SHUT THE FUCK UP

The Society for Ethnomusicology and especially me, Mike Whybark (although the Society has seen fit to suppress many, indeed, the majority of, specific aspects of their requests in previously published versions of this acoustifesto):

* calls for full disclosure of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means of delivering music as torture;

* condemns the use of music or noise although how the fuck it’s possible to definitively delineate a goddamn difference is beyond my weak-ass means to determine but it really fucking pisses me off that assholes some of whom I may have met or may meet personally in the next forty-to-sixty years engage their time to ‘defend’ what they mistakenly perceive as our shared economic or political interests by perverting one of the most astonishing and nearly holy facets of human social creativity into a weapon revealing the true and absolute nature of all our interactions with one another as wholly predatory and therefore never worthwhile for one moment from the day of birth forward and fuck you oh fuck you oh fuck you may my money turn to shit in your hands as an instrument of torture at which improbable instance I shall laugh; and

* demands that the United States government and its agencies cease using music or noise such as that commonly found on top-forty radio or independent ‘experimental’ radio stations with the ironic exception of the compositions of Iannis Xenakis as an instrument of physical and psychological torture, insofar as it may be possible given the generally dismal prospects of providing commercially successful music which may be fairly judged not to be an instrument of physical and psychological torture.

Wake

As I waited to turn north on 4th on my way home, an odd-looking plane, banking in to Boeing Field, caught my eye. Never having seen one on approach to a dirt landing, the steeply-raked engines atop the wing fooled me into unknowing. The plane, a flying boat in U. S. Navy dress blue-and-gold, was almost certainly a restored PBY Catalina. Over a decade ago, that model of plane in similar livery flew an excursion service off the glassine surface of Lake Union. What a treat; I dearly love each glimpse of flying dinosaur I get and treasure each memory. My neck-craning gawkery at the stop sign led to the Seattle version of a Noo Yawk salute: somewhere behind me, someone politely ‘beep-beeped’ with the intent of guilting me off the cell phone, a faulty assumption.