Modern Art and Shenanigans


Michael Stuart Kelly

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Modern Art and Shenanigans

The phenomenon of the super-high price of modern art entangled with money laundering. No doubts in my mind.

I'm not against modern art per se. I resonate with some of it and I have given good reasons here on OL. But a lot of it is pure trash. And that makes it perfect for money laundering. I mean, if the paintings get damaged, what loss is that to humanity?

:) 

But I never figured that this money laundering process happened--or at least received a huge boost--due to the US government, specifically the CIA.

Talk about a boneheaded story. But it happened. It goes something like this.

 

In the fight against communism, some genius or other (like a Rockefeller or two and their clique) came to the conclusion that communist countries used naturalist art depicting real things and people. So what better way to show the people in communist countries what freedom looks like? At least in art? And with one fell swoop, the concept of freedom got exchanged for chaos and a huge money laundering operation began. The US government started sponsoring modern art events to show off American freedom. The more unintelligible and child-like the art, the better.

I'm not making this up.

And of course, the whole thing backfired. When taxpayers found out what they were paying for, boy did they get pissed. Then the CIA came in and saved (funded) the modern art operation for its own nefarious purposes.

 

Laura Southern gives an outline of this mess in about 3 minutes. See 6:25 to 9:18 in the video below.

(btw - That entire video is well worth watching if you are interested in PSYOPS and propaganda. It covers vampires and gay bombs--literal bombs--and condoms thrown from airplanes and stuff. :) )

The source she used for the modern art and CIA part came from a site called JSTOR Daily, which I had never heard of. But it is now on my primary daily look list for news and intellectual stimulation about current events. They are fact-based with credible sources and out-of-the-box thinking. I came to that conclusion after perusing the site for about 5 minutes, at which time I fell in love with it. 

 

Here's the article Laura used:

Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op?
The number of MoMA-CIA crossovers is highly suspicious, to say the least.  

was_modern_art_really_a_cia_psy_op_alt_1
DAILY.JSTOR.ORG

The number of MoMA-CIA crossovers is highly suspicious, to say the least.

I want to quote some things from this article, but it is so rich, I'm having a hard time trying to decide on what to leave out. There's no goddam fluff. Talk about a piece of history and historical figures I never imagined existed in this form. Besides, I'm going to be busy running down all those links and sources.

 

Here is the best way I can characterize how this felt for me for a reader in O-Land. Remember those meetings of artists Ellsworth Toohey used to foster in The Fountainhead? Remember that each of the participants talked absolute garbage about art (and philosophy) while never doubting their power to make it happen?

That's exactly what reading this article felt like to me. Except the power part did not come from cultural institutions and traditions, but from gobs of moolah and the USA government over decades.

 

Note that the article is not about money laundering, but the art world has always been good for shenanigans, probably going back centuries. I remember reading a bio of Armand Hammer years ago. His Hammer Galleries were gigantic money laundering schemes for the communist government in Russia. Oh, he used real impressionist paintings and so forth, but he got his start selling Romanoff art treasures without telling where he got them. Isn't that so, comrade?... 

The way modern art has taken on this role is like the size difference between a whale and a guppy. We can thank Uncle Sam's cold war warriors, then the CIA. for all the enthusiasm.

And this raises an interesting O-Land question for me. Rand showed clearly the influence of philosophy on civilization. But the sheer amount of money and power involved in fixing the modern art movement as a cultural staple in America shows that the money/power context can be just as important as the philosophy. 

Michael

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I want to mention an insight about my past that appalled me due to looking into this article.

I never before knew about the Congress for Cultural Freedom. What an eye-opener. This was a CIA cultural organization that sponsored some of the worst trash in the arts, called it American and sent it all over the world. The CCF no longer exists--it went from 1950 to 1979 and at one point changed its name to the International Association for Cultural Freedom. But there's a more modern name to characterize it (including its government-sponsored progeny and cutouts): Deep State

Where it is personal for me is that the CCF sponsored Arnold Schoenberg. Alban Berg, Anton Webern and their idiotic 12 tone system of music composition. This was rammed down my throat in Boston University during my college days (I went to college to major in trombone and in music composition).

I tried my damnedest to make 12 tone composition work for me back then, but I just couldn't. All those years and efforts were nothing but an enormous cognitive dissonance. Once I left the university and landed in Brazil to play professionally in the SP State Symphony Orchestra, I still won some music composition prizes and almost always had my works performed, but nothing based on 12 tone writing.

I had to get away from that in order to develop as a composer. In fact, I threw out all of my 12 tone works because one day I put them to the "personal use" standard in judging them. I asked myself if these were written by another person, would I like to listen to them? And I had to answer that they were stinkers. So I got rid of them.

 

Here is an article from the Ron Paul Institute by Adam Garrie that discusses the CCF and music, but please don't consider this as deep research. I just now got it on a normal Internet search and the title caught my eye. It's a good article, but to me, this is just the beginning.

Did the CIA Ruin Classical Music for the Masses?

RONPAULINSTITUTE.ORG

As both a classically trained musician and an audiophile, the 1950s and 1960s was something of a golden age of recorded music. It was at this time...

 

There's icing on this cake, too.

One of my biggest cognitive dissonances was why on earth Igor Stravinsky started using 12 composition. Stravinsky's most popular works are characterized by small musical phrases--including very, very, singable melodic phrases--that are used over and over and altered as the work unfolds. (Stravinsky never goes for the big long melody.) Hell, one of my best concerts in São Paulo as a conductor was Petrushka, which is one of Stravinsky's works that uses this small melody technique.

So how on earth did a man like that go into 12 tone writing? Stravinsky's endorsement of it was probably the main reason I, myself, kept trying to make it work for so long. I knew the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern sounded like fruitcake city to me, but Stravinsky was a real composer. 

Now I learn that the CCF was paying Stravinsky money, too. (Probably through Robert Craft, who I met at BU. He was Stravinsky's not-so-talented friend and assistant when Stravinsky was alive, then made a living from that reputation afterward.)

Shit and damnation. That crap helped ruin my college education.

Stravinsky didn't love 12 tone writing. He loved the money and power he got from the CCF so he used his own talent for smoke and mirrors. After all, he had not really had a hit (a classical music hit, but the hit concept is still valid) in years when that crap started. And the CCF made his modern stuff relevant to the world. So he prostituted his art and went da-da for money and master.

And he did that to protest Russian composers going da-da for money and master under communism. What a joke...

Ayn Rand said whenever you find a contradiction, check your premises and one of them will be wrong.

I want to add a corollary. The wrong premise will involve money so often, money should be the first place to look to correct the error.

So follow the friggin' money...

Bah...

Michael

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I thought this was a good piece detailing and explaining the extent of the institutional / culture rot ,wrought. I had thought to use it as the basis for a comment somewhere else in critiquing a blog post about how 'terrible' 45 is/was, how his supporters are too stupid to realize blah blah typical residual TDS.

Not to put too pessimistic a varnish on the culture , but until we recognize how deep and for how long the rot has been promulgated and how almost revolutionary the effort must be to rid ourselves of it , the idea that we are somehow "now' at a crossroads" and "the next /this election is the most important of our lives" isn't going to be the idea that changes our predicament.

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Wokeness is Here to Stay (and win), Neo-Con Gatekeepers, Putin Psyops, the "Need" for Mass Skilled Immigration from Asia, English as...

 

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3 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I want to mention an insight about my past that appalled me due to looking into this article.

I never before knew about the Congress for Cultural Freedom. What an eye-opener. This was a CIA cultural organization that sponsored some of the worst trash in the arts, called it American and sent it all over the world. The CCF no longer exists--it went from 1950 to 1979 and at one point changed its name to the International Association for Cultural Freedom. But there's a more modern name to characterize it (including its government-sponsored progeny and cutouts): Deep State

Where it is personal for me is that the CCF sponsored Arnold Schoenberg. Alban Berg, Anton Webern and their idiotic 12 tone system of music composition. This was rammed down my throat in Boston University during my college days (I went to college to major in trombone and in music composition).

I tried my damnedest to make 12 tone composition work for me back then, but I just couldn't. All those years and efforts were nothing but an enormous cognitive dissonance. Once I left the university and landed in Brazil to play professionally in the SP State Symphony Orchestra, I still won some music composition prizes and almost always had my works performed, but nothing based on 12 tone writing.

I had to get away from that in order to develop as a composer. In fact, I threw out all of my 12 tone works because one day I put them to the "personal use" standard in judging them. I asked myself if these were written by another person, would I like to listen to them? And I had to answer that they were stinkers. So I got rid of them.

 

Here is an article from the Ron Paul Institute by Adam Garrie that discusses the CCF and music, but please don't consider this as deep research. I just now got it on a normal Internet search and the title caught my eye. It's a good article, but to me, this is just the beginning.

Did the CIA Ruin Classical Music for the Masses?

RONPAULINSTITUTE.ORG

As both a classically trained musician and an audiophile, the 1950s and 1960s was something of a golden age of recorded music. It was at this time...

 

There's icing on this cake, too.

One of my biggest cognitive dissonances was why on earth Igor Stravinsky started using 12 composition. Stravinsky's most popular works are characterized by small musical phrases--including very, very, singable melodic phrases--that are used over and over and altered as the work unfolds. (Stravinsky never goes for the big long melody.) Hell, one of my best concerts in São Paulo as a conductor was Petrushka, which is one of Stravinsky's works that uses this small melody technique.

So how on earth did a man like that go into 12 tone writing? Stravinsky's endorsement of it was probably the main reason I, myself, kept trying to make it work for so long. I knew the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern sounded like fruitcake city to me, but Stravinsky was a real composer. 

Now I learn that the CCF was paying Stravinsky money, too. (Probably through Robert Craft, who I met at BU. He was Stravinsky's not-so-talented friend and assistant when Stravinsky was alive, then made a living from that reputation afterward.)

Shit and damnation. That crap helped ruin my college education.

Stravinsky didn't love 12 tone writing. He loved the money and power he got from the CCF so he used his own talent for smoke and mirrors. After all, he had not really had a hit (a classical music hit, but the hit concept is still valid) in years when that crap started. And the CCF made his modern stuff relevant to the world. So he prostituted his art and went da-da for money and master.

And he did that to protest Russian composers going da-da for money and master under communism. What a joke...

Ayn Rand said whenever you find a contradiction, check your premises and one of them will be wrong.

I want to add a corollary. The wrong premise will involve money so often, money should be the first place to look to correct the error.

So follow the friggin' money...

Bah...

Michael

The smelliest money you must follow however is that which has been corrupted.  Honest money, if attained by persons of integrity and rationality are rarely used to fund their antipodes.  Money tained by acquisition through force, theft, fraud, or unjust taxes... is tainted... the smelliest currency of all...

follow the gangs, the oligarchs, the crony-socialists, government funding...

 

..follow your nose.

 

 

 

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SL,

The point is not the odor of the money.

It's awareness of the existence of the money in the first place.

Back in my college days, who on earth would have imagined that Stravinsky was taking money from the Deep State and selling out his art for it? People NEVER talked about money in the context of talking about Stravinsky.

But insiders knew. They always knew. The bad guys were and are using money to change the culture while encouraging intellectuals to play the intellectual-discussion-fiddle as they watch Rome burning.

The issue is not about the nature of money or any other intellectual idea. It's about money changing hands, especially in the dark. It's about the damage massive amounts of money can cause in the wrong hands and when one is not aware that this is what is causing things to happen.

Look, for example, what Big Pharma is doing to the world. Some in government and some among certain ideologies want the power, but most of the people involved in perpetrating this mess just want the money.

btw - I am not too convinced the ideologically pure are much of a force against massive amounts of money, at least not in the short term. Over the years, I've seen too many people I have admired for their integrity sell out. Including most of the academic scientific community.

Anyway, Stravinsky was just the latest disappointment for me. Back to the arts...

If one wants to change the world through the arts, the first step is not to analyze anything at all about any particular art. Nor to generate an audience. Nor even to look at the philosophies involved. The very first step is to see if the Deep State or some other bad guys are funding it somehow.

One can fight the Deep State and other bad guys with all tools talent can muster, including philosophy, but one has to be aware of them to fight them.

What's more, in my experience, most people, when faced with the choice of being true to an ideal or receiving a pile of money will not hesitate to take the money. And, from what I have observed up close and personal, most of them will sleep like babies.

Don't think the Deep State doesn't know this...

Michael

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1 hour ago, tmj said:

I thought this was a good piece...

T,

I got through most of it, but I didn't think it was very good.

Defining the rot in terms of left versus right, conservative versus liberal, etc., with a whole lot of "isms" thrown in didn't do it for me.

I define social rot in other terms, for an example of one standard: freedom versus coercion. 

Take the issue of gay marriage. The rot is not about who gets to force their own views on others, the religious people or gay activists or woke Karens or whoever. The rot is anyone who forces views on others regardless of which side the coercion comes from.

On this level, I don't care if a person is woke or a racist--or reasonable for that matter.

I do care if such a person has coercive designs on my own life and choices. The live and let live people for me are not the rotters. All live and let live people are welcome in my universe. The power-mongers and cheaters and liars and so on are the rot.

Michael

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1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Back in my college days, who on earth would have imagined that Stravinsky was taking money from the Deep State and selling out his art for it?

Frank Zappa would. He once made waves by suggesting that the CIA was responsible for the introduction of LSD into the hippie counter-culture.  (In addition to his "regular" music, he was also creating his own orchestral "avant garde", as well, inspired by Edgar Varese...hmmm...) He was mocked at the time, but it's since come to light that it was true. Even more relatedly: Hollywood and the counter-culture at that time has a connection to the CIA and military, with "Operation: Mockingbird",  "Laurel Canyon"...and many of the hippie artist's parents and musician's management were military-adjacent. (A lot of it revolves around the California desert and military operations. For example, Zappa's father was a chemical scientist for the military and Jim Morrison's father was military...notably, and ironically, Zappa was anti-drug/anti-hippie, while Morrison and others died from overdoses. Zappa knew...)

)Think MK-ULTRA.  Zappa was mocked, but proven right; this is NOT conspiracy theory, either; it's all been acknowledged. This is the stuff that makes the "Q" phenomena at least plausible, putting aside all the supernatural/alien nonsense from some of the anons...

(And to connect it to current events: Compare the CIA's "Poisoner in Chief", Sidney Gottlieb, who was behind the LSD experiments, to Dr. Anthony "I am the science" Fauci...and it's wondered why people don't "trust the science...")

 

7a-portrait_wide-b41c6ccb71728bd957b2b93
WWW.NPR.ORG

Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and...
THETRUEREPORTER.COM

Were you aware of the fact that the CIA invented LSD and hippies in the 1960s? Not a clue? Well, the plan was to hook kids on sex, drugs and...
WWW.JSTOR.ORG

The purpose of this article is to establish a connection between music and politics. In Western societies añer the Second Worid War...

“There’s this guy from the CIA, and he’s creepin’ around Laurel Canyon…”— Frank Zappa, “Plastic People”


 

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25 minutes ago, ThatGuy said:

Frank Zappa would. He once made waves by suggesting that the CIA was responsible for the introduction of LSD into the hippie counter-culture.  (In addition to his "regular" music, he was also creating his own orchestral "avant garde", as well, inspired by Edgar Varese...hmmm...) He was mocked at the time, but it's since come to light that it was true. Even more relatedly: Hollywood and the counter-culture at that time has a connection to the CIA and military, with "Operation: Mockingbird",  "Laurel Canyon"...and many of the hippie artist's parents and musician's management were military-adjacent. (A lot of it revolves around the California desert and military operations. For example, Zappa's father was a chemical scientist for the military and Jim Morrison's father was military...notably, and ironically, Zappa was anti-drug/anti-hippie, while Morrison and others died from overdoses. Zappa knew...)

)Think MK-ULTRA.  Zappa was mocked, but proven right; this is NOT conspiracy theory, either; it's all been acknowledged. This is the stuff that makes the "Q" phenomena at least plausible, putting aside all the supernatural/alien nonsense from some of the anons...

(And to connect it to current events: Compare the CIA's "Poisoner in Chief", Sidney Gottlieb, who was behind the LSD experiments, to Dr. Anthony "I am the science" Fauci...and it's wondered why people don't "trust the science...")

 

7a-portrait_wide-b41c6ccb71728bd957b2b93
WWW.NPR.ORG

Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and...
THETRUEREPORTER.COM

Were you aware of the fact that the CIA invented LSD and hippies in the 1960s? Not a clue? Well, the plan was to hook kids on sex, drugs and...
WWW.JSTOR.ORG

The purpose of this article is to establish a connection between music and politics. In Western societies añer the Second Worid War...

 


 

For an example of Zappa's personal experience that informed his insight:

Quote

 

Frank, the eldest of four children, was raised in an Italian-American household where Italian was often spoken by his grandparents.[1]: 6 [8] The family moved often because his father, a chemist and mathematician, worked in the defense industry. After a time in Florida in the 1940s, the family returned to Maryland, where Zappa's father worked at the Edgewood Arsenal chemical warfare facility of the Aberdeen Proving Ground run by the U.S. Army. Due to their home's proximity to the arsenal, which stored mustard gas, gas masks were kept in the home in case of an accident.[1]: 20–23  This living arrangement had a profound effect on Zappa, and references to germs, germ warfare, ailments and the defense industry occur frequently throughout his work.[9]: 8–9 

Zappa was often sick as a child, suffering from asthma, earaches and sinus problems. A doctor treated his sinusitis by inserting a pellet of radium into each of Zappa's nostrils. At the time, little was known about the potential dangers of even small amounts of therapeutic radiation,[9]: 10  and although it has since been claimed that nasal radium treatment has causal connections to cancer, no studies have provided enough evidence to confirm this.[10]

Nasal imagery and references appear in his music and lyrics, as well as in the collage album covers created by his long-time collaborator Cal Schenkel. Zappa believed his childhood diseases might have been due to exposure to mustard gas, released by the nearby chemical warfare facility, and his health worsened when he lived in Baltimore.[1]: 20–23 [9]: 10  In 1952, his family relocated for reasons of health to Monterey, California, where his father taught metallurgy at the Naval Postgraduate School.[1]: 22  They soon moved to Claremont, California,[11]: 46  and then to El Cajon, before finally settling in nearby San Diego.[12]

 


 

Zappa_16011977_01_300.jpg
EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

 

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Zappa on Stravinsky, Weber, and Varese  (from his autobiography, THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK):
 

Stravinsky & Webern

The second 33 1/3-RPM record I bought was by Stravinsky. I found a budget-line recording (on Camden) of The Rite of Spring by something called The World-Wide Symphony Orchestra. (Sounds pretty official, eh?) The cover was a green-and-black abstract whatchamacallit, and it had a magenta paper label with black lettering. I loved Stravinsky almost as much as Varèse.

The other composer who filled me with awe -- I couldn't believe that anybody would write music like that -- was Anton Webern. I heard an early recording on the Dial label with a cover by an artist named David Stone Martin -- it had one or two of Webern's string quartets, and his Symphony op. 21 on the other side. I loved that record, but it was about as different from Stravinsky and Varèse as you could get.

I didn't know anything about twelve-tone music then, but I liked the way it sounded. Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels (who had a song out then called "Angel in My Life"), or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music.

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Zappa on the CIA and LSD (from THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK):
 

Other Options

If we were to decriminalize and commercially 'recontrol' the "controlled substances" (dispensing them on a rack next to the alcohol in State Stores, or in chains of Federal Party Pharmacies, for example), benefits

to the U.S. Treasury could be substantial, as would domestic 'cocaine brewery' profits.
At least one aspect of our agricultural problem would be solved
("What should we plant next year, Wanda?"), the prison population would diminish, and, most importantly, we could put a crimp in the pipeline feeding cash to the guys in the jungle.

I don't know about you, but I have never issued a 'temporary license to govern' to
any guy in any jungle, but, because they made so many friends in Washington during the last eight years (just helping out with 'the war effort'), they act as if it had been granted by proxy.

Would 'recontrol' put the cartels out of business? Probably not. What if RJR Nabisco decided to open a 'brewery division' -- Dan Dorfman would report rumors of another big takeover, the stock would soar (a lot of church and pension-fund buying) and the cartel would wind up as a legit U.S. business -- just like some of our most illustrious old-money families who hit it big when the booze trade got redignified. What if a kinder, gentler CIA chose to produce a low-cost 'designer drug' with special 'social engineering characteristics,' and mount yet another covert civilian
test for profit, arranging for this New Buzz to drive Traditional Flavors out of the marketplace? It worked with LSD. (And doesn't PCP -- makes you crazy; takes five guys to hold you down; etc. -- have a sort of'militarily useful' aura about it?)

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7 minutes ago, ThatGuy said:

Zappa on Stravinsky, Weber, and Varese  (from his autobiography, THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK):
 

Stravinsky & Webern

The second 33 1/3-RPM record I bought was by Stravinsky. I found a budget-line recording (on Camden) of The Rite of Spring by something called The World-Wide Symphony Orchestra. (Sounds pretty official, eh?) The cover was a green-and-black abstract whatchamacallit, and it had a magenta paper label with black lettering. I loved Stravinsky almost as much as Varèse.

The other composer who filled me with awe -- I couldn't believe that anybody would write music like that -- was Anton Webern. I heard an early recording on the Dial label with a cover by an artist named David Stone Martin -- it had one or two of Webern's string quartets, and his Symphony op. 21 on the other side. I loved that record, but it was about as different from Stravinsky and Varèse as you could get.

I didn't know anything about twelve-tone music then, but I liked the way it sounded. Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels (who had a song out then called "Angel in My Life"), or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music.

Lest one think that Zappa's love of the avant garde made him a communist: quite the opposite. While there was no love lost between him and the Reagan-era, he was still anti-communist, and more "Libertarian" in that sense. (So it makes sense that he would be the one calling out the CIA, while his lefty peers in music would be shilling for the Democrats, and the ones who didn't fry their brains and OD would become "useful idiots" for communists)... From THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK.
 

Communism

Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn't work. It's against a basic law of nature: "PEOPLE WANT TO OWN STUFF." Perestroika virtually certifies this as an axiom. You still want to call it "Communism"? Sure -- g'head -- call it what you want. We don't need to say, "I told you so." Leave a guy some dignity. The Cold War? Have another Pepsi -- it makes you moonwalk.

In exporting their philosophy, the Soviets employed a technique reminiscent of U.S. evangelical TV ministries. They told people who were hungry and sick they'd give them food and penicillin. The evangelists forced them to read the Bible; the Communists made them read The Little Red Book -- and if you couldn't read, the motherfuckers would recite it to you through a bullhorn.

The Soviets have spent many years (and a lot of money) marketing and maintaining a political Edsel, fueled by the assumption that entire populations will cheerfully endure Spartan conditions, then hand over the fruits of all labor to a benevolent bureaucracy which would redistribute the wealth in an 'equitable manner.' What?
In every language, the first word after
"Mama!" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine!" when you grow up, has -- to put it mildly -- a fatal design flaw.
From the time
Mr. Developing Nation was forced to read The Little Red Book in exchange for a blob of rice, till the time he figured out that waiting in line for a loaf of pumpernickel was boring as fuck, took about three generations. Television helped to speed up that cycle.
Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact:
People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, it they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.

Why, then, do so many Americans, while professing to adore Freedom and Democracy, support -- even demand -- that actions be taken by their own government which bear a striking resemblance to Old-Style Evil Empire Communism? (Censorship? Disinformation? The Public Library Spy-Squealer Program?) Are we really that unspeakably stupid?

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45 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

T,

I got through most of it, but I didn't think it was very good.

Defining the rot in terms of left versus right, conservative versus liberal, etc., with a whole lot of "isms" thrown in didn't do it for me.

I define social rot in other terms, for an example of one standard: freedom versus coercion. 

Take the issue of gay marriage. The rot is not about who gets to force their own views on others, the religious people or gay activists or woke Karens or whoever. The rot is anyone who forces views on others regardless of which side the coercion comes from.

On this level, I don't care if a person is woke or a racist--or reasonable for that matter.

I do care if such a person has coercive designs on my own life and choices. The live and let live people for me are not the rotters. All live and let live people are welcome in my universe. The power-mongers and cheaters and liars and so on are the rot.

Michael

Yeah we share the same universe, re live and let live people :), I took more of the chronicling and itemizing if you will as the thing that resonated.

 

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TG,

I'm not at a distance on this one. I lived the dodecaphonic thing and the amount of pretentiousness surrounding it was something to behold.

Zappa said he likes Webern?

Heh.

Here's the Symphony opus 21 he gushed about.

Don't worry. It's only 6 minutes or so. The best thing about Webern is that he's always short. Some of his works only last 2 minutes or so.

Look at the YouTube comments if you want to see the pretentiousness I mentioned. People are talking about the difficult journey of opening oneself to this music until it clicks and they become one of the enlightened. Then they get to gush and use the metaphor of finely honed diamonds and other gem stones on Webern. What a load of bullshit. Not one of those people would listen to this garbage unless someone else was looking at them listening. All it is at root is in-group and out-group virtue-signaling crap and a little martyr role playing thrown in for fun.

I speak from experience. I was around this idiocy for about three years at BU back in the 1970s and nothing has changed.

And Zappa himself? If he listened to this more than once, I would be very surprised. I can see him liking the idea of praising something weird-sounding like that to stick it to music industry and other authority figures, but he-himself listening to that crap as part of his normal musical diet? Nah... I just don't see it.

Zappa was smart enough to learn the 12 tone technique, but he didn't. All it takes is a couple of hours if that, but he didn't do it. I wonder why?

(For interested readers, you take all twelve tones of the chromatic scale, arrange them in any order you like, then you have to repeat that sequence over and over without repeating a tone until the other 11 have been sounded. But you can run the sequence backward, run it upside down and so on. No restrictions on single voices, chord clusters, octave transpositions, rhythm, anything else.)

This particular symphony is a little more laid back than Webern's normal works, which often have sudden loud one second passages followed by silence and stuff like that. This work could be a movie soundtrack for zombies relaxing before eating a meal of human brains... 

:) 

And yes, I know all about the way Webern manipulated the tone rows--retrograde, retrograde-inversion, palindromes and all that shit. They had me doing this busywork (which is all it is) and telling me I was making music.

So imagine the CIA doing a money-laundering operation out of this as they presented it to the world as typical American music and typical American freedom.

That's exactly what they did.

Michael

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36 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

TG,

I'm not at a distance on this one. I lived the dodecaphonic thing and the amount of pretentiousness surrounding it was something to behold.

Zappa said he likes Webern?

Heh.

Here's the Symphony opus 21 he gushed about.

Don't worry. It's only 6 minutes or so. The best thing about Webern is that he's always short. Some of his works only last 2 minutes or so.

Look at the YouTube comments if you want to see the pretentiousness I mentioned. People are talking about the difficult journey of opening oneself to this music until it clicks and they become one of the enlightened. Then they get to gush and use the metaphor of finely honed diamonds and other gem stones on Webern. What a load of bullshit. Not one of those people would listen to this garbage unless someone else was looking at them listening. All it is at root is in-group and out-group virtue-signaling crap and a little martyr role playing thrown in for fun.

I speak from experience. I was around this idiocy for about three years at BU back in the 1970s and nothing has changed.

And Zappa himself? If he listened to this more than once, I would be very surprised. I can see him liking the idea of praising something weird-sounding like that to stick it to music industry and other authority figures, but he-himself listening to that crap as part of his normal musical diet? Nah... I just don't see it.

Zappa was smart enough to learn the 12 tone technique, but he didn't. All it takes is a couple of hours if that, but he didn't do it. I wonder why?

(For interested readers, you take all twelve tones of the chromatic scale, arrange them in any order you like, then you have to repeat that sequence over and over without repeating a tone until the other 11 have been sounded. But you can run the sequence backward, run it upside down and so on. No restrictions on single voices, chord clusters, octave transpositions, rhythm, anything else.)

This particular symphony is a little more laid back than Webern's normal works, which often have sudden loud one second passages followed by silence and stuff like that. This work could be a movie soundtrack for zombies relaxing before eating a meal of human brains... 

:) 

And yes, I know all about the way Webern manipulated the tone rows--retrograde, retrograde-inversion, palindromes and all that shit. They had me doing this busywork (which is all it is) and telling me I was making music.

So imagine the CIA doing a money-laundering operation out of this as they presented it to the world as typical American music and typical American freedom.

That's exactly what they did.

Michael

Listened to a little bit of it...I'm not into avant garde, but this sounds like it could work in a horror/suspense/thriller movie...or even some Looney Tunes background music..
As to Zappa, I don't know if he "liked" it or if it was a put-on...but was more interested in how it (the CIA/atonal music connection) related to his CIA/drug claims...

I haven't listend to his orchestral avant guard-inspired works  (I know mostly his "Valley Girl" and "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow"/DR. DEMENTO novelty- type of songs...) And not to derail the topic too much, but just for fun, then, here's him doing a Varese composition...
 


 

 

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TG,

The MK-ULTRA thing, including the drugs and all the rest, is here on OL in several places.

And here is a Twitter thread I lined up a few days ago to condense here on OL. I hate reading long Twitter threads and I imagine others do, too, so I like to put the content of great threads all in one post and strip out the tweet containers. When I get a little time, I will do the copy/paste thing.

But for now, I think you will enjoy this. It's much better than most.

Suddenly names have faces...

Click "Read the full conversation on Twitter" to see the entire thread.

Michael

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19 minutes ago, ThatGuy said:

Listened to a little bit of it...I'm not into avant garde, but this sounds like it could work in a horror/suspense/thriller movie...or even some Looney Tunes background music..
As to Zappa, I don't know if he "liked" it or if it was a put-on...but was more interested in how it (the CIA/atonal music connection) related to his CIA/drug claims...

I haven't listend to his orchestral avant guard-inspired works  (I know mostly his "Valley Girl" and "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow"/DR. DEMENTO novelty- type of songs...) And not to derail the topic too much, but just for fun, then, here's him doing a Varese composition...
 


 

 

Something I just thought of: to the question of WHY the CIA would use LSD as mind control, and why would they promote atonal music:

I don't know much about atonal music, but I remember Ayn Rand talking about it in THE ROMANTIC MANIFESTO, how it disintegrates the mind, something like that. That makes me think think of how LSD supposedly causes schizophrenia, and "fractures" the mind...I don't know the exact reasons (beside money laundering) that the CIA would promote atonal music, and maybe this is a stretch, but it's hard not to see a connection between the "disintegrative" properties of both LSD and atonal music...and if the CIA was willing to utilize mind-altering drugs, why not "mind-altering music"? (But then again, I never got the impression that atonal music had much of a following, unlike the "psychedelic" music of the sixties, which seems at least still based on normal scales...mostly...then again, Hendrix and the Grateful Dead had some far-out stuff, too...so...)

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