Happy Freakin’ Halloween
My Halloween gift to myself is LAZINESS!!! Therefore, my halloween gift to you is COOL LINKS!!!
Okay, I know it’s a bit late for this, but keep it in mind for next year (you’ll be glad you did). Want a surefire way to take some of the fun out of Halloween for your kids and encourage a thorough TP-ing of your house and car? Here’s one way (though I’m sure you can come up with plenty more on your own)! First, only let your kids participate in halloween if they dress as biblical characters. Second, only let them carve a jack-o-lantern if it depicts a cheesy religious scene or emblem. No cool, scary faces, like those heathen kids are carving into theirs. We’ll be having none of that.
Or, if you’re not super lame, but are in fact awesome, you could do something like THIS (amazing).
Hey, did you know you are being beamed with Cosmic Rays? Well you are. Probably right now. In fact, according to astronomers, you’re being hit by cosmic energy particles all the time. Don’t believe me? Check this out. (Thanks to Steven L. Cloud for the link).
On a final and more serious note, I recommend everyone check out this excellent post by Tim Boucher of Pop Occulture. It’s an insightful take on halloween costumes and the personas we wear like costumes, all the time. I couldn’t agree more with his perspective, and I think reflecting on the roles we play in ordinary life is more than just an interesting intellectual exercise. The realization, if you take it far enough, can, if you want it to, free you up to be much more playful with the roles you play, to ‘try on’ different personas and possibly discover new facets to yourself that maybe you didn’t allow yourself to acknowledge as ‘you’ before, because you were stuck within the boundaries of a particular, narrow sense of identity. Stretching outside of these arbitrary boundaries and learning that you’re still yourself, in fact more so, when you do this, can be very freeing. I say this from personal experience. Maybe that sort of thing isn’t your cup of tea, but I think everyone can benefit from any increase in self-awareness, however small, and awareness that our limitations are usually, if not always, self-imposed. Because that means they can be self-unimposed. Just thoughts.
So, in closing, happy Halloween every day. I wonder who or what I’ll be tomorrow?… Perhaps a sexy uncanny valley… (what)?
How To Play ‘Street Spirit’ by Radiohead
[audio:Radiohead-Street-Spirit.mp3]
LYRICS * TAB * MP3 * Album: The Bends
(Basic Chords: Am Em Am + C Em Am)
GUITAR DEMO ON YOUTUBE (by Me)
ACOUSTIC COVER ON YOUTUBE (by Me)
Destruction of the Past
Last month, Tim Boucher, in his post, The End of Art, raised some rather interesting questions:
“If destroying human history meant that you could be the new Plato, the new Shakespeare, the new Beethoven, would you initiate or at least applaud that destruction? … What do you want to have power over? What do you want to be remembered for? What do you want to be quoted for and loved and hated for? Would you initiate a break with human history in order to be that? Or is this thinking a delectable trap of the worst kind?”
An excellent discussion rose up around this (I highly recommend reading the whole thing). I thought I’d share my own comments from that discussion here:
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Would I want all art erased from history? No. It’s a rich and beautiful history, and like all history, you can learn a great deal from it. If I need to look away from it to clear my head, I always can. I can meditate. I can stop listening to music for awhile. There are ways to shake off some of the over-influencing. But it’s the forms of the current culture, if anything, that I find most difficult to detach from, not the influences of the past.
The idea of destroying the old so you can claim the credit for (re)creating it yourself is just stupid, and people who want to do that are stupid. I suppose I could see art from other periods (just as from other people, now) as my competition (if I was stupid), but even if it is, good. Competition = positive. It’s much better to welcome competition than try to eliminate it. Without competition you degrade into mediocrity. You create with lower standards just because you can. And then you suck.
The difference between envy and inspiration lies in how secure or insecure one is. What some choose to let hold them back or keep them down, others choose to climb onto and springboard off of.
Also, originality is overrated, and can’t ever truly exist in pure form, anyway. Then again, there can be no two exact copies, so there’s an element of originality in everything. You could start an art movement that was nothing but artists all doing their own interpretations of the exact same image. Something interesting would come out of it. Musicians used to cover each other’s songs all the time. Different actors will bring different qualities and nuances to the same role. It’s like viewing an object from many different angles. Each of us is an ‘angle’. The more angles we have access to (ie: those from previous generations), the more of a complete picture we’re building. That may have its down sides, but what doesn’t?
I’ve recently started listening obsessively to the podcasts of zac, and some of his ideas are bubbling up as I write this. For one - archetypes. They’re always influencing us, and it’s great to be able to look back and see them more and more clearly, by way of the patterns emerging out of history - art history, cultural, political, etc. - it’s all of value, if you choose to make good use of it.
The other idea is the developmental model zac keeps referring to. I think it’s valid, and it applies to art as much as anything else. If you set out to destroy everything that’s been established before you, thinking it clears the way for the complete dominance of your own, newer, better ‘way,’ well duh, everything’s going to crumble, including you and your ‘way,’ and whoops, look, now we’re all back to square one. Good job.
One more thought. Some might say it’s good to go back to square one at some point and start fresh, when we’ve exhausted all the potentials of this line of development. But I beg to differ. To have that logic I’d have to assume a) that it’s even possible to exhaust a line of development - that there’s a limit to the infinite in any direction, and b) that if it gets boring, or you just want to try something different, that you can’t just shift peacefully sideways instead of destructively backwards, or maybe start combining the current line with other lines of development, bring in new elements - not destroying what exists but transforming it, alchemy-like, into something else entirely, gaining something new without losing (wasting) the gains of the old.
Just scrapping the past and starting over - memory erased, history erased - still being in the same line, but kicked to the back - that’s more like a waste of time than a good idea for something to do. It’s one thing to spiral around and revisit things from higher perspectives, but we’re talking about erasing and starting with a clean slate, if I’m understanding correctly, which seems the opposite of that. In any case, that was more than one more thought.
How to Play ‘Behind the Garage’ by Eric’s Trip
[audio:Erics-Trip-Behind-The-Garage.mp3]
LYRICS & CHORDS * MP3 * Album: Love Tara
(Basic Chords: C Am G F / Am G F)
GUITAR DEMO ON YOUTUBE (by Me)
Why Do Ghosts Wear Clothes?
…asks Suki of 23rd Mandalation in a recent post.
“The other night on Art Bell’s Coast To Coast AM radio program, some guy called in and posed the question, “Why do ghosts wear clothes?” I’m stumped, except maybe to say that people who “see” ghosts aren’t seeing anything at all and are projecting our customs and morals on something they think they see. Anybody else have a theory?”
I don’t know why those ghosts are bothering with clothes, but in contemplating the question I came up with my own ideas as to why I might do so, were I a ghost. If I were visiting, say, relatives who I’m trying to comfort, I doubt appearing to them in the nude would be particularly comforting. Secondly, if you’re going to go nude because you don’t have need for clothes, why even bother with a humanoid body at all, since that’s just another unecessary layer of appearance you’ve shed. Again, being recognizable to loved ones would I guess take priority over say, showing up as a unicorn, just because.
I was looking (in vain) for good ghost videos on YouTube last night, and something I wondered is how those shots of ghosts floating around (no feet) in cheesy tattered robes could be thought to be real. I mean come on. Unless… these are ghosts with senses of humor (once a prankster always a prankster?) and they’re hamming it up on purpose, messing with peoples’ ideas of what’s real and what’s not by deliberately mimicking our cheesiest representations of ghostly phenomena.
I’m probably giving ghosts too much credit, but then again, I plan on pulling all kinds of shit like that after I’ve crossed over. Don’t you? Is my theory really that far-fetched?