Naked and spectacular

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2018-05-10

I am not impressed




I am not one of you.
I am not of this place.
I am not a sterile alien
in an environment mediated
for my comfort and convenience.

I am not impressed
by your pretentious stateliness,
your hollow decadent sobriety,
your cluttered simplification,
your demonic rationality,
your psychopathic paranoid security,
your technological connected isolation,
your nihilistic self-conscious alienation,
your incomprehensible layers
of ironic PC cynicism,
your empty distracted busyness,
your guarded defensive attempts at socialisation,
your beautiful plastic carcasses
taunting my desperate loneliness,
your sterile industrial filth,
your abstracted categorised scheduled
attempts at spontaneity and joyous expression,
your reactionary self-justifying
fear of anything remotely different,
your angry ancient humiliated defeat,
your opinions,
borrowed from deformed malignant celebrities,
your offence,
reeking of violent disgust,

Your pleasures of the flesh
are merely self-abuse and delusion.
Your freedom
is selfish irresponsible isolation.
Your democracy
is entertainment.
Your consumer capitalism
is just a flurry of hysterical advertisements,
shamelessly manipulative,
to justify emptying the earth
and filling it back up again.

Your entire wretched civilisation
disgusts me,
makes me want to gouge out my eyes,
castrate myself in hopeless horniness,
harden my heart with bitter cynicism,
or run away into the wilderness.
(I choose the latter.)

I see through your pretense.
I don't believe you.
I see you,
trying to be fake,
painfully real,
painfully feeling, noticing,
undermining your own observations.
I see your brittle tender humanity
tucked inside your personalised
plastic packaging.

But I haven't been paying attention
to the hype, the cultural conversation.
How am I supposed to be talking now?
Am I naive or offensive?
I don't understand.
I have stepped away too many times.
I'm too far gone.
I'm not like you anymore.
I'm not a part of your futile games.
I'm just a confused beast
just self-conscious enough to look normal
most of the time.

But messy silly fun in the wilderness
is obscene and illegal in the city;
and I cannot reconcile that
with my need to not wall myself
in a private garden of despair.

But right now
I love you.
It hurts me
but I love you
and I want us to travel together
in the forest, up the beach,
into each other's hearts and trust.

Somehow I still have faith
in your ability to break through.
I possess precious memories of
moments of mutual discovery
that are more real to me
than your robotic role-playing.

I am merely human, transforming,
amorphous, ignorant, intuitive, emotional.
I need love, intimacy, mutual respect,
honesty and purpose.
I refuse to imprison myself in
a suffocating private paradise.

I want to sleep under the stars
or in my tent,
on the earth,
wrapped up warm
with you, in embrace,
without thought,
deep sleep
and
deep wake
into a vivid morning
transcendent in the new day,
no tendrils spreading me around the world,
unwaveringly present,
flowing through a simple beautiful life.

2018-05-06

Sony Music's looting of Bob Dylan's genius





This is a studio outtake, a version of the song that was abandoned by Bob Dylan for the superior version he included on Blonde On Blonde. It has been released 50 years later because Sony Music do not want unreleased Bob Dylan recordings to enter the public domain. Many of these "bootleg" releases are great treasures, but mostly it is just an attempt by Sony to milk Bob Dylan's popularity for all it is worth, and Bob is clearly beyond caring.

The video itself is a meaningless set of advertising-like images with only the most superficial and incoherent relationship to the song and to each other. It is basically an advertisement for the album release and has zero artistic intention or integrity in itself.

To read more into it than perhaps is appropriate, it can be seen as an attempt, inadvertent maybe, to render powerless the incredibly powerful artistry of Dylan's mid-'60s music, by releasing all of the outtakes and dregs and failed attempts to capture the brilliance that has surprised and delighted many people over the last 50 years, and to juxtapose that music with images that suggest a vacuous simulacrum of the world that the song emerged from and that it represents and reminds us of.  Basically, turning great art into hollow artifice.

It is a sign of the incredible strength and integrity of Bob Dylan's work that it survives the shameless looting Sony Music has subjected it to over the last 20 years.

2018-05-03

Quinoa's Symposium Podcast - Ep 1: Death



The first episode of Quinoa's new Symposium Podcast.

A philosophical discussion recorded live in the Western Australian wilderness, in the tradition of Plato's Symposium or the Native American Talking Circle.

The topic of discussion in this episode is death. What is death? What happens after death? What does this tell us about the context of life, and therefore how to live?

Please make a donation to cover the costs of making this podcast happen. Quinoa is an independent artist with no income offering his work online, accessible to everyone.

Please feel free to contact me with any feedback or response.

For further great listening, check out my 24 minute spoken word performance about my experience of grief. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqQ6S3GrwRg