Category: clouds

Social Proof, not Social Goof!

It’s about balancing the goofiness with precision … but don’t fail, though.

last update: 28 February 2025

I heard Lenny Kravitz for the first time with Let Love Rule on the car radio, probably around 1990 on PBS. I think my brother was sitting next to me and my dad was driving. Our car was passing a cemetery.

Really, I think LK should put acoustic guitar to bass/drums/organ more often, if I may suggest.

I was thrilled no one changed the station during the song and thought it was one of the coolest tracks I’d ever heard. Then I recognised the music again at a friend’s place a number of months later and it all clicked and I bought the album.

In 1992 (above left) I owned the Digipak edition of LK’s 2nd album (middle) and in 1993 I owned the Digipak of album 3 (right.)

My dad’s first reaction was to his name – okay so he must be Jewish!

However, one of my cherished Kravitz CDs ended up severely scratched after I lent it to Tim in 1993.

[ Note, LK Digipak in bedside table under Branford Marsalis CD. ]

I think it was Let Love Rule because Sitting on Top of the World never played past the second bar without getting stuck in a loop.

He later said that the CD was passed around in the unit without him knowing and he mentioned some other people. It ended up on the wood floor somehow. Accidents happen. But people return favours in different ways. A few people told me to clean it with tooth-paste. Why not?

At least Stain remained …unstained.

[April?, 1993]

Later that year the whole year group helped clean up after a flood – really puts things into perspective seeing people dealing with their whole material lives being washed away. I think it was Seymour.

EMERGENCY WARNING – RIVERINE FLOOD – Evacuate Immediately – Seymour

Major flooding is expected in the Seymour area, slightly higher then the 1993 flood level.

More details at https://t.co/NTLs9mU5bx pic.twitter.com/xgtQ02nSa7

— VICSES News (@vicsesnews) January 8, 2024

Helped us see-more.

That said, speaking of messups, I took the woodshed 2 steps forward and 1 step back (or was it vice-versa because people couldn’t leap up onto the roof anymore) by making it bigger and higher in the rear but with a little less overhang in the front so it was more work to stack it out of the way from the rain. I think it was an improvement, but not by much.

[ the original boiler woodshed ]

Later, the unit master suggested I should’ve done more planning and there was nothing wrong with the original shed but he wasn’t around while the work was done. That was done towards the end of the year and no one really complained.

With Jun by my side, a bunch of guys stood around as I drove in nails – it wasn’t like I did it without any sort of tacit approval either, or formality.

Anyway, during this time LK wasn’t really hard, manly or grungy enough to be universally accepted, at least at my school. It could have been the falsetto, who knows? I just liked his music. Image was secondary to me, if not completely irrelevant.

Anyway, on 12 Feb 1994 I saw LK in concert and I even bought a long-sleeved t-shirt – but that’s over now.

At school, it was strange because I think a bunch of girls liked me (as they liked Lenny) but I didn’t really know that – female competition and jealousy was probably a deterrence.

At a house party, I took a skateboard taken that I had carefully constructed in 1994 during woodwork (in the Deaf School) and many years later it appeared at someone’s place with serious mileage on it. A chap I knew quite well, Rikka, (Mark) mentioned some other names that gave it to him and they were my buddies anyway. Strange situation, we were both stressed, and I let him keep it as it was so banged up and possession is 9/10 of the law. Did I have a choice though? I didn’t think about the police at the time.

Also, I thought deep down that having the board disappear meant it might well have saved me from having an accident on it. I was more into skiing and blading and designed a pair of skis that were built in late 2012 for carving (but very strangely ended up great in powder too.)

2013 (Zermatt)

They were never stolen, but I haven’t seen them in years though. I hope they’re still around.

So I found these skis to be extremely safe – I only took one fall in ~20 days of skiing and that’s because I was testing their limits. So these Heartcarve skis are for endorphins, not adrenaline. And due to the lack of pain and fear, skiing becomes a much more social experience and I ended up talking to many more people on the chairlift and simply overall. The biggest challenge was finding a pair of boots that fit well, because so much g-force is taken by the tongue.

Note, like downhill mountain-biking, my upper body is facing in the same direction as my skis.

Back in 2008, on off-the-shelf slalom skis after having worked on Heartcarving since 2002:

(also vid 2007 – Tirol)

1 2 3

2007 – Little Buller Spur | 2007 – Summit Slide  | ’08 + ’08 (Whistler)

Today, I think the style could be comparable to an e-unicycle.

The whole “always keep upper body facing downhill” thing is a paradigm to me that causes tension and pain in the body. Even today’s modern carvers still do it to a large extent.

I suppose no matter what the skis or technique, one can always numb it all down later apres-ski. I’m centred in my heart… isn’t that goofy?

So all boots have a pain point when fitting in the shop and that has to be on the front of the shin because after a few days of skiing, the front of the shin develops a muscle to counteract that force. For me that was the Garmont G2 – a miracle find because it was for bony, narrow feet.

Anyway, back to the skateboard, in one way I was happy for Rikka because he was a really good skater and I hold no grudges. In the news, there are so many stories about small disputes escalating into serious offences, it’s important to keep things in perspective and this is why condemnation as a mental device (also mentioned here and here) is problematic as it leads to disproportional, emotive responses. I should have kept a closer watch on the board at the party instead of long hair and smiling faces. But it also shows I made a good deck because he said a number of people had used it.

It was a Magnusson deck (~1988) that I cut down.

I used full-size large wheels from another board I owned, tightened the trucks, loosened the wheel nuts – like one of today’s cruiser boards, perhaps. Ollies were hard, yet it was fast and stable.

No wonder it disappeared. And I thought people would think I was a weirdo.

It’s worth noting that that board had nose-to-tail, hell concave and I initially bought the whole thing second-hand at Huntingfield Road for about $25 from a friend of a brother of a friend.

He didn’t like the concave, and it was still in pretty good condition. It was my first “professional” board.

The board I had prior to that was an el-cheapo and it was slow and unwieldly but got me tinkering around with it to try to make it better.

And I’d already been building Lego for years prior to that.

So on the Magnusson, I removed the rail and tail sliders it came with, and would stop by rolling onto sidewalk grass or s-bending on the road.

Like my skiing, I didn’t care about tricks and wasn’t too good at them either, I just wanted to cover distance in style – as with life.

To this day, I think it was a great design because my feet could stay over the trucks and this kept the board parallel to the ground rather than bending as with a longboard.

[ src ]

Perhaps I should see it as me having “lost” it rather than having had it “stolen.” I just forgot about it long-term because it was so new to me and I was so focused on school work.  Thus, the whole time it had a “borrowed” status among some of my school friends. But I never did tell anyone “here, that’s yours now to keep.”

On the other hand, maybe it was straight up stolen or taken as “ownerless” one night at the party – maybe it was dumped and picked up. And Rikka was most probably right, I did last see someone using the board at full pelt up and down the street at that party. Or was that a different deck?

It was on that night that I turned to a couple at one point and said “love is a beautiful thing” and they both laughed.

I could’ve said it to the skater. Finders, keepers, right?

A lot of people ended up there that night, in Toorak in late ’94 or early ’95. Eden was there. And that’s probably it right there with Mark:

… or not.

So at least it got good use! The whole thing has a sexual connotation too.

Anyhow, I really wanted to go to my school formal with someone I had met at a party that had been at my house, P, whereby Luke met her randomly shortly before it (with her friend S also coming to the party.) Luke thought they were hot and I chatted with both of them in the back garden with Mike around where Desmond is below.

So then in 1996 out of the blue P appeared outside South Yarra train station as if waiting to speak to me, and I spoke to her for a bit, but being into my walkman and schoolwork, my mind was too linear for me to pop the question. Well spoken, she had been on an ABC television show that year too. Frustrating.

Some months later I saw her at schoolies in Noosa (Rolling Rock) and we spoke again by chance at nearby Funkies, funnily enough where Tim’s good friend Sarah worked who I also knew quite well from school, and later that pair wound up in the back of the Nissan at some point as we went clubbing in early 1997. Just needed to find a Kravitz concert to complete the night.

So to P, I said “there’s no sign I’m not compatible with” (Prince – Kiss) and she said “bull.” She was with a friend and that was the end. I should’ve just said, “hey, let’s all meet at Silvers tonight” as it was in the same building, and come to think of it, I did see P once at Silvers in I think early 1997 but we never spoke. She either ignored me or I ignored her, who really knows in those chaotic places? So a few weeks or months later Lucy (and Noah,) who Luke knew, would’ve been over with her upright bass.

Right about that time I started delivering pizzas for Giardino which became Vintage Cellars and was a few doors up from Fuji where Toby was dognapped.

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Michael Todd of the Australian Ballet (1978) (above-right, bare legs) was a waiter and said he felt I had a shielded or guarded personality and should loosen up … something like that anyway. I didn’t really agree with him – but he may have had a point – I don’t know – I was serious a lot of the time. Perhaps I should’ve popped on a clown suit. Good guy though, and we had some interesting discussions. He looked at my hair, touched a few strands and said in a professional tone that I should cut it really short, which I eventually did (but only years later) or else grow it long.  Dreadlocks would’ve been ideal.

He was at the tail-end of his career and had trouble finding work in ballet in his late 30’s – he had to move into choreography at that point. It must’ve been tough for him to transition from an acclaimed dancer into someone who some people would treat condescendingly at a restaurant. Every job has its downsides and my car was starting to smell like the restaurant.

One rare regret I have from the years 1997-2001 is the lack of photos I took of my fashion choices of the day.  All my clothes were thrown away from that time too. So my biggest tip while doing deliveries was a $20 bill for a $13 pizza and to “keep the change.” That was from Brian Blythe (1939 – 2022) of Spotless at the doorstep of Coonac, Melbourne’s most expensive home.

I wasn’t just grateful, but also in awe. But how would deliveries get me there permanently? I did take some shots outside Coonac in 2020.

Photo deliveries?

Anyway, I did some additional delivery runs for a pizza shop in the Balwyn area in place for Zoltak.

Interestingly, during my time at uni, but I’m not sure when – most likely 2001 – I had the idea to run a meditation class. But it wasn’t really a meditation class. It was just about getting a whole heap of people in the same room.

The idea never moved beyond the image above, I had no qualifications, and people could get the same feeling at a cinema just as the lights dimmed. Maybe it’s something people will do in 2050 …for whoever remains. A meetup in its purest form. I still think it has potential: expect nothing, receive the universe, charge anything.

Maybe a group-sleep could work like in kindergarten but for adults in a retreat setting.

src

Wait don’t people do that on aeroplanes? Maybe in hyperbaric chambers or sensory deprivation tanks? Too Goofy?

So in early ’97 at uni I momentarily met P’s younger sister P2 (and her friend E) on the tram who later brushed passed me after she saw me laughing out loud in front of the commerce building – during my conversation with Robbie about clubbing. Kind of gnarly to think about it all now. It must be quite common, a person is friends or even an item with someone, and really they should be hanging out with the sibling.

So Robbie lived around the corner from me and Jun met him one night and Robbie said Jun was a “top bloke.” Jun, Robbie, myself and I think Peck were in a taxi going to Crown Casino, and we passed the Arcadia Hotel and I saw a homeless/derelict person outside and I said “Can I have a dollar?” to him and we all cracked up laughing. I highly doubt the guy heard over all the background noise, and I said it facetiously to take the piss out of us all – not him. Anyway, if he gave me a dollar, I could’ve tried to turn it into 10 for him at Crown minus the carried interest!

These days I’d have to wonder who are the real parasites – the super poor or the super rich? Speaking of which:

Gary nails it—this rentier economy has turned ownership and hard work into relics of the past. Like Yanis Varoufakis points out, this isn’t capitalism in its original sense; it’s a parasitic system designed to extract wealth rather than create it. The middle class is being squeezed, not because they’re lazy, but because the rules of the game have changed. We’re forced to rent everything—homes, jobs, even our futures—while the owner class rakes in profits from systems they didn’t build, exploiting our labor and resources. And then they preach about ‘hard work,’ as if it means anything in a rigged game. This isn’t progress—it’s neo-feudalism, and it’s dismantling the social contract piece by piece.

Gary’s Economics | top comment | 6 Jan 2025

I’ve seen the behaviour up close personally with the leeches of the fashion industry as mentioned here. And the same in Hollywood, from my experience. What’s theirs is theirs and what’s mine is theirs. It’s the international money mafia, baby!

Yet from my understanding, Hollywood A-listers don’t have full control of their money, and they can only spend on certain things. That was according to one internet personality (now inactive with many videos offline for many years.)

If so, then Steven Spielberg can buy a superyacht for himself, but couldn’t buy one for me, even if he wanted to. That personality also spoke of R Kelly being innocent, with his convictions being drummed or even fabricated so he could be used as a sexual misconduct scapegoat, and also as part of some type of revenge thing – although that was for a case in the 2010’s so just a continuation of that?

Speaking  of A-listers, why is Harrison Ford still working? Is it a clone? Why is Lenny Kravitz back on tour in 2025, is he on a hamster wheel? How does he hear anything anymore? Why did R Kelly, Lenny Kravitz, Bruno Mars and Kanye West all lose their mothers early on in their careers? The rules in the beast-system are different and clandestine. But once you’re on the “freedom train,” there’s no turning back.

Gary from Gary’s Economics was on the finance trading floor for 5 years before retiring a multi-millionaire with great resistance. How many Hollywood A-listers or pop stars have even been able to retire at all, let alone after 5 years?

LaBeouf walked the red carpet in 2014 with a brown paper bag over his head with the words “I’m not famous anymore” written on it. https://t.co/4eFqct845W pic.twitter.com/1GvonJVioq

— Bounce Mojo (@BounceMojo) November 17, 2021

It’s like there’s a centralized ledger of who has what amount of money, and people have to request for a voucher any time they want to buy or sell something of any value. Actually, I have no idea if there is a system like that in place, but it wouldn’t suprise me. I think Dave Chappelle said to be careful of being paid too much – something like that. The last thing I’d want is to be more valuable dead than alive with the value of a song catalog rising as a result, the negation of royalty payments, the avoidance of fading glory and the freeing up of fans and fame for new acts. Same with film. And there’s also the risk of failing mind-control and the slipping of “secrets.”

So maybe the fashion heads want to reciprocate… but can’t! No one wants to be “deactivated” and thrown off the train.

src

Also, status is bestowed to those who inspire the next and that should go to someone important like an heir.

Hitachi doesn’t just imagine the next – we inspire it together, with customers & partners. #SaveTheDate and meet us at #AWSreInvent booth #1532. See how we are sparking sustainable business growth using #data: https://t.co/dMifolOC74 @Hitachi @HitachiDS @GlobalLogic pic.twitter.com/bCdQYCPmBw

— Hitachi Vantara (@HitachiVantara) November 8, 2023

Not a goofy outsider.

[ 23 Apr 2018 | 10 July 2018 | 7 Aug 2018 ]

Yet at the same time, according to Primal Status Elevated, one challenge “new money” has is maintaining and monopolizing primal status within their sphere of influence and greater society. As with Hollywood fame, companies (and families) can also seek their own type of fame to create inter-generational wealth (“old money.”) This is outlined in this video. I don’t think Marta Ortega has a very good fashion sense myself – how is she going to uphold a fashion dynasty for decades to come? But does it matter? People can gravitate toward their strengths anyway.

If I publicly had over $100 Billion, I would look at aiming to hide the bulk of the money from the public anyway, like the Wallenberg family (apparently) over the course of decades.

[11 July 2018]

It depends on the context of course – in France I could pitch myself as the second coming of Napoleon but I still might need a private army and prison.  In North Korea, it’s either life as a serf or a soldier… is that what the West has to look forward to? If the super-rich are squeezing out the middle class today, then won’t the ultra/invisible rich eventually squeeze those out tomorrow?

So it may be an interesting strategy to create the appearance of being a billionaire to elevate status, and the nepo babies need help – and so do their parents if they want to turn their surnames into long-standing brands. Who do they let into their inner-circle?

Anyway, Peter Thiel recently alluded to the notion that to lift billions out of poverty would require whole new energy sources. Interestingly, that may end up lowering birth rates. Also, perhaps those futuristic energy devices exist but are purposely hidden through a lack of love.

It’s interesting to note how restrained Thiel is in pushing the envelope. That said, according to one theory, JFK wanted to use his platform to rein in the Federal Reserve and look what happened to him. No one wants to be first to invest in anything too disruptive. Anything too good is siphoned away into a breakaway civilization for the chosen few, right?

So I read about a very wealthy guy that started to buy up radio stations in the USA and he was “put to sleep” as well. But at some point you’ve gotta fight the good fight, but if you hit people in the wallet they tend to swing back. Prince sung “What’s the use of money if you ain’t gonna break the mould? … All that glitters ain’t gold.”

So another girl at school told me I looked like Joaquin Phoenix or Daniel Day-Lewis.

Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix in ‘To Die For’ (1995). The film was based on the real-life case of Pamela Smart, who allegedly seduced her teenage lover into murdering her husband.
➡️ via https://t.co/UJJ8RuDFKh pic.twitter.com/YEZ19CmJEs

— FilmFreeway (@FilmFreeway) April 27, 2021

Anyhow, in Newcastle, Daniel Johns was bashed because he wasn’t masculine enough, and his music was already pretty heavy.

They were the cool guys, we were just the others guys that were in a band that wasn’t as masculine. (1:00)

So back to Kravitz, in May 2018, I took this photo in Atlit, Israel and by September Lenny had his album cover on the shelves:

Raise Vibration. Out now. Everywhere. Love and respect all around. pic.twitter.com/vocmYGYVzb

— Lenny Kravitz (@LennyKravitz) September 7, 2018

Fast forward to October 2023, LK’s newly announced album Blue Electric Light seems to have followed from my April 2019 pics from Innot Hot Springs.

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And I read an interview in the 90’s about Lenny re-recording Tony Breit’s basslines from jam session tapes and not giving him songwriting credits and that caused a lot of tension. Unfortunately, I don’t have the exact quote on hand. This was from 1993, however:

src | screenshot

[ IG ]

So I do remember going to my CD at the time and looking at the album art perplexed.

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Breit’s only listed playing on 4 tracks. Chad Smith got writing credits on Blood Sugar Sex Magik and he was “just” the drummer. But they’re a “band” so it’s different, right?

Has Breit written anything with Lenny? He plays guitar too. Maybe I’m over-reaching but I lost some of my innocence at the time.

Best of luck to them anyway and maybe what was written was garbage.

Or not. I think it was Me’shell Ndegéocello that said she wouldn’t even step into the same studio with someone with her instrument unless there was a contract in place. And re-recording parts is nothing new. On Guns ‘n Roses’ 2008 Chinese Democracy:

"According to Ferrer, he is the only drummer on the title track; the rest of the album features drums by Brain and Ferrer, using Freese's arrangements. Bassist Tommy Stinson stated he had to rerecord his bass parts with each change in drummer." - src

Brain said Freese played on 30 songs before he split with the band. While Axl Rose admired Brain's feel, he was set on the patterns that Freese had played, so he had Brain replicate Freese's parts note for note. - src

This made it the most expensive rock album ever produced – $13 million.

And Coco Chanel said that creativity is the art of concealing your sources, non? But it shouldn’t have to be this way and what goes around comes around.

In the 80’s, I remember listening to Genesis on the radio and turning up the volume dial only on the 2 and 4 and muting the rest – I realized I could do that on any song.

The rest is just filler anyway, right? It was so easy to record stuff as well onto tape.

When it comes to my playing, I could see how someone would want it optimized, as there is a sloppiness and unpredictability to it but also taste and groove. My timekeeping, at times can be discernibly off. Yet one could also use quantizing – Grohl’s bass drum on Nevermind was quantized, well that’s what someone told me when it came out.

However, I’ve got excellent hearing when it comes to placing notes in relation to a pulse – that happens looking at a screen, not at tom-toms.

For example, with my drumming “switcheroo” (enabled by AI track separation) of It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over, Kravitz may have liked it, but recognized the imperfections, and then re-did it to his liking.

Well, I highly doubt it, but it’s worth understanding the temptation in these situations. It’s about balancing the goofiness with precision. Or in more opportunistic settings, being able to conceal the sources. It’d also be possible to take the best bars and loop them.

Anyway, at the start of this clip, I am keeping time on the hats and laying out a fill at the end of the section.

Same with Krav.

Very generic stuff, but I think RaveDJ quantized my drums and was able get the drum overlap right, and, Krav put out his track about a month after I first released mine (30 March 2023). RaveDJ have since made my mashups unavailable on that site.

Also, following on from the Phoenix/Kidman film from 1995 (mentioned above) is a new Kidman/Dickinson film almost 30 years later.

Nicole Kidman A24 Babygirl edit – LEASH by Sky Ferreira pic.twitter.com/JO9vjJ5uUK

— that one bitch who dont play abt CareyMulliganedit (@careymulliqan) December 5, 2024

OK, so back to 2020, and today a rainbow literally appeared in front of me through the trees as I started playing this on drums, and it dissipated by the end.

It’s in my squint at 0:29 … It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over… yeah… tell that to the Social Goofs who stare at the rainbows that no one else are yet to see!

pics
www.etsy.com/nz/listing/590425852/vintage-90s-1993-lenny-kravitz-universal
sg.carousell.com/p/arthcd-lenny-kravitz-are-you-gonna-go-my-way-limited-edition-digipak-cd-poster-147322884/

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