So here’s a funny thing: The mantra of our age, the sentiment that is both liberational creed and the essential marketing sentiment for every product, is some version of “be yourself”. Hence our culture’s secret admiration of the Narcissistic Psychopath. That Dude is Killing It. But how do you know if the self your being…
Category: Psyche
The Revolt Against Beauty
I’ve saved lots of images I’ll never look at again, but there’s one I didn’t save that I wish I had. This image was a photograph of graffiti spray-painted onto the wall of some crumbling and dilapidated building. The reason I wish I’d saved it is so I could recall the exact wording, which not…
Pulling a Bannon
Well, it’s August again. Which means I’m starting on another album. Truth is, I have what seems to me a great wealth of creative inspirations, and a corresponding dearth of financial resources. It is, as with most things, a chicken and egg problem. And I think it was Chris Chandler who finally cracked the case:…
Candid thoughts between you, me, and the world’s intelligence services #1
The Bitter Pill #6 Hard-headed woman/Ghost in the Shell You may know me as that guy who writes bitchy letters to editors of Eugene’s Weekly and Register Guard. From this, you may have gathered that I’m a frustrated artist. If so, I commend you on your perceptiveness, and thank you for taking the time to…
I Think Bob Dylan Was With Hydra
To my mind, this is a perfect love song. Couldn’t find Dylan’s original, so Jeff Buckley will have to suffice. There are a million covers, but I believe Buckley knew the heart of it. This is the sort of love song that’s quite seemly in a young man, though it ages strangely, as perhaps we…
The Best of the Worst
Reading the EW’s “Socializing with Socialists” article from last week, it struck me that the problem with being anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, and all similar things is that the negation of hierarchy does not in itself solve the problem of hierarchy. Hierarchy, in short, reasserts itself, covertly at first, and then again in the fresh bloom…
The Perils of Illuminism
Back in the days of Socrates, in the mind of Socrates, their lived what we might call a keen but highly dangerous and unpopular idea that people weren’t fit to govern themselves. More, and it seems strange, this lack of fitness relative to self-government was exactly paralleled by a mysterious prohibition Socrates had picked up…
A Sort of Blueprint
Megan Burbank’s note to readers suggests to me a sort of blueprint, though I’m having trouble quite summing up what for. This mysterious something is more than a meme but less than a manifesto. Perhaps I can awkwardly describe it as a Platform for Political Action, though that’s not really quite it. Anyway, maybe I…
Great Achievements in Social Engineering #1
Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communications Without Warrants – Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept The transformation of opinion on ‘the Left’ as regards the National Security State over the past 15 years has been striking, if slow to unfold. Back when Bush was King, the revelation of warrantless wiretaps – which was just…
Just Another Day in the Age of Universal Deceit
This picture does a nice job summing up everything that’s wrong with people on the Internet. Well, ok, it doesn’t do all that. It does, though, demonstrate how complete and casual the disregard for truth is in the construction of clickbait. It’s not merely that this picture never happened, that there never was a tour…
Very Much Like a Newspaper
The Bitter Pill #4 I have to hand it to the Weekly: it looks just like a newspaper. They seem to have gotten a firm handle on the whole matter of arranging words according to the familiar pattern of Headline, Sub-Heading and body text. The illusion suckers me in most every time. Even though I’ve…
Wound Consciousness and the Flower of Enlightenment
I am approaching an idea about wound/wounded consciousness. In part, the dampening of awareness that serves as an anesthetic brings as a corresponding cost a loss of those cognitive skills that have the potential to transform, and even transmute, the experience. Reducing something to a dull ache numbs the pain, but at a cost of…
Errors in StereoScopic Thinking
HAMLET For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now…
Thou Shalt Not Ghost The Ghost
There are deeper parts to why this professor bugged the shit out of me, as we used to say. His final invocation of Hamlet was icing on the cake of my outrage, the pyramidion completing my pyramid of dissatisfaction. It was perfect, and I haven’t really spelled out the perfection. I want to connect his…
Pious Hypocrisy and the Lesser of Two Evils
You will all have noticed that your political opponents have no concern for truth. Or rather, they only have concern for and allegiance to truth when such truth is inconvenient for you. Have you noticed, though, that your side is essentially the same in this regard? This isn’t about whether your values or theirs are…
Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina
It’s fashionable to admire, in the abstract, the iconoclasts, the rebels, the kids in high school fighting to keep their minds alive in the face of a system designed, consciously or not, to reduce them to mental servitude. As that Apple ad made plain some years ago, these figures are the idols of our age….
Golden Showers For Everyone
It’s been interesting to watch Chris Hedges’ path from the heart of intellectual and moral dissent under the Bush Administration to the political Siberia of RT. This path saw him first fired from the NYTimes for expressing opposition to the invasion of Iraq too far in front of the curve, to his current exile beyond…
Man Walks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. You’ll never guess what happens next.
You know how it is with us humans, always seeking after some answer, some new tool or toy. Behind it all, as the gurus tell us, is a feeling of insufficiency. The appropriate response to this information has become almost self-evident; and when you hear that phrase it helps to remember how far Thomas Jefferson’s…
Disinterested Survivor
Dreamed I was on a Survivor-type dating show, except we were all dressed as Vedic deities. I was Hanuman. A few of the people were discussing the nature of disinterested action, and coming upon them I declared (authoritatively, as you might imagine) that the essence of disinterested action lay in not trying to be disinterested….
Modern Miracle: The Election of Trump Proved Everyone Right
I’ve noticed something miraculous over the last couple days. The election of Donald Trump has proven just about everyone right. Not in terms of their predictions – obviously most people predicted the outcome of the election incorrectly – but in terms of their preconceptions. Miraculously, a host of varied preconceptions have all been verified by the…