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Friday, December 13, 2013

actually, i would drastically prefer to live in a universe that is defined by logical rules and develops according to an understandable framework that follows a rational outline. i didn't choose to live within the chaos of absolute stochastic mayhem. alas...

prematurely republishing inri (inri015)

so, post-production on this is complete, along with some minor changes - removal of awkward samples, basically.

i consider this a listenable release. the lyrics are not always great (although there's a few i like that i'll pull out for inricycled B), but they either express valid viewpoints as i was experiencing them or they pull of the shock rock thing well enough to be effective. less than half of this will be recycled, but i would only really like to actually strike out track 8.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp

Thursday, December 12, 2013

i think this article makes some valid points, but it goes a little too far and in the process exposes the author's reactionary white privilege.

my reading of mandela is essentially that he didn't really know what he was doing. he campaigned from the left based on it's ideals and then found himself in power at the confluence of the collapse of communism and the rise of neo-liberalism. he followed his advisers to the implementation of failed reforms.

i've compared him to trudeau before and will again. people attack trudeau for his economic policies. the truth is trudeau didn't actually understand anything about economics, he was a lawyer with an interest in philosophy, and if you spend some time searching through his biography and reading some of his statements you'll realize he admitted as much. on the one hand, trudeau took power in an economic mess - nixon shock, opec embargo, collapse of keynesian economic theory. even if he did have a clue, the challenges were substantial. he would have had to rely on advice, regardless. and we now know that the experts studying the situation were as flabbergasted as anybody else.

so, trudeau - a social liberal by any concept of the term and one with a background in workplace organizing that ran on an election platform that promised direct democracy - ended up carrying out experiments on behalf of milton friedman. canada liked monetarism before it was cool. and trudeau had no idea what he was implementing.

likewise, when mandela's advisers came to him and presented trickle down as a solution, he went for it because he trusted the advice and believed it was the way forward in a post-communist future. the task, now, is to point out that it failed. there's no need to vilify and no value in it.

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/26519

the situation's sort of complex. apparently, the israeli right (netanyahu is actually in the centre of the heavily rightward-skewed israeli spectrum) rejected the idea of planned resettlement as a sort of welfare.

as mentioned, beyond the problems of resettlement itself, i'm concerned about the ramifications regarding forced resettlement of israeli citizens that happen to be arabs and the collapse of the rule of law in israel. this is a different thing than bulldozing over villages in the occupied territories. like most people on the left, i don't want multiple states in the region that are defined by ethnic or religious identities. that's a formula for perpetual violence, nationalism, racism, etc. rather, i want to see a single cosmopolitan, multicultural, multi-ethnic state that buries the nineteenth century ideal of ethnic nationalism. i reject the idea that jews and arabs are too different to live together. reality is that they're virtually indistinguishable - same genes, same language, same religion.

http://972mag.com/bill-to-displace-israels-bedouin-to-be-scrapped-laws-drafter-says/83525/

in all honesty, the best thing that could happen to the area is an invasion by an outside force. it's interesting to contemplate an alternate history where the ottoman empire maintained control of the area long enough to accommodate jewish resettlement after wwII.

another thing to think about is the possibility of a new messianic cult arising in the region. hey, religion is a statist fantasy to begin with; now's a good time to make a new one up.

i'm really not interested in ideas that maintain the status quo and merely seek to balance power. the problem is that there's a gang of armed morons in charge that think god has the right to grant fiefs. that's what needs to be resolved.

it's not a question of sharing the "holy land", it's a process of bringing people to terms with the truth that there is no such thing as "holy land".

only a secular, multicultural state that rejects ethnic nationalism can get us there.

and this idea of rounding up arabs and putting them on reserves is really damaging to that only possible end goal.

spent hours doing post-production, can't tell the difference between result and initial wave files.

grargh. let me try this again...

i'll never forgive myself for deleting all the source files for this ancient stuff. something as simple as boosting the guitars turns into a math problem about fundamental frequencies and harmonic overtones. ugh...

not to mention those samples. to be 17 again would be to understand what the fuck i was thinking.

the mastering process on this stuff consisted of compressing the wave files to mp3. the fraunhofer method, i suppose. hey, that *is* a type of compression and it was a valid best approach when mastering software was out of the reach of warez on home pcs.

btw, my take on warez is that if intellectual property is to exist at all then it should be very minimal in scope. ten years, tops. i don't tend to go after the newest releases, but i think previous cycle software should be treated as freeware.

anyways, this is long overdue to be run through some stereo imaging and harmonic exciters. but there's just a handful of places where the mix has come out fucked...

so, i'm running over the source material with parametric eqs trying to get just the right frequencies out. almost done. and it's almost painful, really.

^ only a perfectionist, huh? lol.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

http://projects.wsj.com/lobotomyfiles/?ch=one

publishing inricycled a (inri002)

so, i just spent the last several months flooding everybody's feed with music that i wrote in the 90s as a teenager, criticizing both it and myself and more or less suggesting that you don't bother listening to what i'm spamming you with.

this inri material has been a problem for me for years because quite a bit of it is some of the music i've written that's closest to me (consider i was around 15 when i wrote most of it), but quite a bit of it is also absolutely terrible and unoriginal garbage and it's all intertwined with itself.

i've gone over it a few times and pulled out sections for listenable consumption. it's the only really workable approach. I had never done that for the cassette demos, though.

i wanted everything available for analysis in it's rawest form, that's why i uploaded. but, that's not the material i'd ever send anybody to go listen to. i'm actually really happy that this is finally put together because it gives me a document of myself in early high school (the tenth grade) that i can actually send people towards.

so, no, you probably don't want to listen to the other 90s stuff i was posting. the awful lyrics, the rip-offs, the sometimes terrible playing and other characteristics make those demos of historical value only.

this compilation i've just pulled out, though, is void of all of that and is really quite listenable. if you like noisy grunge/punk/doom/hardcore with a prog/fusion/jazz/blues flair (and can handle the odd ambient or psychedelic pop embellishment) then you might get some enjoyment out of it. i was a pretty talented little guitarist...
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inricycled-a

===

i've released a dozen different things with the title "inricycled", making it more of a concept than a release. it's not just the material i'm recycling, now, it's the idea of recycling material.

i hope this is the final iteration. the difference, here, is that i'm trying to isolate segments of songs that people interested in my more recent compositions would find interesting. these fragments aren't entirely void of lyrics, but they're very minimal. they're also quite short.

i've retitled most of the tracks to get a feel of what the music sounds like and/or what i was thinking as i was writing it.

the material in this volume is taken from the following cassette demos:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-cassette-demo-1 (1996)
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-cassette-demo-2 (1997)

this is the best possible absolute starting point for my musical material.

sequenced and mildly modified in dec, 2013. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, drums, vocals, keyboards, tapes, found sounds, metronomes, digital wave editing, production.

released july 1, 1997

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

no they're not. this is a very misleading headline, covering very cynical politics. unifor is angling for refineries to be built in canada. they're going to co-opt the first nations struggle to try and get that done, but to suggest that they are "on the same side" as first nations, here, is a flat out lie.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/energy-union-backs-first-nations-against-northern-gateway/article15799496/

‘We’ll be there in solidarity to support them,’ says Unifor area director Gavin McGarrigle.

first nations would be wise to avoid any strategic planning with big labour.

thankfully, i think they mostly realize this.

the truth is that the article itself is probably trying to lump together the opposition to the pipeline as "unions and indians". the conservatives benefit from that kind of optics, as both groups are deeply unpopular.

you can hear ezra, now.

"today, an evil axis of communists and savages descended upon the peaceful oil executives of central alberta and threatened to sacrifice them to their nature gods unless certain concessions were made. we're going to dedicate this entire program to the existential threat that this axis poses to our freedoms in canada."

that's only a mild exaggeration.

in truth, unifor does not care about the ecological issues. if they get their way, and refineries get built, they will immediately swing their support for pipelines to move the refined product. that could conceivably have a catastrophic effect on the ability to actually resist.

it's hard to reject temporary allies, especially when they're powerful, but first nations should really be making an attempt to clarify that the nature of their opposition is drastically different than unifor's. unifor's solidarity should be rejected in no uncertain terms. this would hopefully have the effect of undercutting support for unifor's proposed refineries, which is a more important goal than building a level of transparently fake solidarity that will eventually backfire.

unifor's "solidarity" is, in fact, an attempt to co-opt an ecological movement into one for economic nationalism, at the cost of severe ecological ruin.

Monday, December 9, 2013

this is funny math. MLEs. probability theory. ugh. i sort of hate it. worse, you don't want to start letting programmers do the math because the flat reality is that they're going to do it wrong.

...but i realize that there's a huge class of relatively simple practical problems that are NP and that require complete rethinks to approach.

to put it another way, the algorithm is going to have very, very bad results from time to time. so, you write in a time-out operation and start again. it's random, so you could get 100 bad results in a row. that's extreme, but it will happen from time to time. when you do get a good result, though, the guessing is often going to be faster than a systematic approach.

but, it's all guessing and working with probabilities.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131202121546.htm

well, they sucked. they rode a wave of leftist indignation to a second place showing, then elected a fucking liberal. actually, that's not fair - mulcair has demonstrated that he's opposed to ideology, in general, and merely seeks power. so, they elected a megalomaniac masquerading as a fucking liberal.

suck. sorry.

http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2013/12/beyond-politics-origins-and-future-ndp%E2%80%99s-orange-wave

the denisovans hadn't been discovered yet when i was working this out (neither had the "hobbit"), but i can sort of work them in. this, i'm having trouble making meaning of. it's easy to make sense of, but i don't see it shedding light on anything.

except, maybe, this: basque is a language isolate, sometimes connected to caucasian languages and north american languages that are ultimately siberian. 400 000 years ago is clearly too early to be talking about any existing languages. however, if continuity can be developed until fairly recently it is a possible diffusion point.

https://phys.org/news/2013-12-oldest-hominin-dna-sequenced.html

this was bound to happen eventually. it's not that macs and linux machines are inherently safer. well, maybe they're a little harder to hack into, but you shouldn't be worried about somebody hacking into your machine. you should be worried about getting something in your email, or running a compromised program or opening the wrong website.

see, here's the thing: windows had something like 95% market share at one point. i know it's gone down a lot, but it's still dominant. you're an 31337 hax0r. why bother with the machine with 8% or 13% market share? no, you want the high probability option. so you write your 1337 scripts to go after windows. or, windoze, as you'd call it.

that's the only reason that macs and linux boxes have less viruses targeted towards them. it's just a smaller market. and, again, most viruses spread nowadays through user behaviour. the weakest link is not your operating system, it's you.

macs are growing steadily but slowly. they might maybe hit 15% soon if the current rate continues, and 20% by 2020. with those kinds of numbers, it's not likely that virus makers will bother targeting mac users any time soon.

android, though, is dominating the market. 81% market share in q3. and these are the devices that people are using to connect directly to their bank accounts, credit card companies...

https://phys.org/news/2013-12-symantec-worm-linuxthreat-devices.html

Sunday, December 8, 2013

i've wanted to do some projects with this sort of thing for a while, but i was thinking more along the lines of generating them in matlab.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/december-2013/baryonic-acoustic-oscillations

timeline: 2005

100 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 85 84 83 82 81 80 79 78 77 76 75 74 73 72 71 70 69 68 67 66 65 64 63 62 61 60 59 58 57 56 55 54 53 52 51 50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0- 0+ 1 2
000
00 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

2005

mar 7: thee silver mt. zion memorial orchestra & tra-la-la band - horses in the sky

april 13: the angels of light, akron/family @ la sala rosa, montreal

july 10: do make say think, four tet @ bluesfest, ottawa

aug 29: system of a down @ bell centre, montreal

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/chronology/CE/2000/000/00/05.html

thee silver mt. zion memorial orchestra & tra-la-la band - horses in the sky

hit and miss

i've swung so wildly on this disc that it's hard to even order the thoughts. i think i've conjured up a basic idea, though.

suppose you approach it as a singular whole, as an album that cannot be modified - which, to be clear, is how it ought to be approached in an absolute sense. from this perspective, i'd have to say that, if there's another record out there with so much blown potential, i'm not sure what it is. it begins with two ridiculously powerful pieces of epic rock that are maybe a bit more conventional than an old fan would expect but are no less satisfying. it then collapses into a couple of boring folk songs and a pretty generic doom/grunge thing before bouncing back a bit with a throwback track that, as is often the case with throwback tracks, seems haphazardly thrown together, even in it's epic haze.

suppose, though, that you simply remove the third and fifth tracks from the disc. what is left is a record of four lengthy tracks that is arguably on par with the previous disc. the grading consequently comes with a very deep caveat: removing those two particularly awful misses produces a pretty big hit. half of me wants to overlook it, but it's just that the misses miss so badly....

thankfully, this disc represents the end of their folk phase, and i really don't know what they were thinking. then again, i don't know what any of the creative artists that felt the need to explore folk, of all things, were thinking around '05 or so. it was popular. trendy. ok. however, the audience such a thing can attract is very fickle (and not particularly suited for propaganda purposes). the nature of the mid noughties folk craze is practically the definition of fickle, trendy nonsense. how it was able to ensnare so many otherwise forward-thinking artists, i don't know; it was upper class, latte-drinking, small-business-supporting, pro-capitalist conservative-liberal shit, more or less the antithesis of what this band seemed to be. i suppose that breaks with the past are meant to be dramatic, but they need not be contradictory; did it cross their mind, at any point, that smashing the state had given way to playing for petty bourgeois aristocrats in thrown together courtyards.....? so, what were they thinking when they recorded an ironically perfect straight-to-starbucks classic like "horses in the sky" or a frat-house sing-along like "hang on to each other"? well, i suppose i answered my own question. unfortunately...

teddy roosevelt's guns is a different issue. thematically, this is interesting. i'll even admit a partiality to the mood they go with, as well as the general aesthetic of disconnected dreariness. yet, it seems like it was thrown together. it's filler. we don't really expect filler from this act and are a little confused by it when we find it. it's something similar for the last track, which is musically partially recycled from the last proper gybe! disc. there's a very good idea here, but it seems hampered by a refusal to break with the band's own conventions. what i'm trying to get across is a level of predictability. now, that being said, a casual listener may not even notice this; it may only really be apparent upon a close analysis of their entire discography, after listening to it fairly intensely for six years (at the time of release; nearly 15 at the time of this writing). this track is successful, but it's a little tired. can't win with me, can you? well, they pivoted massively on their next record...

i've previously alluded to the influence i may have had on the band, and have to wonder if the imagery in the second part of the last track (imagine the view as they bounce shit off the satellites) has anything to do with the cover art attached to a demo i sent their label. i think this is pushing it, though. substantially...

so, what is so special about the first two tracks, then? god saves our dead marines sounds sort of like freddie mercury delving into slavic folk, or perhaps roma ("gypsy") music. operatic grandeur has been replaced by an existential peasant angst that meditates on how fucked up the world around us is, making specific reference to some sneaky tactics the canadian government was using to hide it's war dead, but it's fundamentally a perverted queen tune. this opens up into an ambient second track, as many of their more upbeat tracks tend to, which presents some moral questions about the extant conflict in the levant from an anti-zionist jewish perspective. "this is their busted future, and this is our dream. which one do you believe in?". it's a remarkably powerful, gut-wrenching 21 minutes of music that really has few parallels. stop reading this and go listen to it...

despite the high points, as high as they are, the record lacks cohesion, as a whole. perhaps extraordinary goals require extraordinary results? you can't skip over this in the band's catalog, nor should you, but you need to prepare yourself to wonder what the fuck they were thinking.

stream:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnpQFjefXCROaSni7C2oteYu1PyWP5ywx

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/music/artists/ASilverMtZion/2005-HorsesInTheSky/index.html

Saturday, December 7, 2013

william iron arm

born:
died: 1046
father: tancred d'hauteville [1]

william and drogo seem to have probably really been brothers. they were present in italy by 1035 at the latest. the legend is that he killed the emir of sicily with his bare arm. he was elected count of the normans in apulia, and successfully defended the province from an attempted byzantine reconquest, but died shortly afterwards. also lord of ascoli.

[1]: the deeds of count roger of calabria & sicily & of duke robert guiscard his brother , book I

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/gen/lines/hauteville/williamironarm.html

ok, so step one is to relisten to things closely. a lot of what i just uploaded was raw, and i may reupload. i won’t repost. i should be back to reposting deny everything material within about a week.

my goal was to be done remastering by jan 1. that was a full month with no headphones, so i'm going to need to work a little faster through it.

i have a rough outline of things. i'll be constructing several new releases to hold outtakes and alternate mixes. so there's a LOT coming...

...and then there's going to be a lot of new material coming, as i complete roughly 5 projects quite quickly.

found the contradiction i was looking for. it's kind of nasty.

in 1058, pope nicholas II started to more vigorously enforce rules against incest. the duke of apulia at the time, a norman landholder, was forced to divorce and remarry. this indicates that the duke of apulia (robert guiscard) must have been related to the ducal line of normandy, as the confused mythical history states.

robert guiscard took over control of sicily in an unclear way. either circumstance was remarkably fortuitous, or the history that exists is essentially a lie to justify his seizure of control, with the backing of the church. it is said he was the brother of the ruler he seized power from, putting him next in the line of succession. ok, let's accept that supposedly historical statement at face value.

it would then follow that robert guiscard was also the brother of a geoffrey, who had a son that entered the clergy and married into the norman aristocracy. oops.

first, note that the clergy were, at this point, permitted to marry. laws against priests marrying are actually fairly recent (and the reformists rejected them for that reason). so, there's nothing weird about a priest marrying. but, how do we explain a priest marrying into his own family, breaking the rules that the church were then recently so keen to enforce? how do we accept that the church forced the powerful duke to divorce and yet permitted his priestly nephew to marry his own cousin?

the solution is that geoffrey did not marry his cousin at all. to be clear, i'm not suggesting a reason to think that marriage that is recorded didn't happen. rather, the marriage was not one between cousins because geoffrey and robert guiscard were not actually brothers.

it is the sons of tancred from his first wife that comprise the likely historical fiction, as it was concocted by guiscard to justify his seizure of power after the death (and possible poisoning) of humphrey. so says my hypothesis, anyways.

but the contradiction that has been found does expose the lie and it can no longer be responsibly upheld.

i have conquered all of the mortals.

the only thing left for me to pwn is time.

"Today, Fighting Island is privately owned by BASF Corporation. "

that's a thing that happens?

it's ok, though. basf, which was created out of the decartelization of ig farben, which was the neural center of the nazi state and was never actually run through a "denazification process", which has led to many decades of reminders that they were once the neural center of the nazi state, are fully engaged in the process of reversing the effects of fordism in the region. don't feel bad, that one went over my head, too. http://riccawu.mnsi.net/story9.html

Friday, December 6, 2013

headphones have arrived at the post-office. back in business tomorrow.

timeline: 1041

100 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 85 84 83 82 81 80 79 78 77 76 75 74 73 72 71 70 69 68 67 66 65 64 63 62 61 60 59 58 57 56 55 54 53 52 51 50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0- 0+ 1 2
000 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
00 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

1041

unclear date:

tancred d'hauteville (died)

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/chronology/CE/1000/000/40/01.html

RE: Yes, All new homeowners can pick up their first recycling Red & Blue Boxes free at the Environmental Services Centre

From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: city.windsor.on.ca

i picked some up at home hardware the other day....

thanks anyways.

j

ollie
I like going through my media chronologically, in all aspects. I started with wwi. After immersing myself in WWI media, docs, literature, art, etc for about a month, the joy of those early 20s jazz recording sprang to life and didn't seem trite in the slightest. I've actually been doing this for a couple of years now and I'm in the early 90s now. Its a fun experiment that I'd highly recommend.

I want someone to invent an app so people can build historical/chronological playlists with friends. It would be cool if people could have a best of 1990 cross media playlist to crowdsource

... or a best of 1782

jessica amber murray
i was building chronological playlists on youtube for a while, but have kind of let it sit since i moved here. 60s - 00s. plus one for "serialism" which i took a broad definition of to include any kind of abstract jazz. and i suppose i'm building something like that on my web page, slowly, although it's cross-linked to literature and other things as well. i think it's a neat idea, too. http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIx9xafrMCgYqDYIp4SK6tA/videos?view=1

ollie
I have this book, its a historical atlas of world history. I think it forms an excellent template for how people should interact with their media. Sort of like a google earth with a timeline that media could be tagged to by date.

I'm meeting with someone in the next month to develop the idea. If you have any input I'd be interested to hear about it.

I want it to be a crowdsourced documentary organiser that can serve as a tool for historical schooling.

jessica amber murray
i think that sounds like a lot of programming! i've played around with geographical lists to organize bands in scenes (montreal post-rock, or seattle grunge, or whatever) and can see the appeal to approaching music this way, at least up until about 2000 when the internet sort of abolished the local music scene by opening up the spread of ideas. the kind of isolation that created the washington/oregon punk scene probably isn't going to happen again. what we've seen more recently are scenes jumping up around hashtags. a good example of that is "chillwave". it's interesting, but is it anachronistic? and, if so, if the focus is *history*, does that matter? i was actually thinking of building something like this for my programming project. i ran it by a bunch of people and they all questioned whether there was any kind of demand for it. my answer was always "well, i'd use it.". but after thinking about it, i sort of think they're right. i mean, i like the idea - i'd use the site. but it's hard to see why people would move from spotify (although i should point out that spotify didn't exist at the time, and my idea may have been interpreted as an alternate model for spotify that took in aspects of discogs, which also didn't exist, and timeline, which also didn't exist....) or last.fm for that reason, or why the media companies would license it. i've been slowly building up a timeline on facebook, though. just my own records. just a hobby. but i do hope that, one day, it's a large resource. having something like that opened up and crowd-sourced would definitely be interesting. but, again, why would people use it instead of wikipedia, besides the gui? so, i guess my input is it's a cool idea that's going to require a lot of work and will probably have a hard time sustaining itself. but i'd use it. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jessicas-Music-Collection/505092896244390?ref=hl

ollie
I don't know a thing about programming, but the first step from my basic perspective is meta-tagging fields for detailed date information, so your date tag for Sgt. Pepper says June 1, 1967 instead of 1967.

As for local scenes being relevant or not, think of how this could be applied as an event promotion/ local media collection tool.

jessica amber murray
you'd probably end up storing it all in xml files with those tags and then putting a searchable interface over top of it for usability. the user would be able to construct a timeline of desired events by genre, individual, whatever so that timelines of 'john lennon, 1960-1980' or 'punk rock, 1976-1996' could be constructed.

ollie
Bring in the geographic tag and it becomes a historical media atlas. With a calendrical interface, people can contextualise their media historically.

Computer, what was happening in October 1962?

its already on wikipedia, just not the direct link to the media

First James Bond movie, first Beach Boys album, first Beatles single, Cuban Missile Crisis.

jessica amber murray
yeah. it's a neat idea. i wish you had asked me this five years ago, though, when i was in the right head space. right now, i'm personally more interested in building a personalized timeline that focuses on my own writing, reviews, interpretations, etc than opening it up to crowdsourcing and objective analysis. but i do think the latter would be interesting to see exist.

ollie
That's where it becomes a promotional tool.

A database for event footage so that people can familiarise themselves with a local art scene.

I'm looking forward to developing it. Know a couple of teachers who think it will be a good teaching tool for history.

I'll keep you updated.

jessica amber murray
i'll just point out that if you compare it to something like discogs or librarything, something that bogs those sites down is the user content. wildly inaccurate or borderline reviews by people that don't really know what they're talking about. i guess that's more something to worry about down the line. but i think the major usability challenge on the timeline is likely to be clutter. maybe another example to look at is the phenomena of the soundcloud comment.

ollie
I see it working more like facebook, where you add users based on the quality of their content. For instance, there would be some interest in having an Idle No More or an Oxford History department newsfeed for tagged media.

on the inevitability of metalcore fans all eventually dying of catastrophic, stress-related heart attacks

all tension, no release.

studies will show that metalcore fans will have higher rates of stress related illnesses.

(deleted)

well, they will, once the audience reaches heart attack age. which is probably not that far into the future.

well, if anybody does the studies, anyways. there's a research idea, at the least.

(deleted)

hardcore is a type of music that developed in the late 70s and early 80s, mostly out of the punk movement. early hardcore bands included the likes of bad brains, the dead kennedys and black flag. it had some influence on thrash metal bands like slayer, which is what this sounds a lot more like, and a mild, roundabout influence on progressive metal bands like dream theatre, which provide the missing piece in the equation. yet, it lacks the political messaging that defines hardcore as a genre. i'm willing to concede that this isn't as bad as the modern "metalcore" that derives itself thematically from bands like limp bizkit, but it has essentially nothing in common with hardcore as a genre. labeling it as such is really highly disingenuous; thematically and conceptually this is metal, and not punk.

i stand by my hypothesis, however, and think you're providing more evidence for it than you realize.

(deleted)

i'm actually a middle aged schizophrenic weirdo with a masters degree and a good sense of misanthropic humour, but that's a nice try.

(deleted)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20013543

(deleted)

i'll still take beethoven over rossini, though, because it has that release. this doesn't. listening to this is like bottling your emotions up until you explode....

...and arguments otherwise are basically labeling that explosion as stress relief.

(deleted)

i think release could refer equally well to an idea from music theory and a reduction of volume and/or intensity. what you're getting at is the opposite of release. it's not my fault, it's just what the word means. but i sort of explained that already, too - what you're doing is creating high amounts of tension, watching it explode and then calling it release, when what that is is either tension (relative to the first meaning) or implosion (relative to the second).

i also have to admit i don't hear a lot of chaos in this. it's very ordered.

(deleted)

yet, none of these words express relative concepts. you're consequently spouting pretentious nonsense.

what you mean to say is that the record makes full use of the spectrum, which i can mildly agree with, and also that you enjoy the adrenaline rush and subsequent burnout.

the price of this disc is going to increase dramatically if heroin users find out it produces endorphins....

(deleted)

converge is a type of progressive metal. i've used the term thrash in this thread and would continue to. they don't draw much influence from hardcore (which preceded them by a good ten years) and never did.

certainly, converge and dillinger are more similar to each other than either are to black flag or bad brains or minor threat or....

Yes, All new homeowners can pick up their first recycling Red & Blue Boxes free at the Environmental Services Centre

From: the city of windsor
To: "death.to.koalas@gmail.com" <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>

Hi Jessica.

I just wanted to let you know that you can come down to pick up your new boxes. We are located at 3540 North Service Road East (corner of EC Row & Central Ave.)

We are open from 8:00 am to 4:00pm. I will just have you write down your name and address and then you can collect your boxes.

Thanks,
Public Works / Environmental Services

regarding the legacy of christian tonality in western popular music, and subsequent challenges to it

tomhulcelover
how are you gonna say the beatles ripped off of journey? haha didn't that beatles song come out before?

deathtokoalas
that's right. these are all rip-offs of let it be.

most shocking statement of the century, said nobody: all pop music is ripped off from the beatles.

...although the dude that pointed out that it's just a basic mathematically correct chord progression is also right, even though it just obscures the reality that pop music has been stuck in tonal stasis since the 1700s. people in mozart's time frame wouldn't have insulted you for your lack of originality if you had played something with a mathematically correct structure, they would have accused you of channeling satan and destroying music if you deviated from a proper chord progression.

the mathematics of tonality underlie the primary reason that creativity and popularity go together so seldomly and are often defined more by atmospheric changes rather than tonal shifts. if you want people to react well to your music, you need to conform to the mathematics underlying harmony. it's consequently us, the consumers, that drive a lack of originality in popular media.

that's all this is really pointing out.

tomhulcelover
umm ok

deathtokoalas
the channeling of satan part is historically completely accurate. chopin is one example. and beethoven was regularly accused of trying to destroy music (and, in fact, was.). let alone, you know, ozzy.

the intervals and shifts that we interpret as acceptable are precisely the intervals and shifts that the church declared to be acceptable. that's not a coincidence.

tomhulcelover
dude, im sorry but i dont really care

deathtokoalas
seems like you do to me. whatever.

Tom Alma
Bear in mind that Waltzing Matilda was around a long time before The Beatles...

deathtokoalas
sure. and celtic folk, as we know it, came from renaissance lute music. most of the songs in the list, though, are let it be, including the journey tune. i was more drawing attention to the background that it all has in sanctioned christian tonality (itself derived from pythagorean number mysticism).

babalooey100
Cool I thought the Pythagoreans only played triangles .

deathtokoalas
except that pythagoras (who was head of a philosophical school that fused number theory and music theory into a kind of buddhist mysticism) stole his theorem about parallelism (which is actually wrong in the geometry we live in) from chaldean sages while he was stumbling through babylonia searching for wisdom, and they themselves probably ripped it off from the egyptians, who probably stole it from atlantis and/or aliens, at which point our history currently begins and we can't go back any further.

Jimmy Greer
Uhhhh, dumbass....the reason Mozart and them could be more creative is because they've got about 60 more instruments to use than your average rock n roll band.

deathtokoalas
yeah, that makes perfect sense, you illiterate nincompoop.

in terms of creativity, the beatles blow mozart out of the water, and it's precisely because they're on the other side of the abolition of a set of rules that mozart was expected to follow. nobody talks about mozart's creativity - because he was not a creative artist. rather, people hold him up as the finest example of a dullard who followed the set of proper conventions, as they were pushed down from the hierarchy above.

if you're going to bother, try and keep up. but i'd rather you just shut the fuck up.

Aussie Dave
Mozart was amazing

deathtokoalas
you could create a computer algorithm, call it "mozart" and lose nothing of value from the original. i suppose there will always be those that praise form over function, but creative is not the correct way to describe his music.

Matthew Joseph Harrington
Too many notes for you?

deathtokoalas
you don't even realize that you have no idea what you're talking about....

i mean, i'd like to produce a witty come back, but it just doesn't make any sense. it's, like, not even wrong.

BryanPiekarski
You're crazy. "All pop music is ripped off from The Beatles." Unless this statement was satirical, in which case, I retract my comment.

deathtokoalas
i don't even think it's controversial.

BryanPiekarski
The Beatles definitely did have a lasting impact on popular music, their music spawned a lot of copycat bands trying to copy their sound and success throughout the 60s, but The Beatles were pretty much gone by the 70s. Besides, The Beatles were no where near as influential to even rock n' roll as the likes of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry.

deathtokoalas
i don't see any use in arguing with hipster revisionists about something that is not considered controversial by anybody with the slightest bit of understanding on the topic.

you probably don't realize that the beatles actually changed the rules of music theory when it comes to harmony, which is what the video is about. there was music before and after the beatles. there are very few artists that can make that sort of claim. you can talk about bach, beethoven, debussy....and the beatles are next in line. there hasn't really been a shift away from this yet, but there have been a few near misses (kurt cobain's concept of harmony was radically different, but he didn't have enough of an effect on what followed to cause a shift. reznorian tonality has been recently seeping into pop music (see the most recent avril lavigne song for an example) but it is repackaged impressionism.).

i mean, you don't even seem to realize that buddy holly and chuck berry existed about ten years before the beatles did anything worth listening to, or pushed through the changes that i'm talking about. 50s, 60s...same thing, right?

BryanPiekarski
I don't understand your last paragraph. You seem to agree with me but you're also berating me?

deathtokoalas
chuck berry and buddy holly belong to the era that existed before the beatles. they were both influential on the beatles, chuck berry moreso, but trying to compare their influence is basically a category error. it's like comparing michael jackson to kanye west.

in terms of direct influence, it's a joke to suggest either one of them even come close to the influence the beatles left. in terms of their influence on music, they are only important in terms of the artists they influenced, which would also include the rolling stones and the who and pink floyd and many others. and, if you want to play the game of stringing things backwards, you have to string it back further than the 50s, and you have to consequently conclude that neither one of them deserves more than a footnote in history - neither did much more than market traditional folk and blues arrangements that were written well before they were born.

the beatles transcended all of that, and in the process changed the very fabric of what pop music actually is.

BryanPiekarski
is 1957 to 1964 really a huge cap in time? "neither deserves more than a footnote in history" lol. What did The Beatles really change? Their impact doesn't seem to resonate today as it did throughout the 1960s.

deathtokoalas
you think that because you don't understand the changes they made.

the britpop movement aside, every time you hear a string section in a pop song ballad, that's the beatles. and, as i've mentioned they're responsible for a shift in tonality. shifting tonality is gigantic. there's only a handful of artists that can state that, and i listed them already.

you admittedly have to stretch a little to pull metal out of helter skelter, or techno out of tommorrow never knows, but the blunt reality is that these were the beginnings of those genres. and, they of course hold a central place in psychedelic and progressive music; you can hear their influence still across that spectrum, from tame impala to radiohead to the mars volta.

but, in terms of chord progressions, the key is that shift in tonality that they pushed, with the help of george martin.

speaking of michael jackson and the beatles, most people don't know that michael spent a good deal of his childhood living with paul mccartney. it's known they collaborated a bit, but paul did a lot of ghost writing and michael mostly relied on his producers so the extent of his involvement in michael's work is a bit of an open question, in my mind.

the influence of those five dudes is really just immeasurable.

...and as for lennon's work in the 70s, it's worth noting that he wrote what is probably david bowie's biggest hit (fame), amongst other things.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

summary response to the death of nelson mandela

mandela was the perfect neo-liberal: campaigned on the left, governed on the HARD RIGHT.

Far from presiding over a “post-apartheid” South Africa, the popular-front Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, SACP and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) has instituted a neo-apartheid capitalist regime, still subjugating the impoverished black working people in the interests of the same capitalist masters.
http://www.internationalist.org/southafricaminemassacre1208.html
http://roarmag.org/2013/11/south-africa-marikana-anc-poor/

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i'm not kneejerking. the death of mandela is a good opportunity to draw the world's attention to the fact that, in truth, not much in south africa has actually changed.

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/26519

i think this article makes some valid points, but it goes a little too far and in the process exposes the author's reactionary white privilege.

my reading of mandela is essentially that he didn't really know what he was doing. he campaigned from the left based on it's ideals and then found himself in power at the confluence of the collapse of communism and the rise of neo-liberalism. he followed his advisers to the implementation of failed reforms.

i've compared him to trudeau before and will again. people attack trudeau for his economic policies. the truth is trudeau didn't actually understand anything about economics, he was a lawyer with an interest in philosophy, and if you spend some time searching through his biography and reading some of his statements you'll realize he admitted as much. on the one hand, trudeau took power in an economic mess - nixon shock, opec embargo, collapse of keynesian economic theory. even if he did have a clue, the challenges were substantial. he would have had to rely on advice, regardless. and we now know that the experts studying the situation were as flabbergasted as anybody else.

so, trudeau - a social liberal by any concept of the term and one with a background in workplace organizing that ran on an election platform that promised direct democracy - ended up carrying out experiments on behalf of milton friedman. canada liked monetarism before it was cool. and trudeau had no idea what he was implementing.

likewise, when mandela's advisers came to him and presented trickle down as a solution, he went for it because he trusted the advice and believed it was the way forward in a post-communist future. the task, now, is to point out that it failed. there's no need to vilify and no value in it.

---

this article is very similar to points i made elsewhere.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/12/the-two-mandelas/

--

it's hardly a "secret history"; it's available in any encyclopedia, even.

further, when you look at the video, it's not even clear that obama realized what he was doing. it just looks like he's shaking hands on a line. it even looks like he asks raul who he actually is and sort of cringes when he realizes it.

but this puts the silly media response into proper context: you really can't "celebrate the legacy of nelson mandela" WITHOUT shaking castro's hand in some way or another.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/11/the_secret_history_of_how_cuba

"For the Normans never desired any of the Lombards to win a decisive victory, in case this should be to their disadvantage. But now supporting the one and then aiding the other, they prevented anyone being completely ruined."

as professional soldiers, the normans didn't want to see an end to conflict in italy. that would have been bad for business. every time it looked like one of the princes had an upper hand, they'd bail to join forces with a smaller prince in order to ensure the war didn't end. they'd go back and forth up the countryside, reconquering the same areas over and over again for different princes. nobody really trusted them, but nobody knew how to get rid of them, either - that they were there was a fact of life, and, certainly, nobody wanted to *fight* them.

it's amazing how little things have changed....

this is a good case study, though, in explaining how abolishing the state and maintaining currency exchange will not eliminate war.

on the question of cultural appropriation in the nutcracker suite

has there been a discussion around cultural appropriation and the nutcracker suite? is it even really christmas music?

dunno. but this arrangement for classical guitar is a personal favourite.

in all truth, the spanish dance sounds like german music. i'll give tchaikovsky free reign with the russian dance. the arabic dance should probably be called the chechen dance or something; it might not sound like something from the heart of the arab world, but russia has a very large muslim population with it's own culture and you can sort of hear a synthesis between russian and muslim ideas in a way that kind of makes sense, if you only assume that the composer had no real understanding of anything south of the caucasus mountains. and, likewise, tchaikovsky's concept of "chinese" probably relates more to mongolian settlement in central russia than to anything legitimately sinic. russian/mongolian as a hybrid culture is also a pretty real thing.

but, i'm missing the point. i don't want to comment on the actual ballet other than to concede any points about trivialization as entirely valid.

the thing is that the composer was probably mostly working with scales, modes and tonalities. we can debate the value of doing so, but starting off on a specific note is said - within western music theory - to have an ethnic character. so, there is a "spanish mode" and an "arabic mode". and there is a real correlation there. that's probably the extent to which tchaikovsky made any attempt to sound genuine.

that's how davis got the name of this jam. it's not spanish in any way, it's just phrygian.

so, i just watched a three hour mit food security symposium and what i learned is that, because meat consumption is correlated with wealth, the best way to promote the shift to vegetarianism is to promote policies that decrease total wealth.

they weren't even asking the right questions. so of course they didn't have any useful answers.

they danced around the climate change issue, but the closest thing to a straight answer i could pull out what was "we find that the greater uncertainty makes it difficult to make predictions, and consequently to plan".

it's fair on some level. but it's not encouraging.

what they're all more concerned about is malthus...

first, i should point out the sarcasm if it's not obvious. to them, the issue is trying to find a way to produce enough livestock to feed 8 billion people. the idea of not producing livestock seems to be outside of the ideas being contemplated.

but, malthus. he thought we'd all starve to death. a simple mathematical model.

it turned out he was wrong, but he was wrong for a specific reason: as quickly as population has risen, and it has risen quickly, technology has simply moved ahead faster: mechanization, refrigeration, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides...

that doesn't mean his model was wrong, it just means he didn't realize how useful oil would be.

of course, there's a cost.

but these guys get that. and now they have the blind faith that malthus was screaming at us all to avoid. technology has been elevated to this sort of religion, defined by some kind of creed of moore's law.

well, i'm willing to listen. skeptical. i mean, it has to burst at some point. tomatoes are finite.

infinite tomato.

anyways, what's your fancy technology that's going to beat the math this time? i'm waiting...

it's....

africa.

no, for real.

africa.

well, ok. africa is huge. makes sense on some level. that's math you have to do with a pen and a paper, not guess in your head - not due to computational complexity, but because the precision of the calculation is important. there is probably lots of arable land in africa, which is a really unfathomably big place. it just might work...

but, you're going to work in the effects of desertification, right?

*crickets*

you're going to make sure there's carbon offsetting from cutting down all those trees, right?

*crickets*

here, in the heart of the empire? we'll be the last to starve.

i'm going to retreat back to my previous suggestion of terraforming mars into a natural strawberryological cycle.

we could promote it by getting strawberry shortcake to do a rendition of "strawberry rain".

no cryptoracism.

"the red planet". wouldn't even create galactic chromopollution.