Relevantly Irrelevant
Watched this movie recommendation by fellow Spotter Marilena.
I, too, suggest you watch this 15-year-old movie. Especially if you like making lists, can relate to music geekery, can remember what it used to feel like burning mixtapes/audio CDs for people, have been recently, er… disengaged, and most importantly, if you could use some great laughs.
Soundtrack:
Inspired by the song at the end of last post.
The new trailer for Star Wars VII came out just yesterday and it’s racked up more than 30 million views already. Not bad eh?
Here it is for good measure.
I used to really, really love Star Wars. It was about the same time I really, really loved Harry Potter and Pokemon, give or take a few years. Today, as a more or less adult man, in the same way I will still enjoy but find it difficult to really get into Harry Potter and Pokemon for prolonged periods of time—even for nostalgia’s sake—, I cannot really get Star Wars the same way I used to anymore. It feels comfortable, it feels familiar and easy, but comfortable and familiar is not necessarily what I need or want. Of course I’ll enjoy the movies anytime (I had a blast re-watching A New Hope on VHS a couple of months back—seriously, give let’s VHS a chance— and listening to Verily, A New Hope immediately thereafter) and I’m sure that the SW fan lying dormant somewhere inside of me just waiting to be Awakened will duly do so two months from now, hand-in-hand with the rest of geekkind and the very Force itself, apparently. That much is a given.
But sometimes I do wonder what the world would look like without Star Wars. There, I said it.
Jodorowsky’s Dune. Here’s a link to the full movie. I can’t recommend it enough. Watched it on the train from Belgrade to Thessaloniki. The thumbnail with ole Alejandro sticking his tongue out doesn’t do it justice—or maybe it does. Depends on you.
Imagine a world where there was no Star Wars yet, no original sci-fi blockbuster. Imagine a world where Moebius, Pink Floyd, H.R. Geiger, Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and others had all been gathered together by pioneering film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky with the ambition to create a film that would change the world. A film to “simulate an LSD trip” and change young minds, redefine what was possible for cinema at large visually and thematically. A movie that would play the same technical and cultural role Star Wars played for us, just taking us down a completely different road. A more spiritual and artistic road if you will.
Even though it got as close to production as a film can possibly get without actually making it to the other side, Jodorowsky’s Dune indeed was never shot because of financing troubles: basically nobody in Hollywood possessed balls big enough and the right shade of gold to support the astronomical $15 million budget and all the associated risk. I don’t blame them really.
Think about it though. Star Wars is great, of course, we all love it, but it’s true that as a film it doesn’t exactly have any kind of message, it’s just a superbly made fairy tale with a generic fairy tale good vs evil plot. In fact it has grown into a marketing and merchandising monstrosity, especially in the last five years or so where you can’t throw a rock without having the rock come complete inside a Darth Vader helmet or better yet have it transform inside your hand into an overpriced Lego brick.
What if our Star Wars had been Dune? The documentary above draws all the parallels, ultimately how this spectre of a movie influenced Star Wars itself as well as other significant films in ways we’d never suspect—another reason I would encourage you to watch it. But get this: the universe where Jodorowsky’s Dune was made is the universe where not only Star Wars would have been completely different, if it had been made at all, but also one where we’d never have seen Alien or Blade Runner.
Would you rather stay in our universe with Star Wars, Blade Runner and Alien, or move to one where Jodorowsky’s Dune had been as successful as Star Wars in ours and had spawned all kinds of stories and ever genres we had never thought possible? If you believe that life imitates art, it would definitely be an interesting universe to experience in a broader sense. Would Muslims be seen under a different light? Would psychedelics or ecology play a more important role in pop culture or even make people vaguely more environmentally-conscious? Will we ever be able to traverse parallel universes and find out for ourselves?
If you enjoyed going down this mental path, I would recommend reading Replay, the book that inspired Groundhog Day, but basically spanning the 26 years between 1963 and 1989 instead of just 24 hours. There is a film in it too that gets big instead of Star Wars and changes the world.
Last night was the now famous supermoon eclipse. I woke up early to go outside and have a look. Quickly, like a lot of Greeks, my enthusiasm was quenched because of the cloudy sky. These September nights have been warm but cloudy and rainy. Switching from a Mediterranean climate to a tropical one? Check. At least it’s better than turning into Sahara, I suppose.
To my credit, I didn’t immediately give up, either. I sat there for 40 minutes or so, reading and underlining my morning pages from earlier in 2015. Alas, the clouds won that hopeless staring contest. I went back to bed and thought it would be a good idea taking advantage of waking up that early to take a shot at entering a WILD. Instead, I was welcomed with a bout of the worst sleep paralysis I can recall: when my body fell asleep, my consciousness didn’t, and I had hallucinations of a person walking in the apartment, into my room and around my bed. It was pitch black, so the hallucination was consistent, in that I couldn’t see him/her/it, only hear the footsteps. I had to endure this while unable to move any part of my body apart from my eyelids and their contents. All the while, the blood moon was setting behind the cloud cover. During sleep paralysis, no-one can hear you scream. You can’t scream….
Take a deep breath.
It could have been me who took this .gif. It’s a consoling thought.
Nevertheless, for all its photogenic glory, it has to be said that September 28th 2015 will not be remembered for its supermoon eclipse. It will go down as a small footnote in history that on the day NASA announced they found flowing water on Mars there had been a supermoon lunar eclipse less than twelve hours prior. It is a veritable milestone that would have me leaping for joy—if I was any proper kind of science/sci-fi/astronomy nerd to begin with. Instead, all I can think of, perhaps especially after almost half a year of constantly dealing with water as a human right and the current global state of affairs, is how we should be sorting out our shit on Earth first before starting to even think about colonizing other worlds.
Don’t get me wrong, I too get terribly annoyed when other people generally show this kind of flamboyant lack of interest in the vastness of the Universe and the amazing advances in our apparent knowledge of the world. It’s usually such people who shun video games because they’re capitalist toys and refuse to see how they can work wonderfully to promote education or cultural awareness. Similarly, they show open contempt for science fiction as a genre, no matter how eye-opening, poetic or important it might be. They’re not interested to know that Dune, for example, was one of the first books bar none to speak about ecology and sustainability when it was published 50 years ago. No, it’s science fiction. “We have real problems on Earth. Sci-fi is for comfortable middle-class white nerds”, they say, or seem to imply. My very own father told me off when I tried to explain to him the virtues of The Dispossessed. As I was saying, under normal circumstances I get borderline offended by these reactions; at this very moment, I can sort of see where they’re coming from.
A lot of the excitement surrounding the discovery of flowing water on Mars has to do with the fantasy of modernity, the wet dream of boundless progress, the Promethean achievement of humankind founding an extraterrestrial colony. While science fiction wouldn’t have you believe it, especially with the likes of Interstellar framing the popular imagination, we’re far, far from thinking about humanity as a separate entity from our home planet. There’s no reason to believe that without Earth we could survive for any length of time. I don’t think we would want to, either. But we’re obviously not taking care of our planet as one would take care of their home. In fact, we couldn’t do much worse if we were actively trying to destroy it.
Colonising Mars as our last hope for survival after we’ve made Earth unfit for humans and broad swaths of other types of life, too, is not something I’m going to support. We’ve been making our bed, we should be honourable enough to sleep in it too—once and for all, if it comes to that. If we can’t live as part of the great ecosystem, we don’t deserve to survive. I would use the cancer analogy, namely that us out-surviving the Earth would be like cancer cells out-surviving the cancer patient who died because of them, but on second thought the analogy wouldn’t be exactly right, as it’s not really possible to kill the Earth the same way a human can die of cancer. Still, if not kill it, we just might see our Earth wither away into a wasteland where it will take many thousands or millions of years for new forms of life to take advantage of the mess we’ll have left behind—if we don’t end up like Venus, that is.
I know you might say that some ideas born out of past science fiction turned out to be possible. After all, “we” (i.e. well-funded Americans) did go to the Moon (don’t take my word for it though) and that was just four years after Dune was released and a single year after 2001: A Space Odyssey did. Back then, people were saying that we’d definitely have at least a couple of bases up there by the turn of the millennium. But here we are, the turn of the millennium’s already fifteen years behind us and I’m not seeing any bright lights up there. So what happened? Could it be that there are some hard limits to our malignant growth? I would argue that yes, and plenty of them, as much as we like to pretend they don’t matter.
Next to all this, I’m secretly hoping for disclosure of long-standing alien contact, that moment that will change everything, like Naomi Klein says, only for real. Maybe in that scenario we will be taught how to build a viable multi-planetary civilization together with them and cross the stars that way. But on our own? Now? We’d probably destroy the colony the moment they were unable to pay off their debts to Earth, or make them privatise their water company, like many people were quick to joke about with today’s discovery on Twitter and Facebook.
Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.
But all said and done, I see videos like the one above, where you get to do a to-scale virtual tour of our solar system at the speed of light, and go right back to marvelling at how far we’ve come. Suddenly it hits me how difficult, how amazing it is sending missions to moist rocks or giant chewy-cored balloons so far away from here, redefining what is possible.
What vocabulary would a space-faring civilization like in Stellaris develop to describe the vastness of space?
I want this game very bad. Very very bad.
Τους είδα και στο Resistance τον Ιούνιο, αλλά αυτή τη φορά η συναυλία τα έσπασε όλα. Τέτοιος παλμός, τέτοια συμμετοχή απ’τον κόσμο! Ο σβέρκος μου είναι πιασμένος φουλ. Φουλ. Οι VIC πάνε για διεθνή καριέρα, να μου το θυμηθείτε.
Πήρα και το εργαλειάκι μαζί και ηχογράφησα μεγάλο μέρος της συναυλίας—ήμουν αυτός ο ψηλός τύπος που όχι μόνο την έσπαγε στους από πίσω, κράταγε κι ένα ηχογραφητήρι παρατεταμένο για την μισή συναυλία! Άκουσα δυο-τρία «δεν βλέπω» από συνομιλίες πισινών—από πισινούς, όχι πισίνες—που νόμιζαν ότι δεν τους άκουγα! Τσκ, τσκ, τσκ…
Τα περισσότερα τραγούδια δεν τα ηχογράφησα ολόκληρα, η πλειοψηφία είναι κομματάκια από εδώ κι από εκεί, αλλά σαν δείγμα, σαν ανάμνηση, κάνουν μια χαρά.
Vavoura Band (αυτούς δεν τους ήξερα αλλά είναι ιστορικό ελληνικό ροκ συγκρότημα απ’ότι φαίνεται. Πρέπει να ερευνήσω!)
Πλειάδες (οι κοπέλες καταπληκτικές. Τελευταία, μετά την Βουλγαρία, πολύ γουστάρω τα πολυφωνικά γυναικεία σχήματα)
VIC (προς το τέλος της συναυλίας που είχε εξτασιαστεί η μισή αρένα, δεν ξέρω πότε πατιόταν το record στο εργαλειάκι και κάποια μέρη ηχογραφήθηκαν ενώ το εργαλειάκι ήταν στην τσέπη μου. Ειδικά το Κρασί έχει ενδιαφέρον, περισσότερο ακούγονται όλοι να τραγουδάνε παρά το συγκρότημα.)
Σημαντικό, και συνέχεια το ξεχνάω: ΜΗΝ φέρνεις σακίδιο σε συναυλίες αν είναι να πας μπροστά. Δεν αξίζει. Ελπίζω η κοπέλα η οποία ήταν στις παρυφές του moshpit και άδειασε ολόκληρη της η τσάντα πάνω στα πατημένα τσίπουρα, μπύρες και ούζα, να βρήκε τα χαμένα της υπάρχοντα.
Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery by Don Richard Riso
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Experience has shown that … personalities … may be grouped into various major categories, and for purposes of studying them this is a helpful device. Classifications must never be taken too seriously—they ruin much thinking—but the fear to use them has prevented much more thinking.
—Karl A. Menninger, The Human Mind
The above quote would find a lot of people in the world in open disagreement. Even in the US, where different social needs and anxieties gave birth to almost all forms of typology developed today, there is still some skepticism about the extent to which typology works and is based on fact; in the culture I grew up in, namely millennial Greece, the very concept of the existence of a number of more or less concrete personality types, is rather foreign to say the least—ironically, too, because some of the most adamant proto-typologists were ancient Greeks philosophers such as Galen, who is the best-known.
My enduring fascination with the subject and my attempts of discussing it with my surroundings have been mostly welcomed with polite indifference and at worst with open contempt: surely the entire wide spectrum of humanity cannot fit in a handful of archetypes. “How is this any different from astrology?”, asks a One that has made her mind up about right and wrong; “no system can pigeonhole the infinite complexity that is me” is a common reaction from Threes or special-snowflake disintegrating Fours; “you do know that people’s behaviours change according to their surroundings, right?”, comes the valid though overly dismissive comment from a Five who likes to think he’s unusually smart and thorough.
It’s been very difficult to get people to look at this seriously and see the strengths of existing typology systems and how they can help us empathise with and understand eachother and ourselves. Half-arsed online tests and the seeming equation of typology with “which Disney/Game of Thrones/famous person are you?” hasn’t helped people take the field seriously either, but I’m not one to judge; after all, it is how I myself, and many others I’m sure, originally came across typology. The difference is that I took an interest in the theory of it all, the questions that result in the answers that are all the different types. Thus did my research in this realm begin years ago and ever since I’ve been slowly trying to follow Kierkegaard’s advice to become subjective toward others and objective toward myself.
Before reading Personality Types, the typology system I’d been most familiar with was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, developed in the ’70s and in later years built upon by David Keirsey and his theory of four temperaments. MBTI was based on Jung’s eight cognitive functions and laid out the sixteen four-letter type system we know and love today. According to it, each type is a different ordering of these Jungian functions that correspond to each individuals preference of use. I, for instance, am an INFP because I primarily use Introverted Feeling and then Extraverted Intuition.
Understanding how the cognitive functions work for each type is essential for understanding the MBTI, a fact which regrettably but understandably is most often missed by online tests, because it makes the whole thing about ten times more difficult to decode.
To sum up, MBTI is used to categorise people according to their cognitive functions: the mechanics of the manner in which they perceive and process information, how they perceive the world (by observing or by abstracting?) and how they make decisions (thinking their way out or doing what feels right?).
Nevertheless, the MBTI isn’t even what this book is about; I just wanted to illustrate the difference between it and the Enneagram, which is a different school of typology, and what Personality Types is about. Riso and Hudson did an excellent job with it of presenting the Enneagram as a more organic form of typology than MBTI. Sometimes the latter feels as if it’s somehow constructed or artificial; the Enneagram, on the other hand, is very convincingly presented in this book as something that does exist out there, that it is what had been attempted to be captured by the first known typologists in ancient times up to Freud, and consequently it is something that absolutely has to be part of modern psychology and psychotherapy. They make a convincing case that the Enneagram’s the culmination of everything that’s been done before in the field, the most perfected and complete system that has been developed to this day. And after reading the book, I do stand convinced.
Here’s a small sample of what the types are about and our problems:
Twos spend their whole lives searching for love from others and still feel that they are unloved.
Threes endlessly pursue achievement and recognition but still feel worthless and empty.
Fours spend their entire lives trying to discover the meaning of their personal identity and still do not know who they are.
Fives endlessly accumulate knowledge and skills to build up their confidence but still feel helpless and incapable.
Sixes toil endlessly to create security for themselves and still feel anxious and fearful about the world.
Sevens look high and low for happiness [through new experiences] but still feel unhappy and frustrated.
Eights do everything in their power to protect themselves and their interests but still feel vulnerable and threatened.
Nines sacrifice a great deal to achieve inner peace and stability but still feel ungrounded and insecure.
And finally, Ones strive to maintain personal integrity but still feel divided and at war with themselves.The way out of these self-defeating patterns is to see that they cannot bring us the happiness that we seek because our personality does not have the power to create happiness. As wisdom has always recognized, it is only by dying to ourselves—that is, to our ego and its strategies—that we find life.
Apart from this small sample, here are some of the reasons I think the Enneagram is an excellent tool and theoretical system:
• The Enneagram is based on triads, just as the MBTI is based on pairs. Each Enneagram type is the combination of thinking, feeling or instinct with a modality of overexpression, underexpression or repression, which in turn represents each type’s fundamental characteristic: all at once, its main weakness, the bane of its existence, what it strives to overcome, as well as what it’s ambitions are aimed at and what it thinks it lacks. That makes 3 times 3, three modalities for three fundamental aspects of humanity.
• The wing system adds more depth and intricacy.
• On top of that, the fact that if as a person you’re expressing your type well you’re “integrating” into another type and if you’re not you’re disintegrating into yet another makes it clear what each type can strive for or can expect to happen if it doesn’t remain healthy.
• The system is made even more complex by the fact that for each type there are essentially nine sub-types according to the level of development of the type. That also goes for the wings and directions of integration/disintegration.
• All the above combined make the Enneagram not only a great tool for self-discovery, empathy and understanding, but also quite revealing and useful for self-development as well.
• While reading the lengthy descriptions for each of the types, I had very clear images of real people I know or friends of mine who appear to be embodiments of their types. Imagine the symbol above but with the faces of people in my social network at each end. My personal Enneagram became these 9 friends of family of mine, and now I believe I can understand their possible fears, troubles and priorities much better, as well as see reflections of those characteristics on myself.
This stuff is real and I want to get deeper into it. I would heartily recommend you do as well, and there’s no better place to start than Reddit’s Enneagram Subreddit which has all the information and links to tests you might need. When you get the basics, reading an actual book, this one or another good one by Riso and Hudson or other personality psychologists and distinguished writers on the subject, will be the way to go. Good luck!
As heard in the following moderately creepy video:
I’ve been thinking recently that we just don’t have enough comedian musicians, or musician comedians.
This is a song in defence of the fence, an anthem to ambivalence.
I discovered Tim Minchin through Toni, through Daphne. I don’t agree with his attacks on alternative medicine (I want to believe he’s still on the fence on that one himself, however unlikely) but overall I’m liking this guy more and more. Plus he’s Australian.
Article originally posted in the Rights4Water Website.
Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America (after Suriname), with an area of 176,215km2, making it about 15% smaller than Belarus and 35% larger than Greece. A total of 3,324,460 people call it home and about 1,947,604 (or roughly 57% of the population) reside in the Montevideo metro area on the Río de la Plata. In fact, its urbanization rate is over 95%, one of the highest in the world. Meanwhile (and perhaps contradictory to the previous statistic), close to 93% of its territory is apt for agriculture or pasture, and with existing cattle numbers surpassing 12.000.000 in 2014, Uruguay is world champion of cattle per capita. To reiterate: for each Uruguayan that lives in an urban centre, there are 3.6 bovines living in its vast fields.
The fertility of Uruguayan soils would likely not be possible without its vast river network, which is mainly defined by Río Uruguay and important tributaries in its basin, such as Río Cuareim and Río Negro; Río de la Plata and its tributaries (including Río Santa Lucía, which provides water for Montevideo) and others. OSE is the country’s main public water company, while DINAGUA (the National Water Directorate), along with MVOTMA (the Ministry of Housing, Land Management and the Environment) and a number of other government directorates are responsible for managing Uruguayan water resources.
Major basins of Uruguay
Privatization of management, with some exceptions, has been largely avoided due to the 2004 plebiscite promoted by the National Commission in Defence of Water and Life. The plebiscite, ratified by 64,58% of voters, resulted in a constitutional reform and the inclusion therein of the now famous Article 47. With it, the Uruguayan constitution was the first in the world to give the state sole authority over water management, making privatisation unconstitutional, explicitly stating that “users and civil society are to participate in all planning, management and control of water resources”. In addition, it declared water “a natural resource essential for life” and made access to water and sanitation “a fundamental human right”.
More than a decade later, management of water in Uruguay is now organised by river basins and hydrographic regions: they are the basis for the regional and basin councils regularly called by DINAGUA. These councils, which are meant to be tripartite, allow the participation of delegates from the government, the users (agriculture, pastures etc) and civil society, and are convened to discuss matters of water quality, regional development plans, emergency situations such as droughts, good practices etc. The inclusion of the citizenry in the management of water resources, as mentioned above, became a constitutional right as a direct result of the referendum. However, until now, these councils have been the only formal way of allowing the citizens to have any say in water management and control.
Regional council in Las Cañas, Río Negro
There have been more problems with the actual implementation of Article 47. Apparently, compartmentalisation of power over water resources has become a problem of management: “The water law (predicated by the constitutional reform) is based on management by basin; the territorial legislation law is based on management by political boundaries, by regional department”, says Carmen Sosa, current member of CNDAV and representative of the worker union of OSE in her interview to Rights4Water. “Since authorities for each river basin are so compartmentalised, we need to examine the difficulty of managing water in such a way. It was our inspiration to have a single organisation, a ministry of water, a ministry of the environment, which would bring all the powers together in a single place. For when authorities are so dispersed, when the responsibilities are so dispersed, in the end nobody’s responsible. Management is very complicated when there are ten different organisations in charge—and all with the same level of responsibility.”
Carmen Sosa
According to Mrs. Sosa, the state could make popular participation more viable by making the regional councils and the information discussed therein more accessible to the citizens. “Oftentimes the only thing people know about is the problems that they have: how their neighbour’s well dried up, or how their own water is polluted. But they do not have any information on the context and on what state the country is in for such things to happen.” Most of the councils are presently working with the most serious water-related problem the country’s facing right now: the contamination of the basins by run-off from its soy plantations and its pastures. We shall go more in-depth about this in our next article on water as a human right in Uruguay.
Laura invited me yesterday to some bar at José Enrique Rodó 1830. Some of her friends were playing music, along with two other acts: a guy who played the guitar kind of experimentally and did the Hun-Huur-Tu thing with this throat (but more skillfully than Hun-Huur-Tu themselves, it seemed to me) and another one I missed forever because it was time to catch the bus back home.
It was 100 pesos for the entrance (~31 pesos to a euro; when I got here 4 weeks ago it was 29—I’m rich!) and another 100 pesos for a strange kind of alcoholic beverage people drink a lot in Uruguay that tastes very much like Fisherman’s Friend. Imagine that, with coke.
A few minutes after I got my drink, her friends started playing their music. The whole concert reminded me of the very first venues in Rock Band, when you first set out and play the easy songs, where supposedly only your friends and some of their friends, at best, come and see you. They were amateur musicians, you could tell: their songs were mostly uncomplicated, and they had a bunch of different instruments, such as unusual percussion (e.g. the lower jaw of a cow, complete with teeth) and types of guitars I would imagine the likes of Inti-Illimani would always keep within arm’s reach. One or two of them were more skilled, but the group as a whole was not. They would go in and out of tune in their polyphonic segments etc. Nevertheless, they left me with a positive impression. I thought they were an interesting group, doing what they enjoy, not caring about perfection and not being scared to experiment in front of an audience.
Then, from the minute I woke up today on, one particular song from yesterday keeps playing in my head. It’s the one in the media player above. It’s a recording I made with my smartphone, that is why the quality is abysmal (I can hear my H2n’s vindictive laugh from the corner—that’s what you get for not having proper sound recording equipment with you ALWAYS ). I can tell that what they’re singing in the chorus is probably “esto no es café” (this isn’t coffee), and I can catch some of the rest of the words but the quality of the recording is so bad and the skill level required for understanding sung language is so high I’m not even bothering.
All that’s nice and good, but something soon dawned on me after listening to his recording a couple of times: I will probably never listen to this song in better quality. This is it.
In this day and age where every original song has a proper recording done in a studio and posted on Youtube, problems like one-off performances, live recordings or poor reproduction quality due to technical reasons seem absurd and things of the lo-tech past. But here we are: an earworm of a song I will never listen to in better quality. If this band never played again, this song would live in posterity in the form of this shitty recording. This realisation gives me similar vibes to listening to the world’s first recording of a song (but not the oldest sound recording in general, that’s too creepy, man). Suddenly you realise it’s a recording; somebody recorded it, it was there and then suddenly thrashed into infinity. It wasn’t born from nothing the way contemporary music makes me think about it sometimes. Somebody was recorded who, after the job was done, left and went on with his or her life. The difference in quality makes me aware of factors I’m sure were invisible for people playing the music. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, anyone? What about “Any sufficiently advanced observer will be able to distinguish between magic and technology?”
You know what though? At least I’m better off than with that Häxan projection with a live soundtrack by No Clear Mind. That was music that rocked my world. I have no recording of it and I will most probably never have the chance to ever even listen to for a second time in my whole life. It makes you wonder what’s important in the end in this art form which has changed so much and has become so very incredibly complex and meta ever since the internet became speedy for cheap, which is actually true for most about everything humans do.
The song is very catchy. The polyphony is excellent, even if not technically perfect. And what’s this genre of music called, if it even has a name? It must, right? There’s an obscure genre for everything. Anyway, I want more!
PS: After I finished writing this post, I started looking around for more info about this group, starting from the address of the place, and step by step I actually found their SoundCloud. Okay, now I sure feel stupid for writing this whole post above! But here it stands, perhaps as a testament to my beautiful, romantic self-delusion and my tendency to make a story out of limited data and believe it if it sounds good enough? Maybe, maybe. Enough playing philosopher for tonight; here’s a good recording of Rocotó’s music. Enjoy!
