BBC - The Trap, What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom

part 1

John Nash - devised the Prisoner's Dilemma, equations showing that self interest always trumps helping others. Got Nobel Prize. Later diagnosed as schizophrenic. The idea: there's no grant unifying theory of "the people" since everybody has only self-interest at heart: the Impossibility Theory. (oh, he's the one portrayed in "A Beautiful Mind". How amazing that Disney left out the fact he was notorious for his cruel games, above all his "Fuck you buddy" where you could only win through betrayal.)

Cold War, resulting from game theory: ends in an equilibrium where you made sure "the other" had no interest in attacking you - in this case by keeping squadrons in the air 24/7, by having enough missiles to destroy them -. Both sides lowering the amount of weapons will never work: you cannot trust the other, then you'd give him an advantage.

Game theory: the idea you can incorporate your enemy into your own thinking.

Tests carried out in relationships: people constantly battle to "win".

Government wants control for a "perfect" society. The result, for some, is the dictatorship of the USSR.

A test: distinguish between madness and sanity? 8 people including David Rosenhan went to different mental hospitals, hearing voice in their head that said the word "Thud". That was the only lie. Otherwise they were to behave as normal as possible. None of them had a history of mental illness.
It took some of them two months to get out. Doctors didn't believe them. Only by pretending to be sick and then getting better, they got out.

Tests were made, hundreds of thousands of people were questioned. A computer "computed" who was sane. Half of the American people had a form of mental disorder.

The tests changed. Became checklists. Tell us what to do / how to be if we are not insane. If you don't have this-and-this, you are sane. A new form of control by the government.

Thatcher claimed a new freedom. But knew she needed a new way to control the people. Again, numbers. Public servants were encouraged to follow their self interest.

"Zealots are less interested in incentives and self-motivation like money. You don't want too many of them in a group."

Computations were made by some guy: how many megatons needed to be dropped on the USSR, how many people killed and how much of its industry destroyed, to win. When applied to the Vietnam War, it showed its horrible face. "body count" had been considered a rationele for success: kill enough enemies and we know we are doing fine. So troops started to shoot civilians to get to their targets...
A year later he resigned. And was later asked by Thatcher to oversee the reform of the NHS in Britain. "Give incentives to do a better job." Shedding all incentives to work for the public good.

All of this based on the kind of people John Nash created in the 50s to make his game theory work.

The idea of freedom in the West is deeply rooted in the paranoia and the suspicion of the Cold War.


part 2

John Mayor tried to mimic the self interested drive of free market. Public servants got performance targets --> can achieve them in any way. They become entrepeneurs.

Clinton made a "smaller" government. Couldn't pay for his plans with the existing deficit. Listened to Alan Greenspan and Citycorp guy: let the markets do their work. Thus, dismantled most of the safety nets put in place in the 30s.

Freedom redefined: the ability of individuals to get whatever they want.

"Liberation management", a real thing. Tom Peters is an ass.

"You can never win when you deal with the public" a very sour politician?

This would start to undermine the very ideas of democratic freedom.

James Buchanan: politicians, like public servants do not server the public. This is a fiction. They too followed their self interest.

John Nash idea, about people always just following their self interest. Philip Morowski: People are little information processors. The market is the ultimate information processor. Voting - or a democracy - is a weak information processor, inefficient.

"You think of yourself as trying to create more of yourself when you procreate. Instead, you are just a vehicle for your genes. They are using you to ensure their survival." And then of course Richard Dawkins comes looking around the corner.

During the cold war, people were reduced to mathematical equations, simple desires that could be modelled - using game theory - because they lived in a scary era full of unknown dangers. In the 90s, the Cold War was over, but the theory persisted and claimed to fully describe man, his desires, goals and aims. A machine model of human beings. Ready to be adjusted. Not through politics, but by how well every single machine performed. Doctors and psychiatrists are now in control, by defining and quantizing all mental illness, by defining who is healthy and who needs adjustment. "Generlized Anxiety Disorder". Everybody suffered from it. "Panic Disorder". Checklists with only objective symptoms, deliberately not listing WHY these were experienced.

Drug companies started to manufacture "rssi"'s, such as prozac, adjusting the amount of seratonine flowing through the brain. The checklist became a powerful, seemingly objective guideline to people what should be considered normal. A static society was created of "normal people", defined by the checklist. "They imagine living in a world where there's never grief"

They deliberately excluded any understanding of the patient's life. And guess what? "it confused genuine psychological disorder with normal human feelings, like sadness and anxiety. This was happening on a wide scale." All done by Robert Spitzer. "So you effectively medicalized ordinary human feelings like sadness, fear, ordinary experiences.."
RS: "I think, to some extend. I don't know what the percentage is. 20 or 30% That's considerable. But we don't know. Whether it's 20 or 30%"

"Those drugs made them happier human beings. But they also made them simpler, more ordinary. Easier to predict and manage. Closer to the machine-like creatures at the heart of the economic models. [...] More efficient. Less human."
"A medicalized illusion of an epidemic."

In the UK, Tony Blair, new Labour, followed Clinton, selling government organizations to the banks.

The treasury, under Gordon Brown: they invented ways to assign numbers to things that previously no one thought could be measured. Hunger in Africa was to be reduced below 48%. And all the villages in England were to be measured for their Community Vibrancy Index.  Even the life in the country side was broken down into a series of indices, one of them measuring how much bird song there should be."

Almost immediately, New Labour began to discover human beings were more complex than the simple model allowed for.

In hospitals, wheels of "trolleys" were removed so they were no longer trolleys. People were scheduled for meetings during their holidays, so they couldn't come... but targets were met. Polic reclassified many crimes (including assault) as mere "suspect behaviour"... so targets were met.

Government response? Even more levels of target management. A more rigid society emerged. At its heart: education. Government tallied best and worst schools: this would entice schools to do better, all of education would improve. The opposite happened. Rich parents moved into neighbourhoods of the best schools, driving up the house price, driving away poorer people. All schools started teaching their pupils only what they needed to know to pass the exam, in order to meet the criteria, thereby hiding the wider education from them that they needed to rise above their poverty.

The inequalities not only determine how you will live, but also when you will die.

Politicians see things spiralling out of control.

And now, the simplified equation of human beings being simple automatons, programmed by our DNA millions of years ago, begins to erode. In the 90's, scientists discover that cells choose which part of DNA to copy.

And now, John Nash, who once championed the idea of humans solely fighting for their own best interest, starts to doubt his own theories, starts to realize the human being is more complex than that.

part 3

Alan Enthoven: Recommending missiles under ground, missiles in submarines, and all that, was a way to make it all more stable. We're trying very hard to reduce the likelyhood of nuclear war by creating powerful incentives for the Russians not to start a nuclear war because we're trying to give them incentives not to attack, either a nuclear attack or a convential attack. Yeah, so, incentives are important to them.

Jungle Book (2016)

Nice enough but nothing really exciting. I wasn't miffed by the talking animals (which were exceptionally realistic) but couldn't say I cared a lot.

Philomena

with Steve Coogan (good actor here, I knew him previously just from "funny" stuff) and Judy Dench.

Quite moving story about an elderly Irish lady trying to find her son who was sold while she was a nun. Very effective "true" story telling. Both the journalist (Steve Coogan) and Philomena (Dench) go through an arc, but no muffy Hollywood way, yet very, very moving. He turns from cynic to angry, she finds peace. Beautiful.

Paul Robeson (vinyl)

"Me Curley Headed Baby" very old, but quiet for a Sunday afternoon.

"The World is Yours"

Heard "The world is yours" from "Scarface" for - I think - the very first time.

Eerily reminiscent of "Exit Music (For a film)" by Radiohead. Wondered if they were inspired by it.

SidiRum - "LUNA EP"

Electro, slow beats, spacey sounds.

Remo-Con - "Streams" (Nhato Remix)

Catchy, good house rhythm.

Mono - "The Last Down"

Quite amazing album. Same postrock soundscapes, but amazing melodies. "Cyclone" for example.

The beginning of "The Land Between Tide & Glory" is sad and lost.

Designated Survivor

Kiefer Sutherland as hapless president. I just want him to be Jack Bauer.

Westworld (season 1, 2016)

Enjoyed it despite the plot/logic gaps. I wonder where they will take it in season 2.

The western styled rendering of songs like "Paint it Black" and "No Surprises" was quite amazing. Must look into Ramin Djawadi.

Refused - "Refused are fucking dead"

Punk, screaming, fast riffs. Nice nice nice.

"Tannhäuser / Derivè" - violin with postrock guitar!?

Pyramidal

nice electro, floating, whispering.

Haruki Murakami - "The Wind-up Bird Chronicles"

    ... It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to win its spring, the world descended more deeply into chaos.
    I rinsed my mouth and went on looking at my face for a time.
    I can't find the image, I said to myself. I'm thirty, I'm standing still, and I can't find the image.

Meaningful misery

Acknowledge negative emotions:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/negative-emotions-key-well-being/

Edge of Tomorrow

Remember seeing the posters and not thinking much of it. But it's a cool sci-fi time-travelling story. Almost not too Hollywood-ish.

Midnight Special

Boy shoots light from his eyes and moves to a higher / other plane at the end, while followed by FBI and whatnot.

"A cult classic in the making", the airline's description read. My bad for hoping that might even be slightly true.

Nightcrawler (2011)

With Jake Gyllenhaal.

Not bad. Lots of LA driving shots, him the dirty reporter that would do anything, including staging a shootout between mobsters and police, and getting his "partner" killed in the process, but it didn't really hit me. Good mood though.

Amy Hempel - "New Stories from the South"

Emily Quinlan - "The Green Belt"

    It was hard to be a triplet! You couldn't blame anything on anybody. Always you were there, sitting right across from two copies of yourself who were doing correctly what you had just done wrong.

    He didn't know what they were communicating to each other. He used to be better at that, that knowing. These days he brought Pamela coffee when she wanted to sleep, tried to kiss her when she was dreaming of salad.


Marjorie Kemper - "Discovered America"

this story blew me away completely

    When we'd pulled up, Dr. Grueber had been working on a GM van in his driveway. He was middle-aged - I couldn't help thinking he was the right age to have worn a German uniform during World War II. He washed his hands at the sink with Borax. He dried them on a towel hanging off the kitchen stove.
    "So! Poison ivy!"
    "Right," John whispered. John's head had eaten his neck; John was the color of Paul's fire truck, he was in no condition to question his new doctor's credentials, his diagnosis, or his living arrangements.
    "Cortisone," the doctor said briskly. "Some pinephrine for good measure, I think," he added, eyeing John.
    Dr. Grueber opened the fridge and batted around in it. A family-size bottle of ketchup fell out on the floor. The doctor kicked at it, and it lodged beneath a baseboard that had never seen a scrube brush. He called to the woman in German.
    She was leaning against a counter and answered him in English. Hefound was he was looking for in the door. Where she'd said it was.

    Abortionists don't, as a rule, have green thumbs.

    I knew from the start I couldn't take a chance on having John's baby. To have it was to be stuck with John forever because that's the way I am. And by then I believed that a woman had a right to a life not patched together from mistakes she'd made when she was too young or too dumb to know any better - like marrying a Yankee who talked too loud and didn't like her mother; a man who got midnight hang-up-calls and wanted it every night. (I never bothered hunting for her underwear.)

    The bathroom was tiny. You couldn't have swung a cat.

    With your automatics, I found driving a car is not that big of a deal. D is for drive. That's pretty much it. I had no need of reverse. The worst part is you can't close your eyes crossing bridges. I drove to Dallas.

    But we'd none of us listened, and now it was too late. Death was on television like a beauty pageant; it was in my grandfather's familiar cigarette cough; it was enthroned trumphant in my empty womb; it was depicted on the front page of every newspaper, morning and afternoon, which each new day hit the porch with sickening thuds.


Elizabeth Spencer - "Return Trip"

    Patricia got up from the porch and walked in th dark down to the New River. She kicked off her shoes, sat on the boat pier and put her feet in the cool, silky water. It was then she heard the Mississippi voices for the first time. She knew each one for who it was, though they had died years ago or hand't been seen for ages. Sometimes they mentioned Edward and sometimes herself. They talked on and on about unimportant things and she knew them all, each one. She sat and listened, and let the water curl round her feet.


Tim Gautreaux - "IDOLS"
 
    "Take you back?" Julian gave him a startled look. "Didn't you tell me that woman beat you with a broom?"
   Obie looked down at his plate and smiled a faraway smile. "Aw, she's just a woman. Can't hurt a man unless she buys a gun."

Greg Egan - "Permutation City"

   'But ... if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet ... why shouldn't the pattern we think of as "the universe" assemble itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers ...  then what makes you think that you're not doing the very same thing?'
    The djinn's expression hovered between alarm and irritation.
    Squeek. 'Paul ... what's the point of all this "Space-time is a construct; the universe is really nothing but a sea of disconnected events ..." Assertions like that are meaningless. You can believe it if you want to ... but what difference would it make?'
    'What difference? We perceive - we inhabit - one arrangement of the set of events. But why should that arrangement be unique? There's no reason to believe that the pattern we've found is the only coherent way of ordering the dust. There must be billions of other universes coexisting with us, made of the very same stuff - just differently arranged. If I can perceive events thousands of kilometres and hundreds of seconds apart to be side by side and simultaneous, there could be worlds, and creatures, built up from twhat we'd think of as points in space-time scattered all over the galaxy, all over the universe. We're one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram ... but it would be ludicrous to believe that we're the only one.'


    'We haven't structured the whole thing. The universe is random, at the quantum level. Macroscopically, the pattern seems to be perfect; microscopically, it decays into uncertainty. We've swept the residue of randomness down to the lowest level.'


    The most that could be said, at anymoment, was that someone existed who knew - or believed - that they'd once been David Hawthorne.


    Peer seemed to be making love ith Kate, but he had his doubts.


    'A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust ... or it doesn't. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole ... or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods.'
 


Intriguing philosophical ideas about id and personality, spreading scans of people's minds over thousands of processors (where is the person), slowing them down (where are they in between thoughts).
As a story, not the best. No characters you truly care a lot about. Perhaps I read it too fast. I never got the part of the dust and its patterns well enough to appreciate it enough.

Kelly Link - "Pretty Monsters"

The monster stood and looked down adn grinned. "You," it said. It had a voice like a dead tree full of bees: sweet and dripping and buzzing.

She still has that magic touch of estrangeness in her shorts, but I felt like I knew the trick by now. I stopped reading them for some time, because they felt too much the same in voice and eeriness. Still, great writer.

The Martian

The film, this time. Enjoyable and a good watch.

127 hours

Good film, though the hallucination sequences seemed a bit much and piled up at some point.

7JK - "Star seed" (Ride the Solar Tide)

Its vocals, mixed with the synths, reminded me of that "uullaahh" track on War of the Worlds.

Ursula Le Guin - "The Dispossessed"

     There was something lacking - in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.
    He forced himself to work, but even there he found no certainty. He seemed to have lost the flair which, in his own estimation of himself, he counted as his main advantage over most other physicists, the sense for where the really important problem lay, the clue that led inward to the centre. Here, he seemed to have no sense of direction. He worked at the Light Research Laboraties, read a great deal, and wrote three papers that summer and autumn: a productive half year, by normal standards. But he knew that in fact he had done nothing real.

Enjoyable but in a cold, theoretical sense. Seldom was I moved even a little bit by the characters or what happened to them. In retrospect, I wonder how I felt about Earthsea, whether it was the idea of the story that appealed more to me than its characters.

the ALGOR!THM - "AutoRUN" ("Octopus4", 2014)

techno-ish. Good beat.

SomaFM - Secret Agent

• Midi Brotherhood - "Violin Bliss"
  Instrumental, slow sweeping. Nice enough.
• Harmonic 33 - |Bossa Nova Supernova"
  Never a big fan of the bossa nova rhythm but this instrumental song swings yet meanders

instrumental, creepy

http://8tracks.com/igniparous/dreadful-darling

• Caroline Campbell & William Joseph (feat. Tina Guo)
  Miserlou

Infected Mushroom - "Becoming Insane" (Vicious Delicious)

Fast. On the Sphongle spotify radio thing. More intense beat.

Prettiest Eyes - "Alright I'm Ready to Go" (Looks)

Punk, think Crystal Castles but more guitars and less electronics, although there too are keyboards murdered in screaming strings.

Let's Eat Grandma - "Rapunzel" (I, Gemini)

Two girls, angry, piano and melodic, scathing double voiced lyrics.

Frank Delaney - Re-joyce

• yellow is the colour of memory

Kevin Morby - "Harlem River"

Moody. Slow. Rhythmical.

Quantum Entanglement Drives the Arrow of Time, Scientists Say

    as particles become increasingly entangled, could replace human uncertainty in the old classical proofs as the true source of the arrow of time.


    Lloyd found that as the particles became increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them (a "1" for clockwise spin and a "0" for counterclockwise, for example) would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing, like coffee that has cooled to room temperature.


    Consequently, a tepid cup of coffee does not spontaneously warm up. In principle, as the pure state of the room evolves, the coffee could suddenly become unmixed from the air and enter a pure state of its own. But there are so many more mixed states than pure states available to the coffee that this practically never happens - one would have to outlive the universe to witness it. This statistical unlikelihood gives time's arrow the appearance of irreversibility. "Essentially entanglement opens a very large space for you," Popescu said. "It's like you are at the park and you start next to the gate, far from equilibrium. Then you enter and you have this enormous place and you get lost in it. And you never come back to the gate."


    The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei - "Say Yes"

    Derrida reminds us that yes also names language itself, not only in the sense of langue d'oil or language d'oc, the two main French dialect groups which derive their names from their respective ancient words for yes, but also because "the affirmation of a language through itself is untranslatable." And indeed names themselves are notoriously untranslatable, because they - especially the proper ones - hook into reality in a way that always suggests a more intimate relation between language and the world than linguists would want us to believe.


    The idea of a talk show, and by extension the majority of contemporary televised journalism, is founded on such globalization of testimony: It is determined to exploit the testimonial value of saying yes far beyond any affirmative value such a yes may carry.


    ... trauma can be experienced in at least two ways, both of which block normal channels of transmission: as a memory that one cannot integrate into one's own experience, and as a catastrophic knowledge that one cannot communicate to others.

Lisa Guenther - "Why solitary confinement degrades us all"

    The prisoners might enter the SHU with good hearing, 20/20 eyesight, and stable mental health, but the longer they remain in isolation, the greater the chance that their sensory awareness, cognitive clarity, and emotional stability will erode. This is because, as relational beings in an individualist society, a good deal of what we take to be our own, intrinsic properties and capacities are in fact social practices that rely for their coherence and vibrancy upon interactive feedback loops with other social beings in a shared situation.

    But as a phenomenologist, my task is not to describe the teapot as if it were a totally separate entity from me, but rather to reflect on the way that the teapot appears to me.

    The other people with whom I share space give me an objective location in the world - they anchor me somewhere.

    In the words of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, my body "gears into" the things that draw my attention, my toes feel for the edge of the last step, my hands dig into a backpack searching for my keys. And likewise, the world gears into my body, warming my face with sunshine or moving me to tuck my nose into my scarf. But the main thing that my body gears into is not a thing at all; it is the body of another person, another "here", another starting-point for the experience of a world. My own sense of objective reality, and even my sense of myself as an objectively existing person rather than an abstract capacity for awareness, depends on the co-ordination of my here with your there, and vice versa.

    The prisoner who bashes his own body against the walls of a rec yard is both refusing and confirming the abyss of solitary confinement. 

Jessa Crispin - "The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries"

    Let's say, for a moment, that the character of a city has an effect on its inhabitants, and that it sets the frequency on which it calls out to the migratory. People who are tuned a certain way will heed the call almost without knowing why. Thinking they've chosen this city, they'll never know that the city chose them. Let's say, for a moment, that the literal situation of a city can leak out into the metaphorical realm. That the city is the vessel and we are all merely beings of differing viscosity, slowly taking on the shape of that into which we are poured.
    if that were the case, what to make of the fact that Berlin is built on sand? Situated on a plain with no natural defenses, no major river, no wealth of any particular resource, it's a city that should not exist. It can't be any wonder that Berlin has for hundreds of years, - no, longer than that, past Napoleon, past the medieval days when suspected witches were lined up at the city gates and molten metal was poured between their clenched teeth, past the whispers of the Romans that those who inhabited these lands were not quite human, back to the days of the people residing here who are now known to us only by some pottery shards and bronze tools - been a little unstable. It would explain the city's endless need to collapse and rebuild, even as the nation that engulfs it marches on confidently, linearly.


    That's when I took my William James essays off the shelf. I found in his works of philosophy a friend, a mentor, a professor, and some sort of idealized father. It was his works on the more mundane matters that I relied on - how to make changes in your life, how to believe you can make changes in your life, how to convince yourself to get out of bed in the morning, how not to be a worthless slug - rather than his more important pieces about war or whatever.


    As a philosopher, James is able to hold all of the sorrow and violence and pain of the world in his mind and remain somehow optimistic. It doesn't wipe out the goodness of the world, it just sits beside it. It's no wonder then that people get a little religious about this agnostic philosopher, this man who can restore your faith in the world without necessarily bringing god into it.


    It's been let go in the Berlin way, all of those straight German lines blurring a little into chaos.

8tracks - William Gibson

http://8tracks.com/screamingtemple/ths-ace-j

• iamx - "My Secret Friend"
  catchy
• LOLO - "Hit and run"
  one of those songs, slightly Marina and the Diamonds, that returns regularly in the playlists I find. It's not too bad. But I can never remember who or what.

8tracks: hunting

http://8tracks.com/l-howlinmad/wolfskin

• EELS - "Dead Reckoning" - strangely atmospheric, almost parlando and film noir
• 
  

Baxter - "I Can't See Why"

on SomaFM's "Lush"

Strings and female vocals (well duh). Sounds very familiar. God, so close, tip of my tongue.

Lawless (ft Britt Warner) - "Diminuendo"

http://8tracks.com/mirayuuki/where-i-end-you-begin

Bit over the top, but catchy and dark.

Also:

• Chelsea Wolfe - "After the fall"

Falling in Reverse - "Caught like a fly"

over the top and fun
http://8tracks.com/mottinthepot/carnival

The Heavy - "Short Change Hero"

Not as amazing as I thought it would be, but still nice.

via: http://8tracks.com/tulipohares/i-m-gonna-save-this-town-a-preacher-fanmix


Esqueletos by Tarantella: is this "the" Tarantella that I used to listen to in CA?

Michael Dudok de Wit - "Father and Daughter"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miGQrV7uE08

Amazing. The reason why I love short films so much.

William Wordsworth - "The world is too much with us"

The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

[...]

Great God! I’d rather beA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Tom McRae flashback

http://8tracks.com/shadowhunterradio/dracula#

Suddenly a very strong flashback. KinkFM. Sadness. Pure sadness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDx6nHExwRw

Do I know this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcqm8_hImJ8

Piano Magic - "Luxembourg Gardens"

http://8tracks.com/noellesnowelle/the-love

Intriguing song. Haunting, but not so.

Star Trek: Beyond

Meh. Enjoyable enough but predictable, very thin story and just nothing really special.

Stranger Things

Great series, captured everything perfectly.

Keep an eye on those Duffer brothers.

Imagination Upgraded - "Harley Quinn's Theme Music"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obJKUWkr9RA

strange but cool in an estranged eerie carnavalesque way.

Gabriel Bruce - "Sleep Paralysis" (and more, maybe)

Slow, Czar-like singing, moody song.

via http://8tracks.com/mia-wallace/when-you-look-into-an-abyss-the-abyss-looks-into-you#

• Show Time - "Camero Cat" - carnavalesque
• Yoav ft Emily Browning - "Where is my mind"
  strange version, upbuilding in a creepy way

Craig Armstrong - "Rosa Morta"

Instrumental and amazing album, good for late nights, and coding and writing,...?

(later edit: upon listening to it again, it suddenly struck me: this is reminiscent of the wonderful "The Virgin Suicides" soundtrack)

Henk (H.J.A.) Hofland (met hier en daar Jan Blokker, Harry Mulisch)

Wat is dat dan voor zenuw?
   Blokker: Die waarvan we altijd denken dat Nederlanders hem niet hebben. Namelijk een aanleg voor waanzinnige hysterie.
   Hofland: Wij hebben een capaciteit tot razernij waar de rest van de wereld nog jaloers op kan zijn.

   Als je in een park liep, stond er om de tien meter een bord: "Laat niet als dank voor het aangenaam verpozen de eigenaar van dit park de schillen en de dozen". Er was nog een soort rare orde in dit land.
   Mulisch: Iedereen had een ingebouwde politieagent.
   Blokker: Precies.
   Mulisch: En die is ontsnapt.
   Hofland: In Nederland komt er nooit revolutie, want hier mag je niet op het gras lopen, zei Marx ooit. Onze generatie heeft een zeer verse herinnering aan die ingebouwde agent.

   Mulisch: Het doet me denken aan toen Klinkenberg een boek over Bernard geschreven had. Met beschuldigingen over een SS-lidmaatschap en weet ik wat. Bernhard vertelde mij - dus het is waar - (imiteert een Duits accent): "Ik heb de minister-president gebeld, en gevraagd: heeft u dat boek van Klinkenberg gelezen? Van Agt zei nee. Nu, als dat alles waar is, wat in dat boek staat, moet u mij morgen laten fusilleren. Toen zei Dries: laat ik dat maar niet doen, koninklijke hoogheid, want dan gaat iederéén dat boek lezen."

   interviewer: Hoe bevalt u het vooruitzicht om binnen tien jaar te zijn vergeten?
   Blokker: Dat is een gedachte waarmee ik totaal geen relatie heb.
   Mulisch: Als je dood bent, ben je in elk geval vergeten door jezelf. Hoe de omstanders reageren, dat zullen we nooit weten.
   Hofland: Vrienden zijn eerder gestorven. het was niet zo slecht geweest als we hadden geruild. De onzin die je overkomt in de rest van je leven. Die weige Wiederkehr van alles, hebben jullie daar ook zo'n last van? Ik kom net terug uit Griekenland, vier weken een totaal andere omgeving en ik denk: verdomme de Amsterdamse tram en de gevels. Ze stáán er nog. het hangt me zo de kéél uit.

   Hofland haalt adem, peinst anderhalve seconde en steekt van wal met een prettig klare samenvatting van een halve eeuw geschiedenis. 'Kijk: de Koude Oorlog was een goed geordend tijdvak. Twee wereldmachten die elkaar met de atoombom bedreigden en niet zo gek waren om die ook te gebruiken. Aan de zijlijn voerden ze een paar vergissingsoorlogen: Rusland in Afghanistan en Amerika in Vietnam. Voor de rest: de bondgenoten hielden zich rustig, iedereen wist zijn plaats. Het was in zekere mate een klassenmaatschappij en het was in zeker mate een verzorgingsstaat; het was werkelijk heel goed geordend. Goed, toen is de Muur gevallen en de wanorde begonnen. Eerst hebben we die illusie van eeuwigdurende zich alsmaar vergrotende welvaart gekregen, van de nieuwe economie, toen is de zeepbel van internet geploft, toen hebben we 9/11 gekregen, en daarna zijn we toch, globaal de kluts kwijtgeraakt. Een van de hoofdoorzaken daarvan is George W. Bush, met zijn grootheidswaanzin!'

   Hofland: Eigenaardig, eigenaardig. Ik hoorde dat hij toen doodziek was en ik belde hem op. "Kousbroek," Ik zeg: "Rudy, ik hoor dat je ziek bent." Hij antwoordt: "Je wéét dat wij ruzie hebben. Courage!" En hij hing op Nou ja."

   Een columnist die het moeilijk vindt om aan een onderwerp te komen, kan het bijltje er beter snel bij neerleggen. De onderwerpen staan bij mij meestal in de rij. Bij De Groene overleg ik eerst met hoofdredacteur Xandra Schutte waar ik over zal schrijven, bij de NRC pleur ik het er zo in.

   Je kunt deze tijd niet met vroeger vergelijken. De crisis van de jaren dertig was anders. Het proletariaat van toen is in consumentisme ten onder gegaan. Consumentisme en rancune, dat tekent onze tijd. Het nieuwe digitale lompenproletariaat koestert zijn wrok. We zijn boos, schrijven ze. Met vijftien uitroeptekens.

Matthew Beaumont - "Vagabonds, Crafty Bauds, and the Loyal Huzza: A History of London at Night"

(essay was an excerpt of his book)


    The capital's slums also acquired a toxic reputation for being thieves' colonies. The most notorious of these during the early modern period was Whitefriars, the dangerously overcrowded area between Fleet Street and the Thames that, in a laconic reference to the territory fought over by France and Germany on the continent, was known as Alsatia.


    The watchman was regularly guilty of malign or corrupt behaviour, or of acting from dubious motives, so he often collapses into his opposite. His nightwalking, his nightwatching, was often quite as nefarious as that of the itinerants and prostitutes he was supposed to apprehend. Required for official reasons to be suspicious of other people, the watch was also, in a more colloquial sense, suspicious - that is, suspect. Here is an early instance of that entanglement of the identities of detective and criminal that is characteristic of noir cinema and fiction in the mid twentieth century.

Darwin Among the Machines (to the editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 june, 1863)

Amazing letter by Darwin regarding machines.

If we revert to the earliest primordial types of mechanical life, to the lever, the wedge, the inclined plane, the screw and the pulley, or (for analogy would lead us one step further) to that one primordial type from which all the mechanical kingdom has been developed, we mean to the lever itself, and if we then examine the machinery of the Great Eastern, we find ourselves almost awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall find it impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending? What will be its upshot? 

We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical oranisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race.

If they die, for even these glorious animals will not be exempt from that necessary and universal consumption, they will immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?

... man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state.

... there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two stea engines, it is true that machinery is even at this present time employed in begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realized by our feeble and imperfect imagination.

... but the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. 
   Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them.

David Mitchell - "Slade House"

good read. Finished it in one day. Strange day. It harks back to the Bone Clocks, and where that book fell short, this one was just right. It's a delicate balance, I guess. Just the right amount of repetition. Also, a lot shorter? But his Cloud Atlas was long and that was amazing...
Still a favourite author of mine.

Antonín Dvořák - "Symphony No.9 in E minor, Op 95, B178, 4: Allegro non fucco"

massive!

Chinawoman - "Partygirl" (Lovers are strangers)

Evanescencent, ungraspable. Late night, whiskey, a cigarette. Streets flanked by sad houses.

8tracks dancy

http://8tracks.com/anon-832024076916118/mix1

* Sub Focus - "Rock It"

David Mitchell - "Death of the Pugilist, or the Famous Battle of Jacob Burke and Blindman McGraw" and "The Ecstacy of Alfred Russel Wallace"

Two grand shorts by David Mitchell. Amazing how a simple story is given so much depth through the thorough description of its character(s).


   Watching from the crowds, admidst the cheers and curses, there's not a soul that day at Dead Rabbit's Heath that knows what Jacob Burke knows, that the fight is already over. For Blindman's standing and Blindman's fists are still up, and if he's slack in the lip no one can see from what Muscular Jacob Burke has done to his face. They'll know, in breaths they'll know and for years they'll talk about it, but in this half-second between Muscular's knowing and the crowd's knowing, it's as if Muscular has been left alone with a knowledge and an omnipotence only God should have.


   Indeed, they said he had the naiveté of a child: too trusting, too awed by others' greatness to know that he deserved greatness himself. There were hours when he thought: I know nothing. And there were other hours, chiefly at night, waking from dreams he didn't remember, that a different thought came: the idea, that beautiful burning idea, that recasting and refiguring and resculpting of the world, that idea burst forth from me, and me alone.

Descender

Amazing comics. The story is interesting (slightly reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica) but particularly the drawings are sometimes breathtaking. Can't wait for volume 3.

Kelly Link - "Pretty Monsters"

Another collection of short stories by Kelly Link. Still as strange and sometimes unnerving as "Magic for Beginners" but either I have gotten used to it or her style has become slightly too repetitive for me. I'm reading a story every now and then now, which seems to work best.

    But his mother and Talis are quiet in different ways. Jeremy's mother is the kind of person who seems to be keeping something hidden, something secret. Whereas Talis just is a secret, Jeremy's mother could easily turn out to be a secret agent. But Talis is the death ray or the key to immortality or whatever it is that secret agents have to keep secret. Hangin out with Talis is like hanging out with a teenaged black hole.

    "I won't tell Karl," Elizabeth said. She leaned forward and kissed Jeremy and then she wasn't kissing him. It was all very fast and surprising, but they didn't fall off the roof. Nobody falls off the roof in this story. "Talis likes you," Elizabeth said. "That's what Amy says. Maybe you like her back. I don't know. But I thought I should go ahead and kiss you now. Just in case I don't get to kiss you again."
   "You can kiss me again," Jeremy said. "Talis probably doesn't like me."
   "No," Elizabeth said. "I mean, let's not. I want to stay friends and it's hard enough to be friends, Germ. Look at you and Karl."

random 8track songs

http://8tracks.com/tekryon/road-to-nowhere

• Porter Robinson - "Goodbye to a world"
  trip-hoppy, distorted voices, synths... should look into this

http://8tracks.com/amissum/avenoir-fluctuat-nec-mergitur

• Babbit - "Painting Greys"
  not even sure I like it (vocoder... :| ) but still intrigued

http://8tracks.com/oscrwilde/losing-you

• Jaymes Young - "Come Back For Me"
  Bit Florence and the Machine, also she keeps singing "Don't Come Back for Me"

Kelly Link - "magic for beginners"

Breathtakingly strange and unsetting, Kelly Link spins incredibly original stories. Can't believe I forgot to mention her.

Livia Llewellyn - "Furnace"

A gripping short story of a girl in a dying town, her grandfather showing her maps of the city, her mother chasing her...

Thought of Kelly Link's magic for beginners.

Ernest Cline - "Ready Player One"

A thoroughly enjoyable book about a world fifty years in the future where everybody escapes into OASIS, a MMORG as well as... everything else. Creator, in his last will, tells about an easter egg. The one to find it, will inherit all the fortunes of Oasis. Wade, our young protagonist, is special...

It's dripping with 80s references, since the creator loved that period supposedly so much. Sometimes it's a bit much - he seemed to rave about anything - but all in all, although the plot is a bit shakey and predictable, a good fun read. Great escape. How ironic.

those moments

• Dolly Parton - Jolene
• Jacques Brel - Dans le port d'Amsterdam
• R.E.M. - It's the end of the world as we know it
• Claude François - Comme d'habitude 
• R.E.M. - "Leave" (alternative version)
• Krang - "Kraaien"
• Bende van Vier - "Drinklied"

Richard Harris - "MacArthur Park"

oh damn... the memories :(

hebrew proverb - don't ask questions

אל תשאל שאלות לא תשמע שקרים

Al Tishal she'elot Lo tishma shkarim

don't ask questions, you won't hear lies

(it's for a cheating husband situation imo but it works well for a lot of cases)

SinQ - "Who's Afraid of Noises"

On Groove Salad. Nice fading wavelengths. Echoing voice.

nuclear reactors and rewrites

https://storify.com/jrauser/on-the-big-rewrite-and-bezos-as-a-technical-leader
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf

Philip K. Dick - "The Man in the High Castle"

The Axes have won, the USA is separated in a Nazi occupied part and a Japanese occupied part. People read the "I Ching" to make choices. A forbidden book, "The Grasshopper lies heavy", details an alternate reality where the Axes have lost...

Japanese vs Western thinking. Tao. I Ching.

At the very end the book turns out to be "written by" the I Ching (as Philip K Dick used the I Ching to write this book). Why it was written? Inner truth... because it's the truth.

Nice read, but I wasn't blown away. I think I'm missing the deeper connections here, which is a shame. Maybe I should read more Leonard Cohen poetry, then try again.

musicforprogramming.net

http://musicforprogramming.net/
* 03: Datassette is pretty nice. Around ~43m-45m it has an amazing buildup with piano that reminds me of Candyman/Philip Glass with its chords and everything. Dunno which song of the playlist it is, but intriguing. Should figure it out.

Got it! Christopher D. Lewis - "Metamorphosis 3"

adding some other stuff from similar Spotify playlist
https://open.spotify.com/station/user/redconfetti/playlist/03bKMoeCxREu1jKjPvCXwD

• Trifonic - "Parks On Fire"
  sometimes a bit more ephemeral, but good instrumental stuff

Marisha Pessl - "Night Film"

A hard boiled detective teams up with Nora, a young girl and Hopper, a random boy, searching for the reasons why Ashley took her own life and what role her father, the elusive film director Cordova, played in that and her life.

Had to get used to the constant use of italics.  The moment I read it like a hard boiled detective voice in my head it became a bit better.

Okayish. Enjoyable but not in a special way. Read it super fast, half skipping over lines.

Discohen

This made me giggle uncontrollably for a moment.

Lárus Sigurðsson - *

Thought it might be too dreamy sigur rossy, but actually quite nice. Might be good for coding.

Zero 7 - "Dimensions"

Slow, woman's voice. not something you might want to listen to all the time, but still nice.

Prinz Pi - "Donnerwetter! (Instrumentals)"

came here because I was looking for a band name Donnerwetter (I think). Nice though, bit of [tr|h]ip hop influences, but very laid back.

Oraclez - (EP)

Massive Attack-y. Slow. Good for coding?

Dave Eggers - "The Circle"

Quite scary how reading this at this particular moment in life, seems to hinge on foreboding and angst.

Interesting book. Intriguing to imagine what I would have thought of it had I read it months or years ago.

Francis was staring at his plate. "Shit. Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage. I'm sorry. I swear I'm working on this."

"The third screen is your social, Inner- and OuterCircle. But these messages aren't, like, superfluous. They're just as important as any other messages, but are prioritized third. And sometimes they're urgent. Keep an eye on the InnerCircle feed in particular, because that's where you'll hear about staff meetings, mandatory gatherings, and any breaking news. If there's a Circle notice that's really pressing, that'll be marked in orange. Something extremely urgent will prompt a message on your phone, too. You keep that in view?" Mae nodded at her phone, resting just below the screens on her desk. "Good," Gina said. "So those are the priorities, with your fourth priority your own uterCircle participation. Which is just as important as anything else, because we value your work-life balance, you know, the calibration between your online life here at the company and outside it. I hope that's clear. Is it?"

Messer Chups - "Fantomasofobia"

Fun surf-y song.

The Green Room (2016)

Intense gripping and occassionally hardcore horror flic about an innocent punk band getting caught up in a kill-cover up at an extreme right wing cum heroin lab place. With Patrick Stewart.

Robert Miles - "Tsbol"

Nice track, mostly instrumental, hints of voices.

classic programmer paintings

http://classicprogrammerpaintings.tumblr.com/

Holly Golightly - "Your Love is Mine"

Country, dark.

Thea Gilmore - "Razor Valentine" (avalanche)

Muted late-night sad song.

coding music

• King Kitch - "Puesta Del Sol"
  instrumental, pan flute
• Waldeck - "Slowly"
  very Massive Attack-ish, would say it must be one their singers
• 
  

Saga

Comic - yeah yeah graphic novel - were a child is born from two species that fight each other all over the galaxy. Read the first book and enjoyed it. Strange, but intriguing enough.

Femke Halsema - "Pluche"

Erg leuk om te lezen, over een tijd die ik me herinner. Ik heb er geen quote van opgeschreven, geen anekdote raakte me diep. Leuk, makkelijk boek. Waarschijnlijk ontbeer ik politieke inslag.

the Rat Queens

Four girls, all sex and fights with trolls, assassins and whatnot. Got the first book, won't be buying the rest.

lehkat chel hayam - להקת חיל הים "חסקה"

https://youtu.be/c3sgHDIBCU0?t=21s

"about a guy asking a girl to join him on a Hasake (large surfboard)"

Cigarettes After Sex

Very much the smokey low key jazzy nightclub-on-a-dark-night variety. Perhaps repetitive after a while, but worthwhile.

Boku dake ga Inai Machi ("Erased")

Cool one season (?) anime about a guy who unintentionally time travels to fix bad situations. Usually it is just a few minutes into the past, but this time he travels fifteen years into his past to save three children from being murdered.

Nice, fast moving series.

Friends of the Family - "Time"

Dutch?

Interesting songs!

the Sore Losers - "Skydogs"

Very nice rock!

• White Whale - that one slow part, just a few seconds, is wonderful

Monomyth - "Exo"

Nice as ever!

ContraContra - "Wrakjuweel"

Een beetje zoals De Kift, qua teksten, qua muziek.

"Een hart vol gaten is een luchtig hart."

Haty Haty - "Tell Me Something" ("High As The Sun", 2016)

3voor12 mentions Blaudzun, not sure why. Should look into that. This song stands out. Haunting electonic strings, parlando female voice, electronic.

Wintergatan - music machine using 2000 marbles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q

Joe Bonamassa & Beth Hart - "Strange Fruit"

Found while searching for the Siouxie and the Banshees song with the same title. Typical Joe & Beth song. Slow and melodic. Sometimes almost James Bondish. Cover of Nina Simone? Of Billie Holiday? Of all of them!?

Andrew Weatherall - "Covenanza" (2016)

Dance music. Nice.

Mark Lanegan - "Prayer Ground"

Low, Americana, slow guitarish song.

Via 8track, first hit when searching for "george orwell"

William Gibson - "Distrust That Particular Flavor"

Compilation of essays. Not amazing, but a nice enough read.

If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.
We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.


In [H.G. Well's] preface to the 1941 edition, he could only add: 'Again I ask the reader to note the warnings I gave in that year, twenty years ago. Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: "I told you so. You damned fools." (The italics are mine.)'
The italics are indeed his: the terminally exasperated visionary, the technologically fluent Victorian who has watched the twentieth century arrive, with all of its astonishing baggage of change, and who has come to trust in the minds of the sort of men who ran British Rail. They are the italics of the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever, the less evolved. And they are with us today, those italics, though I've long since learned to run shy of science fiction that employs them.

And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today [1996], in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that post geographical meta-country we increasingly call home. it will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun - we seem to have a knack for that - but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web  is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working.

John Milton - "Paradise Lost"

analysis

• http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/paradiselost
• http://www.enotes.com/topics/paradise-lost/critical-essays/paradise-lost-john-milton
• http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/paradise-lost.html
  
  Milton emphasizes the importance of reason. Man is noble by nature, but he has free will, and hence free to choose and capable of action, morally good or bad for which he alone is responsible. Milton does not believe in Calvinism according to which God has decided everything, and a man’s destiny has been fixed before his birth. Milton is a great humanist pinning his faith in the liberty and adventure of man.
  
  Men gain spiritual rebirth by controlling their passions. Is this akin to Sisyphus' acceptance of his fate, not succumbing to passions like rage and anger, he is spiritually reborn?

Monomyth

The Hague (?) based band. Found because Imagine mentions them as live performers of a new soundtrack to the restored "Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari"

Long soundscapes. (I assume, the first one is still playing.) Nice.

(I've heard of them already?)

Tindersticks

The Waiting Room (2016)

• We Are Dreamers! 

Ypres (2014)

• Whispering Guns Part 1, 2 and 3 - very filmish. 

He Thought of Cars

Nice playlists!

http://8tracks.com/bynar/he-thought-of-cars-part-1
http://8tracks.com/bynar/he-thought-of-cars-part-2

• Comsat Angels - "I Come from the Sun" - good guitar twangs

Same user, different playlist: http://8tracks.com/bynar/until-the-darkness-is-desolate

• IAMX - I Come with Knives - German and English lyrics, power

http://8tracks.com/gojyochan/a-tribute-to-the-tenth-doctor-doctor-who-mix

• Silversun Pickups - Growing Old Is Getting Old - very 90s rock feeling to it

Who knew that a search for "americana"+"electronic" would yield results?!

http://8tracks.com/the-gallery/the-gallery-presents-luis-royo

• Doctor Flake - "Fightclubbing" - nice, look into!
• LAKE R▲DIO - "Martin Hannett's Ghost" - very strange
• Diablo Swing Orchestra - "A Rancid Romance" - fun swing dance song. Good for Halloween?

Chris Garneau - "Lucioles" (El Radio (2009))

A French and English female version of Drs P., judging by the way she sings (she sings way better, but music wise, it is somewhere between a music box and his kind of song)

Franz Ferdinand - "You're the reason I'm leaving"

Happy!

Jiang Rong - "Wolf Totem"

meretricious persiflage

(appearing in D.H. Lawrence's "Women in love"

meretricious persiflage: "apparently attractive but actually valueless small talk"

Jonathan Franzen - "How to be alone" (essays)

Great reading, even though I must often reread every other sentence, and look up words I thought I knew (and often, still know, but its essence just a feeling, never a proper description in my mind.)

* * *

In Death and Life, Jacobs also quoted Paul Tillich, who believed that the city, by its very nature, "provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely; the strange." Familiarity, whether of chain stores or of cookie-cutter subdivisions, erodes the autonomous intelligence and, in  a weird way, undermines privacy. In the suburbs, I'm the stranger; I feel exposed. only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself."

John Crowley - "Endless Things"

Amazing fourth and final book, and I have no clue on how to describe it. Wonderings, musings. Books and the world. His amazing diction and style. Not something to be spread out over months, but to be read, quickly, days and weeks.

* * *

(they are in bed, talking. at some point, a short flashback, then they continue talking.))

The first time they'd shared this bed - after a couple of drinks at the Sandbox, and well after they'd first begun to consort often - she had seemed unsettlingly cagey. She kept breaking off, or slipping away, to change the radio, or fool with the heat; and she kept talking - not about what was going on right there between them, but about other things, general remarks, questions about life, his life, his thoughts. So tell me. He wondered if it were some kind of test, see if he could keep up his concentration, or his attention to her. He was about to ask if maybe she'd rather just stop, and talk, but just then a sort of smothered fire within seemed to burst softly, and she pressed hard into him; she ceased to say words, only sounds, sounds that seemed, somehow, like further admissions, hard to make at first and then more willingly made.

((now))

She laughed a low laugh, her tummy rolling beneath his hand.
...
"That's what my book was about. How if you change the way ahead, the way behind changes too."
"Seems kind of obvious," she said.
It seemed so when she said it; it was obvious, or at least a commonplace. More than one history of the world; one for each of us. A bright moment arriving when you choose a new way into the future, which illuminates a new past, the backward way, at the same time. Everybody know. It had been true all along.
"Because, you know," she said, "You can't step in the same river twice. You ever hear that?"
"Nope," he said, pressing her now meaningfully downward to supine, enough talk. "News to me."

* * *

So he had had his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made, as his father's and his mother's lives were made of them. Sometimes laid deep like mines or bombs (he thought you'd have to explain this to young people nowadays, who didn't live such lives, probably) so that you had to proceed with care along your way, not come upon them unexpectedly or at the wrong time, at a juncture, and have them explode.
Homo, viator in bivio, the Latin Church declared, offering to help. man, voyager on forking paths. There's no provision, though, for going back, is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shout our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead, as in the silent comedies that Axel loved: no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture, a double infinity, an infinitesimal calculus; you'd never get back to there, and if you could you'd never return again to here where you started from: and why would you need to go back in the first place except to learn how to go on from right here, to go on along the way you have to go?

* * *

A light wind, able to stir the yellow fog but not at first to disperse it. A wind young and inexperienced, learning its uses and its work, but so far aimless; a wind that had been borne along with the world's great slow-marching airs and atmospheres from west to east, from Albion to the Middle Sea and over the Bavarian mountains, wondering, wandering. As it blew more steadily over the White Mountain, the day grew clearer. ot the light of day: what the day was great clearer, though not at once to everyone, and to some not at all.
A little wind. The first wind bears in the time, an angel said to John Dee, and the second bears it away again.
The protestant soldiers on the heights felt it first, lifted their heads and noses to it, to see from which quarter it blew. The various unearthly powers ranked behind them felt it too, and turned from the battle, to see who or what was coming through from the rear. No zephyr they knew. They were astonished then to be picked up and swept away by it, one by one, as by a broom, right out of the to-be and back into the once-was forever. All in a moment those powers were gone, were nothing - for they had all along really been nothing, less than nothing, mere signs, mere phantasmata, and no help now to the human soldiers, left with only their human commanders, standing on an insignificant little hill outside a contested city in the middle of Europe at the start of another battle in another war. Their warm mammalian breath condensed on the damp cold air. They thought how short life is, and how little worth is the promise of Heaven. On the other side the same, as in a mirror. Then the first wave of Catholic pikemen, crying out as though for their mothers, advanced against the Protestant left.
...
That little wind went away from the ghastly battlefield, growing just a little less little as it went, though few still could feel it. Nothing hindered it, perhaps because of its small size - it was no more than a breeze, really, a breath, the puff of air that comes in at the thick small windows of desert dwellings to touch a cheek and say that the simoom might be coming, or might not; hardly wind enough to cover with sands the tombs and temples that its mother had before uncovered. Yet it blew "far and wide"; there wouldn't be anywhere it didn't enter in, rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of opened books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath, propelled by those fat cheeks, separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other, like conjoined twins that can't survive together, encyclopedias of aerial etheric demons in Egypt. Nobody noticed. And then with a little laugh it blew itself out, bowling up its own nonexistent fundament and drawing all of itself in after.

* * *

According to Dr. Pons, though, it was actually just the opposite. To him, physical matter had no real existence at all; it wasn't different from human, or divine, ignorance. It was an illusion, in fact a hoax. The slightest and smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul is more real than any aspect of materiality. And more real in turn than all those emotions, all tears and laughter and love and hate, are the conceptions of the mind - Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom - which give to materiality whatever form and worth it has. Most real of all is the world beyond nature and even Mind: the real Without, utterly out of reach, the real of the Fullness and God.
What Kraft had learned, in those first joyous labors of imagination long ago, was that, different as Dr. Pons's inverted universe might be from what is in fact the case, it is necessarily very much like the world inside a work of fiction.
All the myriad material things that we, in our universe, touch and use and love and hate and depend on - our food, our flesh, our breath; cities and towns, roads and houses - in a book these things have no true reality at all. They're just nouns. But emotions are quite real; there are tears of things, and they are really shed, and real laughs laughed. Of course. And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, the governing, sustaining reality - the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, its hidden Author.
They, those pretend people in their factitious world, they owe their embodiment, their circumstance of being caught in unreal souls and bodies, to an upheaval that happened before the beginning of space and time (their space and time): a dissatisfaction, a troubling of a single soul's primal economy, a soul startled into awareness by a girlish or a boyish question: if things were different from the way they are, what would they be like?
More, even more: the most precious and only truly real thing within each of the conscious beings who had been made to inhabit Kraft's little world (well, not the hylic mob, the mere names, the spear carriers and extras) was their share of the original undivided consciousness from which they sprang - that is, his own. Into which, when their work is done, they are gathered again at last: when their false world is closed up, and shelved.
...
In subsequent years and subsequent books he had sometimes wondered if he might somehow send them a message, one of them or some of them; awaken them to their own condition, to this peculiar reversal of what we out here, most of us anyway, call reality most of the time. To speak into the ears of one soul at least the commandment, the suggestion, the hope of waking.

David Mitchell - "The Bone Clocks"

Very nice read about the life of Holly Sykes, the people around her, and the raging war of Atemporals vs Carnivores, the first century old souls reincarnating, the latter evil Anchorites who siphon off some life'soul stuff from mere mortals to stay alive.

I did enjoy it, and the end was properly bleak - though a deus ex machina tacked on -, but was I truly gripped by the big meta fight? No. The human characters meant more than those Horlogists and Anchorites. Which a book club might reveal to be exactly the point, perhaps.

Clip from Severed Heads - "Legion"

Just too weird

https://vimeo.com/139352179

Eivor - "Gryt Ei"

Soft and sad, and could just as easily be called cheesy perhaps. But it hit the right nerve and I like it.

Alessandro Baricco - "De Jonge Bruid" (La Sposa giovane)

Vreemd boek. Rare stijl, soms irritant, soms ok. Wisselend van perspectief zonder waarschuwing, soms midden in een zin. Ik kan niet zeggen dat ik echt begaan was met de hoofdpersonen, maar toch was het intrigerend om te lezen.

"Na die eerste kus waren de zaken exponentieel voortgeraasd, eerst stiekem, vervolgens onverholen, tot ze uitmondden in dat soort van trage huwelijk dat in feite het onderwerp is van het verhaal dat ik hier aan het vertellen ben, en waarover een oude vriend me gisteren nog ronduit vroeg of dat iets te maken had met de wederwaardigheden waar ik kapot aan ga de afgelopen maanden, oftewel in dezelfde periode dat ik dit verhaal nu aan het vertellen ben, het verhaal dat, zo meende die oude vriend, best weleens te maken zou kunnen hebben met het verhaal van datgene waar ik kapot aan ga. Het juiste antwoord - nee - was niet moeilijk te geven, maar toch bleef ik zwijgen en antwoordde ik niets, en wel omdat ik anders had moeten uitleggen hoe alles wat we schrijven uiteraard te maken heeft met wat we zijn, of zijn geweest, maar persoonlijk heb ik nooit gedacht dat het schrijversvak kan worden afgedaan door je eigen issues op literaire wijze te verpakken, met het zielige trucje om dan de namen en soms de volgorde van de gebeurtenissen te veranderen; ik heb juist altijd het idee gehad dat het oprechter zou zijn om tussen ons eigen leven en dat wat we schrijven een geweldige afstand te scheppen die ons, eerst geschapen door onze fantasie en vervolgens opgevuld door ons vakmanschap en onze toewijding, naar een elders voert waar werelden blijken te zijn die voorheen niet bestonden, en waarin datgene wat er aan intiem persoonlijks, onzegbaar persoonlijks is weer gaat bestaan, maar voor onszelf vrijwel onbekend, en geraakt door de gratie van uiterst broze vormen, zoals die van fossielen of vlinders."

Andy Weir - "The Martian"

Loved it. Great read, easily written. Sometimes he is a bit too nerd-jokey, but that's ok. Once or twice I felt a problem being set up too obviously. Perhaps first let the accident happen, just a few sentences describing what happens, then give the background info?

on Grunnsonic sampler

• Kin - "Knee Jerk", dubstep with haunting vocals
• Anthony's Putsch - "Hair" - very Mika like
• De Kat - "What Time do We Meet"
• the Blind Roofers - "Lost in Wander" - very Sixteen Horsepower, though the accent is off

Nils Frahm & Jon Hopkins improvisation

Amazing stuff.

https://www.facebook.com/jonhopkinsmusic/videos/1218318841517650/