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All new work can be followed here.

Thank you for 1000+ comments (many of them mine) and years of engagement.

No dogs allowed,
You’re not our crowd,
Obey the signs,
And boundary lines.

You’re out of place,
You bark and chase,
You’re not our crowd,
No dogs allowed.

Keep off the grass,
(No dogs allowed),
All pups and hounds,
(You’re not our crowd),
You don’t belong,
(Obey the signs),
You’re out of bounds,
(And boundary lines).

You pant and wheeze,
(You’re out of place),
And carry fleas,
(You bark and chase),
You’re not our crowd,
(You’re not our crowd),
No dogs allowed.
(No dogs allowed).… Continue reading →

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Now that the Edward Snowden “controversy” is dying down, it is an appropriate time to finally put the man – and his leaks – into some kind of context. I put the word controversy into quotes because, try as I might, I can’t seem to find much issue either with the disclosure itself, or with the spirit (albeit not the reality) of the program Snowden’s disclosure revealed.

Let’s examine the two key issues here. The first is the “legality” of the leak, and where the first half of the Snowden myth began. Yes, Snowden could be charged with almost anything, but pure legalism is a rustic way to view an ethical dilemma. Jim Crow was a legal fact once. So is Monsanto’s bio-piracy. Just as morality is ensconced within religion, legality is under the auspices of another authority: government. Yet, neither have much to do with ethics, which has an objective reality outside of such institutions.

The fact is, few people are now wrangling about whether or not it was “legal” for Rome to have crucified 6,000 rebel slaves along the Appian Way. Clearly, it was. Yet such questions ultimately take a backseat to things people actually remember – namely, right and wrong, and the deeper, existential issues of personal meaning and survival. I guarantee that a decade from now, Snowden’s disclosure will have minimal impact on national security, even as the United States continues to do little about true long-term threats: climate change, corporate plunder, and silly wars that fuel terrorism the world over. Priorities are very slowly learned.

The second issue is government spying itself. Is it right? Is it wrong? In a way, it is neither. It just is. Government spying has been around forever, and it’ll continue to be around for as long as it’s deemed necessary. At some point, it will disappear, and be replaced with whatever other scheme that whatever other monopoly will devise, for the sake of – well, control. It’s wrong to assume, at the first crack of civilization, that we’ve either hit the apex or the nadir in these matters, for such problems and their legal implications are only beginning, if only because human flaws are so many, the desire to control them so strong, and the means for such so limitless and ever-changing. In Rome, it was mere appeal to The State. In America, it is merely a subtler hue of the same idea.

Thus, there’s a fatalism here, and one that Snowden’s well aware of. Governments set laws, and governments punish. Then, there are “troublemakers” who rush headlong into that reality. This makes Snowden little more than a cog within a process he’s merely on the wrong end of. Fifty years ago, the Pentagon Papers were deemed utterly destructive. Today, they’re hailed for having opened up the government to well-deserved scrutiny. Yet these are trivial “controversies” spanning mere decades. Ask yourself what, exactly, is fated to matter in this circuit, when such names grow distant, and … Continue reading →

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Yes, the question of ‘why’ is often a satisfying one, but it is just as often immaterial. And while there are many reasons for this, just one should suffice: that people, being quite curious, will apply their curiosity towards questions that are insoluble, wrongly assuming that, since the cosmos offers up some answers, it can provide all of them. It simply won’t, however, since the questions we have learned to ask are not questions we have adapted to. In some cases, this is easily solved by letting go, by recognizing appropriate human limits. In others, however, it is more so that the relevant terms have never been defined, out of ignorance, out of inability, or both.

Art falls somewhere between these two realities, partly because it is more a question of ‘how’ rather than ‘why’ to begin with. Take, for instance, the issue of artistic trajectory: the inevitable arcs that all artists seem to go through, and, despite thousands of years of examples, these same artists’ failure to recognize them, much less avoid them. In short, it is true that most great artists will eventually start to repeat themselves in rather pallid ways; most great artists will forget how their art came about in the first place, content, as they are, to merely re-capture the spirit of youth; most great artists will, for lack of a better term, dull, dull, dull, and many (if not most) will never notice this in others or in themselves. Indeed, it is as if their decline somehow forces the world — or at least their conception of it — to acclimate to such, wherein nothing seems to move, nothing seems ‘wrong’. Sure, it is easy for people to see a boxer as washed-up, or smile at a fat, aging baseball player with the knowledge of what they had once accomplished. But this doesn’t seem to apply to the arts, for while every animal has a functional body, the human mind is somehow thought to be unique. It does not age. It doesn’t go. And this conception does not die, or else it is assumed that there was not much there to begin with.

Yet as limiting as this view of art and the artist is, connoisseurs can be quite rabid, which is sometimes a good thing. Recently, this has been the case with Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (2015), a mediocre film that (as with other films he has done over the past decade) borrows heavily from earlier masterpieces. Yes, this is a common plaint, but the deeper point is that he’s borrowing things with little understanding of how those elements worked so well in the original films: the real sin, in fact, since a borrowing that leads to artistic greatness is no sin at all. Thus, I find myself in agreement with not only the consensus surrounding the film (42% on RottenTomatoes, which is about the same score that Woody’s 2007 classic, Cassandra’s Dream, received), but also some … Continue reading →