Friday, 26th of November, 2004

Look! Now Mum’s in the paper! Cute.

Thursday, 25th of November, 2004

OK, the AudioMulch discussion list currently has a thread on “current fav music CDs”, to which I contributed. I thought it was only fair to post it here, as I haven’t been talking about music lately. Here you go:

Tunng – Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs (brilliant forthcoming CD on Static Caravan, drops 15th of Jan. Think the Books with slightly more folk-song arrangements, utter brilliance)

The Boats – Songs By The Sea (the two guys from the Remote Viewer (ex-Hood) plus female vocals, lovely hybrid of acoustic sounds and minimal electronics. Strongly recommended, on the Remote Viewer’s own label Moteer and certainly available through Norman Records)

Hood – The Lost You EP and promo of Outside Closer album (utter genius as always)

Pedro – Fear & Resilience remixes (best track on the excellent Pedro album from last year; the Prefuse 73 remix is his best thing in ages as Prefuse – but check the wondrous Savath & Savalas EP Manana. The Four Tet mix is a bit self-indulgently long but has some great bits…)

Her Space Holiday – The Young Machines Remixed (oh, that Matmos remix! Oh! But the Album Leaf is a beauty too, Dntel turns in one of his lovely orchestral-sampling pastiches, and all the mixes are good. On Mush)

Kattoo – Places (half of Beefcake, sounds exactly like a Beefcake album, which I’m not complaining about. On Beefcake’s original home, Hymen)

Tin Hat Trio – Book of Silk (indescribably wonderful band, gypsy/folk/jazz/improv/C20th classical/tango/bluegrass etc, on Ropeadope – subsite for the album here)

Sufjan Stevens – Seven Swans (perfect folk, the Christian lyrics are fitting if not my thing)

And just to make it a bit on-topic (for the Mulch list where this was originally posted):
Adam Butler – Schmoozing With the Après-Garde (I keep coming back to this – lovely semi-improv piano live-processed presumably in AudioMulch. Adam is on this list, so I’ll probably hear from him shortly! On fairly obscure German label Whatness, making it an expensive prospect to get this one)

In my email I forgot to mention also Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of the more famous Sergei, whose String Quartet No. 1 is a rather good work which has been released in a performance by the Elysian Quartet by new label Nonclassical along with a bunch of remixes of the work. Hm, remixed string quartet, what a great idea! *heh* They’re great too, and by far the best remix is Gabriel Prokofiev’s own. Worth tracking down (try those Norman boys again…)

Thursday, 18th of November, 2004

I don’t know why, but I’m irresistibly amused by this SMH article.

Funny ol’ Momus started a thread over a ILX about metaphysics, with a cute quiz. Go read his rant and quiz. He also posted it in his LiveGerbil. Here are my answers, which admittedly go off the beaten track a little.

1. Do you think that ‘Reality is elsewhere’?
No, reality is right here.

2. Do you think that ‘If my life as I live it was all there is, I’d top myself right now!’?
Certainly not. I’ve never felt that there’s an afterlife, or an uberlife or anything.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it’s not really where your concerns are?
Not really, unless my concerns are about other (real) things. On a related note, it’s quite possible to care about things that don’t directly seem to be “physical” (as opposed to “meta”-physical), like people’s rights not to be tortured, or whether it’s advisable to destroy the environment, and yet be a scientific materialist. Caring, and human rights, and moral responsibility and so on exist because we exist rather than on some higher plane of existence. They’re part – in fact an imperative for – living in a society or society of societies in a shared biosphere, if self-destruction is to be avoided.

4. Is your body going to seed because you’re off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?
I’m trying not to let it. But if it were, that wouldn’t imply that one’s “too metaphysical” or something – unless one were to actually believe in that other world (especially if it’s the X-Files). Uh.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?
No. I once thought I could be a Marxist, but no I don’t think so. Call me a non-dogmatic green-leftist…

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?
There was never a Golden Age. Lionising our childhood is a difficult thing, because one’s so dependent during childhood. Your childhood bliss came at the expense of your poor slavedriven parents. And our childhood bliss was generally driven by our childhood ignorance. The trouble was, as we realised more about how the real world works – oops, here come the tears!
So will utopia come when we all grow up? I don’t have that much faith in human nature, but it’s a nice thought. It’d be nice to think that the more knowledge we amass about the world, the more in tune with it we’ll get, and the more in tune with each other. But that’s not how it works. I believe strongly in the need to continue the scientific program, to continue the gradual whittling away at the edges of what we don’t know, the gradual focussing and nuancing of what we do know.
But it’s fair to say that the program of creating the utopian society won’t just be an inevitable by-product of that other program, although just as science’s shadow, industry/technology, makes big bad things easier, it can also make an enlightened, sharing society of equals more attainable (inasmuch as it’s possible)…

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them ‘objective’?
Pardon?
Oh all right, well those which aren’t designed by others (such as Philip Pullman or some committee or evolutionary process) I accept personal authorship for. But the’re just conceptions, and radically incomplete and probably inconsistent at that. Relativity notwithstanding, there’s only one “objective” world. (Relativity calls into question the concept of “simultaneity”, but when two observers (subjects) share the same relativistic frame of reference, this isn’t a problem.)

8. Do you find yourself using the word ‘timeless’ when you praise things?
I doubt it. If so, it would only be metaphorically. But I’m very wary of using the word “infinite” even metaphorically to describe things in the real world, so I doubt it.

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as ‘all there is’ be like? Better, or worse?
Depends how literally they took it. The present? I think that you can be doggedly non-metaphysical but still accept that some parts of history (remembered and learnt) are most likely mostly the case, and there are shades of believability. Living only for the present would be, as someone else mentioned upstream, living without a context. That strikes me as a dangerous thing. Take it to its extreme, and it would mean ignoring things you saw just a second ago. Take it to even a considerably lesser extreme, and you still couldn’t rely on science or the lessons of culture and history.

Accepting the material world as described to the best of its ability by science as “all there is” is a trickier question. I’ve tried to outline why I don’t think this sort of materialism implies that other sort of materialism, a philosophy of life in which nothing matters other than amassing material wealth. If such a materialist of the latter sort really believed that suffering, love, culture et al didn’t matter because they didn’t exist, why would even material wealth matter? Why would having when others have not matter to them, that is?
Oops, I’m ranting. Over.

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or ‘god particle’? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?
The questions? Well unifying physics is a holy grail of sorts, but it won’t inevitably mean all the other questions are answered. There’ll still be more for science to unravel and demystify. The Higgs Boson won’t necessarily convince people of the truth of Darwinism, nor will it stop people who yearn for “something more” from yearning – and nor will it bring about the Republic of Heaven on Earth.
Shame, though.

Wednesday, 17th of November, 2004

I can hardly contain myself. After a long long time not being able to work out how to get my category-based archives working properly, I’ve finally sorted it out!
So I hereby present:
The reading archives (aka book/short story/magazine reviews and occasional reading commentary) and…
The listening archives (aka music reviews – sadly in decline since I’ve started doing Utility Fog and posting playlists and some commentary there).
Also there’s a sortable archives page which is rather, well, “nice”!

I adapted these from Nicer Archives and the various WordPress included php files and suchlike. It took quite a lot of php hacking and I’m rather proud to have finally sorted it out. *phew*
If you’re interested in what I’ve done, feel free to drop me a comment (or an email if you know my address).

Thursday, 4th of November, 2004

Well this morning, at the end of an hour-and-a-quarter-long judgement, Magistrate Ian Barnett dismissed my Dad of the ludicrous attempted murder charge that’s been hanging over our family for some 2 years now. I’ll have to save my distaste for Murdoch’s NEWS empire for another day, because (courtesy, mind you, of APP), all their papers have a really good article about the judgement today. Here’s the one from the main NEWS site: Doctor murder charge dismissed.
It gets a few details wrong (the amount in the will was even less, but most papers have quoted the very incorrect figure given originally by the police, and the committal was about 5 weeks all up, over a period of about 3 1/2 months), but still – vindicated we are, and Dad is indeed a “respected Sydney doctor”. We’re all extremely relieved, to say the least.
Our legal team were absolutely superlative, and everyone involved has been wonderfully supportive through it all. During the judgement this morning, the small local court was full to overflowing – people standing along the walls because there weren’t enough seats… Now life can get back to normal, especially for Mum & Dad of course.

Edit: Here’s the SMH article, finally… Similarly, it gets a few things wrong but also says a lot of good things.
And also, today a new article from News, by the Daily Telegraph gal.