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Surfing My Way to Satriani
Apr. 10th, 2012 10:33 amA few nights ago, I started out on one of those internet journeys that you sometimes take when you really need to get away from where you are but you don't have any money or, you know, anyplace real to go. In the pop culture, it's called "surfing the 'net," and it's an apt description in some ways.
You know, how it captures the way that our infinitely smaller physical beings interact with the tide-driven immensity of the world's oceans and the way that our finite human intelligence interacts with the internet's virtual ocean of information, ideas, and other such things.
And the way that sometimes, as with the tides and waves and rip-currents and undertows of the natural oceans, we allow ourselves to be pulled along, from site to site, without a pre-conceived destination. And how, sometimes, the places we end up provide few clues about where we started or how we got there.
Indeed, there are those times when it really doesn't matter. Times when all that matters is that we got someplace, that we even still exist somewhere. Especially when we understand that, depending on what one believes, we may well have ended up nowhere, in a state of nothingness more infinite than any ocean, natural or man-made, could ever encompass.
Anyway, I ended up with Satriani, guitar guru to some of the best and a technical and artistic genius in his own right. And somewhere, a ways offshore, I could still hear the elegant if somewhat funereal strains of the middle-Baroque Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel.
Because I could hear it, I knew I was alive. And because I was alive, I knew that I had to believe that in the coming days this agony of loss, separation, and sorrow for another, would somehow find its own remission. And, failing that, that I would surely drown.
Below this, for now, is Joe Satriani, live in Paris, from a few years back. I dislike the video itself: got my own wheels and gears, thanks, and don't need the psychedelic lights. But I guess this has to be OK, until I can find another. (Or until it's taken down by those unthinking, would-be guardians of intellectual properties which only become art by being known and appreciated by the rest of us.)
So the visuals, which at one time I might have thought were "cool," are clearly there for others. Because the others were there to be entertained while I, who merely happened by, was there to find some consolation, some assurance from another of my kind that life can, at least momentarily, be captured in human art and thereby be understood and perhaps survived...
LPK
LiveJournal
4.10.2012
[As I discovered while editing and compiling my LJ posts, some three years after this one was written, the intellectual property police have indeed conducted their raids, closed down the offending site, and deleted the Satriani video clip. For now, I'm just gonna leave in its place that unhappy digital symbol of art's subjugation by commercial interests.]
You know, how it captures the way that our infinitely smaller physical beings interact with the tide-driven immensity of the world's oceans and the way that our finite human intelligence interacts with the internet's virtual ocean of information, ideas, and other such things.
And the way that sometimes, as with the tides and waves and rip-currents and undertows of the natural oceans, we allow ourselves to be pulled along, from site to site, without a pre-conceived destination. And how, sometimes, the places we end up provide few clues about where we started or how we got there.
Indeed, there are those times when it really doesn't matter. Times when all that matters is that we got someplace, that we even still exist somewhere. Especially when we understand that, depending on what one believes, we may well have ended up nowhere, in a state of nothingness more infinite than any ocean, natural or man-made, could ever encompass.
Anyway, I ended up with Satriani, guitar guru to some of the best and a technical and artistic genius in his own right. And somewhere, a ways offshore, I could still hear the elegant if somewhat funereal strains of the middle-Baroque Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel.
Because I could hear it, I knew I was alive. And because I was alive, I knew that I had to believe that in the coming days this agony of loss, separation, and sorrow for another, would somehow find its own remission. And, failing that, that I would surely drown.
Below this, for now, is Joe Satriani, live in Paris, from a few years back. I dislike the video itself: got my own wheels and gears, thanks, and don't need the psychedelic lights. But I guess this has to be OK, until I can find another. (Or until it's taken down by those unthinking, would-be guardians of intellectual properties which only become art by being known and appreciated by the rest of us.)
So the visuals, which at one time I might have thought were "cool," are clearly there for others. Because the others were there to be entertained while I, who merely happened by, was there to find some consolation, some assurance from another of my kind that life can, at least momentarily, be captured in human art and thereby be understood and perhaps survived...
LPK
LiveJournal
4.10.2012
[As I discovered while editing and compiling my LJ posts, some three years after this one was written, the intellectual property police have indeed conducted their raids, closed down the offending site, and deleted the Satriani video clip. For now, I'm just gonna leave in its place that unhappy digital symbol of art's subjugation by commercial interests.]
