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Tuesday, 01 September 2009

Side Work

Not sure if anyone's still checking in on me on this blog anymore, but just in case, I wanted to give a brief update to what's going on with me.

Big things going down in September.

On the singing front:
1. A cappella vocal jazz quintet Storeytime--featuring autistic savant Patrick Storey--set for an autism benefit September 12th, and hopefully an NBC reality TV show later this year.
2. Tenor section lead for St. Matthew's in Pacific Palisades beginning September 10th.
3. Ramakrishna Oratorio going on the road to Santa Barbara on September 26th.
4. New song "Come From Nothing" debuting in the show Side Work (see below) September 18th.

Writing:
1. Regular feature "New Book Releases" for AOL Shopping Trends & Advice, appearing every Tuesday at http://shopping.aol.com/bloggers/jamey-schrick as well as frequent posts elsewhere on the site.
2. Will complete first draft of feature-length post-apocalyptic western Tracks this month.
3. Hard at work on the novel Fugue State, with a first draft targeted for January 1st, 2010.
4. Finished official biography for artist/photographer Angelica Hoyos, which will soon appear on her site along with a shot from our photoshoot dubbed "Will Busker."

But most importantly:
1. Side Work. The artist's collective I began in March has completed the creation and writing of an original show, and it's better than anything I could have possibly dreamed. Seven artists, covering more than a dozen different artforms, exploding out of the routine of their day jobs and bringing their stifled creativity into brave reality, on stage, four shows, Sept. 18th, 19th, and 20th. I can't explain it any better than that, you'll just have to see it for yourself to understand how innovative and unique Side Work is. Showing at the Whitmore-Lindley Theater in North Hollywood. Tickets are just $15. We're already 1/4 sold out, so hurry!

http://www.sideworkonline.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/sidework
http://twitter.com/sideworkonline

It's gonna be one helluva fun month. Especially since I have no idea how I'm gonna make enough money for rent!

Jamey

Wednesday, 21 January 2009

Fugue State

You lose yourself in the weaponry you develop to protect yourself from the fucked up way that the world is.
Convinced that you're safe finally, and that your way of life is impervious to outside influence, you stand above the advice or admonishment of others with a wry smile: they have no idea how bitterly you'll fight for your perpetuity.
Even logical ideas that come down from sturdy trees of knowledge are no match for your sharpened sawblade and youthful back.
You take to referring to yourself in the third person, as if someone's reading a story about you, some mythical hero in a sweeping epic.
But really you're just lying about yourself.
My self.

Tuesday, 13 January 2009

Work

The economic crisis has arrived at my doorstep like a thunderclap. Whereas the previous length of time I went and the number of jobs I had to apply for before being hired was a couple of weeks and two, respectively, now I'm into my seventh week of unemployment, and have applied to something like sixty or seventy jobs. Granted, I did get one, a part-time freelance writing job that arrived seemingly from Santa, but it pays a meager $800 a month, and aside from that, I'm on borrowed time. The money I saved up from the tour has dwindled to a trickle.
While my level of alarm has risen to a substantial din, the kind that you can sleep most of the night through, I still can't imagine what it must be like to be staring this thing in the face with sad, hungry eyes beaming up at me. I'll figure something out, I'm sure. I'm overqualified for 25% of the jobs I'm applying for. That percentage will increase as the days pass, as an inverse proportion to my pride level.
But what would it be like if I had joined the workforce straight out of high school - or sooner - and staked my future on the unskilled or non-professional labor market that once upon a time was an institution in this country? What if I, for instance, had been underestimated since birth, attended underfunded schools as a child, unable to secure a loan for college due to my color and/or test scores, discouraged from possessing condoms by my parents, forbidden to have an abortion by my faith, and unable to be hired except at the most flimsy of jobs because of a felony possession charge?
And then, remove that flimsy job, pack it up, send it overseas, or eliminate it entirely to ensure a nice cushion for someone making money off of having money, and what's left?
Can we now finally admit, as a nation, that we have destroyed ourselves through the systematic annihilation of the American workforce by corporations that practice creating profit through job-slashing and outsourcing? There was a time in this country when getting a job for a major corporation meant security, upward advancement, loyalty, and pride. Nowadays, that same job is the first to be sliced off for a shareholder percentage, frozen forever in a promotionless enviroment, or contracted out to a labor-exploitative factory in the Phillippines.
Business, in America, is about the bottom line. It has stopped being about people.
The only job that poor, undereducated people in this country can count on always having a spot for them is the making and carrying out of war. So if you're all right with and capable of putting your life and sanity on the line for dubious causes and a lousy $20-30k a month, you've got a shot. Otherwise, good luck, we'll see you at McDonald's, on the streets, or in hell.
I dearly hope Obama et al can turn this battleship around. We did this to ourselves, all of us that played the game of greed and excess, or turned a blind eye while it happened. Read the book No Logo by Naomi Klein. If we don't give the future of America back to the workers, and call the bigshots on their bull, we're doomed to sit forever on the brink of class warfare, as millions of able-bodied people sit at home or on the street corners wondering how in hell they're going to make it to tomorrow.
This is not the America I've heard so much about.

Monday, 29 December 2008

Roboticized

In an effort to update and maintain progress on my novel, I'm going to be posting relevant material that I've culled from my own writing. To begin, I'm returning to a subject I explored previously:
The dearth of empathy.
On the currently-running television show Battlestar Galatica, the human race faces extinction at the hands of the Cylons - rebellious androids that humans themselves created. Some of the Cylons have become startlingly human, so much so that a few of them don't even know they aren't. The image of a merciless, bloodless killing machine that is a simple enemy to abhor is replaced by living, breathing, flawed beings, identical in almost every way to the humans, which complicates the effort to sustain a monolithic front against them. Often, it is the humans who come off as cold and merciless, so mindless are they in their relentless war stance.
The producers of Battlestar have done well to present such an adept mirror to our current society, one that is precariously balanced on the edge of ideological fissures opened up between previously united populations. While once it was easy to Fear the Soviet Threat, or to write off the problems of the Middle East as savagery from a primitive ideology, we are being confronted daily with a deeper understanding of differing points of view, thanks in no small part to the availability of information from around the world, and the voices of people who are not presidents or jihadists.
However, when doled out for profit or policy, the churning and spinning of that same information into buttery soundbites or political platforms could have an unsettling side effect that might derail the process of bringing peace through commonality, at least when viewed as a tap that cannot be turned off.
Information, as history has shown, can be weaponized.
There is a psychological condition called alexithymia, which in essence is the inability of a person to express their own emotions verbally, to the extreme end that they will report themselves as 'normal' following episodes of self-mutilation or apparent suicide attempts. Sufferers also fail to understand the expression of emotions by others, and react to emotional situations in manners that could be construed as cold and robotic. Often the sufferers of this condition are victims of sexual or mental abuse during their formative years, although ultimately the onset of the condition is a result of psychotrauma that can happen at any time in someone's life. Basically, the brain's emotional circuitry blows out in response to overwhelmingly intense stimuli.
There is a proposed physiological basis for this condition. The corpus callosum is one of the parts of the brain responsible for transmitting messages between its two hemispheres. It is one of the slowest parts of the brain to develop and to go about a process called myelination, which is the building up of a conductive shield over nerve fibers to more efficiently convey electrical impulses. Consequently, this part of the brain is particularly vulnerable in humans under the age of 18.
Studies have shown that alexithymia is causally linked to damage to the corpus callosum.
It may sound obvious, but would it not follow that physical and mental abuse leads to a physiological change within the brain that stunts a human's ability to express themself? And if so, is it a reach to think that the dosing out of terror and fear that masquerades as profitable information in our news, entertainment, and politics, can over the course of a lifetime chip away at a human's physical and mental tolerance for abuse, and therefore make it increasingly likely for people to draw back into isolation?
The inability to describe or express one's emotions is one of the fundamental threats to any human interaction. Lacking any idea how to describe the emotion of any given situation, otherwise 'normal' people lie or hide the truth as a matter of course, rather than embarrass or incriminate themselves. Lies between parents and children, between lovers, between bosses and employees - between leaders and their people - are breakdowns in understanding one's responsibility to their own emotional integrity.
The fear and negativity that assault our society on a daily basis become like little pills of abuse that are swallowed down, usually with sugar and fat to make it taste better. It's a short leap to think that with the people buried in stressful stimuli even while they isolate themselves further from the responsibility of describing their reactions to them, society at large then suffers from slow, relentless abuse, and as a result are pandemically alexithymic.
Perhaps we are the Cylons after all.
If it is true that there is a growing lack of empathy in humanity, there yet may be hope. The corpus callosum is appreciably larger and more developed - and presumably more resilient to damage from mental abuse - in one particular segment of the population, due to the necessity for these people to engage both hemispheres of the brain in their chosen human activity.
Who are these people potentially immune to the disease of apathy and isolation?
Musicians.
Studies have shown that music positively affects even those who are not trained at a young age to be musicians, enhancing the communication between the hemispheres of the brain. It literally expands the mind. Who would argue that above all other forms of communication between human minds, music - and art in general - is the tie that binds.
So, as they say, turn it up. Connect those hemispheres.

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

The Cynic Party

Before I launch my recounting of the last four months on the road, I want to spend a moment on something that occured to me the other day, something that made me sputter and rant in impotent anger, to which my girlfriend replied - "That's more of the same, and not very productive."
And so, I blog. To what avail, I don't know, but she's right. Aiming at nothing means hitting it, and aiming at nothing in anger means collateral damage.
On the KCRW political opinion program, Left, Right, and Center, the panel was discussing the Blagojevich mess, and its potential impact on Pres-Elect Obama. Robert Scheer - the left view - was lambasting the "idiots" in the media for focusing on this "stupid" sensationalist story rather than devoting energy to far more substantive stories - i.e. the current administration's complicity in torture outlined in a Senate Armed Service Committee report, and the impending financial crisis that is so much more relevant to Americans.
Furthermore, the contention of Matt Miller, representing a centrist view, was that Blagojevich's actions - while reprehensible - were more a question of the degree to which the Governor acted above what is potentially common among wheeling-dealing politicians, and Ariana Huffington, an independent progressive, wondered how political fodder could possibly be made of the tenuous if non-existent ties Blagojevich had with Obama, whom is having to fend off accusations for simply having an interest in who replaces him in the United States Senate.
In contrast, Tony Blankley, of the right...or as he would say "wight," seemed delighted to entertain this "non-story" as a nugget of Republican hope to derail Obama's perceived infallibilty, even responding to Miller's tongue-in-cheek characterization of this story as a kind of "Republican Christmas present" by saying, "It's better than a lump of coal."
My god that's cynical.
I grant you, I'm an Obama supporter. I believe this man represents a return of pride, integrity, and competence to the Presidency, an office that as a boy I came to believe could only be held by the most graceful, intelligent, and heroically patriotic human being in the country. Now, as an adult, I've grown woefully disillusioned in that regard, and so Obama's rise has not only restored a sort of childlike awe for my leader, but a more mature sense of the intense personal sacrifices and standards a man or woman must endure to rise to the level of President.
Is it true that Obama has a sheen of Teflon invincibility with respect to the media, or does it just seem like that when compared to the outgoing President, who received with good reason perhaps the most relentless disparaging in modern history? Jimmy Carter must be eternally grateful that cable news hadn't arrived in earnest when he was leaving office, to now witness the country hand over their attention and hope so swiftly and completely to a newly-elected leader that sometimes I forget Obama isn't actually in office for another thirty-five days.
Yet, on the "losing" side, the tail-between-the-legs set, there is this sullen grumbling going on, this opportunistic huddling, looking for any sign of weakness in what is cynically characterized as an unstoppable political force. There is a sense of glee even in these desperate times at a speck of dirt on the standard bearer of a clear and present paradigm shift. The "Republican Christmas present" apparently is this: what we all thought was a ray of light in a dimming sky is just as murky as everything else, ha ha! "See," they seem to be spouting, "he's just as crooked as we are!"
Even were something untoward going on between Blagojevich and Obama's staff, is this cause for mirth? I don't recall feeling particularly grateful when, for instance, Scooter Libby was indicted for outing Valerie Plame, or when no WMD's were found in Iraq, or when New Orleans was blown away.
Add to this the "birthers," people who are dead set on proving that Obama is a British citizen or was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be elected President, among many other fringe societies who have even more dastardly views on Obama's election, and there seems to be a growing portion of people in this country who would love to cut off their own noses to spite their faces.
I'm no apologist, and in the event that Obama is somehow significantly less than he represents himself to be, then his fall will be swift and precipitous. But the effort by these carrion birds to hock their bitter, acidic spittle at a pillar helping shore up the crumbling American facade seems to me something akin to suicidal tendencies from very, very unhappy souls.