The City Veins

After getting real angry at Charles dick-dom for chiding me from 3,000 miles away, I decided to actually post rather than ignore him out of defiance.  This is not my normal way of proceeding, but I decided that  our numerous fans should not suffer a lack of my innermost thoughts simply because Charles is an ass.  Most of you already know that to be the case, so I’m sure I’m surprising no-one.

Charles claims that our blog-posts can be about whatever we want, even matters unrelated to the band, so instead I’m going to hit you all with something I’ve been observing in the classes I teach and try, in a roundabout way, to relate it to music.  Our maybe this will have to exist as two separate subjects within the same blog.

Primarily, I have become concerned that the portentious claims made by George Orwell and Ray Bradbury might be true:  that human beings have become overly concerned with ways to save time, with their own lives, and are beginning to avoid meaningful human contact through the arts.  I’m not sure blogs are symptomatic of this process, but the growing prevalence of multi-media apparati seems to be making people dumber in the ways that we traditionally have measured intelligence.  For instance, the fucking kids I teach can’t read books.  They just can’t.  They’re not flashy enough.  They can’t focus without an I-Pod in one ear, and then they can’t hear what you’re saying to them, which is a bit of a catch-22.  Our generation, I believe, uses the internet to supplement traditional forms of receiving information.  Or perhaps we remain cognizant of the fact that more than half of what is on the internet is crap.  But generations after us will not see it that way.  If it is on a computer, it is codified knowledge.  This essentially makes the masses responsible for truth, and not intelligentsia of any kind.  Like Michael said on the office, about wikipedia:  “anybody can write on it, so you know the information’s good”.  I’m not trying to be elitist and say that only the people who know stuff should voice an opinion (especially since that would likely rule me out).  I am saying that our growing need for instant gratification of all types is going to kill what we once considered human.  I thought for a while that the variety granted by increased media sources would give us further insight into the expanse of the human experience.  Now I’ve decided that all things that once illustrated that experience (art, literature, music) will become overly simplified so that they can murmur in the background of the everyday.  No one will listen with a critical ear when music becomes background for daily operation.  The intention will be sensory gratification, not complexity.  I’m sure I’m not the 1st to be an alarmist on this because many people have been freightened about this process before me.  And while many of these things that I think will destroy culture COULD actually make us smarter, I’m pretty sure it will work for current 20-somethings but fuck up everyone else.

That’s my rambling.  Suck it, Charles.