Category Archives: music

Science of happiness and prettiness

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di091020

There is beauty for the eyes, beauty for the ears, and beauty for the mind. Today I have enjoyed them all.

Got book from Amazon in my mail! Actually it was too big for my mailbox, because they used a huge flat package. In a small box it would have fit right in, but I suppose they have their reasons. For me it was a nice walk to the post office and back, and then I could open yet another Happy Science book. This one is actually called The Science of Happiness: 10 principles for manifesting your divine nature. As usual it is written by the astoundingly prolific Ryuho Okawa, but let it not be said that he is a miser who keeps secrets. He has already explained how he has been able to write more than 500 books since the mid-1980es when he started his happiness movement. The secret? He does not write them, he holds speeches. After making an outline, he then holds a series of speeches (something he does regularly anyway) on those topics. Afterwards, he edits them into a book. This book is no exception, and you can clearly see it when you know it. It has a living, unstilted form that is quite suitable for a public performance.

Yes, I still buy and read books by Okawa. No, I still don’t believe that he was king of Atlantis or ruled Venus when it was a tropical paradise. Apart from his personal biography, however, the voices in his head are disturbingly sane and even wise. Much like mine… ^_^ But of course I’m not some grand savior, just an ordinary guy from the sixth dimension, at most. If I had been incarnated before, I was probably called Ibn something and dabbled in alchemy… Anyway, the voice in my head tells me to pay attention to THIS life so I can get it at least somewhat right. I don’t exactly see a lot of divine nature in my life to date.

Speaking of divine, I have ordered the Saga CD I wrote about yesterday. Even though it is sold by Sony, I have not heard that the original Japanese division engages in the same random attacks on their customers as the American recording companies do. Therefore I don’t feel that I am supporting injustice when buying from them. And I don’t think it would be divine – or even humanly decent – to keep playing their song over and over and not pay for it, even though this is easily possible. Still, I would rather prefer to buy songs in non-physical form. Unfortunately the European iTunes does not have Japanese songs, and I don’t read kanji well enough to even find out whether it is possible for Europeans to use the Japanese iTunes or any similar service.

While waiting for the CD (which will probably arrive after I have left this address) I still enjoy listening to the full song on YouTube with the best conscience. It may not exactly be divine, but it sure is pretty. And beauty is also in its way a reflection of the divine, or so say the perennial traditions. According to Happy Science, great works of art are inspired from the sixth dimension, the Realm of Light. I won’t argue against that. There certainly seems to be an element of Light in it.

Scientists work long and hard days to prove that the consciousness is only a product – some even say byproduct – of the brain, and the same for beauty and religious experience. But by the same token, their own relentless search for “truth” as they see it must also be an unfortunate side effect of a brain that has forgotten its only purpose, to raise as many healthy children as possible to pass on the genes. It is an irony that just like the religious hypocrite is unable to practice what he preaches, so too is the anti-religious crusader unable to live up to his professed non-faith. The Light keeps shining on us all, and even the blind feel the sun on their face at times.

Violet song

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2009-09-30 22:49:57

“With the violet that flows from your fingertips, let us paint a small dream, just for us two.”

The picture is from the game City of Heroes, featuring my imaginary girlfriend’s imaginary sister, in this case as imaginary heroine Yubisaki Violeta.  There is a story behind that name, of course. That’s the topic of today’s entry.  (The guy next to her is me, the Eternal Newbie.)

The anime Umi Monogatari (“Sea Story”)  is nothing to write home about. It is a pretty standard magical girl anime, which will probably be liked by grade school and middle school girls, and the occasional other person who likes to watch girls who are technically not underage but certainly look like it, hug and say “I love you” to other seemingly underage girls when not transforming into magical priestesses to save the world from eternal darkness and sorrow.  There are probably people who get a kick out of that.  But what I like about it is the opening song, Violet by Marble.  Luckily the song can be bought separately now.  Or you could listen to it here, at least for now.   If you do, you can probably understand why I love it, even though the singer is not amazing by Japanese pop standards.

Yes, it is excessively innocent.  Even if you don’t understand a word of Japanese (which is slightly less than even me) you should be able to feel it in your heart.  As for the lyrics, what I think I understand is something like (in the shorter form used in the opening song):

You…  you… Heart… peace… You too… you too… peace… It is good, just like this (?) … Time… forget… that’s why. Fingertips… violet… small dream… draw (?)… two people alone… Happy(?)… sky.

In my defense, Japanese songs are even more cryptic than everyday conversations, which themselves are held in a language that has evolved apart from ours since the deep of the last Ice Age, when our ancestors were too buys hunting woolly mammoths to study linguistics. Anyway, the voices in my head have opinions on the lyrics, but they may be wrong. I am sure I got the spirit of it right though.

As proof I present you with the animals, who have no linguistic capabilities at all, but do have a spirit of sorts.  As I was walking from my home, humming the song too myself, I passed the neighbor’s cat.  Well, one of them.  This is unusual.  When I come anywhere near, the cats run for their lives, except the kittens.  They have good reason, for the previous inhabitants of the house (up to three and a half year ago) hated them with a vengeance and would chase them for their lives.  However, as I was wordlessly (or nearly so, see the scarcity of words as seen above) humming to myself, the cat made no effort to move at all, but let me walk straight past it so close that I had to take care to not step on any part of it.

Curious, I walked through a small park on my way from the bus station in the city to work. (Not today, obviously, since today is Sunday.) Ahead of me were a modest group of crows, eating something vaguely vegetarian that someone had left on the ground.  Seeing me, they started to take wing.  I, on the other hand, started to sing Violet.  Hearing this, the crows immediately fell at ease and settled to the ground, letting me walk right through their congregation as if I belonged there.  It was a pretty amazing experience.

It probably would not work on humans, more’s the pity.  Or would it? Feel free to listen and chime in with your opinion.

Finished ripping CDs

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di090703

Two bags with my favorite CDs, which I once assumed I would leave behind when I died, hopefully far into the future. Now in the trash they go.

Finished at last! Every CD I could find is ripped to the hard disk, and a backup is made to an external disk.  The CDs from USA and Europe are stuffed in bags to throw in the trash, those that are not there already.  I keep the Japanese ones, for now. I originally planned to keep the CDs from my favorite artists:  Enya, Leonard Cohen, Chris de Burgh.  They are all awesome, compared to pretty much anyone else, in that the consistently make good songs and perform them themselves with great enthusiasm.  And they fill up all or much of the CD with good songs instead of spacing it out with one good song and 9 boring on each CD. So I was really planning to keep them, until the Jammie Thomas judgment. Now I am not planning to have an American or European CD in the house ever again.  Nor do I intend to buy any from online shops like iTunes etc.  They had their chance, and they blew it.  This means war.

I have decided on Sound Converter, a Linux program, to make all the tracks into MP3 files for easy streaming.  The Opera Unite music streaming program only handles that format.  Unfortunately it also panics at the sight of non-ASCII characters.  Perhaps it thinks they are malicious code?  I am still not sure what to do with my Japanese music in that regard, I have found English translations for one (DearS) but may have to either translate or transliterate the others manually, a Herculean task, although not Sisyphean.  As it is, just converting the hundreds of non-Japanese CDs will likely take weeks, as my Linux CD at home is so old, it is slow even with Xubuntu.

Once the tracks are converted, I intend to use Opera Unite to stream them so my friends around the world can listen to them.  That’s illegal, of course: According to the recent Norwegian law about intellectual property, it is illegal to play music for your family. You can only perform copyrighted works at home if you do so “without the help of strangers”. Since your stereo is almost certainly made by strangers, using it to play for your spouse and kids could get you arrested.

That is not very likely though, because the police is locked up in a long struggle with the government.  They are refusing to work overtime – crimes should please be committed during office hours until further notice.   Things have been going sour over a very long time:  The Norwegian police was reorganized, as are pretty much every tentacle of government, including the one in which I worked.  And like that one, the police also found themselves doing more work for the same pay, and less meaningful work as well. As far as I know this has been the outcome of every “reorganization” in public sector in Norway, as it probably is everywhere else.  Anyway, after years of this they have had enough.  So they are doing only what they absolutely have to do.  And this means as long as we have crazy people running around doing actual crimes, there won’t be police left over to make sure I don’t let my best friends listen to my favorite music.

Jammie Thomas pays my music

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di090619

In the trash they go. There will be no new ones.

Jammie Thomas, one of the most ordinary people in the western world, was just fined nearly 2 million dollars for having made 24 songs available for upload on the file sharing service Kazaa. (The songs became available for upload because she downloaded them – this is the nature of most file sharing systems.)

I get the impression that the court’s decision did not spark much controversy in the USA, and this seems reasonable:  Americans are used to farcical trials, where the best paid lawyers win more or less by default; so much more when the opponent does not belong to the ruling ethnicity. For us Europeans it seems strange, but once you get to know a number of Americans, you realize how little faith they have in the judicial system.  And if neither the particular crime nor punishment has any direct consequence for you, you just ignore it.  Mind your own small business.

The reaction here in Scandinavia is very different.  A wave of hate  and contempt is sweeping Norway (the homeland of “So sue me” DVD-Jon) and neighboring Sweden (harbor of The Pirate Bay). Particularly the younger generation vow to never buy a CD again. I am not sure they will stick to that always, but probably as long as they can effortlessly download the songs from file sharing sites.  Certainly whatever sting their conscience may have offered them before is now gone, nay reversed:  A deep sense of righteous glee filling them each time they get to stick it to the fascist recording industry and the corrupt governments that allow it to run rampant over the back of the poor.

My reactions are more mixed. I developed a pretty large software package for certain businesses a couple decades ago, and I remember the murderous rage I felt at the thought of people stealing it.  I would not particularly mind seeing them in debt for the rest of their life – actually how I felt at the time was that they were not really human and their lives worthless.  Of course, this is true most of the time for most of us, but I was still projecting much of that then, thus the intensity of feeling.  Objects and random strangers cannot incite such intense emotions, they always need to have an anchor inside us.

For the young and angry virtual mob, the anchor is no doubt the reasonable fear because they too have been sharing songs online, and probably more than 24 of them at that. The thought that their entire lives could be ruined any random day and that there is nothing they can do about it would be pretty upsetting.  (This does not in any way change the fact that this was a gross miscarriage of justice and should never have happened.) Personally I have bought and paid for my hundreds of CDs, which I am throwing away, except for the Japanese ones.  I am even more motivated to get rid of them now.  I do not really want to have physical objects in my house associated with the cRIminal Association of America and its lickspit running dogs here in Norway.

Actually downloading music used to be legal here in Norway, until the current mainly Social Democrat government changed it. Their minister of culture is still supporting the record label industry, whereas the state’s less political privacy watchdog is pulling in the opposite direction.  This is no great wonder, for the Social Democrat leadership is strongly in favor of the European Union, from which we got the current law.  This again makes sense since the EU is dominated by Social Democrats. As such it has an extensive bureaucracy with many leading positions that may be available to former politicians who have been good at wagging their tail, and with no more need for elections to maintain your status.

When I was young – in the 1970es – we had cassette recorders, which people used to play music casettes they had bought, but probably more often songs they had recorded from the radio or copied from one another.  This had been going on since the days of the spool tape recorder, about half a century ago.  Kids these days have probably not seen those contraptions, but I have one stashed away in a closet here, as well as a couple tapes with songs copied form Light knows where.  (Although by far most of my tapes are recordings of meetings at conferences in the Christian Church, popularly known as Smith’s Friends. I am keeping these for as long as the tapes may still last, or I do, lest they be lost forever.)

OK, that’s a pretty roundabout entry.  But I am currently working on getting Opera Unite running stably on my machine, so I can stream all those thousands of songs I have bought and paid to friend and family.  (Who else but friends and family would wade through a blog like this?)

I will come back to the actual address of my music streaming server if I get it to work stably. So far it stops working on my home machine with Windows, my old Linux machine is too weak to pull it, and the new Linux machine is only active a few hours a day.  But my intention is good, at least.  ^_^

…keep you Spotified

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di090511

“Maybe I didn’t hold you, all those lonely lonely nights…”

Music has never been the huge part of my life that it is for some.  (My oldest brother comes to mind, but then again he was a performing artist from his youth.  But there are many others.)  Even so, there were times when I spent more time (and money) on music.  Over the last several years, this has waned.  I wonder if this is because I am growing older, or because of my unique lifestyle, or because there just isn’t so much good new music anymore.  That would conveniently explain why the recording industry experience steadily lower sales, even though online copying (“piracy”) is increasing.

“Wait, what do you mean, even though?  Isn’t that the problem?”  I mean what I say, because every study on the topic shows that people who download music illegally also purchase significantly more music than those who don’t.   This is, as far as anyone can tell, by now a scientific fact, even if you don’t like it.  Now it may be that they would have bought even more if they did not download, but this is not certain. It may be that they would have been exposed to much less music, and therefore have bought less.  Nobody knows.  But we DO know that they are your best customers, and you go out of your way to threaten them with unrecoverable ruin.  Not some for-profit shop, but ordinary students and housewives.  There is not a day, it sometimes seems, that your hate is not raining down on your best customers.  Wonder why you sell less and less.

Then again, perhaps it is simply because there isn’t much good music.  I certainly haven’t seen much lately, and it has almost all been either New Age or Japanese.  Then again it could be just I who has changed.  Although I hear it from other adults too.  I suppose this could be part of growing middle-aged:  The people who made your favorite music die or at least retire, and the kids these days just don’t measure up to the Great Old Ones.  On the other hand, I will point out that the 90es was a bit of a high point for me in buying music, with a wealth of great Ambient, Trance and Euro-Dance to choose from. Ace of Base, Infinity and the sublime G.O.L.  And at the same time we had the height of the Celtic wave represented by such stars as Clannad and the angelic-sounding Enya.  Seriously, it was a time that could easily compete with my own youth, as far as I was concerned at the time.  (Of course, arguably this WAS my youth, since I hadn’t been young much when I was young.)

Be that as it may, I haven’t had that much interest in music the last few years.  I don’t like to have it on unless I can actually listening to it.  I like silence better and better as the years pile on.  I suppose that could be because of my lifestyle.   I had a musical renaissance when I discovered Pandora (which soon after restricted itself to America) and later Last.FM which I still use somewhat, although I now mainly listen to my loved track now and again.  With my forays into brainwave entrainment sountracks this spring, music faded almost completely.  After all, when you can write directly to your brainstem, it kind of takes presedence, right?

Well, music has another chance, if a small one.  This is thanks to the European music streaming service Spotify. Based in Sweden, it covers much of Europe, including non-EU member Norway.  UK residents can listen to it freely, others will either have to pay a modest monthly sum (as I do) or receive an invitation and listen to some advertising. The invitation model is available currently in Sweden, Norway, Finland,  France and Spain.   It is not available outside Europe though.  I guess that is fair.  We don’t get Pandora, you don’t get Spotify.

As I am pretty sure I’ve said before, Spotify is a lot like having a million songs on your hard disk.  You can stream any of them at any time, in any order, again and again.  Not like other “Internet radio”  stations where you at best can give a general guideline for what you want to hear, and skip tracks you don’t want to hear.  This is more like your own harddisk. A very big harddisk full of music.

Unfortunately none of this music is Japanese or New  Age, so it is not really worth paying for, for me. I do so anyway, because unless it drains me too badly, I like to spend money on things that I wish to encourage, things I want to be part of the future.  This is it.  In fact, many years before the coming of the Internet, I wrote a science fiction story in which people anywhere on the planet could listen to any music they wanted at any moment, beamed to them from a network of satellites.  These days, the Internet is almost that omnipresent.  And indeed, I use Spotify with wireless network at work, although I have no idea whether the signals have passed through a satellite at any time on their way to me.  They combine peer-to-peer when feasible with a server fallback.  It is highly reliable and faster than piracy!

Lacking my first choice in music, I have instead revisited some ballads from my earlier layers of music interest. For some obscure reason, one of them have stuck for some days now. I think you call this “earworm” in English. That actual song is Always on my mind, which I know from Chris de Burgh’s album Beautiful Dreams. This is one of the few times when he sings a song not made by himself.  I may have heard it performed by Willie Nelson before that, possibly but probably not Elvis Presley.  (I mean, he did sing it, but I never listened much to Elvis.)

Anyway, this song keeps repeating in my head, except the voices in my head has subtly altered it.  The line that reads “Give me one more chance to keep you satisfied”?  Yes. It now says “Give me one more chance to keep you Spotified.”

And that is my message to you, dear readers.  I happen to have 6 spotify invites lying around, so if you live in one of the countries listed above and for some inscrutable reason don’t have one, mail me.  Give me one more chance to keep you Spotified.  Chances are you will enjoy it more than I do.

CDs that leave my home

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di090506

Music is difficult to let go of. Especially when cute girls are involved, I guess, and surprisingly often they are.

I have come to the CDs that resist being thrown in the garbage. Even though the song being ripped right now is actually called “Trash”. It is by Suede, from the album “Coming Up”. I have not played it for some time – a couple years, surely. And even when I did, I only played two of the tracks. One was “Trash”, the other was (even more appropriately) “Lazy”. There is a story behind that, of course.

I bought this CD (like so many others) after listening to these tracks repeatedly at the home of my best friend over many years, the amazing Superwoman. (I wrote about remembering this already in 2001. Complete with embarrassing daydream about her. Well, more like embarrassingly safe for work.) Whenever I heard them later, a part of me remembered those times, which were good times indeed. Not that times are bad now. They are good in a different way though. One of the differences is that I can’t sit down with my online friends and listen to music together. At least not yet. I am mildly surprised that this is not yet possible. Perhaps it is, but I just don’t know about it?

In any case, over several years most of my new CDs came from listening to music together with her. She had great taste in music, although she was more omnivorous than I. It took me quite a while to find some music on my own after we parted ways completely. And most of what I’ve bought after that has been Japanese pop that I learned from watching anime.  Eventually I also found some songs via Last.FM, but those are mostly bought via iTunes so I don’t need to rip them and throw away the CDs… Someone did that already.

The previous CD that I ripped today was “luring” by Odd Nordstoga. If you think Odd is an odd name, you are probably not Norwegian. He is one of the few remaining artists that create and sing songs in my native language, Nynorsk (New Norwegian). If you think it looks more like New Norse, that is not far off either. It was created during the time when Norway was awakening to national independence, and its purpose was to gather the heritage from old Norse that had been preserved in our dialects during the centuries of Danish and later Swedish rule. But the pressure from the Danish-Norwegian BokmÃ¥l (Book Language) favored in the cities has gradually polluted the ur-Norwegian language, so that today only a few of us can write it fluently without unwittingly bastardizing it with Danicisms. Among those few are I and Odd Nordstoga. And possibly my friend Zimena (her name changes from time to time, as she has a lot more to protect than I, and anyway her journal is friends-only for a while now). She is a much greater fan of Nordstoga than am I. Truth be told, the only track I played more than once on that CD was the first one, the national smash hit “Kveldssong for deg og meg”. Ooh, I wrote about it in 2004.

The first of the tree CDs I throw out today is “Dreamland” by Robert Miles. Again this was one I learned about from my best friend, but while she was taken by the song “Children” (if I remember correctly), having seen a music video of it, I preferred the song “One & One”. Ooh, I wrote about it in 2001. Seems I did remember correctly after all those years. Woo, go me! And I already wrote about it in 1999, one of my entries most worth reading actually, once it finds it was a bit down the page. “Let’s stand still in time” – that was indeed in some ways the high point of my life. A part of me wants to go back and live that year again – and again, and again. Yes wouldn’t that be nice… if I could do it without losing what I have gained since. But I can’t. But at least I don’t need to lose the song, even if I throw away the CD.