I just saw The Fucking Champs put up a tabs page so I decided to finish the project I started during the summer. I took the bulk of today to tab out the rest of Powerpoint by The Fucking Am (collaboration of The Fucking Champs and Trans Am), off of the album Gold.
I’m sending the tab to the Champs and, with any luck, the gods of guitar will accept my humble offering.
Oh Walt Whitman bardic every-man with love and song for the grass that is mankind in blade and in leaves, democratic and romantic. Yet Walt Whitman, you do not have enough love to fool fool-me, for you are still a massive pain in my (gr)ass to read.
It’s night and I’m in a forest with Tim waiting for him to get his gear ready so we can record a wilderness soundscape for a movie we’ve been working on called Young Goodman Brown. Adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story of the same name, the movie has been an unexpected one-off. Shot on a Panasonic DVX 100 and its sound mixed and recorded on a separate unit, Young Goodman Brown has given us the chance to gauge what our technical capabilities will be coming into the rapidly approaching Ameviathan: The Green Machine. As is always the case though, the one-off has taken on a life of its own.
Occasionally I get these urges to see some little corner of the universe fall before my concept of fasciest perfection. Usually these things ferment (or foment) upstairs for quite awhile, eventually falling on She Dragon’s patient ears but rarely traveling further. But now that The Mindlab is my podium to the world everyone can know the narrowly focused brilliance of my visions.
So far though there are only two real world-changing visions I can remember having and deigning to share here, the first being The Ideal Pants. But my more recent, further reaching ideal, fresh off the drawing board is sure to revolutionize not only this website, nor just the internet. Nay it will impact the very structure of the English language itself.
Ladies and gentelemen I bring you (crudely rendered with in the modern alphabet): The Alpha-eps!
Love is a refrigerator door left wide open wasting precious cool in electric emotion. Love is a refrigerator door growing old and grey humming predictable minutes day by mundane day. Love is a refrigerator door filled with magnet men held up by notes you wrote her in the black pen.
"Ne te quaesiveris extra."
"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
ESSAY II Self-Reliance
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Continue reading “Self-Reliance” from Essays: First Series (1841) by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Loki, I may just not fully understand what the problem is but I think I may have figured out a solution to the the floating sofa issue. Actually the picture of the sofa you provided in your last entry on the subject gave me a hint.
But let me take a step back from this issue for a moment and digress heavily.
In spite of it’s many foibles I and many others very much enjoy the Dungeons & Dragons game, especially in it’s d20 system iteration. Perhaps one of the major reasons for game’s popularity both in it’s current form and historically is the evocative, tone setting, and somewhat customizable character archtypes it offers in the form of mythic races and heroic classes.
Character classes range from the simple (ie. Fighters) to the extravagantly abilitied (ie. Bards, Druids, Rangers), covering a wide range of occupational and lifestyle choices. However, one potential drawback of this sytem is that each sort of class is very much focused in a particular area of magical and/or mundane expertise. And this can be fine if you simply want warriors who kill things and magicians who sling spells about…
But what if you’re interested in playing a different sort of warrior: a cavalry man with who has studied history a bit and has better strategic, diplomatic, and leadership skills? Or a wizard who’s not just a walking toolbox of magical effects, rather a wise man who has studied up on arcane lore of all sorts, strange creatures, alchemy, poisons, spirits, and the planes beyond?
Continue reading d20 New Character Classes – Just These Guys
I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.
Continue reading “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau
