A Flake's Progress

Victory is mine! I finally got java running on Firebird so all those goofy scrolling thingies on web pages work now. Actually, what really irritated me was that I couldn't view any of the art work at the home page of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg where Russian Ark was taped. Also, I snagged a very handy yenc decoder. This makes newsgroups much cooler.

Pete got a set of those new-fangled walkie talkies for Xmas and we were playing with them yesterday. Of course, the first thing we did when giving them a go for the first time was to do the Young Ones thing - you know, "Charlie, Teakettle, Barbeque - CCCCHHHHHH!!!". I've got TechTV on (go figure) and they've got this little hottie now on Fresh Gear - Stephanie Siemiller. I've got some fresh gear for her, alright.

I see that our helpful and friendly federal government is banning ephedra. What the hell are truck drivers gonna do? Plus I used it occasionally for a buzz. Pop a few of them and wash 'em down with some coffee and your scalp starts tingling in a few minutes. Bummer.

OK, here's something uninteresting. I'm in the process of writing this lengthy paper on the lyrics of Jethro Tull's music and I've gotten up to 1981. Then I go ahead and find this bit from John Watson's Behaviorism:

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant chief, and yes, even beggar-man thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

Now compare this to the lyric of Tull's "Cross-Eyed Mary":

"Who would be a poor man, a beggarman, a thief --
if he had a rich man in his hand?"

Was Ian Anderson on the nurture side of the debate? Had he read Watson's book? Does this cast my interpretations and argument into doubt? Nah. He prolly just snagged the phrase for his own purposes. Now don't get me started on potential references to Dante's Inferno in Tull's A Passion Play. The "icy wastes" and such.

...................

I put on my Live at Leeds bootleg by The Who and have been reading an interview with a guy named William Dumhoff who is a dream researcher. Quite interesting. He basically says that Freud and Jung are full of shit. So then what are dreams? "Dreams express our conceptions of ourselves and of people close to us." This is to say, dreams aren't our subconsciouses trying to sort out repressed or underdeveloped bits of our personalities, they're just reflections of ourselves, albeit in weird and convoluted forms. If I could remember any of my dreams, I would reflect upon them.

Ya know, this Who disc is fucking awesome!! If aliens came to Earth and wanted to know what rock'n'roll is, I'd give 'em a copy of this show. It's got everything: simple verse-chorus-verse pop songs and longer, more complicated pieces such as the whole of Tommy. But whatever song you're talking about, it's loud and raw. There's nothing quite like the sound of a Gibson SG turned up to 11. Something about the way "My Generation" weaves in and out of various other songs...you get "Sparks" which is raucous and full of distortion. Then a short, quiet passage and then Pete launches into a fast, heavy riff and we're off to the races again. You have some order, some melody and then decays into chaos. Feedback and distortion reign. Then the notes organize themselves again into something peaceful. And then entropy kicks in once more and the shit hits the fan. It is, as Dave Marsh noted, hallucinatory.

"Magic Bus" too is great. Formula: take a Bo Diddley beat (which he got from his grandmother's singing when he was a child) and have the band go fucking insane.

The song starts off slowly but it builds over the course of five minutes. The beat picks up and becomes faster. Townshend and Daltrey start screaming in call-and-response. ("You can have the magic bus for 100 English pounds!" --> "No! Too much!") Gradually the song swells and you can just feel that it's going to bust out at any time. Just when you think it is, they hold back. But it reaches critical mass and they let loose in a musical climax. You've got Moon all over his kit, Entwhistle's bass part fills out the bottom end and acts as a lead simultaneously, Townshend beats the shit out his guitar and he yells some more, and then there's Daltrey screaming, "I'm gonna ride her!" It is loud, distorted - it just oozes energy. It's fucking primal. It's like sex - rhythmic and raw. Tension slowly builds and then is suddenly released. The song is so hypnotic - it's so easy to lose yourself in it. That's rock'n'roll!!

Speaking of hallucinatory, I might be able to get me some psilocybin! Not sure if I really need a ¼, though. I guess I could just divy it up over a couple doses. Or, if I could find someone to go on a trip with me...