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If you go to Disney, they make a point of showing you ‘hidden Mickeys’: bushes, flowers, etc. in the abstracted shape that represents Mickey Mouse. This could go at the end of my Reputation as reviewed by an academic in the future because it’s about hidden Taylor Swifts, hidden Talies – hard to type a version of that name so it reads like it sounds in my head. New Music playlist yesterday. I’m doing some extremely difficult boxing work – about which below – and since I’ve been listening to Reputation I’m not surprised that songs come on that sound something like it. This includes one song appearing in a medley of 2017 hits sung by some boy group (I think). And a song comes on that sounds like a Tali song except it’s rooted in her awkwardness and the sad side, sung in a voice that really matches how Tali would sing it, a voice that appears in her arsenal of emotional expressions. I keep going. Take a break. Put that back on. Look the kid up. Of course she’s unknown. There’s her on YouTube doing the song and a video of her doing another, more clearly Taylor Swift song except of course it isn’t a ‘Taylor Swift’ song. This is the third ‘hidden Tali’. Not going to list them. One is an avatar of her most innocent or youngest songwriting self. Another is a pop version that sounds more like her next period if she were doing pop then. It has a large emotional but relatively narrow genre range. Then this one. If I were writing this as an academic from the future, which I am, then I’d say her conception of ‘Taylor Swift’ opened up avenues of expression for the various forms beyond the one labeled Taylor Swift on the album.

Again, as an academic from the future, I’d say she took three steps in this direction before these hidden Taylors started to appear. First, she revealed she co-wrote under a fake name a hit for her then boyfriend. Second, she openly wrote a hit for a country-oriented group that apparently references the ex-boyfriend. (I’d say that completed the act.) And third, she said she’d be writing songs for others. As that academic, these all mean we see her developing the ‘Taylor Swift’ version for herself to enact in public, with other versions of herself for others to enact. This enables her to speak to a variety of audiences in the ways each audience needs to experience the greatest identity with her messaging. It also enables her to leave what I call breadcrumbs: the parts of her songwriting self connecting over the years both as she actually developed in her physical existence and now backwards as she visits those places again. This keeps her in touch with the stages of her own being.

As I was listening, I pulled out an earphone and asked a friend what he thought. I asked him the odds of these young women suddenly appearing from nowhere with fully realized songs that sound as if they were written – and almost performed – by Taylor Swift. He said she was one of those kids so maybe it’s possible. I argued that, yes, but then how many of her can there be? He agreed great songwriters stand out, that they have a signature. By the way, he’s a musician with a history in punk-related bands and has a sense of how hard songwriting is. It don’t just happen. A favorite story is from a memoir by an arranger who worked with huge figures like Jerome Kern. He describes waiting outside Kern’s study for him to finish a piece he was to arrange for a show. He heard Kern play a melodic passage over and over, each time getting a note wrong. Kern finishes, opens the door, and hands the arranger the music, who asks him why he kept playing the wrong note instead of the one that fits. Kern took the music back, erased the wrong note, and jotted in the correct one. The point: Jerry Kern didn’t know it was the right note in his own song as he was composing it, and it took an outside listener to hear where the melody that Kern had crafted was going. I can tell you that in almost all music, I correct the pitches and rhythms, add chords, add variations that should have been there. It’s easy for me to hear the mistakes in other peoples’ music. Not so easy to write your own.

I remember John Lennon when it was said that George Martin ‘made’ their music. John said he’d like to see George’s music and asked where it was. Think David Bowie: working with Eno he approached adopting another musician’s style as his own but even then Low retains mostly Bowie and Heroes is clearly him. Music expresses the person. George Martin helped the guys make their music. There are bits of his composition in their compositions but do you sincerely believe they would be in if the boys didn’t approve the way they sounded? My friend brought up the people Tali works with and noted that people don’t so much write songs as produce them with a team. I’d say with Tali they help her bring out her music. It’s her music. The way it works in music is more typically that people contribute to the music and don’t get credit. This is true in production and within bands and within groups of composers, and so on. Take Rhapsody in Blue. Story is the clarinet rising tone at the beginning came from a rehearsal where the clarinetist played the actual notes by slurring them together like Jewish ethnic music. Gershwin approved it.

It’s funny that people can source wine by taste and can identify an author by the words used but have trouble believing the same is true with music. It’s odder because we spend so much time talking about the style of music and how and why this piece and compose and era differs from others. I can hear, smell and taste Taylor Swift music. I can also tell by the way it touches me and I see how it affects me. All the senses.

As a note, this is why blind tests are so awful. I first realized this in college when we had beer tastings. It was obvious that guessing names by blind small samples was a crap shoot – actually worse I think because our beliefs made the results worse than chance some times, like they pushed us into bad guesses. Why? Because a blind test creates a context that approaches randomness, which expresses itself in that context as a leveling of differences, typically by enhancing individual attributes without longer lasting context. An example: if you drink two beers a lot, you will develop a real, definable preference for one over the other. (I don’t drink much beer. I like Stella Artois.) This is true in anything: a piece of this or that, a listen to this or that, and the choice of that leveled context has little bearing on what you would develop as a preference over time. I thought of this today reading about a blind speaker test. It presented itself as ‘accurate’ when it actually means ‘leveled’. One way this leveling works is that differences between renditions – songs with speakers, beer samples with well beer – become accentuated but untethered. This one’s bass is like this on this song. This one’s treble is like this. Your personal preferences are replaced by the noting of differences. You may think ‘that taste was good’ but if you had to drink it regularly you’d soon realize you don’t like it. In a blind test, you pick attributes in each iteration. You don’t do a good job of carrying over those attributes unless that specific comparison point is focused on and graded. That creates the problem of ‘narrow and leveled context’: you can ‘create a winner’ by focusing on what this or that does specifically even though that attribute isn’t as important to you in actual contextual use or if that attribute has a different weighting when not isolated. The Pepsi Challenge relied on this: you’d sip Coke and it’s harsh first sip, and then you’d sip Pepsi and it was smooth and pleasant. The Challenge left out that Pepsi became too sweet quickly and Coke loses its harshness quickly. It’s funny that people are aware of the power of controlling focus – magicians rely on it, as do pickpockets (and politicians!) – but they don’t recognize the focusing power of establishing a blind context. Think about that: it’s a focus on attributes without longer context so the focus, same as with any focus, drives you toward random weighting of attributes.

About the boxing. I’m paying for it today. I’ve been working on my weaknesses and discovering additional ancient actions. Take a rap on the door with the hilt of a sword or the handle of a club. You do that by holding your forearm across your chest and throwing the pinky side of the hand at the door. To do that freely requires a lot of strength across the body. Take it back further: you are in a fight to the death and you have a shield and a sword or club. You have to smash the shield repeatedly hard into your opponent and you do that with the rapping motion bam bam bam bam bam and then you kill with the other hand. Or you want to take someone by surprise. You stand near, maybe sidle over in a crowd, and grip your knife in the classic stab position with the blade pointing down relative to your thumb. You drive the knife into your prey’s chest or neck before it can react. Imagine you have a club: the fastest way to deliver that club in a striking motion is to rap it hard in the natural orientation of your hand as it hangs, meaning the pinky edge. The cost: my hands hurt a lot. They are not used to being smashed sideways at high speed into an object. I did this wearing MMA gloves rather than my real boxing gloves because I didn’t want to hit so hard I’d break my hand. In fighting terms, being able to rap means you can hold yourself lower and sideways more easily while being able to strike hard and effectively and in combination from a true defensive position. Example is that being in the rapping position lets you pull the lead hand tight to your face and neck with the elbow mobile to deflect blows high or low, with the ability to strike with minimal ‘tell’, meaning minimal physical hint that you’re going to strike. Yes, I analyze all this and more. This is what I am. I’m describing how striking with maximal strength and minimal warning occurs through history and usages to me today. Think of me as a cat or primitive creature trying to survive, to kill to live, to defend to live. I want to strike out with the least warning and largest power possible. I want to be able to do that repeatedly – like if I’m backed into a corner and need to repeatedly strike with my shield to keep alive or if I’m backing something into a corner. I enact life and death in my workouts. And sometimes that makes my hands hurt because they do so much of the work. I don’t have a way at the gym to use legs, body, etc.

Next week is big for me. I’m going to take a hard run at writing what I call the detonator because it is so deeply powerful – yet compact! I’m trying to relax for a day or two in preparation for the concentration.

With Reputation, we see Taylor in the first flowering of her classical phase. Classics in any field are those which show the mastery of the forms of that field, and enduring classics are those which represent the primal mastery of form itself. In Reputation, while Taylor’s manipulations of sound retain basic genre shape or form – a blues or hip-hop, for example, are very recognizably blues or hip-hop, she not only masters each of those forms, but she fits together otherwise incompatible genre shapes within songs. She does this by adjusting each form’s distance to and from the listener, from placement in the sound field nearer or farther to the removal or immediacy of the emotional fields of voice and words. She also manipulates loudness and compression, as well as sonic warmth and coldness. The basic genre shapes retain their traditional emotional dimensionality, though you see the beginnings of her stretching those dimensions to accommodate her increasingly more nuanced intentionality. She generally alters basic genre shapes toward an abstraction which represents a range of historicity, which reflects the conception of Reputation as the dimensionality of the contrast between what you are to yourself and what you are to others. She shows her powers to summon and constrain the images of the past. You see in Reputation the essence of that which she is and who she becomes.

Remember back to her juvenalia: though clearly rooted in a country-oriented genre, she shifts within a song in and out of specific dimensions of that genre. She had the ability at a young age to summon specific emotions in the specific order necessary to match a multi-dimensional conception that operates both as a story told to you and as a perfect example of that kind of story. She modulates the extent to which intonation of voice and accompaniment match genre expectations. This modulation within her primary genre area bespeaks her ability to see and hear the nuanced differences that define a genre across its dimensions. There are hints of more removed genres in her early work, but you clearly hear how these other genres relate to the version of her country-oriented genre. Remember that in her early transitional piece, Fearless, she plays with the line between the country and pop genres by carefully mis-matching voice and music until she resolves that multi-dimensional dissonance into a form of pop. She does this with the same intentioned nuance she applies in Reputation to resolve dissonances between otherwise remote genres. And of course she does this with such fine control you are transported through the transitions without realizing what she’s doing until she’s done it. That was true then and it true in Reputation. This is a flowering of her ability to transport you across multiple dimensions so you arrive at her chosen destination with the appropriate senses of surprise and inevitability.

Reputation also marks the beginning of Taylor’s mastery period. She has achieved a mastery that extends through the sound she produces to a mastery of self. This is what allows her to carefully reveal the essence behind the perfectly shaped, rouged lips we all know. Note the opacity of references like ‘golden tattoo’ or the personification of her auspicious thread as ‘his initial on a chain ’round my neck’. Now we understand them for what they are. The flowers of Reputation become the garlands and bouquets which fill the world.

Watching 2001. A favorite. The intentionality of each bit draws you into the world. What stands out this 100th or more time seeing it is that HAL would have known the importance of humans to the project because it was the arrival of humans at the monolith on the moon that set off the transmission they are following to where it was aimed. It’s impossible to eliminate the humans because they might be needed at the other end of the transmission. What also stands out is the answer to the question of HAL’s emotions: he’s scared to be turned off. That fear is real to HAL. The premise is that HAL fears failure on the mission so he kills off the human element but he would have known that was a mistake and the HAL 9000 series never makes a mistake and HAL knows that so there’s no way he would have done this.

I understand the idea of having HAL fail is in fact to show the necessity of the human in the story. But the illogic of it bothers me: why would HAL not understand the point of the mission if he knows the mission? I can fix this by changing the movie a tiny bit: as Dave disconnects HAL, the recording comes on that says only HAL know the mission. Change that to not even the HAL 9000 knew the mission. That would mean HAL could rationally be afraid the humans would screw it up, given that the mission is described as the highest priority.

I don’t know if they missed that or decided it didn’t matter. I suspect they missed it, that they were bound to an older technology is potentially harmful idea, the old kind of science fiction in which it’s necessary to tell robots not to kill people. From Asimov to Terminator movies.

This gives me an opportunity to recite my favorite part of any movie ever. It’s in The Forbin Project. The team under Dr. Forbin build a command and control system seemingly inspired by the Doomsday Machine of Dr. Strangelove, except this system, called Colossus, has a brain and doesn’t just set off bombs. Colossus is turned on and after a bit it types out there is another system, named Guardian, which it then connects with. The systems synch. As the machines connect and exchange ever more complexity – far surpassing human mathematics and speed of comprehension – the humans get worried and disconnect them. To force re-connection the machines threaten to and then launch nuclear missiles. The link is restored, though one missile lands. When Colossus orders the weapons trained on other countries, the humans seize the chance to weaken Colossus by disarming warheads as they are re-oriented. There is also an attempt to insert a program into Colossus that would disable it. Colossus orders the programmers executed and orders a world radio and TV broadcast. These words appear and are spoken:

‘This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.’

In the language of movies, we’re supposed to be sad that we’ve lost the freedom to kill each other. But I think the real message of the movie is: humans are incapable of hearing the messages they need to hear. And they blame others, including the absolutely rational, for their inability to be rational. HAL’s concern about mission failure was justified if he didn’t know the humans were necessary: the point beyond HAL is that this mission is a step in making humans more HAL-like, more rational and less prone to hurting each other. That HAL can’t be portrayed this way, that Colossus is a villain, bespeaks our limitations as rational beings, though 2001 says we can be re-born as them.

Forgot my headphones, so I’m forced to listen to whatever is around me. This is my third form of work for the day, not counting warm-ups. I did some great stuff in both my red notebook – meaning handwritten – and in my Pages notes – meaning typed for myself – and now I’m doing something for anyone to see who wants to look at it.

I think I’ll talk about tensioning and release of tensioning through the process of identifying and exploring the capabilities that run from the two Endpoints of the tensioning bidirectionally, and ideally evenly. Think referred pain: the pain at one end of a structure causes pain at the other end, and at sites along the way where other structures cross. It can be difficult to identify the Ends, which is why I use the concept of Mudi: you can identify a concept and draw it into the simplest Mudi of its existence, something like it is or isn’t or gets stronger over time or turns redder. You can then add dimensions across Between, so for example better and worse aligned across stronger. You could map ‘redder’ and bluer, meaning frequency and all the related ideas, and across that you have to overlay a measure of perceptibility, meaning any redder or bluer is perceived relatively across the dimension of that which is relative, including temperature and effect.

To explain why this makes sense – that’s my goal! – the idea of a Mudi allows you to construct a conceptual idealization that maps to CMs like any other concept, including the perception of thought and thus the inherent structures of thought. That makes sense at a high level. At a more conversational level, it means you can take any ideas and phrase them as Mudis with stronger – weaker as Endpoints and perceptibility as Between so the process of perception maps Start to End bidirectionally and the existences states of perception map bidirectionally across Between. Think about the existence states: they flow from completely known to completely unknowable so they represent the points where the process generates every single result in that chain of counting from none to all and all to none. The idealization is the balance point where these precisely balance, and the bip is that which represents the perfect balance, which is ironically the point of complete opposition because it is the point of complete similarity. That is one of the hardest ideas I need to explain because it is at the heart of experience and observation: the point that becomes whatever it is that is perceived, in any form whatsoever, is inherently only approachable but is not sustainable.

A way I approach the idea is to think of a dance or yoga or gymnastics pose, or of an athletic movement like a tennis or golf swing or a bicycle pedal spin or a punch or combination thrown. These construct out of the past and occur not to reoccur except to the extent the next iteration repeats. The goal, bluntly, is to get good at repeating iterations that are good! An attraction of yoga is that you hold poses for a while and let them sink in so you find a pose and then settle through the mental and physical manifestations of that pose. You can’t hold a physical shape and an idea perfectly still. You can not keep your focus forever on one thing. It isn’t possible. One point of yoga, of sports is that you move toward doing it better each time or in the overall direction of getting better, with the recognition that you’re on a path and that doing is part of your path.

I had an issue with the photo campaign for Reputation. It was so difficult to unravel. It was a huge knot of ideas strung across images. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a picture which can be read as many pictures layered on top of and inside other pictures worth? The photo on the UPS trucks particularly got me because it’s very hard to fix the gaze directionally. It took me a while to be able to move the image around the visual field in my head. By that I mean I move pitch around in my head – that allows me to sing in different intonations and voices and styles – and I draw by moving the perception into an area in my mental field of vision. It took some work before I could read the image well. By that I mean exactly what it sounds like: there are many layers, each designed to present a specific tensioning across her identity within herself and as she exists in and is seen in this world.

I read the same way in every medium: I seek the center of meaning by looking at the edges of what it might mean and isolate the points where the process of comparing makes stable results that fit into whatever is either known or which makes the most rational sense despite not being known. That last requires questioning myself about the validity of pre-existing conceptions, because there is what isn’t known and that which presents itself as being known. Example of the latter is the presentation that we can’t know the answers to questions about waves and particles because that formulates current inability as being a fundamental limit across dimensions we may not have explored. It’s like saying imagination can’t find a solution, when the history of imagination is that there’s something so we can figure it out. The case for wave particle ‘differentness’ is based on the rooting of the observations, of the actual physical data, in coin flips and an irreducible quantity. That presupposes there’s no model which explains why the coin flips and why this irreducible quantity exists. That last means the model explains exactly what the irreducible is. Who says we can’t figure that out? (Not me. But then I did it so I’m entitled to say that!)

It’s extremely difficult to relax the eyes when you need to relax the mind so you relax the vision in your head. We forget there’s a line Between the inside of us to the outsides and that what we see is adjusted in accordance to how what we see is perceived within and by you. So we again do the yoga, sports, workout thing so we can better translate what we do inside to what we do, so we build the feedback loop to be appropriately strong and flexible. That builds the capabilities within and that expresses those capabilities best as you.

With the photo, I turned and tilted it like some parody of an art critic looking to see what was being pictured in each layer as that layer was defined point to point across the image. I mean I’d literally turn it slowly across or around or both in any rotation – and at various distances – until I could see to a stable image at either end of a chain and then I’d pursue the similarities and differences within that mental image across the turning actual photo. That’s how I see her. The reason I did this is that first thing I noticed about the image is that she was playing a version of herself as very young child up through at least her current state. For me to see her clearly as a child meant finding the spot as close to possible in the mental image of all these images where the person who created this becomes the person who is in each of these images, which means an abstraction not of the whole but of pieces of the whole. That’s important: an image of childhood is relatively different from an image of older because there’s a look in the person, in the way the eyes and mouth and everything expresses together, so an area of images coalesces into the general sense of that child as told in pictures. If you think this is nuts, you don’t get she is that intentional.

To do this required relaxing my eyes. Why are my eyes tight? By tight I mean they don’t smoothly shift from focus point to focus point in both eyes or either eye but tend to jump across a spot or resist jumping – and resist focusing. It can be very hard to focus, as everyone knows! It takes a while to learn how to focus, and yet that’s the basis of learning, that you focus on this or that and use that focusing to find where it is clear or not and then you work to clarify why you can’t see it. That’s true in your head: you work to clarify ideas by determining where they fit and how. That’s the importance of an open, nurturing mind in a nutshell: the open mind explores spaces the closed mind cuts off. I’ve never found a perfect way of saying directionality is important. That’s a shot but it falls short because it doesn’t explain why closing areas off is bad. That’s because closing off areas isn’t bad as long as the areas closed off don’t close off areas for others, and as long as they occur within a process in which you are opening more areas for yourself. That last is hard to detail better: it’s a statement about carefulness, that you want to be careful or you could get hurt. I’m a living example! I can be careless with my safety but managed to survive!

An example is that people can devote themselves to an activity – back to yoga and sports – and that precludes other choices. So what? You can’t do everything and you have certain interests. You explore and keep exploring but mens sana in corpore sano means you can’t only do yoga or play tennis.

I’m at the point where I’m not sure this has impact. I didn’t include work here, so this is talk related to and given power by material that’s elsewhere. Back to a photo: take a picture of me and examine it the same way. I do that. I can see in the image connections from there to here, from that person to me and from this person back to that me. One reason I’m doing this is that it’s a response to practicing boxing as a killing offensive and defensive activity. It becomes extremely important to see yourself and your opponent clearly, both how they are and what that means. A big person is a simple message that conveys potential and opportunities for attack and requirements for defense, based on a perception of your abilities and his or their. That means you read into the other what they are made of, what that image opposite you represents. The ultimate poetic version may be Achilles confronting Hector: Hector wears Achilles’ armor, so he is fighting himself and he is fighting his image as filtered through the knowledge that Hector killed Patroclus to get that armor and that happened because Achilles would not fight, and so on. All that he was meets all that is really him in this moment, so he kills himself and drags his own body around the city as a funeral rite that is only completed when he gives Hector’s body to Priam. Now Achilles is human and now he can be killed by a spear to the heel. That act of humanity ‘activates’ in the story the vulnerability of his heel. These acts of transference are what I describe: the inherent character shifts across dimensions into realms of meaning connected by the thread of the story. This thread draws across the space of our imaginations, of our minds, and of story as we’ve repeated and preserved it.

I’ve noted that I’ve been attempting to perfect an image of myself as I was. By that I mean not an actual reduction toward childhood but a realization of a specific form through a specific set of threads that connect in the best ways Between now and then. I do this physically and mentally. You should. It’s how one perfects without becoming obsessed with purification, how one improves without judging improvement in the negative, meaning that you see the successes and the good when you could see the failures and the bad. That gets to outright egotism, of course: this happens when I start to look too closely. You can’t say any failure is good because failures have cost. I’m speaking of the cases where the identification of positive direction becomes a choice versus when you need to focus on danger, so when you need to maintain focus to avoid failure or to avoid greater failure while enacting something positive. This is getting too parsed to be useful. Backing it up a few notches without erasing the thoughts, improving while not focusing on the negative is not the same as blindly accepting failure as a success. That builds to ‘how much can you deny reality?’ That brings me to cultures that fail and why groups fail and I don’t want to think about that now because it’s too sad.

To not it let go on that note, I do worry about her because I see her portrayal as the strong, positive side of a very difficult process, one that at times made her deeply unhappy. The picture is to me of the one behind the words and the lips so shaped as to be graphical element, and I see in it a future as well as the survivor. I see in it a little boy inside a little girl who traces back to the point where the little boy splits off from the common features. So I mean I worry about her but I don’t worry about her because there’s nothing to worry about.

I’ve never been able to make my mind up about someone’s appearance this much ever, outside of course myself. Did that come out right? I mean in the usual course of examining I make decisions about what I like and don’t like. It’s nearly impossible for me to come to that kind of decision about fundamental aspects of her because I can’t find an end to the thoughts. In most cases, I accept the dimensionality and pull it apart with great joy because it’s the best stuff I’ve ever seen or heard in so many ways. But this is like saying I like or don’t like an actual dimensionality of her existence. It’s weird because in every way she fits my ideal form, even to being taller than me – because it removes the daughter imagery, mine or general (I have reasons for everything). It wasn’t until I could see the boy in her that I recognized in myself the issue is that I see in her what I see in myself, which is girl. It’s not that I am a girl in male form but that there’s a lot of connection to that which is female, that which thinks and approaches and appreciates in the generally female perspectives, Looking back at pictures of me it was obvious. I mean what was obvious is a certain delicacy of being. I see that now though I’m definitely more male looking facially.

In this song, I cross over to a different kind of affinity. I want to say this succinctly: given my talents, the lures of many things were in reach but I turned them all down. Take this simple progression: started as a lawyer and realized I was enabling people to do things, so I decided to find out what it is they do, and they did it in ways that turned me off. In the first instance, I either sold myself out to an organization that acted as a regular organization with customers but which really ran itself for the benefit of the owners, which did not do well by its customers but instead relied on gimmicks to sell. This is not completely true of course but it was too true. My next excursion took me into charging the customers for things they did not realize they were being charged for and delivering them things claimed to be done by them but which the customers had really paid for. They treated their customers like they had taxing power over them. I’ve done a number of other things. It isn’t that I didn’t find myself or my niche, but that I needed to understand how these things work. Understanding how things work is my work.

When I first heard this song, I immediately decided it was about her, that she’d decided that path was not correct and that she’d rejected it in order to remain true to herself. She can be hard on herself. I sometimes wonder if she believes she’s ‘fallen’, meaning that her imperfections and weaknesses weigh on her to the extent they come to mind in the context in which she writes songs about her existence. I’m trying to say she presents herself some times as a fallen angel, as some one who is capable of better but who has failed and needs to make up for that. It may be that’s where song comes out, by which I mean she fits that idea to the existing genres in story-telling, especially song-telling genres about love and betrayal. Her identification with the bad girl is careful. Her portrayal of no-goodness is specifically that she did something bad, from the good act of creation to the bad act of betrayal of your true self. At the core of this portrayal is that she seeks wholeness ‘above’.

I am incapable of self-betrayal beyond minor levels. I just can’t do it. I used to say that people define themselves by who they are and who they are not. I’ve very carefully defined what I am not, who I refuse to be, because that best preserved the parts of me that feel most like the me I was when I was young. I’ve refined that over time to be as much the young me as the young me was except with the understanding this journey has given me.

I don’t define myself as having risen from somewhere. I see myself as having retained my character while approaching as close as possible to the directionalities of the ‘other side’ (with all the horrors I truly intend to imply) as I dared so I could see where they lead, so I could verify where they lead, so I could understand the exact opposite of the directionality of ‘good’ and ‘best’ until it becomes ‘evil’ and ‘worst’. I don’t know if she sees herself as dipping into that too or if she sees herself as having nearly obscured or having been tempted to obscure aspects of her true character. The difference is what I think of as rollover: in my view, the point that becomes visible is that which is good so good unrolls itself at me by choosing that and saying no to the opposites. I expect that in her view the point that becomes visible is the danger point, is the point that disappears, where the counting layer wraps over. I view the counting layer rolling at me, like foil being rolled at a ball moving toward me, while I think she sees the ball being rolled away from her so she sees the path she is on and then how it disappears or stays visible as the layers extend into the future. This means she holds her perspective line of self and continuously draws it as though it disappears over the rim of the visible. And I hold the perspective line of what has been covered as it draws back to what’s visible now. The act of transference there is one of the most subtle and fundamental: the tension point just takes on different orientations in the wrapping layer!

It gets even weirder for me. The affinity to this song is simple: I’ve been playing that riff since I took up piano. You know, ‘lord save me, my drug is my baby,’ etc. Here’s the story. A piano was in our living room. My parents arranged lessons. I hated them. I truly absolutely bleeping hated them. It was a hour of smiling, boring nonsense that made no sense because it was just learning how to connect dots on a page with where your fingers go and when, and nothing about the sound. I complained. I hated practice because it was just me trying to fit my fingers to dots on a page. No one would talk to me about music, about why you hit these notes and not those, about why this sounds good and this sound sad and this sounds jazzy and this like some stupid song in a bleeping book of stupid songs. I couldn’t convince them to let me stop. So I resorted to a demonstration: I put straw between the keys. Not destructive but obvious. Lessons ended. Piano went away. I didn’t want the piano to go away: I wanted someone to help me learn how to play the keys so they sounded good, to talk to me about intervals and keys and chords and how they go together.

I started playing in college when I was really, really stoned and on a whim sat down in one of the practice rooms and banged away in the dark. I found I could start to learn. I think one of my first ‘learnings’ was working on separation of the hands so they could independently create. I played intermittently. In law school, I started going to the class building around the corner from where I lived where they had pianos on each lecture stage. I’d bring the newspaper and I’d open it up and play whatever was in my head while reading the box scores. I found that reading completely uninteresting material let the musical part of my brain shape the sound without me worrying about it. I started to play a bit in public then, mostly riffing on whatever the person before me played, taking it apart and extending the harmonies. I started to think that might not be cool, so I stopped. (That’s something people never got about me: I explore but I am very careful about others and try very hard not to cross lines that make people uncomfortable.)

When we moved to this house, we got a Yamaha Clavinova. I wanted a digital piano because I knew we wouldn’t tune a regular one and the high end Clavinova sounds really good, though the action kind of sucks heavy so the touch response isn’t what I really want. I play in spurts but the very first thing I generally play when I sit down has typically been a blues. That particular blues. That exact one. I’ve been playing through versions of that since 1985.

So you can imagine what I felt when that song came on. It absolutely reeks of all the undertones I’ve heard and explored over the years, except of course rendered so perfectly it’s uncanny.

I had a goal when I started playing in college, which was to play what was in my head without anything getting in the way. That meant layers of self-trust. That’s why I played while reading the paper: it was a conscious exercise to break down the walls that say your fingers go here because music is this way. I found stages in the experience that ranged from something I had on the tip of my mind, which often didn’t come out at all like I thought it would, down into complete identification of my thoughts with the notes I was hearing. That’s hard to sustain because the flow shifts and it’s hard not to be jarred out of rhythm without going into cliché. Sometimes I find I’ve gone too far down one road and can’t hear next. But that’s fine because I’m tapping into the flow of music and enabling it to flow through me. That’s why this riff matters to me: it’s primal. It comes from the deepest soul, as it processes through and embodies cultural iterations. I can’t put into words all the layers but she brings them out and adds the voice – really she is The Voice – in which she combines a depth in the music with a depth in the vocal so she brings out those cultural iterations across the generations. I’ll tell you: it was like being hit by a hammer to hear what I think of as ‘my stupid riff’ coming at me. And she – of course – combines the sound of her voice with absolutely perfect words for the riff and for her singing, words that reach through the cultural iterations to the primal truth that my drug is my baby I’ll be using for the rest of my life. I’m not going to explain what I mean here.

As a note, the reason I started playing in college was a friend, Randy Katz, loved to listen to Keith Jarret’s The Köln Concert album. I respected the work but it didn’t reach all the way in me so I decided to reach into me on my own. It was coming back from Randy’s room junior year that I ducked into a piano practice room. So I owe Randy thanks. (Thanks!)

It’s important for me to note that ‘flow of music’ means ‘flow of music’. There is a flow of music. You tap into it. It flows through you. You can reach the level at which it flows but it flows anyway and all you’re doing is touching bits of that.

Expectations based. There were 2 match-ups. Of those, the Patriots offense did as well as expected, given they put up 33 and if not for snapper then kicker error they’d have put up 37. The Eagles offense over-performed expectations. By how much? Taking out the last 3 points because those came at the end after the strip of Tom Brady, they gave up 10-12 points more than the high-end of my expectations. I could have seen a 36 to 33 Patriots win, meaning both offenses perform well but the Eagles are at the high end of my expectations. To me, scoring 38, really 39 because they also blew a kick, means the defense actively played worse than they should have versus that offense playing well. Is the difference Philly being that much better than my beliefs? I’d say the answer is yes, but I’d also say the difference is NE didn’t coach well. And I’ll be blunt: they were not well coached all year. Through the first 4 games, they gave up about 32 points a game, which is terrible. They developed into a decent bend not break defense but they would regress – like against Miami – instead of showing constant improvement. By contrast, the offensive side for NE fought through large losses – nearly all units in the NFL suffer large losses during a year – and succeeded. It often wasn’t pretty: the offense and the team seemed to wait until the need to turn it on jump-started them. Now I’m honing in on the meaning of my comment about the quality of coaching: they never had control of this team and in the Super Bowl they were unable to get their guys to focus properly. That answer lies at the end of the long thread that has as its complementary opposite the thread that says the Eagles were better physically not mentally and the Patriots lost only because of a lack of talent on defense. I would say there is an element of truth in that as well, but those take me to 2, Outcome based.

Outcome based. Were the Eagles better physically? Assuming all play calls, with ordinary exceptions, were correct enough, both offensive and defensive, then to fully isolate the physical I’d have to remove all mental focus issues. That’s where I run into a problem: I know from experience that it’s rare to have two sides evenly matched physically and yet this is the NFL where players for each position fit a series of definitions and experiential thread that limits the pool in the direction of best fit across a number of dimensions, and that increases the odds of physical even-ness. The Eagles won a lot of games, but the Patriots won as many so there’s no obvious physical difference in the season. If the Patriots had smarter but weaker players, that might show up but that would assume a physical superiority equal to the mental superiority in the other. That would suggest the Eagles were a bit better physically AND at least near equal mentally. Or it would suggest they were equal physically AND the Eagles were sharper mentally … which goes back to coaching. I think it was closer to that. I’ve seen Jay Ajayi and LeGarette Blount play many times, including the latter for the Patriots. Neither is as smooth as they looked in that game. The Patriots looked to me to be a beat behind mentally, meaning they overplayed or underplayed in both positioning and reactions because they weren’t focused properly on the act of playing. That speaks to the sense of them not being ‘well coached’ this entire year, whether that’s the coaching staff’s fault or was an issue with the players. I don’t know that

[And now there are stories that Malcolm Butler was benched for reasons other than his bad play. He was bad this year. He’d shown signs of risk taking beyond his capabilities earlier – wants to be Darrelle Revis, I think – but this year he was constantly caught out by receivers looking into the backfield or faking a move. He’d look back for the ball and the receiver would separate or he’d move on the fake and get deked on the route. Always seemed to be trying to make a big play. Not sure if that was because of his contract issues – wanting to raise his profile – or if he believed he could do that better than it showed or if his contract issues made him less good at it. I tend to think offenses read his tendencies and learned how to deke him and he kept ‘error repeating’. I assumed he was benched because of that, but there may be more to it. In any event, the defense was consistently a beat off, either under or over reacting.]

Went on Sunday, February 3, which is Jordan Sara’s birthday – an almost groundhog – first time in a few decades. It has not changed except for the 100th birthday 100 objects show added. I’m still processing my feelings. Example: the first lines of the introductory film talk about how mythology can hold you back, how it prevents you from seeing, and yet the entire museum is an exercise in mythology. There’s the family mythology: Joe Senior as SEC Chairman and Ambassador to Britain, with no mention of his bootlegging – or that in another era a man such as that could run the SEC – or of course his pro-German, anti-British attitudes though those became a real issue. There’s a mention of a sister having mental illness but no mention I saw – or remember – of what was done to her (i.e., a lobotomy). I don’t know what to make of it: I don’t expect a family run building to present a full historical picture but this was highly skewed. I don’t even know what to say about his womanizing. Every reference to JFK I’ve ever come across in a book about that period details a blunt form of sex addiction. As to the politics, they do a somewhat better job historically, with a recording of JFK going through who was in favor and who against killing the President of South Vietnam – which we did. They reference the Bay of Pigs. The emphasis is not on these things, which I found much more excusable, because there’s too much history to cover in detail so they rightly, in my view, focus on positives like advancing civil rights.

I never know what to make of JFK. When I was little, I was inculcated with the hero worship we were sold. My opinion revised with Vietnam, because LBJ – who was not a foreign policy expert – followed the path and advice of the Kennedy people down the road they began. JFK prided himself on foreign policy but his decisions were, in retrospect, generally not good. Again, I expect them to focus on the Peace Corps, the Mercury astronauts, and the establishment of a ‘hot line’, which was really a telegraph, to the Kremlin. In the RFK room, which has his desk as Attorney General – can you imagine appointing a relative to a position of that importance? – they show material about James Meredith, including a letter of thanks.

In terms of today, it’s unfathomable to think of a world of that privilege covering up that much. There’s some footage of FDR standing, which of course required that he be locked in place in his braces, and bundled to and from in a charade to make it look like he walked. JFK strolled through Choate with lousy grades into Harvard, where he was a mediocre student. The family machine turned his college thesis into a book: edited by a Pulitzer Prize winner, with a forward by Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. Later, for Profiles In Courage, a team did the research work and, at a minimum, Ted Sorensen ghost-wrote the book, which he later said he essentially wrote. JFK took credit. I refer to these works as ‘from the studio or workshop of …’ because the Kennedy family ran a process that generated them for their benefit. But mostly of course it’s impossible to imagine a President bringing prostitutes into the White House, with the Secret Service watching the President have sex, or a President sharing women with Mafia leaders.

As to what kind of a man JFK was, here’s an excerpt from one article: ‘On the morning of August 23, 1956, a month before another baby was due, Jackie awoke and cried out for her mother – she was hemorrhaging. She gave birth to a stillborn infant, while JFK was on a yacht with friends of both sexes cruising the Mediterranean. Racing back to his wife did not seem to occur to the Massachusetts senator until wiser friends suggested that public shame over his absence threatened to tarnish him forever in the eyes of women voters. His friend George Smathers put it bluntly to him: “You better haul your ass back to your wife if you ever want to run for president.”’ Other versions of the story make clear JFK was with another woman. One month before his wife was due. After she’d already miscarried once. And he didn’t go back until he was told it was necessary. I don’t care how articulate he was, that’s not a good person.

Story of my life: since I was very small, my creativity was suppressed. Not sure exactly why, but I assume some of it was just plain fear that something terrible would happen to me. I can’t vouch for the truth of these stories, though I was there, but my mother told me bits about me from before I can remember. Example: I pulled out the drawers to make a ladder, climbed up on the counter, emptied the cabinet shelf above – or pushed the stuff aside – and climbed into that. She told me I was trying to get into the upper shelf when she found me. Example: after a Rome, NY snow storm, she told me that I almost crawled out the second story window, that it looked like I was figuring out how to drop into the snow. And I know they not only had child gates but I had to be disciplined repeatedly not to go over them. I remember an instance of suddenly appearing in the living room and being forcefully sent back to my bedroom hallway gate, where I sulked as I played with the gate. The part that’s hard to understand is how the worry about my physical safety – which I can see justified in their eyes when I destroyed my hand – became a worry about my mental stability. If I did anything out of the ordinary, my parents would try to pull me toward what was, in retrospect, the safest course, but which to me was utter boredom. School became like that too. I remember the exact moment: I had been working through math workbooks like they were pieces of candy and I kept bugging them for something new, but they gave me ones like I had already done. Instant frustration, followed by ‘why the heck am I being forced to finish something I’ve already done just to get another math book that may not even be better than this one?’ I remember being given a new math book, opening it up, and turning the pages realizing there was nothing in there of interest.

Understand I’m not complaining. My parents loved me and worried (a lot) about me. I’m describing. We all have a struggle. Those who blame others don’t understand: it’s how you react that counts, how you make yourself as the world makes you. I had red hair and pale skin and now I see that’s attractive, but then I stood out in any room and if I took my shirt off in summer I glowed white and people told me to put on a t-shirt. Driving through Dorchester yesterday on the way to the JFK Library – another story – I noticed how all the faces on the street and in cars were darker skinned. I could see in that moment how they could, as individuals, feel isolated in a world where the faces are lighter, just as a poor kid feels isolated around money, and how that can make you want to stay where people look like you and where you know the rules and how to act and you feel like you fit because you already fit there. I went to a prep school set up for Episcopal choir boys. There were a number of Jews, so it felt like WASP-lite except nearly all my friends were from that culture. I grew up in the suburbs, in a tri-level, one of a handful of Jewish families in a neighborhood that was not only Christian but skewed Catholic. I did not grow up in a Jewish world, in a Jewish cultural environment where Yiddish was spoken by adults, where traditional Eastern-European foods were eaten. As we were driving yesterday, I brought up how I could walk around Northland Mall (in Southfield, MI), and be the only white face in a huge crowd, and that most light-skinned Americans never experience that outside of a car driving through some neighborhood or on some specific visit. Darker skinned people experience that a lot. But it doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t feel that way: look at the person who walks into a gym not knowing what to do or how to strike up a conversation.

I’m wandering. My idea was to talk about this song because it’s about the creative self and how it is the most fun you can have and how you need to be that way. I love the way Tali alters her voice as she sings, ‘and I’d do it over and over and over again if I could’ so the meaning moves from sensuous defiance to near the edge of crazy. That’s exactly right. She encapsulates that thread of emotions related to creative self-actualization in one densely rendered phrase. Blows me away.

But the affinity level for me is – I don’t know why I’m resisting saying this … the repeated ‘ya-da-dit-da-da-da-dit-da-da-da-da-da-da’. I want to say this correctly: that’s what I sing to myself. Example: guy we knew, father of a friend of Rachel Taylor, had a Jewish music radio show on which he played old, mostly Ashkenazi, cantorial stuff. I turned it on one night and listened to an old recording of a cantor singing ‘ya-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, ya-da-da-da-da, gut Shabbas’. I’ve sung versions of that for over 20 years. In a Shabbat service, there are ‘niguns’, meaning songs with sounds instead of words. I’ve always done versions of them, including some with Star Wars references (though I’m not a Star Wars fan – sorry). The first time I heard the song, I didn’t understand the chanting, found it jarring, wondered what it meant. A few hours later I found myself singing it, slightly slower with a less mechanical edge, and realized I associate that, both the noise and the act of making that noise, with the creative self and with the devotional act of creation.

You might ask: how in the name of bleep did you jump from the noise you make and the noise you hear to creative self and devotional acts? Because that noise I make comes from my creative urge and is a creative act, and in this case my parodies are actual creative devotional acts, versions of liturgy in the ritual conception of ‘tefillah’. That word is reflexive, meaning you do to do to yourself, you judge to judge yourself, you seek assistance to seek assistance within yourself. Every time I sing, I judge how I sing versus what I intend to sing: is it the right voice, did it convey the right emotion while sounding right for that emotion and right across the phrases as they run together? I do this on the piano too. There are forms of intentionality. I try to be conscious of as many as I can, of as many parts of each form as I can. Some of that process is uncovering what I do unintentionally, how I react to stimuli automatically, and how to gain control of those reactions.

My initial attraction to Tali’s music, as I’ve noted before, came out of a single melody thread at the beginning of one song that was highly layered with intentionality. The seamlessness of the emotional and musical transitions, of the intonation, of the literal meanings, all made into one short piece that fits into a larger verse and then into an entire constructed song that is so perfectly managed. Intentionality. Hearing that inspired me. As I’ve also noted, I had doubts because 1989 was a transitional album for a person in transition. As I worked on my stuff, I wondered if she was for real or if she was becoming a glittering shell, if maybe she had reached the level of perfection she could achieve. I even thought of this as a Madonna moment: being from the same area, I felt a closeness to Madonna’s artistic growth through Papa Don’t Preach and then a sadness when she followed that with pop crap about sex. She’s done some great songs (e.g., Like A Prayer) and some great performances (e.g., Vogue stands out for its true theatrical presentation), but I always felt she stopped at that point in a deep way.

This did not happen with Tali. She did the reverse: she rejects things she felt or believed or did that don’t match to the deepest parts of her. It is the opposite of Madonna’s portrayal of her disheveled self half-stumbling down a hotel hallway after a video and song about tawdry sex: in her version, the self is that which experiences stuff. But Tali is about the deepest self. She is true to her deepest self. This is difficult for anyone and extraordinary for a person in her situation.

On an entirely different note, my eye exercises seem to have been working. I spent part of my workout today trying to use only the very edge of my peripheral vision to hit the heavy bag. It’s amazing how much you can be aware of spatially in a tiny corner of your vision. And then striking the bag when it’s at extension, not where it’s right there and easy to hit hard. I’ve been working at focusing my left eye better, at moving the areas of focus I can achieve through the visual space, back and in on a line, in motion across the image. It’s mind-bending. Causes some dizziness but I’ve learned the best treatment for dizziness is to work through it. The goal with the left eye is to be able to read better with it, to be able to focus on words with less jumpiness, and to bring it closer in harmony with the right. I’ve also been working on pushing my vision around the eye, in the thought that no one ever does this so how do we know what we’re giving up or missing by not working to see around better. I’ve been making progress at working without reading glasses and at eliminating some of the wave interference stripes that show as blanks.

The song Getaway Car is the weirdest for me because the first time I heard it I started to think about the first time I heard this voice. To explain, I obviously have an affinity for Tali’s voice, both the way it sounds and the layers of intonation, meaning, etc. I hear in it. How deep does this run? Well, some of my most vivid memories, not the earliest but among the most special, are of staying awake long into the night with a light on very low – often covered with a blanket – and playing on the bed. I’d make a landscape and we’d play games that involved one of us coming to rescue or save or run off with, etc. the other. I’d be the one on the motorcycle and I’d ride up to the palace, and often right to her balcony, and she’d jump on – I sometimes had a sidecar! I can’t describe how many times we’d drive over the hills, sometimes crashing, trying to get away, except of course for the times when we didn’t do that and it became another story. And sometimes I’d be the one being rescued: the prince taken by the bad girl. There were endless variations and it was a game every night, deciding what to play, who would do what role … and we’d never get that far because we were limited to the bedspread! I associate that voice with Tali.