Money, status, sex, drugs

[Layne] Staley denounces “the hypocrite norm, running their boring drills,” and commits himself to consuming whatever drugs are available to him. “Money, status, nothing to me,” Staley sings, though that’s not completely true—it’s the money and status that “allow” him to live this way.

Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell are the living dead

Related: All posts tagged excess

The liberation of all deviant desires

rocco siffredi

Careful readers of Natural Right and History soon realize, however, that [Leo] Strauss was a subtle critic of the philosophic principles that founded the United States. He brings into doubt the principles on which Enlightenment liberalism and America were founded, and he shows them to be woefully deficient. Strauss, it becomes clear to the alert reader, was a trenchant critic of the principles and institutions that are most uniquely American (e.g., natural rights, individualism, limited government, and laissez-faire capitalism) precisely because they are all ultimately grounded on a moral philosophy of rational self-interestedness. Strauss believed that such principles ultimately lead to nihilism by untying man from the “eternal order.” In other words, he believed that liberal-capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. For Strauss, the very idea of a right to “the pursuit of happiness” necessarily leads to the liberation of all deviant desires.

The Death of Neoconservatism: Six Questions for C. Bradley Thompson

O victory forget your underwear we're free

We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.

Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, Modern Art was a CIA Weapon

Meanwhile, on the other side of the firewall...

Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would an officious lifeguard at a swimming pool—an occasional, largely irrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through a proxy server—a digital way station overseas that connects a user with a blocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because he doesn’t have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad. (According to the Institute of International Education, the number of Chinese students in the United States—some sixty-seven thousand—has grown by nearly two-thirds in the past decade.) He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

“Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

The New Yorker. Angry Youth - The new generation’s neocon nationalists [in China].

Same same, but different

trustocorp

I don't know about you, and I don't know what your friends are like. But this seems to me to be a sadder, more hungry generation. And the thing that I get scared of is, when we're in power, when we're the forty-five and fifty-year olds. And there's really nobody - no older - that no people older than us with memories of the Depression, or memories of war, that had significant sacrifices. And there's gonna be no check on our appetites. And also our hunger to give stuff away.
...
And we're the first generation - maybe people starting about my age, it started in '62. We grew up sorta in the rubble of the old system. And we know we don't want to go back to that. But the sort of - this confusion of permissions, or this idea that pleasure and comfort are the, are really the ultimate goal and meaning of life. I think we're starting to see a generation die...on the toxicity of that idea.

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, by David Lipsky, p159

Related post: The long line of supposedly beaten generations

Would you buy a used paradigm from this man?

jaron lanier by allan j. cronin

Good talk by Jaron Lanier at the LSE [link to MP3 on that page] that starts slow and fairly rambling, but touches on a lot of interesting things [Xanadu / the importance of boundaries / the wrong turn at Turing / anti-Singularity / anti-Wikipedia / anti-neo-Maoism / pro-micropayments] as a way to a) sketch out the ideas in his new book, and b) make a case for a new [well…old] technological / economic model for the Internet, essentially based on one copy of each file [Ted Nelson's Xanadu] and micropayments.

Since Larnier was previously on the ‘free’ side of the ‘information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive’ debate, it’s an interesting trip he takes the listener on. The bottom line – of this talk, at least – is that micropayments will be embraced when anyone can launch themselves as a creator – already possible – and become part of the system [not yet in place, but presumably something like a bigger version of the iTunes store]. With the right incentives thus in place, people will work harder at being more creative, because they’re being [potentially] rewarded for their efforts and can maybe pay the rent and so on without a day job.

Side note: things are sloooowly getting back on track here, and something like abnormal service will kick back in later this month.

Occupational hazards of the self-employed, #1

Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you'll be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every day since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age.

John Cage, via Milton Glaser

For a while I've been letting the work fall into a random plan- but my life in its current iteration seems to lack the property of self-order. Or maybe I'm expecting too much. Every deadline is met and yet I appear to be doing nothing, hanging out in cafes and bars.

To misquote Flaubert, I need to be orderly and disciplined in my working life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wilder the rest of the time.

Interesting properties tend to arise just on the border of order and chaos, while one of my weaknesses is to blindly rush far over either side and hunker down, like an exile.

Ways of escape

On October 10, 2006, Steve-O appeared on Tom Green Live, an Internet talk-show hosted by comedian Tom Green, alongside guests Jukka Hildén and Carson Daly in which he discussed his hatred for current U.S. President George W. Bush and organized religion. Steve-O also spoke out about his feelings towards his clown college alma mater, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, for abusing the animals used in the circus. He took calls from viewers while repeatedly huffing medical-grade compressed nitrous oxide (commonly called "whippits"), smoking, drinking alcohol and eating hash brownies. The show ran for three times its normal length, ending with Steve-O collapsing on the floor after drinking a bottle of Italian salad dressing and vomiting violently.

Wikipedia

Sarcastic ending

tokyo undressed

For the utopian mind the defects of every known society are not signs of flaws in human nature. They are marks of universal repression - which, however, will soon be ended. History is a nightmare from which we must awake, and when we do we will find that human possibilities are limitless.

John Gray, Black Mass, p29

Small and vulgar pleasures

The kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples does not in any way resemble what preceded it... I want to imagine what aspect despotism could take on in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, similar to one another and equal, who gyrate unceasingly to obtain small and vulgar pleasures for themselves with which they fill their souls. Each one of them, isolated at some remove from the others, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his personal friends constitute the entire human species for him: as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is right next to them, but he doesn't see them; he touches them and doesn't feel them; he exists only within and for himself and, although he still has a family, one may at the least say he no longer has a country. Above all these men rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes care of assuring their enjoyment and watching over their fate. It is absolute, elaborate, regular, calculating, and mild. It would be like paternal power, if - like it - its goal was to prepare men for virile maturity; but, on the contrary, it seeks only to limit them irrevocably to childhood; it likes its citizens to be happy, as long as they dream of nothing other than being happy.

Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted p76 in How the Rich are Destroying the Earth, Herve Kempf

Goodbye to all that

William Steig illustration for Listen, Little Man

I.
My wife says it's good to change your life every five years or so, it keeps the brain fresh. For the last 20 my own has tended to fall apart or fall together on such cycles, with each side not too clear until later, and even then the judgments remain preliminary.

Ten years ago I left London to hide out in China for a year-long vacation to break everything in an old life and take only the minimum for the new. Five years ago I was in a business that fell apart and, to over dramatize, lost everything. But that turned out to be a stroke of luck, as it enabled me to skip out of further commitment to a series of bad choices - professional, romantic, chemical - and to slowly rebuild things in a simpler, better fashion.

II.
I fell into teaching. I graduated in 1992 and my parents were living in Portugal and so I took a short course in Lisbon, but I never followed up. I went to London and did other work. I hated the little teaching I'd done, had no idea what to do, and was terrified of getting up and taking charge.

When I first came out here I still hated teaching, but I liked the lifestyle, the extended student / adolescence of all the fun things in a warm climate and cheap city.

Five or so years in I settled down and began to pay attention to what was happening in class, and I learned how to stand and do the job. It taught me a lot, but now I'm tired of standing up and being 'on'. I'm retreating into freelance proofreading and it's a giddy, good feeling to be stepping out of one job into nothing organized.

III.
I have no idea if the following true. Let's imagine that an animal's been inside a cage for a long time, when someone opens the door, does it run out or does it wait for the shock of the scene to compute. I know our cat will sit in it's little box for a long time after even short trips to the vet, but his intelligence is fairly limited, although brilliant as far as it goes.

You get the point. So then what? Ten years ago I quit one life in London and gave myself a year of not working in China and SE Asia, and as anticipated (and wanted) fell in with my animal spirits. The temptation was always to get fired up and look for low life adventures.

IV.
I have a copy of The Pleasures of the Damned on the shelf behind me, a collection of Bukowski poems selected by his editor, John Martin. I got it as a gift, because like nearly every other guy I was a big Chinaski fan in my early to mid-20s. I could be at an awkward age [38], or in a comfortable place, but I don't feel too much sympathy for the old guy now. The outsider thing will never get old, but the alcohol is no longer so romantic.

After 30 everyone knows some alcoholics and the body is less forgiving, hurting it becomes less fun.

I still drink, but I avoid getting drunk and rarely get hangovers, and when I do I feel like shit for more than half the day, guzzling coffee and water, swallowing pills. So I've learned to stop drinking before the hangovers will come, which is just before the urge to put my hand up the shirt of a stranger seems like a really good idea that'll bring fun to everyone.

Digression. If you want to do bad things, don't drink first- it'll only cloud your judgment. When drunk everything seems like a good idea, but the aim now is to embrace the best bad ideas, not the worst. The best transgressions are commited more than half sober, if not fully. It depends on how much initiative you have.

Back to the thread. It's no wonder Bukowski was a grumpy old man. He woke up with hangovers and let himself get trapped in jobs that he hated, and perhaps only with the good luck of finding John Martin - who promised $100 a month for life back when that was a living - was he able to leave the post office and make things better, but even then, always with the hangovers, with the shitty feeling half of the day.

V.
This matters because I can now drink all day if I want to, and generally play the Bukowskian fool. There are many ways to get in trouble, and all of them are open to me.

It's been a full week now, and I'm wildly impressed that so far I've done nothing I regret.

The rules of the game

david bowie mugshot

Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chapter Six

I was looking for free language mp3s and ended up at audiouniv where there was nothing that really got my eye except The Four-Hour Week, which I remember hearing about when it came out, and then again at Casey Serin's page, and so I thought why not? Stick it on the mp3 player and ride the bicycle around town, expose myself to the self-help / get rich madness.

So I started listening to the book. The guy starts out with the mission statement that you don't have to be rich to live like the rich - you too can have time to pursue your bliss. But then how? Simple...you become rich. At that point the essential sleaziness begins to flow.

There are far more failed than successful entrepreneurs and artists, which is all cool if you're in it for the passion, but it kind of sucks to fail and fail again, even to fail better, if the process itself is no fun, just fixated on the goal of $ rather than the task in hand. It's now when we have to live, not in the past or future. The means become the end.

So I'm a lazy man, I want to relax without a large income, without the necessity of worldly success. A flexible schedule at a job you enjoy, with low / no stress. Spend less than you earn, exercise, eat right, have fun, pay less attention to what others do.

No matter how rich are and how much property you own, you end up with a private quarters where you get things done. Essentially an office with a bathroom, perhaps a kitchen, living room, library and so on either attached or part of the whole. You can live in a mansion or own a skyscraper, but in the end you'll essentially build a small apartment and do everything in that.

And never forget that Elvis had it all - looks, talent, fame, acclaim and wealth - and he died busted on a toilet just after 40.

"All the people that created traditions, that created countries, and created rules.All them fuckers are dead. Why don't you create your own world while you got the chance?"

Bill Hicks says this dressed as Elvis, here.

Iggy Pop, Manchester [U.K], October 1977, Bowie on keyboards and backing vocals

Related posts:
Deception, trickery, vanity, falsehood
The myth of 1,000 true fans

Bill Hicks on his worst gig ever [LSD, guns, knives]

Doing what is loathsome

Roy Oxlade

The conclusion I can draw from all these reflections is that I have never been truly suited for civil society where everything is annoyance, obligation, and duty and that my independent natural temperament always made me incapable of the subjection necessary to anyone who wants to live among men. As long as I act freely, I am good and do only good. But as soon as I feel the yoke either of necessity or of men, I become rebellious, or rather, recalcitrant; then I am ineffectual. When it is necessary to what is opposite to my will, I do not do it at all, no matter what; I do not even do what accords with my will, because I am weak. I abstain from acting, for all of my weakness is with regard to action, all of my strength is negative, and all of my sins are of omission, rarely of commission. I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do; and that is the freedom I have always laid claim to, often preserved, and most often scandalized my contemporaries about. Because, as for them - busy, restless, ambitious, detesting freedom in others and not wanting any for themselves, provided that they sometimes do what accords with their will, or rather, that they dominate the will of others - they torment themselves their whole life long by doing what is loathsome to them; they omit nothing servile in order to command.

From the Sixth Walk in Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, p83

Handed in my notice today, although will work up until December 19th, when I leave for my UK vacation. After that, no bosses for as long as possible.

Related posts marked Wilhelm Reich