A lost luxury ship

Pop star Lady Gaga was said to have been sued for copyright infringement for allegedly lifting her hit single "Judas" from a song written by an aspiring singer named Rebecca Francescatti.
Lady Gaga's song "Judas" was released earlier this year and featured in her latest album "Born This Way," according to the Indo Asian News Service which carried the story.
The news agency, quoting the online contactmusic.com, said Francescatti claimed that the tune of Lady Gaga's song "Judas" has a striking similarity with the piece "Juda" she composed in 1999.
In the lawsuit filed with a federal court in the US, Francescatti pointed out that her former brass player is now working for a music company that was responsible for creating 17 tracks for "Born This Way".
Her lawyer Chris Niro said that although the songs are of different styles the composition is the same and the chorus has the same melody. The bottom line of the case is that Francescatti wants "recognition of what she created".
The story stopped short of what kind of recognition she wanted but presumably it could be compensation for royalty.
The story, posted online by Yahoo!, caught my attention because it reminded me of my previous blog "Christianity must be a way of life" in which I wrote lengthily about our ego, the core of our being human.
Not that I find Francescatti driven by her ego when she filed the lawsuit. Probably it was more on the financial side - to be paid for royalty - or it could be both. Either way, she has all the rights to claim for "recognition of what she has created."
Our sense of pride makes it natural for us to make a living so that we would not be a burden to anyone. Nobody wants to be a pauper, nobody wants to lose one's self-respect. It would be different if we make unnecessary waves to attract public attention.
That brings me back to Lady Gaga, who wants to project herself as an illuminati or enlightened. Since my teenage daughter told me months ago that Lady Gaga was an illuminati, I could not help think how swift the world has changed.
Our relativist outlook seems to have muddled our sense of right and wrong. Seeing her video showing her almost naked and reading an article in which she was quoted to have said that she is a cheap date, I could not imagine how she could be an illuminati.
Some bloggers call her "illuminati puppet" with the insinuation that she is being manipulated to help project the "dark side" of the world. Without the religious undertone, I think "illuminati puppet" describes her well. I always associate enlightenment with the brain and not with the flesh, much less not with being an easy lay.
Lady Gaga is a perfect symbol of the crass materialism that has eroded our values over the past decades. Shedding off old-fashion worldview, we don't care anymore about the feelings - and the lot - of other people as long as we get financially wealthy.
It is ironic that our civilization seems to have advanced only in terms of technology but has lagged behind in the task of lifting human values. Although we are now in the digital age, our nature has not evolved far from where we came.
In the jungle of sky crappers, we are no more than cavemen playing the same game of survival of the fittest. In our neatly walled and carpeted offices, we often step on the toes of others just to get ahead in the corporate ladder. It is akin to science exploring our outer world without first conquering our inner space.
Even our sense of reasoning has become warp and weird. Logic is supposed to guide us to the path of clear thinking, but we have been using reason subjectively to justify our biases and self-interests. Most, if not all, of our lawyers are putting more premium on their fees than pursue the noble cause of justice. We condider others to be objective in their worldviews only when they cross over to our side.
This easily reminds me of the debates on religion. In a previous blog, I have pointed out that debate on religion is an endless exercise in futility. However tall is our claim to reason, we always tend to become emotional in the process. Because that's what we are. We have both the rational and emotional side of our being.
I am sure that atheists, who have held the view that we are an accident of time, will disagree that human nature, which is one of life's many mysteries, is designed - for whatever purpose, we can make an endless guess. Was the world designed to be a purifying furnish for the soul? And why? Until science finds the elusive absolute truth, the questions will be endless.
That's putting my position clear that I digress with the scientific postulate (neuroscience in particular) that the soul is a mere illusion created in our brain. Some, if not all, atheists feel some degree of spiritual yearning that they turn to other beliefs like pantheism. Well-known psychologist Susan Blackmore, who turned to Ten Zen for meditation, said in her essay "Why I have given up" parapsychology that abandoning the study "does not mean abandoning spirituality or spiritual practice".
The emotional side our lives convinces me that we could not rely on reason as the singular tool in our search for the absolute ttruth, which I believe we will discover in life after death. Reason, without spiritual compass, is a luxury ship lost in high seas.





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Life's driving force called passion

A Filipino who lives in the same building as ours has a passion for tinkering with his car. Everyday I would see him either adding decorative paintings or fixing something.
Once, when my wife and I saw him fixing his car, my better-half blurted out a side comment: "I don't understand this guy, there's seems not a day in his life that he does not do something with his car."
"It's a passion. Things that we love to do but don't know why," I told her. "It's just like my passion for writing."
"But you are a journalist so you have to write," she retorted.
"I do some blogging which is not part of my job," I said.
I cited blogging purposely because it's my passion that she always complains about, saying that I could have used the time I spent for blooging to take some rest or do other productive endeavors.
I kept on telling her that blogging is some sort of theraphy after a week's work that is focused more on the technical side of journalism - layouting that does not interest me much, editing, rewriting or writing stories that you don't like to write.
Journalism, which I enjoyed when I was young, has become a job. I remember Filipino consul Jose Jacob once telling me when he was still assigned here in Jeddah that our job becomes work when we lost the passion for it.
I forget my job and the world when I start blogging, pouring in my ideas into words, a passion that goes back to my high school days when I used to write verses that I passed on for poetry or love letters I slipped into the books and notebooks of the girls in our class and relished their wondering on who the letter writer could be.
My late cousin, an engineer, once dubbed me crazy for using the dictionary in writing love letters to the village lasses who had not even reached the primary grades during the summer school breaks. I shrugged off his comment because I was not really interested with the girls but with the wonders of playing with words that seemed to beat with the rythm of my life.
Having cast my eyes to a career in engineering, I had never thought that my passion for writing could lead me to journalism. Call it destiny but I dropped my dream to become an engineer when I realized that, as a working student, the course was too expensive and I couldn't afford to buy even a slide rule.
While many people find fame and fortune out of their passion - Newton, Einstein, the Wright brothers, Shakespeare and an endless array of names that we cannot count with our fingers and toes - I don't expect much out of my blogging. Yes, I do entertain possibilities that it may give me some passive income later on but until then I have learned to leave such cares to fate.
Passion, which is closely tied to our search for self-gratification, is one of life's mysteries that drive us to keep on going through the doldrums of daily living. It's an anathema to reason that assures us that we are more than atoms.


Please see my other blog Fun in Life salt-funstories.blogspot.com