A while back, after some controversy involving the rap artist 50Cent, ideas of accountability shot through my head. His album was 'Get Rich or Die Trying' and somehow, despite his huge success with that album, he had somehow disappointed millions of fans with his next album. Well, he already got rich. It reminded me about my own preferences. The theory started like this. I would rather make 1million dollars each from 17 people, than make 1 dollar each from 17 million people. At the time, a CD cost about $17 and an artist could be fairly sure to get at least a buck from every one sold.
So if you piss off a million people, you've got to be some colossal-sized arse, but in the end you can ignore them. They're only out $17 bucks most of which you didn't even collect. But if you piss off a million dollar investor, you're in trouble. These are relative extremes of responsibility. When you're chilling in you mansion, and some sobbing waif shows up at the gates begging for an autograph, you don't interrupt your Cheerios breakfast. When Mr. Shadow calls, you sweat blood. Having watched Julie Taymor's film 'Titus', I reckoned that making a deal with a king is a very, very dangerous thing to do. One should hope never to owe their life to anyone, the cost of abandoning those responsibilities might very well be fatal.
So maybe I don't want 17 million dollar investors in me after all, and certainly not one 17 million dollar investor. Which is better? The irresponsibility of having cadged the masses, or the enormous debt incurred by the sponsorship of a few powerful benefactors? In the former case, you are famous forever. You are ultimately accountable to the masses who must ultimately be disappointed in you by the millions. When you owe allegiance to a cabal, your fame is inverted. They will say as did the man in the Godfather: "A man in my position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous!" It's a deadly game when at some point you are made an offer you cannot refuse, but everybody saves face and the accountability is brutal.
This morning I was stunned by what I'm calling the Secular Northstar. More about that later, but part of its brilliance, this manifesto of world historic dimensions, is that it seems to understand perfectly how it is that the web of obligations can corrupt our most important institutions. And those corruptions are manifest in their inability to be responsible to the public. It is because of Mr. Shadow. He has dirt on you. You have dirt on him. You must be sharks.
It suddenly occurs to me why motivational speakers and con artists prey on the public. "I'm a successful real-estate developer who has made millions. I can show you how, just buy my book!" Maybe he's the guy who just realized that to make tens of millions, he gets in over his head with people he never wants to piss off. Better to just stay in the 7 digit category trying to sell books, than in the 8 digit category looking over your shoulder.
Integrity dies in the confidential, accountable service of masters you cannot escape. Of course you were just following orders. You were protected. Only make sure that when you die, the secret letter gets published. Then you may smile at gunpoint, like Aaron the Moor. Then you may be a martyr.
So let’s start with giving an evaluation. A parcel of stones at VVG1 to VVG2 at an average size of .35 carats with F-G color will net out to about $3250 per carat. 1kg of such stones will be about 14,285 stones worth about 46.5 million dollars US. So really the question is how would you hide about 15,000 little things worth 45 million bucks. Your ability to hide them depends largely upon one thing, which is your ability to sell them.
If you have no ability to sell any of the stones, then you can only use conventional means, IE something anybody could think up on a middle class salary. In which case you might as well just throw them in the ocean because you’re going to get yourself killed or jailed the moment one person finds out. So there’s a Clean Approach and a Dirty Approach.
Clean Approach So the first thing a smart guy will do is to approach someone with moolah and someone you can trust with your life. So for me, I happen to know a couple such people as I am fortunate in that regard. One of them is a Wall Street broker. He would know someone who deals with that level of investment with whom I would partner. I convert a fraction of my diamonds to cash, essentially 2 million worth, and give the other people the impression that this is the extent of my cache. I then set up an entity through which I can employ my own skills and improve them. This would include a cursory understanding of the diamond trade and a couple of trips to such traders and producers. The aim of these trips is to determine how far I can get away with selling diamonds legitimately without being a known quantity in the business. In other words, I’m setting up a diamond laundering business, but I can remain overground and live fairly large.
Dirty Approach The other way to go is go underground, which means I live low rather like a card sharp. I produce the occasional rock in card games, to used car dealers, to pawn shops all at a level that people will immediately be able to handle and not talk about. In this case I have to do a lot of low rent stashing and have a 5 year plan to raise about 200k per year.
OK so either approach gets me to the point at which I can use sophisticated means to hide my stash. It costs money to hide money.
The Stashes
One - The Big Pentagram I’m thinking undeveloped land in New Zealand would be the best thing for buried treasure. It’s not hard to get there. It’s not a dodgy place. I’d keep the biggest fraction there, roughly half, in five plots underground in a pattern. How about a pentagram 100 meters across? Uncleared woods. GPS tracked. Iron rebar markers with RFID tags. On a hill. (25 million)
Two - Obvious I’m going to make a mistake. So it might as well be a stupid mistake. So I’m going to seed the stupid mistake ahead of time so the over-confident detective gets to talk shit. Which means I’m going to put the stash under my mother’s grave, or in a mausoleum niche having bribed a groundskeeper at a cemetery in my town. I will be observed making regular trips. (2 million)
Three - Attorney Client Privilege This is the first technically challenging one to place. I troll around to find an attorney like Go Call Saul from Breaking Bad. Living in LA with its drug trade, I’m sure I can find a gang attorney relatively easily. I will put it into this attorney’s hands. I don’t know or don’t care where the attorney puts it, but he only gets his cut as trustee based on his ability to sell the diamonds himself. This is the one I plan to live from. (7 million)
Four - Charity I use geocaching to place a handful of random stones into that game. Once a year I travel out of the state and place a rock into a geocache. I drop a rock off into the coffers of various churches in my travels. (<1 million)
Five - Rich Bitches I develop a rapport with douchebags of all sorts who can fence this kind of stuff on their own. I develop a reputation and then flame out quickly. It will cost me getting my ass kicked but among that crowd I will clearly appear broke and flamed out. Kills suspicion. (1 million)
Six - Other Hidey Holes Smaller versions of the pentagram. All self-service all visited during peak tourist season.
Black River National Forest: Michigan
Mount Washington: New Hampshire
Hot Springs: Arkansas
Sturgis: South Dakota
Gifford Woods State Park: Vermont
And I periodically check Quora, detective novels and CIA spycraft legends just to make sure I’m up on the best ideas. After all, I’ve got nothing else to do.
This could generate some interesting discussions. I should say ahead of this that I've said 'cynical' more times than I should, whereas I mean skeptical. I don't mock people who have a notion towards the beloved community or a cultural nationalism. Obviously my parents generation actually made it. They made 'black' out of 'negro'. I simply don't see people of that calibre engaged in The Struggle. That is because, according to my reasoning, the Struggle was merely to be American Middle Class, a fait accompli. Even DuBois' Talented Tenth, well he was just talking about college education. Anyway, flavor can still be interesting if the underlying stuff is nutritious.
For about 20 years I have been saying that I have 2 or 3 original ideas. Today I'm going to share them in one giant tarball. I'm going to call it the Logos Project. The reason I'm calling it the Logos Project is because of Jordan Peterson's big book Maps of Meaning. It was a very rambly book but it was one that lay behind all of my most profound interests. In one way you could say it represented a reconciliation between faith and reason, which is ultimately the combination of religion and science. What could be more fundamental to the prospects of Western civilization? The one Bible piece I've been able to quote was the beginning of the Book of John. In the beginning was the word. And it seems that many of us have abandoned the word, and that needs to be addressed. Social media falls short. We need to build logical media. We need to transform our computer mediated communications into something that serves the purpose of social maintenance of the commons. This is a management problem which is poorly served by the faint number of actions that social media spaces allow us to perform. We are trapped in Twitter because of what Twitter is, and because we have given it over to the builders of Twitter to be the masters of Twitter, Twitter doesn't belong to the people. Anyway, there are a lot of problems like this and the aim of the Logos Project is to solve each and every one of them.
This is something I'm ready to contribute to for the rest of my career. And at this moment I am particularly excited about the Intellectual Dark Web, in that they are finally doing what I've been hoping would be done. Of course I've been creating all kinds of content but I couldn't quit my day job. Now is about that time to see if I can integrate all I've been building and thinking into something both concrete and sticky. I'm sure I'll need others to help me pour the concrete, and this teaser is the sticky part. So please do check it out and put in your comments and criticism.
When I was 31, I read American Mythologies. It was one of the great intellectual moments in my life, an dit helped me to understand the power of what I can probably describe at length but will not. Let's just call it 'virtual truth'.
A great deal of what I experimented with in my early web writing days was a riff on this problem, which was that there was very little 'authentic' culture in American culture. There are signifiers built on top of symbols, which leverage metaphors that are bolstered by analogies all based on myth and urban legend - and this is what most Americans believe. Education is all trivia. You can't walk into a bar with physics degree and find a mate. You have to play the game and it is a mind-numbing game because everybody is hooked into American 'culture' and not much of it is real. This was my attitude towards that called the semiotic swamp. I followed Umberto Eco and Marshall Blonsky for a time and insisted that they knew what was up. Foucault's Pendulum was my favorite fiction just before reading Blonsky. But the invention of the Internet was about to happen, in the mainstream. So I invented Boohab, who was the perfect kind of character to inhabit such a realm, a post-modern racial essentialist. In a world where influentials like Howard Rheingold encouraged the reality of virtual life led by the guiding light of McLuhan who's mantra was 'the medium is the message', there needed to be a black trickster out there keeping it real.
A lot of people resented the idea of bringing racial realism to the new digital frontier, but the fact that I did so persistently was very useful. I sought to inform my experiment with a bit of philosophy which I found in a book called The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. I excerpted something I thought was very important from that moment when there was still a question in the public mind about whether or not blackness belonged in cyberspace.
"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occuring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a trade off. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."
It turned out that only applied to the static web. When the web became dynamic, and populated with jillions, emergent disclosure returned. As it became even larger and more distributed, and as it will be in the future, the only findable stuff will be more and more static. People will need larger narratives to deal with its interminable complexity. The web itself will sustain more and more of these narratives. Certifications will become more important and/but they will tend to be more localized. "Word is bond" will become more important.
But my point here is that for the most part, people will require more and more skill to make sense of all of this meta-literacy. I happen to think it raises the value of war. But during peacetime, the swamp is filling up and overflowing.
This morning it took me almost an hour to find Ms Dewey, and I had lost her before. Her real name is Janina Gavankar and as Ms Dewey she exemplified the sort of woman that is my perfect mate in look, attitude and all that. I used to worry for most of my life that the woman I married would suffer a heartbreaking fate if I were to find 'the perfect woman' sometime during the course of life - and I had this odd premonition that it would happen around when I turned 35. It never did happen with the exception of the fictional Ms Dewey with whom I promptly developed a completely nerdy crush. And so I was a bit extra frustrated when, this morning for some reason, I could not for the life of me remember her name and none of my usual methods could suss her out of the incredible shitpile that is the world wide web. I finally found her.
It turns out that Ms Dewey was the creation of a marketing outfit known as EVB, short for Evolution Bureau. They are also the creators of Serenading Unicorn
And so we are most definitely way, way down the long tail. At some point it must be asked whether or not large fictions are not more useful than small ones. But I'm going to leave that as an exercise, depending upon how many people respond to this particular essay.
I no longer have much of a cultural project out here in cyberspace. I went from the responsibility of Mellow Mike to put a black foot out here, to the provocations of Boohab to get all post-moderny and interactive, to whatever it was I was doing at Slate, Salon, & Utne, Brainstorms, The Well, Electric Minds and then finally to Meanderings, Vision Circle and now Cobb. I have come full circle to the sort of peeved skepticism about the quality of knowledge purveyed on the Web, now that there is so much and the cost is so low. I perceive that the big hunking narratives are larger and more false and that the smaller ones seem more infinitely clever. It's different but the effect is the same. Truth is hard to find. That's because it's so easy to get everything else, so much of which is layered like the Juicy Fruit advertisement, upon very little else but the simple longings of an individual. There's nothing universal in that at all, which is why we'll all end up killing each other. I know it's difficult to understand why that's my conclusion, but trust me on this one. I'll explain it all later.
In the meantime, I will continue to write here, while writing more software code, and attempt to keep my perspective on the world historical, and ignoring that which is right in front of my face.
You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind -- driving you mad. -- Morpheus
My life sometimes hates my brain. And it is for any number of complex reasons that it does. There is certainly a profound social reason, but since I am the sort who likes to believe my own actions matter I tend to take a responsibility which is perhaps larger in my head than in reality. I think my life hates my brain because I can't often get it to that place where it can breathe free and make the connections its hardware dreams of making. Connections between the abstract and the real, between the ideal and the practical, between God and man, man and woman, music and philosophy and a list that wants to go on down this page, but can't because I do have a life.
Between my brain and my life is therefore a compromised mind. A mind that bears up sometimes and wears down other times. That makes excuses and rationalizations and bridges the gap between the desires of my wetware to crank and the time I have on this planet to focus. It is the creature that must worldswap when I'm on a 6AM conference call with the practice manager on the East Coast and my 15 year old daughter knocks on the bedroom door.
But there are times when I work out the three, the life, the mind, the brain. It is through nothing less than the tried and true - reading, writing, listening. A discipline of engagement one could almost call 'the life of the mind', where all parts are in harmony and mostly satisfied. It was once a journal. For a time it was performance poetry. A decade ago it was an online community or two or three. Since 2003 it has been this blog. I have a category in this blog called Mind Splinter, and I have another.
There is a sound I am searching for.
Benzon reminded me this morning about the connection between Africa and Europe being played out in American music. Some of that was done and perfected and put down on wax. Wax doesn't last. But memories do, memories of music in my mind. My brain hungers for the things it might generate in the presence of such a sound. My mind could be put at ease in guiding my life and brain to that point of excitement. But I have a splinter. It is the inability to track down where that sound has been recorded. It is a problem of search, perhaps. But it is also a problem of context, because the thing that created that sound in the first place now has no place to go. And that is why I only know of two or three clips of it.
I call it Negro Operatic. And maybe it could be described as African spirit wearing a European Christian dress as Benzon describes the some fraction of that musical connection. But I know that it is close to my home. It is a kind of extremity of performance reaching beyond perfection in the hopes of attaining the practically transcendent. It is a creation of mind, coaxing the brain to achieve something that drags the life out of the dust to the mountaintop and beyond. It is like reaching up and trying to touch the face of God knowing you stand in robes on stage in front of people who may be merely entertained. You take off the robes and head out the back door into the streets. You live for the next moment of creating that sound and your brain hates your life, and your life hates your brain, and you employ your mind on the daily to keep them from snuffing each other out.
For those who have been trained by it, no discipline seems pleasant at the time but painful.
Robert McFerrin Sr. sung that kind of music. And I'd like to get my hands on some because I want to be put in that frame of mind. I want to drink from the well of spirit that created the sort of virtue that seems superfluous in today's market of music. I want to hear music that makes me cry - a crying of a different sort than is evoked by swelling violins and deep screen kisses. I want to hear it and I cannot find it. It sounds a little something like this:
Do you hear the perfect diction? Do you hear the perfect harmony? Do you follow the dynamic lead surrounded by the power of the chorale? Can you hear the contrast? Did you catch the off key denouement and diminuendo? Aren't you amazed all that could be done in 79 seconds? I play that album every year during the Holidays and have ever since I've been married. It is in may ways the single most profound piece of music I possess.
But I've heard the sound before. For a moment, Take 6 will go there as they did riffing 'Rock of Ages' on 'David and Goliath'. There is of course McFerrin's 'Discipline'. But that's it. That and the way I sung in the Gospel Choir at St. John's Episcopal Church in 1977. Alto.
I'm going to start looking. And maybe you and Benzon can help. I fear we are losing some of the old world as everything goes to iPad. There is a sound beyond soul out there. And maybe it might never be recorded. Maybe it isn't a problem of search, but of something else entirely. But there you have my splinter.
I cannot listen to Synergy Sequencer or the New World Symphony without thinking of outerspace. A child of the space age imagines in futures of near lightspeed travel, intellectually gangpressed to galactic vessels, breathing compressed the oxygen of an extraterrestrial destiny. Earth, throwaway in the vastness of the cosmos had but weak gravity for the nearsighted youth face close to the illustrated page. Hours and hours and lazy summer hours idling away in the future of youth's memory. What's outside? The same old netless bent hoops 9 feet over cracked asphalt. What's inside, one book containing the universe.
It took me about 10 years to find 'Ragged Robin', the book of poetry I learned to read as child. So much of my imagination was formed in consideration of Zachary Zed, the last man on earth, the Ten Towers of Tarlingwell and good Sir Kay. And so I wonder how long it will take to find those illustrations of alien spacecraft. Perhaps they'll never be found, though old dreams live on in fuzzy, weighty memories. And though I found James Reeves, I may never find the man whose illustrations painted extraordinary detail on my mind, now lost.
Where did all the illustrators go? Where are their easels, their scissors and paste? They've all gone to EA and Valve, to Bethesda and Microsoft Studios. There's no magazine I think, but Graphis where they might be found outside of their commercial endeavors. And how many hours was I there in Oviatt Library eyeballing every design that made its pages through the 1980s? I see it in the product, the industrial design in a tube of Prell with its bubble and pearl. I see it in the curve of my iTouch in its rubber special forces glove, ribbed by the designer at Speck. Our arts are subsumed objects in a global web of Krell-like manufacture, its ability bleeding away under a crisis of financial confidence. Hold on to that Maglite. It might go away. But what is the name of the man who decided the angle to extrude? Where did he first put a pencil to paper, a mouse in his palm?
The artists and craftsmen who turn the blades to cut a cricket bat or check the charcoal in the filter for the vodka that costs a little bit more. As we bleed and forget peaceful designs on our recreations, their quiet concentrations will fade from view and respect. We will forget the poetry in the din of tomorrows banging and bleating and screaming over more and more typical government corruptions. Why? Because people forgot that hope was not something gotten from political speechifying, because they forgot previously that singing about sex was not art, because they previously forgot that Ella Fitzgerald used to sing about falling leaves of sycamore and that when she did, there was a real person playing a real piano made of wood. But now who could bother to sacrifice a tree for something as Twitter-free as a park bench?
Inspiration is becoming a lost passion I think. And though I may never travel into space, I still know that thinking about things beyond consumer products gets the woman whose hammer sits idling beside the marble doing something much more inspiring than tiles for kitchen floors. I've never seen a sculptor at work, not even on YouTube. I don't even know where they teach it.
My XBox is a portal to artists, I know. I could lament that they give me zombies but I know the market. I cannot hope that there will be any unifying aesthetic, in fact, that scares me given certain audacities of hope and unity. So in my inability to find that particular guide with the cutawaysis bittersweet. Maybe inspiration stays ephemeral. Perhaps it refuses to be identified and referenced. Maybe the artist wants to remain anonymous, but I don't think so. Maybe we just lose them, and what a shame that is.
The greatest thing about Google and the power of the net is that it puts people back in touch with things thought lost and never found. Right now I'm in a bit of ecstasy after having identified and found two artifacts from my childhood through a combination of searches.
The first is and most exciting was this old song by Cat Stevens. Was Dog a Doughnut? This was, in my mind among the first songs that got me hooked on electronic music. Among the others were Billy Prestons' classics Space Race and Outa-Space, and of course the brilliance of George Duke, Bernie Worrell, Larry Fast and W. Carlos, all many years before Kraftwerk. Oh yeah, and Yellow Magic Orchestra.
The second and even more unexpected was a camp song from my childhood that I had begun to think was a figment of my imagination. It was one of those you only have the nerve to sing when you are drunk and around drunk friends.
Baritone Robert McFerrin, the first black male soloist at the
Metropolitan Opera, died November 24 at age 85. If you love Bobby
McFerrin, then you probably remember his dad singing a piece in the cut
'Discipline' on the Medicine Man album. That's exactly the kind of
singing I'm trying to find for my next bout of musical Recovery. Let
Bobby know your love at his website. A great piece can be found at Playbill:
McFerrin, the father of vocalist and conductor Bobby McFerrin, was
born in 1921 in Marianna, Arkansas, the fourth of eight children of a
Baptist minister. As a child, McFerrin was discouraged from singing
anything but gospel music, but when he moved to St. Louis in 1936 he
auditioned for the choir at Sumner High School and was introduced to
classical vocal music.
He received an undergraduate degree from Chicago Musical College in
1946, then moved to New York. In 1949, he appeared in William Grant
Still's Troubled Island at New York City Opera and as Amonasro in Aida with the National Negro Opera Company. He joined the New England Opera Company in 1950.
In 1953, McFerrin won the Metropolitan Opera national auditions and
became the first black male to join the company. He made his debut in
1955 as Amonasro, three weeks after contralto Marian Anderson became
the first black to sing a principal role at the Met. His other roles at
the house were Valentin (in Gounod's Faust) and Rigoletto.
McFerrin also sang the role of Porgy (played onscreen by Sidney Poitier) in the soundtrack of the 1959 film of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. He toured internationally as a recitalist and was also active as a teacher.
Mr. McFerrin toured internationally, showcasing his rich, baritone
voice in concerts and opera houses throughout Europe. He sang with the
National Negro Opera Company and appeared on Broadway.
In 1973, Mr. McFerrin moved back to St. Louis, performing regularly
at venues such as the Sheldon Concert Hall and the St. Louis Art
Museum. Though a stroke in 1989 impaired his speaking ability, he was
still able to sing. He continued to perform, teach and tour on a
demanding schedule until 1998.
Mr. McFerrin often sang alongside his daughter, Brenda McFerrin of
Anaheim, Calif., a recording artist, and his son, Grammy-winning
conductor and vocalist Robert “Bobby” McFerrin Jr. of Philadelphia, who
is best-known for the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
In 2003, Opera America honored the senior Mr. McFerrin with a
lifetime achievement award. He earned a star on the St. Louis Walk of
Fame in 2004.
Here was an extraordinary man and father. I'm sure he will be sorely missed. There seems to be nowhere I can find his music. Musicbrains could only locate one track, and there's virtually nothing on the web about the National Negro Opera Company. If anybody knows something, let me know.
I'm sitting here listening to one of my favorite funky songs of all time, and I realize that I have no iead what the people are saying. Sure there's something about Betty Boop and Alley Oop. And we all know that Tom Browne is 'one ordinary guy'. Does anybody know what's going on in that song?
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