Close Enough for Folk Music

I'm far from a veteran, in the sense of expert, when it comes to the local folk music theme. However, another family, the Pinneys, pivotal in transforming Stark Street facility into a real Quaker meetinghouse, knows the folk music scene inside-out, and Sonya, the matriarch Pinney, personally invited me to this elite gathering at Reedwood Friends Church. I was more than happy to accept her extra ticket and perform as chauffeur, a preferred role.

Bobby Jenkins, far different from me, is indeed an expert, both in the lore surrounding, and in the playing, of folk music using authentic folk instruments, in the string family especially I gather, including the Theremin (a "stringless" violin). Tonight he featured the banjo and the classical guitar. He would return both instruments adroitly as a part of the performance, as the range of tunes he was covering were by now means all designed for the same scales. If that sounds like I know music theory, trust me, I'm faking it.

Jenkins leverages the fact that he doesn't need to masquerade in blackface and come off like a phony white person pretending to be otherwise (whites are good at that, like parrots or minah birds, just witness their stand up comics). He knows Portland really well and had QuarterWorld in mind for his destination after the show, as he's a connoisseur of pop culture and knows what Portland is known for. The guy is originally from Brooklyn NYC, with those famous STEM schools, but with a lot of North Carolina background.

The narrative he delivered, which I found no reason to contradict, was that what we call the banjo was primarily a slave class instrument, and its vocabulary, in terms of native tunes, turns towards the defiant, as well as the encrypted. African cultures needed to find a way to self perpetuate, despite the imposition of a Christian framework, which they learned to adapt towards their own purposes, all of which accounts for the vitality of the all-Americas music scene to this day (Bobby knows a lot about the evolution of Reggae).

The audience, unlike me, were indeed veterans of the folk music scene, many like my friend Sonya with season tickets and a long track record of getting educated along these lines, by a variety of accomplished shows on the road. I'm reminded of the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, produced by ISEPP, where I was a veteran, in terms of how a certain "trans-episodic shoptalk" bleeds through. That's a fancy way of saying insiders seem to know what they're talking about, whereas as outsiders within hearing distance (like children peripheral to the council of elders) pick up on what they glean and formulate their own conjectures and speculations.

Now that slavery and apartheid have ended, although we'll continue paying karmic costs, it pays to go back and do what the Civil Rights Institute in Bellingham does: revisit the past in meticulous detail. Overcoming a chapter does not mean turning one's back on the content, but rather diving in with gusto, without the polarizations of the past. Novel perspectives, low hanging fruit, is easy to come by, another way of saying such scholarship is rewarding. Jenkins, highly skilled, even brings some of the higher hanging fruit within the comprehension range of a noob such as myself.

I was surprised to learn from Sonya about the death of one of my peers in Quaker-verse, Laura Martin. The Martins, along with the Pinneys, Jumps, Urners, and Hazel Hephill, were among the original families of our nascent Quaker meeting on Stark Street. As we awaited the show starting, sitting in those Reedwood pews (I don't access this space very often), I shared with Sonya our saga as I'd come to learn it, about the heroic exploits of one Doug Strain, the conscientious objector who helped our Quakers get their show on the road back in the mid 1900s. The Urners had recently moved from 57th Street Meeting in Chicago, their new son (me) in tow.

Bobby's performance reminded my of Danny Ryan's. Danny would specialize in offbeat blues bordering on what never made it on the record, again inheriting bigly from slave subcultures in the north American southeast, around the Mississippi Delta and so on.

Next Projects

Vintage Blender 2.5

You might’ve come across me talking about Blender here and there, meaning the animation and spatial design environment, in the same ballpark as Maya and Rhino.

I keep reimplementing a core framework of polyhedrons, arranged in accordance with the Synergetics Hierarchy (a concentric arrangement of a familiar cast), having it backend in different file formats: vrml, pov, stl, or directly into animation tanks (cartoon vistas): Visual Python’s, Blender’s and Rhino’s.

Ideally, the same scripts I use to develop POV-Ray stills (.pov files) could be used to drive Blender, with the result being a real time interactive vista, suitable for VR. I’ve accomplished this goal to partial degree but don’t really have the energy slaves (inanimate machinery) to commit to running the newest Blender.

To that end, a next Linux box is on my wish list. Or a Mac with similar rendering capabilities. As of this time, Windows is too unstable to take seriously.

However I’m not wanting to be a bottleneck and prefer accelerating the spread of the existing knowledge base over doing cutting edge R&D. Andragogy and pedagogy, curriculum development, testing, improving, have been core concerns, over coming up with something splashy, not that our content isn’t naturally splashy.

Bizmotica

Espied on Hawthorne Upon Descending from Mt. Tabor

Madam I’m Adam

Yes the title is a palindrome, letting the comma go where it needs to, but that’s not the topic here. Rather I’m hearkening back to my senior thesis at Princeton, on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, wherein I posited a thought experiment.

The thought experiment: I wanted my reader to posit a single Adam, like an LLM (not a term in 1979), that spoke through everybody. Think of language like that, and you’ll maybe DuckRabbit into the Wittgensteinian view, of a vast machinery without interiority, which isn’t to say we don’t have private lives, only that “we” belongs to it, as part of its machinery.  See?

I also talked about chunks of text (mega-tokens) getting organized like railroad cars in a switching yard to make sense. Trains of thought. When you read enough, you start to find a lot of the same trains (of thought) in peoples’ writing, which again lends itself to the “One LLM Behind It All” thought experiment.

Nothing changes, actually, when you look at it this way, except one’s “sensibilities” perhaps one could put it. The temptation to lunge at internal ephemera in order to capture “the meaning of” by means of introspection, is lessened, as Wittgenstein suggested would be the case. He’s operating in an aesthetic dimension, not sharing empirical findings from anthropology, except “investigations” do require attention to details, the actual patterns. 

Once you give up the easy picture of meaning, representation, name pointing to object, then what do you replace it with? A more detective like attitude. Discovering meanings takes research, field study. Wittgenstein used the field of mathematics for a lot of his “entomological” studies (or call it “ant work”). Namespaces do tend to colonize one another, which is to say blend, to varying effect.

Turning to one of those “psychological” verbs, is “sulking” a sensation? Does one close one’s eyes and savor that sulking feeling? Is it the same for everyone? 

Or is it a mistake to identify such a complex storyteller verb with some physiologically enmeshed endocrine talk? 

I make fun of the overly literal interpretation of “interiority” in this spoofy prompt to Perplexity:

Help me with a satirical piece poking fun at neurobiologists who over-literalize English verbs to where they imagine chemical processes corresponding to every novelist’s invention, such as “sulking”. These scientists have suddenly discovered the “sulking hormone” and know which part of the brain is involved. Parody prose.

And here’s what Perplexity came back with, some very apropos trains of thought, wending their way through Hilbert Space:

Clever premise — the satire practically writes itself once you imagine a research team describing “sulking” with the seriousness of a Nature Neuroscience paper. Here’s a short parody take you could expand or stylize further:
________________________________

The Sulk Cortex and Its Endocrine Pathways

After decades of neglect, neurobiology has finally caught up with the novelists. In a paper preprinted last week, researchers at the Institute for Limbic Literalism announced discovery of the long-theorized sulking hormone, endosulkine. “It’s what happens,” explained lead author Dr. Primrose Gland, “when an organism receives insufficient validation but refuses both confrontation and forgiveness.”

The team identified a walnut-sized region of the brain near the anterior insula, now dubbed the Sulk Cortex, whose metabolic activity spikes when subjects are asked to “feel misunderstood but also a bit superior.” Functional imaging revealed synchronized pouting waves across hemispheres, particularly when observing others being comforted first.

Administration of synthetic endosulkine to lab mice produced telltale behavioral changes: hunched posture, slow tail swishes, and refusal to run the maze even after being told it “wasn’t their fault.” In humans, microdoses led participants to stare at unwashed dishes while whispering “whatever.”

“We now suspect that sulking may serve an adaptive purpose,” said Dr. Gland. “It allows the brain to conserve energy previously wasted on rational communication.” The team is already investigating adjacent regions potentially responsible for brooding, moping, and the dignified flounce. Funding applications are pending, though reviewers have complained of long delays and pointed silences.

Pretty good for an LLM. Thank you Adam.

Learning Through Playing

The Cat in the Bottle

World Game Museum: Exhibit

Ed Applewhite to Kirby (pdx4d), 13 May 1998

Night and the City (movie review)

I got the Criterion Collection version of this one, and as of this posting I've only been through disc one, but that already means watching the movie twice, the second time with a very knowledgeable overvoice giving all kinds of backstory. That's what I love about the Movie Madness collection: how much behind the scenes stuff is stored. This latest borrowing extends my noirs kick.

The director of the film was a little like the anti-hero, a guy on the run, in the director's case from the fascists using "anti-communism" as a rallying cry for the mob. The mob controlled Hollywood and people like the director, into more American values, had to leave the country to find work. Unlike the movie’s loser dreamer schemer, Jules Dassin managed to have a pretty successful career in the rear view mirror, despite those ax-grinding Nixonians.

People in 1950 didn't really like the movie when it first came out because it painted too raw of a picture. Instead of capitalism meaning "a few bad apples" (the justice force will protect us) it seemed to mean "bad apples all the way down" (everyone purely selfish and desperate). 

Of course no one talks about "capitalism" in the movie, just they make London the backdrop, and we're supposed to make the connection to "a rotten system" on our own. By whatever name, right?

There’s a lot more to the backstories and I haven’t even watched disc two yet. If you’re into film studies, see if you can find a source as good as Movie Madness. What podcasters talk noirs?  Anything on NPR?

Movie Madness is moving to Sandy Boulevard by the way. The new storefront advertises that’s what’s happening. It’ll be across the street from its parent, the Hollywood Theater. For me, it’ll be a little further to drive, or I’ll do what I did today and take the 75. I was headed to the nearby sushi train.

Filing Taxes

Preparing Taxes

Another Monday rolls around, a first one in March, and suddenly everyone is thinking the same thing: next month I have to pay taxes.

As I’ve blogged about several times over the years, I get interviewed by a tax professional after I’ve retrieved and summarized the year’s documents. This year is no different, other than I have developed more of a system. My wife was a professional bookkeeper so I used to leave the accounting all to her, but twenty years later, I’m not that helpless.

What I do is what everyone who has bank accounts or stuff like PayPal or crypto wallets does: 

• generate statements for the entire year, showing all transactions, both in and out; 
• iterate over all such accounts (we think of iterators in Python, an umbrella type). 
• Then I filter out the business expenses and 
• offset those against business income to keep my taxes that of a small business (which it is).

What do I do for a living? You may have attended some of my lectures, online, asynchronously, or even in person over the years at a Pycon or OSCON or one of these (even a Djangocon in Chicago). 

I put myself down as a teacher and writer (what kind of writing? A lot of it is curriculum development — echoes of my job at McGraw-Hill back in the 1980s). 

I do both with or without income deriving therefrom (gig economy). For example, last year around this same time I was working for bosses based closer to Eastern Europe than to Japan, just to make a Where in the World Carmen Sandiego clue out of it.

Speaking of kid games (computer games for kids), I dusted off an old Codesters account from my Coding with Kids chapter, and was gratified to find my curated projects (not all by me I don’t think) still working. I wonder if any of my students have anything curated. I had a teacher account. 

Codesters came after MIT Scratch in our sequence. All our curriculum stations were cloud based, even if the classes were in person, until the virus hit, the pandemic, at which point we started summer camps over Zoom.

As people were recovering from the pandemic, I found myself back in the classroom, this time with just the one school, not a school-serving company. 

Working with various concepts on up the ladder, starting high, going low (to beginner), back up to a summit and so on, repeatedly, is a great way to get a mature picture of the landscape, so to speak. Which landscape is always changing. 

One can’t help but be out of date on various topics. We get our updates asynchronously, that’s just how it is. There’s an entry under Doppler Effect that’s reminiscent.

Breakfast of Champions

This was a bleak day in world history, so what better way to start than with a good, healthy breakfast of champions? Shades of Vonnegut, right?

I made it to H-Mart yesterday. That’s an Asian (Korean-owned they say) food mart on nearby Belmont, where there used to be a Zupan’s. What was I seeking? Kimchi. I also got a cold sesame noodles I wanna try (missing our favorite Chinese restaurant’s version, closed long ago). And some dried peas I thought were wasabi but were plain, yet still good (I ate the whole bag).

I haven’t found kimchi at Winco, and whereas Fubonn is quite close by there on SE 82nd (as is Hong Phat), a brisk walk from the Steeplejack (was Bank of America) on Hawthorne was in the cards. We had just had our curry stew.

Kimchi and an NA Guinness at around 10 AM gets me going this Saturday. Very Pacific Rim if you ask me.

I’ve been busy printing out bank statements and PayPal logs, getting ready for an appointment with H&R Block. This time last year, I was winding up with Clarusway as a data science teacher and shifting gears into full time Python development in service of my own School of Tomorrow curriculum. That work is paying off in some dimensions.

You could think of me as a writer / teacher who eschewed wood pulp dead trees as a medium (i.e. print) because my dream had always been hypertext, as in hyperlinks, so once the internet came along, it was duck to water time.