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33 in 2023

33 in 2023

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Usually I try to write these yearly reflection posts for my birthday. The better, and more accurately to coincide with my yearly dispositions. Yet I have felt that not much has changed since last year, which is reflected in the fact that it feels like the year has passed me by dizzyingly fast. Has it only been a year since I was holed up in the restroom of the Alamo experiencing a separation of mind, body and spirit? It feels like yesterday, or rather like one long unbroken and deterministic chain of events that hasn’t really stopped. Something has definitely changed though, my creative output on all fronts has slowed down. I write less, film less, produce less “content” for lack of a better word. Though to be clear none of this is ever meant to be marketable (because you would need a market) and in fact anything you ever read that is meant to be profitable should be looked at with suspicion. Not because of any ill intent on behalf of the author but they are now serving something outside of their authentic self, and despite claims to the contrary this master will creep into their process. Sorry, this could really be a post about the Hollywood studio system vs less profit driven world cinema but I wont digress.

Why has my output stopped? I think I’m victim of a pattern I fall into where I consume consume consume in an attempt to parse through and come up with some subjective view of an objective reality. To put forth an example, if I want to write about a movie I love it’s easy to watch the movie, then read everything written about it, then read about all the sources of the prior reading, then explore tangentially related topics all in a vain and desperate attempt to hold an opinion that is unimpeachable. Obviously I’m not the subject matter expert on anything because once I see the maw of knowledge open itself to me I recoil back and think “you know what I think I know enough”. Yet I don’t feel satisfied enough to ever really publicly say anything so I think “let me just sit on this for a while longer”. There’s a clip I’ve seen of Ethan Hawke stating how Leo Tolstoy thought his brother was the real genius, but he lacked the ego to put pen to paper so Leo was the one who was showered with accolades. Here we have a terrible shadow though for if those with egos are the ones who write then wisdom, or even competence, is not really a determining factor in success, and with success comes the further dissemination of ideas. Maybe this is best reflected in our political landscape where we have a bunch of Socratically deficient dummies that don’t understand that they know nothing. This is an oversimplification though because even the smarter politicians get consumed by the political game everyone plays to assure majority support but regardless being able to show your face in public and say “yeah I got the answers I can do that” is always a lie, regardless whether the person saying it disagrees or not. To break down that into its arguments though…I think the mere statement “I know” is false. The implications are thus:
If I have verified something as a fact then I know it.
I have verified it as a fact.
Therefore I know it.

The jungle cat lying in wait to eviscerate this argument is “I have verified”. When is the last time you verified something? a quick google search? A text? Asked Alexa or Siri? Academics all know to check sources when reading through others’ works. Yet how deep do we search through this tree of knowledge? Sources have sources, those sources have sources, even when it coms to raw data and numbers it is interpreted by someone or something. This is a pedantic view but my point is all our knowledge is built on others’ “knowledge”. So then when we say I know it is not the previous argument we are really saying it’s this:
If someone/something I trust has verified a fact then I know it’s true.
This fact has been verified by someone/something I trust.
I know it’s true.

Of course the second ticking time bomb here is the definition of verification. Scientifically we have errors of measurement but what of non-empirical matters? If I find a friend who looks down on there luck I may say something “I know you’re sad, but things will turn around”. Do I know they are sad? I am interpreting their emotion using body language. Or to remove doubt I ask them what’s wrong and they may answer “I am sad because my ice cream fell”. Ah there we a firsthand verified source. I know they are sad because I trust them to know they are sad. Later I may go and tell mutual friends that I know our friend is sad without any second thoughts. But does my friend know they are sad? Is sadness something we learn or is it something within us that carries a blueprint of what it means to be sad. Of course the final question is what is sadness? And do I really know that my friend’s definition of sadness is the same as my own? When I say “I know you are sad” what I’m really saying is “I think you are exhibiting signs that I identify as sad” or in the second scenario where I tell our mutual friend: “Our friend is feeling emotions he has defined as sad and I think it closely resembles my interpretation of sadness”. Our language is mutable enough that in both cases we understand what is being said and since “being sad” has no true objective definition we all have to accomodate various interpretations of sad into one term. I can never really know if my friend is sad just as they can never really know if they are sad because being sad is an external concept which we have continuously tried to define in the course of our lives. There are more accurate words you can use to be sure. My friend could say “I am unhappy” which relies upon both of us understanding what it means to be happy first. Or he could say “I feel upset that my ice cream fell because I wanted to eat it.” which is more precise language. Yet we had already no doubt assumed that was the case when they remarked that their ice cream fell. Even now do we know they are upset because of that or is there some deeper significance to the ice cream. So the margin of error lies in the abstraction of our language and thus in the abstraction of knowledge.

It is how we have advanced as a species to rely on secondhand information that we accept as true empirically or non-empirically. Yet it is the same reason that in the age of technology we have come to our reckoning. We have unlimited sources and virtually unlimited discourse. We can pick and choose trusted sources that say whatever we need them to say. It’s a relativist nightmare which we cannot wake up from, an unceasing churning of truth. Which is all to say that if nobody can know anything, then maybe it’s okay if I produce more dumb stuff next year. I know you’ll agree.

District Of Columbia

District Of Columbia

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At 3:30 am June 22nd 2022 I awoke to the booming sound of thunder rattling my windows and lightning illuminating my room. At first I thought it was a car exhaust, a firework, or a gunshot which are all known culprits for waking me up in the small hours of the morning. But as I heard the rolling boom fade away I realized it was a natural occurrence. There is much fun made of us southern Californians and our over-reaction to real weather. Believe me when I say though that thunder and lightning of all things is so, so rare. Even more rare for me was the proximity of it, it felt like there were explosions just outside my window. I silently cursed to myself because of all the nights this night I was trying to get as much sleep as possible because I had a flight to catch at 7:50 am. The jolt, along with the adrenaline that came with it virtually guaranteed I would no longer be sleeping that morning. I didn’t know it but the thunderstorms would follow me all the way to my destination: Washington DC, and even further to Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia on the second leg of my journey. Although the thought crossed my mind I chose not to dwell on this fitful start as an omen of what would come and before I knew it I was touching down on federal land.

From the national portrait gallery

Columbia is a personification of the United States because we love anthropomorphizing things, and it lets us assign optimistic traits to ourselves. Yet Columbia is named after Columbus who as modern revisionist history points out was more akin to the Americas’ first slave master than hero. Washington is a founding father and the first president of these United States, and perhaps most curiously…a Virginian. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason and Patrick Henry were also Virginians and together they formed some revolutionary heavy hitters. They helped write the documents we still refer back to almost 250 years later. So I say it’s curious because not 85 years after declaring independence from Britain, Virginia declared independence from the United States along with the rest of the confederate states. It would seem that slavery was too precious to their economy to get rid of even though most of the rest of the world had outlawed it already. Economic concerns trumping humanistic decisions are a recurring theme in our nation’s history. We refer to ourselves as a democratic republic but our system of government might better be called Capitalism. If the government is a political machine running the nation then money is the lubricant, the fuel, and its necessity is the guiding force behind the whole apparatus.

Looking through our nation’s history in DC presents a problem, the danger of storytelling. Even here on this post I present to you my opinions, mixed with some factual evidence, laid out in a way that accentuates the jaded, pessimistic, yet still prone to inspiration mind behind these words. There are around 74 museums in the capital, they stand majestically side to side with a who’s who of massive federal agencies. Walking through some of them I found it interesting to see descriptions of Benjamin Franklin with addendums of how he used slaves make his inventions, or descriptions of how many slaves each founding father owned underneath their portrait. It would seem that we are at last trying to hold a mirror up to the story of our national identity. For how long though was all this subtext and context missing, left buried under the rug in order to present a satisfying tale of tenacity and doggedness against the tyranny of King George. I’m an avid visitor of museums and I like to do a depth first dive into the exhibits which often means I leave the museum unfinished as I’m forced out by docents. The museums in DC were vast, varied, and detailed and yet for all that has been written about history what has been left out?

Lincoln’s Death Hat

I sat in the very theatre that Abraham Lincoln was in when he was shot to death by John Wilkes Booth. Exclaiming “Sic Semper Tyrannis” he ran from the stage where now a ranger was telling us about his fate. The latin phrase was a reference to the murder of Ceasar and it also appears on the seal of Virginia. Presumably Booth believed Lincoln was a tyrant, abusing his war time powers against the confederacy. Yet how could Lincoln abuse his power against the states that had seceded from under his rule? Even though the Confederacy lost it hasn’t stopped them from unloading a slew of pro-confederate propaganda immediately after the war to this very day. The Lost Cause is an attempt to couch what was a pro-slavery war in romantic ideals and heroic deeds. I visited Richmond Virginia, the capital of the confederacy on the last bit of my trip and couldn’t believe our bloodiest conflict erupted basically between two capitals barely more than 100 miles apart. Statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis were barely taken down two years ago. Only recently has the nation started to take an active part in rejecting the siren song of a feel-good story. How long will we keep it up and how far will our memory go, after all when I visit statues of Alexander The Great I don’t think of the man, I think of the god, and his list of accomplishments and atrocities float through my conscious mind with ease and without emotional burden.

The memorial to the Korean War haunts me still

The history of our nation and of the world is riddled with bloodshed, revolution, and turmoil. The many monuments devoted to the countless wars since our nation’s conception make that obvious. On the third day of my trip the supreme court struck down Roe V. Wade and protests erupted immediately on site. The only way to get lasting, real change in the US is through tireless coordination and effort, by constitutional design. I can’t help but think though that as a democracy, a crowd of protesters is inherent with the threat of violence against elected officials. After all if there is a disconnect in what the people say and what those in power do then the system has failed and what’s the ultimate and final way to take back the power? How long can we build towards our idea of a utopia before it all bubbles over again and we are forced to regenerate the only way we know how?

LBC 2020

LBC 2020

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I shot the footage in this video on a Friday I took off back in June. It was the first time I went out into the wild with my filters and lens. My phone looked comically obtuse in my hands and there was no hiding the fact from passerby that I was clearly filming everything around me. Guerrilla filming is not really my thing per se and it feels strange but it’s just something I’ll have to overcome if I ever want to produce anything meaningful.

I bought a variable ND filter because I was being cheap and didn’t want to switch out filters constantly but its limitations were apparent in this film, the bright daylight was just rocking its world and the extreme ends of the filter couldn’t handle it. Seems like I’ll have to get a darker one for my daylight filming. I also had some technical difficulties with my anamorphic lens. Unbeknownst to me the screw was a little loose and you can see it in the video when the image warps a bit. Eventually caught on and fixed it but the damage was done. Still, I like how this turned out.

Fermenting Terror

Fermenting Terror

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Sometimes I get remarks from people I know about how I haven’t grown much through the vicissitudes of pleasures, pains, and sneers.

“Some things change but Jairo, he’ll be the same for years”.

I laugh and give them the finger guns, make some clicking noises.

I’ll tell them I just know what I like. Because how could they ever fathom the truth of my foolish choices.

My secret is in plain sight. Sitting right there in the kitchen of my house.

Many moons ago I tampered with forces beyond my understanding, idiocy I did espouse.

I read the books. They were easy to find, most everything is nowadays.

Originally it was only out of curiosity, but as I read my pride erupted into a blaze.

“What do these people know that I do not?!”

“I can do this myself, I’ll put together the ingredients that time forgot.”

So I set about my errand, and had to gather the resources.

There was only one place I could go, the house of sorcerers who dispensed powerful forces.

Bearded men did greet me, and they had all manners of equipment, reagents, and insidious creatures.

I described to them my goal, and if they knew I was a fool, they did not show it on their features.

Happily they sold me the materials I required: dormant ravenous animals, the fluid extracted from living corpses, and grains of sin.

I left there with my hubris on full display, how could I help but grin.

That night was dark and brooding, a gift I thought.

Whether it was my inexperience, naivete, or ego I know not, but ne’er did I get the results I sought.

I spoke the words of power in a hurry, I did not care to keep in mind my quarry, and I haphazardly measured the components.

Worst of all I dropped the final piece into the concoction by accident. No matter I thought, as the liquid dripped from my clothes back into the cauldron. “I have all but bested this opponent”.

I stared into the pot and it bubbled and gurgled as if it was trying to tell me something of great importance in a language I did not understand.

My eyes gleamed with the reflection of my dark victory. But soon I would see the full breadth of what my blunder would command.

The first half of the ritual was over, and the second would take weeks before I could, in my delicious mixture, partake.

But I never would. Perhaps it was the pieces of my dead skin that the brew did take.

But I found myself robbed of my agency, despondent, and lethargic. A sorry state.

I should have opened the vessel soon thereafter, but dear reader, it’s been years since that day and I don’t remember laughter.

It sits in my kitchen still, collecting my worries, anxieties, and fears.

It has imparted on me something I could not foresee. My nails have stopped growing, my hair stays at the same length, even my bowels do not move.

Hunger is but a memory, thirst seems like an old dream. I have long ago decided this calamity I could not disprove.

The truth is I am trapped in this body, in this state, unable to move on, to realize my fate.

The potion that I tried to make took something from me on that night, I realized too late.

A piece of me, one of the most important. My soul, my humanity. It’s robbed me of living but gifted me an eternity.

And still, I dare not open the lid to that ethereal beverage. Will the years of pause suddenly come rushing to my unsuspecting body?

Sometimes, on sleepless nights I can hear a hum emanating from the receptacle and my dreams turn to waking nightmares as I feel the severance of heart and mind.

I have visions of what I think may be lurking inside, a horrible mixture of magicks, spirits, and flesh that I did enshrine.

To look upon it myself would be too much to bear, and so it sits in my kitchen, never to be drunk by mortal hands.

But instead it has imbibed mine own psyche. My body now is but a puppet and my true self swims in the golden dark depths of the beer I brewed then neglected due to life’s demands.

Valhalla

Valhalla

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Dual twin guitar attacks blast out of my stereo as I politely turn my blinker on to slowly switch lanes on the 405. “Today is a good night!”, I yell loudly at myself as I barrel down the highway at 5 miles per hour. The passenger in the front seat thinks I was talking to them, so be it.

“Dude, what are you on about”, they say.

I answer and tell them I can taste the adventure in the air is all. It’s a lie though because all I taste is the salty, wheaty remnants of the sesame sticks I was snacking on. I greedily thrust my fingers into small container that held them, finding none. As my fingers flail deeper into the container, they hit pay dirt. The accumulated loose grains of salt have all collected together forming a concentrated package of pure saltstruction that my mouth is ready to receive. An amateur would try to pinch the grains together but I, an intellectual, lick my fingers to make sure the moistness covers the maximum surface area for optimal salt delivery. I slide my fingers into my mouth and the familiar feeling of my tongue dehydrating is there to meet me.

“Awwww YEAAAAH”, I burst out like a salt shaker kool-aid man.

My passenger looks at me oddly never knowing the sheer ecstasy radiating from body.

My voice cracks as I say “So what did you do this summer?” As they start explaining the ins and outs of their job, I take a mental sigh of relief. Good I have them talking for a while, I immediately stop paying attention and let my social verbal cues manage the conversation. My mind has business to attend to.

I need to merge right now but the speed differential between the lanes is drastic. The cars to the right blend together into one color as they warp through the highway at unfathomable speeds. I do the mental calculations in my head, not only do I have to make sure I don’t get rammed by a car, but I need enough time to accelerate to their speed so the car behind doesn’t slam into me. I do some quick finger math and decide I’ll need approximately 2 years to perform the maneuver. It’s those 105 bastards with their dedicated lanes that have put me in this position. They think they’re above us for traveling through the parts of LA no one likes. We 405ers never catch a break, but I’ll have the last laugh yet. They’ll rue the day they underestimated the tenacity and patience of the 405er. The time for politeness is over, I don’t turn my blinker on because I’ve never met a 105er that would actually slow down to give me the chance needed to get over, I’m on to those conniving jerks, I see through their plans to speed up instead of giving me a shot. I stalk my side view mirror for the perfect gap as the cars zoom by. Like a predator cat I slow to a crawl, waiting…biding my time. I try to stop the larger trucks and trailers, they are slower and less quick to react leaving me ample time to cut in.  I spot a huge long distance bus and a smile curls around my face, I smell the kill. The gap in cars is approaching like an unsuspecting deer, and my hands on the steering wheel tense up ready to strike. Before the metallic taste of victory washes over me, I am rudely reminded of the laws of this concrete jungle. Another car somewhere behind me goes in for the kill and succeeds.

The gap is closed, the prey is lost and I silently mutter to myself the rule I forgot, “There’s always another car ready to merge”.

“What?” says my passenger.

“Never mind, uh, sounds rough”, I tell them hoping that the general feeling of struggle my subconscious picked up from the out of focus conversation was right.

“Yeah”, they say and continue.

Time is running out, if I don’t merge now I’ll be cast into the fiery pits of staying on the 405. I watch the lane I need to get on with renewed focus when I see another chance. I quickly turn on my blinker as a legal formality, never actually expecting that it would give anyone notice. My arms spin the steering wheel until I’m met with the haptic feedback of hitting the maximum turn radius and as I grit my teeth I push down on the accelerator. The leap forward startles me for a second, but I quickly have to negotiate settling into my lane so I don’t cut across the highway like a redirected missile. I let the wheel spin from under my hands as my car corrects it’s own course. Finally I’m reaching the dizzying speeds of the dedicated 105 lane. I watch my odometer climb to new heights…10 mph, 15 mph, and settling on 20 mph, the cars in the 405 lanes are now dashes of color. As I climb up the 105 ramp I look back at the 405ers. Bottom dwellers, the lot of them, tax them I say. Those 405ers think they’re better than us because they have the worst commute at any time of day. Weak. Deplorable. If I ever meet one in person I’ll have some choice words.

The conversation bubbles back up to my consciousnesses “…and that’s why you can’t feed dogs chocolate”, they finish saying.

“Yeah…CLASSIC DOGS”, I sputter.

“Yeah, I guess”, they say.

“So what about cats?” I say trying to incite a tangent. They take the bait just as I notice something.

There’s a truck next to me I thought I had left behind ages ago. How is this possible, I zoomed past it miles back and here it is again, in spite of me. I thought I made the smart choices, zigged when I had to, zagged when it was right. Even in traffic the gap between me and this god damned truck should have been ever widened. Did it take another route I didn’t know about? Has google betrayed me. Imagine having the entirety of Los Angeles ask you for directions, hinging on your every word for guidance. The freeways are the veins of the city and Google maps literally has power over the flow of the blood. Who’s to say they don’t keep the nice and empty routes hidden from the masses. Maybe they set them apart for their VIPs, persons in power, people with money, the government? With a push of a button they can misdirect thousands of vehicles to make a side street empty for Jeff Bezos to get McDonalds coffee. Is this truck evidence of that? Maybe, because if not what am I to believe. The choices I’ve made don’t matter? Every smart decision I thought I made driving on this highway, every driver I’ve cut off, every time I switched lanes only to notice that it got slower and immediately switched back, every motorcyclist I spooked….did it all not matter? All the split second decisions shaving off minutes of my life in stress. I’ve literally given my life to get ahead and here this truck is nonchalantly caught up, taunting me with it’s hideous message of consumption. EAT FRESH. The tortoise to my hare, a sign that in the end everything I’ve done is meaningless, the universe doesn’t care about me or the risks I’ve taken, the decisions I’ve made or even my morality because it will just let this giant, lumbering beast of a truck catch up to me…..this fucking truck…..this MOTHERFUCKING TRUCK! I grunt audibly.

“That truck is the WORST, fuck Subway!”, I interrupt my passenger.

“Damn, I didn’t know you hated them like that?”, they say.

“Yeah man, they have trash sandwiches. Never eating there again.”, I say.

My passenger pauses reflectively, almost as if to question whether Subway is even worth defending then lets it go.

“Are we almost there?”, they ask.

I look up into the sky while the blast beats thump out of my speakers. Still even now, faced by the indifference of the universe, I feel a sense of defiance, my spirit won’t roll over and accept death, It will die a warrior’s death traveling a low speeds on the 105.

“No”, I say, “We’re not. Give me like 10 minutes”. I turn my blinkers on.

The Call

The Call

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It’s 8 a.m. and you wake up. You grab your phone and pause for a second before turning off the alarm. You thought about snoozing it but you know that traffic will only get worse. You’re committed now, no turning back, if you fall asleep again you won’t wake up.

You lift yourself up, breaking free from the remaining strands of sleep. Your bones protest the sudden movement, and the gelatinous mass of flesh that hangs onto your frame pulls you down. Fuck, you’re out of shape for 27. Time to get ready for work.

You make the mistake of turning your computer on. The horrors of the world proceed to walk through, filtered through the opinions of morons. There is a small window of seconds where you begin to react before the kill switch in your mind numbs you to the news. Another mass shooting, a hero’s death, the betrayal of a species, the doomsday clock strikes 11:59:59, the confederacy of dunces meets, fires engulf the world. Which one will be your first talking point of the day?

It’s 11 a.m. and your work is piling up. The system works against you, challenging you to be productive in the face of bureaucratic sloth. Still, you toil against the machinations of the corporate agenda if only to prove even in uncertain odds you can still get shit done.

It’s noon and you give up. You position yourself next to trays of food. You know that if you open your mouth at just the right angle, and activate your black hole generator 5000 you can consume the maximum amount of matter in the shortest amount of time. Did you get all the nutrition you needed? It’s in there somewhere I suppose. You take a brisk walk around the parking lot to make sure the meal is packed into the bottom of your stomach as densely as possible, there will be more to come. You bring up the mass shooting.

It’s 6 p.m. and where has the day gone. You quipped, bantered, and sauntered it away with your co-workers. In the process, somewhere in the muck of the day, work got done. You’re not really sure how or why. Forces conspired in your favor, but only now at the tail-end of the day does a spark of real inspiration strike. Now, your real masterpiece comes forth, unfettered by the system – the beast sleeps at 5 – you can breathe life into your creation.

It’s 8 p.m. and you’re dead. There is but a thread of life left and its only function is to make sure your corpse alternates between pushing the gas and the brake pedals. It strives to reach the promised land, the home it was promised after the day has ended. The voices coming from the radio remind you that perhaps you are not as deceased as you thought, or perhaps they are the only thing keeping you from doing so.

It’s 10 p.m. and you’re exhausted. Still there’s time for one last tv show. You try to guess at the relevancy of the episode. What part of society will it deconstruct, and will you have seen it before? Perhaps it will be a character study, or an educative romp. You’ll watch it and let your dreams digest it. It shall become part of your ethos in due time. After it is done, you take one last breath as you prepare for tomorrow’s marathon of existence.

12 a.m. and your eyes dart open. There sitting in the darkness of the room, there is complete silence, and yet… you hear it. The call. The beckoning song of the night. Your body extends out into the domain of the moon. There is a pull, gentle at first, chaotic at best. You start to hear the frenzy build in you head, a manic saxophone, and bearing it no longer you leap out of bed. You gather your nocturnal instruments and depart into the realm of shadow. The air is cold and you need a drink. You walk down the block and all you hear is the shuffling of your boots on the cracked asphalt. Sometimes you skip a beat to dodge a root bursting forth through the concrete in defiance of the masters who have asked it to remain low. Slowly you approach life. The city is alive at this hour and the dim thumping of the bass guides you, sandworms in the night.

You order your favorite drink, who cares what it is, do you even know? As the tentacles of the alcohol creep into the edges of your vision you start to ruminate. What do the words that come to you even mean: horrible, tragedy, worst, history, terrible, despicable, disgusting, fascist. The words are worn hammers, and we’ve been using them too long. If you throw a piece of shit into a cesspool you just have a bigger cesspool. Have you ever tried to yell into a hurricane? Your words get ripped out of your throat, flung to the far reaches of the universe, drowned out forever by the cries of the infinite and after you’re done your voice is gone.

Your melancholy thoughts don’t stop you from hearing the music. It’s not your style though, so you walk out. You’re on the hunt for the self-expression you desperately crave, expressed by another. You cut through the darkness, pausing at the entrances of temples to hear the oracles produce their visions. The musicians tap into the collective consciousness of the city and produce an interpretation of the impossible. A trumpet here, an electric guitar there, drums, synth, beats. The music scores your movement, are you the puppet or the puppet master? Whoever you are it feels great. The people around you seem to enjoy it too, and perhaps you feel a sense of kinship but it’s false. Your muse is a reflection of your soul and they have different ones.

The whole world around you is vibrating on the same frequency. You try stand perfectly still so as to not get caught up in the motion. You didn’t sign up for this, so you finish your drink and slip back into the nothing. Still feeling the need to escape deeper, you do, down into the earth past the fossilized remains of the city that was. A man at the piano is explaining humanity in 88 keys or less. You exhale deeply and sacrifice a bit of yourself to this night.

As the notes on the piano fade away, so too do the last vestiges of the call. The moon’s fingers retreat across the sky, signaling the beginning of the end. Thoughts start creeping into your head that you’d rather not have. The dread sinks in, did you stay up too long? You look at your watch and it’s almost 4 a.m…4 hours of sleep will do you suppose.

The 8th of November.

The 8th of November.

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I want to expand on my previous post and reflect a bit more on V for Vendetta, I thought it would be a good exercise given the current political climate. Perhaps some underlying truth can be gleaned from the things I write, or perhaps I’m just nerding out. V for Vendetta is many things but at it’s heart it’s a story of revolution. V’s play is to strengthen the people to take back the power of government into their own hands. So the most important thing he does is wear the mask, and it could have been any mask. But by doing so you remove the man from the idea. Who is V? who cares? Everyone can be V (as Natalie Portman points out), the people need to band together under an idea to take back the power.

This notion is kind of paradoxical though because V’s plan would have never worked if he didn’t take matters into his own hands as someone willing to do things that an average person wouldn’t; he had to be the superman while all the while convincing the people that he was no different from them.  Maybe something else would have sparked the revolution although from the way future Britain was portrayed everyone was happy just complacently existing. So what really triggered it is what created V and empowered him to take action and that is personal tragedy. Whoever V was is gone: imprisoned, experimented on, and baptized in fire V literally had his identity burned away. All that remains is rage and hatred, and this is tempered over time into what becomes his purpose, a Vendetta against those who destroyed him. V perhaps correctly comes to the conclusion that simply dispensing “justice” to those who wronged him, while personally satisfying, will not fix the real reason he was persecuted: The government, or more specifically the Norsefire party that manipulated these events to ensure a fascist victory. So he has to ensure the downfall of the party as part of his Vendetta or his work will not be done.

So what’s the take-a-way from this? There are no supermen in the real world. No one’s going to swoop in and inspire us to take back the power. Instead we got Anonymous who much like V himself has suspect motivations at best. These groups who have sprung up around us act more like world police acting in spite of the people as opposed to on their behalf and by their will. The symbolic gesture of Evey pulling the lever that would explode parliament needed to happen, if V himself had done it then he would be no different from the fascist dictator he was trying to overthrow. But even Evey wasn’t a total representation of the people because V himself stripped her of her identity and fear in the jail cell, and was baptized by rain washing away the doubt that remained.

But do we need a revolution? It’s easy to take arms when you’re being unequivocally oppressed. When your liberties have been taken away, your freedom of expression is gone, and there are no checks and balances among those in power. You could say V only had but to suggest the idea of a revolution to get the people on his side. But society today is a little more complicated, it’s hard to have conviction unless you have personally suffered at the hands of injustice. So now we hit on the theme again, personal tragedy leads to revolution, but not as easily as is portrayed in the film. The hard part in today’s society is convincing those unaffected by an issue to make a stand in favor or against it. In the movie every citizen was being actively oppressed and that led everyone to revolt. In the world today there are different areas of oppression and they overlap in confusing ways. Are you more oppressed for being black or gay or is being both worse than the sum of its parts? So instead we have movements and those movements are revolutions in and of themselves. These movements seek to bring awareness to issues and to convince the people outside of those directly affected to join their ranks.

So ask yourself this: Are you trying to enact change or are you resisting it? Is that change trying to oppress a section of the population who has no control over the issue? Do your feelings come from a place of fear? Are you letting the fascists win? Don’t vote for a politician, vote for the issues they represent. Don’t vote out of fear, vote out of conviction. Attain that conviction by burning away all the layers of yourself and exposing nothing but the raw core of your humanity underneath. You may feel your vote doesn’t count but you can’t be part of a revolution by staying on the sidelines.

Remember, Remember…

Remember, Remember…

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It’s the 5th of November and as is pretty much tradition now everyone who’s seen V for Vendetta or read the graphic novel is imploring social media to remember the date. The ironic thing here is that we only remember the 5th of November on….the 5th of November.

Whereas the original intention of the poem/rhyme was to celebrate the failure of Guy Fawkes and co-conspirators to blow up parliament and effigies of him are burned yearly on this date. The people rejoiced that the plot was foiled, the king was saved, and parliament remained intact. What V does in the story is take this idea and embodies Guy Fawkes to take up his original mission of destroying parliament but really by extension toppling the government. It’s a perversion of the rhyme: he says “remember, remember because I’m going to finish what he started” and now because of the cultural impact of V for Vendetta we parrot this rhyme (which I’m totally guilty of too no judgement here) on this date too.

So now we live in this strange world where we are simultaneously celebrating the real world defeat of Guy Fawkes but also the fictional anarchistic success of V both of which are tied to the 5th of November. Let’s remove the historical implications of the 5th of November though and focus on the use the gunpowder treason plot in V for Vendetta. V weaponizes this simple rhyme by creating real world stakes around the usage of it. He says “In one year I will blow up parliament on this date”. In context he wants people to remember the date as it will be the last spark in the coming revolution that he will engineer. Seen through a more figurative lens though it’s used in a cautionary way: “Remember, Remember the 5th of November because if you don’t we’re going to end up here again with our civil liberties removed and a government in place that runs the country via fear”. So I think we need to “remember, remember” constantly lest we end up where Britain does in the late 2020s. Perhaps a good time to remember will be this November 8th…

Why A Meshuggah pit is the most dangerous pit: as told by a survivor

Why A Meshuggah pit is the most dangerous pit: as told by a survivor

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I know what you’re thinking: “NO fucking way Jairo, a Slayer pit is the most BRUTAL.” That wasn’t what you were thinking? okay uh… is it “Cannibal Corpse pit bro, I lost a hand in one.” Still not it? Okay you must be thinking “Metal?! PSH you’ll get fatal diseases from just standing near a punk pit”

…

Alright man I’m not a damn mind reader what do you want from me? Oh right, this post.

I saw Meshuggah recently (hours ago actually at the time of this writing) and I know there’s this ongoing joke within the community “lol you can’t headbang or mosh to a Meshuggah song, it’s too weird”. There is a whole world of videos trying to mash Meshuggah’s songs to different dances. Just to give you a timely taste:

But it’s not true, these pits are so fucking dangerous. You have people trying to mosh without rhythm….like they’re trying to avoid giant sandworms. I had the “fortune” of having the pit open up right on top of me while at the concert. I got pushed to the back wall, and I didn’t want to move because I had a good view damnit. I’m used to standing next to pit, and just shoving along anyone who gets too close. But this time I was getting hurt all over the place and found myself flinching like a little mitch almost the entire show. Before I lose whatever small pittance of cred I’ve developed though let me explain the shit I was seeing. In a regular ass circle pit, all you have to worry about is moving in a circle, it can get varying degrees of rough but no one is gonna surprise with a punch to the gut or a foot in your ribs. but here..man…here I was seeing people get weird with it. Every time Fredrik and co. shifted grooves people reacted by violently launching their limbs in separate directions. It was like the band was playing QWOP and the dancers in the pit were the character on the screen:


like this but faster, and more violent

So  that in of itself is kind of a weird way to mosh but it’s definitely not the worst. You can safeguard yourself by keeping track of the shifting bodies, making sure you catch the moshers and send them along. But where this enters nightmare territory is with the strobe lights. Meshuggah have an AWESOME stage show, and it involves tons of lasers and lights. They particularly love to use the strobe. Have you ever danced in a strobe light? it’s like you’re seeing little freeze frames of people moving around. Now imagine those people are moshing, coming at you unpredictably  while you’re temporarily blinded. It’s like in call of duty where the military force throws a flash grenade, breaches a room and instead of shooting everyone in the head proceeds to mosh with the blinded enemy. Now imagine me getting blinded by the strobe lights while I try to daredevil the crap out of the darkened bodies and limbs rocketing around me. I got slammed into, stepped on, and hit so many times. I had to assume the emergency protection position: one hand firmly cupped over my genitals and the other arm raised against whatever may ram into me from the front.


Cup your hand and cover up. NWH say, grab. your. stuff.

The Coup De Grace to the whole thing is the bane of any indoor mosh pit: The spilt beer. Oh yeah, all these poor guys trying to get the other side of the pit only to have Meshuggah start the strobing, blinding death dance in the middle of their jouney means that the beer they so desperately were trying to save was spilled all over the floor of the pit. This only exacerbated the problem. All the dancers were now slip and sliding into my shins while I sat there trying to Mr. Magoo my way through the song.  At this point I probably should have just left the pit for safe zone but I was in too deep, I could show no signs of weakness! War is hell man, but damn…it was a good show.