brion and bill...

...dreamed a machine to transcend the threshold where their drug addled analytics end and something else all together begins. today these two would be considered terrorists to be profiled and watched. bill talked often of his recipes for homemade botulism and other weapons of mass terror. and why? who knows. bill was a trust fund kid. perhaps they had too much. bill didn't only outlive his peers, he hurried them to their deaths with debauched pleasure, his own Constitution superhuman in its ability to stay high for nine decades. dream machine is all that's left. and iggy pop.

Rashoman

Rashoman is probably one of the best films in terms of examining the human condition and our inhumanity. Janus Films has just remastered it and apparently it's going to be making the rounds in theaters. For those of you in SF and NYC please take advantage as I very much doubt we'll get the pleasure here in Halifax. Kurosawa is by far my favourite film director (I'm not much of a film buff) and Toshiro Mifune never disappoints.

earth day = humans day

what am I doing for earth day? well I rode my bike to work in the pissing spring rain. please hold your applause. riding my bike to work is not going to "save our planet."

this may get a little ranty so cool your boots.

We’ve been getting duped for a long time with this earth day bullshit. Now everyone is “green” and every company offers a “green” product line. You can pledge monthly tithing’s to save: whales, wolves, hawks, beaches, frogs and trees. Hell you can even pledge to send some poor belly full of worms kid in a developing country to school. You can put their picture on your fridge and smile each time you go for your next beer. But really what it all boils down to is saving our own asses.

Before I get too cynical let I re-direct.

We are animals. Unlike other animals like iguanas in the Galapagos Islands, we do not speciate. This means that we are not limited by geographic location as we can adapt to live in any part of our earth. Like the iguana, we have a habitat which needs a basic level of natural functioning to support the life of the iguana. Any radical changes in the Galapagos sea iguanas’ environment and it will die. This is the same for us. However, because we can adapt so easily, and we can eat and digest just about anything, our habitat is not as easily derailed as say that of a really specialized animals like the marine iguana of the Galapagos.

All I’m saying through the above obvious statement is that we need to be honest with ourselves and with the language we use. We are destroying our own habitats. Some have destroyed theirs so completely that it doesn’t support them any longer and they must rely on aid. Haiti is the perfect example. I won’t waste any virtual ink on the blaming game as to who is responsible for the most damage to our habitat (we all know it’s the developed countries). The bottom line is that if you shit in your cage then you gotta sleep in your shit.

So what is the answer? How do we fix things? According to some it may be too late but perhaps the most powerful thing anyone in a developed country can do to help preserve their “own” habitat is to radically cut down on their total consumption of resources. I will leave it that as I intended this to be more linguistic discussion than an ethical argument about consumerism environmentalism.

Happy Humans Day!

Zorba is recession proof

in times of bankruptcy and failing governments, and rising sea levels, and depleted fish stocks, and poisoned rivers, and suicide mass murderers in Germany and the US, and religious zealotry, and pollution, overpopulation, and consumerism over humanism -there's still always hope.

flow like water, subvert when necessary and be like Zorba, full of love of music and dance, fueled with a passion for good food, drink and friendships. this one goes out to Matty, the good Doctor and most importantly my dear Dad, who's always taught me the value of integrity and to avoid the love of things. for as Malcolm Johnson quotes from Snyder in his last entry : "the best things in life are not things."

the virtue of ego

on my way in to work this morning I was thinking about the ghetto boys. I felt like my mind was playin tricks on me and I was wrestling my way out. what kinda tricks? dirty ones. ones that make you feel like you know where you stand when in fact you’re about to sink in quicksand.

a while ago Foulweather wrote an insightful piece on community and the Internet.

“I fear people are seeking community here at the expense of real community, taking social risks 'online' but barely able to have meaningful interactions with their neighbors. It is going to catch up to us. There's nothing better than going a way from computers, cell phones and all that shit and having to actually interact with real live physical people.”

the internet gives us a false sense of community. I say false because although we do create some sort of community through our blogs or forums or the scourge that is social networking sites such as fecalbook, it is all based on words and images which may or may not reflect anything about our individual day to day lives. knowingly or not we build these virtual persona and social groups which exist primarily in our heads and fingertips.

you may ask what is wrong with that. isn’t it the way of the future?

remember that sci-fi film a while back when the guy goes into the future and meets a girl. he thinks that they are about to have sex when suddenly she sits him down and hands him some sorta helmet with which they will make a virtual romantic experience. the irony of course being that they are in a room, alone, sitting mere inches from each other –the perfect conditions for a true intimate experience.

the point I’m trying to make is that we are already separated enough from the natural world tucked away in our offices and cars and malls. and now with our “internet communities” we are separating ourselves even farther from a natural experience. humanity separated itself from nature a long time ago with its “taming” of nature and creation of the scientific method. this intellectual separation from nature has had many ill side effects which have been written about and documented by the same said scientists. however, this current separation that is taking place from natural human relationships is still new and can have massive potential downfalls.

in the immediate I write these words as a didactic self exercise –exorcism. I want to remind myself that what gives me meaning is making dinner with B each night, or meeting a certain dark one at the crack of dawn for a dip in the turbulent north Atlantic, or making lots of double shot espressos with my co-worker all day long to see if we can hallucinate from too much caffeine.

this space is no more than a sounding board for my ego, a way for me to learn to express myself with the ultimately ineffectual written word (more on this topic some other time).

I leave with the classic from Bushwick Bill and crew.

kalle lasn (monkey see -do)

L.A.: But what about the good ideas? Do they really come from cyber these days, as some people are saying?

Kalle Lasn: I don’t know, I’m from the old school. I don’t see it yet. I see a lot of frenetic activity in cyberspace, but a lot of it is like the postmodern hall of mirrors. It’s just people sending email messages to each other, hand on the mouse, and you think that you’ve done something great if you get some big idea here and send an email to your friend, and pass it on, and you think you have made some sort of a big thing for the day. I don’t actually see too many really new ideas coming out of cyberspace yet. I see a lot of new ideas still coming out of philosophers, musicians, thinkers, sociologists, a few economists. I think that the big ideas are still coming out in the traditional way, and then they start to reverberate within cyberspace. They are amplified there in cyberspace.

for the rest of the interview go to adbusters

soundbites for this reading provided by dub.com dubcast #6

Identity - the Newfie

OK I’m not much for forwarded email jokes at work but this one here is different. It deals with identity. It also makes humor of language. I love language. And dialectical differences too –and tone. When I first met B and she learned I was Venezuelan she asked if my older brother had an accent. She was referring to a Latino accent, since English was our second language. I thought for a moment and replied that yes, my brother does have an accent but I refused to show her what it sounded like. Many months later when the two finally met B was shocked to learn that my brother’s accent was actually a thick southern drawl. We still get a laugh out of that.

In the Maritimes there a several regional accents that I can recognize and I’m sure that there are many more subtle ones which pass me by. The most pronounced regional accents come from the people of Cape Breton and also from Newfoundland. Below is an example of a Newfie accent (at least from the original author’s perspective). It highlights both the language and clever and picaresque ways of the Newfie stereotype.


A Newfie wants a job, but the foreman won't hire him until he passes a little math test.

“Here is your first question” the foreman says.
“Without using numbers, represent the number nine.”
“Without numbers?” says the Newfie. “Dat is easy” he says and proceeds to draw three trees.

“What’s this?” the boss asks.
“Ave you got no brain? Tree and tree and tree make nine” replies the Newfie.
“Fair enough,” says the boss.
“Here's your second question. Use the same rules, but this time the number is ninety nine.”

The Newfie stares into space for a while, then picks up the picture that he has just drawn and makes a smudge on each tree.
“Ere you go.” The boss scratches his head and says, “how on earth do you get that to represent ninety nine?”
“Each of da trees is dirty now. So, it's dirty tree, and dirty tree, and dirty tree. Dat is ninety nine.”

The boss is getting worried that he's going to actually have to hire this Newfie, so he says, “all right, last question. Same rules again, but represent the number one hundred.”

The Newfie stares into space some more, then he picks up the picture again and makes a little mark at the base of each tree and says, “Ere you go. One hundred.”

The boss looks at the attempt.
“You must be nuts if you think that represents a hundred!”

The Newfie leans forward and points to the marks at the base of each tree and says,

“a little dog come along and crap by each tree. So now you got dirty tree and a turd, dirty tree and a turd, and dirty tree and a turd, which makes one hundred.'

“So, wen do I tart boss?”