flip through de tocqueville's 'democracy in america' reveals the chaos which still defines us today. love it, hate it, or love-hate it: america's main export to the world [besides treasury notes and the military] is a barely-contained game of bloody-lipped dodge-ball!

but, i thought you just said that a single author can't say anything accurate or interesting, never mind prescient, about the american experience?!! what about that singular french aristocrat you mentioned?

well....that was soooo 1835-40....

and what about you? you are a single author, aren't you?

that remains to be read....

here i'm touching upon a sentiment about which i have mixed feelings----about the only ethos i feel in common with conservatives and even tea partiers...that i'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 people out of the boston [or anywhere] telephone book, than by the ivy-league elite that has ruled us since the beginning...

and what's the connection between the previous paragraph and the ones before that?

that i think the leaders and the journalists are way out of touch with the lives of their subjects! notice that the word 'subjects' is appropriate to both...

yes, very clever! how long had you been planning that wordplay?

not very...and that the subjects are losing interest and even becoming hostile towards their subjugators!

ha! same word root: latin sub=under+jugum=yoke. is it me or has this blog entry split into a dialogue between plain and italic fonts?

no, it's me too...

and how does that make you feel?

i'm of two minds about the whole thing...

besides that? oh, i get it...you're trying to illustrate your original point of writing this entire blog entry: about the inadequacies of journalism, politics and the necessity of honest, even chaotic, dialogue in the intellectual marketplace?


ooo, good point! in trying to grasp the multitude i've splintered off into renegade sub-personalities....mmmm.....

well, isn't that the logical corollary of what you're saying? that if embracing multiplicity, one must become multiplicitous?

 mmm....that i'm suggesting a schizophrenic state is the one [or many] truest-to-reality?

sorry, i'm not taking the bait...

good. my point is proven.

decisions, decisions

technology/marketing has spoiled us for choice...figuratively, by, of course, offering us stunning, numbing numbers of slight variations on a theme...just try buying shampoo at your ubiquitous, local cvs. unfortunately, politics suffers from the exact opposite problem! i wish it would catch up to market economics already....yes, power relies on concentration, not dispersion...

as our attention is dispersed, so is our power....

spoiling our choice, literally, too, suits the purposes of business perfectly! by blasting us with the said options, companies can make us worse and worse at making decisions...and making the wrong decision we have to buy another proposed solution to our created problem, i.e. a product...a product always stands by, ready to rid us of our problems...

why do we seem to have so many problems? well, to borrow from my favorite adulterer of fat, ugly women: it's the economy, stupid! problems keep us trying to buy our way out of them. repeat like a gang of four lyric.


elsewhere, across the corpus collosum, i can picture an evolved future where ever-youthful, gorgeous, pale and pasty, hyper-rational beings can parse stacks of bifurcating charts of options with cpu-ease...i can picture it....but would i want to photoshop myself and/or loved-ones into this pixel-perfect picture? 

why does the mechanism of choice and discrimination/discernment not seem like a muscle; that the more one 'flexes' it in a healthy manner, the stronger it gets? perhaps, the hinging, operative word is 'healthy'?! that market forces are ripping our muscles of decision-making, rendering them weaker...what would a decision gym be like? [minus the lab rats]

moral relativism wriggles in the back door to this discussion and ominously laughs, 'how do you know what's right when evil and good depend on your perspective?' let's just choose the cheepest bottle of shampoo and get the hell out of the store....

no...but seriously...

why don't writers write 'cover' novels in the same way that musicians play cover tunes? they could keep the same form in tact while perhaps radically revamping the style and 'point of view'...maybe expanding on different characters, giving different narrators a shot...foreshadowing...epiloging...think of a literary analogue of tony bennet covering ozzy's 'crazy train' or....hendrix's 'star spangled banner' from woodstock...

why the hell not?

[besides the fact of the auteur-solo-genius fortress that surrounds the act of writing which could only kill the act of making music---which is necessarily a more communal, interpersonal endeavor...]

are we still in the grip of bible-mania? that a text is somehow 'sacred'? unalterable? from the hand of god? [or king james...] not to be desecrated by the vulgar restylings [that i am suggesting]? that it's forever? immovable clay tablets for the ages? commandments for living? [i think i just heard a stone tablet falling...]

or that, since books require so much effort to read and to write, that the ping-ponging interplay of references and influences which come so readily to music, as you hear it in time, would be too painfully slow to sustain anyone's interest?

parking lot incident

she frightened me!
a friendly woman
who knew what
i was thinking,
without knowing
what she knew.

in the parking lot,
she said her friend
loved fish too...
almost backed over her
flattened her
like flounder...

but how did she know
and not know what
what she knew;
that i was then
pondering
sardines in a can
i ought to have bought?

distraught, i thought,
"oh, the stuffed
orange clowfish on my dash..."
so, for something to say,
i said, "so, there's
someone else?"

she replied,
"yes, and i'm telling her!"

an inner depth grabbed
by an easily available handle:
out of the fire
and
into the frying pan.

artisan fantasy

workshop dreams
grant me tools
to work on things
and not with fools.

something actual,
proof in the hands--
non-outsourceable
to foreign lands...

in corpore sano
keeps me sane.
the whole body
as embodied brain.

a spasm of poetry

home

away with your stuff!
your stuff stuffed away...

anywhere it can go,
except wherever it is...

the right to be
or the right not to be,
there is no question:
be elsewhere, but not here.

out of one's mind with
'out of sight/out of mind'.
one minds when one
is in sight, in mind.

an insight into the making of my mind...



music

we all know
it used to
mean so much more

and

feel like
the victims
of cliterectomy!

our capacity
for being moved
moved away...
like a beloved
childhood friend.

it was love
and language,
married
eternally!

and
dancing hellfires
burning
infernally

a
sound
mind
ravishing
a
sound
body...

even if...
the song's
sad:

isn't anything
so much happier
when singing?




'authenticity'

how great to all be fakes!
all equal in thievery
under the law of creativity.

the search for pure aurum
and novo ordo seclorum
makes us '49ers
on the fool's gold trail.

make an element
if you will it...
replace a fly
if you kill it...

if you will to make,
you won't!
if replace you must,
kill you don't!

obamacare infographic

this in response to a contest sponsored by fast company magazine...the new healthcare bill represented as a subway map: what a great idea! we need the information communication model of the future, graphics, right now! download the supersized .jpg here.

note to paranoid conservatives: illegals WILL NOT BE COVERED!!! i repeat, 'WILL NOT BE COVERED!!!'

boost the junk in your trunk

last week, i had the pleasure of momentarily being a man in the way most of us contemporary males miss, but could hardly admit in fluffy-white, over-processed company---both personal and commercial. to wit[less]: with the help of my father's car club which provided a lift, tools and some eager manpower, i got to replace the faulty air suspension of my 1990 lincoln town car with a relatively cheap but effective spring and shock conversion kit! see it here on the strutmasters site.

being a 'man'? yes. getting dirty and not caring. cursing [ditto]. skinning a knuckle or two [used to be an animal hide]. sometimes joyously employing brute force to solve a problem before rational detachment could even stir its toussled, [fluffy-white, over-processed] head. having a physical problem to solve in the 'real' physical world----not one that is mediated by the now ubiquitous over-feminization with its overemphasis on feelings, process and process of process...and process of process of process, etc. a typical joke about lesbians writ large in giant bubble letters across the face of our schools and workplaces.

by no means do i sentimentalize manual labor, having done many years of it [still am] myself. however, my feelings about satisfying work with one's [my] hands are persistent. these feelings could not be put any better than matthew crawford's 'shopclass as soulcraft'! these feelings inform my decision to train as a stringed instrument repair tech after 10 years as a massage therapist-----manual labor's most literal epitome! [though one surrounded by a stubborn crust of feminization and downright fear of men and 'maleness', from which i hereby declare my personal secession]

what does the continued virtualization and soft-skill-ification of the world hold for maleness? prognosis: not good. patient lost interest in the said world long ago. fails to see relevance of self to world and world to self.

for femaleness? finally time for them to be understood? and heard? to play in a cooperative way? and touched appropriately [as only someone with similar anatomy and psyche can]? finally free from oppression? not if my experiences of female bosses with female employees is any indication!!! no, ma'am!!

moribund maleness not only effects females who want to breed and/or have a relationship with a man...but also due to the fact that women have a male aspect to their psyches...well....had...past tense...we're in this together, tethered to each other for better or worse; till divorce do us part...and this separation will be the worst one yet!

counting people/celebrities are like teeth

over-cautiously, i've been avoiding saying anything about my pretty decent stretch of timely employment with the u.s. census bureau this spring/summer. as of now, i'm wrapping up my second, and most likely final, operation. yes, in this sclerotic economy i might attract envy and/or contempt making $18.22/hr...neither of which i want----anyway, i think that my tree falling in the forest, this blog, hasn't made a sound....so fall away, proverbial tree!

there is no easy algorithmic way of summing up my checkered experiences with the people of northern new jersey: for as many who implicitly or explicitly have wanted me to turn around and return from whence i came [putting it too diplomatically] there have been just as many who seem genuinely at ease with a government employee asking for some basic information and recording it on a form.

any conflicts without as well as within have mostly arisen from the census procedure itself, which, as far as i can tell, is an emergent, chaotic, mysterious process that no one person has a grasp of----throw a swarm of people at a particular problem until it goes away. i sympathize with residents who are utterly fatigued with visits by the likes of me, with my badge and clipboard. they ask, 'you again? how many times are you going to come back?'...an unanswerable question. to say that the census process is redundant is like deja vu all over again and again!

i think the greater problem touched upon in the above paragraph is the pre-existing burnout of many people in this geographical area: there is no more room for much after everyday life extracts its considerable tax. add a ladle-full of contempt for the perceived 'invasiveness' of the current administration [despite the fact that the same ol' census would've happened the same ol' way even if mccain won and has happened for the past 220 years, regardless of the administration] and you get a potentially volatile cocktail waiting for you when you ring a random doorbell.

could thatcher's [and by association, reagan's] 'there is no such thing as society' maxim be coming home to roost? i find the prospect of dissolving the concept of society in favor of an atomized hyper-individualism an amazing, devastating step backwards based on the fallacy that we can do and have done everything ourselves, without assistance from any outside agency---the myth of the self-made person. how ironic that society and its fruits: roads, plumbing, sanitation, medicine, schooling, inherited knowledge, currency [to name a few] have spoiled us into thinking that we're an island by granting us time free from the struggle to satisfy basic needs. how we ignore the hand that feeds us...thankless little bastards!

we're so enchanted by the self-made myth, that its aberration, its shadow casts itself across most of our psyches: celebrity worship, which is a symptom of our profound disconnect with our selves and each other. let's attempt a courageous experiment:

let's ignore celebrities and see if they go away....

this time, left-handed

there has been an amazing symmetry in my life, especially the past five years. i've had the opportunity to revisit issues, people, and places that have been waiting for me during that time---very well-preserved, indeed...a time capsule...an open book with open-ended chapters, to which i now get the chance to write the conclusions and codas...hopefully with a steadier, more mature and robust hand!

this second time around, i'm having to live left-handedly, actually and metaphorically---more true to my real nature. i'm even [re]learning how to play the framedrum lefty...i'm pursuing a relationship...left-handedly! a new career: ditto! if i attempt to re-learn guitar...ditto, ditto...

i've heard it said, perhaps in an unfounded, anectdotal way, that naturally left-handed children develop problems, including stuttering, when using their right hand dominantly [by force or by choice], all of which clear up when left-dominance is reestablished. i'm finding myself clearing up my metaphorical stutterings at 39 yrs. old. one could call my focal dystonia a stutter of movement...

luckily i was never forced by my parents or the church! in fact, the gross, inherited persecution of left-handed people by the catholic church and the society based on it is due to a misunderstanding of the latin word for 'left', which is 'sinister'. this was actually explained to me by my brilliant high school latin teacher: our english word 'sinister' does have the roots of its meaning in that same latin word, but for reasons of fashion rather than hand-dominance. since the majority of people are right-dominant and have been, even in roman times, the person wearing a toga needed to have his/her right hand free for acting in the world; so, the other hand [left] was needed to hold up the other end of the sheet. the left arm extended out front with the sheet draped over it created a pocket or 'sinus' in which things could be carried innocently or concealed sinisterly...

 notice that hidden----sinister---left hand!

words, words, words....from now on my words will be left-handed...as is this blog...

dan's typical duck and weave?

so...the kitten is gone----off to a hopefully good home with a local teacher/collector of various canines and felines.

so...i wonder about a moot point for myself, an intellectual notion frozen out of life's organic flow: should i have kept it? was my not keeping it a sensible, pragmatic move or a typical, selfish duck and weave of responsibility?

however, i'm starting to know for myself that responsibility=life...and that i want to embrace life rather than evade it. i want to anchor myself in. not only the tangible, but the sticky, living networks which comprise the stuff of life, without which, i'm concluding, we are withered appendages, unfed, unwatered, atrophied----deprived of aqua vitae.

involvement, in a word....involvement in something at least larger than one's self...i wonder about what it is within me and my society that makes this process so elusive...

sudden bout of interspecies mothering cont'd

somehow the universe is making me feel universal motherhood [is this an experience i need?]: sudden responsibility for a new life and the resultant worry, joy and instant identity of it all----as well as sleep deprivation.

this morning at 3:30 am i was jolted awake by sudden, extreme white noise...or white water to be more exact. half asleep, i assumed i was dreaming it, but i wasn't! the water filter hooked into the main pipe cracked; so, all the considerable pressure was unleashed against the wall, furiosly bouncing against the hollow door of the closet containing the pipes----all of which was 2 ft away from my sleepy head! without that door i most likely would've drowned, inhaling a river of water in my sleep. my room in the basement is out of order---under water---for the second time in 3 months...hint, hint?

 for the third night in a row, my baby kitten slept in the window well. lifting him out, i am mother! this morning was no different...i suppose i keep expecting his real feline mother to take him back....i suppose he thinks the same thing....he was never so happy as when i appeared with actual feline milk [in a can from the pet store]. his whole demeanor changed after ingesting it---frisky and energetic! i tried to capture the friskiness in this series of photos...

someone is supposed to take him on monday---i wonder how i'll [we'll both] feel about that after all of this bonding?

mammalian mother surrogate

at first, i thought i was hallucinating auditorially, but yes, it was true----a slight, fearful meow was indeed peeping from the side of my house. a shivering kitten stared up at me with whatever nascent eyesight it could muster at so young an age...a week or two at the most...from the basement window well. scared, dependent and hungry...seems like the way we all enter the world...an inborn spur to reach out into the world....imagine if we didn't have to...weren't forced to!

it took about 5 minutes for the kitten to warm to me. i was no feline mother, certainly...and apologized for my built-in shortcomings. but i then submitted to the situation and asked the great Whatever, 'what the hell does one do in this situation?' to my surprise, out of the nothingness, i received a silent reply, 'be its mother...' i put my head down, offering some snuggle fur. i asked my dad for a dish of milk. i imitated the kitten's peeping. that really won him over! i must have said just the right thing in cat-speak---a bit of home for the weary tourist.  he searched for the nipple on my perplexingly non-feline physiognomy...

yeow! i immedaitely empathized with breast feeding mothers throughout mammalian history as he sank his needle teeth into my fingertip! see illustration above.

the year that was still is

another birthday comes and goes....whizzzzzzzzzzzz.......

on the day itself, i worked...it rained....some calls from those who still remember and care----a rarefied bunch whose preciousness increases in inverse proportion to their number...

the best gift, i think, for my 39th year, has been the realization that i don't have to [and cannot, at any rate] change my parents in order for me to be an independent, autonomous being...this message courtesy of my friend james...my grandmother gave me underwear...

i feel love burgeoning and flowing through me in an inner, subterranean way...wanted to record it here, since throughout my life i've experienced love, mostly not as an attachment to an object [though that's certainly happened] but rather as a state of mind/being that pre-exists the 'beloved' and is catalyzed by them and projected outwards towards them. let's see what time and space have in store...though sooner or later, odds are that love will happen, no?

my 'reverse walden' experiment [venturing back home rather than away and alone] is bearing fruit----i'm very glad to be living with my family and am trying to recapture the groundedness, honor, respect and love [filial piety] that gets lost in our culture which places 'individuality' and striking-out-on-one's-own above all else----i have done that, however and deem it overrated. i'm interested in reclaiming what gets trampled in that mad rush to ones self. right now i feel that it is deep, ancient and quite quiet about itself...it whispers hidden in plain sight...

currently on page 510 of the exceptional 'john adams' book by david mccollough. interesting to note that our country was born of nasty partisan politics and press in lockstep with each other...and much of what adams wrote at the time could be equally applied to today without modification. i suppose that this is the crux of the entire enterprise of writing history----a cyclical saga of common life with our ancestors...an aspect of the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same of time...

note to someone: write a book with exactly this premise---finding historical parallels for now, almost proving its not-newness...an 'anatomy of melancholy' for history....anatomy of history...could one person ever do this?

the uncertainty of a poet

what an amazing ear worm from a transcendent artist [kurt elling]! the poem is based on the painting of the same name by georgio de cirico, whose torso was seemingly fond of bananas, too:

the external, meandering brain

as i go on my external, meandering walks i reflect, in grand tradition, on my internal meandering jaunts...and why, over the course of my life, i've had dreams, ones that have not only come true, but have been true---objective--- about places and objects to which i have no real conscious attachment, or are tangential at best...well, not all....

examples:

while living in brooklyn, i was receiving a live feed in my sleep that my car was being broken into and stolen at that very moment [which it was]! in fact, i almost felt the glass breaking, of being impacted, as if my car and i were part of the same whole. however, forgiveness was immediately included in the witnessing---forgiveness was perhaps the real meaning of the reportage...somehow this higher consciousness perspective had enough compassion for me to report the event to me in my sleep, in essence, transferring the higher vantage to me....and, hey, if consciousness is conscious, it would almost have to do such a thing, no?

at college, in syracuse ny, i knew that my girlfriend at the time [my high school sweetheart] had been raped back in new jersey, 300 miles away...i had such bad headaches for 3 days that i was scheduled to get a brain scan...

for some reason, years ago i dreamed that the baseball field in the back of my grammar school was being flipped around, which....as you could probably guess.....actually happened...i pass it each day, now that i'm back in dumont...at the time of the dream i was living 275 miles away in boston...

probably for the same reason, i received first hand knowledge of the family circumstances of the house up the block from here...our families barely know each other, despite having lived on the same block for 40 years...but somehow i knew that the older children had moved back in with the mother after the father died. now, i see those older children [in their 50's] walk a dog up and down our common asphalt path each day....

all foreshadowing for my return home? the universe winking at me, a flirtatious reminder of the sheer rationale-busting nature of its interconnectedness---which i tend to forget in my left-brained rush to separate, categorize, make-sense-out-of?

well, i welcome mystery back into my life....may art follow!

old people talk loud

...or, 'how i learned to perceive sonic obstacles...and attempt to overcome them...'

having lived many other places, i can now see [hear] just how much noise, psychic and actual, is routinely created in my current geographical/cultural area of northern nj. particularly in my parents' and grandmother's houses, the tv is a formidable barrier to communication and the desire thereof. my, what must seem, dumb smile asks, 'is it just me, or does no one else notice this?' at the very least, i must say, my grandmother prioritizes the live person in the room over the pixelated intruders and actually grabs the remote to lower the tv volume; my parents, however, not so much. this creates an escalating opera of pitch and volume.

my father's hearing is much more compromised than i'd realized---though the $3k hearing aides sit silent in the drawer. he chooses the compromise. note to self: study hearing loss in older couples [correcting for war and industry involvement]...i'd bet that there are far more males with [intentional] hearing loss buffering against the usually far more loquacious female sex. do females with talkative spouses exhibit similar symptoms? or is it just plain life: not-for-sissys aging? or does deafness-as-a-defense-mechanism have some statistical validity?

writing the previous paragraph triggered the memory of an interesting theory a voice teacher of mine expressed to me, using sting as his example. the theory was that sting has been loosing his hearing, not because of playing for 40 yrs. with excessively loud rock bands, but that because he has pushed his voice so hard that the blast of air from the pharynx to the middle ear through the eustachian tubes is the cause...deaf because of one's own voice...judging by the known, intimate physical, as well as developmental, connection between the two, the theory seems feasible.

let's tie the two strands of this blog post together:

i've been studying voice for the past two years and it's been a great journey! in fact, the act/process of developing my voice has been the only activity which has helped the focal dystonia in my right hand get better; whereas, the attempted retraining of my right hand's motor skills on stringed instruments [my symptoms originally appeared when i was playing guitar] has consistently ended in a very frustrating failure! i've been using this as my direction from the universe that i should stop with stringed instruments and continue with voice.

so...i noticed that until recently, whenever i tried to sing, i couldn't really place or even hear my notes very well; so as a result, i would blast louder and more unmusically in a sonic vicious circle. it turns out that they are really the same problem! it all made sense to me after i read the blog and book of bel canto voice maestro, anthony frisell...his writing is very elliptical and poetic, even if it isn't always grammatically correct---very recommended if you sing [or are trying to].

bel canto theory recognizes two vocal registers, the chest voice and the head voice. chest voice is your normal, untrained speaking voice, which seems to emanate lower [from your chest]. head voice is where falsetto seems to project from [higher, from the sinus cavities---in the head], though the terms aren't technically synonymous with each other. chest voice is naturally very heavy and therefore not as flexible as head. but, head voice is naturally light and quite weak [i'm finding] without extensive training and practice!

long before science confirmed the fact, bel canto theory posited that the two registers are physiologically antagonistic to each other; so both must be trained separately and then blended together to produce the wonder that is the 'mixed voice' [any professional singer has a mixed voice]. the chest voice provides the vibrations and power while the head voice seems to me to constitute the acoustically appropriate shape [formed by controlling the muscles of the naso-laryngo-pharynx] which resonates and projects the primary vibrations. to simplify: if chest is the buzzing trumpet mouthpiece, head is the valve position, tubes and the bell. [using a trumpet metaphor]

soooo...my point? think about where the larynx [voice box] is located....below and in front of your ears---that's why chest voice seems to be heard/felt in the chest [conduction through bones: hyoid, sternum, clavicle, ribs]...the ears hear it in muffled fashion, being in back of the speakers [your mouth and nostrils]. head voice is much more audible to the singer since it rings more closely to one's ears...remember that your ears and head are connected by the eustachian tubes....remember sting?

i can finally hear myself now that i'm getting acquainted with my head voice, and am starting to sing rather than yell! i don't have to deafen myself...yet...

some fight is won

a dream....

not just any ol' 'daily residue' or anxiety dream: another 'psychically significant' one----a dream from which after waking, a distinct feeling of 'shift' or 'resolution' or 'processing' exists and remains. somehow, you're not the same person who turned out the lights the night before. you know?

i won a fight. it seemed like a long-standing, long-overdue one, too....though its exact nature was not immediately apparent. the imagery from the dream was ordinary enough: a literal boxing match [including an absurdist, punning cardboard box]. lots of blood. i came out with a cracked rib which hurt, but also was an 'honor', a badge, a memento to commemorate [common word root 'to remember'] the experience, the rite of passage. love those dreams! appropriately enough, my father was the referee of the boxing match. i passed a test i haven't known i was taking...somehow i'm a man...it feels appropriate...[i look down to check]...perhaps my cracked rib was my inner woman, broken free or is that too biblical?

in this case, one can see the cambellian/jungian theories of dreams, myths and rituals as having the same source and functions: to mark passages, psychological stages, growth, etc. it seems that we only ignore this to our detriment [speaking for myself here]---the lessons/remediation agents come and find us anyway...sometimes in our sleep ;-) well, in the absence of rituals [living ones, at any rate] and myths, dreams are all that remain to us postmodernites...

as you can tell [whoever you are] i'm catching up on necessary remedial developmental life experiences at thirty-eight that i somehow missed the first time around----my poor life performance in the school of life has been due to excessive absences! attend your own life! [take it from me] being at least a weed in the sun [to mix the metaphor] is so much better than being a lingering mold trapped within a wall...

at least a weed has a moment in the sun...

poem time on line at the dmv

re-redundancy redux


every night, every night;
the light, the light;
of might, of might;
flashes bright, flashes brightly;
on our father, on our fathers;
on our forefathers:

wwII again.
wwII on the tube.

watch our way, watch our way into glory!
[glory, not gory]
death, dying in the living room.
a life feeds, a life feeds on other lives...

remember when...remember when?


a world in black and white; a black and white world.
it's just war, a just war.
no 'maybe'; no 'maybe' in our might.
the might; our might and the zeit was right
for the last time; last time.
the last time our might was right....

...was wwII.
feels so good to view---
unless you were there,
out of the chair:

with no remote;
not remote,
but close.
up close,
close up
a long shot...

do anything once...twice if i don't remember....

a neurologist reading the following probably would suspect an episode...the theme of the week so far? i must do everything twice!

first: dmv. i planned to knock out my official conversion from being a massachusetts denizen to becoming a new jersey one, license and registration in one trip. not to be. pre-middle-aged me forgot the title [see 'third' below]. so only license it was---with an inevitably chubbier-faced picture...i extrapolate into the future,  a visage fully engulfed by extra chins and jowels---and a hairline outsourced beyone the horizon. alas, registration had to wait for the next day...

second: returning the license plate...plates. went to the post office with only one to send back to taxachusetts [so that i can cancel my insurance there]...must...go...back home again, a second time [and i'm not even being redundant!]...#%$^#%...

third: excited to get a local library card----i think that this is the main reason i converted my license [avoiding the taxachusetts $1000 fine for not lining the pockets of the health insurance companies is a close second]...andy summers' well-wrought memoir, 'one train later', jumped out at me for the picking...scanning it over a diner dinner, so much seemed so familiar----even to the point of anticipating the specific language! some was...unfamiliar enough to make me think i never read it...ironic, since mr. summers seems to remember everything in fine detail, judging by his writing.

the jury's still out...and is apparently quite confused: i don't know if i've read this book or not!!! a first for me...a milestone i'm not proud of...

back home a second time....again....this also is the ur-theme of my boomerwranging back to live with my parents...family relationship, this lifetime, take two...

snap!

one-fourth self

 We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.---Friedrich Nietzsche

so, i'm on a bit of a nietzsche kick....don't worry, shouldn't last long...but his aphorisms explode in my head [like a good aphorism should] and knock down the interwoven rows of dominos in there...

the above aphorism hits, literally, close to home...not even 'close'...it hits home directly, in several ways! carving my initials in the door of middle age while living in my parents' basement after inevitable life crash/bubble burst, i get to witness first hand the assumptions which helped to shape my character----assumptions that are as well-preserved today as they were 38 years ago. in essence, i moved back into the museum of my die cast, where my die was cast.

not in the mood now to air the dirty laundry list here, now, but just tonight when i told my dad, in response to his testy question, that full-time employment for me is a long way off [at least a year] and isn't that desireable anyway, he looked punched in the gut. i kicked him right in the world-view. and this was after i came home from a job interview---really, when dealing with my father, it's almost better not to do anything...then, at least, the potential is very high and has no earth upon which to crash down...

and i wonder where i got that trait from?

in my life, i've expended so much mental energy with the above and many other 'viruses' running and replicating in the background, taking up at least 75% of my being----i think nietzsche had the ratio about right for most of us. at least, meditation has helped me to claim some self back, but the task of self-reclamation is still seemingly impossible...or at least very entropic. perhaps this realization indicates progress on the path?

 last year i took a workshop at kripalu---i think it was entitled, 'making life changes'...the psychologist moderator boiled it down, 'i'll save you thousands of dollars of therapy money: we usually don't make necessary changes in our lives because of fear: we're afraid of the success/failure continuum and/or we're afraid of being disowned by our friends and family.' this, she explained, is a vestige from when we were kids, when abandonment would mean actual death----adult life changes imply a symbolic death of your prior self....and perhaps entail an actual one, if you choose your change unwisely, of course...

not making a necessary change, i think, amounts to a three-quarters forfeit of self...no?

hits home...speaking of home....house...houses....homes....and the job one most likely needs to finance one...i look at houses and think....why would i sacrifice the remaining 25% of my self to buy a house the way most of them are currently made? living room? dining room? who needs them? seems to me that such 'function' rooms are inheritances from manor homes of british royalty who would've needed them for the practice of royalty's only full-time job: keeping up appearances...which, unfortunately, has tricked down, like everything does, to us plebs, unquestioned.

lawns, i know for a fact, have infiltrated our lives via the same process....hah....and most guys [hey, the word 'mister' was once a title for a landlord-----now, any schmuck is a 'mister'!] take supreme masculine delight in the upkeep of their lawns, even if the mexican immigrants do the actual work ['meeester? meeeeeester?']; perhaps they [american guys] wouldn't if they realized that americans won the right not to, 234 years ago...

so, i close with a visualization of my ideal dwelling...open plan.....efficient...lots of space and tools for tinkering and building and experimenting.....and...barn-like.....

oooooh....sounds expensive....better get cracking on that full-time job, with however much self i have remaining!!!!!


how much self do you have available? where are your self-leaks?

end of days never ends

my parents were supposed to leave on trip this morning, which they did. i drove them. i had enough time to make the slog from jfk back here to joisey only to find that i had to about face back to jfk.

a spewing volcano in iceland closed the airspace over northern europe!

my parents waited 6 hours to reclaim their checked baggage. i waited for them, awaiting their call in the 'cell phone lot'. like it or not, i was trapped in a car, waiting for the waiters. somehow i feel that there's something about our [cultural, media] world that can only increase the potential of such purgatorial moments for its inhabitants---more interconnectedness=more fragility/volatility. larger, more complex structures=statistically more ways in which things can go 'wrong' [or other than intended]....butterfly wings flapping [though this time in the form of a volcano eruption]

in the end, my mother got her wish: she knew, from the nervous early morning, that something was going to go wrong...now there are some powerful reality-creation skills!

amor fati

hoppin' down the eternal self-improvement trail, i happened upon the most readable and most practical of joseph campbell books: reflections on the art of living: a joseph campbell companion. in need of more art in my living, i cracked the book to find an eloquent voice of sanity...

especially helpful was campbell's retelling of the nietzschian concept of amor fati, translated as 'a love of one's fate/life'...the postmodern equivalent would be, 'it's all good'...that one's life need not be different than it already is...and that anything that might happen to one is for the best, for learning and growth.

the warrior's approach
is to say 'yes' to life:
'yea' to it all.

he cautions against people who need to change others and or 'the world', basically stating that the only real change one can make without forcing someone/something else to fit one's own terms, is one's self...all else is projection. campbell says:

the world is perfect. It's a mess. 
it has always been a mess.


we are not going to change it.


our job is to straighten out our own lives.




lately, i've been framing my [seemingly negative] sabbatical experiences and most of the rest of my [seemingly negative] life as amor fati. i feel surges of peace warrior energy, saying 'yea' to everything! this modus operandi alone has done wonders for my relationship with my parents; it dovetails with eknath easwaran's mantram for happiness and service in life and relationships---put others first.

go ahead. call me. ask something ridiculous of me. i just might say 'yes'...

first poem: age 7

my grandmother surprised me with this one. she saved a small slip of pink paper for 32 years. on it was one of the first poems that i wrote, age 7.


rain

the rain is raining all around
it falls on field and tree.
it rains on the umbrellas here
and on the ships at sea.

teaux jam swan song 1993

recently, during the long drive to and from boston, i had an opportunity to revist a recording of my college band, the teaux jam. years ago when i worked for a dot-com, i burned this 4-song ep onto cd from a dat master. this enabled me to save these songs from total oblivion, rescuing them into a modest, mature obscurity.

we recorded this in 1993----i remember having a severe flu, needing to crash in a blanket pile between takes. it seems self-serving, but now i stand by the adventurous music that those angry, restless, searching, young men made 17 years ago. i'd say that the songs have aged well and sound better now than they did at the time. in fact, what made us anxious about our music [and made others apathetic] was that it didn't really sound like anything else. i'll let you judge...

so i post the four songs here...and in doing so, run a little web experiment of the proverbial tree-falling-in-the-forest variety: how long, if ever, will it take for one of my former bandmates to find this posting after searching for traces of his past? i'll include their names for the sake of the search engines [and to give credit where it's due] the clock starts now...

the lineup:

don hutchison: vocals, trombone, banjo
dan madinabeitia: vocals, keyboards, saxophone
matt robinson: bass
me: drums


1. living in the guest room





2. now




3. mom's bridge club warned me of the real world




4. waitress pop fetish



btw: embedding mp3 audio on this blogger blog was surprisingly convoluted and frustrating!!! after following at least 4 suggestions in vain, i stumbled across this tutorial on youtube which finally worked.

they stay the same age while you get older

i have listened to this npr broadcast by singer-songwriter, will stratton, so many times that i have to post a link and the discarded toe nail clippings of my opinion about it...

i listen right now...to an earnest young man that i surely never was....that was so unfashionable when i passed through the narrow slit of golden chronological limelight [+/- 21-27yrs.] that it seems absolutely refreshing to me, but must be de rigueur to the much less sarcastic younger generation---or perhaps theirs is an encoded sarcasm?

he plays guitar as well as john fahey ever did, even approaching leo kottke territory; but his fingerpicking never upstages his unpretentious light tenor voice! already, in will stratton at 22 years old,  i find the complete musical package...solid songwriting, technically virtuous american primative guitar stylings that don't scream for attention, and an honest voice....listen for him in a few years!

rework/ re: work

was perusing this article in slate about a book and a company i hadn't heard of previously. the internet company is called 37signals and their manifesto/guidebook for starting a web endeavor is called 'rework'---#4 on the nytimes bestseller list.

the company blog is very interesting [and i think is a wonderful window inside the minds/lives of the employees---it's effective marketing and might represent a new version of company branding]...on this blog is a post about the illustrations [and slogans] in 'rework'. i love 'em. see them here on their flickr photo page. i'm a sucker for things like this, having been a fellow dot-com sloganeer myself! 

the slogans, and hopefully the book, break through some of the inherited [from the corporate world] myths about work and, more specifically, about starting your own business: that you must give up your life, that you need to contract out, that you need to delegate, that you must not sleep, that you must throw money at problems, that you must fire people when the economy slows, that you must continually grow, that you need to obsess about your competition, etc....37 signals have been a profitable and long-lasting [10 years] web company where thousands of others [including the one i used to work for] now only belong to the web wayback machine---so, they must be doing something right.

hello, bill!

i've done a fair deal of mental bill gates bashing, but no actual pie throwing----yes, just the shadow of my helplessness thrown onto the former top dog. but now, to me, his remarkable life trajectory from world's richest man to world's largest philanthropist is breathtaking!

his personal site is almost a paragon of the examined life worth living. it's broken down into the following categories:

what i'm thinking about

what i'm learning

my travels

curious classroom

conversations

infrequently asked questions


i couldn't think of categories any better than these with which to give shape to one's evolving life...but then again, maybe i'm an egghead too [notice 'what i'm thinking about' is at the top]...more about overly identifying with one's thoughts-----later...

all one----science meets religion

note: science translates as 'knowledge'; religion translates loosely as 'to tie back together'

i feel mad....as if i need to write down all the facts and impressions that make up my world, lest i forget them, lest they fail to make any sense...either is a possibility...

anyway: an interesting take on my previous post. found this link to harvard's new itunes shop, where one can find free audio lectures! in the 'medical labcast' section, i listened to episode 1, 'the science of social networks'. the doctor interviewed was compiling research about medical effects, called 'interpersonal health effects', within networks of people; a simple example [a network of two, the minimum number for a network] is called the 'widower effect', wherein the death of a spouse seems to somehow facilitate [increases the chances of] the death of the survivor. no surprises here...but what might be is that members of social networks [anyone with friends and/or family...mmm...the jury's out about me] can influence others, separated by as much as 3 degrees [network members], to gain or lose weight, to drink alcohol, to smoke or even to get a colonoscopy!

the research realized that 'birds of a feather, flock together' and attributes the influence of people on each other not to the flocking effect but to social networking effects----by just being connected. so we'd be wise to heed poor richard's words: 'be slow in choosing a friend; slower in changing.'

interesting ramifications: the other day, i happened upon my dad watching glenn beck, which unfortunately happens every day. there he was, the overstuffed buffoon running around the giant plasma screen in adolescent angst over the sky falling [again---like it seems to do every day, though there's only one sky]...so the manchild was crying wolf and the wolf du jour was the government health plan's attempt to award certain prevention behaviors and the banning of salt and fat in restaurants. he claimed that it was his god-given right to eat as unhealthily as his whimsy dictated. after all, he's only harming himself and, golly garsh, that darned government can't tell him what to do [even though it does every day: every law you follow or break, taxes that you must pay, car insurance you must buy, etc].

of course, if you believe that every man is an island and makes himself and is solely responsible for the outcome, then...naturally solipsism can reign...but what if even science [not even quantum science] proves this false? what if, by your very presence, you can nudge your friends, family and associates towards your behavior [whatever it may be]? the above study would seem to suggest that 'god' gave us something we're only starting to perceive, never mind understand.

on another front entirely, malcom gladwell's 'outliers' also punches holes in the 'self-made-man' hypothesis. in his 2009 book, gladwell examines the usually ignored circumstantial effects and not the proprietary personalities or traits of high achievers throughout history and finds that people are definitely made at least as much as they make themselves.

eknath easwaran would find nothing i'm saying surprising. for the past year or so, i've been working through his massive 3-volume 'bhagavad gita for daily living'. he's convinced me that living as if you were a separate entity---from the ego's limited perspective---is the absolute wrong path antithetical to life's natural law. my own wasted life serves as an example of this wrongness. i sound the warning now---i've thoroughly tried this exercise in sheer existential nihilism/selfishness in the guise of the artistic life! my constitution?

article one: no one else matters but me.
amendment one: well, and perhaps my friends too...

article two: i only do what i want.
amendment two: well...and whatever i have to do to pay the rent.

i hereby make a motion to tear up this constitution. motion granted. well, it's been granted for some time...but now i'm coming out officially!

long live blog!

i did it. i killed my sabbatical blog. it's over. it served its purpose. it joins a venerable group of dead blogs. not surprisingly, there's much fetishism on the internet for dead blogs, amongst millions of other particles of minutiae. in the same way that america's fetishism for the automobile created suburban sprawl as well as junkyards , the early-mid 2000's blogger bubble has burst to create a vast blog graveyard.

note to someone [else]: find the number of dead blogs, the hits they get and the energy needed to power the servers. calculate the cost per year.

when faced with a medium [the web] so voracious for 'content', the amateur [myself, in this case] is overwhelmed by the futile attempt to satiate an insatiable beast. how can any of us, but the most talented, focused, stubborn, dedicated [or combination thereof] keep up?

how i love the postmodern idea that 'everyone is an artist'...and that the time [technology] has finally come for all of us [artists] to communicate with each other in [the language of] video and multimedia; mixing and remixing oursevles into endless bliss. blogging seems, to me, to be the text-based version of this 'sampling', 'remixing', collage concept of art. funny that 'wiki' when said [especially in repetition] can resemble that sound of a dj scratching on vinyl...

is the future of employment just to stay 'connected'? if so, what a twist on mcluhan's 'global villiage' idea! 'connectedness' seems to have almost literal currency----ask anyone on facebook, where the unit of exchange/value is the 'friend'. you tube is the 'view'---some are even lucky enough to literally earn their living by such efforts, in this vast web-wide popularity contest, upon whose back rides the advertisers...remember the unit of the 'eyeball', and the greed for them, in the early days of the web? even in a biological way, connectedness has been shown to bolster well-being and even the immune system, while, conversely, disconnectedness seems to foster depression and disipation of human systems [never mind malaise and ennui]. sales-people, matchmakers, middle[wo]men and 'networkers' already live my off-the-cuff, spontaneous thesis...back to the automobile: in new jersey, where the intra-state public transportation is notoriously bad, a car is connectedness.

i know how much it makes me smile to receive well-thought comments [hint, hint....]...my real motivation to do this is to exteriorize my thoughts, maybe experiencing catharsis and connection in the process...perhaps shaping my world...inspiring...

but, first, i need friends....and eyeballs! ;-)