Dump Trump!

The Republicans are using the genocidal spectre of Gaza to intimidate and frighten the American people into accepting the normalization of state violence and terror. If nothing is done it surely won't be long before we see similar tactics employed on our shores in the service of Trump's authoritarian agenda. Only the American people can stand up and prevent history from repeating itself: Contact your senators and congresspeople. Let them know how much you oppose his unconstitutional maneuvers which have no further aim than to subvert the democratic process entirely, only to replace it with an ossified, hierchical vanity project propped up by a fringe anti-science ideology that has been disproportionately amplified with the help of millions in private donations from some of their wealthiest campaign contributors. Take the country back from the oligarchs and techlords! Resist the authoritarian agenda! Fight the unconstitutional occupation of American cities that absolutely no one voted for! Dump Trump!!!

Peak Human

Peak brash 

Peak trash

Peak clash

Peak flash

Peak cash

Peak bash

Peak smash 

Peak crash

Hello everyone, and welcome to my life!

...Stage directions adapted from the heady, cerebral 60s thriller "The Prysplendra Trimlicate" about a young debutante who searches vainly for her former lover only to discover his covert connections to a band of Greek revolutionaries and gradually vanishes into a vaporous mist of hookah bars and visiting dignitaries with untraceable accents, some of whom in turn have connections to an industrial magnet magnate and a mysterious telepathic theremin virtuoso named Clara... 

By the end no one has any idea what is going on nor what the motivation might be for any of the actions depicted but along the way there were some smashing costumes and a fair bit of shagging. * 

* None of this was generated by a computer 

No one is less tolerable, even to themselves, than the person who meets with early success. 

Assured of their ineffable greatness, jealous of early victories, the greater the level of success the more someone becomes a prisoner of the castle they built with their own hands, unable to escape from the grim pictures staring down at them - as in a Roger Corman film starring Vincent Price - from the walls that only pretend to separate the worthy from the unworthy, the saved from the damned, the holy from the unholy.

 

 

There can be no doubt that the slow inevitable slide into the sea awaiting each of us is made a lot longer and steeper starting from the top of a mountain.

Up with REAL musicians and artists

Down with the endlessly rebrandable, leotard-encrusted, corporate boardroom-friendly AI-enhanced circus performers and their terrible taste in everything.

There is no god but... Nothing

Jim Al-Khalili explains:

Then it really is long overdue that we abandon entirely the leftover classical picture of the twin "arenas" of space and time in which material objects solemly and inexorably drift through imaginary ethers, and consider that "empty space" itself is the actual seed of what we refer to as both space AND time. They didn't exist beforehand. They literally spring out of the void in perennial fashion, as from a constant source. 

In other words, objects don't so much move "through" spacetime any more than they do through either space or time in isolation; rather things appear to us as immediate combinatorial possibilites that are more or less likely to remain, recombine, appear to move, or be annihilated based on an extraordinarily complex array of subtle mechanisms embedded deep inside of what was once thought to be... nothing but empty space!

Perhaps it was this implicit abandonment of the notion of a "body" subject to explicable external forces and undergirded by direct causal relationships that so unsettled Einstein about quantum dynamics, precipitating his infamous comments that God (understood by him to mean the God of philosophy, not of theology) "does not play dice".

https://ra.co/podcast/1016

Don't miss the Andrew Weatherall (posthumous) b2b set w/ DJ Harvey from the RA1000 extravaganza. Runs nearly 6 and a half hours and worth every minute! 

BTW, I can tell you that I'm much better at doing mental math than the authors of the blurb for this mix assume - even while stoned ;) I didn't have to clock the dates: 13 IS in fact bigger than 12, which would add together to make 25. Thanks for your opinion!

But, uh, anyway, about the mix. It reminds me of some rather more easygoing times when it was still kind of cool to be just some maladept loser freaking out to slowed-down disco beats on a battered hi-fi, later messing around making tracks with an old version of FruityLoops or Reason and generally not giving too much of a f*ck about anything in particular. That period seemed comparatively forward-looking and optimistic; excitement was bubbling around the new possibilites brought about by combining advanced DSP software with faster computer hardware to finally realize the "studio in a box" concept, combining multitrack recording and editing with virtual instruments and real-time effects processing and automation, until eventually interest began to shift toward modular systems and embedded software within dedicated devices. If you read old back issues of a magazine like Tape-Op, for example, this gradual change of emphasis is quite visible, contrasting the holdover from an earlier ethos to the often "boutique-y" advertisements for precise recreations of vintage gear that so many of today's producers lust after. There are some important reasons for this change, it could be added, but I think it's undeniable that something was lost when lots of people decided that the instrumentation was at least as important as, or in some cases even started to eclipse the importance of, the content of the finished work itself. The era referenced in this mix definitely had its flaws in the form of absurd amounts of signal oversaturation, 'blocky' arrangements, digital diarrhea and regular drug overconsumption, but in many ways the culture was very probably a lot more open-minded overall than it is now, when neatly tended guides and digests are always just a click away. And it wasn't all that long ago either.     

Note: I added the part about the mix a couple of hours later, upon which I discovered that the first two people to read this (according to the view count anyway) would have irretrievably missed it! Honestly I have absolutely no idea who they are. Of course I'm very sorry but I will refuse to pay for any potential psychological or other damage that may result from their having missed that part of the post, or from any other aspect of this blog, either positive or existing (somehow) by means of omission. Can't be too careful these days, right?

Out of line

We are habitually conditioned to treat of time as consisting of a long, singular "line", leading to such absurd questions as where must this line "begin" or "end" (how thick is it? is it really composed of infinitesimal points or 'slices'?). But these are only properties of lines, not of time. What does a line have to do with time? 

If time is really any "thing" at all, the one "thing" it most definitely is NOT is a line.

No force apart from traditional religion is capable of corrupting an otherwise rational person into sincerely believing that maiming, starving and denying medical care to thousands of innocent children is equivalent to doing "God's work."  

Liar in Chief

The time has come, ladies and gentlemen, to disobey your orders.

Burn it down

None of what we are witnessing in this country and around the world would be possible without a sizeable portion of the population having already accepted and internalized the basic tenets of authoritariansm either implicitly or explicitly. We were there ten years ago, if not much longer ago than that. The French, who very wisely made the decision to disallow this style of politics in their government, would have long since burned their country to the ground after refusing to work all year if things had gotten to this stage. What is it then, exactly, that has so long stayed the hand of the citizenry of the United States and kept them from overthrowing an obviously tyrannical government, right here in the "land of the free" and, allegedly, the "home of the brave?" Are we so useless that we can do nothing but stand back and allow the least worthy of us to lead the charge straight off the cliff?

People routinely invoke history in order to claim membership in a group and to sound important, not because they wish to call attention to the intricacies of the historical record or indeed the impermanence, ephemerality or triviality of the present in light of the vast range of actual realities or potential scenarios, the majority lying forever hidden from our view. Yet from this many will forcefully claim that the ancients knew better than the moderns regarding some practice or set of beliefs, or that our contemporaries must finally have arrived at the truth after so many untold centuries of error. What is held to be true changes; this much at least must be admitted  But what happens when the notion of truth itself is called into question? What happens when, publicly or privately, the only truth becomes 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'? The old skeptical argument that disagreement between peoples across world regions and historical eras implies that no universal truths can be established succeeds by default where people are incapable of making truths for themselves.

The end of the end of an era...

...or, "Cancelling the Future." 

I too watched this on VHS as a child, thanks to a PBS affiliate station which syndicated the series from the then-new cable networks; it was one of the first TV programs to have been written for the format that soon went on to dominate the world with its prepackaged, carefully manicured "universe in a box" concept from which we have more or less been struggling to escape, vainly, ever since. What struck me most poignantly, seeing this as an adult, is twofold: One, the presence of Matthew Broderick (appearing here as the unwitting poster child for the John Hughes makeover of Hollywood under Reagan) and two, the titular heroine opposite played by an almost breathlessly energetic Jennifer Beals, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. It's quite unlikely that many children, myself included, could have understood what this choice of characterization might have suggested to audiences at the time.    

But it is now obvious, with the full benefit of hindsight, that somebody must have been paying attention. There is no doubt considerable irony in the realization that the systematic defunding of Public Broadcasting in the United States by right-wing extremists may have been due, in no small measure, to the unease felt by certain self-appointed defenders of what are alleged to be "traditional values", that (among other programs) a harmless and indisputably traditional fairy tale might actually succeed in inculcating in children the authentic sense of fairness or justice those values are meant to embody. Or... maybe it was the way the wicked stepsisters' only responsibilities - namely the curation of their grotesquely and unredeemably porcine profiles - too closely resembled the chief preoccupation of the first, but certainly not the last, public administration to play itself on television? 

Whatever their primary motive, it's clear that for all their talk about freedom, the new authoritarians have little tolerance for anything other than endless reruns of their own navel-gazing Christmas special where even poor old Charlie Brown might be a closet commie. Some conservatives, it should be noted, have even managed to maintain these or similar levels of paranoia for decades, often without the aid of any drugs whatsoever (other than alcohol, presumably): A truly impressive feat, to be sure. 

Either way, it's bleedingly obvious by this point that there is no princess, and none of us are invited to the demolition derby hosted by the world's richest and most powerful. Rather, it seems we might just have to host one of our own!  

Welcome to Emerald City!

The well-worn path of holier-than-thou-ism on the left leads nowhere and will get us all killed. Few (if any) in this world can claim genuine moral superiority. "Authenticity", as it is now understood, is only a code word for the suppression of originality. The "good person" / "bad person" signifier matching game, like most of what passes for culture, is almost totally devoid of meaning in a soulless copycat / shakedown society in which money trumps everything and brute force is the only currency in circulation. Our postindustrial meltdown is the inevitable result of a raging intellectual bonfire in light of which the primary goal of enterprise has become not the generation of works possessing any intrinsic or enduring value, but merely the placement of other practioners of whatever art at a competitive disadvantage.

Where honest living has been made impossible, thieves and thugs set up shop and take root. Our major cities are full of well-intentioned (and doubtless very useful) idiots who are, if anything, even more convinced than their avowedly neofascist foils that progress can mean only one thing: eliminate the competition, or, in the case of certain insurance companies, the customer as well.