Oh! What a Lovely War!

“And fornicate my bleeding life away.”

I have been coding some crude MaxMSP patches, both for algorithmic piano composition, and for pedagogical purposes (for my advanced students). I have also been thumbing through many of my books, which is way more fun that looking at a computer screen with decent pr0ns. Some such books: one concerning Μάχη τῶν Θερμοπυλῶν, http://www.amazon.com/Fathers-Daughters-Their-Own-Words/dp/0811806197, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Technologies of Lived Abstraction) with the following review:–

“FANTASTIC BOOK” (5 Stars)

This book was published under the name of Steve Goodman (a lecturer in Music Culture at the School of Sciences, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of East London), not of Kode9. So it is not a tutorial on how to make wobbly bass in Massive. True, because of its subject matter it can be at times heavy on the SAT phraseology, but I seriously doubt the usefulness of writing a vibrational ontology for kindergarteners, especially if that ontology is explicitly developed in the context of Leibniz, Deleuze and Guattari.

If you are looking for a fresh perspective on sonic weaponry, piracy, pop music as torture, sound systems, earworms, crowd control, and the Big Bang then this is the book for you.

If you are looking for “a pretty interesting philosophical read,” try Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Wait, maybe that too is “over-written,” “quickly filling and hard to digest,” so better try Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts: An A-to-Z Guide with Detailed Instructions and Endless Inspiration.

And if you are looking to practice your reviewing skills without having to read anything, go to Youtube and join the pissing contest coming up with the next lackluster metaphor for face-metling griminess when commenting on the latest Datsik track.

PS. Read the editorial reviews. If you feel like you don't understand them, save your money and buy instead Kode9’s Memories of the Future.

(The review is evidently responding to a troll.) At least the title of the book is honest, and the material too, though I am so dumb it is probably about how to eat recently killed game with delicacy (but no relish), on polishing Rolls Royce engines while they are running, on contradancing. I have bought 100 or so new books in the past six months, such is the intrigue I have with fonts of wisdom, the smell of paper, nice layout, always from major presses. I love books and paper and manuscripts; I used to have a part-time summer job (1998) at Houghton Library at Harvard University. That’s where the rare books and manuscripts are kept, real white glove and glass rod material.

And speaking of iDance Contra’s “canned hell”: am I, trying not to disturb nature by opening that “can of hell” by breeching Pauli’s exclusion principle, and instead being more inclusive, reading about dancing, ... censored, though, lightbulb! Something just clicked! It is popular at places like Harvard and BU because the patterns resemble predictable flow in fluid dynamics! And that is all about lovin’. Here are some pictures, and this ain’t the 1/10th of it:–

And here are some excerpts. It really must be about fluid negotiating bends and changes of diameter of pipe, kind of a Bernoulli thing. Here is part of the derivation of the Bernoulli equation for incompressible fluids:

I get a hint, looking at that, that someone likes their sativa, but seriously, like, with gravity.

http://www.cdss.org/elibrary/dart/appendix_a.htm
http://www.cdss.org/elibrary/dart/appendix_b.htm

And some incredible information about flow in contradance:–

[Retrieved from http://www.cdss.org/elibrary/dart/aesthetics_1.htm on 20110227-1914.]

AN AESTHETIC OF CONTRA DANCING

The responses given by my informants in answer to the question “What makes a good dance?” can be divided into a number of clusters of criteria, each of which I would like to discuss in some detail. These clusters include the “flow” of the dance, the choice of figures and formations used in the choreography, the complexity of the dance, the social interaction that takes place within the dance, the degree to which the dance moves conform to the expectations of the dancers, the fit of the dance to the music, the physical activity level of the dance, and the quality of specialness or uniqueness exhibited by a dance.

FLOW

The most common short response to the question, “What makes a good dance?” was “good flow.” The concept of “flow” seems to refer predominantly to the transitions between the dance figures rather than to the figures themselves, and it relates to how smooth these transitions feel to the dancers. Here are two summary statements from my informants that give an idea of what is meant by this term, “flow”:

Good flow means that each transition is easily maneuvered and rewardingly maneuvered. (Jennings 1990b)

If the dance is smooth, it means that the transition from one figure to the next is easy to achieve. You do not ever have to turn the hard way. You don’t ever have to stop, literally stop in your tracks, and backtrack to do something else. Everything flows into the next thing, so you are eternally walking forward. (Park 1990)

The term “flow,” as used by my informants, has both physical qualities which have to do with the laws of physics, and nonphysical qualities which have to do with the expectations of the dancers and the degree to which they perceive the dance as “making sense.”

The physical component of “flow” concerns the motion of the body. In a dance with good flow the dance sequence avoids transitions where the dancer must change his or her momentum suddenly through either a change of direction or a change of dancing speed. (“Suddenly” is an important qualification, since many dances have either a full stop, or an assisted change of direction through an “allemande” or other strongly connected figure performed with another dancer.) If such a change of momentum is easily anticipated and can be done comfortably, it may not disrupt the flow of a dance. An example of a comfortable change of momentum might be the change from a “circle left” to a “circle right,” a transition which is common and anticipated and for which dancers have learned to adjust their footwork to make it smooth. An example of an uncomfortable change of momentum might be an “allemande left” followed by a “circle left,” in which the dancers must change from a forward counterclockwise motion to a sideways clockwise motion, requiring both a change of body position and a change of direction. Bad flow may also result from movements that are difficult because the hand that is needed is not free. Steve Zakon gives an example:

We just finished a “swing,” now the men allemande right. Well where’s your hand at the end of the “swing?” It’s behind the lady. You can’t get there. (Zakon 1990)

...

It is possible to have too much flow in a dance, especially when the choreographic sequence includes a lot of circular motion. A dance with too much flow can leave the dancers either disoriented or dizzy. Ted Sannella comments on this phenomenon:

...

In the composing of contra dances with good flow, conservation of momentum is an important principle. The movements work better when one takes advantage of the momentum already established in a previous figure, because the dancers do not have to work as hard to perform the dance. In particular, when rotating figures move into other rotating figures, the direction of rotation should not be reversed. Gene Hubert elaborates:

If you’re going to have a circle on either side of an “allemande right,” it should be a clockwise circle, which means “circle left”.... And “allemande left” means that you’re going around the other direction, which is basically “circle right” direction. So “allemandes” and “circles” work together that way.... And “swings” to “circles” and “circles” to “swings” are the same deal. A “left circle” is a basically clockwise movement, and a “swing” is a clockwise movement. They go together real naturally. (Hubert 1990b)

The conservation of angular momentum may produce acceleration and deceleration within the dance. For example, going from a “circle” into a “swing” involves an acceleration of movement, because as two dancers pull closer together for the “swing,” the conservation of momentum results in their going faster, an exciting and pleasing effect.

One way for the dancers to change directions without disrupting the flow of the dance is to use assisted changes of direction, as noted above. An “allemande,” for example, can be used to send two dancers in the opposite directions from which they came, without their having to stop or turn around. Dan Pearl gives an example:

”Anniversary Reel” by Ted Sannella has a deal where the actives go down the center while the inactives come up the center, and you allemande with your next neighbor by the handy hand, and you immediately return to your original neighbor. So it’s like you’re using the next one in line like a pole.... It’s an assisted change of direction, and that kind of muscle tension in contra dancing is fun. (Pearl 1990)

The dance composer must be careful in the use of the directions “right” and “left” if the dance is to flow well. If many dancers are doing a movement together it is not likely to be confusing, but if a single dancer must make a split-second decision between right and left, some dancers will be confused, and the flow of the dance will be disrupted by their hesitation. John Krumm has noticed this problem:

I find there’s a lot of right and left anxiety on the dance floor, a lot more than anybody imagines there is.... Thirty percent of the dance floor will be confused by simple right and left hand things. They’ll have to think. If you put right and left together a few times in one sentence, you can confuse fifty percent of the floor. Or if you have different things doing right and left, like put your left hand on your right shoulder and face left, then you confuse almost everybody. (Krumm 1990)

Another guideline offered for the composing of dances with good flow is that the last move of a dance must flow well into the first move. This is because when the dance is actually performed by the dancers, the dance is repeated perhaps fifteen times, and the transition from the last move to the first one becomes just as important as any of the other transitions. Ted Sannella emphasizes this point:

People, when they’re writing a dance, sometimes they start at the top and they go to the end. And they don’t think about what happens when you go from the end to the beginning again. You may have a dance that flows beautifully all the way through until you get to the end, and then the last figure doesn’t flow into the beginning again for the next repeat. (Sannella 1990a)

The last principle of flow discussed by my informants comes out of the problem of too much flow discussed above. In order to avoid a dance being disorienting or dizzy, the dance composer needs to insert moves which do not revolve, to break up the circular flow of a dance which contains a lot of “swings” and “circles.” Straight line movements such as the “forward and back” figure or a “down the center and back” figure will serve to break up a dizzying circular flow, as will any kind of “balance” figure.

[Retrieved from http://www.cdss.org/elibrary/dart/changes.htm on 20110227-1907.]

TABLE 2. CHANGES IN CONTRA DANCE CHOREOGRAPHY

FORMATIONS:

1. The triple formation and the proper formation are used less frequently.
2. The improper formation and the Becket formation are most commonly used.

SYMMETRICAL ROLES:

1. There is less distinction between the roles of the active and inactive couples.
2. Terminology has been altered to reflect this change.

FIGURES:

1. The use of the “swing” has increased.
2. Fractional figures are common.
3. Figures danced on the diagonal are being used.
4. Borrowed and invented figures have been added to the repertoire.
5. “No hands” figures have become more popular.
6. Strongly connected figures are used to facilitate good flow.
7. The use of figures requiring unequal roles has declined.

TRANSITIONS:

1. The sequence “down the center and back” and “cast off” has declined in use.
2. Figures that cross the set and return are now used more often in their half form.
3. Transitions are designed to build momentum for vigorous dancing.

COMPLEXITY:

1. Sequences are more complex.
2. Figures of shorter duration are common.
3. Dance movements are faster and use closer timing.

MULTIPLE PROGRESSIONS AND END EFFECTS:

1. Dances have been composed that progress the dancers more than one place in a single round of the dance.
2. Both single and multiple progression dances may require dancers to dance outside their minor set of two couples.
3. More complicated choreography has resulted in more complex adjustments that must be made at the ends of the set.

NUMBERS OF DANCES:

There are many more dances in circulation now.

******

I have so many books to write about, and interests, now that I made a major breakthrough. It might just be a TP in my ~life. I talked about TP in this blog or the other. And, especially pertinent....

I see the Coen brothers have a new cinematic experience awaiting me. Yes, just for me. No Country for Old Men was quite something. From Wikipedia (yawn):–

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, a hitman hired to recover the missing money. The character was a recurrence of the “Unstoppable Evil” archetype found in the Coen brothers’ work, though the brothers wanted to avoid one-dimensionality, particularly a comparison to The Terminator.[7] The Coen brothers sought to cast someone “who could have come from Mars” to avoid a sense of identification. The brothers introduced the character in the beginning of the film in a manner similar to the opening of the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth.[8] Chigurh has been perceived as a “modern equivalent of Death from Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal.”[9] Chigurh's distinctive look was derived from a 1979 photo from a book supplied by Jones which featured photos of brothel patrons on the Texas-Mexico border.[10] After seeing himself with the new hairdo for the first time, Bardem reportedly said, “I’m not going to be laid for three months.” Bardem signed on because he had been a Coens’ fan ever since he saw their debut, Blood Simple.[11]

The latter film is one of my favorite films ever, and I think while watching (it for the tenth time) that I received my first success handjob. Quite startling. Closely behind Blood Simple is the candid O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I would certainly not label it a comedy. And, yes, the parallels with Homer’s Odyssey are in plain sight. I am sure many people say that. I bet many of them haven’t read Homer’s Odyssey, even in translation. They might just know about Circe, the Sirens, Calypso, and Trojan Horses. No, that’s the Iliad.

On my other blog I am singing of song, about

Das ist kein cubed.

“Today” or “Dear” or “Gloves & Scarf” or “It’s a Yellow Murmuring Thing”

That yellow thing lies below the warzone of a painting, i.e., my painting has to start somehow and sometimes a spray can is simplest. It’s also a vas deferens (“carrying away vessel”), the yellow brick road, a test pattern to see if canvases work. Things tend to lie about warzones.

Oh, “In the hall of the mountain king”—I really want to know what that is all about. It feels important if it is on my download of the 50 darkest pieces of classical music. I wonder too about “All creatures great and small.” I need to know. I will massage them (get it, “knead”) until something arises (get it, “yeast”). I doughn’t know if it will have bred anything short of a crust. Actually if the crust is cut off, then in Italy it’s a tramezzino and not a panino.

Painting and room arrangement/glorious interior design © 2010–2011 Peter Whincop. If I change my name, you’ll know it’s because of a spelling problem I can’t face, or care not to be reminded of. But, no, I like my name. And so do I.

amanformystoveroftenfaultydiseasyplusreadynamicall sortsinfactoidosed

2BA3, 19, 6235, 15, 1B823468, 238 or 32B, A23+B56, 13629487, 95, 124,79AJ, F, 123456780, 11, -7, 8, 6A-8, 456P9A, 0, 2345, 1234677891, 2356, 1234677891, ..., D, C7, 239, 1235789, 123456789, *, 45679ABC, 456789ABC, 12.

7ABC, 23798, 147(A), ... (from above), 239, 142, ID, 456, SSS
2, 25B, 25B25B, -3
AF,ED, 123456789, UD, 123456789H
SSS, 2789, 1236789-H, e, ssde
1235, 0, A-124+123456789, 1253, ... (... from above), -3₂, ed, mid

nb. Read web logs carefully, that is to say, “theft vent.” And if you can solve that and are not some fascist scum, then you could save the world. Magari. I think I can (as I am editing back and forth, since the next statement holds, once I check the facts and make sure, which I have been VERY careful to do, there are no claims about people that could be misconstrued). Scenario, a little like corporations barging in on patents just by breaking someone else’s: the individual probably can’t afford to defend themselves legally. And the usual response is, I got a year out of it, so fcuk that sheet now. Or smile and say, I know I did the work, and developed that artificial virus that emulates a ducks back, and that corporation is just water. Or say, and this is that “next statement that holds,” I’ve done my work and whatever, whatever, it’s not longer quadrivial. The rest is naïve and trite and vile. Like a vial of naïve backwards—well, to make it work I suppose you have to accept that there is envy among that subject of reading: nV = PrT. I could do this: ∂nV/∂A = ∂PrT/∂A where A ≜ area—cross section of volume, area under pressure. And boyhowdy, how de-boy-ed often has that been relevant. My friends used to say I was Cartesian and not Caucasian as I am noticeably thin (when you can actually notice me)—perhaps I have a prostrate Napoleon complex—so the ∂/∂A is a somewhat pertinent and slightly ga-ga operator.

She told me “concrete” was not well understand. And it had CO2 trapped in it to be harnessed.

Image © 2011 Peter Whincop. It is the local ice-skating rink. Or something like rust on abstract. Which means “to draw from.”

We are going all out in our next entries.

Because it is T. Time. Said the silk screen artist to the t-shirt:

But in math a relationship is reflexive (vRv is T otherwise R is not a relationships), symmetric (vRy ⇔ yRv likewise), and transitive (vRy & yRz ⇒ vRz which is difficult to map onto certain things) and there is also a rule about when R inverts x, for an implied conjugate R', so with xRy & xSy you can have (xRy)S'y & (xSy)S'y oh I forget but it guarantees things like matrix multiplication and music and cellular automata all function in the way I want them to. Yes, it is subjective.

Yes, all out in the next few hours after we grade student work, write a few references, tidy our offices, tune P’s viola, and brave the snow... because we haven’t had dinner yet, plus I hear the front cover of Cosmopolitan is just fine this month.

H-J FROM amf.&p.,

xoxo

Vis fore ut dicta, a.k.a. V is for Vendetta is Revolting.

I was thinking (where “I” equals the shared mind of Amf. and Peter, where “shared” equals by mutual consent, unlike rape-stealing the mind, by which I mean being one of those people who kind of look at you with an intensity, often nodding their heads as they agree with themselves to make you agree with them, very overbearing and intrusive, the ultimate in gentle passive-aggression, or the people who sit too close, not respect aura(l) space [that looked like a “one” in parentheses but it is an “ell” to make a very clever statement which whatever I just blew it and it wasn’t that great to start with), which is terribly rude and uncalled for. At least I have better sense(s) than most, but I know where to draw the line that is not to be crossed. Now, that is a funny phrase, to cross the line. It’s like fickle, something having to do with “Am I or am I not” or “Should I or should I not” or “Have I or have I not” or “Am I this or Am I that” or “Should I project this or should I find some other filthy lie of an existence to push”... crossing that fine line, hairline, from face to baldface, boldface, and line becomes a lie, too close for comfort, like being taken around the Mount Baldface Circle Path in NH in the White Mountains, wow, (using an NZ term) that tramp is a symbol of ultimate deception: quite a steep climb, and the comedown was pretty wretched; looking back at it you realize that pleasant afternoon trip was a lie that wasn’t uttered, as in, collapsed from exhaustion, it was a bitch of a day: I personally like an extreme challenge, like Mount Cannon NH or Tongariro NZ, where you know you are up for some nasty footwork and ferocious wind emanating from up the ridge somewhere enough to knock you down, or a stroll around Fresh Pond, although that can be the biggest trick of them all (like, two hands holding desperately, for love or put quite in chemical or material terms for an exchange of human data). I am still trying to work out if Fresh Pond has some meaning, like Baldface or World’s End or god knows where else. Lyin’ Tricksty (of the Red Revolution)! But uncool. That was of no real significance because I am getting back to this post which started with three words) about La battaglia di Algeri, in English The Battle of Algiers. I saw it when it was re-released around six years ago, when it was billed as the film that t*rrorists use for training. Yes, it is pretty specific in details of insurgency. Why, when t*rrorism is vile—action disguised as military but with civilian targets, hence its extremely dastardly and cowardly nature, I mean, get a grip of reality which is never supposed to lie—would a film be billed as such? It’s like that ramble—I guess I’m effectively bringing them up and playing into the purpose I am describing, but everyone seems to know this already, on a need-to-know basis—just kidding, I’ve been watching too much Alias—The Coming Ins*rrection, which proudly proclaims that it was used as evidence in a French t*rror case. Point: what kind of publicity is that? Huge, but for whom? It reminds me of the obverse, when a far better cause was talked about, except for the part about any action directly against the government, or indirectly for that matter, e.g., in the manner of the Brigate Rosse of Italy, who wanted to push the state into a police state—and they partially succeeded, especially by kidnapping Aldo Moro, the Prime Minister—streets of Rome were deserted after dark such was the terror, and the military was extremely present, all in the 1970s, though they in fact barely killed, and their targets were not overly civilian; the Ba*der Me*nhof were a little more automatic weapon trigger-happy—etc. etc. I’m saying ins*rrection is sedition, not cool, but aside from that, the trial of James P. Cannon, a C*munist leader tried in 1945 (I really can’t be bothered checking) for sedition. The verbatim transcript of the trial is published as Socialism on Trial, with essays: it was a two-week long chance for Cannon to teach M*rxism in one of the most media-covered trials in the country up until that point. And he taught it in very simple, justifiably attractive terms: none of that dictatorship and expropriation nonsense, just a lot about the communal, sharing aspect, fairness to workers, etc., nothing scary; he kept the talk of sedition or revolution slightly separate, although it is more than just a lemma of Permanent R*volution in reality. The Algerian ins*rrection film was in fact played twice by the US military to senior advisors as a teaching aid in “low-level conflict” guer*lla tactics. How many films and TV shows are covertly like that? How many books? I mean, forget the Ins*rrection book because that is a little blatant. It seems to me, almost everything, be it preparation, action, or aftermath. All songs? Are we crazy? Do all clouds look like our pet cat fror NZ? (We shared!) It is a scare-music [“music” is an instance of metaphor here] of traversal or traveling. (Oh! The collective I just had my class listen to a piece called “Traveling Music” by Tod Dockstader, a visual/sounds effect designer from the 1960s, in Canada, who, after hours, secretly worked on his music: people didn’t have home studios in those days, in fact there were only a handful in the whole world, so we are very lucky to have his album Apocalypse. Disclaimer, as a devout and well-reasoned anti-eschatologist—someone who studies christian saints? I forget—I am very much not endorsing what I have just done—drawn attention to all zero readers of this except the mote of my brain, the flicker of the mind’s eye, certain things; except they will already know about this, such as is the case with my being of no such cause, unless teaching is considered a ?sedative activity—sometimes, like listening to Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a Room” which is innocuous and is true, because, guess wait, I am sitting here not as a lunatic on the grass, or the potentially less innocuous—just a supposition on my part, I love the piece, but, hmmm, lately I have got to wondering so much, Bob Ostertag’s “Sooner or Later” which is on the same week’s listening list, but I am probably wrong, because despite [ick how many subordinate clauses can I nest—I used to live in a nest or we called it that but it was more of a rat’s nest that a bird’s nest, though I know I am not a rat so were we infested?—including this? There is usually an unsavory, sometimes slightly desperate reason for this malady, which is trying to say too many things in one sentence. Break up! Many sentences, not those feeble punishment technique of concurrent sentencing by some judges...] it being about war (a little boy burying his father, in El Salvador, vowing revenge), “sooner or later” seems a little casual or flippant or perhaps it was written then and now it is... now, now, now, all these successive nows, when will they stop, like a week, or a year? When the calendar runs out? Ha, they never run, they are in constant revolution. Oops. Wassup with me today, I think it is (i) stupidity, (ii) temporarily being soleless because my feet were too hot and I needed cold feet to cool off thus no sneakers, (iii) inculcated by the un cool cult [not really, I just wanted to “c”s the moment... like Candace Bergen in the 1970s advertising a perfume called C, and she would say, “C’s me”...] if reading mainstream—any?—newspapers with the scare of Egypt, the new events in Bahrain, I got to thinking of this culture of reading about uprisings, which, who knows, everyone who knows history knows, have been reported with increasing fervor, bah humbug they have been going on the whole time, wake up and smell the, er, I was going to be overly witty and say music in your iPhone collection but then I thought, nay, I can truly hear artifacts of their mp3 decoder (or it could have been the encoder, I don’t even trust LAME which is, not that I’d know, expected on torrent sites, especially membership ones like Oink was, to keep the quality high, recall how how some songs were distributed over Oink and other such things that sounded good then suddenly a minute in there was a message that warned against copying, and I suppose you could say it was secret because mp3s are viral, and perhaps a million were distributed in a day by a mass campaign of seeding all at once [I hope I am not giving ideas, see my comment below on good guys vs. bad guys, who are the good guys? The RIAA? They have nabbed so many MIT students who famously share files mainly because they invented the internet when Al Gore wasn’t inventing it, at least the RIAA had some courtesy not to sue directly the people, but to pass the names to the administration here (yes I am here right now, where else, there?) and they issued warnings and fines, but the funny thing is that it didn’t alter file sharing at all, but there was that Adobe CS4 virus that got a lot of Windoze lusers, another mass distribution of evil/propaganda, well, it’s hard to avoid saying things without it seeming like an instruction manual, just warning people NOT share files, but also to tune your ears to how bad mp3s sound; here is how to hear it: listen to OLD CDS, play the piano or guitar and sing, then listen to the mp3s, an early iPod—viral in their own right, I guess, slick, expensive, nabbing a particular sector of society, which is educated and not impecunious—couldn’t even play one of my pieces, on pure tones, which is weird because a slightly wobbly sine tone is easy to reproduce, as I teach, also every 2’14” [I forget] their was a glitch at 320kbps, or up to 9–11’ for a 128kbps mp3, and I think it was buffer loading, which is pretty shoddy, but I think the buffer thing has been fixed... at least on the Applemacintosh it is accessible software which takes us back to LAME or other open source software at places like sourceforge [forge is such a positive and good word, like some groups say “forging the [new way of some political kind]” but it also smacks of a forgery] but just because something is open source, do we believe it is safe or CORRECT in its task and being on sourceforge ipso facto we who can code [which is neither of us, oops] simply won’t look through it?

]] I forget, I am halfway through a sentence, though being halfway is a little misleading since we don’t know how long it will be, and compared with the sentence itself being an event occurring in acto in all its single-lettered glory, the ending is a very occasional event which means if we recall Mr Staples’ (!! we remembered !!) Math with Statistics class at our high school, we would use a, um, now we are unsure, a Student T distribution [so-called because it was research at an institution and something about royalties or it being secret, Wikipedia will have it and normally I research the facts carefully, practically knowing some Wikipedia essays backwards [for me, things related to graphic design, but all roads lead to Heisenberg and Eigenfunctions, dork], but it is a Poisson distribution which sounds like someone spreading fish all over the world like in our water supplies, imagine opening the faucet and whitebait [are they specifically NZ? it didn’t give me a spell-error] stream out, they are pretty small [we made fritters of them as children pre-vegetarian but I cut the eyes out and that left nothing! Without the eyes, what are they?] gulp, another fish in body [I had a friend Kay Ward—no names are ever changed here, and I wonder what he is up, I should have looked him up on my [Peter’s] last trip to NZ which was so wonderful but has ruined the country for him because it can never be the same, too hard to explain], but Kay was befriended by a very fun and clever and witty and jack-of-all-trades man, Mr King, who fixed radios, and he said “one man’s fish is another man’s poisson” which struck me as pretty clever, hence my calling him clever; it is also witty, hence my calling him witty],

]] yet another discursion to ga-ga land... fomenting at the mouth I mean I am foaming at the mouth but that might be the rabid disorder I have. If we can read all this dangerdangerdanger in newspapers, then I see read, so I must see write. And that is what it is, call it what you will; these people write. If two wrongs hardly make a right, many rights are impinged by many rights impinging. There is a strange accusative thing happening, doubling up the subject of the sentence with the object. “I’m trying to make things right here” takes on a whole new meaning, probably several but I have a head and just took Imitrex which leaves a very bad taste in my mouth, post-nasal. It ADHDs me to yet two more thoughts, and that is the bifurcated idea that even if we hear that human rights are being abused, we are still having the word “right” drum-banged into our head (although banging a dr*g usually means that late Led Zep alBum, In through the out door, sort of up-lies).

Rightrightrightrightrightritetritetrite what is tetri? Lots of “four”s? and this is the bi-parttwo of the -furcation, and that is when you read or hear anything (or however things enter the head, I’ll never know for circular reasons, since) you never know if it is the good guys or the bad guise (because they are usually in dis- as good, how awesome is that... NOT), and having said that, it sometimes doesn’t matter, since you learn, you learn, and if you are discerning, it doesn’t matter how you build up your knowledge if you can have access to many sources, and that that is not a privilege but a right (there we go) for anyone and everyone, and the worse thing would be if your access to privileged information was by privilege, okay, I was a Harvard Ph.D. student and it takes privilege (who am I kidding? For me it was luck and the minor fact that I wrote my application statement of purpoise and two essays as proof whatever, but my exceptional scholar of a girlfriend made minor rewrites—and liked swimming and said she was a “porpoise with a purpose”] as I was far removed from elite academic style of writing. It did the trick, thanks!) and we all, as far as I know, were not in some special club, etc. thought lost, I’ve been making a video tonight, and being confused by film titles and trying to think of them in Latin, more on that, the second point now the bifurcobfuscation has been covered, and that is I have forgotten, but the Algiers movie, no suggestion at all being made, I swear, and no disrespect at all being paid to these people or their groups, professions, etc., just an observation, that one has most of the letters of “fascism” in his name (the director) and the other has most of the letters of “nazi” in his name (an author): now, I will throw in that this was a nationalist uprising, and it was quite socialist, BUT, and that’s a big BUT: it was not national socialist, i.e., nasty nazi. Just an observation that names can be toyed with in the mind: I have a neighboring apartment in my building, in which a couple with the names Canney and Tsaltas live. Um, “canny” means sharp, smart, derived from Scots I think, and “stultus” mean stupid in Latin. So the other names on the door buzzer list (I disconnected our buzzer because I could hear all that neighbor’s door intercom communications, and i checked the wiring, and it was crazy f.-ed up and it seemed that it was possible—with the building’s very old wiring—that those neighbors could hear everything I said, as if the listen button had been pressed and I was downstairs at the door. So I snipped it. Definitely not the landlord’s door, bless him, he was a wonderful landlord, and sadly he is deceased now, and his wife is now the landlady, and she is the sort who said, honey, if you are struggling with the rent, make sure you call me, and if you are depressed, call me too... how awesome is that): McCall on the call list by the door, too! But I say this other name about winning a cop, which struck me as scary. Um, er, that is one half of me (us). So, I was attributing meaning so something that had no real meaning, just that low synaptic-threshold-of-firing syndrome I seem to have. So everything I write is genuinely nonsense, plus I write with impunity because it is not as if anything I could write, so long as not threatening or libelous, could cause any trouble, any of my far-fetched ideas, putting my paintings up, my music, photos, etc. And I celebrate where I teach, where I live, this country, New Zealand, everything!

))) I forget how many close parentheses I need. What was I going to write? I have on a scrap of paper “rodeo vending engine” and ”indeterminate 3D structure” and “vis 2005⟶1605 und [some scrawling in German I guess from the “hun” oops that’s terrible I mean “und”] and “MegaDrumMachine and PopcornFiltersOuter” which are MaxMSP patches someone I am no longer close to wrote—she was a decent musician, in a strange way, I taught her a lot of electronic music things back at home after I had finished teaching. (I think I resent that slightly.) So I just managed to talk about what I was going to talk about. I wander what people do with what I teach them? I teach simple and advanced electronic music composition techniques, and that includes visits by other artists, an expert producer, recording techniques, but mainly computer (somewhat expert) mixing and composing with recorded, analog, early digital, noise, the opposite, and sampled sounds, a lot of layering, some tricks in DSP in the advanced course, although the students increasingly know more digital signal processing than I, which is understandable because I quite (both Is) some time ago, like 22 years ago to be precise. Ach, 22. It is a nightmare number for me. Ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend’s birthday, a frat number, the age one of us was when we had mono for the second time (thus, stereo, though current thought is that it was Cat Scratch Fever, very acutely). But 22 is to be celebrated, as it is part of the 4th of July, as are cubes and canon balls, I am led to believe, as all are in the fireworks here, presumably all around the country (I almost wrote around the whole world! I forgot there is no global hegemony [yet—just very much kidding [I hope]]). ))}} to be sure.

Now to find a picture to post, a movie for the other blog, and another composition. And since it is a holiday tomorrow, I will write a 12 minute long poem of prose that is probably terrible, have the Mac speech synthesizer read it like I have in four posts in the other blog (by which I always mean Tumblr, which has a symbol that informed the way I made my video which is of a large painting). I wish I (we) could sing.

Now to eat, take ADHD meds, and post a picture here. I think people must wonder about how we take photos everywhere, we are both faculty/academic staff, well-known enough, but perhaps because we, at our respective and very respectable institutions, carry our camera around, snapping photos of dirt or water stains or posters at strange angles (and we both are), etc. and I wonder if this sort of thing can get one in trouble, even more so, for the wrong reasons? That would be sad. We are in a minor [nothing legal, thank god, nor the key of Fauré’s 9th Barcarolle which is beautiful] predicament, and we are referring doubly to both wes of we. Camera caused it? Trying to say it is a snake that has swallowed an elephant and not a hat? Blip. Food.

Oh, I have dreamed of three things when we were at primary school (as well as many other things and many other places, but these three related ones just entered my head): how to build the perfectly safest house. Mine, not saying whose, was a mile underground, surrounded by concrete and lead, and a gap with giant hydraulic spring-like things, then the same encasement, and a secret entrance somewhere. But a single vulnerability is enough. Like an anything addict, recovered, just one slip up, and recidivism is the new buzz. A trope in mythologies: the Achilles tendon. The next think was how to commit the perfect crime alone, like robbing a bank. I figured out that it simply wasn’t worth it, and since I equated leaders with criminals, I also determined what many kings and queens and emperors have found out the hard way: it pays not to be a leader, to have a high profile. And the third was how to survive a nuclear war: we were teenagers in the 1980s and there was a glut of endgame movies—Terminator, The Morning After, Wargames, as well as ton of survival films. We had, as all NZ kids—it was compulsory—to watch all those movies, and Watership Down which I write about elsewhere and since it is in quite an interesting webmaze, we will link to it as soon as it is back up, it is more of an insurance policy or repository of private papers and the webpages but with a lot of spell errors to correct, and we watched a remake or the original Lord of the Flies to teach us, presumably, how we should not act.

Food. BTW the Latin in the title approximately means “You want things to be as it has been said” with a pun about the notion of force and power (“vis”).

I thaNK friends.

Drawing © 2010 Peter Whincop. I think this is his first Indian ink and paper piece blogged. And logs it has, and lines (and bark and mel for spectrographic freaks out there) OH! I wonder if there is place on the web we can drop an image and it does a 2D Cartesian, then 2D polar Fourier transform of it? That’d be more awesome than a little of five furry little kittens.

Making a World, then Tearing it Down, I Admit, by Sheer Panties and Hubris.

Painting and video © 2011 Peter Whincop.

The proof AIN’T in the pAINTing. The ID is in the vIDeo. Ergo sum. We have a sneaky feeling Peter’s not about to be outed as gay, but ousted as plain inconvenient. Not the sort of truth Al Gore speaks of (Man-Bear-Pig, which helped me with my name), but understated. And I’ll just add three things to this doughy mess-cum-pudding (where the proof is): currants, raisins, sultanas. Spotted dick, it ain’t no fiction, it’s found in Harry Potter so it is real. I had my first panic attack during the first Harry Potter film, it was that good. Spotted something, anyway. And, no, no outing or ousting, more probable is jousting (or that q-word from Harry Potter), if we get vaulted back to the middle ages.

Painting © 2011 Peter Whincop, proof that gremlins do not assist in any of his art.

Weapons of Medium Destruction by a 5 Year Old.

Images © 1974 Peter Whincop!

Like a carrot, you are a tap root, in NZ English.

[needs editing]

I used to talk about “The Gremlins.” It was my way of saying two, three things, which can be figured Seuss-instructionally “inside outside upside down.” From here will have to be another post, (1) I have forgotten, (2) I want to swim at the Z-Center while I am visiting MIT, (3) I have to deal with students!

This will have a high specific gravity. CAVEAT LECTOR. As if being the scribe wasn’t bad enough. I am trying to work out when I first started noticing discrepancies. They are made up by me of just observations.

(1) Bad printing alignment, color matching, and alpha-channel cross-talk by other colors: some, not I, speak forthrightly about such undesirability! Like, inscrutable—difficult to understand, impenetrable—um, is Adriana Lima an accident/undersirable/or wholly acceptable? Arbeit—er?—freely made decisions, I hope because the initial nice sounds of a tryptophan tastic Tunisia, triptych of temples—Sbeitla—Sb, I have no Antimony which is fairly poisonous, used in liquid metal batteries being developed at MIT, sounds like some unkind of dislike, and Kant had four of them

(3) In film I suppose subtle time adjustment, jitter and dither control, angle adjustment (in Final Cut the instructive DVD uses Angelina Jolie, so it would be angel adjustment), directedness of action, and sound “trickcraft” as it is known in the profession.

(2) There is no two.

This is all to say, the following DOES make a lot of sense when you put two minds to the task.

I thought Amf. had written about Lewontin and Gould’s article on Spandrels, but I have them in my notes. I’ll post them next. For now, we learn about Spolia, which is close to “spoils”—generally columns taken from diverse sources and put within a single structure; for me Basilica di S. Stefano Rot_ndo al Monte Celio springs to mind. I have spent many hours at the tiny circular (no, it’s not fat) church just above the Amphitheatrum Flavium in Rome, quite close to the palimpsestual Basilica di S. Clemente al Laterano, which is my favorite church in Rome itself (okay S. Ivo [alla Sapienza, the former location of L’università di Roma, now within the confines of Gli archivi di Stato] of Frencesco Borromini comes close, as does Il Tempietto di S. Pietro in Montorio of Donato Bramente, Il mausoleo di Santa Costanza [a S. Agnese fuori le Mura]—the photo on Wikipedia is—may I dither a response to this monstrously pathetic representation—truly fcuked up), which Father Leonard Boyle, former Librarian of the BAV—Biblioteca Apistolica Vaticana, as an amazing archaeologist, mapped in a veritable palimpsestual book, with layers of (architectural) vellum for the various layers of the church, right down to the Mithreaum and the sacrificial alter—one of my favored subjects these days. The Wikipedia article on S. Clemente doesn’t even mention Father Boyle. He was, dicitur, removed from his job as librarian by JPdue just before his [LB’s] retirement, as all his predecessors were made Cardinals. In such a way, the pope, who had, dicitur, difficulties with Father Boyle’s policies such as hiring women, could guarantee that the Irish-Canadian, later to be buried at S. Clemente, would never have a voice at the Vatican. Unlike Bernard Law—no elaboration, q.v., quiver, go figure, brrrr.

I must write one day about the truly great Father Reginaldus Foster. But another, logical post.

Dale Kinney, “Roman Architectural Spolia, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145/2 (2001)

I think it may exaggerate the purposefulness of their builders to call them historicist. A truly historicist building would be a “strong” one in tense conversation with its historical sources; and these traditional basilicas—however wonderful for other reasons—are not strong in that way. In Bloom’s terms, the millennial repetition of the architectural idea of the basilica, like the reuse of spolia, “just happened.” Paradoxically, these buildings, which, according to the loose conception of “influence” demonstrated at the beginning of this article, should show Roman influence most strongly, on the “anxious” model show no influence at all....

Disproportionately steep from ground level, the central space looks normal from the raised perspective of the throne, in which the lower story almost disappears and only the upper arches with their two registers of columns are clearly visible.

The columns were proclaimed spolia by Charlemagne’s advisor Einhard, who wrote that Charles “was unable to find marble columns for his construction anywhere else, and so he had them brought from Rome and Ravenna.”³¹ In fact, a number of the capitals have proven to be Carolingian simulations of spolia, and the authentic spolia did not necessarily come from Rome.³² It is usually assumed that the claim to have acquired spolia from the old imperial capital cities was made for programmatic reasons, to express Charlemagne’s own pretensions to imperial status and grandeur; thus the palatine chapel figures in most discussions of spolia as a paradigm of influence in the normal sense employed by R. R. Bolgar: the “transmission of ideas.”³³...

There is no lower story, however, and the columns are disposed on receding semicircular paths between the piers. There are no straight lines like the heavy horizontal cornice or the vertical planes suggested by the rectilinear alignment of the columns at Aachen (Fig. 8). Although the elements are the same and the designs are unmistakably related, the effects of these interior spaces are almost opposing: balanced proportions and serene expansiveness in San Vitale, dominant verticality and stark prismatic constraint at Aachen.³⁵

It is unclear whether the palatine chapel was meant to reprise San Vitale specifically, or whether their resemblance denotes a more generic affiliation with a tradition of centralized buildings associated with emperors and kings.³⁶ Even in the latter case San Vitale remains a conspicuous point of reference, an indubitable source for the Carolingian chapel, as the formal resemblance between them is much closer than one normally finds among medieval buildings. But the spolia are a difference, signaling an area of resistance. The column shafts and capitals in San Vitale were newly made for the sixth-century construction, and the capitals, in particular, are distinctively post-Roman, comprising early Byzantine shapes (impost capitals, folded capitals) and decorative motifs (Sasanian palmettes, vine scrolls, interlace) that are flagrantly unVitruvian. ³⁷ Vitruvius probably was unknown to the architect of San Vitale, but Charlemagne’s advisors knew his treatise well. Einhard puzzled over its “obscure words and names.” ³⁸ Students of Vitruvius would have appreciated the conceit of bringing spolia especially from Rome. They might also have applauded the designer of the chapel for rejecting the qualities that modern architectural historians find Byzantine in San Vitale, notably its curvaceous grace and the hanging effect achieved by dissembling weight and gravity, in order to foster qualities that we consider Roman: solid, static masses, unnecessary height, traditional ornament.³⁹ The spolia are indices of the builder’s intensely retrospective aspiration, in Bloom’s terms, an anxious avoidance of the more immediate traditions of effeminate Byzantine and uncouth Frank.

[This continues, and starts, very interestingly. I kept in the footnotes in case they are a secret signal to passing UFOs, rather like the tune in Close Encounters of the Third Kind]

Now for this. Best snope this: [nyc.gif]

[Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayhem_(crime) on 20110208-1914]

Fetter v. Beall
The most significant revolution in common-law mayhem doctrine came in 1697, when the King's Bench decided Fetter v. Beale, 91 Eng. Rep. 1122. There, the plaintiff recovered in a battery action against a defendant. Shortly thereafter, “part of his skull by reason of the said battery came out of his head,” and the plaintiff brought a subsequent action under mayhem. Though Fetter is also known as an early example of res judicata, it is most significant for expanding the ambit of mayhem to include “loss of the skull.”

[Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragging on 20110208-1918]

I call this mind-rape, just one form of it, anyway. It really and truly is criminal, unconscionable, and it happens. Not sure if res judicata, as obvious as it might seem, is especially fair.

Ragging
Ragging is a practice in educational institutions in India and Sri Lanka that involves existing students baiting or bullying new students. It is similar to the American phenomenon of hazing. It often takes a malignant form wherein the newcomers may be subjected to psychological or physical torture. Currently, Sri Lanka is said to be the worst affected country in the world.

Recent cases
Since 2001, ragging has been the focus of a number of legal actions. For example, the Supreme Court of India defined it in a judgement as actions that "adversely affect the physique or psyche of a fresher or a junior student".

A report from 2007 by the Indian anti-ragging group Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education analyzed 64 ragging complaints, and found that over 60% of these were related to physical ragging, and 20% were sexual in nature.

[I have removed footnote references in the hope that this is rendered less conforming to any particular code of publishing conduct, just because i’m a rebel.]

Another reference for which I couldn’t think of a tag to give to it.

[I would read that, more than just this, weighing in all the details also of the the following cadence/coda/cadenza/credenza/credentials (a falling, tail, falling, place for writing, things to have someone believe you are in fact you)]

[Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_are_stupid,_throw_rocks_at_them! on 20110208-1935]

On misandry:–

Can you imagine if a company put out a line of T-shirts that said, ‘Black people are goobers, drop anvils on their heads’ or ‘Homosexuals are stupid, throw rocks at them’? And can you imagine the San Francisco Chronicle doing a story on how cute these T-shirts are?... Turn it around and imagine shirts suggesting the following: ‘Girls lie and will break your heart. Throw rocks at them’ or ‘Little girls are not soft and cuddly, they are mean and vicious and will destroy you.’ Can you imagine a newspaper doing a cute little headline and story on how wonderfully cute little boy fashion has become? I doubt it.

—Rush Limbaugh

Why do I somewhat agree with a man I have always despised? I don’t think I’m drifting to the right, more to the left-right-out because history possibly will swerve in the near future to a hell unknown that takes us back to I don’t want to know but it is perhaps a minor fear, some form of Medieval or medium-evil Devo “Whip It” goshdarn it I can’t really speak of such things. (Because writing is privileged over its binary opposite, speech, according to Derrida, upending Rousseau, but not eliminating the category. The word upend is peculiar: it is like U-Haul. U-Pend. Patent pend? Patient pend? Pending what, depending on what, defending what, deafening whom, offending whom, offensive forcing whom, certainly not sitting on the fence with Hume, too much spending—I hear as a complaint on a day on which $1.1tr of cuts were made—pend, mend, send, bend, it’s gonna be the end. Incend.0 SO MORE ON THIS:

As a 16yo I stayed after English class (5th form = American 10th grade) to be a giant unpoetic math-like dork with Geoff Shepherd, an incredibly good English teacher, new to our school. He was a thespian, good looking, spoke very nicely, held our attention, and we largely responded. I started doing all the lighting design and ladder climbing for school productions. That is by-the-by. I asked him if he knew of any sentences like the one I am about to write, which I gave him. It had to be seen. Perhaps now, heard, but then, seen. He said, no, he prefers the Romantic poets. The sentence, in its second, slightly more sensible form, really does apply these days (said my bruised head, and my right big toe—at least it was the right that was crushed, and fell off, I mean, the toe nail, after a good beating): “Go to the ranger’s tops.” I was thinking of a Park Ranger, like one tending Mt. Tongariro, one of NZ’s wonderful volcanoes. I said, if you shift the spaces, like “together” becomes “to get her,” the sentence becomes “Got other anger stops?” Poignant. Dorky.

I just notice the word upend: “word upend”⟶“wor dupend” which is dripping with possibilities. “was/war/we’re/warped depend/deepened/duped/end,” and I can’t but help feeling the word “puella” there, but I’m single, and beautiful/pretty in the feminine (Classical and Modern Latin) is somewhat not unappealing. But the puella come from nowhere, except for the first line of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” from his first book of Metamorphoses. Nothing to fight for or upend, but just remembering my past, which was sweeter than this vile present. Well, it isn’t really THE present, it is MY present. NO, wrong way around. The past, I was in my little world. I was nice, despite some very bad character traits. Innocent too (same contradiction applies). I wake from this happy slumber (okay, the slumber itself was dreadful, foreboding, cruel) of forced insanity, true: I was forcibly made to feel (and subsequently go a little) mad. Only my imaginings were REAL!! How unfair is that. And of course, since it is real, it persists. Yuck, IHTFP. The people up North-East at MIT have those letters to mean, ostensibly, I Hate This Fcuking Place. Knowing these clever students, it is probably a chemical formula, possibly just baking soda. Hacking too, a funny thing. People don’t waste their time. No one learns Morse Code for the heck of it, or scrapes body parts pretty bad just to tag their name in an abandoned room somewhere. But I secretly (oops! no longer a secret) wish I had done all those things, the pipes, the careful planning, the moving of parts, say, of a firetruck (which had Latin on it which is extremely cool), yes, piece by piece, then assembled on the Dome of MIT. I have been to a couple of places, but that was pretty basic. That is where I took the photo, either here or on Tumblr, of “The Head Phone Tomb.” Everything has a name, except some people have a number. Says No.6, “I am not a number, I am a free man.” Then Rover, the big white ball—in fact a weather balloon, “when the balloon goes up” is a weird expression I heard lately, perhaps 99 red ones? That was the 1980s, bounces on him, arise from the sea which in this case isn’t a metaphor.

Amazing, and I wish my screen wouldn’t flash at me whenever I write something about MIT or conspiracies or theories of kerning or when I quote the NY Times (which I very much like, just read about Google searches being “black-hat” stacked by J.C. Penney), or I put up one of my compositions or videos, or paintings/drawings especially, or comments about how I believe that, well, I leave that remark involving the words, not connected, alpha, www fora, trees, lights (what about xmas?), lyrics, books, and anything having a shred to do with anything I have been doing all my life, to which I have some propriety relationship: my ideas! My output! Is identity theft going on by proxy, by taking everything from me? By causing enough despair for me to willingly give things up? I think not. I don’t have fears, a strange brain-chemistry thing, oh very strange brain, oh very strange chemistry, che misterioso. Basically playing music, then composing it, analyzing it, teaching it including time and frequency domain, writing words of many means but nothing especially orthographic though I am font-obsessed and did have a Letraset font catalog which I read obsessively and it was just the alphabet! Mind you, for transfer-stencils, as a kid, and designed fonts at the age of 10, and was Greek/Norse/Egyptian myth-obsessed, and I had The World Atlas of Mysteries with an awful photo of Spontaneous Human Combustion leaving a Zimmer frame and shoe after the person immolated, I write about representation, I was involved in the editing of my ex-girlfriend Cammy Brothers’ dissertation and book on Renaissance architectural sketches of ruins and built/unbuilt works by the architects, and worked on formal music theory with the greatest modern music theorist David Lewin at Harvard where we spend half our time rotating and inverting and retrograding strings of notes, using Markov chains, infinite and finite string systems, dovetailing, counting intervals, duplicating notes as singularities (BEFORE the recent spate of them), and studying ways of understanding, semantically, difficult but seemingly obvious texts (and his book on the subject was published, finally, posthumously) and that involved excising parts of the music kind of hypermetrically in the sense, loosely speaking, of Cone, Lerdahl and Jackendoff (I am being very generalizing here), etc. I work on representation of transformational voice leading between two sets, basically a critique of current ideas on the subject, their metaphors, which makes the heating pipe very unhappy with me (yes, a metaphor, and metonymy and metaphor are major parts of my dissertation). I like everything to be in words. Able to be spoken, heard as-is.

So, yes, I do all this. And I am about to put up a couple of videos. I don’t know how well they will be received, but here goes nothing.

[The following from a good sort!]

Gypsy Wife

And where, where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight
I’ve heard all the wild reports, they can’t be right
But whose head is this she’s dancing with on the threshing floor
whose darkness deepens in her arms a little more

And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?
Where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?

Ah the silver knives are flashing in the tired old cafe
A ghost climbs on the table in a bridal negligee
She says, “My body is the light, my body is the way”
I raise my arm against it all and I catch the bride’s bouquet

And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?...

Too early for the rainbow, too early for the dove
These are the final days, this is the darkness, this is the flood
And there is no man or woman who can't be touched
But you who come between them will be judged

And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?...

—Leonard Cohen

Famous Blue Raincoat

It’s four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you’re better
New York is cold, but I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.

Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
You’d been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody’s wife.

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well I see Jane’s awake—

She sends her regards.
And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I’m glad you stood in my way.

If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free.

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried.

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear

Sincerely, L. Cohen

—Leonard Cohen

._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._.

Those are amphibrachs. But feet. Meter.

Leonard Cohen’s own liner notes:–

I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York sometime during the early seventies. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end.

According to Wikipedia: In the 1999 book, The Complete Guide to the Music of Leonard Cohen, the authors comment that Cohen’s question, “Did you ever go clear?”, in the song, is a reference to the Scientology state of “Clear.” Cohen was very briefly a member of the Church of Scientology, which he had heard was a “good place to meet women.”

And, “why not?”

Check out www.songmeanings.net for some Revelations. [Bad guise!] Also find P’s “Wild-blue-inland-kid-intimacy” which is on one of our main blogs. [The words of a great man!] To swing the other way completely, read about what is accidentally celebrated (no, I mean wesentlich/Anfall, not zufällig) in Wikipedia, on the swastika. I simply cannot reproduce the postcard here because it is so vile, and freedom of speech referring to something before it apparently became evil and vile but with an implicit grope to it as there is in the article on eugenics, is not warranted other than for a reasonable rest.

This will continue later; I have a bACKlog of things to get through. SpAeter.

Coded Crack.

Video*/images*/text(!)/sound © 2011 Peter Whincop

*including the weird shapes (like a cloud) that form, like people (attract according to Wiccans, which is pretty cool and better than opposites attract—I am genuinely impressed with everything I read about Wiccans) doing things (like, using the loo), structures (compositions by my friend Peter from the Netherlands for whom I wrote the MaxMSP patches for a couple), maps (the email address of my friend Peter from New Zealand), plots (of land for gardening, especially ones given to communities by local authorities), anything my wild crazy little inland empire can conjure (that doesn’t mean “with the law,” it means “sworn together,” as in a conspiracy, which is from “to breath together,” with a PIE base *(s)peis- “to blow”—cf. O.C.S. pisto “to play on the flute”), etc., more visible in the next video I put up. Part intention, and part intention-by-proxy, in that the wonderful bonus feature of the Mac rendering engine (probably QT—funny how that sounds like cutey—in this case 7 Pro) + iPhone and broken Macbook Pro screen made some of these shapes which I emphasized, and I decided to keep them, kind of like found art except someone also by intention fcuked—I am speculating, and this is of course only speculation and part of a fantastic nightmare—with these OS drivers and engines. Just a thought. Last time I went crazy and told someone brainy about it—and he almost developed the Unified Field Theorem a couple of decades ago, and that is independent of my madness—he said that I have to explain how it happened, not just observe that it happened, or so I claim. Hence, my semi-obsession which has yielded a pretty decent artistic output. So, the common factor is the OS. And my sleuthing. Thank god for the eh?! in sleuth, it points the way. I should meander restaurantwise, prey that eating fruit with aplomb and pears, apples, etc., de-hungers that aching gut. Stabbing sideache almost fcukked this slightly lonely victim (since surgery...).

And all because someone broke my little heart. Silly them for bothering to meet me. YEARS AGO. Anyway, it has been quite the favor to me in the LT (long term) [invariant? I think not]. And where I’m from, favours (yup, with the U—I think a U-bend is what Kiwis call an S-bend, for removal of sh!t etc.), are shared at will, and never negatively.

And also by exhaustion (... late) I am virtually prostrate.

Oh, and by the way, this is Peter walking through our apartment, talking about all the paintings and mess on the floor.