Brilliant. Best thing I've seen this year. Imax, two rows back from screen (last tickets available), 3D, seriously, the immersion was so deep I found myself wondering whether I was going to handle it in the first five minutes, but then I adjusted and it was fantastic. Dialogue: Bad. Seriously: "Unobtainium"? Really? Hilarious. Plot: Well, yeah, brilliantly predictable. Worldscape and imagination: gold. Incredible use of 3D, and wonderful world.
Obvious parallels between the experience of the main character (living vicariously in the alien world then returning to normal bleak human existence) and the viewer (very virtual experience, then returning to a bleak undramatic world). I wasn't bored once for the entire 3 hours, a feat in and of itself in the modern cinema experience.
A discussion regarding worldviews followed the epic film experience, related to what defines beliefs versus thoughts - a summary:
Now, there is nothing wrong with any of this - it's a natural human construct, and we all do it on some conscious or subconscious level. People who make believe and don't question too much can be (occasionally simultaeneously) the most happy (canadian research has shown people with some spiritual faith and practice generally live longer and are more physically and mentally healthy) or dangerous people (think the crusades, or any number of religious wars. Or Brian Tamaki) on earth.
People who think rather than believe contribute heavily to society and our understanding of the world. Scientific discovery and exploration is based on the acceptance of areas which lack enough objective data to destroy reasonable doubt (ie. a lack of "faith" is required). Hypothesises are formed and discarded as new data contradicts them. This occurs continually.
It is, however, more demanding and less fun to live with doubt. We all like a good, solid objective framework of truth on which to demarcate our lives.
Of course, the kicker in all of this hypothesising is that all of the above detail contradicts itself, in that it is built on my worldview, which in and of itself is a subjective interpretation of life within which ideas and feelings are reformed and reshaped through prior experiences and long-held (subconscious or sometimes conscious) thoughts and beliefs. To be blunt, my thoughts and beliefs about what beliefs and thoughts are, are just that - thoughts and beliefs.
I believe the sun is going to come up tomorrow. I believe it 99%. I do not think it. All the data would suggest so. I believe I exist. All the subjective and objective data would seem to point to "yes".
Are my thoughts and worldview more flexible, than, say, your average right-wingedly-devout religious person (assuming an 'average' exists for such a commodity)? I would say yes - as "what I think is true" (60%-80%) rather than making an unreasonable leap of "faith" and "believing" (90%-99%), allows for greater change of worldviews. Am I happier? Probably Not... would I trade uncertainty for a unreasonable happiness? Definitely no. More molded jello than creamy pearly gates for me!
My new EP is "Penetration", and it's as rocky and angry-ifying as this year is.
18.5 minutes total (not including bonus tracks).
1: Penetration - based on a relationship I had late last/earlier this year, where my faith in humankind was-and-is severely screwed with- possibly the darkest thing I've written, to date. In four parts.
style; industrial/indie/pop.
2: Story - wrote the lyrics about 5 years ago, recorded them about 3 years ago, then forgot about it.
Later this year I got a call from an african guy wanting to do some rap stuff. He wanted a song composed plus his lyrics recorded for $100. I thought, well, hey, why not, so I slapped something together. The dumb prick complained that the music wasn't similar enough to the crappy 1kb sample that he played me through the speaker on his cellphone, and asked if I could do 3 songs for him for $100, instead - obviously, I showed him where the door was and how to use it.
But end justified means in this case, as the song was coincidentally exactly the same bpm as the lyrics I had recorded all that time ago. SO I reclaimed it, turned it into my own. This is the result.
style; urban/industrial hiphop/rap
3: On a dare to myself, and partially to gratify my younger, more internet-defiled friends, I made this song.
style; A joke. Don't take seriously :)
Available for $2USD here.
Also available via itunes/emusic in about a month.
Happy Christmas to you all and a merry new year to those who don't get too trashed to remember it.
p.s. The dream-logic in Where the Wild Things Are is just awesome - go see!
Last night I had a dream where a master chef was showing me a frog he was going to cook for me to eat,
and I asked him what it meant that the frog had started to pulse red intermittently.
I may have played too many computer games in this life.
Also, this.
The recent discovery that the retrovirus XMRV is found in 95% of USA-based CFS sufferers:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/166838.php
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chronic-fatigue-syndrome-retrovirus
correlates with an earlier study in 2005 in UK, and a later one in 2006 in USA, which found that the majority of CFS sufferers have genes (related to stress and physiology) which are different in non-CFS-sufferers:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4580051.stm
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Genetics/GeneralGenetics/3130
A retrovirus transmits by altering genes in the host, so it's fairly conclusive given the independence of the studies.
However. And this is a big however.
All this proves is extremely strong correlation. It has yet to be established that XMRV exactly causes CFS, though a 95% correlation rate (as opposed to 3.8% in non-cfs-sufferers) is pretty powerful evidence towards causation.
As an example, XMRV is also found in 40% of prostate cancer sufferers in the states (linky-loo) - however, a similar study in germany found absolutely no incidence of XMRV in prostate cancer sufferers in germany (link). This is suggestive of a proliferation of XMRV in USA but not germany. XMRV -could- potentially be one of a number of causes for prostate cancer.
In the same way, XMRV could be one of several causes for CFS - though a 95% correlation is pretty unheard of, even if XMRV is localised.
Testing for XMRV is possible but expensive at this stage, and there is no known 'cure' for it as yet.
It may be that treatment with anti-retroviral drugs such as those which've been used on HIV may be effective in arresting and reducing the symptoms of CFS but nothing has been tested as yet.
A more detailed Q & A is available here.
It is suspected that XMRV could be sexually transmitted but be far less strong than the other 2 retrovirii known to infect humans (HIV and the other one). In other words, some people could be carriers.
It's also possible that it's just a common benign retrovirus and proliferating more in people whose immune system systems are already low.
m@
The death of mistakes = the death of rock
Digital recording blues vs The importance of Room acoustics
Everybody says
time heals everything
but what of the wretched hollow,
the endless inbetween?
Are we just going to wait it out?
Sit here, just going to wait it out.
Sit here cold, just going to sweat it out.
Wait it out.
- Imogen Heap, "Wait it out"
Over-precise music, sound-wise sonically detailed, heard on a decent sound system is sort of more of a excitation physiological response I think, whereas
LESS detailed, more muffled or music heard through a less detailed stereo system provokes more of an emotional response rather than a physiological response.
It seems like smudging things more, whether it's onscreen or on speakers, results in a more interpretive, dream-like,
relaxed reaction to stimulus.
Whereas more detailed, frenetic imagery, sound-wise or visually creates more of an excitation thrill.
For example, a blockbuster world-ending CGI film vs a rom-com or emotionally-based film.
The best thing, perhaps, is to use these things as subtle juxtapositions to emphasise each other -
slow movements and lowered detail to accentuate more emotive segments ("pillow shots" in film terminology) with more dramatic movement and detail to highlight visceral sections.
The japanese seem good at doing this in their films - allowing equal time for the audience to decompress during relaxed sections as well as time for the fast sections to play out.
The difference in focus between japanese and hollywood standards is that the slow bits are considered equally important in japanese films.
And that's why the faster sections have more impact - but only as an added bonus.
The drama in hollywood films (and in modern western music) seems to suffer from treating any soft section as being necessary to highlight the hard section - rather than an important point in-and-of-itself.
This article is incredibly relevant to those of us who grew up recording 16-bit audio, trying to get the levels up as high as possible to avoid grainality of a low bit-depth: Proper Audio recording levels by Massive Mastering.
Also relevant:
related forum discussion - so much data!!!.
This article gets more relevant every year: Quitting the Paint Factory by Mark Slouka.
[EDIT: Apparently (I believe, via inference from some retard actions) somebody took this post seriously - and personally!! I didn't think the following was anything more than a clever bit of writing. I don't actually agree with the message, however thoughtful & provocative (and eloquent) it may be.]
Thought I'd quote this:
Tom Robbins has a go at something or other (I'm not entirely sure this time), kicks ass in process:
"... those stoppers, thingamagigs, and substances devised to prevent conception were intended not to liberate womankind from the biological and social penalties imposed on her natural passions but, rather, at the insidious design of capitalist puritans, were supposed to technologize sex, to dilute it's dark juices, to contain it's wilder fires, to censor it's sweet nastiness, to scrub it clean (clean as a laboratory autoclave, clean as a hospital bed), to order it uniform, to render it safe; to eliminate the risk of uncontrollable feelings, illogical commitments, and deep involvements (substituting for those risks the less mysterious, tamer risks of infection, hemorrhage, cancer, and hormone imbalance); yes, to make sexual love so secure and same and sanitory, so slick and frolicsome, so casual that it is not a manifestation of love at all, but a near anonymous, near autonomous, hedonistic scratching of a bunny itch, an itch far removed from any direct relation to the feverish enigmas of Life and Death, and a scratching programmed so that it would in no way interfere with the real purpose of human beings in a capitalistic, puritanical society, which is to produce goods and consume them?" - Tom Robbins, "Still Life with Woodpecker", Italics not added.
Incidentally, whilst attending an ailing grandparent over the past week or two, I've been surprised to find the listener has gone back to being a somewhat decent read again, far from it's abbarent deviation to nouveau women's mag (courtesy of it's replacement editor, a former women's mag specialist) over the past five years (a fashion section? Christ Why?).
Asides from the somewhat obsessive US political commentary that is so ingrained in new zealand today (does anybody in this stupid nation grasp the fact that the united states is a separate country, and not actually related to our general day-to-day affairs?) it's become intelligent again, though it's previous incarnation was yet smarter.
The editorial on Mike King was great, as were the accompanying photos - I always thought him a sell-out celebrity in NZ- so good to hear the other side. Good luck, nutter's club.
Feelings of attractiveness and self-worth play a greater role in male's lives than we tend to acknowledge, and this lack of acknowledgment lies at the root of some very real male problems. If a male strikes a female who threatens to leave him, it is less an expression of power than an expression of fear: in this case fear of being made to feel unattractive and/or worthless.
I think this problem is largely sociological - if males had the kinds of support networks which women have, which allow for the interactive reflection of each other's relative attractiveness and inherent self-worth, then males would feel less reliant on the partners in their lives for feelings of self-worth and attractiveness. As it stands, in western society females have an unacknowledged degree of power over male's feelings of attractiveness and personality-based self-worth (as opposed to worth-through-accomplishments). The emotionally-stupid man will tend to react towards this through attempting to make his partner powerless - the subconscious idea being, if he is in control, then the female cannot leave him and remove the predominant source of those positive feelings.
What is preventing the kinds of support networks that women have, among men? Two things: fear of appearing weak, and fear of homosexuality/being perceived as homosexual. Both have a sociological basis that I believe primarily derives from early tribal origins - perception of weakness affects pecking order, alpha/beta male dynamics etc - while homosexuality reduces a tribe's potential offspring and inherent survival (I suspect homosexuality being (somewhat) less feared amongst women has some roots in a patriarchal/tribal past wherein women had little say in their mating choices).
Both of these fears are irrelevent at the present time, just as hip-to-waist ratios in women are, and yet like hip-to-waist ratios, they continue to play a social role - most males at some point in their lives will have experienced the effects of homophobia or of being perceived as weak. What I see as needing to change (asides from homophobia - we're working on that) would be the entire concept of weakness as negative. Strength is useful, yes. But we are all weak in some aspect or another. The idea that acknowledgment of weaker emotions encourages their proliferation is also not a valid construct - and in the case of male violence, it is the suppression or disacknowledgment of weaker emotions that encourages uncontrolled expression in fearful displays of control of others.
While it is positive that campaigns like New Zealand's mental health tv ad's stimulate acknowledgment of weakness - they also inadvertently reinforce the concept that emotional weakness is abbarent, rather than part of a fluctuating norm of emotional strength/weakness- ie. a 'mental illness'. Somehow the idea that males are, or should be, at their core, rigid beings of emotional strength never disappates. Disappointing, given that all available evidence contradicts this concept. I suppose that eventually either society will close the gap between it's knowledge and it's behaviour or experience much of the same for the forseeable future. The flight from our origins is a long and complicated one, but one worth doing.
Just updated the tiny Firesomething firefox plugin so it works with v3 and above of firefox, and added a bunch of new elements and animals - the result:
Firesomething Plus (download here). Basically Firesomething randomly changes the name of your browser every time you start it, to a random combination of elements and animals. Right now I'm browsing with Mozilla JungleMoth, but tomorrow I might be using Mozilla HypnoGiraffe. It's awesome.
Incidentally, this article on the (potential) end of the loudness wars is interesting (though flawed, IMO)-
linky-loo
Saying that you're an audiophile and you think MP3 sounds great is slightly contrdictory, in my view. Don't get me wrong, I think MP3's are good in the way they blend out subtle things - the same way cassettes did (though in a less musical way). Works well for rock and pop/metal (the genres that rely more on overall emotion than subtle listening). And SCIENCE!!! has proved that people get used to a particular 'sound' of a particular medium, associate it with the pleasurable experience, and believe that that medium sounds better than another,
as this test showed - making a moot point of the 'enhanced audio quality' of vinyl records (which sound like rubbish to me, and age terribly).
Overall I prefer the sound of CD, but even I've had some difficulty adjusting to the CD versions of certain albums after getting used to them in MP3 form (too much high end 'detail').
Overall, who cares?
M@
Have thought a while about what it means to be "a man" - quote unquote. Particularly in this day and age, when all too often the expectations developed for men as part of a patriarchal society are still in effect (low emotional tolerance, strength and 'masculine' over-confidence as strong selling points) and are enforced by both men and women, it is important to question this in the same way and with the same vigour that feminists applied to the question of what it means to be female. I have come to a few conclusions. One is that that you don't need women or the approval of others to be a man, or to shape your own beliefs. That self-belief, relative emotional introversion and keeping a protective shell around the more vulnerable of emotions is still an integral part of being male in a post-feminist society as, despite feminist ambitions to the contrary, feminism has focused predominantly on changing society's viewpoint of what is acceptable for women, rather than what is acceptable for all people. Hence the relatively important (some would say more important at this point) task of defining the societally-imposed limitations for men has gone unnoticed and unrewarded.
Emotional sensitivity and expression is still by large rejected and lambasted in males, as often by females than males from my experience, and the attractiveness of a man typically diminishes in a female's view once he has displayed strong emotion on an ongoing basis. Some would say this is biologically based, due to the nurturing instinct in females, which, once targeted on a male individual, reduces him on a 'potential-mate' scale to 'more like a boy'. Others would say this is sociological and an adaptable pattern. Still others would say the same is true for females, where males might identify an exceptionally emotionally-open female as being 'high-maintenance'. I do not believe this is the case. The balance swings in women's favour here, with a wide degree of emotional openness being expected as part of a western female normative structure. While I suspect emotion in males has - and will continue to be - more widely accepted in society, in part due to feminism's influence and the influence of a more modern, changing society, I also believe it is unrealistic to expect less-than-temporal emotional vulnerability to become a desirable 'mating' trait in my lifetime, in males.
The swing-side of feminism is that while 'feminine' emotions like sadness, vulnerability, connection and affection have become more accepted, the opposing council of anger, aggression, resistivity, rejection and distancing have obtained a negative spin. Some would say this is natural, that aggression, anger, resistance, rejection and distancing are inherently negative, have no positive value in the world. Not so. Sadness and vulnerability can be used to manipulate and harm. Anger and aggression can be used to cause the same. Sadness can be used constructively to let go of situations, or to build connections between people. Anger can be used constructively to the same effect. Ultra-vulnerability leads to chaos. Ultra-resistance leads to rigidity. And here we get into a yin-yang taoist dialogue. Stepping aside that obvious and culturally-useless comparison, the yang or 'thumos' energy has been unfairly tarred with the 'unpleasant' brush by feminism - which has focused not on the negative side of masculine emotions, but on taking the negative side of masculine emotion as the norm rather than aberrative. It has ignored the constant, obvious and pervasive evidence of positive use of masculine energy in it's quest to change society for the better. It has also ignored largely the negative aspect of feminine emotion, such as emotional manipulation and damaging.
In order for society to progress and not go backward into an even greater male-female divide, the focus would need to shift to accommodate negative perspectives on both 'male' and "female" emotions. As we say 'no' to physical violence, we need to address emotional violence and bullying also. As women will tell you, girls can be as cruel as boys - but the ways they are cruel differ significantly. I have met many men who are well-versed in controlling and channelling their emotional energies toward constructive, rather than destructive or expressive ends. I have met fewer females for whom I can say the same. The reasoning given always is that females are 'more emotional', and have more difficulty containing and controlling their emotions. This is simply not true. Sadness is an emotion. Anger is an emotion. Toughness is a state. Vulnerability is a state. Men are no more or less significantly emotional than females, but they -are- differently-emotional. And the degree to which western society accepts male emotion is far less than to which it accepts female emotion. That is why men have learnt better how to effectively channel and placate their own drives and emotions - into sports, art, business. If they do not, they are rejected by society - either for displaying their emotions in vulnerable ways, or in uncontrolled aggressive ways. Women by contrast tend to have support networks for their emotions, which dissipate the emotional energy in ways which are considered by modern society to be 'more healthy' (regardless of whether or not that is the case - I would say it is situational) but which have no "production" outcome. Hence the continual dialogue in the media about 'goal-driven' men and 'process-driven' women - a fallacy that is likely more sociological in it's origin than otherwise.
Male emotion is often regarded as being 'dangerous' because of the potential of physical violence behind it. This is also a fallacy. Violence is learned, not innate - whereas aggression is innate. But a man can be aggressive without being violent. It is in fact the repression and negative stigma on aggression which encourages it's suppression and subsequent uncontrolled explosion into emotional and/or physical violence. Take a look at the positive uses of aggression in the world - from mathematical thought, to comedy, to physical labour, the aggressive energy can be applied in a vast variety of positive ways - both physical and intellectual. When someone says a person has an aggressive intellect, it is not metaphorical. Just as the pervasiveness of housework by women masked it's significance to society, and as the pervasiveness of patriarchy masked it's presence, it masked the positive aspects of a pervasive male drive, also. And if in fact aggression is accepted as part of a healthy range or palate of emotions from which to draw one's strength, or to express, it suddenly becomes less of an enemy to be frightened of and more of a friend to take care of, or a resource to draw upon. It is part of our life-force, our will-to-live. And it is also part of our drive to mate.
Sexuality is inherently tied up with aggression, as both are linked to testosterone in males, and females. This is unsurprising as sex is an inherently physically demanding activity, and also one which involves a certain degree of rejection and resistance in terms of who one will accept into their bed. Yet sexuality is also tied up with vulnerability, as accepting one into a bed means also accepting their body into and against your body. So sex is one of these few places where both aggression and vulnerability, masculine and feminine states, are both accepted and held simultaneously - seemingly in contradiction. And again - sex, and it's intrinsic emotions, can occur in either a positive or negative context. To harm or to heal.
Personally, and going beyond the male-female divide, I believe a man is defined more by what he rejects in his life - what he says 'no' to - than by what he accepts. Acceptance and exploration are paths for the young - for boys, girls and teenagers - once a person discovers more of who they are, they become more accustomed to, and more confident in, saying 'no' to things. However, it is important not to shortcut this process - exploration of life is as valuable as it's results, in terms of the gradual evolution of social mores. Furthermore, false security and false confidence are spotted easily and are obvious trademarks of growing adults. True confidence is therefore both a mark of experience and a note of a healthy acceptance of 'thumos' - aggression, resistance, rejection. A great man - and a great woman - must say 'yes' to all of these things, more than once.
Have added a couple of new pages to the XPfree site:
1, A brief guide to computer data safety, and
2, A brief guide to partitioning for digital audio workstations (DAWs).
Enjoy.
Firstly, Drifting In Silence's Debut "Ladderdown" is available for free here courtesy of archive.org. It's bloody awesome. You should totally own it. Great melodic electronica.
Secondly, for those of you who don't already know, Myrakaru's Tammetoru album is also pretty and beautiful glitch/IDM, courtesy of the Sutemos netlabel.
Thirdly, Nintari's Protector album is a muscley piece of electronica/glitch wonderment, available in MP3 and 24-96 flac!
Fourthly, William Fields' Timbre is a gentle, illustrious bubbly floaty thing, my review here. Fantastic headphone-music.
Fifthly, if you haven't yet heard of Ochre and his work, then his Audiomicrodevice, and free volumes I, II and III are some of the best electronica I have heard in a long time, and worth paying for.
So why is anyone pirating music? There's no excuses - so much legitimately-free good stuff available-
m@
Mountain Goats -
"got up before dawn
went down to the racetrack.
riding with the windows down
shortly after your first heart attack.
you parked behind the paddock,
cracking asphalt underfoot,
coming up through the cracks
pale green things
pale green things
we watched the horses run their workouts.
you held your stopwatch in your left hand
and a racing form beneath your arm,
casting your gaze way out to no man's land.
sometimes I'll meet you out there
lonely and frightened.
flicking my tongue out at the wet leaves
pale green things
pale green things"
o2 has (finally) been released online due to the availability of HD viewing-
without which the entire 15-minute film just looks like pixelated mush due to the pixel-per-pixel nature of the images.
Praise to Tubemogul for enabling me to upload this to various sites (though, for the sake of simplicity only Youtube links are available below)- without further ado:
o2 part 1
o2 part 2
o2 part 3
o2 part 4
o2 part 5
The music is from my I want to listen to it" EP.
[UPDATE: first link fixed now]
M@
Farewell Michael. Keep moonwalkin' in heaven.
Have added ads to the site to cover domain fees etc. Will refine over the next week or two.
Myself and friend Thomas had absolutely nothing to do with this.
Enjoy ;)
Just found a haiku I wrote when I was 7 & 1/2 years old - it's not grammatically haiku though.
"Wind. Invisible
arms push me over. It jumps
on me, kicks my face."
Just brilliant.
m@
No. 1: Glum Buster, a beautiful wee freeware puzzle/platformer game which's taken my brain by force. Very smart, very lateral-thinking but not in a boring 'combine the piece of string with the wooden mallet'-bullsh*t way. All puzzles eventually figure-out-able, which I appreciate. And so smart. So smart.
No. 2: Intelligent Toys 5 is out (actually it's been out for a while, I only just caught up). Beautiful 3-hour set of free IDM/melodic electronica - for me, the "Think" section is easily the best. Check out Wack Spine by Funkarma for an example.
No. 3: small recommend - not for everyone though! All of our Friends are Dead. F'ing MENACING. Creepy/spooky little freeware platformer game which I thoroughly enjoyed, even though when you finish it you have absolutely no idea what just happened other that it felt like a teen goth poetry session gone Right, for a change.
And finally thought I'd mention a little EBM song by Pola called "Circles". Never heard something so sad and beautiful. You'll have to find it yourself tho'.
m@
Buddhism, religion, music, tv, cinema, drama, books,
all these abstractions, all amount to so much pomp, as they pump air into life, make it bigger than it
is capable of being sustained as. And particularly mine.
When the balloon deflates, we typically feel disappointed.
One book which doesn't mimick this commitment to obsfucation is Harvey Pekar's
"American Splendor", which I am getting into 30 years too late. The film was great of course, but the comic really conveys the soul of it.
The crux of it is a commitment to reflecting reality - all the seedy, normal, concrete facts of a normalised
existence, filtered down into comic book form.
It seems strange that something so ordinary could be in any way uplifting and grounding at the same time.
Perhaps it's the unique intellectualised take that Harvey has on objective reality in a workaday world (he's sort of a working man's thinking man),
maybe it's the fact that his stories, while occasionally depressing, never aggrandise or distill the depression
and ordinariness into something more potent. And that lack of potency is it's selling point. The fact that it
reflects life with all it's drunken blurriness, is what makes it useful.
The lack of memorableness of it's subject matter is strangely what makes the exploration of such rememberable.
I have a mouse for a friend- he's visited the past couple of nights, at the same time, crawling in through the airgap under my kitchen window. I'm not sure whether he (well, could be a she I guess, but I'm going to assume a he) is seeking warmth, or food. He is very cute and can jump rather high in the air if you try and catch him.
I washed everything he touched after he left. You don't fool me, Mr Tiny Rodent. You may be irresistably adorable, but you're also swimming in diseases that I probably don't want.
m@
UPDATE: 3 times! He must really like me or possibly staying alive.
Just thought I'd pop my head up and say something bout this amazing freeware game Iji, just entered my top 3 list of freeware games, up there with Cave Story and Kyntt Stories. I liked the game so much I ended up putting together an alternative music pack for it. "PassivePack" (the alternative music replacement pack) can be downloaded here and there. Got author's (Daniel's) permission to do it, of course.
Just because.
Incidentally, screw Creative Freedom NZ. If this website is black on your machine, it's just because it's got a random layout generator which switches between four different look-and-feels.
Coming back from town on an empty electric scooter and listening to Cerebral's "Motoroto" dj mix, I looked at the stars whizzing past at 5kph, thought:
It takes extraordinary people to shake us to make us see how small our lives are or have become.
I also believe it can take extraordinary people to show people how vast and real smallness can be.
m@
Escapism.
""Who," writes the distinguished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, "hasn't--sometime--wanted to escape? But from what?" In his fascinating look at the idea of escape, Tuan suggests that all human culture is really a kind of flight, an evasive mechanism, a means of not facing facts: our shelters give us refuge from the weather, our cities give us protection against nature red in tooth and claw, our religion and institutions give us solace against the certainty of death. "A human being," he says wryly, "is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is." Tuan examines the artifacts of our present civilization to buttress his argument. The cornucopia of the modern supermarket, for instance, with its "dazzling pyramids of fruits and vegetables, its esplanades of meat," which promises ceaseless abundance, and the growth of escape-to-nature ideas, which, he insists, depend on an antithetical escape from nature (nature being, in his definition, "what remains or what can recuperate over time when all humans and their works are removed"). That escape to nature, he suggests, relies on an unfortunate abstraction, one of simplicity. Images of nature, he continues, are often formed from wishful thinking and not from direct experience, and they tend therefore to lack the complexity of reality. Tuan's vigorous essay is provocative, challenging, and a pleasure to read."
Quite enjoying Penn & Teller's Bullsh*t! series - reflects on some of the more hokey sides of various aspects of society. Incredibly opinionated, it's impossible to agree with all of it - specifically when they seem to choose the most crackpot characters in each of the various subjects, to pick on - but challenging and thought-provoking - and fun, of course.
After some questionable reflection, have decided to make all my EP's $1 to purchase online, instead of $3.
My hope is that people will consider this donation-able, and support me to make future music.
As always, most of the songs are available for free in 128kbps mono (asides from newer stuff).
This pamphlet explains very adequately the problems that people have with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (M.E, Yuppie Flu, etc), as well as what to expect from a CFS victim: Download in Word document format. Written by Rosamund Vallings of Auckland New Zealand.
m@
Videoclip for Nameless, senseless now online and viewable at the following places (and more): YouTube, Yahoo, Metacafe and Viddler.
New EP. Jugs-to-position. Have been working on 'pinetree' a long long time.
m@
All bullsh*t & writing (c) Copyright 2009 Matt, except when quoting others