A Blithering Literates Life

Apathy.  That is the life blood of the lower class.  It’s what keeps them scrabbling away under foot of those in power.  The moronic Croesus with the power over many lesser beings just because he knows a guy and went to the same school and joined the same fraternity and had to go through a similar experience with a potato and a jar of Vaseline.  They see those connections and latch onto that similarity in an effort to continue a lineage of power among the elite.  They are the ugly side of people.  The people that people will be given the opportunity.  With the option of rule laid out at your feet, you can’t refuse it in the name of equality.  Every chance we get, we will stomp on each other to reach the top of the pile where less feet stomp on you and you get to do some stomping of your own.  It’s disheartening to the onlookers who truly understand this and even more so when they realize, despite their noble intention and morality when watching from a distance, when they are face to face with that evil they will take those kingdoms that it offers up freely and rule over our fellow man.  Well, what?  What do we do?  What should we do?  We should use that power to make those under us feel better about not having the power.  Try and disassemble the establishment from within it’s soma.  That won’t happen though, because comfort is what we strive for and what we will do for it can involve atrocities and unfeeling apathy, but we’ll still do it because we want to stay comfortable.  Looking back, we realize and appreciate that apathy, because we can float on top of it, and nobody will argue.  Why?  Apathy.

Symphoniacal is a musical experience that has been compiled and secured on the threads of the world wide web.  It’s motto is “Sound Occupies Space” and rightly so.  The scale of this medley of great themes is staggering.  Despite it’s epic connotation, it streams without buffering, even on a sluggish connection like mine.

You’re probably asking, “What kind of music is this epic masterpiece composed of you blithering callipygian Adonis?”  Well, good people, I’ll tell you, though you should probably be finding out right this moment by going to http://symphoniacal.com/, instead of reading my ramblings on the subject.  Go on and do it.

Your still here, eh?  Well, I will say this about it.  It is an arrangement of the greatest musical works by the greatest musical minds of our time.  You’ve likely heard these songs before in context, but not noticed them for what they are as standalone material.  The works of Danny Elfman, John Williams, Hans Zimmer, and many others are all well represented and, believe me, if you’re tastes are anything like mine, you won’t be anything short of mesmerized by what you hear.  It’s a listening experience and so it can not be explained with words.  You must hear it to experience it and know that awe that only Symphoniacal is able to bring.

So, I was once advised to just consider everything on the Internet as shit until it could prove otherwise with a handy ethereal certificate of “Not Shit” or something.  This is because the Internet lacks quality control.  This can be easily illustrated by looking at any number of comments below the videos posted on YouTube or MySpace or, indeed, the videos themselves.  I once saw a grown man dressed in a not very well fitting cat suit play piano - very terribly after drinking a cup of milk like a cat - on public television.  This was before I had an Internet connection and this was also about the time that I decided that television was a massive drain on my life and decided to just not watch it anymore.  I still catch glimpses of flickering squawk boxes at my friends house’s and such and am now very aware of the dangerous and hypnotic power that television has, like it’s got a plate of fresh chocolate strawberries in front of it with a sign that says “Please, sit and enjoy.” 

Sorry.  I’ve been falling further off the precipice of this post’s topic.  My point is that there is shit all around us, like being locked in a septic tank, and it’s hard for us to find anything truly good among that sea of egesta.  That’s why I feel the urge to share the good things I find with the public because I’m sure there’s at least a couple people out there that quest for something better as I do.

I’ve never been into silent movies, so I didn’t really know much about Charlie Chaplin, and I’m not really into psychedelic rock or rock in general, so Muse is news to me.  It took a new Watchmen trailer for me to find this video.  When I saw the trailer I thought, “That music is really cool, I wonder who does it,” and, working to answer that question, I found a not so useless comment that named the band responsible as Muse.  I then searched for Muse on YouTube and eventually found the song I was looking for, “Take A Bow.”  When I scrolled down the search results, I found a clip with a description that said it also included Charlie Chaplin’s “Emperor Speech.”  I never knew Charlie Chaplin did anything with spoken dialogue and was further intrigued by the subsequent images from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “A Clockwork Orange,” and several other horrific and mesmerizing clips.  Let me wrap this up by saying it was a very stark portrayal of the brutality of man that ended with one of the more inspiring speeches I’ve ever heard.  I heartily recommend it and would like to thank Morganiser for creating such a poignant video.

Art is the crystal that results from pouring your energy, futility, and gross error, again and again, into the infinitely vast wellspring that is your medium.  With any luck, this refined gem will float from the pool of slurry that you so arduously created by vomiting countless chunks of your enduring spirit and, with a little more luck, you’ll be able to repeat the process without retching the whole of your eternal self into that empty vastness to which you dedicate yourself.

What is art?  Art is life sacrificed.  Art does not just happen and though some may spit and toss and tear and mar and destroy and kill and call it art, they are lying.  Though responses can be random, signals must be pure.  All that is there is there and was all carefully orchestrated to mean something.  That is what it is to be an artist.  To create.

That is art.

While making my margarine fried eggs, I heard an advertisement on my roommates T.V. for a video game called “Fallout 3.”  It was short.  Only a couple words, which I assume where the tag line for the game, but I noticed them because it was Ron Perlman saying them.  The line was “War.  War never changes,” bolstered by some epic music in the background, as it should be, I suppose.  Now, normally I take anything that Ron Perlman says as holy decree, but thinking about the phrase caused me to say to myself, “That’s not true Mr. Perlman, sir.  War has definitely changed.”

Let us examine the facts or, rather, let me type the facts up for you to read.  A brief history of human warfare would start us out as spear hurling, rock throwing ape-men with preposterous jaw lines and bodies built like brick shit houses.  Of course, we didn’t do much to record warfare at this point, so I only have my imaginations word for that historical tidbit, but, moving on, we then got into the whole metal thing and started carving each other up on battlefields for king and country, but mostly for king.  Even with the advent of artillery and rifles, we still had to get close enough to smell our enemies lunch on his breath to guarantee a successful kill.  Then World War Two rolls around and suddenly we realize that just charging a machine gun with a heroic phalanx of young men in button down shirts and hard hats wasn’t really working to take any ground or keep our men alive.  With this and the whole business with explosives and flamethrowers - the most awesome impractical weapon in the history of warfare - We decided to move up to our new strategy that just involved bombing our enemies into flaming hamburger.  While raining clusters of death from the sky was effective to a point, it was highly inefficient.  Military scientists saw this and decided to compact the power of a million bombs into one bomb.  Always thinking, those scientists.  With that we have nuclear weapons.  Your one click solution to countries you hate or dislike slightly or who call you a pillock or who give you a dirty look.  That brings us to the present day, where we all point our nukes at each other and basically play a M.A.D. game of “you kill me and I kill you.”  Reminds me of playing with other kids in grade school, sans the mass genocide.

So there you go.  We’ve come to a stalemate with our weapons of mass destruction and, some day, some pillocks finger is going to slip and everybody is going to blow everybody else up and we’ll all be back were we started or dead.  I guess coming full circle can almost count as “War never changing,” but that’s not the case really.  Sorry Ron Perlman.  War has and will continue to evolve so long as man lives with himself in contempt.  Life is change and war is  and, sadly, always will be a part of life.

It’s certainly a glorious gray day here in the badlands of Eastern Washington.  Deserted streets stretch out every which way in anticipation of the approaching Thanksgiving day.  Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really see much point to Thanksgiving or, as I like to call it, “Fat day.”  Yes, Fat day is an opportunity to brush all those grumbling hostilities that we have for our relatives, under the table from which we gorge ourselves on gobs of semi-liquid tubers and dead fowl that probably saw the ax coming but were to busy wondering what the hell was falling from the sky to notice.  As much as I love mashed potatoes and turkey, I just can’t seem to get my head around the principle of the holiday.

Sure, we eat and get to spend time with people we’d normally try ridiculously to get away from for one reason or another, but we don’t come to iron out any of those contours that keep us apart for the other 364 days of the year.   All we do is sit around in uncomfortably improvised seating arrangements in a house not meant to contain more than ten people at a time, much less twenty, and talk about sports or that new politician that’s causing so much controversy, or the new warts we’ve endeavoured to remove from ourselves.  We don’t tackle the issue of why we dislike each others company.  We don’t try to understand why we consider uncle Ernie the black sheep of the family.  Actually, that one might speak for itself.  Uncle Ernie carts around a miasma of whisky and patchouli gained from his experiences as a professional change collector.  He relishes a free meal, even if every other member of the family burns him with scorn from their eyes the whole night.

Maybe I don’t see what we have to gain by shutting ourselves in together when we’d much rather eat in the comfort of our living room, plopped in front of the squawk box listening to O’Riley jabber on about why America is great and everywhere else sucks.  Maybe I just don’t want to wade through all that tension between the haves and the have nots brought together and made equal.  Maybe I’m just a misanthropic young man who takes no pleasure in stepping outside of my comfort zone to be judged by my predecessors.  Maybe it’s apathy.  The latter may be the most likely; just not wanting to put forth that effortless gesture of acquiescence.

I won’t be with my whole family this Fat day.  I’ll be with my mom, dad and sister, eating whatever improvised meals we can gather from the depths of our pantry, and I don’t see that vacancy of extended family as a negative.  They don’t like us and we don’t like them, so it’s best we stay away from each other and stay happy.

That’s what Fat day’s all about.  Being happy with those who make you happy.