Why Blog?

I never used to blog much.. blog what? blog why?

I dunno why I do. I think most of these entries come out of a initial reaction to my course.. and I’m still going. I used to think it crazy people would actually subscribe to something like post modernism.. but I realize people do now. I never wanted to go university and was tempted to drop out at the end of the year and go into music or working someplace away like the Merchant Navy. I’m just.. well I don’t like the rituals of society I’m immersed in. When I was away in places like Peru and India it was the fulfillment of things I never knew I wanted. I came back and felt cheated I think, to be honest. I didn’t like the drinking.. but honestly its where I used to be. I would of left… I wouldn’t want to change course but you know.. on a limb I signed up with the Christian Union. Two years of religious studies and some amazing teachers in my A-levels had opened doors. Now I’m on the committee.. I dunno but you can’t help but I think it wasn’t a accident.. it’s the one thing which would of held me here. I like people, I find relationships messy though.. I’d never want to be in a place where I couldn’t just go off and get lost someplace random on the planet.

I still dunno why I put these out there.. you throw these things out and occasionally something or someone throws something back to you. It isn’t me though.. I read my own posts sometimes and I’m like.. what?! It makes me realize that I am a social being.. its with other people I’m known. Some of the stuff I say here might twig but its likely who your reading isn’t me.. I don’t subscribe to the ever changing pluralist sense of identity which a lot of people in the web fostered. I’m sure a lot of people out there don’t either though. Its funny it’s like when you listen to yourself speak on a recording.. I used to have that same reaction then.. but at least its easier to find whats consistent.. online.. theres no identity.. no-one and some could say everyone. How does that affect us though? I dunno.. I could guess.. but I dunno. I know off line though.. I’m me whether I like or not.. and I love that. I am who I am, I make the best of what I can, thats not a great deal though without God. My humanity reminds me of that. You go so far, God shows you that much more and you got to ask yourself whether your prepared for that. I find prayer important for that, with faith God provides.

I dunno the point of this post though.. does there need to be one?

Manifesto

Got a add request on MySpace few days ago from this guy called Benjamin Blower. He’s a Christian it turns out and this was something he’d written.. it seemed pretty bang on too and it seemed posting this to the blog seemed a pretty apparent thing to do. He’s a solo musician from Birmingham who stacked Yahweh next to Nietzsche on his influences and his music is something else.. so.. well yeah heres the link to his page .

 

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=113549026

 

MANIFESTO

Babylon is dead.

We divorced ourselves from God & became gods ourselves . . .
Our culture has divorced itself from God. We are told that we have out-grown Him. We are told that we would be happier without Him.
We have arrived at a time and a place where to talk about God is a curse. It’s weird and socially reprehensible. On the other hand, to use God’s name as a curse is as natural to us as breathing.
We divorced God in a flurry of ideas and dreams, and now we have made ourselves the centre of all things.
Our parents used to tell us “the world doesn’t revolve around you…” Then we grew up and Foucault, Usher and Ikea told us that, actually the world does revolve around us. The world revolves around me – what I think, what I want, what I choose. Was Galileo wrong?

We rejected God’s morality, so that we could build our own moralities that suited us.
We rejected God’s authority, so that we would be answerable to none but ourselves.
We rejected God’s paternity and love, so that we could be free of the responsibility to love Him back.
We divorced ourselves from God and became gods ourselves . . .

We erased our value and identity . . .
We divorced ourselves from God and became gods ourselves.
It’s survival of the fittest. It’s every man for himself. Let the weak fall by the wayside, because we are now only worth as much as we are rich, or beautiful, or useful. We no longer have any innate value or identity.
We used to be equals. We all came from the same intelligence; from the same love.
Then we left God and became disconnected from each other – relative to one another. There is no basis for equality here. We left God and there are no absolute morals. Morality is relative, and so there is no basis for basic human rights (or wrongs, or right and wrong). We have no particular value. We are the illegitimate children of nothing, with nothing to do but try to prove our worth . . .

We became slaves to each other and to badness . .
(Macrocosm)
We became gods, and so we please ourselves. Selfishness has become the foundation of our society. We reassure each other; “You have to look out for number One…” “Follow your heart…” “Be true to yourself…”
It’s weird then, that we all live like slaves, doing whatever we are told to do, wanting whatever we’re told to want, chasing whatever we’re told to chase . .
What are we chasing?
“Religion is the opium of the people” says Marx, and ours is a religious society. Idols are set up everywhere we go: on every page, on every channel, on every street, in every shop, in every home, and ultimately in every heart. TV, pay rise, alcohol, new car, Friday night, younger flesh, weed, porn, bigger breasts, clearer skin, property ladder, 50% extra free, and so on. Here in the middle of a million idols and anaesthetics we have become pacified and completely apathetic. You could take every bit of dignity and reason from us and we wouldn’t even notice, because we are too busy chasing the desires that other people hang in front of us.
Why are we chasing these things?
In a society where self-centredness is the ultimate principle, those who can gain from others’ loss, will do so. It’s a game… it’s monopoly… it’s the economy… its illegitimate gods fighting for significance.
So drink more and think less – it’s good for the economy.
Retain the body of a sixteen year old girl at all costs – it’s good for the economy.
Spend yourself into the red with credit cards – good for the economy. Sue somebody because you fell off your ladder – good for the economy.
We chase these things because we’re told to. We are slaves – Chasing fallacies, so that those who can will make money. We do whatever we’re told, and somehow we still believe that we’re the masters of our own lives.

(Microcosm)
Society based on selfishness naturally leads to the enslavement of the many by the few. Worse than this though, the pattern is carried out on every level. There is no ‘us and them’ here. We each enslave one another.
We became gods. Every man for himself. We’re not givers, we’re takers. We’re not lovers, we’re consumers.
Sex is like food to us – pure sensory pleasure, divorced from all human relational significance.
People are like disposable cameras to us – we take nice memories and we throw away the carcass.
We use each other to prove our worth – our desirability as a product, or our prowess as a consumer – because, since we divorced ourselves from God we have no innate worth.
And we use each other for our own enjoyment, like we would any other product, because since we divorced ourselves from God other people have no innate worth either.
Love has become consumerism. Human beings are a commodity for social, emotional and physical satisfaction. Sometimes we are the consumer, and sometimes the product. Sometimes the slave, sometimes the master. And generally we are both at once.
We say we define our own relational moralities, but then we all end up doing the same thing anyway. Sexual roles have been defined by the media in the interest of the economy, and power, and the selfish desires of people. We are told what to do and we passively decide to obey. Yet, we still believe that we are masters of our own existence.

Jesus did something else . . .
We divorced ourselves from God and became selfish. But all the while God has shown us selfless love. Jesus is the opposite of selfishness. All wrong is rooted in simple selfishness, but God squashed it with the opposite – selflessness. While we live as though we were gods that will never die, God has shown Himself as a human, and died. For us.
When all is done, the selfishness that crushes us will not survive.

Decision, or default.

God, or self.

God, or Babylon.

God is alive.

Babylon is dead.

“A wise man attacks the city of the mighty and pulls down the stronghold in which they trust” – Proverbs 21:22

Counter-culture for the masses.

Well I had a bit of free time this weekend and it was my Dad’s birthday so I snuck back upto London this weekend. Its good to see my family and just have a change in environment occasionally. My Uni bedroom window view is a white van.. back home it’s a woods. The whole area, and everyone in it seem familier like old shoes.. the ones you’ve worn for a long time.. the ones you never throw away.

But yeah, I get some time to just chill as well. I dunno why I think like I do with this stuff but it seemed something to blog about.. to be honest its probably because I’d forget about it by the time I go home though. When I was younger I always fancied myself as alternative.. when I was younger I listened to a lot of metal.. I got older in turned into punk… I got older still and it turned into reggae and folk.. I dunno how but I never got into much of the club scenes which were so popular around where I grew up (anyone heard of Hammersmith Palais?). I think about it now and I realise I fancied this.. along with my ’select’ group of friends as a fact that it was a genuine appreciate of good music.. or thats what I thought whilst everyone else got caught up in the mainstreams hypnotic consumer siren songs.

I chose bournemouth uni because I wanted to surf, skate, enjoy sun, sand and I already knew a few people down there.. my dad worked on computers and I knew photoshop so.. thats how I ended up on my course. Perhaps that was alternative but I found it strange that whilst clubbing was so popular amongst students at uni.. a fair share of people were into this so styled alternative scene. Did bournemouth just attract people like me? Or was it just slightly more popular to be that sort of person in bournemouth? I found me and my friends counter to club culture but I soon realised how many other students had similiar tastes in music or hobbies as me even if they did club too. It was a bit of streach but it wasn’t hard to notice that this counter culture wasn’t counter.. it was our culture. No sorry.. ‘is’ our culture.

I’m not sure who said it but theres a saying that ‘the conservatives of today are the revolutionaries of tomorrow’.. or maybe it was the other way round, either way.. same difference. I love the film ‘lords of dogtown’ set in the early seventies it shows the early years of some skate legends but it also shows the effect of how this fringe group so quickly became mainstream. The counter culture wasn’t started as a rejection of culture.. it was invented by big business to further consumerism. I fancied myself pretty left wing once but now I’m not so sure, people like Naomi Klein (author of ‘No Logo’) are partly the cause of this.. encouraging the rejection of big brands (ie; Nike) in favour of stuff (I’m guilty of this) like No Sweat clothing .. that isn’t justice.. its just capatalism.. and just like its fashionable to be green it starts out as a niche of thosea little more ‘aware’ than everyone else.. but as more people get aware the status of the niche group is devalued.. if you ever read ‘No Logo’ Naomi Klein talks about her Toronto warehouse… house type thing in the same way when ‘yuppies’ move into her area.

Hippies stuck it to the man by striving to raise their own awareness.. mostly through drugs. This probably has something to do with post-modernism and the insistence that if we unlearn all our socialised values (if we look at how table manners evolved from the middle ages we realise how laiden with ‘norms’ we really are.. even as children) we will somehow be free.. and change the system.. this could be encouraging or cheering on crazy people (‘who are actually put in prisons called hospitals by the repressive state.. obviously’) or more obviously.. stupid amounts of drugs.. if the whole world is on dope and this somehow subverts its thinking then we’re changing the world ‘man’. But nothing really happened.. Punks rejected hippies but as soon you could purchase the counter culture in mecca’s like camden market or even some trendy shops Goths.. metalheads.. grungers.. emos or whatever.. a evolution. Rap you could say came from the same vein too.

Anyone fancy watching Jackass? Johnny Knoxville comes from the skate culture and the series/films (as well dirty sanchez) promote the kind of ‘rebellion’ typical of the counterculture. The behaviour disruptive of social norms. The Movie.. made with the help of (shock, horror!) Mtv also reaped in massive profits.. I mean.. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen it! Apart from me.. but perhaps my religious convictions have something to do with that. I guess Borat has something in that too.. very politically incorrect.. so was Ali G really ’showing things as they really are’ an all that..

Some people argue that the counterculture simply gets Hijacked by the mainstream.. or ‘The Man’ and turned around for the aims of capatalism.. but I don’t see how thats possible.. capatalism encourages compeitition so the counter culture is a nature progression.. and the mecca for any eternal ‘revolutionary’ is find a counter culture.. so counter that it’d never be hijacked.. because its too crazy. I remember back in our.. Audiences project? We worked on non-linear narratives and the star.. a female songwriter.. who couldn’t sing or play to save her life and her escapades. In one narration her father mentions.. ‘perhaps the world wasn’t ready for it.. it was too raw.. something I’d call post-music’. Its something the revolutionary is searching for.. the fact is.. it was bad music but some people I could imagine if and when such situations do take place that people do take this on.. some music I know Sufjan Stevens does is nothing but white noise (but I quite some of ‘other’ stuff he does I got to be honest).. but some people love it’s ‘alternative’ nature.

The Avant-Garde comes in here.. a means of unravelling the social conditions and symbols in which we encode our every day lives.. it goes back to hippie culture the whole ‘yay for insanity.. yay for dope’. The only difference is.. in the 60’s (I can’t say for sure.. not being alive then and all) it was a means of discovery… but now… well its generally the norm you don’t intend to discover anything.. but simply because its fun, a little crazy and supposedly involves a good time. Wether its productive for change? Thats another issue but its debatable wether thats the concern of most drug users. Another example is UFO’s or Ghosts.. most people consider it historically on the fringe but its been so far out for so long that people are increasing getting kicks out of that sort of thing.. most of the time purely because if anyone refutes it and refuses to engage people say thats just close minded and people are scared of ‘the truth’ the X-files probably summed that up pretty nicely. If the aim is a sell.. it’s not hard.

Buying nothing.. or buying alternative won’t change anything.. earning nothing would thats for sure.. but I could be wrong.. I’m just musing. The quest for crazy and actual reality via ultimately nihilistic subjectivism though has yet to yield anything in the terms of revolution wether it comes from post-modernity, the beatles or hippies in general. I guess I’ve always felt this way, post-modernity struck me as the result of a overtly decadent society.. I would probably say hedonistic now but.. yeah more variations on a theme. I’m just continually surprised by the fact that so many people take it seriously in the arts and media field.. but its a learning experiance we’re all effected by it.