Discontentment As so often when I try to write about philosophy when rereading my thoughts I am unhappy about them. In hindsight my conclusions often seem too unsubtle, too undifferentiated, too simplified, too arrogant and the statements are too sweeping. My pessimism concerning mankind which I uttered yesterday is probably more based on man's hubrus (mischief) than its mediocrity. And on the other hand there are moments when I am more optimistic about our future. But I still feel something has to change maybe more inside each of us than from outside so that future generations can live on the planet earth. Man can do it, we can do it, but we cannot continue as before. Actually my Nietzsche obsession dates back from my adolescence (I am not the only one) and it has faded long ago. Nevertheless I still feel I have to defend Nietzsche as he was so dear to me when I was young. I couldn't refrain from writing yesterday's post as I am subscribed to the Philosophical Quote-A-Day Service newsletter which yesterday included Nietzsche's Übermensch statement. Additionally I read in a German biography of Joni Mitchell (my favourite songwriter) that she has started to read a lot of Nietzsche recently.

Today's Philosophical Quotation Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra Translation: I teach you the Overman Superman. Man is something which shall be surpassed. These are some of the most famous words of Nietzsche, they are extremely ambivalent and provocative and the term Übermensch has been trivialised, misunderstood and discredited by the Nazis in Germany's dark age from 1933-45. I'd like to explain a little how I read them. In contrast to what most people associate when hearing this quotation I think Nietzsche does not think about race or even master's race (Herrenrasse) here. Those words do not appear in Also sprach Zarathustra. This is a statement of modesty and farsightedness. Man is not the crown of the evolution as the bible implies. And the evolution which lead to man does not finish there. Man is just a stage, not a final state of evolution. The big question is how the overman can be reached. Probably Nietzsche thought the overman can be bred (by man), but here I really have my doubts. That sounds like Münchhausen's paradox/dilemma (to draw oneself plus horse out of the mud by oneself's shock of hair) to me. But I think mankind can only survive long-term if man surpasses himself. If mankind stays on its current mediocre level it will be doomed soon. A good starting place to get a grasp of Nietzsche's thinking is his short essay from 1873 (when he was 29 years old) Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne. English-only readers should either use Altavista's Babelfish translation service or look for the English translation "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense". That essay illustrates the problematic limited nature of the concept of anthropomorphism.

Song lines This morning I listened to Giant from The The's third record Soul Mining. I didn't remember how good this song was. The percussion play peaking in the second half is absolutely addictive. African tribal rhythms plus synthie plus "iyeai-yeai-yeai-yea-aa". And Matt Johnson sings "How could anyone know me. When I don't even know myself?". That is logical but I immediately thought the reverse is true as well: How can I know myself when I haven't looked at me from the perspective of a stranger? In one of her few covers Joni Mitchell sings "How do you stop before it's too late" on Turbulent Indigo. I have to relate this to smoking, Joni's voice has gone down at least one octave in the last 15 years because of all those bloody cigarettes. I don't know if she has stopped now but I know I have to stop and I hope that it is not too late. At the moment I switch between one/two days on and off all the time. And the next day after a slip I usually waste the tobacco which is left. Ridiculous, no pathetic is the word. The best part of a cigarette is putting it out. That is like stopping smoking. A release. At least it gives me the feeling of how it would be to stop this bad habitude. In my twisted smoker's logic I restart smoking only to stop it again. And as I love to stop I have to smoke again to stop again. A vicious circle.

Why I don't post right now Regular readers of this blog must have realised that I got a little bit tired of writing here. One reason is (I have to admit) that I don't really have to say anything. Another is that a lot of my energy in the last couple of weeks got into (you won't believe it) trying to learn inline skating. I must be the worst skater in the world. When Catherine, me and some friends skate around Frankfurt I am always the slowest and last. I sweat like hell and I think it is not because of the exercise but because of the fear to fall. I never did roller skating, downhill skiing or ice skating when I was young. I am fascinated by the challenge to roll on eight wheels. It is like starting to walk the only difference being that I didn't realise how difficult it was to walk on two feet when I was one or two years old. What else did I do recently? I started the following two threads at I Love Music:

• Free music for music webloggers (an interesting but I think doomed idea, applications are closed for now)
• Ministry. S&D. And I participated in the following discussions at ILM (because right now I prefer to talk to others than to blog for myself):
• The The: C/D, S&D
• What Do US Pop Musicians Have That UK Ones Don't?
• ABBA: Classic Or Dud?
• Jacques Dutronc
• Satie's Trois Gymnopedies: Classic or Dud?
• ILM Snapshot: The Last Five records you bought pt 2 (The one-year anniversary edition!)
• Interpol - Ian Curtis reincarnated?
• neneh cherry's homebrew: isn't it better than overrated raw like sushi?
• After The Goldrush And some others which I don't want to remember now.

Links

• The new Aimee Mann album Lost in Space can be streamed at her home page until the release date August 27th (via elements of surprise). Bachelor #2 was one of my favourites in 2000. Aimee Mann always reminds me of Joni Mitchell whose subtle melodies and personal lyrics captivated me a lot during my studies in the 80s. When I heard Aimee the first time I thought she was Joni reincarnated only twenty years younger, a similar crystal clear warm voice and the same looks: slender, fragile with long blond hair.
• Tom Ewing writes on the best-of 21 Singles by The Jesus and Mary Chain. I never really got into that band but I loved the trashy primitive guitar sound very much influenced by the Velvet Underground around White Light/White Heat.
• Strange Fruit has some news on Austin's American Analog Set splitting up as their singer Andrew Kenny is going to attend grad school at Columbia University. Their gig in Frankfurt a couple of weeks ago was my favourite concert this year up to now. Even the Sonic Youth concert in Cologne could not come close to that intense mind-blowing set.
• Ten songs Radiohead played at the first gig of their European Tour in Lisbon on Monday of which the new ones were described as more 'immediate and melodic' than their stuff on Kid A and Amnesiac as mp3s here: punch up at a wedding, myxomatosis, we suck young blood, i will, sail (you) to the moon, karma police, up on the ladder, scatterbrain, there there and lift (via parallx view). I also found Joseph Tate's on-going investigation of the music and art of Radiohead in the form of a weblog: pulk-pull* (via eclogues).
• German: Bekenntnisse einer Frau, die es liebt Männer im Mund zu haben (kam mir anfangs wie ein Fake vor, ist aber in any case lesenswert).

Unhappiness (DE) Das größte Unglück ist nicht zu merken, wieviel Glück man hat. Wenn einem das erst einmal klar geworden ist, dann ist man schon einen Schritt weiter. Unglücklich zu sein, obwohl ich alles habe, was ich brauche, ist ein Luxus, auf den ich gerne verzichten würde. Und doch finde ich, dass man gerade wenn es einem materiell gut geht trotzdem das Recht hat, unglücklich zu sein. Es ist geradezu so, dass man nur unglücklich sein kann, wenn gewisse Grundbedürfnisse befriedigt sind. Jemand, der nahezu verhungert oder verdurstet, kommt gar nicht dazu unglücklich zu sein, da seine Gedanken um andere elementarere Dinge kreisen als Glück oder Unglück. Es dürfte nach dem Geschriebenen unschwer zu erraten sein, dass ich unglücklich bin. Aber was mich im Moment antreibt, ist herauszubekommen warum. Irgendwo ist da die naive Hoffnung, dass wenn ich erst einmal den Grund gefunden habe, das Unglücklichsein verschwinden wird. Aber will ich das überhaupt? Vielleicht bin ich ja gerne unglücklich? Auch das ist möglich. Logisch stringent ist das alles nicht. Aber ich musste das jetzt mal loswerden.

Some lame jokes on a band I don't care about At I Love Music there is some Grateful Dead bashing going on. I found the following jokes there which possibly give an idea of the band and especially their fans:

Q: What do Grateful Dead fans say when they run out of drugs? A: God this band are shit.

Q: Where do you hide your money from a Deadhead? A: Under the soap...

Q: How can you tell a Deadhead has been at your house? A: They're still there!

Q: How many Deadheads does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None... they just wait for it to burn out and then follow it around the country.

Jerry Garcia and Eric Clapton are captured by cannibals one day. Before they are about to be cooked for dinner they are granted one final wish. Jerry says "hand me my old guitar and let me play Dark Star one last time...". Eric says "please kill me before he starts".

And to finish off this not so serious morning post a programmer's joke I found at jc-log: "There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't."

How to keep track of weblogs I have found what I was looking for. Call it a weblog monitor, a blogroll or a weblog watchlist. I am talking of a tool which organises the weblogs you read in a chronological way, i.e. the last updated ones on top of the list and the lazy guys & girls who didn't write anything recently on the bottom of the list. Up to now I have been using blo.gs. It worked fine but it had the disadvantage that it only took into account weblogs pinging to weblogs.com and some other monitor sites or to blo.gs directly. I found freshblogs (via smi) which tracks any site even if the site does not ping. This is my current watchlist with music sites. None of these weblogs/sites pings but I can still keep track of the last updates this way. A small step for mankind but a big step for the weblog community (or at least for those webloggers like me who are not able to program a weblog monitor themselves). Freshblogs can still be improved, e.g. the possibility to immediately open new windows from the monitor would be nice but I am sure new options will come soon. Another improvement could be a more frequent update check as I have got the impression that the list order only changes about once every three to six hours. A problem seems to be that websites showing up on top of the list do not always contain what I'd call new stuff. According to the discussion thread How Does Freshblog track sites?: "When freshblogs has to scan a site it downloads the page pointed to by the URL. Freshblogs calculates an MD5 checksum from the page and stores this checksum in the database. Unfortunately sometimes people's web sites have dynamic elements that aren't really new content. The checksum dutifully reports the changes, but this isn't necessarily what is wanted. What is needed is a "fuzzy" checksum that tolerates slight differences. This will always be a best guess though and never as realiable as people "pinging" weblogs.com to notify updates to their site." Therefore I still would like people to manually ping weblogs.com whenever theý have added new content to their weblog. An easy way to do this is by using Phil Ringnalda's Weblogs ping bookmarklet constructor (you just have to input the name of your site and its url once) after every new post. The bookmarklet can be dragged to the Links Toolbar (in Internet Explorer) and is only a click away.

Nick Drake Via my referrers I discovered the weblog letting loose with the leptard with a transcription of a monologue Nick Drake had spoken into a tape recorder in 1968 after having been to a party. I couldn't have put the analysis of Drake's words better myself: "I posted the Drake monologue yesterday because I'd heard it for the first time the day before. Sitting down and listening to it was something of a revelation. First impression was that there was something faintly eerie about it, but that's only because I'm a fan of Nick Drake. To anyone else hearing it, they'd probably take it at face value: a young man, well spoken and well educated, having come home from a party a bit buzzed, staying up to play a bit of piano (as you do!) and watch the dawn come in, finally rambling into a tape recorder at five in the morning, enjoying the view. Even as he's sobering up he minds his p's and q's. And so to bed...." Discovering people with similar interests who can write better about them than myself is always a revelation for me. That is what I like so much about the internet. That it connects my brain with other brains out there. And even if I am not able to write about the music I love as I would like to I at least often can find someone on the internet who can.

Do Make Say Think live When we arrived in the KoZ (Kommunikationszentrum) on the Frankfurt University Campus at 8 o'clock last Wednesday we were greeted by a wall of noise. The band was still on rehearsal. Around 9:30 when the concert was supposed to start there were hardly twenty spectators. Around 10 when the places started to fill the seven band members enter the stage and the bass player utters the only sentence of the evening: "We are Do Make Say Think from Toronto". They begin their set with "Classic Noodlanding", the first track on their last album & Yet & Yet. A promising slow starter introducing us to dense hypnotic droning soundscapes. The following pieces are noisier with guitar and other freakouts. The repetitive tuneless tracks start to grate. After a while we move from the front to the bar at the back of the room. The overall sound and especially the two drummers are too loud. The music resembles progrock and is very heavy. The musicians change instruments often. At one point there are two saxophones and two trumpets. The main trumpet player looks into the audience with a big smile whenever he pauses. Later on I understand why he grins so much. His muffled but still crystal clear trumpet sound makes me think of Miles Davis. A guy next to us rolls a joint with one hand and I suddenly think that that's it: dope music, music which can only be properly enjoyed under drugs. The guitarist is extremely thin and looks a little like Nick Cave. His guitar is way too big for him. After the concert I talk with the trumpet player who is extremely relaxed. I tell him that I am going to see Sonic Youth in Cologne the next day and it turns out that they play Cologne on the same day. Apparently they had also played Berlin at the same day as Sonic Youth and therefore didn't have a big audience. I mention my beloved Cowboy Junkies (dope music par excellence) as another band from Toronto and he tells me that at their concerts you can hear a needle fall (German expression) as the public is extremely attentive and silent. Margo Timmins languishing voice is simply irresistible. Though the concert was not really that impressive I still enjoyed it. At concerts with unknown bands in small places I feel more comfortable and closer to the music than listening to big names in big venues. P.S. All Google searches (and some other engines as well) leading to the front page of this weblog are now temporarily (until the next Google crawl) deviated to my old home page at Geocities. I took this rather strict measure to be able to read my referrer logs again. The visitor numbers have already dropped by two thirds. Hooray!