Hot and Cold

I think often of living overseas. I am very concerned about the oil crisis lately. Europe, England, and some previous lands the British colonized have infrastructure that was created before the oil boom. America on the other hand, is a country that won it's power, and was raised to heights because of oil. The difference in highways, cities, and rural areas compared with the majority of the rest of the world is a clear indicator. Though those countries have now much macadam, the underlying architecture in many areas still lends itself more to small communities. You see this still in city areas, but suburbia is a goner. I think we'll still have some electric before I die, however everything we can think of when we think forward--or perhaps just this idiot writing--runs on oil. Some part of it's history, somewhere on the road to potentially available, involves oil, and usually some kind of human slavery. Forty million slaves, roughly, now days--unseen and sequestered from the real world. Did you know that motions that have anything like the word, 'inequality' in their title don't usually get sponsored financially? Christyia Freeland recently wrote a book about it. Take this and scale it beyond reasonable, and you have some idea of the difficulty we face as a species.

In all history, there is a subjected group, and a benefiting group - these are my terms, and reflect idiots understanding. The wider the base of subjects, the more the benefit. Rome is a clear example, however so is Babylon, Ur, and especially ancient Egypt.

The picture of these slaves represent the gold used in making products like the computer I type this on, and the smartphone I'll read this later on. It's the only way these electronic devices work so quickly and cheaply. Gold is a magnificent conductor, so we better get it cheap; but it's hard to claw from the ground after the burst in population (mimics oil use) and the idea that everyone should have it all. So the answer? Subject your own species through fear, and keep it obscure enough that the majority doesn't have a revolt in their consciousness, and we're pretty trapped deep. I mean writing about how it sucks, is being done on a device made through and through with oil (plastics, transportation, etc. etc.) and simultaneously supports slavery. That's my computer...you know, those devices that are more than a passing fad?

Back to the narrative: after Rome, France, Germany, England, then, America grows--and she discovers the use of oil. When this spreads to the other worlds, all reeling from not being the ruling super power anymore (Greece anyone?) then we see oil based empires rise across the world. The old war of Greeks and Persians is today played out for oil, and still uses the reasons we as a species created in the Middle Ages. The turn to Humanism was born from intellectual cross-pollination during the fifteenth century, so all the rampant 'individuality' and 'choice' that people love in their redefined, temporary epochs, would be totally lost without the Muslims that came up through North Africa into Spain. Where do you think St. Augustine and St. Aquinas got their understandings of the Greeks?

So we stand here today, or generally sit--for more than four hours a day in the 'developed world' (the new nomenclature for the last centuries, '1st world') and we have this whole history of perspective available to us, just like the people before we breathed this air, yet we play out their roles. When the printing press was invented by Gutenberg in the Fifteenth Century, there was a devastating affect to the spread of materials as seen by the ruling body (this mirrors, prefigures, and is incredibly important to the rise of the Protestant sect of Christianity and the subsequent divisions thereof). This was their internet, this was their smart phone, this was their tablets.

As they had workers and slaves, we too have those, just on an international scale thanks to cheap energy. By the way, if you don't think energy is cheap, a gallon is about eleven dollars in India, and three to four dollars in America - then imagine a gallon of Starbucks coffee - it would be like fifteen dollars with current prices of a grande at $1.95 with a personal cup discount. Three to four dollars explains our defense budget almost single handedly when compared with world oil prices--think of it as really cheap liquid...even bottled water at roughly two dollars for sixteen ounces would equal about sixteen dollars a gallon!

The places that have oil available cheaper? We war with them and simultaneously sell them our older weapons; cause you know, oil makes everything you and I take for granted. That hot shower in a tub? More people than not don't have that luxury. Heat? Ever heard of a blanket and suffering through the cold? Even our cancer, horrible, saddening, miserable, disheartening, soul-sucking, and who gives great joy in beating away, is a problem that comes after we've sufficiently secured clean drinking water. It is why THE FRESHWATER is the name of everything I do; it's basic, and a lot of people don't have it. We look upon history and our own parents and wonder why they didn't contribute to the same end--the security of the species--and as we have this thought, we remember to "be the change we wish to see in the world" and suddenly my love of all things Apple makes me complicit in murder. A diamond? Ha! There is one place I've heard of in Canada where the miners aren't basically slaves. In fact, in ninety plus percent of the cases our diamonds come from actual slaves--families held hostage, wives and daughters raped in front of their husbands and fathers eyes who have their eyes held open at gunpoint and threat of death to their other smaller children, limbs cut off, tortured or 'disappeared.' They probably don't think about a heater going out, or a constant lack of money--the idea of even owning to them is lost; they think only of being able to be another day, and some think of escaping (though often found the torture is inflicted even worse upon their homes and extend through generations that are not able to be generative anymore).

You know how we are arguing about social security for the elderly and presuming that our generation will have to deal with the economics of its failure? Well, when it was written, taxes were in the seventy percent for the wealthiest. We scaled personal wealth, but kept the legislated sharing up to the kind hearts of money hoarders; then we convinced everyone--everyone and anyone that we could, in any way that we could--that they should also do that. We became the oil for the markets engine, and the engines of our lives, run entirely on the depleting substance.

So I was born in the heat, and mostly raised in the cold. If I don't make a decision in twenty years, I may be paddling across the Pacific when I'm seventy. The Atlantic would probably be better. The sense of adventure and danger would have to re-enter man.

The Age of Boldness would necessarily be ushered in.

I hope we are the ones that bring it, and not the ones that need to react with it. Our species is generally reactive, and I think C. Jung was right, if we can begin moulding these ideals on micro scales, we can finally--as cohesively as possible--make macro shifts in our relationship to one another, and especially to this life-sustaining rock, wholly unconcerned with the people upon her; gently responsive to all of the activity, and who will outlast us more than any lack of oil, and speed and intensity of war, or any plague. The information we make is ultimately only as long as life, and on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. 

So I think of moving back to the heat, or near the equator. I like the inland not because I don't love the ocean, but I believe the coast is the first to sink. The culture will have to spread inwards. Swarms of culture is an easy way to visualize it.

Another Record for Life Lived

I'm thrilled to introduce you to the second of a three album arc -

On October 30th, 2012, at 9:30, I'll be playing at Canal Street Tavern to commemorate my 'Roaring Twenties' and look ahead to the fourth decade of my time here (to commence mere hours later on October 31st). ROSEBUSH & THE PURSUIT OF DREAMS will be available, with digital release scheduled for Q1 2013. If you can make it, I hope to see you there, I'll be playing for a potent 30 minutes. I'd be honored to entertain you, sharing some new and old songs with you. 

For those interested further, here's a quick story about this album: 

Throughout 2011 - from March, through November, I woke up at 5 AM and drove to Nashville, TN. I would arrive around 10 AM Nashville time, and begin recording nearly right away. We would go relentlessly, with few breaks, till 8 PM when I would get a copy of our work that day, and listen to it repeatedly on the way back to Ohio at around 1 AM.

We only had the honor of playing this circus out five or six different days throughout the year--but those days were deeply lived, and all the juice from the always over-ripe fruit of life was relieved through our thorough mastication of time. This album is a record of those days, and the songs on it point to days before, during, and after its studio capture; it's about a three year effort, and we think you'll really enjoy it. Hope to see you at Canal Street Tavern in Dayton, Ohio, on October 30th at 9:30.

Wandering

I'm just writing a long paper about interesting things. It's super tiring.
I've also been reading scripts and looking for the architecture. I have some good notes as fun guidelines, along with clear cues for casting, sound, movement, sets, director, producer, and actor.

Writing this paper has me with the blessing of a random song selection and my courage to let any feelings rush in and out of my heart (not getting much sleep and working too much can have a meditative quality, I assure you--it's just to be used sparingly is all). That said, Wandering, by Johnny Cash comes on--I've written about it before, but it led me here, wandering around in my mind.

I'm going to help my mom set up a blog unless she already has. She's the most righteous. Surmounting the self is the highest peak we all climb and die upon.

My beard is strong these days, it takes only few days to grow.

1   EXT.  A DESERT - SANDSTORM - DUSK               1

A body silhouetted by the sand carries a dead child. We can hear wailing. Grains of sand swirl in tornadoes threatening to choke the whole world breathless. There is a stillness amongst the chaos. 

The silhouette fades around an imposing figure. ASH. He looks like he's been on fire for decades. A broken pillar of ideals. Sand caked to his lost mouth. He's not sure if he's still alive. 

OLIVIA (O.S)

I never met a man I hated as much as Ashlyn Joseph DeZousa. 

Better wander back to my homework. 

Goodnight. 

Harry gets a letter

So, as said in my previous post about enjoying the process. I found video editing software for a mobile device and stayed up for an hour between three am and four am to make the following trainwreck.

What's fantastic, is that just one project focused on doing--with no intention of sharing--led to the discoveries that will make the next video just a little better; at minimum I'll at least have a plan for what song and what images to use.

This was comprised of a song from over two years ago, where we're off pitch in a few sections. The sketches are from six years ago and some of the videos are from March and others from just sending stupid messages out to friends because in the future, videos can be shot and travel to your friends while you drive. It's pretty neat. Basically, whatever was loaded on my iPhone and iPad was used in this tester to see how cross-fades and camera movements and frame-by-frame refinements could be made. This was more for the creator than the end user, but I'm still going to enjoy sharing it.

Maybe I'll take this down, but right now, after a long three weeks and a long two more coming up, I'm feeling frisky and am focused on the importance of process. Without further hesitation, here's the video.

Enjoy:

Loudly, on Silence

I will tell you why I have little to say. It is because I am very, very little.
One can use the term insignificant, it means nothing to me anyways.

I want to create more than I consume.
The thing about creation is that you do so much of it that sometimes you have to take a break and decide what you want to share--that break is not really coming.

The process of creation is simply a process, and it starts with about a years worth of observations and attempts from me before my creations begin looking something like what I thought.

The process is also dynamic as any creator would tell you, so unlike God, often I'm being transformed by my attempts.

Daily I write a script, or a story, or some freakish hybrid of both--the idea is just writing, not outcome.
I take a character, and put him or her in a place. I give them a series of adventures, and let me tell you, some of them are just terrible, and none are really any good, yet; of course, that isn't really the point--and isn't that the point?

If you begin reading movie scripts on a regular basis before you watch the films they became you find the importance of nuance, and the great trepidation from which creation can be born. Conversely, bold creation is also a blessing--and for me, that exists mostly with songs.

Film takes time, a lot of time; even a music video for a few minutes takes a shit load (technical term) of time to plan, storyboard, capture, manipulate, edit and process. All of those steps stand on the throat of creation. The love of digital capabilities grows accordingly.

For the really great stuff, I will use film. I'll be lucky to do that even once in my lifetime. Hopefully many times, but really, I'm no filmmaker, yet, not even in practice. I'm interested in the medium's ability to capture and train imagination so that it forces the unsuspecting deeper down into Wonderland. I believe that trip down is what helps us enable joy.

The future is always new, because any conception of it is based on our previous and current processing; the future, however, will not be so tame. It is unknown, and the very nature of speculative thought is impossible to convey articulately. It's what the ancient world knew before The Age of Reason kicked emotions out of the room of rhetorical value.

Dreams of the future therefore also consist in a series of end games. In a land of Capitalists, the consumer is inundated with the best 'new', and as the tired old tale is becoming, with a shorter attention span; as if philosophical training is anti-American--though when considering our national proclivity for pragmatism, at once one understands what Alexis de Tocqueville is driving at in the first sentence of his second volume of "Democracy in America."

The fact that most Americans wouldn't even read this, let alone wonder why the quote referenced above isn't linked easily here is exactly what I mean by the pragmatism of our industrial model superseding the desire to explore and discover. Discovery takes a relinquishment of the end, and I know some of us have been saved from this, and I have supposed that it's why we feel like outsiders, or as I like to refer to a thinker and a lover, the Mad ones.

Being sold on the end goal, humanity forgets the importance of how that end is reached. People these days are more concerned with their branding than their products viability; and the viability of the product is only important if that is also considered to be a value of the brand. If someone has a shitty brand name, perhaps KIA motors, but a substantial product, then it makes sense why we're still not so sure about those 'Korean Import Automobiles.' If something has a great brand, say the iPhone, then even though there are more powerful devices, there is a security in purchasing Apple (ps. I'm still a fan boy for Apple, so my bias must be taken into account.)

In the end then, the celebration of process gets lost among the glitz and glamour of the end result. It's the subtle pincer that disables our creativity and keeps the majority of us solely consumers. From clicking around the internet to watching television, we are all passively taking in, yet not considering the latent affect on our imaginations--many look at media to quell too-busy minds, instead of using this amazing proliferation to sniff out desires. If you're reading this, then you're one of us that do this to varying degrees.

Perhaps that's why I've not been writing on here very much. I realized how much of it is self-serving shit, and I can do that elsewhere before taking my mind public. What you, internet stranger, read here, is the process, and yet it appears as the end result.

Hopefully I'll get over myself enough shortly (I'm certain I will) to put up some more of my process here. The next steps are pedantic music videos. So that ought to be a blast to laugh at and enjoy--which can be mutually exclusive if I do my job half-properly and focus on stretching my limits to the point of surfacing glaring deficiencies for future refinement.

Exposing your process is a weird and fulfilling feeling. The future may have a greater appreciation for it, I wouldn't know, my imagination--like yours--is filled with the end results. Perhaps being insanely ourselves, the being and becoming of the 'it' and the 'I' is the new future.

It's also so funny how much like Man I am. The process includes so much speculative thought about oneself, that it dichotomizes  the person from nature; that is to say, in conclusion, that it separates the process from the product.

Come then, let's make the future today, and be concerned primarily only about the next step in our macro evolution, created on a micro scale.

Karn

Rock, and roll.

Playing Canal Street in Dayton, Ohio again on September 25th at 11:30 pm (no one expects you to come) and October 30th--which will be a big bash, because it's at 9:30 pm, and 2.5 hours later I'll be thirty years old. I'll also have albums available that night.

I hope you enjoy this song; would love hearing your comments and see you soon.

Rock rock. 

Recognize

Certainly we can speak about Truth and Absolutes and the historical context of our science of interpretation giving rise to its own need for narrow proliferation in scientific principal, but I think we should have that conversation while staring, completely awestruck that one another is being. 

The Great Wave of Kanagawa

He loved the act. All his passion raged towards it, alone in any environment. In any form he wanted the act. The bang of the keys on a keyboard were his impressions on the saxophone during dangerous jazz-songs from upstate New York in the early nineteen-sixties; he ached for the scratch of the fountain pen on thick paper and the stroke of a brush; the mechanistic nature of a typewriter, and the pedantic technology in a word processor were his fetish.

He was in the woods, in a dream, and his fingers dug into the dirt around the roots of the tree he leaned his head upon. His loin cloth was his only covering but for mud over all the rest. His hair was strangely familiar and matted beyond fashionable.  He writhed and his eyes spun beneath his eyelids; grabbing a clump of clay as he feels the heat from a freshly printed page and the final ding on the typewriter singing cautiously that only a few more characters and he’ll be typing in outer space. The sniff of a book, the dust of ancient thinkers and crowded places enchants him, and he wakes up.

The sun is on his face and blinding him, the air is humid, and messy; covering his eyes he sees there, in the dried mud on his arm, a faded note from before he slept. He turns his head and the world seems to fall on its side again, the note is written backwards. He stumbles up, goes to a freshwater stream, drinks copiously—making sure to keep his forearm dry so as not to lose the message—proceeds to wrestle the most beautiful man he’d ever seen with matted hair, nearly drowns since he was fighting one-armed, and then uses the freshwater's surface to read the reflection of the old message on his arm. It read, “You're never really awake when life's such a dream.” He looks down, at his feet, and then he's gone.

-The Madman Laughs at Everything

Legception

Venus and the Solar System

Listen, I know I’m supposed to be doing homework, and I’ll get to that in just a few minutes; if you know, then you know I simply have to write. You see the thing is that there is this remarkable glow outside; I’m almost always working when the day becomes a spinning loom of vibrant blonde, and today I was lucky enough to be allowed off work a few hours early.  I will perhaps go back to work after I complete this pressing schoolwork—in any event, actions.

            Yesterday Venus passed over the face of the sun for the last time in our century. It will be the twenty-second century before she appears again.  I looked, and even created a pinhole camera to view the sun with safely.  Alas, Dayton Ohio’s spotty clouding and my relentless need to work had my observation relegated to the experience of speaking with a friend about it, downloading an app that told me the time it was passing over based on my location (on my twenty-first century ‘smartphone’) and finally watched it on the local weather on my twenty-first century television and cable system. 

            Today is the rest of our century; we will never see Venus in the same way.

            Isn’t it the same truth for every moment? My Madness speaks of this in its second chapter.  “Every moment is a funeral and a birthday.” – 2:2

             The next set of people that want to see it but can’t, will have their own ways of experiencing it, and we will live with them.  It is remarkable how naked we are and how little we have to lose—the trick really is that we don’t have a damn thing to lose.  Life has no prescriptive method towards itself in the same way psychologically that it does fundamentally in the psychical world.  The fact that we need water is not the same as we need success, especially considering how much more complex the simple emotion of satisfaction is. 

So too, the conception of ideal as defined by our current Western culture—and predominate majority of international media—and as such, its definition of success is fundamental only to its particular context; even if the current context is reviewing an aggregate of other reviews—the language contains the code to be broken, and the actions must come first.

What is really amazing to me, here in the final spinning gold of the day after yesterday, is that when lazy Venus again dances where we can see; when she again seems to seductively graze the surface of our solar systems sun, on that day, she'll be very similar to who she is today, and we'll be nothing; and while we're nothing, she'll hold the same face, the same slow crawl, the same promise to appear in a pair (last time she was visible to us was 2004) and then disappear to another place until our century catches up.  That far out, they'll never know us, they couldn't, only what it seems like to them from the perspective they see their history--and who knows if we'll even be in there? Venus though, she'll be there, watching them, waiting for them to fade into the solid past. Eventually the sun will eat everything and then let loose it's swelling storehouse of hydrogen and helium, the solar system colder, and a planet sized diamond where once our source of energy was. 

Pray that we be bold. My Madness speaks of this in its first chapter, in the first section, and in fact in the first slot of apothegms. “Be.” Madness 1:1

            Pray that we go and do likewise. We have only dreams to lose. The world is our crucible; we may enjoy the martyrdom or die in agony.