Category: Life

I am sitting in a concert hall, waiting for the performance to begin, I am not sure who or what it is, but the audience is well-dressed and well behaved. Directly in front of me is a mother and her two small sons, both in the five-to-eight age range. They are restless and she suggests they sing a song – softly – to keep them occupied until the curtain goes up. They choose “Down To the River To Pray”.

It starts with just the two of them, hesitantly, in the pure, crystalline, self- conscious- yet- completely- open manner of young children:

“As I went down to the river to pray…”

The people around them turn and look for a moment, then join in. Quietly, not at all professional, but with the same purity and clarity of voice. With each word, each line, more join in.

“O brothers lets go down
Let’s go down, Come on down
O brothers lets go down
Down in the river to pray”

By the end of the second verse the entire audience, hundred of people, are singing this simple, beautiful song. The performers come to the edge of the stage and join in

At the last lines of the song this moment has become one of perfect beauty; these two young children are the seeds, the nexus of something extraordinary, which never happened and will never be repeated.

Hail and farewell, Mr Rogers

I’m probably the last person on the planet to get in line, but Boycott the RIAA !!!!!

Insane, slavering rant to follow.

The kung fu/tai chi/chi kung demonstration on Saturday was deemed, by all participants, the best show EVER! We all had a great deal of fun, we were all relaxed and focused and exactly where we needed to be.

At my suggestion Virginia stopped out to watch the show. Sure, we have only been dating for a week and a half, but I wanted to get it right out in the open that This Is What I Do. She said it was intense and very cool, particularly watching Master Lee beat Rick and I with large sticks in the Chi Kung portion of the show.

She left so suddenly afterward that I was afraid I had scared here away (“FREAK!!!!”). That was, fortunately, not the case. We have another date on Wednesday. She wants to see The City of Lost Children.

On Sunday I went back to the farm where I saw Don’s left hand for the first time since his accident . The doctors did a great job repairing what they could, and now his hand looks just like a normal hand, except for the missing ring and pinkie fingers.

My brother was there with his girlfriend and the bunch of us went through a big box of old photographs, dating back to around 1965. I was a cute kid. My brother was a cute kid, but I was cuter. It was interesting to see the evolution of my Dad’s facial hair, from clean-shaven to mustache and lambchops, to fu-manchu-ish mustache, to full beard, to mustache, to full beard, to clean shaven, to mustache. And that was just 1972.

So now my free time is taken up completing the website for Master Lee. there was a design. It was not quite right. Now there is a new design, provided by the inestimable Mr. Bock . I am way late in finishing the thing. It should have been done six months ago. I blame it on… er… umm… me.

And so to home, and thence to practice.

You know what pisses me off more than anything in the world? The fact that every person on the planet has the potential to be an Einstein, a Gandhi, a da Vinci, a Florence Nightingale, a Dostoevsky, a Mozart, a Michael Jordan… This is what a human being is capable of.

Now take a good look around.

Kind of depressing, isn’t it?

Spend some time reading through The Edge . Think about the articles and conversations. Contemplate .

Realize that the minds here are not superhuman. The bodies and minds eat sleep work shit ache play relax laugh cry fuck create and destroy. Just like everyone else.

Perhaps they are a little more curious than most. A little more restless. Just a little.

If that is the case then the public opiates and soporifics of mass distraction are killing us all.

I apologize for the lack of updates. My time has not, lately, been my own.

This past Tuesday my grandmother, Bernice Winkelman, passed away. She was 99. I remember seeing her maybe six or seven times in my life, the most recent being in California about four years ago. Before that I was in high school, and before that, in fourth grade. We weren’t really close, but she was kin, and I miss the opportunities I never had to get to know her.

*sigh*

We have a martial arts demo at Grand Valley this weekend, as part of the International Festival. For the past three weeks Rick and I have been at Master Lee’s house at 7:30 in the morning for iron-shirt chi kung training. It’s a great way to start the day; a huge burst of adrenaline, then sit in front of a computer for eight hours. Usually by noon I am ready for a nap.

Being a hardcore member of the swinging bachelor scene I expected to curl up with a beer and some nice cuddly porn this evening, but instead a beautiful woman called at the last minute and we spent a couple of hours at the Bar Divani, where I had a glass of Condesa de Leganza Crianza ’98 ; light, dry, and quite yummy.

I first met V. at school about eleven years ago, and then recently ran into her at a bookstore. This time I remembered to get her phone number.

It is a wonderful thing to be able to talk the night away.

The Eisen case left me with a bad taste in my mouth, so in a fit of almost-civil-disobedience I marked up “The Raven” and added it to the Project Gutenberg pages.

While I was Taking It To The Man the UPS fella came by and dropped off a completely kick-ass CD by Bonerama out of New Orleans. I bought the CD based on a single track I heard on WYCE a couple of weeks ago; a twelve minute funky jam version of Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein . Sure, it’s already a bad-ass song, but when a band comprised of five trombones, a bass, a tuba and drums plays it you’d swear the top of your head is coming off. Amazing.

Look for some design changes to es.o in the next few weeks. Brian and Bock are in the process of redesigning and that has me thinking that my stuff is a little dusty.

I had the stunning insight this morning that Jacques Derrida is to philosophy what L. Ron Hubbard is to religion. My opinion has not changed: deconstructionism is still stupid.

So I see that the Eldred case didn’t pass, and that means that copyrights on currently copyrighted materials can be extended ad infinitum . So now, essentially, once a book/movie/song goes out of print, it will be gone for good. When it is no longer a money-maker for its owner – who 99 percent of the time is the publisher and NOT the creator – it will be “archive” and never again see the light of day.

If this kind of thing had been going on a hundred years ago no-one born since 1960 would have ever had the chance to read Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Lovecraft, Whitman, Dickenson, or any of the foreign works which were translated by Americans. They would all be shelved. Project Gutenberg would not exist. Neither would the Open Source movement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation would be a troupe of Qixotic mimes.

I do not begrudge authors and publishers the opportunity to make money, or many opportunities to make a lot of money. But the rights to a piece of creativity which is no longer making any money should be given to the public – under the understanding that anyone who is willing to pay for a copy of the thing, already has.

General consensus in the online community suggests that 20 years sounds fair.

Think about it: listening to orchestral music we say “Hey: That’s that song Beethoven wrote”, not “Hey! That’s the piece the Austrian nobility commissioned!”

All is not necessarily lost, however. Lawrence Lessig is working on a proposal which would simultaneously extend the length of copyright and move a great many works into the public domain. Eldred.cc is collecting news articles and legal material relating to this issue.

I have to admit that the snob in me occasional throws out a “So What?” Think about it: 90 percent of everything produced (and by extension copyrighted) is worthless and a blight on modern culture. The fact that the creators bother to copyright Britney and that whole crowd of music androids is rather pathetic. As if having that crap is worth the real estate value of the sectors on my hard drive. The RIAA blames music pirates for the decline in music sales when it should be blaming the producers and artists for creating crap. Michael Eisner is fellating Congress with glee now that he gets to keep the Mouse for another twenty years. Twenty years of Cambodian sweat-shops pumping out cheap plastic Donald Duck bidet spouts.

Frankly I couldn’t care less if Disney goes out of business tomorrow, or every member of the RIAA winds up in an oil drum in the Okefenokee swamp. In 2050 I want to be able to download the complete works of Jim Harrison, surf to a Tom Waits feedsite, and tuck into a plate of Soyent Green. For free.

So that 90% of crap which is created by jacking in to a mixer and jacking off on a microphone can stay copyrighted forever. No-one will care. But those few gems should be available for free, forever.

That would be AT&T. They are raising my rates by $15.00 per month. Several of my friends are switching over to DSL and filing nasty letters to AT&T. Can’t say that I blame them.

Here is what I’m a-gonna do:

They will be charging me a large amount of money for a service which, in my opinion, should be less expensive that it currently is. Therefore, for the increased fee, I will become the Bastard- Customer- From- Hell. From now on, AT&T gets exactly 0% slack from me. Every time I get less that 100k/second, even if I am connected to a teletype machine, AT&T will get a stupendously vile email from me. Power outage? I better God Damn still be online. My cable is cut? I better God Damn still be online. AT&T goes out of business? Still goddamn online. End of western civilization? Still online.

I am paying more, therefore I will demand more. AT&T has no say in this. I am merely playing by rules they set up. I demand absolute perfection in this service. I will not switch providers. I will hound the support desk, mid-level leeches management, marketroids and owners to make sure that even if the Earth falls into the sun, for what I am paying, ATT will ensure I do not lose my connection for so much as a nanosecond. AT&T is now my $60.95/month beeyotch.

And no I will not add cable TV in order to keep my current broadband rates. The reason everyone is switching to satellite is that AT&T cable TV sucks. I will not be strong-armed by a company which I am paying to be my beeyotch.