The Activist Commandments of the New Millennium

  (The following text was circulated anonymously as a techno-placa on the internet)

1.     Practice responsible hedonism. Revindicate the sacred right to party, and fight Puritanism in all its forms–it is a subtle form of political control.

2.     Avoid simplistic “us/them” binary oppositions. Things have gotten logarithmically more complex. The new conceptual models for understanding and explaining our times must be fluid, open-ended and multidimensional.

3.     Practice intelligent skepticism, o sea, question simplistic formulas, simple answers, one-sided narratives, dogmatic solutions, self-righteous positions. (Question everything, coño, even these commandments.)

4.     Distrust mainstream media. Go out of your way to remain informed. Subscribe to various alternative magazines. Read the foreign press as much as possible. Scan the net regularly. Get other points of view.

5.     Discuss politics and culture daily with friends and colleagues.

6.     Learn other languages, especially those that will help you understand and communicate with your surrounding “others.” We must all be fluent in at least three languages.

7.     Confront the oppressive and narrow-minded tendencies in your own ethnic- or gender-based communities with valor and generosity. The “enemy” is everywhere, even inside ourselves.

8.     Sit at the table with your true enemies (if you can, of course). Talk to them. Be polite but firm with them–it’s painful, but necessary.

9.     Fight self-marginality. Be an “outsider/insider,” a temporary member of multiple communities. We need to be everywhere: in the media, in academia, in the major institutions as well as in the community-based ones.

10.  Go high-tech; we have no other option. If you don’t participate in the net, and expropriate the new digital technologies for humanistic purposes, you will soon be out of the game.

P.S.: And one more thing­­– don’t make the mistake I am making in this text and take yourself too seriously. If you stop laughing, you are dead.

Gomez-Pena, Guillermo. "The Activist Commandments of the New Millennium." Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back. New York: Routledge, 2000. 77-78. Print.

A Rhyming Contest

A footnote in Byron’s Don Juan mentions a rhyming contest between John Sylvester and Ben Jonson:
“I, John Sylvester, lay with your sister.”
“I, Ben Jonson, lay with your wife.”
“That is not rhyme.”
“No, but it is true.”

(retrieved from futility closet)

Guess what?!

Hey everyone,

I decided to make a compilation of my work, and create a little book!

If anyone is interested in it, feel free to comment or @reply me on twitter (@danielnnz)

Love,
Daniel

My Life Story

My situation is FAR from unique… I soon leave for the next chapter, the next act, the sequel for which my publisher won’t have to ask. As such, I must wrap up the lines, crossing T’s and dotting I’s, before the spine will be glued and the kindle version synthesized. My life story does not begin with the where was I born and the who did I know, but the: what did I learn and why did it matter.

I find myself at a crossroads; street lamps absent. An invisible line extending ad infinitum to my left and my right, despite my brights and headlights, my foresight relays nothing. My shoe meets mud, I’ve equipped myself with a wind-up flashlight, the grinding charge winding whining a soundtrack to my twilight trudge. Over my shoulder I hear memories, interpretations, hyperinflations of past situations; memories, and memories of memories indistinguishable, extinguished with reminiscence and lack of replication.

My past and present memories flicker and fade from me; buy, sell, and trading facts and fiction for free.

Left arm forward I step, the perpendicular plane parallel to my palm, reading life lines and tragedies passing data to prophets and IDs. As I reach the boundary my fingerprints meet solid, like a mime I stand hand to an invisible wall, seemingly stationary. As I wait, I find it moves forward both quickly and slowly. The chronological wall moves logical to the accelerations and stalls of each moment. Weeks pass like days and days pass like weeks.

In America we consider looking behind us the past, and looking forward, the future. There’s a culture somewhere, I forget where exactly, that considers the future to be behind oneself, and the past to be within one’s gaze, since we can see the past clearly. The wall adopts the shroud of the future, my past and present preceding its motions.

Six years have passed since I last wrapped up classes and wore a cap and gown, I’ve found love, friends, I’ve worn out dreams, I’ve created sounds, I’ve driven for hours passing corn rows over dirt roads, dusty hubcaps emoting my silent excitement for novelty. My beliefs fluctuate, reliant on science waiting hours before the powers of gravity remind and mediate my existential opinion. Sex, drugs, Bach and Beethoven, my experiences lay open, every page accessible, some dog-eared in ALL CAPS and others small-fonted and barely legible. Just ask, and I can read you a page.

So, I’ve attempted and feigned adulthood for half a decade… what have I learned?

1. You train others how to treat you (and vice versa)

2. Life is Balance-

Everything in life follows a sin wave, of a sort. The stock market, freedom, weight gain and loss, productivity – the NEED to grow inspires our greatest growth; achieving our goals often begins the downward slope of negligence.

And on that note:

3. Shit happens, and it’s a damn good thing it does.

The greatest growth I have made as a human being has commenced subsequent to or concurrent with painful situations. Moments of fuckery, tumultuous relationships, major academic rerouting- Do you think it hurts when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly? Metamorphosis happens to all of us, the cocoon is intangible. Life experience forms the chrysalis in which we become future-us… we never emerge, we are a constant insect trifecta– caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly all at once.

4. How you treat your body affects EVERYTHING.

From mood, to sex, to how likely you are to get an A on a test… what you put in your body, how much you sleep, how much you exercise, and how much you take the reins and have control over keeping these balanced– this will strongly dictate many facets of your being. I’ve gotten to the point that, if I’m feeling badly, I run through the list: Do I have a legitimate reason to feel this way? If not, what have I been eating? Have I been working out? Sleeping? It’s not perfect, but it explains a lot.

5. For many women, chocolate is more than just a sweet: it’s a solution.

6. Besides being in a loud environment, there is no good reason to raise your voice

If you’re trying to communicate how you feel, and want someone else to respond well… There is a very small chance saying it loudly will defend your argument. As soon as you lose your cool, YOU are now the biggest obstacle between your point and mutual understanding.

7. Never take anything personally.  

Never. Take. Anything. Personally.

It’s hard.

You can never know where people are coming from. It is naïve to think that your interpretation of the sights, smells, sounds, and valences of your surroundings is the ONLY way and/or the RIGHT way to see things. Whatever someone expresses, whether it is love, pain, disgust... It is the trickle of life experience through the filter of their current state. If someone tells me I’m an idiot, I’m ugly, and I won’t go anywhere with my life… That’s fine. To them, at that moment, it is true, and that’s totally okay. It is human to feel hurt about things outside of our control, but human does not mean smart or logical. We can choose to evolve our reactions, involving understanding as the catalyst in the interpretation.

8. There are three types of criticism:

The kind you agree with,

The kind you disagree with,

and the kind you don’t want to agree with.

Lastly:

9. It’s all going to work out.

I don’t believe in destiny, I don’t believe in things happening for a reason. However, just as life is balance, and shit happens, we are BUILT to ADAPT. No matter how hard things get–You are going to figure out a way to make it work. In my undergraduate, I got denied from the music composition program TWICE… and went into music therapy. Now, I’m off to an internship, conducting research, writing for national blogs and presenting at conferences… and guess what? I’ve been FAR more successful as a composer since I’ve left the program. I actually thanked the head of the composition program for denying my access to the professional sequence.

No matter how bad things get, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not going to throw your hands up and go, “Well, fuck it” and just curl up and wait til you die.

Hands up against the wall, I try and look through it’s invisible cracks, attempting a sneak peak at my future. Static predictions lay like pictures, graffiti always changing, paint flaking where journeys have ended, and aerosol cans laying where plans are in the making. I sit with my back against the wall, my life covering the expanse between myself and the horizon. I’m equally nervous and excited for each inch the wall moves, slowly laying me down as it inches and flies forward.

Religion

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful –Edward Gibbon

The Next Day

There are few things more poetic to me than the collective recall of a novel prior event. A gaggle of folks placing puzzle pieces of the previous evening, laughing with the pictures being formed, the holes left behind, the pieces I hide in my pocket, embarrassed at the data it provides. MY forms of this experience border the mundane, a vain LCD beer-goggle memory of flamboyant dancing, perhaps a smooch, free-flow rhymes of internal overclarity.

Catching the eye of a co-party goer, my pelvic preaching reaching for the brakes braces for impact passing competition, reducing the partition from attracting atoms, protons and pro-contraceptives, deceptive cadence, rhythmic steps towards a mutual goal. With blurry eye contact I contact her equally hazy eye contacts I impact my intact ego ergo I go gogo grass romping and floor stomping hashtag #YOLO. Self esteem repleted, cell phone number deleted, day by day proceeded unimpeded no repetition needed. I played it  professional, let the night get locked into internal scrap books and unspoken eye glances remembering the night previous.

When I see films of the fantastic, I brainstorm how protaganists woke up the next morning, how they looked at one another, how they felt a week later. Our ability to consciously and unconsciously gold pan the silt and stone of our experiences post-hoc float on the boat of our rules and regulations, our judgments of the situations past present future – and future intoxicated. I heard once that we are the only animals that get punished more than once for failure, because we can be embarrassed by it later.

Let your judgments devolve, consider their efficacy, the biological advantageosity, ask yourself if your actions would have helped your survival, or hinder it; let the good and bad be not good and bad but incurred better survival or taught you for the future. Don’t stew on negativity, simmer on success and boil and improvement. Strain the pain of your gambits and games, let the colander hold the pasta (pronounced like New Englander) accomplishments and let the scalding water of embarrassment pass through to the garbage disposal. Let your dreams steam, brainstorms cracking lightning, create and ameliorate flow what you know and let yourself be great, let/ go of your imbalances at the graffiti covered overpasses/ don’t wait  /greet the /semi/ at the inner yellow dotted middle of the interstate/ play chicken with hitchens which ends whichever way that you create. Choose your evolution, be your own rebel, and revolve. Revolve around and judge your own actions, be a mirror, a camera, a blog posting stranger, endanger your assumptions and be the popcorn peeking brief glimpses of your projected love story, comedy, drama, and documentary. Be not the protagonist, be the screenwriter, the director, the guy who clicks the marker at the beginning of each scene.

            I love the reruns, the backward swirl behind a boulder eddy letting wetbeds revisit the steady amidst the rush. We do, we review, we learn. We question, we answer, we question the answers, we ask for input, we discuss, we say it out loud, we say it in thought, we don’t say it at all. We have the gift of the instant replay, the memories, the memories of memories that may or may not even be true anymore.

I don’t just want to learn from my memories; I want to revel in making them.