Thoughts Between Stations

I've been called a "splendid specimen of neutrality" but I prefer nonchalance. Usually when I feel a heavy emotion it's a matter of slow and steady build-up that takes its time to erupt. Elvis Costello provides some sage words for the meantime: "I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused." That hardly means I'm amused all the time but some goals, even or especially if unreachable, are worth pursuing. Whether or not Nirvana exists, the process of seeking it can reduce people's suffering. The same goes for me and peace of mind. I know neurosis and melancholy come easily to me, so I strive in the other direction: seeking not to escape myself, because that would be impossible, but to balance myself. Writing for me is as much about self-correction as self-expression. I don't begrudge those with a hard-on for a grudge, but when I vituperate it is to purge and release. If I say my piece to satisfaction, it is finished and I can move on to the next inevitable turn of the spiral.

When I do wallow in the mud and blood with all the other pigs, my Super-Ego, residing in a silver spring somewhere to the south, rebukes me. I know that when you grapple with bullshit you get some on you. I know that if you constantly define yourself in contrast to something else you become tied to that something else. I know this but I am human and sometimes define, contrast and grapple anyway. When I'm done I wash myself in the silver spring seeking purity again. I feel the urge to shave my head and escape to a mythologized California. Yet this California only wants me if I'm passionate, and if I open myself up to passionate emotions some of these passions will be evil. Without the occasional flaring of hatred love will not flare so bright. Love is disappointed by my hate, hate is disappointed by my love: the heat of California and Brazil is fled for the icy but steady nonchalance of Canada, my true home and native land.

I don't know how it is for most people but for me it's extremes, one end of the map to the other. Transcending that recurrent shift is utopia: literally in the Greek, nowhere. Nirvana, paradise, peace of mind, the unattainable state we must nonetheless reach for. Truly, as David Byrne says, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." We try to get there not to reach it - we cannot even if we wanted to - but to stay one jump ahead of the ever-encroaching borders of Hell. Demons taunt me as a coward, fleeing my true nature; angels scold me as a failure, unable to live up to their image of what I should be. When I appear nonchalant it is because these forces are in stalemate, and rather than feel love and hate - passionate emotions - I am forced to choose between disgust and amusement, their lesser cousins. I try for the latter because it makes me feel less corrosive to all that is good in the world. Hate and love make for the best songs; I know this, Leonard Cohen knows this. But in between, in that vast middle ground, I must have my respite. While it lasts I ask your patience, for it like all things is temporary.

Londominion

The purpose of this post is to inform readers that the "webmaster" of Head Wide Open - Ben, Benjamin, Benjaminion, Benito Jaminolini, Ben-ana-na, Benladash, Bengerman, Ben J. Amin (no relation to Idi Amin), ¡Benjaminista! - will be off to London (England) today for a five-day trip. If a plane crashes in the mid-Atlantic, please fondly pray that I'm not on it. Otherwise, I will return shortly with possible stories, anecdotes, love-letters or hate speeches regarding England and the English. The title of this post, "Londominion," is a merge of London and "Dominion," the nation I am a citizen of, Canada, being a former "Dominion" (deluxe colony) of the British Empire. It is also a reference to the song "Dominion/Mother Russia" by English band/solitary misanthrope-romantic Sisters of Mercy. If I do die in a plane crash/bombing please regard one of the previous posts as my last will and testament, not this one. And to radical Islam, if I do die in a terrorist attack: Touché brothers, touché.

Man By Way Of Machine

Technology is traitorous. Radiohead were right about the world becoming Planet Telex, where "Everything is broken." Any video game system above Super Nintendo is a needlessly complicated black hole of time and effort. The iPod is a farce designed to break down so you must constantly buy the newest model, thus negating any money supposedly saved from not buying CDs and giving nothing instead of next to nothing to the artist. Printers never know how to eat paper right, despite my feeding it and feeding it and feeding it a feast of frustration. The load of the computer is rarely worth bearing. All the data in the world won't buy back the soul you never had. There is no ghost in the machine, no master node to the network; only indestructible sterility for terabytes on end.

Luddism is not a viable or coherent ideology but it would be primitive carthasis for hammer to say hello to CPU. Machines break down and are discarded like deformed Spartan babies. The rate of obsolescence exceeds the rate of mindful absorption. Simple, sundry books wear and tear but last. As they are passed down to a diminishing few their preciousness only grows. Formats change so fast our cutting-edge media will be unreadable to the post-digital archaeologists of the future. The public record that is the Internet won't have a gramophone to play it. By trying to be in advance of the future we short-circuit ourselves out of the timestream. At least Ozymandias left a statue; our desert of 1s and 0s will leave no simulacrum of life to inspire poetry, if poetry is still around.

High-definition surround-sound cocoons all advertise themselves with the same implicit slogan: "Leave your home without ever leaving your home!" Well I want to leave my home! I want to have to go places to get things! I'm not a dripfeed-sucking amorphous mouth attached to a stomach defecating meta-content to be fed again, I'm an ape with all appropriate parts attached, and sometimes I like to swing from trees. Despite what the hyper-modern three-fifths of me says, I need sex, not computer porn; human contact, not virtual interaction; physical movement, not Nintendo pantomime; birdsong, not lifeless hum; experience, not television; live music, not memorex and player pianos. I may not live up to my ideals but I have them, and though I communicate them through machine I yearn to sear them in my flesh.

Even Heroes Have The Right To Bleed

Devoted father, Rotarian, lady-pleaser and community patron Dennis Farina on charity mission to darkest Africa with nunnery.

From Reuters:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor Dennis Farina, who was arrested on Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport for carrying a loaded gun on his way to board a plane, has apologized for the incident.

The 64-year-old former policeman who built a Hollywood career playing detectives issued a statement saying he was embarrassed by the arrest.

"I apologize to anyone and everyone that I have caused any embarrassment or inconvenience to," Farina said. "It is my own stupidity to find myself in this embarrassing situation. I'll be spending the next few days kicking my own a--. No one is more embarrassed than myself."

Head Wide Open accepts his apology, and recommends you do the same.

Between Mother And Justice

Condemning the terrorism of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in their campaign for an independent Algeria, Albert Camus outraged the anti-colonial French left by declaring: "I have to denounce blind terrorism in the streets of Algiers, which might one day strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I'll defend my mother before justice." In choosing his flesh-and-blood mother over the abstract ideal of justice, Camus proved himself not just to be a good son--one of the few remaining meaningful roles left in a post-God world--but a true humanist. Sartre may have written that "Existentialism is a Humanism," but for him human beings were less important than the fashionable causes they were killed in the name of (though extreme principles necessarily lead to extreme hypocrisy, and it is certain that for Sartre some people, like himself, were less worthy of sacrifice than others). To be a good Communist party member was to put Party before all else, certainly before such a historically negligible element as one's mother. To do so would be scientifically (remember that Marxism was once seriously considered a "science") absurd--and few intellectuals besides Camus took the centrality of absurdity to life seriously. Perhaps the suspicion that most left-wing intellectuals would indeed put justice (or egalitarianism, or solidarity, or multiculturalism, or whatever the sacralized word of the moment may be) before their mothers is what makes many, including the lower classes they aim to speak for, look askance upon them. If a man can't be trusted to put his mother first, how can he be trusted at all?

If the concept of mother is expanded to motherland, we can see exactly how and why the internationalist left failed so spectacularly in the twentieth century. The concepts nationalists use in their rhetoric--blood, soil, community--are much more tangible than abstract notions of international worker solidarity. International socialism failed precisely in 1914 when the workers of the world chose their physical neighbours--their fellow citizens--over their imaginary neighbours--their fellow workers in distant lands. It was the floating threat of internationalist rape of the motherland--by communists, by Jews, by global finance--that allowed ultra-nationalists to expand conservative ideals like land and blood into counter-revolutionary sacralized abstractions of their own. The irony is that by elevating the concept of motherland to a holy signifier, ultra-nationalists were equally as guilty as the communists in putting unreachable goals before actual people. "Between my motherland and my mother, I choose my mother," would be just as much a heresy in a national socialist milieu as "Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother" was for Camus in an international socialist milieu. The autonomy of the family is a threat to any totalitarian system, and due to the primordial loyalty they inspire and the unregulated cultural and moral values they impart, perhaps mothers are the greatest anti-revolutionary threat of all.

Human beings exist in two worlds--the physical world, and the symbolic world that gives the physical world meaning. Symbols are made real through actions in the physical world. Thus communism was certainly a real phenomenon, as real people lived, killed and died for it--but it was them, not the symbols, that made it real. Thus Stalin was as much a legitimate representative of communism as Marx. Humans are symbolic animals and can no less rid ourselves of the urge to create abstractions than the urge to defecate and eat. Camus discussed the meanings of many important abstractions in his work: freedom, justice, revolt, exile. This is what makes him a philosopher and an intellectual, like his countryman Sartre. But unlike Sartre, unlike the ideologically dogmatic left, Camus was not willing to sacrifice his physical world of flesh-and-blood ties for symbols that are ultimately only as meaningful as the meaning we put into them. If the meaning we put into symbols involves the sacrifice of kin, these symbols are instrinsically anti-human. The swastika is anti-human, though surely Heidegger claimed to be deeply concerned with the human condition; the hammer and sickle is anti-human, though surely Sartre and the rest of Stalin's apologists claimed to be humanists. To be an intellectual requires an active mind, but to be a human being requires more than that. It requires, at the very least, loyalty to one's mother before any abstraction. Unlike so many intellectuals, Camus was more than the sum of his symbols: he was a true human being.

Encyclopedic Vanity

Facebook is Wikipedia for nobodies.

French Culture-Wars: Céline Vs. Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Genre: Modernism
Influenced: Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., William S. Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Bukowski, Samuel Beckett
Famous Works: Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan), Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre)
Political Controversy: Released rambling antisemitic pamphlets before onset of Second World War; convicted in absentia as collaborator with Vichy regime
Romantic Interests: Whores, dancers, the abyss
Themes: Nihilism, nausea, misanthropy, the underworld, urban squalor, familial discord, bodily discharges, mortality
Pet Peeves: Petit bourgeoisie values, modernity, mercantilism, Jews, the decline of the west
Other Activities: Doctor, veteran of the Great War
Critical Reaction: "Movement toward adulthood—into the world, that is—becomes equated with progressive disassociationism, submission to the disintegrative process; and adulthood itself becomes, as it were, the inevitable end product, metaphor for decay in the entropic universe." - Alvin Greenberg
Quotable Quote: "I could hear the stampeding herds trampling the flowerbeds . . . The numberless legions of thirst . . . They were battling to lick the bottom of the pond . . . sucking mud, worms, slime . . . They’d plowed up the whole place, disemboweled the earth . . . a chopped-up crater for three miles around, rumbling with disaster and drunks."


Céline Dion

Genre: Adult Contemporary
Influenced: Mariah Carey, Seal, global anti-Francophone sentiment
Famous Works: D'amour ou d'amitié (Of Love or of Friendship), Tellement j'ai d'amour pour toi (I Have So Much Love for You), My Heart Will Go On
Political Controversy: In response to the American government's slow reaction to Hurricane Katrina, asked "How come it's so easy to send planes in another country, to kill everyone in a second, to destroy lives? We need to be there right now to rescue the rest of the people."
Romantic Interests: Older, bearded, cherubic bald men
Themes: Love, the heart, saccharine romance
Pet Peeves: Papparazi, anything that stands in her way
Other Activities: Established a restaurant, released a line of eyeliner and perfume, gives to charity
Critical Reaction: "[Dion's] sentimentality is bombastic and defiant rather than demure and retiring....[she] stands at the end of the chain of drastic devolution that goes Aretha-Whitney-Mariah. Far from being an aberration, Dion actually stands as a symbol of a certain kind of pop sensibility—bigger is better, too much is never enough, and the riper the emotion the more true." - Keith Harris of Rolling Stone Magazine
Quotable Quote: "I missed my family and my home, but I don't regret having lost my adolescence. I had one dream: I wanted to be a singer."


Winner/Loser: Tout le monde

Romancing The Aztec

Still of Hernán Cortés wooing Aztec princess from Mexican film La Otra Conquista

Anti-Anti-Anti-Communist Manifesto

After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Marxistentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre decided to hedge his political bets by claiming to be neither communist nor anti-communist, but "anti-anti-communist." In a similar spirit of Gallic prevarication, I declare that I am neither communist, anti-communist nor anti-anti-communist, but rather anti-anti-anti-communist. I simultaneously loathe the idiot populism of McCarthyism (or Birchism or Hooverism or Bunkerism) and the useful idiot crypto-elitism of Sartreism (or Fanonism or Frankfurtism or Meatheadism). As applied to modern politics, I consider myself an anti-anti-anti-Islamist, anti-anti-anti-Bolivarian and anti-anti-anti-socialist (as well as being anti-anti-anti-social). I prefer to primarily use the all-encompassing title anti-anti-anti-communist, however, as it rolls off the tongue more easily. And so in these days of post-communism (and post-post-communism) I simultaneously loathe the idiot populism of post-McCarthyist Cheneyism (or Limbaughism or Foxnewsism or Elephantism [though I like elephants]) and the useful idiot crypto-elitism of post-Sartrean Chomskyism (or Saidism or Berkleyism or Nologoism™ [though I dislike logos]). Sartre wanted the freedom to bash the vulgar defenders of freedom without being called a Stalinist, and I want the freedom to bash the bashers without being called a reactionary. As an anti-anti-anti-communist I am so progressive I give progressives vertigo; their tunnel-vision prevents them from seeing the tunnels I've dug beneath them to get ahead. From this dizzying position I declare: anti-anti-anti-communists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your opponents' ability to know exactly what you're uniting against without pausing for several minutes to think!

Natural Antidotes For Depression

• Motion
• Sunlight
• Work
• Communication*
• Stories
• Laughter
• Bonfires
  
• Lobotomization*
• Visual Stimulation
• Pie
  
• Immersing Your Soul in Love*
• Waterfalls
• "Hurry Hurry Super-Scurry"
  
• Endorphins
• Nirvana
• Fruit
  
• The Outside World*
• Dogs
  
• The Mediterranean Sea
• Meditation
  
• Lists
• War*

* Last resorts