In a recent post here —America Is Alive and Well. You’re Just Not Looking In The Right Direction(s)—I wrote:
I fully expect to see an article in the Sunday NY Times about 15 or 20 white Williamsburgh no-dancing hipster wannabes having a “big” party in an abandoned Brooklyn warehouse.
It took a couple more days than I expected and it was in Queens, not Brooklyn…but there it was, large as (media) life.
Group Behind Underground Music Venue in Queens Seeks a New Barn
The future looks uncertain for the Silent Barn, a celebrated underground music venue in southern Queens. Members of the collective that runs the venue said they had decided to search for a new home and to shut down the space at 915 Wyckoff Avenue in Ridgewood, where they have been showcasing bands and performance artists for seven years. The reason: the city buildings department has ordered the musicians and artists living in the old industrial building to vacate it unless an extensive renovation is done.
—snip—
The Silent Barn has been a fixture in the underground music scene for years in Brooklyn and southern Queens, serving as an incubator for several beloved indie bands like the Vivian Girls, Teengirl Fantasy and The Dirty Projectors.
Now I don’t know about you, but I do not need to search out tracks by groups with names like “the Vivian Girls, Teengirl Fantasy and The Dirty Projectors” to know exactly and precisely how lame their musicianship may be, nor do I need a YouTube video to see the people who dragged themselves out of their onanistic little hipster-world warrens to go witness these undoubtedly fine examples of our ongoing musical and cultural collapse.
Just sayin’…the above article made the Google News front page today.
The NY Salsa Congress scene at the Manhattan Hilton that was the real subject of that America Is Alive and Well. You’re Just Not Looking In The Right Direction(s) article…5 days long, thousands strong, an audience of the same general age group as the so-called “hipster” scene, totally racially mixed and absolutely burning? Not a peep from the good TimesFellas.
Read on.
Now you might claim that the reason I’m pissed off is because latin music is an idiom in which I am artistically involved and the syndrome extends to almost all of the other groups w/which I play and have played for 40+ years in NYC. (Go here for another take on the same media act from the fine small publication The Brooklyn Rail. New York’s Best-Kept Jazz Secret by William S. Niederkorn. I play at that Baha’i Center venue often with a number of the bands mentioned.) But these sorts of things are simply small drops in the badly damaged and leaking cultural bucket of America. The corporate-owned media hype whatever is most profitable to the corporate world that owns those media. That corporate world would rather drop some garage band that literally cannot tune its own guitars into the mix than put a spotlight on a band like The Mambo Legends because more complex musical systems are harder and more expensive to produce plus real musicians will not allow themselves to be ripped off and are not easily discarded and replaced if they start to make waves.
And this syndrome is not limited to music, either.
Here’s a parallel story from the same day. Same newspaper as well. (More about that later.)
A Poetic Mentor Who Minces Few Words
—snip—
Four stories above East 12th Street, down the hall from Allen Ginsberg’s old apartment, one of the East Village’s last standing bohemians soldiers on.
Mr. Fagin, 74 years old, second-generation beat, New York School veteran, friend of Ted Berrigan, publisher of Ashbery, lives with his wife, Susan Noel, also a writer, in adjoining rent-controlled apartments in the building near Avenue A.
Although Mr. Fagin — a handsome, T-shirt-and-jeans kind of guy with a square build, tousled silver hair and a cheerful air of insubordination — now collects Social Security, his chief source of income for decades has been giving private creative-writing lessons and editing and producing small magazines and chapbooks from the work of students and friends.
He reports that despite former teaching gigs at the New School and St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, neither he nor his wife have held anything resembling a straight job for any substantial period of time, though he has worked, he says, as a librarian, a reader to the blind and a “black marketer.”
“I try to be disaffiliated from bourgeois society,” Mr. Fagin said the other day, “like most good people. Because all we have are these very few, precious days.”
—snip—
Mr. Fagin seems to exert a magnetic pull on his students.
“If you have any inclination to get in touch with the arts, to express yourself creatively, and you live in this century, and in this city, and you’re struggling to make ends meet –and I fall into this category — you’ll be enamored by Larry,” said Kate Thompson, 30, a former market researcher from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, who has studied prose fiction with Mr. Fagin for a year. “You walk into his apartment and it’s just filled with all this stuff you recognize and don’t fully know but you want to.”
In a classroom setting, Mr. Fagin has had mixed success. For about five years, until 2007, he was an adjunct at the New School, where he rubbed many people the wrong way, said one former student, Kathleen Kyllo.
“By the time the last class rolled around attendance was significantly lower,” she said in an e-mail. “Where students had once sat closer to him near the front of the room we were hanging back in a defensive mass.” She recalled an incident where Mr. Fagin announced to the class that her poetry was “too vaginal.”
Mr. Fagin acknowledged that he got “really mean” in the classroom. “You walk in and all these faces are staring at you and you want some reaction from them but they really have nothing to offer you. It’s like, come on you jack wagons!”
All in all, Mr. Fagin takes a blighted view of the current generation of aspiring artists, whom he likened to “pod people.”
“They are so inundated by information, they have no way to sort all this stuff out — it’s like being perpetually electrocuted but not realizing it,” he said.
This man is one of the real ones. He didn’t cop out, he just continued doing what he does.
Nor does he have much good to say about what has come of his once-beloved downtown art world, which, by his reckoning, ended in February 1975 at a dinner party around the corner hosted by Claes and Patty Oldenburg.
Mr. Fagin, who went with his friend the critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, recalled his excitement that the artist Robert Smithson was to be in attendance. “But when we got there, all anyone talked about was real estate,” he said. “They’d all just bought lofts in what was later to be called SoHo. We left and I said to Peter, `Well, that’s the end of civilization.'”
Yup.
But the interesting part is this…why is the NY Times covering both the Queens lamers and this serious poet and teacher?
The answer lies in the media’s 98%-2% “equal coverage” myth.
The best example of this…and the one with by far the most evil consequences to both the U .S. and the world in general…was the media’s selling of the Cheney/Bush II invasion of Iraq.
Surely you remember how the selling was done, right?
No?
Let me refresh your media-clogged memories, me news-saturated doogies.
I wrote this about a year and a half ago.
So…you say that you do not understand how the people who control this system could allow such epidemic fuckups to take place on an almost daily basis?
You watch TV and see poisonous foods being massively advertised as what you should eat?
Glossily produced spiels for drugs so poisonous that a good part of the ad must contain a voiceover listing its negative effects?
You are daily bombarded with fear-producing news about the ongoing dangers of terrorism and disease, yet the very forces that are supposed to protect you from those forces are quite plainly totally incompetent?
Is that what’s bothering you, bunky?
Well, lissen up.
—snip—
Never forget the run-up to the invasion of Iraq as well. It was rather crudely done…the media have come a long way in this regard over a span of less than 10 years…but it was very effective. Literally hundreds of military and (supposedly) ex-military “experts” blathering on about the necessity of war, balanced by an occasional frumpy looking nun or frazzle haired 50-ish ex-hippie talking about “peace in our time.”
The article about Mr. Fagin? He was cast in the 2% frumpy nun role while the other 98% of the paper hyped death, destruction and the end of American culture.
Those of you who wonder why I keep pressing on opposition to the media as the single most important effort that can be made if we are to right this floundering ship of state before it goes down with all hands? Why I write so often about Newstrike/Mediastrike/Culturestrike?
Go read this And The Mirror Broke article again.
I cannot say it any better. Read it.
NEWSTRIKE!!!
MEDIASTRIKE!!!
CULTURESTRIKE!!!
VAYA!!!
As the great basketball player and world class fuckup Micheal Ray Richardson said when asked about the state of one of the sad NY/NJ Nets teams with which he played:
“The ship be sinkin’.”
Yup.
Start bailing, folks. The water’s rising fast.
The first truly strong and effective action that you can take? It won’t need a great deal of time or effort and it will not only require no financial commitment but wlll actually save you money…
STEP AWAY FROM THE TV WITH YOUR BRAINS IN THE AIR!!!
BAIL OUT ON THE MEDIA.
TAKE A FLYING JUMP OFF THE END OF THE MEDIA PIER IN THE FULL BELIEF THAT YOU WILL FALL UP!!!
Yup.
You will fall up, y’know. If you dare to try.
Bet on it.
I am.
Later…
AG
Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden knew sump’n about holey buckets.
Bet on it.
Tired of wet shoes?
Patch the motherfucker!!!
AG
I’m with you as always on the social experiment, AG.
Thanks for the link to the Fagin story. It’s their story, though — I can’t take it as being representative of anything. Fagin is fodder, the hipster bohos are fodder, culture, art, politics, rebellion, suffering, death, everything’s fodder for digestion & regurgitation onto an extremely limited canvas, without any real differentiation between them. It all just fills the places in the mind where there’s nothing else happening & ultimately shapes the way the mind pays attention.
That is precisely my “Newstrike/Mediastrike/Culturestrike” point, ww.
You say that you can’t take the Fagin story as being representative of anything, but it is representative of something. If the entire NY Times was full of similar stories that would be “representative” of something else, but of course it is not. If it was, it wouldn’t be the NY Times/paper of record/Good Grey purveyor of all the news fit to print, it would instead be a little broadsheet being handed out on odd streetcorners or a little known website buried in the almost ungoogleable depths of the internets.
Those empty places in the mind of which you speak? How the controllers fill them is what makes things the way they are in any given society. There will always be controllers and there will always be a majority of fairly empty minds…that’s how human society works, from the tribal level right on up through today’s international PermaGovs. However, when things start to go wrong then the filler must be changed or the society collapses from the bottom up.
That is the sole point that i am trying to make in my writing now. My Newstrike/Mediastrike/Culturestrike thing? That’s both the only practical weapon that we have against the ongoing rot in this country and a very practical way for people who have a little more on the ball than most to clean out the dusty back corners of their own minds so that they can more clearly see what is going on.
That’s all I am doing here, ww. Trying to wake a few people the fuck up. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but I do keep trying.
Later…
AG
I hear you on the Mediastrike. Of course.
You can lead a horse to water, etc. As you know. We wake up when we’re ready, as individuals, not before.
Here’s the thing: as long as one refers to media as representative of anything aside of media reality — which is the only reality for most, as it turns out, because direct experience without prior conditioning by media has become impossible — media is always a touchstone & mediastrike is personally impossible.
It’s a very heavy thing you’re asking people to do: the complete readjudtment of their own minds, a re-circuiting of the thought processes as designed by wholescale media indoctrination. A reshaping of the brain by the brain.
Far easier to stick with media & approach it with a shade of distrust. But as far as I see it, that’s not mediastrike. Mediastrike would be the complete rejection of the world as presented by media, including the parts we like.
Yeah.
Well…
Addiction therapy, ww. Like kicking heroin. You can’t just continue to chip at it. Not until you really have it under control you can’t. And you must be especially careful about “the parts we like.” That’s where they getcha!
Now that said…I have totally discarded my own suspension of disbelief regarding the media for well over 10 years. The last straws were the runup to the Cheney/Bush invasion of Iraq and the “ARRRGH”-ing of Howard Dean, but I have been pretty well there since the ’70s. (The whole Watergate scam, to be precise.) I watch an occasional ballgame or prizefight/MMA fight/poker game//movie on TV; I just switch away (or turn the sound down and look away) when it gets…trancemedia-dumb. Commercials, palaver about “our gallant troops”, etc? I look away until it goes away, and when watching fiction I refuse to take the bait. I sometimes take a quick look at what is being hyped…the Arab Summer, the recent hurricane, the faux contest between and among Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McLame…but I always keep in mind that anything to which the mass media pays attention is by definition misinformation/disinformation.
However, if a real, practical Mediastrike movement were to somehow miraculously appear? I would throw my 20+ year old TV out the window in a NY minute in order to be part of a movement to break the media bank.
Bet on it.
You also write:
Quite possibly true, ww. But my own “awakening(s)” have most often come because someone (or something…some real world occurrence) planted a foot up my ass. Was I ready? Yes, I suppose I was. But how long had I been ready? How much time had I wasted in a sleepwalking dream state? That sort of change doesn’t just happen like a cloud formation or the change of seasons. It can be…and usually must be…prompted from the outside.
Thus I do tend to try to perform some foot-planting of my own. Occasionally that planting takes root and grows, and that is all I expect.
I do keep trying, however.
Yes I do.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
Interesting dope analogy, AG. Something I can relate to, unfortunately. Question remains as to how you can really successfully ‘chip’ & retain control — or is it just the illusion of control & a matter of denial? Or is the ability to control a habit indicative that there’s really no habit? As far as dope goes, that last one seems to be the way it is. Kicking a real habit successfully means you just have to leave the shit alone. The necessary metabolic adjustment isn’t possible otherwise. You really basically have to die as you are & then be reborn. Not a fun process. Again, a very interesting analogy regarding mediastrike. The thing that forms us has got to be replaced.
You never give up an addiction merely by quitting. Quitting, yes, but there is more.
Every addiction fulfills a purpose. That purpose must be met–or confronted–another way, with an activity that is not destructive or dysfunctional.
When you quit an addiction, you must also find something else to do.
OT–but this reminds me–I often meet the media at second hand, through the appearance of strange concerns and obsessions in people I know. Sometimes it is explicit and obvious (the name of the latest, big-thing program will be mentioned) and sometimes it comes out of context–like an echo–that only comes into focus after several different encounters (different people) and I can see the media reaching in and occupying parts of their minds. So as you suggest, reality can be hard to find even in the real world.
Still worth looking for though. The search itself turns up much of value.
Broadly stated?
This will do quite nicely:
…addiction, a compulsive habit that is maintained despite harmful consequences.”
And how does it work, this plainly counter-survivalist system?
This is a good start.
You write:
So…you are saying that one must replace an addiction with some other activity (or set of activities) that produce levels of dopamine to which the addict has become accustomed?
This sounds like the classic “replacement syndrome” where an addict goes from addiction to addiction…first an alcoholic, then a sex addict, then a heroin junkie and on down the line.
I suggest that addiction itself is the addiction, gaianne. Once one becomes addicted to anything…and the compulsive TV watching behavior that is considered quite normal among young children today in certain societies is quite definable as an addiction if you consider how anti-survivalist that action really is…then further addictions are almost predestined to happen. I mean…there comes a point in most addictions where the drug or activity begins to lose its dopamine-producing effect. One becomes satiated less and less easily and thus either the amount of the drug/activity must be increased or a stronger drug/activity must be found. Sesame Street/Spongepants Squarebob only works for so long. The brain develops and requires more complex input, and here we are with Anderson Cooper instead of Spongepants Squarebob, adult PBS pablum instead of Sesame Street.
To truly kick an addiction…any and all addictions…one must kick the addiction to addiction itself!!!
Easy to say, hard to do.
Replacement therapy only works if that which replaces the addiction to addiction does not fit the original definition offered above:
It is the phrase “harmful consequences” that is the kicker here. If addiction itself is “harmful” no matter what the means used to addict…???
UH oh!!!
What to do; what to do!!!???
The answer? The only one that I have found, anyway.
The silence of real meditation. The peace that comes from regularly achieving a stilled mind, a mind that is not compulsively…addictively in one sense…producing words.
How does his work?
Damned if I know.
But it does.
William Burroughs maintained the the word itself is a virus.
Burroughs was a poet of addiction. A student of addiction as well, from his earliest days as a NYC street junkie. He knew what he was talking about on the sub-cellular level of a serious addict, and he quit his addiction(s) by searching for silence.
Once some sort of silence is achieved the whole “certain experience hat peroduces dopamine/need for more of the experience to produce more dopamine” feedback cycle is broken.
Now…one might say that this is just an addiction to meditation or at the very least an addiction to the silence that comes from true meditation.
I do not know the answer to this idea other than to say that if meditation (or the silence that it produces) is indeed an addiction then we must throw out the original definition of addiction as used above because not only does it not produce “harmful consequences,” it quite plainly produces positive consequences in those who manage to find that silence.
Here is one beautiful example from the beginning of the amazing book “Zen and the Art of Archery” by Eugene Herrigel. (Quoted in a Zen Essays website.) This book…this passage, actually… was for me the beginning of a lifelong search for freedom from what could be called the word addiction.
This is not the cheesy Zen of pop culture…it is not even “Zen,” per se. It is simply the result of an understanding (and remembrance) of one’s real place in the universe, an understanding that can be reached many different ways and can evince itself in action just as easily as in repose…an understanding that can only be reached by silencing the word addiction.
A Zen koan:
Rewrite?
Sure.
Different how?
No longer addicted to tree, word or media.
Different.
And addiction-free.
That’s my story anyway, and I’m stickin’ to it.
Later…
AG
P.S. Read my sig. The media are the carriers of conventions. They are the pushers of conventions just as dope dealers are the pushers of heroin.
Addicted to conventions.
Lao Tzu knew.
Bet on it.
the addiction must be replaced by another activity, that occupies the time and mental space that the addiction filled. If you try to give up an addiction and do nothing, you will reliably go back to it.
How do you fill that time and space? With another addiction, as you imply? Well, that may not always be the worst outcome. Many of us know alcoholics who have replaced alcohol with coffee and nicotine. This is actually an improvement.
The media is one of the most destructive addictions. Replacing it with anything, even drug use, provided it is cheap enough, would be an improvement.
But the new activity need not be another addiction. Meditation? Very good–and I don’t know anything that is consistently better.
Giving up the addictive process itself is surely harder, but not impossible. And raises the question: Where does the addictive process come from? Experiments with rats measuring dopamine levels provide only a partial answer. Don’t forget the “Rat Park” experiment: Rats raised in a natural (for rats) and non-hostile environment proved difficult to addict to even the strongest drugs, while rats raised in cages could be addicted easily to almost anything. One might extrapolate and ask how important is the larger environment in addiction: Is our civilization itself unsuited to human life?
Probably. As you suggest, the old Taoists seem to have been aware of this.
The new ones too.
S.
Is our civilization itself unsuited to human life?
Damn right. Everyone knows it, too, on some level. How we live under any manner of control mechanisms is dictated by consciousness of the fact.
thank you! he articulates clearly something I’ve non-vocally valued for many ages. I give up on Language and have the blessing of very minimal (and often absent) inner dialog, especially the noxious “spinning in circles” kind of dialog.
Language was not my first language…
–die and be reborn–
It is good not to be overly attached to ones self. The self is the smallest part of ones being. How should one say this? . . . don’t worry. Just still the mind.
Even better: don’t say it.
But…the path to “not saying it” is steep and fraught with dangers and diversions
A help?
Sure.
Easy to say; hard to do.
Even harder when echoes of the media are blathering on in your inner ear about the latest hottest-thing-ever.
First move?
Step away from the TV with your brains in the air.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
P.S. “But not Ron Paul?”
Yup.
A fact:
Everything…the magic 99%, anyway… that is heavily covered or promoted by the media is disinformation or at best misinformation.
Everything.
Corollary?
Everything that is not heavily covered or somehow hushed up by the media is also disinformation/misinformation.
Trust not.
In any direction.
Word.
Bet on that as well.
Gaianne asked:
How should one say this? . . . don’t worry. Just still the mind.
My answer: don’t say it.
The path to quietude isn’t through noise. The path to quietude is quietude. The way is the way, right? Don’t say it, do it. Or don’t.
Once you’ve brough in Burroughs & the Word Virus there’s no going back.
🙂
Anyway, the futility of approaching no-words with words is why a student of Zen often gets smacked.
at this point in the discussion, the subject’s expanded to the point that it’s not about the media; it’s irrelevant as a frame of reference. Just like it should be.