Your moment of Zen

i took this shot one evening at my parents farm. when one catches a moment like this, all the cynicism in our world suddenly slides away…for the moment at least.

Best of and rest of music for 2007

Just in case you are holding your breathe, I am now releasing my complete "best of" for 2007 in the music world. Sorry Kanye, you've been snubbed again. Coat-tailing off of Daft Punk was ingenious but not getting you on my lists.

Top 10 Albums of 2007:
1. The National - Boxer
2. Panda Bear - Person Pitch
3. Radiohead - In Rainbows
4. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
5. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
6. Great Lake Swimmers - Ongiara
7. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
8. Band of Horses - Cease to Begin
9. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
10. Deerhunter - Cryptograms/Florescent Grey EP
Honorable Mention: Caribou - Andorra, Bowerbirds - Hymns for a Dark Horse, Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha, Battles- Mirrored

Top 5 Live Shows of 2007
1. Animal Collective - Variety Playhouse - could be the one of the best i've seen ever. go see them before you die.
2. The National - Variety Playhouse/Earl
3. Arcade Fire - Atlanta Civic Center
4. Grizzly Bear - Drunken Unicorn
5. Deerhunter/Black Lips - Variety Playhouse

Top 25 Singles:
1. Bros - Panda Bear
2. Atlas - Battles
3. Someone Great - LCD Soundsystem
4. Nude - Radiohead
5. Brainy - The National
6. Your Rocky Spine - Great Lake Swimmers
7. The Underdog - Spoon
8. Hljomalind - Sigur Ros
9. Melody Day - Caribou
10. Breakout - Genaro
11. Fireworks - Animal Collective
12. Florescent Grey - Deerhunter
13. 23 - Blonde Redhead
14. Little Brother - Grizzly Bear
15. Lime Tree - Bright Eyes
16. Scythian Empires - Andrew Bird
17. Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe - Okkervil River
18. Veni Vidi Vici - The Black Lips
19. Keep the Car Running - Arcade Fire
20. Nantes - Beirut
21. Dark Horse - Bowerbirds
22. While You Were Sleeping - Elvis Perkins
23. Lovesong of the Buzzard - Iron & Wine
24. Detlef Schrempf - Band of Horses
25. The Perfect Me - Deerhoof

Top 5 Disappointing Albums of 2007
1. Wilco - Sky Blue Sky - holy crap this album is boring. please Wilco, no more soft rock.
2. Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger - Two is the only good song on this dozer.
3. The White Stripes - Icky Thump - Think i listened to it twice. That was enough. Finally the Stripes trip up.
4. Interpol - Our Love to Admire - I'm beginning to think they may never come close to Turn On The Bright Lights ever again.
5. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Some Loud Thunder - I'm not giving up on them quite yet because the live shows are so much fun but this album was definitely a sophomore slump. Satan Says Dance was the only track that stood out and i had heard that from their first tour already.

Stinker of the year goes to:
Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgist - what an utterly flaming piece of poo. please go away Billy Corgan.

A message from the original "W"

This could be the best "green" commercial ever made. So much better than toiling creative effort to hawk tennis shoes.

Remember Friday is Buy Nothing Day.

Think you can make this happen? I'm sure going to try. And I don't care if it is 50% off chinos at Macy's.

okay with it

It's 4:30 in the morning. That time that the real meets the surreal. Tom Waits is on the radio. No time for slumber. Because for now the surreal is devine and the real is just ordinary.

What is graphic design?

Sometimes public perception is refreshing…or really hurts. I think i'm going out for some more sun or maybe hire a chiropractor now…or just cry.

Quick thought of the day: You are what you eat

While our society has become so predisposed with how we look and how what we eat affects that, I'm so often amazed at how much we ignore our intake in other areas. Most notably the media we take in. Let's face it. We live in a world cluttered with media like no other time in it's history. Books, magazines, television, radio, ipods, internet, cell phones, pdas and much more deliver messages to us from all sides. As a matter of fact, we average per person, 3,000 marketing messages fired at us alone a day! It's overwhelming if you think of it. It has to affect us in ways we can not imagine. How we speak, think, act. And there is a good chance that much of the quality of that media, if not carefully chosen by the user, is the equivalent to your brain and psyche as chugging down a twelve pack of beer and a bag of cheetos is to your body. Makes me laugh at the irony of the uber-fit person next to me on the treadmill engulfed in the latest celebrity trash mag. Because aren't they really just trading one kind of fat for another?

i'm back

So after a horrible case of noblogitis, i am recovering well and looking forward to gracing these digital pages for the remainder of the fall and winter.

Highlights of my absence have been nearly losing my earlobe in a kayaking accident on the Ocoee River in a rapid aptly named Tablesaw(it's healed now and unfortunately no cool scar because my ER doc was such a badass), my continuing feet dragging of getting out of my granite cave of a house to either buy or rent somewher better in town, and the realization of how great it feels to fire clients.

More to come later.

Toodles.

Jeff

No logo?

I love logos. As most people in the commercial creative field do. Hell…there is even a website in which creatives will spend the whole day debating the kerning of the new paypal logo: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/. We love admiring the beauty of them, finding meaning inside their simple(well..sometimes) shells, nitpicking every little detail, ridiculing them(ie. Michael Beirut calling the new UPS logo the "golden combover").

But DON'T ask us to wear one. IF you have ever noticed from any of your friends that work in the creative industry, they will go to painstaking levels to avoid any sort of logo on their clothes. This includes removing stitching, preforming precision surgery to take off labels, and just not buying anything with them on it(especially the one with the horsey on it). Have you ever noticed the look on a creatives face when offered a free t-shirt with pimping a company's logo? It will usually resemble the same look when they found they stepped in a fresh pile of dog poo. I'll admit since reading Naomi Klein's book, No Logo, a few years back that I have been even more aware in what i sport on the billboard of what i choose to wear.

While funny to think of, it raises the question why? If we love logos so much then why do we often keep them at an arms length? Is is a simple question of taste? Is it a representation of a larger question or problem? Is it the natural creative desire to not conform or to be an outsider? Is it a symbol of the awkward bedfellows that business and art often make? Is it a superiority thing in that we are smug about how we are versed in the ways of propaganda, that we are in on the joke that the rest of the population doesn't get? Or are we just in denial to the fact that often no matter how beautiful and meaningful our efforts are, that when it comes down to it, we are often just creating more junk that feeds the consumer monster?

Heima

On November 5th, Sigur Ros will release a concert movie from footage shot in their native Iceland last summer. Like everything the band touches, it looks and sounds absolutely beautiful. The innocence and beauty of Iceland makes me pine for a simpler life away from the shiny, plastic commercialized world we have created for ourselves here in America.

Alphabet City

When I was in grad school at Portfolio Center, I had a class in my first quarter where we were assigned to create a book of the alphabet using photos of everyday objects from around our wanderings through Atlanta that just happened to create a letterform. Everyone came back with such inventive perceptions for their books. It remains one of my favorite projects I did there. It changed how I looked at the world around me.

The other day I came across the above photo and all I could say was, "fucking brilliant!" It took the concept to a whole new level. I love this world we live in sometimes!

I get my best ideas in the shower…

…and some bands do their best work there too.

Pop and Lock Bears

Remember those scary singing mechanical bears from the old Showtime Pizza restaurants? Well…this guy, Chris Thrash on YouTube, has assembled the whole stage setup in his house and records popular songs with the band of bears and gorillas. It's both hilarious and very strange.

Joke Design Awards

Was flipping through Graphic Design USA this morning. It was their American Inhouse Design Awards issue. It should have been called The Special Olympics issue because I think everybody that entered got a hug. Ugggh. No wonder that rag is free.

The lovers, the dreamers, and me

You may begin smiling…now. Jim James at Kiddapalooza at Loolapalooza.

A story of the iWorld

Once upon a time great inventors created wondrous tools like the internet, TiVo, Netflix, and the ipod. The people rejoiced in the sudden realization that they no longer had to be dictated to in what they watched, listened to, or wore. So went back to their homes, did whatever they wished, and reveled in their new found individuality.

Then one day while at work, the people found themselves standing around the company water cooler. Staring at each other. Grasping in their individual minds for what to talk about. But nothing came out and they walked back to their cubes. Sighing, they all played another game of solitaire. The End

Deceptively safe

I love whitewater. I love metaphor. And I love using whitewater as metaphor for life. One term that has been dancing inside the gray matter lately is the term "eddy".

If you have never paddled before, and eddy is like a little oasis along your journey down the river. A place you can pull over to rest, think about your next move in the middle of a large rapid, or take a little "smoke" break in some cases. Eddies are circular. They usually lie behind large rocks and what keeps you safe and sounds in them is the water circulating around in it. Thus holding you in. Overall eddies are very comfortable places to be. Calm within the storm.

But eddies can be bad places if you stay there to long. You can relax too much. Let your guard down. Even let that four letter F word creep into your mind.

"Gosh that rapid looks scary down there. What if I screw up. What if I die? What if I look really stupid in front of those girls hanging out on that rock?"

So we stay in the eddy a little longer than expected to battle with our thoughts until we are completely paralyzed.

Eddies can represent lots of things in our lives. Jobs, places we live, relationships(or lack of one). While many times they feel comfortable to be in, we realize that we are in the middle of a large river and that there is a goal or much larger purpose to make it to. A destiny maybe. We end up sitting by and watching all the other people paddling by, successfully navigating the waters. But for some reason we sit back in fear that we won't be able to. We forget that we had the strength and skill to make it this far into the river of life. That maybe we've gone over larger rapids successfully than the one before us.

But if you have ever paddled, you know to get out of an eddy, it's deceptively simple. It takes one stroke to cross that line into the current. One single powerful stroke and you are back in the mix. And the rewards are exhilarating.

Think about it, what kayaker have you ever known to brag to their friends about staying in an eddy all day?

Man I love lo-fi!

I've never heard of this band(ZZZ) but the video is so rad! Love the appearance of the dreaded pinwheel.

Is it really worth pursuing?

Been a slow news week around the old homestead. So rather than force myself to write something to keep me from feeling bad that I haven't updated the ol' blogger with much original thought, I figured I would just share this highly stimulating essay that my sister forwarded to me earlier this month:

The Pursuit of Emptiness
by John Perry Barlow

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
- Chuang-Tzu (350 B.C.)

Chuang-Tzu had it right. No more need be said. But such is human nature that the more succinctly we state the truth, the better we become at ignoring it. So, despite the completeness of the above homily, I'll proceed, hoping that my volume may insinuate into your worldview what Chuang-Tzu's brevity might not.

Here's what I believe. I believe that extolling the pursuit of happiness was a toxic stupidity entirely unworthy of my greatest American hero, Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, it is a poison that sickens our culture more wretchedly every nanosecond. I wish he'd never said it.

It produces a monstrous, insatiable hunger inside our national psyche that encourages us ever more ravenously to devour all the resources of this small planet, crushing liberties, snuffing lives, feeling ourselves ordained by God and Jefferson to do whatever is necessary to make us happy.

And yet the American people are miserable. Or so it would appear.

A bit of anecdotal evidence (of which I could supply a thousand more examples). At the beginning of this year, my lover Lotte and I decided to start counting the number of spontaneous smiles we might observe in the upscale organic supermarket we frequent in San Francisco.

Since then, we've seen thousands of faces, nearly all of them healthy, beautiful, and very expensively groomed. We have so far counted seven smiles appearing on them. In 11 months. Seven smiles. (And at least three of these were insincere.) I am not kidding about this.

I also spend a lot of time in American airports. The same expression of troubled self-absorption has become a nearly universal mask worn by my people. Rarely do I hear laughter in an airport, despite there being plenty in an airport to laugh about, however darkly.

What am I to think of my people, who, during the year 2000, while feeding at the greatest economic pig-trough the world has ever slopped forth, also ate 13.4 billion dollars worth of Prozac and other anti-depressants (up 18% from the preceding year)? Better living through chemistry? I don't think so. Of my legion friends and acquaintances who have become citizens of Prozac Nation. I have never heard any of them claim that these drugs bring them any closer to actual happiness. Rather, they murmur with listless gratitude, anti-depressants have pulled them back from The Abyss. They are not pursuing happiness. They are fleeing suicide.

Actually, it is unfair to single out America in this regard. The pandemic of longing may have started here in the land of infinite possibilities, but it seems to have spread now to every part of the world where industrial economy and the religion of science have taken deep root since Jefferson, Voltaire, Locke, and their other practical colleagues kicked it off a quarter millennium ago.

The smiles per mile rating is only a little higher in Geneva, Brussels, Washington, Paris, or the other capitals of the Rich World than it is in dour San Francisco. But at least the rest of G8 have not declared happiness to be the kind of patriotic obligation it has become in the country literally founded on its pursuit.

Here we suffer the tyranny of fraudulent bonhomie. Big Brother has arrived as the great Smiley Face. I think I probably sensed this early, since I came from a family where nearly everyone drank themselves into oblivion during times like Christmas when happiness was most pathologically pursued.

But not until I turned 30 was it made obvious to me that my wariness of the pursuit of happiness might be a subtle form of treason. Like many of my generation, I hadn't really expected to live to such an age. I really didn't trust anyone over 30 - and remain reluctant to do so even now - but since I was about to be one, I figured I ought to at least take a stab at graceful adulthood. At least it seemed clear that I would no longer be able to excuse my peccadilloes on the basis of youth.

So I spent the night before my 30th Birthday composing a list of advisories to myself that I called "Principles of Adult Behavior." Most of these were blandly inarguable, the sort of platitudes Polonius liked to lay on Hamlet. Stuff like " Expand your sense of the possible." And, "Tolerate ambiguity."

"Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that."

Despite the safely Puritan kicker, this homily actively pissed off the broadest range of folks you can imagine. Whether hippie, cowboy, redneck or debutante, practically everyone who read my list thought there was something threateningly wrong about this. It was... why, it was downright un-American! I even got this from people who were ashamed to be Americans.

Openly agitating against the very pursuit of happiness was considered a sedition of the most insidious hazard. Because nearly everyone feels its weird invisible pressure - driving them to the fatigue that is despair, in order to acquire possessions that possessed them, money that turned their friends monstrous, addictions that turned them monstrous - nearly everyone feels that secret shame of not trying hard enough to be happy.

To have someone tell them they should just stop trying felt like a threat to the oath they'd taken with their lives. They had sworn, sometime during adolescence, that they would pursue happiness, and, by raw will, that they would catch some. When you've sacrificed so much to a creed, having it disappear turns your sacrifices into stolen goods.

So Jefferson's gentle aspiration had become law. The right to do something counter-productive - pursing something that flees in absolute symmetry with your desire, pursuing happiness - had become an obligation, as surely as charity became entitlements. If we were not pursing happiness - whatever the hell that meant to whom-the-hell-ever - we were not part of the Great Work of America.

Yet even as happiness became our American due, the inner sense that we deserve to be happy seems to have generally withered. Kant spoke of "making ourselves worthy of happiness." It seems to me a rare American who behaves as if he has done so.

I don't know where the disease arises, but I think there's an epidemic of self-loathing in this country that is, besides the folly of the pursuit itself, the greatest barrier to contentment in most hearts. I can't count the number of people I've known whose misery amidst plenty seemed to be a suspicion of joy rooted so deeply in their personalities that it had to have been planted during infancy. It's not simply the sensible awareness of cycles - that the natural price of magic is tragedy and that life actually is fair. If only it were that wise.

Rather it seems a sense of one's own unremembered original sin, the hazy belief that by failing some early test in life, the wretch has made himself forever unworthy of any earthly paradise he might accumulate around himself. I've had two friends commit suicide rather than accept their own successes, and I'm sure there are more of their kind out there.

Get over it. No matter how bad you are, you deserve some happiness. Just don't consider it either a right or an obligation.

Let me be clear. I like happiness. Hell, I think I am happy most of the time. (I know. Most Americans, when polled, will tell you the same thing, but I look happy most of the time, which cannot be said of most Americans.)

And when I'm happy, why am I happy?

Never because I pursued it. Rather because I let it pursue me. To me, it seems that the more you ignore it, the more it will come looking. Swami Satchidananda put it better:

"If you run after things, nothing will come to you. Let things run after you. The sea never sends an invitation to the rivers. That's why they run to the sea. The sea is content. It doesn't want anything. That's the secret in life."

I'm not sure what would happen to our economy if everyone took this dictum to heart, but I have a feeling it might come to look like Satchidananda's. But would that be as bad as it sounds? While I'm not ready to move to India, my experiences in Africa make me wonder if I wouldn't be happier moving there.

I've spent a lot of time in Africa over the last several years and, wherever I go in that supposedly dark continent, I am continuously amazed by how happy most people seem to be. Despite living with pandemic AIDS, starvation, filth, disease, and ghoulish little wars where children dismember one another, most Africans grin and wave as I pass through their villages. They seem to mean it, too. They would probably not have a similar experience were they to pass through our suburbs.

The apparent happiness of Africans, against all horror, seems to derive from a sense of connectedness, or as the Zulu put it, "ubunto." This word is often translated to mean community, but one of them gave me what I think is a more accurate definition: "I am because we are; we are because I am."

In other words, their pursuit of happiness seems more successful than ours because it is not a solitary endeavor. African happiness is a joint enterprise, something that can only be created by the whole. I am happy because we are happy. Much contentment arises from a sense of family, community, and connectedness.

Such virtues are in dwindling supply in America. Two thirds of all our first marriages end in divorce. The war between children and parents has never been uglier (since it is now concealed, rather than public as it was in the '60's). We think AOL and the local mall are communities. We think that Disney, the corporation, is a story-teller. And, to the extent, we are connected at all, it is largely by mass media like television, which, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, "allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone."

Imagine an evening spent peering through the suburban windows of America. Think of the faces you would behold within, lit pale by the flickering blue bath of electrons Big Content blasts out for their "entertainment." Slack-jawed and silent, one hand gripping a Bud, the other in a bag of Fritos, they watch other "people" pass through contrived "ordeals" and imagine themselves pursuing happiness.

But they are not pursuing happiness. They are seeking what I call The Zone, a mental and emotional condition where nothing happens. Nothing can happen except for the most rudimentary necessities of life and manufactured entertainment. When Zoned, they are left alone. They are being granted a twisted kind of peace.

By this I don't mean that The Zone is a halcyon and serene mental condition. It's only correspondence to those states aspired to by Oriental mystics is outward dispassion. It's more like being in an iron lung than any condition you'd achieve by sitting Zazen. Rather than being detached from the illusory world of perceptions, one is painfully separated from a world which seems quite real. Absolutely no one likes being in The Zone. What's peculiar is that not only do we allow it to exist, we encourage it in practically every venue of our lives, whether it be in our workplace cubicles, our commuting cars, our Sisyphean Stair-Masters, our Generican landscaped landscapes.

While Zoned, one is under no obligation to care about anything more enduring than, say, who wins the football game, and it appears that many of us would rather not.

If we can't entertain ourselves into happiness, what about buying it? I skirted the issue earlier, but I suppose that something does need to be said about wealth and happiness. After all, Jefferson's dangerous statement of the essential liberties was preceded by John Locke's "Life, Liberty, and Property." Given the similarity of these two phrases, it's only natural that a certain conflation would take place. And it has.

Almost everyone in American seems to regard wealth and happiness as though they were practically interchangeable. Even the wise Bessie Smith is reported to have said, "I been rich and I been poor, and let me tell you, Honey, rich is better." Maybe. But let's define our terms.

If, as I suspect, she was talking about dirt poor vs. modestly rich, I would agree with her. But most Americans in pursuit of material happiness are attempting to move from modest poverty to filthy riches, and, having watched scores of my friends come down with what Stewart Brand calls "toxic wealth" over the last decade, I wouldn't trade places with any of them. (Not even now, when my own recent wealth has evaporated...) I feel I have enough money to stave off terror, but hardly enough to put me in the grip of paranoid anomie and the paralysis of purpose that seems to have afflicted most of them. And I never have to wonder whether anyone actually loves me for my money.

I suspect that the greatest benefit of the DotBoom and subsequent DotBust will turn out to be that more people have experienced great and ephemeral wealth at an early age than ever before in history. There is now among us a very large number of young people who know the emptiness that can only come from three Porsches in the garage and two bimbos in the bed. There are a lot of smart kids who are now more dedicated to making a difference than making a dollar. At least most of them now know, in a deep way, that money doesn't buy happiness.

Alright then, if you can't pursue happiness, how can you make yourself a fertile place for happiness to grow of its own? Happiness being the most subjective of states, I can only speak for myself. I have found four qualities that I believe naturally enrich the ecology of joy. When I'm capable of sustaining them, they sustain me and continue to do so even in these strange days. They are: a sense of mission, the casual service of others, the solace of little delights, and finally, love for its own sake.

Having a sense of mission has served me extremely well, even better than I thought it would when I wrote Adult Principle Number 15 and bound myself to purpose rather than its by-product. Often I would have been hard-pressed to define mine and it has certainly taken on many different manifestations in the course of my careers, but I have taken a lot of happiness from a sense - often grandiose and sometimes illusory - that I am, by my various actions, helping create a future that will be more free, more tolerant, more open, and more just.

My primary ambition is to be a good ancestor, and though, by definition, I will never know if I've succeeded, I am pleased to believe that I'm giving it my best shot.

Connected to the happiness of mission is another joy that can no more be pursued than grace itself: the gift of creation. I've been blessed by the opportunity to let art pass through me on occasion. Whether songs, or essays, or interestingly designed haystacks, these manifestations of beauty, for which I take no more credit than the faucet should take for the water, have been wonderful gifts.

The sense that one has become the instrument of invention is so satisfying that I find it truly stupefying that anyone one would claim that artists are motivated to create primarily by the money they might get from such miracles. Not to say they shouldn't be paid. Paying them provides them with more time and liberty to channel art. But it's a rare artist who's in it for the money. A real artist creates because he has no choice. He is pressed into the involuntary service of art, and thereby, humanity.

Which brings me to another solace cheaply available to all. Consider the joys of service. As a few leaders, ranging from Jimmy Carter to the Dalai Lama, demonstrate with their lives, we can become happy through the exercise of compassion. But following the training we receive in schools and workplaces, we have come to regard service as self-suppressing obligation rather than a self-fulfilling responsibility. It doesn't have to be that way.

I think a related problem is that we tend to approach service the same way we approach exercise programs, in lunges and spasms of temporary idealism. We raise the initial bar too high. We fail to see that they also serve who, while not quite heading off to Calcutta to comfort dying lepers, merely treat the strangers miscellaneously at hand with a little humor and kindness. You don't have to be Gandhi to be a good guy. There are few things that make me happier than successfully resisting the impulse to snarl at some idle transgressor and elevating myself into an actively benign stance. Such opportunities arise almost hourly. (Not that I always rise to them.) The habit of small kindnesses is immensely rewarding.

Which brings me to another under-appreciated fountain of happiness: the common little joys the universe leaves lying around for the truly casual observer. I think of something Kafka - that noted happiness-hound - wrote:

"It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its

unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet."

He is not talking about the pursuit of happiness. He's not even talking, as one might easily and incorrectly conclude, about lying in wait for happiness. He's talking about making oneself genuinely available to it. He is talking about opening one's senses to the little delights - the sunsets, the lilac-scented breezes, the hilarious bartender jokes, the quick flash of anonymous smiles, the inside straights, the large purring cats, the click of stiletto heels, the popping of bubble-wrap, the liquid song of the meadowlark, the shrug of a New York cop - the granular texture of unsolicited joy.

There have been many hard times in my life - including the present - when I took refuge in reduced focus, comforting myself with the glorious filigree of immediate existence. Even a man facing a firing squad can appreciate the dawn that also arrays itself before him.

Finally, and always, there is love. By this, I don't mean that economic bargain that often passes for love these days. I don't mean that I will love you if you get good grades, or that I will love you if you'll sleep with me, or that I will love you ifŠanything. I mean what I mean when I say, "I love you." Period. Without expectation, condition, term limit, codicil, or obligation. To say that - and to mean it in that way - makes me happy.

What makes me happiest of all is when someone says "I love you" to me - meaning it as unconditionally as I intend to mean it - and I simply accept it. Learning to accept unconditional love has been the most demanding part of my education. It requires me to love myself as much as I am loved, which is not easy, since I like to pretend that my loathsome short-comings are invisible to all but me.

Still, when I love without goal and accept love without doubt, I am happy. In this, I am not pursuing happiness. I am becoming it.

(A shorter version appeared in the December 2001 Forbes ASAP.)

--
"Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful." ~ Tao Te Ching

The perfect storm

Within the past week I have discovered that Andrew Bird, Peter Bjorn and John, The National, Animal Collective, Interpol, Midlake, Do Make Say Think, and Earlimart will be playing Atlanta in September. WOW. I'm definitely going to have to do more freelance on the side this month and August.

Life is weird

A chronological summary of a contrast filled weekend:

Friday
Life is good…Drinks with friends at the Brick Store in Decatur. High gravity Belgian beer is like delicious deadly candy.

Life is crap…One of said friends is rudely dressed down and generalized by a repulsive hipster girl about how he doesn't belong at the Decatur Social Club. Reaffirms my belief that most hipsters have decided to be angst driven 16 year olds for their whole lives.

Saturday
Life is good…Brunch with M at Ria's Bluebird. MMM…goat cheese omelettes.

Life is crap…I can't find my check card.

Life is good…Chilling by the pool with R and T.

Life is crap…Still trying to find my check card and then get a telephone call from VISA saying someone has gotten a hold of my credit card number. Credit card is canceled and I cancel the check card because i am freaked out about the credit card. I have been reduced to Money 1.0. Have to dig around to dust off the checkbook.

Life is still crap…Realize that I wrote down the wrong date for V's going away party. It was Friday night. She flew out Sat. I felt horrible.

Life is good…Great time at B's birthday party at The Spotted Dog. Girl on girl arm wrestling is hot.

Life is crap…I owe M for the tab because of earlier stated lack of plastic.

Sunday
Life is good…An absolutely stellar day of paddling on the Nantahala River with C and some new friends. First time in my boat this year. Hit my roll every time!

Life is crap…Check engine light comes on and engine starts to stall on the drive back in the middle of pouring rain. I guess 7000 isn't a good number to wait for getting the car serviced. Visions of being stranded on the highway in a lightning storm dance through head.

Life is weird…As C and I leave the convenience store with a quart of oil, we notice a full rainbow set against the gray, ominous night sky. A perfect metaphor for the entire weekend.

0 to 1 on a 0 day

This may be one of the best monologues I have ever heard on the trials and tribulations of being "creative". Made me feel better on this day of blah(woke up with a stomach bug. yarg.)

start em young

Just flipped on the TV just in time to catch a commercial for a 14 year old pop star's DVD. Her name?

Hannah Montana

Good one, publicist. With that stage name, she'll transition to the porn industry with no problem when she turns 18.

Simple solution

Hey you! The week got you down? Well then put down that TPS report, tell the client you WILL NOT make the logo bigger, get out of the cube, take off that ridiculous blue shirt and those uncomfortable pumps, send the kids off to summer camp, go outside and run barefoot(just make sure to apply plenty of sunscreen because it’s HOT out there) and whatever you do, turn this song up to eleven! Because it’s FRIIIIDDAAYYYY !

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Simple pleasures

There is nothing I love more than when simple occurances in life that we usually ignore are presented in interesting ways. This is a video from a side project of some of the Sigur Ros members called Riceboy Sleeps. It's absolutely entrancing.

Try to get some rest.

I wrote this post on MOG the other day and liked it so much I thought I would repost it here as well.

There are moments where angels come into our lives.

About a little over a year ago, one came into mine. It was a time of turmoil and personal grief. I was watching my mother slowly lose her battle to cancer and at the same time dealing with the aftermath of a long-term stifling, relationship. She came in out of nowhere as they usually do when one is not expecting. One night early on, as we IM'd back and forth, sensing my pain, she sent me this song by the Summer Lawns. I wept. But then felt a sense of peace come over me that things were going to be okay regardless. That angel and I went on to have one of those Icarus-like relationships that flies so close to the sun, that you know there is now way it could last. One of those short term flings that kick starts the senses to unimaginable levels. And then a few months in, as abruptly as she entered, she flew away. As angels usually do. I didn't give chase because deep down I knew she was not mine. That she had other places to go. So I stayed back and cherished the gift she left me. Hope.

So now every once and a while, on those quiet nights where memories float through the air like whispers, I turn this song on, smile back on tender memories and hope for another chance that an angel will cross my door step.

I hope you enjoy "Piano Song" by the Summer Lawns as much as I did.

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boing boing boing

My mind is a bouncing piece of silly putty today. Flying in every direction but the one I should be going. What's the dog doing? What are my friends doing? I wish I was in the mountains. I should paint more or create a manifesto. Oh gosh, my boss has a Celine Dion songbook! I really shouldn't eat that chocolate donut but oh, so delicious. I should grow a beard back but, damn, it's almost July. Sometimes Conor Oberst sounds like goatboy. There are't that many attractive people on MARTA. SO much that I think average looking girls get a 3-5 point boost in the 1-10 scale due to the contrast. I should quit drinking coffee. I wish they would bring back the Muppet Show. Nevermind. They'd dumb it down for the Lohan crowd.

focus.

focus.

focus.

bugger…hey look! something shiny!

Elizabeth v. Ann: the smackdown

My respect for Elizabeth Edwards just went through the roof. Ann Coulter is in my opinion, a perfect representation of everything that is wrong with the state of American politics, particularly the self righteous right wing side. Ms. Edwards eloquently calls her out on her tactics. It baffles me how people continue to pay to read or hear her pompous, mean spirited drivel.

Reading between the lines

“One of the only things that we are guaranteed in life is that everyone that we love will be taken away from us.”

When I saw those words on the page my heart skipped a beat. I quickly closed the book and shoved it far down in my bag. Damn you Dave Eggers. Why did I have to read this now? A wave of emotion started in my feet and rushed towards my eyes. I had to hold it together. I was alone in a hospital waiting room full of strangers. I was freaking out inside. In that one sentence two years worth of fears and ghosts were released inside my head.

That happened around the end of last month month. Dad was in the hospital undergoing cancer surgery. My sister couldn’t make it down from NY for this surgery so I was the sole family representative. After having gone through the death of my mother to cancer two years ago, this was an all too familiar experience. Not one I had expected so soon. That line from the book, And You Shall Know Our Velocity, would continue to haunt me for next month. So much that it would cause me to put much of my personal life on hold for a month in order to regain my equilibrium and regroup.

My first reaction was in a negative way. Obviously I hid. I even refused to touch the book for at least a couple weeks. Of course it is not something I didn’t know. Of course everyone dies. But the context and location of the message made the reality seem as close as it had ever been to me. The possibility that I could be alone so soon in regards to being without the two people that we all grow up thinking are invincible.

For the next few weeks I went to work, dialed in, came home and just thought. Running every bit of my life through my head. About all the times I had taken the chance to love only to have it taken painfully away. Be it past relationships or my past with my mom and dad. I took everything apart. Put it back together. Reasoned with it. Prayed. For a while I felt like I felt like i could sink no lower.

Until the week before last. I woke up one Wednesday and there was a peace in my head. A peace I had not had in a while. The answer was suddenly clear. That quote was not a beacon of hopelessness but a beacon of setting me free. Because once you realize that it is all temporary then it gives you all the more reason to grab on to what you have now. To not hide from experiences in life and with others in fear of being hurt. Which is, once I gained the courage to open the book back up, what happened to the hero of the story as he traveled the world with the loss of his good friend running through his head. He learned to live.

So for the past week I have felt lighter. Passions that had gone numb are slowly coming back. I’m am falling back in love with design. Reconnecting with friends. Finding the will to create again. Dad is recovering nicely from his surgery. Things seem to be coming back together. WHich brings me to close on a passage my mother kept hanging up in our house. One that I had seen every day but never taken the time to truly consider until now:

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not very Shag-tastic at all.

If there is one dance that I wish would be taken off the face of the earth, it is the Shag. Popularized in the 1940’s by beach music loving fraternity kids in the Carolinas, it is in many ways the bastard stepchild of swing dancing and the not too distant cousin of country line dancing. But more importantly, shagging may be one of the primary reasons that black people make fun of the way white people dance and a large cause of bar fights. Here are other reasons of my aversion to the dance:

1)Shagging is the IED of dancing.

You never know when it is going to break out. And it is indeed explosive. You could be in a packed bar with not an iota of room and if Brown Eyed Girl comes on the speakers, there will always be at least three couples in the room that decide that there could be no perfect place to shag than in the inches of free space which they occupy. And we all know what comes next: A Chip and Mitsi buzzsaw, sending everyone in a 10 foot radius and their beers in disarray.

2)Shagging has no conscience.

Once Chip and Mitsi return from their pastel-laden, erotic, caucasion spinfest, they will almost always give no acknowledgement to the destruction which they have left in their wake. At best, Chip will brush his frop(mop haircut preferred by most current and 1-5 years removed Southern fraternity guys) to the side, glance around, and give the person closest a curt,” What the fuck are you looking at?” or my personal favorite, the silent blue blood “eat shit” smirk.

3) Shagging acknowledges no musical style or taste.

Certain people will find a way to shag to ANY form of music. Case in point, last night at a local bar festival. Band playing Metallica? Shag faster with the occasional devil horns hand gesture added in. Tommy Tutone? Use more of a new wave skip to your shag. I have even seen the occasional indie rock show shag. I wondered how they stumbled in there. It was hilarious. You would have thought from the look on some of the local indie crowd’s faces that the couple had drawn lewd doodles on a Ben Gibbard portrait.

4. Shagging is the equilavent of shaking your drunk girlfriend or prospective hookup up like a beer can.

First of all let me say that despite my despise for the shag, there seem to be a wide array of girls of all types that love it. I even admit have even performed the dance(begrudgingly) to humor a girl or two in my past. But I don’t really get why they like it, other than to possibly reclaim that odd sense of euphoria one got as a kid when they spun in circles in the backyard until they got dizzy, fell down and in some cases yarfed. But back to the main point, in almost every case of the rowdy bar, shag induced IED explosion, Mitsi is almost always found later, as you leave the bar, either being drug comatose by Chip out the door or sitting on the asphalt in the parking lot with her head buried between her legs as her friends chatter away on cellphones circled around her. So if you think of it, the shag as a pick up form is much like playing russian roulette. While it may pay off and create the perfect rush to get her a little closer to ones bedroom, there is a good chance the wrong chamber loads and good ole Chip is now the proud owner of a projectile launcher for the night.

Quote of the Day

"Destroying human lives in hopes to save human lives is not ethical." - President George Bush

Come on Georgie! Will you never stop sticking that shoe in your mouth? It must be quite flavorful. This is too easy. Refer to the contradiction blog.

What happened to the family house?

Since I started taking MARTA to work a few days out of the week I have had to enjoy a three quarter mile hike to my place of work. Of which most of it is spent walking through the bustling new neighborhoods of Brookhaven. Each day as I slog through the June heat, I am taken back with the sheer size of which the suburban house has taken on. In place of the modest ranch with the front porch and the nice back yard, has been placed imposing 3 story brick and stone monoliths. Gone are the back yards because the house has taken up all that room. From a walkers perspective, you almost feel like a dwarf walking through a forest of angry giants. The welcome mat has been replaced with "Go the fuck away!". Sometimes these houses remind me of turtle shells in how if a person walks down the street, instead of waving and saying hello, the occupants duck back inside.

Which makes me wonder why it has come to this. Why have our homes become fortresses of defense instead of welcoming beacons to our fellow neighbors where community is formed? Is it because of our current society of fear? Where 24 hour news and even our authority figures seem to delight in scaring the shit out of us like a demented uncle? Or is it Keeping up with the Joneses 2.0? A aggressive belief by a society with more disposible income than ever before that one must continue to "one up" the neighbor in order to polish frail egos by buying bigger, shinier, faster?

abort the contradiction

Let me get this straight. Our president and the court he has lined up are against abortion. But if you really think about it, isn't he preforming the same operation himself, just a bit later in life, by keeping our young kids in Iraq?

Save the babies. They're so cute. Screw 'em when they get older.

Good one, Georgie.