Category Archives: Philosophy

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits

The “seven dirty words” are seven English-language words that comedian George Carlin first listed in 1972 in his monologue Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. At the time, the words were considered highly inappropriate and unsuitable for broadcast on public airwaves in the United States. As such, they were avoided in scripted material, and bleep-censored in the rare cases in which they were used; broadcast standards differ throughout the world, then and now, although most of the words on Carlin’s original list remain taboo on American broadcast television as of 2010.

It is almost as hard to imagine Christ telling a parable to tax collectors and prostitutes as it is to imagine him doing so without curse words.  They are a part of our social fabric as humans: the real world, the factual world, the world in which we and our children function. They are important to developing real world characters with which children can identify. There is something wrong with obsessing over many of the things ‘curse’ words refer to, but, it is also wrong to obsess over money, music, freedom, or just about anything.

Often words are segregated according to the people who use them: their class, race, religion, education, and so on — in themselves most have no inherently crude or disturbing meaning.  They are used to divide and stigmatize, domesticate and rule.  Meanwhile unspeakable evils are plotted with ‘acceptable’ words. To a certain extent over-reliance upon curse words for adding emphasis indicates a lack of imagination, but so does avoiding them altogether in order to white-wash a story or character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words

"Tilikum" New Thrash Death Metal Band

 

“When you do make a difference is when you individually champion something that you have passion for in your heart. And that can be anything from protecting animals from domestic harms — like, chickens, pigs, or cows — or it can be protecting get whales or the orangoutangs, or protecting a habitat that they live in.  All of those little things is what makes a movement. A movement is one of diversity, and, its these individuals all over the world, hundreds of thousands of them, that are really making these changes.” Captain Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd International

Imprisoning intelligent mammals in tanks for entertainment is medieval and just plain weird. As protest I’m starting a new thrash death metal band called Tilikum, in honor of an Orca enslaved by criminals at Sea World.  Not only are such conditions torturous for these animals they impart a distorted understanding of Nature to the audience, leaving them with the impression wildlife is (1) not wild and (2) unendangered. Nothing good comes from this carnival whatsoever.

“I’m amazed when I’m asked, ‘how can you ask people to risk their lives to save a whale’? I’m amazed when they ask that question.  We don’t ask that question when we are sending people over to defend some sheik’s oil well in Iraq. We give benefits for that. […]  To risk your life to protect an endangered species, to risk your life to protect a habitat, to risk your life to protect another human being, or to risk your life to protect another sentient being on this planet — that is worth dying for.”

“In our world today, it is considered by the powers to be, to be one of the most insidious crimes: the crime of compassion…because it undermines everything they stand for.” Captain Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd International

Captain Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd International, YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O8D5lPGTgw

Sea Shepherd International
http://www.seashepherd.org/

Power of Art: Think Different

“The Crazy Ones” 
(Original “Long version” appeared on posters made by Apple.
Apple folklore has it Steve Jobs was the author of the original piece.)

Original
“ Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Full version
“ Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Short version
“ Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Power of Art: Let’s Draw Endangered Species!

[scan of 1998 poster made by unknown artist]
 
As artists we can tell stories relating the problems of endangered species through animated films, illustrations, and projects of all kinds to humanity worldwide.  We can create endearing, lovable characters based upon species which need our help now. We can use our skills to make humans raised with such characters — as their childhood friends — incapable of destroying their habitats, wearing their skins, or not loving them in any way! : ) Whoo hooo!
 
One small part of the solution.
 
The idea is, if you can draw, paint, or render a cool character based upon an endangered species — and would like to post it online to publicize your illustration and narrative skills (while still retaining copyright to your work) — please send us an image!  Tell us about the personal history of your character, a bit of imaginative background story, and a bit about yourself and your inspiration.
 
We’ll post characters and stories as often as possible. Hopefully this will turn into something larger than a blog, with broader lasting impact like Sketchtravel or Tortoro Forest.
 
We’ll be around for a long time, so, maybe you or a group of your friends and colleagues met through similar interests and styles shared in work seen here, will, perhaps, create films, children’s books, and similar projects with cool characters which might help to save endangered species. Maybe ten to fifteen years from now there will have been a few blockbuster films which contributed to funding a wildlife refuge, renovated a zoo or two, and maybe started a few wildlife reintroduction programs.
 
It can be done. We have the skills.
 

Where is the Art? Marijuana and Lost Friends

How did it become artistic to get high? It is hard to imagine Da Vinci as a pothead. Drugs are a cheap way for untalented poseurs, curators, and hangers-on to purchase the aura of “artistic” without producing a single work of meaningful bold imagination.

As Anthony Kiedis said, “It’s easy to be a junkie. It’s not easy to be one of the greatest guitar players of all time, or one of the greatest writers.”

Marijuana makes you stupid, lethargic, paranoid, irrational, schizophrenic, emasculated, passive, complacent, and easily ruled. It is not the drug of revolutionaries; it is the drug of frat boys and social incompetents who have nothing in common with each other except marijuana.

Da Vinci would have been curious about the effects of various activities on his mind. With marijuana and most drugs this curiosity can be answered through observation: where is the art??? Where are genius potheads?

With a clear mind you will have confidence the flights of your imagination are empowered by genius, the breath of God, insightful and bold — rather than self-censored by doubts about their chemical origin.

Protect your neurons; take care of your physical brain. Nurture your physical mind — your neurological system — with sleep, exercise, healthy nutrition, optimism, travel, friends, joy, sunlight, and Kindness.

Unfortunately many artists use the drug culture to project an aura of coolness — while in fact they themselves do not use any drugs whatsoever. For example, a brilliant inspiring author (albeit of “horoscopes” in their most broad literary form), writes on his website:

“I was peeved that so few of “the antennae of the race” had enough courage to blow their own minds with psychedelics. How could you explode the consensual trance unless you poked your head over onto the other side of the veil now and then?

Pot, hashish, and LSD were very good to me (never a single bad trip), but their revelations were too hard to hold onto. As I came down from a psychedelic high, I could barely translate the truths about the fourth dimension into a usable form back in normal waking awareness.

The problem was that unlike the other techniques on the list, psychedelics bypassed my willpower. Their chemical battering ram simply smashed through the doors of perception. No adroitness or craft was involved on my part. One of my meditation teachers referred to drug use, no matter how responsible, as “storming the kingdom of heaven through violence.”

Gradually, then, I ended my relationship with the illegal magic. Instead I affirmed my desire to build mastery through hard work. Dream interpretation, meditation, and tantric exploration became the cornerstones of my practice.” (http://freewillastrology.com/writings/started.html)

Amazingly Brezsny goes on to write on page 21 of his book Pronoia, “I had not ingested (and still have not as of this writing) a single mind-altering substance, even marijuana, since 1985.” Why not state this clearly, upfront, as a straightforward guide to future artists?

Why is it so difficult for artists to say clearly, “Hey, I don’t do drugs. I don’t need them. You probably don’t either; they’ll almost certainly make you a worse artist. Nothing has destroyed more potential in our generation than marijuana. Protect your Mind. Rewire your brain with Kindness, not chemicals.”
—

Rather than militarize our society while providing the false veneer of ‘hip counter-culture rebel’ to paranoid poseurs, privileged dilettantes, and salaried weekend warriors (who need self-medication to survive dream-crushing careers), we should end this false revolution of the anti-imaginative class: all drugs must be legal.

There is nothing cool about getting high; there is nothing rebellious or counter-cultural about using a roadside weed to become a pothead. Marijuana makes you incredibly stupid and does nothing whatsoever to improve your imagination. If you want to go to an idiot parade, watch a NORML march…no kidding, truly unbelievable. Go to a NORML march before becoming a pothead, please. (Many of my friends would be marching if they could wake up and remember the date.)

For an articulate alternative point of view, the comedian Bill Hicks frequently defended drug use as inspirational. Most people though do not take drugs for inspiration; they are not remotely capable of broadening their minds, they are not revolutionary, they definitely cannot retain a single meaningful interesting concept from the supposedly novel experience of smoking marijuana. Most artists were exceptional in elementary school. Long before experiencing drugs they experienced inspiration as a gift. Only then, long after, did some became fat angry drunks and has-been potheads.  2¢

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX1CvW38cHA

Chemically induced light-trails are not enlightening; hallucinations are not Ideas.  Let uncreative poseurs trip on their crutches.  Artists only need hearts filled with the breath of God.

‎”All the great writers were alcholics. [This is untrue!] Where are the great pothead writers? I’m sure they’re out there but do really want to read a whole book by a pothead? 500 pages on why if you put a hat and glasses on a dog he looks like he could drive a truck.” Dave Attell

Lead singer for the rock band Kiss, Gene Simons, has the courage to speak out against fake Muses, “I have never been drunk or high in my life. I have never smoked a cigarette and do not stay in the same room as people smoking.”

An alternative point of view: “We have a lot of really bad prejudices about marijuana, and we need to expose them as a society, because they’re holding a lot of people back – I know they held me back. They made me – until I was thirty years old I thought pot was for idiots. A lot of people do. And it’s important to let them know, not only is it not for idiots, it’s a tool. You can use it. It can benefit you. This is not a benign substance – it’s slippery, like all other psychoactive substances if you are on the wrong path mentally, you can go off the deep end with it. Like everything else. Like alcohol or anything else.” Joe Rogan, JRE Podcaast #807

Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls

The Economist headlined as their cover story an article titled “Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls,” the most important take-away being: cultural appreciation for the value of girls rather than economic development prevents gendercide:
 
“It affects rich and poor; educated and illiterate; Hindu, Muslim, Confucian and Christian alike. Wealth does not stop it. Taiwan and Singapore have open, rich economies. Within China and India the areas with the worst sex ratios are the richest, best-educated ones.”
 
“In the 1990s South Korea had a sex ratio almost as skewed as China’s. Now, it is heading towards normality. It has achieved this not deliberately, but because the culture changed. Female education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings made son preference seem old-fashioned and unnecessary.” [I’m not a Christian fundamentalist psycho — and hardly understand what Christianity even means — but it is worth noting South Korea is now more “Christian” than Europe and most parts of the United States; this may be a factor.]
 
“And all countries need to raise the value of girls. They should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life—using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said “women hold up half the sky.” The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down.”
 

The Case for Ellification of the Universe, ASAP PDQ PLZ : ) ♬♫♪♫

First, the most obvious argument for Ellie: she exists as a proven character created by artists still working together at the most successful animation studio in the frickin’ universe, Pixar. She would be hard to screw up. Second: Ellie radiates virtues and passions difficult for any of us to evoke whatever our gender, age, or calling; she can show humanity worldwide how to make everyday life fun, meaningful, and authentic — while being entertaining and adorable.

This is especially important when independent, expressive, ambitious young girls, women, and the men who adore them (and who are made stronger by them) are under attack so explicitly on cultural — not economic — fronts, worldwide. As bizarre as it may be, we share a world with fathers who pay physicians to cut the clitori off their daughters — at a rate of over 2 million girls every year; amazingly, we are also sharing our God-forsaken planet with parents who kill — solely because their children are girls — nearly 100 million Ellies before they are born every year. Neither of these direct assaults against female humans are due to economic reasons. How is this possible? These attacks are motivated by ideas which can be changed for free — at no cost — even while temporarily psychotic minds undergoing change pay to be altered and entertained.

Then there are the glass ceilings of our open-air global madhouse: the incompetent uneducated men throughout the world who are somehow dependent upon women to calculate, translate and basically transact everyday business for the companies these men supposedly manage.

Dowries, arranged marriages, veils, chadors, mandatory headscarfs, required overcoats, full body swimsuits, hajibs, niqabs and God knows what else to hide and sequester feminine beauty — round off this cultural attack on all humanity. We do not need to make societies wealthier to change these ideas. We can change expectations by teaching lifestyles embodied in entertaining, fun, endearing characters everyone wants to watch everywhere.

Pixar could run with this opportunity as quickly and as far as Ellie’s spirit will take them — with little risk, with the virtual assurance of profitable accolades, and, with the satisfaction of having woven deeply into our global social fabric the most important female spirit thus far recognized. She does not need to be a freckled red-headed cartoon, either; Ellie’s spirit could be embodied in an animated caterpillar, carrot, or gigantic monster — who can imagine what: with a vibrant sense of self-respect, a fun uninhibited exuberant drive for self-expression, and an uncompromising straightforward sense of oneself as a unique female person.

The following are comments by National Public Radio’s Linda Holmes about Ellie from an article titled “Dear Pixar, From All The Girls With Band-Aids On Their Knees“:

“Please make a movie about a girl who is not a princess […] Of the ten movies you’ve released so far, ten of them have central characters who are boys or men, or who are anthropomorphized animals or robots or bugs who are voiced by and imagined as boys or men. […] And Up…oh, Up has Ellie, who I could have watched forever. Seen only in flashbacks to the main story, Ellie is warm and hilarious, ambitious and fearless, and then gone for most of the movie. She provides the engine for the story, in many ways, but it’s an old man and a little boy who actually get to hit the gas.”

If you would like to watch the entire segment of Ellie’s spirit embodied as an adorable young girl — the most profound Pixar character yet created — check out:

Congratulations to Peter Docter, Bob Peterson, Ronnie del Carmen and the entire Pixar story crew for boarding such a precious positive role model.

O Ellie, Ellie! Wherefore art thou!!!!!!!!!!

http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/09/short-film-life-for-yemeni-girl/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_cutting 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chador
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_segregation_and_Islam
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2009/06/dear_pixar_from_all_the_girls.html?sc=fb&cc=fp
http://www.titlesequences.com/heroines/whereRthey.html

(As an interesting side note on the transmission and life of ideas independent from any one one particular mind, the motivation for this post arose after Emma Coats (a story artist at Pixar) asked through Twitter “where have all the folk heroines gone?” with a link to this article: Google Cache (backed-up on Titlesequences here). A moment in the life of this idea can be seen by clicking on the ‘Favorites’ link of my profile: http://twitter.com/oceanbluesky/favorites Changing the world is a team sport; righteous fury is a gift from God. Enjoy!)

If You Want Muses, Have Opinions

If you want to know what attracts Muses, it is standing for something.
Rough edges make people tractable. Present. Alive.
Your Life is a Force; force others to recognize It.
Lean your shoulders into them.
Respect Yourself: do not only serve others;
you are part of the equation.
Become energy motivated by ideas.
Like moths to light Muses will swarm.
Come out swinging. Artists are not politicians.
We are Forces to which others react.
Become a vehicle for your own Spirit.
Believe in yourself. Have an opinion, make it known.
 

(That said…even ‘god’ spoke (metaphorically) to Elijah with a “still, small voice.” Boorish, crude, inflexible and uninformed opinions will make you even less attractive to Muses than the archenemies: untalented cowards who distract them, poseurs.)

Ironically the more you seek approval by being nice, polite, diplomatic — the tighter you clamp a lid down on energy which might actually draw Muses to you. Once you have domesticated your interests — there is little about you to attract anyone’s attention. If you do not want to offend, you will certainly have nothing to say.
 
Your pictures may be pretty — they may be profitable — but accolades will pass as the institutions supporting you move on.  And because your work is completely meaningless, spiritless, and without character, it will be forgotten. Nothing in your life will have lasting impact or importance.
 
Intellectual cowardice — domesticated art — kills Muses. They cannot tolerate it. For their sake, become a force of nature: speak up!  Strong orgasms do not occur without strong emotions; Muses exist in a realm of precognition, you cannot reason them into ecstasy. ( I like writing charming bright cheerful children’s stories to educate the next generation; they don’t need to know what an orgasm is — you do.)