I have spent most of my day on a video buzz, which is as it should be, I’ve spent so long getting ready to do my pirate video, and then I just did it with the very barest effort. No masterpiece but done for the sake of having done it.

Maximizing explosions was a bit of a hit when I’ve showed it to some Reality Compound fans

After maximizing explosions, I decided to do another music video, which was “Low Key” which I was pretty happy with, to be honest. Low Key’s a project I will look back on and be happy with a solid tune with a cool video. Today I uploaded the hamlet video, that I’d been holding back so I could stagger my vids a bit more changing up between music and more um entertainment vids.

The idea of the hamlet video was just to do some acting, the plan was to just do easy, modest videos, and it’s working, I’m doing lots of videos now because I didn’t try too hard to do anything that major. With hamlet I just wanted to remember some lines and try some real acting.

But yeah and I’ve been updating the reality compound channel with more videos too, basically just warming up the channel with activity,

But yeah I just went at that pirate video, well . . . in the most casual fashion. I honestly just went ohhhkkkayyy set up the camera, filmed one take, and was done. Y’know, like, whatever. I could have done 10 takes but I didn’t. It’s about doing it, about getting with video where I’m at with blogging. I blog hard, now all I need to do is bring more quality to it.

I did that pirate video, it’s done, so I’m afforded the luxury of reflecting on what that was about and what’s next. Like Hamlet, it was about doing it, proving a point that I can throw down a video. I can do it. Now I want to start upping the quality, for the next pirate video I want to use a net and do some real slapstick.

The point was my old video was years old and old and ragged. My new video looks much better quality although perhaps I didn’t make the biggest effort to ensure it was as effective as possible. Who cares. Done is done.

The next video project we’re going for is pure juice and juice of life. I have gathered heaps of resources but I’m still trying to get my ideas together. I’ve got the film resources I want to use now I just have to round up my own sources. What have I got?

What I shot of karl and I at upfm studio
Snippets of live footage from karl
Footage of me + Ivan at upfm solar series
additional footage of me at mine and john’s
Ivan’s online stuff.

I’ve actually uncovered a few discs of footage Ivan’s given me so I should have enough, but I still want to use some of his south island tour short circuit footage.

My plan is to actually use all my own sources on both videos, but juice of life is soul science remixing NSU ft. squeezer but pure juice is just us remixing squeezer so all footage of ivan goes to juice of life.

pure juice

ray ban electro
football theme montage
80’s dancing
Concrete TV
top gun

juice of life

interactive-installation – prisma – 3 mins
pieceofpaper – 3 mins
forest footage 7 mins

So what we’ve got here is 7 minutes of forest footage and two 3 minutes of futuristic noir and cyber lights.

so basically forest 0 -1.27 / 3.38 – 4.22 / after 5 minutes
strictly techno lights 2.32 – 3.38 / 4.22 -

and sort of mashing them up in between. I’m pretty much thinking all the footage of me and karl at upfm and me and ivan at solar series will be for pure juice, while all the footage I found from ivan will be for juice of life.

intro – 0 – forest / intro bits
bass – 1.27 – paper introduced /
“chorus” – 1.52
roll out – 2.32 no forest
breakdown – 3.38 forest / microscope scenes
2nd drop – 4.22
wind down – 5.48

Oh man going through all this footage ivan gave me, there is a tonne of stuff! I forgot he digitized my whole tape from downbeat syndrome, there’s enough stuff for a whole short circuit mini clip, and tonnes of stuff I can use in the vid for our stray theories remix.

This is really exciting to dig up new historic material!

Which means for juice of life I have:

Downbeat syndrome material, rescape material,

And for pure juice I have both the upfm related tapes.

So I’m doing the same as I did with low key, making a full length clip based on my own source footage, and adding the bits later. With Pure juice, I have to look at the footage. I think I will use the solar series footage for the melodic parts and the studio footage for the drop, which I’ll also try and put in the bits I’ve got of soul science playing and squeezer playing.

So there will be a little bit of double up on the playing out footage for both vids, and possibly all the best solar series bits, but also 2 clips I took of myself and super sped up so it looks like madness, I think I want to use these in both clips, just try to tease it out use it in different ways.

I mean they’re not supposed to be freestanding masterpieces just yet. They’re videos that are cool to check out if your listening to the song, and I like the idea that having these videos will make us stand out, especially if I can catch up and have the videos ready as the songs come out! That’s why I can’t muck around and if that means using the best footage in 2 videos I’ll be putting out together for the same label, then hey, I’m lazy.

Finally my rendition of the hamlet soliloquy . . .

I was pretty disorganised when I left, I was not a super prepared as I had hoped. Prepared as the DJ, and hooked up online for business, filming, and diligent about what I’d need to take. I ended figuring that I’d been working too hard, and my main thing was that I needed the holiday, so just accept it.

There’s what happened and how I feel about it. What happened is more interesting, but how I feel is more valuable to me.

That’s debatable because in 20 years I will value the fact that we went on tour for a week and we went to vineyards, tasting wine and picking apricots, and we broke into an abandoned office building in the christchurch quake zone, chilled philosophically in the christchurch jungle, I found a rabbits foot, we partied with all kinds of random chicks in queenstown and the sexy dentist in wanaka, where we caused crazy havoc in the hotel room with our unhinged drinking. The vanished world and elephant rocks to oamaru, and our dunedin stop down into the haunted pub, Chick’s in port chalmers.

All that stuff is interesting, and it’s brilliant because there’s a story to tell, but more so, psychologically you feel a sense of having been in the narrative, passed through it. That’s the richness of experience that is life. I come back and I don’t even understand all the stress I put myself under, I don’t understand why I was on that insane archiving binge . . . because I felt that raking over the past was more valuable than going out and living.

There’s a time for everything. I had felt constrained and caught in my own rigid routine, and I felt this slogging data mining into the dank hillside shafts leading into the past, was legitimate. It is legitimate, but you need to have more varied and healthy stimulation. I struggle for stimulation, that’s why I need this, I need to do this to progress forward physically, geographically and absorb understanding and knowledge of altered environments.

I need to charge up on this material. I need it. I need to disrupt the pattern in order to break up clogged up channels that are stuck in a loop.

At one early point in the tour I thought I was bored, it felt old, but that’s at the same point as where in most tours a day or so in, I’d be depressed and overwhelmed, withdrawn from the internet and my other crutches, irrationally feeling withdrawn from your bed, your shower, fresh clothes. That’s important, because you’re jarred from the routine you cling to.

But because this tour was more organised and smooth, at that extraction stage it was just a vague and numb disappointment. It’s the shock of recognising you’re not in kansas.

The gigs weren’t that great though, which is a pretty important component, I don’t care about crappy gigs, but you need your hit as a performer you need to get your fix of crowd response. Without that . . . well it’s part of the experience. So it about evened out, since we had a good time and checked out some cool shit. It was a bit of a disappointment to not really rock any crowds, but it was balanced out by the fact that I mostly had beds, showers, and time to check out stuff. Main issue was too many times where I thought I’d have a chance to grab a coffee or meal that didn’t happen.

I don’t know why I didn’t take those mocha sachets for coffee, and a bag of really good muesli, that’s a decent road breakfast. More the issue with meals is whether we have meals on the tab because I need a decent meal but I’d rather avoid paying for it. I like to eat at the venue anyway it feels uh congruent or something. This tour the new management wanted to cover meals, which was great, but you know me, I have to have a feed of something decent. Perhaps my standards were not really appropriate for the tour because y’know I eat some expensive shit, that’s what I’m used to.

But yeah I gotta do it, I gotta go from place to place. You need to surprise yourself and smash the routine. This is the best way I know how to do that, and I gotta keep doing it whether it costs me or it feels like a waste of time or not. I need to make it work, because if I’m going to do it

It doesn’t make sense to sit still, because you become set and limited in your ability to broaden your perspective and adapt. It doesn’t make sense to distract yourself, you’ve got to actually progress forward, which actually is moving forward in space and receiving this input as experience, knowledge and inspiration. Born to tour baby, permanent tour!

I’m linking here to another piece on anti-consumption, this time from the wire cutter, it starts off in familiar territory about people being depressed or less happy because they’re on computers all the time and not running and playing, happy and laughing.

We know all about the last version of anti consumption, a backlash against rampant materialism, but now it’s about the consumption of a poor information diet.

I talked about this dude I read who was trying to cut down on news because it just fills your head full of nonsense that doesn’t really matter. Most of the information we’re picking up through media and online, is useless to us other than to progress our various anxieties and inadequacies.

So we got all kinds of minimalists and anti-consumptionists coming forward in the intellectual mix for real! So we have another article about this here. The ongoing process of technology allowing us more to sacrifice toward a bunch of bullshit. The illusion of progress, that tachnological advance really isn’t making the quality of our lives better at all.

It’s too much, there’s no way of processing all this constant infomation bombardment, not all of it is bad, but much of it is just not useful, it’s not consequential in our lives.

So this guy ends up proposing an information diet – less TV, less games, facebook, twitter, youtube vids, and he says that gives him 3 hours a day he didn’t have before, for doing his own thing. He liked to build things. I like to create stuff anyway, but these days I seem to be really into exploring ideas, and so I blog a lot.

I’m pretty lucky that I’m already well along the path. I don’t have a TV. I don’t really spend more than a few hours a week either watching a movie or TV. I do act as if twitter is not an issue but I am a bit of an issue with it, because it’s my one outlet.

Except I did just join facebook, but in saying that I decided to be extremely cautious about it. That is under review. We want to review the quality of the information we’re getting, the quality of the connection.

Right now I’m purging my reader, and it’s always the same, so many of these blogs are just dead, so many people start them and they’re done! I just love to write and blog, I don’t get more than a 100 hits a day, but most of these guys they just disappear they fall off!

It’s not me. I just write anyway, it’s obvious I don’t really care if people read what I write. I just feel simplifying my life is actually quite a positive thing, it’s true there’s just too much information that is useless.

There’s heaps of blogs that I once found out something on. Something that was important and helped me in business or in my thoughts on a particular subject. But I don’t really care about that now. I know enough about business and I can’t be bothered learning any more because I’m more interested in knowledge more valuable to me.

A lot of music marketing blogs have to go, they’re gone. So many old internet marketing blogs just left or run into the ground by new owners posting crap content, they’ve been sold off and stripped. Abandoned armies of blogs. New Zealand businesses I’ve been snooping on that gave up – on blogging at least. Silly. Too much work was it?

Entrepreneurial blogs, they have to go. I’m just beyond that now. If I really want to make more money, and I can’t see myself wanting that much more right now, I’ll go back to it. I’ve got ideas. I know what I have to do, I just don’t want to waste all my time trying to make money I don’t need. Unsubscribed from some ranting lefty blogs. I’ve heard it all before. I’ve got my blogs I like, and I’m spending too much time “clearing my reader” which is dumb.

Except I don’t know if distraction is so much my problem as direction . . .

I set up a new facebook account after my first facebook account was deleted, but it was just mainly for business anyway, but I thought that that was bullshit. Over the years I set up several accounts none of which I planned to use but I still have one account that my mates were on and they still link to me there.

unfortunately it’s hard enough getting started on facebook as it is without having to check on this profile and what it is doing, and all the situation there, so I figure I’ll leave that for now, and focus on a clean start. What I do there later, whether it’s a quiet, clean solution or not, no one has to know all my stuff. What’s the point?

Well what did I suddenly want to be on facebook for? Be honest. Sure, the tour meant felt I needed to be in touch with people so that the connection isn’t developed,
but that moved wider to thinking I’ve be negligent socially and I need to get active there. We need to use facebook as a way of staying connected with people who can help me get with my goals.

But sure, if girls are looking for me, I want to be found!

Okay so unrealistically I’ve just got this idea that I’ll be all up to date with my mates doings and then suddenly all these random unexpected cool friends will emerge from the past and the future and invite me to a million cool parties and I’ll be messaging all the hot girls I meet there for dates.

In reality, my mates will annoy me with dumb shit, there’ll be people I won’t add and then there’ll be people I met and added who are not going to be any value.

There are going to be people who are close to me who’ll be privy to certain behaviour.

I like the idea of having 2 accounts but what if people straight away realise I have more than 1 account? So what, you tell them that you got one party account and one straight account. When in reality the party account, is a screening account.

On the flip side, I can delete all my sensitive close contacts from the screening account so I can

We’ll have to feel it out. I think when I meet the first person I want to hold back, I’ll join them on another account. But right now it doesn’t matter, all I did was start the account, dunno what comes after that. All we did was start something, it doesn’t mean it’s going to go anywhere.

Although I am back from tour I am not that keen to really discuss it immediately because I want to come out of the blocks keen to head to a new direction and not get caught up on dissecting an old frog. Whether it’s journeying across the landscape or writing endlessly there’s one thing that counts – moving forward, moving on up to your destination.

The idea is to positively put forward action, like do something rather than being stupid and just being an idiot which basically means not doing anything.

You can blog, but blog in a smart way moving you to the new tunes you want to do, the new videos, if the blogging is leading there, then good. If the blogging is going to a better blogging place, then good. We have to decide right now what is up with our blogging and where we can do some good blogs. We’ll have to start doing good blogs here now. A lot more blab will have to be shuffled over to the business blog and music business blogs, but really we have to choose to blab away less, and to focus on putting down 6000 word wordstorms that actually go somewhere.

Again it’s that stupid thing where you have to make decisions about what you’re going to do, rather than just be swamped by this nothing, but then there’s too many decisions, be a better DJ, do some more reality compound videos, write more drum and bass songs, write other songs . . .

But people need to know what I’m up to, I know even what little music and video I’ve done needs to be out there more for people to get. The only way is to actually put down the ill awesomeness. Maybe I have to get a facebook because I have to get with my people but again what I actually have to do is get with my content, because my content is how I put it to my people.

I’ve updated the reality compound youtube, and added a twitter, and now I’ve finally set up a new facebook account.

I want to manage some shit out there, get active managing relationships, but my way, which means being smart about it. Minimum investment of energy. Just ignoring all that hasn’t worked out. I need to but my business first, but I need to break some off for the old vibe online, and acknowledge this is a big part of being social now.

Blogs will have to be part of that, and I’ll have to be smarter with what I write.

Now my video production site which was my favourite dumping ground for screeds of stream of consciousness is getting frequented more often so I can’t dump the toxic waste of my mind there! Y’know I want to link to my blogs and people to read several good pieces and decide they want to follow, but not if it’s just me mentalizing endlessly.

Too many blogs about boring business stuff that means nothing. It’s so pointless,I barely understand it, except that trying to have a sensible business blog and a sensible artist’s journal discussing interesting themes is just too boring to cope with. None of it really matters at the my highest functioning level of business or art or anything, so why not just go on?

Oh because I’m meant to have a plan to do something? It’s too boring.

Too boring to know what you want? Too boring to work out where to go? Who’s got all the answers? We blog because we push on toward the possibilities of getting further in tunes, in video, in DJing, pirates. I gotta catch up with where I’m at. I gotta put down some more funny, and I’ve got to organise relationships and connections to make things happen, I’ve been copping out too long. I got tunes to finish. Videos to finish. Blog about it if you want to, but just get on with it.

Maybe I should get a mix done for my tour. I’m going on tour and I thought I’d better get sorted out. Well now I’m supposed to be leaving in the morning and I am completely unorganised.

- Oh yeah, I do stuff like making music and DJing and stuff I just don’t tend to write about it, it’s y’know? Like dancing to architecture.

So yeah I’m going on tour doing 5 dates in the south island.

Jan 18: Franz Josef
Jan 19: Wanaka
Jan 20:Dunedin
Jan 21: Queenstown
Jan 24: Christchurch

So the first thing to think about is what to play. Any fool can jump up and play some music but if you want to represent yourself as a “real DJ” then a degree of preperation is involved. Anybody can learn to beat match but a real DJ does his homework.

Tonight I am doing my DJ homework.

Now that I’m key mixing I truly feel like I can improvise and roll out on the fly, but also a few things have changed in my DJ style since I last went on tour over 2 years ago. Really 2 years? Really. I’m not so purist about playing new tunes any more. I always play more state of mind and shapeshifter in my sets anyway when I’m on tour, but now in the last year I’m not really apologetic about playing big ramping sets of classic smash ‘em up combos if the audience aren’t discerning.

I think Drum and Bass is becoming more similar to house, with a slighter older audience than you’re average brostepper, but a ramping set can still pull in the kids for a rage, out of centre city clubs they aren’t so fussy. It’s pretty good really, if the vibe is low key I can roll out deeper tunes in key, if the vibe starts to ramp, I can switch into my long chains of banger combos.

So DJ homework means key detecting all the tunes I might choose to play.

A DJ has to be prepared, because the more you rely on technology and systems, the more you can be caught short when systems or technology falls over, so you have to be more prepared. I personally have to be more prepared because when it comes to DJing – like most things, but particularly DJing – I don’t handle stress well, and little upsets can get to me. Shitty gear at the venue is nothing you can do anything about, you just have to do the best you can, which I have experiencce of, but when your own systems let you down or are challenged, that’s where you need back up.

I’m just thinking because in the past I’ve had real trouble with nero and burning formats – I’ve had trouble over recent years turning up to parties with just mp3’s when they only have decks that will play audio, but on tour and now these days more often, I either have my mark 3’s, or clubs are more likely to have decks that play data.

but my secret problem right now is I have to rename my tunes in such a way the CDJ recognises them and puts the key code visibly in the display, for some reason, my name changes to show the key code for each song aren’t displaying, so I can’t really improvise until I sort that.

But there’s possibly places where drum and bass won’t be suitable and of course if you look at the bigger picture of me doing the upfm beat dungeon new zealand electronica show, and just generally, I want to expand my horizons a bit more, I want to be bringing up the standard of my New Zealand dance music sets by not being so blase about it, actually keying all my tunes and culling out tunes that aren’t that good, or at least having some “go to” stuff so I can look at other spaces and palces for me as a DJ.

Not just drum and bass and new zealand electronic music, but also doing sets of kind of 1995 – 2005 classics, having a really really solid library, so you’ve got all your bpms and keys grouped together so you can start really working out and going on journeys and getting opportunities to play parties to older people who are going to want to listen to music and beats from 1995 – 2005 for the rest of their life.

They’re pushing royksopp for the big day out and they play that tune of theirs and it just makes me think of how the pre-myspace era music was always defined by all these underground hits, I’m sure you could gather hundreds of them and play sets that would get 30-somethings OMGing all night.

One thing at a time though, I’m going on tour now, but it’s interesting to think where you could go on the DJ vibe, especially when you’ve got layers of technical skill and experience. I just tend not to push it because it’s all associated by me with excitable young dudes and various wankers who all take it too seriously.

I guess it should have been obvious. Young middle class guys love mixing dance music because it’s not that easy to do and is extremely nuanced.

I gotta sort out my laptop / camera situation. And my place and whatever. This is good, good to be back in the habit of packing up and rolling out, just used to living that way, It can be quite inefficient, hard to settle and zone in, but then you’re also learnign to draw on resources in not necessarily comfortable conditions.

There is a factor . . . in the balance of you and everybody else, it started off talking about doing art for you vs. your audience, but now exploring the concept of pure enjoyment, it’s going deeper on that theme – like the balance between the you that exists for you and the you that exists for the world.

When I’m creative I’m just trying to express more efficiently.

Blogging allows you to just waft somewhat aimlessly and a creative vibe can really blast that all away. But I am learning to be more patient. I know that with me, when I make a plan to get something done, hell it might take 10 years . . . but you might be surprised.

I also know that I run a successful business and I am starting to learn how to keep my creativity happening, while the cash keeps flowing, which I have to recognise is definite progress.

You ask yourself what you enjoy, you try to dig deeper and you wonder what the answer is, maybe . . . you don’t enjoy yourself enough.

I’m trying to think of a writing project I could do that would be decent, and that’s the good thing about me and my archiving and what not is that I usually have an old idea handy I can go back to.

Like the “How To Be Awesome” Ebook!

The main thing about HTBA is that it does a freaky flip, it starts off as a silly self help book, until the narrative voice starts to skewer into a more fictional account, it’s as if the narrator or the voice of the book goes from cock sure to questioning, and then starts peeling off altogether.

I think I have to think about writing more sensibly on this blog, y’know, like if I wanted to make this a more serious post I would be seriously asking what a guy who can write a lot should aim to write.

Write a blog, and an ebook to go with it, but make it about something people want to read about, not just fluff all day and all night.

You see there is a factor . . . in the balance of you and everybody else. Why should I change my blog just so more people will like it?

It goes deeper than that if you like. I mean, who are you, really?

Are you you for selfish reasons or do you exist only at the intersection of how those who surround you perceive you?

Do you accept that?

I was always conscious of the fact that outside my own perception I only exist as hundreds of perceptions of me by those who know who I am, and that that was valid. So many people tell not to care what others think of you, but I’ve just seen far too many sane people deluding themselves completely with such force that it grips them and everyone around them.

A lot of people find limited use for reality. I’ve talked about this before in comparing reality to fantasy without resolve.

But who defines who you are? You or them?

They define you by what they know. They base their assumptions on millions of precursory computations, many of which have created unsound algorithms.

You define yourself by your choices, isn’t that the whole idea this blog is going on? Blogging to understand enough to make the correct path to choose your own way? But those choices take place in a context of compromise that is society, the whole of civilization is a compromise of choices made by individuals.

But some groups have moved to take choice away from others, who for the most part welcome the respite of having to make choices. Even left to their own devices, most people will not think through their choices.

I think about my choice to think about choices, and I reflect whether I was too smart for my own good, I never chose to make mistakes that could have changed my life.

I am an analytical person and am extremely sensitive to the cues I pick up and the information I am receiving. I love to receive information and through a process of understanding, reach my conclusion. The person who lies to themselves, that isn’t me.

Unfortunately that means the channel is wide open, and all this information I’m receiving repeatedly suggests below expected outcomes with girls.

What are you willing to choose to do to get an audience for your art? To get girls?

Y’know I’ve been trying to pinpoint a part of me that is enjoyment, and pleasure separate from status and development. That’s where I said that my music bares a burden of expectation, and video production is a series of personal challenges as a performer and technological challenges as a producer. It’s not a matter of motivition, it’s calculation, videos take a lot of work so it matters to know that what you’re doing is a sensible deployment of your efforts.

Writing isn’t so indulgent, with writing you just hit it. But if I’m saying that I enjoy writing, why do I enjoy it? Do I enjoy for me, purely, do I write droning nonsense all on these blogs because I do it for me and I don’t really care to be burdened by the need to impress other people or derive benefit from it?

But what’s the point of that? Why not lock yourself in a cupboard for a year, maybe you would find that “unburdening”?

What’s the point of saying anything that doesn’t mean anything to anybody but you? Isn’t that selfish?

But that’s the point – enjoyment that asks nothing of anyone, yet holds out joy. I don’t ask people to read my blog, I write and blog because I question. I want to understand so I can make the best choices, your choices define you. Your ability to make the best choices allows you to progress and develop, even if it’s just an illusion of one issue begetting the next, the same repetitions of experience.

We’re taught to see the patterns, we make the pattern, we are the pattern, but the essence of this shaping force, the shape of conflict, which defines all things, the choice begets another conflict which begets another choice.

I’m 5000 choices away from becoming a millionaire, but at any stage I could choose not to be a millionaire, that is the power choice has to define me. I could choose to enjoy myself, and find myself defined by the fact I feel as if I underachieved. What is the enjoyment in that? Feeling bad about yourself? I feel proud to drive my beamer up because I worked for my money.

Don’t you want to step up in the venue with the girl and my new works being acclaimed knowing with pride that you worked for it?

This is a really top doco on modern art culture type things that I blog on from a personal angle, and it’s definitely a must see.

PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.

Great music and great artists feature.

It’s mainly about technology allowing for a new dynamic to creativity, mass personal creativity to a “crisis of democratized culture” which one dude was talking about which I found really compelling, they were talking about the life cycle of creative industries, the death of craft, and how current technology will age.

The new york guys though were pretty funny, all trucker beards and psuedo masculine stylings, smart guys, but still. All the chicks look like teenage boys and all the guys look like bears.

Can’t help but look at these guys and wonder, you’re smart, but what kind of thinking led you to decide you all need to wear v necks, trucker beards and funny little woollen hats?

Oh you’re a lumberjack, and you’re an an elf creature! A woodling? I’m going to start asking hipster lumberjack elves if they are woodlings who have lost their magic pipes that make all the animals sing and play.

That’s not what the documentary is about though. I really enjoyed it.

At first I was depressed because I don’t know anyone I can be arty with, but then I’m not very arty myself because y’know, I run a business. But the fact that I make music and blog and make videos makes me sort of arty, but not full on arty. I just tweeted something about all artists being impoverished egotists, y’know, I despise watching people crawl on their belly and if you’ve got no money then guess what? Probably every other day you’re in some undignified scenario, like hanging around the dude with drugs because you can’t afford your own.

It’s not me!

The documentary touches on theis “crisis of democratized culture” everybody grabbing and saying look at me! I’m cool too! How’s it ever going to work?

There’s one chick who starts sounding fruity like how it’s all so amazing and seth godin’s there saying it could all happen for you by statistically, relatively it won’t!

Seth tells us we can do it all, and now we’ll just feel worse about ourselves

In the meantime, how does it benefit for us all to start believing we all matter so much? You take guys like Rupert Murdoch, who may not be much of a lizard afterall since he’s been hung out to dry, but they guy knew how to manipulate the masses. He saw trends, and leveraged a more mediocre manifestation of humanity to take advantage of them.

Is he right or wrong? He’s looking more like a nihilist every day. What does the information we receive about media give us in terms of understanding and take away actions?

Media and marketing dickbags like me watching this stuff understand how powerful it is that everybody wants to be a rock star and I felt very gratified watching the doco and understanding, with understanding that I’ve been playing that game for years now and it’s why I’m financially comfortable.

It comes back to the manly trucker beard dudes, they were the ones pushing the story angle, that despite technology it was all about the ability to tell a story. They didn’t go in any deeper than that.

But it’s about a market for people who want to tell their story. I’m no good on this blog and I’ve been wrestling with that because I’m not appealing to anybody else’s narrative but my own. There was a funny tweet about the Listener magazine the local weekly general middle class mag mock cover story: “how does your home value effect your children’s performance at school?”

Basically.

This super generally targeted kind of “product” type information, it’s specifically for the audience but it’s so robotically tuned. It’s not art or creative to cater to some demographics finely tuned needs. It’s commerce.

But this is what markets are demanding, they demand what matters to them. Is it for good or bad? That’s irrelevant. People want to express themselves. What do they want to express? Everything. They want to do art, they want to be artists. That is the trajectory we’re on.

There’s going to be no rush to self restraint any time soon. Expression is evolving and mutating, successful expressions will go on, defective expressions will not. Just as religion thrived as people sought to understand the world, now people flock to try and understand themselves.

What is there to understand? What are they looking for?

People live longer, they have less kids, they have more time, they are going into themselves and manifesting these new beings who are clued up with technological knowledge. You got these new beings with knowledge while most people are either starving or stuffing their faces while watching kim kardashian.

These people aren’t thinking people. It’s not their fault, it’s not my job or your job to save them, but go for it if it makes you feel better. This blog will tell you, I want to look at my archives and remember that my life meant something and that’s other people want too. Giving that to them is not exploiting them.

They want to celebrate and understand their lives by making art. With video, with music, with food, people want to show and to play. This way we learn, and we progress, helping people to do that is of real value. Exploiting people’s loneliness, fear, hatred, sexual alienation, intimacy issues, loneliness, inadequacy, that’s not right, that’s not progressing anything.

Media and art help people to remember who they really are and what matters to them. I think as a businessman I obviously have grasped this, but have I got this as an artist?

Maybe I have, because I think an artists job is to help people get in touch with themselves. When I’m stressed out over $100 I’m not in touch with myself. When I’m texting some girl I’m not really keen on, I’m not on the vibe. Art has to bring you closer to what is really who you are.

Who am I? Well if I knew I wouldn’t need to make art would I? Art is understanding, and understanding is a mirror of infinite shards reflecting different truth. It’s about the choice, what is the truth to you?

So y’know I started turning the place upside down and now I’m looking at this blog, well to be honest I was dicking around, rearranging the furniture and then next minute, as should have been expected the phone starts ringing and dudes are hosing me down with cash once again, and it’s all like it always is.

I was trying to figure out what I really enjoy doing. To forget about trying to be something for once and go back to really just having fun with what you’re doing, and having it flow more naturally, and be naturally drawn to it and excited by it. Well I enjoy unwinding by writing my blog, just some stuff and wondering what it really means. That’s art isn’t it?

Sure, but I’m just stubbornly self indulgent I refuse to edit my blog or even write about anything other people would enjoy reading about.

But I wanted to still finish off my kind of round up thing of 2011 by looking at . . . well, towards the end of 2011 I was much more into knowledge and wisdom. First it was trying to think more critically about gender politics and then when the rugby world cup and election were on, I just reacted by trying to get my head into more important concepts. A boing boing post turned me onto ribbon farm which is now my favourite blog, and that turned me onto bruce sterling, and I just love these guys, serious interdisciplinary concepts for living.

So I wanted to have a whole post devoted to going from stuff science, gothic high tech, to where we’re heading, but this probably isn’t it. But I did read quickly over the latest ribbon farm post and he was talking about stuff that is relevant to me again, because what this post IS about is going deeper into discovering what I could be blogging about that is real and matters.

A quote:

“But the scribe-blogger cannot assume that there is anything coherent to be discovered in the gonzo blogging theater.”

I think he was referring to things unfolding so quickly as we’re just blogging and what not that it ceases to have any depth and the nature of blogging is very much about feeling stuff out rather than truly understanding it, and well, I can identify with that.

It connects with my ideas about enjoyment. Enjoy blogging, but if you don’t want to make an effort (and kill the lazy enjoyment of being a ill disciplined ranter), then maybe you need to be looking at video and music – the stuff that feels like work – to make the gains that will feed the ego and make you feel like people give a shit.

But that’s another thread there. After I wrote 6500 words on new years eve, that was a statement that I should be writing, I should be thinking about what and how to write something more effectively, and then get stuck in to writing.

I am serious about being a pirate but I haven’t found the right path yet. If you want to make money, make money. If you want to chase girls, go for it. If you want to do youtube, hit that shit.

I’m not going into the pirate thing with the right spirit because well in pirate parley, I’m not taking any risks, I’m just choosing pirates because it seemed like the best opportunity to do money, girls and videos, and I don’t know if that’s right. I should be doing what I want to be doing, and if I really wanted to dress up as a pirate I think I’d have no trouble doing it.

RETURN OF THE POWER MASTER

Doing funny videos isn’t about anything but me trying to work with a side of myself I like to see, I enjoy seeing myself as being an earnest performer. The fact that it won’t make me money or get me girls is why it matters. It’s pure. It’s me being me.

I started playing with some ideas for power master again as it is the natural progression of videos on the kurb channel and it’s as I say, I’m looking for the places, the paths where I’m moving forward and motivated by enjoyment and excitement.

To be jumping in front of the camera to do power master every week because I loved doing it would be awesome. Power master can go out on the street once we’ve done enough solo stuff and because power master is general self improvement he can advocate powerful mastery in finances, romances, health and spirituality.

Again we’re getting this lord jonathon/pirate matty thing where power master/preacher mathias are similar characters, and all 3 names have the initials “P.M.”

I think the idea is I ride in on these “funny” characters who slowly dissolve over time until it’s just me, breaking into various characters and sliding in and out in an almost schizophrenic way. The layers peel off like an onion, as first you see the characters, and then I break character but still remain serious about the characters as legitimate money scams, before it becomes obvious I’m just this guy trying to be funny for youtube.

you don’t have to choose, you don’t have to think, you don’t even have to be alive, you just have to believe you’re THE BEST!!!

powermaster shows you a power pickup by demonstrating mastery over dominating power.