Midway
through my time on the stair-master this morning I got hit with an “old”
classic that, as always, lifted my mood.
This was a song that I played incessantly when I was eighteen and
nineteen or so. I remember having
a new room in my sophomore year of college in a house off campus and I put the
album up above some books in the corner.
On the cover was a man with a guitar. The gent, with long hair, eyes closed, clothed in a loose
fitting purple shirt, was lit from behind so that he had an eerie aura
emanating. The guitar was a
classic Fender Stratocaster with a thin rosewood neck, upon which he was most
certainly bending a note with his left hand while he plucked with his right. The guitar hero in question was
Steve Hillage.
I had, those years, looped back to a general appreciation of
most non commercial music after an intense period of hardcore punk appreciation
that was a purest regime of zealotry, wherein people not part of that particular
music scene, were all utterly wrong. Steve Hillage came up in the lysergically enhanced band
Gong, the collective of Octave Doctors and Pot Head Pixies that Daevid Allen
lead. But Hillage really came in
to his own, as far as I was concerned in the two albums that followed the Gong
trilogy, “Fish Rising” and the second of which I described above, the 1976
album “L.” Recorded under a full
moon not far from my home, there in Woodstock, New York, the first song on that
album is the one that popped on for me at the gym, his version of the old
Donavon song, “Hurdy Gurdy.”
The song builds and swirls convincingly with his earnest
voice and then welcomes his lead work.
I must know every bend and flourish of that solo such that I could play it through in my mind without any music around, 含宫咀征[1]. As always, air guitar on a stair master
must look utterly ridiculous but feels wonderful and in as much as no one else
is around at 6:20AM, who cares?
One of my oldest friends, who had turned us all on to Gong back in the
day, sent me an interview clip with Hillage and Allen from back in 2008, and it
was fascinating as the prior had, to my ears a thick cockney that was out of
character with the elfin-like sage persona I’d somehow always imagined for
him. That clip on their official
site is inert now and while I found another interview with them both on Youtube, Steve seemed less like
the artful dodger and more like a well-educated chap, slightly annoyed that the
cameraman wouldn’t pan to include his long time partner Miquette Giraudy
Having spent some time then, out in the ether exercising with
my favorite rock pescador, I was in
the right frame of mind to receive the following article a bit later in the
morning from a chum down south. We
may have finally have pivoted a full 180 degrees from the days of COINTELPRO
and wars on drugs. No, it is not
to suggest that yet another state has acknowledged that pot should be
legal. Far more revealing to my
mind, it would appear that the FBI have begun to acknowledge that marijuana is
a critical success factor in the search for differentiated talent, in the war
against cyber terrorism. The Feds
can’t hire the best talent because of their pot policy.
In fact, (FBI Director James) Comey
indicated the bureau is already relaxing its restrictions marijuana. When one
attendee at the conference said one of their friends was discouraged from
trying to work at the FBI due to the pot policy, Comey said they "should
go ahead and apply" in spite of their marijuana smoking.
If we’ve come to the point where the now FBI acknowledge
that herb is a critical success factor in securing top talent and, implicitly
for defending the nation, and harnessing disruptive innovation, I think its
about time to consider freeing all the hapless souls rotting in U.S. prisons
for no other crime than mere possession.
Meanwhile the FBI has issued “Wanted” posters of Chinese men
in uniform, accused of hacking U.S. companies and using the information for
commercial advantage. The U.S.,
trying to regain the high road, not only among stoners but also with rhetoric,
suggested that while eavesdropping on foreign heads of state like Angela Merkel
may be “fair game”, the U.S. draws the line on using stolen information for
commercial gain. I see. Little of this seems lost on the
Chinese who scoffed at the notion.
As the article below points out, even if this were defensible, there are
countless examples of U.S. sponsored espionage materially benefiting U.S.
firms. It is sad to watch our
nation scramble so, publically, between ideals and practicalities. And it is almost inevitable that China will force a new
opening in this debate. If we get
to the point where the P.L.A. “Comment Crew” decides it too must recruit stoners to
keep up with U.S. hacker innovation, we will have truly entered a rather brave
new world.
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