These times just don't suit me.
It's not that I'm getting old. I still enjoy new things, new music, new styles. I have no problem putting Mozart and Lil Jon next to each other on a play list. I just installed a new car stereo with iPod, auxillary and (ready for this?) USB adapters on it. I can cruise along, blasting Lil Jon from my USB key.
No, I'm all about innovation. That's not an issue for me.
What is an issue is how mean, angry, and insecure this country is getting. Well, has gotten.
When I was in my teens, we used to wear some damn silly looking things. Jams (those three quarter length shorts) in horrible clashing shades of neon pink and orange. Pink dress shirts with skinny ties, baggy suits with Hawaiian shirts. And yes, part of us knew we looked silly.
Those days are gone. Go to the store now and you find many shades of black, gray, brown. I love the utility of my cargo shorts, but there's a limit to the angry, militaristic clothes I need.
Cars. Take a good look at cars. There are the pathetic pseudo assault vehicles (choke, cough, Hummer), and the even sadder throw back pseudo muscle cars. Don't get me wrong, some of them are really sweet looking (muscle cars, not Hummers; all Hummers look stupid, including the ones you folks with dirty minds are thinking of right now). The thing is, can't we come up with anything new? And can't it be a little bit fun and a little less "My country will invade yours if I can't afford to gas this bitch up?"
It's depressing, and I've realized that over the last few years, I've let it get me down.
I've spent a lot of the week listening to Prince. New Prince, old Prince, Prince from that time when he changed his name to 0+> and we all laughed and kept calling him Prince. I miss the days of weirdly androgynous people in purple rain coats and women's underwear, and Wendy Melvoin pretending to give Prince a Hummer (uh, a hummer) while playing Computer Blue. It was just so... colorful.
I miss that. 1999 was an anti-nukes song, and Ronnie Talk to Russia was about as clear a message as you could get. Things were serious then. It's just that we handled them so much better. We didn't act as bitter.
I once asked my friend the Mad Scientist how the hell you could live in this atmosphere, and (to paraphrase,) he said, "I guess you smoke marijuana, listen to obnoxious music and download internet porn." (for the record, he was not seriously advocating any of that except maybe the music part)
So, that's what I'm doing. Resisting the bitter zeitgeist of our times by listening to a short, crazy, androgynous black guy in women's underwear sing about "purple bananas" and God. It really seem like the only thing to do.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
A Joyous Grey
Eternity: While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existing for an infinite, i.e., limitless, amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside of time. Basically nothing can happen in eternity in the sense we understand it. In order for actions to happen, there must be a tense that corresponds to a continuing action: a tense in which past, present, and future are combined to form a continual action. ( Wikipedia )
One of the oddest things that seemed to rub my early teachers the wrong way was my answer to "What's your favorite color?"
Grey. I always liked the "e." ( UK v US spelling )
"Gray's not a colour," they would tell me. "Pick something else."
"If I pick something else just because you don't like grey, then it's not my favorite colour, it's the one I picked to make you happy."
Long discussions of what constituted a colour would then ensue. At some point I would be told that I shouldn't ever color in things in my drawings with black, except for cats and car tires. "No, you can't color the cars themselves black... Well yes, hearses and limousines are almost always black, but you shouldn't be drawing them anyway... No, I don't know why we say "black people" when they aren't actually black, they're brown, just draw something and don't color it black."
Grey is the mix of black and white, in whatever proportions. Black is a term describing the reflection of no colors, while white it the reflection of all colors equally. Or, if you want, black absorbs every color, while white absorbs none. Grey, then, is what happens when something that is everything, is mixed with something that is nothing. A perfect shade of grey can be said to be everything at once while being nothing at all.
Grey also has a sound. I dreamed it one night, and managed to get pretty good to reproducing it. I stood at the kitchen sink in my parents old house, on a cloudy afternoon, when the medium light made the stainless steel sink a flat grey. I turned the water on and positioned the faucet so that a small, uniform, steady stream struck the steel at an angle that created no splashes or ripples, just one smooth, continuous flow of water (a clear grey). The sound was a steady, infinitely sustained note, that was not really a note. That is, it produced a constant tone, but any note you picked on the piano would be above, below or beside it.
Today, I was thinking of a ride I took recently. I was peddling along the shore, with a misty fall sky over and around me. The clouds were all shades of grey, the water a liquid mass of dark grey, punctuated by light grey wave caps, the rocks along the shore a dull powdery grey, the road a smooth, hard, dark grey. I could stare out into an endless grey, with the sound of the wind and the waves and the hum of my tires, all a never-ending tonal grey.
I was thinking of this when my co-worker came in dressed uncharacteristically well (for our office). Black pants, grey shirt, black and white tie. "What I love is that this is easier than picking out jeans and a shirt. I mean, black, white and grey, it all just goes, you don't have to think about it."
One of my favorite stories is the classic manga Grey by Yoshihisa Tagami, one of the best dystopian tales I've ever read (and I'm a guy that knows his dystopian tales). The title character is an almost-anti-hero who is willing to kill endlessly to find out why people are killing, and to eventually stop them. Black and white; all the colours and none of the colours.
Everything and nothing, all at the same time.
One of the oddest things that seemed to rub my early teachers the wrong way was my answer to "What's your favorite color?"
Grey. I always liked the "e." ( UK v US spelling )
"Gray's not a colour," they would tell me. "Pick something else."
"If I pick something else just because you don't like grey, then it's not my favorite colour, it's the one I picked to make you happy."
Long discussions of what constituted a colour would then ensue. At some point I would be told that I shouldn't ever color in things in my drawings with black, except for cats and car tires. "No, you can't color the cars themselves black... Well yes, hearses and limousines are almost always black, but you shouldn't be drawing them anyway... No, I don't know why we say "black people" when they aren't actually black, they're brown, just draw something and don't color it black."
Grey is the mix of black and white, in whatever proportions. Black is a term describing the reflection of no colors, while white it the reflection of all colors equally. Or, if you want, black absorbs every color, while white absorbs none. Grey, then, is what happens when something that is everything, is mixed with something that is nothing. A perfect shade of grey can be said to be everything at once while being nothing at all.
Grey also has a sound. I dreamed it one night, and managed to get pretty good to reproducing it. I stood at the kitchen sink in my parents old house, on a cloudy afternoon, when the medium light made the stainless steel sink a flat grey. I turned the water on and positioned the faucet so that a small, uniform, steady stream struck the steel at an angle that created no splashes or ripples, just one smooth, continuous flow of water (a clear grey). The sound was a steady, infinitely sustained note, that was not really a note. That is, it produced a constant tone, but any note you picked on the piano would be above, below or beside it.
Today, I was thinking of a ride I took recently. I was peddling along the shore, with a misty fall sky over and around me. The clouds were all shades of grey, the water a liquid mass of dark grey, punctuated by light grey wave caps, the rocks along the shore a dull powdery grey, the road a smooth, hard, dark grey. I could stare out into an endless grey, with the sound of the wind and the waves and the hum of my tires, all a never-ending tonal grey.
I was thinking of this when my co-worker came in dressed uncharacteristically well (for our office). Black pants, grey shirt, black and white tie. "What I love is that this is easier than picking out jeans and a shirt. I mean, black, white and grey, it all just goes, you don't have to think about it."
One of my favorite stories is the classic manga Grey by Yoshihisa Tagami, one of the best dystopian tales I've ever read (and I'm a guy that knows his dystopian tales). The title character is an almost-anti-hero who is willing to kill endlessly to find out why people are killing, and to eventually stop them. Black and white; all the colours and none of the colours.
Everything and nothing, all at the same time.
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