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SpiralTruth
Just another post-modern quest for meaning.
Browsing SpiralTruth blog archives for September, 2009.
UrbanMonk has an interesting article on how to get to the core of your passion(s) and then pursue them. A lot of it’s just the standard “don’t give up on your dreams” rhetoric (which isn’t exactly a bad thing) designed to give that much needed boost of hope that creative types need more often than most, as we pursue our various quixotic quests and treks up Maslow mountains.
What I found different about this post was how it encourages you to analyze a given passion, to break it up into a core essence, preferred forms of expression, and preferred mediums to communicate it to others. We often make the error of locking into a specific version of a passion (i.e. “I want to be a rock star with a record deal who sells out arenas”) when what we really want is much more fundamental (i.e. “I love to tell stories and explore emotion and thought, especially through music, and I’d like to do it full time. I could get a record deal to help with this, but I could also do it myself. It would be nice to have a big audience, but all I really need is a thousand true fans.”).
Check it out if you think you should be pursuing some of those passions you’ve been denying but don’t know where to start.
I recently stumbled upon Michelle Malkin, someone I had no clue existed but who is apparently quite popular with the far right of the United States. I found myself gritting my teeth as I read attack piece after attack piece, each one held together by questionable links and even more questionable reasoning, and as I continued to read, I tried to figure out what it was about Malkin’s “journalism” that made it so distasteful. After all, my last post was an undisguised bashing of Rahim Jaffer, a politician I find particularly loathsome.
So, what’s the difference between someone like Malkin and someone like me? I fear that the truth is: not much. Both of us believe that we’re one of the good guys and that whoever or whatever we attack constitutes the bad. Our arguments seem rock solid to us and hopelessly contrived to each other.
This isn’t anything new, of course. We’ve all complained about how polarized debate is becoming at one time or another in the last decade. It’s almost as much fun to complain about polarization as it is to be polarized. And as we become more and more aware of this polarization, it’s tempting to blame it on the rise of the Internet – and the rise of blogging, in particular. After all, if we didn’t have all these “amateurs” out there editorializing everything to the point that facts are considered secondary to the narrative they’re trying to convey – and instead left it all to “real journalists” to deliver informed, well researched news – wouldn’t we be better off?
Some might say you can tell a lot about a man by his favourite intoxicants. Marijuana and LSD, for example, have long been associated with idealistic hippies that will never amount to anything in life. Take, for example, Steve Jobs. He’s been quoted as saying that taking LSD was one of the three most important things he’s ever done. What a loser! If he’d only done something more productive – like, say, help invent the personal computer and become CEO of one of the most innovative companies around…
Bill Clinton seemed to like marijuana, even if he didn’t inhale. It’s long been known that pot has a negative affect on ambition, and it obviously affected Mr. Clinton’s. Instead of making a name for America by starting a long term war or two, he wasted his talents on reducing the deficit, boosting the economy, and creating a budget surplus. Thankfully, his successor knew how all that money should really be used. Clinton might be satisfied with balanced budgets and rescuing reporters from North Korea, but George Bush knew that Jesus lovin’ cowboy swagger – and pre-emptively bombing the fuck out of countries – is where it’s at.
And what drug is George Bush famous for taking a spin or two with? That’s right… cocaine.
So, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Rahim Jaffer, who has long been critical of marijuana and parties like the NDP who advocate decriminalization of the substance, has been caught in possession of cocaine.
Not only in possession of cocaine. Also drunk driving (aren’t the conservatives all about “responsibility”?)… in an SUV (way to help the environment, buddy). And, yes, this is also the guy who got someone to impersonate him on a radio show. If there was a lifetime douchebag award, he would certainly be in the lead to receive it.
As expected, the refrain from fellow right-wingers in Canada seems to be: pot smokers are still deserving of jail time, but Rahim is only human, and we should forgive him for making a mistake.
Today, on the 8th anniversary of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security’s Absurdity Level is set to orange, and there is a high risk that the TV drama queens out there will try to milk this thing for yet another year. Yes, you know you’re desperate for news when your own erroneous reporting about a major event becomes your top news story this morning.
Or perhaps this is simply more evidence of the singularity that Kurzweil and others are getting all worked up about. The medium itself is the story. It has become self aware. We’re walking around in a hall of mirrors, and the only question that makes any sense to ask is: how deep do the reflections go?
In any event, it’s amusing to watch a major news network try and save face in real time…
Since seeing Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity, I’ve thought a lot about muses. When we hear someone refer to a muse, we often think of a beautiful woman with whom a poet is deeply in love, writing poem after poem after poem for. I shudder to think of how many poor women have been tormented by moronic attempts at verse because of this personification. Ladies, you have my sympathy.
That’s not to say muses aren’t important. Gilbert’s talk made me realize that, far from simply being an easy source of inspiration, they’re a necessary mechanism an artist uses to keep from becoming too self-absorbed while creating some very personal and subjective things. A muse brings coherence to these personal experiences, making them transcend the person. It simultaneously allows an artist to maintain a comfortable distance from whatever it is that torments him to create and provides a framework in which others can understand those creations.
Alan Watts was one of my favourite philosophers and I think his talks on zen are absolutely essential for anyone in the western world who hopes to understand the discipline. If you listen to enough of his talks, you’ll find that they tend to repeat a few central themes that Watts was obsessed with – the notion of irreducible rascality, buddhism as a dialog, the perils of being too serious about life, and so on. Some may find this repetition annoying – evidence that Watts never had all that much to say. I find it endearing. The man had his issues, but he understood a few things about life very well, and he chose to focus on those things, patiently explaining them in as many ways possible to as many as he could. One of my favourite talks, mainly due to its relevance in today’s very fast paced, technology-driven world is the “Reproduction” talk. And it goes something like this…
From very early on, humans have been obsessed with reproducing reality. First, there were the painters who would try to capture it on canvas. And, depending on how good the artist was, a painting could represent a person, place, or thing very faithfully. Someone who had never met that person, never been there, or never seen that thing could get a pretty good idea of what they were like…
Eventually, we invented the camera. At first, it was blurry and cumbersome, but in terms of being able to capture and store reality, it was a giant leap forward. Blurry as it was, it helped keep that memory of “Grandpa” sharp in our minds…
Add some colour to that photo and you have an even better representation of reality.
But to truly know some people, you had to know how they moved. A static photograph could never capture what it was like to be around them. And so we came up with the motion picture and we could see them move over and over and over again.
You can probably see where this is going. Add sound to the motion picture. And colour again. Add more definition to the picture. All of this in an effort to make it more like you were really there. All in an effort to capture reality and play the good parts over and over again.
Here’s where it gets a little more interesting…
The following is a copy of my hasty letter to the Canadian Copyright consultations going on right now. Please send your own while there’s time.
Dear Ministers,
I put a lot of work into my art and, yes, I would love to one day be able to quit my day job to pursue my artistic endeavours full time. There’s a lot changing in the record industry and the publishing industry, and for the little guy, most of it’s good. My enemy is not piracy, it’s obscurity. Please don’t pretend that you’re helping me realize my dreams by creating harsher copyright laws. You’re not. In fact, I’m hard pressed to figure out what sort of creator extending the length of copyright past what it is now (life + 50 years, I believe) will help. Certainly not the guys just starting out. I’d be happy with a 10-20 year span before the works I create fall into the public domain. In fact, shortening the length of copyright is far more reasonable given the faster pace of the world today.
The stories of how much a musician actually gets from his own record sales when under a record company contract are well known… so well known that most musicians I know no longer want a record deal and even some of the major players are getting out of their contracts as soon as they can. The creators are busy forging new roads. The best way to help us to do that is to simply stay out of our way. You’re dealing with some powerful lobbyists, I know. They’ll tell you that culture will go down the drain if you don’t step up the laws on copyright. In fact, relaxing the laws may do more to encourage culture than anything. It just won’t help the guys looking to get rich off of my (and other artists’) work.
Look at the Internet today. It has permeated every part of our lives and opened up communication dramatically. When I was a child, I needed access to a set of encyclopedias to find out about something. Now I can get that knowledge instantly, for free… online. Imagine how things might have been different had that knowledge not been so easily accessible over the last few years. We are creating more than we ever have before, enabling more people to create, and despite a huge recession brought about by non-creators looking to make a fast buck, creativity goes on unhindered.
The only thing you can do to stifle creativity is to put more control of it in the hands of corporate types.
I visited my local public library for the first time in years a month or so back. I make enough money these days to buy the books I’m interested in as soon as they come out. And it’s impossible to estimate how much of an edge that gives me on my competition: to be able to read about the newest theories, the newest programming languages, to explore philosophy and science on my own time whenever I need to and without having to wait for someone else to be done with their copy. When I visited the library, I was struck by how many people there were obviously much poorer than I was. Whereas for me, this was a curiosity, a place where I might find a book I wanted to read and didn’t want to buy, for them it was the only place they could afford to get new knowledge. And I realized how much of a disadvantage that put them at. The maddening thing is that at this point in history, the lack of availability of a new book is completely artificial. In reality, all of these people could have the latest and greatest information at no cost to us. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t compensate creators for their work. I’m one of them. But I think that the compensation should be looked at fairly. How much easier is it to create and have a voice than it was 10 years ago? A lot. I don’t have to risk as much to create. Consequently, I don’t have as much claim to higher rewards.
Don’t worry. Creators will find ways to make a living off of what they do, no matter what. They’ll still create as much as they can without that. And every day, thanks to the biggest example of information sharing (the Internet), some of the brightest minds are coming up with new models and ideas to support art and culture without that support coming at the expense of the public.
Three strikes and you’re out? Copyright extension? Fining people outside of the court system? These are all things I’m hearing about in other countries and that I hope Canada will stay away from. How about a three strikes you’re out policy towards companies making spurious copyright claims (make 3 claims against someone that turn out to be false and you get YOUR internet taken away)? How would a record company do business without the Internet? But that would be fair given that they want to take that form of communication away from a citizen without even proper court proceedings.
Please consider this when you’re making your decisions. You were elected by us, not your lobbyists. Don’t make it harder to create so that a few can make way more money than they deserve. Encourage creativity. Get out of our way.
- David