As I drove home from the weed store today, I resolved to write these more often: if I wait more than a week I have too much to say and still end up missing many things I want to comment on. Did I even mention that I had a new dream about Gaga, where I was with a friend or two watching her videos on Youtube? Probably not, it was just the other day. Well, I feel like the rest of the night was full of media magic, things on TV and radio, that confirmed this is a good decision. I had previously felt a little guilty for writing this when I should work on my Gaga / Oz magic book, but I realize now that writing more and more will help that book become the best it can be now that I'm really ready to write it and stick with it. But I won't stop writing this as I do - I will still have more current timely things I want to talk about.
It was only my own idea to write this last series of Gagablogs about my own uninformed interpretations of the songs on Artpop. I want to finish that project but I've taken two years already. As I typed that I remembered a strange interaction with someone on facebook who asked me to copy a page of Gaga's VEVO videos into an email to her. I never figured out what it was about but I think of it now as a magical symbol of what I've been doing, here. I don't feel these have been wasted, but I do feel like I need to change speeds: ever since Swinefest I felt like I was trailing far behind Gaga, not in that graceful zone of drafting along in her wake, being carried by the rush of waving boundaries she breaks through. I've been far behind, like at the base of the hill watching her up on the horizon. It's been great, in ways: I do talk with a very few other little monsters but I'm not really part of the online community. Instead, I talk online with magical communities and try to carefully introduce them to Gaga magic. It's like the Buddhist bodhisattva vow to continue to incarnate until all beings are liberated - I want to stay outside until everyone is "in", to make sure everyone makes it. Well, the media magic tonight gave me a few new ideas about how to let everyone into this magical world, and then some magic in my personal life made me think I might finally write about Sexxx Dreams the way I've been hoping to, or at least finally start really working on the Gaga / Oz magic book.
When I got home from the weed store I went upstairs to my bedroom. The TV was on and as I walked in Gaga came onscreen. To me this was a confirmation of my resolve to write the gagablog more and a verification of the gagablog itself. I was just talking about how she is Taking Over TV in the last edition, written this morning, and here she was on Entertainment Tonight. I have seen her from time to time on shows like this, just not with as great a frequency recently as in past years. It's no surprise that she was on the show and no surprise to me that she seemed to be the main story. The questions they asked her revealed that she is in love but hasn't made wedding plans yet and that her dress was one she asked the designer to make in a bold color for her and he chose blood red. It may have been the premiere to American Horror Story or another event, I had seen pictures on facebook last night. I took the fact that it came on as I walked in as media magic confirmation that I should write another edition tonight, so here I am: at the time I did not know exactly what I would write, maybe tie up some loose ends or bring up things I forgot to mention. (Like when talking to my mom about Boehner and Biden's response to the Pope and she said "I think Boehner was just emotional - he is Catholic." To which I replied "and Biden is Catholic, too, and was emotional, too - but did you see the smile on his face the whole time, while Boehner just looked devestated?") But of course I got some more examples in the minutes and hours to follow.
It was great to see Gaga, she looked so beautiful. I was a little sad that we didn't get more quotes from her but I loved what we heard from her castmate and director. They mentioned that she is in a foursome and posed questions about it to one of the actors lucky enough to be in the scene with her. He said her fiancé had told her not to mention him so it would not make it embarrassing or awkward for the actors, so they could get into it as much as possible. This helps assure me a lot that he is a good guy for her - I previously had concluded that from pictures of them together but kind of did not want to "know" more because I wish I was with her myself, of course, and it makes me envious of him in a way - but mostly it makes me happy for them both. ET then showed a clip from the director. He said that her fiancé and parents were completely supportive of her, then concluded that you have to be because "she is a force of nature: you can't tamp that lady down." This is everything about creativity, to me, the heart of the matter that makes her the Goddess of Love, the Goddess of Magic, Art, Music, and Creativity itself. It's an irrepressible force of Nature, the divine will, once we get into it. But that entry has been repressed and hidden from us and Gaga is the greatest Goddess, to me, for how she opens it up again to all of us.
I met a girl at Denver Pagan Pride festival and got excited to talk more with her. She is a witch but has been solitary and seemed like she really wanted more people to talk magic with. I'm the same way though I am lucky that my lover and best friend are into magic, too, so I invited her to join our group. Then I saw she had a flying monkey tattoo and when I asked her about it she emphasized the importance of reading the Books. I felt like she was just who I have been looking for to talk about Oz and Oz magic to make sure I write the best book about it that I can. We texted some then I did not hear from her for a few days. But after seeing Gaga on ET and deciding it was time to write everything, all at once, I took it as a sign when I got another text from her a few minutes later. I don't know what I will learn from talking more with her but I really look forward to it and take our meeting as a sign of a new era, since I have been talking with magical people online for years, thousands of people, and never find anyone who is really into Oz like me. But altogether I feel like I am getting back into that divine grace, catching up with Gaga and closer to the Heart of Magic so that everything that happens takes on increasingly wonderful significance.
I got in the car to come to work. On NPR they were doing TED Talks and the speaker was a Neuroscientist studying creativity. He had done tests with jazz musicians to identify what brain activity was associated with the creative process. It was only one test, and maybe having similar results from different jazz musicians says something about creativity, or could even be specific to music or jazz - but it made sense, and made sense with the other media magic of the evening, 10-5-15. He mentioned two things that stood out to me before I had to come inside to work: one was when he was asked if there was anything we can do to boost creativity. He said people have always tried to do this, likened it to starting the day with coffee, then mentioned the three most common methods, drugs, meditation, and practice, in that order. He did not say they were the most common, I just thought it was telling that these were what he mentioned and the order he used. I know I was already thinking of weed, for myself and many other artists. I remember Gaga saying she felt her lyrics were divinely inspired, with the help of weed, which is exactly how I feel. When a beautiful singer on "The Voice", whose dad was in a Dead cover band, got to choose between the three remaining judges and my friend asked who she would pick, I correctly predicted Pharell and explained "I know art." The truth is we all have access to the creative magical world but we can feel special kinship with people who share the same paths we travel. I've always felt "like Gaga" because I think we are both Weed witches, each of us a Genie-in-a-Bong in our own way. He said he wanted to take the romanticism out of creativity, that it was something everyone could access not some fairyland for a special few. I agree it is for everyone but I also feel creative muses and fairies are always inviting us into their world and the better we get at accepting this the more magical our world becomes, the more of this fairyworld, the true world of magic, comes through the ways we've covered it over. But from a scientist's perspective I can see why he does not want to look at it in terms of fairies, though. Which is too bad since that same narrow focus, towards making a pill - which I'm sure has it's uses - is kind of silly when pot exists, and other psychedelics.
The other important thing he said was describing what parts of the brain change when a person enters a creative state. He mentioned the frontal lobe activity, two changes in particular. One was what he called an increase in "autobiographical expression", greater willingness to express more and more things about "oneself". The other frontal lobe change is that the censor or shame response is reduced. We are much less hesitant to say what comes to us, basically. This may seem obvious but there's something to have scientific evidence for something, beyond just developing a pill. It lets you know some of what you can practice, or meditate upon, to become more creative or unlock creative potential. Of course studying plants like weed that have been used for ages to stimulate creativity would yield results, too, but from practice we don't have to know how it works to use weed to work for more creativity. But it might help us get even better at using it. I've always felt that not giving a fuck was a key to creativity, but it's nice to have "studies show", too - mostly to encourage that dimension even further and make the most of it. I was just telling my lover how I feel a little different than "most males" regarding thinking about sex. I said I think it is probably true that men think about sex almost constantly, but I suspect most males suppress it or turn it to other pursuits. I do this, too, especially art, but I don't do it automatically, instead I have to remind myself. I don't mind thinking about sex a lot and enjoying fantasy all the time. I think it keeps me closer to the creative state, generally. And it makes me less self-conscious to allow these thoughts to flourish, even if many social pressures try to repress them. Or it makes me have a sense of "identity" that is not restricting my expression, a more expansive sense of "me."
I was feeling pretty good about myself, thinking about how I am uninhibited and proud of this, yet could be even more so as I actually use my creativity more, as I came into work. I was all ready to write all of this but also hoping something on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert would tie it all together. He did a piece about finding the true Colbert, I forget the name of it, I think it was "Who Am Me?", and in it he took a lie detector test about himself. The best part was the premise and the set-up and the banter with the guy who would administer the test - the only result the reported was that he was telling the truth about his name. In the set-up he talks about playing a false character for 9 years. Everyone knows the "Old Colbert" was a character but there is a reason he has to bring it up besides just to explain why he has to find himself. He is magically distancing himself from that character and magically evolving America further away from it's false, conservative, more hateful past. Another form of this distance is when he jokes with John McCain that the band are Trump supporters or even republicans. They play along with the joke but everyone knows that every last one of them, as artists, musicians, people of color, all of them are liberal or at least not Republican. That's what makes it funny, the suggestion that they even could be republican, and of course even McCain is laughing at that - he knows it's not cool to be one. Or the surprise that anyone from the audience would cheer shows how no one expects cool people or even regular people who are the least bit cool to be Republican. Colbert took a crack at McCain when the Senator tried to imply a Cain/Bachmann presidency would be better than Obama's. Colbert mocked him offending the audience by saying "Making Friends with John McCain: 'want to come to the McCain cook-out? by the way your kids are ugly.'" This is just a way of saying "No one (in the audience - effectively "no one who matters") supports Republicans". He does some great jokes where he questions "who" really loves Taco Bell, about his identity as a corporate tool, or questioning how we are all amalgamations of social conditioning and subjectivity. One philosophical conclusion from this line of thinking is that we are all One and are represented by Whoever Is Speaking. But there is so much, magically, that we can reap from this "finding myself" theme Colbert is doing, this journey we are on together. He is still willing to "debase" himself, and joke about it, as a corporate shill, but will not be sinking to the depths of playing conservative ever again. it's just too demeaning, even as a joke, and the process of redefining himself is Redemption for us all.
In terms mentioned in this edition, it is like saying Our Creativity / Identity is Loving enough, Open enough, to loan us out to play scenes with other people. Or that our identity / creativity is faithful enough to us, will always come back, that it can take on any form she needs to and we don't have to worry about losing her. It's like saying realizing we don't know who we really are is like taking a mind-opening drug, pondering and questioning and seeking our identity is like meditation, and expressing and sharing the journey or discoveries with others are like practice. The Quest for Identity has these aspects of the Creative process. It's not a coincidence: this is the Identity of Magic. The Creative Identity is the Only True Self - and it is not a "self" or Ego because it does not belong to any of us more than others: it is all of us. It's just that we notice more of it in the people who get more into it. Everyone is creative in their own ways but we can all be moreso. This is why I've always called Gaga the Goddess, not that she is "more" the goddess than the rest of us, but because she has gotten more into the creative identity at the heart of us all and shows us even better how to do it. This is what is so magical about Colbert's Journey to discover himself, because the "joke" itself, the process, is the nature of re-awakening magic in ourselves. And we're doing it all together, for the whole culture. The key is to be flexible about "oneself", expressing all the wonder that comes with that and broadening experiences to discover more of ourselves in more of each other. Maybe go places "we" wouldn't go and do things we've never done before, because "we" can't really know who we are, only that we will always be likely to cling to one idea of who we are when even more identities are waiting for us to grow into them.
This makes even more sense with some examples about how he is doing it. Some of the best jokes came from his conversation with the guy running the polygraph. All he had to do was take a paranoid tone, suggesting that the guy "knew something about him", to bring up a magical tension that questioned "who" we are, what we can know about each other, and how. He emphasized this more near the end after saying he was a "10" on a 1-10 honesty scale, then said "you're reading me right now, aren't you?" in a nervous tone. The guy kind of deflected by saying "you're trying to figure me out, too" but that also opened up an intimate psychic space between them, prompting Colbert to say "I don't have to...I can help myself... do you ever help yourself?" and the masturbation-tension was relieved by the guy good-naturedly admitting that he did. I'm sure the KGB and CIA have words for these kinds of exchanges and the psychic/energy play at work within them. I just thought it was a hilarious joke but also felt the magical implications of their banter. The real gem was when Colbert started talking about sociopaths. The guy said he seemed to know a lot about sociopaths and he was hilarious saying "I read, I'm not one of...'them'" - really hinting at being a sociopath. Then he said that as an entertainer he had a similar role. He explained that an entertainer studies other people in order to pretend to be like them so that people will like him, but a sociopath studies other people in order to pretend to be like them so that other people will think they are human. The distinction is powerful, especially considering that he is not seriously saying, conclusively, that he is not a sociopath. As far as feeling inhuman is concerned, it reminds me of starseeds, autism, otherkin and "a hybrid can withstand these things." Of course the ideas associated with "sociopath" are pretty negative and I can't imagine what people who suffer from this think they are, besides human. But I know a lot of the nicest, kindest, most loving people I ever met identify as "non-human" and it makes them much nicer than "normal humans." They are not trying to convince people they are human to get approval, they aren't usually trying to convince people they are starseeds or fairies, but it is nice when they can feel comfortable around others who accept this already. The non-human nature, in this context, makes people much more likeable and even moreso when they're comfortable and don't feel they have to pretend to be human. But this often comes with a negative view of humanity, too. And it can even turn into bitterness -which is why I want to remember how all of this magic works regardless of which way one is going in the universe of identity.
To become our best, most creative selves, to access the most magical and inspiring powers and spirits, we must be flexible with ourselves. We can let ourselves enjoy new loves we never knew before. We can encourage our lovers to do the same, knowing that all love is enriching and ultimately brings us all together, even through strange paths. Colbert is the psychopomp (sociopomp?) who guides us to a new reality though the shared quest for his own identity - but the reason this is so magical and impressive to me is partly the context, being available to the whole country not just people who can afford cable, as I mentioned in a previous edition. Mostly it is like a blank template of All Artistic Activity: the artist takes a journey and the audience comes along but there is a magical journey between us, too, so that Art brings us together in the world and also magically, through our soul. Gaga exemplifies this flexibility of identity through her style and statements of encouragement to us to "remake ourselves every day." But she also shows how the same spirit of Goodness pervades all forms - all her own forms and all existing forms. It brings Us, our creative Self, out to see Us so Out Loud in Her. She leads the way, blazing trails all over the world and out into the heavens. And Colbert is here like our very Egos themselves, holding our hand always along the way, right there with us. Who knows if we are his support or he is ours, who knows if the times the footprints go single are they his or ours. It doesn't matter, we are together, co-equal. This is a good way to feel about the divine, a way someone once told me to talk with the divine - as a closest friend. I get overwhelmed even thinking about meeting Gaga -what would I say? But I know if I could feel comfortable and talk with her, she would feel the same way about me that I do about her, recognizing the creative spirit within, the desire to make the most of letting it out and transforming the world with it, and a natural friendliness. And we'd probably make out. But through conversation, sex, or any form of magic/communication we could see how we have the same nature - she is so supportive and connected to all of us little monsters we already feel this way, like she knows us. But it's totally natural to want to experience that with her, to feel it in person. I believe the main conclusion for what to do with that desire is to use it to make our own art. The longing to be with Gaga is the same as the longing to return to the magical, creative, artistic world or Heaven, to re-make this world into one in which heavens come through easier. And we are "with her" when we get creative and make art. But just as Art itself unites the artist and audience in the magic of the art, physically, but also brings us closer together in our Soul, going the Soul route and being close to Gaga through our own art will magically open paths that can lead to meeting her, too. I've always been so overwhelmed by magic that I can't draw Gaga, as passionately as I want to draw her. But attempting it has gotten me back into drawing after years of neglect. And my current project, to draw other people, is starting to make me feel like I'm finally getting back into Art and closer to Gaga and all the other little monsters surrounding her. One of my little monster friends draws amazing pictures of Gaga and has met her, Gaga even wore her art. She thanked me for always supporting her and when I asked a week ago if I could draw her picture she said yes! I know between this path and my songs I will meet Gaga one day and many other amazing monsters and people on the way. I've been so happy to discover that songs just come right out of me now that my friend makes music for them and we formed a band. We almost have our album ready but I want to include some of my worship songs for Gaga, since she ultimately is making all art possible for me, since I had been retreating in my shell in the face of a seemingly hostile world. But I know I have a part to change it, too - thanks, Gaga! Paws up, I love you forever!
One final note: We can be whoever we want and support each other. Or we can insist there is only one way to be and tear each other down. Trump and the Republican primary are perfect examples of the latter. Reagan had a rule, like honor amongst thieves, that Republicans should not speak ill of each other. The truth is they have always all been greedy liars, con artists, and can't risk anyone exposing their game. But Trump is exposing it, and exposing himself as the True Jerk Spirit of it all in the process. It's all so negative and once it all starts to come out it will destroy them. By contrast, their biggest obstacle to stop Hillary has been "Benghazi" but one "Happy Accident" of the fall-out of Boehner's resignation is the McCarthy guy who wants to replace him tipped his hand and indicated the whole Benghazi investigation was purely political. It took a could of days but now that Hillary is responding to this the tone is changing completely. I just heard an anchorman suggest that her biggest liability could become an asset - pointing out that Republicans do not have the common good, only their own self-interest, at heart. The same is shown by the opposition to sensible gun laws. The further evil over-reaches the bigger the backlash will be - and there will always be a backlash. If gun owners had agreed to some laws that would make everyone safer, we might not get to the point of saying get rid of all guns. But if they don't compromise, they can expect drones to pick them out of their cold dead fingers, eventually. This is just how the future works - love it or leave it to the rest of us.
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