Hey, hope everyone is having a frightingly good Halloween. Any holiday involving candy is fine by me. I dressed up as a mormon. It's fun and easy to do. All you need is a short sleeve white button down shirt, black shoes, black slacks, a thin black tie, and the book of Mormon. It also helps if you have a few passages memorized, especially ones relevant to whatever you do for Halloween. Passages about sin, excess, regret, deception, and belief are usually handy here and lots of fun at parties.
Continuing my curiousity towards Emerson, I picked up a book: The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'll flip through it over the course of the next few weeks and see if he can suck me in.
Speaking of sucking, my basketball team has its' first game on Tuesday evening. I have been working on my game a few days a week for about a month now, and I feel pretty good about it going in. I am a little unsure about my conditioning, but we are on a team of about 10 and only 5 can play at a time, so everybody should be relatively fresh when they are in the game.
I find myself admiring more beauty lately than usual (You'll notice I don't always do transitional journal writing). When I say beauty, I find it everywhere (people, leaves, the sky, the breeze, food, photographs, words). Perhaps I am seeking out aesthetically pleasing things because everything is dying right now. Maybe I'm seeking beauty in the face of death.
I also find myself listening to older music at a growing rate. New music is irritating me more and more. Is this a sign of aging? I guess so. I'm looking for meaning in the music, you know music that says something. I find that there is more meaning to the music when you go back to the difficult times in our recent history, such as the 60's, 70's and early 80's. It seems that we've had it pretty nice the last 10-15 years, so the art has suffered.
I know what you are thinking, what about 9-11? That wasn't nice. My point is that we've had it nice "internally". Americans don't seek out and protest things in this country like they once did. The civil unrest is gone, and what unrest there is seems to fall under a more non-threatening P.C. umbrella of disagreement. Real disagreement with your brothers and sisters (Americans), man that's inspiring because there's love and hate there. Disagreeing with people halfway across the planet is not terribly surprising nor as balanced... I mean how can you love someone you don't know, have a different belief system than, and have little in common with on an everyday scale.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not pining for civil war to improve my record collection. I'm not wanting for minority groups and others to have to go through what they did 30-40 years ago so I can be a little more satisfied about my artistic endeavors. I'm just digging the old stuff and trying to conceive of what growing up as a person and as a nation in those times was like. I listen to Sly and Family Stone from around 1970 and every song on the record has a deep meaning and tackles some societal issue... every one.
With all that rambling out of the way, I must say that I hope Bush loses Tuesday. I don't like the direction this country has gone in the last 4 years, and I'm using the "lesser of 2 evils" theory here as I'm not enthralled with Kerry either, but in this case to paraphrase, I'll take the possible evil I don't know over the devil I think I do. Of course, as per usual I have no idea what I am talking about.
I'm EDDIE and I approve this journal entry!
Continuing my curiousity towards Emerson, I picked up a book: The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'll flip through it over the course of the next few weeks and see if he can suck me in.
Speaking of sucking, my basketball team has its' first game on Tuesday evening. I have been working on my game a few days a week for about a month now, and I feel pretty good about it going in. I am a little unsure about my conditioning, but we are on a team of about 10 and only 5 can play at a time, so everybody should be relatively fresh when they are in the game.
I find myself admiring more beauty lately than usual (You'll notice I don't always do transitional journal writing). When I say beauty, I find it everywhere (people, leaves, the sky, the breeze, food, photographs, words). Perhaps I am seeking out aesthetically pleasing things because everything is dying right now. Maybe I'm seeking beauty in the face of death.
I also find myself listening to older music at a growing rate. New music is irritating me more and more. Is this a sign of aging? I guess so. I'm looking for meaning in the music, you know music that says something. I find that there is more meaning to the music when you go back to the difficult times in our recent history, such as the 60's, 70's and early 80's. It seems that we've had it pretty nice the last 10-15 years, so the art has suffered.
I know what you are thinking, what about 9-11? That wasn't nice. My point is that we've had it nice "internally". Americans don't seek out and protest things in this country like they once did. The civil unrest is gone, and what unrest there is seems to fall under a more non-threatening P.C. umbrella of disagreement. Real disagreement with your brothers and sisters (Americans), man that's inspiring because there's love and hate there. Disagreeing with people halfway across the planet is not terribly surprising nor as balanced... I mean how can you love someone you don't know, have a different belief system than, and have little in common with on an everyday scale.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not pining for civil war to improve my record collection. I'm not wanting for minority groups and others to have to go through what they did 30-40 years ago so I can be a little more satisfied about my artistic endeavors. I'm just digging the old stuff and trying to conceive of what growing up as a person and as a nation in those times was like. I listen to Sly and Family Stone from around 1970 and every song on the record has a deep meaning and tackles some societal issue... every one.
With all that rambling out of the way, I must say that I hope Bush loses Tuesday. I don't like the direction this country has gone in the last 4 years, and I'm using the "lesser of 2 evils" theory here as I'm not enthralled with Kerry either, but in this case to paraphrase, I'll take the possible evil I don't know over the devil I think I do. Of course, as per usual I have no idea what I am talking about.
I'm EDDIE and I approve this journal entry!
as for the music, ummmm, YES. when i moved to dc, i was deeply dissapointed to find the punk scene had utterly dissolved. then i considered that it was during the clinton administration, and things were good, so there was no strife for artists to react against. however, right now, i think musicians and other artists are reacting, but what we recieved is more mediated messages about them talking about their art rather than their art. however, i believe its out there somewhere.
bush must be stopped.