Singularity

Pondering

Nov.10, 2006, filed under Miscellany

I am a one-eyed mutant freakI’m on what could be called leave at the moment, so I’m at home with cold feet looking at the wind blowing a hooey out there and grumping because I had planned to go out on my bike. Instead I shall make flapjacks so that Frood is greeted by flapjacky goodness when he comes in this evening. I shall also tidy the flat, because if I’m stuck at home the least I can do is keep the place nice.

While I’m here, not being a daytime tellybox sort of girl, I’m listening to music I haven’t listened to in years. Today I am playing the whole of Faith No More‘s Album Of The Year. I bought this album in my second year of my PhD, when I spent the very late/early hours playing Quake. Gods I hated the noise those zombies made.

It’s funny how the shapes of the songs on this album recall so exactly the circumstances in which I used to listen to it. I can remember the colour of the carpet (tasted of the smell of slugs, I kid you not), the bookcase; the way the windchimes used to start playing Ennio Morricone whenever weird shit was going down. The smell of the essential oils I used to use in the bath when things got really tough and I needed half an hour of quiet time.

There’s a lot more from that time it recalls. I think I’d rather skip that.

I sometimes wonder if other people recall in the same way. The sense of olfaction is most strongly tied in with memory. No matter how poor a person’s recall is, a scent can provoke an entire episode of flashback, including thoughts and emotions. It surprises me that more people don’t use this in creating triggers for cantrips and altered states of consciousness, but it seems to be just me and Mr and Mrs Miller (good book, by the way). I know people use specific incenses and oils in ritual, but I’m talking a more specific, trigger-based approach.

To Chris Brosius this is old news, of course.

That aside, I sometimes ponder whether my recall is altered by the synaesthesia: as all scents and tastes have shape and texture and usually colour, as does everything else, and it all eventually binds into one great sense of form with a shape defined by all the input of all my senses, does the synaesthesia allow me to make triggered recalls that wouldn’t be possible without it? Does the smell/taste/sound/colour/shape/texture synaesthesia mean that the shape of a song will trigger something in the same way a scent might?

At the end of the day, does it really matter? It’s probably all down to my crazy mutant brain anyway.

While I’m at it, I have to share this story I found on the FNM official website.

Remember the fish flopping in the video for Epic? Do you remember the fuss that was caused by animal rights people wailing and moaning about how cruel it was? Björk — that feisty, pixie-ish mistress of techno-babble — at one point ‘fessed up that it was her fish.

Kevin <96069031@csunt2.napier.ac.uk> wrote in alt.music.bjork november 24th:
[thanks to Joe Headcrash] A.P.

Reykjavík, Iceland
Almost a decade after a once-controversial music video gained popularity and success for now-defunct rock band Faith No More, the video (for the band’s 1990 hit “Epic”) returns from MTV purgatory to reap all-new controversy, thanks to techno-pop queen Björk.

“Yes, it was my fish” the spacey, brunette Icelander told CNN on Friday.

“There was a party at Roddy (Bottum, ex-Faith No More keyboardist)’s mansion in Berkeley and I was just coming from a poetry reading in San Francisco. I had been given the fish (which she admits to having named ‘Linear Soul Child’) from a person at that poetry reading, and brought it to Roddy’s party. That’s the last time I ever saw him.”

The fish, a common 3-finned goldfish, caused a media uproar from animal-rights groups the same year for supposedly being “flopped” on the ground during the video shoot. Faith No More insisted that the fish ‘flopped only once’ despite allegations of animal mistreatment.
Björk, despite becoming emotionally upset in our interview over the loss of her would-be pet, comes to the defense of the group. “I know those guys, I know they wouldn’t do anything to harm [him]. But I know, if I had gone home with MY fish, which was given to ME, none of this would have ever happened.” The former members of Faith No More declined to comment further on the incident.

So there you go, people. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more bizarre: they do. I think there’s a lesson in that somewhere.

It’s probably something along the lines of: “If you’re mad enough to call a goldfish Linear Soul Child, you’d better be making a living out of crazy.”

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