my love for you...

Some of these are new. Some are not. All of them are words. I like to eat words.

These are about how my love is like a various item of food. I hope you enjoy it.

And, if not, then I suppose you've failed. Not me, you.

My love for you is like a frozen carrot: bold, vivid, unbreakable, and full of vitamin A.

My love for you is like an apple: subtle, shiny, tender, and quick to become discolored if exposed to oxygen for too long.

My love for you is like a pumpkin: big, cumbersome, warm, hearty, and a favorite object of bat-wielding drunk teenagers.

My love for you is like a peanut: tough to crack, efficient, versatile, and occasionally highly toxic to the wrong people.

My love for you is like a banana: mushy, fragrant, easily digestible, and on the brink of extinction.

My love for you is like a papaya: exotic, robust, seedy, thin-skinned, and incapable of sitting on a shelf more than a few days.

My love for you is like high fructose corn syrup: mildly sweet, borderline addictive, and in every damned thing everywhere.

My love for you is like canned beets: easy to slice, little nutritional value, and stains everything in your house.

My love for you is like a potato: nondescript but widely varied, turns purple from iodine, and will break windows if thrown hard enough.

My love for you is like a milkshake: cold and stodgy at first, but yields with warmth, and is drunk to the full by Daniel Day Lewis.

My love for you is like a piece of bread: not the heel - no, not that one either - yeah, that one, sort of in the middle of the loaf.

My love for you is like a thin-crust pizza: smothered in greasy things under the illusion that because part of it is thin that it isn’t quite so deleterious.

My love for you is like an orange: sweet, sticky, pulpy, an inspiration for two out of five of Neruda’s poetic images, and doubles as the base for a detergent.

My love for you is like a pork chop: surrounded by fluff, robustly textured, and not at all kosher.

My love for you is like hummous: simple, basic, incredibly filling, but gets in the way of your baba ghanouj.

My love for you is like cheese: fuck patriarchy.

My love for you is like milk: nourishing, mixes well with chocolate, leaves a thin film on things, and goes bad after seven to ten days.

My love for you is like canned tuna: watery, compressed and ready to spring into action, and a favorite of feral cats.

My love for you is like a burrito: fill it with damn near everything and get away with it.

My love for you is like fried rice: peppery, tinges of color, and loaded with enough MSG to take out the 51st Manitoban Cavalry.

My love for you is like a cup of pudding: smooth, silky, can be thrown in the pantry and forgotten for weeks on end, and develops an alien skin once exposed to sunlight.

My love for you is like uncooked pasta: filled with dog hair once you spill it all over the floor.

My love for you is like avocado ice cream: trust me, buddy, it will knock you on your ass with how good it is.

My love for you is like four loko: addictive, generically fruit-flavored, and will land 82 partygoers in the ICU after two cans.

My love for you is like a raisin: small, lonely, delicately sweet, but will show up in foods you least expect and make you shriek with terror.

My love for you is like tofu: blanched, bland but takes up any flavoring you give it, soaked in its own juices, and makes a terrible pillow.

My love for you is like a watermelon: filled with boiling rage.

My love for you is like a three-layered cake: excruciating in terms of effort in creating it, the true measure of its wonder comes only when it has been completely devoured.

My love for you is like a glass of water: cool, clear, a staple of life, and easily thrown into the face of a hussy.

My love for you is like caviar: basically pointless, but schmucks place artificially high monetary values on it and fish its producers to extinction.

My love for you is like a cup of coffee: damn good coffee.

My love for you is like a bottle of imitation vanilla: overpriced, smells terrific, and tastes terrifyingly grotesque.

My love for you is like a box of crackers: square, occasionally perforated, salty, but can be covered with any variety of substances.

My love for you is like a glass of Chimay: I really enjoy beer.

My love for you is like a taco salad: someone said “let’s figure out how to combine everything we have left in the fridge and slap some salsa on it and call it ‘Mexican.’”

My love for you is like a sack of flour: ground out by massive stones and veritably useless unless combined with other things, like pestilence, fear, or loathing.

My love for you is like a cup of lentils: earthy, crunchy before cooked, and typically filled with small stones that will break your teeth.

My love for you is like a Gummi worm: amazing elasticity, psychotropic translucence, but created from Gummi Bear slave labor, destroying the surrounding countryside in the maddening hunt for the highly prized worms.

My love for you is like cold beef stew: disgusting.

Golden Bowl recollections...

I wrote this over six years ago. I have no idea if it's still funny in the least.

---

One of the more entertaining facets of Chinese take-out would be, sans debate, the fortune cookie. In this case, Little Chinatown provided me with three of their better Golden Bowl confections. I have chewed and swallowed only one -- today after my Galaxy of Faux-Prawns Fried Rice, and I decided to make a purport.

"Romance comes into your life this year in a very unusual way." Hmm. Seems innocuous enough. And ambivalent enough to pass as a commonplace fortune. And while I know these brief missives of mystery slipped into the cookie mean nothing, I shall make a list of how I expect romance to enter my life in "unusual" ways.

--At a side-show, someone gets shot out of a cannon and collides with my abdomen. I wind up with severe internal bleeding and a crushed pancreas. In the pancreas trauma ward, I meet the future love of my life, a person who lost their pancreas when, in a bizarre bowling accident, they became trapped in the frame and got reset as a 4-pin. The hollow feelings in our guts are replaced with long nighttime conversations about the various flavors of jello and the pace of the intravenous drip.
--I witness a burning building on my way to work and decide to be a hero. Instead of finding people, I find a voodoo priestess in the back room sacrificing the structure to cleanse her family's spirits. Noticing my unscrupulous entrance into her life-sized altar, she casts upon me a spell, turning me into an anteater and casting me off the the Faeroe Islands where a confused seal becomes enamored with me.
--Due to circumstances beyond my control, I get forced out of my apartment and have to live in a stairwell. This stairwell is located in a building below a bluff. One fine day, a busload of Zen nuns flies off the bluff into the stairwell. I run for my life and run into a real estate broker who, because of circumstances beyond hir control, is faced with living in the stairwell in the opposite end of the building. Various puns about staircases ensue and true love doth blossom.
--I get reincarnated as a rabbit. Let the good times roll!
--Returning to my seat at a hockey game, I notice a large, brooding man has taken my seat. I decide to fight fire with uncomfortable gestures and I sit on his lap against his protestations. He flings me headfirst into the lower rows where I end up with my head stuck in a bucket of popcorn. I wander around for a while and realize I'm on the ice. I get viciously attacked by Per Sven Østergård, a very angry Nordic man thinking I was the opposing team's mascot. After he destroys my ability to feel things below my neck, he shows remorse by introducing me to his sister, Helga Svenska Østergård, who happens to also be a very angry Nordic man. But her daughter is neither angry nor a man.
--Working at the 7-11, I get held captive by a team of bitter sea lions wearing headsets. I flee and they chase me into the desert. I trip over a rock and prepare for a nasty tumble. A giant pteradon swoops me up and attempts to devour me whole, but after a struggle it drops me through the roof of a bowling alley where I land in the kids' ball crawl. Since the ball crawl is infested with scorpions, I make a break for it, noticing the sea lions are still closing in. I jump the fence around the bowling alley and end up in the backyard of one Renee Zellweger, who pumps my guts full of lead. I wake up three days later in the pancreas trauma ward where I meet the wardmate who was involved in a serious bowling accident the night before.

Here are 100 additional Hobo Names you did not request

In Honor of John Hodgman's 700 Hobo Names, I bring you 701-800. I guess.


#701: Edamame Jones, the Human Soybean
#702: Timothy the Jellyfish Chiropractor
#703: Homeostasis McGillicuddy
#704: Alvin “Tijuana Nights” Spencer
#704: Flashlight Burleson, of the Burning Burlesons
#705: Nadia the Backgammon Cheater
#706: Skipper Sanders, the No-Pocketed
#707: Hush Puppy Alaijuwon
#708: Salmon Patty Douglas
#709: Esperanto Davison, the Babbler
#710: Toothpick Ramirez, the Fingerless
#711: Big Gulp
#712: Dmitri Burleson, the One-Eyed Dentist, no relation to the Burning Burlesons
#713: Deep-Sea Diving Irma of the Fish People
#714: Pressure-Valve Tcherepnin, or the Whistling Wozniak
#715: Viva Camels Horseback Tourism Service
#716: Hakim “No Trans Fat” Mendez
#717: Irish Steve, the Bearded
#718: “Pancake Fighter” Norris of Mapleton Falls
#719: Ahab, the Hooks-for-Eyes and Hooks-for-Teeth Reference Librarian
#720: Dual Exhaust Burleson, of the Burning Burlesons
#721: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#722: Saltpeter McAdams, the Catholic Civil War Re-enactor
#723: Isabella Rosselini Cozick, or the Fake Italian
#724: Mariela Azkenazy, or The Little Bedazzler
#725: Bald Pete
#726: Hirsute Pete
#726: Mortician Pete
#727: Herbert “Adrianople” Left-Arm, or The Last Cappadocian
#728: Frank McCourt’s Eyebrows
#729: Jeff Gort, the Moderately Medium-Heighted
#730: Boxcar Nathan Burleson, the Pyromaniac
#731: Your Mother, So Named Because What Else Can You Call a 59-Year-Old Hobo from Platteville, NY
#732: The Tigress Ethan Hawke
#733: Nebuchadnezzar Gleeson, The Rapscallion Onion Cooker
#734: Santa Monica Freeway After Dark
#735: Concho “Crow’s Feet” Randall, the Shark Tester
#736: Papyrus Franz, the Banal Scrawler
#737: Boxcar Danforth, the Lackluster Scrabble Player
#738: Tetsuo
#739: Boxcar Ianuzzi, Electronics Dealer
#740: A Ladle Once Having Belonged to Henry David Thoreau’s Grist Mill Operator
#741: Tina Fey, Or Someone Who Resembles Her Greatly, But Bearded and Paunchy and Most Likely Not Tina Fey
#742: Bus-Stop Oliver Wendell Sherlock Holmes the Fourth
#743: Gooey Gooey Cocoa Beans, The Bitter
#744: Napalm Burleson, Father of the Burning Burlesons
#745: Alistair Go-Lightly McLean, the Footless Ghost
#746: Nebulous Nelly, the Hazy Actuary
#747: Jumbo Jameson, Designer of Flightless Liquor Bottle Birds
#748: Heavy Metal Delacroix , The Gumbo Queen of Kansas
#749: Ivor Darnetchka, the Three-Fingered Knitter
#750: Sullivan O’Sullivan, the Surly Jew
#751: Queen Anne Wearing Nothing But Lace
#752: “Uvula” Utley, The Silent Killer
#752: Humbert Humbert
#753: Wade Philips, the Dolt
#754: Nine-Ring Paul, the Electrician Who Once Successfully Mixed the Worlds of Sweet and Salty Breakfast Bars, As Evidence By His True Name, Oscar the Gastronome
#755: Oscar the Gastronome the Second
#756: Felipe Calderon
#757: “Jet-Pack” Travers, He of the Scalded Back
#758: Mister Blisters
#759: Eye-Teeth Frida
#760: Marvin Gleeson, the Dilettante Actuary, not to be confused with…
#761: Garvin Meason, the Actuarial Dilettante
#762: Yasmin Bleeth(e)
#763: Horatio Snowbottom Leahy, or Permafrost Pelvis
#764: Legless “Clusterbomb” Neely, Second Cousin Once Removed of Jet-Pack Travers
#765: “Normalized Relations” Weisenstein
#766: “Airport” Stevens, or The Man Who Leads At Least Three Double Lives Between Visits to His Loves at Various Airports Within Jet-Pack Distance of The Railyard
#767: “Airplane” Stevens, “Airport” Stevens’ Former Spouse
#768: Rusty Kelvin, The Frigid
#769: Busty Melvin, The Frigidaire
#770: Napalm Claxson, the Catnip Farmer
#771: “Burnt Toast” Nixon, The Naughty Ex-Girlfriend So Named for Depilating a Chihuahua Near a Toaster
#772: Harold Mouth-Eyes, the Food-Watcher
#773: Tabasco Marlin, or a Cooked Fish
#774: Renal-Failure Sanford, the Lipless
#775: Aldous “The Bulbous” Malikonious
#776: Kaneda
#777: Reena Burleson, or Spicy Curry Steve
#778: Mohawk Albritton, the Saddest Hobo Not In A Joy Division Cover Band
#779: Fauxhawk Albritton, Mother of Mohawk
#780: “Remote-Control” Randy Riles, the Living Nickel-Cadmium Battery Pack
#781: Snow-Angel Jimenez, the Rowdiest Cobbler
#782: Key-Lime Krista of the Secret Anti-Jet-Pack Hobo League, or the Baking Beauty
#783: Arista Records
#784: Kurt the Opalescent Turtle
#785: Shiny Shiny Shiny Knees, the Legless
#786: Noriko Fuji, the Displaced Shinto
#787: Birth-Sign Helman, the Birthday-less
#788: King Lear
#789: Ignatius Josephus Centurion, the Belt-Eater
#790: Ignatius Barnabus Kleptos, the Belt-Stealer
#791: Little Argonaut Boskiewicz
#792: The Ghost of Juan Williams Present
#793: Mara Liasson, The Ghost of Juan Williams' Future
#794: Little Cranky Keith, the Disappointed Father
#795: Large-Eared Ernest, the Deaf
#796: Crabcake Dawson the Kosher
#797: Hidalgo Burleson the Tarantula Masseuse, no relation to the Burning Burlesons, except through marriage to…
#798: Wanda Ford, Secret Taxidermist
#799: Jose Guiterrez Lancaster, the Third-Most-Sought-After Tennessee Ernie Ford Impersonator
#800: “Habeas Corpus” the Silent Azerbaijani, or Klaus Peck the Loudmouth

(reposted here for those who aren't affiliated with That Particular Social Network)

conundrum, or dilemma, or crisis?

I find myself now in a bit of a (large) crisis. At present time, I have sketches for about a dozen pieces. Only two have any sort of firm deadline - two that have guaranteed performances - and neither has received much attention from me lately, owing to the fact that their deadlines aren't until the early spring.

I've halted reworking gravity express (despite my claim that it's basically finished, I'm not satisfied with the form and pacing), and I'm staring down:
- violin, clarinet, piano work sketches;
- bassoon quartet sketches;
- string quartet sketches;
- two orchestral works in various states of completion (or, sketches);
- a Pierrot ensemble sketch;
- a piano/string quintet sketch;
- various wind ensemble sketches.

That's not all of them, obviously. It feels as though all this music wants to escape at once and it's all getting caught in the threshold. I'll fizzle out working on one thing and try to flit over to another; I'll lose patience on that and focus on yet something else. The cycle perpetuates. Of all the sketches, the work for which I have the clearest vision is an orchestra piece, but I can't logically justify letting that take precedence over many of the chamber works. Each of the chamber works I can easily see being an entry into some prize or contest - if I could finish them. They would also, theoretically, be easier to get performed - if I can find performers for them.

This has been a perennial problem for me. I have no problem working with multiple canvases, but when I have more than two or three set up, my world becomes disarrayed and harried pretty quickly. I'm not finding outside encouragement to write a lot of these pieces (read: been getting more rejections than usual, not having performers lined up for the pieces, etc), so that erodes my due care and focus pretty sharply and quickly. In the back of my mind, there's a "don't bother" attitude promulgated by the very same long string of prize/commission/contest rejections of late, but I know this isn't a healthy sentiment to have. I've been disappointed with my slow progress on all of my projects of late, and my dolefully tendentious brain is always caught between simply writing and stepping back and asking whether what I'm writing is imaginative enough, or challenging enough, or too banal, or too tonal, or too uninteresting.

This all leads to a bit of a devastating thought. I know I have the talent to be a composer, and perhaps a good one, but where is the focus, the determination? Where are my connections? Why is it that I know so many people - software engineers, law professors, teachers, academics - but so few performers? I feel as though I've largely exhausted my list, and I am loathe to keep pestering the same dozen people for performances of existing pieces or about asking them to perform newer or not-yet-composed works. I seem to have the mind for it, most of the time, but little else. And with my bizarre desire to get so much written - seemingly at once - the situation is just compounded...

from one

Apologies in advance. Been composing and doing other things, but here's a quick break from that. I'm known to occasionally write haphazard poems. Here is one. Yay.

“from one to zero”

There is the waiting, and the waiting,
and the waiting.
Days drag on, a mouldering fire
exhaling in slow, whiskered gasps,
unable to lift their heads, ears
of cloud sharpened by lancet winds.

I lose myself among the counted weeks,
the soft-soled march drumming
uneven, pale rhythms;
I lost count of the untold seconds

(must be tens of millions by now)

That seem to count backward from
one, to another zero, one, to
another zero.

There is the waiting, the pendulous
shadow green as copper. There is
the waiting.

(I swear this all looks familiar.)

Desiccated days with raspy voices,
coughing through acrid smoke, the
nostrils flared, caked with ash, eyes
unable to open ---
the nights wet with worry, gurgling
sobs stifled by a silence, melting
eyebrows and cheeks flushed, as
though beat counterclockwise.

Then there is the waiting.

The worlds traversed, occasionally
crossing orbits: tenuous words in
maudlin capes, a mock Saint George
with blood-drained fingers; coffee
spoons unfurled in florid bells of
porcelain’s clamor, closing up shop
for winter, trellises as hands grasping
at brittle noon haystalks and clover.

(I really don’t want to leave here.)

Words meant to suture seem
to nurture the wound back to health,
a rapier upending the papier-mache
scar tissue, a gnarled claw digging at
flimsy beer-coated armor;
a footless ghost, wizened, drifting
among the corridors and catacombs,
neither lost nor grey with discomfiture.

(From one to zero, there must be
tens of millions, tens of millions)

There is yet the waiting; it will always be there.

To see the ember fall up into
its wood, to see back into ash cascading
into solid boughs, into the conflagration
and the void of light before it;
To view a brittle brown oval of
an elm denude itself of brittleness
and drink back the tenderness with
which it clung to the spindly branch;
to watch with zeal the cinnamon strands
of pine needles scattered among the
dirt and dogshit rethread the air and touch
a piquant green, and then a wilder
green, and then disappear into the
scales completely:

There is the waiting

And there is the waiting.

something old-ish

"volant"

The dial face of the sun takes its hands and scrubs my scalp, chestnut filaments burning into hot wisps of gray, indistinguishable from a fog that tumbled out of trees one morning that stumbled and choked in the haze as it caused a luscious trainwreck, lathered in oil and rendered fat from weary travelers.

They were all fine. They stood up and shook their britches off and dusted off their shirts. Took their wallets out, from pockets they forgot they had, extra purses they packed for such an occasion, and dumped the contents out on the gravel, reclaiming only their cash and a business card for an attorney.

Without too many words other than cranky “that’s mine”s and “oh, beg pardon”s, they took their slimmed down lives and wandered into birchtree groves; shirakaba, said a foreign traveler, who then decided to make that his new name.

They all left their shoes behind, which I thought just a trifle odd.

The sun beat down on the groves as Rinzai would a pupil all too clever; I watched from a cell a mile or so up the line, a clear direct path illuminated for me, but not for me. The roof had been sold back to the monastery, you see, so I then had an obstructed view of a ceiling by looking at some haze-smitten sky, endless, terrifying.

The cycle of humidity has taken to putting dental floss impressions in my forehead. I never remembered it being such an object of topographic interest to the authorities. My eyes look like pale cinders trapped behind folds of leather; my nose pitted and getting more lopsided with each UV burst. My hearing is starting to wane. It’s getting fuzzy, so the expression goes, probably from the fibrous shellac, tangled kitten hairs, covering my pinnae.

So this room sees me sitting, looking, pausing. Over what, I couldn’t tell you. I asked to be placed here. Not precisely: I asked others about where I ought to go, where I ought to go, where I ought to go; what I ought to do, what I ought to do, what I ought to do: I ended up here.

I’m probably 135 feet up. I started at 820 millimeters, then worked my way to 831 inches. I made it as high as 167 feet or so, but those damned beavers. I should mention I reside in a well-crafted cell, with no ceiling, a plexiglass floor, and a wide window overlooking the railway. I built it myself, for the most part, with some help from some key personages. Too bad none of us know what we’re doing with a power drill.

I spit into some clay, let it harden. Try to build it up too quickly. Snap down young red pines and complain (forever) when they leave me with far less than the constructive result I’m seeking. The non-union crew showed up whenever it felt like it, which was part of the problem. We’d have planks and 2x4s, made out of tapioca, frozen. We’d have nails and woodscrews, made out of dried arteries and sparkplugs, respectively. We’d wrap the thing in Styrofoam coffee cups and aspirin bottles, try to balance heavy loads on Warsteiner bottles, half-broken from a contractor we never remembered meeting.

We left a debris field right under the window. Miraculously, this spindly trestle stands on its own piers, although it isn’t quite so aerodynamic as to withstand mighty blows or gusts in the shape of a cat. I look down over the pile of ragged, jagged tin cups and soap wrappers and broken clocks, ringed and flanked by tarnished silvery-gold hubcaps, and soiled once-diamond-bright knives, all at attention, Marines on parade. I pretend to know what it’s like to fall 12 storeys, survive, and do it all over again.

I only wish I could convince someone to jump with me, or four, or nine; I’d rather have someone break my fall in case I ended up in the birch grove, emptying my wallet, seeking a new realm, footless as a slug.

According to the skywatch, it’s nearly evening. Any leaping, caressing of gelatinous air, tender embrace of the soil at 25 meters per second only to splash through a mud puddle and emerge a vagrant somewhere in Newark, to be thrown into something else, fused into the gearworks of another name, will have to wait until I can see precisely where I’m going.

a small, simple rant

I am a composer and a musician. What I do is relevant and necessary for the perpetuation of culture. I bring meaning, however small, to a life that is otherwise matte, grey, and dull. I bring a set of skills and a particular knowledge into a world that pays lip-service to "creativity" and little else. I can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the bassoon, woodwind and brass fingerings, string instrument bowing and positions, how to compose a piece of music in any medium from the ground up, anything about post-war experimental music, most things about phenomenology and aesthetic theory, and give a rundown of Western art music's history in surprising detail, from roughly 800 CE to present, in about an hour, and I can go into even greater detail for the Reformation period, the Ars Nova, the Ars Subtilior, and American, German, French, and Latin American music after 1890. Of all of these, I create works of art the best.

A few ground rules.

No, I won't write you a piece just to get "exposure" - I do have bills to pay. No, I won't perform for free for you "as a favor" - it takes time to prepare. No, I won't get a "real job" because this IS my real job: it takes time, effort, labor, skill, and patience to do what I do. I'm damn good at it, even though I'm continually learning and striving to improve.

Let's observe this differently.

Can I borrow your skills, sir, as an accountant? It will give you exposure to potential clients! Can I borrow your time and well-honed abilities as an architect to design a structurally-sound and aesthetically pleasing building for my friends? I can't pay you, but you should be lucky you get to show off your skills in public with the finished product! What about you, there? Can you, bricklayer, carpenter, and mason dwell over a blueprint for a while and build a house perfectly in front of a live audience that has seen houses built faster and better than what you may be able to do? Pay you? You should be lucky we all get to participate in your gifts!

See? See how stupid that sounds?

Beethoven got to get paid, son.

Easy Things to Consider Regarding Islamophobia

"Nimium altercando veritas amittitur." [Through too much fighting, the truth is lost.]
– Publilius Syrus

After the advance into power by the rather repulsive political party known as Sverige Demokraterna – or, rather, the Swedish “Democrats” – in Sweden over the past few weeks, a party that uses for its motto “Keep Sweden Swedish,"¹ and after the continual disgrace in American discourse known as DoBYMoH (Don’t Build Your Mosque Here) based on completely refutable and fallacious logic, I am obligated as a citizen of the world and as, hopefully, a fairly enlightened American to help provide a list and call to action to people as aggravated as I am at the pure, unabashed dichotomization of the world’s population over Islam, the victimization narrative present in especially Western discourse, and the rampant falsehoods about what Islam is and what it stands for.

Mainly, I’m just pissed off and would rather see some sanity restored to this discussion.

The responsibilities of citizenship and the fluidity of nationalism are – by way of understatement – tricky and not-simple things. When a person immigrates to a new country to seek its citizenship on paper, a thorny issue erupts surrounding identity. It is easy to point to American policy and citizenship as a quintessence of this problem: an immigrant takes an oath of citizenship in order to uphold the responsibilities and enjoy the rights and privileges of being an American. But what, I ask, is an American? Is there a solid national identity to which we can point, some sort of totemic standard that dictates American-ness? In a word, no. Why so many Greek festivals? Why the allowance of Día de los Muertos celebrations within our borders? Why Oktoberfest? The cliché is that we are a nation of immigrants, and while it may seem specious, it’s true. The singularity of an American identity is its plurality, and, in essence, it’s the only thing that seems to come close being the only idyllic thing entwined with being American. What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship within a multicultural nation? What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship in a place like Sweden where immigrant populations are extremely small? What, then, can we say about nationhood and nationalism? If we are a nation without a nationalist identity, what rights do we have to criticize others who bring their cultures, their faiths, with them? If we have minimal cultural standards – standards that cannot necessarily be defined in universals or in government documents – on what defines citizenship and national identity, what rights do citizens have to dictate and legislate practices that exist peacefully in other parts of the world and do not interfere with, and do not dismantle, and serve to bolster, preexisting cultural frameworks? Turkey is not a Muslim nation – it is a secular state where most of its citizens are Muslim. Indonesia is a secular state. India is a secular state. Egypt is a secular state. Religious plurality is allowed and not criticized as means to destroy the fabric of national identity and it is not targeted as process through which societal downfall will occur. As arguably the most culturally diverse nation in the world, why is it we feel the pernicious need to target one faith, one culture, as the bogeyman set to unravel the American way of life when we cannot point to a solid, basic definition of what American means, outside of being able to say “I live in America?” Nationalism, in this sense, must no longer be used as something internal, as something akin to a birthright or a given. I was born in America, but I may not be American because of my views? This is ludicrous. I must conform to a certain physical and ideological ideal in order to be a Swede? Again, ludicrous, and nothing short of begging for stereotypical epithets rather than a veracious identity.

At various points in history, Judaism, Christianity, and other faiths have been oppressed and faced opposition in their development and migration. Obstacles, and even genocide, did not stop these faiths from becoming rooted, becoming established, becoming loved, accepted, and known the world over. To know that Judaism continues to thrive and flourish despite genocides, to know that Christianity flourishes despite schisms and early persecution, only ensures that Islam – and its 1.5 billion adherents – will survive. Attempts to end it, attempts to garner converts, attempts to vilify it: all will ultimately fail as a means of subverting it as a cultural and religious force. Islam has followed a geographic and cultural path no different from the first two Abrahamic faiths: it arose in the holy land, it took a few hundred years to gain traction, and it moved omnidirectionally from its center. It found a home in multiple lands, became a steering force for law and order, dictated cultural values and ethical standards, but with one exception: a fair amount of higher mathematics arose from Muslim scholars, including algorithmic procedures and Algebra. (Zooks! Maybe this is why so many dumb white people worldwide hate Muslims!) At various points, each of these religions became slightly perverted by those who took some vague or poorly-worded scriptures a little too seriously. And lo, we end up with Zionists, Fundamentalist Christians, and Wahabists.

All faiths have their perversions. Each of the Abrahamic faiths has its outlier groups of people hellbent (pardon the pun) on eradicating the Other or, at the very least, converting everyone into their “chosen” / “right” / “only” faith. Here we have a problem that exceeds logic: clearly, in the realm of belief we can have no absolutes. Perhaps absolute morality issues like murder (it should not be done) do exist, but if we are to view religious ideologies as things of rightness, as items bearing moral positive worth and value, we cannot place perfect, infallible values or glowing positive weights upon the tenets and the sum total of what the faiths preach. Aside from this unsolvable problem, we have an issue of deontology: each of the Abrahamic faiths preaches the necessity for nothing but a total conversion of all unbelievers to their respective faiths. So far as I can tell at this point, only Islam is winning at that – and I honestly chalk this up to the fact that by sheer age, Islam is one fifth as old as Judaism, and only half as old as Christianity. According to the Holy Scriptures – take your pick – adherents to the faith must convert and evangelize. Are Judaism and Christianity miffed that the youngest kid on the block is winning, or is it more a matter of moderation? That is to say, where is the fervor? Where is the zeal? The billions of regular adherents of the Abrahamic faiths are creating disservices to their faiths and not upholding their bargains to make each heathen a true believer, yet the vast majority of mainstream participants in these faiths seem to find perfectly acceptable the fact that they are not upholding a major duty of their religions. If this is the case, there needs to be a radical re-cognition of religious duty. And, in so doing, we valorize the fallacious and the fallible. Which, therefore, eradicates any absolutist claim that one faith supersedes another or trumps a lack of faith.

The Constitution guarantees the protection of all people of faith; outrage over the existence of a religion is Constitutionally protected; the existence of a religion res ipsa is also protected. Debate and faith are on equal footing nationally and under the UN Declaration of Human Rights, no single one is elevated above another, and all people worldwide should have the ability to criticize and practice whatever faith they so choose. This should be self-evident.

In terms of the infamous “Ground Zero Mosque,” which – if it is not already apparent, is misnamed as it will be a community center, like the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side of New York – is being funded privately, transparently, through private hands with private property. Government money and government property are not being exchanged and are not at the center of the debate, yet the rhetoricians from the far right would have us believe that somehow this is being sanctioned by the Federal Government. It is private. Private development is just that, and cannot be subject to public debate or discourse beyond what is already subject to public oversight or transparency; if we as a populace want to dictate how land and real property trade hands, then the entire capitalist system of real property ownership needs to be overhauled so that we micromanage every exchange of money for land. I do not see this happening in human existence any time soon. Further to the point, do we ask for transparency each time a Christian church or community center is built in our neighborhood? Can we be certain that the local Christian church isn’t being backed by a domestic extremist or terrorist group? Do we impose and erect such barriers to the freedom of worship and community outreach when the Church of Latter Day Saints or American Catholic Church plan a new building? Should we? In all fairness, if we are to be selective of where and what faiths do in the public sphere through private means, perhaps we need to insert into the popular imagination a perpetual outcry about all institutions that hold such power and sway – over both our deepest beliefs, and our deepest fears, and how the twain meet.

The topic of what should and should not be built near “Ground Zero” is moot and I will not address it here.

Whether it is simple human nature, or if we as Americans – or we as Westerners – have been conditioned to do so, we seem to fall under the auspices of the binary and instinctively and intellectual have the necessity to find, or conjure, or create a nemesis. Historically, it this has been easy for Americans since the inception and nascence of this country: first, the English. Then, at various points, Native Americans, Chinese, Irish, Polish, Italians, abolitionists, anti-abolitionists, Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Swedes, Norwegians, Mexicans, Cubans, Russians, Germans, Japanese, and countless others. Since 9/11, Islam has been an easy target – a testament to an unbridled and well-embraced fear by the American population, and a further testament to our choice of viscerality and emotion over reason – although over the past few years, popular discontent has shifted to other venues. Popular hatred has regained focus on to the dark spot of Islamophobia, in no short measure aided by the Great Recession, lingering wars in the mid-East and South Asia, and the irascible, irrational fear of a Black President, yet somewhat well-effaced through populist “anger” (viz. Tea Party). We are growing, oddly, either as a species or as a civilization, one, in that we are verily struggling to find a new enemy. We are having difficulty latching on to one subject for derision, one entity to vilify. Perhaps we are finally maturing as an "American" society and, as such, are taking one long, last, brutal swing at an unseen apparition of an enemy that we've created out of our own xenophobia and ignorance.

Furthermore, since popular media and news reporting tend to straddle, if not cross, the line separating “reporting events and allowing the reaction to arise organically” and “creating the reaction in order to promulgate events and evince reportage”, it is ever more difficult to find the truth of a matter and retrieve the heart of causality. It goes without saying that popular media evokes reactions not merely because of what is reported but in the “unbiased” tone through which the mainstream media place “facts” on display.

Finally, we have Islam itself and its practitioners to observe. Dig out an original version of the Quran – not one that adds in the codices of Sharia law, which were added by Muhammad’s aides toward the end of his life and repeatedly reworded over the centuries. At the heart of Islam are messages no different from the other principal faiths of the world: peace, love, kinship, charity, compassion… Then, though, if you wish to read the words about Islamic law, it might be wise to break out the Talmud, or Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and, of course, it would be wise of us who practice these faiths to see the myriad ways we don’t practice these laws, and how Western governments and laws were based upon Judeochristian texts, and how many of these sacred duties were really hygienic and cultural practices: Hallal food? Simple: botulism and salmonella in poorly-cooked meats. No shellfish? Same deal: tough to cook properly. Don’t mix your wool and cotton? Simple: in the desert, it gets really hot, and wool will make you sweat your ass off while cotton breathes and keeps you at least slightly cooler.

So, with this, I say: hug a Muslim. Embrace plurality. Hold on to your faith, but don’t choke it into submission, and don’t let it drag you around. Mankind’s survival – or, at the very least, mankind’s ability not to look like a bunch of screeching, brainless idiots who can live peaceably – depends on it.

1. "Bevara Sverige Svenskt!" - which, literally, means, keep Sweden Swedish. Personally, a nation of 8 million teutonic, blond-haired, blue-eyed beautiful people is not just a false stereotype, but aesthetically and culturally boring.

a confession

I enjoy college football. A fair amount.

There. I feel cleansed, and I'm happy I shattered some of your expectations.

project status almighty-uh

Never fear! I am working on an essay about the "experimental" epithet I'll post here sometime soon, but for now, I'll regale you with some projects I'm working on in the actual-writing-music part of my existence.

gravity express for standard orchestra (3222-4231-Hp-Timp-2-Strings):
On my website, it says that the piece is already done. I call it: extrinsic motivation. At any rate, I haven't composed an orchestral piece in eight years, and I've never composed a good one.¹ I figured it was time. It's a train piece, alright, with some requisite effects and train-y sounds, but it veers a little more closely into tonal-reference category and is more likely than not to be seen as a "crowd-pleaser" type of piece. (I don't have many of those, either.) I estimate the finished product will probably be around 11 to 12 minutes long, which should be safe territory for a lot of contests and hopefully a few performances. To wit: I'm writing it in a less-challenging style and leaving out some of my rhythmic idiosyncrasies that seem to damn a lot of my pieces to a one-performance-and-done existence. I project that the work should be done within two weeks.

deep cover for pre-recorded electroacoustic sounds
Some time back, I posted here about a fixed-media piece I wanted to write based on the numbers station phenomena, and it actually came to fruition. I'm in the last stages of work on that piece and it ended up taking quite a different path (duh) from what I originally anticipated. It became, in the words of a colleague and friend, a "musical short story" with a number of narratives threading through the work. The piece is currently 14 minutes long - which makes it quite iffy when it comes to unsolicited performances and conferences - and while I'm typically fine about writing long pieces, this one actually feels somewhat long for what I want in the piece. I imagine there will be some editing, some remixing, and some fussing with Vegas to make it glitch-free before 2033.² I also expect it to be done within two weeks or so since it, more than anything else, is in the final stages of birth.

resemblematics for wind quintet
"But, Tom!" you cry, "You've already written this!" I can explain.
Back in 2004, I, a little bassoonist-composer, decided I needed to write a wind quintet. I did. It has sat on a shelf. Deemed too hard by a lot of undergrad performers, I decided that I wouldn't revise the existing movements but, by fiat of necessity, instead add two more. I laid out sketches for movements 4 and 5 some years ago but never finished them. I could never figure out if the piece was strong enough as a three-movement work, and I finally decided: no. I'm balancing out the long-scale form of the work, extending some idioms I was toying with while composing it initially, and wrapping up what I see as thematic loose ends. I don't have a firm end date on this, but I'll try to get this done by the middle of October. I don't realistically have much to add to the sketches, other than decide among the material.

seven selected points of reference for a lingering spectre for violin and piano
I dug out an old sketch, from 2006, of a violin-piano piece I wanted to write. Multi-movement, short movements, reduced materials and rather simple approaches. I had one movement written already: for some reason, I called it the 5th movement, and in its previous form, it clocked in at just around 22 seconds long. I plan to add about 8 seconds of music to it and I finally got around to sketching some things for the other six (!) movements. It follows an arch form (cf: Brahms Requiem) and has a rather minimal approach to pitch material. The vicissitude of the lone written movement is a guiding principle for the rest of the work - none of them can be more than a minute long, except for the 4th movement (the keystone), all must have very simple forms, and use the same kinds of pitch material. I get around this by excising certain pitch classes for certain movements and toying with my interval sequence structure.³ I want to get this one done by the end of October; seems like it could be a strong festival entry, or at least feasibly performable by good performers - and by that, I mean, if a seven-movement piece is only 9 or 10 minutes long, it stands a much better performance chance. It's also been years since my last piano-and-instrument work -- I'm guessing around seven or eight.

Oh! Before I forget, the violin/piano work (should it get performed) will be curiouser in that the movement titles are the program notes. Observe!

i. she appeared at my door wrapped in snakes
ii. a capricious spirit she seemed to have
iii. i could barely hear her whisper
iv. she held her glass up to my visage
v. and then the ghost descended lengthwise
vi. and proceeded to flash a tender iris
vii. before it shuttered and hissed away

On deck:
violin/clarinet/piano (mid-late Novemeber 2010)
wind ensemble (mid-late November 2010)
saxophone orchestra/sextet (no, really, it can be both) (mid-late December 2010)
solo piano work (finally) (mid-late December 2010)

I've also been tempted to dig out some of my older, underperformed chamber pieces and arrange them for wind ensemble and/or orchestra. I see potential in at least a few of them.

***

1. I don't count the viola concerto in this. The viola concerto, while an orchestra piece, is totally soloist-driven. It's also 40 minutes long. It's a good piece, but, damn, I retrospectively got a little too Mahler - or Feldman - on that ass.
2. I run Win7 on my primary soundmaking machine, and for years my multitracker of choice has been Cubase. Steinberg, Cubase's parent company, has been extremely, painfully slow about releasing Win7 compatible upgrades; I fear Steinberg will, if they haven't already, just dump their old platforms, scrap upgrades, and make a new, expensive version of Cubase for Win7. So, I've been stuck running Vegas - a good program for what it is - in compatibility mode, and I get inexplicable glitches here and there in complex renders. No fun. It leads to lots of swearing and panic and surgery.
3. Don't make me explain it. It's a homegrown algorithm based on fairly simple probabilistic math.

In the year 2000...

Future blog posts may include but are not limited to the following:

- Why I may never write an opera
- My (semantic) quibbles with the moniker "experimental music"
- A screed about the concept of regret and why it's good for us
- Corporate Empire Building vs Academia vs The Great Recession
- A screed about composition prizes and why they mean little to nothing
- and more!

Grunt.

Longer Questions That May Never Be Answered

If we were to put a moratorium on creative arts – that is, if we were to actively stop the creation of “new” artworks across disciplines – for a full generation, 25 to 30 years, what would be the result? How would the creative spirit thrive during that interstice? Would people create works subversively? Would the populace that survived the silence awaken with a deeper appreciation and understanding of dance, or art music, or poetry, or sculpture? Would we forget how to create? Would we forget our techniques? What of the children born during the silence – how would they cope? How would they be able to reinsert themselves into the world of artistic creation? Would they be startled or appalled at the idea of people freely expressing themselves through scores or canvases? Would we subsist on previously-created works for a full generation? If so, how is that truly different from the mainstream artistic world as it is now? What would happen to pop music? Would we enter a new Renaissance period where years of ideas accumulated creates a driving push into The Next Phase of creation? Or would we go backward?

Is there such a thing as a musical avant-garde anymore? Have we succeeded in shocking everyone into complacence, or is cultural literacy that advanced and uniform – that is, has a critical mass of understanding been met? I find it difficult to believe that either is true, but this creates a dangerous cosmic interplay of relativistic thought. A soybean farmer in Arkansas may never have heard of Xenakis or Lady Gaga – would either matter to him or her? Do we enter the dark chambers of "it’s new to you but not to me, and that’s acceptable"? Gravely seriously, though, what constitutes the New in music – other than having been just composed?

Is the term “experimental music” anymore just a marketing gimmick or a way to appeal to an already self-selected audience of cognoscenti, the pretentious, and/or gallery-hoppers? When we parse the semantics of "experimental," do we end up with the unified pluralism that all new music is in some way experimental and we need some degree of musical literacy to label something truly Experimental or more in line with Conventional models? Should we rather just make way for history and deem Experimental Music its own subgenre from the mid 1950s until the early 1980s when “experimental” veered into (or was concretized as) Performance Art?

They never taught me how to focus

Throughout graduate school -- the part of it where I had direct, weekly, and human contact with my mentors -- I was encouraged to have one main project on my docket at any given time but to dabble and keep working on sketches and other works-in-progress. One composition instructor actively challenged me to write as much as possible and find ways to write material quite different from the primary endeavor for the month / term. Retrospectively, this was to force me into modes of thinking to divorce my first responsibilities from any other ideas or brainstorms and to collect a back-catalog of sketches I could use for other, later projects without being tempted to work on too many things at once.⁰

If I were a visual artist, there is no conceivable way I could have just one easel set up in my studio; no conceivable way for me to keep simply trucking away upon one idea. Part of this is a long-standing problem I have with artistic patience. Part of this arises from the high lack of feedback necessary to younger composers on works of music: it doesn't necessarily matter how it looks, and if I'm composing a work for large forces, I don't get the luxury of hearing whether some element "works" until rehearsals -- or in the case of some dormant, unperformed works, not at all. Part of this also stems from my natural knack to be engaged in many activities at once, despite my quiet and easy-going (typical) behavior,¹ a curse from being a "Jack of all trades" personality.

How soon I forget the lessons of past instructors; how soon (and for the past 15 years) has this become a perfect storm.

Many years ago I was relatively prolific. In 2008, by contrast, I didn't finish a single piece I was composing.² I finished (I think) four pieces last calendar year. While I would love to become more like Villa-Lobos and less like Henri Duparc in terms of compositional output (minus the "Frank O'Hara syndrome" of not revising anything), I don't think it is going to come to pass any time soon.

At last count, I have sketches for nearly 20 pieces in my notebook, most in the very early stages with only a few measures. Some works have several pages of notes, but all rather rudimentary -- and I get into a habit of criticizing and analyzing my sketches (my sketches, for crying out loud!) and putting them aside after I've made my dour notes and changes and called into question what it is I'm doing. I have pieces that I know must take priority: an orchestral work, a wind ensemble work, a few chamber works. I have older pieces in various states of "completion" that need to get revised before I foist them upon an unsuspecting performer or choral director -- that is to say, I want them up to my standards: right now, they're not, and I hate putting my name on something inferior, much less opening myself to criticism for it.³ I have a commission for a saxophone orchestra piece I seriously need to get started on.

But all the possibilities seem endless and too tempting.

And too crippling.⁴

And I wonder how much of a composer's "voice" is bound up with how many pieces she is working on at one shot, how many ideas are on back burners yet sneaking in...

A lot of my old sketches came about as sporadic, or better impulsive, attempts to capitalize on an upcoming conference, contest, or performance call. (Case in point: I have a cello-piano piece sitting 10% finished in my notebook, a sketch I haven't looked at in over two years) I realize, of course, this is a foolhardy approach to writing. But with so few people asking me to compose works for them, and with a lot of time on my hands, this is the ultimate result: a lot of aphorisms when there should be a philosophical exegesis; charcoal sketches when there should be a 20'x80' mural. This is also due to the fact that my catalog, while quite large in some respects, leaves out some standards and staples: I have one standalone orchestral piece; I have no string quartets or quintets; I have no Pierrot-like ensemble pieces; I have no percussion-only pieces; my piano-and-instrument catalog is fairly thin; most of my chamber music has odd or non-standard instrumentations (bassoon, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet, for instance, or trombone and violin). So, submissions to things come and go and I scramble. Sometimes I succeed in completing a work (my clarinet quintet -- didn't win the prize I submitted it for, but it's a good piece, still waiting on a performance); other times, like the aforementioned cello-piano work, I get caught up with other pieces, with life, with people, and that October 1st deadline quietly eludes me.

So, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to focus on writing just one piece at a time. Something has been lost in mental translation since the days of composition teachers hovering over my work; something has been amplified in the liberty I've received as a free-lancer; something is missing in the fact that I don't have the immediate resources (peers on a performance faculty at a music school, to wit) to run a piece by someone and get their response. I do have Facebook and all and I occasionally post my scores or send scores to acquaintances and friends -- but there's a frustration level there, as well, in that I rarely get feedback, or at least critiques beyond the topical (of course, many of my friends are busy with spouses, jobs, careers, and the like, so I can't blame them for letting a solo trombone work, for instance, fall through the cracks). I have no ideas on how to focus and I'm left with basically the notion that writing as much as possible as quickly as possible couldn't feasibly include sticking to one work at a time.

I'm dating my music, perhaps. Moving back and forth between sketches, getting somewhat familiar with them, but not profoundly so, and not committing to any singular entity. I did manage to do so with my dissertation and a few other larger works, but those were important works for deadlines or merit. I guess I used those pieces, then. But then, perhaps -- if we extend this gruesome analogy further -- I'm nothing more than a man-whore of composing. And all composers, then, probably fit into this scheme, of moving on from piece to piece after various levels of intimate understanding of each musical world. We're a lascivious, insatiable bunch.

All of us, except maybe Henri Duparc.⁵


0. This was supposed to be a chronicle of what works I'm attempting to create; instead, this happened. I'll keep this instead.
1. No, really. It's true. My natural demeanor is very quiet, borderline-boring, and not easily provoked. Wasn't always so, to be sure.
2. Admittedly, I started a few pieces in 2008 that I finished in 2009 or am still working on; I also dedicated a fair amount of time to updating and revising some pieces, and I also had this thing called a dissertation (and, at the time, a serious romantic relationship -- despite the discussion above, the two were not mutually inclusive) that took up a lot of my time.
3. As it stands, I have difficulty taking existing works and extracting new pieces from them. I know it would increase my exposure and performance chances, but I'm on principle opposed to taking a movement out of a work to make it stand alone. I also don't relish the idea of more work or finding errors or rehashing old blunders. I should probably change this perspective.
4. cf. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
5. Henri Duparc was a French composer who, along with Samuel Rousseau, Chabrier, Massenet, d'Indy, and Franck, represents the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (prior to Debussy/Ravel). Despite his lasting reputation, or maybe causative of, his output is one of the smallest and paltriest of any "established" composer. Villa-Lobos, on the other hand as we all know, wrote what seemed like a piece a week -- he himself admitted that a lot of the hundreds of works he cranked out were not very good. Frank O'Hara was a poet who, while I adore his work, could have stood to reread a lot of his poems.

Slowing the Phenomenon Down

I come quietly out of the still and silence of the shadows to ask the eternal question:
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?

The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?

The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).

My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.

The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.

Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.

This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.

Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.

John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.

Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.

Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!

first sample
second sample

As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.

*****

[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011

I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.

Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."

Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.

Oh, hello. I didn't see you sitting over there, poor neglected blogorino.

My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.

Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.

Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.

Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?

---

Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...

EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.

a few small, important questions

Music criticism is a baffling thing. Having written reviews, the questions of objectivity and taste are always paramount. As it approaches lay audiences, what else can be said beyond an opinion? How can there be equal measures of education and elucidation about the music? At what point does criticism stop and theoretical analysis begin? Must criticism defend itself by means of observing musical works in a radically lucid analysis to justify whether a work is “good,” “bad,” or “neither?”

espionage (the multichannel way)

I have finally started the "numbers station" project, though it's likelier than not that "numbers station" will not be the final title of the work resulting from the efforts.

I've been scouring the AM and Public Service Broadcasting bands on a 1970 model Panasonic analog radio (that doubles, with a plug-in mike and a squelch controller, as a one-man public address and/or singalong machine) since around 10 PM trying to find suitably weird material to add into the piece -- primarily, obscure broadcasts or static patterns that seem out of place, which is the very essence of a numbers station shout-out.

Of course, I would probably have to explain what a numbers station is. From the end of WWII up until the late 1980s, there were a great many broadcasts in the extrema of AM broadcast bands in various countries, and moreso on shortwave radios, that are completely unexplainable or at least easily explained, Occam-style, as too weird to be part of the aural standard. Occasionally, things like "ATENCION!" or "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would interrupt the music or dead air or sideband-rich static and be followed by - in mundane cases - a string of numbers read aloud by a nondescript voice or left-field sonic signals - chimes, gongs, shouts of "ACHTUNG!", and repetitive patterns of numbers that are all, apparently, unbreakable. One extreme example is a three-minute long music-box rendition of a 1930s German pop-tune called "Swedish Rhapsodie" that is followed by the voice of a small child, possibly a young girl, reading an immensely long string of numbers in German. Yet another is a twelve-minute long rapid-fire statement of numbers in Romanian. As you could probably guess, much of these were set up, broadcast from nondescript locations -- brutalist office blocks controlled by the Stasi or KGB or someone's house with a HAM radio -- and the messages relayed at exact times, and only once, on a particular frequency, so that the listener (or "operative") could get the message, translate it, and carry out the instructions. Much like the MacGuffin in The Lady Vanishes, but far more sinister in nature, especially given such messages have occurred just before such pivotal moments as the coup attempt against the Soviet Union in the early '90s or within days of the Berlin Wall falling.

It stands to reason that this might just be an Eastern European trend, but this is not at all the case. Radio Havana has regularly been intercepted as broadcasting secret messages to assumed operatives in the US, and Numbers Stations are in fact more prevalent now than they were 40 years ago. Recordings have been made in the past ten years of numbers station broadcasts in multiple countries throughout the world, far afield from the Eastern Bloc epicenter. (This may explain why the FCC keeps narrowing the available "airwaves" the American people can use and why HAM radio operations is all but illegal now in the United States.) Nonetheless, these eerie, cryptic messages keep getting repeated, and for persons alive during the height of the Cold War and during the nadir-pinnacle of 1960s Soviet control in Eastern Europe, these broadcasts are chilling reminders of quiet, unseen, and ramification-unknown governmental operations existing just below the surface of society, just below the surface of ethical legitimacy, all just below the radar of the everyday people. They're prescient reminders today, too, that worldwide alliances, governmental and idealistic transparency, and communal trust are at the very least in the realm of fantasy, and even more sinister, reminders that as our society continues a push into making every citizen a form of technocrat glued to a computer, there is still plenty of technology out there being used for purposes of ambiguous morality, technology once in every household, technology now slowly being forgotten and relegated away from the control of the citizenry. Think about it - when was the last time, especially if you are under 40, you turned on a radio (never mind an analog radio) in your house that was not a live-stream website -- or at the very least, not on the FM dial?

So, I scanned the ends of the dials for probable signs of covert operations but all I ended up encountering were gospel stations, low-power talk radio stations from Alabama, Louisiana, and Maryland, a few religious stations, Art Bell, and a whole hell of a lot of static. I would sit on a frequency or band for roughly ten to fifteen minutes before trying my luck. Being a Friday night, and a clear one, I thought I'd be able to luck out and get at least Radio Havana or something from Fort Bragg or Camp Lejeune, but alas, I was thwarted. I remember staying up late at night with this same radio when I was in my early teens, focusing on the weather broadcast band on PSB, and then trying to listen "between the cracks" of station bands to see if I could hear the various "ghosts in the broadcasts" -- modulated voices just below the threshold of cognition -- and try to figure out if these were friends or foes...and all the while being creeped out of my mind, fascinated, as though I was hearing a code I couldn't decipher that could have been anything from "Spy: check your mail" to "go commit [atrocious deed here]."

I have found a repository of numbers stations recordings, gleaned from over 50 years of home radio listeners across the world plugging their radios into tape recorders or computers, and while a fair amount of what is there is rather mundane -- how many times can we reiterate the trope of heavy static and sidebands with a barely-audible voice repeating numbers in Spanish or Russian? -- some of what exists (in this library, anyhow) is damn near terrifying. Of course, there's the aforementioned, postmodern-foreboding music box with the child (!) repeating the secret code of numbers; one of a cool, collected woman's voice repeating, as close to a robotic fashion as I've ever heard, a short series of numbers in clear American English; heart-sinking messages following the "Lincolnshire Poacher" in what is clearly a voice owned only by an Iowan attempting to speak German; and, in probably the most bizarre example, a string of English numbers superimposed on a broadcast of German numbers superimposed on a broadcast of Russian numbers, all of which sound like they were cut and pasted on magnetic tape or primitive LPC technologies, which meant someone spent a lot of time creating this one-time use message and wanted to make damn sure it could never be broken except by the recipient, which says quite a bit about the importance of the message. And, of course, there are also the messages broadcast by NATO and the UN -- the "good guys" use the same methods.

A lot of these materials encapsulate a fair amount of, certainly, strong rhythmic material, from which I can hear numerous motivic and ostinato devices arising, and in a few cases, the static and sidebands in some of the material is so rich and dense that, given the proper treatment, I have a narrative and an underpinning in one fell swoop given the breadth and beauty of the resulting spectrum after some cleanup. It seems as though a lot of the elements for this piece are already germinal in the source materials, and all that needs to be done is let the materials' essences gestate so I can cull and pull and twist and lay this out and let it dry and see if needs any more work.

I plan to, at this point, record myself, in somewhat noisy environments, reading my own series of numbers -- in English (with a Kent accent, as much as possible), Spanish, and Swedish -- and I am trying to get recordings of numbers read in Russian and German (I welcome volunteers - for real, this time). I am also working on creating spectra and rhythmic patterns, largely based off of "radio-ish" sine chains and AM swoops, to bring out of the source material textures, and I'm wondering the feasibility of using some pre-recorded snippets of music here and there to simulate the workings of an old, analog radio. There are also sinister bits here and there: perhaps some guerilla field recording and some trick recording is in order, and it may be time to break out the "creepy" and really hammer down the ghost in the broadcast with my own forms of glossolalia-via-microphone. I have a general structure for the piece in place, but right now I'm simply sifting through all of the available alternatives and potentialities before I start layering things in the sequencer.

I'm looking forward to this project, honestly. onethousandwords is a decent piece, but pretty quickly wrought - and somewhere between musique concrete and a soundscape; there's no actual narrative structure to it. basking in the copper look was an experiment for another piece that I'll return to later. So, this will be my first "real" electroacoustic undertaking since contact clusters, or "the piece that got performed a lot in 2008-2009 and almost won Bourges but didn't" -- and it feels good to be working on something I really enjoy and am inspired by, and doubly good that it isn't "dissertation" -- which still needs to be fully completed before I can get too wrapped up in this piece.

I'll keep you posted.

we don't know each other (and we don't want to)

It's always baffling to me how quickly, once a plane lands, practically everyone reaches for their cell phones or gadgets and gizmos. It's the last thing I think about. There seems to be this desperate urge for authenticity: separated from terra firma by five or six miles of vertical lacunarity, separated from loved ones, friends, animals, flora, we reach for the very first thing that reconnects us to the world we know, our selected cocoon, the safety net and support system we hold close to ourselves, and, in some cases, guard and protect -- and maybe are even addicted to.

And yet, airplanes are completely silent, save the roar of the engines. People shunt themselves into seats, determined to survive the interceding hour or five between boarding and disembarquement, attached to everything around them, and always secretly disappointed each time they turn off their mobile device or gadget of whatever stripe. The roar of the body language says all: people hunched over a book, or busied with something business-related; arms folded, head down (or tilted far up, as though sneering from 35,000 feet would be assisted by tipping one's nose up a further few inches), legs crossed, compressing and hugging oneself, really, sheltering oneself from the audacious pursuit of human interaction and connection with perfect strangers, shuttering oneself and pretending the world around them is the only one they know, resigning themselves to ignore the potential richness or mundanity extant in the people surrounding them.

Yet we are so segmented, fragmented as a society. We have lost social graces and dignities and have become cool, reptilian, avoidant. We yearn for meaningful human connections, laud them when we think they arrive, and bemoan their absence or loss as though -- and perhaps rightly -- we have lost a family member. We do not know how to say hello, to be pleasant to each other. Is there a meaninglessness in saying hello or thank you to a complete stranger? Perhaps; there may be a naïveté here, true, but to persist in an environment where any sort of greeting or conversation -- even if it is wholly in passing and consists of nothing more than a word or two and therefore deprived of cerebral, academic, or deep spiritual or profoundly intellectual meaning -- is avoided, loathed, perhaps, or even feared (due in part to the righteous paranoia drilled into us for aeons) and is tantamount to slicing out our tongues, poking out our eyes, and treppanning our eardrums. In short, we exile ourselves to our personal Colonnus with greater sensory deprivation, and we furthermore lose the ability to find connections, find bonds, find the pleasance that is generally inherent in human beings. Everyone wants to fall in love; everyone wants to have friends and make friends. Yet we don't know how to talk to one another; we don't know how to explore the experiences of others in diplomatic fashions; we don't know how to be anything but guarded, isolated, against persons that are ostensibly strangers, all the while conveniently forgetting that at some point in the past all persons we know, love, desire, explore, and long for were all foreign to us, individual entities comprising part of a larger amorphous mass of humanity that we may or may not have sat next to on an airplane from Dallas to Chicago.

This morning, in friendly old Austin, I was procuring some coffee for myself at a coffee bar in the airport, bleary eyed and groggy. I ordered, and the relatively slowhanded barista staff took their time filling my paper vase with an artwork of jitters. On my left, a small-eyed white male in a suit and top coat, most likely a mid-level functionary for a company who at one time left his MBA program idealistic (in the Keynesian sense) that his service would become fruitful and his service would benefit the greater good of his company. About 35 to 40, closely-cropped hair. My mind wanders back briefly, thinking about a few people I love back home, thinking about the growing to-do list for the week. I see the barista put a tall cup of coffee on the counter; by this time, I'd traded places with the businessman. I reach for the cup, gently feel the scald potential as my fingers touch the paper. I hear a growly, surly "hey, that's mine!" in my right ear, and the fellow yanks up his cup, grasps his carry-on, a rotting American Tourister rollaway, and starts walking to the other side of the coffee bar for accoutrements. In a good humor, admitting I'd made a mistake, I say "sorry, guess I was too eager." Unaccustomed, perhaps, the guy wheels around and glowers at me momentarily with a half-angry, half-shocked look. It was bad enough I made an error and thought the coffee was mine; it was only worse when I admitted my fault and tried to establish a connection with him in order to simply apologise for making such a small, stupid error. How dare I break the perverse social contract that people aren't supposed to speak to one another in public if they don't already know each other! How dare I make a reversible error and attempt to make amends! This certainly does not fit into the schema of most people, and for me to doubly dissolve the bonds of this again perverse social contract is anathema to the lonely, isolating experiences so many people live daily, if not even look forward to. I wonder how many people who travel a lot for a living actually look forward to, seek out the pleasure in, checking into their hotel room for one, a room with the ability to be pitch black with the flip of a switch and flick of the wrist to close the drapes, a room with the ability to be silent -- sensory deprivation after being surrounded by persons for so many hours. I wonder how many people are physically repulsed by the thought of human contact simply by virtue of not knowing how to connect with others; I wonder how many people are loathsome of being surrounded by people simply because the isolation and fear of the other and Other deepens and becomes more pervasive and all-encompassing the more one is mired in it.

What do we have to lose? What are we so afraid of? Is it territoriality of some sort -- somehow asserting a yell of "hey, that's mine" in terms of space (which is shared, anyhow, and even private space is not "private"), or "hey, that's mine" in terms of somehow insuring and ensuring the continued integrity of our personhood? Does speaking to a perfect stranger somehow devalue us because it acknowledges the existence of another person and therefore increases their value? Are we that territorial over who we are that we are simultaneously petrified of invading someone else's personhood space by speaking to them, addressing them, acknowledging that they exist? Or are we afraid of divesting ourselves of what makes us fundamentally ourselves -- are we afraid that by initiating contact and perhaps engaging in conversation, perhaps even sharing life experiences to some degree, we lose control over ourselves? AH. That must be it. Certainly, there's more to it and no one answer (except in simple arithmetic) is ever fully correct, but this age-old, rather obvious conceptualisation of control and power. Foucault and Bauman write a lot about societal fragmentation, segmentation, and the concepts and praxis of control and power and how they are lorded over populations, loved and feared and needed by groups, shunned and hated by persons on the individual level while existing within the paradox of the social construct of total obedience and conformity to the societal order. "Society must be defended," indeed. But what is a society that doesn't speak? What is a society that validates, celebrates, even expects, a form of control where its individuals are forbidden from even making contact with each other, even for slight seconds? What is a civilization that refuses to acknowledge itself?

No civilization at all, or, the American marketplace of terrified loneliness and solipsism that is the early 21st Century.