A Brief History of Music pt2

Last week, I wrote about how the Greeks unlocked the key to music theory when Pythagoras discovered the Golden Mean. The Greeks elevated the study of music to an intellectual pursuit on par with geometry, science and philosophy, and this new attitude and knowledge about music spurred the development of precision crafted musical instruments, which, in turn, inspired the precision machines that powered the industrial revolution. Besides demanding better instruments and inspiring precision craftsmanship, this new, highly intellectual attitude towards music yielded many technological applications as well as well as producing a lot of mind-blowingly beautiful music.

The Romans also embraced the classical approach to education, and when a decadent Roman Empire turned Christian, in the 4^th Century, the Catholic Church put the power of music to work for the Holy Roman Empire to maintain, and even expand the extent of their power by spreading this new religion all over the world. The Roman Catholic Church used music as a sort of psy-ops propaganda tool to win over hearts and minds, and to break down resistance to Roman rule.

Rome started sending missionaries armed with hymnals instead of Centurions with swords to their colonies abroad, but the Catholic Church burned folk instruments all over Europe in the Middle Ages, calling them tools of “the Devil’s music.” The church denounced folk music as profane and blasphemous and banned it from “The House of God,” but the Catholics built classical music into the architecture of the stone cathedrals they built for European peasants to pray in.

The Catholics built huge cisterns into the foundations of their cathedrals to power the enormous pipe organs they installed inside them, and then built soaring stone bell towers to house huge bell carillons high overhead. The bells woke everyone up, got them out of bed and brought them to church, where they heard choirs, accompanied by a pipe organ with banks of deep bass pipes resonating in optimally designed halls. This was the first time most Europeans ever heard a musical bass note so low and full that they could feel it in their chest. While Catholic Mass mesmerized the peasants, nuns busily taught their kids catchy little songs about Jesus. The Catholics put classical music to work as a tool of empire, and used it to subjugate people with other cultural traditions.

Of course, the Catholics used this music to reaffirm their own faith as well. I’m sure that hearing music with tight harmonies, pure tones and rhythmic discipline must have seemed absolutely heavenly, and miraculous. Honestly, it still seems that way to me. There’s just something about how music makes you feel, that encourages you to continue doing whatever it was that made you feel that way. That’s how musicians learn to play, but when someone presents music to you, in a way you do not understand, and in a form you can not replicate, music becomes a kind of magic that inspires awe.

Awe can be a powerful tool for an empire that seeks to express power abroad. You’ll recall that inspiring awe was an essential component of the US military’s recent offensive in Iraq, code named “Operation Shock and…” Despite the violence, clerical sexual depredation, and economic pillage, somehow, music always restored people’s faith in God, by inspiring awe.

The Roman Catholic Church demonstrated the true power of music, and it’s ability to inspire awe, as a tool for empire, and it serves them well to this day, but subsequent empires have not failed to learn from the Romans. Music had been weaponized. Music became political because music has power and anyone who wants power, needs music. That is the “gospel truth” as taught by the Holy Roman Empire.

By about 1600, medieval craftsmen had made great strides in the field of instrument building. They called their crowning achievement, the “piano-forte.” “Piano,” in musical parlance, meaning played quietly, and “forte” meaning played loudly. This room filling instrument had an elegant ivory keyboard, and employed a complex system of hammers and dampers to sound an enormous iron rack of tuned strings. It was the first keyboard instrument that allowed players to vary the volume of the note sounded by how forcefully they played. Today, we simply call it a “piano.”

It takes an empire to build a piano. While the instruments of our indigenous ancestors were likely built and played by the same hands, from materials on hand, no one could ever build a piano from materials on hand. One lifetime is not long enough to learn all of the skills necessary to build a piano from scratch. It takes skilled machinists, cabinetmakers, wood-workers, felt-makers, blacksmiths, iron workers and more to build a piano, not to mention ivory, exotic woods, metal and materials from all over the world. Today, most piano players have never even tuned a piano, let alone built one. The piano is a product of hierarchy and empire and you would be hard pressed to find a better ambassador for either.

The piano became the king of precision crafted classical musical instruments, but of course, only kings, and popes, could afford them. Most kings and popes really didn’t play the piano very well, so they hired people to play it for them, and to teach them and their kids to play. Johan Sebastian Bach got one of those jobs, and elegantly mapped out the complete melodic and harmonic potential of the twelve tone chromatic scale, on the piano. He’s been teaching the whole world how to make music ever since.

People recognize J S Bach as the “Father of Classical Music” but his music represents the culmination of hundreds of years of technology, mindset and discipline, that includes the piano. With more than a seven-octave range, the piano became the principle instrument of composers, who wrote arrangements for entire symphony orchestras, while sitting in front of it. We should not underestimate how much the piano shaped the golden age of classical music that followed.

The piano, despite it’s amazing ingenuity, has limits, like any instrument in the real world. The piano offers an impressive seven-octave range, but it cannot change pitch continuously, the way a guitar player can bend a note note up, or the way a violin player can add vibrato, for example. The piano can play loudly or quietly, and you can let the sound ring, or damp it off, but the piano only makes one sound. If you play violin, you can pluck the string, or you can bow it, to create two distinctly different sounds. Horn players use mutes to change the tone of their instruments, and organ players can often choose from a multitude of voices. Also, a piano cannot start a note quietly, and then make it louder, as a horn player might do, nor can the piano articulate words and syllables into a pitch the way a human singer can. Those are just a few musical limitations of the piano.

The piano makes many musical compromises in order to give the player the maximum flexibility for melody and harmony. Classical music is all about melody and harmony. Add in rhythm and dynamics, and you’ve described the complete palette of classical music. I bring this up to point out that in order to delve deeply into these four elements, the classical music tradition completely overlooked not only sounds and techniques, but whole ways of looking at and appreciating music. For example, overtone music, such as Tuvan throat singing sounds alien to us, because our classical tradition choked that whole approach to music out of western civilization.

Everything but melody, harmony, rhythm and dynamics got squeezed out of classical music, as it ascended to it’s pinnacle with composers like Mozart and Beethoven, who composed their masterpieces at the piano. It was an age of empire, and these composers produced music for kings, emperors, and even God himself. Our classical music tradition strongly reflects this. That’s why classical music sounds so grand, reverent, and orderly, and why it is so very careful not to offend the ear.

Flash forward to the turn of the 20^th Century at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Several new inventions greatly increase the reach and the power of classical music, but they also would eventually change the way we relate to music. Radio, the phonograph, and eventually the tape recorder revolutionized music even more than the piano.

Before long, even people who never learned to play an instrument, could experience the sound of a full orchestra in the comfort of their own home, thanks to the magic of radio. By the 1970s, electronic sound reproduction technology reached it’s zenith. If you had a decent stereo, most bands’ records probably sounded better in your living room than the same band did playing live at a concert hall. It no longer made sense, if you wanted music in your life, to learn to play an instrument. For the price of a single musical instrument, you could buy a whole sound reproduction system that would allow you to listen to studio polished performances by the world’s most renowned artists, right in your own living room, right out of the box, and with no practice.

By this time governments, churches, and corporations all started using music to express power and influence people’s behavior, and our modern technological media helped them do it. Where once, the only way you would hear music was if you made an instrument yourself, and learned to play it, by the 1970’s when the FM band opened up, anyone with a radio had their choice of music, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Suddenly, music was just there, everywhere, all the time, everywhere you went. Classical music had become an institution. Kids still learn to play an instrument and read music in school as part of their classical education, and charitable foundations continue to keep symphony orchestras playing in most major metropolitan areas, so long as they keep playing the old classics, but the playing field has changed. Disciplined performers and precision machines no longer impress us. We take them for granted. Not only that, we’ve heard it all before, and we no longer feel any connection to it.

We don’t know how any of it works anymore. We don’t know where it comes from, how it is made or why it works, just like all of the high-tech gadgets we surround ourselves with these days. The proliferation of artificially flawless, studio produced music has the same effect on our self esteem as seeing images of people with artificially flawless complexions and perfect smiles in the media. We no longer believe we are capable or worthy of a direct relationship with music, so mostly, we leave it to the professionals, and consume music passively, second-hand.

Meanwhile, the whole classical music game got stale. Composers got tired of grand, reverent, orderly and inoffensive and started looking for ways to make classical music more aggressive and challenging. Some sought to subvert the classical system of tonality, while others looked for ways to add new sounds to the repertoire, and still others looked for entirely new ways to approach music.

Some of these composers embraced this new sound reproduction and sound production technology and incorporated it in creative ways into their music. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Iannis Xenakis’s Diamorphosis, and saw the written score to it in an elementary school music class. Xenakis composed this piece on magnetic tape, from a variety of recorded and electronically generated sounds.

Karlheinz Stockhausen composed pieces full of weird electronic sounds that came at the audience from all directions with discreet multi-channel sound systems,

and John Cage used microphones and electronic transducers to amplify ordinary household vibrations into bizarre sounding compositions.

I love all of that weird music, by the way, and it still turns me on. That music is rebellious in a very intellectual kind of way. These composers all recognized just how finite the tradition of classical music really was, and they understood the oppressive nature of classical music, as only a classically trained musician would, so they went exploring, to see what else they could do with music. I still love that music because of that rebelliousness, and how earnestly revolutionary it all sounds, in that deeply intellectual, symbolic and inconsequential way that privileged people embrace radical ideas. Still, it spoke to me at an impressionable age and I still love it because of the nostalgia I have for it, and for what it was in it’s time.

Today, empires of all shapes and size compete for your attention with music, but music no longer wows the peasants as much as it once did. Marketers continue to use music to ambush us and invade our space, because they know how powerfully music can convey their message. As a result, we’ve become music resistant. Music has become a pervasive noise that we learn to tune out, and we resent catchy jingles that stick in our head. We get subjected to so much weaponized music these days, that we no longer trust music, and we no longer respect music. We assume that anyone who makes music these days, has an agenda, and serves an empire, or wants to build one.

That’s too bad, because we need music to build culture. Our culture has disconnected us from the musical process, in order to subject us more completely to its power to inspire awe and manipulate behavior. At the same time, music has died in our culture. Classical music has long since exhausted itself and folk music has succumbed to the lure of capitalism. When the music of your culture dies, your culture dies too. You might not notice it for a while, especially when there are so many great recordings of it to replay, but there’s no real future in our culture anymore.

Stockhausen, Cage and others saw it clearly decades ago. They saw that it was over, and because they knew it was over, they had no enthusiasm for musical convention. Instead, they cast aside everything they had been so painstakingly taught about music, since they were school-children and they went looking for whole different approach, starting from scratch. They weren’t afraid to offend the ear, they showed no reverence for tradition, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been able to use any of their music to sell anything. That’s what makes them some of the most important composers of the 20^th Century.

This has been a very brief and very broad overview of the last 40,000 years of music in our culture. From this perspective, anything that’s happened since then is still today’s news, so I think this is a good place to end. I’ll tell you what I still find compelling about music next week.

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A New Mass Shooting Meets the Same Old Mass Stupidity

I missed the story about the latest school shooting because I don’t follow the news. Please spare me the details, but I know that one must have happened because I suddenly hear people talking about gun control again. It’s funny how Americans have become conditioned to respond to every tragedy by volunteering to give up their rights. Kids OD on drugs, so we sign up for prohibition and sacrifice our privacy in the War on Drugs. We see poor people on our streets, so we write off our right to free speech with anti-panhandling ordinances. By the same Pavlovian conditioning, every time somebody goes berserk with a gun, Americans line up to write the 2^nd Amendment out of the Constitution.

Partially because of government propaganda, partially because of media brainwashing, and partially because of denial, many white middle-class liberals still believe that the government works for them, even though, in reality, most of them work for the government. The government, on the other hand, actually works for the rich, who use it to control the rest of us, but they do it in such a way as to convince the middle-class that it was their idea, because, of course, the rich will make the middle-class pay for it.

Middle-class people don’t have many ideas of their own. Instead, they let the rich fill their heads with a few carefully selected memes, endlessly repeated and dutifully conveyed by the media. By the time most people become middle-class, they’ve already sublimated years of conditioning in school, and they’ve learned to do what they are told without thinking about it much. That’s why every stupid middle-class liberal has the same stupid idea at the same time. That’s not thinking; that’s drooling, just like Pavlov’s dogs. The truth is, middle-class people have forgotten how to think for themselves, and instead, have learned to regurgitate whatever predigested pap the rich feed them through the media.

Meanwhile, the rich have created the greatest arsenal of lethal weaponry ever assembled on Planet Earth, and they use it to kill anyone in the vicinity of anyone who might dare stand in their way, with complete impunity. The rich spend a trillion dollars a year, of the middle-class’s money, to upgrade and improve this arsenal every year. The rich now have more bombs, guns, tanks and war-planes at their disposal than the rest of the world combined, and that arsenal is designed, built and maintained at-the-ready, by trained, well-paid professionals, who have learned not to think for themselves, but to do what they are told, because, of course, they make up most of the middle-class.

Stupid white liberals ignore the massive and rapidly growing, pile of bodies murdered by US, state and local governments, which they dutifully serve, lack the courage to oppose, and remain in denial about. Instead, they let the rich use them as ventriloquist dummies to turn these terrible tragedies into political footballs in a sleazy, underhanded attempt to undermine my right, and ability, to defend myself and my home. In so doing, they also distract us from the economic inequity, media manipulation and social dynamics that drives the phenomena of mass violence in our society in the first place.

Homelessness and Mental Illness

Last week I hosted a show about the housing crisis on my local community radio station. Like a lot of the country, we have a chronic housing shortage, especially affordable housing, and as a result, thousands of people sleep outside, or in their cars, on these cold, rainy winter nights. After the show, a woman approached me to make a comment. She told me that the people she sees on the street don’t seem very friendly to her. She noticed that the people who carry big backpacks and appear to be living outside, mostly talk to, and associate with, each other. They don’t make much of an effort to engage with the rest of society. She seemed to think that they owe us more of an effort.

I told her that I didn’t think poor people owed her anything. By the time you’ve made someone sleep outside in the rain, put up fences and bars everywhere, and paid cops to roust them from every dry, sheltered place they can find, you’ve pretty much blown your chances for friendship, and you should not be surprised to find them in a bad mood. Everyone seems eager to offer helpful criticism to poor people as to what they could improve about themselves to better deserve our compassion, but I have to ask, and I wish I had asked: What about mainstream society deserves respect? Why should poor people voluntarily participate in a system designed to oppress them? More importantly, why do any of us participate in a system that excludes so many people and denies them even the most basic of their human needs?

Once upon a time, we would say that our society deserved respect because we followed God’s word and we endeavored to obey God’s command, so only God could judge us, but to disrespect our society was to disrespect God himself. A whole lot of people still believe that, by the way. There’s really no point in talking to those people. Rational arguments only go so far with them, and I respect that. Belief is a powerful thing. A shared belief brings stability and cohesiveness to a group, even if those beliefs destabilize the climate, disintegrate the ecosystem, and contradict compelling evidence to the contrary.

These days, the rest of us mostly fancy ourselves rational, intelligent creatures capable understanding the world around us, and of making wise decisions for ourselves and the common good. This is every bit as stupid and crazy as believing in God’s word, but it is also just as important to our identity as Jesus is to Christians’. What’s more, this idea is foundational to the concept of democracy, which has become our new religion.

The News has replaced Mass, and elections have replaced The Holy Communion, but it’s essentially the same mass stupidity. Still, you can talk to these people, because they believe deep in their heart that they can solve any problem with rational thinking and creativity, even if they have no real experience at doing either.

If you believe in the supremacy of human intelligence, and your own ability to think something through, this is one of those things that maybe you ought to take the time to think all the way through: What about our society deserves your respect? And more tangibly: What about our society merits your participation? Think about that for a moment.

Off hand, I can think of a lot of reasons to be ashamed of our society. We should be ashamed of global climate change, and what it means for future generations. We should be ashamed that we have exterminated half of the world’s biodiversity in the last 40 years, and that we squeeze more than a hundred species of plant and animal out of existence and into extinction every day. We should be ashamed that today, having practically exhausted the Earth’s resources, all we have to show for it is a few billionaires, a host of toxic gadgets designed to exploit our every thought, and poverty, poverty everywhere.

Historically, we should be ashamed of genocide. We should be ashamed of slavery. We should be ashamed of internments, witch hunts, lynchings, black lists, prohibitions, Jim Crow etc. We should be ashamed of US foreign policy. That’s just off the top of my head, but it’s already a pretty serious list. I could go on.

I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I’m just pointing out that we sacrifice a lot, and we excuse an awful lot of really bad behavior, in order to participate in this society. If we could each choose whether or not to participate in modern society based entirely on principle, I’m sure that a lot of people would find our society too distasteful.

Unfortunately, most of us choose to participate in this modern society out of economic pressure, not principle. You work hard and pay taxes, not because of your burning desire to glorify the proud fatherland, but because you are hungry, and because you want to have a roof over your head. We participate in this society largely because of economic coercion, but we tell ourselves that somehow we are in control, and can fix it all with an election, because we are intelligent, rational people capable of understanding the world and making good decisions. That’s the mythology of a democratic society.

In reality, we mindlessly help the likes of Bill Gates, Elan Musk and Donald Trump mine whatever is left of the Earth’s natural abundance to further their plans to re-engineer the world, escape from the consequences of that re-engineering and put their name in gold letters across whatever is left of it, respectively. Not only that, we step over the broken bodies and spirits of our brothers and sisters to do it. Honestly, there’s nothing sane, rational or respectable about any of it. That’s the real crisis today. There is nothing respectable about modern society. It’s a crime, a disaster, and a failure all rolled into one.

Today, we see democracy for the fraud that it is, a thin veneer of populism over a machine built with violence and coercion, for the purpose of violence and coercion. We have plenty to be ashamed of, as a society, and our complete failure to meet the critical challenges of our time, only adds to that legacy of shame.

We no longer believe in God, but now democracy has failed us too. Our gods have died. Only crazy people worship dead gods, but worship them we do, because we have no idea what else to do. What’s more, we still expect the people we sacrificed to these gods to worship them too. And you thought the homeless were mentally ill.

SoHum’s Goose is Cooked

“The goose is dead,” I heard Ed Denson tell the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. He didn’t say “the goose is gonna die if…” He said “the goose is dead.” I’ve heard a lot of that kind of talk lately, but when Ed Denson says “the goose is dead,” I believe him, because he’s the goose’s lawyer. Ed went to the supervisors to complain about the excessive county taxes on legal cannabis, but it appears that the confluence of legalization and regulation created the perfect storm for Humboldt County’s cannabis industry, otherwise known as “the goose that lays golden eggs.”

They could also call it “the goose that eats people, sucks the rivers dry, and turns the community into a ghetto,” but you know how much people around here prefer to focus on the positive. Whatever you call it, Humboldt County’s cannabis heyday is over. The price of black market cannabis collapsed last year in the face of a historic glut in supply. Meanwhile, the CA state regulators dealt the fatal blow to Humboldt’s so called “small farmers” when they decided to license grows larger than one acre. Suddenly, Humboldt County growers are too remote, too dispersed and too small to produce cannabis, competitively in the free market.

The bubble burst. Although it happened suddenly, it didn’t take a genius to see it coming. Anna Hamilton saw it coming a decade ago, and she warned everyone about it. She asked “What’s after pot?” and the community resoundingly replied, “More pot!” Unfortunately, “more pot” quickly turned into “too much pot,” leading to the current collapse in price. It’s a classic small farmer mistake, and it’s why small farmers usually struggle financially, and fail often. Today, the goose still sucks the rivers dry, and it still eats people, but it doesn’t lay golden eggs anymore.

Eventually, life as a small farmer will rehabilitate a lot of black market growers. The people who played smart, paid their land off, love it, and know how to live close to it, will survive on honest labor and thrift. For the rest of Humboldt County’s 12,000+ black market cannabis growers out there, the people who moved here to grow weed, because they thought they could make money at it, it’s just a matter of time. You can tell haw smart they are by how quickly they scram. The smart ones have already left.

A lot of growers will move on to the next sleazy scam. Don’t be surprised if you see them in the health care industry, or working for Big Pharma, but only the smart ones will make that transition seamlessly. Most of Humboldt County growers will not respond well to the economic downturn. Generations of living the low-status, highly secretive, life of a black market drug dealer left us with limited skills, substance abuse problems and chronically low self-esteem, issues we could always cover up, when we had plenty of money. Without money, it’s gonna be a bitch.

A lot of people still don’t know what hit them. They will crumble along with the black market cannabis industry here in Humboldt County. Broken-down cars will continue to accumulate on broken-down homesteads, occupied by broken-down people who have no idea what else to do. We won’t see quite so many big shiny new trucks in town, or cocky young men driving them. Instead, we’ll see more hollow, addicted and despondent young men, hitchhiking and asking for help. We’ll all feel the pinch, but it will be worse for some parts of Humboldt County than it will be for others.

Arcata will be fine. They took steps to run black market growers out of their residential neighborhoods years ago. They also have the college and a strong arts community that will all help buffer and mitigate the impacts of economic upheaval. McKinleyville seems to have inherited most of Arcata’s old indoor grows, and problems, which they are likely to see more of. Eureka and Fortuna have enough economic diversity to withstand the shock, if people, especially in Eureka, could learn to be more humane to each other.

Life up in rural North East Humboldt has always been pretty hardscrabble, and will remain so, but here in Southern Humboldt, where the black market cannabis industry choked out most of our economic diversity decades ago, we will feel the impacts of this collapse most acutely. Despite Anna Hamilton’s warnings, we remain ill prepared for it. Here, instead of facing reality, and preparing for the inevitable, we put our energy into cultivating a mythology about ourselves as growers of superior cannabis, in a region narrowly suited to it. Unfortunately, that myth only fooled us.

The goose has become a liability. Our dream of becoming the Napa County of cannabis just got buried in bushels of bud from Bakersfield. Now, it’s about survival. It’s about recovery. It’s about reality. For the first time in a long time, we’ll have the financial poverty to match our cultural poverty. Ultimately, that’s a good thing. When you build culture, it attracts money, which brings prosperity. A fountain of money, on the other hand, divorced from culture, breeds dependence and weakens communities. It’s time we got back to building culture, here in Southern Humboldt, instead of just growing money.

A New Approach to the Problem of Homelessness

This past Tuesday, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors took up the topic of whether or not to declare a shelter crisis in Humboldt County. At least 20 people came, mostly from the HSU Homeless Students Alliance to ask the Supervisors to recognize the well established fact that Humboldt County does not have nearly enough housing to accommodate its residents and workforce, and that emergency measures should be taken to address this problem.

The HSA is just the latest group to ask the Board of Supervisors to make this declaration. Concerned citizens and organized groups like AHHA have been pressing the county about this for years. The Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, after listening to dozens of hours of public testimony on the subject, has recommended that the Board of Supervisors declare a shelter crisis multiple times. The Board of Supervisors has repeatedly ignored them all.

The Board of supervisors didn’t have any problem taking swift and decisive action to address homelessness, when they thought they could do it by passing radical, draconian, and unconstitutional laws designed to criminalize poverty. Clearly the problem was serious enough that they thought it warranted infringing on all of our constitutional rights, but, alas, this punitive approach failed miserably, yet again.

When this policy of unbridled police state fascism failed, the county jumped on the “Mormon Miracle” called “Housing First,” but even the Housing First consultants, who the taxpayers pay to advise our Board of Supervisors, have told them that there isn’t enough housing in Humboldt County to make Housing First very effective. In reality, all Housing First does in Humboldt County is take housing away from working families, and give it to disabled individuals. We need housing for working families, and for disabled people, and we need it all to be affordable.

We have well established organizations with plans and working models, all home-grown, designed to solve our housing problem here in Humboldt County by creating affordable housing that works for the people who need it. They have made dozens of presentations and attended hundreds of meetings about it. This past Tuesday’s BOS meeting was just the latest. What did the Board of Supervisors decide to do about this serious problem at Tuesday’s meeting? They decided to form an ad hoc committee, which allows them to waste everyone’s time and money for another couple of years without doing anything constructive.

If they could have solved this problem by punishing people, this problem would have been solved years ago. We love to punish people here in Humboldt County, and our Board of Supervisors will eagerly implement our most sadistic impulses and write them into law, but we really hate to do anything that makes life easier on people. Most of us are too small-minded to see beyond our own petty resentments, insecurities and greed, and too well programmed by corporate propaganda to think for ourselves. We don’t mind working two low-wage jobs, just to pay the rent, so long as the people who don’t work that hard, sleep out in the rain. We’re literally just that stupid.

Even without a significant racial divide, Humboldt County gives Mississippi a run for the money in the field of bitter small-minded hatefulness. Honestly, I have never heard hatred and bigotry expressed more openly and frequently, against anyone, anywhere, in all my life as I hear it here in Humboldt County, against the poor and homeless. It is, by far, the ugliest thing about Humboldt County, and all of the media outlets here pander to that ugliness and promote it. It’s shameful.

Unfortunately, the American Genocide, extractive industries, and the War on Drugs have brought out the worst in people here in Humboldt County, and attracted the worst kind of people to Humboldt County for longer that anyone can remember. It shows. It shows in ugly attitudes, bitter resentment, and heartless insensitivity to the suffering of others.

We’re not getting anywhere by reasoning with these people. For them, reason is just a tool for getting their own way. They’ll say anything. Lying is second nature to them, and lying to themselves is first. They’ll make sure that the new ad hoc committee on homelessness does nothing but waste time and money for another year or two, while dozens of people die needlessly on the streets of Humboldt County.

We should stop wasting our time with them. Instead, I think we need to take a more revolutionary approach to homelessness. Instead of appealing to the better nature of people who clearly have no better nature, we should focus directly on providing the needy with the tools they need to secure for themselves, a home, and a brighter future here in Humboldt County.

Instead of appealing to the rich and insensitive to come together as a community, we should arm the poor and oppressed to enable their liberation. For $200 we can put a quality firearm in the hands of a needy homeless man. For $1 we can put a bullet in that gun. With a gun and some bullets, we can give homeless people the tools they need to claim their rightful home here in Humboldt County, the same way early settlers did when they first discovered this beautiful place. That is, by killing, and enslaving the people who already live here.

A lot of our homeless Vets have military training. Providing them with guns and ammunition would give them the opportunity to put that training to use here in the US, and they could train other homeless people how to work together to launch successful tactical assaults. Together, they could overcome any obstacle and rise above their current economic condition, even without the support of Humboldt County’s “Old Guard” or new rich.

Every cop we hire here in Humboldt County costs the taxpayers more than $100,000 a year, and hiring more cops has completely failed to address the problem of homelessness in Humboldt County. The Kevlar vests and semi-automatic weapons our cops carry cost a pittance by comparison. We could save a lot of money, and solve the problem of homelessness once and for all, if instead of hiring cops, we just gave the guns, ammunition and armor to to the people in the street who need them to secure their little piece of Humboldt County and participate in this proud Humboldt County tradition.

Even if we can’t raise the money locally, I’ll bet we can find foreign governments who would be happy to help us out. I know this isn’t a new idea, but I don’t think it has ever been given a fighting chance to succeed in the US before. We could be pioneers here in Humboldt County, with this new approach to solving the problem of poverty and homelessness. They’ll call it the Humboldt Revolution, and it will change the way the world sees poverty in America. It’s got to start somewhere. Why not here?

Some Christmas Music

Well here we are in the final week of 2017. As I look back on the year, I realize that I’ve made a lot of music, and watched almost no TV in 2017. I don’t regret it. In fact, I hereby resolve to do the same in 2018. However, I feel like I’ve done a really half-assed job of promoting the music I have created this year. I really need to step up to the plate on this because I have a lot more music in the pipeline for 2018. I hope you’ll take the time to listen and that you find some of my music interesting. You are welcome to listen to, and download, all of my music, for free, any time you like, at my music blog, www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com, but allow me to present to you, dear reader, the gift of music this holiday season.

Not that long ago I told you about my new album, Vintage Startraveler , and the synthesizer I built from scratch, the GeoSafari Modular Analog Synthesizer. Since then, however, I’ve released two new videos featuring music from the album. These videos feature old footage that I found in The Prelinger Archive, a collection of movies and videos in the public domain. I turned the final cut on the album, Black Hole Energy Field, into the soundtrack to The Visitor, the story of an animated alien who gets frightened away by some Cold War era government propaganda. This alien originally starred in a weirdly religious driver safety film made by the Methodist Church, called Stop Driving Us Crazy.

Native Planet draws heavily from an old, sci-fi film titled Assignment Outer Space. The movie had terrible dialog, but exactly the kind of space footage I wanted. Intermittently, you’ll see shots of me, at the controls of the GMAS.

In addition to building synthesizers, I also enjoy creatively rewiring, or circuit-bending, electronic toys, and turning them into weird musical instruments. One particular toy, a Casio ML1 toy keyboard, has proven quite precocious. “ML” stands for “Magic Light.” This one-foot-long keyboard has a tiny two-octave keyboard, and red LEDs light up under each key when you press it.

While probing the electronic brain of this toy, I discovered several contact points that, when momentarily bridged, cause the ML1 to malfunction in such a way that it spontaneously composes its own original music. When manipulated in this way, the ML1 generates complex original musical themes that repeat, but change in subtle ways that evolve over time. The ML1 has it’s own aesthetic, a Merzbow meets Super Mario kind of vibe that takes some getting used to, but I find the ML1’s music quite interesting and compelling.

It was an honor to collaborate with the ML1 on the album we made together this year. I feel that Post-Apocalyptic Noise Fields for Active Listening barely scratched the surface of our musical potential, and I look forward to collaborating with the ML1 more in 2018. For now, here’s a video I made from the track, ML1 Quartet from our new album Post-ApocalypticNoise Fields for Active Listening. I titled the video “The Supreme Joy of Spontaneous Creation,” because of the short audio clip that starts the video. I created the video collage from a collection of TV commercials, a military training film and an anti-drug propaganda movie from the ’60s, all from the Prelinger Archive.

 

What’s ahead in 2018? You haven’t heard me play didgeridoo for a while, have you? Right now, I’m working on a new didgeridoo album that I’m really excited about. I don’t know what to call it, but here’s a couple of videos that’ll give you an idea of what’s ahead.

Happy Holidays!

Thanks for reading and listening!

The True Meaning of Christmas

My partner, Amy Gustin had a great idea the other day. This is not at all unusual for her. A lot of my columns begin with one of her great ideas, and this is one of them. The other day, Amy was perusing some books about the cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet while contemplating the flora and fauna of Ice Age Europe, and speculating about the Paleolithic origins of certain pagan European Christmas symbols, when she said this: “Environmentalists should take over Christmas.”

“What?” I replied. She explained that a lot of European pagan Christmas symbols celebrate the Boreal Forest and an arctic climate. We have Christmas trees. Christmas is the only time of year when snow is popular, and Santa lives at the North Pole and gets around on a sled pulled by caribou. All of these things remind us of the arctic, and they should remind us that the arctic is undergoing dramatic changes due to global climate change.

Can you think of a better symbol for global climate change that Santa Claus? First, he drives a zero emission, carbon neutral vehicle, and he’s been doing it for centuries. Second, everything Santa owns faces imminent destruction, unless we can stop the sea ice from shrinking. Santa, Mrs. Claus, all of the elves and the whole toy factory are headed straight for a watery grave at the bottom of the ocean, unless we stop global warming now.

Suddenly, Christmas made sense to me in a whole new way, and I knew I had to write about it. Global Climate Crisis is the biggest challenge we face as a species; it deserves our biggest holiday, especially since those Sciencism dorks took over Earth Day. Fuck them and their March for Science. The people who gave us nuclear proliferation, and put 250 different persistent man-made toxins in every mother’s breast milk came out and walked all over Earth Day to tell us that scientists agree that global warming is a real phenomena, and by the way, go vaccinate your kids, eat your GMOs and have faith in Elon Musk’s space program. May the force be with you. Nanu Nanu.

We need Christmas if we are going to turn around the climate crisis. Forget about the baby Jesus and the Catholic Church’s first victim of sexual abuse. Jesus has always been a divisive figure, even as a baby, and nativity scenes often stir controversy. Who needs it? If you want to put out your creche, go ahead, just leave the holy family in the box. Go ahead and put out all of the animals. They’re the only parts anyone really likes about your creche anyway. Then go ahead and add a few more animals. Christmas is all about protecting biodiversity, so go wild on the animals.

Coca Cola has done a great job of making the polar bear into a symbol of Christmas, and we should adopt that symbol wholeheartedly. Instead of Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus, put a mother polar bear and her two cubs in your nativity scene. I’m all for wise men, if you can find any, but how wise can your men be if they’re standing next to a hungry polar bear.

Global Climate Crisis effects everyone, and it’s time to make Christmas into a holiday for everyone. From now on, Christmas is about the North Pole, and the gift of a stable climate. Being born doesn’t get you a holiday, in my book. Jesus has a holiday, it’s the one he lived and died for, and Christians should go ahead and do Easter big, but Christmas is too important to let Christians hog it to themselves. Besides, Christmas is better without Jesus.

We’ve still got Santa Claus, but now Christmas is about saving Santa. We’ve got reindeer and sleigh-bells, snow and Christmas trees and we’ve got all of the animals coming together to help their friend the polar bear. We’ve got the Nutcracker to help us crack the nut of global climate change, and we can re-edit the Charlie Brown Christmas Special so that Linus’ big speech reflects the holiday’s bold new direction. Everything you love about Christmas will still be there for you, but now, Christmas has a mission.