Post reblogged from Fuck Yeah GBV! with 12 notes
by Robert Pollard, from Magnet
May-June 2005Touring is something you get used to. It can be difficult and grueling, especially for a band like us that drank a lot and played three-hour shows, but I learned to enjoy it. I learned to relax during the long drives and make better use of the hurry-up-and-wait aspect of load-ins and sound checks (like, not attend them). By the end of the tour, I’m more than ready to go home. After a couple of weeks at home, I’m anxious to go back on tour.
Writing is easy. It’s an ongoing process, like eating, breathing, or sleeping. It shouldn’t be painful or difficult. It’s a report on the state of the soul and, like the soul, should be continuously evolving. It does so through inspiration. From people, books, film, music. When inspiration is lacking, you get writer’s block.
Three-way phone conversations can blow me.
I especially like what Pollard has to say about touring, writing, lo-fi and mistakes.
Source: fuckyeahgbv
Post reblogged from get free or die tryin'. with 5,261 notes
Some guidelines for loving:
1. Tell them about their brilliance. They likely can’t see it and they don’t know its immensity, but you can see it, and you can illuminate it for them.
2. Be authentic, and give others the gift of the real you and a real relationship. Ask your real questions. Share your real beliefs. Go for your real dreams. Tell your truth.
3. Don’t confuse “authenticity” with sharing every complaint, resentment, or petty reaction in the name of “being yourself.” Meditate, write, or do yoga to work through anxiety, resentment, and stress on your own so you don’t hand off those negative moods to everyone around you. Sure, share sadness, honest dilemmas, and fears, but be mindful: don’t pollute.
4. Listen, listen, listen. Don’t listen to determine if you agree or disagree. Listen to get to know what is true for the person in front of you. Get to know an inner landscape that is different from your own, and enjoy the journey. Remember that if, in any conversation, nothing piqued your curiosity and nothing surprised you, you weren’t really listening.
5. Don’t waste your time or energy thinking about how they need to be different. Really. Chuck that whole thing. Their habits are their habits. Their personalities are their personalities. Let them be, and work on what you want to change about you—not what you think would be good to change about them.
6. Remember that you don’t have to understand their choices to respect or accept them.
7. Don’t conflate accepting with being a doormat or betraying yourself. Let them be who they are, entirely. Then, you decide what you need, in light of who they are. Do you need to make a direct request that they change their behavior in some way? Do you need to take care of yourself better? Do you need to set a boundary or to change the relationship? Take care of yourself well, without holding anyone else in contempt.
8. Give of yourself, but never sacrifice or compromise yourself. Stop if resentment is building and retool. Don’t do the martyr thing. It helps no one and nothing.
9. Remember that everyone you encounter was created by divine intelligence and has an important role to play in the universe. Treat them as such.
10. If you want to keep growing emotionally and spiritually for the rest of your life, accept this as your mantra and try to live as if it were true: Everything that I experience from another human being is either love, or a call for love.
What steps do you take to love others?
These are things that I make a conscious effort to do, but could never verbalize so succinctly.
Source: ohapoeticsoul
Link reblogged from Capullo de La Mariposa Roja with 164 notes
juniper glass How would you define love?
bell hooks Love is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. I found that a lot of people just felt really confused about what love is, so I said, here, take these six ingredients and as you go about your life, you can ask: the action I’m taking, does it have these six ingredients?
One point that I would emphasize to people is that it’s the combination of the six ingredients that make love, because so many of us have one of the ingredients in our life – like we may be deeply cared for, but we may not be in a situation of trust. To me what’s great about these definitions is that they’re just very helpful for people in daily life trying to engage in a practice of love.
jg What is the link between healing and loving?
bh Well, it seems to me that all healing is the work of love, because all healing takes place in a context where we wish to promote growth. We wish to engage the organism in ways that people grow stronger. I find myself telling people that my wish for the rest of my life is that all the work I do would be about healing. I want people to heal. My concern is always to link those practices of healing with practices of political resistance.
jg What needs to be healed? Is it the heart, the mind, the spirit?
bh For many of us, whether it’s turning toward Buddhism, or like many African American people who have turned toward Yoruba, the healing is a healing into wholeness, moving away from the sense of the self as splintered and fractured and broken. But it’s not a healing into perfection. It’s not a vision of wholeness that says everything will become right with me. It’s an acceptance that says we are, at our core, essentially whole even in the midst of our flaws and our woundedness. And it’s an acceptance that includes those flaws and wounds and that includes the embrace of pain.
I think particularly in the Western world, and in the United States especially, people have a vision of healing that is about feeling that you must be free from pain. Other than a vision of healing that says we can restore a sense of balance to our being that may allow us to cope with pain in ways that are restorative. So pain isn’t perceived as the enemy but as the point of possibility and transformation.
I think that vision is really hard to keep alive in a culture that’s always offering people some kind of drug that promises to take the pain away. So many people that I talk to, young people who are lusting for wealth, imagine that there’s some wealth they will achieve that will take pain away in their lives. No matter how much we hear from people who have great wealth about the pain in their lives, people continue to maintain this fiction.
jg Healing implies that something is broken. How can we keep from seeing ourselves too much as victims during the healing process?
bh I think that in a culture like the West that values youth and power so much, the whole idea of being flawed in any way often leads people to embrace victimhood, whether people think they’re flawed in the space of race or flawed in the space of gender. And I think the difference between a healing approach that leads to greater empowerment of self and one that leads to greater diminishment of self is that it’s all about accountability. There isn’t any need to posit blame. I think at the core of any embrace of victimhood is the will to blame and to feel as though something outside of ourselves that we can’t control is acting upon us in some way that renders us powerless.
jg One of the ideas I like in your writing is that healing is essentially a growing-up process. It involves taking full responsibility for our lives.
bh Exactly. And I think that has to be viewed, in the context of the West, as a project of political resistance because there’s so much in the daily-ness of our lives that militates against a vision of growing up. I think that we live in the ultimate Me culture, where everything is always brought back to that sense that the ego or the self is at the centre and what matters most. Sometimes as a teacher I laugh and tell my students, “You know everything is not about you!” And there are days in my life when I have to remind myself that everything is not about me!
Source: guerrillamamamedicine
Link reblogged from From The Skerries with 268 notes
(NEWSER) – Three Chicago teenagers have been arrested after placing a noose around a black student’s neck at knifepoint because of his relationship with a white girl, according to law enforcement authorities. “I feel they were serious, and that if I didn’t get out of the house when I did, I might not even be here. I might be dead,” Joshua Merritt, 17, told the Chicago Tribune. The three students, ages 16 to 18, have been hit with a variety of charges, including hate crimes, unlawful restraint, assault, and battery. The girl at the center of the confrontation is the cousin of one of the teens. The assault occurred at his house, and his mother is an administrative worker in the Cook County state attorney’s office, said police.
Merritt said the girl is a friend, but that they aren’t dating. He said he was invited to the student’s home by a friend, who was one of the three teens. After he arrived the trio began using racial slurs and one put a rope around his neck, while another held a knife to his neck and threatened to kill him, he said. “I couldn’t believe that they were doing this,” said Merritt. “I just felt trapped.”
Something like this could have happened to me when I lived in Pottsville, PA during the first O.J. Simpson trial.
Source: chicagotribune.com
Photoset reblogged from Capullo de La Mariposa Roja with 149 notes
1970’S AND 1980’S: NYC SUBWAYS ALA GRAFFITI TAGGING AND OTHER SIGNS OF A DIFFERENT TIME IN NYC.
PH. BRUCE DAVIDSON
mom is that what it looked like when you and dad lived in harlem? plz call me to confirm this info.
I completely recall this subway system…
As a child growing up in Brooklyn, I got scared shitless whenever the lights in these trains went out in mid-ride. Being able to SEE the graffiti again became a relief for me.
Source: robertldanforth
Photoset reblogged from Life & Times with 9 notes
My new business cards came in the mail! I’m so excited! Probably because I love getting things in the mail (even if it’s something I ordered for myself).
I ordered these from Moo and used the simplest most monochrome color scheme I could come up with so that there’s no distraction from the scarves in the shop. I love being able to check that off my YLAINE list. Now, I just need to finish stocking the shop…
And yes the qrcode works! You can scan the above photo with your phone and it’ll actually work (even through the photo). I just love those silly little things.
BIG TINGS A’GWAN! <3
Source: vainbuthonest
Quote reblogged from Capullo de La Mariposa Roja with 21,878 notes
Slut” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “yes”. “Friendzone” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “no”.
Source: angels-and-angles
Post reblogged from Jaki Griot Productions with 21 notes
I’m judging you.
Right now.
Every time you write a sentence I get an idea of who you are as a person. I form opinions based on what you convey. That’s what exchanging ideas is supposed to do. In order to understand your thoughts, I need you to write or speak in a way that expresses them clearly. I do. It helps if I don’t have to keep asking you to repeat yourself or if you misspell words so much so that I can’t comprehend what they mean. I also admit that when someone has a gift at communication, I think highly of them. I love when you write in a way that lets me not only understand your point-of-view but fully feel your experience. That gets me wet. It makes me want to lean in and learn from you.
But I hate the majority of English Majors I meet. There. I said it. I really dislike them. This is my confession. Yes, even though I was one.
But why? They are usually well-read and well-spoken. They use spell-check. They are grammatically correct and use proper punctuation. They never ever confuse “their” and “they’re” because apparently that is the most heinous thing an educated human being can do.
But I hate them. I hate them because they forget the purpose of language. Language is about conveying thoughts and ideas to the people around us. And some thoughts need to be written. Some thoughts are meant to be spoken out loud. Some thoughts are spelled differently. And thoughts are really motherfucking fucking vulgar. Because Language moves us and connects us. Language is fluid even as it demands respect for its rules.
Language is also a barrier. It won’t let me tell the Latina woman on the bus how much I love her shoes because I was far too lazy to take those Spanish classes seriously. And it’s her fault for being in my country and not learning to speak to me on my level at my command. Right? Right? Language is classist. It expects me to understand Shakespeare as well as Langston Hughes. And while William might ponder wherefore art thou, Langston might holla’, “He be o’ dere!” And each one of those men breathed a peculiar art into the world but the English Majors debate and attempt to make me choose.
I won’t because Language is sexist. Each female I write about has to have a vagina carefully rewritten into her sentence. Or she has to stand out in a dress in the sunshine or she will become another generic “he” in the background. I can’t express being one person who is a she and often a he and occasionally both and neither at all because it confuses everyone, including myself. Language is ablest. I’m allowed to call you stupid or slow because you didn’t write the way I expect. Which tells those who have difficulty with their words that they are less than the rest because they didn’t make their point as eloquently. Most people wouldn’t dream to taunt a deaf person for not hearing them whisper. Yet I can sit at my computer and correct someone’s words like a college term paper and be treated like I’m a genius by my peers? What about the people living with disabilities? Are they banned from Language too?
Language expects you to use words that require a license to handle. I refuse to speak in words that can’t be universally understood. If I’m not comprehended, I make a point to give a definition. Because Language wasn’t always patient with me but my parents were. My teachers were. My friends were. But everyone does not get those opportunities. If the word is impossible and someone says “unpossible”, I do believe correcting them can be beneficial. Is it beneficial to belittle them in the process? Is in necessary in that moment? Is in relevant to anything besides your ego?
And to all the self-identified “Grammar Nazis”, is this a name you really want to claim? You like the idea of oppressing people with language in order to further your idea of what Language should be? Beating people down then patting yourselves on the back? You are the high lords who demand strict dedication to something our society that fully admits is fickle, subjective and constantly evolving.
I won’t say there isn’t a place for rules. We live in a society of forms, manuscripts and templates. But everyone wasn’t meant to be an editor or a writer. And I fully believe everyone has the right to be heard without being ridiculed for it. I want people to be free to learn from their mistakes or to create from them or to just be able to fucking have them. Language is a free form design with a purpose. The purpose of being understood. Now if only people let us enjoy that.
I’m re-posting the whole thing because it nails how my views on language evolved the more mature I became. It’s the reason why I can write songs with titles like “Schadenfreude” without looking down on people who don’t know what it means.
Source: jakigriot
Audio post reblogged from Wir Bauen Eine Neue Stadt with 43 notes - Played 130 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Christian McBride on bass and its role and importance in music.
Just listen to this.
I can’t not reblog this. Interesting for bass guitarists and non- bass guitarists alike.
Reblogging for later
Source: benfriedlander
Photoset reblogged from A Moth Eaten Musical Brocade with 4,463 notes
Human beings. We are all unique, our bodies are different, and they are all beautiful.
Source: ilearndrawgood.blogspot.com
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