http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI4JLa0hbUw
Toys in rhythm.
Music video by Owl City performing Fireflies
with Adam Young [Producer], Steve Hoover [Video Director], Danny Yourd [Video Producer]
(C) 2009 Universal Republic Records, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc.
Q for G+S: Is there some sort of backet, brochure, information package that I can forward to interested artists/authors to get them interested in the project?
Consider it like this.
A multitude is walking down a broad dirt highway. Maybe it is grass covered. The multitude is young and old, every color, every race, men and women, some walking alone, some with a partner, some with their children, some with their friends. Some are talking, some are singing, some are singing, some are silent.
As they walk, every now and then, one falls down, and the people around them stop for a moment, and stand there. After a moment, horrified and screaming or sad and quiet, those who stopped walk on. No trace of the fallen remains to the visible eye. The grass-covered highway has swallowed him.
The music is playing in what we now call the background. (Background to what? Foreground of Our Being?)
Life & Time flows past me. I stand still.
What seems flat and static is strange and complex. A crystal origami lattice, folding and unfolding into and around itself. Constant transformations, unseen and unnoticed, as the transforming becomes the transformed.
Always becoming.
Secrets are not and cannot be kept. Not here.
If my generation is the 1974-1983 generation, what is the shared common experience of us all? What the hell happened?
Well — the End of Vietnam is in our parent’s minds, if not ours. The late 70s doldrums collapse into the ra-ra 80s, with Reagan and Reaganism, a Fake New Cold War, the Space Shuttle (new space), the Challenger Explosion, horizontally integrated children’s entertainment that bring the TV show into your house with fully articulable action figures (new strange superheroes, He-Man, Thundercats, and Transformers), E.T. phoning home, the Disney Channel, Care Bears movies, Halloween, beginning of Overprotection, beginning of a national freakout about our children (those mad Gen-Xers above us), we don’t know what, headed into post-post-modernism, Reagan, Bush, then Clinton, certain exhaustion of greatness (return to a lower norm after the Madness of Nixon), MTV, and Kurt Loder, and MTV news, and Kurt Cobain shakes up music, and then blows his brain out, and Bill Clinton is on Arsenio Hall, and the New Kids come on SNL, perfectly pitched to the 12-16 male demographic, and there’s money to be made, here, there, everywhere, oops, recession, oops, it’s the economy stupid, Bill Clinton, cool, did not inhale, did he protest Vietnam, are we talking about Vietnam, that’s ok, let’s elect him anyway, oh, he’ll do so much, better than the other guy, I can go to college, my mother says, oops, Republicans bounce back, feral, and angry, shoot his knees out from under him, Contract with America (which contract, sign here on the dotted line, America, don’t read the fine print, America, what’s that rotten egg smell I smell, America), high school, 30something over, My-So-Called Life captures us perfectly, Counting Crows and REM alternative rock is a softer kinder machine gun hand, we little teenagers like it fine and dandy (Nirvana and Pearl Jam are already one step back, for the older kids among us), going to first music concerts, at these great big old arenas, the singers are maybe ten years older than we are, they don’t remember Vietnam either — (maybe they do, but they’re not talking about it) — they were all in school in the silly silly 80s — oh yeah, DARE, and Project Pride, and THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS, smells like EGGS again, starting to feel the hormones coming, first come, spin the bottle in a basement, same as it ever was — I’m a Jew, so at twelve I did the Bar Mitzvah circuit and slow-danced with Alaska between me and the girl to cheesy pop songs — (oh yeah, pop songs, Michael Jackson when I was young, American Gladiators) — my sports teams sucked for most of the 90s — got through middle school and high school did a good job — the Big Bad Millennium was coming — oh, yeah, when I was in 2nd grade there was a war in Iraq, didn’t last long, the Prez who did it was out in a year anyway, didn’t hear much from that area of the world for sometime — five years maybe — Israelis and Palestinians making nice in the Middle East — until there’s this strange strange assassination — is the world worse than I thought it is — can’t be, we won the Cold War, the threat of annihilation is over — let’s party now, tear down the Berlin Wall, unification, world peace, the future, can’t really see past 2000 though, it’s this big opaque singularity — science fiction numbers over there — go to college somewhere — then what — write a book maybe — then what — get married? have a kid? maybe, can’t think about that (can’t think about that now, either, another singularity) over in Israel in 98 when we learn that a fat old (to us) intern likes to give the President hand jobs with her mouth. Hmm. Doesn’t sound too bad to me, 16 year old male. Then the Republicans go crazy one more time. Hey, I say, don’t take away my President, I didn’t vote for him, but I would have liked to.
Blah blah. Someone mentions George W. Bush as a great potential candidate for the Republican party. I’ve been waiting for Al Gore since ’92, always seemed like a real good guy.
Aretae says …
http://aretae.blogspot.com/2009/08/klings-triangle.html
Jon Haidt, one of my favorite psychologists (not least because he demolishes Kohlberg’s silly moral stages), has a perhaps more complete answer. He suggests that the liberal/progressive side of the fence politically operates off of only 2 moral dimensions (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity), while the conservative ethics usually operates off all 5 human moral dimensions (including also: Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity).
Libertarians are weird, so we don’t count.
I think this account does a good job of explaining why liberals differ from conservatives on the importance of income equality. From conservative POV, Bill Gates deserves his money from a respect/authority position.
From a liberal POV, fairness trumps that, and suggests that while Bill may deserve some reward, but the scope of his reward is way out of line, regardless what he did.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/08/what_is_real_fr.html
Arnold Kling defines freedom as “absence of monopoly” saying that what matters MOST is a right to exit, touching on the possibilities of charter cities — (the danger here is the everpresent danger of White-Flight, which is the Privileged [who didn’t get that way by accident] cashing out before the game is over).
Kling argues that people would & could prefer a right to exit than a right to vote. Maybe (and yes, no country should force people to stay, only to abide by certain rules if they do decide to stay –)
But what about people who can’t exit, who are stuck where they are? (Kling might argue that those people should have the right to *exit* in place)
So what about the *right to exit in place*? Nozick talks about this ASU. Well, to a certain extent this is possible in America to a point. What’s required is that it happen in an area not already controlled by a local government — and in America, there’s plenty of those places. Why not allow it within the boundaries of continguous communities? Maybe because the Rights of your Neighbors not to live in a Gerrymandered Balkinized Community where everyone pays what they will is an effective Veto on your right to opt out of the rules of the local area. And that if you want to opt-out, you either need to get your neighbors to agree or go somewhere where there are no neighbords.
To some things, our neighbors are so geographically disparate that everywhere within the sovereign borders is a neighbor, and there can be no opt-outs, only votes. However, Kling, and Nozick is right that a Maximization of Freedom should be careful about how many rules the Federal Government requires >> thereby promoting, within reason, the laboratory of federalism.
However, given that there are large number of people who can’t leave, because of economic reasons, there should be some binding rules that cannot be exited from. Otherwise, there might be strong incentives to spoil and move on.
(The soundtrack is Furr by Blitzen Trapper)
Across the field, the long grass pushing up past ankles white, to the twisting fringed hem of a blue and black skirt, with small gold bells sown in at intervals as as she ran to me it was if the whole world was singing –
Gypsy Moon, she is, the Gypsy Moon.
And he said to her, “You must know that men think you are beautiful,”
He was looking at her while he said it, believing it himself, but saying it this way, the eternal hedge, saying but not saying.
Charlie Chester had rolled out of bed some time between 10 and 2 that morning, checking his email on his five year old laptop (none, if it could be trusted), ate some Raisin Crunch cereal with orange juice instead of milk, thrown on a sweaty dirty t-shirt, lit a half-smoked joint, and slipped his Bob Ross VHS into the VCR and collapsed on his couch.
Approximately two hours (and seven happy trees) later, the Thong song by Sisquo started playing on Charlie’s phone. This — like always — was somewhat of a rude awakening for Charlie, who scrambled — a half-hearted scramble — to locate the device before the music stopped.
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees 