The Body Electric

...have always had a kinda vexed relationship with technology...I mean, without modern antibiotics I’d at least be deaf, if not dead...and have trouble imagining life without the Daily Show or cinnamon Pop Tarts...even if the fruits of our busy modern minds seem to be driving humanity off a cliff at alarming speed...

...and I’m kinda doubting the planet’s gonna miss us much...

...but I'm thinking right now of one of the few true miracles of today's technology...rising above petty concerns with its awe-inspiring amalgamation of essential utility and general really really goodness...if, at times, horribly misused...even for ghastly and near-unspeakable atrocities (particularly during the 80’s)...nonetheless, a modern wonder and sign of the highest capabilities and dreams of the human species...

...of course I’m talking about the electric guitar...

...heard about that yoga & music festival out in California...at first thought it sounded cool...like a yoga Woodstock...sadhana and rock n’ roll swirling together like chocolate and peanut butter...

...then, lookin’ at pictures, gotta say it just looked a bit too...yogic...too peaceful...just too fuckin’ healthy...

...don’t get me wrong, I’m totally into the yoga thing...the inner peace thing...the living healthy thing...the meditation and asana thing...but, wonderful as it is to spend time at yoga retreats and ashrams...it's not exactly rock n' roll...

...which is okay...it probably shouldn't be...but still can’t help thinkin’ there’s gotta be a place for danger...recklessness...dancing with chaos...it’s better to burn out than it is to rust...let fury have the hour, anger can be power...even honey, I’m the world’s forgotten boy, the one who’s searchin’, searchin’ to destroy... *

...but, maybe that's just me...

*Neil Young, Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, respectively...

...in memory of Les Paul, 1915-2009...

Rain, Conflict, and Green Tea

rainy day, dream away, let the sun take a holiday...
Jimi Hendrix

...or else just sit around feeling miserable...there are days when it seems like conflicts spring up out of the dirt like weeds...watered by incessant rain...make ya wanna run home and hide....then, the worst conflicts are generally those experienced alone...and most disagreements are actually about something entirely different than those caught up in them think...maybe most agreements are, too....often we tend to drift from one argument to the next, never really plumbing the depths...never finding out what's really behind any of them...

...is it closed minded or judgemental to tell a friend his dislike of dogs is a personality flaw?...I say it with a smile, at least....my friends at the coffee shop were running down their latest rude-customer stories while I finished up a mug of green tea I’d let get cold...making me realize how quickly I’d be fired if I had their job...and that I should tip more....I used to try to get elite college students to write papers on an issue that matters to you....how bad the food on campus was tended to be the most pressing...and I couldn’t disagree it was lousy....but they’d also talk about how rude the servers were...though, whenever I forgot to bring my lunch, I’d end up standing in a line with ten or so undergraduates, not one of whom would say please or thank you...sometimes barking orders like particularly irascible drill sergeants...acting like their privacy was being violated if the guy behind the counter interrupted their conversations to say excuse me, sir, do you want fries with that?...

...Henry David Thoreau, after starting a forest fire by accident, saw it from a distance, finding it a glorious spectacle if one can part the burning from the burned...or so I read in the New York Times Book Review...I can remember somebody saying something similar about footage of the first space shuttle explosion, back in the 80’s...some people like to use a flower as a symbol or metonym of life...others use war in much the same way...William Blake said everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth...and he was probably right...

Huh?! What?!

Is this love, baby, or is it...confusion?
Jimi Hendrix

...some people appear to have found recent Yoga for Cynics posts confusing....that might be a good thing...or maybe not...I’m rather confused about the matter...

Confusion is next and next after that is the truth...
Sonic Youth

...the last four posts were mostly written while yoga retreating in Mexico...the exception being the Marvin Gaye one, which was mostly written by hand while waiting for a train to take me home from the Philly airport....like last year's retreat, which inspired the creation of this blog, this one included writing workshops led by legendary writer/performer/teacher/holy lunatic Ann Randolph , in which I found myself rhapsodizing about things like...y’know...Vikings walking on water, and how the Hulk manages to keep his waistband intact...with some more serious soul-searching stirred in...which can get confusing...then, maybe confusion is the point...

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.
Salvador Dali

...I find these days I’m opening more and more to my deep inner weirdness...as normalcy is always and ever nothing more or less than a social construct, you’re never gonna get in touch with yourself until you learn to embrace your deep inner weirdness...even if that’s, ultimately, a social construct, too...and my deep inner weirdness is very deep and weird...can anyone reading this disagree?

If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.
Tom Peters

...I’ve always found it strange the way people take statements like truth cannot be known and hold them up as truths that they, in fact, know beyond a shadow of a doubt...even I don’t know, it seems to me, needs to be spoken with some degree of skepticism...unless I’m confused...I mean, what if you do know and are simply too confused to know you know?

he who knows does not speak and he who speaks does not know
Lao Tzu

...I suspect that Lao Tzu knew he was being inherently contradictory...and therefore inherently confusing...and that may have been his point...he wasn’t offering something to repeat in a wise voice to one’s acolytes...but something by which to be confused...so that one might eventually learn to live more comfortably in confusion...or maybe I’m just confused...

Purple Prose

...saved for last...hardest to write about...perhaps operating out of some very deep kinda purple synaesthesia...I tend to be covered in it...purple sweater, purple shirts in numerous styles, purple sheets, purple blanket, purple towels...purple prose all over the place...even that Sanskritish title up there...purple lotus...purple Kool-Aid...Riders of the Purple Sage...and the wild mountain thyme grows around the purple heather...raspberries are best when they turn purple, almost but not-yet overripe...but only when you eat them right off the bush...really, they shouldn’t be eaten any other way...and, in an ideal purple world, they wouldn't be...

...blending blue and red...blood and the sea...rage and contemplation...celebration and melancholia... red-faced embarrassment and boundless sky...purple nurple...owww...

...prime color of psychedelia...even as all colors swirl together...Owsley Purple...Purple Haze...Jimi Hendrix himself seems to me to be purple...maybe that’s how he managed to cross the musical color barrier...he was more purple than anything...lately, I’ve been meeting up with old psychedelic friends...now all invested in purple yoga mats...

...Obama talked about a purple America during the campaign...not sure how well that’s working out, now...purple, of course is the color of royalty...nobility...people you're supposed to call your majesty or your holiness...as if kings and emperors could be any more majestic than convicts and elevator operators...popes and lamas any more holy than prostitutes and laborers...purple should always be for everybody...

Not So Mellow...

my yellow in this case is not so mellow, in fact I’m trying to say it’s frightened like me
Jimi Hendrix

...yellow is the color of the sun and, yes, the color of piss...the color of light, and life...though, yeah, I know, light is really white, in its purest form...but we live in an impure world...even though a banana really is, sometimes, just a banana...

....yellow slapstick banana peels...yellow is the color of my true love’s hair...well, not really, but it’s the color of my hair...at least I try to keep telling myself that, even as it's increasingly invaded with distressing grey and white...so, in that sense, yellow is youth...though also jaundice, and cowardice...and my somewhat cowardly golden retriever, Duncan...walking in the grass, sniffing yellow dandelions, chasing after yellow tennis balls... my good friend when no people were...used to lie in the driveway outside my dad’s office, on the other side of the garage from the house, by the lawn where the dandelions were...one of his patients would crouch there for what seemed like hours after appointments scratching the dog behind the ears and talking to him...my dad said she teased him that Duncan was a better psychiatrist than he was...to which he replied, “maybe he is....”

...yellow, for some reason, I associate with Buddhism...maybe it’s all those golden Buddhas...or the Flower Sermon...though who knows if that flower was actually yellow, though I might think of it that way...or perhaps, I fear, some lingering racist association with yellow people...as if there really were yellow people, or black or white or red people, rather than bogus divisions created out of some deeply yellow fear of the knowledge that we’re all simply shades of some indefinable human color...which may look something like sadness, which I think is also yellow...as, of course, is joy...and candle flames, like I’d see in the windows when we’d sit in silence Christmas Eve at the Quaker Meeting...

...yellow journalism, yellow fever...mellow yellow...yellow corn...waves of grain I’ve seen generally tending, I think, more toward yellow than amber...mustard seed...school buses...yellow submarines...doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to, isn’t he a bit like you and me?...daisies...sunflowers...the yellow rose of Texas, whose image seems a bit tarnished at the moment...yellow desert sands...yellowing pages of books and old thoughts...Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper, representing repression and madness....when life gives you lemons make lemonade, but if the lemonade isn’t any good, maybe you can get a soda or something...

...the sun’s out today, for what seems like the first time in forever...though I can’t see it from here...yellow in blue...coming across if you’re not actually looking at it as clarity...but to look directly into it is to go blind...

Blue Blue

Nothing is as visible as what we try to hide.
Japanese proverb

...been reading these books on therapeutic writing...with all these suggested prompts for venturing into the jungle inside...shadow selves, inner critics, masks and mood colors...all that shit...and finding it’s taking me a long time to get through it...keep doing all the exercises in my head...including the ones they keep emphasizing should only be attempted with a qualified facilitator...preferably with a degree or two in counseling, present...can make for a rather harrowing reading experience....

Blue blue electric blue, that’s the color of my room, where I will live,
blue blue
David Bowie

...pick a color that expresses your “current life or state of being”...all I can think of when I read that is blue...it’s not even like I pick it...or that it picks me...it’s just there...in the forefront and behind my entire field of inner vision...any other colors just dancing around ephemerally...and we all know what blue means, right?...every day, every day I have the blues...blues fallin’ down like hail...when she turned blue, all the angels screamed...but, just outside, there’s the sky above the snow...I mean, it’s trite, but it’s real...all we have here is sky, all the sky is is blue...and but for the sky there are no fences facing...and, then of course the ocean, water...chaos between earth and sky...giver and destroyer...blue all the life giving waters taken for granted, they quietly understand...when the levee breaks, there’ll be no place to stay....

...synaesthesia is that exquisite little misfiring of the synapses by which sounds are interpreted as smells, or smells as shapes, or shapes as flavors...kinda like saying you want a red flavored snow-cone, but a bit more sophisticated....a friend and I used to sit around listening to music and making tapes for each other...he had these multicolored magic markers, and I’d write down song titles with those...always trying to choose the right color for a particular song...sometimes we’d discuss it: would you say those two are red songs or blue songs?...I’m thinking kind of a blending of the two, not quite purple, really, more like red and blue tendrils interweaving, swirling together, kinda....the strange thing was, he seemed to know what I was talking about...at least at the time....

...so, here I live, in between the mean old lonesome blues and the clear blue sky...embroiled in the raging ocean or floating on the calm sea...then, don’t we all...the ideal, I think, is to float peacefully on a raging ocean...but I’m not anywhere near there, yet...hey blue, here is a song for you...because it all, somehow, feels like music....

[particular shades of blue provided by Pablo Picasso, B. B. King, Robert Johnson, Lou Reed, Jane Siberry, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Memphis Minnie (by way of Led Zeppelin), the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell]

Going to Eleven: The Obligatory New Year's Resolutions Post

The Dormouse: You've got no right to grow here.

Alice: Don't talk nonsense. You know you're growing too.

The Dormouse: Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace, not in that ridiculous fashion.
Lewis Carroll

These go up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap

As I believe I said, or at least vaguely referred to (more likely), I don’t do the New Year’s thing. Nonetheless, to show my deep commitment to personal growth, I here present:

****Eleven New Year’s Resolutions****

1. To forget the lyrics to “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers.
2. To write the Great Southwestern Antarctican Novel.
3. To be the first postmaster general of the United States to unicycle to the top of Mount Everest wearing leiderhosen made of pancake flour.
4. To master new and original yoga poses like Inebriated Oxen Herd, Three Point Sweater, and Muppet Off His Meds (and, of course, to translate each of those into Sanskrit).
5. To eat my weight in zinc every morning, half my weight in artificial sweeteners every evening, and wake up to drink a third of my weight in melted styrofoam every half hour during the night.
6. To read Moby Dick aloud, unabridged, backwards, to an audience of millions, with live musical accompaniment by Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, and Ludwig Van Beethoven (performing simultaneously).
7. To end all international conflicts that aren’t likely to inspire good movies.
8. To invent the one device that will make the xylophone, zebra mussel, and cotton gin obsolete.
9. To experience photosynthesis and deep-fry myself.
10. To have my tonsils, adenoids, and appendix replaced with those of Werner Herzog, Alfonso Cuaron, and Pedro Almodovar, respectively.
11. To make the Venus de Milo smile.

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.
Walt Whitman

Kind of a Movie Review #4: Religulous

Belief, idea divides; it never brings people together.You may bring a few people together in a group but that group is opposed to another group.
J. Krishnamurti
....just biked home in the dark from seeing Religulous, in which Bill Maher rips on Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Judaism, Scientology, and belief in general in an incredibly offensive and utterly unrelenting fashion—I fucking loooved it—to find that my new neighbors are seriously smoking up some very pungent ganja to the point that I can’t help smelling it...in my apartment, not just the hallway—again—which, I can report, brings on some nostalgic feelings...put on some Hendrix...but no particular desire to go and join them...seriously, the last time I smoked I thought, man, I’d rather be doing yoga...but, no, in case you’re wondering, the word hypocrite perhaps, quite understandably, blooming on your lips, I wouldn’t have minded if the movie ripped on yoga, too...hell, if you’ve read this blog at all, you know I do it all the time...was kinda disappointed, in fact, that the movie left the whole Eastern spiritual spectrum alone...and I say that with a big namasmotherfuckingte to everyone...and the view, held at least momentarily, that all of our beliefs and practices are pretty ridiculous when you think about it...or, at least, when I think about it...not bad, necessarily, or good, necessarily, just ridiculous...and if we could realize that we might have a whole hell of a lot less to kill each other for...or, maybe not, as that would be a far too logical conclusion for such a ridiculous species as we....

and they also threw this in my face:

they said

uh anyway

you know good and well

it would be beyond the will of God....
Jimi Hendrix