This ain't so bad at all!

Sorry I haven't posted anything in the past week or whatever (if it even matters). But I've found some really great stuff while glued to my laptop in the endless pursuit of knowing more things than I knew yesterday and then writing about them for money.

1. I wrote a long piece based on all the Turgenev/Nihilism/Postmodernism stuff I rambled about not too long ago. Because of that research I discovered that I was right about many aspects of "postmodernism" (ie; it's not really a coherent thing at all), but also that I was a bit closed-minded about it and there are some writers whose stuff I really appreciate. One of them is Richard Rorty. When I first was exposed to some of his ideas I thought they were reprehensible. Of course, when I read the interviews with him gathered in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, I realized I agreed with an incredible amount of pragmatist and antifoundationalist thought. It also germinated a drive to recast elements of nihlism in a more positive light (though that's a really long-term project, I guess). You can get a good idea of where my brain might be after reading the essay through which I was exposed to Rorty's ideas. Now I don't necessarily agree with everything in the essay, but I don't think I have to agree with anything. Necessarily.

2. Tonight I finished an article on string theory and cosmology that was exhausting to research. Fortunately I found a great guide to help me out and give me some focus. A couple months ago I waddled my way through Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and enjoyed it despite not really understanding a whole lot of what was going on. Thankfully, PBS made a three part documentary based on the book that makes a fantastic companion! The whole thing is streamed here in segments which make it way more manageable to watch. It also makes it a hell of a lot easier to watch a part again if you didn't understand it the first time. I had to do that a few times.

3. After this week I'll hopefully be able to return to posting a bit more regularly. I just have a bunch of material to submit in a short time. Since I have no idea when the site I'm writing for is going to be up and running, I may post more excerpts and links to keep any readers updated on things. Also, if any of you haven't yet, go check out some of my friends' blogs. A few of them (here, here & here) have been contributing material to the same website and I think the product will be incredibly interesting (I'll keep everyone updated when it finally goes online).

Computing Consciousness?

Quick update for today: I just got hooked up with what seems like will be a sweet, paid writing gig for a website. Some of the material may overlap with what I post on here already, but the important thing is that somebody will be paying me. Not sure how much this will get in the way of SpaceshipBastille, but seriously, could I be more inconsistent anyway? Probably not.

In some amazing science/brain news, researchers are building a model brain from the bottom up. Best of all, what they have so far works! Unfortunately, it'll be some time before the full plans can be put to effect because our brains are far more powerful than the supercomputers we have available. I really appreciated what the head neuroscientist, Henry Markram, said about consciousness near the end of the article:

"There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes," Markram says. "Consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don't know why you wouldn't be able to generate a conscious mind."

Since the time I first started engaging the ideas of consciousness that many philosophers and scientists probe, I've wondered if folks were overthinking everything, that our consciousness just is the experience of processing so much information simultaneously. We think there must be something else to it, when really it's just that there is so much going on that keeping it all together is simply too overwhelming. Thinking about the extent of the universe or how something could be "infinite" is overwhelming to most minds, so the fact that our brains are continually processing so much information surely inhibits our ability to make sense of that processing. In some way I'm sure this is connected to meditation and "clearing your mind" type actions (or non-action, really). I guess my ultimate point is that we are the products of our processing of experiences and perceptions of the world around us. To think that there's something else going on seems a bit daft, eh?

Seed Mag: "Out of the Blue"

This is for Satan!...or Odin!...or someone...

Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground - Michael Moynihan & Didrik Søderlind



I had been eyeing this book at work for some time now and finally picked it up this past week. As far as any book on "metal" is concerned, this is surely one of the best and most thoroughly researched. Black Metal is a subgenre whose reputation far outsizes its reach. I would bet most people know little about it and the scene itself isn't particularly large, but
it has a prominent (short) history of murder and destruction. I'm not aware if author Michael Moynihan has a direct connection to the scene itself, but I do know that he moved in some odd musical circles and may have far-right connections that go unacknowledged in the book. Søderlind is apparently a former music writer from Norway and doesn't have any such connections it seems.
In terms of the content of this book, the history is exhaustive with profiles of the major personalities involved with black metal since its inception. The material, though probably shocking to many, is presented quite even-handedly and the major figures aren't spared critique. Reading this is worthwhile for just the history of the fledgling Norwegian scene and the subsequent terror waged through church-burnings, a few murders and right-wing political action.
It is this latter story, though, that is most open to critique here. While there is no doubt that many figures in black metal have rightist views there is no profiling of characters who do not espouse such views. Whether this is a conscious move on the part of the authors to exclude such remains unknown. There may just not be anyone vociferously leftist within the scene's ranks to bother reporting (and let's face it, BM is too extreme for moderate personalities). It is true that the martial/medieval aesthetic and raw power of the music excites those with affinities towards power and violence. Thus, there is a natural fascistic connection that can be made.
As well, some of the folks discussed in Lords of Chaos are claimed to be "intelligent", I can't help but object as many of their ideas are clearly nonsensical and betray an incredible sociological ignorance. For some, an adolescent "satanism" matured into political doctrines based on pagan/heathen Nordic legends imposed on modern circumstances. Clearly some of these men (as most of them are) have difficulty discerning reality from fantasy. I think the authors could (and should) have been more critical of some of these views, (though I'm sure the book would have ended up much longer if they had followed through with this) and their failure to do so has led some to wonder if this is a veiled or subtle attempt to sway readers to rightist opinions.While I would not say that far right opinions are necessarily glorified, they certainly could have been more effectively critiqued. It is the lack of critique in this regard that betrays possible rightist sentiments of (one of) the author(s).
On a whole, however, I'd say that this book is definitely worth checking out for anyone interested in metal, in Nordic mythology or in rightist politics as a movement.

...In which Alex resolves a pointless argument

The other night Sam (he who once posted on basketball here) and I engaged in a debate on which was the better early Today Is The Day album. He stuck to his stupid guns and remains (I'm assuming, since this was less than a week ago) convinced that Willpower is superior. I, on the other hand, am of the belief that the self-titled (Today Is The Day) surpasses its predecessor. Degenerate drunks as we are, the "discussion" trailed off into some haze mixed of Czech beer and assholery that, if not for the power of spacetime, may have continued unabated into some future that we are all better off not having ever experienced. Not that there is ill will of any sort, just that we are opinionated and rational discourse beer doth not procure.
So to Spike Lee the shit out of this, I'm gonna state my firm opinion that none of TITD's albums top Sadness Will Prevail. And in a grand gesture symbolic of where drunken arguments about music hardly ever fail to lead, I bring to you a video from that majestic double album: "The Descent"



Today Is The Day plays NYC on St. Patrick's day.

The Shape of Nihilism to Come

"The favourite formula was to declare that 'spiritual' - for the naive primordial opposition of spirit and matter was still accepted in those days - had not kept with 'material' advance. This was usually said with an air of moral superiority to the world at large. Mostly there was a vague implication that if these other people would only refrain from using modern inventions so briskly, or go to church more, or marry earlier and artlessly, or read a more 'spiritual' type of literature, or refrain from mixed bathing, or work harder and accept lower wages, or be more respectful and obedient to constituted authority, all might yet be well."

- H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come

This week at work I picked up H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come as I put down David Ramsay Steele's Atheism Explained. The latter of these is actually a fantastic read for anyone who is interested in the philosophical underpinnings of atheism and doesn't wanted to be ranted at by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. Arguments and (a)theological currents I hadn't been privy to or thought of filled this book to the point where I had to put it down. Essentially it got boring because, let's face it, there are no plausible or logical arguments for God and once you've read nearly 200 pages of debunking various arguments, things start to repeat and get a bit stale. Wonderful effort, though, and provides great answers to folks who get badgered by religious people about why they don't believe.


As for Mr. Wells, he was a genius and a prophetic bastard to be sure. I think I had mentioned in a recent post my ongoing struggles to understand and get a grasp on postmodernism and the postmodern condition. I had finished Terry Eagleton's The Illusions of Postmodernism, a critical yet even-handed examination of the "phenomenon" currently en vogue, at the same time I completed Turgenev's Fathers & Sons. At some point in my mind nihilism and postmodernism entwined and I've been gasping for air ever since. I bring up Wells, and the quote above in particular, because he was a good thirty-odd years ahead of the curve with some of the descriptions of what has come to define our contemporary modernity.


Right now I'm working out some of the interconnections I'm finding between the nihilism found in postmodernism, the supposed nihilism that follows the death of God (i.e.; the Nietzchean conception), and Turgenev's conception as portrayed in Fathers & Sons. Of course, this is material that would probably fill some huge volume, so I'm not even going to attempt it here, but I'm excited about the possibilities that Wells has set up in his own "history of the future" and how it might interact with what's in my head already. That's something I'll post on when I get there.

Our Modern Diet: Heavy On the Plastics, Please

It just so happens that I grew up in the self-proclaimed Pioneer Plastics City, Leominster, Massachusetts (and birthplace of Johnny Appleseed...yeah, he was real). Home to the National Plastics Center & Museum, the plastic pink flamingo, dozens of little injection molding plants and similar factories, we grew up surrounded by plastics. Leominster even has streets named for various types of the stuff. The downside to all this being the toxic wastes scattered in who-knows-how-many sites around town. Apparently we're also infamous for high rates of autism amongst kids who grew up in the shadow of the long-gone Foster Grant sunglass factory (the site is a strip mall now, yay America). My dad and his siblings used to play down in those swamps and eat the blueberries. To make a long story short, my younger brother got off pretty easy and just had some minor learning dysfunctions (and in a grand irony, is now an elementary school teacher). I am just chronically underemployed and a-motivated, though the cause is as-yet undetermined. Oh, and my stories never have a point.

Anyway, I figure this is as good a way as any to bring up some new findings on plastic containers that I just saw over at Scientific American. Around the time I entered college carrying around your own Nalgene was a bit of a fad amongst the crunchies and activist kids. I still notice folks carrying them around, attached to their belt-loops or backpacks. Not long after the trend got popular a rumour had begun that they leached chemicals into the water, though most kids passed it off not thinking much of it. Well, turns out that rumour's been proven true about eight years later. Scientists are conflicted as to how much damage the chemical (known as Bisphenol A or BPA) actually does, but it's generally agreed that continuous consumption of this is moreso bad than good. Go read the article to find out more about the studies involved as I'm not motivated enough to rehash it all here.

I personally have unverified hypotheses about the nature of our particular strain of American stupidity and our amazing levels of toxin consumption. Let's just say I've had experience with chemically-affected (not altogether negative, either) people most of my life, so I can speak with marginal authority (as I'm only a trained social scientist).

Hey, China, here's to your children's future! <<makes plastic-y fake 'clink' noise>>

You Need a Bun to Bite, Benny Lava?

This is easily in the top-8 funniest things I've ever seen. Completely and totally makes up for what feels like a semi-lost day.



Absolutely Hilarious Indian Music Video - Watch more free videos

I'm really hoping my friend Justin is prancing around on some Indian hillside singing a song just like this as I type. That would really make my day.

Rootless Rooted To This Router

I'm currently sitting in my room listening to self-selectable internet radio, reading a fantastic discussion on humanity and placelessness, and ruminating on critiques of postmodernism that I've been reading at work. In the past seven years I've lived in nine different apartments and I'll be moving again at the end of March (most likely and hopefully), hardly ever getting the chance to settle in before having to up and out all over again. Regardless of where I live, though it seems, I can tune in to knowledge and information distributed across vast times and spaces. At any time I can (and often choose to) disconnect from my surroundings and envelop myself in a world that I seemingly make for myself. Of course I'm not going to get into the real pros and cons of such a situation.
But what I really wonder at this moment is how I'm not supposed to feel separate and disoriented, without narrative and only the most tenuous grip on what could be considered "true" or "real." As much as these attributes seem to define the postmodern condition I can hardly help but heap barrels of disdain upon what amounts to little more than intellectual criminality and cultural hogwash.
None of us should really be posting inane diary entries for anyone around the world to read, but after spending most of our lives (at least those of us under 30 or so) being dictated to by every conceivable form of media, we'd love for somebody to listen to us for just a minute, please! If everyone else's bullshit opinion is valid and credible, surely my "educated" opinion is worthwhile, too, right?
Well, probably not generally speaking. But until we have the intellectual courage to move and think beyond tired, lazy, paralyzing postmodern theoretical drivel I'm afraid we as a technologically-connected segment of our species are confined to remain captives of this spectacle. In the meantime I've been trying to muddle my way through critiques of this state and try to make sense of a diffuse body of purposefully obfuscating, jargonistic theory that will probably only be really understood when we're dead.
So far I've found these two books really enlightening and helpful:

Christopher Butler - A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism
Terry Eagleton - The Illusions of Postmodernism

Both explain the pros, cons, ambivalences and context of all this mental buggery. If you can relate to anything I just wrote and need help clearing your mind, I think these books are a great place to start.

It's the 19th Century All Over Again...Again

I'm really on a latter-1800s kick at the moment: I finished Huysmans' The Damned last week, Zola's Germinal yesterday and just today began Turgenev's Fathers & Sons. Another way of putting it is that I'm catching up on some classics, but really, it's just this period that's having a huge effect on me. One of the major themes of the period (and these three novels do a great job of covering the disparate attitudes) is the struggle between the dawning age of science, mechanization and industry and the fading world of religion, metaphysics and romanticism.

It almost seemed for a while...well, let's face it, for most of the 20th century, that the scientific age of modernism had definitively triumphed. The world wars, communism, the rise of the technological era: for a large part of the world that romantic, metaphysical age had long since passed into history. Now I don't know if this is just a curiously American thing, but in reading these novels (as well as other bits of research) and following current events you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that we have thoroughly sloughed off the skin of the pre-industrial era. Sure, we're technologically advanced, but we're also ridiculously religious and too many people have failed to accept the non-divine revelations even of Darwin.

There is the other possibility that we've completed a circle and the scientific, progressive attitudes and successes they have brought have been turned upside-down by those who fear the soulless-ness of our modern (some might say post-modern, i don't know) age. There's a deep yearning for some return to metaphysics, some sort of spiritualism that pervades this place and I fail to be able to determine the source(s) of it. In the meantime I find myself running aghast towards other ages to find analogues, examples of this happening in the past to understand the cycles, why this is all repeating itself. For the most part things always repeat themselves and all the early religious systems recognized this (particularly the Hindu/Vedic systems), but twas all destroyed by the linearity of Christianity...

Before I ramble off into the moonlight, the original intent of this post was to write about Germinal, but I don't think any succinct reply is possible with regard to such a dense, overpowering masterpiece. The truths it contains remain relevant in our age, which says as much about Zola's awareness and ability to convey his time as it says about the failings of the industrial systems that have uplifted some segments of the world's population. Maybe the truth behind these novels lay in the dystopia of the present, the possibility of the future and the romance of an idealized past (made possible by our selective memories and amazing ability to forget). Our myths retain their power because our lives cycle, maybe spiraling ever so slightly outward, but always treading close enough to the old, worn paths that it's impossible to lose them. We try desperately to create anew without the ability to truly move away and that's why we, as a people, as a civilization, remain perpetually torn at this event horizon.

JayJay, What Am I Doing?

Alright, in order to marginally level out the excessive testosterone of Super Bowl Sunday (GO PATS!), I'm gonna post about art this afternoon. However, first I have to put in a mention for the best Tom Hanks movie ever, Mazes & Monsters. The plot of this 1982 masterpiece revolves around four college friends whose love for the game Mazes & Monsters gets a little out of hand. We watched this last night after finishing our own D&D campaign and, man, it really capped off the night perfectly.

Okay, now for the art. On Wednesday I made a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art mainly to check out the Indian Art. (My friend Laurence is designing a new tattoo for me based on the bronze Nataraja sculptures of the Chola period.) Of course, my luck being my luck, the Indian and South Asian rooms were closed for Wednesday only. So to make a day of it I wandered through the European rooms to find old medieval stuff about satanism and whatnot (see my previous post on The Damned) and then traipse through the modern art wing. I took a bunch of notes on the stuff I thought was cool, so here's a sample of some things I think are awesome...

This is really the only awesome medieval/satanist thing I found, but it's super rad. That piece of paper at the bottom reads, "The Devil doesn't jest. No, the Devil [does not play games]" How fucking sick is that?! And those claws! And that skull is upside-down and there's smoke coming out of it. Conjur that, impressionists!

Pieter van Laer (Il Bamboccio), Magic Scene with Self-Portrait


Pretty much everything Joan Miró has ever done is awesome. There's some great stuff of his at MoMA, but The Met has got some winners, too...

Constellation: Toward the Rainbow (1941)

This one is older and less "out there", but is still quite striking and you can see glimpses of what his future holds...

Vines & Olive Trees, Tarragona (1919)

Now this guy, Yves Tanguy, apparently was self-taught. I guess Jimi Hendrix was, too, but Tanguy's paintings demolish any song that Hendrix ever wrote. I'll fight you if you disagree. (He's also got more at MoMA, of course, but this one might be the best anyway)

Indefinite Divisibility (1942)

And this, this one, man. I've been to The Met before and don't ever recall being so enthralled with a piece before. Hell, I don't recall ever seeing this one at all! But for Pete's sake, this is not only huge, but you could examine it for hours. It's also made of encaustic, which is a mixture of paint and melted wax, so the texture is actually reminiscent of a cave wall. It's so perfect. Please, for the love of Pete, go just to see this. Stare at it for hours. A dumb picture on my dumb site doesn't do any justice...

Victor Brauner, Prelude to a Civilization (1954)

Now get back to your american football and beer. I can't tell you how nervous I am about this Pats possible perfect season right now.