Hello.
I was listening to "I am the Walrus" while working on a Master's Thesis (strange basis), and in the sidebar was the song in the subject line. I was floored. I cannot describe exactly what it is, but the entire song has been nothing short of amazing. (Admittedly, it has served as a good "backdrop" for working on my Thesis about cyberwarfare.) What inspired this absolutely incredibly frenetic work?
jessica
that version of the recording was written in late '01 as a stadium rock track for an unrealized rock project, but not constructed in it's existing form until about a month ago. there's consequently a set of influences relative to 2001 (it's half industrial, half no-wave/grunge) and a set of influences relative to 2014 (i've been listening to a lot of melodic hardcore recently), as well as a lot of stuff i've come in and out of in between. i've dubbed my work "blender rock", which means that it tries to take in as diverse a set of influences as is possible.
i have writeups for most material up until about 2002 at my bandcamp site:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/to-spin-inside-dull-aberrations
i should also point out that this is a reworking of what i call my fourth symphony. there are roughly ten versions of this track, and i will be compiling them shortly, but for now all i have is this, which is the version with the symphony title:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/trepanation-nation
ganzonomy
It's some of the wildest, most interesting, stuff I have heard in a long, long, while. I'll take a look at those links when I resume my work on my MA Thesis, but from what I heard, I am thoroughly impressed.
I've been listening to a lot of late 1960s / early 1970s Miles Davis (The "Electric Era"), and I see parallels in it, especially the extent of keyboard and guitar work and the emphasis of such instruments. (If you have a chance, I highly recommend finding a copy of Dark Magus - Live at Carnegie Hall, for me, it seems to be his "peak" from that era). I've very often just sat down with a good pair of headphones and tried to pick apart each individual instrument and where it's going (or trying to go) compared to the others. (I like doing that with a lot of works, be it King Crimson, Frank Zappa, Miles, anything that has a lot of instrumentation that's intertwined, or just something that can be ridden like a "magic carpet").
Again, great work :-)
jessica
davis is an interesting parallel. i've certainly spent a lot of time listening to davis, but the times i've sat down with any kind of emulation purposes are pretty rare. i'd say i get my mclaughlin pull more out of the mahavishnu stuff. the prog is key for me: i was sort of reared on crimson, genesis, zappa and floyd and it formed the basis of my musical understanding before kurt cobain smashed a guitar over my head and made me take notice of punk rock, which i suppose was a fairly normal experience for people my age at that time. that prog rock childhood was very formative, though, and eventually defined my interests in post-rock in the late 90s and early 00s.
i'm glad you're enjoying it...
ganzonomy
Davis' work from 1972 to 1975 (post-McLaughlin, his primary guitarist by that point had become Pete Cosey), is less smooth and more a mixture of Hendrix-meets-Parliament. I got reared on what would be considered "classic rock", but one of the things I enjoyed doing was finding out where "the limits" were. I became a Disc Jockey at WHRW Binghamton from 2004 through 2008 (I was a student at Binghamton University, hated it... wound up going through the City University of New York (CUNY) Queens College from 2010 onwards to complete my Bachelor's... but I digress, back to Disc Jockeying. I found that era of my life to be the most musically expanding. I would play anything ranging from Django, to Antheil (Ballet Mecanique being a personal favorite), to Zappa (the show was named Frankly... Zappa for a time), to spike jones, etc., The premise was "if it's been recorded, it's playable, and if it hasn't, I'll figure out how to turn the random things in the station into musical instruments".
Alas, the master's thesis is on cyberwarfare - which due to the lack of political science stuff (but a TON of computer science stuff) is kicking my brains in. Thanks for making the research process easier. PS: I read some of your works from when you were in college for law, they're actually quite good. If you find the spark to finish, go for it.
jessica
i started off in theoretical physics and, after bouncing around quite a bit, finished a math degree in 2006. i went back in '08 to do a computer science degree for purely economic reasons and got to a half credit from finishing it before realizing that it really wasn't what i wanted to be doing with my life, so i mentally switched into law and finished up to the end of second year in it. i ended up concluding that i was arguing with the basic premises of the english common law and that there wasn't any future in continuing on with it outside of existing in some kind of purely theoretical space that is populated solely by anarchists. i couldn't possibly apply my perspectives in any kind of a real world context. i have loose plans on going back to school, but i think i'd probably want to focus on a master's degree in mathematics.
for the time being, i'm focusing on "completing my discography", which ran from roughly 1996-2011 and has dozens of half complete ideas. the track in question (as mentioned, from 2001 but finished last month) is a part of that process of finishing incomplete ideas. i've worked my way up to 2002, meaning i still have about ten years of musical ideas to finish before i start thinking about restarting an academic career.
ganzonomy
The basic arguments of law are some of the most absurd things i've seen, i'm not a lawyer (my area, were I to enter it after the MA, would be international law), but there are some arguments where i'm just like "REALLY.... what was being smoked when this was argued?!" (and that's even taking into account historical contexts in supreme court cases). I started out in Mechanical Engineering myself (discovered I couldn't do calculus) before going into psychology and finally political science. Insofar as anarchists, are we talking anti-government sorts, or are we talking about the IR idea of anarchy that is chaos?
The idea of having a vault of unfinished music, is something that has fascinated me. I'm a photography fan, and to see works that I've done years after they were made, I find interesting; particularly in seeing the things now that I could have improved, conditions that I could have changed (lenses, film type, etc.,), and I find I have very few that I'm like "Yes, this was PERFECT!". Admittedly though this travels to my writing, where I'm always - after the fact - going into analyzing every little grammatical mistake that was missed.
Side Question? What exactly did "death to koalas" come from?
jessica
one of the (many) assumptions i found myself having difficulty agreeing with was the idea that situations should be analyzed by an objective criteria. i'd ultimately take the perspective that this isn't even possible - which is essentially the critical legal studies view that law is functionally defined by actors using the rules to justify enforcing their opinion, rather than the other way around. where i'd break with the cls people is that i actually think this is preferable to an objective set of rules, so long as the class relations can be abolished or minimized in terms of decision making (and replacing incarceration with civil/tort law in all but the most extreme of situations would ease a lot of those concerns) and the decision making is take out of the hands of elitist judges and put more into the hands of the community.
even something as seemingly black and white as "thou shalt not murder" is not really acceptable to me. i can come up with endless justifications for murder that go beyond the immediate need for self-defense. so, i don't think that a system that produces these static, immutable rules and demands they never be broken is the right approach - i think a system that looks at the situation on a case by case basis and determines whether the behaviour is or is not beneficial to the community on that basis - completely independently of past decisions - is preferable. adopting this approach would throw the concept of stare decisis out the window and completely abolish the authority of the existing common law in favour of the authority of the actual, existing community.
the general position in opposition is going to be that a system of clearly delineated laws makes it clear what the boundaries are in terms of what behaviour is allowed and what behaviour is not. but i'd identify this "liberal" mindset as the basis of most of the problems we have in front of us, from financial speculation to environmental degradation. if we want to talking about improving our social conditions, we have to shift society so that people are thinking about actively making moral choices rather than behaving as badly as they can with the singular restriction of merely avoiding the law. if your only argument in favour of a behaviour is "it's not illegal", maybe you shouldn't be doing it.
but, in taking this position, i'm rejecting the very foundations of english society. it may be an interesting exercise in anarchist rhetoric, but it's not something i can explore in a courtroom or in a classroom. and, i ultimately don't feel i need those pieces of paper to write on the topic if i decide to in the future.
ganzonomy
The first two paragraphs are mind-blowing to me (not in a bad way, but in a way that I had never considered viewing things and will have to research further, since traditional law is built on absolutes and to a great extent ignores ethics for "if it's legal I can do it, if it's not deemed illegal, i can still do it!". Not to get too political-sciencey, but you are touching on the issue that existed between President Theodore Roosevelt and President William Howard Taft during the early 20th century. Whereas Roosevelt's mentality was primarily "if it's not stricken as explicitly illegal, I can get away with it", Taft's mentality was "it is only doable if the law explicitly states it is doable". (However both were notable for their "trust-busts" during the early 20th century as well as their presences in Latin America during that time period as well. As far as law goes - admittedly I'm not a law student in the US (right now, I'm finishing my Master's in CUNY Brooklyn, I may go for International Law after), I will agree that law is a construct that is built from the norms of the society of which it exists in, but the issue I have is that while not having "objective rules" may be preferable in either a small state / municipality, "objective rules" need to exist in some capacity for the purposes of providing a structure - however decrepit it may be - for judicial purposes.
I do agree with a case-by-case basis for things, because of mitigating circumstances. I find the allowance of organizations such as the MPAA and RIAA to act egregiously simply because someone's grandmother plays happy birthday from an MP3 download, to be asinine. (Actually, the fact happy birthday is copyrighted, and that the copyright law in the USA allows for it to be continually renewed, is mind-blowing. The recent movie, the butler, underwent an MPAA issue because Warner Bros. has a movie called the butler from about 1914, that is not publicly available (so it is not hostile-defended in a public market), but WB won the right to have that movie's name changed for "disambiguation purposes". Although I'm a liberal thinker in terms of economics (ie: I do believe some measure of patent law is necessary to protect original innovation, but the extent that such things are protected, and even what can be protected... is insane (video yoga, for instance recently was patented in the USA; DiMarzio has a registered trademark on its double-creme pickups for electric guitars, etc.,). Conversely, I do think there is a cost-of-service that comes with the rarity of the position and the ensuing difficulty (ie: an anesthesiologist should make more than a burger-flipper due to the level of skill that is required, but at the same time I have more respect for the working individual, regardless of whether he / she is a lawyer or a burger-flipper, than the welfare case, simply because of the effort being made). As someone who's put himself through undergraduate, and now graduate, school, I do appreciate the value of working - even though much of my work was physical, rather than intellectual, labor.
I think, if you could take what you are thinking, grind out law school for the LL.B or JD (depending on if you go in the USA or Canada or elsewhere), and then go for an LL.M or S.J.D., your views and the research you have for them, will be very fruitful. The first two paragraphs you wrote though - perhaps because i'm not a law student - were difficult to understand. So if I need some clarification, I apologize. The last two paragraphs though, I 100% agree.
jessica
i just want to clarify that i wouldn't align with either taft or roosevelt on this point. my position would be "as a sovereign individual, *i* decide if it's right or wrong". now, i'd give the community a sort of right to review the decision, but i wouldn't force any kind of a constitutional order on the community in their process of doing so.
so how do people know if something is legal? they answer is they don't and can't know by merely looking it up in a reference text - they have to work out those details and decide for themselves if the behaviour ought to be condemned (technically, behaviour cannot be restricted in a free society, so it's not a question of what is allowed or not allowed it's a question of what is censured or not censured) or not. there may be disagreements, but i wouldn't argue that this is a bad thing. i think the level of uncertainty is already inherent in the existing system and dismantling the facade of an objective system is merely being honest about it.
there are some obvious things: it's obvious that somebody that kills his neighbour for walking on his lawn should be censured. there are less obvious things: i would argue that somebody that kills his neighbour for raping his daughter is justified in his reaction.
ganzonomy
I'm going to ponder your argument a bit. I do like sharp conversation (A LOT!) and I thank you for that. (I'm pondering it because you have given me an incredible amount of info and i have to digest it mentally.)
I did see on your feed "He used to cut the grass". That album (Joe's Garage), has my favorite guitar solo (Watermelon in Easter Hay). That guitar solo was the first Zappa song I figured out by ear. I have the first part, and the last part, but I need to figure out the middle part. (But that solo... puts chills down my spine.)
