Holiday Guilt

I can appreciate the psychological and economic motivating factors for putting such emphasis on 'The Holidays' within the seasonal context of the miserable coldness of late November thru January 1st. We get less sunlight, we get depressed and our mammalian genes long for hibernation. That's no good for people who wish to make shitloads of money during those weeks. No good for industries that rely on those weeks for enormous amounts of their annual profits. Seasonal Affective Disorders be damned.

It's rather unfortunate that we cannot strike a balance between an economic and cultural hibernation and the suicidal mania that is our mechanized, modern mass-culture.

I find a tension between our natural neuro-biological state in December and the cultural narrative of Christmas: The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. We're told that its OK if you're not Christian, Jewish or religious. It's about family, community, compassion, selflessness and charitable, giving attitudes.

There are too many reasons to list why an individual might face great difficulty manifesting such happiness on any day of the year. Anyone who's grown up in a church has heard Christian leaders bemoaning the fact that Christmas has been overtaken by consumption; rather than overflowing goodwill and compassion in the midst of the snowy desert.

I assume that putting such collective stress on any month would cause an undermining factor to occur. It seems like this is a general consensus, too; due to the prevalence of the myth that suicide rates go up around Christmas. (A myth I accepted as true until I looked it up today.)

People have problems. In the US we cage more people per capita than any other country on the planet. 

Today I worked both of my jobs and I've noticed a certain characteristic that spills out of some holiday shopper

 The interaction varies somewhat. Some people thank you specifically for working on that day. Some people even patrol their city on Christmas giving out free food and/or gifts to open businesses. (I got a free pizza from a non-customer last year.) But some people apologize to you 'for having to work'.

Personally, I've given up Thanksgiving mostly due to our national history of Native Genocide. Thanksgiving has long felt to me to be a nice, political whitewashing of that history. I also dissent because of the nightmarish Black Friday cult. Following up a night of feasting in the name of family unity and giving thanks with a feverish morning of slave-labor plastic junk peddled by 1st world wage-slave laborers somehow strikes me as schizophrenic.

I've given up Christmas because I'm no longer a Christian. I also think life is far too weird to become an atheist. However, the more I look into biblical texts the more I find it difficult to not see the Yahweh of Abraham as a fucking sociopath. I doubt I'm alone on that.

I prefer to work on Thanksgiving and Christmas and get the higher pay-rate. Why not? It's a day like any other, regardless of how sacred the majority finds those days to be. Most of my coworkers have no interest in competing for those hours anyway. Even as I grew up in an evangelical family we downplayed the sacredness of the specific dates of holidays. We'd usually save our family rituals of gift-exchange for the most practical day. I've been working these days for years; they're simply not sacred to me and haven't been since I was a wee child. 

Artist Statement

While the power of sonic messages shall not be underestimated, our interaction with the world is dominantly visual. However, the noise of sonic advertising invades and occupies the individual differently than the visual ad. While our attention is demanded by visual means by a myriad of advertising forms, vision is restricted to a single angle of the open eyes.

A sea of visual noise can quickly be broken down to individual messages much easier than an equal sea of sonic noise. This principle allows for the great density of visual noise within the public realm. A majority of corporate businesses program various versions of Muzak, which are openly designed to influence customers, additionally including variations of jingles and slogans in broadcast and closed-circuit audio systems. In the advertising industry a good campaign is a ‘sticky’ one; a message that bounces around in the mind in loops. All of these tactics have been applied to the fullest in recent US Presidential campaigns. Obama even won the Advertising Age's marketer of the year for his 2008 campaign.

This could be a motive for an increased amount of headphone usage in public spaces, increasingly from the emerging generation. It’s easy and convenient to drown out predatory noise with personally chosen self-programming.

In a world filled with the feverish, fantasy imagery of advertising demanding our attention on television, in print, online, on clothing and on any product imaginable, any relative quietness can be unsettling. When predatory advertising can fill our every waking moment, we may find it comforting to juxtapose our visual reality with the sounds of our choice. When the physical world is reportedly seen as boring, trivial or unpleasant, we can easily retreat to the Network at any time, almost anywhere with computers smaller than a deck of cards. Physical and virtual realities have merged, and their integration will continue to escalate. The result is an increasingly virtual relationship to reality and communication between individuals. We are demanded to participate in a hyper-reality if we choose to remain connected. What parts of modern life are free from media messages? This is a differing view from the official hypothesis of advancements in technology equating to human progress.

The result is an increasingly virtual relationship to reality and communication between individuals. We are demanded to participate in a hyper-reality if we choose to remain connected to current events. What parts of modern life are free from media messages?
             Largely, the reclusive world of Noise counterculture has been an effort to reject and escape mass culture. It can be a method to choose one’s own delirium. To use the powerful tools of media to create one’s own altered state of reality. The lack of rhythm, melody, and apparent or traditional structure can create an experience outside the customary movement of time. The sensory overload of frenzied strobe psychedelia can clear the mind of the boundaries of established language and linear cause-and-effect. It can become clear that flickering images on a screen representing the human experience is merely an artifice that can never be fully trusted regardless of its origin. It is similar to peaceful protestors using corporate products to videotape and document their own subjugation and trauma delivered by the same corporate authorities that sold them said products. It is the use of mass-produced cheap slave-labor products in ways they were never designed to operate. It is reverse-engineering a device of mass manipulation into a hallucination that reveals our daily modern reality as what it has been since the birth of modern media: a deception.

Ironically, the greater the density of the sensory overload the more the electronic signal can come to resemble the organic sonic realms of nature. The more powerful the entropy of audio/visual static, the more we can discover hidden within the signal; or within our own consciousness. The thicker the digital mirage, the deeper we can fall into our own minds and break from the influence or agenda of others.

An antivenom is derived from the original toxin. It is not developed independently. But viewer beware, most artists have their own agendas.

Things I commented yesterday:

In response to (paraphrasing) the status: Reality TV is OK. It's part of the natural evolution of scripted narrative, and those who disagree are mostly in denial.

OR they see the scripted cycles of 'normal behavior' of sitcoms of which Reality is a descendent.

Reality TV is the fulfillment of decades of programming in repetition of stock-situations and their subsequent canned responses and their predetermined resolutions.

Klosterman innocently analyzed this phenomena in Sex Drugs & Coco Puffs in his Saved By The Bell chapter when he observed, 'it's as if the viewers wrote the script.' To paraphrase another of his points: nothing was learned or truthfully discussed in any episode. Only what had been predetermined as acceptable narrative parameters within the history of sitcoms was presented.

People behaving badly has become an entertainment standard. Look at the evolution from Homer Simpson, Seinfeld, South Park, Family Guy, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, etc. Reality TV (The Real World, Survivor, American Idol, Punk'd, The Simple Life, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Jersey Shore, etc) further established sociopathy as a social norm and a vital prerequisite for fame.

But you're ignoring the escapist nature of entertainment. No one really wants to watch shows about ordinary people. Reality TV allows people to imagine living in their own TV show.  You can argue that it's proletariat, but you cannot delegitimize it's entertainment value. Art and Entertainment unfortunately are very different,  often but not always removed from each other.

I'm not ignoring the entertainment factor, for the majority of the shows I listed I have clearly viewed beyond 'research' motives.

The problem is that Reality becomes an Orwellian inversion. Those who study Documentary are quickly confronted with the conflict between truth/reality and artifice of the cinematic form. All of the 'fathers of documentary' staged their narratives. There are vast untruths rampant in the archives of Documentary and equally in News Media since its origin. It's becoming increasingly difficult to determine 'the real' amongst the ocean of media that claims to be presenting 'truth'.

I'm the last one to bury the nature of escapist entertainment. Entertainment is the most effective means of manipulation. To play even further with the line of fiction and reality as Reality TV does by its doublespeak namesake is very dangerous because the sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of viewers are not media-literate. They don't see the edits, don't hear the overdubbing, the construction of 'events' from multiple days/months/YEARS worth of footage. All documentarians do some form of this, as do all News media.

The nature of the products that you are entertained by is immensely important, because it's what's filling your brain when you 'turn your brain off'.

Narratives are very different from reality, but narratives are the tool in which we shape our reality. Narratives are one of the most powerful weapons in all of recorded history.

I've always argued that Reality TV is equally as fake as fiction. If viewers were interested in watching 'real people', broadcast television is one of the worst places to look. So is the abyss of Entertainment media.