From now on I’ll be blogging at www.spgreenlaw.com. Update your bookmarks and join me, won’t you?

Special thanks to Morgante.

Firstly, I’ve been invited to blog over at Intrepid Classroom and I have my first post up! Check it out.

Secondly, I’ll be moving the adress of my main blog (this one) to it’s own domain, free from the tyrannical shackles of our WordPress overlords! Except that I’ll still be using their blogging software. And I actually really like WordPress. But in any case, I’ll give you delightful readers the new url once I get everything ironed out. Till then this will still be my base of operations, so don’t remove the Post-Punk Nerd from your bookmarks just yet.

Thanks for reading!

Shadowplay

Joy Division

Performed on Granada Reports/Granada Television (1978)

This is a selfish post. It exists more for myself than anybody else. However, if you bother reading it your opinion would be appreciated.

Currently, I’m debating whether or not I ought to go back to college. I’m 21 and I haven’t gathered enough credits to account for two semesters; I’ve tried my hand at four. My entire family and most of my friends seem to know what the correct decision is, as if it were obvious. Maybe it is. I should, by all accounts, continue my “education proper”. The problem is, as much as I love to learn, I have always hated school.

I’d much rather follow my own thoughts wherever they lead me then swallow something down that a professor deems important. All my favorite teachers have been the ones who favored discussions over lectures, and allowed us to write long meandering papers about whatever inspired or angered us. I liked school best when it looked nothing like school.

I can understand the need for a well balanced education. If it was left up to me I’d probably never get far beyond basic math. But to be honest, basic math is all I need (for now), and if I should ever need more I think I’d be entirely capable of discovering it on my own. What I do know about more complicated math I haven’t learned in class, which I tended to skip or spend napping in the back row. No, I picked up what I know while wrestling with economic models and climate change predictions. What I know has come from experience, although that experience is fairly abstract.

I’m a smart fellow, if I.Q. tests and SAT scores are to be trusted (I don’t think they are. To be honest, I don’t even have a working understanding of what intelligence is supposed to be. It seems like there are different skills for different tasks and most people are excellent in at least one area. I’ve never met anyone I could honestly label stupid, though I throw the insult around as much as anybody.). At the very least I know that I concern myself with topics most people my age don’t; I’ve always been that way. So despite that propensity for intellectual exercise, I’ve gotten fairly middling grades, with a few As and some Ds and Fs thrown into the mix. As my structured schooling went on, I’ve witnessed a polarizing effect in the academic results. The classes I loved I spent huge amounts of time reading and writing for. It didn’t feel like work. It felt like life. The classes I hated I could rarely be bothered to get out of bed for, or just as likely, put down a book for. Subsequently, I failed. The disparity resulted in slow progress,  slow by traditional academia’s standards, at least. I earned not even a year’s results for two years time, if you give a shit about course credits and class hours.

Do I give a shit about course credits and class hours? Should I? Am I going to be an absolute failure if I don’t get a degree?

Ah, that is what it comes down to for me. Fear. The only reason I am considering returning to school is because I’m afraid that I won’t live up to a certain standard of success. I suppose I’ll have to define that for myself before I decide whether to go back. I just wish it didn’t feel like the situation was a ticking bomb. I’m 21. How many years do I have, realistically, before I have missed the opportunity to chase down a diploma? Before I get caught in a routine I hate just to survive at a level that the middle class approves of?

Drats. Grease has wormed its way into my wordle.

Clay Burell tagged me for my very first meme!

1. Create a wordle from your blog’s RSS feed.
2. Blog it and describe your reaction. Any surprises?
3. Tag others to do the same.
4. Link back here and to where you were first tagged.

Impressions? Well, I’m not surprised by the results; my last two posts of substance have both climbed close to 2,000 words in length, and both dealt with similar themes, so I’m not surprised at the words that came out on top. I think it will be interesting to revisit this in a few months and compare what comes up then with this first effort.

I’m supposed to tag others, but since I’m not exactly established enough to have any frequent and familiar readers, I suppose I’ll just tag the last few people with blogs who commented here (not counting Clay, obviously). So feel free to run with this:

Steve Ransom

Bill Farren

And a free spot… With which I guess I’ll just tag the next person who wants it?

The last spot goes to jhawtin! See her creation here.

Imagine

John Lennon

Imagine (1971)

28 years.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done:
and there is no new thing under the sun.”
- Ecclesiastes 1:9

“If the music’s gotten boring
It’s because of the people
Who want everyone to sound the same”
- Chickenshit Conformist, Dead Kennedys

The holiday season is upon us. Typing that phrase, incidentally, put me in mind of swarms of locusts pouring down onto a field. I may be a bit of a curmudgeon. Generally, I really do enjoy this time of year. The weather is cold, the air is crisp, and life feels fresh, with every snowfall comes a new chance to make tracks. People seem friendlier, and as much as I hate to admit it, some of those carols are a sleigh full of fun. I’ve got several stuck in my head right now, jostling around for my attention; so far, “White Christmas” seems to be in the lead. But with the holiday season comes constant commercials aimed at making your family love you through toys, cars, and gift cards. We get O’Reily screaming about the secular War on Christmas (an argument that loses legs when you realize that Sam Harris has a Christmas tree). We are inundated by tacky store displays and threats from talking heads that we can either go deeper into credit card debt and buy more presents, or let the economy slip further down the hole. And, to kick the whole thing off, we get a wildly expensive parade on Thanksgiving, when the Macy’s store marches beloved corporate icons down the street while horrible pop groups lip sync along to abbreviated standards on floats sponsored by candy companies and tooth paste brands.

My favorite part of this annual event has always been the performances of numbers from musicals, since I’m a sucker for show tunes. This year the CBS broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade aired two Broadway numbers. One was the eternally annoying “Grease Lighting” from Grease (hell is other people dancing on cars) and the other was a sugary number from Mary Poppins. I can’t help but think we’ve seen this all before.

Broadway seems to have been hit hard by a lack of truly vibrant, powerful new musicals. Watching the Tony Awards the past few years has been thoroughly disappointing, as most of what I’ve seen are reproductions of Disney movies and revivals of old stage classics. The standards are great, don’t get me wrong, but when the only new musical of recent years to really get me excited was the grim Grey Gardens (which is, as it turns out, based on a documentary of the same name), one has got to start questioning where the creative types have wandered off to. I’m hardly an expert or even a devoted amateur when it comes to the history of Broadway, so it may very well be that this has always been the way of things. But in any case the trend toward sameness and repetition I’m talking about isn’t just happening on the stage. It seems systemically pandemic in our culture.

The most successful touring bands of today are rock and roll dinosaurs. The Rolling Stones have been going at it nonstop since their inception, and I will admit A Bigger Bang, their most recent album, had its moments, but I don’t think anyone would dissent if I say that they are well past their creative peak. It isn’t just the Stones, though. Rock bands that broke up decades ago are reuniting and touring, bringing in the big bucks. A few years ago I saw Black Sabbath play at OzzFest: Ozzy botched a few lines of Paranoid and after the cocaine rocker Snowblind laid a finger to the side of his nose and wistfully reflected that “Ah, those were the days.” Led Zeppelin were back last year, gods bless ‘em, and might be recording new material without Plant on board. The goth grandpas Bauhaus have been spotted opening for their musical offspring Nine Inch Nails and released an unsuccessful, uninspired new album. The Sex Pistols, whose greatest strength might have been their volatile one album/four year life-span, have come back for reunion tours several times in the past decade; at least John Lydon has been quite honest that it’s been all about the money. The Dead Kennedys are touring without Jello, and the Germs have gotten an actor to play the enigmatically tragic Darby Crash on stage.

Look at the movies. The silver screen has been flooded with remakes (I Am Legend, The Manchurian Candidate) and new additions to old franchises (The Dark Knight). Now, I’m not bringing into question the quality of these films (I could, but I won’t). What I am asking is why so much of our culture seems recycled and repetitive. Hell, even the comics pages of newspapers are clogged with geriatric legacy strips who long ago lost their creators. It’s something that has bothered me for some time, but I’ve only really wrestled with it for a few weeks, starting on Thanksgiving morning when I grumbled about how goddamn much I hate Grease.

Since then I’ve begun to think that this sad state of affairs has been a long time coming.

I’m of the mind that the most important thing to happen in the West in the 20th century took place around the end of World War 1. It wasn’t Tzara’s Dadaist manifesto and it wasn’t the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy, and Germany. Shortly after the end of Great War, records first outsold sheet music in the U.S.  For the first time in the course of human history, more people were listening to music that was captured at an earlier date and mass produced, rather than playing it themselves. Before then, the top songs had been written by the sonic craftsmen of Tin Pan Alley and published for piano and sing alongs at home and in bars. When you wanted music, you made it yourself, or went to see someone who did. But with the advent of affordable home audio systems and the proliferation of recording technology, it became easy and inexpensive for people to listen to the professionals over and over again. It was the first time we turned our collective back on a culture we helped create, and instead payed someone to take care of it all for us.

And now look how far we’ve come. A few handful of companies control the film, music, television, and news industries. We are less involved in and more distant from our culture than ever before. Can we even say it is ours anymore? The only time we participate is when we line up at Walmart or download off iTunes, because even our digestion of the material we are paying for is increasingly inactive and passive. Music serves as a soundtrack, as background muzak for our day to day lives. Movies are so mundane that we walk in for a couple hours of escapism and walk out without ever pondering what the film is actually saying, assuming it is saying anything at all. I suppose this might be inevitable in a world that favors specialization, where factory workers perform the same repeated tasks over and over again for hours each day, office staff fill the same forms out with the same series of identifying codes a hundred thousand times until they retire, and areas of academic study are increasingly concentrated and insulated. We can’t be blamed for not exerting energy or talent on things as unnecessary as culture, can we? How much of this is out of necessity, I don’t know. But it’s become increasingly clear that, just like the Industrial Revolution left the working class impotent and destitute, our own Consumerist Revolution has left us voiceless and soulless. Two things are happening, and have been for a while now:
1) Our control over our culture slips more and more until all we can do is “vote with our wallets” and we begin to lose touch with what shapes our views and values. A loss of control over culture is a loss of control over how we think.
2) What the executives who finance our culture consider marketable is increasingly narrow. Music sounds the same, movies are more and more modeled after the same Bruckheimer blockbusters and Chick-Flick cookie cutters, the novel continues to be reduced to a few sad cliches and sellable genres, et cetera et cetera.

When art springs organically from the people who are enjoying it, it not only allows for the expression of their long held traditions, but encourages and inspires new ways of thinking. Art is a language that allows us to explore the abstractions of the human experience, not only to communicate them. Look at how African American slave songs, worker shouts and  gospel hymns, reinterpreted the same white bible myths used to justify slavery and turned them into a grape vine for the underground railroad. Or how the folk scene of the 60’s birthed revolutionary movements while rock music was breaking the boundaries of what pop music could do, thanks to the noise experiments of Jimi Hendrix and John Cale. Or how in the late seventies, working class youth in the U.K. threatened the foundations of their civilization by picking up guitars, learning three chords, and forming punk bands. Bakunin once wrote that the passion to destroy is a creative passion. This is true, but when you are made powerless and voiceless, the passion to create is a destructive passion. It disobeys orders, it refuses to know its place, and it demands to be heard. Creating is a radical act. If you own the culture, you own the terms and the means by which and with which that culture can be criticized. Right now the ruling ideas of the day are the ideas of record labels, Hollywood executives, and media empire moguls like Murdoch.

This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.

Because those who own the art industries treat creation primarily as a business, culture plays by a very different set of rules than we might otherwise want it to. The standard by which art is judged is all about profit margins. Whereas we might be drawn to create and promote art that expresses our evolving experiences and views, a business is more interested in making money and maintaining stability. Record execs have become less and less entrepreneurial, instead sticking to what works and demanding bands to produce singles that follow the model of their previous successes. It’s no wonder people of all ages are turning to concerts from times gone by when today’s radio ready music is so wilted. The comic syndicates would rather preserve their spot in the papers by recycling The Peanuts or hiring a committee to produce ancient Archie and Blondie mummies, rather than support a new innovative artist’s idea and risk handing precious print inches over to their competitors. It’s the same everywhere. When change does happen, it almost always comes from the bottom up, and is then reworked and repackaged when it is handed back down, usually the merit is bowdlerized away by the time it hits a chain retailer’s shelves or the airwaves, or the dead tree press.

And so what we need is a change. We have got to take our society back. What we need is a revival of organic, grass roots entertainment, coupled with the bravery and self confidence to be honest and original. Things seem grim. Fortunately, there are reasons to stay hopeful about the future and examples from the past that shed light on what we have to do.

To Hell With Poverty

Gang of Four

Performed on The Old Grey Whistle Test (1981, BBC2)

I’ve been thinking about what direction I want my blog to go in, and how I want my blog to reflect and effect my life. There’s been quite a few separate fibers that have come together to form the thread I’m sewing now. The most important ones are perhaps the most personal.

Some months ago, I think in June, my father and I were listening to NPR in the car. There was a discussion about whether or not the internet was making us stupid, whether the nigh unlimited access to information we find online, and the ease of tracking down our wild tangents in Wikipedia or with the aid of Google was destroying our abilities to read longer works attentively and think deeply  about subjects. I scoffed at it at first. How could the democratization of knowledge be bad?

I was missing the point. Access to information and unlimited education is powerful and should be available for all people. But what we must be careful of, as individuals responsible for ourselves, is that we do not let the hasty animal aspects, the unhindered curiosity for our surroundings, the urge to skim quickly and then react (things the internet encourages, through links that let you chase down extraneous information, flashing, distracting adverts, the instantaneous updates brought by news feeds and the abbreviated colloquialisms employed in IM conservations), to impinge on what should be deeper, slower processes. Reading. Thinking. Creating. Sharing.

When I was in third grade I read the complete works of Shakespeare. I found an old single volume hardcover copy in my parents’ basement with a faded brown dust jacket decorated with a watercolor of the Bard’s England, and I set my mind to read it. I knew that Shakespeare was supposed to be good, the best even, and I knew that I loved good writing, so it seemed the moral thing to do. I lugged the massive book to school each day, where it would sit on my desk when not in use, taking up a quarter of the surface area. My teacher would threaten all the usual grade school punishments if I didn’t start bringing a less obtrusive book from home, but I persevered. At the age of eight, I read the complete works of William Shakespeare.

I am not telling you this to brag or to show you how smart I was. To be completely honest, I didn’t understand ninety-five percent of what the poet was trying to say. I didn’t even understand what the characters were saying in the dialogue. I am telling you this because what is important is that I took the effort to read every single word that we’ve inherited from Shakespeare and when I didn’t understand something, I thought about it until I either understood it or I had a headache. I did not go to sparknotes.com and I did not skim. I did not turn to Wikipedia for a summary of the plot. I didn’t do any of those things because I couldn’t. I had no access to the internet whatsoever and even if I had, those resources probably weren’t available back in 1995.

And now, at age twenty one, when searching for the online article that accompanied that NPR broadcast, I find that I cannot even finish it before getting distracted and opening up a text editor to start writing this.

I am actually less skilled at reading and thinking now then I was at the age of eight. I may read more words per minute, but I am reading less carefully. I am learning less. I am retaining less. Worst of all, I am reflecting less.

I first started blogging in high school, in what I believe was my sophomore year. Because my day was heavily invested in classes and mandatory sports practices and study halls, and because I rarely had a computer of my own (I was the scholarship boy in my class, and had little money while at boarding school) I did not have the opportunity to post frequently. If I was lucky I could get an open computer a few times a week in the library. Obviously, I could not send off the short little bursts of rapid fire blogging that is so predominant in this medium. What I did have, though, was a lot of time spent in boring classes or on the sidelines of athletic events to think, and so I thought carefully and constantly. My posts, as I remember them, were passionate about politics, but they were also philosophical in nature, touching on human things meant to stir the few readers I had, not just pass on the news I read in the few papers the school subscribed to. They were often long, dallying on a single topic but drawing from all of my experiences and interests: my love of punk music, my penchant for Russian literature, my radical idealism and my old-soul cynicism, and my working class upbringing flung into an upper-class environ.

And now, with my laptop as constant companion and an open schedule that ought to be spent writing literary fiction, which is what I promised myself I would do in lieu of going back to school, I am skimming a million news articles and posting nearly everyday, frequently multiple times a day.  The posts are usually short, no more than a few paragraphs, and my comments are trite, and cheap, and add very little to the public discourse. I have, once, tried to write a piece deeper than the typical blog fare, but in review I find the results to be poor: the language struggles, the sentences enjamb unnaturally and it reads as if I were a mumbling street preacher. What I am trying to say is important, I don’t doubt that, but I lack the skills to say it.

My use of the internet is, it turns out, abuse. I have traded away my brooding study in exchange for an all encompassing buckshot of skim reading, estimation, and chiding. I have not got very much to say anymore, but very many topics  on which I feel required to speak. In high school I would spend whatever money I had ordering books, and I would wile away an entire weekend dissecting Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. Now I struggle to get through an abridged edition of Marx’s Capital, and I spend no more than fifteen minutes on it at a time before I go running for my RSS Reader to see if XKCD updated. In my youth I spent time writing epic (and awful, as most youthful writing is) novels on reams of loose leaf paper. These days I have to force myself to sit down and drag a short story to a conclusion, if I get that far.

Peter Kropotkin at his desk.

The Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris has one of the greatest names I’ve ever come across. He also has a very interesting idea. According to Malafouris, the tools we use, be it a tablet for keeping records, a blind man’s cane, or a hunter’s spear are not simply utilitarian objects we employ, but actively shape the way our brains work, and have played and will continue to play an important part in our cognitive evolution. He credits our species’ philosophical and inventive nuance to our use and dependence on tools, for example. In short, the creation changes the creator. This makes a lot of sense to me. Running with his interdisciplinary hypothesis, it has led me to reflect on how my use of computers and the internet has altered my thinking.

I feel rabidly, insatiably hungry. I consume information constantly, but as to what nutritional content that information has, I pay no mind. For me the internet has been a 24 hour McDonald’s drive-thru window. I have become such a consummate consumer that I do not even stop to question if I need this, if this is good for me. I do not even stop to ask if I am enjoying this. And no, it turns out, I am not enjoying this. My mind has turned into Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. There are so many things going on in my intellectual life, so many characters to keep track of and simultaneous plots to read through, that I have difficulty keeping track of it all, and I am overwhelmed. There is no time for understanding any of it. That shows in my blogging, which has amounted to little more than a few dumb jokes and some righteous fury quickly spent. My ideas are fetal pigs stuck in jars, never to grow any larger or develop any legs. My thoughts need time; the style of blogging that I’ve been pursuing demands immediacy. Ergo, my ideas are small and premature, bitter and unimportant.

So I am going to take back my mind.

Rather serendipitously, the New York Times recently ran an article in the Fashion & Style section on the slow blogging movement. Adherents of slow blogging intend to take the time to think about a topic and compose a meaningful essay, rather than blogging about a subject as soon as the headline drops. In short, it is more or less the antithesis to the current ruling zeitgeist on how blogging ought to work. It is also a perfect fit for what I want to do, or need to do, with this blog. There’s a Slow Blog Manifesto written by Todd Sieling (who seems to be returning to his Slow Blog, despite what the NY Times article says) that I encourage anyone else who wants to find a more contemplative form of blogging. It was the third point in his Manifesto that preoccupied my mind the most.

Slow Blogging is a reversal of the disintegration into the one-liners and cutting turns of phrase that are often the early lives of our best ideas. Its a process in which flashes of thought shine and then fade to take their place in the background as part of something larger. Slow Blogging does not write thoughts onto the ethereal and eternal parchment before they provide an enduring worth in the shape of our ideas over time.

For me, that first sentence spells out exactly what is wrong with my blog at the moment.

I am going to blog less often. There will not be pressure to get a blog post up every day, and perhaps not even every week. A post will materialize only when I have wrestled with a subject long enough to make my viewpoint valuable. Conversely, blog posts will be longer. Instead of simply throwing headlines out into the internet, echoing a hundred million other simultaneous bloggers the world over, I will actually think deeply before speaking. As a result when I speak I will probably have quite a bit to say. Hopefully it will be meaningful as well.
So, I hope you like to read. And reflect.

Ice Cream for Crow

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

Ice Cream for Crow (1982)