Today’s manifesto 🙂 Perhaps it’s obvious, but I feel it needs to be said (again) that industry music is like high fructose corn syrup for the mind. Music that is too perfect, made robotic (without intention) and produced, slips through the body like confectioner’s sugar, both toxic and too easy. There are no exceptions. The spectacle manipulates us. The stadium (from rockstars to presidential candidates) turns those who listen into Echoes of Narcissus. (The desire that dissolves us is more nutritious in less manufactured places.) We live in a regime of violent narcissism that trickles down. How do we break the spell? What do we take into our ears and bodies that will shrink the objects of trances? We have criticisms in circulation of economics, from Wal-mart to fast food. But the correlate effects of the spectacle, from all medias to sex, need further attention and from other angles. I wish we could begin to move away from the control of intimate space. For me, that means abstaining from, or using only with the utmost emotional caution, things like cinematic sex, performativity and porn, and most importantly resisting the evaluations of self and other on the material terms that these things generate. I actually believe that, more than anything else, primordial emotional responses can hold within them the power of creativity and vision. But the knowledge of feeling is not immediate; it is slowly made known to the self in an ongoing process. Without that process, self reflection also becomes a commodity. It is not necessary to be a total puritan about any of these things. In fact, I think that too feeds the cycle.