some sort of open letter to a diety. to be read with mitch hedberg's voice in mind, maybe. (for recreational purposes only, do not try at home)

and so i think really we either conquer the shit out of things, or we make tea and enjoy puppies. and it might seem best to conquer the shit out of other people's tea and puppies and then bring them back to enjoy your own tea and your own puppies when you got home, and you could put your feet up and have some bourbon and really enjoy how soft that particular new puppy is and how nice and warm and tasty that earl grey is, but then maybe not.

what are tea and puppies really, when you've spent the whole day conquering the shit out of things? (i mean, you really fucked shit up – you’ve got like 4 times as much land as yesterday!) i think, like, kind of like an old woman’s, unproductive waste of time really.

and what is conquering the shit out of things when you've spent the day making great fucking tea and getting to know your groovy puppies? (that one with the one ear that does that thing when he barks -- he's a fucking riot man, he really cares about you man!) i think the conquering seems like, kind of like a pointless rage of egoism and insensitivity, and a disgrace to other living things really there, guy.

so i think it's pretty hilarious that humans have been handed the potential for both conquering the shit out of things, and of caring deeply about the lives of puppies, and about the wonders of tea -- at the same goddamned time! we get all these cool tools like thumbs and brains and teeth and computers and lawyers to conquer the shit out of things, and all these subtle mysterious inclinations like love and compassion and ethical concerns, and the jesus guy, and the buddha guy, and other guys, and they come from the same building blocks, from the same pieces, from the same bucket of mixed up legos. some crazy shit to think about, man.

i don’t think there’s a dude there with a whitebeard, and a good aim with a lightning bolt, and a whole lotta veteran leadership, but i guess there are the the catholics and the hamas and the jews and the witnesses and the people who think the spaceship is comin(they've obviously decided, and when someone has decided, they are correct unless the rest of us conquer them so badly that history forgets them, and i'm quite enjoying my tea for now, thank you very much), but if he does exist, he surely is a funny, funny dude who quite obviously doesn't give a shit about puppies, or things, or tea. he’s got some wicked good shit to smoke – better than we've yet found, to enhance his enjoyment of all the observations he's probably lost interest in anyhow, so maybe he’s just listening to kid a, all starin’ off into space there, all ‘man, those horns are crazy,’ or busted stuff and he’s all like ‘tim is really good,’ and i’m like ‘man, tim isn’t on this album’ and shit. could be.

man, but you know, maybe not, and instead he’s got some wicked good tea and some pretty jivin’ puppies that do amazing tricks to keep his interest after conquering the universe and playing stupid tricks on all the jesuits and communists and spoiledrichsaudibastards and gandhi and brothers and sisters and acidheads and puppies that run around trying to be his friend.
man. god.

you're one craaaaaazy motherfucker man.

pretty good job though, so far man, i’d give you like a B-

t-rex and bluelips

dude is an extinct predator, but his teeth are never bloody.

dude is always really cold, but i never see his teeth chattering.

...

discuss.

a sort of moment

so i guess i just had one. listening to an old frat house recording of dave matthews playing #40. i wondered if i'd ever been present for such a moment. not with a mic handy, tape running, but at least a beer handy, memory running.

i asked the question of the room, directed indirectly at em and gem, em mashing tuna for a bagel tuna melt, gem waiting patiently for mistakes to hit the floor. i had a moment there, realizing my own thoughts about the universe, about art's slow estimation of where we ought to be.

i'm a singular being with moments that have importance to me. we spent a good part of the night tonight planning wedding things, conjecturing of the reliability of relatives, the travelbility of friends in far off states.

the tuna mashing and the patience is my love, and my love is subtly sending out its genius to my quiet listenhood. i'm here for this. i've got no tape running, but i'm here, and it's as good as it gets.

you think itzhak perlman would play our wedding?

can someone (out of the none of you) clarify something for me?

i'm trying not to listen, watch or involve my cares or brain in politics at all, but i'm curious if there's someone out of the none of you out there reading can clarify something for me: what is the harm in sitting down with some asshole iranian punk bitchass slop of pissed on yellow paper that came from a building made of some bricks and some mortar.... i forgot what i was talking about.... oh - and having a cup of coffee for an hour, telling him he's wrong, and he better get out of the 12th century, thanking him for the coffee, and flying back home?

it's supposedly naive to even suggest this - and i understand it would be pointless -- he's going to stay in the 12th century - but what exactly does it hurt? is it a pissing contest? i've never even heard of that pissing contest. usually pissing contests involve proving your strength by embracing confrontation - which diplomacy with a nutbag would be - not by giving the silent treatment.

i understand one theory - which seemed to work with arafat - that in the arab world, if you are irrelevant, you are essentially dead. and by not meeting with a country's leader, you are saying something about his real position -- but we can't barricade Ach!mydinner'shot!'s house, give him 'the hand,' and let him have a little timeout (like Israel/we did with arafat). Achmadidashot isn't just going to go away. he's a piss-ant, but he's not on the same level as arafat. arafat was a crook and a liar and a profiteer and a politician. Achtungbabyjad is a hateful, braindead, completely fucking off-his-rocker leader of a country full of people drinking the kool-aid he's handed out. we need to play the game. the biggest failure of the u.s. in reaction to islamofacismcrazyshit has been not to play the game - use the media and goodfaceness to fight some battles for us.

okay. please someone bring me some bourbon. i don't want to focus on this anymore. i want to listen to some piano jazz. i'll pull the lever when it's time to bomb some nuts if it gets to that point (i'm no pacifist, but i recognize incompetence when i see it - and we try to bomb anyone with a lever soon, it's all over folks - see post on 'the rules have changed'), but i really just want to drink myself stupid and turn the volume down on this campaign bullshit and turn the volume up on some bad plus. mmmmm.... whiskey and dave king on drums.

amusing post, lively discussion, my inevitable, dull opinion

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/09/23/the-hubbert-peak-theory-of-rock-or-why-were-all-out-of-good-songs/

my load of bullshit:

"i have to admit, i didn’t take the time to read all the comments. i am at work, and i do have to pretend somewhat that i’m typing up something very important.

so if i’m repeating anything that’s been discussed, sorry.

i think the general analogy to genres as oil fields that can be sucked dry is really missing the point, or one of the bigger points of the value of music. certainly, some value in music is to intrigue us, a la progressive technique - but two elements of modern music make that totally unnecessary to make something good, or even great.

first: music has the power to move without being different than things we’ve heard before (at least generally different - not the same notes w/ the same rhythm) - the abstract emotional power of beethoven’s seventh may have had progressive clout when first performed, but it doesn’t to listeners nowadays - it’s just gutwrenchingly powerful. there are musical formulas that have been proven to ‘work’ in affecting people, and recycling them doesn’t make them any less valuable - it still takes great craft to pull it off, in most cases.

second: words. lyrics. i happen to be a fan of folk music, but i recognize that powerful or interesting lyrics are the only reason folk survives. dylan wasn’t musically interesting, but people still listened. it translates, although maybe not in such a focused fashion, to other more ‘rockish’ music. it’s part of why i feel like radiohead has plateaued (recently slowed down progressive sense + can’t understand a damn word he says = i get bored w/anything after kid a), and why i can listen to soul coughing records that groove and groove again in much the same way.

so progress-ivity doesn’t make something great, and a lack of it doesn’t limit greatness. that being said, i am someone who prescribes to the notion that art should be an ever-expanding field, and that’s made possible by experimenting with new sounds and combinations. since i also think that art is essentially our way of very slowly realizing the aesthetic value of everything (all-inclusive), i try not to snobify and throw out the ‘old’ music that doesn’t intrigue our curious ear. artistic movements are moods of a specific subset of culture that get projected onto larger groups by institutions of art.

popular ‘rock’ will die and be reborn every so often, but good music never goes away. it just gets harder to find. i suppose one has to drill deeper."

shouting into an empty cave

i had radio show with andy billing in college called "nobody's listening." it was a weekend night show, and the signal from the station didn't even reach some dorms on campus. we usually drank whiskey in opaque containers and played lots of tom waits and les claypool. we had a giveaway once, it was for 2 tylenol to the first caller with a headache, and when no one called, i think we gave them to a guy who happened to wander past the window that looked out onto the commons.

with access to the studio when no one else bothered to stop by, we should have just disabled the webcam and permanently borrowed the condenser mics to record our own music. hindsight is 20/20 i suppose.

anyhow, i think the new unofficial name of this blog is "nobody's reading." yeah, i know, oh woe is me. first person to comment anything of substance gets one of the many mix cd's rolling around the floor of my car.

the most interesting thing you'll read during the time you're reading it. i promise.

There has been a great deal of discussion in a number of fields (philosophy of mind, ethics, cognitive science, etc.) about what place things like feelings, emotions, and so-called “non-rational” cognition have in our experiences. While there is certainly a great range of opinion about how separate these sorts of phenomenon are from conscious, calculated reflection, most agree that feelings and emotions are usually more immediate, and sometimes beyond our control to a degree. In philosophy, and in particular the study of ethics, this property has given feelings a 'secondary' sort of status as a guide for appropriate action and interaction. Rational thinking is often understood as a sort of calm, collected mediator to our unruly passions, and those passions, while sometimes reliable, are ‘not to be trusted’ entirely.

While I do think that thought and feeling are distinguishable as different sorts of experiences, I think feeling often informs our thoughts and ideas more than we realize, and that one really can’t exist without the other. This is hardly a revolutionary notion, but I think its application to ethics is an important one to make, and that giving feeling a primary position in our experience paints a more accurate picture of our processes. I would hold that our moral core is analogous to our experience of color, in that it cannot be communicated by reason alone. I certainly don’t discount the value of reason in the process of our judgments, but this premise, that feeling is the foundation on which we base our reason, I think is much more satisfying than that which places a calculator at our core – for calculators have no real meaning, lest we feel the numbers are doing some good in the world.