You see what I mean?  You see?  I give up.  I quit.  Okay, not really.  I think instead I’ll just drink heavily for several days to get my bearings and be on my way.  You take care of yourself, too.  Bye now!

Yo.  I wanted to share this video because of the strangely profound effect it has on me.  For me, this video represents some kind of eerie depth of reality that inspires in me a weird combination of feelings.  There is a feeling of strangeness – I feel slightly uncomfortable, but in a good way – mixed with some sort of simmering excitement and and at the same time, peaceful warmth – like I feel whole and complete.

I think this response has something to do with the series of spiritual experiences I had about ten years ago.  I also did a lot of reading back then.  One of my favorite authors at the time was Lewis Thomas, a guy who wrote a whole bunch of essays in the seventies on the topic of biology.  He wrote one essay entitled “The Music of This Sphere,” in which he celebrates the sounds life on Earth makes, observing that more than anything else, creatures love to make noise.  From here, he draws an analogy to music, suggesting that if we could hear all the sounds life’s creatures make all at once, it would sound like the most incredible musical composition we’ve ever heard.  After first reading this a decade ago, I was standing outside the woods one summer midnight while hanging out with some friends, and I was just listening to the noise of the insects emanating from the mysterious blackness of the forest, imagining a great symphony, with each species as a different instrumental section.  The experience was really something.

I was high at the time, of course.

You see, music is really magical for me.  I’ve thought about this a number of times.  There’s something really unique about music.  I mean, there’s more to it than just “really cool sounds.”  The experience of listening to the sound effects in Star Wars is very different from the experience of listening to a really good piece of music, even if there are no lyrics.  We feel “moved” by music.  What the hell is that?  I mean, neuroscientists tell us that our brains are wired from birth to appreciate music, and even more fascinating is the fact that the most ear-pleasing pairs of frequencies happen to be perfect mathematical fractions of one another.  Music is it’s own animal in the human experience.  There’s nothing else like it.  Because of this, music is a surefire way for me to tap into spiritual feelings.

Now, I know that most bird formations will probably not sound pretty when translated into musical notation, and I know that if we actually heard the biosphere’s collective noise, it would probably just sound like static, and I know experiences influenced by The Sweet Leaf should probably be taken with a grain of salt.  Scientific skeptics will surely explain away all of my feelings whilst rolling their eyes, but I’m not so naive that I haven’t already considered such explanations, and quite frankly, as atheistic as some of my song lyrics may seem, scientific skepticism is one of my great pet peeves.  I don’t see any value in what seems to me to be a dogged effort to strip magic from a reality which is full of magical things, magical things which we’ve renamed with “proper” words, like “electromagnetic energy” and “sinusoidal plane wave frequencies.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see music, math, and nature line up like they do in this video, I get the staggering feeling that I’m witnessing a glimpse of reality in its totality, rather than in little bits and fragments like we usually experience.  And that centralized, holistic, and fundamental truth of all reality is how I personally define God, in contrast with the bearded old man in the clouds.

So, yeah, it’s God on YouTube, I guess.

Also, there’s this:

Try to imagine a wedding that this band wouldn’t ruin.  If you can, you have a better imagination than I.  2:07 to 2:24 is my favorite.

Pretty neat, eh?  Yes, I thought so, too.  Oh, and sorry for my extra-lame internet presence as of late.  I think I’ll be able to put up another YouTube video this week, and in about a month’s time I’ll be in super active mode with a super-radical recording space which I’ll probably show you in a video or something.  Ooh, look!  A good weekend!  Have it!

I think my favorite stuff on the internet is this sort of thing.  This kind of creative effort that really reaches into multiple media to create something that nobody’s ever seen before.  I’m not saying this is the only guy in history who’s ever done anything like this, but I’ve sure never seen anything like it before.  What’s awesome about it, though, is that we’ve all seen the individual elements of it many, many times.  Everyone has heard songs, and everyone has seen card tricks.  But when the two are combined in such a clever way, it amplifies everything that’s impressive about them individually.  It helps that the song’s lyrics are already clever and allude to playing cards, and it helps, of course, that this guy is already amazing with his sleight of hand skills and his inventiveness in crafting his tricks.  But when the two are joined into a single act, it has this exponential effect, and the vision to harness that is what makes this guy really brilliant.

I’ve always thought that was the essence of creativity, really.  Not to create something out of nothing, which I think is impossible anyway, but to take different familiar elements and join them in a way that is unfamiliar and yet somehow seems completely logical and even inevitable.  I think when people try to just be “original,” they sacrifice their audience’s ability to connect with the art.  The audience needs to see something familiar in order to understand the art, and so they can have a frame of reference with which to recognize and truly appreciate what’s “new” about it.  They need to contrast the new with the old.

It also makes the art more impressive if the audience can see the challenge the artist overcame.  If I invent something completely new, like, say, a Goolakfa Brump, nobody will be impressed that I’ve created such a thing because I had no boundaries against which to struggle.  It took no effort to create it because I didn’t have any rules by which I had to abide in order to create it.  I made up my own rules.  But if I start with two already established things, like two different film genres, and combine them, I have to follow the conventions of each and make them line up in a way that fits and even makes it seem like they were supposed to be together all along.  If I can achieve that, people will be really impressed because they will recognize the challenge of what I did.  In that sense, art is more like a game than people realize, I think.

Okay, that’s Matt’s philosophy lesson for the day.  Happy Thursday, everyone!

Bye.

For today, I thought I’d share a really fun video I got to take part in.  My friend Dan submitted this video to a film editing competition in which contestants were asked to use footage from three separate Nicholas cage movies to creatively edit together a single movie trailer for a silly, nonexistent, new Nicholas Cage movie.  The source footage was taken from the films Raising Arizona, Face-Off, and Ghost Rider.  Dan decided to go for a 1960s-style James-Bond-type trailer for a fake sequel called Archer:  The Second Helping (if you haven’t seen Face-Off, the protagonist’s name is Sean Archer), and he asked me to provide the voice over, so I tried to do a cheesy, old-school movie trailer voice.  You know, Mid-Atlantic accent and everything, although I didn’t have time to properly learn the accent, so I sort of faked it.  Anyway, I think Dan did a really good job with this.  I know he put a lot of work into it, and apparently, it paid off because he won second place.  Hellz yeah.  Anyway, here it is.  Enjoy!

I want to know how long it took them to do this.  I wish they’d done the whole song, but it’s absolutely delightful either way.

I don’t think I even need to say anything, other than why in the hell do these people look so goddamned bored?  This is so unbelievably cool!

Right.  So, I would like to submit these two videos as further evidence in support of my argument that the two best things that ever happened to the universe are human beings and the internet.  Unless you wanna add The Lord.  I’ll accept that.  But he was technically human, so I’m still right.  Oh, I also really like spiders and whales, so those can be honorable mentions, I guess.  And puppy-dogs.  And candy.  And birthdays.  And sex.  And birthday sex.  And Fred Rogers.  But he was technically human.  Okay, I should probably stop there.

Wait, why did I put “birthday sex” and “Fred Rogers” right next to each other?  Christ, I need sleep.

Okay, well, I hope to be a good deal more productive the next couple of weeks while I have the whole house to myself to record.  Hip.  Hip.  Hooray.

For now, why don’t you write some music, too?  Take a look at this ridiculous and fun site called Seaquence which allows you to create little biddy musical organisms that play whatever goofy chiptune sounds you want them to and swim around adorably while you giggle.  Below you can check out the one I made, but you can create your own, too!  It’s jolly, proper fun, if I don’t say so myself.  Enjoy!

Woohoo!!! (My Microbial Diddy)