It's fucking nice in Chiacgo

...therefore, I have not been thinking much. Sorry.

Expertise

Due to the hyper-availability of information, generality must be practiced. The benefits of expertise, although easily reaped, are hardly economical. The primary product of specialization is waste. It may, in that sense be beneficial to strive to be an expert in vaguery; understanding the principles and practices of specialization, but unbound by precisions high demands. Understanding the "why" then becomes more valuable then the "what". This is a debate to be fought by engineers and philosophers. I am not about to try and suggest that specialization is wholly unnecessary, quite the contrary, merely that, having missed the boat myself on expertise, I must instead strive to understand.

Reading, writing

It's all a matter of chance. Creative forms require a lifetime to ingest these days, if you miss the boat, you've got no other choice. We have to be choosy how we spend our lives, or we have to leave it all up to chance. Let arbitrary movement determine our interests and the paths our lives take. Life is not a collection of stories, each lifetime is a story. A story that is reciprocally footnoted and cross referenced by all parallel stories around it. We can edit our stories, and add appendices, and start new ones, but they all end up chapters recorded in the central story. You don't have time to live other stories, you've got your own to write. That's probably why no one bothers to read this stuff. You've got your own stuff to do, right? Well so do I. I'm gonna go read.

Imagineer It! *sic

The mind is our only frontier of absolute freedom. We may have limited control of the bodies those minds occupy, but those bodies are subject to invasion by harmful viruses, they may break down, they may be riddled with genetic disease, and they will eventually, if given the chance, become old. But the mind is made of the same stuff. The mind just as susceptible to damager, disease, and wear as the rest of the body. Maybe even more so. But not the physical make-up of the mind, and certainly not anything as airy as the "soul". No, our horizons lay at the boundaries of our imaginations. We can create the worlds we inhabit in our minds. This must be practiced with care, for this is considered a mark of insanity, but where else have we to turn if we want something other than the world outside? What other options have we? We can't travel to a distant planet. We can't live under the sea. We can't simply vanish. But we can and do everyday. Daydream, and play in your mind while the world isn't doing much of interest. Travel wherever you want. Punch your boss in the face. Make love to that beautiful woman you saw on the street last week. I imagine this is a pretty trite exercise I have undertaken here, but my enjoyment of my imagination does not hing on its originality; merely on it's existence.

Small Questions

If a thought isn't recorded, is it gone forever? Can you count on someone else to pick it up? Should we concern ourselves more with the occurrence of ideas, or the ownership of them. Would you rather they find a cure for cancer or you find the cure for cancer? Would you rather have written this thought down? Could you have? How about all those thoughts that dance through my head before I fall asleep; too tired (or lazy?) to reach for the pen again and jot down the phrase to access the information in the morning. They are like dreams. If you can't remember your dreams, they might as well have never happened. They are non. Ideas, I think, are the same way. If you don't remember them, you might as well have never had them. What was I talking about?

Me an' My Buddy Matt: Crappy Readings Series No.1

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This is the first installment of a new "Crappy Readings Series, which I don't know if will be hosted as part of {firebreather} or will necessitate it's own home, but either way, we are putting way to much effort into sub-bad fiction.

This particular story was written by 28 year old Patrick Finnigan of New Pallantine Indiana. He's dead so you can't write to him and complain.

UPDATE: It actually has necessitated it's own site: Idiot Fiction so, check it out and don't blame me.

Blood from Water

I now know something that I had spent my life ignoring. Punk Rock did not create new people. Staggering, I know, but to my best efforts, the truth. I think there is a common perception that any new form of music turns all of these other people into metal fans, or techno enthusiasts, or goth kids, or punks. It is now my humble opinion that this is a patently false assumption. The various forms of music succeed because they connect with people in need. Everyone who fell into that initial wave of punk was already a punk before the Sex Pistols first single came out, or the Dead Boys played their first show. They were mutant rock and rollers with nowhere to turn. New music is people up against the ropes needing some form of release desperately, but not knowing what it is.

This realization came after years of disenchantment with the state of things - after going to show after show of people standing around with their arms crossed; after watching bootlegged video after bootlegged video of old Dead Kennedys or Germs shows where they are playing to seething crowds of lunatics with bleeding wounds and sweat covering every exposed surface in the venue - the need for physical music and the desire for a sense of involvement with a certain type of revolution.

Where have all the mutants gone? The terminal thing about the here and now of underground music is that there is no underground. As far as we all know, any itch can be instantaneously scratched from any number of sources. There is no more extreme. There is nothing (musically anyway) to rebel against anymore. All the other exciting music breakthroughs in history have come about from the fact that popular music sucked. Now everything is just a degree of popular on a sliding scale of preference, and a lot of it’s good! How can we get pissed off and do something about it if there’s a thousand different sounds that we’ve never heard at our fingertips at any second of any day no matter where you live? Metal has burnt out, punk has been chewed up and spit out, noise is getting acceptable, hip-hop supports the status-quo, and indie is popular. What are we to do? I don’t even know what different sounds sound like anymore. It’s all fair game, and it’s a damn shame. If only we had a common enemy like Disco again, but we must always look to the future. What do those new sounds sound like? Movements are over, it’s just moving now; shifting about in a constant state of overwhelmed confusion.

You can’t demand people be interested in your music. You can’t force conviction, and you can’t create punk rock fans. What do we want? What do we need? Our generation needs to connect with something; otherwise we’ll have to settle for everything, which is the point we’re at now. But maybe that’s why today is more exciting than any that have come before.

also published on Thirsty Media as A Riot of My Own.