Art is long and time is fleeting
And our hearts though stout and brave
Still like muffled drums are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
I think that’s right.
My high school crush wrote that Longfellow quote in my yearbook something close to 25 years ago and the words sometimes come crushing down on me. The brevity of Life and the absolutely MASSIVE task we set upon ourselves to try to comprehend our experience with any semblance of consciousness. I figure its why so many people go through it all with some level of blindness fettering their awareness of the world. Filters that keep them from thinking TOO hard about their surroundings and as the world falls down, as Australia burns, as we hasten our paths unto our own hustling extinction, we bury our hearts and heads in the sand and pretend heartily that clicking “like” is going to save us.
Or maybe I’m having a bad day.
Technology, something that I’m a Lover of, has grown too big. Every three steps I take forward are hobbled with two steps back as my incomplete knowledge of the tools I use creates compatibility errors and software freezes. I move too fast for some things, too slow for others, and caught in the middle somewhere is my own feeble attempt at making sense of the world through art and music.
Getting set up at the Chesapeak Arts Center in Brooklyn MD. Ainsley McGray. Old Eastern. He’s all like “but about my ass tho”. Went to see Femi the Dryfish’s act Out of Water Experience Saturday night. Absolutely phenomenal.
I’m writing again. What I’m writing isn’t very nice.
I read a couple of articles recently that I’m trying to parse. Stuff about Westworld of all things… yeah, the HBO show. Apparently as a press push they did a dinner event at the CES show this week and invited a number of journalists to their “Activation” (I think this is an industry term for “activate yer damned note taking devices and write about our product!!!”). The author went in sort of expecting a fancy dinner party with pretty people pretending to be robots – and she was at least half right – but what she HADN’T expected was that the “robots” would have done a deep dive into their guests’ social media, studied up on the invitees, and engage them in conversation about their pets, about their Christmas presents, about why they’d gone dark on Twitter… making inside jokes that referenced old posts… in what sounds like a genuinely unnerving experience. The author goes on to talk about how easily they’d dismissed the discomfort of other guests, assuming they weren’t “real” but that in hindsight they had no way of KNOWING who was acting and who wasn’t, and how it was unnerving how easily that dismissal had come… https://io9.gizmodo.com/hbo-invited-us-to-a-westworld-dinner-party-where-we-we-1840975766
Between where Westworld seems to be going and where Watchmen WENT, it’s almost as if HBO might actually be making… well… ART beyond just good television. Things that make us question our surroundings and even things that make a pretty hefty moral statement on the world around them.
Meanwhile.
Dead of it.
It’s a hot and stinking winter
We’re all standing in the yard
with our eyes glued to our palms
we don’t want to miss a scar
cause it’s been a pleasant day
and it’s been a pleasant night
It’s such a wholly mindless way
To watch the world die
Hot and stinking winter
There’s a not-so-distant light
There’s a burning livid gleaming
Reflecting down off the skies
And it’s been a pleasant day
It’s been a pleasant night
It’s been pleasant to forget
That the world is on fire
And I woke to distant sirens
the neighbours screaming bloody murder
The taste of you is still on my lips
Sweet cherry cyanide and sugar
And the sirens are getting closer
And the neighbours’ noise has died
The taste of you is all that I’ve got left
You used to swear to me that you’d try
Hot and stinking winter
We’re stripped down to the skin
The cancers won’t matter
And even the storms won’t chase us in
Packs of dogs are howling
And I’m showing the flood right in
I hope that there is a God above
Because you know we’ve all got words for Him
And I woke to distant sirens
the neighbours screaming bloody murder
The taste of you still on my lips
Sweet cherry cyanide and sugar
And the sirens are all around us
And the neighbours’ all have died
The taste of you is all that I’ve got left
You used to swear to me that we’d try
