Messages

16

Non-Music Shit / Re: what are you reading?

« on: August 02, 2015, 09:02:23 AM »

Been reading The Power Of Myth by Joseph Campbell, which I think is basically the transcript from the PBS doc he did with Bill Moyer in the '80s. I've seen a few clips. Campbell comes across as an endearing autodidact (in the same sense that Bucky Fuller was) whose frame of reference is pretty fucking staggering, and Moyers does a good job of treating the subject and expert with the right proportions of reverence and skepticism, and also doesn't have any trouble switching modes from scholarly conversation to the Dateline-izing of cultural anthropology for those with short attention spans. I'm skeptical of the ease with which any relatively internally consistent, shared system of beliefs could be called a "mythology" if it fits within those broad parameters (Advertising? Mythology! Magnet therapy? Mythology!) but I have to admit it's a handy way to compartmentalize, if that's your bag. Campbell's equally enthralled by all strains of world-building storytelling, and doesn't favor the complex over the simple, or the observant over the imaginative, as he shouldn't. He's just fascinated by human potential/aptitude/cunning as revealed by the origins and prerogatives they make up for themselves in the always-frightening vacuum of self-determination which of course looms as large in the industrializing era(s) as it did back when a guy had one shrub, two berries and a lot of fucking questions.

I can't remember if he explicitly talks about this, but I'm interested in the prospect of seeing, say, a creation myth as both a literal description of what came before, and a kind of elastic metaphor for a certain class of ideas and experiences common to a population. I'm fascinated by the idea that something could exist in such a truly dual state, as accepted fact and as ephemeral pattern, fixed unity and flexible manifold, without compromising either. Well, that's what an allegory is, I guess - at best, the preceding, and at worst, a crossways jump between art and life that elevates neither; a bathroom reader of The World According To. The 365-day calendar version of an intimate, intransigent metaphysics, Golgotha under phallic clouds with extra fart jokes. (Which, to be honest, might be all it takes to tempt me back into the fold.)

17

Upcoming Shows/Tours/Events / Re: BALLROOM 2015: Midwest & South, Aug. & Sept.

« on: July 24, 2015, 07:28:03 AM »

Is that a threat?

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Music Shit / Re: I'm a one man band, nobody knows or understands...blah, blah

« on: June 26, 2015, 02:31:27 AM »

Phantom Payn
Prince

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Upcoming Shows/Tours/Events / Re: BKLYN - Thurs, June 18 - BALLROOM RECORD RELEASE SHOW

« on: June 18, 2015, 12:58:19 PM »

Everyone.

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Music Shit / Re: Acapulco Presents... Delightful Missives from the World of Music "Criticism"

« on: June 16, 2015, 06:40:01 AM »

Dave Hex?

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Non-Music Shit / Re: Termbo Horoscopes

« on: June 14, 2015, 04:06:10 PM »

Eerie!

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Music Shit / Re: Acapulco Presents... Delightful Missives from the World of Music "Criticism"

« on: June 14, 2015, 06:06:19 AM »

I misread the generic biomarker in the above quote as "gothic dogmaze", which I thought was a wonderfully idiosyncratic way of saying "confusing and full of shit" until I looked closer. How absolutely disappointing. Is "-gaze" the musical suffix-equivalent of "-gate"?

WATERGAZE
WHITEWATERGAZE
BENGHAZIGAZE
BRIDGEGAZE
DEFLATEGAZE

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Non-Music Shit / Re: Quantum Mechanics

« on: June 05, 2015, 05:44:10 AM »

I read Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" when it came out. Lots did. Very popular book. But it had some nice conceptual teaching tools that helped me launch into other areas. I'm sure the info is outdated like made by now, but maybe one of Greene's newer books? Or has the physics world passed him up?

I need to read that Greene book.

Didn't read the article linked to (not that I don't have enough time on my hands).

I got interested in this "hologram" stuff a few years ago when I read an article somewhere about it - and connected it with some research I'd read recently showing that the retina has a two-dimensional array of receptors and hypothesizing that the brain converts visual information into three-dimensional tableaus using cues like shading, foreshortening and perspective as they naturally appear (and are interpreted by the eye). The premise was interesting enough to warrant (personal, unscientific) exploration.

If you think about it, doing shit like using a map, putting together a chair using an instructional diagram, watching a movie on a flat screen and using a photograph to jog your memory of an event all depend upon your ability to transform two dimensions of information into three. To add an extra dimension to an image, you simply posit a data point that isn't there: a depth coordinate that matches up with every pair of height and width coordinates. This lets us talk about objects on a 2-D plane using a vocabulary that generally applies only to 3-D objects. A woman's figure in a photograph, partially obscured by a table, is "behind" the table, even though she isn't, because there's no such direction in the flat plane of the photograph. Using visual information like shadows, size and prominence, you reconstruct the photograph as an imagined 3-D tableau, often without even being aware of the change.

I don't know if this came naturally to anyone - it didn't to me - but I remember that when I was 6 or 7, someone showed me how to draw a "cube" by making two squares on a piece of paper and connecting the corners with lines. I remember squinting at the new shape, trying to see the cube, but my brain wasn't convinced. All I saw were two squares. Then, suddenly, spontaneously - I saw it. I looked away, looked back, and it was facing the other way. I practiced flipping it back and forth in my mind - making the front face the back face and vice versa. What happened there? I succeeded in making myself believe - in a provisional, temporary, personal way - that the "cube" was a cube. Maybe once we learn this "trick" - and clearly I already had, as evidenced by the fact that I hadn't yet wandered into traffic or fallen out of a window - it naturally and unconsciously occurs when we receive visual information, a kind of metaphorical conversion that links visual data with our experience of a world we can move in, three-dimensionally.

Does this entail living in a hologram? Maybe, in a NY Post-headline kinda way. More importantly: is Oculus Rift porn a reality yet?

24

Non-Music Shit / Re: what are you reading?

« on: June 02, 2015, 03:30:39 AM »

No one cares, including me, but I woke up at 5:30 a.m. on my day off and to make matters worse, I'm still thinking about Virginia Woolf.  And I get it, and I don't. Also, know that my opinion is entirely informed by the first 30 pages of To The Lighthouse, so please disregard it whenever possible. I needed only slightly more to dismiss William Faulkner out of hand, so that's the kind of person who's writing this, in case you were thinking of paying attention.

Maybe I just don't have the attention span to unpack a sentence that swoops from the mundane to the metaphysical and back again, but I don't think that's the problem. I like what she does, in theory: it's the equivalent of pointing an electron microscope at a landscape painting, dissolving the lines and blotches into something wholly other: small constellations of atomic impressions, half-thoughts, emotions at weak valence. A world not ready to be explored; not finished, will never be finished. That's what I like about her. Vague and ambiguous cohabitate with sharp and pithy, and it isn't clear which one is the dark matter, the underside of the universe, and which is the stuff our worlds are made of. I guess what I don't like is her way of saying it.

Yeah, I know, time expands and contracts and I waste a lot of it in worse ways than trying to understand Virginia Woolf's assessment of a lawn chair, but christ, sometimes it's like watching a Merchant Ivory movie dead drunk or stepping outside (I have terrible vision) with one eye unlensed and a magnifying glass strapped to the other. Disorienting, not pointless, possibly a learning experience, but not necessary either. The immediacy of her writing comes from the head, not the gut, which is too close to my own way of processing things that it does little more than remind me of my personal closed-circuit tendencies and the way small details have a way of swallowing the larger picture whole leaving nothing but a forest of chewed-up-and-shat events and principles which I have to gather up and reconstitute into a map of the known universe before I can leave the house. It's kinda like how I don't smoke weed because it makes me more insular and paranoid than I already am. But that's not a complaint, just an observation.

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Non-Music Shit / Re: what are you reading?

« on: May 24, 2015, 04:55:54 AM »

Took a stab at Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse; gave up halfway through the second chapter. Very nice words, but there were just too many of them.

Too bad. You should've schlepped it to at least the halfway twist.

I wanted to like it. She seems like a true weirdo with a knack for grasping the strange mechanics beneath fairly mundane events or expressions, which I really appreciate. I think it says more about my attention span than her writing that I couldn't stick with it.

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Non-Music Shit / Re: what are you reading?

« on: May 23, 2015, 05:50:56 PM »

Took a stab at Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse; gave up halfway through the second chapter. Very nice words, but there were just too many of them.

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New Releases For Sale/Distro Updates / Re: Ballroom - S/t 12'' debut EP....out soon on Ever/Never Records

« on: May 20, 2015, 01:55:53 PM »

Chicago plower pop band

Is that a typo, or a truism?

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Music Shit / Re: Acapulco Presents... Delightful Missives from the World of Music "Criticism"

« on: May 20, 2015, 01:49:47 PM »

Hunter Hunt Hendrix: To me, the work really has three aspects, which I associate with music, art and philosophy, respectively. The music itself goes along with a philosophical system. It?s sort of a cross between psychoanalysis, Christianity, German Idealism, and the Upanishads. I?ve been developing that a lot more since the last record. The song titles are named after archetypal characters that represent important aspects of the system, like "Kel Valhaal," and, "Reign Array." Then, there?s the career of the band itself, which is as much as a part of the work of art as anything else. The relationship to the Internet, and the music industry, the flow of trends, and the contradictions between making money playing music, and paying attention to a broader historical context: It?s like process art, or performance art. I?m interested in approval and humiliation, connection and disconnection, the ways that emotion and identification translate across the Internet.

I went on an internet date with this dude a few years ago. No favors were exchanged, but I did get to hear all about the three pillars of the Kabbalah and the time he curated a month at Issue Project Room. Needless to say, I walked home that night.

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Music Shit / Re: What's your crown jewel?

« on: March 16, 2015, 12:30:51 PM »

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Upcoming Shows/Tours/Events / Re: ExpatLitJournal Issue 2 Release

« on: September 13, 2014, 10:20:31 AM »

Good show. Good issue. Good job, Manny.