everything is magic

When I was a kid living in rural North Mississippi, literally on a farm, I would spend many hours entertaining myself by running barefoot through the countryside, chasing lightening bugs, rabbits, cats, or whatever else I encountered while playing. When you are a kid, it's all magic. The moon. The stars. The lightening bugs. The way that sharp kitty claws are concealed in their little fuzzy paws. Happy Meal boxes. The way my feet turned black from running barefoot. Air conditioners. Everything was magic. Not in the Harry Potter sense, but that it all existed outside the grasp of my childhood intellect...I lacked the understanding, the syntax, or the mechanics to wrap my oversized noggin around it. My imagination filled in all the gaps with fantastic voyages of spaceships, muppets, dragons, warriors, robots, and whatever other bits of art that I had consumed to that point...these were the syntax and mechanics of my child mind.

As I got older, I traded magic for fact. And you can never trade it back. Or can you? I was taught two very different takes on why I exist and how it is that I am sitting on this rock looking at my stained feet in the first place. One, religion, says magic isn't real because God is the only true supernatural force in the universe. The other, science, told me that magic isn't real because what we consider to be magic is just that which we lack scientific understanding of for the time being. Science says God doesn't exist. Religion says science is deceiving you and undermining faith. As a child, you have no idea what to believe, but if there's one thing both agree on, it's that magic doesn't exist. Indeed, we are taught that at a certain age, to think of things in terms like "magic" or "supernatural" is to behave childishly. As if that were a taboo in and of itself.

I stuck with religion through college, but all that I had learned succeeded in putting too many cracks in beliefs I held dear as a child. I didn't believe in much of anything, and to me this was just unacceptable. So my whole adult life has been spent trying to recapture that lost magic. I turned to film, books, music, games, art and other human expressions of that which can't be explained. I've even crafted some of these things myself as a way to exercise my imagination. Then I began to devour tons of scientific information in the form of articles, documentaries, and visual representations of how the universe "works." Science Fiction got close, but even that existed outside of what I could see and touch on a daily basis. Carl Sagan got closer, articulately and philosophically painting pictures of the cosmic awe. He made it almost spiritual to me. I deeply revere the man and his mind, but the picture...the connection to life itself remained incomplete. The search continued.

It wasn't until recently that I actually attained some portion my lost sense of magic. It came through an artistic expression in the form of a film. Last year, director Terrance Malick released a film that didn't really capture my attention at the time. The film, The Tree of Life, seemed like another hard to grasp arthouse film with a disjointed narrative with far too much impressionism. But recently the film was released digitally and on Blu-Ray, and I gave it a try at the suggestion of a friend. It was one of the best recommendations that I've ever gotten.

The Tree of Life is a film expression of the existential questions that conflict within us throughout our lives. Told from the perspective of a boy growing up in a Texan, Catholic family in the '60s, it asks these questions directly to God. And God answers. Through science. The film cuts from this intimate family drama to scenes of the universe's creation, to the molecular and cellular sparks of life in the primordial. It shows that there is majesty and wonder in the smallest particles of matter to the largest galactic structures. We see how incredible the events that lead to us being on this rock contemplating the existential truly is. It gives a glimpse into how tiny, insignificant, rare, and miraculous each life on this planet is ... from the smallest leaf to the tallest tree. It tells us that there is magic, or God if you prefer, in everything all around us if we only open up our eyes to see it.

The day after seeing the film for the first time, I looked up at the sky and I wept. I don't do this often. Not for loss. Not for tragedy. Not for anything. This isn't a point of pride. I wish I could cry more often, in truth...I just don't. But a sense of awe washed over me when I looked up at the expanse before me, and it was completely overwhelming. I could not contain the feeling that I was so small, and so insignificant, yet not alone. Never alone. In that moment, all the science that I had learned seemed to confirm that there was something bigger than myself, or humanity. It was love, warmth, compassion, and an interconnectivity of every organism on this planet with the cosmos itself. This wasn't necessarily a vision that was in any way related to what Sunday School taught me, but the perfection of it all pointed me towards a moment of faith, nonetheless. The mechanical devices, the micro-machinery, the chemical, the cosmic particles within us that are as old as the universe itself...all these things pointed to a structure that seems too perfect for random chance. I thought about my own mortality and of friends and family long gone. I thought about cosmology, physiology, psychology, philosophy and and every other ology. I thought about my cat, fireflies, trees, and the breeze on my face being generated by that perfect, boundless sky. I could only thank whatever hand was at work in the creation of it all, even if it was simply the function of blind chance. Whatever the case, it exceeded my understanding, and felt like something else entirely. It felt like magic.

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Interesting Stuff Related To The Magic of The Universe...
 

In addition to The Tree of Life, I recommend checking out some of the things I've posted below to blow your mind at how incredibly awesome the universe and all life in it truly is. From the micro, to the macro.

Micro:

This just absolutely blows my mind. There are tiny little molecular-level machines comprised of amino acids that actually have legs. Legs. Legs with which they tow things around like a little delivery system within a cell, marching along micro-filaments connecting chromosomes and other sub-cellular level structures. While only one of the variety, there are hundreds of thousands of these little guys working in each of the 20-50 trillion cells in your body. And each of those cells have purpose-driven functions, comprising organs that have specific functions. All in concert to give us life. I've been fortunate enough to be relatively intelligent, but this is beyond me. 

Macro:

Hubble photo into section of deep space...there are 100s of billions of galaxies in our visible universe.

This is a great 2 min video on the universe's scale. Consider that our sun and its solar system, which is so great that we've only begun to explore it, is only one of the 200-400 billion stars in the milky way...and the milky way is one of 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe...and physicists theorize that there may be many universes. Now, think about the little micro-machine above that's towing around that sack of protein within one of our body's 20-50 trillion cells. Mind=blown.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos - a PBS show from 1978-1980 based on Carl's book of the same name. What a beautiful and adventurous spirit that man had. Also, I highly recommend Contact, a film based on the book of the same name, which explores the political and religious implications of discovering that we might not be alone in the universe, while also touching on the themes of forces and mysteries of the universe that are simply too big for us to understand with science or religion. Magic. It is my all-time-favorite science fiction film.

And then there's this, because it's awesome. If all teacher's could inspire like this, we'd have an entire nation of scientists.

addition by subtraction

You've heard "what a difference a day makes", right? Imagine what an entire year with the expressed desire to change as much of your life as possible could do for you. You discover some things are easy. Some things are crazy hard. And some things just take a long time to set in motion and follow through on. Over the last 12 months or so, I've been on that journey. For me, change has been almost entirely about subtraction. I've had at least 10 years of bad habit forming and shit accumulation. And when given the chance to make the type of life changing decisions I had the opportunity to make, it began with cuts. Deep cuts. But I can't say that I've ever been happier. Why? Because I'm letting go.

I've run the gamut between losing a ton of weigh, quitting drinking, and even selling my home of almost a decade. But one of the more rewarding and addictive changes I've made is just getting rid of stuff, and therefore, stress. It's true, the cliche': Stuff you own ends up owning you. When you honestly don't care if you have a single possession or not, you find yourself in a place of remarkable freedom. Unprecedented freedom to not worry as much about what the economy is doing. Freedom to chase a dream. Freedom to be bold enough to live a life less ordinary.

Now, I'm not there. You see, I need a car to travel in, and a computer to do work on. But even then, need is subjective. To go Fight Club on it, you could say that we "work jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need." Indeed. That draws the whole "need" thing into question. And certainly, the modern materialistic life can be a trap, perpetuating states of misery because we can't let go of the stuff around us. And of course, children who are dependent on us change everything. So let's keep it philosophical: could we let go of the material in pursuit of greater happiness and more lasting contentment? I'll let you know when and if I ever find out. But the journey is intriguing. And with the world changing around us and standards of living falling for everyone but the rich, living with less seems like a quest we should all embark on. For many, the trip will be mandatory.

late to the party -or- how vinyl may help me rediscover why i loved music to begin with

By Chris Nolen
January 6, 2011

The counter at Sneaky Beans Coffee Shop, in Jackson's Fondren arts district, is a wonderland of distraction for the visually A.D.D. This is great if you're standing in line, as you have time to take in the posters, T-shirts, postcards, and other colors of the rainbow. This is not so great if you should be ordering your coffee and letting the next person in line get on with their life. As I'm up there glancing over the wares, even though I already knew what I wanted, one item in particular caught my eye. Nestled amongst the local band CDs on the counter was a really large CD by a guy named Ming Donkey. Turns out, it was no CD at all, but a 7" vinyl single. I'd heard of this "vinyl" thing...even browsed the collections of many a friend, but being the modern man I was, I never really considered having vinyl of my own. I'd even turned away record collections offered to me in the past. I understood the quaint nostalgia of it, but never felt compelled to go down that path to obsession, which seems to be a common quality of all who indulge in vinyl.

artwork by Ming DonkeyIn any event, it was an obsolete technology, and useless to me. But still, that package was so attractive with its silk-screened artwork and indie credibility. I didn't need it, but I wanted it. Then I realized that I didn't even have a record player. I shook my senses into focus and ordered my standard Skinny Caramel Soy Latte and hit the door to the delight of those behind me. As I walked to the car, fate intervened. I'd gotten a message from an old friend, that I didn't really get to see very often, inviting me on a road trip to this record store in Raymond called Little Big Store. Sure, I'd heard of this place. But I did all my music shopping online. Until this moment, I'd never really considered the trek out there. But this friend was an agent of fate. Is it coincidence that he called at that moment to invite me to go to a record store when I was so recently considering the analog journey? Or was the universe conspiring to find another way for me to spend my disposable income, which is certainly not disposable? Either way, I'm not one to tell fate to bugger off, so I happily agree.

The journey, per usual, was half the fun of the trip, discussing music and friends while listening to Liver Mousse, telling the story of Black Salt. Soon we pulled next to an antiquated building that was nestled away from the main road. As I stepped out of the car, I surveyed the building and determined that this was the same Little Big Store I'd seen on the back cover of The Jackson Free Press. But it was something else to behold in real life.  It was a perfect metaphor for vinyl in my mind. Quaint. Old. Dusty. Obsolete. But stepping inside, I soon found that it was more. Warm. Inviting. Dense. Intimidating.

courtesy Little Big StoreNow, I consider myself to be somewhat knowledgeable of music, particularly the pop and rock varieties. I'm always the music guy on our Pubquiz teams, and my teams generally win. But I'll be the first to admit that I don't know squat next to my friends who are vinyl aficionados. Current obscurities are a bore to these guys. They know all the obscure stuff from 1973. And I was on their turf now. I felt like the greenest, newbish poser that had ever stepped out of a Hot Topic. Thankfully, my friend doesn't have an asshole bone in his body that I've seen. Hell, I've never seen him go to the bathroom, so he might not even have an asshole. So I find myself in the position of the guy asking dumb questions and feeling completely and utterly lame. I confess to my friend that I didn't even have a record player, and had only recently even considered having one. He was a gentleman through and through, letting me know it was alright and never for a moment made me feel as loserish as I did feel at the moment. But my pride wasn't off the hook just yet.

Nearly right off the bat, I made some questionable decisions that drew my newbishness into stark clarity. For one, I brought in my aforementioned Skinny Caramel Soy Latte, which I thought nothing of. As I perused the M-N section, leaning forward with my coffee cup angled in suggestive ways, I drew the ire of the shop's curator. She didn't care for my liquid ways one bit, which she pointed out politely, but her volume was such that I was clearly an example for others. I smile and act as cool as guy who's just been outed can be. "You can put it up here on the counter. It'll be your little coffee bar!" she said, to which I nervously shuffled toward the door and replied "I'm just gonna set it right here outside. Mea Culpa, mam." 

At this point, my ruse was up. I wasn't fooling anyone. It was time to actually find some records and join the club if I were ever to do so. So I start flipping through the records, coming to some classics that I already owned on at least two formats already, such as Who's Next and Houses of The Holy. And these things were old. As in original pressings, maybe. The question then became, how do I handle these? Do I just start a stack somewhere or carry them in my arms? Do I carry them vertically or horizontally? Where the hell are the price tags? I was green as a newborn, and clinging to my last thread of credibility when I approached my friend and asked "how do you know how much these cost?" He told me that I had to haggle with the dealer to set the price. This sounded like a deal-breaker. No way I'm bartering here. This is my day off. I'd heard horror stories of how expensive this old stuff was. I was having the world's tiniest little anxiety attack.

Finally my friend convinced me to just grab a stack and take them up there...I might be surprised at what I found. "Why not?!" I thought. So I gathered my stack: Bowie's Hunky Dory and Man Who Stole The World, Mott The Hoople, and The Boxtops (as consolation for striking out on finding any Big Star.) I approached the dealer lady with my stack in hand, not knowing exactly what the protocol for the transaction would be. I explained that this was new to me, which is not the smartest thing to do when you about to have to negotiate. To my surprise, she quickly and painlessly deemed each one a mere $10. My entire stack was a mere $40. I'm thinking that this was a little treasure hunt that I could enjoy just about every Saturday.

As we left the store, stack in hand, I realized that I still had a problem ... to this point I didn't actually have a record player. I again contemplated the options ... I could get one of those cheap little suitcase players from Target that looked cool, but you know, sounded like ass. Or I could spring for a higher end system that was complete overkill for my vast collection of four records. I chose something right in the middle: a sub $100 AudioTechnica table that got some good reviews on Amazon. I clicked the buy button and in a few days I was ready to begin my analog experience.

In truth, this wasn't my first exposure to vinyl. As a child, I had listened to tons of my Mom's old records like T-Rex's Electric Warrior and Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen. But I was 8 years old, and had no way of appreciating it for anything other than a place to practice my DJ scratching. By my early teens, I was listening to CDs, having left vinyl and cassettes long behind. I'd forgotten what analog sounded like, or didn't care, as shiny new tech made the old tech useless and tired. Hence my negative impression of vinyl through my teens and early adulthood.

So here I am at 34 years old, about to drop the needle on my first LP on my first record player since I was a little boy. Mind you, this entire exercise has been an almost impulsive reaction to the feelings insecurity about my enthusiast status. In short, I was late to a party that most of my friends had been at for years. I felt some misplaced need to catch up. But as I set the needle down to play track one from Hunky Dory, all of that melted away. It was now about the experience of listening. I was on my own turf again, and nothing else mattered but what was pumping through my headphones. The crackle of the needle quickly recalled the imperfections of the medium, but soon, even that wouldn't matter. As the first piano notes were struck on Changes, I instantly heard a distinct tonal difference from my CD or MP3 version of that song. It was rich, warm, and buttery. I don't mean to describe it as I would a desert, but that's what comes to mind. It was an experience to be savored. Turns out that analog captures the natural warmth that digital doesn't seem to duplicate very well. That point is arguable, I'm sure, and I generally have little tolerance for audiophile snobbery. But damn if I don't agree with them on this one ... vinyl just sounds better.

Then I looked at my fancy, new record-playing machine. I traced over its modern lines, looking for a forward button. I wanted to fast forward to Queen Bitch, dammit. It occurred to me that there was no skip button. And Queen Bitch was on the other side. Holy hell. The term "B-side" actually became relevant again. Then the grand realization hit me ... I would have to listen to this album whole and complete, just as Bowie intended. And it is in that last realization that vinyl may make the biggest impact on the way I listen to music.

As a child of technology, and someone who acquired the majority of my music in digital form, I had fallen victim to single-itis. This affliction occurs when vast music libraries can quickly and effortlessly be compiled and organized on iTunes and MP3 players into endless playlists. This has its advantages, but the biggest factor against it is that it kills the album experience. Why is that so important? Because I used to only have a handful of albums. I would listen to them repeatedly, memorized every note, and loved them so much it hurt. I appreciated what I had much more, and tended to listen to an entire album all the way through every time. Sometimes, for no other reason than laziness. For whatever reason I sat through an album, it was endeared to me as a result.

Beyond memorization by repetition, there is a certain magic to the full-album experience. Whereas many digital-age albums are just an unrelated collection of potential singles and filler, pre-digital albums were generally constructed with purpose to take you on a journey. The artist was the navigator, and would decide when and where to accelerate, stop, or diverge completely. And if you decided to bail before you reached the destination, you risked robbing yourself of some of the record's culminating moments. Masters of this form might string songs together reoccurring themes or melodies laced throughout. Or they might simply apply a formula of "start strong, take it up a notch, bring it back down, etc." Either way, it was still a controlled experience that led you, the listener, on a journey of their making. Each song was a scene to a great movie, and you wanted to stay till the end to see how it all worked out.

That experience of loving an album from start to finish had begun to disappear when I started hitting Napster, and was completely gone by the time I had my entire collection digitized on iTunes. Soon, I acquired tons of music every month because it was so readily available from friends or cheaply online. The album experience, as it would become, was just skipping through the highlights and adding tracks to existing playlists. To return to the previous metaphor, a playlist is like just picking your favorite scenes from a 100 different movies and trying to tell a story. You are the editor, and with that comes some creative opportunities, but it still feels a little disjointed and incomplete. Yet that's been my experience with recorded music for the last decade. And it breaks my heart. No joke. So here I am listening to Hunky Dory, and you know what I do? I listen to it all the way though. And loved every rich buttery moment of it. I begin to wonder which of my beloved records deserved to be savored in this way. The list got long pretty quickly. I was hooked.

And the next time I hit Sneaky Beans, I bought that damn oversized Ming Donkey CD.

what the ipad should have been

from gizmodo.comLet me start by being perfectly clear: When the iPad hits streets in April, I will probably buy one. Because I am weak and need the comfort of sexy technology to fill the emptiness of this modern life. But existential crisis aside, the device disappoints on a few fundamental levels, particularly for the creative mind.

Aside from the crushing lack of Flash, removable memory, or even a freakin' USB port, the biggest failing is that this device has been crafted into one of pure media consumption. Not creation. Granted, we have desktops and high-end laptops for creation purposes, what I had hoped for was a device that would allow for some on-the-spot creative generation and sharing opportunities. A device that would allow me to use the tablet as a journal, to send the goodness that I've gathered with the device out to others in a collaborative environment. Such endeavors seem wholly impossible on the iPad. But I realize that this desire is unfair to the little tablet from Apple. It's because my expectations for what i wanted it to be had already been fulfilled by another, the Microsoft Courier. And I was yearning for Apple to rise to the challenge and create something even better. But what we got was a big iPhone.

In and of itself, this isn't evil. Hell, it's sexy. And I still want one. But if I can only buy one computer product this year, my choice has been made already. Courier wins. EASILY. Check out the attached videos below to see what the future of creative collaboration looks like. It looks like a win sandwich, with pickles and a side of hell yeah.

Microsoft's Courier is rumored to release mid-2010 at about the same price point as the iPad.

20th century boy: a skin-deep appreciation of the glam rock legacy

You would never know it to look at me, but I love glam rock so much it hurts. Aesthetically, I'm pretty devoid of pigments, opting for black 9 times out of 10. But inside, there is a Technicolor 70's NYC hipster with skinny pants and glittery eyeliner, pretending to be an alien from the future. Scratch that...I'd be British. But the creator did not grace me with the form, temporal placement, or geography to pull it off.  And I'm straight. But hey, we all have our cross, right? All of that is to say that it is a subject dear to my glittery heart. So along the next couple of paragraphs, I will touch on some of the things that make it such an incredible era of music which spawned a cultural revolution, particularly for the Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Transexual community.

You cannot begin this conversation without touching on what exactly the glam rock era is in relation to rock history as a whole. It all started with this cat named Mark Bolan in 1970-71...you might have heard of his band T-Rex. He more or less established the look and tone of the era - a theatrical and campy world of androgynous aliens from the future , platform shoes and outlandish costume, which was quickly adopted by the popular subculture. After Bolan pushed open the door, artists such as David Bowie, Lou Reed, Sweet, Slade, and The Stooges would adapt elements into their own styles in 71 and the years to follow. Bowie was most famous for his incarnation which took the imagery literally, spinning off into the Ziggy Stardust persona. Lou Reed, on the other hand, opted not for the space opera, but for a purer NYC drag scene with his landmark album Transformer.  Iggy Pop would take his garage rock sound to new levels with his Bowie-produced epic Raw Power, which was the genesis of punk rock. Other notable acts would include the proto-punk band New York Dolls, the British prog-rock of Roxy Music, the Bowie produced Mott The Hopple, and Brian Eno, the famous producer of U2 and countless other acts.

Later Queen would take up the mantle and take it into the 80's to help produce the glam metal movement which spawned the androgynous hair band, the progeny being Poison, Warrant, Bon Jovi and countless others. Bands like The Damned and The Ramones carried on Iggy Pop and The Stooges legacy and spawned NYC punk, which in turn produced British punk giving us legendary bands such as The Clash and The Sex Pistols and eventually Billy Idol...granted most of the glitter had disappeared by that point. Pop acts such as Duran Duran, The Cure, Culture Club and others were direct decedents as well, perhaps in the cultural sense more than recognizable musical conventions.

Clearly, the shadow of glam rock was cast long and dense over music, but it was just as influential to the greater cultural zeitgeist. Pop culture would be altered forever as the 70's and 80's would be dominated by the vivid color palate and androgynous styles that saturated art and design through Andy Warhol and the Pop art movement,  film and stage. Gay, Bi, and Transsexual movements would also benefit from the greater cultural recognition and acceptance the glam era provided. Stage productions such as Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch became cult classics, giving the straightest of boys the chance to go drag one night out of the year. There is liberation in that, I suspect. In fact, I think many straight guys yearn for a chance to run around in dresses...thousands do every year at events like New Orleans' Red Dress Charity Run. Maybe, like me, we were just in the wrong place in the wrong era.

But while we're all sorting that out, I highly suggest you check out the film Velvet Goldmine by Todd Haynes. It essentially tells the story of David Bowie and the Ziggy Stardust persona; his relationships with Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan, and Lou Reed; and his eventual mainstream, heterosexual "sellout." While the names have been changed for the innocent, and the personalities have been scrambled into more archetypal representations, the film tells the story of glam better than any other piece I've consumed to date. The soundtrack is phenomenal, featuring covers of glam classics and original tracks by musicians from Radiohead, The Stooges, T-Rex, Placebo,  Elastica, and Grant Lee Buffalo, as well as the legendary Lou Reed, Mark Bolan, and Roxy Music's Brian Ferry. It is currently available for instant streaming on Netflix.