Torley Lives

Many people get stuck on the meaning of words like old trains that've already passed by and delivered their cargo. This leads to unpleasant semantic arguments and backwards-thinking which is neither relevant nor applicable to moving forward. Philip K. Dick recognized this when he said:

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Words are worthless if you do not know what they mean. If someone swears at you at a foreign language to your face, of course you know they're angry (or something like it). But if they send you the same words in an email, sans ALLCAPS, sans emoticons, you may never know how to interpret it. Filtering it through Babelfish may result in something laughable, and quite off-base.

The best wordal communication can be done through a small subset of key players who are dynamic, adaptive, and possess shared core strengths but different specialties. They may be generalists, but must be able to improvise, to product a stream-of-soniconsciousness. I use the not-too-far analogy of a jazz quartet, each of which has their own instrument, but together, they create. They can have solo albums. They can work on side projects. But still, their unique voices shine through collaborations.

Metaphysical, but, somewhat-Heisenbergian: trying to define a word moves what it means. Not necessarily to a remote observer, but almost invariably to yourself. And if you keep repeating the word out loud while thinking different things, you'll see: it's already changing.

The first time I realized this was gazing at the word "the" and wondering why I even understood it in the first place. Aren't we full of miracles?

It's a safe generalization that when you describe someone's personality, you attach as much consistency to their character as to their physical appearance (plastic surgery aside). Sayings like "A leopard never changes its spots" get bandied about, but when you're presented with the possibility of someone changing their personality like they change their clothes, that may very well result in brainjam.

Popularly, we attribute "not having a consistent personality" to mental illness, such as schizophrenia or Tourette's. We attribute "lack of a personality" to conditions like Asperger Syndrome. Words like "sociopath" automatically get sorted into the "bad/negative" bin. Why can't someone often do good things without a conscience or remorse? What's the opposite of remorse, for that matter?

I don't think this kind of stuff is thought about or discussed enough, so I've been doing some thinking of my own.

In Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (an excellent read), the wild-haired author makes a case for "the power of context", referring in one part to how people behave differently depending on the circumstances, such as if they're being watched. He semi-concludes:

Character, then, isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.

This makes a lot of sense to me. What's also sensible is that we've been given new tools to control our environments — I of course, as I often do, refer to Second Life. And not only can you shape the virtual world around you, you can get an alt(ernative) account where you can live out a secret life, experiment with things you might be afraid to do more openly, and essentially, take a magnifying glass to some of your habits/tendencies/interests and explore them deeper.

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I've seen comment threads devolve into "blahblahblah wordwars" where one party accuses another of "Not getting it", or "You don't understand". Geeks have a word that goes beyond mere understanding, and that is "grok".

Media that uses Second Life poorly makes me cringe. I don't want to see my favorite virtual world used as cheap set dressing or a stand-in throwaway where any virtual world would've done. I've had more than my fair share of that rubbish (*curmudgeon brow furrow*), and while I do certainly think Second Life on a show like The Office is funny, well, it's still very surface and doesn't doesn't grok the societal beauty which must be experienced. It's kinda like how The Man with the Golden Gun was filmed in Thailand due to its pretty settings, but James Bond's no cultural ambassador.

Publicity's good and inevitable but we can do better!

I think we can win. I know we can do both — highlight our new WindLight-enhanced atmospheres wrapped around avatars in love and tell an awesome story. That's an example.

I look forward to what's to come, but for now, hats off to each and all who are responsible for Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey. Including Orhalla "Hobo King" Zander. I've only seen previews and not the full documentary, but what I've watched so far tells me they do grok it, and don't misappropriate Second Life in an analogous way to callously wronging First Nations people on film. Are some artistic liberties taken? Sure, like not showing Ruth in all her hideosity. I can live, and live again, with that.

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Photo by wonker. 

I've made strong points before about drum 'n' bass lacking a wealth of really good artist albums — tragically, a non-trend that continues to this day. Like most dance music genres but even sparser, drum 'n' bass has grown a tree of notable singles over the years, but whole albums (which don't just dabble in the style on a couple tracks) which embrace the form and substantially shape, deform, warp it forward are frustratingly rare.

That's why I'm so happy to share that Pendulum's new album, In Silico, their first since 2005's Hold Your Colour, starts things off with the headbanging stomp of "Showdown", and ends powerfully with the live-action-anime-thrust of "The Tempest" too. Shy of 58 min., not as long a work as their 80-min. debut and hardly as collaborative. However, the tracks are, for the most part, tighter-produced and rich in melody while sacrificing none of the literally earthquaking DRUM and BASS heaviness which made them such a field success in the first place. Let's put it this way: Pendulum take what's essentially good about DnB, chop the slop and let it drop, and add special ingredients to the stew you've never tasted together before.

In Silico will definitely appall and provoke lots of guttertalk from technosnobs, and it already has. Wise words from lead singer Rob Swire about the DnB "echo chamber" aka "ideological incest":

my only real problem with dnb (which i also tried to point out with my other post but fucked it up)… is the insular thinking that sometimes pollutes every electronic scene. when people don't look outside their given genre / scene for musical inspiration, things tend to get boring and tired very quickly. the music goes in circles, repeating itself…the amount of fans never changes, new people aren't attracted to the scene to give it fresh input and shit gets stale very quickly. all the drum n bass i have really liked since i got into it sounded like it took inspiration from different places…

Well, all that spew in response can only result in more things being said about Pendulum — you know what they say about publicity — and if we were to rattle off a list of comparative features for In Silico like most tech products on the market today, it might go something like this:

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