When amongst peers, there seems to be a certain amount of, for lack of a better term, ‘magic’ missing with respect to their idea of fear. The classic imagery of Ray Bradbury’s illustration seem to do little to stimulate any kind of fear-like response. This is a disappointing concept. The chains that rattle through fog filled graveyards seem to be silenced now. No transparent sheet of a specter would cause fear to rise in any reasonable young adult. Instead there may be laughter, or even worse, apathy with respect to this image. Realistic fear is just as rattling, however, it’s not as avoidable. No clove of garlic or circle of salt will protect anyone from a car-crash or a dirty bomb. It’s there that the real fear is. It seems that with the images of ghosts and the surreal, one could, hypothetically, control their fear and take superstitious precautions to avoid encountering them.

In the contemporary idea of fictional horror, the concepts and the stories are getting more realistic. This, again, is both good and bad. The better of the realistic can be truly stunning and leave one completely shaken to the core. The bad comes in the fact that it could potentially leave one further afraid and helpless feeling. All the while, the ghosts of the ghosts that once knew youth now shuffle without real reason. Their direction is lost as there’s little to anyone left to scare. The most recent track utilizes the heavily processed guitars as in the prior tracks, and a Celeste sound created through a series of keyboards, heavily processed to avoid juxtaposition in fidelity.

02 days run away ii_ w.y.w.a.g..mp3
Download it at mp3space.com

This is a follow up on the Destruction post, although it takes a nearly opposing point of view.

When faced with a shock to the system, we go into an animal defensive. Our alerts, on either a personal or societal level, ring until we are deaf with fear. We hide in the shell until the danger passes. The danger: wars, thugs, layoffs, rejections, asymmetries. Anything that upsets the system. As mentioned before, the destruction takes away a chunk of the shell; it does not create anything by itself.

But once the shock passes, we look up from underneath the cover and rebuild. We use the steel beams of the WTC as monuments, we forge skyscrapers at nuclear ground zeros. We shrug off Bear Stearns, and invest in our future. Or at least we should. This is a normative argument: we must use creativity to push back the blackness of destruction. It is a struggle of the living against the dead. It is again an animal struggle.

And in our process of redemptive creation, we find the newest thought. The newest art. The sounds of the phoenix. Life is vivid, we are reminded. Here it is. So how to reconcile the positive effects of healing, and potential strengthening, with the black hole of destructive processes? How to correctly draw causality, a thin line in the sand between inspiration and evil? I don’t yet know.

And finishing off with an elegant flourish.

Warp! Some light and dimension bending, all depends on your point of view.

A three part vignette on the color blue. This building is like candy, reflecting a calm spring sky. Pay close attention to the lines in the windows!

Collage of building materials. Wooden planks and metal pipes intertwined through construction.

Some delicious metal chocolate textures. A skyscraper smooth as a guitar string.