Gestalt

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about art, music, history, ideas, philosophy, zen, and the like. Almost a year ago I came upon the sudden realization that my focus was attenuated by my own distractions, resulting in poor work service and social skills among my friends and peers. Thankfully, I've been working on all that and things have been going swimmingly. You could even say people love me, even people who aren't my family or apart of my immediate friendship circle. I'm ready for the Orlando Fanclub LOL. 

In all seriousness, what I am truly talking about here is thinking processes on a metaphysical level. Gestalt actually. This is a German word for shape or form, and its the idea that systems and their properties should be viewed as a whole, not as loose collections of parts.

What really got me going with this was reading Heidegger's Being and Time, a book so immensely prolix that I'm not quite sure anybody who's read it quite understands it, or definitely doesn't understand all of it, but perhaps portions, or segments of it. Being and Time got me thinking about life metaphysically. What is life, what is being, what is time, what does it mean to be apart of the worldhood of the world? Etc. 

I've thought about these things as part of Heidegger's thought processes but that is too complicated to go into here [blog in the future incoming on that book], so rather I'll focus on what I think about these ideas. 

Life is the optimal persona [don't ask, its a California thing] of the soul, of a person, place, or thing. Being is the consciousness, so to speak, the thing that makes it a life plus everything else. This includes personality, physical, and mental traits of the person, and the way they make their thoughts process. Time is the standard measurement of life. To be apart of the worldhood of the world means to be a willing participant in the game of life, to want to be apart of social conventions. This includes work, friendship, family obligations, girlfriend, wife, kids, etc. Plato has different variations on these ideas, as does Heidegger.

My own thoughts on these ideas are simple, they're still valid still fair game. My thoughts on Being, or as Heidegger calls it, Dasein, has brought me to a new idea, a new way of thinking, thought processes. Basically, you don't have to think about your thoughts as being apart from each other. Rather, you can look at it as one entity. All your ideas could be thought of as one spontaneous act. Cycles of reality if you will. Your whole entire day could be thought of as one smooth motion rather than many different acts within 24 hours. That sort of thing. Frank Zappa had a word for this that I've since forgotten. But basically, he thought of all his recorded body of work, music, as one entity, rather than as individual albums or single inspirational moments. I'm thinking about daily ideas, activity, and thought processes in a similar way. 

This could also correlate to activities. You could do many things throughout the day with many different people, see a lot of places, do many things, and at the end of the day, you can look at it all as one activity, one single act of motion. 

I think about all this as cycles of reality, an idea I got ironically from a jazz song, from a modern jazz muso from New York, a drummer whose name I've forgotten. For me its a way of thinking in a more meta way, thoughts are more cohesive rather than random and disorganized. This isn't to say that all your ideas are related, rather when you think in this vast linear fashion, the worldhood of the world changes a bit, not it in itself, but rather the way you fit inside of it. It can come in handy sometimes when boredom is so ready at hand in the humdrum of everyday life. It connects everything together, you're more alert, so you don't look up and go, either in your mind or speaking to another person, "what?" 

What can I say? These Germans have me thinking metaphysically. 

Last open jam set of 2017

Here's the last open jam set I played of 2017 at Petie's Place, on Reseda and Oxnard Street. I'm pretty happy with the recordings, mostly because my vocals are a lot better than they've ever been. I've really come a long way with my singing starting last year. I'm really glad I started singing rock and roll. It's a lot smarter and easier, as I don't have to rely on other people to do vocals.

We started off with Sunshine of Your Love with this dude named Allan (a typical blues rocker long hair w/ a Strat). He did a great job jamming with me for the first time ever, I especially liked his leads on Spirits of the Dead, the second song we played. I really liked my solo on Sunshine, I was going for my Hendrix style there.

On Spirits of the Dead Allen's leads really give the piece a new dynamic melody. And then there's me doing black metal style coarse/scream style vocals. Pretty funny! A lot of people say to me that they don't expect that when they see me play. It's cool to have one death metal song, and this is my only one as of now. We played the song a lot faster than we usually do but again Allen's leads really pave the way for a great tune, especially when I repeat the chugging bridge riff and he takes some bluesy leads over it. Spirits of the Dead!

And the last tune we have for you is Blues Improvisation no.1. This tune was just a blues Allen and I called in A. I stuck to dominant and ninth chords in the key of A. I might have switched it to minor ninths near the ending too. Added a little bit of the power chord blues shuffle in there too for contrast. I think my blues solo really hits the heart strong. When I do a blues solo I always try to go for the Hendrixy emotion.

Allen's blues solo on this tune was quite something, as you can hear. He hits a lot of the common cliches but it always sounds good. He's a great player and I'm glad to have jammed with him on the last open jam of 2017. I'm going to do even better to sing better and become a better performer in 2018!

https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/sunshine-of-your-love-2
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/spirits-of-the-dead-2
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/blues-improvisation-no1

A call for peace

Lately there has been a lot of shootings and mass deaths. The Orlando shooting at the club was horrific. I'm not usually a political guy at all but on the gun issue I must say that we have to put a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons. Nobody should have weapons that can kill fifty people in minutes and injure another fifty. Those among the injured might even die too. This story is pretty much all that everybody is talking about. Even the announcers at E3 talked about it a bit as awkward as that sounds. I think the only logical way to help prevent these senseless acts of rage is to ban assault weapons. If the guy only had a pistol there's no way he would've been able to kill that many people that fast.

So I think they should ban assault weapons. In addition, they should make it harder to gain access to guns-any guns. There should be a more throughout medical evaluation and mental history for all gun owners. Lastly, there should be rigorous gun training classes that are mandatory for all gun owners. Now, I'm no gun expert and I've never even shot a gun before so I'm not sure if they already have these things in motion. But if they do, it seems like they aren't doing a good job of it at all.

I classify myself as a progressive democrat with some socialist leanings so you can sort of expect where I lean on the gun issue and how I feel about the NRA gun lobbyists. They're horrible. They have all this money and power over our government and every time something fucked up like this happens we all talk about banning assault weapons and nothing ever happens. That's because of the NRA gun lobbyists and Republicans but also the Democrats that are protecting the NRA and gun lobbyists too. They're all to blame because they're not doing anything of substantial change. They bring awareness to the issue and we mourn the victims as a national ritual for a short while but ultimately nothing substantial is ever done. This makes me very sad as an American because it shows that our government is run, bought, and sold by these gun tooting NRA lobbyists and they're not showing proper respect for our dead by making it harder for these things to happen again in the future.

I obviously have my own ideas about guns. For me, in a perfect America, there would be no need for guns, either by civilians nor the police. That way nobody could get killed by bullets and stupidity. Basically I want America to be like Japan or Canada-where most semi-automatic weapons are banned. Obviously America isn't that kind of country because mass shootings happen here on the daily and people are fighting for their right to bear arms because of the Second Amendment. Although I don't think we should change the constitution, I do think there are times when the laws need to adjusted to fit the situation as things change over time. This is why I think they need to ban assault weapons. It's like fucking Call of Duty out here. Obviously that's an overstatement but today we live in a world where you can get killed anywhere doing anything. Which leads me to my next point.

The Orlando story will capture the media's attention for weeks, as it should. But on June 12 Christina Grimmie was gunned down when she was signing autographs after a concert. She was a big gamer that I used to see at Fire and Dice but she was also a talented singer that was a finalist on The Voice. What happened to her was tragic. Although I never talked to her or even played her in bracket there's an empty feeling knowing that she's gone. If you're a famous person things like this can happen to you. It's that kind of world we live in. It's a scary place. She will be missed and we will remember her as a whole in the SoCal Smash 4 community.

To wrap things up the greatest thing we can do is come together as a nation, continents, and even world and give peace a chance. It's easier said than done but blaming guns isn't going to fix this issue. The government isn't going to fix this issue either-otherwise they would've done it a long time ago. People and only people are the bringers of peace. Peace is salvation. Give peace a chance.