how far does your seele rei au diverge from canon :0 if I may ask

Thank you so much for asking this !! Well, I gave it some thought, and I wouldn't say it would stray too far from canon, but some big changes would be made. One of which being, well, the main thing. That Rei gets raised by seele. I covered some of the changes it would make to Rei and Kaworu in this post I made a bit ago, but after giving it a bit more thought, I wanted to note down a few more changes I would make to canon in this AU. One of which, probably the biggest divergence in this au, is that Rei doesn't get forced/conditioned to take such a maternal and feminine role. Other than the usual maternity stuff that comes with having the soul of a progenitor, she wouldn't have to experience it with the intensity they do in canon. They also won't get sexualized, since that was another thing that I really disliked in Evangelion. Not to go off on a little tangent here, but when talking about canon, I really think Rei never really wanted to take on that kind of role. The femininity was something they were made to feel like she had to do. She was taught it meant to serve, to be complacent, to fill a role, and to mother. Whenever I think of Rei and femininity my mind always goes to that one Aradia gender meta, since the parallels between the two are insane, and it just voices basically most of my thoughts. In the seele!Rei AU I like to think that Rei's more self-expressive. Being reserved, but a helping hand because she wants to. I think they would also take part in their interest to learn more. We don't know too much about seele, but since we know they probably let Kaworu have access to music and human culture, I think Rei would also have the opportunity to indulge in more books, the internet, and so on. Also, since Rei isn't a clone of Yui here, she won't be subjected to Shinji's Freudy antics as much. She would still somewhat look simmilar to Yui, but this time not made from salvaged remains. Now, another thing I would change is letting Kaworu develop more as a character. In most adaptations of Evangelion, we only see him mainly interacting with Shinji. In this AU, he will not only have Rei as a sibling, but I plan to make him interact with Asuka and Misato too. I think a talk between Kaworu and Misato would be really interesting. Especially when she finds out he's an angel. Imagine meeting the kid that got created, and half of the population, including your dad, died because of that. An interaction with Asuka would be similar. Imagine meeting the guy who's here to replace you if you get worse at piloting. They would eventually get along, but at the start, I can definitely see some conflicts going on there. Since Rei's with seele here, they have both seeds of life in their custody, so it would be even easier for their instrumentality plans. While it's true that Lilith's still in the NERV basement, and Adam's still getting kidnapped (angel-napped?), seele can at least be sure that if one of them dies, at least there's another vessel to work with. (Speaking of which, what would happen if two instrumentalities happened at once? Maybe seele didn't think that Adam, in her embryonic state, could be enough to initiate one? Maybe they were too focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls that they never bothered to think of it?) While we're on the topic of instrumentality, they would totally try and rebel against it this time. After spending a good amount of time at NERV with the rest of the Pilots, I think they would attempt to go against the whole "everyone becomes one in the big primordial soup ocean" plan. Those are just the major changes I would make, but overall? Yeah, it would be canon-divergent, but it would still follow most of the happenings of canon.

@staff are finally starting to understand their user base. It’s only taken -15 years.

Lore Spotlight - The Lady Margaret

The Lady Margaret is the ship that brought the fog to Kingsmouth, the first location you are sent to as an agent. It brought with it the Fog, which kicked off a landslide of events.

First, a singing was heard coming from the ocean, and a large percentage of the island’s population walked out to sea. Returning as Draug. Soon after, the dead across the island started rising; whether they were killed recently by the Draug, or were buried long ago. Nearly every trickle-down disaster across the island can be traced back to this event.

Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT - initiate New England signal - RECEIVE - initiate the Caledfwlch frequency - THE WEATHER STARTED GETTING ROUGH, THE TINY SHIP WAS TOSSED - initiate echinoderm syntax - WITNESS - Lady Margaret.

There is a horror story bobbing in Kingsmouth's harbour. Its name is Lady Margaret. Listen.

Eee-ah! Eee-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!

The story is encoded in seagull cries. The seagulls eat the bloated bodies, and in the alchemy of their bellies, those dead secrets fuse to the essence of the birds.

Owah! Owah-ow-ow-owah!

Can you decipher it, sweetling? No? Those vestigial bits have not fully developed yet - your skull is in its pupa stage - but they spasm when you hear the ranting of the gulls. We can decipher. The gory story drips into the tides, one part per million, and still we can taste it. We will regurgitate it to you - feed you as a mama bird does.

Initiate the seagull scream cadence.

They thought the fishing boat lost. Then it returned to port weeks overdue. It brought no relief. It brought no comfort. It only brought the fog.

Eee-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-owah!

A great storm caught the crew of the Lady Margaret - twisting clouds and waves as tall as houses washing over the deck. Prayers were said, the final kind. The tempest beat the boat, and the crew scrambled to save their cargo. In their toil, a sudden swell washed a mate overboard. The rest watched helplessly as their fellow's head rose twice with the waves. There was no third time.

The waters calmed, and the Lady Margaret remained. A thick fog crept in like a cancer. Mechanical madness. None of the instruments worked. The crew tried to manoeuvre the craft, but there were no bearings, no direction, no mercy from the sea.

Time passes, first in hours, then in days.

The fog parted as a freak show curtain, revealing a graveyard of ships. Rusty steel, ancient wood, Dhows, Viking long-boats, modern frigates, oil tankers, and luxury cruise liners - they all dipped and bobbed in the same water - vessels from all times, all cultures, all covered in red.

What happened next, sweetling? Seagulls are compulsive liars. Let us say an object was found, floating on a driftwood raft. Let us say that a man, designation Joe Slater, dove in and brought it up. Let us say that at that moment, the fog closed on the Lady Margaret with the purpose of a vampire squid's mantle.

Perhaps the boat rotated, caught in the beginnings of a maelstrom. Perhaps the men looked upon the rotting hulks and saw the glistening movement of lean, slimy bodies writhing in red seaweed like undead otters cracking open skulls for their fruit. Perhaps the fog and the dark conspired to play tricks.

There are fragments of older tales embedded in the seagull screams - mariners' tales of things birthed in dead bodies and dark water. Putrid souls, stippled with eel holes, these unquiet dead, these hungry dead, with their milk-cataract stare. A few seagulls even remember the name. Draug-draug-draug-draug!

We can suppose the Lady Margaret fled both maelstrom and monsters. The engine came back to life. Some instruments found lucidity. The boat made its way back to Kingsmouth. The fishermen kept the strange object they found to themselves. Some argued to sell it on the Internet. Others said it should be brought to Innsmouth Academy for identification. They decided to bring it to the esoteric school.

The next day brought the fog. Time passes, first in screams and then in moans.

Joe Slater is the only one left. One by one, his fellows went away, like the deceptively vicious plot of a children's rhyme. Each is a tiny story in the belly of a different gull. And then there was Joe. But he is just barely Joe. Perhaps it was the object, or the primordial soup he swam through to get it, that passed on the fish-oil leprosy.

It started with stomach spasms that felt like writhing lamprey nests hatching in his belly. Then Joe could hear the hag-fish singing in the crushing depths, even when he pretended he could not, even when the Q-tips snapped in half in his bloody ears. Madness bubbled in his brain like the bends. Then pale flesh. Then barnacle sores and wriggling growths and sea cucumber discharges. Now Joe feels the itch and burn as different species of coral battle for primacy of his chest, spitting up their digestive enzymes in time-lapse warfare. Something scuttles out of one body cavity, to be eaten by something hiding in another.

And though the seagulls scream a hundred thousand stories, all Joe can hear is, "Draug-draug-draug-draug-draug!"

#Reposting @neo_artists with @instarepost_app -- Made using @screenstretch supplies #MonkeysMoonsandMonoliths @aaron_rawcliffe Preview Saturday 16th September 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm "I aim to transcend the veneer of commercial imagery, boiling down the vacuous skin and bones of contemporary culture and make relics from this primordial soup, if not for now, for the radiated man living off the ashes of the post-apocalyptic, European landscape." Aaron’s work is formed through his experience of the culture and the information that we are exposed to in contemporary society – the Internet, film and books provide us with an endless stream of imagery and information, carefully designed for our consumption and manipulation. In contrast to the screen, we simultaneously experience the material world, as well as our ancestral history, ancient past and future possibilities. Aaron attempts to create analogue imagery with a hieroglyphic effect: a combination of visual languages, encapsulating a process of absorption, dissection and re-appropriation of contemporary visual culture. Through this process, he aims to present the viewer with a distilled snapshot of his interaction with visual culture and create images that open a dialogue between his paintings, the viewer and the wider context of our society. 16th September – 22nd October 2017 Open Thursday to Sunday 11am – 5pm #neogallery23 @marketplacebolton Bolton BL1 2AN United Kingdom FREE ADMISSION The venue is fully accessible #AbstractPainting #Abstract #Painting #Collage #Digital #ArtExhibition #SoloShow #neostudios #Artist #ArtistsOfInstagram #Art #Screenprinting #Screenprint

The 1975 & The Cohesion of Fragmentation

By Chewy

November 29, 2018

—–

Music is an elemental sign of the times.

In 2018, the multitextural web of fractured realities, social climates, ideologies and identities is cacophonous. We want to get away from our phones and the internet, from people, but not all people, and not all places on the internet, but we also want peace, but our definition of peace, with enough content to last us through our 8 hour shifts. To truly embody the times of 2018, modern music has the improbable task of absorbing and reflecting the inherent conflict, contradiction and multiplicity of the age. We need music that can reflect the madlib dimensions of a time where coal is the way of the future and food brands tweet anthropological dissection of technology-accelerated social alienation. As an ever mutating, paradoxical beast, our time needs music to match, our time needs The 1975.

Spearheaded by The 1975’s nucleus Matt Healy, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships is massive, ambitious, and digitally indulgent. Submerged in the primordial soup of buzz blogs, Tumblr fandoms and the like, this is a band that really knows the internet. They know the construction of personality and consumable interests. They know obsession, the comfort of emotional smokescreens and the indistinguishability of ironic and earnest intent. On the searing, post-punk rip “Give Yourself a Try”, Healy and crew encourage the youth of the internet to literally believe in themselves. Not to be mistaken for a sermon, Give Yourself A Try finds Healy is venting his own stupidity. As an embarrassing throwback to things he used to embody, Healy is literally leading by example. Through lifting and brightening Joy Division’s “Disorder” guitar riff, Healy effusively details all the ways to not fuck up. He’s outlined a fucking up playbook, a forewordmay as well say ‘here’s what to learn from, or what you can ignore, that’s fine, STIs suck tho’.And as ever, with his meticulous wordplay, Healy punches it up with charasmatic jabber that feels manically human.

Frequently impressive, the wordplay and lyrical structural approaches to this record are confident expirements. Playing like a modern take on REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”, “Love It If We Made It” is a brilliant jumble of venomous verbatim quotes and contentious social-media summaries. Mirroring the relentless barrage of inescapable information and moral decay, Made It’s lyrics connect a wide gamut of topics while rarely space time for digestion. This instinctive approach to prose and flow helps ground The 1975’s signature gloss in the process. Similarily, the unsuspectingly poignant trap bounce of “I Like America and America Likes Me” presents micro statements and recurring thought strands in a panicked elliptical. By juggling thoughts of carefree youth to surviving school shootings, The 1975 create a powerful pop beast unlike most other songs of 2018. Embeded in a neon trap production, the ever ubiquitous mainstay of youth culture, America Likes Me is an inspired cyclical mediation on American gun violence and the vulnerability of teenage life. It’s an unorthodox construction only made capable by The 1975′s endless tinkering .

Unorthodoxy, pinned by mutation and audacity, only serve to make The 1975  stronger. Far from aimless genre hopping, the salient personal wishes and flaws fused to ABIIOR’s compositions give them an overall weight and authenticity. “It’s Not Living”’s  big, shiny 80s balladry goes beyond imitation when applying its tragic overtones. It walks like an 80s ballad, but Not Living functions on a level of post-modern juxtaposition that only comes from deep reconstruction of convention. It’s warm, bright choruses openly detail a tragic cycle of drug withdrawal, isolation and dependency, Not Living is incredibly appealing and appalling at the same time. The 1975 are honing a mastery contradiction that really exemplifies the fragmentation and misdirection of our current culture. ‘I always want to die, sometimes’ is another amazing, lyrical distillation of the emotional murkiness that surrounds life on the internet. This hook from the album’s closer is a universal culmination of the daily emotional whiplash of our time. Among the emotionally frayed climate of youth culture, this hook speaks to an inescapable core sensation of self, a feeling of despairing smallness but also minor melodrama.

Always tumbling forward with bigger, bolder ideas, The 1975 have really struck a summarily potent body of work this time. Not to discount their scrappy, brilliantly sprawling sophomore effort, but A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships is a swiftly confident elevation of that framework. The 1975 deftly synthesize and reconstruct pieces of the modern pop music canon into distinct, humanistic explorations of our overlapping digital/non-digital identities and behaviors. This is the sound of our Post-Trump, meme-wrought, obtusely romantic social era and it’s way more impressive and clever than boomers will probably give it credit for.

An iconography of truth

With all the talk about post-truth and post-facts swirling around me, I thought I had to write something about all this, about how utterly important it is to stand up for facts, truth, evidence, expertise, sincerity, honesty, dignity, integrity, fairness, justice…., however hard that might be in the political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and academic contexts in which we might find ourselves.

To get my mind into gear I made the mistake of looking up truth on Wikipedia (on 16 March, 2017); and then, just out of curiosity, I also looked at German Wahrheit and French vérité, because it suddenly struck me how very different the three words were. It turns out that truth seems to be derived from Old English trīewth, trēowth, meaning faithfulness or constancy; Wahrheit comes from Middle/Old High German wärheit, meaning trust or consent; and vérité has its roots in Latin veritas meaning true or real nature, reality. This was interesting in itself, insofar as faithfulness, trust and reality all have something to do with truth, at least semantically.

What I had not expected when clicking on truth on Wikipedia was how totally overwhelmed I would be with information (21 pages for truth, 28 for Wahrheit, 21 for vérité)! Somebody sometime somewhere will have to sit down and do a proper comparative analysis of these ‘key words’ of our time from a lexicographical or philosophical perspective (and one might want to include other languages too).

While letting all these words flow over me, I clung on to the illustrations, sprinkled amongst the words, like life rafts. From this activity emerged this blog post, which, in the end, is not about truth or post-truth, but about what I call an iconography of truth and post-truth in three European cultural and linguistic contexts.

Truth

The English entry starts with a brief conceptual overview of ‘truth’ which goes directly into medias res, mentioning Heidegger, Peirce, and Nietzsche on the first page – all major contributors to theories of truth, but slightly overwhelming to read about. This short overview introduction is illustrated with three images: a painting where Time slays Falsehood and rescues Truth (the slayer and slayee are male, truth is female, and like many images of ‘truth’, naked). The image has the subtitle ‘Time saving truth from falsehood and envy, François Lemoyne, 1737’. The reader is also confronted with a bas relief of ‘Truth [the Roman Goddess of Truth], holding a mirror and a serpent (1896) [by] Olin Levi Warner, Library of Congress Tomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.’ (see left); and the final image is a photo of a stone head that is ‘An angel carrying the banner of “Truth”, Roslin, Midlothian’.

The entry contains a long list of theories of truth, one of which is ‘coherence theory’. This is illustrated with the statue of ‘Walter Seymour Allward’s Veritas (Truth) outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada’.

Under ‘notable views’ – ‘ancient history’ we find a striking painting of ‘La Verité “Truth” by Jules Joseph Lefebvre’ (also used in the French entry; see below). And finally, under ‘modern age’, we find a famous portrait of Immanuel Kant (see below). So we have a nice mixture of UK, French, US, Canadian and German images of ‘truth’. I liked that.

Wahrheit

The German entry on Wikipedia is big. It even contains a table of all the theories of truth that have been put forward over time. But the only images it includes are a picture of a bust of Aristotle entitled: ‘Aristoteles formulierte das Grundprinzip der Korrespondenztheorie’ (Aristotle formulates the axiom of correspondence theory); a painting by ‘Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Ge: Was ist Wahrheit (1890): Pontius Pilatus zu Jesus; Joh 18,38’ (this painting depicts a famous scene from the New Testament where Pilate asks Christ: What is truth?); and, finally, a visualisation of spheres of truth according to the Catholic Church!

So, what we have here is lots of words, an Aristotle and two theological images. NO image of Kant! That is rather strange! (see right; taken from the English entry)

Vérité

If the German entry on truth is as dry as chalk, the French entry is like a mature cheese, really worth tasting. The first picture that hits you in the eye when opening that entry is ‘La Vérité, abstraction personnifiée, toile de Jules Joseph Lefebvre’, which we had already encountered at the end of the English article. The painting depicts a naked young woman holding aloft a globe that is glowing with light (see right).

But there is more. Quine and nominalism of all things are illustrated with ‘La Verité’ (1901) a rather beguiling family portrait of naked truth by Merson, a, to my mind, relatively unknown painter. The section on verification, falsification, Kuhn and paradigms is surprisingly adorned with a fragment of the frontispiece of the famous Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d’Alembert. In this engraving Truth is, of course, radiating light and Reason and Philosophy tear off its veil. This representation of truth and the enlightenment was painted by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Benoît-Louis Prévost in 1772.

A section on truth in philosophy is preceded by the painting of Pilate and Christ which we already encountered in Wahrheit, but it also contains a fresco depicting Plato and Aristotle by the Italian high renaissaince painter Raphael, a painting of Augustine by the Italian early renaissance painter Botticelli, and a statue of Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci.

Early modern philosophy is, of course, illustrated with a portrait of the most famous French philosopher René Descartes, but also Spinoza, and modern philosophy gets Bertrand Russell and… Martin Heidegger. In the photo, Heidegger is grinning; probably because his picture was chosen instead of one of Michel Foucault, for example, or Jacques Derrida.

With Heidegger, we are on the threshold of postmodernism, which some regard as an ingredient in the conceptual primordial soup from which post-truth emerged. So what about post-truth? I wondered whether the three entries for that concept would be as different as the ones for truth? Let’s have a look.

The English entry (11 pages), entitled ‘post-truth politics’ contains only one image, of a Vote Leave poster with a misleading claim about the EU membership fee. The German entry (13 pages) entitled ‘postfaktische Politik’ only has that one image (‘post-Wahrheit’ is not a real thing in German; it mostly exists as a translation of post-truth). But the FRENCH entry on ‘ère post-vérité’ (37 pages), ooh la la! We get a veritable smorgasbord of images and representations!

Post-Truth/post-vérité

The article initially surveys the political scene in the US and in the UK and sets the concept in some historical context. The first image we see is a caricature of the humourist Stephen Colbert, author of the 2005 concept of ‘truthiness’ (interestingly mentioned by Sheila Jasanoff in her 2015 article on ‘serviceable truths’ – that would be another topic!), illustrating the emerging power of conspiracy theories.

This is followed by a photo of a protest of a 9/11 truth movement, as well as Colin Powell delivering the ‘truth’ about weapons of mass destruction in 2003. The next two photos are of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, side by side.

After that we get into more philosophical discussions. We are told that the concept of post-truth is impossible to define, accompanied by a picture of Pilatus asking Christ about the meaning of truth (which we encountered in Wahrheit and vérité).

In a section on truth and politics we find a portrait of Benjamin Constant who invoked the ‘right to lie’ as early as 1797. A section on truth and journalism is illustrated with a portrait of the famous German sociologist Max Weber who famously talked in 1919 about the way journalists always have to work under time and production pressure. An abstract image of the internet illustrates the rise of fact-checking in the digital age, quoting the French political journalist Thomas Legrand. A section on truth and fact contains a portrait of Hannah Arendt who, famously, distinguished between truth of facts and truth of reason.

We then get a section on the banalisation of lies (I like that phrase), which contains the Vote Leave campaign photo that is used in the English and German entries but over and above that we get a rather lovely engraving of Pinocchio by Enrico Mazzanti!

In a segment on the primacy of emotion over reason and the merging of fiction and reality, we are shown a photo of Paris Hilton. This is followed by an overview of conspiracy theories, accompanied by an image of the attack on the twin towers. After sections on the influence of social media networks, the loss of authority of mainstream media, on ‘info-obesity’ and hacking (‘piratage informatique’), we are confronted with a photo of Noam Chomsky, author of the famous 1988 treatise on manufacturing consent which has certainly come into fashion again. This is followed by an infographic representing threats to openness and democracy.

The entry also contains a long section on conceptual precursors to post-truth, starting with a photo of the seminal book The medium is the message by Marshall McLuhan. I won’t go through that section in detail, but just mention the photos of people included: Régis Debray, Nicholas Carr, Jacques Ellul, François Jost, Mike Godwin, Mark Zuckerberg, Etienne Klein and Google…. And that is NOT all. There is much more – on filter bubbles, hyper-connectivity, hyper-fragmentation etc.

I’ll only pick out two more images, one illuminating a section on divergences in thinking about post-truth and one elucidating a section on fascism. The first image is supposed to illustrate how Andrew Calcutt, castigating postmodern thinkers for their contribution to the post-truth world we live in, reignites an old debate about the relativisation of truth. This is a caricature which appeared in the satirical journal Le Grélot (19 December 1897) during the Dreyfus Affair. It represents truth emerging from a pit or well holding aloft a glowing orb of light (similar to the truth by Lefebvre, but of course, in a pit!), helped by some intellectuals such as Émile Zola, while others try to prevent this from happening (I think). The subtitle to the image says: “The truth would disappear today because it would be relativised to excess, since the most antagonistic positions could be considered by the press and intellectuals as relevant as the others”. (By the way, the Roman goddess of truth, Veritas was believed to hide in the bottom of a holy well because she was so elusive).

The last illustration I want to mention is entitled: “Symbole du bullshit selon Pascal Engel, le joueur de flûte de Hamelin” (the symbol of bullshit, according to [the French philosopher] Pascal Engel, is the Pied Piper of Hamelin). As in the case of the banalisation of lies illustrated by an old engraving of Pinocchio, the wikipedians have chosen an old and evocative engraving to make their point about bullshit in the sense popularised by the philosopher Harry Frankfurter. Post-truth certainly fits in well between the banalisation of lies and the spread of bullshit.

Conclusions

What have I learned from surfing the images in the three Wikipedia entries on ‘truth’? While being quite overwhelmed by all the erudition I encountered, this also made me feel quite humble and, in a sense, quite proud. Words like truth and post-truth are thrown around nowadays with great abandon and cynicism, all the while forgetting the philosophical, cultural, artistic, scientific, political, linguistic…. ‘knowledge-work’ that has gone into thinking and writing about these issues for centuries, if not millennia. We need to take care of these concepts. We need to cherish and defend them from erosion, as much as we do paintings and antiquities. We also need to learn about them from each other across interconnected and overlapping languages and cultures.

  Featured image: Photo taken near Nottingham station; a billboard depicting three Nottingham-based writers and what they have to say about truth. All other images Wikimedia Commons.

The post An iconography of truth appeared first on Making Science Public.

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Characteristics of Bone: A Memorie

https://amerarcana.wordpress.com/

...bone represents the very source of life, both human and animal. To reduce oneself to the skeleton condition is equivalent to re-entering the womb of this primordial life, that is, to a complete renewal, a mystical rebirth. 

-Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy 

The characteristics of bone describes the music of Glenn Spearman (tenor saxophone) and Marco Eneidi (alto saxophone). They have moved beyond bone now, yet bone is eternal. Civilization can never defeat bone. For the sake of the memory of Glenn and Marco, I will skip the rigmarole of making an acrostic of their names, and whatnot. You need only to find recordings and listen: listen to their material. You need to run it down from before the beginning for yourself, and after. Many others are more qualified than I to give detailed accounts of the lives of Glenn Spearman and Marco Eneidi. It was only dumb luck and poverty that led me across their paths in the first place. 

I was homeless San Francisco in 1993 just a few months after coming from San Diego. I came up Highway 5 to attend the state university. I had even sold my drum kit to barely afford the essentials. This is when I discovered the infamous San Francisco burrito and the salsa verde, which my buddies still refer to as “the drug.” El Castillito made them huge, by San Diego standards, and the wasn’t far from my place on 26th and Alabama. My job at the recycling center at school didn’t pay but once a month. I had to starve in between checks. Not dire by any account. I loved it. I was a Creative Writing student after all. I’d starve and smoke and nibble and drink wine. Within a month of living in in the city, sunrise to sunrise. I was pushed out of a ratty apartment in no time. I discovered Food Not Bombs and Homes Not Jails through the Epicenter Zone, a Punk community center. They had a switchboard hot-line service for those in need. No one really had cell phones or the internet. I made my way to a Homes Not Jails meeting. They had left over free soup from Food Not Bombs. A dude I met there let me crash in his attic. Jeremy Graham. We talked about what I thought was music and I what I thought was literature. He is a lawyer now and still comes to my shows 23 years later. Jeremy gave me a tape of John Coltrane’s last album “Expressions”, Frank Wright’s “One for John” album (with Bobby Few and Noah Howard), and Glenn Spearman’s Double Trio.

“...(Cecil) Taylor drafted (Glenn) Spearman for a big band…(t)hat led to a few gigs with Cecil’s other bands, a seven-piece group which played for dancers, and a six-piece Cecil Taylor Unit including (Raphe) Malik, Jimmy Lyons, William Parker and Rashid Bakr ‘That’s where I got my advanced degree in music,’ says Glenn.”  

Bassist Lisle Ellis has been a great conduit for me, and the other young pups I ran around with. Lisle was a later addition the Glenn Spearman’s Double Trio. He was the only one as far as I knew. I saw them perform as much as possible. Great musicians, bunch of dudes: William Winant (percussion), Donald Robinson (drum kit), Chris Brown (piano), Larry Ochs (saxophones), Lisle on bass and Glenn. I still don’t really know the other guys well. Lisle linked me to pedagogies and practices of the Creative Music Studio in New York around the mid-70’s, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor and beyond. Plus, he remains super accessible. He ran a workshop out of his apartment in the Upper Haight in San Francisco. Had us doing all kinds of exercises. He introduced to me violinist India Cooke which led to trio project, ESP, with bassist Kimara Dixon (a dude, now in Atlanta). She was teaching me to listen demonstrating loads of patience. Lisle joined us once on stage at Beanbender’s in Berkeley. India, Glenn, Chris and, maybe, Willie, back then, were on the faculty at Mills College. Larry was/is a part of ROVA Saxophone Quartet as the “O.” He performed the “Bedouin Hornbook,” back in the day. Donald fixed cars and drove the smallest car. It only fit a driver and drums. It was a Le Car or old school Honda Civic or something. Simply legendary. 

India and Glenn were my Black Arts Movement - West. I uncovered Ishmael Reed and Marvin X a bit later, after music. Many Black artists, intellectuals and Creative Musicians passed through the San Francisco Bays’ industry of thought, but I wasn’t really hip to it at the time. I was a struggling student and political activist. I staunchly rejected MTV and Hollywood because Chuck D, KRS ONE and Bad Brains told me to, thankfully. I switched majors from Writing to History to Philosophy & Religion and kept yo-yoing in and out of school. I kept up political education and service-based activism. Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Fred Wei-Han Ho and the Asian Improv Arts crew were quite explicitly positioned the music in an international, multi-ethnic nexus of resistance strategies and cultural progress. Rest in power, Fred. His book Sounding Off!: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution. There remains a lack of radical analysis and language amongst my community of Creative Musicians. Jason McGill and I interviewed back when Royal Hartigan gave him a residency at San Jose State. We heard Free Jazz as get-free-or-die-motherfucker! Years later Fred warned me about my academic language and intellectual tendencies. Fred was an action man. I mean, you just gotta talk to people and build. I find myself now digging through the past relationships and realities I simply missed in the ol’ Bay Area Creative Music scene. 

Unlike most cities, homeless persons, street persons, are quite visible up and down certain streets at all hours in San Francisco. I saw my fair share working with organizations affiliated with the Coalition On Homelessness. People have many reasons for escape, I can’t judge. What got me was that I recognized myself in the blatherings and bangings of some ecstatic urchin, high as fuck, banging away on buckets and pans for change, or for no reason at all. I stopped and stared not knowing if I was seeing my future self. A child of an alcoholic, though never an excessive user of any such thing, I only sought something behind the music I craved and worked through. Chasing Creative Music made me feel how that tripped out dude looked. People on the day to day are truly Improvisers: improvising a meal, a living, a laugh, so-called sanity. Navigating these streets and institutions will sure put you on a different plane. Just like how solitary confinement creates insanity. The complexity of the Double Trio saved my life. People say that kind of thing sometimes, and when it’s true it’s true. ROVA also turned me out. Composer, all around musician and bassist for Earth, Don McGreevy recently reminded me of all legacies of complexity, wonder and mastery that we inherited from this continuum of Creative Music. The bar is quite high. 

I was hungry for that essential transmission from improvisors with teeth. Experiencing the Double Trio was a kind of an initiation. My crew of musical and personal allies were transitioning into Creative Music enthusiasts at the same time. We imbibed all that we could. Performances spaces took on a sacred and profane quality. I only spoke to Glenn once or twice. I interviewed him on the phone after he quit doing chemo. He said he only wanted to self-medicate and finish his work peacefully. I trust that he did. 

Last I saw Marco, it was in February 2015. We ran across each other in Vienna, Austria on a Tuesday night. I was hunting for him. Black Spirituals, my band from Oakland, CA, performed while on tour with the iconic drone Metal unit Earth, from Seattle. We found ourselves in the fortunate circumstances of having our meals, booze, venue and sleeping accommodations all under same roof, or rooves in this case. European venues do it good that way. Drink up and load out in the morning, like a human being. I befriended a Viennese chap, an artist or philosopher unlucky in love, who joined me in a cab at midnight. We cut through the immaculate city in search of Marco. We found him, gray-faced and dogged, preparing to go home. He had been running the New Neu York/Vienna Institute of Improvised Music. Dude looked exhausted as he greeted his former apprentice, sort of looking past me. He was looking for his bed, no doubt. The poor bastard exchanged a few words and promptly left after informing us how avoid the entry fee at the venue door. He disappeared into the night, into history, and, all too soon, into the awaiting arms of the ancestors. I guess I thought he’d be a buoyant Henry Miller with a tart over one shoulder, tobacco smoke pouring out over too many words, a fifth in his breast pocket, and rubber soles under his heals. I think I just wanted to see his horn-playing stance one last time. That night, though, I performed improvisations with no-non-sense, badass musicians and threw back a few with Hans Farb from Festival Konfrontationen in Nicklesdorf. He knows all my Free Jazz family intimately. He is like an uncle I never knew was out there. 

Several years before, during one of Marco’s orbits from Vienna to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was able to host him. I booked a gig at Omiiroo Gallery in Downtown Oakland. It was my duty to spotlight him, feed him, give him a $100 bucks, and the stage. My man Githinji set it up. He taught me how to make Kenyan black-eyed peas for the occasion. “Gotta use coconut milk, brottar.” I arranged for additional catering from the Afghan spot down the street. And since the gallery didn’t have a proper bathroom, I made further arrangements with the Afghans to keep everybody comfortable. My band at the time was called Mutual Aid Project, a free jazz collective. We had undergone and performed the very first iterations of Decolonizing the Imagination together. Nick Obando (alto saxophone), Tracy Hui (guitar) & I performed composed analyses and democratic spaces to confront the tenets of colonization that brought our peoples to this land and still persist in our everyday lives. Rarely work with such deep cats. However, they were rightfully annoyed with me because I opted to perform solely with Marco. The next night, I must say, we opened for him at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco with Jamaaladeen Tacuma (electric bass), Lisa Mezzacappa (acoustic bass) and Vijay Anderson (drums). That gig with Marco was mine. My brother was shooting video, sort of. Some hot, young thing was sitting in the front row. My pops and his lovely wife brought their friends up from Oxnard and down from Napa-tasting. See, it was my dad’s birthday. I felt like an apprentice when I first pulled Marco’s coat and now I was a journeyman. We did two sets. I never released it. It’s just a thing I had to do. 

In early 2000’s, I worked with Marco as his sometime drummer. He was the kind of guy who lived in a van in NYC, so I heard, and schlepped his axe everywhere. Someone actually stopped me from doing that myself when I lived in DC. Back 

8:Second Cultural Text

Assignment Brief:

What is your cultural text?

Look at it, describe it, ask questions.

What do you think your selected cultural text suggests you can discuss?

Who is the audience for it?

 What is your cultural text?

This is a visual representation of the internet. Barret Lyon, the creator of this ‘internet map’, is an artist, computer scientist, entrepreneur, pilot and educator. He called it ‘The Opte Project’, inspired by the Latin word for optical- opti. Opte began in October 2003 and is a full C-based application in open source code. Barret believes that the network mapping can help teach students more about the Internet, how connections arise between networks and how the evolution of a biological organism is not dissimilar to the evolution of artificial technology.

The internet is a huge collection of networks that connect in weird ways, which its users sometimes don’t recognise. Barret realised that you can logically draw connections between two points across networks, where the length of that line represents the delay between two nodes. Using a variety of advanced techniques, Barret created maps which provide relative connections across thousands of different networks. It’s a visual relationship between every network on the internet, metaphysical spaces, wasted IP adresses space, weather, natural disasters, and art.

The colours in Barrets map represent geographical location:

Blue lines = North America

Red lines = Asia Pacific

Green lines = Europe

Purple lines = Latin America

Orange lines = Africa

White lines = Highly connected networks

Look at it, describe it, ask questions

Most home internet users will be using an Internet Service Provider (ISP), which will be connected to a higher level of ISP. This higher ISP level then connects to the Tier 1 ISP. These giant networks use underwater data cables, to connect ISP’s from one land to another land. Not all data passes through these cables though. Organisations like Google, YouTube, Facebook all have their own data centres, we call them Internet Exchange Points (IEP). Whenever you use traditional websites, you will be transferring data to that IEP, and then through your ISP. If 3.2 billion people are doing this every day, that’s about 20,000 gigabytes a second. So collectively as a human race we have been forming a gargantuan series of network maps. By Moore’s Law, computing power doubles every year since the space used to store transistors half's approximately every year. Therefore, scientists estimate by 2020 internet traffic will have tripled. Imagine what the map will look like by then!

A variety of tools, languages, and applications were used to generate Barret’s map of the internet. The following quote is from the Opte website itself, which explains briefly how the internet was mapped:

“The process starts with a BGP dump from routers, that is then processed into a relationship database. The database is exported to a format called LGL, which is eventually converted into vector images. At the end of the process, we have an Image.”- Barrett Lyon / The Opte Project, ‘Visualization of the routing paths of the Internet’

BGP stands for ‘The Border Gateway Protocol’. It’s used as a carrier-class router on the internet. One BGP feed contains most of the routes and prefixes available at any point in time. A prefix, has attached to it an ‘AS’ path. This is the path of networks a group of data must take to reach the end based off the initial BGP feed. The initial BGP feed might not have included all the paths to a specific prefix. So in order to ensure the final product collects as much data as possible, Barret used route views with feeds from all over the internet allowing the final image to be incredibly intricate, but still accurate.

I won’t go into too much detail about the next stage of this process, as it’s rather complex, but I’ve linked a very helpful diagram supplied by the Opte website again: http://dev2.opte.org/wp-content/themes/opte/i/how-it-works.jpg

Barret made Opte an open source code, which basically means anyone can take the same code in make their own changes to it. Barret found it difficult to teach others how the code works because nobody could understand it. Barret and his new team are currently working on a new Large Graph Layout (LGL) 3.0 system, which enables fixed points, faster image rendering, and more efficient code. Their hopes for the future is to have an animated map of the internet, showing how networks evolve within the internet as if they’re a biological organism, stretching, breathing, expanding, morphing, shrinking and dying.

 What do you think your selected cultural text suggests you can discuss?

To know that I am peering into the metaphysical universe which no one’s ever gets to see, but myself and 3.2 billion others use every day, is fascinating to think about. The fact that the internet only came into existence 25 years ago, and 4.5 billion pages have been born and evolved into an complex artificial organism is incredible, and shows that although humans are a rather flimsy organism, collectively we can create anything through the fusing of creativity and technology. I’ve found from other people’s first impressions of this map, they assume it’s a piece of fine art or something which holds no deeper purpose than its aesthetics. But once you know you are not just looking at the shape of the internet, but you’re seeing how time has an impact on evolution, it makes you think more deeply about what the internet really is. Personally, I don’t think it looks too dissimilar to clusters of stars, nebulas, galaxy clusters, and neurons within the human brain… Seeing something as drastic as this is thought-provoking, and makes me think about life, evolution, freewill, and parallel universes. 

When Tim Berners-Lee made the first ever website in 1989, was that the equivalent of the Big Bang?

Or was it in 1969 when Leonard Klienrock transmitted the first ever form of data from one computer to another computer? Was that the equivalent of two universes colliding, in the primordial soup of multiverses they exist within? 

When humans go extinct, what will happen to the internet?

What if in the same way there could be a multiverse which contains all existing universes, there could be a multiverse of different types of internet’s, one of which is ours, and the others are intergalactic civilisations who have harnessed the power of a network of networks.

Could an intergalactic internet collide with our own internet? What would that look like? 

Is the internet a human concoction, or is it a secret universal property we have discovered? 

These questions are unlikely to ever be answered, but are thought-provoking and fun to think about.

Who is the audience for it?

Something as intriguing and thought-provoking as this probably appeals to anyone, of any age, of any sex, of any education, of any discipline (and so on). I don’t see how there could be any boundaries on this form of visualisation, which would block a certain group of people from connecting with this image.

Links to other internet mapping projects:

http://internet-map.net/ http://cheswick.com/ches/map/ http://www.caida.org/tools/ http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/ https://qz.com/se/map-of-the-internet/