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The Current Tide - BLOG

TV, FILM, PHILOSOPHY, POETRY, AND GENERAL OBSERVATIONS BY CHRISTOPHER SMITH

Mound Dividing Time.

Soft dirt crumbles underfoot, lone pebbles rolling down the trench.
His hand rises, fingers splay, grip at the earth, pregnant with despair, dreams have gone astray.

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August 10th 2010 @ 10:55

Posted By: Christopher Smith - Category: No Category

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POST MODERN HOMOGENEITY AND THE BLUES

It is an undesirable and yet seemingly unavoidable irony that the more democratic we become, the more we destroy high culture, become homogeneous, grow outward rather than upward and make ourselves susceptible to the common social diseases of mass society. Boredom, obesity, anorexia, depression, bulimia, sex addiction, oversanitisation, the list goes on. We are the affected middle classes of human existence, every one of us a minor king, ruling over a shitty little kingdom built of paper mache, bursting at the seems, but for now assuring us of our place at the pinnacle of human creation.

We the people are the rulers, we the people make the rules and we the people declare more for everyone, a party with never enough guests, but all too many hosts. We the people, demand more of what we don’t need from those who have all the things that we do. We revel in our ‘freedoms’, boasting of our mastery over our forefathers and our triumph over their simplicities, assuring ourselves with technology, and comforting ourselves with our decadence. Safe in our little kingdoms we form members of a single unit which rolls outward and onward enveloping everything in its path until unity is all that remains, we wage wars to extend it and justify all things in its sanctity, democracy is god, and we the clergy

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August 8th 2010 @ 12:46

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Inside the Leviathan

In the belly of the leviathan, none of them suspect, they walk past me without looking twice, I look like I should belong.
It must be my dull eyes, and my lack of any sense of purpose, I seem superfluous here and indeed I feel it.
I am submerged in the bowels of heterotopia, where even the young can be dangerous if woken from their stupor, and I stand here with impunity, a foreigner who judges with his gaze. Handing down sentence after sentence each of them is condemned before their crimes are even heard

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July 28th 2010 @ 01:39

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Where does 'it' go?

In Trainspotting, the character titled ‘Sick Boy’, tells Ewan McGreggor’s character Mark ‘Rent Boy’ Renton,

“It's certainly a phenomenon in all walks of life…at one time, you've got it, and then you lose it, and it's gone forever. All walks of life: George Best, for example. Had it, lost it. Or David Bowie, or Lou Reed... The Name of The Rose is merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory

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July 23rd 2010 @ 07:50

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Atheism is a hard gig but well worth it

Its hard being an atheist, you have no one to rely on but yourself when shit hits the fan, you have no insurance policy against death (on the flipside there is no chance of going to hell either), your constantly nagged by theists about the spiritual and metaphysical implications of your choice, and again by agnostics about the dogmatism of atheism and your similarity to theist. To top it all off the chances are that you once were a theist so you constantly hammering yourself about all of this and ensuring that your decision was made for the right reasons, it never bloody ends.

I made mine after much jumping from one camp to another trying to find the right fit. I believed in god because I was basically told by those I trusted most at a time when I couldn't decide for myself that it was the way of the universe (in other words I was brainwashed as a child), and stopped believing because I was just far too intelligent to swallow such rubbish. I was then indifferent until I decided that perhaps I had been to harsh on my creator, maybe the bible was bullshit but I had missed the point, it was not about non-fiction, but rather messages about human experience that were valid in-spite of their likelihood, and perhaps god was still there he just was not in the form which I had always imagined him (roman sandals, long beard, Grecian robe, stern look, and always frowning fro constant disappointment

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July 19th 2010 @ 08:09

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The last fiction

I remember watching a movie called Baraka a few years ago (flick w/ no dialogue just visuals) and seeing the baby chickens flying down the chute toward the packing trays, they looked just like tennis balls, and when they reached the end they were treated like commodities of the same importance or value as tennis balls, I think it was the intended message of the movie (although you can never be sure with these type of films, often we read into them what we want to). It was the first time I was introduced to the reality of farming practices of the the 21st C, it quickly replaced the myth of the farmer with acres of land walking to his pens and spreading feed across the dirt for his chooks to peck at.

As we get older we shed a lot of the fictions which shield us from the horrors of our nature, it begins with the tooth fairy, and for those of us brave enough to admit it, it usually culminates in the dissolution of the idea of heaven, I guess the fiction of our food can be harder to come to terms with than even that. I can live without god, but when my stomach rumbles I become a slave to my desires, it is the baseness of the flesh, as opposed to that of the soul. Much harder to master, as it is much more latent in its corruption

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July 18th 2010 @ 09:38

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The Greatest Man of the 20th C

By what criteria do we measure greatness? How civil are we? our neanderthal still treads heavily upon this earth, leaving deep footprints wherever he has been, the scattered bones of the flesh he has consumed and stench of decay which follows his blind self interest. Enlightenment still remains elusive, perhaps we are a world of too many minds and too few processes of enlightenment?

Who we crown king of the 20th Century matters, not because it tells us more about the barbaric 100 years of growing pains our species suffered in its tumultuous adolescence where cause and effect are still mysterious, but because of what it tells us about ourselves now. History is not so much our window into the past as it is the story of who we are now, and who we long to be in the future, we only celebrate the forefathers that espouse current morale, and who shape present self descriptions

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July 17th 2010 @ 02:04

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places never dreamt

four white walls of equal size, and a floor with a corner for each

blue and red balls stand alone, with no discernible purpose, they are aesthetic

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July 16th 2010 @ 14:27

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The appeal of Man v Wild

Why is it that I cant stop watching this bloody Man v Wild Show?

Every time I tune in its the same thing, he gets dropped off in the middle of nowhere, encounters a problem gets round it, eats a raw snake, sucks water out of some root vegetable and then gets rescued

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July 14th 2010 @ 03:13

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Neanderthal Redux

Observations from the modern jungle.

Never underestimate the middle class, semi- professional, quasi skilled man of average intelligence, he may seem an easy foe and in all respects perhaps he is. He is neither well versed in the ways strategy, adept at changing when necessary, nor able to reason without the clear guidance of his intellectual betters, but sizing him up in a glance only oversimplifies him

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July 9th 2010 @ 12:06

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August 2010

2 Posts

July 2010

9 Posts

February 2010