9 Tir - Year 1389
It's my last day at my current wage-slave gig--I'm seemingly the victim of "down-sizing, off-shoring and out-sourcing". The entire staff of the department was summoned back in March for a 'company strategy' meeting. It was announced that six full-time staff members would be made redundant by September. The following couple of weeks, interviews were held about everyone's prospective plans. In mine, I did mention that I was thinking of leaving the department by the end of the year. I had also applied for a couple of in-house roles, which I subsequently wasn't chosen for. I know--probably not the best time to do so--but I didn't want to put my plans on hold.
When the announcements were made in early May, about who was on the chopping block, it wasn't much of a surprise that my name was among them. Each employee was 'rated' by their team manager, as far as following e-mail guidelines and a few other criteria (surprisingly, not productivity, though). My ratings were mysteriously low, considering that only a month or two before - my performance was roundly praised. Hmmmm...
I was told that my last working day would be September 30th - or as they put it, could be. That was probably important to remember, because last week--I had my 'final consultation' meeting with H.R. and the senior manager of the department. In the meeting, I was told that actually, my leaving day was suddenly moved to 30th June, not 30th September. Uh......Okayyyyy. Apparently, my team is 'over-staffed' by 1.9 critters. How they worked that out, I'll never know. I was told that I still get my full severance pay and I get my salary paid through July. As The Dead said once, "Set up, like a bowling pin/Knocked down, it gets to wearing thin.."
I have a feeling that the whole "over-staffed" thing was just a ruse to cover for the fact that the powers-that-be wanted me out before September. Maybe they think that my 'work-standards' have dropped (which they really haven't) or that I may be a 'disruptive presence'. I couldn't really say. That whole corporate/office politics thing bores me to tears, so I'm glad to be moving on now.
As I say, I've wanted to leave for a while now. I've been here for four years now and, as far as the context of the job I have, I've accomplished everything I can. Maybe it's my attention span, but I get really bored of jobs after a couple of years. I remember a statement of Robert Anton Wilson's, which said (I'm paraphrasing): "No matter how much you love your job, you should take a leap and try something different every five years, otherwise you become a zombie." I realise that not all have the luxury of leaving their jobs - but that definitely seems like sound advice to me.
From what I hear on the grapevine - there's more changes coming and more culling of the staff. Even if I had 'passed' this time, I might not have been so lucky next time. Ah well, so it goes in the world of wage-slavery. Perhaps this time, I can secure a gig where there's less of the politics and more enjoyment in 'work'. Heh heh....I can dream, can't I?
Time to get the CV updated and hit the pavment. Wish me luck!
30 June 2010
21 June 2010
The Boat Trip
31 Jyaistha - Year 1932
Back from our holidays now - as I suspected, they flew by. In fact, I've already been back at work for a week (grumble..grumble..).
Pixie and I hired a narrowboat, in which we planned to head up to Chester and back. The marina we hired the boat from is located in Shropshire. The company is Maestermyn and their prices seem fairly reasonable. The boat we hired is called "Rhonwen" and is a 35-footer...small-ish compared to most of the boats on the canals now.
When we picked Rhonwen up from the marina, we were given a checklist of how to use the cooker, the lights, etc. He asked where we were planning on going...I answered "Chester." He replied with "You won't make to Chester and back in a week...it takes nearly a week to get there." D'oh! So, with a change in plan, we aimed toward Llangollen, in Wales, which was a much shorter distance to traverse. I nearly hit a couple of boats moored up in the marina as we left...such is the sensitivity of the rudder. It took me a couple of hours to really get used to piloting...by which time I had hit the canal bank at least once, along with the sides of bridge through-ways.
We made our way through to Chirk, which seems to be on the border of Wales. Between the over-night mooring spot and the village itself...there's a weird bit of 'no man's land' along the road. The sign stating "Welcome To Wales" is at the end of the road into the village..and at the top of the road is a "Shropshire" sign. I wish I'd taken a photo of it. There's also a huge tunnel to pass through. It felt a bit surreal piloting the boat through there. The light on the front of the boat worked well enough, but unlike the headlights on a car, it looks very dim when you're standing at the back. The ceiling of the tunnel was sliding over my head, but I couldn't really see it. It almost seems like you're not moving at all. We were quite lucky as well because sometimes the canal traffic gets heavy and the tunnel can only accomodate boats travelling in one direction. If that's the case, you have to wait along the canal bank until you are safe to go through...and if it's raining, it becomes a bit of a drag.
The other bit that can be hairy (if you don't like heights) is the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, near Llangollen. It has a walkway on one side and the canal bit for the boats on the other. The walkway has a railing--the boat side, however, does not. There's about 12 inches of raised metal to keep the boats from going over the edge..and that's it. The aqueduct is about 120 feet above ground. I mainly just looked ahead of me and tried not to look down over the side...not so easy to do. Luckily, time-wise, it's not too far to go and soon you get into the twisty canal route to the town itself. We moored up and went to have a look around. It's a small, but picturesque place. I found a huge used book-shop and scoured the charity shops for LPs. I ended up buying two Thomas Hardy novels (Tess Of The D'Urbervilles & Return Of The Native) and a Mick Farren sci-fi novel called The Last Stand Of The DNA Cowboys. Looking forward to reading that! We stayed there over-night, which meant getting dinner in town. A pizza restaurant located near the centre of town fit the bill and we enjoyed some yummy grub and a couple of Italian beers, too.
Pixie and I hired a narrowboat, in which we planned to head up to Chester and back. The marina we hired the boat from is located in Shropshire. The company is Maestermyn and their prices seem fairly reasonable. The boat we hired is called "Rhonwen" and is a 35-footer...small-ish compared to most of the boats on the canals now.
When we picked Rhonwen up from the marina, we were given a checklist of how to use the cooker, the lights, etc. He asked where we were planning on going...I answered "Chester." He replied with "You won't make to Chester and back in a week...it takes nearly a week to get there." D'oh! So, with a change in plan, we aimed toward Llangollen, in Wales, which was a much shorter distance to traverse. I nearly hit a couple of boats moored up in the marina as we left...such is the sensitivity of the rudder. It took me a couple of hours to really get used to piloting...by which time I had hit the canal bank at least once, along with the sides of bridge through-ways.
We made our way through to Chirk, which seems to be on the border of Wales. Between the over-night mooring spot and the village itself...there's a weird bit of 'no man's land' along the road. The sign stating "Welcome To Wales" is at the end of the road into the village..and at the top of the road is a "Shropshire" sign. I wish I'd taken a photo of it. There's also a huge tunnel to pass through. It felt a bit surreal piloting the boat through there. The light on the front of the boat worked well enough, but unlike the headlights on a car, it looks very dim when you're standing at the back. The ceiling of the tunnel was sliding over my head, but I couldn't really see it. It almost seems like you're not moving at all. We were quite lucky as well because sometimes the canal traffic gets heavy and the tunnel can only accomodate boats travelling in one direction. If that's the case, you have to wait along the canal bank until you are safe to go through...and if it's raining, it becomes a bit of a drag.
The other bit that can be hairy (if you don't like heights) is the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, near Llangollen. It has a walkway on one side and the canal bit for the boats on the other. The walkway has a railing--the boat side, however, does not. There's about 12 inches of raised metal to keep the boats from going over the edge..and that's it. The aqueduct is about 120 feet above ground. I mainly just looked ahead of me and tried not to look down over the side...not so easy to do. Luckily, time-wise, it's not too far to go and soon you get into the twisty canal route to the town itself. We moored up and went to have a look around. It's a small, but picturesque place. I found a huge used book-shop and scoured the charity shops for LPs. I ended up buying two Thomas Hardy novels (Tess Of The D'Urbervilles & Return Of The Native) and a Mick Farren sci-fi novel called The Last Stand Of The DNA Cowboys. Looking forward to reading that! We stayed there over-night, which meant getting dinner in town. A pizza restaurant located near the centre of town fit the bill and we enjoyed some yummy grub and a couple of Italian beers, too.
Our plan was to go back toward the marina, then bypass it for a day to trek to Ellesmere. We made decent time back to the aqueduct and Chirk. Past that, though, we underestimated the canal traffic at one of the two locks, which we had passed through so easily just a few days previously. About twelve boats were lined up, waiting to pass through the lock. We held Rhonwen to the side of the canal by mooring ropes, for three hours in the pouring rain. Ugh! Ah well, I suppose that's to be expected. While piloting back from Llangollen, Pixie noticed that the electrics were hardly charging, though we were running the engine constantly. A stop at the marina and a check by an engineer showed that the alternator was kaput. He changed the alternator and chucked a new battery in, in just over an hour.
Ellesmere itself is pleasant enough. The wharf area is under development at the moment and the sight of a massive Tesco, when walking from the mooring spot into the village doesn't make for pleasant scenery. We ambled around for a while, checking out a wooded park area and trying to locate the 'Castle Mound' (possibly the site of a Saxon fortress) among a bunch of small hills. There aren't many shops, so we quickly looked in the more interesting ones. Dinner was at a local pub/restaurant and we shot a couple of games of pool, too.
The next morning marked the end of our journey. We duly dropped Rhonwen back at the marina, loaded up the car and before getting on the road back to Oxford, stopped by Whittington Castle for a bit. The grounds are relatively small and you really only need about an hour to see everything. Pixie suggested we also stop in Shrewsbury for lunch and brief shopping excursion. I found a Manitas De Plata LP in one charity shop and a Gordon Giltrap LP in another. We arrived home in the late afternoon, then picked up the cats from the cattery. For a few days afterward, I still felt as if I were swaying back and forth just a little. I didn't realise you had to get 'land legs' after being on a boat for a week.
02 June 2010
Slouching Toward Middle-Age
2 Pepper - Year 43 p.r.S.P.
Jaysus! June already - sorry I only managed a couple of posts in May. So much for my plan to blog more than I did last year. I still blame Facebook and eBay...been spending far too much time at both.
So...what's new, you ask? Not a lot. Still on the chopping block at work and still not really fussed by that fact. I've applied for a couple of gigs, but was turned down. Ah well, still a few months to go before I'm officially unemployed. Plenty of time..plenty of time..
I completed the second anniversary show of the Kaleidophonic Stroboscope podcast. Really weird that it's been two years since I started it up. Thanks to all who've listened and to those who made requests for the anniversary show. I hope to start the new episode when Pixie and I are back from holiday.
Yep - we're away to Shropshire in a few days. We've hired a narrow-boat and will be afloat on the canal for a week. Muggins here gets to do the piloting. It'll be an adventure, anyway--trying not to collide with the banks of the canal or other craft. You can only go about 4 m.p.h., top speed, so I don't foresee any serious accidents.
Monday (7th June) marks the 40th year I've been on this backward, superstitious planet. I honestly don't know how I've survived for so long--I suspect a combination of luck and genetics and sheer will (sometimes). It seems strange to me, becoming "middle-aged", whatever that means these days. Critters are living longer, at least it appears that way to me. I remember when reaching 100 years was a feat of incredible doing. Now, it's almost expected that most humans (at least in 'The West') will live well into their 90s. I do hope I stick around a little while longer, but one never knows. I think it takes a lot of hubris to state how long your life will last...and I've got no idea. Still, I've had a pretty good run so far and I can look back on it and be fairly satisfied on how it's turned out. Maybe in about twenty years (if I'm still here)...I'll jot down my memoirs on some sort of holographic recording machine...or to a robot who will file my memories away on whatever replaces DVDs. Maybe.
Jaysus! June already - sorry I only managed a couple of posts in May. So much for my plan to blog more than I did last year. I still blame Facebook and eBay...been spending far too much time at both.
So...what's new, you ask? Not a lot. Still on the chopping block at work and still not really fussed by that fact. I've applied for a couple of gigs, but was turned down. Ah well, still a few months to go before I'm officially unemployed. Plenty of time..plenty of time..
I completed the second anniversary show of the Kaleidophonic Stroboscope podcast. Really weird that it's been two years since I started it up. Thanks to all who've listened and to those who made requests for the anniversary show. I hope to start the new episode when Pixie and I are back from holiday.
Yep - we're away to Shropshire in a few days. We've hired a narrow-boat and will be afloat on the canal for a week. Muggins here gets to do the piloting. It'll be an adventure, anyway--trying not to collide with the banks of the canal or other craft. You can only go about 4 m.p.h., top speed, so I don't foresee any serious accidents.
Monday (7th June) marks the 40th year I've been on this backward, superstitious planet. I honestly don't know how I've survived for so long--I suspect a combination of luck and genetics and sheer will (sometimes). It seems strange to me, becoming "middle-aged", whatever that means these days. Critters are living longer, at least it appears that way to me. I remember when reaching 100 years was a feat of incredible doing. Now, it's almost expected that most humans (at least in 'The West') will live well into their 90s. I do hope I stick around a little while longer, but one never knows. I think it takes a lot of hubris to state how long your life will last...and I've got no idea. Still, I've had a pretty good run so far and I can look back on it and be fairly satisfied on how it's turned out. Maybe in about twenty years (if I'm still here)...I'll jot down my memoirs on some sort of holographic recording machine...or to a robot who will file my memories away on whatever replaces DVDs. Maybe.
13 May 2010
Hoffman and Bucky - watch and listen!
29 Jumada I-Ula - Year 1431
I meant to post these a few weeks ago. Thanks to Singing Bear and my pal Fuzzbuddy (whom I met via the Maybe Logic Academy) for sending me these docu clips.
The Albert Hoffman one is titled Hoffman's Potion and is, as you may have guessed, about LSD and the psychedelic experience in the West. You can check it out here.
The Bucky Fuller docu is actually a BBC Radio 4 programme about Bucky. Listen to it here (I'm not sure how long it will be around--so you may want to listen soon).
Enjoy!
I meant to post these a few weeks ago. Thanks to Singing Bear and my pal Fuzzbuddy (whom I met via the Maybe Logic Academy) for sending me these docu clips.
The Albert Hoffman one is titled Hoffman's Potion and is, as you may have guessed, about LSD and the psychedelic experience in the West. You can check it out here.
The Bucky Fuller docu is actually a BBC Radio 4 programme about Bucky. Listen to it here (I'm not sure how long it will be around--so you may want to listen soon).
Enjoy!
11 May 2010
Redundant Man Walking
28 April - Year 2010 (Julian calendar)
I haven't had much time for posting, despite my resolution to do so more this year. There hasn't been much going on..well, except one thing. I don't usually discuss my job here, as you never know who's going to read my musings. I suppose I can this time, however.
As of the past couple of weeks, my job is officially "at risk of redundancy"--so I've been notified. The company I work for (not to be named) did the same thing last year, but I made it through the minefield. I wasn't so lucky this time around. I suppose it's to be expected, what with a lot of places "off-shoring" and "out-sourcing". There was a sort-of 'scoring' system for all the drones..and I was marked at the low end. Was there favouritism and deliberate manipulation of the scores involved? I strongly suspect it. I was offered a small period of time to challenge the decision, but, to be honest, I couldn't be bothered. I welcome the change.
I've been where I am for nearly four years...the longest I've stayed at one job. My previous record is 3-1/2 years, at an architecture firm in Conn., right before I moved to the UK. I've no idea why I stayed there so long - probably the money and the fact I could go on-line a lot and chat with friends at the Flaming Lips site.
It feels a bit weird, though. Every other time I've been made redundant (or 'laid off', as us Yanks would say)--I've had a week's notice...a couple of times it was the same day. I've got another 3-1/2 months to go before I'm pitched outta here. During that time, I'm supposed to remain committed to my job. That's a challenge for me, resisting the temptation to super-slack and let things slide a lot. I suppose I need to keep up appearances for the time being, as I'm only at risk, so I can still be sacked. They've still got me yoked for the moment. It's strange, too, getting the sympathetic looks and hushed-tone condolences--but not leaving yet. Definitely all new to me.
Ah well....time to start really perusing the job ads and sites. If I time it right, I get my pay-out and a new gig. See you at the interview room.
I haven't had much time for posting, despite my resolution to do so more this year. There hasn't been much going on..well, except one thing. I don't usually discuss my job here, as you never know who's going to read my musings. I suppose I can this time, however.
As of the past couple of weeks, my job is officially "at risk of redundancy"--so I've been notified. The company I work for (not to be named) did the same thing last year, but I made it through the minefield. I wasn't so lucky this time around. I suppose it's to be expected, what with a lot of places "off-shoring" and "out-sourcing". There was a sort-of 'scoring' system for all the drones..and I was marked at the low end. Was there favouritism and deliberate manipulation of the scores involved? I strongly suspect it. I was offered a small period of time to challenge the decision, but, to be honest, I couldn't be bothered. I welcome the change.
I've been where I am for nearly four years...the longest I've stayed at one job. My previous record is 3-1/2 years, at an architecture firm in Conn., right before I moved to the UK. I've no idea why I stayed there so long - probably the money and the fact I could go on-line a lot and chat with friends at the Flaming Lips site.
It feels a bit weird, though. Every other time I've been made redundant (or 'laid off', as us Yanks would say)--I've had a week's notice...a couple of times it was the same day. I've got another 3-1/2 months to go before I'm pitched outta here. During that time, I'm supposed to remain committed to my job. That's a challenge for me, resisting the temptation to super-slack and let things slide a lot. I suppose I need to keep up appearances for the time being, as I'm only at risk, so I can still be sacked. They've still got me yoked for the moment. It's strange, too, getting the sympathetic looks and hushed-tone condolences--but not leaving yet. Definitely all new to me.
Ah well....time to start really perusing the job ads and sites. If I time it right, I get my pay-out and a new gig. See you at the interview room.
28 April 2010
Springtime Update
8 Vaisakha - Year 1932
Hey now! The end of April is here. Sorry I haven't posted much - I've been creating a podcast episode, tidying up the house (with the goodwyf) and celebrating our 6th wedding anniversary. I know, I couldn't fathom it either.
You can listen to the new podcast episode here. No theme again - just a collection of freeky tunes to swirl around in your mind. Next month marks the 2nd anniversary of the debut episode of the 'Stroboscope. I'm making it an all-request one. If you're on Facebook, you can submit a request there...or add one in the comments section here. I will try to add as many in the show as I can.
'Election Fever' seems to be everywhere at the moment. It was nice to see Nick Clegg trounce Posh-boy Cameron and dour Brown in the (U.S. stylee, natch) debates, but unfortunately, I don't really see the Lib Dems seizing power from the 'two-party-that's-actually-a single-party' stranglehold. Which probably means that the dreaded Tories may win. To me, it doesn't really matter--as some clever critter said once: "No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in." Amen. Still, if I were allowed to vote, it'd be for The Monster Raving Loony Party, seeing as there's probably no UK equivalent to the Guns And Dope Party. Pragmatically speaking, I suppose I'd vote Lib Dem or Greens. We'll all have to wait and see what happens next week.
Hey now! The end of April is here. Sorry I haven't posted much - I've been creating a podcast episode, tidying up the house (with the goodwyf) and celebrating our 6th wedding anniversary. I know, I couldn't fathom it either.
You can listen to the new podcast episode here. No theme again - just a collection of freeky tunes to swirl around in your mind. Next month marks the 2nd anniversary of the debut episode of the 'Stroboscope. I'm making it an all-request one. If you're on Facebook, you can submit a request there...or add one in the comments section here. I will try to add as many in the show as I can.
'Election Fever' seems to be everywhere at the moment. It was nice to see Nick Clegg trounce Posh-boy Cameron and dour Brown in the (U.S. stylee, natch) debates, but unfortunately, I don't really see the Lib Dems seizing power from the 'two-party-that's-actually-a single-party' stranglehold. Which probably means that the dreaded Tories may win. To me, it doesn't really matter--as some clever critter said once: "No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in." Amen. Still, if I were allowed to vote, it'd be for The Monster Raving Loony Party, seeing as there's probably no UK equivalent to the Guns And Dope Party. Pragmatically speaking, I suppose I'd vote Lib Dem or Greens. We'll all have to wait and see what happens next week.
After we arrived back in Poole, we had a bit of time before heading back home. I scoured a few charity shops for vinyl, but no luck. Right at the end of the high street, I saw a sign for a used record shop. Jackpot! The shop is tiny, but has a decent, though small, LP section. I picked up a pretty good copy of Gryphon's Raindance and a really beat-up (jacket-wise) copy of Focus's Hamburger Concerto. I was tempted by a copy of The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request (with 3-D cover!)--but I couldn't afford the £40 asking price. Ah well, another time.
UPDATE: Oop..seems as if Gordon Brown's in trouble again over calling an old woman a 'bigot'. I've watched the footage and while she doesn't come across as a raging BNP supporter--her comment about "all these Eastern Europeans" does seem a bit bigoted to me. I'm not a big supporter of Brown or Labour, but I dunno..it seems like he made a pretty good call on that one.
08 April 2010
R.A.W. on Cybernetics
8 Phoebus - Year 89 p.s.U.
Steve 'Fly Agaric' Pratt, whom I met through the Maybe Logic Academy a few years ago, posted this article at Facebook this week. It was written by Robert Anton Wilson for The Realist magazine in 1966. As is my own view on Bob's stuff, this 'is' brilliant as always. Sadly, and I suspect Bob would mostly agree, the principles outlined in the article 'are' still relevant today. I suspect when he wrote it in '66, Bob thought the cybernetic utopia would have unfolded by now. I hope the scenario doesn't end in a Rand or Goldwater way, but things do seem to be heading in that direction at the moment. I'd like to think that sometime, everyone will be a "Person Who Matters". You can check more of Bob's writing here.
THE CYBERNETIC REVOLUTION by Robert Anton Wilson - published in 'The Realist' (1966)
Paul Revere 1976: two hundred years after the original, will be a guy galloping through every middlesex, village and farm, yelling: "Grab your guns, boys, the machines is a-coming!"The Triple Revolution Manifesto got a great deal of gassy publicity a few years ago. There is no need to reiterate the obvious here. The reader has already heard of translating machines, song-writing machines, chess-playing machines and totally automated factories.The labor dispute that almost put New York's newspapers out of business last year was provoked by fear of automation, and the same fear has inspired most of the recent waterfront troubles.The Negro riots of summer 1964 are attributed, by some sociologists, to the accelerating unemployment rate of urban Negroes. One statistic suggests the whole picture: in 1963 there were exactly 500,000 – one half a million – less mine workers employed than in 1945, and in 1964 there were again 125,000 less than in 1963.
At The Realist's expense I attended the 3-day Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution held at the Hotel Americana in New York. The panelists were all well qualified engineers, managers, sociologists, etc. – Ph.D.'s were as thick in the crowd as sailors in the balcony of a 42nd Street tit movie-and they all seemed in basic agreement with the Triple Revolution Manifesto's projection of massive unemployment directly ahead of us: massive unemployment utterly unlike the Depression of the '30s, because there will be no "cure" for it. It will be permanent. And it is not merely the "proletariat" who are threatened. I, for one, came out of the conference seriously wondering how soon Paul Krassner was going to replace me with a Bad-Joke-and-Radical-Propaganda machine. Among the many possibilities seriously discussed by the conferences - this is straight reporting, not a Realist satire, was a gizmo called the "Friend-o-Mat", with a voice programmed to sound human and mellow, which would dispense Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian or any other kind of therapy to several patients at a time. All that remains is the deathless dream of an immortal limerick:
There was a young man from Racine/who built a screwing machine
Concave and convex
It would suit either sex
And jacked itself off in between.
But even that machine is probably possible, with the new mathematics and sophisticated hardware of cybernetics. Cybernetics is, basically; an exquisitely subtle mathematical theory describing self-organizing and self-regulating systems "biological or mechanical".The theory is applicable to any form of self-correcting behavior, in the electro-colloidal system known as an animal, and shows how to duplicate that behavior in an electronic-metallic system known as a machine.The irony of the cybercultural revolution is that this state of affairs is what we have always dreamed of. "Machinery is the moral substitute for slavery", somebody wrote a long time ago; we have always thought that super-machinery would mean man's liberation from toil and the freeing of his energies for "higher" artistic or scientific activities. Now that the super-machinery is at our door, we begin to realize that it might bring, not liberation, but stagnation or starvation. The latter alternative is, indeed, the ultimate implication of cybernetics, if we return to the philosophy of classical capitalism as espoused by Barry Goldwater or Ayn Rand.
Capitalism has inherited from Feudalism – and from the earlier theocracies, slave, states and sultanates – a certain idea which is completely incompatible with cybernetic technology. I will try to state that idea as baldly as possible. This is it: The human race is divided into two groups – the People Who Matter and the People Who Don't Matter.The PWM are those who own the planet earth. Their ownership is a "legal fact," although not an existential fact, and is demonstrated by land-titles, franchises, bank charters, stocks, bonds or other documents, certified by the king or the congress, indicating the exact dimensions of their share of ownership. The PWM have an absolute right to exist, symbolized by these documents and guaranteed by the State.The PWDM, on the other hand, do not own any part of the earth, and, therefore, do not have any absolute right to exist. They may obtain a relative right to exist, however, by finding (or being found by) masters among the PWM who will employ them to toil, and compensate them by food and lodging, under slavery, or by wages, under capitalism. Note that it is the State which decides who are the PWM and who are the PWDM.
Under Feudalism, and earlier systems, the PWM consisted only of the relatives of the king, and, since production was mainly agricultural, the principle form of ownership of the planet was through land-titles. Thus, the "nobility" became lords-of-the-land, landlords, and levied a tax upon those who actually worked the land, the tax being known as "rent."The franchises, bank charters, stocks, etc., owned by the modern nobility are the same type of tax placed upon the productive process; capital interest 'is' the "rent" of capital. A man born into the PWM has his right to exist guaranteed by the State due to his inheritance of these certificates of ownership. A man born into the PWDM, on the other hand, has no accepted worth in and of himself and obtains the right to exist only when a PWM will employ him.This age-old class division is the idea mentioned above which is completely incompatible with cybernetics, and I trust that I have stated it baldly enough. Before Cybernation, the authoritarian structure had at least one slight protection built into it for the PWDM, which is that they are needed: the PWM cannot survive without the millions of PWDM grubbing and toiling away to produce the commodities of the nation. For this reason, the PWM have never allowed all of the PWDM to starve completely.This is exactly where the nightmare of cybercultural revolution begins, for, in a cybernated age, the PWDM are no longer necessary. The PWM could let them all starve and be served forever after by machines. The fellow who called machinery "the moral alternative to slavery" never thought of this.
And among the PWDM are a class whom the participants at the Cybercultural Conference jocularly called "the noodles." The noodles think of themselves as being among the PWM, but by our definition, since they do not own any inherited franchises or charters of ownership over the planet, they are actually among the PWDM. . .the noodles, you see, are the non-technical managerial and administrative groups. (The technical managers and administrators, although also – by our definition – PWDM, cannot be allowed to starve by the PWM). What will happen to the noodles, briefly, is that they will be in exactly the same leaky boat as the "gooks," "niggers," "errand boys" and other proletarians. Although their higher salaries have allowed them to rub elbows and socialize (somewhat) with the PWM – and although they have, because of this, built up the delusion that they are among the PWM – the noodles will soon have their noses rubbed vigorously in the messy fact that they are, and always have been, PWDM. (It couldn't happen to nicer guys, could it?)
But we are exaggerating (I hope). Our PWM aren't like the kings and sultans of olde. During the last great depression, without having to shoot or exile any of them, Roosevelt managed to get them to cough up may be $1 out of every million to go into a government dole, to keep them PWDM from starving.*And Lyndon Johnson has read the Triple Revolution manifesto, or at least had one of his secretaries write to the Triple Revolution Committee and tell them that he had read it. So, let's all relax, fellows; we can be sure that as cybernetic unemployment spreads, the dole will gradually expand to make up the difference, and nobody really will starve. It seems to be this elevated level of utopian optimism that the Triple Revolution Committee would peddle to us. The picture I get is a 4-decker society in which:
(a) The PWM retain their ownership of the planet through their land-titles, franchises, stocks, bonds, etc., and continue to rake off interest, or usury, on every productive process, while:
(b) A technological elite actually runs things, and:
(c) The governing class, at gun-point – all taxes are collected at gun-point, let's keep our eye on the ball here and not forget an unpleasant truth even if it is people like Goldwater who nowadays remind us of this particular truth – holds up the PWM and the technological elite to collect just enough from them to distribute a permanent dole to:
(d) Millions of bored and unemployed ex-workers and ex-noodles (who, presumably, will have lots of movies and TV to fill the long hours when they are too tired to fornicate any more).
By and large, the best brains of the Cybercultural Conference seemed to go along with this Triple Revolution formula, although I can't imagine why. To me, it sounds like hell on earth. The best thing that can be said for it is that it is better than sticking to the old PWM mystique in the pure form of feudalism and classical capitalism.The Triple Revolution formula is something that could arise only in America. It is a pure product of our national muddle-headedness and our refusal, ever, to ask fundamental questions and re-think fundamental assumptions. Capitalism is under suspicion all over the world, except here. Here it is not an economic system but a revealed religion. Questioning it is a sign of eccentricity, if not depravity.The Triple Revolution is not a revolution at all, being neither original nor radical (most of its ideas were long ago hashed out in the Social Credit and Technocracy movements).**
The whole Triple Revolution is nothing more than Hopalong FDR Rides Again – Capitalism plus the dole, period. The irony of the Triple Revolution program is that it is based on ignoring the fundamental principle of cybernetics itself. The Triple Revolution program is an adaptation of cybernetics to our local (capitalist) authoritarianism (just as the ultimate Soviet program for cybernetics will be an adaptation to their own Statist authoritarianism). But cybernetics itself is profoundly anti-authoritarian, and if we merely followed the logic of cybernetics to its ultimate conclusion we would easily find the solution to the problems created by cybernetics. All of these problems, it will turn out, are the result of not following cybernetics logically; they are the result of trying to dilute cybernetics with the logic of earlier systems. Consider for a moment, not the hardware, but the essence of cybernetics. Cybernetics is a mathematical theory describing self-regulating' or self-organizing systems. The general theory 'is' applicable to mechanical, biological and social systems.The material of the system doesn't matter – you can be dealing with transistors and electric circuits; or with the nervous system of a cat or a man, or with a herd of cows or a tribe or nation of men – what makes a system cybernetic, or non-cybernetic, is the structure of the materials. If the structure allows for feedback from the environment and alteration of behavior in accordance with the feedback, you have a cybernetic system.
The essence of cybernetics is just that: an information flow that allows for self-correction.'This information flow is only possible where there is a structure to transmit and receive the information. It is perhaps necessary to point out that "structure" and "information" are very high order abstractions in cybernetic theory. The governor of a generator will illustrate this. The first generators had a nasty habit of accelerating until they tore themselves apart (no feedback). The governor was then invented. This is a pair of balls on a pair of flexible arms, attached to opposite sides of the generator. When the speed exceeds a certain point, the balls are thrown out by centrifugal force, creating a drag in the air. This slows the rotary velocity, until the balls fall back into place, the drag ends, and the machine starts accelerating again. In this way, the speed is kept oscillating in the vicinity of a safe point where the generator will not tear itself apart. A thermostat controls a furnace in the same way. The balls of the governor, as much as the temperature-reading of the thermostat, are said to feed back "information" in cybernetic terminology. They "inform" the generator about its speed, just as the thermostat "informs" the furnace about the amount of heat it is generating. There is an old Navy tradition that the steersman always repeats an order to the captain before executing it. If the captain says, "Sixty knots," and the steersman replies, “Fifty knots, sir," it is obvious that he has mis-heard and the captain can correct him. This is another example of a feedback, or self-correcting, system.
Feedback can be very "smooth" and continuous. When I reach for a bottle of water, the eye feeds back to the brain information about how far my hand has moved, and how far it still must move, and the feedback occurs continuously, every micro-second, until I reach the bottle. If it is a bottle of bourbon I am reaching for, and I have already reached for more than I should have, the feedbacks in my nervous' system work less "smoothly," more "jerkily," and I may even land on my nose in the middle of the floor. The first cybernetic anti-aircraft guns had just that jerky kind of motion. There is also a condition of too much feedback. In human beings, this takes on the form of the Hamlet kind of neurosis – self-checking carried to the point of indecision, and paralysis. This also has its mechanical analogy. An early model cybernetic anti-aircraft gun was built with so much feedback that it kept correcting its direction of fire and never did fire. A mechanical system is said to have "redundance of control" when it has optimum feedback – not too much and not too little. In redundance of control, every part of the system feeds back information to every other part, and the system as a whole is self-regulating. An automated factory works on this principle.
Democracy, from the point of view of cybernetics, is an attempt to introduce redundance of control to the social organism. Note that every step forward in democracy – limited suffrage, universal suffrage, the referendum, the recall, division' of powers, etc. – has increased the feedback in the system. It can be argued that democracy as we know it does not yet contain optimum feedback, but for the moment we will accept the democratic State as a model of sufficient feedback and self-correction. Let us, from this perspective, contemplate for a moment the "economic States" which divide the control of this country with the political State – let us, that is, contemplate the Corporations. How much feedback do they possess?A long time ago, I decided that the corporations possess very little feedback and are, from a cybernetic point of view, unstable and primitive systems. At that time, I made myself a bet: nobody employed by a university, I bet myself, would ever announce this discovery in public, although it is a very simple application of cybernetic principles.To my astonishment, on the second day of the Cybercultural Conference, Professor William Perk of the University of Southern Illinois, criticized the corporations on exactly these grounds, pointing out in detail how the basic feedbacks of the democratic State are completely lacking in the modern corporation. Professor Perk went further and remarked that the citizen, spending most of his life as the servant of an authoritarian corporation, is conditioned to submission and obedience and is gradually made psychologically incapable of participating fully in the freedom of the democratic State.
An anecdote, once told to me by Tobey McCarroll of the Humanists is very apropos here. Mr. McCarroll, as a lawyer, was representing some Indians in their perennial fight against the Grand Land Thief, or the U.S. Government as we prefer to call it. While he was conferring with the chiefs of the tribe, an archeologist appeared and requested permission to dig for relics in certain mounds, which he believed were graves. The chiefs soberly gave permission, although they knew that the mounds were actually cesspools. The savant dug his way down into the dung, without a single Indian speaking up to warn him. The folklore of all repressed peoples is full of such crude jokes. The Indians, like all repressed groups, had long been forced to realize that they are not information-channels or feedback-channels in the major society. What they see, hear, smell, deduce, know or suppose is of no interest to the control centers of the society. Having this realization beaten into them for several centuries, they are not about to start volunteering information now. (The legendary poker-facedness of both Indians and Negroes, in the old days, frequently was a mask for this type of hostility, but always expressed in a context of doing what the master class demanded: communicating). Every authoritarian society creates this type of voluntary "stupidity." The employee of every corporation practices it most of the time, although not as much as the Indians. Any system lacking feedback encourages this species of sabotage.(The Italian anarchist labor unions once tied up the railroads, not by striking; but merely by obeying all the laws on the books. Because there had never been enough feedback, the law-makers had never discovered how absurd and impractical most of their laws were – until the workers started obeying them).
The PWDM are always in the position of non-feedback senders to the PWM. This is the very definition of an authoritarian society. The PWM make the decisions, and the PWDM merely obey them. Any cybernetics engineer knows that no mechanical system can imitate human intelligence if it has this non-feedback structure. Only the fact that capitalism has become a revealed religion keeps people from realizing the simple truth enunciated by Professor Perk: the Corporations, lacking feedback, lack human intelligence. As a whole, every Corporation behaves ten times more stupidly than any particular member of it. Cynics have puzzled for a long time to explain the "hydrostatic principle of organization," as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it; that is: the principle by which an organization, like water seeking its own level, sinks to the intelligence level of its stupidest member. This is that principle in a nut-shell. It is not a law of organizations at all, but just a law of organizations without feedback. And this is why America is a schizophrenic and uncomfortable civilization. The political unit is, at least partly, democratic; the economic unit – the Corporation – is more authoritarian and centralized than any sultanate of old. The citizen is told to be an individual, to be responsible, to think globally, to participate in the world's activity - and, once in four years, he gets a chance to make a mark on a piece of paper.The rest of the time, he lives as a medieval serf, within an organization that is exquisitely totalitarian.
And these "private States," make no mistake about it, dominate not only the time of the citizen, but all of the other dimensions of "his" life as well, much more than the public State does. The owners of the corporations, under capitalism, are the PWM, just as the owners of the land were, under feudalism. You might almost say, from the point of view of this kind of radical cybernetics, that capitalism is the continuation of feudalism by other means. I think that the tendency of this argument should be obvious to the reader by now. Either the PWM and their Corporations have a true title by ownership of the planet, or they do not. If they do, Ayn Rand is right and the State has no justification for coming along with a gun and robbing them to feed the PWDM. If, on the other hand, the whole PWM mystique is just the modern form of "the divine right of kings," if it has no basis in justice, then it is time we had as much balls as our ancestors had when they hauled Charlie Stuart I up before the court and stripped him of his powers. It is time, in short; that the corporation go the way of the monarchy, and be replaced by democratic self-regulating institutions; institutions that would belong, not to a few of the people, but to all of the people. If the people really do own the planet, then there need be no State dole: they will merely receive dividends from their joint-stock companies which will run their machinery for them, and they will have to take on the responsibility of making the decisions for these companies.
If the people are too stupid to run their own companies, then, by God, the old authoritarian system is justified, and the earth does belong to a minority. In that case, I see no reason why the talented minority should be robbed to feed the incompetent. This, really, is the choice that cybernetics sets before us: do we believe in man, or do we believe in an elite of super-men? The Triple Revolution is merely another American muddle, a refusal to face the issues, and an attempt to have one foot in each boat, while the boats are obviously going in opposite directions. Far be it from me to condemn stupidity utterly. It's been around so long that I'm sure it must have some use. It does appear, though, that in facing the particular challenge of cybernetics, intelligence may be of more use than stupidity. In that case, we will have to define the issues crisply and make a definitive choice. Either we can trust the people, or we must trust an elite. It would be melodramatic, corny and inaccurate to state this choice as Socialism or Fascism, because most forms of socialism 'are' fascism. Whatever you want to call it, however, the choice remains. God knows, I wouldn't attempt to influence such a conglomeration of heretics as the Realist readership, on how this choice should be decided. The choice is probably out of our hands, anyway; the corporations own 98% of the wealth. I'll see you on the unemployment line. . . .
* Corporation taxes are higher than that, of course – as conservative readers will quickly write to tell me. Very true, but I still remain dubious about how much of corporation taxes goes into the various doles and how much goes into warfare and cold warfare to protect the corporations from rebellion on the part of their foreign serfs.
** And Ezra Pound went to the jail and the bughouse for insisting on precisely these ideas over Rome Radio, 20 or so years ago. Remember?
Steve 'Fly Agaric' Pratt, whom I met through the Maybe Logic Academy a few years ago, posted this article at Facebook this week. It was written by Robert Anton Wilson for The Realist magazine in 1966. As is my own view on Bob's stuff, this 'is' brilliant as always. Sadly, and I suspect Bob would mostly agree, the principles outlined in the article 'are' still relevant today. I suspect when he wrote it in '66, Bob thought the cybernetic utopia would have unfolded by now. I hope the scenario doesn't end in a Rand or Goldwater way, but things do seem to be heading in that direction at the moment. I'd like to think that sometime, everyone will be a "Person Who Matters". You can check more of Bob's writing here.
THE CYBERNETIC REVOLUTION by Robert Anton Wilson - published in 'The Realist' (1966)
Paul Revere 1976: two hundred years after the original, will be a guy galloping through every middlesex, village and farm, yelling: "Grab your guns, boys, the machines is a-coming!"The Triple Revolution Manifesto got a great deal of gassy publicity a few years ago. There is no need to reiterate the obvious here. The reader has already heard of translating machines, song-writing machines, chess-playing machines and totally automated factories.The labor dispute that almost put New York's newspapers out of business last year was provoked by fear of automation, and the same fear has inspired most of the recent waterfront troubles.The Negro riots of summer 1964 are attributed, by some sociologists, to the accelerating unemployment rate of urban Negroes. One statistic suggests the whole picture: in 1963 there were exactly 500,000 – one half a million – less mine workers employed than in 1945, and in 1964 there were again 125,000 less than in 1963.
At The Realist's expense I attended the 3-day Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution held at the Hotel Americana in New York. The panelists were all well qualified engineers, managers, sociologists, etc. – Ph.D.'s were as thick in the crowd as sailors in the balcony of a 42nd Street tit movie-and they all seemed in basic agreement with the Triple Revolution Manifesto's projection of massive unemployment directly ahead of us: massive unemployment utterly unlike the Depression of the '30s, because there will be no "cure" for it. It will be permanent. And it is not merely the "proletariat" who are threatened. I, for one, came out of the conference seriously wondering how soon Paul Krassner was going to replace me with a Bad-Joke-and-Radical-Propaganda machine. Among the many possibilities seriously discussed by the conferences - this is straight reporting, not a Realist satire, was a gizmo called the "Friend-o-Mat", with a voice programmed to sound human and mellow, which would dispense Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian or any other kind of therapy to several patients at a time. All that remains is the deathless dream of an immortal limerick:
There was a young man from Racine/who built a screwing machine
Concave and convex
It would suit either sex
And jacked itself off in between.
But even that machine is probably possible, with the new mathematics and sophisticated hardware of cybernetics. Cybernetics is, basically; an exquisitely subtle mathematical theory describing self-organizing and self-regulating systems "biological or mechanical".The theory is applicable to any form of self-correcting behavior, in the electro-colloidal system known as an animal, and shows how to duplicate that behavior in an electronic-metallic system known as a machine.The irony of the cybercultural revolution is that this state of affairs is what we have always dreamed of. "Machinery is the moral substitute for slavery", somebody wrote a long time ago; we have always thought that super-machinery would mean man's liberation from toil and the freeing of his energies for "higher" artistic or scientific activities. Now that the super-machinery is at our door, we begin to realize that it might bring, not liberation, but stagnation or starvation. The latter alternative is, indeed, the ultimate implication of cybernetics, if we return to the philosophy of classical capitalism as espoused by Barry Goldwater or Ayn Rand.
Capitalism has inherited from Feudalism – and from the earlier theocracies, slave, states and sultanates – a certain idea which is completely incompatible with cybernetic technology. I will try to state that idea as baldly as possible. This is it: The human race is divided into two groups – the People Who Matter and the People Who Don't Matter.The PWM are those who own the planet earth. Their ownership is a "legal fact," although not an existential fact, and is demonstrated by land-titles, franchises, bank charters, stocks, bonds or other documents, certified by the king or the congress, indicating the exact dimensions of their share of ownership. The PWM have an absolute right to exist, symbolized by these documents and guaranteed by the State.The PWDM, on the other hand, do not own any part of the earth, and, therefore, do not have any absolute right to exist. They may obtain a relative right to exist, however, by finding (or being found by) masters among the PWM who will employ them to toil, and compensate them by food and lodging, under slavery, or by wages, under capitalism. Note that it is the State which decides who are the PWM and who are the PWDM.
Under Feudalism, and earlier systems, the PWM consisted only of the relatives of the king, and, since production was mainly agricultural, the principle form of ownership of the planet was through land-titles. Thus, the "nobility" became lords-of-the-land, landlords, and levied a tax upon those who actually worked the land, the tax being known as "rent."The franchises, bank charters, stocks, etc., owned by the modern nobility are the same type of tax placed upon the productive process; capital interest 'is' the "rent" of capital. A man born into the PWM has his right to exist guaranteed by the State due to his inheritance of these certificates of ownership. A man born into the PWDM, on the other hand, has no accepted worth in and of himself and obtains the right to exist only when a PWM will employ him.This age-old class division is the idea mentioned above which is completely incompatible with cybernetics, and I trust that I have stated it baldly enough. Before Cybernation, the authoritarian structure had at least one slight protection built into it for the PWDM, which is that they are needed: the PWM cannot survive without the millions of PWDM grubbing and toiling away to produce the commodities of the nation. For this reason, the PWM have never allowed all of the PWDM to starve completely.This is exactly where the nightmare of cybercultural revolution begins, for, in a cybernated age, the PWDM are no longer necessary. The PWM could let them all starve and be served forever after by machines. The fellow who called machinery "the moral alternative to slavery" never thought of this.
And among the PWDM are a class whom the participants at the Cybercultural Conference jocularly called "the noodles." The noodles think of themselves as being among the PWM, but by our definition, since they do not own any inherited franchises or charters of ownership over the planet, they are actually among the PWDM. . .the noodles, you see, are the non-technical managerial and administrative groups. (The technical managers and administrators, although also – by our definition – PWDM, cannot be allowed to starve by the PWM). What will happen to the noodles, briefly, is that they will be in exactly the same leaky boat as the "gooks," "niggers," "errand boys" and other proletarians. Although their higher salaries have allowed them to rub elbows and socialize (somewhat) with the PWM – and although they have, because of this, built up the delusion that they are among the PWM – the noodles will soon have their noses rubbed vigorously in the messy fact that they are, and always have been, PWDM. (It couldn't happen to nicer guys, could it?)
But we are exaggerating (I hope). Our PWM aren't like the kings and sultans of olde. During the last great depression, without having to shoot or exile any of them, Roosevelt managed to get them to cough up may be $1 out of every million to go into a government dole, to keep them PWDM from starving.*And Lyndon Johnson has read the Triple Revolution manifesto, or at least had one of his secretaries write to the Triple Revolution Committee and tell them that he had read it. So, let's all relax, fellows; we can be sure that as cybernetic unemployment spreads, the dole will gradually expand to make up the difference, and nobody really will starve. It seems to be this elevated level of utopian optimism that the Triple Revolution Committee would peddle to us. The picture I get is a 4-decker society in which:
(a) The PWM retain their ownership of the planet through their land-titles, franchises, stocks, bonds, etc., and continue to rake off interest, or usury, on every productive process, while:
(b) A technological elite actually runs things, and:
(c) The governing class, at gun-point – all taxes are collected at gun-point, let's keep our eye on the ball here and not forget an unpleasant truth even if it is people like Goldwater who nowadays remind us of this particular truth – holds up the PWM and the technological elite to collect just enough from them to distribute a permanent dole to:
(d) Millions of bored and unemployed ex-workers and ex-noodles (who, presumably, will have lots of movies and TV to fill the long hours when they are too tired to fornicate any more).
By and large, the best brains of the Cybercultural Conference seemed to go along with this Triple Revolution formula, although I can't imagine why. To me, it sounds like hell on earth. The best thing that can be said for it is that it is better than sticking to the old PWM mystique in the pure form of feudalism and classical capitalism.The Triple Revolution formula is something that could arise only in America. It is a pure product of our national muddle-headedness and our refusal, ever, to ask fundamental questions and re-think fundamental assumptions. Capitalism is under suspicion all over the world, except here. Here it is not an economic system but a revealed religion. Questioning it is a sign of eccentricity, if not depravity.The Triple Revolution is not a revolution at all, being neither original nor radical (most of its ideas were long ago hashed out in the Social Credit and Technocracy movements).**
The whole Triple Revolution is nothing more than Hopalong FDR Rides Again – Capitalism plus the dole, period. The irony of the Triple Revolution program is that it is based on ignoring the fundamental principle of cybernetics itself. The Triple Revolution program is an adaptation of cybernetics to our local (capitalist) authoritarianism (just as the ultimate Soviet program for cybernetics will be an adaptation to their own Statist authoritarianism). But cybernetics itself is profoundly anti-authoritarian, and if we merely followed the logic of cybernetics to its ultimate conclusion we would easily find the solution to the problems created by cybernetics. All of these problems, it will turn out, are the result of not following cybernetics logically; they are the result of trying to dilute cybernetics with the logic of earlier systems. Consider for a moment, not the hardware, but the essence of cybernetics. Cybernetics is a mathematical theory describing self-regulating' or self-organizing systems. The general theory 'is' applicable to mechanical, biological and social systems.The material of the system doesn't matter – you can be dealing with transistors and electric circuits; or with the nervous system of a cat or a man, or with a herd of cows or a tribe or nation of men – what makes a system cybernetic, or non-cybernetic, is the structure of the materials. If the structure allows for feedback from the environment and alteration of behavior in accordance with the feedback, you have a cybernetic system.
The essence of cybernetics is just that: an information flow that allows for self-correction.'This information flow is only possible where there is a structure to transmit and receive the information. It is perhaps necessary to point out that "structure" and "information" are very high order abstractions in cybernetic theory. The governor of a generator will illustrate this. The first generators had a nasty habit of accelerating until they tore themselves apart (no feedback). The governor was then invented. This is a pair of balls on a pair of flexible arms, attached to opposite sides of the generator. When the speed exceeds a certain point, the balls are thrown out by centrifugal force, creating a drag in the air. This slows the rotary velocity, until the balls fall back into place, the drag ends, and the machine starts accelerating again. In this way, the speed is kept oscillating in the vicinity of a safe point where the generator will not tear itself apart. A thermostat controls a furnace in the same way. The balls of the governor, as much as the temperature-reading of the thermostat, are said to feed back "information" in cybernetic terminology. They "inform" the generator about its speed, just as the thermostat "informs" the furnace about the amount of heat it is generating. There is an old Navy tradition that the steersman always repeats an order to the captain before executing it. If the captain says, "Sixty knots," and the steersman replies, “Fifty knots, sir," it is obvious that he has mis-heard and the captain can correct him. This is another example of a feedback, or self-correcting, system.
Feedback can be very "smooth" and continuous. When I reach for a bottle of water, the eye feeds back to the brain information about how far my hand has moved, and how far it still must move, and the feedback occurs continuously, every micro-second, until I reach the bottle. If it is a bottle of bourbon I am reaching for, and I have already reached for more than I should have, the feedbacks in my nervous' system work less "smoothly," more "jerkily," and I may even land on my nose in the middle of the floor. The first cybernetic anti-aircraft guns had just that jerky kind of motion. There is also a condition of too much feedback. In human beings, this takes on the form of the Hamlet kind of neurosis – self-checking carried to the point of indecision, and paralysis. This also has its mechanical analogy. An early model cybernetic anti-aircraft gun was built with so much feedback that it kept correcting its direction of fire and never did fire. A mechanical system is said to have "redundance of control" when it has optimum feedback – not too much and not too little. In redundance of control, every part of the system feeds back information to every other part, and the system as a whole is self-regulating. An automated factory works on this principle.
Democracy, from the point of view of cybernetics, is an attempt to introduce redundance of control to the social organism. Note that every step forward in democracy – limited suffrage, universal suffrage, the referendum, the recall, division' of powers, etc. – has increased the feedback in the system. It can be argued that democracy as we know it does not yet contain optimum feedback, but for the moment we will accept the democratic State as a model of sufficient feedback and self-correction. Let us, from this perspective, contemplate for a moment the "economic States" which divide the control of this country with the political State – let us, that is, contemplate the Corporations. How much feedback do they possess?A long time ago, I decided that the corporations possess very little feedback and are, from a cybernetic point of view, unstable and primitive systems. At that time, I made myself a bet: nobody employed by a university, I bet myself, would ever announce this discovery in public, although it is a very simple application of cybernetic principles.To my astonishment, on the second day of the Cybercultural Conference, Professor William Perk of the University of Southern Illinois, criticized the corporations on exactly these grounds, pointing out in detail how the basic feedbacks of the democratic State are completely lacking in the modern corporation. Professor Perk went further and remarked that the citizen, spending most of his life as the servant of an authoritarian corporation, is conditioned to submission and obedience and is gradually made psychologically incapable of participating fully in the freedom of the democratic State.
An anecdote, once told to me by Tobey McCarroll of the Humanists is very apropos here. Mr. McCarroll, as a lawyer, was representing some Indians in their perennial fight against the Grand Land Thief, or the U.S. Government as we prefer to call it. While he was conferring with the chiefs of the tribe, an archeologist appeared and requested permission to dig for relics in certain mounds, which he believed were graves. The chiefs soberly gave permission, although they knew that the mounds were actually cesspools. The savant dug his way down into the dung, without a single Indian speaking up to warn him. The folklore of all repressed peoples is full of such crude jokes. The Indians, like all repressed groups, had long been forced to realize that they are not information-channels or feedback-channels in the major society. What they see, hear, smell, deduce, know or suppose is of no interest to the control centers of the society. Having this realization beaten into them for several centuries, they are not about to start volunteering information now. (The legendary poker-facedness of both Indians and Negroes, in the old days, frequently was a mask for this type of hostility, but always expressed in a context of doing what the master class demanded: communicating). Every authoritarian society creates this type of voluntary "stupidity." The employee of every corporation practices it most of the time, although not as much as the Indians. Any system lacking feedback encourages this species of sabotage.(The Italian anarchist labor unions once tied up the railroads, not by striking; but merely by obeying all the laws on the books. Because there had never been enough feedback, the law-makers had never discovered how absurd and impractical most of their laws were – until the workers started obeying them).
The PWDM are always in the position of non-feedback senders to the PWM. This is the very definition of an authoritarian society. The PWM make the decisions, and the PWDM merely obey them. Any cybernetics engineer knows that no mechanical system can imitate human intelligence if it has this non-feedback structure. Only the fact that capitalism has become a revealed religion keeps people from realizing the simple truth enunciated by Professor Perk: the Corporations, lacking feedback, lack human intelligence. As a whole, every Corporation behaves ten times more stupidly than any particular member of it. Cynics have puzzled for a long time to explain the "hydrostatic principle of organization," as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it; that is: the principle by which an organization, like water seeking its own level, sinks to the intelligence level of its stupidest member. This is that principle in a nut-shell. It is not a law of organizations at all, but just a law of organizations without feedback. And this is why America is a schizophrenic and uncomfortable civilization. The political unit is, at least partly, democratic; the economic unit – the Corporation – is more authoritarian and centralized than any sultanate of old. The citizen is told to be an individual, to be responsible, to think globally, to participate in the world's activity - and, once in four years, he gets a chance to make a mark on a piece of paper.The rest of the time, he lives as a medieval serf, within an organization that is exquisitely totalitarian.
And these "private States," make no mistake about it, dominate not only the time of the citizen, but all of the other dimensions of "his" life as well, much more than the public State does. The owners of the corporations, under capitalism, are the PWM, just as the owners of the land were, under feudalism. You might almost say, from the point of view of this kind of radical cybernetics, that capitalism is the continuation of feudalism by other means. I think that the tendency of this argument should be obvious to the reader by now. Either the PWM and their Corporations have a true title by ownership of the planet, or they do not. If they do, Ayn Rand is right and the State has no justification for coming along with a gun and robbing them to feed the PWDM. If, on the other hand, the whole PWM mystique is just the modern form of "the divine right of kings," if it has no basis in justice, then it is time we had as much balls as our ancestors had when they hauled Charlie Stuart I up before the court and stripped him of his powers. It is time, in short; that the corporation go the way of the monarchy, and be replaced by democratic self-regulating institutions; institutions that would belong, not to a few of the people, but to all of the people. If the people really do own the planet, then there need be no State dole: they will merely receive dividends from their joint-stock companies which will run their machinery for them, and they will have to take on the responsibility of making the decisions for these companies.
If the people are too stupid to run their own companies, then, by God, the old authoritarian system is justified, and the earth does belong to a minority. In that case, I see no reason why the talented minority should be robbed to feed the incompetent. This, really, is the choice that cybernetics sets before us: do we believe in man, or do we believe in an elite of super-men? The Triple Revolution is merely another American muddle, a refusal to face the issues, and an attempt to have one foot in each boat, while the boats are obviously going in opposite directions. Far be it from me to condemn stupidity utterly. It's been around so long that I'm sure it must have some use. It does appear, though, that in facing the particular challenge of cybernetics, intelligence may be of more use than stupidity. In that case, we will have to define the issues crisply and make a definitive choice. Either we can trust the people, or we must trust an elite. It would be melodramatic, corny and inaccurate to state this choice as Socialism or Fascism, because most forms of socialism 'are' fascism. Whatever you want to call it, however, the choice remains. God knows, I wouldn't attempt to influence such a conglomeration of heretics as the Realist readership, on how this choice should be decided. The choice is probably out of our hands, anyway; the corporations own 98% of the wealth. I'll see you on the unemployment line. . . .
* Corporation taxes are higher than that, of course – as conservative readers will quickly write to tell me. Very true, but I still remain dubious about how much of corporation taxes goes into the various doles and how much goes into warfare and cold warfare to protect the corporations from rebellion on the part of their foreign serfs.
** And Ezra Pound went to the jail and the bughouse for insisting on precisely these ideas over Rome Radio, 20 or so years ago. Remember?
30 March 2010
10 Years In The Blogosphere
10 Hamal - Year 1389
That's right - I've been blogging for 10 years now, pretty much non-stop. Back in 2000, I had never heard of 'blogs'. A few of my old high school friends that I had kept in touch with throughout the 1990s were more clued-in to cyber-stuff than I was. They started up a weblog where we could stay in touch and post about topics that interested ourselves. They invited me to join in January or February, but I wasn't sure about the blogging thing and delayed for a little while. I finally joined up in March 2000--mainly just commenting on what the others had posted.
The page they created was called Triptych Cryptic and it's still going, albeit with only C-Dog and Bone Daddy at the helm. I think there were seven of us posting there at T.C.'s peak. I really enjoyed being there for a while--it was our own little corner of t'internet. Most of us started up our own solo blogs as well. It was C-Dog who encouraged me to 'start a blog about prog-rock'..and so, in September 2000, with his help, I came up with 21st Century Schizoid Man, dedicated to all things music and most things prog-rock. C-Dog and I scanned in some great album covers and he pasted them together to make a groovy backdrop. He also put together a great banner and added both into the blog template. It looked brill, until he was moving and packed up his PC. I didn't have a copy of the jpegs and they disappeared. I joked for a while that it was the big, bad record companies keeping a striving prog-geek under their collective thumb, but no, it was much more mundane than that.
I kept "Schizoid Man" going for four years, while also posting at "Triptych..". When I moved to England in 2004--I found I had less time to post and to be honest, I was starting to grow a bit tired of "Schizoid Man"s format, even though I had changed the template a couple of times. Over at T.C., there were some personality clashes, which seem inevitable in any group effort (bands, casts of films and plays, etc.) and it soured the mood a bit. I decided to stop "Schizoid Man" in May 2004 and I left the T.C. fold shortly after. I whittled down the "Schizoid Man" posts to roughly 50 and let it float around in the aether. You can still find it, if you're looking for it. Not to be confused with a newer blog by another 'Merican ex-pat, who seems to be of a conservative, right-wing slant and enjoys writing screeds about Obama's health-care plan. I suppose Crimso fans appear in all stripes. Hey-ho. I also changed my nom d'internet from "Mo" (short for 'Molasses', my T.C. nick-name) to Sly Stoner, an hommage to psychedelic soul genius Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart...and also 'cos Bone Daddy said I had a sly sense of humour.
I thought about stopping blogging altogether, but I still liked the idea of a group blog. With that in mind, I invited Pixie, my mate Singing Bear and a few others I met during my time at the Flaming Lips BBS. Only Pixie and Bear signed on for definite and Pond Of Tunes was born! I initially wanted to name it Ocean Of Sound, after David Toop's book about ambient music, but I found another blog had already used that title. P.O.T. lasted for about two years and it was a lot of fun--the highlight being our spamming a spam-bot called 'Vicky', who kept leaving irritating comments about real estate. We found her site and counter-spammed. That was hilarious...she even started up an 'anti-Pond of Tunes' blog. The ultimate flattery. Our collective interest began to wane and I ended up deleting P.O.T. early in 2006, while Bear started up his own blog.
Once again, I thought about packing it in, but I thought I'd have another go at a group blog and so "Blog Is Not.." was created, with Pixie supplying the excellent title (referencing Andy Votel's Folk Is Not A Four-Letter Word collection), as well as my new-new handle, The Purple Gooroo. Bear was back on board and I invited my brother, the illustrious Aloicious P. McGinnis, who then joined up and has yet to post. I think of him as a 'silent partner'. We started up in June 2006 and we're still here....well, with a few changes. Bear decided to strike out on his own pretty much permanently in 2008 and he's had a series of blogs, the latest being the great Grown Up Backwards. This blog has essentially become a one-critter operation..so in ten years I've sorta come full circle. I reckon I'll continue for another two years, 'till 2012, then call it a day...as I've got the podcast to do. Facebook and Twitter eat up a lot of my time now as well. One never knows, though--I may change my mind and keep on bloggin'.
That's right - I've been blogging for 10 years now, pretty much non-stop. Back in 2000, I had never heard of 'blogs'. A few of my old high school friends that I had kept in touch with throughout the 1990s were more clued-in to cyber-stuff than I was. They started up a weblog where we could stay in touch and post about topics that interested ourselves. They invited me to join in January or February, but I wasn't sure about the blogging thing and delayed for a little while. I finally joined up in March 2000--mainly just commenting on what the others had posted.
The page they created was called Triptych Cryptic and it's still going, albeit with only C-Dog and Bone Daddy at the helm. I think there were seven of us posting there at T.C.'s peak. I really enjoyed being there for a while--it was our own little corner of t'internet. Most of us started up our own solo blogs as well. It was C-Dog who encouraged me to 'start a blog about prog-rock'..and so, in September 2000, with his help, I came up with 21st Century Schizoid Man, dedicated to all things music and most things prog-rock. C-Dog and I scanned in some great album covers and he pasted them together to make a groovy backdrop. He also put together a great banner and added both into the blog template. It looked brill, until he was moving and packed up his PC. I didn't have a copy of the jpegs and they disappeared. I joked for a while that it was the big, bad record companies keeping a striving prog-geek under their collective thumb, but no, it was much more mundane than that.
I kept "Schizoid Man" going for four years, while also posting at "Triptych..". When I moved to England in 2004--I found I had less time to post and to be honest, I was starting to grow a bit tired of "Schizoid Man"s format, even though I had changed the template a couple of times. Over at T.C., there were some personality clashes, which seem inevitable in any group effort (bands, casts of films and plays, etc.) and it soured the mood a bit. I decided to stop "Schizoid Man" in May 2004 and I left the T.C. fold shortly after. I whittled down the "Schizoid Man" posts to roughly 50 and let it float around in the aether. You can still find it, if you're looking for it. Not to be confused with a newer blog by another 'Merican ex-pat, who seems to be of a conservative, right-wing slant and enjoys writing screeds about Obama's health-care plan. I suppose Crimso fans appear in all stripes. Hey-ho. I also changed my nom d'internet from "Mo" (short for 'Molasses', my T.C. nick-name) to Sly Stoner, an hommage to psychedelic soul genius Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart...and also 'cos Bone Daddy said I had a sly sense of humour.
I thought about stopping blogging altogether, but I still liked the idea of a group blog. With that in mind, I invited Pixie, my mate Singing Bear and a few others I met during my time at the Flaming Lips BBS. Only Pixie and Bear signed on for definite and Pond Of Tunes was born! I initially wanted to name it Ocean Of Sound, after David Toop's book about ambient music, but I found another blog had already used that title. P.O.T. lasted for about two years and it was a lot of fun--the highlight being our spamming a spam-bot called 'Vicky', who kept leaving irritating comments about real estate. We found her site and counter-spammed. That was hilarious...she even started up an 'anti-Pond of Tunes' blog. The ultimate flattery. Our collective interest began to wane and I ended up deleting P.O.T. early in 2006, while Bear started up his own blog.
Once again, I thought about packing it in, but I thought I'd have another go at a group blog and so "Blog Is Not.." was created, with Pixie supplying the excellent title (referencing Andy Votel's Folk Is Not A Four-Letter Word collection), as well as my new-new handle, The Purple Gooroo. Bear was back on board and I invited my brother, the illustrious Aloicious P. McGinnis, who then joined up and has yet to post. I think of him as a 'silent partner'. We started up in June 2006 and we're still here....well, with a few changes. Bear decided to strike out on his own pretty much permanently in 2008 and he's had a series of blogs, the latest being the great Grown Up Backwards. This blog has essentially become a one-critter operation..so in ten years I've sorta come full circle. I reckon I'll continue for another two years, 'till 2012, then call it a day...as I've got the podcast to do. Facebook and Twitter eat up a lot of my time now as well. One never knows, though--I may change my mind and keep on bloggin'.
19 March 2010
Acid Spooks En Francais
3 Rabi`ath-Thani - Year 1431
I saw this story linked to at Facebook the other day. It's being reported by several newspapers, most notably by the Torygraph...er, I mean Telegraph, in the UK. Back in 1951, the residents of a French village started going really loopy. A few critters died and some were confined to institutions. The big mystery over the years has been why the folks of Pont-Saint-Esprit suddenly experienced nightmarish hallucinations and began to behave in highly 'unorthodox' ways.
It was initially thought that the local baker had unwittingly baked some ergot-infected wheat into bread, which was consumed by the locals. The villagers would then have been victims of ergot poisoning, or St. Anthony's Fire--a very not-pleasant combination of hallucinations and convulsions. In extreme cases, gangrene in the limbs develops and death can occur.
I saw this story linked to at Facebook the other day. It's being reported by several newspapers, most notably by the Torygraph...er, I mean Telegraph, in the UK. Back in 1951, the residents of a French village started going really loopy. A few critters died and some were confined to institutions. The big mystery over the years has been why the folks of Pont-Saint-Esprit suddenly experienced nightmarish hallucinations and began to behave in highly 'unorthodox' ways.
It was initially thought that the local baker had unwittingly baked some ergot-infected wheat into bread, which was consumed by the locals. The villagers would then have been victims of ergot poisoning, or St. Anthony's Fire--a very not-pleasant combination of hallucinations and convulsions. In extreme cases, gangrene in the limbs develops and death can occur.
It definitely seems plausible, given the agency's track record with other experiments of a similar nature. What amazes me is how long it took for the original files to be made public. I suppose it shows a sliver of progress that the Iran-Contra affair was exposed after only a few years of being in operation. Same old CIA. Robert Anton Wilson once quipped that if the gubberment were really fighting a 'war on terror', they would carpet-bomb Langley, Virginia. But of course, like the 'Drug War', it's only a war on some terrorists (mostly brown ones, with funny names, who don't worship the X-tian 'God').
Now, if I lived in a paranoid reality-tunnel most of the time - I'd ask why the Pont-Saint-Esprit story is surfacing now. I'd think that maybe it's another scare-story about psychedelics, to try and put the kibosh on any legitimate research. The Beckley Foundation is starting a research project on LSD and I suspect that M.A.P.S. will be soon, too. Ah well, hopefully humans have learned more and got a bit smarter since psychedelics were demonised by the mainstream press in the 1960s. I say hopefully....
Here's a great little film showing LSD experiments with British soldiers in the early 1960s:
08 March 2010
05 March 2010
Save 6Music!
14 Esfand - Year 1388
The BBC's director general Mark Thompson has announced cuts to the programming line-up, mainly that 6Music and the Asian Network will be axed and cease broadcasting by the end of 2011. I had got used to some decent stuff being on the radio, especially Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone--the only show I listen to regularly. There's other good stuff, too. Marc Riley, former Fall guitarist and part of the awesome Mark and Lard duo, has his own show, as do Adam and Joe, the two guys who created the hilarious 90s comedy telly programme.
Sure, there's other stuff that's not so great - I rarely listen to Lauren Laverne's programme, or Dave Pearce's Dance Anthems show (which is on right after the 'Freak Zone'). Shaun Keaveny's morning spot can be funny at times, but I don't listen to him much either. Despite that, though - at least it's an attempt to spotlight some non-mainstream stuff from a major corporation. If 6Music does go under, I suspect the 'Freak Zone' or Marc Riley won't be transferred to BBC2 or any of the other remaining stations.
There's already been a massive backlash and plenty of grass-roots protests, including a Facebook group and lots of articles and 'sleb' input. David Bowie and Charlie Brooker have both issued statements criticising the proposed cuts. I signed a petition which will be sent to the BBC Trust and to Thompson. Sign it if you can - or find another website with a petition. Pixie found one and posted her view. She was rankled by the BBC referring to 6Music as a 'pop station'. Heh heh.
I hope the Beeb reverses it's decision and keeps 6Music going..or failing that, someone else snaps it up to keep it alive. Please don't leave us with Radio 1 and 2. Chris Evans seems just alright to me, but he does my head in after a while. Don't even get me started on Chris Moyles...
The BBC's director general Mark Thompson has announced cuts to the programming line-up, mainly that 6Music and the Asian Network will be axed and cease broadcasting by the end of 2011. I had got used to some decent stuff being on the radio, especially Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone--the only show I listen to regularly. There's other good stuff, too. Marc Riley, former Fall guitarist and part of the awesome Mark and Lard duo, has his own show, as do Adam and Joe, the two guys who created the hilarious 90s comedy telly programme.
Sure, there's other stuff that's not so great - I rarely listen to Lauren Laverne's programme, or Dave Pearce's Dance Anthems show (which is on right after the 'Freak Zone'). Shaun Keaveny's morning spot can be funny at times, but I don't listen to him much either. Despite that, though - at least it's an attempt to spotlight some non-mainstream stuff from a major corporation. If 6Music does go under, I suspect the 'Freak Zone' or Marc Riley won't be transferred to BBC2 or any of the other remaining stations.
There's already been a massive backlash and plenty of grass-roots protests, including a Facebook group and lots of articles and 'sleb' input. David Bowie and Charlie Brooker have both issued statements criticising the proposed cuts. I signed a petition which will be sent to the BBC Trust and to Thompson. Sign it if you can - or find another website with a petition. Pixie found one and posted her view. She was rankled by the BBC referring to 6Music as a 'pop station'. Heh heh.
I hope the Beeb reverses it's decision and keeps 6Music going..or failing that, someone else snaps it up to keep it alive. Please don't leave us with Radio 1 and 2. Chris Evans seems just alright to me, but he does my head in after a while. Don't even get me started on Chris Moyles...
01 March 2010
New Kaleidophonic Stroboscope episode!
10 Phalguna - Year 1931
I completed the latest K.S. show about two weeks ago. It's been live for over a week now - so go check it out, if you haven't already. It's my tribute to the cold season, which will be fading away soon. You can listen to the episode here.
Oh yeah, The 'Stroboscope also got a mention in the newest Shindig! magazine!! Thanks to my mates over at Sonic Tonic, who were interviewed by Richard Jones about S.T. in a sidebar column. Thorax The Thurd and Silent Monkey named the K.S. as an influence. How cool is that? Cheers, lads!
I completed the latest K.S. show about two weeks ago. It's been live for over a week now - so go check it out, if you haven't already. It's my tribute to the cold season, which will be fading away soon. You can listen to the episode here.
Oh yeah, The 'Stroboscope also got a mention in the newest Shindig! magazine!! Thanks to my mates over at Sonic Tonic, who were interviewed by Richard Jones about S.T. in a sidebar column. Thorax The Thurd and Silent Monkey named the K.S. as an influence. How cool is that? Cheers, lads!
If you haven't caught any of the 'Sonic Tonic' episodes yet - seriously, get over there and have a listen. Those guys mix the choons up like nobody's business and their banter is far more entertaining than mine. Another great podcast mentioned in the same article is Harold's Attic Radio, which I've linked to at the Stroboscope's page. The latest 'Harold's.." has a fine selection of soul, soundtrack stuff, rock & dance. Those boys have a top-notch collection at their disposal.
That should keep you busy for a little while - and go buy a copy of "Shindig!", too!
22 February 2010
John Lennon - Spinning In Grave
8 Adar - Year 5770
I don't know how many of you have seen this. Pixie and I were watching TV the other night. Well, she was watching, I was reading Vico's "The New Science". Suddenly, this is shown:
Yes, that's a film of John Lennon (it looks like it was filmed in 1968, around the time of the White Album sessions). No, it's not actually him speaking, but a Scouser impressionist. This seems to be so cringingly bad on so many levels to me, that it nearly hurts. Firstly, even if Lennon (hypothetically) would have those 'anti-retro' views, I strongly suspect he wouldn't have used them to sell cars. Personally, I suspect he would've enjoyed new bands using elements of 60s and 70s music in their own creations. But I don't know that, and neither do the ad-makers know if he would say "Do your own thing." Secondly, why didn't they just get an actor who looks like Lennon did in 1979, instead of using a clip from '68--it just makes the spoken-word part seem even more incongruous. Lennon may have been ahead of his time, but admonishing critters for 'being nostalgic for the 60s and 70s' in a film from 1968 just looks stupid. Not that most advertisers 'are' the sharpest knives in the drawer, mind.
Yep, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse for counter-culture icons being used to sell crap...this happens. I still can't get over Led Zeppelin's Rock And Roll used in a Range Rover ad, as was The Who's Baba O'Riley. Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze was used in a Pepsi ad...and I suspect that Janis Joplin's Piece Of My Heart has been used in an ad at some point. I also remember the 80s, when Budweiser sponsored tours by Eric Clapton and Genesis, among others. The early 1990s Nick Drake Volkswagen ad made me uneasy, too. I recall supporters of the ad saying "Nick would've liked it - he wanted to get his music out to as many people as possible." Really? In 1972, when he recorded Pink Moon, Nick Drake was so depressed, he could barely talk. I strongly suspect he wasn't concerned with selling cars through a commercial.
There was considerable outrage when Nike tried using The Fabs' Revolution in a commercial in 1988. It'll be interesting to see if the Citroen one gets the same reaction, or if using classic rock songs to push products has become so commonplace that no-one even notices. If Johnny Rotten can appear in butter ads and Iggy Pop is hawking car insurance, I suppose doctoring a clip of Lennon to sell cars 'is' just everyday stuff now.
I don't know how many of you have seen this. Pixie and I were watching TV the other night. Well, she was watching, I was reading Vico's "The New Science". Suddenly, this is shown:
Yes, that's a film of John Lennon (it looks like it was filmed in 1968, around the time of the White Album sessions). No, it's not actually him speaking, but a Scouser impressionist. This seems to be so cringingly bad on so many levels to me, that it nearly hurts. Firstly, even if Lennon (hypothetically) would have those 'anti-retro' views, I strongly suspect he wouldn't have used them to sell cars. Personally, I suspect he would've enjoyed new bands using elements of 60s and 70s music in their own creations. But I don't know that, and neither do the ad-makers know if he would say "Do your own thing." Secondly, why didn't they just get an actor who looks like Lennon did in 1979, instead of using a clip from '68--it just makes the spoken-word part seem even more incongruous. Lennon may have been ahead of his time, but admonishing critters for 'being nostalgic for the 60s and 70s' in a film from 1968 just looks stupid. Not that most advertisers 'are' the sharpest knives in the drawer, mind.
Yep, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse for counter-culture icons being used to sell crap...this happens. I still can't get over Led Zeppelin's Rock And Roll used in a Range Rover ad, as was The Who's Baba O'Riley. Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze was used in a Pepsi ad...and I suspect that Janis Joplin's Piece Of My Heart has been used in an ad at some point. I also remember the 80s, when Budweiser sponsored tours by Eric Clapton and Genesis, among others. The early 1990s Nick Drake Volkswagen ad made me uneasy, too. I recall supporters of the ad saying "Nick would've liked it - he wanted to get his music out to as many people as possible." Really? In 1972, when he recorded Pink Moon, Nick Drake was so depressed, he could barely talk. I strongly suspect he wasn't concerned with selling cars through a commercial.
There was considerable outrage when Nike tried using The Fabs' Revolution in a commercial in 1988. It'll be interesting to see if the Citroen one gets the same reaction, or if using classic rock songs to push products has become so commonplace that no-one even notices. If Johnny Rotten can appear in butter ads and Iggy Pop is hawking car insurance, I suppose doctoring a clip of Lennon to sell cars 'is' just everyday stuff now.
10 February 2010
Pop Video Observations
Sweetmorn, Chaos 41, Year of Our Lady of Discord 3176
So I've been going to the gym since November (shock, horror!). I know, I know - it's only once a week, though. I'm still practising yoga three times a week. The gym we go to (yep, Pixie's going as well) is in the local sports centre. All around the upper walls are a bunch of TeeVees. Some show Sky News or one of the BBC stations. A few of them are tuned to videos of the latest pop hits, on channels like Viva TV or E4.
Now, given the fast-buck, sleb-creating style of many of the tunes--you'd expect the videos would be roughly the same. You'd be correct. I suppose I finally am getting old, but viewing some of this stuff seems like a train-wreck to me. I probably could avoid watching them, but I can't help it..they're so bad, they're..well, not good, but curious. I'm not intending this as a sort-of "back in my day.." spiel...as anyone who watched a lot of phlegM-TeeVee in the early 80s will attest to the volume of sheer crap that was broadcast. Still, most of the UK 'Top-Twenty' clips that I've watched lately seem to have been directed by the same team of fashion-school drop-outs. There's certain elements present in them: 1) The band or singer is in a large room, either brightly lit or dimly lit 2) The 'outrageous' costuming, meant to seem futuristic or S&M (I can't decide) 3) Lots and lots of slow motion 4) Katy Perry is 'featured'
Here's one - it's for Alexandra Burke's 'girl-power' anthem, Broken Heels:
Can someone tell me why they're posing as an American football team (as Burke is a British singer)? I mean, the whole gist of the lyrics seem to be about how girls can do anything boys can--but no joke, I think if Alex and her dancers were to play those dudes in football, there'd be a lot of stretchers involved. You're saying "But P.G., you're taking this way too seriously." That may be - but these videos puzzle me. I'm only trying to get some answers.
Here's another one - by the not-so-cleverly monikered 3Oh!3. The tune is called Starstrukk (yes, they're actually spelling it that way):
I couldn't embed the video - so you have to click here.
Notice the ubiqitous slow-motion and hey look, it's Katy Perry! I'm not sure why it's become de rigeur to have her in one's video--she had one crappy hit about three years ago (the faux-raunchy I Kissed A Girl--which shares a title with Jill Sobule's (admittedly coy) much more subtle 90s tune) and suddenly, she's friggin' everywhere. I'm not sure why the various ladies are charging at the two twats in the band--at first, I thought it was to hit them for crimes against music.
Lady GaGa, another culprit, 'gives' us her latest opus, Bad Romance:
I admit I have no fucking clue what is happening in that video. What are the white, spike-topped PVC costumes about? Same with the dudes sitting around in a circle with bits of Roman centurion helmets attached to their faces. It's like a 12-step meeting out of Blade Runner. It's got the large room and the bright lighting covered--the goofy clothes, too. Shame Katy didn't show up--they would've had everything in there. I don't know what the video has to do with bad romance, but there you go.
Here's Cheryl Cole, the Geordie one out of Girls Aloud. I think she's stolen a pair of MC Hammer's pyjamas and a Canadian border-guard uniform. Are the blood-red ink splatters supposed to be 'edgy', or a sly hommage to Ralph Steadman? I'm lost with this video as well. At least it's set in a big room with bright lighting--still no Katy Perry...I may have to re-think that part of my hypothesis.
Here's the video - I couldn't embed this one either.
And finally - it's Rihanna, with Hard:
I sorta get that she's equating being hard (which is 'tough' in UK slang) with soldiers and guns, but what's with the black spikey suit? Did a Marvel superhero have a garage sale? I dunno, I suppose this video will appeal to armchair generals, chickenhawks and Guns And Ammo enthusiasts. This one's set outside - so it does blow my "large room" theory a bit. It does have the outrageous clothes and some slow-mo, too, so I'm not way-off in my assessment.
Try to watch these without sound, as the tunes seem fairly crap to me. The Cheryl Cole one's kinda catchy, so be warned, it will get stuck in your head. You'll then have to spend the next few days listening to the Butthole Surfers or early Black Sabbath to erase your brain. As I say, I think I'm finally getting old.
So I've been going to the gym since November (shock, horror!). I know, I know - it's only once a week, though. I'm still practising yoga three times a week. The gym we go to (yep, Pixie's going as well) is in the local sports centre. All around the upper walls are a bunch of TeeVees. Some show Sky News or one of the BBC stations. A few of them are tuned to videos of the latest pop hits, on channels like Viva TV or E4.
Now, given the fast-buck, sleb-creating style of many of the tunes--you'd expect the videos would be roughly the same. You'd be correct. I suppose I finally am getting old, but viewing some of this stuff seems like a train-wreck to me. I probably could avoid watching them, but I can't help it..they're so bad, they're..well, not good, but curious. I'm not intending this as a sort-of "back in my day.." spiel...as anyone who watched a lot of phlegM-TeeVee in the early 80s will attest to the volume of sheer crap that was broadcast. Still, most of the UK 'Top-Twenty' clips that I've watched lately seem to have been directed by the same team of fashion-school drop-outs. There's certain elements present in them: 1) The band or singer is in a large room, either brightly lit or dimly lit 2) The 'outrageous' costuming, meant to seem futuristic or S&M (I can't decide) 3) Lots and lots of slow motion 4) Katy Perry is 'featured'
Here's one - it's for Alexandra Burke's 'girl-power' anthem, Broken Heels:
Can someone tell me why they're posing as an American football team (as Burke is a British singer)? I mean, the whole gist of the lyrics seem to be about how girls can do anything boys can--but no joke, I think if Alex and her dancers were to play those dudes in football, there'd be a lot of stretchers involved. You're saying "But P.G., you're taking this way too seriously." That may be - but these videos puzzle me. I'm only trying to get some answers.
Here's another one - by the not-so-cleverly monikered 3Oh!3. The tune is called Starstrukk (yes, they're actually spelling it that way):
I couldn't embed the video - so you have to click here.
Notice the ubiqitous slow-motion and hey look, it's Katy Perry! I'm not sure why it's become de rigeur to have her in one's video--she had one crappy hit about three years ago (the faux-raunchy I Kissed A Girl--which shares a title with Jill Sobule's (admittedly coy) much more subtle 90s tune) and suddenly, she's friggin' everywhere. I'm not sure why the various ladies are charging at the two twats in the band--at first, I thought it was to hit them for crimes against music.
Lady GaGa, another culprit, 'gives' us her latest opus, Bad Romance:
I admit I have no fucking clue what is happening in that video. What are the white, spike-topped PVC costumes about? Same with the dudes sitting around in a circle with bits of Roman centurion helmets attached to their faces. It's like a 12-step meeting out of Blade Runner. It's got the large room and the bright lighting covered--the goofy clothes, too. Shame Katy didn't show up--they would've had everything in there. I don't know what the video has to do with bad romance, but there you go.
Here's Cheryl Cole, the Geordie one out of Girls Aloud. I think she's stolen a pair of MC Hammer's pyjamas and a Canadian border-guard uniform. Are the blood-red ink splatters supposed to be 'edgy', or a sly hommage to Ralph Steadman? I'm lost with this video as well. At least it's set in a big room with bright lighting--still no Katy Perry...I may have to re-think that part of my hypothesis.
Here's the video - I couldn't embed this one either.
And finally - it's Rihanna, with Hard:
I sorta get that she's equating being hard (which is 'tough' in UK slang) with soldiers and guns, but what's with the black spikey suit? Did a Marvel superhero have a garage sale? I dunno, I suppose this video will appeal to armchair generals, chickenhawks and Guns And Ammo enthusiasts. This one's set outside - so it does blow my "large room" theory a bit. It does have the outrageous clothes and some slow-mo, too, so I'm not way-off in my assessment.
Try to watch these without sound, as the tunes seem fairly crap to me. The Cheryl Cole one's kinda catchy, so be warned, it will get stuck in your head. You'll then have to spend the next few days listening to the Butthole Surfers or early Black Sabbath to erase your brain. As I say, I think I'm finally getting old.
04 February 2010
Oh Noes!
19 Safar - Year 1431
If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can't keep it together, what hope do the rest of us mere mortals have???!!???!!
(paraphrased off of a quote by Janeane Garofalo, from one of her comedy shows I watched on the telly ages ago)
26 January 2010
Erasing The Borders...
It was big news in the UK over the X-Mas shopping period last year. Borders UK, the chain of bookstores spun off of the parent corporation in the U.S., was in administration. Competition with on-line retailers, poor management and expensive high-street rents led to it's demise. A couple of weeks after the administration announcement, a further statement was issued, saying that all of the UK shops would close, following a 'shut-down' mega-sale. Now it's being revealed that Borders U.S. will be closing a further 200 stores this year. In the U.K. and the U.S., it looks as if the shopping centers and high streets just got a bit more homogenous, with just Waterstones and Blackwell (in the UK) to choose from (if you get a choice, as Blackwell don't have that many shops).
It strikes me as a bit sad, as Borders (at least in the beginning) tried to be a sort-of 'mom and pop' chain (I know, an oxymoronic assertion). I had never heard of Borders Books & Music before a store opened in Manchester, Conn. in 1994. I did apply to be part of the original crew, when the store was setting up, but I didn't make the cut (I can't imagine how many applications they had, but I suspect it was a lot). I started shopping there regularly, as their CD selection back then seemed truly astounding. There was an 'Out-To-Lunch' section with stuff from Art Zoyd, The Residents, Lard Free and tons of other bands I'd never heard of. Now, I realise that was the work of a clued-in staff, but it's also the result of a laid-back policy in which the staff could order that music for stock. Pretty amazing, for a chain.
I finally got my chance to join up in 1996. I had an interview and an author and music test...no really, I did, for 'product knowledge'. I scored poorly on the author bit, but fairly well on the music. I was assigned to the music dept. (natch!). Disaster nearly struck, when I was offered a full-time job in an architecture firm the same week. As I have a degree in architecture and had never worked in the field, I thought I should take the firm's offer (even though it was only a courier position--gotta start somehwere..). Borders hired me for a full-time job as well..but in another cool concession on their part, agreed to keep me on as a part-timer, helping on weekends. I ended up staying for seven years--mostly part-time, but I did a full-time stretch for a year, when the aforementioned firm made me redundant in 1999. I found a job at another firm in 2000 and changed my hours back to part-time, then cut them back even more to just a contingent (for when regulars called out sick and they needed cover for the evening shift). By then, however, most of the really cool critters that I started with in '96 were long-gone and the company itself slid into corporate doldrums - even toying with the idea of employee uniforms, which I despised from my days at Strawberries and Sears in the early 90s.
I finally handed in my notice in January 2004 - a month before I moved to the UK. I discovered the Borders in Oxford in summer 2003, when visting Pixie for the first time. After the move, I thought "well, if I can't find a job - I could try there." That's pretty much what happened. I temped for a short while and (in a bit of desperation after walking out of my temp gig at Oxfam) applied there in July 2004. I got the job, but couldn't start until September. I stayed for a year, until a 'disagreement' between myself and the general manager forced me to leave in October 2005. While the Oxford store was much more corporatized than even the Conn. store (time-keeping was especially enforced), I still worked with some great people. I continued shopping there every so often and would chat with some of the critters I knew, who were still working in the shop.
Now, as anyone who's worked in retail will know, it's not all a barrel of laughs. Dealing with John and Jane Q. Public for 40 hours per week can be a strain on the calmest, most jovial critters. Some clowns, repeating that "Customer Is Always Right" mantra, used it as a get-out clause to excuse their childish and boorish behaviour. We all had run-ins with difficult customers...I did more than a few times and it would just ruin your day. The pay was crap and Borders also wouldn't allow employees to unionize. As I've mentioned, the corporate symptoms worsened year after year, until the only difference between them and other chain shops was the decor..oh and you could still wear T-shirts and jeans to work--but even that stopped when they brought in red polo shirts for everyone to wear, in the last few years.
For all that, though, there were moments of transcendence. Sometimes, especially in the Manchester store, the whole crew would be firing on all cylinders with jokes, or making insanely great in-store CD mixes or even just getting the mundane work finshed. The shifts seemed to fly by and it made work seem like fun. I strongly suspect almost everyone's had moments like that at a job. I had as well--but at Borders, especially the first couple of years I was there, I never had so many. There was a short while when Jimmy C. and I worked the Friday night shift. We used to have a blast goofing on weird customers, putting together killer in-store mixes and crafting bizarre in-jokes. I swear, there were times when I almost couldn't wait to get there, because it was such a good time. In a sense, we were being paid to listen to music and goof around...in between the mundane stuff, of course--shelving CDs and tidying the department. I used to think "this is what work should be like". For that reason, I will miss working at Borders.
As a wrap-up, here are my Top Ten favourite moments from my time at Borders (both U.S. and UK)...the ones I can remember, anyway. In no particular order:
1. "The Nutter Status Quo Fan" (UK): The Oxford store used to get some fairly high-profile critters for in-store signings (as England is a smaller place and because Manchester, Conn. can't complete with Boston and NYC for the big names..). The Quo's book, XS All Areas, had just been published--so Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi were at the Oxford store for a book signing. Despite numerous placards stating that they would only sign copies of the book...people showed up with CDs, LPs and posters and other memorabilia. One bloke was standing in the queue mumbling to himself and acting a bit agitated. I approached him to let him know that they wouldn't be signing his VHS tape and ticket stubs--he lashed out with "You're not Quo, mate! They'll sign this--you don't know!" and some other related babble. I let the security guys know about him and he was eventually removed from the queue, as he was starting to disturb others, and ejected from the shop. He later destroyed some terra cotta plant pots outside of a restaurant down the street. I guess he really wanted that videotape signed. Oh yeah, Parfitt and Rossi signed the booklet of my copy of the Matchstick Men CD.
2. "Jimmy C. skools Matt D." (U.S.): When I first started at the Manchester store, I was pretty intimidated by the music crew. They were very knowledgeable about lots of crazy obscure music and there was lots of snobbery about. This one guy, Matt, was very into funk and soul. He was cool enough, but he was constantly going on about how prog-rock didn't groove, which I was a bit rankled by. One day, he was talking about the Ohio Players and said "Bill Bruford just can't hit a groove" and prog can't swing, etc. Jimmy goes over to the CD racks, brings back Gong's You and pops it in the disc player. He cues up You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever and lets the intro play. For those who haven't heard it, it has a real funky intro with nice interplay between the bass and drums. Jimmy then starts naming out the time signatures. "5/4"....7/4..." Matt didn't admit that he'd been schooled, but he didn't much of a come-back either, as I recall.
3. "The Righteous Moss" (UK): I made some friends at the UK store, but a few of them were real muso-pals. One of them, Mark P., is defintely a rawker...besides being a funny bloke and all-around freakball. One day, after he had grown his hair out, someone said his hair looked like a big moss. He riffed on that and came up with 'Righteous Moss'. I said that sounded like a great band name. We starting toying around with a goof band concept, where everything would be hooked up to a wah-wah pedal, even sitars and didgeridoos, kinda like Miles Davis's early 70s groups. A Welsh girl called Dominique, who also worked at Borders, volunteered to be a Stacia for the band, plus play Stylophone (hooked up to a wah-wah, natch!). Sadly, we never got it together enough to even have a jam session...but the legend of the Moss looms large.
4. "Promos!" (U.S.): O.K., this one's more of a bunch of moments than one single moment. When the Manchester store first opened, digital listening stations hadn't been perfected yet, so the stations were a carousel-tray CD player hooked up to a set of headphones. Each genre of music had roughly 10 different stations. The labels would send promo discs out to the shops for all of the featured albums every month. Once the month finished and a new bunch arrived - the crew were allowed to take them home. Man, that was brilliant. I beefed up my collection with tons of discs. Good stuff, too...not just the latest crap records that no-one would remember in two years. I got the deluxe editions of The Who's Live At Leeds and Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On, to name just a couple. I was gutted when I started in the Oxford store and found out the listening stations were digital...so no promos. Actually, I did get a promo of Richard Hawley's Coles Corner, but that was it.
5. "The Sunday Night Jam" (U.S.): I can't remember who finagled permission from the general manager, but one Sunday night, after the store had closed, some of us musos brought in our guitars and had a jam in the music section. Zack S. even hauled in his drum kit. I think there were 3 or 4 of us with guitars, 1 with a bass and Zack's kit. Most of it was a sloppy, loose jam. I remember this one guy, Cory, a neo-Dead/Phish-head, started up a three or four chord vamp. I was trying to find different chords in key with his, just to make it a bit more interesting..but he showed me what he was playing, as if to say "this is what you're supposed to be doing", which put me off his jam. Four guitars chugging the same chords in unison sounds very boring to me. I also remember trying to start up an impromptu version of Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive, but my skillz aren't good enough to keep it all together and it floundered after we all finished the main riff. A fun night, though. The Sunday night sessions were supposed to become a regular thing, but as far as my memory serves me, that was the only one.
6. "Brushes With 'Slebs'" (U.K.): As I've mentioned, the Oxford store had quite a few high-profile in-store events. While I was there, there were signings from the Little Britain duo, Michael Palin, the aforementoned Quo duo, Rory Bremner, Clive Woodward (the 2003 England rugby team coach), Ray Mears (the survival bloke off the TV), Jon Ronson, Will Self and a bunch of others. The store also attracted some famous critters as well--I wasn't there when ol' Billy Boy Clinton stopped in...but I did ring up Thom Yorke's purchases a couple of times. I found the Scene-It DVD game for Gaz Coombes of Supergrass (really nice bloke, by the way) and had a long-ish chat with Bruce Johnston, of The Beach Boys, but to be honest, he seemed a bit of a tit to me. I think I also rang up a purchase by Mick Quinn of Supergrass and saw Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead perusing the jazz CDs one day. I did leave them alone and didn't get all 'fanboy' on them...it seemed to be the best thing to do.
7. "Guys, Guys...The Supa-Jam!" (U.S.): Ian S. and I would talk from time to time about getting jam sessions together outside of work. A few times, we actually did manage to get the crew over to Joel B's place for a jam and recorded the results. Joel lived a ways away from me, so I didn't get to join as much as I would've liked. Anyway, Ian and I started jokingly referring to the sessions as the "Super Jam". One Saturday shift, we were talking about it, when Zack came running out of the stock-room with a large arm-full of CDs in their theft-proof 'keepers'. He yells out in a really nerdy voice "Guys! guys! The Supa-jam, the Supa-jam!!", then does a crazy prat-fall. The CDs went flying about three feet in front of him and crashed to the floor. There were some customers around and they just stared at him. I seriously nearly pissed myself, I was laughing so much. I suppose you had to be there--but that still makes me smile when I think about it.
8. "The Bluegrass Band" (U.S.): Sometimes on a Friday night, live music would be featured in the department. One night, a bluegrass band played with a girl singer. I can't remember what they were called. They were decent musicians and the woman's voice was alright. I'm not a huge bluegrass fan and while I can appreciate the musicianship involved, it does seem to start sounding the same after a while. They finished their sets and as was Jimmy's and my custom, we heralded the closing of the store by putting Fripp & Eno's No Pussyfooting in the disc player. As The Heavenly Music Corporation started, we watched them pack up their gear and make little asides about the long drones in the music. Eventually, one of them, the mandolin-player (a short, scraggly-looking dude with greasy hair and beard) sidled up to the information desk and asked what we were playing. Jimmy told him and (according to Jimmy - I wasn't at the desk at that moment) he suddenly said in a hushed, conspiriatorial tone, "Those long drones...that's what they used in Waco, man." I'm not sure what Jimmy's response was to that. Hey, just 'cause you're paranoid...
9. "The Local Freaks" (U.S.): I strongly suspect that every Borders store had it's own collection of local weirdos who would practically move into the place. They'd be there every day, or at least every weekend--grabbing a magazine or newspaper off of the racks, plopping themselves in one of the chairs scattered around and well, staying...all day, sometimes into the evening as well. Some would wander around the store, pestering other punters and eventually get thrown out--only to return the next day..or week..or month. I'm not just talking about the garden-variety lechers who show up and ogle the young female staff members--I'm talking about the hardcore nutjobs. The Manchester, Conn. store had some right legends. There was "11-Digit Boy" (I can't remember how he got that name), "Creepy Laughing Guy", who had quit his medication and used to draw in a notebook and emit shrill laughs to himself, "Tweedle-Dee And Tweedle-Dum", a rare double-act--this short fat older guy and a short fat younger guy who used to sit in the chairs all day reading newspapers. There was also "Anti-Claus", an old smelly guy with a huge white beard and glasses. He was eventually barred from the store for weeing all over the floor in the gents. I suspect there were a few more that I'm missing off of this list. The Oxford store had a few, too - like "The Romance Beast" and "The Polish Newspaper Guy"--but nothing on the calibre of Store 60.
10. "Jimmy's Announcement" (U.S.): Another classic moment in the Manchester store. A local jam-ish rock band was playing one night in the music department. Whenever there's an event in-store, the staff has to announce it over the P.A. every so often to remind the punters what time it will be starting and that. Jimmy was given the task of making the announcements for this particular gig. I'm not sure how he got through it without laughing, but he gave the gig time and the usual spiel, then he said at the end of it: "So if rock and roll is on your agenda for this evening, head to the music department." Almost pissed myself again when I heard it and it still makes me laugh now.
15 January 2010
15 Years On: P.M. Dawn - Jesus Wept
25 Dey - Year 1388I can hardly believe it's been nearly 15 years since this album was released. I can already hear the derisive snickers from the 'real' hip-hop crowd, but hear me out, O.K.? I know, P.M. Dawn 'are' a joke to most hip-hoppers and possibly always 'were'. Unlike the Beastie Boys, who managed to claw back their cred after Check Your Head was released in 1992, the Dawn never returned to the dizzy chart heights they scaled with their first full-length, Of The Heart, Of The Soul, Of The Cross..., released in 1991.
After their string of hit singles and then a much-publicised (at the time) beef with KRS-One, the Dawn's second full-length, The Bliss Album?, was released. While most of the tracks continue "Of The Heart"s spacey R&B/hip-hop hybrid, a couple of them show the duo in a near defensive mode after the KRS-One bust-up. Plastic sneers at thug-rap poseurs (remember, this was 1993 and the West Coast 'gangsta rap' phenomenon was all the rage, following Dr. Dre's The Chronic record)--with a dig at KRS-One in the breakdown. "Think I don't know about hip-hop", Prince Be spits, "well what's this..", as DJ Minutemix scratches different tempos. The Nocturnal Is In The House also presents a harder edge (for the Dawn) and a bit of a cynical look at the group's fame: "The ego, the frame, remain unemployed/But they screamin' at me, they wanna be my freakazoid" and "I'm burnin' up son, I think I got the fever/Don't believe the hype 'cause if you do it might deceive ya", attest to the pressure of maintaining their sanity in the "Yo Mtv Raps!" sphere and maintaining their cool in the face of the beefs and some rather homophobic rants.
So they disappeared for a while - aside from a one-off cover of Jimi Hendrix's You Got Me Floatin', which was released on the tribute album called Stone Free in 1993. They returned in October 1995 with Jesus Wept (named after the shortest psalm in the Bible).
The title seems to sum up the contents of the record. Gone are the playfulness of the first album and the occasional anger of the second. In their place is a meditative questing and a sort-of soulful angst. Be's Chrisitianity was hinted at on the first two, but reaches full-flower on "Jesus Wept". Not to worry, though. He doesn't Bible-bash or holy roll--in fact, almost the opposite...he's as unsure of 'God' as a lot of critters, but he wants to believe (like in that X-Files UFO poster). In the intro. to the album, a sample taken from It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown states "...even if you are a fake, don't tell me..I don't want to know." Downtown Venus, the second track and first single, sets up the psychedelic feel of the rest of the record perfectly--making excellent use of a sample from Deep Purple's cover of Hush. You can watch the original video here (though you have to sit through an advert first).
My Own Personal Gravity has a hazy, mellow feel that channels Hendrix, except for the lack a flash guitar solo. Instead, it has a backward-guitar figure that could be right off of The Beatles' I'm Only Sleeping. It could almost be an out-take from Electric Ladyland. Forever Damaged (The 96th) samples Joni Mitchell's Don't Interrupt The Sorrow (from her most experimental record, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns) and contains a tasteful steel drum solo--yes, a steel drum. The track mutates into a kind of down-tempo Caribbean folk-rock. The Puppet Show comes off as a trippy Motown tune, that wouldn't be out of place on The Temptations' Puzzle People. The 9:45 Wake-Up Dream continues the inner-space journey, with a funky organ riff and some nice acid-guitar runs.
Elsewhere on the album are gentle acoustic moments. Sonchyenne, a Joycean pun on the word sunshine, evoking both Jesus (as the alleged 'Son of God') and the Native American Cheyenne tribe. A Lifetime's lyrics of "What's a human/what's a lifetime?" remind me of Robert Heinlein's quote about what a human should be able to do. The weakest tracks, it seems to me, 'are' Miles From Anything and I'll Be Waiting For You. Both seem to be typical Dawn 'smoove' ballads and don't really innovate their sound at all. Having said that, they're probably on par with any of the decent R&B tunes of that year. I do like the way the lyrics can be construed as multi-level, much like Richard Thompson's mid-70s 'love' songs. 'Are' they about a woman, or a deity, or Be's 'higher self' (what Aleister Crowley referred to as "The Holy Guardian Angel")..or all three?
Then there's the final track - which really shows the ambition of the group. Fantasia's Confidential Ghetto is a suite of three covers, and not slavish ones, either. 1999 sees Prince's glam-funk party call-to-arms stripped to just a piano and acoustic guitar. Be sings it in a world-weary fashion, even singing "Tonight I'm gonna cry like it's 1999" at the end of the last chorus. A piano figure lifted from the 1970s Schoolhouse Rock animated short Rufus Xavier Sarsparilla announces Talking Heads' Once In A Lifetime. It's funked up good, even more than the Heads' early 80s experiments. It's almost as if Al Green is repaying them for their version of Take Me To The River. Coconut uses a Three Dog Night (from Mama Told Me Not To Come) sample and even a snippet of The Fabs' Flying for a woozy cover of the Harry Nilsson tune. It's probably the most 'faithful' of all three, but it maximizes the trippy aspect of the song. Brilliant.
The Dawn had a top-notch band for the sessions, but an MVP citation must go to guitarist Cameron Greider for the nice, jazzy solos and folkie strumming. Despite the record being a spiritual heir to the Native Tongues posse's output (if not musically), it was largely ignored. "Downtown Venus" had a very modest showing on the singles chart, but '95 was the year that Trent Reznor wanted to shag everyone like an animal, while wearing his crown of shit, upon his liar's chair. Smashing Pumpkins sang about bullets with butterfly wings and Rage Against The Machine were raging against machines. Gangsta rap was still flourishing and no-one wanted to listen to Be's questing gnosticism. The Dawn were in the company of The Orb and Spiritualized, whose '95 albums also received low-key praise (at least in the States).
P.M. Dawn disappeared again (aside from another one-off--the single Gotta Be..Movin' On Up) and surfaced in 1998 with Dearest Christian, I'm So Very Sorry I Brought You Here, Love Dad, their entry in the awkward long album title stakes. The tone went from sombre to near-despair and the music veered even further away from orthodox hip-hop. The hipster mafia 'were' probably correct...it's not necessarily hip-hop, but a trippy hybrid of R&B, psychedelia and ambient--in "Jesus Wept"'s style. They were quiet throughout the Noughties, with just the obligatory record-company stop-gap, The Best Of P.M. Dawn, released in 2000. A follow-up album, reportedly called P.M. Dawn Loves You, has yet to be released. Prince Be suffered a massive stroke in 2005, but still managed to appear on the U.S. teevee talent show, Hit Me Baby One More Time (which the Dawn won) and a tour of small clubs in 2006. Minutemix left the group after the TV show and their cousin, Dr. Giggles, joined up for the '06 tour. At the moment, Doc G. is the only active member of the group.
So while I wait for "P.M. Dawn Loves You", which may turn out to be another Smile or Get Back..or the follow-up to Loveless, I'll spin "Jesus Wept". It seems to be one of the definitive psychedelic hip-hop records to me..even if it 'is not' really that to others.
12 January 2010
Never Liked Him That Much Anyway..
Mois de Nivose - Annee de la Republique 218
I suppose it must be me, 'cos thousands of critters really like the bloke, but I never really enjoyed Garrison Keillor's Prarie Home Companion radio show. I watched about an hour of the film (directed by Robert Altman!??!) one late night for about an hour, before I realised that I didn't give a shit about what was happening in it - I was that bored.
I never really liked that 'aw shucks/down-home' Midwest humour. I guess I appear to be a coastal-interlectural-snawb, but what can I say. If I don't find it funny, I don't find it funny...or endearing...or whatever. Sorry, hordes of Keillor-ites.
This op-ed piece* in a Baltimore (figures...) newspaper's website really made me cringe. I couldn't get my head around whether ol' Garry was joking, with a serious undertone--or if he actually meant the whole thing! Maybe both? The lame quips about Harvard 'geeks' and digs at Unitarians aside, what the fuck was that line referencing Jews writing X-Mas songs about?? I don't mean I don't literally know the meaning of it - I gather that Jewish song-writers have penned well-known Christmas tunes. I mean, was the guy joking, or does he seriously have a beef with Jews for 'messing about' with his sacred 'Christian' holiday (which, incidentally, was brought in by The Church to cover up all those narsty pagan solstice celebrations--it seems to me, anyway). Maybe Keillor should grow a small mustache and start goose-stepping around? O.K., that was harsh--but it seems to me he needs to lighten up. I don't want to think of him as a crypto-fascist, even though I'm not a fan of his.
So, I'm left with....Garrison Keillor: uber-twat? I'll leave it for you to ponder.
*Cheers to C-Dog for linking to the article at his blog.
I suppose it must be me, 'cos thousands of critters really like the bloke, but I never really enjoyed Garrison Keillor's Prarie Home Companion radio show. I watched about an hour of the film (directed by Robert Altman!??!) one late night for about an hour, before I realised that I didn't give a shit about what was happening in it - I was that bored.
I never really liked that 'aw shucks/down-home' Midwest humour. I guess I appear to be a coastal-interlectural-snawb, but what can I say. If I don't find it funny, I don't find it funny...or endearing...or whatever. Sorry, hordes of Keillor-ites.
This op-ed piece* in a Baltimore (figures...) newspaper's website really made me cringe. I couldn't get my head around whether ol' Garry was joking, with a serious undertone--or if he actually meant the whole thing! Maybe both? The lame quips about Harvard 'geeks' and digs at Unitarians aside, what the fuck was that line referencing Jews writing X-Mas songs about?? I don't mean I don't literally know the meaning of it - I gather that Jewish song-writers have penned well-known Christmas tunes. I mean, was the guy joking, or does he seriously have a beef with Jews for 'messing about' with his sacred 'Christian' holiday (which, incidentally, was brought in by The Church to cover up all those narsty pagan solstice celebrations--it seems to me, anyway). Maybe Keillor should grow a small mustache and start goose-stepping around? O.K., that was harsh--but it seems to me he needs to lighten up. I don't want to think of him as a crypto-fascist, even though I'm not a fan of his.
So, I'm left with....Garrison Keillor: uber-twat? I'll leave it for you to ponder.
*Cheers to C-Dog for linking to the article at his blog.
11 January 2010
Happy Bob-Mas!
21 Pausa - Year 1931Three years already, since the great man headed off into the bardos and beyond - leaving his meat-suit behind. Hopefully, his fans will celebrate in some fashion. I'm stuck at my wage-slave confinement today, otherwise I would fire up my Maybe Logic DVD and soak up Bob's woids yet again.
Here's a (still relevant, unfortunately) thought from his website:
WAR AGAINST SOME TERRORISTS
7 Ways of Looking at a Monkey-House
September 29, 2001 e.v.
Just as the War Against Drugs would make some kind of sense if they honestly called it a War Against Some Drugs, I regard Dubya's current Kampf as a War Against Some Terrorists. I may remain wed to that horrid heresy until he bombs CIA headquarters in Langley.
I turned on CNN a few days ago and a White House robot announced that the rebels in Chechnya "were" no longer freedom fighters but "are" now terrorists with "clear" links to Osama bin Laden.
CNN provided no details about whether the transformation occured in a sudden miraculous flash like the transubstantiation of the host in a Catholic mass, or happened slowly and gradually like Darwinian evolution.
In a related bulletin, Russia pledged its support in the 'War Against Some Terrorists', and will presumably start with those bastards in Chechnya.
DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND: IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING
The plight of Bill Maher reminds me of something Ezra Pound wrote about London in 1919: "A single intelligent remark can destroy a man's entire career."
A friend in Israel just sent me an email quoting George Bush saying we should all go to Disneyland. It didn't surprise me. I kind of suspect George lives in Disneyland all the time, with Mickey and Goofy and Osama bin Laden and all the "faith-based organizations" in the world. As Voltaire said, "The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity."
Pfui.
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