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2012 was undoubtedly the worst year of my life,
a year when everything bad came to an appalling head, making me wonder, as I
cast my mind back over the torturous sequence of events that culminated in a
change of address over Christmas, how I managed to survive into 2013 to write
this and other texts.
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The audience is to the band (or group) a kind
of abstraction, which would not exist but for the band. To be sure, the band
needs the audience and, in a sense, would not exist as a commercially
successful entity without one. But it is the band that creates the audience,
not vice versa, and to the band the audience are an abstract collective,
scarcely recognizable as individuals. It is the band, on the contrary, that is
the concrete embodiment of individualism, both as individual members of it and
as exponents of musical and/or compositional individualism, without which it
would have no interest for the audience, that abstract embodiment, as it were,
of collectivism, some of whose members may well aspire towards individuality or
even be representative of individuality at other times and in a different or
analogous context. For audience and band are not immutably fixed in a
dichotomous mould but are capable, to varying extents (depending on the
individuals) of interchangeability, so that what was
concrete in one context can become abstract in the other, and vice versa,
though not normally within the same audience/band concert.
Tangerine Dream Live at the Tempodrome Berlin (‘September
21st 2006’) is without the shadow of a doubt Tangerine Dream's best Eastgate-released DVD, featuring not only 25 concert
tracks/titles and 5 encore ones, but a seven member line-up comprised of Edgar Froese, Jerome Froese, Thorsten Quaeschning, Iris Camaa, Linda
Spa, Gerald Gradwohl, and Bernhard Beibl. That is at least two more musicians than one usually
gets from their Eastgate DVDs, and the sound is
correspondingly richer and more varied. Also, some three hours of their music
is no small contributory factor to what I regard as the overall appropriate
musical pre-eminence of this particular DVD recorded in
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If you are a slave to your addiction, be it to
alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, sex, or whatever, you will not be a free man. Nor
will you become a free man without outside intervention, without the
assistance, that is, of persons capable of liberating you from your slavery and
thereby setting you free.
If alcohol gives you nightmares, it would be
better if you desisted from its consumption – assuming you were not slavishly
addicted and incapable, in consequence, of doing so.
It is ironic that at a time when tobacco is
being discouraged, at least in relation to the smoking of cigarettes, alcohol,
by contrast, is more easily and variously available than ever, with literally
thousands of different kinds of spirits, wines, and beers being produced in
dozens of countries and exported from hundreds of sellers or merchants all over
the world. It is also somewhat sad, since alcohol, in whatever guise, does
little to enhance your life or better your health, being for the most part a
temporary solution to a permanent problem, namely that of living in the
modern/post-modern world with its soulless consumerism and societal malaise,
one born of materialism and the overwhelming dominance, universally, of money.
Whether you prefer spirits, wines, or beers,
have arguably upper class, middle class, or lower class tastes, you will be
afflicted by the same demon in different guises, a demon that, issuing from the
devil and/or bedevilment of original crime, ensures that the soul is starved of
metaphysical nourishment and rendered incapable of joy, without which there can
be no godly grace but only, at most, a subversion or corruption of it such that
results in a sinful acquiescence, by males, in the dominance of devilish values
like crime and evil.
Another thing about alcohol and the consumption
thereof is that one gets carried away by it to a point where the 'golden mean'
of all things in moderation that makes for relative happiness is drowned in an
orgy of excess, whereby every vice or cultural indulgence (the two are not
necessarily identical) is taken to extremes and the variety that is the
proverbial 'spice of life' in sobriety is replaced by a self-indulgent fixation
upon one thing, like music or drama, to the exclusion of others. Good in one
sense, that of the immediate present, but in terms of the development or cultivation,
through variety, of a 'rounded psychology', profoundly self-defeating, since
the fixation is bound to repeat itself to a degree whereby it becomes
predictably boring, like a record or song doomed to replay itself ad infinitum and ad nauseam, because there are only a
limited number of things that would be considered appropriate to or 'worthy of'
the particular alcoholic bias.
The 'red devil wine' he consumed, from time to
time, did not wash his sins away but was itself a sin against the holy ghost
that warred upon his self, making him feel polluted and spiritually unclean.
This is the 'inner dirt' that renders the 'inner cleanliness' of grace
impossible of attainment; for the committing of sin is folly, just as the
avoidance of sin in the interests of divine grace is wisdom. By the wisdom of
grace are you saved from the folly of sin.
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