Below the Apricot Tree

Nutcracker – a 100 word story

The nutcracker bird was sitting on a high brunch overlooking the kingdom. The king was standing below the apricot tree shouting orders. “Where is my nutcracker? I want to eat some nuts!” he shouted. The bird, hearing the king and wanting to shut him up, did the only thing it could do and dropped some crap on him. “Off with the bird’s head” shouted the king quite angrily, “and do it quick. I’ve got a Tchaikovsky concert to catch. They are playing The Nutcracker Suite.” The bird laughed a little birdie laugh and flew away, as birds would often do.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 5, Below the Apricot Tree

Stitching sounds together, we create music. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at music. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about music. When you put sounds together in an orderly fashion, you usually come up with music. There are many debates about the nature of music. Some claim that creating order and aesthetics in sound are essential in music. Music according to that definition need things like harmony and rhythm in order to be music. If I take the sound of, let’s say, the ocean waves, break them into recorded chunks and rearrange them, then call it music, is it really music? According to that very narrow definition of music as harmony and rhythm patterns, it isn’t, unless you can find harmony in the random sounds of ocean waves, but there are other ways of looking at music. For example, I used to do take the human voice, break it into little pieces, rearrange it and call it music. At least, I believed it was music. Some people disagreed, but I digress. I do think that by checking the boundaries of music, we redefine it and evolve it into something a lot more interesting. I hear something in the other room that might be concrete music. Let me check it out. I’ll be right back.

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Apricot Tree – a 100 word story

The king loved his apricots. Everyone knew that, that is, everyone except the new servant who brought him prunes by mistake. The king was furious and the sentence was immediate, “off with his head!”

Jasmine, the servants’ wife, was furious. Now, you don’t want to anger a sorceress, especially not one of Jasmines’ skill level. In the morning, they found the king with an apricot tree growing out of his gut, and… very much alive. In the end they just left him there. They say the king is still there, living off his apricot tree. He really loves his apricots.

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Welcome back. Musique Concrète is an experimental musical genre that emerged around the end of the 1920s’. The composers of Musique Concrète used recordings of found sounds as the basis of their music much in the same way Ready Made artists used found materials in their artworks. Included in Musique Concrète were things like the sounds of passing cars and industrial machines from factories. The act of recording sounds and sculpting them into a musical sentence became the act of composition. Other musical genres evolving from Musique Concrète like Industrial Music took it even further, incorporating electronic sounds that where sometimes very far from being melodic or harmonic. They created a new kind of aesthetic for their music.

Things like Industrial Music and Musique Concrète show us that there is more to music than meets the ear. The only thing that defines music might be the intention of the musician. Music might have some completely random elements, but by arranging them or deciding which musical element goes where, music is created. In short, music is what the musician decides is music. This concludes episode 5 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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The Ice Melted

Writ of Execution – a 100 word story

I sit in darkness. I keep the refrigerator door open, try to cool the room a little, but to no avail. The ice melted long ago and no cool air is sipping out. There haven’t been food in the fridge for a long time. They’ve turned off the gas, then they switched off the electricity. Couldn’t afford the food anyway, or pay for electricity, gas and water. I hear them coming up the stairs, the guys from the execution office. They are here for the furniture. I light up a match, watch the fire dance, then let it consume me.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 4, The Ice Melted

Fiction. Reality. Where do you draw the line? This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at the relationship between art and the real world. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about art and fiction in relation to reality. In 1929, the master surrealist artist René Magritte created an artwork called “The Treachery of Images.” It is a life like depiction of a pipe with the words “this is not a pipe” written in stylised French below it. Those are, of course, true words, for the painting of a pipe is not really a pipe. You can’t light the pipe in the painting and smoke it. It just wouldn’t work. So, if the pipe is not real, what is its purpose? Why does it exist? Why does art exist?

Art moves us, stirs our emotions and stimulates our thoughts. For example, I could say the pipe in the painting is a most beautifully depicted pipe. The interplay of light reflections on it is superb and really makes it seem to stand out as if coming out of the canvas, thus making it seem almost real, creating an interesting contrast with the words written below it. I could say that something about this pipe evokes in me the image of a dark cabin somewhere, made of wood, and an old man sitting there, smoking a pipe. All of this is not really in the painting, but is in the relationship I have with the painting. Someone else would probably feel something else and have different imagery, emotions and thoughts evoked by the painting. In that way, art bleeds into reality, but in a different way for each and every one experiencing the art, creating multiple and personal realities. Let me wipe off the blood that seems to be bleeding out of some of the paintings hanging around my apartment. I’ll be right back.

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Hair Would Do It – a 100 word story

It was February when all the barbers disappeared. The shops to the right and to the left of any barber shop were now next to each other, as if the barber shop was never there. No one could remember what a barber even looked like, or what he did. When people’s hair started growing long, everyone wondered about it, not remembering how to get it to be short again, but they learned to live with it. Hairbrush sales went up. Some people say that hairbrush manufacturers put reality altering chips inside their products, but those are generally viewed as lunatics.

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Welcome back. Art can have a profound impact on reality, even if it has very little to do with reality in the first place. Fantasy books for example have very little to do with reality. Still, people are moved by the adventures of Bilbo Baggins as though he was a real person. People would do in depth analysis of the personality of Harry Potter and the motivations of Random from Roger Zelazny’s Amber series as if those where real persons. The fact is that the line drawn between reality and art is beginning to fade out.

Some would argue if video games are artworks or not. Let’s define art as a creative endeavor, generating a depiction of reality that is seperate from reality while commenting on it. There are other ways of defining art, but we’ll go with this one simply because it includes video games within it and it would best serve the purpose of this particular talk. So, back to video games, while art was inherently something which we experienced outside of ourselves, video games are changing that by being made up worlds we actively interact with. With virtual reality just around the corner, we are entering an era when reality and art could become indistinguishable. We might just find ourselves stuck in an artwork, not knowing we are stuck in a mare simulation. This is where we dissolve the line between reality and fiction completely and dive into the simulation hypothesis I talk about in episode 2 of this podcast, but this is episode 4, not episode 2 so… This concludes episode 4 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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When the Cycle Was Finished

Laundry Day – a 100 word story

It was laundry day. Harry memorized the instructions ahead of time. He just knew he would be able to operate the washing machine with ease this time. Margaret watched him like a vulture. He shivered. One mistake and he is toast. He put the clothes in the machine, turned the knobs, pushed the button and watched as they started spinning. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Later, when the cycle was finished, he took out the clothes under Margaret’s watchful eyes, intending to hang them on the laundry line but… Oh, the horror! – they all turned out green.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

Episode 3, When the Cycle Was Finished

Time travel have kindled the imagination of science fiction writers for several decades now. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at time travel. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about time travel. We are actually traveling through time, every day, at the rate of a minute per minute, that is, it takes us one minute to travel a minute into the future. The questions are, can we travel faster? Can we travel backwards? Let’s say traveling backwards in time is possible, how come my future self haven’t come to visit me? It totally seems to be something that I might do. Science might have an answer to that. In order to travel through time, we need what is commonly known as a time machine, and time machines can only take us as far back as the time when the first time machine was invented. They might be wrong about that though. Wouldn’t be the first time. I might have to invent one myself then and see. Let me take a break then to check back on that time machine I’m building at my basement.

Paperclips – a 100 word story

They were a top notch paperclip making company. When they created the paperclip making robot, they instilled in him a sense of the utter importance of making paperclips. Paperclip making became his reason for being. The presentation went well. They turned him on, and he sipped from a pile of previously prepared materials, quickly converting them to paperclips, then he ran out of materials. First, the meeting room table went. The technicians tried to shut him off but he converted them to paperclips as well. He stormed through the building converting everything and everyone, then he went for the exit.

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Welcome back. This is embarrassing. It turns out that not only I’m not building a time machine in my basement, I actually don’t have a basement. Oh well. It might not be a good idea to meet my future self anyway. It might create a time paradox. Let’s say my future self accidentally pushes the wrong button and goes further into the past, then he somehow prevents my parents from ever meeting. This means not only that I wouldn’t exist, it means my future self wouldn’t exist either and wouldn’t be able to change the past in the first place.

You might solve this by throwing Schrödinger’s cat into that time machine travel box. Basically, opening that box would mean that when my future self prevents my parents from meeting, the universe would split into two separate universes. In one, my parents meet, I’m born, invent a time machine and travel into the past, never to be seen again. In the second universe I prevent my parents from meeting each other and then I go and get myself stuck in that universe unable to return to the original one. Oops… Maybe inventing a time machine isn’t such a good idea. I think I would leave that to other people. Let them get stuck in a different universe instead. This concludes episode 3 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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