A friend recently sent me a link to the video that I link below. It's an interesting lecture by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia. He talks about the moral foundations of differing political ideologies, and he's a much better speaker than the rambly videos I posted from bloggingheads.tv. That said, his talk has some hokey moments. Also, unfortunately for a format like this where people (myself included) tend to just watch a few minutes of a video, his talk looks like it's heading in some bad directions at times and you have to stick with it to see that he's not smarmy or really relativistic. That said, I recommend it.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
9.30.2008
Rainbow
All this talk of economic depression, world leaders "rearing their ugly heads", and death (see post below) I thought it might be nice to bring up the mood here. Below is a short video showing a installation by an the artist Mark Garry. If you are anywhere near western Pennsylvania you must visit and see this in person, it is simple beauty. The video doesn't do the piece justice but provides some interesting background information.
9.26.2008
Death
I've been slacking on my blogging day recently (although Bret's been doing a good job of pick up that slack) and feel like it's high time I help carry the weight of yhmmgo (wow, I don't think anyone has made that acronym yet).
I've always thought about if and how I'd like to be buried but I've always had problems with the usual ways of doing it. First of all burials can be insanely expensive, the casket alone can be thousands of dollars and then the burial spot and all the other cost involved can easily reach $10,000. Seems like a burden to your family to me. The other problem I've had with being buried is with the land use issues. Here in the U.S. cemeteries are for all intensive purposes off limits and usually take up huge amounts of land. I offer this as an example:
This is right in the middle of Chicago and there are eight cemeteries, and just look at the size of Rosehill! Imagine if all that land was filled with parks, or wetlands, or gardens, but no, it's filled with dead people and really expensive exotic wood caskets. I do concede that this land is usually open and you can walk around freely, but how often do you go there? And how usable is the land with all those mausoleums? Thinking about kicking around the soccer ball? Forget it, it will puncture! Also watch out for security! In addition to all this there's a huge environmental impact. Here are some facts courtesy of our friends at wikipedia:
Each year, 22,500 cemeteries across the United States bury approximately:
30 million board feet (70,000 m³) of hardwoods (caskets)
90,272 tons of steel (caskets)
14,000 tons of steel (vaults)
2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets)
1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults)
827,060 US gallons (3,130 m³) of embalming fluid, which most commonly includes formaldehyde.
I've told myself that I'd be buried in the ground if one day I owned some wild wooded tract of land were I could be put there without being a disruption to others. Lately there's been a larger movement to change some common practices in how we are buried. People are calling it "natural" or "green" burial, I like the direction this is going.
How about this for an idea?
When you're buried, you just go straight in the ground, no metal or fancy wood casket. Above you they plant a tree and as your body returns to dust it feeds the tree above you. Instead of cemeteries we have forests and thanks to legislation, they'll be protected forever. Sounds awesome to me. Let it become public knowledge, when I Daniel John Bracken Jr. die, this is the way I'd like to be laid to rest, with a tree growing above me surrounded by other trees.
I've always thought about if and how I'd like to be buried but I've always had problems with the usual ways of doing it. First of all burials can be insanely expensive, the casket alone can be thousands of dollars and then the burial spot and all the other cost involved can easily reach $10,000. Seems like a burden to your family to me. The other problem I've had with being buried is with the land use issues. Here in the U.S. cemeteries are for all intensive purposes off limits and usually take up huge amounts of land. I offer this as an example:
This is right in the middle of Chicago and there are eight cemeteries, and just look at the size of Rosehill! Imagine if all that land was filled with parks, or wetlands, or gardens, but no, it's filled with dead people and really expensive exotic wood caskets. I do concede that this land is usually open and you can walk around freely, but how often do you go there? And how usable is the land with all those mausoleums? Thinking about kicking around the soccer ball? Forget it, it will puncture! Also watch out for security! In addition to all this there's a huge environmental impact. Here are some facts courtesy of our friends at wikipedia:
Each year, 22,500 cemeteries across the United States bury approximately:
30 million board feet (70,000 m³) of hardwoods (caskets)
90,272 tons of steel (caskets)
14,000 tons of steel (vaults)
2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets)
1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults)
827,060 US gallons (3,130 m³) of embalming fluid, which most commonly includes formaldehyde.
I've told myself that I'd be buried in the ground if one day I owned some wild wooded tract of land were I could be put there without being a disruption to others. Lately there's been a larger movement to change some common practices in how we are buried. People are calling it "natural" or "green" burial, I like the direction this is going.
How about this for an idea?
When you're buried, you just go straight in the ground, no metal or fancy wood casket. Above you they plant a tree and as your body returns to dust it feeds the tree above you. Instead of cemeteries we have forests and thanks to legislation, they'll be protected forever. Sounds awesome to me. Let it become public knowledge, when I Daniel John Bracken Jr. die, this is the way I'd like to be laid to rest, with a tree growing above me surrounded by other trees.
9.25.2008
a) how to think - rest peacefully DFW b) Jitka Hanzlova's perception of time-scale in forest photography as seen by John (non-ham) Berger
A
The adult content and language of David Foster Wallace:
1995 commencement speech at Kenyon College... this is completely worth reading! Thanks to Michael and Laura for telling me about this.
B
'I went to the forest-hills early in the morning when the forest awakes. Standing there I breathed in the wind. the unruffled voices of the birds and the silence which I love. And then when I was concentrating on a picture, I stopped hearing the silence around me. It was as if I was somewhere else, like in a film. The forest started to move and, as I looked through the camera, I experienced fear. Maybe it was just the framing and the stillness of the evening. As if the birds and the crickets had stopped their singing, as if the wind had come to a stop in the valley. Nothing but nothing to hear. No birds, no wind, no people, no crickets. The darkness of the light and this other silence made my hair stand on end... I could not exactly place the fear, but it was coming from the inside. It was the first time I felt this so intensely, but not the last. I escaped! What's the basis of this fear of mine? Why? I'm not afraid of animals or of the forest. The place is safe.
Throughout history and prehistory forests have offered shelter, a hiding-place, whilst also being places in which a wanderer can be ultimately lost. They oblige us to recognize how much is hidden.
[...]
What is intangible and within touching distance in a forest may be the presence of a kind of timelessness. Not the abstract timelessness of metaphysical speculation, nor the metaphysical timelessness of cyclic, seasonal repetition. Forests exist in time, they are, God knows, subjects of history; and today many are catastrophically being obliterated for the quick pursuit of profit.
Yet in a forest there are 'events' which have not found their place in any of the forest's numberless time-scales, and which exist between those scales. What events? you ask. They are what remains in photographs after we have made an inventory of everything this is recognizable. The ancient Greeks named events like these dryads.
[...]
To make sense of what I'm suggesting it is necessary to reject the notion of time that began in Europe during the eighteenth century and is closely linked with the positivism and linear accountability of modern capitalism: the notion that a single time, which is unilinear, regular, abstract and irreversible, carries everything. All other cultures have proposed a coexistence of various times surrounded in some way by the timeless.
Return to the forest that belongs to history. There is often a sense of waiting, yet what is it that is waiting? And is waiting the right word? A patience. A patience practiced by what? A forest incident. An incident we can neither name, describe, nor place. And yet is there.
The intricacy of the crossing paths and crossing energies in a forest - the paths of birds, insects, mammals, spores, seeds, reptiles, ferns, lichens, worms, trees, etc - is unique; perhaps in certain areas on the seabed there exists a comparable intricacy. but there man is a recent intruder, whereas, with all his sense perceptions, he came from the forest. Man is the only creature who lives within at least two time-scales: the biological one of his body and the one of his consciousness. Every one of the crossing energies operating in a forest has its own time-scale. From the ant to the oak tree. From the process of photosynthesis to the process of fermentation. In this intricate conglomeration of times, energies and exchanges there occur 'incidents' that are recalcitrant incidents, unaccommodated in any time-scale and therefore (temporarily?) waiting between. These are what Jitka photographs.
The longer one looks at Jitka Hanzlova's pictures of a forest, the clearer it becomes that a break-out from the prison of modern time is possible.
The dryads beckon. You may slip in between - but unaccompanied.
-John Berger in Hold Everything Dear
The adult content and language of David Foster Wallace:
1995 commencement speech at Kenyon College... this is completely worth reading! Thanks to Michael and Laura for telling me about this.
B
'I went to the forest-hills early in the morning when the forest awakes. Standing there I breathed in the wind. the unruffled voices of the birds and the silence which I love. And then when I was concentrating on a picture, I stopped hearing the silence around me. It was as if I was somewhere else, like in a film. The forest started to move and, as I looked through the camera, I experienced fear. Maybe it was just the framing and the stillness of the evening. As if the birds and the crickets had stopped their singing, as if the wind had come to a stop in the valley. Nothing but nothing to hear. No birds, no wind, no people, no crickets. The darkness of the light and this other silence made my hair stand on end... I could not exactly place the fear, but it was coming from the inside. It was the first time I felt this so intensely, but not the last. I escaped! What's the basis of this fear of mine? Why? I'm not afraid of animals or of the forest. The place is safe.
Throughout history and prehistory forests have offered shelter, a hiding-place, whilst also being places in which a wanderer can be ultimately lost. They oblige us to recognize how much is hidden.
[...]
What is intangible and within touching distance in a forest may be the presence of a kind of timelessness. Not the abstract timelessness of metaphysical speculation, nor the metaphysical timelessness of cyclic, seasonal repetition. Forests exist in time, they are, God knows, subjects of history; and today many are catastrophically being obliterated for the quick pursuit of profit.
Yet in a forest there are 'events' which have not found their place in any of the forest's numberless time-scales, and which exist between those scales. What events? you ask. They are what remains in photographs after we have made an inventory of everything this is recognizable. The ancient Greeks named events like these dryads.
[...]
To make sense of what I'm suggesting it is necessary to reject the notion of time that began in Europe during the eighteenth century and is closely linked with the positivism and linear accountability of modern capitalism: the notion that a single time, which is unilinear, regular, abstract and irreversible, carries everything. All other cultures have proposed a coexistence of various times surrounded in some way by the timeless.
Return to the forest that belongs to history. There is often a sense of waiting, yet what is it that is waiting? And is waiting the right word? A patience. A patience practiced by what? A forest incident. An incident we can neither name, describe, nor place. And yet is there.
The intricacy of the crossing paths and crossing energies in a forest - the paths of birds, insects, mammals, spores, seeds, reptiles, ferns, lichens, worms, trees, etc - is unique; perhaps in certain areas on the seabed there exists a comparable intricacy. but there man is a recent intruder, whereas, with all his sense perceptions, he came from the forest. Man is the only creature who lives within at least two time-scales: the biological one of his body and the one of his consciousness. Every one of the crossing energies operating in a forest has its own time-scale. From the ant to the oak tree. From the process of photosynthesis to the process of fermentation. In this intricate conglomeration of times, energies and exchanges there occur 'incidents' that are recalcitrant incidents, unaccommodated in any time-scale and therefore (temporarily?) waiting between. These are what Jitka photographs.
The longer one looks at Jitka Hanzlova's pictures of a forest, the clearer it becomes that a break-out from the prison of modern time is possible.
The dryads beckon. You may slip in between - but unaccompanied.
-John Berger in Hold Everything Dear
9.23.2008
Rock, Rock, Rock?
Above is a picture of Danny, Jer, and me getting ready to get some beauty rest on our last tour. But this was not just any night. This was, if I'm remembering right, the second of three consecutive nights in which Danny beat me at Rock, Paper, Scissors for who got to sleep in a bed. It's no wonder that, if you look closely at the picture blown up, Danny looks like an evil genius who's driven me crazy.
I'm not sure how these successive losses happened, and I'm starting to get concerned about my prospects for this next tour. After all, just the other day I lost to a fellow Starbucks worker (more on that in a later post) who I thought I had accurately psychoanalyzed as a paper-thrower. Boy was I wrong! As a result, I didn't get to throw out the trash, which involves being outside for a few moments and is therefore actually a sought-after task where I work.
After he laughed all the way to the dumpster and back, this co-worker informed me that the internet had some sage wisdom about how to win at this confounding game. I just checked out a few sites, with http://www.worldrps.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=256&Itemid=37 being the most comprehensive I've found. I'm a bit bummed at the level of luck that still seems to be involved. Still, my searching was not in vain. I ran into an interesting tidbit on the competitive mating habits of the side-botched lizard, which, according to Wikipedia, resemble Rock, Paper, Scissors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-paper-scissors). Thankfully, what's at stake in my case is only taking out the trash or making an evil genius sleep on the floor.
9.22.2008
Party...Pizza Party!
Erica and I decided to chomp on some pizza tonight. We were on the internet looking for some local pizza places and stumbled across Domino Pizza's online ordering center. Now...we would usually go with the local pizza slinger but the glow of screen, the novelty of ordering a pie in cyberspace and having that pie miraculously showing up at our door was too tempting for us. The whole process was unbelievable! I think I remember Bret telling me about doing this a while ago, but I guess I needed to see it to believe it! They had real-time updates about when our pie went into oven and when it hit the road. And they were FAST. They were so fast that Erica and I were still at Walgreens when they showed up. My roommate James was kind enough to pay for our 'za with his credit card since we were slow to the draw. He was able to use this card because THE DELIVERY DRIVER LET HIM PUNCH IT IN ON HIS IPHONE! Talk about Domino's keeping up with the times.
Anyway, pizza is pretty synonymous with parties and we're planning a party. As some of you may know the Anathallo crew is headed to Japan this winter to play some shows set up by our new, good friends Yuya and Yuki at the wonderful label Moor Works. Yuya and Yuki have tacked on another show to the end of our tour and it's going to be a show/party. The one thing we need to do is come up with decorations for this little end-of-tour. I was thinking the boar pictured above would be a good touch. But I'm going to keep up the google-image-searching. I welcome anything that can top the swine on the table. Maybe a Bar Mitzvah theme.
One last thing...after we stuffed our faces with pizza, Erica and I watched a little of that Heroes show. The highlight of the whole show is below!
I AM BEHIND ON THE TIMES
My apologies if you've already seen this bit of magic before... but VOILA! Just-Woke-Up-In-The-Morning-Me has now been taken to:
1952---
1964---
1970---
1976---
1982---
And a couple years that might be a little more familiar:
1994---
1996---
Take your own! Astound your friends!
9.20.2008
Tour sounds 2008
In Japan we play seven shows with Aie...
We'll have Cale Parks with us for the record release shows...
We'll have Cale Parks with us for the record release shows...
9.19.2008
FORGET ALL THAT
It looks like Anticon has posted a new song from Canopy Glow. I think a few of you even found this before I did? Either way, take a listen if you'd like!
Have great weekends everyone.
NOW HOW ABOUT YOU TELL ME WHAT THIS MEANS?
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I'm not sure an official champion has emerged yet from Wednesday's voting... Blackstreet, Coolio, and Seal all seem to have at least captured a few of your hearts. I really can't explain Gotham City's appeal to me... but well, it's there. Even if R. and Puffy have been left behind in the voting.
Okay, NEXT!
Which one of you smart ones in the comments can tell me what the last couple weeks on Wall Street mean. Or, to clarify, what does all this mean practically to me and probably the generally assumed "whoever" that reads this blog? I'll give an example:
I mean clearly, a few banks have failed. I know that can't be good but my life really hasn't changed yet... how could it? Am I going to be eating potatoes half a year from now? Or when I read the headline "WASHINGTON MUTUAL NEXT TO FALL!" - well - that's my bank. I have no idea what "about to fall!" means. Like, there goes my money Jimmy Stewart style? All four hundred of my dollars?? None of you will be able to afford Canopy Glow on our CD release tour? We're going to get stuck in Europe this November because no plane will fly back to the States? Because looters will have taken over the streets and smoke will be pouring out of the National City near my house?
Or if the government really is going forward with this rumored mega-bailout (what?)... well, what does THAT mean? I just read the headline "We're All Socialists Now" and well, that's surprising. And good news for Obama, right? (HA HA HA.) No no, but really - what does it mean that the government could own a nice chunk of the economy? Higher taxes? New logos? Patriotic color schemes?
Change we might have to believe in.
I'll be honest - these are a few of questions I have. They aren't smart, impressive ones. It's much more fun to ask about things that you're familiar with - ask the "ah ha!" question or two that allows the audience in on the fact that you know what you're talking about. The above questions aren't it. I don't know what I'm talking about and besides the overexaggerated fear or two... well, if anyone knows a good financial blog or two to pass on that would be much appreciated. Because right now I know "markets down is bad" and "the 'whatever' that is happening right now is REALLY BAD."
Or is the "REALLY BAD" - is that just for folks with money? Because if that's the case, I am sittin' pretty!
A late entrant.
They don't make 'em how they used to.
***update: I thought this article was pretty helpful... scroll down to numbers one and four if you don't feel like reading the entire thing.
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