Ninja Radio’s Hot Fossils No 177 – Nuit Blanche 2009

 

During Nuit Blanche this year the highlights for me were three sound events.  The first you’ll hear is Sound(e)scapecurated by Darren Copeland at New Adventures in Sound Art in Toronto’s Wychwood Barns Artscape venue.  The next is a segment from the storytelling event at the Barns. Finally I share an event called In Search of a Wife in Search of a Husband. First is the memoirs of the wife of the Crown Prince of Korea, and her “experiences before and after her father-in-law, King Yongjo, forced her husband, his 25 year old son, to climb into a rice chest.   The chest was then sealed and her husband died in the chest eight days later.”  Later, the letters between Hester Lynch Thrale and Dr. Samuel Johnson are read.  The exchange is from 16 days between June and July 1784.  Thrale communicates her in intent at 43 years old to remarry and Johnson reacts strongly to the threat of the end of their twenty year association.

Links:   http://www.angelusnovus.net/events.html, Hector Centeno, Andrew Stewart , Nuit Blanche Toronto 2009

Listen to it at this link:

• HotFRM 177 (31MB)

Hot Fossils 176 – 11,000 Things to be Miserable About

You know – if you aren’t laughing then you might as well be crying so laugh dammit laugh.

Special K and I head to downtown Toronto to star gaze during the Toronto International Film Festival.   We actually see Juliette Lewis, Marcia Gay Harden and Richard Kind.   But we have to wait a long time during which I muse about mango shakes at The Green Fusion. We then head over to an upscale nik-nak store called Teatro Verde where I read randomly from the books on display and check out the scary, spooky halloween stuff like eerie origami.   Finally we go to Starbucks and meet fake stars that people insist on taking pictures of.  Who are all the men in black suits?

Custom Motorcycle (Photo By Ninja)

Other famous people mentioned:  Jodie Foster, Laura Dern, Steve Lawrence, Donald Sutherland.  Other important links:  6 Billion Others Project, Eleven Thousand Things to be Miserable About.

Listen here at:

• HotFRM 176 – (33Mb)

(You can find other episodes of  my shows you will never listen to at http://www.ninja-radio.com/)

The Search for Comfort is Not the Same as the Search for God

Hellbound Alleee of Mondo Diablo fame gets it right on the nose.  There is no rhyme nor reason to the world and this life.  There doesn’t have to be.  But that is not the subject of this post.   I am responding to her episode number 195 of Mondo Diablo where a believer says that the number one question of non-believers is “Why is there evil if there is a god?”.  Of course it’s the number one question that non-believers asks because the answer, that normally involves how god gave us free will to test our faith, is incomprehensible. It simply does not answer the question.   This whole business of free will and its relationship to evil begs the question of god,  as Alleee points out in Mondo Diablo #195 :    “What, indeed, do we need god for if we have free will”, she asks.  What exactly would be the point?

The whole question of a free will and the fallen world is very foreign to all other non-christian religions because no other religion has this concept of original sin.   Why bother to create an Adam and Eve if they’re going to disappoint you and once they’ve disappointed you why not just destroy the world and all its sinners and start over?  Oh sorry.  Is that what is supposed to happen with the coming of the apocalypse and Armageddon?  One might argue that the ways of the superior being are not understandable to us.   Then why bother at all believing?  If his ways are not penetrable, then why should I waste one moment on it?  I’ll tell you why:  because there are only about 1.5 billion of us in the world who are self described non-believers in a god and the rest believe in one (or many), much to the  puzzlement of non-believers, who spend a considerable amount of time defending ourselves against this offense to our sensibilities called “belief in a god and all that it means.”

Alleee hits another one right on the sweet spot in that episode.  I have to say it again because I love it:  “The search for comfort is not the same as the search for god.”   These are indeed and importantly two very different things.  A god is a very terrible thing to believe in.  A “bubba meisis” as my mother would say, “an old wive’s tale”, a scary monster thing to tell your children to keep them in line.   And then we tell them that it’s ok to believe in the scary monster because they’ll be rewarded when they die by some other fabrication called heaven or resurrection or rebirth as a brahmin, or with virgins in an afterlife that they can rape with abandon.

On the other hand I would like very much to remind Alleee how she got here -  Her wonderful show Mondo Diablo, that I have been enjoying for 4 years wouldn’t even exist if it were not for someone’s belief in god.  How’s that for a slap in the face?

15 Books I’ve Read That You Don’t Care About

1. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
2. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
3. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Dune by Frank Herbert
6. Godel, Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
7. Remembrance of Time Past by Marcel Proust
8. Long Dark Teatime of the Soul by Douglas Adams
9. Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
10. Sexing the Cherry by Jeannette Winterson
11. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
12. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
13. Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
14. Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic
15. Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda

50 Things About Me That No One Will Ever Read

1. What time did you get up this morning
7:00am

2. How do you like your steak?
Medium Rare

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
Uchôten Hoteru

4. What is your favorite TV show?
30 Rock

5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
Japan

6. What did you have for breakfast?
Low Carb/High Protein Breakfast Bar and 250ml of soy milk

7. What is your favorite cuisine?
Japanese

8. What foods do you dislike?
Cooked carrots

9. Favorite Place to Eat?
Sushi Bar

10. Favorite dressing?
balsamic vinegar

11.What kind of vehicle do you drive?
mazda

12. What are your favorite clothes?
Loose Cotton Lounge Wear

13. Where would you visit if you had the chance?
New York

14. Cup 1/2 empty or 1/2 full
1/2 full

15. Where would you want to retire?
Gay Retirement Home

16. Favorite time of day?
Just Before Sunset

17. Where were you born?
Toronto

18. What is your favorite sport to watch?
Bronco Bucking

19. Who do you think will not tag you back?
I don’t know what this means.

20. Person you expect to tag you back first?
Blah I don’t know what this means.

21. Who are you most curious about their responses to this?
Any one who reads this and that will be about 0.

22. Bird watcher?
No.

23. Are you a morning person or a night person?
Night.

24. Pets?
No.

25. Any new and exciting news that you’d like to share?
Big Screen TV

26. What did you want to be when you were little?
Courier de Bois.

27. What is your best childhood memory?
My baby brother coming home from the hospital

28. Are you a cat or dog person?
Cat

29. Are you married?
Yes.

30. Always wear your seat belt?
Of Course.

31. Been in a car accident?
Yes.

32. Any pet peeves?
Mendacity

33. Favorite pizza topping?
Tomato Sauce

34. Favorite Flower?
Portulaca

35. Favorite ice cream?
Vanilla

36. Favorite fast food restaurant?
Wendy’s

37. How many times did you fail your driver’s test?
I lost count

38. From whom did you get your last email?
Some spammer

39. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card?
Any Computer Store

40. Do anything spontaneous lately?
No.

41. Like your job?
Yes.

42. Broccoli?
Yes.

43. What was your favorite vacation?
Japan

44. Last person you went out to dinner with?
Special K.

45. What are you listening to right now?
The wind.

46. What is your favorite color?
Green

47. How many tattoos do you have?
One temporary tattoo of a mummy that the neighbour’s daughter just gave me.

48.How many are you tagging for this quiz?
None

49. What time did you finish this quiz?
21:00.

50. Coffee Drinker?
Yes.

Famous Seduction Line

Love is messy by Sean Moroney

“…love don’t make things nice – it ruins everything…We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people… and die”  What Ronny said to Loretta in Moonstruck to get her into bed.  It worked.

Am I Just a Bag of Chemicals?

Well?  What if I am just a bag of chemicals?  I like to think I am something more.   Something more than water and empty space sloshing around inside an elastic container responding electrically to everything.  Suppose my consciousness and identity are just that.  Rapid electric firing of neurons that fool the body into believing it is more than the sum of its parts.   I open my mouth and sound comes out – so what you understand it.   You’re just the same kind of lifeless bag of sloshing chemicals that I am that gets the noise.

Yes I can buy it on a certain level that my so called awareness identity and very strong sense of self is just the chemicals telling me so.  Then I have about as much consciousness as Marvin the Robot and almost as depressed.

I'm So Depressed

Neuro-Bio Gems from Jonah Lehrer

I give Proust was a Neuroscientist an 8 out of 10 for its ability to provoke thought in me and allow me to contemplate on my own assumptions about creativity, genius and the mind/body split.    If I ask you to visualize someone who is creative and/or brilliant what sort of person do you think about?  Special K thinks of Leonardo Da Vinci.   I think of some young mathematician.  Often I think of some young person who burns out his or her flame brilliantly and quickly – like Rimbaud, Michael Jackson, or Boy George.  Athletes often fall into this category.  Their talents are external.  They are so obviously dependent on the ability of their bodies to perform according to a range of activity that is almost never available to our aging shells.

In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks writes about a forty-two year old man who after he was struck by lightening, becomes a musical prodigy.  Sacks loves to write about people who, at various points in their lives, because of neurological changes, develop talents previously unknown to them.  In Proust was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer instead focuses on established artists who reveal neuroscience through their art.  He explores where the body ends and mind begins and vice versa.  He asks what it means to be aware and conscious as human beings.   Personally, I tend to think that we are just a random collection of protein.  And that there is no distinction between the mind and the body.  My mind is in my toes and heart as much as it is in my brain. My brain is simply where the electronics gather to interpret.    About our experience inside ourselves, Virgina Woolf said: “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself “.   And in reponse to this process, Leher is comfortable asserting that “…only the artist [is] able to describe reality as it [is] actually experienced”. Here are some of the other ways that Lehrer describes that same experience:

…the mind is not a place: it’s a process.

The self is simply…the story we tell ourselves about our experiences.

Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind.

When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is its stage.

Marcel Proust

Not That It Matters to Anyone But Me

Hol-ee.   3 Months. No posts.  Sorry folks.  Is all in my head actually. A running torrent of blog posts in my mind (or is that mind/body) that never make it to a blog that no one is reading.   I just finished reading Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Leher. If you are an artist, it is a must read.  If you are a writer, it is a must read.  Later this week I will provide some of my favourite quotes from Jonah Lehrer and his book.  Stay turned.

Nobitics and Mark Bernstein

I am at Podcamp Boston this weekend and at a sermon by Mark Berstein on Nobitics. Nobitics is the art of writing for yourself (ahem) or for a small group of friends or family.  Ok and he made up the word from the latin nobis a form of the pronoun us.  It’s meant to refer to intimacy.  He calls this particular blog of mine nobitic.  He refers to me as a self-described “ninja queercaster” who he thought didn’t or perhaps wouldn’t share her name. Well that would be because I am Ninja.  I think he missed that point.  I not just a ninja – my name is Ninja.