Turn and face the strain...
Lots of changes are in the works. I haven't been updating much here because these changes have commanded most of my attention over the past several weeks. As I wrote a couple entries ago, we decided to look for both a new place to live and a new (used) car to buy. Since then, we've accomplished both.
After a nonzero amount of hassle, we have are shiny new 2001 Mercury Sable GS. That photo on the page is the right color, though our car has a few more miles on it than that one. We also paid much less for the car. Magic works, without a doubt. :-)
The second piece of news is that we also found a new place to live, in Ocean Park, Maine, just down the road from Old Orchard Beach. Actually, if you didn't know better, you'd just assume it was part of OOB; I didn't even realize that it was a separate municipality. We had considered buying a house, but our lease runs out at the end of September, and we just ran out of time. 5 weeks is not enough time to buy a house intelligently. So we decided to do the offseason rental. So as it turns out, we'll be spending the winter (until June 1st 2005) on the beach.
Not much else going on. The time has seemed ripe for ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, without question. Despite the hassle, this feels very right.
Forward momentum!
Another Roy article
I've mentioned it before, but
Arundhati Roy is one of my favorite political writers today. It's funny, I was talking to a friend of mine the other night, and we both said that now that we've heard her speak, we can hear her voice in our heads when we read her work.
She has a new piece, Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire. As always with her, it's good reading. Check it out.
I really needed ...
... to hear this. From this week's
Brezsny:
CANCER (June 21-July 22): You haven't been singing and dancing and
laughing and playing enough lately. You haven't been telling yourself jokes
as you drop off to sleep or leaping off the couch during the exciting parts
of your favorite TV shows or going ten miles out of your way to track down
the exotic sensation you're in the mood for. Either get more serious about
having fun, Cancerian, or I swear I'll show up in your dreams in the form
of a giant crab running amok in a place where you take everything too
seriously.
Yeah, no shit. Nothing else to say to that. Wait, how about this, for those nearby:
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): You may think you need a teacher or genie or
rescuer, but I say you don't. I say that what you need most is to realize
that right now you are your own best teacher and genie and rescuer. In my
astrological opinion, you should drop any fantasies you have that there's
someone out there who will save you or give you what you lack or reveal
the secrets that will fix everything. For the foreseeable future, you won't
get what you need until you're prepared to provide it entirely by yourself.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Some astrologers say that Virgos tend to be so
obsessed with small details that they neglect to focus on the big picture;
that they get so bound up in seeking perfection that they miss out on life's
messy beauty and slightly flawed glories. But even if there is a grain of
truth in those ideas, they've temporarily become irrelevant. In the
coming weeks, you'll be drawn to carry out the task Henry Miller
described as follows: "to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the
miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear
allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only
miraculously."
Sounds like good advice to me.
catching up
I've been busy this week. Lots of things on my mind.
First of all, there is quite a bit of what I would call "ambient negativity" around. Lots of people I know, myself included I suppose (at least to some degree), are dealing with it. A good friend and I have been joking about "inner weather," jokes about "partly cloudy with an occasional glimpse of the sun" etc. I'm not sure what the source of this negativity is. Those of us who are sensitive to such energies have a lot on our plates; if nothing else, look at the current political climate. I think it's going to be interesting between now and the end of this calendar year.
On another note: some people very close to me are also involved in a conflict, a conflict I've tried to stay out of but ended up being pulled into. So I've tried to cultivate an attitude of detached compassion for it, and see if I can help them go toward the light and out of the wilderness.
My wife and I have decided to investigate buying a car, and finding an offseason rental somewhere on the coast of Maine. Our current lease is up at the end of September, and we had thought about finding a place to settle down, possibly buying a house. And though we were preapproved for a mortgage, we've decided to put that off for several months. I think a seasonal rental would be good for us, plus it would be very cool to live near a beach for a winter. I think Mo would love it, I know I would. I also just think it makes more sense to have a car before we try to buy a house. As long as we can figure out the transportation-to-work thing, we should be fine.
I'm thinking quite a bit about acoustic treatments for the studio. It appears that to do everything I want to do would cost several hundred dollars. So I'll have to do it in stages; the trick now is to figure out where and when to start. Step one, I think, is to acquire some rigid fiberglass panels, as these are the best, most cost-effective acoustic treatments available.
All for now, just wanted to give an update...
Perseids
The Perseid meteor shower is back. Look to the east beginning at 10pm this Wednesday, August 11th. Also, make sure you're looking again 4 hours later, at 2am on Thursday, August 12th.
From NASA:
The best time to look for these "traditional Perseids" is during the hours before dawn on Thursday, August 12th. Set your alarm for 2 o'clock in the morning; go outside; lie down on a sleeping bag with your toes pointed northeast. You'll soon see meteors racing along the Milky Way.
Above: The pre-dawn sky on Aug. 12th. The Perseid radiant is denoted by a red dot. While you're looking for meteors, check out Venus and the crescent Moon, too, near the horizon.
Can't wake up at 2 a.m.?
Try looking around 9 or 10 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 11th when Perseus is hanging low in the eastern sky. You won't see many meteors then, but the ones you do see could be memorable. Shooting stars that emerge from the horizon and streak horizontally through the atmosphere are called "Earthgrazers." Slow and colorful Earthgrazers are a good target for city dwellers, because they are so bright.
Hmmm. Earthgrazers. Sounds like a band name or an album title or something.
I also like the fact that it looks like Perseus is hurling spears at us.
the economy as fractal?
Maybe not, but
this piece by Benoit Mandelbrot, "father of the fractal," marks an interesting challenge to economists:
Isn't understanding the market as important to the economy as understanding solid-state physics is to IBM? If we can map the human genome, why can't we map how a man loses his livelihood? If millions can contribute a few cycles of their PCs to the search for a signal from outer space, why can't they join a coordinated search for patterns in financial markets?
It's an interesting set of questions. Can the economy sustain itself? Or has it grown too far in the direction of the privileged few? Perhaps if Mandelbrot's challenge is accepted, and they generate data about the economy, they will discover that it is beyond repair, without basically tossing it out and starting over. Fractal La Revolucion!
Zeroing in on Al Qaeda
There are some
very strange statements in this article. Among them:
Sources: Al Qaeda may have made contact in U.S. recently
Wednesday, August 4, 2004 Posted: 6:23 PM EDT (2223 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Intelligence found in Pakistan suggests that suspected al Qaeda operatives in that country contacted an individual or individuals in the United States in the past few months, according to two senior U.S. government sources.
Oh. OK. Someone has made contact inside the United States. This someone could be from anywhere, but made the contact somewhere in Pakistan.
What do I do with that? I imagine there are thousands or perhaps millions of emails, IM or AIM chat, faxes, telephone calls, and broadcast transmissions exchanged between Pakistan and the US each day. Good intelligence work, guys.
A senior military U.S. official said a computer seized from Khan contained hundreds of images, including photographs, drawings and layouts of various potential U.S. targets.
Ahh, ha! This obvious Terrorist(tm) had images of US buildings on his computer. Must be a Terrorist(tm). For sure.
Wait, I have images of US buildings on my computer. Shit....
Scott McClellan, white house press secretary, said this:
"I can't go further into it because it could compromise some ongoing operations at this point," McClellan said.
Ahh, I see. "Ongoing operations." That's the same word they use for what they're doing in Iraq. And in Iraq, they have invaded and are now occupying the country with overwhelming -- yet restrained, this is mostly low-intensity warfare we're talking about here -- US force, against significant resistance from the local people of Iraq.
The only conclusion to make is that these warnings mean absolutely nothing, and are designed to reproduce this charade of a meme: the illusion that the US government is engaged in meaningful dialogue with the people of the world (including the vast majority of US citizens).
These platitudes ring hollow as "declarations," because the declarations have no ontological weight to them. They are meaningless, and provide only the appearance of accountability on the behalf of the US government. The government goes through the motions of saying things, but in reality they are saying nothing. They want to "protect" us by increasing the amount of armed tension in the "threatened" areas. Joy. Just like the freedom the US government is bringing to Iraq. I get it.
Except here in the US, we have cars, computers, an information flow infrastructure, and a very high level of noise.
Acoustics for studios
Ethan Winer's article is essential reading for me at the moment, as I'm currently researching the most effective and cost-efficient ways to acoustically treat my studio. So there.
anarchism, Marxism, and Nietzsche
I've recently discovered the work of
Saul Newman, an Australian anarchist academic and activist. I've been meaning to study more about anarchism, and his work seems an OK place to start because two of his pieces address familiar points of reference in my own intellectual history.
The first article, Anarchism, Marxism, and the Bonapartist State examines some of the tensions between anarchism and Marxism, another political philosophy that is interesting to me. I haven't read it yet, but I have a hardcopy and will work through it shortly.
The second article, Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment, analyzes Nietzsche's "most venomous words for the anarchists." Again, I haven't yet read this article either, I just wanted to mark it here for reference.
