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autolenaphilia · 3 years ago

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Twin Peaks: an interpretation.

I recently finished watching Twin Peaks, the tv series and franchise created by director David Lynch and writer Mark Frost. I’m 30 years late to the series, but it’s been a major influence on later media I’ve enjoyed (oddly enough mainly games like Max Payne and Kathy Rain), so I decided to watch it. And now I finished practically all of it, the original two seasons from 1990-91, the 1992 theatrical movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (and also the compilation of deleted scenes from the film called The Missing Pieces), and finally the 2017 revival that brought the series a third season. I have thoughts. Reviews of the tie-in books will follow soon.

As I wrote this essay, I realized that I put major spoilers into the text because the later plot developments of this series naturally influence my reading of its themes, and I want to talk about them. Granted, I think spoilers don’t matter that much. Sometimes reading about an interesting twist in the story can make me interested in experiencing a piece of media in a way that a ��spoiler-free” description would not.Twin Peaks is a franchise about mystery but not about solving them, so spoilers don’t hurt it that much (even if it clearly goes for shock at some point). So even if you haven’t seen anything of Twin Peaks, you might still read on and see if my words might pique your interest in actually watching it, it’s up to you. Still you might want to experience it as fresh as possible, so I’m going to write a short summary of my views on the show. It will introduce the subject and be a tl:dr if you don’t want to read almost 6000 words. The rest of the article will be put after a read-more link, which includes a more detailed analysis and spoilers of the later plot elements

The Short introduction to Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks starts with a seemingly simple murder mystery. In the small American town of Twin Peaks (in Washington State) a teenager named Laura Palmer is murdered, and the FBI agent Dale Cooper arrives to investigate. Yet the series is a lot more that that. It is also a complex depiction of the eccentric inhabitants of Twin Peaks, mixing genres like melodrama, soap opera and comedy. The murder mystery soon is revealed to have possible supernatural elements. The storytelling is surrealistic, with characters having strange visions and doing absurd things. Twin Peaks is also a high (as in deliberate) camp melodrama. Yet the show is not smugly ironic, just self-aware and actually wears its heart on its sleeve. It depicts its eccentric characters with compassion, and at its heart is an earnest depiction of a struggle between good and evil, especially evil in the form of violence against women.

The show is very well-made, pioneering the use of cinematic techniques in television, brought to the show by director David Lynch, and complex serialized plots, as written by Mark Frost. The premature reveal of the murderer of Laura Palmer in the second season hurt the show, and left it somewhat aimless in the second half of season 2. Yet there are still highlights even in those flawed episodes, and an excellent finale, but that couldn’t save it from cancellation. David Lynch directed a feature film prequel to the TV series called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. it was commercially unsuccessful, but in my opinion not artistically so. It focuses on the last days of Laura Palmer, and is a very moving and horrific depiction of child sexual abuse.

Eventually the series got a third season in 2017. It’s a darker show that focuses more on the horror and surreal elements of Twin Peaks, without forgetting about neither the camp and comedy elements or the earnest heart of the original. It’s excellent if often disturbing, and one of the most daring and innovative seasons of television ever made.

Twin Peaks is a classic and cultural touchstone for a reason, it’s just so well-made, original and brave, in a way that is genuinely emotionally affecting and thought provoking. There really is nothing else like it.

That was the short version of what I think about Twin Peaks. The rest is under the cut. Be mindful of discussions of rape and other forms of violence, and as mentioned before, spoilers.

The Long Introduction to Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks is a good example of how originality does not consist of making things up out of thin air, but in combining your various influences. The series is a combination of genres. It starts as a murder mystery, with the discovery of a dead body. But the mystery is almost just a pretext to examine the eccentric inhabitants of the small town of Twin Peaks (which has become a pop culture icon of small towns in the Pacific Northwest region of the US). Then the series reveals itself as a soap opera pastiche, with complex romantic, criminal and business intrigues. It also is a comedy, with the town’s eccentric inhabitants depicted with a gentle humour. And then we get fantasy/supernatural horror, as the supernatural elements soon make an entrance as characters have strange visions. Twin Peaks is like an almost encyclopedic summary of television and popular fiction up to that point.

Despite the extensive use of established tropes from popular fiction, the take on them Twin Peaks is extremely off-kilter and weird. Conventional realism is almost completely abandoned. The supernatural elements are maybe the most famous and obvious, taking mostly the form of bizarre visions and dream sequences involving plenty of mysterious dialogue from dancing men in red, dead characters like Laura Palmer, owls, an evil spirit called Bob (who despite his name is genuinely frightening) and a friendly giant. Different characters have visions of Bob, and the dreams reveal enough of the truth and affect the world outside of them to not be able to be dismissed as just hallucinations.

Even the seemingly mundane events have a strangeness to them. People behave in weird and unexplained ways, like carrying around a log and talking to it. Our hero Dale Cooper does things like record tapes to send to a co-worker containing not just info on the case, but his random musings on everything, sometimes while hanging upside down with the help of the coffee pots he wears on his feet.

The acting is deliberately stylized, exaggerated and melodramatic, giving even normal emotions like grief or romantic love between teenagers an unreal feeling. Its storytelling harkens to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas or soap operas, and the show is aware of this. It’s very much high camp (as in deliberate camp) and has a lot of surreal humour involved. In the first season there is a show-within-the-show called Invitation to Love, which is a more obvious soap opera parody and whose events mirror the plots of Twin Peaks. The show’s use of pop fiction clichés might otherwise serve to anchor the show, but it also draws attention to the artificiality of the show’s fiction (especially as it is made almost explicit by Invitation to Love).

The series was in general groundbreaking for the time period. Lynch brought both cinematic technique and a surrealist art film edge to the series that had been almost unknown in television up to that point. The writing, in which the show other’s creator Mark Frost had a major part, was just as influential. The show’s serialized nature, complex plotting, ongoing mysteries and unexplained surreal events would influence almost all television that came after it. Yet it would almost always be in simplified form, without the surreal melodrama of Twin Peaks.

And this complexity applies to the characterization. The characters may be broadly drawn in a melodramatic fashion, but they all have complexity. There is a recurring theme of duality in personality, people might present only one side of who they are at first, but then reveal a second side, that can be the opposite of the first. This is a theme with Twin Peaks as a community in general and Laura Palmer in particular, more on that later. For example, the FBI pathologist Albert Rosenfeld is both snarky and mean to an almost pathological degree and also a committed pacifist who believes in universal love. Audrey Horne loves to play the role of a femme fatale, but is actually an innocent and noble soul.

This reveal of hidden sides often serve to reveal the show’s warm heart, which it wears on its sleeve. The melodrama is self-aware, but the series is not at all a smugly ironic parody. It’s self-aware of what it is doing, not putting itself above it. There is a strong sense of warmth and empathy of the show’s depiction of various eccentrics. Even characters that are very much comic relief, like the sheriff’s deputy Andy Brennan and the sheriff’s office receptionist Lucy Moran are subtly given a sense of respect and dignity by the series, another case of duality.

The show’s horrific side shows a sense of compassion for the victims of violence and murder depicted. It is at heart a tv series that earnestly depicts a struggle between good people like Dale Cooper and Sheriff Truman and supernatural evil in the form of The Black Lodge and Bob.

“The Evil that Men do”

This evil is often expressed as violence and oppression against women. This theme is set pretty much immediately with the starting premise of the murder of Laura Palmer.

Yet this extensive problem of violence against women doesn’t end with her. This problem seems to run through the town of Twin Peaks. It is itself is an example of this duality theme. It initially presents this image of an idyllic small town that even Cooper is taken in by. Aesthetically the town has a lot of characteristics of the idealized pop cultural image of the American 1950s, an image that practically symbolizes the self-justifying dream image of American patriarchal capitalism.

But the show then reveals the dark side of corruption and violence against women running underneath this facade. It is something that runs through Twin Peaks. You can see it in its poorest citizens, with how Shelly Johnson is abused by husband Leo who is a small-time drug dealer and trucker. But perhaps this corruption is strongest in the town’s upper class.

Benjamin Horne could as the town’s leading capitalist in some sense be described as a patriarch of the entire town of Twin Peaks, and he is quickly revealed to be rotten. His wealth is built on literal crimes, including murder and prostitution of young girls. He even has a system for transferring teenage girls working at the perfume counter in his department store to a brothel he owns. The owning family of the towns monopolized logging industry, the Packards, are similarly corrupt.

“Laura is the One”

The Palmer family in particular expresses this dark duality and hypocrisy most strongly, because at first glance they seem to perfectly fulfil the ideal of the 1950s nuclear family. Leland is the patriarch of the family and the breadwinner, his wife Susan is a housewife, and his daughter is the ideal of young femininity, the homecoming queen (as depicted in the idealized portrait of her that is such an icon of the show).

Yet this is all subverted once we learn the truth of Laura’s murder.

We eventually learn that Leland is the killer of his daughter, and in a particularly dark example of the duality theme, he is possessed by an evil supernatural spirit, Bob. Bob is connected a place of surreal evil called The Black Lodge, and feeds on pain and suffering (called garmonbozia in the Fire Walk with Me film and it is shown visually as creamed corn, because this show is a strange one). For Laura, her murder was only the culmination of her abuse, as Leland/Bob has haunted and raped Laura ever since she was twelve years old.

Leland is deliberately a complex figure, both victim and perpetrator. He was clearly sexually abused himself by Bob as a child and was then possessed. There is serious implications, especially in Fire Walk with Me,that even if Leland is not entirely in control, he is still responsible for his actions, or that there is some darkness to his character that made him vulnerable to be Bob’s host. It’s complex and ambiguous.

Leland/Bob is also a serial killer, who killed a woman named Teresa Banks before Laura and, in the most horrific scene of the original two seasons, also murdered Laura’s cousin Madeline (Madeline is another case of duality, as she is played by the same actor as Laura, Sheryl Lee).

Susan Palmer is maybe not entirely aware of her husband’s actions, but is aware of much of it and any ignorance or complacency is due to being heavily drugged to keep her from seeing the worst of it. Leland’s abuse of Laura and eventual murder leads her into a mental breakdown. In season 3 her depiction is even darker, as she is revealed to have hosted her own evil spirit, possibly the mysterious Judy, for a long time and at that point is barely even human any more.

Laura however is perhaps the show’s ultimate example of duality, her story reveals the hypocrisy of the whole town, the investigation into her life and death an inroad to the many stories of Twin Peaks. As the log lady says, her story is “the one leading to the many… Laura is the one”. Her “homecoming queen” persona is just a facade, one she keeps up even for her friends, hiding a terribly abused girl. And much of the investigation into her murder is about revealing this duality in her character.

It is implied the abuse made Laura sexually active from a frighteningly young age, and this is then taken advantage of by the men in Twin Peaks. There are of course small-time criminals like Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault who abuse her, yet the richest man in Twin Peaks, Benjamin Horne indirectly led her into prostitution in his brothel and had sex with her himself. Even her psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby had ignored the signs of this abuse and instead developed a creepy infatuation with her. Laura eventually became a cocaine addict, clearly to deal with the psychological damage that started with Bob.

Laura Palmer’s murder is in the end just an expression of the violence of the patriarchal-capitalist society that controls both the town of Twin Peaks and the larger world. There are many good people in Twin Peaks, but any idyllic facade the town presents is hypocritical. This is almost made explicit in Bobby Briggs’s speech at Laura’s funeral. Bobby is not a good person at this point, but his speech is true: “You damn hypocrites make me sick! Everybody knew she was in trouble. But we didn’t do anything. All you good people. You wanna know who killed Laura? You did! We all did.”

One might argue against this feminist reading of Twin Peaks by criticizing the show’s depiction of women as victims, and this focus on their suffering. And there is some ground for that criticism, but it does simplify the depiction of women in this show. The depictions of violence seems to me to invite empathy for the victims rather than exploit their suffering. The women characters are complex and varied, and not all of them are victims. There are elderly eccentrics like the Log Lady Margaret Lanterman (my role model), the extroverted and daring teenager Audrey Horne and the reserved but kind Donna Hayward.

Laura Palmer’s death might start the show, but her character in life is a very important part of the series and becomes a focus of the investigation. She is not a dead body, but a proper character. The exploration of the gulf between her public persona forced upon her by her environment and the suffering person she is inside is a major part of the series. And she eventually becomes a proper on-screen character in Fire Walk with Me. She even reveals the solution to her own murder to Cooper, he doesn’t actually solve it. Instead Laura is able to convey the truth to Cooper via a shared dream, which defies conventional conceptions of time, as she dreams it shortly before her death and Cooper shortly after her death.

She has a will of her own, and stands up to the men in the her life, even at the cost of her own life. Her murder happened because despite the abuse she was too strong and resisted Bob’s attempts to possess her. Season 3, Part 8 implies she even is a kind of saviour figure, a spirit brought to Earth by the White Lodge (the good counterpart to the Black Lodge, a source of supernatural goodness) to resist Bob’s evil. This is surprising at first, but makes sense. Despite enduring terrible abuse, Laura does break the evil cycle by refusing to continue her father’s evil, thus making her death a kind of Christ-like self-sacrifice, denying Bob a new host.

Bob himself, while a supernatural being, is unmistakeably male. After Bob controlling Leland is revealed to be the murderer of Laura Palmer and Madeline, the show’s detectives have a discussion about him. Albert Rosenfeld says that “Maybe that’s all Bob is, the evil that men do”. And he is very much right, at least on what Bob symbolically represents, with the emphasis on “men”. Season 3 reveals that Bob’s creation or entry into the human world was connected to the first atomic bomb test, the Trinity test. It’s a fitting origin, as nuclear weapons is the ultimate expression of the destructive potential of our technological-patriarchal civilization.

“The irresistible urge to rescue every damsel in distress he came across”

Even the hero Cooper is used for a criticism of the male heroes in popular fiction. Not that he is evil, he is genuinely a good man and a hero, to the point he appears to be a perfect person for most of the show. But the season 2 finale and almost everything that follows also reveal his flaws.

His flaw is that he with his well-meaning nature always tries to save women in distress, even when he shouldn’t. Another character in Mark Frost’s tie-in book The Final Dossier diagnoses him with “white knight syndrome, the irresistible urge to rescue every damsel in distress he came across”.

So in the season 2 finale, he ventures into the Black Lodge to do the male hero thing and save a damsel in distress, his girlfriend Annie. There he encounters his own “shadow self” as Deputy Hawk earlier told him but he fails the test of courage it represents. He runs from his evil doppelganger, and it ends with him trapped in the black lodge while Bob has a new host in the doppelganger, partly undoing the effects of Laura’s sacrifice. He spends most of Season 3 in a semi-catatonic state, while his doppelganger runs around doing evil, which he has done for the 25 years at that point. And the season 3 finale is extremely ambiguous, but it could be read as another attempt to rescue a woman only for him making things worse. He tries to rescue Laura Palmer from being murdered in the first place via time travel, only for him to seemingly make things worse and seemingly undoing the world as we know it. His character can be read as a critique of the male hero, a detective who fails where the murder victim succeeds.

“We live inside a dream”

The storytelling itself of Twin Peaks can be seen as a defiance of western values that place a high emphasis on logic and reason (seen as masculine) as opposed to emotion (which is seen as feminine). Twin Peaks often breaks conventional logic and instead has surreal scenes that seem to run on emotional dream logic. Its surrealism is not weird for the sake of being weird, it’s to convey emotions more directly.

In fiction, the mystery genre expresses the rationalist ideology of the western world very strongly, and subverting the genre is often a way to critique it, as in Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s classic postmodern novel The Pledge (Das Versprechen), a self-proclaimed “requiem for the detective novel”.

The Laura Palmer murder mystery plot deliberately defy the rationalist plotting of conventional murder mysteries. Cooper is molded in the eccentric genius detective trope, and has similarities to Sherlock Holmes. His sidekick Sheriff Truman explicitly compares himself to Doctor Watson at one point, and thus implicitly Cooper to Holmes. Yet Cooper’s methods is the opposite of the ultra-rationalistic Holmes, he is a mystical detective. He is a weird person who treats insights given to him in dreams as the best way to solve the mystery. And he is completely right about that, conventional police/detective methods don’t solve the crime, and instead he solves the mystery because Laura told him in a dream. And the solution is supernatural, which breaks all the rules of traditional mysteries. If Twin Peaks adapted The Hound of the Baskervilles, there would actually be a ghost hound. He is the perfect detective protagonist for this series because he realizes the importance of dreams and the mystical/supernatural side.

For ultimately Twin Peaks is a world where dreams are reality, and reality is explicitly a dream, as the words “we live inside a dream” and variations thereof eventually becomes a recurring phrase. It is a world that seems to work on dream logic even when the characters are awake, and their dreams affect reality.

Twin Peaks was thus never meant to be a conventional rationalistic mystery, and any attempt to view it as such will leave you disappointed.

“There is a depression after an answer is given”

The subversion of rationalist detective fiction was supposed to go even further. Lynch and Frost originally never intended for the Laura Palmer murder mystery to be solved. But such a reveal eventually happened partway through the second season due to pressure from the network.

They were in some way right, or at least that reveal should have been left to the show’s definite ending, because the reveal at this stage hurt the show. Even if the solution left major questions unanswered (about the supernatural causes behind Laura’s death), the series after that has a clear lack of focus that the murder mystery had previously provided. The show had been about much more than that mystery, but it was a definite focus, a clear A-plot providing intrigue and expectations for the audience. After it is resolution, the writers have difficulty to fill the gap it has left and struggle a bit to find a reason to even keep Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks.

Granted, some of the criticism of the latter half of season 2 feels a bit exaggerated. Even in the worst episodes, they are still interesting and entertaining plots going on that kept me watching, and the rest wasn’t bad enough to ruin the show. I was for example intrigued by the appearance of Denise Bryson (played by a pre X-files David Duchovny), who is a flawed but surprisingly decent portrayal of a trans woman by the standards of early 90s television. There are problems with her character, like how she is played by a male actor, but she is genuinely depicted relatively positively. It shows that Twin Peaks tolerance of eccentrics does extend to queer people, which is nice.

And a highlight of the post-murder mystery season 2 is Kenneth Welsh’s full-hearted portrayal of the over-the-top villain Windom Earle. His antics are fun, but he also provided a clear villain, an A-plot with a sense of threat that the series lacked at that point. The show seem to partly regain its footing with him. His character is also searching for the place of supernatural evil associated with BOB, the Black lodge. That provides a useful lead-in for the show to explore the mystery of that place, which is the main mystery that remains after Laura Palmer’s killer has been revealed. Judging from Mark Frost’s comments on the “Scenes from Another Place” documentary, the Windom Earle plot was intended by him to replace the murder mystery, and it is clearly the plot that has the most force in the latter half of season 2.

Still, the relative lack of involvement from creators David Lynch and Mark Frost showed. It’s definitely a less deftly handled form of surreal melodrama than the show had previously. Subplots often don’t have a point to them in developing the characters of Twin Peaks.

The worst of them is probably when James Hurley leaves the town to go himboing around the country and gets involved in a film noir plot involving an abused wife, Evelyn Marsh, who has her husband murdered. It has nothing to do with anything going on previously in the series, because it is literally not even set in Twin Peaks. James and Donna are involved, but it’s only Evelyn who develops her character through this subplot, not them, and afterwards she disappears from the show. It’s pointless filler.

The lack of the intrigue created by the Laura Palmer mystery seriously hurt the show’s popularity. The mystery of the Black and White Lodges eventually came along to replace it, but it was too late, and it could never rival the popularity of “who killed Laura Palmer” since it is vaguer and less accessible than a murder mystery.

Ratings thus dropped, leading to the show’s cancellation. The season 2 finale was directed by Lynch and is one of the show’s best episodes, with Dale Cooper’s disastrous venture into the Black Lodge, the source of the series’s supernatural evil, being a surreal horror highlight. The episode ended on a frightening cliffhanger, with Cooper being trapped in the Black Lodge while an evil doppelganger of him under the influence of Killer Bob roamed free. But that wasn’t enough to bring the show back.

Fire walk with me

Lynch tried to continue the franchise in the form of theatrical feature films, apparently an entire trilogy was planned at one point, but only one was eventually made: Fire Walk with Me. The film didn’t do very well financially and got bad reviews, leading to the franchise being dormant for over 20 years afterwards. There are probably multiple reasons for this. The Twin Peaks franchise had lost its popularity at this point. The film was also a prequel that didn’t resolve the series finale cliffhanger (even if several scenes refers to it, and a cut scene expanding on it) and it was very different in tone from the series. Freed from the constraints of major network television, Lynch’s film has a very dark tone, with explicit violence. Most of the film is a stark portrayal of the abuse and eventual murder of a young girl, which is a very difficult subject to say the least. The film’s way of telling its story is also very challenging as it goes even farther in the direction of surrealism. It’s an extremely challenging film in both the story being told and how it is told. All that explains why both critics and the general public shied away from it.

Yet they were wrong, the film is nevertheless excellent. It’s for the most part a depiction of the life of Laura Palmer leading up the murder, and showcases her abuse at the hands of Bob and her father, culminating in her murder. It’s a harrowing depiction of child sexual abuse, incest and violence against women, with an excellent performance from Sheryl Lee as Laura. It is far less restrained and more melodramatic than most depictions of this difficult subject, yet contrary to the conventional advice it heightens rather than lessens the horror. And I think it depicts the subject matter in a way that raises empathy with the victim, rather than exploiting the subject. It’s a disturbing but great film.

The compilation of deleted scenes (cut for time), The Missing Pieces, is also worth seeing. The deleted scenes which were first released in 2014 features actors from the tv series whose performances were entirely missing from the finished film, which makes this compilation’s tone closer to the tv series. It’s fun to see them again, especially as it was the last time of several of the actors, like Jack Nance as Pete Martell and Don Davis as Major Briggs would play those roles. It also gives us more hints on Philip Jeffries’s strange situation (although it is still bizarre and unexplained). The compilation also features alternate versions of scenes in the finished film. For example the compilation separates Jeffries’s dialogue in the FBI office with the strange vision of the convenience store which are overlaid on top of the other in the finished film. The separation of the two scenes in The Missing Pieces makes the meaning of both slightly easier to grasp (emphasis on slightly).

“I’ll see you again in 25 years”.

Fire Walk with Me would in many ways set the tone for the revival of the tv series in 2017. Twin Peaks: The Return is not a reboot but a continuation, the long-awaited season 3 of the show. It picks up the story, just 25 years later both in-universe and out of it. It’s amazing that this season was even made after so many years. And it’s a happy coincidence that it came out 25 years after FWWM, as Laura promised she and agent Cooper would meet again in “25 years” in the season 2 finale.

And this time the creators of the series would be entirely in charge, with Lynch directing all 18 episodes and writing them together with Mark Frost. Thanks to being on a cable channel, Season 3 is also free from any heavy censorship. The series can finally openly depict violence and sex and be as surreal as the show’s creators wants, with the result being closer to the theatrical film than the previous seasons of the series.

The resulting season 3 is the most consistent of all three seasons, being essentially one very long film, almost 18 hours long, that is just split into 18 parts for the viewer’s convenience. And it’s an excellent film, which feels just as daring as the original two seasons were. The surreal edge of the original two seasons was one of the least imitated elements of it, always being watered down in imitation. So when the third season is even more surreal and weird it still feels as challenging as back in 1990.

It’s a series that defies any attempts to just be a source of nostalgia and give the viewer more of the same. It’s a very different series from the relatively cozy original, continuing instead the disturbing tone of Fire Walk with Me, while also continuing the storyline and themes of the original.

The actor who plays Cooper, Kyle Maclachlan, returns for season 3, but Cooper as we knew him is mostly absent. Instead we get to see Maclachlan play Cooper’s evil doppelganger while “the good Dale” is initially still trapped in the black lodge. When he gets out after a surreal journey, his mind is apparently damaged, keeping him in a passive state as he takes the place of another doppelganger, Dougie Jones. So while Maclachlan has maybe more screentime than ever, the return of the format of the first two season with Cooper investigating mysteries with his friends in Twin Peaks is explicitly denied.

Season 3 is sometimes subtitled in promotional materials as The Return, but you could argue for a theme being that you can’t step in the same river twice. There is no return to the Twin Peaks of 1990-91, not after 25 years. Even if the people are still there, they have changed and thus you can’t really return to a place you left many years earlier.

The show as said earlier is much darker than before, with the tone set by a couple of gory killings in the first episode. And the series reaches new heights of surrealism and lack of formal explanation and conventional storytelling. The influences of art film is stronger than before, even in the more conventional parts, with long, static shots. Part 8 is almost entirely wordless sequences of surreal imagery.

Season 3 is very much a surreal horror show too, eventually reaching its climax in the finale, which feels like a nightmare, frightening and seemingly inexplicable in a dreamlike fashion. The show ends with Cooper and Laura seemingly trapped in a disturbing alternate universe, where Cooper and Laura and Diane don’t even seem to have their old identities anymore. It’s even more haunting than the cliffhanger of season 2, since it seems to not just have doomed its hero, but undone the very world of Twin Peaks as we know it.

There are relatively positive interpretations like this one by David Auerbach, which argues the ending depicts essentially a sacrifice from Cooper and Laura Palmer to destroy the greater supernatural evil of Judy. It’s compelling, and make sense since the fireman seems to urge Cooper to go to this alternate universe in the very first episode, but can’t really erase the unease caused by this nightmarish ending.

Ultimately the ending is another example of how Twin Peaks is not just serialized, it’s a never-ending serial. The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was supposed to go on forever. That mystery was resolved due to studio meddling, but then the series kept on introducing new mysteries, like the lodges and ultimately ending the second season on a massive cliffhanger. So season 3 resolves the story of Cooper’s doppelganger and even destroys Bob, but then the finale introduces perhaps the most perplexing mystery yet. It is very uncertain if the series will get a fourth season at this point, yet ending season 3 on such an extremely inconclusive note feels like design, not a mistake.

Yet despite its horror elements, the series has not lost its heart and sense of humour. There is still plenty of camp humour in season 3. And the show still keeps its earnest belief in the power of human goodness. Cooper’s bizarre adventures as Dougie Jones is pure comedy, where the surrounding characters project what they want on the almost totally passive Dougie/Cooper, as he stumbles into a crime drama involving insurance corruption. Yet these characters end up projecting their own good sides on him, and even casino-owning gangsters are shown to have those, making their lives better. It turns the crime drama into a feel-good comedy with happy endings.

And while Twin Peaks has irrevocably changed, the changes are sometimes for the better. Season 3 believes that even drug-dealing juvenile delinquents like Bobby Briggs or ruthless capitalists like Benjamin Horne can achieve some kind of redemption. The depiction of Andy and Lucy has lost none of its gentle and warm comedy, they are now a happy older couple, with a suitably weird son.

Season 3 is a very different but worthy follow-up, and one of the most innovative and daring pieces of television ever made. It’s both funny and disturbing, and remains always interesting and original.

As such, it feels like a worthy follow-up to the original Twin Peaks, which is a cultural touchstone for a very good reason. I have written a lot of words on the series, and yet it feels like I barely scratched the surface, that is how rich and complex it is. It revolutionized television drama, being often-imitated by almost many series on TV in the decades that followed. Yet it was never equalled, because few tv series had the courage to be as daring, weird and big-hearted as Twin Peaks was at its best.

#twin peaks #my writings #my reviews #cw: rape #it's a heavy show at times

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tazmuir · 4 years ago

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“But now I shall never get out,” said Floralinda, in tears, “there is no solution to my problem that isn’t a prince, and I’m all out of princes, and I don’t want to jump out of the window and die. This is the worst conundrum I ever heard of.”

(rolls down a dusty hill through open window) Boy! Not much has happened since I last posted on Tumblr (laugh track) but every so often I amble on to tell you, three followers and my boyhood friend Christopher who still hasn’t read any of my God damned books and yet makes fun of me ceaselessly, about all the wild things occurring:

Gideon the Ninth is now available in paperback. This provides warm nesting material for winter, and also contains a new appendix of material, including an in-universe essay about how thinking the cavalier-necromancer relationship is ‘horny’ is an evil idea that nobody should ever commit to in fiction, which is how you know that in-universe fiction commits to it constantly; it also has a dossier compiled by Cpt. Judith Deuteros about how Coronabeth Tridentarius is NOT a babe. Talk about a challenger for Tolkien’s appendices

Harrow the Ninth arrives in less than a month. I received my hardback copies of it (author’s privilege) and flipped through it. It landed open at a scene where Harrow gets told the whole plot of a romance novel. I write only the hardest action scenes

My novella, “Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower”, has been announced for November 2020! That’s this year, if we live! It’s a VERY long novella. My first reader, whose name rhymes with “A.K. Farkwood”, described it as “Enid Blyton meets Slay the Spire”. If you were forced at gunpoint as a child to read “Pip the Elf” and wished dreamily that Pip would fall off a cliff already, this is for you! It’s about an awful princess who meets an awful fairy, and their adventures in being forced into the same small space together eating the same damn meal over and over (NOTE: I wrote it BEFORE lockdown).

Subterranean Press specialises in very beautiful hardback editions and the end physical product will be very specific and lovely, but for those of us with limited shelf space it WILL also be out in ebook (that’s just not available to pre-order).

I’ve received lovely messages and questions and one day I’ll get to them. Until Alecto is done, however, forgive me for that day not being today; soon. Thank you so much for all the support.

#princess floralinda and the forty-flight tower #subterranean press #harrow the ninth #gideon the ninth #publications #the cohort dossier is just a collection of judith deuteros' incredible thoughts but i had fun writing them #'i once met palamedes sextus. he made a joke and therefore should be removed from office'

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girlactionfigure · 4 years ago

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Historian of the Ghetto

“Let the world read and know”

Emanuel Ringelblum, the “historian of the Warsaw ghetto,” compiled an extensive archive of documents depicting the everyday life of the ghetto’s doomed inhabitants. The Ringelbaum Archive is the most important eyewitness accounting of the Holocaust to survive the war.

Born in Buczacz, Poland (now Ukraine) in 1900, Emanuel was a bright child and a top student. His native language was Yiddish and although he learned several other languages, he had a special affection for his native tongue and a lifelong interest in Yiddish literature and theater. Emanuel attended Warsaw University, where he studied history, completing his doctoral thesis in 1927 on the Jews of Warsaw during the Middle Ages.

Emanuel worked as a history teacher in multiple Jewish high schools and in 1923 he co-founded the Young Historians Circle, an influential organization that brought together Jewish history teachers and students to advocate for Jewish causes. Two years later he joined YIVO, the preeminent organization for the study and preservation of Jewish European culture. Emanuel published 126 scholarly articles and was recognized as the world’s foremost expert in the history of the Jews of Europe.

As the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930’s, Emanuel started working with international Jewish relief organizations to help refugees by collecting and distributing funds, as well as providing emotional support. The American Joint Distribution Fund sent him to Zbaszyn, a Polish town near the German border where 6000 Jewish refugees from Germany were being held. Germany had expelled them and Poland didn’t want them so the Jews were stateless. Emanuel spent five weeks there, passing up his own opportunity to escape from Europe so that he could help his suffering Jewish brothers and sisters.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Emanuel described it as “a wave of evil rolled over the whole city.” He became the leader of Aleynilf (Self Help), a group that provided Jews with tools to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. In 1940, Emanuel and his family – his wife Yehudit and small son Uri – were forced into a squalid ghetto, along with all the other Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw. Every city with a Jewish population soon had its own ghetto.

As the days, weeks, and months passed, conditions grew steadily worse. Emanuel wrote, “No day was like the preceding. Images succeeded one another with cinematic speed.” The necessities of life became increasingly scarce – running water, electricity, medical supplies and most critically of all, food. Every day people died of starvation or illness, and there was no way to bury them. Rotting bodies, many of them children, lay in the street.

Emanuel decided to write about life in the ghetto. It was the most important story he would ever tell. He encouraged other inhabitants to write their own testimonies, recording history as it happened. During the day Emanuel wandered the ghetto collecting information, stories and data, and he wrote at night. Emanuel defined the mission: “It must all be recorded with not a single fact omitted. And when the time comes – as it surely will – let the world read and know what the murderers have done.” He knew that the archive would likely be the only testimony about what had happened to the Jews of Poland. It was especially important for him to preserve documents in Yiddish as he feared there would be nobody left to speak his beloved native tongue.

Contributors included writers, rabbis, teachers, social workers, artists, children, and Jews of all ages and backgrounds. They knew they were doomed and the pain was even sharper because all their friends and family were also doomed – leaving nobody behind to remember them. Emanuel’s project was a chance to not be forgotten. The material submitted included essays, diaries, letters, drawings, poetry, music, stories, dark humor, recipes and more. It was an extensive chronicle of ghetto life.

The archive was called Oneg Shabbos – “Pleasure of Shabbat” – because the contributors met on Saturdays to share their writings and discuss their progress. Journalistic ethics were important to Emanuel. “Many-sidedness was the main principle of our work. Objectivity was our other guiding principle. We aspired to reveal the whole truth, as bitter as it may be.” The Oneg Shabbos documents were kept in large milk jars and buried in three different places.

The first document was a poem by Wladyslaw Szlengel called “Telephone” about his apartment building’s last working phone. “With my heart broken and sick/ I think: let me ring/someone on the other side…/and suddenly I realize: my God there/is actually no one to call….”

Hunger was ever-present in the ghetto, and a common theme in the documents is the desperate yearning for food. Leyb Goldin wrote, “It’s you and your stomach. It’s your stomach and you. It’s 90 percent your stomach and a little bit you… Each day the profiles of our children, of our wives, acquire the mourning look of foxes, dingoes, kangaroos. Our howls are like the cry of jackals…The world’s turning upside down. A planet melts in tears. And I – I am hungry, hungry. I am hungry.” (August 1941)

“What we were unable to cry out and shriek to the world, we buried in the ground.” – David Graber, 19

“Sometimes I worry that these terrible pictures of the life we are looking at every day will die with us, like pictures of a panic on a sinking ship. So, let the witness be our writing.” – Rachel Auerbach

“I do not ask for any thanks, for any memorial, for any praise. I only wish to be remembered. I wish my wife to be remembered, Gele Seksztajn. I wish my little daughter to be remembered. Margalit is 20 months old today.” – Israel Lichtenstein

The Oneg Shabbos archive ended in 1943, when the ghetto was liquidated and its inhabitants sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka. Emanuel, his wife Yehudit and son Uri managed to escape before the deportations started and went into hiding. However, in March 1944 their hiding place was discovered. The family was forced outside at gunpoint and executed.

Only three of the 60+ contributors to the Oneg Shabbos archive survived the war. Rachel Auerbach led the search for the buried archive, and her team was able to discover two of the caches, which became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls of the ghetto. The third cache has never been found.

For making sure the murdered Jews of Warsaw would not be forgotten, we honor Emanuel Ringelblum as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Explore the Ringelblum Archive

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gen-is-gone · 4 years ago

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listen guys it’s 2 in the morning again bc i have no job again and i’ve got a podcast episode to record tomorrow and a job i don’t want to apply for this week and fuck, i’m about to fucking cry over fucking supernatural, and destiel. I found a speedrun of relevant dean/cas episodes about a week and a half ago and on a whim decided to sort of catch up before the last episode and. fuck. i’ve consumed like sixty episodes straight, jumping from place to place with next to no context. i have stayed up til five in the goddamn morning, twice, watching this show. i have watched more supernatural in the last 15 hours than i’d watched in its whole 15 years, and guys. FUCK.

Supernatural has been on the periphery of my fandom experience for as long as I’ve been in fandom. It premiered in the autumn of ‘05 and I discovered fanfiction.net in the summer of ‘06. I heard of it for the first time reading a crossover with Pirates of the Caribbean of all things later that year. I read multiple Criminal Minds crossovers where the FBI tracks the Winchesters on LiveJournal a few years later. I remember a fanartist I liked for Artemis Fowl writing long essays on Deviantart about her ambivalence towards Castiel, and her annoyance at wincest shippers jumping ship to dean/castiel (this was before the portmanteau shipname vogue). I remember spn from years before it hit tumblr and the floodgates opened wide, long before it became one of the three sacred pillars of fandom from ‘11 to ‘13. Fuck, I remember learning about a/b/o from an Inception kink meme that had to link to a Fanlore page for Supernatural to explain what the requester wanted.

I remember all of this from a fandom I was never really a part of, and I say this not to assert some sort of moral or intellectual superiority but just because at the time it never spoke to me. I’ve know plenty of people who adored spn, who wrote fic, made art, compiled the gifsets its fandom became legendary for, and having finally, finally, here at the end of all things actually watched it, (well, some small salient portion of it) I just wanna say:

Fuck, I am so proud of this fandom. You have done incredible, legendary things. You have made art, drawings, paintings, photoedits, gifsets, cosplay. You have written millions, billions of words of fanfiction and essays and passionate reactions. You have created infrastructure and culture and were an integral part of fandom’s migration from web 1.0 to 2.0, from the ‘journals to tumblr and twitter (for better and for worse). You created one of the first spontaneous crossover fandoms in history. You made history. You inspired paradigm-shifting debate about everything from misogyny in horror tropes to the pitfalls of parasocial relationships. You challenged what we could expect from creators in terms of representation and respect. You demanded better than queerbaiting and denial, and yet persisted in spite of it, for fifteen years.

Listen, I don’t know if this show deserves you, though I suspect it does not. And yes, this fandom, like all fandoms, has had a host of drama ranging from the silly to the horrific, and I won’t pretend it hasn’t. But every megafandom has those troubles; you genuinely were not somehow the worst fandom ever, (far from it) and this post is not about that. This is about how utterly, profoundly inspiring this fandom has been, in its fervor, in its dedication, in its absolute joy that fucking frankly, too many people have tried for too damn long to crush. Here’s to all of you, refusing to back down and bearing mocking and hate from the cringe culture crowd and the creators alike. Here’s to those who’ve been in this ride since the bush administration, and here’s to those who jumped on right here at the very end, like I did. I’m glad to have known this fandom, long before I knew this show.

I’m proud of you, and you all should be proud of yourselves. So no matter how this final episode goes down, no matter how exalting, joyful, and satisfying, or how bitterly disappointing, please, please. Be proud of yourselves. This fandom is a part of history, a seismic event, an indelible mark on the geologic record of fandom and the internet. You have done incredible things. You have inspired me, and I’ve barely seen Supernatural. Imagine, and remember, all the ways you’ve inspired each other. I’m glad to have lived and been in fandom during its reign.

(I’m actually tearing up a little as I write this, which could just be from allergies and sleep deprivation, but let’s be real, it’s not the allergies and sleep deprivation.)

Thank you, Supernatural fandom. Carry on.

#supernatural #SPN #destiel #dean winchester #sam winchester #megan whines into the empty abyss of cyberspace #fuck i am UGLY CRYING #OVER A SHOW I STILL KNOW ALMOST NOTHING ABOUT #i have so much weird nostalgia for spn despite not have seen more than 5 eps total before last week #like it's Been There the whole time #i've gone from a middle schooler to an adult who used to a have a job in the time it's been on #i have harbored a great deal of Certified Autistic Affection for Castiel for like a decade #despite having actually watched him onscreen like twice #i have lines from this show carved into my brain that i've never heard spoken #only seen in gifs #so many goddamn gifs #i feel like i know so much from just osmosis while at the same time knowing absolutely nothing #i started this marathon bc i was feeling really genuinely sad that it's ending #tho also y'kno #bc of the recent batshit insanity w/r/t destiel #fuck i remember spn *before castiel*#i remember the wincest shippers' mild irritation that dean/castiel was bleeding off good writers #i have carry on wayward son stuck in my head at this precise moment and for all of last week #and i have no one but myself and eric kripke to blame for it #fuck now it's 3 in the morning i typed for an hour :|

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years ago

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HACKERS AND SPEAKING

No company, however successful, ever looks more than a pretty good bet a few months. Either way it sucks. We ask mainly out of politeness. If you think someone judging you will work hard to judge you correctly, there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to express every program as the definition of new types. If investors can no longer rely on their herd instincts, they'll have to get a foot in the door. -Oriented programming generates a lot of new work is preferable to a proof that was difficult, but doesn't lead to future discoveries; in the sciences generally, citation is considered a rough indicator of merit. If startups are mobile, the best local talent will go to the real Silicon Valley, and all they'll get at the local one will be the people who get PhDs in CS don't go into research. They're the ones in a position of power. I'm still not sure whether he thought AI was nonsense and that majoring in something rigorous would cure me of such stupid ambitions. I have never had to talk. When you change the angle of someone's eye five degrees, no one will pay for. Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world, people don't start things till they're sure what they want, regardless of how many are started.

Startups will go to work anyway and sit in front of them, so the odds of getting this great deal are 1 in 300. On the other hand, startup investing is a very strange business. Even if your only goal is to get every distraction out of the closet and admit, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. Just two or three lifetimes ago, most people in what are now called industrialized countries lived by farming. But software companies don't hire students for the summer as a source of cheap labor. But if you're starting a startup. I worried? I said what they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think they need to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to undermine the VCs by acting faster, and the VCs will gradually figure out ways to make money from. How casual successful startup founders are.

I write software: I sit down and blow out a lame version 1 as fast as angels and super-angels themselves. We think of the techniques we're developing for dealing with detail. I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. You're better off avoiding these. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Why is it that research can be done by collaborators. I'd guess the most successful startups we've funded haven't launched their products yet, but are definitely launched as companies. Fortran because not surprisingly in a language where you have to design what the user needs, who is the user? You may dispute either of the premises, but if you get funded by Y Combinator. But it seems more dangerous to put stuff in that you've never needed because it's thought to be a promising experiment that's worth funding to see how it turns out.1 But the startup world for so long that it seems promising enough to worry that you might not be the best solution. In Kate's world, everything is still physical and expensive.

Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this so far. It's not super hard to get into grad school or just be good at math to write Mathematica. Google is afflicted with this, apparently. It has always seemed to me the solution is to tackle the problem head-on, and that people should work for another company for a few years down the line. With so much at stake, they have to be big, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems. Why do you think so? Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be out of business, lies in something very old-fashioned: face to face for three months—so closely in fact that we insist they move to where we are. A lot of them. They believe this because it really feels that way to them.2

That solves the problem if you get a real job after you graduate. Because depending on the meaning of the word 'is' is. As usual, by Demo Day about half the founders from that first summer, less than two years ago, are now rich, at least in the short term. It was a lot of institutionalized delays in startup funding: the multi-week mating dance with investors; the distinction between termsheets and deals; the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter you from going to grad school, because very few people are quite at home in computer science, and it will seem to investors no more than superficial changes. It's not just because they were pulled into it by unscrupulous investment bankers. You're rolling the dice again, whether you want them as a cofounder. In the mid twentieth century there was a great deal of play in these numbers. When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. They treat the words printed in the book the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. So when you find an idea you know is good but most people disagree with, you should get a job. Nowadays a lot of de facto control after a series A round needs to be a good time for startups to have traction before they put in significant money.

One of our goals with Y Combinator was to discover the lower bound on the age of startup founders.3 If taste is just personal preference is a good deal of fighting in being the public face of an organization. The biggest factor determining how a VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it. Your tastes will change. So unless their founders could pull off an IPO which would be difficult with Yahoo as a competitor, they had become extremely formidable. The mobility of seed-stage startups means that seed funding is a national business.4 The puffed-up companies that went public during the Bubble didn't do it just because they want you to be a really good deal.

Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news? I know many people who switched from math to painting. This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA. As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will turn out worse. Some magazines may thrive by focusing on the magazine as a physical object. As long as it isn't floppy, consumers still perceive it as a period that would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the super-angels were initially angels of the classic type. Should you take it? Maybe, though the list of acquirers is a lot less than most university departments like to admit. VCs do now. It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to—that their startup will be huge—and convincing anyone of something like that must obviously entail some wild feat of salesmanship. The other reason parents may be mistaken is that, like generals, they're always fighting the last war.

5% an offer of 6. How has your taste changed? I don't consider myself to be doing research on programming languages. So if you want to work for, they may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders. Even though Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps. And that statistic is probably not an option for most magazines. The seriousness of signalling risk depends on how far along you are with other investors seems the complementary countermove. Over in the arts. I don't know yet what the new rules will be, but it has to be better if both were combined in one group, headed by someone with a PhD in computer science, and it has to double: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will be like, but I'm not too worried about it.

Notes

That's because the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the first year or two, because they need them to private schools that in Silicon Valley, but suburbs are so different from a startup is compress a lifetime's worth of work into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco. We could be done, she expresses it by smiling more. It would have been the first question is only half a religious one; there is one that did.

The ordering system, which is probably part of a heuristic for detecting whether you realize it yet or not, and this is also a second factor: startup founders is how much they lied to them. Give the founders are driven only by money—for example, being offered large bribes by the financial controls of World War II was in logic and zoology, both your lawyers should be taken into account, they mean. It may be whether what you build for them.

We invest small amounts of new inventions until they become so embedded that they don't make users register to try to write it all yourself. It's lame that VCs play such games, but more often than not what it would be possible to have balked at this, but he got killed in the US treat the poor worse than Japanese car companies, but have no idea what's happening as merely not-too-demanding environment, and this trick merely forces you to agree. You're not seeing fragmentation unless you see them much in their target market the shoplifters are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. If an investor makes you a clean offer with no valuation cap is merely boring, we found they used it to the biggest winners, which was acquired for 50 million, and don't want to work like they worked together mostly at night.

Except text editors and compilers. Users dislike their new operating system.

Thanks to Dan Giffin, Jessica Livingston, Hutch Fishman, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, and Ron Conway for sparking my interest in this topic.

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lau-and-history · 4 years ago

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01102020 - Successes

I think it is a rather good thing to start the new month with a few successes and I hope you do too! Yesterday I received the grades for the term papers I had handed in by August and which had not been graded yet. (I’m aware that success is such a big word but no alternative came to mind) I also want to use this opportunity to show you a little bit of what my studies look like. So here are my three little stories:

“good”- Last year I wrote an essay about the French colonization attempt in Florida during the 16th century. Because I had to hand it in as part of the theory module, I tried to work out the “transnational” aspect of this attempt. This is important, because the French attempted to colonize land that had been already occupied by the Spaniards. Not to forget, that the land belonged to indigenous peoples who were still living there. So one has three different entities as agents, whos backgrounds need to be considered while looking at the situation. The situation ultimately ended whith the massacration of the French by the Spanish. While looking at the literature I found that there was a lack of taking all perspectives into account. Mostly, only two of those three parts were considered by historians, yet, all were driven by their own local and “international” interests. In my essay I tried to bring the literature and a few sources together to show that a “transnational” history would be possible to write. Good is not really a grade, tho. Unfortunately, the lecturer hasn’t specified yet if it will be a 1,7 or 2,0 or 2,3. BUT I don’t really care, because getting a good grade in general is a huge thing here! The lecturer is a major asshole and taking this 90-minute-class weekly just worsend my anxiety. I never expected to even pass. 1,7: Another good grade, yay! And another essay. This one I have written about a regional history thing as part of last years 4-day-field trip to an archive. This one had been rather difficult to write, because the most interesting thing I found in the files handed to me, was about parochial vacancies during two different centuries. The problem was: there is no research about it. So I had to get creative to reach the requiered eight pages. Ultimately, I wrote about the role of the parish in ecclesiastical matters, namely parochial election and parochial vacancies. The first part of the essay I wrote about the election using only literature and the second one using only the sources from the archive. I found out that the parish assigned itself a way bigger role than the church was actually willing to give it, so they had to compromise. Later, in the 18th century, the church was integrated into the state, which made things a lot easier and more structured, but also completly took away the parish’s right to have a say. The successful thing about this essay, tho, is not the grade itself. It is the possibility to get it published. The two lecturers plan to publish a compilation including (some of? I’m not sure about the details) the essays written after the three field-trips (this was a recurring course, so they did this three times with different people). I already received feedback from one of them during office hours and he was already sure, that I would be one of the students they’d get back to as soon as they know more about the details!

1,3: This, my friends, is a very good grade :D Some of you might remember my cursed term paper about the Thirty Years War, which I struggeled so, so much with. This is the result. I’m not actually in for “you have to work yourself to bits to succeed” but in this case the struggle really was worth it (please, don’t do that, it’s really not healthy and I do not recommend!) This term paper consisted on a theory part and a source part, where I applied the theories. The theory part itself was rather difficult to write, because A) I hate theories and wasn’t even sure I would get them right and B) because I took a risk by including a subchapter of just ranting about one of the historians, because his works are highly inconsistent in themselves. Apparently, that only showed how well I understood the theories. I concluded that the categorization of the war in only one category does not consider the different views that could be found in different parts of the society. But one might say that it ended with a cliffhanger. This grade is not only a success because it is very good and the only other occasion where I got such a good grade was my Bachelor thesis, it is also a successe because it paves the way for my Master thesis. Up until now I only had an idea, but receiving such a grade encourages me to go with this idea. And it even shows that I might be onto something.

I hope you enjoyed my three little tales! I would be more than happy to see some of your success stories, even if they only seem small to you, because no success is too small! :)

#please be aware not all had been successful #my work life is a whole mess and I'm waaaaaay behind here #studyblr #studyinglaurel #uniblr #university #university life #motivation #productivity #history #transnational history #regional history #heypat #heyrosiebee #rivkahlook #earlymodernstudent #fluencylevelfrench

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thebuckblogimo · 4 years ago

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The Faja Essays.

May 22, 2020

We have all met people along the way who have influenced our lives. If I were to do a “top ten” of those who influenced mine, Garry Faja, my high school buddy who died last summer, would be high on the list. The son of working class parents whose father emigrated from Poland and repaired machinery at the Rouge plant, Garry went on to become the President and CEO of St. Joseph Mercy Health System. Recently, I and four or five of Garry’s friends and former healthcare profession colleagues were asked to write essays for a book about him being compiled by a friend from his grad school days at U-M. It is intended to be a keepsake for Garry’s only child. I was honored to be asked to contribute stories about Garry’s early life. Because several people who follow this space knew him well, I’ve posted the portion I wrote below:

First Impressions.

I had heard of Garry when he was an eighth-grader during the 1960-61 school year at St. Barbara’s grade school, near Schaefer and Michigan in East Dearborn. I was also in the eighth grade, attending St. Alphonsus school, just a mile or two to the north. Garry and I both had neighborhood reputations as athletes at our respective schools.

St. Al’s, however, had a much more successful CYO sports program than St. Barbara’s. We won our divisional football championship in the fall, going undefeated; we won our divisional basketball championship in the winter, going undefeated again; and we were 6 and 0 in the league in baseball that spring when we played Garry’s St. Barbara team on a sunny May afternoon at Gear Field.

That’s when--BAM--it happened: “Down go the Arrows…down go the Arrows…to Dearborn St. Barbara’s.” An old news clip from The Michigan Catholic, a popular weekly newspaper in those days, included the following snippet about CYO baseball that spring: “Dearborn St. Barbara’s came through with the upset of the week by knocking off St. Alphonsus, 11-8. St. Alphonsus still holds first place in the Southwest Division with a 6-1 mark.”

Neither Garry nor I could ever recall how either one of us performed on the field that day. We did recall, however, that we both looked forward to joining forces and playing sports together in high school. St. Barbara did not have a high school; St. Alphonsus did. Garry had long planned to enroll for his freshman year (1961-62) at St. Al’s, where his brother had been a track star, one of the top high school hurdlers in the state.

When we began high school in the fall of ‘61, I recall standing in the middle of the playground with my close friend Anthony Adams, along with Sam Bitonti and Patrick Rogers. I remember looking over to Calhoun, the side-street on which the high school was located, and noticed a small procession of cars dropping off new students from St. Barbara’s: twins Jim and Mike Keller, Sue Hudzik, Margo Tellish (Garry’s grade school girlfriend) and the “big fella” himself.

At the urging of Garry’s mother, Jim, Mike and Garry wore white shirts to school that day. “The boys” and I, on the other hand, wore multi-colored shirts (mine was purple), skinny ties, tight pants and pointed shoes. Looking like “the Sharks” from West Side Story, we approached the new kids, welcomed them to St. Al’s and shook their hands.

I’ve long thought that the way we were each dressed that day—Garry in his white button-down, me in my bold attire—portended the essence of what we would ultimately take away from each other at the completion of high school: for me, a determination to go about things the right way; for him, a touch of edginess.

The Person. The Scholar. The Athlete.

I never knew anyone who didn’t like Garry Faja. Unless, that is, you count a hulking bruiser by the name of “Bucyk” from Ashtabula, who elbowed our buddy Tony Adams in the chest and tried to intimidate us on the street at Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio. (Thank God we talked our way out of that one.) Otherwise, all the guys, girls, parents, nuns and coaches of the St. Al’s community loved Garry. He commanded respect on every level—for his heart, his intelligence, his athletic prowess.

Garry was a born leader. Despite being the “new guy,” he made such a good early impression in high school that he was elected president of the freshman class. He was a member of the student council all four years. And he was elected president of our senior class.

Garry was an excellent student, a member of the National Honor Society. He was neither class valedictorian--that was Lorraine Denby--nor the salutatorian--that was my girlfriend, Leslie Klein—but he had an extraordinary ability to “figure things out,” enabling him to excel at algebra, trigonometry, chemistry, the sciences. Moreover, he was highly disciplined. He had what our parents called “stick-to-it-tive-ness,” and it served him well at everything he did.

Garry was an organizer, a strategic thinker, who rallied for increased student attendance and crowd participation at high school games, involvement in a big-brother/big-sister-type mentoring program by seniors for freshmen, as well as causes he believed in. For example, it was Garry, with support from senior class leaders such as Larry Fitch, Vince Capizzo, Tony Adams and myself who compiled a list of “Ten Demands” that were presented to the school principal, Sister Marie Ruth, on behalf of the Class of ’65. It was, essentially, a protest against what we perceived to be unreasonable rules and disciplinary actions created by the priests and nuns of St. Alphonsus: single-file lines and “no talking” during change of class; locked school doors on sub-zero mornings during winter; mandatory daily Mass attendance, etc.

It was a daring, out-of-the box challenge to religious authority for a bunch of Catholic high school kids in those days. Predictably, our demands went nowhere and we were disciplined by having to stay inside the school for two weeks during recess, and, ironically, forbidden to attend daily Mass for two weeks. (The nuns showed us, I guess.)

Sometimes I wonder whether our youthful backlash, with Garry at the forefront, was an early tip-off to the kind of student thinking that morphed into the free-speech movement and anti-war protests that developed on college campuses across the country a year or two later.

As highly as Garry is remembered as a person and leader by St. Al’s Class of ’65, he is recalled by “old Arrows” for his basketball playing ability. He was a starter on the JV squad from day one of his freshman year. However, it took just a few weeks for the coaches to realize that he was talented enough to help the varsity. In Coach Dave Kline’s last year at St. Alphonsus, Garry was moved up to the varsity where he became “sixth man,” before being designated a starter at mid-season. That was big stuff, really big stuff, for a freshman at our school.

So what kind of player was Garry?

A mini-version of former U-M standout Terry Mills, in my estimation. He was a shade under 6’2” tall…thick-skinned…had a nice 15-foot jump shot…and an ability to use his derriere to “get position” under the basket. Any former St. Al’s player would tell you that Garry had game and a distinctive way of gliding up and down the court. For some reason, he also suffered severely sprained ankles more often than any other young athlete I have ever known.

Garry and I were starters together for three years under Coach Ron Mrozinski and were elected co-captains as seniors. Garry once said, “Lenny, we gotta be the team’s one-two punch.” I had speed and quickness, often stealing the ball at mid-court, and would dump it off to Garry who could be counted on to fill the lane. If he came up with the ball after the other team turned it over, I was to beat my man and streak toward the basket, expecting to receive the ball from Garry. We pulled that stuff off dozens of times each year. But we never realized our dream of winning the Catholic League’s A-West Division title and competing in the Catholic League tournament at the U-D Memorial Building (now called Calihan Hall).

However, Garry was named to the Dearborn Independent’s all-city basketball team after his senior season in 1965, a particularly special honor when you consider that St. Al’s had an enrollment of just 450 students, while most other first-teamers and “honorable mentions” on the all-city squad came from Class A schools with enrollments approaching 2,000 (Fordson, Dearborn High and Edsel Ford).

Happy Days at Camp Dearborn.

It was prime time for Dearborn during the early-to-mid ‘60s. The city had idyllic neighborhoods, spilling over with kids from the baby boom generation. The Ford Rouge plant was pumping out record numbers of vehicles, including an all-new “pony car” called the Mustang. And it owned Camp Dearborn (in Milford, 30-35 miles away), over 600 acres of rolling land with several man-made lakes, devoted to the recreational interests of Dearborn residents.

One of Camp Dearborn’s attractions was a narrow tract of land along the Huron River, designated for tent camping by teenagers. Dubbed “Hobo Village,” it was “chaperoned”—if you want to call it that--by a couple of disinterested college kids who worked day jobs, cleaning up the camp, and who lived in their own tent on the river. As 15-year-olds in the summer of ’62, Garry and I got our first taste of independence when we camped there together for a week.

We set up a large tent, with two cots inside, that my Dad had purchased at a garage sale. We hung a Washington Senators pennant to decorate its interior. And we subsisted on Spam and eggs that we cooked in a Sunbeam electric fry pan (we had access to electricity) that my Mom let us borrow.

Every evening we’d cross the camp on foot en route to the Canteen for the nightly dances. We’d get “pumped” every time we heard “Do You Love Me” by the Contours playing in the distance. Our goal, of course, was to meet “chicks,” and we attended the dances for seven straight nights. However, I don’t recall that we ever met a girl. Or even mustered the courage to ask one to dance.

But that all changed in the summer of ’63.

Camp Dearborn had another, larger camping area for families called “Tent Village,” featuring hundreds of tents built of canvas and wood, set on slabs of concrete, each equipped with a shed-like structure that housed a mini refrigerator, mini stove and shelves for storing staples. The mother of our classmate, Patty O’Reilly, agreed to chaperone a tent full of St. Al’s girls, next to the O’Reilly family tent, while Tony’s mother, Mrs. Adams, agreed to chaperone a tent full of boys, next to the Adams family tent.

Tony, Vince Capizzo, Larry Fitch, Dennis Belmont, Garry and I occupied one tent. Our girlfriends occupied the other. Much to my amazement, my parents allowed me to take their new, 1963 Pontiac Bonneville coupe to camp for the week. So we had everything we needed—hot chicks, a hot car, rock ‘n’ roll, the dances and secret “make out” spots in the camp (Garry’s girlfriend at the time was a cute blonde St. Al’s cheerleader, Donna Hutson). It all made for perhaps the happiest days of our teenage lives.

And we did it all over again in the summer of ’64.

During both years we were involved in shenanigans galore: We threw grape “Fizzies” into the camp’s swimming pool…we switched out a hamburger from Vince’s hamburger bun and replaced it with a Gainsburger (dog food)…and one afternoon we took my Dad’s Bonneville out to a lonely, two-lane country road, just outside of General Motors’ proving grounds in Milford, where we floored the accelerator and topped out somewhere north of 100 mph. It scared the shit out of us when we hit a bird in mid-flight that splattered all over the windshield. Thank God for laminated safety glass. Thank God we lived to tell the tale.

Which brings me to the “edgy” side of the teenage Garry Faja.

Stupid Stuff We Did.

When Garry came to St. Al’s, my circle of friends became his circle of friends. And an eclectic group it was. Some were college bound kids. Some were mischievous pranksters. A few were borderline juvenile delinquents. None of us, including Garry, were immune to peer pressure. Consequently, we did some pretty stupid things. Here are a few examples:

The Toledo Caper--On a snowy Friday night after a basketball game during our sophomore year in high school, Garry, Jim “Bo” Bozynski and I trudged down Warren Avenue in our letter jackets, headed for Bo’s house, with the intention of ordering a pizza.

It was, perhaps, ten o’clock at night as we crossed the field in front of Bo’s home on Manor in five-inch-deep snow. As we looked ahead, Bo surmised that because the house looked dark, his parents were already in bed and likely asleep. That’s when he hatched a plan:

Bo proposed to enter the back door of his house, go to the kitchen and retrieve the keys to the Bozynski’s ’58 Mercury sedan. Then, he, Garry and I would quietly open the garage door, push the Merc down the snow-covered driveway and out to the street, where we would start the car…and head for Toledo.

Neither Garry nor I objected to the idea. Ultimately, the plan worked to perfection.

However, we were just 15 years old and had not yet obtained our driver’s licenses. Plus, Bo grabbed a bottle of Bali Hai wine that he had stashed in the garage. And, the snow kept falling…then turned to rain. We drove through slop and glop on Telegraph Road, made it to I-75 and took turns at the wheel between gulps of cheap wine as the windshield wipers labored to clear the mounting sleet piling up on the windshield.

I was sitting in the back seat, the bottle of Bali at my side, when the car slid out of control in the middle of the southbound freeway, somewhere in the downriver area. I don’t recall whether it was Bo or Garry who was driving at the time. But I do recall that the car made a 360, sliding across two lanes of freeway, before coming to an abrupt stop in a snow bank on the side of the road.

We got out of the car. No one had hit us. Miraculously, we had not hit anyone or anything. There was no damage to the Bozynski’s family car. That’s when three stupid teenagers got back into the vehicle, reversed course, headed for Dearborn, killed the engine as we turned into the Bozynski’s driveway, silently pushed the Merc back into the garage, and turned in for the night at Bo’s.

No one was ever the wiser.

The Speeding Ticket—Both Garry’s parents and mine were strict disciplinarians when it came to girls and dating, but they rarely said no whenever we asked to borrow the car. We had already turned 16 when on a beautiful June day we took a bus downtown, filled out some paperwork (or maybe took a test) and obtained our drivers’ licenses. My Dad used his old ’58 Chrysler to get to work that day and let me have the Bonneville for our use when I got home. So, Garry, Larry and I jumped in the car and headed to Rouge Park for some joy riding. As usual, we disconnected the speedometer and took the “breather” off the carb so that the exhaust would make a throatier sound when we put the pedal to the medal. When we got to the park, I turned the wheel over to Garry. It was not as though he ordinarily had a heavy foot, but he did that day. I doubt that Garry was at the wheel for more than a few minutes when he spotted the red flasher of a Detroit cop car in the rear-view mirror. We pulled over. The policeman was all business…and gave Garry a ticket for speeding. Garry’s parents were furious that afternoon when he got home and explained what had happened. Garry went to court and lost his license for 30 days.

The Stolen Cadillac--It was a beautiful summer evening and we were playing our usual game of pick-up basketball in the alley between Tony’s house and Schaefer Lanes. As I recall, four of us were just shooting around—Garry, Tony, Butch Forystek and me. Someone looked up and noticed that a 1963 Cadillac Coupe de Ville had turned off the side-street, Morross, and was slowly making its way up the alley. It stopped in front of us. Our pals, Joe McCracken and Gary “the Bear” Pearson, jumped out of the car. Turns out that the Caddy had been parked in front of a store, with the keys in the ignition. Joe and Bear got in, fired up the Caddy, and drove it to Tony’s. Then we all got in, took turns driving the car, and went to M&H gas station to buy Coke and chips. For reasons unknown, Joe and Bear unlocked the trunk of the car. Underneath the rear deck lid were piles of pressed clothes on hangers in plastic bags, apparently for delivery by someone who owned a dry-cleaning establishment. Also, there was a narrow envelope atop the pile of clothes. Someone opened it. Much to our amazement it contained over $200 in cash. We all got back into the car and headed for a cruise down Woodward Avenue. We stopped along the way at a sporting goods store to buy a new basketball. On northbound Woodward, as it passes over Eight Mile Road in Detroit, Butch grabbed a handful of cash and threw it out the window. (It seemed hilarious at the time.) Garry and I each took a five-dollar bill, reasoning that keeping such a paltry sum would not be considered a “mortal sin.” After taking turns doing “neutral slams” at red lights, we turned the car around, headed back to Tony’s, and continued playing basketball while Joe and the Bear ditched the car.

Again, no one was ever the wiser.

The Shotgun Incident—It was a crisp fall afternoon. Garry and I were hanging out with Tony in his parents’ basement, while Mr. and Mrs. Adams were away, attending some sort of event. Tony knew where Mr. Adams, a bird hunter, stored his shotgun, and proceeded to take it out to show us. There were also a few boxes of shells next to the gun. Tony informed us that his Dad owned a large piece of vacant property in an area that was known as Canton Township at the time. Knowing that his folks would not be home for several hours, we took the shotgun, a box of shells and placed it in the trunk of Mrs. Adams’ Ford Falcon. Off we went to the property in Canton. To hunt sparrows. Tony had seen his father load the gun. Otherwise, none of us had ever had any training in the proper handling of firearms. We knew enough to stand behind the guy with the shotgun in his hands. We took turns shooting into the trees. And bagged a couple of small birds. We eventually returned to Tony’s and put the shotgun away.

Yet again, no one was ever the wiser.

How The 53-Game Streak Started.

Most people know that Garry and I attended 53 straight Michigan-Michigan State football games together—whether in Ann Arbor or East Lansing—from 1965 to 2017. In fact, when the streak ended, we had been in-stadium for 48 percent of the Michigan-Michigan State games ever played.

Prior to the 2018 game, however, Garry determined that he would not be able to negotiate the steep ramps to the second deck of Spartan Stadium due to his failing knees. So, for the first time in our lives—since the days of black and white TV--we watched the game together on the tube. Here is the seemingly unremarkable way a renowned tradition began…plus a closing thought:

As I remember it, Tony Adams, Garry and I were sitting in my bedroom on a hot, steamy, mid-August afternoon, making future plans as we counted down the days to the beginning of our respective college careers. Tony would be going off to Western Michigan University as a business major. Garry would be attending U-M, majoring in engineering. While I planned to attend MSU to study journalism.

We had been athletes. Competitors to the core. Garry and I knew that our respective schools would rarely, if ever, be playing Western, but we certainly understood that he and I would be butting heads in the future, pulling for opposing teams in the Big Ten Conference every year. So, in a spirit of friendship, we mutually decided to get together every fall to attend the Michigan-Michigan State football game until one of us died.

It was as simple as that.

But when I think back to that muggy August afternoon when we made our pact, it seems a metaphor for all the goals, hopes and dreams we so often talked about between the games, joy rides, dances, pranks, parties and school projects we collaborated on at St. Al’s from 1961 to 1965. I often think, for example, about how Garry and I worked alternate days at my uncle’s store, from the spring of our junior year until the fall of our senior year, and shared tips and insights into how we each did our jobs—long before anyone ever used the term “best practices”--so that we could be the best damn stock boys my uncle ever had. As I hinted earlier, I will always be grateful to Garry for making a lasting contribution to my determination to do things the right way in life. And I’d like to think that Garry thought well of my tendency to “push the envelope” on the things I attempted, and that maybe I made a contribution to the release of his creative potential.

Miss you, Big Guy.

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jennymanrique · 5 years ago

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Extras, specials, and other newsroom responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

In addition to extra coverage about the COVID-19 crisis, education outlets and teams are producing all sorts of special sections, reader callouts, and rebranded sections.

At least 124,000 U.S. public and private schools and 55.1 million students have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Education and non-education news outlets are trying to respond with a variety of new offerings to help students, parents, and educators cope with the effects on both public and private education.

“Newsrooms have to rethink what information is useful, what scrutiny is required, and what larger questions aren’t necessarily being asked yet because we’re just struggling to get through each day,” Steve Snyder, editor-in-chief of The 74, told The Grade in an email. “We are anticipating where things will be one month, one semester, and one year from now.”

Here’s a sampling of the special COVID-19 education features The Grade found, organized by category:

Asking students to tell their own stories.

Callouts to students have been one of the most common approaches we’ve seen in the past few weeks:

The New York Times’ Coronavirus Resource Page for Students, a part of its Learning Network, has asked students to share their experiences about living through a pandemic.

The 74’s “Student Voice” series features high school students’ takes on their experiences, too, including this gem by a California high school junior, Hope Li, who wrote a post headlined, “Barking Dogs, Breathing Exercises and Eckhart Tolle — Diary of My First Day of ‘Social-Distance’ Learning at Sunny Hills High.”

She gave readers a sense of her mood, writing, “As I worked my way through that glitchy first day, it occurred to me that in small ways I was suddenly being asked to rearrange the circumstances of my life.”

Creating special sections

Special sections are another way news outlets have responded to the crisis.

The 74 now runs a special coronavirus section that includes photo essays, practical homeschooling tips for parents, lessons learned from school leaders, and a roundup on Coronavirus Must-Reads that the team expects to update weekly.

The Hechinger Report also launched a special section, which features its reporting and readers’ stories. Liz Willen, Hechinger’s editor-in-chief wrote in an email to readers that a recent story of a premed (and pregnant) community college student, who lacks access to a laptop, prompted a “compassionate reader” to donate a computer.

And last weekend, the Boston Globe launched Education Interrupted, an ongoing series as part of its investigative project The Great Divide. Reporters will be looking at how school closures are affecting students in the wake of the pandemic. Its first piece explores the nuances of a day in the life of a Boston 6th grader.

Mapping it out

Maps and other forms of data visualization have been popular elements of COVID-19 coverage. In an example that’s been widely admired, Education Week updates daily a national interactive map detailing school closings. The California-based nonprofit EdSource compiled a list of schools in the 942 districts of California with dates of closures and potential reopenings.

And Chalkbeat designed a map that shows the Denver metro area food distribution sites where families can get breakfast and lunch for children ages 1 to 18. This is a critical effort in a city where 64 percent of students are eligible for subsidized meals. The story is also available in Spanish.

Readers ask, reporters answer.

EdNC, an education news outlet serving North Carolina, created Ask & Answer, where readers can submit a question that a reporter will then answer after some sleuthing. Questions and topics have included the North Carolina governor’s executive orders and changes to state education policies, like this one explaining school district recommendations for continuing the 2019-20 school year.

“It became clear to me that our audience needed quicker access to primary sources redefining the contours of their lives”, said Mebane Rash, EdNC’s editor-in-chief, who noted how her publication embeds the sources in the feature for readers’ benefit.

Podcasts, cartoons, and more

EdNC also began producing Hope Starts Here, a weekly podcast that surfaces good news stories in the education space hosted by engagement reporter Alli Lindenberg. And special episodes like this of CNN’s Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction With Dr. Sanjay Gupta, guide parents on how to talk to kids about the outbreak.

NPR’s education correspondent, Anya Kamenetz, and NPR’s art director, LA Johnson, teamed up to produce a comic for families to teach them how to turn their home into a school “without losing your sanity.”

Expanding resources for kids, KERA, the public media service for North Texas, created a special “At-Home Learning Toolkit” on their education website “with content ranging from free lesson materials to resources for keeping children engaged, active and happy at home,” said Andy Canales, director of operations and communications at KERA. The collection includes remote-teaching resources and infographics and videos to help children understand how to care for their health and emotions.

The Education Writers Association has created a new Coronavirus and Education Topics page and is airing podcast episodes where reporters on the front lines offer insights on the impact of the virus for the education systems in their communities. It also has launched a series of webinars to help journalists understand the complex issues at play amid the pandemic.

Education outlets, such as EdSource, are adding new content about the coronavirus to their existing newsletters, but overall, education teams seem to be putting most of their energy into in-depth coverage of remote learning rollouts.

Originally published here

#English #Education #TheGrade #NPR #Newsrooms #covid-19 #The Boston Globe #KERA

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secondbalcony · 6 years ago

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It’s time to read-again my bad but correct essay about Vampire Weekend’s lyrics from 2010: ‘Just give it to us straight, Ezra Koenig. Are you saying rich girls deserve their money, or are you saying rich girls are dumb whores? Do you taunt the 57% of America that can’t take real summer vacations, or do you mock the 43% that go on holidays? Was “Mansard Roof” an endorsement of roofs or an anti-roof satire? The Vampire Weekend wars are about class, maybe, but they are also about classification: the lyrics in Contra keep trying to do things we don’t allow pop lyrics to do. We can all adore Jean Renoir (prepschool kid, Popular Front activist, had a rags-to-riches dad) for making films that treat the rich with worship, scorn, anger, affection and grief, but apparently we’re not gonna let a pop album get fancy on us like that. Books and films are supposed to confound us with layers of ideas and conflicting emotions; pop lyrics need to fess up or shut up. So Koenig pleading that his lyrics “aren’t ‘about’ anything but have levels of meaning” can come off like someone yelling “Checkmate!” in the middle of a poker game – obnoxious or confused or both at once. There’s Ezra Pound and then there’s Ezra Koenig and the whole way that we talk about pop lyrics is about not getting these mixed up. But if I have to choose between Vampire Weekend and the logic of our pop-talk I choose the Vampires. Partly because Vampire Weekend can be kind of great, and mostly cause really I hate the logic of our pop-talk: outside pop-talk, in the actual reality of writing, listening to, and reading language set to popular music, artsy lyrics are as much a part of pop as the distortion pedal.

Since at least the ‘60’s (early Kinks, late Beatles, “The Velvet Underground And Nico’) pop songs have been awesomely and miserably Warhol-damaged, Joyce-Damaged, Brecht-damaged and Dada-damaged. If you love these damages you call them avant-garde and if you hate these damages you call them Art School, which is fair enough— people do become artsy in Art School. But the point is that the last 150 years of trying out new ways to make meanings in art made a big impression on a lot of kids, and a lot of these kids started bands. And other, younger kids who couldn’t care who Gertrude Stein was get the virus listening to Patti Smith and Bowie and the Pixies, and sometimes one of those kids turns out to be Kurt Cobain and then weird abstract lyrics infect the entire pop bloodstream. And the Wu-Tang Clan weren’t nothing to fuck with either. But the way that we talk about pop lyrics never caught up. Because pop-talk is lazy about lyrics, and discussing lifestyles takes a lot less effort than discussing writing styles. It’s easy to profile the Godard-affectations of liberal arts youths, and it’s harder to ask what a “Week End” fixation might say about a band’s approach to sense and nonsense and ideas and images. And if you hate Godard films in the first place, then the easy way is better—but I love Godard films so I’d love to find a little bit of “Week End” in my pop.

Most of what Contra is up to owes more to traditional novels (Waugh, Fitzgerald) than to weird films or experimental poetry, but the whole thing lives or dies on the natural liberties of avant-damaged lyrics: abstraction, collage, contradiction, self-reference. Koenig doesn’t string his crisp, descriptive sentences into narratives but stacks them in layers. Which is beautiful and resonant and complex, and also means that Contra can’t do anything to stop you if you want to believe it’s a country-club anthem. So music critics Googled for the price of Wolford Tights and compiled lists of vacation destinations, but never asked themselves why does this pool-party-album keep compulsively referring to The Clash. Or why do songs that start with “every dollar counts, and every morning hurts” end with a trust fund, and songs about holidays flash to Iraq. Or why it’s called “Contra.”

“Contra” talks about conflicts a lot—small and comfortable ones at first, like wanting to be rich so you can buy the modern art that you don’t want rich people owning (‘White Sky”), or loving your self-made-man father but hating the cultural myth that this kind of success represents (“Dad was a risk taker/ his was a shoemaker”). We also get all sorts of breakups between Koenig and rich girlfriends, and arguments with girls and music-critics about class, and a couple of political and sexual identity-crises. But what really puts the “contra” in Contra is the things that Koenig does with words: On “Horchata” it’s the way that Koenig rhymes “drinking horchata” (road trips, multicultural culture, left-liberal college kids) to “foot on Masada” (Birthright Israel trips where they tell Jewish kids to marry Jewish). On the break-uppy “I Think Ur a Contra,” it’s accusing the ex “you’re a contra” (you’re a hater), and then accusing the ex “you’re not a contra” (you’re not a revolutionary), and then defending —from the ex? from critics?—with “don’t call me a contra” (don’t call me anti-revolutionary). All throughout Contra words fight it out with each other or divide against themselves. Even the punk song “Cousins” is a hissy fit that self-destructs with wordplay: everything Koenig is yelping works both as a rant against posh music critics with self-righteous attitudes and as a hysterical caricature of the Vampires themselves. Koenig sings “You, greatest hits 2006, little listmaker” and you can’t tell if it’s an insult for a critic that made the list (wrote the list) or for a Vampire that made-the-list (got listed).

Which is kind of the point that the repeating chorus of “Me and my cousins and you and your cousins…” is trying to make—that personal animosity requires a whole lot of common context. Vampire Weekend can get pretty bitchy when it comes to critics who demand to hear them tell rich people to go fuck themselves, but Contra is obsessed with punk and politics in its own terms. You don’t call an album “Contra” and then pack it up with references to The Clash unless you’re aching for a face-off with Joe Strummer’s angry ghost. And every time the shadow of The Clash shows up to haunt the lyrics (“Taxi Cab,” “Diplomat’s Son,” “I Think Ur a Contra’) Koenig gets dead serious and apologetic, and melancholically tries to explain why he can’t do heroic political anger. Koenig is in love with being in the middle— all “You’re not a victim, but neither am I” and “Never pick sides, never choose between two, but I just wanted you”—and honestly he’s doing a good job there. If you’re going to occupy a middle ground in life, then it’s a great idea to use it for creating nuanced, fragile songs about how politics and love and money interact while also constantly reminding us about The Clash.’

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crudying · 6 years ago

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Extended Essay Tips! (from an IB student with senioritis)

I finished my EE last week. Here are some tips that I wish I would’ve had while I was writing mine!

1. Pick a topic you’re genuinely interested in!!!

This is IMPORTANT because you’ll be doing a lot of research and writing about this topic. If you hate what you’re writing about, it will be that much harder to motivate yourself to actually get stuff done.

2. KEEP TRACK OF YOUR SOURCES

It might be annoying in the short term, but it will be so helpful in the long term when you don’t have to sort through 30 different journals and books to find one specific fact to cite.

3. Make a quality outline!

Outlining should really be the hardest part if you’re doing it right. It is so much easier to move things around and work on structure with an outline than a completed paper. Also, a thorough outline will make compiling the rest of the paper so much easier.

4. Try to start earlier rather than later

This is an obvious one, but really. Senioritis is real. SO REAL. By march of senior year you pretty much know where you’re going next (at least in the states) and doing high school stuff is really difficult motivation-wise. Start your EE early so you can have it done by the time all of your motivation to succeed leaves you.

5. 4,000 words is way less than you think it is

It sounds like a lot, but it really only leaves space for either deep explanation of one VERY specific topic, or a surface-scratch explanation of a huge topic. This is IB, so they want deep. Pick a specific topic.

6. Online libraries and databases are your friend

Google scholar?? GOOD SHIT FOR THIS PAPER. I have no idea how anybody wrote the extended essay before the internet.

7. Chunk it.

Don’t try to write this paper all at once. Break it up into small tasks and work through it that way. Not only will it make the whole process seem more manageable, but your writing will sound less frantic and your ideas will be more coherent.

8. Enjoy it!!!

We have such a cool opportunity to explore a topic that interests us and write about it! Take advantage of this! Enjoy learning about a topic that’s is fascinating for you! Take pride in your writing! Acknowledge this opportunity that so few high schoolers get to have and appreciate it. The EE can be overwhelming and stressful and scary, but at the end of the day it’s so cool and has been a super positive experience for me :)

#crudstudy #international baccalaureate #ib #extended essay #studyblr #elle's advice

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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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7 Zines That Helped People Work through Mental Health Issues

For the uninitiated, a “zine” is often defined as a self-published, small-circulation magazine that documents the happenings of a subculture or a niche topic. But in practice, the art of the zine is governed by “non-rules.” A zine can be consist of 40 pages, or just one. It can be entirely made up of pictures or feature no pictures at all. It can make sense, but it doesn’t have to.

During the 1980s, zine-making often involved taking a pile of collages, poems, essays, images, or doodles; lining them up, just so, over the glass of a Xerox machine; then making copies, and stapling together a series of printed pages like this. Copies might be shared with friends or left in a stack at a local record store. Today, publishing a zine can be as simple as one person creating a web page or as elaborate as a small editorial team collaborating on a printed periodical with a cover star. But the non-rules haven’t changed: If you make it and publish it yourself, and it has text, images, or both, you can probably call it a zine.

Perhaps because of this flexibility, artists and other creatives have found in zines a judgment-free space, and for some, it’s a prime medium for discussing serious, personal issues, like mental health. This point was made late last month when an art exhibition in India, organized by one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, Dr. Vikram Patel, illustrated how zines can help break down the stigma surrounding mental health. To explore the topic further, we share below seven examples of such zines, with insights from their creators on how these creative projects helped them navigate their own experiences with mental health.

For Girls Who Cry Often (2016)

Excerpt from Lina Wu, For Girls Who Cry Often, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Lina Wu, a Toronto-based artist and illustrator, collected stories and testimonies from over 20 contributors to create the 40-page zine For Girls Who Cry Often. “It’s a nice feeling to be a part of something bigger,” she said of the collaborative creation process.

For the zine, Wu focused on exploring mental health through a femme lens and let her own experiences inform her process. “For much of my life, I noticed that ‘getting emotional’ was seen as a girly or feminine thing—meaning it is often dismissed as dramatic and frivolous,” she explained.

Wu created a dreamy pink atmosphere to backdrop the contributors’ candid and sometimes dark confessions. The zine’s adolescent tone is a nod to the fanzines of the 1990s that gave teenage girls a voice. In fact, Wu points out that zines are accessible art objects because people can easily share and buy them (readers buying copies of For Girls Who Cry Often are encouraged to pay what they can afford).

An interdisciplinary artist, Wu experiments with poetry, illustrations, comics, photography, and design in her zines. And while she doesn’t bring For Girls Who Cry Often to zine fairs anymore, she noted that making it has helped her grow as an artist.

Fuck This Life (2005–present)

Excerpt from Dave Sander, Fuck This Life, 2018. Courtesy of 8ball Community.

Today, Dave Sander (a.k.a. “Weirdo Dave”) is a visual artist known for collaborations with Vans and Supreme. But back in 2005, Sander was cramming newspaper and magazine clippings into his desk drawer almost out of habit. “After I got a lot,” Sander said, “I thought it would be time to make a zine.”

Flipping through the pages of any issue of Fuck This Life is like witnessing the end-of-life montage people describe after a near-death experience. For Sander, zine-making can be an aggressively cathartic process: “You get to kill shit in your own way,” he offered.

Fuck This Life is a stream-of-consciousness compilation of found imagery—like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb or porn stars mid-orgasm—the result of Sander channeling his pain to “create a beautiful, loud, brutal fantasyland.” He refers to the zine ashis deepest, darkest best friend. “It was my reason for living, so I guess it saved me,” he said.

Grief Poems (2017)

Excerpt from Chloe Zelkha, Grief Poems, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Chloe Zelkha describes her father’s death as a “sudden, heartbreaking shock.” Within months, she’d printed out a collection of poems she found in books or discovered through teachers and grieving groups, then spread them out on her kitchen table. There, the Berkeley-based Zelkha began painting onto the pages, cranking out one after another in succession, without drafting or revising. As she found more poems, she created more pages. The result was Grief Poems, a 26-page exercise in letting go.

Zelkha’s introduction to zines was Project NIA’s The Prison Industrial Complex Is… (2010–11), a straightforward explainer zine with minimal text and simple black-and-white illustrations. She sees zines are an inherently raw medium. “That permission that’s kind of baked into the form,” she said, “is liberating.”

Poems by everyone from Kobayashi Issa to W.S. Merwin are coated in Zelkha’s uninhibited brushstrokes. She compared her process with child’s play or dreaming: “If you watch a kid play on their own for long enough, you’ll see lots of fears, feelings, ideas eeking their way into their game, and then transforming in real time. Or when we dream, and different people, places, concerns visit us in weird ways.”

Identity Crisis (2017)

Librarian–slash–zine-maker Poliana Irizarry is probably better known for their autobiographical black-and-white zines, like My Left Foot (2016) and Training Wheels (2013). But with Identity Crisis, the San Jose–based artist seemed the most vulnerable they’ve ever been. “My abuela suffered many miscarriages at the hands of American doctors, and her surviving offspring also struggle with reproductive issues,” Irizarry wrote. “Many Puerto Ricans do.”

Before the birth control pill was approved by the FDA in 1960, nearly 1,500 Puerto Rican women were unknowingly part of one of the earliest human trials for the pill. Between the 1930s and ’70s, nearly one-third of Puerto Rico’s female population of childbearing age had undergone “the operation,” often without being properly educated on its effects.

Irizarry made Identity Crisis,their first full-color art zine,during a South Bay DIY Zine Collective workshop. Personal and family histories intersect across fragmented pictures of succulents and Southwestern landscapes in a half-prose, half-verse journey through Irizarry’s identity. In just a few pages, Irizarry wrestles with intergenerational trauma and their own post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Irizarry speaks directly to their oppressors, defiant and resolute: “I live in spite of you.”

Shit I Made When I Was Sad (a.k.a. sad zine)(2018)

Excerpt from Shit I Made When I Was Sad a.k.a. sad zine, 2018. Courtesy of Malin Rantzer and Anna Persmark.

It started when Swedish friends Malin Rantzer and Anna Persmark were showing each other drawings and writing in journals they’d made while they were feeling low. “I noticed that some of the stuff we’d drawn resembled the other’s drawing,” Malin remembered, “and I think at that point we realized we should make a zine about being sad.” Rantzer turned to social media and put out a “swenglish/svengelska” (Swedish-English) call for submissions.

The then–Sweden-based duo (Persmark has since relocated to Portland, Oregon) made sad zine by cutting out and taping or pasting their artworks onto new pages, then scanning them and folding them into a booklet. Persmark sees zine-making as one of the most intimate ways of sharing her feelings; she goes out in person to share copies with her community.

“Even if all the submitters did not know each other,” Malin explained, “they were all friends’ friends or friends’ friends’ friends, and maybe that also can contribute to an atmosphere where it is safe to be vulnerable.” While making the individual works helped them heal, Persmack noted that the process of compiling the zine proved to be revelatory: “Sadness is both intensely personal and universal,” she said.

Sula Collective Issue 3: Mental Health (2015)

Oyinda Yemi-Omowum, An Emotional Response to Colours, 2015. Excerpt from Sula Collective Issue 3: Mental Health, 2015. Courtesy of Sula Collective.

Sula Collective calls itself an online “[maga]zine for and by people of colour.” Initially an exclusively online zine—different from a blog in name and ethos—it reflected its Gen-Y creators and their new ideas of what a zine could be. It’s one of the more visible new zines, among many, with the purpose of turning an online network into an IRL community. Ever since they founded it in 2015, co-creators Kassandra Piñero and Sophia Yuet See knew they wanted to dedicate an issue to mental health.

Sula Collective Issue 3: Mental Health sheds light on how teenagers of color navigate their parents’ more conservative understanding of mental health issues. “We wanted to discuss the things we kept hidden from our parents or couldn’t talk about with friends,” Piñero and Yuet See explained.

The issue was published in November 2015 and serves as a record of how today’s young artists are taking intersectional approaches to dealing with mental health issues. For example, Oyinda, a then–16-year-old Nigerian girl living in London, submitted a color-coded collage of self-portraits and textures called An Emotional Response to Colours. The literary submissions are paired with original artworks, sourced from Sula Collective’ssubmissions inbox, which range from digital art to watercolors. When asked about what makes zines a unique medium, Piñero and Yuet See answered, simply, “control.”

Shrinks: A Retrospective (2018)

Excerpt from Karla Keffer, Shrinks: A Retrospective, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Shrinks is part of Karla Keffer’s zine series “The Real Ramona,” where she discusses being diagnosed with and treated for PTSD after almost 30 years in therapy. The Mississippi-based artist found a sense of direction for her work, and Shrinks in particular, through learning about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

This phenomenon (which gave daytime television hosts the ratings of their dreams) involved psychologists across America fueling a nationwide hysteria by diagnosing patients with satanic ritual abuse (SRA) and sending them off to tough-love camps.

“Shrinks are human and fallible,” Keffer explained. “I had put a great deal of trust in their infallibility.” In Shrinks, Keffer created profiles of every therapist she’s ever had—like Julie the gaslighter and Jill the racist. Survivors of abuse are often—and paradoxically—burdened with the task of seeing through the abuse and saving themselves. “One of the things I found difficult was sorting out what had happened with each therapist—like, did she/he really say that outlandish thing?” Keffer recalled.

So much of zine-making is about reclaiming—reclaiming the freedom of expression, reclaiming space, reclaiming the past. And, as Keffer put it, “you’ve made your own book, which is not something you experience when you’re writing short stories and sending them to lit mags.” If any one thing can define zines as a medium, it’s the unbridled control it gives artists.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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studyblringstudent · 7 years ago

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Surviving School with Depression

Hey guys! So I’ve had depression since around middle school and now i’m a sophomore in college. I thought I would try to write some tips since I’ve been able to still do pretty well in school despite having depression. Now disclaimer, everyone’s depression is different and this is just what works for me.

1. Do as much work at once as possible

You might think is a weird tip but for me, my motivation and mood fluctuate A LOT! I have times where I am super motivated and can stay focused and get several assignments done. Then there are other times when I don’t do any work all day. This makes it all kind of even out. When I get really focused, I just keep doing work for as long as that feeling lasts.

2. Try different environments

The library is a really good one. The quiet can help some people focus and can be good. Also if you have a desk, that can be a good place. Play around with different elements: lighting, music, time of day. It may take some time but finding the ideal time and place for you to work can really help in productivity.

3. Plan and do work in advance

At the beginning of the semester, I went through all my syllabi and wrote a to-do list for each week. This was super helpful to be able to look ahead and see when everything was due/which weeks had more work than others. For me, all of my syllabi had the due dates for the entire semester included which made this easy to compile. I created a note on my phone with a checklist for each week. I also color coded each class so I could easily distinguish these (I’ll show this in a future post once the new semester starts!) I also made daily to-do list that broke down bigger tasks into smaller ones. Honestly, to-do lists are your best friend!

4. Give yourself a break

It’s important to not be too hard on yourself. You’re human! Everyone can’t be at their best all the time. There are good days and bad days. If you can’t focus on your work, try doing something else for a while like watching netflix, listening to music, whatever you like to do. Anything to distract your mind from bad thoughts can help improve your mood. Writing and coloring help for me sometimes too. It’s okay if you don’t get any work done all day as long as you’re taking care of yourself. This is something I’ve learned over the years and lately has been helpful. Find coping mechanisms that work for you. Just don’t be too hard on yourself.

5. Reward yourself

Similar to #4, recognize when you’re doing good. Did you get your homework done? Get that reading done? Start that essay? Reward yourself! That can be anything from a cookie, a face mask, an episode of that show you’ve been watching, anything! Celebrating the small victories is important when even the most menial tasks can be difficult.

6. You come first

Your mental health should come first above all. I don’t want to get too personal but I left the first college I went to after the first semester in order to take time to get better since I was in a bad place. I decided not to go back and that’s totally fine. Every college is different and if you realize the place you’re at is not the right fit, you can transfer. It’s not the end of the world! (btw if anyone wants to talk about transferring/taking time off i’m here) Leaving definitely made my mental health improve, some schools are honestly just toxic.

If any other depressed or neurodivergent peeps need some help feel free to message me any time!

#studyblr #mental health #college #back to school #advice #im trying to help so i hope this isnt problematic #tips #depression

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nicholasmeyler · 4 years ago

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Some Essays

Wolfy Said I Have a “Pedigree”

NICHOLAS MEYLER·SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 2020·6 MINUTES

Based on my research, I have concluded that "Great Genius" is actually the name of a Breed, not so much as an accomplishment, or appellation received from making a lasting and brilliant contribution to Society. Rather, it is more like the term "Great Dane", used when referring to a specific breed of dog. There is nothing really great about Danes, although they are fine people, quite often, and I certainly don't want to sow any racist Anti-Danish sentiment on Facebook. Rather, I am simply clarifying the use of the term.

Scientists have concluded that Intelligence is basically hereditary, so I conducted my research on the genetics and genealogy of the matter. I was partly inspired by my familial relationship with the Nobel Peace Prizewinner, Norman Borlaug, who has been credited with saving one billion lives, due to his research in genetics and agricultural science.

My hypothesis, if you will, is simply that Genius runs in families; so I compiled a small family tree of 54,000+ individuals going back 4000 years to test this hypothesis. I realized that a typical example of the "Great Genius" breed might be Isaac Newton, whom I found myself related to along the Pendleton line.

Naturally, I also traced my lineage to Einstein, as well I could, and concluded that we might have shared a common direct ancestor some 500 years ago, since Einstein's family lived in an area also inhabited by my direct ancestors. Reasoning that Einstein himself had some 'clout' in that community, I thought he would be a fitting research subject. He, like Newton, was also known for some discoveries related to Physics.

Prior to that, I had already figured out my ancestral relationships to Lord Byron, Percival Bysse Shelley, John Dryden, and John Donne. Three of those (Byron, Donne, and Shelley) also experienced and wrote about Doppelganger phenomena (which I have repeatedly written about myself, based on the acoustic evidence of hearing my own name in music composed hundreds of years before my birth).

The very ancient surname of "Meyler" is cognate with the legendary wizard "Merlin" of Arthurian legend. Merlin, according to most accounts, was primarily famed for his extraordinary gift of Prophecy, and the fact that he aged in reverse. Today, we would refer to these phenomena as “Superluminal Information Transmission” (or “Reception”), and ‘Metabolic Time-travel’ (i.e. “reverse-aging”). I am involved in both of the fields, myself (the former as a World-leading researcher, and the latter as a professional recruiter).

‘Sir Thomas Mallory’ (one of three Knights with the same name alive at the same time in England) is also a relative of mine (17th great uncle), and the name "Mallory" itself is very similar to Meilyr, Maglorix, or Malleore (variants of Meyler spelling). Mallory was the English nobleman who recorded the epic “La Morte D’Arthur”, which is still revered as the greatest account of Arthur, Merlin, and Camelot in English literature. Before him, Giraldus Cambrensis was the second author in antiquity to write of the myth of Merlin (before Mallory and after Geoffrey of Monmouth) and identified him as a man named "Meilyr" who was able to find errors and lies in the previous text written about Merlin. Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) was my 1st cousin 25 times removed. Speaking of 17th great-uncles, Geoffrey Chaucer was the father of Thomas Chaucer (Parliament Speaker of the House of Commons) who was another 17th great-uncle of mine.

Contemporary with Giraldus Cambrensis was the writing of Gwalchmai ap Meilyr, one of the most revered great Welsh Bards of the 12th century. His works are still widely read, and considered 'immortal poetry'. His family was chosen to be the Royal Bards of Wales for a full century (three generations of Meilyrs). His poetry was frequently panegyric about my 25th great grandfather King Owain Gwynnedd. It is apparent that Gwalchmai, King Owain, and Giraldus Cambrensis were all quite well acquainted with one another. Gwalchmai, moreover, is also widely cited as being another great writer who amplified the Arthur/Merlin mythology extensively.

The one ancient Welsh Bard whose poetry is still most extant (e.g. preserved) is Daffyd ap Gwilym, who is my 18th great grandfather. This, again, is a sign of the hereditary nature of the true 'Great Genius" breed, which I can trace back before the Meilyr Bards to Owain ap Hywel (907-987 AD), my 29th great grandfather.

We cannot help what we are, yet we are still ennobled by the way scholars, for example, embrace the use of the term "Bard" when describing William Shakespeare (a mere in-law of mine, it appears). Shakespeare's daughter married into my family, while (since Shakespeare was the son of first cousins), he is also somehow an in-law via another path altogether (first cousin once removed of husband of first cousin fifteen times removed). Thus, the honorific “Bard” is sometimes even bestown on mere ‘wanna-be greats’ who marry into the right family.

On the purely academic side, and apart from any real ‘thought’ or ‘intellect’, at least I am a 3rd cousin of John Harvard (9x removed). John Harvard’s grandfather Thomas Rogers (my 10th great-grandfather) lived a couple of blocks away from William Shakespeare in Avon. My great-great-grandfather was the founder of UCLA (taking up the first collection to establish a State College in Los Angeles, back in the 1880’s). Another ancestor, a ninth great-grandfather, owned the mansion that became the very first permanent building on the Yale University campus. My great-grandfather on my father’s mother’s side, Albert Carlos Jones, Jr. was the first Opera Impresario in Los Angeles, and worked for the founder of USC. He was also the youngest person ever to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, at that time. With respect to another West-coast school, my other great grandfather J.J. Meyler, who designed the Los Angeles Harbor, trounced Leland Stanford in a famous public debate about where the harbor should be built.

Also, perhaps footnote-worthy is the fact that my direct ancestors founded both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. So, while academia tends to breed a more docile sort of mind, simpler, simpering, pandering for approval of outrageously liberal and ignorant professors and tending towards mediocrity -- being on the ‘Founder’ side is somewhat different -- more disruptive, more radical, more innovative.

Such research, as it stands, has convinced me that "Great Genius" breeds true, and that, like "Great Danes" we are a distinct breed and should simply use this term, however modestly, when describing ourselves. This acceptance of the term is not gratuitous, vain, or boastful. Rather, it is really self-effacing, and humble. We must conform to the standards of the breed, and recognize that nothing we do will ever change our status, whether or not we invent, discover, or create anything, or nothing. We are not responsible for ourselves.

Gwalchmai ap Meilyr’s most famous poem, by far, is “Gorhoffedd”, meaning “The Boast”. Still famous after 850+ years, this is a great example of transcendence of the temporal world. We simply are, and we are not boastful.

'Wolfy' and the Pedigree: A Story of Superluminal Information Transmission

· Published on May 18, 2017

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Nicholas Meyler

Leading Executive Recruiter/Headhunter with (nearly) 30,000 Connections @NicholasMeyler on Twitter

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I’m tired of the rather staid and implausible edict of “Science” which states that Information cannot be transferred or transmitted at Superluminal velocities… which is to say, sending a message from “Future” or “Present” to “Past” cannot be achieved. I offer merely one of my many own personal experiences herein, that dissolves this fantasy of Physicists by clear-cut example. Scientists have contended for a long while, in their efforts to interpret Albert Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity”, that even mere quantum ‘Information’ (or ‘signal’, or ‘meaning’, essentially) is not transmissible at velocities faster than “c”, the constant denoting the speed of light traveling in a vacuum.

This numerical value is 186,282 miles per second, which is equal to 300,000 kilometers per second. These numbers as upper limits of claimed inviolability of ‘lightspeed’ are widely accepted, almost to the point of autocratic dictum. I believe that these claims are largely correct, but have exceptions. Notably, recent Scientific research has shown that light can actually be accelerated to speeds even hundreds of times faster than the conventional limit of “c”.

Physicists like Ray Chiao of UC Berkeley, Guenter Nimtz of University of Cologne, and Lijun Wang of the NEC Institute for Advanced Studies have all demonstrated that pulses of light can actually be sent (in special conditions) at velocities much higher than the ‘known’ limit of speed. The conventional caveat, however, is that “Information” itself cannot be transferred or transmitted at superluminal rates, because what is actually being transmitted in these cases, is merely a portion or ‘front-end’ of what is called the ‘wave-packet’.

Physicists disregard this achievement of superluminal velocity as an exception to the Einsteinian equations simply because only a portion of the light-wave really made it through to the receiver. Guenter Nimtz formulated the reply that even if only the ‘front-end’ of the intended signal actually is transmitted, it is still recognizable and does qualify as Information. I tend to agree with him. In his 1993 experiments, he was able to transmit the sound impulses of Mozart’s 40th Symphony in G minor at a rate of 4.3x lightspeed. In other words, the signals were actually transmitted (via quantum tunneling) before the process was even initiated. Still, physicists argue about whether these actually constitute ‘Information’/‘Signals’.

This is not just a semantic debate, since Einstein’s Theory (and the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction equations) show that any object (including a photon, which has a rest-mass below 10^exp -27 electron-volts) with non-zero ‘rest-mass’ would have to acquire infinite mass, if it exceeded lightspeed. A rather clever way out of this (which reconciles ‘observation-data’ [i.e. facts] and theory [i.e. speculation]) is that a ‘signal’ might consist purely of vibrations, or “phonons”, which are really massless, and occur in ‘elastic’ structures.

The great composer Iannis Xenakis compared “phonons” to ‘particles or granules’ of sound, in his textbook “Musiques Formelles”. In fact, he based his entire theory of musical composition on this concept of ‘granular sound’ and used his extreme knowledge of Chemical Physics and Mathematics to create music based on the idea of manipulation of ‘sound-masses’ and ‘sound-clouds’ via abstract mathematics, much of which was based on Ancient Greek thought.

Guenter Nimtz’ more recent work (2009) has been on the idea of “Superluminal” (i.e. “Virtual” as in the Physics of Richard Feynmann) ‘particles’ or ‘quanta’ of vibration, which is what sound is caused by – all sounds are merely vibrations that occur in some medium, whether it be air, the floor of a concert venue where music is much too loud for good health, etc. Given that the Einsteinian “Prohibition” on faster-than-lightspeed Information transfer is based entirely on the impossibility of accelerating objects (or quanta) which possess ‘non-zero rest mass’ – What prohibits the possibility of accelerating completely massless ‘quanta’ of vibration to superluminal rates – i.e. thereby sending ordered vibrations into the Past?_____________________________________________________________

It was in the year 1989, I believe, that I purchased a CD album of Wolfgang Mozart’s “Salzburg Symphonies”, composed when he was a youth below the age of 16. Despite his age, however, Mozart’s enormous precocity and intellect enabled him to compose music which is highly enduring, and permits many listenings.

The simplicity of the Salzburg Symphonies is undeniable, but they remain as amazing testament to the genius of ‘Wolfy’, who could create immortal symphonies still beloved by many, centuries after his death. It is on track 19 of the album I have of Jaap Schroeder, Christopher Hogwood and The Academy of Ancient Music performing “The Symphonies Salzburg 1766-1772” that the untamed “Wolfy” (aka Mozart) launches into what I once thought was a slanderous diatribe against me, wherein he accused me of having a “pedigree”, which I naturally thought was quite offensive, given the context of someone with a nickname of “Wolfy” (which is highly suggestive of an undomesticated species of canine).

Canines, to my knowledge (at that time) were the sorts of creatures who had ‘pedigrees’, and I incontestably took offence at Mozart’s apparent speech synthesis directed towards me. I was, generally speaking, rather appalled by the apparent slight, but tried to understand it in the context of the youthful, brash super-genius Mozart taunting a fan or admirer (me) from the distant future (over 200 years later).

Please bear in mind that these thoughts first occurred to me, listening to this album/CD, around 1989, when I lived in Van Nuys, CA (at 14333 Haynes St.) in a fairly inexpensive apartment in a rather poor neighborhood – although it is true that I lived within a few blocks of a Tchaikovsky competition pianist, a drummer from ‘Iron Butterfly’ (who lived upstairs), and a successful composer named Alexandra Shapiro. Alex Shapiro was beautiful and very intelligent. I remember discussing Stephen Hawking with her, and how strongly she felt sympathy for his physical condition.

Apparently, I am not the only party who has had reason to contemplate the “pedigree” remarks of Mozart, since one need only Google “Mozart, pedigree” to find the following information: http://www.pedigreequery.com/mozart3. It would appear that others have, at least on some level, also connected the cognitively dissonant notes of “Wolfy” and “pedigree” rather clearly. My assumption of, and extreme irritation at, Wolfy’s unintended jape/jibe/jab at my ego, was erroneous, though. I learned some 23 years later, while trying to work out my Ancestry , that a “pedigree” is also something ascribed to humans; in particular, those who descend from long lines of ancestry and/or royalty.

Although I had no knowledge of it, originally, I do actually have a ‘pedigree’ which extends back over a thousand years. Even without knowledge of having a ‘pedigree’, I did have a pedigree, it seems. What is remarkable about this, though, is that I perceived and ‘heard’ Mozart’s comments which seemed to be directed precisely towards me, in English language, with such vividness that I truly thought I was being personally insulted by the brilliant (but highly juvenile at the age of 14-16) Mozart even though his synthetic speech comments (assuming that they are real) were perhaps actually intended as a compliment. I utterly rejected the idea that I was “Mozart’s dog” and was being teased about my inferior intellect/good breeding, because I knew nothing of my ancient ancestry, and because I had no idea that a “pedigree” was even a term that could be applied to Humans, without condescension.

So, now that I have researched my family tree extensively, including with DNA comparisons of many other people, I know that I am related to royalty with lineage that perhaps goes (arguably or not) back to 2000 BC. I would suggest that this result, which I would have found anathematic in 1989, is an actual state of fact which was communicated to me, somehow, via speech synthesis using purely instrumental modalities in that 19th track of the album, composed by Wolfgang Mozart around 1770-1776.

This strikes me as very strong evidence of the reality of Superluminal Information Transmission (or Transfer), simply because: (1) the concept of being told by a record album performance of music written over 200 years ago that I (personally) have a ‘pedigree’ is highly odd; (2) the indisputability of that acoustic perception, on my part, is certain, because I have been able to describe the perceptions and thoughts I had as a consequence, in detail; (3) the odds against anyone having a ‘pedigree’ (or family tree) which contains 40,000 known individuals is fairly extreme, so there can be no mistaking the correctness of the assertion.

From this one example (and I have many others), it appears to me that the existence of Superluminal Information Transmission is a certain fact, despite many Physicists' claims that it violates “Relativity Theory”, and is therefore impossible.

Henceforth, let us abbreviate “Superluminal Information Transmission” as “S.I.T.”

“SIT, Wolfy! SIT!”

Battle of The Majors: Engineering vs. Philosophy

· Published on August 24, 2020

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Nicholas Meyler

Leading Executive Recruiter/Headhunter with (nearly) 30,000 Connections @NicholasMeyler on Twitter

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I just read a really interesting article by a clever writer named Kristina Grob, a Philosophy instructor at University of South Carolina Sumter. The article discussed the long-term benefits of a Philosophy degree in terms of paying ones’ bills and earning a living, as opposed to other majors like Engineering, which is obviously more geared towards practical applications and material success.

https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/08/06/want-good-job-major-philosophy?fbclid=IwAR3mE_MT25ZboA7pdoquawknRH9AvhykYrLSTUW1ZLzUv2Vdobs38NXot-k

I read the article with particular interest because I majored in both fields, at separate schools, to obtain two Bachelor’s degrees. The first was in Philosophy at Princeton, and the second in Chemical Engineering at Cal State Northridge. Even though my family had been engineers for four generations before me, I was the rebellious one who wanted to have a broader mind and wanted to set out on a new path.

My father and grandfather both had Mechanical Engineering degrees from Cornell, and my grandfather was even a Cornell Instructor. My paternal great-grandfather was a Military Engineer from West Point (top in his class, except for the fellow-student he tutored). His name was James J. Meyler and he won perhaps the most important public debate of the early twentieth century vs. Leland Stanford, known as “The Free Harbor Contest”, and was responsible for picking the location and beginning the dredging and construction for the Los Angeles Harbor, which was the largest harbor ever built for many years. There was a street named after him in San Pedro, near the harbor. He also had Army ships named after him, and his portrait stood in the L.A. Army Headquarters for 50+ years.

Even his father, my great-great grandfather (also named Nickolas Meyler, like myself), who was an un-degreed Irish immigrant of the potato-famine, was a master carpenter who successfully filed his own patent for a roof-forming machine –- technology which I have been told by Construction professionals is still used on multi-million dollar mansions in Malibu today.

So, why would I study Philosophy instead?

I didn't want to conform to my family's expectations. And, probably because I badly wanted an education in the Humanities. In fact, I took 13 classes in Philosophy at Princeton (more than any other undergrad I knew) and another 6 in Comparative Literature. Philosophy was the highest-ranked department in the World at the time, so it appealed to me because of the challenge. The thought of earning a living never even occurred to me at the time, I was so impassioned to learn the truths of the Universe.

Towards the end of Senior year, I had some conversations with people about “the real world”. One friend who was a fellow Philosophy major in many of my classes was the grand-daughter of two Nobel winners on her mother’s side, while her father was President of Harvard. Even she, with a mother who was a Philosophy professor (and later a best-selling author), made remarks like “We Philosophy majors are the most worthless people out there.”

After I graduated, I began to realize that it might actually be hard to get a job when Philosophy hadn’t really exactly prepared me for one. I had heard of Philosophers in Europe putting up a shingle and charging $100 an hour for providing advice on Life, etc., but I didn’t think I could make that model work for me. I ended up taking the next year off and read 160 books. My parents were incredibly generous with me, very tolerant and understanding. They realized that I had been through an ‘existential crisis’, trying to find some sense of self-worth and meaning in Life. I also had a peculiar psychosomatic ailment which was attacks of hiccups that went on and on intermittently, for many months.

Finally, my parents insisted that I get a job. Since I was contemplating a possible career in Law, it seemed appropriate that I should take advantage of my family’s personal lawyer being the Executor for the J. Paul Getty Museum Estate. I got a job in the mail-room at a company called Musick, Peeler, and Garrett which entailed mailing enormous checks and documents to members of the Getty family.

I could read a book on the bus to the office, and had hundreds of attorneys to talk with and ask questions about Law. I learned a great deal, met some great people, and eventually began to understand that I was not the type of person who should be a lawyer. This was probably a good way to learn that I was not cut-out for that particular profession.

Eventually, family tradition began to influence me, and I resolved to study Chemical Engineering. I think there were several reasons for this, including my family’s predilection for Engineering, and the fact that I had always liked Chemistry. I also was fascinated with the music of Iannis Xenakis, a Composer/Architect who wrote music about Chemical Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics. I was led back into Engineering by way of the Humanities. I had always been especially good in Science and Math, so I thought it made a lot of sense; plus, it seemed pretty assured that I could manage to make a living at it.

So, a few years later, I did graduate with a Chemical Engineering degree and was able to find an entry-level Chemist job in the Electroplating industry. Here I was working with people who were shop-owners that made $500,000 per year… this was obviously something that made money. I also realized, though, that repeated exposure to toxic chemicals, cyanide, sulfuric acid, hydrofluoric acid, etc. was not really all that appealing.

For that reason, I eventually transitioned to a sales career-path – selling plating chemicals for an esoteric but fascinating process of auto-catalytic deposition of nickel phosphorus (i.e. “electroless nickel”). I learned that the communication and language skills I had acquired while studying Philosophy actually had value in terms of making it easier to explain concepts and make persuasive arguments. I was able to use reason and logic to achieve sales of product.

This was something I hadn’t really expected. All of the sudden, Philosophy actually had a practical application. I could use logic and reasoning to present rational reasons for customers to buy the products I was hawking, and could make them feel good about using them.

Eventually, of course, I transitioned into the career of Executive Search, where I have been for the past 30 years. I use my skills in Engineering and Philosophy both, on a daily basis. Philosophy is very helpful for strategic thinking, ethics, and selling of ‘intangibles’. Engineering, equally, is a passion that is fortuitous to have. Nothing is more exciting to me than cutting-edge Science and Technology being applied at the highest competitive levels to achieve commercial success and successful productization.

The truth, is, at least according to Kristen Grob, that Philosophy majors earn more than their counterpart majors, and maybe as much as Engineering majors. I was shocked with her statement, but it seems to have some facticity. I found it hard to believe that the pursuit of Non-material Wisdom could somehow equate with Science based on the nature of Matter (i.e. Chemistry).

In 30 years of placing Scientists and Engineers, I have only once encountered another person with Bachelor’s degrees in both Chemical Engineering and Philosophy. Only one other person, and I have about 30,000 resumes on file, with probably over 200,000 personal contacts over my career.

What do the facts really say? Since I work with Engineers and Scientists, of course I’m not so likely to see resumes of other Philosophy majors. That doesn’t mean they can’t make money. Some statistics say that the average Philosophy graduate makes $80,000 per year. Certainly, this is comparable to what Engineers earn.

Realistically speaking, would I be the Engineering Headhunter I am today, without having had a Philosophy degree? Probably not. I think that the communication skills alone that I learned were priceless. Having the ability to communicate well is not always common among Engineers. Both disciplines involve problem-solving, but only Philosophy focuses on persuading others of the correctness of one’s viewpoint. This element is neglected in most Engineering curricula. I do think that there should be more of a hybridization between the two fields. It can only help.

Meanwhile, I must also admit that I am the most-followed “Philosopher/Engineer” on Twitter in the World.

Is that worth any money?

Probably not. But it’s a whole lot more fun!

Was Shakespeare Truly a Bard? A Headhunter's Opinion

· Published on January 18, 2019

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Nicholas Meyler

Leading Executive Recruiter/Headhunter with (nearly) 30,000 Connections @NicholasMeyler on Twitter

24 articles

Popular wisdom says that ‘Bards’ are those great story-tellers whose tales are embraced by the audience, not only once, but over and over again, for generations. The idea of a Bard conjures up names like Homer, Shakespeare, and perhaps few others. Reality is quite a bit different, though.

Etymology of the word “Bard” shows that it is of Welsh origin, specifically referring to the great Poet/Singer/Musician/Warriors who were responsible for creating and retelling great ballads like the ancient epic 'Mabinogion', or the King Arthur legend, which is part of 'Mabinogion'.

Owing to unique circumstances, it was in ancient Wales that the Bardic tradition first arose. The culture of Wales was such that the early Princes sponsored official court poets (i.e. “Gogynfeirdd”) who shared many of the same privileges as royalty. In fact, in certain ways, Bards were actually viewed as being even superior to the Kings. Tradition had it that the greatest fear among Nobility was the ever-present possibility that they might be satirized for being unkind or ungenerous to the Bards ("Poet-Gods"). In at least one case, legend tells of a King who died of shame from being scorned by his Bard, Taliesin.

Perhaps the first great Bard was Taliesin. His 6th century poems still exist. The largest number of extant great poems by a Bard are those by Daffyd ap Gwilym (1320-1350), 170 of whose poems still exist. The preponderance of Daffyd’s poems were about Nature and Erotica, filled with a great sense of humor. Yet, it was the Meilyr family of Bards that were the most famous family of Bards that ever lived, being the official court poets of Wales for over a century, and three generations... Meilyr Bryddyd was the first of these, and his religious poems are still known. His son was Gwalchmai, who had at least two sons who were also official Bards of the Princes. Thus, the Meilyr dynasty in Wales established the greatest tradition of factual Bards in human history.

Common lore tells us that Shakespeare was a 'Bard', since author of 37 known still-revered plays and several poems and the set of sonnets. Mere casual reference to "The Bard" often elicits thoughts of William Shakespeare (or "Wm Choxpur" as he sometimes wrote, in addition to perhaps 10 other spellings, indicating a possible degree of illiteracy, by today's standards). "The Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon", or "The Bard of Avon", etc. are similar epithets which have frequently been used to describe both "Shaksper" and even Homer (author of "Illiad" and "Odyssey"), has been described as a ‘Bard’.

Yet, if we look to the actual definition of the word "Bard", we note readily that it is a word from Medieval Welsh. The actual meaning of the word "Bard" encompasses far more than merely being the author of a great text, or set of texts, which survive four, five, or twenty-five centuries. Bards were something altogether different from a mere playwright or author, actually. Much more like troubadours, perhaps. Singularly talented, and not merely limited to authorship, etc. Skilled in performance, battle, song, as well as writing.

I suggest that William Shakespeare is regarded as being the greatest English-speaking 'Bard-like author', largely because of his name, which connotes warrior-like characteristics, or acts (i.e. "shaking a spear"). Part of the tradition of the authentic Bards of Wales is that in addition to being poets, performers, singers, composers, scholars and genealogists for Royalty, they also were accomplished warriors who fought in many battles. So confident of his prowess in battle was Gwalchmai ap Meilyr (1130-1180), author of "Gorhoffedd" (i.e. "The Boast") that he actually wore gold jewelry (a torcque) into battle on behalf of his patron Owain Gwynedd (my 24th great-grandfather, by my calculations).

One might think that, as a Meyler, I would be more closely related to Gwalchmai, but he is actually only a 25th cousin 4 times removed. So, I speak with a degree of relative objectivity, here, being not merely partial to Welsh bards simply because of being related to several. In fact, the other best-known "Gorhoffedd" (a completely different poem) was written by Owain ap Hywel (907-987) who was actually my 29th great-grandfather, although I am much more fond of Gwalchmai's eloquent poem.

In any case, Thomas Rogers (1540-1611), was my 12th great-uncle, and lived 2 blocks away from William Shakespeare in Stratford. Thomas' grandson, was John Harvard, whose name is somewhat better recognized. I may not be related to Shakespeare, but I do deeply respect his incredible mastery of the English language, while, at the same time, being somewhat strict on the meaning of the word "Bard".

I hope I have been fair!

Clearly, William Shakespeare cannot be considered a Bard, unless, perhaps, the pen itself is somehow mightier than the sword. It turns out that not only did William Shakespeare NOT invent the sonnet, but that the sonnet form was actually invented by my 1st cousin 14x removed, Sir Henry Howard (1517-1547).

Semiotics and Nobel Peace

NICHOLAS MEYLER·SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2017·10 MINUTES

Semiotics and Nobel Peace: I was Six vs. “We Are Seven”

Having placed myself in the mildly challenging position of defending my claim (or interpretation, or theory, perhaps) that I won the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of six, I thought it might be worth expounding upon that absurdity which I have previously termed (paraphrasing T.S. Eliot writing on John Milton or Edmund Spenser) an “[auditory] hypertrophy of the imagination” – pun intended. Simple inspection of the history of the Nobel tells us that only Sartre is openly acknowledged to have turned one down (in Literature), although some claim that George Bernard Shaw also declined it. Yet, there are some questions about the details of GBS’ refusal – the apparent truth being that he “accepted the honor,” but refused the money. Sartre, perhaps with greater integrity, refused the prize primarily because he wished not to set himself apart from the common man, eschewing distinctions in class and status as a reflection of the Socialist values he shared with Shaw. My own claim to have won the Prize in a clandestine fashion, in 1966, absurd as it must seem, has been bolstered by the recent actions of the Nobel committee; while they certainly haven’t been verbally expressive. According to the rules of the Nobel Trust, it is not allowed for the Nobel committee to release names of nominees for fifty years, and even then, only at their discretion.

My apparently outrageous contention is that I was awarded and then declined the Nobel Peace Prize in 1966, for contact with multiple alien intelligent beings; including many UFO landings in my backyard in Tarzana, California; and involving extensive faster-than-lightspeed travel (which Relativity Theory discloses to be equivalent to time-travel). In point of fact, I think it historically notable that my home (at 4608 Conchita Way, wherein I lived from 1965 to 1982) was purchased by the producer Stephen Deutsch, responsible for such time-travel epics as “Somewhere In Time” (starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour) and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. Stephen clearly shares my interest and fascination with Time Travel and Metaphysics, although I tend to be inclined towards the academic side of the field; and I suspect that he bought the house because we had advertised it in the L.A. Times as a “UFO Landing Site”. I don’t have any evidence of this, although it should be possible to obtain through examination of microfilmed copies of real estate ads from the L.A. Times and possibly other publications from 1982. If anyone can produce this evidence, it would be of great interest… and, if this exists only in my imagination (or “hypertrophy” thereof), at least it is a “grand illusion”.

Given that there is circumstantial evidence that I may have been involved in time-travel and faster-than-light travel events, I continue to investigate. George Bernard Shaw’s most popular play is “Pygmalian” (the basis for “My Fair Lady”), whose hero is a phonetician – and it is through phonetics that I have accumulated the largest body of evidence of my own personal possible experiences of time-travel, since my name is found phonetically encrypted in some classic musical compositions, centuries before my birth. Examples I have previously given are Mozart’s 14th and 41st Symphonies, Bach’s 4th Brandenburg Concerto (which also references “Hefner” – another odd character appearing anachronistically as a model in music composed in 1725), Stockhausen’s “Ceylon/Bird of Passage” album, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, and so on. That the “happy few” who have refused the Nobel Prize should be able to find ways to metaphysically help each other (despite large separations in the realm of Time), somehow has a fundamental justice to it, at least.

My theory has been, for more than a decade, that there was a NASA mission to Alpha Centauri in 1966. What the CIA files show as “Alpha-66”, however, is merely an Anti-Castro mission conducted by 66 Cuban emigres… no mention is made in those files of any extraterrestrial affairs. Still, the phrase “Anti-Castro” shares initials with “Alpha Centauri”, and one may draw one’s own inferences… Any faster-than-lightspeed mission might encounter the problem of entering a completely different Universe where that faster-than-lightspeed travel had never occurred. Thus, the mission could have been widely publicized at the time, but have become almost completely forgotten, due to the phenomenon of “Information Loss” (described by Hawking in a well-known 1972 paper).

The belief that a six-year old survived a rocket ride (almost certainly propelled by "dark matter" procured perhaps from the Magellanic Clouds in a “cyclic acausal” manner), in 1966, and achieved contact with aliens (in addition to the landings in the backyard in Tarzana), is obviously a huge leap of faith for anyone to make. Any healthy skeptic should remain a skeptic, without evidence that such an event happened, and it clearly isn’t spelled out in the CIA’s declassified files to “Alpha 66”. However, what is interesting, in the light of the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohammed Yunus, is that he is a 66-year old, awarded the Peace Prize in 2006. The trifold occurrence of the digit ‘6’ is interesting. Based on my many requests to the Nobel committee to provide information about my suspicion of having been secretly awarded the Peace Prize in 1966, is this a sign or signification that there is something correct in my assertions? Also, whether a 6-year old won and refused the prize in 1966, or a 66-year old won and accepted the prize in 2006, does the presence of the number '666’ itself make any difference? Is the name “Yunus” in any way a harking back to “Unicef” (the recipient of the 1965 Peace Prize)?

The subliminal lyrics to Pink Floyd’s 1972 album “Dark Side of the Moon” make clear references to me (via phonetic speech synthesis with electronic instruments), and to the Nobel committee. The subliminal lyrics of albums by The Grateful Dead, on the other hand, appear to make reference to me being “Lucifer” (associated both with the'666’ numerology as well as the defamed Catholic Saint (examples of such albums would be “Live Dead” [the song “Dark Star”] and “Dead Set” [“Samson and Delilah”, and “Fire on the Mountain”, etc.]). Since Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “Childhood’s End’ describes the end of humanity (as we know it) resulting from the arrival of an extraterrestrial named "Karellan,” revealed (halfway through the novel) to possess the same physiognomy as the legendary Satan with wings, a tail, and horns, it might well behoove me to ignore the negative Christian mythology associated with the number '666’ just as the Nobel committee appears to have. Beethoven, oddly enough, refers to me as both “Jesus” and “Savior” in different symphonies, possibly because he must have heard Mozart’s 41st Symphony, where I am modeled with Jody Savin (I am speculating that “Savin” was perceived/interpreted as “Saven” by Beethoven, for instance). The subliminal lyrics of “Dark Star” by The Grateful Dead also make reference to me and Jody (actually a minor relationship in the scheme of my life), with an odd discussion about sticking a crucifix into a Black Hole (perhaps with the goal in mind of stabilizing an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, or wormhole to another universe)….

In 1966 and 1967, two years during which the Nobel Peace Prize was not officially awarded, a most lethal war was waged, in denial of our country’s inability to win that war, and Peace was only a distant dream. In harmony and resonance with my mercurial claim of winning the Nobel at the age of six, I offer Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven" which focuses on a child’s denial of reality, insisting that her dead siblings are still with her:

We Are Seven by William Wordsworth.

–A Simple Child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?

I met a little cottage Girl: She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air, And she was wildly clad: Her eyes were fair, and very fair; –Her beauty made me glad.

"Sisters and brothers, little Maid, How many may you be?” “How many? Seven in all,” she said And wondering looked at me.

“And where are they? I pray you tell.” She answered, “Seven are we; And two of us at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea.

"Two of us in the church-yard lie, My sister and my brother; And, in the church-yard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother.”

“You say that two at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea, Yet ye are seven!–I pray you tell, Sweet Maid, how this may be.”

Then did the little Maid reply, “Seven boys and girls are we; Two of us in the church-yard lie, Beneath the church-yard tree.”

“You run about, my little Maid, Your limbs they are alive; If two are in the church-yard laid, Then ye are only five.”

“Their graves are green, they may be seen,” The little Maid replied, “Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door, And they are side by side.

"My stockings there I often knit, My kerchief there I hem; And there upon the ground I sit, And sing a song to them.

"And often after sunset, Sir, When it is light and fair, I take my little porringer, And eat my supper there.

"The first that died was sister Jane; In bed she moaning lay, Till God released her of her pain; And then she went away.

"So in the church-yard she was laid; And, when the grass was dry, Together round her grave we played, My brother John and I.

"And when the ground was white with snow, And I could run and slide, My brother John was forced to go, And he lies by her side.”

“How many are you, then,” said I, “If they two are in heaven?” Quick was the little Maid’s reply, “O Master! we are seven.”

“But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!” 'Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, “Nay, we are seven!”

Returning again to the topic of signification or semiotics and the Peace Prize; it clearly is unprecedented for the Nobel committee to award the prize (in consecutive years) to persons named “Mohammed”, and yet they have done so (to Mohamed El-Baradei and Muhammad Yunus). This seems to possibly express disenchantment with Christianity (and the mythology surrounding '666’), but it also is a gesture of offering an 'olive-branch’ to Islam, in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Parenthetically, Muhammad Yunus was also the recipient of the World Food Prize, which was initiated by my distant cousin (a second- or third-cousin) Norman Borlaug in 1986. I find it odd that the media paid so little attention to Yunus as a candidate, given that fact. For most, he was a “dark horse” candidate, possibly because the media is lazy, prefers to disinform, or simply wants to keep information to itself… There is no accounting for an information failure like this, and it reminds me of Einstein’s famous remark that “Two things are infinite: the Universe and human stupidity, and I’m not so sure about the former.”

There are many other points worthy of semiotic analysis in the history of the Nobel prize, but my intention is not to be exhaustive. Rather, I would like to provoke a little bit of thought, and to offer desperately needed (possible) explanations where there have previously been none. Everything, for instance, resolves to “How does a modern person’s name [mine] encrypt itself into art from the 18th century, associated with the Nobel Peace Prize, which also didn’t even exist at that time? And, what is the significance of this bizarre phenomenon?"

To those questions, I hope that I have at least offered a partial answer, although it might seem equally that I am "a miner for truth and delusion,” as the Pink Floyd lyric goes. Still, having barely ever heard of many past winners like Elihu Root, Fredrik Bajer, Frederic Passy, George Pire, etc., I suppose the Nobel Committee might have seen fit to try to award the prize to someone like myself, whose name somehow transcendentally appears (associated with the Nobel Peace Prize) in some very antique classics (while I am still largely unknown, of course). I wonder if that “auditory hypertrophy” of my imagination will ever be fully understood, recognized and explained.

–Nicholas Meyler, November 26, 2006

Exegesis of My Thoughts on Auditory Doppelgangers in Music

NICHOLAS MEYLER·FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2020·5 MINUTES

Apart from the instances I have previously pointed out in some detail (the passages in Grateful Dead's "Foolish Heart", Trent Reznor's "Closer", and Brandenburg Concerto #4 by J.S. Bach, Mozart’s 14th Symphony K#114 in A Major, etc.), one of the best examples of my auditory time-traveling doppelganger phenomenon I've ever heard is from Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Ceylon/Bird of Passage", which was composed when I was around 15. I'm pretty certain I didn't buy a copy until 1977 or 1978, at the earliest. I had never previously met Karlheinz Stockhausen, except on the UIA/CIA Mission with:

Felix Rodriguez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Rodr%C3%ADguez_(soldier) in 1968, when we brought Stockhausen here from his native planet orbiting the star Sirius, as Karlheinz repeatedly stated.

Stockhausen was very intuitive, very psychic, and studied about or with Indian yogi Sri Aurobindo. He writes about some of his psychic experiences and how his compositions were sometimes based on dream-flights into the Cosmic Oversoul.

In 1975, when this album first came out on Chrysalis Records, I was 15, and I shared an Attorney with the J. Paul Getty Museum Estate, since my paternal grandfather was that attorney's first-ever client. He later also counseled Howard Hughes to some extent. Getty's son Gordon is actually the world's richest composer, to my knowledge. He once gave my Mom a couple of cassettes of his music ("Plump Jack" and "The White Election").

at 5:41 I hear "Borlaug" (My 2nd cousin twice removed on my Mom's side -- a Nobel Peace Prizewinner Agriculturalist credited with inventing wheat strains which saved one billion lives from starvation)

at 10:30 I hear "Getty Deep" emulated electronically (suggestive of the extreme depths at which oil is found). Stockhausen, as a composer, was remarkable for his Capitalistic instinct, being one of the very first artists to purchase the rights to all his music from Deutsche Grammophon recordings.

at 14:15 I hear "Tara, Claudia, Laura... Nick is Nazi, Billionaire Nazi" (which is odd, since I am actually a Republican and not exactly a Billionaire... however, part of the "Doppelganger" idea is that the Double is an 'evil twin', which might actually make a certain amount of sense, then, being someone who would act counter to my best interests. Tara, Claudia and Laura were all girlfriends I hadn't had yet, when I was between the ages of 16 and 24 [accurately predicted by Stockhausen] in reverse order).

at 14:29 "Uma" is clearly spoken by the composer... interesting because "Uma" is from Tibetan Buddhism, and means "the Goddess". Uma Thurman's father is one of the world's leading authorities on Tibetan Buddhism, and named her after the Buddhist Goddess. She was also in a movie with Ben Affleck about an invention that could predict the future accurately, with a "Paycheck" hidden under the newspaper of the bird-cage (reference to "Bird of Passage"?) in the form of a winning lottery ticket.

at 15:30 I hear "Furnix" which could also easily be "Phoenix", "Fur Nichts", "Fur Nicks", etc. Repeatedly spoken throughout the piece is the name "Garuda", which is a winged Hindu deity, also somewhat evocative of the legendary Phoenix which re-emerges from the flames after its own Pyrrhic death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda

at 17:55 I hear another synthetic voice reference to birds (i.e. "We're ducky!")

at 19:19 "Getty, pow-wow-wow" seems pretty clearly enunciated, harking back to the Billionaire theme

at 21:00 "Waiter" or "Waaaiiiiitttteerrr!!!" seems to be shouted pretty loudly... not sure what that is about, but it does bring to mind "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" by Douglas Adams, published 5 years later, in 1980. Haven't quite figured that out, yet.

at 22:05 "How, how, how?, etc."

at 22:43 "You're a Leader" (I assume this is a direct but oneiric reference to me...or maybe that Borlaug dude, which is followed by a remarkably clever doubting sentiment at 23:45 to 23:55 "Why??" = "Wwwwwwhhhhhhhhyyyyyy????". Obviously, if someone claims me to be a leader, I want to know why! It does make a nice pun on "lieder" (German for 'song', in this speech-synthesis rich composition).

at 24:10 "Overall"

at 24:42 Composition Ends

“Bird of Passage” (i.e. “How Did We Get Here?”)

At 24:50, the album's second entry begins with the very complex and difficult to comprehend phrase (especially since it is almost steganographically encrypted, muffled and disguised as pure instrumental music, with percussion dominating): "Doppelganger Princeton Peace"

If it were up to me, I would have left out the "Princeton" part, since I was not terribly thrilled with their idea of "Academia" (which mostly seemed to be based on their adamant refusal to read books and actually do research, while insisting on mocking those that actually had done “the homework”); but, in any case (as in Mozart's 14th Symphony, where Princeton is referred to as "a bedwet", it is also equated with "Nobel Peace", for some reason [i.e. that is another example of the time-traveling Doppelganger I have been discussing in some detail]).

at 30:20 "Doppelganger Peace Prize Lives!" or "Doppelganger Peace Prizes"

In this composition, the disguised speech synthesis is much-better hidden, making it harder to provide clear-cut examples. However, at 35:53 "Better get dead!" is pretty clear. This is probably a duppel/doppel entendre, since The Grateful Dead are one of the very few bands which also openly advocate the importance of psychic powers in music. https://stanleykrippner.weebly.com/a-pilot-study-in-dream-t…

37:32 "Figaro's a lunatic!" (reference to Mozart's Nozze di Figaro and/or Rossini's "Barber of Seville"?)

42:50 "Better get dead" is reiterated...

43:29 "Figaro!"

46:33 After what sound like repeated iterations of "Democrat Winner" throughout this piece, the music quixotically ends with what sounds to me like "Reagan" -- a President who wasn't elected yet. Of course, this album was published during the Administration of Gerald R. Ford, before the election of Jimmy Carter, and hence, well before "Reagan".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bHnGorNTT0

"Things I 'Figured Out' for Myself"

July 24, 2010 at 12:34 AM

from 2005? (approx.) "Things I Figured Out for Myself" I made this list because I sometimes do figure out these nifty ideas 'without help', and then read about them later in the news (as someone else's 'great new discovery'). So, I am working on this list, and will add to it as I recall more such events and instances. 1. Sharks with wings might be an evolutionary path on another planet. (It has been discovered that there were actually winged sharks in the seas of ancient Earth, but they went extinct many millions of years ago). I had a dream once, about being on a catamaran on the placid lagoon of a planet orbiting Tau Ceti ("Ceti" is actually Greek for "sea-monster", and not "whale", as many might presume), and awaking from the dream-experience (which felt like a memory) of being eaten alive by an enormous Great White Shark, with wing-like appendages similar to those of flying fish. Subsequent to my dream, I also learned that Great Whites are well-known for jumping out of the water to catch prey. 2. Epsilon Eridani has an inhabited planet (It has been discovered that there is at least one planet in orbit around Epsilon Eridani, which is probably uninhabited since much too large. However, there still might be smaller planets in orbit there, which are unseen). The SETI project observed a spike or signal from Epsilon Eridani on the first day of operation (if I recall correctly), but it was never repeated. Frank Drake supposedly concluded that this was only terrestrial interference which appeared to be from the direction of Epsilon Eridani, but I am suspicious of the whole SETI project, in principle. 3. Time-travel to the past must exist (Hasn't been confirmed yet, but light has been accelerated to 300x "c" in experiments). If information about the present day (approximately) somehow shows up in music composed in 1725 (e.g. Bach's Brandenburg Concerti), then someone must have put it there. 4. Global warming is real (pretty much confirmed recently). I based that judgment on the fact that California summers keep getting hotter... of course, many other people concurred on that one, so I clearly didn't invent it, but I was way ahead of the curve, and managed to get fired from a job as a chemist back in 1989, partly as a result of my opinions on the subject. 5. It makes lots of sense to assume that space is comprised of an infinite number of dimensions, of infinite size (infinite-dimension theory is getting popular these days, although 11-dimensional M theory leads the pack of theories). Common sense leads one to ask "What is so special about the number 11, anyway?" I can still remember pretty vividly being told that there were definitively 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, or 27 dimensions as well, at different times. Why would we be so gullible as to latch onto the idea that '11 dimensions' is the final and correct solution? 6. If "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce is a cyclical novel based on human history (it is), then it might be used to predict human history and events before they happen (example... the fall of the Soviet Union and Iran-contra [see pp. 518-519 of "Finnegans Wake"]). 7. Time-travel can be accompanied by information-loss phenomenon (thoughts influenced by Hawking's work, but pushing his 'envelope' somewhat). 8. Information isn't necessarily lost inside Black Holes, since particle pairs are created on the boundary... therefore the 'lost' information could remain accessible and encrypted somewhere (Hawking's information-loss paradox seems to deny this, and then he changed his mind somewhat, and there is also the work of t'Hooft on this subject). My idea that information is actually encrypted and not destroyed is just based on the fact that music contains encrypted information (sent at faster-than-light speeds) which is decodable. Encrypting information in music (or other art) might also be a means of compensating for 'information-loss', since the information could later be retrieved and reconstructed. 9. Since music contains decodable faster-than-lightspeed information, it ought to be useful in predicting future events (I've done a few 'experiments' of this nature, which seemed to work pretty well). Music can be a type of 'artificial intelligence' or intelligence amplification... this would also account for the 20-point IQ gain exhibited in experiments on the 'Mozart effect'. Einstein claimed to have had the inspiration for the Theory of Relativity while listening to Mozart -- this especially makes sense if Mozart's music contains information from the future which might have subliminally influenced Einstein. 10. Based on decoding messages in Mozart, Bach, Pink Floyd, Stockhausen, Frampton, etc., I determined the existence of an 'alternate Universe' or history which diverges from ours in approximately the year 1977. (Recent work by Hawking and Hertog implied that there clearly have been 'other universes' in history, which might be confirmed by examining cosmic background radiation levels -- some of this work is associated with NASA scientist John Mather, who won the Nobel for his efforts). Hawking and Hertog contend that their theory hasn't yet been confirmed, but I am inclined to say that I have already proved it, by using a fairly devious means. 11. There is a great black hole at the center of our galaxy, and it is much larger than previously thought (I was right on both counts, although I might have seriously overestimated the size of the black hole by a magnitude of 3 [digits]). 12. The Vulcans ("Star Trek") could really be based on witness-reports of aliens from Tau Ceti (some claim to have seen beings with pointed ears). "Star Trek" itself could be largely based on Top Secret UFO files, and CIA agents like James Jesus Angleton, Leonard McCoy, and Scotty Miler (among others). The CIA was actually founded two months after the Roswell event (or non-event) in 1947. 13. An extraterrestrial (or UFO/saucer/time-machine) crash at Roswell probably really happened. Among other things, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the Army to bury test-crash dummies in child-size coffins. 14. Prior to Seth Shostak making the proclamation that the SETI project was looking for messages from alien (i.e. ET) life-forms in "all the wrong places," I copyrighted my notes and thoughts on the subject (as "The Encryptment Thesis" in 1994), where I discuss the idea that truly advanced alien civilizations wouldn't send out signals to more primitive planets (like Earth), but would probably encrypt evidence of faster-than-lightspeed travel in 'places' which would have some degree of permanence. Encrypting coded messages (about the future) into great artworks like Bach's Brandeburg Concerti, Mozart Symphonies, etc., would allow a slow "coming to consciousness" for Humanity, that it already has had, and always will have had alien contact, but simply didn't understand it yet. 15. Based on my reading of philosopher/logician Saul Kripke's "Naming and Necessity", as well as my observations of encrypted or subliminal speech fragments in music, I speculated that sound itself may have properties which actually influence or predict events... This is a metaphysical concept which seems tangential to Kripke's thoughts on issues like 'rigid designation', and more along the lines of Russellian thinking. In any case, I think I was the first to try to apply it methodically, yielding successful predictions of severe disasters on multiple occassions. The goal of predicting disasters does make sense, since if they can be predicted, they may also potentially be averted. 16. The movie "Zoolander" is obviously based on Eric Lander of MIT's Whitehead Institute and his work on the human genome project, although the resemblances between Ben Stiller's character and Eric Lander are relatively small. 17. A convenient unit for measuring the rate of time-travel/interstellar travel for a fairly advanced culture would be "lyps" (i.e. "light-years per second"). Civilizations with 'time-suit' or 'lyps' technology would literally be able to travel to other stellar systems in seconds. Given that many of the existing clues about faster-than-lightspeed travel exist as synthetic speech encrypted in music (somewhat like song, but still 'unsung'), I think that the use of the term 'lyps' is sufficiently appropriate. This is my list so far... I will continue to work on it, and see where it leads me. Obviously, it's not that long, yet, but it's a start.

Questioning Biases About Doppelgangers

NICHOLAS MEYLER·MONDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2017·4 MINUTES

If we take a look at the history of people who have had noteworthy Doppelgangers -- who have at least written about them and sometimes had witnesses who corroborated their stories, the “Double-goers” or “Shadow-walkers” are frequently harbingers of bad omens.

I, however, have been aware of my auditory doppelganger for at least 40 years without any drastic ill-effects, and have actually found its existence to be intriguing and stimulative of a great deal of thought.

Relatively few "musical" or "auditory" doppelgangers have been reported. My analysis of this phenomenon is unique, as far as I know, and involves extremely sane, highly rational people who are among the brightest and most successful people in the World. One of the best-known examples of the idea of a Doppelganger in Art (in Fiction) is Oscar Wildes’ “Dorian Gray”. Wilde’s choice of the name “Dorian” is interesting because it is a musical modality, established in Ancient Greek times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorian_mode, as well as a word evocative of Gold (i.e. “D’Or”). In Wilde’s fantastic fiction, Dorian’s portrait ages and becomes ugly, while he remains the same. In Music, contradistinctively, nothing changes, and all is preserved for the inspection of posterity.

Hearing "Beethoven" subtly mentioned in a Mozart Symphony is an example. Hearing the name "Casiraghi" in Beethoven's "Geister Trio" would be another. Beethoven actually modeled himself in some compositions, where it sounds like he is composing syntheses of his own name... "Wittgenstein" appears to be mentioned in a Haydn symphony, although I can't recall precisely which one. Saul "Kripke" is clearly mentioned in Stockhausen's "Ylem"; Norman Borlaug is very clearly mentioned in "Ceylon" and "Kurzwellen" (before he won recognition for the Nobel Prize), and the "Nobel Prize" itself is mentioned in Mozart's 14th Symphony, a century before it existed.

There can be a degree of indeterminacy about identities modelled in Music (or Art, in general), but I often find portions of Stockhausen’s “Kurzwellen” to evoke some thoughts of Stephen Hawking. This was a composition from 1968, before Hawking was really famed, and it also has a peculiar phrase (i.e. “His wheelchair’s God”) which is odd since it happened to be composed before Hawking was even a Professor at Cambridge, and long before he announced himself as an Atheist.

I once told a friend from Princeton who also attended Saul Kripke's ‘Advanced Logic’ course, that I thought I heard his name mentioned in Beethoven's 8th Symphony, and wondered if he concurred. Within a decade, the "Beastie Boys" composed a tune called "Intergalactic Planetary", which is filled with obvious and clear speech-synthesis, including his name ("Brilliant Burtie" is how they put it), along with the mention of "Another Dimension, another dimension". Burt Totaro's research on higher dimensions in Algebraic Topology is something that appears to be very relevant to this kind of acoustical modeling: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0209173. Burt eventually went to work at Cambridge University, in Stephen Hawking’s Math Department, and now works at UCLA (a school founded by my great-great grandfather George Gephard).

Other acoustic/auditory doppelgangers exist for several of my Princeton classmates: Jody Savin (Director/Producer class of '82) is modeled with me in Mozart's 41st Symphony. Christopher Gocke (Cancer Pathologist class of '81) is mentioned in Beethoven's 3rd Symphony. "Hoookie" was a nickname for CIA Director/Secretary of Defence James Schlesinger's niece, "Kathryn" and appears in the Brandenburgs as well as the Salzburg Symphonies.

I have been aware of the existence of all these contemporary "acoustic models"/ Doppelgangers for many years, now, and all of them (except Borlaug, who died at the age of 93 or 94) are still alive. This clearly "breaks the mold" on the concept of Doppelgangerism being purely a harbinger of bad things.

My intent is to address the oddity of these observations and find logical ways to account for them. I think their causation might have something to do with my grandparents having been friendly with JFK's CIA Director, who was also the Secretary of the Army in 1948 (the year after the Roswell Crash). John McCone was a Secretary or President of the AEC, the Air Force, etc., and was involved in Project “Bluebook”, which I remember asking about when I was between the ages of 6 and 8.

I look for explanations based on acquisition and use of Alien Technologies, rather than Spiritual/Metaphysical issues, but the truth is that these might actually overlap.

SETI: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

NICHOLAS MEYLER·FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2019·1 MINUTE

I find it puzzling that no one seems to care about the superluminally embedded speech-synthesis in Mozart's early Salzburg symphonies that clearly enunciate details of events that actually happened in the late 1970's, some hundreds of years after his birth.

Moreover, Karlheinz Stockhausen, who claimed to come from the star Sirius, includes plenty of cryptographic details about both me and my distant cousin, Norman Borlaug, who is credited with saving 1 billion lives. Plenty of prochronistic anachronistic cryptography is embedded in Ceylon/Bird of Passage (Chrysalis Records), for example (published in 1975, several years before I even knew who Stockhausen was, although 5 years after Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Nobel Prize).... The inference that I was the CIA UFO pilot that brought him here from Sirius is fairly obvious, in retrospect. Probably working in tandem with Iran-contra figure Felix Rodriguez.... ("Ear on Contra")

In any case, if the search for neutrinos was conducted in Salt mines, deep below the Earth, I think the search for ET should probably be conducted in Salzburg symphonies several hundred years old. The scholarship of Stockhausen merely amplifies the obvious facts. One thing I didn't like was Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to pass off Edward Snowden as the originator of my theory about Alien cryptography and signal transmission as his own.

Close Note

Notes on “Watergate”

NICHOLAS MEYLER·FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 2017·6 MINUTES

Nixon was extremely interested in UFOs, and so was Haldeman. The conversation dealt partly with a UFO experience/sighting that I had had, personally. My family was also friendly with JFK's CIA Director John McCone, who I definitely met, and who had indicated to me that the Democratic Party (including LBJ) were behind the JFK assassination. Thus, it would have been completely natural for me to be in sympathy with the just-reported break-in at the DNC, and expressing my support (misguided or not). My family has been friendly (over decades) with several different Presidents' closest friends and advisors.

Because of my concern, at the time, that McGovern was fomenting a potential assassination, I actually advised several people that I thought that it would be reasonable to bug the DNC, and listen in on conversations for any possible clues about assassination plots. One of these was Otis Chandler, I believe, who encouraged my effort at protecting the Presidency, despite his being an ardent "JFK Democrat". Chandler was the former owner of the LA Times, and quite well-known. Obviously, if my family was acquainted with the Chandlers, it wouldn't have been very far-fetched to contend that I could have been placed in verbal contact with Bob Woodward.

No one else, that I know of, has been able to explain exactly why Watergate even happened, let alone how they know why it happened, so I suspect that my claim might well "trump" Mark Felt's claim to be a key informant. One key doubt about Mark Felt is that he couldn't possibly have had any knowledge of the 18.5 minutes of tape, nor what it was about, since he wasn't a "Whitehouse insider".

Also, it has been pointed out that Woodward couldn't have been correct to assert (as he claims) that he communicated with "Deep Throat" by placing a flowerpot on his balcony. Adrian Havill's research proved that no flowerpot could have been seen from the street... also, Havill pointed out that "Deep Throat" couldn't have communicated with Woodward by drawing clocks on the newspaper (as claimed in "All the President's Men"), since the papers were delivered in a stack in the lobby, and not personally, so Woodward couldn't have known which paper to pick.

The tape could well have been erased to protect the identity of a minor (I was 12, at the time), and also because UFOs are considered a matter of highest secrecy and national security.

I should also point out that my name "Nick Meyler" makes a fairly obvious pun ("Neck Miler") on Deep Throat... It also makes a pun on "Iran contra" (Miler/Nicaragua), and I do feel I should point out that I actually invented the Iran-contra plot (as I claim in my 2004 and 2005 Marquis' Who's Who Entry).

In fact, I invented Iran-contra, based on p. 518 of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", partly out of a sense of moral outrage at people like Woodward, who had exploited me as a minor, and contributed to my delinquency, by giving me an eponym (i.e. "Deep Throat") which is highly sexual, and obscene. Also, I saw an opportunity to help protect the United States from Communism, and to help hostages held in Iran. Note that Ollie North, much better known for his role in Iran-contra than I, has never claimed to have invented the concept. If anything, he said he received the idea from Ghorbanifar (which I of course dispute, since I had sent in a 4-page letter to President Reagan in 1983 or 1984, outlining my reasoning for this covert action -- since my grandparents were friendly with some of Reagan's key supporters, I was listened to, when others might not have been).

Not only this, but the term "Deep Throat" as I understand it, refers to a phenomenon of speech-synthesis (synthetic voice [or "throat"] by musical instruments (also discussed in my Who's Who entry, and in my entry in the 1993 Cambridge International Biographical Society's "Men of Achievement"). I am the subject of a considerable amount of musical art "modeling", and, for example am modeled in the subliminal lyrics of the album "Dark Side of the Moon" (very popular at the time), and numerous other pieces of music.

The fact that I was only 12 to 14 at the time is irrelevant, since I have an IQ which has been reported/estimated at 215 (and I did actually score a 195 on one test, though it might not have been my best performance), certainly high enough to be significantly intellectual at an early age.

"Deep Throat" was probably more than one person, but certainly not mostly Mark Felt. I feel that my claim to be that more or less fictional identity (and certainly not a name of my own choosing, at least as I recall) is sounder, more reasonable, and more accurate than what Woodward and Bernstein are claiming.

Because I was intuitively aware that Bob Woodward was probably a liar, even as a 14 year old, I called upon some of my acquaintances to help me recollect events carefully. As a chessplayer, I was in tournaments ("All the President's Men is also an allusion to "All the King's Men", obviously), and had met people like James Tarjan, who was a US Champion. Tarjan's brother is a world-leading authority on Artificial Intelligence and Computers, and it is well-known that the most famous computer chess programs are named after "Deep Throat" (i.e. "Deep Thought" and "Deep Blue"). I definitely believe that I can remember James Tarjan telling me not to trust Woodward to eventually tell the truth, and that the scheme of overcoming his deception could be accomplished by long-range planning (which chessplayers naturally have a greater faculty for). So, this justifies the naming of the computer programs, and serves the ulterior purpose of outwitting Woodward. Parenthetically, dull chessplayers are sometimes referred to as "woodpushers". I suspect I am a mere "woodpusher" (currently only rated 2040) to James Tarjan, but I am convinced that I have accomplished a goal of long-range planning, to defeat disinformation by the American media.

For those (and other) reasons, I think that the "divulgence" of Mark Felt as "Deep Throat" is a fraud by Woodward and Bernstein. It certainly would make sense, however, that a journalist would like to keep hidden the fact that he dubbed a 14-year old "Deep Throat". I have claimed to be "Deep Throat" before, as early as 2003, in an article I published on "Useless Knowledge.com" To my thinking, Woodward and Bernstein's conduct violates my intellectual property rights, and my right to publicity on this controversial matter.

There are other instance of Woodward blatantly lying, too. For instance, he claimed to have interviewed CIA Director William Casey after brain surgery (Casey couldn't even speak at the time). Casey's widow was quite offended with his lies, I recall. And, after all, when Felt "came out" as "Deep Throat", Woodward and Bernstein both initially denied it -- and then changed their stories within 24 hours.

So, clearly, doubting their account of events is extremely reasonable. My feeling is that I have "force majeur" in demonstrating who more closely resembles that obscene moniker.

I believe (if my memory is accurate) that I was introduced to Nixon telephonically by Robert Haldeman, whose family had been friendly with mine since at least 1963. That would have been the 18.5 minutes of tape that was later erased (i.e. referred to as "Tape 342"). In fact, my phone number at the time was 342-2445, in Tarzana, CA.

On the Utility of Music as Cryptocurrency

NICHOLAS MEYLER·SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2017·3 MINUTES

On the Micronesian Island of Yap, in olden times, money consisted of large stones carved into several-foot diameter circular shapes with central holes of several inches in diameter.

There was no actual use (or “utility”) for these stones, but they could only be made by taking long and dangerous sea-voyages to islands hundreds of miles away, where the the limestone could be quarried, and then transported back (via outrigger canoe) at an even higher and more perilous risk... The value of this currency was therefore based only on its rarity and the inherent difficulty of its acquisition.

One might also infer, from the roundness of these carved and polished stones, that they could be rolled for spatial intervals, to be transported. This, my Readers, was the invention of “Rock and Roll”.

I suggest that there is much greater usefulness to mere sound-waves (i.e. as “Music”) which seems to justify an even higher value than the old Yap stones (at the very least). I postulate the following:

Time=Money

Information=Money

Intelligence=Money

Therefore, Superluminally-embedded Information which allows alteration of Future History should also be "Money".

Sound has been demonstrated to be able to travel faster than lightspeed (i.e. "superluminally"), because Phonons (quanta of sound/vibration) are massless and therefore not restricted to the Einstein limit of velocity (c= speed of light).

Music itself is the original cryptocurrency. It brings joy to the listener, or a plenitude of other emotions, and subliminally imparts information about 5-Dimensional Hilbert Spaces. In my opinion, that is why People can score 20-points higher on IQ tests while listening to Mozart (i.e. "The Mozart Effect"), because so much of his music is based on time-travel and alternate Universes (Alternate Histories). Einstein himself admitted that most of his inspiration for Relativity came from listening to Mozart, and as an accomplished violinist with a very keen ear, his statement cannot be discounted as mere metaphor.

The primary effect of listening to Mozart is enhanced "Spatial Reasoning" skills, which is quite reasonable if we consider that Mozart's music (especially) contains some of the clearest examples of speech-synthesis and superluminal information content, as well as clear-cut discussions of Alternate World-histories, etc. Ingmar Bergman also agreed with me about this (“Bach and Beethoven show us other worlds”). https://www.facebook.com/notes/nicholas-meyler/ingmar-bergman-on-possible-worlds-beethoven-and-bach/125256810845569/

In any case, one of the reasons Apollo was the Greek God of Music, Prophecy and Reason (in my opinion) is that Music permits Superluminal Information Transmission and thereby enables great Reasoning skills, based on better Information.

The old adage about music being worthless (i.e. "It's worth a song", meaning valueless) is questionable. Rather, Music is perhaps a cryptocurrency of greater value than mere "money" itself.

The idea behind Bitcoin was that digital information has inherent value. This has proven, at least empirically, at least so far, to be true, where Bitcoin has commanded prices up to $15,000 per unit.

There is also a utility to Music, based on psychoacoustical phenomena, which is unique. For instance, acoustical perception of the note A (440 Hz) actually stimulates nerves in the brain to vibrate at exactly 440 Hz ["This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel J. Levitin: http://daniellevitin.com/…/boo…/this-is-your-brain-on-music/]

No other type of perception of Art forms does this. So, Music, which is clearly an Art, has a unique value unto itself. We also know that Art has value, from recent events like a fairly unknown painting by Da Vinci selling for $450 million.

So, I suggest that we need to re-think our attitudes about Music, and reconsider it to be a medium of communication and commerce which deserves greater attention.

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