Cryptowen

i'll acknowledge at the outset that my perspective may well just be a product of my particular worldview (ie, as someone who's been irrationally wary of any sort of authority figure since early childhood, and tends to gravitate to emotionally intense experiences as if their intensity alone gave them authenticity), but...I basically view the psychiatric apparatus as largely being used to enforce social normativity. There's this idea of the "well-adjusted" individual who fits comfortably into the existing social structure, and with that comes the implication that any negative reaction to the existing structure is a defect to be treated. The individual is made to see his negative feelings in terms of his isolated experience, his personal history, his egoic desires etc. The content of the negative feeling is to be deconstructed, or expressed within the "safe" confines of mainstream discourse. The possibility of a large number of individuals recognizing that they share these negative feelings, and could in fact fight in the name of these feelings (rather than simply making vague allusion to them in socially-permitted conversation) is stymied. I typically see people online responding to eccentric or angry outbursts with "seek help!"...the question is, seek help doing what? seek help becoming comfortable with a world that makes you uncomfortable? seek help learning to watch the news without gagging? seek help learning how to be "chill"? imo the implication in all this is that the primary purpose of life is to just be comfortable, to fit in, to accept the hand that's been dealt to you. for me this is not the purpose of life at all. for me the purpose of life is to work to uphold an ideal - be that ideal aesthetic, moral, political, social, etc. (i'm not saying it should be the same ideal for everyone). for me there's a sense of wanting to be true to an inner feeling - whether or not that means my life is comfortable, or accepted by others, or financially viable. in fact i'm pretty sure that most things i've accomplished that i'm actually proud of, most things that i look back on fondly many years later, were the product of tremendous inner tension & emotional malaise. Periods of my life where i've just been "chill" felt like a year, two years, five years going by as a blur, until i reached a point where i just got frustrated with the artificiality of it all But! I also recognize that simply wanting to stare unblinking at the sickness of lfie isn't going to bring about massive social change (or even meaningful artistic output). i recognize that there's a certain kind of individual (myself) for whom these states hold quite an appeal. You're always going to have your dissidents, your would-be revolutionaries, your hermits, your malcontents etc who will naturally gravitate to these outlier positions, whether or not their efforts succeed in bringing about any kind of social or personal transformation. You're also going to have a certain kind of individual who really does just want to be normal, to fit in, to have a good time - and there's nothing shameful about that. I think for that kind of individual something like psychiatry probably makes a lot of sense (heck, maybe they even make better art when they feel more "stable" and not bogged down by their emotions). Then you also have a great number of individuals who are somewhere in the middle - they recognize that their might be some deeper truth to their discontent, but at the same time they recognize that there's something to be said for making an effort to fit in, and to get over yourself. For them, it's a process of determining to what degree they indulge their eccentricities, and to what degree they attempt to conform to an imperfect social machine. imo this is what most people are doing most of the time, and it's only on rare ocassions that things tip over, and a large number suddenly feel compelled to FIGHT DA POWAH also i more or less agree with most of what Deleuze & Guattari have to say on the matter. Nick Land as well, but he's also a case study in how trying to rise up & strike the lightning can have some unintended ripple effects on a person's life

well i mean if you're going to do it everywhere else...

i just keep all my mp3s in a single audacity project file & whenever it gets too big and starts crashing my computer i just cut out the parts i still like & save them to a single mp3. crackin off a piece of the trak as we call it in the music industry

i'm pretty strongly anti psychiatry personally but at the same time i recognize that for a lot of people it's probably exactly what they're looking for also speaking of artaud i'm reading him rn to try to improve my francais again

you should make a track rn, give yourself a 45 minute time limit or something my sexuality is like a cat that sits outside waiting to be let in, and then as soon as they let the cat in it immediately wants to go back outside

yeah i watched that a few years back and it made me pretty hype about the creative process in general. remember it having a good soundtrack as well.

and folks here we see chairman mao eating his manchair chow *camera zooms in on chairman mao with cheesies in his beard, he's trying desperately free them up but they've become entangled

have enough equipment stored in the park now that i can do a 400 pound deadlift. didn't even have to look particularly hard, it's mostly just bricks & logs and stuff i found by the train tracks the only lift i'm finding difficult to replicate is the bench press, because the bench in the park is slightly too wide (for one), which turns it into more of a floor press. and (for two) i haven't figured out a suitable rack setup yet so i have to get up from laying on my back holding the fully loaded bar when i'm done my set, which is per-carry-us to say the least. especially when doing decline bench (for decline bench i use a plank with a tire under one end up it. for squats, overhead press etc i load the weights on top of the dip bars & come up under it. this wouldn't work for bench because the bars are kinda too narrow. but good for squats. have recently started going good mornings. sometimes it rains in the park and sometimes it suns. looking forward to working out in the winter, using a shovel to free up the bricks once they get frozen to the ground. drinking a big thermos of soup in between sets. etc. becoming powerful

found a blender so i've been working on a new preworkout shake: 6-10 raw eggs + the shells (shells are for calcium) 2 bananas a pear or an apple or whatever kind of fruit you want however much milk you need lots of salt (optional) it's pretty good if you blend it up enough for there to not be shell bits

i really enjoy this book even though i'm not sold on the "math is ontology" angle. have read it twice. planning on reading his theory of the subject at some point. also listening to badiou lectures on youtube is a good way to improve french comprehension imo

its been a while since i read adorno but i remember having mixed feelings about his thoughts on popular music. like i feel like a decent amount of early/mid 20th century intellectuals look down their noses at pretty much any kind of music a person could actually dance to, and equate it all with soulless mass-produced commodity music. Sometimes the critz feel on point, when they're actually addressing a certain kind of soulless mass-produced pop commodity, or the kind of stuff that'd get played in the background of car commercials. But there's a lot of other music they write off where i'm thinking "pretty sure you don't actually see why this appeals to people". Not every kind of music can be equated with Schoenberg, nor should it But yeah largely agree wrt Marx. He revolutionized a lot of things but was also clearly limited by the technology & the social milieu of his day. imo it speaks to how rich his work was that so much stuff has been written since trying to figure out why it didn't pan out the way he predicted. a person probably could still use marx as the foundation of their economic/social thought but personally i don't. i've read a shitload of his stuff but that's mainly because he's such a prominent figure. it's kinda like reading plato without neccessarily becoming a platonist.

itd be badass to be chinese because then whatever you did you could say you were doing it with chinese characteristics

I've never listened to Cabaret Voltaire, but I happened upon his Number of Magic album completely at random last year, and it was on heavy rotation for a large part of the lockdown. RIP

how many wears you guys get out of your disposable masks? i usually get two or three weeks out of the blue ones, trying to last out the entire coronavirus just with the one box (fingers crossed)

not reading but i'm just gonna assume it's a bunch of boring rock & pop classics again, but this time with more token identity group representation

yah Hermitix stanning Gurdjieff makes me want to read his stuff. I found volume three of Beezlebub's Tales to His Grandson a few years ago at a bookstore, but haven't really dipped into it because it doesn't seem like something you can just start in the middle

The worst case i had of this was when i was 18, moved out for the first time, was renting a basement from a middle-aged married couple who ended up going through a messy divorce the winter i lived there. they'd be having a screaming match about their intimate lives directly above me in the living room while i was trynto work on beats, pretty much every night. also the only washroom in the place was through the living room, so if i had to go i'd go up there, and they'd always be like ohh hey bud! how's it goin there mate? like i hadn't heard what they'd been up to for the last two hours

The elderly man who lives above (not my apartment but) the guy next door's apartment walks so loud that i can hear it from my apartment. heez a beest

i remember reading this when i was 18 & doing all the exercises in it. i remember some of them actually being pretty engaging, like the one where you start by going "i am sitting here, doing this exercise because..." and then try to trace the chain of causality as far back as you can september reading: kuhn's the structure of scientific revolutions. just finished it, very good paul gottfried - After Liberalism. this was also pretty interesting. he basically presents the same idea as Kondylis (that bourgeois liberalism has slowly mutated into a global managerial state) but much much easier to read. i think gottfried might be of the "postmodern right" (his term) but i don't consider that a mark against him marx's grundrisse - doing a proper reading of it after having it on my shelf for a while. he seems to be doing more of a sociological analysis of the effect of currency & exchange value on cultural development here, compared to das kapital. there's also far less of the long polemical footnotes & extended lists of statistical data from the 1850s, which makes it easier to read the complete works of aristotle - i didn't have any internet for 10 days. i got bored. i mean i'm not done yet but i'll probably try to at least hit all the major ones i haven't read yet deleuze - logic of sense. i feel like i'm probably going to have to read this one again, it's pretty dense even for deleuze. maybe i'll read alice in wonderland first

coronavirus did 9/11

thanks Luke! I used to jam the one milieu album i had on cd constantly back when i had a car, driving around back roads in eastern canada. the others (aside from boc obv) are actually new to me so gonna have to chekkem out

in the future we will eat nothing but insects. we will feed the insects cows & pigs

turns out real politics is just like political discussions on the internet