universal destroyer, inc.

"I love killing slaves"

2009-03-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

OK. Out of context, that title might sound kind of weird or creepy, but hear me out.

My kids were on the computer and the eldest said, "Dad! I'm so hungry I feel like I'm gonna barf!"

I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, Master. I forgot that I was your slave. I'm doing a terrible job."

The eldest responded, "That's right! You're fired."

"I'm a slave," I said, "You can't fire slaves. You have to kill them."

"Alright!" they both cheered.

"I mean, you have to sell them," I corrected myself.

Next thing I know, they're standing next me and the youngest shouts, "I love killing slaves!"

That makes it all better, right?

Note: No slaves were killed during the composition of this post.

Do You Have Any Idea Who I Am?

2009-03-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I drove a SuperShuttle van. One night, I picked up a grizzled old-timer and drove him to San Francisco. He was my only passenger on that run (which meant I was making like $2.50 an hour) and we got to talking. I guess he enjoyed the conversation (which focused on the ups and downs of unionism in the Reagan era), because after a while he told me, "Ya know, you got personality. A lotta guys don't got shit."

That stuck with me as did the notion that, if I had anything, it was "personality." As fate would have it, for a time I was able to make a career of said personality, eventually coming to embody, for good or ill, the corporate culture at a global staffing company.

If corporations can have celebrities, I was one. I authored the corporate blog, wrote newsletters, direct mail, and"thought pieces," and represented the organization across the social media sphere. Additionally, I hosted a weekly, organization-wide conference call known as a the "Fireside Chat," a responsibility I had inherited years before from the COO after he had taken it over from the CEO. Moreover, at annual company events and manager's meetings, I regularly served as MC/host, and, when people were publicly recognized for their accomplishments, I was the tuxedoed one handing out the awards.

In effect, I addressed both employees and a variety of external audiences more regularly than any member of senior management. Then, last week, I got laid off.

I was surprised, though not shocked. After all, announcing weekly performance stats was part of the Fireside Chat format, so I knew which way the cookie was crumbling. Naively, I had believed that my celebrity, to a certain extent, would shelter me as the layoff waves mounted, but events proved me wrong.

More jarring than the lay-off, however, was losing my status as a "personality." This loss was driven home when I received my severance letter. Although the numbers were tailored to my specific situation, the letter itself was decidedly "form." It felt strange to go from a "somebody" to an "anybody (who gets laid off by this organization)." A few days later, I was at a networking event and, though I knew a few of the attendees, it was clear that a bunch of the people there HAD NO IDEA WHO I WAS.

I'm not opposed to anonymity. Nor is the notion of "ego-loss" foreign or repellent to me. On the contrary, I see it as, if not totally ideal, undeniably inevitable, and even desirable in some circumstances. Still, I really didn't appreciate being reminded that social status and personal identity is dependent on the decisions and ongoing acknowledgment of others who do not have the maintenance of the aforementioned status and identity as their primary objective.

Image Courtesy of freeparking.

I Seek Refuge in Darkness...

2008-11-04T06:52:00.001-08:00

... and impending doom, but said doom is seldom forthcoming.

When I read the work of Theodor Adorno, I took it to heart. "Auschwitz" became my watchword and the measure of all things. Of course, "Auschwitz" was itself just a cipher, a stand-in for Nazi horrors which didn't seem so much to repudiate 2000 years of Western Culture, as represent it's inevitable trajectory. Auschwitz was the Apocalypse, in the original sense of Revelation. It revealed an essential truth and the baleful glare of its light robbed everything that came after of all meaning and reality.

For me, Auschwitz became a kind hammer. I used it to reject and destroy anything that seemed comforting or affirmative as naively trivial or criminally frivolous. On the other hand, works of art or fiction that were disturbing, unsettling, or even cruel were redeemed by their mimetic approximation to the Holocaust. The serene, albeit inhuman, warmth of Mark Rothko's paintings, for instance, served as a kind of metaphysical valium drawing a veil over void, while the jarring and panicked post-punk of Saccharine Trust, or the macabre austerity of Joy Division, on the other hand, held up a mirror to human brutality and froze its nauseating topography in colours drawn exclusively from the palette of the abyss.

Now, of course, I'm more apt to see this morbid focus on humanity's "darker angles" as a kind of a cop-out. I wasn't living in a death-camp or being driven from my home or seeing my children murdered before my eyes. I was a privileged kid from suburban LA who cavalierly flaunted mankind's malevolence as a badge of hipness. Acknowledging the abominable suffering of others, not just in the past but right now, today, a suffering that the people I grew up around seemed intent on avoiding, denying, or down-playing, was a step towards maturity, clarity, the truth. But lingering there, was not, is not.

The first of the Four Noble Truths states, as I understand, that "suffering is really happening." But that's just the first truth. The Truths go on to acknowledge a cause of this suffering, the possibility of suffering's cessation, and, most importantly, the way to bring suffering to an end, not just for you, but for all sentient beings.

Enlightenment isn't about insisting that things suck, it's about hunkering down and dealing. Or, to quote the Beastie Boys: "Darkness isn't the opposite of light, it's the absence of light."

I want to turn on the light and, as Pigpen used to howl with his alcoholically unbridled passion: "... LEAVE IT ON!"

Humanitarian Catastrophe

2008-10-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

Tens of thousands have been driven from refugee camps in Democratic Republic of the Congo. The camps were then looted and burned. 5 million people have died in the civil war there and, as anyone who's been paying attention knows, countless women and children have been raped, and worse (this report mentions forced incest and cannibalism, for example).

Oh, but there are some great Halloween Icons you can use on Twitter!

I'm feeling especially snide today.

They'd do it, if they could

2008-10-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

The other day I heard a story about experiments on monkeys that may prove beneficial to paralyzed humans. Seems that some scientists paralyzed these monkeys with drugs, stuck thin electrical wires into their brains, attached the wire to some sort of transformer which was then attached to a muscle in the monkey's wrist, and discovered that the monkey's could actually manipulate the wired wrist in this way, enabling them to play video games.

I'm more ambivalent about Man's dominion over the beasts of the field than the folks at PETA, but stories like this get me moving more swiftly in their direction. I don't have any problem with victims of paralysis volunteering for studies like this. In fact, I bet a good number of them would. But, this sort of experimentation just creeps me out. We are monkeys, for chrissakes. Would researchers perform studies like this on human slaves? Should they?

Talking with somebody about this story he said, "Well, they'd do it to us if they could." The Nietzschean notion that "life is will to power," and that domination of one species by another is the natural order of things, while not indisputable, certainly has an enduring appeal to which I admittedly have not always been immune. Still, it's not the case that predators hunt their prey of choice to extinction, or raise them for the purposes of exploitation and multi-faceted use. As far as I can tell, only humans and our alien masters do that.

John Coltrane and the Face of God

2008-10-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

Listening to Coltrane's Settin' the Pace this morning. It's not one of his greatest hits and even the various jazz cd review books give it second tier status, but I really enjoyed it. "I See Your Face Before Me" is the lead track, an exquisite ballad that, I humbly believe, outshines the more famous "I Want to Talk About You" from Soultrane.

Still, saying this or that by Coltrane is better than this or that by Coltrane seems trivial and, frankly, beside the point (much like I found Ben Ratliff's book on Coltrane's sound). These are just opinions, after all, and vanity moreover. Who cares what you/I think about any particular work by this man? It's a mixture of hero-worship and elevation-by-association that frankly demeans the opiner by revealing a lamentable failure to listen.

I read an interview with Matisyahu once in which he pointed to the number of love songs out there as an indication of how much people are yearning for the love of God. Coltane's commitment to God makes me hear his ballads in the same way. The face he sees before him, is the face of God. The "you" he wants to talk about is You, My Lord.

Is all love the love of God? Should it be?

the perils of anonymity

2008-10-16T10:53:00.000-07:00

i've maintained this blog in quasi-anonymity from the get-go. i've done this in part because I lead a public life on the web and, for some reason, i thought that i would be addressing subjects here that would not sit well with my employer or my role as public representative of his company. i'm not sure that i've entered into any territory that is overly controversial or patently offensive and, in fact, i start to wonder if this anonymity is more inhibitory than liberating.

it reminds me of an experience i had on second life some time ago. I had gotten into that v-world and started blogging about its potential as a marketing platform in my worklife. then i had a tryst with another avatar and realized that it would not have been difficult for "her" to find out who i was in "real" life, since a google search for my avatar name would have led "her" straight to me. so that i could then explore the dark digital underbelly of life, i created a new avatar and set off for my adventures. oddly enough, my carefully crafted masquerade actually made me feel more shy, as foolish as that may sound, in this world and, eventually, i stopped second life-ing altogether or, if I did go in for work purposes, i used my original "public" persona.

what am I afraid of? that people will know that i advocate the legalization of most drugs, even if it means that you must acquire a license to take some of them - psychedelics in particular? my thinking is that if people can demonstrate that they can deal responsibly with this stuff, why shouldn't they take it? you can own and use a handgun but you can't even possess LSD without committing a felony? that's just not right

i also think that the war on terrorism is bullshit and a thinly veiled, when it's veiled at all, power grab by the executive branch to do whatever it wants. neo-con guru frances fukuyama effectively stated that free markets and authoritarian government are not mutually exclusive and the war on terror, as it's sometimes called, is the perfect excuse to do anything you want.

terrorism doesn't exist, as I've mentioned here before. no one self-identifies as a terrorist - it's a label you get from an enemy. declaring a war along these lines means giving yourself carte blanche to go after anyone, etc.

again, what am i afraid of? this stuff seems tame or trivial

wait, THAT's what I was afraid of!!!! OH GOD NOOOOOOO!

tell the truth

2008-10-15T16:12:00.000-07:00

can we only tell the truth while masked? while hypnotized? unconscious?

"before too long then I was looking good, man, I was beautiful/i made believe that I could tell the truth to the whole wide world"

the truth is only make believe

the truth is always exactly what you think it is

the really real truth is more like the "ding an sich" - unknowable, by definition, ineffable, inescapable

are we capable of the truth, or incapable of it? incapacitated by it?

like I said, we always know exactly what the truth is

we never know

pure, uncut, the real deal, accept no substitutes - the uncanny connection between the truth and what is.

what is the truth? the truth is what is

Models of Enlightened Behavior

2008-08-21T11:28:00.001-07:00

If you drop something, pick it up.

When the bill comes, pay it.

When the phone rings, answer it.

When the light turns green, go.

One Definition of Enlightenment

2008-08-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

To be the same person in every situation, whomever you meet, wheresoever you go.

To be the same person, without masks, without ruses, without guile, without anxiety or greed, without schemes, agendas, or goals.

To be the same person you were before you were born and after you're dead. A carbon atom doesn't change when it belongs to a carrot or a rabbit or a hawk. Neither should you so change.

Ethics Are the End of Reason

2008-08-08T15:57:00.000-07:00

When someone deems your actions "unethical," they generally mean, "does not conform to a certain ethical standard which separates actions into 'right action' and 'wrong action'." When you ask them the basis for their ethics, they will have two possible answers: On the one hand, they will refer to an authority who has established the ethical code and infer that you should abide by the code out of respect or obeisance to said authority. On the other hand, and this is the post-enlightenment tendency, they will justify their ethical standard in terms of practical or utilitarian concerns regarding the outcome of actions deemed wrong.

Here is where conflict arises. No ethical standards can be immediately or unproblematically derived from the world of phenomena, particularly when the phenomena in question are social in nature. The ethical conclusions drawn in this way from or against any particular act are dependent both on knowledge and depiction of the human situation concerned - both areas in which certainty is, for the most part, provisional.

Dispute is always possible when we are describing situations in human life and particularly when we are claiming that, "given situation x, action y, will lead to outcome z." In the realm of science, the experimental method stipulates that exceedingly rigorous conditions be met if someone is to even make the claim, let alone experimentally verify, that, given x, action y leads to outcome z. In fact, the experimental situation is intentionally artificial, the connections between x, y, and z demonstrably tight, and the conclusions peculiarly modest.

Unfortunately, in human life, given the number of variables involved in even the simplest interaction between two people, let alone the complexities inherent in the multiple, both highly interdependent or very weakly linked, interactions that compromise any social process, ethical standards that are justified in terms of "inevitable" outcomes of specific actions are either trivially few or unquestionably questionable.

Yet, herein lies the conundrum. If you question the ethical standard, you are pointed to the utilitarian reason behind it. If, however, you question the utilitarian reason, you are quickly accused of questioning the ethic.

It becomes clear that the ethic itself is not seen as the product of social consensus and open to revision or dispute. The apparent argument from utility reverts to an argument from authority. Thus, if you are questioning the ethic, you are implicitly questioning the authority. If you are questioning the authority, you are in opposition. If you are in opposition, you are an opponent. If you are an opponent, you must be overcome.

Any conflict that cannot be resolved via dialog and compromise, must be resolved by force. While such a resolution may be "comprehensible," to the extent that if follows the laws of physics, for example, it will not be "reasonable."

Disputes over ethics are sad and the sadness stems from weakness. The proponents of a particular ethical standard resort to force in order to silence opponents because, sadly, they do not possess the power that could transmute their ethic into law.

There is no God, but God

2008-08-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

Grim: The only thing I care about now is God.

World: But you said God didn't exist.

Grim: You're not fucking listening to me.

Intestine Baalism - Bad Name/Good Music

2008-06-29T19:23:00.000-07:00

Been on a heavy metal kick of late. Told everyone I was re-dedicating my life to metal. So, I go to Newbury Comics and scrounge through the "[insert letter of choice] Misc" bins looking for metal cds - the semiotics of extreme metal are pretty well-defined, it's hard to know what will succeed, however, within the discipline and rigor of the genre - and buying anything that looks obscure and cheap. Thanks to this aesthetic foraging, I've come across some great stuff. Right now, I'm listening to Intestine Baalism. It's totally awesome!

Death metal, of the Swedish variety, but from Japan, and broken up by epic "melodic" moments - which are more psychedelic than anything, and Maidenish - then back to thrashing death. The 1990s were THE decade for death metal (this one comes from '97), a time of purity and simplicity. A time of honor and focus. Truth.

Everything now is an adventuresome and reverent pastiche (I'll write about Hammers of Misfortune later), not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyway, I had already flipped by this one a few times in search of Inquisition or something, now that I have all the Immortal cds I could ever want, when I saw it today. I almost bought it and I didn't (though I did pick up something by Blood Ritual that was quite impressive, albeit from the 21st century).

I wasn't sure. I'll bet a few bucks ($4-ish) on music I've never even heard of if there is the chance that it will be surprisingly awesome. Anyway, this cd on that score is amazingly brilliant. Crushingly brutal, death-grunt morphing into blackened, tortured screeches. Then, and this is what all the Amazon reviews tell you, it veers into a grungy take on NWOBHM.

But also like I said, the melodic parts sound more progressive and psychedelic than metal. There's even a really spacey acoustic intro on one cut.

Bottom line, the thing is this: as I type these words, and listen to this music, it consistently catches my attention, surprises and astonishes me. Intestine Baalism, extreme and sublime masters of this weird art.

I bow to their excellence.

Ripping Corpse, "Dreaming With The Dead"

2008-06-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

Saw Ripping Corpse listed on some death metal lists and got their amazing Dreaming with the Dead.

I was expecting something heavy, but not exactly this. The highly processed/phased guitar reminds me of Euro-metal like Coroner, but the drums have some real thrash elements, and the vocals are fairly hardcore. Maybe it qualifies this as grindcore, I don't know.

I do know it's good. Real good. Strange chaos moments, heavy moments, psych-wank soloing, and those vocals. I guess the mainstream version of this would be Pantera, if that makes sense.

I was intrigued by the participation of Erik Rutan, who has played off and on with Morbid Angel and co-founded (founded?) Hate Eternal (in which Ripping Corpse guitarist Shaune Kelly now plays. If I'm not mistaken, the first album was recorded with one of the guitarists from Suffocation, Doug Cerrito). I'll address the question of Morbid Angel in another post.

Final Analysis: Dreaming with the Dead is an artefact of a bygone era, the sign-post to a path not taken by metal, and by extension, the world.

Should your Fantasy become a Reality?

2007-08-31T19:01:00.000-07:00

In our culture of indulged, individualized experience, a certain perfection of life is ascribed to that moment in which your fantasy becomes reality. The idealized human life culminating in the realization of fantasy, in other words.

Accordingly, it is assumed that everyone wants their fantasies to become reality. For example, I have a friend whose life plays like a never-ending letter to Penthouse Forum. To many, his life embodies an (pornish) ideal. I myself am not above admitting to have looked upon his life from time to time with eyes greened by envy.

Nevertheless, I do not hold reality to be the perfection and natural destiny of fantasy. I want many of my fantasies to go unfulfilled because they are fantastic, outlandish, or impossible. More importantly, I'm glad that they do not contain the weight and persistence of reality. I am nurtured by their unreality and, in many ways, dependent on it.

Reality does not lie on a continuum with fantasy, but unfolds rather as an autonomous zone. Fantasy can, and should, guide and inform our actions. It should not, however, be revered as the measure of our actions.

Personally, I am drawn to reality precisely because it is beyond my control and intent, because it surprises and startles, and because it does not wholly conform to my expectations. Reality attracts me, ultimately, because it does not seem to be me.

castration

2007-08-04T19:44:00.000-07:00

sitting with my laptop on top of my lap - connected to the interweb via wireless, wondering if I was castrating myself with radio waves....

Snuff Culture, Part 2

2007-01-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

There are a number of sites that feature grisly photographs of the dead and dying in Iraq. This one is particularly gruesome. When we view the slaughtered and the maimed, do we take away more than our own sense of having survived or escaped? Do we consume massacre? Or is violent death the new opiate of the masses?

Chaos is our Mother

2007-01-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

I have always maintained that chaos is fundamental, the state from which all reality springs and the state to which it perpetually returns - the law of its weaving and unraveling. God must needs be come from chaos, which precedes it as origin. God, in fact, is the human spell cast to bind chaos. Reason, instead, tries to harness and direct it, driven to uncovering greater and deeper sources of it, never sated, having once tasted the awesome and demonic power.

Of course, we always conceive of chaos as madness, profusion, and violence. But there is also chaos in absolute uniformity. The heat-death of the universe, when all entropic movement ceases, is as chaotic as the star-birthing convulsions of the big bang, in fact, more so. The random coalesence of matter we call the universe, while formally unpredictable, embodies the chaos of emergent form. The thermo-dynamic end, however, is devoid of form, and inditinguishable from nothingness.

Why do people do wrong?

2007-01-02T21:44:00.000-08:00

Are actions wrong in and of themselves, or only contextually? In other words, is there a universal law of value, or merely situational efficacy? The codes of conduct maintained by human beings, must be considered part of the situation. It doesn't matter if they were ordained by god or not. As long as there are humans ready and willing to enforce them, or adopt them as internalized ways of being, they are "in effect," regardless of their providence.

2007-01-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

Welcome to snuff culture.

The whole world watching sleazy saddam necro-porn. Low budget home movie of an execution in what looks like a basement by leather-jacketed thugs. It had no trappings of the official or even professional, more like an impromptu.

How many death-scenes can I find on YouTube?

How many watching actually contemplate the reality of their own death? Its inevitability? Not to be avoided, they say. When I die, no one else will live this life. I don't have to believe that I go anywhere or become anything. The earth doesn't believe it, either, seeing in me more material.

And why should we morn the destruction of the biosphere? Oceanic dead-zones, clear-cut forests, extinct species. The human spasm will find its end.

But not the earth's.

2006-05-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

i've never believed in reincarnation. the human soul is too obviously contingent, a product of its physical substrate and environmental pressures, and famously instable. at the "pulse of life" level, it is too generic and thoughtless, too deinviduated for a linear, body to body, journey. for this reason, a karmic doctrine asserting that the conditions for this current life have been set or in any way influenced by behaviors and preoccupations in a previous life have always struck me as either absurd or as an ideologically motivated ruse, one which paints the current situation as somehow pre-determined by the irretrievable, and thus unchangeable past. however, it is not unreasonable to claim that the lives we live have been set in motion by the actions of others, parents, grandparents, etc. and that we are carried along by the momentum of their dreams, their successes, their failures. we act out and out of their passions and, unless we take the time to consciously recollect our origins, or the origin of our origins, we do indeed live lives of a blind, karmic pre-destination.

On the other hand, karma is really just a doctrine of cause and effect. the entire universe is a complex chain reaction that goes on and on and on and, at least theoretically, there is a continuous chain of cause tying all current being to every other state of being, in its totality, stretching back to the primordial, original cause. There is no doubt that my behaviors, my actions, even my intentions, are part of an unbroken chain of physical events reaching back from this moment to the beginning of time, criss-crossing with innumerable other chains of discrete events, and carried along by the wave of all things happening forever. Reincarnation may simple mean that a particular chain, or more likely, complex of chains, has once again attained personhood. The exploration of past lives is always only an effort to understand this life and capture, in a highly symbolic narrative, the forces which have shaped both our proclivities and experiences.

2006-05-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

apparently blogging is about updating content with an alarming frequency

i'm eating pretzels and am getting fatter by the minute

when i am living in the woods, fleeing authority, reflecting on the decisions that led me to commit the regrettable, the forever undoable (what can ever undo the done?) and wondering if, though i am at large, i will ever feel free (for the hunted live in the shadow of pursuit - never resting, only hiding), i will thank the Utz company for their manufacture of these salty carb sticks, which my body thoughtfully converted to fat in anticipation of this now inescapable eventuality.

2006-05-01T06:57:00.000-07:00

in five minutes i've got to do something

awoke this morning thinking about the alt-rock indie underground - can't explain why -

mind too prone to relativize, to absolutize, in an ascending and descending sequence - a genetic code of culture, but in reverse, an entire universe of individual entities (that means "beings") that don't matter to anyone - since "things"
only matter to "someones" - or so I'm told

if someone said, "I saw Julia Roberts yesterday," and you asked, "Where?" and they said, "On TV, they were replaying "Pretty Woman,'" you would think that odd. "Seeing" someone is supposed to be different from seeing a picture of them. But for movie folk, they mainly exist for us as images. Real images, in other words. (Thoughts I had after seeing a man who looked like Tom Cruise and wondering what it would be like to be a recognized image, like him, but then walk anonymously down the street in a Boston city. If you are used to being recognized, and then are not recognized, does this cause pain? Does this cure pain?)

2006-03-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

i'm going to return to this blog and let the world know what i think

WORLD, YOU ARE OFFICIALLY ON NOTICE!

2003-09-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

What if a god, instead of creating the universe, merely found it? And then, what if he lost it?

2003-08-13T14:08:00.000-07:00

some recent thoughts:

1. was the past better or worse than the present? recent discussions with friends uncover a consensual belief that all valorization of the past over against the present are delusional and regressive fantasies. Two hundred years ago, the population of Europe was roughly 11% literate, the majority of people were peasants (soon to become industrial laborers), and cities stank running with filth in the streets (since plumbing in the modern sense did not exist). While I have tended to agree that worship of the past was generally motivated by politically conservative interests and relied on a purely constructed version of "what was," I've now decided that it all depends on your perspective. In this regard, I've been primarily influenced by Mike Davis' "Victorian Holocausts" book in which he demonstrates how colonial policies and practices turned drought conditions from Brazil to China into humanitarian catastrophes of biblical proportions, thus creating a long-lasting divergence between the conditions of the poor in the 1st World (Europe and North America) and the poor in the 3rd World. In the case of the latter, it cannot be asserted that the present is better than the past since, as Davis shows, imperial policies in china, as well as practices of the moghuls in India, were geared to prevent exactly the kinds of disasters that the colonial policies produced. Of course that may beg the question of the present present vs. the past past - that is, for example, are the inhabitants of modern day China, or India for that matter, "better off" than their ancestors. Conditions are better, certainly, than they were 100 years ago, but are they better than they were 200 years ago? 10,000 years ago?

2. liberalism and America. Lieberman claims that a "swing to the left" - whatever that would mean in America - would mean certain defeat for the Democratic party. I would instead wager that a further commitment to centrism would further the party's demise. Americans are extremists by nature, not moderates, and appreciate high contrasts. The larger problem for the Democrats is actually producing a worldview that is as simplistic and stark as that propogated by the Republicans, a worldview with a clear division between the good and the evil, and easy to understand solutions to the problems currently facing America (unemployment, "terrorism," etc.) This would involve a reclamation of the concept of America itself. The Republicans, while actually serving the interests of a small minority of extremely wealthy Americans, have successfully marketed themselves as the embodiment of America. They are the flag wavers. They are the patriots. Etc. Their idea of America, however, is Christian, conservative, and plutocratic. Because they mobilize fundamentalism in all its forms on their behalf, they have successfully projected the message that any opposition to this concept of America is opposition to America itself (as one conservative put it, "Life is a living hell for liberals because they hate America but don't hate it enough to leave"). America should mean, is supposed to mean, was intended to mean: FREEDOM, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY. If the image of Republican community par excellence is the Christian fundamentalist revival meeting - which is about submission to an absolute authority, then the image of Democratic community par excellence is the old-style Dead show/Woodstock/ Lollapalooza-type rock festival - which is about the celebration of freedom, enjoyment, and self-expression.

3. But it's not just about the battle of worldviews - on the one hand, the monolith of Republican fundamentalism, on the other, a polyglot bazaar of Democratic pluralism - it is about power: the power to tax, the power to legislate, the power to mobilize, etc. The Republicans are all about power, taking power, and using power to benefit specific special interests. They do not want to change the world or social system. They want to control the government to fulfill certain personal and business interests. They do not say this. Instead, they say they want to protect America, keep the streets safe, etc. The democrats, on the other hand, at their best, would like to create a better, different world on behalf of a generalized human interest involving the right to education, healthcare, income, welfare, shelter, security, etc. Because they do not serve specific financial interests, and instead want to promote a diffuse interest inherited from and invented by the humanist enlightenment, they have a harder time of it. In a sense, they have no center of power, no specific interest unified enough and identifiable enough to mobilize and direct the actions of the party. This results from their celebration of diversity, in part.

2003-04-17T19:42:00.000-07:00

I gave a talk at harvard the other day at a conference on terrorism (specifically, that of the Red Army Faction - they didn't call themselves "terrorists" of course, though, as one participant asserted, "the society saw them that way." - now why would that be?). I talked about consciousness. Any organism that uses a mental picture to interact with and manipulate the world would require that this mental picture have two characteristics: it must be relatively stable, otherwise action over time and remembering where you left your food would become difficult, and it must be essentially fluid, otherwise it would be incapable of adapting to the shifting form of reality itself. Fundamentalism is rooted in the stable aspect of consciousness, and liberalism, understood as a relativistic formalism, is rooted in the other. Come to think of it, liberalism combines both aspects, in the formalism of law's rule, and in the tolerance and freedom of thought that it encourages and protects. Truth, I claimed, resided in the fluid adaptability of consciousness, in the movement from one stable state to another, and not in any particular stable state that consciousness adopts in order to negotiate a particular configuration of the real. Pedagogy should encourage this transversal movement, should teach it as the form of truth, rather than teach a specific or particular proposition. In doing so, pedagogy fulfills the Enlightenment's vision of a free humanity, a humanity made free by the truth. This is, however, the devil's pedagogy - for the devil, in the gnostic schema, frees humans by revealing to them the truth of this world's imprisoning deception. The devil, who only exists for fundamentalists after all, is not evil because he does bad things, but because he is a relativist, and thus attacks fundamentalism at an ontological level, at its foundation, just as the chaotic flux of reality itself does.

2003-03-10T21:01:00.000-08:00

something else to say about the war: IT HASN'T HAPPENED. everyone's freaking out about it and our minds are getting pumped full of details about how devestating, horrible, atrocious, brutal, it will inevitably be, but it is still just a possibility (however probable). it's important to hold on to its not-yet-ness - there's still time, still hope ["for what?" you might ask - max c. sez: "no hope=no fear" - trungpa rinpoche stresses the "hopelessness" of enlightenment, etc.]. feel like Ginsberg declaring the Vietnam War over in "Wichita Vortex Sutra." but there is that utopian moment before something has happened, the utopia of "still not yet."

for what it's worth, doesn't the fact that we are willing to send troops into Iraq imply that we (notice the "we" - written like a true American - "our troops" "our president" "our country" - who were "we" again?) believe Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction? If they did, wouldn't they be using them?
the media coverage makes the whole buildup seem slow motion. we've been talking and thinking about this for months. the slow motion makes it all appear scripted. what will happen next? has the end been composed already? what if there's a surprise ending? what if the whole thing isn't about Iraq after all, but about, say, the UN? What if Bush is just building up to the US leaving the UN or asking them to move shop to Brussels? the war seems so real and pending to so many - what if it were neither?

and is this imperialism? the war on Iraq seems like imperialism in the traditional, Schumpeter sense - forcible extension of sovereignty over another national territory, and not just the plain old leninist capitalism=imperialism. that is, no longer a metaphor of indirect control but a real, physical control of another country.

2003-02-17T21:08:00.000-08:00

Whatever is physically occurring now, exists. Anything that does not belong to the realm of currently transpiring physical reality does not exist. But this reality itself does not persist as a stable entity from one moment to the next - it is this instability itself, this transpiring (what's that tumbling over the event horizon?). However, we have access to things which do not exist through memory, fantasies, and dreams, which themselves are with specific physical events occuring with(in) the consciousness through which we experience and perceive. There are physical realities that we do not, in fact, in principal can not, perceive. The question for us is: Does it make sense to speak of "non-physical" reality? For example: meaning. How does the meaning of a word exist? More pointedly: Where does it exist? If something exists, we assume that it is localizable in space. If something is "nowhere," how can it be anything? Etc. God is nowhere.

2003-01-20T06:55:00.000-08:00

Many have mentioned it before, but I'm still surprised and disturbed by the juxtapositions of data we encounter daily in the news media. Sometimes they are as appalling as, "The perpetrator of this brutal rape is still at large. Up next, the cutest doggy you ever saw!" In this morning's New York Times email, I found this:

QUOTE OF THE DAY
=========================
"We believe that a persuasive case will be there at the end
of the month that Iraq is not cooperating."
-SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN L. POWELL

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/international/middleeast/18ASSE.html?todaysheadlines

/-------------------------------------------------\

Plan Your Perfect Ski Trip at nytimes.com/travel

Visit our Ski Guide for all the best New York Times ski
coverage on destinations like Aspen, the Green Mountains,
Vail and more. Also check out the best in ski deals from
our advertisers in our Ski Marketplace. Click below to
plan your ski trip.

http://www.nytimes.com/top/features/travel/activitiesandinterests/skiing/index.html

\-------------------------------------------------/
So, while the administration plans for war, those with disposable income plan their vacations.

2002-11-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

The "Temporary Autonomous Zone," however, may be the last refuge of the slacker - or merely the dream of the quiet suburban home where anything goes as long as the doors are closed and the shades drawn (and volume is kept to reasonable levels). As the structures solidify, the gaps too become institutionalized, disciplined. Anything completely outside the system, is irrelevant to it. Think different.

2002-11-13T07:48:00.000-08:00

Hope for the hopeless: While you hold the center, the periphery frays; when you secure the periphery, the center decays.

And living in the empire, the land of the pharoah, as they're calling it, where any human being can be killed anywhere in the world at the whim of the intelligence forces, and the chief executive can declare a person an "enemy combatant," thus exempting that individual from the civil rights afforded merely criminal citizens, and this declaration cannot be appealed or reviewed. On a day to day level, for many, little has changed. The changes will come in the future, gradually, as living conditions and the basic assumptions of function change. Of course, its a race against entropy.

The forces of chaos can only be circumscribed - no thing or agent penetrates to the heart, because, unlike order, chaos is primal, the fundamental state - order is an afterthought, epiphenomenal, and the evolving persistence of chaos demands ever increasing energy expenditure on the part of the order-worshippers. Their scheme is a house of cards. The meanings they erect are fetishes to the ego and vain ambitions. There are local victories, of course, subjugated zones, degrees of tolerance. And, naturally, what has been done, will always have been done - this is the nature of occurence. But the goal to which they aspire - permanent, unassailable control - is an illusion, though it can be real enough in specific, timebound circumstances.

Image courtesy of julauch.

2002-10-29T06:54:00.000-08:00

Every website is a neuron, or is it every word on the web? It goes down to the smallest attribute, the tiniest tributary, since you can link from any discrete point to any other. So, the thoughts and images are the ganglia, snaking out to exchange charge across a sea of neurotransmitters. What will happen if the Web has a stroke? Gaps, holes, realms of the inaccessible, the entire schema like a sponge of information - a fractal volume, coexistent with absence.

2002-10-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

children are an acquired taste.
watching high on fire the other night, trying to stay awake through the battering, i was aware of their music as a finite entity, limited, predictable, relentless. it was not engaging, mysterious, surprising or, utlimately, inspiring. more than anything else, it made me think that the strength (and weakness) of music, as well as the crux of its affinity with magic (and myth), lies in the power of illusion. because the world we perceive, the perception we live, is constructed, provisional, ad hoc, we are susceptible to hallucination, wizardry, and mystification. the evocative quality of music shrouds the performer in dream. but when you see through or past the oneiric veil, you see young men posturing and playing, and (little) more. they assume the forms of violence and fury, and even inhabit them, enact them, manifest them, but always under the banner "as if."
there was also a strange detachment about the band. matt pike (the leader) perfunctorily introduced the band, though not the individiuals, and named the songs, but did not interact with the audience in any meaningful way. was he drunk, out of it, insouciant? case in point: they played "baghdad," one of their best songs, but there was not irony or even indication that "baghdad" might refer to anything in the real world, at a time when "war against iraq" is under constant discussion. was he, by omission, telling us something about the "reality" of the world presented by the media, insisting, unconsciously, on the baseline of their brute, physical presence as existential anchor?

2002-08-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

formidable jaws gaping wide - who will clean these teeth? lambswool clotted with blood, crown and throne up-ended and shattered. a blizzard of flaming stones, a sea of ground glass. take a step. take a breath. the eyes are open. the ears are listening. what subtle words of destruction and awesome commandments of revelation await? turn away the curve of the earth. peel away the sun. behind the underneath of everything it is slumbering now. it is dreaming then. now: AWAKEN

2002-08-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

On NPR this morning, at the end of a story concerning separation of powers and the ongoing "war on terrorism," the reporter stated that the government was having trouble figuring out the roles of its various branches in a war, "with no identifiable enemy and no foreseeable end." Of course, if this is a clear statement of the case, as I believe it to be, then we have entered a realm (in point of fact, entered it quite a while ago) in which war is a state of affairs, rather than an activity undertaken for a particular end. If there is "no identifiable enemy," how can there be a war at all? If the war has no end, what differentiates it from its opposite?
The American Empire has no identifiable other, no counter-empire, against which is opposes itself. Instead, it only has threats to its structural integrity. "Terrorism" is the word currently used to describe a class of threats, and is, as such, the enemy itself. "Crime" is another word to describe a class of threats. It is related to the class of threats which fall under the term "Drugs," though the latter is ambiguous since, in the case of an anthrax vaccine, "drugs" may actually refer to a class of preventative agents or events.
The system cannot proceed against a class, since it is the system alone which defines it as a class. However, the system can proceed against members of a class. The challenge thus becomes clearly defining the members of the class. The recent debate concerning whether or not we should, unilaterally or not, intervene against the regime of Saddam Hussein is related to the complex described above. If Saddam Hussein can be effectively defined as belonging to the class "Terrorism," then the system can proceed against him. As we have seen, this has not been as easy as one might presume. The international community is not in agreement concerning his classification, and similar doubts have been raised domestically. While there does seem to be a consensus that Hussein, in his attacks on the Kurds, for example, has committed crimes against humanity, the problem with assigning him to the "Crimes" class is that the function of this class is to define internal threats to system stability. Neither the Kurds nor Saddam Hussein nor the gassing of Kurdish civilians can be situated inside the system. As horrible or atrocious as they may be, they belong to the outside of law.
But there may be another problem, deeper than one associated with evidence. The class "terrorist" itself may need further specification, particularly as the justice department begins the process of constructing an internal surveillance network in the US (very 19th century). Prior to an actual terrorist act, and apart from specific plans to carry it out, what observable actions define a member of this class? When will "sympathy" become such an attribute? When will legitimate critique of governmental policies and actions become such an attribute? When will defending yourself against a false accusation become an attribute? When will (did) your name appear on a list?
This set-up, the "war on terrorism," breeds such paranoid musings and is itself a product of them. The bigger question thus becomes, how do we define "threat to systemic stability"? What "system" is the government trying to maintain, what "system" does is thereby create, and, as a result, what other "system" is either destabilized or prophylactically made impossible?

2002-08-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

In "Sein und Zeit," Heidegger described "Sein zum Tod," or "Being unto Death," as the authentic existential posture for any "Being there" (what you and I would probably call a "being"). As I recall it through the haze of my post-graduate years, Heidegger was advocating a quasi-buddhistic "keep your eye on your death" approach to living. You will die. You are going to die. Your death is yours alone. It is inevitable, out there, waiting. "Death comes ripping," as Glen Danzig reminded us many moons past. By choosing your own personal and ultimate death as a closing bracket for your life, the latter is illuminated by the proper light of actuality.
The subtext here is that the one thing every human has in common, is this lowering fate. The odd thing to me was the abstractness of it. Certainly, we all die. But some will die before I finish typing this sentence (may you now rest in peace), some will die wasting away in a hospital bed, some will did obliviously as they drunkenly drive their cars over embankments, some will die suddenly of heart attacks on commuter trains, some will die of diseases that were preventable, etc. In fact, unless you commit suicide, the fact of your death remains shrouded in potentiality.
On the other hand, and I think I'm ripping this idea off of Heidegger's old flame, Hannah Arendt, it is a demonstrable fact that everyone living was born and the precise moment and circumstances of that birth are very specifically situated in time. By focusing on this birthedness of us, rather than our eventual mortality, we choose a perspective that gives greater wait to our deep connection to other humans (moms in particular). It anchors our way of living in a (past) certainty rather than a (certain) future possibility. The one event is concrete (I appeared covered with blood and amniotic fluid from my mother's vagina), the other conjectural (I will leave this world in some as yet to be defined way). The one creates a perspective in which our specific origin and subsequent experiences are acknowledged as the necessary foundation for our life as it is, the other creates a perspective in which an idea (that of our death) becomes the basis of our life and actions, thereby facilitating all forms of actionistic fanaticism (either of a heroic or diabolical nature).
All religions focus on death - how to prepare for it and how to overcome it. They leave birth alone because it has already happened (though, of course, some religions focus on death as a way of preparing for a better next birth - nevertheless, even in these cases, birth is mediated by death). When we reverse our perspective and consider birth as the primary, organizing event in our lives, we turn our backs on the so-called spiritual, the beyond, etc., and ground ourselves in the real situation of living here in this world in this way right now. Our death is not the doorway to the beyond, but the beyond itself. There is nothing (literally) on the other side.

2002-08-14T07:47:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman wrote an editorial in the Times today (if you, whoever you may be, are reading this more than 2 weeks in the future of this posting, you may no longer have access to the above) in which he stressed "context matters." He was talking about democracy in India and how it has prevented the growth of Islamic militancy by providing Muslims (150 million minority population in Indai) real opportunities for social movement and self-actualization. He also stressed, as I have done, that America and the world would be better served by a campaign to promote democracy, rather than a campaign to end terrorism. If you did the one, I believe, the other would follow (and there are real historical examples of this occuring). But that was not what intrigued me. A few days ago, I was writing up a preliminary ethics in which I wrote "Know your context." Which was my way of saying "Context matters," while putting the emphasis on the subjective relationship to context, rather than the latter's objective significance. This is a basic relativist tenet (and critical to the emerging philosophy which calls itself "transversal") and, indeed, relativism provides the context for the contextualization of context. Tis true that context matters, but what, precisely, is the context for any particular thought or event? That is: democracy is the context for Indian Muslims.The European Enlightenment and Ghandi are the context for Indian democracy. The rise of humanism and capitalism in Europe (along with the collapse of Euro-feudalism) provide the context for the Enlightenment (and, by extension, the French revolution). The dark ages are the context for the rise of euro-feudalism. Fall of Rome (and rise of Gothic tribes) context for that. Decline of Alexandrian world context for rise of Rome, etc. etc. Of course, these are merely historical contexts. I could have chosen climactic changes, species migration, technological advances, spiritual innovations, etc. And, of course, the what is the context of the earth itself? of the Milky Way? The history of the universe? Remember: context matters, meaning precisely, what you view as the object of interest and what you choose as its context.

2002-08-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

Limits, borders, boundaries, barriers. Strange how few actual, physical limits there are. Most borders, for example, are conventional or merely legally defined. Where does Mexico end and Texas begin? Does the Earth know and respect these relations? Of course not. What if you could arrest clouds or wind for crossing state lines? Which leaves us with the "other" boundaries, those imposed by our thought-patterns or by specific social groups. To be a Kurd in Turkey means something (it may mean that you will be put in prison and executed, if you are politically inclined, or want to teach children to read Kurdish). To be a Kurd in the US doesn't mean anything. The line that distinguishes between Kurd and Turk does not exist here, indeed, it does not exist anywhere, although it is enacted by Turkish soldiers and citizenry.
Such lines can be condensed under the rubric of difference. A difference does not exist in, but in between. The difference is the boundary, the borderline, that only appears through the window of relation. The relation creates the difference and can likewise uncreate it (through rearrangement of the related). This begs the question: Is there ever a "real" difference? Of course, all differences are real. But difference itself faces its own threshold, that dividing sense from the senseless. There is a difference between Turks and Kurds here in the US (differences of language, history, memory, desire, fury, etc.). It is just that, in this context, the difference is senseless.

2002-08-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

struggling with the concept of "space-time." everything is a four dimensional object occupying four dimensional spacetime. I realize that the math works, but there seems to be something amiss on the conceptual level. even in the string world, they talk of "x spatial dimensions, and 1 temporal dimension." isn't this formulation itself an acknowledgement, that at least in one regard, time is different from space? indeed, the notion of "spacetime" itself, embeds this difference in its awkward compoundity. heidegger (that wily ol' nazzy), faulted contemporary physics for its "spatialization of time," since this invovled an attempt to make time, the Insubstantial, substantial. Looking at an old Wired magazine (circa '98) the other day, I came across the same tendency in the quote: "Today, time is the only truly scarce commodity." It's a strange sort of commodity since, you can't increase or decrease it quantitatively. You can't stockpile or hoard it. Time simply and inexorably elapses. (Funny to think of "elapsing" as something one thing does to another: "I will elapse you." The triumph of the intransitive.) We spatialize time as a matter of course when we say things (do we "say things"?) like, "This is taking place IN real-time," or "at that point IN time." Spacetime can consist of points (located in some sort of four dimensional grid), time cannot. Our brains, or at least my own, seem incapable of modeling such a structure, though I seem to have no trouble existing as such. We believe that, since there are other places in space, there must be other places in time. is time not the "place" that all space occurs in (or the Space the Place occurs in)? Time resides in the occurrence itself (even if this occurrence takes the form of endurance). We tend to think of time as an abstract, uniformity in and through which the events of the universe unfold. Time, however, is what these events (and ourselves as events), "bring to the table." We (and they by extension, or vice versa) are the fourth dimension.

2002-07-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

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

2002-07-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-07-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-07-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-07-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-07-08T20:16:00.000-07:00

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?

2002-06-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

now this pledge of allegiance deal, even though it's a few days old. and the guy who brought the suit is getting death threats. on the one hand, who cares if your child hears "one nation, under god" two hundred times a year for 12 years? Do you really think that makes her think certain things like "there is a god up above us"? maybe she thinks it says, "one nation: Undergod". Maybe "under god" means the same as "underwear" to her? at the same time, is it right that people want to kill this man, or at least threaten him, just because he used the court system to legitimately challenge something that he found troublesome?

Do the people in congress have to behave the way they do? Are they autonomous or automata? i've said it before and I'll say it again, there is a strict limit set to how high an office one might obtain while proclaiming atheism.

Atheism is cosmic anarchy. anarchy is the enemy of stability. anarchy is true equilibrium (which is chaos). heat death equals disorganized uniformity. if there were any difference in states at that point, then their would exist the possibility of energy shifts and discharge, therefore, heat, but, when it's all one temperature, will there be anything at all? anything only exists due to movement and change, flux of energy decalibria. we too are states of energic fluidity.

think about how much energy is required to maintain this nation's hard won stability? how much energy will we expend to make it even more stable, to make this stability unshakeable? how much power will we concentrate in the hands of the few, so that they can focus it, our living lenses? laserlike, they will seek out and eliminate all sources of instability until there is nothing but stability, no movement - heat death, chaos. Anarchists! Atheists!

2002-06-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

Justice Scalia said, in a recent speech that any judge who found the death penalty "immoral" should resign from the bench. His argument was that, if someone disagrees with the law, they should work politically to change it. Judges, however, must make sure that the law is implemented correctly. If a judge believes the death penalty is immoral, he or she may refrain from imposing if, even when statues clear dictate its imposition. There are several assumptions that underly is recommendation that bear examination. First, can someone do something even if they find it immoral? Of course. Second, are justices always unbiased/impartial in their assessment of a case or the law? Of course not. Thirdly, must justices be impartial? I'm not sure. Fourthly, does interpretation of the constitution necessarily mean "uncovering the intent of the framers"? Of course not. Is it possible that the framers were not impartial in their framing? Of course. Etc.

2002-06-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

i'm lost to the effortless. shorn, beleaguered, strident. top of the morning to you. the sheer power of honest description beats the ornate finery of rarefied reflection. or does it? the infinite leap from scientific or even philosophical insight into ontology's most undenial truth or metaphysic's most unshakeable foundation and the experience of living for one minute in this body on this earth at this point in history. the world may be computational, the result of a few, or even one, simple rule, repeated on a basic material for untold aeons, but I've still got to make out a will and do the laundry (to give to examples of life mundane-style). it'll be interesting to see how Wolfram tackles the "why is there something instead of nothing" - its one thing to talk about the rules and how they produce infinite complexity, and another to say why there is anything to apply rules to in the first place. bring it, dude!

2002-06-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

more paranoia: It is reported that, "An early draft of the White House's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace envisions the same kind of mandatory customer data collection and retention by U.S. Internet service providers as was recently enacted in Europe, according to sources who have reviewed portions of the plan." The data collection in Europe includes "from, to, cc and subject lines" from all e-mail and a complete browsing history of each user. The fact that everything you do in "cyberspace" must pass through controlled systems that can record and archive any information (including your clicking paths) that you send through them should encourage us all to reconsider the merits of the offline world.

2002-06-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

plastered to the thick of it. daring to blush in anguish. several more instances of that and we will have an entire catalog. just think, us, we, the morning after the apocalypse, which everyone thinks means death and dying destruction, but, of course, the word simply means "revelation." what do we fear to confront revealed before us? the veil rendered, the bandaid removed with a quick, skin-shredding yank? as if this situation were not "real" and, when facing the brunt of the real real, we will evaporate, obliterated by this uncompromising, uncompromised force. who told us the world is not real and we have to wait and see the real thing later, after death, when the universal death leaps up onto the stage and everything be laid terrible waste? who makes brains think this way? why can't we directly perceive the small unit of space, the shortest duration of time? do we? not?

2002-06-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

we associate savagery with speed - the speed of a predator rushing in for the kill. what god love or is speed?

the gaia hypothesis states that the earth is a living organism, and all components - atmosphere, biosphere - are similar like to organs or limbs in this one body organism. we then talk of cancer and disease in this bodyplace. are we parasites? or useful like the bacteria in our bellies? also, what if the earth is a predator? perhaps the earth grows us for some use or purpose. we are food.

2002-06-19T18:43:00.000-07:00

"They get tons and tons of information," this lawmaker said. "I don't think people realize how much information our government collects." this just on cnn. do people not realize, or do they have to actively repress this fact, that most electronic communication, and certainly all cell-phone communication is recorded by the national security agency? in fact, when you think about it, getting people to use the web, the internet, etc. basically gets an unprecedented number of people to use a relatively closed system for communication. we are the fish in a barrel.

2002-06-19T18:20:00.000-07:00

after writing that "'out' is the new 'in'" bit the other day (6/18/02) i was reading a review of music done by vincent gallo and the reviewer wrote, "'anal' is the new 'oral.'" every head appears to be one nub or nodule in the big meta-brain and a thought that pounces through your mind is part of a chain of thought running across the sprocket-teeth of all-minds. proof is the new pudding.

2002-06-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

funny the things we fall for, the way we confuse an artist or performer with the world evoked by their work. for example, i think of certain heavy metal dudes playing their guitars on a muddied battlefield strewn with corpses, screaming through the mist and blood-haze. they wear leather and black, ammo belts and spiked cuffs. why? do you have to dress that way to produce those sounds? and what happens when these people - as is the case with Varg Vikernes, or Samoth - are actually involved in murder? does that give them street cred a la Tupac? or does it discredit them as amoral idiots? why must an artist be what they invent?

2002-06-18T20:09:00.000-07:00

"Blogger offers you instant communication power by letting you post your thoughts to the web whenever the urge strikes." but when your voice is literally one in thousands/millions, and you don't know if anyone is reading what you write, and, even if they do, they may not reply, etc., then in what sense is this "communication?" it begins to seem that having thoughts and posting them amount to the same thing - personal, subliminal experiences that may be accidentally discovered by strangers, or, more likely, only read by people who know you already. the ability to communicate anonymously with strangers seems to be one achievement of the web. the ability to exchange commodities, that would otherwise cost money (music, porn), is another. the ability to find buyers for your goods who would never have heard of you or your goods, is yet another. the ability to propagate memes and crazy theories (LUIS PADILLA IS JOHN DOE #2) another still. it should create money for those who facilitate access/use. but what if use becomes "free"?

I "voted" on a wired.com site about whether or not tech was "here to stay" or "died with the dot coms." i voted for death. not because I believe that "Tech is dead," whatever that would mean, but because it was obviously wrong. at the same time, i was thinking about a comment overheard the other night. while lamenting the decline of the telecoms (motorola, worldcom, etc.), a friend said, "it's incredible but, it's possible that no one will make money from the biggest technological revolution in history." well, someone made money once, but I think he meant, "in the future." of course, it's possible that technology, which people developed "to make money" may have outstripped or outpaced its originary urge. that is, what if you invented a machine that could make food from random bits of carbon and water - charcoal, sticks, oil, etc. and, what if this machine was easily and cheaply made from common materials. on the one hand, you might say: you'd make a million bucks. but, what if you couldn't make money off this thing because it was so easy to reproduce? and what if that fact that no one had to really worry about procuring food anymore, made them drop out of the money society (migration to temperate climates, etc.). of course, this would be a revolution. there is a problem that, at a certain point, it becomes possible (not necessarily easy) to create things that, at one point, would have been very valuable, but, which negate their value simply by dint of their creation. that is, a million dollar idea and a 25 cent product.

2002-06-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

"out" is the new "in." "jackass" is the new "idiot." "cutting edge" is the new "retro." (or maybe that one works better in reverse). that shit's so good and you just give it away. that's what I told myself a long long time ago in a song i wrote about myself. reluctance to claim ownership of my whimsy. is that the difference between me and all those who do claim ownership of their whimsy? "personality" is the new "character." okay. that schtick is getting old ("old" is the new "new"). are there high-priced hollywood writers trolling these shoals looking for something spicy? "big ticket" is the new "top shelf" - "me" is the new "you" - "sterile" is the new "fertile" - enough already ("enough" is the new "not enough")

2002-06-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

only because i feel like I've got to add something everyday (overlooking the fact that I didn't add anything yesterday, whatever). just thinking about copyright and intellectual property and the laws of electronic reproducibility. it is only a matter of time before anything that can be reproduced electronically will be accessible to anyone for zero money at all. music, movies, books, pictures, videogames, computer programs, etc. I know I'm not the first to say it, but it sort of seems like everyone is in denial (the courts and the large corporations especially) - because they still don't get it; they still don't understand that the universal machine, the turing machine, has demonstrated what no one wants to believe (because of the implications it has for their own minds) - everything is just energy patterns - sense is a symptom - individuality is an illusion. the problem isn't that people won't get paid for having thoughts (which is ridiculous to begin with), but that people can't deal with the radical crypto-random contingency of their own being, their ambitions, their interests. thought experiment: what if a random sound generator produced the 5th Symphony or "Master of Puppets" - is that plagiarism? if metallica owns the rights to "master of puppets," do they also own the rights to the algorithm that would produce the song on a digital synthesizer? if someone had perfect recall, heard "master of puppets" and then played it in their head over and over, would metallica own the neural cascade that produced this silent symphony? what if you took the song "until it sleeps" and created a picture by assigning colors and coordinates to the various pitches? would metallica own the rights to that picture? does it count as a "reproduction"?

2002-06-15T21:08:00.000-07:00

it was either on september 11 itself, or the day after, that ollie north, in response to a question from a television reporter regarding what we should do, said, "we should declare war." the reporter asked, "against whom?" and north said something like, "against al queda." he cited the declaration of war against the barbary pirates early in the 19th century as a precedent. since those days, of course, the United States has been at war de facto, if not de jure. after all, war, while invoked at every opportunity, particularly when anyone criticizes the administration, has yet to be declared. this has not prevented military force from being deployed successfully against the Taliban and Al Queda forces in Afghanistan, and it has not prevented several individuals from being incarcerated without trial as "enemy combatants." war has not been declared because, we are told, the US is not at war with a conventional enemy. in fact, we are at war against a concept with a very strange relationship to concrete reality. talk is of a "war on terrorism." this war bears more than a superficial resemblance to the "war on drugs" because, in this case as in that one, there is no clear definition of the foe. During the cold war, ideological struggle (and sometimes physical struggle) was waged against a political opponent, communism, that had actual adherents and identifiable leaders, because communism was well-delineated philosophical and existential position that some human beings consciously adopted and others consciously opposed. there were grey areas, particularly when talk turned to "communist sympathizers," but this was due to the fact that "ideologies" are not only exhibitted in human behavior, but occupy and are the products of human minds. you could "think like a communist" before you "acted like a communist." if thought could lead to communist behavior, then it was the origin of communist behavior, then it had to be curtailed. are people already being arrested or investigated for harboring "terrorist thoughts"? communism started as an idea, so the idea must be connected to the reality (even if this connection is purely conventional - what is, after all, the relationship between thought and reality? "Sein bestimmt Bewusstsein.")

My point is this: terrorism does not exist as an ideology or belief system like communism did. Even terrorists denounce terrorism (something unthinkable for communists vis-a-vis communism, or christians vis-a-vis christianity). As such, the war-declarers have chosen the perfect enemy - one who has no defenders or advocates. in fact, an enemy that does not exist as such. this means that the war-declarers specify who the enemy is at will. this is also why the war-declarers can say, "these evil doers have attacked the american way of life." an abstract enemy naturally seeks out an abstract target. everything is a metaphor except the money that can be made by waging this indefinite (in every sense of the word) conflict, and the actual bodies put in jail or killed by other actual bodies.

the people who died in the Trade Centers were not metaphors (though they are now). They were human beings at work or flying in planes. they were not representatives; they were not symbols. they were people who died. real, non-metaphorical humans killed them. these human beings adhered to a definite ideology (militant islam). everyone wants to be careful and not tread on toes, but calling this a "war on terrorism" does just that. isn't it strange that no one calls it a "war for the establishment of true democracy in every country on earth"?

****after posting this, I read "occamstoothbrush" and the blogger there actually said the same thing about terrorism etc. is this "communication"?

2002-06-15T20:41:00.000-07:00

always strange to me when people say that music is "expressive" or "descriptive." I don't believe this is possible (although I believe that people do in fact talk about music this way). music - organized sound patterns, more abstractly, organized energy patterns that take the form of audible, identifiable, transcribable, and repeatable soundwave pattern formation and harmonic pulse distribution - is just that. unlike words (which can take the same form just immediately described above or the form of visual patterns either on paper or, as in this case, computer screens), music does not refer to anything (of course, the deconstructionists showed us that words referred primarily to other words. I think I addressed some issues related to that state of affairs below/above, which raises the possibility that music always refers only to other musics). a melody does not have a "content" in the same way that a sentence has a content. for example, it does not strike us as odd to ask someone to clarify a statement such as, "this statement is unclear" and for them to reply, "i don't understand the meaning of this sentence because its pronoun references are ambiguous." on the other hand, take the opening riff to "smoke on the water" or "devil's haircut" or the 5th Symphony and restate it, clarifying it. In jazz, of course, we regularly encounter the restatement of melody in a different key, or in harmonically altered form, but we never think "john coltrane is expressing the same thing as the original "my favorite things" with different notes." in fact, we are more likely to say,"while anyone will recognize the melody as "my favorie things," Coltrane is obviously expressing something quite different from the childlike naivete of the original." - what would it mean to "express the same thing in a different way"? music, unlike language, remains expressively opaque thanks to its very materiality. in fact, when a poet or a child plays with language, foregrounding its sonic or physical attributes (a la ee cummings), we say that he or she is emphasizing the "musical" in language, meaning precisely that this person is not using language to express a thought or a sentiment (though, we might say that, by using language in a seemingly senseless manner, one is expressing something, about senselessness, confusion or insanity, for example - but then, of course, the expression lies in the speaker's intention or the listener's interpretation, not in the sound patterns - having said that, though, is it ever otherwise?)

music transpires in a pre (or post) linguistic space-time and, for that very reason, falls short of (or exceeds) signification and anything akin to communication (in the way we normally use this word). it is evocative, rather than expressive, and addresses itself to those parts of us (that part of us) that is sub (or supra) linguistic. for this reason, we tend to associate it (mistakenly, I'm arguing here) with feelings. music neither describes nor gives voice to feelings, though it may call them forth, like a wizard might call forth a demon, or a witch a fox or crow.

2002-06-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

Laurie Anderson (following William S. Burroughs) called language "a virus." A virus is a strange entity that may not even be alive but is able to reproduce itself by hijacking the living. Language seems to fit the bill. It is definitely not "alive" - in fact, trying to define what language is will lead you into strange and arcane realms of philosophical inquiry - but it does rely on living organisms to perpetuate and propagate it. Language is our intimate alien (in the very basic sense of "coming from elsewhere"). Other (and even arbitrary, for we could use any human language) to us, we must use it to communicate what is most "our own" - our feelings, sensations, desires and experiences. Indeed, even our most private thoughts are composed of language, a most public entity - in fact, if it were not public, communication would become impossible. Last night, a dreamed a plague of wasps.

2002-06-13T06:53:00.000-07:00

"you may never have his game, but you can have his gear" - Nike ad about Tiger Woods, the Jimi Hendrix (or is it the Charlie Pride?) of golf. Well, you may not be able to have his actual gear, that is, the stuff he wears and uses to practice his phenomenal and genteel art, but you can have exact replicas. in fact, you are one of any number of humans that can wear clothes, shoes, and hats generated according to the same specifications (well, not precisely the same, since you may actually have dimensions different from those of Mr. Woods) and fabricated under the same conditions as the stuff he wears. though of course you will have to pay for it (which he presumably doesn't). scratch that. he does pay. his fame, his celebrity is exchangeable, and he allows Nike to use it in exchange for free clothes (and, naturally, lots of actual money). the implication is that there is some connection between Tiger's game and his gear. this is indicated by the conditional 'may.' This connection is quasi-magical and is reminiscent of archaic practices relying on the power of association - eating the heart of a lion will give you the strength of a lion; wearing a bear's pelt will give you the ferocity of a bear - All celebrity endorsement is based on the allure of the associative and as such speaks to an atavistic fetishism in our culture. it is powered by simile. "be like mike" - you can never be Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods or Mark Maguire - but you can be like them, similar to them, symbolically associated with them, and thus draw off some of their power. What will you do with it?

2002-06-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

"war is their reality; music is their escape." saw this on the side of a train this morning advertising some show about people in the military (the "service," as it is called - they always say that soldiers "serve," rather than "obey"). picture of a soldier with headphones pressed to his helmet. many consider music an escape, though, more accurately I suppose, you'd have to say that music is an "avenue of escape" or a "line of flight" [deleuze/guattari]. we escape through music to somewhere else. where is that place? different musics describe/conjure up different places/spaces. trungpa rinpoche wrote, "true escape is impossible." that is, the escape afforded by music is a false escape. why? because it is stationary, insular, solipsistic. "in my head" [black flag] the statement should be reversed: "music is their reality. war is their escape." music takes place in our heads, a construct of our minds. it is an escape only in the sense that sleep or dreaming is an escape. war, on the other hand, takes place "out there" in the world. in fact, it consists primarily of conquering and occupying territory, contesting or maintaining geographical boundaries, enforcing or preventing specific physical movements by actual human bodies. war takes us outside of our heads; it explodes heads (the true seat of music). war also sets aside every convention and expectation of civil society (the real reality for many). war frees the warrior, the soldier, from the inhibitions and codes of this society, in fact, often demands that he leave them behind in order to triumph in victory. in this sense, it is an escape, and its idolators have often celebrated it as a return to the origin, the essence, to reality in its realest sense, a liberation from the false fetters of civilian life. of course, there has always been a specific music of war and, in fact, the regimented beats of popular music are derived from the martial beats of war. so, in this sense, the reality of music is war and, again, it provides no real escape from it (since, at its core, it is an expression/extension of it). etc....

2002-06-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

david brooks in the new york times magazine said that the "noblest, most creative, and fullest life can be found in the malls, office parks, and twinkling times squares of america" (I paraphrase). i do not and did not agree with this statement but it did make me think about the expression "a full life." if a life is full, what is it filled with? is life filled like a schedule or more like a shopping cart? do we think of someone who spends most of their time at the office or the mall as living "a full life"? (as someone once said, "no one rasps on their death bed, 'i should have spent more time at the office.'") of course, "fullness" resonates with "fulfillment." a full life is filled with fulfillment. yet, fulfillment is a discrete rather than a continuous state. in fact, it relies on the prior emptiness of a wish, a desire, a hope, a dream, which is fulfills. a full life is driven by wanting; it is a kind of permanent wanting. yet this wanting is also the basis of all greed, anger, and suffering.so, a full life would also mean a life filled with sorrow, frustration, and despair. we do not usually consider the homeless woman with a black eye begging money on the street the poster child of fulfillment. but the fact that we don't should make us reconsider the content of the full life. a life cannot but be full, unless we are to say that feelings of joy and satisfaction are something, while feelings of depression and anxiety are nothing. oddly enough, the bias would be to say the opposite.

2002-06-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

back again. okay, I was neglecting things in my negligence.
the people at "doors of perception" (some dutch, design thinktank) said that someone else said, "a website that is never accessed does not exist." that seems ridiculous to me and strangely idealistic. already we're back with bishop berkeley and existence predicated on perception. now, think of something that doesn't exist. what is the main difference between this non-existent thing and anything you can imagine that does exist?

2001-03-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

i'm going on a trip. i hope it will be fun. i just found out henri bergson won a nobel prize. i think that light slips in through the cracks of experience. ice cream tastes good. i am listening to krisiun as I write this. i used to be a christian. turning time inside out and making a hat out of it. do you like my hat? no, I do not like your hat. that's the way it goes some time. leaving aside everything, what do you have? I do not exist, I have never existed and I will not exist. but I will have existed. what am I? my favorite authors are philip k. dick, gilles deleuze, susan choi and chogyam trungpa. who am I? we'll only understand the web when we realize that it is just one thing (and not many). we do not know what the web is.

2000-11-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

I performed at a fund raiser for something called the "sun unity tower" upon which will be emblazoned a poem written by Sarah Ting the first line of which reads "do you think you are greater than the sun, that shines on everyone?" The irony was that, of all the people in attendance, I was the only one who probably had declared himself greater than the sun. Specifically, in a song I wrote called "I Have Come" I sang: "The seas are brimming with my blood, they're overflowing with my love, I'M BLAzING LIKE TEN BILLION SUNS, so rally round me everyone."

2000-11-28T21:44:00.000-08:00

The universe will be destroyed and all things known and unknown will go with it. This includes, among other things, all forms of information and disinformation (check out what that might mean at www.disinformation.com).