Hi All!
Missed you all. I hope to update in all your journals soon, especially those who have been kind enough to keep posting in mine.
Love ya!
Lately I've been having so many things going, so many ideas to write about I don't know where to start. It's like when you have so many things to say at once, it just makes you shut up...deer in the headlights and all. That pretty much sums up the last several weeks.
For those of you who kinda know the real me, I'm a heady and cerebral guy. That's the equivalent of running 100 programs at the same time on your computer, making it fucking useless.
I'll try to cover a few things without making this a zillion lines long and totally unreadable.
Ramones
I just finished watching the Ramones story. Lot's of mixed emotions there. First is, every rock music fan should watch this movie, especially if you don't know who these guys are or know only a little.
I fancy myself as a novice rock historian (just got a phone call in the middle, my RL friend and SG friend Jared is getting married in a month!) and I love to chart out in my head who influenced what. I find alot of those early bands' music, the most influentual ones and not necessarily the most commercially successful ones, are some of the best.
You know there are many rock and punk bands labeled as great and responsible for starting, representing or greatly influencing entire music movements. Sex Pistols and The Clash (punk, Ska and eventually New Wave and later 80's metal), Joy Division/New Order (Electronica), Blondie (New Wave, Disco), Nirvana and Pearl Jam (Seattle Grunge), on and on. But you look at these bands, many of them with great commercial success and very influential on today's musicians, and they too were influenced by someone else.
There are very few bands that REALLY STARTED something from scratch and weren't just copying someone else. And that was the Ramones. Sure, they were fans of music, what musician isn't? They liked people such as Iggy Pop and such.
The Ramones started mid 70's in New York and basically made CBGB's, a dive bar, into the legend it is today. But they never had any commercial success in the US. When they moved to England to play some gigs, they basically started the entire UK punk scene. That UK punk scene basically started within one or two generations nearly every major music genre today, except Country and Hip Hop.
They played their own music and did what Nirvana was credited for 30 years before Nirvana broke, which is they showed Rock N' Roll for what it really was.
You didn't need musical virtuosity or an excessive image to make great rock music. You just needed passion, some catchy hooks and riffs, and a willingness to leave it all on the performance stage.
Watching the Ramones movie, the most poignant moment was when they interviewed the late/great Joe Strummer of The Clash and he spun an anecdote about when he and his friends heard about this London club the Ramones were going to be playing. They snuck around the back and threw a rock through a high window.
Johnny Ramone, rambunctious as ever, sticks his head out and yelled "WHAaaaAaT??!". Joe yelled up, "hey man, it's The Clash and the Sex Pistols, we want to get in!". So Johnny sneaks them in, they form a human chain to pull each other through this window. A perfect punk rock moment, haha.
Point is, no one single band has had more of their fans start their own bands. And many of those bands became great and influenced other bands. All those bands I listed above had a direct influence from the Ramones and think of all the bands and artists thus influenced by them.
Anyway, go see this movie, it's possibly the most relevant movie to Rock N' Roll. ....oh, and so many great fucking songs!
Linear Thinking: Micro and Macro
Now to go in a TOTALLY different direction! This one is a major thought I have all the time.
Often times people wonder why I get so bent about so many issues and have such a strong opinion about boring topics like economics and politics. All I ever wanted to be was a biological scientist of some kind, doing stuff like...well...like my good bud legionnaire. Ironically, he has a great curiousity for economics (which will naturally and inevitably lead to politics). I guess we intellectuals are just like that; an insatiable desire for knowledge defines us. And on top of being an intellectual, I fancy myself a scientist who believes greatly in the Scientific Method.
Anyway, many intellectuals constantly feel they are at war, an intellectual war, with the mediocre ideas (lies and misconceptions) that are generally accepted as fact and truth by the public. I feel this way too and so do many economists. So the question pondered me: why are things like this? Humans are intelligent and sentient yet society seems more like a mob or a herd of sheep. I've come to accept this fact and have even been able to justify logically why this is not only the truth but even a good truth. BUT! Why is it so many intellectuals and smart people don't understand basic economics or even the conservative economic agenda? SHIT, EVEN MANY SO-CALLED "ECONOMISTS" DON'T GET IT EITHER! For those of us who get it, it makes complete sense on all three levels: ethos, pathos and logos. (Before I go any further, what I mean by "conservative" is not the political "conservative" aka the Republican and Bush agenda, but more like the Libertarian "laissez-faire" type of ideology. I believe econ should drive poli, not the other way around. )
So I toss this around in my head alot. Could it be, this economic idea which makes total sense to me on every level could be wrong because so many other people, whose intelligence I respect, don't get it? I mean, I'm a scientist first right? The basis of the Scientific Method is where your ideas/theories have been studied and scrutinized by other scientists and intellectuals, and it only becomes scientific fact when there is some sort of consensus. Why no consensus for the conservative economic theory? Could we conservatives be wrong?
The answer to the smaller question is, no. We are not wrong. This idea can not make sense on every level and be totally wrong. Nearly every major scientific breakthrough idea is first disbelieved by the scientific community of that day. It almost always happens: Columbus and the world being round, Semmelweiss and microscopic germs, Copernicus and the earth revolving around the sun, Darwin and evolution, the list goes on. Just because we don't have a ideological consensus right now, doesn't mean the idea is wrong. ...maybe 50 years from now if things are still the same...
So the new question, the burning one became "how do I explain why people just don't get this?". Various pieces of the puzzle, various facts I had observed since I was a teenager and first started thinking about not only finances but economics, started to piece themselves together in my mind like a scientist framing a new theory by putting together his data gleaned from many repetitive observations.
The answer is ,what I call, linear thinking combined with human "arrogance" and emotional attachment. Human arrogance is simply the fact that many people feel that humanity is not a part of nature. I don't need to explain this but we all know that the Earth revolves around the sun, but people used to arrogantly believe that it was the other way around simply because humans lived on the Earth and not the sun. Now what I mean by "linear thinking" is people can easily measure things and understand trends for a short amount of time. For example people get paid at a constant rate every hour or month. If that pay rate changes, then all the amounts are directly affected by exactly that much. If you get a raise, every paycheck will go up exactly by that amount or percent constantly. This is what economists call "micro" scale economics. Basically it follows and measures only one line of resource measurement. It doesn't measure at why I got a raise, the local or global job market, new technologies or anything else.
"Macro" scale economics on the other hand measure the trends and activities large populations and this is where people get in trouble. What makes sense on the micro level has only a very tiny place in macro econ because macro economics measure many things at once.
But economics is a natural science (and yes it is a science). As a science, economics studies and measures the activity of living beings acquiring and exchanging resources. It's alot like biologists studying ecosystems and food chains/webs (ironically the same plague of linear thinking also affects this community). Numbers and trends in nature do not go in straight lines for long. They almost always are curves that go up and down. Logarithms and trigonometry, sine and cosine waves, the "bell" curve, the fibonacci sequence, and many other mathematical properties were all developed to explain occurences in nature. All of these "numbers" when graphed come out as curved patterns. If economics measures activities of populations, mainly human animals, then the typical graphs of these behaviors should also be expected to look like these patterns, "waves" if you will. Take a simple equation that graphs out to be a straight line, like (X + 2) where X = 1. Then add in one element that changes this like (X)(X + 2) or whatever, and suddenly it graphs out as a curve. Now imagine several factors figuring in here, mainly the basics of supply, demand and human nature, and you will get a curve that looks like a sine wave.
The baseline is that yellow X-axis line (the horizontal one).
The trap that people fall into is seeing part of the wave, and measuring that snippet of the wave as a line, what we call a "ray" in geometry (remember from your grade school days?). For example if the price of something is going up, most people only see that it can continue to go up and up, like gasoline prices of today, or the declining supply of gasoline vs. the increasing demand to remain constant. In reality, it will follow a wave pattern like everything else. The only question is how high is the peak of the wave. The peak for the gasoline example is alot lower than most people believe! I'll explain more about this next time.
There are many reasons for linear thinking. The greatest reason is, linear thinking works in micro situations. We follow it in everyday life and it works. But when gauging macro economics, you have to use a different method. You lubricate your car engine with oil because that works in that situation but you don't go out and buy tons of oil and nothing else to run a car. The car needs all sorts of things from periodic hands-on maintenance, coolant liquid, gasoline and all sorts of other things, with a different solution for each need. The micro solution for lubricating your engine is an oil change. The macro solution is to take it to your mechanic who does that and all the other things needed such as tune-ups. The final macro solution is to bring your car in periodically a few times a year for this. In the end, micro and macro is relative.
Now for my ultimate theory! My theory in life is that not only are all things measured as waves (or as parts of wave curves), but the baseline (not sure if that's the correct math term) is not a flat X-axis but actually another wave. The further "macro" you get, in other words the bigger the picture, the more you see the measurement of economic activity to be a sine wave plotted out on a larger sine wave. I wish I could illustrate this...
More New DVDs!
And once again
New Stuff! 04/28/2005
Stand By Me (Deluxe)
Bliss
House Of Flying Daggers
Happenstance
There's Something About Mary (More)
Family Business Season 1
End Of The Century: The Story Of The Ramones
Guns N' Roses: Welcome To The Videos
Girl Seduction
New Stuff! 04/24/2005
Sideways
Dracula
sex, lies and videotape
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Blue Velvet
Run Lola Run
The Shawshank Redemption (new two disc version)
New Stuff! 04/20/2005
Far And Away
The Untouchables
Hotel Rwanda
Scary Movie
Scary Movie 2
Oceans 11
In Living Color: Season 1
Miami Vice: Season 1
Godfather box set
Conan The Barbarian: Franchise Edition
Best Of The Best
I also picked up Dr. Dre: The Chronic, The Eagles Greatest and Don Henley's Greatest Hits CDs.
Missed you all. I hope to update in all your journals soon, especially those who have been kind enough to keep posting in mine.
Love ya!
Lately I've been having so many things going, so many ideas to write about I don't know where to start. It's like when you have so many things to say at once, it just makes you shut up...deer in the headlights and all. That pretty much sums up the last several weeks.
For those of you who kinda know the real me, I'm a heady and cerebral guy. That's the equivalent of running 100 programs at the same time on your computer, making it fucking useless.
I'll try to cover a few things without making this a zillion lines long and totally unreadable.
Ramones
I just finished watching the Ramones story. Lot's of mixed emotions there. First is, every rock music fan should watch this movie, especially if you don't know who these guys are or know only a little.
I fancy myself as a novice rock historian (just got a phone call in the middle, my RL friend and SG friend Jared is getting married in a month!) and I love to chart out in my head who influenced what. I find alot of those early bands' music, the most influentual ones and not necessarily the most commercially successful ones, are some of the best.
You know there are many rock and punk bands labeled as great and responsible for starting, representing or greatly influencing entire music movements. Sex Pistols and The Clash (punk, Ska and eventually New Wave and later 80's metal), Joy Division/New Order (Electronica), Blondie (New Wave, Disco), Nirvana and Pearl Jam (Seattle Grunge), on and on. But you look at these bands, many of them with great commercial success and very influential on today's musicians, and they too were influenced by someone else.
There are very few bands that REALLY STARTED something from scratch and weren't just copying someone else. And that was the Ramones. Sure, they were fans of music, what musician isn't? They liked people such as Iggy Pop and such.
The Ramones started mid 70's in New York and basically made CBGB's, a dive bar, into the legend it is today. But they never had any commercial success in the US. When they moved to England to play some gigs, they basically started the entire UK punk scene. That UK punk scene basically started within one or two generations nearly every major music genre today, except Country and Hip Hop.
They played their own music and did what Nirvana was credited for 30 years before Nirvana broke, which is they showed Rock N' Roll for what it really was.
You didn't need musical virtuosity or an excessive image to make great rock music. You just needed passion, some catchy hooks and riffs, and a willingness to leave it all on the performance stage.
Watching the Ramones movie, the most poignant moment was when they interviewed the late/great Joe Strummer of The Clash and he spun an anecdote about when he and his friends heard about this London club the Ramones were going to be playing. They snuck around the back and threw a rock through a high window.
Johnny Ramone, rambunctious as ever, sticks his head out and yelled "WHAaaaAaT??!". Joe yelled up, "hey man, it's The Clash and the Sex Pistols, we want to get in!". So Johnny sneaks them in, they form a human chain to pull each other through this window. A perfect punk rock moment, haha.
Point is, no one single band has had more of their fans start their own bands. And many of those bands became great and influenced other bands. All those bands I listed above had a direct influence from the Ramones and think of all the bands and artists thus influenced by them.
Anyway, go see this movie, it's possibly the most relevant movie to Rock N' Roll. ....oh, and so many great fucking songs!
Linear Thinking: Micro and Macro
Now to go in a TOTALLY different direction! This one is a major thought I have all the time.
Often times people wonder why I get so bent about so many issues and have such a strong opinion about boring topics like economics and politics. All I ever wanted to be was a biological scientist of some kind, doing stuff like...well...like my good bud legionnaire. Ironically, he has a great curiousity for economics (which will naturally and inevitably lead to politics). I guess we intellectuals are just like that; an insatiable desire for knowledge defines us. And on top of being an intellectual, I fancy myself a scientist who believes greatly in the Scientific Method.
Anyway, many intellectuals constantly feel they are at war, an intellectual war, with the mediocre ideas (lies and misconceptions) that are generally accepted as fact and truth by the public. I feel this way too and so do many economists. So the question pondered me: why are things like this? Humans are intelligent and sentient yet society seems more like a mob or a herd of sheep. I've come to accept this fact and have even been able to justify logically why this is not only the truth but even a good truth. BUT! Why is it so many intellectuals and smart people don't understand basic economics or even the conservative economic agenda? SHIT, EVEN MANY SO-CALLED "ECONOMISTS" DON'T GET IT EITHER! For those of us who get it, it makes complete sense on all three levels: ethos, pathos and logos. (Before I go any further, what I mean by "conservative" is not the political "conservative" aka the Republican and Bush agenda, but more like the Libertarian "laissez-faire" type of ideology. I believe econ should drive poli, not the other way around. )
So I toss this around in my head alot. Could it be, this economic idea which makes total sense to me on every level could be wrong because so many other people, whose intelligence I respect, don't get it? I mean, I'm a scientist first right? The basis of the Scientific Method is where your ideas/theories have been studied and scrutinized by other scientists and intellectuals, and it only becomes scientific fact when there is some sort of consensus. Why no consensus for the conservative economic theory? Could we conservatives be wrong?
The answer to the smaller question is, no. We are not wrong. This idea can not make sense on every level and be totally wrong. Nearly every major scientific breakthrough idea is first disbelieved by the scientific community of that day. It almost always happens: Columbus and the world being round, Semmelweiss and microscopic germs, Copernicus and the earth revolving around the sun, Darwin and evolution, the list goes on. Just because we don't have a ideological consensus right now, doesn't mean the idea is wrong. ...maybe 50 years from now if things are still the same...
So the new question, the burning one became "how do I explain why people just don't get this?". Various pieces of the puzzle, various facts I had observed since I was a teenager and first started thinking about not only finances but economics, started to piece themselves together in my mind like a scientist framing a new theory by putting together his data gleaned from many repetitive observations.
The answer is ,what I call, linear thinking combined with human "arrogance" and emotional attachment. Human arrogance is simply the fact that many people feel that humanity is not a part of nature. I don't need to explain this but we all know that the Earth revolves around the sun, but people used to arrogantly believe that it was the other way around simply because humans lived on the Earth and not the sun. Now what I mean by "linear thinking" is people can easily measure things and understand trends for a short amount of time. For example people get paid at a constant rate every hour or month. If that pay rate changes, then all the amounts are directly affected by exactly that much. If you get a raise, every paycheck will go up exactly by that amount or percent constantly. This is what economists call "micro" scale economics. Basically it follows and measures only one line of resource measurement. It doesn't measure at why I got a raise, the local or global job market, new technologies or anything else.
"Macro" scale economics on the other hand measure the trends and activities large populations and this is where people get in trouble. What makes sense on the micro level has only a very tiny place in macro econ because macro economics measure many things at once.
But economics is a natural science (and yes it is a science). As a science, economics studies and measures the activity of living beings acquiring and exchanging resources. It's alot like biologists studying ecosystems and food chains/webs (ironically the same plague of linear thinking also affects this community). Numbers and trends in nature do not go in straight lines for long. They almost always are curves that go up and down. Logarithms and trigonometry, sine and cosine waves, the "bell" curve, the fibonacci sequence, and many other mathematical properties were all developed to explain occurences in nature. All of these "numbers" when graphed come out as curved patterns. If economics measures activities of populations, mainly human animals, then the typical graphs of these behaviors should also be expected to look like these patterns, "waves" if you will. Take a simple equation that graphs out to be a straight line, like (X + 2) where X = 1. Then add in one element that changes this like (X)(X + 2) or whatever, and suddenly it graphs out as a curve. Now imagine several factors figuring in here, mainly the basics of supply, demand and human nature, and you will get a curve that looks like a sine wave.
The baseline is that yellow X-axis line (the horizontal one).
The trap that people fall into is seeing part of the wave, and measuring that snippet of the wave as a line, what we call a "ray" in geometry (remember from your grade school days?). For example if the price of something is going up, most people only see that it can continue to go up and up, like gasoline prices of today, or the declining supply of gasoline vs. the increasing demand to remain constant. In reality, it will follow a wave pattern like everything else. The only question is how high is the peak of the wave. The peak for the gasoline example is alot lower than most people believe! I'll explain more about this next time.
There are many reasons for linear thinking. The greatest reason is, linear thinking works in micro situations. We follow it in everyday life and it works. But when gauging macro economics, you have to use a different method. You lubricate your car engine with oil because that works in that situation but you don't go out and buy tons of oil and nothing else to run a car. The car needs all sorts of things from periodic hands-on maintenance, coolant liquid, gasoline and all sorts of other things, with a different solution for each need. The micro solution for lubricating your engine is an oil change. The macro solution is to take it to your mechanic who does that and all the other things needed such as tune-ups. The final macro solution is to bring your car in periodically a few times a year for this. In the end, micro and macro is relative.
Now for my ultimate theory! My theory in life is that not only are all things measured as waves (or as parts of wave curves), but the baseline (not sure if that's the correct math term) is not a flat X-axis but actually another wave. The further "macro" you get, in other words the bigger the picture, the more you see the measurement of economic activity to be a sine wave plotted out on a larger sine wave. I wish I could illustrate this...
More New DVDs!
And once again
New Stuff! 04/28/2005
Stand By Me (Deluxe)
Bliss
House Of Flying Daggers
Happenstance
There's Something About Mary (More)
Family Business Season 1
End Of The Century: The Story Of The Ramones
Guns N' Roses: Welcome To The Videos
Girl Seduction
New Stuff! 04/24/2005
Sideways
Dracula
sex, lies and videotape
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Blue Velvet
Run Lola Run
The Shawshank Redemption (new two disc version)
New Stuff! 04/20/2005
Far And Away
The Untouchables
Hotel Rwanda
Scary Movie
Scary Movie 2
Oceans 11
In Living Color: Season 1
Miami Vice: Season 1
Godfather box set
Conan The Barbarian: Franchise Edition
Best Of The Best
I also picked up Dr. Dre: The Chronic, The Eagles Greatest and Don Henley's Greatest Hits CDs.
VIEW 27 of 27 COMMENTS
If a cell phone rings in the woods and there is no one there to here does it stilll count on your minutes?