Freeing a Frozen World

Buford Youthward
stockcap@hotmail.com

What is scribble to some is content to others. Memorable content must cast spells. Anything worthy of memory imprint has to take you someplace else. Content will always be nostalgia for some. There's no shame in that. Not when we live in a world made up of manufactured heroes and magnified martyrs, where misplaced madness competes with omnipotent apathy.

I'm not content to chit chat with laptops on desktops balancing radio and rocket technology with human discourse. Etching my joint on servers meant to serve but set to master the way we relate has its moments but it's better to keep moving.

Being in it for the witchcraft is too clichˇ today. It's hard to keep up and keep your pulse hitched to the delusion. Being a maximalist as opposed to a minimalist, getting the most out of the least, is the story I'm forced to write.

I peep the racks before I rack and spy news stands crammed with stapled fluff. No protein, just press releases regurgitated verbatim. The glossy zines gleam with cd samplers and scratch and sniff desires, assuming we need soundtracks and sensory motivation to pass time.

Skill and budget are always at war within the media. Independent presses churn will, drill and spill, but the market is capped. I get tapped out just trying to smoke my resources and make sense of what I see. I can only believe what I feel and distrust my ears and eyes. Getting jaded by humanity isn't a sport for mere cynics. The hope of the market is in the airbrushed gaze staring back at us. Buying in to the lie is the great capital dream.

But there is nothing false about a nightmare. Our fears refuse. They can be denied or hidden but they will never lose shape or form. And just as the glossy monthly exists for potential consumption, the reality of real time passing poses the challenge of getting in synch with the rotation.

Music makes much sense as a way to cope. The active manipulation of rhythmic, harmonic, melodic stimuli is a spit in the eye at gravity and time. Humanity's ridiculous notion that time can be harnessed and gravity loosened is not just the stuff of science. Poetry, architecture, and film share in the dance with time and flirtation with gravity. Sometimes even graffiti freezes the world.

The earth shakes, rattles and rolls past the problems of today. So it is that we must pretend to master our sense of time, space, light and matter and satisfy ourselves with flippant distractions that impress as much as they express. Our imaginations need the employment for fear nature is at odds with who we have become.


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