Lucia and the Prisoners

Today's dawdle - a blog I read mentioned the Cornish sheep-counting rubric.  (I had to spend five minutes staring at my bookmarks list, which is not extensive, to try and recall the name of the blog.)  This had me searching the rubric to see what videos appeared.  In it I found an unrelated but brief list of uncommon videos (of which four have been deleted).  It turns out that this is a playlist put together by the official Youtube account of the band British Sea Power, who I have not heard.

We've all tried these things - curation, right?  You have something and you want to organize it, put together lists of your favorites, and share that way.  But that's not the way Youtube works.  Youtube doesn't care what you like.  It works under its own inscrutable logic, logic that brings you inexorably to the same places.  Typically this involves Joe Rogan.  I don't know why.  I hate Youtube because of this.

But the curators still exist, and if you try really hard (for some reason it seems to be easier when I browse Youtube in Porn Mode, when you force it to forget your past) you can find things that way.  This is why I am watching a video from 2014 called "Lucia and the Prisoners".  It uses words like "entheogenic" and "transcendental", which means that some people who call themselves doctors are conducting experiments to try and get prisoners high.  The video itself is extremely striking and compelling.  It reminds one of A Clockwork Orange, certainly, and of orgone, and of, and here is something that in fact has a sound and credible empirical basis, my own experiences with transcranial magnetic stimulation.  Except that while I was getting TMS I watched nature documentaries and "The Last Jedi" on Netflix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcSQ-RldqG4&list=PL5wNIzQH-MF-fmB7pBZQvPooElwMnCuZD&index=4

This video racked up 1,376 views between April 19, 2014 and March 26, 2020.

Here's another video I found while searching.  This is fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Lhuw2ukvQ

It has that fantastic quality of being technologically mediated.  The poster plays an old tape they got from their relatives, many years ago, on a cheap transistor Walkman.  Then they holds his camera in front of the walkman and films it, through what pirates like to call the "analog hole".  The camera shakes for the whole video.  The filmer is trying to be quiet but makes noise anyway.  Halfway through they reach down and fiddle with the volume.

As far as I can tell this is the only circulating digital copy of this obscure children's cassette.  The song is fantastic.  I'm not really into children's records but this is just an amazing top-quality bit of folk music.