Instrumental Rationality · 12 August 2008

Fussy. Sorry, internet. Here goes.

Remember the ashtanga energy market? This is related, in a way. 

When you love a practice—sociology or ashtanga—being around careerist people is sometimes really hard. That’s been the main distraction of letting academia draw me in on a professional level, as is now happening. And I’m transparent, so my feelings about this are inconveniently obvious.

Instrumental rationality is useful for getting things done and can coexist along with more value-based motivations. Actions can be partly instrumental and partly value-driven; people ourselves are some of both.

But god is pure instrumentalism tacky. It’s so apparent when someone asks “what can I get out of this?” with respect to every relationship. Yes—I see the little wheels turning. Right there.

It’s also obvious when someone is obsessed with social hierarchies and institutional power and jockeying for their own position in the web. When some self-promoter wants to be close to the energy, the power, the money—even if they have no energy or real intelligence of their own to contribute.

For two years I’ve considered writing an anonymous piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the tragedy of professional success for grad students whose egoes are too fragile to take it—how this creates a slithering kind of professionalism and dissolves community. Today year I’d actually do it if I had the time. It would start with a discussion of how many people now practice yoga to get through their dissertations, and an exhortation to ethical arbitrage: bring the karma-yoga ethic of Arjuna over to your professional life. Put a little soul in your soulciology.

Anyway. It seems obvious that my love of true believers grows out of this exact shadow—my despair when I see the “what can I get out of this relationship?” mechanism churning. Userism. You don’t have to be a player to be in the game, and you don’t have to hate the game even if the players make it ugly. “Networking,” and some bit of instrumental rationality, are natural to professions and networks and social life.

But it’s people who actually have little energy or love or inspiration or intelligence to give, and who play for the get, who seriously damage the practice. Stop that, ok?

Here’s more free-association from the world of Evangelical music. It’s all coming back to me these days from my subconscious. You people listening to Madonna and Wham! in your misspent youths, oh what you missed without Sparrow Records. Good thing you read this blog. As a reward for getting through this post, here’s something hilarious. It's not a parody.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory , sound

'Til we grow beards get weird and disappear into the mountains--- · 29 July 2008

Something about these crazy arm balances, I tell you. I went into the hip-hop archives of the Owl House CD shelves Sunday, and drew out The Eminem Show. I cannot endorse this record because it exhibits high levels of misogyny, pandering to children, preening rhymes so obviously non-spontaneous he probably copped them from a songwriting dictionary (but who doesn’t), and, sort of, the dreaded cultural appropriation. Also: it’s good. Sorry, embarrassing; but yes. I thought about stemming my habit on Monday, but it’s been the Show all week here. In my fragile 5:40 am state, it’s true that I can hew to the lowest common denominator.

The record was already two years old and tired four summers back when I was learning the first series. But I stayed in a similar can’t-quite-change-the-record groove for days on end at exactly this point in late July that year, and it worked. The rhythm was a little different: the Editor and I would go to campus around 8, and for two hours I’d write notes in preparation for my upcoming field exam in Economic Sociology. At 10:10 I’d sneak back up the parking garage, and secret through the backstreets of Beverly Hills listening to that record loud like a white university-schooled fool while the middle-aged men from Michoacan and San Salvador trimmed trees and hauled grass clippings at the curbs. I’d cut back to Wilshire at Comstock, where the country club forces you back into the big arterial, and hit just a couple of lights before landing at a now-bought-and-decommissioned (thanks, YW) beautiful little studio in the heart of downtown Beverly Hills. Park in the free garage on Beverly drive and take a manduka and change of clothes from the trunk, in time to be on the mat with hair braided up at 10:30.

Interesting that these are still my practices—Econ Soc, astanga, driving my Civic—and that a return to this place in the annual cycle shows me how much it is the same person now and then. Also, the country is weirdly the same one that the record—with its backwards E evocative of financial crisis and much to say about clueless White America and horrible wars and dirty Dick Cheney—addresses: will we throw everything away as manaically as we did in Fall 04? It took the dense evocations of Eminem’s bad but good record to see me and us in this light again. What’s different? Some edges softer and some harder, I guess, a shift in sense of humor and ideas about this and that. Maturity in some areas, loss of orthodoxy in others. Oh, and an even more obvious alternative come November. On both levels, this year’s shift in context will be a little dramatic. The four-year cycle is concluding.

In aught four the Eminem show ended when I parked the car for a week and flew to another city for the annual disciplinary meeting. Same this year. When I come back, it will almost feel like fall.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , sound

Crim, Again · 20 June 2008

A client offered keys. She lives in Venice and the home studio is a silent wooden nest for my 108-beaded Saturday solstice mala. It ain’t Stonehenge, but the space sure is pretty.

I feel like a hippie, having you know I have a thing for the solstice, but I promise my enthusiasm for the longest day of the year long predates the yoga. Yonder up the 49th parallel in the land of my birth (Big Sky Country, Montana), there’ll be no more than 5 hours of shuteye, with the long days pulling the sweetcorn up knee high by the Fourth of July. Or more like chest-high these days, thank you Monsanto. Glad I no longer live in the flightpath of either cropdusters or testflight B2 bombers, thanks.

Here in godless LA we get a close to 7 hours of darkness tonight, but I’m still sun-stoned and loving the light. Did I mention the Editor tends to have business in South American archives? Winters in Buenos Aires or Porto Alegre… would I be an unbalanced person if I double-dipped the longest day and ducked out of the yule?

For now, everybody in town is having a party this weekend and I actually feel like doing something about it. Some dancing, party or two, breakfast with and old friend. Tonight, Billy Wilder and backrubs. 

By the way, can somebody tip me to fast new summer music (electronic, hip hop, dub, bachatta, rock?) before I start taking the new Bonnie Prince Billy all seriously or succumb to these nagging memories of Jane’s Addiction, Danzig or (further back) the Beach Boys?

I’ll come down out of this feeling eventually. I do keep meaning to write about food and feet behind the head. Those thoughts have got to go somewhere.

Completely random Saturday links:

*Laksmi is normal, 8limbs and all.

*Fun with gender. Nagging isn’t female, it’s just what you do if you’re the less powerful one in the relationship. Excellent use of comparative- sociological method.

*I stopped reading the NYT and the smartmags. Which sucks. But this is what ABD looks like.

* Via Julian Walker's good blog, Andrew Harvey talking about how huge the shadow really is and how much it's in the body. I haven't listened yet, but will probably get to it during the usual Sunday night kale-washing ritual.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , sound

Mellow Gold, Steel Trap · 13 June 2008

Mellow gold: summer music. The other morning with memories of beery oak grove sunsets circa 1996, I played the old record on the way to practice. Loser is the first song. It’s hard not to sing the chorus, but I have no memory for the absurd beat-nick hip-hop verses except for when he finally slows it down…and my time is a piece of wax fallin on a termite… that’s choking on the splinters.

Except for at 5:40 when the mind is all quiet and sharp and the song goes on fresh. What the heck? I belted out both verses traveling up and around San Vicente to practice (there just one road that describes a giant arch from house to shala—I just have to turn right out of my building, and eight minutes later left at a light). At the end of the song I hit the deck and played it again. In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey butane in my veins and I’m out to cut the junkie with the plastic eyeballs spraypaint the vegetables...

What? I was happy to find that of all things intact in my head, but couldn’t reproduce the trick brain-tired after a day’s work. The Editor said: Yeah of course you know the lyrics word for word. Because your mind is a steel trap. Unless you are telling a story to friends. Then you are unreliable and make shit up.

Steel trap? Thanks man. As for unreliable, I guess that is the trick with subjectivity. It skews everything and makes me a shadier character.

Which reminds me. It’s not really accurate to say I’m the child of Karl Popper (you listening, Natalie?), only sort of his child. Popper , like Gregor's Carl Sagan but more abstractly, thought the truth was "out there" and believed trying to dis-prove bold propositions was the logically strongest way to find it out. Except, er..., unless we're talking physics, the truth is not out there. The truth is what works. I’m with Wittgenstein and the Buddha and Karen on that. Or a better way to say it is that what’s true is specific to every social- economic- religious- political- cultural era, which is what Marx and the Integralists bear out in their different ways. The truth is ephochal.

So if it isn’t out there—if the truth is just what works—why bother to frame bold conjectures? I guess if you don’t want to deceive yourself. The truth is what works to hide from your problems. But on the other hand the truth is what works to develop your character. The truth is what works to let go of your pain and be a nicer person. I dunno. I really don't know what the truth is in this sense.

I guess you only would want to frame bold conjectures if you are curious about existence. Otherwise, sure: don’t. You’ll be relatively shallow and easily duped, but maybe that’s your truth. Go om shanti go.

The only reason I bring it up is that I’m working over a paradox here in the SoCal yoga subculture. People go thorough daily life as tough customers, smart operators, asking the world to be honest with them and yield its best stuff for their efforts. They get amazing things done, take care of themselves and their families, learn and grow as a result. Except for around their yoga, these same reasonable people might employ bizarrely low standards for truth. Instead of truth being what works for happy relationships and productive work and a beautiful life, truth becomes: whatever the authorities tell me, or whatever seems fun to believe. The truth is what feels good on a surface level. Kind of escapist, that.

It’s almost like we don’t take spiritual life seriously here in this little breeding ground of modern lifestyle norms. 

It's almost like we don't expect anything real from spiritual life.

Wouldn’t this be the area where we would employ the highest standards for truth and meaning? Isn’t this the part of our life where truth is most important and worthwhile? Wouldn’t we want to make ourselves most open to finding out new shit in this particular area of our lives? Why are people who are not flakey or fake about work and relationships happy to settle for other-worldly, airy-fairy yoga?

Don’t believe everything that you breathe you got a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve

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Categories: self-deception , sound , spirituality

Music For Airports, II · 7 June 2008

I held off from saying what I needed to say about dance for the earlier post to make sense. I did not clarify that I was talking about the kind of dance you do like nobody’s watching. The kind that maybe you do drunk at weddings, in dark bars, and definitely in unadvertised meetings of openminded healers in deconsecrated churches and temples in Santa Monica.

I don’t write about this because even if I can dance like nobody’s watching, I can’t write about dance like nobody’s watching. The truth is I’ve been dancing free-form every Saturday since October. It’s SO revealing. About modern spirituality (whatever that might be), about embodied practice, about the boundaries of self, about what’re the point and the possibilities of contemplation. About how groups form and how people really communicate. There’s just a whole anthropology of this little supercreative edge of culture waiting to happen. It's also in some ways old as it is new, like Susan said in the last comment.

This morning when I arrived in the huge old temple space, they were playing Music for Airports and for the few minutes before I stopped thinking about outside things I remembered the drive across the Golden Gate from Marin two years ago, after a first Vipassana retreat. That is music for breaking a long silence, in my experience. The theory of the Five Rhythms is that one of the tempos of life is stillness… this also makes MfA a good place to begin.

A woman was weeping in the corner and my friend Fred, a psychotherapist in his mid-60s, was holding her hand like a brother. Nobody was at all uncomfortable or self-conscious about her emotions; and nobody tried to resolve them too quickly. For the first 30 minutes the still tones of MfA would come up over and over under much faster music and some people would notice and slow way down. Me I felt good to mix in the associations I have for that music with more chaotic, high-energy kinds of experience. To find the Music for Airports when everyone around you is knocking on the door of the big kuckoo. As corny as that sounds. Both rhythems are just techniques for letting go.

I think I’ll stop trying to talk about any of this now.

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , sound , spirituality

SLIII: time to be small · 10 May 2008

Friday night I lay under the bath and listened to the echoes in the pipes and the footfalls in the outside corridors. Resonant under the hot eucalyptus water I was asking to seep into my trapezius and left levator scapula. I was out late and all excitable on Thursday night, and after I finally went to bed the left l-s, which has been touchy all week, cramped so hard it woke me in pain. Weird and so awkward, and it’s slow to release no matter who puts their hands on it or how quietly I ask it to let go. 

Notes to self: Fifteen months ago I shifted my atlas on the axis jumping into a bad tripod, and the sub-occipital ache and loss of cervical rotation the following week made me become protective of alignment in the neck. In finishing, I rarely put my head to the floor in sirsasana, and in the tripods of third I take most of the weight in my shoulders and hands. Great for cervical alignment, but oven time this overdistribution of work into the levator scapulae, traps and even the scalenes has grown a little harsh. A teacher asked me to step into forearm balances rather than jumping, I realized that in doing so I reverted back—in a good way—to using the base rather than the neck for support (makes sense: when I practiced by stepping up was back before I’d developed this intense mode of l-s/trap/scalene work). At this point I will learn to work inversions more from pure balance than weighting the base with so much contraction. I ask students what they need their traps for in standing postures as a kind of inquiry-based release mechanism; and it’s time to ask myself why I need them in arm balances. Meantime, the poor battered l-s is pulling my medicine ball head back and to the left in the stupidest way, causing an enormous energy drain, awkward lane changes, shameless neckrub solicitation, and a little Advil habit.

Under the water listening to the pipe symphony, and with my ear to the floor at the Masonic Temple listening to the dance of the accelerated culture, I feel small. Brian May, the queen guitarist who became an astrophysicist, was on the radio talking about the sublimity of contemplating his own smallness—how much more awesome to think on the stars above than himself as a star on a stage. I will bury myself in the bath; go to the weekend's parties without thinking so much about it; and see old art with our brilliant visiting friend Indiana that- belongs- in- a- museum Jones. Let the guitar lines from Interpol’s song play in the back of my mind day after day. Who says Angelenos are afraid to merge? I am looking for opportunities to feel small, because it is beautiful. Besides, there may be limits to the old strategy of breathing in to the muscle and asking it to release… oddly I feel that this time leaving the body might be a better release strategy than burrowing back inside.

Links: Brian May interview, NYT on building new habits.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , sound

Who are the virgins? · 29 April 2008

This post follows up on questions about my reference in Monday’s post.

Like I said, the virgins keep coming back. But it’s a good haunting now. Nothing sinister.

When I was small, they were phantoms of doom. The original story, from Matthew 25, is that they were ten. Five were wise, kept their lamps trimmed and burning like in the gorgeous old spiritual that turned into a blues song: Blind Wille Johnson version, Billy Childish version.

(The way the idea of waiting for the judgement plays in to the writing of this song I do not know, but the minor chords and the keening that come through the blues version—if not the dry, domesticated hymn I sang as a kid—make me imagine it was first sung in the fields of Dixie… pointing to a whole new, and better, idea of apocalypse. The tiiime is draaawing niiiigh….)

Unlike the wise virgins, the foolish five let their lamps go out. When a “bridegroom” comes to them he takes the wise five, marries them, and takes them behind the door. But he says to the others, who had let their flames go out: Verily I say unto you, I know you not.

Or more specifically: go to hell. So the straight interpretation of the story is obvious. Watch out because the judgement day is coming and if you don’t keep working out your salvation with fear and trembling you won’t get to have sex with Jesus like you know you want to. (Jesus is always having sex with the church in the gospels, and the clean interpretation of this is that it represents spiritual union of God and his community on earth). Given all this sex, maybe the judgement day version actually isn’t cut and dried like the mainstream church would have it...

In any case, all I care about anymore is the lamps and the flames they keep. Flame is “spirit,” whatever that is, all over the world all over time.

For example, staying with the Judeo-Christian tradition, here’s something wonderful from a book I do not like (Proverbs 20:17 KJV):  

The spirit of a man (sic) is the candle of the Lord. Searching all the inward parts of the belly.

...The fire inside?

...Keep your lamp trimmed and burning.

...Stay awake. 

That’s all it means.

I never thought of this simpler, more beautiful understanding of the virgins until I encountered Tolle talking about waiting as a kind if being present. It’s somewhere around page 60 of The Power of Now (which, please, is not the most amazing spiritual manifesto by a loooooooooong shot, but is interesting and a kind if inspiring so far as it goes). The satirical imp Tolle writes that the lamp’s flame is merely awareness in wait for the bridegroom of enlightenment.

Even that is more interpretation than I need, though. 

The spirit is the candle of the “Lord…” Searching all the inward parts of the belly?

“Spirit” isn’t something “out there” though when I think of the lamps now… it’s just awareness. Which is just the spark that is here if I bother to tend it. So there's not much of a story hanging on to the little flame image anymore, even if the virgins keep coming back by association.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound , spirituality

More PDA · 27 April 2008

So ok. I took the little animals to play at the store I have often ridiculed (more because of bad labor practices than cultural iconography, but see the footnote I'll post later I posted in the comments***). Did they get dirty? I don’t think they really did, even got as they rolled around on the floor of the yoga lifestyle mecca, temporarily seared with the post-OM loopdy-loop of the brand. If only chattel could remove their burned-in brands so easily as I did later, wriggling out of a corsetlike top that created the illusion of cleavage with my A-cups and left a line around my ribs where the elastic reinforcements had been.

The animals will probably get more dirty right here, as I confess I am mildly amused to have done this thing, and that it was pretty good practice.

So, this is the only remarkable thing: I had a deep practice, on a Saturday, on the floor of the Lulu store. I was expecting some kind of pre-performance jitters, but their edge was well removed by the experiences of earlier that morning, which left a kind of buzz that transcended even the apropos LCD Soundsystem record that accompanied my drive to the venue. I was expecting constant distraction and performance-awareness, but my experiences of practicing as a visitor in certain shalas has been far more outward-focused and performative than this.

When you visit a shala, you’re taking your goods in to a new house within your own community. The natives know the species of animal you’re offering up, and they know just how to evaluate it! Are the flanks in the right place, are the muscles of the belly indicating the right awareness, how straight are the legs here and do the hands reach the floor there? Edges edges edges.

In the land of pussy yoga (can I say that? No, really can’t say that), you have them from the transition to the first chatwari. Nobody has a vision of a Marichyasana D and there is no edge you can push there to impress make some mark on them. The animals themselves—sages, boats, turtles—probably don’t even count on that stage. Just the fact that you are moving on the breath is arresting, informative, interesting, maybe even educating… and least to the people who might notice in the first place.

I could write my best ethnographic fieldnotes here and fill you in on the most amusing details (which have to do with reinforced fabrics and a fussy assistant manager), but the details weren’t so important to the actual experience I underwent.

I lug my laptop to cafes all the time, because I focus better with a little ambient sound and commotion. I’ve always thought this is because movement around me reminds me of the passage of time—which gets lost behind the double doors of my office—and creates an urgency that makes me work better. Time is a shared category of the understanding, and the social nature of the now (the productive now, at least, is social) is unavoidable among others.

But after practicing deeply under a Justin Timberlake soundtrack and under the eyes of god knows how many passersby, surrounded by so much intensely overpriced lycra, I see that the social aspect of my focus in chaotic environments might be a bit more sinister. It’s that movement around me reminds me that the other is out there, and drives me to set the boundaries of my own attention very close. One-pointed, but in an almost protective—if not defensive—way.

Again, I come back to the mantra parable of the seven ten virgins who keep their lamps trimmed and burning.**** This is from the book of Matthew, which is why I resonate with the story so easily, but Tolle uses the story to talk about the ways you guard your awareness. Awareness is often depicted as a little candleflame in yoga and Buddhist commentaries, too. The preciousness of a focused presence, the cultivation it requires. But when there’s an external “threat,” at least in this case, it’s no trouble at all. Far more focused than most kitchen practices, in fact.

This disturbs me a little, but opens up some paradoxes about the social aspects of consciousness, the interaction of society and deeper layers self-awareness (below mere self-consciousness), and well, a certain—ok, limited—potential for doing contemplation in the marketplace.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , sound

"Decatur memos" · 22 April 2008

The first year, the question in play was What is this mental state am I experiencing every day?

I was all interested in neuro-linguistic programming from Milton Erickson through Bandler and Grinder to the self-help guy Tony Whateveritis. That was all about suggestibility and the idea that there was a sub-conscious mind. (Side note: the first day I practiced with my teacher and he said “just establishing rapport…” I knew he was hip to the NLP and probably an eclectic like myself… which of course turned out to be exactly right.)

In that line were yoga nidra of course, the intriguing Edgar Cayce, a lot of dimestore self-hypnosis New Age nonsense and cheap evolutionary theory á la Robert Anton Wilson, and finally a mysterious, ancient cassette tape I had mailed in from a distant archive like a character in Umberto Eco. On it a woman called Jasmine Riddle intoned the most potent yoga nidra sequence I’ve ever found, but I can’t tell you what’s in it because I never got past the second minute without my mind shutting off. It would return 50 minutes later, Ms. Riddle whispering to me to wake up. I guess I could try to crack her code but I don’t want to re-request the thing through ILL because my reputation with the university library is already sketchy (seriously).

At the same time, that first year, I was starting to explore Vipassana. Which, at first (shamatha practice) was all about concentration and operated on a simpler idea of the mind than the hypnosis people. For Vipassana, for a practical purposes the mind was just the house of “attachments” and “suffering.”

Together, the NLP and the Vipassana led to a relational question (usually the best kind question): what is the relationship of meditation and hypnosis? (And: which framework is better for mapping my experience, or do I need both?)

The Vipassana people will tell you meditation is not the same as hypnosis. Not the same! Of course they will say that: if it were the same, you could get the method without the metaphysics (the metaphysics being the belief system anchored in the Four Noble Truths, though they will also tell you that this is not a theory but a fact revealed by looking inside, like Socrates supposedly revealed geometry to the boy in the Meno). Over time I found a few very good answers from Buddhist scholars for why meditation and hypnosis are different (along with a lot of answers that made me suspicious), but none of the answers were so good that I remember them.

So now I am concluding the fourth year, and I am still not sure—experientially—what is the relationship of meditation to hypnosis. But what is different now is that I trust myself more as a first-order experiencer and when applicable a second-order witness of that experience. And, I’m a lot more interested in the tones, textures, and subtleties of altered states, and in the meaningfulness that seems to arise out of them after the fact. Also, there is the whole phenomenon of other minds (not the so-called "problem of other minds," thank you), and the ways groups actually share and collectively deepen altered states.

Outside/objective approaches would just quantify things: measure brain activity and be done with it. What if they found that the elecrtromagnetic map of asana (which I experience as meditation ranging from light to deep) is the same as chanting (which I experience as full-on hypnosis)? Would having it quantified externally as 1=1 answer the question?

Actually, yes. And no.

The problem with the subjective side is that once I’m in an altered state I’m not much fit to gather data. And since I love altered states my reflections on them are colored with the emotions of wonderment and joy that I associate with them after the fact.

Is there some kind of meditative-hypnotic spectrum that cannot be reduced to an electroencephalograph readout? Inside, there are other spectra in play:

-witnessing/nondual

-passive/active

-receptive/one-pointed

and others.

Just to mix it up, I practiced this morning with the Gayatri Mantra droning over and over in the background. Swaying right out of my body just standing up, but sharp and focused for the rest of it. It was pretty strange and delicious. Chocolate with chili powder.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

What Today Was Like · 14 April 2008

Slept in til 5:15 when the Editor whispered me the time. Twilight and bird sounds were filtering through the large open windows to the porch—both for the first time since late last fall. Oops! Light out? Oh…, it’s not really late.

Feet to floor, enjoy the feeling of having calf muscles for the first four steps: the way they pull at the attachment, a crescent-suture around the curve of the heel. Sip water in the kitchen, where the smell of warmed-over paint—the aromatic sign of summer inside this place—is back, just slightly. Nauli, trying to rustle off the weird sleepfulness that means it’s Monday.

Torpor. The Monday effect: regardless of what combination of sleep, hiking, asana, kriya and (always exhausting) esoteric shit happens inside the weekend, ever since I quit taking a flow class Saturday mornings Mondays have been special. The universal Monday lag that continues all the way in to the first hour or so of practice. Preparation for aging, I take it.

Pick up email because I’m a little worried about a friend who has been struck by love and talking to me (of all people?) about how women supposedly relate. (Why do humans fall in love?) No word from the thunderstruck inspired one, but something from my 9:00 private: Husband is sick, can we reschedule?

Thank you yes! I mean..., Fine if you must. I try to respond neutrally so as not to congratulate anyone for skipping practice just because I’d rather work a bit less today. But I feel thankful and go talk to the E in his sleep for a minute before I trip out the door.

Shakira’s on the Latin pop station and her Honduras- roadtrip- reminiscent warbling suits me fine, so I don’t switch to the cheesy blues-pop that’s waiting in the stereo for the drive down Santa Monica Blvd. It’s actually a little too light out by 5:55 for my taste, and when I pass the hospital construction zone the crew is mostly across the street and disappeared into the recesses of the site. Them off to work, and me too late for the grins they usually give as I stop for their long parade through the crosswalk, when they remind me silently that ashtanga is anything but work. Tomorrow, up a little earlier to catch those two edges: the dawn and the more-serious-than-me 6:00 crew.

At practice, the Monday effect is in full force, especially for those who yesterday practiced led with the one who passed through and treated us with that weird conspiration ritual, complete with a lot of extended hail-Patthabi chaturangas. I light a candle in front of some brass statue, and at least it’s still dark enough for 15 minutes of ganesh shadow-dancing on the wall.

By the time that effect wears off I am still creaking through the Bs, eluded by ujjayi, and interrupted by the pesky thought that even a morning like this is beautiful… and is something I might want to read about years from now if I ever bother to archive the owl.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , sound

Saturday XLIX: Inner Dark · 11 April 2008

A secret reader sent the owls. How much does this delight me? Thank you. They brew a good daily sencha, too.

Also exciting: the Black Keys new record is hot! Yes. Even without headphones, I respond well to the rhythm and attitude of the Akron blues. It is even helping me get my mind off of Jack.

You know I have been madly devoted to Jack for the right reasons all along. But these smug, preachy-ponderous, oh-so-disaffected lyrics on the recent Raconteurs record. What are you saying, my Pasty Prince? I just wonder if you’ve been this way all along but I haven’t seen it. I’ve been blinded by your piano riffs and your swaggering hips.

As usual, the The One Who Will Not Be Named guides my listening. The OWWNBN threads my drive time with new sounds and, measuredly, fleshes out my understanding of the history in delicious ways. I am Potter Stewart—I know it when I hear it—to his Aristotle—types, kinds, classes: he sees all the patterns and shares as much as I can take of what he knows. Which isn’t that large a fraction, given my limitations.

I am mostly done with consuming culture, but only beginning to appreciate sound. This is big. Music is a big deal.

Anyway… I am the editor this weekend. I freelanced a lot of research and editing the first years of grad school, and still read final drafts for a scholar in Beijing and one in Tel Aviv. Today it’s the Jewish historian, who works on FDRs generous aid and asylum for children of the Holocaust and contrasts this with his refusal to do anything about simultaneous lynchings in the South. God that’s a hard side of FDR to see.

You might know, if you're close, last year I had a lot of dark weekends. Dark, I tell you. The different relationship to time on those days, the non- practicing on Saturdays, the dissertation-induced neuroses that threaten every PhD candidate… maybe these were part of what put me into disconsolate, angsty negativity. Because there are emotional-intellectual sources of that suffering, but also practical sources. What is different a year later, when weekends are perfect? Without trying, I’ve habituated some really nice routines—the esoteric stuff I’m hesitant to mention, plus concerted long sleeps. That's just about regulating my energy. But too, there’s this sense that the present era, which I love so much, might end soon. How could Saturdays and Sundays ever be so good without these specific routines, these specific people, this one place? Without my own life now? If these weekends were mine forever, and this little sadness for its eventual end were not in me, I am not sure I’d be quite so happy.

Links? Still doing this? Just three.

● Soros on what we’re in for. He predicted this in a book a decade ago, but says the conditions are even riper this time. And he’s more than a financial writer—his perspective is historical and sees the whole economy, not just the credit crunch. (Review.)

●This isn't The Road (phew), but it's what I'm finally taking from my nightstand-pile and reading this weekend.

● By the way, I keep forgetting to introduce you to Eliza. Eliza is a therapist-bot. I will leave it to you to sort out the implications.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound

It's Friday · 21 March 2008

To bring it around to where it started on Monday...

(a riddle.)

Oh Katie solved it immediately. Just wanted to make sure you all were, in fact, listeners of The Cure.

 

 

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Categories: sound

Acrostics · 17 March 2008

B elief
I s
B lasphemy
L ovingly
E ncoded

C rossing
O ver
I nto
T he
U nderworld
S afely

These are from Daniel Higgs’ 2007 book, Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot. No wonder this Cd/Book drives reviewers to eloquence. Here’s his label, Thrilljockey: Higgs has wedded his music and his visual art into a singular being, meant to be encountered as a conjuring force similar to that of the tarot experience.

As any proper druid with Wikipedia knows, in Norse mythology, Yggdrasil, aka the World Tree, connects the nine cosmological worlds…. Passing into Christian folklore, the tree is said to connect heaven and earth. In his relentless pursuit of the indivisible, Higgs travels up and down this spine and hatches a new transubstantiation of sound and image into life-form.

                      ……………………………

Anyway, the implication is that you’re implicated, like a caustic acrostic spelling out your name. I wrote one for Vanessa, and one for CP. Maybe some more to come...

E verything
A fter
S econdseries
Y oga 

K osmic
A narchy
R arely
M akes
A mends

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Categories: esoteric shit , sound

The Internet is Made of Words and Enthusiasm... · 17 March 2008

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Categories: sound

Language Games · 17 March 2008

Every woman is a poet when she is in love.

Plato said that. But I translated it if you knowatimean.
 

Wittgenstein said that. But I paraphrased it because this is no time for exactitude.

It is time for wordplay. I am thinking of tongue-twisters, limericks, haiku, acrostics, palindromes, alliterations and old favorite lines. Whatever words stick in the head.

At times I have kept lists of the words I love best, and as of today I am beginning again. I don't even know, what words do I love now...:

        antediluvian, blithely, concord, daft

Hated words is more difficult, but for sure:

        blowhard, dumpy, moist, secrete

The list will need to be organic to my life. It's more a know 'em when you see 'em kind of thing, for me. But it's good to start with a seed list.

What are the words you love or despise?

Later this week: acrostics, the six-word autobiography, I don't know what else.

Yoga not serious. Poetry serious.

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Categories: integration , sound

Digital Provocation · 27 February 2008

For emotional provocation, a girl with a piano is most powerful. A piano was my self-expression during the terrible years—high school—so maybe that’s got something to do with it.

But anymore, the strongest mood-shifter (mental state-shifter) for me is electronica. The Editor, bard to the core with thick icing layers of rock and jazz, protests: “It’s a wall. No movement in it. It is music that tells you to stay still.” 

Yes, sort of. The monotony of digitalism is part of what sucks me in. All that space between the data shortens the distance between 0 and love. Shit, I mean 0 and 1. In a way it’s subversive when beeps render you bliss, but in another way it’s almost easier.

The experience is like this: I want to waltz to its monotony. Interpolate my body in to it while my heartbeat/brainwaves just do what the monotony tells them to do. (Somewhere here there's a connection to Karen's jazz practice... but for me practice music, if any, is devotional cornball stuff: the triggers to downshift and become rhythmic in that context seem to be more about supercalming content than about BPM/form.)

Zero/one. Form/emptiness. Yadda/yadda.

Specifically, yesterday I finally stopped listening to Hot Chip (who sing about bodhi trees--not burning trees!). A really nice wakeup record, in all its moods. Now there are post-digital, yet similarly Enoesque, musics in my stereo: and I don’t know if I should cringe at the signposts in the lyrics or just take it as a indication that we have a little bit more than 1 and 0 in common.

Robert Wyatt (Comicopera, Be Serious):

I reall envy Christians. I envy Moslems too. It must be great to be so sure as a top Hindu or Jew. And I don't believe in willpower; self-expression's such a fraud. I mean how can I express myself when there's no self to express? Be serious! Put a sock in it. Then put a lid on it. Do us a favor.

It's a little more convincing when it's sung.

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Categories: beta state , having a body , sound , spirituality

Serious Fucking Alchemy · 17 January 2008

Can I say that?

Yes. Breakfast with the ineffable again this morning. Probably, it is always this good but my mind forgets to note it.

Oh who am I kidding??? This is special. Serious. Fucking. Alchemy.

How many days in a row are we going to hit paydirt like this, kids? Are you wondering the same?

Yeah, you give up the digging of a thousand shallow wells. Choose a method and just mine it mine it mine it like a dirty methodical little drone…, and now and then you hit a vein like this.

Think you can take it to the bank? Want compensation for your efforts or your surrender? Want to buy in? Riiiiight. Not packaged for resale. It’s here and it’ll be gone soon. I’m too much my teacher’s student to hold it or him or us tightly, and this only increases the joy. Like contemplating death increases your living.

The room is packed to the point of a waiting line, because everyone in fifty miles whose value of practice edges out her compulsive need to be right (hello: what is that hangup about except self-sabotage? It’s ok, we all get in our own way; but we don’t have to keep doing it forever) is on a mat in that room. Post-political practice space, right here for the making. Get in! Carpe manduka.

Many days, there is no assistant. A few who have been at this thing a little longer will give a neighbor an adjustment in supta vajra or pachimo. I’ve been doing a pretty strict counted practice this week, and this highlights strongly the relationships that facilitate my rhythm and those that do not. One companion, I can come to the top of a vinyasa, shift over for his supta vajra, breathe him through it and take one step to the mat without ANY shift in mental state. He doesn’t reach for any talky talky connecting, doesn’t put some kind of lowly beta-level awareness on me. And I come back to the top of the mat just like I’d added a posture—supta vajrasana B—between chakorasana and bhairvasana. Two others on that same train in the immediate perimeter, but another who hasn’t quite caught on. I love her just fine, but if the greater good is to contribute to the collective rhythm that supports the alchemy, I have to let her wait for the teacher. Because his awareness, given which he’s doing and what he’s done, is less fragile than mine.

I got in the car and this was on the stereo, loud. (What I get for blaring Back in Black, from the Unholy Los Angeles Driving Mix cd my brother made a while back, because I thought it a good way to toast RP this morning. Or at least so it seemed on the jaunt from bathroom floor pranayama to the door of my car, as the CDs live in a big cramped bookcase in the hallway. And it did work nicely for cruising Santa Monica Blvd in the dark, though I did frighten a homeless man at a stoplight. Anyway I took the highroad--Wilshire--back here to the working class fringes of Santa Monica, trumpeting Prince's version of the apocalypse and definitely in a state unfit for operating a motor vehicle.)

That’s a lot of apocalyptic Americana from twenty years back. But AC/DC and Prince never knew the shift in consciousness would look like this. This quiet, this early in the morning, and as much about working hard as it is about letting loose.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

About Alice · 15 January 2008

I was not kidding the other day. By the way. About Alice Coltrane.

Bebop piano as a child; a young life all in jazz; then an India Period that never really ended. She founded the Vedantic Center of Los Angeles and produced a modest discography of sharply blended, yet beautiful, new age/ jazz/ indian/ soul harp-sitar-tambourine. A brilliant life. 

And an anchor to many. Here is her grand-nephew talking:

For a long time it’s been difficult to come to terms with her death. She was such a big presence for all of us—she really held us together. But not we’re all readjusting and gradually finding it easier to talk about her again. Slowly, we’re starting to bring her up in conversations and telling stories about her again. When the time is right and everyone is comfortable just remembering her for the special person she was, I’ll finish [the documentary I am making about her]…. As far as my relationship with my art is concerned, though, we never really talked about music much. I mean, she knew what I was doing and she always expressed and interest, but really she was much more of a spiritual mentor to me, someone who gave me guidance and insight because that was always the biggest part of her own life.

Here is the truth about the way women are remembered, the way we are reviewed and recommended and talked about and seen: it’s about a woman’s associations. Her connectedness, her ability to facilitate transformation, to collaborate, to create togetherness. With a man, what is remembered is all drive and ego and accomplishment. I wish we’d memorialize more in the middle. Most of the obits of Alice lead with her husband, follow with her bandmates, and around paragraph seven get around to something about Alice herself. Embarrassing, that extremism. And yet Alice was one who contained traditions, who connected people. It’s good, after all, to be remembered as a goddess.

So I’ll mention that of course her appellate name came from being wed to John; and that the speaker above is Flying Lotus. Her grand-nephew and an hypercreative, synthetic Los Angeles hiphop artist who will soon be large. I like him very much, and love that his feel is all Alice in hip-hop. The quotation is from Wire magazine, Nov 07. (Owl-House subscriptions ceased upon advancement to PhD candidacy: The Economist, The London Review of Books, The Yoga Journal. Subscriptions maintained: Veneer Magazine, Wire, Namarupa.)

For Christmas, the One Who Will Not Be Named gave me transcendence. I mean Transcendence. I will check out the IP situation on this record and do a reader giveaway if it’s not robbing some trust or foundation. I shouldn’t be listening to this record alone, with so many transcendence-hungry, Culver City-loving, Vedantic-friendly, jazz-listening, covertly chanting, secretly sitar-loving people in this thread.

If I ask for your address, you’ll know why. Or maybe you should just begin now.

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Categories: arbitrage , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXXVIII: Sour and the Tower · 12 January 2008

So. Speaking of dead brilliant women whose not-unbrilliant husbands got in their names. Dead brilliant women who will be remembered because of—and yet also so forgotten because of—those husbands. Last week, Laura Huxley. This week, Alice Coltrane. She died a year ago today. Brilliant Alice.

I’m noting for the record that vocab around here has been getting ahead of itself. Tapas—Grenadine appetizers? Siddhis—the plural of Sith? Nadis—bad people? Oops. I forget how much of my idiolect is dead languages—Sanksrit for the yoga and Latin for the (ivory) tower.

Ridiculing the latter has become too easy for me, I realized on new years. A professor whose mind I love is stateside again and I’m remembering that, for what they’re worth, intellects can be machine sof beauty. His is light and tough, hungry and fast. Refined like an Oxford don, and decorated with poetry and anime and about a dozen fluent languages.

Apropo of the tower, maybe my drawing it two weeks ago out of the tarot deck is worth more than I know. Since then everything is noisy mismatch between my visceral expectations for 2008 (great great things) and my lived experience of it (strange inner bullshit). I feel like an ingrate for even noticing the bullshit, here in world-historical paradise. There is incomparable abundance in Santa Monica, California, 2008, as I sit around studying far-flung sweatshops and global pollution, with colleagues mired in the political violence and disease of one century or continent or the other. And here: lack of resistance, lack of real difficulty, lack of outer conflict. It’s weird that sometimes the ease it makes me feel lost and dark.

Trust your feelings? That’s a call to intuition, not to the reification of emotions! I will sort it out. Not that I’m all happy and shit about it just now. Not at all. Salty Saturday links:

● Supply chains in which slavery is happening now.

● So many books arriving in the mail. I strongly dislike owning them, but what do you do? There was a grant to finish off with the year, so now all this printed tonnage is arriving. Not a single volume of it fiction. So would someone please read this so I can live through you? I don’t know why I like Coetzee so much. He is something between a sick old man and a great human soul.

● Do we have a natural bias toward superstitions? Here are some evolutionary biogists arguing irrationality is evolutionarily efficient. Their philosophy reeks. And yet, the argument itself is almost good.

● You know about what goes on at Fort Benning, right? Today is the first large peace vigil to close the School of the Americas, the training camp for Latin American Paramilitaries. The annual peace gathering in Georgia is in two weeks.

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Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXXIV: Gridlock Hero · 7 December 2007

There’s this phenomenon. The December Congestion. Santa Monica gridlock in all directions, starting when darkness edges in at 4 and holding out until 8—every weeknight from about the 5^th through the 23^rd. You can’t go anywhere. Sidestreets are solid taillights in red. Flying over we must look like a colony of fire ants frozen in time. I just want to go inside and pull the blackout curtains or something.

Or go to SF. Is the holiday lighter up there? I’ll be in Union Square and surrounding from Thursday through Sunday. Any suggestions for the visit? I like a good salad, hipster coffee shops with free wireless, and something intense (I mean activity, not waffles) on Saturday mornings. Business trip that is really pleasure.

After: Portland/Seattle. Pleasure trip that is really business. Hmmmmm. First, maybe some art this weekend. Shepard Fairey is doing his first ever gallery show, which I definitely will be skipping. But this person, Francis Alys, might be amazing.

Also, I keep listening to the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi record while I am sitting around staring into taillights. The lyrics are talking about waiting on a moment, and about surrender, and about battling the evil machines. It’s like the Bhagavad Gita for urban girls. Maybe.

I should probably switch out the CD before I start getting all heroic or something.

● The owl persona got ruffled up about politics this week, here and there. Yeah. I’ll own it. Heartfelt apologies if my directness was at all hurtful. Here is the thing: when some say they are on the left, they mean they disfavor the present regime and want to dis-identify with it. (Boomeritis?) When I say it, I mean I want a practical, everyday politics of social class. I mean an enduring conceptual leftism with egalitarianism in its veins. Not a screw-you politics of opposition. So sometimes we are going to disagree.

● By the way, in case your email is being screened by the feds, here are some emoticons to help you go undetected. Funny.

● Faith healing at Disneyland.

● The Dawkins and friends’ conversation about God continues in Edge. Pretty good. Sciency, though. Jonathan Haidt argues the following and several others respond.

I now think of religions first and foremost as coordination devices that bind people together into moral communities with effects that are mostly good for the members, although sometimees terrible for deviants and for neighboring groups…. [E]very longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , sound

Saturday XXXII: Stop Owl Commodification · 16 November 2007

I found the ecstatic grassroots movement I've been imagining. Uh oh. But I’m not going to tell you about it. Except to say it involves a secret society and does not involve naked yoga.

Returned to morning practice this week, which included Thursday contortions next to an intriguing New York ashtangi poet met through this medium. Somewhere between post-practice Fred Segal and Real Food Daily brunch, I realized I'd been charmed. Sometimes RL is so much better.

I have to admit morning practice and the rhythms it creates for me are what I love best, even though I have adored the evenings this fall. I’ve done six weeks of all 5:00 practices, milking the habituated morning energy spike for dissertationly purposes. Gradually over the weeks this has shifted my energy eveningward, and the mornings have slowed. The experiment has showed me so much about my choices in energy-distribution: between relationships, work and practice. About practicing to give energy to my life rather than letting practice be the main event. I’ll try to write more about this before it is gone.

● I am kind of excited about the little movie about bob dylan this week.

● Speaking of sentimental wonders: a re-realease of songs a decade old at the RJM Digital Archive. He never used to talk to me back in the days when he was making these recordings. I was generally pissed off and what people called "intense" while he was ethereal and lovey. Tendencies which have tempered on both sides. But one December afternoon after my shift at the library desk I passed him under the pine trees and asked for a cassette. Listened throughout the Christmas break, out there driving a Dodge truck on icy Montana roads. Up to the ski area for days alone on Red Lodge Mountain, and down to the bars in town for nights with my old nemesis—the only other one of us rural kids who escaped, albeit in her case to a worser fate. That’s where these songs go for me.

● What else? Well, here is some trouble. Some good discussion earlier in the week. If you come around, you better listen at least as sharply as you soapbox. We are so done with recycled opinions and 2004-era rants.

● Oh, and whoever sold my address to Yoga Pura also gave it to Anthropologie, whose catalog just arrived.

I tolerated it this summer when the outer hipstosphere switched from swallows to owls as their cute-but-disturbing bird of choice (ho hum). But now there are owl candles, an owl purse and (yes, Tova) an owl apron in the Anthro catolog. I mention this by way of saying to those of you who might be tempted: I don’t actually like owls. Please no owl things for the holidays. (Unless it's something really good, you know.) Otherwise, STOP OWL COMMODIFICATION.

That’s enough linking. I don’t care what else was being said in the world this week.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , sound

Saturday XXX · 3 November 2007

On this date in 1976, a 28-year-old C.E.J. drove a white VW Beatle through the snowed-in cornfields of Yellowstone County, past the feedlot with the cattle billowing steamy breath in the cold, five miles down Airport Road past the hilltop cemetery, around the corner and down past the country doctor’s house into Laurel, MT, a railroad town with the highest national rate of alcoholism, if not poverty and Evangelicalism rates to match. She parked at the high school, home of the Laurel Locomotives, and hauled herself inside to the voting booths set up in the gym with their levers and their curtains. They cut her to the front of the line.

I like to believe she voted for Carter, but the truth is it was probably Ford… though the negation, as they say, was in her belly.

Later that day she had her first baby, and took it home to her fireplace-heated, century-old Ranch house under giant cottonwoods on a rise above Canyon Creek. And the two of them would pretty much stay there in that grove, safe and doing nothing but cooing and eating and rolling around in front of the fire or out under the trees, for the next three years.

Thank you, Mom. I’m sorry I don’t really remember it.

I was increasingly together this week, relatively clear in mind and action. Please let it be an emerging trend. And I practiced a little harder than usual. By Thursday the edges were finally pretty well burnished and I thought somewhere in standing, “Is this what it takes to get to surrender?” It feels nice to be spent like that on a Thursday, spent in a Friday way.

But then right at the end, without putting any particular try into it, I made a convincing UKK-B for the first time since GT knelt down and talked me into it in August. Hello. I wonder if that is a regular part of my world now? I told the Editor that I had a feeling UKKB was really miiiiine and he said not to be a pose-whore.

“That’s not practicing yoga—that’s just doing a couple of moves you can do.”

Moves. Hee hee. We’ll see what happens Sunday.

Today, birthday things. All day. First some links.

●New issue of Veneer is out. 

● I’ve always felt Sigur Ros were cheesy and trying too hard to sound “beautiful.” But just a second. Maybe it’s just that they can’t help it. Here is a trailer to some film they made about their home. Beautiful. Otherworldly. They are screening tonight and playing an acoustic set. Think I'll go.

● I received this record (Sally Shapiro, mysterious Swedish disco princess!) as a gift this week. Sad disco, nostalgic synth. I like its moody precision, and like how it accompanies a night drive on the freeways of this decrepit city. Here’s a video of one of the singles.

● Via Souljerky, David Lynch and Donovan are hyping a new university where TM training is required. With a lot less style and too many words, here’s the same arbitrage happening at UCLA. Good discussion in the second article of the history and practice of MBSR.

● Very intriguing. Techsattva is a podcast that wants to "make sense of several systems of thought at once.... By denying the completeness of any one system, Techsattva hopes to... get a view of connections that exist between them." Wonderful intention, but we’ll see if they can do much with it. The recent show is on the subjectivity of neuroscience. About time. Includes a discussion of the implications of new neural feedback (like biofeedback, but more finely tuned) for meditators' state awareness and state maintenance. Nice.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , science , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXVIII · 21 October 2007

Night before last I dreamed Alastair Crowley was watching the Editor and me from a second-floor window across the street while we played with sea creatures in turquoise tidepools. Crowley was wearing a billowy black cape and trying to look scary, hunched over like the grim reaper. Poser.

In the dream, I told the Editor, “Alastair Crowley’s up in that window, watching us!” And he replied, “Don’t tell me that—I’ll have dreams about him!”

Guess Halloween is coming. I just ran across a poem I wrote on Halloween a decade ago. Very dark. I remember writing it in my head while on a run along the train tracks after class, before an evening of waiting tables and before getting smashed in an old downtown Victorian overrun by us disaffected Philosophy majors. That is what happens when 20-year-olds read Sartre and write poetry. Good thing I stopped.

Rachel and I are seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company tonight. God. Being a little sharper on  X-men than on Chekov, I actually got the tickets out of excitement to see Magneto on stage, thinking “The Seagull” must be some obscure thing by the Bard. But no, it is Chekov. Only Rachel could help me understand that this play is no drama but just a wicked, wicked joke.

I’m going to do some Kundalini this morning and then secret down to the beach with the in-line skates that mysteriously showed up in the campus mailroom with my name on them. The departmental staff made me open the package immediately ('cos last time I received a non-Amazon box, it was cookies). That was embarrassing. By this token, I’ll understand if you want to disassociate from me when you learn I partake in either Kundalini or inline skating. Though you should probably lighten up and do some kriyas.

By the way. After much deliberation, it is Big Sur for Thanksgiving. It appears I’ll be stranded between equidistant (and I do mean distant) yoga in Mountain View and Santa Barbara, but correct me if I’m wrong. Any recommendations for what to do (the baths at 2 a.m., maybe, or afternoon snack at the Post Ranch?) and what to read (Henry Miller?) are welcomed.

Saturday links.

? Speaking of deliveries and of autumnal feelings, this record came in the mail for the Editor the other day. Beautiful. Nonsensical. So nice. Listen to the sample track embedded in the linked review. For the rest, though, send Bon Iver (this is a self-release and it sounds like he’s stuck up in a cabin in Wisconsin) some dollars. Right after you go back and pay Radiohead for that download you forgot to settle up the other day, weasels.

? Here is a clip from the recent Mindfulness and Psychotherapy conference at UCLA. Thich Nhat Hahn opens and then Jack Kornfield speaks about Burma. This related short interview—on warrior traditions in various faiths and the possibilities for activism rooted in Buddhism—is more provocative. “It’s one thing to be calm in a peaceful mountain monastery, and quite another to act calmly on a festering street corner in East L.A.”

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXVII · 12 October 2007

Minimalism, recently.

I’d say avant, but that would be obnoxious.

AF moved into a sleek LeCorbusier this week. I keep accidentally imagining myself there. But the flights to Chas de G are just stupid, and I’m supposed to be doing what DJ (the dissertation journal) says.

Reading My Paris as consolation (check it, U).

With Gui Boratto.

Eating Red Delicious. Which taste like something for once. 

Bad moon day on Wednesday. Moon days piss me off. I’ve been trying not to mention that.

Meanwhile, the secret planche is starting to show (phase one; oooooh Tristan—what you trying to do here? But thanks; and the bboy is something else). Take note if you are a 14-year-old boy or a female ashtangi. Related: I am showing a new interest in pressing up to handstand. Elusive. But it turns out I can hold an inverted L all day. Useless.

Also related: return of the desire to tattoo the arches of my feet. I know, I know. Guess it’s the collective unconscious talking. Sort of loudly.

Incidentally, there is no collective unconscious. Been ridiculing Jung’s bad metaphysics in the evenings. Can’t be helped, considering the October occult reading taking place in the Owl House.

However: I will be nesting alone in Eagle Rock this week while a dear friend plays CMJ. It is a writing retreat. Raising the question: to schlep to Santa Monica for practice, or moonlight closer to the temporary digs. Jury’s out.

And obviously, yes. There is a disturbance in the  force. I mean the collective unconscious.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound

Fall · 7 October 2007

Textpattern went on strike this week. It’s a young program and still wily, but I like that. Having this outlet sealed off ought to have narrowed my life right down, but it did not. Turns out that I have a long way to go before I achieve sociological one-pointedness (thank god: I’ve witnessed what damage that can do to a person). Conclusion: it helps to have this bin for orthogonal thoughts.

Thanks to those of you who asked whether I was allright, fussed about the error message (for those who do not want to hear there are multiple errors in your root elements, maybe you need to work on that), and especially for the generous offer of server space.

Anyway. It is fall.

I keep taking people for walks on the palisades. It’s the time of year you can see Catalina Island in detail. I am listening to Bat for Lashes, eating pomegranates, and going tonight to the premiere of Control, the Joy Division biopic. Should be good and dreary.

Meantime, am looking for autumn-appropriate occult reading for bedtime. (I think it’s in A Whistling Woman where A.S. Byatt has the gorgeous tangent about November being for creepy fairytales, but I prefer the Editor’s version. A good scientist, he tends to go in for the dark side of rationalism in the fall. But he’s already advised me not to reveal what embarrassing creepy Alastair Crowley nonsense he’s been bringing home from the library this week.) This brings me to the questions DZM sent over, about books. So, ok: no playing around here.

In other news, my parents (who are obsessed with National Parks and frightened by The Urban—the first time they visited me in LA someone stole my dad’s Bible out of their car) just announced they have a conference week after next in San Diego. They asked if I’d meet them next weekend in my choice of the three following locations: Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Torrey Pines. Real difficult decision there.

Not that the Canyon and the Desert don’t have their charms.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Ornette · 27 September 2007

Ok. Holy Shit.

It was decided that I should be edified. By a sort of direct experience of free jazz, which in its recorded form can make me irritable. Ornette Coleman an