Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

what does the universe smell like?



Among Thieves

"I can see that your thoughts are deeper than you yourself are able to express. But since this is so, you know, don't you, that you've never liked what you are thinking and that isn't good. Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value. You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the same way priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think."

Demian, Hermann Hesse

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

neverland

it´s difficult to resume what happened at sxsw because by now it´s all a blur. what i do know is that i never wanted it to end.
the downside of attending such a mind-bottling event is that you are forever inclined to frown upon bands playing huge venues. this had been the case beforehand, i´d always preferred to see bands at small joints (who doesn´t), but living austin i´m officially boycotting the whole thing.
the strokes, M.J huge? really? don´t get me wrong, i´m a huggeee strokes fan, but austin made the biggest fuss to see their show. i ended up seeing it on a bridge, way better than a three hour line. at least there i could sway from side to side.

james blake at fader with half the people talking/looking the other way? bummer. upside is i made friends with some rappers from L.A.

but charles bradley, mount kimbie, OMD, psychic tv, grimes, trentemøller, GAYNGS, !!!, glasser, and a couple of others i´ve blacked out on, killed, murdered, annhiliated it.

so if i could make one suggestion to people reading, is never ever ever go to sxsw. less lines for me.
it took forever to go, the festival is my age, and i´ve heard it´s changed so much, it´s mainstream now and blablabla, but isn´t everything mainstream nowadays?... i don´t know what it was before, or what that actually means, but i do believe you can still find those little spots still keeping it how it was intended to be kept. and if my analysis is off, it all basically felt amazing.





















ps. i made two notes to myself on my phone stating:
1. "michael cera is eye-fucking me."
2. "stupid people with initiative rock my world, but they don´t".
i´m thinking really hard to who i was referring to but i honestly cannot remember. i really wish i could, then i´d know where all my anger comes from...

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

two realms

i cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. if it were possible i would reach farther still- into the very first years of my childhood, and beyond them into distant ancestral past.

novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man´s life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. i am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist´s is to him- for this is my story; it is the story of man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood. yet, what a real human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men- each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature- are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. if we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storyteling would lose all purpose. but every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world´s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. that is why every man´s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. in each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemeer is nailed to the cross.

few people nowadays know what man is. many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that i will die more easily once i have completed this story.

i do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. i have been and still am a seeker, but i have ceased to question stars and books; i have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. my story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams- like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.

each man´s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. no man has ever been entirely and completely himself. yet each one strives to become that- one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best as he can. each man carries the vestiges of his birth- the slime and eggshells of his primeval past- with him to the end of his days. some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. some are human above the waist, fish below. each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. we all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. but each of us -experiments of the depths- strives toward his own destiny. we can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.

demian, hermann hesse.

"lose some, lose some"

if your subconscious could articulate physical sound, it would most likely sound like the narrator in the following:

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

white on white

...white, although often considered a no colour, is the symbol of a world in which colour has disappeared as a quality or material substance. that world is too far above us, that none of its sounds reach us. from it, a great silence takes its place, like a cold, indestructible, impenetrable, and infinite wall. white acts like an absolute silence over the soul. internally it sounds like a non-sound comparable to musical pauses that temporarily break a melody. it is not a dead silence, on the contrary, it is full of possibility. white sounds like silence, that all of a sudden can be comprehended.
wassily kandinsky,
concerning the spiritual in art.




i begin my thesis with this excerpt, which to me seems to sum up many of the things i lived through, let´s say for the past lifetime. anyone who´d disagree must really hate the abstract. or is simply a control freak.

ps. as i relistened to the song i just posted, and assimilated it to whatever i just wrote... i´m such a nouveau new age junkie. on my defense, even though i´m authentically repelled by myself, i grew up in the nineties/Y2k.