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.