on the sickness

As the year 2012 draws to a close and flurries of snow fall fitfully from the darkened skies, the sickness that plagued me this past week now infects a half-dozen others. I cannot help but blame myself, in part, for getting them sick: my self inflicted quarantine was too short, and my desire to be in their company was too strong, for me to have effectively denied the disease access to additional hosts. It has been years since I felt so ill that I had to skip work; I shall remember this sickness fondly.

The character of the disease included infection of the sinuses and bronchial tubes, which then produced steady amounts of thick, tenacious mucus. I also suffered from weariness, confusion, and decreased appetite. Such was my inability to think clearly that I resorted to editing and posting old texts instead of writing new ones. (I was not surprised to find that many of my previous blogposts were riddled with grammatical and contextual errors, which has lowered my already low opinion of my abilities.)

As the malaise abates and my faculties begin to spin back up to speed, I welcome the opportunity to reappraise the routines and habits I formed this past year. With a bit of foresight and a lot of luck, I may just change them for the better. Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

no superior state

America's system of elections is broken. Instead of all citizens of voting age sharing equal responsibility and enjoying equal privilege in the selection of their president, certain battleground states have emerged (Ohio and Florida are two examples), states in which political parties and their candidates spend disproportionately large amounts of time and treasure, states that have been granted greater power than their neighbors and fellow members of this oh-so-precious Union. If we elect to the presidency a person willing and able to fix this system, we might all be once again be treated equally; if we elect to the presidency a person with a proven track-record of beating back the ever-creeping tendrils of government, one who will veto unnecessary and wasteful laws and fight the influence of deep-pocketed corporations, we might once again look at ourselves in our mirrors with pride, basking in the knowledge that we are all equal under the law, that not ass nor pachyderm meddles in the Peoples' affairs, that the opinions of not Buckeye nor Cornhusker are valued greater than the political views of Blue Mountaineer or Big Skywatcher. We need a president who will make things better, not worse. We need a president who will sacrifice his chances of re-election so as to battle entrenched corruption and the stranglehold of the war-mongering lobbyist.

For the aforementioned reasons, in hopes of breaking the gridlock of power in Washington D.C., and desiring to throw off the mantle of federal oppression, I endorse governor Gary Johnson for president. For too long have we considered votes for third-party candidates wasted votes; for too long have we tried to choose between the lesser of two evils instead of casting our ballots for that person who we know will reinstate the Constitution's tender grasp, who we know will end our illegal wars of aggression, who we know will restore the Liberty granted us by the Declaration of Independence. Please, dear reader, fight the choke hold of business-as-usual, smash your television-set to bits, and vote for the only man who will revoke both the Patriot Act and NDAA 2012, pieces of legislation passed by both Republican and Democrat that continue to desecrate the Constitution and destroy the freedom and equality for which this nation was once known. No state is more important than the next, no segment of the population more valuable than its neighbor. Only by fighting for Liberty can we secure for ourselves her Blessings; only by joining together as twigs in a bundle can we guarantee for ourselves the peace and happiness upon which our country was founded. Stand up – speak out – vanquish injustice – vote Libertarian!

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

on the audacity

Attention, liberty-loving, self-respecting Americans who mind their own business: the forces of greed, deceit, and religious oppression are running for president. Anyone supporting the notion of equality amongst humans ought help to combat this threat. Long have we winced when our leader spoke of ruling us according to the rules found in Christian bible, which is just one of the countless different religious books that we Americans turn to every day. Messieurs Romney and Ryan just announced that if they should be appointed by the electoral college to the presidency that they would add to our secular Constitution a line defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Not only would such an amendment violate the rights of gay and lesbian Americans of sound mind and legal age to wed whomever they should wish to wed, it would contaminate a pure and honest document with the hateful directive of YHWH, the Christian's jealous (Exodus 20:3) and genocidal (Joshua 6:17) godhead. This, however, is not the gravest threat facing our nation at this time; the greater threat comes from the Republican Party itself, and from its mindless, lie-spewing, line-toeing members, light-skinned and well-to-do individuals, puppets marching in jackbooted lock-step with tears of joy in their eyes as their leaders gut the welfare state and destroy the last remaining remnants of fragile, precious Liberty.

Millions march across the globe to protest the greed of vulture capitalists, the avarice of our corporate overlords, and the cruelty of consumption-oriented capitalism, and yet the members of the Republican Party in America chose as their candidate for our nation's highest office a 1%er, a silver-spoon-sucking, income-tax-evading, private-jet-flying, local-job-destroying douchebag whose first name rhymes with shit. And why shouldn't they? They long ago sold their souls to the first corporate bidder to dangle an envelope stuffed with greenbacks in front of their milky gazes, forfeiting sacred Honor for cash, a paltry exchange. This author is not trying to say that only the Republican Party is a donation-addled behemoth that cannot possibly represent the varied interest of one hundred and sixty millions of American voters; the Democratic Party is just as deaf to the cries of the poor, as blind to the whites of its lies, and as polluted with the foul stink of corporate funding as are its donkey-sucking counterparts across the aisle. It is shocking, though, that the Republicans would prove so disconnected from reality, so stultified in what passes with them for thinking, so bedazzled by the righteous fury of religious conservatism that they would even seriously consider openly releasing the platform they drafted for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It appears, however, that my hope for the future of this land was little more than cruel and short-lived fancy, that my belief that we Americans were still a compassionate people bent on uplifting those without means and on perpetuating the notion of personal Liberty was little more than foolhardy delusion.

Beyond this author's whining and my dislike for theocratic rule, the audacity of the 2012 Republican presidential platform is what really chaps my buns, that a party that once included Abraham Lincoln and Theodor Roosevelt could forget that our founding persons conceived this nation as one of Liberty, equality, Safety, and Happiness for all, not as a piggy-bank for brainwashed, super-rich, goose-stepping religious extremists. (America's native religious extremist groups are just as dangerous to our common Safety and Happiness as are foreign religious extremist groups such as al-Qaida or Hezbollah.) A Constitutional ban on gay marriage would destroy the right of each American to choose whom to spend his or her life with, be that person black, white, yellow, tall, short, fat, skinny, hirsute, balding, sick, healthy, gay, straight, whole, crippled, or born without hands. Ultimately, it is not the Republican Party's business, nor is it the business of the federal, state, or local government, nor it is not the business of heterosexual individuals to tell homosexual or transsexual individuals how they should live their lives. So let's all start minding our own business, and focus on making our own lives long, and happy. Stand up, speak out, fight injustice, and keep America free of morally-justified terrorism. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

perspective - it matters

Time, age, tiredness, joy, sadness, loss, gain – these hard-to-define concepts are aspects of the human condition, not iron-clad rules of law but rather matters of perspective that change with one's outlook on life. What is to one person a grave insult is to another as a joyous and welcome gift. A few days ago, a family friend was telling me about growing up Jewish in a Christian town, and how the other kids would throw pennies at her and call her a penny-pinching kike, and other bad names, and how she would pick up those pennies and use them to buy herself cartons of milk and boxes of cookies, which cost about five cents a-piece. And then there is my longtime partner-in-crime, Mr. P, a friend from my childhood in Germany, who makes over a hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars a year, who lives in the new W residences near the World Trade Center site in New York City, and who is so upset with his former boss in Thailand for that man firing him and forcing him to leave that country that his heart has become swamped with hatred, keeping him from seeing his life as blessed, the kind of life that people kill for.

I spoke with Mr. P a fortnight ago, trying to help him see things from a different perspective so that he might come to enjoy his time Stateside and not be so miserable and mopey all the time, but changes in perspective are achieved only by each person individually and are not easily forced, or coerced. So subtle is perspective, and at once so powerful, that entire industries exist to shape and to mold the views of persons who consume media (which accounts for any person who has ever watched TV or listened to the radio). Even as far back as the 1930s, American advertising was so effective and so quick to control and to shape the perspectives of millions of far-flung and unrelated citizens that the National Socialists in Germany, the Nazis, adopted Yankee-pioneered advertising and propaganda techniques and used them to brainwash tens of millions of good, honest Teutons into acquiescing to the invasion of sovereign foreign nations and the eradication of train-loads of men, women, and children. The power of the American advertising machine persists – so great is it that an imbecile such as the political puppet Sarah Palin can be packaged and sold in such cunning fashion that otherwise intelligent individuals come to see her as a desirable candidate for the second-highest office in the land.

You may be asking yourself right about now, “Well then, oh-so-clever LyeSmythe, how can I avoid being brainwashed, and how can I craft for myself a pure and honest view of the world?” Persons who change their perspectives begin by turning off and throwing out their television sets, they refuse to watch junk-TV (think reality- and talk-shows), they get news from sources located in different countries around the world, and they read news in languages other than English. In this manner, self-respecting people avoid the snare of America's propaganda juggernaut, giving their minds enough unique views of news-worthy events that their opinions are not shaped or dominated by just one brand of crazy.

Beyond the political sphere, however, one's perspective of something on the order to time itself – time-keeping via clock or watch, being on or off schedule, on time or off it, early or late – is shaped by society and by the consensual, Western hallucination that time is a rigid temporal plane extending in a straight line from the past into the future. Which is all well and good until one runs into the article entitled the Rebirth of a Sioux Nation in the August 2012 edition of National Geographic in which the author talks about the way the people of the Oglala Sioux view time – as a cyclical maelstrom in which past and present, life and death, and the spirit and waking worlds are shadows of one another, not strictly separate realms. Seeing the world from a point of view so foreign to the cookie-cutter, pre-packaged perception drilled endlessly into the heads of average Americans is a nice way to blow one's mind on a rainy Tuesday afternoon; such adventures into the curious minds of wise and ancient peoples are good ways to keep one's perspectives loose, and flexible. Therefore, on the next occasion that someone complains that you were not on time, you, dear reader, can claim to be changing your views on the nature of the universe, and that the clocks were wrong, not you. Give the gift of cognitive insecurity – change your mind frequently, adopt new points of view as often as you are able, and keep that dome-piece of a swivel. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on street art in NYC

I am yesterday come direct from New York City (NYC), that fair, Mid-Atlantic island-metropolis. Being a purveyor of street art, and a person who collects images of these most fleeting slivers of mankind's dazzlingly bountiful imagination, posting them occasionally at urbanartuploads.blogspot.com, it is my rote to explore a city's avoided and trash-strewn places, taking pictures of any graffiti I find living there. Having collected street art in Berlin, Los Angeles, Amsteram, Philadelphia, Long Beach, San Diego, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Tampa, Boston, and, most recently, in New York, I have amassed an internal sense-knowledge-base of the many different and various trends, techniques, and habits that graffiti writers tend to exhibit; ergo, I believe I can gain a rapid understanding of a city's predominant trends-in-vandalism from seeing but a small portion of the overall milieu.

Perhaps I was in the wrong areas (Hunter's Point, Long Island City, and Manhattan), or perhaps I was on the wrong streets (primarily down Broadway from 42nd to Battery Park, and near the World Trade Center), but most images (except for those examples that will be uploaded to urbanartuploads.tumblr.com in about three months, due to backlog) that I managed to capture were obtained from only a handful of areas around town, including near Canal Street, on the Lower East Side, and in the East and West Villages; the rest of Manhattan was either swept clean of its no-charge-to-the-consumer open-air-art-galleries or the police forces of certain areas are so adept at patrolling and desecrating the works of art that street artists labor to apply there that these clever vandals know well enough to stay away.

Compared, moreover, to the cities mentioned above, Manhattan's street artists seem to prefer primarily self-adhesive name badges sold by one of the major office-supply chain stores, upon which they write – in nearly illegible, seemingly gang-or-crew-specific script – their own names, identifying numbers, or the name of the group or home area. (Such stickers were seen primarily in parts of NYC with little to no other graffiti, as opposed to graffiti-rich areas, which exhibited such profusion of street art that the aforementioned stickers became all but invisible against the colorful and riotous backdrop of other works). Whereas in, say, Los Angeles, one finds curious and strange examples of graffiti adorning otherwise-blank surfaces in nearly every part of the city, whether in the financial district, in the heart of Hollywood, or in the sleepier parts of Koreatown, graffiti in New York tends to be applied to almost any available surface – adorned or blank, private or public – that happens to be in arm's reach of the sidewalk. Whereas in most other cities graffiti-writers generally apply their works of art to the backs of street-signs, to public utility-boxes, or to hatches and those metal doors that cover access panels – mostly avoiding stuccoed or painted surfaces – in NYC, vandals appear to not give a fuck about what they spray over with their pressurized paints, which pisses off the city's property owners.

Persons looking for high-quality street art in New York City will do well to avoid the shiny and the well-swept areas, preferring rather the grimier and less-well-kept areas, which will exhibit such bountiful and beautiful examples of graffiti as one might expect from a world-class city such as the Big Apple. Just remember to stoop slow, to revel in the filth, and to keep your head on a swivel, because the NYPD is alert, and it is everywhere.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit