#445

Whoo! Got-damn, shit, and HELL FUCK. 

Silence has invaded this space, never a thing I like to let stretch out, but the times demand what the times demand. Typing that made me itch to segue into current affairs, but I'm not going to do that. Commentary on this planet and its human doings has never been easier or less necessary. Necessary isn't exactly what I mean, but I didn't want to say pointless, because then that would sort of make it my job.

What I mean is that in the current moment, everyone knows what is wrong and why, and no one can do a single thing about it that's going to affect our sinister momentum.

We are but spectators, trapped in a garish, filthy arena which constantly extracts a toll we cannot refuse to pay; our untouchable criminal overlords ensconced in a crystal bubble set above it all, gurgling and fondling themselves as they roll around in a reeking paste of champagne, melted butter, and various illegal meats. Anyone pretending otherwise is part of the toll-extracting process, their perverse ambitions driving them towards that lofty perch I was just describing. 

Our only autonomy, indeed, our only ability, is to stop paying attention, try to enjoy each day as much as we can fashion ways to do so, and let whatever is going to kill us kill us in its own good time. This peasant wisdom is all that remains.

For my money, the expectation is to be killed by a drone. Accidentally or on purpose and designated an accident, or finally on purpose for a specific reason but the stated reason being something completely different and probably defamatory. Does it matter? I've decided that it doesn't at all. Drone, wild animal, heat, zombie, plague, explosion, impact, bullet--who gives a flying fuck how it happens and what people say afterwards if they even notice. Drown me. Choke me out. Defenestrate me. Fire me into space. Put a plastic rifle in my hands and send me out against ten million desperate, starving kinsmen  you call my enemies. I'll chuck it off to the side and wait for it to happen. I'm not fighting anyone about any of this. Can't bother with feelings about it anymore.  

RRRRRRANYHOW, reason I haven't posted since the last post is no longer that I am too tired and still adjusting to all the change--adjustment does continue, but at least my energy is rising nicely--but that I actually have too much to say. It has been difficult to approach the text field with confidence that I could walk away from it without making a massive dirigible of a post ten topics deep, thousands of words per topic.

I'll just talk about some culture today. I mean, now that I've already talked about all that other shit.

Culture! Love that stuff, and there's plenty to tell.

*

Ezra and I have been watching Star Trek all the time, maybe I mentioned it. Been going on awhile. A few episodes of the original series, most of The Next Generation, and now Voyager. We'll be watching Star Trek for a good minute, I expect. It's good! It's way better than Trekkies made it out to be. No one makes Trek as unappetizing as its evangelists. 

But it's good. Good as fuck, actually. There can be no settling of this debate, but naturally I am of the opinion that it's no Star Wars, though that is not the fault of Star Trek, as nothing can be. Frankly, it's not even a good comparison. They are in fact extremely different animals.

*

I have sometimes mentioned about movies I have seen here, but never anything even remotely approaching the exhaustive record-keeping I apply to the books I read. Even with the books, there are probably at least fifty or even more I have forgotten to mention. In fact I watch a lot of movies! Happens all the time.

However, the tenor has changed. My most intense period of watching movies--multiples in the day and night--was in my early twenties, and my rough estimate is about five hundred movies in a two-year period. I have gone through several more periods of a movie or two every day since, the last one being in 2019 and 2020 when I wasn't recording much of anything. Sometimes I don't watch any at all for long periods, or only occasionally.

Beginning before I started at the theater to two nights ago, I was watching cartoons and concentrating on other long-form stuff. The only movies I've watched all year were all the Star Wars movies, though I did those at least twice each.

Now that I am at the theater and now that I am done rewatching all Adventure Time and Steven Universe materials, I am ready to watch ten million movies again and shall endeavor to mark them down as I do the books, except I'm not going to bother with directors or anything, Titles only, man. Lionizing directors is not a thing with me, though I respect the role as much as anyone. Movies are everybody that made them though, and if you're interested, find them, watch them, and read the credits clear through to the end.

Wise Blood

Tuesday

Janet Planet

These movies were all excellent.

*

Been reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, by Stephen Apkon. Fun stuff to read in tandem, trying to balance nonfiction and fiction more closely by consistently being reading at least one of each.

*

What movie will I watch today? I'll find out, and you'll hear about it in good time.

*

Musicwise, been sharpening my knowledge of and rabidly consuming cartoon soundtracks, game soundtracks, chiptunes, vaporwave, African folk (especially Malinese, my favorite), exciting jazz records minted in recent years, oddments and explorations here and there. Albums and other recordings of note inclide Deltron 3030 and the Deltron 3030 instrumentals, new extended recordings of the soundtracks to The Lord of the Rings movies by Howard Shore PLUS a six-movement orchestration of the music from all three films also by Howard Shore--the new choral arrangements in particular are amazing.

Heard belatedly that John Frusciante was back with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they cut one with Rick Rubin, which has resulted in true greatness in the past, so I listened to part of that endeavor before getting bored and doing something else. I guess maybe they should finally have made an instrumental album if they wanted me to care. Anthony was once one of my icons, but now he's like my dad--lovable, worthy of respect, but needs to get the fuck out of my way. It's funny because they were born the same year, and I sure did rely on both of them to grow up. But one also grows beyond; it is the way of this world. I am more than they, as they were more than their fathers. I still need them, too, but on different terms and different timelines, for different things. Anthony keeps doing the same thing, though. 

Maybe I'll like that record in a couple of years, or their next one right away. Hope so. I like liking stuff, put work into enjoying stuff. It's an important thing to bring to culture, to criticism, to how you live your life. It's easy to hate, simple to excoriate. No flex at all, just gunpowder, and gunpowder is weaksauce. Loving something, seeing something beyond yourself and the power you get from tearing it down, is hard work, but essential. That's where the growth comes in. That stregthens the heart and the eye and the mind and the stomach. 

Not to say some shit doesn't need tearing down. Just that it should come after a great effort to love and understand deeply.

*

(Kermit the Frog voice) 

That's probably the correct note for my exit.

PEACE YOU MAGNIFICENT BITCHES 

(end Kermit)

--JL

#383

Fucking crazy. These American fascists are seriously down to Weimarize us and clean house. I can't believe the current administration didn't send word down to quietly dispose of a dude like Stephen Miller in the dead of night about early spring 2022. I mean, given the shit he did and said before he was in the White House the first time, the shit he did once he was there, the fresh shit he has now come out and said, the plans he has laid out, all the shit that's happening with the shit falling out of these motherfucker's mouths--doesn't it seem like justifiable use of deadly force in the name of national security? I can't believe these fuckers killed MLK and Malcolm X but Stephen Miller draws breath and says federalize select National Guard troops to deport whoever the president says, wherever they are. Pray tell--aside from all of the massive civil violence such a move would portend--where will you put these people, on their way out, since presumably you'll de driving millions of people like cattle and like cattle you'll have to process them somewhere, I dunno, some sort of camp maybe, where they might end up for longer than predicted, where a lot of bad stuff can unaccountably happen and we don't know just how bad till later.

How many dudes just went out and signed up for their National Guard units just on account of he said that? Somebody checking that data would maybe note little spikes in certain states and areas. Just hinting. Coyly, even though the game is getting pretty fucking easy to call at this point. 

If I had the native sense God gave a goose I'd leave the country right about now. But I lack even that, because I am a man. Still, maybe today is a good day to think new thoughts, thoughts that could maybe carry me far, far away from this place and these wretched dangerous fools. Oh shit! Wait! I got new windows coming.

Guess I have to die in this house. More specifically, in my front yard or atop my roof, protecting my windows and everything behind them best I can. 

Factually Masculine 2024! Bereft of good or common sense!

*

In the western canon, we have a personality test from back in Hellenistic times: are you a Stoic, an Epicurean, or a Cynic? These days: false, brittle, plastic, blank-eyed stoics can be found in significant numbers, blackpillers fail to pull off the point of Cynicism, and you have to have partcipated or accepted the secondary benefits of incredible injustice and human suffering on a massive scale to be able to successfully pull off something resembling epicurean lifestyle, since the values now necessarily entail a level of asceticism  beyond reasonable thresholds. All this is to say that a peaceful life is a privilege and by no means a cheap one, whose price is basically that no matter what you pretend to yourself you are, no matter how you enjoy your pleasures and the sense of righteousness that comes in "earning" and managing those pleasures, you are a tool, and a wicked one, wielded by--you guessed it--liars and thieves, the very liars and thieves I have harped on all along here.

I'm something of a Skeptic, myself, but everything in life is plotted on a spectrum, as Aristotle wisely taught. 

You can take this test with all kinds of three-dude, three-school combinations in order to define yourself and bare yourself thereby to the interpretations of others based on their interpretations of dudes or text or loosely-defined imprimatur. Western canon, Eastern canon, or tradition or whatever we choose to call a textual continuum/semiotic landscape/etc., doesn't matter. Mix 'n match. 

Do as you please. Read what you can get your hands on. Think whatever you want about it. Cinema works this way too. Interactive entertainment, like video games. Looking around at the buildings motherfuckers built where you live. What were they trying to accomplish with these buildings, these cars, these sculptures, these industries? What were they trying to say? Your guess is as good as anyone's, and you can even improve it. 

Anything that is culture is yours, if you go and get it. The more you do that, the less you can be told by some other motherfucker what the world really is and who you really are. You'll start to see for yourself. 

*

Dudes who see for themselves are worth approximately fifty million shitheads that take a liar's word for it. Hopefully the ratio of dudes to shitheads is more favorable than that, but this seems doubtful, even naive.

--JL

#352

The final installment, as it were, of the current generation of the main Pokémon games has dropped and it has hit me like a bullet that shatters into a hundred perfect rainbow love letters. Each time I have loaded up and played each iteration--the initial drop, the first additional chapter, and now this closer which I am hours and hours into exploring and revealed thereby that it will take hundreds more, that they could stop here and I could play with what we have on the switch for the rest of my life. They won't, and I'll keep going with them into the unlimited potential futures of the Pokémon World--in which we all live, praise be and God bless. 

Surely internet seethes with hatred for everything I love and appreciate about it, but culture war internet is a pimple, where our most putrid selves go to coalesce and collapse together into an ocean of stinking pus. Once you're done with internet thinking--with cultural hatred--you are back in the bloodstream, baby, and can love what you please waging peace like a gangster.

If only I could aid the world, and make that process faster. All one can say is no snobs no masters.

*

Look, I'll say it. I'm not gonna push around some false humility like an extra dick. I am fucking inordinately proud about that rhyme and scansion. Again, I'll say it myself: that was a mic drop. 

*

But I wouldn't drop a microphone really because that is not good for the equipment. Maybe if it was already crapping out pretty bad I could drop it as like a farewell. That would take some planning, and could never be as cool playing out as in my head, where it's already not very cool.

*

2023 is almost over. The year ran at speed, it seems to me. This probably due to the true aging process taking hold of my system, my brain changing tempo, as it were, as my body undergoes its first "weakening" puberty. None of that is the point--do I even mean it? What the fuck. Never mind, speed on--Album Week this year will undergo what might be called a restructuring, in company terms, or reboot, in continuity terms. That's maybe what is called "inside baseball"? I like basketball, and Plato, if we're playing with spheres. There's no company. Not the kind with meetings and tiers and hierarchies would confabulate to create what is compressed into the term "inside baseball". 

Digression over. Welcome to Factually Musical, brought to you by Factually Pointless. This year, the next week's posts--today being Monday, running through Sunday--will appear, if they appear, in the form of paragraphs, perhaps making use of lists or figures, concerning various musical concepts, ragging and raging and even ranging from whatever the fuck I feel like to whatever the fuck ends up happening, period. How do you like that, motherfucker? Do you fucking...do you love it? Good. That is a huge relief. I didn't prepare very well and I was a little nervous. 

Onwards.

*

Because I am talking to more people a bit more regularly than since 2017, music is sometimes discussed. I guess music is like a part of life or something. Replete with emotional connections? Ringing any fucking bells? This is going to be about music. Music is about feelings.

Thing about feelings is that they arise, and exist well before any reasoning process can be applied, even if the arousal is rooted in layers and layers of reasoning process and lived experience. Indeed, this deeper rooting may even intensify and further remove the feeling from reason or the ability to interact with reason, because by the time our brains are even partially developed, most of us think in language so quickly that arousal and the resultant idea/reaction are perceived as simultaneous. This is something we need to try to remember when we think we've personally evolved beyond our emotions and have achieved command control. Please be convinced, without my further elaboration, that this is the mindset which leads to the most fabulously irrational behaviors that humans perpetrate. 

All this is by way of saying that one is never exempt from dealing with one's feelings, and one's feelings simply are what they are and not something to blame oneself for. Processes are processes. You may as well be angry with bedrock for having the percentage of silicates that it does, rather than some optimal figure you pulled out of your ass. Therefore, looking at what a computer program tells you is your most listened-to music and sharing it because someone shared their own computer-program-generated tallies for hours dedicated to particular music will generate feelings, before during, and after, and feelings lead to thoughts. As previously discussed. 

Let me, now that all is preambled to my satisfaction, tell you about some of those thoughts and feelings.

*

The relationship between data and the interpretation of what music is and how it behaves is ancient and fraught. Now we live in the time of Big Data, so we have a lot of grist to chew up in our little mills when it comes to, say, which rapper has the highest word count vs. vocabulary vs. repetition vs. various matrices of the preceding categories and as many as we can think of in addition. Ah, but who has done more with less? And who has turned less into significantly more than even that? And who defied convention in such a way as to skewer this math a third way? What escaped through the holes in the net? What lies deeper than these questions, these numbers, these ciphers?

It doesn't really matter and I don't really care, unless I care more that anything--depends on the question--but the actual thing about the questions is that they change how I feel about things and how I feel as I hunt for the answers and decide how I feel about what I'm able to find--a modifier on my lived experience, on my interpretative and emotional journey through existence. As importantly, I notice things, and that leads me to make connections with the data I have happened to access (which must be taken with a grain of salt in any case), and connections we make ourselves are key emotional warp, weft, and weave. 

That so much quantitative data and mathematical backbone be available, be elemental to something that every organism does and must experience in their own completely unique way--breathtaking! Terrifying? A hilarious joke? I always favor the latter, as you know, but we've only been crawling around the tip of this iceberg, and depths alway carry their risks, may contain subliminal horrors, always more tenebrous and unfamiliar than our beloved surfaces.

*

Yet to attain heights, we must suffer depths. Indeed, we must command both, if we are to advance. 

*

Basically, I felt ruffled that an industrial focus on what we most consume by volume must by its nature undermine the value--at last as perceived and reflected in the sense of the general antechamber of shared culture--because it obscures range. Because ape brain says numbers go higher are better, people with highest numbers are best. Oh, to be the Swiftie with the most hours of Taylor Swift listened to on this planet! POWER SO GREAT THE SIDEWALK SHATTERS IN A LINE TEN FEET BENEATH WHERE THEY FLOAT, WREATHED IN LUMINOUS ENERGIES THAT BLIND THE UNWORTHY!

In reality such a thing is only meaningful if you know the story and depending on how it makes you feel. In reality, an untold fuckton of bots and scripts and sockpuppets listened to 8760 hours of each of Taylor Swift's songs, maybe a few hardcases did something more linear manually, maybe one in a billion needed her in the ear all year no surcease no pause and is the one authentic claim to the figure and then the hundreds of millions of stories beyond, but none of it matters. I mean it's a fucking footnote to a blip, and matters the same amount--to me, precious, en masse and in total, precious, even if I hate the particular details I've chosen to discuss. To others, not. To some, also precious, but their feelings and their emotions will lead them in the direction of different performances, emotions, expressions, ideas, states of mind, further explorations and calculations. Concepts, interpretations, moments, communions, transcendences, all molecules on a great, trackless, unsoundable ocean on which we pass like ships in the night, and we signal one another, oh, we play music, we send up signal flares, we declare, we care, we share.

And so on.

*

Once again, back in reality, probably no one in ten million thinks about that list and its implications for more than a few minutes and certainly most would wish to tell me that I am overthinking, overcarrying, overstretching, and overinterpreting the affair to a degree which strains credulity. 

That is because I have a lot of feelings on the subject, which get away from me as I write although I am so aware of them that I spent all this effort telling you about it, dear reader, in the preamble, as an effort to remind myself, which has been a resounding failure--unless it was my plan all along to demonstrate what I believe is truly beautiful and meaningful about music, about love, about art, about life; which is to be carried away, which is to get ahead of oneself and fall into the sublime.

*

FACTUALLY MUSICAL

2023

HAS BEGUN

--JL

#329

Wearing a Jurassic Park t-shirt, specially tie-dyed in the colors of the electric tour cars from the first (and, if I want to be a dick, only) Jurassic Park movie--bright green, red, and yellow--with the famous logo on the front. Man, it feels spiffy. Boy, do I love Jurassic Park. Ezra and I are watching Amphibia to take the edge off of Owl House being over and having been violently and hatefully robbed as a culture of the proper amount of Owl House, but if we weren't, I'd want to watch Jurassic Park. Next time I watch it, I definitely want to be wearing this shirt.

Sometimes I think I'd be happy just writing books about how certain pieces of culture are very, very important. Jurassic Park is very nearly at the top of this heap. The problem with this dream is I end up feeling like writing about a thing and reading what someone wrote about a thing is often a very poor substitute for the thing itself. 

Also, trading on advanced-type, fancy ideas about a thing without actually knowing or giving one's own committed thought to a thing has caused huge problems in culture and society. Don't know that I want to contribute to that economy, even though I would find it pleasurable.

*

THE WORD FUCK, Y'ALL

PEACE

Next time, lists of books! God, look how horny you are for me to write down a bunch of books I got/read. You sick animal. Wipe your fucking mouth, you sinful beast. Your chin, too. 

--JL

#268

Well, it's the new year. 2022 is quite a number. I was born at the tail end of the eighties, almost 1990; to my parents, the year 2000 was the distant future, but I was eleven years old the year 2000. Now, and only now, have we reached year numbers that sound as space-agey to me as 2003 did to the author of Achewood on the morning of that year. It tracks; he was thirty-two or thirty-three at the time, and I am thirty-two now.

Yes, I think about Achewood literally all the fucking time, in all kinds of weird contexts applicable mostly or exclusively to myself. A friend of mine does the exact same thing with One Piece, and never you mind whether you know it as well as he does (placing you in a firm minority worldwide, by my lights), liked it but don't remember which pirate ate what devilfruit or uses only kicks in combat, or even know what One Piece the fuck is--my boy will explain at length, for as long as it takes, until you understand what he means and why he made the brain connection he just made or until you walk away from him. He is also like this about Dungeons and Dragons.

Me, I can be like that too. Specifically, about Lord of the Rings, Achewood, Star Wars, Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Twin Peaks, Bleach, Animorphs, and Sopranos. Also, Mountain Goats lyrics. These are the fundamental pillars of my cultural being, and I can connect their payload to anything in the world, so far as I know. Deeply autistic about a lot more stuff than just those things, way more and very varied, but those are the things I can always thought-step over to at any given moment in a single effortless motion. Technically, also Jesus Christ plus the Word and Immanence of God, but that's like, superluminal and supraliminal and not really subject to what I'm talking about here. It might be more informative to discuss runners-up and materials which are very very nearly in that top-tier zone, such as Jurassic Park, the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. LeGuin, James Baldwin, Haruki Murakami, and a dozen or twenty more, why not; bestiaries scientific and mythical and other books by naturalists, A Song of Ice and Fire, Halo, Dune (Frank Herbert books only, and also, other books by Frank Herbert), Unsounded, Ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese classics, fairy tales and myths worldwide (special mention to King Arthur), buncha superhero shit, the other works of David Lynch, and for fuck's sake all of this shit is too much and no one cares. I choose to end this paragraph here, and move on. I'm into a lot of shit. This barely touches comics, or nineties cartoons. 

An exhaustive list of the shit I could autistically and realistically talk about for hours could drive a regular person fucking insane. In ancient times I would be considered nothing short of a madman, a wizard, or an alien. That's just how brains are, mine and everybody else's. Some people's brains make them suitable only for statesmanship, or physically torturing other people, things which would drive regular people, to varying degrees, fucking insane. In modern times, we are all insane, and therefore suitable for a wider variety of roles with less meaning and durability than in properly organized societies.

There is no need for me to discuss any of the material extant in the preceding paragraphs with strangers for entertainment or clout, since such discussions rage in my subconscious eternally and satisfy me tremendously on a personal level. Don't need to win about it at anyone, though I'm of course happy to talk about it face-to-face with people who want to (never online, never, ever). The complete selves in me which have recorded every scrap of information I have ever been exposed to about the underlined material and related interpretative material constantly grow and give input to my ur-self about my life, other creative works, the world at large, memetic generation, everything. It would be fair to state that my opinions and ideas relating to these topics are, speaking concisely, developed. And, still developing. The process will end with my death, maybe. If it does not, I will be quite well-pleased to carry on indeterminately. 

*

Good digressions today, dear reader, good mental flexibility, but getting back to the fact that it is a new year, I have to go do life in it, and there's more than enough words in this post. Maybe I'll do that thing where I finish talking about what I started talking about in the next post, and maybe I won't.

All I know is that we are in another year and anything fuckin goes, baby. Who knows what'll happen. Only the Good Lord and the wargamers, know what I mean? 

PAT YOURSELVES ON THE BACK BITCHES WE DID ANOTHER LAP

ONE MORE LAP

ONE MORE LAP

UNTIL THE SUN EXPLOOOOOOOOODES

--JL

#140

Everybody wants recognition for their talents and ideas, which is perfectly natural and healthy. Seems like most people want a lot more recognition than they are due, though. Most people that end up as rulers of any description have a bad case of it. Basically a lot of demands for recognition are very premature, even if they are met. Actually it is worse when they are met.

Terrible as it is to not be seen for who you really are, to have your many fine qualities go underutilized and even squelched by those who could use them, it is worse to have your mediocrity championed and to reap adulation for simply having better-than-average teeth or excellent deception.

Harder, much less likely to be of any material use, and kind of embarrassing as it may be, it is better to stick to your guns and work on what you know you were made for deep down. To not morph into what people want to see, but to grow into what you are.

* 

In order to meet the expectations of a culture that capitalizes and enshrines the path of least resistance in all things, we become greaseballs eternally slip-rolling and wetly bouncing further from dignity and autonomy, committing to nothing except the performance that gets us the most positive reinforcement on social media and the most capital for the least expenditure. 

Those last two things are deeply intertwined. 

*

Not that I'm not into it. If you can make money off of eyeballs, you absolutely should, and if making your internet avatar dance and shriek to the tune of chaotic decay makes you a buck and gives you a kick, who am I to judge? Be a king or queen of whatever scene. Monetize your identity as you politicize your body. Be a thinkfluencer or independent "journalist". Cacophonize synergistically. Get into imaginary real estate. Buy domain names by the dozen and remember the Parable of the Sower. Troll for a disinfo farm and if you're lucky it'll break legit. Who gives a fuck.

As I said, it is natural and healthy to want to be seen. 

Gotta eat. 

*

It's not that it's not smart or adaptive, because it is, and it's not that it's not moral, because that is outside the question and a fake anyway. 

The problem is in gaming the world, which is interesting and tantalizing and fun, but attaching this kind of meta to history comes at something of a cost to our ability to actually play. When you have locked yourself into a game's language in order to manipulate it, you give up your ability to be creative outside of its constraints. The problem, then, is not our ability to change the world, but our ability to imagine it and how to live in it, becoming the people that we want to be.


--JL

#138

One nice farce is watching the journalistic edifice lumbering in the far after-wake of the ships whose prows churn the edge of culture, misinterpreting and misrepresenting what their trawlers haul out of the water. Slicing off the heads and fins, macerating the flesh, sticking it into a can, and saying that the can is the heart of the matter, that the can is the thing that was swimming.

I call it the unweirding of the fishes. Necessary for stability, I guess? Simplifies the history books. 

*

Of course, I can be as easily misled as anyone. There's always more webs of delusion to disentangle; no one writes or reads out of total understanding and perfect clarity. These things do not exist.

*

Culture! A total fabrication.


--JL

#130

Basically how I feel about this particular moment in political history is that I am less troubled by the material actions of national officials than I am by their affect and their current entanglement with the public through the medium of online society; the people who call themselves our leaders are constantly up in our faces. This is because I am essentially less concerned with the consequence of policy--which, to simplify, is essentially consistent (princes be princes, and princes gonna prince, and all empires fall)--than with the behavior and rhetoric of policymakers and enforcers, which has a powerful mass psychological effect. The psychosocial condition of human beings is of more concern to me, and I think it's in a lot more danger than any political institution.

You might argue that I am lending undue credence to the notion that institutions are firm, but it is more that I consider the consequences of their disintegration in applied terms--increased public suffering in the short term--completely certain and inevitable, and so far something always springs up in place of what fell. Ecologies behave like ecologies. My interest lies in how people deal with these chaotic changes, whether they can be healthy and reasonable about it or allow themselves to be disrupted and destroyed.

Naturally this has a lot to do with the institutions that are available to them, or whose interest lies in their tractability, if nothing else.

But what do they feel? What do they come up with in order to survive and make sense of the world? What art do they make, what do they chatter about, who are they listening to?

The answers are usually horrifying, but never uninteresting, and sometimes life-affirming and beautiful beyond description. 

*

Alright, no, sometimes I find people very boring. They like to listen to idiots and con artists and they love to blather about inanities beneath the purview of basic brain function, other people's business, made-up problems, advertising, and bad sex.

I mean, who doesn't like inanity and sex, though. So punk rock. So Dada. 

*

It is a very beautiful day, and I cannot wait for my walk to work. Very excited to work my shift. March is warming up and turning sunny and we are gonna do this thing fucking alright, folks. 

Have a rad day. Rad day, everybody. Get the paperwork in order and clear the launch pad. Let's do it.


--JL