Thursday, July 25, 2002

Just a little tidbit: Command performance for a captive audience.

Friday, July 19, 2002

heard some kids talking in the cd store. costs about 1.50 to produce a cd. so, the logic of one kid, you're getting ripped off if you pay 7.99 for it. other kid said, yeah, but you're paying for the time it took to make it, etc. what are we paying for when we buy cds? how long will it be (2years/5 years) before the idea of buying cds will seem absurd (Why did we ever do that?) Why do I do it? Why did I just spend 50 bucks for 4 discs? In all cases, I was buying from indy labels, so I assume that the artist will get more than at the majors. But what's really going on? I wanted to spend some money and I did. As a friend of mine once put it, "My mother and sister went shopping together, because that's how they feel." She didn't mean, "they feel like shopping." She meant, "Their relationship to the world is mediated by purchasing clothing, etc." When she said that, probably more than 10 years ago, now, I did not identify with the mother and the sister. But today, I do. Depressed this week and so, in order to feel like I have some control over the universe and the ability to satisfy my needs (take care of myself - feel), I bought a bunch of cds. I'll be surprised if I listen to any of them 10 time before I die (though, frankly, its not out of the question - though listening to them 10x before next year is a little more questionable). I like to collect. I like to acquire. I makes me feel like I actually exist. I do not know what existence is. The future belongs to the irreplaceable and the singular. Like me.

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

and reminded yesterday in the presence of an androgynous funk sorceress of the power of music. this is materialist mysticism. no gods. no beyond. no elsewhere. music, generated and evaporated in the flux of time. that we can spend our time this way, dancing, playing. and every religion on earth a construct, a convention. "would you walk the path of righteousness if you knew that there was no heaven, no god, no eternal reward?" many would hesitate; many more would simply walk the path, realizing that that too is one way to live here on earth, to reenact the dramas of faith, the carnival of belief. not believing is possible as well. knowing is possible. not knowing, also. but a bunch of humans together under the spell of music, the energy focused and broadcast through one particularly active node, nodding, funking, precipitating the flow. we're in it too.

words are coins. we use them, though they don't belong to us, are not produced by us. nor do they end with us. a wider variety of riches. what we hammer from these divers metals. what we accept as is and pass along as was.

plagued, or nagged, today, by the hierarchy. the primate play of things. esteem rises and falls with the shifting perspectives of our inter-actors. negotiated against our self-esteem.

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Beset lately by the solipsism of experience and the indifference of the natural world. The same sun shines down on the torturer and the tortured. As the latter jerks and spasms on the blood and urine bespattered floor of the torture chamber, the shocking sensations wracking his or her body remain hermetic, an inexchangeable (though not inexpressible) data point. Whether a child is raped and murdered or spends a joyous afternoon at the playground is of no matter to the air or the earth. Both eventualities are possible, inscribed in the open nature of Being. Likewise, a person can drive along the highway listening to music on a nice car stereo, stop for a drink with friends, and then proceed to relax in his modest home in a quiet suburb, while elsewhere on the globe, in the Sudan for example, unfortunates are pressed into slavery. From freedom to imprisonment, from birth to death, from love to hatred, such is the spectrum of this world. And yet, our thoughts and feelings, our celebration or condemnation of this state of affairs, are transient and private chemical states - a certain, momentary disposition of the substrate. The thought that everything we cherish, every ambition, every reaction, is reducible to itself, and devoid of any place in a more cosmic skein of meaning or purpose drives many to God, failing to consider the great absence in which even this great figure aimlessly drifts.

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

what wild thoughts cause men to weep, and ancient secrets crack open the hardened ground of oblivion? capitalists may have conscience, but capitalism has none. it is the universal solvent. ever traditional bond or primitive structure will bow and rupture neath its anarchic brunt. this is its beauty. shiva, the universal destroyer, made systemic. there is no law or code inscribed in its sinews of distribution and exchange.

Monday, July 08, 2002

william bennett's denunciation of relativism. how can any thinking person not be relativistic, or at least recognize the political value of relativism when it comes to discrediting opposing ideologies? Even Pat Robertson realized the deconstruction's privileging of the text, and post-modernism's celebration of pastiche offered the Christian Right an opening - it could actually justify/legitimate itself in terms of the theories that nominally opposed it.

what do I mean when I say, "I love America"? What do I love, precisely?