Cosmic contours

I am a wandering star

in eccentric orbit

across the warp of light

years of a lifetime

charting the contours

of the eternal abyss

Random studio pic of the day: The studio sleeps...

Of course, electronic devices don't actually sleep (Or, in a certain sense one might say they never wake up...?)! At any rate here's how my studio looks at night with the overhead lights turned off. This is in fact the lighting configuration I maintain nearly all the time, as I prefer the diffuse effect of different-colored LEDs coming from various places, plus a couple of spot sources, rather than relying on one or two conventional light sources. The overall atmosphere is funky, "futuristic" and fun, further reinforced by the lava lamp visible on the right-hand side of the photo. ;)

Apologies for the slightly blurry quality of the image -- it's extremely difficult to get a sharp exposure using a hand-held phone camera under such low light conditions -- but hopefully it serves to illustrate the interior aesthetic that I find most conducive to late-night synth programming and keyboard practice sessions.  

 

Eh, yes, that IS a cat in the lower left of this photo. Her name's Phaedra, and I'll have more to say about her presently...

All my Bandcamp releases are now up on YouTube

This past January I FINALLY got around to uploading all my Bandcamp releases so far to YouTube for your streaming convenience and (I sincerely hope) listening pleasure! Here ya go people, crank 'em up and have a blast!!!

RIP Dana S. Barnett (1982 - 2023)

It is with great sadness, and additionally more than a little annoyance, that I must announce the death of myself, Dana S. Barnett, who was without a doubt one of the most extraordinary individuals of his time and a true unsung hero of his generation. 

Being a true underground legend is no easy task, but Dana took to it with grace and aplomb. His intelligence, sensitivity, honesty and creativity - nay, genius! - were practically unmatched by anyone, and yet it was his humility and sly sense of humor that consistently charmed those lucky enough to find themselves in his orbit, for however brief an interval. He kept his feet firmly planted on the ground at a time when everyone else was busy losing their heads, and he never lost sight of the important things in life while others tilted at windmills and wasted their time engaging in petty disputes. 

With his music, his art, poetry and philosophical explorations he demonstrated not only great wisdom, understanding, skill and diligence, but above all the kind of originality characteristic of the very finest artists and thinkers of any age. Always generous with his time and energy, he strove to leave the world a better place than with an almost maniacal degree of enthusiasm, frequently putting the needs and wishes of others well before his own. At the end of the day, is difficult to imagine a more authentic and genuinely gifted human being as Dana was, and it will no doubt be a very long time indeed before we see the likes of him again. He will be badly missed by all those whose lives he touched.

Dana S. Barnett died today on April 1, 2023 after a long and arduous struggle with a cocaine-addled polar bear. Funeral arrangements are pending.   

The ocean within

Queen of Night,

I sink into your mists

like the prow of a wrecked ship

slipping through the velvet abyss

to the depths of the ocean within

Dream theater

No one auditions for the parts they play in life; the various roles we assume at each stage are typically unglamorous, and our appearances altogether fleeting. The dialog is third-rate, the action hackneyed and laborious, and our entrances and exits so often lack the proper timing. The theater is condemned and the seats sparsely filled. There are cracks in the ceiling and rats scurrying down the aisles, their bellies full of skittles and little bits of popcorn. The whole play seems to have sprung from the warped mind of a criminally insane asylum inmate whose pathological lack of concern for the well-being of their characters is matched only by the casual disinterest and bewildering inattentiveness of the audience. Every performance is simultaneously debut and final act. There are no rehearsals.

Yet great rewards await those lucky enough to have been paying attention since the beginning, especially if one is in the habit of reading between the lines. And although probably we will never begin to understand why we've ended up in the particular parts seemingly cast for us across the warp of existence (it would seem that the realization that "we" might easily have ended up in different ones lies near the root of ethics), the kind of understanding which constitutes those rewards - the fruits that hang from tree of knowledge - are notably convergent and frequently worth the price of admission.

The beauty of beauty

If truth is beauty and beauty truth it is only because we have already decided that true things are beautiful and that what is appealing does not deceive, for it is so very often that upon encountering actual things that are true we find them to be essentially uninteresting, patently unappealing, disappointing or actively distasteful. Once in the thrall of such a preconception it is easy to select examples of true things which happen to appeal in some other way also, and to pass over the contents of the enormous list, inescapably far longer than a list of all such things that could ever give us pleasure, comfort, hope or joy, of items that are either of no account due to their extreme triviality or are in some way onerous, oppressive, or intolerable to life but which are nevertheless true facts about the universe.    

This must explain the excessive number of true and verifiable things of which someone might become aware but that very few or none will ever actually come to know, and for good reason: Were we to gain immediate access to the truth of everything around us we would quickly become overwhelmed, subsumed, engulfed, etc. by the deluge of information, descriptive data, parameters, contingencies, eventualities, coincidences, consequences and facts in all their resplendent minutiae, with a total paralysis of our sensibility the inevitable result. 

The beauty of beauty is that it can be comprehended, beheld, perceived directly and immediately understood. Impervious to doubt, beauty is something unquestionably felt. The truth, however, is always open to question, always open to doubt and uncertainty. The truth may be hidden; something might have been missed, something that was not immediately obvious might have led us into error. And though unlike truth people can differ, even dramatically, in their estimation of what is beautiful and what is not, and not fall into error, those who come to know beauty indeed cannot be mistaken in that particular estimation, and only in this way is beauty a certain kind of truth, but not because the object of beauty itself partakes of the truth, or because the truth is itself an object of beauty.