Tribune to a Genius: 7 Things I Learned from George Carlin

(An interview of George Carlin by Tim Russert in 2005)
Hello Fellow Seekers of Truth and Life,

I want to talk today about a figure who has influenced my creative life in a profound way. I remember the first time I heard George Carlin's material. I had just turned 18, and I found lots of points in the material. However, his material got very violent, which often disturbed me. I am the type of person who just hears about and sees horrible events happen in media and news, and it scares me, makes me mad or sad. It was almost as if listening to it too much would bring the catastrophes he was talking about into being. So I decided to give listening to Carlin's routines a rest.

Two weeks later, I was visiting my grandmother in Virginia. She had the TV on one Sunday morning, and the newscrawl underneath proclaimed that George Carlin was dead at 71 in Malibu. I remembered that was the same guy that I had been alternately amused, inspired and taken aback by just two weeks earlier. Although I didn't think much about it at the time, it turned out that this man's 50-year body of work would help give my ideas a framework, a means of expression that I hadn't known was possible.

First of all, the reason I am writing this is because we of the anniversary. Not only was this past Friday, the 22nd of June, the fourth anniversary of Carlin's death, but it would have been his 75th birthday. I meant to write this on Friday or Saturday, but it just got so hectic around here that I had no time until this afternoon to write. There are many passages I could write about the life and work of the late, great George Carlin. For simplicity's sake, though (or so I don't bore the hell out of you), I will make each of my main points in one of the following seven bullet points.
Here is my list of seven things I learned from George Carlin. To pay tribute to the common comedic form, I will present them from last to first.

7. Language is an amazing thing, have fun with it. Have you ever taken the time to take apart a word, and then wondered where it came from? The fact is, every word is an interesting and unique concept that came from somewhere. Language is something only humans can use and understand, it is the reason we don't spend all day grunting at each other.

Allow yourself to notice, and be amused by, the ways that words and concepts line up, contradict, make sense, don't make sense, sound similar, sound different, cover up and reveal things. Now if all this sounds too academic for you, remember that Carlin, the guy who took all of this language play into new territory, dropped out of school in 9th Grade. Clearly, you don't need to be an academic to do this.

To give an example, just yesterday, I was grocery shopping, and I picked up a bottle of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This name baffled me. First of all, what does the term virgin even mean in this context? Is it uncured, unsaturated, not heated up? And second, have you ever come across a bottle of virgin olive oil, because I never have. Your only choices in the grocery store are olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, which leads to the third point. What does the extra virgin mean? I always thought that something could be either virgin, or not virgin. There aren't degrees of virginity, it's something you have or you don't, it's that simple. My grandfather first brought the term to my attention, but it is little phrases like this that George Carlin made we who listened notice.

6. It matters which word you use to describe an object or concept. Whatever you may believe, the words you use actually do matter. One of Carlin's running themes was his love of tearing down euphemistic language. When some idea or thought makes us uncomfortable, we try to soft-pedal description of it, so we don't experience the full brunt of what is happening. This is a natural human urge, we want to protect ourselves from the idea of harm. Often, we also want to ignore the idea that we could be wrong.

While this is a natural urge, it does us great harm. It is dishonest, and it hides us from dealing with life as it is, and often, it keeps us stuck in a place that may feel comfortable, but robs us of life force, insight and genuine compassion. For instance, we love to say "I'm getting older," rather than "I'm getting old," because we don't want to face the fact that we will grow old and die too. Such a thought shocks and frightens us at first, but it could also help us treat others with honesty and decency. After all, if we are going to die, too, that means everybody else will die at some point, so we share this "marked" fate, terror, and sadness with everybody else.

I'll give you a macro-example from the Carlin files. After World War I, soldiers would experience a condition of terror, anguish over past battles, regret, and a mental fraying over what they had seen and experienced. This was called "shell shock." A simple name, that told you what you needed to know, with vivid language that gave you the sensation. After World War II, the same state was referred to as "battle fatigue." That name seems to hurt less, like you just need a good night's sleep for it. Then after Korea, it was called "operational exhaustion," a highly mechanical term for a human condition. When soldiers were coming back from Vietnam, they got "post-traumatic stress disorder." This word dilutes the original meaning with several superfluous academic terms, when "shell shock" works just as well.

In fact, such a convoluted term hides a key reality of war from us. Even if you survive a war, it takes a toll on your psyche. I'll always remember one line of Carlin's: "I'll bet if they were still calling it shell shock, a lot of those Vietnam Veterans would have received the attention they needed." Think about the soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq now. What do they have? P-T-S-D. Now they don't even bother to come up with names anymore, they just give it a meaningless collection of letters. Since about the mid-1990's, our language has gone progressively more and more toward abbreviation. This is an example of how dangerous it can be.

5. Producing violent media doesn't make you coldhearted or cruel. As I mentioned above, I was initially turned off by Carlin's repeated wishes for people's deaths. As I grew, I also grew to dislike movies that were excessively gory or violent just for the sake of being excessively gory or violent. This made life tough when everyone around me was thriving on movies like 300 or Inglorious Basterds, and playing war-themed video games, while these were a big turn-off for me.

However, Carlin was different in that he didn't mind if carnage happened closer to him, where there was a chance he could be hurt or killed. I later saw this and understood the conscious nature of what he was saying, and the conscious nature of the audience's laughing in approval. While it still scared me that people could be so blaze about such material, I knew that the intent behind it was to call our attention to something. There was something inherently violent and ignorant in our human societies, particularly in the United States.


Remember this segment from Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine? This had to do with the scapegoating of violent media and video games in the wake of that tragedy. The reason I included it is this discussion of whether violent entertainment is really the boogeyman everybody claims it is. The fact is, there has always been some sort of violence and cruelty out there. Are supposed to just not  talk about it, and hope that'll make it go away? Carlin spoke of the dark urge to see someone hurt in people. If we don't address that, how will we ever move forward.

Whatever you may think of Manson or his music, listen to the last thing he says."I wouldn't have said one word to [the Columbine victims]. I would've listened to what they had to say, and that's what no one did." The people you hear on TV are constantly telling you how to think, and what to do. When you get hurt, in a small- or large-scale way, there is always someone there telling you what to think and do ("You need this product," or "Violence is rampant, and this group is to blame"). This is all to sell a neat narrative about the world, that you must always accept. Because of Carlin, and what Manson said above, I don't think the problem is violent songs, comedy routines, or movies themselves. I think the issue lies in intent. There is being shocking to pander and boost sales revenues, and then there is being shocking to prove a point, and offer insight, which I will talk about in the next point.
4. Take the things that piss you off, and convert them into creative insights about life. You may have noticed a lot of "angry rants" on this blog of late. Believe it or not, I think anger can be very productive for solving problems and helping people in pain. The problem is that people rarely deal with anger in a positive way. Most of the time, people deal with it in the most destructive way possible, by choosing scapegoats, rallying around "heroes" pinning all the bad in the world on the scapegoat, and then taking out their anger on them.
Unfortunately, people either handle anger this way, or cut themselves off from the anger entirely, trying to deny or destroy it. Another way would be to look at the anger, and keep asking "What is behind this?" You could explore what it is about the things that bug you or make you angry. Sometimes it might be insignificant, but other times, there might be something behind it. Carlin routinely talked about things that made him angry, exaggerating the anger for comedic energy, and it usually lead to some insight about life that you hadn't thought of before. Some people were threatened by this, but for many people, including me, this was the insight I needed to grow.
I've lately began making lists of things that bug me. One thing is people with earbuds in their ears all the time. Going to college, I see this all the time, people walking around with those blank looks on their faces, with the damned white headphones in, as if to say "I don't have to pay attention to anything." What bugs me the most is when I see people with headphones on skateboards and bikes. Focusing on this singular annoying thing led me to some creative insights. It led me to think about how people shut down reflexively, was there anything I did that was an easy way of shutting down, getting stuck in my own world. Here, an annoying occurence became an opportunity to reflect and grow. By the way, the things you complain about also apply to you, as I will discuss in a moment.

3. All people are hypocrites, and contradictions in people are a part of life. What was interesting to me is that George Carlin's career grew out of anger toward the Vietnam War, and the culture of Reagan, where it became good to do evil and evil to do good. However, Carlin was not kind toward the people in the government, the corporations. He hoped they were hurt-the same thing he attacked them for doing. As I watched his material later, I saw he was also lashing out at causes and groups usually defended vigorously by the Left of the 60's. Earlier in my life, I had believed that you had to support one set of ideas or another, but this changed my mindset. I realized that my own gut feelings mattered, and I shouldn't ignore them, or try to stuff them into a conventional wisdom box.
I had also assumed that because Carlin had this rough-edged, biting persona on stage, he must have been just bad to everyone he met. Not true. At least, not according to his memoir (which was transcribed by a friend of his after his death). In his memoir, he had only positive things to say about his fellow comedians at the time, and often worked with them anonymously to help their careers. He certainly said what he felt at a gut level, but some of it was brutal, some of it was very insightful. It was all very genuine. I also learned how to disagree. You don't have to accept or reject some point of view across the board. I used to believe that people had one persona about them, and that was what guided their life. I now know that what we say, and what we do, think and feel, often contradict each other. I have begun using this as a part of my life, rather than rejecting or trying to bury it.

2. Beneath race, gender, class, religion, nationality, et. al., there is a common experience we all share. You may have noticed that under labels, I will often include the phrase common experience. This is what  that refers to. I don't know a great way to describe it in words better than this: there are things in life we all have to go through, trials, joys, heartbreaks, and most importantly, those little awkward moments, and the little things you succeed at that make you go "Yes!" Let me let the late, great Mr. Carlin do the explaining.



Truer words have not been spoken.

1. Life isn't nearly as serious as it pretends to be. In life, there are many things, concepts, ideas, entities and processes that pretend to be so important, the most important thing in the world, in history, ever. They aren't. Part of Carlin's buzzsaw approach was exposing life, particularly human life, as a game. We really aren't as important, noble, or paramount as we make ourselves out to be. There will come a time when everything that is here now is dust, invisible particulate matter floating around somewhere. The room you are in, the laptop or phone you are reading this on, your house, your body, all of your possessions, all of that will disperse, and the same is true of me. It's a scary thing, isn't it? It often scares me.

However, our egos have become so inflated by the things of the world that we believe we are the only important thing. What can bring us up, can also tear us down, so the highs and lows of our lives lead to the same illusion of importance, permanence. What George Carlin did was to tear down this idea that human well-being is paramount. Ironically, this urge came from a deep, deep anger over the injustice faced by many people, and it led to many people, including myself, actually discovering something in life. George Carlin once said that each person, by him or herself, is an amazing thing, but once they start to form groups, that's when the bullshit starts. Beneath that statement lies lots of truth. There has never been, and will never be again, something that replicates you. It is imperative that you realize both that you are not as important as you believe, and that you can discover more than you ever thought possible.

This is why I wanted to pay tribute to the late, great George Carlin on what would have been his 75th birthday. Because he took comedy into a whole different dimension. He used to to make us realize things that you couldn't just tell a person. If you tried to tell them, it would end up a confusing mess. If you use humor, that opens people up, and that gives them an experience they can remember, and they can think back and realize, "I had never heard that before." This is what I hope to do with you, dear reader, of this blog, in my own small, humble way. If I can give you that, and you take that gift, open it, and are amazed by what is contained inside, then this blog is worth all the work I put into it.
I'll have more good stuff for you to sink your teeth into soon.

See ya, and don't forget to live!

Martin Luther King, and the Courage of Imagination

People of the World,

I think this opening is especially appropriate, given our task today. Anyway, today marks the 83rd anniversary the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Above is the "I Have a Dream" speech, a landmark in U.S. history. We've taken this day, this monday in January, off, for every year since 1986. To many people, this first holiday after the holiday season is just a "day off," or another day at work. In the past few years, though, I have attempted to keep a few things in my heart and my mind as I go through my daily activities today.

From a young age, I was bothered by problems in the world. When I was about 15, I began feeling this pit of despair about the human condition. I worried that maybe those dark forecasters of the future, and of human nature were right after all. What if all people only cared about themselves, in the primal sense? Maybe we were all just in it for our own power, survival, and primal drives. My fear was, Did that mean people who cared about others were just deluding themselves? This was what the fear seemed to be saying to me. This was the worst possibility of all. After having read 1984 at that age, I was determined not to let this happen, not to give in to my own primal urges.

Ever since then, I've been looking for people to model my life, and my mission, after. This mission is in part a political one, and in part a psychological and sociological one, a mission of the self. The people that have remained as icons for me are people like Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, in the most grand sense. To me, it is their great senses of both compassion, and justice, the longing for freedom, and for unity. Allow me to clarify.

Both were opposed to war and institutionalized violence, whether it be of the police, or the public at large. This is something I came to identify early on in life as critical for a complete moral code. They also refused to allow oppression of any sort, by whichever party may be perpetrating it. That spoke to me in a big way. Even though I considered myself kind, and caring of people, I could not tolerate wrongs. I did not want to "learn to live with" oppression, slavery, war, despotism by government, or despotism by corporation.

Right after Osama Bin Laden was killed last May, many people were seen to write, as their Facebook statuses, a quote from Rev. Dr. King that read thusly: "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoit of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." In class, a few days later, some girl remarked, in my argumentation lecture, why she dissed that comment, "I don't think somebody who wanted rights for black people would say that about a terrorist like Bin Laden."

That comment just really got on my nerves. Here's why it pissed me off. It was not just the ignorance of King, the not knowing (some people just don't know that much about history), but the refusing to know better, the refusal to just listen. In that moment, she was just saying "I don't know what that's about, so I'm just gonna piss all over it." What really made me bonkers about it, personally, was that Martin Luther King was about so much more than just "rights for black people."

King really knew how and when to speak truth to power. People were telling him and other civil rights crusaders that, as his colleague, Rev. Joseph Lowery put it, "It is not the appropiate time." I have observed that people say that often in politics. One thing I would ask them is a simple question in the Zen tradition: "If not now, when?" If you watch the speech above, one part of it is about " The Fierce Urgency of Now." "Now is the time!" That is even more true today than it was back when those words were delivered.

Anyway, in actual fact, Martin Luther King went much further in his social action than just civil rights for the black community. Listen to the speech he gave named "Beyond Vietnam," at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967.






In this speech, he talked about the other side of the Vietnam Conflict, the one that Americans rarely talk about. Namely, that the U.S. had collaborated with France to keep their claim on Vietnam. The only problem with this game-playing, as well as similar games played in Iran, Guatemala, and other places, was that the good of the country's people was not regarded. They did not get the chance to fight, struggle and work it out in their countries. The leaders of the two superpowers dictated their destinies, and the people were forced to comply. We only talked about "freedom and liberty" for them in vague, glowy terms, but first, we kept our own gains on the line. Tellingly, he finished with a JFK quote, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Martin Luther king was also aware of the economic nature of this struggle for not just civil rights, but freedom, dignity, humanity, the humanity of black, white and all other races. In the I Have a Dream speech, he decried specifically a country in which "a negro in Alabama cannot vote and a negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote." Look at where this country is now. This sense that people can do nothing about our future now haunts us like the pall of impending catastrophe in some horror movie.

One poll I looked at (I forget which one) said that 5% of the public currently believes that Congress is doing a good job. That speaks for itself. As I mentioned before, the poverty rate has been increasing rapidly in the last six years. While I was researching that, I saw stats that showed there were many more children in homelessness. I have also begun hearing that hunger is becoming a big problem for people in this country. Not just in the third world, but in the United States, there are people who are going hungry (See here and here). When Dr. King was assassinated, he was rallying at a garbage workers' strike in Memphis.

Today in America, race relations still amount to a series of volatile fault lines. The most hairy of these is the white-black divide. All you have to do is say the wrong word, or make an ill-thought-out comment, and presto, you've ignited a centuries-old clash. They feel that guttural sting of racism, that weight on their dignity. Then when you get the heat, you feel wrongly blamed for some racist sin you didn't commit. This can make for an awkward and tense coexistence. Poor bastard, you were just trying to make some clever comment, now you've hit below the belt.

What formed this old clash comes from the simple history of slavery. This gets to the key of the meaning of MLK Day. Dr. Cornel West wrote on the history of the utterly dehumanizing slave trade. He observed that the Africans had been abducted, taken for weeks in ships that festered with brutality and diseases, in which many slaves died and were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean. Once in the Americas, they were stripped of any social worth, and essentially, any humanity they had, in the brutality with which they were treated. Now, they were not the only ones to have this happen, but it has happened. Even today, if you're black, you're more likely to be unemployed, poor, looked at with suspicion, and beaten up by the police.

This robbing of humanity needs to be addressed. But how do we address it? I don't pretend to have any answers. However, I do know that we need to use our creativity. This is what I mean by the courage of imagination. We need to be forthright enough with ourselves to imagine a different world, to question that which we are told is gospel, and doubt not just when people say what is possible, but when people tell you what is impossible. Imagination means that you proclaim your freedom, and then honor the dignity of others.



Van Jones, a former Green Jobs advisor to the Obama Administration, lays out what this means beautifully here. It is an injustice that he was expelled from said administration, simply because he had explored extreme-left politics 20 years ago. Meanwhile, senior members at Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, et. al., continue to work as Obama's advisors. What Jones did here that I want to see more of is talk about freedom. In this country, we are given a very narrow definition of what freedom is. Usually, it is just a code word to promote nationalistic saber-rattling and the allowing of corporate dominance. Sadly, freedom and liberty have become meaningless feel-good phrases used by the power-brokers.

Martin Luther King knew what freedom meant. Freedom does require a struggle, but not just a physical battle. It may mean a struggle with your peers, your family, your spouse. Sometimes it means being marginalized, cut out socially. Freedom and peace are seen as static states to many, but I believe they are much more active. As King said, so beautifully, "Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice." Thankfully, because of this overwhelming sense of desperation in this country, there is more willingness for people to live honestly, live truthfully, to refuse to be part of old patterns. Now, this type of change can be perilous, being largely an unknown, but we have seen the shortfalls of conventional doctrines, ways of living, and our lives are shifting. Let us see where this takes us.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!

2011: The Year of Living Creatively

Hi there,

Well, I know Christmas is past, and it's January now, but I thought I'd show you this anyway. I started this the night of Christmas, and it took me a while to color. I was out of town, and more importantly, away from my laptop, for the past week. I just got back into town yesterday, and I went out to Downtown Long Beach last night, so I haven't have time to blog since then. So here I am to cap off my blogging from 2011.

I started this off as a christmas memory, but it is also a reminder of the feeling of being in church. The feeling is an important theme in my creative work here. I like to create, in the viewer's eyes, the feeling of being somewhere. In this case, it was the feeling of being in a small, cozy church sanctuary on Christmas Eve. In this one, I used more dark tones. I also showed the lights coming down from the ceiling, and from the tree in the corner. The points of light are what give it that cozy feeling.

You know what I mean? Have you ever been in a church, or a house, or anything, at night? It's dark, but the little sources of light or warmth (this goes for cold and warmth, too) make you feel really warm, and secure inside. We all have our little places that we like to go to for this feeling. For some people, this would be a church, for others, it would be a restaurant, or a city, or a club or gathering. People are either given, or find, these places that give them a sense of comfort, constancy, meaning, and well-being. For many people, this is the function of a church, synagogue, mosque or temple. It is social, as well as religious.





The photo above is of the church that I used to go to when I was little, where I went on Christmas Day, as I explained last week. As I grew up, the church and I grew apart. Now, I am largely ambivalent about church, but I still believe that people who are religious can have good motivations. For instance, the ministers at this church run a number of after-school programs, since this is an inner-city church. I did volunteer work for them for four years, as at my high school, 40 hours of community service was a requirement for graduation. The kids who go to this church are often from poor families. They didn't have good educational resources back then (2005 to 2009, a few years ago), so the organization, which my Mom and I worked for, helped them with schoolwork and learning. So this drawing was partially based on this church that I used to attend regularly. I still attend, albeit less often.

I did this from an image I saw in my mind when I thought of going to church. I have been using impulse images more in my work lately than I used to. This year, 2011, I have devoted more attention to my drawing technique. I decided to use my first mental images more in my work. I'd try to think of something, look at what came to my mind, and record that. I used to want to plan out the right way to represent some image. I still do that sometimes, however, now, I am using a much rougher style. The big development of this year is I am branching out.

I said to my friends, It will be sad that 2011 has to be over. This was a good year, overall. In 2010, it seemed like all the news was bad. In 2011, it was about an even split between bad and good news. It was also a big year for my artistic endeavors. I got the idea to do this blog, putting my works up on it. I had to put it on the shelf for a while, then I finally got it up and running on December 16. The end of a landmark year, the beginning of a unique blog.

Well, what I can say is I have many good entries on their way in the year that has just opened, 2012. I will have some more good material up for you soon. Until then , see ya, and keep wondering, folks! I think that will be this new blog's sign-off line.