Is Our Galaxy In A Bubble?

Doom-scrolling In A Pandemic 

Sometimes you lose perspective on what to write about. That's at the best of times. During lockdown, you lose way more perspective than you realise. My Pandemic Lockdown Rock-down has turned out to have yielded some bonkers ideas for lyrics according to the Dude at Audio Darnok. 

I tend to think the whole galaxy being in a bubble is possibly the most emblematic theory of the universe that befits our time. After all, I'm convinced that we're all living in a financial bubble and nobody ever seems to notice it. If the whole galaxy were in a bubble of its own, who would care? 

There used to be a phrase about the economic bubble in Japan - they called it "that bubbly feeling". Even now when they refer back to that time, they say "that bubbly feeling era". The bubble, metaphorical and otherwise, is all around us. all the time. 

You've been warned!

Old Style Rockets

Going Back to the Moon

Old masters NASA have finally sent their Artemis rocket to the moon. Back in the day I would've been -pardon the pun - over the moon with joy that they were doing this kind of thing but of course Elon Musk and his Space X have stolen their thunder quite a bit. The Artemis is a single-use rocket unlike the fancy things Space X have built with their multiple launches. Dare I say, the thing is more of the mid-20th century than the 21st Century. Since being conceived during the Dubya administration, the project has been overtaken quite a bit by technological developments around the world. 

Elon Musk himself has launched himself into what might as well be the Moon for him with his Twitter purchase. It's all very messy right now, but lest we forget it's also the same dude that made rockets and electric vehicles viable. He may pull that one out of the hat as well.  

We sure live in interesting times. I wonder what Chuck Yeager would make of all this. 

Arguing Semantics

The Weirdness of Eastern Europe

I used to know a Czech at high school. He was always up for an argument. When I ran into him some years after high school, he wanted to take up on some argument that we had back at high school, as if only days had passed. He wanted to re-prosecute his arguments and then drive home some arcane conclusion that he wanted to push for back in the schoolyard.  

I knew another Czech. He played dungeons and dragons with us. He would drink quite heavily and by 8:30 pm, he would argue anything and everything. He once argued that there were no such things as medieval townships, just "potential cities". He wouldn't let that pass even when we begged him to. Like that guy in the meme who wants to be argued around a difficult point, he demanded we argue with him.

When I got to AFTRS, I kind of hit the motherlode of East Europeans. Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and so on - and they all loved a good argument. Even the laconic ones would be loquacious when it came to the true nature of Marxism or the unbearable lightness of one's libido. At some point you would find yourself in a deep argument with them. It just was the way it was.

What I did notice about the way they argued, was that they liked to argue semantics. In the English speaking world, we don't like to argue semantics. When somebody who is a native English speaker says "I'm not going to argue the semantics," it usually means "fuck off with your bullshit." However, if you ever found yourself in a surreal never-ending argument with an Eastern European, you usually found yourself arguing the nuances of semantics like they mattered. It doesn't to us, but to them, it seems to matter a lot.  

I don't know why Eastern Europeans love semantic arguments so much. Our disdain for semantics must seem barbaric or anti-intellectual to them, but there really is a divide in how and what we argue. My own theory about this is that Eastern Europe was so much more boring than the rest of Europe, so to devise some entertainment, East Europeans developed arguing semantics into an art form. To endlessly argue semantics is not only a virtue, it is also a great way to pass time living under tyranny and with no rock music, movies, or books. Arguing semantics endlessly is, a kind of performance art over there. I suspect that over time, Eastern Europeans have created a consciousness where arguing semantics endlessly is just the way life goes. It's a bit sad that this passes for philosophical thought in some parts of Eastern Europe. 

Take Alexander Dugin, the alleged ideologue of Contemporary Russia. He seems to be nothing but a demagogue selling tawdry race theory claptrap. And yet he lands in Vladimir Putin's orbit as a great thinker on the back of reams and reams of bullshit. And by bullshit I mean semantic crap woven into more semantic crap. Hardly any of Dugin's 'thought' would pass Philosophy 101 in the West, but there he is, advising Putin. It'a all semantics built up into something that it shouldn't be. 

And this phenomenon, more than anything else would explain Vladimir Putin's penchant for long speeches about nothing. They're "about nothing" to us exactly because a lot of what he's banging on about are semantic arguments which we dismiss instinctively, or as second nature. Putin on the other hand thinks he has crafted some incredibly intelligent argument arguing the most nuanced semantics. He would be dead wrong in thinking any of those semantics would persuade anybody in the West. And so he wonders why we don't understand him. It may well come as a shock to him one day when somebody explains to him that the great effort he puts into arguing semantics is totally meaningless to an anglophone world. 

The cultural schism is a lot bigger than people are giving it credit. 

Dinosaur Remains On The Moon

Guitar Synths

A couple of years before the pandemic, I obtained the EHX Syn-9 pedal which turns your guitar signal into synthesiser sounds. It's a cool pedal because it allows you to play synth runs as a guitar player, and suddenly your palette sounds like a mid to late 80s pop rock outfit. I've played with it live and people are taken aback when you dial it in and suddenly there's a fat Prophet IV sound coming out of the guitar amp. 

During work on Cosmic Orphans, I decided I would use the Syn-9 pedal as the backbone sound. I would use it to play all the sections that I would normally assign to keyboard or rhythm guitar during the basic outline of the tracks. Then, just before the pandemic hit, I managed to get hold of the Boss SY-300 pedal, and that fit right into the sound of Cosmic Orphans too. 

When I played early demos of those tracks to some people, I got the response "but why would you want to turn your guitar into a synth?" It struck me as odd that people would want to ask that. The same people are okay with the guitar signal going through overdrives, distortions, modulations, and so on. Somehow they drew the line at guitar synths. Why wouldn't you expand the palette of guitar sounds to include synths? It was weird.      

 

The Patient

Seems Over Now

The pandemic feels mostly in the rearview mirror. It was approximately 30 months of the most extraordinary government intervention to stave off a larger disaster by embracing the lesser disaster. You couldn't say we weren't warned because there have been any number of pandemic stories in the last 50 years. Some of them have made great movies. They all end up with overwhelmed hospitals and corpses piled up on the streets somewhere. It was shocking it happened in places like NYC, but that chaos is exactly what we all collectively lived through on this planet. 

The virus is still around but governments have now told us to go back to work and pretend like it's not there. Or to pretend it's like the flu - just another respiratory disease in the population. Of course we'd feel better about it if the thing didn't have the potential to mutate back into a killer. Governments are too keen to make out like the virus has gone endemic and become milder. The science of it says otherwise - it's much too soon for that to happen. Even the Spanish Flu epidemic 100 years ago took half a decade to wind down. We're only halfway trough year 3. Even with the amazing vaccines that have come into play so quickly, there's no statistical reason Coronavirus has evolved into a less harmful endemic organism. 

But for now, we're not going to do lockdowns any more unless you're in China. In some ways the lockdown and hitting the great pause button had its upside. I got to spend a lot of time re-mixing things and got 18 months ahead in the scheme of things. Going forwards, I will have less time to tool around with the music thing so it feels like it was a blessing to be able to just delve deeply. I guess if I were Robert Fripp, I would write something like "the drive to 2026 continues" or some such nonsense. In most part the schedule is intact in spite of the aggravations of this year. 

Come join the fun.