Puck

James Greathouse writes:

Terrence McKenna reads the opening to Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

Made with Audacity and Sony ACID XPress 5.0 (both free).

Made on a Dell I rescued from a dumpster with a 930 MHz Intel Pentium III processor and 512 MB of RAM. All I did was add a CDRW drive rescued from a dead computer and reinstall the OS. It is hooked up to a 20″ Trinitron monitor pulled out of a dumpster. The keyboard, mouse and powered speakers came to me the same way.

I would hope that the mention of James Joyce and Terrence McKenna speaks with more meaning than anything I could say. If these artists go unknown to the audience then I have little expectation that my musings would prove illuminating. It seemed appropriate to me to use Finnegans Wake in a layered mash up. Truthfully, I doubt any other text could be more relevant to such a process.

This is placed in the genre of general semantics. The great debt semiology owes to general semantics recently came to my notice. Thank you Alfred Korzybski for saying, “The map is not the territory.” Anyone who reads Roland Barthes ought to find this meaningful. And if you don’t read Barthes, then the meaning is still up for grabs, isn’t it?

When you die, hearing is the last of the physical senses to remain.

Greathouse submitted two versions of Shot; I like them both (especially The Fall in First Shot), so here they are: First Shot and Second Shot.

Learn more about Terrence McKenna here–and download goodies, including more of McKenna reading Finnegans Wake.

A few facts (some may be made up) about Permeable Press.

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Here’s “Stein’s Box” for your listening pleasure. I’m not sure how to categorize this piece: is it techno? trip-hop? drum ‘n’ bass (without the bass)? “Stein’s Box” was inspired by reading Gertrude Stein’s prose-poetry, especially “A Box” in the Collected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Your humble DJ adapted Stein’s words, recorded the vocal and produced the song.

Here’s a sample of the text DJ Funken Wagnalls used in “Stein’s Box”: “Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle.”

Help yourself to the MP3 of “I Think the Government Is Watching Me.” This may be the world’s shortest rap song. Cottonmouth and I recorded this a couple years back; it’s been languishing on a hard drive for far too long. The image is from Robert Edward’s film Paranoia.