ZLB

I will be playing live the 10th December at the Regentekamer, Lange Beestenmarkt 108, Den Haag. There will be 5 different projects performing, I will be the last one. It starts at 8:00pm, I will play at around 10:00pm.

Centrafrique: Musique Gbáyá / Chants À Penser

Minimalism clearly was not invented in Europe (European musicians, specially composers, were/are? more interested in dramatic structures), it’s roots are clearly set in Africa. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) these african traditions are not known so much, maybe because they lack the pretentiousness of the intellectual constructions that are so much the main focus of european art music circles. Tracks like dai-te (1) would not feel out of place performed in the same concert as say, Reich’s Drumming. 

But credit must be given to the original American minimalists (specially Reich), in claiming the African and Asian traditions as a source of inspiration. When listening to an album like this one, or the gamelan ensembles of indonesia, or so many other unbelievably rich music traditions around the world I just smile when I think of the devotion most “serious” music appreciators feel they have to render to the likes of Bach or Mozart (who have no fault in that, off course, they were dead a long time ago).  

Btw, when listening to Tambours de bois à fente (Centrafrique) from Instruments de musique du mond, it’s clear also the connection between african drumming and say, minimal techno.

Thomas Ferguson’s Investment Theory of Parties studies in details what is obvious to well informed people, that in most western democracies the large interest groups set the agenda of the government and the will or opinion of the people is highly irrelevant. 

The article “The Power of the Rich ” by William K. Tabb, explains it clearly:

Political parties need votes, but they are not simply vote maximizers. Parties are better understood as blocs of investors that back candidates who represent their interests. Public policy is shaped by the interplay and jockeying of these blocs, since most voters are unorganized, often minimally informed, hostile to the political process, and so prone to emotional appeals on issues of only glancing interest to the investor class. Public opinion on issues of interest to this investor class has weak influence on outcomes.

…

As Thomas Ferguson writes, “on issues affecting the vital interests that major investors have in common, no party competition will take place.”⁸ It is not that the issues of interest to these investors will be the only ones discussed. The point is for the candidate favoring the vital interests of the investors to win. This leads to candidates giving prominence to all manner of issues, from gay marriage to abortion, which may not be of central concern to investors but are calculated to ensure victory, and to mud-slinging and negative advertising based on false and malicious claims. The point is winning so that investor objectives can be legislated. The big campaign givers are those whose wealth depends on the government, such as military contractors, or those who want to change government regulations, like the securities and energy sectors, as well as everyone from tobacco to those on the receiving end of asbestos lawsuits. Some individual contributors are driven by ideology.

…

Let me conclude by putting some of these aspects together. The investor theory is clear enough in its predictions that issues of interest to the majority of citizens will be ignored if the rich contributor class does not want them considered. Likewise, issues of interest to the rich will be put forward and reinforced in media discussion even though they lack popular support. The legislation that results, as shown in the case of tax policy in the foregoing discussion, seems to confirm a correlation between investments and government policies favoring investors.

bibliography:

Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Parties and the Logic of Money Driven Politics

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

http://oblong.com/

On postmodernism I stand in the same situation as chomsky, which is comforting: 

It’s entirely possible that I’m simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. [...] 

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc.  even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest  write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out. 

from Chomsky on postmodernism

The only accepted political speech allowed in the USA is to vote for a candidate of one of the business parties. Any other political voice outside of voting is considered illegal and repressed.  When several groups started organizing to protest the Republican National Convention, they were met with illegal “preemptive” house raids, where political literature was confiscated and stolen, and mass arrests with no justification of everyone present in a certain area of the town. A documentary named “Terrorizing dissent” on these events is now available.

When thinking about the piano strings, or other strings for that matter, it’s basically assumed that there’s fundamental frequency and that the partials occur at harmonics of the fundamental frequency. From here on, classical music theory people go on about the consonance of the intervals being related to the internal partials of the music instruments, and how therefore western classical music theory is universal, based on scientific reasoning, and should therefore be imposed on everyone else (and it is, thorough the school system).

  Off course this is not so.  The piano string for example is slightly inharmonic and furthermore other (also inharmonic) partials called “phantom partials” , which are cause by the longitudinal waves that cross the string, also contribute to the sound.

Very nice examples of the influence of the longitudinal modes on the piano string sound can be found here.

A cool animation of the Wave Field Synthesis system I’ve been using for the last year in Leiden.

On the morning after election day. Hundreds of newspaper boxes had their covers changed and contents augmented with anarchist news and opinion, a small payback for the election media blitz and near media blackout that followed militant conflict at the conventions.

more info. full front page

There is an alternative way to do things, that works from below, instead of forcing decisions made by a few on most of the people. This applies to any aspect of human social organizing. A wonderful approach to this problem in the architecture domain here.