There is a new consciousness crystallising, and  Rushkoff said something which (as usual) was very insightful, in that the mainstream media are having trouble getting to grips with the (r)evolution because they can’t see it, it just looks like a jumble of different causes all mixed together, and the people at the heart of it refuse to discuss it on the mainstream media’s terms, and reduce everything to black and white and soundbites.

Check out the Fox News interview he links to on there and you can see the new and the old paradigm meeting.

Old: binary (right or wrong)
New: inclusive (everyone has a facet of the truth, including the so-called ‘enemy’)

Old: soundbite
New: conversation

Old: Simplified
New: In depth

Old: Judgemental
New: Non-judgemental

Old: sensationalist
New: realistic

Old: dreaming (our actions have no consequences)
New: awake (our actions do have consequences)

Old: newspapers, tv
New: social networks

Old: top-down politics
New: bottom-up organising

Old: secrets, cover-ups
New: open source, transparency

Old: protest (asking for a favour from those ‘above’)
New: occupy (taking what is rightfully ours in a peaceful way)

Old: News of the World
New: Wikileaks

Old: separation, fear
New: inclusion, love

This new paradigm has gradually, almost gently, emerged and it is still in its fragile early stages. But I imagine that reading back this blog post in a year or two’s time, what I am saying here will seem so obvious as to make people wonder why I even bothered to mention it at all; the consciousness will have fully established itself and will have totally changed the ‘conversation’  we are having about any important issue you care to mention in Western industrialised society.

And also to say ‘Thank You’ if you subscribe to the blog or regularly check back here to see what’s new. When I see the subscriber stats or look at the anal-lytics it tells me that I am not just posting stuff into an endless void – interesting as voids can be: see the incredible film ‘Enter the Void’ for an example. I assume that those reading this blog are human beings as I am, and indeed probably share similar tastes. My tastes are very eclectic so I don’t expect anyone to love everything I post, even if I do. In fact that is the only criterion for posting stuff here, that I love it, or it is my own work and thus I at least want to love it.

Most of the things I post here are either shared from Google Reader or YouTube – I just click one button and it appears here. That way I get round my laziness and actually post things rather than just following the road that is paved with good intentions. But from time to time, as now, I actually get off my arse and write something – these posts can be found under the unassuming title of ‘thoughts‘.

Also I do make music – see here – don’t be scared, people have actually expressed surprise that it is quite good, y’know, like ‘proper’ music by someone you have heard of. Or maybe you have heard of me, in which case it is already somewhat ‘proper’. There will be more of this soon, I am working with some friends and family to produce something which I hope you will find interesting.

So, thanks again and if you read this, feel free to leave me a comment, constructive criticism is ok, or just say ‘hi’. I do this stuff to create connections, to let my brainwaves expand into the electronic ether in some small way. If there is an echo from the void, so much the better, if not, I will carry on anyway and the best of luck to all who sail in her.

The idea of ‘practice’ creates a false self with its own hopes and expectations and all the sense of future which goes with it. Although we may indeed improve in some sense with more time and more practice: stilling the mind, controlling the emotions etc., we are in fact strengthening this false future-dependent self and ultimately getting further and further away from fully experiencing the present moment. Enlightenment or fulfilment remains tantalisingly out of reach.

The solution for me, at any rate, is to forget everything, forget that I know how to meditate, forget any idea of getting better at it, and just totally surrender. By the way, surrender is not something that can be practised!

What is the purpose of art? To communicate that which language cannot.

In this way we are not ‘productive’, we are not caught in the trap of ‘becoming’, we are not placing hope in an illusory ‘future’ which acts as a drug to stop us seeing the reality of how things are right now.

We are defying the corporate mindset that all people have to be efficient cogs in the machine, the machine which will deliver us to our inevitable technological Utopia.

Of course, sometimes we have to be productive, have to be part of the machine, but it helps our soul to forget about all of that just for a few seconds and be whatever we happen to be in that moment, as imperfect as it may be.

If this seems like nonsense to you, maybe you are so embedded in the prevalent corporate mindset that you are unable to see outside of it. Just stop, and gently ask yourself if you really think for yourself or if your mind has been programmed for you by others.

photo credit: cosmonautirussi

How much does location play a part in your sound?

“I am fascinated by the resonance certain places can have, which invests them with almost heroic proportions. The very name of a place itself can inspire awe and credibility. There are countless examples of this in American folk and pop music and beyond and I am trying to key into a mode which elevates places around Britain, which have a personal resonance, into the realm of myth and mystery. In this sense certain locations play a big part in the music we make; trying to mythologise a place which provided the backdrop to some great personal realisation or other.”
-Alex Neilson, Trembling Bells

“And the whole secret of relating mythology and the spiritual life to your environment is involved in what’s called land nam by the people in Iceland; naming and claiming the land through naming the landscape, land-taking. You read the land you are living in as the holy land.”
-Joseph Campbell quoted in The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on his life and work by Joseph Campbell, Phil Cousineau, Stuart L. Brown.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs

I feel this is something we have really lost touch with; the perception of our day-to-day life as sacred and the very mundane world we live in as holy. William Blake saw contemporary London as the New Jerusalem and was ridiculed as eccentric or even insane. It would seem laughable to describe Peckham or Doncaster as holy places but it is our decision to treat anywhere as a place where the Spirit does not live.

Julian Cope has resurrected interest in the ancient holy places of Europe in his books on megaliths but if you just look at the names of places you will notice how many have religious or spiritual meanings – where I live in Spain one can see many places named after saints and holy deeds.

Surely it has been the mistakes of organised religion which have caused us to close our eyes to the numinous quality of places in which we live, but it is the task of the artist to re-sacralise the ground under our feet and show it is none other than the original Garden before time began, which it surely is if we look at it with fresh eyes.

I don’t wish for us to see everything in a Christian context, that is too narrow; rather to see where we live as sacred in itself and then use whatever mythology comes to hand as in aid in pointing to that… and it can do no more than point. It is up to us to see it in its full Glory and then pass that on to others by means of Art.

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Why is it presented as such? Because as Alan Watts pointed out, people who are afraid of death are easy to rule. The constant grim and scaremongering coverage of the various deaths around the world shows people what might happen if they venture too far out of their comfort zone (the ending of the film ‘The Truman Show’ brilliantly satirises this). Fear of death creates the chains that bind us and we tune in every day for a fear top-up. This allows us to feel better about our petty and uncourageous lives – ‘look at all that death out there, better not step out of line in case I become one of its victims. I will postpone what I really want to do and do as I’m told to do as this seems to be the safer option’.

Why, especially on British TV, is death not shown in all its gory details? Let’s say another American bomb hits a wedding party in Afghanistan- we are shown the debris and maybe some blood on the ground but never all the mutilated corpses. The issue is not really protecting the Americans, it would be the same if US soldiers had been killed. The programme makers do not want to show the full horror and thus risk arousing the righteous anger of the populace which might in turn, if unleashed sufficiently, lead to a change in the status quo. We are to fear death as a shadowy unknown, something constantly at our side, but which must never be turned and faced. If we did face it, we might discover a different countenance to our gaoler than the one we have long feared.

‘Yes’, you say ‘I have got that, but I hate it.’

‘And now I hate you too.’

Harsh but fair.

photo credit: Brainless Angel

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You can read more and sign the petition here:

http://ping.fm/3xtlV

Thanks!

(copied and pasted from above website)

Prog rock. Progressive Rock. Filthy, hated, heretical noise, utterly shunned since Year Zero (1976). But I love it… or a great deal of it anyway.

Those who lump dazzling avatars of God’s Own Progression like Yes, Genesis (the early version, naturally) and King Crimson in with lumpen regurgitators of egoistic bombast like Emerson Lake and Palmer are merely demonstrating their own cloth-ears. Where ELP sound totally of their time, Yes in particular are still in the fantastic future world they created for themselves.

photo credit: bootload

I remember the first time I heard Yes, the actual location is irrelevant because as soon as I heard them (it was the opening of The Gates of Delerium from ‘Relayer’), I was totally transported into a parallel universe where the rules of what ‘rock’ was supposed to be had not been ripped up, they had never existed in the first place. Anything went and the more out there the better. It seemed like all the musicians were playing solos at once, to different songs, YET it worked. Of course the more I heard it, the more it became evident that they were not just wildly improvising, there was a coherent plan behind it, which is why it worked. People call prog ‘impenetrable’ but it is, at its best, profoundly penetrable, it’s just that they don’t have the patience to listen to it four or five times in order to work out what the hell is going on.

I, to be frank, didn’t really want to work out what was going on and I still don’t. I prefer to regard the music of Yes as beamed down from another galaxy, one which looks remarkably like the wonderous Roger Dean paintings on their album covers. On reading a book about the history of Yes I was both fascinated and repelled by the prosaic tales of their previous bands, their massive egos, their tedious-to-be-around-perfectionism (Chris Squire taking an entire day to tune an electric bass guitar for example, Jon Anderson insisting that the vocal booth he was singing inside be tiled with bathroom tiles, only to discover that this did not automatically confer on it bathroom-like reverberational properties).

In a way, and despite these stories and many more, Yes is one of the most ego-less bands ever to have existed. Because when a group of musicians, usually including Squire, Anderson and Steve Howe gets together and calls itself Yes, something develops which puts all of their individual pettiness in the shade. I say ‘develops’, perhaps better to say ‘descends’. Look at Yes lyrics on a page, here are some:

Love comes to you and you follow
Lose one on to the Heart of the Sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with its arms all around me

Lost on a wave and then after
Dream on on to the Heart of the Sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with so many around me
lost in the city

Total rubbish, right? Well to my ears, when these words are sung they take on a poetry which would be unimaginable to someone merely reading them. Anderson just slings a few words together and lets the music and your imagination fill in the gaps. And one finds oneself in the ‘Yes-world’ of the Roger Dean paintings and beyond. It’s like he is just reminding you of this other world as if you lived there long ago (or will live there in a distant future) and it’s unnecessary to spell out every detail. Yes never insulted your intelligence, at least not on the ‘great’ albums (I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which those are).

photo credit: smithereen11

Another great thing about Yes is how un-ironic they were; even though they included (on and off) two of the driest wits in the music biz in Bill Bruford and Rick Wakeman. They just totally went for it, unashamed and naked in their innocent pursuit of musical greatness. No wonder the punks hated them… I have nothing against punk in fact but not only did it throw out the baby with the bath water, it went round throwing out many babies who were never even near the bath water. Seeing old footage of Keith Emerson now, I am retrospectively cheering on Johnny and Sid and the other self-appointed idiots in a ‘down with this sort of thing’ way. But to think that Yes were hated as part of the same scene… I don’t know. Maybe they had to go as well otherwise the whole punk project would’ve been in vain (even though they carried on thriving commercially, their credibility was dead after punk).

Of course to see old footage of Yes, like their concert film Yessongs, one laughs at the stack heels, the silly flowing bits attached to their clothes, the gurning Alan White on drums and of course Wakeman’s enormous glittery cape and stupid hair curtains… but those who came to mock stayed to praise, as they totally blow you away in stages with their music, rising to an almost absurdly powerful intensity with Wakeman’s organ solo on ‘Close to the Edge’ which almost transcends music itself in its sheer, sheer, sheer blistering baroque otherness. And that last sentence is how I would write if I was in Yes, totally over the top and loving every second.

Check them out (again) now.

photo credit: smithereen11

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What do I mean by ‘the self’? Well, whatever can be meant by that: in trying to justify the existence of a personal self, there have been many theories, ultimately each is as confused and confusing as the last.

To paraphrase Barry Long, there is no self other than the frustrating notion of one, just as the concept of ‘the feathers of an elephant’ does not exist in reality except as a frustrating notion. An elephant just does not have feathers and we just do not have ‘selves’. This fundamental fact is missed by many people, whether doing consciousness research or ‘personal growth’ practices, or whatever it may be- the assumption that there must be a self underlies a lot of the confusion in modern society.

photo credit: Elton Melo

Apparently when the Dalai Lama first heard of the concept of ‘self esteem’ he just could not understand what was meant by it, being brought up in a culture which does not have this concept of a concrete self or individuality as separate from the whole.

If anyone is inclined to disagree with any of this, please just shut your eyes and find ‘the self’- you cannot do it. You can of course point to yourself as having a ‘separate’ physical body and distinct personal character, you can see thoughts arising and disappearing, but a coherent ‘self’ holding all this together cannot be found. You can and probably always have assumed there must be one, but an assumption is not a fact, and the assumption will be found to be false on close examination.

Why is the notion of self so deeply entrenched in modern societal thinking?

Here is Adam Curtis:

“The way power works in the world is: they tell you stories that make sense of the world. That’s what America did after the second world war. It told you wonderful dreamlike stories about the world … And at that same time, you were encouraged to rise up and ‘become an individual’, which also made the whole idea of America attractive to the rest of the world. But then this very individualism began to corrode it. The uncertainties began in people’s minds. Uncertainty about ‘what is the point of being an individual?’”

“The politics of our time are deeply embedded in this idea of individualism,” he continues, “which is far wider than Westminster, consumerism or anything like that. It’s how you feel. People think, ‘Oh, if it’s within me it must be true.’ But it’s not the be-all and end-all. It’s not an absolute. It’s a way of feeling and thinking which is a product of a particular time and power. The notion that you only achieve your true self if your desires, your dreams, are satisfied … It’s a political idea. That’s the central dynamic of our life.”

Because you’re worth it? He nods. “Because you’re worth it.” He gestures out of the window, towards the Westfield Centre, Europe’s biggest and most eerily calming shopping mall. “That’s what Westfield is about. What you desire is the most important thing. But a great paradox of our time is that what you desire may not be coming from within you.

photo credit: 416style

In short, the concept of the self or individual is used by corporations to flatter you, make you feel special, and make you buy stuff. This also cuts you off from the truth that there is no self, nothing to seek for, and separates you (as the illusory idea of a self) from your essential contentment and perfection (despite the undeniable challenges inherent in relative physical reality). Once cut off, you need something like a new iPhone in order to make yourself feel whole again, but because it’s only a substitute for true contentment, the satisfaction does not last for long.

Here is Douglas Rushkoff to explain more about the corporate culture’s use of this concept of ‘the self’:

Life Inc. Dispatch 05: Markets Love Selfish People from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

To solve the problems of poverty (both real indigence and the poverty consciousness of those who always want more) and environmental destruction in this world, we need to change the economic model to a non-debt based one:

Buy the book: Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System And How We Can Break Free

And in order to do that, we need to unhook ourselves from the illusory concept of a self which needs to stay separate and consuming at all times.

Strong medicine can be found here: The Open Secret.

As this is basically an addiction, and the source of all other addictions, we should not expect it to be easy to ‘get clean’, however it is utterly necessary and we can be glad that it is becoming more and more obvious, mostly thanks to the reduction of power in the corporate media sector which has had a vested interest in keeping all this hidden for centuries.

We are born into this world knowing nothing and we accept what we are told as children. For my part I have never really understood what was meant by ‘the self’, I just assumed I should go along with it as if it were a real ‘thing’ as everyone else seemed to give the impression that they knew what ‘it’ was. I am now starting to realise that maybe they were also bluffing, even if that bluff has now become so entrenched that it has almost become real.

So that’s nice for them for the time being. But what happens if ‘the One’ dies or leaves them? Or worse still the bathroom habits and general boringness of ‘the One’ start to pall and the relationship cools significantly? Is that person still ‘the One’ or have the got ‘the wrong One’?

photo credit: www.LizzieVPhotography.com

If it is the former, they can carry on believing that that person was indeed ‘the One’, and their love life is basically now over- as in this classic clip shows: Human Remains: Perfect Partners. Anyone who is not ‘the One’ is seen as necessarily a poor substitute.

Or they can revise their opinion and decide that this person was not the One they’d been waiting for after all, and they are yet to meet him or her; this also applies of course if they themselves go off ‘the One’ and end the relationship.

I would suggest that it is the very concept of ‘the One’ which is the root cause of problems in a lot of relationships. It comes from a fundamental belief in scarcity and lack of faith in life to provide abundant opportunities. Of course the particular person we are with is great and may tick all our boxes and we may be happy to spend the rest of our days with them, but that is not to say that someone else could not be equally good for us.

The difficulty with this is that we may not be fully committed to the relationship because we know that breaking up would not be the end of the world or the end of our love life- ‘there’s plenty more fish in the sea’.

Contrast that ‘easy come, easy go’ attitude with the suicidal depression of someone who believes that in losing ‘the One’, they have blown their only chance to ever be loved in this lifetime. The possibility of this disaster hangs over them throughout the whole relationship, often gradually building in pressure until it forces the couple apart and the dreaded break-up and feared recriminations become a reality.

It would seem that a balance between these two attitudes is ideal: we are totally into our partner right now as the perfect ‘One’ for us in this moment but know that if we were to be separated we would not necessarily fall into despairing loneliness for the rest of our lives; another ‘One’ will probably come along and be perfect for that moment.

So do I believe in ‘the One’? Of course the answer has to be ‘yes and no’.[/lang_en]

Now it seems clear to me that every ‘ism’ is inherently the result of a delusion, except perhaps, as Gray sometimes points out, ‘realism’. The basic structure of any ‘ism’ is the assumption that a ‘perfect world’ or utopia is possible in an imagined future and we must make changes, sacrifices, and generally work toward this vision of perfection where everyone is happy, or equal, or whatever idea or collection of ideas is deemed to be the most important and the most lacking in the present moment.

photo credit: www.PCharlon.es 

The main assumption arising from this is the pernicious notion is that ‘the end justifies the means’- or put more prosaically, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ – real-world meaning: ‘you can’t make a utopia without breaking heads’. Current atrocities are excused by the justification that ‘it’ll be worth it in the end’ i.e. when the utopia has come to pass and everyone is happy.

Of course the problem is is that your utopia gets in the way of mine. A utopia may be partly created, as in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but when it is seen not to provide the universal happiness promised, this is blamed on conflicting and competing utopias which must be crushed in order for ‘our’ utopia to triumph, upon which everyone will accept that ‘we were right’ and say sorry for trying to create their flawed utopia in competition to ours.

Also, I would argue that as any utopia is inherently impossible, there will always be scapegoats for its failure, in the Nazis’ case it was the Jews, who wanted their own utopian ‘promised land’- now they supposedly have this, in the shape of the state of Israel, they are blaming the Palestinians for spoiling their utopia. There is always the feeling that ‘if only everyone else would believe what we believe everything would be all right’.  But they stubbornly refuse to believe what we believe and the utopia remains tantalisingly out of reach.

Rather than admitting this to ourselves in a rare moment of realism (the anidote to the other ‘isms’), we go on creating new utopias out of the ruins of the old ones. At the moment we have a rising tide of believers in ‘atheism’- the underlying assumption being that if everyone believes what I believe (that science has proved there is no god and thus all religions are wrong), we would create a world free of superstition and delusion: in other words another utopia which must be worked towards by prosletising and evangelising the gospel of Dawkins, Hitchens or whoever has the latest book out.

But what they fail to see is that this is just another ‘ism’, another form of utopia, and will inevitably collide with the existing religious utopias out there (as of course it is designed to do), creating more conflict and ultimately having no chance of success, as of course there is no possiblilty of everyone in the world thinking in the same way about anything. I don’t say this with a nihilistic glee, but with joy- who wants a world where everyone thinks the same anyway?

Even in a country which shares a dominant belief with little or no dissension from that belief- let’s say Britain in the last few centuries, which was an overwhelmingly Christian country – that belief will split and fracture into different ideologies which all posit their own particular version of utopia. So although the Christian belief has in theory ‘won’ over other utopian ‘isms’, that belief itself becomes viciously split into different denominations like Protestant, Catholic, ‘Quaker’, Plymouth Brethren, Jehovash’s Witnesses, Baptists, Episcoplalian, etc etc. Each one believes that the others have got it wrong and if they would just accept ‘our’ way of doing things, we would have our promised utopia.

Why does a belief system split like this once it becomes overwhelmingly dominant? Because once it is seen to be dominant, everyone looks around to see whether the promised land has arrived (as promised). Deciding that it hasn’t on the basis of lions not being seen to lie down with lambs etc., they go about modifying the original ideology and recruiting people to their new utopian cause- the United States of America was founded on exactly this principle- a bunch of dissenters decided that if they could just get away from the ‘wrong’ utopias in ‘old Europe’, they could create their own, purer version of the ideology, and thus bring the promised land into being, heaven to earth! And of course as we see in the peaceful and utterly equal USA of today, they were proved conclusively right (excuse the irony, I couldn’t resist…).

So what is the solution to this? Simply realise that no utopia can ever work and don’t bother to join any utopian project. So what I’m saying is ‘if we all believe in no utopia, everything will be perfect’? Have you not been paying attention to the rest of this article?

For a fantastic example of a ‘No-More-Utopias’ utopianism, check out the lyrics to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one’

The giveaway is ‘I hope someday you’ll join us/ And the world will be as one’- as in ‘join my utopian project so we can create a world without utopias’. This is as dumb as ‘let’s start a war for peace’ (which as it happens is very often the outcome of utopian projects).

So am I saying ‘let’s all just stay in and watch ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ and do nothing and it’s good that Lennon got shot’? Funnily enough, no. It is possible to change things without being utopian, and by the way I love most of what John Lennon did and wish he was still with us.

I would give Martin Luther King as an example of someone who changed the world without a vision that could be called ‘utopian’.  He proceeded from what he saw as an already-existing fact – that all men are equal – and merely tried to show and inspire people with the truth of that. As what he was saying was true in the present moment and not dependent on some promised land being created in the future (although ironically he did actually use that phrase from time to time), his words had extraordinary power and moved people to take action which had a transformative effect on society.

One could argue that Hitler also spoke with great power and certainly persuaded large numbers of people to begin creating his vision of utopia. The problem was that what he was arguing was total nonsense: that the Aryan or German race is inherently superior to the others, and he only got away with it for the few years that he did because the German people were so desperate to be saved from their plight at that time that they would believe almost anything.

Why are utopias so seductive when a few minutes’ rational thought shows us that they can never work? I’ll leave that for another time, and leave the last word to John Gray:

“When utopia takes over power, it leads to a catastrophe”.

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At first people gazed in wonder as the bubble rose into the air, wondering if it was too late to join, and some squeezed in to join the party going on in there. After a while though, those inside realised they could only see each other, and the inner walls of the bubble were mirrored so they couldn’t see out at all. They felt pretty clever that they had left all the ‘ordinary people’ behind on the ground but as the bubble rose, they started to get the nagging feeling that they had left terra firma with no idea of where they were going.

We ordinary people down here can see the bubble for what it is, that is we can see that the politicians and the journalists have got a pretty cosy little arrangement going on, and we can also see that they are almost totally detached from reality. Those few people who take what politicians say seriously (and they seem to be getting fewer) are surely to be pitied, but they are perhaps investing their faith in something obviously flawed for the simple reason that they can’t see anything else to believe in. This tiny amount of remaining faith is the last string connecting the ‘media reality’ to the ‘actual reality’, and when this breaks, and literally no-one believes a word politicians are saying, then their bubble will burst.

The financial markets’ bubble is in the process of bursting for the same reason: it is getting harder and harder to believe in. There are so many layers of belief, with so little underpinning them, that it is soon going to be hard to believe in money at all. It is just created out of nothing as figures on a screen in the first place, and we have to work all our lives to scrape together a minute fraction of what someone else can create with a couple of strokes on a keyboard.

Add to the fundamentally insubstantial nature of money the overwhelming complexity of the money markets, and it becomes clearer why the bubble is bursting: no-one at all has any idea of what is going on, and therefore has no clear idea of how to save matters. This was an advantage for a long time, because it was assumed that underneath the complexity was something very profound and substantial, it was just that I, the individual looking at the situation, was not clever or educated enough to understand it. Now it just becomes clear that the layers of complexity were mainly to hide both deception and the underlying nothingness at the heart of the system; and if the layers could be stripped away somehow, they would reveal precisely nothing beneath.

What we have forgotten, it seems, is that all the clever philosophers who said that truth is just a matter of opinion, and that my truth is as good as your truth, and ultimately there is no such thing as truth, were wrong. What truth actually is may remain a mystery, but the fact is that if you create a bubble, the thing that eventually causes it to pop is going to be truth in some form or other. This is bad news in some ways because it means we can’t live in our bubbles forever, and that all debts must eventually be repaid (and I don’t just mean financial), but as we see various parties float off into the stratosphere, we can take heart that they will be back, possibly with a bump, as reality bursts their bubble.

The really scary thing is that those in the bubble may not know they are in it, and in fact we may find that our entire Western culture is a bubble, just ready to be popped- and the landing may not be a particularly soft one, especially if we land in a shanty town full of people who spent their childhoods making our running shoes.

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Have one or two of those moments a day and life seems more worthwhile- make up your own, it doesn’t have to be a blog post- could be that you finally hypnotised a chicken for the first time.

The argument against it would be that just ‘settling’ for a nice moment or two a day would take away any ambition for larger achievements, and I would agree, but I find one only gets those moments of satisfaction, of ‘having one’s day made’ if one’s life overall IS reaching for the bigger picture, the larger goal, whatever that may be… possibly hypnotising an ostrich, or a member of the US Congress. Reaching for the ambitious is the background, the soil if you will, in which these day to day satisfactions grow.

Just a thought, now leave me a comment and make my day

After it was over I looked it up on the net and then I remembered: the reason I particularly wanted to see it (apart from the fact that I want to see all of Herzog’s films), and one of the reasons it is very odd, is that all the actors in it are hypnotised, except one, Josef Bierbichler, who plays Hias, the herdsman who can see into the future.

That’s right, Herzog personally hypnotised all the cast before shouting ‘Action’ (or the German equivalent). Now I suppose when someone is hypnotised they are literally ‘under suggestion’ from the hypnotiser so it depends what suggestions he gave to them. In a way it is a director’s dream come true, to give directions to the actors which they carry out precisely; and possibly it could be said that they are not really acting at all as they temporarily believe that what they see before them in the film set is real and that they are their given character.

The overall effect is very strange, in a way disturbingly real, in another way, very detached. It is like watching someone sleepwalking- they appear to be awake but their mind is clearly elsewhere and they don’t inhibit their behaviour like we normally do in the consensual ‘real’ world in order to fit in.

‘Heart of Glass’ reminds me of so many other films, I feel sure that it is one of those works that every director has to see at some stage and I can detect its influence in many other movies, for example David Lynch has created this same odd atmosphere, pushing it over the edge into the realms of nightmare on several occasions, such as ‘Lost Highway’ or ‘Mulholland Drive’… even ‘The Straight Story’ has a slightly dreamlike quality which is akin to ‘Heart of Glass’.

Also Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ has this dreamlike, detached feeling which many people seemed to think was a weakness when it came out, but I feel sure it will be ultimately judged as one of his greatest films. It’s not an accident that it feels detached, Kubrick did not deal in accidents.

‘Mirror’ by Tarkovsky and ‘Hour of the Wolf’ by Bergman must have been influences on Herzog for ‘Heart of Glass’- for me ‘Hour of the Wolf’ is one of the scariest films ever made; I can sit through more or less any horror film and feel nothing but boredom but HoTW is properly chilling, like taking a holiday in a schizophrenic’s mind. ‘Mirror’ has the same poetic quality as ‘Heart of Glass’, it is nothing so prosaic as an allegory or a metaphor, hiding one thing behind another; more like the director’s emotions put straight into your body and mind by means of the medium of film. Yes, I like it…

Older films which may have influenced ‘Heart of Glass’ could be Robert Bresson’s films where he used non-actors and told them not to even try to act, giving a very emotionally flat effect to the performances which is contrasted with occasionally very dramatic subject matter, for example in ‘Mouchette’ where the tension between the performances and what is taking place leads one to doubt what one is actually seeing.

Anyway I was left literally hypnotised by ‘Heart of Glass’ and never cease to wonder why the less a film tries to please the audience, the more I like it (with the exception of ‘Container’ by Lukas Moodysson which I saw recently and was thoroughly bored by, even though I love all his other films). It’s probably simply that I am allergic to cliché in the cinema, and ‘Heart of Glass’ is further proof that Herzog is the right kind of man to be making films, i.e. a complete nutter.

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As an example, I was just watching the coverage of Glastonbury Festival on the BBC and I realised that pretty much anything goes now- you just pick any style you like and run with it. I saw Spiritualized, fair enough, they have never followed trends and are all the better for it- but also Hot Chip (nerd-electro or whatever you want to call it), Band of Horses (1976 Neil Young template), Groove Armada (dance), The Imagined Village (folk fusion)…etc etc… my basic point is there is no ‘scene’ or movement of bands which could be called a trend.

I think this is down to the fact that before, major labels had a success, then looked for other bands who were more or less part of the same ‘trend’, signed them and made them change to fit in to the trend template, then pushed the whole package as one through the music magazines. Thus it appeared that everyone was making a certain type of music more than any other at any one time, and this inspired other bands to copy that and so perpetuate the ‘trend’. Then everyone got sick of it, especially the knock-off bands who were signed just as a short term attempt to make some money from the trend and were more likely to have been changed and styled to fit into a trend they were perhaps never that into in the first place. For example, Menswear were shoehorned into the ‘Britpop’ package but probably never really shared much with Blur or Oasis or any of the others (of course they were more shit, but that could have been a result of them being forced to follow the trend instead of their own inspiration. Or it could just be that they weren’t any good.) Same thing with Inspiral Carpets and other bands from ‘Madchester’ around the same time, and it’s these ‘lesser’ bands which made everyone sick of ‘the scene’ and eager to find the next ‘scene’.

Also I rejoice in the dwindling influence of music magazines, I think they wielded an unhealthy amount of power and were complicit in creating these trends.

The only trend is see now is ‘do what you want how you want’. Or as someone far greater than me once put it, ‘have a good time all the time’.
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