TINAFTS

The songs that are stuck in my head are now quite high-caliber.

2008-11-15T22:41:00.004-06:00

"Another Day," Jaga Jazzist

"Love Will Destroy Us In The End," Hefner

"Step Into My Office, Baby," Belle & Sebastian

"Nothing Much To Lose," My Bloody Valentine

"The City," the Dismemberment Plan

"French Film Blurred," Wire

"Miss You," the Rolling Stones

Thank God that Clear Channel lost the contract to run the radio station that is broadcasting thoughts into my head.

DEAR GOD MAKE THE BLANKS GO AWAY

2008-10-28T19:53:00.002-05:00

I warnt all y'all.

Once again I have plagiarized popular music for my blanks. This time the music I have plagiarized was written in English. Therefore I have not provided the names of the original artists. If you can do so, I will give you a cookie. If you can do so but your blank answers suck, it will be a Hydrox.

Let's go:

Rich will _______ and _______ his play. He might forget _______, but this is what it said: "_______."

If you're looking for me, I'll be ________, with the _______ in my pocket, _______ into the sea.

It really, really could _______. When the days _______, just _______.

I can't even explain. I'm _______, and it doesn't even fit me. Write my own name? Someone else may have _______.

You disappeared, your _______. _______'s not that far away. It could be _______.

_______ at night to paint the house _______.

We could talk ourselves into ______ before anyone realized _______.

Just like a _______, so many ways to set me _______.

The cop's walkie-talkie squawks: "_______!" We've got to _______ -- it looks like that broker _______.

VOTED

2008-10-24T17:54:00.002-05:00

I went down to the Hennepin County Government Center and voted today. Glad to get that out of the way. Finally I can recede back into the general American morass of know-nothing political apathy, and not a moment too soon.

My respite is only momentary. I'm skipping school on Election Day, like a lot of people 'round here, to participate in efforts to keep the Republicans from hijacking the electoral process and disenfranchising minorities, college kids, and the poor.

I've worked as a pollwatcher in the past, during the last presidential election. My posting schedule is so erratic that you can probably see my posts about that somewhere down this very page. This time, though, I actually get to do something that may count. See, every political party is entitled to post an official "Challenger" at every polling place in Minnesota. The Republicans are going to use the opportunity to try to knock out every registered voter who even looks vaguely like an Obama supporter the second they show up at the polls. The DFL meanwhile is going to make sure that everyone who has the right to vote gets to use it.

They haven't told me where they're sending me yet. Fingers crossed for Thief River Falls.

STUCK IN HEAD. FOR A WEEK. ME NO SLEEP. ME NO REST.

2008-10-19T20:22:00.004-05:00

The songs stuck in my head lately have been of a slightly higher caliber (on average).

"Mindreader," Sebadoh

"Bad Song," James Kochalka Superstar

"Heart of Glass," Blondie

"Blitzkrieg Bop," the Ramones

"Kiss Me Deadly," Lita Ford

"Got Your Money," Old Dirty Bastard feat. Kelis

"Build Me Up Buttercup," the Foundations / "I'm Going To Buy You A Gun," Dismemberment Plan (medley)

"Echo's Answer," Broadcast

"Big Brother," David Bowie

"Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong," Kenny Loggins and Kim Carnes (?)

More blanks.

2008-10-19T17:35:00.003-05:00

OH COME ON, THAT'S TOO EASY. I'm not even going to bother subverting _______ of the original _______.

Having someone jump off of Gtalk the moment you message them is the new _______.

Being _______ about the implications of the above is the old _______.

Have you ever tried _______ for a _______ fan? It's especially difficult when your _______ is full of _______ alienation and anomie.

Custom blanks on a bizarre theme.

2008-10-17T17:53:00.003-05:00

Post-coffee Dr. Pepper is the new _______.

"_______," said the Doctor. "Unfortunately, we can't afford to be caught testing the new formula out on humans."

Staring into the _______ of the stock photograph of cold black coffee, I had an epiphany: Skunks are really _______.

With the _______'s beady, purple eyes staring back at me, I had no choice. _______ in hand, I raced to the vending machine.

I will keep writing blanks until they get filled in.

2008-10-14T15:00:00.002-05:00

These blanks are based on translations of German rock lyrics.

I am the _______ of forgiving and forgetting. Schwermut Forest, "Gästecouch"

From my window, it starts to move: A new day ______. Another day on which I must get up, in order to __________. Blumfeld, "Draußen auf Kaution"

I speak no _______ to the end. I hear _______ the way they are pronounced. What I have left to say would _______ a cigarette factory. Brüllen, "Laufe Blau"

Destroyed. Destroyed. Please, think about _______. Destroyed. Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, "Alles ist Gut"

You are arrogant and ignorant. I find that _____. Stereo Total, "Ich liebe dich, Alexander"

And between between two _______ or two or three shots please, four shots, three four. Kante, "Einigen wir uns auf die Zukunft"

I have more of these. Just test me.

2008-10-12T17:29:00.002-05:00

-_____ is the new recording a mixtape for _______ who will never _____.
-"The _____," they called him. Probably ______.
-The Harmon Doctrine in its limited historical context was not a _____.
-I'm working on a new nonfiction coffee table book that compiles the pet peeves and bad habits of important historical figures. I worry that it won't really help to further humanize _____ when people find out that _____.

Is it a blanks game if nobody fills them in?

2008-10-02T08:37:00.002-05:00

I don't think we should be so quick to _______. I mean, I'm not seeing a _____ here!

There is no other way to _______ the way I ________ it. I _____ so much you thought I _____.

Before he died, he drew an arrow on ________, connecting _________ to ________. That proves __________.

I would have forgotten how it all came to this, but instead I am finally _____.

No, _________, no! Not on the _________!

Another one of these high-mental-rotation top tens

2008-09-07T15:49:00.003-05:00

These are the songs that have been stuck in my head for the past seven days. No particular order.

"Peg," Steely Dan

"No Scrubs," TLC

"Fuck and Run," Liz Phair

"Take It To The Limit," The Eagles

"Rock'n Me," Steve Miller Band

"Taking Care of Business," Bachman-Turner Overdrive

"Waiting for the Man," David Bowie or possibly Lou Reed doing a David Bowie impression

"Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" Jet

"Cup and Saucer," Bent Leg Fatima*

So now it's your turn.

___________________
*Technically this isn't caught in my head; the drum break in the middle is the rhythm I default to when I grind my teeth.

TLJ CONTUNES TO TALK SHIT.

2008-08-06T13:51:00.006-05:00

Tinyluckygenius is all posting shit about the Chicago weather. That's the problem with the scene these days, frankly. Weather photographs.

It's the perfect event for you Chicago scenesters, frankly. It fails to affect anything outside of a fifteen mile radius from Wicker Park, it's over with in about an hour, and you can post pretty pictures of it so you can make the rest of America feel left out.

It's New York envy is what it is.

Decreasingly relevant pop culture review part CCXV

2007-12-06T18:56:00.000-06:00

Now I am listening to "Do You Love Coffee?"

It is not about coffee.

It is about a girl.

Who knew?

Decreasingly relevant pop culture review part CCXIV

2007-12-06T18:52:00.001-06:00

Right now I am listening to Braid's "I'm Glowing And You're The Reason" off of their 1999 singles/rarities collection Movie Music. I didn't really realize it before, but on paying closer attention to the lyrics it is not a love song, or a song about a girl.

It is about nuclear war. "It's snowing out of season/And you're the reason." Geddit?

You need to go die.

2007-09-27T09:18:00.000-05:00

Local music "journalists".

Ron Paul hippies.

Pirates, ninjas and zombies.

Cokeheads.

Misbehaving celebrities.

People who devote attention to celebrity misbehavior.

Bill O'Reilly.

Ironic metal "fans".

That is all.

Go us.

2007-05-31T12:02:00.000-05:00

I would just like to take this opportunity to mention that the United States government has by now created the reasonable expectation in the minds of people the world over that at any point, for any reason, and without warning, America could kidnap them and sneak them off to a lifetime of torment.

Yeah, I said "lifetime of torment". Explain to me how that's not an exaggeration.

At long last, the funniest cartoon short ever.

2007-05-31T08:57:00.000-05:00

This aired in the early 1990s as part of MTV's Liquid Television show. Finally, somebody put the damn thing on the Internet.

It's also available on Youtube, but I don't recommend looking there because a) the video quality is inferior; and b) the comments thread, as usual, is a heated argument between two different kinds of totally wrong (HINT: It's a funny cartoon, kids. It is not an endorsement of fascism; nor is it in any way "deep").

I have a question for you all.

2007-05-21T13:00:00.000-05:00

First some background:

1. Matthew Rothschild's article in The Progressive.
2.Text of Bush administration ukaz.
3.Sourcewatch.
4.Federation of American Scientists' summary of Clinton-era equivalent ("PDD-67").
5.1999 FEMA "Federal Preparedness Circular".

Does this directive mean what everyone is clearly worried it means?

Is the worrying part an innovation over and beyond PDD-67 (#4, the Clinton version of #2)?

My thoughts: Second question first: Although the fas.org summary of PDD-67 doesn't address the issue, the text of the "Preparedness Circular" (#5) implies that the problem addressed in the PDD, solutions to which the FPS is intended to implement, was considered only as it applied to the Executive Branch. Agree/disagree?

Moving on to the first question: Bush's ukaz (#2) applies explicitly to all three branches of government, including the Legislative and Judicial branches over which he Constitutionally has only limited powers that don't look like they ought to even apply in a catastrophe. What kind of power does he imagine that he can therefore hijack with his decree? Given the candymouthed attitude of this administration toward the Constitution, is the appearance of "Constitutional" in this decree more windowdressing, just grandfathered in from earlier presidents' similar statements? Does he actually imagine that he can arrogate to himself the power to direct the other two branches of government, that is, to make new laws and abridge old ones? No, don't answer that. The real question: Does this look enforceable to you?

I would also like to point out that the range of circumstances in which earlier presidents' directives of this nature were intended to apply were: nuclear war with the Soviets. The current directive is intended to come into force for "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions," not defining "extraordinary levels" or "severely". Translation: Nearly anything, anywhere, as long as it's scary enough. This is quite a step down in magnitude from Global Thermonuclear War.

Friday Night - Fuck Or Fight!

2007-03-19T21:23:00.000-05:00

I was at the Triple Rock with Chris the other day in order to catch the Red Sparowes show when I heard one of the opening acts (William Elliot Whitmore) announce that "Friday Night - Fuck Or Fight! That's my motto!"

I thought, sure, but isn't going to cut into the rest of the week? Clearly he's never heard any of these gems:

*Monday Night - Make Out or Melee!
*Tuesday Night - Tussle or Tussle!
*Wednesday Night - Work It or Warfare!
*Thursday Night - Throw Off All Yer Clothing or Throw Down!
*Saturday Night - Screw or Scuffle!
*Sunday Night - It's The Sabbath! What The Hell Do You Think You're Doing!? Go Home And Think About What You've Done!

I know they don't rhyme. Fuck you. It was bad enough coming up with euphemisms to fit the alliterative scheme, as you can well see.

The Slats, Boom Patrol

2007-03-19T20:42:00.000-05:00

The other day I was driving through downtown St. Paul, trying to familiarize myself with the area considering that it's now a virtual certainty that I'm moving to the Twin Cities in the near future (didn't get into Harvard, didn't get funding at UC-Berkeley, decided that I'd sleep better at night actively working to improve the future than digging into the past anyway), listening to 770 AM, "Radio K", the UMN student radio station.

Eventually, after some crappo jug band, I stumbled upon something pretty damn awesome. The song I heard was not identified until some minutes later, after I had pulled into the parking lot of a conveniently-placed Cheapo Records location to wait for it.

The lyric was seemingly written by someone unfamiliar with the idea of the cellular telephone, not to mention the lesson of Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny" (that is, don't put real telephone numbers in your songs -- in this case it's 319-1234); together with the production, stylisms, and a certain amateurishness of musicianship it all pointed to a long-lost one-shot single of early-80s vintage (it probably also helped that it was served up with a light dusting of AM-band static). I wrote down the song title ("Call My Telephone", which I honestly should have figured out on my own) and the name of the band (the Slats) whilst bracing myself for a years-long wild goose chase. I figured if all else failed I could ask my aunt if she had heard of them - she has the Young Canadians album No Escape (featuring the classic "Hawaii"), which is of a piece, stylistically, with this.

The Radio K DJ said that the band was local-ish, so I started in the "Local" section, and damn if there weren't three copies. Fuck if it didn't come out in 2006.

Trances of the Young Canadians' album are in evidence all over this one: there are more related song titles than chance would seem to allow (for instance, the Young Canadian's "Automan" is here replaced by "Ironman", "Hawaii" goes to "King of Hawaii", "Data Redux" is "I Wrote The Code"; another swell TCs connection is Vancouver's Young Canadians' having written a song entitled "I Hate Music" at virtually the same time as the Replacements).

Once I actually got into the album beyond just "Call My Telephone" and the tracklisting, I found that while the Slats are very very good at their simulacrum of early-80s power pop, they aren't just slavish imitators. And that would have been fine. That stuff is a son of a bitch to track down. The Slats do just enough that if their album gets dropped through a time warp into 1979, it's blowing some fucking minds, man.

Sometimes that doesn't work out too well. "Ignatius", for instance, comes off like an outtake from License to Ill-era Beastie Boys. In general, though, the drummer knows when to get off of the historical-reconstruction high horse and drop some modern post-hardcore/indie rock beats, which means that many of these songs work better than they would have as just straight power-pop songs. It also meshes much better with the Slats' guitarist's tendency to throw in dissonant squawks and off-time digressions, but ironically, probably strengthens the case of anybody out there who feels the inclination to trick their friends into thinking that this album is 27 years old, tragically ignored for its out-there vision.

CNN: A hotbed of incompetence.

2007-02-14T18:29:00.000-06:00

Video from CNN at Crooks and Liars displays CNN Pentagon correspondent and all-round ill-informed person Barbara Starr saying this:

The bottom line Heidi, the US certainly does have intelligence tying these Iranian weapon shipments to Iran's supreme leader— The Ayatollah Khomeini. It's not something that the Bush White House wants to talk about in public too much because they really do not want to ratchet tensions up with Iran. The facts aside.

I went ahead and listened to the video to doublecheck the accuracy of this transcript, which relates to the first few seconds of the video.

She did indeed say "The Ayatollah Khomeini". WHO DIED IN FUCKING 1989.

I would address the rest of her claims, which amount to "The Pentagon told me and I believe them", but I think I've already done enough of that.

Instead, I am going to point out, without resorting too much to all-caps, how GALACTICALLY MOTHERFUCKING STUPID you have to be to place any stock in the reportage of a journalist who asserts that CURRENT FUCKING EVENTS are the responsibility of a man who DIED BEFORE MY TWELFTH FUCKING BIRTHDAY.

FUCK!

Today's Special Presidential News Conference

2007-02-14T10:21:00.000-06:00

Well, if there's one thing George W. Bush wants us to take away from this news conference, it's this:

"Qods Force, Qods Force, Qods Force. Qods Force Qods Force, and by the way Qods Force." Note that I am spelling it the way it ought to be spelled, and not "Cuds Force", which is what Bush is saying.

The man is a fucking broken record. He brings up the name in response to questions that it does not apply to. Questions like "Are you trying to make a case for war with Iran?" that he dodges.

Before I move on, I'd like to point out that this "Qods Force" business is, while probably nonsense, also the precise kind of media manipulation of which this White House is most fond. This technique is simple: Take a phrase, and only translate part of it into English (or just do a bad job: "Chemical" Ali). Bonus points if you can use the letter "q" a lot.

See, "al-Quds" is Arabic for "Jerusalem". Simple. It is a word that exists in English.

Anyway, what Bush is implying, while refusing to explicitly state it (which is where the unending Qods-Forcing comes in) is that Iran is waging war against the United States in Iraq. This he cannot state because he has no proof for it. He has no proof for it because it is not happening. It is not happening because it doesn't make any sense.

Another connection that the Bush Administration fails to make is between the Qods Force and arms smuggling. The five Iranians detained by the US in Irbil (which is in the relatively peaceful Kurdish north) are said by them to be part of the Qods Force, but they have not presented any evidence linking them to the weapons. The only connection, apparently, is that they were both in Iraq at the same time.

The American case is admittedly "an inference based on general assessments", which in this case is their way of saying that they have no proof. In fact, the British troops who have been subject to attacks using the described weapons have now "stopped making any such claim, saying only that the technology matched bomb-making found elsewhere in the Middle East, including Lebanon and Syria." The lack of confidence that even the Americans have in their "case" is demonstrated by their decision this time to entrust the revelation of this absolutely shocking news not to the Secretary of State, as in the Iraqi WMD debacle, but to anonymous, low-level spokesmen. BBC World Service commentators have noted that while the weapons in question may have originated in part in Iran, they were most likely imported to Iraq from Syria or Lebanon. They also pointed out that parts of the devices were made in Taiwan.

Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the majority of "The Insurgency" that is so devoted to attacking Americans has been, and remains, Sunni. Because nobody on television seems to consider it worth noting, let me say again that Iran is Shiite and it is unlikely to to the point of laughability that the Iranian government would want to arm a group whose most likely target is the Shiite community.

And then there's the question of the "Explosively Formed Penetrators", which has overnight become the name of no less than seventy different snotty, political junior high punk bands. That's how great of an expression it is. Sounds nasty. Of course, the "Explosively Formed Penetrator" is a type of weapon that has been in use for at least ninety years. As long as there have been tanks, there have been antitank weapons. The Iranian weapon allegedly used by the insurgents is even a copy of an American weapon from the 1970s. But hey, why say "antitank weapon" when you can say something calculated to scare the fuck out of people?

This is what the President thinks of us, the American people. He believes that we can be easily misled by some sloppy inferences and some spy-novel talk. He believes somehow that the American people will tolerate yet another insane revanchist adventure in the Middle East with an unacceptable cost in American lives and American international credibility in the alleged service of some "nation-building" or "Democracy spreading" project that current experience continues to demonstrate does not work.

But really, if I have to convince anyone, I'm just going to fall back on this, that really makes all I've written so far superfluous:

George W. Bush is a fucking liar. We all know it. He lied about Iraqi WMDs, he lied about his cocaine abuse and his DUI arrests, he lied about his reasons for going to war in the first place. He has no credibility left.

Speaking of lying, it was also amusing to see Bush stand up at that press conference and, talking about North Korea, bald-facedly take credit for China's initiative. That's what the Six-Party Talks are good for, of course. Allowing Bush to take credit for any advances made by any of the other partners in the talks.

The Curse...of THE VIEW!!!!

2007-02-08T17:01:00.000-06:00

Dunt dunt duuuuuuuuhnnn!

By now I'm sure that you all know that professional casualty Anna Nicole Smith is finally dead.

While less-imaginative minds will accept the obvious explanation, that cold-blooded supermodel and magician's moll Claudia Schiffer has finally had her whacked as the culmination of an elaborate decade-long revenge plot, there is clearly something yet more sinister afoot:

If you too didn't have a job, you would have known that only today, the very day of Anna Nicole's demise, the jaundiced eye of The View fell upon her, as they appeared to chat about her general predicament with a glee that was most definitely not Schadenfreude. Sure, most of the people The View discuss don't die that day. But that's just part of the coverup.

Clearly, the eldritch energies focussed when Rosie O'Donnell and the scrawny Republican one actually agree on something struck Anna Nicole Smith dead where she stood.

"Partnershipping"?

2007-02-04T21:12:00.000-06:00

Liveblogging the Colts' owner's Vince Lombardi trophy acceptance speech.

Points deducted for empty evocation of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Further points deducted for attributing the victory to divine intervention.

Now Tony Dungy is "showing [the world] that you can win doing it the Lord's way". That's just horseshit. The Lord would have run the ball way more.

Dumb questionnaires are still new content.

2007-02-04T19:41:00.000-06:00

Originally I was going to answer the questionnaires included in the current installment of Did You "Bring It", Pussy?, but midway through I got sick of reformatting, and they asked for too many names. Therefore I am resurrecting the Blanks Game.

Use of a transparently unreliable narrator in your transparently semiautobiographical novel is the _____ letting yourself off the hook.

The only real _____ left in the world is to be found in luxury automobile advertisements.

His was a mind in which love and revenge were irretrievably commingled, complicating _____.

"Now, brothers," said the King of the Rats. "Now is the hour of _____."
But behind him there was silence.

He died a man's death, with a _____.

So there we go. You will comply, or you will be Proust Questionnaired.

Blumfeld, Verbotene Früchte

2007-01-31T15:36:00.001-06:00

First of all, a big "fuck you" to Blogger for terminating diacritic support in the title field. The name of this album is "Verbotene Früchte".

Moving on.

Once again, Blumfeld have failed to top L'etat et moi, their 1994 classic. They have however succeeded in surpassing their three intervening albums, Old Nobody, Testament der Angst, and Jenseits von Jedem. Those three albums largely jettisoned the impassioned, glittering rock and roll of their predecessors for a kind of bland, nylon-strung AOR folk-rock, although there were moments of quality (some of it woefully overproduced, but still) strewn about.

On this, their sixth album since 1992, they plow ahead in their pop furrow, but this time, mercifully, they've brought some actual songs. If there are cornball moments on Verbotene Früchte, they are washed out by the greater degree of inventiveness in melody and arrangement present here. It appears also that the band have retrieved from their past a fair amount of post-punk musical technique that they seemed, on Old Nobody, to have forsaken. It's still fairly AOR-folky, but at least now it's substantially fiercer.

The sitar crap on "Schmetterlings Gang" is still pretty inexcusable, though.

I'm keeping a chainsaw under the bed from now on.

2007-01-23T22:53:00.000-06:00

That's not because I'm continually losing faith in the government. Well, not precisely.

My car has reached a certain age and has begun to develop quirks. The first of these is a tendency for the engine to die (it's an automatic) if not kept inside a certain RPM range in first gear and reverse. The second, which seems to have evolved between nine last night and seven this morning, is that the driver's side door will not unlock unless the key is shaken violently in the lock.

It is clear that the circumstances are converging to make my car an ideal part of a "frantic getaway" setpiece in a horror/slasher film. I can only hope it's the former and not the latter -- I am far better equipped to vanquish supernatural evil than some nutjob with a mattock.

This is fucking disgusting.

2007-01-13T22:11:00.000-06:00

In today's New York Times, I found a disturbing article. In it, we learn that Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, an assistant deputy secretary of defense, believes that companies should boycott law firms that offer legal representation to Guantanamo detainees, and by extension that Guantanamo detainees should not have lawyers.

Volokh Conspiracy carries a calm and nuanced dissection of Stimson's assertion. TINAFTS, however, is not the place for calm or nuance.

I would like to begin by noting that so far,

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had any official comment, but officials sought to distance themselves from Mr. Stimson�s view. His comments �do not represent the views of the Defense Department or the thinking of its leadership,� a senior Pentagon official said. He would not allow his name to be used, seemingly to lessen the force of his rebuke. Mr. Stimson did not return a call on Friday seeking comment.

(NYT)

Despite the broad, general claim by AG Alberto Gonzales that he "had no problem with the current system of representation", no official rebuke has been forthcoming. Certainly Gonzales' comment cannot be construed to say that companies oughtn't boycott law firms for doing their jobs. No official from the White House has yet commented.

This, therefore, is a case of a federal official, with the tacit approval of the federal government, assaulting one of the bases of the American legal system and a right that is enshrined in the Constitution.

Stimson is himself evidently a lawyer. Surely he must be aware that the entire job of a defense attorney is advocating on behalf of repellent motherfuckers. If we expanded his principle, that we must boycott attorneys who defend people who are accused of committing (or, hell, actually did commit) illegal acts, to crimes other than terrorism, then what attorneys will we hire? Surely not just inexperienced ones: My brother, an attorney for around a year, interned for a project getting appeals for convicted felons in law school. Will we show our commitment to women's rights by not hiring lawyers who defend rapists? Will we show our commitment to life by not hiring lawyers who defend murderers?

What this exposes about Stimson's position is that it necessarily revolves around the idea that every last person in Guantanamo Bay is guilty of what they are accused of; it reflects the laughable opinion that the accused are automatically guilty by virtue of suspicion: If you're innocent, why do you need a lawyer?

Of course, the federal government technically doesn't need to distance themselves from Stimson's position. After all, he wasn't stating an official course of action or proposed policy for the federal government to enact. All he did was hand out a list, and make a suggestion about how that list could be used by non-state actors. This is why harsh condemnation is so necessary, and why even the nameless Pentagon official's condemnation is so weaselly. Stimson's action's don't need to "represent the views of the Defense Department", because what they effect is outside of the purview of the government. His act was analogous to supplying a list of abortion clinics and suggesting that some people somewhere may be inclined to bomb them. There is no way to stop what Stimson has already done in a court of law. The Supreme Court cannot revoke the damage that he and his department have done to the rights of the incarcerated, because he has chosen an extra-legal means of depriving them of counsel - cutting them off at the source, so to speak.

I think, therefore, that the only appropriate course of action is to ask Charles Stimson to resign. He clearly has no respect whatsoever for the notion that all accused persons deserve the right to legal representation, which is an unacceptable characteristic in a government official.

FRESH FOR '07, SUCKAZ

2007-01-07T17:55:00.000-06:00

I thought that I would break my extended blogging silence by doing what I usually do anyway, and bitch about popular culture. So without further ado:

A few weeks ago, I saw The Holiday. I will not attempt to justify this decision.

The movie was schmalz. Twice during the schmalzfest, the audience was visited with a now-standard moviegoing trope that is unique for having been unpacked and discredited by High Fidelity, the movie that introduced it. The Holiday twists the cliche in that it is the two woman protagonists who perpetrate it; this is of course a standard chick-flick/rom-com cliche in itself, but this second layer of cliche is weakened by the fact that the filmmakers seem to be unaware that they are doing it.

The cliche is the Soundtrack Spiritual Litmus Test. As per High Fidelity, it is the use of the "right" music to signify less that a person is a member of a clique or subculture, or even that a person has certain tastes or a certain degree of discernment, than that a person has the right sort of character or moral attainment, expressed as aesthetic judgment. Another smash-hit use of the cliche is in the Shins-driven meet-cute scene in Garden State. Of course, in High Fidelity the idea was introduced to reflect the supposed social reality that there are people who do subject their acquaintances to exactly such a test, rather than just people who gravitate to others with similar tastes.

Once each during the movie, the Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz characters, who have swapped houses over Christmas, demonstrate to the audience that they are the same sort of great people by "rocking out" to songs cribbed from the other's record collections.

As an aside, I would like to point out that one of the songs was Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl", which proves by the cliche's own logic that the two main characters are vile.

I have probably now just bitten off more than I can chew: A complex cliche composed of the boy-flick standard SSLT, and the chick-flick standard Sisters Gonna Exhibit Stereotyped Masculine Behavior For Ourselves, slightly modified to admit the fact that the stereotype males who engage in SSLT in film are generally fairly "sensitive". Because I don't feel like taking on the underlying ideology of any of these cliches, which are probably only the result of lazy characterization, and to the extent to which they do represent something deeper are beyond the range of my interest at this exact moment (late, tired), I am going to stop now. Maybe I will pick back up later.

УНКОМПРОМИЗИНГ ВАР ОН ЖОННЙС УНДЕР ЗЕ ДИКТАТОРШИП ОВ ЗЕ ЖУКЕБОКС

2006-08-05T01:10:00.000-05:00

Uncompromising war on Johnny's under the dictatorship of the jukebox.

A few weeks ago I was at Johnny's, a crappy local bar (but still in the top three citywide, which is why we go), with my friend Stern, visiting from NYC. Like many bars these days, Johnny's is equipped with a state-of-the-art Touch Tunes jukebox, the kind that allows you to spend extra credits to download any one of thousands of songs stored remotely in some database somewhere. If it weren't for the weak selection, it would be a truly revolutionary idea, but not quite up there with the conventional jukebox stocked with classics and set to free play.

Because we planned on being there for a while, and it seemed like we had an in on the music rotation (we showed up kind of early and the bar was pretty dead), we dropped an entire five dollar bill on the thing. After it played two or three of our songs, it became apparent that someone had elected to have the entire balance of our song list skipped. Because we only witnessed one person plugging the jukebox between the time we did and the time our selections came up, and it was highly unlikely that that guy would have spent the extra credit on "play my song next!" on five consecutive songs, we could only draw the conclusion that our music was not amenable to one of the guys behind the bar.

Therefore, despite the technological wonder before us, no Slayer. No Anthrax. No Descendents. No NOFX (Stern digs the old-school pop-punk). Immediately we hatched a plot for our revenge:

We must devise a playlist that, while not immediately offensive to any of the bartenders, and composed entirely of unquestioned popular hits, would so enervate and subconsciously irritate the patrons that it cuts into the bartenders' tips, either by sending people home or cutting down on their drinking. A fight would be a bonus. Unfortunately, that was almost as far as we got.

Our two requirements, therefore, are that our selections must be total party-wreckers, and that they be superficially either good or popular enough that no bartender would think to terminate them. A song need not, and probably should not, be totally awful to appear on our list.

The one thing that we know is that the capstone of our effort must be Wham!'s "Careless Whispers". "Careless Whispers" is ideal because, while it is a former Top 10 hit that is sure to get some of the more nostalgic patrons tapping their toes and singing along, it is simultaneously so saccharine and so maudlin, what with its lyric and its terrible, lugubrious saxophone wank, truly the apotheosis of the 80s Smooth Sax Solo, that people will be subconsciously pushed in the direction of sullen introversion. They will dwell on their regrets. They will remember how they never suspected that George Michael was gay, and how betrayed they felt when they found out that "I Want Your Sex", which they made out to with such alacrity back in junior high, is about a dude, Linda Evangelista notwithstanding.

After that, though, we're stumped. I know that one of the songs has to be by Guns N Roses. Guns N Roses are ideal for our purposes, because they are so "rockin'" and well-liked in the popular consciousness that nobody will admit that one of their songs is actually bad. "Bad," incidentally, is not a criterion for our list. Just "enervating". I think that "November Rain" might be a good choice, because despite its surface bluster (rock guitars, blazing solo, etcetera) it is actually kind of a downer. The lyric is, as required, maudlin and depressing, but not in the manner of a country song; the song itself is extremely long; the rock "payoff" of the solo is relatively short compared to the rest of the song; and it is generally very dynamically stable, with a lot of buildup that really goes absolutely nowhere. In short, "November Rain" is the hair-metal equivalent of an hour of mutually unsatisfying dry humping. There is also a case to be made for "Patience".

Therefore, I am throwing open the door for suggestions. Under the established conditions (principally, that it be available on a Touch Tune jukebox, which in practice would mean virtually any in-print major label hit, current or catalogue) we want any song that will totally wreck the vibe at a hoppin' bar without anybody realizing what's happening. Like I said, the songs don't have to be bad. They can be songs that totally kick ass for sitting around and listening to, or making out to, or driving to, or anything else. They just have to be bad for having on in a bar.

I await your responses, and I thank you in advance for your advice.

Be the first on the bandwagon.

2006-07-04T23:50:00.001-05:00

Usually by the time you've heard of a new band or artist they've already at least been signed to an independent label and toured around your region at least once. That virtually guarantees that you're barely one of their first twenty fans in your state. How to preempt that threat to your cred?

Well, the BBC and Norwegian state radio (NRK) each have a weekly radio show, both now available on podcast, featuring one or more unsigned local recording artists. The BBC show, "Radio 1's Best of Unsigned" (XML,iTunes) is a half-hour with one track each chosen by four presenters and a fifth track chosen by listener feedback. This means that no matter who you are you are guaranteed to be bored out of your mind for no less than ten minutes of every show, but the other less-than-twenty are mostly worth it. One of the presenters, Ras Kwame, also has his own genre-specific unsigned podcast, "100% Homegrown" (XML,iTunes), devoted to UK hip-hop, soul, R&B, and suchlike.

NRK2's "Ukas Urørt" ("The Week's Unsigned") (RSS,iTunes) is an approximately 10-minute podcast featuring a single group; they get an interview and one track. In the unlikely case that you don't understand Norwegian, just hop ahead until you hear the music. The website itself has a massive database of unsigned Norwegian groups. The podcast itself updates fairly sporadically for what I assume are technical reasons. but in general it's worth a listen.

There are more unsigned music podcasts out there, like Ian Foulds' "Unsigned Rock Podcast" (RSS,iTunes), a decent UK rock show, but for the most part the state radio shows seem to have the best music on a consistent basis, probably because as the largest entities in their particular countries they get the most entries to cherry-pick each week.

A NOTE: I discovered a fun little protocol while writing this post. If you want to avoid having to display the long-ass, technically-worthless-to-your-web-browser podcast RSS/XML feed URL as plain text, which eats up space and actually broke the tables on my blog, and you know that having the http protocol there will only tempt people to try to use the thing as a link (which I did anyway, sue me) now there's itpc! The itpc protocol will automatically subscribe at the very least iTunes to the linked podcast when clicked. Supposedly it works in IE and Firefox; I don't know if it will subscribe other podcasting/mp3 programs besides iTunes. Find out and tell me.

I have a job, kind of.

2006-06-22T07:22:00.000-05:00

I am a telemarketer. In Germany.

Take that, globalization.

Iranian tits.

2006-06-21T00:19:00.000-05:00

Just now I was browsing my hit referrals because I haven't done it in like three months and it's fun. What do I see but an actual honest bonafide hit from the Islamic Republic of Iran to my "Some facts about Iran" post!

Unfortunately it turns out that this hit is due to my blog's being on page 9 of an MSN search for 'iranian tits'.

And isn't that one of the most human of impulses? Not just to seek out, in the face of massive state repression, boobs on the internet, but to seek out boobs attached to someone like yourself. Familiar boobs, even friendly boobs. Because at the end of the day, doesn't everyone prefer glassy impersonal electronic sexage that speaks their own language?

I also noticed that for some reason the poor bastard had his browser language set to Faeroese. Still poorer the bastard is if that's not a mistake - going all the way to Tehran to look for 'Iranian tits' on the internet when you can do it just as easily from Torshavn.

How to be a small furry thing from Alpha Centauri

2006-06-20T22:51:00.000-05:00

It may be dumb but it's not this dumb. And it's way more sensical.

* Be small, furry, and from Alpha Centauri. If you find yourself in excess of one yard in height you may find it beneficial to have some proportion of your biomass converted to hair. If you find that you are not Alpha Centaurian, you should immigrate immediately. Fortunately for you the Centaurian immigration policy is astonishingly lenient as long as no member of your family has been in within 5*10^10 AU of Tauris Beta through Tau in the past 44 million years.

* Be a thing. Unless you are one of the sentient verbs of the Buckminster system, you probably already have this licked. Hyperintelligent shades of the colour blue at least have strong grounds for an appeal, should they somehow also manage the "small, furry" criteria.

* Do not overindulge in Gin and Tonics. Nobody likes spontaneous tesseracts.

* Groom yourself regularly. God created small furry things from Alpha Centauri, not small matted things from Alpha Centauri.

* Astonishingly, what we call "humour" here on good old Alpha Centauri generally corresponds elsewhere to a mode of discourse called "true grim necro Black Metal". Therefore if you seek to impress at parties it is advisable to stick to "mathematics".

* Likewise, most sentients do not regard serial murder as a magic trick.

* Remember that small furry things from Alpha Centauri are from the eighth planet of the Sol system (metaphorically speaking) and that psychic mice from Algol are from a peninsula on the third renowned for its beaches and fascism.

* The psychic mice from Algol really like to feel like hoopy froods, and most of the time they are. Don't constantly undermine that by hiding their towels.

* Very few of the known universe's organisms are antimony-based. Most of them are testy. Don't bring either of these facts up with strangers. Trust me.

* Do not feed the Mogwai after midnight, particularly the one called Stuart. He has clearly been getting into the pies, if you know what I mean.

* Learn to knit. When age takes its toll and you are no longer such a furry small furry thing from Alpha Centauri a smart homemade jumper is an attractive way to keep warm on those chilly Alpha Centauri mornings.

* Avoid Vogon poetry. In fact, avoid Vogons full stop.

Apologies to Douglas Adams and no one else.

Unearthed Americana

2006-06-15T10:35:00.000-05:00

Time was, I was a roleplaying nerd and there was nobody that bugged us more than the religious right. Unlike twelve-year-old boys, they had trouble realizing that Dungeons and Dragons was just a game. This is apropos of that. I'd like to say more but I'm racing a laptop battery. (This is also going to be longer).

Tablet of Decalogue.
The Tablet of Decalogue is a 2’x2’x0.25’ gray stone tablet with ten lines of text engraved on once face in Common. It radiates Protection from Evil and provides a –2 bonus to all Intelligence and Wisdom checks performed by judges and schoolchildren in a 10’ radius. A larger variant of the Tablet of Decalogue is a 3’x3’x3’ cube and has a 50’ effect radius. The Tablet is non-magical for the purposes of Detect Magic.

Theou-Yios Fetish.
This is a painted wooden or metal statue, approximately one foot long, representing the avatar of the area’s primary deity. For every month that a Theou-Yios Fetish is kept in a special shrine constructed on the kingdom’s land, the kingdom receives a cumulative +1% to Luck checks.

Rood Pendant.
A small, ornate gold or silver pendant, often encrusted with precious stones and evidently meant to represent a crude wooden pole and crossbeam. It provides Protection from Evil in a 5’ radius from the wearer unless it is accidentally inverted in which case the effect is reversed and a Protection from Good aura is produced instead.

Shake of Robertson.
This potion provides the drinker with 18/00 strength and moves his alignment one component closer to Lawful Good. The strength bonus lasts until twilight.

So you want to stride purposefully toward the camera in slow motion.

2006-05-29T00:11:00.000-05:00

Once I promised that this would be a semi-regular feature. I also implied, though I never promised, that I would keep up this weblog. So here you go.

YOU ARE: A doomed Vietnam War platoon.
YOUR SONG: "Hey Joe," Jimi Hendrix.

YOU ARE: A pair of dolorous young men with or without literary pretensions.
YOUR SONG: "The Boxer," Simon & Garfunkel.

YOU ARE: Skeletons.
YOUR SONG: "Danse Macabre," Camille Saint-Saëns.

YOU ARE: Vampires.
YOUR SONG: "Some Kind of Stranger," Sisters of Mercy.

YOU ARE: Will Smith.
YOUR SONG: Your crossmarketed single.

YOU ARE: Carnivorous wildlife in a documentary.
YOUR SONG: "Slow This Bird Down," Boards of Canada.

YOU ARE: Carnivorous wildlife in a drama/suspense film.
YOUR SONG: "Angel," Massive Attack.

YOU ARE: About to kill a lot of space aliens all at once.
YOUR SONG: "Cowboys From Hell," Pantera.

YOU ARE: American criminals (petty).
YOUR SONG: "The Boys Are Back In Town," Thin Lizzy.

YOU ARE: American criminals (master).
YOUR SONG: "The Big Payback," James Brown.

YOU ARE: American criminals (organized).
YOUR SONG: "La donna é mobile" from "Rigoletto," Giuseppe Verdi.

YOU ARE: British criminals.
YOUR SONG: "Angel," Massive Attack.

YOU ARE: Carnivorous wildlife in a Will Ferrell comedy.
YOUR SONG: "Never Never Gonna Give Ya Up," Barry White.

YOU ARE: Wearing sunglasses.
YOUR SONG: "Angel," Massive Attack.

I am tired of getting static about not blogging.

2006-05-05T19:49:00.000-05:00

Giving people static about not blogging is the new hounding people to convert to your religion.

PS A_RON = B_OTCH

Some things you should know about Iran.

2006-04-16T02:58:00.000-05:00

It has recently come to my attention that once again the Bush administration is planning to do something rash. Although with this government "planning" something rash is virtually identical with "going" to do something rash and I may as well be screaming at a wall, I am here going to lay out some fun facts about America's new number one enemy. I tried to keep them pretty basic.

Iranians are not Arabs. Arabs, properly speaking, originate from the Arabian Peninsula and speak a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Amharic. Iranians arrived in present-day Iran from the Central Asian steppe and speak an Indo-European language related to English.

Not all Iranians are "Iranian". There are a number of minority groups inside of Iran that, while speakers of Iranian languages, are not "Iranian" in the sense that they belong to the dominant nationality. Kurds would be one example. There are also a number of Turkic groups in Iran such as Azeris and Khalaj.

Most Iranians are Shiite Muslims. This is due primarily to the efforts of Shah Isma'il Safavi in the sixteenth century. There are however other religious groups in Iran, the most notable of which are the Baha'is, whose religion is officially proscribed as it is regarded as a heresy of Shiism, and Zoroastrianism, the religion of all Iran before the Arab Conquest, practiced today by a small minority inside Iran and a diaspora community in India called "Parsis"; Freddie Mercury was a Zoroastrian, but your Queen records will not help you here.

Iranians generally dislike Arabs. The Arab Conquest, which brought Islam to Iran, has historically been regarded with some ambiguity. On the one hand, the Shiite clergy has a clear amount of power in Iran, and most Iranians are sincere Shiites. Despite this, the Arab Conquest is also regarded as having destroyed the great Sassanian Empire, in its day a world power in competition with Rome. The villain of an early part of the Shahnameh, the Iranian national epic (think Beowulf but longer), was an Arab chieftain with snakes growing out of his shoulders. Since the sixteenth century Shiite-Sunni antipathy has also played into this.

Iraq was historically a part of the Iranian empire. Mesopotamia was first conquered by the Persians in 537 BC. Since then it's been lost and regained quite a few times. This is one of the historical factors explaining the presence of the large Iraqi Shiite community.

Iranians are fairly nationalistic. The nationalisms of Arab states tend to be rather weak because of their essentially being cobbled together randomly around British, Ottoman, and Roman colonial boundaries with the major exception of Egypt which has had a unitary history and culture for the most part since the fourth millennium BC; the major brand of ethnic nationalism in the Arab region is, or was, Pan-Arabism. Iran, like Egypt, has millennia of imperial history to point to, and its national borders are largely contiguous with the geographic settlement area of ethnic Iranians, even fairly loosely defined. It has not spent its entire history in such a unitary form, and one other national state, Tajikistan, uses what is essentially a dialect of Farsi, the Iranian national language, as its own. Much more so than a citizen of an Arab state, who may be for example Iraqi but not consider his or her Iraqi identity to have primacy over his or her Arab or sectarian Muslim identity, Iranians consider themselves Iranians foremost.

In 1988, knowing that most Iranians did not support the regime, various Iraq-backed Iranian groups entered Iran from Iraq with the intention of overthrowing the government. They failed, because they were backed by Iraq.

Saddam Hussein used Western-supplied WMDs against Iran throughout the 1980s. Iraq deployed massive amounts of chemical and biological weapons against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, much of it supplied by the US. Over 100,000 Iranians were killed by nerve and mustard gas deployed by the Iraqi army. This colors the Iranian view of American WMD policy.

We overthrew their government once already. In 1953, the CIA, working on behalf of BP, overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, which had voted to nationalize the Iranian oilfields. They replaced Iran's democracy with a dictatorship under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who proved to be one of history's nastiest bastards, and was overthrown himself in 1979.

Most Iranians think Mahmud Ahmedinejad is full of shit.. They consider him to be an embarrassing yokel with a big mouth who got elected due to electoral fuckery and scare tactics. Sound familiar? Despite this, remember the whole nationalism thing.

It's sad that I should have to point this out, but considering how many people seem to think Uzbekistan is in Eastern Europe, I think I'd better. Iran is bounded on the west by Iraq and the east by Afghanistan. For perspective on what this means, imagine that the USSR has reformed, built up a military arsenal thousands of times larger and more effective than our own, and occupied Mexico and Canada.

In which I say things I oughtn't without even being drunk.

2006-04-06T13:57:00.000-05:00

A recent telephone conversation I held with one of my friends from Indiana turned eventually to the subject of crushes. Specifically, he related that despite his current happy situation he retained if not a crush then at least a pleasant nostalgia for a crush on a girl he knew who had since moved away but with whom he communicated occasionally over instant messenger. I didn't really have anything to compare it to, which got me thinking on the subject.

I can state unequivocally at this point that I don't have a crush on anyone, or even the kind of meta-crush my Indianan friend has. The closest I can now come to experiencing the sentiment is an aversion to the smell of violets that I refuse to elucidate. In a way, I think this is a product of my living situation: I lived for two years in southern Indiana where my studies, in what to judge from the breakdown of students is a very "guy" field, limited my ability to break down the relatively high barriers to clique entry that exist there. Following that I lived in central Wisconsin for a year, and then for three months in San Francisco without a job. Not a lot of opportunity to meet people, in other words.

I know that developing a crush on a barista is de rigeur for people of my particular pretensions, but I can't say that I've ever succumbed. Not that it would have been difficult: By and large looks have been a prerequisite for effective java-slinging since at least 1990. Part of the problem is that crushes of this type require a certain flight of fancy on the part of the crusher. Crushor? That can't be right. Too "my first metal band". Anyway. The genesis of any kind of service/retail worker crush is in my opinion the wilful inability of the subject to make the crucial distinction, first expressed by my friend K. and me to get another of our friends to quit verbally fantasizing about our waitress, between "attracted to me" and "good at her job". If, standing in line at the coffee shop, you turn your head from the list of drinks which is totally invariant no matter what coffee shop you go to and you're getting the same thing you always get anyway, toward the front of the line, you will see that the smile you have been getting, and upon which you are building your vacation plans, is the same smile currently being flashed at the cranky old lady who never tips. At this point, you have two available cases: either A) that smile is the product of genuine sexual interest, with the subcase that said barista has at the very least some very complicated appetites that you'd do well to get yourself right with damn fast; or B) said barista is good at her job: she's being polite.

If your arrival occasions the breakdown of a forbidding grimace into some kind of Hallmark-card idiot grin, by all means go right ahead. That has never happened, though, and if you think it does, my hipster friend, you are being at the very least disingenuous regarding your attitude toward Meg Ryan movies.

Moving back from the general to the specific, by which I mean to myself, it's not that I'm philosophically opposed to the idea of the service industry crush. It's just that I can be, if history is any guide, without opening myself up to the danger of hypocrisy. This is not a fact of which I am proud. It speaks to two essential deficiencies: First, I need to meet more women. Second, as follows:

Somewhere on the Internet, there are a series of tests (faithweb.net, maybe? I dunno) that I took awhile ago which had the stated aim of diagnosing your propensity toward each of the seven deadly sins. According to them, I am an absolute fucking saint, in the traditional Buddhist sense of the word. I have freed myself completely from the wheel of samsara and I have in effect no appetites. I thought for certain that I would at least score well (badly) on Wrath, and veganism actually falls within St. Gregory's definition of Gluttony so that would be worth some points, but no. To Lust, I am similarly disinclined.

This puzzles me. The test's preambles warned that a low score might just be a sign that you're consciously repressing yourself, so I made certain that I answered the test not as myself, but as a bigger asshole caricature of myself. Still got me nowhere. Later I would read Gide's The Immoralist and be thoroughly unscandalized, so I think I'm reasonably jaded to begin with.

Apparently, therefore, I am just bad at lusting. This comes as a surprise to me, but of course I also thought I could pull off wrathful. This does not bode well for me. The Seven Deadly Sins, after all, aren't really "sins" in the original sense at all but rather habits of mind that are uniquely unbecoming of celibate monks. Their metastasis into the general culture was a side-effect of the accession of St. Gregory to the papacy and the further overvaluation of monastic life characteristic of the Middle Ages and of Western culture thereafter as a whole. The whole situation has obvious Nietzschean resonances, in that monasticism in general can be considered to be an Apollonian attempt to deny the human being's natural Dionysian impulses. Someone once told me that Catholic school had really done a number on me, and I laughed at him. Now I'm not so sure.

Seacrest out?

2006-04-01T03:01:00.000-06:00

Seacrest & Hatcher = Scratcher?

This isn't working.

2006-03-14T11:23:00.000-06:00

As much as I wish I could stick around, SF and I are suffering from a profound failure to interface.

See you at Genna's.

I've been thinking. Anybody want

2006-03-03T23:56:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking. Anybody want to start an organized crime syndicate?

A great big Fuck You to Subcomandante Marcos, in the language of his forefathers.

2006-02-20T03:26:00.000-06:00

Mel Gibson is at it again.

I obviously haven't seen Mel Gibson's new movie, Apocalypto, and I have only the vaguest idea of the plot. Supposedly it is to be another dead-language "historical" epic, this time filmed in Classical Maya. But lest you assume that Gibson has thrown over the radical Catholicism of his previous effort and gone Zapatista, all you need to do is watch the trailer.

Without regarding the trailer as anything other than a work in its own right and a product of Gibson's vision: It is a nasty piece of work. It starts out with the Will Durant quote, "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," against a black screen. This is replaced in short order with a dimly lit shot of some grotesque, sinister-looking native Mesoamericans, shiny with sweat and soot, which tightens onto the face of a woman with a Frida Kahlo unibrow and some sort of dental jewelry, grinning lewdly. It is almost as if Gibson wants to combine the notion of the decadent aristocrat along with a retrofit of a stereotypical "greasy Mexican". It's fairly outré and racist but then all of a sudden we're off into the largely undifferentiable mass of percussion-driven blockbuster action movie trailers, this one of the subtype distinguished by the prevalence of green blur on the screen and cod-African pretensions on the percussion (viz. Predator).

In the light of history, that is, what happened to the Maya in short order after the events of the trailer (set in around 1400 AD) it is impossible not to associate the "conquest from without" of the quote with the Spanish conquest. I have not read any Durant, and I therefore do not know what his statement was actually intended to mean. In this context, however, what it means, that is, what Gibson is using it to say, is that Maya civilization was destroyed (in fact, it was not) because of its intrinsic decadence or wickedness, rather than, for example, Spanish firearms, which historical records suggest played a large role in the loss of Mayan political independence.

In this context, it is always and everywhere flatly wrong to state that internal "decay" is the precondition for external conquest. Abstract "wickedness" does not predispose a society to collapse, and the wickedness probably alluded to here by Gibson, human sacrifice, was practiced in turn by numerous pre-Columbian Mexican, Mesoamerican, and South American cultures with no concomitant ill effect on their fortunes. Rather, they tended to thrive or decline with their economies and their relative technological and military power, as states tend to do. Gibson suggests that virtue on whatever model leads to security, and this is transparently not the case. The Achaemenid Empire was arguably just as virtuous as the Macedonian, and Darius III more virtuous a ruler than Alexander, but look what happened to that. Tibet: Also didn't "destroy itself from within" before its conquest by China. The only way you can possibly agree with Gibson's interpretation of that quote, and therefore with the message of the trailer, is if you think that "destroying one's country from within" means the failure at any cost to stay technologically and militarily at the top of the heap. Otherwise what are you doing? Clucking your tongue about some long-dead priest pulling the still-beating heart from some longer-dead prisoner's chest. Mother Teresa would approve, I suppose.

Reposted from some comments box somewhere.

2006-02-14T22:20:00.000-06:00

Run a bus over my self-concept.

Ah, technicalities.

2006-02-08T18:41:00.000-06:00

If you're like me, you've been working on containing your rage to the extent that you can now sit through a full thirty minutes of the Vice-President lying, misleading, and just plain being a dick to the American people on national television without smashing anything. You are probably not like me. Studies have shown that nine out of ten bodhisattvas are not in fact remaining on Earth to help others achieve Nirvana - they are waiting for their turn to cold-cock Dick Cheney.

In between the dodges and stonewalling about Darfur, domestic spying, and those little jokes about energy dependence and the Iraqi insurgency's being "on its last legs", Cheney took the opportunity to dodge and mislead about the Iranian nuclear power issue.

One thing that you will find mentioned occasionally, but never in the domestic press, is that while the US government likes to insist that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, this is simple conjecture. That is, despite what our State Department tells us, there is no material reason to suspect that Iran wants a nuclear program for other than peaceful reasons.

And Cheney knows this. Knowing that he knows this, my ears perked up as soon as Jim Lehrer broached the subject and I listened very carefully to what Cheney had to say on the subject. In fact, immediately after Lehrer made the inchoate but predictable statement that we know Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, without specifically denying it, Cheney went into a detailed litany of what we do know. Specific knowledge about an Iranian weapons program was not on his list. Dick Cheney refused to confirm that we had evidence of an Iranian weapons program in a way that disguised his admission. By contrast the "non-confirmation confirmation", used repeatedly throughout the Lehrer interview, is the phrase "operational details".

In the current climate, this can be regarded as a tacit admission that not only does the administration not possess intelligence that suggests such a program, but they do not expect to discover any. A continuing problem for this administration's credibility is the Iraqi WMDs lie, and the associated linkage of Iraq with al-Qaeda. By not making the connection themselves, relying on an insufficiently critical press to do the heavy lifting for them, the Bush administration retains plausible deniability in the event that the view be demonstrated to be false. To come full circle, they would not need to protect themselves from the chance of demonstrable falsehood unless it were still a possibility, that is, unless they still lacked incontrovertible evidence.

If you listen to what the Bush administration is saying about Iran, it will always be framed in terms of their current public refusal to comply with the IAEA. I don't blame them. The US wouldn't admit IAEA inspectors either. And Iranian refusal, even refusal of the Russian plan, can be explained away much more quickly by something far more prosaic than a covert nuclear weapons program:

Iran wants energy self-sufficiency forever. Petroleum, which Iran has a lot of, is a limited resource. It will run out someday, and it must be replaced. Nuclear power, unlike more environmentally sound alternatives, is not contingent on weather and, probably also importantly for Iran, less likely to be sabotaged due to the massive consequences for the entire world and any discovered culprits. Nuclear power will cut Iran's own petroleum usage while petroleum is available, boosting their profits, and they will have positioned themselves to become the Middle East and Southwest Asia's premier energy exporter.

Whence the ire of the State Department. As far as they're concerned, that is enough reason to oppose the Iranian government's uranium enrichment program. Unfortunately "The US opposes Iranian nuclear power because it is economically inopportune for us" travels very poorly.

Korledes sier man 'opportunisme' på arabisk?

2006-02-08T18:29:00.000-06:00

Sorry to continually bring up the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, but finally we see a response on the part of the American government.

And what does our fearless leader do, in the face of these demonstrations which span the Muslim world from Indonesia to Afghanistan to the Middle East?

He blames Syria. Yeah, sure, they're probably responsible for what happened in Syria. Maybe in Lebanon. Afghanistan? Unlikely. Indonesia? Extremely unlikely.

Speaking of responsibility, how responsible is it to turn these attacks on Scandinavian embassies, provoked by a combination of religious intolerance and disaffection with the West, into just another excuse to invade Syria? If anything it will be read abroad as merely a Bismarkian trick carried out by the Danish press as a proxy of the American government; this is already in a way symptomatic of the human inability to tell apart any country that doesn't immediately border your own - essentially the President is wrapping himself in the Danish flag in order to level veiled threats at Syria and Iran. Evidently the American flag isn't good enough for that anymore.

Clean Prophets, Winter Flowers, Dead Meadow @ SFCA Great American Music Hall 4 February 2006

2006-02-06T17:34:00.000-06:00

This was my first time attending the Great American Music Hall and I think it's pretty much the stereotypical San Francisco concert space: A converted ballroom or theater with a lot of sad rococo ornamentation and a reasonably large stage. It was certainly an appropriate place for the likes of Dead Meadow, what with their deliberate mining not precisely of the stoner-rock vein being plied by most bands they are lumped together with, but a far more psychedelic, acid style once typified by Iron Butterfly, Blue Cheer, and Jimi Hendrix. Hippie music, in short.

First up were the Clean Prophets. My friend Jerry and I lasted through three songs before we retreated to the sidewalk to smoke. The CPs were not bad, per se. I'll explain it like this: When you start a band, ideally what you do is jam for a little while together, figure out how your band fits together, and then write a couple songs. Then, when you've rehearsed the fuck out of those songs, you throw them away and write six new songs. Then you play your first show. Clean Prophets were clearly playing out on their first six songs. They were tight enough, but stylistically they lurched all over the fuzzy end of the mainstream: Here's some U2, here's some Coldplay, here's some Strokes - you could basically identify the individual songs they were emulating. According to Jerry they were also pilfering heavily from the last Alkaline Trio record.

The Clean Prophets were followed by Winter Flowers, and I'll bet whoever was booking the show thought they had scored some kind of post-modern/ironic retro-minded San Francisco bill-scheduling coup. Winter Flowers dressed like hippies.
The kind that would eventually become New Agers, not the kind that would eventually become survivalists or sell-outs. Renn Fayre hippies. Lots of paisley, formless shifts, flowing hair, handlebar moustaches. They sounded like they looked: a late-60s Mamas and the Papas/Simon& Garfunkel/Sam & Dave (not really) amalgamation of American coffee-shop folk rock and fey "Celtic" folk. Back in the day this band could have opened for Fairport Convention or Pentangle, and I would have given them the same review. It is depressing that now, under the wider banner of Rock And Roll, a sort of music that's always been at least a little bit about shocking your parents, we have bands like this, who are revisiting music that my mom, aged twenty, considered corny.

The headliners of the night were Dead Meadow. I had seen Dead Meadow once before, opening for the Super Furry Animals in Indianapolis in 2002 or so, and is show was not quite up to that stellar performance. This is probably due to the fact that their openers were weak, the venue was large and fairly impersonal, and they didn't have SFA's state of the art a/v gear to help out their light show. The set was heavy on unfamiliar material, presumably from their forthcoming album, sprinkled with a few songs from earlier albums.

My San Francisco To-Do List

2006-02-06T13:21:00.000-06:00

With occasional forays into the East Bay and maybe Marin.

Find a damn job.

Learn which streets carry minimal danger of stepping on hypodermic syringes. Use those.

Locate and provoke Daniel Handler into a fist-fight. Win (very important!).

Find time to exercise in a uniform with two white stripes on the beach at night.

Bring a dog to Jack London Square. Comment loudly on irony when asked to leave.

Expand range of casual daily-life rockstar interactions to include more than the guy from Rogue Wave who works at the grocery store.

Consider a membership at the video store owned by drummer from Jawbreaker.

Write short story: "I Whupped Lemony Snicket" in style of same. Submit to McSweeney's.

Cultivate strange need to shove people aside rather than alter your route to exploit the massive gap between them and nearest obstacle, evidently required of all true San Franciscans.

I am kind of drunk on Danish spirits.

2006-02-05T05:37:00.000-06:00

I think that I am if not a strictly typical Norwegian-American, then at least a fairly common sort of one.

As I am a leftist, a run-of-the-mill cracker has no problem painting me as anti-American, and part of me has to concede his point. An American is not who I am. America is the country I live in and the people who make my passport work. I look around this country, and I even go to live in parts of it outside of the Scandawhovian pale (Wisconsin, Minnesota, and supposedly parts of Washington that I've never been to) and it makes no sense to me. America, even other parts of the Midwest, is/are more culturally alien to me than a country halfway around the world. Some people in Indiana don't even recognize my accent as American. "My people", that is, my family, have only been in this country for 89 years or so as of today, and so we don't share the Revolutionary and Civil War heritage that "real Americans" do. I don't give a fuck about that shit as a matter of personal identity. As far as I'm concerned the entirety of my share in the collective guilt for slavery can be assuaged by buying a Guinness for some strawberry blond asshole in a cableknit sweater. For the record, I wouldn't even have been an American at all had the McCarran-Walter Act been passed thirty-five years earlier. Ironically "Walter" is my maternal grandmother's maiden name. Those people wouldn't have made it in after 1952 either.

I read cute little newspaper tidbits about "quaint", supposedly alien cultural idiosyncracies and I think, "that's unusual?" -- for the record, The Incredibles struck me as un-American before I realized that its Americanness was what's wrong with it. I believe that bragging is the act of only the most extreme assholes.

I know the words to "Vi Elsker" and I know when to sing them. I don't eat lutefisk because I'm vegan but I feel bad about it. One of my professors spent World War II sabotaging German boats at port in Bergen. I had to restrain myself from trying to high five him. I got into Dungeons and Dragons in grade school due to my interest in Norse mythology and not vice versa.

When people badmouth a-ha, even though I know that "The Living Daylights" was a weak-ass Bond theme and Morten Harket is a sweaty-faced jackass, I want to hit them.

I speak Norwegian well enough that cabdrivers think that I'm a Trønder with a drinking problem. I can tell roughly which third of the country a Norwegian is from by listening to them for three minutes.

You might remember the Oslo Accords. This is probably proof that you, too, are Norwegian, because nobody else does. They do however go to show what it is that Norway wants to do in the Middle East. Stop all the fighting. And not to get out the oil, either. Norway has enough of its own damn oil.

So I basically have the same sort of irrational connection to Norway that your average NASCAR dirtbag has to the United States. The difference is, as I have stated before, Norway isn't really exploiting anybody. Torture schools? Not in Norway. Under-the-table dealings with Saudi Arabia? Not in Norway!

This is why I view the continued march of attacks against Norwegian (and Danish, too, I guess) embassies around the Muslim world with nothing less than disgust. Norway has absolutely no history of exploiting the Middle East or Indonesia. Now word has come that Iran has withdrawn their ambassador from Denmark. Look just below to see the traditional Persian Shi`ite stance on depictions of Muhammad (this has nothing to do with my opinion about Iran's right to nuclear self-determination, by the way - just their hopping aboard the asshole wagon). Fifteen thousand marchers each in Beirut and Damascus is not the sort of thing that one can explain away as a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. Thirty thousand people can only be a massive accumulation of people with fucked up priorities. Thirty thousand people in two countries, plus however many more in however many other countries, who have no idea what press freedom entails, is the shame of each one of those places.

As a person who has spent a reasonable amount of time working on Muslim cultural issues in an academic context, I hope that it doesn't get around that I said this: Islam is just as full of shit as Christianity and Judaism, and that's just for starters. There is an irritating sort of pussyfooting you have to do when discussing the various Near Eastern monotheisms in whatever context in academia which is entirely designed to pacify the fundamentalist Christian, or Muslim, or Jew who is sitting there, sweating in his cramped little desk and itching to jump up and scream j'accuse the very second that you imply that their scripture is not literally true. I've seen it from all three, plus a Tibetan Buddhist, and all I have to say at this point is; الف ایر بدیک و الف ایر بنبیيگ. I hope that rendered correctly. The type is too small for me to see. At any rate my point is the game is over. While of course I don't mean to denigrate true belief as a motive for any action, frankly, you true believers can swing on my nuts.

I really wish that at this point I could indulge in the sort of arrogant jingoistic dickwaving that the typical American Cracker Patriot normally does when faced with even more vacuous and artificial threats to his national conciousness. Unfortunately Norway is a small country with a small military and as a non-citizen I can't really speak for them. However I would like to point something out to our arsonist friends in the Middle East:

You know how you benefitted so much culturally from the Dark Ages in Europe, collapse of cultural institutions, flight from barbarians, etcetera? We caused that.

Grow the fuck up.

2006-02-04T16:20:00.000-06:00

This is a sixteenth-century Persian miniature.

The central figure is Muhammad, seated on the back of a fantastic beast called the Buraq. Muhammad. So what are you going to do? Go set fire to the Iranian embassy?

The "strict prohibition" against depicting Muhammad at all is a thing of the modern age. It is not long-standing or universal. Nor is the supposedly similar prohibition against depictions of living things or people; for evidence you need only look at Samarqand's Shir Dor Madrasasi, so named because it has a big fucking tiger on the front of it, And it's a religious school.

As Aaron at MBMIMOTMOG has noted, we cannot regard the actions of "a few bad apples" as representative of the whole of the worldwide Muslim community. However it bears noting that in the Muslim countries where this sort of thing is going on the prevailing belief must certainly not be what it is here, that governments have no say in what their newspapers print. Otherwise those people would be dismissed as cranks and ashamed to wave matches near candles, let alone near foreign embassies.

And what foreign embassies were they? Not the American embassy. That would have been despicable, too, but at least the US is responsible for actively fucking over Muslim countries. Not so Norway and Denmark. These are two countries who were so little on the minds of the people of the Middle East that in most of the pictures I saw of flag-burnings, the mock flags the protestors had made for themselves had the pole on the wrong side.

See, this was leading up to something. Bet you wish you would have read all that pope shit.

2006-02-03T01:05:00.000-06:00

If you've been following the Scandinavian media in recent days, and even if you haven't, you may be aware of the great debacle currently facing Denmark and to a lesser extent Norway and now even Germany and France.

Last year, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a number of political cartoons, many of which could be characterized as critical of Islamic fundamentalism and two of which explicitly depicted the face of Muhammad, which is considered by Sunni Muslims to constitute blasphemy. This went largely undetected, and earlier this year, the Norwegian magazine Magazinet ("The Magazine"; if you want creativity go to Sweden) reproduced them. The pictures, taken as a whole, are probably as insulting to Muslims and Islam as the majority of American newspaper editorial cartoons are to me and my opinions. They are probably less insulting to Muslims and Islam than 99% of American newspaper editorial cartoons that deal with the subject.

Somehow, quite a while after the fact, these depictions became common knowledge in many Middle Eastern countries and led to widespread public criticism. As it stands now, the people of many Muslim nations are boycotting Danish goods, and many Middle Eastern governments, including those of Libya, Palestine, and Iraq, are calling Danish diplomats to account for what they see as their government's unsatisfactory handling of this problem.

This week a French newspaper reproduced the cartoons, and as part of the apology its managing editor was sacked.

From here out I am going to tread extremely carefully so as to make my intent and my sympathies absolutely clear.

Muslims are angry with the editorial staff of Jyllands-Posten and have demanded an apology; although one appears on the JP webpage in Danish, English, and Arabic, it presumably does not take precisely the tone that Muslims would prefer. More importantly, Muslims are angry with the Danish government for not chastising the newspaper. The Danish government's position on this is that the Danish government has no place interfering with the freedom of the Danish press.

And so the boycotts continue. Now, Indonesian militants have stormed the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Jakarta.

There is a simple reason for this. The people of these countries evidently will only be satisfied when the Danish and Norwegian governments punish the responsible newspapers, which they refuse to do, and rightly so. But why do the people of Indonesia, and Morocco, and Iraq insist that they do?

Because in those places, there is absolutely no cultural expectation that the press be independent of the government. This expectation, on the contrary, is so absent that the people of these countries believe that it is the responsibility of the government when the press "misbehaves". This is the very opposite of one of the primary preconditions for a free and healthy democratic society.

The sentiment being expressed by the Muslim protestors is not an unusual one in our own society. It is in fact espoused by many of the very people who would like to visit Democracy upon them like a cleansing fire. However, in our society it is not so unbridled that one simple disturbance in one newspaper costs the Danish dairy industry US$1.5 million per day. In our society it is thankfully so mitigated that Proctor and Gamble can thrive today, over 25 years after emblazoning its goods with the Number of the Beast.

My point is this: It is not wrong for Muslims to interpret an image of the face of Muhammad as blasphemy; blasphemy is essentially just a violation of religious mores and we can no more expect an about-face on this issue than we can expect Christians to suddenly start lending money at interest in violation of their most deeply-held religious beliefs. It is not wrong for them to feel insulted or put-out by the depictions appearing in the Danish newspaper or express that sentiment to the Danish newspaper itself.

It is ridiculous for them to expect the Danish government to abridge press freedom to protect their feelings, however deeply-held or highly-flown. The fact that they possess this expectation, particularly in Iraq, shows just how far they are, culturally, from being prepared to practice full Western-style democracy. It is not that Islam as a religion is inherently anti-democratic; all religions are anti-democratic, and in order for democracy to function, we must be prepared to abdicate our religious responsibility to fuck with people who disagree with us. The problem furthermore is not just due to strong religious belief.

The problem is that due to generations spent without a completely free press, those engaging in the boycott believe that governments have the right to control the content of newspapers and other media, when in fact this is not the case. This is not the kind of idea that simply takes hold overnight, as for example when the United States invades and proposes to set up a completely free society in less than ten years. This is the kind of idea which must be inculcated at the root of schoolchildrens' psyches, and that is done either by bringing them up to understand the total incompatibility of press and state, or by making them witness the fight to win press freedom.

A place like Iraq or Morocco or the United States where a newspaper faces the threat of victimization from the government or the populace when it prints something that is unpopular or unpleasant or flies in the face of the dominant take on Semitic folklore is a place where civil society itself is in jeopardy. We can see just in our everyday life how everything can take on a religious dimension if we let it, and if we make a religion the absolute arbiter of truth above reason or the arbiter of policy above human accountability then there is no hope for democracy, because we have just completely subtracted human agency from the political equation.

Daniel Higgs @ SFCA Hemlock Tavern 25 January 2006

2006-01-30T22:45:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I'm putting these reviews up out of order. Fuck you.

This was actually a longer show, featuring "Lichens" and "Feathers" in addition to Daniel Higgs. I missed Feathers because we got to the venue late. I missed Lichens because it's the lead singer from 90 Day Men and I haven't given a shit about them since about three weeks after their debut album came out. Yeah I said it.

Daniel Higgs was and probably still is the frontman of Baltimore, Maryland/Washington D.C.'s Lungfish, who have to date released quite a few albums of varied character on Dischord records, which honestly I never heard of before just now. Lungfish as a band have a spotty back catalogue that i personally don't know how to navigate - I got 2001's Necrophones a while back and wasn't impressed, but, my interest sparked by this live show, I went out and got Artificial Horizon from 1998, which is a much better album in every respect.

Perhaps the best introduction to the show review proper, now that we've done away with the preamble, is what my friend Ben said immediately afterward, while we were waiting for our ride: "The line separating Daniel Higgs from some street lunatic is very very thin." His onstage chatter is unusual to say the least. His persona is incredibly off-putting. He took the stage wearing woolen trousers and a long-sleeved white cotton tab-collared shirt, over which he was wearing a sleeveless navy blue cossack that came down to mid-thigh. Add to this his bald head and huge Civil War general's beard and finish off by noting that his hands are covered in bizarre tattoos, marks of his trade.

Higgs filled his 45 minutes with just three songs, only one of which had lyrics, and one of which was played on a Jew's harp with no other accompaniment. Normally he plays acoustic guitar, which he routes through a piezoelectric pickup to an amplifier with a 3" speaker, which is guaranteed to distort and feed back. In the hands of most musicians what he does would be described as "meandering" or "discursive", as most of the time he seemed to be producing a deliberate series of long, ragalike runs that didn't seem to match a particular time signature or cadence. For the most part however Higgs managed to keep up the interest on guitar, presenting the audience with a fair degree of musical interest beyond simple guitar jerkoff, although it was something of a challenge to the endurance. The same was true of the shorter Jew's harp number and the song on which he supplied vocals, which I believe some in the crowd recognized - it may have been a popular Lungfish song (the band seems to have a reasonably sized cult following in the Bay Area).

No matter how many times you type "relativism", it just looks wrong somehow.

2006-01-30T20:41:00.000-06:00

In part I blame a highschool classmate who wouldn't stop talking or writing about how he was an "athiest" who believed in "athiesm". Say what you will about "wieght", "freind", and misapplications of "they're", those are the misspellings that eat at my sole.

Athiesm, or excuse me atheism, brings us to part two of the post whose first half has been so eagerly devoured. Because it is the Catholic understanding of atheism and existentialism that makes possible this quote, which I used last time as well but am reproducing again because I know all you secular humanists can't be arsed to scroll down the page and find your old place again.

Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own "ego".

The pope brings together a lot of longstanding assumptions and dogma to that little paragraph. It's not really his fault, though. The theological-philosophical edifice of Catholicism is so uniquely self-contained and expansive that merely challenging individual elements of the system without holding the whole thing up for ridicule at once pretty much guarantees that Catholic thinkers will interpret your criticisms in its terms. This is the same system that was essentially established through the efforts of Saint Thomas Aquinas upon the foundation of Aristotelian thought. Essentially the weakness of the Thomist model is the same as its strength: all parts of it depend on all other parts of it for validation and proof.

This is to say, that for Catholicism, a thing is so because it follows from other principles, and this chain is traceable back to God. In the field of moral logic, therefore, a Catholic sufficiently grounded in Catholic philosophy cannot conceive of an atheist who is not a murderer, because their lack of a belief in God wholly precludes their ability to have an externally constructed moral code, because God is the only legitimate source of morals. Necessarily for Benedict, if God is not the source of your morality, then you yourself are the source of your morality, because without a moral code proceeding directly from God, then clearly whatever moral code you claim to possess is something you devised personally. Openly admitting that your moral code proceeds from human society is tantamount to asserting that your moral code has no universal authority and can be modified at will.

One of the major bugbears of Catholic educators, at least at my high school, was "situational ethics", the view that the circumstances you find yourself in might affect the objective rightness or wrongness of an act that you engage in. The popular example is a flatly absurd scenario in which, pressured by a gunman to kill yourself or passively allow your friends to be murdered, you let the murder happen because suicide is a sin. Under the rubric of situational ethics, Catholics typically also include "moral relativism", because both ideas transfer a high degree of moral agency, or at least moral authority, to individuals. Moral Relativism for Catholics is not what it is in anthropology, the refusal to apply value judgments to descriptions of a culture; instead it is the refusal to accept that any act has a moral character at all. This is, quickly, the Catholic understanding of moral relativism and relativism in general.

This is why Benedict is so quick to condemn modern culture for succumbing to moral relativism: Because we clearly do not toe the Church line and are probably atheists, it follows that we do not believe in the idea of moral absolutes, and if we do not believe in moral absolutes we have no morals at all. As people who lack any morals whatsoever, our social views are completely desire-driven. QED.

What the Catholic Church, as well as other Christian organizations in Europe and the United States fail to realize is that as social progressives, we do in fact have an extremely well-tuned sense of right and wrong that is bound to principles which, while admittedly not handed down from the magic honky in the sky, have much more to do with rationally established norms than our simple whims. We are tagged with the "moral relativist" label here for one simple reason: Our moral absolutes do not match those of the Church. In fact, we can judge the Church to be morally deficient on several levels.

Our acceptance of homosexuality is not due to our moral degeneracy on the subject. Rather it is because we recognize that a Ugaritic folktale is not a moral authority, and furthermore that doing harm to a person over an inborn trait is morally wrong. That's not something that proceeds from our appetites or whims. It's a principle that follows logically from an understanding of justice and free will. If we start punishing gay men from having sex with other men, then we may as well start punishing women for menstruating.

Oh wait.

Ferocious Eagle, Polar Goldie Cats & The Moggs @ SFCA Hemlock Tavern 27 January 2006

2006-01-28T21:40:00.000-06:00

In the interest of full disclosure I would like to reveal that Ferocious Eagle are friends of friend of mine but at no time did money or other consideration change hands and this review was written free of outside influence. The only band that has ever given me a kickback of any kind is the Hat Party, who rock by the way.

No sooner had I walked into the Hemlock Tavern than I recognized someone from the old days in Madison; I had been warned that this was par for the course there but in this case the ex-Madisonian was only visiting from New York City. Well, I got a drink out of it. It was certainly entertaining to play catch up with a near-complete stranger at the unnaturally fast pace that nonnative New Yorkers cultivate (for the rest of the night I couldn't stop myself from saying "yeah yeah yeah!" when a simple "yup" would have sufficed) - this however stretched on for a dangerously long time and fortunately I was able to disengage just in time to make it back for the start of the Ferocious Eagles' set.

As I was promised, Ferocious Eagle truly truly rock. A two-guitar/drumkit trio from Portland, Oregon, they build their rhythmically propulsive songs around complicated chords straightforwardly played. There have been a lot of bands like this in the recent history of rock and roll but none of them manage to be quite like Ferocious Eagle. I picked up their EP at the show and it's pretty good, but you can tell they've gotten a lot better in the short time since it was recorded. By contrast to the live music, it sounds tame, which is disappointing as it is definitely not a band that relies on mere showmanship to get itself over.

They were followed by the Polar Goldie Cats.

I was extremely jazzed about this. The fact that there were about 40 people in the room at the time they were playing now means that I have concrete proof that other people have heard the Polar Goldie Cats. I bought their first album when it came out on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace! label in 1995 at the age of 17 on the basis of a positive writeup in Option, and despite being utterly blown away by it, I could find neither a) other people who had heard it or b) people who would sit still long enough for me to play it for them. They have only made two other albums since 1995, the most recent in 2001 on Up!, and another one whose existence I was not aware of until last night, in 1997 or so. Yeah, the PGCs have some publicity problems. And this is totally unfair.

Last night, the band played very much in the vein of its most recent album, which is to say, sort of like the first album, but tangibly darker. Yeah, that really helps you out, I know. Well, it's your own fault. The Polar Goldie Cats sort of sit at a nonexistent fork in the rock family tree that leads to Bis on one hand and Sweep The Leg Johnny on the other. All-instrumental (bass, drums, two guitars), their songs are driven in part by their unusual chords and bizarre jangly melodies, but what really makes Polar Goldie Cats stand out is the drumming. If you listened to just thirty seconds of the band you could be forgiven for thinking that they just let some sugared-up ten-year-old on the kit but that is just so not the case. The drummer is in fact hyper-competent and treating the drums, the cymbals in particular, as a means to make sound, not just to keep the beat; it would not be out of place to mention the drumming of Sunny Murray on Albert Ayler's Bells. It is impossible to overemphasize the uniqueness or the greatness of the Polar Goldie Cats. Do yourselves a damn favor and go out and get the self-titled debut fucking now. I don't know how hard it is to get now, and I don't much care. You should have thought of that in 1995 like the rest of us cool people.

The Moggs closed out the show, and as usual I am sorry to report that I only caught the first half of their set - I had a bus to catch and a gracious friend to wake up before he fell too deeply asleep stranding me alone in the land of Aislers Set lyrics in the middle of the night. What I saw was quite good, although I do think it's time to retire couplecore as a genre and a term, even if I did just think of it. The Moggs had three strikes against them to begin with anyway: 1 - following up the Polar Goldie Cats; 2 - following up Ferocious Eagle; 3 - reminding me of Wisconsin Rapids people I'd like to forget. I get the feeling that on album, or on a better night, the Moggs could make better use of their one-guitar noise shard approach.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

2006-01-26T10:43:00.000-06:00

Haaaaaahahahahahahahahahahhaahahaha!

From the New York Times:
"Democracy brings not just rights but obligations and responsibilities, too," [Condoleeza Rice] said. "One of these is to be a fighter for peace and not for war and not for violence."

This was not posted with a mobile phone.

2006-01-20T20:12:00.000-06:00

I just got back from the Virgin Megastore, where my interview went well, I think. The interviewing manager looks exactly like Los in fifteen years. Spooky.

2006-01-20T10:45:00.000-06:00

I have an interview with Virgin Megastore today.

Immoral relativism.

2006-01-19T16:27:00.000-06:00

I just listened to this episode of the BBC series "In Our Time", and I think that some of what it has to say is relevant to contemporary American political and cultural debate.

The episode basically covers the history of the relativism as a philosophical idea dealing with the existence or absence of absolute truth over the past 2500 years, with particular attention paid to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it raises a few points which I would like to carry forward: First, that scientific, philosophical, and social-scientific "relativism" are all unique entities; second, that the "relativism" railed against by Benedict XVI in the lead-in quote, to wit

Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own "ego".

is not a type of "moral relativism" at all, but rather the definitive rejection of the Catholic moral standard, particularly its sexual moral standard, as itself immoral. Thirdly, I would like to point out that the chief proponents of relativism today, and in fact of a sort of nearly Cartesian solipsism, are conservatives and fundamentalist Christians themselves; in an act of basic intellectual dishonesty, rigorous scientific skepticism, in which reasonable people are free to propose refinements on established scientific theories when facts render them untenable, is perverted into a scenario in which science is given the same footing as religion due to its supposed abdication of the ability to describe things as they are.

In current conservative rhetoric, all the different kinds of "relativism" noted above are conflated and then ascribed to the Left. A facile contrast is drawn between the Right, which knows what is good and true, and the Left, which is so bound up in solipsism that it refuses to take a moral stand on known evils like abortion, homosexuality, suicide bombing, and the oppression of women. This is a common editorial tack taken by our buddies over at FreeRepublic.com and wherever else it is that my dad's buddy Nick sources all of his news. This is how it works: Left-wingers (so the story goes) are opposed to, for example, the war in Iraq, not because they see it as a massive tactical blunder of the first order, but because they tacitly approve of "what is going on over there", itself a dishonest generalization of the worst behavior of guys named "Ali" the world over; it's clear that these people (the Left, Muslims, whatever you got) have no moral compass whatsoever, because otherwise they would act exactly like us. Left-wingers clearly have no values, because when they trumpet their so-called commitment to feminism, they refuse to back it up by invading countries that are backward in that regard.

This is a mischaracterization of a long-standing principle of social-scientific investigation. Sure, if you look at filthy, Marxist academia, you will find a refusal by most scholars to excoriate the subjects of their study for any perceived shortcomings. There is a reason for this: There is no damn point. I recently finished writing an MA thesis entitled Competing Models of Autocratic Power in Timurid Transoxiana (because that's what it's about). The subjects of my thesis could fairly be described as an "asshole parade", and yet this expression is wholly absent from my writing.

The reason for this is that recently, intelligent people realized that in explaining how things work, or how they happened, or even why they work or happen, value judgments are a waste of time. Sure, making a drinking vessel out of your enemy's skull is not the act of a nice man. But how would our understanding of the world be advanced if all of our writing about world leaders was just variations on that theme? Moving into a more modern, but more general, frame of reference, it is of no use to our understanding of the way political violence is legitimated in societies to dwell on dead babies.

This mode of thinking about social science has been called "relativism", but it is not the same as philosophical relativism, which is to a greater or lesser extent, depending on who is being tagged with the label, the belief that what is "true" is mutable or variable. Generally the people who are called "relativists" are simply pointing out that your perception of the world is not the same as someone else's. Under a hard-core, true relativism, nothing is real in the accepted sense because each observer's "truth" is equally true and no contradictions exist.

I have heard people claim that during the Vietnam War, some opposition to the war was due to a supposedly widespread belief that Southeast Asian culture was "incompatible" with democracy. If this were true, it would illustrate a philosophically relativist viewpoint with respect to the value of democracy. It is also kind of racist. I'll concede that some people probably said something like that, because I find a lot of hippie culture racist in the extreme. I won't concede that it was ever a mainstream reason for opposition to the Vietnam War.

These same people now claim that unwillingness to try to export the American Revolution to the Middle East is symptomatic of the same kind of racist, relativist thinking. Obviously, if we don't want the Iraqis to have democracy, there must be some reason for it - probably because we don't think they're capable. This is just a tactic. It is racist to undertake a great civilizing mission against some Third Worlders who need to be drug kicking and screaming to our level of culture and sophistication.

Here again we see the disconnect between social-scientific relativism and philosophical relativism. Without divorcing ourselves from the idea that democracy is the worst kind of government except for all the others, we still recognize that trying to rank different cultures one above another according to some kind of arbitrarily determined rubric is pointless.

Of course leftists want to see the entire world turn into a democracy.

One democracy. And then we nationalize the steel industry.

But having what amounts to a practical dispute about the best way to achieve democracy (which by the way is not the same as human rights, civil rights, or equal rights, which I am choosing not to address - I'm not above mentioning certain right-wing elected officials to make that point) in Iraq is not an example of relativism. That said, I'll still be laughing when democracy at gunpoint fails.

Fortunately, in addressing the subject of scientific relativism, we get to step out of the minefield that is Iraq for a minute.

And jump into the minefield that is educational policy.

Yay.

Let's turn our attention to the popular fundamentalist saw, "Evolution is just a theory". That word 'theory' has a lot of connotations, doesn't it? A theory is very tentative, very vague, very formless. I mean, your Uncle Frank has a theory about the Kennedy assassinations, and we can all disagree about that, can't we? Except that's not a theory. That's a hypothesis. And we talk about the "Theory of Evolution", not the "Hypothesis of Evolution". A theory, as distinct from a hypothesis, holds up under the weight of empirically observed fact. But what can we get away with if we blur the distinction? In fact, what can we get away with if we smear all of science as "just a theory?"

So much hay has been made out of the "Conflict Between Faith And Reason" down the millennia that I almost feel bad pointing out that there really is no conflict, because Reason is the mental faculty for interpreting the data you gather with your senses, whereas Faith is the mental faculty for enjoying movies and doing badly for yourself in Las Vegas. They don't overlap at all. And yet some people who think that faith rather than reason should be the guiding principle not only of social policy but of working out problems in biology, a branch of scientific inquiry whose practitioners will on occasion suggest to us things for putting in our mouths, want us to think that they're the same.

Here, ironically, the religious right, normally so opposed to relativism in all its forms, waves relativism's flag high. Due to their facile refusal to distinguish skeptical scientific inquiry from philosophical relativism, they wind up equating science with religion. If you, as a scientist, are unhappy with the current formulation, say, of superstring theory, you are free to propose an alternate theory. You take into account all of the relevant facts that you can collect, and you devise a new theory that accounts for them. You use your reason to synthesize facts that you empirically observe. If your observed facts are wrong or inaccurate, your theory is wrong. If your theory fails to account for data which you had no way of collecting, it is also wrong but hardly your fault. We don't make fun of the ancient Greeks for their idea of the atom. This is skepticism.

The suggestion that all theories are somehow of equal value in the abstract is a creation of people who seek to downgrade science as a mode of inquiry. All theories are not of equal value. Clearly, theories correspond in greater or in lesser extents to the state of affairs they attempt to describe, and the more they do, the better they are as theories. It is dishonest to exploit some kind of Schrödinger's Cat gambit and claim that because we cannot absolutely know the truth or falsity of any theory that they are all equally valid or equally false. That is philosophical relativism as applied to science, and probably also a fundamental misapplication of quantum mechanics.

And yet it is exactly that claim that the Religious Right, opponents of relativism, make when they want to get Creationism or Intelligent Design taught in school. They claim that because you cannot know, in the same way that an omniscient all-present being would know, that evolution happened, then as a theory it holds as much water as Creationism. Never mind that you cannot know, in the same way that an omniscient or all-present being would know, that the third-to-last time you bought french fries, the carton they came in was not an omniscient, all-present being under the specie of a french-fry carton.

The difference between a good scientific claim and a bad one is that a good scientific claim is falsifiable. Religious claims, hinging as they do on revelation, prophecy, and recieved wisdom, are invariably bad science. Religion amounts to a body of normative prescriptions about right and wrong, and there is no way to reformulate them to make them observably false. They are rules, and rules don't have truth-conditions.

Okay, I'll pick up where I left off next time, with how it isn't moral relativism that the Pope should be worrying about.

Also, I'll be musing on how "relativism" is one of those words that looks wrong no matter how often you go back and retype it.

I swear this isn't a moblog.

2006-01-07T23:28:00.000-06:00

A that's a dumb word;B I'm feeling aphoristic lately;C this's a damn good vrsn of 'She Cracked'.

I jvst want y'all fuckers to know.

2006-01-07T23:19:00.000-06:00

I've seen Dillinger 4 like 8 times. Before 1999. That's how much punker I am than you.

People who run down do

2006-01-04T22:02:00.000-06:00

People who run down do hometown for how it smells have clearly never been to Barstow.

75 miles east of Barstow.

2006-01-04T17:46:00.000-06:00

And boy howdy am I sick of the purple mountains' majesty.

Next up:'Afghamistam'.

2006-01-03T18:04:00.000-06:00

Right now I am driving thru NM, listening to Minus the Bear's 'Spritz! Spritz!' and laughing.

New Mexico.

2006-01-03T15:26:00.000-06:00

It's like Texas with scenery!

America!

2006-01-03T14:18:00.000-06:00

I am on Route 66. At a Stuckey's.

Otachestvo.

2006-01-03T12:34:00.000-06:00

Further proving my theory that Texas is Uzbekistan, this rest stop is identical to Moynaq's WWII memorial.

Stern & I: @ WI

2005-12-22T00:47:00.000-06:00

Stern & I: @ WI Rapids' newest dance club. On the PA: Norwegian blastbeat gods NOXAGT. We win.

Spectra Sonic Sound

2005-12-21T21:42:00.000-06:00

Ever since explaining to that guy that what he had there was indeed a perpetual motion machine, I have had the Nation of Ulysses' "Perpetual Motion Machine" on constant repeat in my head.

Karma at the Country Kitchen.

2005-12-21T05:01:00.000-06:00

The last time Stern and I were together in Rapids, we wound up our night by crank-calling the local Country Kitchen from every pay phone in town.

Tonight CK had its revenge. Tonight, as we sat at our table trying to develop a map of the Rapids/Port Kid Diaspora, part of that diaspora came back to haunt us. A classmate of Stern's, who I vaguely recognized as a person who talked nothing but nonsense, invited himself over to our table and proceeded to hold forth on his plans to revolutionize the energy industry.

It did not help that he was ragingly drunk and, probably, stoned. It certainly did not help that his plan was a perpetual motion machine. The dealbreaker was the condescending way he soldiered on, trying to make us understand his beautiful plan in a dialect of drunkenese known only to those who failed highschool physics, when we pointed out to him why it would not work. It was like being trapped in the Timecube website brought to life.

STERN!

2005-12-20T23:10:00.000-06:00

Woohoo! Someone has come to Rapids!

Elizabeth. Work isn't an excuse.

LoST VI.

2005-12-15T15:20:00.000-06:00

Confidential to BR: Don't be dead.

LST V.

2005-12-15T14:44:00.000-06:00

Nipsey Russell, Loni Anderson & a wand mike.

LST IV.

2005-12-15T14:42:00.000-06:00

I also know that 'Schwarzenegger' should be pronounced like two words.

LST Pt III.

2005-12-15T14:38:00.000-06:00

Thx to internat'l podcasts I now know just how angry the world is w/ CIA ghost detainee rendition. Thx George.

Liveblogging Schierl Tire: Part II.

2005-12-15T14:26:00.000-06:00

Chuck Woolery. That is all.

My time is water down a drain.

2005-12-15T12:57:00.000-06:00

Five hours in the tire shop. Whoo!

Blogging on an empty street.

2005-12-14T22:11:00.000-06:00

Lately the majority of my interpersonal communication takes place on the Internet; I have been coming to realize, although I knew it before, that most of the people with whom I interact have somewhat different internet schedules than I do. Because I connect from home and don't have a job, my Internet day is far less intense and far longer than theirs (or, since you're reading this, yours). Occasionally I am near a computer during the critical period during the greater North American workday that enables vigorous sustained participation in an AIM conversation or a comment-box conversation.

Usually though I have been out running errands and I hit the computer in earnest at around 10 PM as I am doing now. At this point it is incredibly unlikely that I can catch more than one or two of the usual suspects at the usual internet watering holes. Sure I leave comments as appropriate, but more often than not the smoke has long cleared from the witty-banter fest by the time I throw in my mixed metaphor.

And it's alright. It's the digital equivalent of one of my favorite situations: Sunday afternoon in Madison during a non-summer academic break. To get the full effect, stare at the above photo while listening to Cadallaca's "Winter Storm '98". It's Kars, not Madison, but let's not split hairs.

My brother is no rock & roll fun.

2005-12-11T01:17:00.000-06:00

If I never hear Hunky Dory again it will be too soon.

The Genius of Minus the Bear

2005-12-07T21:49:00.000-06:00

My brother has a certain way of talking up the classic rock crap that he likes that makes their casual obsessions and craven lyrical kowtowing to the fanbase sound like inspired songwriting. Listen to his argument for Queen's "We Are The Champions/We Will Rock You", which basically boils down to it being a great song because it was written for fans to sing along to, and you are powerless to argue. Because it's a nonsequitur lawyer trick, which is unsurprising because it is his job.

His shill for Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band is more insightful in its analysis of Bob's appeal, even if its conclusion, that "Night Moves" is listenable, is a fraud. Basically, every Bob Seger song is about the exact same thing. "Night Moves", "Turn The Page", "Old Time Rock and Roll", "Still The Same", "Against The Wind", "Rock And Roll Never Forgets" - I admit I don't know a lot about Bob Seger but I challenged my brother on this once and he's got lyrics to quote to back himself up on every Seger song I could find listed on the Internet. All Bob Seger songs are about getting older and looking back on your younger days, when you were quite the hellion capable of tearing shit up on a major scale, against whom all the forces of history and economics were arrayed. Now you are wiser and maybe a bit sadder, but damn it you know what it is to be young.

Minus The Bear are the Bob Seger for our era. Due to their indebtedness to the emo school of songwriting, in which 60% of your output has to be about a particular young woman with whom you broke up last year and for whom you will forever bear a combination of emotions the precise nature of which depend on whether or not your band has any mosh breakdowns, Minus The Bear's nostalgia-rock impulses are expressed most succinctly in their takes on the emo girl song.

Uniquely in the Minus the Bear girl song, the object of the singer's affection is always depicted as completely unreachable (which is not to say unattainable) because of the vagaries of time and distance. In songs such as "Let's Play Guitar In A Five Guitar Band", "This Ain't A Surfing Movie", or "Fulfill the Dream", whether or not the girl is ever gotten, the mood is regret, and the perspective, while not made explicit, is apparently some years after the fact. Most of Minus The Bear's songs are to some extent girl songs, but even those that aren't, such as "Hooray" or "Michio's Death Drive" push nostalgia to the forefront.

Returning for a moment to Bob Seger, I would like to challenge you to guess the release date of "Night Moves". Give? 1976.

Yes, Bob Seger's major-label debut was in 1976, a year largely dominated by music that doesn't sound a damn thing like Seger's. Bob Seger was basically aping Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band that had broken up four years before, and ruining their good name in the process. Similarly, Minus The Bear's debut album was released in 2002, three years after the breakup of Braid, and their resemblance to Braid is uncanny.

How uncanny? Well, when I went to see Minus the Bear some time ago, City on Film, Bob Nanna's new band, were opening. As we walked in CoF were just winding up and I was momentarily pissed off that I had just driven to Urbana to hear five seconds of Minus The Bear. With each successive album, though, MtB become more and more technically sophisticated, diversifying their field of influence to add, say, Firebird Band.

In fact, the piece of lame-o band math that most accurately suggests Minus the Bear is Braid as played by The Sea And Cake with electronics assistance from Tortoise. Ignoring the suspiciously Illinois-heavy influence list (no Slint, even), it's basically a compressed best-of late 90s indie rock. Like the Seger case, MtB's short-term nostalgia rock is composed of both lyrical and compositional elements.

And that is totally why Minus The Bear rock.

Forgetful Jones, the Bracelets, the Hat Party & Colony of Watts @ Madison WI Slipper Club 3 Dec 2005

2005-12-07T21:34:00.000-06:00

Yes this is the same as the below show.

Hah. Below show. That's lame. Anyway, this is also the show that MBIMOTMOG profiles here.

I started out this show a bit drunk and very garrulous. I really hope that I surprised the fuck out of everyone I talked to who doesn't know me well. The way I accomplished this was simple: First, I had about four brushes with death and one with an empty gas tank on the way up from Bloomington, where I was elated never to have to visit again. Second, I hung out in Genna's watching college hockey alone with strangers for like two hours for practice. And Old Style.

I honestly don't remember the Forgetful Jones show too well except for being made to face the crowd and pull a face. The Bracelets I remember a bit better. They sounded rather Braceletty, but don't really hold up as well as a two-piece as they do a three-piece. Whatever instruments are currently in use don't cover the absence of what isn't. Even the xylophone.

The Hat Party sucked. They sounded like Lee Atwater's backup band. They sounded like a cross between Skynyrd and the Goldwaters. No really. Actually the Hat Party continued to pull their musical chameleon act. I'm pretty sure that their sound is at the mercy of whoever's running the board - whatever that person's take is on what can delicately be called "the keyboard issue" has massive repercussions for the structure and texture of the songs. On the night in question, midway through the set they went from sounding like Swervedriver to sounding like Satisfact.

Immediately after the Hat Party finished I bailed in search of food, which I had not eaten in any significant quantity since the day before. So I missed pretty much the entire Colony of Watts set.

Sitcom politics

2005-12-07T21:29:00.000-06:00

Those of you who know me may know that I went to a Catholic high school. You may also know that as a non-Catholic, this did not always end well for me. What you might not realize is that until about two months ago I had never heard of the Catholic League. And I went to an unusually doctrinaire school. I'm sure they had publications, but those publications were not in the library to my knowledge.

And now all of a sudden this William Donohue fucker is everywhere. Can anyone explain to me why?

It appears to have something to do with this whole War on Christmas non-starter. A front on the culture war that is such total bullshit that I am not about to justify it with any attention whatsoever.

Not the Mountain Goats, not Hood, not Swervedriver & not Hoover @ not Club de Wash 3 December 2005

2005-12-05T08:29:00.000-06:00

Whu-whuuut, John.

Ah Genna's.

2005-12-03T19:35:00.000-06:00

Watchin' hockey. Listnin' to a guy crash & burn on a 1st date.

Heiliger Bimbam.

2005-12-03T16:46:00.000-06:00

Schnee. Stau. Steuerbahn.

Further adventures in I wish I had a digital camera.

2005-12-03T16:07:00.000-06:00

On hwy. Just drove through a huge flock of starlings. Vv cool.

YU/8N

2005-12-02T22:06:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I dropped my thesis off at the bindery. It is now officially their problem until the end.

Today I got transcripts from IU sent to everyplace I could conceivably apply except UW-Seattle, which I forgot about.

I got done doing that at about 3 PM, meaning that driving back to WI today was not really feasible. Some of you may have recieved a premature text about that today; I wasn't about to take back my good news over an hour's worth of bureaucracy.

That shouldn't have been a problem because supposedly there's some kind of mega-party going on today here in Bloomington. As square as I consider the idea, there's a "Punk Rock Prom" that's been merged with some peoples' birthdays.

And I feel like shit.

I am a new kind of ill. I'm not cold sick, and I'm definitely not flu sick either. The only things that I've experienced that are similar are:

Being six and taking too much Theophyll.

Day Four of a raw-foods diet coupled with four-mile daily runs.

You know how we were talking about Sebadoh on someone else's blog? You know the chorus to "S.Soup" off Bakesale? I've totally done that. Over the course of a week. Ask Chromeeyes if he ever gets back online, he might remember.

Giving blood - I have a condition (like my grandfather and my mother) that makes me conk out when I have blood drawn in any quantity.

But I haven't done any of those things for quite a while. The Internet says I've OD'd on crystal. I haven't done that lately either.

So now, instead of getting my "hey, you look vaguely familiar to me also I'm leaving town forever tomorrow*" on, I'm sitting here. I just watched "Nip/Tuck" for the first time ever. Wow does it suck.

____________
* Not to be confused with "getting my 'I'm leaving town forever tomorrow baby, how you doin'?' on". If I tried to get that on, there would be a surfeit of ladies getting their "whatever, Rick's Friend**, I got a man" on. And if there was one who wasn't getting that particular thing on, I would shortly have to be getting my "what exactly in the fuck do I think I'm doing" on.

** To the extent that I have a name to go with my face here, it is "Rick's Friend", or occasionally "Rick's Other Friend".

Gas is $2/gal here!

2005-11-30T16:23:00.000-06:00

I take back everything I said about the war in Iraq. Yay torture.

Maybe it's just me.

2005-11-29T21:56:00.000-06:00

I like to sleep over 15 yards from handguns.

Dedicated to the XNO LIFE CREWX

2005-11-29T12:19:00.000-06:00

In general, I don't have a problem with straightedge. Not even in particular, most times. Refer to the title of this blog if you want proof of that. In Madison, many of my best friends were straightedge.

Notably, none of us ever called it that.

I didn't drink or smoke for a long time. When I moved to Bloomington, it became sort of a social handicap. Exactly how much of a social handicap, I only discovered much later, when I started to smoke and drink again.

The real genesis of my current jam-up was outside of the Metro, in line for the Tortoise/Isis double bill a few weeks ago. Knowing full well that the Indiana straight edge kids with whom I usually crash when I am visiting IU were there to see Isis, I walked up to the venue smoking a cigarette. I got a comment from them about it, but that's to be expected. You get comments from people when they see you in new shoes. That's human nature.

Flash forward to this week. I haven't had a cigarette since like last Tuesday. I cut myself off because I have had prior experience with the state of hygiene in their house, and I have bad asthma. See? I am capable of wicked hardcore advance planning. As a result of the not-smoking, I am still kind of cranky. Yesterday and today, that crank is crunk up thanks to a phenomenon I'm sure everyone who has ever gone for a while without smoking has experienced: the seven-day nic fit (there are also four-week, six-month, and one-year nic fits).

So yesterday I am talking to one of the people with whom I am staying. Whenever he is home, he prefers to keep himself shut up in his room with a space heater taking the temperature to a bone-dry 90 degrees, and clouded with incense. Another thing that differentiates XWIX from XINX is that XINX involves a whole lot more New Age superstitious bullshit than I thought punk rock was ever allowed to be about. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Unbroken doesn't have any songs about qi. But I digress.

I am in his room talking to him, and I cough. Once.

Maybe the cough is due to the incense. It is equally likely to be due to the two cats that have the run of the house. A house that is never cleaned. A house that is surrounded by a lawn that is never mown. See where I'm going?

But my cough has set off a lecture. A condescending, smirking lecture. A lecture that, if I had actually been smoking, maybe I would have found less snotty. I would have expected this to be the end of it, but, an hour later, having located his roommate at a local coffee shop (because caffeine isn't a drug. Seriously, I didn't even drink Coke. And did I ever give anyone shit about it?) he relates the saga of my single cough, so I get it again.

I point out that I haven't smoked for a week.

"I don't think so, because when you got here on Saturday, your car really stunk."

Yeah, thanks, dude. I didn't go through the obvious: It smells like that because I mainly only use my car to ferry my brother from bar to bar; you, as a smug non-smoker, have no idea how long it takes to get that smell out of your car, especially when the air is moist and the smell sticks around longer.

I also didn't go through the ultra-obvious: I do not give a fuck what you think, except insofar as it will cause you to shut the fuck up, and therefore I do not have particular motivation to lie about something about which I am not ashamed.

I also didn't point out that their house smells way worse than my car.

I just grinned and bore it, which to my distress is turning out to be the only valuable social skill I have. Too bad I'm so bad at it most of the time.

Like I said before, I don't really have a problem with straight edge. But a person needs a personality. I think seriously one of the biggest personal strains that this whole me-smoking catastrophe has exerted is that now, they have one less person to talk about being straight edge with.

One less person to speculate with about the BAC of some fucking metalcore band that honestly, I don't dislike only because I've never heard of them. One less person to listen to puns involving bracketing next-generation executive buzzwords with capital x's. One less person to sit around with you because you refuse to go to any fucking bars or parties.

Although honestly, if I knew where the bars or parties were on my own, I would be fucking gone.

Missed connections.

2005-11-28T14:26:00.000-06:00

Most Sundays between August 1995 and 1999, when not out of town or occupied with schoolwork, I would get up reasonably early and head downtown. My preferred route, while not exactly a complete detour around campus, took me near the Engineering area of campus, past the dingiest McDonald's in America, and south of Washington. I took the detour in order to find random food, often from the Regent Street Rocky's or Taco John's, and to listen to my walkman. On the occasions that I ventured north into the familiar part of the city, that I preferred to avoid precisely because I saw it every other day, I went straight into the basment of the Pic-A-Book for comics. For the most part however my goal was the early matinee at the Majestic Theater where I would watch everything that was not a French or Italian screwball comedy and where I saw you (WF 19-21, straight brown/occasionally black dyed/possibly this was due to the dimness of the theater hair, 5'5", med. wt., thrift-shop/"indie rock" attire) between 40-60% of the time, generally in the back left quarter of the theater.

On the Yellow line of the Oslo T-Bane in August 1997 you (WF ~24, blue eyes/hair, unseasonably warm clothes and notably not one of those sarongs that literally every single other girl in Norway was wearing, no idea on the height because I got on the subway after you, and left before) asked me if we had passed the Parliament stop, which we had. You swore and looked at your watch. The next day I left Norway and have not been back since.

April 2000. You (??) stole my bike from in front of the Memorial Union. I don't know the exact date because I had taken the bus home one day because it was raining, and I didn't come back for the bike for about a week. I would still appreciate it back, please.

September 2002. You (WF ~25, shoulder length blond hair, evidently a Public and Environmental Affairs student) and I talked about dropping Environmental Issues and Constraints in Northern and Central Eurasia. You should have stuck it out, it got a lot better.

Me: WM 18-26, 6'0", 180-220 lbs., red/black/green once hair, hazel eyes.

Thanksgiving recap.

2005-11-28T14:06:00.000-06:00

In order to maintain my binge-and-starve blogging schedule as well as to conform to the fashion I present here a bullet-pointed and moderately cryptic recapitulation of my Thanksgiving holiday.

My food, once again contaminated. Who puts cheese in someone else's mashed potatoes? Who puts cheese in mashed potatoes full stop?

Dinner at my aunt and uncle's house - more than half the group was composed of people that only they knew.

Reptilian conservatives make up a majority of my father's extended family and the entirety of his brother's social circle.

Hmong. It isn't related to Chinese. Neither is Vietnamese. Read a book.

Also, stop making fun of the way it sounds. First of all, you don't appear to actually know what it sounds like. Second, you speak German.

The standard avoidance tactic is to read a book to stave off conversation. Just my luck that my current reading, The Truth (with jokes) by Al Franken and Nikki R. Kedzie's Modern Iran would probably be lightning rods for the majority-dittohead gathering. Left them at home. Brought the Ipod. Lost the headphones.

Tetris on my cellphone. A respectable back-up tactic.

Cheese in mashed potatoes. Serioiusly, what the fuck? I still don't get it.

Ducks on half the horizontal surfaces.

Plaid on every vertical surface.

I hate our freedom.

2005-11-28T12:47:00.000-06:00

The United States overthrows governments. We've been doing it for quite a while now and it's turned out well exactly once. Supposedly we are spreading "democracy," which is a more specific form of the "freedom" that we used to spread. And if I may do away with snark in favor of vitriol, that conceit was not bullshit exactly twice.

The vacuity of "freedom" in the American formulation is demonstrated by its usage. Take for example the formerly popular locution "the Free World," which has fallen out of favor due to the fragmentation of our opponent superpower and its satellite nations. "Free World" wasn't then even an accurate descriptor of US satellites' economic policies, unless, say, self-damaging concessions are somehow "free market". The "Free World" outside of Western and Northern Europe was rarely even marginally politically free. Speaking semi-topically for a moment, let's remember that Iraq was part of the Free World until 1990, and crossed over into the Unfree World without so much as a regime change, once their same-old-same-old dictator decided to try something new.

American-style Freedom (henceforward "Our Freedom") is first and foremost the freedom of American, and sometimes even not necessarily American corporations to extract resources from less-industrialized countries. The tools we use to spread Our Freedom, and its newer variant, Democracy, are the Armed Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Pat Robertson thinks Hugo Chavez is being irrational when he says that the US and the CIA want him out? It happens. It's happened all over the world, and there have even been bragging accounts written by the perpetrators. Our Freedom has been about knocking over democracies and installing dictators in the name of our economy since the fifties.

Our Freedom involves the shoring up of sociopathic regimes around the world to protect ourselves against the specter of Communism even today, as well as the new threat of militant radical Islam. Any dictator with a single torture prison to his name can join the Free World just by lending his credibility to US foreign policy efforts.

And this has consequences.

Our Freedom, being essentially identical in most of the world with rape rooms and raw materials economies, is not something that most people would aspire to. Ignoring the fact that their discrimination against national minorities exceeds even US levels (at least in places without "English-Only" ordinances), Our Freedom is commensurate with the People's Republic of China's Freedom. The US's credibility now on human rights issues is the foreign-policy equivalent of a Philip Morris antismoking ad (tell your kids that only grownups smoke. *cough*cool grownups*cough*). I mean, if you're going to be enserfed to a foreign industrial superpower that's going to bankroll your unnecessary electroshock therapy, you may as well be enserfed to the leading foreign industrial superpower.

From where I am standing

2005-11-24T00:23:00.000-06:00

I can see a former nun dropping it like it's hot.

1/2

2005-11-15T19:08:00.000-06:00

Just now I decided to put "Dissident Aggressor" on repeat: I absentmindedly vocalized part of my decision and so

2/2

2005-11-15T19:07:00.000-06:00

inadvertently told the woman walking up behind me to 'Fuck a priest again'.

Why do they call you Sifl anyway?

2005-11-11T23:12:00.000-06:00

You'll find out in two weeks. CRESENT FRESH!

New Sheriff.

2005-11-09T23:11:00.000-06:00

You may have noticed that your comments are not appearing immediately, and you have to use one of those obnoxious verification boxes.

Unfortunately in response to a glut of really poorly composed and targeted comment spam, I've had to turn on comment moderation and word verification. In return for your patience I have made the comment box a pop-up window. Because those are fun.

It's all downhill once I start referencing German philosophers.

2005-11-09T22:56:00.000-06:00

Someone once said that poetry was inconceivable after Auschwitz, although he later retracted and requalified the statement.

That's pretty much how I feel, but substitute "blogging about politics" and "the Bush administration's latest hijinks". Every day. My current operative theory is that the Republican leadership is trying to silence dissent by doing something so vile and/or incompetent every week that they keep the national bullshit detector on permanent overload. And what do you do with an overactive smoke detector? You take the batteries out.

What's worse, reports that the US used white phosphorous weapons to injure anyone, even civilians, is technically old news. The US government decided it was above the Geneva conventions long ago, and this is just another manifestation of that decision.

We could go over and over again about how the American government's contention that the Iraq war is a new kind of conflict that nullifies the Geneva conventions, or whatever they're saying this week, is essentially fraud, but that distracts us from the main issue:

Chemical weapons are fucking immoral. Likewise torture and attacks on civilians.

Now we see why the Bush administration is so afraid of the International Criminal Court.

Filler.

2005-11-08T17:22:00.000-06:00

1. Would you rather be an African elephant or an Asian elephant? Could I be a rhino instead? Elephants are sort of dorky.

2. Would you rather freeze to death or burn alive? Freeze.

3. Name three movies you like: Get Carter, Band of Outsiders, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

4. Name three books you like: Invisible Cities, Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Man Without Qualities.

5. Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? No. Do people do that?

6. Republican, Democrat or other? Democrat.

7. Attendance percentage at high school dances? 0%.

8. What television shows do you watch regularly? I can't get my shit together enough to make it to the TV at the same time every week..

9. Abortion is a right.

10. The death penalty is racist.

11. How do you take your coffee? Black.

12. How do you take your tea? Green.

13. Who's your favorite teacher/professor? I'm not going to risk coming off like a kiss-ass in case he Googles himself.

14. How do you feel about your parents? I fear for them.

15. What sort of music do you listen to? Better than the kind you listen to.

16. List five or ten bands you listen to: Mirza, Wolves, the Fall, Satisfact, Joy Division, Black Eyes, the Aislers Set, Wrangler Brutes, Growing, Boris.

17. Do you use public transportation? Not available in my area.

18. Ever told someone you love him/her? Yes.

19. Morning person, night person or both? Neither.

20. Siblings? One brother.

21. What are your friends like? Swell.

22. Amusement parks are for children.

23. Cafeterias are where you eat when a relative is about to die.

24. Dogs are hit or miss.

25. Any phobias, traumas or other weirdnesses? Plenty.

I hate Elton John.

2005-11-08T16:54:00.000-06:00

That's just a fact. Speaking of which, my Saturday night bit. As it was happening, I was planning on fulminating in detail but in retrospect I think we can do with some bullet points:

My brother had two friends visiting all weekend to sample the alcoholic delights of an average Central Wisconsin mill town.

I was designated driver both nights as a mandatory favor to my parents.

My brother's friends are both two kinds of drunk: Garrulous and Sensitive. Do the math.

An undercover policeman (possibly) tried to buy cocaine from my brother (which he doesn't use) in garbled Spanish in Hollyrocks

At 4 AM Sunday morning, I was in the kitchen of a woman named "Tara" while my brother and his friends played with her Great Dane.

I'd had my fiill of shenanigans by about 3:30 and managed to relate this to my brother, away from his friends who would demand to know why I wasn't having a good time. He told me that people "have to be gracious".

Gracious?

Gracious ran out an hour after bar time. The only thing keeping me there was the fact that I was driving his car, and leaving with it would be at least misdemeanor joyriding.

YOU BE THE JUDGE.

2005-10-20T21:40:00.000-05:00

On the one hand, Nation of Ulysses provided the blueprint for an entire generation of assholes who made shows suck.

On the other hand, handclaps. Yeah.

Discuss.