Vegas on our mind
I'm up late, posting our next gig, I see the news, 50 dead in Vegas.
At a gig.
Damn it.
Our thoughts are with those affected by the events in Vegas.
I'm up late, posting our next gig, I see the news, 50 dead in Vegas.
At a gig.
Damn it.
Our thoughts are with those affected by the events in Vegas.
A strong week.
The video we did (ok, I did) caused some Online Posting. I'm following some strange internal compass when I do this stuff and mean no harm.
That said, in looking at the footage, I didn't make anything up there. It is what it is.
What you walk past, is what you accept. Us muso's are the canaries in the coal mine. The Frogs in the pot. the litmus paper in your pool kit.
If it gets at ya in some way, I'm doing my job.
Now for an actual Soapbox Moment.
Net neutrality matters.
The US Government asking FB for lists of people who were at an anti government rally, matters.
It matters a lot.
There's never been a time in existence where more data has been created stored and referenced for a single human.
George Orwell would totally freak out, it's beyond even anything that could be conceptualised back then, and he was a cluey dude.
Don't fear AI. Fear the inherent selfishness of being human, and that humans will take advantage of opportunities, and that the law often works in retrospect.
As do analysis of elections.
What about 'security'?
Sure. Well argued point. I could point to Franklins' 'security vs liberty' argument (and i do), but, and i am trying to avoid 'but' in my arguments, it's not what's on my mind.
Our very thinking is on display online.
Our lives easily mapped in EFTPOS/ATM transactions.
Seeking to capture information that is used for exploitation and control is unacceptable.
It is, in-human.
We're still a Primate species. Not robots. Not perfect. Each generation, each person, has to learn all the lessons again from scratch.
Our lives are now in permanent record. if so, at least let the use of the record be benign. The keepers of the records subject to scrutiny and to censure.
It's bugging me (pun? groan) to think that a Western Democracy wants to put its citizens on a watch list for protesting.
Again.
Oops.
It disturbs me to think that corporations will throttle information access, like a return to the priests of the Nile, deciding whose fields will be flooded.
Hail Pharoah.
Meanwhile, Bill just sent me 20 songs.
No, make that 22.
I can't sit here trying to think big thinky thinks, we got work to do. Ya mule! ya!
As you drive back towards Sydney, the kerbs return. The streetlights return.
Looking at the bay at Eden, I was struck by the thought that Sydney Harbour would have once looked the same way. Green fingers gripping the water.
You can feel the future as it moves in waves of generations, like ripples in a pond, radiating inland and up and down the coasts from the main centres.
The Australia of Banjo Patterson still exists on the fringes. Vast silences and open spaces, tinder yellow hills.
We triangulated between the edges of the frontier, from the hills to the coast. It made me wonder about the last frontiers, before my mobile phone coverage becomes excellent everywhere.
Strange in the nature of man is to be at odds in such beauty. Living in a smaller town is not some blissful paradise. Perhaps to be a traveller is to skip along the pretty surface. Even as I write that I dismiss it.
In some ways we all live in the country of our mind.
I look at the window and I am awestruck. Amazed by the stars. Fascinated by the edge of the dark I can see in the sliver of a moon. Is this the world I live in, only brighter, more real?
I missed a few days of world connectedness, reading the bad news. I spent some time blogging the scenery for FB. It's a bright feed into the world.
In the browser window in the screen to my right, the world is flashing at me. I'm resisting its pull and staying a moment more in the spaces between the waves.
We had a grand weekend of playing music. Friday we were fumbly, Saturday we got it right and we ended Sunday strong. Jo sang one of the new songs so well I was almost giggling with glee.
I got to hear Dinesh do 'Manifesto' three times. We worked on 'Brave With Your Heart' and got it right. Our logistics were rational and smooth. Getting the simple little things right makes a difference.
We may be visiting the last vestiges of the frontiers, soon you'll need to travel farther to travel back in time.
Thank you to everyone who joined us this weekend and made it possible for us to do it.