1) 4/20/20 My World
I’m tired of this shit. I’ve been stuck in my house for God knows how long. I’m not cut out for quarantine. The distractions of the four square meters of space in which I spend most of my time are friggen’ killing me.
I think I consistently spend about an hour a day fondling a slinky. Its an old slinky. Maybe thirteen years of age. It has seen quite a bit. Its metal coils; no longer the silver, bright, reflective shine that it used to have, but now a tarnished patina. It has two loose gaps within the coil that give it a segmented look. I remember I received that thing for Christmas. I remember that my Hungarian aunt (not related by blood) and I stretched it the length of my front stair case. That distance is maybe twenty feet. After that, I feel bad for It. I fondle it for hours on end: sometimes when I am occupied doing productive activities, and sometimes not.
Several weeks ago my brother and I shot a short-film for shits and giggles. It turned out quite well. It seems that most people found it quaint and amusing. All this in mind, my brother shot it on his iPhone, which takes plenty of quality stabilized hand held shots. However — and here is the thing — one of my camera lenses, I just found out, has a stabilizer in it, and it take really nice hand-held video. And I never knew.
I think my desk looks cluttered. However, let us be honest. My desk looks like a fallout stricken city a year after the bombs fell. At the base level of the clutter lies a series of old school book from seventh grade that I still have returned, and some of which I assume to be quite expensive. Above that, there is a secondary layer over various radon papers, CDs, novels I haven’t read, and magazine pages. Above this layer lies the decorative layer of camera and recording equipment, floral drink coasters and bumper stickers for every outdoor, and guitar brand imaginable draped around. As a center piece to this cacophony of chaos lies my iMac that takes two literal minutes to load the opening page of the various browsers that I tend to use. Its all pretty bad. As a whole, I think my house is very beautiful, but the places that I inhabit end up looking quite awful.
I’m not sure. I just get distracted by everything.
2) 4/30/20 Cleaning Up
In times like these, life will be chaotic. There does not seem to be a point in doing many of the tasks that would typically be necessary to function in a world that is not being suppressed by a pandemic. There is no real goal to work toward. Nobody can see any of their friends. Relationships are souring. And there is not much to do about it. There is a systemic lack of personal agency amongst locked up people around the world. How do I expect to curb my lack of personal agency? I am going to start by cleaning up my desk.
I ‘m going to try to get rid of most of the shit that, over the years, has gradually found its way to my desktop. There is a lot on here. I am guessing that the wait of everything on here probably weighs in the several-dozen-pound range. The things range from books that are effectively stollen to an assortment of knick-knack games and old stacks of papers that have not been looked at in many years. It is all very rough.
*Some moments later.
It definitely looks better. There is a lot of space. I am making up for the many years of being so close to my computer, due books and trash being behind it, by having a full meter between the computer and the edge of the desk. Its so spacious. It feels like a I actually have room to think now.
This is my first expedition in to the philosophical mountain range that is minimalism. There is a well done documentary about minimalism feature the de facto founders of the modern minimalist movement, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. Its a pretty good documentary. I think it does a good job at capturing the whole point of the movement. But never minding all that, their main thesis is that basing you life’s satisfaction on material objects is not sustainable. Now I do not know if just cleaning up is going to make me happy, but I don’t think that their point is that a lack of material objects is what will make you happy. If that was the case, demographics that are materially lacking would be the happiest, but they tend to have the highest rates of depression. So I think their point is more specifically that happiness is not attached to material objects.
I can be a bit of a hoarder. Discipline is a big problem for me; or maybe a lack thereof. I think lack of discipline feels my gradual accumulation of a myriad of different objects, which then plays into my amazing ability to distract myself with my surroundings. This hoarding is a symptom of the larger problem of discipline. And if we are talking about an apparent lack of agency, I feel that the solution for me is to give myself a the start of a disciplined structure to follow. Now, I am fully aware of my limitations. If I give myself to much of a structure, I will be overwhelmed, intimidated and I will push back. So I’lll just start by cleaning my desk.
3) 5/4/20 Ego and Creativity
There is a video essay by a youtuber, Accented Cinema, that discussed the 2010 shoestring budget, Ugandan, film, Who Killed Captain Alex, by Nabwana I.G.G. The video essay talks about how the film’s cinematography, production design, video and editing quality, acting and especially the film’s special effects are terrible, yet how the film still accomplishes to be very good. So the movie looks terribly, but the narrative holds up. The film emotes very well. The film is endearing. Accented Cinema brings up the fact the films director, Nabwana, seems to a genuinely decent person, and that he made this film purely as a passion project. He brings up examples of truly horrid movies like The Room or Pure Hearts: Into Chinese Showbiz which are effectively vanity projects by there creators. His thesis is that the easiest way to make a good film (and story) is to be a genuinely good person.
I recently listened to an episode of the podcast, The Portal by Eric Weinstein. This episode consisted of an interview with one of my favorite filmmakers, Werner Herzog. This guys has a pretty large ego. In one instance, Herzog brags of the his acting in the film Jack Reacher, and proclaimed that his acting was probably better that Tom Cruise’s acting. On a different occasion, the host recounted an instance where Herzog says to a large angry booing audience, “you are all wrong,” and compared his work to Dante’s Inferno and the work of Hermosa Bosch. So this guy’s ego is pretty large. Yet he can produce some of my favorite documentaries ever made.
I am not to the point where I can understand how someone can reconcile one’s large ego while in the creative process. An concept that Accented Cinema brings up is that of ‘write what you know.’ But when one’s ego obstructs the creative process to the point where they can only write about oneself, how do you prevent creative stagnation?
One of Herzog’s favorite points of advice is to read lots of books. I think he would say that this will give you an intellectual edge on your competitors and colleagues. However I think that reading stories that speak to the human condition gives one perspective in the world. So, like I said, I do not fully understand how to be a decent person in order to be creative, but I think maybe perspective is necessary. I think thats is what Nabwana has in spades.
4) 5/6/20 The Rise and Fall of New Atheism: How I Became Politically Aware
These times of boredom, stress, and development remind me of a similar time in my life. I was a bastard when I was thirteen. A really stereotypical over overconfident, idealistic, under-socialized, internet asshole of a thirteen year old. At that time I was a doing my schooling online, from home or on the road. I had hours upon hours of time where I would browse youtube looking at any video I found interesting. Politically and spiritually I was quite naive. There were only two things that I was sure about: I was an atheist, and I was not a conservative. Both of these things I had figured out for my self. This was all during the time of the Obama Presidency, and he was surely a good guy, so I was a liberal. Buy the time I was in fourth grade I was pretty well sure that god did not exist. At the time, the group that interested me new atheism.
New atheism was a group that was founded in the early to mid 2000s when four authors (the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, journalist Christopher Hitchens, philosopher Daniel Dannett, and psychologist Sam Harris) published books questioning the necessity and factuality of religion in the modern day and in a post 9/11 society with increasing religious fundamentalism. This group was “The Four Horsemen”. Along with the anti-islamic activist and Somalian émigré, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (plus one Horse-woman), this group spearheaded the movement. However soon it would grow.
Now, clearly this movement was unabashedly divisive. Obviously, most religious people frowned upon the movement. The movement was more specifically aimed at evangelical groups and fundamentalist, and how they influence politics. It drew copious amounts of flack from Muslims and islamic fundamentalists. In fact, one of Hirsi Ali’s friends and collaborators was murdered after their short film Submission, depicting the oppression of an islamic fundamentalist Somalian society, was released. Much of their rhetoric, which seemed brash and potentially hateful towards some groups, and often vaguely ahistorical, tarnished their reputation academics. However, this exterior push back is not what would doom the movement.
By the time I had begun looking into the movement, a bulk of its members were involved through various popular youtube channel. This was my introduction to more complex political thought: through a bunch of ass hole ideologs that would post videos of critiques on absurd religious ideologs, and make fairly rational refutes of these religious arguments. Youtubers like Shoe0nHead and Armored Skeptic, The Atheist Voice, Thunder foot, JaclynGlenn, the provocative Atheism-Is-Unstoppable, Sargon of Akkad, and of coarse The Amazing Atheist were the voices I listen to for political commentary when I was thirteen. These people are glorified youtube trolls that have a sprinkling of intellectuality to them. At the time it was very entertaining stuff. Definitely a bit toxic, though. I ate it up.
But, I think if the atheist youtubers had a laugh over religious fundamentalists, they hated the SJWs. After the Horsemen [-woman] gained traction and the movement began to grow, the first cracks be gan to form. Feminists, under the 3rd wave variety, were inducted in to movement for all of the best reasons. However, when these feminists started to speak up about alleged sexual misconduct at New Atheist conventions, the movement split. Each of those youtubers slowed down the production on their religion focused videos, and started making videos about the SJWs. People like Steve Shives, Rebecca Watson, Anita Sarkeesian and Laci Green became the boogymen of youtube. The discourse around the community turned from being optimistic to downright toxic. The left wing end of the movement called into question the stance of opposing islam and portrayed it as racist. I do not think that these progressive feminists were in the right, or even unjustly vilified. Its just that the discourse shifted to be primarily about third wave feminism. I believe this is what truly killed the movement.
I saw all of this, but I was definitely a confused gullible person. I would be watching stuff like that but then also watch content buy right wing voices (some admittedly a little to far right), and then also farther left wing people like The Young Turks. I watched all of this stuff in the name of consuming diverse content. I was all over the place. I was so muddled and confused that I really only understood how different each different voice was when they started talking shit on each other.
As a whole, the New Atheism movement I believe had good intentions, but was far to willing to venture into problematic conversations. The movement then faced exterior push back. Then once cracks in the movement started to form, it immediately fell into infighting. Ideological demagogues perpetuated this inner feud for popularity, making New Atheism that much more divisive. Under the weight of the internal and external pressure, the movement loss traction. All the while, the talking heads of the movement gave into rhetorical excess. People got tired of it. I got tired of it. Youtubers that were getting millions of views per upload now rarely get views above fifty thousand. The movement lost its base of support. However I do think it did help to normalize the idea of people being non-religious. I think it might have succeeded in that regard.
How I attained my political and religious views and who I attained them from might be ugly and my readers may find this offensive (hell, I find most of the youtubers I mentioned abhorrent assholes today), but I believe the long chain of events a sociopolitical tides that brought me to where I am today made me into a healthy, skeptical member of society. How I attains those was definitely chaotic, though.
5) 5/8/20 Embrace of the Serpent
Quarantine’s been doing weird stuff to me. Well over half of the movies I am watching these days are non-english language films. This is atypical. Normally I would be watching english language films from a plethora of different genres. I have also found that I am consuming more and more surreal content. From podcasts about psychedelics to Korean zombie movies. I’m watching some weird stuff … by my standards. One hidden gem that I found is a 2015 Colombian film called Embrace of the Serpent.
The film is weird, interesting, and pretty good. It is about explorers in the Amazon rainforest trying fix their physical and metaphysical deficiencies. It is very surreal. It uses the transformative effect of the jungle to show how some will go mad and how some will be healed. It incorporates the use of psychedelic drugs into the plot. It also happens to be a black and white film with pretty great cinematography set in a remote part of the world and is in languages that I have never heard in my life, so that also adds to the apparent surrealism of the film. The story structure is very odd. There are two timelines. Each narrative timeline has a very loose plot. Both storylines play out like a series of vignettes with a central driving conflict stringing the story together. Events and places in the earlier storyline play an effect on the later storyline. The story is definitely not conventional, but it all plays into itself in a very satisfying way.
My viewing experience with this film was odd. When I started this film, I felt fairly detached, and I stayed that way throughout most of the film. However, in the last half hour, the film really started to both lure me in and confuse me. The film becomes very cryptic. It discusses things like the river having more than two sides and how the reality that we perceive is just a dream that we follow. At my first viewing, I could not understand it. Only once I let these scenes marinate and continued to watch them after them after I had finished the movie, I understood the meaning of these discussions and How they play Into the rest of the film. It took me time to understand what the film had to say.
Recently, I have been watching out-of-the-way movies like this one. I think its has been to challenge myself in our boring world. This film took me a lot of time to get it. And I think I have been spending a lot of my time trying to think about the odd content I consume in this way. I don’t know.
6) 5/8/20 Concluding All of This
I think I did a good job on this assignment. I think that each of these little pieces of writing that I did collectively can describe and give a sense of what my quarantine experience has been like. I was trying to document my inner musings as my mind wanders in boredom. However, I was also just trying to have some fun writing.
In My World my, was attempting to show the chaotic, neurotic, scrambled thought process that often takes hold of me. In Cleaning Up I wanted to talk about and act on some of my insecurities over how disorganized I can be. This blurb is definitely piggy-backing off of the topic of the last essay. In the Ego and Creativity I talked about a subject I think a lot about. That being how to foster creativity. I think about that one a lot. In The Rise and Fall of New Atheism: How I Became Politically Aware, I was reflecting, reminiscing and reevaluating parts of past events. I really what to develop this one into a more comprehensive essay. It is hard to find good coverage on this topic, especially from somebody with the perspective of a thirteen year old at the time. Embrace of the Serpent was about the content I consume to pass the time, and how I consume it. Then in this entry, I reflect upon the work I have done. Thats what all of the essays were supposed to be about, although I think I might have gone a bit off rails in some of them.
Yeah writing this was a pretty fun assignment. It gave me an opportunity to write about very random things and in a nonconventional format and structure. It was interesting to play around with the non formal introductions and writings that would not proceed towards any specific point. I do not think that many of my essays in this assignment would actually fit under the definition of a formal body essay for that reason. I think it was a good exercise for general writing and I might keep doing stuff like this. That is a might.
I also tried to play around with language. I would try working between a formal style, a very neutral style, and then pretty much how I would speak in my day-to-day life. I think this mixed style of language is where I work best in.
But yeah, I did enjoy this assignment.
Creative Minds 