What about music as a form of collective entertainment

Music, the art that has survived capitalism and springs up from every part of the earth and every moment that humans have occupied, continues to express societies, classes, nations, genders, metaphysical beliefs, problems, emotions, happiness and pain.  It should not be left on the hands of experts, industries, interests, or government to dictate, to suppress or promote.  As a tool, as most arts, crafts, and techniques, should be redistributed to all those below as users and not passive consumers.  Everyone can learn music, sing, play an instrument.  To do it well takes practice first and a little bit of talent, which we are not convinced of what it really is.

Music has also played a role in popular movements.  There has never been any significant social change without some music associated with the movement that caused it, while music for the sake of producing more music has not lived as long, as the music of social history.  We found a good introduction to a music genre that survived some real sever oppression to follow basic steps of emancipation and struggle to freedom.  The struggle, the living conditions of the past, the pain and suffering of those who sang their way on the narrow path towards liberation, is embedded in their songs.

We Borrowed this From the Music Room


This Primer is dedicated to promoting Rhythm and Blues, but it's clear to anyone with a passing interest in the music that it really doesn't stick to any clear definition of the genre.

John Lee Hooker

As a Primer, it's an attempt to illustrate the music, the labels and the artists of a particular style but it cannot lay claim to be a theoretical, academic or scholarly treatise. This is primarily because I am ill-equipped to do it well and there are others who are far better qualified to deliver a definitive history of the form.

So what you'll find below is an emotional and historically flawed account of the music that the Primer promotes, designed to provide a background and context for what you'll find in the real world..

Mushrooms, how much we don't know

If the study of mushrooms is a science in itself it may be the youngest science yet.  There is such a vast amount to study around mushrooms that indeed we (humans) may be just barely scratching the surface of this science.  As there is very little knowledge around the subject in-house we thought it would be a good excuse to utilize this opportunity to share this learning experience with others who may find an interest.  The process of learning something collectively without the assistance of experts is slightly different and it may be even more objective when a wide spectrum of information as a library is available.  When information does not exist the process becomes science in its true basis.

As we generally avoid encyclopedic interest in learning (learning for leisure or to satisfy personal curiosity) as such may only be expressed by an individual not a community or other group, learning about mushrooms, how to choose them, how to grow them, cook/eat them, use them for other purposes, making paper for example, or medical/health reasons, seemed as worthwhile.  In the most introductory reading we have found yet it would be hard to imagine a community that wouldn't need to learn about mushrooms.

Why does this take so long?

The initial aim of this blog was to attract interest by other teams and collectives to engage in an organized inquiry of how to develop a set of practical solutions material for developing or enhancing an autonomous community anywhere in the world.  But goals sometimes are either set too high to achieve, or take too long to materialize.  In such cases people who may initially share them may loose interest.  The system has altered our internal clocks to work in the rhythms of industrial machinery.  This has been partly our experience here, which we would like to share without the specifics of who, where, when.  Some of us have grown to cleanse our internal clocks and are more patient in watching change take place in human terms, not in capitalistic industrial rhythms.  Some have not been able to do so and are impatient and try to force things.  While doing so what they are forcing are their ideas on other people who are unable to share them or are unable to commit to a process where those ideas can collide, blend, and evolve into a collective product.

Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals

Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process

Ian Sample, science correspondent @ The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013
 

Randy Schekman, centre, at a Nobel prize ceremony in Stockholm.

Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a "tyranny" that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.

Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.

Schekman said pressure to publish in "luxury" journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

The treacherous world of modern scientific practice and its industrial use

Here is a piece from an essay that relates the experience of a scientist within the industrial scientific complex.  Science has evolved to a tool that is isolated from society to have value only to large scale private industrial institutions.  Its funding comes from public taxation and "humanitarian" organizations, but its product is funneled to private industry.  This is an example of how those from above load the burden of their cost to further develop their machines of exploitation, on those from below who are ultimately the objects of exploitation.