Sad News

We had a close member of our family pass away today, read more here.

Spoken Word: "Beers in the Sunlight"

Check this out ya'll, something I may do more of in the future. A quick piece I wrote while out in the yard, drinking a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and chilling with my best friend, a blank notebook:

"Beers in the Sunlight" (mp3) Length: 1:04

What say thee? Where hath the readership gone? Oh what, oh what, oh what would it take to get some wee little comments going in my comments section once again? I am wondering, pondering, drumming, and drowning....

Illustrator: The Mystics

"The entire room looks to the left, dreading what they see creeping up upon them: the dreaded Mystery, source of the ultimate terror-beauty of the lovewrathing divinized Kosmos."

Live Trace, rainbow gradients, and a photo from ISC.

Illustrator Experiment: Lizard Skin

Here's another round of Adobe Illustrator fun, this one making use of envelope distortions and transparency.

My Nastiest Record Review So Far

Here's my latest for Urban Pollution, this one slamming British modern rock retards Stereophonics' recent live album Live at the Dakota. Please note that the editor cut out (and rightfully so) the best line, where I get all sci-fi:

Sometime in the future, when human beings have colonized every planet in the solar system, there will be a stubborn group of individuals claiming Pluto as their own. They will have witnessed the glories of the Jovian sea, the hedonic splendor of Saturn's rings, the exotic bathhouses on Venus and the impossible ruins of Mars, and will forgo it all to hunker down on a bland, frigid rock of nothing, there to spend eternity listening to Live at the Dakota.

Am I the only music reviewer to end a review with the phrase "postmodern quietism"? Perhaps....

Dan Sings About Satan

Whoah, this has got to be one of the weirdest songs about The Man in Red since "Satan Gave Me a Taco". Nice work dude.

Illustrator Experiment: Moire "O"

This is me messing with Adobe Illustrator CS2, using the program's layout grid, rotation, and dashed stroke capabilities. If you lean back from the screen, you'll notice it does something quite different than when viewed from up close. Thanks Dan, belatedly, for the idea to post such visual experiments....

Life in the World Today

You wake up overwhelmed, your mind already projecting forward into the day to analyze the many struggles you will face in the next 16 hours. Each item on your task list spirals out fractally, and you know that everything you've planned to do will take twice as long to accomplish. You think back to the quaint days before email, before the Internet, before you could be contacted anywhere at anytime, and wonder what it was like to work in an office without a computer, where projects were requested by rotary phone or through the postal service and coffee could only be purchased in cans in the back of the supermarket.

But now.

Now you have said yes to a slew of projects which a poor farmer would have laughed at. The majority of them consist of writing a few sentences here, tabulating a few numbers there, and waiting for a tiny electronic device halfway around the world to process a message you've written to a friend you met in high school.

"Take my plow and plow for a day," he'd say, chuckling, and you'd give him your thirteen post-it notes and your box full of unanswered email and wish him luck.

For the poor farmer is forgetting that the brain requires the most energy out of any organ in the body. He is forgetting that what seem like easy tasks--pay the cable bill, finish the blog post, download the spam filter and update the spreadsheet program--require more exertion than the building of the pyramids. For these are not simple A to B, "apply pressure here" efforts, but endless acts of impossible Choice.

Never before have humans been faced with so many choices. In a life that once boiled down to two or three per day, we walk now down the shopping aisles of the world, being asked to make hundreds of choices at a time, our wild brains considering the minutea of ingredient lists, nutrition information, microeconomics, and brand allegiance. So many factors, so little time, so many more things to buy.

Within ten minutes, the poor farmer is approaching you out in the field, begging for his plow back.

"There were simply too many variables," he tells you, "and I didn't know which way was up and which way was down."

Your brief respite in the field showed you what he was missing. It was simple, really: push hard, thrust with endurance, and let your mind wander towards thoughts of the Lord. In the cities, in the far away places, big decisions were being made, but these you would not have to learn of for decades on end. What seemed like Austerity to your laptop-bound and overtasked brainiac self, was simply the Fact of Life to the farmer side of your soul.

"Please, the plow."

You hand it back, and unstick the Post-Its from his dirty, gnarled fingers, cursing him under your breathe.

"But what about television?" you ask after him as he turns back towards his field. "What about Wikipedia? And fashion magazines? And 38 kinds of cheese?"

"They were interesting," says the farmer, "But they were not for me. I know better than to put my poor brain into that sort of swamp. I'll take the open air, if you don't mind."

And with that, he waves, and shovels off into the sunset.

Creative Sovereignty! Inspiration!

Cartoonist Hugh McLeod (see above) is brilliant as usual with this quote from his blog book "How to Be Creative":

The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. How your own sovereignty inspires other people to find their own sovereignty, their own sense of freedom and possibility, will change the world far more than the the work's objective merits ever will.

Might this explain my love for the Magik Markers? Perhaps....

k-punk: Reflexive impotence

K-punk is at his typically articulate best with this post analyzing the situation of college kids in the UK, whom suffer from, as he puts, a "Depressive Hedonism" ably displayed by the recent work of the atrociously apolitical Arctic Monkeys. A kwote:

The majority of students I encounter seem to be in a state of what I'd call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterised in terms of anhedonia, but the state I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a consequence of students' ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services.

Google to Microsoft: Drop Dead

My buddies at work have been waiting with baited breathe for the release of this, Google's brand new Outlook-killing calendar system. Combine iCal, Outlook, Evite, and every ridiculous Web Two-Point-Oh gimmick Google has under their evil little candy-colored belt, and you've got an unstoppable web apps juggernaut. The geek in me is swooning.

Mushroom Clouds Are Looming (?)

Ok, I'm going to go out on an politically-naive limb and say that dropping nukes on Iran is probably not the super best of cool ideas. In fact, it kinda sucks balls. If you're so moved to declaim such an activity (and are of the personality type "US Citizen") please click here and rock out with the MoveOn petitioning.

Noise vs. Tune (another record review for UP)

Here's the latest review for Austin's Urban Pollution, this time for a band I'd never heard of before, Austin locals The Casting Couch. As usual, I took the opportunity for a little theoretical mud-slinging, advising the band -- who sound like a more conventional Architecture in Helsinki combined with common twee pop tropes and polite "everyone plays together!" arrangements -- to explore a collaboration with another female-led combo, notorious Kentucky noise improvisers the Magik Markers. See this video of the Markers wreaking havoc at a show in Massachusetts, where lead "singer" Elisa picks fights with random strangers, and oceans of feedback get pulled up from beneath the rubble of smashed bad cymbals.

ADDENDA: You can check out some songs by The Casting Couch here.

The Other Side of Failure

For the past few weeks I've been putting considerably more effort into long-form prose writing, commiting to at least an hour a day of pure writing (no blogging, no images) on my laptop at night or in a coffee shop. This steady practice began to produce results in the form of two longer written works, one of which became a baudy little story about a girl living in Buffalo around the start of the war who has crazed interactions with college professors, anti-war activists, overweight writing addicts, homeless men, a cable-access show called "It's Bassin' Time", and three boys in a band who lived upstairs. The problem was that, because I was working on it every day, yet was unable to keep track of the myriad plot threads my fevered A.D.D. mind would generate faster than most people flip through TV channels, the things got out of control very quickly. Yet another attempt at writing a novel (which seem to occur every six months) had crashed and burned, and yet for the first time, this was ok.

I take inspiration from Ternary Software CEO Brian Roberston, a consultant we had through here recently, whose innovative organization is actually excited when it fails at something, because they've framed it as a learning experience. To fail, and to fail gloriously, and to reflect on it: that's where true knowledge seems to come from.

In my own case, I've realized a few things about my writing. For one, no amount of writing is ever wasted. Even if a week's worth of one- or two-hour sessions doesn't amount to a novel (let alone a novel about Buffalo), the practice and the act of writing with consistency is of enormous benefit, as it trains the muscles of the writer to be disciplined enough to run with inspiration when it does strike: constant discipline translating into effortless art-making activity. To fail at writing a novel is no indication that one should refute this practice, as I so often dejectedly have before.

Second: awareness. The reason things got so out of control, it seems, is that I was not present with my writing. As in real life, every action taken in a novel creates a chain of karma which, according to Ken Wilber, we can define as "any action which requires further action". The whole of Buddhist teaching seems to consist of training oneself to be mindful in each moment so that one is not creating further karmic chains with each action, something which can also be trained in the writer. Know that each plot thread and personality quirk counts, and at a certain point will overwhelm you. Better, then, to keep things simple, stay within the logic of each character, write right into the heart of each moment. Fearing depth, and boredom, I often "change channels" within my stories, which is a notice to try a new tack: sticking with something.

Anyways, I won't bore you further. Suffice to say, for once I'm not throwing my entire career in the fire and wiping my hands with it: to fail, now it seems, is simply further proof that those who do succeed as writers are to be commended at every turn.

This is How It's Done: Justin's Anamnesis Album

On heavy rotation this week at the Boulder Anti-Apathy Cluster HQ: my buddy Justin Bolognino's Anemnesis album, which he recorded in his living room in Brooklyn with a guitar, some drums, and a laptop. According to his website Learned Evolution:

The album tracks Justin's development in integrating a computer into the music-making process, as well as referencing developmental psychology,  developmental sociology and developmental culture.

Taken aesthetically, the album is quite breathtaking, the perfect companion to Ris Paul Ric's Purple Blaze. Both albums explore the relationship between acoustic and digital instrumentation in a way that seems to transcend both. The results are rich, organic, and human. Here's an mp3 of my favorite track from Justin, the gorgeous Chaordic (mp3).

April Fool's Mo-Fos!!!

Yes, yes, it's true: Dallman wrote all my posts on Saturday, and I wrote his. Everything from the "Myspace Commits Murder" post to the one preceding this one was written by him. Come on, do you really think I'd name-drop K-punk and Houellebecq within hours of each other? Not without a lame song in between I wouldn't! So, anyways, nice work Matthew, yes it was fun! My posts:

Poo at the Zoo
Andrew Sullivan... and Wilco?
Why I Can No Longer Be a Cubs Fan
Poo on a Plate

And just in case you dispute the levels of nerdom to which we'd stoop, we also wrote comments using each other's user name. Geeks.

I'm done with philosophy

That's it. No more. I can't do it anymore. No more thinking about philosophy. No more considering perspectives I don't give a shit about. No more sweating about meditation, enlightenment, and my chakras.

And no more god damn maps. I feel like I've toured the "consciousness atlas" of empty signifiers, but still am no closer to really making a mark in this world, as a positve force for depth and enriched life. I've contemplated 3rd person accounts of the kosmos, but I still haven't been to Italy (home of my grand-mama!) And my love life has gone, um, let's see—no where.

Integral rocks, no doubt about it. But I'm rolling on ... where else? ... I'm goin' down the mountain.

From now on, my own philosophy is simple. I don't have one. Seems as good as anything else, doncha think?

Truer words ...

"Sexual identity is part of the genre of art," says Lyotard. It could be said that Marx uses the term 'socialism' to denote the role of the writer as participant. The main theme of the works of Pynchon is a neocapitalist whole.

... have never been spoken.

Not by K-Punk. Not by Houellebecq. No one. I'm so excited right now, I can't ... even ... handle ... it.

I know it's crazy...

... and (perhaps) insufferably presumptuous, but I picked up a paint brush today, and it feels like it just might be the start of a Boulder-based art revolution that could sweep the world.

Unreal.

Question From A Reader

This was recently sent in to me:

Paul, I know this is a strange thing to say, and all. But I've wondered it all my life, and I just thought maybe you might have a perspective. So here goes....it is okay to hate babies?

Thanks for the note. My answer is simple. Yes.

Why? Because hating babies is actually a sign of AT LEAST three things.

1) You are a baby
Deep down, aren't we all? Age is an enduring, not transitional, stage conception, which means we are all still 6 months old, even if the 'leading edge' of our age is in the early- to mid-twenties. (Yes, I learned this yesterday when I performed my study theoretical psychology module; fascinating stuff.) So in this way, you hate babies out of a self-loathing sense of inner nihilism—or simply, you hate yourself. Welcome to the club.

2) You want a baby
I mean, seriously, who doesn't, at least a little? By becoming a parent, you get to have a life-long worshipper (with slight break in their teen years, but don't worry, worship of you will resume again) whom you can tell to do whatever you like, whenever you like. I'm basically saying—dogma is alive and well in the American household!. By retroflecting your original Adult impulse of "I want a li'l tyke!" into a projection of your Parent's "I'm not ready" upon the babies that you hate, you are simply suffering from an intense case of baby envy. If you are a woman, I suggest finding a your nearest dealer of roofies. If you are a man, I suggest the same thing. In this ultra-Pomo, post-intimacy world we live in, there is no other way.

and 3) You are having a baby
Yes, a divine emanation is already on the way. Congrats! But "a divine emanation of what?" is the question. And, aye, here's the rub. It might be a baby. It might be a new piece of art birthed by your own native intuition. Or it might just be a big turd. Have you shit recently?

Hope this has been a help. Happy Gestalting!

Honestly...

Don't you just get a little tired of Dallman sometimes? I mean, I love him to death, but today is over the top—both Andrew Sullivan and Wilco, IN ONE POST?!? Next he's gonna combine Goldberg, Dewey and Paglia in a post surely from aperspectival hell.

And lord help us if he goes McLuhan on us, again.

Well anyway, back to my making morning eggs module. Stay tuned...

MySpace Commits Murder

O.My.God.:

MySpace.com, the fast-growing community website hugely popular with American teens, has removed 200,000 "objectionable" profiles from its site as it steps up efforts to calm fears about the safety of the network for young users.

It wonder what Houellebecq would have to say about this?

Hmmm.

Well, off to my Saturday ILP. More later...