Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Shards

Two and a half weeks until school is done. I can start playing music again. Three BMO songs finished, two of which involve scatological humour (my inner child needs a break sometimes too).The one is called "I'm Going to Need Another Autopsy, Scully", which is pretty self-explanatory, I think. Interview for two jobs today. Finish making brown stock this morning. Go see Until the Light Takes Us with pals tonight. Go to activist meeting beforehand to talk about risk assessment. Finish paper that was due yesterday. Look at potential new apartment tomorrow. Possible book review with program director/mentor next week. No time for complete thoughts or sentences, just straight ahead forward, one goddamn maniac fueled on caffeine and grindcore, skirting disaster and collapse, because I'll deal with those later thank you very much.

Hello Edward Burtynksy, could you stay away from the next 30 days of my life, please?

Essentials for spring living: Defeatist - The Sixth Extinction and Sharp Blade Sinks Deep Into Dull Minds, Human Remains - Where Were You When..., various Edward Burtynsky photos, Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain, Jeru the Damaja - The Sun Rises in the East, Dr. Octagon - Dr. Octagynocologist, Disfear - Misanthropic Generation, the way that the 2006 Sokol Blosser Dundee Hills Pinot I opened last night slowly evolved, The X-Files: Season 2



Thursday, March 18, 2010

Pattern Recognition

Back to the monastary. Another few weeks of sleepless nights and it's all gone. Let's see if I can come down clutching some more wisdom tightly to my breast, hmmmm? Time to defer to the master, I suppose:

"For we are like tree trunks in the snow. They appear to lie flat and with a small push one should be able to dislodge them. No, it can't be done, because they are firmly planted in the ground. But, look, even that only appears to be so."
- Kafka

Roots: Combatwoundedveteran - I Know a Girl Who Develops Crime Scene Photos, Discordance Axis - The Inalienable Dreamless, Dinosaur Jr. - You're Living All Over Me, Josef K - Only Fun in Town/Sorry For Laughing, The Flying Luttenbachers - The Truth is a Fucking Lie, Greymachine - Disconnected

Monday, March 15, 2010

In which the author reaches for a higher plane of existence and grabs on to ... something.

The sun is out. It's gorgeous, it feels like summer. I'm done classes in less than four weeks and I'm thinking about my future. I'm applying for jobs (or I would be if I wasn't writing this blog). I'm sitting down and focusing, and for me focusing isn't the blank screen or the nothingness of the Buddhists, but it's having all channels on at once and letting myself become overwhelmed in the glorious overload of information and sensory inputs. Let the images and messages make themselves clear, because thinking of everything is the same as thinking about nothing but nothing.

You can write about it in a formula if it helps. Isaac Asimov worked it out: that we exist, because we have to exist, because we cannot possibly exist, and it can be proved with math if you believe in that sort of thing. 0 ± 0 = 0, nothing equals nothing, which really means that everything equates to nothing, everything that is nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit - out of nothing comes nothing - or creatio ex nihilo - out of nothing comes everything, all the same, because 0 ± 0 = -1 + 1 = ∞ ± ∞. Nothing can exist without everything, because nonexistence constitutes existence, and everything cannot "be" without nothing, therefore nothingness is not possible without something(ness), thus all there is is everything, converging at a point in the middle of the existential contrast, the droning God-loop equilibrium, the circle of life, Ouroborous circling hungrily in pursuit of his own tail, and so on.


Doesn't this make so much more sense than that horrible run-on sentence?


Back to the point at hand and the matter in question. What I'm doing, where I'm going, all of that. Point is, there's nothing in store for me, but there is everything for me. I've never had a chance, not even a small one, and the moment is lost like tears in rain (score one for Rutger Hauer's on the spot revelation, where he too probably saw into the void) before it even happened, but that's because even where it doesn't exist it will always exist, and energy is never lost or destroyed, but just transferred (thanks, laws of physics!), and so we're always stuck in that uncomfortable stage of becoming, becoming, becoming. Listen closely enough and you can hear Sisyphus cracking his head against the boulder as he lurches it up hill, as is his eternal task, and laughing - laughing! You would too. You should!

I never had a chance, you never had a chance, none of us ever did, but that's what makes us so fucking free, so stop what you're doing, right now, right in the middle of this sentence, and grab on to that heaving temporal wave before you drown in it.


Lifeboats in an ocean of time: Throbbing Gristle - DOA: The Third and Final Report, Groovie Ghoulies - Travels with my Amp, The Dictators - The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, White Static Demon - Decayed, The Slits - Cut, Public Image Ltd. - Metal Box

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Compiling ammunition for Halloween a full 234 days in advance

Hate to get all 160 character on you, but this requires your immediate attention. Yaz meets The Gossip meets controller.controller*, with a descending riff that sounds like it could have been copped from South of Heaven's title track thrown in for good measure.

* Yes, I know that controller.controller's rhythm section makes up 2/3 of this band, but still.

Monday, March 8, 2010

27b/6

Just remember....


... we're all in it together.

Tickling my id with: Final - Solaris, Send More Paramedics - A Feast for the Fallen and The Hallowed and the Heathen, Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works '85-'92 and Windowlicker, The Knife - Tomorrow, In a Year



Thursday, March 4, 2010

Smiling Back

I stayed up until 4:00am writing a mid-term (that I'm still not done), I'm hungry, and I just realized I don't own a pair of jeans that don't have big fucking holes in them. My apartment is a mess right now. I probably don't have to do some of the extra curricular research for the City that I wanted to this semester, and I recently had to pull out of a project that I'd been working on since September. My girlfriend of six year is moving to France in May, and then to Victoria when she returns. Things are hectic, things are changing.

But....

Yesterday I held a speaker session with one of the academics I respect most, after spending a night out on the town with him on Tuesday. I want to study under him at UBC, and I think I left a good impression. I'm headed off to breakfast with him and my program director in 40 minutes. The things I'm writing are stronger than they've ever been. I'm going to get to see some of my friends today who I haven't seen in basically forever. Last night I got the idea that maybe I should move to Toronto, which is kind of an exciting proposition. I'm 24 years old, about to complete my undergraduate degree, and yeah, it's too late for everything, I know, but I have my whole fucking life ahead of me and I might never be as free as I am right now and yes I am stressed out and overworked but good things are happening and life is good right now.

When the stakes are high, the odds are stacks against you, the chips are down, and the absurdity of the whole deal snaps into focus, sometimes there's nothing left to do but smile back.

Foundations: Isis - Panopticon, The Pixies - Surfer Rosa, Alice in Chains - Unplugged

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

And ANOTHER Thing...

It needs to be said, so I'll just say it: the Olympic aesthetic is a decidedly fascist one. The torch burning, the flag waving, the mindless nationalism, the rhetoric about the "purity of sport" and supremacy of an elite class of athletes ... christ, we're one step away from eugenics here.


The ancient Greeks did not have a torch ceremony. The first Olympics torch ceremony was in Nazi Germany, in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Nice, eh?


Anyway, we've got another two years until the IOC uses the rights of the athletic elite to trample on the rights of the underclass in London, so until then let's everybody practice your indifference towards 95% of the sports that are involved in the Olympics (and 95% of the worlds social justice concerns that you have no stake in, apart from your shared stake in the wellbeing of other people).

Today's nutritional intake: Rational Youth - Cold War Nightlife EP, Iron Maiden - S/T, Zero Boys - Vicious Circle, Arghoslent - Incorrigible Bigotry