Only a Blockhead

A Matter of Living Death

"Death isn't what it used to be," says Guy Brown in a Guardian article worth pondering. In the past, people were usually "fully alive one day, and fully dead the next." Then "in the 20th century, the average lifespan in the world doubled." For the last 100 years, it has been increasing by a relentless 2.2 years per decade with no end in sight even in countries with the highest life expectancy. As a result "people in developed countries--and increasingly in the developing world--tend to die old and slowly from degenerative diseases brought on by ageing. Death is currently preceded by an average of 10 years of chronic ill health. The last decade of life has become a living death."

Both my parents died in their 90s in the drawn out fashion described above. It was their choice if choice is the right word, for theirs was society's default belief that one avails oneself of the medical profession in order to live as long as one can, whatever the cost. My parents paid the cost with great courage. Being of a more cowardly persuasion, I vowed never to buy into that belief, for I never want a life such as they lived in their last years.

We instinctively avoid death. Maybe that's why most of my contemporaries pop pills and monitor their cholesterol level, apparently unaware that there lies the road to the loss of mobility, the dementia, the depression of extreme old age as life crawls to its close. My university campus has just installed AED defibrillators around every corner. I would be most, um, disheartened should one of them be used on me. If my heart stops, it will be for a very good reason. It will be worn out, diseased in a way young hearts are not, clogged from years of enjoying life, at any rate, well beyond its best before date.

This is not a death wish, don't get me wrong. I'll rage against the dying of the light with the best of them, but I'd like to do it while I can still get myself to the bathroom and know my ass from a hole in the ground.

--Julian

What I Don't Like About Rock Music

Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses

Howard Hampton

Something grisly happened to rock music in the 1970s that it has never quite recovered from: the sound congealed into a dense, ponderous and soporific mass.  In the words of an all-too-popular Jethro Tull album of the period, rock became "Thick as a Brick."  Nowhere was this more apparent than on FM radio.  There the playlists narrowed, rock 'n' roll aesthetics were codified in lockstep fashion, and the music business consolidated its clammy grip on the public's imagination.  It was like an Iron—or rather Led, as in Zeppelin—Curtain of uniformity had fallen over the freedoms of the 1960s.  Where playfulness, humor, chaotic weirdness, and wayward passion once reigned supreme, now even the excess and outrage came to seem stage-managed by some invisible bureaucracy of FM station consultants, management firms, technocrat producers, and record company apparatchiks.

Rock, as FM radio defined, promoted, and administered it, became less concerned with representing life than with merchandising ready-to-wear lifestyles, serving up self-mythologizing caricatures of lust, rebellion, sensitivity, and anything else bands could get away with.  Somehow, though, all moods and whims of the period seemed eternally to return to Led Zeppelin's stunningly ubiquitous "Stairway to Heaven," which stood astride the era like a colossus of drug-inspired kitsch, melding the ethereal with the histrionic: Donovan inflated to King Kong size.

From Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses by Howard Hampton.

—David

The End of the Hike

Where Our Hike Ended

—David

A Day Late, but Always Timely

A Thanksgiving Prayer

—David

Expressing the wordless in words

An experience can often be boiled down to 17 syllables:

    A clear night; the moon
    illuminating the yard
    A dog barks and barks

But sometimes I want more words to better approximate the wordless:

    A cold, clear night
    As clear as it ever gets here on the populated plain
    Fills the sky with stars
    Bright, white, glittering

    The moon illuminates the garden lawn

    A dog barks and barks

--Julian

Abandoned Toy

Abandoned Toy

--NC Tate

Sobering thought

From Scientific Blogging: If you are older than 40 the world's population has doubled in your lifetime.

--Julian

What the Music is Really Saying

Did Shostakovich always mean the opposite of what he said?  Did he take no joy at all in the prospect that 'freedom-loving Peoples will at last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism"?  Even in the grip of totalitarian terror, life goes on.  People are able to feel joy, rage, sorrow, love.  Music is, in fact, better at communicating these primal emotions than it is at managing anything as tricky as irony.  Irony, in its standard definition, is saying something other than what one appears to be saying.  To talk about musical irony, we first have to agree on what the music appears to be saying.  This is invariably difficult to do.  We can, however, learn to be wary of interpretations that display too much certitude about what the music is 'really saying,' and stay alert to multiple levels of meaning.

Alex Ross, in The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

—David

new moon

The new moon
glides across the treetops as I ride
and comes to rest when I get home.

--Julian

In front of the fire station

In front of the local fire station, between a warehouse and a rice paddy, after school high school kids sometimes hang out. On the margins of the adult world they squat or straddle bikes and scooters, talking, sometimes laughing, cigarettes glowing in the dark.

Cycling home late last night, I saw the spot was deserted and strewn with food wrappers and containers, discarded tissues and empty cigarette packets, scattered with as little thought as the surrounding trees give to dropping their leaves.

This morning the ground was swept clean: trash, leaves, all of it. Thanks to fellow blockhead David, I recognized it as one more example of uncoerced socialism in The People's Republic of Japan.

--Julian