Today I (largely) finished The Dance Music Manual, a big textbook on how electronic dance music is produced, from math and physics through machinery and software to psychoacoustics, aesthetics, and culture:

Although both these genres are still produced and played in clubs to this day, the increased popularity of 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA or “E”) amongst clubbers inevitably resulted in new forms of trance being developed. Since this pharmaceutical stimulates serotonin levels in the brain, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to place clubbers into states of trance with tribal rhythms, and instead the melodies became more and more exotic, slowly taking precedence over every other element in the mix.

The book is hilariously written in parts — the author makes no distinction between the words “subsequently” and “consequently”, for example — and so it requires some interpretation to really understand. The included CD, while not required, is interesting listening if you want to hear tracks being built and instruments being synthesized.

It’s rare that I run into a book which is perfectly suited to my competence in a subject. Most are too simple, some are too complex. This book provided me with exactly what I needed, including the first-ever cogent argument I’ve heard against weed: since weed makes music better, don’t smoke it while learning to compose — it’ll impair your critical faculties.

I’ve been listening to Sublime quite a bit — Everything Under the Sun — and in, I think, the Westwood One Interview Bradley talks a bit about their influences: “anything from the Ariwa Sounds label”. So I started listening to that — I think the label is trying to position itself as the roots of dubstep or something. Anyway.

Here’s a good mix of early 90s digidub, and here is a 100 song YouTube playlist of Macka B tunes, which are pretty great. I think I just heard a sample Tupac used! Here’s his song about being Vegan:

As a practising Rastafarian, Macka B’s music is based around the political and spiritual message of the religion, with an often light and humorous touch. Working with the Mad Professor, he combined dancehall and dub styles of reggae, although has avoided a more commercial crossover approach. He takes his name from the Judean rebels against the Romans, the Maccabees.

Not laudanum, not heroin, not oxycodone. This time Big Pharma is calling its refined opium hydrocodone — brand name “Zohydro” — and it’s ten times stronger than Vicodin. The theory is that it’s so strong people won’t have to take as much. Yeah, because that’s how humans think: “hey kids, this piece of candy is so great you can just eat one!”

“It’s like the wild west,” said Peter Jackson, co-founder of Advocates for the Reform of Prescription Opioids. “The whole supply-side system is set up to perpetuate this massive unloading of opioid narcotics on the American public.”

In the mean time a nonlethal plant is what’s illegal. Ridiculous.

Thursday was the day I was last sober, previous to today, Monday. The rest of the time I was sucking on a Launchbox from Jupiter.

I picked up the Launchbox at the suggestion of my doctor. Here’s how our initial social health meet-and-greet went down:

doctor: Do you smoke?
me: Just weed.
doctor: Switch to a vaporizer — it’s better for you than alcohol.

I’m on a long-term development contract for which billable hours are settled monthly, so I just recently got my first cheque. Jupiter is near where I work so I strolled in over lunch and got the skinny. I had tried to stop at another, even closer, store first but it was late opening: Jupiter was far more professional and I ended up topping off most of my ancillary supplies there (herbal nargila, coals, new grinder).

The box is very simple: a heating element controlled by a battery-button which you push on to juice. The battery’s anode and cathode are on the same side to facilitate this, and so they come with some rubber caps to stop pocket shorts and other random fires (and also a charger and a spare).

And, essentially, that’s it: weed goes into the box, heat goes into the weed, weed goes into the air, air sucks through a tube into your brain.

No smoke, no fire: and that’s also the catch. I’m used to smoking until I feel like I can’t smoke anymore, which it turns out is an effect of smoke. With vapor you can just go and go and go, which is why, I think, some people say vaporizers get you higher — there’s no practical barrier to continued consumption, and since weed is perfectly safe you can have as much as you like.

I’m a convert to vaporizers now, especially one this convenient: the time-until-smoking is equivalent to that of a pipe, as is the pocket-friendly size, and there’s no wait time or strange bag-sucking as with table units like the Volcano. At the end of the weekend I broke a personal rule — “no weed on school nights” — and had a couple of joints and one-hitters: the smoke, while fun and visually pleasing, left me with a sore throat and stinkbreath.

Four high-profile former mayors of Vancouver — Mike Harcourt, Sam Sullivan, Larry Campbell and Philip Owen — released a letter Wednesday pushing to decriminalize and regulate marijuana use in B.C.

Apparently. The argument is an oldie but a goodie:

A regulated market would enable governments to improve community health and safety while at the same time raising millions in tax revenue.

Insane right-wing Dutch nutjobs are trying to reclassify high-THC cannabis strains as drugs equivalent to cocaine and ecstasy.

Shameful.

Smoke as much as you can of the most potent cannabis you can find, then take as much low-grade cocaine as you can. Tell me which is worse.

Ha! Okay, you see the trap. Tell you what, replace cocaine with alcohol in that thought experiment: drink as much perfectly-legal alcohol as you can THEN tell me which is worse.

Oh wait, you can’t: both the illegal cocaine and the legal alcohol will kill you stone fucking dead, whereas no one anywhere has ever died from cannabis use. It’s not physically possible, because the LD50 of cannabis is impossible to consume — we’d need bigger bodies to pack it all in, and then the LD50 would be correspondingly higher.

The war on cannabis has something else behind it. I can’t decide what: ignorance, hatred, some combination, or something else. There’s no rationality to be found in it, and making plants illegal is straight-up retarded.

Via BB, it turns out that cannabis hyper-primes your brain [Narco Polo, see refs], making it easier to see distant connections.

Jill would be the first to jump in here: neuroscience doesn’t make subjective experience more real, it just makes it easier to write papers about because scientists prefer certain kinds of evidence.

What if “high thinking” didn’t make sense when you were sober because you had become too stupid to understand it? How’s that for a narrative shift? Plus, I can certainly imagine that a hyper-primed state would be more paranoiac — you’d be stretching towards connections that might not be there.

It would also explain why, anecdotally, several poker players I know find multi-level thinking (I know that you know that I know that you…) ridiculously simple on cannabis. My largest tournament wins have come when I was high, f’real.

Via BB, Rick Steves on pot:

July 1st is Cannabis Day. Stock up early.

Gatineau police smelled skunk, so conducted an armed raid of a family home:

“I opened the door and they all had their guns drawn,” MacQuat said.

Sure, it turned out that the skunk smell was just a skunk. But it gave the forces of prohibition an excuse to play with their guns and inspect a private dwelling in the Nation’s capital.

And not a single fuck was given (by the Hell’s Angels).

(via Ceebs)