so, this is beginning to exit the realm of islamic mythology and beginning to enter the realm of western history. there's still some funny shit, but it's fading out; i'm going to wait to comment.
the one thing i want to say as i finish my eggs and leading into the next period is this - karma's a bitch, isn't it?
this is also where the islamic mythology stops being silly and starts interfering with real history, which is partly what it's engineered to do. the almoravids would actually agree with me, in suggesting that islamic spain wasn't that different than the rest of europe, in a lot of ways. but, when you approach the situation with this near-myth of islamic tolerance, these punitive taxes don't come off as retribution but as aggression. it's only in recognizing the nature of the caste system (with it's punitive taxes) put in place by the muslims that the punitive taxes enacted by the christians in response, once they took over, can be seen as retribution; if you weren't presented with it that way, you might almost even see it as a reason to take the side of the almoravids, who were there to liberate the muslims from these barbarians and their vicious taxes.
cheek-turning aside, he gets the point across that there was still substantive resistance to islamic rule in the 11th century, even if he skips the opportunity to point out that the heavy taxes were a little bit of their own medicine.
the reconquista gets a lot of shit from the contemporary fake-left, and it's partly in not understanding the context, due to having the issue framed in a biased manner. oppressive taxation is one thing, but i can tell you that i wouldn't have any problem standing in solidarity with anybody fighting against these almoravids - for as long as it took to drive them back into the sea.
if you want objectivity and facts, then asking a culture to narrate it's own past is the worst way to arrive at the truth.
if you look at central germany or the areas up along the russian rivers like the dnieper and don in the year 300 and compare it the year 1300, they made major progress. kiev hit it's high point in that period; berlin wasn't founded until around the year 1300. the same is true in france and england, even if the difference is a little less.
but, that was not true in spain, which at best underwent stagnation through the period. it's not true in the arab heartland, either, which limps to the mongol destruction event having barely managed to convert all of the greek literature to arabic, while adding little to nothing of it's own.
it's important to compare apples to apples, here - and not confuse stagnation from a very high point of civilization as a superior level of development over rapid generation from a point of almost nothingness.
a good way to understand this is to look at china vs the united states, today. yes, america is still ahead by a good horse-length. but, look at the progress made in china....
in absolute terms, what comes out of northern europe in this period is admittedly pretty weak, but it's also leaps and bounds over what existed there a millennia previously. and, that rapid growth would continue throughout the dark ages, as the south continued to stagnate and decline - until it was eclipsed altogether.
so, who writes these histories that frame the narrative in this arab-good, german-bad sort of way? the answer is musiims. and, that's what you get for letting people tell their own history, rather than allowing scholarship to take over.
let's hope he learned his lesson and things are better from here.
so, here's some critical thinking. nice to hear...
my take on this is that it is somewhere between a myth & an exaggeration - more than exaggeration, but not quite ungrounded enough to be myth. the problem is less about when people point to spain as a somewhat more literate society than existed around them, and more about when they try to give them credit for it, as the latter is mostly unjustified.
the video at least points out the importance of the byzantine influence, which is the missing ingredient in many of the narratives, which may credit the jews somewhat, but go something along the lines of "advanced arabs conquer primitive savages and protect spain from dark age, thereby creating renaissance". that sort of thinking is largely myth, but it's caricatured for a reason - you only really hear it from religious clerics and arab nationalists, whose voices are amplified by the contemporary culture, which trains us to defer to them rather than challenge then.
as mentioned previously, spain was a developed part of the empire, so anybody that took it over by force was given a pretty good head start in terms of building something new. it's consequently rather disingenuous to try to compare spain to france or britain, which spent the roman occupation period trying to overthrow imperialist rule. rather, you want to compare spain to other parts of the ancient world - italy, greece, egypt, the levant. and, how does spain fare when compared against it's contemporaries in alexandaria, or baghdad, or constantinople? not terribly, but not spectacularly. in that context, spain becomes it's name in arabic - the ass end of the earth. somewhat of a backwater, really...
i mean, one of the stories he mentions here is that the byzantines had to send monks to teach them to read greek - which is exactly the same problem that happened in italy, and exactly the thing that needed to be reversed to bring on the renaissance.
inventions like paper (which came from china) and base-10 numerals (which are indian in origin) may have come to europe through spain, but they may just as well have come through constantinople or even across the steppes. that spain was at the end of the trade routes shouldn't assign them any special status. and, al-khwarizmi was a persian in baghdad who was mostly reinterpreting existing greek science, rather than coming up with anything of his own - although he is one of a small number of persian and kurdish mathematicians that can be credited with original ideas (most of them, in truth, can actually not be - they were translators, rather than innovators).
on that note, it's worth pointing out why all these greek texts ended up in arabic in the first place.
when the muslims took over, they inherited a greek world - and inherit, they did. the arabs got all of the big libraries of the ancient world almost instantly, and nearly by chance. everything was written in greek. they seemed to realize that they'd just get conquered by the culture in the end, if they didn't uproot it. on top of that, they found a lot of disagreements in the existing greek literature, in terms of how it related to their new religion. they wanted a book burning, but they wanted to keep the good stuff, too.
so, what they actually did - and they did do this, as crazy as it sounds - is go through these huge libraries book-by-book and either burn the parts they didn't like or translate the parts they liked to arabic. once the texts by the authors they liked - which included aristotle, quite predominantly - were translated, the original greek was then burned.
so, we give the muslims credit for saving the books? no, they burnt the damned books! and, what was left had to be translated back from arabic, because they burned all the greek.
so, it's within that context that you have greek monks being sent to spain to teach the people there greek, after the culture had done everything they could to destroy it. did you think they just forgot because they were barbarians? no - the arabs burnt all the greek books, except the ones in the empire; there was no longer any utility in learning greek, unless you lived in greece. oops.
the fact that he has to bring in persian mathematicians and inventions from china and india, rather than point to the original work of intellectuals in islamic spain itself, should amplify the point - spain may have been doing fairly well when compared to the undeveloped areas outside of the empire, but it was actually largely a laggard within the remnants of the empire itself.
he hasn't brought up the renaissance myth yet...so i'll beat him to it...
while spain may have held some books, the event that really set off the renaissance was actually back-migration from constantinople to italy, which set in after 1204. the city was toast well before 1452, and people started leaving it, as refugees, in streams. some went north to russia, others in fact went to spain and the bulk of them went back to rome - because they were romans, in identity. they brought the more advanced culture of the late empire back to italy with them, and it mostly went from there. to the extent that anything found itself back to italy via spain in the arabic language, it would have been supplementary - and i don't want to downplay it, because that means it was probably the last chance to save it. but, it was the last chance, and not the driving influence. and, who created the problem in the first place?
what the arabs did leave spain was the culture of barbarism that developed in the region during and after the reconquista. the exaggerated almost-myth of islamic tolerance is really a reaction to the inquisition; it's a compare and contrast essay, but it misses the point - it was the arabs that laid the basis for the inquisition in their caste system of religious hierarchy, their extortion schemes and their punitive taxation. they seemed to have a thing for crucifying christians, they seemed to like the irony. worse, the extortion scheme is not "like organized crime"; this is the actual, historical origin of organized crime! it is the muslims that built the slave trade in africa that the spaniards would inherit and use to export africans to america - and they did it not based on the colour of their skin, but on the content of their religious observation. none of this would have happened if not for the arab presence, and their insistence on treating people differently based on their faith.
but, did some last gasp of empire, however perverted, hold out in the south of spain, no doubt in hopes of an eventual reunification with the fatherland? sure. for a while. just don't give it more credit than it earned - ground the analysis in actual fact, and realize that the similarities between spain and the rest of europe are pretty powerful as well, and that, while the peninsula may have experienced a less brutal dark age, it didn't escape it altogether. islamic spain was also a dark age society and should ultimately be treated like one.
so, this is better, but it's like he had a eureka moment when it clicked in that wait-a-minute, this is all bullshit. and, i wonder if he regrets publishing the first part of the series, if my analysis actually hits harder than i realized....
so, i got my fans in and it's not a moment too late - i woke up feeling groggy and coughing from the stale air. the halted one has loosened up substantially, but isn't spinning yet.
i now have backups for the fans in the two main spaces and will need to stay on it if any of them break.
that means i can do a serious clean tonight, after 19:00.
it's absolutely beautiful out, but there's nothing to do, nowhere to go. i'm not a beach or park person, i need a concert to get to or would rather sit inside. but, it's very sad - like something out of a zappa record. but, all i can do is sit inside and cry.
i'm not going to start on august until after my appointment.
see, there's a point around 10:00 where he suddenly gets extremely skeptical, in an almost sarcastic kind of manner, and there's two things about this i want to take note of:
1) it really does demonstrate a suspension of disbelief
2) it indicates an exceedingly strong bias
this guy is a nihilist, in the classic nietzschean sense. well, i don't want to call him a fascist - that's a little too much. but, he glorifies dominance and submission; he's adhering to a master morality, and that was common in the ancient world. he identifies with these muslim conquerors, and their spencerian vanquishing of the weak. so, when somebody gets in the way of his social darwinist fantasies, they get showered with scorn and derision.
if i were to act the part of the professor, i'd have to tell him he's a bad historian - he's not even trying to be objective. but, these are designed for entertainment, rather than scholarship, and that's not useful - what's useful is to point that fact out.
i wish he had applied this glimpse of skepticism more rigorously throughout the series. alas...
...for, it is now almost done, and i'd might as well follow through with it.
so, i have reuploaded the files for doc201307-2 - which is the july, 2013 music journal (part 2). i started in mid-july...
however, i'm not going to post a re-release because, while the travel blog is now 142 pages and the dtk blog had some minor additions (albeit with a page decrease due to the reformatting), there is no substantive addition here to the music journal; it's fifty pages shorter, but essentially the same document. i've simply noted that i've reuploaded to fix the formatting....
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i first decided to remove myself from facebook some time around the end of 2013, not due to any kind of security concern but due to being fed up by the terrible interface and incredibly slow servers. a few years later, i found myself with a similar desire to extricate myself from the youtube comments section, as the interface changes made it almost impossible to actually use. but, old habits die hard, and it took several attempts before i could really pry myself off, not having any kind of permanent success until i designated the migration as a time-wasting tactic while i successfully kicked the tobacco addiction, in the first half of 2016. this left me with thousands of pages of writing that i was going to need to eventually repost to a more user-friendly platform, which ended up being the blogger interface on google. faced with the need to build liner notes for my very first recording at the end of 1996, it was at the beginning of 2017 that i first sat down with the intent to rebuild my music journal as a singular whole, with the eventual plan of cutting it up and appending it in instalments within the discography.
my life hit a roadblock in the middle of 2017 as a consequence of a shift in ownership of the building i was living in, which led to multiple legal battles (still ongoing) and two separate moves. the situation eventually worked itself out for the better, but it slowed me down dramatically and left me with a very large back log in working through the loose ends around closing my first two period discs that i am only finally beginning to clear in the spring of 2019. this added period of reflection has allowed me to think this through over and over, and add increasing levels of detail to the journal, and subsequent pending liner notes. while not every month is going to be equally exciting, the level of detail in what was initially a journal is now more like a series of novellas. the first entry, which is only the second half of july, is 176 pages long.
i am not going to summarize the story, but it is available on the web over here: musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/07/.
this is a compilation of written correspondences that includes facebook posts, messenger chats and emails with friends and family members, in an attempt to build the context around my move from ottawa to windsor in early august, 2013. this was a pretty heavy two weeks, and the narrative consequently has an arc of it's own, but the story being told here is how i rebuilt my studio over the second half of 2013. the contents of this download are the dummy track, a word doc file and a pdf file, both written in a more readable, chronological ordering. i've also added the respective files for my other three blogs, for general interest.
the events documented in this journal occurred in july, 2013 and were compiled into a narrative in several stages over the years 2014-2019. journal completed on mar 31, 2019. released and finalized in doc and pdf format on april 14, 2019. re-uploaded in reformatted version on april 6, 2021. doc201307.
released august 1, 2013
j - editing, participant
esa - participant
illuminous - participant
mom - participant
sister - participant
nana - participant
step-mother - participant
the youngest aunt - participant
jeff - participant
dad - participant
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the item is available for free on smashwords, but the formatting is somewhat busted:
if you find this compelling, consider throwing me a few dollars via whatever method you'd like on the sidebar, including potentially by wiring some cash directly to death.to.koalas@gmail.com.
the body of water behind me in the shot would be the ottawa river; the picture was taken in the britannia bay area of ottawa.
this picture got lost in the posting frenzy and didn't end up in the july, 2013 archive because it was posted in 2011.
but i'm going to post it here for now:
i'm about 6, maybe 7.
always loved the bicycles.
you'd never see me wear a leather jacket past the age of about 10.
ok, so this will be done by sunrise.
today's post is a big one - inri019, my second symphony.
note that this flips over into 1999, now.
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this is the final section of the last proper inri demo, which was written as somewhat of a suite, but only in a fleeting moment, and then forgotten. it's a sort of sardonic take on the jesus story, in that it follows a persecuted person through a suicide and a resurrection, with tongue in cheek commentary.
initially, it was a song suite about being young and not listened to, culminating in a rather dramatic overreaction - that i ridiculed as counter-productive, partly by reference to kurt cobain, whose suicide is an event that hangs over the childhood of my generation. people that were adults at the time might want to think of it in the same way that they interpreted watching kennedy get his brains blown out on live tv. as i grew up (stated loosely - i was still 17/18, here), i realized this is a general condition of society that is not limited to young people. so, i generalized it to reflect the illusion of what we call "democracy", and gave it an exaggerated persecution complex. the cynicism was targeted at the clinton administration, but in a broader sense i'm sort of ridiculing the rather cartoonish perception of generation x as this kind of raelian mass of fatalist children....
my final vocal edit for viewless focuses on a small part of the verse and cuts the chorus out altogether. i then distribute that small part into the rest of the song by cutting it up into parts and pasting those parts in where i want. this drops the more general commentary, which seems like an anachronism, in favour of refocusing the listener on the direct storyline of individual persecution and self-inflicted martyrdom. for suicide, i left the vocal track largely in tact, except to remove the suicide note, which in hindsight also seems like a giant distraction from the satirical storyline. what's left is more direct.
i also want to note that there was a conscious decision to move to a more recited vocal style on the 1999 rerecording (and subsequent 2016 reconstruction), rather than the screamy style that dominates the initial 1996 demo. at the time, i considered screaming to be sort of contrived and passe. the recitation is actually a very considered reaction to something i interpreted as largely cartoonish. i was certainly still heavily influenced by the screamy stuff i grew up with, but it wasn't a characteristic of much of anything i was attracted to after about '97 or so and actually something that i really wanted to distance myself from.
i've pulled back from insisting on recited vocals in order to minimize that contrivedness, but the truth is that the vast majority of music released after about '97 that has screamed vocals very much *is* contrived. time has only cemented my rejection of falsely emotionalized vocals in punk-derived genres.
written and demoed from 1996-1999. initially constructed in this form in january, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. compiled on nov 13, 2016. sequenced on nov 22-24, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. released on nov 24, 2016. release finalized on nov 27, 2016. this is my second symphony; as always, please use headphones.
section one ("epilag"): initially created in early 1999. remastered on nov 23, 2016.
section two ("viewless"): initially written in 1996. recreated over 1998 and finalized in dec, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 19, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning electronics on dec 29, 2015. sequenced nov 22, 2016. vocals added on nov 23, 2016. corrected to remove an errand click on nov 24, 2016.
section three ("anticipation"): background noise built in 1996. rebuilt in late 1998. edited in late 2013. remastered on nov 24, 2016.
section four ("suicide"): initially written in 1996. recreated over 1998 and finalized in dec, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 20, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning electronics on dec 27, 2015. sequenced nov 22, 2016. vocals added on nov 23, 2016.
section five ("resurrection"): initially written and recorded on january 4, 1999.
the album version of this track appears on my second record, inriched (inri021): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched
this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1996, 1998, 1999, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016).
released january 13, 1999
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, electric piano, vocals, drum kit, drum programming, sequencing, cool edit synthesis, sampling, light-wave synthesis, noise generators, sound design, loops, tapes, digital wave editing, production
