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  hardie karges 8:12 am on June 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: MUSIC ( 8 ), video ( 2 )   

  EmptyVee 

  MTV is rapidly evolving from illustrated songs to Hollywood shorts, complete or incomplete with ‘pretty girl singers’ wearing little but shorts, crotch meat for the famished affections. Nevertheless, it’s an opportunity for a new art format. If only someone could see the connection between illustrated songs and sonically sweetened pictures, then there might be something there. Of course very few music videos qualify as anything remotely resembling art, while many short films do. Considering how much teen-culture crap serves as filler for music video channels, removing that should leave room for both music and film. The ideal way, certainly, would be to have only the best of both, or maybe the ‘edgiest’, thus bringing the two fields closer together. Considering the dubious trend of using the film industry and music industry to promote each other’s most pathetic commercial instincts, any new creative approach would be welcome. The widespread use of pop songs to decorate movies, regardless of true applicability, is bad enough without the movies now decorating the songs.

   

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  hardie karges 7:14 am on June 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: entertainment ( 3 )   

  ENTERTAINMENT 

  Entertainment holds me between acts. Entertainment cures all, the light, color, and sound wrapping me up in its long loving arms. Bathe me in images of other faces and other races, fights to the finish with action heroes and multiple chase scenes. Movies always have happy endings. The good guy gets the girl and the bad guys get bars. The girls drive their fast guys and the guys drive fast cars. The good guys get the high-school sweetheart and the split-level complete with breakfast nook. The bad guys get cheap whores, cheap hotels, and battles with battles. It’s funny how the bad guys’ bullets always miss their targets, while the good guys’ bullets always hit. The good guys can even dodge bullets. Anything can happen in the movies; stories are created with effects and editing. Sometimes life imitates art, and the stories have happy endings. I could do without all the chase scenes, though, and all the guns, too. Sometimes the simple boredom of real life is preferable.
   
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  hardie karges 8:44 am on June 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 )   

  ART FOR ARTISTS’ SAKE 

  Art, like language, is a form of communication, but with slightly different goals. The goal of art, like almost anything else beyond mere survival, is to create pleasant sensations and enjoyment, that is, entertainment. The only question is the best way to do that. Meaning is secondary, only one of many sorts of entertainment. Any meaning ascribed to a portrait is usually of the simplest sort, nostalgia and sentiment for an object of affection. Landscapes are no different, really, love of the known sort, simple sensations. With Impressionism and Cubism and Surrealism, we move through increasing levels of abstraction, to the point where familiar objects are non-existent, grossly distorted, or unrecognizable. So what sort of entertainment comes from the pure abstraction of Expressionism? Abstract meaning, one would assume, the pure thrill of colors and textures having their way with canvas. This is probably not true, however, given the implication that anyone, or at least anyone with high intellectual capacity, could and would find enjoyment in it. In actuality enjoyment seems to come from deriving the sort of meaning that comes from having studied art and knowing its trials and travails over the course of history. In other words, the works are derivative, dependent on prior study of other material, high art in the sense of highly schooled art, largely useless for those not in the club.

   
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  hardie karges 9:00 am on June 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: POETRY ( 12 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  THE BIZNIZ OF POETRY 

  Poetry is what happens in the cracks, the empty spaces, the margins along paper’s rim, bar chits, and bills not yet paid, void if detached. The recycled paper bin is the wellhead of new thought. Poetry is what comes out when the brain is unwinding, disengaged, coasting downhill after a long night of tossing and turning. The early morning hours are fertile ground for plowing, fallow fields for planting. Poetry is a job where you gotta’ be on call. If you can’t write in the dark, then you don’t get the job. Poetry is what happens between acts, entertainment that truly holds you between. We’re competing with jugglers and clowns; we’re not competing with scientists and philosophers. A word is worth a thousand pictures. Writing is like gene-splicing, re-shuffling the codons. The most innocent mutations can lead to entirely new species. I mine my memories to see if there’s something I forgot, cross-reference myself to find out where I stand, second-guess myself as to where I’ll likely end up. Writing is like sex; I try different positions to make it come out fast and hard, in light hot licks.

   
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  hardie karges 10:50 am on June 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 ), MUSIC ( 8 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  EDIT THYSELF 

  “Edit thyself” is the first commandment of writing and the hardest thing for anyone to do with his own work. We love our own work as our own children and hate to cut anything out. More than that, it’s just hard to look at one’s own work objectively, even harder to toss things out, knowing you might never get them back. That’s the feeling you get when the computer goes dead and you haven’t saved your work. It’s a question of negative space and positive space. Are you creating something where nothing previously existed or are you chipping away at the whole potato, just to reveal the precious sculpture within? Is the potato half full or half empty? Are you creating something out of nothing or are you merely clearing away the rubbish so that the diamond can shine through? As a child aficionado of popular music, I lamented the fact that most of the appropriate themes of life had already been discovered, and that therefore the future of the industry was grim, a sad thought, considering the amount of enjoyment that it’s capable of giving. Such are the vagaries of youth. There is no limit to creativity. Its potential is exponential. The more we create, the more there is to create, stone shards, wood shavings, clay splatters, paint drips, wasted words, all just like the film snips lying on the edit room floor of a life almost too abundant for living.

   
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  hardie karges 9:15 am on June 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 ), destiny   

  I’m not here to pop bubbles; 

  I’m here to blow them. Henry Miller and William Burroughs were products of their times, the best of their batch in my opinion. In 1934 we needed a prolonged insult, a spit in the face of Art, a kick to the ass of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Art, and Beauty, just like we needed Cubism. In 1959 we needed to see ourselves turned inside out, our worst nightmares become reality, just like we needed Abstract Expressionism. We don’t need that right now. My heroes have succeeded in tearing down the old walls that confined us. Now we need to build some new ones on new foundations. We live in a different time and I have a different mission. I want to restore Truth, Beauty, and Goodness to our lives, before it’s too late. Things are too crazy. The planet will survive, but people may not, especially in a civilized form with culture and language. We take it all for granted, the culture that took thousands of years to accumulate, the life that took millions to evolve. It could all disappear in a puff of smoke, with the strike of a match.

   
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  hardie karges 7:29 am on June 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 ), POETRY ( 12 )   

  POETRY AND ALL THAT RAP 

  Forget story line; forget characterization. Like his critic told Jackson Pollock in the movie, “there’s only paint and surface”, words and paper, time, a medium for light and sound. A medium it is, certainly nothing rare nor well done. Nobody’s writing the great American novel anymore, just pulp fiction for ultimate adaptation to screenplay. Most poetry sucks, too, reverted to the flower arrangements in fragile crocks that the Beats smashed to bits fifty years ago to no future avail. When the smoke clears, poetry’s firmly back in the control of the academic pencil pushers and their precious little artifices and the delightful breaking of grammatical rules for dramatic effect. Someone who’d never dangle a participle leaves a subject noun suspended in mid-air at the end of a stanza waiting for the verb beginning the next stanza to rescue it and its lack of importance from certain oblivion, the flying trapeze of literature. This proves nothing except that the author went to poetry class and learned the insider’s language. I get all giggly just thinking about it. Of course ‘slam’ poetry tries to undo all that artsy-fartsy crap by the pure will of ego unleashed on a noisy stage, releasing obscenities on a suspecting public in dire need of sensibilities left to offend. Its similarities and simultaneous emergence with rap music is more than coincidental. Henry Miller and William Burroughs were the right men for the jobs of their times, but it remains to be seen who’s right for the new millennium, an age of interdependence possibly beyond the grasp of heroes.

   
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  hardie karges 6:53 am on June 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: desire ( 4 ), progress, technology ( 12 )   

  DESIRE-A-DAY 

  Welcome to the poem-a-day club. I’d like to think it’s ‘automatic writing’, but no, it’s work. Automatic writing was all the rage for a while with the Dadaists and surrealists and psychics and psychoanalysts looking for shortcuts to the ‘inner self’, as if what’s there might simply be downloaded on to paper. That was a golden age for art and literature and even science, too, the years 1900-30, the age of relativity, quantum, cubism, surrealism, pragmatism, positivism, and more, literally an age of knowledge that we have yet to supersede, despite all our technology. Those were the good old days of silly-eyed optimism and belief in endless progress. Now that we’re swimming in the fruits of that progress, we don’t know what to do with it. We’ll probably end up blowing it, arguing about who gets the biggest piece of the pie, without appreciating the fact that the pie didn’t even exist a century ago. I lived in a house during my childhood that wouldn’t even be considered ‘livable’ by middle class standards in the US now, regardless of the fact that my father died in a house very similar, by choice. Desires are somehow very adept at keeping up with the Joneses.

   
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  hardie karges 8:09 am on June 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: DNA ( 46 ), EVOLUTION ( 21 ), language ( 173 )   

  DNAANDDNA 

  This is not writing; this is word processing, processing words to infinity in some sort of differential calculus. Word corresponds to thought corresponds to perception corresponds to reality. Did thought create language or did language create thought? The only questions remaining are those concerning reality itself, the field of reference. Language itself is only a medium, certainly neither rare nor well-done, high nor low, and an overstuffed one, spilling tracks and traces of ancient transgressions and future possibilities. I doubt that language can actually create reality, but then you wouldn’t expect that of DNA until you see the results. Does DNA create evolution or does evolution create DNA? To find some creative principle in evolution would be the greatest discovery of the 21^st century. If bacteria can create enzymes to combat antibiotics from scratch without the slow motion process of mutation and natural selection, then what else might be possible? Even if a bacterium is merely dialing up DNA at random to try and come up with a winning combination, still it is doing so in response to a need. While the needs of humans are far more complex than those of microorganisms, and an average generation twenty-five years, not twenty-five minutes, still the effects might be cumulative. The finest paintings of history are made of individual brush-strokes, as is the finest literature, even closer by analogy to DNA.

  Joram Arentved is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Joram Arentved 1:56 pm on June 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    If there has to be any certain obligation of mine©, it’s This Time Travel Phenomenology, on which issue you & your nearest Lawyer, Police & even Any Judge are a.s.a.p. for whatever why please welcome to receive any of my further & most relevant information, i.e. most accurate, so that I can later on & the sooner, the better, of course tell & e.g. help You All & myself etc. find out, What’s Common Sense & e.g. All About: to be continued.
    Greetings from Yours, faithfully,
    Joram Arentved, The Universe’s
    legal & official owner©,
    (there are 2 more).

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  hardie karges 12:22 pm on June 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  OLD BEGINNING 

  It’s a novel; it’s a travel book; it’s science fiction; it’s poetry; it’s stream of consciousness; it’s philosophy; it’s art; it’s automatic writing; it’s typing; it’s word processing; it’s desperation, love, inspiration, and sex, congealed into phonetic symbols. If someone accepts a dollar bill folded, bent, or mutilated, then it’s still good until someone blows the whistle. If those in position to pontificate judge these efforts to be worthy, then the work is good until the door slams on my fragile dreams. Free enterprise is a confidence game. You whip out your dick and you take your chances. How do I know what will come out of my mouth until I put my foot in it? Who am I to ask you to waste your time digesting these same words that I just let out on to paper? I’m just a smarter-than-average guy with a lust for language, same birthday as Bob Dylan (but not the same year) and the guy in the T-Mobile office in San Diego (but still not the same year), possessed of wanderlove and dreams that don’t stop, speaker of English, Thai, Spanish, and smatterings of a half-dozen other languages. What else? I have a degree in philosophy, I worked first as a carpenter then businessman and now hopefully writer, I’ve traveled in forty-eight countries, and I live in Thailand up close to the Golden Triangle. I’m self-taught in anthropology, history, and linguistics. I have spermicidal tendencies but still am very interested in reproduction of the species. Do I get the job?