Polythene Sky is a track from my album “The Things She Never Owned” – you can buy it now on iTunes.
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Blog
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The Things She Never Owned
You can now buy my album “The Things She Never Owned”, released under the name Whtsqr.
It’s available on iTunes and Google Play as a digital download. You can buy a physical CD (and a digital download in lots of formats) from Bandcamp.
You can preview all the tracks by clicking on the CD cover image below.
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We’re all gunna die
The meteors that fell on Russia this week should remind us all that our time alive and on planet Earth is fleeting at best and could be ended at short notice. You’d better make sure you’re doing the things you want to do now, rather than waiting for some imagined perfect future time when you’ll get around to it.
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Nothing Good Will Come of This
I just finished mixing a song called “Nothing Good Will Come of This” – a cautionary tale for all you boys and girls out there in the big scary world.
Click the orange play button to have a listen. I hope you like it! Please share it on your Facebook profile, and leave a comment with your thoughts!
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Featured Images
Here are some featured images from the Art page.
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I’m on a CD!
I’ve had a song (“No Mystery”) included on a CD. It’s called Emu Parade.
It contains a selection of music donated by artists from around the world (but mainly from Melbourne, Australia) with a dual purpose: 50% of profits will assist Stewart Anderson and Jennifer Turrell train and maintain an autism service dog for their 5-year-old daughter Tallulah. 50% will go to Autism Awareness Australia.The CD was put together by my old friend David Nichols, who also did the artwork for the CD, and the video for No Mystery.
You should go and buy a copy.
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The web is full of spiders
Since I rebuilt my web site, I’ve been using some interesting statistics tools that show information about visitors to my web site. Back in the day, pretty much the only traffic you’d see was real people using web browsers to actually look at your site.These days, the amount of traffic coming from spiders (automated “bots” that crawl the web indexing its pages) is phenomenal. Sadly, these days I get about as much traffic from spiders as I do from actual people.
In addition to the spider-bots, there’s also a lot of traffic from other kinds of malicious bots whose only job is to crawl the web looking for vulnerable scripts that can be used to send spam.
So, if you’re a real human and are you’re here reading this, please leave me a comment to let me know you’re not another spider.
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How much is enough?
I saw this in the paper today. It tells us that Australia’s own Gina Reinhart is now officially the world’s richest woman. Hooray! Her fortune now stands at almost 30 billion dollars.
For people like this, how much is enough?And what does she personally do that makes her worth this sort of money? Does she dig holes? Carry ore around? Serve customers? Do the books? Does she do anything useful?
I know some will argue that she generates wealth for others by being an astute operator, and thus providing jobs and paying taxes. That may be so, but does that really make her worth $30 billion? That’s a LOT of money – much more than she could require to live better than anyone could imagine.
And whatever good she might do, can it balance out the harm that must be caused by this sort of concentration of wealth? That money isn’t out floating around in the rest of the economy (where you and I might occasionally see some of it) if it’s stuffed in her bank account (yes, I know her wealth is on paper and that’s not the same as money in the bank, but still…)
At some point, from a group dynamics point of view, someone who manages to accumulate and hold onto such disproportionate wealth HAS to start being viewed by the rest of society (or at least a large part of it) as causing harm to the group as a whole, don’t they?
Perhaps that’s why Gina is buying media resources, so she can start to manage the messages that we hear about her, and not hate her.
Will we one day turn on Gina and people like her – the Wall Street bankers, mega-rich CEOs and their ilk?
Will we need a revolution to get rid of the obscenely rich? It’s hard to see how else such entrenched privilege can ever be undone.
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The colour of music
Light and sound both travel in waves. As the frequency of the sound waves change, so does their pitch. As the frequency of light waves change, so does their colour.
The frequencies we hear in modern music are typically oriented around a frequency we refer to as “concert pitch” – typically this is 440Hz and the note is the A above middle C. 440Hz is an arbitrary number though, and different people have different reasons for preferring other values. There are people who strongly believe that 432Hz is “deeply connected with nature” and that 440Hz is bad for us.
Throw into this mix the idea that colour and the notes in the western musical scale are related. There are 7 colours in a rainbow and 7 notes in a scale. 1st, 3rd and 5th intervals make a major chord, the 1st 3rd and 5th colours from the rainbow are the primary colours. Coincidence, or clues to the secret workings of the universe?
And what about synesthesia? Why do some people see music or hear colours? Is it all down to the vibrations of the strings at the heart of matter?
I’d be interested to hear what you think.
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“…the Australian public has an insatiable appetite for narcotics”
From this article in The Age, we learn that the Australian public has an “insatiable appetite for narcotics”.
Of course we do. Humans have been using mind-altering drugs since pre-historic times. A significant factor in our rapid evolution as a species has been our willingness to experiment with substances we find that have an affect on us – this is how we found both medicines (like aspirin) and hallucinogens (like psilocybin mushrooms).
Increasingly, as human consciousness has evolved we have become more complex, to the degree that we now have entire branches of science dedicated to improving our understanding of our minds. Is it any surprise that these days we need the occasional escape from ourselves (or change of perspective) that drugs can bring?
Prior to the early 1900s drugs such as cocaine, opium and marijuana were legal. Making them illegal has created a huge black market and been the cause of countless deaths and crimes against property.
This “war on drugs” is one the authorities will never win, because humans will always want to use drugs. We always have and we always will, and arguably it’s better for us to continue to do so, if the past is any guide. Governments should not be attempting to control our use of drugs any more than they should be legislating what we do in the bedroom.
A great book to read on the subject of drugs and human society is Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization by Hans Peter Duerr. It’s a great read, and will make you think.
Follow up: the Age has a page about the war on drugs that’s interesting – it has a timeline showing when laws changed.
