the news holds no truth

nobel peace prize
bed sheet bonanza
everything is on sale
sex and ideas too
ideas are sex
I fucking hate school
rotting my brain
I want to be a cloud
not an organ
If I only had keys...
typewriter static
like various werewolf songs
hoisted up on pulleys
to the sorry moon
Never mind the shivers
at the climax of a thought
that ties a tune
at the end of a line
Belly up on the edge
of a shadow's stoop.
Tune Cartoon Moon
Boo Hoo

Christmas Clean Room and LaLa Lamps

Beads of circus makeup
trial bouyant philosophy
tip corners honest candyman
buildings balloon animals
rock concert.
Zombies with tongues
full of pulp and whips
gregarious turnpike
on the interstellar highway carousel
Make way for the ring leader
and the mignons on drugs
of their anscestors
tear tickets
for Grandpa and the tikes.
Christmas presents
Baluga whales
swollen fins wading
worthiest pantheon
barbershop wedding cake
tye dye socks
for your striped Santas
nonsensical syllables
streaming raspberries
blueberries
tea and cookie
big big plasma TV
merry coca cola machine
in times square magatron
sitting high in little mexico
americana blues bar
for burritos and horchada.
Getting fatter for Christmas
in honor of a Saint
who's dead in our hearts
and stark dogshead
on Aluminum billboard.
The sun hides under
subzero roof mask
car alarm wet wipes
clear the window
shake the snowglobe
release the penguin fleet
On the eve
playwright's magic
of everyworld's universe
This is America
I swear to Christ

steak taco note-to-self the night of freedom's laughing rejoices pull your shit together matthew

She said

What I meant

For are there patterns

Man makes for himself

That woman reacts

To bring in

The spring

In our steps

The taps on our ceilings

The masks of our ancestors

And the gongs

In our halls?

When midnight

Chimes like a ghostface

Sings to the mirror,

Watching mud

That won't reflect

What's done

Left done

And all return.

We come forward

To share the song

of Freedom

If only

We Pay

Attention. 

loop'in-between texts

SENT
To: Matthew McKinney

ROLL ROLL ROLL prog folk dance electronics grunge metal drone stoner jazz psychedelic noise toys classic ROCK ROCK ROCK

thinkin of the fam

add tropicalia and cavemen and we are good to go. WE ARE GOOD TO GO. haha math sux im drawing triangles tho so sweet.

Sent:
Tue, Sep 16 1:59pm
Delivered:
Tue, Sep 16, 2:21pm

INBOX
From: Matthew McKinney

nuclear fusion. the subsistent patterns of its people, the language. as a chaos erupted in the east over symbolism, remaining text percolated in the west as an object to fulfill collective understanding of symbolism. bred toward consumption of information, we forget that our food connects us with the mother goddess. gods stop speaking to us so we find our gods elsewhere. in language which is everything, the universe is the brain. the earth is the language! reality is the language we experience and create to each our own and collectively. crater mountainscapes of daily interaction and idolatrous nuance. the information from the brain in projected into all parts of its language. west built a belief system unconsciously to cultivate into the mystery of that language. we separate language as an object outside ourselves to infer the nature of our life force.

A time is approaching.

Tue, Sep 16 2:59pm

SENT
To: Matthew McKinney

we're only human and we are all language. i know what i mean and pray to god that u do too. the symbol is the world but the story is now a story of the cosmos. we are back to reality oops there goes gravity, to quote marshall mathers. haha. i miss u matthew

Sent time:
Tue, Sep 16, 3:09pm

INBOX
From: Matthew McKinney

I miss u too. im gonna try to send u new mp3s over the internet. i have to bounce tape@ cuple hours@

Tue, Sep 16 3:26pm

------------> now im writing to you. in trying to grasp onto the unconscious, in a desperate attempt to understand it, the conscious becomes even more embedded into the dry earth, unable to breathe. the conscious mind is trapped. to cultivate and reap water and air, we must not create a universal mystery but thrive in what the mystery tells us each individually, and the collective will grow together as semi-autonomous entities sharing and creating, and growing through each other's language. the language will grow. the language is the symbol that is alive - pulsating inside of each object, waiting to be discovered. see you soon, always, Tralalafunnybaby ------------------------------------------------------------------------>

The War of Now

Dear Felicia,
The hyper-real. The Present Moment. What else is there right? If only it were that easy.
What’s gone is gone has been once was.
I’m longing for the present moment.
Where have I wandered? From what? Where to?
What’s seen and felt is here and now.
For what’s seen is contingent on the collapse of a potential future, for another believed to take place sometime at the end of the temporal Now?
There were no other options. How it happens is how it was always supposed to happen. I am dealt no other cards. If only. If Only wrought struggling into ambiguous form. Does this read like rambling? I’m simply rambling. What is now was somehow then of a particular glimpse of the future. The present moment is nonsense. If I’m making sense, I’m not here and now. But I don’t know things, nor do I pretend to know things, but if you perceive my attempts at making some sort of sense, then I come more into the present moment for you.
Time is relative, as is seeing and feeling. Where do we begin, where do we end? There is no beginning, all moves to, from, and through all. And although this reads like a declaration, I’m simply rambling.
In dreams, we are kings and queens of all time, hero’s to our evil villains, and villains to our evil heroes. Save me. Save me. There was no end. It all began where we determined to end by the laws of a past I made sense of in a present moment long ago. I saw the dream and inside was an outline, to underline, to make notes with a red pen when the ovens got hot. The bird I’ve been baking is almost cooked, and I’ve set the timer by the code of an annual catalogue. Sticky crust, gravy, peas, and carrots never change. Three hours, 425 degrees. The layout, more efficient, another adjustment, aesthetic precision, different smells somehow we’ve changed. Wrapped in tin foil when the bird got cold. Leftovers in a different time and a different place. Same old bread meat and vegetables. Set this moment in the microwave, even if the chicken gets soggy. I don’t feel like waiting right now.
In another world chickens wore armor and carried axes. The peas were frozen and took longer to cook. The kitchen hands were in a hurry, couldn’t wait for the peas to defrost, sent them into battle before they could prepare. Stodgy critics sat with napkins in laps, suspiciously savoring first bites with a squint, in wry contemplation of something that didn’t seem quite right. There’s something strange about these peas, set the critics with salad forks dismembering the potpie. Perpetual frustration with consecutive bites makes the critic like an ornery toddler, discarding the fork, succumbing to fingering the meal of all frozen peas, which gather in a pile on a bread plate and are flung ruthlessly at the manager. The kitchen hands go home to melancholy apartments. The manager rewords his catalogue, making red crosses over names of patrons and employees. This ends here, he says, and retires to sleep in a dug out furnace on the coils of his mattress.
We talk of real things, because we’re making sense of a war. We’re at war in the end. The war was making sense, but we didn’t know. The war was knowing how to know, and that was never known, of all the other things that we know. I don’t know things, nor do I pretend to know things, I’m simply rambling.
Perhaps all of time is the end, in the end. Because if time was always beginning, we’d have no need for an end. But if time is the end, then we’d need a beginning to justify the direction we’re moving. But words are an end in themselves, and there was no end before there was the word for the end. Maybe that was the beginning of the end. When the call for the pie was flying across the room, splattered the kitchen-hands face and produced guttural curses that resounded around the dining table. And the critics laughed after it was all over, and they could fall asleep standing drunk at the bar and wait for a new beginning, to which they’d attach the same end, from the outset, where it all ended. And the words never mattered. The end existed without words, because the end came before the beginning. It was simply happening before it began. The bread, meat vegetables and gravy can’t realize it has begun until its already begun happening, until it has already ended. But there was no end and no beginning falling asleep standing up drunk at the bar, because falling asleep had not begun until it had already ended, and by then it was all over.
In dreams we’re asleep, but I don’t usually remember my dreams too well, until after they’ve ended, and then I’m not as likely to remember what I was seeing and feeling when it was happening, because I wasn’t aware it had begun. I was a king and a queen, I was a hero and a villain, but I wouldn’t make sense then, only after it had ended. Then it would all seem so clear. And why I didn’t know then when it was happening what I know now after it has ended, that is the dilemma. It never even started, so how could I know? I’d been trying to make sense, and then it ended, and it all made sense. It all makes sense now that it has ended, because I’m aware of the beginning. Now it makes sense now. But am I here Now, now that I have the beginning and the end. Now I can re-access my catalogue with a red pen. Now I can take the bird out of the oven. Now, I can be awake and realize it was all just a dream.In the beginning, it was just happening because I wasn’t aware of the beginning. Now that I have an end, I have a beginning. But what did I do with now. I’ve made brackets. <> There it was, but now is before. Now is before the word. Before I call this now. Because by the time I can say now, I’ve established the beginning because I’ve reached the end. There was no present moment. There was only Now, which is not the present moment, because I must analyze a word. A word is an end in itself but words never mattered, until Now. Now that I have gotten to the end, I’ll tell you that before it began happening, I knew what I was beginning, but only until after it had begun had I realized that what was happening was not what I’d planned before I began. What had happened was completely different from I thought would happen before it began. But I still have more to say, in fact, I still have a completely different set of things to say that are more related to what I was planning on saying before it began happening. But now that what has happened has reached its end, perhaps I’ll just be settled with what I have now and try beginning again later.


July 31, 2008


Dear Matthew,


Is the War of Now truly a war of now? The phrase doesn’t seem appropriate when humanity seems to be fighting for past histories and future utopias. It seems to be a war of ideology – something that doesn’t exist in the now, but exists somewhere in time and space where minds introduced themselves to the concept of now. But we are not somewhere, we are here, and we have already been introduced. Longing for the present moment is longing for the introduction. We want to start over. We want to begin again. You say, “But where have I wandered? From what? Where to?” That is our Present, the gift of Now, where we can ramble on all we want. And we can talk of chickens in armor carrying axes…

In the end, the war we are making sense of doesn’t extend itself to the full scope of the mind, its eye, and its heart. The war doesn’t extend itself to the swelling of the soul – instead, it bursts, or it diminishes into nothing. Our present must not rely on the technological advances of war, that is only one way, a way from the beginning to the end. Do we want this to end? I don’t. And all of us, as artists, creators of our world, deep down do not want this to end. We must go back to the beginning over and over again in the present moment using the future as a metaphor. The future can only be a metaphor because it does not exist, same with the past – the past can only be a metaphor because it does not exist, so, right now we can go to the end, and go to the beginning, as artists trying to fill ourselves with what we, can only understand as life – the gift, the present, the excitement of that gift and opening it, rediscovering it, being afraid of what is inside but too curious with faith in the verve which we cannot control; the energy from which we are made.

A writer reminds me of the “siren song of Pythagoras”… the mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator, more sensitive than any radio receiver or the largest optical telescope, more complete in its grasp of information than any computer: that the human body, its organs, its voice, its power of locomotion, and its imagination – is a more-than-sufficient means for the exploration of any place, time, or energy level in the universe.[1] I feel like this statement is what the truest souls on this universe have set out to prove, in a myriad of evil and angelic actions, to find how our minds can capture certain essences of life in the time and space that only we can comprehend through meaning and lack thereof. It’s beautiful and sad, and outrageously full of laughter and fun, all at once, and that it what it means to live.

And since we speak of war, I will end with the best monologue I’ve heard about war, and of course it’s from a movie, which will be the closest I will ever get to that specific face of horror.

“The bloodlust, they say, are the men that I have read about. They say that the human animal is the only one that has bloodlust; killing without purpose, killing for pleasure. You can see light through this. You can take the ones that are made for garbage detail, you can take the ones who can think but can’t act... I swallowed a bug. It’s irresistible when a bee discovers honey. He is irresistibly driven. My friend laughs; he is my critic, my only critic, perhaps outside of myself. It takes bravery, the deepest bullets are nothing to be feared, phosphorous and napalm are nothing to be feared… but to look inward, to see that twisted mind that lies beneath the surface of all humans and to say, Yes. I accept you. I even love you because you are a part of me; you are an extension of me.” [2]


This is now. We must not leave our humanity, we must be true to ourselves, even if it hurts, we must make our hearts stronger with whatever it is that we know and we find through our own destiny. I will not push others, I will push myself, and in turn that will cycle onward towards what I know that I do not know. I am here, not there, and I trust that alone.

If each one of us is brave enough to see this twisted mind I have hope for a new beginning, a new age of exploration, rested not on fear but on the holy spirit of all of our souls, judgment free and simultaneous with history and the mythology of the future.


Love,
Felicia
[1] Terrence McKenna, True Hallucinations, Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise (Harper Collins, 1993) 85.

[2] Apocalypse Now, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, writ. John Milius, perf. Marlon Brando, DVD, Zoetrope Studies, 1979.

RRRainbow Family: The World Is A Stage (1)

Dear RRRainbow Family
Music can be made anywhere:
Give black holy melody, if the black burns brighter the beauty, but move and move and move until the tune fumbles a drunken hand drops marbles down a staircase, and we all fall apart. Each brother and sister in his/her isolated universe, glass walls in a thumb snap spun cue ball, staring out the fish eye orb of his/her own emanating musical projection reel, analyzing the projections in confusion, as if they were not his/her own. Looking in the past to pick where he/she left off, stuck in another time and space, chasing his/herself on a cosmic treadmill. We stop running get back to center. All musical identities at peace in isolation, we emerge together, find presents from the void and steady each other into infinity.
Music can be made anywhere. The music is/of the essence of an environment. Our music comes from within us and dictates the quality of our environment. I propose we focus on the environment.
The world has a stage.
The stage is the real world.
The brolw has the world.
The stage has a world and the world has a real world.
As we construct reality with sound, we construct reality with imagination. Instead of trying to communicate solely by listening to each other, I propose we imagine an environment collectively, steady each other into the portal of infinity and transport the family to our imagined environment to create music and finish the construction of our imagined reality.
Our recorded music is the remnants of our journeys through time and space.
If we play on the world, our world will play on us.
But only if we devote ourselves
To the actualization
Of our visionary
Destinations.
Our first journey:
RRRainbow Family
Cosmic Gypsies of Infinity
- We are a tribe of psychic nomads, a psychedelic family gathering around a bonfire we’ve summoned from the earth in a post-apocalyptic world when reality is wreaking havoc on itself. We open the infinity portal and travel back to our musical gathering in the present moment to inform our present selves of the mythology of our future. This musical séance is a prayer to our unconscious and the spirit of the expanding cosmos. By harnessing the energy between each musical identity, we tap faculties of the unconscious and of outer space, to transport ourselves back through time to the present moment where we are constructing both the future and the present moment thus constructed by our knowledge of the future.
- The album, the journey, is the telling of our mythology as well as the experience of our revelations that teach us how to move outside of time, to move beyond the third dimension on Earth.
- We are a traveling folk band, we write songs but we have all of time and space feeding through us, distributed according to our collective will. Our songs are catchy because we have a lot to grasp onto in life, our dynamic scattered in many directions but flowing together as an immaculate organization of the chaos between our separate timelines. Under the red night sky that is bleeding down on us from wounds carved by the razorblades of time passing, we have nothing more to do for our earthly survival than to disappear into the forest, to summon infinity and to travel back to the present moment to reprogram ourselves with broadened faculties of imagination and the abilities to construct our environment, our position in time and space, and the music we make there.
- The album is a movement of songs of prayer. The album personifies our movement from the future back to the present moment. In the future our rationality and our ability to make sense of our environment breaks down before we can steady each other into infinity. We are reprogrammed with a new rationality, a new history, a new reality, and we are transported along with the remnants of the process back to ourselves in the present moment. In a mythological sense, each of our musical identities, our characters have been given the secrets of infinity, thus the mythology continues on an individual level.

Brothers and Sisters, we play make-believe all the time, but we have limits to what we allow ourselves to make believe. To create something out of this world, although outside of play does not exist in this world, still will bring the creation into this world, to construct reality if only we do not cease to play. To create and live in play within our constructing mythology, we emerge into the real world to creatures unknowing of our reality, and appear as if we really have traveled back from the future to spread the power of imagination.
Reality is constructed in belief. Reality can be the belief in what you are, but that always necessitates a struggle with the past and future. RRRainbow family is the belief in ourselves, and each other, and all others in the Reality of becoming. We can decide to become what we are without play, or we can play at always becoming something more, going farther outward and inward, from, to, and through and back again. The possibilities are endless as long as we never cease to play.

********************************************************************

Dear RRRainbow Family,

First I offer a prayer of in hopes of beginning.

You speak of the future that is always happening right now, tomorrow, and happened yesterday. You speak of what we know, what we are doing, what we know that we are becoming; you speak of being.

But when you say if we play on the world, the world will play on us - I think we must be a little more careful before we deem ourselves divine. The world has first played for us, now we must play back for the world. There is a humble effort that we all must take, together, to respect the time and space there really is. If time and space does not exist, regardless of whether we want it to or not, it will always be useful for us today. It is here, it is part of the dream that we do not have control over. Recognize it. Brothers and sisters, we must accept this, and find beauty everywhere. It is a festival of forms. It is reality.

First let us use our minds, our hands, our ears, and all the materials that we have around us. Let us take a look around. Only then can we live the theory of our dreams – only if we can see our dreams already present. If we want to make-believe for the purpose of actualizing our visionary destinations, we have to worship the vision at this very moment, we must worship now. We must let the infinite cosmic soul see, feel, hear us – we have to let the infinite cosmic soul know that we know ourselves. Once upon a time when we know this self, then we can play make-believe to worship in sheer delight, then we can worship the continuous being of spontaneous glory! Remember, we must first let the infinite cosmic soul know that we can see, feel, and hear ourselves. Only then will we have the right to mimic the infinite cosmic soul, because only after this knowing can we worship in the fun of it all, without worry or fear of ourselves.

Psychic nomads you say, you say, gypsies of infinity, you say, mythology, you say, traveling folk band. This is our visionary destination, this is the character chart, these are the forms you want to place in the festival. This is what we already are, this is what we are becoming; being; this is real. But remember that the possibilities are indeed endless. And remember that there also is a time for playing and there is a time to cease playing – the moment we cease to play make-believe is the moment we can fully realize the scope of the divinity within all of us; it is when we can become conscious of the dual dimensions (space!) of making and believing; it is when magic and truth exist simultaneously – it is when we can play back for our dreams as if we were the world itself hearing it play for us. Belief in the making.

We are not only characters; we are the set of the play as well. Let us not trample on the stage. We can become the scenery as well. The stage has been built long ago. Let us not set it ablaze. Our characters can change our destiny if we have the proper willpower, if we have enough belief in our ideal, enough believe in our dreams, enough belief in our mythos - but first we must seek what Destiny has allowed to reveal about itself to us, and respect how it has come through us. Destiny’s ancestors are present. They are here as Death and Resurrection. Look at them in the face now; look at the world around you! Worship these infinite nomads and let dualism coincide within you and throughout us. All prayers will be answered in forms of endless spontaneity.

Let us commence and make music!

Passing Notes On Dark Nights

Dear Felicia
Yesterday when I went to the movie theater, noticing the difference in size between movie theaters in the city and the gargantuan cultural monuments that lie in the center of suburban towns, I stood in line for batman witnessing the congregations that take place to the experiential laboratory of real citizens. Grandfather and grand daughter waiting in line for her first movie-going experience, a mom wearing a fanny pack staring out at the parking lot collecting her family from the shores of the theater entrance, little old ladies with purses full of newspaper-clipped coupons, contemplating friendship and the past awaiting their conditioning into the present world.
In Social Science Survey, my senior year of high school, I remember examining sitcoms through the decades that pumped the particular family values of the times into the collective subconscious of the American public. Yesterday, going into Batman, I pondered the significance of re-introducing a brand name such as Batman or Indiana Jones into the public consciousness, and what that might mean to present day citizens. For one thing, the brand name is more profitable because there is a legacy, and therefore a predisposed interest. But more than that, the characters, whether or not the same characters, they appear to be and are thus closer to the archetypes we have already constructed for ourselves concerning the hero and the villain. It is in this that the subconscious is most potently penetrated and altered without our conscious knowing, if we so treat the cinema, this entertainment which we consume without apprehensions, as a break from the familiarity of our real lives in order to rendezvous with the familiarity of our imaginary ones.
Walking into the theater, the lights had already dimmed and begun playing the previews; I sat down in my chair 8 rows in front of the projection screen that spanned the majority of my viewing lens, coupled with surround sound that ensconced me in my seat from all directions. As if I was slowly being oven-cooked on timer, two and a half hours until the lights come back on and I emerge into the real world, a new bird.
The last preview to come on before the Dark Night began was “THE END…(trailer scene flashing)…IS NOW…(more scenes flashing)…TERMINATOR 4 with CHRISTIAN BALE…(Apocalyptic scenes of the machine war fastest flashing to trailer climax)…ARE YOU READY?”
The Dark Night begins with the scene of the Joker manipulating a group of burglars while robbing a bank, killing them all off as well as a bank clerk, and taking all the money for himself. His next appearance, in a conference between the mafia and the black gangs, Joker prances in and proposes that cops are cracking down on crime because of the new Vigilante hero, Batman, who has decided the systems of control weren’t effective enough and taken control into his own hands, has bred equally mystifying and theatrical opposition. “Why would I want to kill you? I love you. You created me. You complete me.” The joker whispers to Batman in an interrogation room, “I don’t plan, I just do whatever comes to me. I’m here to show all of you what happens when you try to control what you can’t control.”
The Joker reacts to the scenes as if they were a play, getting off on the unpredictable, the surprising, reacting to Batman’s extravagant heroism with an equally extravagant portrayal of the villain. “Just play the game with me,” he says.
Standing in an underground warehouse in front of a pyramid of cash, the Joker’s lackies douse the pile in gasoline and light the place up to the grave dismay of the Hispanic gang-leader to whom the Joker stares in the face and says, “This is my city. All you care about is money. I just want to see the world burn.”
The most evil of villains have no motives of money, of power, no personal motives of any kind, but simply the curiosity of seeing how far they can push the world, what sort of madness that can become of them in the face of the world, and what more madness that causes them to project. Throughout the course of the movie, The Joker’s twisted actions become more reasonable, and we begin to emphasize. At the credits, Batman is more of a villain than anyone else, very understandably because he began the game. For the rivalry between the Joker and Batman is a product of what happens when you make a play of the world.
In our real lives, which I believe are now more than ever driven by the media we consume, we see the excitement in real life between the guise of the imaginary worlds we are immersed in and the characters we’ve become in our own minds. The imaginary has been disregarded as imaginary for so long, just as the concept of the unconscious has become so classically accepted, that we disregard the lack of disparity between what real life appears to be and what in our imagination is driving and constructing the real world, to which we relate all other worlds, real or imagined.
Mothers in fanny packs ushering together her kids watches Desperate Housewives and knows, “this is not my life, because I can see the differences.” On the surface level, this is not her life, because she is subconsciously scheming away from that life, because she has seen it and made the comparison. There is, however, something intriguing about that life that finds its way to the surface. In learning how not to think, we learn how to think. In learning what to avoid and what’s most useful for personal goals, we learn what to believe.
In the past, belief systems were constructed out of necessity for political and economic control. Such as, my tribe needs to do business with this merchant who is directed by this empire, I should practice this system of beliefs because it benefits my tribes wellbeing. Heath Ledger needed to become the Joker for his job, to believe what he believes to get inside of the characters head. To get inside such a character, I would imagine, would cause any good actor some inner turmoil, an attack of conscience that could very easily make God crash down and some itchy pieces of identity to be unearthed, that once unearthed could never fully be repressed. The idea that this struggle caused Heath Ledger to kill himself brings us as an audience closer to the character.
This is because all celebrities are characters of characters that we can relate with. The characters they play in the movies are how we experience them in our real lives, but are backed by the fact that they are played by real people, who we might be able to come across in the real world. When a part an actor plays causes the actor to die in his real life, his performance of the part that killed him affects us on a more real level because the character in the movie extends out of the imaginary world into the real world. This plays into how we consume this media.
Because we can love Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You, and see his career take off, then watch his greatest performance as the Joker and still love him, and then know that he killed himself, it becomes not the real life of Heath Ledger that affects us, but the life of his characters which is more real. We know the actors as real people, but the characters are how we learn and know them as real people. On screen, we understand we are looking at an imaginary world, but when we go home and watch Entertainment Tonight, we make the distinction that the actors have real lives and screen lives, but we cannot distinguish between who they are on screen and who they are in the real world. This makes the imaginary world on screen more real to us.
This correlates with what we see on our television screens in the news. We have come to expect a certain amount of entertainment from the real world, because we experience the real world in relation to the imaginary world. In office now, we’ve got the villain, the character George Bush constructed as the Big Dumb Idiot who has reeked havoc, who because we have been brought to believe is affecting our real lives, deserves an equal rival, a character to save us from the tyranny in our real life. Barack Obama is that character. In this play we call politics, tension has been mounting and we yearn for climax, for the opposing forces to meet, to cause a riot of reconciliation. But what that riot entails is left to the forces of chance, to the forces of our unconscious. Because we are conditioned to viewing the imaginary world with a particular eye, we are apt to expect the same from the real world. We have our villain and we have our hero. Our media is constructing our expectations, constructing our beliefs, and in doing so constructs the unfolding of the future.
Plato and Aristotle’s call for the need of art criticism was born out of being conscious of what the people need to censor from the masses, to keep our minds in check, so that our world does not fall apart. Over time, criticism has become about criticizing high art, separating the criticism from the information consumed in the daily lives of normal people. Criticism does not concern itself with art that does not live up to a certain standard or time period, therefore the information that is truly affecting the workings of the real world gets lost. This is not to say that we’ve done something wrong. There’s really no use in dwelling on that. It is perhaps useful to deconstruct how the real world is conducted in the face of popular culture. How the imaginary world that we do not choose to apprehend as anything other than imaginary actually plays into the conduct of our own characters in our real lives. How the imaginary and real roles of characters we relate with affect how we view our own character.
The World has become a play. The archetypes change gradually over time in the subtle underlying forces of our own character’s actions. We go into the theaters and lock into our news stations to learn what our world is and come out ready to be a player in that world. In lieu of our country’s political standings, out of concern for the tragedy seen in both real and imaginary worlds and their interplay, we construct our beliefs about who we are, what our purpose is, what we need to do in this world; what part we play. As the Joker shows in the new Batman, Chaos can finally overcome control when you play hero and villain games on the stage of the world. Life as we know it now, life which has always been changing anyway, will quickly turn itself on its ear, because we have all become characters in an imaginary storyline, simply reacting to what we have to react to. Real life resembles a story, so we act on what we know about stories, and chaos ensues.
Control dies because the individual can only do whatever he feels is necessary to do. Life becomes the playing out of chaos, which constructs all, which there was never any use in trying to control. In a culture so used to feeling secure, feeling comforted in passing the control off to higher powers and not submitting to the unpredictability of chaos; were the control to break down, the chaos would appear even more chaotic because its happening in the real world and in comparison to the way real life has been constructed in the imaginary world. For me, this will be the end of life, as we know it; but I believe our media is prepping us.

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July 22, 2008

Dear Matthew,

I’m glad I finally read your letter tonight, I’m all wired off of the coffee we made earlier… you left my house about 45 minutes ago and I’m still awake and your words are directing my scattered thoughts.
Our media is indeed prepping us – and in turn that means that we are prepping ourselves. We are the creators, we are the audience, and we are the critics. Our imaginary worlds in virtual reality and the real world are one and the same – we learn about ourselves from both, simultaneously. The imaginary is the virtual, the imaginary is the real. The virtual tells us how we think about the chaos presented to us, and the real shows us what tools we can use. And always vice versa. The virtual and the real are both chaotic entities that are used for a common unit of understanding. It is here where I have began to realize in the time we’ve spent talking together that you are a man who speaks of what may come, what the future holds, and what we, as humanity, is leading towards. As I came to recognize this I began to see that I speak of the compressed moment, of here, of now, of seeing it all at our fingertips, in this life, today, at the moment I am typing this, and also at the time you are reading this. This is what I have constructed to understand – this is how I control the chaos, with these words, describing you describing me, understanding what parts we play in this particular discussion. We play the same parts, bouncing off of each other, balancing each other out amidst the chaos that we have come to know, have always known.
I also know our parts are constantly evolving into different characters, which is why we never get sick of the reality of the virtual or the virtual reality, because we are always finding new things, seeing new characters, interacting with them and seeing ourselves in them completely – the chaos of culture, in all it’s costumes, is the factor that pushes evolution. There are extremes, heroes and villains, but that is because it is the only way we know how to understand ourselves. We see each other and everyone around us in exaggerated form – it is the only way we can begin to understand the superficial, i.e. cultural, parts of ourselves. Batman is the joker, and the joker is Batman, evil and good combined in one film – that is the only way humans can comprehend the contradictions within their own souls, by seeing a split, by recognizing a difference between two characters – and it is the difference and understanding the symbolism of the difference when the contradictions come to a chaotic ease… in the recognition of one sole unit called the soul.
Heath Ledger is totally dreamy and I can’t wait to see the movie… for many reasons, but mostly because I’ve been in love with Heath Ledger since I was fourteen.
The subconscious and the unconscious are funny things. Now I think that I don’t care about them or understanding the forces at work there – that always leads to wanting power and control in the conscious mind, and leads to failure surely just because you can’t fully go back in time, you can only go back in time halfway … cultural studies leads me back to psychoanalysis all the time, but the true part for me is the journey through my own reality rather than finding the reasons why that reality has been created. (Think about Einstein, he would be opposite of this, he went back into time and only got halfway and then ended up controlling a large bit of historical chaos. That’s cool. I don’t want to do anything like that, I like the way things are, usually). Psychoanalysis and physics never match up to actuality, at least for me, there’s always like ten different parts missing… definitely a great source of intrigue, but sometimes I’d rather enjoy the ride with a good heart rather than a sound mind. I can say Heath Ledger is totally dreamy and all the psychoanalysis and the physics will be there inside of it anyway, but first I have to say that Heath Ledger is totally dreamy. I have to initialize a thought first, before it can be studied. Culture is funny. I’m sleepy and rambling.

Batman. The Joker. Batman is real and the Joker is a figment of Batman’s imagination. Duh. We all begin the game. We are heroes of reality.

The Joker. Batman. The Joker is real and Batman is a figment of the Joker’s imagination.
Duh. We all are villains fighting the ideals of those in power; the “heroes”.

The rest all have to play with and against us just as we play with and against ourselves.


Heath Ledger is still totally dreamy and dreams are destiny in real time. Oh but Val Kilmer was dreamy too in Batman Forever… but that was like totally nine years ago…
or something like that.

Does this make sense? I don’t care.

You write stories, I’ll take notes, we’ll both be entertained, I like your character, I want to kiss you, you are dreamy too, and I’m going to sleep.

I’ll write more tomorrow. I hope this wasn’t supposed to sound like a professional letter or anything.

Yay letters!

I love you.


Yours yours yours,
Felicia