Widows Walk

ZeroPoint Slinky

                           Awhile back I mentioned what I called big slinky.  It was an outgrowth of my research in music theory – not the conventional music theory such as began with Rameau, and I suppose Piston is known in the US and Schoenberg, certainly and finally Schillinger in the 30’s and 40’s – although I am familiar with them, mostly Schoenberg who’s theory such as it is theory is simply a compendium of ways to modulate from one key to .

          Schillinger, the master of Gerswhin, Coppola, Miller, Levant and others has a theory that touches  upon Slinky theory in that it encompasses disciplines beyond sound.

             Notions of beauty such as postulated by Plato and Edmund Burke were based on symmetry and consistency.

          As the case may be however the adage about truth and beauty being the same, put forth by John Keats is not exactly true in the sense it once was.

       (As an aside Keats fell in love with a beautiful girl named I think Fanny, but he was not of the upper class and could not convince her to take the step to marry.  He then took a walking tour of the north, cause cold and subsequently died.   Ain’t beauty a bitch?  I mention this because I dare say had he waited a while Dear Fannys looks  would have faded and he would not have had to die.)

         Anyway the modern way of perceiving beauty is as more of a process then an eternal state. Better a living woman with zits then a corpse with perfect skin, but to each his own.

       The most exciting thing about Zero Point theory is that people, well smart people, are coming upon an understanding of it from all directions.   Not only that but there’s a group of researchers who believe the essential concepts have been around at times, in human history, for thousands of years. I personally try to remain in the realm of  the provable.

           It’s just s theory though, It’s not like quantum teleportation to the other side of the universe instantly. Then again quantum information theory suggests that we can send a yes/no message, like a telegraph  - but I am meandering.   Theories are like maps and as my old master teacher Albert Jesson would say, “Maps were sent.”

            

Previously I only mentioned Big Slinky in passing because I’m very sensitive to the notion of being thought of as a “nutcase” or in the category of flying saucer abductees.   This  can be thought of as an unfortunate legacy of growing up in a country where intellectual efforts are considered proof of depravity.

        Also the thing with “big slinky” is the more one learns about it the crazier one sounds  and as well, there’s the classic objection to the advocate of new ideas  - if you’re so smart and the idea is so good why hasn’t anyone else thought of it.  This is actually a false argument.  If someone else had thought of it it would not be a new idea.

          Scientists and the like, intelligentsia, call this type of thinking “on the frontier”, or the border and many a experimenter  trades a life of comparative luxury for the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of whatever field they are engaged in. 

           Well I am happy to say that big slinky has been discovered in many fields. I came upon it initially via, of all people, Kepler. The  early Moog model D’s were bitches to play - they had no idea of what we call pitch - but on the other hand they were marvelous instructional devices as per the overtone series and anyway I had for a long time been interested in the idea of the scale system that will follow the current tempered one.

                It will happen that tones will change via variation not of the overall pitch but rather of the partials , or overtones. Notes will not leap, but rather morph and likewise the distinction between partials, notes and chords will vanish.  This will take a deal of computation power and I am not sure we will see it in our lifetimes.

       The Dutch have done a lot of work on the theoretical side and the French, eg IRCAM  have been focused on timbre  variation for awhile, but specifically since Debussy.

     Getting back to Kepler  though he apparently sought the infamous “music of the spheres”  which I never understood. It is his laws of planetary motion however that have the most relevance to the construction of musical scales.

       (The first thing you learn in such research is that scales are not musically perfect. And thus to create say a tempered scale things have to be bent.  Of course if we could bend the universe to match our harps this problem would not exist but the problems in doing such a thing I believe are obvious.)

         And again the so called perfect scales, early versions, did not allow for modulation, one was kept in limits of mode for instance and this can be compared with the Ptolemaic Universe with its various circles upon circles. The elliptical Universe of Kepler which is proven beyond doubt both in theory and observation eliminates the superfluous math.

       There’s an amusing story about him. He had to halt his work in the middle of observations to go bail his mother out of jail.  Her crime?  Well in the Europe of the day a woman without a man who owned something that someone else wanted was a certain target for the responsible members of society.  Hence the accusation was witch craft and they wanted to burn her at the stake but Johannes got her ass out of the sling.

              I have visited the Hansel and Gretel towns in Alsace some of which are unchanged for centuries and there amid the picture book fairy tale ambience  is invariably the dungeons and torture chambers where truth and falsehood, good and bad were ascertained.

            The point about big slinky is that one of Keplers laws is that planetary orbits are elliptical  - it is because they are elliptical that gravity can do it’s thing and planets continue to revolve around larger gravitational masses, eg the sun. This was controversial,  because in his way Kepler was also a potential witch, or devil worshiper, because the circle is beloved of God. Since God made the universe he must have made a lot of circles.

        Circles, or in other words, the myth of the eternal return, allow us to believe we are all geniuses.

        The “road” or orbital path, can be compared to the variations of PI the strange attractor takes as it traverses the eternal path to infinity.  Thus, in the same way Einstein  revealed that mass and energy were variations of a continuum one can suggest that  mass and nothingness are variations along a continuum. Think Fractals.  And it’s all done with math.

             This theory does not so much tell us why things come into being as how.   If you have a cookie cutter pattern it will tell you the shape of the cookie but not, of course, the substance.

                I wouldn’t dare mention this stuff in polite conversation where it to exist only in my head, but fortunately other people have come up with the same idea, or the same idea fixee.  As  well they have even begun to research the history of this idea , as evidence by astrological monuments throughout the world.

             Fortunately we don’t need alien visitations to make the idea work. While language continues to expand, human computational and observational ability has been much the same  for awhile, from, in fact, long before the advent of spoken language. I am suggesting this on the basis of the  total period of evolution.

        The usual name for what I’ve called big slinky is Zero Point Theory. It has even made it to the TV sci-fi shows in the form of the Zero point module on the Stargate Atlantis program.

          So you can google it.

         This ridiculously  long intro was inspired by , yes , the blues project.

               I don’t know how valid the complaint against the music industry is.  One is they are greedy, but that is part of the greater corporate greediness picture. The other is they are superficial and that too is part of a greater picture.

           I am happy to say that these  issues  stand a good chance of heralding the collapse of western society and the end of humankind as we know it.

           It serves the bastards right. Fuck Caligula, Fuck Nero, Fuck the whole lot of them.

        

                Actually I have known young actors, well , and they are basically the kids in high school that were into English class, and the debate society.  It’s not that exciting a life, especially if you don’t like getting up at six in the morning.

         And the peeps on Good morning America etc, with their plastic surgery and their beta blockers and their mood elevators can have their humanity justly questioned. It’s not just the music industry then. It’s society. We like pretty people, we like happy people, yadda yadda.

         I went through that intro on Zero point theory because it’s important to understand that often new ideas and good ideas hurt our preconceived notions - notions such as “I am going to live forever”

          In a way dialectical thinking is linear - it says, she loves me, she loves me not, and so on. But that’s not necessarily reality. No love is all love.  In other words love requires us to keep in mind tow opposite thoughts at the same time.

            Some people in the music industry tend I think to try to be overly cynical, but by and large one thing they tend to agree on is that the ones who make it are, for lack of a better word, motivated.   They feel they have something to say.

          I can’t count the number of really talented people who just did  not want to be performers - and I can understand it .

               The other thing is quite pragmatic. It is a working knowledge of a wide spectrum of the styles of the field. That, in a nutshell, is what made the Beatles great.

          And ironically it means you don’t have to be the absolute best in any genre.

       Okay so now I am going to repeat what I just said. In an ordinary dialect, such as the yin/yang symbol  or  the thing and no-thing he two opposites are presumed to be  about eual, only different in composition. In some ways E=Mcsqared is easy to comprehend because we can imagine a mass like a log of wood, being set alight and there you have it  - wood turns to heat.

              As I understand it, Zero point theory is a little different. Imagine a dot, or point, and a plane. Let’s, for the ase of visualization imagine a small rubber ball and a piece of paper. Angle the paper downwards and the ball will roll down the hill, propelled by our old friend  gravity. Now imagine the sheet of a paper is a cone, or better yet a mobius strip - and the ball has a long way to fall, forever in fact. The ball is the strange attractor, the paper is pi and the variance from pi, both positive and negative is the known time space continuum. The variance appears in orbits and in fractal shaping of land masses, as well as in living things such as ourselves.

     What set it in motion is a difficult question and probably not one we ought ask because motion, in this sense, does not exist. It is a little like the difference between becoming and being. The designated differences are illusion,   Another way to look at it is as a coloring book where the outline has been drawn in black ink and the flat spaces are gradually filled in by colors. So simple a child could do it!  And we call the child God.

   Part b-  It is not uncommon in the music industry to come across  people who have been at it for awhile declaring that the crucial difference between those making it and those who don’t is “having something to say.” This sounds a little idiotic but it is not that far off base.

         In some cases the artist  may be motivated by the need to forget about some pain or another. One the pain, of adolescence for instance is gone the artistic urge follows soon after.  I’ve been at this awhile now I’ve probably done as much hammering out of words and meaning as your average supreme court judge

      In one of my many bands the drummer told the story of a group where the lead singer would regularly drink a bottle of liquor and pass out on the stage. “Horrified  was my reply but he informed us that “the audience loved it.”

     I tell this story to suggest thst not only are performers maladjusted by audiences are as well.

              Consider this thought experiment which I have used many times, Ordinarily I use the statement as an example of something that would creep a listener out, but aft a few yeares I realize that it was not only the message the singer was sending but the message the audience was sending to the performer.

     It is “I guess I just want you to like.love me more then I like myself.”   That is what the performer is often thinking

In short we are not always as pathetic as we act.

Frog shell pig flip gold fish

Ollie Oxen free

Intro

                      The question as to who reads this blog (and why) seems particularly relevant to the present issue.

                   First, as always, the joke, which is  our running gag about being the most important website on the planet. It amused me early on because not only does everybody feel thier effort is primary but more importantly because it addresses a core issue on the net, which is the data flood.

To navigate the sites you have portals like Google and to navigate personalities you have Facebook certainly neither of which is unique, but both gain from the perception, at least, of being most efficient.

                                 This leads us to another joke. Question:"What is the purpose of life?" Answer:"The creation of ever more efficient and beautiful machines." Har har There there, don't scratch your head and pretend you don't understand. The stock market measures things the way I have described and not according to some vague measures sure as self actualization. Old yuppies will remember the saying that the person who dies with the most toys “wins.”

In politics the logic is brutal. We insist on being parsimonious with the lives of human beings – our moral sense insists on it – yet who do we provide for? Robots?

                         In any case these essays have a self limiting function built in, which is in part intentional, although it makes it easier for me. Well over 99% of the public doesn't understand them. Most people have not matriculated at several secondary schools and even more to the point most people do not have the opportunity to spend a lifetime doing what they are interested in.

                       But this is not to say there are no models for what I have attempted. I met Ester Dyson, in the mid 90's. after she had spent several years in the funky Russia of the day and she was starting up what could be called a zine called Version 1.0. She's certainly no dummy but I felt she was a little naive as far as her optimistic projections as to what all this data collection would lead to.

To some extent she was prescient in suggesting the tagging of interstitial s, eg google's adding selective adverts to Gmail, but in other cases she seemed oblivious to the power that was going to be given to the corporations. Since then I think she's probably pulled back a little. The credit crunch of 08 displayed the notion that just because you can sell something doesn't make it worthwhile.

In any event Ester was selling V 1.0, which was four or six pages, without adverts for several hundred dollars an issue. Most people think that's expensive but at some levels of expertise it's a drop in the bucket, especially if you are making multi million dollar decisions.

                         Another model which I was introduced to early on when I was writing for the Justice department, right out of school. These are the Presidential Info sheets. Again they are rarely more then a page or two and have to encapsulate the context and options available. (Note: I am not saying I wrote any of these papers, meant for the President’s desk, only that I had access to a very selective few. The President at the time was Reagan who was noted for political orientation, but at the information level, at least, this ideological “spin” was kept to a minimum.)

                       And finally , as those who have invested substantially in the stock market know, most "tip sheets"(that's the vulgar name) are no more then a few pages long and even that is mostly filler. This is by no means to denigrate the value of information, but real information is damned near impossible to find and what is more is the specificity of information.

There is a series of tests I introduce in casual conversation to determine the character of the people I am working with. Most of the time they aren't needed. One can wing it and simply sit back and listen to what the person is saying, really saying, and go with your gut.

But one of these tests is when I ask the person if they feel that ability is specific as to one field or if someone who excels in one field would excel in others. If they say the latter then there is a good possibility that they have not really been tested in the crucible of imposed failure. Experience teaches us that we are lucky enough to know the necessary thing well - because that's where the competition lies.

                             And so, I have left these essays in the darkest corner I can find. The mafia kingpin says "lawyers I can buy" and likewise I have not sought to diversify. I began as, if anything, too diverse and it is only now that the real fruits of concentrated study are being seen. We don't advertise - We do virtually none of the things guaranteed to make one a successful blog - such as offering how to fix it advice. Or putting in key words to fool the robots or posting in high traffic sites and including the url.

In fact the mind is paradoxical. Marketing books will tell that in many circumstances the correct price is higher rather then lower. And if you listen to say, Old Time Radio, at times there is strong attraction to the adverts. We all claim to hate advertising but I suggest one not jump to conclusions before the facts are in.

                       In some regards I have sort of a Teutonic attitude towards this project. I realize that it has a limited audience and to this end I have to leave it for you to find me. If you did then congratulate yourself. If you found me and feel I have sparked some ideas in your mind - I regard my efforts as worthwhile.

   the main section

 

                  We were surreptitiously pushing the latest single. It was late in the Carter administration. The song was was called “Big Silence” and it was a homage of sorts to Laurie Anderson’s “Big Science”. We were still teenagers and originality was not our strong suit. (Come to think of it it never even became our strong suit.)

I can still remember the chorus after all these years.,

“Neutron bomb, Neutron bomb

There is no big noise with a neutron bomb

But there’s a big silence, big silence”

Lyric poetry this was not.

              There’s a theory that the reason why Marijuana is taking so long to legalize when for instance almost anyone can buy a multiple round assault gun, is the pot has comparatively little in the way of negative side effects.

Since everything pleasurable is sinful and there fore must be punished this is against the way of the vengeful God. Alcohol gives you hangovers. Narcotics get you addicted - so they are okay, decent things.

The beautiful thing about the Neutron bomb, and chemical weapons is they kill people and leave the more valuable things, like property, alone. There isn’t much talk about the Neutron Bomb nowadays. I wonder where it went?

Kollywood, bless their mercenary little souls, has not forgot. Abiut ten years ago there was a spat of TV programs all based on the premise that humanity had be forced to the pre-technological era. Very amusing.

                        One “cousin” of the neutron bomb is the Electromagnetic Pulse weapon, or EMP, both these weapons have disadvantages however. One is they don’t kill people, and that is one of the goals of warfare. The other is the destruction of the administrative infrastructure which then has to be repaired.

Then again creative thinkers can see this as an advantage as in the case where the only communications devices are in your hands and all you have to do is pry them from the dead hands of the people you have killed.

It raises a question we have not dealt for over two thousand years. If you read the Bible you realize that there was a like of smiting and smoting and basically it was take no prisoners except for slaves and if you were say a Viking you only took slaves when you were in a good mood.

                         It has to do, basically with what the Brits, in their warm hearted way, call “good value.” Joan Baez, an opponent of the VietNam war pointed out that she could not actually see the day when the Viet Cong would march down Main Street USA and take over the drug store, which was one of the arguments of the pro war crowd.

It points out that a constantly changing aspect of war is civilian participation. The American Civil war was so “Civilized” that the ladies of nearby towns would pack a lunch, dress in their best gowns and stand on nearby hills to observe the progress of battles. In warfare, such as the Napoleonic conflicts war was a matter of set armies having set battles at set places, usually places out of the way - because it was understood that the winner would want to own the property they fought for. My own forebearers, from Alsace-Lorraine had the experience of seeing themselves change from French to German to French to German and so on, as the land changed hands constantly. (Meanwhile the actual inhabitants kept on growing wine and making pastries.)

When in 1941 an increasing frustrated Josef Goebells, propaganda minister of the third reich, declared “This is it! Enough is enough! From now on it’s total war.” He was referring to a specific concept, one that he hadn’t really paid attention previously anyway. It was the idea that henceforth civilians would be considered legitimate targets.

                           In reality this was already in place, because the Luftwaffe had been bombing civilians since 1938. What is more such bombing was primarily a terror tactic since it tended to have little impact on a nations ability to wage war - and indeed the case is made that it was counterproductive in stiffening the enemies resistance.

                            Suffice to say the invention of the nuclear bomb changed everything. Now it was the soldiers, in bunkers who’d survive and the civilians who would die, indiscriminately.

As stated. Compared to a nuke, chemical weapons are discrete - the only kill the living.

Now comes the nasty part.

                       Joyce described the history of history as Circus Vicus, which was a reference to a fifteenth century Italian historian, Giambattista Vico  who believed in a cyclical model of human history. The opposite is called teleological and it says that humanity is moving straight towards some end or another, for our purposes that can be either good or bad.

I find it often wise to remind myself that progress is a funny critter. Specifically slavery appears then goes away then comes back and never seems to go away totally. Likewise monarchy seems a function of environment.

Some early wars, when life was scarce, consided of one or two champions fighting to the death - simply because they could not afford to lose more men. Then in tribal conflicts over limited terrain the extermination of entire tribes comes to be.

We are currently in a period of sufficient, if not over population. The elites in universities with one or two children are not overly sympathetic to the groundling with his dozen infants. If then we were to suppose a pendulum between the value of human life and that of property one could suggest that property is increasingly at a premium - and this may well also be impacted by global warming’s effects.

The is the context by which the post colonial era can be understood. The Axis nations, and before that Imperial Germany were essentially seeking to gain the sort of colonial empire that had seemingly so enriched Great Britain. To end the constant wars for control of the third world Roosevelt agreed to help Britain if Britain would agree to relinquish her colonies after the war. This is what happened.

                        Still the same forces that brought us slavery and the Imperial empire were still in place and they rapidly began the formation of the post colonial world - one where the natural resources and labor of the third world would continue to serve capitol but the responsibility for the maintenance of the resident populations, health, housing and education, would be given to the local states.

                   Some of the new nations, Jamaica for instance, used their independence to attempt a total break with the world economic order and the results were not good.

                          I’ll admit there are times I get discouraged in these writings - no one seems to get it, nor if they were to take the time and effort to understand does it seem they would value it. But I like to think that this understanding, hopefully unfettered by the constraints of ordinary society, may be of use to someone, somewhere, some lucky person or persons.

             In retrospect it’s possible to suggest that the reason I am not selling books at twenty dollars a pop to up and coming world shapers and movers and shakers is most of the futurist books claim they can make you rich and/or happy with the wondrous events “just around the corner”.

It could be suggested I have a scientific orientation, which demands that any hypothesis be proven in as many situations as the scientist can imagine.

But a better model might be that of medicine. One of my early career goals, shot down by circumstance, was to be a psychoanalyst and in any case medicine is about two things - finding out what’s wrong and fixing it. There is a school of psychology that in effect studies what is right but most people consult physicians only in distress.

                                  To say this yet another way, I have and will continue to, sought to identify the possible problems we may face in the future - if not to eliminate them then perhaps to mitigate them. I wish I could give you some magic elixir, or cure, but among other things that’s only possible in the face of actual circumstances.

When you come right down to it there’s not much I can do and again I resort to the psychoanalytic model where the therapeutic process focuses more on avoiding current and future f*ckups then in somehow relieving the wounds of the past. As they say, “It is not much but it will suffice - it has to.”

 Outro

                Outro  

                 For the record and those interested these articles are usually written in three or four sessions - more then that and they tend to be all over the place. Twain, famously said that had more to say he'd have written a shorter letter, and in my case the more factual the source material, usually the briefer I can be.

                         And often I write the bulk of the essay initially and then return to add another 20 % or so, usually in an effort to tie it into the readers frame of reference, which I understand may not be as academic as mine.

                             And Hemingway reminds us that one can only produce a certain amount before needing time to "Let the well refill".The great social novelist Honore Balzac could write at twelve hour stretches for days and weeks - but that, after all was fiction

An nineteenth century English poet, who's name escapes me,said when he wrote his poems they were between God and him and then after a few days God only knows what they meant.

I find that the great benefit of obscurity is that one is not shaped to fit the mold of prevailing wisdom. (As an aside, in my other life, as a musician, this is a real problem in that the central controllers in the big cities have ruined many a talented band and artist.)

                                     Finally then in commenting on the essay you, hopefully, have just read I'll say this. One is that increasingly I seem to be leaving the realm of current business trends and venturing back into anthropology. My apologies :-)

                       Actually this is not as great a digression as it may appear at first. In the fifties there was great concern in the US about the "Hidden Persuaders" - advertisers who could control our minds and pocket books, later on many conspiracy theorists came to the fore and today we are concerned with the degree to which organizations know and thereby control, our personal decisions.

                       Francis Fukuyama, Ray Kurzweil and others all have different ideas as to what the near future will bring. What they agree on is that science and technology will continue to advance. I separate the concepts of science and technology and us the idea of Teknos as initially defined by Lewis Mumford, although I am not primarily concerned, as he was, with the design of humane living habitates.

The concept of Teknos we are here addressing is the broader concept of "the maker." I wish to avoid theological issues but immediately one can see that the maker's subject, increadingly is the remaker, of mankind. That role hitherto has been left to God, as the uncreated creator, and left to sort itself out, an option we are increasingly unable to afford ourselves of.

Jacques Ellul, a French law professor of the mid 20th century, was able to see how technological process invariably tended towards totalitatianism, a situation he experienced first hand as an occupant of Nazi occupied France.

To free ourselves of debilitating limitations we must be prepared to answer all questions as to how we would like to live our lives. I refer you to the question of "What is life for?" Do we serve machines, or the other way around? It is not settled nor will ever be.

                    Even logic has problems with this. Is it valid to detroy one section of a population in order to advance another?

                     Information theory, like music, is an old science. However primitive it still functioned as the glue of society. Today I would lie to leave you with two suggestions, or thought experiments.

One is that there is nearly always an element of sacrifice. The Greeks would send 20 of their best men and maidens to be the food of the Minotaur. However we view it, via individual or collective the notion of pure logic, Kantian interpretation aside, seems to demand sacrifice.

Secondly, When we speak of slavery, human sacrifice, or any of the past human behaviors we now find abhorrant it is important to realize that such behavior in its day was the norm. We still regularly kill convicted murderers in the US and there's little opposition to it, even as we know that a certain percentage of those put to death are innocent.

                       Furthermore when we start to deal with these practices, which have become the norm they d not come into being overnight. unlike science, which can proceed in leaps and bounds, or evolution, society, left to it's own pace proceed in gradual steps.

First something is a possibility, a risk that is either taken or not, then if successful, it becomes the custom of the land, and only then, finally it becomes codified into words as law.

                   And I will leave you with the suggestion that we judge others not only by what they do, but by what they not do as well. 

        One last  though relating to something I touched upon in the body of the previous essay. It has to do with paradox of mind. What we might call the superficial paradox is  actually the dialectical flip flop. One thing turns into  it's opposite.  Actually the original thing is still there, but what with most things in the universe occurring in waves the original concept or definition goes into abeyance.

     Real paradox, as in Zeno's paradoxs is much weirder and  in fact cannot actually be described - er, hence the paradox.  It is a state of things were two contradictory existences seem to occupy the same reality at the same time. 

         The fact is the mathematical axioms of Euclid  cannot explain these paradox's and yet they are the basis of all math.  Actually, like Godel's theorem it's beyond  my skills, but it seems to explain things.

     What I'm about to say is much simpler. As time goes by the conservative movement it tending towards it's more extreme dogmatic, and ideologically driven forms.  The young turks of the Republican party for instance admire the libertarian motives of An Rynd.   I'm not sanguine about this or willing to declare it trivial because my experience in politics suggests that for every outward conservative there's several more in the background egging them on.

         As I mentioned in relation to the stock market however the result of total freedom from laws is not absolute power, but our old friend chaos.  You can to an extent, "ride the tiger", as was done by people in the late nineteen twenties. In fact one of the specific blind spots in American history is the question as to what extent the great depression  was predictable and why wasn't it?

 

Lobster!

                                                                                         

              

              I have of late been plagued by a horrible dream. My skin, once firm and manly is now soft and sponge like. I can no longer feed myself. The very surface of my skin burns with a fire all consuming and were it not for the pieces of moistened clothe that envelope me I feel I should surely burst into flame.

                 This is, obviously hell, compounded and made immeasurably worse by the knowledge that I have had no forewarning, not hint, nor suggestion as to how I got here.

                    The torture people push little carts from victim to victim.

                      “Mai Tai?” They say, “Mimosa?”

               Were I but certain that these potions would bring instantaneous suicide I would down them in an instance, but my fear, founded in experience, is that these monsters would like nothing more then to extend the agony they have imposed on others, and on me in particular.

                    And it hurts. Tears well up in my eyes. Mother what have they done to your child! Rain, rain Flibbertigibbet! This must be my punish for the sins I never knew I committed!

                   The horse eggs break my teeth. How the cold dark sea calls to me. Were I once again, again a lobster these pains would matter not.

            Oh! Happy days of bygone youth, of youth bygone by golly in my cold atlantic home.

                                                

                                               

unibursal Pabadeesa

            

        You know I don’t like being a thief and a crimbinal and pyrite all these years and I  wusched I could better make it one. So I am thinking  on the obvious fo awhile now and I b’lieve I have come up with Project UP – that is the Universal Pamacea guaranteed to solve all our problems and then some.

         As I understand it there’s tens of millions of men who growed up with roof over their head and food on the table and some even took vacations and had families to occupy their spare time with. Mostly they got the roof and grits but the other stuff is further and farther betwixt.

           You ask them is this bothers them and they say “No, I’m keeping busy and something’s bound to turnup.”  What do you expect? “Sure it bothers me and I got a 12 gauge under the bed in  case it really bothers me.”

              That’s problem number one.

                Problem number two, which we are all intimately acquainted with is people who spend too much time online and especially appropriating the legally owned property of other law abiding, hard working, tax paying and property owning citizens.

        Dudn’t no one see the connection?

It’s very simple  - give me a job that pays 80 thou

A year and I won’t have the time to spend all day downloading stuff -  I may even pay for it with my new found wealth.

    Changing the focus. I used to write a blog which eventually gravitated to the business of the companies that controlled multimedia on the web. This was late 9

1990’s.  And I got totally pissed because a lot of people

Had gotten into the field and the major companies, rather then allow them to enter the market place dragged their heels and basically sabotaged it.

            The result was the crash of 2000. There have been so many crashes we can’t keep them straight but rest assured – after each crash we come back a little weaker then we went in.

               I don’t want to blow anyones mind but the piracy thing could have been stopped years ago – just make a product too large to be downloaded – suffice to say I didn’t want to give the creeps any ideas because they have a knack for taking good ideas and turning them into shit.

          Okay so that was year 2000 – but the idea of deliberately impeding technology to maximize profit continues till today – and frankly it’s a drag.

State of the art – thirty years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-sx02eiysg

 This is the famous amorphic wall as in Bill Gates house .  It’s been around for ages, since the 80’s.

         If you look at Firefox the add ons and such are impressive which is the way things should be but aren’t because Firefox is open source.

         I’m not a developer  far from it. But when the first mp3  apps came out, like macamp and winamp part of the

Coolness was being able to chose between many  skins – all made by outsiders and free.   Now look at I-tunes – I
 never cared for it. And worse yet as they developed I-tunes they started stripping down the original QT player so to get a playlist for example you must use I-tunes  which is bloatware and non skinable.

       The reason Apple has become a dirty word among developers (this is old news) is first they moved to OSX  and removed classic capability soon after which mean that all the little guys in basements who had spent ten years on their product were effectively fucked.  The big companies in comparison could upgrade quite easily – and at a tidy profit.  Then to add insult to injury the move from PPC to intell meant another tranche of software became obsolete.

           It wasn’t that OSX and Intell cpus were bad ideas, it’s just they left a lot of people behind – people that  like those laid off in their fifties – are never going to catch up.

          It’s all ancient history now  and I mention it not to diss Apple so much as to suggest that there’s a much better way to do things and what is more you don’t have to live on bread and water to do it. 

         I happened to make a few people rather well to do when I told them to buy Apple at it’s low point, because I go with management and especially in tech industries that’s the way to bet. But now?  We shall see, won’t we?

      Nevertheless the lesson to be learned, which is that a closed system dedicated to personal profit cannot compete with an open system which spreads the profit around has already been learned, many times.  That systems dedicated to the good of the few have existed is not news either.  The thing is such systems have to be held in place by procedures that we generally think of as repressive, if not brutal, or even  genocidal.

          In reality most systems are somewhere in the middle and I am not about to be the one who decides what kind of regime you or I function under.  I will o so far however as to point out that we must not delude ourselves into believing that it is in the interest of those in the upper hierarchy to encourage innovation if such changes will remove them from power.

      It is not going to happen regardless of the constant misinformation campaign seeking to convince us that it will.  However to quote someone,”If you keep going in a circle eventually you wind up where you started.”

        And sometimes it’s a mobius transformation.  That is when the revolutionary becomes the opposide side of what they believed they were fighting for – a tyrant.

               I have thought long and carefully about Marx’s declaration that one of the most effective ways to destroy capitalism is to give it everything it wants.  This is not that far from the suggestion that the last capitalist will be hung on a rope he just sold. 

         We have seen the practical application in the past forty years. When all regulations were removed the problem was not limitless power but instability. (Suffice to say, the dirty little secret of Wall Street is one mans instability is anothers opportunity.)

         Riding a bicycle is comparatively simple, but try doing it when after a night of drinking and it becomes impossible.

         Again,  this time to refer to Darwin’s suggestion that without private property the natives of Tierra del Fuego were doomed. These were people that lived on the southern most tip of  South America in a primitive state. They now are extinct.

          So we say, “Information wants to be free.” Right? That is the mantra of the basically good guys.  We do not wish to see the goddess opportunity chained in some dungeon at the command of the horrible beast from Redmond, for instance. Nor do we want the best things in life to only go to the few. 

       Still private property, for better or worse, is one of the realities of our world.  There are many of us who, for a variety of reasons, jealousy perhaps   or love of freedom want to preserve or in some cases create individual freedom.  We like it. A surprising number of people don’t understand this  but it has to be taken, as Jefferson would say, as self evident.  The freedom to walk across a field conflicts with the owners property prerogatives – so there’s a conflict inherent here.

     Here we go through the looking glass.

    In the real world the case for open source software – for instance- or free content file sharing  has been made. The open source software advocates  have a very powerful argument that their products have consistently proven better then the corporate ones.  If that doesn’t convince you I can give you an even more convincing argument. War.

         Wars are almost always  won by the sides that work together of their own free will and are not forced to do things by paymasters. I doubt one could find a more crucial application of business necessity.

                     So why isn’t open source the norm?   For the same reason CEO’s make hundreds of times more then line workers – because among other things, in the absence of war the necessity of justice is not appreciated or considered.

     That’s where we come in.  It is our job to make people appreciate not the desirability but the absolute necessity of justice – economic justice.

    We have waited many years and we may yet wait many years more, but our  day will come and our vision will persevere .

      To sum up then. Theres the lord of the manor, initially all powerful.   Theres the serfs, the microserfs  if you will, and there will be a union, or guild, call it what you will. But I have had my head handed to me enough times to know that we must become aware of and adopt the strategies of the opponent.

         I feel like L Ron Hubbard in a way when he talks about the powers needed for survival. We must learn from the masters – the corporations. We must learn to emulate their lies, to intimidate the weak and  deceive the powerful.  If god isn’t on our side we can make a deal, Make God a deal he can’t refuse.  Choose the battle well, like Alexander don’t fight unless victory is probable. 

         These are the maxims of the cold war – of the new cold war that is being waged within the walls of the empires.

           If this repels you. If the knowledge that you are above the hunt and degrading opportunity then you are free to do what you want.

          Of course there will be doubt.  When the Muslims invaded Spain under the flag of God there were those who could not see why they should fight.  In truth, in those days especially Islam was probably a more open ideology the Christianity.

          As a young boy  I would sit at the feet of men who had fought in the second world war. These were no armchair heroes flattering fools, they were people who had seen  war upfront. And they said “There were bad things done on all sides.” 

       I never discovered exactly what these bad things were but one can guess.

      Fortunately in this new game such violence is counter productive and ironically we must guard against the accusation that it is in our interest to use it.

      -  back to the normative essay     

        My orientation has changed a little. I used to think of the virtual state as a way of circumventing the current power structures and in part without getting them mad at us.  Another way to look at it is to try to imagine the freedoms we currently grant to corporations – to circumvent national laws, regulation and taxes – being given to  if not to individuals, then smaller corporations.

          I don’t need a fuckin miracle.  I’m prepared to keep refining the concept until it works  because I have nothing better to do. Also I want to avoid the trap of thinking that one person can make a difference. In other words it’s not a matter of one person inventing the wheel it’s a matter of the wheel waiting to be discovered.

              That’s a whole nother mind trip – ut maybe if in fact we have regressed to the middle ages economically and socially with the corporations playing the role of the manors and barons we should accept that.

        The difference between CEO’s and line workers in the US has continued to  increase – now it’s over 300%

And I don’t see any corrective mechanism for that

         It’s like with Obama, who I don’t particularly dislike – unlike his predecessors, but  as   Naomi Klein has noted  - “Where’s the policies?” I don’t at this point care why I’m just dealing with what is.

            Fuck. Maybe humans just like being slaves. They seem to revert to it time and time again – but to get back to the middle ages analogy  what we want to do is the equivalent of making buildings- it’s a task that requires a lot of different skills – but not too different.

         The actual masons , who were formed as a response to the nobility are still around, actually tat group is kinda set in it’s ways and has a protestant orientation. FWIW – In MA Bell the Masons had a lot of power to promote  and as in many of these cases with organizations it was also used to obstruct persons deemed not team players.

          Don’t let this fuck you up but a lot of players in NYC meet through their dealers, heroin dealers. It’s an exclusive club and everyone is sure to be discrete. Like I say lets be honest a lot of players are or were junkies at some point. It’s not my thing but I have worked with them and let’s just say they are not always reliable.

          Then in TV there’s the gay mafia, again like junkies, these guys and girls, in the past especially are exceptionally discrete, employing “beards” ( hetero role playing partners) and you can’t blame them because in many cases it’s hideaway your real self or starve.

       

          And we all do it to some extent. And it’s not entirely a lie.  A guy says he’s in the field for the love of music and not just to make money, despite the fact that he seems to do everything possible to make money,  we really don’t  have the right to throw stones.

     I saw the phil spector movie recently. Phil was an early hero. David Mamet wrote and directed and apparently made the case that Phil was innocent of killing the girl. But Phil was his own worst enemy.

For a long time he has come off as crazy as a loon.

I don’t know what the story is there. He made some damn good records.

          I realize I’m changing the subject and this “essay” is wandering all over the place. So to wrap it up and put it together what I am saying is that artists have to learn to act like businessmen – instead of being repelled by the three piece suits.

          I realize I’m changing the subject and this “essay” is wandering all over the place (as usual). So to wrap it up and put it together what I am saying is that artists have to learn to act like businessmen – instead of being repelled by the three piece suits.

    It's almost counter intuitive, which may be why it's not often tried.   It's like injecting order into chaos in order not to lessen it but rather to increase it. 

  My first thought is to think of the famous universal syllogism.

"First there is a mountain

 Then there is no mountain

Then there is"

or the zen version

“before satori one chops wood and carries water

   then one does not chop wood or carry water

   after satori one chops wood and carries water"

Then, of course, I could put on my tough guy hat and read the riot act. For instance one could inform the capital markets that they had better make nice with the workers or they will face consequences that they will find far less comfortable then the alternative.

To put this in the medieval terms "Either pay the bricklayers a decent wage or you will have no cathedral - and we all know what happens to cities with no cathedral  - that's right, they go to hell and burn forever." 

           Woody Guthrie one time in the fifties got talked into trying out in the Rainbow Room which is a restaurant at the top of the NBC building/Rockefeller center.    And so he gets there and rides the elevator up.  Steps out, looks around for ten minutes and gets back on the elevator.  He just didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t for him.

         Can you imagine some “suit”  saying “What’s this talking blues thing? Where’s the melody?”