There is something to creating music that means something. To anybody that knows me, there is a very deep-seated antipathy for what has come to be “Pop music.” Maybe it’s because what has become pop music is precisely the opposite of what pop music was when it was first invented in the 1960s—or maybe not. The Beatles were incredibly popular. Cream became incredibly popular—although it could be argued that they quitted their careers right at the point where they were verging on superstardom. CCR, Van Morrison, and even Bob Dylan all ran in the Something-or-other-Pop category: rock-pop, jazz/rock-pop, folk-pop, etc. That is a little difficult for this humble music listener to understand. A quick juxtaposition of top tens might prove something. The number one song from 1969 and 2007. According to one website (http://digitaldreamdoor.nutsie.com/pages/best_songs50-69.html), the top songs of 1969 were:
1. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin
2. Proud Mary - Creedence Clearwater Revival
3. I Want You Back - Jackson 5
4. Honky Tonk Women - Rolling Stones
5. Bad Moon Rising - Creedence Clearwater Revival
6. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes - Crosby, Stills & Nash
7. Dazed And Confused - Led Zeppelin
8. Gimme Shelter - Rolling Stones
9. Come Together - Beatles
10. I Can't Get Next To You – Temptations
(Which is, I might add, a pretty imposing list.) According to Rolling Stone, the top songs of 2007 are as follows:
1 "Roc Boys" - Jay-Z
2 "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country"
Randy Newman
3 "Umbrella"
Rihanna
4 "D.A.N.C.E."
Justice
5 "Four Winds" - Bright Eyes
6 "Dough Is What I Got"
Lil Wayne
7 "Rehab"
Amy Winehouse
8 "Long Walk Home"
Bruce Springsteen
9 "Boyz" M.I.A.
10 "Int'l Player's Anthem"
UGK
I guess the big question that I have, is whether or not anybody could see forty years into the future and see the artists of that day and age listening to MIA and UGK and wanting to make music like that? I guess the big difference, for me, is a matter of longevity.
Lately, I have been studying temporality. When I first questioned time, it took the rudimentary form of asking “Who invented time? And why should I abide by it?” Well, it turns out that I invented time at (or around) the same time that I made the split from myself in the upsurge of the consciousness. Time, if looked at from a technical viewpoint, is a personal fiction. Yes, the days move and the world turns, and we can measure it, but from a more individualized standpoint: the past does not exist because we can’t go back in time, every time we try to catch hold of the present we are presented with the problem that it is constantly being driven into the realm of an infinitesimal instant and the best we can do is get pretty close, and as to the future, I have a maxim: “Only act, the future is unknowable.” But given the fact that it is a kind of personal fiction, it is still a supportive kind of fiction. We rely on our past to make decisions in the present that will hopefully make our future what we want it to be. The past is like a crutch supporting us in the present: our experiences, our knowledge, and our wisdom from all of these things is what makes us the person we are—as a matter of fact, existentialist theory would say that we are what we were and Post-Marxist theory would say that the decision in the present illustrate what we want (which is always about the future). Given all of this. What kind of structure is “Roc Boys” building for the future of music?
There is no real music for this particular piece of music. It is pure lyrics and mix mastering. Your average Joe Schmoe, sure, couldn’t put together a piece of music like this, but give just about anybody a mix board and you’ll come up with something. Meanwhile, some of your most accomplished guitarists couldn’t manage to play Whole Lotta Love. They might not’ve known music theory, but they could play the instrument. It was part of them. Maybe I’m way off base. Maybe the mixboard is the most complicated instrument in the world, and I’m sure it takes time to master, but can you imagine carrying it to Central Park and busking? It is the manifestation of the capitalistic machine grabbing hold of the music industry. You can’t take it outside these boundaries. If the machine can’t control your money, then what’s the point?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Wandering Mindspace
(Written a couple of weeks ago, but the sister city to another piece at poeticmindofeli.blogspot.com)
Sometimes, all I want to do is drop my thoughts from an ocean-crossing jumbo jet and watch them plummet for a second, before opening up a parachute and gliding through the rest of their journey and landing safely—perhaps a couple of broken bones, but safely nonetheless. I thought this as I awakened from what one could ostensibly call sleeping, but really more like an alternate state of consciousness.
More and more and more there seems to be the sense that I’m wandering in awe through my days, as if there is nowhere and nothing more important that the steam streaming out of the little heating unit on the side of that building, nothing more important than continually putting one foot in front of the other, nothing more than the realization that with that as the focus, one is bound to get somewhere, anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. Am I a being that is present to itself in reflection only in terms of my situation and it’s ontological reality? Does a question like that make sense? Can it be applied to literature? What of Paul Morel? He is certainly most present to himself in reflection in terms of his situation (which could also kind of be called materialist) and it’s whats and hows. Thanks Lawrence for making it seems as though an Existential Post-Marxism might be possible from a phenomenological standpoint. If its reality is dependent on my looking at it, then look at it I shall, and we shall see. It’s one of those floating thought moments I think: perhaps something, perhaps nothing, and perhaps a hallucinated reality that is nonetheless reality.
My nose has been doing a great deal of leaking lately, and it looks as if I shall never be able to patch it up—there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I don’t feel like elucidating it because it seems self-apparent to me (and that’s something like a pun?).
The language has come back to me as a thing of fluidity. Precisely as I had hoped, although perhaps not as clearly as I had hoped, the study of language as it pertains to the learning of it as a second is reminding me of the fickle nature of the word. When the word is fickle, what of the paragraph? We are the meaning makers, and the best any text can do is try to illustrate things as clearly as possible—which is always a mind-numbing failure.
What, then, of meaning? Even the one book that is supposed to shed light a singular meaning (that of existence) is read and even translated in so many different ways that the meaning which it gives is always personal.
Sometimes we need help. Sometimes the words on the page don’t mean anything until somebody else helps us understand them. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say (in the spirit of attempting to get things just right) that somebody else helps us come to our own understanding of them. We are the unifiers. It comes together in the subject. Is this my song of myself? Do I celebrate myself and loathe myself in the same breath? Am I in anguish of my freedom? Of my power? Of my weakness? Of my inability to comprehend the comprehensible? Of my ability to comprehend the incomprehensible? How does one go about attempting to understand?
There once was a fellow who followed a road. He wandered as it wandered and only looked at intersections to see that the road he followed had the same name, but he wondered if there was not a road construction crew that he had at some point ordered to be just up ahead of him continually laying the path that he would wander. He moved through the world as if he weren’t in control, with the sense that perhaps he was in control. Controlling the next step he took seemed to control the way the road lolled and rolled among the hills. He could always retrace his steps, and sometimes he took his lunch under a tree that seemed to magically appear on the roadside, but always there was the sound of his stepping on a road that seemed to come from nowhere. He often met fellow travelers, and sometimes there roads ran parallel, enough that they could call to each other and interact, and sometimes their roads ran together for a while, but they were always building their own roads as well. The world was absolutely cluttered with roads. But his roads seemed to have a tendency for where there were no other roads: through the mountains, through long stretches of desert, through dense forests, through untamed countryside. He longed for his road to pass through places where no road had gone before, and as he longed for it, he realized that it was quite near a reality.
“By god,” he muttered to himself, “All I have to do is direct this next step, and it is as the butterflies wing, causing a tsunami of reality that I cannot know until in my present, this is the past and I can reflect on it.”
But he often wondered at the validity of his own claims. He often wondered if there was a culture of the self, if not in the sense of a governmental system, a history, an arts scene, a night life, an understanding about the things are done, then at least in the sense of a Petri dish culture—like the nascent stages of a possible life.
Possibility… anything is. I am. Therefore I think. I think about Wagner’s Ring Cycle and wonder how it is that there are moments when I have absolutely no idea what is going on or what is being said or what is inside it, and I find myself welling up as if this is the most important point in the work and I start madly conducting the aria in a fit of seeming importance: the language of music, dropping out of the sky and floating down the ground, gliding through the air, and landing with AK-47 cocked and at the ready to blow away any misunderstanding through its unmistakable sense of something or other. The unreal is leaking into the real.
Musical existence – something that is pervasively giving off that sense of something or other, that transcends language, that reaches high points anybody can understand bodily, without the slightest notion of transcendent meaning.
To build a road of musical existence, perhaps that is my goal where the unreal leaks into reality and gliding seems to emanate from its presence, when really what it’s doing is falling.
Perhaps cohesion is best left to those who desire cohesiveness. Even as a sentence is made up of parts—a noun, a verb, the etcetera—metaphorized existence could take the form a sentence, a statement: a thing, what the thing is doing, and everything to describe that thing and what it is doing. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositional phrases make up the bulk of the sentence, while the thing-in-itself and the existing for-itself are still the most important parts of the sentence because without them there is only the etcetera. There is no statement. No phrase. No longing to be made meaning of. Warmly.
The flowers on my apparently ugly wallpaper move sometimes, as if they were actually growing. I never think about how ugly the wallpaper is though, it is simply a “fact” that has been illuminated for me by just about everybody that comes into my humble little room. I believe the appropriate colors are: khaki background with light green vines and lavender and peach flowers. Apparently it jars on people’s delicate sense of aesthetics. But what is beauty? Cohesion? Building? Stepping? Flowers? Wandering? Music? Leaking? Gliding? Falling? Language? Words? How is one to know?
Sometimes, all I want to do is drop my thoughts from an ocean-crossing jumbo jet and watch them plummet for a second, before opening up a parachute and gliding through the rest of their journey and landing safely—perhaps a couple of broken bones, but safely nonetheless. I thought this as I awakened from what one could ostensibly call sleeping, but really more like an alternate state of consciousness.
More and more and more there seems to be the sense that I’m wandering in awe through my days, as if there is nowhere and nothing more important that the steam streaming out of the little heating unit on the side of that building, nothing more important than continually putting one foot in front of the other, nothing more than the realization that with that as the focus, one is bound to get somewhere, anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. Am I a being that is present to itself in reflection only in terms of my situation and it’s ontological reality? Does a question like that make sense? Can it be applied to literature? What of Paul Morel? He is certainly most present to himself in reflection in terms of his situation (which could also kind of be called materialist) and it’s whats and hows. Thanks Lawrence for making it seems as though an Existential Post-Marxism might be possible from a phenomenological standpoint. If its reality is dependent on my looking at it, then look at it I shall, and we shall see. It’s one of those floating thought moments I think: perhaps something, perhaps nothing, and perhaps a hallucinated reality that is nonetheless reality.
My nose has been doing a great deal of leaking lately, and it looks as if I shall never be able to patch it up—there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I don’t feel like elucidating it because it seems self-apparent to me (and that’s something like a pun?).
The language has come back to me as a thing of fluidity. Precisely as I had hoped, although perhaps not as clearly as I had hoped, the study of language as it pertains to the learning of it as a second is reminding me of the fickle nature of the word. When the word is fickle, what of the paragraph? We are the meaning makers, and the best any text can do is try to illustrate things as clearly as possible—which is always a mind-numbing failure.
What, then, of meaning? Even the one book that is supposed to shed light a singular meaning (that of existence) is read and even translated in so many different ways that the meaning which it gives is always personal.
Sometimes we need help. Sometimes the words on the page don’t mean anything until somebody else helps us understand them. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say (in the spirit of attempting to get things just right) that somebody else helps us come to our own understanding of them. We are the unifiers. It comes together in the subject. Is this my song of myself? Do I celebrate myself and loathe myself in the same breath? Am I in anguish of my freedom? Of my power? Of my weakness? Of my inability to comprehend the comprehensible? Of my ability to comprehend the incomprehensible? How does one go about attempting to understand?
There once was a fellow who followed a road. He wandered as it wandered and only looked at intersections to see that the road he followed had the same name, but he wondered if there was not a road construction crew that he had at some point ordered to be just up ahead of him continually laying the path that he would wander. He moved through the world as if he weren’t in control, with the sense that perhaps he was in control. Controlling the next step he took seemed to control the way the road lolled and rolled among the hills. He could always retrace his steps, and sometimes he took his lunch under a tree that seemed to magically appear on the roadside, but always there was the sound of his stepping on a road that seemed to come from nowhere. He often met fellow travelers, and sometimes there roads ran parallel, enough that they could call to each other and interact, and sometimes their roads ran together for a while, but they were always building their own roads as well. The world was absolutely cluttered with roads. But his roads seemed to have a tendency for where there were no other roads: through the mountains, through long stretches of desert, through dense forests, through untamed countryside. He longed for his road to pass through places where no road had gone before, and as he longed for it, he realized that it was quite near a reality.
“By god,” he muttered to himself, “All I have to do is direct this next step, and it is as the butterflies wing, causing a tsunami of reality that I cannot know until in my present, this is the past and I can reflect on it.”
But he often wondered at the validity of his own claims. He often wondered if there was a culture of the self, if not in the sense of a governmental system, a history, an arts scene, a night life, an understanding about the things are done, then at least in the sense of a Petri dish culture—like the nascent stages of a possible life.
Possibility… anything is. I am. Therefore I think. I think about Wagner’s Ring Cycle and wonder how it is that there are moments when I have absolutely no idea what is going on or what is being said or what is inside it, and I find myself welling up as if this is the most important point in the work and I start madly conducting the aria in a fit of seeming importance: the language of music, dropping out of the sky and floating down the ground, gliding through the air, and landing with AK-47 cocked and at the ready to blow away any misunderstanding through its unmistakable sense of something or other. The unreal is leaking into the real.
Musical existence – something that is pervasively giving off that sense of something or other, that transcends language, that reaches high points anybody can understand bodily, without the slightest notion of transcendent meaning.
To build a road of musical existence, perhaps that is my goal where the unreal leaks into reality and gliding seems to emanate from its presence, when really what it’s doing is falling.
Perhaps cohesion is best left to those who desire cohesiveness. Even as a sentence is made up of parts—a noun, a verb, the etcetera—metaphorized existence could take the form a sentence, a statement: a thing, what the thing is doing, and everything to describe that thing and what it is doing. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositional phrases make up the bulk of the sentence, while the thing-in-itself and the existing for-itself are still the most important parts of the sentence because without them there is only the etcetera. There is no statement. No phrase. No longing to be made meaning of. Warmly.
The flowers on my apparently ugly wallpaper move sometimes, as if they were actually growing. I never think about how ugly the wallpaper is though, it is simply a “fact” that has been illuminated for me by just about everybody that comes into my humble little room. I believe the appropriate colors are: khaki background with light green vines and lavender and peach flowers. Apparently it jars on people’s delicate sense of aesthetics. But what is beauty? Cohesion? Building? Stepping? Flowers? Wandering? Music? Leaking? Gliding? Falling? Language? Words? How is one to know?
Monday, December 1, 2008
You Can't Be Too Good
because the world just simply won’t allow it. You can be as awesome as you like—even if it is in your own mind. It is even possible to have everyone around you telling you how incredible you are (and I guess I’m thinking specifically about the celebrity circle there), but still manage to wind up feeling the next day as if God had unceremoniously scraped you off his hiking boot after looking down and saying, “Ewww….”
I’m not sure about karma. There seems to be something to it, and I suppose that’s where we can leave it off. What I am almost absolutely certain about is balance and the power of the human will to exert some kind of control over their universe—and I want to emphasize that THEIR. How does one go about explaining a bodily understanding like that? Everything moves in circles? Karmic principles dictate? The Middle Way? Almost every culture in almost every part of the world has some sense of the harmony that can be achieved by human beings simply being aware of the power they have over their own reality. Based on the information I have researched, the amount of water saved by one human being doing their best to conserve water in every way is in no way going to help out with our current international water crisis because the amount of water saved is too insignificant; however, it can have an effect on the local environment, and with enough individual efforts pooled together, enough environments could be salvaged, and suddenly the impossible is merely the improbable.
A lot of life is about imagination. Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that can understand something like possibility. My old professor used to hate this word, but they have somehow managed to be imbued with possibility. As a matter of fact, this is generally the problem that most human beings run into: they understand possibility, so they spend most of their lives being something they aren’t and not being what they are because they are so little focused on reality. It’s not a problem in the technical sense of, “You’ve got problems buddy, no doubt at all about that,” but more like a problem in that it creates conflict in the essential nature of the human character. Sartre likes to use the example of a waiter in a café. The man is very busy being a waiter (which is something he’s not) and very busy not being himself (a struggling artist or some such), so that at the end of the day, we spend most of our lives involved in an act that we are fully conscious of, but about which we can really do nothing about, and don’t really want to do anything about because it is through this fissure that we accomplish things, where the possible becomes reality, and a new possibility opens up.
It’s a matter of reality, see?
We cannot know what’s real because it is impossible.
Like always doing anything.
It’s not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t.
The past is subjective at best,
And can only be referred to as my past or his past or
Something along those lines,
But by days end we see how impossible the past is.
The present does not exist as
We think it does. Focusing on the moments you can
Control is probably one of the
Best ways to go about existing, but there is no way to
Grasp the moment in your hand
Because by the time you think you got it, it’s vanished.
The future is unknowable—
An old personal adage with the simple qualifier at
The beginning of “only act”—
And can only be slowly worked and moved toward.
So with an un-objective past
An elusive, at best, present,
And an unknown future, how
Are we supposed to know
What’s real?
The problem is the same all over the place. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and we are fully conscious that we have no idea what is going on inside us, while at the same time being fully conscious that we know what’s going on inside us is probably most closely related to turmoil of one kind or another. So, we sometimes set ourselves up for the self-flagellation that sometimes happens. We do things (perhaps subconsciously, but still in the consciousness) that we know, at some point down the road, we’re going to have to pay for, and we accept them wholeheartedly because we know there is a balance. It works the other way, too. Sometimes you work really, really hard. Sometimes you work to the point of pain. Sports might be a good metaphor here, in that you will work until your body is yelling at you, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Why are you doing this to us!” but you just keep right on going, and it learns to take the pain, because the glory you will receive through the competition is worth it. Pain now for pleasure later or pleasure now for pain later—it’s like the quintessential text of anything. Only a fool would make the claim that you can enjoy a life of pleasure forever.
What’s important is to remember that no matter how many father-figures you lose or many hours overtime you’re working that you’re not getting paid for or how many times your schedule changes or how many times you spill Jameson on your computer or how many times the world plays magician and has you looking at its left hand while taking a huge swing at you with its right or how many times your internet unexpectedly goes out or how many times you are so confused with the nature of your own existence that you cry and cry and cry and cry, you’ll hit a balance. You might only hit it like a miler hits the line after the first lap, but you’ll hit it, and “that’s life. That’s what all the people say. Ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. But I ain’t gonna let it change my tune. When I’m back on top in June.” I just hope it doesn’t take that long to get back on top.
I’m not sure about karma. There seems to be something to it, and I suppose that’s where we can leave it off. What I am almost absolutely certain about is balance and the power of the human will to exert some kind of control over their universe—and I want to emphasize that THEIR. How does one go about explaining a bodily understanding like that? Everything moves in circles? Karmic principles dictate? The Middle Way? Almost every culture in almost every part of the world has some sense of the harmony that can be achieved by human beings simply being aware of the power they have over their own reality. Based on the information I have researched, the amount of water saved by one human being doing their best to conserve water in every way is in no way going to help out with our current international water crisis because the amount of water saved is too insignificant; however, it can have an effect on the local environment, and with enough individual efforts pooled together, enough environments could be salvaged, and suddenly the impossible is merely the improbable.
A lot of life is about imagination. Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that can understand something like possibility. My old professor used to hate this word, but they have somehow managed to be imbued with possibility. As a matter of fact, this is generally the problem that most human beings run into: they understand possibility, so they spend most of their lives being something they aren’t and not being what they are because they are so little focused on reality. It’s not a problem in the technical sense of, “You’ve got problems buddy, no doubt at all about that,” but more like a problem in that it creates conflict in the essential nature of the human character. Sartre likes to use the example of a waiter in a café. The man is very busy being a waiter (which is something he’s not) and very busy not being himself (a struggling artist or some such), so that at the end of the day, we spend most of our lives involved in an act that we are fully conscious of, but about which we can really do nothing about, and don’t really want to do anything about because it is through this fissure that we accomplish things, where the possible becomes reality, and a new possibility opens up.
It’s a matter of reality, see?
We cannot know what’s real because it is impossible.
Like always doing anything.
It’s not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t.
The past is subjective at best,
And can only be referred to as my past or his past or
Something along those lines,
But by days end we see how impossible the past is.
The present does not exist as
We think it does. Focusing on the moments you can
Control is probably one of the
Best ways to go about existing, but there is no way to
Grasp the moment in your hand
Because by the time you think you got it, it’s vanished.
The future is unknowable—
An old personal adage with the simple qualifier at
The beginning of “only act”—
And can only be slowly worked and moved toward.
So with an un-objective past
An elusive, at best, present,
And an unknown future, how
Are we supposed to know
What’s real?
The problem is the same all over the place. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and we are fully conscious that we have no idea what is going on inside us, while at the same time being fully conscious that we know what’s going on inside us is probably most closely related to turmoil of one kind or another. So, we sometimes set ourselves up for the self-flagellation that sometimes happens. We do things (perhaps subconsciously, but still in the consciousness) that we know, at some point down the road, we’re going to have to pay for, and we accept them wholeheartedly because we know there is a balance. It works the other way, too. Sometimes you work really, really hard. Sometimes you work to the point of pain. Sports might be a good metaphor here, in that you will work until your body is yelling at you, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Why are you doing this to us!” but you just keep right on going, and it learns to take the pain, because the glory you will receive through the competition is worth it. Pain now for pleasure later or pleasure now for pain later—it’s like the quintessential text of anything. Only a fool would make the claim that you can enjoy a life of pleasure forever.
What’s important is to remember that no matter how many father-figures you lose or many hours overtime you’re working that you’re not getting paid for or how many times your schedule changes or how many times you spill Jameson on your computer or how many times the world plays magician and has you looking at its left hand while taking a huge swing at you with its right or how many times your internet unexpectedly goes out or how many times you are so confused with the nature of your own existence that you cry and cry and cry and cry, you’ll hit a balance. You might only hit it like a miler hits the line after the first lap, but you’ll hit it, and “that’s life. That’s what all the people say. Ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. But I ain’t gonna let it change my tune. When I’m back on top in June.” I just hope it doesn’t take that long to get back on top.
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