Noise To Signal
My penultimate term at PSU was the most reading/grok intensive yet. One class that involved a 2 page journal per week and another that had 2 paperbacks, most of a textbook, plus 2-4 10-20 page PDF files to read and respond to all crammed into a 10 week term. That means so much time sitting in front of a computer that spending another however long to compose a relevant blog post has to wait for available headspace to resume.
Part of the intensity is that what I've learned in African studies helps to pull together many threads of things I've studied in the past. I've learned so much in so short a time about the roots of the technocratic orgy of consumption we call our culture that I'm in a brainstorm of realignment and reconsidering goals. I've long had green aspirations. I learned about deforestation and decided it sucked when I went to outdoor school in 6th grade. Learning about the nasty details of how Europeans crafted the ontology of the survival of the fittest to make an excuse for wiping out anyone who couldn't stand up to their guns reveals the bullshit rotting underneath the assumption that Europe and her panAmerican puppies have crafted the bestest most superior culture in the history of humanity. I know exactly why authoritarians are always making noise about the educated "elites".
So in the process of digesting 200 years of African history into knowledge I find myself unsure of my position in spacetime, I find more relics in my own mindbody left over from the American Dream of superiority and puffy-chest exploding heart masculinity. I feel as if I don't know enough to write a long blog post. I feel like Cassandra when I point out how poisonous our civilization is to everything, including its own citizens. Nobody cares when they're all dazzled by the blinking trivialities of the garbage between their thumbs. I mean 99% of the stuff we forcibly extract from the Earth, making life living hell for billions of people worldwide, it ends up in a landfill within 6 months from the time it was a raw material. A lot of the more toxic waste gets dumped in Africa. We put a lot of our stinky factories in China where the current rulers don't give a shit about pollution. It's insane.
I see in this artificially manufactured perception of obsolescence all of the garbage music that sounds as if someone who has no musical skill is pushing buttons and cutting and splicing and it sounds like a machine left on auto pilot cause who has time to develop to learning a craft when a new toy comes out every month? And garbage lines the streets, people with their noses pointed at a glowing screen 24/7, iPod, iPhone, Blackberry, laptop, war and rape in Africa, consumers are all garbage transfer devices. I find myself listening to Jazz a lot, when I have the desire at all to listen to dead, pre-recorded stuff. The tone of a saxophone, trumpet, guitar, bass, even a piano in the hands of someone like Thelonius Monk transmits the life force shaped by the experience of a living creature. Dub Step (or however you spell it) sounds like carelessly mashed together piles of garbage, the path from living creature to sound wave so sterilized and convoluted there's nothing left alive at the other end.
Just like a forest, a mountain ground up and turned into an iPod or cell phone or laptop that gets tossed in favor of the new model, nothing left that the biosphere can digest at the other end. Our civilization excels at trashing the biosphere, our main gift to our descendants is mountains of trash.
http://www.storyofstuff.org/index.php
It's starting to bubble up to mainstream consciousness. If Cassandra speaks with enough voices maybe we can drown out the ethnocentric lies of the sun god. Our humanity is worth more, is capable of much more than being mere consumers, cogs in a machine whose main purpose is to provide lavish lifestyles for a few billionaires at everyone else's expense, slaves to a process whose end result is piles of toxic waste, continents of garbage where there was once life. There are mushroom people who can digest toxic waste, eat radiation, metabolize hydrocarbons (Mr. Yuk ) into carbohydrates (food for life), clean up oil spills. We need them more than they need us. Mushrooms are on a bottom line far below Wall St.'s consciousness, like a boil, a patch of melanoma, a strange loop of caustic noise distorting surface perceptions in domesticated primates so they don't notice the psychopaths burning the biosphere at the stake, taking revenge on Gaia for her cruleties. If that's the game you want to play, expect the direful judments and all the noise.
Drop it. Life is more bottom line than Wall St.
Part of the intensity is that what I've learned in African studies helps to pull together many threads of things I've studied in the past. I've learned so much in so short a time about the roots of the technocratic orgy of consumption we call our culture that I'm in a brainstorm of realignment and reconsidering goals. I've long had green aspirations. I learned about deforestation and decided it sucked when I went to outdoor school in 6th grade. Learning about the nasty details of how Europeans crafted the ontology of the survival of the fittest to make an excuse for wiping out anyone who couldn't stand up to their guns reveals the bullshit rotting underneath the assumption that Europe and her panAmerican puppies have crafted the bestest most superior culture in the history of humanity. I know exactly why authoritarians are always making noise about the educated "elites".
So in the process of digesting 200 years of African history into knowledge I find myself unsure of my position in spacetime, I find more relics in my own mindbody left over from the American Dream of superiority and puffy-chest exploding heart masculinity. I feel as if I don't know enough to write a long blog post. I feel like Cassandra when I point out how poisonous our civilization is to everything, including its own citizens. Nobody cares when they're all dazzled by the blinking trivialities of the garbage between their thumbs. I mean 99% of the stuff we forcibly extract from the Earth, making life living hell for billions of people worldwide, it ends up in a landfill within 6 months from the time it was a raw material. A lot of the more toxic waste gets dumped in Africa. We put a lot of our stinky factories in China where the current rulers don't give a shit about pollution. It's insane.
I see in this artificially manufactured perception of obsolescence all of the garbage music that sounds as if someone who has no musical skill is pushing buttons and cutting and splicing and it sounds like a machine left on auto pilot cause who has time to develop to learning a craft when a new toy comes out every month? And garbage lines the streets, people with their noses pointed at a glowing screen 24/7, iPod, iPhone, Blackberry, laptop, war and rape in Africa, consumers are all garbage transfer devices. I find myself listening to Jazz a lot, when I have the desire at all to listen to dead, pre-recorded stuff. The tone of a saxophone, trumpet, guitar, bass, even a piano in the hands of someone like Thelonius Monk transmits the life force shaped by the experience of a living creature. Dub Step (or however you spell it) sounds like carelessly mashed together piles of garbage, the path from living creature to sound wave so sterilized and convoluted there's nothing left alive at the other end.
Just like a forest, a mountain ground up and turned into an iPod or cell phone or laptop that gets tossed in favor of the new model, nothing left that the biosphere can digest at the other end. Our civilization excels at trashing the biosphere, our main gift to our descendants is mountains of trash.
http://www.storyofstuff.org/index.php
It's starting to bubble up to mainstream consciousness. If Cassandra speaks with enough voices maybe we can drown out the ethnocentric lies of the sun god. Our humanity is worth more, is capable of much more than being mere consumers, cogs in a machine whose main purpose is to provide lavish lifestyles for a few billionaires at everyone else's expense, slaves to a process whose end result is piles of toxic waste, continents of garbage where there was once life. There are mushroom people who can digest toxic waste, eat radiation, metabolize hydrocarbons (Mr. Yuk ) into carbohydrates (food for life), clean up oil spills. We need them more than they need us. Mushrooms are on a bottom line far below Wall St.'s consciousness, like a boil, a patch of melanoma, a strange loop of caustic noise distorting surface perceptions in domesticated primates so they don't notice the psychopaths burning the biosphere at the stake, taking revenge on Gaia for her cruleties. If that's the game you want to play, expect the direful judments and all the noise.
Drop it. Life is more bottom line than Wall St.