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.