h. Play

FocusJam by Harold

And also:

Much more to come… Peace.

The process is always the same: play music to forget about this stupid world, closing my eyes and forgetting about things that are on the surface, I’m playing. After a while I am not thinking anymore about anything, I’m in the feel, in the patterns, thinking ahead, getting ready to land my fingers on strings and move them accordingly.

And then after a while in the Zone, somehow, my brain jumps to a memory. Often one that I never or barely thought about before. Some are insanely old, some are insignificant, but always feel real, like the exact feeling of being in a swimming pool around Lyon when I was like 13, the exact feeling of being in this small room to change clothes. Or a stormy weather over my small French village and going back home and eating sautés mushrooms when I hadn’t been even adopted yet.

These portals are only happening when playing music closing my eyes, improvising. Sometimes it’s so disturbing, so real, that it puts me out of the Zone. In some cases I was so amazed to remember something that I had to immediately stop playing, and being like “but… How? How do I remember that right now, how is that so crystal clear?” 

It’s awesome and scary at the same time. Often, it gives me a sense of what I have accomplished or it gives me a sense of “wow, that feeling was so great”, even if it’s just like a memory of making a left turn on Sunset Blvd with the sun reflecting on cars windshield or sitting down in the grass in Vincennes, watching people. It’s the little things and the perspective from them.

Of course, pot enhances that feeling. Sometimes I swear, even smell and odors are almost coming back. Like I can almost get a sense of it. I cut so much information by closing my eyes that everything else gets bigger.

It’s all about spending hundreds of hours listening, I guess. Listening to music, copying notes, listening to my copy/paste play, listening to my own play, listening to my breathing, listening in general, at some point I suppose that my brain kind of gets split up in two with an half being a spectator and the other being like “btw, I have this little super HD 5.1 4K in odorama movie of you being lonely, wanna watch it?” and I’m all like, “shoot”.

But it’s not just that. I can’t count how many times I found solutions to problems by improvising funky bass lines and bam, “Jesus fuck, of course!!”, or “oh smart, I totally need to try that in fact, I’m gonna do this right now”. /puts his bass back on its stand.

Music and non-visual focus are so different from this visually over-saturated world we live in. It feels damn good.

Tod Seelie photography.

I feel that a real gender war is going to happen. Historically, we never really fought over this, women were too busy cooking in the kitchen. This era started to end with my mom’s generation. Gender conflict is the last conflict. It has to happen.

I read all the Kotaku stuff for instance, and here what’s happening: there’s a lot of sexism in computer games, OK. Writers call it out, people react, some people think they are wrong some people think they are right. At the end, the most annoyed crowd -the sexist douchebags- is taking it personally and gets apeshit in the comments section and everywhere on the internet and probably in their lives.

As a side-effect, a lot of guys who didn’t subscribe to sexism nor feminism are feeling that they have to choose a side. They obviously choose the side where there is more bros. Bros before… You get it. They also feel being treated like shit with these serious articles about women representation in the biggest entertainment medium of the after boomer world.

As a feminist dude who doesn’t like religious systems, I never spend time to proselyte guys. If you can’t see by yourself the benefits or try to see what world a much better equality would bring, I will not change your mind and I will not feed your troll attitude. You need to be ready for it, you know, Yoda style and all that. Usually happens when your little boy’s club-bro world goes down.

But anyway, my point is that conflict is def heating up and I feel that it’s going to get ugly, uglier. Here’s why:

-Women are for the most part in the West at work and for many, running a triple job madness: (shitty) job, child job and house job. They are pissed and tired but also ready to rumble. Because they do rumble, right fucking now.

-Men are starting to see the benefits of not working like crazy and enjoying hanging around with a stroller.

-This creates a trend where women work even more than before while still not getting the top spots and benefits, and men work less while maintaining all the privileges they got from decades of a dude-centered economy, like not cleaning anything behind them or not knowing what stuff to buy to sustain the house.

-Therefore families are not traditional families anymore: for the first time, family isn’t the corner stone of society; single mom, a single dad, a gay couple, a grandmother living with her daughter, you name it. Siblings and friends, parents, everything is mixed up now. Everybody can take any “role”. Stability isn’t the norm anymore. No need to shut up, then. Women access rebellion as much as men do.

–Gender selection and imbalance. “These authors report that more girls have been killed in the last 50 years, just because they were girls, than the number of males who were killed in all the wars of the 20th century.” Yes, you read that right.

-Everywhere in the world where women are treated with less respect than a piece of furniture, they are fighting back because enough is enough. When you can be gang raped and set on fire in your own home, just like that, I think you have the right to defend yourself and not trust any men, ever. This shit is happening everyday and now that information flows so fast, women are talking about it more than ever. They are empowering themselves against the insane violence men can inflict to them and it’s changing things, as we speak. Meanwhile they work like crazy, I mean they are slaves for us. All our digital stuff is built by young, amazing Chinese women hands. Someday, they will understand the power they have and it will be payback time.

-Bi and transgender people. They are around, they are getting louder and society hasn’t done anything for them to live without fear and guilt yet. As gay people transformed our society and our views on relationships, bi and trans people will too. They will question our stupid bias and irrational behaviors toward sex. It’s gonna be fun.

 

All that together, projected in the next few years means more friction. More friction means a higher chance of extremes. Which means war, blood, cut penises, bad behaviors, and so forth.

It’s not that I want to see this to happen, but if we need to go through that so that we can have a better society, let’s do this. Historically, it seems that the only way we make progress is through violence, pain and suffering. We’re that smart.

I was watching Terminator 2 the other day. It’s a good action movie when in the first ten minutes, you know what’s going on and you are totally hooked on “what is going to happen next?”.

But it also reminded me of something that seemed to only touch me, during the 90s when I saw it for the first time.

“Bummer. That’s uh that’s a bummer, man.”

The man responsible for Skynet’s creation, Miles Dyson, is black. The black engineer is the start of a nuclear holocaust that would kill billions of lives.

Watching the scene where Sarah tries to kill Miles in front of his family after he tells his wife how excited he is about this new microprocessor, is kind of painful. I remember being young and feeling so much for the character. “This is so unfair!”. Not just because of the Miles line, “so you’re judging me for something I haven’t done yet, how were we supposed to know?” to which Sarah replies that he’s still fucking guilty but because for ONCE a black man on screen was super smart. For ONCE that black dude wasn’t wearing gold chains or dancing, he was a programmer and allegedly, the best on Earth.

You can’t have a better role model. Except when that guy happens to start Judgement Day and has to die for that.

At that time I had a computer, my own computer. Except one, none of my white friends had one in their house, let alone just for them. It was still so rare in France. I had worked and invested money to buy a sound card for it. I couldn’t grasp the feeling but I remember this all scene left me empty. From there, the movie just wasn’t the same to me.

Terminator 2 is one of the biggest movie of the last 20 years, ranked #84 on the all time worldwide box-office. Impact.

Now I read this excellent article: declining numbers of blacks seen in math, science. Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. STEM. Where some jobs for us humans being replaced by machines, are left. In biological and biomedical sciences:

6,957 PhDs were awarded in 2009. Only 88 went to black men — that’s 1 percent. (176 went to black women.)

Note how gender overrides ethnicity for the better, even if it’s still so bad for women.

It reminds me of this other big 90s movie, Boyz N The Hood. Furious Styles is the true hero of the movie and of course, everybody forgets about him, he’s too deep. Like he says, math is the only thing taught at school that is not compromise by racial issues and ethnicities. I wasn’t good at math at school, but I loved the agnosticism about it. The cold, non biased, maybe not perfect, truth of it. Anyway, the fact that Doughboy the motherfucker with no future became the huge, iconic hero of BNTH is terrible. It’s fucking terrible.

I could write about the weird and patronizing Silicon Valley’s way to deal with minorities, the unbreakable “pattern matching” system that automatically makes things harder or the black dudes cleaning my street while white people “go to work”, but you get the idea.

Looking at the Terminator 2 casting, Joe Morton, the guy playing the black scientist had and has a great career of movies and TV shows. He lives with his wife and their three kids, since 1984. Meanwhile, Arnold, Linda and especially Edward had some chaotic fucked up future waiting for them. Talk about saviors!

I agree with Sean. People are pissed. But occupying the streets is not a 2011 method to gain power back, sorry.

I think about all these rich people. They abused the system and moved their pieces in the dark, behind, slowly. For decades. They didn’t get disgustingly rich by stopping traffic and screaming HEY BITCHES WE’RE FUCKING STEALING YOU IN YOUR FACE OH FUCK IT’S COLD LET’S GO HOME. It wouldn’t have worked as good as it’s been. They worked hard, in stealth mode-ninja style to screw us. It worked really well, I guess we can all agree on that.

Now, they are in a position of power with no equivalent in history. The same can be said about the world which isn’t working as before, more interconnected and interdependent than ever. I still remember the millions, dozens of millions of people across the world protesting the war in Iraq. It didn’t do shit. All over the world, in Israel too people are protesting about the Gaza problem. It doesn’t change anything. Protesting loudly is a method that doesn’t work well if at all in long democracies as “the West”. North Africa is fighting decades of dictatorship, it’s absolutely different. It had to explode this way, with people in the streets but also a lot of dead bodies.

“The West” isn’t in this situation anymore. We’re in full cold war with the 1%. I think that protesting and making sure that they hear us is OK but might not be the best way to change things. They own us for so long, even cutting their heads off and putting them on spears ala French revolution, wouldn’t change anything. I hope Anonymous and Wikileaks and more underground movements are fighting back. I know every single politician is a sell out. For good or bad it’s done, the system works this way. I can’t trust them more than that. Corporations and politicians aren’t going to end their relationship because we demand it. Oh, and they own the police and the army too, so.

The 99% need to erode the power, slowly. It’s going to be long. But the more we aim for independency, sharing, sustaining and giving them less money, the better. I always think that if people were drinking sodas like I do and did, none of these companies would have been big enough to fuck the entire food system, the FDA and pouring so much money to lobby politicians and giving more sugar to millions of kids who didn’t need it at all. People don’t think enough about the butterfly effect. It always seems out of touch but it’s just a matter of being consistent and thorough. Persistence is required to change, progress. The 1% knows it very, very well.

I feel stupid in front of death. Being adopted means that you need to kill your biological parents in your mind. You need at an early age to live with the fact that they are not here. They don’t exist. They sure are missing but they will never come back. They are kind of dead.

It’s so hard that a lot of adopted people go back later in their lives to resuscitate them by any means necessary. I haven’t and I don’t want to. With the luck of having people taking care of me, people who don’t look like me at all, it expanded my empathy, it expanded my will to kind of love everyone regardless you know? I care a lot. By design, nothing that I really chose upon.

I just don’t know what to say about death. I feel extremely cold about it compared to most of you. I only had one very close death but I was away from him since so many years. It wasn’t a shock, even less with a throat cancer and decades of heavy smoking. I only lived with him during my first six years on earth and then every year for a week or two, that’s not the same. The bad part was being so far away and useless. I still feel bad sometimes when I receive a private message on Facebook and of course, I miss him.

To me death creates a sense of emergency to do my best at anything I do, an urge to be the best and good and make people happy. To beat myself at being even more happier because I am alive and don’t need a lot. MinMax.

I know that anybody can at anytime, disappear. Like not just knowing, acknowledging. That’s the first rule in my life. “Hey you’re supposed to have your parents when you’re born! Guess what, not you. It happens. Sorry”. Which makes me believe that we should really like what we do and shit like that. But also makes me really precautious, sort of shy, maybe too much even if I feel confident overall. It’s hard to find a balance and it’s a weird mix.

The thing is that it will never change. I’m like an aggregator of people, families, I get really close to all of you but I don’t share enough either, like a son and a dad, a mom and her daughter or sisters and brothers. Maybe gladly because you are all fucked with these strong connections, I noticed.

I’m a monster. So I try to be a nice one like in the Pixar’s movie.

Boo

I was about to install Disqus comment system because it’s neat and everywhere but then, I realized that they would host my blog’s conversations and have control over it.

“When you’re not paying for a service, they own you” would make a good movie line. I want to keep control over my stuff.

I didn’t join G+ because Facebook is enough. I am not doing this shit all over again with another company.

Google Reader. To me, it’s the worst of them all, as big G knows everything about everything I have a big interest in, all the time. I was very reluctant to use their service but had no choice if I wanted to sync multiple devices. Peer pressure (go on Google Reader dude! I love Google!). Plus they bought Feedburner, now we have fugly feedproxy.google.com or gross utm_source=feedburner& instead of nice HTML links. Fuck Google Reader.

RSS is barely use by the Internet -like 3 or 5% of people are using it- though it’s used by highly influential people. It must be fascinating for Google, much more interesting than what Facebook gathers when your cousin shares a stupid video or likes that you were drunk last weekend.

So there’s Tiny Tiny RSS which is nice and cool but hell, this is so rough. I dream about a OPML file on my server with clients (desktop, mobile) connecting and syncing to it. That doesn’t seem that crazy, does it? Well it doesn’t exist so I guess it’s crazy.

I almost signed up for Spotify. Peer pressure; “125 of your friends use it!” bullshit. I signed up on Facebook through peer pressure too from people not using it at all since then. At least it’s very useful for family stuff, especially when distance plays a big role.

Diaspora was meant to be a nice replacement but it went nowhere. I don’t get it. It was great. Tabs used as filters is the best shit ever. Every single browser does it but wait, I just saw that they killed that feature on the website. Anyway, they seem back on track for something, stay tuned.

Flickr? Well I pay so I own my stuff. Paying automatically creates a much better trust. I just wish they would evolve much faster than what they do now. There’s no real alternative but they really have a hard time evolving, it’s painful to watch.

Twitter? All the competition died. I found status.net but like Diaspora, it’s pretty weird. An open source software that does Twitter should be doable or am I missing something? I love Twitter but I don’t understand what they do with it, they still have technical problems, they focus on pictures (???), don’t want developers to create clients even if it’s what made them, there’s nothing that makes sense. I still can’t have access to the thousands of tweets I sent like I have access to my six years worth of blog posts. Fucking silo.

The number of things that can happen in a week and spin your head a thousand times.

Fred L. Shuttlesworth died at 89. He was a civil rights movement fighter. An excerpt of the NYT article about his life fighting over stupidity:

In one instance, on Christmas night 1956, he survived an attack in which six sticks of dynamite were detonated outside his parsonage bedroom as he lay in bed. “The wall and the floor were blown out,” Ms. McWhorter wrote, “and the mattress heaved into the air, supporting Shuttlesworth like a magic carpet.”

When he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school in 1957, Klansmen attacked him with bicycle chains and brass knuckles.

Derrick Bell died at 80. First black professor at Harvard Law School. Article here.

In 1980 he left Harvard to become dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, but he resigned in 1985 when the school did not offer a position to an Asian-American woman. After returning to Harvard in 1986, he staged a five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school’s failure to grant tenure to two professors whose work involved critical race theory.

 

My brother-in-law Sean Wilson died at 38. I don’t have any NYT article for him but he was a good man. Generous and loved by everyone. He will be immensely missed.

I guess it stops here as my grand father has not yet passed away but fuck, he’s so close to it. I know it’s going to happen soon.

 

Of course, the news of you know who died and made the headlines all week, really annoyed the hell out of me. That was just gross, too much, ridiculously too much, you all disgusted me so bad over this shit. Fuck. Decency Jesus fuck, decency. You don’t have a fucking one. Of course I know, it’s just that the timing wasn’t good.

A society overdosing on shallowness, glorifying fakeness and worshipping a freaking, useless social status through devoted consumerism and unlimited love for a dictator bitch. I mean, we should just all die in a fire right now, shouldn’t we?

I was kind of sick today, I thought it was the 20°C drop in temperature but it might not be the only thing cramping my stomach.