Salvaging Reality
What To Do Until Reality Is Rediscovered
… a Few Practical Suggestions
Although I’m just beginning this little foray into the art of the essay, (I’ve committed myself to doing this for at least a year.) nevertheless, if I only critique without providing a few unconventional suggestions then I won’t have given much support for the lone souls trying to piece whatever this means together.
So far the only alternative I’ve provided is puppetry, which is not a simple proposal at all. (See Antidote Art #1 & #2.) Meanwhile there is indeed much more to say. But rather than try to be too schematic I’m going to jump around and present what might appear to be disconnected.
Dancing as a Community Activity Used to be Quite Common.
The first thing that occurs to me is the need to recognize that much that used to be taken for granted has been cast off in recent years. People used to make shoes, make music in the evenings together, grow their own food, make local forms of folk art, invite friends over for intellectual discussion, read together, pass on memories and that’s just what popped into my head rather spontaneously. In other words most of what used to pass for human behavior has been overturned largely in favor of passive amusement intake and rather addictive information gathering. When activity does get the upper hand it is largely inspired by the media we consume, the propaganda we manufacture at every turn or the fear that that our current modes of existence are somehow highly detrimental to our own existence. What used to occur naturally now must happen by choice or not at all.
Consider this: People used to get together and make music. This is particularly important to me, since I have spent quite a while among musicians and studying music history. I am probably a product of one of the last folk cultures in North America to actually just play music with no thought of actually ever recording. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I was part of a network of Jesus People communes running from the San Francisco Bay Area to Oregon that provided a foundation for a unique music style that was at best poorly recorded, if at all. When I came home from work and sat with my friends we naturally played an unusual form of country influenced acoustic rock together. Now I could make quite a few serious criticisms of these Jesus People groups, but the music is not one of them. We took songs of all types and turned them around for own purposes. It was a far more vibrant music scene than most of what has passed for Alternative or Independent music since then. It was eventually supplanted and subverted by the commercial Christian music stealing out of Southern California.
Christian Communal Music 1973 San Rafael California
After I passed on to the next phase of my life, I found myself in the late 70’s in situations where people were actually singing John Denver and Beatle songs around campfires as if they were folk songs. Later I would meet people, musical types, who would in all earnestness tell me that all pop music was folk music. I could only reflect back on what I had experienced in the flesh to know that making real music is a very different idea from the containment of pop consumption. (And the word consumption here is definitely tubercular.) I eventually ended up in New York City in the Eighties and was stunned to find out that the vast majority of my musicians friends never played together except in conditions where they could practice or play at full rock concert level. I rarely heard of any of them just sitting around playing together. (And I don’t mean jamming and all of the connotations that implies these days.) Since then I have indeed met post-Deadheads into “drumming” or other naïve wastrels who seem to be yearning for something more real, yet somehow often moving music further from that which unites people into a culture as they imitate their favorite pop cult examples. So for me making music together is a crucial way to resume the human project. And yet the microphone and amplifiers too often crush the real experience of music. The key to the equation seems to lie in this thought: That music is not primarily either entertainment or art as defined by the 20th Century.
Music used to be connected to work. Music used to truly celebrate the moments that make life meaningful. Life wasn’t about music. Music was about life. And so to even begin to think of ways to integrate music back into life will require much more time than I have here.
Speaking of celebrations: I don’t want to find that when I’ve died someone has cooked up “A Celebration of the Life of Byrne Power”. When I die please mourn my passing. Why are the most important moments in our lives mutating into feel good parties? How many chances do we actually get to show sorrow in public anymore? Please hold a funeral for me. And cry. I don’t mind if you have something like a wake afterwards. But please no slide shows with photos of me as a child. And above all do not play a recording of my favorite song. (Good luck trying to figure that out.) Find real singers, someone who knew me. Get over this positive thinking curse and learn to grieve properly.
Food: Here is a major area of conflict and nightmarish propaganda. So I’m certainly not going to launch into a vegan vs. synthetarian diatribe here. But here is what I have to say: Eating meals is near the top of the list of practical things you can do to retrieve a sense of reality back from the artificial maw of mass culture. Now while I am all in favor of nutrition, knowing the difference between good wine and bad, sustainable living and whatnot, that’s all really beside the point. What matters is finding ways to reconnect with others while you eat at least now and then. What is the point of living in culinary splendor or correctness if your meals are less than human? None at all.
Meals are the best way to help weld a small community together. I have experimented with meals for years as way of bringing people together the like and the unlike, the convivial and the disparate. Here are a few practical personal rules that I have discovered for myself. I really haven’t expected anyone else to follow these rules, but I have discovered that as I apply them others seem to be at least momentarily present at the occasion.
An Outdoor feast - Haines, Alaska 2005
First: The television should never be left on. This seems to me to be almost obvious and insulting to point out, except that I know from too much first hand experience that far too few people even know what I mean. A meal is essentially subordinated to the screen, especially during holidays that require the presence of a turkey. Yeah I know what about the game? Exactly what about the game? Why is it so important? If the game is so important to you, then just watch the game. But try not to confuse eating a real meal with grabbing a few people to watch the game. In my house I try to never leave an active screen on when real humans are present, unless the point is to watch films. It sucks the life out of anything. Ditto screens that fit on your teeny phone.
Second: Meat. (Okay if you aren’t into meat please skip this…) Yeah meat. Meat is important for getting people together. The real feast always hovers around meat. I’ve been invited to endless potlucks with casseroles and organic get-togethers. It’s never special until you throw the sacrificial animal down on the table. (See the story of Cain and Abel.) And I’m not simply talking the big turkey meals, which are often too clichéd to ring true. I mean goose, duck, rabbits, goat, moose, an entire freshly caught sockeye salmon. Someday I hope to have suckling pig for the second time in my life. I could go on an on here. I’ve seen it work every time. Three times last summer and fall I had an entire haunch of goat (which I killed and butchered myself). Each time automatically became a memorable moment. Ask anyone who was there. Good meat, rare meat, expensive meat makes people talk. The conversation begins and that is the real point of the whole meal.
The Crab Signifies at a Meal - Haines Alaska 2007
Third (and last for now): Don’t invite people over a meal at the same moment that you expect to eat. Get them there at least an hour earlier if you can. Leave some of the cooking unfinished. Let people work together prepping the food in the kitchen. That’s when people really start talking. When I cook a special chestnut dressing that I learned in France I always wait for the guests to come over before I start the boiling process. Then I assign one or two of them to boil the chestnuts and to peel them before they get cold, which always burns your fingertips. But no one has ever really complained because the final product is so tasty and the process of scalding your fingers actually provokes much needed laughter.
There are so many other ideas related to food and the practicalities of life that can be done to help people recover enough of their human essence to open up the path for dialogue, real discourse. And that, my friends, is the point. I will return to this subject in due course.
Meanwhile conduct some experiments in conviviality…
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
4/15/11
Dark Cloud Coming
My head’s been in a cloud lately. I don’t mean I’ve been distracted by airy dreams. Rather I’ve been pondering the growing cloud of digital information that seems to be drifting into view across the peaks of technological development: What we all soon will be calling “The Cloud”.
The Cloud is Forming on the Horizon
The concept of the Cloud has been morphing into existence ever since binary information could be transferred through a telegraph pole. And now since so much of our world has been translated into code and stored on servers we find ourselves getting closer to a decisive point in… well I was going to write ‘human development’, but that is definitely the wrong idea. Progress? Nay. Evolution? Hardly. Extinction? Too dramatic, but perhaps actually closer to the truth.
What is The Cloud? Let me give you my brief non-techie explanation. The Cloud is the aggregate of servers that contain the repository of information that is circulated digitally. It could be something only contained within local computers or data parsed and stored in a variety of public or private servers. In short it is where our digital info is stored as opposed to the Internet, which is a way to access the Cloud. Now I’m no specialist in these fields so please don’t try to nail me down to an exact definition here. I’m fully aware that there are much more precise definitions. You can find them on the Cloud… and that IS the point.
But here is what I do know something about: the raw data that is being transferred into the Cloud for safekeeping and pecuniary interest – music, film, books, photographs, audio recordings, news and anything else that can be translated into digital bytes. Now of course this is all old news to you I’m sure. It shouldn’t come as a shock to you that CD’s are giving way to downloads or that newspapers are having troubles surviving.
But let me give you a scattering of various factoids related to this digitization of reality. Did you know that in Spain they hardly make DVD’s anymore because most people just download mostly bootlegged copies of movies? Or the fact that the promotional wings of many American music distributors are in the process of whittling their physical CD’s down as they try, desperately, to get their music heard on radio stations. Instead of receiving an album a radio station now is often sent an email with a link and then told that they have received the music.
Or how about this question: What is going to happen to public libraries the more we devote ourselves to downloading virtual literature? There are a host of strange issues here. If the library lets you download a book is it yours? The answer so far is no. Or consider the strange things happening in the competition to develop better digital readers. So you connect your computer to the Cloud to receive your digital copy of a book. Now you’ve bought this book outright. But what if the company has made an erratum that needs to be fixed. Well guess what? The next time you plug in to your source to get another book it’s very possible they may “fix” your book for you. And here is where the darkness of the Cloud really starts forming.
Now if someone walked into my house, uninvited, to correct the errors, or worse the legal problems, in one of the books on my shelves, especially a representative of the company that sold it to me, I’d be pretty salty about it. But people don’t seem to realize that when things like this happen digitally it’s the same thing. And that it because nobody looks at all this digital tackle like it represents anything in particular. It is after all just zeros and ones, dots and dashes. And as we transfer more of our creative life to the binary we surrender to a strange record and erase mentality. We have a pad or pod or lapdog and we fill it with virtual baubles until we get full. Then we all erase to make more room. And no matter how much memory we have we will always fill it up with bigger and bigger files. And that is why the Cloud is coming into a prominence. Rather than keep all of your digital gunk on your simultaneously shrinking and expanding computers why not just keep it in the Cloud until you need it?
Well there are quite a few reasons actually. But let me put my cards on the table before I give them to you. Anyone who has walked into my house knows that I possess a rather formidable library of books, records, and movies. Without blowing my own horn I will state this: when I moved up to Alaska the contents of my container weighed over 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilos). Most of that was my library. And yes that nails me down to a very specific geographic spot. So if you want to talk about the curse of material possessions I’m guessing that unless you own a collection of marble statues I’m in a better position than most of my readers to reflect on the obstinate nature of matter and it’s temptations.
As I was moving from New York City one of my good friends told me to sell it all and just find it again online. I didn’t follow his advice and gladly. First of all, a lot of this stuff is nowhere to be found. Secondly, as the Cloud grows above us my private library is mutating from being a collection of hard copies to a collection of material originals. And most importantly what is on my shelves is not subject to revision against my will. It will remain politically incorrect, dangerous and tactile. The books will smell from age. The records will develope scratches. The CD’s and DVD’s will scuff and need polishing. This knowledge will remain in time not reconfigured in the Cloud for future consumption patterns.
But I know what people already think. If you don’t own so much crap you can be more mobile, you can travel more, you can make friends around the globe and go visit them. In a weird way it can be argued that the new resident of the global scene in more like Saint Francis who gave up his material possessions and lived in simplicity to spread the gospel. Well no one I know who has divested themselves to live globally (and I do know several of these types) is living simply. And what is the point of visiting people around the globe who live as cut off from their geography as you do. Because ultimately that is what this is all about. All of our cellphones, GPS systems, laptops, iPads, portable music machines, social networks are scything us off at the legs from our geographical relationship to the soil. Ironically so many people pay lip service to the environment while in the exact same instant that they are severing their connection to the actual rocks and trees and real human beings that make up this messy life.
And finally for me the real problem with the Cloud is this: that by consigning our knowledge and art to the virtual void we hasten the New Dark Age. This is too serious a discussion to follow right this moment. Essentially we are leaving our knowledge in a repository that is actively being studied for its weak links in order to be destroyed. As recent events in this moment of history have revealed clearly: If you think the unthinkable can’t happen you are clearly not living in this world. If you think that the Internet will never be taken down… Or that the Cloud will always preserve your memories… Well I hope you are prepared for the storm. Live real.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
4/5/11
Non-Random Thoughts