Brief moment in Time

Beirut.

2005 was a solid year for music. It was my graduating year of high school and I like that it was such a strong year for independent music. The Shins, The Flaming Lips, Le Tigre, Sleater Kinney’s last years, The Decembrists, Neko Case, Beck, Queens of the Stone Age, Nada Surf, Rogue Wave, The Tragically Hip (sometimes), Band of Horses… Yeah, I’m looking directly at you Sasquatch music festival ’06…

Let’s take a brief moment for nostalgia:













However worn Converse aside--

I’ve realized one album that continuously becomes overlooked and shadowed by hipsters and music critics alike is Beirut’s Gulag Orkestrar. And I admit, usually in my blogs I try and let the music critics and hipsters create posts about music. It is, after all, their one area of confidence and safe haven. They do it better.



Creating arguments for “good” art is a slippery slope, from Kant to Ruskin, to some modernist popular artist commercialized mixed media… art is not something that is tangible, logical and easy to prove. Creating an argument? Sure. Platonic critiques on binary organization on art’s worth to society? Kant’s judgment on the aesthetic? Not so much. And, in fact, this very subjective interpretation is what makes art beautiful.
Beauty is any particular thing to any particular person.

However, with all this, I can say, Gulag Orkestrar is just too great to be lost in the times of dusty record shelves and old mixtapes. The entire album goes beyond just being music. This music is based of a genre that attempts to bring fractured people together.

I was introduced to this album by someone who had a strong attachment to gypsy music and Balkan Brass. Much of the point of this type of music isn’t to be “good”, but rather, to bridge social, economic and cultural gaps.

Case in point:




This is what solidified Gulag Orkestrar as a means of successful artistic expression. Not only does the entire album sustain itself in versatility and musical talent, but so much of Condon’s live performances are about making the audience feel something similar and universal.

The Rise of the Overeducated Underclass

My dad recently visited town and he added a subtle reminder that I will be 25 in six months. For some reason, this struck a hard chord. It made me uncomfortable. With age, come­ societal expectations set up by older generations. Older generations with an idea of  working America that no longer exists.

 Post-graduate life has been hard, especially since I hit the job market running when the economic stability resembled a mild great-depression. My life greatly resembles the article, “Educated, Unemployed and Frustrated” (NY Times, Op/Ed)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/opinion/21klein.html

While driving in the car today with a friend down a winding two lane Texas highway, I realized my generation might, and probably will be,  the first generation that makes less money than our parents. We were raised with the expectations of the 90's, a time of prosperous growth, social complacency and the boom of the Internet. 

I now know this working America is gone. I am not sure how to navigate a society that does not foster and grow with young, hard working, educated, intelligent individuals. But, regardless, I feel for most of my friends who are graduating college and entering the fierce, unforgiving shackles of the work-a-day world.

However, for me, graduating college five months after the banking crisis and the housing collapse has definitely put a unique perspective on the ideology of working, of economic stability, and what it means to be a young educated person in America.  

http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/recession_depression/

Today I out ran this storm:

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;

Robert Frost "Reluctance" 

I think it's odd that people can begin to exist in the immaterial realm.

...

web 2.0 bring people together or allowing a facade of existence apart?



flight of the conchords first season--- so good.

Urban Exploration

Carrot Rope

The 90's, a time where men could use a tarp as a backdrop, wear oversized raincoats in sun and awkwardly dance.

'

These days of complacency are gone, but things like this remind me of it's existence.

I don’t know what it is. But. I stumble upon people who share incredible pieces of their lives with me, and many of them, I only see for a couple hours (or less). They soon become swallowed whole by the world and I never see them again. And, there I am, left with a small fracture of who they are and I wonder why they tell me these things in the first place.

Dave: A counter-cultural 20-something poet from a suburb outside of Houston. Along the way of stop-and-go Austin traffic, he tells me about the love of his life, a blind performance poet living in St. Louis. She performs her work, without ever seeing the reaction of an audience. She is an Atheist Muslim, who writes about the neo-empirical forms of race-relations and identity.  We talk about court-ship and expression of love. He believes that people’s expression of love should not just be through sex, as he sees it only as a momentary act of pleasure. He believes the most intimate moments two people can share is complete honesty, openness and vulnerability. He then tells me that this woman he loves, will never love him back. At this point, we are at our destination, I smile and he steps out of my car and I drive away.

Tantra-Zawadi: A fierce woman who lives in Brooklyn. I spent the morning attending a workshop on multi-media artistic expression that she took part in. Tantra is an advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness, and travels throughout the country reading her poetry, screening her movie and advocating for HIV/AIDS prevention.

And, this guy:

Who, after his performance, told me that the only reason he really writes is because it is the only thing that makes sense to him surrounded by chaos. 

Google: is it Making Us Stupid?

It is no secret that I am a self-prescribed, paradoxical postmodernist. I have been struggling with  the idea of the Internet, the differing forms of reality and what makes these varying degrees of reality "more real"- or valid than one another-
Along the way:

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Re-post (because it is that good)


And
"Meditations on First Cybersophy"-Bill Pena