Øystein Gullvåg Holter

You have done a good job, says one of the survivors of the terror to the defence lawyer.

Cf http://www.dagbladet.no/2012/02/06/nyheter/innenriks/anders_behring_breivik/fengslingsmote/20107916/

Do I understand this album? No. Was I meant to? Probably no. Do I understand Stereophile making it album of the month, September 2010, after their reviewer Stephan Mejias had grown to like it in May that year, saying “it kills, but it also builds, it soars, it uplifts”- ? Well, eventually, yes. He evidently got the rest of the editorial board convinced, and I mainly agree, re-listening some years later. This is borderline stuff. Not just Hendrix-like solo guitar but put into place also. A new place. Challenging, but well worth it.

Keith Reid was the poet behind the loosely-assembled ensemble “Procol Harum”. His texts are among the ones that  helped me through the late 60s and early 70s. It never failed. When I was down, I grew more optimistic. Reid wrote texts showing the failures of the “revolution” at that time., and yet the need to go on. “I will blacken your Christmas”. For Procol Harum, Reid wrote for a larger meaning, trying to show the aftermath of the holocaust, cf http://www.procolharum.com/99/kr_holocaust.htm

Listening today, 2012, his rhymes on Home are still often good and his overall effect seems sublime. Allmusic.com presents some of the story behind the album, but misses a main influence – the words, the content, and therefore does not give it enough credit. Come on folks, this is one of the best post-holocaust reflections you will ever get. It is surely worthy of an album pick, at this site.

There is a quite unique – very open – picture enclosed with the original Home LP, showing the two main band influences, Keith and Gary, at each side – the band members in the middle. These include Robin Thrower (below, second left). Yet they all cringe, here, confronted with the two geniuses, Keith (left) and Gary (right), who have quite some distance between them, Gary (like always?) trying to tell the point, while Keith just seems to stand there, listening, hands in his pockets. Yet he was crucial to the whole Procol Harum event.  As Wikipedia says, “Although he did not sing or play an instrument, lyricist Reid was a pivotal element to the long-term success of Procol Harum”. # […]

When asked about what has made the deepest impressions on him, through his career,  researcher and research director Erik Rudeng especially notes Johan Throne-Holst (1868-1946), the founder of Freia, in an inteview in the newspaper Aftenposten published 30.4.2010, see http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/article3629825.ece#.TxSi4tWwV2M.

Rudeng argues that the Freia fabric hall with its paintings by Edvard Munch became “the Aula of the east” of Oslo, a main academic forum of working class people. He argues that Throne-Holst was an entrepeneur and successful capitalist long before his time, with contributions to science as well as work-place democracy.

Rudeng says (my translation) that “Throne Holsts’ initiatives to our food research and social research is a chapter by itself. Towards  the end of his life he envisioned a grand library as the heart of the factory. He liked to quote what one of his inspirations, the famous English industry builder and filantrope lord Leverhulme, said about his work: ‘I like to see some things being done'”.

I did not know about lord Leverhulme, and checked it out. JTH must have refered to the lord at his time, William Lever (1851-1925), a capitalist building soap factories by a very radical scheme, for its time, of improving worker welfare and input.

See:

http://www.todayinsci.com/L/Lever_William/LeverWilliam-SoapAndSociology%281919%29.htm

This quotes, “In the opinion of Lord Leverhulme ‘high wages, bonuses, premiums or piece work, apart from a system of co-partnership can alone bring no solution of labor difficulties. Only the true spirit of co-partnership can tend in this direction, and, by combining the democratic with the individualistic attributes of human nature will result not only higher total earnings but greater efficiency, happier life and improved mental condition.'”

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1919/feb/25/industrial-unrest

This shows how his advanced capitalist arguments were met in the debate at the time.

Rudeng has published a study of JTH and Freia in his book Sjokoladekongen / The Chocolate King. Freia was founded in 1889 and bought by Johan Throne-Holst soon after, in 1892. JTH then developed the factory to become the main Norway chocolate factory. Freia was engaged in work environment issues in many ways including the hall and a park. Based on the success in Oslo, the family in 1916 extended the company to the Swedish factory Marabou in Vasby near Stockholm. In the early 1990s, it expired as an independent unit (bought by Kraft General Foods Holding Norway Inc).

Johan Throne-Holst was my mother’s mother’s father. My mother, Harriet Holter, got a lot of intellectual and emotional inspiration from her maternal grandfather, and was very fond of him. She cherished her youth memories of him including their exciting intellectual exchanges. She felt that someone had recognized and respected her, as a child. I wish I had met him, but I was born six years after his death.

This photo is taken from Rudeng’s book. Harriet 16 years (1938) enthusiastically underlined her name under this photo, that she mailed to her grandfather.

Read more: http://www.adressa.no/nyheter/trondheim/byens_gater/article787039.ece

A note on programming (see menu – projects – programming):

This could need an updating – I know. Yet I am more interested in doing work, these days, than investing a lot of time programming how to avoid doing it. Even if my “work researcher urge” is always to look into the work reduction side of on-going tasks. I am not allowed to spend much time with this, in my current job, and doing programming is demanding in my free time. So I usually avoid it.

Yet I do use my free time to update the Bro system where needed. And worthy modules that do make a change like  Mirror (Speil). Very useful for updating my laptop. In all, the system is so useful for me, that being able to transfer it to a new PC and operating system is a major strategical task. Therefore, I took time off from my Christmas holiday to get it working on a new PC upgrading from Windows xp to 7. This mainly worked fine – the troubles were not in my programming but in external changes. I did little or nothing, changing the Bro system code. All the problems were “known suspects” like the code not working due to new security issues. The Bro system runs low-key and has limited cost so I keep it running. The surface has been improved by prioritizing calendar events. Perhaps some further developments could be made, like a mix of calendar events and recent news. I find that one of the main ways I used the interface is to get quickly to “recent news”.

As noted in my earlier blog post, “the loudness war” is a case of mismanagement – and a conflict over what consumers hear. Some examples:

Destroyer: Kaputt – 2 x LP – sounds quite good and undistorted / non-compressed. The improved sound – compared to many other new LPs – allows the more subtle and symphonic ambitions to shine through, contributing a lot to my enjoyment of the music. The good sound helped the album to win critic awards and a strong score on 2011 best album lists (second, on Pitchfork).

The latest King Crimson and Yes incarnations,  Jakszyk, Fripp and Collins: A scarcity of miracles (including improved ‘frippertronics’) and Yes: Fly from here, also pass in my sound testing, as do the recent Kate Bush albums, and others.

Yet many others, like the latest album by War against drugs: Slave ambient, sound so-so and only mediocre. I don’t know exactly, but this effect mainly seems to be caused by too low resolution combined with too much compression. Fleet Foxes’ first LP is another example.

When I get frustrated by this suboptimal rendering of new music, and turn back to well-recorded all-analog albums from the 1970s or early 80s, before digital came into the chain, I hear none of these problems, but then again, I hear other problems, like – usually – a more limited soundscape with less low bass and high treble. The mid-tone “ambience”, however, is usually better, and this often makes up for what is missing in the frequency extremes. There is more of a feeling that this music is actually created by musicans playing together. Instruments do not just make sounds “on their own”, but in combination with others. These combinations are more deeply and subtly reproduced, in the best analog recordings, before digital over-optimism took over.

However, this techno-optimist tendency did not start with the loudness and compression, or even with the CD and the soon-to-be-proven false idea of CD resolution as “perfect”. It started with transistors. We produced the Doors’ albums with gradually worse sound, the sound engineer has told in a recent interview (see http://musicangle.com/feat.php?id=144). At the time (1967-70), the Electra studio console was changed from a tube system to a solid state transistor system. Studios dropped their established tube gear in favour of new, and acclaimed better, transistor gear.  Even if, in hindsight, and by today’s listening criteria, there is no doubt that the sound changed mainly for the worse!

The Doors were among my favourite groups, I have many versions of their LPs including Mobile fidelity pressings and the recent box set, and my listening experience is the same as sound engineer Bruce Botnick’s. The sound got increasingly “transistor-like” brittle and hard, even if the frequency spectrum perhaps became a bit larger and flatter.

The loudness war, like the sugar war, are examples of market mechanisms working suboptimally – at least from a textbook liberal economic point of view. Why are they suboptimal? They typically start with a good idea, but over time, the new patten or idea turns into a kind of arthritis pattern, blocking the market distribution system from functioning in the ways it should do, the ways that market ideologists from Adam Smith onwards envisioned, with the market as a tool for improving society through increased wealth. So for example, through the “dirty” means of profit, the music market would create better music than earlier distribution forms.

This “increased wealth” part is obviously part of the problem. It turns sour, changing into over-eager profit-making. Turn it up, to sell better. But it is not the only part. There is an idealist element too, perhaps a kind of “engineer’s idealism”. This was what translated better sound in some ways (the CD, measuring better than it actually sounded to human ears), into some high-flying “perfect” heavenly attribute. So it would seem that belief and religion, “religious” ways of making market arguments, have an influence too.

Whatever the cause, market solutions are found that may be good then and there (e g the introduction of the CD), but not so good over time, developing into almost “feudal” hindrances to free market initiatives. They involve some short-term market development, and yet turn into a blocking of development and real change for the better. Not only was there no “perfect sound”, this very ideology and business rationale actively helped monopolize the market and keep innovations down (like, only a half-life for the better formats like SACD).

Similar twisted paths can probably be found in much consumer (and producer) industry, even in our “enlightened” world. Why such things happen, is an interesting task for research.

The loudness war is now discussed in Norway also (“lydstyrkekrigen”). It is not a war. The use of the term says something of our time. But it is a fairly bad case of mismanagement. Like the idea – perhaps not when it first formulated, but when it was later repeated – of the CD as “perfect sound forever”. This case of mismanagement is similar to using too much sugar when producing food.

Sugar is sweet, and cheap, why not use it to raise food business profits? This time, it is music business profits, with sound compression the equivalent of sugar. Same shit, new wrapping. Loudness functions as “ear candy”. The music sounds more engaging, especially in the beginning. It has a greater chance to catch the ear, over a lot of other noise. Compression means that the sound level is turned up, so it all sounds louder  -and initially more engaging.

The cost of this loudness turn-up and compression, is that it all sounds more tiresome after a while, like sugar not being so good for the body. Especially, the intense parts are limited or cut off. The sound is quite nasty especially during these parts, as a lot of internet users have complained. I just read a user complaining “it sounds like poo”. New terms are used to describe the problem, the music sounds “crushed”. The typical listener reaction, the first line of defense, is to turn the volume down. But then the music is no longer so engaging – which was the goal, in the first place.

The extra sugar, or loudness, is more easily heard, the better and more truthful the sound reproduction system. On a quality sound system, the same music sounds good on quiet to moderate or less dynamic passages, but turns hard and brittle on dynamic passages. Clearly something is not working very right. This now gets critique from vinyl record buyers especially, not just oldie audiofiles but the hip young crowd also, complaining that their new favourite today’s year group actually sounds worse than some post-punk LP from 1985 or so.

An example is the ambitious and often successful Danish band Mew. Their newest album No more stories is well pressed on two fairly thick vinyl LPs. The vinyl production is fine. The problem is the master used in the first place – it seems to be the same compressed master used for the CD, whatever the case, the sound is not right. It is fine when the group is quiet, ok when it is louder, but bad when it gets loud. How come? Such LPs should have a warning sticker “COMPRESSED SOUND”. Even better, the sticker should specify the digital or analog copy method used, and if digital, the resolution used, along with the amount of compression.

Buying new LPs, I tend to hear three typical detractors from enjoyment. The first, and worst by far, is the compression discussed above. The second is digital copying with too low resolution. The third is poor production, very common in the early 2000s when it looked like the LP was going to die, but improved and less common now. Some quality record labels –  Speaker’s corner comes to mind – very often give good sound, avoiding compression and minimizing digital problems. Some bands and artists are very keen on getting the best sound, not just the best music, like Tom Petty and Steven Wilson. Whenever I see the name “Bernie Grundman” and other good producers I tend to look once more at the title, this usually means good sound. The Grundman-produced Shelby Lynne: Give me some loving LP is great. ECM’s new vinyl, at least Nik Bartsch: Llyria are very good, no compression here and not much digitalis either (this is not so strange, since it seems that most or all of the recording is done in the analog domain in such cases). However, these are niche products.

In Norway, recording studios like Kirkelig kulturverksted often produce good music, but the sound is not high class, but only mid-level resolution, slightly higher than CD. When this is put to vinyl, the results are often only mediocre, as on Kari Bremnes: Reise, a live LP. The sound is clearly inferior to the better resolution and production on Kari Bremnes: Norwegian mood (which got some special EU audiofile attention). This seems typical.

One of last year’s most-favoured and most-sold albums, Adele: 21, has upset the discerning buying public by its compressed sound. I can hear it even on my PC, and can very well understand why those investing in the LP get mad about it. The internet is full of complaints.

So we will see, who wins the sugar war or the loudness war, who brings home the bacon, and who will fry.

I have been thinking, why is “terror” judged so much by words? Why not look at the actions, their actual consequences? Who is killed or wounded? The victims are mainly civilians. In Norway, at Utøya, youth and children.Civilians, women, men and children – these are the typical targets. I have called terrorists “fascists” in a former blog post. Whatever we call them, the victim is clear; civilians and civil society.

This is what terrorists don’t respect – whatever their words. This is what they try to strangle. Everything that is soft, human, vulnerable, trying. This is dangerous and must be eradicated. Society must be “cleansed”. Terrorists use words, to further the deception – it is done for or against capitalism or imperialism, against the wrong religion, and so on. But the real message is in the action itself – the killing of civilians. According to the Norway July 22 2011 terrorist, this deed is even “knightly”.

Besides the actual victims, two key processes are blocked by the typical terrorist actions. The first, most visible, is democracy. A good target in terrorist logic is voters. Another good target is women in public, or schools for girls (e g Afghanistan). The attack on democracy trend is accompanied, more or less visibly, by attacks on women and gender equality. In the Norway case, the terrorist wanted to target two groups, “cultural marxists” and “feminists”, and the misogynistic aspect is fairly clear (e g women described as birth machines).

In a paper written in 2004, called “A theory of gendercide” (see Texts / Publications in English, on the menu above), I discussed the role of sex/gender in the build-up processes of social aggression and war. I compared Nazi Germany, the Balkan wars in the 1990s, and other cases. I found that a trend towards misogyny (hatred of women) and anti-feminism is common, sometimes combined with an idealized “upgraded” role of women in the new state (or reich) created by the aggressors. I also discuss evidence pointing to sexist terror becoming more common, as a component of terror in general.

The Norwegian 2011 terrorist saw himself as knightly, although he did not exactly protect women and children. Terrorists generally appear on the lower end of the power scale in a conflict. They are not up to a meeting man to man, so to speak, they do not have a military able to meet the enemy on a battle front. Instead they operate a bit like thieves, through sneak attacks. This “lower class position” of terror in the hierarchy of forms of warfare, contributes to the anti-civilian, anti-women and anti-children character of typical terrorist attacks, although it is not the only reason for these trends. Terrorism, as a method, as acutely anti-democratic. Democracy is what we do not have time for, faced with terrorism. We must fight or flee. The terrorist act is not an invitation to democratic settlement, but the very antidote to such settlements. It is no wonder, therefore, that terrorism tends to go together with reduction of democracy, and renewed authoritarianism, on all sides.

I learned in school that democracy was a formal thing. It meant elections every four year and so on. This year, I have learned that it is a very real and lively and vulnerable thing. It is not just there, by itself, it is something we must fight for. Today’s “contempt for politicians” resembles the contempt for democracy in the 1930s. “Politicians” are not crooks, but people elected – by us. The enemies of democracy should be brought into the open.

This is hard. It is really hard. It comes to attack me in my dreams.

I thought I was well prepared. But how could someone do this? Not just a bomb, but an hour-long systematic shooting of youth? I haunts me and gives me nightmares. It is worse than even the Nazi death camps.

Here are some pictures, telling more than many words. The first is of prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. present when a woman got a message of grief (copied from media reports July 24).

Tomorrow Norway stops

Norway stands still one minute, the headline says. It was to become more.

The next pictures are from the flower demonstration in Oslo, known as The Rose March, on July 25, where many people participated, perhaps a third of the nearer city centre population. In fact, the centre of Oslo was so full of people that no march type of demonstration could be arranged. Similar scenes had not been seen since the liberation of Norway from the Nazis in 1945.

All kinds of flowers were displayed.

As a participant, I felt that all the people were angry – and yet not about to show revenge!

On the next picture you can see how all kinds of people participated, and on the left, children at the shoulders of their parents. Is it symbolic that the sign in the middle asks for low speed.

Only a third or so of the marchers had the opportunity to actually hear the start speeches for the meeting. The rest walked towards the parliament and the main church of Oslo. I was among them.

This is how the “main strip of Oslo” between the parliament (Storting) and the King’s castle looked

The streets were full of people. We turned towards the main church of Oslo, to honour the dead.

Many had laid their flowers there already, it was hard to get approach, the square was packed with people.

For some months now, I have had stipend time, to write a book on gender equality theory. That is, not just gender equality in practice, but as a theory matter also. A matter to be researched, studied, identified – far better than today.

Why? I look at gender equality as a subject on its own, beyond gender.  I look at the main traditions in research regarding gender inequality, compared to new material on increasing equality. What works, what not. Wheat and chaff.

I also discuss theory issues like, when is  a gender power model appropriate, when not.  Is gender equality something that happens after a lot of social development and democratization – or rather, a causal factor or predictor variable, acting on its own.

The book will hopefully be published first in Norwegian (2012 or 13) as Likestillingsteori, and then in a revised and translated version ca one year later, as Gender equality theory.