Duke's Conservatory

@fuckyeahdukesconservatory-blog

29 - Artist - Guitarist - Writer - Gamer Please follow my pet project Theswansongs.tumblr.com.

165 posts

Ticking Away the Moments that Make up the Dull Day

If I am to learn anything from this class is that every moment spent, doing anything, is a waste of time. From the second we take our first breath we are just wasting time until death, but the concept that is hard to wrap my head around is the fact that anything we do is a waste. Is there a standard to time management, or is time so irrelevant that everyone’s expenditures in the currency of time is respondent to their own needs and desires?

If time is a construct, mitigated by one’s life experiences, then how is time being wasted? Just as some might consider sitting back and watching the horizon fall toward twilight as a relevant usage of time, the person who built the Winchester Mystery House could argue the same relevance. If time is relevant, then the usage is relevant as well. We are not wasting our time, we are spending it.

When viewed as a form of currency rather than an abstract passage of moments, one can denote its importance more clearly. Doug Zeigler of the Huffington post describes the correlation with money and time more clearly: “Money itself is not evil nor a problem. Money is simply a currency. What money does do is blinds us from a currency we have that we forget about most of our lives: the currency of time.” We can even view time through the economic principle of opportunity cost, where time spent is a weight upon better time spent and more enjoyable time spent. Are we willing to divert happiness to spend time constructively, or are we more inclined to fitter and waste it all in some offhanded way? Unlike how the US dollar is backed by the will of the people, time’s value is measured in the will of the individual.

Money is unfortunately tangible. We can watch it disintegrate in our pockets as necessity arises. But time is seemingly constant through a good portion of our lives. Through adolescence, there seems to be an endless supply of time; only through age and what seems like incessant waiting, time finally catches up with us. Maybe it’s a few grays in the mirror or a few hairs on the pillow in the morning, but one day we look at time and see its true value. “One day you’ll find, that ten years have got behind you. No one told you where to run, you missed the starting gun.”

I had a very good friend, named Paul, who would come to my house to find the most esoteric tracks he could find on YouTube and opine about Tao philosophy. Another habit of his was to write quotes on post-it notes to be pinned up on a wall in my house. Among quotes like “We are the music makers, the dreamers of dreams” and “No matter where you go, you end up somewhere” remained one Paul original:

“Time is your only commodity. Some sell it, some waste it, but no matter what you do, you can’t earn back time.”

#pink floyd #time

The Makers Of Music; The Dreamers Of Dreams

Thankfully, not everyone is a gamer. If the population of earth logged as many hours as I did on Everquest in the late nineties I do believe that we wouldn’t be at the same level of intelligence and creativity that is present in our society today. Regardless of the number of people consumed by the distractions of technology and entertainment, there will still be people who think the progress is the highest form of satisfaction and those people will continue to make society better, more sustainable and albeit, more entertaining for the rest of us.

We live pretty much in the same world that Miller described that pacified the exploratory drive that wants to reach other planets. VR has gotten to the point where you can buy a virtual sex club on Steam and, not to go into too many details, there are a lot of peripherals available to purchase to make the experience more lifelike. If entertainment is such a distraction, and video games are the end game for progress, then why is Elon Musk still making electric cars and sending them into space? Because some people have more of a drive than that which is defined by sex and pleasure, they find satisfaction in making the lives better for those around them. There will always be these people, those driven by more than what the world provides. Nicola Tesla is the perfect example of someone who didn’t give in to sins of the flesh in order to produce greatness around him.

Along the same lines, look at what has Elon Musk done for society as far as sustainable energy, space travel and … flamethrowers. He made his fortune off of PayPal, a device used to make accessing entertainment distractions more accessible, but used that wealth to privately fund the first real expeditions to Mars. Arguably, he has done more in the last ten years than NASA has done in their lifetime. Although, it is no selfless act; intelligence has become a celebrity in our waning years of humanity, almost due to its rarity. People like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye have seen a distinct version of fame due to, what I feel, is the nation’s lack of intelligence. We see these people talk about the stars and wonder: how didn’t we learn this in high school? Even without us understanding the world around us, there will still be the Steve Irwin’s of our ecosystem working to make it better.

Now back to virtual sex clubs. I’m sure it takes a dedicated team of individuals to create a VR Orgy-porgy, and arguably there are better ways to use one’s intelligence, but one has to understand that not everyone can be a rocket scientist. I took a screenwriting class, taught by a teacher who was credited with movies titled: American Cutie, Pulp Friction, and much less cleverly named adult fair. His message was simple, you do what makes you money. If we were all intelligent to a purpose we would all be asking each other “what did you learn today” and when the answer is “nothing new” then we would stagnate. But, if the answer was “nothing new, but I saw the new Spiderman Musical and someone died…” now we have social interaction. Everyone can’t be leaning and intelligent all of the time, sometimes we need to see a play where the bungee chords give out to understand what life is truly all about.

I don’t believe a society exist that is constant with indomitable entertainment in lieu of intelligence and progress. If such a society exist, is it truly worth discovering? How can anyone benefit from any influence if it’s buried in an electronic device? It’s like that horrible blind date, the one where she/he stays buried in their phone all dinner to the point where you gained nothing from the encounter. If an alien society is too busy with the entertainment around them to interact with other species, then to me that species is as qualified for friendship as algae. The human race, I believe, is so interested in the stars that we write lore about it, we make games about it, we write fiction about it; all so that one day we will be able to prove that fiction false. We are the makers of music, the dreamers of dreams: if we don’t dream, and create entertainment to fondle those dreams into fruition, then what is the point of existence?

If the earth is a living creature, then we are a parasite; the mold that grows on the persistence of living matter. When flying over the continental United States, one can observe every accent of This Land is You’re Land. Amber waves of grain give way to purple mountains majesty in order to reveal… Los Angeles. Its like a dark continent displaced by desert. The endless sprawls of city look like blackened veins across an endless skyline. It spreads to the sea, pulsating waters with demonic harvesters, defecting from the shore in order to cultivate the rich bounty of the seas in warships destined to bleed mother nature dry. The lungs of the city expel plumes of poison into the air. Wy should one care about the environment if we are the enzymes created to destroy the earth?

I firmly believe that Humanity is nothing but the oncoming storm, the defiler of worlds. We instill the same indifference as cancer, deforesting the common cells of the earth in order to make ourselves present. We don’t contribute to the world; we take more resources than we provide. If one is to believe the Bible, we are given diving dominion over the earth with the expressed cavate that we be stewards to our environment. Just as most of the Bible, we pick and choose what we want to believe and, in this case, the former has overcome the latter. We’ve become accustomed to our lifestyle, anything less than the current status quo is roughing it. Every cellphone battery adds countless of radiation to our landfills, every mile we drive removes precious life from our atmosphere, every birth control pill taken gets recycled into the water to the point where fish have had to evolve new reproductive gonads to cope with the chemical sterilization. Factory farms produce endless acreage of uncultivatable landscaped due to the runoff from manure, rich with growth hormones and antibiotics. Fracking is causing destructive Earthquakes in places that wouldn’t normally be susceptible to such phenomenon, oil rig spills have murdered copious amounts of sea life, and oil pipelines have been persistent as scabs across our nations landscape. And were supposed to worry about plastics?

Yes, we really should. Out of all the man-made weapons of mass destruction, the advent of Plastics has been the most malignant force developed to that point, only to be usurped by the development of the atomic bomb. Plastics can not be broken down by naturally occurring entropic processes. In 1983, Atari buried around 700,000 copies of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, a failed, licensed game and the fall of the company. In 2014, the construction of a housing development unearthed the cash of games and discovered that most of the cartridges were still playable. (but not really playable because it was ET on the Atari after all) But what about the way plastics get ingested in our body? Plastics get broken down inside of our body and create different hormones; regardless of the hormone created, it throws our physiology out of sync. When one considers that humans drink out of straws all the time, and the microscopic amounts of plastic digested with every sip of soda, it shows that the presence of plastic alone is damaging to the human race. Knowing this fact, and when we consider that there is a 7th content of plastic (about a third of the size of the continental United States) floating around in our oceans, how corrupted are the fish we eat every day? How much has our brain changed to accommodate this hormone disruption?

The truth is, we are seeing it every day. Mental disorders, social displacement, phycological and educational erosion; all of these, I believe, can be attributed to plastic in our life. The roman empire was one of the most advanced civilizations in recorded history: they turned architecture, agriculture, and knowledge into an art form. The romans were so intelligent that they invented indoor plumbing. They were not smart enough to not create that plumbing out of lead. Years of lead poisoning (and albeit inbreeding) created a portrait of laussez-faire the world had never seen. Although the story of Nero “fiddling” while Rome burned are easily debased by historical evidence, the philosophical rhetoric described the mentality of the roman people at the time. The roman empire was slowly going crazy; a product of their own advances.

Plastic in the ocean may be a problem, but it pails in comparison to the way plastics effect our life. There were no mass shootings recorded in the United States before 1966, enough time for evolution to reform to the introduction of plastics (circa 1907) into our physiology. As you scroll up the Wikipedia page, the apparent increase in mass shootings develops every decade. If one understands that coalition does not mean causation, there can room to speculate (compounded with the influx of new drugs recycled in or drinking water). The question that really needs to be asked is “Why do we need plastic?” What benefit does it offer in leu of the consequences? Just as lack of fossil fuels have been proven to cure the problem with the environment, shouldn’t the insurrection of plastic in our society be examined?

War of the (intelligent) Worlds

Its hard not to think that we are getting increasingly stupid with the course of time, although stupidity is a relevant term, based on many outstanding factors; pure intelligence is arguably being lost with each passing generation. I would argue that the reason for this is not the amount of “junk” a medium has produced, but how the brain has adapted to consume that junk. Voltari produced plenty of “junk” for his time, but it’s definitively more highbrow than anything produced by Hunter S. Thompson, in the same medium, or Bill Marr, in the same tone. How does junk compare through the ages?

Postman would argue that “junk” is subjective and left to the critics of their medium, going so far to say “… the printing press has generated enough [junk] to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing.” (Postman 16) When you consider the skill set required to understand the printed word it shows a much higher quality junk than what would proceed. Arguably, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses could be considered “junk” by disbelievers and faithful alike. Ninety-five inquiries, with citations, to the most powerful organization in the world; pulp that the educated parishioners best not worry about. Even the worst novel ever written (Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker perhaps?) requires more intellect to comprehend, regardless of appreciation than any of today’s forms of media. Postman talks about the advent of the newspapers, referring to Benjamin Franklin’s observation that “Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books.” (Postman 36-37) This required a new skill set: the ability to understand the truth from propaganda. With further forms of news, the truth and projected information were splitting further and further away.

Radio was an interesting form of pulp. This is immediately understood when examining the War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Wells. It was a dumbing of the nation; although the listeners had been informed that the program was pure fiction based on H.G. Wells book of the same name, people who tuned in late assumed that the Big Band music they were listening to was being interrupted by a true broadcast about explosions on Mars, expounding itself into a full-blown invasion. For some reason, the 1938 audience believed the invasion to be true. Although the widespread panic has been much exaggerated, the fact that anyone would believe such drabble shows both: the uneducated listeners mentality and a sea change in the intelligence of media consumers. When listening to the broadcast, it feels like a horrible news story during 9/11. So much commotion: people trying to report the smallest details; it's so much like the 9/11 broadcast, it's eerie. September eleventh started with stories about Michael Jordan returning to the NBA and ended with endless speculation about who attacked us. This was a dangerous advent of information, indelible from its source but indescribable in its demonstration of accusations. It's not that what we heard was wrong, it’s the fact that we believed everything our senses perceived.

Now we have the internet. If you look hard enough, there are sights that say 9/11 never happened, that is was an inside job, that “Bush did 9/11”. The whole tragedy has become a meme. through a simple deconstruction and demonstration of the phenomenon, we can look at the movies: we had page long newspaper articles about The Maltese Falcon, then five-minute blurbs from Rodger and Egbert on TV about Titanic; Now: 10 Reasons Why Aqua Man Sunk by BuzzFeed. We no longer look for the didactic examinations of things, we simply look for the top ten list and consider ourselves content. A slideshow in lieu of information. The small snippets of a person’s life are better compiled than a true dissertation of one’s true essence. Today, the War of the Worlds would be a tweet that said, “We aRe under attack”. A bunch of people would re-tweet the meme until it became more than itself, just as the War of the Worlds did eighty years prior, but more damaging. We re-tweet the most trivial information until we are pacified by the “news of the day” to where the “important news” falls by the wayside.

Perhaps we are just stupefied to the media that is presented to us. We believe blindly, we trust untrustworthy sources, and we beguile our own cognition towards people who think for us. Voltari and Martin Luther asked us to question ourselves and the situation we are forced to comprehend; today, we only question the Instagram post we liked that morning. Are we the inquiry or the answer? Can the answer be reasonable within a society stifling our understanding? I hope these questions can be further examined through the readings and though this class; because currently I’m baffled.

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at Arizona https://www.instagram.com/p/BpIDxc_HSbi/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1b64w3f2h6kfb

#niece is stealing the show from my sisters birthday (at Black Bart's RV Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/BosddFBHl8k/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=35ks3a25hhwy

at Arizona https://www.instagram.com/p/BokswkPl9MR/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1thi536sds871

at Arizona https://www.instagram.com/p/BokpcySlQLb/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=rjd7yyzm9zr

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at Arizona https://www.instagram.com/p/BoZYfypnwit/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=87lfs4cetfz3

at Fort Valley, Arizona https://www.instagram.com/p/BoKX3DLl3Ov/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=5tx4pxc91kru

at Fort Valley, Arizona https://www.instagram.com/p/BoKWOz8F30C/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=h44ix1nn5673

#guineapig #butch #sundance (at Flagstaff Ranch) https://www.instagram.com/p/BnzQD86FqD4/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=wrv30k8fery3

#guineapig #butch #sundance

The #battlestation (at HOTEL MONTE VISTA) https://www.instagram.com/p/BndUF74HgN9/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=cps2dej8vk17

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at Monte Vista Bar https://www.instagram.com/p/BndTtZvHb9D/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=17wp5mvtj9y6l

#guineapig (at Flagstaff Ranch) https://www.instagram.com/p/BncRvxInl-n/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=54wgpzwou50o

at Flagstaff Ranch https://www.instagram.com/p/BncRUXknRyV/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=8udxkcevsu8o

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