I really wanted to read the Tim Powers short story collection that came in to the Kobo eBooks on my iPad. So I decided to change mode to fantasy for my junk reading.
1st up, "Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr", by John Crowley (2018). The story of the serially immortal crow Dar Oakley, who was the 1st crow to have a name and the 1st crow to talk to humans. I have a lot of hardcopy Crowley (1 of my fav authors) in the FL library, so I bought this in trade paper.
Crowley also allows for the possibility that this is all the delusions of an extremely grief-stricken widower.
I am a huge fan of the family Corvidae: crows, ravens, and blue jays. I loved just reading about how it feels to be a crow.
They are so smart. In Lexington, KY, we have vast numbers of the American Crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos. In Naples, FL, we have mostly Fish Crows, Corvus ossifragus. iBirdPro says that they are almost completely indistinguishable except for their calls. And, yes, the nasal "kaa" of the fish crow could never be mistaken for the "caa" of the american crow.
There are also American Crows in Florida. One of our standard destinations in SW Florida is Shark Valley Everglades National Park. It is off of US 41 (Alligator Alley), 2/3 of the way from Naples to Miami, ~1 hour from Naples. I usually see some american crows there.
There is a great 13 mile loop you can bike, or take a trolley, or walk, with an observation tower 1/2 way. There are signs by the bike racks for the tower that say "Do not leave backpacks. Crows can work the zippers." ?!?!? Crows are so smart!
So, if you are a corvid fan as I am, this will be a fun read for you too. But regardless, it will be a thoughtful one, as Crowley explores the relationship between humans creating mass quantities of dead bodies via war and religion, and crows being quite happy to gorge on those dead bodies.
Next, the Tim Powers short story collection, "Down and Out in Purgatory" (2017). 20 stories of ghosts, immortal body thieves, time travel. He does this so well. I was surprised to find that he seems to be a practicing Catholic. So it's not surprising that there is a story about a priest being visited by a ghost in the confessional.
3rd, "The Bookman", by Lavie Tidar (2016). Very fun steam-punkish fantasy, where, among many other time slips, the extraterrestrial Lizard Men have replaced the Tudors on the English throne. Very imaginative, consistently so. Babbage's corporation produces simulacrums (androids) based on famous dead people and on independent personalities. The writing is excellent. I highlighted this passage:
This is the time of myths, Orphan. They are the cables that run under the floors and power the world, the conduits of unseen currents, the steam that powers the great engines of the earth.
But, somehow, this just didn't work for me. No ongoing serious topics, maybe? There are 2 more in this series, I will forgo them.
It was also odd, after the main book finished, there were 6 chapters of "From the Lost Files of The Bookman Histories". They fill in some of the details of earlier actions. Presumably they were omitted to keep the main narrative thread moving briskly. But, it's like deleted scenes in a movie. There is a reason they were deleted ...
4th and finally, "The Tangled Lands", by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Bucknell (2018). I left this for last because Paolo is always a dependable read. But, I was disappointed. It was billed as a novel, but it is 4 independent novellas, 2 by Paolo and 2 by Bucknell. And I had already read the 1st Paolo story in another collection. The stories are entirely consistent in their shared world and are compelling reads, but, I was expecting a novel. Still, very well written, well worth a read.
On Sunday, February 11, 2018, Dimanche Gras (Fat Sunday), my wife and I attended The Grand Carnaval of Martinique parade, in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique. I will do another travelogue post on the whole trip, but I really want to get this music out. It was absolutely, completely, totally awesome - a bucket list event! After the 1st couple of bands, you could not stop moving!
After reading the David Byrne book with one its main messages being, how the corporate state wants us to be music consumers rather than music producers, it was great to see the exact opposite here. There was a little corporate sponsorship, but by and large, this parade, with the dozens of bands and other groups participating, seemed to be a labor of love. The many hours spent on the lavish costumes and music rehearsal were done out of the community values of creativity, tradition, and love.
I tried to get a pic of the banner of each group, and then a video. So I will present them in that same order. 1st up, a human field of sugar cane! Several of the groups had 1 person dressed as a plantation overseer as this one did.
Now we start getting some serious rhythms. Some of these groups had well over a dozen rhythms going.
Note, the 1st 5 days we were on Martinique, it rained for a few minutes every hour or so. Usually it rained hard for 30-60 seconds in the middle. It rained 3 times during the 2 hour parade, the groups soldiered on. I think the rain on my phone terminated this video prematurely.
Some of the dancing was very stylized.
Nice costumes, and a guy on stilts! Plus the 1st horn section. The horns in general weren't so good.
Man, dancing even simple stuff like this for 2 hours!
This appeared to be an all-female group.
This next was the most commercial group - it was sponsored by one of the rum distilleries. They were giving out plastic cups with the distillery marketing info on them. The jungle cat makeup was outstanding, but the dance routine looked like that of a US high school dance team (some of which are very good I'm sure).
The next group was my favorite. I think they were an AIDS awareness group. I stopped the video when they weren't doing much, then restarted when they started doing some set pieces. After that, they just kind of took it to another level (at around the 2:49 mark) - the crowd went nuts, and you can see how it got them high when the crowd started roaring!
Not sure what this meant. The dancers were all coated in what looked like black oil?!?!?
More great costumes and dance steps.
A lot of the horn sections included conch shells.
A little faster pace.
A common theme of the groups wearing headdresses was headdresses sliding off, headdresses being uncomfortable, and other general modes of headdress failure.
Well, that's it. At one point when they were stopped the guy in of me was playing a really complex rhythm on a cowbell, and I thought, "Now that's what I call more cowbell!" - then I noticed that he was in a row with 3 other cowbell players, all of whom were playing different rhythms! I thought I had that on video, but I didn't see it.
So, if you ever get a chance to go to Carnaval on Martinique, or who knows which other Caribbean island, go for it! This was one of the most moving experiences of my recent life.
My wife got me a most thoughtful christmas present: "How Music Works", by David Byrne, 2012, 2017, 381 pages. I knew of the book and had thought about reading it, my wife made the decision for me.
It was a great read, touching on many topics relating to music, and Byrne definitely provides some memorable phrases and inspiring ideas. It's good enough that I decided early on to review it chapter by chapter and include quotations. As my wife gave me a trade paperback version of the book, this involved dogearing, highlighting, and touch-typing in quotations. [I will also include some of my own musical experience.]
Chapter 1 is titled "Creation in Reverse". Byrne talks about the interplay between music and the venue where it is performed. The bigger the room, the more reverb. Outdoors generally has no reverb, and is best suited to percussion, which dominated African music.
[From my experience, playing indoors you get told to turn down, playing outdoors you get told to turn up. My 15 watt Fender Blues Jr tube amp is unusable for outdoor gigs. My 50 watt Marshall solid state amp used indoor has been set on 3-4, outdoors 6-7 (out of 10).]
We are introduced to CBGB, the club in Manhattan where The Talking Heads, Blondie, and others got their starts.
Chapter 2 is titled "My Life in Performance". Byrne recounts his musical life story. He tried a lot of different approaches and concepts in creating music.
I thought this was a great story of a technique used to evaluate dancers for a tour Byrne was preparing for. From these 4 rules, 50 dancers were moving in unison in under 4 minutes:
Improvise moving to the music and come with an 8-count phrase.
When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.
When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.
When everyone is doing the same phrase, the exercise is over.
Chapter 3 is titled "Technology Shapes Music", subtitled "Part One: Analog". The history of analog recording devices is recounted. Ha, the 1st Edison recorders had such poor quality that they were mostly used for spoken word recordings.
The New York Times predicted that we might collect speeches
In recording music, the early analog media required the performers to modify how they would do things to fit the requirements of the media.
Our understanding of certain kinds of music, based on recordings anyway, is completely inaccurate.
This is interesting. The vibrato that is de rigueur for classical music came about to hide the off-key notes that recordings made painfully obvious?
Katz contends that before the advent of recording, vibrato added to a note was considered kitschy, tacky, and was universally frowned upon ...
Byrne also talks about a version of Wagner's Parsifal directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1982) that seemed like it might be worth a look. It appears to be on Vimeo, but it is 4:15 long.
The 1st and last analog recording and playback devices - the Edison cylinder and the cassette tape - allowed the end user to record as well as listen. Generally, the music producers, the record companies, sold more product if they were the only source of content - so early on user recording options were phased out.
The cassette tape made possible mixtapes. Everyone exchanged these with their friends.
The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.
Mixtapes were a form of potlatch - the Native American custom by which a gift given requires that a reciprocal gift be received in the future.
[I have made only 2 mixtapes in my life - my favorite songs by Fats Waller, and my favorite songs by Django Reinhardt, at the request of a guitarist friend of mine. Those aren't really mixtapes. I would not know where to begin to create a small selection of the music in my collection. Even given a theme, there's just so much good stuff. My kids have given me great mixtapes. Maybe it's a skill I should work on. I'm pretty good at coming up with set lists for bands I've played in, that seems similar, I wonder why I find the creation of a mixtape off-putting.]
Byrne ends the chapter discussing how the dissemination of music creates cyclic homogenization.
Pop music can be thrown off its axis by some previously unknown and talented rapper from the projects. And then the homogenization process begins again.
...
Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.
Chapter 4 is titled "Technology Shapes Music", subtitled "Part Two: Digital". Hmmm, CDs were the 1st digital medium, followed by mp3s. Ha ha, interesting, in the early days of digital recordings, a doctor treating psychotics with music found that "When his test subjects are played digital music, they get agitated and twitchy."
Byrne talks about digital composition, including MIDI. Yay, there is hope for us human musicians!
But some instruments elude capture. Guitars aren't easily quantifiable in this way, nor are wind, brass, or most bowed string instruments. So far, the nuances of those instruments have been just too tricky to capture.
Hmmm, is this a form of a race to the bottom? A local minimum hiding a global minimum?
As soon as technology makes one thing easier, it leaves a host of alternatives in the dust.
Chapter 5 is titled "Infinite Choice: The Power of Curation". I was excited to see the title of this chapter - I love curating my music and my books! Here is the 1st line of the chapter:
Endless choice is no choice.
A simple statement like this, you want to say, "that's so obvious, it must be true". But I'm not sure this statement is true, it seems more like something that is said for effect.
In the very next sentence, Byrne mentions that, at least in music, we have achieved post-scarcity utopia! Yay!
In an age of glut, when huge quantities of music are available, the issue for consumers is no longer access but how one finds music that is of interest.
This is an interesting point. It reminds me of the t-shirt that my oldest daughter gave me at one point: "I listen to bands that don't exist yet".
We want the illusion of free will, that some aspect of what we listen to is our choice.
Byrne posits
four kinds of music discovery and curation: recommendation by experts, by the music itself, by social and cultural forces (often managed by algorithms), and by narrative and context.
Talking about the music selection algorithms, Byrne returns to the "free will" concepts:
We're more predictable than we admit, which is why these things work, but the ecstasy in joining the collective pulls against the urge to feel special.
As my t-shirt says, we "feel special" when we discover the cool new band 1st and then the collective follows us.
Hmmm, I thought that the Music Genome Project which powers Pandora had an academic component, apparently not.
[From my personal experience, in the early years of Amazon, I ordered a Counting Crows album. Amazon then said, "If you like Counting Crows, you should check out The Band". I'm like, WTF!, The Band is possibly my favorite band of all time! But, look at the details of the 2 bands: southern rock, mostly guitar based but with mandolin and squeeze box. Counting Crows is indeed a child of The Band, 25 years later.
The 1st time I used Pandora, I was completely blown away. I picked an artist, it gave me an outstanding selection of similar music. I'm asking myself, "Why are you spending so much time curating your music when this is so good?". Answer is, I enjoy curation.]
Chapter 6 is titled "In the Recording Studio". Early on, total emphasis on separating instruments to make things easy for the sound engineer doing the mixing. I just noticed 1 of the sections is titled "Modular Music" - in music as in software, anytime you are creating composite structures, modularity of your components is key. In software, it is key because it maximizes maintainability. In music, seems more like, it makes the sound engineer's job easier.
Here's an interesting anecdote about what is probably my favorite Talking Heads' song: "Once In A Lifetime":
One or two fragments that I used - the repetition of the phrase "You may find yourself", for example - were straight lifts from the radio preacher
A great video too, let's include it here.
Byrne talks about "Paris, An African City" and "New York, The Secret Latin City" as musical influences.
The vaguely melancholy melodies over the syncopated grooves - typical of Latin music - was attractive as an emotionally liberating combination.
This is really interesting - who knew?
Much Latin music has a framework referred to as the clave (the key), which sometimes isn't even played or audibly articulated by any one instrument. (What a beautiful concept that is: the most important part is invisible!) The clave divides the measures into a three-beat and a two-beat pattern - for rockers it's like a Bo Diddley beat, or the Buddy Holly song "Not Fade Away." (Rock and roll didn't just come from country and blues mixing; there was Latin flavor in there too!) All the other parts, even the horns and the vocals, acknowledge the clave pattern and play with awareness of it, even if it isn't always audible.
So these songs are actually not particularly 4/4 time, they are more like 8/4 time.
Byrne talks about recording moving from the studio to the home, but he notes
The mixing, however. was still done in a "real" studio. A fresh set of ears at that stage can be useful, as one tends to fall in love with parts for reasons no one else can actually hear.
Chapter 7 is titled "Collaborations". Ha ha, here's the 1st paragraph:
The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos. This wasn't intended as a compliment - though, to be honest, it's not that far from the truth. Contrary to their insinuation, I am fairly picky about who I collaborate with, but I am also willing to work with people you might not expect me to. I'll risk disaster because the creative rewards of a successful collaboration are great. I've been doing it all my life.
[I greatly enjoyed his recent collaboration with St. Vincent (Annie Clark), of whom I am also a fan. The background was mostly horns, arranged by Lexington native and Dunbar graduate Kelly Pratt, a friend of my oldest daughter the graphic designer.]
I like Byrne's take on improvisation.
So by improvisation I don't mean long meandering guitar solos. Quite the opposite. Ours were more about hunting and pecking with the aim of "finding" short, sonic, modular pieces.
I found this next paragraph very insightful, and maybe inspirational as well. I've always told people that lots of software developers are also musicians because both are about patterns.
If music can be regarded as an organizing principle - and in this case one that places equal weight on melody, rhythm, texture, and harmony - then we start to see metaphors everywhere we look. All kinds of natural phenomena are "musical." And I don't mean they make sounds, but rather that they organize themselves, and patterns become evident. Forms and themes arise, express themselves, repeat, mutate, and then become submerged again. The daily street ballet that Jan Jacobs wrote about, and the hustle and bustle of an outdoor market, are each a kind of music. Stars, bugs, running water, the chaotic tangle of vegetation. Musicians playing together find a kind of symbiotic relationship between one another and an interplay between their parts, so that the interlocking and interweaving create a sonic fabric.
Byrne posits a heuristic for remote collaboration that I think applies to all collaboration. It certainly applied to working on a team of software developers.
The unwritten rule in these remote collaborations is, for me, "Leave the other person's stuff alone as much as you possibly can."
This was an odd piece of arcana - regarding Carmen Miranda's headdresses?!?!?
There was some deeply profound shit secreted in those headdresses, and Veloso alluded to it obliquely in his lyrics.
Another insightful and maybe inspirational passage from Byrne.
... I was also reading a book by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell, about the almost utopian social transformations that sometimes emerge out of disasters and revolutions - citizens spontaneously and selflessly helping one another after traumatic events ... All these events have in common a magical and all too brief moment when class and other social differences vanish, and a common humanity becomes evident. These moments often last only a few days, but they have a profound and lasting impact on the participants, who witness a door cracked open a little to reveal a better world, one whose existence they never forget.
The final section of this chapter is titled "Emergent Storytelling". It contains a really interesting algorithm for writing song lyrics. I have left this page dogeared, I might have to give this a try.
Chapter 8 is titled "Business and Finance". It is subtitled "Distribution & Survival Options for Musical Artists". Byrne gives quite a detailed analysis of how one made and now makes a living in the music industry, and the role played by record companies. He also provides actual $$$ figures for some of his projects.
Manufacturing and distribution costs are approaching zero
Artists no longer get big advances
Performing is now viewed as a source of income
He then delineates "Six Distribution Models With Different Levels Of Artist Control", ranked from least to most artist control. He discusses each model in depth.
The 360• Deal
Standard Royalty Deal
License Deal
Profit-Share Deal
P & D (or M & D) Deal - production & distribution, or manufacturing & distribution
Self-Distribution
Chapter 9 is titled "How to Make a Scene". This is really kind of different. He goes back to the club where Talking Heads got their start, CBGB in the East Village, and attempts to identify what it was that made this place successful. He defines 8 rules:
There must be a venue that is of appropriate size and location in which to present new material
The artists should be allowed to play their own material
Performing musicians must get in for free on their off nights (and maybe get free beer too)
There must be a sense of alienation from the prevailing music scene
Rent must be low - and it just stay low
Bands must be paid fairly
Social transparency must be encouraged
It must be possible to ignore the band when necessary
Byrne provides sketches of CBGB - it is tiny! [I don't think I've ever played in a place this small - maybe Green Lantern before it acquired the space next door.]
Very interesting stuff. [#8 definitely disagrees with at least 1 open mic I've played at that insisted on silence during performances.]
#3 is interesting in that it implies that there is a cover charge for admission. [There is now a saxophonist/sound man in Lexington who moved down from Brooklyn a few years ago. He was running a jazz jam and charging a $5 cover, including on the jammers. When questioned on it, he said, "Hell, in Brooklyn, it would be a $5 cover and a 2 drink minimum". Ha ha, he was reminded that this wasn't Brooklyn (hipster capital of the universe).] I wonder how much these rules apply to smaller cities?
Chapter 10 is titled "Amateurs!". [Although I consider myself a semi-pro musician (I occasionally get paid), I think that I am included in this chapter.] I think this chapter can be summarized as Byrne contrasting high culture (classical music, opera, ballet) vs low culture (pop music, dance, etc) - or 1% culture vs "the rest of us" culture.
He also addresses again the desire of Capitalism for us to be music consumers instead of music producers. He addresses the question of, is there something ineffable, magic, inexplicable in music? This reminds me of lazy evolutionary psychologists who make this contention about the human mind. And he addresses Great Man Theory as it applies to music - and IP nazis. A wide reaching and evolutionarily sound chapter, I think!
He starts by returning to the theme of Chapter 1 - that music is part of its environment.
The arts don't exist in a vacuum. And, of all the arts, music, being ephemeral, is the closest to being an experience more that it is a thing - it is yoked to where you heard it, how much you paid for it, and who else was there.
He doesn't particularly think it's a "vast conspiracy", but he clearly unhappy with our culture's approach to music.
The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don't want us to enjoy making things for ourselves - they'd prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. ... Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive.
Here is the 1st mention of Great Man Theory.
In the modern age, though, people have come to feel that art and music are the product of individual effort rather than something that emerges from a community. The meme of the solitary genius is powerful, and it has affected the way we think about how our culture came into being.
Here is the 1st IP mention. Cory Doctorow would definitely be onboard.
Much technology in contemporary culture, in which creative tinkering by non-professionals has been crippled by the efforts of computer and software companies, and by the enforcers and lobbyists behind copyright and intellectual-property laws, displays this same tendency. Amateur music makers have had to take a backseat. So much for the market catering to the will of the people!
I did not know that in 1906 John Phillip Sousa wrote an essay titled "The Menace of Mechanical Music". He was really afraid amateur music would disappear completely! This was another interesting thought from Sousa, agreeing with Byrne's "music + environment" ideas.
Sousa is saying that the gaps between performances might in some ways be just as important - socially, at least - as the performances themselves.
On high art vs low art, Byrne quotes John Carey, an English literary critic, who calls out veneration of high art as class-based.
Meanings ... are not inherent in objects. They are supplied by those who interpret them. High art is that which appeals to the minority whose social rank places them above the struggle for mere survival.
...
One is saying, "What I feel is more valuable than what you feel." In assuming that high art makes life worth living, there is an inherent arrogance toward the mass of people who don't partake of such forms ... and an assumption that their lives are not worth as much, not as full. The religion of art makes people worse - because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic.
Ha ha, I liked the story about an artist showing western masterpieces to folks in rural Thailand. They didn't get much out of it. "the great Western masterpieces simply are not the transformative icons they are considered to be back home."
Supporting high art has also been a way for the nouveau rich or those with questionable sources of income to try to legitimize themselves socially. Take, for instance, the Koch brothers paying to help remodel the Lincoln Center in NYC.
Someone who supports "good" music must be a good person, too. (I have no idea why the Mafia dons and the narco-gangsters haven't wised up to this idea. Wouldn't you love to see the Joey Bananas opera hall?)
Interesting, Byrne mentions the Japanese tea ceremony as a flavor of amateur art.
utilitarian objects and activities, made and performed with integrity, consciously and mindfully, could be art.
There is a very interesting story about a music education program in a favela outside Rio de Janeiro helping to transform young men's lives, keeping them out of gangs.
Music is indeed a moral force, but mostly when it is part of the warp and woof of an entire community.
...
From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he is no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress, heading for a professional level, who'll later become a citizen.
Also referenced is an art program in UK prisons.
He claims that the remedy for violence is an agency that will defeat feelings of impotence. Historically, religion has successfully done this, and the rise of fundamentalism might be viewed as a reaction to incresing feelings of alienation and inconsequentiality around the world. Making music might act as a antidote to those feelings too, as those cultural and music centers in the Brazilian favelas attest. In those UK prisons, the quality of the work is beside the point, as it was in Brazil. And unlike religion, no one has ever gone to war over music.
Not sure about that last statement. What about the East Coast vs the West Coast rappers?
Byrne finishes the chapter again touting creation over consumption.
In my opinion, though, it's more important that someone learn to make music, draw, photograph, write, or create in any form, regardless of the quality, than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol, or Bill Shakespeare - to say nothing of opera as it is today.
Chapter 11, the last, is titled "Harmonia Mundi".
"You are the music, while the music lasts."
- T. S. Eliot
So far, we've covered how music is distributed, how it's affected by architecture, and a lot more, but who do we need music? Does it even matter? Where did it come from?
In this chapter, Byrne recounts some of the history of thinking about music, and provides some information on how it works in our brains. We learn about frequency and harmonics, Pythagoras, the Music of the Spheres. Ha ha, Bode's Law, which predicts the spacing of the planets, "gives a series of orbital ratios, which are mathematically identical to the common intervals in musical theory. They're variations on what we call the [C]7th chord, C, E, G, B flat". This leads Byrne to quip
You might say the universe plays the blues.
[I personally prefer 9th chords over 7ths for the blues.]
The 2 sections "Biology and the Neurological Basis for Music" and "Music and Emotion" did not do much for me, as with books I have read on these subjects. I will stick with my Darwin meme.
Ha ha, talking about all the places music is included in our lives, Byrne says he wants to hear "toilet-training songs" - he must not have seen Daniel Tiger.
I was surprised by this statement, which I have said many times.
moving liturgical music away from its original Latin - a language almost no one understands anymore - diminishes some of its power and mystery. The Church inevitably loses some of its deep cosmic power when the hymns are written in languages everyone speaks.
Byrne discusses a proposal by Marshall McLuhan
that after the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, we shifted from an acoustic culture to a visual one. He said that in acoustic culture, the world, like sound, is all around you, and comes at you from all directions at once. It is multilayered and non-hierarchical; it has no center or focal point.
Visual culture has perspective - a vanishing point, a direction. In visual culture an image is in one very specific fixed spot; it's in front of you. It isn't everywhere at once.
That's interesting, some psychoarcheology, reminiscent of TOOCITBOTBM. But I doubt the relative distribution of the 11 Mbps of the human sensorium (more here), has changed from 10Mbps vision, .5Mpbs hearing, .5Mbps everything else. So at what layer in the human mind did this change occur?
This was interesting, on Muzak and background music.
The dynamics (the changes in volume level), and even the higher and lower pitches, were ironed out. It seemed as if Muzak had sucked the soul out of the songs, but in fact they had created something entirely new, something close to what Satie imagined: furniture music, music that was clearly a useful and (to their subscribers) functional part of the environment, there to induce calm and tranquility in their shops and offices.
...
The concept of a musical soporific doesn't work across the board, though. Not every activity is improved by adding a soundtrack. I can't listen to music while I write this, though I have friends who have music playing constantly in their studios while they paint, do Photoshop work, or design web pages. But my attention is always drawn to music.
[I don't listen to music in the mornings - I like quiet in the morning, and I particularly dislike the sound of human voices in the morning. I turn on music when I start making lunch and leave it on until after supper. I particularly like music on while I am cooking - definitely a soundtrack. I turn it off if I am playing music. I have often said that I think my CPU runs a bit hot and that the music acts as a null job, soaking up some of the excess cycles.]
Getting towards the end, Byrne ponders:
If music is inherent in all things and places, then why not let music play itself?
Nice! The last section of the book is titled "Cheesecake", after the description of music as "auditory cheesecake" by one of my favorite writers, Steven Pinker (most recently blogged here), with whom Byrne appeared onstage during a book tour.
Pinker mused in an email to me as we were planning our conversation, "I wonder whether music might be innate, not as a self-contained mental organ but rather as a consequence of the way that language, rhythm, emotion, and acoustic analysis are packed into the brain."
When we move, perform, or play music in unison, we lose ourselves in a way that is psychologically pleasureable. [Or, as my youngest daughter said after the 1st time she sang with a full band at a jam, "Dad, playing in a band is really fun, isn't it?"]
...
we don't dance because we're human as much as we are human because we dance.
Again, a great read, so many different views of and concepts relating to music. Definitely check it out.
I had finished 3 science fiction novels, time to blog them, but then the latest Charlie Stross novel came in, so I went on and read that too. All 4 novels are part of ongoing series.
1st up, the 7th Expanse Novel, "Persepolis Rising", by James. S. A. Corey, 2017, 560 pages. The SyFy channel has done a great job adapting these novels to TV. The authors seem to having fun mining various genres of space opera. It started as Earth vs Mars vs the Asteroid Belt political intrigue and skirmishing being interrupted by a extrasolar bioweapon. Then it transitioned to a story of an ancient network of gates to 100s of habitable worlds, so lots of opportunities there, with 100s of worlds to work with. The latest installment is about a Great Man with a vision to create a galactic empire. It's well done, and this story line will take another novel or 2 to play out. What genre will they go onto next? But, they jumped 20 years into the future for this one, so our main characters are noticeably getting old, such that maybe they aren't going to continue it that much longer.
2nd, the 3rd novel of the Confluence series, "The Druid Gene", by Jennifer Foehner Wells, 2016, 435 pages. These are only available on Kindle. She has retitled the book to "Inheritance" to be more consistent with the others in the series. Oh, Ms. Foehner says on her website: "It needed to join the series so that people would read them in order." This story is set in the same universe as the others, and references the event stream of the other stories briefly toward the end. I had been thinking, I hadn't read any sci-fi lately with lots of weird aliens - yey, weird aliens! The story moves along well, Ms. Wells' writing continues to improve. The 4th novel in this series "Valence" is out now, I have purchased it, I will probably wait a while to check it out.
3rd, the 3rd novel of the Terra Ignota series, "The Will to Battle", by Ada Palmer, 2017, 348 pages. Dr. Palmer continues to blow one's mind. A character who is The God of another universe visiting our God, and events that are totally best described as supernatural miracles, as the future near-utopia continues to unravel. Our totally untrustworthy narrator of the 1st 2 books is joined by The Reader and Thomas Hobbes of "Leviathan" fame to provide additional narrative. Dr. Palmer shows that she has no respect for any convention whatsoever when these narrators start talking to the characters in the story??? She has already broken the 4th wall, which wall is that? One of the most creative (and informational) writers of recent years.
I downloaded "Leviathan" from Apple for free, but I don't think I'll read it, I think I will read the Wikipedia article instead. I also purchased from Apple The Collected Works of Voltaire. I think I will give "Candide" a try, and maybe skim his Philosophical Dictionary.
4th and last, "Dark State", by Charles Stross, 2017, 341 pages, the 2nd novel of the Empire Games series, which is the 2nd series in the Merchant Princes universe. Wow, a 2nd-order series! Plenty of precedent - hah, the 1 that immediately springs to mind are the 2 Amber series that Roger Zelazny did - which these Stross stories reminded me of when I 1st started the series. Hmmm, Charlie moved forward 20 years for this 2nd series, as did The Expanse authors. I wonder why 20 years? Just coincidence, or close to the 22 year (tarot) cycles of life?
So we have a lot of intrigue amongst the parallel earths, but overall the plot doesn't seem to advance that much. Stross obliquely shares his alarm at the panopticon we seem to be moving towards here in the real world. I always enjoy Charlie's writing. We again encounter the ghost of Hobbes, and get a Kafka reference - and a plug for Universal Basic Income.
Another morsel of human food, gulped into the belly of a Hobbesian beast.
...
like the shed carapace of a cyborg Gregor Samsa.
Hmmm, I use Amazon for page counts of the books - Kobo doesn't always show the page count. So the last 2 both under 350 pages long? Meanwhile, the Wells story was 435 pages? I would have guessed under 300. And the new Expanse was 560? Sure didn't seem that long. Let's check the Kindle file sizes; 1st, 2855 KB; 2nd, 4702 KB; 3rd, 4269 KB; 4th, File Size: 4480 KB. That makes no sense either. How to get an accurate page count?
Not sure what to read next. I'll clear the magazine stack and then decide. After some initial technical difficulties, the iPad apps for Sky & Telescope, Scientific American, and Wired seem to work pretty well now (no jinx!). Still having to read Technology Review online.
We have a family tradition of doing jigsaw puzzles over the winter holidays, going back at least a decade. My 3 daughters are always involved, my wife usually, my son sometimes, me not so much.
Last year I screwed up - I bought 3 2000 piece puzzles. 2000 pieces is too many - very little progress was made.
So this year, I bought a 1000 piece puzzle that my wife and I had seen at the Portland (OR) Fine Arts Museum when we were visiting our daughter in Oregon in August. I didn't want to fly the puzzle home, so I took a picture of it, found it on Amazon, and had it shipped to FL.
There was also a suggestion to get a 500 piece puzzle, so I got one of those from Amazon as well. And finally, my son and his wife gifted another 1000 piecer.
The 500 piece puzzle was titled "Barcelona". My 3 daughters made short work of it, finishing it in an afternoon.
Next up was the 1000 piecer from our son, "Wanderer's Cove". It was interesting in that it was based on a night scene. My wife and I did it in around 4 days.
I figured I'd go on and do the other 1000 piecer. (Yes, I am definitely retired). It took me 11 days. Its title is "Geometric Herb Garden".
Doing it on my own, I payed attention to the solution algorithm:
Sort the interior pieces by color and pattern while sorting out the edges and corners. Both 1000 piece puzzles I missed 3-5 edges during this sort.
Put the edges and corners together.
Add interior pieces based on the most distinct patterns and colors. The garden puzzle has ~42 different patterns/regions. Because the puzzle has perspective, the top (further away) sections were less distinct and harder to match.
Finish it off - when you have mostly only a few colors left - by sorting the remaining pieces into the 6 shapes of interior piece and matching based on shape.
The picture below shows the 6 shapes of interior pieces and the 4 shapes of edge pieces. The number at the start of each row is the number of "outies" on the piece, the number over each piece is the number of unique rotations of that piece. There are 16 total interior piece rotations (2^4) and 8 total edge piece rotations (2^3). Corners can have 3 shapes: 0, 1 (2 rotations), and 2 outies - 4 rotations total, 2^2; the garden puzzle had all 4 corners as 1 outie pieces.
So in step 4, a completely enclosed missing piece can be matched by only 1 shape. A missing piece enclosed by 3 pieces can be matched by only 2 shapes; bordered by 2 pieces, 3 shapes; bordered by 1 piece, 5 shapes.
Ha ha, yes, I am definitely retired. Plenty of time to fiddle with numbers. I'm sure there is much can be learned about jigsaw puzzles - say from this very informational Wikipedia article - around since 1760, who knew? - but it is nice to not have to be serious about everything.
Oh, I almost forgot. I took a picture of the garden puzzle every day and then used Gimp to create an animated gif. I didn't do a very good job, but here it is nonetheless.
I started a post on these topics, but then, accessing my exocortex (== reading old blog posts), I felt like I had said it all in earlier posts - no point in duplicating.
But, I think this a concise statement of my current thinking on economics.
A comment on this FB post.
Yes. We moved from Capitalism 1.0 to Capitalism 2.0, from an economy of scarcity to 1 of abundance, in the 1950's. That was when advertising shifted into hyperdrive to convince people to buy things they didn't need. For f#ck's sake, go into any Bed, Bath, & Beyond, Costco, Lowe's, Kroger - and realize that these stores are replicated 1 to several times in every major US (world?) city - and tell me that there is NOT enough to go around.
Keynes predicted that around 2030, capitalism would have done its job - produced enough capital that the human race can meet the needs of all its members - such that it (capitalism) could be retired.
I believe we are there. THERE IS ENOUGH TO GO AROUND. We just need to retire capitalism and come up with a more effective accounting system whose purpose is to optimize the outcome of EVERY human being, of EVERY human child - not just the 0.001% and their offspring.
Sigh. Writing this post to be able to link to a PDF of an email from my senior "representative" Mitch McConnell.
I am so discouraged when I get emails telling me to "contact your representatives" on issues, I mostly don't bother.
Here are my representatives:
Senior Senator and Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, aka McTurtle. He was so proud of being the master of Senate strategy. Now that he has shown all the hidden aces, burned it all down, and basically converted the Senate, from being the Higher Chamber, into yet another completely partisan echo chamber, is he still proud? I sure hope not, I hope he burns in (secular) hell.
Also, I will not dignify the many rumors from the late 70's, when I lived in Louisville, that he was a pederast.
Junior Senator Random Paul. The Senate's token libertarian. "They call him Random Paul because you never know what he's going to say next." Very occasionally, based on the fine Libertarian principles he absorbed sitting on his racist pappy's knee, he will randomly come down on the right side of an issue. Yay?
Andy Barr. Teabagger par excellence. The 1st time he ran in 2010 they interviewed him, "what are you reading". His answer: "Atlas Shrugged". Of course.
On the Finance Committee, so as a matter of SOP collects annually ~<=$1M from Wall Street. Has great newsletters, kisses many babies, and is totally competent at parroting each day's Faux "News" talking points.
He lost the 1st time he ran against Blue Dog Dem Andy Chandler in 2010. Surprising, as 2010 was the 1st Teabagger (racist cracker) backlash wave against BHO. But then he won in 2012. Beat a female educator in 2014, and a female minister in 2016, to both of whom I donated $$$. [Note, I have donated $$$ to ~10 political candidates over the last 10 years, and the ONLY ONE who won was BHO. So, tempted to discontinue donations (unless for BHO).]
Also running, State Rep Reggie Thomas, very upbeat, very transparent (very nice newsletter), kisses babies.
Then, Jim Gray, extremely competent, very popular 2 term mayor of Lexington, 2nd largest US city with an openly gay mayor, announces for the seat.
The night before he got elected mayor, Monday night, my wife and I were waiting for the best live music in Lexington to start at Tee Dee's Progressive Club.
So, 9ish, Tee Dee is chatting with us at our table, when he looks up and says, "Uh oh, politician." Jim Gray and 2-3 of his staffers had just come in the door. Tee Dee left us to settle them out, but Jim Gray definitely got my vote on Tuesday.
Gray is self financing, so I will give him no $$$. But, Ms. McGrath is supposed to call me back for more $$$, I will give it to her if she will assure me that she will run a clean race, the main objective of which is to defeat that asshole Barr, regardless of who is the candidate.
Also, Barr has beaten 2 female candidates in a row. scary to run a 3rd against him, fighter pilot or not. But does a gay man or a black man have a better chance to beat Barr? That is all I care about, to get rid of the Teabagger asshole. Well, after the Dem primary, I guess I won't have to worry about that.
So here's the letter I got back from Mitch re requesting he support net neutrality. Current FCC chair did such a great thing getting rid of those pesky Net Neutrality regulations. Back to rapacious capitalism in 10th gear! As Jebus intended it!
"Autonomous" is the 1st novel of well-known geek (technology) writer Annalee Newitz, 2017, 304 pages. I think I have read some of her geek pieces and liked them. This definitely felt like a 1st novel. I will recommend it, but, I was very disappointed by the ... yucky - and not-very futuristic - future it represented. YAD - Yet Another Dystopia - sigh. The book just seemed off.
The plot is basically IP pirates versus the dastardly International Property Coalition (IPC) and Big Pharma in 2144, 127 years in the future. The IPC violently enforces patents and copyrights - which is pretty hard in a world with 3d printers, molecular fabbers, etc. I found it hard to believe that such a stupid system would still exist that far in the future.
2 of the main narrative threads follow a team of 2 IPC agents, 1 a robot, who are displayed in a disturbingly sympathetic light, given the fact that they kidnap, torture, and murder in the name of the IPC. But, they're in love, so it's OK?!?!?
Meanwhile, the main pirate Jack, who I guess is the good guy, is not much better. She murders an intruder just a few pages into the book and doesn't seem to think anything of it - no discernible remorse, no PTSD. The human march to less violence and more civility documented by Steven Pinker seems to have somehow been totally reversed. The comic book abruptness and lack of emotional depth around this murder was when I totally concluded "1st novel".
The society they live in is also pretty abhorrent. Robots gained sentience maybe 40 years before. But they are forced into indentured servitude until they pay for the cost of their manufacture - plus they get "company stored" such that their servitude stretches out indefinitely. And, if robots are sentient like humans and they can be enslaved, it only makes sense to enslave humans as well! Ugh!
And as a follow up, if you cannot pay for a "franchise" in the place you are born, then you must of course sell yourself for the right to live. So the default birth state of, what, the bottom 80% of humans and all robots, is slavery. Ugh and double ugh!
1 of the semi-likable characters - who is brutally tortured and murdered as seems to be the most common form of interaction in the book - identifies the source of their dystopia:
But now we know there has been no one great disaster — only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.
With the stuff I have read about Postcapitalism and Capitalism 3.0, this bleak future where apparently all human rights have been sacrificed to capitalism is disappointing and discouraging.
Also disappointing was the IPC assassin, who upon feeling attraction to his robot partner whom he initially identifies as male, asserts that he is not a "faggot". Seriously, the breakneck progress being made on gender and personhood issues in the last 5-10 years, and 127 years in the future, this is an attitude???
Another thing that rang false to me was the standard robot-to-robot handshake sequence, which we get multiple times:
Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using the AF protocol.
Paladin replied that he could use the latest AF protocol, version 7.7.
Let’s do it. I’m Blazer. Here are my identification credentials. Here comes my data. Please leave your vehicle here. You may continue inside. That is the end of my data.
Maybe this is just a very verbose English translation of Robotese, but it wasn't presented as such. It seems pretty damn inefficient for 200 years of software advancement.
The descriptions of the robots' mental processes seemed to be way too anthropomorphic to me. I far preferred the "foreign and ineffable" AIs of "Void Star", Zachary Mason's 1st novel, which I blogged about last time - or even those of "Neuromancer" 33 years ago.
I did find this little bit interesting, about how the robot feels after getting its autonomy key installed:
It gave her a peculiar kind of double consciousness, even in real time: She felt things, and knew simultaneously that those feelings had been installed, just like the drivers for her new arm.
Overall, the pacing of the book was not bad, and the conclusion relatively satisfying. But, I really feel like Newitz can do better. And, please, not so depressing next time - try a bright, shiny future instead!
p.s. I hate writing negative reviews :-( And given that Stephenson and Gibson both gave this book a glowing review, maybe my disappointment is just a sign that I am getting old. Oh well, it beats the alternative.
2nd up, "The Dispatcher", by John Scalzi, 2017, 128 pages (a novella). An interesting concept - anyone murdered 99.9% of the time comes back to life naked in their bed in their state of 2 hours prior - is explored and turned into a cheap detective story. Accept the premise, and it is another quick and enjoyable read.
3rd up, "Tool of War", by Paolo Bacigalupi, 2017, 385 pages. 3rd in the series that went from "Shipbreaker" (blogged here) to "The Drowned Cities" (blogged here). Tool, an "augment" - humans genetically engineered with various predator DNA to make them unstoppable, yet obedient, warriors - who breaks his obedience conditioning, is back. It's a fast moving, action-packed story, featuring the characters of the other 2 novels. Another very good read.
4th up, "Void Star", by Zachary Mason, 2017, 401 pages. I greatly enjoyed Mason's 1st book "The Lost Books of the Oddessey" (blogged here) - I still don't get how it is referred to as a novel, it sure seemed like 44 short stories to me.
"Void Star" is a straight-up sci-fi novel which strongly reminded me of "Neuromancer", but more like Neuromancer v4.0. Set 20-50 years in the future, the main protagonist is an AI-whisperer. As one would expect, AIs are completely foreign & ineffable and interact with the human world in many odd ways. So we have 4 protagonists, 3 with memory-recording implants, a 150 YO gazillionaire with immortality in his sights, and lots of action leading to an exciting conclusion. The last several (of 77) chapters have various of the characters getting their consciousness rebooted and repeating events and words eerily.
This is the best thing I've read in several months, I strongly recommend it. Here's some random excerpts with language that I liked.
She often saw people getting dressed, men bucking in the confined space to get their legs into pants, women putting on makeup or stockings, anonymity substituting for privacy. [People getting dressed in self-driving cars.]
...
in the technical world’s uppermost reaches, autistic symptoms have a certain cachet, ambitious young men affecting the inability to look one in the eye and a total innocence of the world
...
Her hand finds a stone on the asphalt, grips it—she grinds her fingers into its surface, savoring its texture, reminding herself that she is here, in this morning, in the world, not lost in the pages of some vast and secret book.
...
"Proust’s madeleines have got nothing on me. It’s madeleines all the way down."
...
The barista is friendly but his hair is sculpted into planes and spines that suggest nothing so much as a lionfish, and she feels old because instead of implying some extraordinarily specific cultural fealty his hair just reads as an elaborate waste of time.
...
A detached, musical female voice recites an endless list of airport codes, gate numbers, times, but it’s strange, because she knows all the codes, these are codes for airports that don’t exist.
Well, I'm glad that's over. I decided I wanted to read some fantasy, so I plowed through the Paul Park tetralogy: "A Princess of Roumania", 2005, 480 pages; "The Tourmaline", 2006, 352 pages; "The White Tyger", 2007. 304 pages; and "The Hidden World", 2008, 384 pages. 1520 pages total. These stories had many glowing recommendations, in particular by John Crowley and Kim Stanley Robinson, both of whom I greatly respect. Park does indeed write well - he teaches a course in writing at Williams College - but I am still really glad to be done with the series.
It is set in an alternative universe where magic works, allowing conjurers to enter 2 additional planes, the hidden world and the land of the dead, and to summon demons, among other things. The world seems stuck around World War I; the British Isles are gone due to earthquakes; America is unexplored beyond the Hudson; and the dominant world center for development & technology is Abyssinia (nice!).
The dozen or so major characters are mostly well developed - there is some inexplicable behavior, but not too much. One of the major characters is a young woman,
a mostly male soldier, and a dog. Nice!
But the plotting seems odd. At times major events happen, but you're not quite sure they did. A somewhat interesting universe, but the story is really not that engrossing, and very slow at times. The 2nd 1/2 of the 1st book is spent by some of the characters trying to travel 40 miles west to Albany. They barely get started, and never come vaguely close to Albany.
It's interesting how much a part feudalism plays in so much fantasy. The long lost princess, etc., etc. The Germans, who are mostly the bad guys for the 1st half of the series or so, are pushing rationality and maybe even The Enlightenment. The princess' noble family, of course, believes in republican ideals.
But you see this in sci fi too. The Atreides in "Dune" were lovable fascists, but they were fascists none the less, just like the unlovable fascist Harkonnens.
Let's do Music Out 1st. Steve & Chris played Bigg Blue Martini 2x in September, and Patchen Pub September 30. The next gig we had booked was J. Render's Southern Table & Bar November 25, the Saturday after Xgiving. Really wanted something for October and/or early November. So was very pleased when Friday September 29 Kristen from Grillfish called to book us for the next Friday, October 6. This will make 3 weekends in a row that we have had a gig, so I am feeling like I have done a better job of hustling us up gigs. Hopefully we can get Patchen or Grillfish again for early November.
Moving on, to 2 months of Music In. A meta-comment here. I rate albums mostly 3 or 4 stars. Occasionally a 2 star, for something I was given, or a local artist who asked me to buy their album. My iTunes currently has 19,337 tracks in it. 3 star and up, 16,022 tracks, is what would go on my iPod. 4 stars & up, 4,781 tracks, is what would go on my iPhone, which now is mostly what I listen to, via Bluetooth, in my car.
But I recently upgraded my phone from an iPhone 5 to an iPhone 7, and from 64 GB storage to 256 GB storage. So now, I could put pretty much all my music (2 star & up is 17.594 tracks, 105 GB) on my phone. But, I am keeping the distinction as is.
However, knowing that I'm not going to overflow my phone with 4 star tunes, as I was before the upgrade, has resulted in some grade inflation. Even if an album is somewhat disappointing and no catchy tunes have jumped out at me, if I feel it has potential, I will go with 4 stars rather than 3.
Broken Social Scene, "Hug Of Thunder", 2017. Very energetic, a nice album, 4 stars. More commentary in the following item. Here's track 2.
Arcade Fire, "Everything Now", 2017. So we have 2 of the big 3 of Canadian large rock bands: Broken Social Scene (Toronto), and Arcade Fire (Montreal). The 3rd, New Pornographers (Vancouver), I believe we had last Music In. I think this Arcade Fire album is the weakest of the 3. But, for potential and inflation, I will rate it 4 stars. Ha ha, trying to find a track to leave, #2 "Everything Now", totally sounds like Abba. Wow, listening to all the tracks & not being able to find 1 I really want to share => 3 stars, not 4. Down it goes.
Gene Clark, "No Other", 1974. Ripping the 1st 4 Byrds albums, I realized that the songs I liked the best were not the Dylan or Roger McGuinn tunes - they were the Gene Clark tunes. "She Don't Care About Time", is a perfect example, completely catchy pop with great harmony vocals. So I thought I should check out his solo work after leaving the Byrds in early 1966.
Reading his Wikipedia page, his solo album that seemed to be best received was "No Other", 1974. Only 8 tracks. I was initially disappointed, because, like The Byrds, he seems to have turned to country rock rather than catchy pop. But the album grew on me after several listens, to where it got 4 stars. Here's track 4, "Strength of Strings".
Gene Clark & The Gosdin Brothers, "Gene Clark With The Gosdin Brothers", 1967. After mostly failing to find catchy pop tunes with "No Other", I thought, well, let's go back to Gene Clark's 1st effort after leaving The Byrds, which lead me to this album. 17 tracks, 4 of which are alternative versions. The Gosdin Brothers sang backup and got a bunch of credit for it. Still more early country rock than catchy pop, plus some psychedelic overtones (usually a bad sign). Still, I'll give it 4 stars. Here's a good tune.
Joni Mitchell, "Wild Things Run Fast", 1982. I noticed I was missing this Joni album. As she is the greatest female singer/songwriter of the 20th century, it behooved me to check out this album. Nothing really stood out. Incomprehensively, she includes "Unchanged Melody" to make a medley out of track #1, "Chinese Cafe". I hate medleys. 3 stars.
Isham Jones, "Swingin' Down The Lane", 1921-1947. My middle sister Carol, after having been divorced for 10 years, decided to get remarried, yay! She wanted me to sing/play a song for her wedding. I gave her the old standards I had done before, she ixnayed, suggested her favorite karaoke song (she is a karaoke queen), it was a woman's song, I would have had trouble singing it. So she then suggested this old standard. She even supplied this video, which very surprisingly included the intro. Mostly these intros get lost over the years.
So I worked it up, I thought it would be the 1st dance or something, it wound up being part of the ceremony, oops! It went fine, except for the 20 seconds I froze trying to remember the 3rd line of the 1st verse of the intro ("why do I sigh?").
I think I've mentioned before how much I love doing music archeology. I researched the song. So interesting, it was written in 1924 by Isham Jones, lyrics by Gus Kahn. Jones also wrote "You're In The Army Now" in 1917 and "I'll See You In My Dreams" in 1924.
There were no MP3 downloads available, so I ordered this CD. 23 tracks. Instrumentals are "Isham Jones & His Orchestra". Vocalists include Curt Massey, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Frank Bessinger, and the always popular Keller Sisters.
Really a lot of fun. 4 stars.
Here's a bonus video, of Curt Massey, playing with his family band The Westerners the song I sang at my dad's memorial service. It is embedded in some totally cheesy comedy, and followed by - a bouncing ball singalong, FTW!
Kaki King, "Legs to Make us Longer", 2012. Somehow I'd forgotten about Ms. King. So I decided to do some backfill. On this album she returns to guitar virtuoso type stuff, rather than edgy alternative tunes with vocals, which I prefer. Very good stuff, but, 3 stars.
Little Silver, "Somewhere You Found My Name", 2017. I think Rolling Stone recommended this album. Good album, alternative country/southern rock, but nothing totally catchy. 3 stars.
Randy Newman, "Dark Matter", 2017. This album got great reviews. Some thoughtful content, but so much of it sounds like ... a Disney movie soundtrack. So,
3 stars, but 4 for "Putin"
I play 2 Newman tunes: "You Can Leave Your Hat On", and "Have You Seen My Baby?". He writes great lyrics. I'd love to do this song, but the tempo changes make that hard. Maybe OK with Steve & Chris?
Grizzly Bear, "Painted Ruins", 2017. Probably my favorite band of the last 5 years. 2 5-star songs from them. Nothing as striking from this album. 2 weird videos so far. But they still get 4 stars based on their body of work. Here's the 1st track, "Wasted Acres".
Iron & Wine, "Beast Epic", 2017. Very listenable tunes, 4 stars. Here's "Call It Dreaming".
That makes Music In current through the end of August.
1st up, I read an Expanse novella, "Strange Dogs", 2017, 111 pages. A pretty good read. Set on one of the 1000s of colony worlds that got opened up in the 5th or so novel, it features our old friend, the protomolecule. It raises an interesting point in that the generation born to this alien world don't seem to care much about what "people on Earth" think about things.
Then, the fun. "The Lost Books of the Odyssey", by Zachary Mason, 2010, 228 pages. It is subtitled "A Novel" - it is Mason's 1st. But, it is not actually a novel. it is 44 short stories, ranging from a few to dozens of pages, all riffing on the characters and themes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The wily Odysseus features prominently in most of them. I have always been a fan of Ulysses, particularly after "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" identified him as the archetype of the post-bicameral mind, and the father of the secret sauce of the post-bicameral mind - lying.
So many different and creative imaginings of different aspects of these stories. I think my favorite was the one where Agamemnon, jealous of Odysseus' fame and reputation after the Trojan War, decides to have him assassinated. The order wends its way through the bureaucracy and winds up being assigned to the Greek's most wily and capable assassin - Odysseus!
I realized early on that this is not a book you should read straight through. I think you can appreciate the stories more if you read them a few at a time.
So to fill in the space between these stories, I downloaded the free eBook "Overview: Stories in the Stratosphere" from the Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination. The ASU group had previously done the excellent Neal Stephenson led collection "Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future", and "Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction". It is 4 stories about man in the stratosphere. It seems a little suspect to me, in that it was sponsored by a company trying to put man in the stratosphere. The 1st 3 stories were OK. The 4th one was definitely worth reading. It made a telling point about the moral peril associated with using geoengineering to fight the effects of the climate crisis, while not addressing the causes.
A personal historic note, back in the day, from 1972-1974. I worked in an X-ray astronomy group. We had the 2nd X-ray observatory on a satellite in orbit. Prior to those satellites (which have been followed by many others), stratospheric balloons were used to carry X-ray detectors above the atmosphere - the atmosphere is opaque to X-rays, so you must do X-ray astronomy from above it. Satellites were deemed to be definitely the superior technology. So to see balloons championed in some of these stories seemed a little odd to me.
I wrote another letter to the editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, submitted September 26. It's my 1st one in a while.
A letter to the editor September 26 stated that Obama "put a target on the back of every policeman". I presume that their impression came from some of our fine alternative news sources - because, in fact, according to factcheck.org in July, 2016, "Annual fatality data compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund show that there have been an average of 135 police fatalities a year under President Obama, from 2009 to 2015, compared with 162 a year for the previous seven years, from 2002 to 2008. That’s a decline of 17 percent."
I think it is impossible to underestimate the damage done to our country by the steady stream of "alternative facts", also known as lies, spewed by Faux "News", Rush, and their ilk, and now also by the White House. Hopefully people will realize they are being had, and develop some immunity to this steady stream of lies.
"With Liberty And Dividends For All" is a 2014 book by Peter Barnes. It is 193 pages long, 9 chapters with a preface and an appendix. It is subtitled "How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough". It is a quick and easy read. It can easily be read in an afternoon.
I wanted to see how Barnes' thinking had evolved since his 2006 book "Capitalism 3.0", which I just read in June and blogged here. I liked that book a lot and learned a bunch from it.
When I finished "With Liberty And Dividends For All", which I will abbreviate WLADFA, I kind of thought, well, that was like "Capitalism 3.0 Lite". It seemed much shorter, but actually it was 193 pages vs only 216. Maybe it seemed shorter because I was already familiar with most of the material.
I don't think Barnes introduces any real new concepts beyond those of "Capitalism 3.0", but he does introduce some new verbiage, some new people, and some numbers. But, all in all, I felt that "Capitalism 3.0" was much stronger, particularly for these reasons:
it seemed to have much more information about trusts and the duties, responsibilities, and legal status of trustees, and maybe did a better job of emphasizing the importance of trusts as the best way to protect The Commons;
it introduced the very important concept of "propertization" for our common wealth - important because property rights are so ingrained in our legal system; searching for "propertization" in WLADFA gives no matches.
I had also wondered (in an update to the "Capitalism 3.0 blog post in July) if Barnes had any ideas on how to empower and realize the value of the household realm of provisioning in the economy. He does not address this topic; his focus is solely on The Commons, which is not a bad thing.
I am not going to do an in-depth review/summary of this book like I usually do. I think there would be too much duplication of the "Capitalism 3.0" post. So instead, I will try just reviewing and summarizing the new stuff, and including striking passages. If you have not read my post on "Capitalism 3.0", I would recommend doing so now - I think this post will seem pretty jumbled otherwise.
New Verbiage and Facts
Would dividends from co-owned wealth mean the end of capitalism? Not at all. They would mean the end of winner-take-all capitalism, our currently dominant version, and the beginning of a more balanced version that respects all members of society, including those not yet born. This better-balanced capitalism—we could call it everyone-gets-a-share capitalism—wouldn’t solve all our problems, but it would do more than any other potential remedy to preserve our middle class, our democracy, and our planet.
I also adopt a wider-than-conventional view of the purpose of an economy. Most economists believe that ever-increasing production is the principal, if not the only, goal of an economy, because if we produce enough stuff, everything else will sort itself out. This mode of thinking made sense in the days when we lacked material goods. Those days, however, are over. Our current surplus production capacity demands two higher purposes for our economy: ensuring the security of a large middle class and synchronizing human activity with nature. Neither of these objectives arises automatically from producing more stuff. Unless they’re consciously built into our economy’s structure, we’re highly unlikely to achieve them.
To heighten our awareness of co-owned wealth, I use the adjective our in places you might not expect. For example, instead of the atmosphere I say our atmosphere, and instead of the money supply I say our money supply.
Barnes references a cognitive illusion which is new to me: "the fallacy of composition, that what works for a few will work for all."
First, we’ll need new pipes to deliver income on a basis other than labor. These pipes should be capable of being installed in the not-too-distant future. This means they need to mesh with the pipes we have today.
Second, the new pipes should be solidly built. Anything that requires repeated refinancing by Congress isn’t likely to last.
Third, the pipes should have — and be able to retain — a broad base of public support. This requires them to appeal across the political spectrum.
Ha ha, I like the use of "slur du jour" here.
SOCIAL INSURANCE AS IT NOW STANDS can’t solve the problems of the twenty-first century, but it offers several useful lessons.
Policies come and go; institutions endure.
...
Universality beats means testing.
...
Universality also avoids the pejorative distinctions that come with means testing. If only economic “losers” get benefits, they become “takers,” “moochers,” or whatever is the slur du jour. Those who don’t get benefits resent those who do, and those who do feel bad about themselves. No one is happy with the arrangement.
...
Build external costs into current prices.
...
Build the pipes first; then add water.
In "Capitalism 3.0", Barnes talked about and defined "commons rent" in a way I had not heard before. In WLADFA, he again defines rent: "rent is income received not because of anything a person or business produces but because of rights or power a person or business possesses." Barnes differentiates "recyled rent" - rents for everyone (good) - from "extracted rent" - rents for the 1% (bad).
I disagree with this statement by Barnes on "debt-free money distribution", aka QE for the People: "One oft-heard objection to debt-free money distribution is that the Treasury would print too much of it, thereby triggering inflation." I see this as bogus Friedman Monetarism. During the Fed's QE program following the 2008 economic meltdown, the Fed tripled the amount of money in circulation and there was no sign of inflation. I think that inflation is only caused by supply-side scarcity, not the money supply or wages.
Barnes makes again a point which is so obvious but so totally overlooked in discussions of "free stuff".
AN OFT-CITED RISK OF PAYING PEOPLE money they don’t work for is that they’ll get lazy. This is the scare story that’s thrown at every suggested method of reducing inequality, so it’s wise to be skeptical.
...
Why does it apply only to those at the bottom and middle of the income scale and not to those at the top, where immunity to the perils of nonlabor income happily reigns? One could argue that the rich have more “moral fiber” than the poor, but that would be difficult to prove. A more logical thesis, if one accepts the premise that the need for money motivates people to work, is that those at the bottom will always work at least as hard as those at the top.
He also makes another point worth remembering.
The flip side of this argument is that even if some people did work less because of dividends, it might not be such a bad thing. Americans are among the most overworked people on the planet.
In 2009, we almost had a cap-and-dividend carbon bill pass congress. Barnes proposes getting ready in case we get another chance:
Get the architecture right. Since we’ll get, at most, only one timely shot at installing a national carbon cap, we’d better do it right the first time.
...
Keep it simple. Simplicity (as in the thirty-five-page Social Security Act) now seems passé in Washington; thousand page bills are the norm. That’s not because the world is more complex; it’s because lobbyists drive legislative language. So beware of any carbon-capping bill that’s longer than fifty pages—or can’t be explained in a few sentences.
Benefit the many rather than the few.
...
linking nature’s well-being to that of our middle class is the key to harmonizing capitalism with nature.
Barnes references the
Jevons Paradox, first noticed by British economist William Stanley Jevons in 1865. Jevons observed that improvements in the efficiency of coal use led to greater consumption of coal in a wide range of industries, an increase that more than offset the savings from efficiency.
Chapter 9 (the last), titled "From Here to the Adjacent Possible", begins from a quote from Milton Friedman: "Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."
Barnes discusses the theory of punctuated equilibrium from evolutionary biology. I think this is entirely appropriate, as I think I have posited several times that the economy is an ecosystem, with occupations as species.
The reason for this punctuated pattern seems to be that complex systems live near equilibrium but never quite at it. They hover in a zone between equilibrium and chaos, and every once in a while a crisis pushes them toward (or over) the chaotic edge. At such times, they either collapse or shift into what biologist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible."
...
It’s important to distinguish between the adjacent possible and what might be called the incremental possible. By the latter I mean adjustments to the existing system that don’t require a serious crisis (aka a punctuation).
...
In my mind, a market economy with liberty and dividends for all is a plausible adjacent possibility. I also believe that a crisis—more severe than that of 2008—isn’t far away and that we need to prepare for it.
Using a crisis an an opportunity to enact sweeping structural change rings true. The Great Depression is what made FDR's New Deal possible. Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent novel "New York 2140" uses this idea. I borrowed this in The Plan which, in a fit of frustration, I wrote up in June 2016.
But, I am at this point unsure if we can count on another economic meltdown. In "Capitalism 3.0", Barnes pointed out that we moved from an economy of scarcity to an economy of plenty in the 1950's - Capitalism 2.0. In the 1930's, Keynes speculated that, in a century or so, capitalism would have accumulated so much capital that it would no longer be needed.
Lately, I find myself thinking we are there. The total personal wealth of the world has been somewhat stable the last few years at around $250T, according to recent Credit Suisse world wealth reports. I can't see another crisis without a stock market crash, and I don't see that happening. I'm thinking that interest rates hanging near the Zero Lower Bound shows that there is more capital in the world than is needed for investment. And with interest rates so low, where else can you get any Return On Investment besides the stock market? The 2008 crash clearly involved fraudulent financial instruments (why is no one in jail?) which I would think at this point markets would reject.
I wish Barnes had provided more detail about the crisis he sees looming. Well, if the financial markets don't cooperate in providing a crisis, we can be sure that Mother Nature via the climate crisis will.
New People
Americans were surprisingly slow to notice that the golden era of the middle class had passed. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has explained, three factors masked the middle class’s descent. First, women entered the labor force in large numbers, providing two incomes for many households. Second, many Americans made ends meet, or tried to, by working overtime and taking second jobs. And third, middle-class families maintained their lifestyles thanks to a vast expansion of consumer debt. But these masks couldn’t last forever. When the credit bubble burst in 2008, so did the accompanying illusions.
Pareto didn’t say why the 80/20 rule governed wealth distribution; he just noted (to his dismay) that it seemed to do so. In 1992, two American mathematicians, Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell, dug deeper. Using technology unavailable to Pareto, they built a computer simulation of a market economy (which they called Sugarscape) to see what properties—including inequality—emerged when it ran,
...
Though not startling, Epstein and Axtell’s finding is nevertheless sobering. It means that small initial differences, such as those in a bell curve, are inexorably magnified until they become extreme differences, such as those in a power law. Which means that, over time, our economic system will necessarily create a small upper crust and a shrunken middle.
Wow, a real blast from the past - a Republican who isn't a total asshole: "Jay Hammond, the Republican governor of Alaska from 1974 to 1982 and father of the Alaska Permanent Fund".
"Louis Kelso ... was a San Francisco lawyer and investment banker who is best known for inventing employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs, which now cover about ten million Americans". Hmmm, Kelso looks really interesting. His ideas presage those of Barnes? I just bought his last book (1986) "Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the ESOP Revolution Through Binary Economics", $4.99 at Kobo. His earlier books "The Capitalist Manifesto", "The New Capitalists", and "Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality" are available for download as PDFs from The Kelso Institute.
Thomas Paine. Barnes again reminds us of how forward-thinking this Founding Father was.
"the euthanasia of the rentier" - I've said before, wouldn't it be great if Keynes were around now?
Also from Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren", which I 1st discussed here.
Numbers
In Chapter 7, Barnes crunches some mumbers based on 2013 data. He posits an annual dividend of $5,000 for 300,000,000 Americans, which comes out to $1.5T. This is around 9% of GDP.
He identifies sources of dividends based on various types of our co-owned wealth, and the amount of dividends they could generate annually. I have put them in a handy table, rather than just capturing Barnes's Figure 7.1 as an image.
Shared Asset
Low $B
High $B
Middle $B
Atmospheric carbon storage
87
309
198
Securities transaction fees
268
446
347
New money creation
244
323
284
Intellectual-property protection
324
324
324
Spectrum use
84
84
84
TOTAL
1,007
1,486
1,247
Per capita share
3,357
4,953
4,157
Family of four share
13,428
19,812
16,628
[For some more recent and aggressive numbers, Scott Santens, a basic income advocate whom I support on Patreon for $5/month, published this past June, 2017 an amazingly comprehensive article on how to implement, and in particular how to fund, basic income. So many creative new taxes!]
Barnes discusses the basis for his numbers in the Appendix. Here's what he says about his "New money creation" figures:
With regard to new money creation: from 2001 to 2008 (before the financial crisis), the average yearly increase in what the Federal Reserve calls M2 was $244 billion.8 I use this figure (which is adjusted to 2013 dollars) to calculate the low end of the range in figure 7.1. For the high end I use the average annual change in M2 from 2001 to 2013, which includes several years of “quantitative easing.” That figure, translated into 2013 dollars, is $323 billion. The middle figure is halfway between.
This seems highly conservative to me. Why does he think we can only create additional new money at the rate at which the money supply was increasing? At the end of 2013, the M2 was $11T. His high figure represents 3% of that. That certainly seems safe to me. But why not 6%, 9%, 12%? Hell, why not 50%? Why not 100%? I am positing 2 things:
Monetarism ala Friedman is totally invalid.
The only thing that causes inflation is supply-side scarcity.
Maybe if you made every US citizen a multi-millionaire, then there might be some inflation - on, what, yachts? McMansions? Caviar? I think we could do a lot more than Barnes suggests without reaching that point.
Hmmm
Well, I said if you hadn't read my post on "Capitalism 3.0" that this post would seem jumbled. I think this post seems pretty jumbled even if you have read the earlier one. I am going to say that my attempt to do an incremental review has mostly failed. I started to think that this meant that I should not read incremental works, i.e., WLADFA, but I was able to read this book so quickly, and I am glad to be more up-to-date on Barnes' thinking - although that thinking did not seem to change that much in the 10 years between the 2 books. I guess the next time I read and review a follow-up book, I'll try something different and see if I can do better.
A final note, I recently read that, in her book, Hillary Clinton says that, after reading WLADFA, she wished that they had added basic income to the Democratic Platform she ran with.
