Social Media Has Officially Landed. Now What?

It’s been coming to this — real-time Facebook-and-Twitter livin’ – for as long as anyone can remember.  We’ve dreamed of a world where we can touch base with anyone we know instantly, effortlessly.  And now we have it.

Isolation as a concept is now about as relevant as an REO Speedwagon album.

Feeling happy?  Let everyone know.  Feeling down?  Same.  Weave your existential minutiae into a tapestry of approachability.  It’s fundamentally human.  And humans dig it.

Clinical causes aside, is there really any excuse anymore for loneliness?

The “elitist” cultural order — the one that presumed differences in, say, the quality of novels or pieces of art — is history.  In its place is a let-your-hair-down hoedown, the most egalitarian forum ever devised.  It is inclusive and uncritical.  And it is having an unapologetically hilarious time.

Tweet.

www.twitter.com/wampusmm

Process and Package: The Power of Song

“If there’s ever a problem, I film it and it’s no longer a problem. It’s a film.”  -Andy Warhol

A song is no different.  Process and package a problem, and it becomes a bear in a trap.  We can’t beat chaos, but we can control our reaction to it. Bob Dylan couldn’t prevent war, but he showed it was as natural as rain.  Warren Zevon couldn’t stop love, but he explained why it was unmanageable.  Songwriters frame ideas as painters do.  And the canvas can’t overflow the frame.

We make galleries of our homes.  And our homes are our lives.

Our lives are opportunities to make sense of the world — for ourselves and for others.

As Pete Townshend put it:  “A-G-D.”  Sometimes it’s that simple.

Jill Bolte Taylor: Creativity and the Brain

Artists sometimes lament their inability to isolate the creative impulse.  If only they could captivate the Muse, they reason, they could accomplish so much more.  Maybe if they had a deeper understanding of how they do what they do, they could repeat it more efficiently, more easily.

Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor gained special insight into this when she suffered a massive brain hemorrhage.  Enduring the loss of cognition in her left brain, where practical work is performed, she found herself existing mostly in her right brain, where creativity resides.  There she had a ringside seat to her own stroke.  Banished from her left brain, she found creativity unimpeded by thoughts of physical reality.

Imagine.

Watch Jill.