I’m establishing a form: the youtube channel. I’m a performance artist and an actor. I also write, sing, play guitar, edit/record videos, and produce tracks on garageband. I’m also producing a tumblr. This will probably go on both my tumblr and my blog and perhaps my facebook. If I think it’s good enough, unrevealing enough, and relevant enough.
I’m laying flat on my stomach on my bed. I haven’t left my room for more than a couple hours a day this week. I have been hungry since Friday I’ve had six to eight meals. Today is Wednesday. Last night I was super hungry, but just about an hour ago I exploited a dom/sub fetish relationship for some food. I picked up a burger, sandwich and beer from Lodge, which is a restaurant that is currently giving away free books.
I got one called Confronting Capitalism. Did you know, that this has been a major issue and concern for some time now? I opened up to an interview with Noam Chomsky because it was titled ‘art’ in the table of contents. He reminded me of the protest at the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle that I’m almost too young to remember, but not quite.
Here’s a bit of what I read..
at the start of the nineteenth century, the ration of real incomes per head between the world’s richest and poorest countries was three to one. By 1900, it was ten to one. By the year 2000 it had risen to sixty to one.
then Noam says
And that is extremely misleading. It vastly underestimates what’s going on. The real and striking difference is not the difference among countries but the difference within the global population, which is a different measure. That’s risen very sharply, which means that within countries the divisions have sharply risen..
So then I got super angry, and convicted and I went right to my tumblr account. What are we going to do about this you guys?
The richest 1% of adults owned 40% of the world’s total assets in the year 2000. The richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of total assets. The bottom half of the world adult population owned 1% of global wealth - World Institute for Development Economics Research, The World Distribution of Household Wealth, 2006
And it has only gotten worse.
Well I thought, this is all very convenient, the poor person picking up on economic inequality. And what of it? I’m only suffering income inequality in America; I tip the scales in the other direction when you consider global inequality.
Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day - World Bank Development Indicators 2008
So you know what just came on my iTunes. I swear to God, and we can have the conversation about whether Microsoft is evil later, it was my song Working. In it I sing about how I renounce working. I no longer wish to bear the burden of employment. I choose to make art.
What a spoiled shit.
How on earth can someone deny the opportunities of employment that the united states has to offer? How on earth? Where the poorest 40 percent account for 5 percent of global income and the richest 20 percent account for three-quarters of world income [World Bank Development Indicators 2008]
Well I’m lucky to be an American. Luck is relative. Last night I was flowdreaming about helping all the people of world, which is to say all the disempowered, but I don’t think that needs clarifying. I would like to add though that I just took a hit of my bong and watched a video I made for youtube titled THE RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY AND/OR FEAR (we made it!!!!!). Also, I just finished my third beer. I don’t mean to be disrespectful. The point is to be honest.
We need the truth. I can provide truth in many different ways. It’s the process of denial that is harmful. Of denying the truth in so many way. It’s got to be a problem. Now I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing so I’m just typing it as it comes out, like a stream of conscious but with distractions. Like life. The universe. Youtube.
I’m writing a screenplay with my good friend Dr. Kelly. He’s a stud. But he’s straight so back off. You might remember him from my videos Pretty Boy or My First Project. He also created the track Williamsburg Rooftops. He’s a talent. Watch out America. You’re gonna be blown over by this guys talent.
But enough about him. Our screenplay is about the universe. How this has all already happened before, and how drugs are actually not immoral, but a rational option for many people, and how these experiences can sometimes awaken parts of our consciousness, changing the course of our lives. Well it’s inevitable, whatever happens.
There’s a loud banging happening in the next room. I live with crazy people. Which reminds me, I wanted to talk about being crazy. It happens when your perceptions don’t match up with reality. But sometimes the truth and reality don’t match up. So there is now a difference between reality, truth, and sanity. This is not a flippant observation.
I feel, something like duty, although I believe in freedom above all things. I feel bound to champion the truth. Do you know what just came on my itunes, I swear to god, “I Know the Truth” from Aida. This is too much, don’t even get me started about coincidences.. well, I guess. Coincidences are the spice of life. They are not random, they are proof of a subconscious experience. Jung wrote a whole book about it. And others have as well. And though I can’t make a thorough argument right now, I firmly believe coincidences are the spice of life. The seasoning that is the detail that is the missing ingredient connecting us to the universe. Follow coincidences. They are magic.
The subconscious, or pre-conscious, is all powerful. Language and its ugly step child ego or “identity”. Oh! That reminds me! I also got Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: Sourcebook of Basic Documents for free when I picked up this food. So you’re still with me, thanks so much. I hope when I reread this it makes sense and that I’m not wasting your time.
Anyway, The Subconcious is the source of Truth. It exists pre morality, social convention, habit; it is ultimate freedom and can be accessed in degrees or sometimes subsume you, almost like when you dream. It is magic too, and coincidences are messages it receives from the external world. So are daydreams. You would know this if you ever flowdreamed. Try it.
Also, everyone should take an introductory acting lesson. Not for commercial purposes. We’re not all going to be reading copy. But in order that we may have the experience, just once, of completely demolishing and then rebuilding the foundation of your “identity”. We can do this other ways, but surely this way is effective and thorough. It goes to the very subconscious. I’ll tell you how my training went.
My teacher was a master. As in the old sense of the word, of which there are very few left. She was a guru. An absolutely individuated, experienced, and knowledgeable teacher. So I got in a lot of trouble the first semester cause I didn’t wanna do it, and I was scared, and I had invested so much already into my identity as an actor that I couldn’t bear to stand to find out that I couldn’t do it. You see, I was insecure that I wasn’t or wouldn’t be as good as I thought I was. I thought I was an artist. And I thought acting was my destiny.
We could substitute the word think for believe. Or even at some point know.
However, I haven’t become anything but less certain as I’ve grown older. After that rough period I brought something very personal into class, I convinced myself (for the sake of my training and ultimately art) that I had contracted HIV and I was going to die of it. I do not intend to claim that my experience in this imaginary circumstance can parallel that of actual HIV patients. There is a way to convince the brain of certain things that aren’t true in reality per se. The subsequent experience however, of this daydream, sustained at the teacher’s pleasure, seems very real. And so we learn.
You can have an experience, in all truth and reality, under imaginary circumstances. For if it is real in your mind, it is real in your body, and then it is really happening. You can convince yourself of something that is not true and believe it. This specific and intentional manipulation of consciousness results in character. By releasing the subconscious so freely, and surrounded by ‘the other’, by having a deeply private or primal emotional experience we can understand certain things about relationships, truth, performance, focus, reality, and the subconscious.
Truths that were imbedded in our dna before we could even speak begin to be revealed. The face to face is the initial differentiation. It is the point of ethics. All further differentiation, and choices arise from the face to face. Language, identity, belief.
So in this process, along with the physical work we did which was designed to completely re-introduce us to our bodies, where nothing was taken for granted, everything was a habit, and every day was a discovery of vast potential and unimagined opportunity, we learned to become actors because we learned how to release the subconscious. The experience, one day after another, of not only having a NEW experience, but of realizing it was a possibility that we had heretofore cut ourselves off from, was so bittersweet. We cried a lot, rolled around on the floor a lot, wailed a lot, played a lot.
We are socialized to inhabit our bodies the way we do. It is subtle and not entirely intentional. My teacher, Victoria Hart, summed up the goal for us with the phrase ‘sense of truth’. Language has overlap, ideas are inherited. Truth is in constant flux, the subconscious (like the universe) cannot be entirely apprehended. Time cannot be fully comprehended. It is a sense that we are after of what’s true. What exists preverbally, even pre consciously, before we assume any role, opinion, or even point of view. It is the ultimate resistance to authority, definition, form, linear logic, rationalism, and fraility. The truth is ultimate power.
There is a wealth of information, a lexus of options and freedoms, that many people live unaware of. We must bring this information forward. Freedom is the goal. This is a metaphor for the global catastrophe of inequality that is happening. Now more than ever. “The top 1% of the U.S. population is getting one-fourth of the national income and nearly half of the national wealth, twice as much as two decades ago” globalissues.org
It is not a coincidence that intuition, queerness, empathy have been suppressed in our industrialized culture. That the performer’s body has been absent in art until the 1960s. That women are victimized in the artistic canon, in employment, and in society. It is not a coincidence that black people don’t receive the same level of education as their counterparts, and are imprisoned more frequently. It is not a coincidence that policies have been enacted on a federal, local and global level that promote and support corporations not the individual. Preference is given to the rich. In terms of education, health care, access to information, time, resources, travel, freedom. There is a starting point inequality that belies any promise of full equality.
This is the result of a now disgustingly powerful minority that can intentionally control the discourse of culture and economy on a massive level. These outcomes are not the law of some natural force, noam says, “they are the results of very specific decisions, institutional arrangements, and plans which can be expected to have these effects. And they have these effects.”
We are seeing the results a mechanism of power, of an intellectually and ethically lazy conservatism that protects it’s own and disenfranchises ‘the other’.
The scales are tipped so dramatically in favor of the powerful that we will not see full equality before we die. It’s that battle. The one where you’ve already lost, it is determinedly futile, and all that counts is in the attempt. As with making art, what matters is that you try. There is beauty and truth in that. It seems the most important thing for me to do. Keep trying.
As an artist, who is that because there is nothing else I am happy doing, I must be able to make the work I want. From my audience, I seek to gain trust in my intention. Words cannot express the full thrust of this. I’ve moved from my bed to a table.. well it’s really a nightstand. It was my grandfather’s.
Now I’m making work that perhaps seems frivolous, or narcissistic. Considering all this. I do. I’m not interested in wasting anybody’s time, especially when the time I usually get is from people who already agree with me.
I read, in one of those free books I was talking about (it was called Libra), the quote: “Happiness is not based on oneself, it does not consist of a small home, of taking and getting. Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general.” Which is an excerpt from a letter sent by Lee Harvey Oswald (who was a Libra like me!) to his brother.
What I’m getting at so well is that: the personal is the political. Libra happens during the fall equinox. Astrology is a metaphor, or a mythology, for the evolution of the personality as correlates to the time of year. I was actually born on the very day of the year when the dark and light are equal. I believe in mythology. I believe it shapes character and explains character. The reason I segued from writing about psychology to mythology earlier was because the words we’ve created to represent sections of our brain, figments of our imagination, and relationships between us, our body, and the external universe, is exactly the same project the ancient Greeks were involved in but with different words. They called their ego narcissus and spelled it all out through allegory. Which is exactly what we’re doing, though perhaps more specifically. Mythology, psychology, the narrative, pattern, figment, form, construction, expectation or language we inhabit becomes who we are and in turn our destiny. We’ve heard that quote before right? Character equals destiny. The greeks figured it out in their epic tragedies. Just because now we have much more specific stories does not mean we’ve transcended the predicament. I struggle everyday to override my socialization and meet my destiny on the path to freedom.
Maybe the whole project of language is why we’re here in the first place. Differentiation is perhaps the problem period, more specific differentiation is not going to make the problem better. It might make it worse. I dream of returning to the origin of ethics and systems, the face to face, the original stepping out and facing a crowd and doing so for what reason? What is the point of the human project? How can we see it through? I’m no longer interested in these endless differentiations. Neurotic distractions. There’s too much work to ever finish. But I at least would like to honestly say that I tried.
I don’t believe in good or bad. I believe in progress and the truth. Even though you can’t ever get to it at all, sometimes you can get at the truth with 3 words just as easily as you can with 1000. So here it is, The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent [Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 108]
Ultimately, measures to create equality must entail a net transfer of resources from the richest 5% of the population to the majority world – the 40% of the world who currently live on less than $2 a day. [Copyright 2006, Share The World's Resources]
