FM - Surveillance

B: Why so glum, Mz. D? 

S: Hmm? Oh, sorry, i guess i'm just bored. We finished GREGORY's album, but i can't really do the cover for the book until Skip tells me the actual page count; they're sticklers about the spine width. What about you? I figured you'd be all over facebook after today's outage. Didn't you write anything? 

B: Sure, yeah, a dozen of the little buggers. One about Lars Vilks's car crash on Sunday, the mutual benefits of cooperative business structures, Proudhon's erratic version of anarchy, funny blurbs about the album, not funny blurbs about the album, today's DNS failure (which is like the 9th or 10th this year alone because decentralization and redundancy are the foundation of the internet as we know it, but corporatization doesn't have a brain to understand why centralization and monopoly are points of failure rather than security), the weird idea that giving addicts a platform for honest expression is actually worse than telling them they are horrible people, all sorts of crap. It's what i do. I don't need to publish any of it, though. 

S: Oh, i thought that was part of the reason you did. 

B: No, no, no, i do it because it's fun, to show people the inside never stops. I don't care if people read them or not. I like it when they do, but i'm not chasing them down and demanding a reply. I'm just giving a voice to ideas that can't speak for themselves. 

S: So, what are you going to do next?

B: I was thinking about listening to FM's 3rd album, Surveillance; it picks up the space-rock weirdness from where the first album leaves off. Surveillance was also their first mass-market release. Plewman left after the first album, so Ben Mink has electric violin duty on this one. 

S: i thought you hated the space exploration stuff. 

B: No, not at all. Why? Oh, the Musk and Bezos and Branson thing? Ok, you have to understand, SpaceX is doing truly amazing things, advancements NASA couldn't even dream of if they all went on a week-long LSD bender. That stuff is totally fascinating, and i'm all for it. The catch is that they think you and i should pay for it by not having any money for stupid things like food and clothes and record collections and education. Musk wants to own space travel, and pass that ownership down to Gx-Delta%, or whatever they named that poor kid. That's the part that wads my panties. 

S: Ooooooh, i get it now. 

B: Welcome home. Same problem i have with field corn and soy beans. We're growing animal feed that's terrible for animals and subsidizing gasoline additives instead of planting edible, nutritious crops we can eat. Musk is like the human embodiment of Monsanto, just evil incarnate when it comes to minion power. Think about it, forests worked pretty good for millions of years until we chopped 'em all down to make toilet paper. Before you even start, yes i'm exaggerating. 

S: I know that, Bottle. I guess i just assumed you really were a grumpy old man. 

B: Only if i need to be. If it's "at the expense of...," then yeah, i'll rain on every parade. If i had an ulterior motive, it would be teaching everyone that it's the exploitation that matters; you can go to the moon and presumably mars in a decade or so, if you're willing to exploit enough people to make it happen. More than half of them will cheer you on and call you a role model while you do it. That's not jealousy talking, by the way. 90 hrs a week and board meetings at 2am is not my idea of fun, whatever the outcome. I'm a generalist, not a professional nail sharpener. I'd rather listen to a skeleton play Russian piano music, or Canadians sing about space travel, than measure plate thickness in micrometers for 14 hours every day. A great achievement for mankind is not the same as MY great achievement at the expense of mankind, it's just not. 

S: But are you going to review it? 

B: No. It's lovely. Goofy, but lovely. Disagree? 

S: No, i suppose not. Way better than the 80s English Hair band also named FM. 

B: No argument from me. 70s Canadian Space-Prog wins. Even has tubular bells hiding in there. Plus, it ends with the Star Council giving us a few more years to figure out how to stop killing each other before totally banning us from the rest of the universe. 

S: 40 years might be pushing our luck. 

B: Oh, yeah, we're totally screwed if they catch us Florida-ing up the place now.