SatNav for the soul®

Oil on canvas

As a day tripper to London, I will often buy a travel pass that will last me for the day. As I often catch an early evening train home, I have a card which is valid for a few more hours and which I don’t need. But someone else could make use of it.

Here is what I suggest. Big Issue sellers congregate in or near the large railway stations of the city. People who have no further use for the travel cards donate them to a BI seller. The BI seller then sells a copy of the magazine with a free travel card inside it. In this way, it becomes known that these BI sellers are useful repositories of unwanted travel cards that still have several hours usage on them. Anyone with a long journey would find it worth their while to buy an issue of the magazine just for the card.

This would do everyone a favour; the traveller who wants to help out, the BI seller who would sell more copies of the magazine in a shorter time frame and the final user who gets a cheaper ride home.

I have a particular interest in edges. In a moral argument, I always ask, “Where is the extreme edge of this position?” This can often prove difficult. It quickly exposes those ideas which are simply fashion based or prejudiced.

So I considered the transporter concept in Star Trek. For those not familiar with the concept (cue jokes about which planet have you been living on) a beam locates an individual and does something to their molecules which allows them to be transported over great distances to another location where they are reassembled. If this were a reality, the problem in the technology would be in defining the edge of the object being transported.

For example, the person standing on the floor of the transporter would have to be differentiated from the floor. How could this be done?

The quantum laws are at odds with the Newtonian laws of physics. They simply can’t be reconciled. So with the transporter concept, this cusp between the two has to be dealt with. In the programme, there is a casual reference to the problem with the mention of a ‘Heisenberg compensator’, which is supposed to address this issue, but it doesn’t really do justice to the enormous complexity of the problem. With the interconnectedness of things, separating the floor from the soles of the boots of the person being transported is mind bogglingly complex. One can easily envisage a crew member having to replace a pair of boots regularly as each time they transport, they lose several molecular layers off their boots.

Also, a vacuum would be created at the instant of transportation and a mini sonic boom should be heard (but we don’t in the programme). Equally, where is the existing matter displaced when the objects are reassembled on the surface of the planet? How are they ‘moved aside’, rather than incorporated into the object?

Somebody has to ask these questions, otherwise, there will never be ‘progress’. If there is anything I have missed, please let me know.

Some regular visitors to this blog will have noticed that a week or so ago, it was off-line for several days. Here’s what happened. One evening I was looking at the comments on my latest post, then I went to bed. In the morning, I went to look at my blog and it wasn’t working. That’s it.

I had done nothing to it, it simply stopped working. What followed was an intense, unpleasant experience of many telephone calls, software upgrades, software uninstall’s, database backups, Google searches, studies of code etc.

At one stage I was prepared to give up. The entire process was too complex to remedy. It would need an expert to fix it and I may have lost all my data. So then I had the idea of starting again from scratch, a brand new blog. This was a strangely thrilling idea. It’s like the idea of owning nothing; at first the thought is terrifying, but then you realise that you would be free of any responsibility and you have the opportunity to start again.

In the end, with the help of various people volunteering advice, I was able to reinstate the blog but there was one comment from a call centre employee of the service provider I use, that made an impression on me. He said, “You are not obliged to upgrade.” He was right, and totally wrong. Of course I could still be using floppy discs if I wanted to but the rest of the world wouldn’t let me. I’m guessing that my blog stopped working because the service provider changed something at their end. My old version of WordPress probably couldn’t handle it. The world moves on, and what worked yesterday, may not work today. The speed of change is exponential. That means it will soon overtake our ability to cope with it.

Here’s the other lesson I was reminded of. If the blog can suddenly stop working, what else can? Well, everything, of course. Imagine waking up in the morning and discovering that you had no power in your house. Could you fix it? Remember, you can’t Google the problem, you have no power.

As a student, I bought a hi-fi system off a room mate. As you would expect from students, it was cheap and functional. It had a Garrard deck, an Amstrad amplifier and Solavox speakers. It gave me many hours of listening pleasure.

When I left college and got a job which gave me disposable income, I went to an auction and bought a Teac amplifier and cassette deck. These items were high quality, and once they were incorporated into my hi-fi system, it was apparent that the overall sound was improved considerably. Over the years it gave me great pleasure.

Eventually I replaced the record deck with a cd player. The powerful Teac amplifier however, was never fully tested. I lived in a terraced house which meant I could only play loud music when I knew my neighbours were out and the ‘loud‘ was only relative. The Solavox speakers were rated at 30 watts and my amp, 80 watts, so any significant volume created distortion in the speakers. Fortunately, my taste in music was somewhat enhanced by distortion, so I didn’t particularly notice.

Then I got married and eventually moved to a detached house with plenty of room. This meant that the Solavox speakers didn’t need to be suspended from the wall anymore. In fact, I could get some decent floor standing speakers and finally upgrade the weakest link in my sound system chain. A little bit of research suggested a pair of Mission speakers was what was needed and a visit to a dedicated hi-fi shop produced a couple of surprises.

Firstly, I could actually test the speakers in a sound proof room before I bought them. Then, when I said I would have them, the shop assistant insisted that I also buy proprietorial speaker cable which looked and weighed like the stuff they lay across the Atlantic.

When I got the speakers home and wired them up to the amplifier I noticed that the amp had the facility to attach an additional set of speakers. An interesting exercise in comparison presented itself, so I wired up both sets of speakers to do a test. A favourite cd was inserted and I waited for a suitable passage of music to switch from the one set of speakers to the other. When I did, a psychological seismic shock occurred. The Solavox speakers sounded like incomprehensible mush when compared against the Mission speakers. It was a fight between an anorexic teenage girl and a pituitary assisted, super heavyweight, Olympic boxing champion. It was a chasm of quality so wide that I couldn’t actually see the other side of the chasm, and I had a moment of existential doubt.

Did it mean that the pleasure I had enjoyed from the original speakers was now somehow invalid?  Were those hours of listening pleasure, ersatz?  If I had not directly compared the two products, would this doubt have arisen? Did it matter, now that it had? Should I have looked on the positive side and been happy that I had, at last, discovered a better product and that my listening pleasure would, from now on, be enhanced?

But it gets worse.

Once I had given the Solavox speakers away and just had the Mission speakers connected, another temptation arose.

The speakers are rated a lot higher than the amplifier, which means that I can turn the amp to full volume and the sound wouldn’t distort. And as I now live in a detached house with insulated walls, there is nothing to stop me from doing so.

Except there is. The amp is more powerful than my hearing can stand. If I wanted to listen to music at full volume I would have to wear ear defenders, which obviously, defeats the object. This means that I have an amp and a set of speakers that I can never fully appreciate.

I interpreted this as an, opportunity loss and felt vaguely disappointed. I realised I had come to the end of my hi-fi arms race. To continue upgrading was futile.

Some people will be reading this and, being expert with the equipment available in the hi-fi market, be despairing of my standards. But this is exactly my point.

Isn’t this where we are in our consumerist culture? With its limitless array of choices and upgrades, we go through this process of comparison all the time. We call it progress, but a better description of it is, turning up the volume.

We each have different elements to our lives – work, family, hobbies, goals – and we try to improve each of these areas as we go along – a promotion, a new partner, a bigger house, a more adventurous holiday. At some point though, we reach a threshold. We can’t turn up the volume any more without causing pain to ourselves or someone near us.

Consider the razors currently for sale. Those five, vibrating, individually lubricated blades cut bristles just as well as the original single blade did (and can still do, if they haven’t deliberately down graded the quality). All that has happened is that the volume has been turned up. Adding a sixth blade isn’t going to produce a closer shave but you can be sure it will be marketed as a ‘better’ product.

We live in a society today that has the volume knob already rammed up to 10 and the noise is so loud that we have unknowingly crossed the threshold from excitement into pain. Just look at the evidence in the mental health statistics.

The only solution the industrialised system has to offer is to produce a volume knob with the number 11 etched on it.  It’s a mindset that will eventually destroy our ability to appreciation the very things that we claim to value.

It is time to turn down the volume and to listen to the music again, to appreciate the subtle rhythms and harmonies of life. This is my song, but who will hear it, amidst the noise?

On the mainstream propaganda news today, was a story about CEO’s pay going up whilst the profits of the companies they manage were going down. The justification for this anomaly, was that CEO’s need to work harder in a recession and, “in order to keep the best people who can get you out of a fix you need to pay them the going rate”.

Wait a minute, I’m sure I’ve heard that argument somewhere before… Oh yes, it was during the boom years, except it had one little tweak; “in order to keep the best people who can maintain a profit you need to pay them the going rate”.

Being a CEO seems like a win win sinecure to me. Their culpability is never up for discussion. Now how did that happen?

There is some ineluctable logic here; if the police presence at the G20 was so massive, how come the ‘anarchists’ could destroy property with impunity? And how come camera crews were there, but not the police? Do the news crews have better intelligence than the police?

Also, we can only assume that the police operation, which cost millions of dollars, was a failure because the very thing they were trying to stop – property being destroyed – occurred unmolested. Presumably, this was because the police were too busy gassing innocent protesters who only wanted to sit down on some grass.

I knew absolutely nothing of this performance artist before I attended the talk, and so my expectations were low. Good job really.

He commenced his talk with interminable video clips of his appearances on breakfast shows and the like. It was apparent that he filled the media slot usually preceded with the words, “And finally…” and features things like skateboarding cats or balloonists caught on camera, tangling with electricity pylons. This produced several thoughts for me.

1. Why, after so many high profile pundits have expressly forbid it, do speakers insist on taking up valuable time with video clips I could just as easily see on the internet. They are there in person to tell the audience something personal. If I can get just as much from a video, what is the point of them being there at all? Admittedly, a short clip is sometimes warranted if they want to speak specifically about what is in the clip, but twenty minutes is far too long.
2. The works, as described in the news reports, were more akin to old Monty Python comedy sketches than anything I would define as art.
3. The overriding impression I got from this video montage was a desperate cry for attention – “Look how famous I am! I have been on all of these specious shows!”

Thankfully, he stopped the video clips and started to speak. What came out though wasn’t much better. There was a football story about psychologically driven managers, another football analogy about something or other and references to trips abroad. Absolutely nothing about his philosophical standpoint or the values and beliefs that he holds (I assume he has some because he referred to GlaxoSmithKline as being ‘dirty’ patrons of the arts).

Finally, he asked for questions and during this interchange, something interesting cropped up. It was revealed that he had spent time living on the streets and in mental asylums. This produced an automatic reconfiguration of gears in my mental processes and several trains of thought emerged.

His back-story is one of mental turmoil, do I need to re-evaluate the work? It is like being shown a painting and then being asked to express an opinion of it. You say you don’t like it, it’s childish. You are then told, it was created by a tortured genius, do you still think it is childish? Rationally, it is still the same artefact that you professed to dislike. Psychologically however, your perception has changed, which begs the question, “Is it the thing itself which is art or is it the myth surrounding the thing, that is the art?”

Well, even with that insight I was unable to find any additional dimension to his work. It did perhaps explain to some extent though, the introductory video. If I had come from such a difficult background and discovered a trick that got me a lot of attention, I too would be proudly telling anyone who cared to listen, to see how media worthy I am! As a self publicist, he is excellent.

Infuriatingly, the very last thing that he commented on, produced the greatest insight. He said, people had pointed out that a lot of his work was ’shame’ based. And indeed, a lot of the video clips showed him crawling on his hands and knees performing acts of humility and supplication. Considering his early history, this was a fascinating area for discussion but tragically, it ended where it should have started.

From what I learned that evening, this Banksy of the performance world, is a comedian. This is not to denigrate comedy, one of the sharpest tools of social commentary that we have, but it only cuts so deep. It stimulates the intellectual part of our brains. Great art goes much deeper and penetrates the hidden, silent world of our souls, and moves us.