moon traveller herald

i. Kicking around our pad like many others is a paperback copy of 1984. For the heck of it in the doctor’s waiting room this week I read the Afterword there, written by Erich Fromm. Fromm was a shrink who shrunk from Freud’s more strident theories on human behavior, theorizing that ‘freedom’ was a more essential part of the human complex than Siggy said. [Truth Be Told [TBT]:I confused Erich Hoffer with Eric Fromm, as they both found a spot in the same cell in my brain… Hoffer was the author of The True Believer, a look at doctrinal Soviet-era communism, and was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher. But Google set me right, and now I put Fromm and Hoffer into different brain cells. David Hofstetter was even more helpful in this.] Fromm in Afterword places 1984 as chief among Dystopian works…tho the term he uses in 1961 is ‘negative utopia’. Utopian works beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, writes Fromm, build on a trust in Progress that arose as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaiss...

Tomorrow is UN Day - I posted this two years ago -  I headed it Cavalcade of the World – as recognition of the news of time time passing ….. and in homage to then retiring Scott Simon of NPR. The U.N. is a source of controversy now – conservatives see it as a Martian colony that landed East of Murray Hill In NY ….  ….. When I was young … it was hopeful thing… better than the League of Nations – say this in the wrong bar today and you get an F U. 'What's the big look back and ponder?' Simon is asked. He said more or less:"I recall when I started out the world was still working to ensure the carnage of the Holocaust and WW II would not be (easily) repeated. So we had UN, NATO, Berlin Airlift, and so on.The biggest surprise today is that motivation to put humanism ahead of nationalism has unexpectedly been TURNED ON ITS HEAD." Why does he still do radio he is asked and Simon says the likes to watch the Cavalcade of the World. (Cavalcade is formal procession of people...

Reading about the future I am. Specifically 'Who Owns the Future?' by Jaron Lanier. He in recent years arose lion like from virtual reality in the belly of the technology machine and stopped by god to wonder what this technology stuff means. As this 'Smarter Planet' hurdles onward, his manifestos are prescient.   He discerningly depicts the modern Web taking its users and turning them into "small elements in a bigger information machine". This bigger information subsumed  great blocks of the former Madison Avenue, and in Google it reaches epitome. (Does Lanier know this terrain? Yes, he sold a company to Google ).  Where Lanier is especially onto something is in his dogged insistence that humans give meaning to the technology, not the other way around. He doesn’t even like you to use the term technology unless you first place it in the specific human context, as I saw on a CSPAN book show he recently did. Technology – and be sure the perfume ...

In October, thinking I have never been to Harvard Stadium, an old concrete bowl by the Charles that Van Morrison made immortal in  Brown Eyed Gir l making love in the green grass behind the stadium...I head out via subway.  Old Harvard Square to go. The essential American Fall Saturday event to encounter. Once there I tweet.  I sat next to Cornell band, and that sort of set the tone. # hahvad  This day is my homage to damon runyon author of  hold them yale # hahvad  stadium watching football literally. See it arc in the air. #Hahvad stadium; twenty 11 yearolds ready to receive field goal kick in stands. Scurry. Scatter.Pounce on the ball. #Hahvad stadium; listen, yo, the glockenspiel # hahvad  stadium: these teams have good sense not to use heads when tackling. Priceless the education. # hahvad  stadium: i think harvard band is playing dreaming is free. Tha...

This week MoonTraveller Herald marks the orbit of the Moon of NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which got there, what, aboutentered orbit around the moon the morning of June 23 after a four-and-a-half day journ 40 years after the first humanoids? In honor we run this YouTube clip ''Dedicatory Piece to the Crew and Passengers of the first Experimental Rocket Express to the Moon'' by Raymond Scott courtesy of the folks at SCLOGSE . ################################################ On American Routes radio , there was a very interesting vignette about Raymond Scott, and enthralling related conversation with Bob Moog – maker of the Moog synthesizer. Scott was a key composer behind some of the looniest Looney Tune music, and a force in electronic music. He had a stint as the orchestra leader for the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, but his very modern sounding music - he was entranced by the sound of the modern, much as one of his influences, Duke Ellington. What I d...

Online and mainstream media reports that country crooner Slim Whitman died on his 84th birthday are wrong, the singer told the Times-Union . Whitman said he thinks another musician he's known for years somehow got the wrong message out and it spread from there. Several Web sites attributed it to a posting on The Nashville Tennessean, which pulled the item before it appeared in the paper. The entertainment editor at the newspaper did not want to comment about it. It was Whitman's yodeling rendition of "Indian Love Call" that ultimately repelled Martian invaders during the administration of James Dale [Jack Nicholson] in 1996 . His sound is unearthly - like a human therimin. In keeping with the recent Superbowl motif, we ask you to visit my 2005 HalfTime Dream. Would it were Slim and not Petty in '08.

The printed word can have a magical quality – the right moment, the right wordsmithy, and the word can pop on off the page. There is a way of knowing, among others, a type of cognition that derives from neurons firing piston-like, causing ideas’ flowering like fireworks as the eye scans a story – say about science – say in the New York Times. But there is a way of knowing that derives from hearing the spoken word. It can equal or better the printed word, depending, firing those pretty little brain synapse thingies along another salient. Working in the Internet medium – cant call it the press, but it does have to do with the visual presentation of words, in this case in electronic form – one wonderswhere it is all going. People are farily ready to download stories and listen to them, perhaps as they jog or drive. You wonder if they just don’t like the act of reading. My son reads books, but, by and large, he scans magazines, doesn’t pick up a newspaper, and when he reads mags, he hardly...

Good to see Stewart Brand showed up in NYT science pages last week. The founding editor of The Whole Earth Catalog has never been quite the harmonist in the church choir, and there’s no sign that’s changed on reviewing the piece: An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’. What are the heresies here referred to? Well, Brand is ready to accept a renewal in nuclear plant building. I am ready to agree with him: The risk of global warming, and the planet’s inhabitant’s tendencies to want electricity, warmth, and individual mobility at this point mitigate in favor of the certainly risk-encompassing nuclear solution. As a viewer of earth phenomena Brand is non par. Twas Stewart who retrieved the Apollo program from cultural insignificance as he forwarded the conception of the importance of seeing the earth in whole in a photo. I have been largely entertaining and often much influenced by Stewart Brand over 30 years now. Since the day I first saw the Whole Earth Catalog at Dave M.’s....

Or, How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they see the bare shoulders of those seductive quantitative models? The ships was free of bounds, it was true. But it had entered a phantasm allegorical. The compass needles spinning in overdrive, as the calendar pages sucked into the vortex. And the models began to spit out gibberish. Yet a lazy air conditioned mid-ought porch somehow came to mind. Spent a couple of evenings at Dr. Shroud’s home on a visit in the mid oughts. Piled high were scientific journals, to be tossed about, launched hazhapardly in the air, and ingested like artsy scientific popcorn, I guess. There was that and true fiddle faddle too, and the tube was always on. The mags were fodder for grand illuminations in underneath the Shroud’s bald cranium. The covers of the journals - I hadn’t really sat down with these types of publications for some ten years before - were surprising - very vivid, imagistic, literally abstract, because the computer model had come recent...

Bubsy Berkeley’s musicals - linoleum, acrylic and fleshy - were an exotic Depression-era tonic that, historians have subsequently suggested may have softened the hard existential torrent that pelted a weary 1930s public. There were other expressions of The Dream of Beauty and Peace. In 1939, the New York World’s Fair enlisted great commercial concerns like G.M., General Electric, Westinghouse and Consolidated Edison, together with the PR arms of nations such as Japan, USSR and Italy, to create great pavilions of something or other. This was suitably leavened with some burlesque [sometimes highbrow – Salvador Dali took part] and amusement rides, and it all came to be well after the fact something of a statement of what a wonderful world it could be and would be in some suitable place known as the future. Futurama designed by Norman Bel Gedes was the GM exhibit and it epitomizes the fair for some folks…folks like me. It was like a Disney ride where you traversed the world of the future,...