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November-December 2004

THIS MONTH's THEME:

Focusing on music

If I were not a physicist,
I would probably be a musician.
I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

Albert Einstein


After a very time demanding season of work, international contacts, teaching and blogging and all the rest, I really need to concentrate on my work as a musician, in the next couple of months.
It will be not less intensive for sure, and you will get informed on what will be going on. You will also witness the changes in this home page, as I have planned quite a lot. At least, to finally complete, as much as that is possible in an ever-evolving site, some of the parts of it that are still uncompleted or unsatisfactory.

And, most important of all, if all works well, I will finally start to publish my music files, so that you will be able to appreciate the quality of what I compose.
There is really a whole lot of things boiling at the moment, due to the better possibilities I have been hardly fighting economically to get for music production.
Paired with an inspiration and creativity that doesn't seem to diminish with age, on the contrary, it seems to give its best now, at the golden age of 42 (soon 43).

All in all, the culmination of a whole life, unfortunately right while the world around is destroying itself.


Well, more than music, I have been focusing on my own health in the last days...
I had a bad flue, which is very seldom, but it was intense and nasty, so that I couldn't read or write or even keep my eyes open, I could do nothing at all and I was getting bored to death.
Eating raw-food and fruit, I have no mucus, so I experienced once more those funny flues without snot, no cough, the only symptoms were actually high fever and headache.
High fever was reduced by fasting and putting a lot of clothes on, so that I could sweat it out.
But headache was very nasty. I am not used to that, as I practically never had headache in my life, not in the last twenty years I have been vegetarian at least.
I started to be a bit worried then, not really being prepared to cope with something so bad and new. I was also getting mad of it, this very intense pain in the forehead was killing me.
But then I thought, may be it is just the result of this very high fever, what about cooling it down?
I had no ice cubes, then I just filled my fine glass water bottle with very cold water, and drunk some of it, and put the bottle on my forehead, and kept it there, rolling it to different points from time to time.
The effect was clear, right what was needed. I felt much relieved, and, last Sunday, suddenly I could feel the flue (or whatever it was) getting away.
Yesterday I was better than before, very healthy and with lots of energy. I was enjoying every single moment of my “new life”, that is, mostly, appreciating what I had already before, and forgot cherishing.

I remember clearly the last time I took a medicine at all: it was exactly 20 years ago. I had a very bad flue also at that time.
I have a lot of Fire in my birth-chart. That means body-temperature is easily an issue for my health. I was probably prescribed some antibiotics in 1984, and that was the very last time I took a pill in my life. Since I have only been using natural methods, with the best possible results.
Why didn't I go to the doctor?
Well, it is always responsible to do that, to exclude eventual dangerous conditions. It could have been sinusitis, meningitis, tumor, who knows?
The problem is, it is always such a frustrating experience to go to an ordinary doctor. I can't talk with them at all, they are not open or prepared to meet a person like me, who doesn't want just to be prescribed a pill, and asks questions and wants meaningful answers. Usually, after not even a few minutes, you are just gently pushed out of the room, and you stay there, with your shirt still half-unbuttoned, under the undefinable glance of his mama-size secretary, with a feeling of “why did I even come here?”.
But, again, don't take this as an invitation to be irresponsible.
Things can go wrong even for a very healthy person, so always better be on the safe side, and face and tackle problems as early as possible.


What is happening in my music, then?
My project is still to restore all the good old music I have been composing for the last more then 25 years. That's an infinite task, but I am very determined to do that, as I don't want it to get lost.
There have been a lot of accidents during those years, due to the fact that I was constantly moving around, travelling and so on.
Some things got lost, some got old, the technologies have been changing all the time, making old media obsolete, and the new ones didn't show to be so reliable as expected, some times. I had two major hard-disk crashes, and back-up media failures too, loosing years of work and some invaluable documents.
I am somehow a man without a past, as I have no material things left from my past.
This way I understood why oppressive regimes are so eager to bomb and destroy everything, they know very well how it feels to be completely lost, when you have no identity left, your life is only in your own memory, but who cares any more?
This has also been the pattern of what is happening in Iraq. The most ignorant man on earth wanted, out of money, power and envy interests, to destroy the cradle of civilisation. The lyrics of the songs are already there, for you to enjoy.
I am working on the sound files, but it takes such a long time because I have to 'translate' any single registration to digital formats, most of the old recordings were on tape and in very bad shape. Some were not recorded well, and have to be recorded anew. Some were never recorded at all, and are even difficult to reconstruct.
I have hundreds of songs and compositions in my head, with arrangements and all stuff, but after more then 25 years, it is not surprising some of them are getting lost!

More on all this story will follow in the next days. Stay tuned!


Apart from the old songs, there are lots new, just waiting to be published.
I can nearly compose a new song every single day, so it is very difficult for me to keep up with the tempo of my own creativity.
And I never forget all the rest, that is, my involvement in what is going on around me.
It always surprises me how people can just forget about the troubles in the world. I can't, and I don't want either. Anyway, all this requires a lot of time, and the day is only made of 24 hours.
That's why I was needed to focus on my own work this month, for once.
But my blog will keep on being concerned with the world's event, be sure about that.

Actually, I am working on a collection of anti-war songs at the moment.
Some of the songs I have written in the last time have clearly been directly or indirectly influenced by the concern for this shameful war going on in Iraq.
Or by other wars too.
So, I decided to do the job more systematically and collect the different songs in an album. They are all very good, and I hope they will become the definitive manifesto of condemnation for all wars.


Yesterday I finally started the process of classification of all my songs.
I started listening to the old tapes, and all songs will get a progressive number and the chronological and alphabetical list will be published in my Music site.
Nearly all songs are already listed, but the problem is with all the instrumental compositions. There are hundreds of them, and many have never been recorded or classified. Some are even very difficult for me to remember and reconstruct.

Just a word today about a man not so many are talking about. As you know I am always interested in histories of individuals who fight for a cause, often against their own States.
This man, Mordechai Vanunu , revealed to the world Israel's nuclear secrets in 1986.
Israeli authorities continue to deny they have nuclear weapons, but all experts agree they have.
Vanunu leaked what he knew to Sunday Times in 1986, and that cost him jail for 18 long years, 11 of them in complete isolation (!).
This is the perfect example of an ethic man who does his duty, and a repressive Nation, which formally has some self-protecting laws, but in front of a superior moral law, that is the right of every single citizen to know what is going on around him, is illegal in itself.
The most disgusting aspect of this story is that Vanunu, when released under some conditions this year, tried to get abroad and asked for asylum in different nations.
They refused.
Now Vanunu has been arrested again, by the Israeli authorities, and some more blood on the hands of the western "open" democracies.


Yesterday the Italian prosecutor Ilda Boccassini, in her final statement in an on-going trial, requested Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's Prime Minister, to be inflicted 8 years of jail for bribery.
Silvio Berlusconi paid hundreds of millions liras to some judges, to obtain a favourable sentence.
I know what I am talking about when I use the word "criminal" about Nations and their governments.
It happens some of the biggest and most powerful "democracies" in the world are governed by the most dishonest people in the world. That's the way it is, and I am just telling it.
That's why we shouldn't fear telling the truth, we shouldn't fear opposing the wrong action by those criminals, and we should be proud of being the honest and independent people we are.
Ilda Boccassini has been threatened, smeared, fears every day for her life, and she is daily attacked in the newspapers owned by the Berlusconi family, and not supported enough by the opposition ones.
The Italian vice-minister, the hypocrite Gianfranco Fini, immediately declared Berlusconi is victim of political harassment, this disgusting litany going on every time he is condemned for criminal acts, not political ones.
But Boccassini didn't deviate one second from her inner drive to search for the truth and do what morality suggests her.
She has my deepest admiration, and you won't read anything like this anywhere else, as it is shameful to be honest in Italy, and few will support you if you are.
I know it is very unlikely she will succeed, as Berlusconi always can count on a net of fellas like him to help.
But the truth is he is corrupted and false and deserves every single day of those eight years in jail, much more than that indeed.


As I use to say: I am not dead yet. Sorry for the long pause, but I had a lot to do and a lot to think about too.
You will soon notice many changes in this home site, some suggested by you, some caused by my own need for change and renewal.

Still working on my music, still very angry about what is happening in the world, still very undecided about what is going to happen in my own life.
Sorry I have to go back thinking again.
See you later.


Well, after hard work, the new version of my home page is uploaded.
Not really major changes, apparently, but this is going to be the renewed base for all my activities anyway.
There are still some wrong links and errors, and some unfinished stuff but I will check the whole thing once again tomorrow.
Feel free to wander around in my site, and discover the changes made.


I checked my website very extensively, last Sunday, and fixed the last errors, so everything should be alright now.
It is a bit easier to navigate and I am pretty satisfied with the structure now. Obviously there will still be a lot of contents more, virtual space is notoriously in a continuous work in progress on Internet, and that's also a lifelong project.

Now I will really concentrate on the music stuff, bear with me for the delay, it has been such an awful lot of work, not to mention my real life, where I have to survive too, and that's not always the easiest.

Out in the world, I have been very shaken and sad about the destiny of the hostages, brutally killed in Iraq. I am asking myself a lot of questions, as also that aspect of this barbarian war makes not so much sense, like everything else.
It is especially the randomness of the liberations / executions that makes no sense.
Why some very "logic" choices are liberated, while some other are executed, even if it was clearly absurd to do that?
You could say: "Are you trying to find a logic in the madness? These are criminals and there is no sense in it".
But it is not true, usually there is always some 'human' patterns even in the most barbarian events.
The fact that Kenneth Bigley and Margaret Hassan have been executed can mean two opposite thing, both being in the end the worst nightmares one can fear.
The first, and simpler explanation somehow, is that all this Iraq war is down there where madness, brutality, absurdity rule, and we can expect no limits any more to what can happen. It is actually like that already, as Amnesty International and other human rights organizations are witnessing, there are countless violations of international treaties going on in Iraq, from all sides.
Maybe Bigley and Hassan were murdered right because they were so human, not concealing their desperation, crying, panicking asking for help, anguishing trying to save their life. Killing them was the supreme act of hate against humanity according to this first possibility.

But there is also an alternative explanation, that is even more scaring, but that doesn't make it less probable.
History has been teaching us so many times that we shouldn't expect there is a 'good' side and a 'bad' side in any war. Things are always much more complicated than that.
This has been the dirtiest war you can imagine, from the very beginning.
Based on lies and hidden reasons and interests.

Why was Margaret Hassan killed? She was of Irish origin, but married with an Iraqi, she had been living 30 years in Iraq. She was only helping there, working for an humanitarian organisation and everyone knew her as a wonderful person, deeply committed. She was against the invasion of Iraq, very critic about the war, and fighting very hard against unjust things going on and for getting help to the local population.
She was loved and respected in Iraq.
She spoke Arabic and was able to explain all that to her kidnappers.
So why even the cousin of the hated premier Allawi has been liberated, while Margaret was killed with a knife cutting her head?
While I was asking myself all these questions I read an article by Robert Fisk in the Independent: "Who killed Margaret Hassan?" update, now: "What price innocence in the anarchy of Iraq?",
please read it, it was very revealing, as usual, and he was asking himself exactly the same things. Adding even more obscure and strange facts to this sad event.
The suspect is either Allawi or the US, or both, needed a very strong excuse for their extermination of Fallujah, such a meaningless killing would definitely give it.
Doesn't that sound familiar? Remember what was the excuse for starting the invasion of Iraq at all. Remember all wars in history needed such an excuse, as wars are always meaningless and criminal, and can't be justified otherwise.


Today, believe it or not, I am really focusing on music.
I am still working on the listing of all my songs and compositions in the last many years, since I started around year 1976-1977, don't remember exactly.
The task is made difficult by the fact, at that time I wasn't realizing at all what would happen in the rest of my life. I was just writing and composing infinite amounts of music, but didn't record it or made score of it or play it for others.
It was entirely a trip inside my own soul.
My songs were my fantasy friends, helping me to express my inner feelings, and comforting me in the lonely and sad times I was living in.

A big amount of those earlier compositions have gone lost, some are left but without any indication of when they were composed. I am trying to reconstruct a lot of it, but even my memory has serious limits, after nearly 30 years.
As I told you before all my documents, papers, old school agendas and so on, got lost forever, after my family moved to their new house a few years ago.

Any case, this will be my definitive classification of my own works, after this, what will be left will be left, no reason to dwell any more in the past, even if some masterpieces will be surely lost forever.

Without music I would not be alive today. I will always be grateful to God, or whatever it is that created this world, to make it not only logical but beautiful, as music can reveal it.
That way, even an hopeless sentimental like me can hold life out.


Today is my birthday, happy birthday to myself!


Yesterday it was my birthday... right, I can't keep on celebrating the day.
I have to realize I am 43 now, this new age has already started, and I have to get back to work.
How does it feel to get such an old man? Well, nothing special really happened yesterday, but one starts looking more often at oneself in the mirror, consulting the "Symptoms Encyclopaedia" at the first cough, nonchalantly forgetting to mention one's own age in any relevant fora, and plain panicking a bit.
On the other side, the confidence in one's wisdom, magnetic charisma and irresistible charm gets a real boost.
One is simply not 43 for nothing.


Well, I am not going to deny that: I haven't written so much this month. I was enjoying the idea of writing about music in general and my own music in particular, but the fact is this month became one of the busiest ever.
What to do about that? Try again, may be.
So, do expect another month with music as a theme, and let us hope I will be able to dedicate more time to this blogging, which I love and some of you appreciate.



DECEMBER


I will continue the last month's theme, as announced, even in the delays :-(

In 1992 I wrote a song "15 Years After" with a very short text. It just said:

“15 years after,
still people die.”

You can find it in my album "Refugee" , which was about the feeling of being lost on this earth, of being a refugee in fact, escaping from an oppressive reality, but not being welcomed in any promised land. And about being lost in general, not really belonging anywhere.
What was the song referring to?
It was a crucial and compelling reminding of the fact that 15 years after I wrote: "Per chi muore di fame" ("To Those Who Are Dying of Hunger") included in the album "Al tuo essere, alla tua vita" , people was still dying of hunger, in the almost complete indifference of all us, and even in higher numbers than ever.

Yesterday it was the 20th 'jubilee' for the tragedy of Bophal, in India.
In that city, in 1984, a fabrics producing pesticides released 40 tons of methyl isocyanate, killing 7,000 people shortly after, 15,000 more (according to Amnesty International) in the next years and, all in all, about 800,000 people were involved, 100,000 of them still suffering of chronic diseases (cancer, lung illnesses, deformations at birth, and so on).
In other words, one of the worst terrorist acts in human history.
It is terrorism indeed, because we know that soon or later those kind of accidents can happen when we build such fabrics, but we play with the environment's and the people's lives anyway.
The owners of that fabrics were the Indian-American Union Carbide, later bought by Dow Chemical, and with an American director, Warren Anderson.
This man, responsible for the death of ten thousands of people is still free, and lives in the USA.
Nothing else practically has happened since the disaster. The toxics are still there, polluting water and soil, people has not been given the due money as compensation.

So I didn't believe my eyes when I read this morning Dow Chemicals was finally going to pay 12 billions dollars to the victims of Bophal.
In fact, it wasn't right: two hours later the BBC admitted they were completely fooled by a false interview with a fake speaker for Dow Chemicals.
A monstrous joke, still effective in reminding us of some facts.

Once again the United States take the role as one of the worst institution in the world, remembering most nations do exactly the same in lesser scale, but we shouldn't forget that anyone buying non-organic stuff is financing and supporting the terrorist fabrics of pesticides, that way being indirectly responsible for the death of people.


It is always funny for me how people focus so much on the tone and not on the substance of what is written.
I mean, you are provoked by the fact I use such strong words like "killing", "criminal", "terrorists" and so on. I am not offending, I am describing, and, honestly, would the reality of facts change if I used other words?
Truth is the most important thing in the world, that's why it is the most humiliated.
Truth is the foundation for anything else, together with universal love.
That's why I have dedicated so much of my life and so many songs to it.
One song for ex. was fully about that: "La forza della veritá" ("The truth force").
The title is the Italian for Satyagraha, a Sanskrit word that has several meanings, and one of the central concepts of Gandhi. I wrote that song at the end of the seventies, around the time I discovered such an incredible man had been on earth.
Albert Einstein wrote once:

“Generations to come, it may well be,
will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever
in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.”

I am sure Gandhi would have written the same about Einstein, a truly incredible person. As known, they were actually in contact, corresponding with each other.

It is worth to read all what Einstein furthermore wrote about Gandhi:

“I believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.”

and:

“Mahatma Gandhi's life achievement stands unique in political history. He has invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country, and practised it with greatest energy and devotion. The moral influence he had on the consciously thinking human being of the entire civilized world will probably be much more lasting than it seems in our time with its overestimation of brutal violent forces. Because lasting will only be the work of such statesmen who wake up and strengthen the moral power of their people through their example and educational works.
We may all be happy and grateful that destiny gifted us with such an enlightened contemporary, a role model for the generations to come.”

Incidentally: forget about the generations to come...


Did anyone notice it was Sunday today?
Did anyone in Iraq notice it was Sunday today?


My latest song "Prede della preda" ("Prey of the prey") , included in my work in progress album "War-ning" , is about the decline of both West and East, each in their own way.

Let's talk about China, for example.
In these days they are having official visits from both Germany and Italy.
They are obviously selling a lot of stuff to China, it is a tradition that political visit in reality are covers for huge commercial deals.
Italia has repeatedly violated the weapon embargo against the regime in China, selling weapons for billions of Euro. It is worth to underline that some of those weapons are meant to kill the Chinese people themselves.
China is one of the 60 countries left that have death penalty. They execute thousand of people every year, even for crimes that are not directly violent, for ex. corruption or thievery. That way, they top the infamous list of the countries executing most people, with an outstanding 90% of the global executions.
The numbers are impossible to assess precisely. It is well known, military regimes don't do body count.
The Italian fabrics Fiat Iveco kindly furnishes vans to execute people, the vans being equipped with more up-to-date executing technology, in stead of the traditional way of firing the condemned a bullet into the back of the head.

Incidentally, the mobile execution vans are deadly reminding of the nazi gas vans.
If you are one of those young people not really remembering the meaning of the word Holocaust, then you could take a visit to the Chelmno site.
Chelmno was a Polish extermination camp, using the infamous gas vans to execute.
In 1941, actually.
Few Polish people knew of the existence of that camp at that time.
Today is the 6th of December 2004.
What do we know?


I am starting to export my audio files to the compressed format .ogg in stead of .mp3

I am not doing it primarily because of quality. Vorbis, the maker of the .ogg standard states it is better, especially at low bit rates, than .mp3
I made my own experiments, and I honestly couldn't hear the difference, even with my very trained ear, actually I preferred .mp3 a bit, but I used only the highest bit-rates, so may be that's the matter.

The reason why I am shifting to ogg vorbis is that is is a free, open-source standard.
That is very, very important.
It is a matter of freedom, quality, accessibility and so on.
When someone uses the .mp3 format commercially, then he has to pay a fee to the copyright's owners. And the format is not open-source, so it is not possible to have a part, and a control, in the development of it.

That's a fundamental difference, and it is so incredibly important to support open-source.
It is really our freedom and our digital future.

PS: Vorbis is also elaborating an open-source video codec (Theora). If you don't understand a word of what I am talking about here, then you could try to go to their site and read their FAQ.
And I will also write more about these issues in the next days.
[update: a new and better codec has been under development since: it is called Opus]


I wrote about hunger in the world, few days ago, and the last report by FAO (Food And Agriculture Organization) unfortunately confirms what I wrote.
852 million people have not enough to chew, every single day, 5 million children die of malnutrition every single year, 20 million are born low weight, and the resources employed by our governments are not enough to do something about this tragedy.
Old news actually, even worsened by the fact that the poor people is growing in stead of diminishing
The 'funny' is: for every $ given to help, 5 to 20 get back.
The best investment in the world and we prefer spending infinite money on wars or meaningless things, or what is even worse.
Truly an amazing hopeless humanity.


Today it's a birthday... oh no, not again, you will say. Right, one can't have more than one birthday a year. But it is somehow legitimate anyway, as it is my brother's birthday.
And it has to do with music, he is an amazing composer, and a writer too, an outstanding one indeed.
Happy birthday to him then.

It is not completely by chance we are both Sagittarius and both composers, as this astrological sign is often a musical one. Many top singers have been Sags too.
Some examples? Here we go, completely randomly:

Ludvig Van Beethoven, Frank Sinatra, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Maria Callas, Britney Spears (oops..), Berlioz, Frank Zappa, Amy Grant, Tina Turner, Arthur Rubinstein, Billy Idol, Jan Sibelius, Sinead O'Connor, Keith Richard.... and so on
Obviously not mentioning all other people having other sagittarian influences in their chart.

If you wish to distract a bit from the word's tragedies, here it is for once a link to a funny, but actually very on spot, "How to Spot a Sagittarius".
No need to say, I could cross all seven steps. [update: original article has been replaced, but still about Sags anyway]
If you are not a Sagittarius yourself then you can obviously look at your own sign on the same site, they are all pretty well spotted.

It reminds me, it is ages ago I have updated my Lunisolar section. Time, where shall I find the time I need, as a grand Sag?


In a day when I am completely disgusted by Berlusconi saving himself 8 years of jail for the millionth time, due to a ridiculously mild sentence in a Milano trial, the only consolation I have is that Senegal has abolished death penalty today.
Best compliments to Senegal, go to hell to Italy.

Just to set it straight, as the world's press has proved to be lousy wrong about this, with few exceptions: Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, has been found guilty of paying a judge, Squillante, to obtain favourable judgments. It is only because too long time has passed since, that Berlusconi can't be jailed.
Read the whole story in the always precious The Independent:
Berlusconi proved to have bribed judge but avoids prison


So, what has been happening during this week? I won't conceal it has been a very hard time, on the private front, that's why I haven't written, and I have also been very busy with work and Christmas obligations.

Despite all bad news from both the interior and foreign matters, my work with music is slowly but steadily progressing.
I still need to focus a lot on the technical side of it. I like that too, it is very fascinating indeed to have such modern media available. I could never imagine I could go back to the analogue era. The digital is heaven and it has come to stay, even if some fundamental problematic issues are underestimated.
One of them being, things get more and more complicated and time-demanding, so much that sometimes one has to ask oneself what is the point with adopting new technologies when they make us stressed in stead of liberating us.

But I do consider these as temporary problems, digital is new and it takes time to get it right. It is inevitable to go that way. We left the Pisces age and have entered the Aquarian one. The shift is clear to everyone: from heavy and polluting industries to information technologies and societies. Aquarius is an air sign, related to electronics and groundbreaking, innovative technologies. Today I read airplanes companies are now offering wireless Internet connections on flights. This is the perfect icon of what is happening in the Aquarian age.
A revolution is also going on in music, with the digital home-studios becoming so cheap, every musician can become a producer in his own little studio bedroom. And the compressed digital formats and the streaming ones give the possibility to publish their works on Internet.
Complete individual creative freedom, in a network based environment, using digital media. All these are Aquarian symbols.
So, we are heading into that direction, that's inevitable. It is pointless fighting against that. But it is worth and due to govern and direct this collective movement, making the best out of it.
Colouring these "cold" image and technologies trends with human warmth and soul, filling the empty media with precious content and substance.
Reducing pollution, stress and lack of freedom, not substituting them with new threats.
To finally unleash the human potentials and resources.


I have added quite a lot of images to my home page, to make it more appealing and visual, as that's the way I actually like things myself. I didn't want this home page to get heavy to load, that's why I haven't been using too many pictures, but there is a massive lot of text in it, so, the other risk was it got heavy in another sense.
Anyway, there is a Merry Christmas greeting in the main page, and some images and animations different places, especially Ecopedia, Live, Musicaid and Fruit.
Hope you enjoy.


Last Thursday I wrote about the shift from analogue to digital technologies. There is an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times today, titled:
"Pressing the Mute Button on Our Daily Soundtrack"
that issues exactly what I was writing about:
there are many aspects of this shift to digital that will have to be addressed, soon or later, as sound is not a minor part of our existence.
The way we handle sounds and noises and music does affect our life in subtle ways.

A few more episodes related to the music world:

  1. Staying in Los Angeles: last Friday the musical director of Crystal Cathedral (incidentally an impressive building) Johnnie Carl shot himself, after a nine-hour stand off with police.
    A tragic story, he was talented it seems, and suffering of big lows of depression. Not really an unusual combination. Music can be the highest consolation in our lives, but also the most dramatic reminding of what is missing in it.
  2. In many newspapers we read, recently, stories about classical musicians living on drugs, due to the stress of performing and having to live up to perfection and expectancies from the audience.
  3. The perfectionist and talented Nikolaj Koppel, at the top of his career as a classical pianist, announced in 2000 he would stop completely, to live life in stead of.
  4. I know personally a top violinist who broke an arm, some years ago. When I met her and saw her with this hanging arm I was shocked. It is my worst nightmare, something could happen to my arms or fingers.
    I play because I enjoy it, and it is an invaluable part of my life.
    You know what she said, to my big astonishment? She got a huge smile on her face and exclaimed: "I am so happy!".
    I understood she broke her arm on purpose, or in desperation, stopping an unbearable pressure on her life she has had since she was six years old!

The point then is:
what is music? And what is it for?
Is it for career, business, perfectionism, stress? Or for pleasure, enjoyment, dance, relaxation?
Is it more important for people to get a high experience or for the musicians to live a good life?

To me, the answer to those questions has always been clear. I have had a very peculiar career, if one can call it so, as I have managed not to follow external pressure, but only my interior call for quality and self-realisation.
I am poor, often starving, I am an underdog and an undefinable freak.
My 'success' didn't save me from depressions or lows or all our common mortal grieves.
But I still enjoy music, and music loves me, it seems, as it comes to me all the time and blesses me.


There is no any other sector in business that gives so many jobs like music.
Just think about the publishing of a CD, for ex. You will need musicians, composers, sound engineers, instruments makers, microphones, producers, artist managers, singers, fabrics for burning the CDs, radios to broadcast the songs, and the list could continue for ever.
Still music is not a 'real' business, it is a hobby, something one plays on Sundays, it seems.
People has no idea of how much and serious and hard work there is behind music.
I read the following in an article, few days ago:


"I can't tell you how many times I've had the following conversation:
"So you're a musician? What do you do?"
"I play viola in the Minnesota Orchestra."
"Really! ... Is that a full-time job? What else do you do?"
What else? I shouldn't be surprised by cultural ignorance in a society that idealizes sports heroes, rocks stars and reality TV. But even though the Minnesota Orchestra is in the public eye nearly 200 times a year, who we are and what we do remains a mystery to most people. To that end I offer, as a public service, everything you wanted to know about the lives of professional orchestra musicians. First things first: Not only is it a full-time job, but Minnesota Orchestra musicians play about 165 rehearsals and 195 concerts a year. We nearly always work on Friday and Saturday nights (many Sundays too), and don't have the same day off every week. Then there are the many hours spent practicing at home preparing the music."

Michael Adams December 5, 2004 "For an orchestra musician, it's a life of few full rests"

I can easily recognize that, every time I tell someone I am a musician, they always ask:
"Yes..but..I mean..what do you do for a living?"
For theirs and yours information: I usually spend between 8 and 16 hours a day for my work with music and all things related to that. I guess I should not eat or sleep or relax, or anything else to finally be able to call myself a full-time worker?


There are some interesting synchronicities from time to time:
I put the Merry Christmas animation on the home page's welcome screen, and it started snowing here in Copenhagen. I was dreaming of a white Christmas...
Remember it could be your last free Christmas this year, so do enjoy it:
Following the greedy and psychopathic logic of corporations, it is highly illegal and shameless that snow is still free and for everybody. What a communist invention.
I can hear them say:
"Jesus was not a communist, everybody knows that, so why should the poor enjoy snowflakes, stealing them from the decent citizens who are paying taxes?"
But some honorable capitalists are gonna do something about it:

SLOWPOKE source

Clicking on the source link you can read the whole story, a Snowpoke (Slowpoke :) cartoon by Jen Sorensen. I first found it at the Working For Change site, which I recommend because it is always full of interesting articles. Incidentally, is the editor of WFC, Working Assets, a corporation? [my eternal raising money for activism in a corporation way issue]
Update: you can read about what WFC is at their own site or at Wikipedia, their Working for Change web site at some time redirected into their latest incarnation, CredoAction

What more today? In the next days, in my Music section, I am going to add links to some musicians I know, and that I would like you to visit.
You are welcome to start with Steve Arceri, not a relative of mine, apparently (who knows?), but surely brought to this virtual world by the magic of synchronicity.
He is very talented, any case.


Continuing the analogue/digital issue.
Any music that is not played live needs a support, a medium.
A long-playing, a cassette or, more recently, a CD, DVD and so on.
A medium is a representation of reality, and it will inevitably end as not the whole reality, but as a sample of it.
So the problem of what part of reality to sample and how, is common for all media.
The mechanical media, such as a long-playing, had a natural advantage of compressing the sounds in a way that was perceived as warm and pleasant. Somehow, some materials resonate in a similar way.
The digital media are often perceived as cold and kind of more 'thought', I would nearly say 'ideological'.
The decision on what and how much to sample is very conscious here, and can be expressed in numbers. It is what it is about when you hear, for ex., terms like 16-bit and 44.1 Khz, which is CD-quality.
Now, the quality of a CD is outstanding, but when you hear the same recording in a higher resolution, you realize that something was missing.
Even more in compressed formats like MP3.
The size of a recording is reduced by eliminating frequencies that are superfluous. Or better: that are considered to be superfluous. This is the 'ideological' choice I was talking about.
What is superfluous? Are we sure that those frequencies are not important by some reasons? The ecology of listening is very subtle.
There is definitely a risk of perpetrating the same murderous error as in biology, the dreadful reductionism.
The number one enemy of biodiversity, Vandana Shiva is warning about.
The dangerous simplification of reality, where a single function is isolated and all the rest thrown into the garbage. A flower is not anymore a whole creation, with its colors and perfumes and dazzling beauty, but only a product that has to be cut and sold.
The ideological human mind decides that something in nature is superfluous and even irritating in the way of practical usage.
Not to talk about Genetic Modified Organisms.
Are we sure we are not doing the same with digital music?


One more of the things people usually ignores about being musician.
The cost of it!
I know by experience that people usually haven't the faintest idea of how expensive music gear is, and when they hear the prices don't understand why one has to spend so much money.
A pair of trousers can cost even ten times more than unbranded ones just because it is made by a popular brand, despite the quality might be disappointingly poor. That's definitely not the case with music instruments. You usually get what you pay for, and the difference can be extreme.
You can't imagine my frustration when I have to play on lesser instruments, it is a real sufferance, I can tell you, and that's nearly always the case, as I can't afford what I would like to play on.
Last month I was at a free guitar clinic with a very skilled musician from Los Angeles. At a certain point he asked a worker in the music-shop, where the clinic was going on, to bring him a good guitar. He got probably the best available, he looked at it and played a bit, smiled sarcastically and then said:

“This would range like this in LA”
(his hand caressing the floor)

American arrogance? It might well be, but hearing how amazingly good he was at playing, I am pretty sure he was just honest, and this way you get the idea of what a fine player can demand of an instrument.

A different matter is software. Here there is no justification for the shameless prices, and let us be honest again: not being open-source they usually SUCK!
It is so infamous that you pay, say, one grand for a professional sequencer, and if there is a bug, they don't even fix it.
Then you are left completely on your own.
I use the sequencer Logic, I like the program very much, but some issues are a pain in the butt. Just an example: I had the old version 2 (667$), there was no audio support, so I had to upgrade to the audio version 5.5 at full price. If you install a popular plug-in that is called Sampletank, it won't work properly with that version.
Read what they suggest at the producer's site (IK Multimedia):

“At this time, SampleTank and AmpliTube are not compatible with Logic Audio 5.5. Please use them with Logic versions 5.3 and earlier, or 6.0 and later.”

So, if you are such a looser moron to buy exactly that version, and actually want to make music with it, then you have to downgrade or upgrade again, at the price of hundreds of $, all this for their faults.
Shame on software patents and corporations again.


So, my most minimalistic, heart-broken, zenbuddhist and poor-Jesus-Christ-in-a-manger Christmas ever is over (and thanks God for that).

First of all, as well known, this date is a bogus. Jesus was not born on December, 25th.
The first miracle of him was actually to probably be born few years before he was..
Some say 3 years, some other 6, so Jesus was born 3-6 years before Christ...
And, what a coincidence, the most probable date is 3 B.C. on 9/11!
I am tempted to find a religious paranoid symbol in the arrangers of the 9/11 stuff, and you know whom I am talking about.

The word Christmas is just a shortening for Christ-mass, as the Church, in the third century A.C., adopted the pagan tradition of Saturnalia (the celebration of Saturn).
After the last couple of years, I would humbly suggest to change the name to Christmess, and that was the Gospel according to Luca for this year.

As a further proof that (nearly) all what I say actually is Gospel, well at least always well-documented, please see a solid confirmation of what I wrote right few days ago about the clear superiority of Open-source software, at my Software News
[update: it was a page I had regarding software, but I discontinued it long ago. Anyway the news was:]

“December 2004,
Linux has far less errors than usual commercial software!
Researchers working at Stanford University Computer Science Research Center , California, and Coverity, San Francisco based, analyzed millions of code-lines in software, for 4 years, and found the following results: Linux (2.6.9 kernel) had only 985 bugs in 5.7 millions lines of code.
Usual commercial software has an average of 114,000-171,000 bugs for the same amount of lines!!!
I would call that a difference.
This is not about Windows, as its code is secret and can't be evaluated, and that's exactly the point.
Buying products from Microsoft is like being part of a secret sect, you can't use your critic sense, you can only believe in what they say.
Furthermore, most of those bugs in Linux have already been corrected since, states one of the researchers, Seth Hallem. ”

You can read the Coverity's .pdf report


Tsunami

I stumbled across this word right few days ago, while I was searching on the net for some music synthesizers. There is one that is called Tsunami in fact.
A Japanese word, tsu meaning harbour, and nami meaning wave.
They are giant sea waves, only slightly related to tidal waves, and caused by both seismic events (earthquakes) and others such us meteorites or landslides.
This time it has been a very hard hit, no doubt.
Ten-thousands died, millions are homeless and there are huge devastations in all southern Asia.
These events are usually so rare, about every 700 years, that there were no alarm routines to signal the coming flood to the population.
Thousands of people's lives could have been saved if one had a simple chain of communication ready, but that's only a privilege for rich countries, poor people is not worth it, it seems.
Few considerations:

  1. It is completely absurd that the life of so many people depended on the lack of some telephone numbers to call to. Charles McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, tells in an interview (newspaper Repubblica, today) that they spotted the coming flood and
    "We did all what we could, but had no contacts in our agenda in that part of the world"
    That is: all Asia. No single telephone number to call to in an area of billions of people.
    As a sarcastic curiosity, if you click into the following link, you will be showed a newsletter from the
    meteorological institute in Korea
    where the address of Charles McCreery institute is noted, surrounded by a flood, sorry, of question marks???
    It is clear, tsunami warning was a work in progress in Asia...
  2. No matter how rarely some events happen, it is needed to take all the due precautions against them. It is not important how seldom they hit, but how hazardous dangerous and destructive they will be (I am thinking also about nuclear plants here).
    This requires just some investments, some knowledge and formation and some sensible tasks. Read: no populism and banana-governments, invoking tax cuts for the rich every single election, but consistent, reliable money investments in security for everyone.
    The U.S. Tsunami warning system was started in 1946, following a similar event.
    Sixty years after, no Asian country has even a telephone number to call to, just in case.
  3. Catastrophes happen, nature is nature, but can we please be saved from the usual comments following these tragedies with all their rhetorics about the 'unpredictable' nature. Sure there is a certain degree of tragedy in human frailty and existence in an environment where humans are not more necessary than flies, but here it is about not spending hundreds of billions of $ on illegal wars, or not financing military institutions at all, and using the money on civilians in stead, or not cutting taxes for the sake of it, or not agitating virtual threats all the time to scare people, while not being prepared against the real ones.
  4. These events are global, and we need serious investments in global institutions.

 


Tsunami 2

I wrote yesterday about the fact that a lot of virtual, but effective, threats are agitated all the time for propaganda purposes, while we are highly irresponsible not preventing real and massive threats like the "natural" ones.
Today there is an article in Los Angeles Times proving that: California's Readiness Lags Other Pacific Coast States
Rich Eisner, earthquake and tsunami program director for the state Office of Emergency Services says:

“We've had very limited resources, and we've struggled to get out as much as we can.
The events of Sept. 11 really diverted interest. We have a lot of competing threats.”

Even if the Pacific has a warning system it is not good as it should be, and some parts of California, for ex., are not protected.
This year the funds for the project of mapping the areas at risk, have been cut nationwide by the Bush administration from 4.3 million to 2.3 million.
As I wrote yesterday: cutting taxes they steal (and kill) from the poor to give to the rich.

We are leaving this year 2004 with about 300 catastrophes, causing the death of 21,000 people (plus the last Tsunami and a couple of days left) and damages for estimated 100 billions dollars.
It would be really a matter of spending much less money in prevention, and avoiding a part of so much sufferance and destruction. We don't do that.
Why?
Because it would be a good thing, and doing good things is not cool anymore. This way I managed to talk a bit about music again. Because the role of the messages sent all the time by my colleagues in business are most often so negative and educationally devastating, one could easily talk about a cultural Tsunami.


Having been moving all the time in my life I am pretty used to the feeling of leaving someone, even if it is not really in my nature, being the sentimental I am.
Sometimes I miss some people, as they are so unique and definitely one of a kind.
Susan Sontag died yesterday, and I guess she will be one of the intellectuals I will miss. I'll keep with me and stick to one of her sentences:

“Never keep silent, never give up”

Only a couple of days left and this blog will change theme. I would have liked to talk more about music, but it went as it went.
Keep faith, soon you won't just read about it, but will finally hear it at this home site!


Sooo, unbelievable enough, we have come to the last day of this year.
Time for the final considerations before shifting to a new vibration.

First of all, we should all be thankful for being alive, as millions of people can't say the same any more. No matter how deaf the rest of the world seems to be I'll keep on insisting that life must come first and, as long as there is a huge part of the world's population in troubles and even without food enough to survive, then all the rest must be set aside and we must give first priority to that.
Planting millions of fruit-trees everywhere is such an easy and simple solution, it is a mystery to me we can be so crazy not to do it.

Then, being responsible about our common environment is not just an option, but a necessity. Hope the tsunami apocalypse has finally taught us this.

Third, shall we really accept that freedom is only for things and not for human beings, that wares can be transported everywhere, while people has to die just because they wish to leave their misery and find a better life somewhere else?
Isn't it about time to start removing those meaningless and nazi-camp-like national borders, tolls and barriers of all kinds?

Some more wishes: hope some indecent governments will be kicked in the butt, and that we all will learn from the Ukrainian people, that when too much is too much, then there is no time to wait and silly excuses, then it is time to go peacefully to the streets and stay there until things change. Proud of you, Ukrainians, hope the new leaders won't disappoint you and that some other European, American and World people will feel some shame in accepting that common thieves and war-criminals sit as their representatives.

All the previous issues will be themes in the next year, be sure about that, plus some surprises, as usual.
Tadaaa, next month's theme: The Agenda for 2005.

Thanks a lot to all of you that have been visiting this site.
To the rare and endangered species of supporters (special thank to Petr and Laura for their brave role as generous ice-breakers in the field of donations).

Thanks to all friends, I'll try to have more time for you next year.
To less-friends: I'll keep on listening to anyone and doing as I please as usual...

To all the beautiful women in my (virtual and non-virtual) life.
Thanks to Helle for always making me cheer up.
To Cofield for always making me laugh.
To Cheryl for blessing my life, even if for far, far too short time.

A Merry New Year to all of you (unimportant if you had a Happy Christmas or not :)