Saturday, February 17, 2007
An word or two on Carl
If you would be so kind as to direct your attention to the top right of this blog page and find the link "Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream" under the heading "Look over here." Here's the story behind that; a good friend of mine from highschool who went to northwestern to be a music major at some point in the first semester invited me to this facebook group that he and his friend from northwestern, Benji, had started with the intention, or so i gathered, of promoting good music. The facebook group links to a blog of the same name and on the blogsite are sound files that you can download for free. the songs are almost always amazing and the guys that run it really know their shit. It's a chance for anyone who finds the popular music scene as sub-par and wants to taste some quality for a change. Mostly its underground-ish artists that Benji reviews and samples with every post. It's good stuff, i promise, check it out.
Friday, February 16, 2007
dadaism: the creepiest and more intriguing of arts
According to wikipedia, dadaism was a cultural movement that began in Zurich during wwi that rejected all the standards at the time, and created "anti-art." I've been looking online for some good websites that i think really capture the genre. I don't claim to be an expert, in fact if i ever reach that point, i'll be thoroughly confused as to how i got there. In any case, check the links at the bottom of the post if you're at all interested. The site offers plenty of straight information about the background of dadaism and some of the major figures, and if that at all intrigues you, or if you get bored reading, check out the sound clips. They're insane, i honestly don't know how else to charaterize this sort of thing. It is totally fucking insane; it's almost as though the purpose of the art form is to unravel the human psyche that makes sense of the world.
The brain, of course, has several functions that are well beyond my comprehension, but what i consider foremost is its ability to make patterns out of stimuli. That's all 'thinking' really is, its the brain taking in the information gathered by the senses and memory, and making a pattern out of it. The funny thing though is that the brain becomes super efficient at this over time, to the point that it makes patterns where there isn't supposed to be any. It gets to the point that any given little stimulus, no matter how genuinely plain it is, can be interpreted and theorized and contemplated at length for no reason other than to understand it better. But this, i think, is where dadaism really comes in. dadaism is without pattern. it's not supposed to make sense. and when you experience it you simply have to let it go where it will and not analyze it, and not contemplate it, not try to make sense out of it, and generally 'think' as little as possible. That's when it really become art, when you can look at or listen to something with no pattern to it, and not let your brain mold it into a pattern that fits. If you make sense out of it, then you're not doing it right. If you come to some kind of conclusion then you've made a mistake. dadaism is a way of seeing things for what they are, and not letting your brain impose assumptions that simply are not part of reality, which it often does for the purpose of creating an understandable pattern. the thing is, you do not understand this kind of art, and you're not supposed to, and therein lies the mysterious beauty and the intrigue of it.
that, of course, is not to say i don't like to think. In fact, i do it quite often. I like to think i'm pretty good at it actually. and now, as an example, i'm going to think of how any of this relates to the class i made this damn blog for in the first place. well, it's a writing class, and that to some degree encompasses literature, and in literature i found james joyce, and in james joyce i found what i interpreted as dadaism. there, i told you i was good at this.
I don't know if this is long enough to meet the class requirements for a blog entry or not yet, so i guess i'll keep going till i run out of shit to talk about. now that i think about it, i want to discuss this blog thing. I don't know why i keep using words like 'talk' and 'discuss,' i know full well that i'm sitting here typing on a computer and not actually saying anything, let alone getting enough feedback to constitute a discussion; but all the same i'll carry on. So i don't really know if i'm doing this blog thing correctly, i'm not really talking about what i did today, mostly because i don't find it particularly interesting, and i can't imagine why anybody else would. I just don't see why anybody would geuinely give a shit about these kinds of things. Too much of actual goings on are trivial and don't mean a damn thing outside of the immidiate instance in which they occured. Furthermore i'd consider myself vain to think anybody is going to read this as anything more than a coerced assignment or a joke. I'm not a damn author, i don't really know what i'm talking about, i'm not an expert at anything in particular, i'm just an opinionated fucked up guy that has to make a blog for a college class and is taking it as an oppurtunity to take whatever is on my mind and put it out there. Maybe i'll get in trouble for this - i'm half-expecting some kind of reprimand from the avid bloggers out there. Listen, i don't have anything against you, i just don't really care what most people do with their days and am not about to commit the time and effort it takes to track the variety of celebrities and self-proclaimed literary genii out there (i recently decided that genii is plural for genius, by the way). I don't care how many books you sell, or how many people know what you did last month, if you're living the same wretched depressing lives as everybody else then i don't want to go out of my way to read about it.
Oh yeah, i almost forgot... DaDa
The brain, of course, has several functions that are well beyond my comprehension, but what i consider foremost is its ability to make patterns out of stimuli. That's all 'thinking' really is, its the brain taking in the information gathered by the senses and memory, and making a pattern out of it. The funny thing though is that the brain becomes super efficient at this over time, to the point that it makes patterns where there isn't supposed to be any. It gets to the point that any given little stimulus, no matter how genuinely plain it is, can be interpreted and theorized and contemplated at length for no reason other than to understand it better. But this, i think, is where dadaism really comes in. dadaism is without pattern. it's not supposed to make sense. and when you experience it you simply have to let it go where it will and not analyze it, and not contemplate it, not try to make sense out of it, and generally 'think' as little as possible. That's when it really become art, when you can look at or listen to something with no pattern to it, and not let your brain mold it into a pattern that fits. If you make sense out of it, then you're not doing it right. If you come to some kind of conclusion then you've made a mistake. dadaism is a way of seeing things for what they are, and not letting your brain impose assumptions that simply are not part of reality, which it often does for the purpose of creating an understandable pattern. the thing is, you do not understand this kind of art, and you're not supposed to, and therein lies the mysterious beauty and the intrigue of it.
that, of course, is not to say i don't like to think. In fact, i do it quite often. I like to think i'm pretty good at it actually. and now, as an example, i'm going to think of how any of this relates to the class i made this damn blog for in the first place. well, it's a writing class, and that to some degree encompasses literature, and in literature i found james joyce, and in james joyce i found what i interpreted as dadaism. there, i told you i was good at this.
I don't know if this is long enough to meet the class requirements for a blog entry or not yet, so i guess i'll keep going till i run out of shit to talk about. now that i think about it, i want to discuss this blog thing. I don't know why i keep using words like 'talk' and 'discuss,' i know full well that i'm sitting here typing on a computer and not actually saying anything, let alone getting enough feedback to constitute a discussion; but all the same i'll carry on. So i don't really know if i'm doing this blog thing correctly, i'm not really talking about what i did today, mostly because i don't find it particularly interesting, and i can't imagine why anybody else would. I just don't see why anybody would geuinely give a shit about these kinds of things. Too much of actual goings on are trivial and don't mean a damn thing outside of the immidiate instance in which they occured. Furthermore i'd consider myself vain to think anybody is going to read this as anything more than a coerced assignment or a joke. I'm not a damn author, i don't really know what i'm talking about, i'm not an expert at anything in particular, i'm just an opinionated fucked up guy that has to make a blog for a college class and is taking it as an oppurtunity to take whatever is on my mind and put it out there. Maybe i'll get in trouble for this - i'm half-expecting some kind of reprimand from the avid bloggers out there. Listen, i don't have anything against you, i just don't really care what most people do with their days and am not about to commit the time and effort it takes to track the variety of celebrities and self-proclaimed literary genii out there (i recently decided that genii is plural for genius, by the way). I don't care how many books you sell, or how many people know what you did last month, if you're living the same wretched depressing lives as everybody else then i don't want to go out of my way to read about it.
Oh yeah, i almost forgot... DaDa
a stab at autobiography
I'd like to offer a little background about myself to anybody reading this. I was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and grew up there for the better part of my childhood. I spent the school-year there, summers in southern Wisconsin, and winters all over the place. I was the son of an Arab businessman and an American college-dropout turned homemaker. I was brought up for the most part in a Muslim private educational institution that, as i decided later, brainwashed kids as part of the cultural endoctrination of the youth. My father commited suicide with a car in '96, and from then on tension grew between my American mother and my Saudi family who financed the lifestyle we lived. I'm not going to say I wasn't spoiled, I'm sure I was at the time. And really, thats no surprise given an upbringing as a Saudi aristocrat. Anyway, my fathers death was tremendous, though it wasn't something completely new to me. I watched cancer kill my grandfather two years earlier. And my sister had been killed in an accident when I was younger still. But at the time of my fathers death, I had no idea it was a suicide. I was fed this bullshit story of heroism and courage and sacrifice about how he was driving his car and swirved out of the way and hit a pole because a kid was chasing a soccer ball in the road. I found out it was suicide from my drunk grandmother - not to be too harsh. I actually spent a summer living with this grandmother and her cowboy husband in Wisconsin between freshman and sophomore year in highschool. She's not a bad person, she just gets drunk every now and then and lets something slip; she ran over my dog with a conversion van, no bullshit.
Enough of that though, I'm not trying to be tragic, or meladramatic, this is all just part of the story. Anyway, my mother and saudi family had a falling out in '99 and when we were in Wisconsin over the summer my mom found out our house had been sold. Oh yeah, and contributing to the falling out was that my mom had met Sami, a half-Saudi half-American who would later become my step-father, and whom my grandparents didn't approve of. Well, when they sold our house we moved to northern Virginia so Sami could get his MBA from Georgetown. Oh yeah, and he's 7 years younger than my mom.
I'd spent plenty of time in America by that point, but actually going to public school here was such a tremendous contrast from a muslim private school. I didn't have a great time. I was horrible at school. I'd never had to go to school in english before, and so I couldn't write a paragraph, I had to do math in arabic and convert numbers to english at the end and shit. I'd never studied American history, didn't really know who Abraham Lincoln was, and so on. Also, I didn't have any friends. I'd gone from one of the strictist theocratic educational institutions in the world to a school with girls everywhere (which intimidated the hell out of me).
This was essentially the case through most of my life so far, I moved around a lot in Virginia. Between 6th and 10th grade I'd been to 5 different schools. On the upside though, the lack of social life meant I could get my shit done for school, as bad as I was in 6th grade when I'd first moved to the states, from 7th grade to graduation I never missed the honor roll.
I'm gonna take a minute also to bitch about my parents, who were the whole time too involved in their own dramatic episodes to be supportive about anything. I wasn't allowed to play sports, play instruments, et cetera, and was constantly told I was retarded. That, more than anything, is what drove me to do some of the things I did; I was captain of the swim team even though my parents had protested it the whole way on account of certain physical inconveniences I have. I played bass for a band and cut a cd. Actually, now that I mention it, I want to talk about my former band for a little while. Freshman year of highschool I was, again, new to the school and had no friends or desire to socialize. Sophomore year I found a clique of people I really liked, but a new school had just been built in our county, so essentially all those people I hung out with were gone by junior year. So i made friends with a few older kids; seniors, dropouts, graduates. I was completely indulged in the punk scene. I played loud angry music, did drugs, and loved every second of it.
I could write a book about that year of my life, but in the end I buckled down and finished high school strong, got into GW, and now here I am playing music, doing drugs, and still loving every second of it. Oh yeah, and over the course of everything, I got pretty smart.
Enough of that though, I'm not trying to be tragic, or meladramatic, this is all just part of the story. Anyway, my mother and saudi family had a falling out in '99 and when we were in Wisconsin over the summer my mom found out our house had been sold. Oh yeah, and contributing to the falling out was that my mom had met Sami, a half-Saudi half-American who would later become my step-father, and whom my grandparents didn't approve of. Well, when they sold our house we moved to northern Virginia so Sami could get his MBA from Georgetown. Oh yeah, and he's 7 years younger than my mom.
I'd spent plenty of time in America by that point, but actually going to public school here was such a tremendous contrast from a muslim private school. I didn't have a great time. I was horrible at school. I'd never had to go to school in english before, and so I couldn't write a paragraph, I had to do math in arabic and convert numbers to english at the end and shit. I'd never studied American history, didn't really know who Abraham Lincoln was, and so on. Also, I didn't have any friends. I'd gone from one of the strictist theocratic educational institutions in the world to a school with girls everywhere (which intimidated the hell out of me).
This was essentially the case through most of my life so far, I moved around a lot in Virginia. Between 6th and 10th grade I'd been to 5 different schools. On the upside though, the lack of social life meant I could get my shit done for school, as bad as I was in 6th grade when I'd first moved to the states, from 7th grade to graduation I never missed the honor roll.
I'm gonna take a minute also to bitch about my parents, who were the whole time too involved in their own dramatic episodes to be supportive about anything. I wasn't allowed to play sports, play instruments, et cetera, and was constantly told I was retarded. That, more than anything, is what drove me to do some of the things I did; I was captain of the swim team even though my parents had protested it the whole way on account of certain physical inconveniences I have. I played bass for a band and cut a cd. Actually, now that I mention it, I want to talk about my former band for a little while. Freshman year of highschool I was, again, new to the school and had no friends or desire to socialize. Sophomore year I found a clique of people I really liked, but a new school had just been built in our county, so essentially all those people I hung out with were gone by junior year. So i made friends with a few older kids; seniors, dropouts, graduates. I was completely indulged in the punk scene. I played loud angry music, did drugs, and loved every second of it.
I could write a book about that year of my life, but in the end I buckled down and finished high school strong, got into GW, and now here I am playing music, doing drugs, and still loving every second of it. Oh yeah, and over the course of everything, I got pretty smart.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
a foreward
I suppose i'll start this the way i guess most anybody would; by saying i've never done this before. but all the same i'll do my best to introduce myself. I was thinking of first giving a background story and telling everybody where i was born and where i grew up and what my parents did and what i did in highschool and so on, but i find that i'm really not that interested in that just now. and honestly, you'll probably get a better sense of me by reading what i'm interested in in the present instead of skimming through a mindless autobiography. I'll work backwards though, a little bit at a time. It's not to say that my autobiography wouldn't be interesting, but honestly, rattling off a bunch of names and dates and stories would make me out to be a lot more dull than i like to think i am.
So this evening I hung out with an english major friend of mine, who was studying james joyce. he handed me a part of finnegans wake. i don't know how else to explain it other than mindblowing. I've read plenty of Joyce and considered him in a lot of lights -- from absolute genius to pretentious and elitist. But now he was just insane. The damn book is 800 pages of gibberish. I knew exactly what it was though; dadaist literature. We did some research on the book and Joyce, as it turns out, was trying to capture a stream of conciousness right before falling asleep. Admittedly he does it well, but if you read anything more than a sentance it becomes completely incoherent and absolutely unintelligible. This is exactly what dadaism is supposed to do.
Well, there's a lot to dadaism, and much more to joyce, and i happen to be pretty tired so i'm gonna call it a night. I'll post soon with more on absurd things like dadaism, tuvan throat singing, and what i did before puberty. It's all interesting, I promise. Keep reading. Sorry if I suck. You suck for reading this. Sorry, i'm done.
So this evening I hung out with an english major friend of mine, who was studying james joyce. he handed me a part of finnegans wake. i don't know how else to explain it other than mindblowing. I've read plenty of Joyce and considered him in a lot of lights -- from absolute genius to pretentious and elitist. But now he was just insane. The damn book is 800 pages of gibberish. I knew exactly what it was though; dadaist literature. We did some research on the book and Joyce, as it turns out, was trying to capture a stream of conciousness right before falling asleep. Admittedly he does it well, but if you read anything more than a sentance it becomes completely incoherent and absolutely unintelligible. This is exactly what dadaism is supposed to do.
Well, there's a lot to dadaism, and much more to joyce, and i happen to be pretty tired so i'm gonna call it a night. I'll post soon with more on absurd things like dadaism, tuvan throat singing, and what i did before puberty. It's all interesting, I promise. Keep reading. Sorry if I suck. You suck for reading this. Sorry, i'm done.
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