more of a conga point, actually

had a friend who studied some sort of african drumming with some sort of african-drumming-and-performing-arts-focused intentional community not far from here.

he described some of his study--which focused now on one voice or drum or orisha then on another--and personal experiences, but there was a strong spiritual & discipline component implied by his reticent behavior and reluctance to speak too much of it. sometimes he would gently nudge me toward some other resource: a book or recording.

often he would hand drum on his legs or a table edge while we were basking in music, and he would clearly be paying attention to something drummerly-technical. sometimes he would hand drum on his leg as i played something on another instrument. 

he gave me a conga.

and was prevented, by his discipline, from giving me any instruction as to its use. 

once or twice he played that conga while i played something on another instrument.

he died.

i have learned some semblance of some basic strikes upon the drumhead & some beginners exercises through the internet. but remain untutored. and wonder about the well-being of that drum there, mostly unplayed. and certainly never being used to the fullness of its design & purpose.

those of his surviving family with whom i have been in touch gladly consent to my possession and control of the object.

and i understand that community to have lost its ... patriarch? leader? host? teacher? ... about a year before my buddy died, and do not know what has become of the members. surely among them are people who seriously studied this discipline of the drum alongside my friend, who still do so, and would use my friend's conga in a way that honored a meaningful part of his memory.

a way that i cannot use it.

i do not know how to reach out to them. i have driven to and from the hill but don't think i could find my way back there, and wonder, after the death of the patriarch, then my buddy, then the cov2 pandemic, whether there is still a the hill there.

he has a daughter whom i know but haven't encountered since shortly before his death. i don't know how to reach her but have tried to enable her to reach me. 

anyway, i don't really want to relinquish the beautiful instrument. i want to magically be able to play it well. but i don't. i try to gently keep that skin lively by occasionally fumbling through those exercises & a shot at wawako (sometimes guanguanco). but i've known drummers and know that i am no drummer.

and an instrument should be played.

[trumped under the couch]: 👀

hot inflation eternal recurrence and the barycenter!

long exposition (which you know or can surmise):

i haven't been much of a youtuber, until recently. you know of the long history as media-shunning luddite, and as consumer of liberated material subject to ownership claims. laggard on the mobile device and broadband, as a dialer-up, my consumption was minimal, focusing on audio for maximum value per transmitted unit of memory. i thus obtained months worth of educational books on tape of the university lectures on x, many of which i've studied or heard attentively during many long hours staring at the emails of corporate vice presidents and recognizing words.

since broadband i've discovered and consumed a bunch of video courses in the same vein, either about music (history theory personalities etc) or, broadly, cosmology: astronomy, astrophysics, relativity, big bangs, black holes, particle physics and string theory.

significant portions of the latter category were excellently reintroduced, at a somewhat superficial level but with much more recent, expensive and mind-blowing animated visualizations of more or less the same data, in neil degrasse tyson's recent reboot of carl sagan's "cosmos".  =>aside: i am dismayed by one episode of the original, and much of the reboot, for the otherwise estimable hosts' unwarranted, defensive, patronizing and didactic lectures and digs concerning subject matter beyond their domain, plausibly intending better to delineate the boundary, but tyson exhibits about as much grace as penn jilette. as to sagan, well, what else would you expect of a scorpio astronomer with a taurus ascendant and sagittarius moon, given the podium?<=

and i have toyed with tedtalks. they routinely have a high pith quotient and top-shelf a/v, ultimately, though, amount to just another channel of edutainment. sort of like much npr programming, it is deceptively deep and informative, all the while smugly bolstering the status quo and soporifically lulling one to "stay tuned" (to the exclusion of other applications of attention, obviously).

unsatisfied with my dated (everybody is really excited about what they're going to learn when the large hadron collider at cern is turned on in, like, the two thousand and oughts) material, i turned to youtube.

a banality of beauty

i am not sure quite how to convey the continuing -- indeed, continuous -- previously-alluded-to spang! quality of the floral development in my yard onomatopoeically. that word i had intended to be evocative of a gong in sequins doing jazz hands (center stage under a spotlight).


little azaelito struttin'

much of the impressiveness of a gong -- of the sound produced by a gong -- lies in its size and developing character: the attack sudden, loud and a little crackly in the treble timbres of the crash; the decay a tapestry of rich, shimmering, complex and dynamic reverberations shedding the treble yet persisting, and then enduring. (the sequins and jazz hands were just to make it more so).

so i am at a bit of a loss: a cascade of gongs (like synchronized swimmers diving in, in turn) would seem to obliterate the impressiveness of any one gong in the sequence. maybe a four-dimensional gong (leaving time -- yes, yes -- as its own non-spatial dimension).

out to the hinternets

when this is non-referential, anyone will be able to spell it
lather, rinse. repeat five times. repeat to others. go –

spread: in quarter-dollar-sized dollops of meaning.

go, out, from the universal data storage and retrieval interface:
go out to the far barren barbarian hinternets, to fast!

go, for immersion in the unread ravings of every kooky Gutenberg
in the world with access to a handful of organized conflict minerals. go!

plunge into the voice of the billion-headed Hamilton beast!

all the soapbox pope-haters and their pope-hater-baiters,
locust-winged alien daters, honey-throated conspiracy debaters,
Nigerian e-mailers, valerian tea sellers, myriad retailers;
kirilian photographers, Brazilian pornographers,
mammalian ethnographers, Lemurian cartographers,
ranters, raconteurs, key-loggers, and bloggers
– each with their own dedicated haters and baiters –

scams, spams, evangelical feature film raters, hot-rodders,
intellectual property trafficking traders, mass daters, pathways to fear,
those baiting and aiding the kiddie-porn trade hating legislators’
efforts to crack down, track down and convict such de Sade-ers,
prefabricated essays such as “Satellites, Satyrs, Saturn, Sadism: a Survey
of the Stochastic Sociocomputational Determinism of Insert Dataset Here,”
vids of skaters, lists of prison rape jokes, random thesis generators,
and school projects by most of the nation’s fifth-graders! go!

go! go out to the hinternets. to fast.

there, the devil will come to you disguised as the widow of Patrice Lumumba.

the devil is an empty referent playing craps in a bar by the docks
of an equatorial port town who will offer stones and meaning,
and we will not imagine meeting him like a boy
intent to try the periled path of manly heroism.

he will offer meaning it is good to know.
a compass comprising the breadth of the four modalities,
and deep he will offer to decrypt the elevated perfumes of significance:

all this, see.

the devil – disguised as savings on prescription drugs
and get rich quick schemes – will come, offering
the opportunity to lock in low interest rates. stones and seas and
a bigger penis or lost secret ancient Chinese sex techniques.
the devil will come to you as a philosopher of the mind,
career counseling headhunter, financial planning consultant,
as the vile profiles of virtual mystics, as marketing statistics,
the promise of good times, a self-proclaimed self-help guru:
it is good for you to decide what is good for you. see!

seen: there the devil will come to collect your selectors
and secure this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be saved

from yourself
and everyone else.

sometimes a double entendre is only a double entendre

there are a lot of pop songs about guns. some:

1. help save the youth of america - billy bragg
2. gunslinger - bo diddley
3. shotgun boogie - tennesee ernie ford
4. just the right bullets - tom waits
5. when the gun draws (feat. mr. porter) - pharoahe monch
6. johnson machine gun - sunnyland slim
7. don't take your guns to town - johnny cash
8. happiness is a warm gun - the beatles
9. the pistol song - ruth wallis
10. gimme back my bullets - lynyrd skynyrd
11. guns of brixton - the clash
12. there goes my gun - the pixies
13. devil's right hand - steve earle & the dukes
14. machine gun - mano negra
15. big man with a gun - nine inch nails
16. saturday night special - lynyrd skynyrd
17. test tube baby/shoot 'em down - morphine
18. tons o guns - gang starr
19. gun - gil scott-heron
20. running gun - marty robbins 
21. streeet 66 - linton kwesi johnson
22. woman shoots john - consolidated
23. sors avec ton gun - reggaesonic

some worthies from negativland that didn't make it to the playlist:

guns (then)


 guns (now) (unofficial video for not quite the entire song)


and perennial favorite, the gun and the bible

a reasonable expectation of violent death at the end of due process

The other day, pursuant to Democracy's Now's coverage of the present administration's "Insider Threat" initiative -- which, if you haven't heard, is a sort of Operation-Tips-(remember Operation Tips?)-style program imposing duties on government employees to observe and report on their coworkers' apparent level of happy fealty to the regime and its mission (you know, to prevent "He was just a quiet guy working in the cubicle next door; kept to himself, seemed competent and polite. No one could have guessed that he'd just crack one day and BETRAY AMERICA!!!1!"), forming ranks, as it were, in the nascent War on Leaky Whistles -- McClatchy's senior reporter on the intelligence/national security beat, Jonathan Landay, remarked that he has taken "extreme precautions" vis-à-vis interception and use of his electronic communications as a means to expose or intimidate sources for some years now. "I'm not going to go into exactly what I do. I think it's obvious what you can do to try and protect yourself."

The program ended almost immediately thereafter, so Amy Goodman did not have the opportunity to inform him that, no, Jonathan Landay, to most of the audience, who are not already thoroughly steeped in intelligence matters, national security, and communications anonymity protocols by dint of their careers; no, in light of the collection of all metadata, the complicity (or, statutorily-mandated vulnerability) of every private telecom brand, the automatic storage of all things encrypted, the privacy-right-vitiating third parties we've permitted to become the intermediaries of nearly all communication, the global positioning (and otherwise broadcasting) chips we carry around with us, the government hacking of journalists' communications, the impotence of the courts, the outright abdication of the congress, a spectrum full of "journalists" howling for the taste of the scandalous, treasonous blood of one of their own, and the unending tapestry of oversights in oversight; under the droning, hovering threat of the fiery justice which due process of law accords Americans deemed enemy of the state (not to mention countless others -- call them Unamericans -- not entitled to such discerning treatment); no, Jonathan Landay, it is not obvious what one can do to try to protect oneself.

Is there a class on that at journalism school?

I, for one, cannot imagine how I might go about trying anonymously to get in touch with, say, Jonathan Landay, Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Democracy Now, or Wikileaks, in the case that my whistle weren't holding water and I didn't want The Man to know. It might involve a visit to the library . . . or maybe a different library than that one I would refer to using the specific article (although, on reflection, I would likely refer to any one other library also using that specific article). Or the United States Postal Service, which would still carry letters along with that bundle of advertising if there were any letters. Come to think of it, I believe that the reasonable expectation of privacy does, still, inhere in the paper and ink communication sealed in an envelope and sent via the stewardship of that august organization (but, w.r.t. analogous "metadata", see -ed.), even as it has faded to phantasm near everywhere else (and believing in phantasms is, obviously, not "reasonable," . . . Ergo. . . )! But for how long? Maybe Goodman, Landay and Greenwald would deign to look into that, and confirm. All of you would-be leakers: Don't drop that sweaty envelope into the mail room of the building where you're working, and stop exhibiting critical thought, conscience and initiative where your friends, family, coworkers, and familiar strangers can see you.

In other news, the Federal Bureau of Prisons denied an application for the compassionate release from prison of former civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart for treatment of her metastatic stage-IV cancer because her "health is improving." So, I guess they're curing cancer in the federal pen, these days. Glory.

a cursory review of the literature

maybe, like me, Dear Reader, you occasionally have an idea,
and, by now have learned to as-though-reflexively turn to the Internet
with a sense of dread at what one among a billion must already have said
before giving way to the conceit that it might be new,
that it might be your idea: an idea unique to you.

for now.

this of course saves time and time and again keeps one from
diverting resources from one's core competencies on a whim.

i was sure, musing on the similarity of some of the cadences in
Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart and certain reggae anthems,
and moving the spaces around among the sounds in the title of that song,
that someone somewhere must have already made
some badass subversive dub by the name of Totally Calypso fi th' Art

and a really good badass subversive dub track
mixing downpressor man sinner man and total eclipse
and whatever other appropriate obscure garage
grooves and beats for deeper dread authenticity
selected by some righteous heir of the sound systems, steeped in the art,
would be quite pleasant to listen to (or play loudly whether listening or not),
as everybody knows; to find it at the wiggle of a few fingers would be bliss
and keep me from having to waste time with my minimal proficiency on the wrong equipment
to at best produce something not even remotely evocative of either badass subversive dub or bliss.

what i found surprised me.

i watched it all the way through, and, although i could find no beat (a few bits would loop well)
it revealed itself as very funny before the end . . . which i think makes it da-da more than dub.

. . . and i'm off to fiddle on the ersatz Hammond.

take a bow

Here is Dave Canterbury presenting, for The Pathfinder School, a practicum in crafting a formidable bow with rudimentary tools and materials from the eastern woodlands: The Osage Bow (pt.2,3,4,5,6) That man demonstrates that he knows what he's talking about, and, if you listen with a modicum of attention, you too might run the risk of being mistaken for a savant.

By way of contrast, here is the construction of the traditional Korean bow, the hwal, -- a sinew-backed bamboo core with oaken handle and water buffalo horn belly, spliced with black locust or mulberry siyahs, glued with fish bladder and wrapped in birch bark, according to Wikipedia and probably the narration, the latter, albeit, in Korean -- by Bowyer, Kwon Mu-seok, in three parts (pt.2,3). (sorry, i guess number three gets cut off short --ed.)

Barely tangentially related are ancient martial secrets revealed at last by this guy & this guy.

a mordant mordent

"Why make things more tense than they already are?"

she said and then
she threw back her head
and laughed like everybody
was doing it

and suddenly, uncomfortably
everybody was

(0) fiat waveform

At first, of course, there was nothing.
very tidy, very simple: nothing
doing nothing, being nothing. no problem.

Time didn't even pass -
after all, nothing was,
and where was it to go, anyway?

But, perhaps, it did come to pass, for
after a while Somebody said something.

Somebody must have spoken for
things started happening very quickly.
That is to say,

nothing was shattered by Voice:
vibration rang through the suddenly extant void,
Coalescing along conductive bubbles of possibility.

It wasn't long before things became recognizable:
lines, arcs, waves, curves, curls
resolving suddenly into something like strings
floating through the erstwhile undifferentiated vacuum:



looping and swooping and soaring
swinging, fluttering and swirling



these two apparent strings floated nearer
and nearer still.  It became clear
that however distinct they appeared,
their fates like their origins were already entangled.

(1) propagandolution (-dilution?)

peyote rave? no: pow wow step.

this is my new favorite music video: Electric Pow Wow Drums by A Tribe Called Red:
(see RPM interview with DJ NDN, DJ Bear Witness and DJ Shub here)



i would like to say more, but i haven't the faintest idea where i'd begin or how to go about developing the requisite breadth of knowledge. and i fear most of my glib, knee-jerk humorous impulses here would likely veer more toward reinforcing stereotypes than expressing sincere ignorant interest and appreciation. maybe i should call in to Mr. NightWolf's show.

Pow Wow Riddim reminds me of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult's A Daisy Chain for Satan, but, you know, a little scarier.

stiglitz on the austere rerecession, and percussion

from Democracy Now, June 6, 2012, in two parts:

1.

the boulevard south

honeysuckle dew
cannabis and lilac glade
mingle 'round windows

something rotting in
the alley promises rich
summer dumpster juice

combustion exhaust
particulates, oil & rain
baking pavement breathes

polo counterfeit,
vanilla lotion, spring wind
drifts from the bus stop

anthropic principle & the multiverse(s)

This is the best of all possible times to appreciate the particular
cognoscibility of the anthropic principle among the multiverse(s).

Or is it?

persistence of true grim & frostbitten small world

1. Dali / Disney short film "Destino," set to Opeth track, "I feel the dark":

 

And a couple other things, while we're feeling grim and frostbitten (and, perhaps, anticipating frost, permafrost and the other colder modes of water, to be in significant decline).

2. A compelling op-ed by (former?) Republican meteorologist Paul Douglas describing his "climate change epiphany."

These are the Dog Days of March. . . The scope, intensity and duration of this early heat wave are historic and unprecedented. And yes, climate change is probably a contributing factor. "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." 129,404 weather records in one year, nationwide? You can't point to any one weather extreme and say "that's climate change". But a warmer, wetter atmosphere loads the dice, increasing the potential for historic spikes in temperature and more frequent and bizarre weather extremes. You can't prove that any one of Barry Bond's 762 home runs was sparked by (alleged) steroid use. But it did increase his "base state", raising the overall odds of hitting a home run. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, more fuel for floods, while increased evaporation pushes other regions into drought.

3. From UCSD's "Do The Math": Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist, portrays a dialogue on economic growth (and energy), perhaps revealing several economic articles of faith withering under well-elucidated laws of physics, as recounted by the prevailing physicist.

So I can twist my head into thinking of quality of life development in an otherwise steady-state as being a form of indefinite growth. But it’s not your father’s growth. It’s not growing GDP, growing energy use, interest on bank accounts, loans, fractional reserve money, investment. It’s a whole different ballgame, folks. Of that, I am convinced. Big changes await us. An unrecognizable economy. The main lesson for me is that growth is not a “good quantum number,” as physicists will say: it’s not an invariant of our world. Cling to it at your own peril.

4. Finally, hone your discourse and disputation with this handy guide to logical fallacies.

widdershins

the bottle

See that tote bag over there by the chair?
You know it used to be a bottle.

And see that big sack fully packed with bric-a-brac,
sure 'nuff used to be a bottle.

And don't you think that it's fine
that time after time we're reusing the bottle?

Do you see that fleece hat on that hip cat?
That too used to be a bottle.

Much more than an idle rumor, if its post-consumer
probably used to be a bottle.

If you please, avoid bag fees with one of these

that used to be a bottle.

And don't you think that it's fine,
and well past time for reusing bottles.

Don't you think it's 'bout time,
that we finally tried recycling all the bottles.

(With apologies to Mr. Scott-Heron, whose original song* was quite a bit more serious than this.)

"Perfume Causes Breast Cancer!"

I just made that up based on almost absolutely nothing, because it's catchy!

Actually, it strikes me as the English-language phrase best suited -- due its seven pithy, terrifying syllables, and the terrible clash of fashion values they imply -- to minimizing my exposure to whatever compound, or compounds, in manufactured fragrances (yes, and in some natural ones, too) gives me migraines.

I'm not going to say that it is not true because I, perhaps like you, Dear Reader, am not sufficiently equipped to assess the truth of such a statement. I do not know that it is not true; but I do not know that it is true. But I did make it up, . . . and do suspect, someday,  that some such link will be acknowledged.

(And, on reflection, I guess, the number of women on the pill who continue to smoke, notwithstanding the well-publicized heightened risk of those two factors conjoined, and the ambiguity of the word "perfume" -- a conscientious woman gripped by whatever mania drives some women to coat themselves in those chemicals, avoid perfume in deference to her own health, may yet think that tawdry vanilla-scented body lotion is something other than perfume and wear it anyway -- make the prospects of even such a bold propaganda putsch appear a little dubious.)

10.

out, shooting. But the hole a spider relatively dejected.
Mána the American spider hole grab prey animals out
on Navajo women have her shove scarce
enough to hold a crouch
You'll be bummin', for cigarettes must leave in the hole

No trap door was screaming in a hole somewhere to represent the spider hole,
if you do that, hide out shooting and hole in charge, him

She takes mirror down
into the spider side of small cornstalk. shivering
'Cause you'll be.