alot of my friends, and old friends are not people i can really relate to. i started noticing and complaining to myself about it around 3-5 years ago. i don’t want to hear about the latest video card, or the hottest computer game. many of them have stopped talking to me about anime too. this is normal, i think.
crappy but true. people move in different directions.
i find it mostly inane but also insidious how ‘living life’ often means getting drunk and partying all night. it’s mostly harmless fun. but at the same time, it’s terribly wasteful in the same way that your parents probably found it wasteful. and if your parents didn’t find it wasteful then there’s a good chance that they may have not found much time to be your parents (ha ha…?)
but seriously. this is has been a kind of weird transformation over the years. i accept that my nights and days spent ‘partying’ or staying up all night doing ‘fun stuff’ have been lost along the way side. and i don’t really care if other people behave like that (as long as they don’t keep me up or disturb me in any particular way). many of the people who choose to, at times, cut loose and revel in somatic pleasures like drugs or getting drunk or sex or whatever are quite accomplished individuals. they have done great things, they have good career — they are not bad people. i guess there’s a bit of slight disapproval from me though, (not that it matters, because it doesnt!) as i find that the energies that go into such recreation are really just thrown away.
but the larger question comes to be, what isn’t thrown away or lost?
i spent alot of my formative years watching star trek the next generation. this is because my family (and some close friends, at the time) were really into it. i don’t have tv at my house so i watch it on tivo when i am at my parents. most of the time, visiting parents = some break for me, since i don’t have my computer and are not tempted to work late at night since i can’t. i mean i do, sometimes on their notebook computer but it’s purposefully devoid of my materials (and of dropbox) so getting onto the server and working directly from there is kind of a pain… i recognize i need some rest… so that’s how i sort of set things up for myself. anyway, watching sttng is a way of relaxing at my parents house. i really only watch tv when i am there. because there’s not much else to do and because tv is easy. it’s inane and the episodes while i have seen them all, sometimes i don’t recall. so it’s alright.
there seems to be a huge theme running throughout sttng i didn’t notice as a teenager. captain picard or members of the crew are always explaining what it means to be mortal, or whatever it means to be human. they explain to aliens who are immortal or super-powerful energy beings that “we are not like them, we die and live short lives… or explain to lesser developed aliens that “we are like you, we are not gods, we die and live short lives… (sorry if the unclosed quotes are annoying to you i did it because i am talking in his voice and my own)
but sttng is really not an exploration of the universe, but a moralistic tool that tries to brainwash the audience into thinking about the greater good of humankind and of all sentient beings… dead and alive…
this really isn’t something that we humans seem to ascribe to.
i spent about 2 hours this evening going to and coming back from a hipster art performance of sorts in north hills. it wasn’t bad. but i had also spent all last night and most of today working on a program… rewriting code and developing a new schema… i had drank a large amount of caffeine and was very focused. and really feeling impatient.
i arrived late, to meet my friend there… so i missed half the performances. i listened to a sound piece. and wondered why it was so unpleasant. a few years ago i might have tried to think deeply about the implications of various words. but like most sonic art, it escapes meaning by the use of non-linguistic sensations. like dance, it’s hard to translate into text even if it is literally in the kristevan term, inter-textual… meaning that it invokes a wide range of semiotic jolts. sound does that. it jolts us.
eventually though, i lightened up. and enjoyed the atmosphere and the sensation. but it grabs me that hipsters can be connoisseurs of sorts (i don’t consider myself one) of things art… art here, is only a collection of anything that creates different bodily sensations of light, and sound… the point of which is the sensation. so food and dance count. so does hiking and traveling. but this kind of art can be a fascinating exploration of various modes of consciousness in a way; the way a friend of mine’s installation changed the openedness of the space by stringing rope at about 10 feet above us across the room… cutting us off, in a way, from the 40+ high ceiling. these hipsters do it and then they talk about it. i find the talk inane mostly because it’s devoid of abstract language which would specify significant topological features of the individual expressions. but the fact remains really that there isnt any framework for such discussion… (as much as deleuze and guattari would like there to be) and to develop such a framework would be in some sense, to isolate one’s self in inanity…
this kind of art is all well and good, but i find myself asking if this attention to these light kinds of foray into second attentions — second because it’s not our first -daily- attention (to use some language from carlos castenada) really adds anything to our human experience. listening to soft live music from hipsters with guitars… okay maybe. it can enrich us subtly, in a sort of under-consciousness kind of way… if we choose to let it. but that kind of fantastic group explorations, which performance art is and can be, between a performer and the audience — is at best only a distraction from everything else. a sort of island from all our other energies and attentions and times.
i think we can be naked to the Name of the Father as it were, in a kierkegaard or a sartrean or a lacanian or a heideggerian way — submit ourself to the function, become the little warm center of the universe qua subject but that in itself won’t bring meaning to our activities… and maybe such a hipsteresque distraction… much like the drunking and partying that goes on every night in all the major (and minor!) settlements of the world serve as our only buffers to the general apathy of being a subject or quasi-subject. there really isn’t any kind of relief from any oppressive feeling from the Name of the Father. you hate it you love it you commit suicide because of it. and it doesn’t matter because it goes on like some crazy superego gone mad.. always to force an injunction that you comply.
personally i follow sartre mostly. i think, because i believe in choice. i don’t believe in oblivion. i don’t believe in the beautiful death that heidegger does. i don’t believe in submission and i don’t believe in any of the lacanian discourses. really, the Name of the Father is just another nomenclature for the cage of being configured as any kind of subject… and i choose to be a subject who wants to make a difference in the world. the explosion of what it means to be human (or atleast the desire for that) as radical as it sounds — is really a conservative way of foreclosing what could be, for me and i think most every one of us, to be destructive impulses that would really only get me, you and anyone else in trouble… eventually.
i don’t think i would drink myself to death. or get arrested or anything like that. although in a sci fi kind of way, anything is possible. i doubt that i would be as hysterical as the enterprise… streaking across the galaxy looking for something… but not at all knowing what that is… or like a broken record, always having to justify our tenuous position with life and bringing meaning and order in the name of peace and humanity. in a way, sttng is just us repeating to ourselves, everything is okay, we are all right. it’s not a great leap then, that star fleet headquarters is in san francisco, as lovely as that sounds… all right.
but what else is there?
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