To appear in the Proceedings of the XXIVth International Conference on Mathematical Physics in Honor of Keith Ball, Chicago, IL, December 1993
Michael Andrew DuVernois
Department of Physics and the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space
Research
The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60615-1433
Mark Sensing, Esq.
Department of Amazingly Stupid Things and Committee on Eating the
Canon
The University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
ABSTRACT
No, not really.
I. Music viewed as a helix of semiprecious stones, or how Sid Vicious ate Detroit in one sitting and was sick afterwards.
As the brilliant scholar of music theory, Sir Isaac Newton, once said, "To the devil with this loud music stuff." While I am not quite so eloquent, least of all in these later days of the twentieth century when reality has dimmed to a dull glow seen only by a few former Hare Krishnas, I hope to bring forth some important points in the mathematical and physical study of music. Not just any old random music either, but the music of this century, the music of Adolf Hitler, and George Bush, and Albert Einstein, and of the composers themselves, nay, even the musicians. For music is more than mere ornamentation in the lighthouse of state. A tacit assumption normally made in the mathematical study of modern music is that the classical theory of mechanics for discrete music, and the classical theory of fields for continuous (ambient) music is all that is necessary. But is this correct?
At first glance it seems like a reasonable approximation in a field where assumption and consumption are the norm, but does the classical theory allow such a wide range of solutions? Can both Carl McCoy, of and Cyndi Lauper simultaneously move masses of seething humanity to emotion through music? (The related issue of why Carl McCoy and Cyndi Lauper have never been seen simultaneously will have to wait for some further research into the All-Thing.) The modern classical composer John Cage (even though his tie was once cut off in a rather blatant "I wanna be a bigtime Fluxus person" act of violence against the composer) showed that absolutely nothing (done for a suitable period of time) could incite serious controversy. Is this a classical phenomena? It seems unlikely. Or the minimalist Laurie Anderson (who in a minimal way wanted to be known as Loni Anderson, but always worried about the possible confusion on the shooting stage of Cannonball Run 2 fnord (which incidentally stars three of Bill Clinton's half-brothers as themselves)) who accidentally froze her ice skates into place and had to wait for them to melt. Is this classically permissible? Certainly not.
II. The origin of Mammon, the classical theory of music, and the whys and wherefores of dining at the Watergate, or how Detroit got its accursed name.
As the great physicist and stamp collector (yes, it is possible to be both) Sir Isaac Newton pointed out, "I like little girls with big eyelashes, like Bjork." Me disagree? How could I? Anyway, Gauss and Mach are generally credited with the first mathematical analysis of music (note, of music and not of sounds, i.e. psycho-acoustics (a movie by Alfred Hitchcock in which a bathtub, a curtail, a hotel, and a Marshall stack featured prominently)). They analyzed the group theoretical structure of a collection of Gregorian Chants. Unfortunately group theory and music mixed about as well as expected, and both of them died horrible deaths. This work was resumed by Weyl and Heisenberg during the heady days of mathematical music in Weimer-era Berlin. The cabarets were filled with former Dadaists and future National Socialists who joined together in choruses of "1, 2, 3, integrate and differentiate, invade Poland, and factor elliptic curves, 4, 5, 6, Russell and Whitehead are full of sleep dung..." (in German of course).
It was in this atmosphere that they announced the discovery that songs, record albums, and musicians all obeyed the laws of classical mechanics (this was before record labels, Irish rock bands, and America's Top 40 ceased to be mere perturbations). One night in the Cabaret Voltaire, after Liza Minelli finished singing about the joys of dying of a heroin addiction (Lou Reed was only a glimmer in his grandfather's eye at this time), Weyl was enlightened. The Bavarian Illuminati have nothing to do with this paper. He understood that the new-fangled quantum mechanics might eventually be applied to music also. Downing another beer, he realized that he really didn't give a damn as long as he could continue working on gravity and on getting Mrs. Schrodinger into his expansive bed.
The restaurant in the Watergate is extremely expensive, at least in part because the only people who generally dine there are congressmen out to relive the days when Congress could really screw the President, and closet Democrats from Kansas who want to relive the days when they really believed that corruption would be punished. Both groups can afford the meal. Many years ago J. Edgar Hoover also dined there, usually dressed as a southern belle who dallied with French fnord diplomats on loan from their China assignments. A broken drum with the head of David on it. (The other David that is.) A lonesome voice in the wilderness crying for the death of civilization. Freedom of choice. The haunted loneliness... of the long-distance runner. Refret, refret the refrain.
III. On the beginnings of a quantum theory of music, the revealed truth of Steve Jobs, and the oil crisis of 1973, or Detroit: Gift from Little Green Men who might very well be from Mars.
Sir Isaac Newton never did meet Hoover, but did muck around a great deal with mercury anyway. He once stated that "the only good mercury is drunk with rum and a splash of 'Rock Star Sweat Cologne' on a warm afternoon sitting under a fig tree." Little did he know that figs would so profoundly influence Cosey Fanni Tutti as a young girl that she would help form a band that would finally destroy classical mathematical musical theory. And now a word from out sponsor: Glycerin. But long before four art-school friends walked out onto stage under a banner that proclaimed "Throbbing Gristle," the old theories had begun to crumble (insert sounds of crumbling tin wrap). Crude oil prices had gone up considerably due to the Arab embargo following the Yom Kippur War and due to the US support of Israel during that war. Some opinions hold that this was the reason for Gerald Ford lost the 1976 Presidential election to a peanut farmer from Georgia who had had the misfortune to briefly attend the Georgia Institute of Technology - not to mention having a boozing buffoon brother Billy-Bubba.
Some of the first obvious cracks were seen by building inspectors in New York City shortly after the appearance of Pierre Schaffer's first musique concrete albums in the United States of America. Such music, if music it can be called (it can be), clearly did not commute with Bach, Handel, Billy Budd, or even Hank Williams, instead it commuted with nature, and sometimes with Buffy and Biff from accounting. It wasn't a simple composition of linear operators (or instruments, linear or not (only the flute is absolutely linear (in an orchestra that is (many flutes outside of orchestras are in fact rather bent (the players that is))) but the other instruments produce sounds which are nearly linear), and it featured the nearly unforgivable sin of playing natural sounds backwards.
An innocent Southern Baptist minister once heard the sounds of a mockingbird singing backwards on an overpriced French import stereo LP and began a crusade against backwards masking that continues to this day. This same minister, his name is Demogorgon (which lead to a considerable number of cruel jokes during his stay at the seminary and in fact forced him out of the liberal church of his family (all Boston socialites of the highest order (2) and prominent in local charities and character assassinations)), found invocations to Satan in Lead Zeppelin songs (backwards), calls for ritual suicide in Deaf Leopard songs (backwards), Bono's voice in Negativland songs (backwards and forwards), and sexual explicit lyrics in the songs of fnord Frank Sinatra (do you care?). But still there was more, all backwards and forwards, so terribly nonlinear and evil. The devil made fools of us all. In a black dress, my guardian angels walks away. Need that, sexual healing. Dare to be stupid - look a gift-horse in the mouth, mashed potatoes can be your friend. I get along just splendidly with mine. In fact just the other day Dr. Demogorgon (he recently got his Doctor of Divinity degree from a diploma mill in Ventura (coincidentally very near where that man went nuts the other day and started shooting people in the unemployment line)) noticed that there was backward masking on the Christian Death album, Sex, Drugs, and Jesus Christ. He was shocked that a band known for its high road to biblical criticism would backmask the repeated phrase, "God was a geek in high school." That, and the "Piss-Christ," in the same lifetime? If only the Pope Alexander had been so lucky, instead he managed to get that Duchess knocked up and Lucretia was never good at much anything except poisoning the neighbors and even that little knack of hers eventually got old and frightfully dull.
IV. The further adventures of quantum mechanical music beyond every single thunderdome in stereovision 3-D (don't throw that cabbage at me!), aka The Quest for the Lost Chord of Joseph(e) of Arimathea, or why Detroit is almost as bad as Flint.
Further damage was done to the already sinking ship of classical mathematical music theory when, despite all efforts, the lost chord remained, well, it remained lost. Sir Isaac Newton once conducted a thought experiment to verify the existence of the lost chord, sayeth the knight "if it don't exist, then neither do I." However he failed to cover all logical possibilities (since he forgot to return Charles Booles and Charles Babbage's repeated phone calls (Lilli Tomlin wasn't even born yet)), he doesn't exist but the lost chord does. Many brave and noble knights (including George Bush) failed to achieve the chord, still others died in Tulsa. Only the absolutely tainted of heart and mind could achieve the chord.
Not even a general call to search high and low for it made by Moody Blues (who, just like the Holy Roman Empire, are neither moody nor do they play the blues (though they did once write a song about how Timothy Leary was dead even though he wasn't and still isn't)) made any difference, at least partially because no one (except for a certain poet in the Lancaster area of England, the Knights Templar, and Sydney Coleman) thinks their lyrics are anything more than pop psychology. So the lost chord is gone. Long live the lost chord. Or as the anarchists in Spain defiantly spoke in the face of certain death, Vive la morte. Death is a woman. But you knew that already, didn't you? No amount of calculation in the OLDE theory could reveal the Lost Chord (whose importance steadily grew to the point where capital letters were necessary). However in the quantum theory, the Lost Chord is no more, at least it's no longer lost, you see? It's like Fermat's Lost Theorem, sure it's lost, but now the theorem has been found, but Fermat never knew it, so he couldn't have lost it now could he?
So, the lost chord, it isn't lost, but found. What is it? Well, it's an eleven note chord using all eight fingers, both thumbs (don't participate in the second encore when Negativland is on tour (you either know what I mean, or wouldn't want to, so don't ask)), and the nose (or tongue (tongus pinques) in the more vulgar treatment). The notes are spaced by a constant multiplicative factor in the frequency domain. This constant ratio, which we will later see to be related to the Planck constant for music, is, conveniently enough, equal to the much heralded BipCuds Factor (BCF). For many of you the BCF is related to the cosmological problems of flatness, gravitational and inertial mass similarity, and why bovinity rays and chromo-shrubatrons (why mountains are tall and valleys are low) can simultaneously exist in a universe that even Kuhn and Feyerabend feel is rational. (Please note that this has often been, incorrectly, equated with the particle-wave duality thingee. In fact it has more to do with the plant-herbivore duality which is manifestly obvious in the latter writings of Abraham Lincoln (particularly in his commentary on the Vietnamese Tet Offensive), one short poem of Sylvia Plath (a poetic commentary on Coleridge's Kubla Khan - "In Xanadu did Kubla Klown, a stately pleasure dome decree, where ALF the sacred fnord animal protectors ran to caverns measureless to mathematicians, down to the moonless sea...a young maid (making less than minimum wage because of NAFTA) played a hammer dulcimer to a crowd of people wearing black, except for the occasional refugee from a Renaissance Festival"), and a brief passage from Kundera's masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being II (sometimes referred to as the infant-who-wants-to-float novel by the deconstructionist in each of us), which says "...and in so doing, he at last understood the relation between hunted and hunter, prey and predator, plant and animal." [italics mine]) However the BCF does enter into these calculations as well. How you may ask? A good question, but if you were truly free you would not need to ask it. Nevermind.
V. Watching glass grow in the pale reflected light of the details of quantum mechanical music, or how I once visited Detroit and was very sick afterwards and my doctor thought I was going to die from it, but I didn't, and it turned out it was only the measles, but the city gave them to me (which wasn't very kind).
"Fair is foul, and foul fair," said Sir Isaac Newton paraphrasing the Council on Foreign Relations assessment of the Bosnian situation. Other people who paraphrased the CFR report include Bozo the Clown and Ronald Reagan's good twin Skippy-skip, the drug-addict gangster-rapper who inspired Winston Churchill to take cold showers. But their story, no matter how significant to the body politic (hard to underestimate if you ask the Gnomes of Zurich, but who did?), influenced modern music only slightly. And that influence was in the direction of brief pad-down searches at movie theaters, concerts, and major players in the encyclopedia wars (absolutely brutal competitions which pitted dwarf-tossing Old Milwaukee-drinking corporate executives against Kthulu in a trivia game to rival the best Kaiser-King (not connected to the Rodney King videotaped beating at the hands of the LAPD (the city of angels has police officers and the city of brotherly love has helicopter bombings EOPR [ed. note: End Of Political Rant])) debates of legend) of the late 1980s. Duels involving balloons and blunderbusses also staged a temporary come-back lofted skywards (so to speak) by the ill winds of Wall Street profiteering from the bungee-jumping industry. Did you know that no one has ever bungee jumped from the space shuttle? It's absolutely true, just like everything you read in the New York Times (all the news that's fit to print), Pravda (= truth), and Soldier of Fortune magazine (all the news that glorifies firing automatic weapons into the malnourished flesh of people in small third world nations that no one with any sense of humor (or humour (or maybe homur?)) has ever heard about). Would I take your money and lie to you? No, all of my stories come from the most reliable sources that threats of physical violence will find for you, and a twisted mind concoct for you (much like a good martini, shaken not stirred). Reality is not a commodity, rather it is the essense of story-telling and finding meaning in the tale of Fred at the University of Bavaria.
Eco commented occasionally during his lectures, which he delivered while standing on a retro-bauhaus chair (for those interested in the architecture/interior design sort of thing (the bats have left the belltower...) even in these more enlightened (there's the word again) times of buying at K-Mart (semi-automatic 12 gauge Winchester shotgun, 7 rounds, full or modified choke, on sale until Christmas for only $379.95, no interest until Spring)), that the Germans used to chant "7, 8, 9, California uber alles, Under the Gun is cheesy synth-pop, go Berlin go, A, B, C, hex is really neat..." Such is expected of senior professors in semiotics, at least in Italy where the mob has taken to post-structuralism like a fish to a blender. A floor wax and a desert topping. We're the government and we're here to help you. I can't get no satisfaction... Sock it to me baby. Twist and shout. I still have found it, what I'm looking for that is. I kissed her honey lips, yeah, I even did that. A white house in the middle of Russia, a white house in Red Square and the 52 daughters of the revolution. I live in films for the sake of Russia, a kino runner for the DDR. I tried to tell her about Marx and Engels, God and Angels, but I don't really know what for, 'cause she looked good in ribbons. The wheel in the sky keep on turnin'. And Davy who's still in the navy. Flying over a little place, right below, Moscow, Moscow, Idaho. My own private Idaho. Me a spud, a spud from Idaho. Green grass over the river. Round up the usual suspects. We will fight on the beaches, we will fight... Marvelous Marvin the rather dejected robot who is, along with George Burns and Cuba's economy, older than the universe. Alan Turing, not older than the universe (even when he was alive), called the human brain six pounds of flesh remarkably similar to cold porridge. But he was an Englishman, in New York. Like Sir Isaac Newton, who is dead, but never existed, but if he had, he would have had an infinite number of legs, be painted white (hated the Stones), and have married Alexander the Great.
You can't go home again, even if you take the electric kool-aid acid test, become a dharma bum, or a subterranean. Kerouac said quantum mechanics is the path to understanding Zen, at least Zen as practiced by Sun Ra and Mingus. They're dead too - so many famous dead musicians. Just proves the point. It was on absinthe that Van Gogh cut off his ear, what was the name of the woman he cut his ear off for? Satan, perhaps? As they say, life is short and so is Perot (life just doesn't have large ears, large bank accounts, or Viet Cong (or were they Black Panthers (or Gray Panthers (or Plaid Panthers (who aren't dead)))) hunting it). Back to Alan Turing, he was a brilliant man you know. He understood that music was the key to decoding the German Enigma system during the Second World War (which has fewer names (have you noticed?) than the American Civil War (and fewer still regional variations)). He would hum tunelessly into the radio. It was in this way that the Axis was dazed and confused (though they were hardly slackers in any sense of the word as we know it [check the OED for origin - ed.]) and so lost the war even though Patton thought his speech in front of the American flag was what did it. Hollywood is not a wood at all, though Wood did.
Ironically enough, in defeating the Axis (D, E, 10, them thar computin machines can't break no code o'ours...), this tuneless whistling inspired a young Japanese mechanic and general tinkerer (this was before tinkering was found to be in violation of the ninth amendment) to wait for the transistor to be invented and flood the American market with cheap radios. Then came Japanese noise music, and Speed Racer, and Mothra, and Godzilla (wonder how I made that connection?), and Adam Ant commercials, and fans for Michael Jackson and 2 Live Crew, and Peko, and subway squishers (alternately called people compactors (not related to (poor white) trash compactors which can only be found in subways in the southern United States)), and Toyotas, and fast breeder reactors.
"They're coming to take me away, He He, Ha Ha.
They're coming to take me away, Ha Ha, He He.
To the funny farm..."
I'm happy now. Anyway, speaking of violating the ninth amendment (not related to the ninth commandment - the thing etched on that rock tablet that Moses dropped on an idol (not Billy) in the Charlton Heston fnord version (Soylent Green, it's, it's us (Soylent Mauve, it's, it's still us))), that was how Throbbing Gristle knew they were on the right track. "The coronet is mightier than the electric violin" (except if Einstein came from Tasmania, wasn't a devil, and tried to split the beer atom), sayeth Cosey. If she had said it, the history of modern music might be a simpler subject altogether and we wouldn't have to guess at the maximal set of commuting observables.
Preliminary investigations reveal position and momentum analogues (the CD cover is just too small for good artwork) in music (roughly each channel's time amplitude and first derivative weighted by the number of watts in your sound system). In addition, angular momentum correspondences can be made with the sex, drugs, and violence tensor responsible for the black and white parental warning labels. This tensor is often represented in one of two ways (and even occasionally in both of these two ways (most notably by Pablo Escobar before he died in a "virtual hail of very real bullets")); either by separately plotting each of the significant variables on the complex plane, or by combining them in some sort of Dalitz or extended Dalitz plot (specifically the Sausmann-Taylor-Friedberg-Feynman-Chandrasekhar (STF2C) phase diagram of which much is written (J.R.R. Tolkien referred to these plots extensively to construct his masterpiece, Holes in the Social Fabric of Old England: The Hatred of the Maternal in Beowulf, or how Detroit has come to signify the end of humanity, Ph.D. thesis, Oxford University)).
Plotting much anything on the complex plane is often thought to be a sign of late toilet training of the individual (Freud said as much to Euler when the later was lying on a day bed telling how he felt inferior to the Norse gods, especially Thor and Hel (after he died, Hel ate his final notebook, forever hiding the proof of the infinity of perfect numbers and the Goldbach Conjecture (which says that a fortune in pirate loot is hidden in the vault of an as-yet-unknown composer)) because they were so cool and popular with the kids at school), but nevertheless can be a valuable exercise for the oppressor in each of us (Smoky says, "Only you can prevent class oppression."). Plot your favorite (and least favorite) bands, composers, and musicians on the complex violence, drug, and sex planes. Try it at home with family, friends, and loved ones. Try it at work with bosses, co-workers, and fellow psychos. Try it on the El with muggers, rapists, drug-dealers, and former Sears catalog employees for companionship. Next you can move on to plotting the band quantum numbers for politics, social criticism, theology, intellectualism, rampant individualism, and on the "cause neighbors to call the police because they think that you just might be a deranged lunatic who has escaped from a mental hospital and is now torturing small animals and might just come after them really soon so the SWAT team should come and do something about you" factor. What were the last words of Macbeth? Ouch.
Extended multidimensional variants on the Dalitz plot, such as the afore mentioned STF2C diagram, are also possible, but involve three to seventeen dimensional blackboards (available from Acme Atomic Devices and Field Theories but at a VERY high price) and so are of limited practicality. They do offer you a chance to do some mighty important name-dropping which is the one true function of knowing the history of physics, astronomy, stamp-collecting, Detroit, or music. As Hamlet said (staying with the Shakespeare motif), "To name-drop or not to name-drop..." He died in the end. Sorry to ruin it for you.
VI. Assorted other topics that I'm going to tell you about regardless of whether or not (more likely not) you care about them, including the price of money, the color of sand, the dreams of Machiavelli, the loves of Martin Luther, the taste of one hand clapping, and the breakfast of champions, or how Detroit is really a nice place to visit, live, or even own, and I'm lying through my teeth.
Commenting on the rumors that Martin Luther used to hum tunelessly and live in sin with Heather Locklear, Sir Isaac Newton was quoted as saying "Give a man enough rope and he'll tie someone up, leave enough for the neighbor's kid to hang himself, and still be able to barter for a good loaf of bread." Today bread is more expensive, assaults are often prosecuted, and killing yourself requires air travel to the state of Michigan and the home of a former pathologist. Detroit is worse though. Being the hairy armpit of America wasn't as satisfying as it should have been for Bruce Jenner, still he liked his Wheaties. So what if Madonna used them for, shall we say, purposes which would constitute a felony in certain states in this country, the Vatican, and the area around Mecca, they remain the patriotic staple of this staple gun society. It was to be stored in water-tight, air-tight containers (milspec 23666-2323, suitable for Spam) for use after the nuclear war. The sun shines on the aluminum, this must be the home of the hitmen. The damage is done. Terror couple kill colonel, in his West German home. Gimme gimme gimme. Brothers, sisters, give me, deliverance. Lonely is the hunter. The boulevard of broken dreams. Night falls over Western Europe, look for me, but I'll be gone, I'll be flying over, some other Europe... She's a Jihad girl and I'm her little Hezbollah. I like Ike and the A-Bomb. I want mine, offered it up on channel nine. Bye, bye, Miss American pie, took the Suzuki to the levy, but the levy was dry, them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rue. Levi, Levi had his money (and his blue jeans and his structuralist theories). And Jesus, he dreamed of working for the University of Chicago, as a lab instructor. Hey Zeus, get it? I did, thanks Exene, love the book. He had, low self-esteem, he had, low self-esteem, he had... A jar of mayonnaise and the king to the keydom. Gretchen went to Kansas or was it Alice? Nebraska? Dorothy? Oz? Man amplified, beep beep, man amplified. A program for my pocket calculator. Trans----Europe-----Express... The napalm gods. Could have been a poet or an architect. Who killed Mr. Moonlight? These wings shall fly again. I'm the passenger, take a ride into the night. Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles, we're stealing it back. It's a carcass, a carcass, loving with a cleaver... Icons, falling from the spire. No, no you'll never, never get to heaven, not even, not even if you're good, there's never, never been a heaven. On Earth as it is in Heaven, on Earth, in Heaven, no never, this prayer goes on and on and ...static... Hot metal and methedrine, dum-dum bullets and they shoot to kill, I've got the dive-bombers, tear the empire down. The sounds of the city and the dispossessed. 6' 1" instead of 5' 2". Burn, baby, burn. This land is your land, this land is my land, from the polluted harbor of Boston to the crack-houses of San Francisco, from the clear-cut forests to the cocaine warehouse, this land is yours and mine. Sing little children...
Sand is sandy and you must never eat a Zen master for they taste of raw nothingness. Did a certain denizen of Milwaukee eat Zen masters? I think not. So go forth from this place, this Mount Sinai of the intellect, and spread the word, the carnivorous eggplant is not dead but dreaming. Dreaming of green M&Ms from the dawn of time. Break on through to the other side. The pump's broken because the vandals stole the handle. You don't need a weatherman (latter feminized to weather underground) to tell you which way the wind is blowing. South by Southeast so no cropduster will part your hair.
VII. Roman numerals are a lot of fun, or how to lose a perfectly good week by visiting Detroit with your great-aunt Erma.
This paragraph is left intentionally blank by order of the United Nation's High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It's an ugly acronym, but the TLA EPCs at NASA HQ-SFOP JPL division were busy. Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit. The future will be bright, and multicolored, with delicate filigree of toilet paper.
VIII. The Roman feast of the Saturnalia was a jolly good load of fun, or the coolest holiday celebrated in Detroit is Hell-Night.
You celebrate at the time of the winter solstice by drinking too much, flirting with members of the appropriate sex, drinking too much, forgetting what you're doing, offering libations to the deceased, drinking too much, listening to Keith, drinking too much, and ignoring that blissful commercial feast of Madison Avenue called Christmas. Besides the suicide rate at that time of year is frightfully high you know. Also did you know that it used to be the case that most murders were committed by close friends and family, and did you know that now random violence is more likely? Miss the good old days when your dearest mixed cyanide in your chicken soup, stabbed you between your ribs with the roast cutter, or threw a toaster into the bathtub with you? Tired of being shot or stabbed by anonymous hacks with low self-esteem and a bad case of acne? Then build a time machine and go back to Hickville, Ohio in 1961 and get into the fallout shelter business and quit bothering me.
IX. A partial bibliography with notes of thanks and brilliant ruminations too late to make it into the paper, or (come on, all together now) Detroit, Detroit, I love you Detroit, you're only a mugging away (join in), Detroit, Detroit, I love you Detroit, home of disposable cars, I love you Detroit.
My record, tape, and CD collection.
The Macintosh on my desk at work.
A book I read a couple of years ago about how the whole world is controlled by these two brothers who founded the CFR and taught themselves international banking so they could eliminate the Rothchilds.
A newspaper article about some 12 year old musician from Iceland (or NYC).
My number one invisible friend Tackhead.
Have you ever noticed how much they look like orchids? Lovely. Sorry to steal from you Heinlein, but you are dead so what harm can there be? Ever noticed how the questions multiply but the answers are only known to those good friends that we bury? See. I want to die just like JFK, I want to die on a sunny day... Vvvvvunderful. I just love the way it sounds. Watch out for the potted plants, but I remembered the book I was looking for. Found it too. It was at Powells. Arresting television from the outer limits of the inner imagination. Hell and brimstone, sulfur and ethyl chloride. We are the normal.
My other invisible friend Hairball.
The series pilot for the Ren and Stimpy Show.
A rather large bottle of pink pills that this gentleman wearing a "Kill Whitey" shirt sold to me for $25 on the corner of Division and Western.
My brother Larry, and his other brother Larry, neither of whom are from West Virginia and neither of whom are trying to sell a certain Washington DC landmark for considerably less than it's worth.
Click, clink, clonk, clippy clap goes the carnival ride. Wooo, wooo, goes the wo-wo. Tartan plaids on the half-shelled dream of a seventh one - disco Dan breaks his fall. Governor of the governed his caged clatter. My heartland, heartland, heartland, my heartland, heartland, heartland, my heartland, heartland, heartland. I dream of dreams, the mystery of the gun. Waldo Jefferies... Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather, whiplash, girl-child in my mind. We're stealing it back. Lies. The opera. Remember Audrey II? Part mineral I guess, at least the part made up of the fillings and associated debris of its squirming, tasty pink meals. So the moral of the story is, don't listen to Cassandra's nay-sayers. Even if you are related to them by birth, marriage, or electrical connection (115 VAC, 50 Hz, 10 A). Turn that horse into glue my friend.
Thanks to the University of Chicago, NASA's Council on Really Neat projects that are terribly unlikely to work, but have to be tried anyway, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms for letting me write this paper and the associated talk.
And special thanks to Mom and Dad, my friends one (hi there!) and all (you know who you are and you should be afraid, very afraid), the number BipCud, the letter o, and chocolate covered espresso beans.