Compositional Space

I 've been having this same old discussion recently with a few people – 'does money make you happy?'

Well if you're a regular here lookin' in on this series of tiny pieces about stuff that I think about, then sooner or later you're gonna have a pretty good idea about what you're going to spend all that money you're about to make on...

Not that you don't already, of course. But there'll be more ideas, won't there; just, more.

Desirable. I like that word. No, I actually love it.

If we don't desire things – I mean really desire them – then attaining things or getting stuff we merely want or think we want adds up to very little at the end of a day.

Composition, I find, is the great secret to all fulfilling acquisitions, that is - the secret to having satisfying possessions.

Lonely alleyways at night, for example, are composed universally of only a very few basic elements: emptiness, and stillness, almost silence, a few nondescript and old things lying about, or snow or still dark pools of water, and a solitary light or a huddling small set of lights weakly fighting the night's covering grasp. Walls demarking this place from other places.

Space – empty spaces, everywhere – are spaces just waiting to be filled. We are the people of the labyrinths. We just don't realise that it takes art, skill, and training, to be able to sidestep the monsters of the dark unknown, and to make sport of our predicament. Our supposed predicament of being in this place.

Walls between Fire and Liquid

Bion Again

This is all off the top of my head so I'm not sure I'm going to be able to reference stuff that well...

Hey it took me about twenty minutes to remember the name of Wilfred Bion – one of the most original and influential thinkers of the Twentieth Century in the field of psychology. What with the election and Fox and storms and floods and global warming and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I stopped thinking about one of the men who began all this 'lead the minds of people to prevent war through the media...'

Bion needs little introduction to most of the people who look in on this blog. But we should remind ourselves that Bion's work was very largely conducted in absolute secrecy because he worked for the Ministry of Defence in the UK, as well as eventually, the US military. Even today, the detail that comes out of his work is, I believe, the tip of the iceberg. Well, okay, the droplets of the water from the melted iceberg that melted because of GLOBAL WARMING.

Armin van Buuren - trance dancers love him

I am grateful to JP who posted an earlier comment directing readers to a Salon article about the effects of rhythmic music. This is a Wilfred Bion idea. He conducted extensive research into the neurological effects of sound and music. A lot of the modern strands of research flow on from the research of Bion and his collaborators. Today, the most advanced researchers have moved on a long long way from the fundamental concepts about 'endorphins' and their capacity to alter sensations of pain and anxiety. 'Endorphins' covers too wide a body of chemical reactions and electro-chemical events in neurophysiology to apocalypse (yes, that's what it really means) the mechanisms of human psychological effects and affective neural pathways.

The actual way the brain functions in concert with its sensory systems, is that there is a virtual constant and continuous flood of signals going on – there are descriminating filters that pick up variance patterns and apply signification to those patterns. Sleep itself, only occurs when another system comes into play that blocks incoming and outgoing sense and nerve signals. Those signals are still going on, they just get 'whited-out' by orthogonal or 'keytonic' additional signals which have the effect of blanking out those patterns that have affective muscular reaction significance to the 'awake state' brain functions. The point really, of what I'm saying, is that there is a lot going on constantly. Nothing is actually dormant as such. And more particularly, the system of pattern recognition/signification is outlandlishly complex, I mean really. Really, it is complex.

For example, if you are familiar with the musical group 'Drum Tao' or 'Drums of Zen' (same people) then you might assume that this is certainly the type of rhythmic sound stimulation that will pump those endorphins of which the article in Salon speaks. And it might, but not because of the rhythm, but because of the pattern variances... And, researchers have found, the more subtle the variances, THE MORE SIGNIFICANCE THE BRAIN ATTRIBUTES.

Black Forest (brand name) wireless speakers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0MRzFW7o1w

I recommend Jonas Steur Featuring Julie Thompson – 'Cold Wind' – ( the link above) for an example of extremely subtle pattern variance. And if you want to compare something similar from a classical repertoire one might suggest Vladimir Horowitz playing a Chopin Polonaise. These quick, almost imperceptibly tiny pattern variances are the kinds of things the human brain responds to most of all. Waves forms, shapes, contours, calculative multiplied notes – all these electrify the brain and underscore that 'something important' is going on to the human mind. It is an evolutionary imperative. And I would listen to what these things 'say.' By accident, or perhaps not by so much accident, music shows us the meaning to our lives.

Calvin J. Bear

The Day Of The Burgundy Wine-Coloured Spy

French wine, lingerie, red velvet curtains.

This is the iconographic image of elegant sex that we are used to in the modern West.

Sex is, afterall – well at least it is for the elite in that game - highly formalized and stylized.

I know this because I learned it from a man I interviewed once who was a key part of Helmut Newton's original Sydney (Australia)-based commercial photographic studio. This gentleman – the one I interviewed - spoke of Herr Doktor Markus Wolf long before too many of the even well-read public had ever heard of his name. Of course, I would hazard not many recall now what that particular fellow was all about...

Actual Russian Intelligence Officer - Anna Chapman

I should say too, though, that whilst I am relaxed in saying that the person that I knew, and that I am speaking about here, did indeed also show me all the great secrets of a good Martini - I am slightly troubled by the fact that later on in his life, I suspected him of either having become, or at least having become very deeply implicated with, a serial killer...

Marinus (Martin) - for that was his name - was also a friend of the actor Lee Marvin and they would spend many summers stalking Black Marlin, I believe it was, from memory. The both of them were surprisingly fit, or let's say physically strong, to be more accurate, and good with long-bladed, serrated-back Marlin knifes,

In one particular discussion about things of the world, Martin pointed out to me that a hundred years ago, the finest restaurants served their clientelle a la francaise and not, as we are used to now, a la carte or a la russe (as it is more correctly termed).

Slava Zaitsev fashion - no ushanka today

'A la russe' means in the Russian style, and that means bringing dishes out in a sequential manner. Which is a bit like serial monogamy, you could say...

Laying out a large table with more or less all the dishes already there to be served from, to the diners – this is a la francaise. Such a thing is all very formal, with liveried attendants standing behind the guests like soldiers until a toast is made and only then are people seated and things go on from there. It's meant to inspire awe in onlookers...

Martin told me eventually when I asked him directly about the killings, that it couldn't have been him 'because he loved women too much...' A very poor excuse, I thought.

But, I say! This man was urbane – the most urbane I have ever encountered. Almost theatrical, but not overpoweringly so, so as you would count it against him; he was, I must say, tres subtle.

So... French wine, lingerie, red velvet curtains.

But I also think you can present Russian vodka, Soviet era emblems, and ushankas, and caviar, as iconographic of a certain kind of decadence and thus of course also of sex. At the moment I'm not so much concerned about the social or historic derivation of these symbols as anything remotely to do with sex, more the current nuances they conjure up.

Burgundy wine coloured velvet, really...

You see I want you all to imagine the launch of some luxury prestige or hot sports car, with a closed invitation guest list. You know what these things are like don't you? They are held in rather large rooms, though usually not big halls as such. There is one wall removed and a modest enough stage behind a large floor-to-ceiling dark red velvet drape. And music plays and champagne is served. And right when the music reaches a certain crescendo, the curtains are pulled back to reveal – the great vision. And everyone applauds. And drinks more wine.

What lies behind the closed curtains? Soviet submarines and ICBM's, Bugattis and Jaguars. And so on. Catherine the Great turns into Mother Russia. Crotchless knickers from Napoleon's Josephine...? I don't know. But what's the great American sex icon deriving from power at the apex? If it's Marilyn Monroe and JFK then it's certainly out of very recent history, comparatively speaking.

The curtains pulled open are like a framed window onto something out there. Sometimes we might be too close to the glass and fog it up with our breath so that we are unable to see clearly past our noses.

See the fact is, without the power factor or the sense of it, no one pulls out their chequebooks.

Anna Chapman again

(P.S. Do we still use chequebooks?)

Get That Edge

One day, when I was twenty-seven, I looked at the bank statement of the private company I owned outright, saw the figure of two million dollars positive balance there, and began to be more careful about the physical risks I was taking – I began to slow down from my usual speed (was never that fast to begin with!) when I was driving, and I stopped thinking about all those extreme sports things like sky-diving and solo glider flying and deep sea diving and so on. That is I stopped entertaining any serious inclination to participate in those kinds of pursuits.

I suppose part of the story was that I was headed into the public listed companies arena and I guess I valued my own being around to complete any saga there that I had decided to commence.

Up until then I was always very athletic, well-coordinated, quite competitive, and liked taking educated risks that seemed like decent challenges to a lot of other people.

Zivko Edge Aerobatic Plane

Theoretically, as my own bank account grew, I could have indulged in a lot of things that had been too expensive previously. My sister flew, I kind of dabbled without putting enough time into getting licensed – but the intent and the interest to pursue such idiotic things like aerobatic flying was definitely there. As time passed I forgot all about this kind of stuff.

My nephew on the other hand, is undertaking most of the things I pulled myself back from in my late twenties. We both go to a few Red Bull air races every year and he has flown with aerobatic pilots as a passenger in two-seaters.

Funny thing is now, I yet might make calculated decisions to get back into certain 'out there' activities. The older I get, and the more I have seen what a waste good intentions are on most of society, and how little appreciated they are (not that I particularly have done anything much in the order of the completely altruistic myself), and certainly how very little use indeed someone with a brain like mine, is to the majority of people – the more I find that it feels possible for me to take huge risks with personal safety. When I say 'huge risks' though, I mean apparent huge risks, because I still believe calculation and judgement and correct assessments are totally paramount.

Professional risk-taking was what I embarked upon early on because I had great doubts and suspicion about what was being cast by society at large as authoritative – either of knowledge, morality, even of science. I had formed the view that I could and should back my own judgement. By about the Nineteen Eighties it was starting to be apparent to me that the world had moved away from broader social reasoning and had become completely drawn to material self-interest as the driving logic for anything that people undertook. I had this view though, that people were not generally that very good at attaining their selfish ends, frankly... There is this hard-nosed 'realism' that has become the sentiment of the modern world, but it is based around a self-important and exaggerated view of capabilities and intellect and talent.

Okay, I DID have an amazing early education and it simply is a fact that for a short while the then young David and Hillary Rothschild stayed in my family's home while my father supervised their University Matriculations.

I don't think I was being necessarily presumptuous or conceited in forming the views that I had about credentialism and trends in science and economics and politics – frankly I was too young and too borderline autistic to be anything other than just plain pragmatic.

However I wish I was as smart still, as I was back then when I could make those calculating and cynical decisions. Because in the back of my mind is another, and newer, suspicion, that society is ripe for something – I know not what...

Anyhow, last Sunday I had an amazing red wine with some older family and their friends: Chateau Tanunda Barossa Shiraz. I think this has been the very very best red I have had in about ten years. It is, in my estimation, at least as good as a thousand dollar bottle of Penfolds Grange.

There are still many amazing things in life in spite of the uselessness of much of what has come to be the establishment and the authoritative platforms for money, science, entertainment and law.

The beauty of the internet is not that it has opened up all of these great things to everyone. But that it has closed them all off and made them intensely private and only privately accessible to the sensible. Most people just don't have the patience to be sensible any more. It takes patience to make a great wine, breed a great horse, cook a great piece of beef.

Old money... is patient, but without losing any of its edge and sensibility and taste for the good things. People who lose their comprehension of what actually is good, waste money on the inferior.

Deep, Dark, Progressional

Do you want a thrill?

The thrill of the most advanced things - you will be
flying in one of these one day soon.

Would you like to experience something that is utterly mindblowing – yet still fits inside that box 'we intelligent people' confine ourselves into these days, namely, the 'scientific.' And of course, not illegal...

Firstly, though, allow me to just say that all of this is actually incredibly old. There was, as far as I know, a long time ago in Greece, a temple at place called Epidaurus, in which there was a thing called an Enkoimeteria (you know, like cafeteria, only enkoimeteria; a place of mystical sleep). And during your mystical sleep there, induced by the musical enchantment of priests and priestesses, the god Apollo himself would advise you of how to cure your ailments.

Now moving on forward to today, the leading edge of the neuroscientific world is adding some scientific authority to what the avant garde digital electronic musicians call 'auditory driving.'

There is a lot of scientific data available about the mechanisms of neural signalling – an area I personally find very interesting - and the system structures and pathways that are now accepted to be, much more so than previously supposed, genetically pre-determined in modern human brains. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book called The Overlords, in which an alien species comes here to try to understand why humans spent so much time playing around with meaningless patterns and structures of audial information. Eventually, in the book, the aliens congratulated a composer on his outstanding work and then departed, none the wiser and still failing to understand what was going on, because they had 'no music within themselves.'

Music is like any other endeavour of Mankind; it becomes more and more streamlined as we progress as a species. The apprehension of advanced music, is not as clearly obvious as say the immediate visual significance of innovative and advanced material physical design – and that is because it occurs and unfolds over time, rather than can be quickly 'seen' as a complete body, as one image, as it were.

Alucidnation - Bruce Bickerton

Oliver Sacks, in a recent edition of the Oxford Journal (Vol. 129, Issue 10, Pp. 2528-2532) quotes Schopenhauer as saying that “music was an embodiment of pure 'will.'” Sacks, still a bit behind the bleeding edge, casually and weakly opines that the question in his own (Sacks') mind is still unresolved as to whether or not Schopenhauer is correct. And yet goes on to intimate that music is pre-installed into the design structures of the human neurophysiology and even the muscle-body.

And now, here is my pronouncement on all this: music is the very essence of language of advanced Man. When you want to look for evidence of intelligent communications from the outer Cosmos, or from ancient aliens, or 'gods,' or from seemingly mythical entities and intelligences, in fact there are a never-ending amount of clues and 'artefacts' in the world of music. We don't rapidly pick these up because they demand a greater scrutiny than what is expected by the Fox Television Era mindset. In fact I don't even admit there is such a real thing as a 'soundbite;' a soundbite is not even a large enough data set to represent the equivalent of an alphabet letter in a bowl of alphabet soup!

No, if you actually want to comprehend an intelligent argument, you are required to possess a certain amount of inherent music within. Science can now – and has – stuck a PET scan onto the activity of the brain, and knows without any contradiction, that neurons light up in constellations of sophisticated connections, when the firing rates of synapses reach the harmonic threshold requirements that define our perceptions and apprehension of what we call 'music.'

The word 'trance' is an Old French word itself taken from the Latin 'transire' which implies a 'petrified condition from fear of evil' when someone transitions or passes or crosses over the River Styx.

Coincidentally, the outstanding modern trance music composer BT, has the root word in his own birth name – Brian Transeau.

DJ Anna Kiss

But in fact modern trance music is highly mathematical, rather than simply haphazard or merely coincidental... It is characterized by a tempo of between 110 and 150 beats per minutes, and has a number of other highly consistently, structurally constrained, elements.

Some of the best exponents of this type of music are quite old men, on the whole - and some women too - and a lot of them are classically trained pianists. Craig Armstrong is not a young man. Brian Bickerton is a ginger-haired mature English gentleman at home with British Soccer, and fish and chips, and beer. But what they are doing in engineering the music they make, is inducing brain activity that is in no way dissimilar to what you will experience even from the most sophisticated or highest-level and highest lifestyle hedonic stimulation. Try it: I assume you all can get YouTube – have a look at Alucidnation 'Deep Rez,' or 'The Infinite Variety.' Just try it.