Record Label Quotes

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait — put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.

The truth is, I don't really like to think about college 'cause that means high school's over. After graduation everyone will probably go play basketball, or sing, or start record labels. And I'll have to start all over - alone.

Kat picked up a folder labeled Senior. "What are these? Bank records?" She did a double take, looking at Hale. "Did your dad really pay two million dollars to the campaign to elect Ross Perot?" "I..." Hale said, stumbling for words and thumbing through another file. "Wow. I guess my cousin Charlotte isn't really my cousin." "Don't worry," Kat said. "It looks like there might be a kid in Queens who is.

When impersonal digital records on electronics are used to forever brand people, the world loses its humanity, its human nature. It’s no longer humans who decide the fate of other humans, but inhuman technology that decides as the world moves closer to a technological tyranny that rules over and controls humans, whether they’ve been labeled bad or good. Jerome had observed how the world was becoming more and more impersonal, more inhumane as people gave up their rights to think for themselves, allowing unelected technocrats to shape the world as they saw fit, and be in control of disseminating information that shaped and molded the population’s mind.

Power-hungry, amoral individuals who didn’t care about other people who had risen to the top of the ladder, or whose family tree had been in power for ages, could utilize a digital system to dominate and control the world. When this happens, forget about a person having a hard time getting a job with a minor criminal infraction permanently stamped on their record, which is bad enough, but instead, every facet of people’s lives would be completely controlled. If a globalist, or whoever had access to the controls, didn’t like what a person had done or even thought, a single push of a button could freeze their digital bank account, make them unemployable, or even label them an enemy of the State, effectively deleting them like a file off of a computer. It would be an Orwellian world where humanity was completely controlled and had no rights or freedoms. You’d have to march in lockstep or be deleted.

All I have to do is say the word and no record label will ever touch Bad Luck. You'll be out of business faster than the fat one from N'Sync.

Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are.

43. Don’t let past failures determine what your future success will be. Walt Disney went bankrupt — twice — before finally gaining lasting momentum. The Beatles were rejected from numerous record labels, as was Tom Petty. Thomas Edison failed at creating the light bulb ten thousand times before getting it right! If he used failure as an indicator of his true path, you might be reading this by candlelight.

For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions.

The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense. The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than to understand and explain it. The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder.

And that will be on my medical records for ever. Everyone will always know I’m a nutter. Behavioural problems. I’m just a bloody label… A label written on a white board in a single room without a radio, in a place where everyone else was at least 20 years older than me. Can’t think about it. It’s anger that goes nowhere.

If I could record them and transmit them to the present age, they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds other than what they actually were, and from what their phonographic labels pretended they were – since it's in ourselves that the silence exists. It was while the sounds were still mysterious that it would have been really interesting to render the mystery palpable and transferable.

Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria. Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.

Most girls my age don't appreciate this kind of music. In my opinion, this is real music. It's haunting, poetic, and carefully-crafted. Not that techno teeny bopper crap that only sounds good because of all the machines the record label uses to make it.

When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it. There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence holding on to the illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible.

He had the sex tape, the canceled tour dates and now the record label’s sword of Damocles hanging over his head to prove it.

Everyone plays for someone, and Kris didn't play for the big dogs like Sabbath and Zep, she didn't play for the ones who made it, for the wizards who figured out how to turn their music into cars and cash and mansions and an endless party where no one ever gets old. She played for the losers. She played for the bands who never met their rainmaker, the musicians who drank too much and made all the wrong decisions. The singers who got shipped off to state hospitals because they couldn't handle living in the shadow of Black Iron Mountain. She played for the ones who recorded the wrong songs at the right times, and the right songs when it was wrong. The ones who blew it all recording an album that didn't fit the market, the ones who got dropped by their own labels, the singers who moved back home to live in their mom's basements.

Indie; I think the ten-minute song is going to be really good. Jenna: I hope you didn't tell him that. Indie: No, I told him it's unmarketable. Hudson: And what did he say? Indie: He said I sounded like a Suit., specifically like Jenna Holden, and that Jenna Holden was hired to get him Balmain deals and negotiate fat deals with record labels, not produce his next album. He also said he'd once caught you nodding your head at a Maroon 5 song, and the fact that you're not dead to him after that is a miracle in itself, so you should not push your luck. Again, his words, not mine.>/b>

A&R stands for “artists and repertoire.” No one knows what that means, but the A&R guy is the person at the record label in charge of making sure a band doesn’t suck, overdose, or try to make a concept album.

Even in the most liberal of countries and cultures, it is not easy for a pre-debut trainee to publicly voice his complaints about the label’s CEO. And Korea is a country where idol groups cannot be launched without significant capital, time, and planning know-how. In spite of this, Bang Si-Hyuk had the members write their own blog posts and publicly share their thoughts and feelings as trainees alongside their mixtapes and journal entries.

It had always been a part of his job which he found difficult, the total lack of privacy for the victim. Murder stripped away more than life itself. The body was parceled, labelled, dissected; address books, diaries, confidential letters, every part of the victim's life was sought out and scrutinized. Alien hands moved among the clothes, picked up and examined the small possessions, recorded and labelled for public view the sad detritus of sometimes pathetic lives.

It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist--it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements--and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle Music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt.

One Sunday at Woodside, gloomy and hungover, I wrote an instrumental that fitted my mood, and kept singing one line of lyrics over the top: ‘Life isn’t everything’. The next morning I found out that a boy called Guy Burchett who worked for Rocket had died in a motorbike crash at virtually the same time I was writing the song, so I called it ‘Song For Guy’. It was like nothing I’d ever done before, and my American record label refused to release it as a single – I was furious – but it became a colossal hit in Europe.

Mom had me start posting covers on YouTube. Record labels saw those covers and two, Big Machine Records and Capitol Records Nashville, wanted to sign me. Mom decided on Capitol Records, because “Scott Borschetta’s gonna be too busy with that Taylor chick; he won’t have time for you.

You ease a record from its cover. It's years since you've held one but you do this without thinking. Slide your fingers inside the sleeve, careful not to touch the vinyl. Draw it out. Hear the rustle of paper. Balance it in the span of your palm, the outer rim on your thumb, the label on the tip of your middle finger. As it brushes your wrist, feel the soft static kiss of it. Smooth as liquorice and twice as shiny. Light spills over it like water. Breathe in the new smell.

The conversation drifted to Puffy aka Sean aka P. Diddy, who had recently left Uptown Records, where he’d started as an intern, eventually becoming head of A&R. Now he already had his own record label, Bad Boy, and his star artist, the Notorious B.I.G., was all over the radio and beginning to spread all over a generation.

I was asked to write something for the movie Hero, starring Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis. Tommy had agreed I would submit a song for the film, to be sung by Gloria Estefan, who was on Epic Records (Sony, Tommy’s label, was the parent company). I knew that Luther Vandross was also writing a song for the soundtrack, so I would be in great company.

An essential difference between British and American punk bands can be found in their respective views of rock & roll history. The British bands took a deliberately anti-intellectual stance, refuting any awareness of, or influence from, previous exponents of the form. The New York and Cleveland bands saw themselves as self-consciously drawing on and extending an existing tradition in American rock & roll. (...) A second difference between the British and American punk scenes was their relative gestation periods. The British weekly music press was reviewing Sex Pistols shows less than three months after their cacophonous debut. Within a year of the Pistols' first performance they had a record deal, with the 'major' label EMI. Within six months of their first gigs the Damned and the Clash also secured contracts, the latter with CBS. The CBGBs scene went largely ignored by the American music industry until 1976 -- two years after the debuts of Television, the Ramones and Blondie. Even then only Television signed to an established label.

Ani DiFranco or Ani, as she is universally know to her fans, was, to a certain kind of white, middle-class woman, girl power in the purest sense. At twenty, she founded her own record label, Righteous Babe. She's released dozens of albums (and has sold over four million copies), had a baby, documented her life on the road, and opened for Bob Dylan.

I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsom. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsom in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'? 'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsom can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.

Our relationship was always platonic and never got weird. After he heard me sing, Will believed in my talent. He took me with him to Def Jam Recordings, the hottest new hip-hop label at the time, where he was signed.

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow.

There’s a vast fraternity of record collectors, and the record store was their hub. There was not a lot of information on these groups or the labels so you’d gather [there] and it would be like a library. - Lenny Kaye quoted

Who would have thought of the “at risk” kids making it this far? But we did, even though the educational system desperately tried to hold us down. By labeling us at an early age, they were almost able to affect our school record for life.

So, consider this. Today he’s sober, no traces of chemicals caught in his bloodstream, no bullet-blown high patching synthetic samples over the melody of his mind. Does that make this real or a side-effect of the comedown? Falling in love feels no-parachute sorts of terrifying, the ground rushing up too hard and too fast. If love is intangible, hypothetical, subjective and experienced on a uniquely individual basis, how can Jaxon ever truly know if that’s the way he’s feeling? But then, realistically, how can he know that it’s not?

Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits. It does not matter whether you have actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you are branded a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008, there were approximately 2.3 million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering 5.1 million people under 'community correctional supervision' - i.e., on probation or parole. Merely reducing prison terms does not have a major impact on the majority of people in the system. It is the badge of inferiority - the felony record - that relegates people for their entire lives, to second-class status.

They talked about record labels, about how the majority of labels didn't care anything about the music, they just wanted a pretty face they could saturate the media with. The people who were doing the good stuff weren't being signed. "Same with radio," Ruby said. "It has nothing to do with music. For the station, music is just the noise in between the ads." "No shit. It's even hard to tell the songs from the ads." "I know. It's like solid ads." "And nobody cares. Nobody cares that they're being spoon-fed shit. They just think, I like this shit because everybody else likes this shit.

Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord to invective was not badness but just such self-righteousness as this…He said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, “Amen I say to you, they have received their reward” (Matt. 6:2). They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were for those who had sinned and had not been found out…He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody’s target, and everybody knew that they were wrong…And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled as sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His death, were coverts drawn from thieves and from prostitutes. Those who were aligned against Him were the nice people who stood high in the community—the worldly, prosperous people, the men of big business, the judges of law courts who governed by expediency, the “civic-minded” individuals whose true selfishness was veneered over with public generosity. Such men as these opposed him and sent Him to His death.

In subject files labeled as correspondence related to Rosemary Kennedy, withdrawal sheets indicate the removal of hundreds of documents dating between 1923 and the 1970s. This leaves significant gaps in the historical record. A large amount of the withdrawn material is associated with Rosemary’s treatment and care after her lobotomy.

Time is passing, I'm still standing here, and people are putting all sorts of labels on me... I couldn't avoid any of that as long as I lived, but maybe there was one last part of me that only I could define. And if that part joined another part that even I nor anyone else could ever define, then my yesterday and today can be created from there.

No, they’re just black vinyl. Probably somebody else’s record that didn’t sell for shit and they got stuck with a bunch of leftovers. They hit it with some spray paint and stick a commemorative label on it and you’ve got your ‘Official Gold Record.’ Kind of ironic though, isn’t it…marking your success with someone else’s failure.” --Reggie Sinclair from Angela's Coven

The most devastating thing artists can do to their career is get in their own way, and way too many people do. It's not the labels, the industry, the fans, the cities, the economy, the social media, the marketing, the promoting, the 'right time,' the music, or whatever other excuse you can come up with that determines whether you succeed or you fail. It is you, no one else,

There’s no dignity in this place, thinks Seda. No privacy either. Some fool is always poking his or her head into your doorway. And as if the residents and nurses aren’t bad enough, lately all kinds of people keep showing up, waving their tape recorders in her face, asking her questions about the past. Everyone is an amateur historian. They use words like witness and genocide, trying to bridge the gap between her past and their own present with words. She wants nothing to do with it. But the other residents have fallen under a confessional spell. They’re like ancient tea bags steeping in the murky waters of the past, repeating their stories over and over again to anyone who will listen. Who can blame them? Driven from their homes not by soldiers this time, but by their own loved ones, to this place so cleverly labeled “home,” a second exile. In some ways, Seda thinks it’s worse than the first: to the lexicon of horrific memories is added the immense shame of surviving, of living when so many others did not. Yet they all bask in their rediscovered relevance. But all the words in every human language on earth would not be enough to describe what

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization-be it an animation studio or a record label-is an ecosystem. 'You need all the seasons,' he says. 'You need storms. It's like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There's no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn't rain, things don't grow. And if it's sunny all the time-if, in fact, we don't even have night-all kinds of things don't happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that's how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can't only be sunlight.' It is management's job to figure out how to help other see conflict as healthy-as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run.

I finally saw the whole conspiracy standing as plain as an elephant in the street; also the conspiracy was admitted to me in great detail by one of the princes of the conspiracy." "Bad, Smith, very bad." "If one of the inmates should come to you right now, Doctor, and tell you it was raining outside, you'd say 'Bad, very bad', and make damning marks on his record." " That's probably true. It's an automatic response with me.

You haven’t gotten to the point of leaving a glass for her, too.” He covered his eyes but said nothing. She pulled away his hands, and then, looking straight at him, asked, “She’s alive, isn’t she?” He nodded and sat up. “Rong, I used to think that a character in a novel was controlled by her creator, that she would be whatever the author wanted her to be, and do whatever the author wanted her to do, like God does for us.” “Wrong!” she said, standing up and beginning to pace the room. “Now you realize you were wrong. This is the difference between an ordinary scribe and a literary writer. The highest level of literary creation is when the characters in a novel possess life in the mind of the writer. The writer is unable to control them, and might not even be able to predict the next action they will take. We can only follow them in wonder to observe and record the minute details of their lives like a voyeur. That’s how a classic is made.” “So literature, it turns out, is a perverted endeavor.” “It was like that for Shakespeare and Balzac and Tolstoy, at least. The classic images they created were born from their mental wombs. But today’s practitioners of literature have lost that creativity. Their minds give birth only to shattered fragments and freaks, whose brief lives are nothing but cryptic spasms devoid of reason. Then they sweep up these fragments into a bag they peddle under the label ‘postmodern’ or ‘deconstructionist’ or ‘symbolism’ or ‘irrational.’” “So you mean that I’ve become a writer of classic literature?” “Hardly. Your mind is only gestating an image, and it’s the easiest one of all. The minds of those classic authors gave birth to hundreds and thousands of figures. They formed the picture of an era, and that’s something that only a superhuman can accomplish. But what you’ve done isn’t easy. I didn’t think you’d be able to do it.” “Have you ever done it?” “Just once,” she said simply, and dropped the subject. She grabbed his neck, and said, “Forget it. I don’t want that birthday present anymore. Come back to a normal life, okay?” “And if all this continues—what then?” She studied him for a few seconds, then let go of him and shook her head with a smile. “I knew it was too late.” Picking up her bag from the bed, she left. Then

The "whites only" signs may be gone, but new signs have gone up - notices placed in job applications, rental agreements, loan applications, forms for welfare benefits, school applications, and petitions for licenses, informing the general public that "felons" are not wanted here. A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind - discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. Those labeled criminals are even denied the right to vote.

Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings

We are all sinners in need of a savior. God came to earth in the person of Jesus to redeem and gather His people. He healed the sick, cast out demons, and taught about the kingdom of heaven. Labeled a blasphemous heretic by religious leaders, He was crucified on a cross but rose from the dead three days later at a real time in recorded history, in a real location. He revealed Himself to hundreds of real eyewitnesses, claiming that anyone who believed in Him would have peace, rest, and, most importantly, eternal life in a place where all tears would be wiped away, forever.

friends and I used to play an invented parlor game called the Worst Records Never Made. The point was to hypothesize the most stunningly inappropriate albums we could imagine—pairings of artists and material so horrific that even the famously dunderheaded major labels would hardly consider making them. Most of our inspirations have been lost to memory, but the notion of discs like “Yodel with the Berlin Philharmonic,” “The Three Tenors Sing Gilbert and Sullivan,” and—my favorite—“The Chipmunks Present Your Favorite Spirituals” can still inspire what P. G. Wodehouse used to call “the raised eyebrow,

Then the giant consolidation happens in ’98, ’99, when all the labels that were out there signing everything in the world got merged. We went from five to three pretty quickly, didn’t we? And then there were hundreds of records that never got released. Bands got dropped. You could write a book about the bands who got signed to labels and never had an album come out in ’97, ’98, ’99, 2000. That’s a whole story. So what’s really interesting is this moment that we’re talking about, for the bands we’re talking about, the evil warnings of getting swallowed by the system had actually really just happened to a bunch of artists.

The thing I remember from the Letters Page in those antique days was the way the OBs signed off. There was Yours faithfully, Yours sincerely, and I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. But the ones I always looked for - and which I took to be the true sign of an Old Bastard - simply ended like this: Yours etc. And then the newspaper drew even more attention to the sign-off by printing it: Yours &c. Yours &c. I used to muse about that. What did it mean? Where did it come from? I imagined some bespatted captain of industry dictating his OB’s views to his secretary for transmission to the Newspaper of Record which he doubtless referred to with jocund familiarity as ‘The Thunderer’. When his oratorical belch was complete, he would say ‘Yours, etc,’ which Miss ffffffolkes would automatically transcribe into, ‘I have the honour to be, sir, one of the distinguished Old Bastards who could send you the label off a tin of pilchards and you would still print it above this my name,’ or whatever, and then it would be, ‘Despatch this instanter to The Thunderer, Miss ffffffolkes.’ But one day Miss ffffffolkes was away giving a handjob to the Archbishop of York, so they sent a temp. And the temp wrote Yours, etc, just as she heard it and The Times reckoned the OB captain a very gusher of wit, but decided to add their own little rococo touch by compacting it further to &c., whereupon other OBs followed the bespatted lead of the captain of industry, who claimed all the credit for himself. There we have it: Yours &c. Whereupon, as an ardent damp-ear of sixteen, I took to the parodic sign-off: Love, &c. Not all my correspondents unfailingly seized the reference, I regret to say. One demoiselle hastened her own de-accessioning from the museum of my heart by informing me with hauteur that use of the word etc., whether in oral communication or in carven prose, was common and vulgar. To which I replied, first, that ‘the word’ et cetera was not one but two words, and that the only common and vulgar thing about my letter - given the identity of its recipient - was affixing to it the word that preceded etc. Alack, she didn’t respond to this observation with the Buddhistic serenity one might have hoped. Love, etc. The proposition is simple. The world divides into two categories: those who believe that the purpose, the function, the bass pedal and principal melody of life is love, and that anything else - everything else - is merely an etc.; and those, those unhappy many, who believe primarily in the etc. of life, for whom love, however agreeable, is but a passing flurry of youth, the pattering prelude to nappy-duty, but not something as solid, steadfast and reliable as, say, home decoration. This is the only division between people that counts.

Up to the beginning of this century people believed in an absolute time. That is, each event could be labeled by a number called “time” in a unique way, and all good clocks would agree on the time interval between two events. However, the discovery that the speed of light appeared the same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity—and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time. Instead, each observer would have his own measure of time as recorded by a clock that he carried: clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree. Thus time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it.

Contemporary preoccupation with the evils of "society" distorts the history of many groups, passing over internal improvements that took decades or generations of effort, because those improvements -- whether modest or dramatic -- imply that there was something that needed to be improved within these groups, that not all their problems were due to the "perceptions" or stereotypes" of others. Clinging to a counterproductive culture in the name of group pride and avoiding changes because they could be labeled "self-hate" are patterns that have no track record that would justify optimism. The evidence is all on the other side -- but that matters only to those who value evidence over ideology, history over visions.

This guy! I plead the fifth. This guy is nuts.” - Eminem “Dope questions, man. Very insightful, very thoughtful.” - Guru (Gang Starr) “You like a Psychiatrist or some shit? This shit is just coming out but go ahead.” - Mary J. Blige “Definitely a real interview! Digging deep up in there, man. Not afraid to ask questions!” - K-Ci Hailey (Jodeci) “The Wizard asked me for a copy of your magazine.” - Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk) “You didn’t wear your glasses and you haven’t carried your hearing aid. What else is wrong with you?” - Bushwick Bill “Peace and blessing, Brother Harris. Thank you for inspiring my words. Keep ‘yo balance.” - Erykah Badu “Can I see that pen?” - Bobby Brown “What else do you want to know? Talk to me.” - Aaliyah

Ideas for Journal Entries You may find the following ideas useful in beginning your journal or keeping the entries varied. If you are not used to expressing your thoughts on paper, it may seem awkward at first. The longer you do it, the easier it will become. You’ll be amazed at the insight you gain into your life. -Write about your most memorable experience with social anxiety. How did you feel? What did you think? How did others react? Why do you think the event happened? -Write about situations that make you anxious every day. Record your thoughts, feelings, and actions. You may want to divide the page into columns with the headings: situation or event; negative thoughts; physical reactions; and actions. Following is an example of how this may look: Situation or Event Should I attend the first art class after school. Negative Thoughts I thought about skipping out. I was afraid of what people would think. I wanted to do a good job. Physical Reactions I felt a shortness of breath. In general, I was nervous and in a bad mood. Actions I took some deep breaths and visualized the class going well. Later, I became engrossed in my drawing. -Write about a time when you were pleased with how you acted in a social situation. -Identify times when anxiety symptoms kept you from doing something that you really wanted to do. How did you feel? What might have happened if you had not been afraid? -Write a letter to someone who made you feel bad about yourself. You aren’t going to show the letter to anyone, so feel free to write whatever you want. -Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter.

Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports. The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on the credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They are hostage to the constant jingle and manipulation of a consumer culture. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. They eat at fast-food restaurants not only because it is cheap, but also because they can order from pictures rather than from a menu. And those who serve them, also often semiliterate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are usually marked with pictures. Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification.

New sciences developed, based on observation of the real world, rather than speculation. Rational thought was valued over inspiration, and logic over magic. All the natural world was closely observed and recorded by self-styled "scientists" who thought that the rich diversity in nature would be understood by being defined and categorized. The diversity of human beings, the one human body, that could have both male and female qualities, and change from female to male, did not fit this new hunger for precise and limited labeling. The new philosophers decided that there were only two sexes, fixed and unchanging, completely opposite, male and female, normal and other. They saw this simple binary model because they favored it. They found it because they looked for it, because it fitted their ideas of male and female status. When they saw behaviors or nature that did not support a rigid binary model, they explained them away. The changing sex of the developing fetus, the presence of all the sex organs in early development was ignored. Two sexes, completely opposite, were never a genuine observation, supported by all the other evidence, but an intellectual fashion, in all modernizing Europe thought, invented to explain and justify sexual inequality.

The marketing geniuses on the corporate side of the country music labels had decided to start using focus groups to test their products before they were developed or released. An example of this would be to ask the focus group whether they liked sad songs or happy songs. “We like happy songs!” the focus group would chirp, and the word would go back to the writers and producers to come up with “happy” songs to record. This made it especially hard on the songwriters, who rarely feel a need to write when they are happy, as then they are busy luxuriating in the pleasure of happiness. When something bad happens, they want to find a way to transcend it, so they write a song about it. When Hank Williams, one of the greatest and most successful country artists of all time, wrote a song like “Your Cheatin’ Heart” or “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” he wasn’t writing “happy” songs, yet they made the listener feel better. The listener could feel that someone else had gone through an experience similar to the listener’s own, and then went to the trouble and effort to write it down accurately and share the experience like a compassionate friend might do. In this way, hearing a song like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” could make the listener feel better, or “happy.

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

It’s a perspective on story that may also shed light on why you and I and everyone else spend a couple of hours each day concocting tales that we rarely remember and more rarely share. By day I mean night, and the tales are those we produce during REM sleep. Well over a century since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no consensus on why we dream. I read Freud’s book for a junior-year high school class called Hygiene (yes, that’s really what it was called), a somewhat bizarre requirement taught by the school’s gym teachers and sports coaches that focused on first aid and common standards of cleanliness. Lacking material to fill an entire semester, the class was padded by mandatory student presentations on topics deemed loosely relevant. I chose sleep and dreams and probably took it all too seriously, reading Freud and spending after-school hours combing through research literature. The wow moment for me, and for the class too, was the work of Michel Jouvet, who in the late 1950s explored the dream world of cats.32 By impairing part of the cat brain (the locus coeruleus, if you like that sort of thing), Jouvet removed a neural block that ordinarily prevents dream thoughts from stimulating bodily action, resulting in sleeping cats who crouched and arched and hissed and pawed, presumably reacting to imaginary predators and prey. If you didn’t know the animals were asleep, you might think they were practicing a feline kata. More recently, studies on rats using more refined neurological probes have shown that their brain patterns when dreaming so closely match those recorded when awake and learning a new maze that researchers can track the progress of the dreaming rat mind as it retraces its earlier steps.33 When cats and rats dream it surely seems they’re rehearsing behaviors relevant to survival. Our common ancestor with cats and rodents lived some seventy or eighty million years ago, so extrapolating a speculative conclusion across species separated by tens of thousands of millennia comes with ample warning labels. But one can imagine that our language-infused minds may produce dreams for a similar purpose: to provide cognitive and emotional workouts that enhance knowledge and exercise intuition—nocturnal sessions on the flight simulator of story. Perhaps that is why in a typical life span we each spend a solid seven years with eyes closed, body mostly paralyzed, consuming our self-authored tales.34 Intrinsically, though, storytelling is not a solitary medium. Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance. This offers a related design rationale for coding story into the human behavioral repertoire—for identifying, that is, the adaptive utility of our storytelling instinct.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

For instance, emotional memories are stored in the amygdala, but words are recorded in the temporal lobe. Meanwhile, colors and other visual information are collected in the occipital lobe, and the sense of touch and movement reside in the parietal lobe. So far, scientists have identified more than twenty categories of memories that are stored in different parts of the brain, including fruits and vegetables, plants, animals, body parts, colors, numbers, letters, nouns, verbs, proper names, faces, facial expressions, and various emotions and sounds. Figure 11. This shows the path taken to create memories. Impulses from the senses pass through the brain stem, to the thalamus, out to the various cortices, and then to the prefrontal cortex. They then pass to the hippocampus to form long-term memories. (illustration credit 5.1) A single memory—for instance, a walk in the park—involves information that is broken down and stored in various regions of the brain, but reliving just one aspect of the memory (e.g., the smell of freshly cut grass) can suddenly send the brain racing to pull the fragments together to form a cohesive recollection. The ultimate goal of memory research is, then, to figure out how these scattered fragments are somehow reassembled when we recall an experience. This is called the “binding problem,” and a solution could potentially explain many puzzling aspects of memory. For instance, Dr. Antonio Damasio has analyzed stroke patients who are incapable of identifying a single category, even though they are able to recall everything else. This is because the stroke has affected just one particular area of the brain, where that certain category was stored. The binding problem is further complicated because all our memories and experiences are highly personal. Memories might be customized for the individual, so that the categories of memories for one person may not correlate with the categories of memories for another. Wine tasters, for example, may have many categories for labeling subtle variations in taste, while physicists may have other categories for certain equations. Categories, after all, are by-products of experience, and different people may therefore have different categories. One novel solution to the binding problem uses the fact that there are electromagnetic vibrations oscillating across the entire brain at roughly forty cycles per second, which can be picked up by EEG scans. One fragment of memory might vibrate at a very precise frequency and stimulate another fragment of memory stored in a distant part of the brain. Previously it was thought that memories might be stored physically close to one another, but this new theory says that memories are not linked spatially but rather temporally, by vibrating in unison. If this theory holds up, it means that there are electromagnetic vibrations constantly flowing through the entire brain, linking up different regions and thereby re-creating entire memories. Hence the constant flow of information between the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the thalamus, and the different cortices might not be entirely neural after all. Some of this flow may be in the form of resonance across different brain structures.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large – thus an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe’s phrase, ‘the word is essentially fruitful.’ He is the man who feels that ‘what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply.’ And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. ‘We talk,’ he wrote in middle life, ‘far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.’ We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction. Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the Humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s. In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctrines in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honoured. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary in as much as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

SUPERFICIAL OBSERVERS ARE QUICK to label as an apologist anyone who tries to explain the unsavory past of his or her country to the outside world. It should be clear in the following pages that justifying Japan’s behavior is the least of my aims in recounting the eight months leading up to the decision to attack Pearl Harbor. To the contrary, Japan’s leaders must be charged with the ultimate responsibility of initiating a war that was preventable and unwinnable. War should have been resisted with much greater vigor and much more patience. To be sure, it is all too easy to adopt an air of moral superiority when indicting those who lived many years ago. Still, that should not stand in the way of a critical evaluation of how and why such an irresponsible war was started. If anything, it is a great historical puzzle begging to be solved. And with the emotional distance that only time can accord, one should be able to look back on this highly emotive period of history with a clearer vision. Unfortunately, clarity does not come easily; so many complexities and paradoxes surrounded the fateful Japanese decision. There is no question that most Japanese leaders, out of either institutional or individual preferences, avoided open conflict among themselves. Their circuitous speech makes the interpretation of records particularly difficult. For most military leaders, any hint of weakness was to be avoided, so speaking decisively and publicly against war was unthinkable, even if they had serious doubts. That is why the same people, depending on the time, place, and occasion, can be seen arguing both for and against the war option. Some supported war at a liaison conference of top government and military leaders, for example, while making their desire to avoid it known to others in private. Many hoped somebody else would express their opinions for them.

A hardliner by nature, Honecker was nonetheless more open to rock music. But rather than import music by decadent capitalist puppets like the Doors or the Stones, he determined the DDR should foster its own rock culture. This led to a string of officially sanctioned East German rock bands dominating Free German Youth concerts and DDR youth radio during the 1970s. Bands with names like the Puhdys, Renft, Electra-Combo, Karussell, and Stern-Combo Meissen aped Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, King Crimson, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Jethro Tull—and landed deals with the government record label, Amiga, the sole music manufacturer and distributor in the tightly-controlled East German media system.

Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.

See this decade, it started with a bang, and ended with an explosion.What we wrestled out of the hands of the dullest cunts on earth…got taken back and they weren’t loosing it again. Corporate disguised itself as hipster, and indie just disappeared. They were gonna do whatever they wanted, no matter what the people thought.

Asylum Records became a power base for David Geffen, with one of the best artist rosters in the business. It became the home label for what was to be known as the California sound. Elliot continued running the management company, most of whose artists recorded on Asylum, whose corporate philosophy was “benevolent protectionism.” The record company was different from other labels and was proud of its noninterference with the private and artistic lives of its artists, who in turn looked to David Geffen and company to insulate and protect them from the shocks and insults of commercially oriented sales and marketing types, aggressive promotion men, and demanding producers. The opening lineup at Asylum included Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Joni Mitchell, with Linda Ronstadt joining shortly after. In 1974, the legendary Bob Dylan would leave Columbia and release two Top 10 albums with the company before returning to his original label. That didn’t matter to David. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were Atlantic artists and they were doing quite nicely, thank you very much. Besides,

Pratt created the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and his motto was "kill the Indian, save the man." At this school, and others that would open and follow in its wake, tens of thousands of Native children faced abuse and neglect. They were often forcibly removed from their homes and taken to these schools that were sometimes across the country from their original lives. When they arrived, the children were forced to cut their hair and change their names. They were made to become White in look and label, stripped of any semblance of Native heritage. The children were not allowed to speak their Native tongues, some of them not knowing anything else. They were prohibited from acting in any way that might reflect the only culture they had ever known. At Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School alone, the numbers revealed the truth of what this treatment did. Of the ten thousand children from 141 different tribes across the country, only a small fraction of them ever graduated. According to the Carlisle Indian School Project, there are 180 marked graves of Native children who died while attending. There were even more children who died while held captive at the Carlisle school and others across the county. Their bodies are only being discovered in modern times, exhumed by the army and people doing surveys of the land who are finding unmarked burial sites. An autograph book from one of the schools was found in the historical records with one child's message to a friend, "Please remember me when I'm in the grave." The US Bureau of Indian Affairs seemed to think Pratt had the right idea and made his school the model for more. There ended up being more than 350 government-funded boarding schools for Natives in the United States. Most of them followed the same ideology: Never let the children be themselves. Beat their language out of them. Punish them for practicing their cultures. Pratt and his followers certainly killed plenty of Indians, but they didn't save a damn thing.

Should I pack up some cookies then and drive them over?” “Actually, I don’t think you need to trouble yourself. Hank got wind of the commotion and stopped by to check on everything.” Margie heard a muffled, “Hey honey!” in the background. She smiled. “And all this time I thought he was working.” “He is working,” said Sandy. “But now, apparently, he can make it part of his official duties to pick up those cookies for Barb. He said he’ll stop by now.” Margie laughed. “That’s perfect.” She prepared a container of cookies for Barb, carefully labeling each one so that she could still record her scores.

Did you know that from the sixties to the mid-seventies, both in the UK and the US, major record labels, like Capital, produced records by proclaimed witches? These albums were primarily spoken, though some of them had music in the background. The albums included such things as an oral history of witchcraft and how to become a witch, but most of them focused on providing spells, incantations, prayers, chants, and conjurations for everything from becoming more wealthy or powerful, to gaining love, to even summoning spirits or demons.

Political leaders often talk as if their side is for all that is good and true, and the other side is for death and destruction. But civic decisions become too easy when we as Christians pretend politics is simply a battle between angels and demons. The implication is that we don’t have to parse the details of their proposals or weigh the alternatives, we just need to know what position the “right side” is taking. This makes for a simple and powerful narrative, but in a broken world, neither side is completely good. There weren’t any perfect groups of people in the Bible (Romans 3:23), and there is only one perfect human, Jesus Christ (Isaiah 53:9). That fact still stands today. That isn’t to say that both sides of any given issue are equal or that one side can’t be clearly wrong, but a quick look at the record of any party or tribe will dispel all misconceptions about their infallibility. Indeed, sometimes political opponents are plainly misguided or even ill intended, and we as Christians would be remiss not to correct them. However, we must be able to disagree and work against those with opposing beliefs without dehumanizing them. When we label other groups evil, stupid, or irredeemable—or deny their pain—we strip them of their human dignity and make ourselves and others less likely to show them concern and compassion.

Incessantly ‘brooding over his problematic character’, [Carl] Schmitt labels himself as ‘Proletarian’ and even intends to write a character study of the type with opportunism as the essential trait. ‘The Proletarian, or, the Plebeian’, he notes, ‘[h]is instinct: to creep or to strut, as the situation demands. He is ad alterum’, i.e. he adapts to every other person he encounters. As one of the editors of Schmitt’s diaries remarks: ‘I know of no contemporary of Schmitt—nor of anyone today—whose written records reveal the psychological state of their author so unsparingly as these diaries.’ The area of Schmitt’s private life most unsparingly disclosed is his sexual obsessions, the tribulations of a man ‘driven by erotomania’. ‘Often bursting with sexual craving’ (27 February 1923; 164), he guiltily notes his ‘ejaculations’. ‘I sneak from a conference so horny I have to bite my fingers’, he records in November 1912.

To my amazement, staff discussions on the unit rarely mentioned the horrific real-life experiences of the children and the impact of those traumas on their feelings, thinking, and self-regulation. Instead, their medical records were filled with diagnostic labels: “conduct disorder” or “oppositional defiant disorder” for the angry and rebellious kids; or “bipolar disorder.” ADHD was a “comorbid” diagnosis for almost all. Was the underlying trauma being obscured by this blizzard of diagnoses?

Cordy grins as all eyes turn to her. “The original cover art of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs had a dog whose...manliness,” Cordy winks, “was clearly visible. A few hundred copies of the cover were run before the record label noticed and told them to airbrush the dog’s nuts. Those albums were supposed to be destroyed, but some were smuggled out. The last time one came on the market a few years ago, it sold for five grand. But since Bowie’s death, they’re supposed to be worth even more.” “And you have one?” I ask. “I think so. Somewhere in there.

Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits. It does not matter whether you have actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you are branded a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008, there were approximately 2.3 million people in prisons and jails and a staggering 5.1 million people under “community correctional supervision”—i.e., on probation or parole.89 Merely reducing prison terms does not have a major impact on the majority of people in the system. It is the badge of inferiority—the felony record—that relegates people for their entire lives to second-class status. As described in chapter 4, for people convicted of drug crimes, there is little hope of escape. Barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to “check the box” indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions, people whose only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for recreational use find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and economy—permanently.

Both Bellcore (the Bell Telephone research company in Livingstone, New Jersey) and Philips (the company that owns Polygram, U2’s label) have set up crude working prototypes of home music delivery systems by hooking up recordable CD players to fiber-optic telephone lines.

The humanistic beliefs, then, of most secular people should be recognized as exactly that—beliefs. They cannot be deduced logically or empirically from the natural, material world alone. If there is no transcendent reality beyond this life, then there is no value or meaning for anything.64 To hold that human beings are the product of nothing but the evolutionary process of the strong eating the weak, but then to insist that nonetheless every person has a human dignity to be honored—is an enormous leap of faith against all evidence to the contrary. Even Nietzsche, however, cannot escape his own scalpel. He blasted secular liberals for being inconsistent and cowardly. He believed that calls for social bonding and benevolence for the poor and weak meant “herd-like uniformity, the ruin of the noble spirit, and the ascendency of the masses.”65 He wanted to turn from the “banal creed” of modern liberalism to the tragic, warrior culture (the “Ubermensch” or “Superman”) of ancient times. He believed the new “Man of the Future” would have the courage to look into the bleakness of a universe without God and take no religious consolation. He would have the “noble spirit” to be “superbly self-fashioning” and not beholden to anyone else’s imposed moral standards.66 All of these declarations by Nietzsche compose, of course, a profoundly moral narrative. Why is the “noble spirit” noble? Why is it good to be courageous, and who says so? Why is it bad to be inconsistent? Where did such moral values come from, and what right does Nietzsche have, by his own philosophy, to label one way of living noble or good and other ways bad?67 In short, he can’t stop doing what he tells everyone else to stop doing. Thus, Eagleton observes, Nietzsche’s “Man of the Future” has not abolished God at all. “Like the Almighty, he rests upon nothing but himself.” We see that there is no truly irreligious human being. Nietzsche is calling people to worship themselves, to grant the same faith and authority to themselves that they once put in God. Even Nietzsche believes. “The autonomous, self-determining Superman is yet another piece of counterfeit theology.”68 We have seen that the secular humanism Nietzsche despised lacks a good grounding for its moral values.69 However, the even greater dangers of Nietzsche’s antihumanism are a matter of historical record. Peter Watson details how Nietzsche’s views were important inspirations in the twentieth century to totalitarian figures of both the Left and Right, of both Nazism and Stalinism.70

The government replaced the real story of what had happened with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off bloodthirsty communist hordes. The National Library removed references to the events from its records. Newspaper accounts were destroyed. Government files from the time were hidden or burned. What remained, the American historian Thomas Anderson wrote in 1971, was a “paranoiac fear of communism that has gripped the nation ever since. This fear is expressed in the continual labeling of even the most modest reform movements as communist or communist inspired.” Roque Dalton, the Salvadoran poet and activist, put it more succinctly: “We were all born half dead in 1932.

Laidback Luke mentioned that he had his own record label, Mixmash Records, and if Tim continued to evolve at this pace, it was not impossible that he would one day release a song by Avici. Now attention was coming from England as well. The DJ and radio host Pete Tong had played the hottest house music on his BBC radio show since the early 90s and in April 2008 he announced a competition for young producers. Tim sent his song ‘Manman’, which to his great surprise was voted the winner by the listeners.

News of the verdicts brought a marked change in Rogers. He became almost obsessive in his desire to discuss the fire on the Morro Castle. Increasingly, he dwelt on how the blaze had been set. Doyle began to keep a record of his assistant’s statements. Finally, he noted: “George knows that I know he set fire to the Morro Castle.” Doyle decided to wait. He knew that what Rogers had told him was not strong enough to obtain a conviction. If questioned, Rogers could always escape by pleading idle boasting, something his police colleagues knew he was capable of. Vincent Doyle told no one of his suspicions. But he continued to question Rogers on every aspect of the Morro Castle disaster, and began to form a picture of Rogers which was remarkably in tune with later psychiatric reports. The strange cat-and-mouse questioning went on until early March 1938. Then, on March 3, a quiet Thursday afternoon, Doyle and Rogers sat down for yet another discussion on the peculiar fate of the Morro Castle. At the end of it Doyle knew “exactly how Rogers set the fire. He told me how to construct an incendiary fountain pen; how it had been placed in the writing-room locker’.” Doyle wondered how best to present his sensational evidence to his superiors. He was still worrying over it next afternoon when he met Rogers outside the police radio department. Rogers seemed pensive and withdrawn. “There’s a package for you,” said Rogers. Doyle nodded and went into the department. Rogers remained just outside the doorway. On the workbench was a package. Doyle unwrapped it and found a heater for a fish tank. There was nothing unusual in that; from time to time Doyle used the department’s facilities to repair electrical equipment for his colleagues. Attached to the fish tank was a typed label: This is a fish-tank heater. Please install the switch in the line cord and see if the unit will work. It should get slightly warm.

most record labels turned the idea down. They felt it was out of bounds to ridicule the president.

Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like “capitalized,” “deferred,” and “restructuring”—and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like “began,” “change,” and “however.” None of those words mean you should not buy the stock, but all mean that you need to investigate further. Be sure to compare the footnotes with those in the financial statements of at least one firm that’s a close competitor, to see how aggressive your company’s accountants are. Read more. If you are an enterprising investor willing to put plenty of time and energy into your portfolio, then you owe it to yourself to learn more about financial reporting. That’s the only way to minimize your odds of being misled by a shifty earnings statement. Three solid books full of timely and specific examples are Martin Fridson and Fernando Alvarez’s Financial Statement Analysis, Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey’s The Financial Numbers Game, and Howard Schilit’s Financial Shenanigans. 8

Quincy was producing Michael Jackson at the time and said he liked Propaganda so much, he wanted them on his label in the US. So I know that Quincy Jones was listening to Propaganda, and I’m positive you can hear its influence on ‘Bad’.

I had my own Record label from day one back in 2001 , being independent was the right choice I ever made no one has a say now over my music or my life I’m free and I published 54 albums and 50 singles worldwide. “- Sami Abouzid

Perry is a salesman. He can really sell anything. We kept it really vague what we were doing [with Gift]… because nobody was gonna fund that, right? He promised multiple music videos. I don’t even think we fulfilled that promise, I think there were some that… there were definitely… I think were four or five music videos that came out of that… Gift was an idea that came to me in a dream state when I was detoxing off of hard drugs and there’s something that happens to your brain when you’re detoxing - it really… heightens, creatively… you go long periods of time without sleep, like sometimes I wouldn’t sleep for a month. And so my brain would just constantly be working. And somehow during those times I would just get these really vivid ideas and I told Perry about it. [The record label] were willing to fund it because it was going to give them the music videos that they needed, which if they would have purchased five, six music videos they would have spent way more than what they spent on the movie. So it was appealing to them it was really a good deal.

Via partnerships with record labels, Screenplay provides commercial venues with sound and screen media that allow them to differentiate their appeals to consumers from those of their competitors using similar attractions.

Lots of artists wonder how to get a record deal, as though everything is easy street after that one hurdle is cleared. The fact of the matter is that if you need a record deal, you won’t get one—at least not anymore. Today, being a talented singer, a great songwriter, or an innovative composer just isn’t enough to land a major label deal. Today’s labels are looking for safe bets with proven track records of ticket sales. In fact, most of the great artists from the past that we love probably would not have gotten record deals in today’s market. It’s important to understand this because many assume that record deals are just awarded to the most talented individuals. The modern-day record industry excels at expanding upon existing commercial success, but it’s no longer interested in nor deft at scooping up raw, unknown talent and sculpting superstars.

The great paradox of the age we live in, then, is that it’s one in which it’s exceedingly difficult to secure a record deal, and yet pursuing the path of an independent musician has never carried with it more potential upside. Another way to look at it: For the first time in the history of recorded music, you now have the astounding ability to become your own record label.

Relocating internationally can be a thrilling adventure, but it’s not without its challenges. The logistics involved in international moving are more complex than domestic moves, requiring careful planning and execution. To ensure a smooth transition to your new home, here are ten essential tips for international moving. 1. Start Early Begin the planning process well in advance. International moves involve extensive paperwork, visa applications, and scheduling with international moving companies. Start at least six months before your intended move date. 2. Declutter and Organize Before packing, declutter your belongings. Dispose of items you no longer need or use. This not only reduces the cost of moving but also helps you start fresh in your new home. 3. Research International Moving Companies Select a reputable international moving company with experience in your destination country. Read reviews, ask for referrals, and obtain quotes from multiple companies. Choose one that offers comprehensive services and competitive rates. 4. Understand Customs Regulations Familiarize yourself with the customs regulations of your destination country. Different countries have varying rules about what you can bring with you. Be prepared to fill out detailed customs forms. 5. Documentation Ensure all your important documents are in order. This includes passports, visas, medical records, and any necessary permits. Keep physical copies as well as digital backups. 6. Packing Strategy Use sturdy, high-quality packing materials to protect your belongings during transit. Label boxes clearly and create an inventory list. Pack essential items separately for easy access upon arrival. 7. Insurance Consider purchasing international moving insurance to protect your possessions during the move. Verify what is covered and ensure it meets your needs. 8. Currency and Banking Set up a bank account in your new country before you move. Also, consider having some local currency on hand for immediate expenses upon arrival. 9. Learn About Your New Home Research your destination thoroughly. Understand the local culture, language, and basic laws. Knowing what to expect can ease the transition. 10. Stay Organized Keep all your moving-related paperwork, receipts, and contact information in one place. This will be invaluable if any issues arise during your international move. Bonus Tip: Stay Positive! Moving internationally can be stressful, but maintaining a positive attitude can make a world of difference. Embrace the adventure and view it as an opportunity for personal growth and exploration. Conclusion International moving is a significant undertaking that requires careful planning and thorough research.

Asch took from his bankruptcy an important lesson: he decided that he never wanted to record another hit record. In early 1949, he commented to an unnamed writer from People’s Songs (the newsletter of left-wing folk music) that he had “focused too much time and money on popular jazz” and from this point forward he would focus on “good records,” which would be “sold to a small circle of people who will buy them.

Preamble The Klassik Era was a cultural and musical revolution that swept through Kenya and East Africa in the early 2010s. It was a time of bold experimentation, fearless expression, and unapologetic individuality that challenged the norms of mainstream music and culture. For the first time, young people from the ghettos and slums of Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu could see themselves represented and celebrated in the music and arts scene, and their voices and stories were given a platform like never before. The Klassik Era was characterized by a fusion of different musical genres and styles, from hip-hop and reggae to dancehall and afro-pop, to create a sound that was uniquely Kenyan and African. It was a time when young artists and producers like Blame It On Don (DON SANTO), Kingpheezle, Jilly Beatz, Tonnie Tosh, Kenny Rush, and many others came together under Klassik Nation, a record label that would change the face of Kenyan music forever. The Klassik Era was also marked by a sense of community and camaraderie, with young people from all walks of life coming together to support each other's art and creativity. It was a time when collaborations and features were the norm, and when artists and producers worked together to create something new and exciting. But the Klassik Era was not without its challenges and controversies. It was a time when the Kenyan music industry was dominated by a few powerful players who controlled the airwaves and the mainstream narrative, and who were resistant to change and innovation. It was a time when artists and producers had to fight tooth and nail to get their music played on the radio and to gain recognition and respect from their peers. Despite these challenges, the Klassik Era left an indelible mark on the Kenyan music industry and on the cultural landscape of Africa. It was a time of creativity, passion, and rebellion that inspired a generation of young people to dream big and to believe that anything was possible. This book is a tribute to that era and to the artists and producers who made it all possible.

In the end, it is your responsibility to read the small print, whether it is for gig contracts, record contracts, investors, management, booking agents, or anything else. You can blame everyone else for your mistakes, but when you make them, you end up being the one who has to pay.

For decades, Billboard had to rely on record-store owners and radio stations to report the most-bought and most-played songs. Both parties lied, often because labels nudged or bribed them to plug certain records, or because store owners didn’t want to promote albums they no longer had in stock.

Catawamteak,” meaning “the great landing,” is what the Abenaki Indians called the early settlement that became Rockland, Maine. Thomaston and Rockland can be bypassed by Route 90, an eight-mile shortcut which I frequently used as a midshipman, but our bus stayed on the main road and stopped to let passengers on and off in both places. At one time Rockland was part of Thomaston, called East Thomaston, but the two towns have long since separated, having very little in common. In the beginning, Rockland developed quickly because of shipbuilding and limestone production. It was, and still is, an important fishing port. Lobsters are the main export and the five-day Maine Lobster Festival is celebrated here annually. The red, three-story brick buildings lining the main street of Rockland, give it the image of an old working town. I have always been impressed by the appearance of these small towns, because to me this is what I had expected Maine to look like. When I first went through the center of Rockland on the bus, I was impressed by the obvious ties the community had with the sea. The fishing and lobster industry was evident by the number of commercial fishing and lobster boats. Rockland was, and still is, the commercial hub of the mid-coastal region of the state. The local radio station WRKD was an important source of local news and weather reports. This was also the radio station that opened each day’s broadcasting with Hal Lone Pine’s song, recorded on Toronto's Arc Records label: “There’s a winding lane on the Coast of Maine that is wound around my heart....” The United States Coast Guard still maintains a base in Rockland, which is reassuring to the families of those who go fishing out on the open waters of Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Rockland remains the home of the Farnsworth Art Museum, which has an art gallery displaying paintings by Andrew Wyeth, as well as other New England artists. The Bay Point Hotel that was founded in 1889 had a compelling view of the breakwater and Penobscot Bay. The Victorian style hotel, later known as the Samoset Hotel, had seen better days by 1952 and was closed in 1969. On October 13, 1972, the four-story hotel caught fire in the dining area due to an undetermined cause. Fanned by 20-mile-an-hour north winds, the structure burned to the ground within an hour. However, five years later a new Samoset Resort was founded.