black market music

Played at club momo yesterday, it was great. the sound was excellent. true to form i broke a string during the second song and had to improvise a solo without it. borrowed a guitar from slowjaxx and the rest of the set went well. binge drinking soon followed and my last few waking moments of the day involved watching, hearing, and smelling tjinn throw up in a cab.

The day after always feels really empty and faded somehow. trying to shake off this monumental sense of gloom thats making me feel five times heavier than i really am. Gonna head out to meet josh in a bit, havnt seen him for ages. we used to be so close, somewhere between being 15 and now our lives went completely off tangent. i think i changed and he remained true to himself. nowadays theres this gulf i cant really cross anymore, in a way we've become a warped reflection of each other, seeing as how we started out pretty much the same. i suppose we're each others' could-have-beens.

im fighting the urge to buy a pack of fags that will surely send me closer to economic disaster for this month. i hate army wages.

i cant wait for our shows to be over for this month, so i can just take out an acoustic and write new songs. Sure playing live is great,but u can only whip out the same old ghosts for so long. Nothing beats writing a song in its early stages. Its unpolished, rough,most of the layers and accompaniments are imagined, and in all probably it sounds like crap to everyone else. But it feels so real and true.

your glassy eyes betray you

your glassy eyes betray you

When you open up to people without checking yourself, many a time your also opening yourself up to being treated like toilet paper. Sometimes its better to keep an objective detachment, cos frankly im getting sick and tired of it. Understand the sides of you they want to see and display them , give nothing more, take nothing more and dont expect understanding or anything for the matter. Cos if you dont turn to lead, you'll break eventually.

tuesday night

Our first show is on this saturday, and this week is pretty burnt out of practice. Yesterday after practice i went to watch a movie with ced and edle. It was pretty damn crappy and badly executed and i have to say that my faith in eric khoo has gone down a couple more notches.
After the film, we bummed and talked til four plus til they both piled into a taxi and headed back. I didnt quite fancy spending a ludicrous amount of quid on midnight charge back home. Its hard enough trying to survive on the third world wages the army trickles down to me every desperate start of the month.

I decided to sleep on a bench somewhere til the first bus. All the benches were wet cos it rained, so i found a slab of pavement under shelter near the Singtel Centre Carpark. i wrapped my guitar strap and bag round my arms so they wouldnt get nicked and dozed off. Later on i was rudely awakened by a sharp pain my head, took me a few seconds to realise someone was kicking it. Realised that i was surrounded by a bunch of obviously drunk indian blokes. One of em gave me a parting liberal kick in stomach, before being dragged away by his giggling mates, then they ran off. Was pretty glad my guitar was untouched. Got up and trudged up to the lucky plaza bus stop, my contacts fused to my eyes and waited fer the bus home. i learnt to appreciate my bed alot more after this morning, firstly its considerably softer than concrete, and secondly random people dont start kicking you in the head.

watching the sun rise during the bus ride was nice though, even though all the seratonin was gone and i couldnt feel much, the aloneness was comforting strangely, cos it always allows billy to take over.

the last song

This is the last song
This is the last song I'll sing for you
This is the last song
This is the last song I can give you

The roaring city sleeps
Metal fingers clutching dirty sheets
And no one comes for free
In this place where the angels sleep

This is the last song

My eyes are open
my eyes are open wonder to this
As you hold the secrets
I count the minutes off so perfectly

The shards of broken glass
Sing the strains of a sad old tune
We've made it at last
But what we had is lost inside our past

This is the last song

Could you find away across me
To forgive and forget me
To appease and relent me
To deceive and protect me
To understand and release me
To the dusk or unto the dawn

cos this is the last song

the end is the beginning is the end

While nihilism is often discussed in terms of extreme skepticism and relativism, for most of the 20th century it has been associated with the belief that life is meaningless. Existential nihilism begins with the notion that the world is without meaning or purpose. Given this circumstance, existence itself--all action, suffering, and feeling--is ultimately senseless and empty.

By the late 20th century, "nihilism" had assumed two different castes. In one form, "nihilist" is used to characterize the postmodern man, a dehumanized conformist, alienated, indifferent, and baffled, directing psychological energy into hedonistic narcissism or into a deep resentment that often explodes in violence.

French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard characterizes postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives," those all-embracing foundations that we have relied on to make sense of the world. This extreme skepticism has undermined intellectual and moral hierarchies and made "truth" claims, transcendental or transcultural, problematic. Postmodern antifoundationalists, paradoxically grounded in relativism, dismiss knowledge as relational and "truth" as transitory, genuine only until something more palatable replaces it (reminiscent of William James' notion of "cash value"). The critic Jacques Derrida, for example, asserts that one can never be sure that what one knows corresponds with what is. Since human beings participate in only an infinitesimal part of the whole, they are unable to grasp anything with certainty, and absolutes are merely "fictional forms."

"Faced with the nonhuman, the nonlinguistic, we no longer have the ability to overcome contingency and pain by appropriation and transformation, but only the ability to recognize contingency and pain"

If we accept that all perspectives are equally non-binding, then intellectual or moral arrogance will determine which perspective has precedence. Worse still, the banalization of nihilism creates an environment where ideas can be imposed forcibly with little resistance, raw power alone determining intellectual and moral hierarchies. It's a conclusion that dovetails nicely with Nietzsche's, who pointed out that all interpretations of the world are simply manifestations of will-to-power.

"Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."