An intrinsic part of writing an ongoing character is character revision. Very few characters emerge fully-formed from the head of Zeus.
It's a fraught exercise. Since characters, unlike humans, have no independent existence outside of the mind of the observer, they face backlash, hatred, rejection at every corner. We know about them only through third parties - someone says "This is who Superman is" and if we don't like it we can get very upset indeed.
Because I understand myself through these characters. Because "queer erasure" erases me. It took me forty years to reach even this basic simple point in my life because humans don't come fully-formed from Zeus either, because from birth we have all been told who we can and can't be.
Queerness, then, is a particularly fraught form of character revision, a battle fought over and over on every media front. Do I exaggerate to call it a life and death battle? I'm alive. I have friends that aren't. Of course the world is complicated but my experience is that it's really hard to be happy and functional without also being able to be who one genuinely is.
That's a pretty heavy introduction and what I'm trying to talk about is a little bit lighter than that. I want to talk about accidents, people stumbling around blindly in the dark trying to express a truth they don't quite understand, horrible mistakes like Silence of the Lambs, Roxy and Poison in Final Fight, that awful mid-'70s episode of that doctor show time has forgotten where Dr. Kildare or Marcus Welby or some asshole like that convinced a man he wasn't _really_ gay, and mistakes I rather like, like "Lola" by the Kinks. I want to talk about that old character in the Legion of Super Heroes, I don't remember the name, who was written as implicitly gay and then when they panicked and tried to straighten him out the only way they could think to do so was by making him trans instead.
I'm not quite up to doing that well today, so instead I'll leave you with this thumbnail sketch. If I'm going to write about something today, I feel like it needs to be something at least somewhat important. I can't come on here today and just talk about the three different live videos of "Ladytron" from when Eno was in the band, to do so seems trivial and insulting. Another time perhaps.
Sunday, 31 May 2020
Saturday, 30 May 2020
Ephemera
One of the effects of the way I live my life is that I pay a lot of attention to minor details. I don't know why that is. On my good days I like to say that I revel in ordinary life. On my bad days I think of it as a form of hypervigilance or rumination. Whatever the reason, there are things that other people notice that I don't, and conversely things that don't seem to matter to other people that are important to me.
Here's an example. At work we have this "incentive program" where they ask us to complete a number of activities which are supposed to "keep us healthy". It's not a popular program. I tend to think of it as another example of Silicon Valley snake oil, something that's supposed to provide "deliverable outcomes" but is implemented in such a fashion that it's easy to interpret as gatekeeping.
Anyway. 20 points for viewing inspirational quotes! I do this every day for six months of the year until the computer tells me I have enough points and then I stop. This quote stuck out to me:
Garden Your Body
Getting Active Card
"Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are our gardeners." - Shakespeare
“Shakespeare”! Well, you know, Shakespeare wrote a lot of things. Hardly a proper citation. Well, no matter, I can always Google the quote and find the source.
Othello! Act I, Scene 3. Roderigo is complaining to Iago that he is too much in love with a woman to control his feelings.
IAGO
Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost'rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. Whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.
So, Iago – who has long been widely considered the most evil of Shakespeare’s villains – is here counseling Roderigo. Virtue? Nonsense! Love? Nonsense! No such thing. There is nothing but what we ourselves will, and it is this will which will in the end triumph. Iago continues:
IAGO
It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man. Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies! I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness.
A lust of the blood! Drown cats and blind puppies! Well, I’m bloody inspired, for sure.
It gets better than that, though. I do seem to recall - and I haven't verified this, so it could be hearsay - that "will" was Elizabethan slang for sexual potency. So, in some sense, this "motivational" quote, in context, is telling us to for God's sake, go on and fuck something already!
What's interesting to me is that this presents a well-known text as a palimpsest, shorn of the (honestly sort of crude and offensive) meaning intended by the author and given a, err, sort of panglossian gloss. I'm not a stickler for original intent; it's interesting in an academic sense but seems to have little bearing on how we live our lives. When understanding why things happen, why they are the way they are, knowing the objective truth is, of course, invaluable, but it is also valuable to know what people, in practice, believe and why they believe it.
I have a book by a gentleman by the name of Maurice Rickards entitled "The Encyclopedia of Ephemera". It's a big coffee-table book guide to all of the weird things people collect. Opening to a page at pseudorandom I find, on page 200, "Lunacy Papers". You can see why this is of great interest to people today. I understand myself today better if I understand how people under other circumstances, in other conditions, lived their daily lives. This in turn makes me more critical of the ephemeral conditions I am living under, the nonsense we live with and take for granted.
I attach here a few bits of ephemera. The first is something printed on the back of an ATM receipt from the downtown Beaverton Fred Meyer. It reads:
cash is freedom
cash is social
cash is control
in a sans serif font, the last word of each line bolded. This is accompanied by a picture of a dog sticking its head out a car window.
My initial response to this was that it was a weird twist on a Bazooka Joe wrapper, but there is, I think, more going on here than its placement in the pantheon of questionable advertising.
(Here, for instance, is a 1906 poster for Mackintosh Toffee which I find endlessly amusing and have tacked up in my work cubicle:)
No, revisiting this wrapper today it reminds me of nothing so much as the Wacky Aunt memes a friend of mine keeps posting. It's easy for me to get a bad feeling from a lot of them. They are designed to propagate superficially without the people viewing them or passing them on really thinking about the deeper meaning they might have, and a lot of them, honestly, they're pretty defensive about behavior that I would consider to be potentially abusive. Example: "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best." Accompanied, like this photo is, with a stock image which bears no apparent relation whatsoever to the text. Life imitates Un Chien Andalou.
With ephemera like this, authorial intent is difficult to actually divine. I need to take things like these in a Baudrillardian sense and read it contextually, with no reference to intent.
The repeated slogans mostly evoke to me the three slogans of Oceania from Orwell's "1984", Oceania's credo so to speak:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
It's not just that these statements are absurd, it's that, as with any credo, their truth value is irrelevant. They are empty slogans repeated, in places where they cannot meaningfully be questioned, until they are taken to be true. Linguistically it springs from not just Orwell's Newspeak but from Carroll's Humpty Dumpty.
So I have it on my makeup mirror as a memento. I'm not likely to forget the absurdity of this world but I keep it around in case I'm tempted.
The other thing I have is from the back of a Splenda packet I had with my tea this morning.
It reads:
Be Happy!
It drives other people crazy!
"Be Happy" is in bold and italics. This has a childlike drawing of a smiling mouth below it in red.
Maybe I am really disconnected from the world, but I do find it shocking. This, to me, evokes Conan the Barbarian's answer to the question "What is best in life?"
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
I guess there a lot of people who really do genuinely live by that ethos. I have a hard time whenever I am confronted with that reality.
Here's an example. At work we have this "incentive program" where they ask us to complete a number of activities which are supposed to "keep us healthy". It's not a popular program. I tend to think of it as another example of Silicon Valley snake oil, something that's supposed to provide "deliverable outcomes" but is implemented in such a fashion that it's easy to interpret as gatekeeping.
Anyway. 20 points for viewing inspirational quotes! I do this every day for six months of the year until the computer tells me I have enough points and then I stop. This quote stuck out to me:
Garden Your Body
Getting Active Card
"Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are our gardeners." - Shakespeare
“Shakespeare”! Well, you know, Shakespeare wrote a lot of things. Hardly a proper citation. Well, no matter, I can always Google the quote and find the source.
Othello! Act I, Scene 3. Roderigo is complaining to Iago that he is too much in love with a woman to control his feelings.
IAGO
Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost'rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. Whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.
So, Iago – who has long been widely considered the most evil of Shakespeare’s villains – is here counseling Roderigo. Virtue? Nonsense! Love? Nonsense! No such thing. There is nothing but what we ourselves will, and it is this will which will in the end triumph. Iago continues:
IAGO
It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man. Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies! I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness.
A lust of the blood! Drown cats and blind puppies! Well, I’m bloody inspired, for sure.
It gets better than that, though. I do seem to recall - and I haven't verified this, so it could be hearsay - that "will" was Elizabethan slang for sexual potency. So, in some sense, this "motivational" quote, in context, is telling us to for God's sake, go on and fuck something already!
What's interesting to me is that this presents a well-known text as a palimpsest, shorn of the (honestly sort of crude and offensive) meaning intended by the author and given a, err, sort of panglossian gloss. I'm not a stickler for original intent; it's interesting in an academic sense but seems to have little bearing on how we live our lives. When understanding why things happen, why they are the way they are, knowing the objective truth is, of course, invaluable, but it is also valuable to know what people, in practice, believe and why they believe it.
I have a book by a gentleman by the name of Maurice Rickards entitled "The Encyclopedia of Ephemera". It's a big coffee-table book guide to all of the weird things people collect. Opening to a page at pseudorandom I find, on page 200, "Lunacy Papers". You can see why this is of great interest to people today. I understand myself today better if I understand how people under other circumstances, in other conditions, lived their daily lives. This in turn makes me more critical of the ephemeral conditions I am living under, the nonsense we live with and take for granted.
I attach here a few bits of ephemera. The first is something printed on the back of an ATM receipt from the downtown Beaverton Fred Meyer. It reads:
cash is freedom
cash is social
cash is control
in a sans serif font, the last word of each line bolded. This is accompanied by a picture of a dog sticking its head out a car window.
My initial response to this was that it was a weird twist on a Bazooka Joe wrapper, but there is, I think, more going on here than its placement in the pantheon of questionable advertising.
(Here, for instance, is a 1906 poster for Mackintosh Toffee which I find endlessly amusing and have tacked up in my work cubicle:)
No, revisiting this wrapper today it reminds me of nothing so much as the Wacky Aunt memes a friend of mine keeps posting. It's easy for me to get a bad feeling from a lot of them. They are designed to propagate superficially without the people viewing them or passing them on really thinking about the deeper meaning they might have, and a lot of them, honestly, they're pretty defensive about behavior that I would consider to be potentially abusive. Example: "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best." Accompanied, like this photo is, with a stock image which bears no apparent relation whatsoever to the text. Life imitates Un Chien Andalou.
With ephemera like this, authorial intent is difficult to actually divine. I need to take things like these in a Baudrillardian sense and read it contextually, with no reference to intent.
The repeated slogans mostly evoke to me the three slogans of Oceania from Orwell's "1984", Oceania's credo so to speak:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
It's not just that these statements are absurd, it's that, as with any credo, their truth value is irrelevant. They are empty slogans repeated, in places where they cannot meaningfully be questioned, until they are taken to be true. Linguistically it springs from not just Orwell's Newspeak but from Carroll's Humpty Dumpty.
So I have it on my makeup mirror as a memento. I'm not likely to forget the absurdity of this world but I keep it around in case I'm tempted.
The other thing I have is from the back of a Splenda packet I had with my tea this morning.
It reads:
Be Happy!
It drives other people crazy!
"Be Happy" is in bold and italics. This has a childlike drawing of a smiling mouth below it in red.
Maybe I am really disconnected from the world, but I do find it shocking. This, to me, evokes Conan the Barbarian's answer to the question "What is best in life?"
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
I guess there a lot of people who really do genuinely live by that ethos. I have a hard time whenever I am confronted with that reality.
Friday, 29 May 2020
Homegrown Prog
Trying to work myself into some lighter fare. Having difficulty. I can get to the point where I'm exploring weird little corners but actually explaining those corners is challenging.
Part of trying to cut back from old places that aren't working for me is trying to find new places. There's a local radio station called XRAY here in Portland, sort of along the "freeform" way of doing things. I got out of the habit of listening to the radio back when I lived in Indiana, but here there's radio that plays human-curated music of interest to me.
But since I am a digger, the other day I got around to digging. What DJs are on the station? What sort of music do they play? What can I learn from it?
And honestly I learn a lot more by listening, and I'm starting to develop the patience for it again. But the thing I found by digging that I don't think I would have come across if I didn't... DJ Cozmic Edward's radio show at 6 AM on Saturday morning. He did a show a couple weeks back called "Homegrown Prog".
https://xray.fm/broadcasts/34337
This is the sort of thing that drives me to look for things. I was previously vaguely aware of the existence of the sort of music on this broadcast. Mainly I am aware of it through the writing of Ash Ra Tom, a '70s record obsessive with a particular interest in a nameless genre that he describes as "Midwestern Progressive Rock of the 1970s". Here's his list, which I note that he just revised earlier this month so it's pretty up-to-date:
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/ashratom/usa-midwest-ontario-progressive-rock-1970s_early-80s/
The music DJ Cozmic Edward's radio show doesn't have the strict geographic demarcation of Tom's list, but from listening to the music I hear a distinct stylistic kinship to the bands on the list. Not only is it good music, this is music that is more obscure than even groups like Random and Graced Lightning known only to a few obsessive freaks.
See, I've sort of evolved in my thinking about "lost media" from focusing on things that are already gone to things that might one day be gone. All of the missing Doctor Who episodes were destroyed when I was an infant, long before I had even heard of the show. It's great that so many have been recovered, but I can't help but think that it's easier to keep things from being lost in the first place than to recover them when they're gone.
And what is in danger of being lost? Things nobody cares about. Things so few people care about that nobody even remembers they exist. Things with few copies of them made. The radio station records of the 1970s and 1980s seem to me to be a textbook example of endangered media.
DJ Cozmic Edward credits the work of Tony Coulter for bringing the music to broader attention. Coulter is an unbelievably knowledgable WFMU DJ who has brought uncountable numbers of recordings to wider prominence and I'm not surprised to hear of his involvement. Oddly enough it seems much of the rediscovery of the 70s radio station recordings comes from a resurgence of interest in soft rock, rather than progressive rock. Earlier waves of revivalism, such as Irwin Chusid's "outsider" movement, focused bizarre music, strange and odd music. Music which is in some sense really the opposite of the soft rock here, which is smooth and professional.
This is something that Ash Ra Tom brings up in his list on Midwest Progressive Rock - the biggest-name examplar of this sort of music is Kansas. America never really had a lot of homegrown progressive rock bands, and I'm starting to conclude that a lot of it was label gatekeeping. American labels, it seems, were just not interested in signing or promoting the bands making music like Kansas, even in the days when Emerson, Lake, and Palmer could headline major music festivals and fill stadiums.
I can't say this is a great loss to posterity. I'm not going to excoriate the evil labels for not spending enough time promoting the well-done but ultimately unexceptional work of privileged suburban white kids. I am going to say that I do like a lot of this music and I'm glad to have a chance to hear it, glad that some of it at least has not ceased to exist, love that in 1978 a band called Trout Fishing in America recorded a prog tune called "High in the Highlands" for a record made by radio station KDKB in Arizona and that I can hear that song now.
I'm not a huge fan of the song, exactly - there's better songs in the hour. But I am, of course, a Richard Brautigan fan.
I had to look and see if the record is even listed on Discogs. It's not. Discogs lists two bands called Trout Fishing in America. One has no info on it at all except that they released a single called "Proto 1 / Bun Hugger Boy". No label. All I can find is that it was pressed by Wakefield Manufacturing, which was a defunct pressing plant in Phoenix. Maybe it's them! Hard to say:
https://www.discogs.com/label/367883-Wakefield-Manufacturing
The other are apparently much better known - they even have their own Wikipedia page!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_Fishing_in_America_(duo)
They mostly make children's music, it looks like, and were based in Houston during the time this record was made. I guess they got played on Dr. Demento and NPR and are on one of those Putomayo comps as well.
Incidentally, best band name I found researching this list "Stickler of the Ultramundane". They were apparently an Ohio-based Doors knockoff band who put out one EP. Not on Discogs. Googling it in quotes gives you one link to an Ebay auction that's ended.
Part of trying to cut back from old places that aren't working for me is trying to find new places. There's a local radio station called XRAY here in Portland, sort of along the "freeform" way of doing things. I got out of the habit of listening to the radio back when I lived in Indiana, but here there's radio that plays human-curated music of interest to me.
But since I am a digger, the other day I got around to digging. What DJs are on the station? What sort of music do they play? What can I learn from it?
And honestly I learn a lot more by listening, and I'm starting to develop the patience for it again. But the thing I found by digging that I don't think I would have come across if I didn't... DJ Cozmic Edward's radio show at 6 AM on Saturday morning. He did a show a couple weeks back called "Homegrown Prog".
https://xray.fm/broadcasts/34337
This is the sort of thing that drives me to look for things. I was previously vaguely aware of the existence of the sort of music on this broadcast. Mainly I am aware of it through the writing of Ash Ra Tom, a '70s record obsessive with a particular interest in a nameless genre that he describes as "Midwestern Progressive Rock of the 1970s". Here's his list, which I note that he just revised earlier this month so it's pretty up-to-date:
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/ashratom/usa-midwest-ontario-progressive-rock-1970s_early-80s/
The music DJ Cozmic Edward's radio show doesn't have the strict geographic demarcation of Tom's list, but from listening to the music I hear a distinct stylistic kinship to the bands on the list. Not only is it good music, this is music that is more obscure than even groups like Random and Graced Lightning known only to a few obsessive freaks.
See, I've sort of evolved in my thinking about "lost media" from focusing on things that are already gone to things that might one day be gone. All of the missing Doctor Who episodes were destroyed when I was an infant, long before I had even heard of the show. It's great that so many have been recovered, but I can't help but think that it's easier to keep things from being lost in the first place than to recover them when they're gone.
And what is in danger of being lost? Things nobody cares about. Things so few people care about that nobody even remembers they exist. Things with few copies of them made. The radio station records of the 1970s and 1980s seem to me to be a textbook example of endangered media.
DJ Cozmic Edward credits the work of Tony Coulter for bringing the music to broader attention. Coulter is an unbelievably knowledgable WFMU DJ who has brought uncountable numbers of recordings to wider prominence and I'm not surprised to hear of his involvement. Oddly enough it seems much of the rediscovery of the 70s radio station recordings comes from a resurgence of interest in soft rock, rather than progressive rock. Earlier waves of revivalism, such as Irwin Chusid's "outsider" movement, focused bizarre music, strange and odd music. Music which is in some sense really the opposite of the soft rock here, which is smooth and professional.
This is something that Ash Ra Tom brings up in his list on Midwest Progressive Rock - the biggest-name examplar of this sort of music is Kansas. America never really had a lot of homegrown progressive rock bands, and I'm starting to conclude that a lot of it was label gatekeeping. American labels, it seems, were just not interested in signing or promoting the bands making music like Kansas, even in the days when Emerson, Lake, and Palmer could headline major music festivals and fill stadiums.
I can't say this is a great loss to posterity. I'm not going to excoriate the evil labels for not spending enough time promoting the well-done but ultimately unexceptional work of privileged suburban white kids. I am going to say that I do like a lot of this music and I'm glad to have a chance to hear it, glad that some of it at least has not ceased to exist, love that in 1978 a band called Trout Fishing in America recorded a prog tune called "High in the Highlands" for a record made by radio station KDKB in Arizona and that I can hear that song now.
I'm not a huge fan of the song, exactly - there's better songs in the hour. But I am, of course, a Richard Brautigan fan.
I had to look and see if the record is even listed on Discogs. It's not. Discogs lists two bands called Trout Fishing in America. One has no info on it at all except that they released a single called "Proto 1 / Bun Hugger Boy". No label. All I can find is that it was pressed by Wakefield Manufacturing, which was a defunct pressing plant in Phoenix. Maybe it's them! Hard to say:
https://www.discogs.com/label/367883-Wakefield-Manufacturing
The other are apparently much better known - they even have their own Wikipedia page!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_Fishing_in_America_(duo)
They mostly make children's music, it looks like, and were based in Houston during the time this record was made. I guess they got played on Dr. Demento and NPR and are on one of those Putomayo comps as well.
Incidentally, best band name I found researching this list "Stickler of the Ultramundane". They were apparently an Ohio-based Doors knockoff band who put out one EP. Not on Discogs. Googling it in quotes gives you one link to an Ebay auction that's ended.
Thursday, 28 May 2020
The Right To Be Forgotten
I find it perversely hilarious whenever someone over in Europe speaks of "the right to be forgotten". There's a sort of bleakness to such theorising. The "rights" they are proposing are so far from my experience, so far from my reality, that they're hard for me to take seriously.
To me, being forgotten isn't so much a "right" as an inevitability. Given enough time, everything will be forgotten. Everything we are, everything we know, will be lost.
I struggle against that, have struggled against that for a long time. There's a lot of the fear of death in there, of dying not just bodily, but of dying so completely that nobody remembers I existed. That prospect has been a hard one to come to terms with.
As I get older, as I change, it gets more complicated than that. There are things about my past I would genuinely like people to forget, because being reminded of them causes me pain. The name my parents gave me, for instance - it hurts me to be called by that name.
Mainly, I think, because it's hard for me to recognize that I am no longer that person, that I have changed. There's a thing that a lot of people like me do, is we take recent photos of ourselves and put them up against old photos of ourselves from before. I have this strong desire to prove to myself and others that I have changed, that I'm not who I once was.
That's what "the right to be forgotten" is, right? The right to be recognized for who we are, not for who we were?
I don't have control over that, and that is a hard thing for me to deal with sometimes.
I try to stay off social media, but I am dimly aware of some of the challenges Black Dresses have been going through.
I believe it is reasonable to expect others to not make a mockery of one's personal trauma. Like, I feel silly even having to say that, but I do. Devi didn't put her trauma out there in the world so that other people could make fun of it.
It's a big world and there are a lot of fucked up people in it. That's not an excuse thing, that's just, you know, there are people who can't or won't treat their fellow human beings with basic respect. As much as it pains me to say it, I understand that happens. I understand, too, needing to pretend otherwise, understand the pain when that facade breaks.
"Forgotten", I guess, that's not really the right phrasing. I can't forget who I was, where I am, what this world is. I just wish I didn't have to be _reminded_ of these things all the fucking time.
To me, being forgotten isn't so much a "right" as an inevitability. Given enough time, everything will be forgotten. Everything we are, everything we know, will be lost.
I struggle against that, have struggled against that for a long time. There's a lot of the fear of death in there, of dying not just bodily, but of dying so completely that nobody remembers I existed. That prospect has been a hard one to come to terms with.
As I get older, as I change, it gets more complicated than that. There are things about my past I would genuinely like people to forget, because being reminded of them causes me pain. The name my parents gave me, for instance - it hurts me to be called by that name.
Mainly, I think, because it's hard for me to recognize that I am no longer that person, that I have changed. There's a thing that a lot of people like me do, is we take recent photos of ourselves and put them up against old photos of ourselves from before. I have this strong desire to prove to myself and others that I have changed, that I'm not who I once was.
That's what "the right to be forgotten" is, right? The right to be recognized for who we are, not for who we were?
I don't have control over that, and that is a hard thing for me to deal with sometimes.
I try to stay off social media, but I am dimly aware of some of the challenges Black Dresses have been going through.
I believe it is reasonable to expect others to not make a mockery of one's personal trauma. Like, I feel silly even having to say that, but I do. Devi didn't put her trauma out there in the world so that other people could make fun of it.
It's a big world and there are a lot of fucked up people in it. That's not an excuse thing, that's just, you know, there are people who can't or won't treat their fellow human beings with basic respect. As much as it pains me to say it, I understand that happens. I understand, too, needing to pretend otherwise, understand the pain when that facade breaks.
"Forgotten", I guess, that's not really the right phrasing. I can't forget who I was, where I am, what this world is. I just wish I didn't have to be _reminded_ of these things all the fucking time.
Monday, 25 May 2020
Skullfuck Vs. The Dancing Bears
I have this elaborate headcanon around the band The Grateful Dead, who I don't actually like, who I genuinely believe are terrible, but who I listen to all the time. It's complicated.
In my head, the band known to the world as "The Grateful Dead" are actually two separate bands. The first, active from 1966-1974, was known as "Skullfuck", and the second, active from 1977-1995, was known as "The Dancing Bears". These two bands had the same members, played a lot of the same songs, and are commonly grouped together by their fans. The difference is one of purpose and intent. Skullfuck, you see, were a drug band masquerading as a rock band. They toured mainly as a pretext for distributing large amounts of LSD around the United States and beyond. That's not to say that they didn't genuinely did love music. All of them loved music, couldn't get enough of playing it, particularly when they were high, which was always. But since they were constantly high, their abilities to perform were limited. While most of them were, individually, decent-to-great musicians, they couldn't sing in tune, couldn't play unison riffs. Despite this they made some extraordinary music, and a lot of it was recorded to tape, because their drug connection was also a huge recording nerd.
It was a precarious and unpleasant existence. They were always being harassed, always under pressure, and having a lifestyle based entirely around drug abuse didn't necessarily make them the most emotionally healthy human beings. Eventually, at the end of 1974, it all fell apart.
But it didn't stay that way, because none of them really had anywhere else to go. So they got back together, after a couple years, as the Dancing Bears, who were the rock and roll band Skullfuck were pretending to be. They were still high all the time, still completely dysfunctional, and on top of that worn down, worn out, broken. But this time, the music came first. They were capable of things as the Dancing Bears that they weren't as Skullfuck. Primarily, they could function as a business, which they didn't quite manage before. They had a large and devoted fanbase, and the Dancing Bears wanted to play music for them, not slip acid in their tea.
My personal allegiance is to Skullfuck. I think the Dancing Bears had some OK stuff. I can see why a lot of people go for them. They could play as a band in a way Skullfuck seldom did. But they also lacked the complete unpredictability, the feeling that they were teetering on the edge of chaos, that things would fall apart at any second. It was there, mind you, but when it came out it was mostly just sad rather than transcendent.
So here's my emerging theory. The question is, what made Skullfuck quit playing a song? Nobody ever really has an answer to that. They start playing songs, they quit playing songs, there's no reason for any of it most of the time. My emerging theory is that they have a certain approach to songs - they're puzzles that they try to figure out, and once they figure it out to their satisfaction, they move on to something else. Well, you know, why else quit playing a song, right? With most bands, the tour's over, you work up new material, you work up a new set, you rehearse that, but Skullfuck didn't work that way. They almost never figured out how to actually play a song before performing it in concert. Their live debuts of songs are notorious for being train wrecks. They're disaster artists.
So to distract myself from life today I have been working through a list of material they played and quit playing before October of '74, and listening to the last performances, to see how it holds up. Here's what I've come up with.
Here Comes Sunshine: See, this was an odd one, they didn't start playing it until '73, and then they played it once at the beginning of '74 and that was it. God only knows. In this case, the last performance is pretty good, but it's the second to last performance that's the one that's really acclaimed as the best ever. Who knows why they played it at Winterland on Feb 23, 1974? It was a weird one-off. They didn't have time to come off with new material. Whatever the case: This doesn't quite follow the "last = best" pattern, but it gets pretty close!
Bird Song: Another "dropped in '73" beloved song. There's only a couple of these and I haven't heard most of them. This one didn't even make it to the end of '73, dropping out after a performance on Sep 15. This one, like a lot of the ones that'll follow, only survives on an audience tape, which means most deadheads haven't and won't hear it. And you know what, yeah, I will say this is one of the great ones. One can quibble as to whether or not it's better than the Veneta or Vancouver versions, but it's genuinely up there. Mostly what lets it down is that Jerry's singing is pretty bad. You know what? It usually was.
Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks): There's kind of a good reason they quit playing the Pigpen songs, being as he left the band to go die and all. Also, they did bring this one back before the hiatus in October '74, but I'm deciding to tactically ignore that for now (haven't heard it, might later). That said, this absolutely does fit the pattern. The last performance of Pigpen's "Anthem of the Sun" closer took place on May 11, 1972. I'm iffy on Pigpen as a whole. A lot of his time in the band consists of him exhorting men to try and fuck women at great length, and that's not the sort of thing that super interests me. This is a goddamn ripsnorting performance, though. I know, really controversial opinion, stop the presses, Kate says that a Dead performance on the Europe '72 tour is good. Ah, you know, maybe it gets a little overlooked, this performance? I mean, I overlooked it, coming is it does like right after the longest and actually possibly the greatest Dark Star ever performed.
Turn On Your Lovelight: Probably the song most associated with Pigpen, and another one that had its last performance on the Europe '72 tour. In this case, though, I'm gonna break with precedent and say this isn't the best version. Again, we're talking about something I never liked much in the first place, so that might not count for much. Still - it's even shorter than the "Live/Dead" version, and the "Live/Dead" version, believe it or not, is one of the briefer versions he did. Even at only 12 minutes it's an ordeal, though.
Good Lovin': Yep, another Pigpen tune they quit doing after Europe '72. Last performance: May 25, 1972. Fantastic version? Check. Arguably better than the version from the Fillmore East Apr 1971 gigs. The thing is by this time the band doesn't just let Pigpen's, uh, "charisma" carry the whole thing along; they've genuinely figured out how to support him while still making things interesting. This just isn't something that happens much in his earlier performances. He overpowers the rest of them. They vamp while he goes to town. In these performances he goes to town and they go to town and if it's not quite the same town they're sort of in the same general vicinity.
Alligator: Pigpen's other "Anthem of the Sun" tune. Last played: April 1971 Fillmore gigs. I don't like this song and never much have. The jam from the Family Dog on Nov 1, 1969 is decent. That's all I can say for it. Here they play the song and there a too-long drum solo and some jamming that some people do like and I just don't much.
Ripple: Another one they quit playing in April '71. This one is part of that whole "Americana" thing they did mostly between '69 and '71. Good songs but but they never quite managed to nail songs like these live and electric. Honestly this side of them just worked better in the studio, as far as I can tell.
Clementine: An obscure one for sure, never released on a studio album. Also a textbook example of "well, good enough, moving on" - after a year's absence they brought it in January '69 back for one of the early shows recorded for Live/Dead, did the best ever version of it, and never played it again.
Cosmic Charlie: A fan favorite for some inscrutable reason. It's kind of a dumb goofy song, but there are some decent enough versions that don't sound like some kind of sub-par Flo & Eddie comedy music. One of these versions, unsurprisingly, is the final performance from early '71. As these things go I prefer the version from Oct 24 1969, which actually segues pretty well from "The Other One", probably purely by accident.
Dancin' in the Street: Another Pigpen tune! People fucking love its later disco incarnation for some reason. Last performance: New Years' Eve 1971->72, as a set opener no less. It's sort of a mixed bag, but only because there's some dumbass deciding to give a play-by-play on whatever tasteless debauchery is occuring on stage while they're playing. The actual performance... well, the jam from May 6, 1970 is unquestionably better, but on that version the performance of the actual song portion is so cringeworthy that I actually edited out the bit with the singing. This one is way more digestible in its entirety.
Death Don't Have No Mercy: Last played Mar 21, 1970. Audience tape only, but a super, super fine version. Theory supported.
The Eleven: Another audience tape, Apr 24, 1970. Epic, all-time version. Last=best, absolutely.
St. Stephen: This one, on the other hand, dragged its heels around for a while after "The Eleven" was dropped. It took its final bow on Halloween 1971, and frankly it sounded kind of anemic and lethargic by that time. This is another one of the "psychedelic" era tunes that comes across to me as a little fussy and overwritten, but a lot of fans seem to like that sort of thing.
Viola Lee Blues: Here's another one that had its last performance on Halloween - this time Halloween 1970. The band were clearly in a shitty mood that day and half-assed the whole concert, including this last-ever version of Viola Lee Blues. The previous performance, from a Fillmore East show in July, wasn't too much to sing about either. On the other hand, the THIRD-to last performance on May 2, 1970 was indeed all-time. Still, it's a bit of a stretch to say that this fits the pattern. Viola Lee Blues did _not_ go out on top.
New Potato Caboose: Lesh's number from side one of Anthem of the Sun, however, definitely does fit the "last = best" pattern. Last performed on Jun 8, 1969, and it kills.
In my head, the band known to the world as "The Grateful Dead" are actually two separate bands. The first, active from 1966-1974, was known as "Skullfuck", and the second, active from 1977-1995, was known as "The Dancing Bears". These two bands had the same members, played a lot of the same songs, and are commonly grouped together by their fans. The difference is one of purpose and intent. Skullfuck, you see, were a drug band masquerading as a rock band. They toured mainly as a pretext for distributing large amounts of LSD around the United States and beyond. That's not to say that they didn't genuinely did love music. All of them loved music, couldn't get enough of playing it, particularly when they were high, which was always. But since they were constantly high, their abilities to perform were limited. While most of them were, individually, decent-to-great musicians, they couldn't sing in tune, couldn't play unison riffs. Despite this they made some extraordinary music, and a lot of it was recorded to tape, because their drug connection was also a huge recording nerd.
It was a precarious and unpleasant existence. They were always being harassed, always under pressure, and having a lifestyle based entirely around drug abuse didn't necessarily make them the most emotionally healthy human beings. Eventually, at the end of 1974, it all fell apart.
But it didn't stay that way, because none of them really had anywhere else to go. So they got back together, after a couple years, as the Dancing Bears, who were the rock and roll band Skullfuck were pretending to be. They were still high all the time, still completely dysfunctional, and on top of that worn down, worn out, broken. But this time, the music came first. They were capable of things as the Dancing Bears that they weren't as Skullfuck. Primarily, they could function as a business, which they didn't quite manage before. They had a large and devoted fanbase, and the Dancing Bears wanted to play music for them, not slip acid in their tea.
My personal allegiance is to Skullfuck. I think the Dancing Bears had some OK stuff. I can see why a lot of people go for them. They could play as a band in a way Skullfuck seldom did. But they also lacked the complete unpredictability, the feeling that they were teetering on the edge of chaos, that things would fall apart at any second. It was there, mind you, but when it came out it was mostly just sad rather than transcendent.
So here's my emerging theory. The question is, what made Skullfuck quit playing a song? Nobody ever really has an answer to that. They start playing songs, they quit playing songs, there's no reason for any of it most of the time. My emerging theory is that they have a certain approach to songs - they're puzzles that they try to figure out, and once they figure it out to their satisfaction, they move on to something else. Well, you know, why else quit playing a song, right? With most bands, the tour's over, you work up new material, you work up a new set, you rehearse that, but Skullfuck didn't work that way. They almost never figured out how to actually play a song before performing it in concert. Their live debuts of songs are notorious for being train wrecks. They're disaster artists.
So to distract myself from life today I have been working through a list of material they played and quit playing before October of '74, and listening to the last performances, to see how it holds up. Here's what I've come up with.
Here Comes Sunshine: See, this was an odd one, they didn't start playing it until '73, and then they played it once at the beginning of '74 and that was it. God only knows. In this case, the last performance is pretty good, but it's the second to last performance that's the one that's really acclaimed as the best ever. Who knows why they played it at Winterland on Feb 23, 1974? It was a weird one-off. They didn't have time to come off with new material. Whatever the case: This doesn't quite follow the "last = best" pattern, but it gets pretty close!
Bird Song: Another "dropped in '73" beloved song. There's only a couple of these and I haven't heard most of them. This one didn't even make it to the end of '73, dropping out after a performance on Sep 15. This one, like a lot of the ones that'll follow, only survives on an audience tape, which means most deadheads haven't and won't hear it. And you know what, yeah, I will say this is one of the great ones. One can quibble as to whether or not it's better than the Veneta or Vancouver versions, but it's genuinely up there. Mostly what lets it down is that Jerry's singing is pretty bad. You know what? It usually was.
Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks): There's kind of a good reason they quit playing the Pigpen songs, being as he left the band to go die and all. Also, they did bring this one back before the hiatus in October '74, but I'm deciding to tactically ignore that for now (haven't heard it, might later). That said, this absolutely does fit the pattern. The last performance of Pigpen's "Anthem of the Sun" closer took place on May 11, 1972. I'm iffy on Pigpen as a whole. A lot of his time in the band consists of him exhorting men to try and fuck women at great length, and that's not the sort of thing that super interests me. This is a goddamn ripsnorting performance, though. I know, really controversial opinion, stop the presses, Kate says that a Dead performance on the Europe '72 tour is good. Ah, you know, maybe it gets a little overlooked, this performance? I mean, I overlooked it, coming is it does like right after the longest and actually possibly the greatest Dark Star ever performed.
Turn On Your Lovelight: Probably the song most associated with Pigpen, and another one that had its last performance on the Europe '72 tour. In this case, though, I'm gonna break with precedent and say this isn't the best version. Again, we're talking about something I never liked much in the first place, so that might not count for much. Still - it's even shorter than the "Live/Dead" version, and the "Live/Dead" version, believe it or not, is one of the briefer versions he did. Even at only 12 minutes it's an ordeal, though.
Good Lovin': Yep, another Pigpen tune they quit doing after Europe '72. Last performance: May 25, 1972. Fantastic version? Check. Arguably better than the version from the Fillmore East Apr 1971 gigs. The thing is by this time the band doesn't just let Pigpen's, uh, "charisma" carry the whole thing along; they've genuinely figured out how to support him while still making things interesting. This just isn't something that happens much in his earlier performances. He overpowers the rest of them. They vamp while he goes to town. In these performances he goes to town and they go to town and if it's not quite the same town they're sort of in the same general vicinity.
Alligator: Pigpen's other "Anthem of the Sun" tune. Last played: April 1971 Fillmore gigs. I don't like this song and never much have. The jam from the Family Dog on Nov 1, 1969 is decent. That's all I can say for it. Here they play the song and there a too-long drum solo and some jamming that some people do like and I just don't much.
Ripple: Another one they quit playing in April '71. This one is part of that whole "Americana" thing they did mostly between '69 and '71. Good songs but but they never quite managed to nail songs like these live and electric. Honestly this side of them just worked better in the studio, as far as I can tell.
Clementine: An obscure one for sure, never released on a studio album. Also a textbook example of "well, good enough, moving on" - after a year's absence they brought it in January '69 back for one of the early shows recorded for Live/Dead, did the best ever version of it, and never played it again.
Cosmic Charlie: A fan favorite for some inscrutable reason. It's kind of a dumb goofy song, but there are some decent enough versions that don't sound like some kind of sub-par Flo & Eddie comedy music. One of these versions, unsurprisingly, is the final performance from early '71. As these things go I prefer the version from Oct 24 1969, which actually segues pretty well from "The Other One", probably purely by accident.
Dancin' in the Street: Another Pigpen tune! People fucking love its later disco incarnation for some reason. Last performance: New Years' Eve 1971->72, as a set opener no less. It's sort of a mixed bag, but only because there's some dumbass deciding to give a play-by-play on whatever tasteless debauchery is occuring on stage while they're playing. The actual performance... well, the jam from May 6, 1970 is unquestionably better, but on that version the performance of the actual song portion is so cringeworthy that I actually edited out the bit with the singing. This one is way more digestible in its entirety.
Death Don't Have No Mercy: Last played Mar 21, 1970. Audience tape only, but a super, super fine version. Theory supported.
The Eleven: Another audience tape, Apr 24, 1970. Epic, all-time version. Last=best, absolutely.
St. Stephen: This one, on the other hand, dragged its heels around for a while after "The Eleven" was dropped. It took its final bow on Halloween 1971, and frankly it sounded kind of anemic and lethargic by that time. This is another one of the "psychedelic" era tunes that comes across to me as a little fussy and overwritten, but a lot of fans seem to like that sort of thing.
Viola Lee Blues: Here's another one that had its last performance on Halloween - this time Halloween 1970. The band were clearly in a shitty mood that day and half-assed the whole concert, including this last-ever version of Viola Lee Blues. The previous performance, from a Fillmore East show in July, wasn't too much to sing about either. On the other hand, the THIRD-to last performance on May 2, 1970 was indeed all-time. Still, it's a bit of a stretch to say that this fits the pattern. Viola Lee Blues did _not_ go out on top.
New Potato Caboose: Lesh's number from side one of Anthem of the Sun, however, definitely does fit the "last = best" pattern. Last performed on Jun 8, 1969, and it kills.
Saturday, 23 May 2020
Criminal status: Fulfilled
The first time I heard about the Internet was when the media reported on the rtm worm. The rtm worm, for those not aware, was a major system-wide crash of the Internet. This worm was named for its creator, a man by the name of Robert T. Morris. In my mind I think of him as a "kid". Looking at him in Wikipedia, he does have a youthful look about him - the picture of him is from when he was about my age, but he looks significantly younger than I do. I wouldn't peg him from that picture as 40-something.
I think I really thought of him as a "kid", though, because of the stereotype of the teenage hacker. At the time the worm struck, he was 22 going on 23, a grad student. Older than a lot of the hackers on the Internet these days.
The thing that struck me, at the time, about the worm is that it was a failure. Morris had rushed his work, gotten sloppy with it, and as a result it failed in his goal. His goal, essentially, was to, as I understand it, root the entire Internet. The Wikipedia article temporizes on this issue - the article states that Morris stated that his intent was to "highlight security flaws", which is a nice bit of euphemism, a nice bit of obfuscating code, if you will.
Whatever the intent, like the old programmer's meme says, Morris didn't always test his code, but when he did he tested it in production. As a result, instead of just taking control of the computers it accessed and terminating, it copied itself again, and again, and again. Oh, it asked if there was already a copy there, but a statistically significant percentage of the time, it decided to ignore the answer. This is a textbook bad programming practice. It is in the textbooks because people who write code do it all the time. And why shouldn't they? Asking a question and ignoring the answer is is behavior regularly exhibited by human beings.
The result was that, for far from the last time, the Internet was overwhelmed with garbage. The worm was, in some sense, an extremely early practical example of what has come to be known as a "denial of service" attack.
The Internet proved shockingly easy to break, and break badly. The damage took a week or more to repair. Wikipedia says: "The Internet was partitioned for several days, as regional networks disconnected from the NSFNet backbone and from each other to prevent recontamination, as they cleaned their own networks."
What was the aftermath? Pretty much the same as the aftermath of every Internet security breach since. Patches were hastily made and distributed. Presumably shortly thereafter patches were issued to fix the things the patches broke, simply because that's been the result of every "emergency patch" I've ever seen since.
Nobody, it seems, gave much thought then as to what implications this incident might have for the Internet on a basic structural level. With decades of work, these geniuses had come up with something that _worked_. More than that, it was, they were convinced _good_. It was freedom. The basic argument - I wasn't there, but I have seen this basic argument repeated by Very Intelligent Men many times since - goes something like this: Why should they change the basic infrastructure of something that had done so much good for them just because some dumb kids couldn't use it properly?
John Gilmore - the creator of the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and "civil libertarian", not the brilliant saxophonist who played for decades with Sun Ra - famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
This is the optimistic, tech libertarian way of phrasing this statement. It occurs to me now that an equally valid way of phrasing the statement would be to say that the Internet interprets security as damage and routes around it.
Some people who were around in the old days lament the loss of the Old Internet. I can't say. I arrived at the beginning of the watershed event that forever washed away that place, the Eternal September of 1993. For a time there were things I missed about the way things were. But although I spend a lot of time living in the past, nostalgia was never really my bag. The Grand Old Age of the Internet, from what I can tell, was a crusty beardo sausage party full of guys who had little better to do than argue about evolution vs. creationism, for some Godforsaken reason, guys and who expected everybody else to conform to the way they did things instead of being open to what newcomers had to say and attempted to regulate the boundaries of their little party mainly through the tactical deployment of withering scorn. I tried that approach myself, for a while. The approach failed and made me miserable, and I have tried to give it up.
Some people, I guess, some people never had to come to that reckoning. Some people were more successful at getting their way than I was.
Morris was put on trial, because what he did was clearly a violation of a law that had just been passed, and he was convicted, sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050. He fulfilled his criminal sentence in 1994.
The "Early life" section of Wikipedia's article on Morris begins:
"Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris (cryptographer) and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA)."
One is left to assume that Anne Farlow Morris is, through some quirk of fate, younger than her son, although if so this fact doesn't meet Wikipedia's stringent notability guidelines.
Morris grew up in the same county I did. The county shares his name, in fact. Morris County. He graduated from a prestigious Jesuit high school, Delbarton, and went on to matriculate at Harvard. I applied to Delbarton, in fact, and was accepted. My dad wouldn't get me go there, though, because he had heard that the priests there were pederasts. My dad often said things like that. We usually ignored him, because he was crazy. He refused to budge, though, and I had to content myself with enrolling in the advanced placement program a highly prestigious _public_ high school instead. The world Morris grew up in is very much the one I grew up in, is what I am saying.
So it doesn't surprise me terribly to learn that Morris's criminal conviction didn't appear to hurt his long term career prospects much. I suspect that his notoriety may perhaps have advanced his career prospects. Professor Robert Tappan Morris, Ph.D., went on to be a cofounder of the venture capital firm Y Combinator. Probably a lot of other people still think about what he did when he was 22. I wouldn't be surprised if he was exasperated by it. It's frustrating, after all, when all people see in you is a mistake you made more than half a lifetime ago.
Personally, right now I don't the mistake was his. I think the mistake was bringing the Internet back up again, patching the bugs, not giving any thought to the idea that his actions might have wider implications, might be more widely revealing about the future of the Internet. November 1988, it seems to me in retrospect, was a rare opportunity for reflection, for broader consideration, for, in corporate terms, _root cause analysis_. So far as I can tell, that root cause analysis wasn't done then. It can't be done now, I don't think. I have my ideas, and my conclusions, and I could probably even state them more directly... but who would listen? What would be the point? It would just be another fight.
Things are going to go the way they are going to go, and there's not much voice I have in it. Roving online mobs are going to continue to attack and harass trans people on Twitter, and nothing will happen about it because that would be "censorship", and the Internet interprets censorship as damage. The Internet doesn't, hasn't ever, interpreted the following things as damage: abuse, threats of violence, misinformation, disinformation. All of these things are things which, under the Internet's model, are "bugs" to be "patched out". You know what, though? I think there are a lot of people who would tell me, with varying levels of candor, that it's not a bug, it's a feature.
I think I'll stop here.
I think I really thought of him as a "kid", though, because of the stereotype of the teenage hacker. At the time the worm struck, he was 22 going on 23, a grad student. Older than a lot of the hackers on the Internet these days.
The thing that struck me, at the time, about the worm is that it was a failure. Morris had rushed his work, gotten sloppy with it, and as a result it failed in his goal. His goal, essentially, was to, as I understand it, root the entire Internet. The Wikipedia article temporizes on this issue - the article states that Morris stated that his intent was to "highlight security flaws", which is a nice bit of euphemism, a nice bit of obfuscating code, if you will.
Whatever the intent, like the old programmer's meme says, Morris didn't always test his code, but when he did he tested it in production. As a result, instead of just taking control of the computers it accessed and terminating, it copied itself again, and again, and again. Oh, it asked if there was already a copy there, but a statistically significant percentage of the time, it decided to ignore the answer. This is a textbook bad programming practice. It is in the textbooks because people who write code do it all the time. And why shouldn't they? Asking a question and ignoring the answer is is behavior regularly exhibited by human beings.
The result was that, for far from the last time, the Internet was overwhelmed with garbage. The worm was, in some sense, an extremely early practical example of what has come to be known as a "denial of service" attack.
The Internet proved shockingly easy to break, and break badly. The damage took a week or more to repair. Wikipedia says: "The Internet was partitioned for several days, as regional networks disconnected from the NSFNet backbone and from each other to prevent recontamination, as they cleaned their own networks."
What was the aftermath? Pretty much the same as the aftermath of every Internet security breach since. Patches were hastily made and distributed. Presumably shortly thereafter patches were issued to fix the things the patches broke, simply because that's been the result of every "emergency patch" I've ever seen since.
Nobody, it seems, gave much thought then as to what implications this incident might have for the Internet on a basic structural level. With decades of work, these geniuses had come up with something that _worked_. More than that, it was, they were convinced _good_. It was freedom. The basic argument - I wasn't there, but I have seen this basic argument repeated by Very Intelligent Men many times since - goes something like this: Why should they change the basic infrastructure of something that had done so much good for them just because some dumb kids couldn't use it properly?
John Gilmore - the creator of the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and "civil libertarian", not the brilliant saxophonist who played for decades with Sun Ra - famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
This is the optimistic, tech libertarian way of phrasing this statement. It occurs to me now that an equally valid way of phrasing the statement would be to say that the Internet interprets security as damage and routes around it.
Some people who were around in the old days lament the loss of the Old Internet. I can't say. I arrived at the beginning of the watershed event that forever washed away that place, the Eternal September of 1993. For a time there were things I missed about the way things were. But although I spend a lot of time living in the past, nostalgia was never really my bag. The Grand Old Age of the Internet, from what I can tell, was a crusty beardo sausage party full of guys who had little better to do than argue about evolution vs. creationism, for some Godforsaken reason, guys and who expected everybody else to conform to the way they did things instead of being open to what newcomers had to say and attempted to regulate the boundaries of their little party mainly through the tactical deployment of withering scorn. I tried that approach myself, for a while. The approach failed and made me miserable, and I have tried to give it up.
Some people, I guess, some people never had to come to that reckoning. Some people were more successful at getting their way than I was.
Morris was put on trial, because what he did was clearly a violation of a law that had just been passed, and he was convicted, sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050. He fulfilled his criminal sentence in 1994.
The "Early life" section of Wikipedia's article on Morris begins:
"Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris (cryptographer) and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA)."
One is left to assume that Anne Farlow Morris is, through some quirk of fate, younger than her son, although if so this fact doesn't meet Wikipedia's stringent notability guidelines.
Morris grew up in the same county I did. The county shares his name, in fact. Morris County. He graduated from a prestigious Jesuit high school, Delbarton, and went on to matriculate at Harvard. I applied to Delbarton, in fact, and was accepted. My dad wouldn't get me go there, though, because he had heard that the priests there were pederasts. My dad often said things like that. We usually ignored him, because he was crazy. He refused to budge, though, and I had to content myself with enrolling in the advanced placement program a highly prestigious _public_ high school instead. The world Morris grew up in is very much the one I grew up in, is what I am saying.
So it doesn't surprise me terribly to learn that Morris's criminal conviction didn't appear to hurt his long term career prospects much. I suspect that his notoriety may perhaps have advanced his career prospects. Professor Robert Tappan Morris, Ph.D., went on to be a cofounder of the venture capital firm Y Combinator. Probably a lot of other people still think about what he did when he was 22. I wouldn't be surprised if he was exasperated by it. It's frustrating, after all, when all people see in you is a mistake you made more than half a lifetime ago.
Personally, right now I don't the mistake was his. I think the mistake was bringing the Internet back up again, patching the bugs, not giving any thought to the idea that his actions might have wider implications, might be more widely revealing about the future of the Internet. November 1988, it seems to me in retrospect, was a rare opportunity for reflection, for broader consideration, for, in corporate terms, _root cause analysis_. So far as I can tell, that root cause analysis wasn't done then. It can't be done now, I don't think. I have my ideas, and my conclusions, and I could probably even state them more directly... but who would listen? What would be the point? It would just be another fight.
Things are going to go the way they are going to go, and there's not much voice I have in it. Roving online mobs are going to continue to attack and harass trans people on Twitter, and nothing will happen about it because that would be "censorship", and the Internet interprets censorship as damage. The Internet doesn't, hasn't ever, interpreted the following things as damage: abuse, threats of violence, misinformation, disinformation. All of these things are things which, under the Internet's model, are "bugs" to be "patched out". You know what, though? I think there are a lot of people who would tell me, with varying levels of candor, that it's not a bug, it's a feature.
I think I'll stop here.
Thursday, 21 May 2020
Speedrunning
My mind is sort of wandering a bit this morning. Watched the Summoning Salt video about the Ninja Gaiden world record progression and it had me thinking about speedruns and why they interest me.
To me, the current popularity of speedrunning is not un-related to "Pac-Man Fever", which the world was in the throes of in my very young days.
I seldom got out to the arcades, seldom got the opportunity to play Pac-Man, and then not for very long because those machines were quarter-eaters and I did not exactly have lightning reflexes. Instead I watched the cartoon, ate the cereal, listened to the record (not "Pac-Man Fever", a _different_ Pac-Man knockoff record), and read the books.
The book I had was what we would now call a "strategy guide", an in-depth explanation of How To Win At Pac-Man. There was no "winning state" that anybody knew of. "winning" meant to play for as long as possible with as little money as possible, to attain what we would now recognize as a "flow state".
A key component of a flow state, as I understand it, is an altered perception of time. We cease to be cognizant of time passing. I was reading an academic article yesterday on older trans women's experiences which brought up the notion of "trans time", the idea that trans people experience time in a different manner than cis people do. I'm a little skeptical of the concept. I'm not sure how one could empirically document or replicate it. Differentiating things which are intrinsic to the trans experience and things which are not is a difficult undertaking.
But it is true that I do not always experience time in a direct manner. I sort of assumed that this was a universal human experience, this sense of chronological disjunction. I mean, I read "Slaughterhouse Five", I knew about "flashbacks", I knew that time was relative. I face certain issues as a result of being, biologically, 13 and 44 simultaneously, but they don't seem all _that_ novel or interesting to me.
(Fuck it, I don't pass, why should time?)
For me speedrunning isn't a matter of "winning" or "beating the clock". There's certainly a John Henry aspect to it, of beating a machine, but a large part of the goal of leisure for me is to bring about the irrelevance of time. So I tend to gravitate towards very long speedruns. The media experiences I seek out are either short or hyperextended, either a hall of mirrors or an endless corridor. Preferably with as few events in them as possible. Events are something for my rational mind to grab onto, ruminate on, forcibly pulling me out of the flow state. Work which defies meaning, which defies rational analysis, is invaluable to me because it gives me permission to just exist, to just enjoy something as it is, without staying up at 3 AM wondering if that man is right in the head, if he knows something I don't.
Well that went nowhere I expected. Hell with it, I'm posting it anyway.
To me, the current popularity of speedrunning is not un-related to "Pac-Man Fever", which the world was in the throes of in my very young days.
I seldom got out to the arcades, seldom got the opportunity to play Pac-Man, and then not for very long because those machines were quarter-eaters and I did not exactly have lightning reflexes. Instead I watched the cartoon, ate the cereal, listened to the record (not "Pac-Man Fever", a _different_ Pac-Man knockoff record), and read the books.
The book I had was what we would now call a "strategy guide", an in-depth explanation of How To Win At Pac-Man. There was no "winning state" that anybody knew of. "winning" meant to play for as long as possible with as little money as possible, to attain what we would now recognize as a "flow state".
A key component of a flow state, as I understand it, is an altered perception of time. We cease to be cognizant of time passing. I was reading an academic article yesterday on older trans women's experiences which brought up the notion of "trans time", the idea that trans people experience time in a different manner than cis people do. I'm a little skeptical of the concept. I'm not sure how one could empirically document or replicate it. Differentiating things which are intrinsic to the trans experience and things which are not is a difficult undertaking.
But it is true that I do not always experience time in a direct manner. I sort of assumed that this was a universal human experience, this sense of chronological disjunction. I mean, I read "Slaughterhouse Five", I knew about "flashbacks", I knew that time was relative. I face certain issues as a result of being, biologically, 13 and 44 simultaneously, but they don't seem all _that_ novel or interesting to me.
(Fuck it, I don't pass, why should time?)
For me speedrunning isn't a matter of "winning" or "beating the clock". There's certainly a John Henry aspect to it, of beating a machine, but a large part of the goal of leisure for me is to bring about the irrelevance of time. So I tend to gravitate towards very long speedruns. The media experiences I seek out are either short or hyperextended, either a hall of mirrors or an endless corridor. Preferably with as few events in them as possible. Events are something for my rational mind to grab onto, ruminate on, forcibly pulling me out of the flow state. Work which defies meaning, which defies rational analysis, is invaluable to me because it gives me permission to just exist, to just enjoy something as it is, without staying up at 3 AM wondering if that man is right in the head, if he knows something I don't.
Well that went nowhere I expected. Hell with it, I'm posting it anyway.
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