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....

======

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

======

the item is available for free on smashwords, but the formatting is somewhat busted:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026388

or you can just view the embed here:

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.

===

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

let me do one last read through before i try to convert it at the word site and put it away...

so, i diffed the music journal with one dated to april, 2019 and all i found was a handful of corrected typos.

it is, however, 50 pages shorter due to a correction in the formatting method.

a part of the reason this is so challenging is that i left so many files half done - and i really, really didn't want to do that, but with my laptop dying on me every other day, and my brain just turning off about midway through last summer...

i'm sure that the file i just cleaned up is the same file as is on the blog spot site and i'm sure it's comprehensive relative to the master document. but, did i actually change it at all? or did i just reformat it? i don't know.

so, i think the best thing i can do is run what i've got through a compare in notepad++ with these various other files i've got and see what it comes up with, then make sure it;s complete and put all of the other versions away.

again - i wish i did this last year. but i didn't. it's the last step; it has to be.

ok, so july is done - and that should be the longest one. i filled the travel blog out a little further, added a few things to the dtk section and fixed a large amount of typesetting issues. this is done done done done. final. permanent. kaput...

i just want to run through to check for typos before i reupload it everywhere.

but, i was thinking a little about what this flashpoint guy (i don't see his name anywhere, although he seems to live in san francisco) is doing, and it's tying back into the said. in truth, this is the perfect example of orientalism.

i previously accused him of not being an expert, but he seems to have some historical training; what i meant is that he's not an expert in that time frame. rather, his expertise appears to be connected more to american and european military history, and specifically in the post-enlightenment period. so, he's approaching this as an amateur, but he seems like he should know what he's doing.

that comes out in how he approaches islamic vs western history, the latter in it's fullest generality. when he talks about western history, he has a critical mindset and a skeptical approach - as he was no doubt trained to have. but, when he approaches islamic history, he takes it nearly on face value, with only the slightest bit of critical thought. i mean, he mentions a few times that it sounds hard to believe, but then he just goes with it anyways...

so, i'm not accusing him of naivete. he doesn't seem to believe anything he's narrating.

rather, he's approaching this with kid gloves, and it's not helpful. instead, it's exposing a level of benevolent racism, in it's application of different standards of analysis. in the west, we can have critical thinking and skepticism and scientific methods, but those backwards arabs can just hold to their mythology and shouldn't be challenged on it. so, it's a hierarchy of analysis that places islam at the bottom of the academy, in terms of methodology, and it's based on othering the orient as different and exotic - and therefore not subject to western critiques.

it's for that reason that i'm trying to point out over and over again that the muslims really have never been this exotic thing. yes, they came from the outskirs of western culture, but so did the germans and the russians. their religion is not this weird foreign thing at all; they adopted a greco-semitic syncretism that was so similar to contemporary christianity that it was readily adopted by romans across wide swaths of territory, at least at first. he uncritically recounts a story where the caliph threatens heraclius with the fate of arians without realizing that the early christian sources essentially saw islam as a heretical form of christianity, and that accusations of arianism were actually fairly widespread - and reasonably grounded. that story is probably projection. so, it took some time for divisions to develop, and a bird's eye survey of the history in a broad sense should really fold islam into the history of the west, not as this distant other from the east. islam is not the east; hinduism and offshoots of it are the actual, real east.

and, if islam is a part of western culture then western methods should be used to deconstruct their histories as the myths and legends that they are.

as mentioned previously, it doesn't help that islamic histories consistently try to argue that the dark age didn't apply to them, that they existed outside of it in some kind of special status. it's obvious why they do this - this is where their civilization started, and writing it off as a dark age mythology means writing off the religion, itself. but, i mean, who cares? if it's wrong, it's wrong; if it's myth, it's myth. what do i care if it destroys their religion or not? i don't. what it masks is that their own histories are in many cases a better example of dark age ignorance than anything that happened in western europe. and, the kid gloves just reinforce the nonsense.

so, he may think he's doing them a favour, but he isn't - these different standards of analysis are racist, and we should be applying the same methods to all aspects of the dark ages, not giving the islamic side of it some kind of pass because they're different.

if i was hoping for a secular history grounded in skepticism, this isn't it. but, it's not his point of focus, and we'll have to see if he gets better or not.

i should point out that, for all my red shit, which is something that i've tested enough for that i've decided is beeturia rather than bleeding, my urine is constantly a very endearing shade of yellow - and that's supposed to indicate proper absorption. that is, if i'm having difficulty with iron absorption, it's supposed to come out in the urine, not the stool. but it isn't....

this is all just very weird.

i got almost nothing done yesterday - i just slept all day :(.

if i have to, i'll start eating fish, not red meat.

but, i don't want to increase my stored mercury with my stored iron. is enough circulating? storage shouldn't be the primary metric, circulating iron should be. this test strikes me as being of limited value. that doesn't mean that my circulating iron is sufficient, but i want to test it and base my further actions on it.

i don't need stored iron if my circulating iron is fine.

and, i'll need to do the research and figure it out - can i find fish that are produced in an isolated enclave to minimize mercury pollution that have sufficient levels of iron to make it worthwhile?

you'd have to pay me to eat that shit...

it's terrible for you.

but, i'm awake now. i'm going to get some coffee and do some work before i make breakfast.

steak is the single most disgusting meal that exists.

 i'd rather be a little iron deficient than eat steak

if anything, the meat is making me more tired.

this isn't intended to be permanent, so if there's an adjustment period, it's going to flip over as it's soon as it clicks in.

i don't think it's working, but we'll see. what's more important is a circulating iron test.

and, no i'm not going to start eating red meat. yuck.

today's post is inr018.

===

this track represents my first serious attempt to break out of the synth-pop sound i'd been developing over the first half of 1998 and into the more epic electro-noise-rock that defines the next period. while i'd been careening in this direction the whole time, and the track is ultimately a failed experiment, this is really the portal i go through that ultimately opens the way for what follows. 

conceptually, the track was initially meant to mock the news cycle; the circus riff was tongue-in-cheek. you can imagine wolf blitzer and judy woodruff getting out of their clown cars and reading their teleprompter, type of thing. while i've eliminated the vocals from the official release, and there were never any produced for the re-recording, the bonus tracks are both early vocal mixes. it's admittedly hard to ignore the conceptual history of the track in explaining why i have a punk song built around the circus theme, but by the time i got to re-recording the track in late 1998 i'd truly moved past the concept. 

yet, i wanted to retain the musical ideas in the track and even take it to a different level. the way the track is sequenced here retains a memory of how i wanted the track to unfold into a lengthy, multi-part epic separated by long sections of guitar-effects generated and digitally shaped ambience. this is not just an idea that would resurface in my next piece, my second symphony, but also something that would follow me for my entire musical career. these collages are crude, but this is where the idea first developed. 

conceptual issues aside, i also had a lot of difficulty getting the guitar tone i wanted for the track - a problem i really hadn't previously had. in hindsight, i think i'd just become a little more aware of the tonal options in front of me. up to this point, when i ran into the problem of the evasive tone, putting it down for a few days and approaching it fresh had always solved it, but that wasn't working this time.

then, out of the blue, there was a power outage that knocked my computer out as i was running a part of the track through an ambient transform. the track - and all the digital additions i had added to it - were largely destroyed. what was left was this completely corrupted wave file of disjointed guitar fragments. i've never been a religious person (obviously), and i don't want to say i took at as a sign or something. yet, i let chance assert itself; the corrupted wave file became the final version of the track, and i moved on to the next thing. 

the actual, proper track was then forgotten about for years. i'm only finally dusting it off now, in 2016, and releasing it here as a single, along with a collection of experimental collages that approximate what the track was meant to sound like. this ep should really be thought of as consisting of two versions of the song, separated by the two minutes of silence after the fifth track. the track was abandoned for good reason; the motif is silly. so, my frustrations with the composition shall have to be recorded in the annals of time. 

initially written in 1997. recreated and reconceptualized in late 1998. salvaged somewhat at the end of 1999. remastered in 2013. compiled on nov 13, 2016. finalized on nov 19, 2016. final album version added as a bonus track and refinalized on dec 15, 2016. as always, please use headphones. 

the album version of this track appears on my second record, inriched (inri021): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched 

the inridiculous version of the track appears on my third record, inridiculous (inri033): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inridiculous 

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 (1997, 1998, 2013, 2016). 

released december 1, 1998 

j - guitars, effects, bass, drum kit, synthesizers, sequencers, drum programming, noise generators, sound design, sampling, found sounds, tapes, digital wave editing, cool edit synthesis, loops, vocals, chance, production

so, for part four he seems to have collapsed into fluff and nonsense, and i'm not going to bother - but i'm going to give him one more chance before i move on to something more scholarly.

the source of pollution and filth was gone for the weekend but appears to be back.

i can only hope the fans get here soon.

in fact, he was almost certainly a berber pretender who's descendants concocted a fictional lineage after the fact in order to justify their dynasty. such a thing is quite common in medieval europe.

i mean, they claim he was born of a berber mother.....in damascus. right.

so, again - it's a nice story. but that's all it is.

the battles happened, but they appear to have been a part of the berber civil war that was taking place, and this guy isn't doing anybody any favours in broadcasting 1300 year old myths and propaganda.

this is a little better in terms of presenting a more critical narrative and drawing attention to the unreliability of the sources, but i want to comment a little on the context around the lack of resistance in spain, and the more serious resistance in france, leading to an analysis of the significance of the battle of tours. he split the podcast into two videos, so i've posted both.

you have to understand that spain was a central part of the empire and the visigoths were barbarians; these were german speaking arians with crude customs that the latin-speaking, romanized locals would not have liked much, despite their own transgressions against roman imperialism, when it existed, which was mostly in the northern parts of the peninsula (the southern parts being more romanized). the berbers, on the other hand, were also a romanized people, fighting under the direction of what must have seemed like a new empire.

so, how would the average spaniard have really seen the situation? there's a good chance that they may have seen the arab-berber invasion as the empire coming to liberate them from the barbarians. and, as it was in egypt and the levant, that might have been a factor in the ease of the initial conquests.

when they got to france, they finally found a different ethno-cultural makeup - a people that were never romanized that were defending their homeland from invasion. if the romanized spaniards saw the caliphate as the return of the empire to save them from the barbarians, the franks would have seen them as a new empire to protect their territory from, as a new hegemon to fight. 

however you want to look at it, it's clear enough that the muslim armies met their first serious non-greeek resistance in france. for the first time, they met a people unwilling to submit to them. so, they never came back...

but, i think that putting it into those terms demonstrates that the muslims would have had a fight on their hands, at least. it's worth remembering that these german tribes were barely christianized, and in many cases not christianized at all. what stood behind martel in the directions of scotland and poland was not "christendom" but a wilderness inhabited by pagan tribes, many of which were soon slaughtered by charlemagne. so, what exactly did martel save? and, the answer is the forces that undid christianity in the end, rather than christianity itself. it's consequently perhaps more worthwhile to suggest that, by preventing the muslim conquest of germany, martel ensured that the process that led to the renaissance, the reformation and the enlightenment was able to take place. but, would the northern barbarians have not resisted arabization as strenuously as they resisted romanization? i see no reason to think they would not have.

it follows that what the battle really represented was the muslims hitting the demarcation point of actual roman influence; for the muslims to conquer france would mean bringing new lands into the empire, rather than carrying through with a mop-up operation around the crumbling cities of the late empire. and, it's worth pointing this out: they failed the minute they found an actual, real opponent.

i'm consequently coming down somewhere in the middle of the narrative. the battle was clearly a turning point in history, but the reasons for it are perhaps deeper-seated than is often realized, and the muslims had no doubt reached their limits, whether they had to die proving it or not.

i will state this as clearly as i can.

if russia aligns with the chinese, then they are unstoppable and we're fucked.

but, if we can peel the russians away and build an alliance with them, then we have some chance of hemming the chinese in.

so, what do the idiots in washington do? they insist on depleting military resources fighting against our only possible way out. 

thankfully, the russians are patient and understand this better than anybody. we've been through this already....repeatably...and we have to just hope that washington eventually pulls it's head out of it's ass and figures it out.

otherwise, we're going to end up a province in a chinese mercantilist empire that is just going to bleed us dry until there's nothing left.

as far as i know, the only area of the world that has never been conquered is sweden. germany is in a grey area, because it loses wars, but it never gets colonized. 

russia has been conquered, but only from the east. it was vicious, and ruined it....

but, if there is even one lesson in history, it is clear: only a fool would pick a fight with the russians.

the current context makes them just that much more stupid, as any halfways competent person would look at this board and instantly realize that russia will determine the outcome. again.

we will never beat the chinese at anything - economic or military - without russian help.

if this is the great struggle of our time - america v china - then the russians will determine the outcome, by picking the winner in the fight.

fighting them is dumb - we should be courting them.

...and stay out of ukraine!

we're going to need the russians later on, and this administration is making a mistake in alienating them.

canada can't outspend america on stimulus, but it can play along and join in. competition, here, is stupid.

there's going to be things we're better positioned to produce, and we should focus on supply chains where it makes sense - and otherwise get out of the way.

in fact, we have our own infrastructure to rebuild, including infrastructure for essential goods and services.

so, my suggestion is to embrace an enlightened parallelism - engage with what they're doing, but emulate them, more than anything else. our investor class does well with these agreements but, overall, if they need to rebuild due to bad trade agreements, then everything that's true about them is even more true about us - and we need to react that much more.

i don't want to be an american, but i don't want to be a mexican, either. we have to maintain this balancing act, and it's by co-operating when it's in our self-interest, while not forgetting that we need sovereignty and independence, too.

i took a shower and got some sleep....

i think i can get the july section done today, and maybe most of the august section.

as mentioned: i realized going through this that i had to do this, due to how i left the files. but, it should be relatively fast. and, then it's done. 

forever.

the alephs are on hold but i intend to actually catch up.

today's post is not an official release but a compilation i helped put together for members of the skinny puppy internet mailing list, epilogue. there's no price tag here.

my remix would eventually end up on my remixes compilation, inri032.

====

so, i'm going through some old files and decided to put this up...

the backstory is connected to a covers compilation put together by cleopatra records called "hymns of the warlock", as well as a remix compilation put together by nettwerk records called "remix dystemper". this compilation was put together between the releases of those two compilations.

the easiest thing to say is simply that there were always two different types of skinny puppy fans, related to a now historical split in electronic music between those who preferred "ebm" (that is electronic booty/body music) and "idm" (intelligent dance music). ebm is only reasonably listened to in clubs because it's simplistic and repetitive; idm is the kind of thing you put on when you're doing homework or reading a book. the separation has been much maligned, but it is intuitively obvious that there are some types of electronic music that do not have much depth (and yet are fun to dance to) and some types of electronic music with dozens of layers to disentangle (and may be less danceable), so i see little point in getting silly about it. skinny puppy existed in a middle point; they always had the ability to attract both audiences because their music was both highly danceable and yet also in an art rock and political/punk rock tradition. this is not unique within electronic music, but it *is* rare. they're not considered to be the high point of electronic art music in the modern era for no reason.

throughout the 90s, skinny puppy fans connected with each other and discussed various topics over the epilogue internet mailing list. within this list, there was much derision directed at the cleopatra compilation due to it's over-representation of the ebm side of the band's sound. the more musically inclined members of the list claimed they could put together a better record, were challenged to do so and eventually did.

i was a fairly recent addition to the list and volunteered for distribution for the sole reason that i had the tools to do so (cd burners were still relatively rare in 1998). the cover art was put together by other members of the list and sent to me for reproduction.

while i would argue that the disc more accurately represents the experimental aspect of the band than either of the officially released compilations did, i listen to it now and wish i would have been more selective. the reality is that i didn't really have the standing necessary in the list (you have to have an understanding of 90s internet communications to get that, i guess) to act as a filter on material coming in. nor did i receive enough material to have the luxury of cutting tracks. there's some interesting remixes/reconstructions, but some of it is very blatantly the work of amateur musicians. i should also point out that i considered some of those amateur musicians to be my friends.

it's up here, as is, for listening ears. should either of the kevins express an opposition to this (i doubt that, but i am not able to tap into their consciousnesses from a distance), they own it and get to make the choices.

now, yes, it may be the case that popeye's unfortunate abuse of the language and blatant double negative literally suggests he is a doctor, but i have no desire to be disingenuous, or to misquote cartoons to prove a point. colloquialisms aside, he clearly intended to explain that he is not a doctor - despite losing his patients on a frequent basis.

 actually, a quick perusal of the literature provides for a definitive answer:

"I ain't no doctor" - popeye

alas.

"popeye is not a doctor"

well, you don't know that, though.

the data on iron is actually a little surprising. 

you get iron from spinach, right? everybody knows that. just ask popeye.

in fact, according to the usda, spinach is not a particularly great source of iron at all. better sources are:

- red peppers

- tomatoes

- leeks

- potatoes

- radishes

- shallots

spinach isn't even in the shortlist.

but, i'm already eating peppers & tomatoes in my pasta bowl.

let me get the results first....

so, is this iron working?

i dunno. 

i know i'm still awake.

you supposedly only use a mg or two a day, so what i'm doing makes more sense than it seems on first glance. there may only be .2-.3 mg in each of these slices, but if my body gobbles it up, i'm giving myself .4-.8, and that's hopefully going right into the stores. and, it's a persistent, small amount with vitamin c, so it's about as much as i can possibly absorb - if i can absorb any at all

if it works, the next step is to replace the roast beef with spinach.

and, i might have to make that permanent.

ok, i think i'm over the hump on this and it should be quick from here...

ok, i'm remembering that one of the last things i did was reformat these documents, so i had to do this, anyways.

i initially decided to skip most of the early posts in the travel blog, but i'm reversing that decision for completeness reasons. that should finish up relatively soon.

ok. this is set up to go, but i need to stop to eat.

it's less that this is going to be time consuming and more that i'm going to need to really focus my brain on it.

so, going back to the july music journal.....

- the master document, which includes all files related to the journal, is dated to mar 31, 2019

- the bandcamp archive is dated to april 14, 2019

- the deathtokoalas file is dated to april 14, 2019 - and has apparently not been touched at all since

- there is a pdf for the politics blog dated to april 27, 2019 but the word document is dated to aug 14, 2020

- the blogs.7z file, which includes the blogs saved to html format, is dated to aug 22, 2019 - which is wrong. i never updated it. i can be sure of that. i need to do that.

- the smashwords upload of the music and politics journals are dated to june 6 & 7, 2020, which is right after the noise trade site shut down.

- my most recent download of the bandcamp archive is dated to july 27, 2020 but probably includes updates from the other blogs (travel blog, etc)

- the music journal document, travel blog document and politics document are all dated august 14, 2020, but there is no pdf for the music journal or the travel blog

so, if i were to take that at face value, it would suggest that i left three of the four blogs in an unfinished state, possibly because i updated them, but didn't move those updates into the other files.

the first thing i need to do is make sure that the complete archive is the same as the master document and i can do that fairly quickly in notepad++.

...so quickly that i'm already done. good. so, that means i haven't added anything to or deleted anything from that section of the master document since mar, 2019.

now, i need to rewind all four of the blogs that are online to the start of each of them in july, 2013 and make sure each is complete relative to what i want them to be, while cross-referencing the master document on the other machine. when that is done, i'll be able to close the july portion of the blog and move to august.

i think that everything is done, and it's just a perusal process, but we'll see.

how do i even do this?

it's overwehelming.

but, i think i got it, to start - and i have a lot of backups to crossreference. if somebody's been fucking with this over the last few months, i should be able to figure it out.

so, i can probably do the start of this in one giant swoop, and it might not even be that time consuming.

in fact, some of these dates don't even make sense and are making me wonder when i last edited it myself, and when somebody else might have.

fuck.

what's the point of this? i'm simply documenting my life, as an artist. who benefits from deleting sections of it? what's the fucking point?

there's apparently all kinds of files missing on my backup drive...

ugh.

i thought i left it in good order; it's in total disarray.

i know i had deleted some files i wanted to replace, but i've lost my train of thought around it.

i really do have to start from scratch, now.

what that means is that i don't see the point in doing these aleph discs yet - i'm just going to have to redo it all because some of the liner notes need to be rewritten.

so, i'm going to have to take a step back, and i'm skipping everything else and going right back to 2013/2014 first. once i get those items fixed, i can finish the frontends properly and go from there. they should hopefully be minor changes.

and, i have to do this first - i've put it off for far too long.

that means everything is on hold until i finish this, but it should hopefully not be too long.

...everything except the alter-reality. i need to start that next friday.

he does, however, make a few good points.

so, for example, there's the part where he talks about islam's indebtedness to iranian culture, which is an often overlooked point that i've drawn a lot of attention to in debunking the so-called "islamic golden age", which was a kurdish-led babylonian renaissance that the islamic authorities eventually suppressed. you have to give the arabs credit for ending the damned war, which was a pre-requisite for the renaissance to occur within. but, not only did they have nothing to do with it, but they shut it down by force...

likewise, the destruction of carthage is important to take note of, but i think he frames it poorly. yes - it was unoriginal, and that was the point, as the arabs of the time (which were a multiethnic force consisting pre-dominantly of former roman citizens or former roman tributaries) saw themselves as carrying out a conquest of the roman empire. so, they copied the romans because they considered themselves a purifying force in roman civilization. this continued all the way to 1452, when the turkish sultan declared himself emperor - to howls of laughter from europe and asia, combined. yet, the "sultanate of rum" carried forwards for centuries.

when they carried forward to spain, and tried to invade france, and held out in sicily, and conquered greece....it was all about being the new rome, as the old rome had collapsed into decadence and corruption. there's some ironic reading of gibbons for you, but it's true - it's how they saw themselves.

so, carthage had to be destroyed to bring roman civilization back to god. that was what the muslim armies saw themselves as, as the christians interpreted them as foreigners intent on enforcing an alien culture - which is just what the romans thought of carthage, too.

in the end, the arabs did not just rebuild carthage but rebuilt the carthaginian empire. like the phoenicians, they were traders, in the end, and we owe our concept of modern european capitalism quite dominantly to medieval arabism.

so, you have to understand that this guy is strictly interested in the military history, and the history is at least clear on that much - arising out of the desert, apparently from nowhere, these arabs were quite good at raiding and plundering. they won a lot of battles, and very quickly...

but, because he's only interested in the military side, he's essentially producing an uncritical retelling of the muslim sources regarding the domestic concerns, and even appears to be doing it intentionally in order to avoid ruffling feathers. what's the point of that? i mean, why bother at all? 

the reality is that much of what exists here is largely discarded by secular histories as myth. he forgets to tell you that much of this so-called history was written well after the fact and through a filter of religious control and is therefore no more reliable as actual history than the christian gospels or the jewish pentateuch. we just forget that this period was a dark age, because it's not some distant, ancient thing - it's in the historical frame. worse, the muslims often try to extricate themselves from the dark age they helped cause, and he's just repeating the propaganda about it.

i'm not going to get into this too much, but, for example, when an emperor has to pass laws about nepotism and corruption, what does that say about the society and the state of governance? you can present this as an example of wise leadership if you insist, but an emperor wouldn't pass anti-corruption laws unless corruption was rampant. further, while these laws did exist, there's little evidence that they had any effect.

rather, what you're listening to here is a founding myth, designed to present these rulers in an enlightened manner, in order to prop up the religion that created them and is no more reliable than stories about david (who killed a philistine with a slingshot) & solomon (who was wise and just). or about george washington and cherry trees. and, this is what happens when amateurs decide they're experts, on the fly.

but, that relates to the military side of it as well because these victories were so decisive and so sudden that they almost do seem like divine intervention, until you work in the reality of revolt. the narrative he's presenting here differs little from the religious narrative, until he picks up the gibbons halfway through and balances it out. but, historians don't take it seriously anymore. while some skirmishes seem to have actually taken place, it seems like the seventh century was a period of internal revolt in both of the major empires, and there was a kind of pan-semitism that developed that took them both down from the inside. these arab raiders were treated as liberators, and couldn't have succeeded otherwise.

but, he wouldn't want that to be true, because he wants battles and he wants one tribe to conquer another. so, he's buying into something that is generally seen as debunked by contemporary, mainstream history.

it's still a nice story, though.

bro.

the idea that i need to "just eat meat" is both facile and biologically wrong.

my heart health is pristine, and i'd like to keep it that way by keeping the meat down. 

this is the correct way to go through this process. all of these charts from the usda are only so useful - in the end, you need to test what you're absorbing and what you're not. you have to actually do the experiment.

everything is perfect except the iron, so let's figure that out and adjust it to compensate for it.

i'm trying this with heme because it's the highest probability approach...

but, if it works, maybe i can try replacing the roast beef with a handful of spinach, or beans or something.

the thing is that i don't currently know what's blocking it - calcium? phytates? oxalates?

...or if it's even being blocked at all, and it's not just bad absorption.

yeah, i just passed a giant combo whopper/fruit/cereal shit and it was brown as could be.

it's the beets. and the peppers.

the roast beef isn't sitting well with my stomach, but that makes sense, as the gut bacteria no doubt needs to rebuild. that's fine. i just need to get my stores up first and figure it out after - if it even works. if i stick with anything, it's probably going to be the salami with the eggs. but, like i say...

sleep is a horribly annoying thing, but i'm awake now.

let's get this done.

so, the great game is still happening but quietly, and the crusades are on hold.

it's the scramble for africa that's the real upcoming focus.

it was obvious that biden's primary concern was going to be a renewed scramble for africa, in conjunction with an expansionist imperial centre in riyadh, and against the chinese.

so, this is the alliance: islam-christianity-judaism.

this is the theatre: eastern africa

this is the pretense: oppression of muslims or christians (whatever. same thing.) that need to be saved

this is the mechanism: western support for extremist jihadist groups

this is the expected outcome: a new caliphate across the historically muslim region that is (nominally) aligned with neo-liberalism and exploits the region for the benefit of western capital - which is really what the old caliphate actually did. this should look stupid because it is. but, capital is short-sighted, and it can't see the unreliability of the arabs as a partner, who will in the end no doubt happily align with the chinese to assert dominance over the west.

this is the enemy: chinese imperialism in africa

if you want to do a play-by-play, that's the theatre that is likely to be the hottest over the next eight years, as we fund and support the saudis in their ambition to reconquer most of africa. and, i told you that months ago.

the base of support for this is going to be african-american women, who are going to be brainwashed into supporting the military-industrial complex via racial and nationalist propaganda.

https://www.cp24.com/news/canada-joins-g7-in-condemning-ethiopia-violence-calling-for-humanitarian-aid-1.5372722

ok, so where was i?

i left here on thursday afternoon to get some things for the week - wood filler, glue & oil at the canadian tire, paprika at the bulk barn, juice (and, it turns out, tomatoes) at the food basics....and, then some roast beef at the far store, some guava at the walmart (because the two closer stores are no longer stocking it) and some blueberries at the freshco.

and, after all that running around and waiting in line, it was about 19:00 when i got home - and took my first c + roast beef. so, it took four hours to do what amounted to two shopping runs?

well, first i had to wait in line for about a half hour at the canadian tire, which was partly my own fault. you have to check your school bag, which is utterly paranoid and horribly frustrating when everybody is stuck in line for an extra twenty minutes. but, the line was otherwise not that bad at the canadian tire, in the early afternoon.

and, the bulk barn across the street was a fast transaction - as was the food basics. i was actually making good time...

...but, then i went for a second run to the superstore and found myself in the midst of a grocery run. unfortunately, the government of ontario has announced yet another month-long lockdown, and it's funny how these lockdowns coincide with muslim religious holidays, isn't it?

if the goal is to stop the spread of the virus, we've already proven repeatedly that these lockdowns don't work. so, if you want my honest take on it? this is the ramadan lockdown of 2021. and, unless we understand and react very quickly, we may need to get used to regular lockdowns during muslim holidays, as they take over the government and dictate terms around the economy.

listen - i can't prove anything. but, these coincidences keep building. and, these mask laws seem like they're going to outlive the pandemic, on top of it.

and, that's my hunch about what's actually happening - some powerful muslim financiers have decided that we can't have people out drinking during ramadan. so, they've shut everything down until it's done.

i was expecting something like this, and have resigned myself to it. if we remain passive and compliant, there's no end point. and, i'm not going to go out and get myself shot for no reason. all i can do is be subversive and hope it rubs off.

we have to understand what they're actually doing before we can generate a worthwhile response.

they didn't have my guava there, so i was actually going to bike out to the other superstore, but i stopped at walmart on a hunch and they had it. but, that meant standing in line for a half hour again, for a $4 purchase. 

and, then i swung back to the freshco and had to do the same thing a third time, to get some blueberries...

somewhere along the way - i don't remember where - i made the conscious decision to purchase some salami for the eggs, as well. i decided that if this is to be done at all then it should be done comprehensively. that is, if i'm going to boost my heme then i should do it with all of the above - roast beef with my c, salami with my eggs and anchovies with my pasta. so, this will be a total heme onslaught for the next few weeks with the intent to get the stores up, up, up. then, once i've done that, if i can do that, i can go back and fuck around with interactions, and try to find some way to isolate the iron from this or  that.

so, i went out for a last run to get some salami & take advantage of a coupon for a 2-for-1 whopper deal. 

as i've stated a few times already, i don't imagine this is going to be dramatic. i have every reason to think that low iron runs in the family, and it's something i've been dealing with my whole life. but, i need to get it out of the critical stage it's in and build the stores up to something more reasonable. if my iron stores are really this low, i should be lapping up the heme as it comes in. and, if i can get those numbers up to 20,30,50 - that's what i want to see.

this is probably going to be a long term project and i'm probably going to need monthly tests for quite a while...

i didn't, however, make it much past the whoppers; i crashed before midnight, was up early in the morning and crashed again around 6:00. not what i want to see, right? but, i have to realize that i haven't had a burger in months, and my gut bacteria could very well be out of whack as a result of it. regardless, that was my initial reaction to the first shot of red meat i've had since the end of last year - i slept for hours, woke up for a few minutes, and slept for hours more.

i was finally up in the early afternoon and set about putting the groceries away and making myself a large bowl of fruit. as i skipped yesterday, this bowl of fruit was double what i would normally eat - and would have in the range of 35-40 mg of elemental iron in it, along with about 1500% of the rdi for vitamin c. if i can't absorb that, right?

and, i've been playing catch up on the various blog items, while cleaning, ever since.

i'm going to aim to get the aleph-0 disc up before i sleep next, and try to kick into the schedule properly on monday.

i'm going to have to flip it over soon and try to oil it from the other side, too.

like, it's halted. stuck...

...but easing...

well, the oil is helping with the fan, but it's not enough, yet.

and, i mean...i don't know if the converter is blown in it too or what....

...and today's post is inri017.

so, this is what i'm doing this weekend, to start - catching up on this.

====

these three tracks were not initially connected in any way, other than being the lead sequence on my second record. they are not even connected in time: the first section was written in late 1997 around the ry30, the second section was written in early 1997 around an octaver and the last section was written in mid 1998 as a sound design experiment. however, they've been connected together since they were sequenced together in early 1999. 

it was in early 2014 that i first got the idea of splitting the opening sequence into it's own release, in order to upload the tracks together to youtube. i eventually ruled against it as it didn't have a deep enough conceptual unity to justify. 

the idea has come back with the revisitation of my first period and the construction of a series of experimental singles. for reasons of chronology, it was somewhat necessary for me to release a single for idiotic in the summer of 1998. but what made the single worthwhile to me in this form was the ability to reversion the concept using the different glitch mixes of the first and third tracks. the result is a challenging and epic listen, and i hope you enjoy it. 

-- 

section 2... 

i was violently anti-tobacco in my teens. to an extent, i still am. but, i was also largely just repeating things that had been said to me, without the critical filter that comes with defining a sense of individuality. i think we probably all remember a time when we repeated things told to us by teachers, parents and the media without fully thinking them through. we don't, however, all have demos of songs that we wrote before we'd come to understand who we really are, as individuals. 

looking back at the initial recording, i mostly just wish that i had articulated myself a little bit better. i never dropped my opposition to tobacco, not even when i was a smoker. i'm not sure that i ever really even admitted to myself that i was a smoker. so, i don't want to distance myself particularly far from the basic crux of my opinion that smoking tobacco is really pretty stupid - i never really altered that opinion. what i do want to distance myself from is some of the precise language and arguments that i used, as they are not reflective of my own thoughts. 

for example, i wouldn't present the health care argument. first, i'm a strong advocate of universal health care. second, the accounting underlying the idea is not well defined, and difficult to construct. third, i reject the entire concept of currency. nor do i think we'd have to make resource-based decisions about health care if it weren't for the limits provided by currency. so, i'm retracting that statement - along with many others. 

by the time i got to recording a second version of the track in mid 1998, i'd smoked a few other things and enjoyed them. a purely anti-tobacco song no longer seemed all that relevant to me; more relevant to me was a song comparing marijuana use to tobacco use. so, i hid the vocals through a very heavy vocoder effect and piled a lot of silly samples, many about marijuana, on top of the track. it stayed that way for almost fifteen years. 

when i sat down to remaster in late 2013, removing samples was a dominant priority. thankfully, i actually had an archived instrumental version from back in 1998. this allowed me to replace the track with only minimal editing. 

there were continuity reasons why i went with the sample version the first time around, but it was against my better judgement, even then. i should have followed my gut. 

- 

section 1... 

i had earlier recorded a vocal version of this, but i had the good sense to realize it was awful and replaced the vocal parts with synth sections, creating an electronic/ambient piece with a liberal use of noise. it's admittedly a little elevator-music sounding, but i think that's sort of part of it's charm. it's very precious sounding. 

this is one of my favourite early pieces. i used to just sit and play the simple guitar outro, with drum loop in my sennheiser 440-IIs, for hours at a time... 

the decision to remove the vocals on this track was largely a reflection of my growing confidence in the quality of the music to stand up on it's own. over the '98-'99 period, i was largely aware of how cringeworthy my lyrics were and put them into three overlapping categories: (1) comedy/satire, in which case i let them stand as they were, (2) cries for help, in which case i upheld them as they were hoping somebody would listen, (3) songs that i had no lyrical idea for but that i felt needed lyrics, in which case i felt trapped by the genre conventions and upheld ideas that i truly didn't even like at the time simply so the songs would have vocals. over time, i eventually got to the point where i had enough confidence in the music that i no longer felt that the songs required lyrics, and i started to look at it as something to use sparingly based on whether i actually had an idea to express. while there are definitely songs in this period that i wish i had kept instrumental versions of, the final mixes only include a couple with lyrics that i actively regret. this is the first time i was able to mentally push back against myself and say "no. this song does not need lyrics.". 

-- 

section 3... 

this is what it sounds like when you open dlls with a wave editor. there was some strategic reshaping, but that's where the bulk of the sound comes from. 

-- 

initially written over the course of 1997. recreated and expanded over the course of 1998. lead track first sequenced in this form in feb, 1999. further remixes generated over the course of 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013, and another in late 2015. remastered in november, 2016 from various sources, 1997-2015. released & finalized on nov 17, 2016. as always, please use headphones. 

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 (1997, 1998, 1999, 2013, 2015, 2016). 

eleased august 5, 1998 

j - guitars, effects, bass, drum kit, synthesizers, sequencers, vocoders, octavers, drum programming, noise generators, sound design, sampling, digital wave editing, loops, a broken tape deck, vocals, production

i skipped yesterday, which was aleph-1 - all of the releases related to lp001, together:

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-box-set

i skipped it because i'll need to build a front-end, like i am with aleph-0. i'll repost that when it's done.

today's post (that is, the post for april 2nd) is inri016:

====

this is something i did between inri demos. i needed a break from structured writing. just wanted to make some noise... 

i suppose this is the biggest sample collage of them all, but it's best not to take it too seriously. the idea here eventually morphed into a project called "fuel true anarchy in the americas" (inri068), a play on the ftaa trade agreement, which itself got toned down in scope. 

there's everything from science docs to hitler in here. it's meant to be a passive trip through real and imaginary time that is experienced with the aid of psychedelic drugs, rather than any kind of political statement. it's quite consciously absurd, often juxtaposing ironic statements with their contradictions. 

the core of the ambience was produced by a program called sound raider. i then took the sound it created and shaped it by adding in vocal samples, looping certain parts, running things through effects, sequencing the noise into a more melodic shape, etc. it's consequently a sort of a collaboration between myself and the machine, rather than the work of the machine itself. 

no sane person could really listen to this passively. you basically *need* drugs to get anything out of this at all. 

...and i think i'm probably the only person that ever experienced it properly. hey, it's never too late... 

created in the summer of 1998. released as a standalone ep on nov 16, 2013. audio permanently closed on oct 12, 2016. release finalized on oct 27, 2016. first liner note release added on dec 25, 2019 & updated on jan 27, 2020. as always, please use headphones.

this track also appears on my third record, inridiculous (inri033): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inridiculous 

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 (1998, 2013-2019). as of dec 25, 2019, the release includes a 5 page booklet in doc, pdf & html, with an html5 audio frontend, that includes journal entries from the remastering process over nov, 2013. as of jan 27, 2020, that booklet is now 6 pages, and encompasses nov & dec, 2013. 

released july 1, 1998 

j - sound raider, sampling, cool edit synthesis/sequencing, digital effects processing, digital wave editing, flute 

gauntk9 - anti-social quip

i'm going to need to test the ferritin again some time soon, probably around the middle of april.

i need to get him to ask for an actual iron test, as well - because while low ferritin is an indicator of anemia, it's not actually a proof of it, and it's actually entirely plausible that my blood iron levels are fine, and my stores are just low.

....which again means either bad genes or cancer.

he should have asked for that in the first place, really.

you know, i'm looking at the clinical ranges around mcv (which is the size of your red blood cells) and  total rbc count and i'm not convinced i'm outside of a reasonable range. i said this about the other blood count metrics, which were an epsilon out of the range last time and an epsilon inside the range this time. but, this lab is using restrictive ranges.

so, my mcv is 95.1. this lab has an upper limit of 94 for a normal range, but others suggest anything under 100 is normal. so, should i really worry about this? i mean, it's so close, regardless...

further, my rbc count  is 4.25 and the lab suggests the normal range starts at 4.3. other labs suggest a normal range for women starts at 4.2 and a normal range for men starts at 4.7.

but, i actually think this metric is consistent across several blood tests, iirc. i'm always just an epsilon off, or an epsilon in. 

my ferritin is low - i'm accepting that and reacting to it, even if i'm not convinced it's the most terrible thing ever, so long as i'm consuming sufficient iron regularly.

but, i'm not convinced my blood count is, actually, low at all - maybe it just consistently runs at the very bottom of the range, along with my blood pressure and my cholesterol.

i can't believe that the media is still talking about eradicating covid-19.

is this incompetence or fascism?

first of all, i've got my shit log uploading - it should be done soon.

i've come to somewhat of a conclusion here, and it's that the colour of the shit seems variable enough for me to conclude that if the low ferritin is due to bleeding then it's not constant. i can't reasonably come to further deductions on the point. is something i'm eating making me bleed short term? is that even possible? 

really, i think that, as far as the shit is concerned, i'm looking at two options:

1) it's a parasite and that's why it's sporadic

2) it's just the food and i'm not bleeding at all

that rules it out, but it would almost be easier if i had an ulcer...

so, where was i?

i got a lot of running around done, but i can't really clean properly in here until the fan gets replaced. i got some oil, and if it works it could salvage the second half of the weekend, but there's no guarantee that it will. 

so, i'm going to do a kind of quick, surface clean and leave the deeper clean until next week.

for right now, let me go some updates done and get back to what i'm doing.

it's important to take some time for the classics, though.

i'll have some posts soon. i'm in for the week, at least.

but, my fan is out, and i'm getting a migraine. coincidence? i think not. we'll see how bad it gets.

but, right now, it looks like i'm going to actually spend the weekend in bed.

al gore supported the first gulf war, the sanctions regime and the invasion of iraq. people under 40 will think of al gore as an environmentalist; people older than that will remember that he was a war hawk, and in fact the architect of much of the groundwork that allowed for the 2003 invasion in the first place. i've consequently repeatedly made the argument that those arguing that gore wouldn't have invaded iraq are probably wrong - and even that he would have seemed to be more likely to do it than bush, standing in the year 2000. bush campaigned against what he called "nation building", and you had to actually listen really closely to hear the burgeoning neo-con in there, which didn't really come out until after 9/11. but, gore was coming out of an administration that purposefully starved children as an economic sanction, and had personally supported military action against iraq since the 80s. and, i mean, look at how hillary clinton took out ghaddafi as soon as she got the chance. nader's argument the whole time was that it didn't really matter which one won, and i think he was actually probably right.

deathtokoalas

the pmc should not exist at all, it should be abolished and replaced by a series of committees.

her arguments in favour of the pmc were really the only reactionary things she said, and this is typical of the so-called academic left, which loves to pretend that it's doing something useful but are in truth mostly useless eaters on state subsidies. that mirror needs to be held up.

they would be - and should be - the first to go.

Immortal Science of Hauntology

npc

deathtokoalas

i have no idea what you're talking about. at all.

(pause)

so, this is apparently something that gross, smelly gamer bros say when they mean to suggest that somebody doesn't think for themselves - which they need to do by implementing a generalized groupthink meme, rather than coming up with something original and pertinent.

it's not subtle enough to be ironic; it's just dumb.

stakkanov friman

some good points you make.

The workers can not wield the state tool for their own interest for it is an oppressive system. but academia? shure.

i see a problem

deathtokoalas

academia will never lose it's superiority complex, and it is consequently forever lost to communism. it is itself a tool of oppression that must be brought under the control of the cooperative, and not the other way around.

stakkanov friman

i am unshure if you are aware of my attempt to explain their hypocracy.

i was trying to mostly agree with you infact. but i do not think that a workers cooperative can wield academia as a tool for their goals. just like the state it must be destroyed and built for a new purpose in a differenet form from the ground up

deathtokoalas

the problem with academia is that it's inherently hierarchical, and consequently can't avoid implementing tyrannies of knowledge. and, in a past era, that may have been unavoidable, but we don't need experts anymore when we have searchable databases - they can be bypassed almost entirely. the technology undoes a certain type of division of labour, which necessitates it's democratization, like any other. 

you were repeating my statement that the academy is hypocritical and i agreed with myself and expanded upon the point. but, it's more than hypocrisy, when they start producing these ridiculous prices to attend the institution, and then restricting access to meaningful labour based on an ability to pay. that's a source of oppression, and it has to be democratized for that reason as well. 

but, because their own self-interest is to perpetuate these prices and this exclusion, these decisions need to be taken away from them and placed in the hands of the people, more broadly. they can't be allowed to run themselves, as it will lead to continued restrictions to access. and, in the existing world, where data is power, that's almost the most oppressive thing you could  imagine.

we could have a debate about the definition of the state, but i'm not entirely sure where you're coming from. you sound almost right-libertarian. i'm a libertarian socialist. so, when i talk about abolishing the state, what i mean is democratizing decision making power, by taking it away from a professional managerial class and putting it into the hands of a collective. maybe you mean something else.

======

deathtokoalas

marx was critical of anybody who called themselves socialist but refused to perfectly adhere to his theory. i think what you're discussing here would better refer to lassalle than proudhon, but there's a commonality in the critique - he felt he had an authoritarian monopoly on socialist theory, and anybody that deviated from it was wrong. so, he would have been vicious on lenin, vicious on mao and vicious on anybody else that tweaked his theory at all. what that's really uncovering, if you look at it, is that marx saw himself as a prophet, and refused to tolerate dissent. and, then you get to  the real point of what marx really was - a cult leader, a religionist.

 

zero books

He argued persuasively that many socialists continued to formulate their notions of socialism on a bourgeois/class basis.

deathtokoalas

see, i don't think that holds well with proudhon, which he seemed to think was just a kind of a loose cannon. but, i think it holds well with lasalle - i don't disagree with you. but, i mean, i'd rather live in sweden than the ussr, too.

i should also grab a burger when i'm out...just cause...

i didn't make some conscious decision to never eat meat again, but it's a function of the pandemic - i only eat things like burgers in restaurants. and, it's therefore been a while.

i've been over this: i'm not religiously opposed to eating meat, it's more of a question of being a responsible consumer, and trying to support an economy that's sustainable. i shouldn't need to eat meat for iron, if my genes work right. but, i'm empirically driven, and here we are...

i need to test it.

but, i mean i always intended to keep getting the odd burger here and there. i just haven't in a long time, due to circumstances.

i actually don't expect it's going to work, or at least not work much. but, if i can get up from 9 to 50 that's at least something.

actually, here's an idea...

i've been taking a quarter of a 500 mg pill of vitamin c every 6 hours. this is not connected to any meal i'm eating.

if i get some roast beef or pastrami at the deli counter and take one slice of that with the 100 or so mg of c, i'm maximizing heme absorption directly, and isolating it from any specific meal.

it's not going to be a lot, but i'm taking 20 mg of elemental iron as it is and it's not doing anything. so, any bump at all is something. and, i'm ultimately just trying to figure out if it works.