DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

Possibly and perhaps set out
to watch the clouding willows droop
though a storm returned the borrowed sky
tomorrow did not reply.

-N.H. Pritchard

Perspective

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 e 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. -- D.F.W.

Mom Quotes

I'm curious to see some of your (if there are actually any of you out there) favorite mom quotes.

Mom's are classic.

"I found what I believe to be, a marijuana" - my mom

the new and improved

Kyle J Karate

Omar

One of my favorite fictional characters.

{{{{{DUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDU}}}}}}

April 4, 2010. 8:00 p.m. The Bourbon Theater. Lincoln, Nebraska.

Hip Hop

is better when it's more about, "Money, gear, drugs, guns, Goodyears" than your typical, disingenuous, socially conscious bull you hear in groups such as, Blue Scholars (I saw them recently--not impressed). Having a so called, "social conscious," regardless of artistic context, takes the art out of the social; it makes the artist more apparent than the art.



Raekwon's music, although likely exaggerated and embellished (but what good art isn't?), exposes much more of the hip hop culture than anything a group that editorializes their particular point of view could ever do.

Overtly politicized art is half art as far as I am concerned. Art can only reach as far as its fundamental limitations will allow. Therefore, art based in the ideas, policies, and consciouses of others' is art that only belongs to that artist insofar as they have developed these things for themselves.

Raekwon is an artIst. His songs grow past society's limitations in a way that use a sort of social artifice to recognize culture in a way that allows the product to be the product, as opposed to an auxiliary end to the producer. Right?