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Fuck the Troops

2006-07-18T10:28:00.000-04:00

"A real soldier, whatever his country may be, is hardly a citizen."
--Marquis de Custine, 1843

"...the worst outgrowth of life [is] the military system. I feel only contempt for those who take pleasure marching in rank and file to the strains of a band. Heroism on command, senseless violence and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism...how I despise them all!"
--Albert Einstein, 1922

Soldiers, throughout history, have earned their poor reputations. Whether the war in question is a dynastic meatgrinder like the Thirty Years' War, a struggle for liberation like the American Revolution, or a secret war like the ones the US fought in Laos and Cambodia during the 1960's, one consistent attribute of these conflicts is the occasionally appalling behavior of the troops towards each other and towards the surrounding civilian populations. Even in the best of circumstances, soldiers can be large marauding forces, devastating landscapes with their appetites just as readily as they can with artillery. The Civil War of 1861-65 was the most recent example in American history of vicious, protracted war fought on our soil. When compared to the vicissitudes of history suffered by nations like Poland or Vietnam it seems that the US has gotten off rather lightly in the register of historical horrors. All of the conflicts indulged in by the US since the Civil War have been of the overseas variety, which has minimized the US population's contact with that most frightening of humans, the hungry and heavily armed soldier in full bloody fury, remorseless and full of hate.

Soldiers are not heroes to anyone except other soldiers. The longstanding view of the happy and motivated soldier sacrificing all to save his or her country's freedom from nasty people and nastier ideologies is a deceitful cartoon that leaves out much of the reality of life as a soldier. Whether they are being sent thousands of miles away to murder people at the behest of their superiors or being asked to defend their homeland to the death against invaders, many soldiers cannot rationalize the suspension of the laws of humanity that occurs during warfare with their tightly-controlled upbringing in societies that base themselves on strict laws and customs. Youth and inexperience make them susceptible to propaganda, which then blocks their remaining humanity from ever developing. The resulting disconnection between their military reality and their moral, human self is often too large to successfully navigate, and this disconnection can manifest itself in explosive and amoral episodes of violence. The terrible experiences of combat never leave the psyche of the soldier who lives through it; oftentimes the intensity of combat drives the soldier insane. This insanity can show up immediately or years down the road; countries ranging from Britain after WW I, the US after Vietnam, or the USSR after Afghanistan have all had substantial problems with their veterans' readjustment to so-called "normal" society after the guns of war went silent. All the more reason to keep US veterans away from the political arena, despite our country's disturbing penchant for equating military service with the ability to govern a diverse and complex society.

Much is made in the US of how we must try to sympathize with our military brethren overseas, fighting a war to protect our freedom. The word "hero" is tossed about like a five-dollar chip at a casino. Yet the recent conduct of our soldiers in Haditha, combined with the recent arrest of 5 US soldiers for rape and murder, shows that the same moral impulses that resulted in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib are still directing the conduct of US troops in the field. These people are not heroes--they are assholes; they are murdering, sadistic fucking scum who would not be out of place in a medieval army. They are living examples of the depths that human beings lower themselves to when they feel unencumbered by the restraints of everyday morality. I know all the arguments made on their behalf--the military consists of lower-class kids who needed an opportunity, it's not their fault that they have a job that requires them to kill people, etc., etc.--but I ask people to consider that the current edition of the US military is a volunteer force. Nobody drafted these unfortunate people; they chose to pick up guns and risk their lives for their country, right or wrong. This act in itself does not constitue heroism, not by a fucking long shot.

It's also worth remembering that governmental oppression is always enacted by a government's military. The rapists and murderers of the Sudan, Israel, Serbia, and Iraq are not lawyers or preachers or cab drivers--they are soldiers. The ethnic cleansers of the American West were not working in accord with America's manifest destiny--they were soldiers. The killers at Tiananmen Square in 1989 or in Prague in 1968 were not actors or musicians--they were soldiers. Fuck them all. They are the basest form of predatory human existence. Shooting someone with a rifle is a crime. To pretend that it is a glorious act of national heroism is a grotesque lie--and the power of this lie to deform the human mind is constantly on display.

Say it with me now--FUCK THE TROOPS! No more killing for peace!

A Slow Month....Enlivened by a Guest Appearance

2006-06-29T10:43:00.000-04:00

I have not been posting much this month; health issues have once again reared their ugly head, counterbalanced by happy thoughts and last-minute preparations for the imminent birth of our first child. I did manage to get around to posting once this month, however, at the request of fellow lefty blogger Blue Gal. She is on vacation this week, and has petitioned several different firebrands this week to guest-post at her fine blog. Our topic was to examine some of the potential candidates for the 2008 Presidential election. I chose the disturbing, vicious, philandering, and self-righteous Rudolph Giuliani as my target, and you can read it here.

the Triumph of Doom

2006-05-31T09:39:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to a reconverted church to see a coronation. Japan's crushingly heavy Boris was playing with the earthshaking SunnO))) at the Avalon in Manhattan, along with avant-guitarist Oren Ambarchi. I was surprised to see the size and the fervour of the crowd. I knew Boris had become a very popular underground draw but was unprepared for the amount of goodwill they engendered in their audience. Although the club Avalon is merely another incarnation of the zipperhead standby dance club the Limelight, the room was a good place to see a show. The high ceilings of the room muddied up the sound of Boris, but SunnO))) sounded amazing. The crowd was pretty diverse for an indie rock show, with everyone from t-shirted hipsters from Williamsburg to dressed-down thrash metallers from Queens, and what was most surprising to me was the patience of the crowd as the drones unfolded from the stage.

Oren Ambarchi started things off with an understated half-hour long piece utilizing minimalist melodic snippets run through a variety of effects. Elongated and processed sustains collided with deep rumbling bass tones, and the elegiac feel of the piece was shattered nicely by an explosion of noise at around the 20-minute mark. I figured for sure that the crowd would despise Ambarchi's gentle pulsings and surges, but they loved it. He would return to play with SunnO))) during their set.

Boris was everything I hoped they would be. Powerful, charismatic, tight, and ecstatic, the trio ripped through a set that drew mostly from their last two full-length releases, Pink and Akuma No Uta. They were received joyously by the crowd. Their professionalism was underscored by their showmanship, led by manic white-gloved drummer Atsuo, who served as set boss and chief ringleader for the band. Whether saluting the crowd with his gong-stick, screaming into his headset microphone, or simply pounding the shit out of his drums, Atsuo got the crowd fired up with his energy and sense of fun. Their set concentrated more on shorter songs, but one or two crawling tempos snuck out from underneath. They closed with a tremendous take on Pink's amazing shoegazer/stoner rock opener after punishing the crowd with a nifty hour-plus set. All in all, they proved themselves to be one of the most creatively asskicking bands on the planet.

I had seen SunnO))) three times prior to last night, with diminishing levels of enjoyment each time. I love their records and think that they are one of the most unique bands currently active, combining tectonic sludge and awesome guitar and bass tones with noise and creepy guest-vocal weirdness. The last time I'd seen them was last year at Northsix, and I found their set that night to be forgettable. After an amazing smoke-machine/blood red spotlight intro, they devolved into boring drone that was not helped by the ridiculous and timid presence of Malefic (from Xasthur), who contributed black metal vokills to that night's efforts. Thankfully, last night's set left the corpsepaint on the sidelines--the duo of Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley were augmented by Rex Ritter on Moog, Oren Ambarchi on guitar and treatments, and the long-lost Mark Deutrom (ex-Melvins) on bass. The additional low end was great, and Atsuo from Boris contributed some gong hits and weird handheld percussion to the ritual. The first half hour of the set was excellent, with both the crowd and band totally into the performance. All six musicians were draped in black robes with cowls, and the extending of a hand or a fist from the robes was enough to solicit immediate crowd response in all the traditional forms of metallic hand signing--horns were as plentiful as fists. After the first half hour, they seemed to drift aimlessly for about ten minutes before I decided to bail. My neck was tightening up and I'd seen and heard enough for one evening. The crowd was still going strong when I took off, basking in the blackness of doom.

I grabbed a copy of the hard-to-find domestically Boris/Keiji Haino collaborative effort before I left, and it is really fucking cool. All the violence of the man from Fushitsusha's guitar work, backed up with the drones and weight of Boris' sound. Despite leaving a little early during SunnO))), this show was a blast all the way round. A great bill of music that featured several different interpretations of how to be heavy. If doom is now king, one of these bands must wear the black and filth-encrusted crown.

The Good Ol' Boys Good-Time Massacree and Prayer Service

2006-05-29T07:31:00.000-04:00

Well, it was bound to happen. You send good-hearted, decent American men and women overseas with expensive weaponry and eventually there's going to be one of those types of situations where they just have to kill everyone they see. Especially when they've been programmed to forget all of their innate human qualities and demonize large groups of people as unholy others that must be killed at any cost. The US military has been caught perpetrating the first unadulterated massacre of Iraqi civilians since the war started, and it appears that we can thank the modern communications industry for providing the evidence via a participating Marine's camera on his cellphone. The sharp minds of the military haven't just bought the rope to hang themselves, but they have constructed the slipknot as well. All of those nifty pics from Abu Ghraib must have really taught the military a lesson.

What makes me laugh in the wake of this story is the idea that this behavior is the first of its kind by US troops in Iraq. Incidents like the shooting of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena or the shelling of a hotel containing numerous members of the international media in Baghdad during the early days of the war were initial indicators of the way in which the US wished to conduct itself in this conflict. At this stage, the war has become a stalemate where US soldiers are targets rather than active participants in their own fate. Psychologically this must be a terrible burden, especially when combined with the propaganda our fighting men and women were fed in the runup to war. When words like liberty and freedom are thrown around by douchebag politicans, it is often a signal that a sizable bloodletting is on the way. The ideals of young soldiers must die as hard as their comrades on the battlefield as they see Iraqis rejecting the cheap knockoff of Western democracy being proffered by the cynics of the Bush gang. No roses strewn in their path, merely improvised explosive devices--which I like to call bombs, by the way--and no end in sight to a war that was illegal from its first days of planning. Ignorant and uneducated people under stress are liable to make very bad decisions, and these bad decisions are compounded when high-powered rifles, xenophobia, heatstroke, dehydration, and racism are factored into the equation.

So-called embedded journalists have provided many stories about the thuggish behavior of US troops in the Iraq conflict. The massacre of Haditha is an outgrowth of the same impulse that led US soldiers to torture prisoners; but it is also an outgrowth of the stunted morality practiced by the Bush gang. Their false piety is supposed to excuse the horrific and violent crimes committed against defenseless human beings on a daily basis in Iraq. In the Haditha incident it appears that numerous crimes were committed--murder and a coverup being the most prominent among them. But these soldiers, if guilty, indict the Bush administration by their actions in much the same way that the privately contracted torturers of Abu Ghraib did. Ultimately the moral responsibility for these deaths rests on the empty head of a panicked, privileged, and overwhelmed asshole who calls himself the President of the United States.

One of the photographs taken from the soldier's cellphone in Haditha shows a mother and child bent over in prayer, stilled forever in death. Shooting unarmed human beings in the head while they are crazed with fear, begging for help from their distant and uninvolved deity--is this an example of the heroism of American soldiers? Perhaps it is the level of transgression that a soldier may attain that impresses the impressionable. After all, killing in war is morally excusable, according to all of the Big Three religious traditions; to wallow in the blood of innocent people must be the ultimate transgressive buzz. And as a soldier, after you've killed them, there are a number of even more transgressive acts that can be indulged. Just let your imagination go as wild as your soul. You are an army of one. When you've finished, don't forget to take a knee for Jesus. Your god is bigger and better than their god.

How To Be A Fucking Fascist Disgrace, by Alberto Gonzales

2006-05-22T11:01:00.000-04:00

The Bush gang has hit a new low recently. As amazing as this tidbit may seem upon first consideration, it is true. Speaking on former Clinton chief of staff George Stephanopolous' weekly political handjob/television show, the Attorney General announced that the administration is reserving the right to prosecute journalists for violations of national security. According to the nation's chief lawyer, the Constitutional protections of freedom that were once guaranteed for the press are now subservient to the demands of "national security"--all this despite the fact that the words national security are nowhere to be found in the Bill of Rights, but the words freedom of the press are.

To ignore the Constitution while you are a working public official in any part of American government is illegal. For the Attorney General to say that "it can't be the case that that right [the right to a free press] trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity" is utterly mindblowing. Gonzales is an appointed official of a Presidential administration, yet he is claiming the right for the administration to re-interpret and completely distort the Bill of Rights. With this statement, Bush and his gang have declared publicly that they intend to ignore and possibly supersede the Supreme Court when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. Additionally, Gonzales claims that the administration's actions are derived from the will of the people, despite approval poll ratings that have been mired at roughly 33% since last July. If these underhanded misrepresentations of the Constitution were not so serious and threatening to our liberties as citizens of the US, they would be hilarious. The Bush gang is attempting to impose radical legislation from above, enshrouded in the most opaque secrecy, without the consent of the American public, and all despite the fact that they are the most unpopular administration in the last century of American history.

Ever since they allowed the events of 9-11 to occur, the Bush gang has taken a proprietary attitude (to say the least) towards national security. They are attempting to use the fear generated by that day to permanently attach war powers (or to use their trendy term, plenary powers) to the office of the Presidency. Going hand in hand with this repugnantly undemocratic conception of our highest elected office is the idea that the administration can ultimately determine exactly what constitutes a national security issue. In other words, the administration can immediately trump up charges against any citizen or journalist and accuse those individuals with violating national security statutes or directives. Since this administration believes that matters of national security should be forever hidden from any sort of oversight, even more people will soon be arrested in this country without being aware of what crimes they have committed or what crimes they are being charged with. This frightening idea is the germ of the New Christian Primitives' American police state.

These ideas are fundamentally antithetical to any concept of American government. They have their closest philosophical antecedents in such wonderfully anti-human stratagems as Stalin's Article 58 or Britain's anti-Irish Poor Laws of the 19th century. The FISA violations, the lies that built up the rush to Iraq, the Enron bankruptcy, the Katrina disaster, and the scandals surrounding the no-bid contracts given to Halliburton and Blackwater were all brought to the attention of the American public by courageous reporters who risked major retaliation against their reputations, their careers, and their families from a vindictive and vengeful administration. The sacrifices these journalists made to tell the truth will probably never be known. We cannot allow this criminal administration to withdraw protections that are nearly two hundred and thirty years old. The traditions of America are contained within the pages of the Constitution. When will we wake up to defend them?

Compacted Disks, Compact Discs, and a Few Books

2006-05-16T13:14:00.000-04:00

Too much time has passed since I last updated...as always, there is an explanation. In the rational and pissed-off world of McBain, there are always explanations. They may not be free of spite, disdain, or rage--but they are at least an approximation of reality.

My latest round of major health woes began roughly twelve weeks ago, when I awoke from a fitful sleep to find my neck and shoulders completely locked in a hideous muscle spasm. The injury was so intense that I could not perform any of these following actions for six weeks without serious, knee-buckling, horrifying pain:

1. lie down
2. lift my head upwards
3. read books
4. play music
5. be on the computer for more than 30 minutes consecutively
6. have sex
7. bend over to pick stuff up off the floor
8. walk without pain
9. ride in a car or the subway without pain

Needless to say, my time spent sleeping (already slightly disrupted due my pregnant wife's increase in size and ability to pump out heat) declined. And this of course led to many nights of the worst kind of thinking--the type of fear-ridden, insecure, and self-hating thinking that only arrives when a person cannot sleep despite high levels of physical exhaustion. My doctors were unable to help me get rid of the spasm, preferring to medicate intensively rather than figure out exactly what was wrong with me, so I turned to shiatsu deep tissue massage as a potential fixer. After a few sessions of this I improved slightly but found the massages themselves to be horribly painful--during my second session in particular I was moaning like someone during interrogation in a secret American facility, with torrents of tears pouring from my eyes. The massage therapist was anti-medication, so I tried to tough it out without ibuprofen, Fentanyl, and Vicodin, while relying heavily on my normal marijuana intake. After an MRI I was diagnosed with two herniated disks in my neck, along with some other neck damage. It is unbelievable how much this shit hurts me when it acts up. The pain has put up a nearly permanent barrier between me and the rest of the world, which oddly enough does have some side benefits.

Fortunately, I regained the ability to read books about four weeks ago, and have been in a reading frenzy ever since, working my way through the metastasizing pile of books throughout my house. I had just started Karl Popper's mammoth Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge Classics) when my neck began sapping my will to live. Picking it up again as soon as I was physically able, I was extremely impressed with his critique of inductive reasoning and Bacon's scientific method. At times Popper can be difficult to get through, but for a philosopher he writes quite lucidly and is very readable. I found this book to be a challenge to all of my preconceived notions of epistemology (which is always a good thing). When reading most philosophy I need to have something a little easier to fall back on when my logic circuitry begins hurting, which can be dangerous sometimes if my interest surges in a new book....which is exactly what happened recently.

I jumped ship from Popper to try a few pages in Simon Whitechapel's Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition (Creation Books, part of their Blood History series), and found myself compelled to finish the book. At a slim 154 pages in length, I thought this book might be a quick and dirty yet informative look at Torquemada. I was wrong; it was quick and dirty, but not very informative. I enjoyed Whitechapel's anti-Catholic outrage as he recounted the tales of several different autos de fe (the proper spelling of the term in Spanish; it appears the term that doubles as the title of this blog is from Portuguese), but found his prose so filled with venom that it quickly became tiresome and humorless. He makes some good points about the Inquisition being an early precursor of the modern police state, but overreaches in his attempts to link the Catholic Church to Hitler and Nazism. The book also prints all of its quotes from Spanish documents in both English and Spanish, as if they were concerned with the veracity of Whitechapel's translations. Overall the book was like a bad wreck on the road--you feel dirty for looking, but you can't look away.

I picked up a copy of Fred Coleman's Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (St. Martin's Press ) for six bucks at the Strand. Published in 1996, his latter-day conclusions for the direction of Russia's post-Soviet era are a little dated (not to mention incorrect), but the book covers the post-Stalinist era thoroughly and with no small amount of style. Coleman spent close to 30 years as a Moscow correspondent for the AP, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and though his perspective is thrown off kilter by his relentlessly jingoistic view of the US-USSR Cold War the book is really a solid piece of work. Particularly strong on the Khruschev and Brezhnev eras, I thought, and for once I can say I've read a history of the Khruschev era written by an American who did not spend his entire time dissecting the Cuban Missile Crisis. For that alone, this book is worth the time to read.

Following Coleman's book was Simon Sebag Montefiore's magnificent biography of Josef Stalin, entitled Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar (Vintage). Montefiore limits his book's focus to Stalin's time as absolute leader of the Soviet Union, rather than delving too far into the nebulous available information about Stalin's early history as a possible double agent and bankrobber or the nasty rumors that surrounded his paternity as a child, and the book is all the stronger for it. Montefiore examines the impact of the deaths of Stalin's two wives upon the man much more intensively than any of the other bios I've seen about Stalin, and makes a good case for Stalin's loneliness and alienation from any other humans as being a major impetus in his purges of the 1930's. Even by the heartless standards of the early Bolsheviks, Stalin was a man whose capacity to inflict suffering was matched only by his competitiveness and his paranoia. Many portraits of Stalin (Solzhenitsyn's first among these, perhaps along with Trotsky's) have painted him as a "grey man", a bureaucratic mediocrity whose willingness to use the gun to solve problems was all too typical of the Bolshevik system. But in recent years writers like Edvard Radzinsky and Martin Amis have opened the door to a re-evaluation of Stalin's intellect and purposes. Montefiore considers Stalin to be a diabolical genius whose madness often got the better of his reason, which to me is a much more appropriate way to view a man who was such a master manipulator. The failures of the Soviet system are often attributed to Stalin, but few consider that Russia was an autocratic empire that had absolutely no tradition of nationhood, let alone democracy. At the time of Stalin's death in 1953, the average citizen of the Soviet empire was probably better educated and just as well fed as the average citizen of the Romanov empire. Though troubling to consider, Montefiore does not shy away from discussing the benefits Stalin brought to his people in the midst of so much blood and terror. Really an excellent book that rejects much of the conventional wisdom about the reign of the 20th century's greatest mass murderer.

After Big Joe, I figured I would give an American tyrant a look-see--so I read Robert Remini's solid history of Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (Penguin). Using language that eerily echoes our present day Choadmaster-in-Chief, Andrew Jackson stormed his way through the Southern states and became the most prolific killer of Native Americans in his day. As the corpses piled up, so did Jackson's governmental promotions and national honors--and although Jackson may have been less bloodthirsty towards Natives than popularly portrayed, he still comes off as a vicious alpha male who could barely control his own temper and had little sympathy for any views save his own. Remini claims that national security (in an era where European countries like Spain, Great Britain, and France loomed at every American border) was Jackson's primary concern in snatching millions of acres of land in Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida but also allows that Jackson's policy of removal of Native Americans was perhaps the single most monstrous act performed by any American President. Couched in racist pseudo-compassionate concerns, the removal policy was something that purported to be humane but turned out to be an exercise in eradication instead. The empirical "evidence" for the basis of the removal theory was pessimistic and grew out of a conviction that whites and Natives could never peacefully coexist. Remini lays the ultimate blame for the deaths of thousands of native peoples at Jackson's feet, but is oddly sympathetic to the idea that the two cultures would forever clash.

I picked up a few discs lately too--the ones that don't herniate. I have been listening nonstop to the new Jesu EP Silver (HydraHead) since I got it. More poppy than last year's LP, this release somehow manages to combine some very diverse sounds to create the heaviest shoegazer-styled rock music ever. The textures are dense, the songs are great, and it all points to the next Jesu full-length as being a killer. Keith Fullerton Whitman's Lisbon (Kranky) is a sweet little forty-one minute masterpiece, recorded from a live performance in October 2005. Using his self-designed Playthroughs guitar treatments system along with a laptop and several other effects, Whitman has crafted a predominantly ambient work of great beauty and emotional weight. A great listen first thing in the morning. Lair of the Minotaur are from Chicago and they play badass metal with lyrics inspired by very specific references to various Greek myths. Though that might sound a little Dungeons-and-Dragons, the music is brutal, well-played, and totally ass-kicking. Their new release, The Ultimate Destroyer (Southern Lord), kills from start to finish. These boys don't waste time with guitar solos; in fact they don't play any useless notes at all. Highly recommended for anyone who needs a serious dose of power, or feels that the Greek myths would have even more impact if they had been played by a heavy metal band rather than written by mere poets and scribes. The new AFX/Analord/Aphex Twin disc is called Chosen Lords (Rephlex), and whatever Richard D. James wishes to call his music is OK with me. This disc is a distillation of the 10-record, 40-track Analord series that James ran out into the marketplace starting in 2004. Having not heard any of those 12" records, I found this compilation to have the smooth-running feel of a regular album. It's also quite good--despite a few bad reviews, this effort is a strong one, focussing on beats and melodies more than rapid-fire techno percussion. I still prefer his ambient works, but I am a big enough person to say I really like this release as well. My last new pickup is the choptastic collaboration between Zach Hill of Hella and Mick Barr of Orthrelm and the Flying Luttenbachers. It's called Shred Earthship (5RC) and if you are at all familiar with the dizzying technique of both musicians than you might know what to expect--a searingly well-played and totally freaked collection of jams that redefines the concept of playing fast. Hill and Barr are blurs on their respective instruments, and this relentless pace might put off more than a few listeners. The two connect with each other pretty seriously however--and I find this release to be more enjoyable than anything I've heard from Hella. My only complaint is with the massive running time and tracklist--19 songs, over 77 minutes long. With this type of assaultive style it would have been better to put out two discs.

Other than that, I've been obsessed with Sun Ra lately--wearing out my copies of Space is the Place, Other Planes of There, and My Brother the Wind. As a younger listener I couldn't hang with the Arkestra; but now I am finding that this cosmic gentleman was an interstellar voyager of the highest pedigree and quality. I've also picked up a couple of outstanding reissues lately, buying the remastered version of This Heat's self-titled first record (ReR). Light years ahead of its time upon its release in 1979, this band utilized a ferociously openminded attitude towards composition that blended improvisation, found sound, cut-up techniques, and great ability. Much of this record sounds as if it was recorded yesterday, and drummer Charles Heyward deserves extra praise for his experimental treatments of his own fantastic drum playing. Not too many rock bands or musicians outside of Eno or Neu! were building songs by manipulating sounds at this point in time. Another bunch of English lads who seemed to be working in the future were the Swell Maps, who were often mentioned more in conjunction with members Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden and their respective solo pursuits. Their Jane from Occupied Europe (Secretly Canadian), released in 1980, puts together noise and song in a way that most bands shied away from at the time. Cool guitar sounds are put next to vacuum cleaners; drum sounds are deliberately distorted; and over the whole mess floats a relaxed and tuneful vibe that such later bands as Pavement mined successfully. Both of these discs are amazing, and the forward-looking nature of the music is really impressive.

So that's about it for me--my neck is fucking killing me, and there's a nice juicy pain at the bottom of my right shoulder blade right now that needs some special attention. Hopefully I can resume some sort of regularity in my postings, but we will see.

American Self-Importance and A Certain Day in 2001

2006-03-11T06:29:00.000-05:00

Recently the Coalition for 9-11 Families filed suit to block the start of construction on the memorial at the site of the former Twin Towers (this column only uses the term ground zero to refer to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II). These public battles have been tiresome in the extreme, populated with all sorts of strident proclamations designed to remind all within hearing range that the families are the real victims of this historic attack, while also displaying all the distasteful "what about ME??" tendencies of American victimhood. This group declared that their opposition to the monument was linked to the idea that the Tower footprints are now sacred ground, and should therefore be left permanently uncovered. Apparently the irony of declaring anything sacred ground in a secular democratic society was lost on these families.

In the 1860's the US fought a civil war that pitted the southern slaveowning states against the more industrialized northern region. Between the two armies over 600,000 were killed by combat or disease in the course of hostilities. The battles of Antietam and Gettysburg resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 soldiers alone, and the casualty totals were equally horrifying--over 23,000 killed or wounded at Antietam, and the astonishing total of over 50,000 killed or wounded cemented Gettysburg's claim to the prize of bloodiest battle ever fought on the North American continent. This war was no mere Red state vs. Blue state in the newspaper columns; this war was blood and iron, in pure enough form to make Otto Bismarck smile. Yet this war and its dead never made the demands for attention that the 9-11 families have; there are plaques and small monuments at these battlefields, and many many graves, and that is how it should be. The lack of media saturation in 19th-century America helped as well, as did the fact that those who died in the war knew the magnitude of their own sacrifices.

Three thousand innocent victims deserve a memorial. This memorial should be what it is--a memorial--and not some hyperventilating pseudo-patriotic screed of propaganda. When the Twin Towers fell, the area beneath them became a mass grave. To suggest that they must remain forever unsullied in the busiest section of America's busiest city is unrealistic (cemeteries have been moved many times in NYC's history). The willful and pompous self-importance of those American families who wish to call the Towers' footprints holy ground assists the Bush administration in powerful ways--it allows them to utilize the language of the pulpit in constructing their multifarious deceits, and it allows them to cover their misdeeds with a blanket of principle and honor. The victims of 9-11 were not victims of a military attack, as this nation's government has repeatedly claimed--they were innocent victims of the horrors of American foreign policy since WWII, collateral damage in the attempt to placate and protect American oil companies. Like German peasants caught between armies in the Thirty Years' War, or Serbian refugees of the First World War, or Japanese citizens of Hiroshima in August 1945, the people who died on 9-11 lost their lives as an ultimate result of disastrously aggressive actions by their own country's governing bodies or executives.

In the long history of human atrocities, the number of dead from 9-11 is dwarfed by such memorable slaughters as the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the clearing of native peoples from the American continents, the Vietnam War, or the Nazi-engineered Holocaust. Americans of our generation have not suffered through anything as horrendous as these events. Despite the horror of that day, no special classification should be required to memorialize those who died. Their lives and deaths were no more special or sacred than any of the other millions of innocents who have died throughout humanity's long and bloody history. Being American does not give your death extra significance, or extra sanctity. Being unable to bury your dead family member is a something that millions of people the world over have experienced, whether through war, famine, or natural disaster. Just ask any survivor of Hurricane Katrina about that, and see if that person is looking to make all of New Orleans into sacred ground.

Nick Sylvester, Traditionalist

2006-03-03T11:33:00.000-05:00

Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and Stephen Glass are starting to look like trendsetters now, rather than the abominations that they are. Joining their sad parade a couple of weeks ago was the annoying Nick Sylvester of the Village Voice and Pitchfork Media. It turns out that Sylvester was caught fabricating the details of a recently published article in the Voice and has been suspended indefinitely. Whereas the revelations of Glass' or Blair's misdeeds earned them immediate dismissals, dearest Nicky has not been fired yet by the Voice--although I doubt we will see him doing the Judith Miller perp walk accompanied by Voice publisher Michael Cohen or Pitchfork chief Ryan Schreiber.

Sylvester's most notable quality as a writer was his snideness. His music reviews for both the Voice and Pitchfork were shallow and lacked a real understanding of music. Too often he was fooled by a thick presskit, as this review of woozy and pretentious electro schmucks Excepter demonstrates. He would also disparage bands whose sound was too sophisticated for his ear while simultaneously passing himself off as a knowledgeable musician, as this review of Deerhoof shows. His visibility in the world of music criticism was considerable, however--and with dual jobs toiling for the Voice and Pitchfork he was approaching something close to critical ubiquity. Remembering, of course, that a music critic's job for a major publication like the Voice consists of being given free music and seeing live shows for free, it would seem that Sylvester's life was fairly set. Destiny intervened, according to some rumors, when his editor began to groom him as his protege journalist; and Nick's job began requiring more copy than mere review pieces as he was assigned full columns.

He choked in the face of that pressure and admitted to fabricating some details in his last story for the Voice, which now throws suspicious light upon his entire journalistic output. But as the numbers of fakers have increased in the American press, it appears that the punishments for them have disappeared. Jayson Blair got to write a book about his experiences, mysteriously equating his lying and absence of ethics with a slave battling against slavery, while Stephen Glass received the book and movie treatment for his own journalistic corruptions. And let's not forget the new breed of journalist/propagandist fakers on the rise, exemplified by former NY Times reporter Judith Miller, Ann Coulter, Armstrong Williams, or any of the assholes who work for Fox "News"--they remain unpunished for their participation in spreading the lies that took the US into war with Iraq, along with helping to quash any public discussion of the Bush administration's conduct on 9-11 itself. Tolerance for embellishment seems to be rising, and everyone from the last two presidents on down is willing to make reality as subjective as it can possibly be.

So little Nick Sylvester's crimes certainly pale in comparison with these other liars. But when an American journalist is caught fabricating their work, it usually ends up opening up a profitable new life for them. As he follows in the footsteps of those giants who came before him, he might be able to console himself with that thought. Life begins after getting caught, Nicky Boy.

Bush vs. the Ten Commandments

2006-02-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

After some time spent in a depressive mire watching the US Congress rubberstamp the Supreme Court's proud new authoritarian, I turned to (of all things) the Bible. Not in any sort of sense of any solace or worship, mind you, but to see if I had missed something when forced to read it in various high-school theology courses. I'd always enjoyed the intolerant violence of the Old Testament, with its histories of the bloodstained troops of Moses hacking their way through the inhabitants of the Land of Canaan, killing others to ensure peace and stability for themselves, but had always been bored by the platitudinous and tacked-on New Testament. Maybe a parallel view to the ancient Israelites was what I needed to aspire to in these apocalyptic days. After all, George W. and his crew of New Christian Primitives are attempting a similar project, with the same underlying philosophy--a pre-emptive war of conquest based on a delusional sense of entitlement that substitutes the goal of unlimited energy resources for a Land of Plenty, a teleological materialism equivalent to the political aims of the Crusader Era. As I thought about these ideas more, I thought it might be appropriate to apply one of the Old Testament's most famous formulas for proper behavior to the American "President" himself, just to see how he'd fare.

Located in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy are the lists of Yahweh's commandments to the people of Moses and Abraham; they are ten in number, far shorter than the 613 stipulations of the Law found in the book of Leviticus. The commandments are viewed as one of the more visible parts of the binding covenant between the Israelites and their God. As with much else in the original Jewish religion, this list of commandments was appropriated by Christianity, where it became ever more famous as a definition of the desires of God for humanity's conduct. All those who profess to be Christian must encounter this revealed list at some point in their faith; all must agree to obey and respect these commandments in the same way that a Muslim must obey and respect the Five Pillars of Islam. So how does Mr. Bush stack up against this list? Let us see.

The first commandment in question is the proclamation that Yahweh is the Lord your God; a question of belief for the individual. Bush obviously believes in God, so we'll give him this one. The next one is a little more tricky: the Lord asks worshippers to "have no other gods before me". Bush's worship of oil and gas, privilege, military spending, and his own increasing executive power put him in conflict with the Prime Mover on this one. The part about "bowing down to these graven images" is especially problematic for ol' W. One hour of repentance on Sunday isn't going to fool the Ineffable One; after all, the Godhead is everywhere at once.

"You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord/take the name of the Lord in vain"--this can be interpreted as either "don't curse using My name" or "do not profess public falsehoods while using My name". Here Mr. Bush begins to fall into a little trouble: as his recent comments about the validity of the US Constitution indicate, this man used the word Goddamn. Oops! And statements like the ones he made during the 2003 State of the Union address regarding Iraq's actual possession of chemical weapons create even more problems: "Three years ago, in another State of the Union address, Mr. Bush told the nation that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which is 1,000,000 pounds) of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, mobile biological weapons labs, al Qaeda connections, and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program. " Needless to say, this enormous stash of chemical beauties was never found because it never existed outside of the imaginations of a few fearmongering assholes--but more importantly, it appears that Bush's observance of commandment #3 is less than rigorous. Taken in conjunction with such statements as "we do not torture", "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job", and his 9-11 whopper of "I can hear you...and the people who did this will hear from us" it would appear that Bush violates #3 more than most of us do. Especially since the US armed forces and their shadowy contractors DO torture, Mike Brown did such a slipshod and negligent job as FEMA head that he should be arrested, and Osama Bin Laden (the alleged ringleader of 9-11) is mailing new recordings to the Western fascists roughly every 15 months while simultaneously avoiding the "largest manhunt in human history".

Commandment #4 asks us to keep honoring the Sabbath. Bush, like many a Christian, does not honor the Sabbath. But where most Christians' dishonoring of the Sabbath is related to screaming curses at the television during football season or socially ostracizing the rare free-thinker in their midst, W's disrespect is a little more severe. This is a tough one, because the Christian concept of the Sunday service is much different from the Jewish ritual of the Sabbath day--but in the Christian version Sunday should at least be a day where the USA doesn't put somebody somewhere to death, right? He loses on this one, in this agnostic's strict interpretation of the moral issues behind the Sabbath. After all, his army kills people every day of the week, regardless of affiliation (preferring, of course, to kill innocent Islamic folks), and doesn't take Sundays off.

#5 requests that believers must "honor thy father and mother". Here is a commandment that GW Bush fulfills to the letter. His father was a warmongering, bought-and-paid-for politician, whose transition to retirement from public life was made much easier by his involvement with the Carlyle Group. Stained black by his lifelong association with the oil industry, George Bush the First dabbled in the world of espionage and international intrigue with posts as CIA director and US liaison chief in China during the turbulent aftermath of Nixon's resignation before authoring a false overseas conflict as American President in 1990-91. No troubling conflicts about morality here...nor are they to be found in the person of Barbara Bush, his mother. This porcine, heartless, and decrepit horror of a suburban matron has been misrepresented as a rational human being due to her tacit support of a woman's right to choose during her husband's administration. Since little W has been installed in the office, however, her callousness toward the rest of American society has been on full display. She responded to criticism for her inept son's War of Lies by saying that she did not wish to "waste her beautiful mind" on thoughts of "body bags and deaths". Such concerns, according to Babsie, were "not relevant". Her wishes for the thousands of American citizens rendered homeless by the Katrina catastrophe in the Louisiana and Mississippi Deltas were not benevolent either--she thought it "scary" that refugees from this disaster were possibly heading to Texas. She also implied that living in the New Orleans Superdome was something that underprivileged Americans were used to. George W is the result of parents like this--and that is why he is a cruel eugenicist, quick-tempered and spoiled, a person whose life of constant privilege has resulted in a complete inability to see anything beyond his own immediate perceptions. When the heredity of Prescott Bush (W's grandfather, a senator from Connecticut whose business ties to Hitler and the Third Reich were so blatant that his operation was shut down by the US government in late 1942) is added into evidence, it appears that little Junior W might have had no choice, genetically speaking, to do other than he does. So W's illegal wars, inattention to public needs in the face of disaster, higher-priced medication for the elderly, warrantless spying, and general disdain for the American people are all products of this poisoned DNA. All of his actions, then, do indeed honor his despicable parents.

Commandment #6 tells believers that they shall not kill. The constant export of murder and destruction by the Bush administration to parts of the world that they desire to conquer pretty much screws W on this one. Additionally, his years in Texas as governor (where he presided over the nation's busiest execution schedule) hurt his chances in the afterlife for sure. Fascist evangelical Christians will throw the old "eye for and eye, tooth for a tooth" Old Testament quote out there to exonerate their boy Bush, but this situation simply illustrates the basic philosophical confusion at the root of most monotheistic belief. God says you shall not kill, but legions of apologists from all three monotheistic traditions like Saint Augustine, the Sicarii of the Israelites, the Popes of the Crusades, and the Islamic Wahabists have merrily justified slaughter in the name of the God. Undoubtedly GW Bush believes his war in Iraq to be a Just War; most Americans, however, see the war for what it is--just war. He is in repeated violation of this commandment, in this column's opinion.

From here we segue into God's proscription of adultery. Seeing as GW Bush has as much sex appeal as a putrefying corpse on a ninety-five degree day, I think that it is safe to say that he and Stepford First Lady Laura Bush do not violate this one. Although Condi Rice might have some highly classified information on this issue.

Commandment #8 forbids theft. Seeing as Mr. Bush has stolen two US presidential elections and is currently attempting to steal an entire country's most profitable resource, I feel secure in declaring him in violation of this commandment. He has also "owned" a major league baseball team despite putting up less than 2% of the total purchase price and has been accused of insider trading after his attempt to become an oil tycoon. Both of these acts could be potentially troubling to the Accountant of the Universe; but then who may presume to know that Mind?

Bush flouts commandment #9 with equal arrogance. Despite the proclamation from That Is What Is declaring that a believer should not bear false witness against a neighbor, W's pursuit of Saddam Hussein's demise has centered around some pretty major false witnessing (see excerpted quote above regarding Iraq's weapons capacity). He and his minions have accused their political opponents of treason on those rare occasions when Democratic timidity has been replaced by temerity; he blocked the investigation into the 9-11 attacks and blatantly rewrote the history of his actions on that morning; and he has repeatedly attempted to link Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator, to an Islamic fundamentalist movement that despised everything that Hussein stood for, despite the report of the 9-11 commission that unequivocally stated that there were no such extant links between them. The important question to consider here is this--when has GW Bush not born false witness against all of his planet's neighbors?

Wrapping up the list is the commandment that forbids coveting of neighbor's property and spouse. Bush, a sexless secret alcoholic, probably cannot achieve erection due to his allegedly massive intake of antidepressants, so he seems to be in compliance with at least part of this directive. Iraq rears its head again as a problem here, because the oil-thirsty neocon architects of disaster who surround Bush have long desired to conquer and profit from the rich oil fields of Iraq. In fact, one might say that the entire Bush administration has been based on the principle of being covetous--they covet resources, they covet dictatorial powers, and they covet a new political structure in the world. This new structure will be a brave new world of economic serfdom for the majority of people on the planet.

So all in all, the former Yale kegulator known as George W. Bush has not fared very well on this little pop quiz. Giving him full credit for correct behavior on numbers 1, 5, and 7 with half credit on number 10 leaves Junior with a score of 35 points out of a possible 100. I believe this would be a failing grade even in the present-day American school system, and it indicates that Mr. Bush probably hired other students to take his examinations for him at Yale. (This attitude undoubtedly helped him determine his own service to the USA during the Vietnam War, when his stint in the Air National Guard helped keep the skies of Texas safe from the Viet Cong. Safer, in fact, than the skies over New York City would be in the fall of 2001.) I think his right-wing Christian fan base will be upset with a score like this on such a fundamental indicator of Christianity. It demonstrates that W either completely misunderstands the religion, or that he is not compliant with the basic rules and regulations that govern Christian and Jewish behavior. Either way, his righteousness is lacking. And according to Mr. Bush's own professed belief system, Someone is taking notice. And preparing a reservation in one of the lower circles for him, too. According to Dante, it's circle #8--the one they reserve for hypocrites and corrupt politicians, those who falsify rather than speak the truth.

the Lonesome Death of Otillie Lundgren

2006-01-05T11:53:00.000-05:00

Americans have no memory. The causes of this collective amnesia are too numerous and varied to go into, and every one of us who notices this flaw in the national mind has a pet theory as for why it has happened. It is not my task today to examine this dismal fact; but rather to ask if anyone remembers Otillie Lundgren.

The circumstances of her death were bizarre but not unique to her time. She was 94, and she died after receiving mail tainted by anthrax. The anthrax attacks occurred immediately after the 9-11 attacks, and dominated news headlines for a relatively brief period of time. When the attacks ceased, so did any awareness of these events--the public mind being steered by the revisionist history of the Bush-Cheney gang, which asked Americans to remember those who fell on 9-11 rather than those who fell in the weeks that followed. Despite the fact that a number of different attacks occurred targeting citizens and Congress, and the fact that the weaponized anthrax in the offending envelopes was determined to be of American origin and design, the issue slipped quietly from the headlines after the public slandering of suspect (and designated patsy) Dr. Stephen Hatfill was completed.

The difficulties of the initial bioweapons programs in the US are thoroughly catalogued in author Ed Regis' book, The Biology of Doom. Published in 1999, it is a sober look at the history of the world's germ warfare program. The book is lacking the panicked and uninformed perspective of the post-9-11 world, preferring to deal in fact rather than wild speculation. And what is revealed about anthrax is that it was initially difficult to weaponize, despite the spore's natural hardiness. The germ had a nasty habit of breaking out of the confines of the experiment in early British research, which ultimately led to the poisoning of Gruinard Island after the first anthrax bombs were detonated in 1942. Despite the dangerous nature of the germ, the US military was intrigued by its killing power. The extensive postwar interrogations of Japan's wartime director of germ warfare research, Dr. Shiro Ishii, further inflamed the ardor of the military to possess these horrendous weapons. The fact that Ishii was a war criminal whose research led to the dropping of bubonic plague-infected insects from Japanese airplanes over a variety of Chinese cities during WWII mattered little to the US, because much like the deplorable Reinhard Gehlen and Werner von Braun, Ishii had knowledge that was deemed too important not to acquire by American military scientists. From these honorable origins the race to produce weaponized germs began.

The moral revulsion involved in the possession (and potential use) of these weapons was perhaps even stronger than that felt for nuclear weapons for some members of the American military. But many felt justified in the production and research of such horrors. Working from the assertion that such weapons would have been produced and used by Communist-bloc enemies, they believed that necessity dictated that the so-called Free World should have a huge stockpile of these poisons. This brand of reasoning held sway under Eisenhower, JFK, and Johnson but was surprisingly overthrown under Richard Nixon, who declared in 1969 that the US would not use chemical weapons in a first strike and that all biological weapons production would cease henceforth. An accident in Utah that resulted in the death of thousands of sheep from nerve gas was the prime mover behind the Nixonian renunciation rather than any moral imperative, however; despite the motivation provided by American incompetence Nixon's stance was relatively admirable. Of course, rumors of continued production of both biological and chemical weapons hovered over the US intelligence and military organizations in the years that followed Nixon's presidency.

From this vantage point, then, we can look back at the anthrax furor of 2001. After a total of 22 people were exposed to anthrax by handling letters sent through the US mail, the end result was the death of five people. The deliberate misspellings contained in the text of the anthrax letters are reminiscent of such media campaigns of the past as the Jack the Ripper killings or the Son of Sam murders, and the proclamations of the letters (Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great etc.) seemed right away to be an obvious attempt at provocation. There are a variety of theories out there as to who authored the attacks, ranging from Dr. B.H. Rosenberg's very public tarring of Dr. Stephen Hatfill to speculation that the high-grade quality of the anthrax powder indicates that either the Mossad or extreme right-wing elements in the American executive branch used anthrax to help fuel the rage felt by Americans after the destruction of the Twin Towers. Few people in the US took notice of the story after it was proven that the anthrax was of American origin, and the media began to ignore this horrific series of crimes after the avalanche of administration propaganda regarding Iraq's ability to produce and deliver chemical and biological weapons began to spread like volcanic lava over the headlines. Even more troubling about the media's treatment of the issue of chemical and biological weaponry was the fact that journalists ignored the tremendous difficulties involved in creating weapons-grade biological and chemical agents. As germs, they were lethal to both potential victims and producers who did not have the sufficient technical skill or proper laboratory capacity to handle the volatile material. Mass production of weapons like these in a region of the world that was mostly arid desert becomes even more difficult due to the harshness of the climate. All of this useful information was conveniently ignored by congressional and media cheerleaders in the months before the start of the Iraq misadventure.

Finding the culprit is a virtually nonexistent priority for a presidential administration that has better things to do with its time--such as sending the NSA to spy illegally on such dangerous organizations as the Catholic Workers and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Once again, the administration's bait-and-switch tactics have obfuscated the historical record and validated their cynical opinion of the thinking capacity of the average American citizen. Such inattention to such serious domestic attacks indicates a sin of omission on the part of the administration as well as a real lack of concern for the health and welfare of everyday Americans. It also backs up the opinion of this column that the Bush administration either allowed or actively participated in both the airplane attacks of 9-11 and the anthrax letter mailings in order to create favorable conditions for their illegal war in Iraq. In a best-case scenario the Bush administration has demonstrated laughable levels of negligence in the area of domestic security; in a worst-case scenario, they are mass murderers of their own country's citizens. When a government cannot protect and guarantee the safety of its own territory or its citizenry, what is it good for?

So this brings us back to the death of Otillie Lundgren, age 94. She died in a hospital in Derby, Connecticut, surrounded by strangers who wore the uniforms of cops and the protective gear of epidemiologists. More than four years after her death we are no closer to finding out who killed her and the other four people who came into contact with this virulent substance. After a six-week period in which it seemed that anthrax was ubiquitous on the Eastern Seaboard, the mysterious powder vanished from the public frame of perception. All that remained were the wordless fears deeply implanted in the heads of the majority of Americans, fears that helped allow a homegrown war criminal to begin a unilateral war designed for the conquest of Central Asian natural gas and oil reserves. Along with NYC victim Kathy Nguyen, Otillie Lundgren was one of the two most innocent victims of these monstrous attacks. Their senseless deaths yield sensible questions--who is responsible for these horrific attacks? And who profited the most by their deaths? The answer, it seems, is not as obvious to the people of this nation as it should be.

I Hate Year-End Lists--So Here's My Year-End List

2005-12-23T17:12:00.000-05:00

2005 was a rough year for us all, with disasters both natural and manmade, but it ended on an upswing; perhaps by the end of 2006 the people of the US will be bracing for the impeachment hearings for GW Bush and Dick Cheney. There was some good music out there this year as always, and here are some releases from 2005 (in no particular order) that helped make a strange year more bearable:

Lightning Bolt Hypermagic Mountain (Load)--what can be said that has not been said before? Those looking for a new sound from this band can fuck off. When your sound sounds like their sound no new sound is needed.

Jack Rose Kensington Blues (VHF)--stately, elegant, and confident playing. Excellent composition. Despite this being a one-man acoustic guitar record it had the loudest mastering job out of any release I heard this year....

Coptic Light Coptic Light (No Quarter)--thunderous trio from Brooklyn with the monstrous Kevin Shea on drums. Loops and riffs and improv add up to dark ass-kicking psych rock.

Earth Hex, or Printing in the Infernal Method (Southern Lord)--Dylan Carlson's new take on his old band is a quiet rumination on American music. More big sky now than noddy drone, this disc is a soundtrack without a movie. Nice Wm. Blake reference in the title as well.

Ultralyd Chromosome Gun (Load)--Kjetil Brandsdal is a bad man. Not only does he destroy people with his bass in the punishing Noxagt, but he slams out the jams in this improvised 4-piece called Ultralyd. Equal parts free jazz and noisy rock, also featuring Frode Gjerstad on saxophone and clarinet. Pretty rocking and brutal stuff.

Nels Cline/Wally Shoup/Chris Corsano Immolation/Immersion (Strange Attractors)--searing free jazz/free rock improv from this nasty trio. Shoup is in fine form, but Nels Cline is magnificent--elastic in his style, his playing ranges from scorching noise, to fast, fat-toned riffing, to clear and fragile droning. Corsano plays his ass off on this too.

SunnO))) Black One (Southern Lord)--O'Malley and Anderson turn their drone directly towards the heart of the Father of Lies on this one, enlisting such black metal stalwarts as Malefic from Xasthur and Wrest from Leviathan to assist them. Oren Ambarchi and John Wiese also help the lads expand their palette a bit on this one, and the results are fantastic. A truly unsettling record, and the black metal vox are an unexpectedly successful addition to the SunnO))) sound.

Om Variations on a Theme (Holy Mountain)--the former rhythm section for Sleep returns from the wilderness with a bass and drums exercise in power. Monumentally heavy and repetitive and blissful all at once.

Orthrelm OV (Ipecac)--Mick Barr and Josh Blair confound and complicate for one mammoth 45-minute track. Incredible technique on full display along with a shifty sense of composition.

Circle Tulikoira (Ektro/No Quarter)--the New Wave of Finnish Heavy Metal has commenced. From this rockcrit joke on their insert, psychlords Circle establish their declared intention with 4 longish pieces. Though slightly more metallic than other efforts, their trademark Krautrock grooves are fully in evidence on this release.

and reissues:

the Ex Singles. Period. (Touch and Go)--singles collection dating back to the earliest releases from this Dutch punk rock band. Their musical development grows with each single. Arranged in chronological order for the true rock geek experience.

Thelonius Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note/EMI)--remastered live brilliance from Monk and Trane. The legendary and brief collaboration between the two jazz icons is finally given its proper due with this excellent release. The drums distort ever so slightly and ever so pleasantly due to the creaky fidelity of the source recordings.

And even though this is a list pertaining to music, I feel I must at least mention that I enjoyed Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture about as much as anything else on this list. And I also enjoyed HBO's Rome and Deadwood series. I think the only movie I saw in the theater this year was the Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo. It was great, a must-see for any fan of the band or Mike Watt. So there it is. I hate year-end lists.

I Spy A Big Lie

2005-12-19T13:32:00.000-05:00

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

On December 19th, GW Bush foamed at the mouth about how “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,” he said at a White House event. Is the shameful act in question related to fatuous bigmouth Karl Rove and his propensity for blowing the cover of CIA agents? Why, of course not. His outrage came from the seamy revelations of administration-sanctioned domestic spying activities in the NY Times last week.

Using language borrowed from Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Bush now expects people to believe that political oversight of his administration's conduct equals treason. He just does not get it--American governments cannot in any circumstance spy on its citizens without the prior approval of a judge. Once again Bush has clearly violated the law, and this violation is something that clearly impacts every citizen in this country. This incident is much more insidious than the politically-inspired outing of Valerie Plame, and is an indicator of what the Bush gang believe their administration is entitled to do in the good old US of A.

The law in question came into being in 1978 after the Church Committee's careful study of intelligence community misconduct was concluded. After the agency's wild, crazy, and unfettered days under Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon, a new sense of restraint was alleged at Langley headquarters. Of course, this new era at the CIA was wild and crazy in its own way, distorting Soviet missile production capabilities as well as the overall size of the USSR's nuclear arsenal during the massive military buildup under Ronald Reagan. The FBI had also become quite active on the domestic surveillance front during the 1950's and 1960's (as Dr. King's family can attest); the Church Committee's findings painted both agencies as almost completely out of control, and acronyms like COINTELPRO and MK ULTRA made their appearance in the American vernacular.

So despite Mr. Bush's assurances, there is a clear precedent for the misconduct and abuse of power engaged in by American intelligence services. The law that he has broken has been on the books in good standing for nearly thirty years. Bush's defense of his administration's activities in defiance of this law can be broken down logically like this:

1. I am GW Bush, President of the US.
2. I am not subject to the same rigor of the law code as the citizenry.
3. If I break a law, it is not broken--rather, I have appropriately discarded an outdated form of legislation (like the Geneva Convention; the Kyoto Treaty; the Plame affair; etc.) in the pursuit of defending our nation.

Further applications of this line of logic can be directed at the Bill of Rights and many other constitutional concepts. If public discussion of the government's right to spy on its citizens is equated with treason, then the entire Bill of Rights is also obviously suspect. Freedom of speech threatens this concept of the presidency, as does the right of lawful assembly--and such niceties as due process and trial by jury have already been defecated upon by the corpulent, shit-filled asses of the Executive Branch and their counsels.

After the disaster in New York City was allowed to occur on September 11th 2001, Bush and his gang began a quick assault on the basic rights of American citizens in the form of the noxious Patriot Act. Bush has repeatedly defended this nightmarish concept of the American democracy, insisting that the special circumstances of the horror of 9-11-01 required special measures to fight them. These claims make me think back to another instance of a politician who used the political scene of his day to secretly and illegally expand his base of power. A man, like George W. Bush, who received less than 30% of the vote from his country's eligible voters when he "won" the election for his office; a man who took advantage of a violent act in order to institute a bogus state of emergency in his nation which then devolved unlimited and extralegal power upon his office.

That man was Adolf Hitler, and the violent act that spurred his party to absolute power was the fire that destroyed the Berlin Reichstag. Within 12 years of the Reichstag fire Europe was in ruins and the hellish nuclear genie had been let loose from its bottle. Hitler's thousand-year Reich was supposed to be able to destroy its ideological antithesis--Stalinist Communism--but instead the sick racist violence unleashed by the Germans ended up making Stalin and Communism stronger. The Communist philosophy suddenly was not quite so abhorrent to the millions of people who experienced firsthand the horrific tortures of the Nazi regime. As we watch Iraq begin to turn into a Shi'a satellite state of Iran perhaps even the deaf idiots who populate this declining empire might hear echoes of the ghosts of Adolf and Hermann and Josef and Heinrich in the vacuous truth-stretching statements of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Of course, one of the biggest differences between the Nazis and the Bush gang is that the Nazis actually had some success in the ugly business of war before their hideous government was destroyed....

The quote that appears at the beginning of this post is from a report by the OSS. It is a description of Adolf Hitler's political psychology gleaned from Mein Kampf and from those Germans courageous enough to see the Little Corporal for what he really was. These words are also applicable to the disgraceful and disingenuous George W. Bush.

All This Useless Starfuckery

2005-12-01T08:59:00.000-05:00

Patti Smith is back in the merchandising public's eye this week, as her Horses album has received the remastering and repricing treatment. Contained within is a recent live performance of the record's material, performed by the still-living remnants of her original band, augmented by fellow NYC original punker Tom Verlaine on guitar. The occasion has been marked by a surge of music rag coverage, all breathlessly overhyped and distressingly familiar to those who lived through the first incarnation of Patti in the 1970's.

I have never cared for Patti Smith's recorded work; but I do have lots of respect for her symbolic importance to the American side of the original punk movement. She was punk rock's first strong woman, one who made a good study of how to offer a righteous middle finger to the establishment of her era. Rockers from such diverse acts as Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon. X's Exene Cervenka, and DNA's Ikue Mori grew out of the tradition she helped establish, and I credit her influence on a younger generation of female musicians. But like so many forms of art that once seemed challenging and transgressive, the passing of time has not been kind to her body of work. With the distance of more than 25 years her music comes off as more hippie than punk, simple bar band rock leavened with an uncomfortable amount of pretense and morbid seriousness. She at least had the grace to know when it was time to get out of the business, unlike her contemporaries in bands like the Ramones and the reunited Television. With the reissue of Horses and other reissues looming in the near future, rock critics have picked up where they left off with her, confusing symbol with substance and in the process relentlessly overhyping her music. In an age where her dead lit-celebrity obsessiveness (particularly if it were offered up by a new, unheralded, and unconnected artist) would come off as an embarrassing form of hero-worship, critics steadfastly ignore this aspect of her music in an attempt to shore up the idea of her cultural relevance. I feel this is aesthetic revisionism of the highest order.

One of the most annoyingly un-punk things about Patti Smith was her very public adoration of such overrated cultural figures as Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. Such petulant heroes say much about those who worship at their altars; their fans are as impressed with the life legends surrounding them as they are with the work produced by the artists in their willfully short lifetimes. Rimbaud and Morrison also represent the hoariest of cliches about art and artists--too sensitive for the vagaries of human existence, their massive souls were too large for a world where conformity is more prized than insight; so they removed themselves from their respective fields in what should have been their creative prime to renounce the world in which we live. I prefer to think of them as pseudo-monastics with real publicists, or as transparently adolescent assholes, in love with the luxury and excess and privilege their talents bought them in their societies. Like them, Patti and the NYC punkers were rock stars first and foremost; and whether you speak of Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, or Tom Verlaine, they were careerists all, despite the lofty aesthetic ideals they publicly espoused.

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's history of the 1970's NYC scene, Please Kill Me, exemplifies the worst tendencies of "I was there" myth-making while simultaneously misunderstanding the fundamental significance of its subject. Representing themselves as ground-floor participants in an important artistic movement, they strike me more as clueless documentarians bragging about their proximity to genius rather than perceptive and skeptical critics cruising through a creatively fertile period of time. While entertaining, the book ultimately fails to see its own most important point--that the original punks of the 1970's in the US and the UK were not really that punk rock, but just regular old rock stars playing at smaller venues. Although nobody in the scene embodied the plain old rock god more than Lou Reed or Iggy Pop, Patti made her bones by attaining notice as a hanger-on at the Max's Kansas City scene and she began to climb the ladder by becoming friends with the famous and fabulous. Whether dating Sam Shepard and Robert Mapplethorpe, or chilling with William Burroughs, Patti's radar was finely attuned to the methodology of success and fame. She was not alone in this endeavor, and as the newspapers and magazines of New York City began to descend on the CBGBs crowd, bands like the Voidoids, the Dead Boys, and Television tried to outdo each other in terms of public intoxication and dissipation, safe in the knowledge that their excesses (though possibly damaging to overall life expectancy) would be widely reported by the trend-followers of the media. These actions of course helped establish "credibility" for the bands.

It's not really Patti Smith's fault, that all of these supposed aesthetes were little more than media whores with guitars and syringes, but I do find it ironic that the further one gets from the date of punk rock's birth in 1976/77, the more one finds artists whose lives were more fully in agreement with the demanding ideals of the punk movement. Anti-stars are still stars of some kind. This statement is lost on the hero-worshipping writers of books like Please Kill Me and the UK's The Boy Looked at Johnny. They prefer that their readers view musicians as tangential and insignificant as Stiv Bators and Poly Styrene as hugely important figures instead of the footnotes to history that they deserve to be. Bands like Black Flag, the Minutemen, Scratch Acid, Bad Brains, Mission of Burma, the Fall, the Ex, the Butthole Surfers, and Sonic Youth are the real punk rockers, artists who were committed to the performance and creation of their music despite economic hardships and being relatively ignored by the radio and print media in their countries. Patti Smith, on the other hand, was well known to a wealthy and sophisticated audience while she was active in the 1970's--as well as being someone who perfectly fit the prototype of the USA/UK music star. After all, she'd spent much of her life preparing to act out the tired stereotype of a really famous person--her only twist on this corniness was that she was a woman. If that is why she deserves to be celebrated, then so be it--I have no problem recognizing her as the first of a generation of women who decided that rock was no longer the property of men. But songs do not become more poignant or more significant if they are written about the musician's famous friends, unless of course the listener is a credulous and cautious rock critic.

Go Home, George

2005-11-10T09:27:00.000-05:00

Really, hasn't this sunken in yet? Libby's indicted and Cheney is obviously going to be next; the war in Iraq is illegal and unwinnable; your boneheaded casino-style "investment plan" for Social Security is dead in the water; and yesterday marked the end of another of your idiotic special projects as Congress voted against the spoliation of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge by US energy companies. You are a living embarrassment to this nation and to the alleged ideals that you represent. You have destroyed the integrity of the American electoral process. You have idly sat and watched as one of America's oldest cities was nearly wiped off the map by a natural disaster. After blithely lying your way through the first four years of your term, you have arisen today to find out that your country has finally seen you for what you really are--a desperate politician who is unequal to the heavy lifting required by the office of the presidency. You are a traitor, a spinner of falsehoods, a wastrel, a disinterested king in charge of a nation that will soon ask you to leave.

So for the first time in your life, will you do something that is in the best interest of the nation that you purport to serve? Will you resign? Or will you trundle aimlessly through the last three years of your term, continuing to harm the future of this nation with your short-sightedness? Go home, George. You are a fraud, a decaying vegetable, and a blood-stained criminal to boot. Three years is a long time to stand unmasked before the people that your administration has failed to protect militarily and economically. You do not have the heart or the strength of character to endure this challenge. Rather than clinging to your diminished position, why not leave today and spare us all the drawn-out bullshit that will undoubtedly arise in the next year? Go home, George. Just fucking go home.

A Righteous Christian Gulag

2005-11-04T07:54:00.000-05:00

Fuck you, George W. Bush. Fuck you, Dick Cheney. Fuck you, Donald Rumsfeld. And fuck you, Condi Rice. Fuck you for all of your incompetence, your heartlessness, your secrecy, and your mysterious commitment to an internment policy that revolves around torture and the further degradation of human rights. Just in case the Abu Ghraib revelations were not damaging enough to the world's perception of America and Americans, news now comes that the Bush administration and the CIA have been running a new Eastern European gulag.

The process of rendition as practiced by the current regime involves kidnapping and forced relocation of those classified as "enemy combatants" to various locations around the world. Though these actions are contradictory in spirit to almost everything that the American system of democracy claims to represent, outrage has not been forthcoming. The apathy that has greeted the news of these secret strongarm processes has been one of the most shameful aspects of the mainstream media's abandonment of its purpose in recent years.

Not many media types saw fit to comment on the bitter irony of the USA and its involvement with secret prison camps in Eastern Europe. The same region that saw humanity abase itself in pursuit of bizarre ideological utopian dreams now sees the one country that could call itself a true liberator after WW II opening prisons on its soil. Not just prisons, mind you--these are houses of torture that use extralegal tactics to break down and destroy human beings. Tactics that were used by the interrogators of the NKVD and the SS mere decades ago in these same areas. It's all part of the proud legacy being developed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the New Christian Primitives.

The USA, prior to GW Bush and Co., had at least managed to maintain an image of intellectual and spiritual freedom around the world. Bush has soured that image forever. Most insidious is the way in which our most basic principles of free conduct, principles we that we had extended to other countries around the world (in slightly truncated, colonialist form of course), are now being contravened by an administration that knows no other solution to a problem than to shoot at it or lock it up.

This country once threw off the shackles of a foreign king; it fought a war to end human bondage; it once helped stop poisonous, fraudulent, and violent political systems from dividing the world amongst themselves. Does anybody really see GW Bush measuring up to men like Washington, Lincoln, and FDR? This weaselly little oil failure has more in common with creatures like Nikolai Yezhov, Reza Pahlavi, and Augusto Pinochet. And like these bringers of death and destruction, he speaks of how many he is saving while at the same time his security forces are torturing and murdering those under their merciless care.

Like a true totalitarian, Bush says the exact opposite of his true intentions. He is neither compassionate nor conservative, neither Christian nor pragmatist. When he claims to defend freedom he means that he defends the right of governments to oppress other nations at the behest of multinational corporations. He should be impeached before he becomes any more dangerous to the future of this planet.

the Unwelcome Consequences of Radical Intervention

2005-10-24T09:04:00.000-04:00

Two thousand American soldiers will have died in Iraq by the end of October 2005. With a nice round number like this, the American news media has decided to resume paying attention to the human cost of the Iraq war. While its belated criticism of the criminally incompetent regime of GW Bush and their disastrous Iraq misadventure is sign of a press finally beginning to do its job, it probably has more to do with anger over the imprisonment of Judith Miller than any desire to hold the administration to any sort of standard of conduct. The shame of this sudden resurgence of interest in the failing imperial policies of the New Primitives is that it has arisen so late in the game, after nearly 2000 American soldiers have given their lives away for nothing more than an attempt to secure a particularly valuable and diminishing fuel commodity. After playing a collaborator's role in the felonious lies dispensed by the Bush gang to a moronic, docile, and utterly gullible American public, the media now decides that it is time to take a step back to commemorate one of those totally meaningless statistical milestones that it celebrates so well.

Sober-minded individuals who contradicted the neocons' claims of instant victory in Iraq in 2003 were all over the political landscape (such disparate Americans as Noam Chomsky and Norman Schwarzkopf thought this war to be a figment of the administration's imagination that was brought to fruition by the careless use of fear-mongering lies); they were, however, studiously ignored by the mainstream corporate media as it served as town crier for the fictions put forth by the Bush administration. Republican stalwart (and former national security advisor to King George Bush the First) Brent Scowcroft has issued his sternest criticism to date of the second Bush's ineptitude--saying that the current mess in Iraq is an example of what he calls "the unwelcome consequences of radical intervention". This statement is important for a number of reasons: a high-powered intelligence and policy guy like Scowcroft is expressing some serious discontent and in all probability he is speaking for a large segment of the intelligence community in the US; additionally, he becomes one of the first Republicans to outwardly declare that GW Bush is a radical conservative. By extension, this statement harshly criticizes Bush's extremism in defense of supposed liberty while also indicating a certain eradication of support among a political group that once wholeheartedly supported the Fratboy President. Scowcroft's statement also uses a word fraught with significance when applied to a democratic system of government like the American system--he says that the administration uses tactics that "invade....threaten and pressure...(and) evangelize". Evangelization has no place in a political system based on the concept of separation of church and state, and Scowcroft's choice of the word was deliberate--he is identifying GW Bush and co. as politicians with a religious sense of their own mission. As such, the administration can be expected to maintain its tenuous grip on reality by clinging to its own failed policies rather than indulging in any sort of positive self-analysis that might yield some different results in Iraq.

At this point in time, how much more will it take to impeach GW Bush? This blog has recounted a number of different crimes that he and his administraton have committed (whether they were deliberate acts or crimes of omission and negligence), yet it seems that the more blatantly Bush fails at something the more he is excused by the same charlatans who served as the Empire Crew's publicists in the days leading up to the illegal war in Iraq. This lack of accountability is all the more stark when compared to the media's treatment of President Clinton--who was impeached for a blowjob and investigated for five years by a biased special prosecutor for an incident of financial impropriety that involved less than $100,000 (a pittance in a world that tolerated such sleazeballs as Al D'Amato and Charles Keating). If the same standards of criticism that once applied to Slick Willie were applied to King George Bush the Second, he would have been impeached and arrested before even having the chance to run for "re-election" in 2004.

And so things go merrily onward--without accountability, without regard for the laws of this land, without concern for human lives lost. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the mask finally fell away from this empty and callow cipher that calls itself George W. Bush; the only efforts to help the suffering citizens of New Orleans occurred when the Bush administration realized it was being embarrassed politically. Now that the magic 2000-killed-in-action mark is within range, this heartless murdering bastard who is allegedly the president of the US will mark this grim anniversary with much public grieving; behind the scenes, however, his only concerns revolve around himself and his pretty little plans for an energy empire. As his approval ratings plummet and his delusional grand scheme of easy conquest crumbles into dust, I predict that his response will be to seal himself off ever more tightly in the binding fabric of his religion. Even his selection of the egregiously sycophantic and spectacularly unqualified Ms. Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court is part of this same "solution", and it reveals Bush's ultimate aim to be the sabotaging the constitution of the US. Once his attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade is prepared, will he even notice that there are far more important matters of state left untended in his pursuit of sanctimonious and irrelevant religious goals?

Both Bush I and Bush II have overseen administrations that are and were relentlessly negative in their view of humanity; peace and prosperity are apparently considered by them to be contradictory and simultaneously incongruous conditions. The Bushes consider our population too dumb to handle the crises that life presents us, so they enshroud their activities in secrecy and construct elaborate lies and justifications that are straight out of the Cold War Playbook. They are the epitome of an evil and divisive superstructure in which the top 1% of the world's population manipulates the remaining 99% into violent sectarian and fundamentalist politico-religious conflict. When challenged on their well-documented record of blood and iron, the Bushes wrap themselves in the American flag and wave crucifixes around as proof of their Christian piety. One thing is quite true about both Bush administrations--they identify strongly with the Christian concept of self-sacrifice, although with a twist--they require that self-sacrifice to be performed by the help. Like the 17th and 18th-century nobility types they aspire to, they've got other things to tend to around their property, and they are far too important to risk their own physical safety in their exploitative endeavors.

Sounds and Words

2005-10-04T08:18:00.000-04:00

I break from my usual routine this morning...instead of growling at the latest political nonsense in the US or suppressing violent impulses while thinking about GW Bush and crew, I will walk on a kinder path today and dispense a few blurbs about what's currently in the McBain CD player and on the McBain reading list.

I haven't been purchasing music at my normal rate lately--not due to disinterest, but rather to lack of funds--but when I have been buying I've forced myself to scour used bins like never before. I've been on a hot streak though, finding some good stuff at some low prices. Titles that I even would've paid full price for, in most cases. So in the munificent mood that today finds me, I will dabble in a little cultural writing and offer some capsule reviews on a few books and discs.

On my way to see Fly Ashtray in the West Village a few weeks back, I snuck into Revolution Records. I rarely have occasion to check them out, as my path does not cross the West Village much anymore, but it is a good store. They have a great selection of obscure metal of all genres, and though pricey, it's staffed with knowledgeable types who aren't all that annoying to talk with. The real deal in the place is downstairs, where the used bins are along with a variety of other rock merch like t-shirts and posters. Anyway, I found a copy of Orthrelm's OV there and snapped it up. For those unfamiliar, Orthrelm is a duo featuring Mick Barr on guitar and Josh Blair on drums. The two men possess staggering technique, and create a bizarrely original sound together, both dense and tinny simultaneously, equal parts metal guitar shredding and free jazz. OV is a single composition, forty-five minutes in length, that uncoils like a predatory snake in a dark forest; it borders on the mesmeric in its use of repetition. I think it's fantastic, but Orthrelm is the type of band that will alienate as many as it will entrance. This release, with its tightly structured repetitive format, can tax the patience of the most patient listener. Repeated listenings only reveal the excellence contained within their frenetic riffs, as far as I'm concerned.

Other used nifties that I've recently grabbed have come mostly from Kim's on St. Mark's Place. I found Oren Ambarchi's My Days Are Darker than Your Nights EP there, recorded with Ambarchi on guitar and devices along with Johan Berthling on harmonium. It is not as engrossing as his Grapes from the Estate LP; this little one-track EP finds Ambarchi playing with a simple insistent drone, one that changes little throughout the 32-minute piece. The harmony achieved is a dissonant one, and there is little dynamic fluctuation in the piece. That day also yielded a used copy of Tom Carter's Monument disc, released on Kranky Records in 2005. While different from the work of Carter's main gig Charalambides, this live to 2-track recording of Tom's solo electric guitar improv is pretty cool in spots. It starts out incredibly sparsely, and then doesn't fill in a whole lot after that; overall its spareness lends a sense of fragility to the guitar tones. I had seen some other reviews that really hammered this release, but I found it to be interesting. His playing is dextrous and his efficient use of delay, slide, and e-bow results in some very nice guitar textures. Again, this release is not for every listener, as it requires some patience to get into it. The last thing I found that day was a copy of last year's Kites/Prurient split on Load Records. The Kites material is more noisy and discordant than their Metallic Gardener full-length of '04, but it is enjoyable nonetheless. Prurient's two pieces steal the show on this release for me, with the instrumental I Lay Down on the Ground in the Woods and Fell Asleep of particular note. The last track is a collaboration between both bands and it can best be described as an excursion into noise hell. Still pretty cool though.

Other new used discs recently acquired: Radian's Juxtaposition (Thrill Jockey)--excellent; a great mix of weird noise and futuristic drum technique. The Blithe Sons' We Walk the Young Earth (Family Vineyard Recordings)--pretty acoustic guitar-based mostly instrumental improv from Loren Chasse and Glen Donaldson of Thuja and various other Jewelled Antler Collective projects. My only complaint is that it's a little on the precious and boring side, as a couple of numbers meander into double-figure track times without developing much beyond their original ideas; plus the singing on the disc is lovely and underutilized. Max Richter's the Blue Notebooks (Fat Cat) is also a very pretty release, in the vein of neo-classicists the Rachels. Violin, viola, and piano are the primary instruments on this disc, but Richter allows himself some serious experimentation within what could have been a restrictive format--the disc even ventures into quiet dub-influenced soundscapes, all the while retaining a taut compositional discipline. Some pretense, of course, is present--a female narrator appears in a few tracks, reading excerpts from Czeslaw Milosz and Franz Kafka, but such potentially ham-handed material is incoporated without giving much offense. In fact, without explicit reference to the texts in the liner notes, the conceit may have gone undetected by most listeners. Whatever. It's still worth checking out. Last on the used parade is Et Sans' Par Noussss Touss Les Trous de Vos Cranes, featuring Fly Pan Am's Roger Tellier-Craig and Felix Morel, along with Montreal scenester Alexander St-Onge and Godspeed You Black Emperor's Sophie Trudeau. Released on Alien-8 Recordings last year, this band purports to be the noisy cousin of such American bands as Black Dice and Wolf Eyes. Hyperbole aside, Et Sans does not come close to the outbursts of noise of such acts; rather they use synths and vocal loops to create a weird psychedelic morass of sound. It is a sound that is much more melodic than their American counterparts. The disc is not bad, with some surprisingly cool dinky synth sounds that seem to have more in common with NYC club music from the early 1980's than the new noise of the 21st century. Titles are impenetrably written on the disc insert, and helpfully they are listed only in French. Fans of Fly Pan Am will like this, but it is not the easiest listen at first, as the material is quite repetitive. I'm glad I found it used; I was curious enough to buy it new.

Discs I've been listening to lately--a whole lot of Southern Lord material, like the new Earth disc. It's called Hex--or Printing in the Infernal Method. Along with a great title this disc finds Earth playing a reflective and spacious brand of slow-tempo rock; nothing like their earlier records, this one is composed and song-oriented rather than droning, blissed-out guitar work. The drumming is excellent and spare too. I picked up the new Twilight disc also. They're a black metal supergroup of sorts, featuring Malefic from Xasthur and Wrest from Leviathan along with 3 other black metallers from the USA. It's awesome. Lo-fi evil, claustrophobic production, and some of the coolest, most abstract, and most fucked-up vocal sounds around. The most recent Boris (Akuma no Uta) is OK, not as great as I'd hoped. They seem to be on a real Stooges kick on this disc; but my faves are the instrumentals that open and close the album. Both are doomy, drony, and intense. My favorite release by this excellent label was one from a few months back--a Chicago band called Lair of the Minotaur. Their disc Carnage is just great. Top shelf metal, referencing bands like High on Fire and Celtic Frost if you really had to name influences, but they write good songs on top of playing in a properly mean-spirited way. They get extra points in my book for using the Greek myths as the lyrical template of the album too.

Some other repeated listens of late include the new USAisamonster disc (Wohaw, Load Records), the new Pelican (the Fire in Our Throats... HydraHead Records), and the Spire: Live in Geneva Cathedral double disc on Touch Records. The last is a compilation with Fennesz, Philip Jeck, and BJ Nilsen using their laptops to wreak havoc on some amazing pipe organ source material. Also included are several organ works in full, performed by Charles Matthews and Marcus Davidson. It's pretty engrossing stuff; the long Philip Jeck piece in particular is excellent, while the Fennesz piece is also tremendous.

As far as books go in NYC, no place is better to the broke reader than the Strand. I've been grabbing books 3-4 at a time when I've been there lately, but usually spending less than $25. Recent good scores for me include Marzieh Gail's Avignon in Flower (1309-1403)--an entertaining study of the history of the Avignon papacy; Procopius' Secret History--a courtier and propagandistic historian of Byzantine emperor Justinian revenges himself upon the emperor and his wife by publishing a scandalous collection of fact and rumor after his own death; Philip Ziegler's the Black Death--a comprehensive overview of the details of the great plagues of 14th century Europe, still possessing merit though its 1970's-era conclusions as to the nature and causes of the plague have been somewhat discredited; Simon Winchester's Krakatoa and Korea--two outstanding books by the wildly erudite and verbose Mr. Winchester, which alternately find him investigating the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 and walking the length of the South Korean half of the Korean peninsula while digressing into countless historical and scientific anecdotes. Also snagged there recently were Bertrand Russell's the Problems of Philosophy--in which Mr. Russell attempts to take on various theories of knowledge; Richard Pipes' excellent history of early Russia entitled Russia under the Old Regime, which deals with the formation of Russia in the 12th and 13th centuries and its development into the tsarist state; and lastly, Orlando Figes' magnificent cultural study of Russia, Natasha's Dance.

Nothing beats cheap books and cheap music. Without them I could not live.

the Incredible Shrinking Format

2005-09-26T10:23:00.000-04:00

Recently my wife purchased a Nano IPod; while I must admit to being impressed with the spectacularly small size of the item I found that it raised some questions with me about the value of convenience and the role that music plays in the modern-day US.

For years, the preferred commercial method of listening to music involved the 12" longplaying vinyl record. I grew up during the heyday of the LP, and I was devoted to the format. The size of the LP was part of the fascination for me--it allowed for complex artwork and also gave more than enough space for recording credits and lyrics. The package could enhance the enjoyment of the sounds contained within and it also had the effect of presenting a unified piece of artwork that gave more significance to the individual piece of art itself rather than drawing unwarranted attention to the label or distribution network. Its size was undeniable; large collections, stored in milk cartons, had the heft of bricks and took up lots of space. Though incredibly popular in terms of mass consumption, the LP did not lend itself to portability, and individual records were something that required care and precise handling to maintain their optimal playing condition. The lack of portability became the first true sign of trouble for the format, and as car stereos began to multiply the LP began to lose some of its desirability in the eyes of the average music consumer.

With the car stereo, a new format was clearly necessary. The stability required to properly play LP records simply did not exist in the car, and the sheer size of LP's and their turntables also precluded their use in a moving vehicle. The first two attempts to make inroads into the market met with differing levels of success. The cassette tape simplified the bulky and semi-complicated reel-to-reel tape recorder greatly, and its size was infinitely more preferable to road warriors. That some fidelity was lost was not such a great concern--after all, who can hear every note in a complex piece of music while travelling 70 MPH with the windows down? Along with the cassette tape, a less successful invention came along to make driving and listening an easier task. The 8-track tape--clumsily split into four "programs" rather than 2 sides--had the disadvantage of disrupting the intended continuity of the album, while reducing the artwork to a cookie-cutter form that paid as much attention to the label that produced it as the artists who were responsible for creating the product in the first place. They were briefly popular during the 1970's in the US, and then they mercifully faded from the scene amid the scorn normally reserved for failed and dated technology. The cassette briefly triumphed as the top alternative to vinyl, and with the introduction of the walkman in 1980 or so it began to take a larger and larger share of the music market. Its tiny size made it the ultimate in portability; but along with its size came some sacrifices in terms of packaging, lyric sheets, and artwork. All were reduced by necessity, and as they began to pile up on the shelves of record stores everywhere their homogeneity began to feel claustrophobic to me. An aspect of an art form that was vibrant, challenging, expansive, and sometimes threatening was slowly being smothered by the uniformity of mass production.

From this point things began to get bad for our 12” LP format. Massive corporations that were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in profits began to complain that they weren’t making enough money from their various outlays of cash and perks. Relying upon the fans of the pop music market to determine who was really worthy of attention was a risky prospect; it meant that all of their product necessarily could not be counted on to be wildly successful. In fact, their narrowing of media outlets for music made once bankable acts into risky investments. The industry used the development of digital sound to solve its problems and strong-armed retailers into converting over to their format of choice. The industry could eliminate weighty, unwieldy, expensive, and easily damaged shipments to retailers with the new lightweight and smaller product; overall production was cheap relative to the cost of producing vinyl; and best of all, the new technology afforded media corporations the chance to increase the unit price of their product by roughly 55%. If listeners had to sacrifice the warmth of analog sound for the cold clarity of digital, then so be it. The same went for album graphics—smaller size meant less money spent in production.

After the digital overthrow, the next big step was the IPod. No graphics, not even full albums—people collected single songs again if they wanted. The biggest advantage to them of course was their small size and massive memory. But even this invention has recently been tinkered with twice (in the form of the Nano and the Shuffle) to make it ever more infinitesimal, ever more insignificant. It is symbolic of a reduction in the overall importance of music; while I am not equating modes of delivery with the actual experience of listening to music, the Nano’s miniscule size simply makes me uncomfortable. The LP record to me represented the majestic potential of music, whether the artwork was enigmatic and mysterious or direct and wordy. The IPod’s faceless reductionism (while somewhat egalitarian in its anonymity) oversimplifies the act of listening for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I always liked the ritual of playing albums or disc. Taking care of the LPs and discs was a method of tribute, a sign of respect. What the IPod is doing to other formats of music is something that will eventually occur with books and newspapers, as art and all other forms of media become the property of cyberspace. It does make me somewhat nostalgic, though…but all in all, I can’t wait for my wife to get the car adaptor for the Nano so I don’t have to bring so many CDs in the car next time. I guess I’m just a hypocrite at heart.

Renaming FEMA

2005-09-12T10:45:00.000-04:00

After the disastrous performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of the Deep South Hurricane of 2005, it has been suggested by some that the agency be removed from the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security. Additionally, the cabinet-level post the office held under the Clinton administration will possibly be restored. I propose in the spirit of the Bush administration that the agency be completely renamed, so that the stain of history's judgment against them for their disgraceful efforts to "rescue" American citizens in New Orleans might be forgotten. Here are some potential new names that have the benefit of using the same acronym as the agency, so they don't have to throw out any of those cool t-shirts or windbreakers or baseball caps that were made at taxpayers' expense.....

FEMA--Failure to Evacuate Many Americans
FEMA--Faith-based Eschatology, Meticulously Applied
FEMA--Families that Earn More are Airlifted
FEMA--Fascist Emetics Made Available
FEMA--Flagrantly Evil Military Attaches
FEMA--Friends Elevated, without Much Ability
FEMA--Free Eugenics Methodology Application
FEMA--Fundamentally Egotistical Macho Assholes
FEMA--Fuck Everybody, Move Away

Within these new titles, the American government's philosopy of rescue is clearly expressed. Such clarity of mission can only help the new, reconstituted FEMA to do its job better next time. Whatever job that is, I mean.

Noise Maelstroms and Scandinavian Psychedelia

2005-09-09T09:26:00.000-04:00

There are few things more enjoyable to me as a music fan than being totally and unexpectedly blown away by an unfamiliar band's live show. Through all my years of seeing bands, it is a constant that remains; oftentimes these sets are some of the most memorable performances I've ever seen. I saw Mudhoney in 1988 opening for Sonic Youth in such a fashion and still cherish the memory today; other surprise ass-kickings I've experienced include such luminaries as Oneida, Storm & Stress, and the Sun City Girls. Last Tuesday night at the NYC Knitting Factory I had another one of these blissful evenings, as a diverse bill of noise and psychedelia unfolded featuring Japanese noise godfather Merzbow, Double Leopards, Jim O'Rourke/Carlos Giffoni, and Finnish psych warlords Circle.

Naturally, my friend and I arrived too late to see Double Leopards--which is an ongoing problem for me (see the Sir Richard Bishop post for clarification)--getting there right as the band finished their droning set. O'Rourke and Giffoni then took the stage, on laptops and pedals, and proceeded to unleash a barrage of noise. Similar in tone to Merzbow's work, their sounds burst like shells through the PA. I found their set tedious--intermittently interesting, but brought down by the derivative nature of the material. There are lots of bands doing what they did that night, but doing it better--artists like Pita, Neon Hunk, and Prurient come to mind, as well as the master Merzbow. Piercing and jarring tones predominated, but in a genre where artists like Hair Police and Wolf Eyes speak in their own distinct musical idiom, the duo seemed like their best tones had been borrowed from other people. Giffoni's "I'm such a busy laptop guy" act wore on me, as he exaggerated his gestures in a lame attempt to show the crowd how intense and into it he was. Their set ran about a half hour and then Circle took the stage.

Circle has been around since 1991; they are from Finland; and their music is a unique amalgam of Krautrock bands like Neu! and Can, jazzy psychedelia in the vein of Beefheart or (gulp!) the Grateful Dead, and the grinding black metal of Scandinavian homeboys like Darkthrone or Immortal. If that doesn't sound like a contradictory collection of influences, I don't know what does--but what is so surprising about this band is that it all works so well. My only previous experience with them came from a friend of mine, who owned a copy of 2002's Sunrise; it seemed to me to combine a healthy love for the psychedelic trance groove along with 70's arena rock. Vocals sometimes bordered on the operatically silly and tasteless, but the band's approach to their influences was both loving and irreverent. The ultimate result was a really cool record, I thought, so when my friend laid it on me that Circle was coming to the Knit I thought that it behooved us to attend.

The band came out--a drummer, guitarist, bassist, and keyboardist/singer. The singer was dressed in jeans, a wife-beater, suspenders, glasses with those annoying "transition" lenses, and the type of leather cap that Al Pacino wore in the movie Cruising. The bassist seemed to be about 7 feet tall, and he looked like a hippie who had accidentally purchased a metal fan's bass. I was immediately worried that I had wasted my whole evening. My fears were unfounded; the set opened with a long piece that started quietly with a very 70's sounding synth riff and then progressed into a psychedelic epic. The whole set consisted of 5 songs--the first and last numbers were in the 15-20 minute range, while the middle 3 were taut swinging mechanical Krautrock, gleaming with metal tinges. In the last song the keyboardist abruptly switched to a second drum kit, using his vocal mic to mic the kit. There was a slight delay on the mic that sounded good on his vox, but added a shifting and shimmering texture to the drumbeat he was playing. While basically doubling what the main drummer played, the delay made it slightly dubbed out. Another totally unexpected touch from these guys. After they finished playing I grabbed two of their discs--Forest and Tulikoira--and found out the next day that the set they played consisted of 3 tunes from these discs, the two longest included. Their simplicity was deceptive, and for a band that favors the mechanical styles of the Germans of the 1970's they possess a feel to their groove that is uncanny (no pun intended). Overall it was a great set.

Merzbow then cleaned out my sinus canals with a dark and brooding piece. I lasted maybe 40 minutes before I figured I'd beat the crowd to the bathroom and head out. His music was much more restrained than the O'Rourke/Giffoni duo, using more time to develop some of the sonic textures that he employed. His sound was mean and nasty, huge ringing bass tones mixed in with harsh squeals and static bursts--denser than Wolf Eyes. Merzbow's antiseptic stage presence was a welcome contrast to the showiness of Giffoni; as much more complex tonalities surged around him he allowed himself a brief smile near the 30-minute mark. The crowd up front was going nuts; they seemed like worshippers finally experiencing the presence of their divinity. His set was great too but finally it just wore me out. After the oddball melodicism and pure rock belief demonstrated by Circle, Merzbow was a harsh opposite extreme. As far as laptoppers go though, it was an engaging and brutally effective set...I'd see him again for sure.

So in review--I went out, got drunk, got high, and got my ass kicked unexpectedly. One of those great nights out. Additionally, Circle is playing what should be a cool show at the Hook in Brooklyn on 9-17; also on the bill are Khanate, Coptic Light, and Mouthus.

Is This the New Teleology?

2005-09-04T13:22:00.000-04:00

"It's all part of God's plan." We've all heard this platitude, usually expressed in tones of voice intended to soothe a questioning, frightened, or raging psyche. It is usually uttered after disasters natural or man-made as an attempt to make sense of the suffering of those who do not deserve to suffer, to try to answer one of the oldest questions that humanity has ever struggled with--why do horrible things happen to innocent people?

Most worshippers of God consider God to be omnipotent and omniscient. This conception of God endows God with the ability to do anything anywhere in the universe. Taken in conjunction with the assertion that God is not evil, this idea of the divine requires that God must manifest itself in good actions rather than disruptive, senseless, and evil actions. If there is a desire within the Godhead for goodness, there must be, by implication, some sort of divine master plan for the development of life in the universe, according to those who believe. As lowly humans, we are simply too self-absorbed, or distracted, or mortal to truly understand what this plan entails.

It has become acceptable in recent years to ascribe everything from a football team's playoff comeback to a child's high score on a test to the divine plan. In this particular conception the all-powerful God manages to weave together strands of prayer and good intentions with natural disasters like hurricanes and volcanic eruptions and man-made disasters like war and political repression in order to keep humanity's forward progress going towards the ultimate, hidden end. These sentiments are typically self-centered and have no basis in reality. The universe is a testament to the power of dumb luck; and if you are familiar with the concept of the multiverse the idea of a deity that intervenes on behalf of the chosen supplicant becomes even more ludicrous.

Christianity's teleological viewpoint is of course shared by other major religions, though with a slightly different perspective. The fundamentalist Islamic movement undoubtedly views an event like Hurricane Katrina as divine justice for a war of invasion, the same way that fundamentalist Christians must view the Baghdad bridge stampede as divine payback for resisting the supposed truth of the Christian faith. Other Americans might view the hurricane in a more negative light, viewing it as yet another example of the way in which the planet is revenging itself upon a population of mercantile polluters. As the number of natural disasters increases in the next few years, look for some kind of spin from somebody somewhere to claim that the increase in disasters proves that God is either wrathful or pleased with the results.

In the US, the new teleology has been dealt a heavy blow, as the destruction of New Orleans has proven that nature can always devise new and unexpected means of making human beings suffer and die. I wonder if those who claim that God's hand is seen in all things on this planet can say that the murders of children at the Superdome served a purpose. Or perhaps they can piously declare that the sewage and debris slowly curdling in the water in the late summer sun, turning ever more lethal by the hour, illustrates God's perfection. Of course, this new teleology has another function--it helps its practitioners to rationalize away all forms of suffering endured by their fellow humans, especially those who are in different economic strata from themselves. It's all part of the feel-good divisiveness encouraged by the saved/unsaved dichotomy of religious fundamentalism.

Existence is without meaning or plan, unless we ourselves invest it with such ideas. To accept this idea is to reject the New Primitivism of the modern fundamentalists. To live comfortably with this idea is to accept your individual responsibility for your own life; not such a radical sentiment, of course, but one that many people find frightening. So much so that they rush into the arms of repressive and irrational systems of belief.

Khanate and the Sounds of Despair

2005-08-31T09:23:00.000-04:00

Khanate has been around since 2001, when Stephen O'Malley and James Plotkin combined forces with Alan Dubin and Tim Wyskida. This quartet has released 3 discs to date, each more dense and fucked-up than what came before, and with the new Capture and Release disc they assume the throne of the most disturbingly bleak band in the world. Primarily concerning themselves with rumbling tonality and the distorted harmonics produced by massive amplification, their music alternates between the enveloping ambience of O'Malley's other project SUNN O)))) and Melvins-type crawling tempos to create a new form of American music. Tangentially associated with metal, this band is far more adventurous in its song structure to be pegged as such. They are a totally unique band--uncompromising and subtle, while creating some of the most defiantly uncommercial music that I have ever heard.

The aural virus began to spread for me after the self-titled 2001 release. The first time I saw them was with a friend of mine at Pianos in NYC in 2002 on a bill with the Microwaves and Vincebus Eruptum. The bill was a little strange--Microwaves were excellent but have very little to do with metal or metal influence, and Vincebus Eruptum was horrible, just horrible--and when Khanate took the stage I was not sure what to expect. They proceeded to play an hour-long set that featured material from the (at the time) upcoming Things Viral disc. I found their music to be difficult to handle, both overwhelmingly loud and distressingly disjointed. When I cannot figure out a band after seeing them live it intrigues me, so I snagged a copy of the first record on my way out of the club. In the days that followed I listened to the disc almost every day, and it grew on me like skin cancer, adhering itself to my brain with repeated listens. I loved the sound of the band--it was restrained yet remarkably powerful, and the singer's demented and anguished vocals played much more of a role in the recorded material than they did live. Guitarist O'Malley serves as the ringleader, laying down detuned chunks of riffs while bassist Plotkin doesn't play so much as ooze low-end hums and buzzes from his bass rig. Drummer Wyskida plays more sparingly than the Melvins' Dale Crover, sitting out for large spaces while the amps surge around him. Lyrically they are obsessive, with despairing imagery that deals with such light topics as murder, alienation, and suicide. In pieces like No Joy vocalist Dubin spits out impressionistic and simple phrases; other songs like the unsettling Torching Koroviev and Skin Coat feature bizarre and disorienting vocal effects that only add to the sensations of creeping madness.

2003 saw the release of the excellent Things Viral. Load Records released one of the songs as a 12"--the cleverly titled Dead--and the other 3 pieces are loooooong, with 2 nearly reaching the 20-minute mark. Dubin takes more of a leading role on this disc as his lyrics on songs like Commuted and Fields propel the music into deeper regions of the infernal world. Clipped phrases like "follow, stare, erase" and shrieks of "RED GLORY" pop out of the mix and help create what must be the first album ever made from the point of view of a serial murderer. Truly disturbing stuff. Compared to the unyielding bleakness of the first two pieces, Dead comes off like a pop song--instead of committing the acts that lead up to the object's death, this narrative comes from the point of view of a corpse. Great lines, too--"I was...not worth knowing...visible, awful, but not seen..."--that all add up to a healthy, disorienting dose of paranoia. One of the marks of this band's uniqueness is that this second full-length pissed off many a doom-metal fan; in fact it was considered by many fans of the genre to be too bleak and unrelenting. There are no hooks, no steady beats, only the ravings of Dubin in counterpoint to the staggering, jarring interjections of O'Malley's guitar and the thick malovelence of Plotkin's bass. The overall effect of this is to create a spacious, huge sound that moves like waves of oily sludge. I saw them live on the tour for this record at Northsix and they were incredible. The band has a stage presence that perfectly suits the music, turning away from their audience to commune with their amplifiers. It's beautiful stuff.

After this punishing masterwork, where would Khanate go from there? The new release (the band's first for HydraHead) seems to travel on familiar territory--two very long pieces, one 18.13 in length, the other 25.03--with lots of references to time spent with corpses, hunting, and pulling things apart and having the residue stick to your hands. Even the main guitar figures of the two songs (Capture and Release) seem to reference other, earlier songs like Dead and Fields. What has changed on this disc is the sheer expanse of the music. The spare amp buzz that begins the second piece (Release) could almost qualify as ambient, as rich, deep bass tones create a slow-moving current of sound. The band has refined itself further on this outing, staying more in the vein of the material on Things Viral than going back to the first disc. Total ensemble discipline is on full display here, as each musician uses his instrument to paint dark clouds of distortion and rhythm while not drawing attention away from the unity of the band. The compositional style keys off of the vocals much more than in the past, and Dubin is steadily emerging as one of the most unique vocalists in the genre. His voice is harsh but not guttural, screamy but not barking, and his use of effects on his voice helps create an extra psychedelic texture for the music. In general, this release opens up their sound a little bit, making them less claustrophobic without removing any of the weirdness that makes them such a singular band.

To say that Khanate is a band without precedent would be hyperbolic; they are, however, one of the most original bands in rock music in the last 25 years. Nobody sounds like these guys. And nobody could, even if they tried.

A Fatwa from the 700 Club

2005-08-23T14:05:00.000-04:00

Can the religious right be stopped? Can they even be censured for their actions? Pat Robertson obviously doesn't think so. This Christian scam artist and professional shithead now feels entitled to call for the assassination of an international leader. Where does his temerity come from? Has he no fear of reprisal? Of course not. Mr. Robertson performed a valuable service to the Bush clan during the primaries of 2000 by pitching in with a bucket of tar for Senator John McCain, helping to slander McCain and paint a picture of him as a dangerously unbalanced freak. Much like Karl Rove, Robertson is now untouchable. His public plea for the death of Hugo Chavez is despicable but it may serve one important function--that of ripping the mask of decency off of the face of the evangelical Christian movement.

Pat Robertson has long been an embarrassment to this nation. His 700 Club requires its members to donate $700 before they can consider themselves truly nestled in the bosom of Christ, despite the fact that the early Christians never charged anyone to join their Church. As if such actions are not contradictory to the precepts he allegedly practices, Mr. Robertson now feels comfortable enough in his self-appointed position as political mover and shaker to call for the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Oddly enough, my copy of the bible doesn't include the gospel where Jesus Christ begins sanctioning hits on other countries' democratically elected presidents, but perhaps I haven't read the text as literally as I should have.

The US attempted to depose Chavez shortly after his election in 2002. When they failed to do so after the Venezuelan people took to the streets to defend the integrity of their political processes, he became a marked man in the eyes of the Bush administration. The combination of Chavez' daring and his country's massive oil supplies makes his defiance towards the US even more admirable. Now, mysteriously, a man who once was the public face of a smear campaign orchestrated by Karl Rove suddenly appears in the middle of this international dustup, making inflammatory statements about a White House enemy. Coincidence? I don't think so....

Robertson appears to have taken a page from the Bush playbook on absurd political linkage. He claims that Chavez' regime in Venezuela is turning the country into "a launching pad for Communist infiltration and Muslim extremism". If this statement is analyzed for even one second its absurdity is revealed--how many atheistic Communists are likely to throw in with Islamic fundamentalists, whose anthropomorphic Allah haunts their every step? How many Jihadists would be willing to work with those who reject the Koran in favor of Marx and Engels? There is not a nation in the world that could withstand the pressures of ideologies that conflict so severely, let alone export this particular brand of revolution beyond their own national borders. The level of absurdity almost matches that created by the braintrust at the Bush White House when they linked secular powermonger Saddam Hussein with ascetic millionaire Islamic fundamentalist Osama Bin Laden.

Calling for someone's murder is not something that a religious leader should ever do. It's that simple. It does not matter whether the offender is Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. It is a moral disgrace for a purportedly religious leader to behave like this. But Pat Robertson is no ordinary Christian soldier. This is a man who has unceasingly fought a war of ignorance by demeaning the achievements of science and technology; a man who equates feminism with baby-killing; a man who has called for the abolition of Halloween due to its hidden Satanic subtext. In short, Pat Robertson is a lunatic--but a well-funded and well-organized one. His money and his organization should not be able to insulate him from a massive fine. The FCC should hit him, and hit him hard. But like Karl Rove and Kenneth Lay before him, Robertson will probably escape with no more than a slap on the wrist for his foolishness.

How is it that the teachings of a 2000-year old peaceful and semi-nomadic carpenter from the Middle East can be twisted into such horrible shapes? Are Christian values really given full expression with the execution of criminals? the starting of wars? or by calling for assassinations? And if this is an example of religion in action, why the fuck does anyone believe in it?

A New Adjective

2005-08-21T10:33:00.000-04:00

Bill Frist and intelligent design....strange bedfellows. A doctor, trained at the highest levels of the American university system, now sees fit to reject that knowledge and declare himself in favor of a primitive form of mythological allegory. The good doctor is now in favor of the ridiculous rather than the rational because of his desire to expose people to the "broad range of fact, of science, including faith". An occasion like this requires more than just ironic putdowns or the odd sarcastic comment. It requires a new adjective.

I propose that the word "Fristian" enter the American idiom. The word itself would refer to any person who bargains away their personal integrity for short-term access to power. Similar in feel and tone to the word "Faustian", this word would also be used to help illustrate the potentially painful consequences involved in immoral compromise. Unlike the tragic central figure in Goethe's masterwork (whose deal with the infernal brings self-destruction), the Fristian individual manages to succeed in their various intellectual charades due to a combination of Mesmer's techniques and a paralyzing blandness. Other indicators of Fristian characteristics involve a strong tendency towards sanctimonious pronouncements and a willingness to ignore scientific fact in order to agree with your boss.

One day, GW Bush may decide that the sun rises out of his closet at the ranch in Crawford, TX; he may say that his preacher recommends using ice cream for deodorant; or perhaps he may arrive at the conclusion that anthrax tastes better in coffee than sugar. Either way he can be confident that the Senate's Doctor will back up his claims. Harvard Medical School must be very proud to have such an alumnus, one who feels entitled to readily dismiss the sciences of geology and anthropology in order that he might assure himself of the potential votes of millions of mental defectives when he seeks higher office.

If Jonathan Swift Ran Baseball, or Another Modest Proposal

2005-08-13T19:36:00.000-04:00

Charles Bukowski once said that there was no lower form of writing than sportswriting; on his ladder above them were such practitioners of banalities as advertising copywriters and propagandists. With that little reminder stated at the outset, it's time for a few thoughts on baseball. I grew up a baseball fan and an inveterate baseball card collector, and memorized statistics like a maniac when I was young. Like most observers I became a little suspicious of the inflated homerun numbers of the 1990's, but never ascribed to the relentlessly publicized theory that all of this offensive production was due to illicit chemical help in the form of steroids. And even with all of the recent positive tests, I still do not believe that steroids were primarily responsible for the explosion of offense over the past 15 seasons. As a physical activity, hitting a baseball is a skill that does not necessarily depend on freakish physiques or ox-like strength. In many ways baseball is the least athletic of all the major American sports; hitters' talents are a unique combination of vision, decisivenss, and hand-eye coordination. But since most sportswriters behave like megaphones (preferring the town crier approach to disseminate information rather than attempting to examine issues carefully and rationally), they have not analyzed the statistics or examined the rush to construct new ballparks, or closely studied the effects of expansion on the quality of talent in the major leagues. After all, why analyze when you can sensationalize?

The most serious complaint aimed at the steroid users is that the advantages given to them by their use of performance-enhancing drugs were advantages that baseball players of years past could not have enjoyed, since the technology did not exist until the 1970's or 1980's. This statement is hard to disagree with--one of the major appeals of sports and games is their egalitarianism, where pure athletic talent determines the place that each athlete holds within their sport--and compared to the conventional wisdom on steroid use by athletes, this contention is quite valid, as it calls into question the old Bart Giamatti phrase about "the integrity of baseball". The result of all of this is that many ex-players, announcers, and baseball writers are now proposing that the statistical records of those caught with their hands in the drug jar should be stricken from the baseball record books. Bonds, McGwire, Palmeiro, Sosa and the like would be driven from their current elite statistical positions into some weird villainous limbo, sharing space with Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson and Denny McLain in baseball's hall of shame. In the spirit of Mr. Giamatti's interpretation of actions that jeopardize the integrity of the game, I would like to follow the logic contained within the instrumentalist approach recounted above and strictly apply it to the game of baseball.

If steroids provide an unfair advantage, then all statistics prior to 1947 must be dismissed as having been compiled in an unfair situation. Jackie Robinson's arrival as the first African-American pro baseball player signifies the beginning of true competition in the game, since all black ballplayers were prevented from participating in the major leagues. Included in this ban were Latino ballplayers whose skin tone was too uncomfortably dark for the tastes of the white racists who ran baseball like Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis or NY Yankees' GM/President George Weiss, or racist players like Dixie Walker and Ty Cobb. Every major league player prior to 1947 competed in a league that demonstrably did not field the best possible teams that could be assembled from the existing available talent. Such actions indicate that baseball's executive management tinkered with the integrity of the game for decades.

Another unfair advantage enjoyed by the players of today is medical treatment. Surgical procedures are much less invasive than in the 1950's, and injuries that once ended careers (such as torn rotator cuffs and torn knee or elbow ligaments) are now dealt with arthroscopically; players return quicker than ever from these once-feared operations. Additonally, anti-inflammatory and painkilling medications are much improved since the days of the 1950's; these too represent unfair advantages. I propose that any player with a weight room in his house for offseason training should also be viewed with suspicion, since none of the men from baseball's glory years of the 50's and 60's ever had enough money to afford such physical training advantages. Nutritional supplements also must be counted as offenders against the integrity of the game, since they were never used by the players of the 1950's. They may be more similar to the patent medicines of the 1880's and 1890's, but their prevalence today is clearly unfair to the players of years past. Such advantages translate into expulsion from the record books, as we continue to follow the exclusionists' logic.

It doesn't end there, either--there are obvious advantages in methods of travel compared to 50 years ago. Airplanes have improved and are now used to make even short trips. Needless to say, train travel was not quite as luxurious or speedy--so the player of today gets more rest on the road and consequently may be counted on to perform at a higher level. This extra rest must be seen as an unfair advantage, so any player who flies from New York City to Boston or vice-versa must have their statistics disallowed. Valid statistics after airplane travel would only count after long flights, such as a Los Angeles-to-Washington, DC jaunt.

In my view there is no greater advantage enjoyed by the modern baseball player than their money. Such economic security allows the 21st-century ballplayer to take the winter off, which never occurred before the onset of the free agency period. Players from the 1950's and 1960's had to get jobs in the offseason and therefore could not devote the time to keep themselves in peak physical condition like many do today. With less money in their pockets, the players also were subject to such unusual conditions as stress from poor financial situations. They were working stiffs, comparatively--and this must obviously be viewed as an unfair advantage. There is no such fear in the mind of the modern baseball player, as guaranteed contracts ensure financial prosperity even in the case of physical ruin. All statistics compiled by players making more than 300% of the national average workers' salary must also be dismissed, since they were compiled in conditions of unfair advantage.

So after the strict application of exclusionary logic we are left with the following result: there are no valid statistics in baseball. No Babe Ruth, no Hank Aaron, no Pete Rose, no Joe Carter. Not even wins and losses, or championships either. All that's left are a bunch of people paying a lot of money to go see events that might be construed to have the same competitive validity as professional wrestling. Is that what the alleged purists wish for?

Since 1985 there have been 21 new ballparks added to the rolls in major league baseball. With the exception of Seattle, Florida, San Diego, Arizona, and Detroit every single one of these new stadiums have been hitters' ballparks. Add in the fact that such pitcher-friendly parks as the Houston Astrodome and Comiskey Park vanished in favor of sluggers' havens and it is easy to see where the offensive explosion came from. As these smaller ballparks began to spring up, MLB decided to help the hitters even more by adding four new teams--which in turn allowed 40-44 pitchers who weren't big league quality to become big leaguers. It is a simple explanation but a correct one, which is why the national sports media prefers to focus on the more sensational topic of drug use. Steroids help these players recover faster from the grind of a 162-game season, but in my mind that's the most help that they offer. The skills required to hit and pitch in the major leagues must already be there for a player to prosper; they cannot be purchased in pill or liquid form.

So now that I've dabbled in the lowest form of writing, I need to take a shower. I feel unclean.