*I am relocating to California today to take up my
new duties as a design academic.
*This involves carting around a host of possessions in a car,
though I have not, in fact, covered them all with RFID
tags so as to locate them in future with
exquisite spiming accuracy.
*One BEYOND THE BEYOND reader, however,
seems to be rather ahead of the curve in his
relationship to the material world.
"Canadian Guy" writes in:
I stumbled into your blog circa your arrival in europe.
You have no time so I'm going to be as telegraphic as possible.
I fugue regularly. I "come-to" with an intense connection to the arrangements of objects left in my wake.
I have two books on my piano...
One is "The Difference Engine" which I haven't read since my Mom gave it to me for Christmas in 1991. The other is "Magic" by this Welsh bloke named David Conway; I've had it always sort of kicking around since I was 8 or 9.
I'm going to itemize the rest of the image. I've felt the need to do this before. Consider it an experiment in explanation. My goal is to get you interested in receiving some text I've been putting together since October which nobody knows what to make of.
Please note that nothing has been planted for the benefit of this email. I'm winging it; this is me doing a mental inventory of a sort.
Ok, here goes...generally from the bottom to the top, left to right. Most of the little things are buried.
1 wood floor in a crappy crumbling apartment in MontrÈal
1 wool carpet
1 piano damper pedal
1 scrap piece of paper
1 garbage bag full of laundry (in corner)
1 Apple Macintosh Dual 2.5Ghz G5 – VERY HOT
1 Apple DVI breakout box
1 Yamaha CP70B electro-mechanical grand piano – VERY COOL
(left side of piano)
1 phone number for Pierre, my guitar tech
1 address for my most trusted friend, Ian in Vancouver
1 business card for the drummer of this local jazz band, Beat In Fractions
1 small box of paper clips
1 pencil sharpener
1 small broken clock (five past twelve)
(right side of piano)
1 1/4" to RCA converter
1 guitar pick
(on top of piano, to the left)
1 black moleskin notebook with lyrics
1 pair of tweezers
1 orange Sharpie
1 elastic
1 Staedtler eraserts
1 thank you card from Ian and his new bride Suzie regarding the composition I did for their weddling last summer
1 Mirado pencil
1 page of a music notebook my ex-girlfriend brought back from a flea market in Brussels
1 DVD: "The Matrix" given to me by this jazz-cat, Kenny Martin, in lieu of cash for studio services
1 business card for my landlord
1 package of extra-light gauge electric guitar strings
1 picture of Ian and Suzie dancing
1 small volcanic rock
1 red candle in 1 wooden-foot holder
1 DVD: The Corrs Unplugged"
1 CD: Frances Cabrel "Les Beaux DÈg‚ts" ("the beautiful small ugly-things/garbage" roughly translated)
1 CD cover: The Corrs "Borrowed Heaven"
1 CD: FaurÈ's "Requiem" transcription and piano by …mile Naoumoff
2 CDRs: entitled "This Shit is Wak!" containing foley sound for a 16mm no-budget film by a couple of buddies in Vancouver
3 CDs in package: software Propellerhead's "Reason" version 2.5
1 loose CD: Billie Holiday "Loveless Love"
3 diskettes in 1 clear plastic bag: an old version of Steinberg's "Recycle", a driver for an ethernet PCMCIA card, some unknown files
1 green felt pen
1 black pencil marked "HÙtels Fairmont"
1 guitar string winder
2 pairs of sunglasses
1 green notebook
1 black address book
1 newspaper article talking about neuroscience and Beethoven
2 more diskettes: contents unknown
1 Apple keyboard
(right of keyboard)
1 Acer Ferrari mouse (for the Acer Athlon 64 Ferrari laptop I wasted $3000 on last summer)
1 loose DVD with no-budget 16mm film I helped clean up, entitled "Dinner for Ten"
1 flyer for the MontrÈal Nouvelles Musique festival or 2003
1 LaCie USB diskette reader
1 small black cardboard box containing some loose tobacco, blue lotus leaves, wild lettuce, catnip and skullcap
2 empty DAT cases
2 books (already mentioned)
1 Acer Ferrari screen wipe
2 diskettes: old text files
1 20" Apple display
(behind display)
1 Shure SM57 dynamic mic
1 mic stand
1 mic cable
(whew!)
Everything else is just cabling or atomic/digital/informational content.
I think there's an important lesson here somewhere but I already have enough topics to cover.
If nothing else, I wanted to say this to you: I think we're collectively developing a new "mathematics of real symbols".
Math is not "beautiful" as the mathematicians like to believe. If it was, we'd be living in Utopia. Math is a language. It's up to us to language the beautiful into the real.
(I'm still trying to say what I wanted to say...)
The language of your blog has changed significantly since your return.
If you do nothing but stop, I swear I could write a book about your last two posts. It's nice to be back home, I'm sure. But I'm scared about the mental health effects of your environment. Essentially, I think I may be volunteering as a sort of logical analyst. I'd say "psycho-logical" but the term is so loaded, you know?
Your life isn't perfect. I'm not trying to play games with you. I'm responding from the gut to your mentioning of Diderot.
Feel free to phone me @ (phone number). I don't usually answer but you may be lucky and, in any case, I'll phone you back. I'm normal, etc.
I'm from (Canadian City), my name is (Canadian Guy). I'm a part-time veteran computer programmer and full-time musical signal receiver.
With this new G5, I feel I'm entering into a mystic-like state. I'm seriously over-empowered and I think many people are going to lose their grip when the next wave of technology hits. We've all been talking about it for years in other ways – you know: "a new level of human consciousness" and all sorts of esoteric cosmological significance, the usual. Only this time, it's programmatic.
I'm just trying to pay my rent. I'm a non-writer stuck in a writerly corner. You have no time, I know, so I don't want to inundate you with opinions right off the bat.
All this == FYI.
I have no ulterior motives other than the satiation of general curiosity. And most of it doesn't concern you at all.
For example, the biggest question I'm looking to answer right now is: "Why the heck did I put the supercomputer on the piano?"
Best regards,
Canadian Guy
