An acquaintance of mine recently posted a link to this email, which I haven't seen in a while. I think it's excellent and should be passed on, especially in light of the upcoming protest(s) of concealed carry on college campuses. (I support CC, of course.)

--

My old grandpa said to me, “Son, there comes a time in every man’s life
when he stops bustin’ knuckles and starts bustin’ caps and usually it’s
when he becomes too old to take an ass whoopin’.”


I don’t carry a gun to kill people.
I carry a gun to keep from being killed.


I don’t carry a gun to scare people.
I carry a gun because sometimes this world can be a scary place.


I don’t carry a gun because I’m paranoid.
I carry a gun because there are real threats in the world.


I don’t carry a gun because I’m evil.
I carry a gun because I have lived long enough to see the evil in the
world.


I don’t carry a gun because I hate the government.
I carry a gun because I understand the limitations of government.


I don’t carry a gun because I’m angry.
I carry a gun so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life hating
myself for failing to be prepared.


I don’t carry a gun because I want to shoot someone.
I carry a gun because I want to die at a ripe old age in my bed, and
not on a sidewalk somewhere tomorrow afternoon.


I don’t carry a gun because I’m a cowboy.
I carry a gun because when I die and go to heaven, I want to be a
cowboy.


I don’t carry a gun to make me feel like a man.
I carry a gun because men know how to take care of themselves and the
ones they love.


I don’t carry a gun because I feel inadequate.
I carry a gun because unarmed and facing three armed thugs, I am
inadequate.


I don’t carry a gun because I love it.
I carry a gun because I love life and the people who make it meaningful
to me.


Police Protection is an oxymoron. Free citizens must protect themselves.
Police do not protect you from crime, they usually just investigate the
crime after it happens and then call someone in to clean up the mess.


Personally, I carry a gun because I’m too young to die and too old to
take an ass whoopin’.


…author unknown. (but obviously brilliant)

I have not written anything of substance here in a long time. It's been months. The few things I have managed to post have been brief rants or pieces of information that I've wanted to share. I've been quite internally occupied though for well over a year now. It's been strange. That strangeness has been the bulk of why I have not written much. I don't really feel comfortable with blogging much anymore, because I know that chances are I'll read it a few months later and be slightly disgusted by it. (Knowing that it was sort of a spur of the moment thing.)

I've felt much like an unfinished painting that I'm trying to hide until completion these days. There is too much that is not done and is not presentable.

Today I realized that I don't remember hardly anything about the past semester, other than a few exceptionally negative or positive experiences here and there. The rest of it was a sleepless blur, and I suspect I don't remember a lot of it because I was so unhappy and stressed. There's been a lot to be happy about, but also a lot of the other way around. It has been difficult to sift through it all, work, and go to school as well.

I probably should write here more, but I still have that 'shy painting' thing going on. Perhaps I should work more on writing things that I won't regret later. (Although that's not to say I regret everything I post here, just the things that didn't come out right.)

I don't really like being so cryptic. It's not really like me, necessarily... or at least it's not a side of me I bring to the blogging table, usually.

I suppose it's this or nothing at all though.

It should get better with time.

Try a Little Tenderness

"UT Educational Psychologist says practicing self-compassion can relieve stress, improve relationships."

I love this article and I look forward to reading the book, as I have quite a strong interest in Educational Psych these days. I think the gist of the article is absolutely wonderful and potentially helpful for anyone.

This is a transcript of a commencement address that David Foster Wallace gave in 2005, at Kenyon college. The pearls of wisdom contained within this speech are absolutely invaluable - and of course, it's hilarious. As a student that works over 40 hours each week on top of class, the stories he weaves into the speech really hit home and crack me up. My personal favorite part: his description of grocery shopping. No matter where you are in life, I highly recommend reading this: you'll enjoy it. Chances are, the more you've experienced in this life the more you'll laugh.

On a more tragic note... sadly, on September 12th 2008, David Foster Wallace hanged himself in his home. I'm glad he was able to write this before he chose to end his life.

--

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address -
May 21, 2005

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that happened was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly .. phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

I usually wonder about them too, because I know for a fact that my dreams are often a reflection of the way I'm feeling - not always, but when they're bad that's usually the case. Most of my nightmares are easily analyzed(by me), although this one I'm not so sure about just yet. I had this one last night and since I remembered it so vividly, I decided to write it down and share.



I was lying on my bed, when I realized there was a water moccasin in my house. It crawled up on my bed from the foot and was maybe 2 feet long and as big around as a small garden snake. I jumped out of bed and was trying to find something to kill it with, since I wasn't interested in shooting a gaping hole in the floor with buckshot/decimating my bed. Somehow the house I was in kind of transformed into my parents' house, so I ran into their bedroom closet where I knew I'd find a .22. When I went back to my bedroom to off the snake, it had grown in size and speed. It was now much larger, several feet long and the girth of a fat boa constrictor. I was freaked out and couldn't really ever get a good shot at it. It was as if it kept getting bigger too, so I decided I needed to get my shotgun out from under my bed after all. However the snake was crawling all over the place, sometimes at me, sometimes on the bed, sometimes under it. I was trying to block it from striking at my feet with an air-conditioning filter I found lying around.

I had to dodge the snake to grab my shotgun from under the bed, and then it jammed. I couldn't get it to fire even though it was full of shells. I was fairly panicked, but then somehow the gun discharged a high-powered blast of air 'by accident' - as if it was an air rifle - the .22 I tried first was also an air-rifle for some reason. (I have no idea what that was all about - as it doesn't make any sense.) Apparently the air pressure was so great that it was enough to disorient the snake and mortally wound him. It ruptured something in his head that wasn't easily visibly, but he was writhing about like he was going to die... and his color started to lighten to kind of a brownish yellow. About that time I think some other people came to my aid and I was trying to figure out how to explain what happened.

Oh, for anyone who isn't familiar, this is what a water moccasin looks like:

I have not really been blogging much lately, which is retarded. Part of it has been that I'm busy, part of it has been that I'm lazy, and the other part is that I'm tired half the time. (Oh and my internet at home is RIDICULOUS.)


Updates:

- I'm going to UT in the fall. Yay. Unless I change my major I doubt I'll graduate from here though.

- I planted flowers in the yard. The pretty ones are now hating the heat. I will probably have to mulch.

- Last night I took in a poor starving kitty that some assholes decided they didn't want anymore. (So they dumped him on the side of the road to starve to death and die of thirst in the Texas heat. Seriously, anyone that does that is a piece of shit - have the balls to Euthanize him, or go to the trouble to get him adopted.)

- It was my birthday week, and the first day in weeks that Josh and I have actually had a day off together. Our schedules are dumb. Especially his, although he can't help the crappy aspects of it. We went to Palmetto state park to walk around and look at stuff in the woods. I took pictures.











We saw an armadillo that startled itself when trying to get away from us - it broke a branch while scurrying away and jumped in surprise. We laughed pretty hard.





There were tiny birds, soft-shelled turtles, and tons of snails.




Oh, and we saw a Red Shouldered Hawk. That was cool. I took a picture of a dead rat because Josh thought it would be cool.





After that we ate at Red Lobster in San Marcos, and I was so dingy from drinking a single beer after getting kind of worn out that I said Dairy Kreen instead of Dairy Queen. Fa ra ra ra raaaa. Yeah, I heard about that for almost the whole ride home. When we got home we watched No Country For Old Men and about 30% of the details in the movie went over my head, as I was still kind of loopy and tired from a more active day than usual.


-Animals are all over the place now. I have possums around my house and lots of different bugs. I took some pictures of a pretty moth the other week, and before that I took a picture of a possum that got into the garbage. It's pretty gross. Oh, I also took a picture of a squirrel at work because I was kind of bored.










He got tired of me taking his picture:




Squirrel!





Ok, that's all. I'll try to take more pictures soon, or at least dig up some older ones I still haven't posted.

I was recently sent an invitation on Myspace to support fair compensation of artists by visiting the 'Music First Coalition' website. I clicked on the link thinking, 'Yes, I do support fair compensation of artists, I wonder who's getting the shaft.'

What I read next caused me to shake my head in disappointment.

The RIAA has proposed a bill to revise the laws that outline who has to pay royalties when music is broadcasted live. To clarify, they're wanting to make radio stations pay royalties on the music they play. Supposedly this is going to make things more 'fair' for the artists and 'save the music industry.' They want musicians to get the money they 'deserve' for 'allowing' radio stations to play their music. (Currently radio stations are exempt from paying royalties.)

However, I find this to be a not-so-clever excuse for some musicians to bite the hand that feeds. The RIAA is there to back them because of its own special interest in supporting the existence of major labels. Last time I checked, the average up and coming artist would kill to have one of their songs aired. Getting compensated for it is the furthest thing from their minds.

Let me just put it this way: about 99% of popular musicians today are broadcasting their music for FREE online through Myspace and Youtube. It's available 24/7, on demand, for FREE to anyone with a high speed connection. (Or patience, if they have dial-up.) WIth AM/FM you'll have to wait for your favorite song to come on a local station, in addition to commercial breaks. The fundamental reason behind this is that it gets music out into the public circulation, it draws in thousands of fans, and it's cheap to do.

It also cuts out the middle-man completely, and the thought of that is enough to send the RIAA into hysterics.

The RIAA doesn't make any mention of that fact that the vast majority of artists are self-promoting more and more these days, yet they want to nail AM/FM radio stations for doing the same thing? Shame, shame.

Although I admit I've downloaded plenty of music illegally in the past, I do applaud the crack-downs on P2P fueled piracy. That IS stealing, particularly when you're downloading entire albums for free. For the record, I don't download illegally anymore. It's also a big no-no when a satellite-radio station makes a profit through an ad-free service they charge for. I can completely understand the RIAA taking action on businesses of that sort. However, trying to penalize local radio stations for giving musicians the FREE advertisement they want is a steaming pile of bullshit. (Didn't artists have to PAY to get their music aired on the radio in the beginning, just like all of the advertisers do now?)

All I can say is that if the RIAA gets this bill passed, radio stations are going to be playing music that up-and-coming artists are more than willing to let them broadcast for free. Artists that want radio stations to pay steep royalties are going to see a significant decrease in air-time, mark my words.


Today I read an article in the L.A. Times that actually supported the RIAA's idea, and upon doing so I discovered a wonderful response from another reader. It sheds some light on a few things that I haven't mentioned, so I decided to copy and paste it.



Of course, the reality is that it is not music that is being killed but rather the record labels which are dying a perfectly natural death - a death which the RIAA is trying to delay by means of political pull and legislation.

Music is alive and well. Indeed, it has never been better. Music is everywhere these days. Thanks to digital technology, one can enjoy music in places where doing so was once impossible. And thanks to Internet radio and websites such as myspace.com, artists have unprecedented opportunities to bring their music to the attention of new fans - and they no longer have to get an official stamp of approval from a record label in order to do so. Today, there are more opportunities for artists who are just starting out and who seek to make a name for themselves and acquire a loyal following than there has been since the boom years of the 1920s when America was in the middle of a dance craze that made dancing and attending performances of live music the national past time of young people.

Music existed and was part of people's lives long before the advent of recorded sound. And music will flourish long after the record labels join buggy whips, telegrams and typewriters as examples of industries which were once a crucial part of people's daily lives but are no longer needed or desirable because better things have come along to replace them.

A little history to put things in perspective: in the early decades of the 20th century, sheet music sales, not record sales, were the measure of commercial success in the music industry. Prior to the 1920s phonographs were luxury items that competed with player pianos for a spot in the parlors of upper middle class homes. Phonograph records were very expensive. Very few people had collections larger than a few dozen discs. Each disc only contained one song per side and cost about the same as a CD would cost in today's money. The musical equivalent of 6 CDs would have been considered a very respectable personal collection back then. So when people wanted to buy the latest hit tunes from Tin Pan Alley for enjoyment at home, most went out and purchased sheet music. Musicians made their money doing live performances - which is still the case today for the vast majority of musicians.

Of course, the sheet music industry, while it still exists, is a very marginal part of today's overall music industry. When a flood of low priced independent labels entered the market in the early 1920s record sales boomed. And, at the same time, radio came along as well. Suddenly home grown music sounded dull and amateurish. Undoubtedly those with a financial interest in sheet music regarded such developments with alarm and perhaps even said that it was the beginning of the end for music - which, of course, it wasn't.

When radio came along the record labels were very concerned about it and made arguments that are very similar to those the recording industry is making today. If people could listen to the popular artists and songs of the day on the radio, why would they buy records? And that fear ended up becoming a reality when the Great Depression struck and few people had the money to afford records. Most of the record labels went out of business - only two companies managed to survive, one of them by being fortunate enough to be owned by the country's largest radio company. The record industry was largely perceived to be dead. And then, out of the blue, Decca Records was formed and revived the industry by selling recordings of top name artists for the same price that the other labels sold their no-name bands for in dime stores. And rather than being the death of records, radio eventually became the industry's best friend and major means of promotion.

I rather doubt that there will be a modern day equivalent of Decca to come along and save the recording industry this time. There was still a need for the role they served back then. Today there isn't. The record labels are middlemen between artists and listeners who are no longer necessary in light of today's technological advances. And the demise of their relevance will have about as much of a long-term impact on the popularity and viability of music as did the demise of the once-powerful sheet music and piano roll industries. This is something that Congress really needs to keep in mind when it is asked to artificially prop up the relevance of the major labels by means of the RIAA's demands for unreasonably exorbitant royalties.

Imagine if we today were forced to pay exorbitant royalties on top of what is already paid to music publishers in order to make up for all of the sheet music sales that have been lost as a result of recordings and radio. After all, record labels and radio have built multi billion dollar industries off their music while killing off what was once their primary money maker - far more money than the pittance such industries pay today in fees for mechanical licensing and to PROs such as ACSAP. Imagine if a special fee had to be paid every time a sound recording was sold or performed on grounds that it is necessary to compensate the makers of piano rolls for the loss of their market when the public decided that it preferred recordings.

What the major record labels are demanding today is really no different and no less absurd. Congress really should consider matters regarding copyrights and royalties in light of the fact that it is almost a given that the marketplace relevance of the major labels will be significantly reduced in the future - assuming that they even exist other than as trademarks owned by the companies who purchased whatever assets they might have which will still be of value.


Quoted from the host of http://radiodismuke.com.


After this response, there was additional dialogue that I found very interesting, I highly recommend that you go to the article URL and read the comment section. It discusses many other facets of this argument in great detail, as other users raise additional questions about the practicality of eliminating the middle men that record labels are. The same user, Dismuke, offers a point of view that I highly agree with.



Ok, I'm sure this was incredibly boring to those of you that aren't particularly interested in the music industry. For those that are, those are my thoughts.

I was doing some research after reading a friend's blog today, when I came across an incredibly well-written article at the Huffington Post. It addresses something that both sticks in my craw and remains unfortunately common in human society: intolerance and prejudice that stems from ignorance and laziness.

If only it were made mandatory that we took diversity or tolerance classes throughout our K-12 education... classes that would not only teach us to accept others and their beliefs, but to do adequate research before forming opinions as well. That would be a step-forward.

Anyway, here's the link to the article. I strongly recommend it to anyone.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to a wedding announcement in the New York Times. The reason being, the HORRENDOUS writing. For your awkward reading pleasure, a few excerpts:


"AS a child, John W. Warner IV loved explosions, cartoons, army uniforms, pranks involving frogs and ice cream — he called health food "seeds and twigs."

"Through it all he remained a die-hard and distinctive bachelor, sometimes picking dates up in his 1936 Packard or his 1966 Aston Martin. But he grew to dislike breaking hearts as much as he hated eating tofu. "Johnny never wants to let anyone down," said Jill Mullen, a friend."

"He, on the other hand, was unsure about Ms. Hamm, whose family founded the Hamm's Brewing Company, which was based in Minnesota. She was nothing like the wild supermodels and party girls he had been dating. Ms. Hamm has unflashy clothes, jewelry and ways and is the opposite of high-maintenance."

"Soon after they started dating, friends noticed a change in Mr. Warner. He put his pool table up for sale, and started shopping for dining room furniture, now that he had someone to dine with regularly. "He used to watch all these war movies, hours of war movies," said Ramon Ruiz, another friend. "Then, one day he said, 'Change it to the antiques channel.' That's when I knew it was serious."

"The couple wed on Jan. 13 in Jupiter Island, where the bride's family has a vacation home with a sign on the front door that reads: "Friends Welcome. Relatives by Appointment Only." It is an immaculate place with homes that are pastel-colored, like Mentos, and as low profile as its residents seek to be."


After wincing through about a third of the article, I thought to myself, "Surely a family member must have written this. Someone who isn't exactly well-versed in crafting literary masterpieces, but means a lot to both families." I mean, come on... 'homes that are pastel-colored, like Mentos?'


So I Googled the author.



Apparently she's a - *gasp* - celebrated New York Times columnist.


WOW.


I mean, wow.

Celebrated??

A NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST???


Excuse me while I breathe rapidly into a brown paper bag. (That was for you, Listi.)


I just can't put into words how much this boggles my mind and completely throws me for a loop. It's just... insane... disconnected... a garbled mish-mash of unnecessary information.


I don't get it.


Is it a massive inside joke that she's the butt of... or is she subtly making fun of the couple? Do people sincerely enjoy her writing for reasons other than how appallingly mundane and sometimes terrible it is?


If that's the case, well, damn.


In all sincerity, it's a nice idea.... but it's so poorly executed.



Anyway. I'm just confused... and tired... and I thought I would subject you all to some fairly crappy journalism. You can read the announcement in full here.