Trackback
That’s interesting, I posted a link to a review David Blaine did of my 2nd book here, and the whole post appeared automatically as a comment under the review on the outsiderwriters website. They must also be using WordPress too, I guess?
That’s interesting, I posted a link to a review David Blaine did of my 2nd book here, and the whole post appeared automatically as a comment under the review on the outsiderwriters website. They must also be using WordPress too, I guess?
Only 21 cds in January, and I haven’t posted my first Feb chunk until the 9th! So bad. But, it is the big slush season in Western NY, Jan/Feb/March have a way of sucking at your soul, grey skies and crusty black snow piles, sudden warm spells that tease one with sunlight, then back into snow… I like snow, but that’s a different story, I’m making excuses.
115-XXX)
Once upon a time, a charming young sitarist named Ravi woke to find monsoon season had come early, and with much suddenness (Ravi Shankar: The Sounds of India). The rain beat at his roof relentlessly, and found its way through every hole in the thatch. In fact, Ravi woke, despite the fur that the previous evening’s party had stuffed into his skull, because one very fat raindrop landed exactly on the bridge of his nose. “Oh, bother,” Ravi thought; “I suppose I will have to go find someone to rethatch my roof, once the monsoon is over. In the meantime, I had better find somewhere else to live!” So Ravi took his sitar and an umbrella and set off on the path to the city, listening to the ragas that the rain played on the leaves, 5 note patterns all.
After walking for half a day, Ravi stopped to rest beneath a plane tree. He took out his sitar and began playing an afternoon raga. Before he had made his way twice through the movement, he felt a strange, wet, sandy sensation on his wrist, and turned to see a bright yellow frog stabbing at him with his tongue. “Hello,” the frog said, in a froggy voice. “Why, hello,” said Ravi, “how are you, Mr…?
“Bob,” said the frog.
“Mr. Bob?” Ravi answered.
“No, Mr. Holroyd,” said the frog, “but call me Bob” (Bob Holroyd: without within).
“Ah, Bob,” Ravi said. “And why do you lick at me with your sandy tongue, Mr. Bob?”
“Just Bob. Ribbit. I’m a musician too, ya know,” Bob replied. “I play chill-out music. And like that.”
Ravi looked at the frog and said nothing. And said nothing. And said nothing.
“You wanna hear some?” Bob said, once he could bear the silence no longer.
“Yes, you are Bob, yes? I forgot. Did I hear the music already?” Ravi asked, and stood up and continued walking toward the city. Bob hopped up onto Ravi’s shoulder and kept talking: “I make ambient world music. I play the mixing board, and Reason, and Acid”–”what are these instruments?” Ravi interjected.
“Do you want some E?” Bob answered.
“Yes, thank you, are you a girl?” Ravi replied, and together the two musicians continued toward the city, chatting happily under the umbrella.
Soon, the road began to grow steep, and Ravi and Bob had some trouble making their way through the mud. After some messy clambering, they arrived at a small, bent building painted a furious lime green. The sign in front of the building read “Templ Uv Psychick Youth” (Psychic TV: Dreams Less Sweet). Ravi pulled at a rope that hung beside the sign, and the sound of a goat braying into a vat of crumbled wax paper echoed from within. It seemed there was no door, but before the goat had brayed thrice, the travelers heard a creaky, exhausted voice warbling at them from all directions: “Oh, very boring, very boring, is that a frog?”
Ravi and Bob turned in a circle, and then in another circle, and then in a third circle, and they became dizzy and fell in the mud. When they looked up again, they saw: Mr. G.
to be continued…
I was in one of those rent-a-space collective antique stores the other day, this one in downtown Lockport, and a group of folks were yappin’ about McCain and Obama, about bailing out Wall street, and so forth. The group’s republican voice sounded totally disillusioned with his parties’ manic candidate, as well he should be, but what was most interesting to me was his characterization of Obama as “just a kid from the South Side of Chicago.” The Obama’s-too-young theme is pretty standard, and I hadn’t thought much about it till that moment, but it really is a striking blend of anti-intellectualism and racism. Obama sounds like what he is: a very smart man, one who doesn’t need to show off his intellect (folks who need to show off that way generally aren’t very smart, in my experience), and that manner of address is threatening to a fairly large portion of the population. Add his blackness to his intellectualism and the result is a theme that tries to infantilize him by calling him too young, lacking in wisdom, and so forth. I’m sure if he was white the theme would be similar (see JFK, for example), but it is double-edged when applied to a minority group that historically has been cast as “child-like.” The more McCain acts like a petulant teen, the more Obama looks like a grown-up. The question, then, is how many citizens have been too infantilized themselves by crappy consumerism and poor education to ever vote for a grown-up? Hell, he might tell us to go clean our rooms.
I also realized, while in the store, that I should visit every one of Lockport’s many bars and blog about each one. Not all at the same time, of course, I would end up dead. So, that will be my next project. In the meantime, I have some poems up at decomP.
Though I feel bad for his wife, and even a bit for the man himself, I can’t help but feel a little giddy about the whole Spitzer fiasco. The epic rise and fall, the ridiculously obvious hypocrisy of an ethics reformer with an immoral habit; it couldn’t be better scripted. People who study the brain and how we pay attention to things often analyze how we separate foreground and background, and one way to make people focus and respond to something in the visual field is to have a stark contrast between an object in the foreground and those in the background. Same with sound, I would think, and smell and in fact all our sensory tools. The Spitzer case is intriguing because, like in Greek tragedy, the central character has a tragic flaw, a characteristic that creates an almost grotesque set of contrasts within the character, a set of contrasts that make observers both entranced and confused, since most of us will feel a need to try and resolve the contradictions: how could he think he would not get caught? Which leads, again to Greek tragedy: just as Oedipus had no choice, his fate was sealed, how much of Spitzer’s activity was the result of conscious choice? Of free will? And how much was compulsion… Roy Baumeister recently addressed the question of various stages of free will in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science; that journal is a behind a firewall, but this quote from the abstract provides a glimpse:
”Human evolution seems to have created a relatively new, more complex form of action control that corresponds to popular notions of free will. It is marked by self-control and rational choice, both of which are highly adaptive, especially for functioning within culture. The processes that create these forms of free will may be biologically costly and therefore are only used occasionally, so that people are likely to remain only incompletely self-disciplined, virtuous, and rational.”
Baumeister, Roy F. “Free Will in Scientific Psychology.”Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (1), 14-19. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-6916.2008.00057.x