Thought Dump

undo wrote:This is why I can't accept that someone like Paves would walk away from music..

Yeah it bummed me out when I realized he wasn’t making music any longer. Making music is really time consuming and if you are prone to any mental illness or emotional swings (like most creative people) The tendency you quit it over frustration at some point and do something else is high I think. That’s just from my experience not trying to lump paves into that category.

I’d love to hear new tracks from him or Marshall staxx though

I feel like a good takeaway to that storyline is that our society places almost no value on artistic genius. And that’s sad as fuck. My little brother continues to write and record. And he’s uninsured, facing severe health and legal issues, and with an uphill road to any life that could be considered even remotely comfortable. Paves walking away to do shit elsewhere is just a self inflicted punishment by and on a society that doesn’t care enough about anything of real value.

That’s true about society not supporting arts but is it true about Paves?

Some people do just give up and do their jobs or whatever. For me I sometimes stop but I do other things (other projects I want to try like videos podcasts and photography)

As somebody who was a math prodigy, a nationally recognized high school debater (and, at the time, the most successful in Illinois state history; records are made to be broken, though, and I doubt very, very, very much that this is still the case) who was unsuccessfully prodded in the direction of "politics," and then one of those undergraduate students who got his name engraved on bronze tablets and shit and was begged to publish several term papers and his honors thesis but who never even thought of going back to school, I can say that "just walking away" was, for me, certainly a practical matter. Now, I was never much of an artist. I've written a few books and book-length academic works, but I don't think that that's the same as Paves, Marshall J. Staxxxman, or Bad Brad. At all.

But I don't think it's so far removed that I can't offer something!

For me, I just saw a bunch of paths that would bankrupt me either financially (years of grad work in either philosophy/comp-lit-adjacent shit or advanced mathetmatics and then...a lifetime spent working off that debt while also dealing with an illness which, after a few weeks without medicine [ie, being uninsured as a graduate student or between gigs], will very literally kill me, I guess?) or morally/ethically/ideologically (politics). I walked away and into an adult life of mostly near-poverty because I felt like whatever kind of "freedom" of mine this is (and that those decisions preserved or seemed, to me, to preserve) was more important to me than much else.

I, for one, feel regular and not-crushing-but-nevertheless-quite-real guilt about these things, because my understanding is that I was a person who was thought to be capable of "making a difference" to whatever extent that may have been. And an adult lifetime spent primarily enjoying "the arts" is exactly the kind of inaction that harms the world. And it's also the height of passively toxic privilege not "even though" I have diabetes, but, in fact, "precisely because" I do. But I tend to see through people like they're Saran Wrap, so my belief in my or anybody else's ability to make whatever differences those might be is pretty fucking slim. Owing, as it were, to the fact that making a difference means making a difference in and making actionable that difference within, you know...man.

I'm really glad that I was able to get an independent study in fractal geometry and chaos theory approved for the second half of my junior year in high school, though. That was some transformative shit! The supercomputers do all that math, in practice, but I guess I could've told them to crank out some baller-ass posters for undergrad computer programming dormitory mushroom trips if I was with dumb old NASA or whatever.

Now that’s dope living. Well, if you’ve written books you are an artist in my book lol.

We all got to live life. I regret not having a true rock band back in the day or challenging myself much more creatively years ago.

And Undo, I feel your posts. Staring at your FL studio or your guitar is daunting and I get the same feeling most days. Personally I know I have wasted a lot of time in my life and can’t help but feel there was a lot more potential there for me.

I’d like to be close friends with David Letterman.

Art and creativity are unique pursuits because achievement can be really hard to measure (it is traditionally mediated by commercial success and other forms of recognition are increasingly limited) and there is a truly indescribable element of genius involved. At the highest level of scientific and mathematical research, there is a similar level of truly pure genius at work but there is more institutional mediation and support (universities, grants, and obviously private sector financial/business interests). Obviously, that puts a hard ceiling on what most people can actually expect to achieve in these particular fields because unique gifts and talents cannot be developed. Nobody can train the next Stephen Hawking or Bob Dylan, essentially.

In most other fields and with the majority of human pursuits, the opposite is true. For example, receiving a Ph.D. in the social sciences or humanities is not really a marker or intelligence but of persistence and some combination of a considerable amount of existing financial resources and/or personal indebtedness. That doesn't mean that the people who attain these degrees are not smart. They often are really smart. But that just comes from years of training and socialization and not some innate gift or talent. The same is true for executive level positions in business and management. There is a level of fairness and meritocracy in this system but the problem is that the exclusivity of our American educational institutions (tuition fees) ends up reproducing rather than dissolving class disparities.

Ned Braden wrote:I’d like to be close friends with David Letterman.

Wish him a happy birthday today!

Ned Braden wrote:I feel like a good takeaway to that storyline is that our society places almost no value on artistic genius. And that’s sad as fuck. My little brother continues to write and record. And he’s uninsured, facing severe health and legal issues, and with an uphill road to any life that could be considered even remotely comfortable. Paves walking away to do shit elsewhere is just a self inflicted punishment by and on a society that doesn’t care enough about anything of real value.

i have worked insanely hard to make a living from music. i've gotten some accolades, been able to do some amazing tours, worked with some incredible people, played crazy venues.

that's all gone now. think about what your personal quarantine would be like without music, books, art, films, etc. if only we actually valued those things enough to let them be careers accessible to everyone, rather than those who crest a certain height.

i will never, ever, ever stop making music, though. i hope i die in the studio.

I remember going to Barnes & Noble excited to buy a copy of Wire magazine because there was supposedly a glowing review for A Place Where Nothing Was in it. Sadly, right around that time was when they stopped selling the magazine for some reason.

edit: since then I read it online somewhere

Don’t ever die J.J.

But if you must, the studio is a good choice.

I distinctly remember watching sportscenter back in the nineties, and during one of the introductions they made the entire thing puns about U2. This was, presumably, to celebrate the release of that compilation album or Pop or All that you can't leave behind. Did I imagine this? I feel like they may have done a similar thing for Pearl Jam's Yield album. I would think that if this were real, it'd be something I'd be able to find on youtube somewhere.

are you thinking about that one hootie and the blowfish video

That does sound like a thing that could have happened but sportscenter was everyday and this is pre-youtube by a good number of years so not surprised you can't find evidence of it.

Duff... wrote:are you thinking about that one hootie and the blowfish video

I’m not, although I think about that very often.
Was hoping somebody had vhs tapes of sports center for some reason and had uploaded these sorta things to the internet.

If Mike Bloomberg is actually serious about spending his money to save the country, why wouldn’t he just bail out the US postal service himself?
If he did, that would make him a national hero in the eyes of pretty much everybody until the end of days.

Because billionaires are the most fraudulent class in the country.

I'd be a Good billionaire, I'm sure of it

If they all thought that wealth should be democratically reinvested in the public, they would not exist as a class. The fact that they do not make those kinds of decisions is literally the basis for their social existence, man!

Ned Braden wrote:If Mike Bloomberg is actually serious about spending his money to save the country, why wouldn’t he just bail out the US postal service himself?
If he did, that would make him a national hero in the eyes of pretty much everybody until the end of days.

The post office is fucking doomed. It started dying in 2006 via congressional mandate, and Trump will likely be the one to carve it up for a few of his buddies using our drop in revenue from Covid and the lack of attention to us bc there is a lot of other pressing concerns about. I hope I’m wrong on this

Every single "counterculture" of the last hundred years that wasn't formed as a byproduct of institutionalized oppression eventually reveals itself to be a huge fucking sham.

I would love to find examples to the contrary.

why do tankies love the dprk

I don't really know. I am not sure what people even mean by 'tankies' anymore? Just like hard-left Twitter personalities? Historically support for the DPRK dates back to the Korean War and early Cold War hostilities. It is the same reason why American leftists used to celebrate the victories of Ho Chi Minh. As the density of union membership started to steadily decline in the United States, the left shifted their attention away from domestic issues and towards the anti-imperialist struggles of both Communist guerrilla fighters and, to a lesser extent, the non-aligned movement.

That does not really answer your question though. I guess some people really like to delude themselves into believing that there is some kind of pure, anti-imperial or revolutionary force that exists in the world. The North Korean shit is particularly bad. However, there are legitimate reasons to criticize the Western media's coverage of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, which is something that has continued into the present-day with the blatantly imperialist attempts to usurp a democratically-elected leader and impose our own puppet regime in Guaidó. The entire American, British, and European media establishment (with the notable exception of Le Monde Diplomatique) has uncritically fed that line to the public, which is upsetting.