Hello, audience. I've been thinking a lot lately during depressingly late nights brought on by fits of insomnia. The biggest topic of late has been getting older.
I was walking around Old Colorado City with Poncho the other day, enjoying the fresh air of a fall day in Colorado and looking at all the nifty hole-in-the-wall shops and restaurants. As we walked, we passed by some other couple who I'd never seen before and will likely never see again, and the strangest thing happened.
I have to make a quick interlude here for clarity's sake. I periodically have these moments of incredible lucidity, as if I'm seeing humanity through the eyes of a being from a higher dimension or something. This one time, it was during a commercial break, and there was some guy talking about some random thing I'd likely never buy. For the briefest second, I saw him as if I weren't a human and had never seen a human before. And I have to say guys, we look really freaking terrifying if you think about it. It's hard to see humans from an objective perspective, but for that one moment, I did. And we are ugly ugly beasties.
Anyway, I had one of those lucid moments walking by this couple. I looked the man in the eye, and I saw his face as if he were really 17 and was wearing make-up or prosthetics to make himself appear older. It was like he was wearing an age mask.
I'm coming up on my twentieth birthday here soon, and it has me thinking a lot about getting older and how we age. It's akin to that feeling you have every year on your birthday, when you think you should feel different now that you're a year older, but you never do. It just feels like another day in your life. Except that I'm about to have that feeling for the twentieth time. Two decades.
Poncho regularly remarks on how odd it is that she can remember specific events clearly up so some fifteen or sixteen years ago. I curled up in a ball and groaned about feeling old last time she mentioned anything to the effect.
I'm not a particularly astute observer, as you may or may not know. I tend to not notice things until they're right in front of my face, painted bright red and translated into layman's terms and then explained to me step by step by Mr. Rogers or Bill Nye with his cool little dinosaur explanations. I am however a highly intelligent person, and I notice things that aren't obvious without even paying them much attention.
As it is, I barely know other people exist unless I care to pay them specific attention. I don't do it on purpose, as in ignoring them intentionally. I just don't stop to consider other people unless I'm prompted to. This isn't something that everyone does, I know. There are many people that are highly conscious of other people around them all the time, and they notice a lot of things that I miss. I make sure to have at least one of those kinds of people around as often as is possible so I have a pair of eyes on my social blind spots.
So maybe I'm just slow or crazy for only just putting thoughts to this particular phenomenon, but who knows. Here goes anyway.
It's weird to think about other people from the perspective that they are also conscious, reasoning, and self-aware creatures who have lived many many years on this earth with their own experiences and interactions and relationships. I saw this couple with their age-masks, and I realized that this was another human being living life on the same planet, dealing with all the same needs as myself and having to face a lot of the same troubles I do. I realized that this man was once 19 going on 20 and seeing life with the same eyes I do now.
It's difficult for me to imagine getting older being any different because I have no idea of how life is going to change me or affect who I am now as I age. I'd like to think that I won't be too different. But then I'd just be 19-year old Mister Ludeman walking around with a 30/40/50-year old age-mask on, and that doesn't stand up in the face of logic. I may be very much the same person, but I'll undoubtedly be shaped differently due to all my time spent living in this fleshy meatsack of a body on this silly little planet in the vast expanse of our endless universe.
Do you feel old, audience? Do you look in the mirror and see yourself as the same old you, but wearing an age-mask? Or does the face in the mirror show you a different person entirely, this new creature you have become over the years, shaped by the life you've lived and the choices you've made?
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
The Rest of Your Life
Hello, audience. For those of you who don't know, I got hit by a car last week. I was jaywalking and not paying attention and I stepped right in front of a car. After the trip to the hospital and all the scans and x-rays and such, it turns out the only real damage was the gash in my head. They closed it up with stitches and ten staples, and I got the staples pulled out yesterday morning. Doctor says it healed up nicely, but now I get to have a scar on the side of my head for the rest of my life.
That's a weird thing to say, the rest of your life. When you think about the rest of your life, how far ahead are you looking? Sixty? Eighty? A full hundred? Where do you draw the line for a vague amount of time like that? How long do people think they are going to live? It's a tenuous thread, this existence we have. Everyday, we walk a line between life and death, an incredibly narrow edge. That show, 1000 Ways To Die makes a lot of jokes about death, and that's interesting to me. That we created a way to entertain ourselves with ridiculous stories of other people's deaths. But the show is right. There really are an innumerable number of ways, everyday, that people face down the potential of death and never know it.
Don't get me wrong. My injuries are pretty mild considering my accident. Another guy came into the ER the same day from a similar accident. He had a broken collarbone and pelvis along with a veritable assortment of other injuries. I'm lucky that I got off with so little. I don't want pity or sympathy for my injuries. They're mine, bought and paid for. I get to deal with them, and I'm trying to do it without unnecessary complaint. I'm also trying not to be completely bullheaded and refuse help or sympathy when it's offered.
One of the things that weirds me out most is all the people who are super shocked and worried when they find out I was hit by a car. I'm upright and walking around on my own without a cast or neck brace and only the one bandage on my hand. Sure, I'm not in perfect health, but I'm obviously not dead. It's as if they immediately assume I should be on my death bed because of what happened.
It's moments like that that make me reconsider how normal the way I think must be. Should I be more in awe of how little I was hurt? Should I be super freaked out or weeping in thanks for my life? I feel like I should be considering my own mortality and rethinking my religious choices or something, but I'm mostly uninterested in that line of thought. It seems pointless to try and attribute what happened to fate or chance or the mysterious workings of some greater being trying to give me a sign or something like that.
My purpose for relating this topic to my accident comes mostly out of interest in how uninterested I am in the typical thoughts (or what I would consider to be the typical thoughts) one has after an accident like mine.
I was thinking to myself the other day about what it must be like to be dying and to know you don't have a lot of time left to live. To know that the clock is ticking down, that your life is definitely coming to a close. It has to be an incredibly surreal experience, one that is really hard to wrap your head all the way around. I can only wonder what I'd do at that point.
Life is long. I've probably only lived for about a quarter of what I can expect my full lifespan to be and I already feel old. I'm still only just getting started. I'm still unsure of where I want to go or what I want to do with my life. I don't now what the future looks like. I don't know how much time I have left. I do know that I'd like to travel. That I'd like to play music, and maybe to write seriously. I want to get married and have children someday. I want to have and adventure of a life that I can tell stories about. I want to live and breathe and experience and be in awe of this incredible world we live in.
There's a line in the song Polaris by The Human Abstract that sends a chill down my spine and leaves me breathless every time I hear it, or even think about it really.
"All the paths I've been down, I still have never found something lasting through the years but all these worthless fears that mean nothing. Compare your life, your love, to the vastness of the endless stars above."
This is my most favorite image ever. It's a picture of earth taken by the Voyager space craft as it left our solar system. For those of you who haven't seen this before, Earth is the pale blue dot in the middle of the yellowish beam of light on the right side of the picture. Here's a famous quote by Carl Sagan about it:
That's a weird thing to say, the rest of your life. When you think about the rest of your life, how far ahead are you looking? Sixty? Eighty? A full hundred? Where do you draw the line for a vague amount of time like that? How long do people think they are going to live? It's a tenuous thread, this existence we have. Everyday, we walk a line between life and death, an incredibly narrow edge. That show, 1000 Ways To Die makes a lot of jokes about death, and that's interesting to me. That we created a way to entertain ourselves with ridiculous stories of other people's deaths. But the show is right. There really are an innumerable number of ways, everyday, that people face down the potential of death and never know it.
I've thought about it a couple times, the potential to have avoided what happened last week. I thought about stopping to head back to the house and grab something ten or fifteen minutes into my walk before I decided it was too late and I should just keep going. I thought about how I could have scheduled the meeting I was on my way to on a different day instead. I thought about ho I could have just been a little more patient and just waited at the crosswalk. But none of that happened.
Don't get me wrong. My injuries are pretty mild considering my accident. Another guy came into the ER the same day from a similar accident. He had a broken collarbone and pelvis along with a veritable assortment of other injuries. I'm lucky that I got off with so little. I don't want pity or sympathy for my injuries. They're mine, bought and paid for. I get to deal with them, and I'm trying to do it without unnecessary complaint. I'm also trying not to be completely bullheaded and refuse help or sympathy when it's offered.
One of the things that weirds me out most is all the people who are super shocked and worried when they find out I was hit by a car. I'm upright and walking around on my own without a cast or neck brace and only the one bandage on my hand. Sure, I'm not in perfect health, but I'm obviously not dead. It's as if they immediately assume I should be on my death bed because of what happened.
It's moments like that that make me reconsider how normal the way I think must be. Should I be more in awe of how little I was hurt? Should I be super freaked out or weeping in thanks for my life? I feel like I should be considering my own mortality and rethinking my religious choices or something, but I'm mostly uninterested in that line of thought. It seems pointless to try and attribute what happened to fate or chance or the mysterious workings of some greater being trying to give me a sign or something like that.
My purpose for relating this topic to my accident comes mostly out of interest in how uninterested I am in the typical thoughts (or what I would consider to be the typical thoughts) one has after an accident like mine.
I was thinking to myself the other day about what it must be like to be dying and to know you don't have a lot of time left to live. To know that the clock is ticking down, that your life is definitely coming to a close. It has to be an incredibly surreal experience, one that is really hard to wrap your head all the way around. I can only wonder what I'd do at that point.
Life is long. I've probably only lived for about a quarter of what I can expect my full lifespan to be and I already feel old. I'm still only just getting started. I'm still unsure of where I want to go or what I want to do with my life. I don't now what the future looks like. I don't know how much time I have left. I do know that I'd like to travel. That I'd like to play music, and maybe to write seriously. I want to get married and have children someday. I want to have and adventure of a life that I can tell stories about. I want to live and breathe and experience and be in awe of this incredible world we live in.
There's a line in the song Polaris by The Human Abstract that sends a chill down my spine and leaves me breathless every time I hear it, or even think about it really.
"All the paths I've been down, I still have never found something lasting through the years but all these worthless fears that mean nothing. Compare your life, your love, to the vastness of the endless stars above."
 |
"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
It's crazy to think about how tiny and insignificant we are compared to the entire rest of the universe we exist in. To think about the vast emptiness of space, the thousands of billions of planets and moons and asteroids floating endlessly around stars, titanic collections of plasma and gases that burn and rage with such unmatched fury and intensity and beauty that our minds can hardly conceive of their devastating power. I have a love of stars because they're so impossibly powerful and uncontrollable and immense.
My life will probably never make a huge impact on this planet, let alone the universe at large. I'm very likely going to be just another one of millions who were born, who lived, and who died here. I'll have some sort of impact, for good or for bad, on the people around me. But that's not really my goal. I'm not out to make a huge impact or to change the world or the way millions think or see life. I just want to have a life full of living, full of experience and emotion and thought. A life that burned with the fire and passion of even the tiniest momentary flash of heat from a star.
My life will probably never make a huge impact on this planet, let alone the universe at large. I'm very likely going to be just another one of millions who were born, who lived, and who died here. I'll have some sort of impact, for good or for bad, on the people around me. But that's not really my goal. I'm not out to make a huge impact or to change the world or the way millions think or see life. I just want to have a life full of living, full of experience and emotion and thought. A life that burned with the fire and passion of even the tiniest momentary flash of heat from a star.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Knocked Out of My Shoes/Six Degrees
Hello there audience. It's nice to see you again. This is going to be a bit of a special blog, as it has two purposes. Let me hop right in.
As you may or may not have already known, I was hit by a car on Thursday. I was jaywalking during rush hour, made it across three of four lanes okay, and then didn't look both ways before I stepped into the turning lane. Next thing I remember is flying through the air upside down and hitting the ground. I looked ahead of me and saw another car coming down the lane, so I crawled onto the median. Next came a lot of screaming and cussing. Partially because I was in pain, and partially because I was mad at myself for being such an idiot. The girl who hit me stopped and came to try and talk to me, as well as a military guy who gave me something to press against my head wound. The girl asked if I was okay, and I gave her the typical "Do I LOOK okay?". An EMT guy showed up and held my neck straight in case I had any sort of neck injury, and people kept talking to me and asking questions to try and keep me focused and aware.
After that was cleaning out and bandaging my road rash wounds on my hand and my foot, which hurt more than I can get across in typed letters, and then sewing up my head wound. They numbed the whole wound by injecting it with needles, then sutured the under layer of skin and stapled the top layer shut. They got me some papery shirt and pants and these super awesome sock thingers that I'm definitely still wearing. I got pain medicine prescribed, and then they rolled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair.
Total damages consisted of my head wound, the road rash on my hand, foot, and some minor scratches on my knees, and the bruise to my left leg. That's right. No broken bones, no internal damage, just some flesh wounds.
As of two days later, I'm already walking, though my leg is stiff and inflexible for the most part. My hand is healing, now cleaned again, smothered in disinfectant goo, and re-bandaged. My head is fine, though it's a bit weird feeling the staples in my scalp. I'm still feeling dumb, though I'm thankful that I'm not more hurt than I am now. It's weird to think that I was hit by a car, knocked clean out of my shoes, smashed my head into their windshield, flipped through the air and onto the pavement, and I got away with only two serious injuries and some scratches.
Now, for the second part of this blog. I feel really terrible for the girl who hit me. She had to have been scared out of her mind by what happened, and I'm not sure if anyone got ahold of her to tell her I'm okay. I'd also like to apologize for being insensitive and for, you know, walking out in front of her car during rush hour. XP Unfortunately, I didn't think to get her cell number while I was cussing angrily and bleeding on the median, so I have no way of contacting her myself. So, I want to try something out.
I'm sure many of you have heard of the Six Degrees of Separation thinger, but I'll explain it briefly. The idea originated from a Hungarian playwright who theorized that a person could be connected to any other person on the planet by as few as six introductions. This is where I need your help.
As you may or may not have already known, I was hit by a car on Thursday. I was jaywalking during rush hour, made it across three of four lanes okay, and then didn't look both ways before I stepped into the turning lane. Next thing I remember is flying through the air upside down and hitting the ground. I looked ahead of me and saw another car coming down the lane, so I crawled onto the median. Next came a lot of screaming and cussing. Partially because I was in pain, and partially because I was mad at myself for being such an idiot. The girl who hit me stopped and came to try and talk to me, as well as a military guy who gave me something to press against my head wound. The girl asked if I was okay, and I gave her the typical "Do I LOOK okay?". An EMT guy showed up and held my neck straight in case I had any sort of neck injury, and people kept talking to me and asking questions to try and keep me focused and aware.
At some point, I noticed the girl was crying, and I said "What are you crying for? I'm the one who just got hit by a car." She replied saying she was super freaked out, and I felt a little bad for being insensitive, but I excused myself given my current position. Eventually firemen arrived and did the whole check through of my wounds and such, then I got strapped to a backboard and loaded into an ambulance. At this point, I was pretty sure my left leg was broken and maybe my lower back. I had totally forgotten about my head wound because it honestly didn't hurt that badly compared to everything else,
The EMT in the ambulance informed me that I had smashed my head into the windshield of the car and shattered it, then flipped over the car and back into the street. Which sounds pretty awesome, minus the whole dangerous accident thing. They performed all their medical stuffs on the ride to the hospital. Then I was carted into the hospital and there were a lot of people around all at the same time making comments and giving orders and such. Oh, I think they had cut off my pants and shirt by now, too. Kind of a bummer because they were some decent jeans, but they weren't my best pair, so I wasn't devastated. I was given a tetanus shot and then morphine, which felt incredibly weird.
Over the next hour I had x-rays taken of my head and neck, my chest, and my leg, and then a CT scan of my head to make sure my brain didn't get jellified or something. I spent the five minutes of sitting still listening to "In The Presence Of Enemies Part 1" by Dream Theater in my head. (Super useful skill to have, by the way, listening to music in your head). After that was more questioning from doctors and then a CT scan of my abdomen. I had to keep holding my breath so the scans would come out clear, and they injected me with a dye that made my veins feel all warm and my mouth taste gross.
The EMT in the ambulance informed me that I had smashed my head into the windshield of the car and shattered it, then flipped over the car and back into the street. Which sounds pretty awesome, minus the whole dangerous accident thing. They performed all their medical stuffs on the ride to the hospital. Then I was carted into the hospital and there were a lot of people around all at the same time making comments and giving orders and such. Oh, I think they had cut off my pants and shirt by now, too. Kind of a bummer because they were some decent jeans, but they weren't my best pair, so I wasn't devastated. I was given a tetanus shot and then morphine, which felt incredibly weird.
Over the next hour I had x-rays taken of my head and neck, my chest, and my leg, and then a CT scan of my head to make sure my brain didn't get jellified or something. I spent the five minutes of sitting still listening to "In The Presence Of Enemies Part 1" by Dream Theater in my head. (Super useful skill to have, by the way, listening to music in your head). After that was more questioning from doctors and then a CT scan of my abdomen. I had to keep holding my breath so the scans would come out clear, and they injected me with a dye that made my veins feel all warm and my mouth taste gross.
 |
| This is a picture of my head after it was numbed, but before they sewed it up. |
After that was cleaning out and bandaging my road rash wounds on my hand and my foot, which hurt more than I can get across in typed letters, and then sewing up my head wound. They numbed the whole wound by injecting it with needles, then sutured the under layer of skin and stapled the top layer shut. They got me some papery shirt and pants and these super awesome sock thingers that I'm definitely still wearing. I got pain medicine prescribed, and then they rolled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair.
Total damages consisted of my head wound, the road rash on my hand, foot, and some minor scratches on my knees, and the bruise to my left leg. That's right. No broken bones, no internal damage, just some flesh wounds.
As of two days later, I'm already walking, though my leg is stiff and inflexible for the most part. My hand is healing, now cleaned again, smothered in disinfectant goo, and re-bandaged. My head is fine, though it's a bit weird feeling the staples in my scalp. I'm still feeling dumb, though I'm thankful that I'm not more hurt than I am now. It's weird to think that I was hit by a car, knocked clean out of my shoes, smashed my head into their windshield, flipped through the air and onto the pavement, and I got away with only two serious injuries and some scratches.
Now, for the second part of this blog. I feel really terrible for the girl who hit me. She had to have been scared out of her mind by what happened, and I'm not sure if anyone got ahold of her to tell her I'm okay. I'd also like to apologize for being insensitive and for, you know, walking out in front of her car during rush hour. XP Unfortunately, I didn't think to get her cell number while I was cussing angrily and bleeding on the median, so I have no way of contacting her myself. So, I want to try something out.
I'm sure many of you have heard of the Six Degrees of Separation thinger, but I'll explain it briefly. The idea originated from a Hungarian playwright who theorized that a person could be connected to any other person on the planet by as few as six introductions. This is where I need your help.
I want to use the Six Degrees of Separation to try and track down the girl that hit me so I can let her know personally that I'm okay. What I need from you all is to repost this blog on your facebook wall or whatever so it can progress another degree toward finding her. I know, this sounds like your typical chain letter or whatever, but it's different because it's actually for a cause. Nothing bad is going to happen if you don't help. I'll just be disappointed in all of you and have to try and track her down some other way. But, if you help me and we succeed, it'll be a crazy story to tell and I'll have another topic to post a blog about.
So think about it. If you live in the Colorado Springs area and you know of a youngish girl, probably late teens, that just had the windshield of her champagne-colored Camry, (I think) smashed in an auto-versus-pedestrian type accident, please let me know. cm.ludeman@gmail.com. If not, pass the link to this blog on to anyone else you know who lives in the area. It'd be awesome if you guys could help me track her down.
Thanks for reading, and I'll keep you updated as to how things turn out.
So think about it. If you live in the Colorado Springs area and you know of a youngish girl, probably late teens, that just had the windshield of her champagne-colored Camry, (I think) smashed in an auto-versus-pedestrian type accident, please let me know. cm.ludeman@gmail.com. If not, pass the link to this blog on to anyone else you know who lives in the area. It'd be awesome if you guys could help me track her down.
Thanks for reading, and I'll keep you updated as to how things turn out.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Consumption: Music In Modern Society
Hello invisible audience! I came up with a blog topic, finally. This one is a good one, too. I'm pretty excited about writing this blog, in advance. I'll jump right into it.
I was on facebook this evening (as I often am when I'm not really in the mood for anything particular and want to waste some time while exposing myself to the interests and ongoing lives of friends and close acquaintances) when I saw a post by a recent musical acquisition of mine, Red Seas Fire. Here is the post:
I was on facebook this evening (as I often am when I'm not really in the mood for anything particular and want to waste some time while exposing myself to the interests and ongoing lives of friends and close acquaintances) when I saw a post by a recent musical acquisition of mine, Red Seas Fire. Here is the post:
"Here's a challenge for you all.
Once a day I want you to load up one whole album on an iTunes playlist (or whatever you use to listen to music), and I want you to sit and listen to it from beginning to end without interruption, without skipping a single track, and then once it has finished playing I want you to sit in silence for five minutes and consider how that music has impacted you emotionally.
We should listen to music how our parents listened to it.
If we stop listening to albums as a cohesive experience, then bands will stop making extended experiences for us to enjoy. If we stop connecting to bands emotionally, and instead only connect to single songs, then sooner or later we will stop loving music altogether.
Stop listening to music on fucking shuffle." -Red Seas Fire
Once a day I want you to load up one whole album on an iTunes playlist (or whatever you use to listen to music), and I want you to sit and listen to it from beginning to end without interruption, without skipping a single track, and then once it has finished playing I want you to sit in silence for five minutes and consider how that music has impacted you emotionally.
We should listen to music how our parents listened to it.
If we stop listening to albums as a cohesive experience, then bands will stop making extended experiences for us to enjoy. If we stop connecting to bands emotionally, and instead only connect to single songs, then sooner or later we will stop loving music altogether.
Stop listening to music on fucking shuffle." -Red Seas Fire
My immediate reaction was to share the post on my wall, despite trying to keep the cussing on my facebook to a minimum. (I have the awful habit of swearing like a sailor when I don't actively put my mind to keeping my language pure. It's actually gotten pretty awful lately, and I'm trying to cut back.) Here's why.
Music means a lot to me. If you haven't read my previous blogs pertaining to music, I will sum it up by saying, quite literally, I would go insane if I didn't have music. I've loved music since before I was born, and I will continue to love music until I die.
Now, since I was young, when I got music, it was usually in the form of a cd or a tape. I'd start at the beginning and listen through to the end. Now, my music tastes used to be quite narrow, but they've developed throughout the years. I've grown, not only in the number of styles, but also in the depth with which I listen. But I have never stopped listening to music from the start of an album through to the end. This is visible in my iTunes play count, as a lot of my albums have the most listens counted on the first half of an album, and a decreasing number as you progress further in the album. This is because my primary instinct when I put on a cd is to start at the beginning. Also, I almost never listen to music on shuffle. I like to listen to full albums by a band because all of the songs have a similar feel and production quality, and I like to listen to them in the context of the rest of the songs that belong to the same album. As much as I may enjoy one song from an album, I will almost always listen to the whole album.
It makes sense to me to listen that way. Would you turn on a movie, skip to your favorite scenes and watch those, then put on your favorite scenes from a different movie? Would you pick up a book, turn to the middle, read a chapter or two, then change books? You may think these are irrelevant comparisons, but let me tell you why they aren't.
Music albums, like books or movies, have a beginning, middle, and end. They have a particular arrangement of individual parts arranged in a particular order for a particular reason, and they were designed to be listened to in that particular order. Each song, chapter, or scene, has its own feel, tone, and mood, and, because of that, were placed where they were as part of the whole. When you take one song out of a movie, like a scene or a chapter, you're only getting a piece of that whole, which, out of context, may have a very different feel or tone than was intended. It will almost assuredly have less impact than it would if you enjoyed it in the order it was intended to be enjoyed in.
Shuffling music is like watching a movie or reading a book out of order. It just seems wrong to me. The artist wrote each individual song, then chose them to be place on the album together, arranging them in a particular order for a particular reason. They were meant to be enjoyed as a whole work, not individually and out of order or in the context of some other group's music.
I believe that shuffling comes as a part of the modern trend of hyper consumption that has taken over in recent years. People have developed a very immediate attitude about pretty much everything in life, always wanting more of something as soon as they can possibly get it, and running through things quickly. We do this with tv, movies, music, video games, food, whatever. Businesses like Netflix, Hulu, Gamefly, and Pandora have started to capitalize on this consumption, allowing you to enjoy the things you want as much as you want, whenever you want, for however long you want, and always providing more options in case you get bored or suddenly want something different. Shuffle allows something similar, but with your own personal music collection. It allows you to consume a wide variety of music without having to pay too much attention to the music itself, and letting you quickly switch to something different if you're not pleased with what comes up.
My problem with this is that when you shuffle, the music becomes almost like background noise. It all blends together in this massive stew of genres and styles and feels and everything loses its individual power. The strength of a specific piece of music becomes lost as it is played out of context with two pieces that don't reflect a similar feel, thereby robbing the piece of its power and purpose. There's no flow of mood or emotion, no organization at all. It's just chaotic jumps from one piece to another, all disconnected and separated from the albums that they come from. Often times, I find myself skipping short interlude pieces from albums, intros or outros, or endings of songs that fade into the next song while shuffing. It's these pieces that make albums colorful, that smoothen out the flow and allow us to progress from one song to the next, whether or not they have drastically different tempos or volumes or moods. Out of context, they just get in the way of us mindlessly enjoying our music.
Along with this is the dying art of active listening. For those who don't know, active listening is putting on a piece of music, then paying close attention to it and picking it apart to analyze each part in itself, and then part of the cohesive whole. This is as opposed to passive listening, where you just kind of bob your head or sing along to the music while doing other things, not really devoting full attention to the music. What makes active listening amazing is that while actively listening, I've discovered underlying melodies or interlocking pieces of songs that I've never noticed before, even after having listened to a cd a dozen times or two. It increases the overall depth of the music and enables me to enjoy it in a way that I never have before.
Now, I understand that sometimes people shuffle because they're not in the mood to listen to any one specific artist or album, and they'd like to just listen to whatever comes up. I've had similar moods in the past, and have made playlists specifically for shuffling. However, all of the songs on the playlist came from the same genre of music so that the playlist would at least remain consistent in one aspect. Nowadays, I usually use shuffle as a means to find something I'm in the mood to listen to, at which point I switch over to that individual album and start from the top.
My point here is that if you listen to an album out of order, or songs out of context, you miss out on the musical experience the artist was trying to give you when they wrote, arranged, recorded, produced, and distributed that particular work. When I listen to a piece of music, I try to take it as the artist presents it so I can appreciate it how they intended while still having my own personal perspective or emotional response.
As a sort of epilogue to all that, I understand that I can be snobbish when it comes to the music I listen to, and that things I say can come across as elitist or exclusionary, and I don't wish for that to be the case. Music is a wonderful thing, regardless of how you choose to enjoy it. There's no right or wrong way to do it, and therefore no one is at fault for listening to music any differently than I do. In keeping with that, I do strongly recommend taking the challenge presented by Red Seas Fire. If you don't really listen to music seriously or actively now, this would be a great way to start listening to your music in a whole new way, and I think you'll appreciate it differently than you ever have before. If you do listen to music seriously or actively already, this challenge will push you to do it more often, ever increasing your understanding and appreciation of music you already know and love. I fully intend to at least try to meet the challenge, and maybe even keep a journal about it. Who knows.
Thank you once again for reading, audience. I hope you enjoyed my perspective and opinion on music. Let me know what you think and how you listen to music. Tell me about an album you love and why. Say anything at all, really. You'll have my ear. Till next time.
Music means a lot to me. If you haven't read my previous blogs pertaining to music, I will sum it up by saying, quite literally, I would go insane if I didn't have music. I've loved music since before I was born, and I will continue to love music until I die.
Now, since I was young, when I got music, it was usually in the form of a cd or a tape. I'd start at the beginning and listen through to the end. Now, my music tastes used to be quite narrow, but they've developed throughout the years. I've grown, not only in the number of styles, but also in the depth with which I listen. But I have never stopped listening to music from the start of an album through to the end. This is visible in my iTunes play count, as a lot of my albums have the most listens counted on the first half of an album, and a decreasing number as you progress further in the album. This is because my primary instinct when I put on a cd is to start at the beginning. Also, I almost never listen to music on shuffle. I like to listen to full albums by a band because all of the songs have a similar feel and production quality, and I like to listen to them in the context of the rest of the songs that belong to the same album. As much as I may enjoy one song from an album, I will almost always listen to the whole album.
It makes sense to me to listen that way. Would you turn on a movie, skip to your favorite scenes and watch those, then put on your favorite scenes from a different movie? Would you pick up a book, turn to the middle, read a chapter or two, then change books? You may think these are irrelevant comparisons, but let me tell you why they aren't.
Music albums, like books or movies, have a beginning, middle, and end. They have a particular arrangement of individual parts arranged in a particular order for a particular reason, and they were designed to be listened to in that particular order. Each song, chapter, or scene, has its own feel, tone, and mood, and, because of that, were placed where they were as part of the whole. When you take one song out of a movie, like a scene or a chapter, you're only getting a piece of that whole, which, out of context, may have a very different feel or tone than was intended. It will almost assuredly have less impact than it would if you enjoyed it in the order it was intended to be enjoyed in.
Shuffling music is like watching a movie or reading a book out of order. It just seems wrong to me. The artist wrote each individual song, then chose them to be place on the album together, arranging them in a particular order for a particular reason. They were meant to be enjoyed as a whole work, not individually and out of order or in the context of some other group's music.
I believe that shuffling comes as a part of the modern trend of hyper consumption that has taken over in recent years. People have developed a very immediate attitude about pretty much everything in life, always wanting more of something as soon as they can possibly get it, and running through things quickly. We do this with tv, movies, music, video games, food, whatever. Businesses like Netflix, Hulu, Gamefly, and Pandora have started to capitalize on this consumption, allowing you to enjoy the things you want as much as you want, whenever you want, for however long you want, and always providing more options in case you get bored or suddenly want something different. Shuffle allows something similar, but with your own personal music collection. It allows you to consume a wide variety of music without having to pay too much attention to the music itself, and letting you quickly switch to something different if you're not pleased with what comes up.
My problem with this is that when you shuffle, the music becomes almost like background noise. It all blends together in this massive stew of genres and styles and feels and everything loses its individual power. The strength of a specific piece of music becomes lost as it is played out of context with two pieces that don't reflect a similar feel, thereby robbing the piece of its power and purpose. There's no flow of mood or emotion, no organization at all. It's just chaotic jumps from one piece to another, all disconnected and separated from the albums that they come from. Often times, I find myself skipping short interlude pieces from albums, intros or outros, or endings of songs that fade into the next song while shuffing. It's these pieces that make albums colorful, that smoothen out the flow and allow us to progress from one song to the next, whether or not they have drastically different tempos or volumes or moods. Out of context, they just get in the way of us mindlessly enjoying our music.
Along with this is the dying art of active listening. For those who don't know, active listening is putting on a piece of music, then paying close attention to it and picking it apart to analyze each part in itself, and then part of the cohesive whole. This is as opposed to passive listening, where you just kind of bob your head or sing along to the music while doing other things, not really devoting full attention to the music. What makes active listening amazing is that while actively listening, I've discovered underlying melodies or interlocking pieces of songs that I've never noticed before, even after having listened to a cd a dozen times or two. It increases the overall depth of the music and enables me to enjoy it in a way that I never have before.
Now, I understand that sometimes people shuffle because they're not in the mood to listen to any one specific artist or album, and they'd like to just listen to whatever comes up. I've had similar moods in the past, and have made playlists specifically for shuffling. However, all of the songs on the playlist came from the same genre of music so that the playlist would at least remain consistent in one aspect. Nowadays, I usually use shuffle as a means to find something I'm in the mood to listen to, at which point I switch over to that individual album and start from the top.
My point here is that if you listen to an album out of order, or songs out of context, you miss out on the musical experience the artist was trying to give you when they wrote, arranged, recorded, produced, and distributed that particular work. When I listen to a piece of music, I try to take it as the artist presents it so I can appreciate it how they intended while still having my own personal perspective or emotional response.
As a sort of epilogue to all that, I understand that I can be snobbish when it comes to the music I listen to, and that things I say can come across as elitist or exclusionary, and I don't wish for that to be the case. Music is a wonderful thing, regardless of how you choose to enjoy it. There's no right or wrong way to do it, and therefore no one is at fault for listening to music any differently than I do. In keeping with that, I do strongly recommend taking the challenge presented by Red Seas Fire. If you don't really listen to music seriously or actively now, this would be a great way to start listening to your music in a whole new way, and I think you'll appreciate it differently than you ever have before. If you do listen to music seriously or actively already, this challenge will push you to do it more often, ever increasing your understanding and appreciation of music you already know and love. I fully intend to at least try to meet the challenge, and maybe even keep a journal about it. Who knows.
Thank you once again for reading, audience. I hope you enjoyed my perspective and opinion on music. Let me know what you think and how you listen to music. Tell me about an album you love and why. Say anything at all, really. You'll have my ear. Till next time.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
The Dream of Perpetual Motion
Hello, audience! I read one of my very favorite books again this week and wanted to post an oodle or two of quotes from it on facebook as I went along, but then I had the genius idea today to compile all of them and then add my commentary and turn it into a blog! So, here's me ranting about the fabulous first work of Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion.
Now, I have become rather formulaic about my blog titles, using a word or two topic followed by a colon and a neat little sub-heading that would show up in smaller letters were my post titles on the front of a book. The sub-heading for this post would have been "The Decay of Innocence and Childhood Wonder," but I decided that would make the title far too long and no one would want to read it. It is still highly relevant though, and it seemed to be the major theme that stood out in my fourth read-through of this phenomenal book.
The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a steampunk spin on Shakespeare's "The Tempest", which I have yet to read, but I have heard mixed feelings about it. The general consensus about it is that it is highly atypical considering the rest of Will's plays, alongside "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics lend an interesting perspective on the matter, which is highly irrelevant to the point here. Dexter Palmer took his Doctorate in English Literature and his love of Shakespeare and turned it into this haunting novel about a man's slow descent into insanity and his love of an equally crazy woman.
Harold Winslow is a former writing student that now works in the greeting card works of his lovely industrialized metropolis of Xeroville. The story begins with him explaining his current situation, trapped aboard the good ship Chrysalis, a massive zeppelin powered by the world's first perpetual motion machine. The voice of Miranda (his life long love and daughter of Prospero Taligent, the world renowned engineering miracle worker who dresses like a wizard) haunts him everywhere in the zeppelin, begging him to talk to her, to say even a single word. Harold has decided to write down the story of his life from beginning to end, to try and relate each phase of his life and each person he became to the next in an attempt to make sense of everything that happened to him.
The story is told in five parts, each going back to a portion of Harold's life relevant to his changing character and the major events that caused the shifts that turned him from one person to the next, with interludes that tell more of himself in the present aboard the good ship Chrysalis. The first, titled "nightfall in the greeting card works" is a sort of introduction to the adult Harold and his mental state at the end of this ridiculous series of events, but before the events that led to his imprisonment on the zeppelin. The second, "lovesongs for a virgin queen" tells about Harold as a ten year old boy, how he met Miranda, was brought to study with her in the magical island playroom her father built for her, and how he was banished for 'staining her innocence'.
The third, "music for an automatic bronzing," tells of Harold and Miranda's kidnapping by luddite extremists ten years later, his heroic rescue of the damsel, and the events that lead up to the loss of his sister Astrid. Section four, "romance in a mechanical dancehall" talks about Harold at thirty, the letter from Miranda begging him to come rescue her from her psychotic father, Prospero's declaration of his lordship over the earth and his airship loaded with death rays, and the events preceding Harold's decision to go to Taligent tower and rescue Miranda. The final portion, "the dream of perpetual motion" tells of Harold's journey up the tower, the people he meets and the stories they tell him, and then his final confrontation with Prospero atop the tower.
Through the whole book, there is an on-running theme of the decay of the old world of miracles and the advent of the noisy and mechanical new age, where there is no place for feelings or spoken world any longer. The children are taught with horrific 'teaching machines'; mechanical men perform most of the basic services to humanity; the new mode of transportation, that also meets the psychological needs of the population, is the 'Shrink-cabbie' with a trained psychologist/cabbie-driver; drugs and intravenous absinthe drips are a totally acceptable way to deal with the neuroses your trip in the shrink-cabbie didn't cover; and the sound of machinery is a constant and inescapable part of reality.
Now, the fun part: quotes and excerpts from the book.
"Sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together. It seems strange and inaccurate, when writing of what oneself once was, to speak of oneself as "I," especially when I find it difficult to own up to some of the actions performed by the people I once was: the ten-year-old boy who played innocent games on Miranda's magic island; the twenty-year-old who returned that island when he had no business there; the thirty-year-old who committed the crime for which I have been imprisoned aboard this ship, with the madwoman. In this last year I've spent time with all of my past incarnations (oh, yes, they have their voices, too, they have just as much to say to me as Miranda), and we have decided that the only way to make sense of our existences is to set the stories of our lives down on paper, to try to make one tale to show how the twentieth century turned Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into me.
Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones.
Every story needs a voice to tell it though,or it goes unheard. So I have to try."
And my favorite part of this first monologue of Harold's:
"I still have enough faith left in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own."
-Harold Winslow, the last portion of the prologue of the book.
I picked up the book because of the title, opened it because of the cover, the first picture above, and decided I had to own it because of the prologue. And never has a book impressed me more in less than five pages. This quote sets up the book fantastically, better than any words I could have put together could. And this is only the last piece of the prologue.
"'When I was your age,' Harry Winslow's father says, 'miracles were commonplace. To me my childhood and adolescence seem as if they happened just a little time ago, just on the other side of the line dividing centuries. But you, who cannot remember a world that was not filled with machines, will never be able to imagine the drastic differences between your youth and mine. When I was a child people could fly without the need of jerry-rigged contraptions that were just as likely to explode as not. When I was young angels and demons walked the city streets. And they were fearless.'"...
"'Fearless,' Allan says. 'You could be strolling down a sidewalk one morning, minding your own business, chewing on a still-steaming hot cross bun and planning your day's youthful exploits, and then suddenly an angel would fly out of nowhere and stand in your path and just stare at you. Winking and leering, doing a little dance and flapping its wings, chuckling to itself, as if to say: Go ahead and try it, child. I dare you to disbelieve in me.'"
-Allan Winslow, Harold's father, on the age of miracles he grew up in.
This is your first peek at the supposed time before machines and mechanical men started to be everywhere in the world, through the aging mind of Harold's father.
"'The girl in the class says it helps to have an eye for art to get the problems right,' Harold says. 'She's always going on about elegant solutions and symmetry and things like that. And sometimes I see something like that, and I get it, but where I guess I'm supposed to feels some sort of universal awe at the order of things, instead I feel - I don't know. Nervous. Terrified. Take - take destructive interference. Now here is one of the things I kind of get,' he says, feeling once again the pleasure of having got it. He takes a fresh index card from the stack on the table and draws a wave across it, nothing like a sine wave, but close enough to get the point across.
'That's the shape of a sound,' says Harold. 'But every sound has an enemy. And to discover the shape of a sound's enemy, you hold a mirror up to it.' Harold scribbles on the card some more, adding to the original drawing. 'Now take this sound on the other side of the mirror and pull it into your own world. And if you add these sounds together, this is what you get.' Flipping the card over and drawing a straight line across it from corner to corner. 'Nothing.'
'Well, what's so god-awfully scary about that?' asks Astrid.
'It's scary because every day thousands of new sounds are born into the world: new machines with new rhythms; new words to name those new machines. Every day there are more sounds, and I'm afraid that, some day in the future, every sound that's possible to make will be in the world at the same time. And since every sound has its opposite, they will cancel each other out, and at the end of the day there'll be billions of machines with their percussive rhythms, and billions of words in a language that doesn't work anymore, and billions of people trying to be heard, screaming their lungs out, hurling their impotent noises into a world so saturated with noise that it might as well be deaf, and dumb, and blind.'
Now it's Astrid's turn to say nothing.
'All the noises of the world add up to silence,' says Harold. 'This world will begin and end in silence.'"
-Harold, talking about his Physics for Poets class and Destructive Interference.
"'Son. What's happened to your voice? I hear something new in it when you read the papers. There used to be music in it; now there's metal in its place. Not something strong and forged, like steel - something cheap that breaks when you bend it. Tin, or the gilding on a cheap thing that makes it look like gold. Yes - there's metal in your voice now.' Allan's gaze drifts, and he looks confused.
I don't know what he's talking about, Harold thinks. But he does.
'To tell the truth, it wasn't sudden,' Allan said. 'For years I've heard it creeping in, more and more, a cheap tin noise coming from something cheap and made of tin. Wait - that's too harsh. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I said that. If I said it it's because I'm sitting here in these empty rooms and turning to tin as well. Just like everyone else.
'But your voice had music in it when you were a child! I remember when you were so excited about that silly roller coaster. Spinning yourself dizzy. Tornadoooo! I'd never hear high notes like that out of you now; haven't for years. You haven't felt like that for a long time, have you?
'All the high notes have left your voice. Mine too.'
Harold says nothing and looks at the floor.
'I can't blame you,' says Allan. 'Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?'"
- Allan Winslow, during Harold's 20's, rambling about the loss of innocence.
This next excerpt is probably the heart of the philosophical purpose of this book, and it describes a conflict of interest visible in many different aspects of life.
"-Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.
What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful now in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.
On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes a caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals.
These forces aren't diametrically opposed, and it's not correct to say that one's good and the other's evil, despite the prejudices we might have toward one or the other. When we're at our best, both the Virgin and the Dynamo govern what we think and what we do. But the fear that we felt standing in the Hall of Dynamos stemmed from the certainty that the Virgin was in trouble, and that we needed her, just as much as we needed and even wanted the Dynamo. What the Dynamo threatened to do was murder the Virgin by explaining her to us, because it was its nature to explain. To us common men it wasn't worth the pleasure of looking at a woman and knowing that we found her beautiful because of the distance between the tip of her nose and her top lip and the size of her eyes, if it meant losing the equally wonderful pleasure of looking at that same woman and finding her beautiful without knowing why.
Imagine a damsel in distress, tied to a train track and screaming. Her impending death would be unfortunate, but would you call the engine that drives the oncoming train evil? You have to ask: how did the damsel get there? Where's the black-cowled dastard in the top hat and the handlebar mustache who did the tying? He is one who forces us to view the damsel and the engine as moral opposites when, in fact, they're nothing of the kind. He is a person who believes that all of our human problems can be solved by the all-knowing Dynamo. And if the Dynamo has to run over a Virgin or two as it barrels unerringly toward its final destination: no great loss, really, in the end."
I'll come back and talk about all this stuff when I'm done posting quotes and excerpts.
"What he can't bring himself to say to Miranda is:
'When I was a child, I used to look at adults half with conclusion, half with envy, trying and failing to imagine the nature of the mysteries to which they'd been initiated, the pleasures they were keeping to themselves. Have you ever watched the swings of moods that toddlers go through, the way they act as if they're attending their own funeral if the axle falls off a favored toy car, or the rapturous expressions that show up on their faces when they suck on sweet things? Though the memory's fading, I can still remember feeling like that, and I thought that being an adult would be even more like that - that the emotions that make us human got more intense, the older you grew. Even at the age of ten, simple surprise gifts could be enough to make me feel like my heart and my brain were both about to burst. I couldn't imagine how people even survived to the age of twenty when such pleasures were lying in wait, out in the world.
'But that hasn't turned out to be what happened - instead, my own father tells me that he thinks I'm turning into tin. Something inside me is dying, and I don't know what to do to save it; something inside me is slipping away, and somehow my memories of what you were as a child have come to stand in for all the things I want to keep alive inside myself and don't know how. In dreams I see you as a queen, standing at a roof's edge; again and again you beckon to me, and again and again I watch you fall, and with you fall all those things within me that make me best.
'There has to be a spell to speak to save you, and myself. But for the life of me I can't come up with the words.'"
- Harold, in what was a pivotal moment in his life, and he chose not to say what could have saved him.
"This is the time of night just before sunrise, the time that no one owns, and if you have found yourself awake and alone during this time, out in the city, outside the safety of the walls you call your own, then you know me, and you have felt what I have felt. This is the hour of the night it's best to sleep through, for if it catches you awake then it well force you to face what is true. This is when you look into the half-dead eyes of those who are either wishing for sleep or shaking off its final remnants, and you see the signs of the twilight in which your own mind is suspended.
"At any other time it's better. You can do the things you feel you should; you're an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In a monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you're read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust."
- Harold, narrating this time, talking about the time of night he is heading home from the club.
"'You've told me many secrets," Prospero says, and smiles. "Now I will tell you one. It's my darkest. Are you ready?
'It is this.' He leans toward me and spreads his arms in mock surrender. 'I have no past. You may think that I was once small and young and unwise as you once were, but I have always been as you see me before you. Always an old magician in exile.'"
- Prospero Taligent, on his past.There are more quotes than that I'd like to share, but they're kind of vital to the plot and goings on and will spoil the story for you. The last one from Prospero almost earned a spoiler alert, but I decided it wasn't enough to ruin anything specific for you, given that you haven't seen his character's development up until that point in the book.
What I love about this book is the elegant and very subtle development of Harold's character through those series of events that lead him to become the man he is aboard the Chrysalis. It's the slow and inevitable and inescapable chugging motor of the Dynamo, turning everything into metal as time progresses. And it's not something it knows it's doing. It's just the natural progression of things. Time changes us and shifts the way we think and perceive and operate in life. Things that used to be important to us become trivial matters, and things that didn't used to even cross our mind now consume our thoughts and cause us to worry and fear and give us many sleepless nights out of sheer stress. And there's not a whole lot anyone can do to stop it.
There's a point in the book where Harold could have changed the entire series of events that came after that point and maybe even saved himself from his inevitable fate. But his failure to admit what is happening to him and accept it leaves him powerless to change it. He won't say out loud that he's terrified to death that he's turning to metal, and instead returns to Miranda's playroom and tries to deny what he feels inside. And, at the end of the day, that choice is what doomed him to end up on the good ship Chrysalis, circling the earth endlessly, trying to find Miranda and not accept his madness by talking to her.
In short, YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK. I love it so much that the ending still gets me literally every time, though the tone and meaning has changed and shifted every single time I've read it. It's become so much more serious and so much darker as I peel back each successive layer and discover more about the characters and the series of events as they progress. It blows my mind how much stuff there is to be found and discussed in such a small story. It does have a pretty complex character development that took me a few reads to fully grasp, though I may not have read as carefully or paid close enough attention the first few times through. But it's totally worth taking the time to break down and pull apart and figure out, though that might just be the Dynamo in my crying out to understand everything going on.
Since I've read this book, I've been more conscious of the battle between the Virgin and the Dynamo in my life, in my need to explain and understand everything about my universe. I've started to appreciate life more at face value and stop trying to detect the motives behind everything or attach value to something that doesn't necessarily mean anything at all. I tend to take things way too seriously and not just lay back and relax and enjoy life and the progression of things. I'm rigid and ordered and systematic and analytical and structured, and because of that, I can be a stick in the mud on a lot of occasions. And, I don't understand people who aren't as structured and rigid as I am. They don't make sense to me.
So I've been striving to reconcile the Virgin and the Dynamo within me, and to learn to understand people who aren't like me so that all of our interactions aren't abrasive and difficult and just annoying. Which is why I've had a huge fascination with body language and personality types and reading people over the last few years. I'm trying to understand other people so that I can meet them in the middle and not have all sorts of arguments and ridiculous fights and disagreements over simple misses in communication like I tend to.
Anyway. Read The Dream of Perpetual Motion. It's awesome and amazing and I love it. Sorry this one was so long audience. I didn't intend for it to be this long. Till next time.
Now, I have become rather formulaic about my blog titles, using a word or two topic followed by a colon and a neat little sub-heading that would show up in smaller letters were my post titles on the front of a book. The sub-heading for this post would have been "The Decay of Innocence and Childhood Wonder," but I decided that would make the title far too long and no one would want to read it. It is still highly relevant though, and it seemed to be the major theme that stood out in my fourth read-through of this phenomenal book.
The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a steampunk spin on Shakespeare's "The Tempest", which I have yet to read, but I have heard mixed feelings about it. The general consensus about it is that it is highly atypical considering the rest of Will's plays, alongside "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics lend an interesting perspective on the matter, which is highly irrelevant to the point here. Dexter Palmer took his Doctorate in English Literature and his love of Shakespeare and turned it into this haunting novel about a man's slow descent into insanity and his love of an equally crazy woman.
Harold Winslow is a former writing student that now works in the greeting card works of his lovely industrialized metropolis of Xeroville. The story begins with him explaining his current situation, trapped aboard the good ship Chrysalis, a massive zeppelin powered by the world's first perpetual motion machine. The voice of Miranda (his life long love and daughter of Prospero Taligent, the world renowned engineering miracle worker who dresses like a wizard) haunts him everywhere in the zeppelin, begging him to talk to her, to say even a single word. Harold has decided to write down the story of his life from beginning to end, to try and relate each phase of his life and each person he became to the next in an attempt to make sense of everything that happened to him.
The story is told in five parts, each going back to a portion of Harold's life relevant to his changing character and the major events that caused the shifts that turned him from one person to the next, with interludes that tell more of himself in the present aboard the good ship Chrysalis. The first, titled "nightfall in the greeting card works" is a sort of introduction to the adult Harold and his mental state at the end of this ridiculous series of events, but before the events that led to his imprisonment on the zeppelin. The second, "lovesongs for a virgin queen" tells about Harold as a ten year old boy, how he met Miranda, was brought to study with her in the magical island playroom her father built for her, and how he was banished for 'staining her innocence'.
The third, "music for an automatic bronzing," tells of Harold and Miranda's kidnapping by luddite extremists ten years later, his heroic rescue of the damsel, and the events that lead up to the loss of his sister Astrid. Section four, "romance in a mechanical dancehall" talks about Harold at thirty, the letter from Miranda begging him to come rescue her from her psychotic father, Prospero's declaration of his lordship over the earth and his airship loaded with death rays, and the events preceding Harold's decision to go to Taligent tower and rescue Miranda. The final portion, "the dream of perpetual motion" tells of Harold's journey up the tower, the people he meets and the stories they tell him, and then his final confrontation with Prospero atop the tower.
Through the whole book, there is an on-running theme of the decay of the old world of miracles and the advent of the noisy and mechanical new age, where there is no place for feelings or spoken world any longer. The children are taught with horrific 'teaching machines'; mechanical men perform most of the basic services to humanity; the new mode of transportation, that also meets the psychological needs of the population, is the 'Shrink-cabbie' with a trained psychologist/cabbie-driver; drugs and intravenous absinthe drips are a totally acceptable way to deal with the neuroses your trip in the shrink-cabbie didn't cover; and the sound of machinery is a constant and inescapable part of reality.
| Imagining the Perpetual Motion Machine, by Myke Amend |
Now, the fun part: quotes and excerpts from the book.
"Sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together. It seems strange and inaccurate, when writing of what oneself once was, to speak of oneself as "I," especially when I find it difficult to own up to some of the actions performed by the people I once was: the ten-year-old boy who played innocent games on Miranda's magic island; the twenty-year-old who returned that island when he had no business there; the thirty-year-old who committed the crime for which I have been imprisoned aboard this ship, with the madwoman. In this last year I've spent time with all of my past incarnations (oh, yes, they have their voices, too, they have just as much to say to me as Miranda), and we have decided that the only way to make sense of our existences is to set the stories of our lives down on paper, to try to make one tale to show how the twentieth century turned Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into me.
Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones.
Every story needs a voice to tell it though,or it goes unheard. So I have to try."
And my favorite part of this first monologue of Harold's:
"I still have enough faith left in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own."
-Harold Winslow, the last portion of the prologue of the book.
I picked up the book because of the title, opened it because of the cover, the first picture above, and decided I had to own it because of the prologue. And never has a book impressed me more in less than five pages. This quote sets up the book fantastically, better than any words I could have put together could. And this is only the last piece of the prologue.
"'When I was your age,' Harry Winslow's father says, 'miracles were commonplace. To me my childhood and adolescence seem as if they happened just a little time ago, just on the other side of the line dividing centuries. But you, who cannot remember a world that was not filled with machines, will never be able to imagine the drastic differences between your youth and mine. When I was a child people could fly without the need of jerry-rigged contraptions that were just as likely to explode as not. When I was young angels and demons walked the city streets. And they were fearless.'"...
"'Fearless,' Allan says. 'You could be strolling down a sidewalk one morning, minding your own business, chewing on a still-steaming hot cross bun and planning your day's youthful exploits, and then suddenly an angel would fly out of nowhere and stand in your path and just stare at you. Winking and leering, doing a little dance and flapping its wings, chuckling to itself, as if to say: Go ahead and try it, child. I dare you to disbelieve in me.'"
-Allan Winslow, Harold's father, on the age of miracles he grew up in.
This is your first peek at the supposed time before machines and mechanical men started to be everywhere in the world, through the aging mind of Harold's father.
"'The girl in the class says it helps to have an eye for art to get the problems right,' Harold says. 'She's always going on about elegant solutions and symmetry and things like that. And sometimes I see something like that, and I get it, but where I guess I'm supposed to feels some sort of universal awe at the order of things, instead I feel - I don't know. Nervous. Terrified. Take - take destructive interference. Now here is one of the things I kind of get,' he says, feeling once again the pleasure of having got it. He takes a fresh index card from the stack on the table and draws a wave across it, nothing like a sine wave, but close enough to get the point across.
'That's the shape of a sound,' says Harold. 'But every sound has an enemy. And to discover the shape of a sound's enemy, you hold a mirror up to it.' Harold scribbles on the card some more, adding to the original drawing. 'Now take this sound on the other side of the mirror and pull it into your own world. And if you add these sounds together, this is what you get.' Flipping the card over and drawing a straight line across it from corner to corner. 'Nothing.'
'Well, what's so god-awfully scary about that?' asks Astrid.
'It's scary because every day thousands of new sounds are born into the world: new machines with new rhythms; new words to name those new machines. Every day there are more sounds, and I'm afraid that, some day in the future, every sound that's possible to make will be in the world at the same time. And since every sound has its opposite, they will cancel each other out, and at the end of the day there'll be billions of machines with their percussive rhythms, and billions of words in a language that doesn't work anymore, and billions of people trying to be heard, screaming their lungs out, hurling their impotent noises into a world so saturated with noise that it might as well be deaf, and dumb, and blind.'
Now it's Astrid's turn to say nothing.
'All the noises of the world add up to silence,' says Harold. 'This world will begin and end in silence.'"
-Harold, talking about his Physics for Poets class and Destructive Interference.
| A diagram that shows the gist of Harold's drawings from the book. |
"'Son. What's happened to your voice? I hear something new in it when you read the papers. There used to be music in it; now there's metal in its place. Not something strong and forged, like steel - something cheap that breaks when you bend it. Tin, or the gilding on a cheap thing that makes it look like gold. Yes - there's metal in your voice now.' Allan's gaze drifts, and he looks confused.
I don't know what he's talking about, Harold thinks. But he does.
'To tell the truth, it wasn't sudden,' Allan said. 'For years I've heard it creeping in, more and more, a cheap tin noise coming from something cheap and made of tin. Wait - that's too harsh. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I said that. If I said it it's because I'm sitting here in these empty rooms and turning to tin as well. Just like everyone else.
'But your voice had music in it when you were a child! I remember when you were so excited about that silly roller coaster. Spinning yourself dizzy. Tornadoooo! I'd never hear high notes like that out of you now; haven't for years. You haven't felt like that for a long time, have you?
'All the high notes have left your voice. Mine too.'
Harold says nothing and looks at the floor.
'I can't blame you,' says Allan. 'Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?'"
- Allan Winslow, during Harold's 20's, rambling about the loss of innocence.
This next excerpt is probably the heart of the philosophical purpose of this book, and it describes a conflict of interest visible in many different aspects of life.
"-Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.
What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful now in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.
On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes a caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals.
These forces aren't diametrically opposed, and it's not correct to say that one's good and the other's evil, despite the prejudices we might have toward one or the other. When we're at our best, both the Virgin and the Dynamo govern what we think and what we do. But the fear that we felt standing in the Hall of Dynamos stemmed from the certainty that the Virgin was in trouble, and that we needed her, just as much as we needed and even wanted the Dynamo. What the Dynamo threatened to do was murder the Virgin by explaining her to us, because it was its nature to explain. To us common men it wasn't worth the pleasure of looking at a woman and knowing that we found her beautiful because of the distance between the tip of her nose and her top lip and the size of her eyes, if it meant losing the equally wonderful pleasure of looking at that same woman and finding her beautiful without knowing why.
Imagine a damsel in distress, tied to a train track and screaming. Her impending death would be unfortunate, but would you call the engine that drives the oncoming train evil? You have to ask: how did the damsel get there? Where's the black-cowled dastard in the top hat and the handlebar mustache who did the tying? He is one who forces us to view the damsel and the engine as moral opposites when, in fact, they're nothing of the kind. He is a person who believes that all of our human problems can be solved by the all-knowing Dynamo. And if the Dynamo has to run over a Virgin or two as it barrels unerringly toward its final destination: no great loss, really, in the end."
I'll come back and talk about all this stuff when I'm done posting quotes and excerpts.
"What he can't bring himself to say to Miranda is:
'When I was a child, I used to look at adults half with conclusion, half with envy, trying and failing to imagine the nature of the mysteries to which they'd been initiated, the pleasures they were keeping to themselves. Have you ever watched the swings of moods that toddlers go through, the way they act as if they're attending their own funeral if the axle falls off a favored toy car, or the rapturous expressions that show up on their faces when they suck on sweet things? Though the memory's fading, I can still remember feeling like that, and I thought that being an adult would be even more like that - that the emotions that make us human got more intense, the older you grew. Even at the age of ten, simple surprise gifts could be enough to make me feel like my heart and my brain were both about to burst. I couldn't imagine how people even survived to the age of twenty when such pleasures were lying in wait, out in the world.
'But that hasn't turned out to be what happened - instead, my own father tells me that he thinks I'm turning into tin. Something inside me is dying, and I don't know what to do to save it; something inside me is slipping away, and somehow my memories of what you were as a child have come to stand in for all the things I want to keep alive inside myself and don't know how. In dreams I see you as a queen, standing at a roof's edge; again and again you beckon to me, and again and again I watch you fall, and with you fall all those things within me that make me best.
'There has to be a spell to speak to save you, and myself. But for the life of me I can't come up with the words.'"
- Harold, in what was a pivotal moment in his life, and he chose not to say what could have saved him.
"This is the time of night just before sunrise, the time that no one owns, and if you have found yourself awake and alone during this time, out in the city, outside the safety of the walls you call your own, then you know me, and you have felt what I have felt. This is the hour of the night it's best to sleep through, for if it catches you awake then it well force you to face what is true. This is when you look into the half-dead eyes of those who are either wishing for sleep or shaking off its final remnants, and you see the signs of the twilight in which your own mind is suspended.
"At any other time it's better. You can do the things you feel you should; you're an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In a monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you're read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust."
- Harold, narrating this time, talking about the time of night he is heading home from the club.
"'You've told me many secrets," Prospero says, and smiles. "Now I will tell you one. It's my darkest. Are you ready?
'It is this.' He leans toward me and spreads his arms in mock surrender. 'I have no past. You may think that I was once small and young and unwise as you once were, but I have always been as you see me before you. Always an old magician in exile.'"
- Prospero Taligent, on his past.There are more quotes than that I'd like to share, but they're kind of vital to the plot and goings on and will spoil the story for you. The last one from Prospero almost earned a spoiler alert, but I decided it wasn't enough to ruin anything specific for you, given that you haven't seen his character's development up until that point in the book.
What I love about this book is the elegant and very subtle development of Harold's character through those series of events that lead him to become the man he is aboard the Chrysalis. It's the slow and inevitable and inescapable chugging motor of the Dynamo, turning everything into metal as time progresses. And it's not something it knows it's doing. It's just the natural progression of things. Time changes us and shifts the way we think and perceive and operate in life. Things that used to be important to us become trivial matters, and things that didn't used to even cross our mind now consume our thoughts and cause us to worry and fear and give us many sleepless nights out of sheer stress. And there's not a whole lot anyone can do to stop it.
There's a point in the book where Harold could have changed the entire series of events that came after that point and maybe even saved himself from his inevitable fate. But his failure to admit what is happening to him and accept it leaves him powerless to change it. He won't say out loud that he's terrified to death that he's turning to metal, and instead returns to Miranda's playroom and tries to deny what he feels inside. And, at the end of the day, that choice is what doomed him to end up on the good ship Chrysalis, circling the earth endlessly, trying to find Miranda and not accept his madness by talking to her.
In short, YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK. I love it so much that the ending still gets me literally every time, though the tone and meaning has changed and shifted every single time I've read it. It's become so much more serious and so much darker as I peel back each successive layer and discover more about the characters and the series of events as they progress. It blows my mind how much stuff there is to be found and discussed in such a small story. It does have a pretty complex character development that took me a few reads to fully grasp, though I may not have read as carefully or paid close enough attention the first few times through. But it's totally worth taking the time to break down and pull apart and figure out, though that might just be the Dynamo in my crying out to understand everything going on.
Since I've read this book, I've been more conscious of the battle between the Virgin and the Dynamo in my life, in my need to explain and understand everything about my universe. I've started to appreciate life more at face value and stop trying to detect the motives behind everything or attach value to something that doesn't necessarily mean anything at all. I tend to take things way too seriously and not just lay back and relax and enjoy life and the progression of things. I'm rigid and ordered and systematic and analytical and structured, and because of that, I can be a stick in the mud on a lot of occasions. And, I don't understand people who aren't as structured and rigid as I am. They don't make sense to me.
So I've been striving to reconcile the Virgin and the Dynamo within me, and to learn to understand people who aren't like me so that all of our interactions aren't abrasive and difficult and just annoying. Which is why I've had a huge fascination with body language and personality types and reading people over the last few years. I'm trying to understand other people so that I can meet them in the middle and not have all sorts of arguments and ridiculous fights and disagreements over simple misses in communication like I tend to.
Anyway. Read The Dream of Perpetual Motion. It's awesome and amazing and I love it. Sorry this one was so long audience. I didn't intend for it to be this long. Till next time.
Friday, April 6, 2012
Topic: I Have No Idea
Hello, audience. I'm not dead or trapped in a well or something. I've just had writers block. Every time I've been online and had the freedom of time to write a blog lately, I haven't been able to come up with anything. Which is basically what I feared would happen when my ex convinced me to start writing a blog in the first place. The other thing I feared would happen is that I would be boring and no one would be interested in any of my blogs. So far, that doesn't seem to be true, but the only real feedback I've received thus far has been from people I already know, so I'm not positive as to whether I'm just getting sympathy views or whether anyone actually cares to read what I write. In fact, some of the blogs I had the most fun writing have the least number of page views, so apparently what I think people will read and what they actually read are two very different things. Shows how underdeveloped my foresight and/or mind reading powers are.
| This chick seems to have it down. |
Anywho, not a lot has been going on lately. Insomnia has brought me some really long nights, and chemical imbalances have put me in some really grey and pensive moods. I've been doing a lot of reading, and I've had some long conversations with friends I don't connect with very often. Long as in hours and hours sitting in a car in front of my house, or a booth in Village Inn after closing time but before the wait staff (who totally loves our Wednesday night group) kicks us out so they can go home. So plenty of mental stimulation.
I recently read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. I've long been a fan of the Peter Jackson movies, but until now I had never successfully read the books. I started Fellowship a couple years back, but I went into it with a totally incorrect mindset and preconceived notion of what to expect, so I never made it past Lorien. This time, however, I wasn't expecting the novelization of the movies, but a grand adventure of some Hobbits that got themselves into trouble of an epic scale and how they got out of it. Needless to say, it went much much better. I had to borrow a copy of Two Towers and Return of the King from friends, but I made it. And I tell you what, I'm going to have a whole new appreciation for the movies next time I watch them. Which will probably be in the next six months or so. I'm due to watch them again at some point this year. Also, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn. /story.
| You wish you could be Aragorn. It's okay, admit it. I do too. |
Hmmm. What else....
I've resolved to buy some EMG pickups for my beautiful Roxanne and gentleman Ray Charles. A set of 81/85X humbuckers for Roxy, and one of their strat sets for Ray, if anyone cared to know. Umm.. I'm totally going to see Periphery, Protest the Hero, and Jeff Loomis TOMORROW NIGHT. It's going to be awesome. AND, Meshuggah next month. I'm super stoked for that one. I missed them on their last tour in America like three or four years ago. And they were playing with Cynic, too. I'm still mad about it.
I'm back on the active role of job hunting again. I've been super lazy for the last few months and haven't been doing a whole lot, but I'm finally sick to death of being unemployed, so I'm filling out online apps like mad and I'm taking down phone numbers to call en masse later today. I still feel like a major bum for not already having a job, but that's what I get for being lazy and not trying super hard. I don't take rejection well, and I get discouraged pretty easily when I'm in a down mood. I lose interest in doing most anything but trying to escape from reality, so I end up reading a lot or playing immersive games, like the ultra-popular Skyrim. To give you a taste of my capacity for escapism, I probably have more than 150 hours of play total across six or seven different characters on two different PS3 consoles, and I don't actually own the game myself. No, I really don't have a life.
And then I stop and think about how many jobs I could have had by now if I had dedicated that many hours to job hunting since Skyrim's release on 11/11/11 and go pull up an online application. And then, as soon as the first window pops up with information I have to fill out, I remember why I haven't. Because Skyrim is way more fun than filling out job apps. Applications are sobering and elucidating and generally put me in a bad mood, whereas Skyrim lets me be an Orc Warrior with bright red mutton chops named Scotty McOrcishbane and run around splattering people and monsters to death with a giant warhammer.
I've resolved to buy some EMG pickups for my beautiful Roxanne and gentleman Ray Charles. A set of 81/85X humbuckers for Roxy, and one of their strat sets for Ray, if anyone cared to know. Umm.. I'm totally going to see Periphery, Protest the Hero, and Jeff Loomis TOMORROW NIGHT. It's going to be awesome. AND, Meshuggah next month. I'm super stoked for that one. I missed them on their last tour in America like three or four years ago. And they were playing with Cynic, too. I'm still mad about it.
I'm back on the active role of job hunting again. I've been super lazy for the last few months and haven't been doing a whole lot, but I'm finally sick to death of being unemployed, so I'm filling out online apps like mad and I'm taking down phone numbers to call en masse later today. I still feel like a major bum for not already having a job, but that's what I get for being lazy and not trying super hard. I don't take rejection well, and I get discouraged pretty easily when I'm in a down mood. I lose interest in doing most anything but trying to escape from reality, so I end up reading a lot or playing immersive games, like the ultra-popular Skyrim. To give you a taste of my capacity for escapism, I probably have more than 150 hours of play total across six or seven different characters on two different PS3 consoles, and I don't actually own the game myself. No, I really don't have a life.
And then I stop and think about how many jobs I could have had by now if I had dedicated that many hours to job hunting since Skyrim's release on 11/11/11 and go pull up an online application. And then, as soon as the first window pops up with information I have to fill out, I remember why I haven't. Because Skyrim is way more fun than filling out job apps. Applications are sobering and elucidating and generally put me in a bad mood, whereas Skyrim lets me be an Orc Warrior with bright red mutton chops named Scotty McOrcishbane and run around splattering people and monsters to death with a giant warhammer.
| This is exactly what it's like. |
Side note: The Sinclair/7-11 on Constitution and Academy is THE BEST 7-11 I have ever been to. Why? Because the employees are cooler, and because they totally kept the big green dinosaur and stuck it on the side of the building instead of out by the corner. I almost cried when I didn't see it mocking the drivers trying to cross Academy on Constitution during rush hour the first couple times I drove by. But all is well, because the big green guy is definitely still around.
Now that I have effectively wandered aimlessly for somewhere around ten or fifteen minutes, I'm going to call this blog a done deal. It's my first ever stream of consciousness blog, and I must say, I enjoyed it pretty well. Previous experience tells me that I am going to get very few views because of that. We will just have to see if that remains true. I'll let you guys who actually read this far know in my next blog where this one stands in the overall running. Maybe I'll even draw up a nifty graph like the guy who does XKCD does from time to time. Great web comic, by the way. I've read every single one, INCLUDING the secret text for each. How's that for not having a life?
| I want to be the hat guy when I grow up. |
I feel like I should start compiling a list of my achievements in not having a life. Among them would be watching the Theatrical AND Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson trilogy in marathon. On separate occasions, of course. Though, I think I may have cheated through a couple scenes I didn't like and let myself nod off, so maybe I'll have to try again...
Anyway. Now I'm actually done. Thank you again for reading, audience. It does actually make me happy to see that people read my blog from time to time. Until next time.
Anyway. Now I'm actually done. Thank you again for reading, audience. It does actually make me happy to see that people read my blog from time to time. Until next time.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Balance: The Great Pendulum of Life
Hello, audience. I'm not going to lie. This blog is fifty percent because I had a topic, and fifty percent because I feel obligated to write after not having done so for most of February. I'm not sure where the last month went, but I have my suspicions, and I'll give you more information in a bit.
Also, I feel like I should inform you in advance that this blog is in intentionally shorter than usual. I tend to write a lot to begin with, but I've been getting longer and longer as time has gone on and I feel bad. So this one will be short, sweet, and to the point.
For a few years now, I've been interested in the concept of Universal Balance. Cultures since the dawn of time have also been fascinated by balance and have exhibited such in various displays of duality in their religious, mythical, and spiritual beliefs. Light and dark, good and evil, right and wrong, male and female, day and night, hot and cold, fire and water, earth and air, time and space, etc.
Lately, I've been pointing out little moments in life where it seems like things are really fantastic, and then everything sucks two or three days later. I have really stretched my belief in universal balance because of that, seeing all these instances of things staying balanced over some period of time. At some points, it even seems like the flow of time runs on a system of balance. Some days, time drags on and on and on, and others, it flies by so quickly, you're not sure you were even awake most of the day. A good example of this is that January took like five months to pass, and February took about two days. Or so it seems.
I get frustrated by this balance, blaming Murphy for ruining things once they started looking up, but that's not the final conclusion I've come to about it. I decided that it's like a pendulum, something that isn't by any means an original thought, but is still a great picture.
Life is a pendulum, swinging between the good and bad things in life. It goes back and forth, into one half, then back to the other. Now, if someone were to put their hand on the bad side to try and keep it from swinging into that half of the spectrum, the pendulum would lose its momentum and therefore not be able to swing as far the other direction. Its range decreases on both sides if you limit one. So by limiting your ability to experience the bad, you also limit your ability to experience the amazing things in life that make it worth living. You can't have one without the other.
A good example of this is living cautiously. If someone is always afraid something bad is going to happen, then they take all sorts of precautions to keep things from going wrong. They don't do dangerous things or exciting places, they don't do anything reckless, they always keep to the plan and live so as to preserve their life the best. Now, this person would surely be safe from danger, but they would also be safe from doing anything fun or exciting. They'd never go sky diving or rock climbing, they'd never listen to loud music, they'd never drink irresponsibly, they'd never stuff themselves silly with junk food,they'd never meet anyone exciting or new, they'd never go on adventures or do much of anything at all. They'd have less bad, but they'd keep themselves from just as much good.
Of course, this also works the opposite way. People who over-indulge in good things open themselves up to a lot of bad in equal amounts. The solution to this is the adage that has taken my group of friends by storm: Everything in moderation.
A pop culture example would be the movie Equilibrium, with Christian Bale. In the movie, mankind suffered through the tragedy of World War III, and decided that IV would leave no one alive. So they sought the root of humanity's problems and realized it was emotions. Hatred, anger, greed, lust, etc. To solve this problem for everyone's sake, an intravenous drug called Prozium was created to suppress emotions. There's a lot to the movie, but the eventual point is that though the drug gets rid of the root cause of violence, it also gets rid of the positive spectrum of human emotion. The decision must then be made as to whether or not allowing ourselves to feel the good emotions is worth the cost of the bad.
In my opinion, it's worth it every time. Life wouldn't be worth living without all the good things. Sure, the bad things suck, but they're not everything. And if all you spend your time doing is focusing on the bad, of course that's all you'll see. I'm learning to accept the bad and hold onto the good. I've found this amazing new appreciation for life in understanding the balance of life and what it really means.
So don't forget, audience. Life may suck now, but it won't always suck. The pendulum will swing back around and things will be okay again. Till next time, just keep swinging.
Also, I feel like I should inform you in advance that this blog is in intentionally shorter than usual. I tend to write a lot to begin with, but I've been getting longer and longer as time has gone on and I feel bad. So this one will be short, sweet, and to the point.
For a few years now, I've been interested in the concept of Universal Balance. Cultures since the dawn of time have also been fascinated by balance and have exhibited such in various displays of duality in their religious, mythical, and spiritual beliefs. Light and dark, good and evil, right and wrong, male and female, day and night, hot and cold, fire and water, earth and air, time and space, etc.
Lately, I've been pointing out little moments in life where it seems like things are really fantastic, and then everything sucks two or three days later. I have really stretched my belief in universal balance because of that, seeing all these instances of things staying balanced over some period of time. At some points, it even seems like the flow of time runs on a system of balance. Some days, time drags on and on and on, and others, it flies by so quickly, you're not sure you were even awake most of the day. A good example of this is that January took like five months to pass, and February took about two days. Or so it seems.
I get frustrated by this balance, blaming Murphy for ruining things once they started looking up, but that's not the final conclusion I've come to about it. I decided that it's like a pendulum, something that isn't by any means an original thought, but is still a great picture.
| I couldn't find any pictures of a swinging pendulum, so you get this diagram instead. |
Life is a pendulum, swinging between the good and bad things in life. It goes back and forth, into one half, then back to the other. Now, if someone were to put their hand on the bad side to try and keep it from swinging into that half of the spectrum, the pendulum would lose its momentum and therefore not be able to swing as far the other direction. Its range decreases on both sides if you limit one. So by limiting your ability to experience the bad, you also limit your ability to experience the amazing things in life that make it worth living. You can't have one without the other.
A good example of this is living cautiously. If someone is always afraid something bad is going to happen, then they take all sorts of precautions to keep things from going wrong. They don't do dangerous things or exciting places, they don't do anything reckless, they always keep to the plan and live so as to preserve their life the best. Now, this person would surely be safe from danger, but they would also be safe from doing anything fun or exciting. They'd never go sky diving or rock climbing, they'd never listen to loud music, they'd never drink irresponsibly, they'd never stuff themselves silly with junk food,they'd never meet anyone exciting or new, they'd never go on adventures or do much of anything at all. They'd have less bad, but they'd keep themselves from just as much good.
Of course, this also works the opposite way. People who over-indulge in good things open themselves up to a lot of bad in equal amounts. The solution to this is the adage that has taken my group of friends by storm: Everything in moderation.
A pop culture example would be the movie Equilibrium, with Christian Bale. In the movie, mankind suffered through the tragedy of World War III, and decided that IV would leave no one alive. So they sought the root of humanity's problems and realized it was emotions. Hatred, anger, greed, lust, etc. To solve this problem for everyone's sake, an intravenous drug called Prozium was created to suppress emotions. There's a lot to the movie, but the eventual point is that though the drug gets rid of the root cause of violence, it also gets rid of the positive spectrum of human emotion. The decision must then be made as to whether or not allowing ourselves to feel the good emotions is worth the cost of the bad.
| Also, lots of action-y violence and fight scenes. Cleric John Preston is way cooler than Batman. |
In my opinion, it's worth it every time. Life wouldn't be worth living without all the good things. Sure, the bad things suck, but they're not everything. And if all you spend your time doing is focusing on the bad, of course that's all you'll see. I'm learning to accept the bad and hold onto the good. I've found this amazing new appreciation for life in understanding the balance of life and what it really means.
So don't forget, audience. Life may suck now, but it won't always suck. The pendulum will swing back around and things will be okay again. Till next time, just keep swinging.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Playing Guitar: Tips and Tricks From A Fellow Musician
Hello there, audience. My last blog was about music, and I decided that I would continue the trend in honor of the new addition to my musical family. A quick story first, and then I'll get to business.
In playing Roxy for a few hours, I sort of rekindled my passion for playing guitar. I've been feeling a bit stale lately, as I don't have much material to learn or any specific direction to practice in. Getting this new guitar as a gracious gift, and it being of better quality than Ray Charles, I decided to run over a lot of old songs I know in E standard tuning. Roxy plays smoothly enough that it was an absolute joy to play, and I ended up sitting around for hours playing old material from memory. Now, I'm sitting on the couch next to my gorgeous new guitar, and I decided to try and take some pieces from my own guitar playing experience and try and pass on some tips to aspiring fellow guitarists, whether I know you personally or if we have never met and doubtfully ever will. So, without further ado, here are some things I have done in the past or still do to keep up my skill and continue to improve.
Always always always start with a strong foundation.
If you don't know how basic music theory works, put down your guitar and go sit in on an elementary school music class. You need to understand what scales are, sharps flats and naturals, chords, time signature and meter, and how to read basic sheet music, tabs, and chord charts. These are VITAL to getting a proper base in music. You can learn everything and anything if you know just a few basic things that you can pick up from any
Start with what you know.
Constantly practice and refine your playing.
Practice may not always make perfect, but it makes it damn close. You have to set aside time to play regularly or else you will lose callous, finesse, muscle memory, or just forget entire songs. If you're really serious about learning, you'll find the time to play an hour or two every few days. Start by warming up your hands with something simple, some exercises you get from elsewhere or you come up with yourself. Things that get both hands awake and ready to play. Play things you know really well first, to keep them solid in your memory and to refine whatever techniques those songs use. Then move onto things you're learning or are having trouble with. Dedicate most of your time to working out mistakes and correcting them. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over should be exactly what your practice time looks like. Until you get it right, or you've made progress and want to move onto something else.
Most important of all, Have fun.
If your practice sessions consist of you getting really frustrated at a new song or a difficult riff, and then giving up and storming away, try to lay off on the new stuff for a while. The whole point of playing guitar is to have fun making music that you enjoy. The second it stops being fun, you're crossing out of the zone you should be playing in. Now, if you're just giving up because you don't want to try, then maybe you should push yourself a little harder. It takes lots of practice, and sometimes things just seem impossible. But if you keep at it, you'll work through it and learn to overcome whatever difficulty you're facing. And then you can be proud of yourself for having learned that really difficult song, and you can show it off to all of your friends. If you give up, you really never will get any better, and you might as well sell your guitar, because it's not that you can't do it. It's that you're choosing not to try.
Thanks for taking the time out of your day to read this, audience. I hope I could help. I look forward to seeing albums with your names on them in music stores soon, or at least getting the opportunity to play with some of you sometime. Farewell for now, my invisible friends.
Once upon a time, I played cello. I got really into guitar, and my parents traded in the contract on my lease to own cello and got me an electric guitar starter kit from Ibanez. It's a nice deep blue GIO, and his name is Ray Charles. Yes, I do realize Ray Charles played piano. I've had Ray for about four years, maybe five now, and he's still playing strong. A couple years ago, I got a Peavey Predator for Christmas/Birthday (they're close enough together that I get presents all at once, but far enough apart that I don't get them combined and get half the presents. :D). It was bright red, and I named her Anna Lee after the song by Dream Theater. In the last year or so, I needed money to repair Ray Charles and decided, after much deliberation, to sell Anna Lee to procure the funds necessary. It was sad, but it had to be done. This last week, my mother went to Arizona on business and took some of her down time to visit relatives living there. She visited my great uncle, who had a few guitars left to him when his son died in the early 2000's. He decided to present one of them to me as a gift, and mother brought it back to me last night. It's a dark red Epiphone SG Special. Her name is Roxanne, or Roxy for short.
 |
| This is one of me and Ray Charles, way back when I started playing. I've come a long way since. |
| Don't laugh. This is where all great guitarists started out. |
Always always always start with a strong foundation.
If you don't know how basic music theory works, put down your guitar and go sit in on an elementary school music class. You need to understand what scales are, sharps flats and naturals, chords, time signature and meter, and how to read basic sheet music, tabs, and chord charts. These are VITAL to getting a proper base in music. You can learn everything and anything if you know just a few basic things that you can pick up from any
music class or book on the basics of playing an instrument. Take the time to learn it.
Along with that, you need to understand the fundamentals of the instrument. Know what all the parts are and what they do. I know it sounds childish, but it really is important. Think of how foolish you would feel talking to another guitarist about playing and not being able to even talk to them about your instrument, let alone how to play it. Learn how to hold a pick, or how to finger-pick or strum with your nails if you would rather not use a pick. Be able to play all the strings at once, or one at a time, or isolated groups of two or three. Know how to place your finger on the frets to get the proper tone, how to palm mute, how to alternate pick, etc. Basic guitar techniques. If you don't know how to do any of these, go out and get a starter book for guitar and begin to learn there. Or, look it up online. Or ask a friend. Or get a teacher. But don't move forward until you have those basics down.
Everything is 200% more frustrating without them. This is where a lot of aspiring guitarists slip up and then quit when things get hard. I wouldn't have made it this far without a firm grounding in basic music theory and guitar playing technique. So learn it.
Start with what you know.
The easiest place to begin is somewhere familiar. Pick a band you know and love, and choose a song by them you've always wanted to learn. Go online and try to find tabs or chord charts or sheet music of their songs. There are countless sites for archiving music for guitar, but my personal favorite is [ultimate-guitar.com]. If you can't find it online, then try listening to the song and picking out parts by ear. This is more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, as it trains you to actively listen, to seek out pitch and teach yourself by repetition how to listen to guitar parts. If you do find an outside record of the music, sit down with it and read it over while listening to the song. Familiarize yourself with the flow of the song, the order of riffs, which melodies repeat or are varied upon and where, etc. Really drill it into your head. Then, start playing.
| No snarky remarks here. Just do it. |
Take it one step at a time.
Pick out individual riffs or licks, starting from the top, and play them by yourself. Do it over and over and over again until you're comfortable playing it straight through with relatively little mistakes on most of your runs. No one is perfect, but if you strive to play it perfectly, then you'll always do better. Once you're comfortable, try playing along with the song. Again, do it over and over and over again, until you can keep up with the song and play it as much like the recording as possible. With that piece down, go back, pick up the next portion, and start again. When you have that down, play the song from the top. Keep going until you can play everything straight through comfortably with the recording. Take it piece by piece one step at a time until you're playing the entire song straight through. After that, you can shut off the recording and play through it by yourself to ensure you've really committed everything to memory.
Don't get discouraged if you're not very good. Most of the songs I learned for the first year or so of playing were played entirely on the low E string, and were very very simple. You have to start somewhere, and that's why starting with something you like will help. It's a song you like to listen to, one you know, and one you really want to play, if only the simplest part or your favorite melody. Every hour of practice you put in strengthens your callouses, builds muscle memory, reaction time, and overall comfort with your instrument. The best way to ensure you never learn to play is by choosing something too difficult or a song you aren't familiar with and then giving up because you can't do it right away. It takes lots of practice to learn an instrument, and guitar is especially hard because it hurts your fingers to be pressing on the strings for long periods, as well as frustrating your brain when trying to make your fingers move in the correct order or with the proper timing and speed or to go to the correct positions without much difficulty. Just keep trying over and over again, and you'll be sure to make progress.
| Trust me. Everyone has one of these moments. |
Keep broad horizons.
As much fun as it would be to learn every song by a single band, most artists only have a few tricks up their sleeves as to the way they write songs. Once you learn a few songs by your favorite artist, pick another and learn some of theirs. Pick different genres, styles, tempos, and difficulty levels. If you know four fast songs, start learning some slow ones. Balance is key to becoming a well rounded musician. That includes genres as well as difficulty levels. If all you know how to play is super fast songs, you may not develop proper technique for keeping rhythm. Super technical songs are fun, but they get you accustomed to memorizing patterns, not actual song structures. You should be able to strum the guitar to a soft rock song as well as you can shred your technical metal songs. The same applies the other direction. Don't learn all slow, easy going, simple songs. Pick some faster or more upbeat songs, or ones with riffs rather than chord progressions. Or just learn the lead guitar parts to simpler songs.
I started off playing Metallica and The Misfits on one string, then taught myself some Dio. I picked up tabs for Iron Maiden and Megadeth, some AC/DC, Led Zeppelin. Eventually I got into Dream Theater and burned blood sweat and tears trying to learn it. I got some simpler things like Ludo, or some pop rock songs with simple tunes. I also played for the worship band at my youth group, so I learned songs with simple repetitive chord progressions but specific strumming patterns or rhythms. I learned fast songs and slow ones, easy ones and much harder ones.
As much fun as it would be to learn every song by a single band, most artists only have a few tricks up their sleeves as to the way they write songs. Once you learn a few songs by your favorite artist, pick another and learn some of theirs. Pick different genres, styles, tempos, and difficulty levels. If you know four fast songs, start learning some slow ones. Balance is key to becoming a well rounded musician. That includes genres as well as difficulty levels. If all you know how to play is super fast songs, you may not develop proper technique for keeping rhythm. Super technical songs are fun, but they get you accustomed to memorizing patterns, not actual song structures. You should be able to strum the guitar to a soft rock song as well as you can shred your technical metal songs. The same applies the other direction. Don't learn all slow, easy going, simple songs. Pick some faster or more upbeat songs, or ones with riffs rather than chord progressions. Or just learn the lead guitar parts to simpler songs.
I started off playing Metallica and The Misfits on one string, then taught myself some Dio. I picked up tabs for Iron Maiden and Megadeth, some AC/DC, Led Zeppelin. Eventually I got into Dream Theater and burned blood sweat and tears trying to learn it. I got some simpler things like Ludo, or some pop rock songs with simple tunes. I also played for the worship band at my youth group, so I learned songs with simple repetitive chord progressions but specific strumming patterns or rhythms. I learned fast songs and slow ones, easy ones and much harder ones.
Sometimes, I only knew two riffs out of a song because the rest were too difficult to play at the time. Eventually I came back when I was better and tried again. Now I can play a stack of Dream Theater songs, a lot of Megadeth, As I Lay Dying, All That Remains, The Human Abstract, some Red, some Forgive Durden, I learned to play and sing a bunch of Ludo, I've even learned some classical songs I transcribed for guitar. I let my playing repertoire reflect my taste in music and spread out the type of things I learned to encompass a lot of it. It keeps things interesting, and it keeps my playing from getting too shred heavy or too slow-strumming filled.
Use your senses to improve your own playing.
Listen carefully to what you're doing. There are plenty of guitar tabs or chord charts that were put together incorrectly, and what you play can end up sounding very different from what the song sounds like. Listen to the parts that sound incorrect and determine whether it was a mistake in the written music, or if you're playing something incorrectly. If something feels awkward to play, try to find a different way of playing it. Move the notes around on the fretboard to a place that might be easier for you to play. Run through the song over and over and try to discover what notes are wrong and correct them for yourself. There's almost nothing quite as rewarding for me as discovering an error in a tab and figuring out the right way to play it on my own by ear. Especially when 323 people gave that tab a 5 star rating and told the author it was perfect and awesome and magical.
Use your senses to improve your own playing.
Listen carefully to what you're doing. There are plenty of guitar tabs or chord charts that were put together incorrectly, and what you play can end up sounding very different from what the song sounds like. Listen to the parts that sound incorrect and determine whether it was a mistake in the written music, or if you're playing something incorrectly. If something feels awkward to play, try to find a different way of playing it. Move the notes around on the fretboard to a place that might be easier for you to play. Run through the song over and over and try to discover what notes are wrong and correct them for yourself. There's almost nothing quite as rewarding for me as discovering an error in a tab and figuring out the right way to play it on my own by ear. Especially when 323 people gave that tab a 5 star rating and told the author it was perfect and awesome and magical.
| Ear horn is optional. |
Above all, trust your senses. After listening and playing to a song a few dozen times, you should be able to tell if something is wrong or needs adjusting. If you find out you're playing something wrong, play it over and over the right way to correct your muscle memory. Constantly check up to make sure that everything is falling properly into place before you go on playing. There's not much worse than learning to play a song, and then realizing weeks later that you have been playing it wrong the whole time and having to re-teach your fingers what to do.
Constantly practice and refine your playing.
Practice may not always make perfect, but it makes it damn close. You have to set aside time to play regularly or else you will lose callous, finesse, muscle memory, or just forget entire songs. If you're really serious about learning, you'll find the time to play an hour or two every few days. Start by warming up your hands with something simple, some exercises you get from elsewhere or you come up with yourself. Things that get both hands awake and ready to play. Play things you know really well first, to keep them solid in your memory and to refine whatever techniques those songs use. Then move onto things you're learning or are having trouble with. Dedicate most of your time to working out mistakes and correcting them. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over should be exactly what your practice time looks like. Until you get it right, or you've made progress and want to move onto something else.
Never stop learning new things. Always try to find something new to play that challenges you in a new way. Something that requires more finesse and attention to strumming or picking patterns, something that stretches your muscle memory by using weird chords or chord progressions, learning new riffs or techniques that make your hands do things you haven't done before. Keep it diverse, keep it interesting, and keep it challenging. If everything you pick up to play is really easy, look into another artist or genre of music.
Along the way, pick up as much music theory as you need to continue getting better. Learn about different scales or keys or modes or chord progressions. Look into blues and jazz and learn about improvising. Start trying to come up with songs of your own using techniques or styles you have learned and become comfortable with. Nothing stretches your ability with your instrument like putting all your knowledge on the table and trying to create something of your own out of it. Write your own songs, then come up with lyrics. Write chord progressions and fun licks to play on them. Come up with riffs or lead melodies. Write solo parts. Write harmonies. Find another guitarist to play with. Always try to find something new and challenging to present yourself with when you become comfortable and capable with the last. The greatest guitarists in the world are still learning and growing and practicing and developing their abilities every single time they pick up their guitar.
Along the way, pick up as much music theory as you need to continue getting better. Learn about different scales or keys or modes or chord progressions. Look into blues and jazz and learn about improvising. Start trying to come up with songs of your own using techniques or styles you have learned and become comfortable with. Nothing stretches your ability with your instrument like putting all your knowledge on the table and trying to create something of your own out of it. Write your own songs, then come up with lyrics. Write chord progressions and fun licks to play on them. Come up with riffs or lead melodies. Write solo parts. Write harmonies. Find another guitarist to play with. Always try to find something new and challenging to present yourself with when you become comfortable and capable with the last. The greatest guitarists in the world are still learning and growing and practicing and developing their abilities every single time they pick up their guitar.
| Even now, when they're playing for crowds like this. |
If your practice sessions consist of you getting really frustrated at a new song or a difficult riff, and then giving up and storming away, try to lay off on the new stuff for a while. The whole point of playing guitar is to have fun making music that you enjoy. The second it stops being fun, you're crossing out of the zone you should be playing in. Now, if you're just giving up because you don't want to try, then maybe you should push yourself a little harder. It takes lots of practice, and sometimes things just seem impossible. But if you keep at it, you'll work through it and learn to overcome whatever difficulty you're facing. And then you can be proud of yourself for having learned that really difficult song, and you can show it off to all of your friends. If you give up, you really never will get any better, and you might as well sell your guitar, because it's not that you can't do it. It's that you're choosing not to try.
So there you have it. A bunch of things I spewed off the top of my head to try and help point you in the right direction. I hope that you find something useful in there, because it's these kinds of things that helped me get as far as I am today. I've been playing for 6 years now, I've learned probably more than 50 songs, written a handful or two of my own, I've played all different styles of music at all different kinds of concerts, from talent shows to worship sets to actual paid gigs at a local venue, and with all different kinds of musicians of all different styles and music tastes and backgrounds and skill levels. If you stick to it, and you really want to go somewhere with guitar, you will. But it's constant work, and it's not always easy.
Thanks for taking the time out of your day to read this, audience. I hope I could help. I look forward to seeing albums with your names on them in music stores soon, or at least getting the opportunity to play with some of you sometime. Farewell for now, my invisible friends.
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| Maybe I'll see you again someday soon. |
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