musings, ramblings, observations, all blown out of proportion and mistaken for insights


Thursday, February 26, 2009

someday i'm going to die

It's going to be sad I guess. I have a feeling it's going to be exciting. But I can't get too interested in death. Life is cool too, it's just such a drag sometimes. Ending your life sometimes sounds like a good idea, sometimes it even sounds logical. It's the ultimate change in consciousness. Some members of the DADA movement killed themselves as an artistic act.

Please don't think i'm going to kill myself. That whole thing "ALL TALK ABOUT SUICIDE IS CAUSE FOR ALARM" they taught you in 9th grade health class is bullshit. They also told us that marijuana was a dangerous drug and we should never be friends with anyone who uses it.

I wouldn't commit suicide and this is why: the ability to witness the universe (or whatever it is) as I can now is a worthy reason to keep consciousness. Reality may be intangible, difficult to understand, or non-existant, but whatever it is has interested me. 

I'm also a coward. 

and at the end of the week, those couple moments of freedom, excitement and brilliance make all the countless letdowns and fuck-ups worth it. 

Read Camus's Myth of Sisyphus. Best answer i've read to the suicide question. 

I understand why people do it. Sometimes it makes too much sense. Too deny this is to be an idiot. Some lives are probably so horrid that suicide really is the best way out. 

Death is the ultimate experience of the unknown and we suffer through our whole lives to get there. But just in case it's another bum trip I wan't to have a nice life behind me. 

End. 


Sunday, February 22, 2009

you see, I truly am a materialist after all

today for my special day I got: 









cool man, cool!





Saturday, February 21, 2009

the sunshine bores the daylights out of me





oh man I never really have realized how much I love this album, after countless nights of staying up as late as possible trying to listen to the whole thing on my mom's walkman trying to figure out what mick meant when he said 'drop your reds, drop your greens and blues'. 


the power of paranoia

Salvador Dali thought paranoia was an artistic tool. William S. Burroughs said "A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on". Robert Anton Wilson says in an interview that paranoids are the most genius storytellers ever, they just didn't realize that their visions were actually fantasies.  Most people think of paranoia as a very negative emotion, and rightly so. There is nothing more terrifying than thinking the world is organized against you while being unaware of how delusional you are. 

The Greek roots of the word paranoia essential mean madness. Paranoia is a state of delusion where one takes the irrational as real. An important part of the art movements of Dada and Surrealism was delving into the irrational. Basking in confusion, escaping rationality, and transcending reality were concepts artist like Duchamp, Dali, Man Ray, Tzara, and Artaud championed. According to Dali, exploring the realm of the paranoid was a way to find inspiration for his works. He called this the Paranoid Critical Method.

"..it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality"  

What could be more transgressive and threatening to bourgeois values than celebrating paranoia? While Dali has become a staple of High School art rooms and essential, his ideas are very subversive. 

The question is how does one control paranoia? While it's capability for artistic inspiration has been celebrated, one cannot forget that it's a debilitating mental ilness that can consume and destroy the mind. It might just be the most uncompfortable feeling one can experience. To allow oneself to be consumed by paranoia is a self destructive act. One is being opressed by their own mind. 

However opression breeds art, and it takes a truly opressed men like William S. Burroughs or Philip K. Dick to bring us visions of reality that are so twisted and insane yet full of truth about our society and existense. 








Thursday, February 19, 2009

a stream of thoughts

open your eyes
and witness the birth 
of a million tambourines 
all shaking like frenzied insects 

through hallways of thoughts 
corridors of boredom
and manholes of sickness
you walk
and see boundless apparitions

it's time to get born again
says the voice of ginsberg 
and then the sky starts to fall
you accompany it with laughter
like you do to everything else 
and then a madman whispers you a question
"is everything really inconsequential
because we're alive just so we can rot"

you forget it all the next minute and keep roaming on and on

it's true;

life is flashing at your eyes 

like a dying star

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

lord, you have me hypnotized

“Even the wretched and despised have their allotted place. Freed from all conflict we have time now to explore new concepts, new frontiers, charting the space inside our minds as we once did the outer void, with pioneers drawn from the hopelessly addicted; psychonauts prepared to risk their sanity in chemical reconnaissance of new, interior continents. We call them ‘spacemen.’ Every child’s ambition is to be one when they’re grown.” - Alan Moore, Miracleman #16




sunflower sutra

of course Howl is the best poem ever, but Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra has been meaning a lot to me recently


"I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past—
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye—
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these
entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen,
—We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision."

Berkeley, 1955

Love

since it's valentines day (or moreso 3 days afterwards) I thought i'd talk about an emotion that's very dear to me

actually i'm joking

Love is the name of a 60's band that was better than The Doors! You better believe it! Love, like The Doors, were a psychedelic band from LA, signed to Elektra records, both had frontmen who were a bit on the edge from a combination of substance abuse and mad genius, and both blew my mind several times. 

except lets get one thing straight - it was Love who got the Doors signed to Elektra, and not only was Arthur Lee a poet genius like Morrison, but he was black! Dig that, Arthur Lee was the first psychelic black man, before Jimi Hendrix, before George Clinton, before Sly Stone, LOVE was an interracial band and because of that along they broke more boundaries than The Doors.


but anyway, we all know it's the music that matter most. Love albums, as a whole, were probably not as even as the best Doors albums, (except for Forever Change which i'll talk about in a sec). However Love's best songs are in my opinion better than the best Doors songs. 

listen to this, one of the greatest punk songs of the 60's:



fuck yeah! what an amazing song! Now go get yourself a copy of Forever Changes, their 67 release
really blew my mind out of the water when I first heard it

it looks like this:



and remember - John Densmore of the Doors said the goal of The Doors was to be as good as Love.
They weren't as good in the long run though they got close, but they did gain waaaaay more popularity.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

songs of atlantis mix

please join me on a journey to the bottom of the sea, where we shall discover the lost city of Atlantis with these wonderful songs:

1. Atlantis - Donovan 
2. Mutilated Lips - Ween
3. Octopus - Syd Barrett 
4. Tropical Fish: Selene (peel sessions) - Gong 
5. Octopus Garden - The Beatles 
6. The Water Song - Incredible String Band 
7. The Oyster and the Flying Fish - Kevin Ayers 
8. Seal Eyeing - Animal Collective 
9. Atlantis - Sun Ra 

it is my belief that with these songs and the aid of certain enlightening substances that one can enter the esoteric realm of Atlantis, a land full of long forgotten knowledge that fell victim to Mother Earth's more destructive habits 

Monday, February 9, 2009

another day in space wasted

an icicle crucifix
a summer day
a manipulated mind
i can feel her staring me down
with pale blue eyes 
and mercury flowers 
sprouting in the fields
of her sadness

Thursday, February 5, 2009

movies that aren't bogus volume 1- Slacker

Not to be confused with the trashy teen comedy 'Slackers', Richard Linklater's 1991 film 'Slacker' is a inventive work of post-modern genius. Plotless, with no main characters or even an obvious message, the film moves us on a tour through the lives of various eccentrics in Austin Texas. We meet a chick whose trying to sell Madonnas pubic hairs, an Old Anarchist, and a couple conspiracy theorist. Don't expect high-brow hollywood entertainment - this is one of the most boring (yet fascinating) movies ever made. And you can watch it for free on youtube!

Dig it baby:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB4xlYKAVCQ

Richard Linklater is also responsible for Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, and A Scanner Darkly, which are all amazing and should be required viewing.

Monday, February 2, 2009

A rare dose of truth


Do I even need so say anything? 

Sunday, February 1, 2009

R. Crumb = artistic genius

This summer I visited the Art Institute in Chicago and I'm gonna lie, large parts of it were extremely boring. However I think it was on the first floor in the same section that contained much of the surrealist and dadaist works I've grown to love over the years that I encountered a couple R. Crumb works. I got extremely excited - HEAD CULTURE HAS INFILTRATED THE ART INSTITUTE! Even funnier is that I joked about Crumb being in the art institute before we left. You can only imagine how much my mind had been blown after walking around for two hours looking at pictures of Jesus and Mary. So Crumb went from being the kind of artist you could only buy in head shops to being worthy of taking up space in the Art Institute of Chicago. It was great.

Above is one of the pieces I saw at the art institute. His fascination with the grotesque and the perverse overtaking American culture is evident as he makes jabs at the whole idea of fashion. He also takes a stab that whole self absorbed and 'decant' punk-rock style of dress that was popular at the time (you know, all that bondage gear and mohawk bullshit!) . 



Crumb was very popular with drug taking hippies in the 60's. Crumb himself took many drugs during his period in the 60's where he wrote in Zap Comix!, an important part of the counterculture of it's time. Often Crumb would simply get as high as possible on lsd and marijuana and just draw and draw, often resulting in pure genius. However when Crumb quit getting stoned in the 70's he found "a certain clarity of thought I'd never known before". However his creativity did not suffer at all, proving that he was not reliant on drugs to create his masterworks. 




Crumb was often accused of being racist, unafraid to explore african american stereotypes in his work. However it's obvious he wasn't a true racist from his massive amount of respect towards  black blues and jazz musicians that he often expresses. Rather than simply condemning racism or pretending it didn't exist, Crumb dealt with the issue in a hillarious and transgressive way. 




Bad Trips are just as interesting and the good ones. The side of head culture that was burned out, fried in the brain and bummed out were some of Crumb's favorite topics. Asshole cops, white corporate men and crushing come-downs showed us the darker side of mankinds inner-space. 


While often sick and perverted, depressed and bleak his work could often raise a smile of zen-like wonder. Stoned revelations about the universe were as common as fucking in the 60's, and Crumb expressed them perfectly. 


Here's Mr. Natural, our guru and god, dispensing the kind of casual nihilism that makes me laugh with glee. Mr. Natural was the true guru of the 60's, who parodied the whole concept of hippy spirituality while embracing it at the same time. Mr. Natural was a perfect human being though - as often as he spoke words of love and peace he would end up in jail for molesting children or creating headless female robots. Maybe Crumb was attacking the whole idea of the guru by creating this kind of genius who would speak words of wisdom that his wide eyed hippy audience would glaze over one issue, only to turn him into a pervert next, just to fuck with their heads? 


SEXISM. "The only burning passion I'm sure I have is the passion for sex." When it came to sex this man was certainly a creep. Be blamed the sexism in his work on a fear of women rather than a hate and said the only way he deal with his problems was through his drawings. It seems like Crumbs most perverted works are a type of therapy, which isn't far from the truth. While I'm never one to condone any type of sexism, it seems like Crumbs solution to his innermost subconscious problems is a lot more moral and honest about the sick and depraved things we all think but keep bottled up. Note that he basically went from being the most pathetic nerd ever in High School who couldn't get a girl to even look at him to a famous underground artist that was craved by women - maybe that's part of his complex? 
I really like Phillip K. Dick so seeing Crumb do a strip on his imfamous 'religious experience' really made me feel good. 



His most acid fried moments are probably my favorite. I love the way he draws the aliens and the overall feeling of confusion this one relays. 


Crumb was a very tortured individual, which should be evident by now. "I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist." he said. Much of Crumbs work is just as a much a product of an overactive imagination as it is a tortured soul. However out of all his pain and suffering essentially came the invention of Alternative Comix - comics that dealt with anti-heroes rather than superheroes, where everyday can be torture rather than adventure, where acid induced visions replace traditional American values of justice and sexually explicit content is a hallmark rather than a reason for censorship. Because of his brutal honesty, his twisted mind and his limitless creativity Crumb is an artist that need to be explored by all.  


what my computer speakers are currently spewing:

Followers

About Me

My photo
i'm made of cells and I have a functioning brain