Jethro Tull Touring U.S. in November
Hurricane Charley is in Massachusetts as of this writing. It's not even raining here in eastern New York state, though they're talking about showers today and thunderstorms tomorrow.
# Jethro Tull is touring America in November, playing an acoustic first half and an electric second half. They'll be in Albany where I can see them on Friday, November 19 at the Palace Theater. Yay! I learned to play the flute by playing along with Jethro Tull albums back in the early seventies. My cassette player was slow, so I learned blues scales in E-flat and A-flat instead of the E & A that they must have been recorded in. Once you can play the blues in those keys, other keys are a piece of cake. Ian Anderson, as evidenced by his How to Play the Flute essay, had a rather harder time of it than I did, neglecting to obtain a fingering chart at an early stage in the process. Hehe. I discovered early on that singing through the flute, for which Mr. Anderson is famous, is a really good way to cover up bad tone. He doesn't need to cover up his tone any more, after 35 years of playing every day, but I do. [wolf]
I am probably both the first and the last person to ask about learning to play the flute. Not because I don't take seriously the many requests for advice, but because, although fairly widely recognised as an interesting but self-taught fumbler, I have neither the vocabulary nor the skills to be able to pass on what I have discovered for myself. But since you ask....
# Brian Doherty at Reason - John Perry Barlow 2.0 - an interview with the cattle rancher, Greatful Dead lyricis, author of A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, one of Dennis McNally's "boys with behavior problems." He's gone on a health kick, doesn't believe in intellectual property, has switched to the libertarian wing of the Democrat party, and is fighting a drug charge in California, caught by a Taking Away Scissors luggage search. [wes]
Reason: Is it your goal to annihilate intellectual property?
Barlow: Let me differentiate my own view from ex cathedra EFF. I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.
Reason: You've said it's better to think of intellectual work as a service you are paid for rather than an object of which you retain ownership.
Barlow: The way most people get paid for work done with their minds is on that basis. Lawyers, doctors, and architects don't work for royalties, and they're doing fine. Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
Trying to own intellectual products and creating an economy of scarcity around them as we do with physical objects is very harmful to the development of culture and the ability to speak freely, and a very important principle not talked about much, which is the right to know. I think we have a right to know. It shouldn't be something we have to purchase.
...
Barlow: I think you can only go so far ignoring the opposing forces in the cultural war now arrayed against bohemian libertarians. It's like in the '60s, when there were two distinct camps in the boho scene, one of which was Marxist and ideological and political and engaged and humorless to beat the band. And the other one was acid-laced and freewheeling and took the view that if you could change consciousness, politics would take care of itself. I was of that view to a large extent.
I've gone back and forth with politics. I've been a Republican county chairman. I was one of Dick Cheney's campaign managers when he first ran for Congress. But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn't worth the trouble put in. I thought it was better to focus on changing yourself and people around you, to not question authority so much as bypass it whenever possible.
But by virtue of our abdication, a very authoritarian, assertive form of government has taken over. And oddly enough, it is doing so in the guise of libertarianism to a certain extent. Most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush administration's current policies are libertarians, or certainly free marketeers. We've got two distinct strains of libertarianism, and the hippie-mystic strain is not engaging in politics, and the Ayn Rand strain is basically dismantling government in a way that is giving complete open field running to multinational corporatism.
...
I have grave misgivings about John Kerry, but I certainly don't have misgivings about Kerry that equal the terror I have about another four years of Bush. What he's done to aspects of the Constitution that are there to assure individual rights is breathtakingly bad.
So I'm becoming an active Democrat. I wasn't one until just a few months ago, because I felt there was more room for libertarian thought inside the Republican Party. I never found the Libertarian Party was a credible political institution. It holds a pure line, and I'm glad there's somebody out there defining that point of view, but in terms of actually having power, making a difference....There are libertarian wings in both the Democratic and Republican parties, and in the past I found it most effective to be inside the Republican Party acting as a libertarian. But I've switched
