Woodstock 99

The other night, I watched the Netflix documentary on Woodstock 99.  As I recall, it was titled Woodstock 99.  It was a stark reminder of how toxic the bro culture of the time was, and how badly the music of that time sucked.

Up until recently, there's been a lot of nostalgia for '90s music. For a while there in the late 2010's, it seemed like every defunct '90s band was reuniting and going on tour, before the covids ended all that. Every defunct '90s band, that is, except for the one I liked, The Sundays, who remained steadfastly defunct, content to be off raising children and living adult lives.

But my point here is that I don't think it's useful to consider music by calendar decades.  As Woodstock 99 reminds us, the music of the end of that decade (Korn, nu metal, and Chili Peppers) bore little resemblance to the music of the start of that decade (Nirvana, grunge, and Chili Peppers).  

Going back in time, 1963 had more to do musically, culturally, and politically with 1958 than it did with 1968.  Musically, culturally, and politically, the "60s" extended well into the '70s, and probably didn't end until Watergate and Nixon's resignation in 1974.  Seventies' disco and punk lasted well into the '80s, and '80s new wave and MTV lasted well into the '90s.  

No, instead of looking at music by calendar decades, the '60's, '70s, and so on, it's more useful to consider split decades.  I can't speak for tastes before my lifetime, but I can subdivide music, culture, and politics into the periods of 1955-'65, 1965-'75, 1975-'85, 1985-'95, 1995-2005, and 2005-'15,  We're now past the mid-way point of the 2015-'25 period.

Music of 1955-'65 was all Elvis, Buddy Holly, and the Beatles and Beach Boys while they were still effectively boy bands performing pop songs for teen girls.  

The 1965-'75 era started when John Lennon dropped some LSD, psychedelic acid rock got started, and Dylan not only went electric but switched from singing social protest songs to more introspective, personal songwriting, and didn't end until after the final US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1974.  

The 1975-'85 era started with the mid-70's rise of disco music and saw punk rockers rebel against the mainstream until they became their own mainstream themselves, resulting in the emergence of post-punk.  MTV may have debuted in 1981, but it wasn't until the mid-80's that it was a staple of basic cable and everyone had access to basic cable, starting the 1985-'95 era. Popularized by MTV, the big hair and ridiculous fashions that you see in movies and tv shows set in the '80s didn't really appear until mid-decade, and lasted (for some at least) well into the '90s.

The transition from 1985-'95 to 1995-2005 occurred sometime around when grunge gave way to "alternative" rock, the rise of Napster and the MP3 format, and the demise of big-label influence on rock music.  With the big labels gone, 2005-'15 was the "indie rock" decade (and my personal favorite period in music).  

We're still learning what 2015-'25 is all about, and how much effect the covid pandemic will have on it (if any). Early lessons seem to indicate this is the era of social media, with Instagram pop stars and Tic-Toc rappers having the same amount - but very differently exercised - influence on popular music.

Woodstock 99 suggests the ill-fated festival represented the '90s figuratively and literally going up in flames.  I'll argue that the festival was the apogee of its era, and occurred smack dab in the middle of the 1995-2005 split decade.

Death Stranding

I'm still not a Viking but I'm not in Control, either.

As previously reported, I wrapped up the video game Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, where you play as a Viking rampaging across Great Britain, a couple of months ago.  In late June, I completed the supernatural action-adventure game Control, and was wondering what to play next.

As it turns out, the next game was Death Stranding, the latest from video game auteur Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear series).  It was one of the weirdest games I've ever played.

Death Stranding is set in some sort of post-apocalypse and you play as a porter who's job is to carry massive amounts of cargo on his back from one outpost to another.  For some reason, you have a human fetus in an incubation chamber strapped to your chest which, for some reason, can sense the presence of invisible supernatural monsters called "BTs." The porter character is played by Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead, so that's cool.  Other characters are played by Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, and Lindsay Wagner, as well as film directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn.

Hideo Kojima has made no secret that he wants to work in movies, and in addition to Hollywood stars and directors, his games all have a cinematic feel to them and are characterized by extended "cut scenes," sequences that play out like film or video that require no interaction by the player.  The last two hours of Death Stranding are virtually one long sequence of cut scenes interspersed only by some periodic travelling by the Reedus character, and includes one 32-minte cut scene that I saw listed somewhere as the second-longest cut scene in all of video game history.

I don't mind long cut scenes as long as they're good and Kojima produces among the very best - they're not unlike watching a movie or tv episode.  But I must admit that some of the closing scenes in Death Stranding, which consisted mainly of exposition by various characters trying to explain the metaphysics behind elements of the preceding game play, got a little tedious.  I don't care about the sci-fi theory concocted about mass extinctions and the afterlife as long as I get to battle a levitating blue whale with a plasma gun that shoots ammo made from my character's blood.  

But that criticism aside, it was a fascinating, wildly original, and involving game.  In the past 30 days, I managed to log some 148 hours of game play.  That's the 11th most hours for my games, right there between Borderlands 2 (160 hours) and No Man's Sky (141 hours).

The game at times is spooky and suspenseful, and Mads Mikkelsen in particular presented an intimidating and malevolent opponent.  But gameplay actually was not particularly difficult.  In fact, I checked the settings a couple of times during the game to make sure the "Difficulty" setting wasn't set at "Easy" for some reason and not "Normal."  My character survived most combat and other violent encounters, although he was roughed up at times and dragged across the landscape.  In fact, like other Kojima, stealth-style games, Death Stranding isn't a "shooter" style game, and trying to kill your enemies, either human or supernatural, was rarely a winning strategy - the game rewards hiding until the enemy passes and simply running away is usually the best solution. My "kill count" at the end of the game was exactly "zero," while in other games my character is technically a mass murderer, credited with dozens, if not hundreds, of deaths.

Death Stranding is a single-player game, but it cleverly simulates multi-player action.  For example, instead of "bonus points" or "XP," you level up by earning "likes" from other, unseen players for completing missions and building infrastructure like bridges and shelters.  And you keep coming across cargo "dropped" by other players that you can recover and later deliver for "likes," and if you drop cargo, unseen other players may recover and deliver it for you (depending on your number of "likes").  But the other players are actually just part of the game program and although you encounter many NPCs, you never actually encounter another player.

There are Easter eggs and homages galore throughout the game, both to cinema and to other games.  I probably missed a lot of the gaming references, although there was an abundance of not-at-all-subtle nods to Cyberpunk 2077, including direct references to Cyberpunk character Johnny Silverhand.  After all of the negative publicity that Cyberpunk suffered, it's nice to see some loving fan-boy adoration for the game.

The game has replay potential, meaning I'm not at all unwilling to play it through again, but not just yet.  I bought Death Stranding in a discount bundle with a bunch of other games during a Steam sale, so I'm going to change the pace a little bit for August before schlepping some more cargo across post-apocalyptic, Death Stranding America.

DOOMS

Due to concerns over the rising number of covid cases and following recent CDC guidance, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of the City of Atlanta, has issued an Executive Order requiring all persons in a public place, including private businesses and establishments, to wear a mask or a cloth face covering their nose and mouth when indoors.

Despite the availability of vaccines, variants (genetic mutations) of the covid virus have evolved among the unvaccinated.  The Delta variant, now the most common form of the covids in America, is more readily transmissible, and while it doesn't pose a greater health risk to the vaccinated, it appears to be capable of being transmitted by both the vaccinated and the unvaxxed.

Only 38% of all Georgians are fully vaccinated (48% of those 18 and older), one of the worst rates in the country.  Nationwide, only 60% of those 18 and older are now vaccinate (at a minimum, 70% of the entire population theoretically needs to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity).  New variants of the covids are going to evolve among the unvaccinated, and some variant eventually is going to be immune to the vaccines, and possibly more fatal.

We're doomed.  We're all going to die.

The hot weather that has plagued much of the country this summer has finally arrived in the Southeast.  Today, the high temperature is forecast to reach 97 degrees, but with the high humidity, the heat index value is 105º (106⁰ tomorrow).  It's late July, and these temperatures are not uncommon for Georgia, but that doesn't make suffering through them any more tolerable.  

They are uncommon for other parts of the United States that's suffered through them this summer, and with the changing climate, we will continue to experience more extreme heat waves, droughts and floods, forest fires, and hurricanes.  The conditions climate scientists have been warning us about for decades are finally here, and it's arguably too late to turn back the clock.

We're doomed.  We're all going to die.

Georgia, Texas and several other states have taken advantage of the repeal of the Voting Rights Act and have passed or are in the process of passing measures to suppress voting by making it more difficult to cast a ballot.  More disturbingly, some of the legislation affects the way votes are counted, and takes oversight of elections away from local jurisdictions and elected officials and gives it to political appointees selected by Governors.  That way, should a future president call and say, "I need 11,000 more votes," the mechanism will be in place to allow that to happen.

We're doomed.  Democracy is going to die.

Impermanence is swift.  What was here yesterday is gone tomorrow.  We should never let this thought be far from our minds.

Meaning from the Movies (Ah! Quel Cinéma!)

 

Another Tree Gone!

So, it was getting to be impossible to ignore the large tree that started leaning out over my house.

Today, I had it taken down.  I got the City of Atlanta-required tree-removal permit last week.  Today, a  crew showed up to take it down, while terrifying me with high-altitude chain-saw acrobatics.

That dude had to be at least 100 feet up the tree, which was swaying to and fro as the limbs came off.  He was on belay, but a fall would still have been painful and injurious, plus he was up there with a running chainsaw.

As far as entertainment goes, it was one of the best shows I've seen all year (not Dark good, but still). I certainly got my money's worth in entertainment, not to mention the peace of mind now that another tree is gone.

Native wisdom holds that trees are our protectors and our friends.  They give us shelter, they provide shade, they're home to small mammals and birds.  I'm  sure my neighborhood owls enjoyed that tree from time to time.  But, native wisdom holds, those benefits don't come to us for free.  We have to earn those benefits from the trees, by nurturing and taking care of them, by showing them kindness, and occasionally by thinning their stands when they grow too close together.  

The poor tree I took down today, crowded among a stand of even taller trees, was only trying to reach out and grab some available sunlight for its much-needed photosynthesis.  But the weight of the branches reaching out for some sun caused the whole tree to start leaning, and it started leaning too far  and toward my house at that.  It was going to eventually topple over, and the responsible thing to do was to take it down before it fell.

Now the remaining trees have more "breathing" room and there's enough sunlight to please the chlorophyll of the remaining trees.  The owls still have a place to roost and keep me up at night with their hooting, and the opossums and squirrels still have homes.  Plus, I'm no longer worried about another tree hitting my house during the next storm.  Everybody wins.  

Finally, a plug for the stellar job done by United Tree Service of Norcross, Georgia.

Dark

I just finished watching all three seasons of the Netflix series Dark.  Oh. My. God. What a great show!

It's a German series, but the voices are dubbed into English.  The voice actors do a very good job of it, not only in synching the words with the lips of the German actors, but also in the dramatic reading of the text.  They're actually acting, not just translating.

Dark is one of the most complex series I've ever followed.  I dare say it's the first and probably only series where I've actually written down notes to keep track of everything, and even sketched family trees before I found some on line.  Without spoilers, the series tells the story of a fictional German town and focuses primarily on four families in that town.  Not only do you have to keep track of four separate families, but the plot follows the families through three separate generations, with scenes set in 1953, 1986, and 2019, often with different actors playing child, young adult and elderly versions of the same character.  And then there are other actors playing characters who were already elderly in the 1953 scenes or children in the 2019 scenes, and therefore don't appear during the other periods.  So you have to keep track of who's who and who's who when, and how they all relate to one another. But the karma of a small town means that an affair in 1953 results in simmering tensions in 1986 and entrenched resentments in 2019.

The series does a good job of telling you who is who - it really wants you to follow along.  And unlike some other series, say, HBO's Westworld, it doesn't try to "trick" you into thinking two different years are the same - 1986 is clearly 1986 and 2019 clearly 2019, and so on.  Some characters may turn out to be liars and untrustworthy narrators, but the show itself is not one of them.  But the show does expect you to pay attention and to keep a pretty large and complex cast of characters in your head.  Hence, my notes and family trees.  It takes a certain amount of work and concentration, but the effort, as it turns out, is well worth it.

The fact that it's a German series with German actors and no recognizable stars (at least to my American eyes) both makes the characters more believable but also harder to follow - no familiar faces, at least initially, to latch onto.  Then all the characters have German names - all Jonas' and Ulrichs and Bartosz's - or biblical names, like Noah, and Adam and Eve.  And the cast includes no small number of stern-faced, older German women who become difficult to distinguish from each another. But as I said, the show wants you to follow along and does its best to identify its cast, but that task does require some work and concentration on the viewer's part.

I'll admit that I've actually watched Episode 1 of Season 1 no less than five times.  The first one was on me - I watched it late at night, and despite its quality, I nodded out near the end of it and missed important details.  I saw enough to suffice for most other shows, but when I rewatched Episode 1 a second time, I was surprised at how much I had missed.  So much so that I watched it a third time, and still picked up more.  Then after I finally watched Episode 2 with all of its plot twists and revelations, I went back and rewatched Episode 1 a fourth time to confirm my understanding of what had just happened to who.  And finally, after completing Season 1, I rewatched the entire ten episodes, including a fifth viewing of Episode 1, before taking on Season 2.  Suffice it to say that each viewing revealed new nuances and clues that I had missed the previous times.     

Some minor spoilers ahead.  Just warning you - no big reveals, but minor spoilers.  It's well known that Dark is a science-fiction series that involves time travel, so to complicate things even further, some characters "disappear" in one year only to turn up in another.  This is apparent after the third or fourth episode of Season 1 (and possibly even in the trailers and promo material), so that's not as major a spoiler as you might guess.  So a child in 2019 might disappear back to 1986, and then grow up in that town to become one of the adults of 2019 looking for the "missing" child.  The series ingeniously plays around with the possibilities of that kind of situation.

What makes the show work, though, isn't the science-fiction mechanisms or the mind-boggling possibilities of time travel.  The show resonates due to the well-written script and the fine quality of the acting.  Those four families are portrayed as real, often complex, sometimes flawed, people, not just stock characters to make some theoretical point about time travel.  The story is emotionally moving and you come to care deeply about the characters. Some fall in love, some betray each other, some are even driven  to murder (the series isn't just titled Dark). But it all makes sense on an emotional level.  And if you make the effort, you become invested in the characters and care about them, are glad for their romances, and hurt by their betrayals. And that's just Season 1.

Things get even more complex in Season 2, and exponentially more so in Season 3, when a new plot twist, which I won't reveal, throws almost everything into disarray.  There are so many characters and so many story lines and so many mysteries that it's easy to lose your way.  Hence my notes and family trees and multiple viewings.  But the series doesn't use a smoke screen of complexity to hide shortcomings in the narrative or unresolved plots. Everything is eventually explained, assuming you can accept the concept of time travel (it involves quantum physics and wormholes, and there's a nuclear power plant on the edge of town).

Questions and mysteries in each season fall into one of three categories: 1) things the show explained but I was too dim to pick up on (the series can be subtle at times), 2) things the show already explained but I forgot, and 3) things the show hasn't explained yet and are the actual unexplained mysteries yet to be revealed.

If you're up for a little intellectual challenge and ready to work a little to follow a rewarding and richly detailed story, I can't recommend Dark enough.  If you just want a few laughs and forgettable, disposal entertainment, this show is not for you.  But personally, I consider it among the best television series ever, right up there with Mr. Robot and Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul. 

Oh, and the soundtrack is outstanding.  The series is scored by musician Ben Frost, and includes songs by artists as diverse as Agnes Obel, Roomful of Teeth, and Bang on a Can, and the soundtrack masterfully supports and even enhances the many moods and emotions of the scenes.

Two minor criticisms:  it's probably realistic for a small German town, but there are no persons of color anywhere in the cast.  Even the blondes and redheads are relatively few.  I'm not sure how that could be resolved without obvious tokenism, but it's almost disorienting in this day and age to see such a singularly Caucasian cast.  Secondly, and another minor spoiler here, the timeline eventually goes back even earlier than 1953 with episodes set in 1920 and 1897, and one episode, titled In Between Times, fills in dates between those years.  But not one episode is set in the 1940s and nowhere does the show even hint at Germany's Nazi years.  It's never explained if the prosperous family in 1953 was complicit in the Third Reich, or if any of the able-bodied men in 1920 or 1953 had fought in a war.  Any war.  It's as if WWI and WWII never happened, and I suspect the dates were carefully selected to avoid that very topic.

Still, a terrific show and I can't recommend it enough.

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god" (Aristotle).

"To live alone, one must be either a saint or a monster" is my interpretation of Aristotle's quote.  I live alone, and while no one would ever mistake me for a saint, I'm trying - I'm trying - real hard not to be a monster.

 

Outer Space Catastrophe

I wanted to see Jeff Bezos blow himself up today. I was cheering for catastrophe.

Nothing against Jeff personally - I don't know him, personally - but I find this post-pandemic spectacle of billionaires taking ego trips to "the edge of space" or to "the lower reaches of space" annoying.

What did today's launch cost?  How many billions, including the cost of all the R&D and the years of previous missions?  For what?  A five-minute thrill ride up into the sky and then immediately back again?

The tv people kept talking about "space tourism," but that trip wasn't "tourism" (neither was Branson's, and Musk's isn't likely to be, either).  It was a multi-million dollar amusement park ride, an adrenaline rush for the very, very wealthy.  

"Tourism" would be if you stayed up there at least overnight, better yet, a week.  If you loaded me into a cannon and fired me over Paris for 120 seconds, that's not "French tourism."  Blasting off into space and immediately falling back into reentry isn't "space tourism."

For it to be "Space tourism," they need to reach orbit, dock with the International Space Station, and have the guests spend some nights on board.  It's achievable, America, Russia, and China have all done it.  Why can't Amazon? 

The ethical questions are obvious - if Jeff Bezos and Amazon actually paid taxes, would he still have been able to afford today's ego trip?  And are there better uses for that money - cancer research, pandemic relief, and world hunger all come to mind - than some billionaire's "space" shot?

I was hoping the ship would blow up, not to kill Jeff Bezos, but to put an end to this on-going spectacle of the tycoons' space race.

The Holy Mountain

Filmmaker, artist, musician, and philosopher Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in 1929 in Tocopilla, Chile.  After dropping out of college, he became a circus clown and also began a career as a theatre director. In 1947, he founded his own theatrical troupe, the Teatro Mimico, and the following year he wrote his first play, El Minotaura (The Minotaur). Jodorowsky subsequently moved to Paris, and began studying mime with Étienne Decroux and joined the troupe of one of Decroux's students, Marcel Marceau. It was with Marceau's troupe that he went on a world tour, and wrote several routines for the group, including The Cage and The Mask Maker. After that, he returned to theatre, working on the music-hall comeback of Maurice Chevalier in Paris. 

In 1960, Jodorowsky moved to Mexico, where he settled down in Mexico City.  Continuing his interest in surrealism, he founded the Panic Movement in 1962, aimed at going beyond the conventional surrealist ideas by embracing absurdism. Its members refused to take themselves seriously, while laughing at those critics who did. Jodorowsky's film, Fando y Lis, premiered at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival, where it instigated a riot amongst those objecting to the film's content, and it was subsequently banned in Mexico.

It was in Mexico City that Jodorowsky encountered Ejo Takata, a Zen Buddhist monk who had studied in Japan before traveling to Mexico in 1967 to spread Zen. Jodorowsky became a disciple of Takata and offered his own house to be turned into a zendo. Subsequently, Takata attracted other disciples around him, who spent their time in meditation and the study of koans.  

In 1970, Jodorowsky directed and starred in the film El Topo.  The violent and surreal film played as a "midnight movie" in the United States and attracted the attention of rock musicians and countercultural figures.  The film received word-of-mouth publicity among the underground and soon developed a legendary status as a profound psychedelic and mystical masterpiece. I saw El Topo sometime in the mid-1970s.  I'm quite sure I was quite high when I saw it, because it was me in the mid-70s and I was quite high when I did most things.  It was a mind-blowing, surreal experience, and I remember virtually none of it.  I've often wondered how it would hold up if viewed today - surrealist masterpiece or pretentious hippie bullshit?  

Fans of El Topo included John Lennon, who convinced Beatles' manager Allen Klein to finance Jodorowsky's next film, The Holy Mountain. During filming, Jodorowsky received spiritual training from Oscar Ichazo of the Arica School, who encouraged him to take LSD and guided him through the subsequent psychedelic experience. Around the same time, Jodorowsky participated in an isolation tank experiment conducted by John Lilly.

Back in the day, word on the street was that The Holy Mountain was even more "out there" than El Topo and full of profound mystical insights.  Not only that, but it had the John Lennon seal of approval, which still counted for something in 1975.  But unfortunately, both El Topo and The Holy Mountain were taken out of circulation for some 30 years due to some sort of contractual dispute between Jodorowsky and Allen Klein. I never got to see El Topo again, or see The Holy Mountain at all.

Until last night.  Atlanta's Plaza Theater screened a 35-mm print of the newly-available The Holy Mountain last evening.  While I would love to say I was there, I wasn't partially because I couldn't find anyone interested in going with me and also because I realized that the film was also available for rental on Amazon Prime.  So last night, at around the same time as it was being screened at The Plaza, I watched The Holy Mountain from the comfort of my home.

Unfortunately, I would be lying if I didn't say that in 2021, the film seems more like pretentious hippie bullshit than profound mystical revelation.  It actually seems like three different films spliced together.  The first part, my favorite portion, makes very little narrative sense but follows one character in a series of bizarre encounters with religious and authoritarian figures.  There's no dialog for the first 30 minutes of the film - everybody communicates through grunts and barks and laughter - and the symbolism is as heavy handed as something from an early Paul Verhoeven film.  But the visual style and imagery is so startlingly original and surreal that it's fascinating to watch, as you have literally no idea what you're going to see next. The opening third of the film, while a failure in narrative story-telling, is a tour de force of surrealism and psychedelic imagery.

The middle third of the film is my least favorite portion.  If there were no words in the first third, there were way too many in the middle third.  This portion of the film provides the backgrounds of the spiritual seekers who will accompany the messianic figure of the first third of the movie on his quest to the Holy Mountain.  It amounts to seven little set pieces about reach one, and the acting is amateurish (the characters aren't people per se, but symbols or archetypes for industrialism, the military, the clergy, education, etc.).  After a while, the scenes all sort of seem the same, as the characters interact, poorly, with clumsy props and all-too-obvious symbols.  It's the sort of thing you might expect from an undergraduate film project in the late 1960s, with none of the daring visual experiments of the first third of the film.

The final third of the film fares a little better as the seekers literally ascend the Holy Mountain.  There are some more skits about the various temptations and spiritual challenges they face, but at least we get to watch the characters out of doors in some beautiful mountain landscape.  It's sort of like bargain-basement Herzog for the very, very stoned. It's still a little tedious, especially the end where Jodorowsky himself directly addresses the audience and instructs the camera to pull back, revealing the film-making machinery (lights, cameras, booms, etc.) behind the scene.  You see, it's really just a movie!, he tells us, as if we weren't already quite aware of that.

There's a lot of nudity in the film, both male and female, if you're concerned about such things.  I don't object to nudity, per se, but the film does handle it a somewhat misogynistic way.  Almost every female is topless at some point in the film, often for no apparent reason, and Jodorowsky seems incapable of showing bare breasts without zooming in for a close up of nipples. There's one scene where several female characters all appear in sheer, see-through blouses for some reason, and the camera closes in one each woman's breasts for a lingering shot before getting on with the scene. Perhaps nudity in and of itself was considered a radical anti-establishment statement back then, but today it just seems a little cheesy and gratuitous.  To Jodoworsky's credits, there's a lot of dick on screen, too, so there's that.

Yes, I'm glad I finally did see it, after wondering since the mid-70s what the film was like.  Yes, I would recommend it to those interested in the history of cinema, in psychedelia and surrealism, and 60s and 70s counter-culture.  But if you're a "normal" person, this movie is probably not for you.

I see that El Topo is also on Amazon Prime and one of these nights, I'll finally re-watch that one.  There are also some later Jodorowsky films on Amazon, including his horror film Santa Sangre.  They may not be quality cinema, but they certainly are singular and original works.

In The Sociology of the Paranormal: A Reconnaissance, Andrew Greeley presented results of a 1975 survey of 1,467 Americans.  Describing their religious, transcendental, or mystical experiences, some 55% of those surveyed described their experience as "a feeling of deep and profound peace."

Interestingly, 27% of those surveyed also reported "a confidence in my own personal survival."  This confidence confuses some Zen Buddhists, as their peak experience of awakening erases any sense of an egocentric self.  How then, can others experience a confidence in personal survival?

This should not be confusing.  In our mundane, day-to-day consciousness, we identify strongly with the egocentric self.  We cling to our identity of our individual self separate from all others, and are constantly vigilant to any threats or dangers to that self.  This, in turns, can lead to a sort of paranoia, a feeling that we're constantly at risk and that we have to continually be alert to any threats to our safety and well-being. Our consciousness is like a radar system, constantly scanning for little bleeps that might pose a threat, and if we identify with our radar system, then of course we're going to feel paranoid.

But in transcendental moments of awakening, that self starts to slip away.  We may not lose the self altogether, but we're more aware of the smallness of the self compared to the vastly larger universe, or to our conception of god, or to various other metrics depending on our belief system.  The egocentric "target" that must be protected becomes smaller, less significant, and therefore, there's less to worry about.  That distant thunder, in most likelihood, is not a lightning bolt being hurled in my direction.  That distant shouting is not necessarily someone yelling at me. In fact, in the grandest scheme of things, my coming and going is a relatively small part of it all.

With a diminished target to protect, there's less to worry about, and that can feel like an improved confidence in our own personal survival.  Of course, if we completely extinguish the ego-self, there's nothing left to survive but there's also nothing left to protect, so why worry about what might or might not happen?  

Formidable Joy

“I am always daydreaming in the bathtub between recordings," Rhiannon “Ritzy” Bryan of the Welsh rock band The Joy Formidable said.  “That diffuse thinking where your mind wanders freely — I always finish songs when I’m in that state. The idea that your imagination, that escape into another, deeper world can sometimes create a stronger connection with yourself.”

To me, these words point very directly to the practical, down-to-earth side of the so-called mystical experience.  The concept that there is "another, deeper world" that already exists inside of us and to which we can, under the right conditions, retreat or to which we can escape.  Those conditions may be the  warm, watery comforts of the bathtub, or prayer, or meditation.  Whatever works for you personally.

It's 2021, and I can safely say that I've enjoyed The Joy Formidable for over a decade now.  I've seen them at least three or four times, and have never been disappointed by their sets.  Their music can be quite loud and overwhelming, but it's rarely (if ever) angry or aggressive - they seem to approach a kind of joyous transcendence in the sheer volume of their music and the complexity of their overlapping effects.  Watch their drummer - he always seems to be having the time of his life, and it's clear that there is absolutely nowhere he'd rather be than right there playing with this band.

But the takeaway here is that the creative state, that near mystical state where solutions and ideas spontaneously and intuitively present themselves, already exists inside each of us if we can just clear away the obstructions.  It's not something that needs to be learned, or gained, or purchased - it just needs to be realized.

In just the latest development in exactly how screwed we are, the Amazon rainforest is now emitting more CO2 than it absorbs.  The carbon emissions are due mainly to wildfires, mostly deliberate to clear land for cattle and soybean farming. The tipping point arrived when the smoke from the flames began producing more CO2 than the remaining rainforest could absorb.

Although still woefully deficient to offset global production, the Amazon rainforest was until recently one of the last major carbon sinks on the planet.  Now, that sink is gone and the Amazon is just another source of greenhouse gasses.

Enjoy your long hot summers, Planet Earth.

Suffering, the Buddha taught, is caused by our attachments, our clinging to things both material and emotional.  Everything changes and changes all the time, but we cling to them in the vain hope that they don't or won't change, and then suffer when they do.

And when we attach or cling to things that are delusory or untrue in the first place, the resulting suffering is even more pronounced.  It's one thing to cling to not growing old or the illusion of unending youth, but it's another to cling to a belief that we are other than who we really are in the first place.

When we attach or cling to a lie, we create the basis for own suffering.  And that's exactly where Donald Trump and the Republicans find themselves - they have created, out of whole cloth, a lie that they lost the 2020 election due to a widespread voter fraud that never actually occurred. When it's repeatedly proven that the big lie is just that, a big lie (as Joe Biden said in a speech today), their suffering repeats itself until they retreat again back into the delusion of non-existent voter fraud and once again believe in their own big lie.

Unfortunately, their toxic belief in the big lie has caused them to propose and in many cases enact, strict voter suppression laws to thwart the "widespread voter fraud" that never occurred in the first place. They are purposely making it more difficult to vote, and even more sinisterly, allowing politically based "certification boards" to decide which votes to allow and which to ignore.  In other words, Republicans are giving themselves the authority to ignore both individual votes and the results of entire precincts if they even suspect that there was non-existent voter fraud.  This obviously, would be the end of democracy in America, and the start of an autocratic regime.

In most likelihood, these audacious measures will outrage a sufficient number of citizens to the point that the vote will be so overwhelmingly against them that their attempts at manipulation won't matter, or the people will rise up and take back, by force, their representative government.  So ultimately, the clinging to delusion, that is the continued propagation of the big lie, will result in suffering, a popular revolt against their autocratic rule.

But meanwhile, we all will have to suffer because of the delusional attachments.

Camping on the Beach, 1973

Probably in the vicinity of Davis Park on Fire Island, New York.  All specific memories (names, dates,  backstory) are now lost to the misty shrouds of time.

 

More Trees

It happened again.  Yesterday, at around 6:00 pm and without warning, another tree fell in the neighborhood, taking down the power lines and leaving me without electricity for about three hours.  Fortunately, this one managed to miss striking my, or anyone else's, house.

The spooky thing is the tree fell when it wasn't even raining or windy.  A thunderstorm passed through several hours earlier, but at the time the tree fell, it was calm outside.  And the tree that fell wasn't visibly damaged or susceptible prior to the fall.  It's just another sign that any random tree might fall down at any random moment.  You can never feel safe or secure - one might fall in three weeks, or three days, or right this moment.  It can fall anywhere.  Disturbingly, this one fell in an uphill direction, reminding me that I'm not safe even from those trees downhill from me.

Kudos to Georgia Power Company for a quick response.  The tree feel around 6:00, they were on site by 7:00, and power was restored before 9:00 pm.  It wasn't even fully dark yet.

But these trees, man, these trees . . .

I'm still adjusting to vaccinated, post-pandemic life.

I still keep a couple of masks in my car and I always have a cloth mask folded up  in my back pocket just in case.  If I'm entering a public space, say the post office or the supermarket, and I see others wearing masks, I'll put mine on.  Not for my own protection or even for theirs from me, but for the peace of mind of those still wearing masks for whatever reason.  Maybe that woman in the supermarket is immuno-compromised or otherwise more vulnerable to the covids than most.  Maybe that guy in the post office is caring for an elderly relative, or has unvaccinated friends.  Maybe there's just no reason at all, maybe they're just paranoid and still living in the past, but for their comfort and peace of mind, I'll wear a mask too.  It costs me nothing, it's not inconvenient, and I won't get mistaken for a MAGA asshole.

On the other hand, if I see that no one else in a restaurant or shop is wearing a mask, I won't either.  I'm vaccinated and I'm not in close contact with any unvaccinated, vulnerable persons as far as I know.  I'm not about to start shaking hands though - that's one gross level of personal contact that I think is now outdated and obsolete.

Live music shows are starting up again, and I look forward to hearing bands at the venerable Earl soon, and Variety Playhouse.  I'm dining out more often than in the past 16 or so months, when the frequency was effectively zero.  I still haven't made up my mind about travel, but more due to a post-retirement, what-will-I-do-with-myself quandary than concerns about the covids. 

Trump Organization Is Charged With Running 15-Year Employee Tax Scheme

The company is accused of helping its executives evade taxes on compensation by hiding luxury perks and bonuses.