It pains me.

De “lorem ipsum” ex Wikipedia, sine citationibus sed con Petro “inscriptionibus.”

The most used form of the lorem ipsum dates from the 1960s, and for some random reason the writer has paired it with this bit of near irrelevance for this exact sentence, it perhaps can be dated as far back as the sixteenth century. It’s a famous filler for text-space when typesetting. Like saying blah blah. Is taken from Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, §1.10.32–33. “About The Purposes of Good and Evil.”

A pathetic translation was given before this second one of the title, above, with the word “About” put in square brackets. I mean, what does “De” mean in this context? Am I lacking a hyphen before I mark the question? I’ll level with you: I have not read the lorem ipsum, nor have I read the Wikipedia article. Honest. But something tells me that it is relevant. And here is how. All I am doing is filling up this sentence with words. So why not use an official filler of text-space. (Might I note that a context is part of its own context, and also I am defeating the purpose(s) of even this sentence by using these exact words.)

The opening from Cicero:–

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit. “Neither is there anyone who loves grief itself since it is grief and thus wants to obtain it.”

That’s a dodgy and stiff translation, even as an oration or essayed statement. (For example, why amet?!) In translating, and among translators too I suppose, since they translate (like the whole christ thing, trans-latus, “carried across”), there is much freedom. I am not sure what kind of freedom, and if we all subscribe to it.

“It is not known exactly when the text acquired its current standard form; it may have been as late as the 1960s.” I should like, finally, to take to task some writers for their crap use of language, and this is more descriptive than prescriptive. Ways to say things abound; they thrive in their abundance. Many they are. Betwixt the wind and our nobility, some sentences suck. And I have quoted verbatim just one sentence from Wikipedia (at the beginning of this paragraph). How would Fowler—I think one of the sculptors of and commentators on the English language, as living and breathing, not a thing but a process—take that sentence? “Inelegant variation” springs from my mind onto this page. If the sentence (ergatively) read well: “The form of lorem ipsum most widely used today, given [above], most likely dates from the late 1960s.” So I’ve use a contemporary form of “dates.” Good. Only four words difference. But why on earth “acquired” and why double up on the whole speculation or uncertainty thing. It is not so good using the middle voice. “It” is no decent way to begin a sentence! It smacks of unwillingness to say, here is how “it” is, by citing something. Verbosity, inelegant variation, high-fallutin’ snob language, redundancy, no scrutiny of implicit terms even if they are not logically equivalent (not even an academic needs to say both “current” and “standard”; I think that is implied by the sentence taken as a whole, and by the article itself). “May” stands out. Properly, we avoid saying “he” if the person is present (and he isn’t so I believe it is fine—witness a fair use of the impersonal voice). And the text is present and it hasn’t been mentioned by name for a sentence or two, so to call it by its real name I think flows nicely, and it is polite. I won’t elaborate on my comparative.

Or, is there something I’m missing here. Here is a little more of the Latin (using the same sections as above):–

[32] Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

[33] At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio, cumque nihil impedit, quo minus id, quod maxime placeat, facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet, ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat....

H. Rackham’s 1914 translation (with major source of Lorem Ipsum highlighted):–

[32] But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

[33] On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

It really has me scratching my head. But it’s infested. My hair is nice, though. Good use of an “it” construction. Not so incidentally, I think that the above Rackham translation is stylistically inconsistent within itself. Problems. I’m not a Latinist; my only claim is studying with Pope’s Latin Secretary (the guy who write a whole lot of bulls) for his junior and senior intensive courses (mainly for grad students and educators). It didn’t all sink in, because I studied only for a year, and it was a while ago. But we lived Latin, drinking it in with the Carmelite Brothers at the Monestario id S. Pancrazio, talking about current affairs in the real lingua franca. There is still a broadcast of world news every Sunday from Finland! And that is where Linux is from, also Sambuca with melted liquorice, and salt. Mmmmmm. But, that translation flourishes just at the wrong moments.

The link at the end of the Wikipedia article to Metesyntactic variable had some foobar kind of code:

// The function named foo
int foo(void)
{
   // Declare the variable bar and set the value to 1
   int bar = 1;
 
   return bar;
}

I gonna look for some math to throw in. Hmmm. Wikipedia like Google is not the secret holder of information nor the evil power that will one day choose; it genuinely wants to get the message out there: anyone can learn. For some more than others, but that is a virtue far from worth discussing.

A precise version of the spectral theorem which holds in this case is:^[73]

Given a densely-defined self-adjoint operator T on a Hilbert space H, there corresponds a unique resolution of the identity E on the Borel sets of R, such that

for all x ∈ D(T) and y ∈ H. The spectral measure E is concentrated on the spectrum of T.

There is also a version of the spectral theorem that applies to unbounded normal operators.

More Ryoji at Another Site. You Can Share Millions of Dollars with Peter.

More from Peter’s Ryoji Ikeda remake CD can be found... HERE! Among them are 6 extracts of a piece he didn’t finish, as the CD was already long enough. They exist for your listening pleasure, um, torture, misery, reminder that your life doesn’t suck? and also to be used with his stupid blessing—stupid because of his stupid copyright notice he puts everywhere. Yes, go ahead and play with the 6 samples, they are fairly good. Credit him. Do something better than he could. Make it sound like a million dollars. Make that two, because then you could contact him, and he could override the -nc- part of the (CC) license. He is as impecunious as I, and, um, isn’t it a -sa- “share alike” agreement, like give me some money. Now. Make three million.

But as I am doing nothing to speak of, here a couple of his other compositions, from completely different periods of his output. He has a Mus.B.(Hons.) (1st class) in composition, but he has largely rejected what he composed for that. Some things should stay in the workshop, or in notebooks. He is old. Forty-two years old, in fact. That means he was approximately class of ’91. He was making electronic music on 8-track machines, and using a MIDI sequencer that overloaded a Yamaha Rev5 reverb device. In fact, vestiges of his 1980s sounds from the Electronic Music Study in Marama Hall of the University of Otago, New Zealand (sorry, he’s a Kiwi) can be found in very many of his pieces. In further fact, the first piece he had me post to my Tumblr site (linked above) has a background wash of sound, very full, writhes ever so slightly; a little unnerving, but it is about bipolar affective disorder, which terrible as it is, some people think doesn’t exist. Or that people suffering (some would say enjoying, for part of the cycle) from some part of the spectrum are misfits or defective. Fcuk them. It’s something you can’t will yourself out of having. I’d know.

If someone tried to say it (the sounds, not the b.a.d., although the latter is likely) didn’t come from the EMS at Otago U., then chance are they are stupid (which includes the possibility of them being a liar).

Oh, the pieces will be in separate links (I can’t work out how to get sounds onto Blogspot. Tumblr is so much easier). I will post my thoughts on lorem ipsum and Wikipedia in a second. Peter and I work together on these things, and his website (I suppose we share it but it is messy, doesn’t make sense too often, and never dollars—don’t become a professional musician, he is muttering—but the site is fun, and my job is to make it worth your while).

PS. I lied a little about how the sounds from 1980s were made. It’s part of my non-renter’s insurance policy. A kind of monetary instrument.

Ryoji Ikeda pt.2.

... following from pt.1 (below!)

Perhaps his music is “Ryoji Ikeda” music, in that no one else could make it, and if someone laid claim to it, even if they, say, called it &/| which means “and/or” or half of some teeter-totter fun, or else /^} which could be “division to the power of a bracket” or a pretty ideogram, instead of +/-, and if they then plastered their name all over it, inside of it, it would still be easy to show that Ryoji Ikeda is the author/artist. How so? Some people have an argument against this notion: for another post, god be willing, I will find the exact word, it escapes me sometimes as I feel something has a stranglehold on my mind. But it is a specious argument. At least, when it is the minimum case of one person or a collective (We are Borg), contending it is theirs when it isn't, the argument I am unable to present is even more useless. The problem is the general case, but I find the Go Make Another One And We’ll Hear Or May We Please Watch? test would come into play. There are legal precedents for obscure, and far less obscure, musical plagiarism. That is more of a stretch than outright theft, so theft should be easy to show.

What does music theft mean? I’m going on about this only because I am writing an article for a local record label’s inform, blog-like column, for composers and similar educators to discuss their work, but more in the sitting at a cafe with a bunch of students—the best lessons are had that way—and writing as if someone said, “Why did you do such-and-such, and this time please be pragmatic! Please don’t try Deleuze. Not appropriate!” See Howard Stelzer’s magazine. Mine’s not up yet because it isn’t written (funny, that), but drafts like this, a scattering of ideas, virally spreading, all over the net, are. Ikeda’s CD is structured in those triplets (three lots of three, plus a kind of summary). The pieces within the triplet run on into the next, and while the transition is as seamless as any other, the music of the new track then has a different bunch of material and transitions to throw at us, I hope bloodlessbloodlessy.

I decided, kind of to frame the task—and I wanted to pump out this music as fast as possible for no real reason, since I’m in no hurry to publish, it’s not like my music is going anywhere—such that each piece uses only the material of a single, chosen “victim” (sacrificial? take me to a Mithraeum) piece: that piece alone (altars are small, but were very powerful in the cult of Mithras, rather like a small alteration here and there can be very powerful when organized and calculated perfectly, or altercations, more fun). And each has a completely different form/content thing happening/being, I’ll even throw out the word dialectic. There. For example, one piece might use a specific technique of altering frequency domain information—perhaps my favorite area to work in, though it’s become a lot harder—either my brain is anti-fractal (I never did like them anyhow—Skeeter Davis) or the sounds are kind of fractal, almost inaudibly. I have written a few papers on the subject, scattered unacademically around the non-academic web—a kind of deathwish in several ways (so if I die mysteriously, blame it on the brainweb of academia and the perverse transfer of ready information). Seriously, how to un-secure a job. Ugh. I will not say what the techniques are quite yet. She or he who stole my multi-disk storage array has all my working files. Learn to tap-dance to their algorithms. Betcha have two right feet.

The video is a still image of the entire spectrograph of the musical aspect, and as the piece moves through its two minutes, I start from low gain/high threshold for the analysis (and therefore color/shape representation) and move to high gain/low threshold. (The coupled terms are in fact similar, not opposites: low gain means not so much sound, and high threshold means to get rid of components that are not loud enough before the gain is applied). At the time I was interested very much in architecture (and I still am), and I go into some detail in one article called “Freak Show” (I’ll ask my friend to add a link to my web maze again once I have completed the clean version’s framework): I made the music and ‘drew’ the spectrograph at the same time, kind of moving from one to the other. It was an important task to me, since I find there to be some quite bogus about Aphex Twin’s spectrographic face. And all the other neat detail—faces, perspective, what seem like words, well, that’s a corruption I have tracked down elsewhere, and published privately on the web (findable but not searchable) until I iron out all creases, take out life insurance, look for a very high paying job (which the articles could well land me...) (and I become a trader at the same time), and I want to have my facts straight. I am very happy with it; I cannot think of too many other examples of two things in this manner being done with no privileged term.

F-ing Cartoon communists

the real and zany end!

Ryoji Ikeda pt.1.

This in from my friend Peter Whincop. He makes electronic music and sounds, video sometimes, paints, and teaches somewhere. He all for sharing art, but never appropriating it. Selling it, yes, but not stealing it. He made me write that, I don’t know what crack he’s on. Clearly strangely obsessed with theft. I know for sure he isn’t the electronic music equivalent of anyone who takes after cookie monster.
______

I made this video and music with two underlying intentions: to produce them at the same time, and to use material (that sounds like his) from a single piece by Ryoji Ikeda, and nothing extraneous. I have completed a remake of his +/- CD, not using all the tracks because some of mine are longer versions of his, one is a video, and because there is a different thrust. Here are some thoughts on thrusting, and eventually with other pieces my friend allows me to, other fencing terms as well (see below).

I have so much to say that I’ll break this into three posts, and for the heck of it put a new piece beside each! This first piece (a video) is the one I am actually talking about: PlusMinusDeathSquareSnowMinusPlus. NB. this is a highly “spatialized” piece, so wear good headphones for the full effect. It is done with IRCAM’s Spat set of dynamic MaxMsp abstractions and externals. When I teach it here at MIT the students are blown away by their new skill—hard to learn, but worth it—that can make their pieces sound as well-produced as Radiohead’s or whatever.

[This should be updated]

Obligatory legal notice:

Title: 0905 ±death⧷death⧷snow∓ [video]
Date: May 2009
People: Peter Whincop (composer, producer)
Credits: Ryoji Ikeda (fair use of material that sounds like his)
Album: ±UNcouth ∓+⧷-
Album/Disk/Track: 18 - (00)
Unix Title: MinusDotDotVideo

Rights: all rights are cleared or implicit. © 2009 Peter Whincop. By permission of owners Barbara and Garry Whincop of Napier, New Zealand. Protected under US and NZ intellectual property laws.

Some idiots thought they could “steal” my music/sounds/art/video/photos/writings/life recently, but I won or they are losing, bad, and I’ve become a little paranoid about the whole “it’s mine even if it’s crap” thing. I’m going to kick their asses. Hard. They also did the fractal filtering (I will fight this to death if need be), digital signing, perhaps mixed in tracks or took some out, though a MaxMSP patch is quite hard to toy with (maybe, just maybe, the thief learned to compose from me? Wouldn’t it be funny if I have correspondence from one of the thieves that discusses a piece? Cleverly worded or not. I do speculate wildly; I do not think I have had a single dishonest music friend), yeah, that’s a lot I guess, isn’t it called fencing when you get rid of stolen goods? All except the composing. Even though the sounds and form are very loosely derived from Ryoji Ikeda’s, they are certainly mine, though I always credit him. And the concept. Only blackmailing me will give the criminals temporary reprieve; until I clear this up legally, initiated by myself. Whatever, and phew.

Ikeda’s 10 pieces are grouped as 3+3+3+1, each group with a “theme.” I don’t mean some fascinating melody, rather I mean what I call an ‘anti-feel’ because I can’t think of his music as having feelings or something that can induce them like a probe sticking you in the brain (or, I suspect, one would respond with equal strength but perhaps differently if a spike was shoved up your rectum); I prefer to think that his pieces enter the mind, but politely so, letting you seize control whenever you like.

But it’s not emotional or even able to be said; it’s somewhat cerebral (and I do not necessarily mean intellectual), even verging on the ineffable. I hope you will hear what I mean; search for his music and it should be clear (well, more than search. Buy or download, listen). It is polite and forceful; delicate/sweet and perturbing: a lot of contradictions, or at least we don’t have singular words for them. I sort of need a word that is, in effect, like a piece of cubist sculpture. Or Erik Satie’s music is like this; as if different when viewed from different directions, in different contexts, with different suggestions. Where can I find words like that?

pt.2 to follow (above!)...

I am Off-Track, or I’m Training (er, shh!) Myself, um, Blogging Techniques.

Hey, I’m new to this, I got a Tumblr account but I thought two “minutes is better than one minute” (FOTC). So I will use this to post music of myself and of friends and we are also conspiracy theorists who want to give a good name to conspiracy theorists. I think it’s a pretty apt, even picturesque and nice sounding, name, but the media has distorted and corrupted so much of what we take in. I think that’s where we get the expression, to be taken in. Nothing to do with cops.

So, blogging I will start! And as I doubt anyone will look, I’ll say and so do as I please (within the rules). NB. The composer and video artist for some of these posts has given me permission to use his material (and his stupid copyright notice attached which I have to include, sorry, I’ll shove it all into one big fat opalescent line).

It is a favor to him; he hates the idea of blogging but secretly wants people to hear and see his stuff. It’s already all around the world, it spans from 2001, with no significant output in a few months (not more than, say 10hrs of finished work) but in private collections, university libraries, radio station archives (he was a performing pianist but now living with him is more like a tantrum), not with everyperson. So it is time. Peter is cautious to kind of mutter that [[mutter mutter i think someone got hold of my sounds and subtly changed them can you add a note when i think they’ve been f-ed up, like in a spectrograph—you’ll see it in my spectrograph piece itself—and i think in that piece there can be seen the profile of women kissing each other but i see that everywhere anyway]] so yeah, I’ll do that.

xxx