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...

Rites of Passage (Moving, part two)

The only cure
I know
is a good ceremony,
that’s what she said.
Leslie Marmon Silko

...if I were so inclined, I might accompany this move-down-the-street with some kind of ceremony of beginning and renewal...with, like, candles or incense or pig’s entrails or something...then, gotta admit I’ve never been much of a fan of that kinda thing...or ceremonies in general...can’t stand weddings, funerals, skipped most of my graduations...and everybody else’s graduations...grew up going to a Quaker meeting, which is about as unceremonial as houses of worship get, but even that was too much...even if I am kinda excited I just got invited to a yoga mala & summer solstice party...

...then, it may just be that I don’t like ceremonies when they’re prepackaged....one August got invited on a trip to the Adirondacks...some time after accepting, realized that the third day of the trip would also be the first anniversary of my dad’s death...and was actually glad when the friends said they had to cancel...and went by myself...climbed to the top of Mount Marcy...Tahawus...Cloudsplitter...the tallest peak in New York state...and, there at the top, sat by myself on a rock looking out over the broad expanse of the mountains, thinking about my dad, who’d taken me on my first hikes, and loved the outdoors, listening to a couple of mp3’s that made me think of him...including Helpless by Neil Young...though he’d never liked most of the music I listened to, one day he walked into the room right after I’d listened to that one—the Last Waltz version, with the Band, and Joni Mitchell on backup vocals...in my mind, I still need a place to go...chains are locked and tied across the door...leave us helpless helpless helpless helpless...he was strangely quite moved by it....then, he was a guy who lived his whole life, I think, feeling like he lost something essential very early on...and I’ve often felt the same way....he asked what it was, then actually went out and bought the CSN&Y album the studio version was on...and, listening to it there on top of that mountain, I felt very moved as well....

...elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong...
Leslie Marmon Silko

...actually, did go my PhD graduation...since my mom made me promise after I skipped the Master’s one...went and ate mushrooms in the desert that day, though I didn’t tell her that...nor that I was skinny-dipping in Puget Sound when my college graduation was happening a mere mile or so away....so, there I was, feeling a bit nervous, watching somebody go up the steps to get his diploma, thinking for a second about how embarrassing it would be to stumble on my way up to the stage...which suddenly flashed me back to fifth grade...and a self righteous and humorless teacher who, after I tripped over a chair, to the laughter of the whole class, said the sad thing is, he did it on purpose...then I heard my name called, and walked up, without stumbling, to formally accept my doctorate...

I got nothin’ more to live up to...
Bob Dylan

...sometimes, still, I realize I’m watching myself through the world’s eyes...or what I think are the world’s eyes...wondering, as I move into another cheap one bedroom apartment, if I’m not somehow failing to live up to the expectations of my socio-economic class...though, if that’s the case, it’s only fair...as my socio-economic class has certainly never made any attempt to live up to my expectations...too many arbitrary rules blindly followed, not enough imagination...too much expensive crap, not enough soul...not nearly enough Walt Whitman, but way, way too much Donald Trump...

...the world doesn’t owe you anything is a popular phrase in the self-help world...and I'm cool with that...one thing I’ll add to it, though: I don’t owe the world anything, either...

Questions to Meditate On...Or Not...

This is the third Yoga for Cynics post in the past week or so that’s featured the word not prominently in the title—could my need for this yoga retreat in Mexico thingy be any more stark?

In the immortal words of Neil Young: tell me why is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when you’re old enough to re-paint but young enough to sell?

What the hell does that mean?

Before Mexico, I’m taking a shorter trip...to New York City....could anything be more appropriate before a yoga retreat than a visit to the world capital of angst?

In the words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: work and work for love and sex, ain’t you hungry for success success success success? Does it matter?

Are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards people you'd normally turn to for a critique of materialism?

Is to be or not to be really the question?

Why is a person with love considered a loser in tennis?

Is it possible to snort crystal meth mindfully?

Do you think there are people who fantasize about masturbation during sex?

Written in a shelter register on the Appalachian Trail in a very wet month of May, 1992: if April showers bring May flowers, what do May showers bring?

In the words of a guy named “Rudi” in Stephen Cope’s The Wisdom of Yoga: in the end, we all have to write our own scriptures, don’t we?

Rachel Getting Married (Kind of a Movie Review #5)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

I know I can’t be the only whatever I am in the room....
Ani DiFranco

...went to see this movie last night called Rachel Getting Married, in which Anne Hathaway comes out of rehab and in to the heaving bosom of her painfully fractured family for a wedding....really captured the dynamics of dysfunction...the deep, festering wounds that only those within the circle can see...the ways something that might seem so harmless to any onlooker can explode so suddenly...as well as, even in its brightest moments, the excruciating awkwardness of always being the most fucked up person in the room, even in the midst of such of a family...or at least to feel that way...even in a wedding hip enough for the groom to start singing Neil Young songs in the midst of self-written vows...to feel like nobody else there is or ever was or ever could be so out of place...to simply wanna, needta get out...

Another time or place, another civilization
would really make this life feel so complete....
Neil Young

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!

Miranda (The Tempest, Shakespeare)

...apparently, the movie was originally supposed to be called Dancing With Shiva...after the figure in Hindu mythology who, according to yoga teachers I've known, dances in fire without being burned....this morning was in yoga class, where, like in every really good yoga class, I found myself going into surprising new areas of this place where I’ve been so long but have never, as long as I can remember, ever felt very comfortable...that I’ve never really gotten to know in 42 years...and that’s the real issue, isn’t it? That, often, the only place we really need to go is in....

Kind of a Movie Review #1: The 400 Blows (1959)

I watch a lotta movies by myself...that’s the kinda guy I am, like Pee-Wee Herman said, a loner, a rebel...or, like Van Gogh said,

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Yes, I started out a mere couple of sentence fragments ago talking about watching movies by myself and here I am, already having drifted on to Vincent Van Gogh who, lonely as he was, never watched any movies...bear with me....what ties it all together is Truffaut’s 400 Blows, or, and the reasons I was glad I watched it alone, and therefore didn’t have to talk to anybody afterwards—no, not one of those socially awkward situations like where you see a movie about an alcoholic destroying himself with a friend who is himself an unacknowledged alcoholic who is also, in an unacknowledged way, destroying himself—though I’ve been there, too—no, it’s more a matter of...let me start at the beginning....

It's one of those movies I’d always heard about, one of those Euro-classics that are supposed to be so sublime, that, often as not, leave me cold...with some exceptions...the Bicycle Thief...or My Life to Live...or Un Chien Andalou...anyway, I started watching it and, while finding it pretty good, was also thinking...how the hell did this just pretty good movie get on all those critics’ top ten of all times lists?...which of course brought me into the usual orgy of egotism and self-loathing as the movie kept playing and I debated internally whether they were all wrong or I was...and then...that teardrop...gotta admit that was moving...though it still didn't seem to...oh, wait a second...the ending...that one overpowering final shot....

I’m not gonna say how it ended. Or what that shot was. You'll have to see it yourself. That's why I'm writing this: so you'll see it yourself. But I am gonna say it hit me deeper than I really expected any movie to at this point in my life...brought me into some of the loneliest, most wounded, most helpless places, with everything that’s been lost and everything that never was...kinda like that Neil Young song says...

in my mind I still need a place to go...and yet...chains are locked and tied across the door.....

I don’t know if it had that effect on any of those film critics...if they did I really doubt they’d admit it...hell, critical theory was invented so nobody’d have to admit to feelings like that...but I had work I need to do before I went to bed...and there was just no way...though there’d been a rash of muggings in my neighborhood including gun shots, I had to go for a late night walk...wasn't fully recovered for days, though I certainly can’t say it’ll have that effect on anybody else, either. But, then, that’s kinda the point...that profound sense of isolation...which, paradoxically, creates a strange connection...between Francois Truffaut, Vincent Van Gogh, Neil Young and me...and, yeah, I guess those film critics, too....

The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many different things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at one and the same time.
Henry Miller