Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net James Howard Kunstler was in rare form in a recent salvo against the pervasive and putatively hopeful (but actually despairingly awful) wish, especially here in America, that techno-industrial society might continue to survive indefinitely instead of doing what it’s actually in the very earliest stages of beginning to…
Tag: music
Teeming Links – August 2, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading under the overarching emotional/conceptual rubric of this recent rumination about the extreme value of ambivalence and undecidedness amid our present sociocultural circumstance of frenetic and manipulative opinion-peddling and belief-mongering: We live in a society in which…
Deadly pedantry: How (and how not) to murder art, literature, and H. P. Lovecraft
The “practical beginner’s guide” to H. P. Lovecraft that I published here last month has received a lot of attention and traffic, but not all of it has been necessarily positive. One observer, Teeming Brain regular xylokopos, commented, “What is the point of this detailed, beforehand investigation into the man’s life and correspondence[?] . ….
Glen Campbell and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Country Weekly recently ran a cover story about my old employer Glen Campbell and his ongoing battle with Alzheimer’s. It sounds like the disease is really starting to take an emotional toll. As some of you know, I was Glen’s video director when he had his own music theater in Branson, Missouri in the 1990s….
A “shattering” musical experience, courtesy of Elew (Eric Lewis)
The Teeming Brain has been dormant for the past week-plus because of a change in my living circumstances — specifically, a move to a new town — that currently has me involved in a three-and-a-half hour daily commute to and from my regular job. I’m also searching for a new permanent house. I’m also searching…
Billy Joel on Beethoven, the Beatles, Mozart, and creativity
I grew up listening to Billy Joel. I still enjoy playing the wonderful opening to his “New York State of Mind” during my private practice time at the piano. I have also become deeply involved in studying and writing about the nature and cultivation of artistic creativity over the past decade and a half. And…
Jóhann Jóhannsson: “Melodia (Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim’s Quantum Theory)”
“The next to last track on the album [Fordlândia] is named after an actual research paper, ‘Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device based on Heim’s Quantum Theory’, which seriously proposes a method of faster-than-light space travel. Burkhard Heim was a German physicist who dedicated much of his life to developing a method of space travel….
Art, meaninglessness, and salvation by despair
Start the music playing and then read the excerpted texts that follow, which may or may not be connected to each other and/or the music. (The music is Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “Fordlandia,” titled after Henry Ford’s epic, disastrous, and somehow mythically tragic folly of trying to create an artificial industrial worker’s utopia in the Amazon rainforest…
Recommended Reading 35
This week, a more America-centric set of recommendations than usual, covering: the gargantuan crisis of America’s “health-care-industrial” complex, which is literally killing the nation with galactically inflated prices and substandard healthcare; the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of America’s “sequestration” debacle; how the “personalized” Internet experience created by user profiling and content filtering actually delivers up two different…
Tom Morello on creative calling, conviction, and inspiration
Last May, Bill Moyers interviewed guitarist extraordinaire Tom Morello on Moyers & Company, and in addition to providing the expected barrage of radical and impassioned political brilliance, Morello said a few things in passing that show him to be a musical artist who is gripped by a powerful sense of calling in the deep sense…