Seams

The sound of tearing below
My feet, the fabric of a veil,
It would not slow, no matter how
Hard I prayed.

Who knew this little notch, the little
Snag upon the rocks
Of my clothing, warmth, comfort, riddled
With love could dissolve so quick?

The fraying turned to river deltas,
The fabric to red clay, and
The void between the binding garbs
A canyon now.

My moon had split, I clenched my God
In one hand, my idols in my other.
I couldn't bear to hear the shifting winds
But it whipped against me.

She says it hurts, she says it
Was pain for her, she cried three tears.
But turmoil, greater than she could
Forsee, was building.

And moons evolved and changed
Their nature, a new start assured.
But I, can hardly fight, this torment
To hate her.

Spite is knocking "open! Free me
unto the earth. Havoc is coming."
It may bring me gray hair, but still
I bleed to forgive.

It was easy for her, I don't discern
How she came to drop the knot?
So easily, it slipped off her heart and
Strengthened her.

I am not, however, as she wished. I'm
Not yet done shaking and trembling.
Witness, man, I long for her, but
She has lost heart for me.

Life before was a mountain, so still
And strong, sturdy and sure. So high,
Bountiful, fruit bearing, brought joy
To all around us.

A promise to return unkept, a hope
Dead. That shriveled contract stained
In my breath remains, I cannot
Forget the emptiness of it.

A fear, now, to continue seeing her face
In crowds, on strangers. To hear her
Laughter in the voice of children,
In the smile of a future wife.

But now in turmoil I lay, I grasp
My idol and my God in fear.
My idol, I look down to, and the fog is
Thick. I blow it away.

My Baal is beautiful, I held it all
Throughout the journey. I did not sense
The burden and weight on my soul
Is her. Help me, God.

I stood on the rock, the lamb
In confidence, but I did not know
She was with me there, under me,
As my foothold.

To loathe my love for idols, the depravity
Of man knows no end. Idol factory,
Veil tearer, poison breather, shame,
Are names for us.

But she was my beauty, fault line,
a canyon between God and I. And
The penalty is mine. There is longing
In my sides for her.

My idol is lovely, she is hard to let go,
Someday it will come to be, but not today.
Guilt eats my bones, regret is my blood. But my God is cleansing.

Embracing Error

Once the video art project "Embrace the error" was announced, I immediately had absolutely no clue what to do. My brain froze up. I went though a total of three ideas that I followed-through with, but none of them were fruitful. I hated all of them as soon as I had finished them.

Finals week approached, I had lots of dinners to go to, plans to sort out, projects to finish, things to study, and my freezer had turned into an ice cube. A lot was taking over my mind.

And nothing was coming to me. What sort of errors could I use? Sound? No, that was too difficult. Video processing? No, I didn't have any software equipment on hand.

As I was frantically trying to force out an idea, I realized something: I couldn't think of anything. My brain refused to function. It was frozen. FROZEN, just like my freezer, which was also an error. Instead of worrying about cleaning out my freezer... Why not make it art, first? Why not illustrate my inactive brain on finals week?

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday to the extraordinarily talented, extremely sassy, late Maria Callas, the original diva!

Performance Art

For my performance art, I took my friends Sammy (camera girl), Gershom and Tim on a little serenading adventure.

Gershom is pretty much a musical genius, although he doesn't like to think so. He's great at making up melodies on the spot, and so I asked for his help.

Tim, however, while being a rather decent guitar player, has been gifted with improvising lyrics on the spot, so he'll be singing.

I don't really play an acoustic instrument, so I'm on the cajon; a wooden box-drum with a snare built into the top corners.

...So we went around to random people. Gershom and I were dressed nearly the same in a rather plain, monotone outfit so that all the attention would go to the bow-tied Tim. We wanted our performance to be more about the words than the music. We sang love-songs to total strangers who were men, songs about what people were doing. Some songs were intentionally made a little bit uncomfortable, and some were accidentally super-uncomfortable, and while some people didn't very much enjoy our performance, some played along and became part of the performance.

None of this was pre-determined, and nearly everyone we played for was a stranger. We decided to just go out and play for whoever, whenever, wherever. We realized how many people at school seemed to drone on with a sad, blank expression. Hundreds of students each day plodding along, treating each day like it was just a "back to the grind" kind of day. Staff doing their jobs whom we've seen dozens of time. People we so often, but never see smile. And so, we went on a quest to change that.

And... most of the time, it worked. Here's my favorite scene. Notice the group of men at the table in the beginning, and look at their expressions before we approach them, and watch how we quickly change them.

And here's a quick compilation of everything.

A little bit of this was solely for making people happy (usually) and a little bit of an experiment, as well. I consider this a success.

Disco Infernal

Once the synthesizer was brought into existence through the Moog devices, experimentation in music exploded, leading to thousands of experiments in music and sound. One such result was disco. Not only a pioneering land-mark of the colorful and creative applications of fashion and hair conditioning, the sound became very distinct. A twangy guitar, dancing bassline, and the occasional violin characterized the movement. Giorgio Moroder was the first to dabble in these new noises, and not long after, nightclubs and bands and even a movie starring the unique, new musical movement began to appear.

But it quickly, all at once, died away with a violent backlash. What could have caused disco, which started as a fun-loving, intense, colorful era of music, to become one of the most despised, hated, oppressed musical movements of all time?

The pressure outside of disco is greater than the atmospheric pressure inside of disco, causing a rapid movement by molecules in the air in the exo-disco area into the disco

As any interesting noise pattern, sound, or creativity, everyone with a microphone and a recording label will soon overdo, overkill, and overuse it. Songs would include a little violin, and people would go "Oh, that's gotta be disco!" The genre became everything, and it was kind of annoying to people.

Not to mention, disco clubs were popular with the crowd of non-traditional sexuality. Occurring soon around the AIDS crisis, which is renown for killing thousands and thousands of homosexuals (not exclusively, but most notably), anti-gay tensions were growing. And so, the anti-disco movement was fueled in part by tension from opposing views of more personal things, as well as the fact that garbage like "Disco Duck" was being fired into the ears of the innocent.

"Kill me" -Disco Duck

But thank goodness for the death of disco, because without it, we wouldn't have house music, where Disk Jockeys would mix the good parts of disco and rock music at clubs, live. And from that, stems nearly every pop song now.

An article explained how annoying disco once became. It pointed out that, like nowadays, a certain noise or beat will be absurdly over-incorporated into songs to the point that the music being produced loses artistic value, and just becomes a noise that was once interesting, put on a 3-minute loop.

And the same thing is going on today, and it really pushes my buttons. Like dubstep and most pop songs, a little "bassy" wubbywub or grinding noise will be inserted into a song. But it isn't there because it enhances the song, it's there because someone said "Oh, when I drop a toaster and play it in slow motion, it makes a funny noise. Everyone is doing it! Let's stick it everywhere!"

-insert noise of king bass falling onto the face of the earth at the press of a button-

If a similar thing isn't happening right now, it's coming. Just you wait, America.

Just you wait.

I Xerox'd myself in the name of art.

Making cutouts of my body parts, fetched from a scanner and hit gluing them to a homemade book cover created this. I wanted to show how people are a part of their writing and reading, and in the middle of creating or indulging in a book or electronic wordspace, it occupies us as we occupy it and we become a symbiotic entity.

The hot glue strings and lines at first were messy and unappealing to me, but the more I looked at them, the more I like them. They look like hollow hairs and pulsing veins, further convincing me of the illusion that our works are "alive" beings, interracting in a very real way with us.

Archetypes

People like to classify people and personalities as "archetypes", or "dominant psychological traits", such as with personality tests, zodiac signs, horoscopes, "dog people" and "cat people", Apple and Microsoft, etc. However, archetypes tend to be more innocent in nature than outright saying "You're white, go away." Instead of labeling people, which is "bad", intended to separate people, archetypes are more focused on identifying people in an effort to better understand them.

Take for example, the Myers Briggs test, an imperfect description of archetypes. The test breaks up most personalities into 16 combinations of introversion and extroversion, knowing and sensing, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving. It isn't made to cause people to say "Oh, ew, you're a ____", but rather to help people identify how best to relate to people, labeling people based on a symbol that typically embodies an exaggeration or pure form of someone's personality. A lawful, logical person, for example, is a "judge". An avid learner and creator is an "engineer", and a thieving, lying person is a "senator". That was technically a stereotype, my bad.

I, personally, like archetypes. i think there's something important in recognizing differences and trying best to create coordination in people groups, taking into account the differences of how people operate. "It takes all kinds of people", they say, and... 

Tangential rant, I hate when people take the definition and identification of race, gender, skills, and differences in general as something that is always negative because "labels are bad and do nothing but destroy humanity all the time without exceptions". I find that labels are a tool, and when utilized, create a more cognitive environment. I mean, I get when people want to try to treat everyone equality, but... Doctors don't prescribe the same medicine to every patient. Food stores don't throw everything on one shelf, uncategorically. And we don't all dress the same. We wouldn't normally ask a music teacher to build us bridges, and we don't go to Disney World for gasoline to fill our vehicles. Things are different, and if (I say "if" because it'll never happen) we learn that our differences are beneficial to the community, then we will achieve a peace that is not possible to acquire if we just ignored our differences. I'm good at math, and someone else is good at writing, so obviously, someone who wants help in writing wouldn't come to me. That's ineffective and impractical. People are different for a reason, we have different heritages to give us a space that is uniquely and comfortably our own, and people are different for the good of others.

Anywho, archetypes help us better understand how to relate to eachother. I won't ask an introvert to help me give a presentation because they are truly, truly, inconfident and uncomfortable in those situations. It's nice to be able to find other people that are genuinely like me and relate to them, and archetypes help me do that.

I remember a video game I loved to play, Spore. In that game, you evolved from a cell, to an animal, to a tribe, to a civilization, to a space-faring super-race. The decisions on how you interract with other cells, packs of animals, tribes and cities throughout the game will give you an "Archetype", giving you certain bonuses and dialogue options for your race and character. Certain archetypes get along better with other ones, and lots of archetypes are distrusted. For example, a race that blows up planets and turns air into lava isn't really "best friend" material.

I'm not sure how this relates, but... Spore.