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....