Cecil Kleakins

My son, Arthur, was born last week. After a hectic last week of the term teaching a beginning design class, followed by a flurry of visitors, graduation open houses, commencements, and family dinners, I am now OFF for the summer and able to just relax. I’m able to reflect a bit on the year and all it has brought me. I got married to a wonderful woman, bought a beautiful house, and have a gorgeous son who is sleeping in the next room.

Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing had I stayed in NYC with Ariella. I miss the city and all my friends there. I sympathize with the Chinese poets of old, relegated to provincial posts far from the life they knew. They wrote poems of nostalgia and yearning, economical in detail yet luxuriant in overall emotional effect.

Yet at the same time, I embrace my life here - I focus on what I choose. I teach what inspires me. I bring artists to exhibit who intrigue me. I have a family who I treasure and love.

It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CEDAR VALLEY is an exhibit of art, design, photography, video, original music, ephemera, and other cultural artifacts to celebrate the prolific creative output and rich cultural impact of the underground music scene in the Cedar Valley over the past 30 years.

The gallery will showcase many examples of DIY design, including posters, flyers, zines, promotional materials, and cover art for albums, cassettes, and CDs. Interactive listening stations will allow gallery visitors to hear archival recordings of local music. An interactive collaborative history website will provide a wealth of visual, historical and anecdotal information about the bands, labels, and music venues involved in the scene.

The exhibit will open to the public on Saturday, March 17th at the Waldemar A. Schmidt Gallery at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. The show will run through April 14, 2007.

OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, March 17, 2007
6-8 pm
Wartburg College Art Gallery
Waverly, IA

This event is FREE. All are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

It is rumored that a great many musicians, music fans, and scene celebrities of past, present, and future will be attending this opening reception!

MUSIC EVENT
At 10 pm on March 17, following the opening reception for the exhibit, a live music event will be held at The Reverb in Cedar Falls featuring local bands:

• Modern Life is War
• Beat Strings
• Brooks Strause
• The Torpedo Darlings
• Checkmate

THE SECRET WIKI
For more information on the exhibit, take a look at The Secret Wiki, a collaboratively written history of the bands, musicians, labels, and music venues involved in the local music scene. It can be found at:
http://www.thesecrethistory.org/

MEDIA KIT
If you’d like to help promote the exhibit, take a look at our Media Kit for downloadable graphics to print out or email to friends:
http://www.thesecrethistory.org/media/

In addition to getting married, having a baby, and raising an eight year old, I have been busily working on curating a multimedia exhibit which documents and celebrates the punk music scene in my hometown, Cedar Falls, Iowa. The exhibit, called “The Secret History of the Cedar Valley” will open March 17, 2007 at the art gallery at Wartburg College. So far, the exhibit has a website, a blog, and a Wikipedia-style History Site.

Some of the Wiki entries are pretty interesting. Take a look at bands like No Consensus or venues like Dean’s Parkade Lounge.

The most intelligent thing that has been said about the question of metaphysics was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 7th proposition in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (condensed version here, full version here), which stated that “whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence.” The Tractatus was an attempt to logically outline the limits of knowledge and language.

In other words, there are some areas where Logic and Reason cannot speak with certainty… (and he spends the whole of another book, On Certainty discussing the very concept of certainty)… there is a realm of human experience which is outside the purview of Logic and Reason.

In such a case, while it is possible to speculate into that realm, such activity should be seen as just that–speculation. There is no certainty in metaphysics. There is only conjecture. Can some conjectures be seen as more reasonable or rational than others? We might see the possibility of a Christian second coming more rational than the flying spaghetti monster, but on the basis of its historical and cultural position, rather than for any cogent reasoning.

Agnostics are chided for their lack of enthusiasm for such speculation. The reason I hear most is the idea that ALL humans MUST believe in SOMETHING. The position of agnosticism is seen as sitting on the fence, refusing to choose sides, being unsure or uncertain, failing to take action upon the foundation of belief. But to me, and perhaps, to Wittgenstein, such a position is the most logical to take.

If, in the realm of metaphysics, nothing is certain (or, if it becomes certain, no longer is a part of that realm–I think of things like the structure of the solar system, which were once thought to be metaphysical speculation but were later scientifically validated), then is it not logical to remain uncertain? Is it not logical to “pass over in silence” without passing judgement?

I do not see a use for metaphysical certainty in life as others seem to. I do not have a conflict with exiting life without a predetermined expectation of what is to come. It is enough for me to know that all mortal beings die and that this death is part of our condition. It is enough for me to know that my fate will be the same as those who have preceeded me. When I enter this new world of which we cannot logically speculate, if I am able, I will experience firsthand what lies beyond.

Having said that, it seems to be a very human impulse to attempt description of the indescribable, to name the unnamable. As such, it is not to be ridiculed or suppressed. Let us simply see it for what it is. Between that which we speak and us is a Kantian “great gulf fixed.” All metaphysical discussion amounts to shouting across this unbreachable canyon. Yet sometimes this seemingly pointless shouting yields footholds of meaning which are of use. Sometimes we can eat imaginary bread. Sometimes it sustains us. Other times we starve nevertheless. Such is this realm.

So it goes…

Last month, a Mefi post about a virtual conflict in a popular video game somehow caught my attention and I spent at least an hour trying to figure out what it was all about. Somehow, it captured my imagination as a sociological dilemma that occurred entirely in virtual space–yet the basis of the ethical knot was entirely in real space.

Real-World Taboo (funerals are sacred rites, spirits must be honored, etc)
Virtual Transgression (virtual funeral party for virtual avatar whose real player died is ambushed and massacred in game space)

MUDs and MMORPGs are alternate worlds where one can don an avatar in order to co-opt an alternate personality with all its attendant behaviors. The otherwise lawful and conscientious citizen can become a virtual Ken Lay (a fascinating read), bilking others out of millions in imaginary currencies. Yet this occurs firmly on the edge of a game which fully allows for such criminalilty in its very structure. These worlds, far from lawless, contain a set of silicon-clad rules which are nearly unbreakable. Free will is only allowed along firmly established trails. Yet where these intersections become most fascinating is where avatars escape from gamespace into meatspace–where what we call real life is infected with the downloaded backwash of gameplay.

This has led to the surreal appearance of etiquette in an otherwise lawless frontier populated by monsters where murder is commonplace.

Ok, I’ve procrastinated long enough ruminating on geek crack.

End Note: Much has been researched about the sociological structure of virtual worlds: their economies, the real-life player demographics, and the real and imagined legalities within gamespace and beyond.

My graduate thesis involved collecting English translations of the Tao Te Ching and using the various translations to concoct narratives. In those pre-Google days, I was translating the original text character by character using an old weighty character dictionary. Now, you can literally read the entire 500 word classic in the original classical Chinese with every character linked to an amazing online Chinese-English Dictionary. Translations are also provided in English, French, and German for reference.

For those who prefer their information served on dried pulp with an ink glazing, Jonathan Star has compiled a printed reference of essentially the same information in his excellent “Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition”.

Other sites have more comparative studies of the English translations, such as this page with 100 translations of Chapter 1.

For those who haven’t read it, a few free online translations are available, plus the ancient but ubiquitous Legge translation at Project Gutenberg.

For the curious, here’s a piece I wrote in 1994 in conjunction with my thesis: Lao Tzu’s Tomb

Here are the first 34 measures of a new arrangement of The World Outside my 45’s. I cleaned the cello part up, added a decent rhythm track (beats actually on time!), added the bitcrushed guitar part sooner in the song, and tempered the rhythm guitar to give more space during the verses. Ignore the vocals–not a great take, though I love singing the deep withered verses of this tune!

On a side note, I now have graduated from GarageBand to Logic.

Hmm… comparing the two versions, the first still has the high lonesome sound I love… punctuated by some noisy exuberance… but the new one is such a pleasure to listen to… I’m trying to strike a balance between my slowcore melancholia and the dangerous brazen hooks of chamber pop… listeners, if there be any… what say you?

Steve and Steve in 1977

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on how he invented the Apple II computer:

I took a lot of lucky, accidental directions, and they all converged… I stumbled into it so accidentally.

Link to BusinessWeek Interview

I love this idea that great things can come about by accident. Or rather, how seemingly random sets of events can coalesce into ideas that are so powerful that they take on a life of their own and seem to invent themselves.

The Huygens probe landed on Titan on January 14, 2005. NASA funded a camera which recorded the descent onto the surface of Titan. They put together a time lapse video (11 MB, QT) which shows the 4 hour descent in 5 minutes.

The most oddly surreal thing about the video is its soundtrack, which has the feel of an Eno/Fripp experiment in ambient music circa 1974. But yet I have to admit it was comforting in a deeply magical way. I nearly drifted off to sleep while watching it. I became curious what composer had scored it. Then I read the NASA site:

Sounds from a left speaker trace Huygens’ motion, with tones changing with rotational speed and the tilt of the parachute. There also are clicks that clock the rotational counter, as well as sounds for the probe’s heat shield hitting Titan’s atmosphere, parachute deployments, heat shield release, jettison of the camera cover and touchdown.

Sounds from a right speaker go with the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer activity. There’s a continuous tone that represents the strength of Huygens’ signal to Cassini. Then there are 13 different chimes - one for each of instrument’s 13 different science parts - that keep time with flashing-white-dot exposure counters. During its descent, the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer took 3,500 exposures.

It was just reported that Tribe.net laid off half its staff on Thursday [via FC]. No official announcement yet, so perhaps there is still hope for an upturn. Despite the recent disasterous UI redesign, the site was definitely my favorite among such social networking sites.