Year's Best Listening

Top ten time. Gonna make it short and snappy this year. Lots of quiet and/or instrumental stuff. And minimal colour palettes, interestingly. Titles link to sample YouTube "videos." Here it is:

Bad Vibrations - Black Train
Heavy stoner punk Halifavourites and all around delightful power trio.

Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil
Wacky, catchy rock songs for kids with ADD and good taste.

Destroyer - Kaputt
Bowiesque Canadian weirdo puts his pompous songs through an '80s pop machine.

Dog Day - Deformer
Just a duo now, and we may miss the full band, but those songs!

Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
Like slowed down acoustic Sonic Youth with Beck prettying it up.

Jürgen Müller - Science of the Sea
Not actually a rediscovered soundtrack by a '70s German oceanographer, but beautifully convincing.

The Oscillation - Veils
I already told you about this one. Postpunk space rock. (If you like it, also check out Suuns in the Honourable Mentions.)

Radiohead - The King of Limbs
I'll admit I was disappointed at first, but I've come around. Definitely a grower.

Tape - Revelationes
Gorgeous Swedish ambient post-rock.

Walls - Coracle
Gorgeous British ambient dance-pop.

Honourable Mentions:
The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
Suuns - Zeroes QC
tUnE-yArDs - WHOKILL

Lest my brevity convince you otherwise, please understand that all this stuff is really great. Try some, buy some, fee fi fo fum!

Tree's Ready!

Just a small one, but I think it looks pretty nice...

Good Mail Day

Hey, check out these cool belated birthday gifts I got in the mail today from my sister. Tintin cap (from the upcoming movie, I presume?), suitable for softball wear, and a music box that plays "Imagine." Imagine that!

Thanks, Eri. Yer great.



I also got three Christmas cards and the latest Guardian Weekly. And no bills!

Merry Xmas!

Speaking of Christmas cards, I just found out about these great ones you can order online. Wish I'd known in time to send some out — maybe next year. I swear I didn't write the copy myself, by the way.


In related news, Alison and I watched Hannah and Her Sisters last Sunday. I hadn't seen it in ages, and forgot just how great Woody Allen used to be. Happy holidays!

Blowing My Own Design Horn

Although this is the time of year for a freelancer when work slows to a trickle (soooo broke right now!), it's also when I get to be my own client on an annual project — the corporate xmas e-card. I just finished sending out this year's, and I'm kinda pleased with how it turned out.

Sweet Jaime

Forgot to ever mention that I finished watching the entire first season of The Bionic Woman. The final episode was the one I remembered as my favourite, where a little girl's dead mother seems to be destructively haunting her father, always when the girl's asleep. Turns out (spoiler alert!) that the girl has telekinetic powers she didn't even know about, and her unconscious mind has been using them when she's dreaming to try to make her dad spend more time with her. It's a real spooky one — the climax is kind of like The Exorcist or something.

Also included in the box set were all the episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man that Lindsay-Wagner-slash-Jaime-Sommers appeared in before she got her own show. That meant I got to hear Lee Majors crooning this beautiful love song... many times! 70s TV was crazy!

Occu-pecha-kucha-py

I went to Halifax's ninth Pecha Kucha event on Wednesday night. It's a semi-regular series of informal presentations, usually in a bar, limited only by their format — 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each. Anyone can present, and what they choose to talk about or do over the course of their allotted (20 x 20 = 400 seconds =) 6 minutes and 40 seconds is up to them.

The format was invented in Japan, and the name, literally translated, means "chit chat." Sometimes there's a theme that presenters are supposed to stick to, and sometimes it's completely open. Wednesday was a theme night. It was originally going to be all about the Occupy movement but got broadened to include any "Changemakers." This allowed a marketing executive to sneak onto the bill in order to cite horrifying statistics about how technology has taken over people's lives and remind us that we all know who Jared, the unappealing Subway spokesguy, is, while repeating the phrase, "I'm not saying this is good or bad — just that we have to learn to take advantage of these changes in the ways we communicate."

Otherwise, though, it was a pretty enjoyable evening of enlightening ideas presented to a full house. Many of the presenters were people who have been actively involved in Occupy Nova Scotia, and some were just folks with suggestions toward making our city more of a livable community and less of an unhealthy structure imposed on us by the interests of big business. I came out feeling a little less doomed and alone.

I'm not sure what's going on with Occupy NS itself these days. Haven't heard too much from their corner since they were evicted. I'm still hoping to see a large group march into City Hall in order to carry our corrupt mayor, Peter Kelly, outside and dump him in a garbage can. But maybe they're working on something a little less shortsighted and juvenile. Sure would be funny, though...

Here's one of the most succinct and on-the-mark summaries I've read of our current politico-economic situation. It's a letter to the editor from November 25's Guardian Weekly.

The captains of finance have been declaring for decades that a free market, without governmental intervention, is the only possible basis for a free and democratic society and the only basis for a sound economy, with market forces cleansing the economy of inefficiencies.

During the global financial crisis, the captains of finance lined up to demand that governments throughout the world subsidise the stock markets and the failed financial institutions. This shows that the captains of finance believe that the market cannot be left to market forces.

When the prime minister of Greece recently called for a referendum on a proposal to radically alter the structure of the Greek economy, the world of international finance reacted with horror and stock markets plunged. Since then, international pressure has forced the replacement of the elected Greek prime minister by an unelected banker.

This shows that the captains of finance believe that capitalism and democracy are fundamentally incompatible. If they are, then, capitalism has to go. The Occupy movement seems to have grasped this.

Imre Bokor
Armidale, NSW, Australia

Give that guy some slides, and get him on a stage!

Conexiones

I had a weird congruence of unrelated readings recently. Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times has been a source of uncompromising but sensible wisdom for me in the form of one chapter every morning for the past week. The other morning, the chapter called "Hopelessness and Death" had this particularly stern bit of advice for me:

Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what's going on. Fear of death is the background of the whole thing. It's why we feel restless, why we panic, why there's anxiety. But if we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.

I was still thinking about that one a lot the next day when I picked up Barometer Rising to continue reading it for my book club. You probably already know this, but it's a historical novel by Hugh MacLennan that takes place in Halifax during the week of the first world war when the Halifax Explosion occurred. I hadn't gotten to the catastrophic event yet, but I was enjoying the description of Neil MacRae's lonely wanderings around the town on a misty December morning — as well as the familiar view of the Halifax Harbour he encounters — when I came to this passage:

Spread below him, the town lay with the mist concealing every ugly thing, and the splendour of its outline seemed the most perfect, natural composition he had ever seen. He thought now that a man could only know the meaning of peace when he no longer reached after the torment of hope. He had lost Penny, with whom there might have been happiness. Now there was no need to argue or justify himself any more; unhappiness could no longer have meaning, for there was no longer anything positive for him to be unhappy about. There was nothing to worry him. Last night he had relinquished the last thread of ambition which had held worries tight in his mind. But the beauty of the world remained and he found himself able to enjoy it; it stayed a constant in spite of all mankind's hideous attempts to master it.

Besides the obvious connection to the first quote and the eerie similarity to my own surroundings and recent mood, the resemblance of this selection, in the context of the Pema Chödrön reading, to some lyrics I wrote years ago for an Our Igloo song called "Note to Self" also immediately struck me:

The body in your bed, it isn't you.
It might as well be dead; it isn't you.
I know it tells you what to feel.
I know that others tell you too,
But they're not you.

This winter morning is a dream.
Look at the harbour — it's a bowl of steam.

Pretty weird, right? Something is definitely trying to tell me something, was all I could think.

Then this morning I was reading an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, himself possibly the king of farfetched connections. It was a short piece called "The Wall and the Books," about the emperor who built the Great Wall of China and also burned massive numbers of books in an attempt to eradicate the country's history before his rule. The last sentence of the essay seems to come from nowhere:

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces molded by time, certain twilights and certain places — all these are trying to tell us something, or have told us something that we should not have missed, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic reality.

That one was enough to inspire a short poem and a long music mix in me. Enjoy! (The title links to the mix download, all in one file. Track listing below.)

Out of the mystery we unfold,
Wait,
And patiently behold our history
That we might penetrate the mystery.

Imminent Revelation
1. Black Mystery Has Been Revealed - Roland Kirk
2. New Grass - Talk Talk
3. In a Silent Way - Miles Davis
4. Lonely Woman - Ornette Coleman
5. Undo - Björk
6. Kalimanko Denko - Bulgarian Women's Choir
7. Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli: Kyrie - Jeremy Summerly
8. How to Bring a Blush to the Snow - Cocteau Twins
9. Touched - My Bloody Valentine
10. Blue Jay Way - The Beatles
11. Irene - Caribou
12. Giuggi - Alessandro Brugnolin
13. Lacunar Amnesia - The Caretaker
14. If - The Flaming Lips
15. Bonus Track 1 - Jonathan Richman
16. No One Asked to Dance - Deerhoof
17. Don't Let It Bring You Down - Neil Young
18. Debussy's Arabesque No. 1 - Isao Tomita
19. Oceanic Beloved - Alice Coltrane
20. The Big Ship - Brian Eno
21. The Colour of Spring - Mark Hollis

Later That Night

Winter Trees

Here's an idea that came to me yesterday for a photo series. I was thinking about the growth of plants as a pulling, rather than a pushing force — like the sun is pulling them out of the earth — and I realized that if you look at them upside-down you get a sense of that kind of gesture. I've decided to carve a niche for myself in art history as the upside-down trees guy. What do you think?

Awk You Pie

Just want to share a pretty funny article from this week's New Yorker. I guess this is the kind of thing popular online life ruiner Facebook is good for...

Occupy NS got evicted on Remembrance Day, by the way, when they went too far by moving their protest from in front of City Hall to a seldom-used park for the day, in deference to the veterans' memorial service. They'd even had the nerve to plan this temporary move in conjunction with the veterans and the mayor's office weeks in advance. Can you believe the impudence of those unsavoury hippies? No wonder the mayor felt justified in having the police physically remove them in the pouring rain during a day of national reflection on the costs of freedom.

Found: Gratitude

Well, a sunny day, spontaneous brunch with a friend, and a bit of birthday shopping, and the world suddenly seems like a much more appealing place. Moods! What is the good of them, that's what I'd like to know.

I bought three new books with the 50 bucks my mom & dad gave me for my birthday — Sunset Park, a new novel by Paul Auster, whose New York Trilogy I recently read and enjoyed a lot; Girl with Curious Hair, David Foster Wallace's short story collection that I have somehow overlooked; and When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön, Buddhist advice-giver extraordinaire. Funny how the purchase itself of this last book almost immediately made my times feel less difficult. Maybe that means I don't have to read it anymore — just put it on my shelf and smile. Although I'm pretty sure one of the chapters in it is NOT "Go Out and Buy Something for Yourself."

Anyway, thanks, Mom & Dad! Lots of great stuff to dive into now, once I've finished Barometer Rising for the book club I've joined at the library (thanks, Kristina!) and Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne's travel-and-eco-musings-blog-turned-into-a-book that Alison gave me, also for me birthdee. Thanks, Ali!

Anger v. Sadness

Sometimes I feel like life is light and full of wonder, like a dream. But lately it just seems hard and mostly pointless. And people, those creatures who can be so delightfully unpredictable and love-inspiring, strike me these days as a bunch of thoughtless, selfish babies, myself included. I try to maintain some detachment from this unhelpful point of view, but it keeps sucking me back in. Hopefully it won't last long.

Maybe I should stop reading the news. This from the Guardian: "'Irreversible climate change in five years' — The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels. The last chance of combating dangerous climate change would be 'lost for ever,' according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure."

Or I could just get all punk rock and let my anger out in blasts of self-expression — that can be quite liberating. The Lodge played a show tonight, and I think it was a decent one, but I mostly felt like I was just going through the motions. My finger, though, which I'd cut earlier in the evening chopping vegetables, bled all over my bass, so that at least felt pretty rock 'n roll.

Here's an angry but uplifting video from Naomi Klein that makes me feel somewhat better. I wonder how she maintains that balance. I couldn't even finish Shock Doctrine — it was just way too upsetting. Do you think John Lydon was right to assert (repeatedly) that "anger is an energy"? Or is it just one of the ways we mask our sadness so that we don't really have to face it? I dunno...

Birthday Presence (or Lack Thereof)

It's 11.22.11, and I turn 44 today. Seems like there must be some significance to that. A dramatic start to the day supports this theory: I got up early, made an extra large cup of coffee, brought it back to bed with me to enjoy while I read some Raymond Carver stories, and dumped the whole cup all over the bedspread, sheets, and pillows. They're in the wash now. Let's hope that's not an indicator of the entire day's spirit.

There was some bowling on Saturday, and tonight I'm meeting up with a few friends for pool at a local bar. Plus dinner with Amber and lunch with Alison. Should be nice.

I should tell you that Alison has made up her mind that she doesn't want to move back in with me. She's found a new apartment, which she'll be moving into in December. It's a sublet until April. I don't know what will happen after that. We'll be dividing up our finances too, as funds will be tight and we'd like to avoid any poverty-induced conflict.

There are no hard feelings on either side. This is something she probably should have done four years or more ago, in retrospect. I think it'll be a very good growth opportunity for her. And for me, for that matter. We'll be maintaining a close, intimate, platonic relationship with open minds about what it could be in the future.

Lest my neutral tone be misinterpreted as uncaring, though, I'm really sad about this. Hopeful for the future, but really sad in the present.

It's a beautiful sunny day right now, and I don't have much work to do, so maybe I'll go for a walk, get some more coffee. But it's also below zero, and there's frost everywhere. What am I to make of these mixed messages? Just dress appropriately, I guess...

Presence

I just finished Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity, a book I've been meaning to read for years. Boy, did I need it, and boy, is it great. Full of sage advice about acceptance and exploration of what is, now, as the only meaningful way of life. It was published in 1951, and it reads like a prophecy of exactly what would be wrong with the culture 60 years later. Here are some of my favourite gems:

"[O]ur age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to 'dope.' Somehow we must grab what we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This 'dope' we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction — a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.

"To keep up this 'standard' most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family... and so ad infinitum." [pp. 21–22]

"The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it. Religious ideas are like words — of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer. The word 'water' is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and the idea called 'God.'" [p. 23]

"The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would 'lief' or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception." [p. 24]

"Because consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Because such a loss is in principle the same as death, this means that the more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love." [p. 32]

"[T]he future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless, sooner or later, it is going to become the present. Thus to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me 'absent,' looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face." [p. 35]

"If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the 'I,' but it is just the feeling of being an isolated 'I' which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.

"To put it still more plainly; the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet." [p. 78]

"To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call 'I." For this we think to be the real man — the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, and the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this 'I' does not exist." [pp. 80–81]

And, if you still have any room left for present moment appreciation after all that, here's some recently composed haiku:

Rain-soaked maple leaves
Tumble freely in the wind
And stick to the road.

The smell of wood smoke
On a cold November night
Warms even the stars.

Huddled on the shore,
We look out at the island.
Sunset's early now.

Foreigner Reimagined

I just finished recording this song today for a friend of mine who's making a compilation of 80's pop covers for his wife as a Christmas present. I'm quite sure she doesn't read this blog, but maybe don't mention anything about it to anyone, just in case.

More Touchstones of My Youth Revisited

Has anyone ever read Lila, the sequel to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that came out 17 years later? I picked it up recently at a used book sale and finished it on the weekend. ZAMM blew my mind as a teenager, but when I read it again as an adult I found an awful lot of flaws in Pirsig's sloppy logic. So I guess I kind of avoided this one for a couple of decades. But it was cheap, and there wasn't much else of interest at the sale... It turned out to be way more interesting than I'd expected. I'd like to hear what others thought of it.

As in ZAMM, the fictional travel story that serves as a framework for the novel is boring as hell, but the philosophical musings it weakly supports are imaginative and intuitively compelling. He talks about a lot of the themes that I'm always going on about — integrating spiritual, political, and religious understandings of the world; keeping seemingly contradictory discourses on different levels that shouldn't be mixed; expanding the concept of evolution to include not just biology, but also cultural and even individual consciousness — but he comes at it in a slightly different way. It's not at all rigorous, though, and I'm worried his ideas could be used in defense of completely opposite beliefs.

Still... extremely interesting. Oh yeah, there's even some Foucauldian stuff in there, for the continental fans among us, about cultural repression through definitions of madness, and the folly of "objectivity" as a scientific ideal.

My other source of entertainment lately has been the entire first season of The Bionic Woman, which I picked up when someone else finally returned it to the video store. I really liked that show as a kid, much more than The Six Million Dollar Man, and haven't seen it since. Probably didn't need a whole season's worth of episodes, but so far they've been weirdly enjoyable. But check out the opening credits — is this not the weirdest theme music you've ever heard? What a mess!

Speaking of Retro...

Remember in the early 80's when prom-rock band Journey had its own video game? It was pretty cool, right? Each of the five band members was the protagonist of his own minigame through which you'd try to negotiate his avatar — a black-and-white image of his face crudely pasted onto a pixelated body — while sub-primitive electronic versions of Journey's hits played in the background. If you completed all five levels, the band would play a live concert of actual, recorded Journey music (there was a cassette player inside the machine for this part). Pretty awesome.

I always wondered, though, why, of all popular bands, Journey should be the only one to star in a video game. Why not, for instance, Van Halen, who were at least as popular and arguably cooler, especially to the adolescent males who would have been pumping the hypothetical quarters?

Well now, finally, VH do have their own arcade game. Or at least, David Lee Roth does. Eddie and the band (represented by its logo), in an interesting twist, are actually the interstellar antagonists. The game also bears more than a passing resemblance to Asteroids. But who doesn't love Asteroids, am I right? Give it a try. And watch for surprise appearances by Sammy Hagar.

Are we there yet?

Lately I've been reading Simon Reynolds's latest book of rock commentary, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Its thesis is that we have become so caught up in a kind of nostalgia for the very recent past that we've almost stopped innovating entirely, concerning ourselves instead with reusing, recycling, and remixing "the good old days" of popular culture. Sometimes the revisiting is ironic, sometimes reverent, but his worry is that, regardless, we may soon run out of raw material to rehash, as no one is making anything that looks toward the future anymore.

I don't necessarily buy all of his arguments, and in fact the author himself could be accused of the very nostalgia he denounces, painting the beloved post-punk of his youth as pop music's last attempt at creating something truly new. But he does make some very interesting historical connections, as well as tell some great stories. Plus, I got to find out about this incredible video from the chapter "Total Recall: Music and Memory in the Time of YouTube."



And here's another heartbreaker from the same guy — Daniel Lopatin aka KGB Man aka Sunsetcorp aka Oneohtrix Point Never — this one unfortunately unembeddable.

If that book hasn't been enough to get me all worked up, I've also been reading The Guardian Weekly for a few weeks now, in an attempt to reduce my criminal ignorance of world events. It wasn't a conscious decision, but I think ever since 9/11 I have paid absolutely no attention to the news whatsoever. I guess even before that, it seemed to me a distraction from one's own life — something to talk about with your coworkers, get angry about, and eventually become embittered by, as it's all terrible and there's ultimately nothing you can do about 99% of it.

But lately that point of view has started to seem overly self-centred to me, and I've felt guilty that I haven't been fulfilling my duties as a witness to the time I live in. So I subscribed to The Guardian. I'm not sure it was such a good idea, though. This news stuff is REALLY upsetting! How long have things been this bad? Do people really read this stuff every day? It makes me feel awful about my species and at the same time completely paralysed, like most of the people in the world are going around with points of view that I think are just terrible, and whatever I do with my life is an insulting joke in the context of the enormous atrocities they're generating.

I do enjoy the "Comment & Debate" section, though, especially some of the analyses of the impending worldwide economic collapse. But even that enjoyment is just the consolation of an ego-stroking told-you-so in the face of my culture's demise. Still, there is definitely some entertainment to be had from these "think pieces." Here are a few of my faves from the past month.

Before I Chuck It Out...

... thought you should see the jack-o-lantern I carved in record time yesterday. I kept it pretty classic this year — it looked nice with a bunch of tealights in it.

I had a smaller pumpkin too, but I decided to eat that one.

Happy Hallowe'en

Ack II (Seen One)

Well, a hundred bucks, half a day's work missed, and two cab rides later, it turns out to be a fan that needs replacing. Could've been much worse, I guess. But now I have to wait two days for them to get the part in, take the computer back to them, and pay them another $50 to install it. At least I got to have lunch with Ali while I was waiting around downtown, so that was nice...

Ack

Taking my computer downtown to the Apple store this morning because the hard drive's making a horrible whirring, grinding noise, and I'm afraid it's going to conk out any minute. Yikes! Wish me luck.

Happy Birthday, Erika!

Hope you're having a nice one, sis.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

In case you ever find yourself thinking, as I sometimes do, that you miss being gainfully employed by someone else, here's a comic I saved to bring you back to reality.


Have a nice day doing whatever you want!

Ambient Surf

Here's a little music video I made using an iPhone and a microKorg. It's at the beach on the island where our friend Johanna's parents have a cottage. Alison and I were there with her over Thanksgiving weekend. The light on the sand under the water was mesmerizing.

Religion! Science! Go to Your Rooms!

So, getting back to the whole "How can we integrate spiritual thinking into a culture whose worldview has become almost 100 percent empirical, and what exactly are those justifiably grouchy atheists missing when they want to chuck the whole enterprise of self-transcendence over the side?" question, about which I never really stop obsessing... I think I may have stumbled onto an important distinction between science, on the one hand, and less rigorously causal ways of looking at the world, like art and religion.

Here it is; see if you think it's workable: the nature of science is to narrow possibilities, so that we can more accurately predict what will happen next or determine why something happened in the past. Art and religion perform the opposite role from this — they're meant to expand the range of possibilities available to the heart and the imagination.

I don't know if someone else has pointed out this difference before, but it strikes me as a potentially very useful partial definition of each field. Because if we can keep this distinction in mind, we might be able to see when one way of thinking is straying too far into what should properly be the realm of another, and thereby prevent things from getting all messed up in terrible ways. For instance, religion notoriously makes claims about the origins of things, which claims end up disagreeing with science. It should stop doing that, because that's not its job. Or at least, it should admit that its origin stories are to be taken as fictional: there only to open our minds to possibilities that are not allowed by science.

Telling us what we should and shouldn't do, at least in concrete terms, is also something it should stop doing. Again, this is a way of narrowing possibility, rather than broadening it. Having us look inside ourselves at our motives, imagine what might be going on in other people's minds, or try to experience everything we perceive in some different way — those kinds of things are all fine and exactly what the point of religion (and partially of art) should be. But rules such as the ten commandments will have to go if we accept this distinction as prescriptively valid.

On the other hand, science can definitely overstep its bounds too. For instance, when people put their faith in the progress of technology as the way for the human species to realize its potential, that's probably not a very good idea. Technology does, granted, open up possibilities that were previously unseen, but it does so only in combination with imagination. If we start allowing technology's evolution to usurp the need for human imagination, as we seem to have been doing for a few decades now, we're in big trouble. Think The Matrix/Terminator scenarios, assuming we don't destroy our own habitat before creating artificial intelligence.

A broader mistake that science can make, and I would accuse Richard Dawkins and his disciples of this one, is to think that it has the answers to all the interesting questions humans can meaningfully ask. To put it negatively, the position is that if your question is not in principle answerable by verifiable, objective observation, then it turns out to be meaningless. It's the kind of smug, positivist attitude that convinces people who have no interest in science that the whole field is bad news. But luckily, it's just not valid.

Science is great at answering questions that demand a narrowing of options: What is the principle cause of global warming? (Twentieth century human culture.) What existed before the Big Bang? (Nothing.) Does God exist as some kind of being or measurable force? (No.)

But there are lots of other kinds of questions that science has nothing useful to say about: How can I better empathize with my neighbour? What is the nature of love? What does existence feel like if time is seen as an illusion? These kinds of questions require answers like, "Observe your own thought process without judgment," "Say this prayer with meaning," or "Listen to this piece of music." And it needs to be OK to only be able to give answers like that — otherwise, we miss out on too big and important an area of possible human experience.

Mixtape

Recently someone tipped me off to this incredible music blog, Hippies Before Priests. It's nothing but downloadable mixes of obscure and interesting music, each with its own inscrutable title and blurry black & white cover. Each mix is also compiled into one MP3 file (so there's no skipping tracks or shuffling), with all the tracks volume-equalized and cross-faded lovingly into each other. Just like an old mixtape — brilliant!

I've been downloading them like crazy and enjoying them all. Whoever the guy was creating them, he hasn't made one since December of last year, so I think he might be done. I got all inspired and made a mix of my own, though, so here you go. The title is the download link.


Breakfast Cloud
1. Sunday Morning (live) - The Velvet Underground
2. Ouroboros - Oneohtrix Point Never
3. Magooba - You
4. Besvarjelse Rota - Joakim Skogsberg
5. See Through You - The Oscillation
6. Father Cannot Yell - Can
7. Stainless Steel Gamelan - John Cale & Sterling Morrison
8. Cryndod yn Dy Lais - Super Furry Animals
9. Foot and Mouth '68 - Gorky's Zygotic Mynci
10. Momentary Expanse - Tristan Perich
11. Please Wake Me Up - Tom Waits

Evil Crows

These crows are driving me crazy! Why do they bark incessantly at each other all day, right outside my window? I like birds as much as the next guy, but that ugly noise is REALLY distracting. Do they have to keep yelling to each other for no good reason, like a bunch of obnoxious teenagers? I'm sure they're up to no good...

Good Weekend

Went to a party in my neighbours' backyard Friday night and met some really nice people around a small bonfire. Saturday, The Lodge played a show at Gus' Pub with art school upstarts Old & Weird. Someone recorded the entire set, minus the first song, and put it on the internet, so you get to hear it, you lucky ducks.



Yesterday afternoon, after brunch with friends at the Jerusalem Café, was the first two games of the softball playoffs, and we won both. They were expected wins, but still I thought we played very well and looked smart doing it. Ice cream with Meg, Project Runway with Johanna, an early Flannery O'Connor story, and that was all she wrote. Because she died young of lupus. Tasteless joke. Sorry.

OK, Here's Some

The view from our balcony at an inn in Baddeck, overlooking Bras d'Or Lake

Top of the first hill we came to the next morning

Only shot of our photographer



The clouds coming over the mountains were blowing my mind.

NOTE TO ALI: If we're going to do a series of these, you gotta get that sensor cleaned. I can colour-adjust everything at once, but all those spots have to be cleaned up one by one on every single frame!

I don't know why the really nice light in this picture gets lost once it's uploaded to Blogger.

A cute motel in Pleasant Bay, inexplicably painted to resemble a pro-life sign


View from the second night's inn in Chéticamp

The infamous Skyline Trail. Yikes!

Sure was windy.