Not that I have anything against jam bands. But over on the Internet Archive you'll also find ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Acid Mothers Temple, Animal Collective, Buckethead, Butthole Surfers, Cowboy Junkies, Death Cab For Cutie, Explosions In The Sky, Fugazi, Liars, Local H, Man Or Astroman?, Mogwai, Pinback, Spoon, Tenacious D, Ween, and Xiu Xiu, to name a few. All lossless encoded if that's the way you like it.
Oh and Vanessa Carlton. Don't lie, I saw you click it.
So here's the question. I just experienced a lucid dream within a non-lucid dream. Does this mean that the inner dream was actually not a lucid dream after all?
Did I only dream that I could control my dream, or did I actually control it? Or put a different way, if the outer dream was scripted, does this imply that the inner one was too?
Thinking about this sort of thing reminds me...the last time I saw Mulholland Drive I noticed what I believe were dreams inside dreams. For instance, the first Winkie's episode occurs right after Rita falls asleep under the table--in real life, is this Diane dreaming that Camilla is dreaming? There are also other segments later on that are bookended by someone falling asleep and waking up.
Dream in which I've moved to New York. I wake up one day full of energy to buy stuff at kmart. Once inside, I grab a shopping cart and start maneuvering it through a doorway but am stopped by a white-haired manager type. He tells me I can't have shopping carts in there. It's some kind of inner store area where carts aren't allowed, just like cars aren't allowed inside the city walls in Rothenburg.
He asks me what I'm looking for exactly. I list them and we go off to find them. Only we leave the store. We walk to his house and I meet his family on the doorstep. The children and wife are awkward people, they don't even know how to shake my hand right. But they warm up eventually and start asking me questions. Yes I'm new to the neighborhood. I gesture in the direction of my place. In the course of conversation they drop the name of some evidently very well-known location. When I tell them I don't know what they're talking about, they think I'm joking at first, then there is uproarious laughter and they will talk of nothing else. They've become useless to me. I walk off.
I'm back at my place. Every time I go to sleep, I dream that I'm playing my keyboard, but that there is a set of colored objects attached to the far side. These objects vary each time, but always move in tempo, enhancing the music in some way. One time the objects are bristles of various colors that sway like sea anemones, as if the music is an unseen current flowing around them. Whenever I descend into these dreams I am in total control of my surroundings. I decide I want to play without my hands, and this occurs.
But each time I wake up there is some new terrible object in the corridor outside. This time it is an enormous flesh-eating spider perched on a water pipe.
Alright, this is sort of a gripe. So this morning I called a delivery company to set up a drop off time. Any day is fine they say. Okay, how about tomorrow morning I ask? thinking I'll just take the morning off.
"We can't guarantee the time of the delivery sir," I'm told.
"So you couldn't even tell me if it would be morning or afternoon?"
"No. The route is pre-calculated by a computer."
"Uh, ok fine, Saturday," I say and kick myself--am I really going to sit around my apartment all day Saturday waiting for a package to come down from on high? No other choice though: "the route was pre-calculated by a computer."
Wait a second. Isn't the whole point of using a computer to calculate things in the first place exactly to solve this sort of problem? Back in the days when computers weren't "precalculating" everything for us, correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't I just call somebody up and say hey can you deliver this tomorrow morning between 10 and noon? And somehow, the person on the other end--maybe it was some greasy guy sticking thumbtacks in a map on the wall and just eyeballing it--managed to approximately solve the CSP involved.
Thank goodness we got rid of that guy though, and his crappy approximate solution too. Now we have computers which can precisely optimize for distances and gallons, but obviously not for constraints involving temporal quantities, and certainly not for quantities such as how pissed off the customer is getting just thinking about all this. Seriously, Urban Express, this made me sad to be a technologist today. Please try to do better.
Update: the delivery men came to day, and put a big divet in my wall. Tada!
Dear Lord. The first set of Debussy's Images is amazing. It's one thing to hear someone play them at tempo, sliding through passages faster than you could possibly comprehend them. It's another to actually pick through them yourself. The difference is like walking through an alpine meadow vs. driving past it at 60 miles an hour. Sure, in the latter case, you see a blaze of color, but it's not until you set out on foot that you identify every tiny tonal bloom in staggering detail.