THIS is computer music: Ge Wang at TEDxStanford

"Expressive"?   Of what?  Would anyone ever really want to listen to these peculiar noises?  I've watched the whole thing through with the sound off--and I see he's reinvented the the ocarina, and I think, the theramin--but am I even a little bit curious as to what any of this actually sounds like?  Not in the least.  We all know what a painfully contrived dodecaphonic tone row sounds like.  It sounds like shit.  Because it is shit. Sorry, Mr. Ge--unless it's Mr. Wang--There's no such thing as computer music.  And there never will be.

You're a very personable young man, Mr. Ge Wang, but your "music" lacks, inherently, charm. And what, you may well ask, is charm?  It is, to begin with, in Latin, a spell or incantation:  Carmen--moving the emotions, indeed the very soul, of the hearer, as if by (and this is a little unfair) magic. Indeed, sometimes wordlessly, or silently--especially in the plural, and when referring specifically to a woman's (or a boys')--"charms."  But usually charm is expressed in music by an odd  little quirk or unexpected twist--a droll dropping, or peculiar upward inflection, of the voice--that gives character to a piece, and makes the heart beat faster for a couple of moments; of which sort of trick, gimmick or business Englishmen, who lived in the time of Elizabeth the First and James I, always seem to have had the knack.  So I tell you what: Go and find a copy of William Byrd's "O Mistress Mine" (theme and variations)--It's in the Fitzwilliams Virginal Book--and teach yourself to play it. Forget about the words--No one knows what they were any more, and the words that have been proposed to sing to it in the past century or so are nauseatingly stupid.  But the tune is not stupid, and Byrd's repeated setting of it, and changes on it, are dazzling, wicked-smart.

Anyway, what you've got to understand, Mr. Ge Wang--and you give no indication of understanding it--is that is there is no music (no real music) without charm. There has, of course, ever since Igor Stravinsky turned the Banshees loose in the orchestra by writing le Sacre du Printemps (in 1913), been a stinking shitload of charmless music in the world--but it isn't real music. Before the advent of the First World War, however, there was a lot of charming music in the world--and maybe nothing more charming, end to end, than Schubert's Trout Quintet:  Which is full of good tunes; which are repeated, but never too often, and you never get tired of them.

And as for writing your own tunes--tunes, Mr. Ge--You might trying singing them to yourself before you try them on your ocarina or theramin (if that's what it is).

Today's quote, from Martin Luther:

"Nature never lets up.  We are all driven to the secret sin.  To say it crudely but honestly, if it doesn't go into a woman, it goes into your shirt."

There are a couple of things to  note about this honest crudity of Martin Luther:  (1) The invention of convenient, absorbent ankle socks was, in the early 16th century, still several hundred years in the future.  (2) The oftenest committed sin in pre-Freudian Christian Europe and America--the one that men and boys were always being warned by reputable authority not to commit, and which weighed heaviest on their consciences because they were, in fact, always committing it--was not homosexuality (which, after all, no one was even sure existed), but masturbation, or, as Christians called it, "Onanism," or "the sin of Onan," or, as in this case, more familiarly, just "the secret sin."  The ladies may have wondered, but the guys all knew what he was talking about.

Did Freud really liberate us (guys) from a morbid preoccupation with, and fear of, masturbation? Well, then I may have to rescind part of my harshest judgement of Father Sigmund, which had been that he  and his silly-ass, crackpot "depth psychology" had done no good of any kind whatsoever.  

Why, after all, one loves Italy

The climate.  Italy enjoys the very type of a Mediterranean Climate--so designated by official meteorologists.  Meaning that it's good and warm, even hot, in the summertime, in the daytime, but not humid, and that it cools down at night so that one can sleep.  This, by the way, is the same type of climate ("Mediterranean" is what they call it) that we enjoy, who live in the Northwestern corner of the United States.  And enjoy it we do, especially those of us who've been east of the Rockies in the summer, and know what a relentless, sleepless torment high heat is together with high humidity.

British Justice, as they prepare to hand Julian Assange over to his American Torturers:

"You may not be breaking any laws now--but we can and will punish you, if not for breaking the law, for having broken the law."

No swine like a legalist swine.

"Embrace of the Serpent," that I watched last night on Hulu.

Is, for me, a guilty pleasure, which I know I ought not to have enjoyed as much as I did, but which, thankfully, was without any serpent-embracings, simulated or otherwise, that I saw, and also without any explanation of what the mythological significance (such as Joseph Campbell was always trying to reveal to us) of such embracing might be--which, frankly, I also much appreciate. But it was an enjoyable black-and-white two-tuber of a trip up the Amazon, with pleasantly chilling reflections on how beastly the rubber trade was to everybody back in the day when rubber extractors were paid by not amputating their hands and arms--apparently the same up the Orinoco as up the Congo with King Leopold, so it seems this movie would have us believe.  But which I had never before heard had been the fate of rubber extractors in the New World.  You'd have thought

Dom Pedro'd have put a stop to it.

Common Core State Standards in Education

I've just been going over YouTube videos expounding elementary-grade level "Common Core" mathematics-teaching curricula:  horrifying when we imagine what it must be doing to the learning processes of children struggling to acquire the basics of subtraction, addition, multiplication and division in the majority of states where this confused, confusing and snottily arbitrary, bastard brain-child of Janet Napolitano (!) has been imposed.  I understand that there are equivalent Common Core pedagogies in English spelling, writing and grammar, but I have not yet encountered them.  Most of the YouTube videos that expound Common Core Curricula, end with a cautionary admonition to those commenting on them not to engage in obscenity or profanity--because for Jesus Fuck Christ's sake, a certain degree of profane obscenity is about the only real, rational, human response to such utter bullshit.

This is the very same Janet Napolitano who, as head of the Homeland Security Department, has so ripely merited decapitation, flaying, dismemberment and evisceration at the hands of a mob wielding tooth-picks, nail clippers and oyster shells.  It seems she has a certain genius.

Actually, one knows that Ms. Napolitano, at a time when she was governor of Arizona, wrote only an initiative that was, in the fullness of time, turned into Common Core Standards by the professional academicians, friends and co-authors David Coleman and Jason Zimba.

The Lechery and the wolvish Predation upon Innocence that the World suddenly woke to, in the 1970's and 80's, as the actual prevailing nature and core reality of clerical and monastic "Celibacy" of Roman Catholicism,

Was (and continues to be) a surprising revelation only to the pathologically naïve and the unread. In fact, it seems on the face of it improbable that mere untutored innocence and credulous ignorance could so successfully have concealed the universal sexual molestation of children and corruption of youth for so many, many centuries.

What did people think that Voltaire meant when he said that the practice of male homosexuality is the primary motivation of those who belong to the Society of Jesus (as he plainly did in his delightful fable Candide)?  Actually, when you read it, he seems just to be saying: This is what people (men, anyway, who are under a vow of celibacy--forsworn never to have sex with women--are really like; and, without being the least bit gay himself, Voltaire rather obviously seems to think that homosexuality is either (1) a natural proclivity in those who are "celibate," or (2) a causative factor in such proclivity, or (3), again without explicitly suggesting it, both. But he is very clear in suggesting that the official hypocrisy of denying that such a proclivity exists is a major factor in the spread of venereal disease among males.

Is there any truth to any of the allegations manufactured by U.S. Security agencies about Russian interference with our 2016 elections?

No.  Don't be ridiculous.

We see, nonetheless, that it isn't just Fox News or the New York Times or the (shudder) Washington Post who are being ridiculous.  It's everybody but me and (possibly) Glenn Greenwald.

But I will say it:  It is not Russia and Vladimir Putin who are the enemy of the people of the United Stares of America--It is the Security agencies, and the Deep State of America who are the enemy of the people of the United states of America, whom for brevity's sake I will hereafter refer to as America.  

The enemies of America are those who imposed the Federal Reserve on us, and the Income Tax, and the Volstead Amendment (Prohibition), and who criminalized drugs, and who contrived our participation in the First World War.  The enemies of America are those who connived at the murder of General Patton in World War II, having diverted funding from the lifting of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and who thereby inflicted the "Hungry Winter" of 1944/45 on that hapless nation. The enemies of America are the advisors of President Truman who invented (made up of whole cloth) the absurd, iniquitous "Cold War," and who were responsible for the genocidal nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for the long imprisonment behind the "Iron Curtain" of the free, blameless citizens of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.  The enemies of America are those who have waged war upon and laid waste the countries of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Yemen. The enemies of America are those who annulled our Constitution with the passage of the Homeland Security and the Patriot Acts. The enemies of America are the TSA and the FISA courts.  The enemies of America are those who practice torture (torture!) in the name of security.

Today is the hundredth anniversary of the murder of the Romanov family...so sad, so brutal and unnecessary

Also, Unser dummer Trump has been to London

Where he was rude to the Queen.  We expected that he would be,

but we're still not sure if it was intentional or not.

Cops Sic Dogs On Suicidal Teen

Parents speak about their child being bitten by police dog

As I've recently said, dogs that bite should be destroyed, and dogs that are trained to bite should be destroyed before they bite someone. It follows, I think, that cops who train dogs to bite kids should be shot in the back of the head at close range (and their families obliged to pay for the bullets).

There's a new HIV Vaccine being tested, developed at Harvard,

Which, they cautiously (scarcely dare say they) hope, will bring us back guilt-free, uninhibited sex with strangers, without   fatal sexually transmitted diseases, within a year.  The way it was until 1979, when there was (or while we thought there was) no AIDS, and we were winning.

So, you may well ask, what kept me (and keeps me) from being infected with HIV?  The first answer is, of course, Luck.  The second answer is a bit more complicated, and has to do with my being born with Venus in Detriment in Virgo, and with my having acquired, early on, a prudent ethical and esthetic philosophy, skeptical, rational and hygienic, with deep reading in history and with what might be seen objectively perhaps as a fanatical reliance on the faculty of intuition.  I had a good time--but not too good a time.  The third answer, of course, is old age, and ceasing to have sex when I turned 50 and it was no longer appropriate.

In any event, hearing the bated breath, viewing the constipated demeanor, of those oh so reluctantly announcing the end of the Great Plague, it does in fact seem likely that the generation born within the last  ten years will enjoy something approaching the sexual freedom known to us who were young in the sixties and seventies  of the last century.  Good on 'em.  May they make as good use of it as we did. ¿You doubt? Well (by opposing the War in Vietnam), we ended military conscription in peacetime in the United States--no mean feat. We legalized marijuana and homosexuality.  We brought back authentic performance on original instruments,  We defeated the ghastly snobbery of the posh Received Pronunciation with the Original Pronunciation of Shakespeare. You wait and see--We will put an end to the corporal punishment of children in the public schools of Red States.  The day may even come when we shall see no actresses in plays written before 1660, their place in the performance of female rôles being taken, as were meet, by boys and young men--even in 'Tis pity she's a Whore.

Dogs that bite should be destroyed.

Dogs that are trained to bite should be destroyed before they bite someone.

Actually, I'm the only one I know who says this, or ever said it, but for political/propagandistic purposes I attribute it to my heroine/guiding light Charlotte Corday: Because, when you think about it, it is a reasonable extrapolation of her Revolutionary Philosophy.  "Revolutionary Ideology" you think perhaps I mean?  Not Philosophy?  No, little Snowflake, I damn-it-all mean Philosophy.   Like when I say, "Kill Cops!"  You may, if you wish, modify it by saying "Kill Militarized Cops!" But the important thing is recognizing that they, like the modern state of Israel, have no right to exist, and, if possible or practicable, slaying them.

I've just finished binge-watching the Canadian TV series "Intelligence" (2005 -- 2007):

Aptly named and wonderfully entertaining.  With unguessable, convoluted plots, plausible villains (multi-national corporate interests, the American Deep State, the CIA, the DEA--and American criminal gangs which are not distinguishable from the CIA and the DEA) exquisitely dissected, fascinating characters, and a point de vue at once realistic (and therefore, of course, pessimistic) and perfectly sane--even, plainly, pro-drug. Not to mention extraordinarily high production values and magnificent acting. Too fine, I guess, for this mortal sphere: it was cancelled after only two seasons.

And please note:  I pronounce "dissect" with a short "i" sound, as in "dissent" and "dissonance." Never, ever, do I say "die-sect."  I would die before I did that.

Auferre,trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

Speaking of the Deep State's appalling/horrifying military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the Yemen.  And particularly, with reference to the "solitudinem (quam) fecerunt," of the NATO bombing of the water supply system of Libya: The fucking, slime-ass barbarians.

"African American"

Is a term I never use.  Nor do I ever say, "people of color."  My standard term for people of a sub-Saharan complexion is "black," or, exceptionally, "negro."  And it will be a cool day in Baton Rouge before I ever shall use language which strikes me as at once ridiculously grandiloquent and stupidly inexact.

God is not dead:

For that would imply that He was once alive.

I have not seen the TV series "Gaycation," nor do I think I ever shall,

given the (apparently unconsciously) heteronormative blanket insult to gay men inherent in its premises: that (1) there might be some putative queer-unity of communal identity  among the disparate categories taken, wrongly, together, as though there were some connection among them, in the acronym "GLB"; and (2) that the male and the female homosexualities might have anything at all in common with one another, in character or in kind. Only women, or nastily effeminate wights, could have erred so egregiously in positing a belief so false, corrupt and vilely demeaning to men as that which holds that there is something (anything whatsoever) similar in Lesbianism to gay men's exclusive sexual preference for other men.

You'll notice that there is no 'T' in my version of the Rainbow Acronym--and that I begin it with a 'G,' not an 'L.'  And I'm sure that my meaning is clear.