Sometimes I put really dark and depressing music on because, paradoxically, it cheers me up.
There has been some commenting/observation that this blog may be making some of you cynical. I’m genuinely not sure how I feel about that; the reason I got started doing this was because I wanted to see if I could write under pressure, and I felt I had a “take” on certain things that I wanted to expose to others for feedback and discussion. My original view for this blog was that it would be like a sort of moderated dinner conversation – you know, the kind where people eat delicious food and drink fine wine while talking about the suffering of the starving? That kind, except the guests know that – outside the concrete bunker that they’re dining in – the world is burning and they’re going to have to go outside because the outside is coming inside, ready or not.
If you want to attach some visuals to that, picture the restaurant scenes from Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (which is quite a movie) The restaurant is not in a bunker, but if you were to mentally fuse it with Dienstelle Marienthal – put the restaurant down in the underground bunker – you’d have a nuclear war with waiters. Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 [wc] seen from a vantage-point of mild privilege.
A symposium for one (Peter Greenaway)
I need to focus a bit more on art and cheerful stuff, I suppose.
The last few days I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker on infinite repeat. [wc] It’s an amazing album; it has a sort of structural integrity you don’t get in albums very often any more. It drops with one of the most beautiful dark basslines since Careful With That Axe, Eugene [youtube – live in pompei!]
All of the lyrics and the music hang together consistently, even when he’s switching topics from a brush-by encounter with a woman he might have loved, to musing on travel as a metaphor for death in Travelling Light. It’s rare that I encounter a whole album that I completely love, anymore; the art of building whole albums seems to have died out with MTV and MP3.
Let me mention: you can even forge blades to this stuff. They just come out dressed in black and silver, with edge-patterns you can feel without touching them.
So, now, if you want the proper music for reading this blog, there it is.
I don’t think it’s possible to turn your readers cynical, I would assume most of them (like me) were like that long before they found this blog.
That Leonard Cohen album is fabulous. Deliciously dark and dripping with angst. Mmm… and that voice that sounds like he was garrotted and left for dead. I shiver to think of the blades such music would beget.
Cynicism? I arrived here with it packed in my bag. I stay because you make it eloquent.
This. I don’t know why the fuck it works, but it does. My most angsty, dark, heavy music just picks my mood right up, bonus points if I know the words. Perhaps it’s something about vicariously getting the emotions out into the mysterious ether.
And to be third in line, don’t worry about the cynicism – sometimes I think it was born with it.
I have been pretty cynical for years. Thus you didn’t exactly make me more cynical; instead you just widened the scope of topics I’m cynical about, because I learned about some problems that I hadn’t known about before. For example, before I started following your blog, I didn’t know about the various problems with American nuclear weapons. Nor did I know that the USA is making more of them. Same goes for computer security. Of course, I was aware about the basics, like the fact that computer viruses exist or that I shouldn’t open suspicious e-mail attachments, but I had no idea about just how awful the whole thing is and how deep the problems go, never mind the fact that it’s impossible to solve anything.
I’d say that’s a good thing. Living blissfully unaware of all the horrible things that are happening in this world isn’t better. Consider the average Christian Trump fan, such people are living in a false reality. They might be happy in their dream land, but they don’t even understand what’s going on in the world around them. I would never want to live like that. If my country’s politicians do awful things and manipulate mass media in order to mislead me, I want to know about it all. I just don’t want my life to be a lie and my opinions to be wrong, even if I could have a happier life while being blissfully ignorant of all the bad things. I want to always know the truth even when I don’t like it. I want to make my own informed decisions instead of allowing others to lead me.
Then again, being cynical doesn’t necessarily have to make a person less happy. Somebody who is very optimistic is likely to get disappointed whenever their hopes get shattered. They are also likely to someday experience a traumatic realization that whatever they believed to be true was, in fact, just castles built in the air.
I like art, so that’s fine with me.
One more thing—I think that a writer should just write about whatever they see as important or simply want to write about. As long as a writer isn’t spreading misinformation, anything goes. How you make your readers feel isn’t your problem nor should you worry about it. I believe it’s every reader’s responsibility to pick what they want to read about. If I made a poor choice and got depressed because of what I read, that would be my own fault and my own responsibility, I wouldn’t blame the writer for my bad mood. We all here aren’t victims of some totalitarian state where citizens are forced to always watch the official TV channel. Instead we make our own decisions. By the way, I don’t always read every blog post you publish. If, after reading the title and the first paragraph, I conclude that the topic doesn’t interest me, I don’t read any further. You aren’t dealing with a captive audience here, so I don’t think you should worry about being a bad influence on your readers. If I was writing a blog, I wouldn’t worry or even care about my readers, but that’s because I just don’t care much about people in general (we already discussed this point, so I won’t elaborate).
I think you just described the main raison d’être of classical Russian music.
ahcuah@#5:
Nobody does dark and brooding like a Russian, except maybe the Finnish. Given Russian history, I think they’ve earned it.
voyager@#2:
I shiver to think of the blades such music would beget.
Lots of black and silver. I just finished a build-up with black bog oak handles capped with silver and ebony. Because nothing’s blacker than black on black. Do you want it darker? I got some phosphoric acid and manganese dioxide and whipped up my own batch of parkerizing fluid (gunsmith’s black) – it turns out if gives unpredictable results on damascus; sometimes you wind up with a dead gray, other times it gets wild.
This is 1095 with nickel foil transition zones and wrought iron facings.
Marcus @#7
Wow, that’s a super pretty blade. The contrast between the black blade and the silvery lines on it looks really cool.
That is a gorgeous blade. The silver transition line is so soft and snaky. Very nice set against the black. My twisted imagination can easily imagine it dripping with blood.
That is indeed a very pretty blade. I find your making of things posts fascinating and certainly not depressing.
On the making people more cynical front, I guess you might be doing that for some lurkers that haven’t commented, but I’m with the posters that have said they were already cynical, you ‘just’ give me chapter and verse on some areas that I didn’t know much about.
I’ll second this. If I really want to amp up the cynicism I can always delve deeper into the news or, gods forbid, politics. Reading STDERR makes for a nice change of pace and is usually a lot more interesting than, frankly, most other things I come across. I certainly do not keep up with any news for entertainment purposes. For the most part it’s more of a daily box that ought to be checked. Like brushing your teeth, you don’t have to but will probably regret it if you don’t.
And like Ieva said, you come up with interesting topics that I’d never have thought about. And while the art posts inflict near-lethal envy – I couldn’t make a toothpick from a slightly larger toothpick – I’m always happy, in a green-eyed way, to read those, too.
Gorgeous blade, Marcus!
I am middle aged, a virulent misotheist, and disappointed with life, so of course I listen to really, really scary, largely Europrean heavy metal. One cannot expect to be cheered up when the band on your iPod calls itself LIGHTCRUSHER. :)
Somebody who is very optimistic is likely to get disappointed whenever their hopes get shattered. They are also likely to someday experience a traumatic realization that whatever they believed to be true was, in fact, just castles built in the air.
For some reason, I have been following excerpts from a cheesy Science Fiction series from a few years ago, Stargate. The last few seasons featured a race of evil transcendental beings called the ORI. They used the power sucked up from their worshippers in their ongoing war with another race of transcendental beings, The Ancients. Anyway, there was device, the Ark of Truth, that magically revealed how evil THE ORI were to all their priests and followers. The remaining ORI baddie instantly lost her power! (Nerdgasm….please forgive me)