One of the only things that keeps me alive anymore is listening to KZSC radio on my radio when I lie down in bed at night and pretend I'm asleep. The other night-- at the climax of the most dangerous day for me in one of the hardest, craziest, most beautiful and desperate weeks I've ever had in this or any of my previous lifetimes-- I forced myself to listen to a show called Savage Bistro on KZSC even though the menu typically makes me so uncomfortable that it forces me to the conclusion that the entire show was made only focused with me as the listener and I don't get support from the universe when I feel that way and it can even get me killed sometimes (Blogger, please don't censor this because I'm a change agent and I need to do my work.) But I had been talking to faith healers on a call-in program earlier on the same station and I knew I needed to not shrink from that precipice For The Good Of Me And The Universe. Anyway, I want to do a paragraph change even though Strunk & White would censure me.
The dj played an album he said is called "You're The Guy I Want To Share My Money With" and he sounded very precise and almost medical when he said on air the name of the album before hand. It becomes clear to me in my state of consciousness heightened by all the horror I've seen lately that it is really important and deliberate that Laurie Andersen and William S. Burroughs and another poet on the album utilize such a powerful universal blessing in plain language as the title of their album and the dj said it again after it was over, because the album is only comprised of content so morally painful to listen to for anyone that you can't help but wonder if they're trying to kill you with words. and all of the sounds on the album are only words.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Stop Giving A Crap, Write Illegal Stuff, Go To Prison
"Stop giving a crap, write illegal stuff, go to prison."-- Craig Ferguson.
My father recently said I could stay in the closet room off my brother's room when I come home to get my teeth worked on. I've always hated that room and given the adult horrors I've been dealing with lately I couldn't imagine what he meant. And then I thought, Maybe he means that if I need to come home for a little while they'll find a place for me somehow. And then I think now, that he thinks I've been frightfully juvenile and should be ashamed of myself. Be that as it may, I feel really ashamed today of the review I wrote of Modio-media because I call fascist what is clearly not fascist in light of the horrible weekend I've spent in the hospital with my sick and undying girlfriend (fingers crossed.) She was always a miracle woman of survival, sleighted to die before the age of 14, back in the 1950's, and then going on to survive an escape from an early marriage, the death of a beloved infant, a year in the jungle, innumerable drunken fistfights and worse, the entire 1960's drugs and politics culture, and then mental hospitals, the kidnapping of her second daughter by her ex-husband, and years of panhandling on the streets without SSI. The last twenty years have been a lot happier and almost all of it she worked full time, but now she's retired and sees her daughter every day sometimes. She also cares about me more than anyone else ever has as far as I know and she is so, so sick and "god" is telling me she's going to survive this crisis but it's been a horrible weekend and I acted in the hospital like a a werewolf in a convent and I just want her to be okay and for people to understand that I'm not playing "god" if being in love gives me unique insight into how she can get herself better when the hospital is wearing a lot of yellow and only checking on her every 45 minutes. You see, one of the first things she ever told me about herself is it's always been a awful struggle to make her body move but she didn't want to die and so she just kept fighting to survive and found she could often excel at stuff, like sports and school and fistfighting when necessary. And I have a friend who's a combination charlatan/stage magician/Tibetan healer who told me-- and I know-- that you can often choose your lifespan by choosing projects you won't die until they're completed. And I'm finding that mainly applying to me these days and all sorts of unbelievably unfunny kharma is coming to me like an old friend and saying, "You can't go until you pay your debt." and I guess I'm just really happy and I always did love those people and never wanted to go to Heaven, Paradise, or Nirvana even when I believed in that stuff. I could go hide like I always used to or I can embrace it and be glad I have a life.
And Linda is surrounded by so much love from me and her daughter and grandchildren that when her body doesn't feel pain she starts to transcend the physical and scare the shit out of us. And it's also true that she filled out an advance directive and I don't know what it says but I think she hates to be a burden on people and doesn't want to take care of us by letting us take care of her. I've been in that position a lot myself and it's crap. But today I think the hospital reduced her methadone and she's felt like crap all day and I call that clarity, because she's really really sick, so I feel better. See, I'm a sadist. But writing this blog post helps me to turn the situation over to the will of not "god" because I don't give a fuck what "god" wants but I think I can let Linda live or end her life or give up or take on more kharma or not according to her will and maybe I'm even cheering up about it.
All this may be academic because her kidney is a tiny bit better today, according to the doctor, and the swelling in one foot went down, though the other foot has a toes turning red with cellulitis and they drew a circle around it(!) They say they expect her home tomorrow or the next day and I'm taking care of my other relationships for a few days and taking showers and eating oatmeal and if she's back in her apartment Wednesday or Thursday I'll stay with her the weekend like I always do and do whatever it takes to lend a hand without overwhelming her with my panic attacks and my needs. Ha ha.
My father recently said I could stay in the closet room off my brother's room when I come home to get my teeth worked on. I've always hated that room and given the adult horrors I've been dealing with lately I couldn't imagine what he meant. And then I thought, Maybe he means that if I need to come home for a little while they'll find a place for me somehow. And then I think now, that he thinks I've been frightfully juvenile and should be ashamed of myself. Be that as it may, I feel really ashamed today of the review I wrote of Modio-media because I call fascist what is clearly not fascist in light of the horrible weekend I've spent in the hospital with my sick and undying girlfriend (fingers crossed.) She was always a miracle woman of survival, sleighted to die before the age of 14, back in the 1950's, and then going on to survive an escape from an early marriage, the death of a beloved infant, a year in the jungle, innumerable drunken fistfights and worse, the entire 1960's drugs and politics culture, and then mental hospitals, the kidnapping of her second daughter by her ex-husband, and years of panhandling on the streets without SSI. The last twenty years have been a lot happier and almost all of it she worked full time, but now she's retired and sees her daughter every day sometimes. She also cares about me more than anyone else ever has as far as I know and she is so, so sick and "god" is telling me she's going to survive this crisis but it's been a horrible weekend and I acted in the hospital like a a werewolf in a convent and I just want her to be okay and for people to understand that I'm not playing "god" if being in love gives me unique insight into how she can get herself better when the hospital is wearing a lot of yellow and only checking on her every 45 minutes. You see, one of the first things she ever told me about herself is it's always been a awful struggle to make her body move but she didn't want to die and so she just kept fighting to survive and found she could often excel at stuff, like sports and school and fistfighting when necessary. And I have a friend who's a combination charlatan/stage magician/Tibetan healer who told me-- and I know-- that you can often choose your lifespan by choosing projects you won't die until they're completed. And I'm finding that mainly applying to me these days and all sorts of unbelievably unfunny kharma is coming to me like an old friend and saying, "You can't go until you pay your debt." and I guess I'm just really happy and I always did love those people and never wanted to go to Heaven, Paradise, or Nirvana even when I believed in that stuff. I could go hide like I always used to or I can embrace it and be glad I have a life.
And Linda is surrounded by so much love from me and her daughter and grandchildren that when her body doesn't feel pain she starts to transcend the physical and scare the shit out of us. And it's also true that she filled out an advance directive and I don't know what it says but I think she hates to be a burden on people and doesn't want to take care of us by letting us take care of her. I've been in that position a lot myself and it's crap. But today I think the hospital reduced her methadone and she's felt like crap all day and I call that clarity, because she's really really sick, so I feel better. See, I'm a sadist. But writing this blog post helps me to turn the situation over to the will of not "god" because I don't give a fuck what "god" wants but I think I can let Linda live or end her life or give up or take on more kharma or not according to her will and maybe I'm even cheering up about it.
All this may be academic because her kidney is a tiny bit better today, according to the doctor, and the swelling in one foot went down, though the other foot has a toes turning red with cellulitis and they drew a circle around it(!) They say they expect her home tomorrow or the next day and I'm taking care of my other relationships for a few days and taking showers and eating oatmeal and if she's back in her apartment Wednesday or Thursday I'll stay with her the weekend like I always do and do whatever it takes to lend a hand without overwhelming her with my panic attacks and my needs. Ha ha.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
An Unsolicited Review Of Modio-Media.com
Hopefully no one comes at me with a fasces...
I should say, as a qualifier, that it is my friend's company and that I always felt stirred in some way by her presence and all she does, both in a positive and negative way simultaneously, so that this cannot help but be a very biased and colorful view.
First of all, she and her husband produced the trailer for what looks to be an incredibly good film when they and the director get the financial backing to finish it. It appears to be their baby right now, as in, it is the work they are most proud of and rightly so. It's called, "A Thousand And One Journeys" (https://vimeo.com44550024) and is about Arab-Americans in the USA and both their struggles to adapt and ways that they were already adapted fine as Americans when they were still on the boat. The trailer consists of bits of interviews of faces I recognize and faces I don't recognize sharing primarily about their values and what they bring to a situation instead of seeking to take away from it. These are among the people who built the country, in every sense of the word, and they make no bones in saying exactly that, which I think is great. Modio-Media's obsession with Italy and with the video image disappears altogether behind the passion of telling the story, which is terrific. A++ I can hardly wait to see it when it's done. If I had the money I'd ask to invest in it myself.
I have more mixed feelings about the promo films for Modio-Media as a whole, however. If you truly have a product that could win you customer loyalty, Modio-Media is right for you, but if your product is just the envelope it was supposed to come in, I'd not trouble with it. Other than that, it appears to be a tiny studio with THX potential, but I found most of its promos aesthetically upsetting on a deep level and I want to explain why because I think it might get people curious about seeing for themselves and that could eventually win the company clients. They're capable of uplifting work, but only in the hands of an uplifting client with the vision to engage them in creative dialogue about the project. Gia admits it haas mostly "Italy-focused content," which is fine for clients in Italy, but I clicked on "television" to look for a promo film for CNN and found this newsclip that horrified me. It start to tell a story of the fires in the MidWest, but includes this agonizing footage of a rescue worker being dragged up accidentally into a helicopter (he survived), followed by a hospital corridor full of enhanced images of the arms of reporters holding microphones politely crammed together against both walls while the smoke inhalation victim from the first shot, having gotten to the hospital, comes crashing through them on a gurney...It's even more grotesque than I make it sound, defensibly Saturnalian, and displaying in every way the camera's overdeveloped eye for beauty and obsession for workers. But then I thought, too, that more people work and see themselves as workers than care about fire victims so that the imagery makes use of the psychological technique known as "masking" to use exaggerated details of workers as an Everyman for seducing a lukewarm audience into fascination with the story. It can then proceed to tell about people needing our compassion or admiration or whatever. The only reason a sensitive person may feel revolted by the apparent fascism of the heroic proportions and obsession with nationality is because a truly sensitive person will feel revolted by the fascism they live in every day, whatever country we happen to be in or feel most kinship to. And no aesthetic can bear the distinction of being more fascist than another, it's apples and oranges. Besides, I'm only complaining about what I feel to be the most original of the promo films. "A Thousand And One Journeys" shows how majestic and sublime their work can also be.
I should say, as a qualifier, that it is my friend's company and that I always felt stirred in some way by her presence and all she does, both in a positive and negative way simultaneously, so that this cannot help but be a very biased and colorful view.
First of all, she and her husband produced the trailer for what looks to be an incredibly good film when they and the director get the financial backing to finish it. It appears to be their baby right now, as in, it is the work they are most proud of and rightly so. It's called, "A Thousand And One Journeys" (https://vimeo.com44550024) and is about Arab-Americans in the USA and both their struggles to adapt and ways that they were already adapted fine as Americans when they were still on the boat. The trailer consists of bits of interviews of faces I recognize and faces I don't recognize sharing primarily about their values and what they bring to a situation instead of seeking to take away from it. These are among the people who built the country, in every sense of the word, and they make no bones in saying exactly that, which I think is great. Modio-Media's obsession with Italy and with the video image disappears altogether behind the passion of telling the story, which is terrific. A++ I can hardly wait to see it when it's done. If I had the money I'd ask to invest in it myself.
I have more mixed feelings about the promo films for Modio-Media as a whole, however. If you truly have a product that could win you customer loyalty, Modio-Media is right for you, but if your product is just the envelope it was supposed to come in, I'd not trouble with it. Other than that, it appears to be a tiny studio with THX potential, but I found most of its promos aesthetically upsetting on a deep level and I want to explain why because I think it might get people curious about seeing for themselves and that could eventually win the company clients. They're capable of uplifting work, but only in the hands of an uplifting client with the vision to engage them in creative dialogue about the project. Gia admits it haas mostly "Italy-focused content," which is fine for clients in Italy, but I clicked on "television" to look for a promo film for CNN and found this newsclip that horrified me. It start to tell a story of the fires in the MidWest, but includes this agonizing footage of a rescue worker being dragged up accidentally into a helicopter (he survived), followed by a hospital corridor full of enhanced images of the arms of reporters holding microphones politely crammed together against both walls while the smoke inhalation victim from the first shot, having gotten to the hospital, comes crashing through them on a gurney...It's even more grotesque than I make it sound, defensibly Saturnalian, and displaying in every way the camera's overdeveloped eye for beauty and obsession for workers. But then I thought, too, that more people work and see themselves as workers than care about fire victims so that the imagery makes use of the psychological technique known as "masking" to use exaggerated details of workers as an Everyman for seducing a lukewarm audience into fascination with the story. It can then proceed to tell about people needing our compassion or admiration or whatever. The only reason a sensitive person may feel revolted by the apparent fascism of the heroic proportions and obsession with nationality is because a truly sensitive person will feel revolted by the fascism they live in every day, whatever country we happen to be in or feel most kinship to. And no aesthetic can bear the distinction of being more fascist than another, it's apples and oranges. Besides, I'm only complaining about what I feel to be the most original of the promo films. "A Thousand And One Journeys" shows how majestic and sublime their work can also be.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Aristotle's "Metaphysics"
Aristotle's "Metaphysics"
I really liked this book all the way through even if it was from the beginning one of the hardest books to understand I've ever tried to read. I don't even know if I've come away with an kind of unified theory of his except that I came to the conclusion for myself, though I'm not sure Aristotle intends it, that Nature and God are the same thing, that it is a self-created, self-creating thing, and that it is something beautiful and precious. Aristotle's mind is likewise beautiful and precious, at least to me. I rather think he must have been one of those ancient Greeks who lived to be over a hundred and that he spent the entire time wrestling with the meaning of life and stuff, because dude actually came up with some answers! As well as being able to show in language all the steps he took to get there and all the other theories he either tried or didn't try to use and why he discards them one by one, and that's really why his writing is terrific. Everyone knows a lot of his conclusions have been disproven by now, but the way his mind works is so patient and precise that I find myself having all sorts of religious experiences while I'm reading him, even though I don't think he believed in gods. Anyway, he's on my profile as being up there with all my favorite authors, because I always feel better about life when I read him, even if I feel like I know less than I started with.
I really liked this book all the way through even if it was from the beginning one of the hardest books to understand I've ever tried to read. I don't even know if I've come away with an kind of unified theory of his except that I came to the conclusion for myself, though I'm not sure Aristotle intends it, that Nature and God are the same thing, that it is a self-created, self-creating thing, and that it is something beautiful and precious. Aristotle's mind is likewise beautiful and precious, at least to me. I rather think he must have been one of those ancient Greeks who lived to be over a hundred and that he spent the entire time wrestling with the meaning of life and stuff, because dude actually came up with some answers! As well as being able to show in language all the steps he took to get there and all the other theories he either tried or didn't try to use and why he discards them one by one, and that's really why his writing is terrific. Everyone knows a lot of his conclusions have been disproven by now, but the way his mind works is so patient and precise that I find myself having all sorts of religious experiences while I'm reading him, even though I don't think he believed in gods. Anyway, he's on my profile as being up there with all my favorite authors, because I always feel better about life when I read him, even if I feel like I know less than I started with.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
There is No Eye in the Pyramid
There is No Eye in the Pyramid
I see the most penetratingly cozy pyramid scheme
Of watchers reporting to controllers
Chowing with delightful risk managers
Answering to the whims of pirates
And never quite cutting loose from
The completely dysfunctional program
Of shitting where they eat.
(c) 7/5/12 Tim Conger
I see the most penetratingly cozy pyramid scheme
Of watchers reporting to controllers
Chowing with delightful risk managers
Answering to the whims of pirates
And never quite cutting loose from
The completely dysfunctional program
Of shitting where they eat.
(c) 7/5/12 Tim Conger
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