Two Birds In The Bush

A bird froze to death on a drift of snow in our front yard.

A close-up of the carnage and the tragedy.

Echoes And Whispers of Voices

I had this great idea to make a mixtape of covers and their original parents. I would put them back to back to hear the different interpretations. I think it will be dope. Here's the playlist I have so far (the order and length of which can and will likely change):

Fast Car - Tracy Chapman/Xiu Xiu
Let's Dance - David Bowie/M. Ward
Dead Leaves & The Dirty Ground - The White Stripes/Chris Thile
Bold As Love - Jimi Hendrix/John Mayer (Mayer=meh, but it's a great cover)
Great Balls Of Fire - Jerry Lee Lewis/Teitur
Downtown Train - Tom Waits/Rod Stewart (surprise: Rod's not the mastermind who wrote it)
Cry Me A River - Justin Timberlake/The Cliks
Down Down Down - The Presets/Bumblebeez
Beautiful - Christina Aguilera/Clem Snide
Hickory Wind - The Byrds/Gillian Welch
Thriller - Michael Jackson/Benjamin Gibbard
Mack The Knife - Bertolt Brecht/Nick Cave
Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana/The Bad Plus
Under Pressure - David Bowie/Vanilla Ice (via Ice Ice Baby)/Ben Kweller
Human Fly - The Cramps/Nouvelle Vogue
Out Of Time - The Rolling Stones/The Ramones
Sin City - The Flying Burrito Brothers/Beck & Emmylou Harris
Restless Farewell - Bob Dylan/Norman Blake & Peter Ostrroushko
Bring The Noise - Public Enemy/The Dirty Three

I'm Too Restless For Even My Own Dreams

Yeah, about the whole digital Dr. Frankenstein thing below...I think about it all the time. Sometimes I decide that it's an interesting experiment and I want to participate/contribute. I've also, on more than one occasion, considered cutting myself off totally from the whole internet monster - a complete erasure. After much internal debate, I've concluded that it's just not reasonable, you know, erasing yourself and joining a digital Amish league of some kind...it just isn't practical. It's becoming a necessity of life for EVERYONE. I mean, old people can get away with it, but the only reason they can is that they're going to die soon, so it's not worth the effort to learn/assimilate/associate. I'm too young to use that excuse. Oh well. I guess I will play the game until the final inning, regardless of my fatigue and disgust of the whole arena, uniform, and championship, because I'm a member of the team, The Human Team. Ugh and pffftttt.

Love is a Box of Paperclips

It's interesting: The Internet has become so advanced (with the advent of Web 2.0 and del.icio.us and stuff like that) that we build a digital version of ourselves. All of our personality traits and thoughts and feelings are written down in social networking sites and on blogs (such as this one). It's scary in a lot of ways, in fact. you never know if the person contacting you is really who they say.

I was thinking about doing a little experiment where I would build a person who is the exact opposite of me and enter her into the net that is Inter. I wonder: what SPAM emails she'd receive, who would contact her, and how she'd assimilate herself into the digital world?

It would defeat the purpose if I actually wrote it all out in detail though or told you when and where this would take place (if it would at all, considering my lack of motivation and time), so we'll just leave it at that...

A Tiny Fist

Yesterday, a six-year-old white girl stood on a snowbank in front of my house with her fist in the air, and said, "I am Martin Luther King Jr and I have a dream that everyone will be nice to each other." I almost died with feelings of scarlet pride, pitch-black depression, utter hopelessness, and a renewed vigor to save the world from the human race. And as per usual, now that time has passed, I'm feeling lazy again and only a few days, mere hours, have passed.
Wouldn't it be grand to have a tiny child stand on the front porch of my mind every morning as I wake and shout this phrase, to remind me what's at stake that day and every day thereafter?

When Girl Scouts Attack

Some colleagues and I were talking about the line of decency in media these days (and the grander scale of "art" for that matter, whatever the hell that means), and I decided it was a fallacy to call it a line, because that would imply some inherent, universal definition or static position or location, and that's just not the truth.

Here's an example [This is a joke I found online]:
An old-ish man and a young boy are in the a forest (clearly the middle of nowhere), and the caption reads:
BOY: Mister, I'm scared.
MAN: _You're_ scared? I'm the one who has to walk home alone in the dark!

Now, to me, that's hilarious. But to someone who has actually had a child abducted or hurt/killed by some creepy pedophile, that's not funny at all. Racist jokes are the same, for the most part. I'm sure I don't need to give examples for you to get the point. On the other hand, the father of one of my good friends says, "It's not a joke unless there's a victim."

So, the line of decency is more of a thick band, where an infinite number of lines are drawn by individuals and those lines can change depending on circumstances, past and future experiences, contexts, times of the day/week/month/year/decade/millenium. It's a blurry, vibrating incarnation of Value or Morality. There are certain things that are so ridiculously over the line/band that one could never argue that it's okay...but who knows? As the morality of Human Culture continues to change, so too will the concept of what's considered acceptable.