u/noms_de_plumes

So, I've just started a master's program in interdisciplinary studies with a concentration in philosophy and theory and would like to later go onto to get a PhD in philosophy. As per the master's program, you can either finish with a thesis or by doing a final project.

Originally, I was dead set on doing a thesis, as I'd assumed that it would look better on my academic resume and was mistaken in my belief that the project was just like a thesis, only with a smaller page requirement.

Having discovered the creative potential of the project, I have become very much so taken with my idea for it, which is to write a work of experimental literature, billed as an epic poem, which is one part concrete poetry, one part philosophical essay, and one part political manifesto. It is to be largely a meditation on Giorgio Agamben's interpretation of Walter Benjamin's notion of messianic time, though is somewhat deceptive in that the author of the text, as I plan to publish it under a pseudonym, drifts in and out of polemics such that the work can also be seen as deconstruction, as there is a way in which the character is also engaged within a political crusade.

In this way, it's sort of like Notes from the Underground, where the narrator isn't so much as "dishonest" as they may or may not be reflective of the author's, in this case, Dostovesky's, actual beliefs.

I'm also working on publishing a book of poetry at the moment and, it seems possible, if not even likely, that I could convince my editor to publish what becomes of this project, anywhere between two and four years from now.

My idea for the project is not so much as relevant as is my inquiry as per having a thesis whenever I apply to a doctoral program, as I obviously don't want to put myself at a significant disadvantage as per not having done a thesis.

I've applied to doctoral programs already, and, so, do understand that I will need a writing sample, of which, given the nature of my project, I would not be able to use, but, aside from having to additionally generate a writing sample, for the admissions committee, would it look significantly better to have done a thesis, as opposed to a creative project?

So, as the title says, I'm looking for a world instrument store of some kind or a store that specializes in Indian classical music as I'm in the market for a harmonium and some tablas.

Writing is a form of personal totalitarianism. When a person writes, regardless as to whether it is fiction or autobiography, they seek fragments of the past to beatify and color with the near ultraviolet hue of equivocal declarations and the many double-articulations of confessional artifice. The very point of writing is to turn a little shrine in your memory unto a great palace, a built environment that is never neutral, ritual architecture designed to hold festivals in your name for eras of the highest order of magnitude. In every author, there's a little Speer, a little Mao, a young Alexander, who, upon meeting the oracle, mistook "O child!" for "O god!". True as it may be that authors are so-inclined to revel in despair, that one's narcissism is self-loathing only shows that they have fallen in love with their own melancholy. One should not feel pity for those weep for lack of adoration. One should not empathize with these scriptural gaslighters. One should feel the deep green rhizomes with their fingers and bask in the glory of the natural world!

Long have folk suffered in tedium! Do not write, I say to you, brothers, sisters, and people of all kinds! Do not read either. Go out into the world, thy dear friends, and do not waste your cosmic luck hunched over fallen arbory!

Alas, however, I have said too much. Writing is a form of personal totalitarianism. The only difference between a bookstore and the Church of Scientology is that the latter is recognized as a cult. OPEN YOUR EYES, my dear friends, and FREE YOUR MIND to the TRUTH!

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel mistook the Prussian state for the invention of komische musik, and The Phenomenology of Spirit actually prophesizes the creation of the band, Ash Ra Tempel. Manuel Göttsching is a conduit of the Absolute Mind and, if you listen to their self-titled first album or his Inventions for Electric Guitar while either on a combination of mushroom tea and ecstasy with a touch of sativa or just LSD, you will become the mind of God. Ask erowid for doage information.

Göttsching is also developed telepathy before recording Ashra, which details a trip on experimental psychedelics where he discovered that American psychological operations had been spying on North Korea in the hopes of developing propaganda techniques with which to establish a global crypto-fascist totalitarian regime, a political project which they have yet to abandon. Telepathy is actually a finely honed form of emotional intelligence born as a coping mechanism to deal with complex trauma, which, in this political context, Giorgio Agamben outlined in The Coming Community as "the irreparable". It was actually the North Korean people who established an elective affinity with Göttsching in the hopes of averting the complete disintegration of the collective unconscious. Everyone in North Korea is a potential telepath.

Göttsching, assumedly because I am both a fan of his music and, at the time, was running a counter-intelligence program against the global far-Right, later communicated with me via the "M"-line, a spiritual channel designed to transmit thoughts through images, so that I could a lead non-violent war of liberation against what I call machina, effectively fascist machines, which I was able to visualize and have since obliterated from the second-order of reality.

I have contacted The New York Times, amongst other outlets within the so-called "free press" to inform them of my exploits in the hopes that my story can serve as an example to liberate the mind of the world from the near omnipresent psychological damage caused by the diffusion of information warfare to little to no avail. Assumedly, this is due to the fact that the Times has always been an integral part of the intelligence racket established originally by the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau and is now orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, but it should still come as a shock to you all that no one in the associated press seems to believe that an attempt at a disintegration of the world-mind and establishment of, to turn the conspiratorial phrase, a "new world order" is not concerning enough to print in the press. I have, instead, come here, in the hopes that, like young Hamlet, you will "draw thy breath in pain to tell my story."

Note:

Almost all so-called conspiracy theories originate as neo-fascist counter-intelligence. The "new world order" of which I speak has little to nothing to do with Jews, excluding a few members of Mossad, and everything to do with the Western intelligence, which MI6 orchestrates and the CIA tries to game and enact.

Secondary Note:

In the old days, The New York Times would collaborate with the Sicilian Mafia to assassinate people who submitted corrections to the newspaper, which may still be ongoing. If you are going to contact The New York Times, for your own safety, do not correct any of their spelling, grammar, or syntax mistakes.

Tertiary Note:

Should you take up this torch, go, like Cassiel, with the speed of God!

So, I've got a harmonium that I plan to purchase soon and am now looking for some tablas. Where can I find them?

So, I play kind of a peculiar mix of psychedelic folk and shoegaze and am looking for a violist, bassist, and drummer. I'd link a song or two here, but I don't think it'll pass through the filters, and, so, DM me if you're interested and I'll share a thing or two with you. My influences are The Velvet Underground, The Plastic People of the Universe, Bridget St. John, Lemon's Chair, and yuragi. Feel free to send a DM or comment if you're, in any way, interested!

Note:

I'm probably also looking for another guitar player.

Alright, so, I've just finished Blossoms Shanghai and came here for some non-idol drama recs.

I'm also pretty into art house, and, so, if you know of any good films, I'm up for that as well.

This is one of my own songs. I hope that you like it.

I'm looking to discover some music, hopefully on bandcamp, but otherwise is okay, too, as long as it's not on Spotify since I don't have an account, that's either on an independent label or released by the act itself and is not already widely popular.

Any genre is welcome!

Note:

Even if you're really sitting on some DIY gems, it is my great hope that you will share DIY gems by someone other than yourself ITT, i.e. promote your friends' music, at the very least, in the comments thread if you plan on doing something to that effect.

I got a little carried away in one of those saddest songs r/MusicRecommendations threads and now am somewhat curious about this. I kind of just like the version by Anna Fedorova, but I'm almost entirely certain that someone here knows of a deeper cut.

I've seen most of Tarkovsky's films, my favorites of which are Mirror, Ivan's Childhood, and Andrei Rublev, a few Parajanov films, one of which, of course, is The Color of Pomegranates, the Wadja trilogy, A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds, a lot of Kieslowski films, such as the tricolor trilogy, Dekalog, and The Double Life of Veronique, a few Hungarian films, Elektra, My Love, Red Psalm, Children of Glory, and Narcissus and Psyche, a fair amount of Czech New Wave, The Cassandra Cat, Loves of a Blonde, Closely Watched Trains, Daisies, A Report on the Party and the Guests, The Fireman's Ball, The Valley of the Bees, The Joke, Capricious Summer, Fruit of Paradise, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and All My Good Countrymen, and a few films made after the fall, such as Wings of Desire, The Lives of Others, Goodbye Lenin, and Cold War, all of which are art films, but only some of which may be considered as dissident films, but, am, anyways, curious is as to whether there aren't any articles written about this out there, as well as to some other recommendations, which, aside from that I like the aforementioned films and want to share them with you all, is also why I've listed them.

So, to my best estimation, the two-state solution, to me, the only viable resolution to the conflict, is paradoxically somewhat unpopular here for reasons either unknown or that I would prefer not to divulge in the interests of maintaining a general decorum, but, it is actually supported by a majority of both Israelis and Palestinians, at least, according to the polls which I could find through a quick Google search or two. Not only that, but there is also widespread international support for the two-state solution.

So, assuming that this is, in point of fact, the case, my guess is that you don't often hear people talking about the two-state solution online because, while there is a small majority of folks who agree with it, what no one has yet to agree to is of just how it is that it should play out.

If you're curious about my opinions, you can wander over to my profile page to find what I've said about this in the social democracy subreddit, but what I'd like to know is how it is that you think the two-state solution should play out.

So, I was looking at another post on the musicians sub and started to think about this.

A lot of musicians out there are somewhat fixated on music marketing strategies online, I think, and I just don't think that most of them are relevant to their current level of success.

Somewhat notoriously, musicians make an average of $0.004 per stream on Spotify. That's a grand total of $4,000 per million streams. You'd need seven and a half times that annually to even be making what is barely even a living wage at $15 an hour before tax.

On SoundCloud, musicians make on average $0.0025 to $0.004 per stream. SoundCloud is, of course, a bit different in purpose than Spotify, which is how it has skirted a bit of the flak in this regard, but, it's, anyways, slightly, but significantly actually less than Spotify.

Perhaps, for someone with different interests, it could be a bit more, but, on my bandcamp fan page, the highest number of sales in a given collection is around 1,000. Even if every person, which probably doesn't usually happen, pays $20 for the album, that's still only $20,000, which obviously wouldn't be coming in annually.

YouTube will pay between $0.001 and $0.005 per stream for a music video, which, again, is comparable to Spotify.

In the best of all possible worlds, if an act has multiple albums on bandcamp which are selling well, say, for a total of $10,000, je ne sais pas, three million YT views in a given year for $9,000, and another four million streams total on SC and Spotify for $14,000, that's still just barely over $30K at $33K and it's also probably entirely lacking in sustainability.

So, even if they're really quite lucky, most musicians just aren't making any real money online.

Yet, many musicians are rather concerned with trying to figure out how to game these kind of music marketing data matrixes. What I have to wonder is as to why.

The most plausible explanation is that they just don't know that sharing your music online is not generally profitable.

Another possible explanation is that they suspect that it still somehow matters. It may, and I am sure, on some level, does, matter to a major record label or their subsidiaries because they look at these statistics to try and figure out what has a good chance of success. Independent labels, to a lesser degree, may also do the same.

The thing about this, however, is that very few labels, major or otherwise, even accept demos and, if they do accept demos, it's more out of a general curiosity than it is to realistically find bands whom they're terribly willing to sign. To my own personal experience and general madness, I feel like I can say this with relative certainty.

If your online portfolio is only going to matter so much for your demo submission and the submissions are mostly pointless, anyways, the only way you're realistically going to be breaking out is either if you know someone already or a scout shows up at one of your shows.

Assuming that you don't know anyone, which, if you did, why would you care about any of this, what you're effectively still banking on is being and the right place in the right time and putting on a good show.

So, rather than concerning yourself with maximalizing your online presence at all, what you ought to be doing is what every moderately successful musician tells you to be doing, which is to create good music, play good shows, and to reasonably promote them.

All that your online presence is going to do for you is to cast a wider net of people who will either know or discover who you are before coming to see you live. True internet sensations are all too few and far between.

So, assuming that the real goal ought to be to get people in the venue when you play out, what, then, is "reasonable" promotion?

If you're playing local shows, you should make a flier for the show and post it around the city. You should also scan said flier, post it on your own pages, a community page or two that is designed for people to promote events like this, and, if the venue does not have a website or has not done so on their own social media account already and is also willing to let you do so, on their wall or whatever as well. If you play an open mic, you can also mention it briefly. That's basically it. It costs very little and should only take about a day or so. If you're music is good and you put on a good show, people will come out. As you play more and more, you might be able to get into larger venues, in which case, things may change, but, until you've become established within a given scene, there's just little to no need for you to consider any marketing aspects aside from the base DIY minimum.

What's good about having a music video on YouTube, uploading your music to bandcamp or SoundCloud, or whatever else is that it lets people out there engage with your music before coming to the show. No music marketing metrics are going to matter to you unless you've already come out of an established scene and are now a successful touring musician. You could be the next MIA, I guess, but it's really a pretty goddamn longshot.

Over-marketing is also just a bit off-putting. If someone invites me to a show at an open mic, I'll consider going to it, but, if they tell me to follow them on Instagram, then I will surely never respect them as a musician ever again.

Maybe I'm just a purist, though, idk?

In many ways, the Trump administration seems as if it should fly in the face of a conservative ethos. President Donald Trump, a crass and candid magnate and former reality television star, has no legitimate claim to authority. He is neither respectful nor respect worthy. He is evidently corrupt and self-serving. He has little regard for the rule of law or the separation of powers and, to just about everyone paying any form of attention, he appears to be more or less amoral.

Yet, such things can be readily disregarded through an appeal to the social equivalent of martial necessity.

It doesn't matter that Trump's mode of conduct is comparable to a low-level mob boss, let alone how it is that he conducts himself at all, because, for the fanatics on the American Right, Trump's actions are considered "necessary".

As to just what they are "necessary" for, that depends upon the conservative faction, but the problem with much of the American Right is not some form of ignorance of the disjunct between their own stated values and the current administration's moral conduct, i.e. it is not that they are just too stupid to see that he just simply enjoys acting like a little tyrant; it almost exclusively relates to what they're willing to sacrifice in the beaten way of strategy.

They believe for American society to "need" a strong and guileful hand in things like the "restoration of Christian values", the maintenance of our "territorial integrity", that we should be a bastion of "peace and security", or, in what was formerly characterized by the notion of a "city on a hill", some mythic model for other "great" nations to take heed of and follow.

As the current president has a peculiar knack for populist rhetoric, lacking in decorum as he may be, they don't necessarily mind for the so-called "miracle" of dictatorship to been made manifest by a man who carries himself about as well as most of the politically incorrect subreddit on 4chan.

For them, too, hypocrisy in politics is radically unsurprising. The problem is not that they can not see that Donald Trump is a hypocrite. The problem is that they believe that granting that hypocrite more and more power is an acceptable means to achieve their ends.

Not so much as here but elsewhere online, much of the strategy in opposition to the current administration has been to point out his apparent hypocrisy. We need to reorient our strategy in both, instead, critiquing those ends, and, much more importantly, in consideration of what is categorically unacceptable, namely dictatorial means.

tl;dr:

Say what you will about Giorgio Agamben but it's high key time to start thinking about the state of exception bc they're not amoral; just Machiavellian fanatics.