Category: Uncategorized

This new site is kind of like slashdot for politics. No wait, it is slashdot for politics! It’ll be interesting to watch. Though I suspect it will reflect the general state of American politics today, as does geekdom in my observation. For every radical or progressive geek, there is a hardcore libertarian or right-wing nutjob. I’ll probably check it out for a while.

Interesting Reading, indeed. From the Project Censored Exposed page:

Project Censored is a media research group out of Sonoma State University which tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters. From these, Project Censored compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country’s major national news media.

I was glad to see that wealth stratification was the #1 story, though all of the 25 look interesting.

An old speech by Bob Black from 1980 has been published on Alternative Press Review. Here are the first three paragraphs:

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

This reminds me of other theories by the Zerowork collective from the 1970s. I particularly like the Brezsnian emphasis on “freely interdendent exuberance.” The world definitely needs more of it. This is a very interesting read.

Go read this. Despite the RIAA’s moaning about violent criminals marauding the high seas, it looks like BMI is posting record profits. Very interesting indeed.

Just to be clear, BMI is one of the main performance royalty collectors on behalf of artists (along with ASCAP and SESAC). So they aren’t technically in the business of selling albums, but rather collecting royalties on behalf of songwriters whose songs are performed on the radio, on TV, in movies, etc.

So technically, this could be seen as irrelevant to the recording industry’s woes. More and more songs are being performed, and more royalties are being collected on behalf of artists. But record sales have nothing to do with it.

Perhaps the most salient point of the article is that the argument commonly put forth by the RIAA that “piracy hurts artists” isn’t the most accurate assessment of the situation, especially given that most artists earn very, very little from album sales.

Regardless, this article is further evidence that the situation is not so cut and dry either way. Clearly, there is a relationship between “piracy” and record sales, but what exactly the relationship is can be hard to pinpoint.

Maybe so. The folks who make Annabelle have started making a new line of guitars. The Pathmaker line (what Annabelle is) is a custom design by Abe Wechter that is made in a guitar factory in China. Abe discovered, however, that due to economies of scale, the factory can make more traditional acoustic designs even cheaper, simply because they make so many more. So he decided to import some of these designs, and give them the “Maple Lake” moniker, since they’re not Abe Wechter designs.

Annabelle is a great guitar, esp. for live performance. It’s pickup system is top notch, and the guitar plays like a dream. Its only weakness is that its acoustic tone is not as loud and full as other guitars, due the hybrid design (some of the guitar is solid wood, and doesn’t vibrate as easily as a normal acoustic). So I’ve been thinking about getting a 2nd acoustic, both for those kumbaya moments around the campfire (ie, playing acoustically with others and without amplification), as well as for recording with microphones in the studio.

Since Annabelle is a small guitar, it makes sense for my 2nd guitar to be a large body instrument, a “jumbo” guitar. And it just so happens that Maple Lake has a jumbo, with the exact same pickup system that Annabelle has. Very cool. I want to get this guitar. I’ll have to sell my old acoustic to do it, but the Yairi is in the same category as Annabelle, and of the 2 Annabelle is better suited to my needs at this point.

There is some amount of trepidation trading in a guitar I’ve had for nearly 15 years, but in the spirit of Buddhist non-attachment, it’s clearly true that a large-bodied acoustic would better suit my needs.

UPDATE: It’s a done deal. I sold my Alvarez, and ordered the Maple Lake 2614 Jumbo. Looking forward to playing it! Hopefully it will tell me its name in a timely fashion.

This has to be the best mode of protest I’ve seen in quite a while. The Surveillance Camera Players do performance art in front of government surveillance cameras. One of their recent performances is a summary of Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Go look at this, it’s well worth it, especially in light of obscene images like this one.

Lots of changes are in the works. I haven’t been updating much here because these changes have commanded most of my attention over the past several weeks. As I wrote a couple entries ago, we decided to look for both a new place to live and a new (used) car to buy. Since then, we’ve accomplished both.

After a nonzero amount of hassle, we have are shiny new 2001 Mercury Sable GS. That photo on the page is the right color, though our car has a few more miles on it than that one. We also paid much less for the car. Magic works, without a doubt. :-)

The second piece of news is that we also found a new place to live, in Ocean Park, Maine, just down the road from Old Orchard Beach. Actually, if you didn’t know better, you’d just assume it was part of OOB; I didn’t even realize that it was a separate municipality. We had considered buying a house, but our lease runs out at the end of September, and we just ran out of time. 5 weeks is not enough time to buy a house intelligently. So we decided to do the offseason rental. So as it turns out, we’ll be spending the winter (until June 1st 2005) on the beach.

Not much else going on. The time has seemed ripe for ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, without question. Despite the hassle, this feels very right.

Forward momentum!

I’ve mentioned it before, but Arundhati Roy is one of my favorite political writers today. It’s funny, I was talking to a friend of mine the other night, and we both said that now that we’ve heard her speak, we can hear her voice in our heads when we read her work.

She has a new piece, Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire. As always with her, it’s good reading. Check it out.

… to hear this. From this week’s Brezsny:

CANCER (June 21-July 22): You haven’t been singing and dancing and
laughing and playing enough lately. You haven’t been telling yourself jokes
as you drop off to sleep or leaping off the couch during the exciting parts
of your favorite TV shows or going ten miles out of your way to track down
the exotic sensation you’re in the mood for. Either get more serious about
having fun, Cancerian, or I swear I’ll show up in your dreams in the form
of a giant crab running amok in a place where you take everything too
seriously.

Yeah, no shit. Nothing else to say to that. Wait, how about this, for those nearby:

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): You may think you need a teacher or genie or
rescuer, but I say you don’t. I say that what you need most is to realize
that right now you are your own best teacher and genie and rescuer. In my
astrological opinion, you should drop any fantasies you have that there’s
someone out there who will save you or give you what you lack or reveal
the secrets that will fix everything. For the foreseeable future, you won’t
get what you need until you’re prepared to provide it entirely by yourself.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Some astrologers say that Virgos tend to be so
obsessed with small details that they neglect to focus on the big picture;
that they get so bound up in seeking perfection that they miss out on life’s
messy beauty and slightly flawed glories. But even if there is a grain of
truth in those ideas, they’ve temporarily become irrelevant. In the
coming weeks, you’ll be drawn to carry out the task Henry Miller
described as follows: “to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the
miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear
allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only
miraculously.”

Sounds like good advice to me.

I’ve been busy this week. Lots of things on my mind.

First of all, there is quite a bit of what I would call “ambient negativity” around. Lots of people I know, myself included I suppose (at least to some degree), are dealing with it. A good friend and I have been joking about “inner weather,” jokes about “partly cloudy with an occasional glimpse of the sun” etc. I’m not sure what the source of this negativity is. Those of us who are sensitive to such energies have a lot on our plates; if nothing else, look at the current political climate. I think it’s going to be interesting between now and the end of this calendar year.

On another note: some people very close to me are also involved in a conflict, a conflict I’ve tried to stay out of but ended up being pulled into. So I’ve tried to cultivate an attitude of detached compassion for it, and see if I can help them go toward the light and out of the wilderness.

My wife and I have decided to investigate buying a car, and finding an offseason rental somewhere on the coast of Maine. Our current lease is up at the end of September, and we had thought about finding a place to settle down, possibly buying a house. And though we were preapproved for a mortgage, we’ve decided to put that off for several months. I think a seasonal rental would be good for us, plus it would be very cool to live near a beach for a winter. I think Mo would love it, I know I would. I also just think it makes more sense to have a car before we try to buy a house. As long as we can figure out the transportation-to-work thing, we should be fine.

I’m thinking quite a bit about acoustic treatments for the studio. It appears that to do everything I want to do would cost several hundred dollars. So I’ll have to do it in stages; the trick now is to figure out where and when to start. Step one, I think, is to acquire some rigid fiberglass panels, as these are the best, most cost-effective acoustic treatments available.

All for now, just wanted to give an update…