Posted 4/20/2002 02:37:12 PM

In Memory of Layne
1967-2002

I'm dumbfounded by me all the time.
Wow! What a... thrill...and a joy.
Layne Staley, The Nona Tapes

Posted 4/20/2002 02:20:37 PM
unconfirmed reports of Layne Staley's death hit the net a couple of hours ago. they say that his body was found in his seattle home today, and that it had been in his home for multiple days. if true, this is a very sad passing of a dynamic lyricist and performer.

Posted 4/19/2002 09:45:33 PM
...I take pleasure in the details. You know... a quarter-pounder with cheese. Those are good. The sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain. The moment where your laughter becomes a cackle. And I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt.
-Troy Dire, at the beach in Houston

Posted 4/19/2002 06:06:10 PM
for all of my friends who need a fail safe post-demise proxy this little utility proves truly useful: dead man's switch.

Posted 4/19/2002 03:30:51 PM

brought to you in part by:
cult of the dead cow
related link for my friends in countries that proxy the inet:
peekabooty

Posted 4/19/2002 12:56:56 PM
once more, before i wonder on
and turn my glance forward,
i lift up my hands to you in loneliness--
you, to whom i flee,
to whom in the deepest depths of my heart
i have solemnly consecrated altars
so that your voice
might summon me again.

on them glows, deeply inscribed,
the word: to the unknown god
i am his, although until this hour
i've remained in the wicked horde:
i am his--and i feel the bonds
that pull me down in my struggle
and, would i flee,
force me into his service.

i want to know you, Unknown One,
you who have reached deep into my soul,
into my life like the gust of a storm,
you incomprehensible yet related one!
i want to know you, even serve you.

friedrich nietzsche
september 7, 1864

Posted 4/19/2002 01:29:19 AM
many of my friends are hitting that place where they feel that the relationships that they are in (or want to be in) must "go to the next level" in terms of commiment. usually, this means that one, the other or both want to get married.

like any of my close friends who let me ramble on about relationship will tell you, i am somewhat nietzschean when it comes to relationship, love and commitment. i thought that since there are many who may never have this conversation with me i would lay out some of the textual groundwork for the neitzschean perspective i bring to this topic.

When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association belongs to conversation. -FN, Human, All-Too-Human, 406

Reverence for each other... is what I name marriage.... Many brief follies--that is what you call love. And your marriage concludes many brief follies, as a long stupidity.... Thus learn first to love. -FN, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book 1

What is done out of love always occurs beyond good and evil. -FN, Beyond Good and Evil, 164

i like these thoughts. there are other rather sexist, stereotyped observations in nietzsche's work that i do not particularly ascribe to. nonetheless, i believe that these aphorisms and segments of homilies speak with a simple candor about this topic.

Posted 4/19/2002 12:42:16 AM

And as she turns
This way she moves in the logic of all my dreams
This fire burns
I realize that nothing's as it seems

I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in pain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand

I dream of rain
I lift my gaze to empty skies above
I close my eyes, this rare perfume
Is the sweet intoxication of her love

Sweet desert rose
This memory of Eden haunts us all
This desert flower, this rare perfume
Is the sweet intoxication of the fall

-Sting

Posted 4/18/2002 04:02:02 PM
deconstruct with hope!

Posted 4/18/2002 03:27:45 PM
Quarks come together to form the protons and neutrons in an atom's nucleus.

There are 6 known types of quarks:

• Up
• Down
• Top
• Bottom
• Strange
• Charm

Matter--stuff--is at a fundamental level made up of quarks. The normal matter we interact with (books, CDs, computers) is made of up and down quarks. Other kinds of matter are formed by other combinations of quarks. This is frickin' intriguing to me. There are "alternative" bodies of matter (from our "normal matter" perspective) that have little/no direct interference with our experience of matter.

Some SMU scientists are about to publish a substantial article in which they detail their research on something called strange quark matter that has been hitting our planet for some time. This matter is made of up, down and strange quarks. This matter has been detected by seismic waves that the geological survey records when strange quark matter intersects with our planet. It has been said that even a piece of this matter only a millimeter in diameter could weigh one ton and has been clocked going through the Earth at Mach 40.

cool

Posted 4/18/2002 02:35:03 PM

it seems few remember what jesus taught.
it was something about infinite debt and god having to
exact a suitable payment for this debt, right??

no.

you are now equating the teachings of yesh'uah ben joseph with a highly detailed, hellenistic ideological "ransom paid to the devil" construction developed by Origen (~185 - 254 CE) and the even more insidious "satisfaction for god" theological construct articulated by Anselm (~1033 - 1109 CE) and then further developed along judicial/penal lines by the "reformers" (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al).

jesus taught about something called the kingdom of god.
what i have taken to calling the other kingdom.

think of any system, power, structure, economy, matrix, kingdom, reality--the kingdom of god, the matrix of god, the reality of god is always the other kingdom. always that which one cannot fully bring into language. always that which one must enact with body and word. a community bordering and embracing the impossible--anticipating and enacting the emergence of the impossible here, now, with this person, in this circumstance.

the other kingdom is a living force within the social order. a way of being (in another place this might be called dharma, but don't let me get too confusing here...). his vision was for this living force, this yeast of culture, to become so pervasive that it ultimately shaped every institution and relationship that it touched.

the other kingdom is a subversive voice always already speaking from within in critique of any system claiming to mediate the other. it is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with subversion, with reversal, with otherness.

[to be continued]

dissent?

a closing thought - a definitive paratheological force in what is unfolding as a new voice within spiritual communities in our time is the unifying, originary message of love and faithfulness amidst unknowing. in the particularly abrahamic faiths i would say that it is more specifically the reenactment of the way of abraham: a living in/out of the reign of god. this thread seems to bring a sufficiently open connectedness to the ancient-future faiths of the abrahamic tradition. but that is just me.

Posted 4/18/2002 11:28:34 AM

so, the Pop Disaster tour hits my current city of residence in less than a month. $85 for lawn seats?? (that's for two. who wants to go to something like this alone?) anyway, that's a lot cheaper than U2. But it should be cheaper than U2 so that is little consolation. maybe i could just go in with five or six friends and rent three DVD's by the bands who are playing and host the Pop Disaster Alternative at my house... that might bring the tab down to around $1.75 each. we could turn off the A/C and shut all the windows to get the place hot like the s.music center would be. i could sell hot dogs and beer for $8 each. we could go to the band sites if we wanted to buy a t-shirt. hell, maybe we could just make some while we watch... yeah. i like this idea.

Posted 4/17/2002 02:00:52 PM

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

- chuck palahniuk
in a memoir on fight club and his life

What good is intellect if it leaves us immobile and frozen in indecision? At some point, despite all the other options, you have to commit yourself to a path. Being flexible is fine, it's may be the greatest talent you can have, but in order to define yourself, you need to pursue your passion. There will always be good reasons not to do something, or to do something else, the world is full of women more beautiful than your wife, you can never choose the best car, there's always a cheaper air fare. What's most important is that you choose and get on with your life.

- chuck palahniuk
in the Pop Matters Interview

Posted 4/17/2002 01:08:38 PM
Para is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, something inside a domestic economy and at the same time outside it, something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it.... A thing in "para," moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between inside and out. It is also the boundary itself...

-J. Hillis Miller, "The Critic as Host," Deconstruction and Criticism

perhaps it is time for a paratheology?

theology that emerges in the logic of parasitism with a courage to live in faith and love within undecidability.

Posted 4/17/2002 10:00:58 AM
still recovering from my loss earlier this morning. i sound like a fucking basket case going on and on about this. i feel helpless before the totalizing destruction of a digital delete. there is no recovery. if it had been written in a journal first i would have had something to refer to... but no, i composed within blogger... anyway, on a happier note, my kids and i watched Josie and the Pussycats this weekend. tre cul. i had very, very low expectations and, wow, did it blow them away. this movie is an amazing parody on the fickle nature of consumption and the cult of celebrity. speaking of consumption, we bought the sound track. that is all we listen to now. anything that gets my kids listening to something related to punk rock as opposed to a boy band or the pop girl du jour is great with me. +

Posted 4/17/2002 02:18:11 AM
i just lost one of my favorite posts that i've written to date... it was live for like an hour before i obliterated it by mistake... i am feeling profound loss... this sucks! i'm sitting here dumbfounded that i could be so stupid.... arrrgh!!!

Posted 4/16/2002 11:18:23 AM
community: what comes first affinity or proximity?

for me it is simple: affinity. this may not be the statistical norm. i don't know. i think i answer in this manner because i see proximity as so accidental, so transient. this may be a 180 perspective for those who grew up in one or two places and see geography as a foundation of their identity, a constant in their lives.

because i see affinity as primary i see nothing abnormal with finding my peer group, my fictive family, my inspiration and my love at a distance. kindred spirits in CA, vocational inspiration in IL, spiritual inspiration and childhood friends on nearly every continent...

also see: does community scale, accidental communities

Posted 4/16/2002 09:30:02 AM
death does not justify death - thanks blogfather.

acting out when your voice will be heard as isolated and shocking is sometimes more powerful than years of picking a side and working it through the bureaucracy.

Posted 4/15/2002 05:02:21 PM
from a long time ago: the genealogy of center

History becomes effective to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being. -M. Foucault

Posted 4/15/2002 04:54:57 PM
sometimes i read back over what i write and wince. i trust you to edit as i have a self-imposed moral obligation not to. being wrong is not that concerning to me. not speaking--now that is something to concern oneself with.

SPEAK OUT

Posted 4/15/2002 04:38:05 PM
transformation takes place relationally, but is not merely relational, as everything that is transformative is a complex of intricate interrelations moving through transformation waves and points in an eclectic movement of semi-conscious and unconscious accretions and engagements that leave one unable to easily define and completely incapable of manufacturing the ongoing evolutatory engagement.

transformation is relational--as everything else i suppose--but not merely mundane. the mundane provide the open spaces of the playing out of transformation, but are not themselves the cause or outworking of transformation. transformation is relational in the double bind of utter openness and profound trust--the mystery of the unfolding and enfolding life together that is an open secret, a trustworthy openness, a connection within and inseperable from the divinely mundane.

settling for the space of transformation confuses the majesty of the to be human with the domination of role; the beauty of calling for the normalcy of vocation; the fire of connected yet indirect interformation with the inevitable emptiness of hanging out or formal guidance (two points on the same continuum) over time.

may we find the courage, humility and hospitality to emerge transformation!

metanoia

teshuvah

...

Posted 4/15/2002 04:27:09 PM

despondency and desire

twin sisters

inseparable conception to death

disappointment and suspense

twin outcomes

through which desire finds a way forward

sufficiently complicated

delightfully simple

the sadness, the sweetness these come in pair

to embrace both with passion

this is to be, to live, to love

Posted 4/15/2002 12:23:12 PM
our actions are disproportionate to their affects.

most in my global community believe that there is a category of action called consensual. we seldom use this word outside of a context in which people are engaged in activity that could be perceived as damaging or without relational integrity or more generally morally questionable. we talk of consensual crime and consensual sex and consensual rendezvous... it seems to be that we seek to communicate some sense of walled in innocence by using this word, "consensual." that somehow the crime is not really a crime, the sex is good as long as they both hit orgasm, the rendezvous betrayed no one because it was just secret conversation, et al. i would like to suggest that in each of these contrived literary test cases, but even more so in all that we do, our actions create affects that are disproportionate to the action and the deliberation and intention we bring to it.

first of all, there is no action or thought--no human creation--that does not touch something or someone else on the network. we are not autonomous individuals running around living disconnected lives. even as many of us try to do this we do so within the network that we are always already within. everything ripples across the network in some way. what is even more fascinating to think about (to me at least) is that our actions not only impact the network of our current moment in time/space, but also are instantly extrapolated out across time/space. we live within a chain of existence. we ourselves are in a place that is the outcome of lives and thoughts of people in a time and space other than ours.

i'm not denying the logic of consensual action. i am denying the premise that consensual action has no affect on others. i am suggesting that all action has affect to degrees unfathomable to us--the actors.

Posted 4/14/2002 03:07:45 PM
harmonapitia sur tri...

Posted 4/14/2002 03:03:18 PM
the oppressed, the oppressor, self-loathing and editorial success...

We all want to be oppressed. Being oppressed is great because you can both blame your problems on somebody else and rocket through your day full of self-righteous indignation which, you must admit, is the best possible feeling to have... smug.com

Posted 4/14/2002 12:14:33 PM
modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with its postmodernity....historical periodization belongs to an obession that is characteristic of modernity. periodization is a way of placing events in a diachrony, and diachrony is ruled by the principal of revolution.

jean-francois lyotard, "the inhuman"

consider undermining revolution as another characteristic of the passing from the modern/postmodern into the genealogical child of the aforementioned, a child of the other, an other child. after the camel of tradition and the lion of revolution the child of creation.

it seems that this cycle may be unending. but is not revolution different now? at least for some of us unwilling to join the movement? is revolution perhaps now a radical creating to the point of sacrifice and death? a reversal of the first order of the violence of lion revolution. a sending of self to the front line of life rather than commanding another in one's place. perhaps now camel and lion are one? or at least more difficult to perioditize.

Posted 4/14/2002 11:19:50 AM
zionism and the diaspora