Page 143 Fundamental Formlessness

I ask Garcia if the small-scale tour and the reliance on outside professionals for the new record and movie were not a massive concession to convention and a statement that traditional Grateful Dead anarchy doesn’t work.

“We still have the fundamental formlessness of the music,” he says. “What makes it interesting is its ability to come to form at any minute; a producer is not a matter of form. He’s there to see where our ideas are going and make sure they get there.”

Garcia walks into the adjoining suite and rummages around in his suitcase. He returns with a four-page paper called With Future Events Having an Increasingly Less Predictable Nature. It says things such as, “Undeniability in concept and translation/transmission will be greatly more important. Language will have to be treated more precisely, creatively and seriously. Manners will increase in effective use as precise shortcuts defining day-to-day relationships.”

“That’s what it’s all about future events having an increasingly less predictable nature,” says Garcia. “That was written by our old manager; Jon Mcintire, a tremendous cat. He’s fallen in with some futurists at Stanford. He’s interested in formalizing the attitude of the Grateful Dead community philosophically. The trick is to be as adaptable and changeable as possible. What they’re studying in physics now-the smallest observable phenomena in nature, charmed quarks and whatever- nobody knows what it is. It could change our entire structure of reality. Literally anything is possible.”

“We could be watching our own minds in those subatomic particles,” says Weir. “There’s a theory that the nuclear reaction of the sun is only on the surface. Inside could be consciousness. The universe could be a mind.” -Charles Young (Relix)

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Lorem Ipsum

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum (derived from Latin dolorem ipsum, translated as “pain itself”) is a filler text commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation. Replacing meaningful content with placeholder text allows viewers to focus on graphic aspects such as font, typography, and page layout without being distracted by the content. It also reduces the need for the designer to come up with meaningful text, as they can instead use quickly-generated lorem ipsum.

The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin. This is H. Rackham’s 1914 translation….with the major source of lorem ipsum highlighted:

“But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing of a pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.”

Greeking

“Greeking” is used when a design is being developed but the content is unfinished. One example might be the layout of a magazine article which has photographs but no text; initially, a lorem ipsum text is used, and then the nonsense text is replaced with draft versions as they become available. This allows design and layout to be carried out in parallel with content revisions.

– Wikipedia

Photo Credits: Keith – Bruce Polonksi, Others – Jerilyn Lee Brandelius