"Even the burglar alarms of medieval Japan were given a poetic art form. The corridors leading to the monk's dormitory in some temples were called nightingale walks, the heavy floorbeams being set on supports in such a manner as to give out thin musical notes or chirrups when trodden, thus compelling night intruders to give audible warning of their approach."
p. 99 of W. Scott Morton's Japan: Its History And Culture. (McGraw-Hill, 1994).
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Why I love 'Emo'
[from Nothing Nice to Say]
Even I find hating on emo funny. Still, I love emo. Why?
-I am contrary. Emo isn't cool -- being called 'emo' is super-uncool. No band in the history of emo has actually been willinng to identify themselves as emo.
-Emo isn't about being a rockstar -- it's about communicating, and rather than glorifying the performers, it's about breaking down the walls between the audience and the performers. The best bands make you feel like they could be you, and you could be them.
-Sincerity= cool. Irony = lame
-Positivity is also cool
-It's not just about girls. There's plenty of self-criticism and stories about broken friendships.
-Mockers will scoff at the sometimes sirrupy/wimpy 'heaviness' -- products of emo's desire to blend melody and aggression musically --but emo music gives its performers (and by extension its fans) a chance to be powerful and vulnerable at the same time. (Alright, so I have to admit that quite frankly I scoff at the sirruppy 'heaviness' of some of the current screamo bands... this post isn't my attempt to say all emo music is good).
-Misogyny is lame. Emo doesn't depict females as sexual conquests.
-'Macho' is lame. It ruins a lot of the good parts of sports, punk, and metal.
-It's cool to find a genre of music where the fanbase is made up (rougly) equally of girls and guys.
-It's inclusive. Emo is for kids that know they don't want to listen to Top 40 radio (or radio rock) but that aren't cool enough to be punk (or macho enough to be metal).
-Emo is punk.
-Fuck you. Who made you the arbitrator of what punk is? The original generation of punk involved a bunch of bands that shared a (somewhat) common spirit, but no one sounded like anybody else -- just try to find the common sound between Television, the Ramones, and Patti Smith! British punk and then American hardcore narrowed punk to a one-dimensional sonic style. Just because you don't sound like The Sex Pistols or Black Flag doesn't mean you're not punk. (Though those are two awesome bands). The great thing about punk rock when it came out was that it sounded unlike anything anyone else had heard until then. (Unlike most of what masquerades under the name 'punk' today, which either sounds like it came from 1977, 1982 or like those two years filtered though 90's modern rock and pop-metal). The first generation of punk bands were brilliant, inventive, hard-edged, and progressive, (and not 'progressive' in a lame, dinosaur-rock kind of way). Any band with a DIY aesthetic, unprocessed sound, and subversive message and unfiltered expression is punk rock. Son House is punk rock. They Might Be Giants is punk. Good emo is punk.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
A Meditation on Boundaries, (via quotes I've collected over the past few years)
"I like boundaries, as long as they are fluid."
-Christie May
We have to move beyond the outside–inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits.
– Michel Foucault (‘What is Enlightenment?’)
A triviality is a statement whose opposite is false. However, a great truth is a statement whose opposite may well be another great truth.
-Niels Bohr
Belief in either radicalism or orthodoxy is too simplified a way of viewing things ... Evil is never all evil; goodness on the other hand is often tainted with selfishness.
-Chinua Achebe
Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity. To say that freedom is graven in the nature of man, is to say that man is free because he obeys his nature, or, to put it another way, because he is conditioned by his nature... We must look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not a static but dynamic; not a vested interest, but a prize continually to be won.
-Jacques Ellul
Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position.
-Hannah Arendt
Any proof of the syllogism would be absurd. The syllogism is, to put it briefly, nothing but a rule of language to avoid contradiction: at bottom the principle of non-contradiction is a principle of grammar.
-Simone Weil
"Liberty [i.e. the bourgeois conception], therefore is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.... But the [bourgeois] right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself...
Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, no longer bound by a common bond or by man, of the estranged elements of his life, such as property, industry, religion, etc., whereas actually this is his fully developed slavery and inhumanity."
-Karl Marx
Rules were invented by elders so they could go to bed early. Men who harp on authority only prove they have none. Kings who make speeches about submission reveal they are afraid.
-Gene Edwards
The doctrine of the established Church, its organization, are both very good indeed. Oh, but then our lives: believe me, they are indeed wretched.
-Soren Kirgegaard
"I started skateboardinging the mid-70s and a lot of people thought 'Oh, it's a sport'. But it's not just a sport. Skateboarding was about redefinition. It was like putting on a pair of filtered glasses -- every curb, every sidewalk, every street, every wall had a new definition. I saw the world differently than other people. Everything had completely changed because I was a skateboarder. It really helped me understand the idea of redefining what's been given you. I've always been interested in saying, 'Here's what's been presented, now how does it work and how can it work?' Skateboarding was such an important part of that... "
-Ian MacKaye, (member of Fugazi, Minor Threat, reluctant founder of straight edge, owner/manager of Dischord Records, etc. etc).
"To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision…one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously. In my experience, the more such ambivalences you can hold in your head, the better off you are, intellectually and emotionally. Categorical statements become meaningless. The saddest stories are shot through with humor. You come to tolerate people, ideas, and circumstances wholly at odds with your dreams and desires.”
- Nancy Mairs
We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.
-Anon
-Christie May
We have to move beyond the outside–inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits.
– Michel Foucault (‘What is Enlightenment?’)
A triviality is a statement whose opposite is false. However, a great truth is a statement whose opposite may well be another great truth.
-Niels Bohr
Belief in either radicalism or orthodoxy is too simplified a way of viewing things ... Evil is never all evil; goodness on the other hand is often tainted with selfishness.
-Chinua Achebe
Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity. To say that freedom is graven in the nature of man, is to say that man is free because he obeys his nature, or, to put it another way, because he is conditioned by his nature... We must look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not a static but dynamic; not a vested interest, but a prize continually to be won.
-Jacques Ellul
Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position.
-Hannah Arendt
Any proof of the syllogism would be absurd. The syllogism is, to put it briefly, nothing but a rule of language to avoid contradiction: at bottom the principle of non-contradiction is a principle of grammar.
-Simone Weil
"Liberty [i.e. the bourgeois conception], therefore is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.... But the [bourgeois] right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself...
Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, no longer bound by a common bond or by man, of the estranged elements of his life, such as property, industry, religion, etc., whereas actually this is his fully developed slavery and inhumanity."
-Karl Marx
Rules were invented by elders so they could go to bed early. Men who harp on authority only prove they have none. Kings who make speeches about submission reveal they are afraid.
-Gene Edwards
The doctrine of the established Church, its organization, are both very good indeed. Oh, but then our lives: believe me, they are indeed wretched.
-Soren Kirgegaard
"I started skateboardinging the mid-70s and a lot of people thought 'Oh, it's a sport'. But it's not just a sport. Skateboarding was about redefinition. It was like putting on a pair of filtered glasses -- every curb, every sidewalk, every street, every wall had a new definition. I saw the world differently than other people. Everything had completely changed because I was a skateboarder. It really helped me understand the idea of redefining what's been given you. I've always been interested in saying, 'Here's what's been presented, now how does it work and how can it work?' Skateboarding was such an important part of that... "
-Ian MacKaye, (member of Fugazi, Minor Threat, reluctant founder of straight edge, owner/manager of Dischord Records, etc. etc).
"To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision…one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously. In my experience, the more such ambivalences you can hold in your head, the better off you are, intellectually and emotionally. Categorical statements become meaningless. The saddest stories are shot through with humor. You come to tolerate people, ideas, and circumstances wholly at odds with your dreams and desires.”
- Nancy Mairs
We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.
-Anon
Friday, January 9, 2009
My Goal For The Coming Year
(Refer specifically to the second panel for my New Year's Resolution; and don't forget to click on the image to see a more readable version; if you want to see the comic in it's original context click here).Happy New Year! It looks like it's going to be a really busy term, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to be on here and writing as much as I'd like. But I'll try. And don't despair! Lord knows there's enough to of my writing in the past few months to keep any sane person satisfied for a long time.
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