It's a tiebreaker between two hourlong works by Brian Eno, for me. They are entitled "Thursday Afternoon" and "Neroli" respectively and I defy anyone to find any work more calming and soothing, even within the canon of Steve Roach or Biosphere who, astonishingly, can be even more ambient, but then at this level, move into the realms of something so ambient as to make the sound of your fridge interesting.....but then, why shouldn't the sound of your fridge be labelled a sort of sonic sculpture??.....in this postmodern way of lookuing at things, music is less a sonic slice of something infused with melody than the cocreated relationship between sentience and sound...our part in constructing music from what we hear has a voice in Eno who, back in the Seventies, defined 'ambient music' as something we could either ignore, like elevaor muzac or involve ourselves in, as we would if sat in the front row of a performance......our choice to do either, or sit somewhere betwen, makes music music....'doth not a well-tuned engine sound like music of the spheres to a mechanic in love with his pistons' as Shakespeare once wrote in his drag-strip racing days.......

anyways, Neroli and Thursday Afternoon are both musical notes arranged in a wonderfully calming way.....whilst TA tends towards a repeated arpeggio, Neroli takes a sequence of notes and repeatedly rearranges them so as to fractallise the work in glorious slomo...

Jon x

The consensual conferring of a judgement tempered by selfobject need, ostensive awe, snakeoil-duping, experimental zeal or obsessive ritualism...it isn't in the object (although pretechno folk ascribe sacredness to a certain something which resides within the object...the Golden Bough is replete with such info...eg manas to the Polynesian tribes....and note that this sacred something differs from the idea of shakti or prana which animates everything....in that this manas-stuff has the magico-mythic quality of ascribing a level of sentience to the object which the object does not, in veritas, possess...)....it isn't in the object, it's our decision to confer sacredness on your dog's crap or the pope's ring....thus everything is sacred in those times when you have the blissed-out unitive experience, and nothing is when you lose a loved one to murder.

delving into that mystery referred to as the opposite sex...and opposite is a rather interesting word in that phrase nyet?....is rather akin to scuba-diving in a quicksand patch....I have no way of understanding what it is to posses a vagina in lieu of them dangly bits, to feel a child growing inside my stomach, to feed a newborn from those chest things, to put on makeup and tights...(well, maybe I'm not such a stranger to that sort of thang)......

The physical thing does not so much confuse mee as leave me in a state of ignorance....actually, the thing that confuses me about sexual difference concerns my attempts to unravel the plethora of armchair theorising which attemptst to define the True Masculine or The True Feminine....this is, I think, an ascription of a metaphysical essence  of masculine and feminine where none exists in reality....we all have the doing and thefeeling stuff regardless of sex and to separate them out as quintessences is to turn the clock back to the times when it was acceptable to see a woman as feely and nurturing because this justified her unsuitability for the manly realms of the senate and corn exchange and contributed heavily to her subjugation.

Naah. Not for me.

Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Live with it.

I've gotten the deckchair out and sat drinking a can of Fosters whilst acquiring a suntan super-quick....mind you, the melting plastic garden furniture has poisonned the lawn which has turned to twig-snappy khaki.....when I strip for the shower, I look like a third-world advert for obscene underwear.....

And then the gushing torrents of floodwater have really honed my kyaking skills cos ya gotta dodge them spikey bits that protrude from the lampposts when sailing down the high street....with my sun tan, I look like one of those guys paddling furiously at the end-credit sequence of Hawaii-5-0 only with stolen hanging baskets of geraniums and pansies culled from the town square awnings in lieu of polynesian talismen....and Steve McGarrett's response to climate change is to get Dann-o to book 'em big style.....but Danny looks around and wonders who you book? The tunnel-vision industrialists, moles who have finallly burrowed all the way to the steel fence of armagedddon? Or the guy who forgot to recycle his fridge when he won a new one last year on the CFC Lottery ('it's a gas!!!)

Thing about climate change is that, like a lovers hand in a long-film cinema date, it creeps upon you very slowly so that there's no abrupt galvanisation, merely seduction in a socially-constructed fuck-scenario, or gradual frigidity......my slomo response has been a gradual infusion of sadness, rage and conceptual vertigo.

With the purchase of a second-hand tardis in 2005, I've been able to soar into the wonderful world of tomorrow and avail myself of all the benefits that are to come.

I'm immune to everything from flu to cancer thanks to the immune-boosting nanobots swimming playfully with my leukocytes.Other nanobots guarantee that I will live to be 850 years old. Boosts to my neurotransmitters have given me an IQ of 200. Carbon filament bone grafts have given me incredible strength and flexibility. Fast-muscle twitch receptor enhancement gives me greater reflex speed than the most advanced martial artist currently living. Twelfth-generation hemisynch tek has me in the nondual state 24/7.

You might think this is all fab but I'm on lethal doses of antidepressants. There are no more challenges. Really. In the 23rd century, theres nothing to push against. We got the climate thing and the economy thing sorted. We don't use money. And it's so fucking boring.

So all the 24th century travellers come back to a bit of second milenial muckraking. 1789 is a great crowd puller. There are no real nouvelle regime bourgeoisie storming the Bastille; they are all 25th century thrillseekers mobbing it up like a frigging Arsenal-Spurs aftergame dustup. Honestly. Wars were not fought out of ethnocentric concerns. They were manufactured in order to give the idle third millenials something to do.

Don't buy a tardis folks. All these struggles give us meaning and value.

I'm looking right now.....I'm looking for a 'me'  within all this space but all I get is a set of narratives that pop up like those unwelcome ads in cyberspace....I am Jon, I live here etc...

But then who is doing the loking? Is that someone?

Where am I then? When I am is right now...but what does that actually mean? A ot of folk banter on about the here-and-now but I question whether many of them actually understand the impossibility of immanence in a dual state.

Hmmm...I got more questions than answers today.

Wot's all that about Guv?

I've heard it said that this speeding up of life processes here in the onrushing aquarian age is detrimental to spiritual evolution because this postmodern richness and diversity we swim in causes our neocortical thinkythink to snap crackle and pop like a bowl of airy substanceless processed cereal rather than allow the slower deeper cortical feely-feel to enable a more mellowed, serene and introspective take on life...you just cannot do both at once, which is why the gear-changeing analogy is becomming more popular in the parlance of the age...you cannot be in first and fourth gear simultaneously here on the self-actualisation boulevard....

Rather than buy into the change-back-into-first mentality, I think that this is an excellent time to shed that sort of retro-romanticw way of thinking and contemplate the fact that here in 2038...oops, 2009 (I'm spending too long in me second-hand tardis) we have the opportunity to practice gear-shifting....I have three; macro is when I problem-solve and timetable in a clean and clear, quick way which gets me beta waves up akimbo and I crack on at a fast thinking pace....I'm currently typing in macro...shortly I will be driving to get the stitches out of my ankle (had a cyst removed, nothing malignant) and will shift down to meso and listen to music, plan the rest of my week and listen to Dan Brown on my iPod all of which will have me slower than I am now and often in alpha if I visualise avalokiteshvara hovering in front of me as I drive.....then there's micro which is my delta mode in which I sit in meditation and let the whole machinery come to rest and listen to the nada which thrums the Silence in every- and no-place at all....

What a wonderful age this is in which one can shift gears in thin timeslices.....sometimes life promotes the stick-shift and sometimes one can choose.....I  think that this is a keynote spiritual practice of the age that was not truely around on a widespread scale 50 years ago as the slow stiltedness of, say, the original Lost in Space can be so juxtaposed against the likes of snapply deep ole District 9.

More scales dropping like hailstones from God's eyes as He She and It observe new levels of awareness and complexity that were not preplanned but a surprise set of emergent properties like wetness emerged once some oxygen and hydrogen atoms got into threesomes

I think that by definition power defines me.

I'm a monsoon of tightly-scheduled broad-spectrum stuff today...whooosh goes the rain on the temple roof......

And behind all of this is a still cerulean sky, wide and open and vast and sunlt.

J x