Million Dollar Baby bruhaha

I read some article in the NY Times about the new Clint Eastwood flick. There’s a controversy. The right wing hates the movie. They say it’s in favor of assisted suicide and plays racial politics. I haven’t seen this movie. the times only revealed that the plot twist involved one of the characters becoming seriously injured and wanting to die. Is it clint eastwood? Is it Morgan Freedman? Or is it Hillary Swank, the plucky young woman who wants to become a professional boxer? Take a guess.
Yeah, you’re right. Hollywood wouldn’t seriously allow a woman to break gender roles and succeed without having to suffer suffer suffer. And she dies at the end, which is even better. So the anti-assisted suicide people are in an uproar. As are the disability rights advocates. Becoming disabled doesn’t have to be a death sentence and really, it’s not fair to disabled people to treat disability as if disabled people were better off dead. But where are the angry feminists? Have we gotten so used to women in movies being punished for everything but being a Stepford Wife (the original, dammit) that we’ve given up saying anything? Seriously, the right wing should love this movie and every other one of the 23719547291541253 movies where a woman who tries to succeed gets hurt. They should love the Austin Powers movie where the woman spy decides that she really just wants to marry a spy instead of being one. They should love Clint’s movie Mystic River where the wife of the suspected killer gets to suffer suffer suffer at the end for not keeping her mouth shut.

The best part of the Times story is where Clint tries to defend the movie by saying the bad guys in it are welfare cheats. See, I hate the poor! I’m on the right side!
I haven’t seen the movie. I don’t feel like I have to. I went to the mall today and spent some time standing with Aaron inside a Lane Bryant. Afterwards we talked about enforced femininity and how it is codified, promulgated and largely adhered to. The plucky-hero-succeeding movies are trite and tiresome too. What I like is more like Star Trek. All the positions are inhabited by all sorts of folks. Aliens. Women. Minorities. Anybody can be anything in Star Trek (as long as they’re straight, *sigh*). And then there are just images of different people who have already succeeded and what happens to them afterwards.
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controversy – Hacking Humans

Person who I forgot to ask if I could quote her said

i don’t understand your reply to my comment in your journal
where you said “creepy? you think the idea of me wanting to use possibly dangerous methods to put people in suggestible states and program them is creepy?”

like, i don’t think that most people would get quite how creepy that is, but if you’re flat-out saying that you’re using possibly dangerous methods to put people in suggestible states and program them and that (if i read you correctly) that *is* creepy, then… why would you do it? i mean how would that be okay?

This in reference to my idea to use 10Hz waves to put people in alpha states and then expose them to ideas of peace, love, joy, togetherness, etc. Morality in art is a good discussion to have. I saw an installation L.A. that used real bits of endangered animals. I heard the artist say the point was about vegetarians who wear leather shoes. I felt like killing endangered animals for so little reason was profoundly immoral. so is it wrong for an artist to experiment on people using methods she’s used on herself? I want to make clear that the “danger” here is the possibility of seizures from strobe lights. Every dance club I’ve frequented on the east coast has had a strobe.
I asked my questioner: if I gave participants copies of my research, explained my methods, provided them with printed copies of all text first and experimented on myself before allowing others in, would it be ok?
She said no, you can’t give informed consent to something you haven’t experienced and furthermore, some things, like recreational murder, cannot have the concept of informed consent.
I don’t think I agree. First of all, I can’t try murdering myself and then go murder you after seeing how it went for me. The non-consentability of murder has to do with the finality of it and that it is universally recognized as harmful. People consent to potentially harmful things all the time, like bungee jumping, or even things that are supposed to cause them pain, like kinky sex (everyone who has done it has consented without personal fore knowledge once). Furthermore, it’s not my intent to harm anyone. So, like bungee jumping, maybe there’s risk (but not risk of getting flattened under a bridge), but the goal is a positive experience. There’s some things floating around online that claim that “there is ample evidence that some [altered states] bring about extremely pleasant feelings and can profoundly affect personality.” (http://skepdic.com/altstates.html)
Well, is it immoral? I don’t think I’m going to have time to do this by April anyway and certainly not in any sort of super-master-hypnotist level. I like generating controversy, though. I wonder who would participate if they thought it might hurt them? Why would they? What role would peer-pressure play? Why do people go to Survival Research Labs events? Are they immoral? This is profoundly useful for distracting me from writing chapter 2 of my thesis.
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The End of Criticism

The era of criticism is over. It is the end of the critic, the end of destructive comments, the long-delayed end of an era.

Critics have power as long as we’re willing to listen to them. We don’t have to engage them. We don’t have to listen and we don’t have to participate. Too often, when critics are decried, the decrier means on that s/he should become the critic. “Only I get to criticize music, because of my unique and legitimate position as the arbiter of taste.” That is not my intent.
Obviously, music and art must be engaged and even discussed, or it is the end of music education. Otherwise, no one will ever know of any artist because no one will have spoken of them. It is appropriate to engage music in several ways.
If you are a teacher and the creator is your student, the constructive criticism is completely appropriate. Constructive criticism implies a power relationship. It should exist within that relationship or when requested, other wise, it is exerting authority where none ought to exist. Also, please note, constructive criticism. Saying “this sucks” is in no way constructive.
The way to engage art is to make art. It is very easy to say “this sucks” and to destroy and to complain about other people’s endeavors, but it’s more difficult to create something yourself, now isn’t it? Engaging music with words, then, means talking about what is worth emulating in a piece. If we look at pieces as jumping off points, then learning from them to instruct our own music is beneficial.
And for those whose role it is to talk about music: If somebody invented something, say that. If somebody had made something great, say that. If something sucks, then don’t waste our time by telling us about it. Talk about something that is worth talking about. Perhaps you’re worried that there’s a danger that some terrible trend will go unchecked unless it is criticized. However, it will not be emulated unless it’s worth emulating. It will not be praised if it is not worth praising. Creators of suck will be met with a resounding silence. Their is no danger of something with no redeeming value taking over, unless, perhaps, you are thinking of Thomas Kinkade. Your position as newspaper art critic, angry letter writer, peeved grad student, gallery curator, arts administrator, university professor, or cultural-capital endowedness is not going to stop a consumer-driven trend. You can’t make the unwashed masses like something or dislike something. Instead, they rather object to being thought of that way. Make something better, or you have nothing to say.
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Iraqi Election!

And who could doubt the credibility of such an election, run under an occupational authority which has a perfect record of flawless elections, especially in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004? Who could doubt the credibility when the observers weren’t even in the same country? When the Sunni’s “boycotted” the vote by having virtually no polling places open in their regions?

Al Jazeera is reporting charges of election fraud in Kurdistan. Kurds are the largest ethnic group with no country. During the 11 years of the US-run siege against Iraq, the Kurds lived in a semi-autonomous region. There is a lot of oil in Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurds have reason to want to maintain autonomy. The US has reason to want to maintain good ties with Kurds. So the US media takes a hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil approach to the “first free elections in the history of Iraq.” And perhaps there is widespread fraud leading to a situation where the US gets to help itself to northern Iraq’s oil and the rest of Iraq gets squat for it.
Was there election fraud? How could I possibly know? How could anyone know? The burden of proof is upon those running the elections. The occupational authority needs to demonstrate that they were free and fair. But an occupational government is inherently untrustworthy. Which is why monitors are needed. Without monitors, it’s like having Tinkerbell elections. The US press gives a standing ovation. They do believe in fairies. The folks in the Middle East aren’t as convinced. Democracy should not be a faith-based activity. The elections are only as valuable as they are perceived to be. We haven’t given anyone but US domestic audiences much in the way of persuasion.
Al Jazeera has constantly been annoying us, what with their uncensored reporting of news. It would be so much better if they just repeated Pentagon propaganda. But don’t worry. They’re for sale. Soon Rupert Murdoch will own them too.
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Polls – should I change this blog?

Should I rename this blog (not change the url) to something a bit more highbrow than “groovy zone”? (A trumpet player told me wednesday that playing tuba is not groovy. I was shocked. “Do you know the name of my website???!” I did not say.)

Should I perhaps separate music from politics from what-i-ate-for-lunch and have three blogs?
Is my genre “classical music”? Is tweaking Rush Limbaugh in the same category as Beethoven?
Answer in the comments, if you want to answer.
Unrelatedly, why does everyone want MAX teachers? They should want SuperCollider teachers. I met a guy over the weekend whose book on hacking hardware (for musical purposes) is going to be published by Rutledge. pretty cool.
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SuperCollider Trick of the Day

“Hello World”.speak;
See Speech helpfile for more information. You can set pitch, which mac voice to use (see System Preferences for Speech to get a list), rate, etc. You could use it with a Pipe to read blogs. You’d pipe to lynx or something. It would be cool to write a Perl script to find creative commons blogs and strip out comments, javascript and formatting information to feed text back to SuperCollider.
This toy is mac-only.
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Probability and private accounts

Toss a coin. You have no idea if it’s going to come up heads or tails. If you toss that coin a hundred times though, you know you’re going to get heads about half the time. Let’s say you’re saving up for retirement. You have no idea how long you’re going to live. You might know the median for people who have similar traits, but you as one person are like a single coin toss. If you die young, you could have used some of that saved money for cruises around the Mediterranean. If you live a darn long time, you might run out of money (shortly) before you die and end up in poverty. It’s the same for private health savings accounts. Most of my family is pretty long-lived and most of my family members don’t get sick until the end of their lives. But say I get a dread disease and then survive it only to get sick again later. In the meantime, I’ve depleted my savings and am cast into poverty by the second illness. Or I might live happily and perfectly healthy until I reach 100 only to die instantly of a heart attack at my surprise birthday party. I could have used that money to buy the alphorn collection I always wanted.

It’s very difficult to predict what will happen to an individual. However, with statistics, it’s easy to predict what will happen to a large population. Somebody in one of Mother Theresa’s hospitals got remissions of some horrible cancer. There was only a 1 in 1000 thousand chance this would happen! It was a miracle for that individual. But if you look at the thousand cases of that cancer those hospitals have treated, well, that person was the 1 in 1000.
If you took a group of a thousand people and pooled their money into a health savings account, you could use statistics to predict how much money participants should add to the account. Some people would add more than they got out of it, but nobody would run out of funds. Predictions are easier to make. Fewer people suffer.
the more people participate, the easier to predict. Hey, what if the whole country contributed to a system where they could put money in and get money out once they needed it, if they were sick, or retired? To make it a little bit more fair, the people who put more money into the joint retirement account could get more out of it at the end. Everyone who participated would know that they wouldn’t die in poverty. Similarly, we could provide healthcare to all participants in a national healthcare fund. Because healthcare is a right, everybody would have equal access based on need. But maybe people could contribute to the healthcare fund according to their ability to contribute, as in a sliding scale. People with a lot of money would have to put in more. And people with no money wouldn’t have to pay in at all. That way, everybody would know they would have healthcare regardless of their ability to pay. And then the national healthcare collective could negotiate with health providers to keep costs down, to keep the collective from having to spend too much.
This way, everyone would know that they wouldn’t get cast into poverty if they got sick or if they live a really long time. they wouldn’t have to guess about what their own needs might be because statistically, everyone’s needs are pretty much known. Everyone knows they will be ok, including poor people and sick people. The system, then is compassionate and fair and reduces suffering. Wouldn’t that be great?
With private accounts, there’s a lot of guessing and a lot of waste. Also, it’s kind of cruel to make things optional. If I need money to feed my family today, I’m not going to be able to put that money aside in case they get sick tomorrow. Even if it’s pre-tax money. Immediate needs have to be met immediately. Privately funded optional accounts are great if you’ve already got money and are a savvy investor . . . and you happen to guess right about how sick you will get and how long you will live. In the real world though, a collective system is a lot more humane and makes a lot more sense.
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