SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Greg Lake passed away December 7 after "a long and stubborn battle with cancer"; he was 69.
Lake was the singer and guitarist in the English "supergroup" Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, which he co-founded in 1970, after an earlier stint in King Crimson. ELP and a rival band Yes (as well as Crimson) helped spark the progressive rock craze in the early '70s; both bands remained active, with intermittent gaps, well into the 21st century as fans flocked to arenas to see them perform.
Keith Emerson died from suicide earlier this year; he suffered from both heart disease and depression, the latter aggravated by a nervous condition which apparently made him lose confidence in his ability to perform the keyboards on tour.
Rolling Stone has a decent write-up on Lake's career. Ironically, critics such as those writing for Rolling Stone were never fans of ELP, Yes, or the other '70s prog rock bands; the article quotes Lake's (2013) response:
"I think there is truth in the fact that the group was pretentious," he told Rolling Stone in 2013. "You don't make an omelet without cracking eggs. We wanted to try and move things forward and do something new and break boundaries. It was important for us to be original. Certainly the early albums ... I'm talking now especially about Tarkus, Trilogy and Brain Salad Surgery. Those records were really great and innovative. There were members of the press that didn't love us, but the public loved us."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @09:51AM
What was right in front of them all along... until it is irrecoverable. And then realize what exactly it was that they lost.
One of the darker parts of human nature I am afraid. And a shortcoming that most people have in spades. (Myself included, although I have met people who do not, few and far between, and most struggling daily against one ailment or another, often right up to the end.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Sunday December 11 2016, @12:25PM
Thanks for the reply; it got me thinking.
I wonder if part of the reason for taking things for granted is that life... changes.
In order to deal with all of a day's activities, by necessity I learn to "compile" the processing of certain activities. Perceive hunger? Invoke "seek, prepare, and eat foo." Tired? "Find bed, get in, sleep." Time for work? "Leave home, get in car, drive regular route, park the car, go to work area." Time to go home from work? "Leave office, find car in lot, get in car, drive regular route, enter home."
And each of those actions have "pre-compiled" aspects, as well. Driving entails an abundance of previously-observed perceptions and responses.
After a while, much of that becomes rote behavior. I would posit that is a good thing insomuch as it frees up mental capacity to perceive and deal with new circumstances and situations.
The alternative — having to make decisions using only base information and having to re-derive every action based upon them — would become terribly time-consuming and exhausting — leaving less time and energy for anything new.
Further, there always seems to be more things that I want/need to do than there are hours in a day, so there is additional motivation to ritualize the commonplace...
And then something unexpected happens and I have a mental SIGTERM on one of these routines and I am forced to step back, re-appraise the situation, and develop new (pre-compiled) responses to those situations.
Perhaps one value of taking a day off from work, a vacation, or even a sabbatical is that it breaks me out of that loop and gives me an opportunity to review those perceptions and decisions and view them from a different perspective?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @02:09PM
Some spiritual teachers advocate exactly the opposite as the way to enlightenment, for example, G. I. Gurdjieff. Part of his training involved breaking long held (often unconscious) habits and learning how to not take anything for granted.
I found this wikiquote site interesting, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/G._I._Gurdjieff [wikiquote.org] Some of the quotes sound like Marvin Minsky in his book, "Society of Mind", but were written most of a century earlier, for example,
* Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation, says "I".
* Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "I"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "I". And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion.
[for anyone offended by the old-style use of "Man", note that he had female and male students and from what I have read was not sexist]