It's called work for a reason...

Every now and again I look at my life, I see what I don't have, and what others around me do, and I get sad. But then I go down to the hole I dug beneath the tool shed and taser the Bangladeshi child laborers I've got making me balloons and I feel, you know, it's not so bad.

(Photo by Pavel Rahman/AP, thanks Augusta)

Strangers with candy...

I just can't stop looking at this photograph (click it to see larger). What a long way we've come... By the way, I don't believe that Obama's deep bow in Japan was a sign of weakness. If the most powerful man in the world wants to buck tradition and show respect according to his own body language, I say let him. The president is a dad, a husband, a basketball loving dude, a civic professional. His behavior is true to these realities that define him. I'm not sure what his costume is in this picture though. Thoroughly-modern-president-at-a-corny-photo-op, maybe?

(photo by Jewel Samad, AFP)

Why the rush?

Once you've confirmed your preferences, life can get to be a very blurry ride. Can you remember the murkier stuff that predates your preferences? Worth a revisit perhaps...

Everything ecstatic...

Realizing the importance of those occasional, profound moments of clarity and empowerment from earlier times. They always involved an intuitive awareness, an infinite presence, a power that could be tapped into beyond whatever shitty circumstances were in front of me. I wanted these were blissful moments of cosmic connection to go on forever. I realize now that these experiences were glimpses through cracks in my ego. I realize that this power is love, and the trick is to share it, grow it, give it away on 2nd Ave., eat it, sleep it, shit it out in rainbow colors all over each other. OK, I realize how this sounds, but how do you express these things? How do you bridge the awareness of something eternal with the need to function in a day? How do you weave cosmic light into terrestrial mud?

Rote by numbers...

Since Sarah's taking the GRE's as I write this, thought this might be a good time to announce my new standardized test - the GAZ's. It's a different kind of test, one that asks takers to demonstrate their core behavior and beliefs through performing tasks.

Samples...

1) Make the person sitting on your left laugh. Make the person on your right cry.

2) Dance with vigor and abandon for the next 100 people you encounter.

2) Secretly instigate a public riot and then be the one to peacefully calm all parties and engage them in meaningful dialog.

3) Strangle a turkey to death and eat it.

4) Recall the worst thing you've done to someone. Do it again, only this time see and understand the consequences of your actions and attempt to put them right.

5) Here is $100,000 cash. How will you spend it? You have one hour.

6) Speak every word you utter into a megaphone for one week. What will you say?


and so on...

Hell people, what are we testing when we take the SAT's or the GRE's or LSAT's or whatever? How can such rote challenges possibly get us out of the mess we're in?

(Russian Army Test)

"Metamuesli"...

n. mettuh-moo-sli - Writing, from a muddy mind, that wants to mean something but doesn't. It just sits there soaking in its own milk getting soggier and soggier.

(skull cake source)

Jaws of life...

On August 2, 1943, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy's boat, the PT-109, was taking part in a nighttime patrol near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands when it was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Kennedy was thrown across the deck, injuring his already-troubled back. Nonetheless, the 26 year-old Naval commander (an ace on the Harvard Varsity Swim Team) gathered his men from the sinking ship and together they swam furiously in the dark for any land they could find.

Throughout this swim JFK shouldered a badly-burned crewman through miles of rough seas, clenching a strap from the man's life jacket in his Kennedy teeth. He found an uninhabited island where he could leave the wounded man and the rest his crew, then swam to a second island, Naru, to summon help. Here, Kennedy encountered two "natives" who spoke no English, so he carved a message into a coconut shell and gave it to the natives to deliver to the PT base at Rendova. He then swam back to the first island where he and his men lived off of coconuts for six days before they were rescued.

This deserted island shelter was called Plum Pudding Island, and later, Kennedy Island. As you can see, it is really a tiny spec, the stuff of New Yorker cartoons. One wonders what those six days were like.

JFK later had the coconut shell encased in wood and plastic and used it as a paperweight on his famous "Resolute" desk in the Oval Office.

The message on the shell reads:

"NAURO ISL… COMMANDER… NATIVE KNOWS POS'IT… HE CAN PILOT… 11 ALIVE… NEED SMALL BOAT… KENNEDY."

Did JFK use his super-teeth to carve this SOS?
Only history knows...

Fela on a rainy night in Calabar...

just another wanker in a mirage...

"Wanking in a mirage"...

To the good gentleman who coolly dismissed my pet project as "wanking in a mirage," I'd like to say thank you for those perfect words. Pure genius. Wanking in a mirage is at the very core of what any creative type worth his or her salt aspires to. It's serious business conjuring these mirages and discovering their erotic charge for others to enjoy and evolve. A world without empowered and respected mirage wankers is a world where vision, art, and dreams are mere exploitable commodities. A flat, blind reality rooted in scalable economies and soulless abundance. Good luck with that!

("Dicken's Dream" by Robert W. Buss)

If you can read this, you're lucky...

Let's say there's been roughly 200,000 years of Homo sapiens. Then let's say that only around 1960 did we as a species begin to recognize children as full-fledged people. I'm talking in round numbers here, so don't hound me on the dates. And yes, a lot of other things began changing around this time too. Go ahead and factor those into this on your own. OK, so my point is that life radically changes once parents start looking at their children as little people rather than unformed non-adults. Once you get into the 60's a mass consciousness kicks in. New parents begin thinking long and hard about the family unit, thinking about how they were parented, and how their parents were parented, and making choices about how they will act as parents and so on. Childhood becomes a foundry of experience, intellect, and emotions. The definition of "family" is (temporarily) up for grabs.

So the lucky part: Not only are you alive in the time of this evolutionary development 198,000 years in the making, but, you are living at the precise moment where both types live side by side, the earlier generation (less conscious and/or transitionally conscious of child rearing) and the more recent (more conscious) one. This is rare. It's like Fred Flintstone having Homo erectus neighbors.

On a side note, I think the show Mad Men is interesting because it focuses on this very moment of species transformation. Don Draper is both a cave man and an enlightened being. He is our Lucy (in the sky with Brooks Brothers). Our missing link.

While we're selling soap flakes, Sarah says, and don't forget the fact that marketers were all over this new segment. They were in on this rebranding of childhood almost from the getgo. If parents Freud and Dr. Spock sprinkled magic dust over the spirit of youth, then Madison Avenue and Tinsel Town were there to quilt our diapers and make animals talk and dance for us pretty soon afterwards. I hate to go down this cynical path, but she makes a point.

("Tent Dwelling Hippie Family of Mystic Arts Commune Bray Family Reading Bedtime Stories " by John Olson)

The Courtship of the Sun and the Moon¸.•..¸.•*¨¸.•*¨

Version groovy, set to Serge Gainsbourg's "No No Yes Yes"

("L'Éclipse du Soleil en Pleine Lune" by Georges Melies)

Bagpipes for all...

Woke up yesterday needing to know if the Irish were full-fledged bagpipers, or if they only borrowed their neighboring Scots aerophones when they needed to make a solemn musical point. Turns out there are many distinct varieties of bagpipes all over Europe, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Indeed the Irish have their own, the Irish Uellian Pipes, a smaller rig often played sitting.

Still, when we think bagpipe, we are most likely thinking of the Great Highland Bagpipe of Scotland. Unless of course you are French, and you're predisposed to think of the Musette de Cour or the Boha of Gascony. Or perhaps you hail from Estonia, and when you think bagpipe you think Torupill. Then again, maybe you live in The Caucasus and you're fond of the Tulum. Tunis your hometown? Then you'll probably know someone who huffs into a Mizwad. Bohemia? Grab your Dudy. Balearic Islands? Strap on the Xeremia. Sicily? Likely you're blowing into a Zampogna (seen above).

There's no instrument that hypnotizes quite like a bagpipe. It's aggressive and oppressive in demanding our full, motionless attention. It conveys great sadness and great strength and it wants our total respect. While were on the topic, know someone named Piper or Pfeiffer or Duda or Gajdoš? It's fairly certain that their ancestors were known for blowing the skin-bag back in the day...

Place yourself in your most desired circumstances...

I was really drawn into Teshigahara's magnificent Woman in the Dunes last night. It's a true original: a sexy, claustrophobic, existential nightmare, that flows beautifully between abstraction and narrative, made by the aesthetically-gifted son of a master flower arranger.

I struggled a little bit to get through its two plus hours, in part because the movie is really about a kind of life fatigue that sets in when we succumb to routine. Digressing here, I've learned that the struggle to stay awake is (sometimes) an important aspect of cinema. Some of the most profound cinematic experiences are tied to overcoming difficulties or prejudices or energy issues that arise during the actual watching of a film. Once you've endured a difficult viewing, the lingering aftereffects, the payoff, the stuff that stays with you for days and years, the growing, can be enormous. Far greater than those other passing cinematic thrills that jolt your nerves and are soon forgotten.

To sum up Woman in the Dunes - A scholarly man searching for bugs near the ocean gets trapped in a deep sand pit with an attractive woman by the arrangement of some corrupt locals. The captives must dig out the sand every night or be denied water and other basic provisions by their captors. He rebels at first, then falls for the woman, and in the process of attempting to trap a crow, discovers a way to leach water from the sand. He resigns himself to his fate and refocuses his energies.

As in so many great books and films, a prison becomes a strange form of paradise. In the case of Woman in the Dunes, I was not as convinced of the sand pit's paradisiacal qualities as was our protagonist. Hard to say if this was the director's intention or not. A typical Western viewer will likely see that our bug collector's world has been reduced to a pile of sand and that an ocean's worth of other potentialities exist just outside his reach. But to our hero, redemption comes in the form of adapting to this tiny world. He finds meaning and pleasure in his new, vastly restricted, life.
As would we... It is human nature: we acclimate to our circumstances no matter how grim they may appear to an outsider.

For me, the film serves as a reverse allegory: A thorough investigation of a mad trap that serves to trigger a reminder of its opposite... The multitude of truly rewarding circumstances and realities our dreams, desires, and interests suggest to us. I posit that the wise human engages in an ongoing journey to find ways to immerse him or herself in optimal circumstances that meet their inner needs and stimulate growth to the greatest possible extent. To settle for less, to resign ourselves, is to give in to the illusions of powerlessness and practicality.

Of course it's a speculative game. You might think that you yearn to be an Austrian ski champion, and you might fight your whole life to climb your way into that world only to have the carpet pulled out from under you by what I'll call a "final flip": You stop half way down the Alps one sunny afternoon, raise your goggles, and realize you might have been just as happy shoveling sand in a pit in Japan. We're funny like that. Humans.

That said, I'm not going to let the slim possibility of there being a "final flip" get in the way of finding and achieving ideal circumstances. You don't cancel a trip to the beach because it might rain.

What punches?

"If they can make penicillin out of mouldy bread,
they can sure make something out of you."
- Muhammad Ali

Undisclosed sources...

1) I do my best individually, but after studying what really drives CO2 creation, I'm left realizing that our industrial world is wired to produce it, and that my personal acts are ultimately meaningless.

2) ...society will eventually reflect the minds of its leaders, and if the leaders are implementing what the majority perceives as evil, the society will be evil as well, and people affected by a malevolent government will start acting like them.

3) We let a well-intentioned Irish rock star, a Jewish-American economist, and their Hollywood cohort become the voice and face of Africa.

Wild Things Tame...

I'm very hard on films that attempt to conjure and play with our core beings, so I'm going to say no to Where the Wild Things Are. It was just too promising a set up and too soft a solution. For a movie about teeth it's awfully gummy. For a child's-eye-view, it's just too cute and cuddly a wildness we get here. Childhood is propelled by dark, morbid, thinly-veiled erotic fantasies, so if you're going to fetishize childhood, let's go all the way.

I credit Spike Jonze for the effort. It's an interesting film, but, ultimately, a tepid one. And no, the plottless-ness was not an issue for me. I find plot overrated and I applaud Mr. Jonze for allowing himself this freedom. There are some amazingly raw and wandering emotions up on screen, but they're just packaged wrong and fail to add up. One scene after another just skids along the surface in an A.D.D. frenzy of forced actions and missed opportunities. Furthermore, those monsters really bugged me. Those voices, aye yi yi! Strangely, I liked the ending, it's abruptness was effective. The mother and child scenes were really well done.

In short, wanted much much more from this...

The beauty of exercise and non-exercise...

Feeling a need to remind people who do lots of yoga and other regular rigorous exercise that there is a whole other brain/body space that exists when you don't exercise, and that it's not a bad place. When the arrows of attention aren't so focused on the body and the micro-management of personal space, the world can become a much more interesting and even enjoyably vast space. Let me be clear, I believe in regular, rigorous exercise as much as the next Californian, still I try to make room for other forms of health. Again, the balance thing...

Los Angeles Suggestion Box...

More prawns, less fawning...

(Peacock Mantis Shrimp, has the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom)

Am I expanding or coming undone?

("Soaring in the Clouds" by Anton Senkou-Melnik)

Total dish...

(An actual plate that uses temperature sensitive ink, by Benjamin Mege)

Send my regards...

I'm no stickler for etiquette, I believe that people shouldn't cloak themselves in too many formal gestures. Save it for the movies. But there is one thing that truly turns my spats inside out - and that is passing along messages via a proxy. It's just so limp and half-hearted. Not to mention a passed buck to the messenger. I understand it's not an overt, malevolent act, but it is passive-aggressive as all hell. How can one expect to convey anything authentic or of value when the underlying message screams, "I couldn't be bothered to contact you in person..."? If one can't make a space to communicate directly and with sincerity to someone they know then it's probably best not to do it at all. Instead, one could spend that time asking why they're unable make a space to communicate directly and with sincerity. Of course they could also ask someone else to pass the message on to themselves, thus creating a feedback loop of epic proportions, which would be a very interesting outcome in all of this. Furthermore, one could argue that this post is a perfect example of the very behavior I'm taking to task. Then the Earth imploded.

They put drugs in those drugs...

I had a cold yesterday, the old sore throat, hair hurting, muscle aches kind. So Sarah gave me some proper industrial strength cold medicine and put me to bed. It did the trick, the pains went and I slept for 11 hours. Awake now, the cold has greatly diminished, but I can still feel dancing pink elephants coursing through my veins. My thoughts feel as though they are being processed through an oriental carpet. My body hovers over the bed as I watch myself type this. My fingers are telephone poles slapping at garbage can lids.

They put drugs in everything in America, because they need us to buy things we simply wouldn't in our right minds. These drugs take the form of advertising copy and imagery, economic policy, fast food, and sexy packaging. In other words, I probably don't need a $9000 white Leica M8, but the drugs make me want one (that is, until it turns greasy-mitts gray after two day's use, then the drugs wear off.).

Respecting our global roommates...

Ever since Spain gave full civil rights to gorillas, chimps, and orangutans last year, I've been thinking about how this trend might grow. At what point will we extend basic rights to all living creatures? I predict that animal law will be huge in the second half of the 21st C. That said, I would not want to defend a mosquito. In fact, I would argue for a specific clause in any declaration of animal rights that gave humans the right to lawfully splatter anything that sucks its blood and whines in its ear while it's trying to sleep.

Rushkoff clusterbombs Philadelphia w. ideas...

Whoa... This one has it all: The birth of media, the sad single arc of storytelling, doing it yourself, sustaining new art distribution paradigms, achieving a non-monetary shared play space, and so much more by the always enlightening and unabashedly nerdy Douglas Rushkoff. Stay with it, worth it. Thanks Nat.

What is this death?

We know so much about birth and carbon fiber and astrophysics and geothermal currents and quantum mechanics and croissant dough - and yet Death remains a question mark? An unmentionable? "The termination of the biological functions that define a living organism" - that's our definition? How in the name of modernity can this be? Are the metaphors of religion our best response to that which follows our last breath? Maybe it's good to have an absolute mystery that can't be solved by Google. Or maybe people should be studying this stuff. What if we knew definitively what happens to us when we go? How might things change?

("Dead Woman" by Reinhardt Sobye)

Thank you Rodchenko...

Thank you Aleksandr Rodchenko, visual pioneer, for giving us the graphic wisdom to see things from all angles. You taught me the deep logic of visual contrast and making images and ideas and spatial constructions pop just so... all while remaining as cryptic and exotic a person as only a Soviet visionary in a leather jump suit could.

Random passages...

“Those dusky Afro-Scandinavian buttocks, which combine the callipygian rondure observed among the races of the Dark Continent with the taut and noble musculature of sturdy Olaf, our blond Northern cousin”

- flipping through Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Art is...

...anything we do that we don't have to do...

According to Brian Eno, that is, who we were happy to see speak last night on the insanely dreamy CSU-Long Beach campus. He was supposed to be talking about his 77 Million Paintings, but really he wanted to talk about the screwdrivers he'd brought along. He showed them to us on an overhead video projector. He explained that the business end of all screwdrivers is fundamentally the same - a metal shape that fits into a screw head. It does the work. But as you move away from the functional bit, you approach the handle which is much more interesting. This is where we encounter Design. Sure enough, his screwdrivers had handles of all colors and shapes, including some with feathers and glitter.

To continue paraphrasing: Stylistic choices can come into play when there isn't a specific piece of action that has to take place. Then he drew an imaginary line that started at the metal end of the screwdriver, went through the handle and continued on off into space. Somewhere on that line would appear the concept of Fine Art, which is very far away from the business end of a screwdriver indeed. He explained that art is a place where dangerous things can happen without real consequences. Art is a way of situating a set of desired (though possibly undesirable) conditions in relation to all other conditions. Art does not occur in a vacuum. Art is a transaction. Every new work of art is like a punch line to a joke. It doesn't make sense with out the story before it. Context is everything to Mr. Eno.

I'd read a lot of this material before in his book and in interviews. Still, I never tire of the way he articulates his thoughts. It was especially great to watch him cruelly (but warmly) dispatch with all the dumb questions people ask. "Can I ask you a question about The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway?" Mr. Eno drew enormous "Z's" on the overhead projector. "I'd rather you didn't. That was a very long time ago and is of interest to no one but you," was his answer. And if you're interested, you can Google it.

Breaking news...

I say! Armies killing people? What next? News organizations twisting facts?

PS: Happy BDay Ted!

Self-excited Universe...

And so the hall of mirrors theme continues... It's been clear to me for as long as I can remember that we humans are microscopic, roving receptors in a conscious, self-observing universe. Our five senses are the interface tools that monitor experience, and our soul is the recording device that accumulates data and shares it collectively with other beings and of course the mother ship, whatever that may be.

In other words, the Universe educates itself about itself by employing neat little organisms (i.e. us) that are out in the field, exposed to the full mystery of being. Of course these organisms are protected by shields that prevent them from taking in too much, and learning too much about the nature of Nature.

I stumbled across this icon the other day and was instantly drawn to it. What could it mean? It turns out to be a symbol created by the late theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler, the man who coined the term black hole.

This symbol depicts the Universe as a "self-excited" circuit: Starting small (thin line at right) it gradually grows denser (thick left line) as observers multiply and participate in its creation - by observing what is gradually emerging and occurring. Mental causality some would say. You can read about it and other startling thoughts about the nature of reality in his 1983 paper "Law without Law."

Wheeler had a hunch that "the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, a loop in which we contribute to the ongoing creation of not just the present and the future but the past as well." Well Dr. Wheeler, I concur. Good work.

Afterthought: Dr. Wheeler's all-seeing eye symbol does lead me to think of this one.

What I miss about childhood...

That point where reality and silliness merge into a timeless googleplex of candy-colored enjoyment.

PS: Happy Birthday peTE, pleasure growing up with you!

Enormous heads vs. Rose Kennedy's vagina...

I met, ok, experienced, Ted Kennedy twice. Once as a boy, I'm told, he picked me up and later gave me his autograph. There may or may not be a picture of this somewhere. Then as a high school student, my poli-sci class went to his Senate office where he fielded questions from our zitty crew in ill-fitting ties. Great memory.

I want to confirm that this man's head was enormous. I mean big like a planet. He was in a fat phase during my visit to his office, which added some bulk, but I'm telling you his skull alone was at least the size of an exercise ball. Very impressive. I'm assuming that Jack, Bobby, and all the other kids were similarly afflicted.

With all the Bros. Kennedy off to Camelot, I feel it's not inappropriate to con-gratulate the late Rose Kennedy on passing all of those enormous heads through her birth canal. It cannot have been fun, by any definition of that word I can conceive.

Coming from a family of five boys, I can relate to the implied subject of the above picture. There's a kind of communication that arises among brothers that goes so deep and yet is taken for granted when it's happening. In fact it must remain invisible in order for it to work. That's a good life lesson in and of itself.

Throughout my life, I've yearned for Kennedy-esque collaboration with my brothers, and I'm beginning to see that it may not happen. I accept this idea with some sadness, but also the confidence that the results of any collaboration would have been wickedly good.

Watch phone...

I like a timepiece. Any recessive OCD impulses that may be hiding in my DNA are satiated by these tiny, precision techno-universes that hug your wrist. People often say that watches are a thing of the past, that every cellphone has one... Why do you need one? (In fact, I don't own one. But I would if the right one were out there...)

Here's the thing. I say turn it around. Why don't watches have cellphones in them? Surely it can be done. I have some good design ideas if anyone's interested.

Oops... Just Googled this. They exist. But they're consistently ugly and enormous. Watchmakers, let's talk.

Bonus image: The watch that they used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Chord progressions and the spinal cord...

Why do certain chord arrangements slay me so? Why do certain songs cause the world to disappear and the nerve bundles to interlace and ripple in waves - like tall grass blowing up my spine? It's a full aesthetic arrest, mon.

I have an intuitive sense of musical structure, but who can really say why certain progressions work so well? What are the relationships between the chords? Sure, basic music theory provides scads of analysis and math, but how do certain strings of notes combine to create such dramatic emotional responses in humans?

What amazing wars we would have if certain musical arrangements could be used to level an army into passive brooding. Weapons of mass captivation.

At the moment, I'm particularly interested in the chordal structure of James Bond themes. They don't "slay" me so much, there's way too much commercial noise and gaudy baggage that comes in tow for them to really sink in. I'm more fascinated by their musically manipulative ways and chordal seductiveness. I'm talking about the significant ones: You Only Live Twice. Live and Let Die. Nobody Does it Better. Goldfinger. I'm beginning to understand the underlying template, and discovering songs with similar chord bombs that could easily work in the Bond oeuvre. David Bowie's "Lady Grinning Soul" is a great example (and a great song).

8 years later...

Eight years after I think we have a predictable mix of outcomes. For some the aftermath has been a sobering experience, a call to a more waking state; for others it has been used to feed their psychic aberrations and sharpen the focus of their (warped) projections.

What I really want to know is how the hell did that flag survive? (Source NYTimes)

What the hell is wrong with critics?

The jaded declarations, the pig-headed assumptions, the cruel put downs, the blind dismissals, the shockingly embarrassing missing of key points. Who are these people?

If you care to know what I'm talking about, choose a movie you really love. Know why you love it and prepare to have that love shat upon: Go to imdb.com and have a look at the "professional" reviews of your selected film. You will likely encounter some of the smarmiest, most irrelevant, hackish, soulless, incurious, patently sad commentary that the human animal can conjure. Where is the love you flatheaded laptop tubers?

I'm sorry but a morsel of popular influence gone flabby, wielded carelessly, and used without imagination or thoughtfulness of any discernible kind, cannot be taken seriously. The job of critic - someone who, ideally, has in important role in shaping the cultural landscape - should be at least as revered and vetted as a judge or a professor, doncha think?

Happy Club...

How much do I love the end of August, the beginning of September? Words fail amigos. Old heat. New cool. Mixing the warm, barrier-less eros of summer with the terror of something institutional and cruel that threatens it all... All the epic joys and conflicts are here. Our dance steps grow assured from a hundred nights of re-humanizing. When do we stop sleeping naked? Do we have to close down, or can we make a break for the other side of the equator?

("Happy Club" by Malick Sidibé)

People before profits...

It's enraging to think that we're even having these kinds of discussions about health care. As my facebook so aptly states, "No one should die because they they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. It's really simple to put people before profits. The rest of the world does." I understand that achieving universal health care might be a complex nightmare, but I can't believe there are people actually fighting this premise. There's no such thing as self-preservation. Our connectedness is irrefutable.

Who Created Your Ass?

Wow. If you KNOW you're going to heaven, why not?

Identity vs. Camera...

This is my kind of tintype. On first glance, this fellow seems to exist independently of the prying eye of the camera. That extended finger on the saw suggests a hint of self-awareness though, of cinematic flare. Or does it? Then the rakish tilt of the hat. Was this 1875 meat masher a closeted runway model, is he oblivious to the idea of being recorded, or somewhere in between? Your answer probably says more about you than him.

We all know the feeling of self-loathing that can arise when we take in images, videos, or audio recordings of ourselves. And the relief of "that one's not too bad." It's very unhealthy to dwell in this space for too long, but it's an important one to consider. These symbolic externals are all that many people can discern in the realms of human interaction.

How strange that we should live on the inside of our skin, unable to read the never-ending story of our physical presence the way we devour others'. We're on to this of course; the fear of not knowing what we're projecting at any given moment feeds many mirror addictions.

Our physical selves almost always oversell or betray our inner identity. I mean, what are the chances of a perfect match-up? Now add the lossy, warping "lenses" of recording devices into the mix and all hell breaks loose. Does our core identity adapt to the information it receives through mirrors and photographs? Do we fawn over animals and people who are blind or deaf because of their "natural," unaltered behavior? Which curations of our physical selves are efficacious? Noxious? Pathetic? Unholy?

In conclusion, identity in the modern world is a tough one.

All kinds of lazy...

"There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy."

- Sogyal Rinpoche

(thanks Trina).

Lovely wallflowers blooming...

While politely observing a shy person this morning at ye olde overpryced coffee shoppe, it (the obvious generalization) occurred to me... it's not that shy people don't want attention, on the contrary, they crave it. They just don't know how to handle attention. Shy people, I can help. I know how much you take in and how hard it is to find a present-tense interface with reality that meets your excruciatingly high standards. Let's talk... behind digital curtains if we must, but really, as attractive as it may be, the shy must be overcome.

(Painting by Ilya Repin)

The sky looks sweet and wears a pretty blue dress...

People who work in extremely dangerous fields (such as Clark Gable's dashing, dumb risk-taker in the excellent film Test Pilot) inhabit another hyper-enhanced reality. It's a powerful drug for them and those around them.

Every hour of life is a bittersweet victory punctuated by the adrenaline rush of cheating death, infused with the agony of knowing that if death visits not today, then maybe tomorrow. Once you're in this zone there's no leaving it - "normal" life can not compare. ("He gets you -- there's no fun being with anyone else," says Spencer Tracy of Gable's character in the film.)

In this erotically charged quagmire you will accept a perpetual dance with death ("Put on the red shoes Vicky!"). It is a dynamic that can be applied to several fields, namely the ones that empower desirable individuals by binding them to a sacrificial alter: actors, politicians, and rock stars come to mind.

Of course, in being born, we're all engaged in a dance with death. Our lives are no less precious. We just don't confront death on a daily basis. Most of us don't live as gods or rock stars or test pilots. We buffer our mortality with the hypnotic drone of "lesser" tasks, and we experience a blissfully false sense of immortality. Good trick!

What aliens think...

This thing you call language. Most remarkable. You depend on it for so very much. But is any one of you really its master?

Cultural Imagination...

There's actual stuff, and then there's the way we think about stuff. I am increasingly interested in the latter (in relation to the former). The cultural imagiation includes all the messy, dreamy, illogical, unconscious, self-serving, magical thinking that is collectively brought to the table when virtually any subject is invoked. Fantastic stuff!

Take anything... The Crusades for example. What is triggered by this concept? Probably something not too far from the image above. The actual Crusades were probably a good deal less cinematic and crisp than this imaginary depiction. Those scaly suits of armor got sweaty.But for this tobacco company, it was the satisfying idea they were interested in not the trench-foot reality.

The "Pop Imagination" has real value. To ignore it, or event to vaguely acknowledge it, is to deny the most accurate portrait of our collective experience. Can it be measured without ruining its wonderful organic sloppiness? Probably not, thank gods.

F.O.G.s

Recent offerings from Friends of Gazpachot...

SBW says the first picture of herself where she thought she looked "acceptably ok" was taken shortly after she met me.

JB says, "at risk of sounding sexist" that "men are generally givers and women are generally takers. This reverses in motherhood, when women have to become givers. Therefore, motherhood brings out the man in a woman."

JTW has "recurring waking dreams"of using his arm in a throwing (or perhaps tennis swinging) motion.

RD says, "let's start a time bank."

STL let slip, "I was recently reminded that I invented Facebook." I would have to disagree STL, since yours truly and RJ invented a religion of humiliation waaay back in the mid- 1980s in which people would record their most embarrassing aspects in public diaries displayed in social settings for all to see.

RJ says that "the POTUS is well-meaning but powerless."

WF sends a photo of an old gorilla mask armature.

JE assures me that "shit sandwiches are exhausting!"

Nature Boy: eden ahbez...

I've always loved the Nat King Cole song Nature Boy, but never would have imagined its peculiar origins. Or rather, these are the strange origins one might have imagined, with the expected reality being far less interesting. Sometimes these things get reversed.

The song was penned by a bearded man living under the Hollywood sign in 1947. Not a "hobo" but rather the original hippie. eden ahbez (lowercase his choice) arrived in Los Angeles in 1941 and began playing piano at the Eutropheon, a small health food store and raw food restaurant on Laurel Canyon Blvd. The cafe was owned by John and Vera Richter, German immigrants who followed a "naturmensch" and "lebensreform" philosophy, influenced by the Wandervogel movement in Germany. Their followers, known as "Nature Boys," wore long hair and beards, and ate only raw fruits and vegetables.

Once, when Ahbez was being hassled by a cop who assumed from his wild appearance that he deserved to be hauled off to a mental institution, he remarked calmly, "I look crazy, but I'm not. And the funny thing is, that other people don't look crazy, but they are." The cop thought it over and responded, "You know bud, you're right. If anybody gives you any trouble, let me know."

Here's a track, The Wanderer, from ahbez' 1960 album, Eden's Island (wonder if this is where Gilligan got his start - and font?).

(Thanks KXLU for the edification.)

Even in abstinence...

Coffee: A drink that puts you to sleep when you don't drink it. Magic!

("Coffee, 2001" from the "I like..." series by Marcel van der Vlugt)

Anything you experience is a reality...

Why should dreams or stories or imagined experience be excluded from the realms of reality? At the very least, let's acknowledge a spectrum of realities. You stir from a dream into what appears to be a "senior" waking reality. Certainly, there could be many realities that are senior to our waking reality, and some of those may actually be ones currently classified as "junior" realities. As I'm writing this I'm worried that these are the kinds of arguments that people who create full-immersion video games use. Can I put some caveats on what is and isn't real after all?

A serene and radiant woman...

HBD SBW!

Gazpachot Health Care Solution...

My solution to this health care mess is simple. Demystify medicine and health. It all goes back to education.

Let me back up a little. The practice of medicine is heavily reliant upon a certain smoke and mirrors factor. The doctor wears a white coat and writes in Latin. He or she knows things you don't. You are at their mercy. Be (a) patient.

I propose that starting from a very young age, right through college, every citizen should receive basic but thorough medical training in school. People should learn to spot early symptoms, diagnose themselves, and administer basic remedies to common ailments. Preventative medicine should be taught (and stressed) along a parallel path.

In a culture where health and medicine are demystified and understood at the core level, there would be less abuse of prescriptions, less self destructive behavior all around.

Of course there would still be doctors and hospitals for surgery and other serious problems, but there would be infinitely fewer visits to the doctor for "frivolous" needs, check ups, and tests that clog up the works and drain our resources while the insurance companies turn a tidy profit.

PLONOVs...

Our economies are based upon the principle of scarcity. The thing you want is rare and therefore has an assigned value. Whatever it is, you use it sparingly because you know you don't want to have to run out again and buy it tomorrow. The higher the value the greater the scarcity. Right?

But there are interesting places I've come across where supposedly rare things don't seem rare. If you work in an industry, the thing that your industry produces and gets good money for out in the world, might seem almost valueless when you see it stacked up in a warehouse in bulk. On a smaller scale the supplies closet in a corporate office is another place where scarcity and value don't seem to apply. I call these areas Places of No Observable Value. PLONOVs.

PLONOVs are important because they remind us of the abstract nature of our value system. I know people who spend their lives situating themselves in high end PLONOV environments. They bask in the illusion that they live outside the "common" value system and that they are entitled to free luxury. I also know people who would never steal a paper clip from their office. I'm not sure who's right or who's winning.

(photo by Bruno Dayan)

Your brain is an animal living in your skull...

Woke up with a word stuck in the hole between my waking brain and my sleeping brain. I just got it unstuck, and it is "panglossian."

(Read about optimism and enhanced activation in the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala region right here.)

Awakening...

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's mind without another's guidance. Sapere Aude! Dare to Know! Have the courage to use your own understanding is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment."
-­Immanuel Kant

("Baby Blankenship" by Paul Gachot)

Ah, Summer...

Well believe it or not, this Star Trek book is a fantastic guilty pleasure, summer sci-fi read with nice philosophical undertones. Or at least the first 100 pages I should say. Grabbed it off a shelf from the family beach rental - tattered paperback, looking lonely with all those fat dusty leather-bound tomes surrounding it.

Kirk, Spock, Glass spider, a parallel singularity... two paragraphs in and I couldn't stop reading... until I got on the plane and left it in my brother's apartment in NYC. Must hit the used bookshops today...

The fine print on dreams...

When did evil forces co-opt the part of reality that deals in human dreams? This evil manifests as the fine print in your mortgage. It's the calorie count of your elixir. The toll booth on your underground railway. The contract on your song. The devil is always up in your details.

Falling asleep on a couch in Shelter Island...

"After a while non-stop brilliance has the same effect as non-stop boredom."

- Richard Brautigan from "Sombrero Fallout"

("Newwwww" by Bryan Dalton)

Hold on to the sun...

("After Lithium" by Joseph Rafferty)

Ownership is odd...

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine,' and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

("Fenced In" by Christopher Brown)

The moon is a big girl...

Why are we going back to the moon? It's like this. Men like to put their independence and their masculinity out there for all to see, but really we're biological suckers for feminine attention, like moths drawn to whatever glowing mommy energy catches our third eye. Just look at the lengths we go to. Of course, we'll deny it, and we may even train ourselves to get over this primal urge, but then you'd have to ask yourself why, and have a really good answer.