Late Night Quotations: Pere Ubu

"Pere Ubu is not now nor has it ever been a viable commercial venture. We won't sleep on floors, we won't tour endlessly and we're embarrassed by self-promotion. Add to that a laissez-faire attitude to the mechanics of career advancement and a demanding artistic agenda and you've got a recipe for real failure. That has been our one significant success to this date: we are the longest-lasting, most disastrous commercial outfit to ever appear in rock 'n' roll. No one can come close to matching our loss to longevity ratio."

–David Thomas of Pere Ubu.
(because I just saw them live and they were great.)

Late Night Quotations: DaDA

"Each page ought to explode, either from deep and weighty seriousness, a whirlwind, dizziness, the new, or the eternal, from its crushing humor, the enthusiasm, of principles, or its typographical appearance. Here is a tottering world fleeing, future spouse of the bells of the infernal scale, and here on the other side: new men. Harsh, leaping, riders of hiccups. Hare are the mutilated wold and the literary medicine men with a passion for improvement."

-Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto.

Construction Worker

Apologies dear reader. The ass I have been putting into this as of late is half at best. Amazing how quickly we have become so ensnared by the internet. (An hour later) I wasn't even two sentences into this when was swept away by the current. I've just now resurfaced after watching an hour of John Stewart videos. The point is, I have dozens and dozens of books at my fingertips. I have dozens of projects sitting on my desk and in my head that I haven't done. It was a beautiful day outside today, and I have a lot of good friends that live in the same apartment or next door to me. We're so afraid of not having enough time to do everything that we do nothing. Remember our imaginations? Weren't those great? Remember when we could think up, and then execute things because we didn't care. There were no consequences. And most of the things I want to do right now at this very moment have no consequences. They don't cost anything, and they would be very good things to have done. I resent the fact that my brain has changed. I resent that it isn't as plastic as it used to be. I resent the fact that real learning takes effort. I resent the fact that unless I really watch myself, I can fall effortlessly into an hour of fluff. I resent that I spend days with nothing to show or remember from them. Not that we don't need to work at things, and practice skills, and get smarter, and better, but I don't think I even accomplish that most days. What do I remember today? I remember that I got some groceries. I remember I spent a bunch of time trying to track down some old Fela Kuti records. I watched a video of an emotive robot begging not to be shut off. But so fucking what!?! It was interesting, but what the hell can I do with that? There are two things we can do with information. We can use it to make different, more complex information, or when can use it to give us an idea of how to use that information.Bricks and blueprints. I want to be a construction worker. I want to build things with my mind. So I should probably get off my fucking computer and do some of those things. See you.

Late Night Quotations: Meaningless

"Even a meaningless universe has meaning. Accept that and everything makes a new kind of sense."

-JG Ballard

Midday Quotations: Poetry

"If you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you."

-Celine. Journey to the End of the Night.

Late Night Quotations: Laziness

"Laziness is almost as compelling as life."

-Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

Our God Our Ad

So we're a generation of lazy kids, with bad jobs, who are all moving back in to our parents basements. We value little above being momentarily entertained. We can't focus for long enough to finish a book let alone a three minute song. We can't do any one thing without at least three others blinking, tinking, and whirring away in the background.

Was there any thought given to the environment we were raised in? Has our parent generation considered the fact that they let the foxes into the hen house, and we are the result of a generation raised by advertisements. We have spent the entirety of our lives being bombarded with images, all promising happiness through consumption. A culture where the best that we can aspire to be is an entertainer or, better yet, entertained. A substance free zone where the content of everything amounts to it's dollar value, and the viability of an idea rests on it's ratings.

We are not victims, we are products. This is what happens when you've taken in more visuals by your twenty first birthday than your grandparents did in their entire lifetime. Advertising is our religion. It feeds us all. Clothes us. Surrounds us. Newspapers, magazines, BLOGS, run on advertising money. Everything we know, we know because of advertising. Our truth is sold to us. Our reality is motivated by profit.

So where does that leave ideas? Was Hitler just wrong because he fought a war for ideals, and US right because we now fight a war for profit. The current Iraq War is the most privatized war in the history of warfare. A lot of people are making a lot of money off this stuff. It's not a conspiracy, it's business. There is no agenda beyond profit. There is no truth but the ad.

And we've been conditioned our whole lives to believe in the ad. We bought it when Optimus Prime told us to, and we bought it when Bush did. We had better whip up some awareness and analysis fast before we buy our own destruction.

a billion

A billion blades of grass and all it ever occurs to me to do is lie in it, sit on it, and whistle. Well that just won't cut it anymore. If you're too scared to call yourself an artist, it's probably because you aren't one! You're a human being. And human beings can be all sorts of things can't they? A billion human beings and all it ever occurs to me to do is be an artist.