Some words from P. K. Dick

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."


"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."


"The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give."


"My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression." 


"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them."


"No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up."


"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night."


"If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others."


"Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."


"You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe."


"Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit." 


"Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness."


 "A man is an angel that has gone deranged."


"This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance."


"Everything in life is just for a while."


"I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth."


"There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me."


"I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure."


"The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real." 


"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."


"There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. "


"I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you." 


"The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom. "


"I'm not much but I'm all I have."


"If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!"


"Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find."


"Reality denied comes back to haunt."


"How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish."


"Fish cannot carry guns."


"The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them."


"A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope."


"I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile." 


"Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.
But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.
And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.
And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you."

"What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great."


"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."


"A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man."


"How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear." 


"God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha.'
'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God."


"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful." 

Spotify and the Death of Deep Cuts

First, let me just say....I love Spotify. It changes everything. I know there have been other companies who have tried the same thing, Rhapsody, Microsoft's own ZunePass.. but these companies all seemed to be in the iTunes business. They were music stores that let you listen to what you liked, but much of the focus was still on the purchasing of tracks to keep. Loading your MP3 player.

Spotify, as it is structured right now in the US, is simply a Cloud based music collection. Access to 15 million tracks in a decent interface, Ad supported (Pandora's popularity proved this works well enough), and offering a couple of improved pay services.

I have a feeling this is the way everyone will soon consume music. If Google Music ever gets out of Beta, much of people's collections will migrate to the cloud, and off their gadget's hard drives. Amazon has already opened up a service for this, and Apple's iCloud is also trying to cash in. 

Of course, there will always be folks who have to physically have their collection, even if that means it is just sitting on drives around their house. Hell, I have somewhere north of a Terabyte of music around the house. Honestly, I welcome a service that will sort and catalogue millions of tracks for me.It is't an easy job, and at a certain point takes the fun out of things. This switch isn't going to happen overnight, but all the signs are there.

Soon all media will be streamed, on demand, from server farms we never see. We will pay to access collections it would take us decades to amass. Look at it this way: if an average album contains 12 tracks, Spotify offers  1.25 million albums (and counting) for your listening pleasure. Sure, they don't have the Beatles, or Zeppelin, or even Tool; but seriously, do you not have these albums already?

As much as this sea change excites me, there are aspects of it that I really hate to see. This direct access to all could change the core format of music: the album.

It has been coming for a while. iTunes was a serious wound to the album, with easy downloads to all the popular music, iPods everywhere filled with favorite songs formed into playlists. Tradition is hard to break, though. The album seems to have weathered that. We still buy music in album containers, because that is how artists release them. Can it weather a world where we do not buy the music, though?

Really, that is mostly academic. What happens will happen, and the market and listener's tastes will decide in the end. What saddens me the most is the inevitable end of the Deep Cut.

At one time, we bought an album, invested some amount of time and money in the purchase, and wringed all the enjoyment we could out of it. We put the album on and listened to every track. We gave songs that didn't strike our fancy at first listen time to make places of their own in our head. After a while, many of these tracks became my very favorites, the radio singles my least liked.

Maybe it was the way we listened. With vinyl, you put the record on, and only got up to flip it over. Sure, with a little effort, you could skip straight to the track you wanted, but this was a rare occurrence. One side might have gotten more play than the other, but it wasn't too terribly common to play a single track from one album, then a single track from another album, repeated throughout your evening. Hell, that is so troublesome we pay people to do it for us at parties. With vinyl, the easiest thing to do was just listen to the album.

Cassettes were pretty similar. Advancements in technology gave us some players that would flip to side B for us automatically, and more control over picking out single tracks, but still, the easiest way to listen was an album at a time. Cassettes gave us blank media, though. Blank media was a game changer. It brought that exalted ancestor of the playlist, the Mixtape. With a mixtape, we were our own Disc Jockeys. With a little effort, we could arrange things however we wanted. It was a harbinger of things to come.

Compact Discs were the first real blow to deep cuts. With simple (and just as importantly, accurate) one button track skipping, we could easily redact a song from the album, like it was never  there, as long as we had the remote handy.
Certain songs had less of a chance to sneak into our heads. Some tracks were now less likely for us to ever get to know them. Still, we bought albums, and many of us listened to them from beginning to end (no flipping sides!) because we just shelled out $15 or $20 and we were going to get our money's worth. Some of us listened to the whole thing out of habit. We listened to the whole record when it was records, the whole tape when it was tapes, and the whole CD now that it was Discs. Habits are hard to break. The jewel case was like a record sleeve with a better spine, and they looked so good there all lined up on the shelf. In our hearts, the album was still king.

Mp3s and the digital revolution was the big shift. No container, no jewel case. The album now was just an idea. A comfortable way for us to relate to how artists released their work, and a convenient form for record companies to release it. Sure, they still sell CDs (I think...), but when was the last time you spent an hour browsing the racks at a record store? I can't even think of a store dedicated to selling compact discs within a half hour's drive from here. When was the last time you saw someone with a portable compact disc player on their side? The mass of music has gone completely digital, and we have to live with all the good and bad that brings.

The question now is, how long does the album persist? How long until musicians are putting out 3 or 4 new tracks every four to six months, rather than an album every year or two? Even with the album, or at least the idea of the album, still with us, how many of us listen to whole albums, beginning to end? With all that music right at our fingertips, it is a great temptation to skim the cream right off the top. Songs that don't catch our fancy right away are likely to never get another listen. Why would they? It isn't like we are stuck with them, property that is our responsibility to get to know. There are tens of millions of other tracks just waiting for a click of the mouse or flick of the finger for their turn at us. And what is wrong with that, you ask? Maybe nothing.

It scares me though. My musical tastes have been acquired. I did not only listen to what I liked. I found artists who did things I liked, and let them show me other things. I did not take to much of this "other" at first, but trusting the artist, I kept at it. Eventually, I came to understand a little more of what was going on with these songs that I didn't originally care for...whose melody didn't match the beat properly, or was too slow and melancholy, or too fast and frenetic. Eventually I came to like this stuff, and was grateful for the artist including it. My horizons broadened. My tastes developed. Many of my very favorite songs take a few listens to initially get comfortable with.
How often will this happen if we have no real reason to give a song a second chance, much less a third and fourth?

It is possible that I am worried over nothing; that music will keep growing and evolving like it always has, even benefiting from being free of that prison called the album, that music was never meant to be sorted into boxes, that each song is a jewel meant to stand on its own, judged for its own particular sparkle and clarity.  Maybe so. Change is good, right? I guess we will have to wait and see.

My best wishes to Spotify. I like the service, and will continue to use it. For now though, I will keep listening to albums, those convenient little meals of music, looking for morsels I have never tried before. For me, nothing has really changed except who is serving it up. Oh, and the menu. The menu has gotten so much bigger.

not completely forgotten

I have been toying with the idea of starting up a blog for random musings, stuff that would arise over a drink if I had time for things like that more than twice a year. Things I wouldn't mind getting out of my head and putting down somewhere, even if I am the only one who would read it.
Then I remember, I have a blog. Mothballed, in the internet attic, untouched for years....
Instead of doing all the work in setting up another one, I'm dusting the cobwebs off this one.

Besides, I like the name.


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