Moving Day

Gang, and others,

I'm not posting here lately. I am going to keep this space active, but I'm not interested in posting here at this time. I have registered a domain in my own namesake, and you may find me there. So, Lindsey, if you're paying attention, Candace, if you're still lurking, and all the potential rest of you, I am at jasonwester.com. Find me there.

Jason

Happy Thanksgiving!

Enjoy turkey and yams and rolls and apple pie and greenbean caserole and mashed potatoes and all the other yummies you enjoy. Give thanks to those who provided your meal instead of imaginary beings who had nothing to do with it.

Atheist by the Grace of God

I'm slowly recovering from slight trauma I experienced last night after being preached to for two hours about Islam at a presentation I attended as part of my sociolinguistics course. The presentation was billed as a Muslim woman feminist speaking about the roles of women in Islam. What it actually turned out to be, however, was a two hour preaching session in which this woman extolled the virtues of Islam, preaching about how polygamy was good (Muslim men are allowed to have four wives), how women were really not treated badly in Islamic cultures, and how we are all going to have to stand before Allah on judgment day.

What was striking about the presentation was how eerily similar it was to our own Christian fundies in this country and the rhetoric they vomit forth. For example, gays and lesbians, very bad (this woman even implied that AIDS was a homosexual disease), premarital sex, bad, and the language of certitude, as in, all of us will have to bow before the Creator. The Creator rules us all.

Why is it that the one thing that people cannot know, cannot possibly know for sure, that a God exists, is the very thing that they express with absolute certainty? Never are any qualifiers used: I believe God exists. I think there is a good chace that God exists. God probably exists. NO! It is always expressed with absolute certainty. God is going to kill you, you fucking sinner. You WILL answer to God for your sins!

The thing is, when I hear that, it tells me the exact opposite. It's like this, and I've said this before: If I go out of my way to say to you, you don't scare me! I'm not afraid of you! What am I actually saying? I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying that you scare the hell out of me, otherwise I wouldn't say it at all.

Same thing here. Everybody with a brain on thier shoulders knows, knows deep down in their gut, and I mean they KNOW, that there is no big bad God. They know it is a fairy tale. They know that it is utter bullshit. But, they think by stating it with certainty that they will somehow make this bullshit fairly tale real. They can trick their unconscious mind into buying it. That's all there is to it, really. When you say, in absolutes, that God is exists, you are effectively saying the opposite: God doesn't exist (but I sure wish He did).

The more I see crap like this in the world, the more certain I become of the destructive role of religion. It hurts people, and almost never helps them, and any benefit that comes from it is almost (qualifier) certainly a byproduct, a lucky break. In other words, if a religious person is a good person, it is in spite of their religious beliefs, and (almost) certainly not because of them.

All of the faiths, Christianity, Islam, you name it, are the product of the same disease, and they all exploit the same human weaknesses for their livlihoods. Religion may be a necessary evil, but on the whole the human race would be much better off if people would simply listen to their hearts and dismiss religious beliefs for the fairy tales they are, stop deluding themselves with the wishful thinking of god-belief, and accept reality as it truly is.

Who am I Kidding? Beck is still God.

As the title says, who am I kidding? The Information has entered my waking consciousness so now I walking in the hallways of Leonard Hall and whistling, singing, various songs from the album. It starts with a seeping into the unconscious mind, percolating there for a couple of weeks, and finally emerging in the conscious mind. It is a good album, it just has to percolate for a while. Disregard previous review. Beck is God.

Something Missing: Review of Beck's The Information

As many of you know, a new Beck album is a rare treat for me, something I look forward to and sometimes dream about. Naturally, I was at the record shop when they opened the doors to purchase Beck's newest offering, The Information. The disk came with a set of bizarre stickers and the cover was made of graph paper, the idea being that every person can design their own cover.

Okay, so that was moderately fun. (See my cover to the left). Problem is, and please understand how much is pains me to write this, that is about the only thing fun about this album.
I don't necessarily want to go into the scientology stuff, which has been written about elsewhere, particularly here and here and here. Suffice it to say, when the last track on the album "The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton" contains an absurd conversation about space ships, I start thinking the worst.

But this album is bland and joyless, mindless, and limp as a noodle. It is all dressed up with a hiphop veneer, but beneath the flashy surface there's none of the depth, the complexity, the brilliance that characterizes Beck's previous work. Maybe Beck is the victim of his own success, or maybe I'm holding him to an impossibly high standard, but I've listened to it beginning to end several times, giving it every benefit of the doubt, hoping that it will reveal itself to me, but as yet that hasn't happened.

I experienced a similar sensation with the previous album, Guero, but eventually I did find a spark in it, just not as quickly as I was accustomed to with Beck. I found many of the tracks on that album cold and pointless, but there was still some musical inventiveness and a touch of fun, a muted homage to the themes of Midnite Vultures, that won me over. That, I think, is where The Information has failed. The lyrics are predictable and and the music lacks flair. Most of all, it lacks fun. With the exception of "Cellphone's Dead" and "No Complaints" I can find no other tracks to hang on to.

To echo what other reviewers have said, Beck is goin' nowhere fast, and that might be because he has stopped reaching out into the musical universe. Both Guero and The Information are remarkably hermetic, rehashes of terrain that Beck had already explored. The genius of Beck, when he was on top of his game, was his ability to grab music, the leftovers and throwaways of diverse musical genres, from all corners of the globe, and mesh them into something fresh and unique. Officially, that aesthetic has gone missing in The Information, and the result is music that feels stuffy and stale. Beck desperately needs a breath of fresh air.