More details on my upcoming debut performance as “Big Elk”, a solo folk outfit, tomorrow morning can be found on the Umbrella Radio website - the people through whom I got this show.

If you’re in or around Baltimore City (actually, it’s in Hampden) tomorrow morning, stop on by and lend an ear. I will be playing a ten song set, for around 45 minutes or so. Been prepping for it like crazy and I’m totally ready to go.

Oh, and if you do swing by, I would very much appreciate it if you took video and photos of the event, post them to the internet and send me a link to it. Word!

Speaking of caritas, got this email today from my friend Sean Moriva, which I’ve gotten his permission to re-publish here. I thought it was wonderful and totally relevant to the current trains of thought I’ve been following. The links embedded are his, and here’s the picture of the home tattoo he gave himself:

So I have been walking around for a few weeks with a pair of boots from vegetarian shoes and if you have white laces, apparently, that means you are a neo-nazi. I don’t put much stock into this, personally, as they are the only shoelaces I had, boots have a lot of islets and I needed long shoelaces.

At any rate, I got new black ones.

At this point, I show them off to my friend, Stab at C-Squat and he starts explaining to me that to have a tattoo where I have it means I am in a gang or the mob, depending.

Because of the nature of my tattoo, I guess that makes me in God’s gang or something. I’ve never really felt myself anymore an agent of God than anyone else, we are all the eyes, ears, voice, and hands of God, but I like the idea of being God’s man. Me and every other zealot too, I guess.

God’s gang.

Anarchists wear black bandannas to identify themselves. They stole this from the train hopping scene. Train Hoppers wear bandannas because of the soot that can get in your lungs when you go through tunnels and the black bandannas are a way to identify each other. Now they use facial tattoos and carharts, among other things (train company logos on patches, ETC)

I guess that nestles into the tribal identity thing we were talking about before too… Plumage.

Been thinking about the burqa garment worn in Islam and the prohibitions against it in public schools, as I’ve heard happening in Europe. A burqa is a useful example of tribal identity enveloping and covering (or protecting, conversely) individual identity. Another modern variant of this same thing is that whole thing John Lennon and Yoko Ono did where they got inside of featureless bags and gave interviews.

I have a tendency to recombine bits of information like this endlessly in my head, and then fast forward them years into the future using various thematic and narrative filters I’ve constructed out of my research. My current projection points towards something like Philip K. Dick’s scramble suit, out of A Scanner Darkly. It’s a computerized garment which is endlessly re-broadcasting scrambled imagery of hundreds of thousands of individual humans. So the person wearing it becomes kind of a featureless blur to the witness.

In a future made up of constant biometric data gathering and multi-modal surveillance, I wonder if something like a burqa (or bag) simply becomes illegal and dangerous because it obscures your identity. I always see signs at local banks about how you can’t wear sunglasses or hats when you come inside because you’re on candid camera and they have to act like every single one of their customers is a robber.

I have a feeling, and I may be totally wrong, but I wonder if in “traditional cultures” (however broadly you want to define that) the notion of an “individual identity” even existed. It may be that you were first and foremost a member of your tribe or clan and then your lodge or your family and then you yourself were merely a link in a chain between ancestors and descendents, and your “identity” was more a matter of how well you fulfilled your societal role. I’m probably wrong, but that sounds basically right to me. One possible proof of that might be how in some cultures, the surname (family name) comes first and the individual name comes second. I feel like that says a lot…

It seems like that is basically the opposite of how the average American perceives themself nowadays. We start with the individual and then MAYBE work outwards in concentric spheres {See also: 8 Dynamics of Scientology}. Most of our cultural identity (our reaching towards other people - if done at all) is composed of likes and dislikes for media artifacts: movies, music, books, magazines, clothes, etc.

I don’t necessarily think either way is right or wrong. I think how people are is how they are and people have the ability to develop awareness of themselves and their relationships with other people and actively change them. That’s probably the most important point.

The other day, a co-worker of mine at the Dog Temple said something which has stuck with me: that either he or I could take any one of these dogs home with us, keep it (and take care of it obviously) and the dogs would be perfectly happy with it. While the specifics of such a hypothetical arrangement would certainly vary from dog to dog (we have dogs who just sit and whine all day by the door, waiting for their masters), I completely *got* what he meant, even if I can’t quite nail it down into a few explanatory words. I think it has something to do with Caritas though…

Last night I accidentally wound up at the Baltimore screening of the Hobo Film Festival, which took place in the cleanest punk house I ever saw’s basement. And they had this really sweet amazing white dog. Cute young girls were sipping forties of malt liquor and we watched a couple films, one feature length, about people riding freight trains (illegally) for pleasure and as a lifestyle. The tour is being put on and the films hosted by a guy named Shawn from Asheville I think, who collected money for gas in a shoebox. The whole event was really fun, even if it did end up making feel sort of lonesome - but I guess that’s just part of the lifestyle.