Etienne Jaumet (Eglise Saint Eustache)

Because I never tagged this and it is amazing.

Yom - "On the Endless Road" (Songs for the Old Man, 2015)

Sad meandering saxophone. Reminded me a bit of Etienne Jaumet, though it lacks those energetic speedups. Which is not a bad thing, just different.

Just listened to the whole album. Pretty nice.


Le Silence de l'exode
This though has a lot more energy, follows a flow of building fast notes, only then to slow down to the twanging of a jazzy contrabass. 

Benjamin Franklin - writing exercises

Step One:  Find writing you would like to emulate.
Step Two: Make short notes about the view or opinion of each sentence.
Step Three: Wait a few days, and then write a piece only using your notes on each sentence.
Step Four: Go back and read the original writing selection you chose and compare it to the writing you did.
Step Five: Find any faults, and correct them.

He started by taking one of the essays and jotting down a note for each sentence indicating the sentiment it contained. He then put his notes aside for a few days and then by using his notes recreated the essay in his own words. Then he compared his version to the original and made corrections. Essay by essay he could see his approach improving his skills and in some small ways he felt his expression might even be better than the original. These glimmers of erudition gave him hope.

Despite the progress Ben felt he needed more. He wanted to expand his vocabulary. What better way then than to rewrite an essay’s prose in verse. Again he would start with notes expressing the sentiment of each sentence but this time he wrote his version in verse. It forced him to add variety and creativity. After a few days he’d forget the original prose and so would then take his verse and use it to rewrite the essay. Again he made a comparison, made corrections and learned by doing.

I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language.

HAPPYish

Too short series with Steve Coogan as sad, depressed advertisement guy. It has great quotes and amazing humour. Must watch again.

N. K. Jemisin - "The Fifth Season"

Amazing book about an Earth gone rogue and humanity try to survive whenever a Season, brought about by volcanos, tectonic activity, ... occurs. Three timelines of the same person, a rogga, who can sess (feel and influence) such activity, necessary in that volatile world, but feared by all the 'stills', the "normal" people who cannot feel anything.

Her trip in search of her husband (to kill him, for out of fear he killed their child), her own childhood, her trip to a sort of freedom with a ten-ringer from the Fulcrum...

Amazing story, well written. A fantasy page turner of the best kind.


"Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
    First, a personal ending. There is a thing she will think over and over in the days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. She will cover Uche's broken little body with a blanket - except his face, because he is afraid of the dark - and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She's old hat at this by now.
    What she thinks then, and thereafter, is: But he was free.
    And it is her bitter, weary self that answers this almost question every time her bewildered, shocked self manages to produce it:
    He wasn't. Not really. But now he will be."

The Naked Sweat Drips - "Psycho Sister"

organ, guitars, grungy, psychodelicious.... good if you don't mind something bit more rough.

Balkan Beat Box - "Dancing With the Moon" (Blue Eyed Black Boy)

Soooo much reggae swunggggg.

Charlie Megire and the Bet She'an Vally Hillbillies - "The End of Teenage"

Great surf songs!

Hava Nargila
and of course "The Death Dance of the Busty Hot Lifeguard Instructor Babe"

Night Beats - "Bad Love"

Heard "Bad Love" on BBC6, now listening to their 2016 album "Who Sold My Generation". Old swamp sound.

Gidge - "LNLNN" (2016)

Kinda nice electro. "Elegy, Part II" has some cool theremin stuff.

Forgotten letters of the English alphabet

 Eth (ð)
The y in ye actually comes from the letter eth, which slowly merged with y over time. In its purest form, eth was pronounced like the th sound in words like this, that or the. Linguistically, ye is meant to sound the same as the but the incorrect spelling and rampant mispronunciation live on.

https://omgfacts.com/we-used-to-have-6-more-letters-in-our-alphabet-a7e1a165853d#.a0pwtcyq5

Haruki Murakami - "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

Ugh, this seems to become a regular thing... but I could not get into the story, delayed it, chose other things to read, turned back to it, had a hard time enjoying it...

It's not bad but, like other Murakami novels (with the notable exception of the "Egg... Wonderland..." one) I seem to miss the deeper philosophical or emotional meaning or layer and I simply Do. Not. Care. So. Much.

There were good pieces, and I was - obviously - quite interested in the strange things happening when he's in the well, passing into that other reality with the room 208 in the hotel, the woman talking to him in different voices, the dark anger trying to attack him...

But did the story grasp me? No.

Iggy Pop - "Post Pop Depression" (2016)

How could I have forgotten to log this one? Amazing album. Bring it on, Iggy, bring it on.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

Enjoyable enough. The beginning was really David Lynch-ish. The inner story, of the book he wrote, was cool. But the outer story was thin. Things unexplained. Things shown that - in my opinion - did not seem to matter. Both Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhal did a great job. And the music was interesting, done by Abel Korzeniowski. Its theme reminded me of another movie but I could not think of what it was for the life of me. "Neon Demon" by Nicolas Winding Refn?
This one directed by Tom Ford by the way.

Willie Nelson - "Texas"

Has that minor key twanging guitar sound I like so much, although part of the song is quite major key country.

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.