almost an empty room.

I never knew Whitney Houston. however, years ago, I worked for a while at the Sonesta Hotel in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. the late Ms. Houston was in town to do a concert appearance, and while she stayed elsewhere, her group of musicians and backing singers stayed at the Sonesta. one morning, early shift, I was asked to go and investigate water pouring from the ceiling in the main restaurant. we quickly traced this to one of the larger suites, where the backing singers from Ms. Houston's group were billeted. no answer at the door. as in, not even a peep, although they did not appear to have checked out. so in we went, with a pass-key, to find that partying had indeed gotten out of hand. the summit of the activities appeared to be that one of the singers had decided that a nice warm bath would be the thing to have after the evenings exertions. however, she obviously did not consider the bath comfortable enough, and dragged a mattras from one of the beds to the bath, and proceeded to let the water flow. passing out in the tub, the water, as it will do, continued to flow, and hence the reason for our now successful investigations as to the source of the errant h2o. the group were asked in no uncertain terms to leave the hotel, never to darken the door again, or indeed the walls. I was the person responsible for clearing up the room afterwards, and so know whereof I speak. now I can also reliably report that the richer the room's occupant, the less likely they are to think of the difficulties in cleaning up after them.

so, a strange coincidence which had me doing a little thinking on reading of the state in which the now deceased singer was found.

the real beginning of 'New Age' (Gurdjieff-related interest)

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=1158589415603817

Orson Welles 'The Trial" (1962)

seen for the first time in 30 years. a staggering work of genius. of this, there can be no doubt. mouth falling open in amazement many times.

more (internal) losses.

today saw the extraction of the 3rd wisdom toom - intimations of age, fatality, and all sorts of other things you can get your teeth into.  geddit? terrible.

baited breath.

http://www.discogs.com/reviews/list?artist=Hafler+Trio%2C+The#c91091

yes, indeed, the reactive mind in action. suggest something that does not follow a previously established framework, and you get a) insulted, and b) dismissed.

Processing. But Processing what?

now three days spent installing “tools” (I think that word as applied to computer programmes is nonsensical and insulting, but I digress) in order to get a square on an orange background on an Android machine. Processing seems useful, but the draconian, idiotic and intrinsically non-helpful AppStore ‘safeguards’ prevent this from being used. One (or at least this one) wonders why Apps related to The Dalai Lama, Palestinian discussions, The Financial Times, Tawkon (the most interesting in various ways), and Phone Story, which makes me even ashamed to be even thinking about an app at all - but I will write more about this soon - are banned. but perhaps the answer is obvious.

the same is true in various ways about Supercollider, PD, (MaxMSP doesn’t count, and Jitter users are eternally dammed as far as I’m concerned), and lots of other applications. So, if I wish to use the years of developmental effort involved in any of these applications - and much of it can be embedded - in an iOS app, I can’t - because you have to write that functionality, developed for years and available in code libraries, again. And why Objective C? Jobs. Who owned NeXT. The man who said he “wanted to put a dent in the universe”. why is a man with such a colossal ego held up to be a hero just because he’s dead? Rather than the universe remembering me for inflicting a violent act on it, I’d rather it remembered me because I didn’t.

Java (at least on the Mac and Linux) still does not clean up after itself - the reason I abandoned it for anything serious many years ago. I am truly appalled that this situation has not improved at all. what can you say when you have to cold restart 27 times in one day?

last complaint, and then I will shut up - Apple does not ‘officially’ support NTFS. now, if I have to reboot, is quit everything, all daemons, everything, run DiskUtility, unmount the disks, then run ‘testdisk’ (I just tried to access the README file in the distribution, but it has taken 30 mins, and a 16k file doesn’t take that long to open), but this has to be done before the disks are unmounted. the remounting process that testdisk does takes about 3 or 4 minutes, and then the disks are read *and* writable. there is always still an unremoveable residue in the ‘trash’ folder, that can only be purged by reformatting. HOWEVER, grateful as I am to the author of testdisk (can’t open the README, so I don’t know who you are), if you quit terminal without FIRST quitting the script, you are left with a zombie that takes up 97% of CPU...sorry, but it does. obviously the QUIT message could be intercepted and a KILLALL sent or whatever, but I’m sure I will be told I could do this myself. trouble is, it took a month to discover this.

here we go again.

Seconds (1966)

saw this again for the first time in 30 years. looks even better than it did before, and its depth is more profound than I remembered. the attention to detail, the sheer beauty, the metaphors stacked on top of each other...and the chicken reference which Mr. Lynch obviously used later...and I finally understand what it all means, too. imagine Brian Wilson’s confusion at entering this film late, on acid, and with the onset of mental illness...or maybe don’t. if you have a chance, see this film and indeed, meditate upon its meaning.