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This article (“A scruffy dillema”) is something I wholeheartedly agree with.

While she was away, I scanned the form which she’d been completing during the interview. Viewed from upside down it made little sense.

But there was one scrawled comment across the top of the form which was clearly legible. I shifted slightly to the left to bring it into focus. And there it was, the verdict on all my smooth talking, on all my shows of interest, on all my engaging smiles and enthusiastic nods.

It read: “Scruffy. Suggest Stock Room.”

I always wonder if it used to be different. If people could just knock on someone’s door, say I’m looking for a job and get it, based on the fact that they’re capable, looking for a job and thus willing to work… without sitting in a room confronted by people who can’t look past a pose, clothes, beard, hairstyle or glasses. Not even a spotless academic record will save you from them.

These kind of job interviews get old fast, they stifle progress, and are based on the idea that people who look different are inherently different, thus making superficial discrimination okay. It’s human cattle herding. It’s freaking ludicrous.

Someone should’ve stuck Einstein in a storage room.

“World world world
I sit in my room
Imagine the future
sunlight falls on Paris
I am alone there is no
one whose love is perfect
man has been mad man’s
love is not perfect I
have not wept enough
my breast will be heavy
till death of cities
are specters of cranks
of war the cities are
work & brick & iron &
smoke of the furnace of
selfhood makes tearless
eyes red in London but
no eye meets the sun”

~ Allen Ginsberg, from “Europe! Europe!”

I hear tunes, I seek out tunes that used to be everything to someone but they probably can’t listen to them now. I know there are tunes I’ve put on, I’ve seen people cry, Moving Shadow tunes, old tunes, because this music is old enough now for it to mean that. Even a single sound, they’ll hear a sound and it’ll just slay them. And you’re right, culture doesn’t seem to notice this. Where I’m from you’re more likely to be sitting around talking about a Rufige Kru or 4hero tune, how much it meant to you, than some other kind of music. I like normal life. It’s weird now, people die and they’re still on Facebook or whatever the fuck else.

~ Burial (2007)

Complete transcript @ The Wire.

“Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.”

The truly frightening thriller ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ is a film I’ve enjoyed many times over and it continuous to amaze me whenever I see it. There’s a famous quotation from this movie that always gives me the shivers, like it hits a Big Truth or something…

“Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you, he said. They’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying… and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”

~ Louis (the chiropractic physician)

According to this page, the quotation is based on the writings of the philosopher Meister Eckhart. The lines in the movie reference the following actual quotations from the work of Eckhart. If you don’t like the word ‘God’, just replace it with something you do like. The core of the idea is what’s important.

“They ask, what burns in hell? Authorities [the Fathers] usually reply: “This is what happens to willfulness” [to individual will, self-interest]. But I say it is “Not” [it is the Nothing] that is burned out [that burns] in hell. For example: suppose a burning coal is placed in my hand. If I say the coal burns me I do it a great injustice. To say precisely what does the burning, it is the “Not”. The coal has something in it that my hand does not. Observe! It is just this “Not” that is burning me – for if my hand had in it what the coal has, and can do what the coal can do, it, too, would blaze with fire, in which case all the fire that ever burned might be spilled on this hand and I should not feel hurt.” (Speech 5b, DW Ι)

“Whatever state we find ourselves in, whether in strength or in weakness, in joy or in sorrow, whatever we find ourselves attached to, we must abandon. . . . You must give up yourself, altogether give up self, and then you have really given up … By renouncing yourself first, you then have renounced all things. … A man who loves God could give up the whole world as easily as an egg.” (Speech 30, DW II)

“What is the prayer of the detached heart? I answer that detachment and purity cannot pray. For if anyone prays he asks God that something may be given to him, or asks that God may take something away from him. But the detached heart does not ask for anything at all that it would like to be rid of. Therefore it is free from all prayer.” (On Detachment, DW V)

Who is Meister Eckhart? A fascinating guy if you ask me …

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

~ Carl Sagan (source, book)

… in the 21st century.

As a companion to David Byrne and Thom Yorke’s conversation about the music biz, Wired’s published “David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars,” a long piece with many illustrative slides and anaecdotes that lays out some surprising, smart and useful visionary material about the way to earn your living with music in the 21st century. Don’t miss the audio of David Byrne and Brian Eno and other lumniaries chatting about the subject!

‘Ere it is, matey!.

“Well I guess in my mind I’ve always wanted music to do something to me and maybe I’ve always wanted it do almost the same thing. But to make music do the same thing you have to keep making different music. Now, when I first started making music, I was interested in the personalities I could play; the different figures I could be. I lost interest in that. I didn’t want myself to be in the center of the music anymore and so I begun experimenting with trying to remove the personality in some ways. For example by making more than one voice so that it stops being a single figure in the middle of the picture. And I’ve tried singing using nonsensical words. Using words backwards. Putting strange sounds on my voice. Different ways of reducing the importance of the figure in the picture. Because what I started to get interested in was not the figure, but the landscape behind the figure.

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