The day after I read this, I happened to ask a neuroscientist, as one does, if it's possible to use sound waves to make someone hallucinate they're standing in a place they're not really standing in, and he said yes, of course, and after typing something in his 2-in-1 tablet/laptop combo he gave me an example: "The Kokomo Effect," a persistent low frequency sound of indeterminate origin that caused the residents of Kokomo, Indiana, to experience strange visions in the '90s and early 2000s. I said well what the fuck that's just fucking uncanny and showed everyone in the kids' show writers' room that I'd been reading a Substack post about the Beach Boys' Kokomo going from an imaginary place to a real one. Maybe, instead of a sound gun, the villain could use a Bluetooth speaker playing a catchy surf rock tune to make the young heroes imagine they're trapped in a deserted island?
After discussing ways to slip in some Borges references into the show (we already have Cortázar and Alan Moore covered), I wrote down a reminder to look more into the "Kokomo Effect" later However, when I tried to do that I realized there wasn't much more to look into; Google showed seven results for "Kokomo Effect" and none had anything to do with mysterious hallucination-causing sounds. I asked the neuroscientist which obscure scientific journal he got that information from and he confessed it was ChatGPT. We determined that ChatGPT was actually talking about something called the "Kokomo Hum," an annoying low frequency sound, apparently originating from a factory's cooling fan, that caused nausea and headaches in some Kokomoans. Some deemed the hum an auditory hallucination, and I guess ChatGPT decided to spice up the story and make it so it also caused visual ones. I think we'll end up using a gun that shoots senses-altering surf rock tunes anyway, hopefully inspiring one of the 7-to-12-year-olds watching the show to create a real one in the future.
There was a short period when Sidney Noad was using the Kokomo effect in his therapy sessions to “induce positive hallucinations that will engender an ongoing state of positive well-being.” This was around 2007, when he had his meditation studio in Goleta, and was teaching third-phase transcendental techniques to wealthy Santa Barbara housewives. Like most weekend transcendentalists, I got bogged down in the second phase, which, as you well know, is a big nothing and even feels like a backward step. I'm told third is great if you can get there, but it takes a year of feeling like gum stuck on the bottom of someone's shoe. Who needs that?
I didn't get to witness Noad's Kokomo therapy first-hand. Apparently, he used to stand uncomfortably close to his patient. His face would literally be a few inches from their face, which probably crosses all kinds of professional and ethical lines. He would open his mouth and make a continuous low-frequency noise, similar to what you might experience if you were to hold a seashell up to your ear. His patients tended to either burst into fits of laughter or become traumatised. Noad would carry on regardless of their reactions. He claims to have made significant breakthroughs with the therapy.
I hear that eventually he received a strongly-worded letter from The Beach Boys' lawyers. He called the technique something other than Kokomo therapy for a while. After he received another letter from the same source, he stopped the therapy altogether. You can find the techniques online if you want. You don't even need a therapist – you can perform them while facing yourself in the mirror.
Lee Brooks (you met him that one time in Kensington, but you probably don't remember) has just told me that it is possible jump from first to third phrase transcendentalism, but there is a chance that you might suffer a heart attack.
I don't remember Lee but I do remember hearing the same thing from poor Chadley Norrington, whose entire nervous system gruesomely imploded after miscalculating a leap from first to third phase transcendentalism and accidentally ending up in phase 17th. Police found his corpse next to record player skipping on the chorus of "Rave On" by John Cougar Mellencamp, the next track after "Kokomo" on the soundtrack for Cocktail.
That is an inspired piece, Sam. My mother was a huge fan of Borges, and referred to his work throughout her life, right up until the end. His writing was as real to her as the Encyclopedia Britannica itself (albeit a very old edition), come to think of it, of which she was also a devotee. And David Bowie. She would have loved your essay. As I do. I stopped reading and listening to music many years ago, but am starting to pay attention again. I've been practicing a meditative discipline that has occupied a lot of my attention, and then a lot of family matters, so my awareness of music has really lapsed. Since my last aural explorations have included several discussions o AI, and our current news cycle includes a lot of alternate identities of one kind or another, all of this layering is being seen. So happy to read you! Now back to drawing the dead sticks of winter before they wake up and become transformed by spring.
Borges' writing was unintentionally prescient of the Internet, most evidently in the honeycomb architecture of The Library of Babel, where the inhabitants are either grubbing around for coherence in a stew of random letters, or elevating a chance non sequitur to the level of something with universal, and possibly godlike, significance. I wonder how he would have reacted to the Internet as it is now, when we are witnessing the death of truth. I don't think that he intended his stories as warnings but increasingly they read that way. In the words of the fraudulent psychic, Robert James Lees, from Alan Moore's 'From Hell' graphic novel “I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That's the funny part.”
I have been trying to set aside some time to listen to music, as opposed to having it on in the background. Vinyl is undergoing a mini-renaissance. I have neither the money nor the space to accommodate it, but I am interested in the way that artists are arranging their songs based on the understanding that they will be spread across two or more sides. It possibly heralds the decline the progressive rock epic – Sleep's bludgeoning sixty minute epic 'Dopesmoker', describing an alien caravan of weed-worshipping priests, as they trudge laboriously across desert sands towards an extraterrestrial facsimile of Jerusalem, does not adjust well to being separated into movements. On the other hand, 20 minutes a side does make records more manageable. Realistically, I am not going to spend an uninterrupted 77 minutes listening to the new Lana Del Rey album in its entirety, but broken down into four sets of four songs that seem tailored to one another, it does make a certain amount of sense.
Why in the name of all that is holy do we need AI to write things for us!! As if there were a shortage of writers! No, there is only a shortage of the ability to take it all in. No one has time to take it all in. Do we realize this? Can we? I love Borges too. That comment by the fraudulent psychic clearly has truth in it. Did you hear that there was some sort of attempt to get script writers to work with government agencies because the writers seem to often predict the future? Don't know if that happened. Far from being discouraged by there being too many writers, I am finding the need to write is really foaming up. Imagining all of this, seeing it, hearing it, adds wonder to the world. I love humans. Sometimes a particular human is a gritty bit to take in, like some writing. But all in all- hat's off to humanity. As for music- gee. That is a good point about length of the disks etc. My friend Louise Landes Levi, poet extraordinaire and international nomad, releases her albums of saranghi music on vinyl. and has done for years.
Over the weekend, I was literally lying on the floor (where I do my best thinking) and pondering this. I use an off-the-peg AI to generate images. I would like to use Stable Diffusion but I think that it would probably melt my computer.
Text AI has come on in leap and bounds since Keaton Patti's allegedly bot-generated Batman movie script, where the Joker presents Batman with a coupon for new parents, and Batman instructs his butler, Alfred, to give birth to Robin.
I am pretty much a one-trick pony when it comes to writing. The way that I spark and then develop ideas would be easily, and perhaps even more competently replicated, by the current generation of AI. You could argue that the software would struggle with things like social context. If you've ever strayed into the cross-hairs of a psychopath or a narcissist, then you will know these things can be easily faked. We're on autopilot far more than we might care to admit.
To a casual observer – one of my height, weight and build - there has been a recent landslide of progress in the field of AI, where suddenly it is really good. I have seen a lot of artists and writers panicking and calling for bans. I have been around long enough to know that, if you stand in the way of progress, then it will roll right over you, and won't even acknowledge the bump.
My gut instinct is to heed the lesson of John Henry's pyrrhic victory over the steam drill. Extrapolating beyond the lyrics of that song, there are other iterations of steam drill and its successors, stretching to the event horizon and beyond. Meanwhile, John Henry lies six feet underground clutching his hammer in his cold dead head. You make your peace with change or you die.
That is certainly an apt comparison. I ain't no John Henry. I use all sorts of machinery and I practice an art or craft that not only takes hours of hand work, but is really impossible to photograph. And not only that, is of little interest to anyone but myself. Any good builder can tell you that nail guns and hundreds of other devices are essential tools of the trade. None of that eliminates the need for the hammer, the hand saw, the screw driver and so on, though adzes be few. I've not only strayed into the cross-hairs of narcissists, I've stayed in those crosshairs and lived to tell about it. As a matter of fact you could say that is my current situation- my partner is one of those who is able to do imitate anything and do it better than the originator. On the face of it, one might think it would be completely discouraging. Well. Perhaps that is what underlies my perspective now. When it gets right down to it, when we do something, creatively or otherwise, or is everything we do creative?- you are right, we are not free agents really, we are responding to a myriad of impulses and informational stimulants, accumulated over generations and millennia, and our selections are hardly random but programmed through our perceptions and receptors, and what we do is output tempered by our own skills and ability to distinguish and appropriate. When i was a teenager, a girl got very good at imitating me- she imitated my style of drawing so well I often could not tell her work from my own, my style of writing and penmanship, and even my style of dress. I found it unnerving and irritating. I could not understand why it bothered me so much. So I have been practicing with this for a long time. It really gets right down to what we call our self, and who are we, and so on.
The day after I read this, I happened to ask a neuroscientist, as one does, if it's possible to use sound waves to make someone hallucinate they're standing in a place they're not really standing in, and he said yes, of course, and after typing something in his 2-in-1 tablet/laptop combo he gave me an example: "The Kokomo Effect," a persistent low frequency sound of indeterminate origin that caused the residents of Kokomo, Indiana, to experience strange visions in the '90s and early 2000s. I said well what the fuck that's just fucking uncanny and showed everyone in the kids' show writers' room that I'd been reading a Substack post about the Beach Boys' Kokomo going from an imaginary place to a real one. Maybe, instead of a sound gun, the villain could use a Bluetooth speaker playing a catchy surf rock tune to make the young heroes imagine they're trapped in a deserted island?
After discussing ways to slip in some Borges references into the show (we already have Cortázar and Alan Moore covered), I wrote down a reminder to look more into the "Kokomo Effect" later However, when I tried to do that I realized there wasn't much more to look into; Google showed seven results for "Kokomo Effect" and none had anything to do with mysterious hallucination-causing sounds. I asked the neuroscientist which obscure scientific journal he got that information from and he confessed it was ChatGPT. We determined that ChatGPT was actually talking about something called the "Kokomo Hum," an annoying low frequency sound, apparently originating from a factory's cooling fan, that caused nausea and headaches in some Kokomoans. Some deemed the hum an auditory hallucination, and I guess ChatGPT decided to spice up the story and make it so it also caused visual ones. I think we'll end up using a gun that shoots senses-altering surf rock tunes anyway, hopefully inspiring one of the 7-to-12-year-olds watching the show to create a real one in the future.
There was a short period when Sidney Noad was using the Kokomo effect in his therapy sessions to “induce positive hallucinations that will engender an ongoing state of positive well-being.” This was around 2007, when he had his meditation studio in Goleta, and was teaching third-phase transcendental techniques to wealthy Santa Barbara housewives. Like most weekend transcendentalists, I got bogged down in the second phase, which, as you well know, is a big nothing and even feels like a backward step. I'm told third is great if you can get there, but it takes a year of feeling like gum stuck on the bottom of someone's shoe. Who needs that?
I didn't get to witness Noad's Kokomo therapy first-hand. Apparently, he used to stand uncomfortably close to his patient. His face would literally be a few inches from their face, which probably crosses all kinds of professional and ethical lines. He would open his mouth and make a continuous low-frequency noise, similar to what you might experience if you were to hold a seashell up to your ear. His patients tended to either burst into fits of laughter or become traumatised. Noad would carry on regardless of their reactions. He claims to have made significant breakthroughs with the therapy.
I hear that eventually he received a strongly-worded letter from The Beach Boys' lawyers. He called the technique something other than Kokomo therapy for a while. After he received another letter from the same source, he stopped the therapy altogether. You can find the techniques online if you want. You don't even need a therapist – you can perform them while facing yourself in the mirror.
Lee Brooks (you met him that one time in Kensington, but you probably don't remember) has just told me that it is possible jump from first to third phrase transcendentalism, but there is a chance that you might suffer a heart attack.
I don't remember Lee but I do remember hearing the same thing from poor Chadley Norrington, whose entire nervous system gruesomely imploded after miscalculating a leap from first to third phase transcendentalism and accidentally ending up in phase 17th. Police found his corpse next to record player skipping on the chorus of "Rave On" by John Cougar Mellencamp, the next track after "Kokomo" on the soundtrack for Cocktail.
That is an inspired piece, Sam. My mother was a huge fan of Borges, and referred to his work throughout her life, right up until the end. His writing was as real to her as the Encyclopedia Britannica itself (albeit a very old edition), come to think of it, of which she was also a devotee. And David Bowie. She would have loved your essay. As I do. I stopped reading and listening to music many years ago, but am starting to pay attention again. I've been practicing a meditative discipline that has occupied a lot of my attention, and then a lot of family matters, so my awareness of music has really lapsed. Since my last aural explorations have included several discussions o AI, and our current news cycle includes a lot of alternate identities of one kind or another, all of this layering is being seen. So happy to read you! Now back to drawing the dead sticks of winter before they wake up and become transformed by spring.
Borges' writing was unintentionally prescient of the Internet, most evidently in the honeycomb architecture of The Library of Babel, where the inhabitants are either grubbing around for coherence in a stew of random letters, or elevating a chance non sequitur to the level of something with universal, and possibly godlike, significance. I wonder how he would have reacted to the Internet as it is now, when we are witnessing the death of truth. I don't think that he intended his stories as warnings but increasingly they read that way. In the words of the fraudulent psychic, Robert James Lees, from Alan Moore's 'From Hell' graphic novel “I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That's the funny part.”
I have been trying to set aside some time to listen to music, as opposed to having it on in the background. Vinyl is undergoing a mini-renaissance. I have neither the money nor the space to accommodate it, but I am interested in the way that artists are arranging their songs based on the understanding that they will be spread across two or more sides. It possibly heralds the decline the progressive rock epic – Sleep's bludgeoning sixty minute epic 'Dopesmoker', describing an alien caravan of weed-worshipping priests, as they trudge laboriously across desert sands towards an extraterrestrial facsimile of Jerusalem, does not adjust well to being separated into movements. On the other hand, 20 minutes a side does make records more manageable. Realistically, I am not going to spend an uninterrupted 77 minutes listening to the new Lana Del Rey album in its entirety, but broken down into four sets of four songs that seem tailored to one another, it does make a certain amount of sense.
Why in the name of all that is holy do we need AI to write things for us!! As if there were a shortage of writers! No, there is only a shortage of the ability to take it all in. No one has time to take it all in. Do we realize this? Can we? I love Borges too. That comment by the fraudulent psychic clearly has truth in it. Did you hear that there was some sort of attempt to get script writers to work with government agencies because the writers seem to often predict the future? Don't know if that happened. Far from being discouraged by there being too many writers, I am finding the need to write is really foaming up. Imagining all of this, seeing it, hearing it, adds wonder to the world. I love humans. Sometimes a particular human is a gritty bit to take in, like some writing. But all in all- hat's off to humanity. As for music- gee. That is a good point about length of the disks etc. My friend Louise Landes Levi, poet extraordinaire and international nomad, releases her albums of saranghi music on vinyl. and has done for years.
Over the weekend, I was literally lying on the floor (where I do my best thinking) and pondering this. I use an off-the-peg AI to generate images. I would like to use Stable Diffusion but I think that it would probably melt my computer.
Text AI has come on in leap and bounds since Keaton Patti's allegedly bot-generated Batman movie script, where the Joker presents Batman with a coupon for new parents, and Batman instructs his butler, Alfred, to give birth to Robin.
I am pretty much a one-trick pony when it comes to writing. The way that I spark and then develop ideas would be easily, and perhaps even more competently replicated, by the current generation of AI. You could argue that the software would struggle with things like social context. If you've ever strayed into the cross-hairs of a psychopath or a narcissist, then you will know these things can be easily faked. We're on autopilot far more than we might care to admit.
To a casual observer – one of my height, weight and build - there has been a recent landslide of progress in the field of AI, where suddenly it is really good. I have seen a lot of artists and writers panicking and calling for bans. I have been around long enough to know that, if you stand in the way of progress, then it will roll right over you, and won't even acknowledge the bump.
My gut instinct is to heed the lesson of John Henry's pyrrhic victory over the steam drill. Extrapolating beyond the lyrics of that song, there are other iterations of steam drill and its successors, stretching to the event horizon and beyond. Meanwhile, John Henry lies six feet underground clutching his hammer in his cold dead head. You make your peace with change or you die.
That is certainly an apt comparison. I ain't no John Henry. I use all sorts of machinery and I practice an art or craft that not only takes hours of hand work, but is really impossible to photograph. And not only that, is of little interest to anyone but myself. Any good builder can tell you that nail guns and hundreds of other devices are essential tools of the trade. None of that eliminates the need for the hammer, the hand saw, the screw driver and so on, though adzes be few. I've not only strayed into the cross-hairs of narcissists, I've stayed in those crosshairs and lived to tell about it. As a matter of fact you could say that is my current situation- my partner is one of those who is able to do imitate anything and do it better than the originator. On the face of it, one might think it would be completely discouraging. Well. Perhaps that is what underlies my perspective now. When it gets right down to it, when we do something, creatively or otherwise, or is everything we do creative?- you are right, we are not free agents really, we are responding to a myriad of impulses and informational stimulants, accumulated over generations and millennia, and our selections are hardly random but programmed through our perceptions and receptors, and what we do is output tempered by our own skills and ability to distinguish and appropriate. When i was a teenager, a girl got very good at imitating me- she imitated my style of drawing so well I often could not tell her work from my own, my style of writing and penmanship, and even my style of dress. I found it unnerving and irritating. I could not understand why it bothered me so much. So I have been practicing with this for a long time. It really gets right down to what we call our self, and who are we, and so on.