10.28.07

Nature’s Ceaseless Chautauqua

Posted in Personal at 11:10 pm by Moody

In my life there have been a few things — outside the arena of the most intimate of interpersonal relationships — that I’ve enjoyed so deeply that they have, over time, come to be ingrained, have come to be mythologically archetypal, in my brain’s comprehensive sense of “pleasure”. Of late I have been thinking a lot about hiking and all that surrounds that activity. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my father, who managed to get his listless, moody, youngest son out of the city and into the High Sierras and other places far removed from the concrete and tar of suburbia’s everyday world. Were it not for his insistence, I might well have never learned what it’s like to climb steep mountain trails for mile after mile to reach, at last, some forest bounded lake; to sit beneath the whispering, creaking pine trees at night, warming hands and feet beside a crackling fire as crickets sing and night-birds call from near and far; to wake up in a tent, nestled into a warm sleeping bag, with the bright morning sunlight highlighting the nylon wall and spangling it with the silhouettes of branches and pine needles; to breathe the chilly, seemingly pristine air while eating re-hydrated scrambled eggs (made from a mix purchased at the backpacker’s supply store) and drinking hot cocoa — both made using fresh mountain water; to munch on gorp (”good ol’ raisins and peanuts”) while exploring the wilderness.

Time has softened the complaints I levied against those trips. No mosquito or freezing night, no switchback or strained climb, no lack of TV or shortage of electronic entertainments ever annoyed me so much that I would forget, in the end, that I had the opportunity to see this primevally beautiful side of the world that most people, I’d guess, will never see in person if at all. Time has given me an ache for those vacations spent hiking and camping. I miss the dust on my heavy boots and the smudges of trail dirt on my face. I miss seeing the myriad, crystalline stars through the boughs of the trees — trees whose heady, living scent seemed a balm to succor the fatigued traveler — as the silent, immovable, sentinel mountains, guarding nature’s sense of eternity from the invasive light of so-called civilization, cut imposing blue-black swathes into the clear night sky.

To watch the trout plucking insects from the surface of a lake early in the morning, while the mist yet lay upon its far bank with its flowered meadow, as I washed my face with the lake’s cold, cold water: — this was joy unbridled and larger than me. From time to time in years to come I would ascribe this sense of joy to what is usually called Providence, saying to myself that “God” was surely revealed among the rivers, lakes, trees, mountains and creatures of such distant places as I then stood. Although I have long since abandoned the idea of such Providence as achingly sentimental at its root and needy in a childlike way, I nonetheless feel a very real atheistic reverence in me for such places and the journeys that lead to them. I am grateful for my ability to appreciate the beauty and power of nature without superimposing some sort of story or motive upon it. Nature provides to any open-minded person a seat in the front row of its ceaseless chautauqua.

And I know that someday I must return to hear it again… or else always know some extra burden, however small or easily repressed, of genuine loneliness in my existence.

……………………

The above portion of this entry has been sitting in draft limbo for a couple of days. Fact is, I’ve been thinking about more than just my experiences, and I feel I should confess that my dreams go well beyond simple hiking and camping.

A day or two ago I finished John Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams. Today I watched the MacGillivray Freeman film, Everest (originally shown in IMAX theaters, now available on DVD), which was filmed during the notorious 1996 climbing season — a season when eight people (unrelated to the IMAX expedition) died tragically during a horrendous, surprise storm high on the formidable peak. Krakauer was caught in that storm and found himself in the midst of the unfolding tragedy. Four members of the expedition Krakauer was with were killed. His expedition’s leader, Rob Hall, died from the intense cold and lack of oxygen. Hall spoke to his wife, Jan, via satellite phone in his final hours. She was seven months pregnant, and he helped name their child, Sarah — a daughter who would never get to know her father. According to Wikipedia:

During this last communication, he reassured her that he was reasonably comfortable and told her, “Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Shortly thereafter, he died, and his body was found on May 23 by mountaineers from the IMAX expedition.

Krakauer, devastated and changed by the experience, wrote one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read, Into Thin Air. It was that book that touched something in me that had lain dormant since my childhood visits to the High Sierras. Eiger Dreams has only served to exacerbate that something within me.

Well into my 41st year of life, I know that it is unreasonable for me to think that — all things considered — I will ever test my mettle on some high mountain climb. Even were the monetary costs not completely prohibitive, my lack of experience and merely average health would serve as dire warnings against indulging any foolish ideas I might have. But of course that means next to nothing where my yearnings are concerned, and I know that it is a true desire I feel, one not done in by the practical world with its humdrum typical concerns.

If I am to be totally honest with you — whoever you are, reading this — what I know in my heart of hearts is that I will never belong to the daily mucking about, the fucking around, the much ado about nothing, the rat race, the game. What I know in my heart of hearts is that I belong only to me, — yet, to myself I am the greatest unknown in the end. And I think that it might always be so, if I don’t actually do something beyond what I perceive to be the norm. And I don’t want to die like that; I don’t want to ebb into nothingness, borne along in the boat of “What if…?” on the tide of self-ignorance, realizing that death won’t be so very different in the end than what I had all along.

I know that it is unreasonable for me to think that I will ever test my mettle on some high mountain climb. But mountains like Everest and K2 are to me no less symbols of my inner hunger, my internal yearning, for that, and I must somehow, some way, sometime come to approach them, humbly, earnestly, and with the understanding that of necessity I shall make the ascent. And perhaps it is, that in the years to come I will find my way to some real peak — my mountain, as it were — and find myself with goggles, crampons, ice picks, ropes, cams, carabiners, and all the rest, climbing for my life up some improbable face of granite and ice, wondering how it is such great fortune came to me. Or, looking further ahead, perhaps I’ll be stunned silent for a moment by the memory of this or some similar blog entry of mine, as I sit beside a campfire far off in the distant wilderness, younger eyes trained upon me as I recount my first real climb in light of my first hiking experiences in the High Sierras.

You never know until you know. What I know now is that we have to have dreams to get us to that next, mightily significant, wakeful knowing. We have to have dreams, have to have the yearning to see them come true, have to have the chutzpa and focus to find the way to realize them, have to know in ourselves that those dreams fulfill us like nothing else could, so that when we stand atop whatever kind of peak it is we ultimately climb — we know ourselves (to be) there, where nature’s ceaseless chautauqua names us.

10.23.07

Fairy Dust on the Day’s Entrails

Posted in Personal at 2:01 am by Moody

“The theater of noise is proof of our potential.”

We welcome entropy, inertia, the maintenance of routine and its dissolution in thoughtless reveries, sex, new products, bright lights and big noises, war; the pursuit of happiness. In our glorious social hives we countenance no deviation from the de facto parameters indicated/sanctified by skilled interpreters/priests of market index matrices in n dimensions. We make up the amoeba-like consumer conglomerates, worshiping as with one mind the great and holy cartel in the Inc. sky: every mega-store is a church; every mall a cathedral; every swap meet a revival tent; every strip mall a roadside collection of shrines. “GOD” is merely an acronym for the “Gross Optimizer of Decisions”.

Can you see your TV as — “Happy Buddha”… {Call now! Operators are standing by!} … “Dancing Krishna”… {Don't wait until this offer expires! Time is limited!} … “Benevolent Jesus”… {Act now and we'll send you this bonus gift completely free of charge!} … “Wise Mohamed”… {But wait! -- there's more!} …? Were your eyes designed for capture? your ears for jingles? your tongue for McHunger? your nose for good buys? your touch for self-stimulation? Were your senses created for denial and/or satisfaction? Could it be true, that there is no truth so strong that commercialized, well-marketed delusion cannot filter it out for the masses? Could it be done in such a way that failing to accept the end product would result in a sense of alienation, a weight of depression, a twitch of anxiety, a pall of disassociation, der Geruch des Außenseiters, Sie niemand — ?

We need no more than the simulacra sold by hucksters at the cost of some undisclosed percentage of our mind’s freedom. While on the other side of the fence millions of animals are sacrificed to the beat of nihilism’s drum — slaughtered and stripped of flesh, ground up and processed, sold in sterile pornographic display cases — on our side of the fence we masticate the plasticized remains of their kindred, heedless of consequences, as images of death-sex penetrate our eyes and fuck our brains out.

While you pray or meditate or rant or otherwise occupy yourself, a portion of your (and my) tax dollars continue to help fund the oppression and death of countless living beings even as a portion of your tax dollars ia allocated to the furtherance of other “Good Social Causes”™ you have only maybe heard about. You (– like me, of course) will not stop paying taxes, and even if a few of us do it is unlikely that our protest will affect any perceptible change in life as we know it. If no taxes were collected, it would certainly have a deleterious effect on society. Perhaps it should not weigh on us so heavily (assuming it does) as it is so far out of our practical control. Maybe it is better not to pay attention to upsetting things… people, places, events, etc. It might be a good idea to sing “Que sera, sera…” with Doris Day and opine with wistful sincerity that a good deal of life is simply not in our control.

Should I not be bitter? I know the value of love in my life, and good people with whom to share it. Most days, I do fairly well at being a good person, a mensch even. What good is it to berate those who run afoul of my unreasonable standards? Who am I to judge? — But isn’t that the crux of the problem? Who am I not to judge? Who am I not to point out that someone is as guilty as I am? So what if they are misdemeanors and not felonies? What is the collective weight of all our misdemeanors? Alone in the depths of the steely night’s bowels, am I alone in such nightmares of self-recrimination and ubiquitous doubt? Of course I’m not! Are monsters no more than a deadly deduction of the children we drown in this societal wasteland? Is struggling with the inept personal management of a species-wide responsibility a perennial one?

How does one human animal contend against the seething abyss of injustice without suffocating in the contemned reality of it? I don’t know… any more than I know why I love so freely the artful folly of our incessant perambulation beneath a sky filled with more mass-produced Sword of Damocles replicas than there are stars to light our darkling way.

Ahhch — tho’, y’know… don’t listen to me.

Listening to: Ryoji Ikeda - What’s Wrong via FoxyTunes

10.22.07

Reading & Viewing Pleasures

Posted in Personal at 12:42 pm by Moody

Home on short-term medical leave (I had my gall bladder removed after a couple trips to the ER for gallstones), I’ve had some time to reacquaint myself with something that used to be called “leisure time” but what is now called “unhoped for and needed respite”. Below is a list of items I’ve either read/viewed recently, am regularly reading/viewing, or wish were on at present (TV programs with an asterisk are currently showing or are available “on demand”).

Current Book:

Regular Blogs:

Recently Read:

Must-See TV:

Movies:

10.20.07

Four in the Must-Have Category

Posted in Music at 9:46 pm by Moody

The following four albums — however different from each other they may be — should be considered indispensable for your music library. Each proves itself on its own terms, building on the merits of those that preceded it. While any one of them might not be your cup of tea, there is not any doubt that all of them are top shelf in terms of quality. All are worth at least sampling, regardless of your usual tastes; who knows when a new favorite might emerge? Goûtez la différence. Apprenez la différence. Vive la différence!

(Just click the album covers to go to the band/album page.)

Radiohead, In Rainbows

[image]Longtime fans of Radiohead have, over the years since Pablo Honey, come to expect surprises, innovation, and the surpassing of all previous efforts with each new release. Although Hail to the Thief felt, to some extent, like a subtle return to elements found in OK Computer and The Bends, it was still different, still another animal. But while In Rainbows builds on the sound of previous albums, it seems to finally realize a true and full synthesis (not distillation) of and balance between all that preceded it. It seems the title suggests as much; all the colors of the band’s music are represented in one overarching work.

If synthesizing and finding the balance point of the band’s distinctive sound on a new album was what they sought to do, the members of Radiohead succeeded admirably. In committing songs to an album that were previously reserved for live audiences (the best test subjects for new material, I’d think), and then reworking them for the sake of the whole, Radiohead have produced an album at least as solid as The Bends and perhaps more accessible than any previous album. It is a work spangled with the sort of highlights and great moments that fans of Radiohead long ago came to expect, but it never brings about the kind of nostalgia one gets — the kind that sends you back to old favorites — when a band is passing their prime. Radiohead have the kind of staying power one hopes for, like a promise delivered in rainbows.

For a longer, more in-depth review, see Pitchfork.

Listening to: Radiohead - Nude via FoxyTunes

Meshell Ndegeocello, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams

[image]On her seventh full-length recording, Meshell has brought the inebriating subtleties of Comfort Woman and the algebraic jazz complexities of The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel together with the fierce incisiveness of Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape to produce a truly innovative, hard-hitting, world challenging work of art that speaks with a blunt, poetic elegance to the life we have been given, the life we have made, the life we wish we had, the life we continue to fool ourselves about. If you are not confronted by the fearless questions Meshell is asking, then you simply have not heard her.

The world has made me the man of my dreams is consistently brilliant. It is a hard brilliance, like that of a diamond, polished by Meshell’s wide range of vocal emotions and amazing lyrical prowess, not to mention her astonishing (one could arguably call it “unsurpassed”) bass guitar work. Musically (by which I mean to include what is sung and how it is sung), the album reaches for and attains a level of pristine artistry; its complex constructions come off as mathematical simplicity, its simplicity unfolds into a rich tapestry of poetry as worthy as Rumi’s and Audre Lorde’s. Her themes are as diverse as ever, yet this album has seen their potency and temperament strengthened still further, as if she has somehow managed to squeeze into them the understanding of even more life lessons.

Listening to: Me’Shell Ndegéocello - Michelle Johnson via FoxyTunes

Iron & Wine, Shepherd’s Dog

[image]“Southern gothic indie folk” would be one label you could stamp Sam Beam’s (Iron & Wine’s) work with, … with a side of Tex-Mex. However, it would be easier instead to say that Shepherd’s Dog is a singularly haunting album buoyed up by a smiling spirit and love of life (despite or because of the odds). To be sure, there is something so easy-going about Beam’s stoner vocals that you may, in fact, overlook what he singing:

Here’s a prayer for the body buried by the interstate / Murder of a soldier, a tree in a forest up in flames / Black valley, peace beneath the city / Where the women hear the washboard rhythm in their bosom when they say, / “Give me good legs and a Japanese car and show me a road” \ (from “Peace Beneath the City”)

With guests musicians from the band Calexico (with whom Beam did an EP called In the Reins in 2005), Shepherd’s Dog varies between southern and south-western regions of Americana in terms of style, but this only lends to the strength of the album because they mix so well in Beam’s hands. The fact is, the music is beautiful as farewell kisses, the lyrics are poetry as pretty as autumn’s favorite dresses, and together they create songs that it would be awfully hard to tire of in one long, worthwhile lifetime. Shepherd’s Dog plays to the part of me that yet hopes for a good ending without having to look the other way from what’s sad or hurtful in life.

Listening to: Iron & Wine - Peace Beneath The City via FoxyTunes

Angels of Light, We Are Him

[image]This release by Angels of Light (with Akron/Family and the assistance of several great musicians) should be considered a music library necessity in the same way Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are, with the understanding that We Are Him hails from ultimate Thule in comparison. Featuring guests like Christoph Hahn (electric guitar; open-tuned lap steel), Bill Rieflin (”Hammond B3 organ, Moog synthesizer, electric guitar, bass guitar, drums/percussion, piano, casio, and backing vocals and probably 3 or 4 things I can’t remember at the moment…”, according to Gira), Eszter Balint (fiddle and violin), and several other really talented musicians, We Are Him sounds full, rich, and otherwise instrumentally resplendent; it sounds, in short, like nothing you’ve heard before.

By turns hypnotic, dark, intricate, touching, creepy; We Are Him does not let up, even in its quieter moments, for its 55.7 minute duration. In his fifties now, Michael Gira — creator/frontman of the seminal avant-rock band, Swans — has spent his career honing a particularly sharp style of music nearly unparalleled in the (generally) non-commercial music industry. On this new album, Los Angeles native Gira sometimes recalls Johnny Cash and sometimes Nick Cave, but throughout the album’s length he maintains his signature style, a style tempered in the same fires — set by New York’s “no wave” scene — that gave us Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca. But, lest this be misinterpreted, let it be said that Angels of Light are the heirs of a certain attitude born in the late ’70s - early ’80s, but the music is contemporary; previous decades are not here revised or revisited. We Are Him is truly a work of this era. While others try to revive or recreate their heydays, Gira proves beyond doubt that his education has not stopped and that his development has been true.

Listening to: Angels of Light - The Visitor via FoxyTunes

10.19.07

Note to Self

Posted in Personal at 8:34 pm by Moody

You have not loved until love has stayed, unbidden, and over the course of myriad minor eternities and multitudinous brevities has recreated you, poisoned you, saved you, possessed you, freed you, ignored you, inspired you, exhausted you, succored and wounded you, maddened you and given you sanity. You have not loved until you have utterly and irrevocably forgotten what came before it, how you survived without it, how anything meant anything at all before it arrived, like a thief in the night, to lay abed with you and partake (sometimes in the preparation, sometimes in the eating, sometimes both) of your fulsome repasts, midnight and midday snacks, and meager breakfasts, with never a promise that it would do the dishes — though sometimes, with seeming randomness, it does.

Love is both the systemic/holistic grande apparence of a single member of the clade Homo sapiens in all her or his psyche’s glory and folly and the spirit of Hermes loosed in a miner’s chapeau as that a-priori-juggernaut ipso-facto-spelunker sings “This Little Light of Mine”. Love is a mysterious, compelling, fascinating, larger-than-life guest who may be mistaken for an angel or devil or god or schizophrenic — but almost never for a golem — when first it arrives at one’s door; it is none of these. Love may stay. It will probably bring gifts made of Tiffany wrapped in burning magnesium and/or carnival glass wrapped in tiffany on the Twelfth Night, just because. Love might move in on a whim, or after great deliberation. In any case, know beforehand that love will use your shampoo and toothbrush, but you will not care — because love’s hair will smell more wonderful than a recent shampooing warrants and its teeth will be whiter than the Pearly Gates of Marilyn Monroe’s haunted laughter. Love will ask you to do things which, if you do them, will seem totally unreasonable in retrospect, and if you do not, will seem like they were entirely sensible and leave you to wallow in self-recrimination. Love will bite you and kiss you. Love will screw you over, on, and under the table. Love will ask for chastity as it shows you naked pictures of its soul drawn in invisible ink. Love will ask you to buy it fine wine and tampons… on your day off… after waking you from a nap. Love will make it up to you.