TUESDAY TUNES – 1977

thank you so much for a absolutely amazing flashback to the best years of my life. graduated in 1982 Montreal, back then last years of the big blocks, the most amazing bands, women, and a whole host of first time experiences. Today seems bleak in comparison but I am glad to have been so naive back then.

cheers from Germany soon to be Balkans – i am getting the hell outta here, history is repeating itself here in ways that i could not have imagined

Peter Frampton
Bad Company
Steve Miller Band
Jethro Tull
Led Zeppelin

The Thin White Duke

Saw a Head(less)line: “Why Bluetooth remains an ‘unusually painful’ technology after two decades”

*“Bluetooth is said to borrow its name from a ninth century Scandinavian king, Harald “Blue tooth” Gormsson, who was known for his blueish-gray dead tooth and also for uniting Denmark and Norway in 958 AD.”

~~~ “I’m a uniter, not a divider (of the spoils). ~~~ “There are a thousand hacking at the bushes of evil to one who is striking at the dead root.” ~~~ Getting chewed on by a dead tooth is unusually painful? Well then, I want the cannibalized folk to describe their more usual & typical pain ……………

Primaries are red, yellow, blue.
Blood, cowardice & “blood.”
You know, “elite” blood. (& their political primaries: redrum, redrum, redrum!!!)

Tennyson borrows the phrase that points to the very prominent nose ~ he knows {& so do youse} ~ but then, alas, waver•everts backward & downward into the standardized plastically-surgically new & improved button nose ~ that, just like Cypher, in The Matrix, doesn’t want to remember/know nuthin ~ of comfortable denial, the intoxicated hopium dreams of Dot & her alter personality slivers, scarecrow-lyin-tinman (look the waver up, if so inclined):

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

The blue in tooth & yellow in character want red blood. And the youse assembled is the host with the most.

So, psst, hey kids, won’t it be great when your thermostat & toaster & toothbrush & toilet are e. pluribus unum’d into cumbayah colon connectivity? “Its alright we told you what to dream,”** we know what you want & we’re gonna give it to you, good & hard-hard-wired, but without any wires that you can see!

“Paul Proteus would end the novel (Player Piano, 1952) as a good guy. He would claim his position as leader of the Ghost Shirt Society & happily accept the manifesto written in his name by one of the revolution’s leaders, the political science professor Ludwig von Neumann.

Ludwig von Neumann is so unlike John von Neumann it seems likely his name was selected for irony. When the revolution backfires, it’s he who bemoans the fact that the revolutionaries failed to destroy EPICAC. His manifesto ends with an incantatory list of affirmations of what is human in human beings:

I hold, & the members of the Ghost Shirt Society hold:

That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, & Man is a creation of God.

That there must be virtue in frailty, for Man is frail, & Man is is a creation of God.

That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, & Man is a creation of God.

That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant & stupid, & Man is a creation of God.

You perhaps disagree with the antique & vain notion of Man’s being a creation of God.

But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress – namely, that man is on earth to create more durable & efficient images of himself &, hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.

Imperfection, frailty, inefficiency, stupidity: these were precisely the qualities John von Neumann had dedicated his life to eradicating not just in meteorology but in every human endeavor.”

“Homestead is isolated by government troops, who refuse to come in & help clean up the mess (of the smash-it-all revolution) until the revolution’s leaders are handed over. Paul & the others briefly hope to build a truly human existence: to chop wood & grow food & build shelters. But, in a final irony, as soon as the frenzy of ruin has given way to the cold light of day, people miss the machines. The revolution’s leaders came upon a group gathered around a smashed vending machine that once dispensed a soda called Orange-O. Everyone has always hated Orange-O, but they are cheering on a comrade as he repairs the machine. The people, it seems, are doomed to reassemble the very world that had oppressed them.

Remarkably prescient, Player Piano foresaw a world divided between well-educated whiz-kid executives who believe technology is the answer to every human problem & alienated service workers showered with shiny new techno-gadgets in place of real roles as citizens. At the center of this world is the computer, deified by the paternalistic, paranoid culture of the modern corporation. Previous dystopian novels taught readers to look for hope in the success of the revolution – or despair in its failure. Winston Smith’s revolution fails in 1984, leading to his brutal torture & “re-education.” Bernard Marx’s attempt to escape the system in Brave New World leads to his exile. The dark irony of Player Piano is that no torture, no exile, is required. Before the revolution’s smoke has even cleared, the rebels are at work rebuilding the very technology they revolted against, because technology tells far too seductive a lie. It tells us we can transcend our banal physical limitations; we can travel at the speed of sound, think at the speed of light, live forever in a shiny digital Eden. We humans, the novel implies, will always crave Orange-O machines & computers & video games & iPhones & self-driving cars, even if we suspect that these false gods are robbing us of our humanity.”

“But he (Vonnegut) was unwilling to lose the shah’s question for EPICAC: What are people for?

The question is reminiscent of the penultimate chapter of Norbert Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings. “Our papers have been making a great deal of American ‘know-how’ ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb,” Wiener wrote. “There is one quality more important than know-how & we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is ‘know-what’: by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.” In order to explain the differences between “know-how” & “know-what,” Wiener gave the example of a “prominent American engineer” who bought an expensive player piano. But the engineer was not interested in the music; he was interested in the piano’s mechanism. “For this gentleman,” Wiener wrote, “the player piano was not a means of producing music, but a means of giving some inventer the chance of showing how skillful he was at overcoming certain difficulties in the production of music.”

On perhaps the last innocently joyous night of his life, just before he heard that Hitler had invaded Poland, Kurt had spent an evening with his buddies at Woolaroc Ranch in Oklahoma, smoking cigars & loading rolls of music into the player piano. They hadn’t been interested in the piano’s mechanism, in the know-how of it. They had been interested in hearing the tunes while they hung out, a tribe of three, enjoying one anothers’ company. Like his brother, Kurt loved music: jazz & classical & the Beatles – it all partakes of the know-what, the higher truth that gives beauty & purpose to human existence. It’s the music, not the mechanism, that people are for.” ~ The Brothers Vonnegut, Ginger Strand

*Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
Where have you been? It’s alright we know where you’ve been.
You’ve been in the pipeline, filling in time,
provided with toys and Scouting for Boys.
You bought a guitar to punish your ma,
And you didn’t like school, and you know you’re nobody’s fool,
So welcome to the machine.
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
What did you dream? It’s alright we told you what to dream.
You dreamed of a big star, he played a mean guitar,
He always ate in the Steak Bar. He loved to drive in his Jaguar.
So welcome to the machine. ~ Pink Floyd, 1975

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