Endangered Species: Book, and All That Implies

The book, as we know, it is on its way out.

This is not a bad thing. It isn't good either.

The ease of proliferation for the e-document is fueling a multifaceted revolution - one with tentacles in political, socio-economic, educational, religious, artistic and technological pies, just like the printing press did hundreds of years ago. The effects will be felt for hundreds of years, assuming we bipedal mammals are around that long. This much is obvious.

It is also burning down the old ecosystem of pamphlets, CDs, churches, silkscreens and leather-bound volumes. This is more complicated.

The new tech shuts down old jobs, even as it creates new ones. More than that, it doesn't replace jobs; it creates openings for new roles, and ones that don't necessarily pay as well.

People like books. There's something that approximates permanence in holding a hard copy. For a long time, I was partial to owning hard copies of all the music in my library. For the same reason, I still carry a phone that has physical buttons on it. I don't trust anything that can literally disappear at the stroke of a magnet.

Its existence is sadly temporary.

It's true, there's no such thing as permanence. It's an illusion, created by living just a little too much in the moment. Right now, the book is a book and it's real. In less than a millennium it'll be dust, and the content will probably be irrelevant long before that, with a few notable exceptions.

Still, I'm inclined to hold on to a few paper books. There are some that perennially return to a list of Shit You're Not Allowed To Read, depending on your time and place. Those are the hard copies I wanna hold onto. Just in case. I've read em already, but there's a whole new generation of readers coming up who might not want all their Facebook friends knowing they just bought Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World or Deterring Democracy on Amazon. Not when the Verboten Books list comes around again anyway.

Jail and Fire:
They're good for what ails ya.

And even if you do want people to know what you're reading, you might have trouble finding copies for your kindle/e-reader/iPad/etc.

Then again, forbidden fruit tastes better, right? And therefore, sells better. And the purveyors of digital media aren't necessarily in it for their health. Hard to say what's gonna happen.

And this doesn't even address what's happening to the whole economic model, seeing as free shit is so easy to find on the interwebz. If the shit's just free, what sort of regulator will emerge?

The un-market is flooded.

See you in another present.

Question Authority. Especially If You're a Cop.

Brad Manning's recent conviction put me in a mind to remember other abuses of power like his. Like Pvt First Class Manning, the perpetrators of these abuses faced swift & decisive retribution.

Let's go back 3 years and a month.

Never personally had a problem with a cop in my life, even with plenty of opportunity. Not til the G20 came to town. From that day on, uniforms have made me nervous. I see cops, I still cross the street to avoid em. It isn't a decision. It's a gut reaction now.

I'm not even that much of a criminal either. I jaywalk & get pissed off about stupid shit the government does. And the media.

I don't steal; I recover. I don't assault; I defend. I don't utter threats; I make promises.

If I ever see a burning police car out of context on the news again, metaphorical heads are gonna fly.

This is different from the usual problems people have with police. Usually it's a case of individual abuse of power - some bully with a badge, abusing easy targets. We saw that happening too (witness "Officer Bubbles," and his frivolous lawsuit against YouTube commentators). This time it was clear in most cases that the officers were just following orders.

"Just following orders" ain't good enough. If you have a sense of history, you know that. "Just following orders" drove another wedge between public institutions & the people they ostensibly serve or protect. And make no mistake, the damage is permanent.

Clearly the buck doesn't stop with the RCMP, and I'm so happy Vic Toews (the master of transparently partisan hyperbole) is no longer around to blather about "vicious & unsubstantiated smears" against people who - for whatever reason - clearly did the wrong thing that day.

Doing what he did best.

The buck don't stop there, but the orders should have.

And every time one of these meetings goes down - no matter where in the world it is - peaceful protesters get beaten, sprayed, arrested, held under deplorable conditions & later released without charge. By the hundreds.

It's important to keep order. I say we bring back crucifixion. Get em all out in the fresh air, instead of those dank studio warehouses with Don-On-The-Job stalls.
 

See you in another present.

The Voice in Caesar's Head

Julius Caesar wasn't trusted by anybody who watched him read. Turns out he was one of the first westerners to read silently. Might be the norm now, but people thought he was some kind of freak at the time.

And like all freaks, he was eventually

killed by the local government.

I can't read silently. Lots of people can't, but sometimes I feel kinda stupid because of it.

To clarify, I can read without talking out loud, but can't understand what's written without playing it back with my mind's voice... or when I think nobody's around, my throat's voice.

Could save some embarrassment by using audio books,

but like the sound of my own voice too much.

Most people seem to be able to look at letters on a page & instantly understand them. Not me. My brain has to translate those images into sounds before it can understand them. Reading with the voice of my throat actually makes it a faster process, since the translation comes instantly that way.

It's a slower process either way. Speed-reading is a foregone conclusion.

You can call it a learning disability if you want to. I did.

We all learn with two tools, and only those two: experience and interpretation. They have to work in tandem too. If you experience without interpretation, you learn nothing. And if you simply interpret other peoples' experiences, you are - sorry - jerking off (which is also an experience, but not as good as interpreting your own experience).

Photo unavailable. Thank God.

Experience comes to us by way of five senses. Some people are blind of course, or deaf, or have numb spots and can't smell (the last of whom are often proud dog owners). On average, they're somehow just as intellectually gifted as people with all five senses.

Then there are those who,

despite having all five... 

I can see, and people who read like I do can too. In fact, I can read from great distances, amazing people with this mysterious power of 20/10 vision... Just not as quickly, and not without vocalization in either voice of mind or voice of throat.

Blows people's minds when I can recite something from memory too. Appropriate that I should be a rapper, cuz there's a shitload to remember when you rap. Learned it by ear. I can recite entire movies from start to finish, which bugs the fuck outta my girlfriend.

"You better not have heard this movie already, you bastard."

Don't jump the gun on somebody if they seem to read slowly or their lips move while they read; they have other strengths you don't have, and could mop the floor with your inadequacies. You wouldn't want somebody laughing at you because you can't identify the frequency of mic feedback with a 300Hz margin of error, would you? Then you'd feel stupid, when all you are is a little tone deaf.

Caesar used to freak people out by doing exactly what you do. That's your little genius trait. People like me are amazed by how fast you read.

See you in another present.

Blips

Might look like I'm hibernating, but don't be fooled. Ever seen what goes on under arctic ice in the winter? Frenetic down there, like Sedna let her hair down & nobody was ready for it.

...not to appropriate anything here...

It's much easier to focus when you're attention isn't split on the task & updating every little action on social media. So by today's standards, single-mindedness looks like a disappearing act. A week off now is a one-year hiatus a decade ago.

And my attention is already split anyway. Write 3 new albums (one at a time, but still). Produce & host a weekly show. Navigate Ontario's (financially crippled and woefully understaffed) mental health programs. Periodically let Student Services know I still somehow scrape by on almost nothing.

So back to work. See you in another present.

Dead Weight

Can't tell me shit about hard work.

I was part of a recent show with what I'd call an abysmal turnout. We broke even & paid the audio tech, but by the time our hard-working headliner hit the stage, even the promoter had ducked out. That left me & the bar staff as an audience for a duo that deserves better.

There were other performers too, and each had various and good reasons for not bringing a lot of people to the show. 

One stood out in particular. He never said a word to anybody. He just showed up late, cut his set in half & left. Throughout his lack-luster performance, he looked deeply disappointed & bitter about the lack of numbers in front of him. I would too.

But here's the thing...

When half the people who come to our show are my fans & friends and they don't wanna stick around for you, you got no business acting like the disappointed one.

The lesson here is simple: I'm not here to push your dead weight around, and my people aren't here to pick up your slack.

See you in another present.

 

A Cautionary Tale for All, but Especially for Parents.

This has eerily stalked the back of my thoughts for more years than I care to mention. What is it about the story of Frankenstein that made it so goddamn scary for two centuries?

Leave aside the fact that it's about a guy who builds a monster out of dead bodies. Peripheral, if also atmospheric.

And a really cool idea.

Leave aside the fact that anybody who's ever faced rejection can relate to the monster. That's scary if you're into disproportionate retaliation.

In every tragedy, the protagonist suffers a loss. If Victor is the protagonist here, he has lost more than anyone ever has in any other tragedy. Agamemnon lost his life. Faustus lost his soul. Hamlet lost his mind. Job lost his family & wealth.

Victor lost all of that at once.

Whatever shape the monster had taken, he represents the sum of all fears: That your whole universe will be destroyed.

What makes this particularly horrifying is the fact that Victor's universe is destroyed by that which represents his greatest triumph: the creation of a human life.

All parents should read this book and be terrified.

Behold: The thing that will destroy you.

See you in another present...

Hate Art: Why You Can't Shut Em Up & Get Away With It

 

First, a word of apology:

 

If you've read this blog before, you know how I love to drop in pictures. I hope you like the way I play with them. But today I can't do it. Technical difficulties. On with the show.

 

Fuck Tha Police

Huge hit back in 1990. Dr Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, Eazy E, Yella and the DOC received some personal correspondence from the FBI over it. Got a lot of negative press, and eventually became sort of an anthem for disaffected youth, anarchists and whiny little shits (different people, BTW).

Ice T got kicked off his label a few years later over Bodycount's "Cop Killer," leading to a very public beef with Charlton Heston (and the launch of Ice T's own, independent label*).

 

Neither track purported to be an objective assessment of facts. In both cases, the artists involved expressed that they were relaying a message from their neighborhood. Wasn't how they felt personally, etc etc... Dismissed as a convenient excuse to spread hate.

 

Funny thing about music and lyrics: They aren't dissertations. Rather, they are often at their best when they're conduits for raw emotional response. Neither FtP nor Cop Killer were particularly helpful in the grander scheme of things, but they did give voice to a group living under intolerable circumstances.

 

The problem of police excess is obviously getting a lot of attention again. So is the problem of talking about it.

Free Hate

Yeah, free speech is an inalienable right, but it's also a problem. A complicated one too. To the point, there's a line between free speech and hate speech; one's a right & other is a crime. The problem is in determining which is which.

Was "Fuck tha Police" a hate crime? The guys who wrote it would argue that it was a response to institutionalized hate crimes. Police officers across America obviously disagreed. And later on in 1992, as chunks of Los Angeles burned in the wake of the acquittal of four cops who beat an unarmed man to a pulp on video, the track would be simultaneously condemned for inciting the violence, and praised for predicting it.

They were illuminating a situation where the strong prey upon the relatively defenseless, and doing it the best way they knew how. From what I can gather, those guys grew up in a culture of Sun Tzu's first rule of warfare.

 

I'd say it was fighting fire with gasoline, but what do I know? That ain't my world. But the medium through which they gave it voice most definitely IS my world.

Ne Touche Pas

 

It's going to look like a sweeping generalization, but here's what I propose: The Arts are off-limits for censorship. Put a sticker on it warning parents if you have to. You know the rest of that argument.

 

Not even sure how I feel about censorship in general, but for art I know exactly where I stand. Art is a subjective (often non-literal) expression of the human condition, which is as broad and varied as humanity itself. It is the main conduit through which we are able to externalize our private commonalities, make visible what is invisibly real, and reconcile the paradoxes that make up our existence. It's how we share our appreciation of the universe's ineffable and infinite field of possibility and beauty.

It's also the way humanity collectively expels some of our most toxic fears.

 

Trying to shut that off is like sticking a cork in a volcano. Without that weird and imprecise capacity for expulsion of the toxins in our minds, we harbor and multiply them involuntarily. Even humans can only take so much of that. Short-term peace, long-term damage.

 

Individually we don't always understand a particular bit of art. It bites into you and fills you with anger or fear or a sense that you are hated. When that happens to me, my first response is to lash the fuck out and argue vociferously, spilling bile all over the place & multiplying the toxin.

All the more reason to just let it go. You can't respond to art with politics, but I continue to forget that, and so do you. Could have used that energy for a work of art.

 

Not saying "Fuck tha Police" is the best response to police brutality. Far from it. But it's hard to argue the virtues of shutting it off either, if you consider that it is an unreasoned response to a real concern. Take it for what it is, put it in context, and understand where the fuck it came from.

You can vomit when art makes you sick. That's your call. But it'll rot your teeth. Then how are you gonna bite back?

See you in another present.

*Not even trying to get into a fight about Ice T's choice of artwork for Home Invasion, but he could hove gone another way with it... somewhere that was more in line with his theme.